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...
[read more]

My wife had a coupon for $2 off a Schick razor and somehow managed to convince me to use it, even though, despite the discount, I could have gotten razors I was satisfied with for less. I had used triple bladed razors in the past, and they hadn't seemed any better to me than the...
[read more]

Wired News is reporting that the DOJ has dropped its investigation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps of US citizens because the NSA won't give the DOJ lawyers security clearance. If somebody (ie. congress) doesn't step in and protect the American people, this is extremely disturbing--the Bush administration violates any law they want (including the Constitution),...
[read more]

The Bush administration, claiming national security concerns, plans to scuttle the suit alleging that AT&T illegally collaborated with the NSA to spy on US citizens. I'm becoming more and more convinced that, in the interest of the security of the citizens of the US, it's time for members of the republican party to collaborate with...
[read more]

I mailed in my tax returns a week ahead of the deadline. I got my federal refund today. It was $127 more than expected. I think I'd better take another look at the Book of Revelation, because something weird is going on here.

What do Japan, Germany and Italy have in common? No, I'm not talking about World War II. I'm talking about the fact that their English names aren't the names they refer to themselves by--they're exonyms (I didn't even know there was a word for it till now!) Japan in Japanese is Nihon or Nippon, Germany...
[read more]

You've heard of the 5 W's--who, what, when where and why--possibly in relation to writing or analyzing news stories or press releases. The 5 W's are also applicable to choosing keywords and sites for AdWords keyword or site-targeted advertising. For example, considering how these five dimensions relate to potential customers for CaRP (my RSS to...
[read more]

Ars Technica has an article about an intellectual property case where someone if France sued someone in the U.S. for publishing something that's protected by IP laws in France but not in the U.S. I'm a little torn on cases like this--we don't want other countries imposing their laws on us, but we also don't...
[read more]

When I first heard people calling XML the next big thing some years back, I gave it a quick look and didn't get it at all. As far as I could see, it was something that looked like HTML, except that the tag names could be anything the publisher wanted and browsers didn't know how...
[read more]

Wow, they still haven't figured this out... Same problem as last year: when you download your transaction history from PayPal in tab-delimited format, each value is enclosed in quotes. That's correct for comma delimited files, but tab delimited files are supposed to just have tabs between the data items with no added quote marks. So...
[read more]