Cold this morning: 35° at 7:00am. There was frost on the shaded
parts of the roof. Autumn is here.
The newspapers have been full of phone spammer sob stories lately:
how companies will go under, and their employees—who are all
minorities and/or disabled, it seems—will be out on the street,
if the national do-not-call list goes into effect.
The phone spammers' latest legal maneuver is to claim that the
do-not-call list violates their First Amendment right to interrupt my
dinner. I am unimpressed. I can put a No Solicitors sign on my door, and
rid myself of door-to-door salesvermin; federal legislation is already
in place to protect my fax machine—if I had one, that is—from
fax spammers; and even the US Postal Service has a form that lets me keep
certain kinds of junk mail out of my mailbox.
The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to speak. It does not
guarantee that anyone will listen. When this issue reaches the Supreme
Court, the Court should give the phone spammers a judicial spanking
& send them home.
This is an interesting issue: it forces congresscritters to choose
between big corporations (and the big campaign contributions they
provide) and the voters (whom the congresscritters ostensibly serve).
Seldom is the true nature of government exposed so clearly.
I was wondering recently what became of Cinemania, Microsoft's movie
database on a CD. Google says it was cancelled after Cinemania 97, and
the microsoft.cinemania newsgroup
is full of porn spam. Apparently, Cinemania went online, and is now
buried somewhere in the MSN web site. I looked, but couldn't find it.
No matter. If there were a Cinemania 2004, it probably wouldn't run
on nessus anyway.
Only eighty-six shopping days left until Christmas!
Pesotum—the next town south of Savoy on US 45—has a web
site: www.pesotum.org.
Long ago, my WRI office had a south view, and I used the Pesotum
grain elevators as a measure of air quality: the better I could see
them, the cleaner the air.
Downloaded three more free e-books from the Microsoft Reader web site,
got a message: “You must re-activate your copy of Reader.”
Sure thing, 'softies. Too bad your activation server is down.