Truly decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) software can't be held accountable for its misuse, according to a US federal appeals court.

US Circuit Court in Los Angeles, threw a major brick in the path of entertainment companies which have been trying to have the courts shut down companies running the P2P networks.

"From the advent of the player piano, every new means of
reproducing sound has struck a dissonant chord with musical
copyright owners, often resulting in federal litigation. This
appeal is the latest reprise of that recurring conflict, and one
of a continuing series of lawsuits between the recording
industry and distributors of file-sharing computer software."

"[W]e live in a quicksilver technological
environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of
internet innovation....The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well-established distribution mechanisms," the court wrote.

National Business Review (NBR) - Business, News, Arts, Media, Share Market & More

Useful color palette brainstorming for you webmaster types.

[ This is awesome. Very very useful. -k]

ColorMatch Remix

] A group of media and
] technology companies including Microsoft and Walt Disney
] have agreed in principle to allow consumers to make legal
] backup copies of next-generation video discs and share
] their content on portable devices.
]
] The group, which also includes International Business
] Machines, Intel, Matsushita Electric Industrial and Time
] Warner's Warner Bros., will not have any technology to
] license until the end of the year.
]
] But the announcement, released late Tuesday, marks a
] shift in the way the movie industry has reacted to the
] threat of online piracy of its films.

WOW! The industry is FINALLY coming to grips with the whole fair use concept and the fact that consumers have a RIGHT to legal archival copies of their media. -LB

[ I'll believe it when i see it. They're gonna have super restrictive DRM all over this crap, i guaranfuckingtee. -k]

Industry deal set on allowing limited DVD copying

Generator for 2-dimensional barcodes that are popular in Japan.

[ Very interesting... they're variable size, which is cool, allowing them to be only as big as necessary to encode the given data. Looks like anything less than 15 chars and it's a 21px square. But "I think that George W. Bush is a crappy president, and I'm not voting for him." is 37px sqare. Pretty neat. -k]

QR Barcode Generator

XMMS's Shuffle feature totally sucks. I think they keep using the same seed for the random number generator or something, because out of 155+ hours of music, I keep hearing the same set of songs every time I run the program.

Any one else notice this?

[ Oh yeah, XMMS' "random" is poor. Ok, well, it was the last time i used it, which at this point is probably about a year, but it sounds like it still is. Also, that was on an archive about 7 or 8 times as big, so it's pretty clearly an inherent flaw in the algorithm they're using.

Aside : Holy crap, i've been linux free for almost a year. No wonder i'm less angry than i used to be...

Anyway, have you looked for a plugin? There may be a plugin which randomizes better. I think there's a list of them on the XMMS site somewhere. -k]

I need more Entropy!

] Acidus writes "While researching for an embedded systems
] project (a magstripe enabled Coke machine), I was shocked
] by the lack of magstripe information: Programs/code that
] would run on a modern OS were all but nonexistant,
] articles that were 6-10 years old, etc.

Acidus is on Slashdot today.

[ Congrats, Billy! -k]

Slashdot | Unlocking The Power Of the Magstripe

] I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is contributing
] more than half a million lines of its software code,
] valued at $85 million, to an open source software group.
]
] The move is one of the largest transfers ever of
] proprietary code to free software, and I.B.M. is making
] the code contribution to try to help make it easier and
] more appealing for software developers to write
] applications in the Java programming language.

The New York Times : Technology : In Competitive Move, I.B.M. Puts Code in Public Domain

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems -- to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.

[ I finally mangaed to read this entire paper, and so I'm finally comfortable recommending it. There's not a great deal of depth in any area, of course, but as a general survey of the current state of thinking/efforts in this area, it makes a great starting point. I recognized many of the citations, but not most of them, and there are a lot. Any non-expert who's interested in reputation systems will probably find something worthwhile here. -k]

Manifesto for the Reputation Society

This is a special issue of PNAS from April 2004, now freely available.

Here are a few papers of note:

Coauthorship networks and patterns of scientific collaboration
From paragraph to graph: Latent semantic analysis for information visualization
A method for finding communities of related genes
Tracking evolving communities in large linked networks
Traffic-based feedback on the web

[ Awesome... i'll definitely be spending some time with this over the weekend... -k]

Mapping Knowledge Domains

] If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they
] would seek to create computer models of their companies
] and constantly simulate potential changes. But the
] computers most business people use today are not suited
] for that. That's because, he says, today's PC is too
] dedicated to replicating earlier tools, like ink and
] paper. "[The PC] has a slightly better erase function but
] it isn't as nice to look at as a printed thing. The
] chances that in the last week or year or month you've
] used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is
] zero -- but that's what it's for."
]
] ...
]
] Though Kay claims he's "not trying to sound like a crab
] here," he does border on it, especially when shortly
] thereafter he asserts "pretty much everything that's
] believed is bullshit."

[ There are a few gems in this otherwise unremarkable article, two of which are above... it's still probably worth a quick read. -k]

A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing