It's not so much that the sky is falling as that things are falling out of it.

Normally I don't agree with Steve Guttenberg. The author of the audiophiliac, part of the CNet blog network, is a class-A audiophile and routinely rails against mp3s, iPods, indeed pretty much every digital music device and standard because it just doesn't sound as good a vinyl. The fact that it is portable, cheap, and convenient just can't seem to make up for even the slightest hint of compression or D/A conversion artifacts. If Guttenberg had his way, we'd all be taking out second mortgages to fit out our homes with $100 000+ stereos complete with tube amps and 8-foot-tall speakers. As nice as that is, that's too much of a financial hit for most of us and Guttenberg doesn't seem to suggest any solutions for those of us who like our music on the go.

One thing I do agree with Guttenberg on is that satellite radio sounds like crap. I've had a Sirius Sportster 4 for over a year now and while I love offerings like Left of Center, Classic Vinyl (weep, ye audiophiles) and the BBC World Service (sans short wave), the sound quality is piss poor. Basically the service has more channels than the available bandwidth can comfortably accommodate, and the compression required does a number on the sound quality. Since Sirius prides itself on variety, as evidenced by its television commercials, I can't see them scrapping channels to improve the quality at least on the 60 music channels. This is the tricky part of satellite communications is that you put up your satellites and you're stuck with that equipment for 10 years or more. We can only hope that either the next generation of satellites are better or that the merger with XM goes through and Sirius uses the extra bandwidth to allow for less compression.

Having said that, one thing that the three operational Sirius and to XM satellites are not doing is falling out of the sky. It seems a US spy satellite was DOA after launch and is now coming down in late February or early March. Although it is notoriously difficult to predict such things due to the quirky dynamics of the upper atmosphere, there is a chance that it will literally come home for a rest, crashing in the continental US. This flying debris brought to you by USAF Space Command. Enjoy!

Damn You Gary Bettman! Also, the Fox Network and Pres. Bush mk2

It's a snowy, miserable evening in Saint John and there is officially nothing on TV. The NHL in its [sic] wisdom decided to put the All-Star game on the weekend between the NFL's conference championships and the Superbowl, so there was no football and only one hockey game all weekend, and it was basically an exhibition game. Tonight there are no games while the All-Stars travel home.

My Monday night guilty pleasure (courtesy of Fox, who else), Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles is preempted tonight so the President Bush (the younger) can deliver his final (hooray!) State of the Union Address. So those of you who care can get it straight from the horse's mouth on why the American economy is in the tank while more soldiers get to go get shot up in Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan, etc., etc. Really, the State of the Union is this, to quote Futurama: "We're boned." See, I just saved you an hour plus of Bush's fake Texas accent.

I did see one amusing story in Ars Technica about the FCC going after 50 ABC affiliates over a 2003 airing of NYPD Blue (seriously, is this show even on any more? What took so long?) over a bare male butt. It seems that the FCC considers the butt a 'sexual organ' and therefore too hot for prime time. I'll leave those of you who actually know some anatomy to puzzle out why they'd think that. Sorry fellas, all the sexual organs are on the other side. We're talking a secondary sex characteristic at best.

Gaza Strippers Bust Out, NASA has a pogo problem, and the RIAA hates college students most of all.

As you may have heard, Gaza has been blocked off by the Israeli army after a series of ramshackle rockets were launched into Israel proper. Its gone on long enough now that the Gaza strip is short on pretty much everything. What to do? Blast your way into Egypt, apparently. No less than 17 holes where blown in the seven miles of wall separating the Gaza strip from Egypt (it seems that the Palestinians had lots of explosives, at least) and thousands of people streamed into Egypt to buy food and supplies. Now, why get Egypt involved in what was purely a Palestinian-Israeli problem? Very simple. The Egyptian border guards attempted to keep order but otherwise did nothing when the wall was blown up. Have you tried blowing up an Israeli Army checkpoint lately? Make sure your will is up to date.

It turns out that NASA's next-gen moon rocket, the Ares, may have a design flaw that would cause it to shake violently and possibly break up during liftoff. It seems that NASA has not quite found a way around Pogo, a problem caused by oscillating fuel flow to the engines that caused some spectacular failures in the 1950s and 60s and even cropped up in a couple of Apollo missions. The good news is that the problem was caught during the design stage and NASA hopes to have a solution by March.

