5. July, 2002 - Fireworks Hangover

• So last night was the first fourth of July when some fireworks were legal in Minnesota. I'm not very impressed with the Relaxed Regulations. If you want things that go bang or fly around, you still have to make the hour-long drive to Wisconsin, and they're still illegal to use in Minnesota. Even more people seem to have made that drive this year, including my stupid neighbor, who was outside firing off batches of firecrackers at 3am this morning. It really doesn't matter what the law says - some people are just assholes.
• Las Vegas Trauma center closes; ERs gear up and commentary from Al at ViewFromTheHeart. Okay, so if you get run over by a car, get shot, blow off your hand with fireworks or have some other traumatic injury in Vegas now, they'll do their best to patch you up in the ER, and if that ain't good enough, you get helicoptered to California or Arizona. Are more laws and lawyers involved in medicine the answer? Somehow I don't think so. But if this is the start of a trend, it's going to get ugly.
• No-call lists make phone ringing welcome again in Colorado. Reed points out a post by Vince Mease about how nice it is.
  
  Well, sort of, as the MN law seems to be somewhat weaker than the one in CO and allow telemarketing by those businesses which don't close sales over the phone. That includes the pesky mortgage companies looking to get me (a renter) to re-finance.
  
  For more info on nationwide no-call policies: Links to other states' no-call laws.
  
  Reading through the exceptions of who can still call you under the different state policies is fascinating and speaks of the effectiveness of the lobbies in those states. For example, in Arkansas: Motor vehicle dealers, insurance agents, real estate agents, funeral establishments or from licensed investment brokers regarding the sale of their products and services. [Reed]
• Clueless Mailers: The Latest Ugly Trend in Spamming. I linked to the map earlier. Here's another mirror. [some guy]
• Zimmermann to Network Associates: Sell PGP back to me, or open-source it. For what it's worth, NetAss hasn't supported me (a paying PGP 5.0 customer) for the past three years. Their ecommerce server wouldn't deliver software to me (apparently they think I'm outside the US), and even after I paid for an upgrade, they never delivered the software to me. Oh, and there's the small matter of their securities fraud a couple years ago. I lost thousands of dollars on their stock. But at least I got a check for $20 back as part of the class-action settlement! I wish PGP would somehow get free of their clutches, but NetAss are bastards enough that I expect them to drag it to the grave with them. [some guy]
• EFF, 2600 give up: Won't appeal loss in DVD descrambling case. Probably a good thing, since this wasn't the best case. There'll be a better case to fight. But that'll take time, and that's the problem with bad laws. They remain on the books until you get a good case to fight all the way to the Supremes so you can get the damn thing stricken from the books. [nick denton]

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Fri, 05 Jul 2002 10:03:35.