Dusk
Thu Feb 15 20:24:29 2007
Peanut Butter Contamination
Just a few interesting things:
- The Dutch are considering banning veils in public. This is about the issue of what openness should look like in a society -- a melting pot? A grab bag? I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, although it's a step that would create considerable controversy. I've been chewing on the idea instead of having a set of norms that all citizens of a nation would be expected to meet, with these norms being decided by a very large supermajority, say 90% (so as not to make them overly political) and their denial being grounds for expulsion or denying immigration. I think this could work and might help protect small countries or those with high immigration from entryism. I'm not sure if this is really a good idea, or if variant forms of it might be - just something I've been thinking about with regards to recent problems of France and Nederlands. I'm hoping some kind of practical ground can be found between things like this guy and people who don't care about entryism at all.
- Alabama isn't progressive. No sex toys will be permitted to be sold there. Surprised?
- Although I generally like Putin, I think this is a bad move - he appointed to Chechnya's (temporary) presidency a politician with their own military force and a cult of personality. At the very least, that's a bad characteristic in a leader - I hope he has enough positive traits to make it worth the cultural damage that kind of thing does.
- Packaged rudeness
- It's sad to see people fighting the good fight against Scientology arrested.
- Reading up on the feature list for Fedora 7, I came across smolt, a hardware profiler. It's not intrinsically interesting, but I thought the stats it's collected so far were kind of neat. The AMD64 ISA accounts for about 17% of submitted profiles, Dell accounts for about 16% of profiled hardware, and 77% of profiled systems have over 2048 bogomips.
- Finally, I'm going to suggest this as NSFW because while reading it in the 61c café, I was unable to stop laughing and was moderately embarassed at the stares I got from nearby people.