When customers ask us why record companies have done various things (putting things out in one country but not others, pulling things out of print, playing games with pricing, etc), our stock answer has become “Because record companies are insane and evil.” The customers just tend to nod sagely.
— Joseph Zitt
i can safely say is one of the finest pleasures i’ve experienced that doesn’t involve a second person.
“If the law supposes that,†said Mr. Bumble,… “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.â€
— Mr. Bumble, Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. And so many of the people in the arena were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
—Barbara Bush on hurricane refugees.
SmartOfficeNews summarized a Wall Street Journal article on Microsoft, covering how they fixed their software engineering process. Spin aside, the best part (emphasis mine):
By late October, Mr. Srivastava’s team was beginning to automate the testing that had historically been done by hand. If a feature had too many bugs, software “gates” rejected it from being used in Longhorn. If engineers had too many outstanding bugs they were tossed in “bug jail” and banned from writing new code. The goal, he says, was to get engineers to “do it right the first time.”
Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of “outrage”, and deceptive business practices:
11. Settlement Support Center also falsely claimed that Ms. Andersen had “been viewed†by MediaSentry downloading “gangster rap†music at 4:24 a.m. Settlement Support Center also falsely claimed that Ms. Andersen had used the login name “[email protected].†Ms. Andersen does not like “gangster rap,†does not recognize the name “gotenkito,†is not awake at 4:24 a.m. and has never downloaded music.
for google’s benefit: Egan’s Irish Pub in Fort St. John BC.
9404 Alaska Road
Fort St. John, BC V1J 6L5
780-263-9992
It is a highly addictive drug, but governments everywhere encourage its use:
Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniol intoxication was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and, on a smaller scale, Ireland.
Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’:
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.