How big is Bloglines?

via SiliconBeat: "Why is Bloglines so popular? Aside from being reliable and easy-to-use, our guess is that it has something to do with what Paul Graham said about Web-based applications in his recent book, Hackers and Painters. 'The idea of 'your computer' is going away and being replaced by 'your data.' You should be able to get at your data from any computer. Or rather any client, and a client doesn't have to be your computer.'' As a Web-based application, Bloglines offers that convenience."

MacWorld kicks off with budget iMac

Awesome. I Want.

via CNET News.com: "Apple opens the Mac community's annual gathering in San Francisco by pulling the wraps off a sub-$500 PC and a flash-based iPod."

The new Mac Mini will go on sale Jan. 22 and will cost $499 for the base model, or $550 for one with a bigger hard drive. The device marks one of Apple's boldest moves yet to expand PC sales beyond a loyal but limited market of Mac addicts. The iPod and Apple's iTunes music store have been responsible for a dramatic surge in Apple revenue, but to date there has been little evidence that those products have done anything for Apple's PC business.

Apple Computer introduced substantial new updates to its iLife package of multimedia software on Tuesday, including powerful new tools for manipulating digital photos and recording music.

The new version of iPhoto, contained inside the iLife suite, gives people the ability to edit pictures in ways resembling the basic features of the high-end Photoshop software from Adobe Systems. New video editing software will support high-definition video cameras, and the GarageBand music recording software contains new tools for recording multiple members of a band.

Unlike most similar devices, the Shuffle has no display screen to show songs or playlists; it consists only of a slender white rectangle with the trademark iPod navigation wheel on one side. The company is instead highlighting the random-play aspect of the device, although this is a common feature on virtually all MP3 players.

"iPod Shuffle is smaller and lighter than a pack of gum and costs less than $100," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. "With most flash-memory music players, users must use tiny displays and complicated controls to find their music. With iPod Shuffle, you just relax and it serves up new combinations of your music every time you listen."

Slashdot on same.

IBM Offers 500 Patents For Open-Source Use

via Lessig: "IBM has announced the pledge of 500 patents to a 'patent commons' for 'open source' software development. That means people developing software licensed under a license certified by the Open Source Initiative can be assured that IBM will not assert these 500 patents against them -- at least so long as they don't sue IBM or another open source developer for patent related issues. (Steve Lohr's got a piece in the Times.)

This is important news. It further demonstrates IBM's commitment to making free software and open source software development flourish. And it could well inspire others to follow. Ideally there should be a trust that these patents could be contributed into. We'll have to get the commonists to get to work building such a thing."

Cnet link to IBM announcement.

Slashdot on same.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

via Democracy Now!: "We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies. "

Keith Yamashita Wants to Reinvent Your Company

via Fast Company (Nov. 2002): "All meaningful change starts with the right aspiration,' insists Yamashita. 'Doing strategy is ultimately about engaging human beings to take a leap. The animating question is, What will you become?' That means unearthing what's true to the company's core, or, as Yamashita calls it, the north star: 'A powerful north star answers questions like, What are we doing that's different from what everyone else in our industry is doing? Why do we exist? What makes employees passionate about their work? What excites our customers?'

The challenge for executives is to manage the tension between an expansive purpose and the day-to-day shocks of the business environment. 'The way to make sense of that dilemma is to initiate a conversation about what's purpose and what's just practice,' says Yamashita. That's what Fiorina did from the moment she stepped into the job at HP. Her mantra was, 'Preserve the best, reinvent the rest.' What's the best at HP? Says Yamashita: 'Popularizing technology in a way that's intimate, useful, humane, and high quality.'"

Beyond Thinking Different to Doing Different

via Brand Autopsy: "Bruce Mau, a designer, thinker, articulator, and massive change provocateur, has a lot of ideas on a lot of things. His Incomplete Manifesto for Change is a list, an incomplete one at that, of 43 ideas to get you beyond thinking differently but doing differently. As 2004 turns to 2005, the message of doing differently is one we should all heed. Enjoy."

Do you have what it takes to join Google?

via CNET News.com"It just helps us attract a different class of people," she said. "There are some people that complete the test that don't even want a job at Google."

The 21-question test includes problems such as:

• Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonality.

• How many different ways can you color an icosahedron with one of three colors on each face? What colors would you choose?

• This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves upon emptiness.

Software firms want copyright law rewrite

via News.com: "A group of large software companies has taken the first step toward inciting a tussle with the telecommunications industry by asking Congress to rewrite copyright law so alleged Internet pirates can be more easily targeted by lawsuits.

The group of companies, which is known as the Business Software Alliance, counts as members Microsoft, Autodesk, Borland, Intuit, Sybase and Symantec, among others. The group released a general outline of its suggestions on Thursday in a white paper that effectively describes its legislative proposals for 2005. The companies say they fear a revenue-sapping future in which software programs are traded as frequently and readily on peer-to-peer networks as MP3 music files are today.

One current law that the software companies single out for criticism is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which established a turbocharged subpoena procedure designed to let copyright holders unmask infringers. The law was considered a workable compromise when enacted in 1998, but a series of subsequent court decisions have created an 'impediment to effective enforcement,' the paper says.

Emery Simon, a top BSA attorney, declined to be more specific about the group's proposals, but any attempt to revise the law could place its members at loggerheads with Internet service providers, which historically have been loath to act as online cops or face liability for what their users do. Verizon Communications and Missouri-based Charter Communications have led court battles against the Recording Industry Association of America to curb the scope of the DMCA--and, in the process, effectively preserve the privacy of their customers."

Recommended Reading: Trade Dress Rights in Musical Instruments

via The TTABlog: "Robert M. Kunstadt and Ilaria Maggioni present an entertaining and enlightening discussion of current trade dress law in the context of the design of a guitar, in 'Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Trade Dress Rights in Musical Instruments,' 94 Trademark Reporter 1271 (November-December 2004)."

Clients to Law Firms: Change or Die

via law.com: "As we welcome 2005, our corporate landscape is littered with the remnants of companies (including law firms) that failed to see the future and seize opportunities. It's time to heed their warnings. Clients are already demanding change from their law firms. Unless you want to join the other fossils, it's time to change your ways."

Top Intellectual Property Law Issues of 2005

via GROKLAW: "It's usual at this time of year to try to figure out what the future holds. I asked Henry Stimpson if he'd poll the folks at Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, a Boston IP law firm (with a really lovely website), and give us the firm's assessment of what to keep an eye on for the coming year, as far as IP law is concerned. He graciously agreed. What I found most interesting is what they say about more conflict expected between patents and antitrust law."

Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?

via Techdirt: "There are some strange things happening with trademark law, and it certainly seems to go beyond the scope of what it's intended to cover. The point of trademark law is to prevent someone from passing off their goods as someone else's. It's to avoid confusion. A trademark shouldn't be considered something that you have absolute control over -- but just in situations where confusion can occur. However, that's not at all how it's being used. Instead, it's being used to stifle any kind of comment that someone doesn't like. About a year ago, we wrote about the somewhat bizarre case where the Greater Toronto Airport Authority told a silly site that posts photos of urinals (pretty much just for the hell of it) that they couldn't mention the name of the airport for no clear reason other than that the GTAA didn't like it. The owners of that site, Urinal.net, have now been approached again by someone who is trying to stop them from posting perfectly legitimate information. In this case, complaint is coming from the Marco Beach Ocean Resort, who is claiming that it's somehow illegal to use their name on the website. Urinal.net has responded by (amusingly) distorting the name enough to try to get around the request of the lawyers who contacted them. Part of the complaint seems to concern the fact that the anonymous contributor mentioned that the urinal is viewable from the lobby. Of course, courts have ruled that simply passing on content sent to you via the web or by email does not make the person or company passing on the info liable for its content."

Bill Gates CNet Interview

via News.com: "In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned--including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future."

Geico To Continue Keyword Battle Against Google

via MediaDailyNews: "Geico might have lost the first battle in its trademark infringement suit against search giant Google last month, but officials from the insurance company vowed that the war is not yet over.

'The fact that a search engine can make money from our trademark is fundamentally wrong,' said Geico's general counsel, Charles Davies. 'We continue to believe that the sale of our trademark is wrong, and we will continue to litigate this issue,' he said."

The Care and Feeding of FOSS: The Lifecycle of Software Technology

via Mooview Scientific Consulting: FOSS has generated a remarkable amount of debate, both informal and in the courtroom. To those of us who lived through the sixties, some FOSS advocates make statements are reminiscent of the idealism of that time – the sharing, the community feeling, the spirit of cooperation, and most of all, the "Up yours!" to the big corporations and big government. Listening to the most dedicated FOSS advocates, one could easily imagine the speaker was talking of civil rights, war protests, or women's suffrage.

On the other side, some commercial enterprises see FOSS as a nuisance at best, and at worst a threat to capitalism itself, or (a few absurdly claim) unconstitutional and un-American. Listening to the strongest FOSS critics, you might think communists are landing on America's shores, and our modern way of life and economy will come crashing down if FOSS is allowed to survive.

Both sides are wrong. There is a natural "lifecycle" to software technology, which includes both commercial periods and FOSS periods. Those who understand this pattern can work with it and thrive. Those who don't understand the pattern, or who choose to fight it, are in for a lot of frustration.

In this essay, we'll explore why almost all software technology will go through stages that include a commercial, for-profit period, but ultimately end up FOSS. We'll look at why commercial involvement is a natural and positive force, and why FOSS is the inevitable endpoint of most software technology.

The essay slashdotted.

I/P Task-Based Billing Codes

via I/P Updates: "The Conference Board of Canada has published a 'Task-Based Billing Intellectual Property Code Set' which, although it uses some Canadian terminology, provides task and activity identifiers that are better-suited for intellectual property matters than the 'Uniform Task-Based Management System' used by many large clients.
Task-based billing is a system of using commonly-accepted codes to describe tasks that are performed as professional services. during legal services. For legal services, the system grew out of the need for better analysis and cost control over conventional systems that merely break charges down by date of service. By requiring bills to be categorized by according to a standard set of tasks and activities, rather than by matter and day of month, clients can sometimes get a better handle on where their legal dollars are going."

McGeady Not Looking to Make Friends

via Soccer365: "Celtic teenager Aiden McGeady has declared he is ready to take on Neil Lennon's mantle as the most unpopular player in Scottish football.

Lennon, who quit the Northern Ireland national team following a death threat, has carved himself a reputation as a trophy winner who also usually manages to upset the opposition. The midfielder is coming to the end of his career and might even leave in the summer when his contract expires.

At 18, play-maker McGeady is at the other end of the scale and has been the Hoops' great success story of the season. But the youngster, who was on target in yesterday's 2-0 win at Hearts, has already courted controversy by turning his back on Scotland to play for the Republic of Ireland."

The Best Links 2004

according to kottke.org: "In lieu of a book or magazine compilation of the best writing of 2004, here are some of the best things I linked to in the past year. The list consists mostly of magazine and newspaper articles with a few other types of media sprinkled in and is more objective than my favorite weblogs of 2004 list."

The Diamond-Orszag Alternative

via TAPPED: "Those of us who think there's a need for a liberal alternative to the Bush Social Security phase-out plan may want to take a look at the CBO's new analysis (PDF) of the proposal that's been put forward by Brookings' Peter Diamond and Peter Orszag. This is basically an effort to fully-fund projected benefits without any major changes to the structure of the program. Perhaps its most noteworthy feature, however, is that it attempts to do this while simultaneously just writing off the trust fund that Social Security has accumulated since the early 1980s, rather than simply insisting that the general fund repay its obligations rather than keep giving tax cuts to the rich. There are some policy reasons to think that's a good idea (and some reasons to think it's a bad idea) but it's pretty terrible to concede so much to the Greenspan/Bush shell game."

Perverse Polarity

via Washington Monthly: "It is a clich to observe that the parties have drawn further apart, the center no longer holds, and partisans on both sides have withdrawn further into mutual loathing and ever more-homogenous and antagonistic groupings. Where the analysis goes wrong is in its assumption, either explicit or implicit, that both parties bear equal responsibility for this state of affairs. While partisanship may now be deeply entrenched among their voters and their elites, the truth is that the growing polarization of American politics results primarily from the growing radicalism of the Republican Party."

Sprucing up open source's GPL foundation

via CNET News.com: "Modernization is coming to the General Public License, a legal framework that supports a large part of the free and open-source software movements and that has received sharp criticism from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

GPL author Richard Stallman said he's working on amendments that could deal better with software patents; clarify how GPL software may be used in some networked environments and on carefully controlled hardware; and lower some barriers that today prevent the mixing of software covered by the GPL and other licenses.

In the 13 years since the current GPL version 2 was released, the license has moved from the fringes to the center of the computing industry. GPL software is now common at Fortune 500 companies and endorsed by most large computing firms. But that prominence has made some eager for an update."

Slashdot on same.

DeLay the Traitor

via The Stakeholder: "'I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today.' Floor Statement of Tom Delay on Kosovo, 4/28/99"

Details, Details

via TAPPED: "President Bush will spearhead an election-style public relations campaign early next year to try to convince Americans that Social Security is in urgent need of change but will keep dollar and cent details deliberately vague, analysts and officials say.

With Bush's political capital riding on a successful overhaul of the popular retirement program, the White House and its allies plan to bombard the public with presidential speeches, television and radio ads, newspaper op-ed articles and grass-roots rallies between now and early 2005.

'It's going to be a battle royal, very much like an election campaign but over an issue rather than a candidate,' said Stephen Moore, executive director of Club for Growth, a Republican group that hopes to spend $15 million on a media campaign backing the White House...."

U.S. Cutting Food Aid Aimed at Self-Sufficiency

via nytimes.com: "In one of the first signs of the effects of the ever tightening federal budget, in the past two months the Bush administration has reduced its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping millions of people climb out of poverty.

With the budget deficit growing and President Bush promising to reduce spending, the administration has told representatives of several charities that it was unable to honor some earlier promises and would have money to pay for food only in emergency crises like that in Darfur, in western Sudan. The cutbacks, estimated by some charities at up to $100 million, come at a time when the number of hungry in the world is rising for the first time in years and all food programs are being stretched.

As a result, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services and other charities have suspended or eliminated programs that were intended to help the poor feed themselves through improvements in farming, education and health."

No cuts here.

Also, Leaving the College Students Behind (via Tapped): "Bush's latest salvo in the creation of an ownership society where everyone is on their own will be keenly felt by college students next year, who will see a reduction in eligibility for financial aid and reduced Pell Grants."

Bush's War

via Daily Kos: "So, who is to blame for all the deaths in Iraq? Let's mull this one over a bit, shall we?"

A Response To Time

via MyDD: "Dear Time Editors:

My son, Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq on 04/04/04. This has been an extraordinary couple of weeks of 'slaps in the faces' to us families of fallen heroes.

First, the Secretary of Defense--Donald Rumsfeld--admits to the world something that we as military families already know: The United States was not prepared for nor had any plan for the assault on Iraq. Our children were sent to fight an ill-conceived and badly prosecuted war. Our troops were sent with the wrong type of training, bad equipment, inferior protection and thin supply lines. Our children have been killed and we have made the ultimate sacrifice for this fiasco of a war, then we find out this week that Rumsfeld doesn't even have the courtesy or compassion to sign the 'death letters'--as they are so callously called. Besides the upcoming holidays and the fact we miss our children desperately, what else can go wrong this holiday season?"

Make 2005 the Year You Start Your Own Firm

via Law.com: "But if you let your fears or inexperience paralyze you, you won't go very far. No matter how long you practice, a situation that you've never before encountered will arise. Get used to it. All you can do is prepare as best you can. "

There Is No Social Security Crisis

via American Prospect Online: "I was -- and the bulk of young people still are -- the victim of a massive fraud, perpetrated by Social Security abolition advocates and unfortunately re-enforced from time to time by liberals seeking an argument against Republican tax cuts. This fraud, which is ongoing and in which a lazy media has been complicit, is crucial to understanding the politics of Social Security."

Come See Our Hideous Slab

via sfgate.com: "Screw it. Let them build the Slab. It's too late, anyway. It will be our own private joke. It will be our memento of a dreary and war-torn time. Tourists will look at it and skip the photo. We will look at it and go, oh yeah, that was from a time when San Francisco and California and the nation as a whole were all mired neck deep in war and gluttony and bitter divisiveness and fiscal abuse, and no one seemed to give a damn and if you did you were considered a traitor.

And the City was broke largely because the state was broke and the state was broke largely because the wildly irresponsible and reckless BushCo imbeciles ran us all into the goddamn fiscal ground and gutted the value of the dollar and put our country a trillion dollars in debt, and they just laughed like drunk hyenas the whole time as they cashed in their oil portfolios and mapped out bombing routes in Iran.

It will be our soulless and generic little landmark. It will stand for decades to come and we will say, sure it's ugly. Sure it's a giant concrete slab. Sure it's graceless and uninspired and brutish and an architectural embarrassment and sure it is, perhaps more than anything else, one massive and rather humiliating missed opportunity.

Hey, that's America in a nutshell, sweetheart. That's the Bush era, right there. You want grace and beauty and dreams all coupled with soaring notions of hope and progress? Move to France, hippie."

Required reading regarding your financial future

via Blog Maverick: "Rather than shaving off all the pork we feed our politicians, and beyond in order to create funding to meet our obligation, the President has decided to relinquish part of the obligation back to us, in hopes that each of us make more than the government could, and pay for more of our own, and our childrens future. To put it another way, keep some of your social security contributions and play the financial markets lottery.

In his challenge, Mr Kinsley correctly describes why it wont work. Let me give you two examples why its even worse than he describes."

Google wins in trademark suit with Geico

via CNET News.com: "Google scored a big legal win Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that its use of trademarks in keyword advertising is legal.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Google's motion to dismiss a trademark-infringement complaint brought by Geico. The insurance company had charged Google with violating its trademarks by using the word 'Geico' to trigger rival ads in sponsored search results. Geico claimed the practice diluted its trademarks and caused consumer confusion.

The judge said that 'as a matter of law it is not trademark infringement to use trademarks as keywords to trigger advertising,' said Michael Page, a partner at Keker & Van Nest, which represented Google."

More from eWeek.

Davenetics has fun with the Geico keyword.

MPAA targets core BitTorrent, eDonkey users

via ZDNet: "The Motion Picture Association of America launched a new legal campaign Tuesday targeting the BitTorrent and eDonkey file-swapping networks, two technologies widely used to trade movies online.

Ratcheting up its previous online antipiracy efforts, the Hollywood group is working with law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe to target and arrest individuals who play a critical role in the functioning of each type of network.

Criminal actions have already been filed in Europe, including the seizure of seven Net-connected servers, with their operator still wanted by French police, a representative of the French government said."

Where's venture capital headed in 2005? Spam, for starters.

via SiliconBeat: "Here's a noteworthy summary of where venture capitalists predict their money will be going in the coming year, published today by the National Venture Capital Association. There are many VC views represented, but we'll just pick on one: the revolution in advertising.

There's been a lot of hype about this, and some VCs see the revolution continuing next year -- notably that 'brands' will follow us wherever we go. Big company brands should forget advertising in newspapers or on TV, they say; instead, they should bombard people with messages directly on their cellphones and other devices."

