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Brillian Digital has quietly attached its software to Kazaa and plans to remotely "turn on" people’s PCs, welding them into a new network. CEO sez a pop-up box will give people a chance to turn it off. Users who've accept "terms of service" already distributed with Brilliant’s and Kazaa’s software are already agreeing to let their computers be used without any payment at all.
comment posted at 1:44 PM on Apr-2-02

Teoma takes on Google?
Ask Jeves launched its new search engine yesterday aimed at challenging Google for the best search engine on the web. Teoma offers options to narrow your search using "subject-specific popularity." For example, if someone searched for the name "Bill Clinton," Teoma offers ways to refine your search, showing links to topics related to your search, such as "Clinton Scandal" and "Monica Lewinsky." Will this search engine replace Google as the SE of choice for the Internet savvy? Also, what other search engines do you use?
comment posted at 9:01 AM on Apr-2-02

Values Fall Prey to Hypocrisy For a long time now, we secular humanists and other skeptics have been denigrated as the apostles of decadence and social decay. A nice article on a recurring theme.
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comment posted at 10:06 PM on Mar-29-02

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act is being spearheaded by Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. He wants to prohibit the sale of any device that can play, copy or electronically transmit one or more categories of media unless special protection technologies are incorporated. Anyone intentionally violating the CBDTPA would be subject to civil and criminal penalties, including prison terms. Welcome to the 21st century.
comment posted at 12:47 PM on Mar-22-02

Yahoo!Mail to start charging for services. Effective April 24, 2002, Yahoo! Mail will no longer provide free POP3 Access or Auto Mail Forwarding to Yahoo! Delivers subscribers. What's your take on this?
comment posted at 4:26 AM on Mar-21-02

Final Whitewater Report Clears, Criticizes Clinton After 10 years, Millions of dollars spent and tons of political fodder, it's all finally over.
comment posted at 2:07 PM on Mar-20-02

America, Heal Thyself. "Racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower-quality health care than whites do, even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable, says a new report from the National Academies' Institute of Medicine. 'Disparities in the health care delivered to racial and ethnic minorities are real and are associated with worse outcomes in many cases, which is unacceptable. The real challenge lies not in debating whether disparities exist, because the evidence is overwhelming, but in developing and implementing strategies to reduce and eliminate them.'"
comment posted at 2:06 PM on Mar-20-02

"The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity ...what we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains." I do feel better.
comment posted at 2:43 PM on Mar-20-02

A family of six was found dead in a case of murder-suicide, authorities in Oregon said Friday. Bryant, the father, became estranged from several branches of his family, including his parents, three brothers and a sister. The other family members were Jehovah's Witnesses and the split appeared to involve differences over religious beliefs. In other news, An angry, mysterious preacher told Andrea Yates that she was evil, that her children were damned, and that only death could save her. Mr. Yates testified that the preacher had taught him and his wife that children are lost forever to God, and therefore damned to eternal hellfire, if they are not "saved" by the time they are 13 or 14. Are we regressing to the religions produced nightmares of the Middle Ages?
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Dream (Dream[Dream Job]Job) Job If only I was so lucky. What do you do for a living?
comment posted at 6:07 AM on Mar-16-02

Don’t call them terrorist – call them "Koran Preservationist." Bob Jones III, writing on BJU’s website, says that his university & Christians in general should move away from the word "fundamentalist" because of it’s negative connotations since the September 11th terrorist attacks.

"Bob Jones University is unashamedly Fundamentalist, but the term is beginning to carry an onerous connotation with the world at large because of the media's penchant for lumping Christian Fundamentalists in the same heap as Islamic Fundamentalists. Instead of "Fundamentalism" defining us as steadfast Bible believers, the term now carries overtones of radicalism and terrorism. "Fundamentalist" evokes fear, suspicion, and other repulsive connotations in its current usage."

