] WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral
] values" at the bluest of TV channels, public
] broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York,
] you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight
] zone.

I'm glad to see someone finally saying it like it is: the fundies are opposed to people having sex, full-stop. It is utterly
despicable.

The Plot Against Sex in America

] The DVD Copy Control Association, the group that owns the
] copy-protection technology contained on DVDs, said a
] company called Kaleidescape is offering products that
] illegally make copies of DVDs. The company, which has won
] several recent consumer electronics awards, said it has
] worked closely with the DVD CCA for more than a year, and
] will fight the suit, filed Tuesday.

Its good to hear they're fighting it; this is clearly fair use even if it violates the DMCA.

Hollywood allies sue DVD jukebox maker

] Best web site: Groklaw

I have to take issue with "Pointless transition of the year:
PCI Express," however. Its PCI only in name and makes board designers happy because they can have 8 traces where they used to have 80. Shared media and parallel data are the way of the past; point-to-point differential/full-duplex serial is the Way. Turn everything into networking.

The Inquirer presents gongs of the year

] The good news is that we may have figured out how to
] solve the moral problem that's been holding up stem-cell
] research. The bad news is that the solution will
] introduce a whole new kind of horror.

If you read down, it isn't really that horrible. But it is
a clever end-run around the definitional roadblocks put up
by the Catholic church and others.

RE: Monster Farming - The creepy solution to the stem-cell debate. By William Saletan

ICANN has little democratic legitimacy. Would we be happier with
the ITU?

hacking the united nations [0E] (((accurate obsession)))

]
] Sun has just submitted a newly created license, the CDDL,
] to OSI for approval. Or not. They don't say officially if
] this is the license for an open source Solaris, but,
] well, duh. Probably it depends on if it is approved or
] not, for starters. But it's not a definite, and they
] would like suggestions and input on the license, separate
] from any particular product. So, let's read it as a
] proposed license for anything. Is it an improvement over
] current licenses or not? That is the question. Also,
] should it be approved by OSI? It's taken from the
] language of the Mozilla Public License but is an attempt
] to improve it from Sun's standpoint. So I have drawn up a
] little chart, so you can compare and provide meaningful
] input.

When Netscape was initially open-sourced, it took a long time for the rest of the community outside of AOL employees to get their fingers into it because its so huge. Its worse here for Sun because
where everyone liked and wanted to use Netscape -- and in fact was the only remotely viable browser option on Linux at the time -- noone really cares about Solaris.

I think the GPL-incompatibility issue is going to prove mostly to be moot. What is there in Solaris that we'd want to put into Linux anyway? Maybe a few bits to support running on huge Suns but then how many people really have such boxes anyway?

GROKLAW on Sun's Proposed CDDL

I bought an old Portmaster 2e a few days ago to run serial consoles for a bunch of unix boxen. When we brought up its config, the domain name in it was netcom.com.

] HARRISBURG, Pa. - The Pennsylvania attorney
] general%u2019s office Monday sued an online university
] for allegedly selling bogus academic degrees %u2014
] including an MBA awarded to a cat.

MSNBC - School that awarded MBA to cat sued

People are mumbling that the IBM PC biz sale is a prelude to
some kind of new IBM/Apple deal.

Is IBM Dumping Its PC Division So It Can Gobble Apple?

] Graphics chip leader Nvidia announced Tuesday that it is
] working with Sony to develop the graphics processor for
] the next version of Sony's PlayStation video game
] console.

Interesting ... they're staying in this market after their fallout with Microsoft over the whole inventory/pricing mess with Xbox.

Nvidia to work on PlayStation 3 chip