How the current owners of land came by it does not bear scrutiny _anywhere_. See: Conquistadores, American wars against the Indians, etc. The best we can do is accept the current state of play and remedy the worst inequities to a degree.

-Gareth

Half of parliament and all of the provincial parliaments, actually. And Canada has _never_ had unanimity in a constitutional matter since 1867, when unanimity created the country itself. Anyway, here's what the Constitution Act (1982) says on the matter.

It's not a big point, but I'll bite. She's capable of smiling.

-Gareth

The speed of light in a vacuum or in a Bose-Einstein condensate? There's a big difference :-)

-Gareth

So does Larry Niven, darn it. (And you don't want to mess with someone who's on speaking terms with tnuctipun).

-Gareth

Yes, yes it is. A boycott is simply a personal choice writ large. I can refuse to patronize a restaurant because it's not kosher, or because it's dirty, or I had a dirty look from the waiter, or it once mistreated a friend of mine. I haven't made the choice to boycott Card, although it's been a while since I've read him, and my reaction to his books is very uneven. If I choose to not buy his work, though, and other people make that choice, there's not much to be said unless you're willing to argue against choice. I believe that Mr. Card would agree.

-Gareth

AppleWorks put the basics (word processor, database, spreadsheet) into a sweet little integrated program. A ton of extensions and other modules came from third parties. (Hello, Beagle Bros!) so that you could do graphics MacPaint style, play with fonts, do page layout, etc. etc. It was a Apple's best-selling program, despite almost no marketing and development, well past the introduction of the Mac. All this, and ease of use. (Press "Esc" to get to the full-screen menus. Make a selection or press "Esc" to return to your work).

All integrated programs of the time, including Microsoft Works, ended up with "Works" in the name because of this program's success.

-Gareth

Some points I do agree with here, but

why have an X-Prize for thorium reactors when you can just (apparently) build reactors to the CANDU pattern and put thorium in them?

rather than just free education at the university, do what the Swedes do: if you get good grades in high school, the first year at university is paid for. Get good grades in that, and the second year is paid for, and so on.

the "everybody in the army" and "everybody has a gun" parts might make sense in an American cultural context, but I don't get it. As Weber said (and I paraphrase) the whole point of a state is that it has a monopoly on the use of force. No tool that is designed to do significant bodily harm is "just a tool."

-Gareth

One switch in the privacy settings and the "advertisements" are gone.

Gallium (not the element) is making a huge improvement in the display on my oldish main computer. I'm really liking QQ.

-Gareth

I can't say that I like "Zen and the Art" because it's famous. I don't know anyone else who's read it, actually. But...let's start with this: you can't say that the book is a novel, or an autobiography, or a travel book, or a book of philosophy, because it's all of them and none. It has the story arcs of

1. a man with amnesia making contact with his past,
2. a man alienated from his emotions who learns to love again
3. a man trying to make contact with a son who may or may not be losing his sanity
4. a man trying to understand two friends who are travelling with him
5. a man trying to understand discoveries about philosophical problems that had obsessed him before he lost his memories.

Let's put it this way, it is interesting in many of the same ways as "Lord of Light," and is at least as complex.

-Gareth

When I first read "Voyage from Yesteryear," I did enjoy it, but I'm convinced that it is just a high-tech version of Eric Frank Russell's story "And Then There Were None." The relationship is closer than that between the movie "Avatar" and Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe," and that is a pretty darn close similarity in itself.

H.G. Wells' "Shape of Things to Come" Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" are two others in the Utopian genre that had a big effect on me.

Including other genres, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and the Heinlein juveniles shaped me.

-Gareth

Correct. There's a difference. If Romney wins, there will almost certainly be a war with Iran. If Obama wins, there may not be. That is literally a life or death difference to many, many people who would live or die according to that choice.

-Gareth

Willis tracks.

I did a recent blog post specifically on how the names of Microsoft OS releases were...lame...or odd...in one respect or another.

For a long time, people could bash Linux, with reason, as an operating system that couldn't even play a DVD out of the box. Pathetic. So what choices did the user have? Either download and install something that would play it illegally, as most did, or pay separately for licensed codecs. Now that Windows users face exactly the same choice, they will feel a certain deflation, a little at a loss, when they argue for the natural superiority of their operating system. It's an uncomfortable feeling, but ultimately healthy.

-Gareth