Hmmm — Derek won his TiVo on September 27th, and got it today; I haven’t seen hide nor hair of mine, and I won it a day earlier. I want my TiVo!!!
Yesterday, I registered a couple of domain names with Register.com, and the level of service that they provide is so far and away better than Network Solutions it’s ridiculous. First of all, the domain is ready-to-use today (as opposed to the eons that it takes with NSI); also, I can make changes to my DNS information on a convenient web-based system, rather than the idiotic mail-based, who-knows-if-it-will-get-done system that NSI employs. Looks like I have a new registrar.
Excellent summary of Al Gore’s actual role in fostering the development of the Internet, written by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf. (Who, you may ask, are Kahn and Cerf? They’re the two guys who invented TCP/IP, the basic language of the Internet.)
The Republicans really are idiots. At the end of many of their current commercials, they run a URL, gorewillsayanything.com. Try clicking on that link.
Lots and lots and lots of news out of the Supreme Court today. In bullet-point form:
- The Court set aside a ruling that permitted students at Florida schools to elect prayer-leaders, in light of their decision in the Santa Fe school prayer case.
- The ability to reverse-engineer code was upheld by the Court’s refusal to hear Sony’s appeal against Connectix for the company’s GameBoy emulator. This will be particularly interesting in relation to the UCITA, which specifically forbids reverse-engineering and is slowly being enacted across the country.
- AOL’s status as more than a common carrier was upheld in the Court’s refusal to revive a lawsuit against the provider by subscribers.
- George Wendt and John Ratzenberger (Norm and Cliff) have standing to sue Paramount in an effort to prevent the studio from licensing robots of the two Cheers characters to bars around the country.
- The Court let standing rulings by the Federal District Court in California that allows schools to use race in consideration of applications if they have a justifiable reason to do so. Of interest, it isn’t college applications that are at issue, it’s elementary school applications.
I love that, as the election nears, the Bushism of the Week has turned into Bushisms of the Day. Two of the latest:
“I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.”
“One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected.”
Today, I went and picked myself up a free CueCat barcode scanner at the Radio Shack that’s on my way home from the subway. Interestingly, the exact summary of the pickup was the following: ask for a CueCat, receive a CueCat. No license to sign, no paperwork to fill out, nothing. And so far as I can tell, there is no license that I have to read in order to plug the device in; the only place where there could exist a license to which I could even implicitly agree would be when I install the software, which I’m not going to do. So I can’t help but wonder what legal principles Digital Convergence thought they could rely upon when they decided to start sending C&D letters to people who were writing alternate software for the device… the company doesn’t have a chance, at least not with this distribution strategy.
In the mean time, I have a free barcode scanner at home.
Does anyone know what happened to the Free Font of the Day subsite over at Andover?
The Yankees are sucking as badly as is possible right now; I wonder if they’ll even make it through the first round of the playoffs. Part of me (the part that’s a dreamer, and knows how ridiculous he can be) wants the 15-losses-in-18-games streak to be a mindgame on the part of the Yanks… but nope, they just suck right now.
