I made it home in one piece. I’ve got a bunch of catching up to do, with pictures from the weekend, and writing from the past three days, but I’ve also got a huge backlog of links, so I’ll do a Sunday evening post to clear those out before doing the weekend recap. Lots of links for your Monday morning, since I probably won’t get the weekend update done until later in the day.
- a brief history of the spud The Burbank Russett (the gold standard of tubers) owes much to the original cultivators of the potato, the Aymara Indians of Peru [Reed, via Blog for Thought]
- Minneapolis approves citywide 2 a.m. bar closings–Looks like bars in Minneapolis will have the option of staying open until 2 AM starting July 1st. [jim]
- Clear Sky Clock Clever meterologists in Canada offer projections on cloud cover, indicating whether the sky will be clear on a particular day in St Paul, MN and over 1400 other locations. [reed]
- Microsoft to ‘Netscapize’ Google? If you are a web site operator and of the mind that Microsoft needs to be hobbled in the coming Google/MSN/Yahoo search engine war, then consider denying the MSNBOT access to your content via /robots.txt. [reed] [or just ignore it, like I do. Information wants to be free. Even for Microsoft. -Dave]
- Aaron Swartz explains Google AdSense.
- Congress Finds Rare Unity in Spam, to a Point. They all hate it, but they’re being paid by receiving contributions from advertisers, so they don’t want to just ban it.
- Man accused of spamming by Microsoft protests innocence, and SpamHaus seems to back him up, but he still may have to spend five figures to defend himself.
- Putting All Your E-Mail in One Basket, namely your work email account, is a risky business. It’s why I got a personal email account on eWorld back when that debuted, and have maintained separate personal and business email accounts ever since (though the line blurs sometimes because I run my own business).
- Bill Aims to Cut Computer Clutter by mandating an additional fee on new computer purchases to cover the cost of disposal.
- rms explains why the SCO smear campaign can’t defeat GNU community.
- Is the Penguin on Thin Ice? Probably not. In fact, it may be SCO that’s going to get an unpleasant surprise once they get to court.
- Putting open source on trial asks the question,
What if SCO is right?
[scripting] - A Mathematician Crunches the Supreme Court’s Numbers determining that the current court has the equivalent of 4.68 ideal (that is completely independent) justices. It’s not always the same justices who ally together, but all of them seem to make decisions based at least in part on other justices’ decisions.
- How Amazon Opens Up and Cleans Up. They’ve given up some control of their data by exposing it via web APIs, but they’re getting lots of extra business out of the deal. Plus they’re allowing third parties to get some income in exchange for developing cool applications that Amazon wouldn’t have time to get to.
- Cory’s talking about how T-Mobile drives a nail into the Sidekick’s coffin. I don’t think it’s quite that bad, but I’d sure like to see a carrier other than T-Mobile that supported the SideKick. T-Mobile’s coverage is spotty in Minnesota (and wasn’t great in San Francisco or Detroit), and their customer service often leaves something to be desired (like maybe service). [boing boing]
- Some shyness may be inherited, study suggests. Kids who are shy will grow up to be adults who have signs of shyness (even if they’ve learned to be more outgoing) that are visible on the physical level.