15 Nov 2005
China to vaccinate 14bn poultry

...and they've hired the valiant knight pictured here to complete the job.

China says it is trying to vaccinate all of its estimated 14 billion poultry against bird flu.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Severe storms roll across Midwest

An absolutely icky day - and to make matters worse, my windshield wiper motor in the new truck picked today to poop out. While I was driving down the interstate with a bunch of semis doing 70 mph in a driving rainstorm. Not fun, not fun at all.

But Kris was sick - she's got a nasty flu bug, so I did have a spare truck, and managed to get my route done. I guess the milkman's like the postman - "neither rain, nor snow nor dead of night shall stop me from my appointed rounds"...

The tornado sirens started after I got the Lebanon about 3pm .. no touchdowns, but it was a pretty green sky for a while. Then another wave about 5, and a third one a hour later. Most of the east pasture is under water - it'll either go down or freeze, as the cold front that's heading our way promises to drop temperatures rather dramatically - they're predicting snow showers tomorrow, with a high of 38°F - today's high was nearly 70°F.

Welcome to Indiana - if you don't like the weather, stick around a bit, it'll change. Drastically.

Just eight days after a deadly tornado struck southwestern Indiana, another strong storm system rolled across the nation's midsection Tuesday, producing funnel clouds in at least three states.

(link) [CNN.com]

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

RetroCoder Threatens Security Vendors

This is like selling a book, with a license that decrees you may not read it if you're a woman (or a minority, or blue-eyed, etc.). Totally against the spirit of copyright law, which, after all, governs publicly published works.

You can't have it both ways - either a work is published and copyrighted, or it's privately circulated under a license (or non-disclosure, etc.). If the latter, then copyright law doesn't apply, and there is no copyright. If the former, you can't restrict the publication to specific groups or individuals.

RetroCoder the company that brings you SpyMon, a commercial keylogger is trying to stop vendors of security software from looking at their software. RetroCoder uses a EULA that prohibits anti-spyware publishers / software houses from downloading, running or examining the software in any way. Essentially, they're trying to hide a key logger behind copyright law.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link