Bruce Perens: A Big Change for Open Source

"An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux. The man who prompted that decision could be described as the worst enemy a Free Software project could have. This is the story of how our community was able to benefit from that enemy."

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Now that a reasonably high court in the U.S. has made such a finding, Open Source developers are sure that they aren't restricted to the legal penalties against people who violate contracts, which are generally just the amount of money lost, but can pursue the far greater penalties against copyright infringers. So, all of the tools that publishers, movie studios, and record companies have managed to win from a too-willing Congress over the past century are suddenly available to the Free Software developer to enforce their licenses.

Gambling Barney Frank Bankrupts Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac

"When the Democrats took over the House of Representatives and the Senate back in January of 2007, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at an all-time high of 12,400 and gas prices hovered around $2.15 per gallon. The Republican-led Congress of the previous 4-years had left a strong-economy in the hands of Socialist Democrats."

Wells Fargo acquiring Wachovia for $15.1 billion: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

"While Wells Fargo has logged three straight quarters of profit declines, the bank has been weathering one of the nation's worst credit crises much better than most of its competitors, in part because it had less exposure to the subprime mortgages whose failure undermined the financial sector.

That means it hasn't been forced to take the huge number of write-downs that other banks have needed. Under Stumpf the bank also has continued raising its dividend at a time when many other financial institutions are slashing theirs to preserve capital."

Google Docs - Wikipedia Vandal Study - US Senate

Study of vandalism of US Senator entries in Wikipedia, presented as a Google Docs spreadsheet.

Ifill says: "Let them eat pudding!"

'I've got a pretty long track record covering politics and news, so I'm not particularly worried that one-day blog chatter is going to destroy my reputation,' Ifill said. 'The proof is in the pudding. They can watch the debate tomorrow night and make their own decisions about whether or not I've done my job.'

Official Google Blog: Saving electricity one data center at a time

"The graph below [follow link] shows what we've achieved: our data centers use considerably less energy for the servers themselves, and much less energy for cooling, than a typical data center. We achieved this milestone by significantly reducing the amount of energy needed for the data center facility overhead. Specifically, Google-designed data centers use nearly five times less energy than conventional facilities to feed and cool the computers inside. Our engineers worked hard to optimize every element in the data center, from the chip to the cooling tower."

Microsoft will soon release 'Windows Cloud' OS, Ballmer says

Best comment from Slashdot:

MS Cloud computing and a fix for people not purchasing MS Office and Windows X+1 every two years. A carrot out there with "light" capability to keep you interested and to generate a more consistant revenue stream. This product is not the answer or a solution to a computing problem that people have, it is an answer to a financial problem that MS has.

ABC News: Candidates Leave Campaign Trail, Head to DC for Bailout Vote

He did not identify the insurance company, and later in the day Reid spokesman Jim Manley said the senator was speaking broadly and not referring to anything specific.

'[Majority Fuckwit] Senator Reid [piss be upon him] is not personally aware of any particular company being on the verge of bankruptcy,' Manley wrote in an e-mail to ABCNews.com. 'Rather, his comments [made up lies] were meant to refer to the conditions in the financial sector [caused by Democratic meddling] generally. He regrets any confusion his [retarded] comments may have caused.'

Apple - Support - Discussions - "Your network settings have been changed..."

Rather than fix a problem or even acknowledge it, Apple lets users experiment with which system files to erase!

Picture our brainwashed future

Before disabling comments and marking all negative comments as "spam" the poster of this video had this to say (emphasis mine):

Because I am a musician, I believe in the power of music to concretely change the collective consciousness, to strengthen and broaden our communal idea of who we are as families, nations and as citizens of the planet. Our children are the most powerful reason for us to come together.

I don't know whether to pity or fear the citizens of California.

Commenter Of The Day: macbeach

I win so few "awards" I have to make the best of what I can get.

WindPower articles

"The ONLY legitimate reason industrial wind power should exist today is for it to live up to its promoter’s assurances that it will meaningfully help reduce greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. CO2). However, in almost all cases, wind power development is instead sold to a community based on the financial incentives offered by the developers."

Virginia High Court Wrong About IP Addresses

"Maybe I'm projecting my thoughts too much on the rest of the populance, but I know very few people my age (~30 years old) who have even started building a family, and that's quite frankly, distressing. The economy isn't everything. We will survive. The crash will happen. Let it happen swiftly and let the recovery happen in the near term."

I don't know what this has to do with the subject at hand, but I agree with you to some extent. I don't agree that it has to do with people addicted to their jobs, although there are certainly people who are. There are also people addicted to the Internet, or addicted to TV viewing or going to those bars you mentioned. If the people who promote the abandonment of religion (and that would be the majority here on Slashdot) can't find a substitute better than just sitting all day hitting refresh on your browser, I don't think there is much hope for things improving.

I'm not saying necessarily that religion is the answer (although it certainly is an answer). But I see few alternatives presenting themselves. Marx said that The State would for a while become our religion, and I don't care what anyone here [Slashdot] claims, we are going down the same path as the Soviet Union, only without a bloody revolution. Der Spiegel is today celebrating the death of capitalism and American dominance, except we haven't been practicing capitalism since the 1800s. Popular belief among American "intelligentsia" is that we now have the power to control every aspect of our society and I foresee that after the next election any failure of such control will simply engender a feeling that the controls weren't strict enough. That's what I'm seeing every day in the mainstream media.

That control, ever more sophisticated, will soon, even if it hasn't already, make anonymity impossible. The novel 1984 may have been a failure in terms of the timing, but I don't think it is far off the mark in terms of where we are going, and the direction as well as end-point to me seems fairly inevitable.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Fact Check: Did McCain warn about Fannie, Freddie 2 years ago? « - Blogs from CNN.com

"The Verdict: True. While it's impossible to know what the impact of his legislation would have been, the ad accurately describes McCain's stance and comments."

It must have killed some people at CNN to give this an nuance-free "true".

Maybe they figure the election is already so much in the bag for Obama that it no longer matters.

Pelosi paid husband with PAC funds

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed nearly $100,000 from her political action committee to her husband's real estate and investment firm over the past decade, a practice of paying a spouse with political donations that she supported banning last year."