A few weeks ago, I read about some Stanford professor's idea for how to ensure that the winner of the popular vote gets elected president. If a few states (only 11 would be needed if the big states signed on) agreed to give their electoral votes to the national winner of the popular vote, they...
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I'm primarily a Mac user. But occasionally, I need to test out my software on a PC. So a few months ago when Office Depot was offering big rebates on eMachines computers (what they'll do is offer their own rebate in addition to manufacturer rebates so that you end up with a really hot deal),...
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Blogger is finally gearing up to flip the switch from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0. Among the changes currently being rolled out to a limited number of Blogger users is a switch to Atom 1.0 as the default feed format. RSS 2.0 will also be available. Once the new system gets rolled out to all...
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Here's an example of the kind of thing I think about while I lie awake at night.

Mark Pilgrim, Tim Bray and others are blogging recently about switching away from the Macintosh. I've been thinking of replacing my old G4, so information about Mac alternatives is of particular interest to me right now. But after reading what they've written and investigating the alternatives a little, I doubt that I'll be switching any...
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I remember in an economics class once hearing that everyone is better off if every place (country, state, town, region, whatever) produces and exports whatever they produce best and imports whatever somebody else can produce cheaper, and nobody puts up trade barriers. The idea seems great on it's face--everyone is creating as much value as...
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I've noticed over the last few days that one of my sites has been getting hundreds of hits a day from people searching for "katharine mcphee yellow dress". I don't have a site about American Idol, and I've never even typed the words "katharine mcphee" (and the first time I'd even copied and pasted the...
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I've just set up a 7 day email mini-course, 7 ways to turn RSS into R$$. When you register, you also get a free download of CaRP Free, an RSS to HTML converter for your website, and if you stay on the mailing list, updated versions will be sent to you as they're released.

This...
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The IETF Atom Working Group has been discussing a new Atom extension for creating threaded discussions between blog. The biggest bone of contention has been two new attributes for the link element which indicate the number of comments in a comments feed and the last time the comments feed was updated. There are two objections...
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I had the idea yesterday that a standardized protocol could be created the enable email clients to interact with whitelist-based SPAM blocking software. Given the complexity of identifying SPAM by textual analysis, whitelist-based SPAM protection appears to be getting more popular. I plan to start using it myself with some of my email addresses in...
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