This guy is claiming that since he missed the $32,000 question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, he has been out of work and hasn’t been able to get a job, and he’s suing for $2 million.
Michael Moore’s latest Elian column is back online, and as I said before, it’s well worth the read.
Nice redesign over at Digital Swirlee.
After thinking about the Microsoft/Slashdot ruckus that started yesterday, I realized that potentially, liability for copyright infringement extends to any website which provides some mechanism whereby people can post to the site. This includes any Manila site which has a public discussion group (like this one, many of the EditThisPage and Weblogs.com sites, and all of the Userland discussion groups), any site that has a Greenspun discussion group, and so on. The DMCA does provide a way to ameliorate that liability — you have to designate someone who will deal with any contentions of copyright infringement, and both register that person with the Copyright Office and post the information on the website. (The registration process is painless; my information is now located here.) The Copyright Office has more information, and the entire text of the DMCA is also available.
Rogers Cadenhead emailed me today to let me know that the story I pointed to a few days ago about the child killed in order to smuggle codeine into the UAE is an urban legend. Wow — it doesn’t seem to me that urban legends penetrate actual media channels all that often.
What a great deal: get insulted by John Rocker, get into a baseball game free. Bold move on the part of the Butte Copper Kings; I imagine that the only people who aren’t eligible for the free tickets are white men.
Out of Rebecca’s Pocket comes the fact that people with aphasias are significantly better than the norm at detecting when people are lying. (Aphasias are a category of language disorders, where there is a disconnect somewhere along the pathways between hearing speech, processing and comprehending it, and producing speech which corresponds to that comprehension. They are fascinating disorders in that they point out the intricate mechanisms of language that exist in the human brain.)
Yet another Bushism of the Week:
GOV. BUSH: Because the picture on the newspaper. It just seems so un-American to me, the picture of the guy storming the house with a scared little boy there. I talked to my little brother, Jeb—I haven’t told this to many people. But he’s the governor of—I shouldn’t call him my little brother—my brother, Jeb, the great governor of Texas.
JIM LEHRER: Florida.
GOV. BUSH: Florida. The state of the Florida.
Also about Dubya, there seem to be a spate of articles popping up right now about his obsession with the death penalty, apparently even when there are real questions about the guilt of the people or the method by which they were convicted. Slate looks at the specific cases of two men, one who was already put to death despite pretty good evidence that there were major problems with his conviction. The Washington Post looks at Calvin Jerrold Burdine, a man whose court-appointed lawyer slept through parts of the trial. Having lived in Texas for almost two decades, I can say that this is exactly what you’d expect when you get a right-wing governor combined with judges who are elected to their seats, all the way up to the state Supreme Court.
