Doctors can refuse treatment at a whim

ProudParenting.com - Gay Reproduction - Lesbian Reproduction - gay & lesbian family and parenting site (): "(Lansing, Michigan) Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House."

Truly an embarrassment to the ideals under which the country was originally founded. Please, oh please, let this springboard itself into doctors refusing to treat patients with certain religious or political beliefs -- only so the irony would become clear.

Doctors need to be open and listen to the needs of their patients; the idea that a doctor would summarily refuse to treat a gay person because of some namby-pamby belief in a santa cult must be insulting to doctors who really do want to heal their patients. I want to find these entitled, self-righteous pricks, grab them by the fucking throat and demand "what the hell is the matter with you, dumbass ?!?"

But that's just me.

EnergyBulletin.net | Peak Oil Presentation in the US Congress | Energy and Peak Oil News

EnergyBulletin.net | Peak Oil Presentation in the US Congress | Energy and Peak Oil News: "As a matter of fact, in 1982, more oil was used in looking for oil than the oil they found in 1982"

Oh crap. Now even the US Government is finding it hard to ignore Peak Oil.

Dinosaurs Land on Earth, Confirming Speculations of Space-Faring Race, Demand Humans Stop Digging Up Cryogenic Experiments.

ha ha, wouldn't that rock?

Sometimes

Sometimes, ya know, you're not feeling the most Chipper.

Sometimes, maybe, you're not so self-confident.

Maybe even you don't like yourself much. Despite all your successes, you just can't be satisfied.

Sometimes you find someone and spew a bunch of hateful shit at them, bringing them down so you can make yourself feel that much bigger.

Sometimes everyone realizes that.

If you're so self-centered that you need to resort to such petty garbage, then maybe everyone's gonna modify their opinion of you, just a little bit.

Keep diggin; you'll get out of the hole occasionally and I'll still not be back up on that fence.

Withhold the Evidence! That'll show you were innocent!

Army Times - News - More News

What do you do if you just shot up a freed prisoner and her country's best intel agent which you knew were coming through a hastily set-up roadblock staffed by yahoo gun-toting rednecks?

Well, you hide the evidence, of course. Even if you promised to let them see it, to prove your innocence, you gotta not let them see it. Why, it'll show what everyone knows anyway.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Kyrgyzstan names new leadership

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Kyrgyzstan names new leadership

Hey, it must be nice to live in a country where the people have control over their government. But don't worry: soon America will invade them too.

US deserter denied Canada asylum - watch for the lawsuits...

BBC NEWS | In Depth | US deserter denied Canada asylum

The key parts here is that

Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board said Mr Hinzman had not convinced its members that he would face persecution or cruel and unusual punishment if he were sent back to the US

which is absolutley bogus.

You people worship your soldiers and blindly support the administration sending them in as mercenaries to support the flow of oil. Worship the soldiers, with my support, but, as nuremburg showed us, do so cricitally: Honour them when they're fighting nobly and protecting your own people -- and only then. We don't need a populace of sheep supporting a new adolph, but you're getting closer to that every day.

Will this man face serious repurcussions when he gets home? We'll never see him again.

Celine Dion - Audiences are Falling Asleep

Celine Dion noticed that her audiences have a tendency to fall asleep.

I say "D'uh!"

Her music may be, in parts, technically great, but overall it's without depth or spirit. It unfortunately resembles elevator music, to my ears.

Frankly, I think that Ms Dion is an export that y'all can keep. Her and that Brian Adams fellow.

'Long Term' is a year

I'm so very affected by what Mr Baker says in this article on slashdot.

I had formerly assumed Mr Baker to be the leader of a software project which was developing a reliable, decent enterprise-ready browser suite. That's what the description once said, anyway.

I learn, now, that either Mr Baker, the project itself, and/or all of us have been deluded. What part of 'reliable' and 'enterprise' equates one year with long term? I've fixed bugs that were older than that. I've maintained apps that were there in the Netscape 3 days, and I'm no one special.

