We love Zannah, for she has alerted us to the existence of an autopsy of a Magic 8-Ball. (OK, we love Zannah for so many other reasons, too, but right now, this one overwhelms all others.)

After the past two columns by Ed Foster in InfoWorld (both about the fact that services providers like FreeDSL, Yahoo, and GeoCities all have Terms of Service that allow them to make legally-binding changes without any form of notification), I thought to myself that it would be tres easy to put together a website that loads these sites’ Terms of Service every day, compares them to the prior day’s, and publishes any changes. I mean, this should be trivial. Are there any takers out there?

If your goddamn life is so hurried that you have to honk at, weave through, and cut off funeral processions, then you may well be the most pathetic excuse for an assemblage of carbon that exists on this here planet.

MIT’s Technology Review has a superb article about real-time video editing. It starts off with the stuff that we all know about, like adding or deleting ads from live video, or adding first-and-ten markers to a football broadcast. From there, though, it talks about processing live reconaissance video from drone military planes, comparing it to previously-captured images of the terrain in order to identify moving or changing targets. The applications of this technology are scary; it is no longer possible to be sure that what we’re seeing is real, in any sense of the word.

I really think that John Rocker should announce exactly when he’ll be on the number 7 train out to Shea next week; I have lots of friends who would want to be on that train.

In New York, huge crime stories have the capacity to spin out of control, quickly turning into polarizing racial issues. The Central Park molestings two weekends ago, coming at the tail end of the Puerto Rican Day parade, didn’t do that. Why? Slate guesses at the answer. In a nutshell, they believe that it’s because (a) actual crimes were committed, (b) they were committed by memebrs of disadvantaged groups (blacks and Latinos), and (c) they were committed against another disadvantaged group (women). (Thanks for the heads-up on the misattribution, Clay!)

You should eat more, Dad… you’re really skin and bones these days.

I’m at the hospital right now, which is a Netscape shop. They have totally disabled any ability to configure Netscape, and have preconfigured it to disallow all cookies, and to only load a page one time per session, serving it from the cache for all other times during that session. You can’t change this. Why is this a problem? ANY website (including this one) that requires cookies for interaction doesn’t work. So I had to be sneaky, and figure out a way to get Internet Explorer to run, in order to type this paragraph. (The funny thing is that the security restrictions on the machine prevent me from typing in a URL, so I had to wind my way around the web until I was able to get to a search engine, and they search for Q, in order to get here. Thank goodness a few search engines have indexed Q.) I’ll update later, though, when I have better web access.