The Department of Justice has published its proposed conclusions of law in the Microsoft case. Now that the judge has issued his findings of fact, the DOJ is suggesting to the judge which laws they broke. Of course, the judge doesn’t have to agree with the DOJ on these, but since the facts are in, and the law is the law, I imagine that the judge’s conclusions of law will be similar to these.

This joke is funny, but you might need to be a software developer to get it.

Today’s New York Times has an article by Denise Caruso about the real lessons of the Microsoft trial, and Lawrence Lessig’s new book that explains how software creates laws unto itself. We’re seeing this illustrated in spades by the ongoing problems related to the registration of domain names right now.

According to an email message I just got, the moon will be the brightest it’s been in 133 years on December 22, thanks to a number of converging factors.

This week’s Rapidly Changing Face of Computing has a lot of interesting tidbits. Particularly interesting is the description of some research Compaq is doing on translating speech to text and indexing it so that it can be searched on the Web. The author is right, there’s tons of important information that’s not yet accessible on the Web, and never will be unless we find a reliable way to index it.

The LA Times has an article today about Patrick Naughton’s legal defense. Naugton is the depraved former Disney exec who got busted in an FBI sting for showing up to meet a teenager for sex. His defense is that everyone in chat rooms lies about everything, and that it’s all just fantasy–that he never expected that the person he was talking to would really be a teenager. Sounds pretty outlandish, except that the person ol’ HotSeattle met wasn’t, in fact, a teenager, they were an FBI agent. Of course, the child porn they found on his laptop is a bit more difficult to explain. I don’t think the “somebody else put it there” excuse is going to fly.

People who think that Userland’s Manila is an incredible innovation should take a look at WikiWikiWeb. People have been “editing this page” for quite some time now.

Amazon.com has finally applied a discount to my SQL book, 30%. By the way, the book description on the site is incredibly old. My publisher said they were going to update the description to one that actually conforms to the contents of the book, but they haven’t yet.

I wonder how much Swatch paid CNN to put this stupid crap on their Web site, and include a link to it from the top of the home page. The thing I hate most about the Internet (it’s so hard to pick one thing), is that most advertising-based sites have no self respect whatsoever when it comes to selling out to sponsors.

perl.com has an overview of using DBI to access relational databases from Perl. Readers of both of my books would probably find this article useful.