Tuesday's Turkey Dinner

Help me, I'm newsing and I can't get up. The first American patent was issued on this day in 1715. It was for a corn processing technique. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1867. The first football play-by-play was broadcast by WTAW in College Station, Texas in 1920. The general theory of relativity was proven in 1976 by radio signals sent from Viking I on Mars.

1. Cell phone number portability went into effect yesterday. So far, so good according the the San Jose Mercury-News. The AP says 100,000 consumers applied on the first day, far fewer than expected. Consumers Union has set up a site, escapeCellHell.com, for tips and complaints.
2. Remember when the .13 micron process was a big deal? Now that IBM has announced a .09 micron process for the G5, Intel has gone them one better, demonstrating a .065 micron (65 nanometer) process that puts the equivalent of 10 million transistors on the head of a pin. Expect 65 nm chips from both companies by 2005 if they can solve the leakage problem.
3. Eben Moglen, General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation and Columbia University School of Law professor, has released an article that compares SCO to a "shyster" lawyer and calls their claims "irresponsibly inflated."
4. The programmer who created DeCSS to crack DVDs has issued a tool to remove copy protection from Apple's iTunes AAC encoded songs. The resulting file has no DRM but also lacks header information that makes the song playable.
5. SuSE Linux 9 is now available for free download. The company typically waits one month from the commercial release to make a free version available. The servers are currently slammed.
6. Apple's response to the Neistat Brothers' iPod's Dirty Secret video: a $99 battery replacement program. Just in time - the iPod was two years old yesterday.
7. From Slashdot comes this Tale of the Strange but True: the County of Los Angeles has asked computer vendors to stop referring to hard drives as master and slave as part of their committment "to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived."
8. Silicon Valley startup financier Gene Kleiner (of Kleiner Perkins) passed away last Thursday at the age of 80. He was instrumental in getting Fairchild Semiconductor off the ground.