Monthly Archives: April 2005

Timewasters

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Timewasters

Just to Tide You Over

No serious blogging today as I'm busy reading some pretty good stuff produced by my students. So here's the INQ's Top ten Firefox browser annoyances just to tide you over.

Update: Ed Bott calls this list “lame”. He's more than half right: the list leaves off the big stuff (like it's too darn slow to start up and could render faster, cf. Opera). But it does include three very fair critiques, I think:

1. Couldn't patches be patches rather than mega-downloads?

2. Thunderbird should be renamed Firefox Mail for marketing reasons, and available as a bundled download so I can give newbies a single URL.

3. And, most, importantly, programs in the suite should share the GRE better.

Posted in Software | 1 Comment

An Amazing Allegation About Bolton

The power of a blog? Be it truth or libel this is one powerful tale about the rabid madness of John Bolton.

Chris Nelson says the real reason this nomination is still alive is Republican omerta. Or is that democratic centralism?

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | Comments Off on An Amazing Allegation About Bolton

FreeCiv 2.0 !!!

The following announcement is reported not just because it's great news, but also because it will serve as a test of how frequently Eldest Child reads this blog:

Freeciv 2.0.0 has been released and is available for download.

Changelog is somewhat slashdotted, so I've reproduced it below:

Continue reading

Posted in Software | Comments Off on FreeCiv 2.0 !!!

Unnatural Selection?

Via Cosmic Iguana – Voice of the Evil Doers comes news that there is now “overwhelming” (well, at least very substantial) evidence that Bisphenol A, aka BPA, a chemical found in plastics, is likely leaching out of plastic bottles and into our bodies. Each bottle may add only a trace amount, but the cumulative of this estrogenic compound effect might, the Iguana suggests, explain radically dropping sperm counts in the US.

Are we living an unintentional evolutionary experiment in which we select strongly for resistance to an estrogenic compound? Perhaps…but only if the effect is real, large numbers of people don't have diets that avoid the plastics, and — most importantly — only if this is is something to which some part of the population actually has a resistance.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 1 Comment

How to Scare a Blogger

Spotted at The American Street:

cache poisoning somewhere? a 302 exploit? ) or what I can do about it.

Update: Kevin amended his post, and we exchanged emails. For the reason described in the comments, the problem is solved (Kevin seemed to have inherited a spammer's IP number, which I had redirected).

Posted in Discourse.net | 9 Comments