Lost Personal Commentary I'm watch ''Lost'' with my reality-TV addicted wife. So far, the players have completely failed to impress me.

Bear in mind I'm not an outdoors person by any means. This is what I would study if I was expected to compete.

None of the six players seems to have taken the time to study the stars. By the first night, they should have known at a minimum which hemisphere they were in, for both North/South and East/West hemispheres. With a bit of work, you should be able to do significantly better. (Conceivably, the contestents could have narrowed down what country they were in to only three possibilities, which I won't share since people on the West Coast haven't seen the show yet :-) ) I suppose it would have ruined the suspense of stage one if somebody nailed the country on day one.Also note that in both hemispheres, the stars give you true north (Polaris) or south (Southern Cross). Compare that with true Magnetic North, and you can place yourself within +/- 5 degrees longitude without much work in much of the world. For instance, in much of South America, true and magnetic north pretty much match.

Big Brother To Watch Judges?
Misc.
Lots of good linkage on the Judge's workplace monitoring on Slashdot. Looks like the issue's heating up.

 

No free speech for animal rights Web sites
DMCA
'On Thursday, EnviroLink Network, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Internet service provider, took offline two Web sites belonging to the animal-rights activist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. The action came in response to a letter sent to the ISP earlier in the week by Huntingdon Life Sciences, a British medical research firm. Citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Huntingdon accused the activists of violating its copyright. Although no charges have yet been filed, under the terms of the DMCA, Envirolink was forced to remove the sites to avoid potential legal liability...'

Ooops...
Personal Commentary
My wife has learned of the perils of living with a computer nutcase. In her particular case, the perils manifest themselves as a periodic cleansing of her e-mail archives. Oops.

I was trying to move the contents of one laptop drive to another laptop drive, and could only hook up one at a time. Of course I tell my wife that this won't affect her e-mail, since that's on the computer's permenent drive, and I'll only be affecting the two laptop drives. Of course she snorts and looks disbelieving. She's heard this before.

US Copyright Office Releases DMCA Advisory Report
DMCA
From Slashdot:

snogwozzle writes: "The US Copyright Office's congressionally-mandated advisory report on the effect of the DMCA is in, and at first glance it doesn't look too good. They're against undoing the definition of temporary RAM buffer copies as possibly infringing (which Jessica Litman in Digital Copyright pegged as perhaps the central dirty trick in the DMCA as it opens the door to technical access control by publishers) is turned down, so is a first sale doctrine for digitally distributed works, and the DMCA's effect on fair use is called out of scope for the report. On the other hand, they think everyone should have a backup right for media bought in digital form, like we have for software." Keep in mind that this is only looking at the DMCA's effect on the "first sale doctrine" (once a work is sold to you, the copyright holder can't stop you from re-selling it) and on the legal right to make backup copies ofa computer program.

[humorix] Finally, A Solution To The DMCA!
Humor-Amusing
'The mission of the church is to make digital copies of every music CD, every movie DVD, and every printed book and then grep the digital version for any tell-tale signs of 'The Meaning Of Life'."'

 

This is a Radio Userland weblog post, made from within Jabber.

It looks bad because I've set my site up to expect titles and departments and stuff, not flat text. (That's actually why I created CustomWeblogPost.) But it worked, and on most blogs, this content would be indistinguishable from the rest of the content.

Excite\@Home snoops on user downloads
Privacy from Companies
'Excite\@Home Australia users are up in arms over the telco's random raids on their broadband accounts in search of pirate activity, with many saying it's an invasion of their privacy.'

'The ISP informed users of its Optus\@Home broadband service that it would terminate customer accounts found to be downloading pirate software or copyright material. A message posted on a public newsgroup service from Cable & Wireless Optus, which half-owns Excite\@Home, said its network security team would investigate claims into activities such as downloading protected movies and "immediately terminate" a subscriber's account without any prior warning. It is not clear whether the policy extends to the company's other international operations.'

Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters
Humor-Amusing
'Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly....'

'The campaign, orchestrated by a group partly funded by Microsoft, goes to great lengths so that the letters appear to be spontaneous expressions from ordinary citizens. Letters sent in the last month are printed on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces--details that distinguish those efforts from common lobbying tactics that go on in politics every day. Experts said there's little precedent for such an effort supported by a company defending itself against government accusations of illegal behavior.'

Fingered by the movie cops
DMCA
'This article does have a point, but it's not about piracy. It's about a flawed piece of legislation that allows a person to be penalized for an alleged action before he has the chance to defend himself. The moral of the story is that the DMCA allows you to be tried and judged guilty before you even know what has happened. The MPAA could have my account shut down immediately -- or yours -- and there's nothing any of us could do to stop it.'