Vonage DigitalVoice .::. Now You’re Talking… For As Long As You Want!
I find this very intriguing. For $39/month, unlimited local and longdistance calls via your existing broadband internet connection with a full suite of calling features AND you can keep your existing phone number and use your existing phones.

For $25/month, you can get unlimited local calls and 500 minutes/month of long distance.

I’m really tempted. I want caller ID, but don’t want to spend another $6/month for it from Quest, and I’d save on long-distance.

Snow Job – President Bush appoints yet another phony businessman, this time as treasury secretary. By Daniel Gross

Snow may yet prove a brilliant treasury secretary. After all, the skills required are as much diplomatic and bureaucratic as they are managerial. But his elevation to the high-profile post, and the appointment of a stand-out like Donaldson to a second-tier position like the SEC, show the relative ascendancy of the access capitalists in the Bush administration and in the Republican Party generally. That may be why the markets regard the recent appointments as one step forward, two steps back.

shakes head in disgust
This is sad, we have a President who promotes mediocrity higher than excellence. But really, who can blame him? When you are dim, you don’t wan’t to stand to close to a bright light, or people will see you for what you are.

Scripting News

BTW, for people who think the woman’s movement started in the 60s, check out The Women, a movie made in the best movie year ever, 1939. Norma Shearer gives a speech to her mother about how things were different, back when women were considered chattel. Now they’re equal to men, says Shearer’s character. While a feminist could make a reasonable argument that the movie is sexist, it also carries the feminist message, strongly, in the 30s, way way before I was told (when I was a kid) that it existed. Women of my mother’s generation (she was seven when the movie was made) said the same thing Shearer said, quite a few years later. The data is out there, feminism was brewing for a while if only in Hollywood.

Woman’s sufferage certainly went beyond Hollywood. And don’t forget, prohibition was driven by a seemingly strange alliance between puritan prudes and feminists who were sick of women getting beaten and impoverished by their drunkard husbands.

Can anyone give me a good sound legal definition of “treason”

A cunning plan
On more than one occasion George W. Bush has emphaiszed that the terrorists, like Al Quaida, who threaten the US, “hate our freedom.” and then he goes and hires an ex-con, Admiral John Poindexter, and put him in charge surrendering our freedom.

An intersting trategy, I am sure you will agree.

Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog

Here’s the deal: to achieve results, you’ve got to do something. If you do something, you’ll make mistakes. Mistakes are, by definition, a process violation. So the only way to reverence process at all costs is to do nothing or, at the very least, proceed with the utmost caution. You’ve probably wondered why government service is so slow. This is the reason why: people are being very careful. They have to be, because any misstep can be deadly.

My father spent most of his professional life in the public sector, trying to get things done. Among other things, he and a colleague built a non-profit that serviced government guaranteed student loans in the early 80’s when the governement opened up that program, and he wrote and managed the grants to build a new sewage treatment plant for a growing western city.

He observed, more than once, that “in a perfect bureacracy, nothing gets done.”