Lawsuit: Software should not be copyrighted

via CNET News.com: "Computer software should not be protected by copyright laws designed for music, literature and other creative works, according to a lawsuit filed in a U.S. court in San Francisco.

Intellectual-property consultant Greg Aharonian hopes to convince the court that software makers can protect their products adequately through patents, which provide more comprehensive protection but are difficult to obtain and expire in a shorter period of time.

The case seeks to clarify which laws the $100 billion U.S. software industry should use to protect its products. Currently, software makers like Microsoft use both copyright and patent laws to protect their creations, as well as 'clickwrap' agreements that stipulate terms of use.

An official with a software-industry trade group said that not every software product is protected by patents.

'If you eliminated the ability to sue somebody for copyright infringement, you would eviscerate our ability to go against pirates,' said Emory Simon, counselor for the Business Software Alliance, which estimates that U.S. businesses lost $6.5 billion last year to piracy.

Aharonian argues in his complaint that software copyright laws violate the right to due process enshrined in the U.S. Constitution because they do not provide clear boundaries for appropriate use. That means industry players and courts do not have a clear idea of the rules"

via Techdirt: "His argument is, basically, that a copyright on software is too restrictive, without clearly stating what the rules are for making use of the copyrighted material. . . . While it's an intriguing idea, it seems like a very shaky legal argument, and not one that many judges are going to buy. It may draw some attention to the issue of intellectual property reform -- but will probably strike too many as "too far out there" to take seriously. You can almost hear the disbelief coming from folks at the BSA responding to the lawsuit, astounded that anyone would take this line of reasoning against software copyrights."

via IP Central.info: "Reading between the lines of his website on the case, his request that a court declare much of copyright law unconstitutional for vagueness is made with tongue firmly in cheek. But a law suit has one big advantage over the endless reports by learned commissions and journalistic moaning that characterize this topic -- people are forced to pay attention to a law suit because they never know what some crazy judges might do, especially out there in California.

Software is not in any immediate danger, though, so one can also see this glass as half full. Software companies, like many others, have been fretting about the law in this area for a time, so the suit may actually give them an opening to think about designing a better system for protecting software that would combine the best features of patent and copyright."

Google hit with trademark suit over 'Scholar'

via CNET News.com: "The American Chemical Society has filed suit against Google, alleging that the search giant violated a trademark held by the group when it launched the Google Scholar search tool.

The suit, filed Dec. 9 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, claims that Google's use of the word 'scholar' violates a May 2003 trademark held by ACS for the name of its Web-based academic search tool, SciFinder Scholar. In the suit, ACS, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group, demands that Google cease and desist from using the word 'scholar' in the name of its tool in order to prevent confusion among users.

Both SciFinder Scholar and Google Scholar are designed to let individuals search previously published academic research. The fundamental difference between the two products is that SciFinder Scholar is used to index information stored in the ACS databases, while the Google tool indexes research already made publicly available on the Internet."

Using Genetics to Rev Up Metabolic Machinery

via ScientificAmerican.com: To accomplish its remarkable metabolic and antiobesity tasks, PPAR-delta evidently modifies the composition of skeletal muscle in the mice. Muscle consists of fast-twitch fibers, which rely on sugar for fuel and are used primarily for rapid movements, and slow-twitch fibers, which convert fat into energy and are responsible for sustained activity. The transgenics had double the amount of the fat-burning, slow-twitch muscle compared with normal littermates.

The increase in slow-twitch fibers, usually associated with long-lasting, vigorous exercise, also translated into greater endurance. On the mouse treadmill, the transgenics could run 1,800 meters, twice the distance a mouse normally runs before exhaustion, and for an hour longer than the usual 90 minutes. "We nicknamed them ‘marathon mice' because they behave like conditioned athletes," says Evans, whose study appears in the October PLoS Biology. He suspects that changes have also occurred in the cardiovascular and nervous systems, both of which are intimately linked to the muscles. He has not yet seen any serious side effects from the extra PPAR-delta.

What it Takes to Be a Famous Mark

via I/P Updates: "This October 2004 Report by the INTA Dilution Committee addresses what is required for a mark to be found famous in the context of a claim for trademark dilution."

Is eBay the future of Web politics?

via ZDNet: "A panel of Internet gurus gathered on Friday at the fifth annual Votes, Bits & Bytes conference in Cambridge, Massachussetts, held by the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School to discuss the impact of Internet business models on online politics.

The panellists said the most valuable lesson online campaigners may be able to garner from Web-based companies is that building a sense of trust remains at the centre of winning loyalty from customers or political followers."

A Liberal War On Terror

via Orcinus: "Peter Beinart's recent piece in The New Republic [Fighting Faith] raises a reasonable problem: Why haven't liberals gotten behind the war on terror, given that most terrorists' political and religious beliefs are diametrically opposed to progressive values?

Good question. And the answer is contained within it, to wit: Liberals have not supported the current war on terror precisely because it does not confront the real nature of the terrorist threat.

Liberals, I believe, would enthusiastically support a 'war on terror' that recognized its broad nature, its root sources in radical fundamentalism, and its asymmetrical shape, and responded appropriately. Unfortunately, the DLC-style leadership we've been getting from atop the Democratic party, cheered on by folks like Beinart, has been too timid to articulate that kind of vision."

see also TNR reader responses to Beinart.

Josh's take at TPM.

How Trademark Owners Can Fight Phishing

via I/P Updates: "According to Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) statistics presented in the December 8, 2004 issue of the World Trademark Report, the number of active 'phishing sites' reported for October 2004 was 1,142 with an average growth rate in located phishing sites between July 2004 and October 2004 of 25%. The statistics reveal that the number of brands hijacked by phishing campaigns in October numbered 44. Some 73% of these were banking institutions, 14% net service forms, 7% retailers and 7% miscellaneous. The average site of a phisher is online for only 6 days."

One Stop Shopping

via Timothy K. Armstrong blog: Some Resources on Open Source

Democrats lost the battle, not the war

via Salon.com : "A longer perspective is more pertinent and more relevant to the future than listening to televised imbeciles maundering about the 'death of liberalism.' (Had the Democrat won by three points and a couple dozen electoral votes, nobody would be touting the 'death of conservatism.') Progressives and reactionaries in America have both survived much sharper electoral rejections than this one. Both sides tend to overreact to such rejection in an election's emotional aftermath.

Exaggeration is the rule, not the exception, in the post-election autopsy. Sweeping pronouncements about this year's close, hotly contested campaign should be considered skeptically, especially when Republican propagandists start to talk about their 'mandate' and their 'permanent majority.' Such claims are convincing only to citizens (and journalists) suffering from amnesia."

