I watched a presentation by Lawrence Lessig today about why we need campaign finance reform now, and it got me thinking -- the ideal of democracy is 1 person, 1 vote. But how much of a vote does each of us have?

First, here's the presentation:

Each citizen starts off with one vote. But thos...
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Wow, what a stormy issue this has become! The following was going to be a follow-up comment over on Andy Beard's blog, but it got a little too long. Here's my take on the issue:

I guess I see it a little differently. Let me see if I can explain in a way that at...
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If this list were worthy to be on itself, it'd just a be a list. But it takes laziness to be that bad, and I'm just not that lazy. Let me explain.

You've seen 'em: "54 great call to action buttons", "32 cool jQuery accordion menu scripts", "79 great header graphics for inspirtion", "15,327 free...
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I'll have to explain that headline, won't I?

I'm about to completely overhaul the way CaRP Evolution, Grouper Evolution, and some of my other products are sold. Instead of giving away a stripped down version of the apps for free, the core application will be free -- the full version. Plugins and add-ons (like Lobst...
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I just sent an updated version of Lobster - my RSS feed reader to all CaRP users. This revision adds Twitter support -- tweet directly from your feed reader.

Lobster automatically generates tweet text from the title and link from each RSS item. Edit it as desired, select which of your Twitter accounts to post...
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Yesterday, I decided it was high time to scratch an old itch, so I built myself an RSS feed reader. It uses CaRP Evolution's MySQL plugin to store parsed RSS feed items in a database. I think this is the first time I've used that plugin for a real project.

My three biggest complaints about...
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What is luck? Does it even exist? It depends on your definition.

Here's mine: "luck" is a mysterious force that brings good things to people who have it. It doesn't exist.

What does exist is chance. Chance is random coincidences.

"Lucky" people are really just people who put themselves in a position to benefit from...
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I just posted a comment on Rich Schefren's blog. That triggered an automated email thanking me for the comment and linking to a few useful resources. The email had backslashes before all the quote marks and apostophes. I sent an email in response pointing out the problem and briefly suggesting possible causes. I got an...
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The other day, I ran into a situation where I needed to do case sensitive queries in MySQL. With a little Googling, I discovered that the keyword "binary" makes that possible, like this:

select foo_field from foo_table where binary foo_key="foo value"

So I tried it out and it worked, but when querying a table with...
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A few weeks ago, my wife and I decided it was time to cut our internet bill by switching away from Charter to a local wireless internet service provider named Internet USA. I figured it was a good time to reconsider our cable TV package too -- we'd discussed switching to DirecTV in the past...
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