] What the war costs in dollars is not the most important
] thing. What it costs in lives and what it achieves are
] the most important things. But right now you can't help
] thinking about the cost in dollars...

What the war will cost you.

] Pound for pound, who's the biggest, richest media mogul
] on the Web? Terry Semel? Nope. Sumner Redstone? Not
] exactly. Try Matt Drudge. Years after his big "scoop" --
] leaking that Newsweek was sitting on a story about the
] tryst between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky --
] Drudge's website is bigger than ever. Run on a
] shoestring, the Drudge Report, a plain-Jane page of news
] links and occasional scoops, clears, by our
] back-of-the-envelope estimate, a cool $800,000 a year.
]
] While other news sites make money, they don't mint it
] Drudge-style. New York Times Digital scored an operating
] profit of $8.3 million last year. But it has 237
] full-time employees, meaning that each worker accounts
] for about $35,000 in profit. (And that doesn't take into
] consideration the fact that the site's reports are
] actually generated by the newspaper staff, a cost
] allocated to the paper side only.) By any calculus,
] Drudge's site might be the most efficiently run on the
] Web; it makes the Times site look bloated. Drudge's is a
] two-person operation (although he never mentions his
] right-hand man); that means it makes $400,000 per
] employee. And he never has to leave the comfort of his
] Miami condo.

Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - Printable Version - The Secrets of Drudge Inc.

] It has been stated by your office that this is "a bump in
] the road" between the RIAA and Michigan Tech, and that we
] will move on from here. It is unfortunate that you choose
] to trivialize the problem in this manner. It is not a
] bump in the road for Joe Nievelt or Michigan
] Technological University.
]
] Taking all of this into consideration, we realize the
] seriousness of the allegations against Mr. Nievelt and
] will cooperate fully in resolving this matter.

(Decius's Comments)

This is from a day ago, but I think its really important.

1. The RIAA must be laughing its ass off about this letter. He says "this is not a bump in the road" and then he agrees to cooperate fully. Obviously MTU is either unable or unwilling to create any real pain for the RIAA. I would have provided my legal department for the defense and stopped all the measures that I had taken on their behest.

2. The RIAA has no moral character. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. (People seem have forgotten much of this in the past few years, but trust is the basis of business, and strong moral character is a pre-requisite for trust.) These are not good people, do not trust them.

3. What the RIAA is sueing here are campus SEARCH ENGINES. They are not just for MP3s. They weren't built with MP3s in mind. These are for anyfile. There are lots and lots of non-infringing uses. With the proper legal defense, the RIAA will loose these cases. Much like Felton, they may have stepped on another grenade. (Without proper legal defense it will be ILLEGAL to run a search engine on a campus, which is an intolerable result, frankly.)

Michigan Tech Media Relations Story#95 - President Responds to RIAA Suit

] This site is a coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and
] ineffectual doves united in admiration for Mohammed Saeed
] al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information (currently on
] administrative leave).

Wasn't sure whether to put this in the humor or current events topic ;)

We Love the Iraqi (Mis)Information Minister

Here's an interesting resource on the "Four-Pronged Fair Use Test". Evidently there's no clear "this is fair use" vs. "this is plagiarism" litmus test, but instead there are four factors that are taken into consideration, with sort of a sliding scale on each of the four factors. This webpage is good reading, but for a real quick and dirty summary, the four factors are:

 (1) What is the character of the use? (commercial, commentary/criticism, educational, nonprofit, etc.)

 (2) What is the nature of the work to be used? (factual article, fictional story, or a combination, with using somebody's factual reporting more likely to be considered fair use, whereas copying someone's fictional story to be more likely to be considered plagiarism)

 (3) How much of the work will be used? (all of it, or just parts)

 (4) What effect would this use have on the market for the original or for permissions if the use were widespread? (is quoting something going to mean that whoever wrote it makes less money or loses control of their own work?)

