Bill Quick complains:

The notion that one cannot protect one’s property with deadly force, if necessary, essentially means that the entire concept of property ownership is a farce. It means that if a man with a knife demands my car, even though I am armed with a firearm, I must allow him to take my vehicle. Even worse is the enshrinement of state-ordered cowardice inherent in the notion that you have a “duty” to retreat from “situations that might escalate into using deadly force.” This places the balance of social power entirely in the hands of any lawless desperado willing to threaten to use deadly force.

I’m not convinced that it’s that bad. As I see it, if your thug shows you a knife with the implied threat to use it, he has already escalated to deadly force; if I’m wrong on that point, then your showing a gun is not deadly force either. Either way, you’re not obligated to assume that he’ll put his knife away if you give in.
Disclaimer: That’s logic, but I can’t promise that it is law!

A year ago, SF Weekly ran an article about go with this memorable line:

Playing Go means honoring the fact that your opponent is going to exist; all you want is just a little bit more than he has. If chess is a game of war, Go is a game of market share.

Found in my mail archive:

Every time I turn around there’s another “small price to pay” in the name of some drooler’s feel-good mis-attempt to solve a non-problem. Got no patience for it anymore.

(The one that peeved me most recently was the rule against flying anonymously – a small price to pay to discourage those few suicidal terrorists too inept to arrange for false papers.)

I wrote that last August 15.

on Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait writes In praise of renting and to hell with owning:

In general, the relationship between owning-or-renting and freedom is surely the opposite of what it is so often said to be by British Conservatives. Renting equals freedom, not owning. Most home “owners” in Britain are about as free as a bird locked in a cage . . . .

One of the appeals of nanotechnology, for me, is the possibility of comfortable homelessness: if I can wear a self-fitting smartsuit that contains my library and computer, and automatically scrubs my skin as appropriate, what do I want a house for?

One of my friends is thinking of organizing an ‘activities day’ for our circle, and invites me to run a workshop relating to my most visible hobby, mathematical beauty. Okay, I said, but what would we do?

I went looking for snub tilings and found a number of dummy pages generated by blackflag: “CGI script that generates self-referencing web pages full of fake email addresses, used to thwart email-extracting web bots”

Satirewire on the breakup of Microsoft. (thanks to Bruce Schneier)