Project Insomnia

Barnesandnoble.com has agreed to pay $60,000 and boost Internet security after a flaw that exposed the personal information of some shoppers, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said Thursday. The agreement stems from an investigation that found that a design flaw in the New York-based company's Web site granted access to customer information such as name, billing address and account information but not credit card numbers.

[Florida catcher] Mike Redmond, who watched platoon partner Ramon Castro hit a roaring home run into the left-field bleachers Thursday, revealed that to break a slump last year, he took batting practice wearing nothing but his spikes and batting gloves in a cage near the Marlins' clubhouse. It worked, too. He continued taking nude BP as the Marlins reeled off six straight wins.

"Ellen is a huge animal lover," said Michelle Gross, a spokeswoman for the talk show host. "When she heard about this woman being separated from her cat, she just wanted to help reunite her and have her on the show."

After picking up Cheyenne from the city's Animal Care and Control department, Pamela Edwards and her daughter went to Los Angeles to tape a future episode of DeGeneres' show.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

GP: I think Jon (Miller) is a star because of radio. Vin Scully is on TV because of radio. I've never done baseball on radio. ... I've done it on TV and you shouldn't be a star on TV. The analyst should be the star (on TV); Mike Krukow should be the star. ... My job is to facilitate on television everybody else's job and to make it easy to watch. My call on TV is sometimes nothing. It's very simple. They can see everything.

Paramount used the latest in digital editing technology to correct the errors and scoured newsgroups and interviewed fans to find all the problems they needed to correct. The service pack is available in DVD, VHS or in digital format from the Paramount website.

Paramount President Franz Pike said, "We fixed everything, from obvious errors like the glaring differences between Shatner and his stunt double to more obscure fixes like removing Spock's 'third ear' in 'The Immunity Syndrome.' We think fans will be pleased."

"Telling people that their most intimate and private e-mail thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers and family members are just another direct-marketing commodity isn't the way to promote e-commerce," Figueroa said in a statement, which called Gmail customers' correspondence "a direct-marketing opportunity for Google."

Figueroa's bill says an e-mail or instant-messaging provider can scan outgoing messages from its users, but not incoming ones. It includes a narrow exception for spam and virus filtering.

"[The Windows API] is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead. It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO [total cost of ownership], our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties. Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move." -- Microsoft C++ general manager Aaron Contorer explains Windows' greatest selling point in a 1997 memo to Bill Gates.

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Florida resident Pamela Edwards was certain her new cat had been eaten by an alligator.

She adopted 3-year-old Cheyenne from her local animal shelter in the summer of 1997. By Thanksgiving that year, the cat had disappeared from Edwards' condominium in Bradenton on Florida's west coast. She hung flyers and ran ads in the newspaper, received no response and concluded the worst.

Cheyenne was just a distant memory when Edwards got a call from her county shelter three weeks ago. The cat had been found -- 3,000 miles away, in San Francisco.

Bush Makes Three Mistakes While Trying to Cite One

While struggling unsuccessfully this week to think of a single mistake he has made since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush committed three factual errors about weapons finds in Libya, the White House said on Wednesday.

Bush, long known for his grammatical conundrums and confusing phraseology, told reporters twice during Tuesday's prime-time news conference that 50 tons of mustard gas were discovered at a turkey farm in Libya.

Just so you know: Gary Heavin, the founder of the Waco, Texas-based chain of exercise studios called Curves, is a heavy contributor to several organizations allied with Operation Save America, the rather more muscular successor to Operation Rescue, the anti-choice group.

The organizations he funds are spreading the lie that abortions lead to an increased risk of breast cancer. Planned Parenthood says its operations in Texas are being threatened by Heavin-funded clinics based on the old therapeutic model "you must carry your child to term."

In an article in Christianity Today, Heavin expressed pride in his involvement with anti-choice groups, to which he donates 10 percent of Curves' profits. You may do with this information what you will.

The magazine said the Starship song earned the accolade because it inspired "the most virulent feelings of outrage".

To make the list, each pungent ditty had to be a hit.

Entry was based on unintentionally poor songwriting.

Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder's maudlin duet Ebony and Ivory also featured, as did R.E.M's Shiny, Happy People and John Mayer's Your Body is a Wonderland.

Barry Bonds will continue as the cleanup hitter rather than moving up a slot to No. 3.

"No talk of it right now," manager Felipe Alou said. "No temptation."

Former Giants first baseman Andres Galarraga had a recurrence of with cancer (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) in the offseason, but Alou and Alfonzo report that he's doing fine now. "I think everything's going well," Alfonzo said. Alou said Galarraga still would like to play in the majors this season. He's two homers shy of 400.

I'd guess the Giants score three or four times as often (and maybe much more) in Bonds innings than they do in non-Bonds innings.

General conclusion? Bonds must get to the plate as often as the Giants can manage.

Even if Bonds is walked in the game-deciding situation, it's better that he gets to the plate. A walk moves the runners. A walk increases the chances of scoring.

