Speeding Traps with GPS

What is the latest in high tech fighting of law enforcement? Using GPS technology to question radar guns is coming to the forefront in California. GPS systems can now track the velocity of a vehicle with a significant degree of accuracy and using those GPS records could be evidence against the police radar guns.

See the Ars Technica story here.

SAG Fight

The upcoming SAG strike basically centers around made-for-internet content and the rights of its union members to participate in residuals. I feel sorry for some of the actors; after all, how can you live in just a small mansion?

Table Top Fusion

Purdue found misconduct by physicist Rusi Taleyarkhan in his behaivor since 2002 when he first claimed he produced nuclear fusion. For example, he published a paper in 2006 in Physical Review Letters that claimed his 2002 was independently verified, but failed to disclose that the "independently verified" work was extensively done by him.

The Most Important Case Ever!!!!

A jury decided that Barbie and Bratz dolls are sisters and that the Bratz dolls were created at Mattel, Inc., and not MGA Entertainment. Still outstanding is whether Mattel owns the copyrights to the original Bratz design drawings, and whether the dolls infringe on the copyrights.

FCC and Indecendy

The 3rd Circuit held that the FCC overreached its bounds by fining CBS $550,000 for a "fleeting, isolated or unintended" image when Justin Timberlake accidently exposed Janet Jackson's breast.

Phone Moratorium

China has ordered a new phone moratorium, "suggesting" to companys that they should be focusing their efforts on the Olympics. At the current rate, phone companies are adding 9 million new accounts per month.

ICANN Approves New Domain Names System

ICANN approved the first sweeping changes in the 25 year old URL addressing system. But the new domains won't come cheap, with about $100,000 in costs per domain. The new process is simple. An applicant proposes the new domain, and if nobody raises an objection on grounds as racisms, trademark conflicts and similarity to another suffix, the name should be approved quickly. Also, countries will be able to have non-English characters in domain names as well.

Nigerian Scam Busted!

Edna Fiedler pleaded guilty to attempting to defraud US citizens with the Nigerian scheck scam. She made $609,000 from people who fell for it. Is there anybody who still believes these scams out there?

South Carlonia now has their own copyright

In a South Carolina Supreme Court opinion, the court ruled that a municipality has a copyright in their own forms and such copyright does not impact the state's freedom of information act. Maybe somebody forgot 28 USC 1338 which states: "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action arising under any Act of Congress relating to patents, plant variety protection, copyrights and trademarks. Such jurisdiction shall be exclusive of the courts of the states in patent, plant variety protection and copyright cases."

Dangerous Web Domains

McAfee, Inc., found that certain domains were a little more dangerous than others. For example, 19.2% of the .hk domains were dangerous, 11.8% of .cn domains and 11.75% of .info. Compare this with the most popular domain family, .com, with a little more than 5% of the sites being considered dangerous. The safest were the .gov, .jp and .au domains, each with less than .3% of sites being dangerous.

The report can be found here.

You just won the lottery!

Yahoo filed a lawsuit on May 16 against spammers who allegedly tricked consumers into thinking they won a contest sponsored by Yahoo. The major counts are under the Lanham Act, anti-spam laws as well as other state law claims. You mean that million dollar prize for which I sent Yahoo's lottery coordinator all my financial information isn't real?

Supreme Court and Govenors

The US Supreme Court decided two cases involving governors yesterday:

• Gov. George Ryan of Illinois: the Court rejected, without an opinion, his appeal of racketerring and fraud convictions.
• Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama: the Court agreed with the govenor that he could fill a county commission vacancy notwithstanding the Voting Rights Act of 1965

No More Set Top Boxes?

Sony Electronics reached an agreement with the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (representing about 82% of all cable subscribers) to develop two way cable services such as pay-per-view movies without the use of the cable boxes.

I made the paper!!!

I made Joe Kollin's column in the Sun-Sentinel!

