Blue Sky On Mars

Environmental groups and the Navy are going head-to-head Wired in court about the Navy’s new ultra-loud Sonar system.

By authorizing the Navy to test LFA in as much as 75 percent of the world’s oceans, the Bush administration may have violated a number of environmental regulations, including provisions of the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Does anything more really need to be said about this administration and the environment?

Alternet offers Ten Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq

So, months after the war, we are once again where we started – with plenty of rhetoric and absolutely no proof of this “grave danger” for which O.J. Smith died. The Bush administration is now scrambling to place the blame for its lies on faulty intelligence, when in fact the intelligence was fine; it was their abuse of it that was “faulty.”

I find it interesting that there has been no real White House response (that I’ve seen) to the increasing number of articles that declares Bush and other senior White House staff as flat out liars.

Slate features the article Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright - Should Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass be banned? which makes the case the Harry Potter follow-ons published around the world should be allowed:

In the end, few people are likely to mistake Tanya Grotter for Harry Potter; it is akin to mistaking Burger King for McDonald’s. The international copyright system is justified in preventing the most basic forms of piracy. But it doesn’t need to stop works like Tanya Grotter. The original Harry Potter is good enough to compete with its foreign cousins. So let a hundred Harrys bloom and let a hundred schools of magic contend.

There are definitely strong arguments for allowing “fair use” to ensure that people can criticize and parody the works of others. In the article, Tim Wu talks about books like Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass being a sort of localized version of Harry Potter that would include local elements that JK Rowling could not write. That’s an interesting point, to be sure, but from what I’ve read, Tonya Grotter has quite a few similarities to Harry Potter and had actually been taken to court in The Netherlands because the publisher was trying to sell the books outside of Russia.
I would imagine that the courts, at least in the US, have fairly well defined notions what what plagiarism is and what constitutes fair use. I hope that those notions don’t just disappear on a global scale.

Last week, I wrote about Harry Potter’s defeat of the Hulk in terms of revenue produced opening weekend. The New York Times has an article now, Harry Crushes the Hulk which talks not only of the financial aspect but of how Harry is more “naturally” successful:

The book’s success bubbled up spontaneously from below, propelled by kids’ word of mouth, rather than being imposed by synergistic browbeating from above.

My state is moving to the forefront of anti-spam legislation:

Modeling itself on a federal bill that would create a national spam opt-out list, the Michigan Senate passed what one member described as the nation’s toughest antispam bill.

Unfortunately, I think that antispam legislation, particularly at the state level, is probably about as productive as trying to stop P2P systems. The more productive use of effort would be to implement newer technical measures, difficult though they may be.

Tim Bray investigates the monetary implications of his experiment with Google’s AdSense program:

Which is nothing that you’re going to retire on, but it would certainly cover the site’s costs and buy a couple of beers. And if you could drive the hits up, you could actually generate noticeable income.

Tim has a fairly busy site, but it looks like he could get several hundred a month from Google’s AdSense. At present, Google’s general policy is to not allow blogs, so I couldn’t sign up. I don’t do this blog for cash anyhow. But it’s interesting to think of what some sites that are trying to make a profit could do with this.

Larry Lessig had a good meeting in DC with some members of Congress and it sounds like the arguments plus the 15,000 signatures are going to result in getting the Public Domain Enhancement Act introduced! Now comes the part of actually telling your members of Congress that you support this.

In the NYTimes, Denial and Deception talks about how so many people seem to stick their heads in the sand regarding how some of Bush’s statements have turned out to be false. Meanwhile, over in Slate-land, Timothy Noah contends that Bush can be both ignorant and a liar and that people shouldn’t allow Bush off the hook.

Next year, it will be interesting to see if the Internet and the weblog world turns into a real political force. The articles that appear at the top of Blogdex and Daypop show that the blogging crowd have actively followed this story. Has the general voting public followed it though?

Here is an excellent collection of farewell screenshots from failed dotcoms. I wonder what the total amount of funding raised for those 300+ companies was.

Glenn posted a good collection of quotes and comments on Dick Gephardt’s now infamous “executive order” statement. I agree with the quote in there that if you criticize Ashcroft for making statements that are at odds with the Constitution, you should criticize Gephardt as well. Gephardt’s spokesperson, not surprisingly, backpedaled on the statement saying that Gephardt essentially just meant that he would use the tools of his office in his commitment to diversity. But the statement itself and the context in which it was made certainly sound like he actually thought, at that time, that an executive order could undo a decision from the Court.