“I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected.” — George W. Bush

1533 as of today, in case you’re interested.

Oh, and more than 100,000 — but those don’t count.

Oh, and 153, going back a few years.

In the Grokster case, a lot of the entertainment industry’s argument seems to hinge on the idea that the companies making P2P software are profiting from piracy — that they encourage (or “induce”) lawbreakers in order to make money.

An article on InternetNews.com suggested that if the Court makes a ruling on the Grokster case and ends it back to trial with a clearer definition of infringement, “it will likely be on the issue of ‘active inducement.’ Under current copyright law, companies can be held liable for secondary copyright infringement if they actively encourage users to infringe.”

That would, in fact, be very good news for file-sharing. That’s because many of the programs used for P2P are in fact open-source. They are free — no cost, no ads, nothing.

In other words, groups such as the folks who make Gnucleus don’t make any money. There’s no way to argue they profit from distributing this software.

In fact, the opposite is more accurate. Far from inducing anyone to do anything, they are responding to the call of the market. People want software that does what Gnucleus does.

So even if Grokster and Streamcast and all their commercial-ish kin go out of business, there will still be open-source clients keeping P2P alive and — judging by the quality of Gnucleus — well.

I was interviewing John Feehery, executive VP for the Motion Picture Association of America, for a story on Rep. Rick Boucher’s proposed Digital Media Consumer Rights Act.

If passed, the DMCRA will make it legal to A) copy your digital content for legitimate (i.e., non-piracy) purposes, and B) create products to allow that copying if such products have substantial noninfringing uses.

But Feehery seemed against the idea of any copying. He said, at one point, “That’s the biggest concern: They can make one copy, but it’s kinda like a Lay’s potato chip — how can you only make one? Can you really only make one? Will you only make one?”

The following conversation (transcribed verbatim) then ensued:

Me: But the alternative — I’m playing Devil’s advocate as I did with Mr. [Representative Rick] Boucher — the alternative is, “Well, you can’t make any copies.”

Feehery: Well, that’s right. That’s why you buy a copy and you give it to your friends and they all use it. Right. On a DVD, yes.

I mean, that’s right. Movies are not like music. Movies are different than music in the sense that people watch a movie and they put it away and they might watch it again in three months or you know, maybe they’re interested in something and they watch it every day. But with music there’s more of a possibility … people listen to music all the time.

Me: Right.

Feehery: So it’s a different kind of entertainment experience. But our biggest concern, obviously, is that if you you know, open the door to that kind of activity, it’ll definitely swing wide open for pirates.

Back in November 2003 I posted some progressive photos of Michael Jackson — photos showing him as a young kid, a young man, and currently.

Here’s an update.

I was surprised when I went once to The Ohio State University Medical Center Hospital and saw a sign that read something like, “If your child has chicken pox, please inform the admissions desk.”

I thought, Chicken pox? There’s a vaccine. Why would any kid have chicken pox? It’s like having measles. Maybe a couple of mothers didn’t get their kid immunized, but so many that OSU needed a sign?

Then I read that there are still people who are having chicken pox parties, where they deliberately expose their kids to a potentially scarring (and fatal) disease.

What the heck is wrong with these people? Heck, Mothering magazine even has an article about how to run a party!

Holy #$%@^! What is wrong with these people? Deliberately getting your child sick? Risking scars, even death because you don’t want to give her a shot?

[whacking head on table]

A local school board got pretty upset at a reporter because he dared to talk to people in places other than where he was authorized to.

The Martinsville Daily quotes the Henry County Schools news release as saying, among other things, that Hays Burchfield, a reporter at the Martinsville Bulletin, “was at Bassett High School talking with students without their consent and in unauthorized areas.”

Without their consent? How do you talk with someone without their consent?

And the reporter also “interfered with the administration’s ability to respond to a bomb threat at Magna Vista High School.”

Sounds bad — maybe you picture him preventing a search or getting in the way of police. In fact, when you read the full story you find that his means of “interference” was talking to students outside (and behind) the school when the administrators wanted him in front.

