The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Adam Rice:

When your address (or in cases like these, nonexistent addresses that resolve to yours) are used as the faked "from" address in spam, that's called a "Joe job." Sometimes this is done maliciously, but often it's (as they say in the mob) nothing personal. I've received my share of these bouncebacks, and even angry mail from people who thought I'd spammed them.

Normally I'm against torture and the death penalty, but I might make exceptions in some cases.

Xopher's right. This is like asking "why climb Mt Everest?"

On the plus side, Tom Delay sounds like he is in fact a Darwinist. Well, a Social Darwinist, anyhow.

Shit. I just got back from Burning Flipside. Infernokrusher is neither fiction nor a joke. It's a way of life for some people.

I like fire too, and ask no forgiveness.

Xopher--it's all at the same site.

TNH (and everyone else)--the "Laura Krishna" story actually goes on well beyond that one blog entry--in fact, the blog's author has changed her name (it isn't really Krishna) because she was getting blitzed by accusatory phone calls.

What is astounding about the Laura Krishna episode is the number of people who either jump to her defense, or jumped all over the prankster/author.

I was born in 1965. I don't know *anyone* my age who expects to collect dime one in social security--and we're mostly a bunch of lefty-liberals.

I have always considered Social Security a flawed system. I've been self-employed since 1990, so I've been paying full-freight all that time. People with regular jobs aren't aware what a bite it's taking.

I come at this a generation or so later. Admittedly a technophile early on, I had been using computers from middle school on. When I got my first job that I took seriously as a job, in a translation agency, we had a Varityper that used a CRT to expose the photgraphic paper (we had a refrigerator-sized developing machine). To get text into the Varityper terminal, our typesetter (a young Japanese woman with an uncanny sense for English hyphenation) would either type it in by hand, or we'd hook up a null modem to one of the TRS-80 IVs that the rest of us worked on. (Except for the one guy married to his TRS-80 II -- for that, we'd first need to modem it to one of the model IVs, and then to the Varityper. Don't ask me why.)

One day I was poking around and found the type wheels used by the previous-generation Varityper. That rocked me back on my heels a bit: as kludgey as it seemed (hell, generating the image on the CRT and passing that through a lens onto photographic paper already seemed kind of kludgey--this was in 1989, well after laser printers were established--but it did produce beautiful output), I realized that when it came out, those type wheels must have been a Very Big Deal.

My boss had a laser printer, and actually taught himself a little Postscript so that he'd be able to produce nicely formatted text. I eventually brought my Mac into the office, and earned the job of DTP guy for my trouble.

Forgive my simple-minded reading of the US Constitution, and my even simpler-minded dedication to it, but

1.A The president swore this oath "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

1.B Article II, Section 3 of the constitution describes the president's responsibilities. It is very short, and includes "he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed"

If the laws of this country forbid torture--and I think they do--then he is in violation of Section 3, meaning he broke his oath (as every other president from Washington on down probably has). The language seems pretty clear, and doesn't allow any wiggling to set aside the law.

made it clear that these people don't expect to ever fall out of power.

Oh, yes. The "aha" moment for me was the Texas re-redistricting fiasco (I live in Austin, walking distance to intersection where the city has been trifurcated into 3 congressional districts). I realized "these guys don't think the chickens will ever come home to roost."

They're wrong, of course.

I worry too about electronic voting being used to rig the outcome, but this is not a reason to despair, it's a reason to work, as Patrick would say. Elections are not handled on a national level, they're handled on a county and state level. How many states will experience "malfunctions" requiring "corrections"? If there is any tampering, we need to make sure they'll need to do a lot of it: the more they tamper, the more likely they are to screw up or get caught at it.

This is good. I appreciate the insight in point 1 particularly.

One aspect of the entire Clarke affair that only struck me after it had time to sink in was when Leslie Stahl made a comment about how he was bringing down a smear campaign upon himself. Well, of course. We all know that, but the thing is, we've gotten desensitized to something we need to remain aware of. Isn't it an odd thing that it's a foregone conclusion now? I'm not sure when the turning point was, but I think it was in '96, when the GOP took the House, that we could pretty much count on anything that would outrage the Republican machine generating this kind of smear campaign.

As long as we're picking nits here, the War on Terror isn't a war (nor was Vietnam, nor Bosnia, nor--as someone else pointed out--Korea). Only Congress has the power to declare war, and it hasn't done so (I don't think) since WW2. It certainly hasn't in the WoT, which is no more a war than LBJ's war on poverty was.

When I lived in Japan, I observed a phenomenon where one magazine or another (but usually Hanako) would annoint some place as the place to go. This would immediately result in a line out the door, which would persist for months. I remember seeing a freaking *noodle shop* with a line out the door, and there's a noodle shop every other block in Tokyo. I remember seeing a sign reading something like "as mentioned in Hanako" in the display window at a store in *San Francisco*.

Clearly there's a stronger flocking instinct there than there is here (though I admit, when I was in college, if I saw a line, I would sometimes get in it first, and find out if I belonged in it second).

You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.

Funny, my first read of that was du Twit (er, Toit) knocking himself. I would agree that any women guilty of such a lapse in judgment deserves to be quit of his company.

An interesting alternative to conventional backups: put it on your digital camcorder

As long as you're in "thinking about backup" mode, you might as well break down and automate the process. I'm using a little OS X preference pane called Deja Vu (there are others, but this works for me) that copies my home directory to a subdirectory on my external in the wee hours every day, and to an MO drive once a week.

Ack. My sympathies. I lost my external a day after I upgraded to 10.2 (odd that people are now reporting similar problems with 10.3).

As almost goes without saying, I had backed up everything from my internal to my external, reformatted the internal, and hadn't moved all the stuff back onto the internal when the external failed. I was getting those ominous clicking noises too.

Although the disk wouldn't mount in the Finder, amazingly enough, Unix could see it, and I managed to navigate around in the terminal and copy back everything that was irreplaceable before the drive truly gave up the ghost. Using the "cp" command meant that I lost creator codes and resource forks, which was an annoyance, but you can use "ditto -v rsrcfork" (do a "man ditto" to read up on the usage of ditto) to make copies that preserve this stuff.

Anyhow, give it a shot. It worked for me.

"why don92t they just become police officers, or join the military"--You try squeezing all those muscles into a general-issue uniform some time. Lycra's the only way to go.

I've had the dubious pleasure of living under Bush longer than most of you folks, since I live in Austin. I was chatting with a reporter from the local rag, who had been assigned to cover GW on the campaign trail--this was actually during the campaign. I said to him that I had the impression there wasn't anything there--not just that he was shallow, but that once you scratched the surface, you confronted emptiness. He pretty much agreed with that.

With such a person, how can you ever know much about him?

My favorite is Anne's hed, a classic of unintended irony:
"Disgusting Doesn92t Make It 93Speech94
She oughta know.

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