The best feature of Picasa

It does not modify the original image. You can of course achieve that on your own, but for it to be automatic makes a big difference.

A minor Firefox 3 enhancement

Previous version of Firefox asked if you wanted it to remember a login right after you entered it. The page wouldn't load until you made a choice. I would often end up telling it to remember, and then discover that I entered the wrong login information.

Taking a page from Opera's book, Firefox 3 now asks the question as soon as you submit the form, but lets you delay answering until the page loads. That way I can see if I actually got it right before saving it.

An engineer's best friend?

The end is near for the diamond jewelry industry.

The largest single-crystal diamond ever grown in a lab is about .7 inches by .2 inches by .2 inches, or 15 carats. The stone isn't under military guard or at a hidden location. It's in a room crowded with gauges and microscopes, along with the odd bicycle and congo drum, on a leafy campus surrounded by Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park. Russell Hemley, director of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Lab, started working on growing diamonds with CVD in 1995. He pulls a diamond out of his khakis. It would be hard to mistake this diamond for anything sold at Tiffany. The rectangular stone looks like a thick piece of tinted glass.

Emphasis mine. The whole diamond jewelry thing is rather absurd. I'll be happy to see it go, though it won't go down quietly:

The diamond-mining companies have been fighting back, arguing that all that glitters is not diamond. De Beers' ads and its Web sites insist that diamonds should be natural, unprocessed and millions of years old. "Diamonds are rare and special things with an inherent value that does not exist in factory-made synthetics," says spokeswoman Lynette Gould. "When people want to celebrate a unique relationship they want a unique diamond, not a three-day-old factory-made stone."

People might be dumb enough to buy that initially. I give that a few years. The thing is, you can't tell, especially from casual inspection, what's natural and what's lab-grown. All it takes is a couple of women in a social circle to be willing to accept a lab-grown diamond triple the size of their friends' natural rocks at the same price, and the levee will burst.