"Ah, a web of lies."

Have you ever seen "Interfection," the episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force where the computer internet service provider takes over the house with pop up ads and the occupants cannot cancel the service? Isn't this episode about AOL?

Check out part of the transcript:

Internet wizard: [I am] the www.yzzerdd, the "Wizard," dot com...

Fry Man: What the hell do you want with us?...

Internet wizard: Why don't you fill this out, you could win a Porsche?

Fry Man: I'm not filling out no damn form so I can win no damn sports car. I want to know what the hell is going on here...

Internet wizard: Congratulations, you are automatically signed up to receive e-mails about updates, specials and e-mails about other e-mails!

Fry Man: ...I'm coming in there to unsubscribe...

Internet wizard: It's only 44.95 a month, that's pennies a day...Surely this convenience entices you. Pornography and online gaming at hundreds of times the speed of your normal advertising service provider. It's so easy to use. And the surgery to implant it at the base of your skull is so painless that it's no wonder I'm number one...

Fry Man: ...Now I know for sure that I don't want this service.

Internet wizard: You signed up for the thirty day trial. You must have to have it for thirty days...

Fry Man: ...You're going offline, Internet Wizard...

Internet wizard: Fine, fine, don't use our service. Get left in the digital dust, but remember, you could have won a Porsche.

Fry Man: [Looking at popup windows options] Yes! Sign me up for your fabulous and invasive service, including the home invasion cam!...No, I need another 90 days to decide, but I'm pretty sure I want this.

Internet wizard: And after this 90 day trial, you will be judged and sentenced to a lifetime of interactive sports, news and information. And we will continue to draw from your account, because banks don't care. It's not their money...

WITH THEIR SLICK Web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of "intelligent design" -- a "theory" that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution -- are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. Rather than attempt to prove that the world was created in six days, they operate simply by casting doubt on evolution, largely using the time-honored argument that intelligent life could not have come about by a random natural process and must have been the work of a single creator. They do no experiments and do not publish in recognized scientific journals. Nevertheless, this new generation of anti-evolutionists, arguing that children have a "right to question" scientific truths, has had widespread success in undermining evolutionary theory.

...To teach intelligent design as science in public schools is a clear violation of the principle of separation of church and state.

It also violates principles of common sense. In fact, the breadth and extent of the anti-evolutionary movement that has spread almost unnoticed across the country should force American politicians to think twice about how their public expressions of religious belief are beginning to affect education and science. The deeply religious nature of the United States should not be allowed to stand in the way of the thirst for knowledge or the pursuit of science. Once it does, it won't be long before the American scientific community -- which already has trouble finding enough young Americans to fill its graduate schools -- ceases to lead the world.

FBI and Department of Homeland Security officers have arrested an Egyptian man who allegedly ran a business from a hot dog cart on 17th and L streets NW that provided American brides for Middle Eastern men seeking green cards, officials said yesterday.

Inside protest headquarters, up a flight of stairs from a discount tire shop on New York Avenue, a recent coordinating meeting veered toward chaos.

The 70 activists, who had plenty of ideas but no apparent leader, got bogged down in making a decision about whether the group had the power to make decisions. People needed to lean in to hear one another over the din made by a drummer warming up in another room. Someone confessed he'd made 150 copies of an important proposal but forgotten to bring them, and a baseball cap made its way around the circle -- the evening's main attempt at fundraising...

"We just go with the flow," antiwar activist Jose J. Rodriguez of Alexandria announced in the middle of the two-hour meeting, undaunted. "We're like water going downhill. They can't stop us."

...Product placement has been around for years, but now the practice is growing rapidly in daytime television. Butterball turkeys, Nascar shirts and Kleenex tissue have all taken recent star turns. Not only do the characters on "All My Children" smell good, but they also have been swilling a lot of Florida orange juice -- and not because they're thirsty.

...Soap operas, a carry-over from radio that started on TV a half-century ago as platforms to sell detergent, are also serving as guinea pigs for networks to test how far they can go with product plugs before viewers revolt. Soap audiences are notoriously obsessive about their favorite programs, so feedback is swift to arrive...

Because advertisers are increasingly insistent that characters discuss their products -- a jug of Tide sitting in the background no longer does the trick -- the work of implementing these deals falls to beleaguered staff writers. Striking the proper balance is tricky: Items must be embedded naturally enough so they don't raise the ire of marketing-savvy viewers, yet overtly enough to satisfy clients. And, as in the case of the Wal-Mart perfume, over-the-top soap-opera storylines can be an awkward fit. "Let's say a character is tied to the railroad tracks," says Ms. McTavish. "I can't just have him sit up and drink a Lipton Iced Tea."

Writers also must deal with companies that have their own ideas about manipulating scripts. When ConAgra Foods and CBS agreed to incorporate Butterball turkeys into Thanksgiving plot lines on "As the World Turns" the meat processor thought it would be nice to have one of the program's most popular characters help serve up the birds. There was a small problem with that plan, however: She was eloping at the time.

