The RIAA’s ongoing attempts to shutdown Napster border on ludicrous at their moments. It’s amazing how the record labels talk about protecting the artist’s rights with a straight face. Napster has started a buycott and a letter writing campaign that will perhaps enlighten the labels. Did you miss our Hopelessly Complete Waste of Time last week? Not this week. Nope, no sir. We’ve got your fix. Ever wondered what kind of cheese you are? Try the Online Cheese Comparator and wonder no more. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

ICANN has approved new top-level domains, but what they will be and the who qualifies to register under them is up in the air. It looks like we’ll get more details in the fall with a possibility of actually seeing new top level domains at the end of the year. Coverage: ZDNet, ICANN And this weeks hopelessly complete waste of time is KillerNerd.com a collection of oddball videos and more. Enjoy. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

We’re always updating our documents section. A number of the articles have got changes and we’ve added a new one that does the math to hang pictures in a gallery. Did you think gallery owners just intuitively knew where to put those pieces? Not really. It normally takes lot of numbers and a calculator. Ours does all that stupid math for you. And it’s time again for the hopelessly complete waste of time. Hooked on arcade games? Want to relive those thrilling days of yesteryear wasting bags of quarters to get a suntan from the games? FreeArcade.com is just the place for you. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

We had to develop a tool to find the distance between two zip codes recently. If you’ve ever wondered about the distance between two U.S. Zip Codes, the name of that city and state, or the (1990) population of that Zip Code, we’ve got the tool for you. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

It’s Independence Day here in the States… as usual we’ll leave others to stick with the script. We prefer something, uhm, different for these occasions. Check out Atom Films’ take on the Declaration of Independence. Ever wanted to have a webpage that encrypts stuff? Well, now you can just steal this one. It use the RSA encryption routine and is done using JavaScript. It’s probably not practical for big messages, but sounds interesting. Although, ICANN’s webpage has few if any details and no dates have been announced, the ICAAN board is expected to approve new top-level domains at it’s board meeting in mid-July. Once that happens, we may finally get to have domains like big-uns.xxx or gugganheim.art or ibm.biz or microsoft.sucks. What do the bids start at for BillGates.sucks? or XXX.xxx? Coverage: CNN. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Have you ever wanted to be a number? You, too can be someone, meet people, be easily identified by them. Although we still arn’t sure who them are, we do know about skim.com, a website that sells clothes with a number unique to you. Then, if someone thinks you’re interesting and wants to talk to you later, maybe ask you out, all they have to do is remember the 000 240 on that oh-so-stylish cape you’re wearing and then send you an email at 000240@skim.com. Interesting… Scientists have US Government approval to test a tiny computer chip that is implanted in the eye to restore limited sight to the blind in certain cases. Coverage: Wired. Early on Saturday, Brattelboro, Vermont, and Kathleen Peterson and Carolyn Conrad made history with the first legal same-sex union in the US. Coverage: Yahoo. In another Hopelessly Complete Waste of Time, return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear… ooops, sorry, a three day cruise to the real Gilligan’s island, a dark noir-esque place of frustrated passions and dreams: Gilligan Must Die (contains profanity and mature subject matter). Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

It seems everytime you turn around lately, someone is coming up with a new trick to make getting into space easier. One company plans to ship off the shelf components include Apple Macs to orbit and have the crew of PhD on the shuttle put the pieces together because the satelites won’t have to be engineered to withstand launch. Can’t rattle something to pieces that’s already in pieces. The satelites will provide inexpensive wireless internet. British Telecom is not a company that’s well known on this side of the Atlantic. But, think big old telephone company and you can’t be too far from the truth. They’ve recently announced that they’re going to begin enforcing their 1989 patent on hyperlinks. Ooops, I think I owe a royalty on that underlined text. Of course, did the British Patent office realize this stuff already existed in numerous programs developed in the 1960’s and documented in any number of books. Coverage: Slashdot Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Oracle and a handful of other big-iron databases occupy the top of the industrial-strength database heap. For those whose needs only get to merely outrangeous, there are a range of options including MySQL. MySQL has been incredibly popular and is free for most uses, but hasn’t been open source, meaning no one outside the company can check the code, fix problems or make improvements. Well, VA Linux is working with MySQL AB and Progress Software so that MySQL will be open-source under the GPL license. Descending into partial Political Incorrectness… Have you ever wondered if a cartoon character is gay? How about the Ask Jeeves Butler? Someone on another website asked that question. As always, Jeeves comes back with a number of choices: Is Jeeves gay? and How Do I Know If I’m Gay. Well handled… The internet is an old creature; dating back decades to a tool funded by DARPA and used by academia and the military to aid in collaboration. The World Wide Web is much more recent. Tim Berners-Lee designed the Web and implemented the first browser in less than a month using a NeXT workstation (half-predecesor of Apple’s coming Mac OS X). The internet doesn’t forget the past; it accumulates it with everything else. There are archives of old browsers (do a search above if you’re curious) and there’s even a screenshot of that first browser Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Want the ultimate home movie experience? Function Communications sells a DVD player you just might want. In a normal DVD player the signal quality is reduced markedly before it reaches your TV. These units use a custom chipset to bring you the full quality. Yikes. Coverage: Wired But, if you’re gift shopping for Christmas already, there may be a better gift for the technophile in your life. The number of technophiles who are also Lego addicts is remarkable. Even if they don’t have any around. They’re just in denial. Well, make them accept who they are. Order them Legos in Bulk. Do you use a Mac and have a huge collection of CDs you want to convert to MP3? Then you’ve probably discovered that all the software to convert CDs to MP3s costs money or doesn’t work all that great. Well, you’re the perfect candidate for Napster. You’ve already paid for the music and someone somewhere has probably already done the work of converting it. Just go get it. Napster clients for Mac include Rapster and Macster. In the Fort Worth-Dallas area and looking for something different to do tonight? In the poster, a smug body builder claims "I put 2 full inches on my arms, 3 inches on my chest and trimmed 4 inches off my waist in just 7 weeks… Thanks to Synthetic Poetry!" The poster is great, has all the details and asks why not you? Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Scientists are developing a system that shines light on the inside of the eye to measure as many as 65 different defects (compared to your normal eye doctor’s two) and correct them resulting in vision that is better than 20/20. The work is promising enough that Bausch & Lomb has joined the National Science Foundation in founding the research. Coverage: Science Daily. For a while now, cross-platform office software meant a current version on Windows and an older version on Mac. Or versions on Windows and Linux. Currently, Sun’s Star Office is available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS/2. But, a port of Star Office to the MacOS –and presumably a build for OS X– is planned for later this year. With the possibility of an immanent Microsoft breakup, the sharks smell blood. Additional coverage: MacWeek. It seems everyone likes to slow down and rubberneck accidents. Something blood and roadkill, perhaps. So, it was destined to happen: a websie devoted to the dotcoms that have crashed and burned. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook