Maszman Speaks!

It’s becom­ing more and more obvi­ous that the Bush White House is in vio­la­tion of Fed­eral law regard­ing email reten­tion. As the inves­ti­ga­tion con­tin­ues, it’s been revealed that an upgrade from Lotus Notes to Exchange/Outlook broke their exist­ing backup sys­tem. The solu­tion: man­u­ally sav­ing emails in .pst files scat­tered among the var­i­ous servers. This resulted in at least five mil­lion e-mails being lost between 2003 and 2005. Per­ma­nently lost. Given the amount of time left in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, it’s unlikely there will be any consequences.

Com­pared to the dam­age to the Con­sti­tu­tion and Bill of Rights lost emails seem fairly minor, but it’s just another exam­ple of how Bush and his cronies con­sider them­selves above the law.

Román Cortés has pro­duced a pic­ture of Homer Simp­son done only with text and CSS. No, really. Drag your cur­sor over it to see the letters.

The USPTO has a prob­lem on their hands, two-thirds of their patent appeals judges were improp­erly appointed. The Con­sti­tu­tion requires that the Depart­ment of Com­merce must appoint “infe­rior offi­cers” and the judges are con­sid­ered as such. The appoint­ments began in March of 2000 and it’s likely most patent cases since then have had at least one improp­erly appointed judge pre­sid­ing. Regard­less of whether the judges were qual­i­fied, such pro­ce­dural irreg­u­lar­i­ties are an open invi­ta­tion to appeal and pos­si­ble over­throw of bil­lions of dol­lars in patents.

Wow, I’ve man­aged to puke out 70 Insider Box comics.

I saw a arti­cle in my feed reader the other day about how the web has basi­cally turned us all into authors but at the same time got­ten rid of all the read­ers. I can see how that’s the case.

[Update] Found it, from the NYT Sun­day Book Review.

Copy­right reformer Lawrence Lessig has been get­ting a lot of atten­tion lately, includ­ing a new book that equates his stance on copy­rights with Com­mu­nism. I guess peo­ple are still pin­ing for the Cold War and can’t pass up any oppor­tu­nity to dredge up the Red Men­ace. But the real issue, as the arti­cle points out is the right has basi­cally splin­tered between those who sup­port cor­po­rate inter­ests and lib­er­tar­i­ans. The rev­o­lu­tion, if I may call it that, has hardly begun.

In case you’re con­fused about what could hap­pen in the Microsoft/Yahoo deal. Marc Andreessen explains it all in If Microsoft goes fully hos­tile on Yahoo. It’s not as sim­ple as I thought it was.