/dev/random

From Life and Deatherage:
Outstanding coverage in the New York Times about a theme present on this blog for many months, one I state more bluntly than the Times does: Republicans are increasingly and obviously unwilling to live by the rules they want to impose on other people. A must-read. [Article Link]

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[Daypop Top 40]
Interesting article, related to this previous post. if it wasn’t for the big record companies & mass marketers like Walmart, no-talents like Britney wouldn’t have a career. The sooner the current entertainment infrastructure disappears, the better for all of us.

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I’m looking at the logs for macmegasite.com & I see www.variety.com listed in the referrers. I wonder why they linked to us?

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“Buoyed by Resurgence, G.O.P. Strives for an Era of Dominance” [Daypop Top 40]
This is really depressing. (full article)

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From Morons dot org:

Somebody at CBS has it out for Christian Supremacists; an upcoming “reality” show features the fundie-unthinkable…

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This is just TOO weird. If I tried to put one of those things on Cody, he’d rip me to shreds.

You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family. “It has changed just for a moment”. [ "it being very dear" or ] You will pass [...]

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WTF???? Starbucks won’t allow you to photograph their stores?
From Aaron Swartz:

Lessig reports that Starbucks is asking people not to take pictures of its environment.

Your mission? Take a photo, then post a link to it.

This exhortation to commit contributory trade dress infringement will self-destruct in…

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I don’t know how it happened, but the stray somehow got in through the patio screen and is now inside my patio. Cody seems to be getting along OK with him.
Update: I just noticed there’s a hole in the screen he was able to get through easily.

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I really like MacCentral’s new summary view, which shows a summary of each story on a single page instead of only the headlines.

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Here’s the daily usage graph for MacMegasite. Note the dramatic shift on the day I switched to static RSS. More visits with much less data transferred. Each time a user requested backend.php the entire feed was returned, whether or not it changed since their last request. I’m now seeing a majority of 304s (content unchanged) [...]

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“Mom” suddenly reappeared out of nowhere when people (including me) started raising money for her sons. According to some accounts, when he saw her for the first time at the trial, Alex asked “who’s the blond chick?”.
(PENSACOLA, Fla.) May 21 – Kelly Marino came to Pensacola for her sons’ trials, but now she is also [...]

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I’ve seen this stray cat hanging around. Cody was safely inside my enclosed patio and he was outside. They just stared at each other for a long time.

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Since I switched to a static RSS feed at MacHack (thanks Jon , I’ve noticed a dramatic decrease in bandwidth usage.
Backend.php was accounting for 37% of my hits and almost 56% of the bandwidth usage. Each time a user updated the RSS feed, it had to execute several SQL queries to generate the file, [...]

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“The New York Times had this anti-traditional values article” (actual article link) [Daypop Top 40]
I find it very disturbing that Wal-Mart is shaping cultural tastes. They sell less than 2000 books, CDs, and Videos with only the biggest selling titles represented. By doing so they make the big hits even bigger while making it more [...]

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This week’s most buried headline could be a real stinker this week for the Pentagon. Apparently over $1 trillion are missing as well as “dozens of tanks, missiles and planes.” [metafilter.com]

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I think I may have found the longest track available for individual sale in iTMS: O.D.O.O. by Fela Kuti, at 31:54. I bought it, since it’s a great song and one of the few songs by Fela I don’t own (not counting a 6 minute edit version from a “best of…” collection).

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I notice that iTunes Music Store’s 30 second previews are nearly useless when you have multiple live versions of the same song (look at Pearl Jam for a good example), since many of them are indistinguishable since it doesn’t include any of the unique riffs from that performance.

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Here’s a new variation on the Nigerian scam that I just received:
From: UNIVERSAL TRUST AGENCY (infounitr@netscape.net)
Date: Sat May 17, 2003 2:53:21 AM US/Eastern
To: (my email address)
Subject: LOTTERY WINNING NOTIFICATION !
Reply-To: infounitr@netscape.net

UNIVERSAL TRUST AGENCY
Ref. Number: 2367/678-0436
Batch Number: 3566465021-SOS/03
ATTN: Sir/Madam.
We [...]

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Cody loves the patio at my new place, especially since my old home didn’t have an enclosed patio. When he wants to go out there, he starts to make a lot of noise.
He was out there for most of the evening, but I wanted to close the door because it was getting too hot & [...]

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