Gardner Goldsmith looks back at history, in an attempt to answer the question: Is government-enforced copyright and patent "protection" reconcilable with a free society?
Hot damn. The government is going to stimulate the economy. Not with a lap dance or lubricated love glove, but with taxpayer dollars. Come summer, Mister and Miz America will get a rebate from Uncle Sam. What a man! Some people will get more than a thou of their own money back. Consumers will rush out and pump the economy. Wal-Mart here we come. Simultaneously, just like in romance novels.
I'm spending the week at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in Gilford, New Hampshire, this week, and so there likely won't be any posts for this week.
For all of those of you who are younger than I am, you're probably on Myspace, that huge social networking site which has a profile for almost everyone in the country under 30.Now you can get Homeland Stupidity on Myspace.
Homeland Stupidity passed another milestone last night, with the 10,000th comment left to the site.
It's been three days since I have been able to post anything to Homeland Stupidity. Fortunately, this isn't because I got shipped off to Guantanamo. There's been plenty of news, though, so I wanted to explain what has been going on behind the scenes.
When the police arrived, they arrested the dog's owner -- not for allowing his dog to dial 911 on his cell phone, but for the 150 marijuana plants he had growing in the house.Despite the fact that he was doing absolutely nothing wrong by growing marijuana, that isn't what this post is about. Instead, it's about the extent of human stupidity.
Homeland Stupidity was unavailable for several hours Thursday night due to an unexpected failure of our DNS provider.
Every few months I like to update my regular readers on what goes on behind the scenes here at Homeland Stupidity. This fall there's some good news, some bad news, and from a few of you I need some help.
Homeland Stupidity is undergoing a few changes, and for my regular readers, I thought it would be a good idea to let you know what you're about to see.
We've moved to a new domain! If you're seeing this post, then you are on the new site. Welcome back to Homeland Stupidity!
Homeland Stupidity has been up and down, mostly down, over the last day or so. The reason for the outage is due to failed server hardware.
As you might have noticed, there's more than one way to subscribe to Homeland Stupidity and receive the latest news and information. For instance, you can subscribe via RSS or via e-mail. For those of you subscribed via e-mail, there has been a change you should be aware of.Previous to today I was using the FeedBlitz e-mail service to provide mailing list services. I've since moved away from FeedBlitz and am running the mailing list in-house. I've already migrated all but three people into the new mailing list system, but it's possible, if you're one of the e-mail subscribers, that you've missed a message or two prior to this one.
I'm performing system maintenance and this post is part of my testing. Feel free to ignore it.
An American legend, "The Gun that Won the West," will come to an end March 31.U.S. Repeating Arms Company announced last week that it would close its New Haven, Conn., plant, laying off 200 employees, and ending production of its American-made Winchester rifles.
A few days ago I posted about the untimely death of my laptop and its inevitable negative effect on this site, Homeland Stupidity, as well as the software I work on and publish here. The response was, well, underwhelming. So instead, now I have something for you.
(Updated 2) I've suffered a hardware failure on my computer and thus further updates to this site -- and to Bad Behavior -- will be few and far between until it's been resolved.
Following closely on the heels of the House, a nearly empty Senate voted Thursday to agree to a one-month extension of the current Patriot Act, giving both houses more time to work out civil liberties concerns in the bill's reauthorization.
I discovered yesterday that an article I wrote a week ago was republished in full at two different sites. Since I provide only a summary feed, I was a little surprised. Not that I mind, but given the state of the U.S., there are a few courtesies I would appreciate if you plan to reuse my content, in whole or in part. On that note, a couple of people are complaining about the summary feed, and want a full-content feed instead.
A few thousand people stopped by today from Sploid, and I'm glad to see quite a few decided to stick around and subscribe. You all probably wouldn't have noticed, but quite a few changes have been made around here recently, and I want to update both you and my regular readers on what's new behind the scenes at Homeland Stupidity.
I'm going fishing. Well, not really. Posts will be very light or nonexistent around here for the next few days. In the interim, you can find some homeland stupidity at...
Hurricane Wilma, which two days ago was a tiny tropical depression in the Caribbean Sea, is now a Category 5 hurricane headed for Florida, and residents aren't taking chances this time.At 8 a.m. the hurricane packed intense 175 mph winds and central pressure of 882 mb, the lowest ever measured.
I just lost all my feeds, Firefox configuration, and probably some e-mail. If there's a news source or blog you think I should be watching, or you sent me anything in the past few weeks, you might want to resend it.This will teach me to keep backups.
On Saturday morning, Tropical Depression Twenty formed on the Caribbean Sea east of the Yucatan Peninsula, moving slowly west-northwest. Forecasts call for it to become a tropical storm before it makes landfall, and to strengthen again in the Gulf of Mexico before threatening northeastern Mexico and southern Texas as a Category 1 hurricane.
Texas governor Rick Perry has asked media to make the following announcement. In the interests of public service, I'm passing it along.
If you've tried to send mail here or used the contact form in the last 24 hours or so, your message may have been lost. The trouble was traced to an improper PHP sendmail configuration which has since been fixed. Please resend your message if possible. Thank you.
This photograph was shot just moments ago in the arrivals area in Louisville International Airport. They seem to have the security level at orange (high). I wonder why?
Scientists have discovered a gene, which they've named the "hangover" gene, that controls alcohol tolerance and time to recover from exposure to alcohol.
Several Wal-Mart employees in Atascocita, Texas, chased a suspected shoplifter from the store and held him down on the burning pavement until he died.
