You wouldn't steal a car, right? So you shouldn't pirate a movie, either.

That was the gist of the infamous "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" anti-piracy campaign from the Motion Picture Association of America during the mid-2000s. But questions are now being asked about just how carefully the MPAA followed its own anti-piracy principles when designing the campaign. Specifically: Did the MPAA rip off a key font?

The answer to that question is, like many matters involving typefaces, fonts, and copyright, somewhat complicated.

According to the government, Dugan directed federal agents away from the hallway outside of her courtroom to see the chief judge, then hustled illegal alien defendant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, whose case she was supposed to hear, out another door. The affidavit also noted that, on top of all that, the case against Flores-Ruiz wasn't called. When the state's attorney asked, the attorney found out the case had been adjourned even though the state's attorney and the victims were there for it.

So much for that "due process" that the victims had come for, and that Democrats are now screaming about. Reminder: the illegal alien was facing multiple charges of domestic violence, and he had already been deported once, so he was a re-entry. //

So if you don't know the details, why are you commenting? How can it be "obvious" intimidation when you don't even know the facts of the case? You say you don't want to comment, yet you are commenting. This tells you all you need to know about why media today is in trouble.

Then Brooks made it worse.

And to me, if she- - let’s say she did escort this guy out the door. If federal enforcement agencies come to your courtroom and you help a guy escape, that is two things. One, it strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic.

And in times of trouble, then people are sometimes called to do civil disobedience. And in my view, when people do civil disobedience they have to pay the price. That’s part of the heroism of it, frankly. And so you can both think that she shouldn’t have legally done this, and that, morally, protecting somebody against, maybe not even in this case, but in other cases, frankly, a predatory enforcement agency... //

Unbelievable. Forget about the enforcement of the law or any of the victims. We've now moved from "no one is above the law" to "sometimes civil disobedience is necessary," and breaking the law is "heroic." He wants to be able to offer an opinion, without getting held to any of the bad details in this particular case, so what is what he says worth? Absolutely nothing. //

Dieter Schultz RedDog_FLA
8 minutes ago

Civil Disobedience by a Judge responsible for the rule of law?
Label me puzzled. Brooks has really left leaned his views.

When you consider the way that progressives reason, namely, that they start with the conclusion that they want to draw and then work backwards to find a line of rationalization that gets them there... when you consider that... well, it's hard to be surprised by what emanates from the mind of a progressive.

It seems to me that Judge Dugan and Brooks both approach the world, including the legal world, from that paradigm... well... it's not all that surprising to hear their views on civil disobedience.

That worldview and reasoning runs counter to the way axiomatic systems like the law, and math, works but nobody ever said they were rational.

"The thing [Trump] was determined to do was to talk to Zelensky face to face, and talk about how we're going to get the largest land war in Europe to an end. Both sides have to want that," Waltz said. //

Waltz also elaborated on one of the administration's biggest frustrations while untangling the Russia-Ukraine mess--the truly disastrous and inept way the Biden national security team went about it:

If you go back--we're 100 days in...just 100 days ago, Biden and his team had no end in sight. This was an endless war. This was a meat-grinder of men and material and national treasure...He had never defined victory.

It was Jan. 10, 1963, that Congressman Albert S. Herlong. Jr. from Florida read the list of 45 Communist goals for America into the Congressional Record. The purpose of him reading this was to gain insight into liberal elite ideas and strategies for America that sound awfully familiar today.

The list is attributed to Cleon Skousen, researcher and author of "The Naked Communist." //

30. Discredit the American founding fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of "the big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

A one-time payout of $5,000 — an amount that wouldn’t even cover the cost of one of my births — isn’t a life raft, but a pat on the head as families struggle to stay afloat amid rising costs, child-care shortages and a culture that undervalues parenthood.

American families don’t need a flashy push present. We need durable policy change.

We need tax reform rooted in research, reflecting the real needs of modern mothers and fathers, and support that empowers families to dream bigger, not just survive.

Several Republicans on Capitol Hill are thinking deeply about how to ease that burden. //

Moore’s Family First Act, for example, won’t solve the whole problem, but it sends the right message: families matter.

