This site -- like many others running Wordpress -- has been under attack by spambots for the last couple of days. I have had to disable the comments script in order to prevent advertisements for online poker and diet pills appearing under every post. I've also indiscriminately deleted all the existing comments.

If you happen to know someone who is the author or user of a spambot, please consider using violence against them. And take the pledge never to vote to convict a spammer-killer if you happen to be on the jury for such a champion of justice.

OCLC is some kind of library organization that deals books out to over 50,000 libraries in 84 countries. And they've got this list of their Top 1000 titles. Check out numbers 1 and 2.

This could be promising: NASA's own X-Prize. But first it has to get Congressional approval, and those suit-wearing ass-cougars like to keep to their pockets full of favors.

I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms, which means I have higher video entertainment requirements than other people. Rather than rely upon the hotel to provide video I like to use my laptop. But most hotel televisions don't yet support s-video or composite inputs -- they only have coax. Happily, these guys in Texas sell an s-video to RF coax adapter kit that works great. You plug your s-video and composite audio output from the laptop into the adapter, then a coax cable from the adapter into the television. All things considered, the picture quality is fantastic. Highly recommended.

I can't wait to stop hearing about Scott Peterson. Hopefully he'll sit around on San Quentin's death row for about a decade so the yammering media will forget about him.

As I've mentioned before, I'm opposed to any US government killing US citizens (unless they're being actively hostile, shooting guns, wielding axes, exploding road-side bombs and so forth). I think it should be the right of the family of Laci Peterson to kill him if they wish (or not if they don't), or to pay some masked avenger to do the dirty work.

I guess the legal principle is that you lose the right to Life when you're convicted of a crime, but that presupposes – once again! – that it's the government that grants citizens that right in the first place. Which is emphatically not the case. People have rights like Life, Liberty, Property, etc implicitly, they are “endowed by their creator”, and not granted by any government. I tend to think the right to Revenge should be one of them. See the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution for what should be the final words on the rights of US citizens.

Check out this list by Freedom House dividing the world between Free, Partly Free, and Not Free. The most notable change this year is that Russia has slipped from Partly Free last year to Not Free this year. Apparently the most free countries are Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, each with a rating of 8 out of 100 (lower the better). The least free is North Korea, scoring a nearly perfect 98 out of 100. The U.S. is a 13. Out of 193 countries ranked, 38% are Free, 25% are Partly Free, and 37% are Not Free.

I could swear some quatrain-writing monk or bible-text-crunching computer predicted the Last Day for the year 2029, but I can't track it down due to innate laziness. Anyway, there's a comet coming, the current odds of it hitting us are 1/37, and we are all doomed. Oh, and it's supposed to hit on a Friday the 13th too. Happily, I'm sure to be pretty much bored of living by then anyway.

Today I composed my own Doctor Who music, and it caused me to grin widely.

A dense, convoluted, often inscrutable time travel movie done on the cheap (I read they spent $7000 to make it). Trying to piece together what actually happens makes for great barroom chatter (sort of like Memento if you've had that conversation). 7of10.