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The Courts

RIAA Wants $1.5 Million Per CD Copied 408

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Not content with current statutory damages, the RIAA is pushing for higher damages for infringement, damages that would total $1.5 million for copying a CD with ten songs. It's all part of debate over the proposed PRO-IP Act. William Patry, a lawyer who wrote the seminal seven-volume reference on US copyright law, called it the most 'outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.'"
Biotech

Artificial Bases Added to DNA 362

holy_calamity writes "Researchers have successfully added two 'unnatural' DNA letters to the code of life. They created two artificial base pairs that are treated as normal by an enzyme that replicates and fixes DNA inside cells. This raises the prospect of engineering life forms with genetic code not possible within nature, allowing new kinds of genetic engineering."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Texas Creationist Museum Facing Extinction 824

gattaca writes "A small Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction. The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder. 'If it sells, well, then we can come another day,' Joe Taylor said. 'This is very important to our continuing.'" Meanwhile, the much larger Creation Museum in Kentucky that we discussed and toured when it opened last year seems to be thriving.
Communications

Submission + - AOL adopting XMPP aka Jabber (florianjensen.com) 5

sander writes: "Proprietary protocols are things from yesterday. Today, Opensource technologies are taking over the world! AOL / ICQ has just launched a test server using XMPP, an open technology. This means that you'll soon be able to talk to your ICQ / AIM contacts via Jabber. Google has already started using it. So who's next? MSN! More here: http://florianjensen.com/2008/01/17/aol-adopting-xmpp-aka-jabber/"
Linux Business

Virtual Containerization 185

AlexGr alerts us to a piece by Jeff Gould up on Interop News. Quoting: "It's becoming increasingly clear that the most important use of virtualization is not to consolidate hardware boxes but to protect applications from the vagaries of the operating environments they run on. It's all about 'containerization,' to employ a really ugly but useful word. Until fairly recently this was anything but the consensus view. On the contrary, the idea that virtualization is mostly about consolidation has been conventional wisdom ever since IDC started touting VMware's roaring success as one of the reasons behind last year's slowdown in server hardware sales."
Republicans

Not All the DOJ Missing Emails Are Missing 656

Hylas sends us to Democracy Now for a newscast on the missing emails, an interview with investigative journalist Greg Palast. Here's Palast talking about the fired US attorney from New Mexico, David Iglesias: "Iglesias believes the real reasons for the firings are in what are called the missing emails, emails sent by the [White House political advisor Karl] Rove team using Republican Party campaign computers, which Rove claims can't be retrieved. But not all the missing emails are missing. We have 500 of them. Apparently the Rove team misaddressed their emails, and late one night they all ended up in our inboxes in our offices in New York City." This story has had zero play in the US media; it's been being carried on the BBC.
Mars

Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars 1050

MCraigW writes "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes might have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Mars, it appears, has also been experiencing milder temperatures in recent years. In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide 'ice caps' near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."
Movies

Submission + - Movie Piracy Claims Mostly Fiction

Justin Primus writes: "Michael Geist's weekly column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) dismantles recent claims that Canada is the world's leading movie piracy haven. The article uses the industry's own data to demonstrate that the assertions about movie camcording and its economic impact are greatly exaggerated and that the MPAA's arguments about Canadian copyright law are misleading. I particularly liked how Geist dug up the fact that the MPAA itself says that there have only been 179 camcorded movies over the past three years out of the 1,400 that the Hollywood studios released."
United States

More States Challenging National Driver's Licenses 389

berberine writes "A revolt against a national driver's license, begun in Maine last month, is quickly spreading to other states. The Maine Legislature on Jan. 26 overwhelmingly passed a resolution objecting to the Real ID Act of 2005. The federal law sets a national standard for driver's licenses and requires states to link their record-keeping systems to national databases. Within a week of Maine's action, lawmakers in Georgia, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Vermont and Washington state also balked at Real ID. They are expected soon to pass laws or adopt resolutions declining to participate in the federal identification network. Maine's rejection was recently discussed on slashdot."

Comment Re:An example (Score 1) 505

Ummm.... yeah! Cause clean head just doesn't get the job done.

In all seriousness though, you can hardly fault a guy for character flaws which don't affect his job. Does cheating on his wife make Bill a bad person? Well, yes... but "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone..." Did it affect his job? Only because the Republicans tried to lambaste him for it.

I'm not going to compare past and present Presidents. If you want to attack Clinton, do it for good reasons (which can be fairly easily found.) If you want to defend Bush, don't try to do so by saying "Yeah, well, Clinton wasn't perfect either."
Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: My 15 minutes of fame 7

Well, apparently somebody out there found my site. Slashdot just linked to my website. Good thing I hosted it on a friend's server, and not my own :D.

Fritzy's box is holding up quite nicely, considering it's not really enterprise equipment, and it was never intended to be a site that more than 20 people even knew about.

Ok, my 15 minutes is up. Time to go back to life.

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"I've seen the forgeries I've sent out." -- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US), about forging net news articles

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