I know I haven't posted in a fucking long time, and I also know that by using the word "fucking" in my first post in a long time, I'm effectively alienating Corpse Divine's "traditional family values" audience base. However, did anyone else see the thing about the Bush Administration's Clarke plans being found in a D.C. Starbucks? The link is here.

"Stay inside the lines. We don't need to puff this (up). We need (to) be careful as hell about it," the handwritten notes say. "This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."

If I recall correctly, though, Starbucks has been at the center of D.C. politics for a long time. Deep Throat wasn't really in a parking garage, but a Starbucks (Woodward and Bernstein caved to threats of litigation and changed it). Also, Nixon wrote the Checkers speech on a flattened-out venti cup. Truman uttered his infamous "Fuck you, Jap surrender plan, I'm gonna nuke those slant-eyes tomorrow!" line from an easy chair at the Starbucks in the mall (sources report that he used to Irish-up his chai latte on the sly and ramble for hours). And, most controversially, Teddy Roosevelt raped Sacagawea in the dumpster behind the State Street Starbucks (biscotti bender, they say). What, you don't believe me? Go read a history book, you fucking dead-eyed Americans. It might not be in your watered-down, white-washed high school texts, but it's all in Howard Zinn, I assure you.

SCO has adjusted its copyright claims against Linux. They used to claim that millions of lines of source code were directly copied. Now their claiming its more like Vanilla Ice vs David Bowie and Queen.

Why SCO Thinks It Can Win: McBride: A lot of code that you'll be seeing coming on in these copyright cases is not going to be line-by-line code. It will be more along the lines of nonliteral copying, which has more to do with infringement. This has more to do with sequence, organization, which is copyright-protectable. It's interesting when you go down this path that everyone wants to go to the exact lines of code, but most copyright cases... McBride: …are not line-by-line, exact copies. It's too obvious. Most copyright infringement cases come from these nonliteral implementations of the same code or literary work. Sontag: My favorite example is the Russian author [Dmitry Yemets], who lost in a copyright case [after being sued by] J.K. Rowling, author of the 'Harry Potter' books, in a Dutch court. He had written a book: It was a girl, not a boy, with magical powers who rides a magical fiddle and not a broom, goes to a boarding school to learn witchcraft and wizardry, plays a game of throwing balls through hoops. All these things were very similar to Harry Potter. Could someone else ever write a book about wizards and witches? Sure. But when the structure and sequence is the same…maybe the words, the code, isn't exactly the same, but Linux is trying to be just like Unix System V. The question is whether Linux was trying to be like Unix System V by doing it in ways that were illegal. ...McBride: I saw it, it was published, so the cows are out of the barn. The analogy I like to use is Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" versus David Bowie and Queen's "Under Pressure." If you just look at the words, I don't see a copyright violation, but if you listen to the riffs, you can hear where they're the same. Editor's Note: Vanilla Ice settled out of court presumably because his song included riffs that had been taken from Bowie and Queen's work. See Copyright Website LLC for more on the issue. McBride: When everything is said and done, when everything is on the table in the court case, there will be an argument when the Linux guys come in and say, 'Guys, the words are entirely different, how can you say that's a copyright violation?' But there are two parts to this. There are the words that are in the source code, and there's the music underneath. The actual code that drives these ABI files is structurally and sequentially the same.

A few weeks ago I jokingly pointed out a NYT reporter whose middle name appeared to be "8". Today, on Slashdot, there was a post by a guy who wants to name his kid "J4ne7" (read: "Janet"). At the end of the post there was a reference to Jennifer 8. Lee. Apparently, her middle name really is '8'.

Poynter Online - Feedback: "FYI, Jennifer 8. Lee's name explanation ran in 1996 in the Globe. She wrote that its origin is Chinese numerology, in which the number 8 symbolizes good fortune. Parents apparently added the 8. to her name after seeing how common 'jennifer lee' was. "