You probably haven't heard about this yet, but if it goes through...you will. This is MAJOR news and I'm surprised the press hasn't caught onto the story yet.

The ensuing spam will be painful. The whois system has been poorly managed from the beginning and they have not done enough to protect domain name registrants from spam, hijacking etc.

Denis Horgan has been shut down by the editor of The Hartford Courant. Blogs, journalists and the media are still working out some kinks in their relationships together...

Update, here's an article about the story:

Hartford Paper Tells Employee to Kill Blog.

StarWars.com announces that Chewbaca will return for Episode III of Star Wars.

I just ran into Snazzykat's site...yet another just-married blogger. Wedding was January 19, 2003. Congratulations!

BTW, our readers need to see pictures of the ring ;)

Sorry, but I couldn't find it...

The Ask Yahoo question of the day is: Do surgical masks really help prevent the spread of SARS?

Click on the link to get the long answer. The short answer is no.

A federal judge handed a win to file swapping tools.

Although I do understand the concern of the recording and entertainment industry, there are legitimate uses for file swapping and it's a shame to kill a technology because they haven't yet found a solution to the illegal use of said technology.

The University of Chicago has put up a website cataloging the Lost Treasures From Iraq.

Google is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA:

Joi Ito has posted his first audio blog entry. Cool!

Always On has an interview with Eric Schmidt.

I was saddened to learn today that Edgar Codd, the father of relational databases, has died. He was a brilliant man. After he proposed the relational database model, people thought he was crazy and that it would make data retrieval far slower. Instead, he revolutionized the computer industry. May he rest in peace.

A reporter for the Boston Globe was caught with looted "souvenirs" from Iraq. The saddest part is the comment made by the reporter to a customs official:

''He didn't think it was a big deal,'' the official said of Crittenden. ''He said all the embedded reporters were doing it.''

The Smoking Gun explains why the music industry might want to take a different approach in combatting the problem of Kazaa. Well, at least Madonna may be happy to get some more press.

Looks like Joi Ito's company is investing in Moveable Type. Good move.

With the upcoming release of TypePad, this will be an interesting little competition for Google-owned Blogger. I would tend to think Google plans to improve blogger, so there may be some interesting wars ahead.

In case no one noticed, the one gaping hole in the field is a php-based MT-level blogging app. When the right player steps in with it, which is inevitable, expect things to be taken to a higher level.

Kudos to Mitch!

Looks like some TV execs weren't thrilled with Adbusters campaign to turn off your tv for a week.

kuro5hin.org discusses the World's largest oil reserve, Canada!!

Everyone is talking about how Ask Jeeves has really improved with this latest release, but I think it's way too little, way too late. The search results are ok, but far from enough to take traffic from Google.

Space Ship One is really cool!

Wired has an interesting story on Google.

Jon Udell discusses The Semantic Blog. There is so much promise in all these protocols, I hope one day we see major use made of them. But as Jon indicates, it has to be as transparent as possible to the end user creating the data.

2 million sold??? I'm speechless.

This is the coolest ad ever. Apparently inspired by The Way Things Go, a film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

The NY Times has a 2 page obituary on Dr. Atkins. Page 2 is quite interesting...

Dr. Robert Atkins has died at 72 years of age, following injuries he sustained in a fall on an icy NY sidewalk on April 8th 2003.

They went to a lot of trouble to explain the SnapBack feature of Mac's new Safari Browser, but I'm afraid it didn't make much sense to me. Is the idea that you select a temporary "Snap Back" page so you can browse around a shopping cart a bit and then "Snap Back" to the same page?

Mesopotamia is a nice site by The British Museum.

Do you know your elements? Because if you don't, you may want to learn this cool song.

I was surfing some more and ran into this news: Update on Dr. Atkins. It seems he fell on the sidewalk in front of his Atkins Center. He had a major blow to his head and after surgery to remove a clot from his brain, he has not yet recovered...

I surfed onto Lying Media Bastards where I read about this link...The Scotsman.com reports that the US gives Israel 3 years to quit occupied Arab land. If this is true, I think it is pretty big news.

Reading Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day, I found out about The Digital Journalist. Looks very promising!

This Back In Iraq 2.0 blog is very impressive so far. You really get to learn a lot more about what is going on in Iraq. I wish I had found it sooner...

OK, now I'm really confused. For my last entry, I checked out BLOGGER (a.k.a. Pyra), recently bought by Google. They have a section on the left, "BLOGS OF NOTE". On top of the list is HGHExperiment followed by Where is Raed. HGH looked interesting, so I clicked on it. I got a "not found" page.

