] Recently I was bemoaning the lack of innovation in
] government. However, the Engineering Department of the
] City of the Victoria have shown me up. They've found an
] inventive use for those ubiquitous traffic control boxes
] you see on lamp and traffic light posts. In high
] pedestrian traffic areas, they've pasted neighbourhood
] maps on them. The maps wrap around three sides of the
] box, identifying areas of interest (as well as,
] interestingly, the city's URL).
]
]
] What a great idea. Not only do they use existing visual
] real estate (avoiding the need for other street-level
] maps), but it's a really cheap, low-tech solution to
] graffiti.

[ Good call. All cities should do this. It's cheap, easy and useful. -k]

Darren Barefoot - Miscellanist

] Want to help fight terrorism? Want to be able to stop and
] detain suspicious characters? Or do you just want to ride
] your horse on ten miles of trails normally closed to the
] public? Then you might want to join the George Bush
] Intercontinental (IAH) Airport Rangers program. That's
] right. Just fill out a form and undergo a background
] check, and you too can become a front-line fighter as
] Houston's airport tries to keep our nation safe and
] secure. No experience necessary. You don't even have to
] be a US citizen.
]
]
] No; it's not a joke. The Airport Rangers program is
] intended to promote both security and community
] participation, according to the official description.
] It's a volunteer mounted patrol that rides the horses
] along the pristine wooded trails that form the perimeter
] of the 11,000-acre airport.

[ Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break. That's simply astounding. I mean really. Wow. -k]

The Houston Airport Rangers | The Register

[ To watch later... -k]

The Lord Of The Rings Movie - Available Now!

] "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of
] Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody
] caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty
] good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish
] it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote
] it, that's all we wanted to do."

[ Whether Mr. Guthrie would approve of this current usage or not, it's always a little unfortunate when money dictates art. -k]

EFF: This Land isn't your land

] "I think that bloggers have put the issue of
] professionalism under attack," said Thomas McPhail,
] professor of media studies at the University of
] Missouri-St. Louis, who argues that journalists should be
] professionally credentialed. "They have no pretense to
] objectivity. They don't cover both sides."

[ Bullshit. Fox, CNN, Gannett, The Times, The Post, and all the rest of the traditional (read: corporate) media have put professionalism under attack for years, particularly the last 5 or so. Mr. McPhail isn't wrong about the blogs being biased, and often less than attentive to opposing viewpoints. However, he seems to have founded his statement on the assumption that "professional" journalists, or the corporate filters they're forced to shovel their work through, DO produce balanced and objective work. They don't. By a large margin they don't. Every so often a gem is produced in which someone rediscovers the seed of Journalism and does their job, and we usually get it here on Memestreams as people find such highlights.

The assumption that professional "journalists" are doing their jobs, or being allowed to do their jobs, is about as dangerous as it gets. It's blind faith, and has no place here. The professionals may have the "pretense to objectivity," but it seems like all too often that's all it is, a pretense, a shield, belying the skew just beneath the surface. -k]

The New York Times - The Internet: Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps

[ I note that the original posting of this story pulls from the press release of the guy being charged. Not always, but sometimes, people are biased when they are the target of a legal action.

Still, I completely agree that the FBI need not have been involved at all, and that the application of PATRIOT provisions is probably a whole bunch of out of line. The destruction of his equipment is a shame and also really should not be considered appropriate... it's almost got to be punitive - any moron could open a computer without demolishing it... this should especially be true for people whose job it is to take apart computers and do forensics.

Now, the guy is almost certainly guilty of infringment, having apparently hosted episodes of the show on the site, but as others have noted, all of it could've been handled in a civil (and i mean that in every possible connotation) manner, without going jackboots all over the guys life. The MPAA is trying to pull off a RIAA-style fear campaign, but i think they've gone way past reasonable.

