I just stumbled across a kickin’ new (to me) log — GirlText. Elizabeth don’t brook shit from nobody; to me, the whole point of weblogs is to express yourself, and it’s great when I find a five-star site in that respect.

What a cool MetaBaby page. (Of course, since every MetaBaby page is world-editable, it may not be the same when you see it as when I did!)

Wow, is this cookie bug in Internet Explorer a biggie. Interestingly, the cookie isn’t available to IE in the HTTP header, only in Javascript on the page; nonetheless, no site would be looking to authenticate against the cookie, it would be looking to read sensitive information out of it, which would logically take place at the page level.

Slashdot is in the middle of proving that the anti-Microsoft bias of some members exerts quite a strong force on their actions, possibly to their great detriment. Someone went and posted the entire text of a copyrighted Microsoft document on Slashdot recently, and Microsoft responded with a very tactfully-worded letter demanding (under both standard copyright laws and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) that the posting be removed. Slashdot is refusing to do so, apparently in major violation of the Act, and a controversy is ensuing. (Warning: Slashdot appears to be crushed under their own weight today; of course, there’s a MetaFilter thread about it, and there’s also a CNet News story with an amazingly slanted headline if you can’t get through to Slashdot.)

As I ask in the MetaFilter thread: why is it OK for Slashdot to violate someone’s copyright, but not OK for me to violate the GNU Public License? Also interesting, though, there’s another thread on Slashdot today about copyright and HTML, and strangely, nobody there has any problem with the rightful enforcement of copyright! Yet another case of situational ethics; it serves Slashdot’s purpose to hack another chink in Microsoft’s armor, even if it is illegal.

I really like the design of the fray. This week’s question (“What was your last flight like?”) is preceded with a short essay that’s illustrated with nice inside-the-plane-looking-out pictures; very calming.

Every week, Splorp has the available domain name of the week. Hurry up and grab ratcrap.com!

In honor of Elian’s hearing today, a few questions:

• Would all the people who hold Elian’s mother up as the paragon of heroism (for getting Elian to the shores of America) still feel that way if she had survived, and he had drowned to death? (Oh, of course, that’s where divine intervention and the holy dolphins come into play.)
• If people really feel that it would be unconscionable to send Elian back to Cuba, do they also feel that we should prevent Elian’s stepbrother (the infant in all the pictures) from returning to Cuba? How about all the kids that came over to play with Elian? Should we kidnap them all?
• If a tree fell in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, would Marisleysis still be the craziest woman this side of the Mississippi?

Roger Cossack, one of CNN’s law correspondents, has a pretty good column today, Who says a 6-year-old can make decisions for himself?. He raises a point I’ve been wondering about: the most the Eleventh Circuit can rule is that Elian does have the right to apply for asylum. That’s it. Then, the INS still has to establish that he is a candidate for asylum, which means an interview with him about his reasons for asylum. And, since it would have been established that Elian has the right to apply on his own, he would also have to justify the asylum application on his own — the two go together.

I wish that the link to Michael Moore’s latest column wasn’t coming up blank right now; among all the great observations, he has one that rings particularly true to me:

I looked at that now-famous photograph of the INS agent with the 9mm automatic in his hand as he demanded that Elian Gonzales be turned over, and I thought, “This guy is in a bunker full of crazed kidnappers who believe that Flipper is a member of the Holy Trinity, and all he has to defend himself and the boy is that dinky little gun?”

According to Stephen, the drug smugglers that I talked about yesterday are prime candidates for public beheadings in the United Arab Emirates.