LawFont.com

Harvey Danger — whom you may remember from “Flagpole Sitta” — has released their new album for free over the web, and also via bittorrent. Their stated reason:

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Good luck to them; I hope it works. If I like it, I’ll buy the album: Harvey Danger – Little by Little

President Bush has reportedly nominated Harriet Miers to fill Justice O’Connor’s seat on the US Supreme Court.

The New York Times is reporting that Australians Win Nobel Prize in Medicine — Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won for their 1982 discovery that helicobacter pylori is the predominant cause of peptic and gastric ulcers. Very neat work that was completely at odds with then-accepted wisdom.

Tim O’Reilly, commentator and head of the excellent O’Reilly technical publishing series, has a fascinating take on the Authors’ Guilde suit against the Google Library Project. See Sarah’s earlier post for additional comment.

Have a look at http://www.google.com/ig — this looks like the first step in allowing you to turn your google search page into a Yahoo-style portal. Currently no ads. Neat.

Just found via slashdot an interview with Eric Raymond at ONLamp.com on his keynote speech at a conference in Brazil. Raymond is reported to have said: “We don’t need the GPL anymore. It’s based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn’t make lots of people nervous about adopting it.”

Interesting, but I can’t agree. (more…)

WSJ.com has a story on how Microsoft last year reversed its approach to writing Vista (aka Longhorn), the replacement for Win XP, and adopted a much more modular approach in the code. I’m rather surprised that they weren’t doing this already. It isn’t a good feeling to think that XP tends towards spaghetti code.

Hmm, Google has just launched the Google Blog Search. Looks very interesting, and rather fast too…

A few newspapers are carrying the story, and the NY Times (Linda Greenhouse) has an obituary.

The Register reports that DVD Jon has hacked Media Player file encryption (it’s the Microsoft NSC format which obfuscates the location of the stream being downloaded). It would be interesting to see the rationale offered for encrypting the data about the stream in the first place.

A story from the Times-Picayune on a possible further problem for some of the unfortunate folk who have survived the hurricane: will there still be a record of their home ownership and mortgage status?

According to the article:

“one of the biggest legal ramifications of Hurricane Katrina’s flooding waters is the probable loss of real estate records dating back to the early 1800s. The records, which include titles, mortgages, conveyances and liens, were stored in the now-flooded basement of City Hall on Poydras Street.

In 2002, employees of Register of Conveyances Gasper Schiro began the tedious process of hand entering the records into computers, a $700,000 process that could have been contracted out and accomplished quickly but was instead done slowly by his staff to save money.”

This scenario shows the importance of true offsite data backup.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a lecture given by an Oxford academic to the Australian Catholic University in which it was said that “It is 97 per cent certain God raised Jesus from the dead – based on logic and mathematics, not faith”. According to the story:

Professor Swinburne, who gave a public lecture at the Australian Catholic University last night, said probability calculus showed a probability of 97 per cent. The probability God existed was one in two. That is, God either did or didn’t. And it was one in two that God became incarnate.

Professor Swinburne suggested a one-in-10 probability that the gospels would report the life and resurrection of Jesus as they did. The chance of all these factors coming together, if the resurrection was not true, was one in 1000.

(more…)

The Seattle Times is reporting that Amazon has sued Cendant alleging infringement of patents. The story is thin on details, but the patents are supposed to be “e-commerce” patents, and Amazon contends they were infringed when using tools “to secure credit-card transactions”. It will be interesting to analyse the claims (and the patents) when further details emerge.

Cendant sued Amazon last year, claiming infringement of a patent for recommending choices to buyers based on previous ordering history.

Groklaw is reporting that it has a copy of a 13 August 2002 email from an expert hired by SCO to look into whether any code had been copied from AT&T Unix into Linux.

It is interesting reading and does not bode well for SCO. The money quote: “At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.”

(more…)