In one case, Leandro Andrade, a San Bernardino County man, received a 50-years-to-life sentence for a third strike of stealing videos from a Kmart store.

50 years for stealing videos!? Of course America still kills innocent people so I guess it's not that odd.
11:40:06 PM   []

Turns out our firewall thinks that our client is executing a TCP FIN attack/scan and so it drops the packet. It thinks this because the heuristic for detecting the attack is faulty. The manufacture has been aware of this problem for quite some time and still there is no fix.

I guess tomorrow we'll decide if we need to buy a new firewall.
11:23:02 PM   []

• They're student ambassadors
• Content isn't editted by others
• No guidelines
• Supposed to be a real account of student life
• They'll cut it down from 9 to 6 bloggers in the fall (UW Blogging Survivor!)

5:04:02 PM   []

You'll hear the sample created with AMG's SmartSelect technology which captures the most representative portion of the song. SonicGuide samples are individually chosen for each unique track. We encourage you to compare SonicGuide samples with samples from other providers.

4:01:28 PM   []

I like how it starts off:

A BILL To encourage the development and distribution of creative works by enhancing domestic and international enforce ment of the copyright laws, and for other purposes.

Wired has some coverage of it in Upload a File, Go to Prison :

A new bill proposed in Congress on Wednesday would land a person in prison for five years and impose a fine of $250,000 for uploading a single file to a peer-to-peer network.

Wow. 5 five years! Large fines! People on Pho are asking "how many prisons do you need for 57 million file-sharers". The answer is a lot. Here are some stats on the current jail situation from the Bureau of Jail Statistics:

• At midyear 2002, 665,475 inmates were held in the Nation's local jails, up from 631,240 at midyear 2001.

• In 2002, jails reported adding 14,590 beds during the previous 12 months, bringing the total rated capacity to 713,899

• 93% of the rated capacity was occupied at midyear 2002.

So a lot of fines will have to be collected to finance the necessary construction of new jails. If you really think this legislation is going to go through better by some stock in Correctional Systems Inc..

Something else that bothers me is this false information from one of the reps:

Content like movies, music and software are the country's No. 1 export, but the creators are being hurt by people who use technology to get the content for free, Conyers said.

I think his interns should spend some time checking out US Monthly Foreign Trade Data.

And of course be sure to check out the top contributors for Berman and Conyers.

And I nearly forgot. If you shoplift a CD the sentence IS NOT 5 years in jail and/or a large quarter of million dollar fine. I think instead they just call your parents and maybe slap your wrist.
2:07:05 PM   []

Blogging @ UW:

Find out what it’s like to live and study at UW by reading the blogs – online journals, also called web logs – of current UW students. Follow the lives of your favourite bloggers and email them with your questions about life at UW.

It's been going on since April! How did I miss this? I even know one of them. I read the Imprint, the Daily Bulletin, the paper, but somehow I missed this. I'm baffled. (Google shows no other sites linking to them.)

Blogs @ UW we'll never see:

• Someone who is currently unemployed because co-op didn't work out
• Someone who lost their on-campus job at Bomber because admin shut it down
• Someone who got kicked out of their program
• Someone who is about to graduate with $20,000 in debt
• ...

Of course it'd be nice if they would reach out to the existing UW weblog community with at least a link to the web ring. Of course those of us not on UW's payroll do not hold back from criticizing the university and university life. We certainly wouldn't want the parents of a prospective student reading about how we drink, do drugs and have sex, now would we? :)

Well, I'm glad to see Waterloo is jumping on the bandwagon. However, it'd be nice (like really nice) if they used weblogging for more than just a recruiting/marketing tool. Ideally every group within the university would have a weblog that could be posted to and then editors could comb these weblogs and float information up with the culmination being the Daily Bulletin, which last time I emailed with Chris was still being maintained in VI.

Why do we need weblogs at UW? Because the majority of students have no clue what our professors are doing besides teaching us.

(UW page on what are weblogs.)
12:22:23 AM   []