So I tried to see if Google had any cache on it or some pages within that domain. They didn't have a cache, but they did have an archive index page. So I went there and it was kind of jumbled up, with a few links on it. Like a corrupt page. But I clicked on one of the links that pointed to a December 2002 archive page and it worked.

I was shocked to find a url that appeared to have the HGH Experiment front page content on it but it pointed to http://hghexperiment.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_dear_raed_archive.html, which looks like the url that an archive of Mr. Salam Pax would have, except it's on the HGH Experiment page. Weird.

A few minutes later, I tried the homepage of HGH Experiment again and this time it worked. It showed the same page as I had seen on that December archive page. So then I clicked on the december 2002 archive page again, and instead of the HGH Experiment front page, it showed the actual December archive of Salam Pax and still does.

Another thing, going back to that archive index page, it NOW shows the proper archive for HGH Experiment, instead of the link to http://hghexperiment.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_dear_raed_archive.html, aka Salam Pax page, which is what it showed before...

My guess is that there is some technical glitch and that during a server move or backup someone mistakenly moved some files into the wrong directory...but I am kind of wondering...

I guess some google employees are having fun with blogs and the google purchase of Pyra. The official chef of Google has posted the Google Daily Menus. Lunch on Friday was a "PASTA CON VODKA mixed al dente rotelle pasta & raditore Served w/ a Tomato Vodka Sauce & Roasted organic vegetables".

Sounds pretty good to me!

I found out about Friendster from reading the latest entry on Joi Ito's Weblog. It looks like a good idea. Increase your group of friends by hooking your own friends and their friends' friends into a network. Hmm, may be worth a try. What's nice is that you can limit the people who are allowed to view profile info.

Even though they lost Game 1, the Dallas Stars are my pick to go all the way this year. Marty Turco only gave up 2 goals in the loss and if he stays hot, he can carry Dallas all the way. He's only 28 years old. He has a great career ahead of him.

Yahoo! News: Officer's Star Searches Raise Liability Worries

Excerpt:

For six years, Officer Kelly Chrisman used Los Angeles Police Department computers to look up confidential law enforcement records on celebrities and other high-profile people, including Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox Arquette, Sean Penn and Halle Berry.

Chrisman says he was just carrying out orders from superiors, but a lawsuit recently settled by the city for nearly $400,000 alleged that the officer had accessed the records to sell the information to tabloids.

This murder case is amazing. That family must have gone through a lot...the relief they must feel after losing hope of seeing their daughter again and then have her show up out of the blue alive and well must be indescribable.

Paypal was the only really successful Internet payment system out of the many startups who promised to revolutionize the way money was transferred between people. Now there's a new one being talked up. It seems like a great idea, you simply need to hook into the system with a 19 digit security code and the cash value and the "money" is yours. I wonder if this system is secure enough....

Jeremy Zawodny has found some cool Yahoo! shortcuts. Here's the full list.

Wired news reported this story about a blogger who was simply copying stories from Stratfor. Amazing that it took so long for him to get caught. Also amazing how much traffic the technique got him.

Yahoo! News - Journalists Killed, Abducted in Iraq...

SARS has now cost over 100 lives. The Department of Health has created a FAQ page for people who have questions about Atypical Pneumonia.

Oh no...

Here is an interesting overview of the Quantum Computer, in the guise of a book review. In essence, if they can get it to work, the quantum computer will be really really fast.

Life imitates art. They just had an internet movie short called 405 with the same plot.

A lot of journalists seem to be in harm's way in Iraq. I didn't know that there was a journalist, Stuart Hughes who had an active weblog from Northern Iraq. He was injured and will be losing a foot as a result. His colleague died. Get well soon Stuart.

Good to see politicians joining the world of blogging. As long as they actually pay attention to the interactive nature of this medium rather than simply letting their employees handle the whole thing, it may put them more in touch with the public.

Here is the new beta of the Yahoo! Search page. I believe it will be live tomorrow morning. The results still show up the old way. I'm not sure what the difference will be between the former link and this one, or which one will go live, if not both.

NanoNexus is an up and coming company...worth a look..

Another take on Google.

This is rather interesting. This person put together a chart of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

There is a controversial Citywide Smoking Ban in New York. I'm a non-smoker and love watching hockey, baseball, basketball and auto racing in Sports Bars.

But I haven't done so much in years because I don't like coming home with smoky clothes just because I entered a sports bar.