The MPAA has admitted that their statistics relating to illegal downloads on campus are out by a factor of 3... yep, the loss of revenue due to illegal downloading by college students is not 44 percent of the total as previously claimed, but 15 percent. Meaning that turning college IT admins into copyright cops as the RIAA has already tried to do would be a drop in the bucket in terms of solving the piracy problem. Its now being suggested that college student have been specifically pursued because they are easy and convenient targets. That's thinking like a lawyer.

I got love for you, if you were born in the '80s

Two words: Giant Rat

I'd like to start off today with a public service announcement. Crave UK is reporting that some Dell laptops featuring aluminum casings, namely the XPS M1330 and XPS M1530 come with a faulty AC power adapter that is not grounded properly. Combined with the metal case, this can result in repeated electric shocks ranging for a slight tingle to a rather alarming jolt. Dell's response has been a complete snow job, they point out that the current produced is not enough to be dangerous, however I find that a pretty poor response on their part. Just because it's not dangerous doesn't mean that it not startling or at least annoying. We've already had massive recalls on exploding lithium-ion batteries; can we please get a laptop power supply that is constructed properly? Oi.

Dell's customer service reps where outclassed this week by the discovery of an even bigger rat, this time a fossil skull discovered in Uruguay. Beat that segway! Anyway, your garden variety rat (the most common species being the brown rat Rattus norvegicus or the black rat of plague fame, R. rattus) usually tip the scales at 300 grams for females and up to 500 grams for males, and are about 5 inches in length (not including the tail) when walking (they can stretch quite a bit). The capybara, the largest living rodent, comes in at 65 kg and 130 cm long. The new discovery, according to the BBC news, belonged to an animal 300 cm long and weighing close to a tonne.

Finally, a Canadian law professor has offered an 8-point copyright reform plan offering a constructive alternative to a controversial bill much like the badly botched Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US. It'll probably never see the light of day, but it is refreshing to hear a plan with some sanity and some idea that consumers ought not to be treated as criminals. Now if only we can get the RIAA to vanish in a puff of logic...

Police State or 'Cyberapocalypse' - the culture of paranoia gets even stranger.

Sometimes those of us living north of the 49th look to the south and shake our heads. We live in paranoid times, the myth of Western invincibility shattered forever by 9/11. It certainly doesn't improve the situation when the head of the National Security Agency goes completely off his trolly. And how...

Michael McConnell proposed in an article in the New Yorker that the NSA needs to start monitoring all US internet traffic to prevent a massive attack on the country's data infrastructure worse than the most dire Y2K predictions. Wow. So the trade off of personal freedoms for (the illusion of) security now becomes an irrevocable choice between living in a police state or facing a post-apocalyptic future. How can anyone in a supposedly democratic country even propose such as thing and be taken the least bit seriously?

Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica gives us the voice of reason, pointing out that you should at least need a warrant to monitor every single bit of even one users internet traffic.

Now, Canada being so close to the US I wouldn't be surprised if much of our internet traffic goes to or at least through the US. Listen folks, your government doesn't even have the right to to this to you, let alone citizens of other countries. I hope that you won't go quietly, and we Canadian have no interest in being dragged down with you.

The world according to Apple

Apple CEO Steve Jobs threw back the curtains on the latest addition to the temple of Mac Tuesday. You can read a blow-by-blow account of the keynote here and here.

Here's my take on the four pillars of fruity goodness this year.

1. The Macbook Air. Drool... this is my next laptop. Apple had to be creative to make this thing as thin as it is. They even shrunk the CPU packaging to make the 1.6 and 1.8 MHz Intel Core 2 Duo take up a bare minimum of space. The hard drive is either an 80 GB 1.8 inch model (much like that in the iPod Classic) or a 64 GB solid state version (which costs a pretty penny, that version of the Macbook Air costs over a grand more). The keyboard is full size, unlike many other micro laptops, and the screen is 13.3 inches.

