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.