Of course, there’s a good argument to be made that the administrators had to spend extra time talking to Burchfield when they should have been searching for a bomb. But “interfering”? Please.

How does this read? That you’ve got a bunch of school administrators used to ruling with absolute power getting fed up with a reporter who was ignoring their absolute authority.

For whatever reason, they didn’t want him talking to students, and they seemed quite happy to build mountains out of molehills to make a case for keeping him away.

I wonder what he was working on that got them so worried.

Hug a copy editor today. :)

Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is an incredibly good novel. It’s a graphic novel — a large, adult comic if you will.

You should read it.

You should read it because it’s being made into a movie, and chances are that movie will be a terrible adaptation. (I am constantly reminded of the awful Starship Troopers.)

Dorian Wright at postmodernbarney.com has a much more detailed discussion of why the movie is a Bad Idea.

So, before it comes out, go get a copy of the book and read it, lest you think the movie came first.

From a AP story on teen cell-phone use:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — There were two things 11-year-old Patty Wiegner really, really, really wanted for Christmas. One was a furry, playful dog that’s now filling her parents’ home with the sound of barking. The other gift makes a different kind of noise — it has a ring tone that mimics rapper 50 Cent’s hit song “Candy Shop.”

So she’s a 50 Cent fan. Cool.

Here’s the front-page image from his Web site, which features info about his latest album, “The Massacre”:

(No, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with his music. But if my 11-year old was listening to it, I think I’d say, “Wait till you’re older.” I would say the same for watching, say, “Silence of the Lambs.” But that’s just me.)

I think it’s time to accept that Terri Schiavo is probably going to die, as the latest of seven years’ worth of court decisions refused to order her feeding tube be reinserted.

Let’s not get into the arguments over whether her husband or her parents were right, or whether or not Congress should have interfered.

Once the decision has been made that she is to be allowed to die, how do we (as a society) go about it? We withhold food and water until she dies. We starve, or more accurately, dehydrate her to death.

What’s the logic here? That allowing her to die is somehow different than killing her humanely? That a quick and painless death is worse than a long drawn-out one because the former would be ‘active and the latter ‘passive’?

Imagine if you heard about an animal shelter that, when a dog or cat needed to be destroyed, starved it to death. Imagine the rightful outrage. It’s inhumane.

But not, it seems, inhuman.

From a CNN story on recycling sweat and urine into potable water, comes this must-appeal-to-worldwide-audience paragraph:

Bottles of fresh water cost as much as U.S. $0.39 (euro0.29) a liter (U.S. $1.50; euro1.13, a gallon). Each weighs 3.6 kilos (8 pounds), so the fees skyrocket when they’re transported across the planet — let alone beyond the stratosphere.

Whoosh!

Interesting bit of info: A couple of days ago, you could have used Accurint (owned by Lexis-Nexis) to find someone’s Social Security number. Now it only provides the first five digits.

Obviously this is related to privacy concerns in general, and to the ChoicePoint fiasco in particular. And SS numbers are still public information, so there are other ways to get ‘em.

In a letter to customers, Lexis-Nexis said:

Beginning on March 17th, 2005 all customers will receive truncated Social Security Numbers (SSN) and fully masked Driver’s License Numbers (DLN).

The company said it would only give full SSNs to law-enforcement organizations, insurance companies, certain departments of financial-services organizations, collection companies and departments, and “Other public or private entities, on a case-by-case basis, for the purposes of detecting, investigating or preventing fraud or other criminal activities.”

ChoicePoint put out a release March 4 that read in part, “[T]he company will discontinue the sale of information products that contain sensitive consumer data, including Social Security and driver’s license numbers, except where there is a specific consumer-driven transaction or benefit, or where the products support federal, state or local government and criminal justice purposes.”

Filed under “Hmm.”

