You know those fish magnets you sometimes see on the backs of cars? You’ve seen them — cars driven by Christians who feel the need for some kind of identifier in case the Rapture comes and the archangels look for a tag as if they were cosmic AAA towtruck drivers?

Anyway. Some of you might have seen a similar magnet, with the word “Darwin” inside and small legs coming out the bottom. Blogspace has alerted me to this new one (and some others):

The Shifted Librarian also finds a luscious piece in Darwin Magazine. Prepare to rethink your analogies: it turns out that apples and oranges are actually pretty similar.

Scott Sandford gives the impression he wishes he never did the damn apples and oranges paper. He admits to having nightmares about his own obituary: He has devoted his life at NASA to studying how chemicals that rained down on the earth billions of years ago may have seeded the world with the materials to create life; he’s published 200 scientific papers on astrochemistry and the delicate intertwining of stellar dust and human existence. Comparing his serious work to that one stupid thing he did years ago on a lark, it’s a joke. It’s like comparing apples to quartz.”

Fabulous piece on The Shifted Librarian about the House of Representatives approving a new .kids.us domain.

For those tuning in late, there are two domain systems on the Internet. One is the TLD system like .com and .biz and the new .info and .name. The other is a system of country domains like .us, .uk and .za, used more widely outside the US than within. Each country controls its own. In the US, country domains are more typically used by schools and government than business.

Congress has been trying in vain to get ICANN (the folks who like to think they govern the Internet) to approve a top-level .kids domain, so they went with the seemingly clean compromise of .kids.us. But, of course, there are problems with making a kid-safe place on the net. Read the article.

From Internet Product News:

Microsoft Gets Defensive About Open Source Software. According to a report in The Washington Post, Microsoft is “aggressively” trying to convince the Pentagon to abandon its use of freely distributed software, claiming open source software threatens Department of Defense security.

What’s wrong with this picture? In his testimony for the Microsoft anti-trust trial, MS bigwig Jim Allchin said that revealing Windows’s source code — one of the possibly remedies sought by the non-settling states — would let hackers find the operating system’s security holes, thereby jeopardizing national security. As eWeek put it:

A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.

So, Microsoft is saying that closed-source software isn’t secure, and open-source software isn’t secure either. MS seems to have missed the bulletin that says opening source code to public scrutiny allows vulnerabilities to be found and plugged. It’s that last part that Microsoft never seems to get around to talking about.

A data point:

The heightened alert in New York City is indeed having an effect. Traffic crossing the Brooklyn Bridge this morning is being restricted and apparently closely examined, with attendant delays. The bridge was closed for a half-hour to investigate a suspicious package. And there are helicopters patrolling the neighborhood.

I need to go into Manhattan this morning, and the bridge is how I do it. Oh joy.

[Later:]

It took 45 minutes to drive the two-block approach to the Brooklyn Bridge this morning; police were screening on a car-by-car basis, and turned back several that didn’t meet the HOV2 requirement. (Presumably, suicide bombers don’t work in pairs.)

Otherwise, the city seems pretty normal. The 34th Street Heliport had about six takeoffs/landings in the hour or so that I was paying attention. It’s the start of Fleet Week today, so there’ll be a ton of sailors around from all over the world. Some might say this presents a target-rich environment.

Other than the traffic checkpoint, the most out-of-place thing I’ve seen today is the NBC News truck with the big-ass satellite uplink antenna (big-ass — that’s one of my technical terms) parked at the end of my block at the entrance to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The film crew has a pretty good overview of New York Harbor and the ships coming in, but when I saw the camera about 10 minutes ago, it was aimed squarely at the Statue of Liberty. Just in case, presumably.

This is from Robert Scoble. I wanted to post it as is, because it gets at some interesting questions about weblogging that I don’t have time to develop just now but need to get back to.

Weblogging Success Based on Traffic?. Is weblogging all about the traffic? This writer seems to think that traffic is all that matters. Hogwash. I don’t want the unwashed masses reading me. I want to link to smart people. If all you measure is traffic aimed at your head, then you’ve gone astray. To me, it’s “what can I learn by visiting you?” Do you entertain? Teach? Inspire? If you have only one visitor, but you teach that one person something that will change his/her life, isn’t that more important than having 1000 viewers of intellectual sewage? The National Inquirer has lots of readers. Is that what we should be aspiring to? If it is, weblogging will be an awfully shallow activity for most of you. I’d like to measure my weblogging success some other way.

Robert Scoble and some others point out a new search engine, Vivisimo, which organizes results in some interesting ways. It’s not really a search engine, actually; more properly, Vivisimo organizes information it finds at other people’s search engines. (No, I don’t entirely understand it either.)

Vivisimo is a spinoff of Carnegie Mellon University, and has some interesting people behind the technology. One of them is Oren Etzioni, who was a founder of Netbot, an early e-commerce search engine. [Source: Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]

Google isn’t standing still. Its home page now features a new Scott Adams (Dilbert) cartoon every day. And check out the public demonstration of Google’s technology toys.

Phil Zimmermann wrote the encryption program PGP, and nearly went to jail over it. He sold his company to Network Associates, which barely seemed interested in marketing the program. Now NAI has not decided to stop selling PGP, but now NAI Tells Sites To Remove PGP, under threat of prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DCMA).  [Source: Slashdot]

Seems to me that NAI has the right to do with PGP what it wants; it owns it, and can sell it or not as it so wishes. It also can insist that other people not distribute it. The techology is out there, however, and other people have built software based on the PGP algorithm. You should use it.

Here’s what Zimmermann himself has to say about NAI’s non-promotion of his program. Keep in mind that he’s not a lawyer, and the page doesn’t directly address the current question. But it’s interesting nonetheless.

It’s not like they have a real threat or anything, but it seems that the FBI has alerted New York City to be watching out for another terrorist attack against a landmark. Specifically listed are the Statue of Liberty, which is within easy view of here, and the Brooklyn Bridge, which a few blocks from here and which I drive across several times a week.

The AP dispatch said that “[m]orning traffic at the Brooklyn Bridge was scrutinized carefully Tuesday.” Dunno if that means it was scruitized more than usual, but the cops are supposed to be out there every morning to enforce the HOV2 regulation in place since September. [Later: the Times says that scrutiny was, indeed, increased.]

I know that stuff like this is always possible, and more possible than ever after 9/11. But there’s a certain degree of denial that I suppose everyone needs to get through the day in every circumstance. Having that veneer stripped is less than comfortiable, especially when there’s nothing that I can actually do about it — and (I suspect) precious little that anyone can do.

Radio broadcasters don’t have to pay record companies to play music over the air. Webcasters were facing the possiblity of having to do just that — and many of them were saying that the proposed royalty was unfair and ruinous.

Except that Librarian of Congress James Billington, whose business it is to set the royalty rate, rejected a proposal from an arbitration panel. He didn’t say what the final rate would be, but promised a June 20 deadline.

Here’s the Library of Congress official link to the whole megillah.

More cupidity from the record industry:

“Since both sides appealed the panel’s determination anything is possible,” said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. [ed note: Where did Hilary Rosen go? Is she now so generally despised that they’re not letting her out in public?] He said he does not know what decision Billington will make, but he looks forward “to the day when artists and labels finally get paid for the use of their music.”

RIAA members, of course, are record labels, which have a perfectly terrible history of paying their artists and a mostly wonderful track record of paying themselves.