Put That On Your Hard Drive And Sue About It

In the wake of last week's wormy weather, Declan McCullagh reports at c | net News.com on products liability claims and software, "A legal fix for software flaws?:" "Liability exemptions for software vendors have survived despite persistent bugs and increasingly severe consequences." (Speaking of Declan, his grueling travel schedule is keeping Politech on hiatus until September. My email economics post went out to the list and produced some lively responses—spam removal lists? not so popular—so instead of waiting for the Politech follow-up I'll try to post about them here soon.)

c | net also reports that Maxtor is releasing a new external backup drive. There's nothing not to like about these things, they work with Mac or Windows and it looks like the pricing keeps coming down as the drive sizes go up ($399 for 300GB, $199 for 120GB). Hey, you've got to put all that spam somewhere, right? You never know when it might come in handy. ("All was koyaanisqatsi.")