Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."

Posted by GeeTee at November 26, 2002 11:17 AM | TrackBack 0

"The failure of the economic boom to expand employer-based coverage for working families significantly is ominous," the center said in a recent study. It found that the current slowdown and the rising cost of providing health care to employees produced a double whammy: fewer companies are now willing to offer their workers health care coverage, and those that do will demand that employees shoulder a far higher share of the cost.

Posted by GeeTee at November 26, 2002 10:48 AM | TrackBack 0

For a fee of $10 per word (5 word minimum), a customer can have a telegram delivered to someone who has passed away. This is done with the help of terminally Ill volunteers who memorize the telegrams before passing away, and then deliver the telegrams after they have passed away. We call this an "afterlife telegram".

Posted by GeeTee at November 26, 2002 06:39 AM | TrackBack 0

When I read that call to action, I resolved to take up Lessig's Challenge. I would donate more money to people and organizations fighting against the media monopoly than I spent buying the monopoly's products. I would support organizations like the EFF, Digital Consumer, the Free Software Foundation, and the ACLU that fight for cyber-liberties and free speech. I would buy items from independent artists online and in person. I would donate money to open source programmers who are fighting the good fight.

Posted by GeeTee at November 26, 2002 06:36 AM | TrackBack 0

The Russian Ministry of Education has included Barbie along with a list of other toys and games, such as Pokémon, that face a ban because of the supposedly harmful effects they have on the minds of young children. Barbie, in particular, is under fire because the doll is thought to awaken sexual impulses in the minds of the very young, and encourage consumerism among Russian infants.

Posted by GeeTee at November 26, 2002 06:32 AM | TrackBack 0

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book "The Sociology of Philosophies," Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses. Freud may have been the founder of psychoanalysis, but it really began to take shape in 1902, when Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler would gather in Freud's waiting room on Wednesdays, to eat strudel and talk about the unconscious. The neo-Confucian movement of the Sung dynasty in China revolved around the brothers Ch'eng Hao and Ch'eng I, their teacher Chou Tun-i, their father's cousin Chang Tsai, and, of course, their neighbor Shao Yung. Pissarro and Degas enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts at the same time, then Pissarro met Monet and, later, Cézanne at the Académie Suisse, Manet met Degas at the Louvre, Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre's studio, and Renoir, in turn, met Pissarro and Cézanne and soon enough everyone was hanging out at the Café Guerbois on the Rue des Batignolles. Collins's point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction—conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener's eye that tells you you're onto something. German Idealism, he notes, centered on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Why? Because they all lived together in the same house.

Posted by GeeTee at November 26, 2002 06:27 AM | TrackBack 0

During irradiation, a piece of meat would be zapped with 10 kilorays of radio- isotope-generated radiation beams -- equal in power to 150 million chest X-rays. The process is not supposed to change the taste or appearance of the food.

Posted by GeeTee at November 26, 2002 06:13 AM | TrackBack 0