Christophe does not like the way the city mayor manages the city, spends the public money and says it on his blog, every day. He has been very successful doing that, with hundreds of inhabitants of Puteaux reading and commenting his blog everyday and many national newspapers that talked about his blog.

Christophe criticizes the city management so much that they have tried to stop him for months, the city mayor has even sent him threats over the phone that he recorded and blogged, of course.

Today, he has been stopped in the street by the Police Municipale (the local French Police) who tried to arrest him for his blogging. Fortunately for Christophe, the National Police arrived immediately as they found what was happening weird, and let him go.

Back to Tim(my)! His latest paper, "Copyright's Communications Policy," has me absolutely floored. Tim traces the history of copyright law, the way that we've spent a century undergoing a once-a-decade copyfight, in which representatives of inventors faced down representatives of artists and duked it out in the courts and Congress.

The parallels to today's fights are downright spooky. For example, the first music pirates (the recording industry, who ripped off sheet music) got this proper dressing-down from John Phillip Sousa, who told Congress:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Thirty-odd years later, the another group of pirates -- radio broadcasters, who refused to pay royalties for the music they file-shared over the airwaves -- violated Godwin's Law decades before it was formulated, comparing the entrenched rights societies that served the recording industry (the pirates of their boyhoods) to Adolf Hitler.

Tim runs down the history of cable versus broadcasters, and other copyfights down through the ages. He does so clearly and engagingly, in ways that non-lawyers and non-historians can readily grasp. And when it's done, the most amazing thing is the certainty that copryight-disrupting technologies every bit as wooly as file-sharing have been invented over and over again, and that the P2P fight is not a new one -- that piracy is the norm, not the exception.

If you want to understand the P2P fight, read this -- it is the most concise, thorough and engaging text on the subject to date. 560k PDF Link

I don't even begrudge them the 30 minutes' worth of commercials they subjected their captive audience to. Well, I did. But I didn't let it get to me.

What did get to me was this warning, shown before nearly every film in the UK:

"You are not permitted to use any camera or recording equipment in this cinema. This will be treated as an attempt to breach copyright. Any person doing so can be ejected and such articles may be confiscated by the police. We ask the audience to be vigilant against any such activity and report any matters arousing suspicion to cinema staff. Thank you."

Every time I see this, my blood boils. I just paid a fortune to see this movie, I've been subjected to 500 percent concession stand markup and half an hour of commercials and now you're going to give me a little lecture about how badly I'll get beaten up if I turn out to be a pirate, and ask me to snitch on my fellow moviegoers?

It's adding insult to injury, if you ask me. It's unforgivably rude.

So here's what I've started doing: whenever this warning is screened, I take a very obvious flash photo of it. I've done it twice now, and both times, I got a round of applause. You can do it too. If we all do it, if we all laugh and boo when this warning comes on, maybe the movie companies will get the picture.

An autism institute apparently is interested in using Half-Life 2's facial animation capabilities to help teach autistic children how to recognize expressions, according to PC Gamer magazine.

"Nothing like the US soldier's sense of  humor...and well aimed!
Hooray for our troops.
READ THE BLACK PATCH UNDER THE US FLAG;
This SHOULD be on the front cover of Time, Newsweek, etc.
But it won't.
Let's you and I 'put it there' by forwarding this all around the world (so
to speak)!
(The flags are France, Germany, and Russia)-- in case you don't know.." 

I should have checked snopes before posting this. The photo is fake. I was wrong about the flag, though. The patch really looks like that. According to snopes, it's to give the appearing that the flag is flying in a breeze blowing towards the front of the soldier. (Thanks Cody!)

David Calkins emailed me another version of the photo, with these badges.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell said he switched carriers for his work wireless phone as well as for his wife and son at a Circuit City outlet and the moves were done in an hour.

"I was shocked at how well it worked," Powell said. He declined to identify the carriers but said his name was not on the accounts so he did not receive favorable treatment.

