I’ve been putting off purchasing a home DVD player, and it looks like it might have been worth the wait, since I only read about this geek-friendly model today. (One problem with it is that it has a really lame remote. My personal rule is that any remote that has the digits laid out differently than a telephone sucks.)

The Consumer Project on Technology has proposed to ICANN some new top level domains that are a lot more interesting than .biz, .firm, and .store. I thought this was a joke until I actually read their proposal. They’re recommending the creation of TLDs to house sites for consumers and taxpayers to exercise their First Amendment rights. microsoft.sucks anyone?

Correction: the other day I wondered why Texas was one of the plaintiffs in the states’ antitrust suit against if George Bush, Jr. was opposed to the litigation. In fact, Texas is not one of the plaintiffs in the suit. Before the suit was filed, the Texas Attorney General was investigating Microsoft, but they did not agree to participate in the suit along with the other states. rc3.org Daily regrets the error.

Tim O’Reilly had a long phone conversation with Jeff Bezos to talk about Amazon.com’s use of the patent system. He has posted a summary of the things they discussed over on the Ask Tim section of the O’Reilly site.

LinuxWorld surveys the landscape of Java development tools for Linux. I’m just getting started programming in Java, and I plan on doing my development on Linux, so this article was pretty interesting to me.

Here’s the funniest thing I’ve read in awhile. Microsoft has published a paper extolling the amazing innovations that have come out of their research group. They have a research staff of hundreds and have cherry picked some of the smartest people in academia for their research group. That group has produced no less than 15 innovations that made it into Windows 2000. And how about the one innovation they choose to highlight? Hard links and symbolic links. Yep, the brilliant minds at Microsoft have managed to duplicate something that has existed in Unix for many years. How proud they must be.

“Action Figures,” the new Salon TV ad, is absolutely hilarious.

Remember how I linked to Jorn Barger’s article about shortening URLs the other day? Wired News has picked up on that article and is characterizing it as a means of “hacking” Amazon.com’s affiliate program. For God’s sake, anyone who’s signed up for their affiliate program knows how to do this, and characterizing it as hacking is utterly idiotic.

Google Browser Buttons are bookmarklets to enable you to more easily use their site to search the Web. I love bookmarklets so much, I created one to enable me to add sites to rc3.org Daily the other day. There are also some useful bookmarklets at dictionary.com.

Ars Digita is giving a Ferrari to anyone who refers 10 new employees to the company. I assume you have to work there to get in on the deal, and if I were living in the Boston area I’d apply.