Laten we hopen dat ze volgend jaar extra streng gaan controleren op het vervoer van passagiers achterin busjes met een grijs kenteken.

Hoeven ze in ieder geval niet echt ver te zoeken…

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Whaddaya know. We were right:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has sponsored an unusual [not for long!] provision at the urging of the nation’s banks granting them immunity against an active patent lawsuit, potentially saving them billions of dollars.

Adopted with little fanfare [I’ll bet!] , the amendment would prevent a small Texas company called DataTreasury from collecting damages from banks for infringing on its patented method for digitally scanning, sending and archiving checks. The patents were upheld last summer by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after they were challenged.

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A prominent U.S.-based human rights group Friday released what it said was a recording of Pakistan’s attorney general acknowledging that next week’s national elections would be “massively” rigged.

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The IOC has given athletes the right to blog at the Beijing Games this summer, a first for the Olympics, as long as they follow the many rules it set to protect copyright agreements, confidential information and security.

Blogging is a “legitimate form of personal expression,” the International Olympic Committee said.

The IOC said blogs by athletes “should take the form of a diary or journal” and should not contain any interviews with other competitors at the games. They also should not write about other athletes.

[..]

Still pictures are allowed as long as they do not show Olympic events. Athletes must obtain the consent of their competitors if they wish to photograph them.

Also, athletes cannot use their blogs for commercial gain.

“No advertising and/or sponsoring may be visible on screen at the same time as Olympic content,” the IOC said.

[..]

Domain names for blogs should not include any word similar to “Olympic” or “Olympics.”

First rule about the Fight ClubOlympics is, you do not talk about the Fight ClubOlympics.

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In reading through IDC’s excellent report, “2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption,” analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength.

The observation? That IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies.

[..]

Why is this a bad thing? Enterprises are unshackling themselves from proprietary, expensive licenses and reinvesting that money in the gift that keeps on giving: people. That’s how I read the data.

This becomes especially pronounced when one considers two other questions IDC asked. The first is, “Compared to all of your other current IT initiatives (whether Open Source software or not), please indicate the importance to your organization of your top 10 Open Source software projects.” The answer? Across the board (Applications, Infrastructure, and Application Deployment and Development) these open-source projects were rated “Critical” or “High Importance” by 73 percent of respondents.

In other words, these projects weren’t simply casual afterthoughts that didn’t require outside help. They were perhaps some of the most important IT projects the enterprise was deploying. Those may be best kept in-house.

And why does IDC read all this as bad? My guess is they make most of their money by selling reports to the vendors, so anything bad for the vendor, is bad for IDC.