Some things had to go entirely, namely the optical drive. People have been flipping out about this, but to me using a peripheral is not the end of the world, I rarely use the optical drive as is, and the thickness of optical drives is a major factor in why conventional laptops haven't been getting any thinner.

Another popular bitching point is the lack of an ethernet port for wired internet connectivity. Personally, going portable and sans wires is the whole point of buying a laptop. I suppose it depends on how reliable your wireless is, if you've got to deal with a buggy router it might be a problem, but that is a router issue not a problem with the laptop. In case you're wondering, the Air uses 802.11n draft 2.0 (will somebody call the IEEE and tell them to finalize this standard already?). Its backwards compatible with a/b/g and even has Bluetooth.

This is the best looking laptop I have ever seen. Silver seems to be the order of the day, which is easy because the case is made of aluminum anyway, although there are a couple of photos on the Apple website that hint at a black version. The screen is glass and lacks the lead and cadmium usually found in displays, and the motherboard is PCP free.

Surprisingly, the Air is affordable, $1 799 in the US, 1 899 Canadian for the 80 GB, 1.6 MHz version. And the pulling it out of the envelope stunt? Genius.

2. Time Capsule: This is actually one of the more interesting announcements, despite Tom and Molly of Buzz Out Loud lukewarm reaction of "meh, it's a network attached hard drive." But it actually is a pretty good product design, or rather a combination of products. Not only is it network attached storage (500 or 1000 GB worth), it is also a wireless-n router. At $329 Canadian for the 500 GB version, it is actually cheaper than buying most combinations of a NAS drive and a wireless-n router separately. It even makes the wireless backup for Macs running Leopard actually work. For Windows types out there, it also works for XP SP2 and Vista (no auto back-up, of course). The Time Capsule is pretty much a complete home network in a box, with 3 ethernet ports and a USB port to easily share your printer or add even more storage. Sign me up for this one, too.

3. iTunes 7.6 and the (somewhat) new Apple TV: well, the Apple TV still does not do the DVR thing, but the software update does make it an independent set-top box rather than an accessory. Apple TV can now make purchases directly from iTunes, including the new rental service (which is based on a business model so weird it could only be Apple, but anyway), limited flash support, and photos from Flickr (the demo gremlins got Jobs here). The price even dropped $70 to sweeten the deal. People who already own one can get the upgraded software free. I'm still holding out for a DVR-enabled version. Archos beat Apple to the punch here with their TV+.

4. iPod Touch and iPhone Upgrades: The Touch will get a minor software facelift, although due to an apparent accounting glitch the upgrade will cost $20 for existing Touches. Yeah, stop crying, early adopters. You clearly have lots more disposable income than the rest of us. The iPhone gets a few tweaks including cell-tower triangulation location-finding (the poor man's GPS). Jobs points to this as an example of how the iPhone is not standing still. Yeah, well, its been standing perfectly still in Canada for the last 6 months, so I can't really get excited one way or the other.

So while this year's keynote didn't get everybody excited, there were some solid products to show off and I'm already saving up for my Time Capsule and Macbook Air. Incidentally, the investors didn't like it, Apple's stock is way down. There's just no pleasing some people.

Strange, but true.

The BBC reports that a luxury hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan was attacked by a suicide bomber. I thought about it for a few seconds, and what came to the top of my mind was "what? Kabul has a luxury hotel?" Maybe they bombed it for its mocking presence over their collapsing hovels.

In things-no-reasonable-person-would-do news, people attending a funeral in Corner Brook, Newfoundland found that they had been robbed. The thieves broke into the church's basement where the coats, purses, etc, were being kept. If you idiots get struck by lightning, don't come crying to me.

Update: CBC now reports that the stolen items were the deceased's wallet and the widow's purse. You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch, your hearts an empty hole...

Some things are staying the same on what's been a bit of a strange news day. The EU is going after Microsoft again about the integration of Internet Exploder with Windoze and general attempts to keep out third-party software makers. While you'll probably never hear me defend Microsoft, they have done pretty well in ignoring previous EU rulings, so I hold out little hope that this latest spate of European crankiness will do any damage to the MicroMonolith. Sigh.

