Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: " The Exchange/Outlook platform is quite simply a menace not only to the organizations that use it, but to the world at large. People who do not use Outlook, who have never used it, are forced to deal with tens of thousands of Sobig-infested messages flowing into their mail spools.

That's scandalous. Microsoft bears responsibility, but so too does every single organization whose computers were afflicted. To respond to this by sticking with Exchange/Outlook is outrageous. I mean, what are the odds that this will happen again? I'd say they approach 100 percent. Truly, a matter of when, not if. "

Write a Story, go to jail

Life and Deatherage: "This Wired article tells the story of Brian Robertson, a creative writer and journalism student. One day at Moore High School (Moore is part of greater Oklahoma City, just north of Norman, and is where both of the big tornadoes of the past four years went through), Brian found a Notepad file containing a paragraph called 'evacuation orders' about how to evacuate people in case of disaster. He thought it was interesting and turned it into a short story about an armed assault on his school."

Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca :

" It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don't understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don't know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try."

Ok; I guess they were done using it as a computer, now it's a ....

http://rubberduck.com/~yeled/binary/nail-wallstreet/L1010231

Smoke This.

From the Boston Globe:

The shifting medical view on marijuana

By Lester Grinspoon, 8/17/2003

IN A RECENT poll conducted by Medscape, a website directed at health care providers, 76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine.

Not the biggest issue in my life, but it is an example of adult hypocrisy that makes it harder for us to be credible to our kids. My 'lesson' to my kids about drugs is that it doesn't matter how harmful drugs are or aren't, they're illegal and if you get caught the hassle will be far greater than any benefit.

Night's out in New York

I know, it's old news. But I found picutres:

Gothamist

Stuck on the subway

Al Gore is still playing in the Sandbox

http://www.moveon.org/gore-speech.html

At first, I thought maybe the President's advisers were a big part of the problem. Last fall, in a speech on economic policy at the Brookings Institution, I called on the President to get rid of his whole economic team and pick a new group. And a few weeks later, damned if he didn't do just that - and at least one of the new advisers had written eloquently about the very problems in the Bush economic policy that I was calling upon the President to fix.

But now, a year later, we still have the same bad economic policies and the problems have, if anything, gotten worse. So obviously I was wrong: changing all the president's advisers didn't work as a way of changing the policy.

Arianna Runs

Links at JD's New Media Musings

More on Dean

From the Washington Post
Over his five terms as Vermont governor, folks there say, Dean grew more polished as a politician and more fervent as a public speaker. In person, they say, the doctor is charming and charismatic, inquisitive about ordinary people and their problems, attentive to his constituents, family, staff and friends.

From Business Week
Q: What would you do to get the economy moving again?
A: First, we need to do what Clinton did in 1993: We need to make a genuine effort to start to balance the budget to restore investor confidence. The second thing I would do is to support the small-business community. They create more jobs than large businesses do, and they don't move their jobs offshore. And if American taxpayers are going to invest in businesses with tax breaks, we ought to invest in businesses that stay here

Cover Story in Time

There is a model for this kind of intentionally unpolished candidacy, and his name is John McCain.

( These links all came from Google News.)

Billions for Iraq; no money to let a sky marshall sleep overnight.

From MSNBC.com
In an apparent reversal of policy, the Transportation Security Administration will immediately begin scheduling air marshals back on cross-country and international flights, MSNBC.com has learned. The move comes less than 24 hours after MSNBC.com reported that air marshals were being pulled from those flights because of budget problems associated with the costs of overnight lodging for the marshals.

Free* Country

"My co-worker, Craig, says that we should probably be thankful the FBI takes these things seriously; I say it seems like a dark day when an American citizen regards reading as a threat, and downright pitch-black when the federal government agrees. "

Read an article, get visited by the FBI.

OMG, he's our president

"Sorry, Ramzi, if I got it wrong." Unfortunately the transcript doesn't get the two mis-pronunciations I heard. Also note the kind coments about the Saudis.

Ok, but a lot of them are flakes

More candidates for governor.

"It reminds me of going to the circus and seeing this little car going into the arena and you couldn't believe how many clowns were able to come out of it," Torres said.