jbNet: Quotes and Commentaries

My sense is that budget problems are making people ask fundamental questions about whether we can afford to keep on doing what we've been doing. We are going to have to make some tough choices about prisons versus schools, and about getting a better investment return on how we run our prisons so we don't have so many prisoners reoffending and being sent back.

— Steven Ickes, an assistant director of the Oregon Department of Corrections, talking about how a number of states are trying to cut the costs of running prisons.

Thursday, January 17, 2002

Future additional tax breaks for the wealthy do not deserve higher priority than strengthening education or covering prescription drugs under health care or meeting other urgent national priorities.

— Sen. Edward Kennedy. Over the next 10 years, his plan would bring in $190 billion by delaying a one percentage point cut in the tax rate for joint incomes above $130,000 and another $110 billion by keeping the estate tax but raising the minimum to $4 million, which means less than 1 percent of estates would be subject to the tax.

Wednesday, January 16, 2002

My favorite athlete might be Ronaldo, the Brazilian, not because he single-handedly lost the last World Cup to France by being in a monthlong funk but because the funk was caused after his super-model girlfriend left him for a sportswriter.

— Bernie Lincicome

Monday, January 14, 2002

Major League Baseball, of course, is making its annual request that its fans go away. Do you know the difference between baseball's regular season and the off-season? You can usually figure out which teams are going to be left at the end of the regular season.

— My old college buddy Michael Rosenberg in a column about how the NFL has become America's game.

Saturday, January 12, 2002

The company has always preferred adding features and freezing out competitors to creating stable and safe software. The cost to business and society has been almost literally incalculable, that is, extremely high. Class action, anyone?

— Dan Gillmor wondering why no one has gone after Microsoft for the lack of security and stability in their software. He references a cnet.com article.

Friday, January 11, 2002

I'm sure there are outages every day, but because of the Internet's robust nature they are generally not noticed. We do control-alt-delete and chant, and eventually the connection comes back.

— Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, who also predicted a meltdown of the Internet from a severed link somewhere along the distributed network, which is, of course, designed to prevent total outages.

Of course, even $1,300 isn't the kind of price today's PC bargain hunters probably have in mind. But it's still less expensive than any comparable machine, if indeed anything can be said to be comparable. ... Apple has yet again provided Macintosh polish and elegance at prices the Windows world can't match.

— David Pogue in his review of Apple's new flat-screen iMac with it's "volleyball in a lake" shell.

Tuesday, January 08, 2002

Coloring the News is filled with canards and an unsophisticated tendency to see conspiracies behind every door even as it fails to recognize the tremendous change that has occurred in American newsrooms over the past six years.