In In These Times, Kurt Vonnegut as usual says what he thinks:

Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting.
Yup. Politicians are constantly second-guessing scientists, […]

Well, well. Looks like the legal department has succeeded in waking up the Sony bosses - the class action lawsuit in New York is going to be settled, according to The Register, and with terms that even us DRM haters would welcome, I think.

This is older, but I just discovered it: Why Digg’s non-hierarchical editorial control does not work and how to exploit it.
I could comment now on the lame comments this guy got but I have little patience with people that like to shoot the messenger. Next: how to prevent this?
It’s prediction time. Here’s my prediction: […]

Troy gives up on Technorati, I bitch about Gmail’s lack of quality, and I’m quite sure that there are lots and lots of similar stories to share.
One funny thing is that whenever you do manage to reach support, they start citing their “privacy policy” for not being able to help you (and then when you […]

Spotted in Forbes.com, school officials seem to be less than amused when kids want to show their heritage at high school dances (or just want to wear skirts for the heck of it).
“To say the traditional Scottish dress makes you look like a clown is a direct insult to people of Scottish heritage and those […]

Someone who claims to be a Google employee about regularly pulling all-nighters:
Are we all stupid for working this hard and ignoring life around us?
Well, I don’t know. But your management is stupid about letting you guys do it.
At least I now know a bit more about why Google’s quality of service is deteriorating…

Some time ago, I implemented a neat hack in SUnit that I had a use for again today. I thought I might share it here.
The issue is that you often want to have a subclass of a tested class that overrides one or two methods with very specific (to that test) behavior. Say you […]

This is what I’m seeing more and more often in Gmail. The quality of the service has been deteriorating over the last couple of months, and I think that keeping the “beta” sticker on what is probably their second most popular service is a bit of a cheap cop-out.
I’m that close to giving up […]

Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel posted their book “Innovation Happens Elsewhere”, giving their take on Open Source, on Dreamsongs.
I still have to finish it, but I’ve witnessed Ron and Dick at work in the Jini community, where they did a terrific job of helping us to get the Jini community going. Not so […]

In The Register, IBM coughs up for multimedia network management:
The $865m all-cash transaction will see Micromuse turned into one of IBM’s Tivoli business units under general manager Al Zollar, and its products added to the Tivoli range and sold through IBM’s sales channels and business partners.
So what? Well, earlier this year, let’s say in […]