It's unfortunate that Mr Baker hasn't worked in the Enterprise previously, or he'd realize that a product's longevity is something of a feature he may want in his little browser. It's too bad that we'll probably have to look for something a bit more reliable for our product at work, because we can't be back-porting fixes for the latter 4 years of this thing. Once again, Microsofties can taunt:

"Yeah, but will it still be a main-stream product on Monday?"

Do they speak English in What?

Paul,

In my letter, the one to which you're responding, I've answered most of your questions. The rest of your questions, every one of them, is answered in the other letter I sent which you received.

Why is it impossible for you to look down or over to my previous ramblings, and from them extract the obvious answer to your questions? When I say, 6 times, 12, I really do mean 12. Not 11, even if you want it to be so. Yes, I know, your program code thinks it only does 11, and you have only used 11, but really it used to work with 12 rather a lot. I depend on 12, and so do a few other people.

Please, understand that some people use 12. Okay? Can we accept that and move on to looking into why it no longer accepts 12? If I'm to use your program, I really need it to do 12.

Not 11. Okay? No, really: not 11; 12.

Do you speak English? I know you're American, but I don't speak American except for what I've learned from your lovely television programmes.

(the situation described herein has been simplified for easier consumption)

The WTC bombing really occured 25 years beforehand.

INTL News by Joe Broadhurst - The Perfect Terrorist Plan To Level The Twin Towers Created In 1976

Hmm. So, before becoming great big friends with OBL, and bankrolling his anti-Russian efforts, the Americans actually planned the very same attack that OBL perpetrated 25 - not 24, not 26 - years later. I wonder if even the timing of the attack is significant -- but I can't say I wonder at the planning, now.

Instead of working to bankroll foreign coups that always seem to backfire, it seems they're acting more locally. They need to just stop doing that kind of thing altogether, since they just don't seem to have the 'world police' act correct yet in any form.

Libertarian is the label used by embarrassed Republicans that long to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.

Review of Team America World Police
Now that's funny.

If video games kill, what about the Bible? | Perspectives | CNET News.com

If video games kill, what about the Bible? | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Maybe it's coincidence, but religion figured prominently in recent national news stories about shooting incidents. Terry Ratzmann, the Wisconsin gunman who last month went on a shooting rampage, regularly attended services at the Living Church of God in Brookfield, Wis. "We believe that the motive has something to do with the church and the church services more so than any other possible motive," the Associated Press quoted a Brookfield police captain as saying.

Just more fuel to the fire, although I'm entirely surprised these people still have their jobs after making such potentially career-limiting remarks as they are making.

The myth of the violent gamer | News.blog | CNET News.com

The myth of the violent gamer | News.blog | CNET News.com

In the search for root causes, has anyone noticed how religion has figured in recent stories about shooting incidents leading the national news? Terry Ratzmann last month went on a shooting rampage. Should we infer any link to his regular church attendance? The local cop interviewed by the Associated Press believes the motive the motive had something to do with the church.

And what to make of Dennis Rader, a man who was president of his church council and described as a faithful Christian? These days he’s in policy custody and accused of being the notorious BTK killer.

Interesting. Now I have something to mention the next time someone worries about Dangerous Video Games.

Mozilla is a Failure

Mozilla 99% dead

Mozilla users may need to groom themselves for the developers of their product making about-faces every now and then, and abruptly abandoning the development of one product for its own derivative. Autofellatic as it is, it seems to be the fashion, and FireFox users should start preparing themselves.

I used to reject the notion that open-source developers compete with themselves (personally) but I'm seeing more of it with each passing month. I've held out hope of a mozilla 1.8, one with a long-awaited superset of Netscape 4.75 features, but I'm not even sure that will happen.

Natives are Restless

I'm affected on a professional level as well. In deliberations as to what we will include in our next release, I'd like to confidently stand up for Mozilla, but the Attention Deficit may be to their own detriment -- our support window for a single release may be longer than the Entire Life Cycle of a Mozilla product, from inception to abandonment. We'll pick a product that's more likely to be supported in 4 years, and we've lost a lot of confidence that FF/TB will be similarly Too Boring to continue development.

