The big entertainment companies (specifically, MGM) has sued file sharing software makers Grokster Inc. and StreamCast Networks, saying that their software makes it possible to illegally copy songs (story here). Nothing new here, really, but today the Supreme Court heard arguements in this case, the first time (to my knowledge) this has happened. It's not going to change the fact that P2P song downloading is copywright infringements; the courts have already agreed on that. But it will change the availability of such software.

In other news...tax returns are showing up on P2P networks, along with classified information including military documents. This is the result of people (being stupid) putting all their files available for downloading. Story here (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds)

Which just goes to show that P2P isn't all that great anymore. With the record companies now getting smart and spamming P2P networks with song spoofs (files that look like popular songs but just contain white noise), and the huge amount of bogus, junk, and virus containing files, P2P hasn't been worth it for years now. Smart people go elsewhere for their needs.

Update: See What You Share - a blog dedicated to P2P woes, drives home the point of how easy it is to get child porn from P2P. And yet these stories never make news, until an Amber Alert appears. So, let me get this straight. Download a song and you'll get fined or get a lawsuit. Download kiddie porn, or release kiddie porn, and there's no recrimation? I've been saying this for a while. The hypocracy of RIAA and it's ilk is astounding, and the public should be chastized for believing that song downloaders are the next Hitler. Clearly we need more public attention to these horrid matters.

Another season has come to a close for the Arizona Wildcats. They lost today to #1 seed Illinois, who just outplayed them at the end. I found it hard to believe that the Cats could blow a 10 point lead in 30 seconds, but they did. And ended up losing by 1 point in overtime, when they had possesion of the ball for the last 20 seconds. Maybe next year. They played hard, gave it all they got, and got to within 1 point of the final four.

Story here.

Here's his story

Who is he? Founder of the Green Revolution, Savior of a billion people (probably more like 2B) in Asia. Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1970.

...a small (very small) former soviet republic.

What's interesting about this is that while the mainstream media finally got ahold of this story, bloggers have been all over it for weeks.

These articles start from Monday. I'm too lazy/busy to track down the rest. Anyway.

This seems good. And reported by main stream media, too.

Wow, this report is surprising. The World Bank underwent a exhaustive investigation of Arafat's secret horde of cache. In a nutshell, donor countries have been giving money to Palastine for decades, and almost all of it went to Arafat. WHat did he do? Kinda smart, he didn't use it a la Saddam, to support his lifestyle, he invested almost all of it. Now about 10 billion in cash is sitting in funds waiting to be used.

Now it's a big political struggle, because the people who control the funds are not the newly appointed democratic leadership, but former Arafat cronies.

Story here.

When the French have to work more than 35 hours a week (gasp)
Story here.

THe stats in the article: French workers work, on average, a 27.5 hour work week. Americans work on average a 34.5 work week. This doesn't take into account vacation/sick/holiday time, so it's skewed somewhat. It also assumes a 52 week year, in reality it's 52.1 something.

laugh
(HT: Chekoff)

Another highlight from the London anti-war rally:

"People poured into the capital from across the country, including 29-year-old human rights author Susanna Akono who traveled in a coach from Kent.

" 'The war on terror is wrong because it is not going to end terrorism when you have people such as Iyad Allawi (Iraq's outgoing prime minister) being put in power,' she said, with an anti-war poster in her hand.

"Akono, who is from Cambodia and is married to a British man, plans to go on a hunger strike from April 14 in protest against the continuing war on terror.

" 'I want to do everything I can to make sure my child has a secure future,' said the pregnant activist."


Starting with starving the unborn.

This is the story of how a British soldier won the VC (the British equivalent of the Metal of Honor), and lived.

...to food.

Here in Harris County (Houston), the powers that be (city Council) are thinking of installing red light cameras. I'm not sure it's a good or bad idea. Right now the idea is stalled at the state level; the state legistlature wants to ban any such program; i think for the reason that the state wants all control over local transportation (roads). IT's hard to get city empowerment here in Texas. Anyway, the beef I have with it is that 1) It violates privacy 2) it forces everyone to be good drivers 100% of the time 3) THe revenue goes towards the contractor, it's a get rich scheme that doesn't benefit the people who need it. I guess that would be the school district.

ANyway in North Carolina they have similiar issues, and after a judge decided that 90% of the revenue should go to the schools, and the contractor already getting 50% of the revenue, well they did the math and realized they'd lose some $20 per citation. Good idea! So they shut it down while fighting it in court. Story here.

The most recent reports state that 108 detainees have died in US custody, out of 65000, since the wars in Iraq/Afganistan began. While human rights groups deplore this (some even state it's a 'massacre') I wonder. We don't know how many died from 'natural causes' ie a heart attack. We don't know how many were killed in prison uprisings, which seem to be somewhat common. Or were killed while the prisoner was trying to escape. Granted, this isn't a good thing, but I think prison is a pretty bad place, i wonder what the stats for the Dept of Corrections are. I wouldn't be surprised if the mortality rate was over 1/1000 per year; this would be comparable to the above figures taken over several years.

Anyway, yes it's not a good thing, but it's not like we are 'killing' half, or even 1% of the detainees. And we don't know how many of those deaths can be attributed to torture or negligance.

Story here

THis is a story about the supposed anthrax scare over the last two days. Turns out it's a false alarm. I can imagine how this happened. They had a positive control, they mixed it up with the sample. For something that critical, inexcusable; especially since they made the big scare without confirming the result (OTOH confirming the result might have lead to a bigger contamination problem). It's important to get this stuff right the first time.

Story here.

So a guy gets cancer treatment (radiation) 10 years ago, survives, but then decides to blame his current existance on everyone including the judge of one of his lawsuits, so he breaks into the judge's home, and kills her husband and mother. Am I getting this right? What a wacko. Story here.

