Science and Technology

For some reason I find this funny as hell: dueling websites from lefty and righty punks, fighting for the souls of the punky masses: Pierced and tattooed rockers are in for a mosh-pit civics lesson this year. Nearly 200 bands are lining up to lambaste President Bush and try to …

John Borland reviews latest privacy schemes for P2P users on the Internet: most peer-to-peer systems require some degree of openness to work at all. In order to download a song from another computer online, a file swapper’s computer must make some kind of connection to it. That leaves a digital …

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers an opt-in plan for legal file sharing. This is a very helpful step down an inevitable path: The current battles surrounding peer-to-peer file sharing are a losing proposition for everyone. The record labels continue to face lackluster sales, while the tens of millions of American …

I am not a fan of the reject episodes of American Idol, being that they trade on cruelty, delusion, excrementitious talent, confrontation, and more cruelty. I think the reaction William Hung has received is due to his enthusiastic guilelessness in the face of rudely dismissive criticism from the AI judges, …

Our pals at the Specious Report are publishing a compendium of election satire links daily through the November Presidential election, “and inevitable re-count.” Here’s today’s list – click over for the links: Monday, February 23, 2004 252 Days until Tuesday, November 2, 2004 Republican Party to Endorse Ralph Nader as …

The price of making a “real movie” keeps coming down: Friends star Courtney Cox was not fazed when she saw the consumer video cameras on the set of award-winning psycho thriller November. ….And his indie film’s surprisingly low budget, just $150,000 instead of the $1-2 million low-budget movies usually cost, …

The most egregious aspect of the vile DMCA is the anti-circumvention provision that says you cannot abet copy-protection circumvention, even though the consumer has the right to make a fair use copy of a DVD. This catch-22 mentality has now been reaffirmed by a San Francisco federal judge: In a …

Very interesting column from Plain Dealer TV critic Michael Dawidziak today on the perils of 24-hour television news and the whirlwind news cycle: Perhaps Shakespeare, writing 400 years ago, somehow envisioned the era of 24-hour news channels when he coined that line about “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It could …

We mentioned the controversy over the DJ Dangermouse remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles White Album. This is very interesting, and I am very willing to help publicize it although I am not willing to host the actual files: I do not wish to break the law, but …

Via the always informative Resource Shelf, an excellent way for the interested layman to keep track of “legal news worth reading about,” The Paper Chase. Researched and reported by Professor Bernard Hibbitts and law students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, here is a glimpse of what’s up …