After 232 years, do we really have a “representative” form of government anymore?
Unfortunately, no, we don’t.
“Your” congressman in the House of Representatives represents 700,000 other people.
“Your” senator? 3,000,000 people.
“Your” President? All 304,000,000 of us.
The federal government cannot effectively represent the people any more than a 16×16 thumbnail can “effectively represent” a 150-megapixel photo.
Both just end up being a worthless, random greyish smudge of red, blue, and green rather than showing the rich tapestry, texture, and nuance of what they purport to represent.
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Haven’t been posting in awhile, but just ran across Bruce Schneier’s latest article and had to link to it. Right on.
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I’m not against tax cuts… as long as there’s a plan for paying for them.
But the rhetoric this week left me wondering, who will cut MY taxes more?
Fortunately, CNN did the math. The result? I’ll save more under Obama’s tax cuts than McCain’s. And so will almost everyone else I know.
Furthermore, everyone I know will still either have their taxes cut under Obama, or on the extreme end, will have the same tax bill as before.
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Now that Obama’s site has an updated issue list, I decided to do a quick comparison of his issues and mine.
Civil Rights: I agree with most of his punch-list, except expanding “hate crimes.” All crimes are crimes of hate, and attaching more meaning to a crime because the driver was racism/sexism/etc. merely diminishes the crime itself. Hating is a sin, but it’s not a crime.
Disabilities: As someone with a somewhat-mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome, I’m excited to see Obama’s position on better research and education tools for autism-spectrum disorders.
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I love Apple, but I hate iCal.
Google Calendar is actually, for me, much more usable than the iCal application itself. Adding events is SO much easier, as is resizing the stupid window.
But, until now, iCal was my only choice if I wanted to sync to my iPhone (and I do). Or, at least it was my only choice when I checked into it about six months ago.
Today, I was able to get three Big Calendar Issues resolved:
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I resisted.
But now I have a Twitter account.
Even the new NASA robot on Mars has a Twitter account.
Edit: not anymore. I wasn’t updating it anyway.
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Aza came up with a cool use for a well-known browser trick.
I’ve adapted it to work without needing Javascript.
The trick used is that if you wrap an HTML anchor tag (link) inside another anchor, the inner link is the one that is followed, but the outer link is still rendered according to its own visited status. Example:
<style type="text/css"> a.testurl:link { display: none; } a.testurl:visited { display: block; } </style> <a class="
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I received my “service phone” today (the temporary replacement while they fix mine).
Replacing the SIM card and syncing back my contacts, etc. took about five minutes.
Even Apple’s RTM OOTB experience is great. The service box included a short letter expressing their regret that my phone wasn’t working, and they included not only the return shipping label (FexEx overnight), but also a clear instruction guide, enough packing tape to stick an elephant to a wall, and even a paper clip (in a little baggie) to get the SIM card out!
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Saw this link to a video about about Rove’s tactics, but don’t have time to watch it right now, saved for future use.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3954858769441262005
Side thought: someone really ought to come up with a “semi-bookmark” app for throwing random things you might want to read later, but don’t want to actually bookmark.
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Google did it!
Last year, I asked them to consider hosting AJAX libraries (so users benefit from multiple HTTP connections and strong cross-site caching).
Today, they did it! Web developers can include the libraries either via script tags, or via calls to a special loader function.
Ext JS and a few other libraries are not included, but CacheFile has more.
I’m off to change a few header/footer files…
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