So, in terms of Memestreams (and I have to preface this with IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer):

Mostly good things to do:
- Quote a small amount of text rather than an entire article
- Quote factual articles
- Add your own commentary or thoughts on what you quote
- Always link back or attribute the source

Sometimes bad things to do:
- Quoting large amounts of a webpage
- Quoting someone's original fictional story
- Quoting from inside a "subscription only" site
- Saying words are yours, when instead they're copy/pasted from somewhere else
- Posting just a copy/paste, without any kind of added original commentary

And again, none of the above items are an instant "good" or "bad" determination. They're just recommended guidelines, that are probably worth mentioning in a Memestreams help file somewhere. :)

My $0.02,

Elonka :)

Memestreams and 'Fair Use' Guidelines

] Three men charged with terrorism for hijacking a
] passenger ferry April 2 were executed Friday after
] summary trials, the government reported.

Sighs. I am rarely for capital punishment, and this definitely is not one of them.

Cuba swiftly executes three hijackers

] This article looks chiefly at completely free (both
] personal and commercial use allowed) or shareware open
] source products. An excellent starting point, and one
] Ward calls canonical, for wiki clone software is at
] WikiWikiWeb WikiEngines [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines].
]
] Built around object-oriented programming, wikis are
] extremely popular within the software development
] community, especially among those that practice the
] principles of Extreme Programming (XP, not to be confused
] with Windows XP). (For definitions of some of the wiki
] and Web content management system terminology I use, see
] the sidebar "Wiki Words Glossary" on page 39.)

I was the initial proponent of using Wiki software for our documentation process at Simutronics. It has since become a way of life for many.

Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars

] A new disturbing trend seems to appear in American
] politics : talks of public health care. Like any other
] social problem, the most popular solution seems to remove
] rights from the individuals, and put them in the hands of
] the "enlightened politicians". Most people living in a
] country where health is socialised has quite another
] opinion on the subject.
]
] There are a lot of opinions, but what are the facts ? Are
] public health care systems an exception to Friedman's Law
] (the economical principle which states that private
] systems are twice as efficient as public systems) ? Or is
] this yet more statist rhetoric ?

Interesting reading, but alas, the reports upon which this article is based are among the worst in reliability about describing the health system in Canada.

How to ruin the American health care system

] A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that a lot of people
] seemed to be pretty unhappy with the BBC's coverage of
] the war, and I linked the BBC's attitudes - odd, I
] thought, for the national network of a nation at war - to
] the shared prejudices of the "New Class" of
] state-supported bureaucrats and their ilk.
]
]
] Since then, things have only gotten worse for the Beeb.
] Andrew Sullivan has kept up the pressure. The BBC has
] even been forced to respond, taking the absurd position
] that:
]
]
] The BBC is not state-funded. We are publicly funded
] through a license fee paid by every household in the
] United Kingdom. The British public, not the government of
] the day, owns the BBC, and it is to the British public we
] are accountable.
]
]
] Get that? They're not state-funded, they're just paid for
] by a mandatory tax that the government collects, and
] about which the taxpayers have no choice. Now if the
] British television viewers got to choose whether their
] "license fee" went to the BBC, or to some competing
] service, things might be different - and so might the
] BBC. But that's not how it works, and quite a few people
] - by no means all of them on the right - are unhappy with
] the BBC's slant....

TCS: Tech - New Class Crackup

] With a blast of X-rays compressing a capsule of hydrogen
] to conditions approaching those at the center of the Sun,
] scientists from Sandia National Laboratories reported
] today that they had achieved thermonuclear fusion, in
] essence detonating a tiny hydrogen bomb.
]
] Such controlled explosions would not be large enough to
] be dangerous and might offer an alternative way of
] generating electricity by harnessing fusion, the process
] that powers the Sun. Fusion combines hydrogen atoms into
] helium, producing bountiful energy as a byproduct.

Yay. Alternative sources of power are a good thing.

New Fusion Method Offers Hope of New Energy Source