In an effort to curtail the steady loss of dial-up customers, AOL announced yesterday that it would sell high-speed Internet services through AT&T, BellSouth and Qwest Communications.

3 Phone Companies to Offer AOL's Broadband Services

Editor's Update 11/11/04: As James Taranto wryly notes in Opinion Journal, citing this original Israel Insider report, "Yasser Arafat is in stable condition after dying in a Paris hospital. A hospital spokesman 'said there would be no details about the cause of death because of French privacy laws,' reports the Associated Press." Now why do you think there would be a need to invoke privacy laws in reporting a man's death? And why, suddenly, is it no longer a "mysterious illness" but an illness that must be concealed?

The article as originally reported on November 6, 2004:

Former White House speechwriter David Frum has joined the growing chorus of pundits, medical experts, and intelligence operatives who claim Yasser Arafat is likely suffering from AIDS.

I have no idea if this is credible. At least I'm not the only one who suspected some such...

Hospital concealment strengthens suspicion: Arafat died of AIDS

Here comes the good part: management has asked the bankruptcy court to let it have — free — roughly 15 percent of the stock in the new company, or about $900 million. Mr. Tilton, the chief executive, who plays the Orson Welles character in this drama, would get about $90 million personally for his hard work shepherding UAL through bankruptcy (for which he was already paid multiple millions of dollars).

...

Wait, Mr. Tilton and Mr. Bankruptcy Judge. The employees were the owners of UAL. They were the trustors, and Mr. Tilton and his pals were trustees for them. How were the trustors wiped out while the trustees, the fiduciaries, became fantastically rich? Is this the way capitalism is supposed to work? Trustors save up, and their agents just take their savings away from them?

This really resonates with everything I've been reading in The Intelligent Investor lately.

Ben Stein on the UAL Debacle

WANT to hear some good news for the labor movement? The percentage of American workers who are union members remained almost steady in the private sector last year.

The bad news is that the figure stood at 7.8 percent — less than a third of the rate of the early 1970's.

Unions Pay Dearly for Success

"Itanium has been taking share from both IBM power and Sun Sparc. We're on the right trajectory, but we want to go faster," Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said at a press event here. "The $10 billion investment is a statement that we want to accelerate as a unified body."

Maybe in servers but last I checked, Itanium wasn't in any of the 3 next-gen game consoles...

Allies pledge $10 billion to boost Itanium

Linus Torvalds said Wednesday that he won't convert Linux to version 3 of the General Public License, as he objects to digital rights management provisions in the proposed update.

Too bad... this will be a mess. If Linux went GPL3 it would probably be a big problem for Tivo, for example.

Torvalds: No GPL 3 for Linux

CNET interview with Eben Moglen on GPL3, Linux, etc.

Defender of the GPL

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a six-foot-long, two-legged dinosaur along the lines of a tyrannosaur or a velociraptor. But it is actually an ancient relative of today's alligators and crocodiles.

Fossil Yields Surprise Kin of Crocodiles

Other cellphone companies get the idea, too. In fact, Samsung has already come up with a Razr clone, nicknamed the Blade. (Its official name is the A900. It's offered only by Sprint, for $200, although a Verizon edition is reported to be in the works.)

I bought one of these a few weeks ago. Its awesome.

Razr vs. Blade: Cloning Is Only Skin Deep

China endorsed a Russian compromise proposal for breaking the stalemate over Iran's nuclear program Thursday and joined Iran's visiting nuclear negotiator in calling for patience and more discussions on the Russian idea.

China Endorses Russian Proposal on Iranian Nuclear Program