A bipartisan group of Congressmen (and one woman) yesterday introduced a major bill aimed at boosting US intellectual property laws and the penalties that go along with them. While much of the legislation targets industrial counterfeiting and knockoff drugs, it also allows the government to seize people's computers.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP... groan)...

Awesome!! This is clearly needed and not a moment too late. Our intellectualy property laws are so lax in the United States! Is about damn time somebody did something about that! Think of the children!

Congress' copyright reform: seize computers, boost penalties, spend money

k wrote:
I don't mean to sound like an asshole, but it seems to me that spending time working through the logistics of circumventing a bad piece of legislation that hasn't even passed yet to be a little like putting the cart before the horse.

This is still a political concern and the solution seems like it ought to be likewise. E.g. write your senator and congressperson, raise awareness (i recognize this is happening to some degree organically, since i just found out about it, but nonetheless), etc.

Have we become so cynical about the likelihood of being listened to that we assume bullshit laws will be passed and jump straight to figuring out how to get around them?

Apparently we ought to be. A version of this bill was rushed through the house Wednesday without following the usual processes. It presents a potentially unintended consequence that individual people who run wifi or other networks are now legally obligated to report child pornography. Because the definition of child pornography is so vauge you are better off reporting than not reporting if you see anything remotely suspicious.

Whats even more frustrating is that this bill seems to have apologists. George Ou says:

The bill in question... would enact huge fines for any... home users with open Access Points who fails to report child pornography users.

I must admit after reading that story I was pretty furious...

Then he turns around and says:

So as you can see, no one is going to be required to monitor their infrastructure.

You are right George. No one is required to monitor anything. However, if you have a wifi network at home and you have a bunch of friends over and you notice that one of them has hentai videos on their laptop, you could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if you fail to report them to the police. Thats probably not what the people who crafted this bill intended, but thats the law they passed, because they aren't paying attention and they basically don't know what they are doing.

Child Pornography is a serious problem, but when Congress continually passes poorly crafted legislation with overbroad definitions and seeks to compell the entire country to enlist in a stazi like network they aren't taking the problem seriously. They are taking advantage of the problem to promote themselves, and they are doing violence to our Constitution in the process.

RE: Thought Crime

It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.

If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?

When a “moderate” Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking.

Islam’s Silent Moderates - New York Times

Politicians need to appeal not only to people at risk of losing their homes but also to those such as Ben Sullivan, who sees the agreement as a undeserved bailout. After the 2001 technology stock bust, many people lost significant value in their retirement plans, Sullivan said. "No one was offering to pay for their 401(k) losses. Why should they do it for their housing losses?" said the 28-year-old commercial banker.

Sullivan lived in the District for years and watched as his friends flipped condominiums and investment properties. "I think we shouldn't be bailing out the homeowners that got greedy buying homes they couldn't afford," said Sullivan, who moved to Atlanta nine months ago.

Those Who Avoided Risk Call Plan A Raw Deal - washingtonpost.com

Using an IR led array and some reflective tape, you can track fingers in thin air using the Wii Remote by Johnny Lee, Carnegie Mellon University.

YouTube - Tracking fingers with the Wii Remote

This preliminary study found no significant differences in the effect of various combinations of beverages on hydration status of healthy adult males. Advising people to disregard caffeinated beverages as part of the daily fluid intake is not substantiated by the results of this study.

I used to drink a lot of Pepsi. I don't anymore. I stopped doing it to loose weight, although I've been drinking more cola in recent months because I seem to have lost energy since stopping smoking and I need the caffine fix more than I used to.

However, when I did drink a lot of Pepsi many of my friends used to say "Why do you do that? Don't you know that cola dehydrates you?" People are always so sure that random "facts" like this that they've picked up from who knows where are the absolute scientific truth.

This "fact" originally struck me as odd. I knew that if I was thirsty, and I drank a Pepsi, I wouldn't be thirsty anymore. So, drinking Pepsi seemed to serve it's purpose. I always drink cola with ice, preferably crushed ice, and I used to tell people who said this that the ice resulted in a net gain of hydration. The depth of their scientific knowledge of the effects of caffine on hydration was no match for this hypothesis and so it usually ended the discussion, but I always wondered about this.

I've googled around in the past for information clarifying the dehyrating effects of cafinated beverages to no avail, which increased my suspicion about the truth of this fact and my frustration with people who propagate it. I even thought about asking the myth busters. Today I managed to find a scientific study of the question. It's conclusion is that drinking a caffinated beverage does not result in a net decrease in hydration. So this "fact" is wrong. Drinking a Pepsi hydrates you.

