gratuitous plug

Norbizness is running a Name that caption contest Myself is hoping the prize is not a Kraftwerk CD.

new virus beagle/bagle going around, on the decline as of today, but update your security and virus patches at Microsoft.com/protect. and turn off HTML in your email.

Music Wars Scene 27
in which the RIAA says (yet again): I'm gonna getcha

Here comes another set of lawsuits filed by the RIAA, 532 lawsuits this time, a new personal best. However, since they have only IP addresses and not individual names, due to the fact that ISP's have told the RIAA to bugger off, and stop abusing the DMCA, and file your lawsuits like everyone else, it may be more difficult to actually get the individuals names, yet Cary Sherman, is undeterred

The resumed legal campaign was intended to discourage music fans emboldened by last month's federal appeals court decision, which dramatically increased the cost and effort to track computer users swapping songs online and sue them.
"Our campaign against illegal file sharers is not missing a beat," said Cary Sherman, president of the recording association. "The message to illegal file sharers should be as clear as ever."
All 532 lawsuits were filed in Washington and New York — home to Verizon Internet Services Inc. and Time Warner Inc. and a few other prominent Internet providers — although the recording association said it expects to discover through traditional subpoenas that these defendants live across the United States.

It also expects some of the IP's are not readily traceable, and so that's why they filed such a large number of lawsuits. 532 down only 49,999,468 to go guys.

In other related news:
Memo to MPAA (the RIAA of motion pictures)

Online file-trading is going to get worse, too. Finally, on the wide-open Internet, the Napster for movies has been born. It's called BitTorrent, and because it can pull a single film from dozens of computers simultaneously (reassembling the pieces on a user's PC), it's incredibly fast. More important, it turns the economics of file-trading on its head. The most popular files download the fastest and make the lowest demands on the host servers (because there are more computers to download from, and the load is balanced among them). The usual barrier to sharing, say, a prerelease of Return of the King - the fear that greedy downloaders will swamp your PC - is greatly diminished. Huge hard drives are getting so cheap that digital video libraries will soon be commonplace.

The bottom line: The widespread assumption that Hollywood has plenty of time to avoid a music industry-style train wreck may be wrong. What once seemed like a five- or ten-year buffer now looks more like two or three years. Consider yourself warned.

So what should you do? Start by accepting that new technology means a new way of doing business. People will trade more movies, and new releases will leak out. It may never get as bad as music, yet it will certainly get worse than it is today. But look at it another way: The same forces are spontaneously building the best distribution network you can imagine.

Myself predicts the MPAA will act pretty much like the RIAA, but will be pleaseantly surprised if they prove me wrong.

RFID

Ever heard of it? It stands for Radio Frequency IDentification. If you never heard of it, fear not, you will. What it is is a method for tracking goods of all kinds, from entire shipments, right down to individual items. You know that UPC code, that bar code thingy on almost every item you buy that gets scanned. RFID goes one better, no scanner is needed, now each item will broadcast what it is to the world. RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Most RFID tags have no batteries: They use the power from the initial radio signal to transmit their response. The possibe applications are staggering. Mail/postal/parcel tracking, tracking shipments, individual tracking of most any item. How about going to the supermarket checkout, with a cart full of stuff, pointing a handheld radio dish and zap every non-perishable item is rung up. Even some casinos are looking into the technology as a way to not only deter counterfit chips but to track the entire flow of chips in, out, and around the casino, potentially any tagged item can be traced to it's exact location anywhere in the world. The potential for mischief, abuse and even criminal activity is also staggering. And that's the scary part, opponents are using invasion of privacy as their main argument. Myself agrees. No one but Myself should have to know that on Tuesday, March 21 2005 at 5:32 PM, at the Beretania St. Longs Drugs store, Myself purchased a can of Gillette Shaving Gel w/ aloe and vitaman E, on sale at for $2.59, where he proceeded to take it to 2**8 K****a St. where it then stayed for three months and 7 days before being transported to the Waimanalo Landfill where transmission was terminated two days later. Screw that shit. Now myself realizes this kind of info is a marketing wet dream to the 12th power, and they get all hard/moist just thinking about this, but there are somethings about Myself that he doesn't want to let anyone know about. Ain't technology grand?