Just read this article from a local paper: 6 arrested in anti-Bush protest.
This particular portion of the article bugged me (emphasis added): 'T.J. Hicks, Bloomfield, said he and others wore masks so they could not be "singled out." He said he would likely protest any president.'
Now, I am a staunch supporter of the right to assemble peaceably and to speak freely in opposition to a government. Doesn't it seem to take away from the effect, though, if you are indicating that you will never be happy with whatever government is in power?
If you're that fundamentally unhappy with a country, why live in it? To quote the Peanuts cartoon strip, "There must be many travel agents who would be only too glad to send you to the other side of the world."
Today I made the switch from Mozilla's Firebird browser 0.7 to Mozilla's Firefox browser 0.8. I tend to be of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset and, until recently, 0.7 worked fine for me.
This week, though, 0.7 suddenly turned into a major system resource hog, cranking up to 100% CPU utilization when loading new pages. I tried removing bookmarks, unloading plug-ins, and disabling extensions but nothing seemed to correct it.
Now that I have 0.8 up and running, the CPU utilization is back to normal. And I am happy once again.
UPDATE: Perhaps I blogged too soon, since I am noticing it again. I am thinking it might be related to certain pages, however, since I just opened 6 or 7 sites simultaneously and the CPU was only minimally taxed. Very peculiar....
I wonder if any doman registration services have any sort of policies or guidelines regarding what is done with listings of search queries for available domain names.
For example, let's say I want to buy a domain for my company, but I'm not sure what I want it to be just yet. So I visit a domain registrar, and click onto their "Check Domain Name Availability" page. I type in the domains I want to check: mycompany.com (not available), my-company.com (not available), my-company.net (available), myco.com (available), and myco.net (available). If the registrar keeps any sort of records on search histories and results, they now have a listing of three available domain names that I might be willing to spend money on, and two others that I may be interested in back-ordering.
Since there has been no commitment or agreement between me and the registrar, there would not be anything illegal about the registrar providing these results to an interested third-party, particularly if that third-party were willing to drop a few bucks for the list. Naturally, my name and contact information would not be associated with the list -- but that may not matter. It is probably not inaccurate to assume that if I were interested in purchasing mycompany.com from the current owner, I would contact them on my own (particularly if they had a web page advertising "This Domain Is For Sale!").
Food for thought.
Google's announcement of a new free email service has created a flurry of discussion in recent days. While the overall terms of the service sound very nice, the following (from their About Gmail page) is what's causing all the controversy:
Gmail does include relevant text ads that are similar to the ads appearing on the right side of Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers using the same technology that powers the Google AdSense program. This technology already places targeted ads on thousands of sites across the web by quickly analyzing the content of pages and determining which ads are most relevant to them.
While they claim that no human will ever read your mail and that no personally identifiable information will be stored with any keywords, it is likely that they will keep track of which ads are served to which accounts -- so if they notice that 30 ads get served about golf clubs, they can assume that I am emailing about golf.
The press, privacy groups, and blogspace has gone crazy with this information, crying foul and equating Google with Big Brother. My thoughts on the matter can be summed up thus:
- Google is being open about it. Who knows if Yahoo or Hotmail are doing similar ad delivery and simply not making it as public?
- Nobody is requiring you to sign up for a free account. If you don't like it, don't sign up. There's no reason to criticize.
- If you do sign up, encrypt your messages. Let the AdSense technology chew on random alphanumeric strings for a while.
I personally will not be signing up for a free Gmail account. I hate ads and spam, and the thought of injecting spam into legitimate messages doesn't interest me in the least. But I also will not criticize Google for their honesty and perhaps one business-minded compromise for an otherwise promising and potentially-useful service.
[UPDATE 9/3/04: Well, I did end up getting a gmail address. Now let's just see if I actually use it.]
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