Slate's new direction

OJR has a Q&A with the editor of Slate, Jacob Weisberg, who talks about jacking up revenues and readership, adding Doonesbury and the controversial deal with NPR during his first year at the helm.

Save the court

People for the American Way has started an online petition drive at a new site called SavetheCourt.org, noting that the odds are50-50 that we will see a Supreme Court retirement this summer.

And whenever it happens, President Bush is likely to nominate a right-wing justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. A justice who will pose a direct threat to decades of progress on civil rights, privacy, reproductive freedom, women's rights, religious liberty, consumer and worker protection, the environment, and more.

I'm not sure this court can be saved, but perhaps the Senate can prevent it from tilting even further to the right. Here's a list of issues at stake when a vacancy occurs.

Linux may hurt Apple more than Microsoft

Paul Boutin in Slate: Flipping the Switch -- Linux's new popularity may hurt Apple more than Microsoft.

Business Week columnist Alex Salkever dropped the bomb last week that next year, "Linux should pass Apple in market share for desktop operating systems on computers."

Supreme Court admits it made mistake

The Supreme Court admits it made a mistake -- no, not that thing about refusing to count all the votes. It reversed a 17-year-old ruling, striking down a Texas sodomy law 6-3, with the usual three troglodytes dissenting.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent and took the unusual step of reading it aloud from the bench this morning, saying "the court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," while adding that he personally has "nothing against homosexuals." Joining Justice Scalia's dissent were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Computer history museum

Motherboards have a resting place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Big Media's silence

William Safire in Thursday's Times:

Over the protests of 750,000 viewers and readers, three appointees to the Federal Communications Commission last month voted to permit the takeover of America's local press, television and radio by a handful of mega-corporations.

If allowed to stand, this surrender to media giantism would concentrate the power to decide what we read and see ó in both entertainment and news ó in the hands of an ever-shrinking establishment elite. ...

No thanks go to the biggest media, where CBS's "60 Minutes," NBC's "Dateline" and ABC's "20/20" found the rip-off of the public interest by their parent companies too hot to handle. Most network newscasts dutifully covered the scandalous story as briefly and coolly as possible, failing to disclose how much it meant to their parent companies, which were lobbying furiously for gobble-up rights.

Unencumbered by such a conflict of interest, public television's liberal Bill Moyers inveighed for months against the power grab, and Consumers Union is on the job. The conservative Joe Scarborough blew the whistle on media giantism on cable's MSNBC, which included an interview with the New York Daily News publisher (and mini-mogul) Mort Zuckerman, outspoken foe of the conglomeration crowd.

Video from the Digital Storytelling fest

Just spotted this terrific page of video snippets that came out of the 6th annual Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, Ariz., earlier this month. Damn, when did Joe Lambert grow that beard?

160 Amazon RSS feeds

Chris Pirillo points to 160 new Amazon RSS feeds.