I've been thinking about the implications of Judge Gertner's ruling in Sony v. Tenenbaum, and have had the good fortune to discuss it with copyright expert Thinh Nguyen. One unexpected effect of the decision, I believe, will be to increase the cost of copyright litigation, perhaps significantly. Judge Gertner employs the Supreme Court's Due Process rulings on damages, especially punitive damages, to hold that there must be some relation (how close a relation, we're not sure) between actual damage / actual harm, and the amount of statutory damages awarded. This is problematic, for two reasons.

Mark Twain's antiwar leanings are already common knowledge (or should be), perhaps best of all through his haunting short story "The War Prayer." But now, as his complete autobiography is being published for the first time by University of California Press, the true radicalism of his position is becoming more evident than ever.

Ran across an interesting story on Slashdot this weekend: ScienceBlogs.com, a high-profile and respectable collection of scientific blogs, is in a bit of a kerfuffle after including a paid "nutrition" blog from PepsiCo. In response, some bloggers have left the site, others are on hiatus, and some call the whole thing an overreaction. The PepsiCo blog has since been cancelled with an apology of sorts.

You're going along, minding your own business when all of a sudden you realize, you've hit a wall. You're stuck. And you don't see a way around it. What can one do to help one's self out of this situation?

I've been doing a lot of content curation lately; you know, the latest fashionable trend in digital content. At least, I hope it's fashionable, because it's a wonderful development that throws a wrench in the works of automated delivery.

When Google Wave first launched some time ago it was met with an enormous hurrah of amazingness from many people in the tech community. Unfortunately the "game changing" realities of what Wave was supposedly going to evoke hasn't eventuated.

The only reason I bought Red Dead: Redemption was for the open world experience of wandering through the landscape with the incredibly well designed audio atmosphere. In fact, I could seriously just live without the storyline.

This past week saw the launch of a new global security project, Internet Fraud Alert, which aims to provide a single, secure channel by which security researchers can report stolen consumer credentials (such as passwords and credit card numbers).

I just took the Sonicwall Phishing and Spam IQ Quiz and I'm proud to say I passed with flying colors. All told, it probably took under 5 minutes to complete, while I was getting ready to leave for work. It's doubtful if Sonicwallwill ever release any data from this quiz, but I would hazard a guess that the results wouldn't surprise anyone.

A week or two ago, I sent a tweet to @imaxbirmingham on Twitter and asked if I could have a tour of the projection room. I've only ever seen projection rooms by looking through the window, and I've never seen an IMAX projector in person, so I thought it was worth a go to ask -- and it was!

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