| Saturday,
August 25, 2001 Far be it from me to urge web DoS attacks,
or spamming, but one does wonder how the j/e/r/k/s honorable people at http://www.the-dma.org/
have escaped. Here is an organization that has done its level best to
prevent any kind of legal action to slow down the spammers, and which
unashamedly blocks all attempts to prevent spam. This message is brought
to you in compliance with the Federal Pro Spam bill that says that if you
pretend to have a way to remove yourself from the mailing list then you
are entitled to spam anyone stupid enough to believe you.
And despite my frustrations, thank heaven for www.spamcop.net
... At least it gives me a way to think I am striking back at the morons
who believe that by sending me 40 copies of a message they will get my
favorable attention.
And from Greg Cochran, who is always worth listening to, on obesity in
America's youth:
Sigh. There is a lot of silly stuff said about diet
in America, but no one is compelled to take it seriously. I sincerely
doubt if asthma has anything to do with obesity or with an increase in
obesity. Second, if you want reasons for an increase in obesity over the
past twenty years, among the most plausible would be A. a decrease in
dietary fat and B. a decrease in smoking. Fat is better than inducing
satiety than carbohydrates, while the nicotine in cigarettes definitely
speeds up metabolism.
As the ecologists insist, you can never do just one thing...
Roland tells us that now keyloggers are classified?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/25/technology/25CODE.html
But it's of a piece with the general level of competence and
understanding of the new technology among our public servants. Competence
is a rare thing. So we get powerful incompetents. But depend on it there
is never a penalty for incompetence among "public
servants". So why do we think the right solution to any social
problem is to hand it over to a government agency, which means hiring more
"public servants" who will never be accountable to ANYONE?
Civil service is a monstrous farce. If we have to have a pervasive
nanny state, then maybe the spoils system would be better. At least when
you get a new political boss you get new "public servants" and
perhaps one of them might even know the difference between classified and
unclassified technologies.
Intel gets rid of the worst 10% of its employees every year. This lets
them earn the profits to be a tax paying organization. Think what that
kind of rule might do for tax consuming industries.
And make no mistake, the world consists of tax payers and tax
consumers, and the consumers are winning.
Microsoft is shipping XP. I have deliberately not activated the XP on
one of my machines. The period for activation runs out today. Report
Monday.
Perhaps they will now make it a criminal offense to break whatever
silly scheme Microsoft uses to enforce "activation". Use a
computer, go to jail.
Now I have to go write. But first:
When I began this site, FrontPage apparently inserted "alt"
tags when it put in an image. The tag would be the file name, which is
better than nothing. I had assumed that was continuing, and I have been
astonished to find that they aren't being put in any longer. Perhaps it
was an older version of FrontPage? FrontPage help is its useful self which
is to say no use at all.
Does anyone know a setting that will make FrontPage 2000 automatically
insert alt tags defaulting to the file name into the html code when
it puts in an image? For example the "golden balls" lines: at
the top of this page there is one put into the template when I made up
this page a long time ago. It has the alt tag for the file name. Further
down is one I inserted this week. It does not have that alt tag.
I have the horrible feeling that FP 98 automatically inserted alt tags
defaulting to the file name, and this was removed in FP 2000 in an attempt
to make FP stop rewriting html, but I am not sure.
My colleague, rival, and sometimes collaborator John Dvorak has a
wonderful essay in a rival magazine in which he asks why Microsoft, which
has made its fortune hiring bright arrogant people who think they, not the
customer, are right, wants to get into the service business in which the
customer is always right no matter what. The Microsoft corporate
culture can't handle that concept, and anyone who believes it can't
survive at Microsoft: will they have to kill the company to move into the
service industry? This may be interesting.
Then there are those who invested in Salon... http://www.msnbc.com/news/613238.asp
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