One wonders if the ISP didn't think at least a little about the legitimacy that might give the organization... but nevertheless, the ISP is on the right side of the law... and that's horrible.

I hope that Britain's example of how badly things can go wrong when you rule that content providers are responsible for content sends a clear warning to other countries (and courts!) who might consider ruling this way. Slashdot today has an article about the British site that's protesting the Godfrey result and the subsequent wild censoring, the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain. The CACIB had to run to the United States because their British ISP shut them down, fearing they would libel someone!

(And a gentle reminder that if you give permission to somebody, they can do whatever you gave them permission to do. Userland's weblog search engine would be unaffected by this ruling, because you have to explicitly ask them to index your weblog.)

A reason I think this is fair is that it cuts both ways. It also means that nobody can walk off with your weblog and proceed to make big bucks with it. It doesn't just protect eBay, it levels the field for everybody. The alternative, that you can walk off with content and profit off of it, results in big money always winning.

I don't know why exactly, but I was thinking about my grandparents and what they think of my education in computer science.

French Group Takes Yahoo to Court Over Nazi Site: Missed this one, dated last Tuesday. Mostly interesting because of the line "LICRA did not say how access to a worldwide Web site could be blocked in France only." A concrete example of international laws in conflict.

More playing with gems: What does the shortcut do...? [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "manilaSuite" hasn't been defined.]
[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "manilaSuite" hasn't been defined.]
ahhh... cool!

I like taking web sites and condensing them down to as few bytes as possible, once you've cached the constant objects. I have 20KB of Javascript on another site I've created... goodness help the poor student who will be hired to replace me in a few months...

Gems. The first thing I'm doing when I get back home is move the 5KB of Javascript out of the template and into a gem. That'll save some time... and some bandwidth. Then I analyse the site and see what else I can toss into a gem. Accomplished.