Baseball owners and players agreed today that the game’s next work stoppage would take place in 2006, when the four-year contract they hammered out expires. What? This is being covered as a settlement of a potential strike? Don’t be fooled. This deal doesn’t fix the problems with the game, any more than the past few seasons of steroid- and expansion-boosted home run records erase the memory of the 1994 strike.

Cory Doctorow sent me email responding to the post on Wednesday about Intel’s WiFi + Firewire initiative. Apparently, the project originally had restrictive digital rights management built into it, though he hasn’t looked at it recently. This is a sticky issue. I think it’s fair to have some controls on licensed content (though Cory and others may disagree with me on where to draw the line). But putting those controls ...

I’m at my in-laws beach house for Labor Day Weekend, so expect more sporadic posting for a few days.

John Judis of the New Republic weighs in favoring competition in broadband. Sorry, John, you’re three years late to the party. The new consensus is the competition is the problem, not the solution. Learn to stop worrying and love the monopoly.

The RIAA Website was hacked last night (via “Scripting News”). This was a pretty boneheaded move by whomever pulled it off. The content industries want to portray themselves as the responsible parties, and the other side of the debate as criminals and cynical, greedy tech companies. The responsible people in Hollywood and the record industry distinguish between the pirates and the people who just want to enjoy their music and ...

Intel is apparently spearheading a cross-industry effort to allow WiFi to interoperate with Firewire (that’s IEEE 802.11 and 1394, for the numerically inclined), using Microsoft’s Universal Plug and Play technology. Incompatibility between the standards pushed by the computer industry and the consumer electronics industry has been a big barrier to home networking since I first started writing about it in 1998. This effort could be good news for the emergence ...

Yahoo! News: Ex-Former WorldCom CFO Sullivan Indicted You know your company doesn’t want anything to do with you when you’re not just the former CFO, but the ex-former CFO. Or does the double negative mean he’s back on the job?

Doc Searls, promoting AOTC and commenting on Verizon opposing the content industries, says, “Up until now, the only party at the table with Congress has been Hollywood: the entertianment industry. Now the telcos are moving up to that table as well. They have the money, so they’ll get the seat. Now it’s time for technology to move up to the same table.” I agree with the last point, but the ...

Joi Ito: “As blogs explode in the US, 2ch, the anonymous discussion site booms in Japan. I wonder if this is random or reflects a basic difference in Japanese in US culture. It is kind of cliche, but blogs are maybe better for opinionated people who want to become famous.” Yep, that’s a pretty fair description of most Americans.

DSL Market Penetration to 30 June 2002: Top 20 Countries (from Point Topic) DSL subscribers as % of phone lines 1 South Korea 26.14 2 Taiwan 11.07 3 Hong Kong 9.78 4 Belgium 7.79 5 Canada 6.34 6 Denmark 6.10 7 Germany 5.12 8 Singapore 4.73 9 Japan 4.44 10 Sweden 4.36 11 Finland 4.21 12 Estonia 4.11 13 Spain 3.86 14 Austria 3.69 15 Norway 3.10 16 Israel 2.88 ...