CNET News.com

Interesting piece in today%u2019s New York Times reports that Michael Dell and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed “at least” $350,000 to the DeLay Foundation for Kids. Much ado about nothing? All depends on your view of corporate largesse.

This could be nothing more than simple acts of kindness by rich philanthropists. But as the Times’ piece notes, DeLay’s foundation lets fat cats curry favor with a very powerful member of Congress “in a way that skirts campaign finance laws.”

Meanwhile, DeLay is in hot water for possible ethics violations and a couple of his political intimates were indicted for illegal fund-raising.

NOOO Bill, say it isn’t. You corporate fat cat pricks. But it’s for the children, right.

Nvu

A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Nvu is being written by Daniel Glazman, former Netscape Communications Corporation
employee and currently of the Mozilla Foundation and Disruptive
Innovations. The project is sponsored by Linspire (formerly Lindows).

Let’s build some awareness and get some more support for this very worthy project. The extensions page.

The Seattle Times: Politics: DeLay blasts Justice Kennedy

The House has no power over which judges receive lifetime appointments, but DeLay has called repeatedly for the House to find a way to hold the federal judiciary accountable for its decisions.

“The judiciary has become so activist and so isolated from the American people that it’s our job to do that,” he said.

Sheese, Tom Delay really doesn’t understand checks and balances does he? Moreover, wasn’t he the one who spearheaded the Schiavo debacle. Talk about out of touch with the American people.

CNN.com

An aspiring physicist was sentenced Monday to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million for his role in a spree of arson and vandalism that targeted gas-guzzling Hummers and other sports utility vehicles.

Rejecting pleas for clemency from William Cottrell, a 24-year-old doctoral candidate in physics at the California Institute of Technology, U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner added more time to the sentence after finding that Cottrell was trying to sway consumers with his anti-SUV message.

The slogans Cottrell spray-painted onto vehicles included “Fat Lazy Americans,” “No Respect for Earth” and “SUV Terrorism.”

Nobody harmed, yet a PhD candidate in Physics gets a sentence equivalent to that of a Rapist or Child Molester. EIGHT YEARS!! WTF is this shit!

The Telegraph

A Texas businesswoman has written to the Senate foreign relations committee that John R. Bolton is unfit to serve as UN ambassador because he threatened, berated and harassed her in a dispute over an overseas contract.

The face of evil, or the face of tasty fried chicken?

Internet News

Adobe Systems agreed to acquire rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion in a deal that sets the stage for a showdown with Microsoft in the graphics software space.

Whoa, what a shocker! What does this mean for SVG?

WRAL.com

Whil Piavis’ campaign as “The Pirate Captain” made quite a slash with students. On-campus voter turnout was up almost 10 percent. He said he wants to keep students interested in the politics of the university.

“We felt a giant squid had eaten part of our spirit, so we decided to find the squid and get our spirit back,” Piavis said.

Quick, UNC needs a Ninja King to combat this.

Slashdot

Some students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator. From their website: SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What’s amazing is that one of their randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk.

Generate your own CS paper!

Slashdot

naylor83 writes “Four weeks ago, Opera’s CTO Håkan Lie put forward the Acid2 challenge to the IE developers at Microsoft. The Web Standards Project has now silently published the promised browser test. Somewhat surprisingly, both Opera and Firefox fail to correctly render the test page. Obviously though, they’re no where near as lousy as Internet Explorer. More screenshots are available at my blog, as well as at other people’s.