stalebread points to a Reuters story reporting that a federal judge refused to issue an injunction against eBay's "Buy It Now" feature. Quoting: "Judge Jerome B. Friedman of Federal District Court denied a motion by the Virginia company, MercExchange, for a permanent injunction to stop eBay from using the feature. The Supreme Court ruled last year that, although eBay infringed upon MercExchange's patent for the service, it was up to the lower court to decide whether eBay had to stop using it. 'MercExchange has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market share, reputation, good will, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these,' he wrote."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week I met with the founders of a young Emeryville company named Persai Research, and they told me about a project to gather a huge collection of feeds.

They just sent me a link to a zip file containing over a hundred thousand feeds.

http://research.persai.com/persai_feedcorpus.zip

And stay tuned to this blog for more information about the company.

WS Nick writes "Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending that parents of high school students upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007. Why not use one of the free alternatives and relieve parents of some of the financial burden they face to buy all the stuff for their children the school requires?" A comment from a reader points out how easy it is to interoperate with Office 2007 from earlier versions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A couple of weeks back we discussed the effort to require voting paper trails in US federal elections. Now WhiteBoxVoter writes: "Democrats and Republicans in the US House of Representatives agreed today on a compromise that will push through a bill banning paperless voting machines and requiring a voter-verified paper record for every vote in the country, after government sanctioned hackers showed how they could break into all three of the top voting systems used in California." The NYTimes reported on Thursday that even if it passes the House, voting-machine reform that would take effect before the 2008 elections may die in the Senate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Next week the province of British Columbia will begin adding a recycling fee to new computers and TVs to pay for their free electronics recycling program. The list of what is acceptable for recycling is short, namely computers, printers, and TVs — you cannot recycle personal audio players or cell phones. What is unclear is whether the definition of 'desktop computer' includes self-built computers, and if so, their plans for adding fees for individual components such as motherboards, etc." The article notes that the recovered e-waste will not be sent to developing countries for processing. But one report says that the e-waste won't be recycled at all, but rather burned in a smelter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kripkenstein notes an analysis up on TechRepublic detailing how Microsoft beat Linux in China, and the consequences of that victory: "With the soon-to-be largest economy standardized on Windows desktops, desktop Linux does seem to have an uphill battle ahead of it." "Linux has turned out to be little more than a key bargaining chip in a high stakes game of commerce between the Chinese government and the world's largest software maker... The fact that... Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Pescovitz:
This gallery of mostly-Polish vintage movie posters, many for American-made films, is absolutely amazing. At left, "The Golem" (1979). At right, "A Coeur Jole" (1967). Link (via Drawn!)

Firedog writes "There's been a lot of recent debate over why Linus Torvalds chose the new CFS process scheduler written by Ingo Molnar over the SD process scheduler written by Con Kolivas, ranging from discussing the quality of the code to favoritism and outright conspiracy theories. KernelTrap is now reporting Linus Torvalds' official stance as to why he chose the code that he did. 'People who think SD was "perfect" were simply ignoring reality,' Linus is quoted as saying. He goes on to explain that he selected the Completely Fair Scheduler because it had a maintainer who has proven himself willing and able to address problems as they are discovered. In the end, the relevance to normal Linux users is twofold: one is the question as to whether or not the Linux development model is working, and the other is the question as to whether the recently released 2.6.23 kernel will deliver an improved desktop experience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lifehacker on timelines from RSS feeds.

Fred Wilson is staying with Facebook, not declaring bankruptcy. Me, I never accepted it as a liability. Jason Calacanis gave up yesterday.

One thing I should add about Twitter is that unlike Facebook, it doesn't demand anything of you. I like that part.

NPR piece on MP3 blogs. Next time I want to share a song with readers of this blog, I think I'm going to do it.

Doc Searls turns 60 tomorrow. Heard it on Twitter.

Anon E. Muss writes "Microsoft has a new Secure Content Downloader tool that sounds an awful lot like a Bittorrent clone. It's described as a 'peer-assisted technology' where '[e]ach client downloads content by exchanging parts of the file they're interested in with other clients, in addition to downloading parts from the server.' Right now MSCD is just a time-limited preview, intended to support downloads of select Microsoft beta releases (e.g. Visual Studio 2008). If this test goes well, Microsoft will probably start using MSCD for all their large downloads. How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From time to time people ask what this site has to do with Scripting News.

