Some day, someone too smart for their own good will write a dissertation comparing and contrasting the cross-cultural mashup-appropriation styles at work in the Hitler "Downfall" Internet meme and the Chinese Red Army magical mystery mashup tour now exploding in a YouTube video near you. But until that day arrives, I won't pretend to tell you what it all means. All I can say is: When the Red Army goes to town on Michael Jackson's "Beat It," you are not going to want to miss the smoking erhu solo. Eddie Van Halen, eat your heart out.

AP - Joe Paterno is now peerless in his profession.

On this glorious Friday, at the end of yet another work week, I wish I could reward you with news about a major feminist triumph -- or, in the very least, hula hooping puppies. Instead, I'm going to risk killing your T.G.I.F. buzz by asking you to read about -- put on your serious faces, now -- suicide. Look, I don't make the news, I just report it, and new findings on how suicide is culturally scripted by gender are truly fascinating, so just bear with me.

Thursday, Oracle filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google, accusing the search giant of infringing on patented Java technologies in its Linux-based Android mobile operating system. Even though Oracle appears to have a solid basis for legal action, the lawsuit could permanently burn bridges between Oracle and the broader Java ecosystem. Such blatantly antagonistic litigation sends a clear message to the open source software community that Oracle is a hostile and abusive interloper rather than a contributor.

It raises very serious questions about the company's stewardship of other open source technology that it obtained during the acquisition of Sun. The resulting uncertainty will likely not be conducive to retaining the customers and mindshare that Sun had built around certain open source products. It will also likely have a serious chilling affect on community involvement and third-party contributions. It's important to recognize that the impact of this lawsuit will be felt far beyond the scope of Java and will also influence other key open source projects obtained by Oracle, such as the MySQL database system.

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