Genii Weblog


Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:18 AM
The Parthenon is an object of beauty and wonder, but we seldom forget that it is a ruin.  While its mighty pillars stand tall, we can see the crumbling marble and the areas of decay and erosion.

The web is increasingly filled with ruins, remnants of a glorious past.  Often, their decay and erosion is less visible than at the Parthenon.  As time goes on, this will only become more true.

When individual companies run their own websites on their own servers, and the company "goes dark" so too do their websites.  With the increasing use of cloud resources and free or nearly free websites, this natural decay disappears.  If a website is hosted on Blogger or Facebook or a service like that, the owners can walk away, leaving the remnants.  As the web semantics change less rapidly and websites are built around templates, it is less "obvious" when a website is obsolete, a ruin.

This may not seem like a big deal, until you imagine the clutter if every temple from ancient Greece and ancient Rome and so on were still standing.  Websites need expiration dates, a virtual razing to tear down the rubble and leave room for the new, or we will increasingly find ourselves wandering in the rubble of dead companies, projects and blogs.

Copyright © 2010 Genii Software Ltd.

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Sun 21 Mar 2010, 07:47 PM
It appears assured at this point that the health care legislation being considered in the U.S. House of Representatives will pass.

I must say, I am greatly relieved.  Besides any general liberal tendency which I have (and I do), I am personally relieved.  My family has been generally healthy, apart from the myriad young child ear infections and such, and we have still gotten mired in the "pre-existing conditions" nonsense before.  I have run my own small company for over a dozen years without company-sponsored insurance, which has meant a series of increasingly expensive insurance which we use less and less each year.  Right now, we are facing a small health crisis (not me, not dire, not going there) which will be resolved fairly quickly and will probably not cost what one year's premiums do, yet it will almost certainly mean that nobody will want to take us on in the future.  If our insurer stops covering us, we are screwed.

But the health care legislation pending will help.  It is not a cure-all, but it does promise more of a guarantee that I will be able to buy insurance for my family, even if at high rates.  That is a relief, and for that I thank the members of the U.S. Congress who found it in their hearts (for whatever reason, political, moral, religious or pragmatic) to pass this.  I also believe that in the long run, this will make small businesses and large businesses more competitive in the world, since right now companies in many countries do not directly have to pay the high costs of health care, which are instead shared across society.

It's not the bill I would have hoped for, but it is a bill that gives me hope, for myself, for my family and for my country.

Copyright © 2010 Genii Software Ltd.

Tue 16 Mar 2010, 10:38 AM
This is brilliant!

Copyright © 2010 Genii Software Ltd.