] I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead
] through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl
] "dead zone" It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite?
] because one can ride there for hours and not meet any
] single car and not to see any single soul. People left
] and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places,
] woods, lakes. There is no newly built roads, but those
] which left from 80th in fairly good condition

Ryan -- this is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. It is a photoblog of a daughter of a nuclear engineer who tours around Chernobyl on her motorcycle.

[yeah, pretty fucking rad... -k]

Photoblogging Chernobyl

[ damn this is fun... i got to level 30, but i've gotta drag myself away so's not to be too worthless. -k]

Warthog Launch

] Martha Stewart's fate was sealed by of the testimony of
] her personal assistant and traveling companion, two close
] friends of the domestic entrepreneur whose stories
] convinced the jury she held herself above the law, a
] juror in the trial said Friday.
]
] The juror, Chappell Hartridge, a computer programmer from
] the Bronx, said the verdict is a "victory for the little
] guys who lose money in the markets for these kinds of
] transgressions. It's also a message to the bigwigs that
] nobody is above the law."

[ Holy shit! Perhaps those "Cell block decor" cracks weren't so off base after all. Daaaammmnnn. -k]

In the End, Stewart's Friends Were Her Undoing

] NEC Corp. asserted Wednesday (March 3) that it owns
] essential patents on carbon nanotubes and, as a result,
] all companies seeking to make or sell carbon nanotube
] materials must obtain licenses from NEC.

[ Wow. If legit, NEC's gonna rake it in on this shit. Time to buy NEC stock? -k]

EE Times - NEC claims carbon nanotube monopoly, offers licenses

"Imagine doing a Google search for a phone number, weather report or sports score. The results page would be filled with links to various sources of information. But what if someone typed in keywords and no results came back?

That's the scenario critics are painting of a new bill wending its way through Congress that would let certain companies own facts, and exact a fee to access them."

"The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill and the commerce committee is expected to review it on Thursday."

[ Jesus. I don't even know what to say to this. I don't see how existing copyright law fails to address this. My understanding is that a verbatim copy of large sections of a published work, even one which is essentially a collection of facts, is already a violation of copyright. If you aren't publishing your database as a work, then you aren't really in danger of infringement, right?

I want more details. If i write a really clever program that scrapes and aggregates court decisions and relevant case law straight from all the thousands of courts in the nation, indexes it and crosslinks it, and then i publish the result, does LexisNexis get to sue me? Under current law, i *think* the answer is no... would this change that? How can i be liable for creating my own independent collection of publicly available information? -k]

Wired News: Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine

] In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had
] revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up
] a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing
] deadly ricin and cyanide.
]
] The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp
] with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the
] White House, where, according to U.S. government sources,
] the plan was debated to death in the National Security
] Council.
]
] "Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a
] country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties
] after 9/11 and we still didn't do it," said Michael
] O'Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings
] Institution.
]
] Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was
] planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
]
] The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White
] House again killed it. By then the administration had
] set its course for war with Iraq.
]
] "People were more obsessed with developing the coalition
] to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president's
] policy of preemption against terrorists," according to
] terrorism expert and former National Security Council
] member Roger Cressey.

[ Shenanigans. -k]

Daily Kos || Bush gave terrorist a pass

] Senate bill 500, sponsored by conservative Republicans
] and members of the Green Party and libertarians, would
] add printers to Georgia’s 26,000 computerized voting
] booths so that officials have the ability to review any
] election.
]
] "What Senate bill 500 does is say there ought to be a
] paper trail. There ought to be a ballot like we did
] before that is cast for every single individual, so that
] if there's a problem or a question there's a check," said
] state Senator Tom Price (R-Roswell).

Ryan -- we should find a way to support this...

Atlanta,Georgia,11Alive,ATLANTA,News,Weather,Doppler,sports,events

] It's official: Stewie Griffin's plans for world domination
] shall continue!
]
] Stewie, the animated ankle-biter with the killer
] vocabulary and the endless string of plots to kill his
] mom and enslave the human race, will return in all-new
] episodes of Fox's cult hit cartoon Family Guy, the show's
] creator, Seth MacFarlane, confirms.
]
]
] Stewie, along with fellow Griffins Peter (the dad), Lois
] (the mom), sister Meg, brother Chris and gin-swilling
] family pooch Brian, is scheduled to hit the tube again in
] 2005--but exactly where channel surfers will spot the
] deliciously dysfunctional clan is still up in the air.

[ Suh-weeeet! -k]

Family Guy Returns!

] It is, I think, an elementary principle of copyright law
] that an author has no copyright in ideas but only in his
] expression of them. The law of copyright does not give
] him any monopoly in the use of the ideas with which he
] deals or any property in them, even if they are original.
] His copyright is confined to the literary work in which
] he has expressed them. The ideas are public property, the
] literary work is his own.

[ This is the text of a decision from a Canadian supreme court judge in a copyright infringement matter. There's some good stuff in here... the quote above caught me especially... this is something i think people need to remember. Also, I think the judge's definition of "original" makes sense - the work need not be entirely novel, but it does need to be a non-trivial product of skill and judgement. Even though the law it treats is canadian, and thus, not exactly useful to an american, it's a pretty good read. -k

p.s. ryan, there's a citation to the Emory LJ in there...]

CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada

] The latest anti-piracy move will prevent you from making
] high-quality copies of broadcast TV programs. And the new
] "broadcast flag" technology enables all manner of other
] restrictions.

[ MIT|Technology Review goes into depth on the evil broadcast flag. Honestly, i'm about this close to cancelling my cable anyway. I'd miss Good Eats, and Scrubs, and i guess i'd have to go to ESPN Zone more during football season, but TV's getting to be not worth the expense. That being said, Simson's cautions are reasonable -- it's hard to forsee the eventual effects of seemingly little things. -k]

Losing Control of Your TV