12 Mar 2006
Banks Fear Minimum Credit Card Payments

My heart bleeds for these sharks - not! I have no idea what's still floating the economy: I honestly expected to see deepening sign of a recession by now. But the bankers apparently see it a bit further off.

They could've put the brakes on this a long time ago, but traded away their influence for a new bankruptcy bill. And now they're gonna reap from some seed that's been sowed.

AP - Making the minimum payment on your credit card bill might not be as easy as it used to be — and two of the nation's largest banks say their own finances might suffer as a result.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Invisible Danger? Parents Look Inside the Lunchbox

Paranoia? Perhaps - but a justifiable paranoia in a lot of different ways.

Many of my customer fit this profile. The problem is not necessarily that commercially produced food is "unsafe", or that packaging is loaded with carcinogens - the problem is that nobody knows anymore. Factory food processing has become so complex that it's safety factor, especially over a long term, has become practically non-computable. And as materials science advances, the chemistry involved becomes more complex as well, leading to the same problem.

We provide a solution to this by being as open and transparent as we can, and by packaging and processing as traditionally as we can. I do use foam cartons for my eggs, and plastic bags for my frozen chickens, but I recycle the cartons and insure that the bags are 100% new polyethylene. For most moms, just being able to visit the hen house and pet the cattle is enough - they can see where their food comes from, and understand for themselves that it's safer.

Reaching into their nylon lunch bags at school, Casey and Cameron Lilley pull sandwiches made of organic ingredients out of wax paper wrappers, and sip water from coated aluminum containers from Switzerland. Their mother, Shawn Lilley, had carefully chosen the packaging.

(link) [New York Times]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Games CEO finds himself reluctant warez hero

Wow. Does anybody still think the folks pushing copy protection on everything are anything close to ethical? This is like anti-virus vendors distributing malware to sell more product. Unbelievable!

When Stardock CEO Brad Wardell released his game sequel Galactic Civilizations II recently, he had no idea he'd find himself mistakenly hailed as a poster child for the anti-copyright lobby. Or that a DRM company that makes copy protection for games would post details of where they could download illicit copies of his game.

(link) [The Register]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Inventing the Telephone, Independently

Some interesting thoughts here, very Jeffersonian. At the exponential rate of technological growth, will it soon become cost prohibitive to maintain the current patent system?

There is a nice article about the history of the telephone at AmericanHeritage.com. Most of us know that Alexander Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by mere hours to claim credit for the invention of the telephone, but did you know that two other inventors can also claim the invention, including Thomas Edison? Similar disputes about independent invention and patent ownership can be found regarding the television, the airplane, and the automobile. Maybe it really is true: the economic benefit of encouraging patents is like that of encouraging window breaking.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link