I think they've found their man.

Eczema is a symptom of a larger disease, atopic derimititis, which I have and it's made life miserable until effective therapies became available to me, including 2x daily whole-body application of emoliant (cream) (I use Cetaphil), steroid and a steroid-like drug called protopic. Now a new study comes out saying that there is an increased risk of patients on Protopic and it's competetor for non-Hodgkins lymphoma and skin cancer (melanoma? Basal cell carcinoma?) Importantly there is a dose-dependant risk, which indicates the risk is specific to the drug. Story here

The FDA release is here.

Update: Okay, I've actually read the report, and it's based on animal testing and a small number of patients getting ca while under treatment. There are some issues here. 1) Animal testing isn't always equivalent to human testing. As Francis Crick (I think) said, we've been curing cancer in mice for decades. In humans its a different story. There are no systematic long-term studies in humans, to evaluate risk of ca. It would probably take a considerable amount of time and a considerable amount of patients, because the incidence is likely to be low, and chronic exposure over years or decades is probably required. So the human results would probably take another decade to obtain.

Meanwhile what is our choice as suffers? Either we take chronic steroids, which have worse short-term side effects, or we take Protopic which might give you ca 10 years from now. There is no other treatment, except for whole-body UV irradiation (PUVA), and you can imagine the ca risk from that. Anyway fortunately my disease is controlled enough such that I only apply a teaspoon size drop per day, on affected areas. In the past that wasn't the case, there have been times where 90% of my body was eczema. Ah, the good old days. Life is much better now.

for peddling to the commercial banks and credit card companies who bear a huge responsibility for the increasing number of personal bankruptcies. Everyone i've read says this is a bad, or terrible, or diabolical bill. Even bankruptcy attorneys, who stand to gain from the bill, think it's a bad idea: (Hat tip, Glenn Reynolds)

HERE'S A PROPOSAL for a cross-blogosphere coalition in opposition to the bankruptcy bill. I note that Tennessee will be one of the states most affected by it, and wonder why my local media outfits haven't paid much attention to that. (Via Tunesmith).

UPDATE: My former student Brent Snyder emails:

As you know I somehow ended up being a bankruptcy attorney at the busiest firm here in Knoxville. There has been some media coverage of the bill, attorney Ann Mostoller was on the talk radio news a week ago or so, my office was called last week as well. The sad fact is that this is a horrible law, designed to feed credit card companies more money. What is worse is that the even more diabolical provision, especially concerning attorney liability has not been mentioned in the senate debates at all.

For instance, if a client lies to me about assets and they are later discovered by the trustee or a creditor, I am personally on the hook. There are many other provisions in the bill designed to either keep people from filing or make it so that bankruptcy attorneys look for other avenues. Something is wrong when the majority of bankruptcy attorneys and trustees think it is a bad idea, Hank Hildebrand the Chapter 13 trustee for MDTN has written an article detailing all the flaws, and this is from someone that stands to benefit from the increase in 13 filings after the amendments are signed in to law.

I am concerned that Zywicki thinks the bill is a good idea, I mean I can understand his assertations that reform is needed and maybe that a means test is the way to go, but the other provisions are so one sided it 's comical.

It seems that way to me.

Sorry the links don't work, but it's at instapundit.

Update: Here is another link showing that a large coalition of bloggers from all over the spectrum are against the bill, and why it's encountering no opposition.

Well I sent off my primers for mutagenesis today. Within a month I hope to have identified the phosphorylation site; I have 8 or 9 likely candidates. Meanwhile I'm cloning like crazy. Each clone has it's own story of woe. One that I thought I had correct didn't have the p95 interaction domain, that was a stupid but innocent mistake on my part. So i have to reclone it, safe to say. Another I actually got to work, but oocytes with it injected don't mature. Interesting, yeah, i'll double check it. But I need mature oocytes to determine if it's interaction with p95 is affected by maturation (which is my goal). Another I can't get to clone to save my life, it's been 3 months so far. Another two I'm in the process of making the construct for, I thought i'd get them this week but no such luck. Anyway, it's a long way to the top, but I'm fairly experience with this.

Well i got my big result on Tuesday, showing that one of 3 fragments of Xp95 actually undergoes a gel shift. Basically the principle is simple, my project is to identify the phosphorylation site that causes a gel-shift of Xp95 during oocyte maturation. I previously narrowed it down to 1/3 of the protein (called P3) (about 270 amino acids, still pretty big), and then i spent another two months cloning and injecting sub-fragments of P3. So now I have it down to 80 amino acids, within which there are 8 candidates. Now we are going to submit purified protein for mass spec again (the first time uncovered sites within this same region, but we think they were mistaken now). And of course not trusting mass spec (particularly this group) I am going to make mutations of all possible sites and see which mutant blocks the gel-shift. That will be my answer. Anyway, a big step forward.

At the same time I am doing alot of cloning of Xp95 partner proteins. I am trying to make ALG2, SETA, endophilin, Xp95 itself, FAK, and Src. Of these I was able to express SETA, the others are in different stages. Next week I should be able to get FAK working, and ALG2 is also possible. Endophilin I am still waiting on the right clone (the clone people (idiots) sent me the wrong clone). Src I may give up on. Xp95 is also a work in progress, I thought i had it but was wrong...Its a heck of alot of work, and running 6 projects at once makes me somewhat crazy (but gives me lots to do).

Aircraft Fuel
Great deals on new and used items. Search for aircraft fuel now! -aff
www.eBay.com

Why would we want to buy used fuel?

Oh Dell is having a 20% off sale on laptops. The ultralight model (4.1 lbs) is about $850, plus tax plus shipping ($100). Still a good deal for ultraportables, they usually run 1500-2000. Not like i have money to buy one. But if i did...