By way of Narsissy, comes
By way of Narsissy, comes My Pet Skeleton. You'll be glad you did.
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By way of Narsissy, comes My Pet Skeleton. You'll be glad you did.
Conductors Pose First Challenge to Copyright Law
In what is apparently the first constitutional challenge to a 7-year-old federal copyright law, plaintiffs, including two orchestra conductors, have filed suit against the U.S. government in federal court in Denver, challenging a law that grants copyright protection to foreign works that were formerly in the public domain.
More copyright zaniness.
After following the Shriekback link elsewhere on this page, I discovered that the band is raising funds for another album.
In order to get this album off the ground the band will need your continued financial assistance. Since they aren't being supported by a wealthy record label and recording isn't free, we are asking that you send money to the addresses below. You may send any amount you wish but, if you send $50.00 or £35, you will receive a copy of the album signed by the band!
As a believer in disintermediation--artists selling directly to their fans, without record labels--I intend to contribute. Those who like the band should consider doing the same.
Scientists warn of 'super athletes'
Drug cheats are on the verge of using genetic engineering to increase stamina and speed, sport scientists warn. And they estimate that 2012 could be the first Olympics to have artificially produced super-athletes in action.
Underground Sea in Jupiter Moon?
Recent photographs from NASA's Galileo spacecraft provide supporting evidence to the theory that Jupiter's outermost moon may hold an underground ocean, scientists said Thursday. Callisto, one of four large moons surrounding Jupiter, can be seen to have a surface that sits directly opposite from its Valhalla basin, which was rocked by a collision with a major object.
Gagpipe BETA: Headline satire from around the world. A humor portal, which in itself is a vaguely amusing concept.
Twin gene idea could wipe out malaria mosquito
Every 10 seconds a child dies from malaria - but there may now be a way to control the Anopheles mosquito that spreads the disease. Scientists say they can genetically modify whole mosquito populations so that the flies are either susceptible to pesticides, or can't transmit the malaria parasite. And they would only need to release relatively few GM mosquitoes to kick-start the process.
I'd just like to take a moment to say that I hate mosquitos.
If there was a scorecard for copyright lawsuits, this week it would look like this: entertainment industry 2, free speech zip. On Wednesday, with a pair of federal courts siding with the music and record industry, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lost two of its most important intellectual property cases so far. Programmers, hackers and open-source aficionados had pinned their hopes on these lawsuits as a way to eviscerate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law loved by the entertainment and software industries almost as much as it's hated by computer professionals.
Rivals Mobilize Alternatives to U.S. System
Around the world, countries are mobilizing to build independent satellite navigation networks, troubled that the Global Positioning System, the only functioning worldwide network, is run by the U.S. military and controlled by the government. In the past decade or so, the continuous signals emitted by a constellation of orbiting satellites have allowed users to compute time, location and speed with high accuracy, calculations that play an increasing role in tasks ranging from firing missiles in Afghanistan to guiding ships at sea to flashing directions in rental cars. As the American technology becomes a worldwide standard, other governments are wary that this dependence raises issues of strategic and economic security.
One ring of satellites to rule them all...
London police are planning to register children who exhibit criminal potential in an effort to prevent them from developing into full-fledged lawbreakers. Kids who tag buildings with graffiti, skip school, or even talk back to adults run the risk of being entered into a database program that will be used to monitor their behavior as they grow up, according to police sources.
Of course there's always the possibility that at some later date potential employers will deny jobs to those on the list, thus pushing potentially decent citizens toward desperation and lawlessness.
Lung Cancer to Change Its Name to Philip Morris
Just days after Philip Morris declared it will change its name to the Altria Group, lung cancer today announced it will change its name to Philip Morris. According to lung cancer officials, the chance to snap up a brand that is more widely associated with lung cancer than lung cancer itself was too enticing to pass up.
It’s an increasingly common scene: a telecommuter perched on a park bench, pecking away at a laptop. But a peek over her shoulder reveals a more startling sight: she’s surfing the Web, outdoors and cable free. Anywhere, anytime Internet access is gaining ground across the United States as wireless networks owned and run by their users spring up in more cities each month—25 at last count. Although companies like Texas-based Wayport and MobileStar have provided wireless access in places like hotels, airports and coffee shops, the new cooperatively run networks are, for the first time, allowing users to surf in outdoor public areas. These networks are set up by groups whose members lend out their Internet access by hooking high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable modem connections up to wireless base stations. These base stations transmit the bandwidth to any nearby computer—commonly a laptop or handheld—equipped with an antenna to receive the signal.
One of my neighbors used to run an open Airport (802.11b) network that I could access with my iBook from my living room. Free DSL definitely has its appeal, even if I could have used my own wireless connection just as easily.
The Little Engine That Could Be
The development of a fuel-powered miniature engine, touted as a more efficient and longer lasting alternative for the battery, may push the Energizer Bunny to the unemployment lines. No bigger than a regular shirt button, the micro gas turbine engine uses the same process for producing electricity as its big brother electricity stations -- burning fossil fuel and running it through a power plant. "Fuel and air in, and electricity out," said Luc Frechette, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and one of the team members building the engine.
Sources: Microsoft Nears Private Antitrust Settlement
Microsoft Corp. is nearing an unusual, billion-dollar deal that would settle a raft of private antitrust cases against the company, sources close to the case said on Tuesday. Microsoft, which agreed to settle its separate 3-year-old case with the Justice Department earlier this month, is hatching an agreement with class action attorneys that would require the company to provide free software and computers to more than 14,000 of the poorest U.S. schools over five years.
Let me see if I've got this straight. The remedy for Microsoft's monopoly is putting the company's software in even more computers? Next we'll be putting an end to robbery by making sure thieves have their hands full.