I shrug it off, saying "It's just a name."

I don't stop to explain because many people who think in terms of scripting languages think linearly and only in one direction. A site named Scripting News must contain news about scripting, right?

But what if the name describes what the author does when creating the software that manages the site? And further, if he shares that software with other people so that this site becomes a focus of the activity of applying scripting to the area of news?

What would you think about that?

Back in the beginning people would have thought I was out of my mind.

Scripting news? Why would anyone want to do that.

But today, many years later, news is the subject of much scripting.

So there you have it.

PS: Sometimes when I say the name of site in my own mind it comes out like this: "Scripting Jews." Same logic.

Cory Doctorow: The Etienne Louis espresso machine is a giant polished aluminium sea urchin whose top half swings away to reveal its removable water reservoir and other vital organs. Designed by Switzerland's Carlo Borer and makes two cups -- no price given on the site. Link (via Gizmodo)

An anonymous reader writes "I recently got an external hard disk with USB 2.0/Firewire/Firewire 800/eSATA to be used for backup and file exchange — my desktop runs Linux (with a Windows partition for games but no data worth saving), and the laptop is a MacBook Pro. So the question popped up: what kind of filesystem is best for this kind of situation? Is there a filesystem that works well under Linux, MacOS X, and Windows? Linux has HFS+ support but apparently doesn't support journaling and there's also an issue with the case-insensitivity of HFS+. Are we stuck with crummy VFAT forever or are there efforts underway to bring a modern filesystem (I'm thinking something like ZFS, BeFS, or XFS) to all platforms? Or are there other clever solutions like storing ISO images and loop-mounting those?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: Check out Simon Iddol's latest mashup album, Forgotten Hits, featuring "old surf/soul/sleaze/jazz '50s/'60s instrumentals, out of print thrift-store vinyl obscurities mashed with new pop icons."

I'm partial to Superfreak Twisters, Mel Henke's mashup of The Twisters VS Rick James's Superfreak. Link (Thanks, Simon!)

Must listen to this piece.

Next time I want to share an MP3 of a song with readers of this blog, I think I'm going to go ahead and do it.

Cory Doctorow:
Here's a tantalizing little build-log from a project to fold the world's greatest origami Elder God. Legend has it that an ill person who folds a thousand origami cranes will get well. I wonder what you get if you fold a thousand Cthulhus? Devouring of your entrails? Link (via Neatorama)

Cory Doctorow: Wired News has interviewed Danny Fingeroth, author of Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero -- a book about the legion of underwear perverts created by Eastern European Jewish immigrants (something that's brilliantly fictionalized in Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- and that I wrote about in my Jewish superman story, The Super-Man and the Bugout, published in my collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More)

WN: You're Jewish yourself. Are you worried that your book might give ammunition to anti-Semites who like to make claims about Jewish domination?

Fingeroth: My joke is that it's of most interest to Jews and anti-Semites. Most other people don’t give a shit. I think it's one of the best things I've written, but it was one of the hardest to write, too, because of how careful I wanted to be about how I framed things so as not to give ammunition to bigots who might want to twist what I was saying. I ultimately decided that if I was going to write this book, and I did and do think it was important to write, I had to put that fear out of my mind and figure that if someone has a reason to hate Jews, they don’t need to me as an excuse to do it.

Link

Cory Doctorow: The Penguin Teaboy is probably the cutest way to be obsessive about your tea -- wind the timer in his belly, hook the teabag's string around his beak, and when the timer runs down, he'll raise his head and lift the bag out of the mug. Link (via Red Ferret)

I was early arriving at the party so I decided to drive by the back end of my old hacienda in Woodside, the one I sold in 2003 as I was moving east.

I sold it to a neighbor with plans to build a megahouse with a huge outdoor entertainment complex, and he needed the extra acres so he would comply with Woodside's strict zoning laws.

I already knew, from Google Maps, that he tore down my old house, and that he had never built the huge house he planned to build. There must be a story. Illness, a death or divorce? Or he just got busy or lazy, or ran out of money?

I didn't have the heart to drive up to the front entrance and see what the land looked like without the house.

It was an old house, constructed in many projects over many years. Some of the contruction was excellent, some of it terribly bad. All the roofs leaked at one time or another. Each segment of the house had its own roof, a different style, as if the builder were experimenting to fin