Is Bob Jones III right to lay blame solely on the media? Or is the public at large simply fed up with religious zealots, young earthers, fundies, anti-abortion bombers and terrorist?
comment posted at 9:59 AM on Mar-12-02

Privacy in Cyberspace. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School is offering a free "lecture and discussion" series on Internet Privacy. The series began today and is comprised of six modules that are introduced weekly over six weeks. Registration is free and open to all.
comment posted at 4:13 PM on Mar-11-02

The Most Listened To Internet Radio Station In The World... is London-based Jazz FM. It's not really a Jazz station, but it plays delightful lounge music and the sound quality(Windows req.)is exceptional. And it makes a profit! What can they possibly be doing right?
comment posted at 9:03 AM on Mar-8-02

A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present (Via Fark.) There's some eye-opening stuff here, assuming it's all true.
comment posted at 9:13 AM on Mar-8-02

Who says corporate websites don't have a sense of humor? Check out the database ID number this NHL player with the famous last name got. Coincidence? I think not! Anyone else have any such bits of humor found on "professional" sites they'd like to share?
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God's gonna outlaw abortion whether you legislators walk out or not.
comment posted at 10:00 AM on Mar-6-02

"Let us pray that our country will stop this war." From a recent speech by U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio: "We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases. We did not authorize war without end. We did not authorize a permanent war economy. We did not authorize an eye for an eye. Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on Sept. 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan." Amen.
comment posted at 7:49 PM on Mar-5-02

Witness the scalability of Gnutella in realtime. We've all read the technical papers and masters thesises (thesi?) about the theoretical growth of the Gnutella network and if/how it will work. Today with the release of Morpheus Preview Edition, now connected to the Gnutella network, you can witness its 345 trillion users put the Gnutella network to the test. In a little over a couple hours it has grown to roughly 3 times the size it was last week, and still going strong.. how much bigger can it get?
comment posted at 2:06 PM on Mar-4-02

Public shaming is in order. It's bad enough to rip off a design. But this person ripped off BABY PICTURES from Hoopla without credit, along with layouts, bits of text, and who-knows-what-else. Also compare: Leslie's status, Enurv's status. The "personal" part of personal publishing means you do it yourself. Argh.
comment posted at 6:50 AM on Mar-1-02

It's easy to think of lawyers as greedy, overpaid blood-sucking pigs. But do we have any clue what lawyers earn? Yes we do, thanks to American Lawyer Media's (via law.com) annual roundup of lawyer compensation. Not all of which is surprising. For example, partners at the top corporate firms like Wachtell Lipton, or Cravath, Swaine & Moore or Davis Polk each averaged millions in 2001 ($3,285,000, $2,245,000 and $1,740,000, respectively). Even piddly little first year associates at those firms got $125,000 to start. (We're talking 24-year-old law school grads with precisely zero professional experience and know-how. Zero.) But most newbie lawyers don't win those jobs. Also difficult to land are entry-level positions at district attorneys' offices, but they're not nearly as lucrative. A junior Manhattan D.A. earned $45,000 last year (up from $42,000 in 2000). But locking up criminals beats toiling for civil rights at a not-for-profit like the New York Civil Liberties Union, which paid entry-level lawyers only $35,000 last year. Over all, best off are lawyers who work for big companies. Top counsel at IBM last year earned a measly $506,000 in cash (salary & bonus), but throw in stocks & options and his compensation totaled $7,795,613. Compared to that, you have to worry about the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court whose family in 2001 had to struggle along on $192,600.
comment posted at 10:04 AM on Feb-28-02

The death of creationism? William Saletan is claiming that creationism is dead, because Intelligent Design isn't as reactionary as the old creationism, even though scientists still treat it as a threat. I think creationism in any brand is still a threat, regardless of how reactionary it is. What do you think?
comment posted at 12:11 PM on Feb-18-02

Those who vote for Democrats only aid the terrorists. "In a series of TV and radio ads in each of five states hosting top Senate contests, President Bush utters the tag line to a narrated paragraph slamming the Democratic senator of that state for being partisan during a time of national duress." Has anyone seen any of these ads? What did you think of them?
comment posted at 11:52 AM on Feb-17-02

Why Are So Many Americans Cancelling Their Subscriptions To "The London Review of Books"? This letter from Paul Genova rings true - and touché - to this European at least. Ever since the very respectable LRB published its issue on the September 11 attacks, American readers(and some notable contributors) have been writing in droves to cancel their subscriptions and connections to the journal. Mary Beard's article(op.cit.) aroused most of the fury, though others are arguably just as outrageous. In the pages of this most lively of letter sections - graciously available online - this particular correspondence seems to demonstrate an ever-sharpening divide between American and European intellectuals. Are Paul Genova's and other readers' disgusted reactions justified? Are they specific to the WTC attacks or, more worryingly, representative of a wider separation?
comment posted at 4:10 PM on Feb-15-02

Are there other universes? It's mind-boggling to imagine how this might be so, but some scientists think it's possible. But if there's no way to detect something, does it really exist?
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