Author: Ashley Bischoff

New FileZilla Beta

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I see that a new beta (2.0b5) of FileZilla is available. FileZilla is an open source (GPL) ftp client for Windows (no relation to Mozilla).

In that past, I previously used SmartFTP. And, it was a decent program, but I prefer FileZilla’s interface. That, and I prefer to use open source programs if I can (though SmartFTP is freeware, so I didn’t feel entirely guilty about using it).

In this latest version of FileZilla, it has the option to “Preserve date/time of downloaded files”. And, just for my own sanity, I appreciate that feature. Now, if only they'd give that option for uploaded files as well (or would that feature be dependent on the ftp daemon on the other end?).

Two Big Beef Burritos Supreme

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

On the American Dialect Society's mailing list, someone posted this story from The Onion:

William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior

NEW YORK — Stopping for lunch at a Manhattan Burger King, New York Times ‘On Language’ columnist William Safire ordered two “Whoppers Junior” Thursday. “Most Burger King patrons operate under the fallacious assumption that the plural is ‘Whopper Juniors,’” Safire told a woman standing in line behind him. “This, of course, is a grievous grammatical blunder, akin to saying ‘passerbys’ or, worse yet, the dreaded ‘attorney generals.’” Last week, Safire patronized a midtown Taco Bell, ordering “two Big Beef Burritos Supreme.”

To which one poster, not realizing the satire, replied in seriousness:

But of course the back-to-back sibilants in Burritos Supreme would probably not be heard as pluralizing the noun, so Safire might have been heard as “talking funny,” i.e., not marking the plural after a quantifier (ESL speakers do this all the time).

Heh. (and I'm guessing that ESL means “English as a Second Language” in this case)

USA PATRIOT Act

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I was going to e-mail my brother about this, but I figured that I’d post it here as well. He and I were talking on the phone the other day when the conversation came around to Bush and our respective opinions of him.

Though I didn’t vote for him, I generally supported Bush in the past. For instance, I was pleased that he was elected in the electoral college over Gore. If for no other reason, I knew that Bush was more likely to enact tax cuts than Gore (I’m not generally in favor of the government deciding “it knows best” how to spend my money).

However, after the 9/11 attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act (yes, it’s an acronym) was quickly pushed through Congress. Though under the guise of preventing terrorism, it was full of bad ideas:

  • Allow for indefinite detention of non-citizens who are not terrorists on minor visa violations if they cannot be deported because they are stateless, their country of origin refuses to accept them or because they would face torture in their country of origin. […]
  • Give the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and deport any non-citizen who belongs to them. […]
  • Expands the use of secret searches. Normally, a person is notified when law enforcement conducts a search. In some cases regarding searches for electronic information, law enforcement authorities can get court permission to delay notification of a search. The USA PATRIOT Act extends the authority of the government to request “secret searches” to every criminal case.

The ACLU also has this chart that compares various before-and-after effects of the act.

And, after all this, I’m not sure what I think of Bush. Sure, economic freedom is a plus, but that’s no good without civil freedom.