] The Patent Office has issued an order granting their
] request for reexamination of MS's patent on the FAT file
] system on the grounds that they had raised "a substantial
] new question of patentability" regarding that patent
] claim. Naturally, PubPat is pleased. "This is the first
] step towards ending the harm being caused to the public
] by this patent that should have never been issued," said
] Dan Ravicher in the press release. Here it is in full:

... given that M$ filed the FAT patent purely to extort money
from flash media vendors. Yay.

US PTO to Reexamine M$ FAT Patent

] Comcast, the country's largest provider of high-speed
] Internet access, has begun blocking a channel frequently
] exploited by spammers to send out large volumes of
] e-mail, a move that many technologists say was long
] overdue and should be matched by other service providers.

I think maybe the right answer here is to firewall port 25 by
default and turn it back on for people who know what they're doing.

Comcast to Firewall Port 25

] WASHINGTON -- Digital radio broadcasts that bring
] CD-quality sound to the airwaves could lead to unfettered
] song copying if protections are not put in place, a
] recording-industry trade group warned on Friday.

Sigh ... here's the "broadcast flag" for digital radio...

Wired News: RIAA Moves In on Digital Radio

Decius wrote:
] ] By an 8-0 vote, the justices overturned a controversial
] ] decision by a U.S. appeals court in California that
] ] reciting the phrase amounted to a violation of
] ] church-state separation.
] ]
] ] The ruling by the justices was based on the technicality
] ] that Newdow could not bring the case before the court
] ] because he did not have legal control over his daughter,
] ] on whose behalf he was arguing.
]
] Bullet dodged...

"Good answer!"

RE: Supreme Court Decides Pledge Case on Technicality

Here are some pics from SummerCon 2004; the first few are of me,
Andrew Widdowson (TIA's producer), and Lord Isildur doing our
TIA brodcast.

The show went really well -- WRCT has recently gotten a badass
digital codec that transmits over a 28.8k modem, which was how we
were linked back to the station. We made a recording at the
station and I'll try to get it online soon.

I ended up missing most of the sessions on Saturday except for
Lazlo Harz' talk on random numbers. I think the Wardriving contest was not as successful as last year.

The only major run in with the law was when Mark (one of the organizers) fell down in the street at about 2am on Friday and then
Mr. Mansfield jumped on him, pretending to shag him... they ended
up with disorderly conduct citations for "simulated sex act." And then Chris Tracy fell off a 6 foot wall in the parking lot Saturday night, landing more-or-less headfirst on the pavement. He got taken to UPMC Presbyterian to be checked out but I think he wasn't seriously injured.

I think they've decided with pretty high certainty that they're going to try have SummerCon in San Francisco next year.

U: Chris Tracy broke his collarbone and bled in his brain
slightly and was kept in the hospital for an extra day or two for
observation but is OK.

Pictures From SummerCon 2004

We're doing a live broadcast of Total Information Awareness
live at Summercon at 1800EDT. Tune in at www.wrct.org.

] If you follow the tech industry at all, you're familiar
] with serial lawsuit filer SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX -
] News). Growing out of Linux software provider Caldera,
] SCO reinvented itself as a UNIX provider, and then it
] made another frightening transformation into the world's
] Linux bogeyman by threatening to sue anyone on the planet
] who uses Linux without sending SCO a check. It has also
] made itself something of a laughingstock by suing much
] bigger firms like IBM (NYSE: IBM - News), DaimlerChrysler
] (NYSE: DCX - News), and AutoZone (NYSE: AZO - News) over
] a variety of licensing issues.

Their GAPP loss widened this quarter to $10M as revenue fell 50%.

Motley Fool: SCO Keeps Sinking

] Despite the recent trend toward global warming, scientists
] have long wondered whether the earth is nearing another
] ice age, an end to the 12,000-year temperate spell in
] which modern civilizations arose. Some have said such a
] transition is overdue, given that each of the three
] temperate intervals that immediately preceded the current
] one lasted only about 10,000 years.

A New Ice Age? None Soon, Snow 2 Miles Deep Implies

] First Lady Laura Bush says she admires Nancy Reagan's
] devotion to her husband, but cannot back her call for
] lifting restrictions on stem cell research.

Its going to go like this: Republicans are going to be lying in
hospital beds and given the alternative of stem-cell treatments
or losing their minds to Alzheimer's over an extended period.
I doubt many pro-lifers are willing to die for this idea.

Laura Bush 'Cannot Back' Nancy Reagan's Call to Lift Stem Cell Research Restrictions

] Take it up a notch without losing your cool. The
] top-of-the-line Power Mac G5 with dual 2.5GHz processors
] squeezes outrageous performance into tight quarters. To
] cool down those steaming circuits, Apple designed a
] sophisticated liquid cooling system that takes off the
] heat without bumping up the noise. Mac OS X dynamically
] adjusts the flow of the fluid and the speed of the fans
] based on temperature.

Is this the first "off the shelf" PC to ship with liquid cooling?

Apple's New Dual G5 is Liquid Cooled