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Thursday, February 13, 2003 |
Yahoo News - House OKs National 'Do Not Call' List . A national "do-not-call" list intended to help consumers block unwanted telemarketing calls is moving closer to becoming reality and lawmakers say it will likely go into effect this year. [ ... ] Telemarketers say the registry will devastate their business, endangering millions of jobs and sending ripples through the economy. The Direct Marketing Association, an industry group, filed a lawsuit against the FTC last month on grounds the registry unlawfully restricts free speech. Consumer groups and many lawmakers say the registry has overwhelming support from the public who are fed up with unwanted telemarketing calls. [Privacy Digest]
10:31:38 PM 
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Subscribing to a site from within Safari. One of my favorite features of NetNewsWire is that it’s scriptable. There’s even a Scripts menu, so you can add your own commands as scripts.
Here’s a little two-line script that lets you subscribe in NetNewsWire to the frontmost window in Safari.
tell application Safari to set s to URL of document 1
tell application "NetNewsWire" to subscribe to s
It gets the URL of the front window in Safari, then it tells NetNewsWire to subscribe to that URL.
When NetNewsWire gets a subscribe command it automatically does RSS auto-discovery.
In other words, you could just be on the home page of a weblog in Safari, run this script, then NetNewsWire will (most often) find the RSS feed for that weblog. (If it exists, of course.)
You could put this script in NetNewsWire’s Scripts menu, or maybe put it in the global Script Menu, or even put it in the Dock.
And then there you have it, an easy way to subscribe to a site in NetNewsWire while you’re in Safari.
(By the way, you could probably modify the first line of this script to work with other browsers. It may not even need modification except for the name of the application.) [inessential.com]
9:33:15 AM
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Technology Review: 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World. But in this special section, Technology Review's editors have identified 10 emerging technologies that we predict will have a tremendous influence in the near future. For each, we've chosen a researcher or research team whose work and vision is driving the field. [Tomalak's Realm]
9:30:05 AM
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Cluetrain-less. Broadband for Suckers
"In a shamelessly clever marketing gambit, Best Buy is selling shrink-wrapped AT&T Broadband digital cable kits for $10 a throw. The truth: There's no 'kit' inside, just a brochure with an 800 number and five pay-per-view movie coupons. Best Buy used to hand out the AT&T kits for free, but it found that customers were more likely to order service if they had financial incentive and something shiny to put in the shopping basket. Upon subscribing, they get their 10 bucks back, and Best Buy collects a handsome fee from AT&T. (When a customer doesn't sign up, the retailer keeps the $10.)
Savvy shoppers, however, note that all the information in and on the box can be had for free at www.attbroadband.com. 'Best Buy is about boxes - we've got people coming into the stores to purchase them,' explains Jeff Stratman, a senior buyer. 'The digital cable kit isn't the only product we sell that's essentially air....' " [Wired]
I have a t-shirt I bought in San Francisco in 1997 that is old, ratty, and stained, but I will wear it until it disintegrates because I love it so much. It says "Waiting on the World Wide Web," and it shows Dilbert sitting at a computer with cobwebs around it. The estimated download time of the file he's trying to access is "427 years. 28 secs." The tagline is "the internet is full... go away."
I find it interesting that the above situation is still the norm for most home internet users in the U.S. Deceptive practices like selling broadband in a box won't help. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:11:44 AM
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Political News from Wired News - Attempt to Block TIA Goes Forward. Congress moved a step closer to reining in a Pentagon computer dragnet Tuesday as an amendment holding up funds for the program was tucked into the final version of a bill, the provision's author said. Last week, the Pentagon sought to head off congressional action against its fledgling Total Information Awareness project, which would scour databases for terrorist threats. Two advisory committees have been set up to assuage concerns about the program's impact on privacy But Sen. Ron Wyden said congressional leaders assured him that his amendment suspending funding for the program had been included in a massive government-spending bill by House and Senate negotiators, with minor modifications. The spending package, meant to tie up the loose ends of last year's unfinished federal budget, is expected to go to the floor of both chambers by the end of this week. "It looks to me like the Congress is getting the message loud and clear from the public, and that message is stop the trifling with the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans," Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told Reuters in a telephone interview. "We've been told by the leadership that it is now expected to be in the final bill," he said of his amendment. The Pentagon says the aim of the Total Information Awareness computer project, which it revealed last year, is to seek patterns in transactions like credit card bills and travel records to stop terrorist plots. [Privacy Digest]
9:00:43 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Paul W. Swansen.
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