This Friday FFF commentary puts things in just the right perspective for the weekend. But it's just as apt on any other day...

In this FFF Commentary Sheldon Richman argues that, while Bush may have been unable to stop the 9/11 attackers, U.S. foreign policy of the last few decades, fully supported by Bush, made attacks of this sort all but inevitable.

Today's news reports that veteran Candadian MP Svend Robinson got "confused" and pocketed an expensive ring at a jewelry auction. In our corrupt society, politicians spend their entire working lives stealing from taxpayers (just look at the gliberals' Sponsorship Scandal). So it's not surprising, merely disturbing, that they occasionally let this carry over into their private lives. The solution to Svend's problem is not in his punishment nor in his being forgiven; the solution, as I have said before, is for the populace (and their "servants", the politicians) to totally get over the idea of taxation as an entitlement. It is the notion of tax money as an entitlement for politicians to spend that makes inevitable such diverse amusements as Svend's transgression, the Sponsorship Scandal, and Bush's War against Iraq. Until we as an entire society get over this notion, we will have thieves running our countries and warfare between nations.

Microsoft has started a campaign to license all implementations of "FAT", the filesystem type used in MS-DOS. This filesystem format is used all over the place, including most media interchange by flash memory cards, USB-based "memory disks", and more. It is also used for floppy interchange on all operating systems that support floppy drives, including the open-source operating systems like Linux and the BSD family (including OpenBSD). Since Microsoft have refused to offer a no-fee license to open source groups, it could easily be inferred that they are trying to use the Patent Office to put an end to the challenge they face from open source development, and in the process put the lid they have always wanted on all software innovation other than their own. One of the leading groups fighting this effort is the Public Patent Foundation; please check out this information on their intervention filed with the U.S. Patent Office to re-examine Microsoft's claim based on prior art. See also my history pages for where Microsoft originally got MS-DOS from.

Found another nice place to get free fonts occasionally, at www.freefont.de. Of course there are many others, but at least the first font I downloaded actually worked, and looks not bad...

A new technique known as Sender Policy Framework (SPF for short) may be the tool to get rid of those bounces that appear to come from you but really come from either a virus or a SPAM twerp that has your address. SPF works by having a domain publish (in their public DNS) a list of valid mail servers from which mail from that domain could be sent. SPF-conforming MTAs will shut down mail that couldn't have really come from the given domain. Find out more about SPF.