I'll be interested to hear more... the details on wether C&D's were sent properly or if adequate efforts were taken to resolve this issue without the FBI are still pretty hazy. -k]

Stargate Information Archive - Federal Charges Filed Against SG-1 Archive

] Vitagenex patches are unlike any other patch technology
] currently sold. While other patches placed on the skin
] deliver substances into the body, LifeWave patches are
] not transdermal patches. Instead this technology is
] entirely new and unique. LifeWave patches do not put any
] substances into the body. Instead the safe natural
] biological substances contained within the patches are
] used to create specific biosignals that modulate the
] body's natural magnetic field in order to enhance
] certain specific biological reactions that are already
] naturally taking place.

[ HA! Magnetic biosignals y'all. -k]

PRESS RELEASE: Vitagenex announces Energy Patches? Nano-technology? World records being broken!

] Harmony also will automatically change songs into an
] iPod-compatible format. But because Apple has not
] licensed its FairPlay copy-protection software to anyone,
] RealNetworks executives said its engineers had to
] re-create their own version in their labs in order to
] make the device play them back.
]
] Although the company said this action wasn't technically
] "reverse engineering," the software could trigger intense
] legal scrutiny.
]
] The license accompanying Apple's iPod says purchasers
] cannot "copy, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble,
] (or) attempt to derive the source code of" the software.

Go Real!

[ I guess now the search is on for anything at all in Real format that's interesting to listen to. -k]

RealNetworks breaks Apple's hold on iPod

] It's the economy, John Kerry.
]
] That's what delegates to the Democratic National
] Convention say their presumed presidential nominee or --
] they shudder to think -- President Bush should
] concentrate on first in 2005, an Associated Press survey
] of Democratic delegates found.
]
] Health care was the No. 2 issue, followed by the war in
] Iraq, according to the survey of some three-quarters of
] the 4,300-plus delegates.

I think this is a very serious mistake. This election is a referendum on Bush, and how his administration has handled security and foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. As long as Kerry can maintain the perception that Bush has loused things up and that he can fix it he can will the election. This is not very difficult to do in the wake of the failure to discover WMD and the difficult security situation in Iraq.

Putting out a numbered list of priorities, and putting national security in the middle of list, communicates only one thing, and that is that national security is not our top priority. This creates a fundamental weakness that will be easy for the Republicans to exploit. They can send the message that they care more about national security then the Democrats do, and if people believe that message the Republicans will win the election. A terrorist attack in this season would play right into that fissure.

Healthcare is a very serious problem in this country, but no one understands it better then the people who operate businesses. In other words, as most voters don't operate businesses they are unlikely to understand how serious the problem is. They understand 9/11. And frankly, they understand that healthcare won't help much if they are victim of an attack no matter how affordable it is.

AP Survey: Top priority of Democratic delegates? It's the economy

] While you have carefully crafted this bill to preserve
] the 20-year-old decision in the Sony case, it may become
] necessary to consider whether that decision is overly
] protective of manufacturers and marketers of infringement
] tools...

This is an extremely biased opinion for an executive agency to be presenting.

Today, the way things work, is that if a tool has non-infringing uses then its legal. The induce act flips this standard around 180 degrees and says if a tool has infringing uses then its illegal. There are many shades of gray in here that we could be having a reasonable discussion about. Instead we have this radical non-sense, and its coming from the people we pay to offer reasonable technical perspectives.

This isn't the first time that people working in the Intellectual Property arena in our government have proven to be foaming at the mouth copyright maximalists. Recently our UN abassador to WIPO argued that WIPO had no business discussing open source software because a discussion of anything other then "all rights reserved" is apparently inappropriate for an Intellectual Property organization. I concur with this author that some serious house cleaning needs to occur. People need to be fired.

[ Hear hear. I have only one nit to pick, which is mainly semantic, but i was under the impression that the wording of the law required "substantial non-infringing uses", i.e. there is a threshold you must meet in terms of having other functions. The threshold is, i think, left up for interpretation, but nonetheless, the non-infringing uses must be something more than token. Within the gray area you mention is discussion of where that line is drawn. Must 50% of the utility be legal? 10%? 90%?. Obviously people Ms. Peters and the *AA's want it to be a lot closer to 100%.
In the meantime, the patent and copyright offices could do with a major top-to-bottom thrashing in this country. -k]

Copyright Office wants to ban VCRs