Axodys

Hmm, I just found out that the F-22 Raptor will cost about $200,000,000 a piece. Multiply that by the 300+ the Air Force wants to bring into service between 2005 and 2015 and that’s an obscene amount of money.

Yesterday I was talking with Mary at lunch about something I had read where Bill Bradley had indicated he wanted to eliminate the F-22 Raptor program as a cost saving measure if he was elected. Considering the F-15’s it will replace are about 26 years old and the technological advances we’ve made since they came out (stealth technologies, more powerful computers, thrust vectored engines, classified stuff, etc.), not to mention the money we’ve already invested in developing the F-22 that didn’t strike me as a good course of action. Our conversation moved on to other things that I did actually like about Bradley and I didn’t think anything more of it. Then last night I happened to flip to a program on the Discovery Channel about Air Force test pilots and it spent several minutes discussing and showing footage of the F-22. Nothing like a good coincidence I always say.

The latest Mozilla build seems pretty snappy on Windows 2000. I guess I need to find some really taxing sites and see how it does with those.

Another useful site for book comparison shopping is the aptly titled isbn.nu.

If you want to comparison shop for books on the web. BestBookBuys.com is the place to go. Unsurprisingly, Amazon is usually one of the more expensive places they list.

Dave Winer has a lot of useful links on the software patent issue today on Scripting News. He points to a very informative article on the issue in the MIT Technology Review. This whole issue just makes me boil.

Great! Blogger, just ate one of my post attempts for the day. Luckily I’ve still got it in my memory banks.

At one point I had a URL for a simple little web application that would take the ISBN code for a given book and list the pricing at several online bookstores (including amazon.com). I’ll have to see if I can track that down again.

No More Pesos For Senor Bezos. I decided to stop shopping at amazon after the One Click patent lawsuit reared its head and anyone who thinks giving a company a monopoly on e-commerce is a bad thing should do the same.

Long time Mac columnist Don Crabb passed away yesterday. Roger Ebert, his good friend and colleague, wrote this obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times

Today’s strip at Penny Arcade could probably be best described as Squirrel Wars.

Continuing the recent parade of Presidential candidates and their wives through Spokane, Bill Bradley is going to be in town for a question and answer session tomorrow morning. I’m debating whether or not to go since it’s fairly early and I’m starting to lean towards McCain since he seems to be the most electable of the candidates I like these days. Guess I’ll see how I feel when I wake up.

Here’s a review of Freaks and Geeks that gives a good overview of what the show is all about. NBC seriously needs to GET A CLUE about this show!

It’s raining, it’s pouring… my weblog is boring. I’ll have to work on that this weekend.

Tog has some interesting thoughts on what Apple really should be doing when it comes to improving its interface. I think he’s right on about keyboards having a return and delete key on the lefthand side of the keyboard as well. It really bugs me to have to move my hand from mouse to the keyboard and back when I’m navigating through dialogs.