I think a lot of people saw that this was a bad idea from the start, but Microsoft finally threw in the towel on Passport ("Microsoft revokes Passport service").

Germany's biggest ISP just launched a home DSL service for €3.99 per month ("DSL in Germany gets cheap and dirty"). Sure, there is a cap on monthly usage (2 gigabytes, which is pretty damn super for that price), but it's head and shoulders above the current offerings in the United States. Our home connection is a cable modem that costs us $30 per month. Hopefully, like many other trends that start in Europe and end up in the U.S., this one will make its way across the pond, too.

The folks at "Think Secret" think Apple is going to announce a $500 Mac computer in a few weeks. If true, this would be big news, and would hopefully get more folks using Apple products (something most people would be better off doing).

Just skimmed through "Prescription for Confusion" and "Vioxx. Celebrex. Now Aleve. What's a Patient to Think?". Reading about things like this makes me happy that I don't take any prescription drugs. And given my increasing distrust of the FDA and pharmaceutical companies in general, I hope I can continue to avoid any prescription drugs in the future.

Cyclingnews just posted an interview with Dave Zabriskie. Good stuff.

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omg, this is so flipping cool. It all started one day with this guy built the original Etherkiller to warn new users that the IT department is not to be messed with. This led to some general discussion about a class of devices, now called the "killers", which should be made. "The Etherkiller and Friends".

A Re-Pet showed up several years ago as an idea in a movie, but pet cloning is now a commercially available service, thanks to Genetic Savings and Clone. And pet cloning isn't just for everyday folks, either... Hollywood folks want to clone a bunch of star animals now, too.

"For the first time, GSC can now offer commercial cat cloning with a very high standard of health and physical resemblance between genetic donor and clones, thanks to our new chromatin transfer (CT) technology. We've just produced the first two cloned kittens by CT, both of which are healthy and normal after being born June 10 and 12. The clones are genetic duplicates of Tahini (shown on the left), a 1-year-old female Bengal cat belonging to the 4-year-old son of GSC CEO Lou Hawthorne.

These two remarkable kittens -- Tabouli and Baba Ganoush -- finally put to rest the issue of resemblance between clones and their genetic donors. When performed by a skilled team using sufficiently advanced technology, clones resemble their donors to an uncanny degree -- just as predicted by GSC."

The following is the story behind the Graphing Calculator that shipped on millions of Macintoshes with the release of the PowerPC in 1994. The original story is posted at Pacific Tech's website, but their webserver is pretty much dead right now, thanks to a recent slashdotting.

Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

This is the latest news I've come across in answering the "are cell phones bad for you?" question ("Lab Tests Show Mobile-Phone Risk"). In short, the four-year German research study says, "yes". Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is working on The Internationl EMF Project, which will assess health and environmental effects of exposure to static and time varying electric and magnetic fields in the frequency range 0-300 GHz (this covers cell phones).

From "Lab Tests Show Mobile-Phone Risk":

The research project, which took four years and which was coordinated by the German research group Verum, studied the effect of radiation on human and animal cells in a laboratory.

After being exposed to electromagnetic fields that are typical for mobile phones, the cells showed a significant increase in single- and double-strand DNA breaks. The damage could not always be repaired by the cell. DNA carries the genetic material of an organism and its different cells.

"There was remaining damage for future generation of cells," said project leader Franz Adlkofer. This means the change had procreated. Mutated cells are seen as a possible cause of cancer.

The radiation used in the study was at levels between a specific absorption rate of between 0.3 and 2 watts per kilogram. Most phones emit radio signals at SAR levels of between 0.5 and 1 w/kg.

Adlkofer advised against the use of a mobile phone when an alternative fixed-line phone was available, and recommended the use of a headset connected to a cell phone whenever possible.

"We don't want to create a panic, but it is good to take precautions," he said, adding that additional research could take another four or five years.

None of the world's top six mobile-phone vendors could immediately respond to the results of the study.

Damn, I love it when respectable publications (such as the New York Times) dish it out against Microsoft for sucking as hard as they do. "The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)" is a super read.

Bruce Schneier, a well-respected authority on security issues, made the excellent observation, "It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools [such as Internet Explorer] with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault. Don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer, period."

So if you're a Windows user, do yourself a gigantic favor and get Firefox now.

A Singular Christmas is what you get when a gang of computers analyze traditional Christmas music and produce their own Christmas music for the world to, um, enjoy.

The new search feature from Google, Google Suggest, is pretty neato. Christ Justus did some investigation into how it works, and posted his findings here.

Another milestone for Apple's iTunes Music Store... Apple iTunes sells 200m songs.

Even though the original goatse.cx site has been shut down, the spirit of goatse.cx is alive and well all across the internet. As ever, goatse content can (and probably will) shock you. I think that's what it's most famous for doing. So anyway, I just clicked several links from the above url, and I'm now in a state of shock. Just thought I'd share.

Well, it's a done deal. IBM sold its PC business to a company in China. IBM will receive a total of $1.25 billion, of which $650 million is in cash.

In what should come as no suprise to anyone, the United States continues to produce mediocrity through the public school system ("The New York Times > National >U.S. Students Fare Badly in International Survey of Math Skills"). According to a new international comparison of skills among 15-year-olds, the United States ranked 28th of 40 countries in math and 18th in reading. The U.S. was also cited as having one of the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education. The study was released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. One of the officials at the OECD said, "The gap between the best and worst performing countries has widened." The study also pointed out that while the Czech Republic spent only one third as much per student as the United States did, it was one of the top 10 performing nations in the study, while the United States performed below the average of the nations surveyed.

A bunch of Swedes gathered data on why cellphones break ("Cellphones get broken by tight jeans"). Here are the Top 10 most common reasons for "Mobile accidents":

1. Dropped the mobile on the ground.
2. Squeezed the cellphone in tight jeans/pockets.
3. Used the handset in the rain.
4. Throw the device on the ground in rage.
5. The dog/child got hold of the mobile.
6. Dropped the cellphone in the toilette.
7. Dropped the handset into the sea.
8. Forgot the cellphone on the roof of the car.
9. Perspiration on the mobile during workout.
10. Dropped the handset in the snow.

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Ok, ok, this is good...

Q: Why did the chicken have a bicycle thrown over his shoulder?
A: Because he was a participant of the Stedman Grand Prix cyclocross race!

Here's an interesting article describing a new way to control traffic lights that's 30% more efficient than current methods.

Have you ever wished, as you sat at a red light, that you had the power to switch it to green? A traffic researcher is proposing that giving motorists precisely this power could improve the efficiency of city roads.

The catch (there had to be a catch) is that this control wouldn't be handed over to individual drivers. Instead they would exercise it collectively. If a large enough convoy of cars approached a red light, this would force the light to turn green, while the other lights at the junction turned red.

Read the rest of "Beating the lights"...

This is just sad... Verizon got all bent out of shape when the City of Philadelphia tried to offer free or low-cost citywide wireless internet access, including in low-income neighborhoods. So Verizon lobbied heavily, and it looks like they won: Pennsylvania Gov. Rendell just signed legislation that gives phone companies (like Verizon) the right to deny municipalities the ability to build their own wireless networks. See "Law restricts municipal Wi-Fi networks" for more details.