"One day in the future, they hope to create a 'doctor in a cell,' which will be able to operate inside a living body, spot disease and apply the necessary treatment before external symptoms even appear."

"I consume gas, therefore I am" kind of sums up the British notion of identity. The world is a vague and fleeting place, changing from day to day like a flowing river. The vast networks of gas pipes, electrical wires and water pipes, however, are firmly in place somewhere underground. They are the arteries of our modern society, weaving their way through the soil from which we harvest our food, and in which we bury our dead. The utility bill is thus our connection to the very fabric of society - our proto-identity as social beings.

Hence, it should come as no surprise that new connections in this network, or connections to completely different networks, can not be made by mere "individuals". How preposterous would it not be if a "person", i.e. the moisty fungus that grows around an utility bill, for instance tried to open a bank account? Where would that account go? Where would it be? Flowing freely in the imaginary world of light and air, fluttering unconnected to the networks of society, that's where.

"(Pre-1933) music is more backwoods and I think of it as representing real isolated pockets of eccentricity... I see radio, or mass communications in general, as ruining that isolation, which to me is what’s most interesting about it. People started imitating. People could hear Bing Crosby on the radio, so they’d all try to sound like him instead of having enough faith in their own weirdness to keep it going."

According to the Associated Press report, "the lights were filmed on March 5 by pilots using infrared equipment. They appeared to be flying at an altitude of about 3,500 meters (11,480 feet), and allegedly surrounded the Air Force jet as it conducted routine anti-drug trafficking vigilance in Campeche. Only three of the objects showed up on the plane's radar."

Yesterday, a follow-up AP report quoted a nuclear scientist from the National Autonomous University who believes "the bright blurs could have been caused by electrical flashes emitted spontaneously by the atmosphere." Meanwhile, the Mexican Defense Secretary says the jury is still out on what appears on the tape.

There is only one logical integration of all these statistics with the recent Soundscan data: even though actual point-of-purchase sales are up by about 9% in the US - and the industry sold over 13,000,000 more units in 2004 (1st quarter) than in 2003 (1st quarter) - the Industry is still claiming a loss of 7% because RIAA members shipped 7% fewer records than in 2003.

Forget the confusing percentages, here's an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as "a loss."

I'll go a step further. This fact, that Sherman seems to confirm, should logically mean a smaller percentage of returns. But, shouldn't fewer returns mean higher profit margins and faster turnaround; and shouldn't that be good for both the retail and wholesale side of the industry? "Sure," admits Sherman today, "but I have no idea what US shipments looked like in the first quarter." Then how can he claim world-wide "losses" in his March speech to Financial Times New Media?

The other super-heroes put Spidey up to it, going to Geneva to wheedle the WIPO delegates about their trademark rights. "Send Batman," he'd begged. "Bruce Wayne is a fucking billionaire. He can talk to these people." But Supe had sadly shook his head and said, "You know that's the wrong answer, Peter. Bruce is a sociopath. We need a diplomat."

The Swiss thought his official underoos were ridiculous. In a diplomatic town like Geneva, no one would bat an eye at a djelleba, or full-dress purdah, or a kilt, but a superhero in fancy underwear drew stares all the way from the Gare Central to his stunningly overpriced and for all that gamey and run-down hotel. He passed one of the youth gangs on the way, muttering into their phones and thumbing at their keyboards, coordinating their crimefighting activities. They had Wonder Womanoid costumes, and he was glad that the Amazon Princess wasn't present to witness this blatant trademark infringement. She'd go bonkers, and it would be the Golden Lasso Massacre of Geneva.

And on Wired News, these photos I shot at the convention this week, including the one at left of a young woman overwhelmed by blinking, bleeping things inside Microsoft's Xbox pavilion.
Link to Day to Day home, Link to archived audio for this segment.

Copyright law has become one of the most important and controversial drivers of the Information Society. The Internet has made every user a publisher, but copyright rules governing their activities are often determined by opaque international bodies that decide rules with little public input.

