Scott Rosenberg’s column at Salon today attacks the argument for pulling the plug on racist sites (and in a larger sense, any socially unacceptable sites) on the Web. As usual, he hits the nail right on the head. Trying to rid the world of these sites will never work, and I tend to agree that they aren’t very effective anyway.

Micron is providing “free computers” for $1,087. The money is for three years of Internet service, a three year warranty, and one year of classes at Micron University. Can you say “marketing gimmick?”

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has published a special issue of its journal, The Information Society, focused on anonymous communication on the Internet. Fascinating stuff.

Microsoft Word 2000 has the word ‘millennium’ misspelled in the dictionary (as ‘millenium’).

If you haven’t checked out the Mozilla Tinderbox lately, you’ll be amazed at the number of operating systems and processors that they’re testing Seamonkey builds for these days. Tinderbox shows the current build status for Seamonkey (the next version of Netscape Navigator) on a bunch of different test machines.

Yesterday I was in the Gap, and I witnessed what was, to me, a bizarre episode. As someone who’s been using the Internet for 10 years (as of this fall), I’m always shocked to witness the degree to which the Internet pervades the general culture these days. Anyway, a woman and her daughter (perhaps early high-school age) were shopping. The daughter was trying on clothes as her mother milled around, I wasn’t really paying attention. Anyway, as I was leaving the store, I heard the mother turn to the daughter and say, in reference to a guy working at the store, “That gentleman would like your email address.” The fact that one teenager could reasonably assume another would just have an email address was a bit shocking, as was the fact that the mother was facilitating some dude at the Gap hitting on her daugher, but I digress.

Jim Barksdale has resurfaced as a Sun Microsystems board member. I guess that means he won’t be the new CEO at Hewlett-Packard.

USA Today offers further proof that the current search engines are unsustainable, which is not to say that they’re not useful.

The Ad Critic is a whole site dedicated to tracking television advertising. They have Quicktime movies of most of the major ads that show up on television, so if your friends at work are talking about some funny new ad they saw on TV last night, you can probably check it out there. Despite the name, there aren’t any scathing but hilarious critiques of the ads, which is unfortunate.

The Apache Group has founded the Apache Software Foundation, which will manage the development of Apache and its attendant projects, like Jakarta (the new servlet engine initiative). Basically, it sounds like this is a way to shield the volunteers who work on Apache from legal action if some idiot sues them because the server they didn’t even have to pay for malfunctions.