• NPR ME: County Tries to Enforce Law Banning Unmarried Cohabitation
• NPR ME: One Extremely Pricy Water Meter in California
• NPR ATC: Missouri, Illinois Locked in Stem-Cell Battle
• NPR ATC: U.S. Loses Its Edge in Nuclear Talks

• News You Can Lose – What I hate about cable TV journalism.
  Slate explains what sucks about TV news.

• DBAs Bar Door Against Big Bad .Net Wolf (eWeek)

  At the heart of the problem is T-SQL, a proprietary stored procedure language that SQL Server DBAs know like the back of their hands but that might as well be Greek to most .Net developers.

  With an integration gleam in its eye, Microsoft Corp. has set its sights on demolishing the wall between those two groups. In SQL Server 2005—due to ship in early November—for the first time, the company’s CLR (Common Language Runtime) will be integrated into the heart of the database.

• WinFS Beta 1 ships (Channel 9)

• Evolving Debate (On the Media) – Covering Intelligent Design

  DAVID KESTENBAUM: Well, I think there’s actually a nice little moment in that story. I’m talking to the intelligent design advocate and I say, so what’s like being an intelligent design guy at an academic university.

  BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

  DAVID KESTENBAUM: And he goes, it’s pretty lonely. [LAUGHTER] And, you know, he sort of – he laid it out there. You didn’t need me to say, I’ve counted and there are ten million scientists on this side and five on the other. And I thought the real question behind this story, when you look at, as you mentioned, the case in Kansas, how the scientific community decided to deal with it or not deal with it. And in some ways.

• Master Planned by H. ALLEN ORR (The New Yorker) referenced by the Covering Intelligent Design peice above.

  It’s true that when you confront biologists with a particular complex structure like the flagellum they sometimes have a hard time saying which part appeared before which other parts. But then it can be hard, with any complex historical process, to reconstruct the exact order in which events occurred, especially when, as in evolution, the addition of new parts encourages the modification of old ones. When you’re looking at a bustling urban street, for example, you probably can’t tell which shop went into business first. This is partly because many businesses now depend on each other and partly because new shops trigger changes in old ones (the new sushi place draws twenty-somethings who demand wireless Internet at the café next door). But it would be a little rash to conclude that all the shops must have begun business on the same day or that some Unseen Urban Planner had carefully determined just which business went where.

• Watching What You Pay (On the Media)

  A little bit on paypal, or how a private company restricted the use of currency after they controlled it.

• Museum Heist (On the Media)

  Podcast + Museum Audio = Much more intresting and engaging Museum experiences.

• Joel points out the deeper coolness of Google Suggest, and announces a geek dinner this Saturday.
• Jon Udell is playing with Calendaring which is a subset of a problem space I’ve been interested in since college.
• JWZ has a link about folding shirts.
• Gladwell has two new pieces up, I found the one on the nature of getting on with life over grief and trauma pretty interesting.
• There appears to be an update for office 2003 for tablet pc‘s allowing context helpers for inking recognition.
• Joe Wilcox remembers the apple angle with Desktop Search. The Seattle Pi looks at the apple angle too.
• Doomsey has a Cat Menorah.
• Bruce Schneier shows how a security screening can reverse the roles of attackers and defenders.
• Bittorrent is in the Slashdot news with Decentralization, Streaming and Lawsuits.

• The lame duck session of congress gives us an Intelligence Overhaul.
• Reality seems to continue marching in Iraq, although not everyone agrees.
• Here is a pretty detailed article about the status of Nuclear Weapons and Iran. Things that stand out to me is that the civilian program issues is still a two year timeframe, alligations of military programs especially related to two sites, Parchin and Lavisan II, an Iranian opposition terroist group that is helping supply the intelligence called the National Council of Resistance and a shopping list of dual use items that have been bought.
• Here is a warning that the 1996 telecommunications bill need some updating.
• In the NyTimes opinion seciton is Red Diaper Babies, getting the government out of industry advertising and Updating the U.N.
• Krugman has some fun: My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system’s current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn’t really an independent entity – it’s just part of the federal government. If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980’s was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice. But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn’t an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis – you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

• Addicted to Digitial Media has a link to the Halo 2 RSS Excel Woorkbook, a video of learning to fly in Halo 2, and a XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility.
• Vik recommends NPR peice on what is wrong with talking heads style journalism.

Oops, This didn’t get posted on friday.

• Apparently Netscape is building a dual rendering engine browser, IE and Firefox.. I wonder if they use wininet/urlmon on the IE renderer.
• Schneier talks about Desktop Google searching other people’s caches because everyone is administrator. He also has a nice peice about Behavioral Assessment Profiling.
• Marwan Barghouti is running for Palestinian Presidency from prison.
• More troops in Iraq. Duh.
• There is a new Windows Messenger client (5.1) available.

JWZ explains that the Roomba isn’t quite ready for prime time.

Safety SecondThe New York Times has an Op-Chart that shows what a differently focused administration could have done with the money we spent on Iraq.

Kerry and IraqSlate does a good job of walking through Kerry’s Iraq statements (as suggested by an RNC attack ad) to find his stable position.