Join us in Berlin to debate where copyright should be going to ensure that authors, musicians, film-makers and the public will all benefit. Engage wih leading international thinkers from across Europe and the United States. Meet colleagues who are working to make sure all members of society benefit from copyright.

Attendance is free.

MOBUTOBE refers to the calculations of Isaac Asimov. The biologist and author published in 1971 that there are 20 trillion (20 x 10^12) tons of live cells on earth. 10 percent of these (that is two trillion tons) are animal cells. This number has to be regarded as the maximum level, for vegetable life cannot increase in quantitiy without an increase of sunlight or a refinement of its capability to process sunlight...

The building complex shall be constructed like this: The roof is reserved fo plant cultivation. Edible algae as well as higher plants that are manipulated so that they are esculent as a whole are cultivated there. Regular supply is easily provided.

Sailor mongering was rife in the 19th century when brothels sent prostitutes laden with booze onto ships as they made their way to harbor. The idea was to get the sailors so drunk they could be whisked to shore and held in bondage, and a law was passed against it in 1872. It has only been used in a court of law twice, the last time in 1890.

Greenpeace says the decision by the U.S. Attorney's Office to prosecute the organization rather than just the activists who boarded the APL Jade freighter is a sea change in policy, and a conviction would throttle free speech everywhere...

Not once since the Boston Tea Party have U.S. authorities criminally prosecuted a group for political expression.

What's delicious about this blog entry is that it ends with Alice, an actual woman who actually plays games, running down her view on the issue. Note to E3: asking women to talk about women in gaming would get you genuine insight instead of steaming bullshit:

I have a few things to say now, speaking as a female player and game-buyer (from the shops!):

1. 25 years of gaming history has sent out the marketing message that games are for boys and men. If you change that message, women will buy more games.

2. I think that it's not a lack of games that will appeal to women that's the problem - there are LOTS - it's women even knowing they exist, and that they're fun, and worth the purchase.

3. In *my* 25 years of gaming history, I have never once seen a game explicitly marketed to me, in "female media" or ordinary media like newspapers. Online, in neutral environments (say, Yahoo) a game banner ad tells me a game is available, but the message that that advert is for boys and men is still subconscious. I'll click because clearly I'm a freak, but will a non-gaming female click if that message isn't changed? Will her eye even notice the banner?

4. I want Playstation teeshirts that aren't in XXL and man-shaped.

5. Daytime TV ad slots are cheap as chips. If you advertise a game there like, say, SSX 3, and women (or men) can see how pretty it is, and fun it could be, you may find the message changing slowly. Surely this is worth an experiment. My dear previously-non-gamer flatmate is now an SSX addict after seeing it play.

6. Making games for women at home who have kids will be tricky because they are time-poor - start with the teenage females and "Sugar" magazine or Habbo Hotel, but don't discount the mothers: they'll be bored during certain hours of the day and eager for entertainment. Oh and can we all stop calling them 'they' with that curious aftertaste?

I worked with Wired Magazine to produce a series of panels, presentations, and "fireside chats" at the event -- guests include Andrew Stanton from Pixar, "Doom" creator John Carmack, Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, James Luyten of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Xcor CEO Jeff Greason, NASA Space Architect Gary Martin, robotics guru Rodney Brooks, and creators of the film "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

The event is presented by General Electric, and takes places Friday through Sunday at Fort Mason center in SF. Tickets are affordable and available. It's a family-friendly event aimed at consumers and deep geeks alike... think Epcot Center meets 1904 World's Fair. Robots, rocket ships, and an abundance of geektastic eye candy. Going to be great. See you there!
Link

Yesterday was the day I hied myself off to the Tottenham Court Road to go shopping for a mobile phone. I knew exactly what I wanted: a Sony-Ericsson P900 with the O2 75 plan, which gets me 1000 minutes and several texts for only two or three times what comparable service would cost in the US (English mobile phones are very feature-rich, come with lovely high-speed data service, and cost so much to use that it's hard to believe that there's really anyone using the advanced features -- not at £4 a megabyte!).

