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)

Claire Wolfe wrote a few years ago, “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” Now Liz Michael observes:

It’s probably not going to be what is commonly thought of as a “patriot” that fires the first shot. It’s probably not going to be a political activist from the left, the right or the center. . . . The first shooting of the bastards will probably be by average citizens who tried to comply but were not allowed to, and whose lives were overcomplicated by that inability to comply.

In fact, this description fits Vin Suprynowicz’s account of Carl Drega – but that was before we had Fatherland Homeland Security to worry about.

The Thrill-Packed Pulse Pounding Adventures of Action Kitty