Month: <span>July 2001</span>

Davenet: Microsoft blinks in antitrust case. “It appears that Microsoft was expecting the court to be confused, and perhaps still does, but this is not a confusing issue. That Microsoft focused on this aspect of the judgment shows that this is where the juice is.”
10:50:35 PM  

Salon: Police ignore Condit’s faulty alibi. “Falsely used as a Condit alibi — and, she says, falsely smeared by the tabloids — an ABC News reporter is surprised she still hasn’t heard from D.C. police.”
10:44:45 PM  

CNET: Glitches hinder Hotmail upgrade. “Microsoft’s plans for a Hotmail face-lift went awry Tuesday night as the company quickly withdrew an upgrade amid undisclosed technical problems.”
10:42:16 PM  

Salon: Thank God for the Internet. “The real showstoppers in [Michael Lewis’ new book] aren’t the technologies themselves, but the kids who are using them…”
10:40:39 PM  

Thanks for the kudos, Steve! (And the software!)
10:32:02 PM  

CNET: Napster gets temporary reprieve. “The appeals court released a terse note Wednesday saying that last week’s ruling, made by federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, would be “stayed pending a further order of this court.'”
10:30:38 PM  

BBC: Smart dashboard watches drivers. “If all else fails the dashboard will squirt cold water into the face of a driver to keep them concentrating on the road ahead.”
10:27:25 PM  

Ananova: Shopper wrecks six vehicles as she parks her car. Whoops!
10:25:30 PM  

Dress ’em up Dubya.
10:24:31 PM  

CNN: Solar sail test flight set. “The first test of the privately funded Cosmos 1 project is planned for Thursday, using a converted intercontinental ballistic missile launched from a Russian submarine to carry two Russian-built sail blades aloft.”
10:24:14 PM  

CNET: Oracle to offer free online storage. “An Oracle executive said Tuesday that the database software giant will launch later this year a new service–dubbed ‘Oracle Files Online’–that businesses can use to store their corporate data.” Umm… can you say covert lock-in, boys and girls?
12:57:18 AM  

Joel Spolsky: Good Software Takes Ten Years. “But that’s just the first ten years. After that, nobody can think of a single feature that they really need. Is there anything you need that Excel 2000 or Windows 2000 doesn’t already do? With all due respect to my friends on the Office team, I can’t help but feel that there hasn’t been a useful new feature in Office since about 1995. Many of the so-called “features” added since then, like the reviled ex-paperclip and auto-document-mangling, are just annoyances and O’Reilly is doing a nice business selling books telling you how to turn them off.”
10:10:17 PM  

Salon: The healthcare disaster that wasn’t. “In 1997, [Bush] said of the Texas Patient Protection Act: ‘I am concerned that this legislation has the potential to drive up healthcare costs and increase the number of lawsuits against doctors and other healthcare providers’… Far from becoming a bonanza for avaricious trial lawyers, the right to sue an HMO or insurance company in Texas has been exercised just 17 times.”
10:07:45 PM  

CNET: HP patents way to wire molecular circuits. “The new technology has the potential to extend the current trend in computing that leads to new generations of chips twice as powerful as the preceding generation every 18 months, a march of progress called Moore’s Law. However, unless there’s a way for molecular electronics to communicate with the outside world, the idea will be merely an academic curiosity.”

What this article completely ignores is the potentially stifling effect that the patent itself will have on this technology. If it turns out that HP has patented the only viable technology for connecting molecular circuits to conventional circuits, then it’s possible that we won’t see molecular computing any time soon.
5:06:01 PM  

CNN: FBI missing computers, weapons. “An internal FBI review has turned up hundreds of stolen or missing firearms, including submachine guns, and laptop computers, including at least one containing classified information…”
5:01:10 PM  

CNET: Deadline set in Napster appeal. “Napster attorneys told the judge the system was prepared to keep more than 99 percent of unauthorized music files off its system. Judge Patel demanded the system keep 100 percent of copyrighted music off the system. [Napster] is seeking an emergency stay from the appeals court that would allow the company to relaunch its service.”
4:59:44 PM  

Salon: House to vote on flag protection amendment. “As in the past, the House is expected to vote in favor of a constitutional amendment Tuesday and send it to the Senate, where it probably will be defeated by lawmakers who say saving free speech rights is more important than saving flags from desecration.”
4:57:29 PM  

Ananova: SWAT team guards empty shop for six hours. Whoops.
4:54:19 PM  

Independent News: Nuclear employee ‘borrows’ tube of plutonium.
4:53:16 PM  

Dictionary.com Word of the Day: exegesis: Exposition; explanation; especially, a critical explanation of a text.
4:52:16 PM  

CNET (AP): Search engines accused of deceptive results. “A consumer watchdog group Monday filed a complaint with the FTC, asserting that many online search engines are concealing the impact special fees have on search results by Internet users… By late Monday afternoon, three of the search engines had responded to The Associated Press’ inquiries about the complaint. Two, LookSmart and AltaVista, denied the charges. Microsoft spokesman Matt Pilla said MSN is delivering ‘compelling search results that people want.'”
6:04:09 PM  

Science Daily: Nano-Transistor Switches With Just One Electron, May Be Ideal For Molecular Computers. “Most previous single electron transistors (SETs) could only operate at super-low temperatures, because heat can also provide the energy necessary to add electrons to the island… Now, Dekker’s group has made a device so tiny that heat fluctuations are irrelevant, even at room temperature.”
6:00:53 PM  

The Associated Press is reporting that Trent Lott has called on Gary Condit to resign: “Infidelity is always unacceptable, but particularly when you have an elected official involved in a position of trust with a young girl, an intern. If these allegations are true, obviously he should resign.”

While I agree that Condit’s infidelity is morally unacceptable (IMHO), by itself it isn’t enough for me to say that he should resign. The bigger issues are of honesty and integrity. Now if I were a defense lawyer, I’d probably have told Condit not to admit anything to police, and for your average Joe, that’s the right advice from a legal point of view.

But Condit is a public official. He has the voters to answer to, as well as the police, so at least politically speaking, lying about the affair was just plain stupid. It should have been obvious to him that he would be unable to keep the affair secret, so he should have just come clean in the first place. (That is, of course, unless he really did have something to do with her disappearance, which at this point, I doubt.)

Much more important than the fidelity issue however, is the integrity issue. Personally I don’t really care about the infidelity in and of itself. But Levy was an intern, and Condit was “in a position of trust”. It’s totally inappropriate for him to have had an affair with her, in particular. I don’t care if he slept with a flight attendant, but having an affair with an intern, less than half his age is unacceptable. If he were a college professor and Levy were a student, he’d probably be fired.
1:24:02 PM  

Jeff finally put up pictures taken on his trip to Alaska.
1:17:56 PM  

Wired: Floridians Mock Cop Cams. “Wearing masks and making obscene gestures at police cameras, about 100 people protested a new security system that scans faces in the city’s crime-ridden nightlife district to search for wanted persons.”
1:15:28 PM  

Reuters: Russia Says U.S. Missile Test Threatens ABM Treaty. “In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement: ‘A logical question again arises — why take matters to the point of placing under threat the entire internationally agreed structure of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, including its core, the 1972 ABM treaty?'” Remember the Cuban missile crisis?
1:08:40 AM  

NYT: How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote. “In its investigation, The Times found that these overseas ballots – the only votes that could legally be received and counted after Election Day – were judged by markedly different standards, depending on where they were counted.”
1:05:36 AM  

spacetoday.net: Spacecraft detects water in extrasolar system. “…Observations by the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) detected a cloud of water vapor around a dying star, CW Leonis. That cloud… is likely created as the star, growing brighter in the final stages of its life, is vaporizing several hundred billion icy bodies in a disk similar to the Kuiper Belt around the Sun.”
1:04:35 AM  

BBC: Solar craft aims for altitude record. “Helios, an unmanned craft powered by 62,000 solar cells, reached an altitude of 22,800 metres (75,000 feet) before beginning its descent.” Cool!
1:03:21 AM  

Wes: “My phone is not working; I wonder how long it’s been like that.”
1:01:59 AM  

Dictionary.com Word of the Day: crux.

Frank Zappa: “The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.”
1:01:05 AM