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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Change in Google Book Search Guidelines for Public Domain Books

Friday, January 30th, 2009

For a few years, Google Book Search has provided PDF downloads of public domain books. The books came with a page listing some guidelines that Google asked people to follow and the same guidelines are listed in their Google Book Search help center. The old guidelines were as follows: The new ...

Removing Vowels from Hebrew Unicode Text

Friday, June 3rd, 2005

One of the questions that recently came up is how to remove vowels from Hebrew characters in Unicode (or any other similar language). A quick look at Hebrew Unicode chart shows that the vowels are all located between 0x0591 (1425) and 0x05C7 (1479). With this and Javascript's charCodeAt function, it ...

How (Not) to Run Background Checks

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

USA Today is running a story about new guidelines on background checks from the Transportation Security Administration: The federal government plans to begin collecting the full names and birth dates of air travelers this summer in its latest effort to screen passengers for possible links to terrorism. In a few weeks, ...

The Value of Commercial Database in Fighting Terrorism

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

There has been quite some talk on the 'Net and in the media about whether giving permission to the government for the use of commercial database services will help with fighting terrorism. I recently ordered a report from one of these companies, Axciom and frankly the results that I got ...

Maryland’s Anti-Spam Law Nuked

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

From an AP story (via Dani): A judge has ruled that Maryland's anti-spam law — the first state law to penalize senders of junk e-mail — is unconstitutional because it seeks to regulate commerce outside the state's borders. Last week's ruling, which threw out a lawsuit against a New York e-mail ...

How to Get Rid of Your Political Opponents: Send the Interpol After Them

Tuesday, December 7th, 2004

Two newsites (RIA and Lenta.ru) reported today that Russia has asked Interpol to declare Yulia Timoshenko, a very popular member of the Ukraine's opposition, a fugitive. It is well known that Russia opposses the Ukraine opposition since it is pro-Western. But to resort to such dirty tricks in public by ...

iPAC’s New Blog

Saturday, December 4th, 2004

Some time ago I mentioned a new political action comitee called "IPAC" focused on addressing some of the problems with the current IP laws. They just opened a blog which seems to be an interesting read.

If you Don’t Get Elected … Sue!

Wednesday, October 20th, 2004

In another bizarre twist of American politics, the Democracts are prepared to declare victory on Election Day even if they lose and then sue to get it (via LGF): Unlike the former vice president, who lost a recount fight and the 2000 election, Kerry will be quick to declare victory on ...

A new PAC for solving the IP issues

Monday, October 18th, 2004

I ran across a story at NewsForge describing a new Political Action Comitee (PAC) called iPAC for influencing the current intellectual property issues. Their principles sound pretty good to me but it remains to be seen how much impact they will make: 1. Creators of ideas and inventions have the right ...

To Evil: A Monthly Column

Monday, October 11th, 2004

I just ran across an monthly interesting column titled "To Evil" written by Danny O'Brien of NTK (via BoingBoing). Its funny enough to make it to my RSS reader. This month's evils are Microsoft's Sender-ID Team, Jonathan Schwartz of Sun and John Kerry? Sender-ID is simple, although this quote is ...