I played the Fallout Tactics demo today and now... and now... I can... I can feel it. Building up inside of me. THE HUNGER! I can feel it building! Like a swirling empty vortex burrowing into the pit of my soul. THE HUNGER FOR MORE FALLOUT PLAYING! Good thing I loaned out my Fallout 1 and 2 games, or I'd probably never finish the Night's Edge beta!

Yesterday I decided to run scandisk on my Win98 machine. Unfortunately, Microsoft can't write an app that actually works with their own operating system. Even though I'd shut down every item in the Task Manager except Explorer, scandisk continued to tell me that some process was writing to the disk, so it wasn't able to work. No problem, I thought, I'll just "boot" to DOS and run the Win98 DOS version. After I did, however, I discovered that it had destroyed all of my long filenames. As you may know, files in Windows are stored with a maximum name length of 8 characters, and 3 for the extension. The ability to give files longer names is because there's a lookup file that associated the 8.3 filename with the longer name. Either this file has been destroyed or wiped out, and it doesn't look like any recovery is possible. Thanks a lot, Microsoft. It will likely take months for my data to completely recover from this. As it is, I have to reinstall every application I have, since the loss of long filenames has rendered most of them unusable.

Once you actually know the details of California's energy problems, you start to get really irritated everytime someone refers to it as "deregulation". The first obvious clue that no deregulation has taken place is the price cap set in place for almost all California power utilities. Here's a hint: a price cap is a regulation.

Of course, the more subtle indication that it was not what it seemed was the fact that it came from California to begin with. Free markets are a traditionally right-of-center concept. California, of course, is anything but. So when their state proposes "deregulation", letting private power companies compete for business, red flags should go off in any thinking person's head. Reading the details of what can only be described as "reregulation" confirms the doubts. The heart of the problem is that California politicians have no grounding in this thing we call reality. California has no one to blame but itself.

From CNN: "The gun show loophole is current federal legislation that allows people to purchase guns at gun shows without a background check that is required for gun sales at stores."

One of the reasons that many people claim to support "additional gun control" is because they honestly don't know any better. The above section is one of numerous incidences of misinformation that is distributed among the general public by the large media outlets. Is it deliberate? Is it an intentional attempt to mislead people? Or do they just believe the continuous nonsense spouted by the anti-gun lobby?

No, the gunshow loophole does not let you buy a firearm "at gun shows without a background check that is required for gun sales at stores." The so-called "loophole" is the fact that the federal law requiring background checks only applies to a gun dealer, "a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms" (18 USC Section 921(a)(21)(A)). In other words, if your business isn't selling guns, then you can sell the occasional gun without a background check (except in some states/cities). The same applies to gun shows as it does to gun stores, backyards, street corners, and anywhere else. If you have a gun to sell, you can sell it at a gun show. If you're a gun dealer, you have to perform a background check.

Gun shows are not magically exempt from the federal law. It applies equally to them as anywhere else. You really have to wonder about the principles of people who would blatantly lie to persuade others to their point of view.