Category Archives: idea

Away from lands so battered and torn


SOTD

Angry Bear:
OK this is simple, there is risk that can’t be hedged by everyone.
Leonard Cohen’s version:
There is a crack
in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

The Key to American conservatism today

Cognitive dissonance.
At Wikipedia, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny:
Does. Not. Compute.

Why settle for a kludge when a monument is needed?

It’s been widely noted that the national debt clock, erected by NYC real estate magnate Seymour Durst to protest the now-quaint US$2.7 trillion debt in 1989, has run out of digits, and that “[a]s a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been replaced with an integer—the ‘1’ [...]

Onion headlines we’d like to see

Right-wing Noise Machine Breaks Down
Repair bill high: vast conspiracy mulls new hybrid
Alas.

Proposed Google service

“Don’t be evil” is too passive and, above all, too simple. A minor mod like this…

Google may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Google must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Google must protect its [...]

Election ‘08: what if?

Cute:
The entire world drafted an open letter to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) today, asking him to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and concede the presidency to Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois).
Scenario: McCain drops out of the election late, Obama wins uncontested, right-wing noise machine revs up the theory that “He isn’t really the president [...]

ISO adopts PDF

(Like lots of things, this news is a few weeks old.)
Indy software developers, meet the ISO:

The new standard, ISO 32000-1, Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7, is based on the PDF version 1.7 developed by Adobe. This International Standard supplies the essential information needed by developers of software that create [...]

Book title for free

The Effluent Society.