Bush's night of the long knives

cia Salon.com : "Powell had wanted to stay on for six months of Bush's second term to help shepherd a new Middle East peace process, but the president insisted on his swift resignation. Immediately, Condoleezza Rice was named in his place. She had failed at every important task as national security advisor, pointedly neglecting terrorism before Sept. 11, enthusiastically parroting the false claim that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program (while suppressing contrary intelligence), mismanaging her part of postwar policy so completely that she had to cede it to a deputy, and eviscerating the Middle East 'road map.'

But Bush's performance princess was his favorite briefer; ever devoted, the unmarried Rice in an unguarded moment once called Bush 'my husband.' As incompetent as she was at her actual job, she was as agile at bureaucratic positioning. Early on she figured out how to align with the neoconservatives and to damage Powell. Her usurpation is a lesson to him in blind ambition and loyalty.

Powell's sack and Rice's promotion are more than examples of behavior punished and rewarded. His fall and her rise signal the purge of the CIA and the State Department -- a neoconservative night of the long knives. Bush's attitude is that of the intimidating loyalty enforcer he was in his father's political campaigns."

What is encryption?

via Techworld.com: "Data encryption has become a sad necessity for responsible data managers. However cryptography is jargon-heavy even by the discouraging standards of the IT world – symmetric and asymmetric cryptosystems, public versus private keys, digital signatures, hash algorithms, RSA, DES, Rijndael, PGP, MD5, SHA-1, https, secure sockets, Camellia, IDEA; what does it all mean? What are the differences? Relative advantages and disadvantages? Hopefully this article will clear some of the fog."

Federal Judge Tosses Porn Purveyor's Copyright Suit Against Credit Card Companies

via law.com: "Ruling from the bench, U.S. District Judge James Ware tossed out a copyright and trademark infringement suit brought against Visa International Service Association and MasterCard International Inc. by Perfect 10 Inc., which publishes an adult magazine and operates an adult Web site.

Perfect 10 claims hundreds of Web site operators around the world are selling its trademarked images of women -- and that the credit card companies that process these transactions are liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

Andrew Bridges, a partner in Winston & Strawn's San Francisco office representing MasterCard, said Perfect 10 was trying 'to impose a commercial blockade on anyone accused of infringement.' Ware found the credit card companies 'are not obliged to manage their merchants away from infringement,' Bridges added. "

Perfect 10 v. Visa International, 04-0371 (N.D. Cal.)

Something Borrowed By Malcolm Gladwell

via The New Yorker: At issue in the case wasn’t the distinctiveness of Newton’s performance. The Beastie Boys, everyone agreed, had properly licensed Newton’s performance when they paid the copyright recording fee. And there was no question about whether they had copied the underlying music to the sample. At issue was simply whether the Beastie Boys were required to ask for that secondary permission: was the composition underneath those six seconds so distinctive and original that Newton could be said to own it? The court said that it wasn’t.

The chief expert witness for the Beastie Boys in the “Choir” case was Lawrence Ferrara, who is a professor of music at New York University, and when I asked him to explain the court’s ruling he walked over to the piano in the corner of his office and played those three notes: C, D-flat, C. “That’s it!” he shouted. “There ain’t nothing else! That’s what was used. You know what this is? It’s no more than a mordent, a turn. It’s been done thousands upon thousands of times. No one can say they own that.”

Factory of the Future?

via MSNBC : "Sources familiar with Myhrvold's strategy say that he has raised $350 million from some of the largest companies in high tech: Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia and Apple. Google and eBay also recently invested. With this large bankroll, the company is out buying existing patents in droves. (Myhrvold won't comment on these activities, but sources say he has already purchased about 1,000 patents.) The strategy is to set up a sort of patent marketplace. Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. Intellectual-property experts say his plan is audacious and unprecedented, customized for a new, rapidly dawning business environment."

Mr. Misery

via rabbit blog" "Of course it absolutely goes without saying that I don't fucking know Smith and I have no fucking clue what I'm talking about. I don't know what it feels like to be him, and I can't judge anything he does or pretend to know what was in his head, and I have no right to even ponder. He owes me nothing. In truth, I loved loved loved his first album, really liked his second, and then I sort of lost interest. I saw him play at a record store in '96 and he was very quiet and shy, in a way that made you want to hug him. Everyone says that about him, really. But when I read about him now, it just gives me this sick feeling in my stomach. It just makes me want to kick his ass. Stop making yourself so fucking small, stop flinching, stop undermining everything you do, stop hiding, stop shrugging it all off, stop it with the whatever and the so fucking what. All that shit just flies in the face of this obvious romanticism that he couldn't own, or wouldn't. If you're an artist, if you're romantic about yourself and your life, own that shit. Instead, it's "Aw, who cares? I'm not what you think I am. Forget about it." And then you put a knife to your heart? What could possibly be more dramatic than that? You creep along and shrug and diminish yourself, and then choose the most dramatic exit possible? My feeling is that if you could live in a more outward, dramatic, bigger way, in the way that some force inside you clearly needs to live, it wouldn't be necessary to exit prematurely.

Today is Wednesday, a good day to stand up for all of the pretty little things you make, no matter how weak and vulnerable they make you feel. Take your pretty little things to town and show them off, goddamn it! Own your vulnerability and sadness and fear and don't hide them and scoff at people who ask after them. Or, if you're not really that sad or fearful, try to be a little bit more accepting of someone who is. Why does everyone think it's so fucking queer and insane to feel sad, or to be preoccupied, at times, by dark or melancholy moods? It's on our TV screens, it's in our movies, but most of us walk around like our lives are chirpy perfection. Or we're just so fucking over it. You know, whatever, no big deal. Or we're insanely happy, but no one actually wants to hear about it. Maybe we're all just afraid of emotion, in any form. Bleh!"

Boo hoo hoo

via The Daily Howler: "Why did this reader vote for Bush? He says the Democratic Party has “belittled his beliefs, dismissing them out of hand,” and has “addressed him publicly as intellectually challenged for holding to the faith of my fathers.” Oops, sorry—one clarification. The readers says the Democratic Party and/or those people who purport to speak for it has engaged in this behavior.

