Apparently the fact that a program built into Windows 2000 was written by a “Scientologist company” was big news in Germany, but didn’t raise any eyebrows in the United States. Unlike the United States, where Scientology (a large scale scam that dabbles in blackmail, harassment, and abuse of the legal system) is treated the same as Catholicism or any other religion, in Germany they really, really don’t care for Scientology.

Web site reviews are a new feature on Apple’s Web site. Their opinion of the Drudge Report — one star. (That URL doesn’t work right because either Apple or WebObjects is stupid. You have to click on the News category on the iReview homepage to get to the Drudge Report review, although that’s more of an effort than I would make.)

Allow me to marvel for a moment: I beat Slashdot to the link to the Gamasutra article about software developers. There’s a first time for everything. Don’t take this the wrong way. This site isn’t a Slashdot competitor, and I mention this only out of respect. To me, Slashdot is the ultimate tracker of geek news, and they get submissions from hundreds of people. For me to find something before the Slashdot army is a shocking bit of luck, but nothing more.

Surely you didn’t think that I would miss linking to Larry Wall’s story on the history of Perl.

Intel is going to be building Web appliances, and get this, they’re going to run Linux, not Windows. This SF Gate story is more detailed, and also mentions that the user environment on these new information appliances will be built using Mozilla. Awesome!

Apple surprised everyone today by announcing the accelerated release schedule for Mac OS X. The new user interface looks incredibly cool.

I’m not the Mac fanatic I once was, but I still get stoked for the Macworld keynotes.

The new law outlawing “cyberpiracy” (who coined that stupid term anyway?) is a bust from the start. While some people may feel that it’s unethical to speculate on domain names, I honestly don’t see how it can be illegal. If I signed up for the telephone number 1-800-786-5282, which could be read as 1-800-SUN-JAVA, does Sun have a right to sue me? If I purchase the land where Microsoft is planning on expanding their corporate campus, can Microsoft sue me? What’s the difference in doing that and registering a domain name that happens to match another company’s name? Domain names are a valuable commodity. To give people exclusive rights to particular domain names based on the fact that they use that name elsewhere seems like yet another example of the rampant corporatism that seems to rule our lousy government and legal system.

I yucked it up reading Declan McCullagh’s rundown of the gloomiest Y2K predictions he could find.

Over at Slashdot, they’re going to give out some awards. The nominations for Unsung Hero are particularly interesting. Lots of good people behind important projects are mentioned.