Taliban nuclear documents mirror spoof article
Documents found strewn on the floor of a Taliban recruitment centre in Kabul, apparently describing how to build a thermonuclear device, may not be as frightening as they first seem. The papers were picked out by BBC correspondent John Simpson and showed, he said, "how dangerous Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network aspired to be". But the sentences shown in focus by the camera also come from a famous document called "Weekend Scientist: Let's Make a Thermonuclear Device", which was first published in 1979 as a humour piece by The Journal of Irreproducible Results.
This is what happens when your nuclear program is based on Terrorism for Dummies.
SafeWeb is no more. Resistance is futile (or at least expensive).
The Pentagon is still searching for a new color for the food packets it is dropping over Afghanistan, but ruled out light blue because Afghans might object to a shade that dominates U.N. and Israeli flags, a defense official said on Thursday. The hunt began when the Defense Department realized the bright yellow wrapping on the 1.5 million rectangular packages dropped over Afghanistan was similar to the color of unexploded cylinder-shaped bomblets.
IP Conference: Copyright Law Has Gone Too Far
The recording industry and the Business Software Alliance squared off against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and US Rep. Rick Boucher Wednesday in a debate over laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act aimed at protecting large copyright holders, with the hearts and minds of a crowd of Washington, D.C., decision-makers as the prize. John Perry Barlow, former Wyoming cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the EFF, told a Washington suit-and-tie crowd of lobbyists and congressional staffers that he can predict the history of this century after the recent terrorists attacks on the US. "I think I can safely say that history of the 21st Century is going to be about the struggle between open systems and closed systems, which was what you saw engaged on 11 September in a very pointed way," Barlow said. "This is going to be an interesting and complex struggle, because it is in the nature of open systems to breed closed systems, since for example, an open system like a free-market economy tends to gravitate toward a natural monopoly, which is a closed system."
Terror 'Mules': Bombs in Bodies
Even if every airport in the United States scanned every bag loaded onto every airplane for explosives, and every passenger went under the metal-detector, a bomb could still get onto a passenger jet, experts say. The Federal Aviation Authority's next generation of holographic body imaging scanners can be trumped too. Welcome to the world of the "terror mule." Criminal groups running drugs and diamonds into the United States have for years smuggled contraband by stuffing it into condoms and having a "mule" swallow the load, or by having it implanted surgically or rectally. The same technique can be used to smuggle plastic explosives like Semtex past security at an airport.
Is that Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World"?
The Polygraph Test Meets Its Match:
Telling a lie produces telltale changes in the brain, researchers announced yesterday at a neuroscience conference in San Diego. Brain scans of volunteers asked to tell lies showed changes as the subjects tried to suppress what they knew was true. The result might eventually form the basis of highly accurate lie detector tests, scientists said. Unlike conventional polygraphs, which assume that liars are anxious and that such anxiety causes measurable changes in skin and blood pressure, brain scans offer even coldblooded liars little opportunity to cheat because people cannot mask the mental processes responsible for lying.
You have the right to lie, but not the ability.
Firm Marketing Parachute for Office Workers
An Israeli company has designed a parachute for workers in high-rise buildings in the aftermath of the suicide-hijacking attacks that toppled the World Trade Center. ``Within three weeks of the attack, the Executivechute was designed, tested, and ready to go,'' Anatoly Cohen, managing director of Apco Aviation, said on Thursday. The backpack-type parachute, which is being marketed in the United States and Japan, has a $795 price tag and weighs four pounds.
Given the slim chance of ever being forced to jump from a tall office building, I think most people would prefer the sort of golden parachute savvy execs demand.
Illinois School Uses Lie Detectors
One by one, the subjects were led into a room and hooked up to a polygraph machine. The purpose: to determine whether the teen-agers violated Dunlap High School's code of conduct by attending a party where alcohol was consumed. Seven of the 10 students who submitted to the lie detector exams - all of them football players - flunked the questioning last month and were barred from competing in the first round of the state playoffs. Some of their parents wept when they learned their children had lied to them.
Perhaps the school administrators and teachers should be hooked up to the polygraph too. It would be interesting to ask questions like, "Have you ever been attracted to a minor?" I'm sure none of them would mind.
Judge: Yahoo! Not Subject to Order
In an important Internet policy case, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that Yahoo! Inc. does not have to comply with a French order that it keep users in France from seeing Nazi-related content on the Web site. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that the First Amendment protects content generated in the United States by American companies from being regulated by authorities in countries that have more restrictive laws on freedom of expression. Fogel pointed out that many Internet users in the United States often make postings or create content that would violate laws in other countries, such as China.
Antibiotic chemicals found in sweat
Sweating appears to be an essential part of the body's defence against bacteria, researchers have discovered. The skin is known to release antimicrobial chemicals when wounded. Now Birgit Schittek and her team at the University of Tübingen in Germany have discovered that even intact skin exudes a small antibiotic protein called dermcidin in sweat. "This is the first antimicrobial compound in sweat ever to be described," Schittek says.
Once dermcidin is commercialized and abused like other antibiotics, expect to see dermcidin-resistant bacteria. That'll be fun.
A California State Appeals Court ruled on Thursday that computer code used to "descramble" DVDs is "pure speech," and citing the First Amendment, the court reversed a trial court's order to block the code from appearing on the Web. But since a federal appeal is still pending in a similar New York case involving the right to publish the DVD descrambler -- called DeCSS -- it's still unclear whether the "code is speech" defense sung by many techno-libertarians will provide them any shelter from the law.
Whatever happened to fair use?
In the absence of clearly defined fair-use rights for consumers, the recording and film industries are moving into the legislative void to assert their own rights over digitally distributed content, said Jessica Litman, a law professor at Wayne State University who specializes in intellectual property.