Jumping tigers, ownership madness, Intel gets NYAGed

A recent escape of a tiger at a zoo in California despite a 15-foot high wall and a mote has raised the question of just how high a tiger can jump. National Geographic takes a stab at the question in a recent story on its website, reporting a case in India where a tiger took three fingers off a man riding on elephant-back. The article unfortunately contains a typo stating that 12 feet is about 4 kilometers rather than 4 meters (which is about right).

It seems that Ed Stelmach is defending his sicking lawyers on an Alberta university student (see the full story a couple of posts ago) over the rights to the domain edstelmach.ca by telling the CBC:

"I'm sure the public, those that are really interested in this, find it upsetting. Obviously the public knows that a name is a name, it's your name, it's your property."

Wow. Hellloooo culture of ownership. What happens if you have a really common name? Does Bob White of Vancouver have exclusive rights to bobwhite.ca, or does that belong to Bob White of Thunder Bay? What about Bob White of Halifax? I can't wait to see someone try to sue over that.

Now Mr. Stelmach might have had an easier go of it if he had just set a meeting with Dave Cournoyer, who by the way finds the whole situation is "bizarre and ridiculous", but since Stelmach sent in the lawyers first and asked questions later, I don't see this settling out of court.

In corporations behaving badly news, Intel is under investigation by the New York Attorney General's (NYAG) office over anti-trust concerns regarding its rivalry with AMD. The accusations are that (a) Intel sold CPUs at a lower price to manufacturers who use them exclusively (illegal), (b) that Intel tried to cut AMD off from certian key distribution channels (also illegal), and (c) that Intel offered financial incentives to keep batches of AMD-based systems from leaving the factory. Intel denies doing any such thing, and really, I think they wouldn't have to.

AMD has been in trouble with the technical aspects of it manufacuring business; as Ars Technica notes, the transition to 65 nanometer-scale processors (which ultimately resulted in the Anthlon 64) was very rough indeed and Intel was able to beat AMD to the 45 nanometer punch by months. AMD has also yet to roll out its first quad-core chip.

Sir Edmund Hillary (20 July 1919 - 11 January 2008)

There was a man, I don't recall his name, who was an old man when my father was in his teens. He often liked to say "Well, there's people dyin' today who were never dyin' before." It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in there somewhere is a fundamental truth.

Sir Edmund Hillary died today in Auckland, New Zealand after suffering a heart attack. He was 88, a veteran of the Second World War, and best known for being the first to summit Mount Everest, along with Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide who passed away in 1986. Hillary was knighted for scaling Everest and went on to reach the south pole. He founded the Himalayan Trust, a charity devoted to helping the Sherpa people which Hillary devoted much of the later part of his life to. He was also the first New Zealander to appear on a bank note (5 NZD) during his lifetime.

Its very rare today to be able to talk to someone who was the first to any place, when travel is really easier than any point in our history. That access to first-hand experience is now a little rarer, and we are all poorer for it.

Old men, guns, and glowing pigs: no good can come of this.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is planning to prop up France's national public TV networks by taxing the internet and cell phone services. By doing this, he hopes to make public TV commercial free. But seriously, in this day and age, don't most people get more use out of their broadband connection than their TV? I know I do. The cell phone part is okay since it will probably save medical expenses for all those tools that yak and drive.

In other news involving politicians, Alberta Premier (American translation: Governor) Ed Stelmach wants his name back. You see, it seems that a university student and blogger by the name of Dave Cournoyer registered the domain edstelmach.ca last April (it actually leads here). Stelmach's people found out about it last month and are now suing Cournoyer, which seeing as how he's a student is like trying to get blood from a stone. Still, I would have liked to be a fly on the wall in the Premier's office when they found out. "What? What do you mean anybody can register any available internet address for twenty bucks a year? When did we give people permission to do that?" Unfortunately, while registration follows a you snooze, you lose model; lawsuits have generally found in favour of the original owner of the name (or trademark), witness oreo.com.

