That's the way the news headlines should read, in my opinion. According to the Supreme Court, the law meant to punish pornographers who market their "wares" to minors is a possible breach of the first amendment -- the right to free speech. As a result, they’ve thrown it out.

So either the judges are drugged out of their minds, certifiably insane, don't have impressionable children of their own to worry about, or who knows what.

The law would have required adults to use access codes or other methods of registration before they could see the questionable material online. It would also have levied some hefty fines at pornographers who continued to market to kids.

Opponents claim that it would have been too restricting on free speech. Hey, I'm all for free speech, especially in a time when it seems like so many of our rights are being subtly constrained. But a law that would have enacted security measures to protect children from porn sites? How exactly is that wrong? Hell, it's bad enough that any child with an email account could be greeted at any time with penis enlargement SPAM and a slew of other nasty sounding emails.

Sometimes I just don't understand our society. If there's someone out there who can explain it to me -- feel free.

Forget the world's oldest man. Never mind the largest number of hot dogs consumed in one sitting. There's a new world's record to beaten, ladies and gentlemen. A Singapore student has grabbed the honor of being the fastest mobile phone text messenger, after feverishly typing a 26 word message into her phone in 43.66 seconds.

Contestants had to type: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."

Using the phone's predictive text function - that guesses words as letters are typed in - was prohibited, and marks for punctuation counted too.

So grab your cell phones, start your clocks and try typing the Gettysburg Address in 56 seconds.

Ultimately, this isn't actually that funny a story, but California cows may have been exposed to unsafe levels of a chemical used in rocket fuel, according to a new study.

Not so funny because young children and pregnant women have to be careful when drinking milk -- the "lifting" but toxic ingredient has been linked to thyroid damage.

Still, the "Cow jumping over the moon," kinda takes on a whole new meaning, doesn't it?

The curtain has fallen on the renowned tradeshow, at least for this year. A combination of industry downturns, shrinking crowds, tighter budgets and a plethora of other reasons have resulted in the current owners of Comdex canceling the show for 2004. Their plan is to brainstorm a total redesign and repackaging, which would debut in 2005.

Still, as retired IBM channel executive David Boucher says, "An era has passed. It's like not having the Super Bowl."

Read more about the Comdex Cancellation, plus reaction from industry execs at CRN.

So much for America Online's claims of a safe community. Such statements get tossed out the window when one of their own fold betrays the trust of AOL subscribers by selling their email addresses to SPAMmers.

Slimeball and soon-to-be former AOL software engineer Jason Smathers used his inside access to steal a subscriber list of 92 million members, selling it to a Las Vegas-based SPAMmer. That "gentleman" in turn sold the list to other SPAMers.

Even more disturbing, Smathers' list not only included the customer account screen names, but their zip codes, telephone numbers and credit card types.

All the criminals have been caught and are naturally facing tons of jail time and fines. Meanwhile, America Online claims that despite this data theft, actual credit card numbers and passwords remained safe.

That's small comfort to all the affected members who have to ponder if AOL can stand by their promise that such internal security breaches are a one-time thing.

As it is, one time was once too many.

The daily routine of rummaging through our inboxes, sorting between wanted emails and SPAM is enough to make our vision go blurry. But for the blind, it's no laughing matter.

That's because the visually impaired check their email using text-to-speech software which verbalizes the subject lines of their emails. Imagine how embarrassing it is hear the computer vocalize that one email reads "Greetings from Aunt Sarah" while the very next one says "Enlarge your Penis size."

That's exactly what they endure every single day. Worse, they don't have the luxury of quickly skimming through subject lines like we do. They must listen to every header to determine what is worth keeping, and what is garbage.

The whole experience is leaving many blind people with the tough decision of giving up email access.

It never fails. Whenever technology is created to better our lives, someone comes up with a way to exploit it. Granted, it's usually a creative exploitation, such as in the case of students in Rome, Italy, who have allegedly been using their mobile phones to text message test answers or even scan in images of the exams.