...At ABC, Ms. McTavish says the 10 writers she supervises have figured out "clever little ways" to tuck placements into scripts. Throwing a few lines to a minor character is a favorite technique -- that's how she solved the perfume crisis. So is writing products into less-vital expository scenes. And don't get too self-important, she advises. "You have to play fast and loose," she says. "You can write in anything if you're clever enough."

...Some consumer-electronics companies are designing products so they will work only in the U.S. For example, some of the latest printers from Hewlett-Packard Co. refuse to print if they aren't fed ink cartridges bought in the same region of the world as the printer. Nintendo Co.'s latest hand-held game machines are sold in the U.S. with power adaptors that don't work in Europe.

Such measures prevent thrifty foreign consumers and gray marketers -- traders who sell goods through channels that haven't been authorized by the manufacturer -- from taking advantage of the decline of the dollar against the world's major currencies to buy lower-price products in the U.S. In terms of euros, pounds or other strong currencies, U.S. retail goods are much cheaper today than they were two years ago.

U.S. multinational companies want Europeans to continue to buy their goods in Europe, however, rather than seeking out bargains in the U.S. The companies make more money if Europeans pay in euros for their goods at current exchange rates...

Consumer groups are also opposed to the latest region-coding measures. "Manufacturers don't like global commerce when it doesn't line their pockets," says Phil Evans, principal policy adviser at Which?, a British consumer watchdog. "In the long term, it's not a clever thing to do from a customer-relations standpoint."

The suits allege that blacks were disproportionately targeted for this practice: "A study used by plaintiffs in another suit found that African-American car buyers paid loan markups averaging $1,229 each. The average for white car buyers with similar credit histories was $867 a loan." Generally, you're targeted if you are not an informed buyer. Simply put, when buying a car, you should go get a loan directly from a credit union or bank. If you get it from the dealer, they will find a way to screw you.

Note this aspect of the case--Bank of America claims that they don't discriminate; that they only have access to credit scores rather than race: "Bank of America spokeswoman Shirley Norton also acknowledged the bank is "in talks" regarding their case, but declined to characterize the talks as settlement talks or indicate how far along the discussions are. 'We don't discriminate. Our policies are racially neutral, based on credit scores,' she said. 'We don't have access to the customers, and we don't deal directly with the customer.'" But this begs the question--are the credit scores themselves discriminatory?

CNN reports:

A $170 million computer overhaul intended to give FBI agents and analysts an instantaneous and paperless way to manage criminal and terrorism cases is headed back to the drawing board, probably at a much steeper cost to taxpayers.

The FBI is hoping to salvage some parts of the project, known as Virtual Case File.

But officials acknowledged Thursday that it is possible the entire system, designed by Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego, is so inadequate and outdated that a new one will have to be built from scratch...

The official said its capabilities were only about 10 percent of what was sought...

Some of the necessary software is probably now commercially available, which was not the case when the project began...

Virtual Case File was supposed to provide a way for FBI agents, analysts and other personnel around the world to share information about all types of investigations, including terrorism cases, without using paper or resorting to time-consuming scanning of documents...

Reasons for the problems include weak management of the project contract, numerous hurdles in figuring out how to share often-secret information with other agencies and the difficulty of making such major changes without requiring the FBI to suspend operations, at least for short periods.

The FBI will make a final decision on the Virtual Case File provided by SAIC after a limited test of the system in the New Orleans FBI office and completion of a $2 million independent evaluation by computer experts at Aerospace Corp., whose primary government customer is NASA.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg reveals the newest insult to our privacy brought to us by Microsoft. Unlike all the other spyware programs out there, Microsoft's one does not eliminate third-party tracking cookies. Now, why would Microsoft do that? It's because Microsoft's software is designed for advertisers, not for you.

The software offers two kinds of scans: a quick, five-minute version, and a longer version that took about half an hour on my test machine. But the scans missed some spyware found by Spy Sweeper. In particular, Microsoft missed "tracking cookies," small files deposited by Web companies, often without your knowledge or permission, that track your online activities. The Microsoft program deliberately doesn't look for these. Microsoft officials say they are concerned that some legitimate cookies, such as those that store Web-site login information, could be unfairly labeled as spyware. They promise to add tracking-cookie detection in the future.

Even worse is the way the program handles another spyware problem,
the hijacking of Web-browser home pages and search pages. This is a spyware technique in which the home and search pages in a Web browser are replaced by pages selected by a spyware company, and it's nearly impossible for a user to restore his or her own selections.

The usual way of handling this, with programs like Spy Sweeper, is to detect the page changes and to restore the user's original choices. But the Microsoft program tries to replace the spyware pages with home and search pages from MSN, Microsoft's own online service. This smacks of the same kind of coercion the spyware authors are using.

Microsoft insists it isn't trying to drive people to MSN. It says it can't tell if a user's own choice of a home or search page was "secure," so it defaults to setting the home and search pages to a site it knows is secure, its own MSN site. But the user's choice should rule here, not Microsoft's...

