Quote of the Day

From Blogs, Customers & Sony's Rootkit on Groklaw:

A company is in real trouble when a lawyer sets up a website dedicated to its misbehavior.

The whole article is well worth a read, by the way, with PJ managing her usual trick of being both entertainingly indignant and devastatingly thorough at the same time, and pulling in not only Sony but Enron, HealthSouth, and the influence of bloggers on corporate behavior.

Whatever happened to "reduction to practice"?

Anyone who believes that the US patent system is not completely broken needs to take a look at United States Patent 6,960,975: Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state.

A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.

I would like to point out that this is an issued patent, not merely a published application, and that the application was filed March 14, 2005 -- which is amazingly fast work for the US patent office.

(From Slashdot)

When the facts are against you...

... attack your opponents' character. From this article in The Boston Globe:

In perhaps his most aggressive speech since winning reelection, President Bush yesterday attacked Democrats for suggesting that he misled the nation on intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, saying that such criticism sends the ''wrong signal" to American forces, emboldens the nation's enemies, and tries to ''rewrite the history of how that war began."

...

''While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," Bush said in a speech commemorating Veterans Day. ''The stakes in the global war on terror are too high -- and the national interest is too important -- for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."

...

But Democrats struck back, calling the speech the desperate act of a weakened president defending an unpopular war.

''The president resorted to his old playbook of discredited rhetoric about the war on terror and political attacks as his own political fortunes and credibility diminish," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said after the speech.

OpenOffice.org training videos

From NewsForge comes this collection of free training videos for the OpenOffice.org 2.0 office suite. The short videos are in Flash and released under a Creative Commons license. Please enjoy.

Seen on the Web

Gives 13 tongue-in-cheek, somewhat racy reasons to switch to Firefox. Possibly not work safe if cow-orkers are close enough to read it.

Making beautiful music together

From vixyish and autographedcat:

( highly amusing but not particularly work safe )