Solar Tower in the Australian Outback?

An Australian power company is planning a 200MW "solar tower" power station in the Outback. If completed, it will be the world's tallest structure, by a considerable margin.

This idea's been circulating for a while, and I'm glad to see someone having a crack at actually doing it...

[Links: BBC, EnviroMission]

Freedom to lie?

This article discusses a very interesting case likely to go before the US Supreme Court in the near future.

Essentially, Nike is arguing that it has a free-speech right to knowingly deceive the public. The Californian Supreme Court has already ruled against them. Paragons of virtue like Exxon/Mobil, Monsanto, Microsoft and Pfizer are lining up to support Nike.

If Nike wins, corporations can lie all they want. We have enough trouble with that already, despite advertising regulations. But if Nike loses... life gets intersting... not least because this case might have repercussions for corporate donation of money to US Political parties.

[link: Doc Searls]

Richard III

Sir Ian McKellen has published the screenplay of his film adaptation of Richard III on the web. The introduction, detailing the development of the screenplay, is particularly interesting.

[edit: and not just the introduction - the whole thing is annotated with interesting snippets of information about deleted scenes, the filming, sets, props, etc.]

[Link: rjh]

I thought I was joking... [apologies to non-geeks]

A few days ago, in a web authoring forum, someone suggested to me that HTTP was just a guideline, and that implementors could pick and choose which bits they wanted to implement. I responded (rather more testily than necessary, but the guy was being an arrogant smartass) that maybe we should play fast-and-loose with TCP/IP while we were at it.

Well, someone's done some poking around and discovered that Internet Explorer and IIS do just that. So Microsoft are buggering about with the protocol that runs the Internet in order to make their web server and browser seem faster. Lovely.

[later: hey! I scooped slashdot! The downside to this is that the site is now slashdotted. The poor webserver is now a gibbering wreck. Hopefully, you'll be able to see the page again in a few days...]

[even later: following a prod from sbisson, I've done a bit of research, and I now suspect that the original article linked above contains insufficient information to determine if MS is doing something wrong - the descibed behaviour MAY be valid in certain circumstances, but we need to know more about the test conditions to be sure. And I _SO_ wanted to spend my Sunday evening resarching TCP/IP and HTTP 1.1]

[much later: after more research, I'm fairly sure that IE is behaving, and the original post is wrong. Guess I should crank up my "scepticism" setting.]

[link: mpt]