"Let’s ignore that expansive escape clause and think of the Dem Party proper. We think it’s time for readers like this to name the names of actual Dems who have actually belittled them in this manner. Who exactly “addressed him publicly as intellectually challenged for holding to the faith of his fathers?” Was it Southern Baptist Bill Clinton, from Hot Springs, Arkansas? Was it Southern Baptist Al Gore, from Carthage, Tennessee? Was it Jimmy Carter? Was it Joe Lieberman? Was it John Edwards, from the reader’s own state? Or was it French-speaking John Kerry himself, the haughty man who dares to wind-surf? If so, when did this insult occur? When exactly has any Dem leader ever behaved in the manner described? When exactly did the Dem Party belittle the reader’s religious beliefs and “address him publicly as intellectually challenged?” When exactly did this occur? Or did it really occur in a dream? Or perhaps in a rant on talk radio?"

To Avoid Divorce, Move to Massachusetts

via The New York Times: "Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, voted overwhelmingly for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. But they had three of the highest divorce rates in 2003, based on figures from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.

The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was Massachusetts, home to John Kerry, the Kennedys and same-sex marriage.

In 2003, the rate in Massachusetts was 5.7 divorces per 1,000 married people, compared with 10.8 in Kentucky, 11.1 in Mississippi and 12.7 in Arkansas.

'Some people are saying, 'The Bible Belt is so pro-marriage, but gee, they have the highest divorce rates in the country,' ' said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. 'And there's a lot of worry in the red states about the high rate of divorce.'"

Monopolies of the Mind

via Economist.com: "There is an urgent need for patent offices to return to first principles. A patent is a government-granted temporary monopoly (patents in most countries are given about 20 years' protection) intended to reward innovators in exchange for a disclosure by the patent holder of how his invention works, thereby encouraging others to further innovation. The qualifying tests for patents are straightforward—that an idea be useful, novel and not obvious. Unfortunately most patent offices, swamped by applications that can run to thousands of pages and confronted by companies wielding teams of lawyers, are no longer applying these tests strictly or reliably."

Apologies Accepted

the world's answer to sorryeverybody.com: "We, wanderers of the world outside the US, have been touched by the initiative of www.sorryeverybody.com, and the huge amount of photos they received. The initiators of this website would like to show back to the American people that they appreciated that message."

Sorry Everybody

Sorry Everybody "Some of us — hopefully most of us — are trying to understand and appreciate the effect our recent election will have on you, the citizens of the rest of the world. As our so-called leaders redouble their efforts to screw you over, please remember that some of us — hopefully most of us — are truly, truly sorry. And we'll say we're sorry, even on the behalf of the ones who aren't."

Sultana of the Texas Taliban, Scourge of Scholars, Despoiler of Textbooks

via Pharyngula.org: "The name is Terri Leo. She’s a real piece of work. She’s been working like a maniac to gut textbooks; she’s even tried to get publishers to add little “facts”, like “Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use, and suicide.” She’s a perfect example of anti-science, anti-intellectual, intolerant bigotry, and yet there she is, on the state board of education. That’s like hearing that Richard Dawkins has been elected by the College of Cardinals to the papacy, or that the new head of the NIH is Bluto Blutarski. She just doesn’t belong there." More.

Fuck the South

fuckthesouth.com: The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

Cruel and Unusual: The End Of The Eighth Amendment

via bostonreview.net: "It might seem at first that the rules for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners were founded on standards of political legitimacy suited to war or emergencies; based on what Carl Schmitt called the urgency of the “exception,” they were meant to remain secret as necessary “war measures” and to be exempt from traditional legal ideals and the courts associated with them. But the ominous discretionary powers used to justify this conduct are entirely familiar to those who follow the everyday treatment of prisoners in the United States—not only their treatment by prison guards but their treatment by the courts in sentencing, corrections, and prisoners’ rights. The torture memoranda, as unprecedented as they appear in presenting “legal doctrines . . . that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful,” refer to U.S. prison cases in the last 30 years that have turned on the legal meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s language prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment.”

What is the history of this phrase? How has it been interpreted? And how has its content been so eviscerated?"

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

By Philip E. Agre, Prof. of Information Sciences at UCLA: "These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves 'conservatives' have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States."

Textbook Wars

via pandagon.net: "It's time to realize that reality is a value in and of itself. Respect for 'traditional values' does not supercede respect for facts, evidence and reason. Plenty of Christians believe in evolution, and this bleating, obnoxious minority cannot be allowed to dictate to the rest of America what our children will learn, how they will perceive the world around them."

Resentment, Politics and the Civil War

via digbyblog: "Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling, by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason." Quoting Stephen Z. Starr.

Stylish furniture firm ready to wage war on knockoffs

via sfgate.com: "Knoll, which makes 18 Mies reproductions, has held a trademark on the Barcelona name since 1968. (Knoll reproductions have Mies' signature stamped into the frame.) The new registration extends trademark protection to the actual design of the five products. Bright said the company filed for protection to stem inexpensive knockoffs. Trademark protection, Bright added, will help maintain the authenticity of the original 1929 design. He declined to provide sales figures for the Barcelona series but said it is a "perennial favorite." The decision could curb sales of copycat versions by retailers like Design Within Reach, whose customers appreciate the period's design masters but do not want to pay for authentic reproductions."

The Decline of Brands

via Wired 12.11: "Marketers may consider the explosion of new brands to be evidence of branding's importance, but in fact the opposite is true. It would be a waste of money to launch a clever logo into a world of durable brands and loyal customers. But because consumers are more promiscuous and fickle than ever, established brands are vulnerable, and new ones have a real chance of succeeding - for at least a little while. The obsession with brands, paradoxically, demonstrates their weakness."

SCO seals deal for legal expense cap

via CNET News.com: "The SCO Group has signed a previously announced agreement with two law firms that will cap legal expenses for its Linux and Unix litigation at $31 million, the company said in a legal filing Thursday.

The expense cap agreement--announced Aug. 31 but signed Oct. 31--puts to rest some uncertainty about the company's abilities to pay the hefty legal fees incurred through its legal attacks against IBM, Novell, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler and its legal defense against Red Hat."

Soldiers Describe Looting of Explosives

via latimes.com: "The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

'We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out,' said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.

'On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave' so looters could come in and take munitions.

'It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots,' another officer said."

