Animated Cartoon using a legal pad with art skills about as good as yours...

Robot Love

] The new law hasn't had an effect on the amount of spam
] being sent, either. "There's been no reduction in the
] volume of spam," says Scott Chasin, MX Logic's chief
] technology officer. "In fact, the exact opposite--our
] spam rates are actually going up."
]
] MX Logic classified 77 percent of its customers' e-mail
] as spam on Monday, up 6.5 percent from January 1.

SPAM continues to grow exponentially. At these rates I think there is about a year left before people will start exiting SMTP in favor of closed systems.

PCWorld.com - Is the CAN-SPAM Law Working?

] In general, people would be well-advised firstly to stay
] well clear of all address-book and 'social networking
] systems', and secondly to prevail upon their friends,
] colleagues and acquaintances that they should avoid
] making any data about them available to service-operators
] like Plaxo.
]
] There are two qualifications to that general statement.
] Firstly, a service that was subject to reasonable data
] protection laws would be less objectionable than services
] located in the U.S.A. or other havens such as Australia
] or a third world country. Secondly, it is feasible to
] design a privacy-sensitive address-book service or social
] networking service. Unfortunately, none of the services
] referred to in this paper have demonstrated sufficient
] understanding of the issues to suggest that they could
] mature in that direction.

On the privacy of social networking sites

] Google notes and saves information such as
] time of day, browser type, browser language, and IP
] address with each query.
]
] Please be aware, however, that we will release specific
] personal information about you if required to do so in
] order to comply with any valid legal process such as a
] search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order.

While everyone is freaking out about their Tivos, Jeremy mentioned a much more serious issue. The fact is that TV only shows you popular culture. There are limited circumstances where surveillance of TV watching habits would really be problematic politically. TV is the soma. The Internet, on the other hand, makes your local library look tame. Google knows everything that you've thought about seriously in past 5 years. And what Google knows, the police know.

If they don't need permission or notification to pull your records from the library, how long before they can do the same with your Google records?

Google Privacy Policy

] By day, Palestinian laborers tend to row after row of
] greenhouses that produce some of the highest quality
] fruit and vegetables in Israel. By night, Palestinian
] militants lob mortars into the settlements and snipe at
] Israeli cars along the road leading in and out of the
] communities.
]
] There are constant reminders of this bizarre
] relationship, based on mutual economic dependence and
] unrelieved hostility.
]
] On Tuesday, young men played volleyball in the sand at
] the Jewish seminary here, where a Palestinian attacker
] carried out a suicidal rampage in March 2002, killing
] five students before he was killed himself.
]
] Overhead, Israeli warplanes roared through the sky on
] their daily training runs along the coast.

A brief glimpse into the peculiar life in a Gaza settlement.

Possible Plan to Evacuate Dismays Gaza Settlers

] The global usage of 2 word phrases has increased with
] 3.36 percent from 29.22 percent to 32.58 percent since
] April 2003. The use of 1 word phrase has decreased with
] 5.74 percent from 24.76 percent to 19.02 percent.

Internet users are become more sophisticated in their use of search technology.

OneStat.com - Web users become more sophisticated

] People who know they're being watched, and that their
] innocent actions can result in police scrutiny, are
] people who become scared to step out of line. They know
] that they can be put on a "bad list" at any time. People
] living in this kind of society are not free, despite any
] illusionary security they receive. It's contrary to all
] the ideals that went into founding the United States.

A fairly good article on why profiling doesn't work.

How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism / IDs and the illusion of security

] Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he had ordered a
] plan drawn up for the evacuation of 17 settlements in the
] Gaza Strip, which he said eventually could lead to the
] relocation of almost all of the 7,500 Jewish settlers
] currently living in Gaza, an Israeli newspaper reported
] Monday.

Sharon Says He Wants Plan to Remove Gaza Settlements (washingtonpost.com)

] According to De Pasquale, the circles in the cells are
] nothing but the first numbers of the Fibonacci series, in
] which each number is a sum of two previous: 1, 2, 3, 5.
]
]
] The abacus would then work on a base 40 numbering system.

sounds pretty cool, if unverifiable for the time being.

Incan Counting System Decoded?

] TiVo estimated that halftime viewership among its
] customers was up 12 percent from 2003.
]
] The play-it-again company also reported that usage of its
] replay technology spiked a whopping 180 percent, the
] biggest surge ever measured, following the broadcast TV
] debut of Jackson's right mammary gland "as hundreds of
] thousands of households [TiVo'd] to view the incident
] again and again."

TiVo maintains records of everything that its customers view, including everything they ask for replays of! Is the FBI now going to be accessing this information to determine who's watching which TV shows??

TiVo's records of viewing habits