BoomFlag

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

— Rene Descartes

In a classic e-mail “oops”, someone at Hain Celestial accidentally sent a meeting reminder (notice?) to a local Linux user’s group– with membership in the thousands. Boy, there’s nothing like blundering in front of a huge audience like that.

The funny thing is that I know this guy, since I worked with him on a project a long time ago. He’s pretty savvy, so I can only imagine it was a complete accident and right now he’s wondering what to do about it…

But perhaps the best part of the message is the classic idiotic legal disclaimer:

“This e-mail is sent by The Hain Celestial Group, Inc. or one of its subsidiaries, and may contain information that is privileged and/ or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please do not review, disclose, copy or distribute. Please delete the e-mail and any attachments and notify us immediately.”

So… I’m thinking I’m not the “intended recipient”. But of course by the time I’ve read the disclaimer I’ve already violated it, since I’ve “reviewed” the message. Dang. Now the Hain lawyers are going to be all over me. And, of course it makes me wonder whether I should follow the last instructions and notify the guy… imagine having a couple thousand Linux users on the newsgroup all writing to you to basically inform you that you’re a doofus.

“Maybe we hyped it up a little bit too much,” Microsoft group product manager Greg Sullivan told Information Week in an interview before the WinHEC conference being held this week. He added, “We’re set up to pleasantly surprise people who don’t have super-high expectations for
Longhorn.”

“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.”

— John Benfield

“If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?”

— Art Hoppe

From a Fark Photoshop contest… just too funny…

I’m in the process of organizing my digital music collection– it’s been “in process” for well over a year now– and as things are becoming more stable I’m at a point where I have everything in a huge directory structure. For fun, I created a playlist called The Big List o’ Everything, loaded it into XMMS, and hit “random play”.

Whee!

Now I get this crazy mix of music… a piece of classical music, perhaps, followed by some hard rock, a chapter out of the “Harry Potter” audio book, and some obscure song I’ve never heard from one of Laralee’s old CD’s. Wild, wacky stuff.

Chalk up another win for the RIAA and MPAA, with a corresponding loss for sanity in our legal system.

Congress approved a new bill today that would make the possession of a digital copy of a pre-release movie a federal felony punishable by three years in prison and a fine of up to a quarter-million dollars. The fine would be levied even if no one actually “shared” the file.

Maybe the brain-trust that is Congress was seduced by the warm-and-fuzzy name of the bill (the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act), or maybe they were just paid off by the idiots running the media industry. It’s hard to tell, but the outcome is frightening. It’s just another draconian rule in the ever-expanding circle of ridiculous copyright “protections” that are really only protecting the absurd profits of a few media moguls.

As with the recent nine-year prison term for a guy who was a notorious spammer, this bill levies penalties that are terribly disproportionate to the crime committed. But hey, the entertainment industry seems to enjoy instilling fear and hatred in their consumers. Go figure.

Today was a red-letter day in my life– a real tragedy.

For the first time ever since I’ve owned a car (about twelve years) I paid more than twenty dollars to fill my gas tank.

Shocking, I know… what’s happening to this country? Surely we can start a war with some third-world oil-producing nation or something, and drive (hah!) gas prices back down.

Today’s science question is brought to you by… my freezer.

So we have ice cube trays, which we fill with water (duh) and drop in the freezer. Every now and then, when I take the tray out, I find one or two ice cubes that have a mysterious spike sticking up into the air. Note that nothing is above the trays, so it’s not like there’s dripping water to make this “inverse icicle”.

The question: how and why does this happen? Why only occasionally?

I expect some research and answers from the handful of science geeks who I know read this. (Yes, Tad, this means you.)