The man in the Carphone Warehouse gave me the hookup, set up my account, called their credit department, and told me I'd have to pay a £150 deposit to go a-roaming in Europe. This is steep, but I can hack it. I gave him the nod, and then he passed me the contract to sign and went off to get my new phone. That's when he discovered that he'd run right out of P900s. I walked the length of the Tottenham Court Road strip and couldn't locate a P900 (or, indeed any phone with more than 12 buttons) for love or money.

But eventually, my luck changed. An Orange store staffed with friendly and knowledgeable clerks had P900s in stock and they were happy to take my money. We went through the signup rigamarole again -- took hours -- and then they called it in.

No dice. All of Orange's account sign-up computers were down. I went away and came back, but the computers were still down. The clerk confided that this happened a lot to Orange's overtaxed billing computers. I thought that it was a little weird that I was about to trust this company with my telephony when they couldn't even manage the IT necessary to reliably sign up a new customer, but shrug, they had the phone and I needed it, and besides, they'd match O2's rates for me. They sent me away and asked me to return the next day.

It was a waste of time.

I came back today, and after an hour more of hemming and hawing, this is what transpired: Orange would give me a phone with e £75 deposit, but I would have to wait 90 days before I'd be allowed to roam with the phone. I pointed out that I travelled two or three weeks out of every month, and this would render this (very expensive) phone very useless to me. I asked to speak to a supervisor. No dice. I offered to leave the same deposit I'd been asked for at O2. Even fewer than no dice -- "We don't know who you are, we can't give you roaming." I offered a bigger deposit. I offered to show the (enormous, promptly paid) cellular bills from my last year with Nextel. The deed to my condo in Toronto. The letter of reference from Yale. The Wired masthead. My US credit-report.

A waste of time.

It's the rules, they said. And please stop asking to speak to the credit department: they're not "customer-facing" and they're getting annoyed. You're annoying them.

Right, I thought, I'll call the press-relations department. I spoke to them at length -- flatteringly enough, they'd heard of me. So, what's the problem, I asked. Well, we can't do this because it's too risky to extend roaming to someone with no credit. I have credit. And it's what everyone does. Not O2. But you could ring up big bills with our roaming partners and stick us with them. I could call Tokyo and leave the phone off the hook for 24h without leaving England's shores and rack up just as big a liability for you..

At the end of the day, it came to this: These are our rules. We will stick to them. We will not make exceptions to them. We will hug them to our bosom beyond any kind of rationality or reason.

I am such a goddamned telephone junkie. I'm no Joi Ito with his $3,500 GPRS bills, but I've been spending $200 or $300 on cellular telephone damned near every month since 1992. I am every mobile carrier's dream. Any rational carrier would jump at my business.

But Orange isn't rational. It doesn't have a business plan, it has a bunch of superstitions to which it rigidly hews regardless of circumstance -- the media person I was speaking to reported that she'd spoken to their head of customer care, who wouldn't budge; this intransigence goes right to the top.

So Orange has lost my business, and to hell with them. As soon as O2 gets some P900s in stock, I'll gladly give them the 150 quid and get signed up and running.

And I think I've figured out why the Orange shop is the only place in town with any phones in stock: they make life so miserable for anyone who tries to buy one that you'd have to be flat-out desperate to take one off their hands.

[T]his November, anyone with a PC, PlayStation 2 or Xbox will have the opportunity to put on Hef's smoking jacket and lord over his mansion. Game publishers Arush Entertainment and Groove Games will release Playboy: The Mansion, a video game that puts players in the virtual footwear of the publishing tycoon. "You can create your own Playboy magazine and throw your own parties," Hefner said.

Given that it's E3 week in Los Angeles, the game was the center attraction at a party at the real-life Playboy mansion Tuesday night -- that is, if it were possible to ignore a bevy of Playboy playmates, bunnies and naked models adorned with body paint designed to look like bikinis.

Think of the game as SimHef. Players take the reins of the Playboy empire, initially concentrating on getting the first issue of a faux Playboy on newsstands. They have to play Hef as a businessman, making financial decisions, developing fame and creating the kinds of personal, professional and romantic relationships Hefner did on his way to the top.

