This man is a hacker.

I like this guy. He thinks.

This essay, for example, is about heretical thoughts, and their relation to the world As It Is, instead of the world as It Should Be. (A subject you should appreciate, erudito.)

This essay is about the insidious nature of PR companies, and their stultifying effects on 'real' journalism, with a sideline on why he thinks that this influence has driven the popularity of blog journalism.

Then there is "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas". Or this, or this. I haven't even begun to read through his writings, and I'm impressed.

You really should go here and start reading.

He is a hacker, in all the good senses of the word. He also hacks ideas.

A short aside on the stupidity of Microsoft.

I recently picked up a second-hand PC from work. (PIII 500MHz – good enough, and a shirtload better than the old P200MHz I was running.) It is running Win2K (because I don't think it could happily handle XP. I could be wrong, but ICBF trying it.) This is also a huge improvement over 98 on the old box.
Now, I have a modem. 56.6 external. Swann Speed Demon, if you must know. On the old box, it Just Worked. Turn it on, bring up the dialer window, click OK, Bjørn Stronginthearm's your uncle. On the new machine, there were strangenesses. It turns out, after far too much faffing about (and the fear that I might have to reinstall from scratch), that external modems have to be re-detected and (here is the good bit) Re-installed every godsdamned monkeyfsking time you reboot the verdammt fecking computer!!!1!!

This does not just mean that you have to turn the modem on before you boot the computer. That's a trivial wart, even if inexcusable in itself. What this means is that whoever boots onto the machine to go online has to have the privileges to install the godsdamned driver: You have to be a fecking local administrator, just to go online! This is for a device which could just as easily tell the OS to keep the drivers installed and active, because it is an asynchronous serial device which can be arbitrarily disconnected and reconnected and doesn't break therefrom.

For feck's sake, this is not hard. Win98 got it right, dammit. This is so fundamentally brain-damaged it makes my teeth hurt (mainly from clenching and grinding).

Some Microsoft Driver Manager 'Developer', somewhere, really desperately needs to be kneecapped and killed, for the good of the species.