You know what smells?

We have all been conned into using the language of extremists to discuss abortion. The truth is that neither side can claim to be the pro-life side, and neither can claim to be the pro-choice side.
No one is anti-choice. Some think that the choice has to be made before conception.
Similarly, it is not anti-life or pro-death to say that a woman is entitled to decide what to do with her own life.

My viewpoint is very close to the mainstream. I feel that abortion is not usually a morally correct choice for a woman to make, but the decision is hers. That's not a complicated position, and it is similar to the views held by most people, but extremists on both sides act as if it is incomprehensible.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court made some ridiculous noises about the viability of a life and the right to life. These issues are irrelevant.

The viability of a life is totally irrelevant. My rights do not decrease if I am diagnosed with an inoperable malignant cancer. If I fall off a horse and break my neck, leaving me unable to move my arms and legs or even to breathe without a respirator, I still have rights.

There is no question about the right to life. Every human has the right to life. The abortion debate should really be about whether the woman in question has a parental responsibility to carry an embryo/fetus/baby to term.
Imagine there is one person with leukemia, person A, dying for lack of a bone marrow donor. Now imagine somewhere else there is another  person, person B, the only perfect bone marrow match for person A. Do you want your government to require person B to donate to person A? This is a real world situation. There are people dying right now because they cannot find a bone marrow donor. Our government would not deny people with leukemia the right to life, but it does not require the rest of us to register for bone marrow donation.
Similarly, the fact that the unborn require their mothers for survival does not mean that mothers are required to keep the unborn alive. The obligation, if there is one, is a parental obligation. The right to life does not enter into it.

Steve Jobs gets way too much credit for the Macintosh. The fact is, most of the things which Jobs insisted on for the Macintosh were the things which people hated the most. He wanted a sealed box (Ever use a Mac-Cracker?) which the user would never dream of opening. No hard drive. The computing appliance.
A lot of these ideas are coming back around in the form of the NC, which is a dumb idea, but that's another rant.
Jobs got kicked out of Apple because he was a kook. I hope some day the stockholders will realize he still is a kook.
What Jobs did right was to associate with smart, effective people, and listen to their advice. Getting people like Regis Mckenna, Mike Markkula, and Arthur Rock interested in Steve Wozniak's work, and listening to their advice, is the only thing he can be given credit for.
But Jobs has forgotten that taking good advice is what got him where he is. He no longer listens to good advice.
He's doomed to failure, and I hope he doesn't take Apple with him.

The Network Computer is a functional idea, in a world where computing power and disk space is expensive and networking is cheap. That isn't the current situation, however. Bandwidth is expensive.
Don't get me wrong. People want to network. They want to be able to access that crucial information in Outer Mongolia. They also want to have local storage and local computing power, and they will for the foreseeable future.
The infrastructures for large-scale network computing don't exist, and the impetus for creating them doesn't exist. The comparative costs of networking, computing, and storage mean that it is cheaper to have some information on servers and to keep some of it with the clients, and for personal computers to be able to do some information processing without going through a connection to a server.
That's why NCs are a dumb idea.

Microsoft screams that it doesn't have a monopoly, until it is apparent that no one is fooled. Then Microsoft says that it has such a monopoly that if the Justice Department interferes, it will destroy the economy.

Having been in the Santa Clara Valley for most of my life, I've heard plenty of rumors about Microsoft tactics far worse than anything the Justice Department is investigating right now. I've also heard the reasons that people are afraid to come forward against Microsoft. But even if none of the stories were true, it is a joke to say that Microsoft has ever represented innovation.
Well, maybe back when Bill Gates wrote BASIC that was innovation. But wait, he didn't write BASIC. No matter what you may have heard a dozen nit-witted news anchors say, Microsoft started out by porting a popular programming language, BASIC, to a number of personal computers. It is not a trivial task to implement a language, even a simple one like BASIC, on a new platform. It hardly compares to actually creating the language, however.
So maybe Gates was innovative when he created DOS. Wait, he bought DOS, didn't he?
Yeah, Gates was once a crackerjack programmer. He was probably one of the top ten or twenty
thousand programmers in the US. Maybe.
Maybe some innovation went into the creation of Windows. After all, it was one of the first half dozen or so graphic user interfaces, based on ideas developed at Xerox PARC, developed for the PC. Hmm, that's not exactly like creating something new, is it?
Well, somewhere, sometime in the history of Microsoft there has to have been some technological innovation, I'm sure.
For the most part, however, Microsoft has been a tremendous roadblock in the way of innovation in the computer industry for the past two decades. To say that Justice Department interference with Microsoft is anti-competitive is the peak of irony.

I'm getting tired of hearing people say what Microsoft does to its "competition." It's time we realized that it isn't about competition. Netscape did not enter the operating system business to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft went after the browser market when it looked like someone might be making a profit there.
Any new technology venture, no matter how unique, has to be created with the knowledge that Microsoft may decide to take over the market if it looks profitable. Companies are started with no intention of competing with Microsoft, and they get chewed up and swallowed.
It's not about competition for any one market, but competition for every dollar spent.

What ever happened to Whitewater? I might have some perverse curiosity about whether or not Mr. Clinton has been cheating on Mrs. Clinton, but I wouldn't spend any money to find out. The only person who really has a valid interest in this is Hillary. If she wants to hire a P.I. to follow Bill around, that's up to her.
It's time to realize what Ken Starr has been up to. He was appointed to investigate Whitewater. He came to a dead end. Rather than wrap things up, he decided to look into some rumors about the president's sex life. He is simply out of legitimate leads and has decided to go into an area which an ounce of common sense would tell him is not worth spending federal tax dollars on.
I know the pretext. "It's not about hanky panky! It's about suborning perjury!" That's bunk. After spending tens of millions of dollars, Ken Starr hopes to be able to prove that after having an affair, Bill Clinton asked a woman not to tell on him.
If it's true that he had an affair, shame on him. I hope Hillary gives him hell for it. If it's true that he told a woman with whom he had sex not to talk about the affair, is anyone surprised? Isn't that what would be expected of any man having an affair?
For crying out loud.

We want the Secret Service to be able to follow the president where ever he goes. We never want the president to feel like he needs to duck away from his personal security force. We want our president to be protected.
I never want to hear about the president's personal life from a Secret Security agent. I never want anyone else to, either. This is common sense.