The System is a set of two devices running on 6V batteries. One device, the Voting Unit is used by the Voter, and another device called the Control Unit is operated by the Electoral Officer. Both units are connected by a 5 meter cable. The Voting unit has a Blue Button for every candidate, the unit can hold 16 candidates, but up to 4 units can be chained, to accommodate 64 candidates. The Control Units has Three buttons on the surface, namely, one button to release a single vote, one button to see the total umber of vote casted till now, and one button to close the election process. The result button is hidden and sealed, It cannot be pressed unless the Close button is already pressed.

The voting unit has a list of candidate's names and their Party Symbols pasted on the surface, and a Blue button to cast a vote faces ever candidate's name. The Party Symbols (like a Lotus, an elephant, a horse etc.) are approved by the election commission to be unique, All political parties use these symbols while campaigning, and illiterate people can identify their candidates by looking at his symbol, and pressing the blue button in front of his symbol.

"An artwork (video) by my friend Amy Jenkins, featuring her daughter breastfeeding and falling asleep, has been called "distasteful" and removed from an exhibition at Salvatore Ferragamo's 5th Avenue store. (Ferragamo originally invited Amy to create the piece for their store's art gallery on the second floor.)

When asked to "create an artwork using inspiration from objects in their store," Amy was promised complete artistic freedom. Hesitant at first, she explored the store and fell in love with a little pair of red shoes, which turned out to be called the "Audrey" shoes (they were originally designed for Audrey Hepburn.) As her daughter is also named Audrey, she felt it was fate to accept the invitation. It was not a commercial commission, and she financed the production of the video herself.

Amy would love to show this piece elsewhere, unfortunately it was made specially for their 42" widescreen monitor (a costly item that she doesn't own!) Her hope is that "The Audrey Samsara" will soon be shown at a more open-minded venue."

* 1 foreign body protrusion

* 1 eyeball

* 1 eviscerated intestines

* 2 crushed feet

* 1 plexiglass pk for simulated "glass in wound"

* 1 roll tape

* and lots more!

What a great gift! Link

Announcing their discovery at a conference being held at the University of California, Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that the 13 lecture halls uncovered could house as many as 5,000 students in total.

A conspicuous feature of the rooms, he said, was a central elevated podium for the lecturer to stand on.

"It is the first time ever that such a complex of lecture halls has been uncovered on any Greco-Roman site in the whole Mediterranean area," he added.

"It is perhaps the oldest university in the world."

We find an intelligent civilization and there's no way in creation we can communicate with them because they're so alien to us. We can't talk to dolphins now. In which case, we'll never know.

Second scenario: We find the intelligent civilization. We can communicate. We discover that they have the two essentials that theologians talk about for the human soul, intelligence and free will. They know who they are, they're self-aware, and they're able to do something about it. I think dogs are self-aware, but they don't have a whole lot of free will. Maybe computers are the same sort of thing. Human beings have to have both...

A third scenario: We find a dozen civilizations out there, and a bunch of Jehovah's witnesses go up and convert them all. At the end of the day, every civilization is Christian, except the human race is still not too sure about this. I mean, anything's possible.

I sat down with Mr. Hefner and his gorgeous companions, and asked him if he felt the game designers had created an accurate virtual depiction of the world in which he lives. "It's pretty good, other than the fact that they gave me this giant Jay Leno chin," he said. There was much butt cleavage in effect. Beautiful women with tromp l'oeil lingerie painted on their perfectly engineered breasts served little snacks off flawlessly polished silver platters (see image at left). Oh, and in case you're wondering -- there is no WiFi inside the grotto, although there is one very heavily used mattress. NPR and Wired News stories coming up.
Link to another mildly unsafe for work picture snapped during the event.

"The wounds' realism (deep, bleeding gashes and amputations, oozing blisters and burns) help get the rescuers' adrenaline going, by fostering empathy with the actors who portray disaster victims."

"Your Joe Bussard entry reminded me of another, similar story that was pretty big news in DC last summer: Leon Kagarise of Baltimore, who recorded around 4,000 hours of artists like Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, etc. during the late 50s through early 70s on a reel-to-reel tape deck at the outdoor music festivals prevalent in the vast rural area that previously surrounded Washington."

"You know, these [performers] were people from the mountains and from the rural South," Lee told NPR. "And once they were put in a studio, and they had a producer looking down at their snoot at the guy. And an engineer telling them, 'Well, if you make one mistake, we have to stop and start all over again.' It lost the atmosphere. It's like trying to play guitar in a straightjacket on... It's sort of like being in the zone. When you're really at ease, when there's no intimidation factor, then it really soars. And the proof is in these tapes here."

It was the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. "Stand down," came the order from embarrassed national security types.

In the case of China, I'm glad they're pirating [Kill Bill]. In a closed Communist country I'd rather be seen than not seen.

Fabric made from woven audiotape, readable by gloves containing tape heads. Dress made for Jim Jon Fishman of Phish, which composed song about dress's debut. Fishman used dress to create music next night. Vegas, May 2004

Update: BoingBoing reader Gary writes, "If you want to hear the results yourself (nothing too impressive ... yet), you can go here and download the concert (during the performance of "Love You"). You might also be pleasantly suprised that Phish is happy to transmit full soundboard quality with no DRM."

LIEBERMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

"'The truest form you'll ever hear in American music is on these records,' Joe says. 'It was put there, and it's remained there for seventy years. It hasn't changed.'"

The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what's on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can't predict.

And it isn't just military affairs, its politics and business and everything else, from attempts to coordinate evidence of Apple's manufacturing errors (previously handled case-by-case, but now becoming a kind of grass-rooots class action protest, to Apple's horror) to the distributed amicus brief on the SCO case conducted by the Linux community to the recent right of Americans to get their medical records on request and within 30 days to the publication of spoilers for popular TV shows. (Read this last link now — its from the Times and goes away in 5 days, and although on the surface its about TV, its really a musing on life in a fully disclosed culture.)

playfair has been renamed to hymn (hear your music anywhere) and is back online with the legal backing of FSF India. It has been updated with the latest FairPlay code from VideoLAN.

Sony's acquisition of a couple of minor entertainment companies has had untold consequences. It's a poison pill that is killing Sony, one piece at a time.

Back from 1976-1984, Sony was the company that spent hundreds of millions on the defense of its VCR, bringing it all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the entertainment industry didn't have any right to its business-model; that if new technology could make the old business irrelevant, that was tough shit, and the movie companies needed to stop pewling and get with the program (they did, and made lots of money, besides).

But ever since Sony "acquired" Columbia, it's been acting like its electronics business was a minor business unit that couldn't afford to disrupt its precious entertainment arm (despite the fact that the entertainment arm's contributions to Sony's bottom line are minimal when compared to the gadget biz). When the first MP3 players appeared in the market, from little companies like Creative Labs, Sony brought out proprietary devices that played stupid formats like RealAudio and OpenAG, which no one wanted to hear. On the other hand, these formats did come with use-restrictions that kept Sony's music execs from getting too anxious and sad.

The result was that Creative Labs, a little outfit in Singapore, ate Sony's lunch, followed by a bunch of late diners to the table, including a bunch of no-name Korean companies, and most recently, Apple. Sony, who invented the walkman and made billions off of it, has now become an irrelevant player in the personal stereo market, with a market share that's barely a blip on the chart.

And Sony -- a company legendary for tis ability to refine its designs to capitalize on lessons learned in the market -- keeps on repeating the same mistakes, as Derek points out:

Apparently, Sony's hard drive player cannot play MP3s, WMA and (of course) Apple FairPlay-locked AAC. It only plays the Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 format; if it's like Sony's MiniDisc players, forcing consumers to convert to ATRAC3 also forces them to accept certain DRM restrictions. In related news, the Washington Post and New York Times both deemed Connect embarassing, noting its poor interface, proprietary DRM format and codec, copying restrictions ... too many to count.