As Moore told me, “Moving toward a pro-family culture will require considering both immediate incentives and lasting policy change.”. //

Which brings me to a moment last week, halfway around the world, that somehow felt very close to home: Vice President JD Vance‘s X post of a perfectly imperfect photo of himself, his wife Usha and their squirming, squinting children on their official trip to India.

The caption? “With three little kids staring into the sun, this was actually the best photo we got at the Taj Mahal today” — followed by a laughing emoji.

That’s the kind of positive, pro-family image Americans need to see more of: messy, real and beautiful.

But what's truly funny about this effort is that they claim this is a "conversation" and they want people to join them.

Then maybe you shouldn't disable the comments and chat on YouTube. That prevents people from commenting on what they think of this silly exercise. It shows you don't want to hear what people think, and you know the reaction isn't going to be positive. //

Even as they attack President Trump and the Republicans, they show just how different they are. Trump takes all kinds of questions, even from hostile media. He's not afraid of that — he will fire right back at them. That's fighting, that's sticking up for principle.

This is just posturing, and all they're getting is a few of their own Democrats to join them. //

ThatGuy81
4 hours ago
That's just performative loitering.

The federal government doesn’t just pass laws in Congress. Each year, many of the 438 federal agencies—nominally under the president’s control through the executive branch—publish tens of thousands of pages in regulations, red tape that increases the costs of business, transportation, and many other factors Americans often don’t consider.

This imposes a kind of hidden tax that makes everything more expensive. It also justifies the work of the Department of Government Efficiency and other efforts to streamline the federal government, according to Clyde Wayne Crews, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the annual report, “Ten Thousand Commandments.” Crews released the 2025 version of the report on Thursday.

A new task force within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) convened Tuesday to rectify the “anti-Christian bias” perpetrated by the federal government under President Joe Biden. Attorney General Pam Bondi created the task force with President Donald Trump’s Feb. 6 executive order, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.”

“My Administration will not tolerate anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians,” Trump’s order stated. “The law protects the freedom of Americans and groups of Americans to practice their faith in peace, and my Administration will enforce the law and protect these freedoms. My Administration will ensure that any unlawful and improper conduct, policies, or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated, and rectified.”

This just in: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is good for plants. In fact, plants can't live without it; the process of photosynthesis is how plants turn carbon and sunlight into sugars and carbohydrates - food. Whenever you eat a carrot, a potato, or a mess of collard greens, make sure to thank photosynthesis!

Now, there is a level of CO2 that we don't want. CO2 is a greenhouse gas; it's not as serious as methane or even water vapor, but runaway CO2 (from non-biological sources) is why Venus is a pressure cooker. But Earth is nowhere near that, and while through much of the planet's history it'd been warmer than now - sometimes a lot warmer - CO2 is, generally, a good thing. A little bit more CO2, according to some recent studies, is actually greening the planet. Watts Up With That's H. Sterling Burnett has the news. //

We're seeing some local evidence of this right now, right here in the Great Land. Our growing seasons are lengthening, slowly, due to slightly warmer temperatures, and Alaskan agriculture is expanding, to the point where the state legislature was considering the formation of a state department of agriculture. That didn't happen, but the slight warming we are experiencing - and, yes, the climate has been on a gradual warming trend since the last glaciation - has the potential to open up even more northern lands for agricultural use. //

Various analyses of the so-called “Social Cost of Carbon” calculations indicate global greening and its effects on agriculture alone may mean that the metric would be better labeled the Social Net Benefit of Carbon.

Global greening is an established fact, and this study is just one more data point of proof. //

Froge
7 hours ago edited
Venus is hot because the atmosphere is 92 times as dense as ours AND Venus gets 3x the energy from the sun as Earth.

The denser atmosphere explains most of it. We would have much higher temperatures too with the same composition but 100x denser. It is a stretch to blame it all on CO2.

Joel M. Petlin @Joelmpetlin
·
The pro Hamas mob attacked two non Jewish janitors at Columbia, calling them "Jew lovers," as they beat them and held them against their will.

