I've always liked this aspect of Lieberman.

Digg Report: Today's #1 Digg, at a brisk 4690 Diggs, is a link to a cutesy picture of Pluto and the other planets.

Bizarre.

Words don't mean much anymore, it would appear:

"Fighting between rival Palestinian militant groups, meanwhile, spread in the southern Gaza Strip, further weakening a shaky truce forged in the face of punishing Israeli air assaults."

I've always thought the word "truce" was synonymous with "no fighting."

This should get the Ron Paulies in an uproar. But beware: these are MORMONS!!!

Very nice.

If you care about global warming policies, this will be helpful come 2008.

Today's "duh!" moment.

A chapter that was removed from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. As depressing as that novel is, this is even worse.

My wife just reminded me of a fortune cookie we received at lunch during our trip last year to find a place to live in California. We were moving from Chicago in about two weeks.

The fortune read: "You are heading for a land of sunshine."

And that's the definition of "coincidence."

The Diggsters show their compassion. Read the comments.

Funny, the underaged, hormone-driven dweebs that populate Digg were probably the first to download Paris Hilton's sex video. Now that she's in prison, however, they can't pile on enough.

Scrappleface on Paris Hilton. "What's bad for Paris Hilton is good for America."

It might seem like I'm picking on Techdirt, but I'm not, really. There's just a surplus of posts in my RSS reader, and I'm just now cleaning out my Techdirt folder. Nevertheless...

This post says "While we're generally suspicoius of vendor-funded surveys..." I wonder why. Are they equally suspicious of government-funded surveys, or NGO-sponsored surveys, or tech group-sponsored surveys? Most surveys are funded by some entitity with an agenda, whether it's obvious or not. It shows Techdirt's anti-business bias that they only mention vendors in this context.

The word "free" in "free trade" just throws some people, Techdirt among them. They simply can't understand that free markets require government protection of things like contracts, agreements and, yes, intellectual property. It would be fascinating to hear how trade could go on between nations without the protection of such things.

I suppose the Techdirt types imagine everyone will just play nicely, and share.

It's an open question as to whether our embassies should be promoting American culture. I don't really think that's a legitimate government responsibility. But the anti-American bile apparent in this Techdirt post is of more interest.

Techdirt often says it's not "political." Maybe, but it's certainly philosophical. And I used to think the site was about technology.

A particularly effective Cox and Forkum cartoon, courtesy of Little Green Footballs.

Update: The above LGF links might not work at the moment. They're apparently having some database problems.

Here's Boing Boing breaking trust with a film producer who's made their film available on YouTube. Boing Boing is recommending the use of the "Democracy Player" to pull the video off of YouTube for easier playing.

Perhaps the producer would have no problem with this, but it changes the game a bit. Rather than playing the film in the somewhat unwieldy and limited YouTube player, one can now play in a much more convenient player. Thus, one might be just that much less inclined to buy the "super high quality" formats available on the producer's site.

The film is an indy production called "Four Eyed Monsters," and I'm not a fan of indy films. But I am a fan of intellectual property and the creator's right to control it. Boing Boing, as usual, isn't.

This is pretty cool. Hum that unknown tune that's driving you crazy, and this site purports to tell you what song it's from.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Not only does Google maintain extensive information on our individual Internet activities, but it also has a tendency to be cavalier with intellectual property in general. The problem for the IT Left is that Google has long been their darling, acting as a foil against the company they really consider evil, Microsoft.

Will they accept privacy concerns with Google that they would accept from no other company? It remains to be seen which will take precedence, their hatred of Microsoft or their inherent dislike of business in general. I have no illusions, of course, that they'll be at all concerned about intellectual property.

Note that I'm not convinced that there are general "privacy" concerns in what Google is doing. Once my activities leave my computer, I'm not sure that they're any longer under my control. What happens on my computer should remain private, but that has as much to do with how I use my computer and what software I run.