Monday's Mashed Potatoes

Good morning. I'm on vacation but the news never sleeps. Did you see the total solar eclipse this morning? Don't fret, hardly anyone did. It was in Antarctica. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published on this day in 1859. AOL ended the browser wars by buying Netscape in 1998.

1. The US House of Representatives passed an anti-spam bill 392-5 early Saturday. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) creates a "do not spam" list and bans automated email harvesting. But it invalidates some stronger state laws, including California's, and makes some forms of spam legal. Spammers can send as many messages as they like as long as they're obviously ads, with real addresses and unsubscribe links. The Senate is expected to pass it this week and Bush says he will sign the bill.
2. I don't like spam either, but a Silicon Valley programmer is facing up to five years in prison for threatening a Canadian spammer with anthrax. He had received just one too many penis enlargement ads. Sounds like he was taking it personally.
3. IV at 4 in 2004: Intel says its next PIV, the Prescott, will run at 4 GHz by next year.
4. Linus releases test kernel 2.6.0-Test10, "Stoned Beaver" today.
5. Friendster fanfare is fading. According to Wired, early users are fed up with the lag time and the "Friendstapo" killing phoney entries. I killed my entry weeks ago.
6. Coming to a pet store near you in January: genetically modified zebra fish that glow red. Bred to glow in toxic waters, the fish will be the first GM animals to be sold to the public.
7. I spent the weekend downloading Debian - all seven CDs - only to learn this morning that hackers had compromised the servers last week. Guess I'll start over. We're trying to decide which distro to use on TSS now that Red Hat is dumping its free support.
8. A growing number of tech savvy young people are abandoning land lines and TV for cell phones and the Internet, according to a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.