There are some rumors going around the Internet from stupid, panicked mothers that blindly share another stupid, panicked mother’s interpretation of a law she didn’t understand. Here, please listen:

Some people are claiming the new child safety laws make reselling children’s clothes and toys illegal. Please read the official statement. It’s up to the makers to certify them, not the store selling it. You can resell anything you can obtain, but children’s things that have their first-sale after the effective date must be certified lead-free. That’s it. What’s on the market is on the market; second-sale doctrine is intact.

Listen: when there’s news of a “crazy new law” that would destroy large parts of the American economy, it’s best to presume the person telling you about it is an idiot first and then research it rather than spreading it like butter. This is yet another example for that rule.

It’s not that I didn’t know this before about them; after all, the bunch of kids that fucked over CES last year and ruined the presentations of a lot of hard-working people. No, this just reinforces it.

In early December, Apple said they wouldn’t be presenting at MacWorld anymore and a lot of asses starting saying that the reason the whole company would miss out on the trade show was because SJ couldn’t do the keynote due to his health (which is a rather silly reason to pull a multi-million dollar company out of trade show) instead of the given reason of … it’s just not that important, anymore. Having been to one, I agree. It’s just not that important anymore. The internet has far surpassed it in terms of marketing value and showing up year-after-year is probably a big waste of time and money.

But, of course, people wanted to make it about his health.

Why? Well, Apple’s had a lot of investors worried about the health of Steve Jobs because he’s been getting thinner every time he appears publicly. They worry about how Apple will get on without him, etc. etc. The things that investors do. That’s one thing, but then they made buying decisions based on this. That’s a whole other thing. So SJ writes up a nice little piece explaining what’s wrong and that he’s trying to fix it (and, of course, effectively says that it’s no one else’s business, anyway, which is right). The board responds with a “we’ll let you know if it’s time to worry” statement. All’s well.

Kind of.

Then the bum streaks at Gizmodo throw up the headline that flies in the face of all the facts:

Answering recent coverage about his health, Steve Jobs has published this letter addressed to the Apple community.

We write Mac applications at work. We have several ideas for great iPhone apps (not the cheesy $5 ones, but real applications) that we’re working on. We can test on the simulator, yes, and that works most of the time, but it’s not perfect¹ and we do need to test on the device now and again so we decided to get a pair of iPhone 3Gs to start off with and see how the development process was.

First, we approached the local Apple Store’s business contact. He said that they don’t handle business orders for the iPhone at all and gave us a name at AT&T that handles small business orders and said that he’d get us set up. That person would be Christopher Spain. Remember that name, he’s going to be coming up a lot here soon.

So I went back to coding and let my business partner handle all the fun of getting this setup. He called Chris and left a voicemail message that first day. The next day we got some information back about how to get setup.

Alas, I have discovered the pitfalls of working for a computer company. One branch of the company resides in California and writes code. One branch here does support. Sadly, we're under both sets of laws. So if I want to write some software in my spare time, I have to basically let my employer know I'm doing it, ensure they wouldn't consider it a conflict of interest and that they don't want to do it, and then I can do it without worrying if they'll steal it from me.

Oh freakin' yay.

I suppose I can see why it works this way, and it's kind of good to have a written notice that they won't steal your code, but it's just annoying as hell that I have to wait on other people before I can do something in my own spare time. Sure, sure, legally if it's in my spare time it's mine. Yes, but we all know the American law system; should-be and real-life rarely mix well there.

Not empty, just private. This place was never updated, so I converted it to a friends/family log. Oh well.