Grim News, Neat Finds

EPA Suppresses Report on Declining Fuel Economy: We need a cartoon of Bush in a toga fiddling while America burns. Just before pushing through his “who cares about conservation” pork-filled energy omnibus bill, Bush suppressed an EPA report showing the continued decline in fuel efficiency of American cars, and even of foreign cars sold in America.

Gun Owners Protected from Citizen Lawsuits: In another sign that the corporatists are running amok in Washington, and as evidence of the heavy erosion of individual civil liberties in the US, gun makers have now been indemnified by Bush from citizen litigation stemming from any ‘misuse’ of their product. If Big Tobacco had only had the kind of lobby the NRA had, we’d all still be dying from cancer sticks.

A Gift Economy for Books: BookCrossing encourages people to mark and leave books for others to find, and them register them with the site. Kind of like a non-stop educational scavenger hunt. Lots of books to find out there.

How to Be Heard: Wonderful, thorough advice from Stephen Downes on how to think through, organize and promote your blog to its true audience.

vSkype: A new product designed to work with Skype (free global VoIP telephony), adds the ability to add both your Webcam and whiteboarding (sharing your desktop with others on your Skype call). It’s always been possible to do this by running Skype with another app simultaneously, but sometimes they tend to hog each other’s bandwidth. I believe this is the first video sharing app designed specifically to work with Skype. I haven’t tried it yet, but the reviews have been positive.The image above is from vSkype’s home page. No idea what it has to do with the product, but it got your attention, didn’t it?