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On the eve of France’s Parliament returning to discuss the possibility of legalizing P2P via a compulsory or global license, the French judiciary has sent a message to deputies
a day early, clearly siding with non-commercial users of P2P applications. The message from the French tribunal actually dates back to December 8 of last year, but the decision has just been made public
in a rather serendipitous way. As the French think about the possibility of making P2P legal by merely charging internet users a flat monthly fee, the court looks to be suggesting
that current usage is already legal.

At issue was the fate of a young man (“Antoine G”)
charged with uploading and downloading over 1,200 audio files whose copyrights were represented by a French recording industry organization, the Société de Civile de Producteurs Phonographique.
After a victory in a lower court, the SCPP had to represent its case to the district court of Paris (Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris), seeking a final judgment
against the man accused of the non-authorized
reproduction and distribution of commercial content. The defendant had been an avid user of Kazaa, and during 2004, his activities were monitored by agents of the SCPP, revealing
him to be a frequent user of the P2P network. He allegedly had almost 1900 files containing copyrighted materials.

The ruling from the district court is rather clear (PDF, in French): the defendant was making use of
these files for private, personal use, and thus his use was legal. According to the court, French law permits citizens to make fair use of copyrighted materials so long as that
usage is not collective, or for commercial gain.

[..]

For now, the French court appears to be giving the go-ahead not only for downloading music on P2P networks for personal use, but also for sharing files that have been downloaded.

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Click here to view full image (2322 kb)

Like the freshly raked white sand of a well-tended Japanese garden, rows of clouds stream over the Bering Sea from the edge of the sea ice. Called cloud streets, these cumulus clouds form when cold air from the ice blows over the open ocean, chilling the moist air. As the temperature drops, water freezes into tiny clouds, which are arranged in neat rows in line with the powerful sweep of the wind. Though some clouds form over the cracking sea ice on the right side of the image, most are over the unfrozen water. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this image on January 20, 2006. The next day, cloud streets were still present across the Bering Sea, but had changed location and direction somewhat.

St. Matthew Island sits alone in the Bering Sea between Alaska to the west and Russia to the east. According to an article on the Website of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, St. Matthew Island is the most remote part of Alaska. The nearest village is just over 336 kilometers (about 209 miles) away to the eest, a small village on Nunivat Island. Uninhabited by people, the island is a seabird mecca. Among the species that nest on the island are murres, northern fulmars, and several kinds of auklets, including the parakeet auklet. In this image, the island appears to be holding back a wall of sea ice, which is packed tightly against its northern shore. Mountains cast their shadows onto the white surface below.

This article by Malcolm Gladwell on profiling and generalizations is excellent.

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We thought President Bush’s two recent Supreme Court nominees set new lows when it came to giving vague and meaningless answers to legitimate questions, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made them look like models of openness when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday about domestic spying. Mr. Gonzales seems to have forgotten the promise he made to the same panel last year when it voted to promote him from White House counsel to attorney general: that he would serve the public interest and stop acting like a hired gun helping a client figure out how to evade the law.

The hearing got off to a bad start when Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican who leads the committee, refused to have Mr. Gonzales testify under oath. Mr. Gonzales repaid this favor with a daylong display of cynical hair-splitting, obfuscation, disinformation and stonewalling. He would not tell the senators how many wiretaps had been conducted without warrants since 2002, when Mr. Bush authorized the program. He would not even say why he was withholding the information.

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted a short story on the top five mistakes made by new mac users. It includes closing an application window, thinking it has quit, downloading software and then running it from the disk image (runs slowly, can’t eject disk image), Windows .EXE files littered around the desktop after they’ve tried to download software and install it.

The comments attached to the article are entertaining, and pick up many other common mistakes.

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Or November 30th. How do I know? Well, Microsoft EMEA has put up a website where you can guess the launch date for Windows Vista. After you submit a date, it plays a “hint�? video. There’s actually a bunch of videos, some of which are quite funny. Anyway, here comes the interesting part: If you take a look at the page source, the videos are hosted on a Microsoft server in Switzerland. And depending on your guess, they are being loaded either from a subdirectory /early/ or another one named /late/.

