Even though the US .gov states that it is meerly a benevolent dictator of the internet ICANN, which does the actual running, seems to have other ideas.

They’ve made a few horrible unilateral decisions that made censorship a whole lot more possible. In fact, it’s already happened within months of the changes taking effect.

So for everyone that thought the USA has a given right to run the internet, or that the UN would make a horrible mess of things. I mean, seriously.. do you think they’d be worse then ICANN?

The RIAA is using their monopoly powers to grab the entire music market by the balls. And record sales keep on slipping away. Now, I’m assuming that’s retail sales, which is a very important distinction as some people totally miss.

They buy straight into the rhetoric that the music market is slipping and completely gloss over the fact that sales are actually increasing, just not in the traditional retail venues. Direct sales are always up.

I think we’re getting a good dose of why monopoly’s are never in anyone’s best interest. Unless it’s nominaly owned by the customers it serves, a monopoly just screws everyone over in an effort to benefit the people in charge of, well, the monopoly.

The major labels (re: the parts of the RIAA) actually tried to screw over retailers in favor of direct marekting. And it’s largely worked. Now they’re using the bogey man of downloading to further screw over customers while making a mint.

Are you really shocked?

I’m not so sure that Microsoft is maintaining their competative advantage solely through intellectual property. They seem to have nastier tricks than that in the bag.

Tom Adelstein, however, draws a good parallel between prohibition in 20’s era USA and the current regime of IP rights. According to the editorial, both served to stymie free trade and harmed society as a whole in the states, with IP being even worse with regards to foreign nations.

A thought provoking read.

Maybe it can’t protect your brainwaves from the men in black, but it can protect your school ID from being read by unfriendlies. Duct Tape and foil wallets could save you from having your various transponders read by the unsavvory types that would.. well.. wander around looking for people with RFID tags hanging out.

It was posted to a blog so it must be true, right? This one makes a neat follow up to dogpile buying Opera.

Looks like I wasn’t the only one to get a kick out of the wild buying opera “news” stories that sprang up. Maybe I should post that Microsoft is going to stop producing their own browser and start shipping Mozilla. Then attribute it to “inside sources”. Yea.. that’s the ticket..

Of course. that’s probably laptop purchashing American adults. And with so many people earning less than Ultrasuede laptop-worthy wages I wonder if that’s just the usual “keeping up with the Joneses” American mentality.

I’ll let you all know when I change my mind and go for a fabric ensconced laptop. Ultrasuede’s company line went along the lines of “If we realized we could make this much cash off 50 cents of fabric, we would’ve been an IT shop from the beginning.

Apple’s iBooks are starting to look positively functional. At least you get a decent OS to go along with ‘em.

Apple doesn’t really want to think different these days. Instead they’re going with the same thinking, and laptop manufacturers, as everyone else. Apple’s signed up Asustek and Quanta to churn out Intel based iBooks for the future.

So remind me. Why would I want a Mac again? Is the cute case fashion statement really worth that 400% markup?

While people have been quick to try and bring evolution down, those pesky scientists have been working on ever more convincing proofs. See, if they can show the genomes responsible for evolving they can show how it happened and have a definitive proof that evolution of some form is how we all got here.

Mind you, some people will never be convinced in anything aside from what they’ve been told. For the rest of us free thinkers, check out the article over at Science. They’ve got quite a few cool developments in the scientific field.

It seems that a Chinese outfit is touting their CD/DVD ripping software as being able to save users from malicious programs promoted by evil conglomerate media empires. Now that is a whole new spin on ripping your media.

With the recent Sony hijinks it’s not entirely without merit, either.

A startup focusing on meta music browsing has taken to free press over at C|NET by muttering the words “Open” “Free” “iTunes” and touting a (er.. in some alternate universe) impressive list of credentials.

Apparently they’ve got a fantasy of combining multiple song services on their “browser-like” interface. Now.. we know it won’t include iTunes, can suppose it won’t include Microsoft, and will assume it won’t include any of the pay-to-play crowd.

The big gimmick in all this is that it’s built on Mozilla and uses an XML interface. Now. to me, that doesn’t have much appeal in and of itself.

So.. what exactly is this bold, new, and freakishly unnecessary creation going to do? Only time can tell.

The courts have struck down a California law barring video game sales to minors. Apparently the judge saw that it wasn’t a feasible law to enforce and violated the first amendment.

So the courts have once again pushed responsibility for what minors do squarely where it belongs, on their parents.

The NSA has a CryptoKids page set up to teach children how to (er…) encrypt? You’ll learn all about the NSA/CSS because (and I quote) they’re “.. America’s real codemakers and codebreakers.” Real American Heros! Right up there with Wal-Mart Greeting Man.

Now I can’t really fault the NSA for providing some kid oriented content on crypto. That in and of itself is kind of neat. It’s the wonky as hell characters that are hillarious. And check out the meet the cryptokids section at wonkette where all their foibles are broken down…

And no, I didn’t check the name of the site before I used “wonky” in the sentence. So I’m not getting rid of it.

You’ve all been duped. It turns out that Dogpile is buying Opera. Yes. Dogpile. I know, I know, it sounds strange. They could use one of the myriad of browsers that are an equally large variety of “free”. But no, they’re going to buy Opera. I’ve got it on good authority.

Which is why you probably shouldn’t believe everything that you read. Why on earth would a search engine company buy, of all things, Opera? They’ve got a smaller install base than most of the free browsers or Netscape.

Add to that the fact that you can pay, say, Mozilla engineers to build you a custom browser tailored to your every whim without buying the company and it starts looking a bit silly.

So no. it’s not bloody likely anyone is buying Opera at anything but a fire sale. Not Google or Microsoft or Yahoo!. There’s really no point.

Roger Ebert apparently thinks that videogames aren’t art. Well… not like movies anyway. Or those metal beams welded together at haphazard angles. No-sir.

Say it with me folks, “anything can be art”. Even if it’s not what you’re into. Now, coming from Ebert I’m assuming it’s not art because it threatens his precious movie nitch. See… games are getting to be pretty close to cinema these days.

And hey, some of them even have better content. Baldur’s Gate II, for instance, has a better plotline than a good portion of this years movies.

But even if that didn’t qualify it, it’s still got, literally, art. That’s right. The painted stuff comprises most every image on the screen. Newer games might have totally rendered-on-the-fly images, but those old school top-down RPGs had painstakingly painted scenery and characters for a while there.

And no. I don’t care that it was a digital canvas. It’s traditional artwork.

In the end games are as much art as that other upstart, movies.

So as my alter ego (yes, I’m a blogger by night and a hard working editorialist by day) I’ve written a piece on data recovery with Foremost. Not only is it totally free, it actually kicks pretty hard. Give the writeup a looksie and check out what Foremost can do.

So it turns out that Microsoft has a problem with Dual Cores. Now, to my mind that means there’s a slowdown on Multiproc boxes as well… but that could be wrong. Although why you’d treat them differently is beyond me.

Anyway, the article’s got some links to “hotfixes” and an apparent voodoo dance you Windows folks do to improve performance. “Spyware” was mentioned in there a few times.

And what’s up with that author? He sounds like he’s trying to mimic some kind of illusory cyber-street lingo. Notice the intentional abuse of “teh”. Makes it sound like there should be a “girlfriend” in there somewhere, just to cover all the potential lingo bases.

What’s interesting in this story on being arrested for modding an XBox isn’t so much that people were arrested for selling modded XBoxs. No. It’s that they were charged with the felony of conspiring to circumvent copy protection. Really.

Apparently we don’t have anything better to do in the US than throw people in a federal prison for conspiring to circumvent copyright. I mean.. seriously.. there are people out there commiting hanous crimes. Can’t we just devote, as a society, a little more effort on that and a little less effort on bloody copyright?

And I dislike it when people infringe on the stuff I write, sure. But I don’t care that much even if I loose money. There’s just no call for that level of screwing people over it.

We’re probably talking about the large business equivelent of that 5 bucks I might loose in ad revenue because someone ursurped my spot in google with my content. It’s not even a real five bucks, in this parallel, because I might have never earned it anyway.

Wired is once again putting out their call for vaporware. If you’ve got any products that just don’t look like they’re going to see the light of day this year go and get ‘em in.

I’m still waiting on that BitBoys GPU .

Bad news for Dell on their laptop lines. They’re recalling an obnoxious number of laptop batteries across three popular Dell lines. The following laptops are subject to the recall:

Latitude D410, D505, D510, D600, D610, D800, D810 notebooks; the Inspiron 510M, 600M, 6000, 8600, 9200, 9300, XPS Gen 2 notebooks; and the Precision M20 and M70 mobile workstations.

Ouch. I’ve seen what an oveheating laptop battery can do. Lithium fueled fires are *not* something you want in the house, so if you’re affected by this get a replacement ASAP.

Pet I.D. Tags for the holidays make a thoughtful gift for your four legged family member. Every new puppy or kitten really should have one of these.. otherwise, if they get lost there’s no passerbys can find out whom their owner is.

It’s also not a bad idea to check and see if your pets tag is getting a bit worn down. Always replace them if they’re no longer legable.