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FreeBSD 4.0 is released. As soon as Walnut Creek CDROM burns the CDs, I’m all over it. Google has used the Netscape Open Directory to add categorized listings to their site. Their implementation has a cool added feature – ranking of the sites based on the number of incoming links. Apple had a big presence at the Game Developer’s Conference, indicating that they really are serious about making a dent in the games market. For the longest time, Apple didn’t get how crucial games are to the platform at all. Their new attitude toward games shows that maybe they really do understand how crucial they are to home users. ...

Last night I watched Paradise Lost 2: Revelations on HBO. It was a followup to the powerful documentary that covered the case of three teenage kids who were convicted of the murder of three 8 year old boys about 7 years ago. After watching the second installment and parts of the first installment, I’m left with a truly disturbing portrait of the criminal justice system in small town America. The three teenagers were convicted (one is sentenced to death) based upon a coerced confession given by a 16 year old boy with an IQ of 72 (after 12 hours of questioning without his lawyer present) and the fact that they liked to wear black. For updated information, check out this Web site about the “West Memphis Three”. (By the way, I really appreciate the fact that HBO continues to fund high quality documentaries. They alone are worth HBO’s monthly fee.) ...

ZDNet seems to have finally picked up the UCITA story. They’re running a multi-story package that includes an interview with RMS. I have only one thing to say about the Blogger redesign – nice color scheme. I was always envious of those Web logs that displayed their archive in a nifty calendar format where you can select a day and see the entries for that date. I then remembered that when you know Perl, envy is unwarranted. Thus, the new rc3.org Archive. (The new format also provides a nice picture of how frequently this site is updated.) ...

Scott Rosenberg takes on the Verisign/Network Solutions merger in his latest column. He points out that the domain name business could very well be a business built on sand, although he cites in support of that argument a future time when there will be many top level domains (other than .com, .net, and .edu). I think that there’s a very good chance that we’ll never see more TLDs that don’t end in country codes, because corporate America doesn’t want to have to deal with them. (Companies like McDonalds don’t want to have to register hundreds of instances of mcdonalds.whatever.) The infrastructure to add TLDs has been in place for ages, and politics has stalled their addition. I don’t see that changing soon. ...

You know, I don’t get out much, so I’m sometimes surprised at how much you have to pay to be entertained these days. For example, yesterday I bought a couple of hockey tickets. Two tickets in the nosebleed section … 44 dollars. Ticketmaster “convenience charge” … 10 dollars. “Processing fee” … 2 dollars. The feeling that the already exorbitant ticket price was really a bait and switch … priceless. (I got a much better deal on a mini package of minor league baseball tickets. Two sets of tickets to 7 games in the best seats you can get for 80 bucks.) ...

Weblog Nation is a daily digest of the best Weblog posts found by Jesse James Garrett. I like it (and not just because one of my updates from yesterday is featured). Walnut Creek CD-ROM (the corporate sponsor of everyone’s favorite server operating system – FreeBSD) is merging with BSDI. The really good news is that the codebases for BSD/OS (the primary product of BSDI) and FreeBSD will be merging, creating the new FreeBSD. The commercial components of BSD/OS will be held back, and the new company will sell FreeBSD combined with those commercial components as the new BSD/OS. This is great news for BSD fans! Daemon News has the story. ...

Researchers are working on a way to eliminate broken hyperlinks. It looks like a pretty cool method, but it still won’t fix my biggest problem with broken links, which is newspapers that rotate their stories every few days. For example, there are tons of great stories in the New York Times, but I avoid linking to them because they take most of them down after one day. The Washington Post keeps them for two weeks, still not enough in my opinion. On the other hand CNN and Salon keep their stories around forever. ...

Correction: the other day I wondered why Texas was one of the plaintiffs in the states’ antitrust suit against if George Bush, Jr. was opposed to the litigation. In fact, Texas is not one of the plaintiffs in the suit. Before the suit was filed, the Texas Attorney General was investigating Microsoft, but they did not agree to participate in the suit along with the other states. rc3.org Daily regrets the error. ...

Salon has an article about business model patents today that presents both sides of the debate pretty well. I think that the appropriate test is whether an idea is innovative enough that the inventor deserves a monopoly on that idea for the duration of the patent. Obviously, in some cases the answer is yes. In the case of the affiliate patent, I think the answer is clearly no. Ars Digita is giving a Ferrari to anyone who refers 10 new employees to the company. I assume you have to work there to get in on the deal, and if I were living in the Boston area I’d apply. ...

It seems UCITA actually passed in Virginia on Valentine’s Day, and that it hasn’t made the news in many places. Pathetic. Tara Calishain did dig up these stories: Wired News (just a blurb): Software Rights Stripped in VA The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot: Software agreements may get teeth of law from Assembly The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot: What UCITA would do ComputerWorld: State Passes User-Opposed Software Law Microsoft is trying to recruit employees in San Francisco with an ad campaign that wallpapers an entire subway station. I think that if I had to walk through a giant advertisement for Microsoft to get to work every day, I’d find a different train to take or start driving. ...