The firm's founder, Ryan A. Brant, has resigned as chairman and director of the company, after federal regulators informed the company of their plans to file civil charges against Mr. Brant and others in connection with accounting irregularities. He will become vice president in charge of publishing, a newly created position overseeing the video game publishing arm of the business.

The European Union could be ready to start accession talks with Turkey as early as next January. Negotiations could take seven years. If successful, it would mean the EU's new neighbours would be Iran, Iraq and Syria.

To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances to Sunday's stark numbers. But no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications, the background -- just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain.

For the non-complacent, the question is fast becoming whether "civilised society" in much of Europe is already too "undermined".

XML co-author Tim Bray has joined Sun as technical director of the software group. He spoke with eWeek's Steve Gillmor.

Bray: "If you look at where things are going in the area of search and XML and RSS, you kind of smell a bit of a nexus happening in there with lots of exciting things coming out of it."

Bray: "I'm interested in the information flows ... There are a lot of potentially game-changing things coming down the pipe."

Bray: "the notion of attention ... that's potentially super hot stuff."

Bray: "As Jim Gray says, 'Memory is the new disk. Disks are the new tape.'"

Gillmor: What's your take on social software?

I have always considered the profound distinction between ninjas and pirates to be an absolute one. One was either ninja or pirate -- there were no inbetweens. One personality type was skilled and proficient, elegant and silent, contained and constrained, honourable and spiritual. The other type loud and flamboyant, gregarious and unrestrained, life-loving and vigorous, passionate and strong. I thought all people must pledge their allegiance, or be categorised accordingly.

The recent war in Iraq was, among other things, a powerful advertisement for the effectiveness of the United States' storied special operations forces.

Their achievements, although impressive, do not fully explain the unprecedented prominence currently enjoyed by special operations forces within the US military. Rumsfeld has made no secret of his plans to thrust special forces into the lead role in the war on terrorism, by using them for covert operations around the globe.

Kids cloudwatching. Asking and answering the important questions. Disembodied words. Speaking to no one in particular.

Isn't that what I do here each day?

In the first half of the 20th century, James Caesar Petrillo of the American Federation of Musicians saw that recorded music, and the broadcasting of that music on radio and jukeboxes, was a threat to his boys' jobs (and his).

Those powers are right to be disturbed. They tend to become entrenched in selling music in particular manners and styles and systems. New technologies inevitably shake all those things up.

There are probably fewer professional live musicians than there would be if we had never enjoyed radios, jukeboxes, transistorized stereos, or computerized file sharing. Yet with every change, people's access to better reproduced, more portable, more personalized music grows.