General

[bOing bOing]

More fallout from the Supremes’ terrible ruling on copyright law: Mystery Science Theater 3000 had been counting on the flims that it lampooned entering the public domain before its limited-time licenses expired. Now it looks like a bunch of MST3K episodes won’t ever get re-released.

I was hoping to see “Catalina Caper” again, but now it looks unlikely.

I just got my 4th copy of a Nigerian 419 scam, a new one-day record. At one time I got 2-3 pieces of spam a month or less, now I usually get 4-5 pieces a day.

Hating Hilary. We’ve certainly heard a bit from Hilary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA. Love her, hate her or hate her more, this particular interview reveals (to me at least) a very different Hilary, a woman who is perhaps not the beast that her bosses expect her to be and the immovable technophobic distribution system and business model she represents forces her to be.

In fact, Rosen tried to steer the labels toward the online future long before they saw it coming. In the mid-’90s, Rosen brought [Esther] Dyson to a conference of music executives to brief them on how technology would transform their business. Dyson described for them the inevitability of digital delivery, an eventuality Rosen says she had begun to understand but wanted her bosses to hear from an outsider. But as Dyson spoke, the label executives became defensive, then furious. By all accounts, the meeting devolved into a shouting match.

the picture of her with an iPod says it all

“I finally convince the idiot record companies that they have to offer a product to compete with pirates, and now the publishers won’t make a deal,” she said, throwing up her hands. priceless. [metafilter.com]

From a European Perspective

“President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was “the single surviving model of human progress.” Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance. “

Is this something many Americans need to hear but don’t want to listen? Personally I appreciated Mr. Eno’s honest and candid observations. And no, I don’t think he hates America. [metafilter.com]

Bigotry of a Teachers Union The New Jersey Education Association, a Teachers Union, has a website that contains brochures called “Getting Involved in Your Child’s School.” It comes in three versions: English, Spanish, and African-American. [more inside] [metafilter.com]

Following are the ten most alarming theories about September 11,
the “war on terror,” and the future of the world. Feel free to
accept them as gospel, study them as symptoms of a traumatized
culture, or scoff at them as anti-American propaganda: I’m only the
messenger. Personally, though, at this point the only person I hold
above suspicion in the matter of September 11 is that poor kid with
the goat.

Via jwz’s
Livejournal , Top Ten Conspiracy
Theories of 2002

As if the Top Ten Conspriacy Theories of the JKF weren’t bad enough …

[The Boston Diaries]

Citing personal reasons, Hillary Rosen announced that at the end of the year she would be stepping down from her position at the RIAA; a successor has not yet been identified. I don’t know if this signals a change in position or strategy for the Entertainment industry, but I certainly… [Lockergnome Bytes]

Hopefully her replacement will be more reasonable.

Robots or men? [The Register]

A new theory emerged today to rebuff the “Astroturf” scandal that’s the talk of the web. A week ago a weblogger who calls himself Atrios discovered that identical letters praising “the leadership of President Bush” had appeared in dozens of local American newspapers.

Before Christmas, Mr.Atrios – whoever he is – had done much enterprising research to discomfort, and eventually help depose the Republican Senate Leader Trent Lott, after Lott’s wistful, pro-segregation remarks at a birthday dinner for centurion racist Strom Thurmond went unnoticed by the poodle mainstream press, here.

The identical letters appeared in 29 publications – including, oops – The Financial Times of London, England – and clearly suggested that a co-ordinated but entirely phony “grassroots” expression of support was swelling behind the President.

Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you’ve ever designed a web site with “selectors or tabs that… seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface” such as Metafilter’s header or Amazon’s tabs or c|net’s yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication’s patent number 5,933,841. Here’s the abstract:

A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.

Armed with this patent SBC is going after web sites with a licensing fee of $100,000 to $16,000,000. Will this insanity ever stop?
via Jarle’s Cyberspace [metafilter.com]