I have only one thing to say about the Blogger redesign — nice color scheme.

ZDNet seems to have finally picked up the UCITA story. They’re running a multi-story package that includes an interview with <a href=http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2457092,00.html”>RMS.

I just got around to checking out my.mp3.com today. They allow you to download a program called Beam-it that reads your CDs and lets mp3.com know that you own that CD (obviously you can borrow other people’s CDs and beam them as well, but that’s against the law). After you’ve beamed a CD to them, you can go to my.mp3.com and have the songs on the CD streamed to you for listening. You never have to carry your CDs to and from work again! One problem is that the library isn’t comprehensive. (The second CD I tried to beam wasn’t available.) Overall, though, it’s very cool.

Scott Rosenberg takes on the Verisign/Network Solutions merger in his latest column. He points out that the domain name business could very well be a business built on sand, although he cites in support of that argument a future time when there will be many top level domains (other than .com, .net, and .edu). I think that there’s a very good chance that we’ll never see more TLDs that don’t end in country codes, because corporate America doesn’t want to have to deal with them. (Companies like McDonalds don’t want to have to register hundreds of instances of mcdonalds.whatever.) The infrastructure to add TLDs has been in place for ages, and politics has stalled their addition. I don’t see that changing soon.

Jeff Bezos has written an open letter about patents and posted it on the Amazon.com site. His recommendations for the reform of the patent system are very sensible. Unsurprisingly, Tim O’Reilly has already written a response to the Bezos letter.

Risks Digest has a note about a very interesting Microsoft Word risk involving the track changes feature. There’s no design flaw involved here, just users who don’t have security in mind when they exchange documents.

Interesting spam today: Siberian Software Services. Specializing in … everything!

You know, I don’t get out much, so I’m sometimes surprised at how much you have to pay to be entertained these days. For example, yesterday I bought a couple of hockey tickets. Two tickets in the nosebleed section … 44 dollars. Ticketmaster “convenience charge” … 10 dollars. “Processing fee” … 2 dollars. The feeling that the already exorbitant ticket price was really a bait and switch … priceless. (I got a much better deal on a mini package of minor league baseball tickets. Two sets of tickets to 7 games in the best seats you can get for 80 bucks.)

Jon Carroll has a f—ing great column today about the profanity, South Park, the Academy Awards, and censorship.

The latest Ask Slashdot installment is about building high volume dynamic Web sites. Surprisingly, this question wasn’t asked by the people who run Slashdot themselves, given that Slashdot’s response time and uptime is pathetic. There are a few useful nuggest of wisdom buried beneath the crap in the comments, for those willing to investigate.