In Slashdot | Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades, Slashdot discovers a very annoying Quicken problem…that I wrote about in May, 2004 (see Annals of Software Obsolescence: Intuit is Evil (Quicken Dept.)).
It's an odd feeling to be that much ahead of the Slashdot crowd. This sort of feeds a growing suspicion I've been having that Slashdot isn't as cutting edge as it used to be.
Here's a example of why, when the CIA squares off with its sleazy and dangerous new Director, Porter Goss, I find two sides I can root happily against.
C.I.A. Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files: For nearly three years, the C.I.A. has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed requests for additional records, say Congressional officials and some members of the working group, who also contend that that stance seems to violate the law.
These officials say the agency has sometimes agreed to provide information about former Nazis, but not about the extent of the agency's dealings with them after World War II. In other cases, it has refused to provide information about individuals and their conduct during the war unless the working group can first provide evidence that they were complicit in war crimes. …
“I think that the C.I.A. has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II,” said Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and a member of the group. “We have bent over backward; we have given them every opportunity to comply.” …
“I can only say that the posture the C.I.A. has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept,” Mr. Ben-Veniste said. In a separate interview, [former prosecutor Thomas H.] Baer said: “Too much has been secret for too long. The C.I.A. has not complied with the statute.”
Hard to imagine how releasing this info could harm national security today. But it might not look so good for the CIA.
I've been called many, many things in my life, but “whimsically surnamed”? That's new.
“It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and a nobleman, or—well, any of those problems—as the triangle. But they are never unqualified triangles. They are always isosceles—never equilateral. So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert and Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle; and of that triangle Barbara formed the hypotenuse.”
—O. Henry Schools and Schools.
Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School:
more (via Boing Boing).
Everyone is having a good time getting excited about media payola, and that's fine. (We've just learned of a third, third-rate, journalist on the secret take.) But that strikes me as almost minor compared to the larger issue of the vast sums being funneled to private PR agencies to push government projects.
How much of that money is being spent on things that clearly identify them as government propaganda (distasteful, but perhaps legal so long as it is not being used to lobby congress even indirectly — that would be quite illegal), and how much is not labeled? I don't expect most of the major media to pursue this since, to the extent it was used to by ads in the media, it pays their salaries….
The Carpetbagger Report: Playing by White House rules, Bush is bankrupting the government: It's always been a ridiculous claim, but using White House definitions, the system will be “bankrupt” when liabilities outnumber assets. Social Security, in other words, will be bankrupt — in Bush's mind — because it may be unable to meet all of its obligations at some point down the road.
And, as the great Carpetbagger notes, if you define 'bankruptcy' as 'cash flow out exceeds cash flow in' or 'cash flow flow out exceeds cash flow in plus assets on hand' then the US government, GWB proprietor, is 'bankrupt'.
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