You know a series of books has gone too far when the following comes out. (It was on the newsroom giveaway shelf, apparently sent by the publisher for our review)

My new camera is on its way via UPS. Obviously I can track it, but the only info I have is:

9:07 A.M. SOUTH CHARLESTON, WV, US DEPARTURE SCAN

South Charleston is about three hours from here, so it may arrive today. But who knows how many stops the truck has to make, plus there are those darned mountains is has to cross.

I’m pretty sure UPS trucks have GPS; UPS has been on the tech cutting edge for a long time, and it puts a lot of careful thought into everything it does.

So wouldn’t it be cool if I could click a “Track Your Package Live” link and see the location of the truck on a map? It has a database that can serve tracking info on millions of packages, and each of those is assigned to a specific truck, so serving the location of those trucks isn’t that much more of a chore.

What say you, UPS?

Referring to the Terri Schiavo case, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, “We ought to err on the side of life.”

Good. So, while Congress and the President are available, perhaps they can pass a law banning the death penalty.

It’s as if the news media is clueless when it comes to economics. A CNN story (and I’m sure there will be plenty of similar ones) says:

ATLANTA (CNN) - The average price of a gallon of self-serve, regular gasoline shot up nearly 13 cents over the past two weeks, to a record $2.10, a national survey said Sunday.

That’s just not true. There’s this thing called inflation, and this other thing called the Consumer Price Index. A buck today isn’t the same as a buck in 1974. People earn more. Dollars are worth less.

A 60-cent gallon of gas in 1974 is equivalent to $2.38 in 2005 dollars.

In other words, $2.10 a gallon is higher than it has been lately, but not even close to a record high.

So CNN and friends should quit the fear-mongering bullshit and start giving people accurate information: We’ve enjoyed some of the lowest gas prices in history lately (yes, lowest), and now that’s ending.

This isn’t a good thing, but it’s a lot different than ‘the highest gas prices ever.’

Here’s a chart from the National Association of Railroad Passengers — inflation-adjusted gas prices are indicated by the red line:

(Click to enlarge.)

So for the highest gas prices in modern times, look at 1980-1982. That’s when it was expensive. Furthermore, today’s cars get much better mileage, so driving is even less expensive. (Except for SUVs, but if you’re driving one of them who cares what you think of gas prices?)

Finally, a good resource to see what a buck is/was worth comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: http://minneapolisfed.org/research/data/us/calc.

So Orrin Hatch, the Utah Senator who is so in the pocket of the music and motion picture industries that he once suggested remotely destroying the computers of people suspected of pirating music is now head of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property.

How nice. Expect more restrictions on how you can use the music and movies you buy — a continued erosion of copyright at the expense of listeners and viewers.

And also expect piracy to increase, as more and more people to get stuff free.

And if the music or movie industries think they’ll come up with a technological solution to fix things, they’ve got their collective heads in the sand. Because every time — every time — some new scheme comes out to deny consumers their rights under current copyright law, some programmer finds a way around it.

Maybe it’s the instruction to “hold down the Shift key.” Or a small program you have to run. Or using a magic marker to draw on a CD. (These are all real examples.) Somehow, someone will find a way to break the copy protection scheme.

The operative phrase is “what the market will bear.” Clearly the market didn’t bear $15 CDs, because as soon as an alternative was available, people jumped. (That it happened to be a free alternative only helped, and that it happened to be an illegal alternative didn’t matter.)

The industry was incredibly slow to catch up, but now there are some low-cost alternatives such as iTunes and Napster (v.2.0). But these came after the free/illegal P2P infrastructure was in place, so it will take a lot to get people to move from that to a pay model.

This is especially true because of Hatch’s appointment. Having an unabashedly anti-consumer person in a position to make decisions about copyright might help the music and movie industries on paper, but in reality it will drive more and more folks to those free/illegal downloads.

Further, with Apple adding more restrictions to what you can do with the music you get from iTunes, the market is bearing less and less.

(Fun note: Some programmers, including Jon Johansen, the Norwegian who cracked DVD encryption, developed a program that lets you download iTunes music without restrictions. Yes, you still have to buy it, but the tunes that end up on your computer are restriction free — just like the music you get when you buy a CD.)

