Ayende posted how he has some 80+ unread and starred email messages waiting for him after a busy workweek. Reading this reminded me of a situation I ran into in the mid-1990s, while working in the IT group for a multinational bank. I went away for a little over a week, and I came back to find over 200 unread messages in my inbox. (This was before Blackberries and ubiquitous webmail.)

Reading through some 200 emails would have taken quite some time (even longer considering they used Lotus Notes), so I decided to take an alternate approach: I deleted them all.

Did I commit a grave error, deleting that all-important urgent email from a busy executive who needed to communicate something important to me? No, I did not. If something was that important, it would have been communicated to me via voice mail, or would have been redirected to one of my coworkers.

Granted, this may not be the best approach in all . . .

→ Read More: How to choose: Email, voice mail, or carrier pigeon?

A report released by the Reason Foundation, Performance of State Highway Systems, 1984-2005, 16th Annual Report, reveals two realities of New York State’s highway system, which you can see for yourself on their interactive map:

It is highly inefficient.
It is safe.

Anyone who lives in New Your State knows how bad our roads can be. In New York City (my home town), road surface anomalies come in many different styles (I never knew the proper name for a hummock until today).

Potholes in the big city have at times taken on lives of their own, and have created subcultures. Pothole Phil roams Staten Island, sticking his head in the many potholes he finds while smiling for the camera. Yes, this is the stuff of legends.

But what about the safety part? Why is it that New York State highways rank at the bottom in efficiency and quality, but at the top when it comes to safety . . .

→ Read More: New York State highways: underperforming, but safe

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed bill H.R.29, also known as the “Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act or Spy Act.” Incredibly, the first text in the summary of this bill includes:

Makes it unlawful for any person who is not the owner or authorized user (user) of a protected computer (a computer exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the U.S. Government, or a computer used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication) to engage in deceptive acts or practices…

Now read carefully between the lines, and realize that the above also means this (changed text underlined):

Does not specificially make it unlawful for any person who is not the owner or authorized user (user) of a protected computer (a computer exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the U.S. Government, or a computer used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication) to engage in deceptive acts or practices…

I’m glad they left the loophole in . . .

→ Read More: Oh, you silly bill (H.R.29)

As reported on Slashdot:

An anonymous reader writes “The Register is reporting that in a few short months a proposal to tax all MP3 players in the Netherlands will become law. The levy taxes 3.28 euros ($4.30 US) for every gigabyte of capacity. This means a 60GB iPod Photo will be hit for an additional 196 euros ($258), all of it going to the record industry’s copyright collection agencies. And they call file sharers thieves?”

In the U.S., about 13 million MP3 players were sold in 2004. (Over 5 million of those were Apple iPods.) If you assume the average iPod held 4GB (a conservative estimate, considering the iPod Mini’s smallest capacity is 4GB), and the average non-iPod held 1GB (again a very conservative estimate), that’s 30.1 million gigabytes of MP3 storage sold in 2004. If you applied the Dutch tax of $4.30 per GB to those conservative estimates, it would amount to about $130 million to record . . .

→ Read More: Taxing your gigabytes