[a proposed reaction to the SSSCA:] 'Unfortunately, mass civil disobedience is historically the best antidote to an unjust law.... Bootleg everything you can get your hands on.' There's a certain amount of validity to the civil disobedience bit; but in every other regard this article totally misses the mark. The problem with the SSSCA isn't that it might prevent bootlegging. That's simply the stated goal. The problem is the lengths it goes to to attempt to obtain that goal, with no regard whatsoever for balance or collateral damage.

Frustration is... staring at your News Aggregator page just before your network connection goes out. It's like being a kid in a candy store, except you get zapped when you try to take something.

A followup to this earlier post: The IETF Draft on Security Disclosure has been retracted. Not sure what to think about that. No agreement would ever have been reached, and debate may or may not have been useful; there's probably nothing to add.

'Microsoft sued Lindows over its name in December. Lindows is capitalizing on the reputation of the Windows brand, the suit said, and its name is confusingly similar to that of the Windows operating system....' 'Microsoft may have received more than it bargained for. Not only did U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour deny the company's request, he also said Microsoft has raised "serious questions" about the validity of its own trademark.

"...it is wrong to blame today's culture of fear on the collapse of the World Trade Centre. Long before 11 September, public panics were widespread - on everything from GM crops to mobile phones, from global warming to foot-and-mouth.... Perceptions of risk... are shaped by cultural assumptions about human vulnerability." I blame the news media. Not Hollywood so much, but the Daily Disaster Report that is your local and national news programs.

The title article is causing a brouhaha about MS licensing practices. Given my reading of the license, I'm wondering if it really means what people are interpreting it to mean. Looking forward to the MS correction, which is likely to come sometime this week.;-) You might want to see what VNC is. It's a very useful tool to know about. Also, there's rdesktop for various UNIX flavors that allow connection to RDP servers, including the one in XP Pro.

I've definately decided to go with the Jabber stuff I described earlier. A few more advantages: Threading issues are simpler. If the users are responsible for re-establishing connections, there's a nasty time while the system is logging in, but the server will reject any other messages, like I said. If I take control of the re-establishment, it's easy to block these messages. There are also a few misc. places where I could construct a multi-threaded scenario where something bad happened; this reduces, and I think eliminates, those.

I just filed my taxes. It took me and my wife half-an-hour, included no redundent steps, and was not at all stressful. (Except at one point where we had to go look up the meaning of "homestead".) The return was zapped off to Michigan and the IRS automatically, and the refunds will be direct deposited to our bank account. I didn't even go to the store to buy the tax software!

A frequent correspondent, a man, writes: "Do you really believe those myths about men and women being different?" [Scripting News] No, I believe in the truths that men and women are different. Ask your local psychologist whether men and women are different. One of my psychology professors gave that as a benchmark to use about whether you should trust someone's psychology theories: If they claim that men and women aren't fundamentally different, then you can safely ignore their theories!

'Six months to the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Florida flight school where two of the suicide hijackers trained received letters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicating that the men had been approved for student visas.' And people wonder why I'm not willing to turn control of things like, say, what websites out children can and can't see, over to the government. Everybody's winging it...