deseretnews.com | Deseret Morning News Web edition

Hatch draws the line
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch told the Senate on Monday that same-sex couples should be able to live together like married people, should have insurance and estate benefits like married people, and should be able to visit and care for each other in hospitals like married people.

The text above, no more, no less, appeared as the leader first story on the home page of the Deseret News, Salt Lake City’s Mormon church leaning newspaper. Clicking through, we learn that Hatch went on to say that they shouldn’t be able to marry. It’s interesting to me, because out of context, the leader seems to be an endorsement.

I installed the latest release of Firefox (0.91) a few days back, and its really frustrating me.

The biggest annoyance is that its now insisting on opening links from other apps, like SharpReader, or Thunderbird, in an existing window. This is bullshit behavior if you ask me and there isn’t any goddamn UI for changing it, unless you count using about:config and setting the obscurely named advanced.system.supportDDEExec to false, which is what I did with the last version. Guess what, the option is still set, but Firefox is ignorning it.

I’m also annoyed by the fact that there isn’t good UI for re-allowing cookies. Mozilla lets you use a menu item to allow or block cookies from the currently displayed site. Its much harder to get to in Firefox. You have to dig into the options dialog and find the site in the long list of sites with blocked cookies and then you can’t dismiss the dialog in the intuitive way because Firefox doesn’t think you’ve changed anything.

Blocking popups is similarly less-simple than under Mozilla. I also think that they should just unify the list of sites for image, popup and cookie blocking and let you toggle each bit separately. Back when I used separate privacy software, I ended up duping most of the block image and block cookie settings.

I’d say something nice, but the window reuse behavior is really annoying me.

CNN.com – Military on alert for Coke’s chip contest – Jul 2, 2004

Specially rigged Coke cans, part of a summer promotion, contain cell phones and global positioning chips. That has officials at some installations worried the cans could be used to eavesdrop, and they are instituting protective measures. […]

Asked if Coke would curtail the promotional campaign because of the security issues raised, Martin said, “No. There’s no reason to.”

I think he forgot to add: “Not when we paid a PR agent to drum up all this flack for the publicity value”

Entertainment News Article | Reuters.com

South African lawyers are suing U.S. entertainment giant Walt Disney Co for infringement of copyright on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” the most popular song to emerge from Africa, the lawyers said on Friday.

“What?!!!! I thought those copyright extensions we bought only applied to us?” — Michael Eisner

I was recently given this swell Black Adder DVD collection. It has all the shows and specials, plus various other rot. As far as I can tell, it lacks much in the way of swell commentary like that on the Simpsons and Buffy sets, but thats not why I’m writing about it in my blog.

I’m writing about it in my blog, because they decided to pack a full season (or series) on each DVD. This makes for efficient use of shelf space, but it sacrifices quality. Overall, its fine, better than the old commercial VHS tapes I have, and much better than the off-air recordings I made on SLP mode, but compared to most of the stuff I’ve bought, its not so good.

I guess the extra few bucks it would have cost to provide twice as many disks would have really eaten in to their profits on a product with a ~$125 list price.