] People may have laughed 16 months ago when obese
] teenagers unsuccessfully sued McDonald's, saying its food
] made them fat. But a well-honed army of familiar lawyers
] who waged war against the tobacco companies for decades
] and won megamillion-dollar settlements is preparing a new
] wave of food fights, and no one is laughing.

The New York Times : National : Lawyers Shift Focus From Big Tobacco to Big Food

]
] 24) Again, how will you stop spammers from forging this
] domain?
] Nothing can stop a spammer from forging a .mail
] domain, but the entire TLD DNS system - the thing that
] controls all domains under this TLD - is run by the
] Sponsor Organization. What this means is that a system
] that tests to see if the connecting .mail domain is a
] valid, "no spam" domain, will be able to spot an attempt
] to forge it right at the start of the SMTP transaction.
] Attempts to forge can be rejected on the spot, or passed
] on to further spam-filter checks.

They need to publish a RFC-level document detailing how this
would work. I think they're saying a mail from amazon.com
would have an envelope sender of mx23.amazon.com.mail. The
receiving MTA can then check that the connecting host really
is mx23.amazon.com and if so, let the mail through.

Spamhaus .mail TLD - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

] The weapon in question is called "dot-mail," a proposed
] new Internet domain like dot-com or dot-org. If approved
] by the Internet's addressing authority, direct mailers
] and other companies could use it to send their e-mails
] straight to users' in-boxes without fear that they will
] be quarantined or discarded by software filters that
] confuse those e-mails with spam.

This is the first I've heard of this ... and its a totally
assinine idea!

U: Maybe not quite as assinine as I originally thought...
see the FAQ.

Dot-Mail Domain Proposed as Spam Solution (TechNews.com)

Diebold voting machines made the Daily Show tonight...

] No sooner has digital tunes really started to catch on,
] we hear that the $0.99-per-song -- or less, if you go to
] Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) -- price tag is being threatened.
] According to The Wall Street Journal, the recording
] industry has been trying to cook up ways to charge folks
] more for music. Even Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes and
] Roxio's (Nasdaq: ROXI) Napster services have been
] charging premiums for some of the big names and hot new
] releases, the article said.

They just don't get it ...

The Death of Dollar Downloads? [Motley Fool Take] April 7, 2004

] All those years on the couch playing Nintendo and
] PlayStation appear to be paying off for surgeons.
] Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three
] hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent
] fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the
] task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did
] not play video games.

Surgeons Who Play Video Games Err Less

]
] In a 33-page motion filed on Monday, April 5, 2004, ICANN
] has asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to dismiss
] VeriSign's recent lawsuit filed against the non-profit
] organization. More specifically, the filed motion has
] asked the court to "dismiss VeriSign's first six claims
] for relief with prejudice," which are:

ICANN Explains Why Judge Should Dismiss VeriSign's Lawsuit

] Voters in Inglewood, Calif., a racially diverse and
] economically struggling suburb of Los Angeles, soundly
] rejected on Tuesday a ballot initiative to permit
] construction of a Wal-Mart complex that would have
] exempted the 60-acre development from virtually all local
] oversight.

Yay.

California Voters Reject Wal-Mart Initiative

] A leading mathematics journal has finally accepted that one
] of the longest-standing problems in the field

The Kepler conjecture about how efficiently you can pack oranges
into a box has been solved with the help of computers, a la the
1976 proof of the four color theorem. There's a lot of hand-wringing here ... there is no ghost in the machine whether
it be made of silicon or carbon. Deal with it, people.

In Math, Computers Don't lie ... or do they?

] But harm reduction for hard-core smokers is another
] matter.
]
] At issue is a form of smokeless tobacco, a popular
] Swedish product called snus (rhymes with loose) that
] satisfies smokers' nicotine addiction with negligible
] health risks of its own. But to many foes of smoking, it
] is not a lifesaver, but the devil's instrument.

Hear hear.

Commentary: A Smokeless Alternative to Quitting