Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Questions about santorum (Dan Savage, in The Village Voice). Such as, Am I being insensitive to my lover if I don't have an enema first and there is some santorum? How do you get rid of a santorum stain? See also Senator Santorum and His Critics Name a sex act after Senator Rick Santorum How to Use "Santorum" in a Sentence 7:08:02 PM    comment []

Paul (who plays with food and other things) speculates on telemarketers moving to Canada, India, or elsewhere, to work around the National Do Not Call Registry. I don't like that idea, but, golly, gee, it makes lots of sense, doesn't it? 5:07:52 PM    comment []

Searching for Ways to Cope With Buzz of Mosquito Season. The pressure to defeat the ubiquitous little bloodsuckers is greater than ever and the list of gadgets and lotions to help in combat is very long. By James Gorman. [New York Times: Science] 7:22:10 AM    comment []

Ex-Intel Coder Wins E-Mail Case. Free speech advocates are applauding California's Supreme Court for striking down a ruling against Ken Hamidi, a former Intel engineer who was barred from sending e-mails to company employees after he sent a series of messages critical of company policies. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News] 7:20:07 AM    comment []

Intel can't block ex-worker's e-mail. Curtailing employers' control over their computer systems, California's high court says thousands of unwanted e-mails sent to the chip giant's employees don't constitute a trespass. [CNET News.com] 7:06:01 AM    comment []

NY Times: A Safer System for Home PC's Feels Like Jail to Some Critics. But by entwining PC software and data in an impenetrable layer of encryption, critics argue, the companies may be destroying the very openness that has been at the heart of computing in the three decades since the PC was introduced. [Tomalak's Realm] This was one of the issues we talked about on the "Fair Use By Design: Programming Fair Use" panel at the ALA/CLA meeting in Toronto. The initiative-formerly-known-as-Palladium ("Next Generation Trusted Computing") threatens to take control of our own computers away from us, so that, for example, the sound card could just refuse to play an MP3 by way of copy protection. A Digital Rights-and-Restrictions Management system (DRM) almost surely needs that kind of hardware locking to succeed in giving Big Copyright the control it seeks. 7:03:35 AM    comment []