When does law prohibit the use of free software ?

I can't believe it. France just prohibited the use of mplayer to play DVD's (Specifically the ones that have CSS)
For me this is a two sided blade. One one side it violates the right of the users (to use the free software that is out there). But at the same time it supports the notion of secure content. To tell the truth , I am not at all a fan of all the DRM and the rest. However I believe that certain works of art deserve to be paid (say movies) because good works of art just do not come out of the blue. As for movies It takes a considerable amount of money and effort to make one and these movie makers deserve something in return (they have to make a living out of it). There is no notion of advertisement supported content as far as movies are considered (Show advertisements along with the movie ??) so either you pay or you don't get to see the movie !

WebOS - Are you for real ???

I found this review about different Web Operationg Systems (or Web OS's) pretty interesting . I know I know , this is where you say "A Web what ??" :) A WebOS is simply a set of applications running in a web browser that together mimic, replace or largely supplement a desktop OS environment [Its in the article anyway]
Anyway I'm impressed that there are about 15 of them around already.

More archiving the web

I always thought that archiving the web is a ridiculous if not impossible task but the way back machine proved I was wrong ! Now they've got a significant grant to do more archiving and I can't imagine what they'll do now :)

Queen takes on podcasting!

When I heard that the queen is taking on podcasting (and yeah, she does own an ipod!) I was amazed. Not because the queen actually took on podcasting but because of the pace the technology is becoming ubiquitous.
It's amazing how things change, for example I was reminded that 'Google came into real existance about 7 years ago' recently and its hard to believe that since I live off Google everyday (my search stats lurk around 20 to 40 per day and I primarily use gmail - BTW I found an intersting article about the birth of Google during my search). So its not surprising that Ipods came into existance about 2 years ago and it has already transformed the world :)