October 8, 2003

Timothy Noah of Slate.com calculates that more Californians voted yesterday for Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor than the number of Californians who saw Terminator 3. 11:36:14 PM

Having called businessman Marc Zell a right-winger The Guardian gets really nasty and calls him a "Zionist". The shame! The horror! An Israeli Jew is an Zionist, will wonders never cease? 11:30:15 PM

Bob Young, former Hamiltonian and a co-founder of the leading Linux distributor Red Hat Inc. has agreed to buy the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League. No word if the team’s uniforms will now include red fedoras.  11:25:28 PM

The staff of the electronics gadget blog Gizmodo has succeeded in getting FCC Chairman and TiVo lover Michael Powell to check it out. 11:18:42 PM

Following up on its highly disputed patent win against Microsoft over the use of plug-in technologies, one man company Eolas Technologies has filed for an injunction against Microsoft to stop it distributing copies of Internet Explorer capable of running plug-in applications in a way the Eolas patent covers. Microsoft is appealing the $521 million verdict and has unveiled methods by which it says web developers can get around this patent roadblock, including making people press gratuitous OK buttons in dialog boxes that will appear when plug-ins run and use external data. One reason for the appeal is that their is prior art that should result in this patent being thrown out. Perry Pei-Yuan Wei who invented the Viola browser and was prevented from testifying in the patent lawsuit says the his work is prior art to the Eolas Technologies patent as it was demonstrated with plugins in May 1993, over one year before Eolas Technologies filed their patent in November 1994. 11:16:28 PM