your weekly dose of linky goodness

where does the time go?
Despite all my good intentions, I can't seem to get around to updating more than once a week. sigh Plus I keep coming up with additional ideas and new projects; I really need to start documenting some of those for the (hopefully forthcoming) day when I have time to deal with them.

author, author
Couple of interesting SF author-related sites I've run across recently: Alexei Panshin's Abyss of Wonder and the Bruce Sterling Online Index. Sterling, of course, is the author of The Hacker Crackdown, Heavy Weather, and several others; Panshin is best known for his crit work Heinlein in Dimension, but is also a SF author in his own right.

While I'm on SF, here's a review of Allen Steele's forthcoming Chronospace.

geeks + beer = fun
The 2001 Linuxbierwanderung has been scheduled for 25 Aug to 1 Sep. One of these days, I am so going to this...

my dot.org! mine!
More fallout from the recent ICANN/VeriSign dot.org madness: follow up to the original story, at La Reg and HandsOffMy.org, a community site tracking the story. I've been thinking about a design change; I should integrate one of their buttons while I'm at it...

gmo over before they began?
Interesting report on a talk at the recent AAAS meeting. The basic idea is that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) won't be as big a deal as people have hoped and/or feared -- but not for the reasons you might be thinking. Instead of being legislated (or terrorized) until they can't be used, Robert Goodman is predicting that GMOs will be bypassed in favor of traditional breeding techniques supplemented with knowledge from genomics studies -- so that breeders based on the actual genotypes that underlie desired phenotypes.

aim at foot; pull trigger; repeat.
Linked all over the place; originally seen at The Reg: the open PC is dead - start praying. I'd really like to hope that this isn't going to come about, but I'm all too afraid that it will. The worst part is that in the long run, this is going to totally FUBAR all the industries that are currently trying to shut things down to protect their own IP. I mean, where do They (you know, the idiots behind these plans) think all this gee-whiz neat-o technology comes from, anyway? Having open, 'hackable' PCs around when you're growing up seems to be an almost universal constant in that mysterious process that produces really innovative, creative, product-developing universe shakers.

harlan, meet the 'net
Duck and cover! Somebody scanned some of Harlan Ellison's work and posted it to Usenet, and now Harlan has found out -- and boy is he ever pissed! It's a complex issue; I wish they weren't leaning on the DMCA quite so hard in making their case, but I might send them some money nonetheless. Ellison's writing has been important to me, and I'd like to see him continue with it.

art, life, whatsa difference?
All I'm gonna say is, don't fuck with Pauly -- err, I mean, Tony.

what's in a name?
Biologists will appreciate the name of the paternity service referenced in a recent Dan Savage column: the Analytical Genetic Testing Center (AGTC). The non-biologists in the crowd should just move along -- there's nothing to see here.

dr. tux
We'll finish up today with the cute "The Tux in a Tux":

"Look at it!
Look at it now!" said the bird,
If we add here StarOffice,
you won't even need Word!
We can set up the network,
and run things in X,
If you want to do parsing,
just use bison and flex.

Hope y'all have a good weekend, and I'll see you back here on Monday!