technological disappointments

I don't care about iPhone at all, but the announcement of AppleTV caught my interest. I'd probably pay $300 for a device that lets me dump the cable service (depending on what content costs). I don't watch a lot of TV but I don't want to watch what I do watch on my computer; this fills a real need for me. Alas, it appears (from Apple's site) that my plain old TV, bought about five years ago, can't talk to this new box; they use the words "widescreen" and "enhanced definition", neither of which I think applies to my TV (assuming "widescreen" means 16:9 instead of the standard 4:3 aspect ratio -- why that should make a difference when they could just letterbox is beyond me). They can make an allowance for wired networks but not for recent-but-not-current TVs? Bummer.

Spam subject line of the day: "mollusk suffrage". On consideration, giving them the vote probably wouldn't make things worse.

I cleaned out my spam traps last night; the problem has definitely gotten worse recently. There's more spam and the distribution (or performance of various filters) has changed:

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