Quote [from Washington Post]: "'[The Web] never presents students with classically constructed arguments, just facts and pictures.' Many students today will advance an argument, he continues, then find themselves unable to make it convincingly. 'Is that a function of the Web, or being inundated with information, or the way we're educating them in general?'"Comment [from Greg Hanek on SiT]: This article provides examples of how poorly many people interact with information and information resources.

Like the title? Rumor has it that a Danish court has ruled deep linking illegal. But is that really true? Hard to tell, since the primary source material is in Dutch. But the provided Slashdot comment, from someone actually present, may shed light on the issue. ...the Danish Newspaper Publisher's Association weren't concerned about search engines like Google or just a few deep links. Newsbooster did a systematic index and furthermore sold services for update-information whenever your predefined search words matched any news article.

Review: Men in Black II is more of the same of Men in Black I. It's not quite as good, mostly because all the stuff that was secret in the first movie isn't secret anymore. If you liked the first one, you should find the second one enjoyable. update: Warning, I'm about to go meta. MiB2 is not as good a movie as MiB1 was. As my wife says, MiB2 was a story wrapped around a series of jokes, where MiB1 was a series of jokes wrapped around a story.

*updated*, now more link-a-licious! The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don't get to decide what runs on your computer -- Microsoft does. You can't even open files unless you've been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. ...Music and movie executives will love Palladium, because it puts digital copy protection into the realm of hardware, making it nearly unbreakable.

Mark Bernstein says: Speculation: the accounting crisis is going to get much worse, and integrity is about to be rediscovered as a virtue. Politicians think people was security -- more surveillance, more arrests, more patrols -- when they want honesty -- honest effort, honest dedication, and candid accountability. Trust is going to top the charts; Microsoft's (again) getting off on the wrong foot. Palladium is so 90's. [via ViewFromTheHeart]

"The problem with the interactions between health care pros and geeks has been the promise and failure of technology on many occasions to make our jobs better and easier...." " I'm working with a patient bed now that incorporates a wide variety of features that makes it much more comfortable and ergonomic for both the patient and the nurse. And it works wonderfully - when it works. But some geek decided to put the controls, LCD panel, and circuit board in the bedrail - a bedrail that is slammed up and down all day and night as patients get in and out of bed, as they yank back and forth on it to adjust their position, and as staff pull on it to guide the bed down the hall to OR, CT, X-ray, etc.

I seem to be on the subject of economic fallacies today. Scripting News: "And perhaps this series of notes on smoking cessation will help a couple of other people to quit before getting a deadly illness. So while it may seem grandiose to think of software as life-saving, it isn't really a huge stretch." It's not grandiose in the slightest, and in truth, it's sad that people will think it is.

If someone throws a stone into a shop window, the owner needs to repair it. This puts people to work and increases total output. Since this creates jobs, would we be better off breaking lots of windows and repairing them?... This is the "broken window" fallacy... No implied endorsement of the article; the last couple of paragraphs in particular may or may not be overstated. But interesting.

"I recently asked one of our developers to draw up a design for a specific component. After a few hours he returns telling me that he'd solved a very similar problem a previous place of employment and that they had developed a "neat" solution. The developer then became concerned that a ground-up re-implementation of these design patterns and principals may infringe on the other companies intellectual property or breach some copyright laws.

Yahoo Inc. announced today that it will debut a service that will let direct marketers send targeted e-mails to consumers based on their search engine activity. ...Only people with Yahoo e-mail accounts who have opted in to receive third-party offers will receive marketing e-mails based on their search activity. Emphasis mine. It's yucky technology (yes, that's a technical term), but You Get What You Pay For sometimes. A bit of browser config might be able to block this, if you're careful about what sites let you set cookies.