About That Base Strategy

Etc. at tnr.com: "The problem with casting your lot with your base is that, once you do, even the slightest deviation from it is potentially disastrous. Why? Because in order to win with a base strategy, you need your base to be incredibly motivated, so that they turn up at the polls in large enough numbers to offset all those moderates you alienate. If you don't get that kind of intensity, you lose. As Bush and Rove may be finding out, it's pretty hard to sustain that level of intensity for months and months on end. "

Why Democrats Should Be Thankful - At least they don't have to clean up the Bush fiscal catastrophe

via slate.com: The only solace for sullen Democrats is that now Republicans might have to clean up their own fiscal mess. The fiscal record of the past four years has been one of unmitigated—and seemingly intentional—irresponsibility. A Republican Congress working with a Republican president created the massive new Medicare prescription-drug entitlement, passed a new, subsidy-crammed farm bill, committed hundreds of billions of dollars to war efforts, and loaded up on pork-barrel spending. Meanwhile, taxes were reduced—on wage earners, investors, and companies. The end result: We collected about the same amount of taxes in fiscal 2004 as we did in fiscal 1999. But we spent 34 percent more.

Broad Nationwide Victory?!

via pandagon.net:
"[T]he result is now clear -- a record voter turnout and a broad, nationwide victory."

-Bush, today

Here's that broad, nationwide victory in visual form:

Cendant sues Amazon over book recommendations

via CNET News.com: "Cendant Publishing has filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com, alleging patent infringement.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Del., claims that the online giant infringed on Cendant's '370 patent' for providing people with recommendations of goods or services to purchase based on a database of previous purchasing histories of other customers. The suit was filed Oct. 29."

Open source's next chapter?

via CNET News.com: "Kim Polese, founder of Marimba and formerly the public face of Java for Sun Microsystems, is now back in the limelight--this time as CEO of SpikeSource, an open-source services company catering to corporate customers. And just like during the early days of the Web, Polese believes she's at the front of something big.

Talking about the future of the industry with CNET News.com, she said the combination of readily available software components, on the one hand, and the Web for collaboration on the other will usher in a golden period for the software industry."

Richard Epstein on Why Open Source Is Unsustainable

via FT.com: "The bottom line is that idealistic communes cannot last for the long haul. The open source movement may avoid these difficulties for outside contributors who work for credit and glory. But how do the insiders, such as Linus Torvalds, cash out of the business that they built? And in the interim, how do they attract capital and personnel needed to expand the business? Traditional companies have evolved their capital structures for good reason."

Pumping Up the Power of the IPod

via Wired News: "After nearly three years of almost daily use, my trusty old iPod was starting to give up the ghost. But thanks to a new install-it-yourself battery, it has a new lease on life -- and it's even better than new.

Wired News tested a $40, high-capacity, 2,100 mAh (milliamp hour) replacement iPod battery from Newer Technology. It was easy to install and delivered 22 hours of continuous play -- more than double the play time of the original battery. (The battery tested is for first- and second-generation iPods; Newer also sells one for third-generation iPods.)"

Starting Young: The case for investing in early childhood

via American Prospect Online: Research consistently has shown that providing children with early childhood development and education is important to their long-term success. However, our country has yet to provide universal child care and pre-kindergarten to our nation’s children. Good programs are difficult to come by, and when they are available they take a large bite out of a family’s budget.

Our Magical President

via The Revealer: Believing, it seems, is more important to the President than the substance of his belief. Jesus Christ’s particular teachings -- well, those are good, too. But what really matters is that if you believe you can do something, you can.

What Suskind misses, and what Bush’s more orthodox Christian supporters seem to dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age religion.

Anticompetitive Settlement of Intellectual Property Disputes

By Herbert Hovenkamp, Mark Janis, Mark Lemley, via SSRN: "The overwhelming majority of intellectual property lawsuits settle before trial. These settlements involve agreements between the patentee and the accused infringer, parties who are often competitors before the lawsuit. Because these competitors may agree to stop competing, to regulate the price each charges, and to exchange information about products and prices, settlements of intellectual property disputes naturally raise antitrust concerns. In this paper, we suggest a way to reconcile the interests of intellectual property law and antitrust law in evaluating intellectual property settlements."

Web radio gets $1.7 billion boost

via CNET News.com: "The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers announced Monday that it has reached a $1.7 billion deal with the Radio Music License Committee to let stations legally stream their on-air content over the Internet.

With the deal, the radio group said, its 12,000 member stations gain the right to program ASCAP-regulated music online simultaneously with their on-air signals. The two industry groups labeled the agreement as the largest licensing deal in the history of American radio."

The Claim Construction Project

FedCir.org: This ongoing study analyzes the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's jurisprudence of claim construction—the interpretation of patent claim language—in order to (1) describe and assess that court's performance, (2) improve legal-policy discussion surrounding the court's treatment of the issue, and (3) provide litigators and patent scholars additional tools for analysis.

False Alarm: What Lawsuit Crisis?

via Washington Monthlyr: "How the media helps the insurance industry and the GOP promote the myth of America's 'lawsuit crisis.'"

SCO to launch legal Web site

via CNET News.com: "The SCO Group plans to launch a Web site to chronicle its legal battles relating to Unix and Linux, as part of an effort to counterbalance Groklaw.net--which was set up to poke holes in the company's legal claims.

The site, to be called Prosco.net, will feature an archive of legal filings, hearing dates and SCO positions on various matters, spokesman Blake Stowell said Tuesday. The Lindon, Utah-based company plans to launch the site by Nov. 1, he said."

I Feel Safe Now

via The Prospect's Tapped blog:: "In summary: Before the war Iraq's nuclear program was years away from bearing a usable weapon and, thanks to the sanctions regime, getting further away. Then, thanks to diplomacy and threats of force, IAEA inspectors returned to the country. These inspectors informed the U.S. government that its pre-war assessments of Iraq's nuclear program were off-base and that the threat was nowhere near as imminent as the administration had maintained. Nevertheless, the United States invaded, thus precipitating the evacuation of IAEA inspectors who'd been safeguarding the most advanced elements of the Iraqi nuclear program. After the war, the administration failed to provide enough manpower to secure the sites and, displaying its typical disdain for international institutions, wouldn't let the inspectors come back.

As a result, instead of being under lock-and-key, bits and pieces of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program are now off God knows where. The war has totally undermined the security of Iraq's borders, has caused individuals with links to international terrorism to enter Iraq, and has led the individuals in question to acquire some supporters among the local population. In other words, the risk that Iraqi nuclear materials will make their way into the hands of members of a global terrorist network has been enhanced rather than reduced by the invasion that's cost tens of millions of dollars and over 1,000 American lives. Shockingly, America's academic national security experts think we need something more sensible than this farce of a policy."

The madness of George

via Guardian Unlimited: "Bush acted like the proverbial ugly American trying to be understood in a foreign land, cranking up the volume and shrillness to make his points while Kerry sat by serenely. The contrast was impossible to miss as Bush became increasingly unhinged. Even on the road, Bush's desperation is palpable as the rhetoric soars to angrier heights.

