Now that I'm back up, it's all happening "out there"...

I'm trying to figure out which home media appliance to buy.  Essentially a wireless way to transmit video content from my PC to my home entertainment receiver.  Any suggestions?

If blogs are "open-source journalism", then what would be the open-source equivalent for scientific journals?  Why, the Public Library of Science, aka PLoS!  "The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource."  Think this isn't going to be big?  They launched Monday and were overwhelmed by traffic.  Excellent!

Space.com reports China Launches its First Piloted Spaceflight.  "Blasting off from a remote space base in the Gobi Desert atop a Long March 2F rocket, a single Chinese astronaut named Yang Liwei is circling the planet every 90 minutes aboard the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft."  Congratulations to them!  Hopefully this will act as a prod to the U.S.; rather than the ongoing national bureaucracy approach (NASA), the best thing we can do now is support private space exploration.

[ Later: CNN's coverage has a few more details... ]

The Supreme Court will hear the Pledge of Allegiance case.  On merit, this is open and shut, right?  How can including a phrase like "under God" in the pledge be anything but a violation of the separation of church and state.  On the other hand, the right-wingers are going to have a field day with this; I predict the court will be influenced to allow the Pledge to stand as is, on the grounds of "tradition", or something.

People sometimes defend the inclusion of God into the Pledge by noting the phrase "in God we trust" which appears on U.S. seals and currency.  Those are clear violations of the separation, also, and really should be disallowed as well.

For once I disagree with Stephen Den Beste, about Instant Runoff Voting.  I like it, and think it would strengthen the U.S.  The two-party system causes more problems than it solves, anything which weakens it somewhat is a good thing.

The [new] Red Herring asks Who Needs the Phone Company?  Combining VoIP with WiFi makes telcos seem so 1900s...  BW has a nice survey on Telcom, including this overview of The Wireless Challenge.  "There's no doubt the old order is crumbling."  None at all.

I continue to be happy with Vonage, by the way.

AlwaysOn has an interesting survey of the new Red Herring by Tony Perkins, founder of the old Red Herring.

Ottmar notes: "Still amazes me that you are allowed to publish a book on: how to crack safes, how to break into houses, how to murder people with household items, how to make atomic weapons, how to smuggle drugs, but if you publish an academic paper that mentions that it's possible to bypass some lame-ass CD copy protection system by holding down the SHIFT key... now THAT gets you in trouble."  Amazes me, too.

VentureBlog: Beauty Contests and Venture Valuations.  "VCs aren't being lazy or stupid when they use multiples and comparables to quickly set valuations - they are being completely rational, knowing that later buyers are doing the exact same thing."  A nice summary.  And yeah, on my side of the table it does look pretty arbitrary...

Hey, Joel has started a book of the month club!  Cool.  This month's book is Small Things Considered, which I've heard of before and have eagerly Amazoned...

PVRBlog has a nice review of AOL 9's integration with Tivo.  When I saw the headline I thought this was integration for video delivery, but no, it is merely integration for scheduling recording...  Not that exciting.  Time Warner does have a huge cable network, and the two companies are talking, so we'll have to watch this.  It triggered some adrenaline, so I thought I'd pass it on...

You know the Mono Project, an open-source version of .NET?  What if it was too successful?  This post suggests it would give Microsoft a way to hurt Linux.  Kind of farfetched, but interesting...  Here's an overview of Mono, by the way.

Doc Searles took this picture of Las Vegas from an airplane, and notes the similarity to Mos Eisley.  I've noticed that the inhabitants are similar, too :)