You know, I actually used to think that Rosie O’Donnell might be a fairly intelligent person. I guess not.

I installed the IE 6 beta yesterday, and I’ve found two problems so far. One is that it forgets my toolbar settings every time I close it, so my Google toolbar and my links toolbar keep diseappearing. The second is that LaunchCast no longer works. There are supposed to be some new cookie management features in IE 6, but it looks like they haven’t been implemented yet. Perhaps I’ll try to uninstall it.

Remember how I slagged Peter Gammons here yesterday? For details on why Gammons sucks, check out Jonathan Vankin’s feature in the New York Press.

A federal judge has ruled that employers are entitled to read their employees’ email once it has been read by that employee. Apparently, the law protects emails from the point at which they are sent until they are read by the recipient. Once they’ve been read, they’re fair game. That’s actually more protection than I thought employees had — I figured that if you’re using your employer’s email system, they have the right to read it anytime. In any case, don’t use your work email for personal stuff if you know what’s good for you.

My former employer is laying off 20 engineers in order to focus more on sales and marketing. My posting this link is nothing but schadenfreude at work. I actually feel bad for the friends that I have who still work there, although I’m afraid they got the last of them with this latest layoff.

William Saletan has a great article about David Horowitz at Slate. In case you’re not tuned in to this, Horowitz tried to take out an ad in a bunch of college newspapers arguing against reparations for slavery, and some colleges refused to run the ad. In other cases, the newspapers that did run the ad were stolen, or the editors of the paper caught lots of flack from people on campus. Of course, that was the very outcome Horowitz wanted, because he knew that stirring up controversy on college campuses would garner him coverage in the mainstream media that he could never afford to pay for. Horowitz’s publicity stunt has garnered an amazing amount of media coverage (it was on the local news here, even), so in that sense it was very successful. Saletan’s article contrasts the 10 points in the ad with Horowitz’s own behavior since the ad ran, and comes to some damning conclusions.

The Merc has a story about Rob Neyer, a baseball columnest for ESPN.com who has built a significant following through his atypical writing about sports. Unlike most sportswriters, Neyer is very analytical and doesn’t give any weight to the stupid common sense crap that you hear spewed endlessly by TV “analysts.” Even better, Neyer delights in skewering the received wisdom handed down by such analysts (like the execrable Peter Gammons).

This week on “Sick, Sad World”: Web developers who buy Macs so that they can use Virtual PC to test their sites using multiple versions of Internet Explorer. How long has Microsoft known that it’s a huge pain for Web developers to test their sites under IE 4, IE 5, IE 5.5, etc, ad nauseum? I guess you just can’t do that when the browser is actually a deeply integrated part of the operating system. (Yes, I’m guffawing as I type that.)

Yesterday a reader sent a link to Apple’s own 300 page system overview for Mac OS X. Definitely worth a look if you’re into the details.

Scott Rosenberg’s take on Hailstorm seems to echo many others. He focuses on Microsoft’s offer to aggregate your personal data for a fee. Naturally, there are lots of downsides to entering into this sort of arrangement with a big company. It seems like if they really wanted to empower users, they’d provide an application that enables the user to store all of the data on their local system and an interface that enables the user to share only the data necessary with third parties in a way that the user controls. They could then provide some sort of net-based backup service for the data that stores an encrypted copy of the data in a central location so that the user doesn’t risk losing it, and also doesn’t have to worry about Microsoft abusing it in some way. Using some established, standard system of authentication, the encrypted copy of the data could also be shared among multiple computers used by the user.