Are you looking for that ever-elusive online application for a job at Target? If so, you need to read this.
Wal-Mart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., has ordered its Roanoke, Va., store to end its Friday night singles' nights.
"My name is Bassam, a one-man band, I came from sand, affiliated with the Taliban." This rap got Bassam Khalaf fired from his TSA baggage screener post at Houston Intercontinental Airport.
Don't know what to do on Friday night? Singles' night at Wal-Mart lets shoppers look for a potential date.
Season 9 of Stargate SG-1 and Season 2 of Stargate Atlantis begin in the U.S. this Friday, July 9th, at 8:00pm Eastern/Pacific, 7:00pm Central.
Tracy over at Irregular Times takes a moment to remind us all why wearing seat belts is so important. It’s a very sobering thing to every day look into the eyes of a person who is slowly beginning to understand that he will never walk again. He will never sit up without help again. He will [...]
On 8 May, while driving home to Chicago from a trip to Canada, a Chicago businessman was held at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel border checkpoint by the Department of Homeland Security, where he says he was shackled to a chair for over three hours, repeatedly kicked while being searched, and isolated from his family for over [...]
John Walton, heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, died when his ultralight plane crashed Monday in Jackson, Wyoming, leaving behind a fortune estimated at $20 billion. No word is yet available on the cause of the crash. Courtesy CNN.
The color-coded Homeland Stupidity Threat Advisory is used to communicate with the public at large through a threat-based, color-coded system so that protective measures can be implemented to reduce the likelihood or impact of homeland stupidity. Now you too can display the Homeland Stupidity Threat Advisory System on your web site.
William Powell, author of The Anarchist Cookbook, has apparently had a change of heart. He’s posted an editorial at Amazon.com where he apparently disavows his own book, citing youthful ignorance. One choice cut: I want to state categorically that I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook and I would be very [...]
Barbecue is easily one of my favorite things to eat. It’s apparently becoming popular in the UK now, as well. This weekend the BBC had a report (MP3) on barbecue in America. BBC North America business correspondent Stephen Evans recently attended a barbecue festival in New York City, normally thousands of miles away from good barbecue, [...]
From BBC News: GW Pharmaceuticals has obtained approval from Health Canada to begin distributing Sativex, a mouth spray aimed at relieving pain for multiple sclerosis sufferers. Sativex is distributed in Canada by Bayer Canada, and is now available. GW Pharmaceuticals is currently working on approval for the drug in the UK. No word yet on [...]
If you’ve been seeing strange images of pumpkins while reading my site or my RSS feeds, please contact me and report it. I have recently enabled hotlink protection for the images on my site, and if you are seeing a pumpkin, then you have somehow triggered the protection. I’ll investigate and take whatever actions are [...]
Are you looking for that ever-elusive online application for a job at Wal-Mart? If so, you need to read this.
Clear Channel Communications, that corporate behemoth in control of almost every radio station on your FM dial here in the U.S., is trying some new marketing tactics. They’ve started up a fake pirate radio station (now shut down) in Akron, Ohio, according to Stay Free! It’s official: even Clear Channel is sick of Clear Channel. The [...]
A New York Times article today explores the issue of media credibility. Can you really believe what you hear on TV and read in the newspapers? Only 12% of Americans have high confidence in the (mainstream) news media, according to a 2005 Harris poll. And the problem looks like it is getting worse, not better. Almost [...]
Researchers at Cornell University have designed and built the first self-replicating robots. Yes, that’s right, these little robots can build copies of themselves. I think someone has never watched Stargate SG-1, or they probably wouldn’t be doing this. While robots that reproduce themselves is certainly a groundbreaking achievement, we need to consider carefully if this is [...]
Update 11:21 PM: April Fool! You didn’t really think I’d go work for the Evil Empire, did you! Wow, I only made six posts in the last month! I’ve been pretty busy in my other life, and I suppose it’s time to tell you all what I’ve been up to. At the moment I’m preparing to move [...]
Photo post.
Mike Godwin has interviewed Neal Stephenson, author of The Baroque Cycle trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World), Cryptonomicon, In The Beginning Was The Command Line, among many others, for Reason Online.
Yet another strange one off the AP newswire: Weyco, Inc., a Michigan health-care company, refuses to permit its employees to smoke, even on their own time or at home, citing concerns about health care costs. Weyco fired four employees for refusing to submit to a drug test — to determine if they smoke cigarettes.
Just some quick notes to let all of you know I'm still alive and kicking, and what I'm up to.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, my employer at the time didn't take long to start outsourcing anything having to do with the Internet. Unfortunately, this included my department. Before, we were about to migrate to all new SPARC/Solaris servers and Cisco networking equipment which would have given us a rock solid platform on which to expand the dialup product from a regional to a national presence. Then management got involved.
While you all were watching, I have moved this site off my laptop and onto a new desktop box running Fedora Core 3. But not all went perfectly with the transfer.
It’s that time of…human history…again. Locusts have started to make their way into southern Israel from out of Egypt. It looks like the weather is going to keep most of them away, though. And this is definitely not one of my usual topics, but I had this sent to me and I just had to [...]
Okay, Azzurra, so I read Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. What do you want, a book report?
So after struggling for most of Friday night to get this thing installed, I have succeeded! I even managed to customize it a little bit. Guess this makes me a blogger. Say hi or something. OK, so you all know me. What should I write about first? Pick a topic. “The hard part is not writing, [...]
Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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