One more story involving a politician (I promise this is the last one). Wired did something good today, posting a video of Republican candidate Bill Huckabee saying that his opinion on science and technology issues is not important, including the 'debate' about evolution (note: in every other industrialized country evolution is a done deal and not the subject of active debate). It seems Huckabee just doesn't think that such issues crack the top ten. That sound you hear is the heads of all the R&D people, engineers, and teachers exploding at once. I would hope that whoever does get elected to be the next President of the United States of America at least realizes that millions of American citizens work in Science and Tech related jobs and will be asking him/her these sorts of questions, so they had better become important in a hurry.

In science news, the Chinese have done it again. Last month it was a glow in the dark cat, this time it a glow in the dark pig. What is with the Chinese and the freakin' glow in the dark animal? For our next trick, a monkey with four asses.

OLPC is not taking the break-up with Intel well at all. CEO Nicholas Negroponte now says that Intel repeatedly and deliberately sabotaged OLPC's distribution deals to make way for its own Classmate PC. That hurts, Nick, that hurts.

And finally, those of you who thought the Wii Zapper was a bit cheap and gimmicky can now go for a more realistic option with these models from CTA Digital. Just don't walk around in public with the shotgun.

Wired: Irresponsible Jounalism at its Finest

Wired's Epicentre blog published a story today entitled "Angry Shareholders Want CNET Board Shakeup" in an attempt to say that CNET consists of a bunch of screw-ups, their shareholders are mad as hell and they're not gonna take it anymore! Well, that's the point author Betsy Schiffman was trying to make, even if it's not held up by the rest of the article. I'm a big fan of CNET, and I'll tell you that up front. So right off the bat I've avoided one of Shiffman's biggest mistakes by burying the full disclosure more than halfway down the page, probably hoping that you won't read that far.

The posting says that two holding companies which own large chunks of CNet stock (NYSE: CNET) are trying to make changes in the number of directors that would give them majority control.

Schiffman then goes on to say that the reason for this shakeup is that the stock "has gone nowhere but down" and that this is "CNET's real crime." Oh for crying out loud! Time for some debunking.

First, a falling stock price or a hostile takeover bid are not unusual. Such things are regular features of any capitalist economy. And in no way is a falling stock price a crime, please buy yourself a dictionary.

Shiffman's case for the falling stock price? By comparing the current price of a little over $8 to the all-time high of about $80 in 1999. That's right! Newsflash! Stock in most tech companies was worth way more before the bubble burst! Everyone in the technology sector lost when the bubble burst, even mighty Microsoft saw its stock price cut in half. And actually, CNET's share price has been more or less flat since mid 2006 after a slight but sustained upward trend. Its all on Google Finance, look it up.

While a stagnant stock price is not a good thing, and would often result in changes in upper management, it has very little bearing on us as individual consumers and has not adversely affected CNET's websites, which are its major holdings, to any noticeable degree, in fact they've done some pretty substantial upgrades over the last couple of years.

So calm yourselves, despite Schiffman's intimation that CNET is circling the drain and there is a mob of angry shareholders trying to grab what that can before the company sinks completely, there is no good argument to show that that is the case.

Oh, and Shiffman's belated full disclosure: "Wired News is a rival to CNET's News.com." Well, the bad news is that Schiffman can keep doing sloppy journalism because as far as I can see, Wired in a privately held company and has no share price to protect, nor shareholders to answer to, be they private citizens or faceless holding companies. But that doesn't mean that I have to like it.

/end rant/

Still with me? Great. Because now I have a public service announcement: would anybody in the Canadian Arctic who happens to see 2 600 reindeer wandering by please return them to Richards Island in the Northwest Territories. It seems that Canada's largest reindeer herd , which was established in 1935 as some sort of livestock experiment, has gone missing from the currently ice-bound island. The herd consists of about 3 000 animals, 400 of which have already been recovered by their keepers (who are so fired when this mess is over). The concerns here is are (a) how in the hell do you lose 3 000 animals each the size of a small horse (!) and (b) it seems that reindeer and caribou can interbreed, making the already fragile native caribou herds vulnerable to diseases commonly found in domestic reindeer.

Well, my job here is done, and now I will ride off into the sunset on my motorized bar stool.

Canada takes gold; more reasons to give your PC the finger, and Phillips knows who wears the pants in your family.