Why We're Happy

A new study from Psychological Science suggests that conservatives are happier than liberals because conservatives are, on average, more rational. It's amazing that it took a grant from the National Science Foundation just to prove that when I've been saying that conservatives are happier and more rational for years!

E-Bay v. Craigslist

The legal dispute between the companies is whether Kijiji, eBay's classified ads site, engages in a competative activity with Craigslist, which eBay owns 24% of as a result of a purchase of stock from a former Craigslist executive. Because of the launch of Kijiji in 2007, Jim Buckmaster said, "We are no longer comfortable having eBay as a shareholder, and wish to explore options for our repurchase." After that, according to the complaint filed by eBay, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Buckmaster "engaged in a series of clandestine transactions designed to ensure that eBay would not be able to elect a director, and to either impose new transfer restrictions on eBay or dilute its interests, and to dilute the interest of the employee holders of company stock options."

The complaint is here.

Iron Man

Terrific movie! A must-see! One thing to look out for is Samuel Jackson's cameo appearence as Nick Fury. Did anybody catch it? I may have turned away when it came on.

Copywriting Malware?

Symantec is reporting that there is a new virus floating around. What makes it unique is that there is a EULA (end user license agreement) with it that threatens "punishment" if a user violates the terms, such as looking at the source code or resell the product. Quite funny!

Government Not Responsible for What It Says

In an option by the 2nd Circuit, the court found that then EPA chief and former NJ govenor Christine Todd Whitman not liable for giving incorrect reassurances after the 9/11 terror attacks by saying that the air near the former World Trade Centers was breathable. The court said, "But legal remedies are not always available for every instance of arguably deficient governmental performance." So, let me get this straight, we can't sue our government for screwing up anymore?

http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov:8080/isysnative/RDpcT3BpbnNcT1BOXDA2LTExNjYtY3Zfb3BuLnBkZg==/06-1166-cv_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov:8080/isysquery/irl4e81/1/hilite

Subpoena Subschena

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution gives greater protection to unreasonable searches and seizures than the US Constitution and ISPs therefore do not have to disclose any information to anyone without a valid subpoena. This case is contrary to the Federal trends that found no right to privacy in internet information.

http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/opinions/supreme/A-105-06%20State%20v%20Shirley%20Reid.pdf

Forbidden Kingdom

I went to The Forbidden Kingdom last night. I have to highly recommend it, especially if you are an afficiandado of martial arts films in that there are many references to other martial art films. For example, the character Swallow is based on Chen Pei Pei's character Golden Swallow in Da Zui Xia (a/k/a Come Drink With Me) and Swallow even says at the end "Come Drink With Me". The Monkey King is a reference to various Chinese legends, but I think Jet Li plays it as a homage to Shen Da. Jackie Chan's character, Lu Yan is not only a famous Taoist scholar, but also plays the character as an earlier reference to his breakout film Jui Kuen.

FCC on Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is the idea that no traffic should be discriminated against on the internet. Yet companies, like Comcast, do divert some file sharing and uploading traffic, at least to off-peak hours, in the hope that it won't overload their systems, apparantly in violation of Net Neutrality ideas. I certainly hope the FCC realizes the only way the internet will work is with the free market Net Neutrality and not have Big Brother telling what files can do what at what times.

EA / Take-Two Watch

EA extended the deadline for proxies yet again. It looks like only 8% of shareholders have tendered their stock to EA, and the stock is now trading above the tender price.

This market

I don't understand this market at all. I do have to agree with Mike Holland's comments this morning on CNBC that this market is a lot like it was 15 to 20 years ago that when a company announced layoffs, the stock went up proportionate to the number of people fired whereas today companies go up depending on how much debt they write off.

Global Warming, Yet Again

Again Al Gore has another competitor: science. Scientists at MIT this week unveiled another model of hurricane formation that demonstrated how global warming has absolutely no link on hurricane formation. Part of it is from research in 2007 that showed fewer hurricanes that global warming models predicted.