What worries me most about the riots is not the riots themselves; it is their disturbing similarity to the trigger events of the previous two World Wars, along with all the political and economic dry powder lying around. All the reading from various blogs I've done and I've only seen hints of this point here and here. The continental Europeans have a history of denying problems and taking the easy way out until things are absolutely out of hand, and then suddenly solving the problem by turning it over to a fascist dictator. Who, upon discovering that his policies aren't really fixing the problems after all, comes up with the brilliant idea of trying to externalize the problem.

Been really busy with my new job. It's a dot-com, and I tend to spend spare time working on that in a push for First Release, rather than blogging. Plus my net connection during weekdays is basically non-existant. But I had to comment on this; normally I don't do these, in fact I think this is the first time I've posted one of these, but I find this interesting. (I slightly tweaked the HTML they gave me to also display the Bush/Kerry vote chart too.)

According to Federal Law, you must be able to request a free credit report once a year from the major credit agencies. The companies were required to roll this out in 4 phases. I remember the annoucements, but either I missed the news reports that they were now available in my area, or the stories were not run. (Either are quite plausible.)

For everyone except "the Eastern States and All US Territories", the deadline has passed and you can now get your free credit report from this web site. (The Eastern States et al come online Sept. 1st, 2005.)

If an adjective is in a statement, but the statement is just as true without the adjective, with its opposite, or with a generalization, then the statement fails my adjective test.

Examples:

• Opposite: "Democrats prey on the weak-minded." <-> "Republicans prey on the weak-minded." Both are demonstrably true; I had a senile great-aunt that was preyed on by both, quite without shame.
• Generalization (by dropping the adjective): "A New Computer from ComputerCompany will speed up your photo processing!" -> "A new computer will speed up your photo processing."

(Sorry for the political nature of that first one; I tried to come up with a non-political one, but equal-or-greater truth with the opposite mostly comes up with groups of people, which is political.)

So now a lawyer is trying to convince a court that a having a cached file on your hard drive doesn't constitute possession. (Slashdot article.)

Good luck with that. The real problem is the "possession" isn't the real issue; it's the distribution and viewing, i.e., the human-experienced message.

I wonder how long it will take us to figure out that the whole idea of possession is fatally flawed in the Internet era?

This is the final posting of the Government Myths series. As you might imagine, the urgency of the series decreased as we left the election season.

Unfortunately, I have already seen the first glimmerings that we are entering the next one (ugh!), as I've already seen stories about who is considering running. Things seem right on track so that by the 2012 election, 2016 at the latest, the campaign for the next election will immediately start after the swearing-in ceremony.

The new job goes well. I'm still not completely clear what I can say about it as yet, as I'm under NDA and the public website has not yet been released, but when it is (soon), I'll link it. But I know I can say it goes well.

Due to the driving distance to get to it and the arrangements I've made to deal with that, for the near future my internet access for the week will be much more limited, but I've pretty much made peace with the fact that if this weblog is update once a week, it's a good week.

Blog of interest: Expanding Brain (ExBr), a blog about "Windows outliners, software development and starting a new business". Also of note is that the author has set up a wiki for outliner topics.

The author and I have been exchanging emails, comparing development notes.

SomethingAwful is an relatively old Internet Humor site, which may not be to your tastes. That said, their complaints and article about the effects of Google Accelerator seem to be well backed up, and I haven't seen this information come through my normal channels; even some of the dedicated Google weblogs don't seem to have picked this up yet... well, at least the ones I can get through to at the moment.

XBLinJS 0.4.1 is released.

In the unlikely event your browser has SVG support built in, see the SVG Widget demo. Simple, but real.