It's good that Microsoft is finally offering users tools to protect their Windows computers. But it's going to have to do much better, and it's going to have to avoid the perception that it's using security as a tool to promote or favor its own products.

Anyway, today's article of interest is on the dietary guidelines, the advice our government gives us on food and exercise:

...The new guidelines arrive after a year of research by a government-appointed advisory panel, intense food-industry lobbying and extensive comment from the public. The guidelines, which hew closely to the draft put out by the advisory panel in August, are the basis for the school lunch and other federal food programs, and are widely hoped to be a vehicle for stemming America's growing problem of obesity...

In a move that was a major win for the dairy industry but angered some health experts, the guidelines also recommend that everyone except small children consume three cups of milk or its dairy equivalent a day, up from two to three servings per day. Some nutritionists have pointed out that a diet high in dairy products has been linked to an increased risk for ovarian and prostate cancers.

When it comes to added sugar, the 2005 guidelines stop short of directly addressing soft-drink consumption, which has been widely blamed for contributing to the country's obesity epidemic. Instead, they tell Americans "to chose and prepare foods and beverages with little added sugars or caloric sweeteners" and suggest various limits as part of Americans "discretionary calories."

While an earlier draft of the guidelines had recommended that Americans should limit their daily intake of trans fats -- the most vilified of all fats -- to less than 1% of all calories, the final guidelines don't put a cap on the amount of trans fat Americans should eat. They say only to consume less than 10% of calories from saturated fats, and to keep trans fats as low as possible. Trans fats are found in hydrogenated vegetable oils that often are used to make snack and fried foods or margarine...

If there is any upside to the forced resignation of Florencio López-de-Silanes from his post as director of Yale's International Institute for Corporate Governance, it is this: corporate governance, a relatively obscure issue a few years ago, has now grown big enough to generate its own scandals

Big enough, indeed, to have inspired an institute, which Yale's School of Management created in mid-2001. Yale wooed Mr. López-de-Silanes from Harvard to run the center, reportedly outbidding other suitors.

As Yale had hoped, the energetic young academic, now 38, soon put the institute on the map, churning out scholarly papers and trotting energetically around the globe to one forum after another. Mr. López-de-Silanes has also been a consultant to the World Bank, and he was recently honored by the World Economic Forum as one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow.

The problem was that Mr. López-de-Silanes reportedly billed both his hosts and Yale for his travel expenses - about $150,000 altogether, according to The Wall Street Journal. Upon discovering these irregularities, Yale quietly orchestrated his resignation for "financial misconduct and irregularities."

Mr. López-de-Silanes has apologized, is said to have made restitution and, through his attorney, attributes his behavior to "the intensity of my focus on my work." There has been much gnashing of teeth among corporate governance experts, who say this is simply another case of leaders' failing to lead by example. A more upbeat take is that only an issue that everyone is now interested in could have generated so many trips.

The radio industry plans to promote itself in coming weeks via a string of high-profile print and on-air ads featuring testimonials from music stars such as Nelly, Alicia Keys and Ludacris, as the medium finds itself the latest of a number of aging industries fighting back against new-tech rivals.

In the past three years, the nation's nearly 14,000 AM and FM stations have come face to face with a new threat: satellite radio. Washington's XM Satellite Radio and New York's Sirius Satellite Radio charge a monthly fee to beam more than 100 channels of largely commercial-free radio to customers. Both services started with zero subscribers and have grown to a combined 4.3 million as of the end of 2004…

The promotional ads, sent to thousands of radio stations yesterday, include the tagline: "Radio. You hear it here first." The campaign is designed to show AM and FM radio as the place that exposes listeners to new music.

The radio ads feature pop stars ticking off career accomplishments and allusions to hit songs, laid down over a musical track. Canadian rocker Avril Lavigne, whose 2002 single "Complicated" rocketed her to stardom at 17, chips in:

"Before the cover of Maxim, before stomping the red carpet, before I stole my father's ties, before the star on my wrist, before boy-beaters beat out wife-beaters, before I got nominated again, before the pop-tart drama, before I toured the world at 19 and 'Complicated' made things so complicated, you heard me -- Avril Lavigne -- on the radio."

Words or phrases which appear on the Appeals List are those currently being drafted or revised for the OED for which the documentary evidence is incomplete. Often these are slang or colloquial items which cannot be researched in specialist texts and are most likely to be found by a general reader in non-specialized or popular literature...

hoodie (n.: a hooded jacket, sweatshirt, or other garment)
antedate 1990...

scrunchie (n.) antedate 1989...

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Are you tired of being held hostage at the movie theater?

Are you fed up with paying too much for a movie ticket, and then being forced to watch pre-movie commercials?

Most Americans are. According to an InsightExpress poll released on November 17th, 53% of moviegoers want movie theaters to stop running pre-movie commercials, and 27% say that the ads "will lead them to decrease the number of trips they take to the theater."

In 2003, 2.07% of covered crewmembers tested positive for drugs in random screens. What is a "oovered crewmember?" I'm not sure. They seem to be defined by function.