A reader alerts me that the domain registrar everyone loves to hate, Verisign’s Network Solutions, has cut prices on renewals. My informant says he asked NSI for a lower price but was told no way. He then started the switch-registrar process, and NSI, asking for confirmation, offered this lower ($15 a year for two years) deal.
Now you know about it, too.
The Hill: GOP threats halted GAO Cheney suit. The controversy with Cheney came to a head in December after U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, citing separation of powers, ruled that Walker lacked sufficient grounds to compel Cheney to disclose the records of a White House energy task force that he had headed.
It may seem like old history at this point, but the Bush administration’s stiffing of Congress — and the American people — on this matter set a tone that has persisted. We have no right to know what corporate influence there has been on administration policies.
The Bush crowd is secretive for good reasons. If the public understood what was going on, there would be hell to pay.
AP: Death row case raises insanity defense paradox. In the latest bizarre turn in a nearly 25-year-old death row case, a federal appeals court ruled that a mentally ill inmate can be put to death even though he would be too insane to qualify for execution without his medication.
Register: MS patents .Everything. Historically Microsoft has not used patents to protect its business, preferring to tinker with the APIs themselves. Quite explicitly, as Brad Silverberg told Andrew Schulman in 1993: if Microsoft stops “evolving” the APIs they become commoditized. This policy, we can assume, is changing.
(UPDATED)Ominous, even though this is just an application, not a final issuing of the patent (though the current U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is prone to issuing absurdly expansive patents). And it makes you wonder if Miguel and his compatriots at the Mono project got snookered when they based their framework on .Net.
Of course, as you may have noticed in recent weeks, .Net has been disappearing from sight. It’s all just Windows again — and it probably always ways just Windows.
Now that the U.S. government no longer enforces antitrust laws in Microsoft-related businesses, the company is free to leverage its Windows monopoly without any restraint. Some observers always thought .Net — with its supposed openness and interoperability — was a con. I thought that was a cynical view. I seem to have been naive, a foolish move when it comes to guaging the intentions of Microsoft.
(NOTE: Thanks to reader Jim Taylor who pointed out that this was an application, not a final patent.)
Cnet: Office for Macs to get Exchange update. The update will give Mac customers access to corporate calendar and contact information stored on a server running the software giant’s Exchange software.
This is long overdue, but for many people it will be good news.
I’ve been puzzled that Microsoft was willing to see Mac users migrate away from Exchange. Entourage remains the best OS X mail/calendar/address-book client I’ve found, and by quite a margin. Had it supported Exchange fully, rather than only by IMAP e-mail and nothing else, I wouldn’t have been so inclined to try other solutions.
Now I’m not sure I even want to reconnect to Exchange. Having gotten out of that lock-in, I’m pretty happy.
Incidentally, one of the greatest virtues in unplugging from the Exchange calendar is that when someone wants you to go to a meeting, they have to actually call you first. That leads to fewer meetings…
Mercury News: California State Official Backs Net Tax. “I think the Internet ought to be taxed like every other part of the economy,” (Steve) Westly, a former Internet executive, told about 400 leaders at a San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
This is overdue. The free ride Internet retailers get has been working to the disadvantage of Main Street businesses for years, and the situation was getting more unfair all the time.
What prompted the official change of heart — politicians who once hated Net sales taxes now favoring them — is the change in states’ fiscal conditions. There hasn’t been such a revenue shortfall in many years, and states everywhere are in a panic about how to supply needed services. Hence the new appreciation for a Net sales tax.
No one likes to pay taxes, and sales taxes are especially regressive. But as long as we’re going to have them, let’s apply them consistently.
Chris Gulker: “We’re talking here. …I do believe that the global network and easy-to-use Weblog tools, RSS feeds etc. have fundamentally changed authorship. It has been democratized, and pushed down from the small, theoretically-highly-expert, professional cadre that were the norm in broadcast media to include a wider group of both amateur and professional authors who are the norm in peer networks like Weblog communities.Comments
I’ve been listening to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council this morning. He is making a persuasive case that a) Iraq does have the kinds of weapons it claims not to have; b) is doing its best to deceive the inspectors; c) is a criminal state; and d) will not change until Saddam Hussein is out of power.
Powell seems to be leaving some tiny wiggle room for Iraq to comply with the Security Council’s resolutions. But it all sounds futile; I think Bush decided a long time ago to invade.
The other members of the council are responding, and it’s pretty obvious that the major powers — Russia and China — are nowhere near ready to see the U.S. go to war over this. (Britain is, and has been for some time.) They want to do more inspections, and they’re clear enough that Iraq hasn’t been living up to what the world has been demanding in the way of cooperation.