By simple iteration I quickly found that “early�? ends Nov 30th while “late�? starts Dec 1st. So either one of these will be the launch date. If this all is not a dirty little trick from the webmaster, of course…

February 8, 1968. Asked about the U.S. assault on the Vietnamese town of Bentre, an unnamed U.S. major, quoted by Associated Press explained:

“It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.

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Wikinews, the collaborative online journalism project from Wikipedia‘s parent organization, just published new details about Wikipedia edits made by Capitol Hill staffers. Using computers connected to the senate’s network, staffers have been editing entries — in some, whitewashing unflattering facts away; in others, inserting nasty blurbs about political foes.

What’s interesting here is that Wikinews seems to be doing a better job at connecting the data dots than some of the larger commercial news organizations covering the story. Not because Wikinews volunteers have access to facts that mainstream media reporters don’t, but because Wikinewsers might just be looking harder for those facts in the right places.

And although some dirty digital deeds were done, Wikinews reports that many edits (and there were lots of ‘em) attributed to Capitol Hill computers were benign. While one could argue Wikinews reporters are more likely to report favorable facts about Wikipedia, publicly accessible historic data supports that assertion. Snip:

Using the public history of edits on Wikipedia, Wikinews reporters collected every Senate IP which had ever edited on Wikipedia as of February 3 and examined where the IPs came from, what they edited, and of what those edits consisted. IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses are unique numbers electronic devices use to communicate with each other on an individual basis.

Okay, now bear with me through this important part, don’t let all the numbers put you to sleep. Snip, emphasis mine:

IP address mapping: The U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms owns the IP block 156.33.0.0 to 156.33.255.255. Requests to learn the mapping of these thousands of IPs were not responded to at press time.

However, the lower 100 blocks of addresses appear to be mapped to the 100 Senators based on their state’s alphabetical listing. This was partially confirmed using e-mail responses from the offices of Senators; where the originating computer was connected to the network directly and was not a part of block 222 (a section which seems to be reserved for servers), the IP addresses matched the prediction pattern.

Whoah, did you catch that? Wikinews is saying that someone (I’m presuming Wikinews contributors) sent emails to specific Senators’ offices, then read the email header data that came back on autoresponder emails to get the IP address for each office. Once IPs could be linked to specific offices, it became possible to look back at Wikipedia edit histories and figure out which office was responsible for which edit, whether good or sneaky-bad. That’s called investigative reporting, folks.

When examining the edit behavior of IPs it also tended to match the predicted pattern. IPs which were assigned to Florida had edits to Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez and other Florida-related pages primarily, while those assigned to California had edited Dianne Feinstein. Edits coming from the U.S. House of Representatives were less traceable because they came through a proxy server—meaning they all showed up under one IP address.

Open, collaborative information projects like Wikipedia and Wikinews tend to make a lot of people very nervous. There are so many ways those sites can go wrong, the logic goes. But what they get right might frighten media traditionalists even more. And in this case, it looks like Wikinews really got it right.

Link to full text of entry, which breaks down Wikipedia edit history linked to staffers for Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, Tom Harkin, Norm Coleman, and Conrad Burns (his fondness for the word “ragheads” was excised by a staffer, according to this report).

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The parking lot: it isn’t just for parking anymore.

In the latest example of advertisers turning space with no commercial value into something valuable, a company is manufacturing printed vinyl ads that cover the lines between spaces in parking lots. They’re unobtrusive from a distance but impossible to miss when standing over them.

It’s amazing how many people (mostly americans) base their stuff on a simple gay cowboy movie.. Take Broke Mac Mountain for example.

I guess it demonstrates how much “gay” is an issue for people…sad, really.

thanks, Ralph, for the pointer

Even CNN is taking notice:

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Some of the “Top Ten Signs You’re a Gay Cowboy,” courtesy of David Letterman:

# You enjoy ridin’, ropin’ and redecoratin’.

# Instead of a saloon, you prefer a salon.

# Native Americans refer to you as “Dances With Men.”

Is the bottomless fount of “Brokeback Mountain” humor — late-night monologues, fake Internet movie trailers, movie poster imitations — harmless and fun, or insulting?

Most gay groups find it fairly benign, and note that in any case, the movie’s overwhelming publicity can only be a good thing.

“Some of the humor may be insensitive, but even that has spurred positive conversation,” says Susanne Salkind of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay rights group.

But Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, says he’s sick of it: “It may be funny, but there is a real element of homophobia. It’s making jabs about sex between gay men.”

