If Sarah is going to have her attorney order people to shut up about her house, she might have started with First Dude Todd. It was his interview with Greta van Susteran in September of 2008 that first drew the attention of journalists such as Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice. In the interview, Todd boasted of his Dudely accomplishments, as a fisherman, pilot, and homebuilder.

Slashdot has a brief story today about an article in Forbes by Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, on the success and future prospects for the Amazon Kindle E-book reader. The product has been quite successful. However, O'Reilly argues that the current closed architecture and book format of the Kindle is a mistake, one that will in time lead to the loss of its market-leading position.

The mainstream debate today is on the various levels of current taxes: income, sales, property, gasoline, etc... What has been missing from the debate is a debate on land value taxes. Thomas Paine wrote "Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."

President Obama has landed in Russia for his first visit to the country as President -- let's hope it doesn't end like the last one as US Senator, when he was detained with Senator Lieberman at a regional airport after a nuclear missile inspection.

A full transcript of remarks yesterday by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) about the media coverage of the death of Michael Jackson.

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed to mandate disclosure of connections between bloggers and advertisers (those selling stuff) under its Section 5 authority, which enables the Commission to prohibit "unfair or deceptive acts or practices" in commerce. There's been significant fear and loathing of this proposal. At a recent legal meetup in NYC, I suggested that there may be a barrier -- Section 230 of the CDA -- to the FTC's enforcement of this move.

While running errands with someone who banks at Chase, the teller made a bit of small talk as she typed numbers into the computer. As the teller kept asking innocent questions along with questions regarding the deposit my friend was making, she inquired in the same pleasant friendly tone that had been there in her earlier small talk about what my friend did for a living.

Karl Marx famously wrote that "Religion is the Opiate of the Masses" in the last but one century. His ideas have since been taken and turned into a kind of religion, one he declared he didn't believe in; he once said (and I haven't the original to hand, so to paraphrase) "I'm not sure what a Marxist is, but I'm fairly sure I'm not one." I wonder whether Che Guevara might say much if it were possible to ask him about the T-Shirt wearing mob of fans he seems to have acquired.

Here Comes Everybody is a book about how technology has already changed society in irrevocable ways, and why you need to recognise that -- whether you're a TV critic unwilling to admit that his job's worthless, a dictator who needs to start worrying about Twitter or, say, a 30-year old journalist who really should be thinking about getting a new job.

The BBC News reports that the European Space Agency's Planck observatory, which was launched along with the Herschel telescope in mid-May, has reached its rather chilly normal operating temperature, '273.05 degrees Celsius ('457.7 F), just 0.1 C above absolute zero (0 Kelvin). It will attempt to make the most precise measurements yet of the oldest "light" in the universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background, left over from a short time (in cosmic terms) after the Big Bang, when the nascent universe had cooled enough (to about 3000 K) that electrons and protons could combine to form hydrogen atoms.

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