In the good old days when print was king, nobody spoke ill of the dead, and if someone did, nobody else would know about until the obituaries came out the next day. As we all know, with the rise of the blogosphere things have changed; still, the death of Jerry Falwell today seems to have set new heights in terms of both haste and venom. Here is a sampling:

The friendly folk at Wonkette are typical: “At a time like this, people deserve sympathy and good wishes … except for Falwell,” the blog notes. “Over his long career as a vile televangelist building an empire of bigotry from the donations of poor people, Falwell has supported South African apartheid, called AIDS an invention of Jesus to punish gays, attacked Martin Luther King and U.S. civil rights, and blamed 9/11 on feminists and homosexuals.”

not just me then

The Opinionator - Opinion - New York Times Blog

The Reverend Jerry Falwell, a leading US conservative evangelist, has died in hospital in Virginia after being found unconscious in his office.

assumming their is a God, which I don't believe but for the purposes of this just suppose, then I would love to have seen Falwell's reaction when he was sent to Hell for being a self-righteous bigot and in violation of everything Jesus said about the meek, humility, praying quietly at the back of the church, the widow's mite and money and wealth in general, casting the first stone, judge not lest ye be judged (well indeed i'm now in violation of that precept but i've tried to live by it not spent my life flagrantly flouting it).

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US evangelist Jerry Falwell dies

Microsoft is using the threat of patent violations by the free and open-source software community to try to drive enterprise customers to SUSE Enterprise Linux and to further muddy the waters around the next version of the upcoming GNU General Public License.
ADVERTISEMENT

As part of this latest strategy, Microsoft has, for the first time, put an actual figure on the number of its patents being violated by free and open-source software.

In an interview with Fortune, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, claims that the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents, the Linux graphical user interfaces run afoul of another 65, the Open Office suite of programs infringes 45 more, e-mail programs violate 15, while other assorted free and open-source programs allegedly transgress 68.

If there are real patent infringements, how about coming clean with them? Just making claims, is a wasted effort, and the rest of us realize that this is just another attempt at Microsoft's classic strategy of FUD.

Give us a break M$, you've made enough money...

Microsoft Claims Open-Source Technology Violates 235 of Its Patents

Katharine Hepburn, who demolished brontosaurus skeletons and male egos in "Bringing Up Baby" and held her own with the King of England in "The Lion in Winter," would have been 100 this past weekend. When she died four years ago at 96, she was hailed as an American icon, celebrated for her strength and independence.

But there was another side to Hepburn, too - more vulnerable, conflicted and ambitious than we knew. Though she liked to appear indifferent to vulgar stardom, she worked hard - very hard - for fame. And she never stopped, enduring fickle tastes and changing times because her desire to be great never waned. While she made us believe she was somehow above Hollywood hoopla, the truth was that long before stars employed staffs to micromanage and refine their public images, Hepburn was inventing a path for others to follow.

a true Hollywood legend and by far my favourite actress

Hepburn, revisited - International Herald Tribune

The conventional view of Tony Blair is that he was a talented New Labor leader whose career was sadly overshadowed by Iraq. But this is absurd. It’s like saying that an elephant is a talented animal whose virtues are sadly overshadowed by the fact that it’s big and has a trunk.

Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.

errr wrong
Blair was a good Prime Minister whose party I most recently voted for 3rd May just gone.
I do not beleive Blair was wrong that we live in an interdependent world and that the international community must enforce shared, universal values. I believe Blair was wrong in the specific example of Iraq as to how to enforce those values in this case. Iraq from that point of view was bad tactics not bad strategy; using tactics to mean the practical implimentation of a broader philosophy, not the tactics of the invasion itself ie troop levels etc but the decision to invade viewed as a tactic of a geo-political philosophy.

The Human Community - New York Times

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.

This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane.

A sad, sad robot song to sing.

Bots on The Ground - washingtonpost.com

Having heard that Vista's CD/DVD burn utility by default uses a nonstandard format, possibly as a result of yet another one of Microsoft's lock-in schemes, I decided to check things out for myself. That would also give me a nice chance to see what Vista was all about.

The plan was simple:
1. Locate a Vista box,

2. Bring empty CD's plus some arbitrary files on a USB stick, and

3. Burn CD's in several ways while making screenshots.

As it turned out, the planning was the simplest part by far. The rest is best described as a tale of frustration.

From the article, it seems that Vista really goes out of its way to try and make the user use a non-standard CD/DVD image format - when it works at all.

Burning Issues With Vista

Catonic wrote:
I just watched this on repeat; one of the items lost in the fire was an Apollo Command Module. =(

Fortunately, it was just a drop-test boilerplate that was lost (not sure, but possibly either BP-23 or BP-27, both models recently in the posession of the Marshall Space Flight Center). The Apollo 16 CM is safe. The other artifact lost was more interesting, the Instrumentation Unit from the actual Saturn V stack they have had on display in the rocket park for decades. This IU has been a fixture of the museum for years...

More Info from the Huntsville Times...

RE: WHNT-TV, Huntsville, AL: Fire Destroys Building at U.S. Space and Rocket Center

Last year, Congressional Democrats allowed the Bush administration to ram through one of the worst laws in the nation’s history — the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This year, the Democrats pledged to use their new majority to begin repairing the profound damage the law has done to the nation’s justice system and global image.

But there are disturbing signs their pledge may fall victim to the same tactical political calculations and Bush administration propagandizing that allowed this scandalous law to pass in the first place.

The Democrats’ Pledge - New York Times

Today we all can feel good about Northern Ireland. Protestants and Catholics - Unionists and Republicans in local parlance - are about to jointly run their government.

Belfast, for decades the scene of urban terrorism and the deaths of so many innocents, has become a city of peace and possibility.
...
Negotiations are essential. Peace never just happens; it is made, issue by issue, point by point. In order to get negotiations launched, preconditions ought to be kept to an absolute minimum.

In the case of Northern Ireland, it was right to make a cease fire a prerequisite. Killing and talking do not go hand in hand. But it was also right not to require that parties give up their arms or join the police force before the talks began.

...

by

Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was U.S. envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process. George J. Mitchell, chairman of the law firm of DLA Piper, was the majority leader of the U.S. Senate and led the Northern Ireland negotiations from 1996 to 1998.

Learning from success - International Herald Tribune