Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil‐minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well‐meaning but without understanding.
I’d welcome work on improving JavaScript as a language and browser implementations to support further application‐controlled sandboxing and data hiding. The same‐domain policy is far too coarse grained a solution for the applications we’d like to be able to write.
There is no chin behind Bruce Schneier’s beard. There is only another pseudorandom number generator and he’s gonna use it to encrypt your face.
It’s easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it’s shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid‐analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we’ve wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets — stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security — and too many ways to kill people… Last week’s arrests demonstrate how real security doesn’t focus on possible terrorist tactics, but on the terrorists themselves. It’s a victory for intelligence and investigation, and a dramatic demonstration of how investments in these areas pay off.
[Carlos Mencia]’s a guy who announces he’s about to be edgy, starts a joke, in the middle of it stops to remind you he’s being edgy, and then congratulates the audience when he’s done with a joke for being brave enough to get through his edginess, and then warns them he’s about to be edgy again. If he would stop with the three warnings and the one congratulation for being edgy, he could cram three more jokes in there… You should never have to go, “Hang on, people, ’cause it’s about to get fuckin’ dark! If your soul has a seatbelt, you better strap in, because —” okay, right now, you’re not dangerous.
It’s not always necessary for the author to put in an appearance himself, if only he can smuggle the Plot itself into the story disguised as one of the characters. Naturally, it tends not to look like most of the other characters… It’ll call itself something like the Visualization of the Cosmic All, or Seldon’s Plan, or The Hitch‐Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the Law, or the Light, or the Will of the Gods; or, in perhaps its most famous avatar, the Force. Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I’d only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. “The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot.” “Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot.” When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero’s head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses “a great disturbance in the Plot.”
I know I am probably preaching to the choir here, but maybe, just maybe, if we sing loud enough, the branding firms that make these decisions will hear our song of reason and make the right decision. If we are going to redesign a classic logo (or design a new one for that matter), let’s stand up for good design and actually do something innovative instead of relying on bevels and drop shadows applied to someone else’s genius.
So why has my party, the party of small government, lately adopted the practices of our opponents who believe the bigger the government the better? I’m afraid it’s because at times we value our incumbency more than our principles. We came to office to reduce the size of government. Lately, we have increased the size of government in order to stay in office.
Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
Senior vice presidents [at Microsoft] sometimes review UI designs of individual features, a nod to Steve Jobs that would in better days have betokened a true honor but for its randomizing effects. Give me a cathedral, give me a bazaar — really, either would be great. Just not this middle world in which some decisions are made freely while others are made by edict, with no apparent logic separating each from the other but the seeming curiosity of someone in charge.