Authorities have ordered all China-based Web sites and blogs to register or be closed down, in the latest effort by the communist government to police the world of cyberspace.

"The Internet has profited many people but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people's spirits," the MII Web site said in explaining the rules, which were quietly introduced in March.

"There's a 'Net Crawler System' that will monitor the sites in real time and search each Web address for its registration number," said one document listing questions and answers about the new rules. "It will report back to the MII if it finds a site thought to be unregistered."

China Orders All Web Sites to Register - Yahoo! News

Do you see any parallels here?

Were these works of art, or were they commodities? The distinction had become blurry.

The industry does care; the people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do.

Some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. "It’s not so much that movies are dead, as that history has already passed them by."

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

In 1975, the average cost of marketing for a movie distributed by a major studio was two million dollars. In 2003, it was thirty-nine million dollars.

The primary target for the blockbuster is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids.

Is the blockbuster the end of cinema?

The trade group sent a wake-up call to the photofinishing industry when, in 1999, it sued Kmart Corp., alleging that the discount store violated federal copyright law by copying images without the permission of the copyright owners.

In 2000, Kmart settled the case by paying $100,000 and agreeing to implement procedures to guard against the unlawful copying of professional photos.

...

Watson said the manager of the photo department "felt" that three of the photos were possibly taken professionally. "I offered to sign anything, but there was just no way around it for them," Watson said. "They were not going to print them.

Decius Writes:
Man, I hate this crap. People that work behind the counter at Kinkos and Walmart do not understand copyright law and they are not well equiped to make spot judgements about what is and is not illegal. The result is that copyright enforcement consists of "I think you look like a punk kid so I'm not going to copy this." As a rule, I don't use Kinkos anymore because everytime I go in there I have some busybody trying to prevent me from doing business with them.

The absolute most annoying case was when I was required (by law) to make color photocopies of a government ID and the idiot at Kinkos insisted that I was commiting a crime and threatened to call the police.

There is a fundamental policy flaw in this, but I'm not sure where to pin it. The government has never required cash register clerks at these outlets to act as judge, jury, and executioner for copyright law. These companies have gotten sued by copyright owners who were not satisfied with actually suing the person who violated their copyright, but wanted to go after someone with big pockets (very honorable, indeed). The companies settled, partially because its cheaper then a suit, and partially because they didn't have the forsight to go through with a suit.

There ought to be a law which limits the liability of printing services.

SignOnSanDiego.com - Snap judgments

But it's easy to have a great time on $20 a day -- just over 150 Hong Kong dollars -- in the city whose name means "Fragrant Harbor" in Chinese.

How to enjoy what we used to call "the many smells of Hong Kong" for $20 a day. Hong Kong is a very easy place to spend way too much money.

CNN.com - Hong Kong: Fun on a budget - Jun 6, 2005

Arnold is PodCasting.

Oh, it gets worse: So is Rush

Welcome to California

We show that network theory, combined with the analysis of roll-call votes using singular value decomposition, successfully uncovers political and organizational correlations between committees in the House.

A network analysis of committees in the US House of Representatives [PDF]

This is a utility that will attempt to guess Mother's Maiden Names for children whose parents were married in Texas. An attacker could acquire the information to launch the attack however she pleases. However, the most obvious place to acquire this sort of information is Texas birth records.

Texas Mother's Maiden Name Discovery

The MemeStreams site code has been updated to fix a number of issues with RSS.

1) All feeds are now RSS 2.0.
2) Links in meme descriptions have been slightly reformatted for clarity.
3) The main page's RSS feed now includes the author of the post.
4) Browsers such as Safari will now detect RSS feeds.

RSS feeds are not just for news readers. It is possible to power an external website using your RSS feed. My website is an example of this. There are numerous libraries available that allow you include content from your RSS feed in other webpages. I'm currently using a PHP library called OnyxRSS, which no longer appears to be available. Magpie may currently be the best option available to others looking to do something similar.

"We have to be more aggressive when it comes to motivating the casual consumer."

There are simply more concerts to choose from. "The pressure on the consumer entertainment dollar becomes very dramatic between Memorial Day and Labor Day."

Clear Channel had hoped to exploit synergies between radio and concerts through advertising and tour sponsorships. Those extra advantages never materialized. Last week, Clear Channel Music announced some steps aimed at getting more people into the cheap seats.

It is not clear whether price reductions will increase demand for tickets.

"The promoter gets 15 percent of the upside and 100 percent of the downside."

"With the increase in the cost of talent, we increased ticket prices. And when fewer people show up, we can lose money on what otherwise would be a great show."

The Trick of Making a Hot Ticket Pay

It took only a few ambushes, roadside bombs and corpses for Neal Saunders to know what he had to do: turn the streets of Baghdad into rap music. So the First Cavalry sergeant, then newly arrived for a year of duty in Sadr City, began hoarding his monthly paychecks and seeking out a U.S. supplier willing to ship a keyboard, digital mixer, cable, microphones and headphones to an overseas military address. He hammered together a plywood shack, tacked up some cheap mattress pads for soundproofing and invited other Task Force 112 members to join him in his jerry-built studio. They call themselves "4th25"—pronounced fourth quarter, like the final do-or-die minutes of a game—and their album is "Live From Iraq." The sound may be raw, even by rap standards, but it expresses things that soldiers usually keep bottled up. "You can't call home and tell your mom your door got blown off by an IED," says Saunders. "No one talks about what we're going through. Sure, there are generals on the TV, but they're not speaking for us. We're venting for everybody."

The downloadable trailer for the album can be obtained at 4th25.com.

Soldier Rap, The Pulse of War - Newsweek World News - MSNBC.com