Dickie's Quickies

By now you might have heard that the French have proposed interoperability between DRM songs and players. Apple and Microsoft are outraged. This blog post sums up the reason for the proposal nicely. Clip:

Can we allow a couple of vendors to establish monopolies tightly controlling their clients and excluding competition? I think that no American can wish for that. Neither Apple, nor Microsoft, nor anyone else is threatened by this law if they intend to play fairly with competitors and consumers. If Apple wants to remain a big player, it will have to innovate and continue providing exciting new products. This is a good news for consumers, who will get better, cheaper competition. And it is also a great news in the long term for Apple.

Someone really needs to build a big reference chart for Republican corruption in Washington. Laura Rozen has been doing her best reporting on the Duke Cunningham scandal that continues to spread. Co-conspirator Mitchell Wade and his partner have ties to John Doolittle, Bob Ney, Conrad Burns, and members of both the Clinton and Republican administrations and defense departments. Clip from Rozen's latest post:

The next contract MZM received was just three days later from the Defense Department's own IT contracting unit, DITCO, and while it was for only roughly half a million dollars, it was swiftly followed by two contracts for several million dollars. I believe those came from the Army National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, whose director's son was hired by MZM, one of many NGIC officials and relatives hired by the company.

When the "product's" "features" describe the following:

* highly sensitive telepathic nipple array for detecting poetic phenomena
* bionic legs for kicking CEO's, politicians, priests, soldiers and other agents of oppression and exploitation.
* whipped cream and olive array for generating Anti-Yahweh telepathic shielding

Then you know you want to see the Meat Cyborg. NSFW (who dreams this shit up?!!?)

Whiteboy DJ comes up with a Christian parody video, Baby Got Book. I still prefer Jonathon Coulton's folk remake of the original.