Well, maybe. The study was funded by a grant from the Coca-Cola Company, who obviously have a business interest in combatting rumors like this that cause people to reduce their consumption. So perhaps the study is biased? Incomplete? Junk Science fueled by an evil corporate agenda?

I dunno. The next time someone tells me this "fact" I'm going to direct them at this study, which will hopefully top out a MemeStreams search for Pepsi once the indexer runs. I'm open to the idea that this study's conclusions might not be the final answer to this debate, but I think these results must be countered with another study and not simply with "well thats not what I heard..." or "the body building website I like says something different." If you've got a link proving that this study is wrong, biased, or incomplete, please let me know!

Does drinking cola dehydrate you?

Shorpy.com is the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century.

The fact that you can order prints from this blog is really cool.

Shorpy Historical Photographs | The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog

To the untrained eye, they appear to be simple daubs that could have been created by a two year old. Which is precisely what they are.

But that didn't stop the supposed experts falling over themselves to acclaim them.

The toddler in question is Freddie Linsky, who has fooled the art world into buying and asking to exhibit his paintings.

Freddie's efforts, which include works using tomato ketchup composed while sitting on his high chair, were posted by his mother Estelle Lovatt on collector Charles Saatchi's online gallery.

People are idiots.

Toddler fools the art world into buying his tomato ketchup paintings | the Daily Mail

Mike the Usurper wrote:

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again.

Yes, that's right, the king of the neo-cons thinks the CIA is now part of a left wing conspiracy to get W. And this is Rudy's #1 foreign policy guy.

I don't know whether or not the CIA is interested in checking the administration. I think the sentences which follow the one quoted above ought to speak for themselves:

This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding.

It is hard for me to understand how a person could be smart enough to actually be Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy adviser and yet dumb enough to have written these words.

The present war with Iraq was not a last resort. The UN hadn't even completed their assessment. It was not undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iraq from getting WMD. There were many people who denied that Iraq had WMD at the time. Those people were ignored. Those people were also correct. Furthermore, no one has ever suggested that Iran is anywhere close to succeeding. Given the information that has been made public about the status of Iran's nuclear power program it is absolutely impossible under even the most pessimistic estimate that Iran could be "close to succeeding" during the remaining days of the Bush administration.

Any trust which this administration might have at some point had that they would only engage in warfare when there was absolutely no alternative was completely flushed down the toilet years ago. Furthermore, the very idea that military action should only be taken as a last resort is antithetical to the very philosophy of foreign relations to which this author adheres!

Dark Suspicions about the NIE - Norman Podhoretz

Nov. 29, 2007 -- The same microwave radiation that reheats pizza can be used to fry the electrical systems in cars, stopping them dead in their tracks.

This struck me as a bit odd, because what microwave ovens do is vaporize water, and anything powerful enough to kill a car by vaporizing the water in it would probably kill it's passengers. So I dug deeper.

The technology uses the same kind of energy used in microwave ovens, but at a different frequency. Ovens typically operate at 2.45 Ghz, whereas the high-power car-stopping system is at 300 megahertz. In both cases, the radiation is above common radio frequencies and is not harmful to humans.

OK, technically a 300 megahertz signal is called "microwave" because anything from 300 megahertz to 300 gigahertz is considered "microwave." However, there is almost no real technical relationship between whatever this 300 megahertz signal is doing to your car, and what microwave ovens do. There is also no relationship between the reason microwave ovens are safe and the reason this car blaster is safe. Microwave ovens are safe because they are sheilded. This blaster is safe because it operates at a completely different frequency that has totally different characteristics. I'm also not sure what they mean by "In both cases, the radiation is above common radio frequencies." 300 Megahertz is in a band reserved in the United States by the government for 2 way radios and meterology. All kinds of radios operate at 2.5 gig, including 802.11b and lots of cordless telephones.

Having said that, this is kind of like a HERF gun. Its a focused radio beam with high enough power and frequency that it has the capacity to fry electronics. Its a cool idea. Its just being presented in a way that seems ridiculous to anyone who understands radios.

Tatoian thinks that with the proper funding, Eureka Aerospace can shrink the device in less than two years to a 50-pound appliance that looks like a plasma television and can disable cars from 600 feet away.

I wonder how big it is now and what it's current range is...

RE: Discovery News : Silly ideas about radio waves