The EFF is encouraging us to thank Gateway for its very public stance in favor of basic fair use rights when it comes to music.

JDS Uniphase step aside, AOL-Time Warner managed to post a $54 billion loss last quarter.

Israel Asks: Is It Time for Arafat to Leave?, Tracy Wilkinson in the LA Times. Apparently Sharon is considering once again exiling Arafat from the occupied territories. It’s like we’re iterating over a loop here.

For those of you living in the Microsoft world, Bob Rossney has published a set of tutorial articles on (MS) XML: XML for Grownups.

Self-preservation, as defined by the house of Saud:

It is a mistake to think that our people will not do what is necessary to survive and if that means we move to the right of bin Laden, so be it; to the left of Qaddafi, so be it; or fly to Baghdad and embrace Saddam like a brother, so be it. It’s damned lonely in our part of the world, and we can no longer defend our relationship [with America] to our people.

I just finished reading Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams, by Cassandra Danz, and I have to say that as far as authors go, she’s my new hero. Not only was the book amazingly informative, but her writing style is funny, and irreverent, and completely accessible. I have a proposal in for a new book (which I will hopefully discuss here next week), and I’m looking forwarding to applying the lessons on writing I learned from Ms. Danz in this upcoming effort (assuming the publisher is willing to pay me to write the book).

I haven’t been linking to Bill Gates testimony stories because for some reason I just don’t care. I haven’t had the energy to read a single story describing his testimony or the questions he’s being asked. Nobody is more surprised by this development than me.

Rogers sent along a link to Iraq Watch, a US-based anti-nuclear group that is keeping track of Iraq’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction. You don’t have to do much digging to find that there are all sorts of open sources gathering intelligence about whatever interests you and posting it on the Internet. As Robert Young Pelton pointed out in his Salon interview, the media is pervasive and well funded. The problem is keeping track of everything that’s published all around the world. Fortunately, there are topical outfits that take care of the aggregation for generalists like myself. Sometimes the results are flawed studies like professor Marc Herald’s infamous compilation of Afghan civilian casualties, or providers of grist for ideologists of a particular stripe, like MEMRI. Others, like the Federation of American Scientists and Iraq Watch, are more intriguing.

AT&T is shutting down the research lab at Cambridge University that it bought from Olivetti. Yet another sad story in the demise of corporate R&D. For all the bad things you can say about Microsoft, one of the good things the company does is pour a lot of money into pure research. They pay a lot of smart people to just sit around and think. It’s a shame to see a working lab like the Cambridge Lab get shuttered. The lab is probably best known among geeks for creating VNC.

The scuttlebutt according to Talking Points Memo is that Karen Hughes is really leaving for the reasons she says she is. He also has some juicy stuff on Ari Fleischer’s impending demise. It also seems to be the general consensus that Fleischer is both loathesome and incompetent — I’m glad I wasn’t alone in thinking that.