According to Federal Law, you must be able to request a free credit report once a year from the major credit agencies. The companies were required to roll this out in 4 phases. I remember the annoucements, but either I missed the news reports that they were now available in my area, or the stories were not run. (Either are quite plausible.)

For everyone except "the Eastern States and All US Territories", the deadline has passed and you can now get your free credit report from this web site. (The Eastern States et al come online Sept. 1st, 2005.)

If an adjective is in a statement, but the statement is just as true without the adjective, with its opposite, or with a generalization, then the statement fails my adjective test.

Examples:

• Opposite: "Democrats prey on the weak-minded." <-> "Republicans prey on the weak-minded." Both are demonstrably true; I had a senile great-aunt that was preyed on by both, quite without shame.
• Generalization (by dropping the adjective): "A New Computer from ComputerCompany will speed up your photo processing!" -> "A new computer will speed up your photo processing."

(Sorry for the political nature of that first one; I tried to come up with a non-political one, but equal-or-greater truth with the opposite mostly comes up with groups of people, which is political.)

So now a lawyer is trying to convince a court that a having a cached file on your hard drive doesn't constitute possession. (Slashdot article.)

Good luck with that. The real problem is the "possession" isn't the real issue; it's the distribution and viewing, i.e., the human-experienced message.

I wonder how long it will take us to figure out that the whole idea of possession is fatally flawed in the Internet era?

This is the final posting of the Government Myths series. As you might imagine, the urgency of the series decreased as we left the election season.

Unfortunately, I have already seen the first glimmerings that we are entering the next one (ugh!), as I've already seen stories about who is considering running. Things seem right on track so that by the 2012 election, 2016 at the latest, the campaign for the next election will immediately start after the swearing-in ceremony.

The new job goes well. I'm still not completely clear what I can say about it as yet, as I'm under NDA and the public website has not yet been released, but when it is (soon), I'll link it. But I know I can say it goes well.

Due to the driving distance to get to it and the arrangements I've made to deal with that, for the near future my internet access for the week will be much more limited, but I've pretty much made peace with the fact that if this weblog is update once a week, it's a good week.

Blog of interest: Expanding Brain (ExBr), a blog about "Windows outliners, software development and starting a new business". Also of note is that the author has set up a wiki for outliner topics.

The author and I have been exchanging emails, comparing development notes.

SomethingAwful is an relatively old Internet Humor site, which may not be to your tastes. That said, their complaints and article about the effects of Google Accelerator seem to be well backed up, and I haven't seen this information come through my normal channels; even some of the dedicated Google weblogs don't seem to have picked this up yet... well, at least the ones I can get through to at the moment.

XBLinJS 0.4.1 is released.

In the unlikely event your browser has SVG support built in, see the SVG Widget demo. Simple, but real.

One of the promises of XBLinJS was that you'd be able to use it for more than just HTML. I have to admit that at the time, I was only about 80% certain that I could do that. But I saw this article, and combined with the recent market successes of Firefox and some personal projects of interest that could be used there, I took a few hours tonight and tried to create an SVG Widget. (Note that the real story with FireFox is they plan to "turn on" the SVG support for everybody in 1.1; it has existed for a while, but in a highly experimental form.)

Springboarding from here, discussing an article on how Darwinians may be their own worst enemy.

I was raised Christian and Creationist.

By explicit and informed choice, I am still the former. I can no longer call myself the latter. I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts and conclusions on that, and why I do not believe that to be a fundamental conflict.

As is my speciality on this site, I would point out the "Creationist" and "Evolutionist" are not the only two choices, nor is this really a "shades of grey" situation, either. Instead, there are several distinct questions that arise, with more-or-less binary answers.