At least the MSIE heads have a retort:
"Will it still be in development on Monday?"

Dirty Tricks

Dirty Tricks

Seems that Mr Enouf, whose path I've crossed a number of times but with whom I can only look forward to talking personally, has a blog. Thad Enouf's blog looks to be similarly critical of the American political progress(ion), and I think I'll take a back seat to him in those matters, but we'll see.

I'm already enjoying it. Thanks, Mr Enouf.

Small-Town Economy

An excerpt from the life of my favourite Northerner:

I confiscated booze from a [taxi] passenger who had no money. It felt good. But then the damn car got stuck in snow, so I gave the booze to the guy who helped me get it unstuck.

And that, my friends, is how economy works.

The Death of Innovation

Carly's Way:

New technology typically has a five-year development cycle. The U.S. technology business stopped being serious about research in 2000 and the results are showing now.

People have a little more money but there's nothing they want to buy. There's nothing that makes you say, 'Wow.' Ten years ago I was seeing something interesting every month, but now we're touting bloated software and cute case designs as innovation.

I often used to say that we're still suffering the fall-out of the Y2K fiasco. I'm surprised to see that we still are, but this article makes a lot of sense.

After a fashion, I think the Y2K fear can be all but directly blamed on some very short-sighted engineers at Microsoft: it was their OSes, after all, exclusively almost, which were defective and showed a lack of understanding that the end of the millennium was coming. We all saw it, but their products didn't take it into account. It's good to be the king of the software business, but not so good when a blunder this mind-numblingly easy to figure out causes such a massive follow-on effect.

In short:

• There is a lack of innovation going on
• because companies killed their R&D budgets after Y2K
• because they had no money
• because people had to fix their computers
• because the Y2K bug would crash them otherwise
• at least the ones running Windows
• which was built by Microsoft
• poorly

In my opinion, the death of American R&D and innovation can be linked directly to a particularly laissez-faire attitude in the OS house of our favourite monopoly.

Isn't capitalism great?!?

The CADT Model - and why JWZ is occasionally Totally Cool

The CADT Model:

I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the 'Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers' model, or 'CADT' for short.

It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because 'this time it will be done right', ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.

Totally bang-on. Ugh.

Strangest Phone Call Ever

The other night, I received a call from An Unknown Number. I picked up, said Hello, and the caller hung up.

Today, when I said Hello, the caller asked for me by surname. Immediately, as per protocol, I asked the caller to identify themselves. After all, I'm just not talking to people I can't identify.

They hung up.

Kids, where the hell has our courtesy gone, that we neither identify ourselves to parties we're calling nor respond to invitations to do the same?

APP.COM - Video of teacher's outburst is on Web

APP.COM - Video of teacher's outburst is on Web

So, let me get this straight, because I guess I'm a little slow at times:

• It's not wrong to refuse to stand while the state brainwashing session is under way
• The teacher is known to over-react to students not confirming to his brand of patriotism
• so much so, that the students brought a device in to record the teacher as proof
• the teacher over-reacted as usual, dumping one punk on his ass and swearing at him
• the student dumped on his ass is disciplined, perhaps in violation of civil rights
• the student recording this teacher's outburst is disciplined for bringing the situation out into the open
• the teacher is not disciplined

Have I got that right?

I'm officially embarrased for the school board in question, for they may not be objective enough to understand just how terrible they are being, and may not have the benefit of feeling the shame they should feel.

Stupid, jingoist fascists.

Study: Instant Messaging is Surprisingly Formal

Study: Instant Messaging is Surprisingly Formal :-)

Apparently, Instant Messaging isn't dooming the written language .. unless the standards have just been reduced to compensate!

Out of 11,718 words ... [t]here were also just 121 misspelled words.

Sheyeah, right. A buddy of mine, who is a great guy, can't write three words and have them all spelled correctly. I can overlook it in his case; he drives Truck and talks more than he writes. Other people with which I correspond, some of them (divided along national boundaries, actually) cannot write a proper sentence to save their lives.

I'd actually like to see the research on this one.