I am currently the proud owner of a Powerbook G4 15" 800mhz [1] and a iBook G3. In the future, however, I would like to slim down on this notebook goodness and switch to a single Powerbook G4 12" and possibly buy a flat-panel display, but that is neither here nor there.#

The first step in this process was backing up the Powerbook, which I have just accomplished with the aid of a Firewire drive. If you need to do a similar thing, I'll let you know the secret--Don't buy a pre-packaged Firewire drive, I bought a Firewire enclosure and a regular drive separately, put them together, and saved over one hundred dollars! "That's a lot of pizza."#

The next step is to find a suitable buyer for my Powerbook. If you think that might be you, or someone you know, read on.#

The Powerbook is a fine piece of machinery and I loved it like I imagine I will love my first born, when that time comes, but overtime I desired something smaller to fit on the small desks at school and that didn't look as precious. Going with the smaller and slower iBook was a strange experience, but bearable, I still long for the wider screen real-estate and faster speeds.#

The only problem related to the Powerbook is a broken Ethernet jack and a lack of accessories. These two things are a result of my house burning down [2] in May. (Here by accessories I mean there are no video adapters and various cables, but there IS a power adapter.) I asked a local Mac store if it could be repaired and they said yes, but did not specify at what price. It is equipped with 1 GB of RAM, 40 GBs of hard drive space, a Combo Drive (DVD/CD-RW), and the latest OS X release.#

If this sounds interesting to you, or some you know, please consult Ebay [3] and the Apple Store for reasonable prices and email me at JAY@KENYAMOUNTAIN.COM with your offer. When this 'auction' is closed I will update this post, and if I am unable to find a buyer I will move to Ebay, I just wanted to give right of first refusal to the blog community.#

Update of 2004/08/01: This has been sold.#

Notes:#

1. http://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g4/stats/powerbook_g4_800_dvi.html
2. http://www.makeoutcity.com/Archives/2004/05/27/105215
3. http://search.ebay.com/apple-powerbook-800mhz

(This post is formatted as such for ease of copying and pasting.)#

Andy Duncan writes about Hans-Hermann Hoppe's A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism.#

Democratic socialism, or as I prefer to call it myself dishonest socialism, is merely another facet to the rancid prism of socialism, which seeks both to destroy property and contract. Under democratic socialism, which some see as being Marx's preferred variant to that of revolutionary socialism, two classes of people emerge: those who generate tax and those who live upon tax. The state takes upon itself the right to take any amount of anybody's property it deems necessary to prop itself up, much in the same way that the Normans raped Great Britain in 1066, and does this mainly through the mechanism of buying off groups of democratic supporters to enable a tiny parasitic elite ruling class to hold sway over the much larger general population, with particular emphasis on buying off the support of the intellectuals, with sinecures in Universities, various government organs, and institutions like the BBC. I'm sure you're all familiar with the regular arguments here, so I won't labour the point. But the Professor dissects all of these regular issues brilliantly, almost to the point where in any future Blog debate, you may just want to say, 'Please refer to page X of The Theory of Socialism and Capitalism', in confident refutation of anybody else's ideas opposing your own, if of course you should happen to agree with Herr Professor.

And then we get to the really interesting chapter, from my point of view, the one on conservative socialism. As far as the Professor is concerned there is hardly any difference between the basic actions of the democratic socialists and the conservative socialists. Both think the state has the right to steal any amount of anybody's property, including their lives, it deems necessary to sustain itself, often calling this either a sound tax base or military service to defend freedom; both forms of socialism tend towards taking control of health and educational systems, in order to control the bodies and the minds of their various subjective populations; and both forms of socialism are always keen on strengthening all the other usual monopolistic apparatuses of state necessary to maintain a parasitical elite in power, though this is for our own good obviously, such as the police, the army, the legislature, and the judiciary.

Halley Suitt explains the passion of prenups to Britney Spears.#

So here's the thing girl. You work your ass off for your money. I've never met anyone with beaucoup de bucks that didn't work their ass off. If they fall in love with someone who really LOVES them, their partner knows this. If their partner has less "frick" as the French say, that is dough-re-mi, that is yankee dollars, that is money honey, that partner should love them enough to insist on a prenup. It's just that way. A prenup protects all your hard-earned cash and girl, you've earned it the hard way and deserve to protect it. Your beau should know. It's not unsexy, it's not unromantic, it's not unreasonable, it's not lacking in passion or love, it's just the right thing. Your parents aren't bugging your ass about it for no reason. Think of it as a financial condom -- smart girls need to protect themselves sometimes.

Will Baude points out that yesterday was the two-hundred year anniversary of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.#

Richard quotes Danielle Crittenden in response to Julie and I.#

Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder write in The Selfish Class about how to evaluate object-oriented code from the point-of-view of the code, á la The Selfish Gene.#

This comment about open source code is interesting:

Interestingly, every successful commercial object-oriented framework has been distributed with full source code. In the case of the GUI frameworks, such as Model-View-Controller (MVC), MacApp, Object Windows Library (OWL), and Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), the framework, with its source and documentation, is bundled with the development tools for a particular language/platform pair.

It's interesting that giving away the store in this fashion doesn't seem to undermine the product. The phenomenon seems to work something like this: give away a thousand lines of code and ruin your business, give away a million lines of code and ruin the other guy's business. While it may be possible to steal key ideas from a small body of code, overtly copying a million line product without being obvious is more difficult. More importantly, few organizations are willing to assume the comprehension burden and maintenance responsibility for a large body of someone else's code.