Many goodies from CES... *drool*

But first, for those of you who spent the weekend under a rock (or out of the country), Canada has won its fourth straight gold at the IIHF World Juniors and avenges its sole round-robin loss at the same time. It was another nail biter (not that I have any nails left... I am a Broncos fan, after all) 3-2 in OT.

Naples is up to its neck in garbage. Yep, all the landfills near the southern Italian city are full and residents now have no where to put their trash. They've been burning it instead, and the army has been called in to help shovel up the mess. I remember a couple of years ago when Toronto's garbage collectors went on strike and the city filled with rotting garbage. Then I laughed and thought about how the arrogant bastards had it coming. But seriously, Naples is too nice a place to be covered in garbage.

And now, on to CES. Cnet has a special site and feed devoted to this, check it out at ces.cnet.com. Some highlights so far...

Bill Gates delivered his keynote address with a look ahead to an age where computers can sense what you're doing, from hand gestures to the look on your face. So, go ahead, give your PC the finger, within the next decade, it may be able to understand you. Privacy nuts can start being paranoid due to their computer looking at them... now!

Much early buzz was generated about the Starry Night Technology Bed. Yep, not kidding. It's a bit like those Ultramatic beds you see in infomercials, but much cooler. One handy feature is that the bed can detect when you're snoring and tilt your side up to open your air ways. While that alone could save hundreds of marriages, the bed is also a fully tricked out entertainment center. Driven by a Windows Media Center PC with 1.5 TB(!) of storage, 4 GB of ram, surround speakers that pop out of the base, and a 1080p projector. Now, it does cost a fortune... $20 000 to 50 000, but with any luck that anti-snoring feature will make it into more affordable models.

Phillips is taking an interesting tack with its marketing. The company plans to make its gadgets appeal to women, saying that while men generally show more interest in technology, women are making most of the purchase decisions. Damn it, Phillips! You've discovered the embarrassing level to which we are all totally whipped! Blast!

Intel Dumps OLPC, Blu-ray wins format war

OLPC was dealt another blow Friday when Intel announced it was pulling the plug on its financial and technical contributions to the project. Incidentally, the OLPC XO uses an AMD processor, but that has nothing to do with it, mmkay?

The next-gen DVD format war may be over. Warner, which was the last of only two studios (Paramount was the other, before going to HD DVD) to offer movies in both formats. The company say it will go fully Blu-ray in May, which leaves only Paramount and Universal as the big studio players in the HD DVD consortium. While the HD DVD folks seem totally bummed, canceling their news conference at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, a funny thing might happen now that the year-long stalemate seems to be coming to an end. People might actually start to go hi-def for movies and not just for TV. Because, really, this protracted format war has just hurt the deployment of hi-def video as a technology.

Worst Jobs: Monkey Nut Remover

It's those damn central Indian rhesus macaques again. After famously killing the deputy mayor of New Delhi back in October, a new plan has been hatched to have jobless youths sterilize the monkeys in a effort to make them less aggressive. Because that's always what happens when a street urchin comes after your nuts. Naturally this has caused an uproar among conservationists and animal right activists. Somehow I doubt these kids will do the humane surgical sterilization of the sort your local vet would perform.

On a subject quite far divorced from nuts (but not as far as those monkeys will be), Ars Technica has an excellent debunking of the idea that using someone else's unsecured wi-fi constitutes theft. Just for the record, if you can't be bothered to take the five minutes to set your router to at least WEP secure, I have no sympathy for you.

And while your making adjustments to your wi-fi, why not add some functionality with a very cool set top box coming soon from Archos. Called TV+, it has the Apple TV-like function of getting video stream and content from your computer on to your TV sans wires (no iTunes integration, though), and also delivers some key features that failed to materialize in Apple's silver box. Such as and onscreen progam guide and DVR capability, and even Flash support. I'm sorry if this bit reads like an ad, but this is a pretty full-featured product and by the looks of it will give TiVo and Apple a pang of jealousy for failing to get it to market first.

One thing you may not have to feel is the flu, UK-based vaccine maker Acambis says its universal flu vaccine worked for 9 of 10 people in small-scale trails. Although it will probably won't make it to your family doctor's office for several years yet, if successful it would remove the increasing threat of influenza A, which includes the dreaded 'bird flu' strain H5N1. The company's management now has the easiest job of motivating the rank and file employees ever; "Okay, folks, we have a pandemic to prevent here! Let's go!"

