] A GROUP from the open source / free software community
] has put together a response to SCO CEO Darl McBride's
] "Open Letter to the Open Source Community". The INQUIRER
] is glad to print Groklaw's "Dear Darl" letter, along with
] their research.

Neat.

Groklaw sends a Dear Darl letter

] The Kremlin yesterday denied a report that it had
] instigated a plot to assassinate the Russian tycoon Boris
] Berezovsky in a London courtroom using a poisoned
] fountain pen.

God, I miss Russian politics. So much more... FUN!

Kremlin denies poison pen plot

] A plan by the Kremlin which would allow Moscow to sell
] off the 843m hectares of Russia's forests to private
] logging companies has raised fears of an ecological
] disaster.
]
] Forest makes up 70% of Russia's territory and spans 12
] time zones. It is known as Europe's lungs and is second
] only to the Amazon in the amount of carbon dioxide it
] absorbs, and is home to many rare species.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | It's Europe's lungs and home to many rare species. But to Russia it's £100bn of wood

] Almost 70 percent of all private ownership in Russian
] companies, around $85 billion, is not publicly disclosed,
] Standard & Poor's latest study finds.
]
] Another study, to be released Wednesday by the Russian
] Institute of Directors, shows that while companies
] release a lot of information, they tend to stay mum about
] data pertaining to their directors and share ownership.

A nation asks itself, "Who owns our economy?" Only certainty... "Not us."

Who Owns $85 Billion?

A drug created by the former KGB to keep its agents sober so that they could drink opponents under the table before stealing their secrets is being sold on the internet to Hollywood stars as a defence against hangovers.

anti-hangover pill

] Personally, when the PC revolution got underway, I bought
] an Apple IIe soon after its introduction. VisiCalc caught
] my eye. As did Flight Simulator, and going online with a
] 300-baud modem to local computer bulletin boards. But
] when it came to writing -- in those days, three drafts of
] a first novel -- I would not abandon my trusty Hermes
] portable typewriter. The Apple would not tempt me to some
] writing Eden. The complexity of computers, I sensed,
] could only sap the creative process.

Slashdot | Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat

Excellent article that put me up 40 pounds in one week. My form was terrible, and Dace Tate helped me out with this article. Great read for anyone that lifts. Although in general, Testosterone Magazine is complete shit, anything by Dave Tate is gold.

Bench Press 600 Pounds

] An international group of cryptographers, the Kryptos
] Group, announced this week that the decade-old Cyrillic
] Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to
] some classified KGB instructions and correspondence.
]
] The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the
] University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was
] created by Washington DC artist James Sanborn in the
] early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos
] sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA
] Headquarters.
]
] The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to
] be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian
] text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control
] potential sources of information. The second part appears
] to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence
] about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that
] his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by
] the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda.

Press Release: The Cyrillic Projector Code Has Been Solved

] After spending an evening and morning with the Gnome
] 2.2-based Java Desktop System, I can report that Sun has
] what appears to me to be the most polished and real-world
] user-ready Linux desktop in existence.

The pricing is interesting. As a home user I don't want to pay that much recurring, but on the other hand I think it makes sense for software like this to be sold based on a recurring service model.

Sun's Desktop for Linux - Sneak Peak

] To gather new strains, Sulakvelidze need only drop a
] bucket into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The waters of the
] Chesapeake Bay, of which the harbor is an inlet, have
] enough exchange with the Atlantic that he can find a
] phage for almost any species of bacteria, he says. If one
] doesn't work, he simply refills his bucket and looks for
] another that does.
]
] "This upgradability is one of the unique qualities of
] phages," Sulakvelidze adds. "Developing a new antibiotic
] takes 10 years and God knows how many millions of
] dollars."
]
] As he puts it, "Mother Nature runs the best genetic
] engineering lab out there. No institution or company can
] match it."

I'd like to know just how effective existing phage remedies are. I really should have brought a bunch of this stuff back with me from Moscow.

Wired 11.10: How Ravenous Soviet Viruses Will Save the World