Technology has us fingered. From Washington Technology: Fingerprinting Puts a More Foolproof Touch on Prime Time:

Printrak is also enjoying an uptick of sales in fingerprint-based national identification systems. In July, the company won a contract to provide a national identification system for the Swiss Federal Office of Police. And in April, it secured a $3 million contract to provide a similar system to the Republic of El Salvador.

And you were worried about your SS# on your driver’s license.

I’ve just got a Black Nova Traders game working. If you ever did any BBSing back in the late ’80s or ealy ’90s you may have played Tradewars 2000. Black Nova Traders is a similar type game played on the web. It is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. The current MySQL server that I’m using is not entirely reliable but it is helping me get some bugs out of things. If you are interested in playing the game feel free to log in and create a player and have at it.

A couple of friends of mine and I were having lunch last Friday and the topic came up of including links to articles that require a subscription in posts to a mailing list. Both of my friends thought it was poor taste to do so. Personally, it has never bothered me but I can kind of understand their point. I’d like your opinion on this as far as my providing links to subscription sites. I’m inclined to include them if the subscription is free but I’d really like my reader’s take on this.

Click on the “comment” link below and give me your opinion.

Think the DMCA only affects people attempting to break the copyright law or open up file fomats on different platforms? Well, in the Risks Digest, Volume 21: Issue 62 Fred Cohen, believes it also gives protection to criminals who encrypt their records. The way the DMCA is written, he may have a point.

ARRRGGGHH!!! Can’t people take a joke anymore? PETA won the appeals over the peta.org domain name.

What can I say? I just like sunset photos and there was just something about them in Key West. I can see how the tradition began.

Hey Justin.

Thanks for asking me to post over here. I’ll try to contribute more than this from time to time….

This is a pretty good Wired article Debating Merits of Palms in Class. I bought my youngest son a Palm M100 when he entered middle school last year in hopes that it would help him get organized. It didn’t but what it did do was get him reading a little more often. I installed the Palm Reader on it for him along with some Rudyard Kipling short stories. I think the organization will eventually come but that is something that he is going to have to develop first and then learn how best to apply the PDA to help him remain organized. The e-book aspect of the Palm, though, does appear to have a lot of merit. Imagine the reduction in copying costs if all those handouts could just be beamed to each student.

It looks like Microsofts PR people have taken a lesson from the late Mayor Daly of Chicago.

Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly.

Well I guess if it worked for Kennedy it ought to be good enough to work for Gates.

This is called the Artists House and it is the home of a strange tale of a doll. The doll was made by a young Haitian woman in service to the prominent Key West Otto family for the young son of the household. He immediately took to the doll and started calling the doll by his first name, Robert, and started going by his middle name, Gene.

Gene grew up but always remained in company of the doll, Robert. When the Gene would get blamed for anything he would immediately pass the blame on to Robert. This continued on into adulthood. Gene became an artist and when he married he brought his bride, Anne, to Key West and moved into the above home. After moving into the home he immediately began rennovating one of the rooms, for a sewing room, the young bride thought, but that was not the case. He had transformed it into a room with furniture all scaled to Robert’s size.

This is one of the better stories on the Ghost Tours of Key West. My wife and I have taken these tours in Charleston, SC and St. Augustine, FL. and I was a little disappointed in this one but I’m still glad I took it.

More evidence that we are becoming just too litigious is the case of Robert Novak v. APD List Members. Robert Novak operates Petswarehouse.com, not to be confused with Petswarehouse.com and let his dissatisfaction be known on an aquatic plants mailing list hosted by Active Window Publications, Inc. I’ve done similar things when I was dissatisfied with a vendor and unable to come to a satisfactory conclusion with them. I guess that Mr. Novak sees it more lucrative to sue the pants off of Mr. Resler and the list owner than to attempt to generate goodwill. He’s asking for $15 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

Some fan coral I saw on the reef while in Key West.

I did a little checking on the Brian K. West story and it appears that we may not be getting all the information from Mr. West. I emailed the Poteau Daily News &amp Sun and they emailed me back. If the PDN&S story is to be believed at all then there are some questions that must be answered.

The computer logs indicate that at least 30 attempts to connect to the newspaper’s server from those addresses were made between 4:05 p.m. and 4:48 p.m., according to the court document.

It goes on to say that group of attempts were followed by at least five separate attempts to connect to the same computer at PDN&S from the site in Mena.

The affidavit said that the logs reflect that many of the attempts to connect were “not simply requests to view the web page, but attempts to access the files and Perl scripts that cause the web page to operate.”

There are portions of these two stories that corroborate each other and then there are portions that contradict each other. Since it is somewhat fantastic that a “Good Samaritan” would be treated in such manner I tend to give a little more credibility to the PDN&S story.

This is about as crazy as it gets. The FBI is going after someone on wire fraud charges for telling a website owner about a security hole he found by accident. This is like charging someone with voyeurism for telling another person that their fly is down. I’m, I’m . . . speechless.

CNN is reporting Sharks attack three off Florida’s east coast. These schools of sharks have always been there. I remember catching small ones on the beach in Daytona years ago. This was where we had been playing in the surf earlier in the day. I will be real interested in learning why the number of attacks has increased so much this year.