Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Where was this guy...

During the campaign? We coulda used more of this.

"We've taken the pissed-off studly John Kerry and replaced him with a total pussy. Let's see if they notice."

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Is the terrorist trial bill really law now?

Or did Bush bungle it by trying to hold on to it and use for grandstanding purposes?

Here's a quick chronology:
That's 15 days (not counting Sundays or the day on which the bill was passed) from when the bill was passed until when it was signed.

So what's the problem? Article I, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution, which states:
If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.
That's inconvenient.

Update: The problem is in the bit about presented to him. I thought that passing the bill and sending it out of the committee counted as that. Instead, there's a formal parliamentary action for presenting the bill and this bill was presented to the President on October 10. Crap.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

More John Yoo

Look at the face of the Prince of Darkness and hear his voice. The man's a cold-blooded, evil sociopathic freak.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

18?

I just saw an interesting series of commercials, late night on some disaster show on a bsaic-cable type network. One was the "Dotster Dots," a weird Spice Girl-like group of women and some cheeseball "technical guy" explaining whatever the hell their service was. The basic gist is that they're a domain hosting and Web design thing. And their Web site is www.18.dotsterdots.com (and they're giving away a Corvette).

Then after that is some work-at-home scam. I didn't really see what they were selling. But their site is www.18work.com.

These are both fairly nonsensical URLs. In fact, it's fair to say that they're obfuscated, deliberately chosen to be cryptic and incomprehensible to non-technical audiences. Go Daddy is kinda incomprehensible (what does it have to do with domain hosting?), but it's simple and it's godaddy.com. If you tell someone to go to gogdaddy.com, they're probably not going to screw it up. www.18.dotsterdots.com is an OK URL for an internal corporate address, to support a particular technical structure, or whatever. But as a consumer site?

Basically only someone who sees the commercial would know what the URL is. No word of mouth, basically. 18work.com is just strange.

But they both have "18" in the URL and fairly conspicuously in the Dots URL. I've seen some other late-night commercials with just Web site addresses. So.. is it just obfuscation to prevent people from being able to tell the address where they were scammed? I don't really have any theories besides that, but it doesn't take a total rocket scientist to know that it would be extremely simple to figure that part of the mystery out.

It's late. I wonder about such things.

Update: The Dotster Dots are named Cool Dot, Smooth Dot, Sweet Dot, Sassy Dot, and Mini Dot. The guy is John. All for less than a dollar a day.