More shovelling yesterday. I cleaned out some of the area in front of my garage. Initially I was just going to shovel out enough space so I could set out the trash and an old dishwasher, but realized that I should clear the path for my car, so I wouldn’t end up with an ice-patch right where I need traction in order to pull into the garage. In the course of shovelling, I met a neighbor across the alley and talked to him until we’d both cooled down. Then I later met the neighbor’s son who finished clearing the area between our garages. I guess the upside of the snowfall is that it gets many of us outside at about the same time in the winter, so I won’t have to wait until spring to meet everyone who lives near me.
- Rule Change May Alter Strip-Mine Fight. The current rule prohibits mining operations within 100 feet of a stream, which prevents coal companies from strip-mining a mountaintop and dumping it all into valleys and hollers in Appalachia. The Bush administration wants to do away with the rule, which would allow mining companies to turn Appalachia into a plain, which doesn’t seem right.
- In this article by David Kopel on Gun Laws, he explains how a recently passed law requires the federal government to destroy NICS records within 24 hours, which rolls back some of the abuses implemented during the Clinton years. [instapundit]
- IBM patents method for paying open source volunteers, which sounds good at first, until you stop to wonder how anyone who isn’t Big Blue is going to pay open source programmers.
- MUDDA is the Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists, and was founded by Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno. It’s a musicians union which hopes to wrest control of music from the labels. [boing boing]
- In this interview with Linus Torvalds, he explains why SCO is
Just Too Wrong
about owning bits of Linux, comparing SCO to a rabid cornered rat. Meanwhile, SCO is offering a quarter-million dollars to find the source of the recent virus, which is set to target their servers this coming Sunday. - Dean should come clean on privacy, but that would mean admitting that he wants a national ID card which would be required to
log on to the Internet
, which would make it tough for him to position himself as the left-libertarian that’s so attractive to many of his followers. [flutterby]