rc3.org

Slate has a photo essay on various displays of the Ten Commandments on public grounds and discusses the constitutionality of each. The most interesting thing I learned is that the big Fraternal Order of the Eagles Ten Commandments monuments were paid for in part by Cecil B DeMille to market his commandments movie.

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Charles Miller wrote an item item today about AOL’s patent for instant messaging (courtesy of ICQ). In it he says he thinks IM is patentable because it was something completely new and innovative. The problem is, if it is patentable, ICQ should not be the one with the patent. Back in 1995, I worked for [...]

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I’ve migrated all of the content on this site to a Creative Commons license. I went for the license that requires attribution, noncommercial use only, and that anyone who uses the content agree to share their work as well. Seems fair to me. If you’re using the HTML provided by Creative Commons and you want it [...]

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The White House has ordered the deployment of a missle defense system, despite the fact that, you know, it doesn’t work. Actually, it’s worked 62.5% of the time in controlled tests; who knows what kind of success rate that would lead to if it ever had to be used. As anyone who has followed [...]

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You know what makes it obvious that the Democratic party really is lost in the wilderness? The fact that 41% of Americans think an unreconstructed panderer (before to racists and now to anybody willing to listen) and obvious moron like Trent Lott is well suited to serve as Senate majority leader. Shouldn’t the other [...]

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ElcomSoft was found not guilty of violating the DMCA. Ha ha ha. The result for the teen author of DeCSS in Norway was less pleasant.

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Now that Wi-Fi is pretty much taking over the world, the military is complaining that it interferes with some types of military radar and that changes should be made to accommodate the military’s requirements. Unfortunately, it’s too late. There are already millions of Wi-Fi devices that have been deployed, and there are going to [...]

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This post at Textism makes me glad I never sent Dean Allen that email telling him how much he looks like Dubya (see picture). One day I went as far as shuffling through the pictures of Dubya at Yahoo News to see if I could find one with a particularly uncanny resemblance to send along [...]

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The Creative Commons site has launched, along with some interesting licenses you can apply to your creative works. Of course you can write any license you want for the work you do, but the availability of some standard licenses for software was a great catalyst for the explosion of open source software, and hopefully these [...]

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Just riffing here on something somebody said:

Andy Oliver is whipping up a froth about the JCP. One thing I rarely see discussed by the proponents of open sourcing Java is how to stop Microsoft from highjacking Java. If Java was open sourced, then Microsoft would pick it up, change it in incompatible ways, and then [...]

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