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random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
Is a young man bound to serve his country in war? In addition to his legal duty there is perhaps also a moral duty, but it is very obscure. What is called his country is only its government and that government consists merely of professional politicians, a parasitical and anti-social class of men. They never sacrifice themselves for their country. They make all wars, but very few of them ever die in one. If it is the duty of a young man to serve his country under all circumstances then it is equally the duty of an enemy young man to serve his. Thus we come to a moral contradiction and absurdity so obvious that even clergymen and editorial writers sometimes notice it.
Then-mere Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) wrote in “Introduction to Christianity”, his “best-regarded book”: “Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a constant temptation, so for the unbeliever, faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world,” he wrote. “In short, [...]
so, interesting things are going on right now that I have plenty of valuable, earth-shattering comments to make (google’s resistance of the DOJ subpoena, the new google 512 decision, siva’s latest article about google in the Chronicle, a recent discussion about personal releases & permissions culture, an exciting conference I just attended), but so is [...]
Right-wing homophobes have been freaking out over the Åke Green’s conviction under a Swedish hate speech code. They were particularly incensed because Green made his anti-gay comments from a church pulpit, and hailed the conviction as a sign of the treacherous path of hate speech codes. His conviction was reversed on appeal and then the [...]
Justin Watt @ JustInsomnia wrote the lovely monthchunks plugin which formats wordpress archives in a very condensed & useful way. And is on the ball like you wouldn’t believe, putting up a new version within hours after an odd possible-bug was reported.
WordPress released 2.0, I duly upgraded, and this post is by way of testing some of the new features …
The EU has researched the effects of the EU Database Protection Directive (Directive 96/9/EC), discovering that despite, or perhaps because of, the EU’s “protections” for its database developers, database development in the EU has been outpaced by the US’ competitive, “un-protected” database industry. From the press release: On the basis of the information available, the [...]
Coming home on JetBlue on Thursday 12/29, we had an interesting experience with the TV programming. One entire “Daily Show” segment was wiped out. The program did one segment, then skipped straight to the interview with Howard Stern, and then ‘programming was temporarily unavailable due to normal motion of the aircraft’. Pretty much until the [...]