Hindu Riots in India Kill 38 Mus­lims. A Hindu crowd set fire to a block of Mus­lim homes Thurs­day, killing at least 38 peo­ple, includ­ing a dozen chil­dren, amid riots across the Indian state of Gujarat sparked by a Mus­lim attack on a train full of Hindu nation­al­ists. [AP World News]

Just in case any­one was think­ing that only Islam breeds homi­ci­dal mani­acs like flies, here is a story about Hindu homi­ci­dal maniacs.

Guan­tanamo Detainees Refuse to Eat. More than a third of the detainees at this remote U.S. mil­i­tary out­post refused to eat break­fast Thurs­day after two guards stripped an inmate of his tur­ban dur­ing prayer. [AP World News]

How is this a prob­lem? Mus­lim fun­da­men­tal­ists are gen­er­ally eager to die, and if they want to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt any­body else for a change, let them. Maybe we can start a ser­vice where fun­da­men­tal­ists can report to a US prison facil­ity to starve them­selves, blow them­selves up, or what­ever, with­out both­er­ing any­one else.

Dan Gill­mor: Trust­ing the News. What this hacker dis­cov­ered is bad enough. But there are even more alarm­ing sce­nar­ios. One of these days, some­one is going to change the online news pages of the Wall Street Jour­nal or New York Time or CNN or other major news orga­ni­za­tion, in a way that does severe dam­age. [Tomalak’s Realm]

This assumes that peo­ple are unwise enough to trust the news when it’s not being hacked. Every time I read an arti­cle in the main­stream media that cov­ers an area I’m famil­iar with, the story is often wrong in some obvi­ous way, and some­times a bla­tant lie. This leads me to sus­pect the same is true of sto­ries that I don’t have per­sonal knowl­edge of.

Jere­miah, a New Series from B5 Cre­ator, Debuts Sun­day [Slash­dot]

This sounds inter­est­ing. Between this new series and Star­gate SG-1, I’m think­ing of sign­ing up for Showtime.

On this day four years ago the New­ton was “Steved.” There is still no PDA that has reached the level of the Mes­sagePad 2100, and it looks like it might eas­ily be four more years before any­thing even approaches it.

I just found a new tip-jar ser­vice that uses e-gold. It’s remark­ably sim­ple to use: http://www.clicktwocents.com/?474846.

Com­puter Com­pany Dell Anti-Gun?. On the 26^th I placed another call this time to can­cel the order. After a few hours I got a call back, with this amaz­ing rea­son for the delay. It seems some­one in Dell had already can­celed my order, when I asked why I was told Dell was afraid I was going to use the machine for ille­gal pur­poses. When I asked why some­one would think that I was told it was because of the name of my busi­ness ‘Weigand Com­bat Hand­guns Inc.’. Because I am involved in firearms I might be doing some­thing ille­gal. [FirearmNews.com]

I rec­om­mend buy­ing PC hard­ware from some other rep­utable man­u­factuer instead. Per­haps HP?

RIAA Almost Down To Pre-Napster Rev­enues [Slash­dot]

This is hardly sur­pris­ing, since Nap­ster is gone. While it lasted, my record pur­chases from RIAA mem­bers went from noth­ing to not very much. With Nap­ster gone, my pur­chases are back down to noth­ing. The RIAA can tell what­ever lies they like, and who knows, maybe they even believe their own lies. But it won’t change the fact that the only thing that got me to buy CDs was Napster.

Dig­i­tal Secu­rity Foment­ing a Feud. A pro­posed bill with heavy­weight sup­port from the enter­tain­ment indus­try gar­ners dis­trust from tech­nol­ogy fac­tions; it would make cre­at­ing, sell­ing or dis­trib­ut­ing dig­i­tal sys­tems with­out embed­ded copy pro­tec­tion a crime. Declan McCul­lagh reports from Wash­ing­ton. [Wired News]

This bill would be totally uncon­sti­tu­tional, of course. Not that this will make any dif­fer­ence to the government.

Ric­o­chet Bounces Back, Cau­tiously [Slash­dot]

Appar­ently the ser­vice will be turned back on in Los Ange­les first, in the spring. This would be great, if it hap­pens. I’ll cer­tainly sign up again.