Today I'm removing evolution from my Fedora 8 system, because it ate my mail this morning, and I'm switching to Thunderbird.

Remember how livid the world was because Microsoft claimed that Internet Explorer was integrated into the OS and could not be removed, even if you were to remove the icon from the desktop? Well, pot, meet kettle: if I attempt to remove the package evolution-data-server from my system, it attempts to take along with it a whopping 32 other packages, including pidgin (the IM client formerly known as gaim) and gnome itself in the form of crucial pieces of gnome such as gnome-panel and gnome-applets.

Gnome and evolution should immediately be sued and brought to justice for their evil monopolistic practices.

More proof that you shouldn't believe everything you read:

Austin Children's Shelter workers share their experiences [with the FLDS mothers and children]. "We had read that they had a fear of technology, so we took down our computer lab, and the first night one of the mothers pulled out her iPod and asked where she could dock it," VanOsselar said. "It surprised us because we didn't expect them to be so technology savvy," she said.

I have 15 moderator points. What's going on?

I've mentioned before my preferred hosting provider is http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/, which by your usage, allowing small traffic websites to exist for basically less than a dollar a year. Now NFS has introduced a plan for higher-usage websites: previously, usage was $1 per Gigabyte of bandwidth used. This is still true for your first gigabyte. However, starting immediately upon completion of one gigabyte, the price starts going down logarithmically. A reloadable page displays in real time your changing bytes-per-penny pricing.

For almost all of my purposes, NFS has been suitable. I could pay a lot more for certain things, but I haven't found it to be worth it at this point in time. I'd rather continue to run my websites for the price of rifling through my couch cushions for spare change.

According to Walter Williams, it's obvious: it's because we're making decisions for everybody instead of letting people be free. Thus, when one's preferences win out, it's necessarily at the expense of someone else who doesn't share those preferences. Of course they fight, bitterly.

The solution is to get government out of these decisions. Eliminate the political machinery that has the power to control these things, and then people will quit fighting for control of it.

And it's affecting arcade restoration and emulation cabinet building.

Do Nuclear Weapons Deter?

The first part of this article is very interesting, as he proposes a chain of logic that he asserts proves that ownership of nuclear weapons is not actually a deterrent to attacks by enemies. I'm not quite able to wrap my head around the logic, yet, and I'm not sure I agree. But it's an interesting thought, and I think I'll be revisiting it.

Then he gets to the point where he mentions "market anarchism." After that point the reasoning gets really weird, and I'm saying that as a market anarchist, myself. I'm sure it's even weirder to those who aren't. :) Some leftist pacifists might agree with and like his conclusions, though.

Private war is waged only when absolutely necessary; consumers would rather spend their money on new cars and clothing rather than on propping up foreign dictatorships and nation building. People fight only when absolutely necessary.

I've had the Slashdot 10 hot comments slashbox on my page since the year I started using Slashdot (wow; that would be 2001, I think). Now I've built an RSS feed to pull links to the comments into Google reader.

Ron Paul wants to permit heroin use in public schools.

I really liked this quote:

I had a vague feeling along those lines when I first heard this story (and being disconnected from most major media I heard the story nearly 24 hours late and have only heard about one update a day since then), but I couldn't elucidate it.

Source: http://www.mises.org/story/2668

This page just told me "This page cannot be displayed because ad blocking software has been detected." Cute. I guess I just won't bother reading, then.

Or I'll turn off Javascript, or I'll use wget and/or lynx.

As we all learned in this discussion, no biological research can take place without accepting evolution.

Unless you count this family, who have beliefs fairly similar to mine.

One counterexample provided. One false premise refuted.

Of course, the truth is that the other side wasn't using the same definition of "evolution" which was explicitly verbally provided at the beginning of the discussion.

(And, yeah, I'm not classing running somebody's distributed computing client as full-blown "research." I'm just saying it's clear you don't have to accept evolutionary origins in order to understand the progress of biological science.

It's a little bit morbid, but I've been scraping Wikipedia to create a feed that gives me names of the recently deceased.

The slashdot comment feeds I provide (also here) have been updated to use https URLs. For subscribers, this means they will get to slashdot through https. Non-subscribers should be transparently redirected to plain old http, at least if my one test through IE where I wasn't logged in is any indication.

Meanwhile, it looks like this means the most recent 24 posts will go through each feed again, as they now have different URLs and thus appear to be new items. Hiccup! :)