JWZ has written an article on Tabs versus Spaces that would have been incredibly useful to me about a week ago. Today it just made interesting reading.

A Sony exec claims that they’re going to put infrastructure in place all over the Internet to block Napster, everywhere from your ISP to your personal PC. There are lots of problems with his plan. You can start out with the fact that there are plenty of alternatives to Napster out there, and if they block all of them, all someone has to do is create an alternative that uses email or HTTP as its transport method. Will they block that, too? And that assumes that Sony has the pull necessary to put in the hooks to filter out this stuff. Obviously the stakes are high, it will be interesting to see what the recording industry does wind up doing.

Declan McCullagh surveys recent cases attempting to makei it illegal to create certain links to other sites. For example, Judge Kaplan barred 2600 from linking to sites distributing DeCSS, and Mattel and the Mormon church have sought to have certain links removed from sites as well. I hope that the Supreme Court puts an end to this sort of lawsuit once and for all in a ruling one of these days.

Downloading K-Meleon will give you something to feel good about from the Mozilla project.

Emmanuel Goldstein’s analysis of Judge Kaplan’s ruling in favor of the MPAA in the DeCSS lawsuit makes for interesting reading. I still haven’t finished reading the full ruling, but my early impressions concur with Goldstein’s. The judge was definitely constrained by the moronic DMCA, but he was also clearly biased against 2600.

Dr. Dobbs has an overview of C# (doesn’t everyone these days). There’s some information in the article that I haven’t read in others, including the laugh-worthy statement that the presence of goto in C# is an innovation. Edsger Dijkstra’s famous paper on goto was published in March, 1968.

Sad news: DeepLeap is closing up shop. I’m sure the story will be told elsewhere, but I imagine it boils down to lack of funding.

Martha Soukup, science fiction author and intrepid Big Brother observer, contrasts what really happens in the Big Brother house with what’s shown on television. As she astutely points out in her article, the show provides us with a clinic on how reality is edited for television, regardless of the context.

A scientist in the UK says that it isn’t all that unusual to find open water at the North Pole, at least when we’re talking about a geological time scale. However, he does agree that the overall thinning of the ice at the pole is a bad thing.

The Well is hosting a publicly viewable panel discussion on copyright, the Internet, and music. The panelists are Salon’s Scott Rosenberg, musician David Gans, Adam Powell, and Mike Godwin (of Godwin’s Law fame). All Well members are allowed to post to the topic, so I’m sure there will be many other participants as well.