I blogged recently about the Holidays and a super geeky Youtube video with a bunch of LARPers destroying a nativity play.
I found out today that the creators of the video did their own Youtube response video critiquing the inconsistencies of their own video. It’s worth watching for a laugh. I like the anti-paladin rant.
It reminds me of this t-shirt design:
This is the odd news of the day. You can read the full story but the Lakota people have decided to end their treaties (generally not signed willingly) with the United States.
The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.
“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.
A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.
They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.
Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.
I wonder how serious the Lakota leaders are in doing this or if this is more of a tactic for better aid to the reservations and a recognition of their grievances. Twenty years ago, this would have been immediately crushed but I expect the U.S. Federal government to be a bit more careful (because of appearances, if nothing else) in reacting to this. Personally, I doubt if they will really make a go of it as a completely independent nation, for economic reasons if nothing else.
Over on Channel 9, an interview with Dean Hachamovitch and Chris Wilson just went up. The IE team apparently passed an internal milestone this last Friday in their work on IE8. Apparently, one of the outgrowths of the work is that IE8 will pass the Acid2 Browser Test for the first time.
Charles, who did the interview, states:
In this interview, I sit down with IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson to discuss this milestone and dig into compliance in general, lessons learned from IE 7 and discuss the IE team’s ultimate goal of de facto interoperability. Of course, no Channel 9 interview is complete without meeting some of the devs who write technology so we take a walk from Dean’s office to super developer Alex Mogilevsky’s office to discuss what’s been done to provide IE with the core rendering features that enable IE 8 to pass the ACID 2 test. We also chat with CSS guru Markus Mielke who was instrumental in identifying and planning the feature set required to pass ACID 2.
The interview is worth listening to for those of us who have wondering what the hell the IE team has been doing this past year as Mozilla works towards the Firefox 3 release. Given the recent discussions of the CSS working group and CSS in general, this seems to be somewhat relevant to the state of browsing (at least on Windows).
I’ve enclosed links to the mp3 of the interview below for playback within this blog entry or you can go to the interview page as well (where there is also the video). Comments can also be left on the interview page (if you have a Channel 9 account).
Warning: the video file is 584 MB in size so you might be better off with the 15 MB mp3 file.
I’m sure that I’ll have more thoughts on the interview later but I wanted to get this out early in the day so those interested in hearing or watching it could take a look immediately.
Update: Now announced on the IEBlog as well (with a mention of “IE8 standards mode” being necessary, which means they have either added a third mode or updated their existing standards mode, as opposed to “Quirks” mode, rendering for IE8 to be more compliant with standards. Go figure.)
All original work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
