Rad Geek People's Daily

I’ve been putting most things on the back burner for the past few days while I get together graduate school applications and polish off a few other tasks that have been on the to-do list for a bit too long. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure…

• Now that you’ve already liberated your Office software (thanks, OpenOffice.org!) and your web browser (thanks, Mozilla Firefox!), you can also reclaim your inbox with the public release of Mozilla Thunderbird, a top-notch open source, standalone e-mail client. It features (inter alia) adaptive spam filters, nice RSS / Atom newsfeed support, and extra-useful Saved Search folders. Migrating from AOL? Outlook? Outlook Express? Eudora? No problem! That’s the thing about open source software: they keep making software that works. Score another one for the free world.

• Patent protectionists show once again how they make our lives better and reward innovation. Another threat to technological civilization will no doubt soon be averted by further intellectual enclosure. (Thanks, Copyfight.)

• Fred Vincy has a thorough take-down of editorial hand-wringing over boys’ supposedly declining educational prospects. In fact, the whole thing is a huge sham (for some tangentially related points, see GT 2002-02-06: The Weird, Wild World of Anti-feminism), and as Fred points out, several steps of the argument apparently require you to presume that the money men make is more important than the money women make. It also includes, among other chicanery, this marvelous explanation of the problem: The small group of experts who research the problem only now is beginning to trace its outlines. It isn’t so much that schools have changed in ways that hurt boys. It’s that society has changed in ways that help girls. Helping girls? O tempora! O mores! (Perhaps someone at USA Today does need help with their verbal skills, after all…)

• George Bush really did tell Tony Blair The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur. You can test your knowledge of our Prince President’s gnomic wisdom at the BBC.

• Now that Fallujah had to be destroyed in order to save it, military commissars now have a free hand to build their model city in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Bright ideas for liberated Fallujah include apartheid-style passbooks for all Fallujans and possibly industrial conscription in which all work for Fallujan men is organized under military-style batallions and directed by Army commanders. (For those keeping score, that’s one of Leon Trotsky’s theses about the possible uses of the Red Army after the Civil War drew to a close. It managed to horrify even his fellow Bolsheviks–no small feat, that. Freedom is, indeed, on the march.)

So it goes in this possible world. There should be some more in the way of non-lazy posting coming soon.