fozbaca.org

Skin Cancer
Well Suck is claiming that skins suck and the skinability of Mozilla/Netscape 6 will ruin the world. But to use their own quote:

“The year 2000 is going to be 1983 all over again, with user interfaces a confusing mish-mash of whatever strikes a coder’s fancy the day before the product ships.”

which sounds like a good thing for me. The current “standard” in User Interface (UI) is far from perfect and the Mozilla XUL will allow for a new avenue in UI testing and experimentation. Sure like the desktop publishing revolution, wehre there were dozens of fonts on one page, and web revolution, where there there were dozens of colors on one page, the highly skinable Mozilla will bring out some great loads of crap to the world but it will also allow some truely usable UIs to develop and flourish.

FreeNet Philosophy: My views on Censorship and Copyright

“Popular revolt” for freeware? based on conversations with Eben Moglen, FSF general counse and author of Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright. Slashdot has a discussion. Maybe the most intresting comment

“…The majority of the people in Boston were AGAINST the boston tea party. Only a MINORITY of people wanted to seperate from Britain. Most people were HAPPY with their lives being merchants, trading, and going on with their day to day business.
It was a bunch of social miscreants that started the revolution.. a bunch of outcasts. Jefferson was a communist, Benjamin got hit by lightning and then tried to create a method of organizing his thoughts (see also: franklin series “day planners”)… and George Washington was doing the same thing Clinton was this past year.
Nonetheless, we benefited from their work.. for a few years anyway. Then the corporations took over large sections of our government, subverted the law, and generally raised hell. And before anyone knew it.. ah, well.. they’re too rich to stop now!
So.. shall we find a bunch of social outcasts again and start a revolution? That seems to be how these things work…” by Signal 11

First they came…

Learn about Manic Depression

Winner of the best quote about User Interfaces for April 7, 2000:
“The only intuitive interface is the nipple, after that it’s all learned”, attributed to Bruce Heddiger, but it may have been another.

Doctor Fun: So Who is Quido Van Rossum?

Tomb Raider Film Cast and Crew Announced
Angelina Jolie to play Lara Croft.

Screenshot of an Aqua skin for Mozilla.

Remember the highschool shootings in Paducha there were, in part, blamed on Doom? Well the Lawsuit Against id Software Dismissed check out the .plan. On a related note, Amazon customer reviews on Lt. Col. David Grossman’s Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill. The whole “video games made me do it” reminds me of the PMRC rating and banning music from the 80’s. Both ideas are so overly symplistic in answering the great question “what makes one do violent acts” as to be meaningless. Maybe some of those with the arguments should look at the whole complex picture.