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Russian Download Site Is Popular and Possibly Illegal
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So great is the official level of concern about AllofMP3 that American trade negotiators darkly warned that the Web site could jeopardize Russia’s long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization.
Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia’s copyright law, AllofMP3 offers a vast catalogue of music that includes artists who have not permitted their work to be sold online — like the Beatles and Metallica — at a fraction the cost of services like Apple Computer’s iTunes service.
Sold by the megabyte instead of by the song, an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents per song on iTunes.
And unlike iTunes and other commercial services, songs purchased with AllofMP3’s downloading software have no restrictions on copying.
It is an offer that may seem too good to be true, but in Russia, considered to be a hotbed of digital piracy and theft of intellectual property, courts have so far allowed the site to operate, despite efforts by the record labels Warner, Universal and EMI to aid prosecutors there.
Music industry officials say AllofMP3, which first came to their attention in 2004, is a large-scale commercial piracy site, and they dismiss its claims of legality. “It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long,” said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, who is based in Washington.
It is only piracy according to property laws in the USA.
According to Russia’s 1993 copyright law, however, collecting societies are permitted to act on behalf of rights holders who have not authorized them to do so. Collecting societies have thus been set up to gather royalties for foreign copyright holders without their authorization. Infringement cases have also affected foreign-produced software, films and books.
The result is that numerous organizations in Russia receive royalties for the use of foreign artistic works, but never pass on that money to the artists or music companies, according to the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, the umbrella organization for collecting societies.
“These collecting agencies are thieves and frauds because they accept money while pretending to represent artists,” said Eric Baptiste, director general of the confederation.
and this is different from the RIAA… how, exactly?
First Sweden, then Russia. I’d like the RIAA and MPAA to stay the fuck out of foreign law, or, if the intention of USA law makers is to let the industry run their foreign policy, just say so. Having Haliburton run Iraq is bad enough, I don’t want the music industry do the same, thank you very much..
Nokia turns cellphones into webservers
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Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, in order to enable mobile phones to serve content on the World Wide Web. Many mobile phones today have more processing power than early Internet servers, suggesting that “there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones,” according to the company. The technique could also be used on Linux mobile phones.
And in related news, the Firefox team has built in support for the new error messages a server can give, such as 604-Server drove into a tunnel.
Cam from the TPB bust
Here’s footage from the bust of the piratebay.org servers. Like proper criminals, the police covers the camera’s with plastic bags about halfway through. The piratebay site is back, the sites on the other servers the police took are still offline. This has been big news in Sweden for four days in a row. According to people over there the national police happen to keep whining about not having enough manpower to enforce problems like drug trafficing, etc. and little gets done about real problems- but they can muster 50(!) people to “bust” a place that doesn’t do anything illegal per their laws as a result of pressure being put on them from MPAA and others in the US. A lot of people pissed about it over there right now, and there are demonstrations planned. Representatives from two major political parties in Sweden, Folkpartiet and Vänsterpartiet have filed formal complaints against the Minister of Justice and members of his staff.
joke in sweden right now: how many cops does it take to change a light bulb?
50. One to do it and 49 to confiscate every other light bulb in the house as evidence.
Virtually all major swedish newspapers, http://www.aftonbladet.se , http://www.dn.se/, http://www.expressen.se/, http://www.svd.se/ are leading with the “Pirate War” and news that Pirate Bay is back online.
Here is a website from a guy translating swedish news about the bust, and commenting about it. [Quote:]
According to idg.se, Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the suspects, was denied a defender during his interrogation. I can’t translate the article right now, since their server seems to be severely overloaded (except for the front page..), and it will probably not be fixed until monday. Anyways, the police said that since he’s not risking prison on the suspicions, he’s not entitled to a public defender during the interrogation.
Ok, now remember that last sentence.
Next, let’s ponder the DNA sample the legal advisor was forced to supply. When confronted with this, the police responded that forced DNA samples are fully legal when suspected of a crime where a possible consequence is prison.
Ok.. So now, a question on many people’s minds is.. “w00t?!?”. If it’s not on your mind, re-read the police’s statements above, compare the possible consequences, and then agree with the rest of us.
