Malaysian high court refuses to acknowledge religious conversion

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/30/news/malaysia.php?page=1

The short version: Muslims in Malaysia are subject to a different set of laws than non-Muslims, so (e.g.) "Muslim" appears on their national IDs. Someone who had been raised as a Muslim tried to have her conversion recognized by the national government...and failed.

This is messed up on a couple of different levels, IMAO.

privacy implications of street-level photo-augmented maps

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/30/google_maps_is_spyin.html

Personally I think that the 'robots.txt' proposal is brilliant.

All joking aside, though, there are some serious questions to be asked here about what's appropriate. (And yes, Microsoft has had a prototype with 2 cities out for several months now; no idea what the current status of that project is.)

put down the ducky

if you want to play the saxophone:

http://kristiner.blogspot.com/2007/05/q-what-do-pee-wee-herman-wynton.html

rebuttals to climate change myths

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

It's the New Scientist so it's not exactly high-quality science journalism...but it's not bad, and it's reasonably accessible.

Project Censored, 2007

http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm

Some of these I didn't realize were 'censored' (e.g. net neutrality). Apparently I read things that cover them anyway.

(So why is this 2007's list already? Is it kind of like the fact that the 2008 cars will be coming out in August?)