You can get It on eBay

No matter what It is. This is an old one, but not surprising. Of course if eBay's not actually giving money to Google anymore because they're annoyed about Google Checkout, then they will have to find some way to promote their sales of dead people.

Buy Steve Irwin dead on eBay! (The Register)

No comment

I have disabled comments on the blog -- if you want to make comments please email me directly, and I will be glad to mention them here.

More from Linspire: Oracle support

I liked this one, although it's a bit dated: "Oracle Support," an Oxymoron"

Actually, I'm sure that's what started this process...Red Hat acquiring JBoss. This upset Larry Ellison, so he's stomping his feet, but the gun he chose to fire back with, "Oracle support," doesn't have any bullets. Threatening Red Hat using Oracle's support is like bringing a water pistol to a gun fight.

CEO of Linspire talks about Linux philosophy

in a letter here entitled "Is Linux Splitting into Two Factions?"

However, looks like Kevin didn't do the CVS merge of his letter properly:

I would pay money

I would pay money to find out which vendor said this.

"We need to stifle creativity in the open source community to get control of standards..."

I am running into some open source "issues" today. The open source solutions tend to be simpler and better. However, they tend to also only be 70% solutions to the business requirement, at which point the developers get bored and move on to something else. This is exactly why companies like Microsoft actually dominate the market instead of open source solutions.

If open source was so great, we would have a functional open source replacement for Microsoft Exchange right now that could be dropped in and used by an average administrator. We don't have one. It's been ten years since I started looking at that issue, but went on to another business opportunity assuming that the Exchange-replacement one would be an obvious one that would be done by half a dozen people who were more qualified than I. Boy was I wrong. This is another one of those ideas I've had that I've ended up kicking myself about years later. That's food for another post later on, though.

Events in Pakistan getting more interesting

While everyone in America is obsessing about Iraq, I have a suspicion that the real news is happening somewhere else entirely.

Pro-Taleban militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan region say they have ended their truce with the government.

In a statement issued in Miranshah, the main town, the militants accused the government of breaking the agreement.

It came as Pakistan deployed more troops in the area, fearing "holy war" after the storming of the militant Red Mosque last week left 102 dead.

If there is open warfare between Musharraf's government and the Taliban guys, it means that he's no longer defending Al-Qaeda if they have been hiding out in his country.

(BBC news)

Top Hat

marriedtothesea.com

Ban on politics

My ban on politics is about to end a little earlier than I expected.

Well, if they were spying they deserve it

Iranians arrest 14 squirrels for spying

Iranian intelligence operatives recently detained over a dozen squirrels found within the nation's borders, claiming the rodents were serving as spies for Western powers determined to undermine the Islamic Republic.

(Ynetnews)

The world is not as simple as you think

From earlier this week -- I didn't see this mentioned anywhere else: Al-Qaeda in Iraq threatens to declare war on Iran if they don't stop interfering in Iraq.

"We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shiite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention ... otherwise a severe war is waiting for you," he said in the 50-minute audiotape.

(Al Bawaba)

The era of cheap food is over

I think that we're in for a period of sustained price inflation for food. Or at least, that's apparently what I think.

Mark Hill, food and agriculture partner at the firm, warned that rising demand for wheat and maize was bound to result in increases in the price of staple foods for British consumers.

In all seriousness, on this one I agree with Fidel Castro (and that, really, never happens.) We should be using food to feed people, and other things to generate power. It is ridiculous to starve the poor in the world so that we can run our cars cheaper.
(Telegraph UK)

I can't beat the title on this one either

It's a stick-up

Police are on the hunt for a man who robbed a New Hampshire bank on Saturday disguised as a tree ...

(Tim Blair)

Wait a minute... *I*'m doing things!

Latest terror from the UK government -- Look out for people doing things (Power Line)

New books

redchilimerchandise is back on line with some more books for sale. Check the store out and see if there's anything you're interested in. Thanks for your continued support.

Safari 3.0.2

I was getting so frustrated with Safari 3.0 that I was just about ready to roll back to the production version (2). But I decided to download the Safari 3.0.2 update first and see if it was any better.

It's somewhat better, the really egregious bug that was keeping Gmail message submission from working is much less frequent (although I still see it from time to time, I'm not sure if they really did anything to fix it or I'm just getting luckier.)

Happy Independence Day!

What to do today -- the weather forecast says we are in a super severe heat wave, but with my nice ocean breezes here it's more like 70 to 80 degrees outside. I could get used to this.

I will be on a mission a few yards away from the Mexican border later today. No, I will not be building a tunnel.