I'm not sure how the city settled with Cigar Bars, but I think the law as it was initially proposed, was unfair to Cigar Bars. I'm no fan of Cigars, but if an establishment specializes in a bar for Cigar Afficianados, it should be legal.

Interestingly, I've talked to a lot of people here about the ban and was somewhat surprised by the results. You see, at least from people I've spoken to, pretty much everyone that smokes would like to quit. No smoker seems happy to be addicted to smoking. So this ban just helps them to smoke less. Last night I went to a great sports bar and asked the bartender what she thought of the ban and if it has had any effect on business.

She said she loves it. She never minded the second hand smoke but having her clothes smoky all the time really bothered her. But she has noticed no drop off in business as a result of the ban. People just smoke outside. The only time she said it may make a difference are on really cold days.

I can say it was a real pleasure to enter a sports bar, catch a hockey game, not cough all the way through and have to deal with asthma problems and then finally come home to smoke-free clothing. Perhaps at the end of the story, the few lost customers will be more than compensated by people like me, who have avoided these places for years due to the smoke.

Now that is one scary Pizza!

Carbon the exposition features some great art. Be sure to click on the images, the thumbnails don't do it justice.

davidgagne.net saw this article on Wired about Benetton weaving chips into garments. Interesting...

TECHNOEROTICA shows you how to watch Iraqi TV on the net. I couldn't get it to work but if you can, drop us a comment.

Good news for me and reminders for you. For you, remember to Spring Forward and reset your clocks. For me I'm just glad that my microwave, alarm clock and answering machine will now have the correct time again ;)

I didn't know Intel was in the wine business?

ABC news tells a funny story: Tassie's Bagdad under friendly fire from e-mails. I say as long as the co-ordinates in the U.S. Bombers are alright they don't need to worry. Now if someone in a bomber mistyped Bagdad into the computer for the missile destination, then I would worry...

Web pioneer Nando Times to close. If I recall correctly they were on the web even before CNN (another news on the web pioneer) was... Sad to see them go..

A few weeks ago I read a gruesome but fascinating article about science gone wrong. In an ethical violation of the worst kind, reknowned stuttering research pioneer, Wendell Johnson designed a cruel study. He used one of his students to do the dirty work on orphans. Today it is Yahoo's most emailed story. Some of the harmed orphans, elderly by now, are suing the University. Here is a good summary of the story. The student who carried out the experiments (now in her 80s) justified it by saying it was a small price to pay for science and the countless numbers the study helped. Perhaps she forgot that the study did not support the hypothesis of Wendell Johnson. Yet he went ahead to publish his thesis without mention of the study. Ostensibly the omission was not due to the cruelty of the study, which he seemed to be oblivious to. It was omitted because it did not support his theory. His thesis got worldwide acclaim and acceptance. Therefore not only was it cruel and detrimental to the orphans, but the results were ignored at a cost to future stutterers who received treatment on the basis of a flawed thesis. To my understanding, today experts in the field accept a modified version of Wendell's hypothesis...

I was really saddened to hear this news. Peggy Noonan has written a nice piece on him.

Thanks to Antipixel for mentioning NetFuture. So far it does indeed look like an excellent pub. The article on Organic food was very enlightening.

The Montreal Expos are 3 and 0?? I thought the team was sold to the "league" and would be dissolved this year. What happened?

The NYTimes reports: Squeezed, a Jewelry Designer Closes Shop.

Excerpt:

Ms. Cummings, one of the country's best-known jewelry designers, is closing her Manhattan office, paying off her staff and withdrawing all her diamond, gold, moonstone and enameled inventory and closing down boutiques in her two main outlets, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, effective June 1.

This is one battle Microsoft won't find easy to win.

I don't know if anyone mentioned this before and I only now just noticed this, but Dear Raed is not just a blogger, he's also a Palindrome.

If you are a top developer specializing in email, you may want to look into Mitch Kapor's Chandler. He's looking for a developer... I know someone who did a port of sendmail for one flavor of Unix, but I lost his email address...hey, if you're reading, this is right up your alley!

Some big news today. Bill Gates has announced that Microsoft is buying De Beers!

I really don't see the synergy but Gates believes that Microsoft can capitalize on their web properties and bring in a whole new dimension to the Jewelry industry. He said it is the first move in a new strategy to help grow Microsoft by bringing E-Commerce into the fold of the Microsoft family.

Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart always shows their correspondents reporting directly from the event, simply using a filmed backdrop like the weather people do...it turns out that a reporter was actually faking being in Iraq.