Journal: News & Comment

Links of interest (2006-12-28):

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Tonight my friend Simon and I are going to have dinner—including our traditional hot wings—while he's in town from his home in Victoria for the holidays. (My wife and daughters will be eating with the in-laws.)

Meantime, a bunch of links from Angela Gunn, among others, from this week:

• Best astronomy photos of 2006. I hadn't seen the space shuttle and space station silhouetted by the sun. Wow!
  
  
• Top ten Apple rumours of all time.
  
  
• How Steve Irwin and others figured out who Harriet the Tortoise was.
  
  
• "Thomas Jefferson said that knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish from the light of the first. [...] Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to have exclusive control of the use of a particular piece of knowledge, thereby creating monopoly power. Monopolies distort the economy. [...] We tolerate such restrictions in the belief that they might spur innovation, balancing costs against benefits. But the costs of restrictions can outweigh the benefits."
  
  
• "The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true."
  
  
• Joel Spolksy thinks that bribing bloggers is a bad idea.
  
  
• Microsoft is trying to patent parts of RSS. Dave Winer, who made RSS happen, thinks it's a bad idea, and I agree with him.
  
  
• Robert Scoble is the blogger invited to follow along during John Edwards's U.S. presidential campaign announcement trip. Interesting. His wife Maryam writes that, "Seriously though I am proud of my man. No matter what, he is still a goofball."
  
  
• "I think my biggest problem with night clubs is that they are full of people... who enjoy night clubs."

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