On the ethics of using RSS feeds

Recently, on syn_promo, there's been some discussion about using people's RSS feeds on LJ; some people have become upset that their precious content is displayed unaggregated on a LJ user page (though I'd wager that most people read syndicated content on their friends page -- i.e. aggregated with other content, as RSS is probably most commonly used). People tend to be especially upset if they're not even aware that they have an RSS feed (especially if they use Movable Type, which apparently automatically creates one for you in the default config).

So there was this post asking about whether it would be OK to write to them and tell them about the feed or not, since one particular person makes no reference to the existence of the feed but it exists. This led to the following conversation:

elwe: It's certainly fine to ask; even if he says no, you've done him a service by telling him about the RSS feed he may otherwise have been unaware of
jwz: And then if he says no, you should scrape it anyway, just on general principle.

ROFL!

Another identity assertion

Today, I performed another identity assertion under the Thawte Web of Trust system.

It took a little while to manage to arrange a date. The first time he suggested a date for the next day but I couldn't make that because I couldn't print out a form in time since my printer at home isn't working. (And I had forgotten that I had a blank form on file.)

But we finally met up today in Harburg S-Bahn station. He's webmaster for the Deutsche Bank. We chatted a little about security, PGP, how little encryption is used in Germany, and so on. He asked whether many people avail themselves of my services and I said no -- after all, he's only the fourth since September 2001. Apparently, notaries aren't very active any more, either; most of those who didn't charge a fee didn't respond to his e-mails, he said. (And I noticed that most of those who had asserted my identity are no longer on Thawte's list of notaries in Hamburg.)

That was my fourth assertion. I think that once I have five under my belt, I can start giving 15 points instead of only 10 (the maximum anyone can give is 35 points).

Planck units

*snicker* Just found this page on Everything2 to do with "Planck units".

Why use kilograms? Why pounds? They're all pretty arbitrarily defined. But some constants are given (e.g. the speed of light in a vacuum, the gravitational constant "big-gee", etc.) so one could derive "logical" units from those.

Their order of magnitude may not be very useful without scaling them up or down, but ... well, read the write-up.