Sox Win! Sox Win! And even cynical newspaper reporters are getting a little giddy. The new magic number is 11.

I hadn't looked at it this way before. Tom Friedman explains how current US policies enrich Saudi oil princes while impoverishing Pakistani cotton farmers. Doesn't seem like the best way to fight terrorism to me.

I've spent a good chunk of time this week helping my mother set up a new computer. Over the phone, from 700 miles away. It's given me a new appreciation for what tech support people go through: it's incredibly difficult to troubleshoot a problem when you can't see the screen or touch the keyboard. Apropos of that struggle, I stumbled across a good article on how to avoid being a software victim.

It took a while, but Congress seems to be realizing that the American people really are concerned about invasions of privacy. First, it rewrote the legislation authorizing the telemarketing Do Not Call List in record time to fend off a court challenge. Now, it's cutting funding for both the CAPPS II airline screening project (pending a privacy study) and the Terrorist Information Awareness project. Both CAPPS II and TIA were intended to combine multiple databases--containing data on millions of innocent citizens--in an effort to spot patterns indicating terrorist activity.

The Red Sox are winning. All is right with the world. Is it possible that Hell is icing up?

(By the time the baseball playoffs are over, readers from outside New England will probably think I've lost my marbles. Yes, I probably have. As a Red Sox fan, such is my destiny.)

Cymer apparently believes in immersion lithography. They've put their 157 nm laser on the back burner, and are developing a source for 193 nm immersion tools. Because of their very high NA, immersion steppers need lasers with especially tight bandwidth control.

(Silicon Strategies article. Free registration required.)

Red Sox win. The magic number to clinch the wild card spot is now 4.

Privacy? What's that? This particular storm has been raging since JetBlue turned all of their customer information over to a defense contractor, violating their own privacy policy in the process. Now columnist Declan Mccullagh suggests that it's time to update the Privacy Act.

Bill Gates has donated US$168 million to fight malaria. That's the good news. The bad news is that global spending on malaria research was only US$100 million before the Gates announcement. It's pretty sad when one individual is willing to do more than the entire rest of the world combined.