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 A note before signing off for the day. Talking with my mom on the phone earlier about what's going on in Washington. The vote was 99-1 for the USA PATRIOT Act. "Feingold for President" we both agreed. He's the one. Where do I sign?  OK, another note. In the debate over the executive order that turns over non-US-citizens to military justice, the proponents argue "If it's good enough for our soldiers, it's good enough for us." At first glance this seems reasonable, but wait a minute -- they want the power to execute people, kill them, in the name of justice, without due process and without the right of appeal. If you believe that kind of power won't be misused, hello, wake up, it will be misused. All the mottos apply. It's even worse than it appears. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. There's no time like now. BTW, more than a few people who read Scripting News are subject to this executive order. I tripped over another executive order that I missed, written about today by Richard Reeves in the Op-Ed section of the NY Times. Was it just one year ago that we thought it didn't matter who we elected President? We voted on how good their commercials were. We nominated two of the least excellent people in our midst. For a whole generation we voted, when we did, for the lesser of two evils. I started a new directory to track the erosion of liberty in the US. Let's hope this directory doesn't get any longer than it currently is. JD Lasica: A new Web ad model from the NY Times. Paul Westman: "To date, Yahoo! ranks as my single biggest investing mistake." Another in a continuing series of notes of caution re depending on Yahoo for community services, which we do. I have started 27 Yahoogroups, and am a member of 35. There's no way of knowing how long these services will remain online. Another thing to worry about, and I am already way overloaded with things to worry about!  Evan Williams is trying something new. Congrats for having the courage to go first. Let's watch this carefully. If it works it could be a new way to pay for "free" services. XML-RPC: Follow-up on Kate Rhodes' Comparison.  Now here's a key point. Rhodes' piece need not be the only attempt to objectively compare SOAP and XML-RPC. There are so many people who have enough experience now to pass on, let's create a set of documents that helps guide newbies through the maze. I linked her piece into the XML-RPC directory. I'd like to link in others. Tim Jarrett: "There's a new script on my scripts page. I used it to write this news item. It posts the current text from TextEdit as a News Item. It's called TextEdit2ManilaNews." What is XmlDataSource.Com? Reuters: "Yahoo! Inc. will cut 400 jobs, or 13 percent of its work force." Dan Gillmor notes that his Windows 2000 installation has gotten less stable. The same thing is happening here. Maybe our OSes are calling home in the middle of the night asking if it's time to upgrade. No I'm not switching to Linux or Mac OS X. But I don't want to switch to Windows XP either. kXML-RPC is "a J2ME implementation of the XML-RPC protocol built on top of the kxml parser." Scott Loftesness sends a pointer to Visionics. "Visionics makes the facial recognition systems that have been getting a lot of coverage of late." He thought I would find the link interesting because they promote their use of XML-RPC, right up front under Hardware Requirements. Nice. It's hardware for the 21st Century. On this day last year: "After watching a week of escalating lies on TV, I wonder if it wouldn't be fun to lie myself?" Even William Safire, a Republican, says that Bush has gone too far. "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens." This really sucks the big one. This is the kind of stuff my grandfather, who survived the Nazis, warned me about. "Stand up when it starts," he said. We thought he was a crazy old man. "It can't happen here," everyone said. It's happening here, and what do you do about it. Pastor Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.." |
 
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