Acts of Volition

Nothing is more upsetting than a good domain name gone to waste. Well no, actually there are many far more upsetting events, and Sick.com could have proudly displayed any of them. At the very least it could have been a medical webiste or a porn site. However, Sick.com peddles e-cards. These aren’t just any e-cards either, these cards are “cards that bite!” They range from the inane , to the inexplicable , to the profoundly inexplicable. Can anyone explain these to me? Am I missing something? Is there a larger joke here which I am not grasping?

I suppose the quality of Sick.com isn’t entirely surprising considering the apparent leader in the field of e-cards, but if you want to make an “in your face” e-card, at least put some effort into it.

I was just like to take a moment to call my own judgement into question. Specifically, why did I assist in the creation of a website whose address I consistently misspell? In retrospect, as nifty a title as acts of volition may be, dogs and cats would probably have been a wiser choice.

An excellent book review on Salon today concerning a new book on network security and its inevitable failure by Brendon I. Koerner. The review touches on one of my more frequent complaints about computer software in general:

There are an average of five to 15 bugs in every thousand lines of code, which means that Windows 98 is riddled with somewhere between 90,000 and 270,000 oopsies. Since software vendors cannot be held liable for faulty code, thanks to those licenses they make users agree to, they have zero incentive to create better products -- much to the delight of computer criminals, who revel in exploiting bug-ridden programs.

This is a slight overstatement. In theory at least, software developers attempt to improve their code so they don't lose out to competing developers. Nonetheless, it has always seemed bizarre to me that a user is required to sign a licensing agreement before they have ever used the program. Can you imagine any other industry operating this way? “Sure we'll sell you this car. But first please sign this agreement stating you won't sue us when something goes wrong. Would you like Firestone tires with that?”

I certainly don’t pretend to know how things should work, but it seems clear to me that any industry which has an exemption from customers taking it to task for failing to live up to its own promises will not produce as high quality a product as it would otherwise.

The images in the news photo section of excite.com are helpfully divided by keyword. Thus one can click on blimp, or profile for example, and see appropriate images.

Currently the black images contains three images of black Americans, as well as a picture of a black bear. The white image section, on the other hand, contains five images of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

This means something.