Tuesday Twitterings

Good morning, newshounds. Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin in 1793. Prohibition began on this day in 1919. Jonas Salk was born in 1914. Happy birthday, Bill Gates - he's 48. Congratulations to our neighbors to the north for their historic rock/paper/scissors championship. We'll get ya next year! Hugs to our friends in SoCal. Check out the fire pictures moblog at Textamerica. Very dramatic. I'm off to burn a couple of hundred tons of prehistoric plant material, but before I do... here's the news.

1. AMD and Intel's usual Q4 price cuts are in. The 3.2GHz P4 drops from $653 to $433. Athlon 3200+ drops from $433 to $325. No cuts on the 64-bit chips.
2. The US Senate is considering a new "privacy" law that undercuts financial privacy protections in California.
3. Ohio's Attorney General says AOL's slow disconnects are illegal. Sues for $400,000.
4. Nokia introduces a "TV" phone, the 7700, available Q2 2004 in Europe and Asia.
5. I've been ignoring the SCO vs Linux case for a few weeks because it's so dumb and pointless. But SCO has taken dumb to a new level by claiming the Gnu Public License (GPL), which is the basis for the entire free software movement, "violates the US constitution." Hunh?
6. Microsoft's Longhorn Development Center is open for business. Forget developing for XP, gang. Invest in Longhorn for mad profits in '06.