Thanks to some military technology however, The Enrico Tosi Technical Institute in Northern Italy school may have a solution that could potentially prevent similar occurrences in schools all over the world.

A device call the C-Guard, jams the phone signals in a 262-foot (80-meters for our European friends) radius in enclosed spaces, thereby reaffirming our faith in the old adage, "Cheaters never win".

Well, okay...sometimes they win, but they almost always get caught.

Alright fine. Usually they aren't caught, but what goes around comes around.

OKAY! NEVER MIND! Sheesh. Jaded bunch, aint'cha?

E-I-E-I-O. And on his farm, he had a wireless computer network. E-I-E-I-O. With a unmanned tractor here, and automated livestock feeding there.

Eh, so it's not so catchy as the original. Nevertheless, wireless technology may end up playing a large role in rural areas, where slow-as-molasses dial up is still the forced connectivity of choice. Farmers could implement wi-fi to monitor soil moisture, control water pumps, open animal pen gates and more -- all from one location (Preferably the back porch, with a cool beer in hand).

That's the lament of many of the bloggers who had their online journals hosted at Weblogs.com. Blog pioneer Dave Winer, who has been hosting approximately 3,000 blogs for free, has decided to pull the plug, citing a number of reasons, from expense to ailing health.

Though Dave claims he intends to offer everyone access to their archives as well as help to find alternative hosting services, there's alot of folks who would like to see his head up on the chopping blog -- er block.

You're tired. You need a holiday. You're off to Cancun for some fun in the sun. You hand your passport over to the immigration officials who tell you to pause for the facial-recognition scan?

No McFly, we haven't gone Back to the Future. High-tech passports that support facial-recognition technology could see distribution to U.S. officials and diplomats by late 2005, and probably the general public a year or two after that.

There's a couple of stumbling blocks though -- both political and technical. Still, it's alot better than Alien 4's biometric security procedure (Stupid Stinky breath-recognition technology. I'm glad the Aliens got them!)

Yahoo's not going to give up their position as the king of free email serives without a fight. As of today (Tuesday) Yahoo upped the email storage for free accounts to 100 MB (up till a paltry 4MB). That's still nowhere near Google's chant of 1,000 MB of free space, but Yahoo's hoping it will be a start.

Second-hand smoke. Fatty Foods. Reality TV. All three can be hazzardous to your health (well, the last one maybe to your intelligence). Several environmental groups, however, want to add your PC to the list of biological threats.

According to their studies, they've detected "Toxic dust" on computer processors and monitors which contain chemicals linked to reproductive and neurological disorders.

Penta-, deca- and octa- brominated diphenyl, which have caused neurological damage in laboratory rats in numerous studies, are related to polychlorinated biphenyls (the eeeeevil PCBs).

Sigh, things were so much easier back in Laura Ingalls' day. No one warned us about not eating greasy foods or the dangers of second-hand smoke. Everyone was blissfully ignorant.

Trodding cow manure through the house, true. But blissfully ignorant nonetheless.

Conclusion: We'll have private blogs

• People use blogs all the time
• They'll just use their blogs for everything, project mgmt etc
• LiveJournal: 4% of posts are private -- people talking to themselves

Conclusion: We'll have private RSS feeds

• People suck lots of data into RSS

For the first time in 239 days we had to reboot IPCop. :-( I know it's sad, but sometime yesterday the poor little box that could stopped responding to requests and just couldn't take the traffic anymore.

But a quick reboot and all is well again. We'll see if that little workhorse can't last 240 days this time.

What's new, you ask? Well we'll be revisiting Web Services platforms again this summer and this time, we plan on keeping the winner and offering the ability to purchase our widgets via Web Services.

If you're interested in some nice clients that are pretty darn easy to use for checking out Web Services, check out:

CapeClear WebServices Tester (Java)
or
.NET WebServices Studio (.NET)

Both work with .NET and J2EE Web Services, but the former is a Java application and the latter a .NET application and it's always nice to have both to test interoperability. I've been using both as of late and am happy to say that both appear to work pretty darn well.