“No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.” “Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.” I believe – that atheists like Jillette tend to be nicer people because they don’t have to pretend to be nicer. NPR : There is No God
Oooh – I treated myself to the DVD of Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, having missed it on the telly. Bob Dylan was the first person I ever saw in concert, I was 14 and someone gave me two tickets for free as I lined up outside Earls Court with my pocket money. Dylan was my current age then, and already had more than a lifetime’s worth of achievement behind him. It strikes me that Dylan’s generation, my parents’, were the children of people who had been through one of the most bestial periods in human history. Those who had experienced war, my grandparents’ generation, were ready for change and it manifested itself through their children who were brought up differently. These people created the cultural renaissance that was the latter half of the 50’s and early 60’s. Is a shame that not everyone believes that war is…
Jarvis, pretending not to be a techy but really getting it on Google base:
American Rhetoric: McCarthy-Welch Exchange During the Army-McCarthy Hearings
Some people don’t seem to like Google Base – I like it a lot and I’m sure that its a product that will gradually evolve into something truly revolutionary. So far nobody has been able to touch Ebay, but one gets the impression that since they are an effective monopoly Ebay have become very conservative with their product, not wanting to risk innovation which could mess things up. This leaves others who innovate with an opportunity, and Google will innovate here. The people that pay Ebay – the sellers, would switch if they could, but Ebay has the buyers. Only someone like Google could offer a rival marketplace of buyers. As an aside – since the single item Google Base upload allows you to define your own metadata via custom name-value pairs, does that mean that with bulk uploading Google will intelligently parse RSS modules in their own namespaces? If…
“While social commerce is a fairly new concept in online shopping, it is quickly gaining momentum, as more online vendors realize that there are few more powerful sales forces than a personal recommendation, picking up where comparison shopping engines leave off…Wists.com and Kaboodle.com are two of the early social commerce programs. “ Yahoo Unleashes a User-Plugged Shoposphere
Sony’s latest cockup with DRM in CD’s shows that they haven’t a clue – or rather that the media bods in Sony don’t have a clue. More than ever, Sony needs to split its hardware and media divisions before one drags the other down. Such a spectacular failure in DRM attached to physical media sets a huge precedent – Sony will have to change tactic. Their real fight now is with Apple since Apple’s DRM is flowing onto iPods without people really noticing while their own attempt got caught by being stupidly aggressive. Anyone who has visited a used CD store recently and looked at the prices, can see that the very CDs that the music industry fought so hard to push, with inferior artwork to vinyl, are its worst enemy – they have created the sneakernet Napster. The price of used CD’s is dropping as they change from a…
Not needing an umbrella, due to the clement weather, she furled the small, weildy flag with both hands, full of ruth at one so vincible, pervious to her own pain. Although he had been maculate, with peccable taste, he was gainly and couth and his love for her was truly requited…
Dorothy: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” The Kansas state motto is ‘ad astra per aspera’ – to the stars through adversity. Sometime Kansan, Charles Lindbergh, was the first person to fly Accross the Atlantic. A Kansan, Steve Hawley, was on board the first flight of the space shuttle, Discovery, and that same Kansan was in charge of deploying the Hubble Telescope. Somewhere in a Kansas school is a litlle girl or boy who could have taken us further towards the stars if it hadn’t just been made deliberately more difficult. And all because a few arrogant grown ups banged their heads and are off to see the Wizard. I’d love to write a satire of the Kansas School Board based on the Wizard of Oz. Ad Astra Per Veritas. Pharyngula::Goodbye, Kansas
According to the principal of unintelligent design, the Kansas school board has technically opened the door to schools teaching satanism on a par with science. CNN.com – Kansas school board redefines science – Nov 8, 2005
Michael Parekh explains wists much better than I ever could in his post: microchunking commerce the web 2.0 way. Speaking of which, having eaten my own dogfood by doing cribcandy I now know what I need to fix on wists to make it a lot better. I’m working hard to try and get a decent wists release out and some more cribcandy like sites are in the pipeline.
The sandwich took 15 hours to eat – but was freakin awesome apparently.link » tags: [weird] posted via Wists: permamark