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Author's note: This article was originally published on the website for the 69th NYSV, Co. B.  Reprinted by permission.

I was raised believing that Irish immigration to the New World was due to the Irish potato famine in the 1840's.  This was a lie.  There was no famine; the starvation of the Irish people was caused by the British as a form of genocide.  Does that sound harsh?  Read on.

I remember the early "dot-com" days in 1999 and 2000.  It was an exciting time, and as a college student I had front row seats: a new computer, high speed internet access, plenty of free time, and surrounded by fellow students with a loose set of morals, especially when it came to things like pirating mp3's.  No one really knew what the internet would turn into.  One very popular technology was Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP.  Back then, it meant a website with a telephone keypad that let us make free long distance calls.

I just played one of the most fun games I've experienced in a long time.  It's only half finished, it's open source, and they want you to subscribe to a subversion repository.
My relationship with SVN is similar to the Republicans' relationship with public health care.  Not friendly.  So, I found someone who maintains their own Ubuntu-compatible repo for the game.  It took about five minutes to download and install.  The interface isn't terribly intuitive and there's no tutorial, but I managed to start a new single-player game.

A new Op-Ed from today's NY Times attacks the "locovore" movement--people who want to eat locally so that their food has a smaller "carbon footprint" because it hasn't been trucked across the country.

Off the bat, here are several problems I see with his argument:

Sadly, there is no incentive any more to write clean code.  So it was with a special, old-school thrill that I had a "hacker moment" earlier today.