BatesLine linkblog

How to install OpenSSH sshd server and sftp server on a Windows 2000 or Windows XP or Windows Vista

Helpful advice on installing and configuring the Cygwin sshd server. More info here and here.

Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes | Life, Tutorials | Receding Hairline

Hyphens are not minuses are not em dashes are not en dashes. A times symbol is not the same as a lower-case X. Straight quotes should not be used for feet, inches, or quotation marks for that matter. A degree sign is not the same as a masculine ordinal. Plus more typographical hair-splitting.

Flaws aside, Rosty and Stevens put the public first | Washington Examiner

Michael Barone praises Rostenkowski for his work removing tax preferences as part of the 1986 Tax Reform and Stevens for his role in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. Worth reading for the contrast with other ways of addressing the needs of aboriginal Americans: "The corporate form gave incentives to the management of each corporation to pay attention to minority opinion (because minorities could elect a director) and at the same time tended to insure continuity of management. In contrast, some Indian reservations are governed by successive winners of 51 to 49 percent elections, with continued skirmishing and attendant corruption."

Journalism Warning Labels « Tom Scott

Very funny: "WARNING: This article is basically just a press release, just copied and pasted." "WARNING: Journalist hiding his own opinions using phrases like 'some people claim.'" "WARNING: To ensure future interviews with subject, important questions were not asked." (Via Ace of Spades HQ.)

American English Dialects

Big map showing dialects of English in the US and Canada. Tulsa is on the border of the Inland South and West Midland. For cities marked in green there's a link to audio sample of a representative speaker. Chosen to represent Tulsa's accent is U. S. Rep. John Sullivan.

Route 66 nearly 60 years ago « Route 66 News

A home movie of the Chicago-to-LA trip in 1953, with scenes that include the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore and the lights of downtown Las Vegas.

Essay: Dumb-dumb bullets - July 2009 - Armed Forces Journal - Military Strategy, Global Defense Strategy

"Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.

"Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool -- it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them....

"Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides."

Grauniad: Cory Doctorow: Reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated

"When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else. And some of us are discovering that we weren't bloggers after all - but blogging was good enough until something more suited to us came along.

"I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I've done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn't be a good fit for the blog - material I just wouldn't have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought."

26 O.S. 4-120.2: Inactive Voters

The Oklahoma law governing the designation and purging from the voter rolls of inactive voters.

The Law of CONCENTRATED BENEFIT over DIFFUSE INJURY

Examples of this phenomenon in the realm of pollution, how to fight against the "iron law," and the connection to the Founders' insistence on limited government:

"A necessary requirement is that most people recognize the nature of the universal law which favors injustice over justice -- even in peaceful democracies. Since this type of education so rarely comes "from the top," either grassroots activists will do it, or it will not occur. The ground for inventing good and effective strategies will be much more fertile when everyone is so aware of the axiom that it enters the folklore ... when just the two words, 'Concentrated Benefit,' can communicate the ages-old dilemma and the dynamics of it.

"Successful solutions to the dilemma are far more likely to come from the grassroots than from prominent intellectuals who so often depend today, directly and indirectly, on approval from one special interest or another. We note that the 'founding fathers' of the United States were less beholden to special interests than today's professional intellectuals. The founding fathers actually addressed the law of Concentrated Benefit.... In the text of the Constitution, its authors tried to limit the areas of government activity -- limits which (if they had been honored) would have greatly reduced opportunities for narrow interests to 'persuade' elected officials to operate on behalf of the narrow interests."