Good grief! Charles Schultz is retiring Peanuts, after 49-plus years of influencing, reacting to, and generally making more pleasant American life. It ran in over 2600 newspapers weekly, which is just an astounding number. I wish him the best of luck and health, and will sorely miss the gang.
The judges today deny APBNews’s request for disclosure documents. I think it will be very interesting to watch this issue as it winds its way through the court system; the interplay of this being an issue about judges, being decided by judges, will be particularly interesting.
Marv Albert returns to the NBA on NBC. I always loved listening to him broadcast games, and his return to Turner Broadcasting made me pretty happy.
The theory of relativity explained using words that are all four letters or less. One of the best reads that I’ve had in a while, but even simplified, I got lost along the way, had to reread, think, reread, exclaim “Oh!”, and continue.
There’s just no way that this company, and their product, can be real. (Warning: R-rated material!)
Ranting on Vignette’s Story Server, Dave Winer today continues to maintain that it’s an offensive product in part because its initials are SS (just like the Nazi secret police). So I guess that we should give up on the Space Shuttle, burn the movie Slap Shot, never go to Shea Stadium, rant about the kids who wrote Sailorme Select as a school project… or just stop reading things into places where they don’t exist.
Speaking of Shea Stadium, it definitely would have been more fun to watch Griffey out there!
Another tech executive arrested for allegedly intending to consort with a minor. I hope we’re not seeing the start of a trend here… ugh.
It seems that they they finally found the disk corruption bug in the stable tree of the Linux kernel. I found this fascinating, mainly because linux-kernel conveyed the frustration of the people involved quite well as they moved from not knowing what was happening to having a fix in hands.
New York City schools have been keeping dead children on the rolls in order to inflate state aid payments, Governor Pataki alleges. (There’s a lot of politics in and around the NYC school system.)
There’s now a restraining order to “prevent” a NYC MTA strike, but it appears to exist just to allow the city to punish those who do strike, not to really prevent them from doing so. The restraining order puts the fines at: $1 million a day against the union, $25K a day against every member who strikes, and $10 million to cover the Board of Education’s expenses. The numbers double for every day of the strike. Those are biiiiiig numbers…
Dave Winer today continues to maintain that it’s an offensive product in part
That’s not true. I said I wouldn’t have named the product Story Server because of the initials. Someone called me to task for mentioning that, and I explained why I did.
• Posted by: Dave Winer on Dec 14, 1999, 3:48 PMAnd in so doing, you asked:
Which do you think is more offensive? Giving a product the name of the world’s most effective extermination engine ever, or pointing it out?
Note that, very clearly, you did not connote that they had given their product a name that happened to have SS as its initials — instead, according to you, they “[gave] a product the name of the world’s most effective extermination engine ever,” a ridiculous contention or connotation.
These things only have meaning when you give them meaning. To me, someone surmising any sort of link between a tech company giving their product a name with the initials SS and the possibility of another Holocaust is the only real offensive thing that I’ve read on this issue, and I completely understand why Charlie Wood took his toys and went home. (Note that, to be perfectly clear and avoid having to clarify, here I am talking about the statements “Who’s going to show some guts? If we don’t, will it happen again?”)
/jason
• Posted by: Jason Levine on Dec 15, 1999, 2:19 PM