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. The reality is that for any given event in life, the net effect of "the little things" are larger then the effect of what most people would call 'the cause'.

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. This developer is talented and experienced – that's why we hired him. The question is, at what point does 'drawing on experience' cross the line and invade others IP?"

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.

mpawlo writes "As reported by Greplaw, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) together with Privacyactivism has released an interactive video game designed to educate players about their privacy and fair use rights. The game is focused on digital rights management technologies, online spyware, and data profiling servers. We have seen similar games in Sweden from the Anti-piracy Bureau and Flash movies from BSA in the US, however striking a different tune. Play Carabella." --- Cute idea.

Ugh. Don't you hate it when "your side" does something stupid that makes you cringe? Look, you can't do something cool on purpose. I personally guarentee that the number of people who will actually choose to play this game for any reason other then analysis will number in the low zeros.

I was going to write my Metaphors rant, which focusses on the do's and don'ts of metaphor usage, esp. as relating to the Internet, but I found myself really wishing I had a prerequisite piece. So here it is: A piece on what I mean by the term Clear Thinking, which I use a technical term with a specific meaning to me.

I'm finally starting to get some synergies going in my essays.

When I first read Meg Hourihan’s piece on blogging, I said to myself— SWEET! Of course, this wasn't the hegemonic response. Stavros was the first to blast it, followed closely by Jonathon.

You see, in my opinion, what she was writing about is really the continuum transfunctioner of blogging. To be tiresomely McLuhanesqe, the medium is the message.

You may be somewhat unfamiliar with the terminology used in this post, but despite, or perhaps because, of it, I think it makes some valid and interesting points.

Get well soon, Dave.

You don't "install" web pages; you simply visit them. Why should applications be any different? ... Existing HTML/JavaScript developers can be productive immediately developing XWT user interfaces. This is because XWT visual layout is specified using a dialect of XML which is extremely similar to HTML tables, and because interactivity is scripted in industry-standard ECMAscript (JavaScript). No special tools are required -- just a simple text editor and a zip archiver.

This is a test post to make sure everything's working correctly.

I moved my main computer system to be a mostly-permenent Linux box for my job, but I missed Radio Userland, which is now the only Windows program keeping me in Windows at all. So I shuffled the stuff I had my 233MHz onto the main machine, and loaded up Windows XP onto my 233MHz Pentium I with 96MB RAM.