Since blogger.com is linked from google.com, any sites we link to could pass on a fairly high PageRank value. (PageRank is one of the factors that determines what results show up in what order for searches.) In order to remove any possibility of unequal ranking of Blogger-powered blogs in the Google main search index, we send links through a URL from which Google knows to ignore PageRank. This way, Blogger blogs earn PageRank only on the basis of their content and other people linking to them, not because they're powered by a tool owned by Google.

We've been doing bootlegs / mash-ups for a few years now. For the last several months, we've been working with MTV on exclusive bootlegs for a new show called ""MTV MASH" which is broadcast all around Europe 3 times a week. We already made12 tracks for the show so far. If you want to listen to our bootlegs, check out our website, it's still under construction, but there's already a lot of tracks to listen to.

Update: The mashups are smokin', but (sorry guys) the Loo & Placido website's obtuse, flash-based UI sucks ass. BoingBoing reader Eric reminds us that you can also link directly to the MP3s themselves. This way you can save locally and enjoy ad infinitum: Bigger than Love,, Complicated Man, Get Your Green On, Golden Bastard, Gomez Soul, Pound for Pound, Stereo Kelly.

Update: These clips have moved.4.8MB QuickTime Link to Rob Courddry On The US Torture Of Iraqi Prisoners, 9.8MB QuickTime Link to Jon Stewart on Giant Messopotamia

hey found the number of pixels that had been blacked out in the sentence: "An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an xxxxxxxx service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike." They then used a computer to determine the pixel length of words in the dictionary when written in the Arial font.

The program rejected all of the words that were not within three pixels of the length of the word that was probably under the blacked-out area in the document.

The software then reduced the number of possible words to just seven from 1,530 by using semantic guidelines, including the grammatical context. The researchers selected the word "Egyptian" from the seven possible words...

Update: This page at Cryptome has more detail and illustrations (Thanks, Chris!)

When he was nine years old Carlos Gomez crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico to the U.S. with his father, mother and two sisters. They had heard stories about the opportunities in America, dreamed about them, wanted them so badly they ran through oncoming traffic on the 805 freeway to get to them. They didn't stop until they reached San Diego. Fear, fatigue and La Migra slowly fading into the southern horizon like their homeland.

They stayed. Dealt with the slurs--beaners, greasers, wetbacks. Overcame them. Paid back America's opportunities with hard, menial labor. Made a fraction of what citizens and legal immigrants made--but never complained.

And 12 years later, in Falluja, Iraq, Marine Lance Corporal Gomez would pay it back again--but this time with his blood.

No one has challenged the cleric's rule more effectively than these young Iranian girls. They have totally changed the Islamic dress code during the past five years. The half-sliced heads of the mannequins are results of Islamic laws that prohibit making identical statues to humans.

"There is no right in the copyright law to make backup copies of motion pictures, so the whole argument that people should have the right to make backup copies of DVDs has no legal support whatsoever," said Fritz Attaway, executive vice president of the MPAA.

"It's against consumers' interests to permit devices that make backup copies," he added, "because there is no way that a device can distinguish between a backup copy for personal use and making a copy for friends, family acquaintances or even selling on the street corner."

Bush is seeking reelection. His advisers remembered the effect of the first landing on the Moon, and proposed a repeat, but on a grander scale. So Mars came in handy. It will take at least 20 years to prepare a flight to Mars. Bush, however, is only concerned with the next four years. But the attempt to portray him as a forward-looking pragmatist has produced an impression...

There is nothing up there. And what about the money for these space adventures? Do you think U.S. Congress will come up with hundreds of billions on a silver platter? Besides, what is the dollar really worth now? In Communist-era Poland it could buy 100 zlotys: That was some money. But now it is worth a mere 3.5 zlotys. Today I am getting more dollars for new editions of my books from Russia than from the United States. We should deal with earthly problems, not with space chimeras.

