Techcordance

Pro Life

Pastor Walter Hoye has spent a week in a California jail on charges related to his ministry at a Berkeley abortion clinic.
Hoye was ordered to serve 30 days in jail and pay a $1,000 fine after refusing the court’s offer of probation. Catie Short of the Life Legal Defense Foundation explains that Hoye declined probation because the court ordered him not to help women.
“He told the court that he would do his best to comply with the law,” says Short. “It’s not like he’s saying, ‘I’m going to go out there and violate the law. But in the meantime, I want to be able to go and offer alternatives to women who are considering abortion.’”The judge ordered him to stay 100 yards away from the abortion clinic, which Short calls a severe restriction on free speech. She has also filed suit in federal court asking that the ordinance Hoye violated be declared unconstitutional.

Virus

The dreaded Conficker Windows worm phoned home as ordered Wednesday — but so far hasn’t launched a full-scale attack on the Internet.
Computer security experts breathed sighs of relief and satisfaction that their predictions that nothing would happen had proven true.
“One thing we’re not seeing is any mass malicious activity,” said Joris Evers, an analyst with McAfee. “The Internet today is working just as well as it was working yesterday.”

Iowa Court

DES MOINES, Iowa – The Iowa Supreme Court says the state’s same-sex marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples, making it the third state where gay marriage is legal.
In a unanimous ruling issued Friday, the court upheld a 2007 Polk County District Court judge’s ruling that the law was unconstitutional.
The case stems from a 2005 lawsuit filed by Lambda Legal, a New York-based gay rights organization. The group filed a lawsuit on behalf of six gay and lesbian Iowa couples who were denied marriage licenses.

IBM-SUN

IBM is on the verge of acquiring Sun Microsystems, as we discussed last week. The pricetag is reportedly $7 billion. According to the NYTimes’s sources, “People familiar with the negotiations say a final agreement could be announced Friday, although it is more likely to be made public next week. IBM’s board has already approved the deal, they said.” After the demise of SGI, one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix. If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix. And reader UnanimousCoward adds, “Sun only came into the consciousness of the unwashed masses with the company not being able to get E10K’s out the door fast enough in the first bubble. We here will remember some pizza-box looking thing, establishing 32 MB of RAM as a standard, and when those masses were scratching their heads at slogans like ‘The Network is the Computer.’