Elian Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:17:37 AM April 24, 2000: Since you asked, I'd mostly like to ditto the Curmudgeon's opinions on Elian, in as much as you can call them opinions.The only thing I will say is I started out agreeing with the Miami relatives at first, before I knew the whole story. However, also before I knew the whole story, they completely turned me off with their treatment of Elian.

Clinton and Gore's big promise looks like a diversion... Digital Divide6/5/2000; 7:17:34 AM April 24, 2000: Regarding the Digital Divide, "'People make it seem like it's a racial issue when it's not,' Ellison says of recent efforts by the Clinton administration to address gaps in computer technology access. Rather than concentrate on race, Ellison would like for more attention to be paid to the influence of income disparity on the digital divide.

AOL Founder: Censor the Net? Ha! Censorship6/5/2000; 7:17:31 AM April 24, 2000: "Communist Vietnam, China, and even the U.S. government should think again if they believed they could censor the Internet, the founder of America Online said Monday."Maybe true, maybe not, but they can definately make our lives miserable, so lets stop gloating and start working in Congress. This false security stuff bothers me.

More artists to sue Napster says Metallica lawyer Music & MP36/5/2000; 7:17:29 AM April 24, 2000: "Expect more headline acts to follow Metallica's lead and launch legal action against controversial software developer Napster - so says the metal band's lawyer, Howard King."I think there's still some confusion going on here. Napster-the-company is doing nothing illegal. All it does is offer software and provide a free indexing service. You may want to sue Napster-the-software.

Despite 'Piracy,' CD Sales UP Music & MP36/5/2000; 7:17:27 AM April 24, 2000: "the industry has been claiming rather loudly this year that digital piracy would hurt music retail. Despite the fact that the issue might not come up as focal point in the lawsuit, the fact that people are purchasing CDs at a higher rate than they were in 1999 is going to have to be addressed in the court of public opinion.

PayLar$.com Music & MP36/5/2000; 7:17:25 AM April 21, 2000: "PayLars.com gives Metallica fans the chance to make a donation to the band to make up for all the revenue the band thinks it's losing to online MP3 trading. http://www.paylars.com/more_info.asp">Read more about what August Nelson is doing with the PayLars.com website."You can use this site to make a non-guilt-admission donation to Metallica for any MP3s you may have. As the site owner says, "

The Zone Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:16:21 AM April 19, 2000: Joel on Software Where do these people get their (unoriginal) ideas?: "With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.

Dr. Dre Sued By Lucasfilm Music & MP3 6/5/2000; 7:16:18 AM April 19, 2000: "One day after taking legal aim at Napster, Dr. Dre is now the target of a high-profile legal salvo himself.... Lucasfilm's suit, which seeks unspecified damages, hinges on Dre's use of something called the "THX Deep Note," a sound trademarked by Lucas' company. According to Lucasfilm, the sound is the first ever to be trademarked; it should be familiar to moviegoers as the sound that accompanies the THX logo before films screened in theaters with THX sound systems.

In Search of Skeptics Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:16:15 AM April 18, 2000: The basic point of this article is that we should consider the consequences of laws constraining the Internet before we make them.Another case of "You'd-think-this-shouldn't-have-to-be-said,-but...""And so too is the danger of this legal imperialism also about time. If the imperialists are wrong, then we will have lost something important by the time the Internet's Robert Bork graduates from Chicago.

Screen Scraping Makes Web Comeback Content Integrity6/5/2000; 7:16:13 AM April 18, 2000: Screen scraping's original purpose was to get information out of mainframe computers and into client server systems. The new breed of screen scrapers use HyperText Markup Language to pull information off one Web site and deposit it into another site or a database, even if the two sites are not connected or if one site would prefer not to share information with the other.