Last night, I found collections of Iron Chef icons at IconFactory (for the Mac) and dotico.com (their Windows affiliate). You can also get Iron Chef desktop wallpaper at The DeskStop.

The Mother Jones list of the 400 biggest individual political donors in the last election is an impressive piece of work. Not only do they list the donors, how much they gave, and who they gave it to, they also have articles on each one of them. Naturally, the article on donors from high tech is most interesting to me. I was only slightly surprised that a lot of the Silicon Valley money goes to Republicans (most rich people not in the entertainment industry are Republicans, after all), but I was pretty shocked to learn that Jim Barksdale is a hardcore Republican. What a disappointment.

Slashdot is the latest Internet outlet to fall victim to the strongarm tactics of the Church of Scientology. The Register’s writeup is suitably vicious. I wish I could publish some CoS documents so they could sue me or have thugs follow me around and harass my neighbors. What a bunch of money grubbing freaks.

The 1040.com tax form I linked to yesterday is a scan of a PDF created by eCompany magazine. (I hate it when people don’t get credit for their work.)

It’s always puzzling when the good guys take on the good guys. John Gilmore runs an open relay on his home network for the benefit of himself and others. Well, as you might expect, sometimes spam gets routed through his open relay. That prompted a complaint by SpamCop to his ISP, Verio. Now Verio is blocking outgoing mail from his network. So, what’s more important, Gilmore’s right to provide an open relay or the prevention of spamming by closing all open relays?

Hopefully, no rc3.org readers will be using this tax form to file their 2000 taxes.

Alas, Aimster’s Pig Encoder is no more. That didn’t take long.

Tim O’Reilly has abandoned his search for prior art that would cause Amazon’s one-click patent to be overturned, and has issued something of a public apology to Jeff Bezos. Unfortunately, in his article, he doesn’t say exactly what the real innovations in Amazon’s one-click patent are, and right now I’m feeling too lazy to read it myself.

The tanstaafl trend continues. Free discussion board provider EZBoard is now hitting up its users for voluntary contributions to sustain the service. I actually think this is a pretty good idea, and I hope it works out for them. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see if enough people kick in the cash to subsidize all of the free riders.

Slashdot: Students arrested for confusing the list and scalar contexts in Perl.