A bipartisan group of Senators is ramming through legislation that would make it tougher for consumers to have their debts dissolved by filing for bankruptcy. This is legislation bought and paid for through millions of dollars in campaign contributions by credit card companies and banks, and I find it disgusting. Over the past 10 years or so, the availability of credit has increased to a ridiculous degree. Those credit cards were handed out under the current bankruptcy statutes, and now that the irresponsibility of the lenders has come back to bite them in the ass, they want to make things tougher on consumers. Give me a break. Banks seem to be developing a pattern of getting themselves into trouble and asking the government to bail them out – let’s not forget the S&L; bailout from the eighties that wound up costing us over 150 billion dollars.
Opera Software has made their browser free, in the Eudora sense. Basically, you can use the browser for free if you’re willing to let them display ads in the interface, or you can pay up and get rid of the ads. I’ve been using the sponsored mode in Eudora to read my email for awhile at work, and I think that it works pretty well. In other words, the ads are easy to ignore. The only problem was a bug in the ad code that caused Eudora to crash every time I launched it until Eudora released an upgrade, but that’s a problem with implementation, not design.
I hate to be snarky, but allow me to indulge myself by laughing at the Bush-Cheney transition team for actually having an official slogan. Why on Earth does anyone need a slogan for their transition team? For what it’s worth, the slogan is “Bringing America Together.” I wonder who came up with that one?
Revenue projections from Apple are bad -- hopefully this is a bump in the road and not a trend. I was planning on buying an iMac soon, and Mac OS X looks really promising.
Request for information: does anyone know of a site that keeps its AP and Reuters news archives online indefinitely? How about good news sites that provide permanent news archives for free? I just noticed that Yahoo’s news site only keeps old stories for two weeks. CNN and ABC seem to keep all their stories forever, but they don’t usually run AP stories, I don’t think. MSNBC seems to dump their stories after awhile, and besides, they use interstitial ads and all sorts of other things that annoy me. I’d like to stick to linking to stories that aren’t going to screw up my archive down the road, if possible.
There’s a simple solution to this problem: don’t use HTML-enabled email clients. Duh.