Which abuse of the patent system are you? Take this test to find out. Now that they got it, they're beating distance learning colleges over the head with it, for money. Another obvious bit of programming turns lucrative for one company.
posted by mathowie on Mar 30, 2004 - 12 comments

The FBI is pushing for online ethics education in schools, but I wonder if it's even possible to teach good ethics in school anymore? It must be a great time to be a young geek: music is free, porn is plentiful, you can save anything on the web by simply right-clicking and choosing save as, you can easily trade and copy reports online, cracks and warez mean never having to pay for software or games again, hacking tools are freely available to anyone, and you can be male/female/old/young online and no one knows the difference. How could you possibly teach kids that all those are bad things?
posted by mathowie on Oct 10, 2000 - 12 comments

Offshore pharmacy sites selling prescription drugs to US customers were shut down this week. I wonder if the cat is already out of the bag on this one, will there ever be a way to regulate prescription drug traffic on the web? There's no worldwide organization to watch over things like this, nor are there laws that every country can agree on. Something tells me that getting steroids and "date rape" pills online is going to be a problem that's never going away.
posted by mathowie on Mar 21, 2000 - 1 comment

I knew hard drive storage was cheap, but I didn't think it was that cheap. Freediskspace.com is offering 300Mb of storage for pretty much anything. They integrate with PCs, Macs, and Linux boxes, in addition to PDAs. That last one I find most curious, because I've never maxed out the storage space on my 2Mb palm pilot before. [thanks bump]
posted by mathowie on Feb 14, 2000 - 5 comments

Carl wrote a great Industry Standard article lampooning online marketing, and I couldn't help but laugh at seeing a "B to B Convention" banner ad running at the end of it (screenshot).
posted by mathowie on Jan 19, 2000 - 0 comments

If you're in Arizona, you'll be able to vote online for your Democratic Primary candidate this year. Nuts! I can't wait to see how this works out. All I can think is that it will be a security nightmare and hell on server resources to do that many writes to a database in a short period of time. I hope it's a success, and spreads to my state, so I won't have to go through the trouble of finding my polling place, waiting in line, and getting to work on time. You want voter participation to go above 20%? Make it easier.
posted by mathowie on Jan 18, 2000 - 4 comments