What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse. This is the proper question: "Should we allow law enforcement to use new technology without any judicial oversight, or should we demand that they be overseen and accountable?" And the Fourth Amendment already provides for this in its requirement of a warrant.

The search warrant - a technologically neutral legal requirement - basically says that before the police open the mail, listen in on the phone call or search the bit stream for key words, a "neutral and detached magistrate" reviews the basis for the search and takes responsibility for the outcome. The key is independent judicial oversight; the warrant process is itself a security measure protecting us from abuse and making us more secure.

Mr Isamu Kaneko, a 33-year-old assistant professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, was arrested on suspicion of developing and offering free downloads on his Web site file-sharing software called Winny, Kyoto Prefectural (state) police said on condition of anonymity.

He is also accused of helping two Japanese men arrested in November on charges of disseminating movies and games on the Internet with Winny, police said.

The rounded corners seen throughout the Blogger redesign (and in several of the user templates) make use of an expansion of the Sliding Doors technique written for A List Apart last year. The Blogger design is a fixed width, which means most of the modules of the site exist at pre-defined widths. Since the width of each module is known, one image is used for the top-left and top-right corners of a module, and another image is used for the bottom-left and bottom-right corners. The images are called in as background images for two nested elements. Since these two elements contain all the text of the module, they expand infinitely as the module grows in height. Think of it as Sliding Doors turned on their sides.

For modules requiring a border, the two images are modified to include top and bottom borders connecting the two corners. A third element gets nested in the HTML that uses left and right borders which connect top and bottom corners.

This design posed many other challenges when building it out, specifically because we wanted to allow the text and each of the design elements (header, modules) to be as flexible and scalable as possible. The markup construction was tricky and required compromises in several places. As is evident with the rounded corner modules, extra divs were necessary for each background image called in. In CSS3, border images will certainly help eliminate the need for extra elements. And I’ve been pressuring Tantek to get the CSS Working Group to consider allowing us to set multiple background images on one HTML element.

They Rule allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.

The data was collected from their websites and SEC filings in early 2004, so it may not be completely accurate - companies merge and disappear and directors shift boards.

Start by slavishly imitating poets you admire. This is the opposite of the standard advice that you need to concentrate on "finding your own voice." Don't take this wrong, _____, but fuck your own voice. Your own voice will take care of itself as your craft matures. Your own voice will, if you're going to have one, insist on emerging. In the meantime, learn the craft. Learn the vocabulary and practice of meter. Learn rhyme schemes. Learn the ways that free verse gets written that yet contains music. Reread poets you admire, read about them and then read the poets they get compared to.

This is yknow a huge step backwards for women's health and for contraception and the prevention of abortions. But it is a huge step forward for what we at Fafblog like to call the "rights of the unconceived," which is just a few short steps from what we are really lookin forward to which is the rights of the inanimate.

I have personally spent hours an hours talkin to cans, waffle irons, boxes, printer cartridges and forks and they all dream of one thing: no longer bein treated as second-class citizens in the United States.

1 Serial killer or vampire stalks and slays victim(s).

i. The tables are turned at the end. (For example, the intended victim turns out to be a vampire or other powerful supernatural creature.)
ii. The serial killer is insane.
iii. The serial killer is under supernatural influence.
iv. The serial killer was abused as a child.

2 Person is insane, and kills a lot of people because of it.

i. The insanity is due to supernatural influence.
ii. The insane person does property damage instead of killing people.

I am writing today to ask you to co-sponsor Rep. Boucher & Doolittle's Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 107). I believe that our copyright law has become unbalanced and fails to address the interests of the public.

The DMCRA would protect consumers from buying "copy protected" audio compact discs that may not work in personal computers, cars, and other consumer devices. It would also codify a citizen's right to make fair uses of copyrighted material. I think that this is an absolutely fundamental step towards redressing the imbalances that have plagued copyright law in recent years.

I hope you will co-sponsor the DMCRA and show your support for the public's rights in digital media. Thank you for your time.