An article in the Washington Post describes a seriously stupid situation between the Nature Conservancy and Mobil (the oil company). It all started when Mobil gave the Nature Conservancy some land in order to protect an endangered bird. Mobil was going to forego exploration on the land in order to …

An interesting article from The Ottawa Citizen has a Canadian interpretation of the latest comments by the US in a recent terrorism action report. In it, the US claims that Canada could be doing more to curb terrorism and sites lack of police and overly-protective privacy laws as part of …

40 teams will be competing in the American Open on the way to the international RoboCup (to be held in Italy this coming July). The contest pits teams of robots against each other to see who comes out on top in a soccer game. Coverage of the event is from …

An article on The San Francisco Chronicle shows that the Motion Picture Association of America (industry organization) is outrunning the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a digital privacy and rights advocacy organization). This should be of concern to everyone.

In a move intended to push a pet project of O'Reilly, the company has announced that they will adopt the Founder's Copyright, a voluntary program by which authors give up whatever remaining rights exist after the 28-year term originally granted by US law at the time of the founding of …

An article in Wired captures some of what the industry is saying about Apple's new service. Here are the highlights: Inside sources claim 200,000 purchases in the first day (close to Billboard's 250,000 in 18 hours claim) If true, that would be half of the annual downloads …

I had the sincere pleasure of attending my first (but definitely not my last) John McCutcheon concert last night at Wolf Trap's Barns of Wolf Trap venue. It turns out that it was also my first time at the Barns, which didn't disappoint either. Holding about 345 people, it …

An article on Billboard Magazine's site states that Apple sold 275,000 tracks in the first 18 hours of operation of its new music service. Based on the Forbes article last week, Apple is supposedly making about 35 cents per track. It's not going to make them the biggest …

OK, given that there are a wide range of opinions about the various music services, I decided to sign up for them and find out what they all look like and are about. My preliminary results are in the table on this site. Feel free to add your comments by …

No announcements yet, but a quote from Mr. Jobs in Time from an interview with Apple's CEO has the following exchange: TIME: What about independent labels? Will they follow suit? Jobs: Yes. They've already been calling us like crazy. We've had to put most of them off until after …

I know, you hate having to call your cable company, Dish Network, or DirecTV to tell them that you want the latest and greatest channels. The folks at The Anime Network (a network of, well.. anime) have made it easy for you to do just this. Go to their home …

The SBC frames patents have been discussed here before (January 28 and February 3), but here is a more recent and more in-depth discussion of the tactics from King and Spalding. It's not surprising that the folks at SBC (a member of the former Bell monopoly) have chosen to assail …

Thanks to Amanda who pointed me at this page which contains a number of amusing filk songs. The Mr. Anderson one is particularly amusing, although Losing My Connection is good too.

The following article contains language inappropriate for pop stars and this web site, so read at your own risk. In an attempt to inspire what can only be believed to have been guilt in her "listeners", Madonna released a series of new tracks to the P2P service KaZaA last week …

Although it is terrible that the artifacts from ancient Iraq have disappeared from view as a consequence of the war in Iraq (and events leading up to it), there is a story in Wired about an attempt to soften the blow by making a virtual exhibit available online.

An article on MSNBC (including audio clip), details the scam by one cramming tele-marketer who may have added insult to injury by altering tapes. Cramming is the act of adding unnecessary charges to a telephone bill by calling the customer under a false or misleading pretext.

There are amusing pictures of the Gnome infestation at an MIT computer lab on the venerable MIT Hacks web site.

One must wonder if Napster's VC, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, had any idea that backing the company would end up producing a lawsuit from EMI and Universal Records for "provided a safe haven for the rampant piracy of copyrighted works on an epic and unprecedented scale...Hummer Winblad knowingly facilitated …

Those who travel to San Francisco will be pleased to hear that BART has announced that they will begin providing service to SFO by June 22. Just in time for Apple's WWDC in June.

I'm not sure what credibility to give this, because it is self-sourced by Black Box Voting, which is a self-admitted critic of electronic voting systems, but there is an interesting Interview on the site.