bell labs withdraws patent applications

Bell Labs is withdrawing the patent applications related to the "scandal" in which one of its researchers falsified tons of data.

the weak link...

....or one of the many at least. I thought this would get solved quickly, because of its implications, but it hasn't. A dispute of union workers at west coast ports is causing tons of damage to the US enonomy, not to mention the other economies, particularly in Asia, that are having problems over this. Some of these dock workers make more than 100,000 dollars a year in base salary, so I thought they were already a bit greedy. No one seems to care about how this affects poor nations. Goes to show how fragile "globalization" is.

the indirect slashdot effect

Today Plan B was getting a few hits a minute from a journal entry somewhere that mentions it in a ... not too flattering context, shall we say. However, this entry was from two months ago, which probably meant it had suddenly been linked from somewhere with many, many readers. I was curious. For that many hits to get to Plan B you'd need at least an order of magnitude more hits on the originating site. So I thought: "Slashdot". And lo-and-behold, even though it's not on Slashdot, there is a new posting on slashdot about Rebecca Blood's book The Weblog Handbook and the entry is mainly about disparaging the weblog handbook. And one of the first replies to the Slashdot review is a link to the "bad review" of the book, which happens to contain the link to Plan B at the end. So the people arriving at Plan B have been "filtered" three times, once through the Slashdot home page, then once through those that bother to read the comments, then those that bother to read the entire linked review. And it still delivered about 100 hits in one hour.

The "Slashdot effect" is always amazing to see in action...

1,000,000 broadband users in the UK

The UK has now officially one million broadband users. Meanwhile, here in Ireland the number hovers in the low thousands. Why? Because of the price. Getting an ADSL connection in Dublin costs 200 Euro in installation, 200 Euro for the modem, and then 110 Euro a month with a limit on transfers of 3 Gb/month after which (gasp!) you have to pay the excess transfer by the megabyte. No wonder it's not taking off. The consequences of monopolies, again.

saddam's puzzle

A New York Times Op-Ed on Saddam Hussein's contradictions and manias.

RIAA taking on KaZaA

It finally happened: the RIAA is going head to head with Sharman networks, the company responsible for KaZaA. If they do win, it will be difficult to enforce, since KaZaA seems to be set up almost as a mob facility of some sort. I mean, they can't even find the programmers, according to the article... how can it be that you are not able to find the programmers?