ZDNet: News: Filter THIS! Librarians to sue over new law The American Library Association has decided to file a lawsuit challenging a new federal law that would require filtering in public schools and libraries.

The ALA's executive board voted on Wednesday to pursue legal action and is still working out the details of the brief and the timing of the filing.

Joel on Software Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef Mystery: why is it that some of the biggest IT consulting companies in the world do the worst work?

Why is it that the cool upstart consulting companies start out with a string of spectacular successes, meteoric growth, and rapidly degenerate into mediocrity?

Read this if you are starting out

Digital Theatre [dtheatre.com] - Bill Clinton asked to star in next Bond film According to Sky News, Bond's producers have offered the US President a cameo role when he leaves office in a few days' time.

iWon - News Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White testified on Thursday that John Ashcroft, the nominee for U.S. attorney general, distorted White's record when he blocked the Missouri man's appointment to the federal bench.

"I believe that (former) Sen. John Ashcroft seriously distorted my record," White told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee which is considering Ashcroft's appointment.

New Scientist: A clear winner IN THE movie Superman, the Man of Steel discovers why he was jettisoned from the doomed planet Krypton by watching a video message stored on a transparent crystal. Now, more than 20 years on, Japanese scientists are working on a revolutionary new semiconductor that might one day be turned into just this kind of gadget.

Space.app: virtual workspaces for Mac OS X Space.app provides "virtual workspaces" to help you to organize your use of the desktop. When you open Space.app, any non-hidden applications will be added to the first desktop. Switch to other desktops by clicking on the corresponding buttons. Any applications that you open or switch to (e.g. using the dock or command-tab) will become associated with the desktop that you are using.


cool for X

blog*spot Blog*Spot is a free hosting service for Blogger?-powered blogs.

Blogger is the easy (non-tedious!) way to update your home page. Keeping a journal, what's new page, weblog, project page, or any other type of frequently updated web page with Blogger is as easy as typing in a form.

MacWEEK: Microsoft on the Mac While Microsoft has frequently been cast in the role of Apple Computer's archrival, its productivity applications remain vital to the Mac platform -- and a lucrative business for Microsoft itself.

After describing his company's plans to bring its Office suite to Apple's next-generation Mac OS X during a speech at Macworld Expo here (see "Microsoft keynote highlights Outlook and Office"), Kevin Browne, manager of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, discussed the past, present and future of the company's Mac operation with ZDNet News.

Fight Rages Over Digital Rights Critics say content owners and digital rights management companies are discouraging the growth of digital music by taking liberties with their control of copyrights.

Schoolhouse Rot Schoolhouse Rot

New research is showing that soft drinks are even worse for kids' health than previously thought. So why are a growing number of public schools signing deals giving soda companies exclusive marketing rights to their students?

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index Windows is a good system if you live somewhere with 24-hour technical support, he said. But if you live in the bush, you want a computer you can troubleshoot.

The News-Gazette Online: A stellar discovery Bob Holmes never got to study astronomy in college, but that didn't stop him from spotting a supernova, the explosion of a dying star.
???He spent an inordinately cold December with a 16-inch telescope east of Charleston taking star images with a digital camera. It paid off Dec. 17, with a supernova spotting that has been confirmed by Harvard astronomers and designated "2000fn" by the International Astronomical Union.

Yahoo - Company to put ads on first down stripe at Super Bowl A small company that made big news last year by inserting digital ads on television shows is at it again with plans to put ads on the superimposed yellow first down stripe in foreign broadcasts of the Super Bowl on Jan. 28.

Pulse of the Planet @ nationalgeographic.com

TopoZone - The Web's Topographic Map The TopoZone is the Web's center for recreational and professional topographic map users. We've worked with the USGS to create the Web's first interactive topo map of the entire United States.

The Nando Times: Science textbooks flunk accuracy test, study finds Twelve of the most popular science textbooks used at middle schools across the country are riddled with errors, a new study has found.

Researchers compiled 500 pages of errors, ranging from maps depicting the equator passing through the southern United States to a photo of singer Linda Ronstadt labeled as a silicon crystal.
and again....

ABCNEWS.com : Science Textbooks Full of Errors The errors range from maps depicting the equator passing through the southern United States to a photo of singer Linda Ronstadt labeled as a silicon crystal.

None of the 12 textbooks has an acceptable level of accuracy, according to N.C. State physics professor John Hubisz, the report's author.

"These are terrible books, and they're probably a strong component of why we do so poorly in science," on standardized tests, he said.

"The books have a very large number of errors, many irrelevant photographs, complicated illustrations, experiments that could not possibly work, and drawings that represented impossible situations."
is this different from any text book, mike and I found tons of errors in our science books, heck we used them to have the students find the mistakes. And my math teachers edition had so many errors that my students thought I was at a disadvantage.

EPAA Vol. 9 No. 2 Goodson & Foote: Testing Times--A School Case Study A highly successful, innovative and creative alternative to traditional education is confronted by the demands of contemporary standardized accountability. The account here is a chronicle of the resistance of a particular school, the Durant School, to the global changes that would destroy its local ecology?a school whose fight against the imposition of state standards and mandated tests has been a fight to preserve its integrity, its mission, and its autonomy.

Cache at the End of His Rainbow Google's search engine may be good for searches, but it's useful in other ways, too.

Just ask Jave Savin, a San Francisco programmer who recently lost an entire website -- and three years' hard work -- but found a copy of his entire site in Google's online archive.

MacWEEK: Reality distortion is optional
From a network manager's perspective, Tuesday's Macworld keynote was a mixed bag. The new products are all good. We finally see the Power Mac G4 go past 500MHz, thanks to the new MPC 7450 CPU, with four Altivec units, more integer units and so on. But for my purposes, the CPU isn't the cool part of the new machines. These towers also have 133MHz buses, and four PCI slots, and finally, 4x AGP capabilities. And Apple announced a redesign of its PCI components that gives the PCI system better throughput. For the network manager, this means that servers speed up all the way around, not just in CPU-intensive areas. So you get better performance on external RAID arrays, because the PCI card connecting your box to that array can pump data at a higher rate, and video-intensive tasks will also have more bandwidth. Jobs also announced that the only multiprocessing model will be the 533MHz configuration, due to availability constraints on the 667MHz and 733MHz chips.

Jobs Tells It Like It Is In fact, fans at this year's Macworld were more optimistic than any in recent memory. Many Macophiles expect to see an avalanche of amazing new technology in the coming year, especially fantastic new software. And they expect to see things get better very quickly

CNET.com - News - Enterprise Computing - Netscape looks to Apple technology That's just one of many applications for the Meta Content Format (MCF), a technology originally developed by Apple Computer but for which Netscape is gradually becoming the key advocate. Netscape has already hired away one of the chief architects behind MCF from Apple, Ramanathan Guha, and earlier this month the company submitted the technology to the World Wide Web Consortium, the arbiter of Web standards