So here's a free idea for you: there's money to be made in somebody who can make a full-on search function that works as a no-brainer, quickly addresses any issues or bugs, and doesn't scare the shit out of you with their privacy policy.

Basically, if there is somebody that does this, they need to fire their SEO person, because I sure as hell can't find them through Google.

Here's the deal: in general, everybody's got way too much crap on their hard drives. You can buy a USB stick that's 400 times the size of the first hard drive I ever owned for $10. You can literally have a terabyte of storage on your desktop for relatively nothing. Hell, the new mondo desktop I bought has 750GB of storage on it. And I have a 500GB external drive just for my music and other backup purposes. Bottom line: storage has gotten stupid-silly and we're all now digital packrats.

I don't know about you, but I can't find my bloody car keys. So the prospect of 750GB of potential space in which to lose something is rather terrifying. And let's face it: the stuff is in a sort of quantum lost state–we know it's in there. It's not like it vanished. But we can't possibly tell you where. It might as well be etched on a rock off the coast of Malaysia unless you can lay hands upon it. (And I can't tell you how much I want some smartass with a smartphone to send me a pic of them standing on a rock off the coast of Malaysia.)

[[ More this way ]]

Jeff Jarvis points out the epitome of dumbass legislation–like we need any more examples of that in this country–that states any website would have to "require and obtain legal names and addresses for anyone who posts online… or else the services can be sued for anything false or defamatory posters say."

Read his full post. Is this what passes for "conservatism" in this country these days? That's rhetorical. We all know the answer.

Is it paranoid to think that once all websites have everyone registered, we can be all assigned a government-issued Net-ID that enables them to track what we're all saying online? Uncle Bill would say no, that wasn't paranoid at all.

Also, I agree with Jarvis that the FCC is a load of shite. Granted, that's not quite how he phrased it, but you know what I mean.

Musical Postscript: Inoffensive pop. That's hard to accomplish with my brooding ass. The New Pornographers' "The Laws Have Changed" manages it, however. Found via…well, The Laws Have Changed.

More Paranoid Postscript: I wonder what weird hits from search engines I'll get having "Pornographers" and "FCC" in the same post.

(scary noises and exeunt)

If this original story is accurate, then this is genius.

Found via Reason's Hit and Run.

And I'd like to say up front that I don't have the cojones necessary to, based on a Reuters article, claim that I'm smarter than a federal judge. But the reason, this article claims, that the subway searches are considered constitutional is they are "an effective and appropriate means to fight terrorism."

The hell they are. Go read this. And this. And come back here and tell me how this is effective. Screw appropriate. Just tell me how it's effective.

If you want effective searches, you have to search everybody and it cannot be optional. Now, how you make that legal and constitutional isn't my problem. I'm just saying: when you can opt-out at one entrance, cross the street and enter the same subway station via another entrance, you have done nothing but delay an attack by two minutes. Whoopee.

Drudge set me off.

Jeff Jarvis has the best response to the Sony rootkit hoohah I've seen. He puts it all in perspective with four words.