East of the Sun, West of the Moon

A blonde moment overheard in NY:

Girl #1: What was that called again?
Girl #2: What?
Girl #1: You know…it’s pudding with rice in it?
Girl #2: You mean rice pudding?

Thank goodness, they didn’t sneak it in (thank you, CNET):

A key U.S. Senate panel on Thursday decided not to intervene in a long-simmering dispute over the “broadcast flag,” a form of copy prevention technology for digital TV broadcasts.

At a meeting reserved for voting on spending bills, not one member of the Senate Appropriations Committee proposed an amendment authorizing federal regulators to mandate the broadcast flag.

It would appear that Russia is on a diet (link courtesy of BBC News):

Russia’s population decline is accelerating, according to the country’s official statistics agency.

According to their calculations, the decline is equivalent to 100 people dying in Russia every hour.

An amusing pair of solutions in the article, though:

Many solutions to the problem have been proposed, ranging from family-friendly tax breaks to legalising polygamy.

Uncle Sam is interested in high school and college kids (link courtesy of The Register):

By combining commercial data with information already accessible to the government, the DoD hopes to assemble “a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service.”

Next stop, the draft?

Goodnight!

In health news reports (thanks to CNN):

A subtle change in a memory-making brain region seems to predict who will get Alzheimer’s disease nine years before symptoms appear, scientists reported Sunday.

And further down in the article:

Also, there are serious ethical questions about how soon people should know that Alzheimer’s is approaching when nothing yet can be done to forestall the disease.

Maybe not, but it would give you a chance to get your affairs in order, prepare your friends and next to kin for what may happen sooner or later, and perhaps prepare yourself in other ways to try and reduce the impact of the disease.

Very few of us are alone in this world, after all, and Alzheimer’s affects everyone around you.

… until I can demand my money back from Amazon, after foolishly ordering something from this crook who was apparently finally shut down on June 13. In the meantime they’re going to have a lot of fun refunding a lot of people.

Is this how you pictured your WinXP firewall?

Save enough pennies and perhaps you will some day beat this guy’s record (thanks to Fark):

Customer Edmond Knowles today broke the world’s record of the largest-ever single cash-in of pennies, totaling 1,308,459 pennies (or $13,084.59). The cash-in took place at the Flomaton, Ala., Escambia County Bank’s Coinstar machine.

Microsoft is at it again, trying to push something down everyone’s throats that doesn’t work and we’re not interested in (article courtesy of CNET):

Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender, Craig Spiezle, a director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker said Wednesday. The move is meant to spur adoption of Sender ID, he said.

Here is a (significant, to me) problem:

Experts say one of the problems with Sender ID is that it doesn’t work with e-mail forwarding services. The basic premise of Sender ID is to check if an e-mail that claims to be coming from a certain Internet domain is really being sent from the e-mail servers associated with that domain.

As if email isn’t broken enough yet as a result of all the spam fighting going on.