Urban Legends Reference Pages: Media Matters (Hot Jobs) describes how a hypothetical consideration from TAZ and a report about a brothel operator who cannot find prostitutes for his brothel (and is not allowed to search for them through the employment office, because it refuses to advertise such jobs) then becomes factual reporting in the English-language press, in which it is then claimed that women who refuse jobs as prostitutes would lose their unemployment benefits.
So much for professional journalism
Although I would certainly hope that our supposedly great legislators don't subsequently turn this newspaper hoax into truth...
Microsoft receives patent on coordinates in URLs - what utter nonsense. Yet another proof that patents on algorithms are simply rubbish and at best serve to rip people off for money, but certainly not the innovation drive that defenders like to cite over and over again.
Read on golem: New Phishing Attack Possible in Many Web Browsers. Great. Once again, a sloppily implemented solution and a sloppy standard. The whole umlaut domain stuff is nonsense anyway, and you have to wonder why it was implemented in the first place - the mere fact that this garbage only works for websites and IDNs can't be meaningfully used for anything else should have made anyone realize what a ridiculous idea it is. And now it's also a phishing hole.
Smog could promote allergies. Great. In the city my allergy is being promoted and in the country I'm suffering from hay fever.
The MBROLA PROJECT HOMEPAGE - the MBROLA project provides a free phoneme synthesizer. Phonemes in, speech out. It is based on diphone databases, which are available for a wide range of languages. The project page also contains links to text-to-speech projects that build on MBROLA.