Interestingly, while most viral surface proteins targeted by vaccine-produced antibodies mutate, leading to a need to modify existing flu vaccines annually, the protein utilized by by the universal vaccine does not, at least not in any known strain. Both bacteria and viruses are notorious for changing as fast as we can find new ways to kill'em. That, by the way, is a obvious example of evolution in action, despite what certain US states put in the classroom. A new report from the National Academy of Sciences blasts schools for the common practice in America's schools of either not teaching evolution or teaching it as a wild theory that the government disproved in the 1950s.

Finally, Jay Leno is a dirty rotten scab. The striking Writers Guild of America has turned its guns on the late night host for writing his own jokes for the show's big comeback episode. Because, as you all know, it takes a team of 10 professional writers at least three days to write enough proper jokes to do a one-minute monologue. Get over yourselves, WGA!

Santa is gonna kick your ass.

Well, its only January 3rd, and it seems a few people may have already made the naughty list.

LANCOR... you've been very naughty. LANCOR is a Nigerian maker of keyboards which claims that the keyboard built into the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO is sufficiently similar to LANCOR's that it violates one of their patents. They are suing OLPC for $20 million US and seeking an injunction that would keep the low-cost laptops out of Nigeria. What makes this so naughty is that OLPC is a non-profit organization whose goal is to build low cost computers to help educate children in the developing world. LANCOR - have you no shame?

Next on the list is an thus far anonymous trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange who just had to push the price of oil over the $100 milestone, sparking reports that low inventory and a weak US dollar had finally pushed oil off the deep end. Now, the price has been rising (duh, it's a finite resource) and is one indicator pointing to a possible recession, so it was near the $100 mark anyway. But apparently one trader decided to get his 15 minutes of fame by buying 1,000 barrels (the smallest lot available) and selling it immediately at a $600 loss. Let's face it, people, there is enough concern about the economy without anyone pulling stunts.

It would hardly be a naughty list without mentioning Microsoft. In addition to the most-bloated OS of all time, the Jabba the Hutt-like Vista, a pay-until-it-hurts pricing scheme, and 'emerging technologies' that don't work, they now want your to plug yourself into your computer Matrix-style. Well, not really, but they have filed a patent for an interactive help system that would use biometrics to detect when you are frustrated and call other users in to assist you. Bill Gates will probably crap his pants when he sees the data from this. Yo, using your software is frustrating 90% of the time!

In product design that actually works, the Apple rumor mill is in full pre-Macworld spin. One of the more interesting rumors is an iMac with a hole in it. Which doesn't seem so exiting, until I go on to explain that this iMac is just a case with a monitor and I/O ports into which you insert your Macbook, which essentially provides the various boards and the optical drive. Makes conventional docking stations look pretty clunky indeed.

Generating even more buzz is a possible iTunes movie rental service, maybe even delivering content via the somewhat less-than-usefull Apple TV, one of Cupertino's few unsuccessful products in recent years. The bad news for Apple is that Netflix and LG may beat them to it with a partnership announced today which would see Netflix provide content to LG's upcoming networked set-top box. Consider the gauntlet thrown!

But, hey, maybe you're old fashioned and you like actual physical media. Well, for a mere three grand, you can give your DVDs the royal treatment with the Arcam Solo Movie 2.1. No, its not an HD DVD or Blu-ray player, it just plays plain Jane DVDs. But it does upconvert to 1080i and produces great 2.1 sound that may even soothe the audiophile in your life, and that's saying a lot. The price is pretty darn steep, though, and its not even the top model. There's also a 5.1 version for those of you with such ridiculous disposable income you must be up to no good.

But the naughtiest thing of all is disrespect for the only planet we've got. California is suing the US federal government claiming that the EPA's refusal to grant it certain exemptions to let it enforce stricter emissions standards is putting a serious dent in the state's efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Just bring Arnie into this, he'll have the whole mess sorted out in a day or two. Don't make me call Mr. T!