riaa sued dead woman

while the RIAA is pondering their RICO defense, i’d like to note they sued a dead woman a few months back:

The Associated Press reported that the RIAA identified Gertrude Walton as a prolific file sharer known as “smittenedkitten”. Accusing her of illegally trading music over the internet, the lawsuit was apparently filed more than a month after the 83-year-old woman died in December.

Her daughter, Robin Chianumba, also pointed out that Walton, who was the sole defendant in a federal lawsuit that claimed she’d shared more than 700 songs through P2P networks, hated computers and objected to having them in the house.

“[She] wouldn’t know how to turn on a computer,” Mrs Chianumba is reported to have told AP.

music genome project

there are a bunch of ways to analyze and recommend music.

  • shazam, which uses acoustic fingerprinting to recognize songs based on 15-second excerpts
  • transpose’s goombah and the indy project, which use collaborative filtering to recommend music
  • music plasma, an interactive flash application which illustrates (perceived) relationships between artists.
  • hit song science, which predicts where or not a song will be a hit.

recently, the Wall Street Journal featured the music genome project, which paid a bunch of musicians to listen to thousands of songs and evaluate them on a bunch of objective criteria.

the $69 pizza

Canadian Immigration Minister Joe Volpe has expensive taste and poor judgment:

A day after failing to explain how he had managed to spend C$138 on pizza for two, Canadian Immigration Minister Joe Volpe was roasted in Parliament on Wednesday for spending C$207 on pizza for three people at the same establishment.

Volpe charged both meals to his expense account, prompting opposition Conservative parliamentarians to accuse him of wasting taxpayers’ money. The ruling Liberals are trying to overcome the damage done by a government patronage scandal.

rockstars tell fans (how) to cirumvent DRM

the bands hate the “copy controlled” pseudo-CDs as much as you do:

Now, in the most bizarre turn yet in the record industry’s piracy struggles, stars Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters and Switchfoot — and even Sony BMG, when the label gets complaints — are telling fans how they can beat the system.
…
A number of leading acts are using their Web sites to instruct fans on how to work around the technology.
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Columbia Records act Switchfoot, whose latest album, “Nothing Is Sound,” is copy-protected — and debuted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 last week — recently took copy-protection defiance one step further. Band guitarist Tim Foreman posted on a Sony Music-hosted fan site a link to the software program CDEX, which disables the technology. The post has since been removed.

“We were horrified when we first heard about the new copy-protection policy,” Foreman wrote in the September 14 post. “It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat and tears over the past two years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding new technology.”

Workaround: get a Mac. :)

US broadband sucks

Salon notices many other countries have decent bandwidth for less than we pay for the craptacular SBC service here:

Next time you sit down to pay your cable-modem or DSL bill, consider this: Most Japanese consumers can get an Internet connection that’s 16 times faster than the typical American DSL line for a mere $22 per month.

Across the globe, it’s the same story. In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month. In South Korea, super-fast connections are common for less than $30 per month.

pilot added to no-fly list

‘No-fly’ action takes pilot’s job:

Cape Air pilot Robert Gray said he feels like he’s living a nightmare.
…
When Gray showed up for work a couple of weeks ago, he said Cape Air told him the government had placed him on its no-fly list, making it impossible for him to do his job. Gray, a Belfast native and British citizen, said the government still won’t tell him why it thinks he’s a threat.
…
The agency denied an administrative appeal by Gray and refused to disclose what information it had, but it provided Gray’s lawyers with a computer printout that indicated it was about a Robert Gray who is Hispanic. The Cape Air pilot is white.

another reason to hate wal-mart

Nutjob at Wal-Mart photo lab calls secret service on high school art project:

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.