General

DMCA Declares Serial Cables Illegal?. I’ve recently had an interesting run-in with the DMCA… apparently, US Customs has rejected entry of a PC<->Sega Dreamcast serial cable into the US, supposedly due to copyright violations. This cable was to be used for Dreamcast programming for the Real-Time Systems class offered at my university. This seems to be a clear case of the DMCA abridging a perfectly valid educational use of a perfectly legal piece of hardware. I’ll be keeping the most recent version of my story here; otherwise see below for what I currently know. [kuro5hin.org]

Justice for ALL Concerned?. No-one can have escaped the recent television news focus on former Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. His tribunal for war crimes is the first of its kind since the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials held in the aftermath of World War II. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in 1993 after Resolution 827 was passed following concerns surrounding reports of rape, ethnic cleansing and mass killings [kuro5hin.org]

14774 ª February 14 3:36 AM. Does anyone care that nobody needs to sing well anymore? Spot-on piece about the way that digital music tools aren’t just making rotten singers sound OK (with software that shifts their pitch upwards), but good singers lazy (“hey that’s fine, just copy’n’paste it into the next chorus”). And removing the excitement from studio performance. Is the only honest response to this electro-fakery to go all Daft Punk? Or am I just an old Stevie’n’Retha’n’Marvin nostalgist? [MetaFilter]

14772 ª February 13 11:11 PM. Is Justin Chapman a misunderstood genius (at age 7) or just an average little boy pushed beyond reason by an abusive, mentally ill mother?more thoughts inside……with thanks tocrabwalk.com [MetaFilter]

Big Brother is watching you read. Increasingly, the government is demanding that bookstores reveal what books their customers have purchased. Bookstore owners and privacy advocates say that’s scarier than a Stephen King novel. [Salon.com]

14771 ª February 13 9:49 PM. Was the fix in on 9/11? My guess is if the accusations the author makes are true we’ll never know, but if just one of them is true… [MetaFilter]

Every one of the hijacked planes should have, and would normally have triggered interception proceedures before it was even apparent that there were hostile intentions. In the cases of the first two planes, it may be possible to argue that the fighters might not have arrived in time to complete interception before the collisions with the WTC, but there is no doubt that in both cases, attempts at interception should have been well under way by the time the collisions took place.There is no excuse for the fact that interceptions were not even attempted. In the case of the next two planes, there is absolutely no excuse for interception not having well and truly taken place before the final results.

Morons in the News: Ten Commandments Not Enough for Virginia. In an addendum to an earlier article, the Virginia legislature has now officially passed a bill requiring “In God We Trust” to be displayed in public schools… [Morons Dot Org]

My theme doesn’t work in Mozilla, so I’m going back to a standard one for now.

I just made a new template which doesn’t use tables.

This is a test. I’m posting this from Radio Services.

hmmmm…. it got posted locally but didn’t upstream. Posting from TextEdit messed up the quotes, which I had to edit manually here