Month: <span>August 2001</span>

CNET: House panel passes Web-tax ban. “A U.S. House of Representatives panel voted Thursday to bar states from taxing Internet access and extend for five years a ban on other Internet-specific taxes, declining to approve legislation that would help states tax online commerce.”
11:24:55 PM  

Daddy Gravity: “…Good honest cynicism gives me a perverse kind of hope.”
11:19:37 PM  

What if other industries worked the way health insurance works?.
11:16:37 PM  

SOHU.com: Hawking to get British accent with new “voice”.
11:15:57 PM  

John Robb: “Die pop-up advertiser, die!!!!” [emphasis added]
11:14:01 PM  

Chicago Tribune: Files erased in Florida, damaging election review.

“As [Palm Beach County elections officials] prepared for the new election, they wiped out computer files showing how each ballot was punched in the presidential election… The data is especially important because Palm Beach was one of the key counties in the five-week recount process that ultimately sent President Bush to the White House… The punch card ballots themselves were not destroyed but cannot be accurately recounted because they have been extensively handled and possibly damaged since Election Day.”

Seems to me that there’s an awareness problem here. Most people are probably used to thinking of computer data as less tangible, and more temporary than data on hard-copy. Somehow this makes its preservation less important, but clearly in this case it’s more important, since the originals degrade with handling (a.k.a. data access). Museum curators have known for a long, long time that you don’t let your visitors handle delicate originals — you let them have a facsimile instead. Maybe the Palm Beach County elections folks understand a little better now, why you keep backup copies of important data.
1:19:59 AM  

SF Gate: Slap the PUC
It May Be the Last Chance to Protect Independent ISPs From Extinction. “… PacBell has proven unable to keep up with DSL demand. It would be difficult to come up with a more effective way to further accelerate the current downward economic spiral than putting the state’s remaining independent ISPs out of business.”
1:13:21 AM  

The Register: Mac OS X 10.1 leaks confirm speed bump. [via Hack the Planet]
1:10:11 AM  

The Flangy News: “Whenever I see the term ‘work flow’ my eyes glaze over.”
1:09:16 AM  

Dictionary.com Word of the Day: machination.
1:07:50 AM  

My brother would probably be interested in these.
1:07:08 AM  

Salon: The rigged missile defense test. “There was only one thing that all the happy salesmen forgot to mention about their latest test drive. The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it. In other words, it would be fair to say that the $100 million test was rigged.”

And we’re getting ready to throw decades of work on strategic arms control out the window for this crap? I smell a rat.
2:29:40 AM  

John Robb: “I went to the Air Force Academy. We had the toughest honor code in the country. Ballmer wouldn’t have graduated. Neither would have Gates.”
2:26:10 AM  

CNN: MTV: Rewinding 20 years of music revolution. “It was a scary few years,” Pittman says. “The reality was that no basic-cable TV network had ever succeeded. None of them had ever made money. There was a real question mark as to whether any advertising-supported basic-cable network could ever be a profitable venture.”

(Bob Pittman is one of MTV’s founders, and currently a co-COO of AOL Time Warner, which happens to own CNN.com.)
2:24:35 AM  

Paul Boutin: search engine optimization. “When it comes to search engine optimization, it’s easy to become obsessed with doing every little thing, but the rewards for that kind of attention to detail are far too small. You need to stick to chasing the big game.”

Paul also indulges in a little “petty gloating” on his weblog — his words, not mine. 😉
2:19:07 AM  

Jeff: “I asked the front desk to call a taxi cab for me. Twenty minutes later a black stretch limosine pulled up, ready to take me to Wal-Mart!”

Jeff told me the story on the phone the other night. Apparently there weren’t any cabs avaliable, so they sent a limo instead, and charged him the regular taxi rate. That’s discount shoppin’ in style…
2:10:03 AM  

Dictionary.com Word of the Day: aficionado.
2:05:58 AM