Thursday, August 28, 2003

'If I lie to you, it's for your own good' And speaking of pathetically disappointing action and lack thereof from political 'leaders': Dust and Deception. Under pressure from the White House, the E.P.A. systematically misled New Yorkers about the health risks of the World Trade Center's collapse. By Paul Krugman. [New York Times: Opinion] What were they thinking? Maybe something like: 'We're going to protect you from terror by soothing your fears by willfully misleading you and encouraging you to take needless additional risks to your health by foregoing simple protective measures you might take if we were filling to tell you the truth and let you make your own judgements as if we lived in a democracy.' Adding still more fuel to the continuing 'craven' vs 'clueless' debate that will, I predict, increasingly plague this administration. 10:16:05 PM    comment []  trackback []

The 'death of email' and the RSS alternative Steve Outing: With Email Dying, RSS Offers Alternative. [Scripting News] Let me repeat: 17% to 38% of the e-mail you send out to customers who ask for it -- or even pay for it -- does not reach them. In other words, it's not just that we're all finding our emails buried in spam, but that spam overwhelm is well on its way to destroying the valuable and transforming communications technology that email was, at least for a while. RSS, for those not familiar with it, stands for Really Simple Syndication, and enables peope to easily subscribe to desired content and read it in their web broswer, free of spam -- at least until the spam slime figure out a way to crack that. Meantime, why can't Congress do anything to criminalize spamming? Dunno -- but you might do well to deluge your reps with that question. 10:04:42 PM    comment []  trackback []