A very generous reader sent me a gift from my wish list that I recieved yesterday. They sent it anonymously, so I have to thank them publicly. Anyway, thanks, I really appreciate it.

The Straight Dope on lorem ipsum.

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that medical use of marijuana is illegal under the Controlled Substances Act. This seems to me to be a compassionless ruling, and according to Dan Shapiro (a medical school professor at the University of Arizona), one that’s not backed up by science. It’s silly to blame the Supreme Court, though, as they were just deferring to the authority of Congress to make boneheaded laws.

Dan Gillmor has a UCITA update in his latest column. Maryland and Virginia are still the only states with legislatures stupid enough to pass the law. Now it looks like Microsoft and other software industry sleazeballs are now trying to push through the law in Oklahoma and Kansas, over the objections of the Attorney Generals of those states.

Now that the Congressional hearing for Ted Olson’s nomination as Solicitor General has started, Salon has opened the floodgates on Olson’s history of scandalous and possibly illegal behavior. Who knew that Olson himself was investigated by an independent counsel for charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, long before he spent millions of dolloars of Richard Mellon Scaife’s money trying to pin the same charges on President Clinton?

Richard Dawkins laments the loss of Douglas Adams.

Douglas Adams, dead at 49. Damn. I don’t even know what to say about that.

Kevin Guilfoile clears up a lot of confusion about Norse legends in his McSweeney’s piece. Between Guilfoile’s helpful primer and a recent episode of Xena I caught, I think I’ve finally got the whole pantheon of Norse mythology pretty well figured out.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. RMS explains how priorart.org is actually a hindrance rather than a help in the struggle against software patents, even the ludicrous kind. I find his argument interesting because I, at one time, considered creating a project to aggregate prior art in a central location. (Frank Bennett’s response sheds even more light on the issue.)

Adam Langley slams JXTA at openp2p.com.