Now please tell me why there are people who are still supporting the violent masked mob and not the minority workers who they assaulted?

The Free Press @TheFP
"The Columbia University janitors who were held hostage during the violent takeover of a campus building last spring are suing their alleged captors for battery, assault, and conspiracy to violate their civil rights, according to a copy of the suit reviewed exclusively by The Free Press.
5:12 PM · Apr 26, 2025

Certainly flips the script on "oppressed" and "oppressor." Marxism hardest hit.

The janitors were working the night shift as heavy cleaners. What were they cleaning? The New York Post reported that the janitors were forced to scrub the swastikas that had been spray-painted in the building. //

As reports indicated, these professionally organized protests were funded primarily by George Soros' Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), and other left-wing concerns.

WordStar was first introduced in 1978 and the final release — WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev. D — came out in December 1992. The program has never been updated since, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; the program is abandonware.

But I still use it, and George R.R. Martin uses an earlier version. There has never — until now — been a complete online archive of the final version of the program along with all its manuals. Here it is:

Noble software that met an ignoble fate, XyWrite no longer is under development by that name. But many journalists and some publishers, professionals, and academics will use the software till--in Paul Andrews's words--"they uncurl our cold, stiff fingers from our keyboard," so let us speak of xyWrite in the present tense.

A famously fast, robust, command-driven text processor/file manager that publishers from Johannesburg to Jakarta, from San Francisco to Kansas City to West 43rd Street, relied on throughout the '80s and some do even now, the software is an unrivaled writer's tool. Derived from the Atex typesetting system by the same developers, xyWrite 3 pioneered (well-established in various courtrooms) the auto-replace feature that while you type substitutes a word or phrase for a user-defined abbreviation. Other equally clever features assist text manipulation, and the superb Microlytics spellcheck and thesaurus are integrated. But xyWrite's cardinal virtue may be that it stays out of the writer's way.

If you believe xyWrite 3 couldn't possibly be any better, or you assume basic things you wish it would do can't be done, !xyWiz will startle you. (And if some !xyWiz component has disappointed you in the past, the current version will come as a happy surprise.)

An installer for XyWrite for Windows (16-bit) running under modern Windows

XyWrite documentation (Mostly XyWrite III+)

XyWrite as delivered by the factory is notoriously under documented, particularly with regard to some implementation notions (such as 3 byte encoded data characters) that one really needs to understand to use XyWrite well. Over time, Herbert Tyson's superb "XyWrite Revealed" book, and a number of excellent notes by Carl Distefano and Robert Holmgren have been extremely useful in filling the documentation void.

I have been working on my own set of notes concerning these implementation details. My notes differ considerably in approach from Tyson's, Distefano's, and Homgren's works in that they attempt to rationalize how and why things in the implementation got to be the way they are. For me, and presumably some readers who are like me, a how-it-got-that-way approach makes things easier to understand and remember. Other will no doubt find the prevailing Tyson/Distefano/Homgren works more to their liking. Some may find value in reading both

This note describes XyWrite III+ in some detail, with emphasis on (a) its overall architecture and on "internals," and (b) its "macro"/programming/automation facilities. The target audience is threefold: (1) XyWrite III+ users who want more understanding, mostly of XyWrite XPL programming, (2) others who have never used XyWrite, and "wonder what the fuss is/was all about," and (3) myself -- since nothing clarifies one's thoughts about a given topic as trying to explain the topic to someone else. //

XyWrite III+ is a product that many users still feel is the best writing tool they have ever experienced. But, due to some misestimation by XyQuest (XyWrite's developer) as to how much MS Windows would damage the DOS applications market, plus an untimely, misguided, and costly partnership between XyQuest and IBM at about the time Windows was emerging, XyQuest failed at about the time MS Windows emerged. XyWrite development largely ceased soon thereafter.