Sure, there will always be people who steal. But fewer people would be willing to “steal” music if they felt even a vague empathy for the recording industry. But the RIAA (the Recording Industry Assoc. of America) and its heavy-handed, sue-the-customer tactics hasn’t won friends. And having Orrin Hatch on their side doesn’t help — it hurts.

Doing a little research into how area codes and phone numbers are assigned, I was reading about the North American Numbering Plan, which is what determines which states and cities and parts of cities get which area codes.

One fun thing I discovered is that we’re likely to be converting to four-digit area codes in the next 10 years as more people need more numbers. It’ll start when 10-digit dialing is made mandatory all over. Then you’ll see a 0 or 1 added to your existing area code.

Won’t that be a treat?

Other things I learned: We all know that 411 is for directory assistance, and that 911 is for emergencies. But the other “11″ numbers also have specific uses (although not every place uses them):

211 - Community information or social services.
311 - City hall or non-emergency police matters.
411 - Local telephone directory service.
511 - Traffic, road, and tourist information.
611 - Telephone line repair service.
711 - Relay service for hearing-impaired or mute customers,
811 - Telephone company services.
911 - Emergency dispatcher for fire, ambulance, police etc.

And more: Like, when area codes were first instituted in 1951 (when everyone had rotary phones), the biggest-population areas had area codes with the smallest number — the easy-to-dial ones. New York was 212, LA was 213, and Chicago was 312.

North and South Carolina got the short straw, with 704 and 803, respectively.

Oh, and if there was a 0 in the middle, the area code was for a state. If there was a 1 in the middle, it was for a city.

Finally, everyone thinks that any 555 number is fake — they use them in movies all the time. In fact, only 555-0100 through 555-0199 are set aside for fiction. You can end up with 555-1234 … and a lot of trouble trying to convince people it’s real.

(The 958 and 959 prefixes — e.g., 718-958-4321– are usually reserved for tests, so you can usually get away with using one of those for a fake number. Ditto for 970.)

…goes to Suzanne Wardle, an intern here at the paper.

We were reading the blurb on the back of a book.

It made me laugh out loud, quoth one reviewer, And I never laugh out loud.

“Well,” said Suzanne, “we know he’s a liar.”

Since blogs got into the mainstream consciousness, the question, “Are bloggers journalists?” has popped up a lot. It’s being asked recently thanks to Apple’s winning the first round in a lawsuit against “online reporters” it claims posted stolen company secrets. (Yes, this is an oversimplification.)

Are these bloggers journalists? Are any bloggers? Are all bloggers? Where do you draw the line?

I just wanted to toss this out: The question, I think, shouldn’t be “Are bloggers journalists?” or even “Is this particular blogger a journalist?” or even “Is this blog journalism?”

When we’re talking about shield laws and disclosure requirements, the question should be “Is this story (or entry or post) journalism?” And the burden of proof should be on anyone who claims it isn’t.

Not everything published in a newspaper is journalism, of course. There are editorials and ads and comics and a host of other things. And not everything a reporter writes is journalism, either; there are personal letters and shopping lists and bad poetry coming from the same pen. And not every piece of journalism is in print, of course; there’s TV and radio and the Web.

So when we ask whether someone deserves First Amendment protection, or should be shielded by a shield law, it shouldn’t matter the site, or the author, or the medium. What matters is “Was the content journalism?”

If 10-year-old Timmy Tucker takes a picture of a politician accepting a bribe and puts up posters of the photo in the supermarket, you can make a strong argument that this is journalism — even if he’s just a kid. Even if he’s not on the staff of a paper or TV station. Even if he doesn’t have a blog.

What he did that one time, that one day, in that one medium — that’s journalism, even if he has never done it before.

Granted, that doesn’t help answer questions about who should get press credentials for a particular event, but I think its an important way of considering what is covered by the phrase “the freedom of the press.”