Jay Leno made at least 15 “Brokeback” jokes in January. Many were references to gay sex. One that wasn’t: “The cold weather continues to spread across the United States. In fact, down south it was so cold people were shaking like Jerry Falwell watching ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ “

Explanation:
Some moons wouldn’t survive the collision. Tethys, one of Saturn’s larger moons at about 1000 kilometers in diameter, survived the collision, but sports today the expansive impact crater Odysseus. Sometimes called the Great Basin, Odysseus occurs on the leading hemisphere of Tethys and shows its great age by the relative amount of smaller craters that occur inside its towering walls. The density of Tethys is similar to water-ice. The above digitally enhanced image was captured late last year by the robot Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn as it swooped past the giant ice ball.

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Only in Washington could an old pro like Boehner, an eight-term congressman with close ties to Washington’s K Street lobbying culture, be seen as the fresh face of reform. Boehner’s ever-present George Hamilton tan gives him the look of a man forever coming back from vacation. He does get around: over the years, he has made the most of controversial rules allowing members to accept free trips to luxury retreats around the world. Since 2000, Boehner has taken more than $150,000 worth of junkets paid for by private interests—ranking him in the top 10 of all members of Congress.

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The Bush administration called Monday for the Bonneville Power Administration to reverse its longtime policy of using surplus revenue to lower electricity rates for Northwest consumers and instead use the money to pay down the federal debt.

The administration called the proposal “consistent with sound business practices,�? but lawmakers from the region called it yet another attack on the Oregon-based regional power agency and Northwest consumers. They said the change could raise electricity rates by as much as 10 percent.

Why not simply call it what it is? A tax increase.

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George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

You see that lady above with her child? That’s Corey Shanaberger & her daughter Grace, who’s 3. They lost Corey’s husband Wentz in an ambush in Iraq.

According to the Bush Administration’s new budget, they’re part of the problem with the deficit.

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President Bush’s budget calls for elimination of a $255 lump-sum death payment that has been part of Social Security for more than 50 years and urges Congress to cut off monthly survivor benefits to 16- and 17-year-old high school dropouts.

If approved, the two proposals would save a combined $3.4 billion over the next decade, according to administration estimates.

Any attempt to reduce Social Security benefits — no matter how small — could face intense opposition in Congress in an election year.

“There they go again,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who chairs his party’s campaign committee, said Tuesday of the administration. “They can’t resist trying to cut Social Security and to cut a survivor’s, a widow or widower’s benefits; it just shows how warped the priorities are in this budget.”

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi agreed. “The president’s budget continues to reflect the Republican agenda of cutting guaranteed Social Security benefits that workers have earned,” she said.

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Gene B. Sperling, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, compared it to a man who leases three fully loaded Hummers, finds it stretches his family’s budget to the breaking point, and decides his family has to start buying cheaper peanut butter.

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Meer dan honderd Nederlandse soldaten weigeren deel te nemen aan de missie naar de Afghaanse provincie Uruzgan. Ruim duizend militairen twijfelen. Dat zeggen twee vakbonden voor militairen, de AFMP en de ACOM, woensdag in Algemeen Dagblad. Druk vanuit het thuisfront en behoefte aan ander werk zouden de belangrijkste redenen zijn.

Voorzitter Wim van den Burg van de AFMP voorspelt in het dagblad dat de komende weken ‘de ene na de andere militair zal afhaken’. “Afghanistan is voor veel van onze leden de druppel die de emmer doet overlopen. Nu de conjunctuur aantrekt, hebben zij uitzicht op ander werk en een normaal gezinsleven. Velen blijken dat met beide handen aan te grijpen.” De ACOM zegt honderden twijfelaars onder zijn leden te tellen.

Bij de Vakbond voor Defensiepersoneel en het ministerie van Defensie is niets bekend over twijfelaars. “Pas bij een zwaarwegende reden zoals ziekte hoeft een militair niet deel te nemen aan de missie. Als dit niet het geval is en hij weigert naar Afghanistan te gaan, dan wordt het contract ontbonden. Dat is niet iets waar je graag voor kiest”, zegt woordvoerder Nico van der Zee in het dagblad.

Toch vreemd, want ’Ze krijgen daar een ge-wel-di-ge tijd’