1. There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don't see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam. (And in fact, those oppressed by spam should look forward to having Google's brilliant search experts tackle spam detection as part of their problem set!) Google doesn't have humans reading this mail; it has programs reading them. Yes, Google could instruct a program to mine the stored email for confidential information. But so could Yahoo! or AOL or MSN today. (Perhaps people feel Google is to be feared because they seem to so good at what they do. But that seems rather an odd point of view.)

The conversations feature is perhaps the best Gmail innovation. Gmail threads together related messages and replies into one ``conversation,'' moving it to the top of the inbox whenever a new reply comes in, greatly reducing inbox clutter.

The big glitch is that conversations are apparently grouped by subject line. So otherwise unrelated messages that happen to have identical subject lines will get lumped together.

Indeed, Gmail is not perfect.

Google's attitude toward deleting messages, for example, is baffling. Because they're giving users a huge amount of storage, Gmail engineers apparently view the delete button as a quaint time-waster. Gmail hides its delete function in a non-intuitive pull-down menu and discourages people from using it.

Instead, Gmail offers an ``archive'' button that allows you to move messages out of your inbox and into permanent storage.

• Charlie – two year old male Lab mix
• Bayli – one year old female Beagle/Sheltie mix

Last fall, when fellow students were signing up for the school's robotics club, rocket club and Latino club, Nathan Hillier and Brandon Wiebe began to fantasize about clubs they'd want to join. A cheese club struck them as suitably amusing.

"Then we realized you could actually do it," says Hillier.

The world's most prolific and most publicized colony of captive Magellanic penguins will celebrate two decades at the San Francisco Zoo in the most proper of ways: a weekend tea party with china, the traditional theme for 20th anniversaries.

It is not, even remotely, the strangest thing they've done. Some ended up in Lisbon for the 1998 world's fair. Others appeared in the window of Wilkes Bashford's San Francisco clothing store. And one spent a day on the loose in a New York warehouse.

An apologetic Peeping Tom in northern Arkansas left a $20 bill and a note for his victim asking if she would not mind if he peered at her outside her window, police said Friday.

"We've been focusing a lot on the accessibility of Style Sheets," Darren Stennet, chief developer at W3C explained. "CSS has been around for many years and is supported by nearly every single browser. So why don't people use them yet? Judging from most pages out there, we figured that CSS has simply been too complicated for the average user."

To solve this, W3C introduces a new class: "Template." This class allows web designers to define the entire layout of their site, using only a single line of CSS.

In the most extreme scenario, using a carbon dioxide level of 1,000 ppm, the study predicts temperatures to rise by 8° Celsius (18° Fahrenheit) by the year 2050. This, in turn, would raise sea levels by 7 meters (23 feet) in a thousand years.

Here's the deal: Sign up for MSN Premium and you get the first three months free, including access to all video- and audio-casts from MLB.com. After that, you pay $9.95 a month. For the full six-month baseball season, which runs from April to September, that comes to only about $30.

By contrast, Mac users--equipped with their high-resolution "cinema" displays--get stuck paying MLB.com's regular rate of about $100--$70 more. MLB.com's All Access offering, which includes live video and audio, goes for $19.95 a month, or $99.95 a season. MLB.com shuts out Linux customers altogether, at least for now.

At dinner yesterday, I tried to cut
myself a slice of prime rib, but it
was only divisible by itself and one.

At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, DeviceLogics took the wraps off DR-DOS 8.0, the first update to DR-DOS since 1999.

The primary new feature of the 8.0 release is FAT32/large-partition support, which DeviceLogics is targeting at customers with DOS-based embedded applications that are built atop FAT32 platforms.

DeviceLogics also rolled out at the show a DR-DOS-based Linux application called DRLX 1.0, which DeviceLogics is positioning as a migration utility for customers who want to migrate from DOS to Linux.

Gmail was promoted in a campy press release that had Google founders saying "Heck, Yeah" to offering mail that could help people search, store and manage messages for a lifetime. Some took the April 1 announcement as joke, along with a job posting on the company's Web site on the same day, seeking staff for a space mission with a project dubbed the "Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering" (GCHEESE). A Google representative denied that Gmail was a hoax.

With Gmail, Google will become a prime repository for personal profiles or life memories, a goal Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell aspires to do with his MyLifeBits Project. Because many people wouldn't have to delete e-mail, they could potentially search for communications a year or two, or 10 in the past, with ease.

During the off-season, the Giants carted off the old signs and put up new ones, at a cost estimated at more than $1 million. Ushers attended training sessions, where they were urged -- politely but firmly -- to call the ballpark by its newly minted name as often as possible.

"It's another B.S. corporate name,'' said longtime fan Rob Shapiro. "Totally meaningless. Just white noise. In today's era, everything is for sale.''

Google is interviewing candidates for engineering positions at our lunar hosting and research center, opening late in the spring of 2007. This unique opportunity is available only to highly-qualified individuals who are willing to relocate for an extended period of time, are in top physical condition and are capable of surviving with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes, The Sopranos and a steady supply of oxygen.