In my view, many of the concepts that made XyWrite great have never been articulated, and many of them died when XyQuest died. This note attempts to explore and lay out some of those concepts, in a way that they might be appreciated even by someone who has never used the product, in the hope that some of these concepts might emerge in some measure in future "word processing" software. This hope, however, is perhaps a rather slim one -- nothing will make a person into a XyWrite fan as much as actually using the product will.

XyWrite is a word processor for MS-DOS and Windows modeled on the mainframe-based ATEX typesetting system. Popular with writers and editors for its speed and degree of customization, XyWrite was in its heyday the house word processor in many editorial offices, including the New York Times from 1989 to 1993. XyWrite was developed by David Erickson and marketed by XyQuest from 1982 through 1992, after which it was acquired by The Technology Group. The final version for MS-DOS was 4.18 (1993); for Windows, 4.13. An offshoot descendant of XyWrite called Nota Bene is still being actively developed.

DOS XyWrite virtualization solutions:
vDosPlus XyWrite installers

I continue to use WordStar for DOS 7.0 as my word-processing program. It was last updated in December 1992, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; the program is abandonware.

There was no proper archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 available online, so I decided to create one. I’ve put weeks of work into this. Included are not only full installs of the program (as well as images of the installation disks), but also plug-and-play solutions for running WordStar for DOS 7.0 under Windows, and also complete full-text-searchable PDF versions of all seven manuals that came with WordStar — over a thousand pages of documentation.

I’ve also included lots of my own explanations on how to use and customize WordStar, many WordStar-related utility programs, and numerous other goodies.

Carolyn Clink kindly did the scanning of the manuals. When she was done, I said to her, “Countless WordStar users will thank you.” She replied, “Oh, I think I can count them.” ;)

And it’s true that the WordStar die-hard community is pretty small these days (George R.R. Martin still uses the even-older WordStar 4.0). But the program has been a big part of my career — not only did I write all 25 of my novels and almost all of my short stories with it (a few date back to the typewriter era), I also in my earlier freelance days wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles with WordStar.

I wanted there to be a monument to this, the finest word-processing program ever created. As Anne Rice said, “WordStar was magnificent. I loved it. It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to it, Microsoft Word is pure madness.”

And, I suppose I’m thinking a bit about my legacy, too. Once I’m gone, my literary estate will need to deal with my electronic manuscripts, and my executor should be able to work with them on her own computer rather than just mine. Also, there are countless other writers who are no longer with us who wrote with WordStar, including Arthur C. Clarke; I hope this archive I’ve created will be of use to scholars.

Anyone can have WordStar for DOS 7.0 up and running on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes using this archive; with just a little bit more work, WordStar for DOS 7.0 also runs just fine under Linux and Mac OS.

Here’s the link to the full 680-megabyte archive:

https://sfwriter.com/ws7.htm

Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans.

WordStar 7.0d was the last-ever DOS release of the classic word processor, and it still has admirers today. A notable enthusiast is Canadian SF writer Robert J Sawyer, who wrote the book that became the TV series Flashforward.

Thanks to his efforts you can now try out this pinnacle of pre-Windows PC programs for professional prose-smiths. Sawyer has taken the final release, packaged it up along with some useful tools — including DOS emulators for modern Windows – and shared the result. Now you, too, can revel in the sheer unbridled power of this powerful app. //

While many folks in the Unix world have Vi keystrokes engraved in their muscle memory, those for WordStar are the equivalent for CP/M and MS-DOS users of a certain age. Ctrl+S/ E/D/X for navigation, Ctrl+K, B to mark the start of a block, Ctrl+K, K to mark the end, then Ctrl+K, C to copy it or Ctrl+K, V to move it; and Ctrl+K+S to Save. The modern Joe text editor still uses them, for instance. It hasn't got all the functionality, but if you don't want to struggle with an emulator to run a DOS app, the FOSS clone WordTsar comes close, and has versions for Windows, Linux and macOS.

By modern standards, WordStar doesn't do much, but it does everything many writers want. The Reg FOSS desk is rather fond of Robert Sawyer's novels, as well as George R R Martin's come to that, but those less given to genre fiction may recognize William F Buckley Jr and Ralph Ellison, both keen users. ®