July 10, 2004

Chemistry

It's not experience. It's not the ability to deliver Southern states. Finally, it can be revealed: What John Edwards brings to the Democratic ticket.

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July 08, 2004

Buccaneer-Americans

Add to the wish list: a "We Prefer to Be Called Buccaneer-Americans" t-shirt.

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July 02, 2004

Virginia's Official State Idiots: Legislators

A change of Virginia law went into effect this week effectively reinstating archaic "blue laws," a centuries-old regime preventing businesses from operating on Sundays. This act, by itself, would open them to well-deserved critcism, but it's even worse: they did it by mistake.

Even as they raced to solve the problem, the state's leading politicians sought to avoid blame for what they acknowledged was an embarrassing mistake.
In a letter to members, the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business said everyone in the lawmaking process was at fault.
"Nobody caught this -- not the legislator who sponsored the bill [Sen. Frederick M. Quayle (R-Chesapeake)], not the legislators who voted for the bill . . . not the governor who signed the bill and none of the lobbyists who watch for such bad bills," the letter said.

In other words, every single member of the Virginia legislature is an idiot.

Every single one.

Today, a Richmond judge compounded the error by suspending the law for 90 days - apparently not for any legal reason, but just because the law was a bad idea. The judge even acknowledged that there were "Constitutional impediments" with his ruling, and that he was "treading on the legislative perogative," but suspended the law anyway. How's that for activist jurisprudence?

Finally, the editors at the Post are idiots for allowing this line to go to print unchanged: "Business leaders are most worried about Sunday, because that's the day the majority of Virginians, who are Christian, consider a religious holy day." Perhaps they meant to say, "many Virginians, the majority of whom are Christian..." instead of implying that all Virginians are Christian and the majority of those consider Sunday their holy day. (And I wonder where they got that factoid from anyway... I'm sure it's possible, but they certainly didn't cite any source.)

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July 01, 2004

Microsoft Internet Explorer Considered Harmful

MSIE is "too dangerous for routine use" according to many observers. Notably, one security hole allows malcious code to install itself on a user's system upon visiting certain web sites, without the user's knowledge.

Even the US Computer Emergency Readines Team (US-CERT) advocates a switch:

Use a different web browser: There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser. Such a decision may, however, reduce the functionality of sites that require IE-specific features such as DHTML, VBScript, and ActiveX. Note that using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control, or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML). It is possible for a different browser on a Windows system to invoke IE to handle MHTML protocol URLs.

Ernie concurs.

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