Saturday, August 14, 2004

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Our school district just introduced a policy kicking sweets out of the schools. No heroin-like dependence on soda-machine kickbacks. Bravo! 11:29:51 PM    comment []

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To avoid dozing off in afteroon meetings, I sometimes leave my seat to stand against a wall. I had a first the other day--I started to fall asleep standing up! My knee buckled, instantly awakening me. Fortunately, it was a small and friendly meeting--I sheepishly confessed what had happened, and took my seat (the side-effect of the incident was to jolt me awake!). 11:28:58 PM    comment []

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Wired has an article about the fact that the nation's "newspaper of record" can't achieve that same status on the web, due to the fact that its archive is restricted to paying customers. I do hate that, though I can sympathize some with publishers trying to make money. Anyway, it seems like there is a good technological solution. The search engines should distinguish between free content, paid content, registration-required-but-still-free content, and perhaps content with other impediments. Then, you could set your personal search parameters accordingly. The default could be the way it is today, oriented toward free content, but you could change it if you wanted to. Of course, that only addresses a part of the problem. A big part of Google's ranking algorithm involves analyzing how many pages are linking to a given source. And if that source is hard/impossible to link to, it won't get so many "votes". 11:27:01 PM    comment []

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No Unrelated Legislation: Good Idea, Bad Unintended Consequences Minnesota has a constitutional amendment that prohibits unrelated legislation from being bundled into the same bill. While this seems like a good idea on the surface, I think it is idealistic and impractical. If the regulation worked, prophylatically, 100% of the time, that would be great. But if (when) it doesn't, then we have to contend with the possiblity that laws may be invalidated months, even years, after-the-fact. 11:14:06 PM    comment []

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Email address theft--Insider jobs? In regard to the AOL email address theft incident--I have always suspected that inside jobs must account for a fair amount of addresses that are delivered into the hands of spammers. This, of course, was on a grand scalse, I was thinking more of employees of small ISPs, or ecommerce companies. 11:09:45 PM    comment []