The ass family
The oops list
Here’s two pictures from the oops list, a page with hundreds of images and movies of vehicle crashes.
?サミ型シュレッダ
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ダイレクトメールや明細書?写真???他人?見られ?????書類を細????断?る????????。
“?????り??も最???。刃?ステンレス刃物鋼を使用。切れ味??久性?優れ????。
New York: No Icons, No Monuments Worth Protecting
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New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent–from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.
“All I can tell you is if you look at their worksheets, and it says that New York City doesn’t have any high visibility national icons … I mean, I don’t have to list the Brooklyn Bridge, the United Nations, Rockefeller Center, the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and the Stock Exchange,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in response to ABC News’ questions.
The formula did not consider as landmarks or icons: The Empire State Building, The United Nations, The Statue of Liberty and others found on several terror target hit lists. It also left off notable landmarks, such as the New York Public Library, Times Square, City Hall and at least three of the nation’s most renowned museums: The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and The Museum of Natural History.
“I think the facts are clear,” Bloomberg said. “What they’ve really done is taken what was supposed to be threat-based and just started to distribute it as normal pork.”
The NY Daily News has a better headline: Feds to city: drop dead
Really expensive cat toy video clip
really expensive cat toy on Vimeo
Manhattan Elsewhere
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Depending on your vantage point, Manhattan seems either very big or very small. On complete map of the New York City area, Manhattan is dwarfed in size by the other four boroughs and surrounding megopolis. But for someone on the ground in Manhattan, the population density, the height of the buildings, the endless number of things to do, and the fact that many people don’t often leave their neighborhoods, much less the island, for weeks/months on end makes it seem a very large place indeed. This divergence sense of scales can cause quite a bit of cognitive dissonance for residents and visitors alike.
A few months ago, I found an image online (which I cannot for the life of me relocate…any ideas? aha! it’s from Bill Rankin’s project, The Errant Isle of Manhattan) that worked to alleviate some of that dissonance. The image depicted downtown Chicago with Manhattan placed alongside it in Lake Michigan. I’d been to Chicago a few times and the image immediately gave me a better idea of Manhattan’s true size.
A few weeks ago, I started to wonder how large Manhattan was compared to some other places I am familiar with. Hence, Manhattan Elsewhere. In the maps below, I’ve inserted Manhattan into places (at the same scale) that, through either habitation and visitation, I have come to know well. If you’ve been to Manhattan and some of these other places, I hope you’ll find it as interesting to visualize these strange positionings as I have. Enjoy.
Here, Manhattan parks itself right in the middle of the Bay Bridge, taking the place of Treasure Island. You can see Alcatraz from Columbia. The view of Central Park from the Coit Tower would be lovely. Compare the sizes of the two cities’ big parks; they look about the same.
Typical.
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Republican Jim Galley, who is running for Congress as a “pro-traditional family? candidate, was married to two women at the same time, defaulted on his child support payments and has been accused of abuse by one of his ex-wives.
Bush to see ‘United 93’ with victims’ families
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George W. Bush, whose presidency will forever be entwined with the Sept. 11 attacks, gets to relive part of the day Tuesday night by watching the movie, “United 93.?
The film, which opened last month to critical acclaim, tells the story of how al Qaeda hijackers took over the flight and steered it in the direction of Washington D.C.
Passengers learned from cellphones that three other hijacked planes had already hit their targets — the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They decided to rise up and attack the hijackers, who crashed the plane into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board.
“The president has always said that … the passengers and the crew members on the flight were heroes,? said White House spokesman Dana Perino.
Bush was to watch the movie in the White House theater with his wife, Laura, along with some family members of those who died on the flight.
George, I have another idea for you - invite the family members of some other heroes who died, and watch Baghdad ER. You can download it here. I don’t expect George to do this, though. Even the Army’s top brass, including the Secretary of the Army and the Surgeon General, who were invited to a screening of the HBO film ended up being no-shows. And the Army even issued a warning that watching the film could exacerbate the post traumatic stress many soldiers are already suffering, a sentiment that is heartwarming considering what a lousy job the Army is doing dealing with the mental effects of this war , and that it is sending troops with diagnosed mental problems back into combat.
