Friday, February 7, 2003

Study: Few Drivers Yak on Handheld Phones Mobile phone-related driver distraction has been cited as a hazard by public safety advocacy groups and U.S. government officials who have focused on legislation banning handheld phone use in vehicles -- but is it really a danger? A study released by the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows that just 3 percent of drivers put a phone to their ear at any given time. [osOpinion] Yeah, but they're all driving on Highway 101, and most of them can't drive worth shit even without the distraction of a phone to their ear! 4:46:44 PM

YA3PDNA - WildGrape's NewsDesk Looks like the space for desktop news aggregators is getting very crowded. Which will be the first with a boxed product at CompUSA? Which will be the first to sell a site license into a large enterprise? Bill Kearney: Have you tried Wildgrape yet? Looks like we have Yet Another Three Paned .Net Aggregator. This aggregator does allow you to have multiple collections of feeds, sorts, searches, and filters your subscriptions by date and content. Sweet. I would personally prefer that this be done over the content than the name of the blog, but what is provided is still quite useful. I was also intrigued by the way it handled invalid feeds. It colored the icon in red, provided information on what was wrong with the feed, and provided a link to the RSS validator. Way cool! [Sam Ruby] I like the fact that it can browse websites as well as weblogs. This is the way to go! Perhaps we could take the Chimera source base and fit it into an open source news aggregator... 4:01:29 PM

Scratch on the go Air guitar meets vinyl. Bizarre new gadget from Bandai that let's you mimic the scratching DJs do with records, on the go. Aimed at "hip hop lovers" who yearn to be DJs, the One Hand Player comes out in Japan next month. Read [Translated from Japanese with Babelfish] [Gizmodo] 10:45:56 AM

'That These Dead Shall Not Have Died In Vain' Ug! Plastic::Work::War: The threat of chemical and biological attack in any conflict with Iraq forces the US military to reconsider a long-held policy. Will flag-draped coffins returned home from battle be replaced by field cremations? [Plastic] 10:42:53 AM

Brilliant debunking of "No blood for oil" Ken Adelman makes some great points: After Mandela's ad hominems and hypocrisy came the zinger: "They just want the oil," he said of Bush and Blair. Were that true, they could "just" get "the oil" quite easily, by scrapping the sanctions the U.N. imposed on Iraq a dozen years ago. Lifting these sanctions would free up all Iraqi oil, much more quickly and easily than war. That's precisely why the French appease Saddam. "They" -- indeed -- "just want the oil." Hence they care little about Iraqi suffering or Saddam's hell-bent drive for weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Iraq's huge oil reserves prove two key points. First, just how desperately Saddam clings to his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. His refusal to scrap them 12 years ago, as he pledged, cost Iraq more than $100 billion in lost oil revenue, perhaps as much as $200 billion. That's a lot to forgo for a WMD arsenal. But it's WMD that Saddam values most. No price his people pay is too high for his personal ambitions. Second, Iraq's having gobs of oil shows how principled America and England are. For unlike the French and Russians, our leaders -- both Republican and Democratic, Labour and Conservative -- have willingly sacrificed acquiring cheaper oil to force Saddam's scrapping his WMD arsenal. Moreover, Iraqi oil is not just there for the grabbing after liberation. Iraqi oil fields have become as dilapidated as has Iraq under Saddam. The successor government will need huge resources to modernize and expand its oil equipment for exploitation. [Keith's Weblog] Finally, someone has verbalized the thoughts scrambling to organize in my head. On NPR other other day, there was reporting on the French OIL companies that are pushing the French to support the way, lest they be kept out of the "spoils of war" after the fact... made my stomach turn to hear that. It does appear that the US and UK simply want to reduce the global threat. Why does Europe, specifically France and Germany, not see the threat even greater and closer to their borders? 10:22:38 AM

Damn you Syndirella!!! Ouch! Here we see the real power of weblogs in marketing. Word of mouth communications continue to accelerate, and weblogs give it an extra kick. With respectable webloggers like Keith discovering all sorts of nasty problems, the author of Syndirella has to act fast or risk gaining an insurmountably bad reputation. Lost my feeds again (after I had to CTRL-ALT-DELETE it), bastards. It froze viewing a PowerPoint file, so I don't know whether it was the PowerPoint viewer, Internet Explorer, or Syndirella that was the cause of the crash. Either way, however, it's Syndirella's fault that it lost my feeds. How can you just lose data? Does it keep the "list of feeds" file open all the time? What a PITA. Ah, that could do it. Syndirella seems to store the list of feeds along with all of the individual feeds' data (cache of posts, feed settings, etc.) all together in a flat file. So if it happens to crash while it's updating any feed, or even when it's marking an item in a feed read, the master data file will be open and data probably lost when Syndirella dies. [Keith's Weblog] 10:08:26 AM