CBS News: “Support for the First Amendment has eroded significantly since Sept 11 and nearly half of Americans now think the constitutional amendment on free speech goes too far in the rights it guarantees, according to a new poll.” [Scripting News]
Test
A note to people writing articles about RSS-based news aggregators. UserLand wrote and deployed the first one, in the spring of 1999. It was called My.UserLand.Com and was quite popular. We then took the same code and converted it to run on the desktop, in the Radio environment. This was called My.UserLand on the Desktop, and it was also quite popular. It was then baked into Radio 7, and enhanced in Radio 8. To write a review about news aggregators and to not include Radio, is wrong, and if you have a reason for doing it, it should be clearly disclaimed in your article so your readers understand. Already one BigPub has done this (with no explanation). We care about people knowing about our innovations. We don’t file patents so other developers can compete with us. But please don’t penalize us for our philosophy of generosity. Thanks. [Scripting News]
Showing that you care is something you’re not supposed to do. The penalty is death, in a symbolic sense. Better to stay aloof, uninvolved, like a TV character. “I don’t really care,” I say, when nothing could be further from the truth. This is the American way. (Or at least the California way.)
But, at some point you have to take a stand. Maybe it’s in the last days or hours of life, struggling against cancer, heart disease or diabetes, or whatever’s gonna getcha. Maybe at that point it’s okay to care, to take a stand, to fight. But I suspect not. Even then people say “What’s he getting so riled up for?” The answer of course is fairly obvious.
It’s called living, and it’s worth getting agitated over, in theory. [Scripting News]
Harry S Truman. “I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: ‘Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.’ I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have – When he gives everything that is in him to do the job he has before him. That is all you can ask of him and that is what I have tried to do.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
Halley also wrote the famous Internet essay that begins with this stunning sentence. “When my dad wakes up today, the first thing he will notice is that he is dead.” What a great piece. It is art. We have our debates and beat our chests a lot in InternetLand, but this is why I love to make writing tools, to enable writers like Halley to tell stories like this one. I’ve never met her, and she uses Blogger, not my software, but I’m still proud to be part an Internet that hosts such great writing. [Scripting News]
Coming soon- the “I support a Bush regime change” t-shirt. [Sean Gallagher: the dot.communist]