Bush is now hemmed in. With poll after poll showing small Kerry leads, he needs to do something to regain the momentum. His campaign's attack ads have kept him in the game but he is not pulling away. Furthermore, he is well below the 50% mark in most key battleground state polls - a mark of political vulnerability.

If he cannot convince people to vote for him, he will have to convince people to vote against Kerry, and to do that he has to attack, attack, attack. And since it takes more skill than Bush possesses to attack without appearing angry, well, he's in a real bind."

Supreme Court Avoids P2P Subpoena Case

The Supreme Court today let stand a December 2003 ruling by the DC Court of Appeals denying the use of DMCA subpoenas to compel ISPs to reveal the identities of users engaged in P2P file sharing.

Novell Issues Statement on New Patents Policy and Open Source Software

via Groklaw: "Novell is announcing today a new patent policy, in which they say they are prepared, if necessary, to use their patent portfolio, 'which covers technologies with significant value and widespread deployment in the IT sector today', to defend against patent attacks on open source products they deliver. "

How the health care system is failing -- and why it's hard to fix

via SFGate.com: "Some 40 years after the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid and more than a decade after the Clinton administration failed in its bid to extend coverage to all Americans, the nation's system of funding health care is on the verge of breaking down."

U.S. Businesses File Four Times More Lawsuits Than Private Citizens And Are Sanctioned Much More Often for Frivolous Sui

via Public Citizen: U.S.Businesses File Four Times More Lawsuits Than Private Citizens And Are Sanctioned Much More Often for Frivolous Suits

But Corporate Americaand Political Allies Bush and Cheney Campaign to Limit Citizens’ Rights to Sue.

An Inventory of Iraqi Resistance Groups

via A Zawra: "US soldiers guard the wreckage of a military armored vehicle destroyed by the Iraqi resistance. In Iraq, the issues are even more confused now than they were before. This happened after an armed group abducted two French journalists, and threatened to kill them if France did not rescind the law banning religious symbols at schools, including the veil, and another group abducted two Italian women in Baghdad. The issues became even more confused when a third group killed 12 Nepalese workers, claiming that they were serving the US forces.

It is our duty now to clarify the picture with regard to who targets civilians and foreigners, who abducts hostages indiscriminately, and who makes the US occupation and its soldiers his main preoccupation."

Flip-flopping charge unsupported by facts

via sfgate.com: "Yet an examination of Kerry's words in more than 200 speeches and statements, comments during candidate forums and answers to reporters' questions does not support the accusation."

Should Judges use extrinsic evidence in deciding patent diputes?

via Stanford's CIS cyberlaw blog: LST Director Mark Lemley filed an amicus brief for technology companies (Intel Corporation, IBM Corporation, Google Inc., Micron Technology, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation) in Philips v. AWH. They argued “that the public notice function of patents is best served by focusing first on the language of the claims construed in light of the specification and prosecution history of the instant patent and related cases. Courts should resort to extrinsic evidence such as dictionaries only in cases of ambiguity in the intrinsic evidence.”

On the Road in China

via NPR : "China, considered the next world superpower in the making, has surpassed Japan as Asia's economic dynamo. In a seven-part series on Morning Edition, NPR's Rob Gifford sets out on a 3,000-mile, 14-day trek across China, and discovers just how far the world's most populous nation has to go to catch up with its potential."

Google Wins German Trademark Ruling

via DMNews.com: "A German state court dismissed a trademark-infringement case yesterday brought against Google for its search advertising system.

A Hamburg district court rejected a complaint filed by German software company Metaspinner Media over Google selling ads to Metaspinner's competitors tied to searches for 'preispiraten,' the trademarked name of Metaspinner's price-comparison software."

Framing the Dems by George Lakoff

via American Prospect Online: "This is an example of what cognitive linguists call a "frame." It is a mental structure that we use in thinking. All words are defined relative to frames. The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero."

Microsoft to take direct shots at Linux rivals

via CNET News.com: "Microsoft is refining its 'Get the Facts' Linux attack, taking specific aim at Red Hat, Novell and IBM rather than the broader movement around the open-source operating system."

Copyright and Culture War by Dan Hunter

via SSRN: "I suggest that copyright and patent reform - where commentators have actually been accused of Marxism - is not where the Marxist revolution is taking place. Instead I locate that revolution elsewhere, most notably in the rise of open source production and dissemination of cultural content."

New P2P software could end illegal music squabbles

via The Register: "Grouper - a temporarily stealth software project - has gone up for download and instantly created a confusing divide between the old world and the new. Unlike most P2P software that shares music and other files with world+dog, Grouper focuses on sharing files between friends. Users can set up mini-P2P networks and open up their photos, music, movies and documents. This approach seems much more similar to old-style content swapping where friends handed each other a mixed CD or recording of the UT versus Texas A&M football game, just with a techie twist."

Novell sees a 'both-source' future

via Cnet. Novell asserts that the future of software development will not be found in the open-source or proprietary models, but in one that combines the best of both worlds--or "both source" as the company calls it.

Linux and Global Domination

via LinuxInsider: Although open-source operating systems have not yet become the standard in corporate and consumer environments, and face plenty of competition, several recent initiatives have shown that it is becoming more prevalent worldwide and has the potential to grow even more. Linux , in particular, is seeing increased popularity all over the map, from Korea to Germany to Brazil.

Here is a glimpse at some of the major open-source initiatives that are changing how computing is done on the planet.

Things Not to Do

Management guru Tom Peters has written something called "60 Tom's TIB," (This I Believe) available for download as a PDF.

Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark Lemley

via SSRN: " But the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities. Indeed, doing so is at odds with the logic and functioning of the market. From this core insight, I proceed to explain why free riding is desirable in intellectual property cases except in limited circumstances where curbing it is necessary to encourage creativity. I explain why economic theory demonstrates that too much protection is just as bad as not enough protection, and therefore why intellectual property law must search for balance, not free riders. Finally, I consider whether we would be better served by another metaphor than the misused notion of intellectual property as a form of tangible property. "

Facing the Copyright Rap

via Wired News: "A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that rap artists should pay for every musical sample included in their work -- even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music. "
More, more and more.

The Central Waterfront

via Satan's Laundromata>: Dry dock and Warehouse No. 6

How to fight software patents - singly and together

via NewsForge: "Software patents are the software project equivalent of land mines: Each design decision carries a risk of stepping on a patent, which can destroy your project. "

Zellfire

via Political Animal: "Reaction to Zell Miller's temper tantrum last night has not been pretty:"