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BAGHDAD ER allows viewers to experience the physical and emotional toll of war by capturing soldiers and care providers in personal moments amidst intense crises inside the 86th Combat Support Hospital. Located in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the facility was formerly the site of an elite medical center for Saddam Hussein’s supporters. Thanks in part to the skill and dedication of trauma center teams like the one depicted in the film, wounded troops in Iraq have a 90 percent chance of survival - the highest rate of war survivors in U.S. history. The selflessness and dedication of those caring for wounded Americans and Iraqis stands in sharp contrast with the chaos of war.
“This is hard-core, raw, uncut trauma. Day after day, every day,” says Specialist Saidet Lanier, an operating room nurse. “Even if you’re lucky enough not to go home with war wounds on the outside, if you’re not equipped with coping skills, you’ll definitely have them on the inside.”
Terror funds
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If we’re going to talk about the federal funds disbursed to fight terror in the US, we should also take a look at that weird, underground world of payments for terror tips. Rewards for Justice (motto: We can give you 5 million reasons to stop terrorism), administered by the State Department for the last two decades, claims to have shelled out more than $62 million over the years for information that has prevented attacks or brought perps to justice.
Two Filipino informants just walked away with a total of $500,000 yesterday for providing information that led to the October arrest of Ahmad Santos, head of a group of Islamic converts who were allegedly behind a 2004 ferry bombing that killed more than 100 in the Philippines. Investigators also believe the group forged links with Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Apparently, when these things are done, the US embassy still goes for the old cash-in-a-suitcase-at-a-press-conference method:
ROMEO GACAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
And here’s the handoff:
Ishaqi
Iraqis look at the bodies of those reportedly killed during a U.S. raid in the rural Ishaqi area, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Baghdad in Iraq Wednesday, March 15, 2006. Residents in the village of Ishaqi said 11 people, including at least five children, were killed in a March 15 U.S. raid on the Sunni-dominated area, whilst the American military confirmed the attack but said only four people died - a man, two women and a child, saying later that the incident was under investigation. (AP Photo/ Hameed Rasheed)
Dirk Jan
Take me to your leader
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As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens.
In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples — water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001 — contain microbes from outer space.
Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600 degrees Fahrenheit . (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250 degrees Fahrenheit .)
So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India.
USA:s regering bakom sajtstängning
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Det var USA:s regering som låg bakom tillslaget mot fildelningsnätverket Pirate Bay i går, enligt uppgifter till SVT:s Rapport.
En delegation med företrädare för justitiedepartementet och polisen mötte i april amerikanska myndigheter som tog upp frågan på begäran av Hollywoods intresseorganisation MPAA.
Justitiedepartementet bad sedan polis och åklagare att agera. När de svarade att rättsläget var oklart kontaktade justitieministerns statssekreterare riksåklagaren och rikspolischefen som gav order om handling, erfar Rapport.
Ministerstyre
The Pirate bay har öppet utmanat dem som äger rättigheterna inom film- och musikvärlden. Men många inom internetvärlden är ändå förvånade över de svenska myndigheternas ingripande.
Enligt uppgifter till Rapport har det gått till på detta sätt. Den amerikanska intresseorganisationen MPAA har tagit kontakt med regeringen i Vita Huset. Amerikanska utrikesdepartementet har sedan tagit kontakt med UD i Sverige och krävt att problemet Pirate bay måste lösas.
Enligt Rapports källa har sedan åklagare och polis blivit beordrade att agera och beskriver satssekreterarens handling med ministerstyre.
According to the Swedish government sponsored tv channel SVT, U.S. government officials — after being approached by the MPAA — requested the Swedish justice department to take down The Pirate Bay. According to the story, the Swedish justice department asked police and prosecution to act, but when they explained the laws are too vague, they turned directly to the state attorney and the chief of the national police force. In the mean time, the Ombudsman of Justice has decided to launch an investigation to determine if there were any wrongdoings in the raid, including whether the swedish government pressured the police to take action. Piratebay will reappear shortly.
Please fix
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Some websites pay network engineers to make sure things stay working. CocaCola hopes that a kind visitor like Paul Zirkle will volunteer to jump in and fix things …
His family just has a different set of traditions