Saturday, September 17, 2005

Iranian Leader Refuses to End Nuclear Effort. In an address before the U.N. General Assembly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran rebuffed attempts to rein in his country's nuclear program. By JOEL BRINKLEY. [NYT > International] 10:23:44 PM    comment []

Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr. Why has the supreme American theologian of the 20th century dropped out of our religious discourse? By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.. [NYT > Books] 10:23:35 PM    comment []

Five Pioneers Are Awarded Lasker Medical Prizes. The 2005 Lasker Awards are going to scientists who discovered stem cells, invented genetic fingerprinting and developed technology crucial to mapping the human genome. By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN. [NYT > Health] 10:19:20 PM    comment []

Under Din of Abortion Debate, an Experience Shared Quietly. While public conversation about abortion is dominated by advocates with all-or-nothing positions, most Americans weigh values that are often in conflict. By JOHN LELAND. [NYT > Washington] 10:18:52 PM    comment []

The Key to Google's $10 Million Man. What makes Kai-Fu Lee, a computer scientist at Microsoft who defected to Google, such a hot commodity in Silicon Valley? By KATIE HAFNER. [NYT > Business] 10:18:19 PM    comment []

Building the Great Firewall of China, With Foreign Help. American and European businesses are not molding China; China is molding them. By TINA ROSENBERG. [NYT > Opinion] 10:18:13 PM    comment []

Not news to those who've been following things here, but Virtual Games Create A Real World Market [Washington Post: Top News] 8:46:19 AM    comment []

By 2050, an Urban Planet. Scientific American projects what the world will look like in 2050, and it is going to be a far different place for businesspeople to deal with. By PAUL B. BROWN. [NYT > Technology] 8:45:45 AM    comment []

Plan Will Pay 90% of Costs for Students Hit by Storm. The Department of Education announced a plan to pay 90 percent of the educational costs of students and schools affected by Hurricane Katrina for one year. By MICHAEL JANOFSKY. [NYT > Education] 8:45:12 AM    comment []

I.B.M. Unveils Plan to Train Employees to Be Teachers. I.B.M. announced a new program that would pay to train some of its veteran employees for second careers as teachers. By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN. [NYT > Education] 8:45:06 AM    comment []

Mark Cuban is a witty guy, as proved in his (once again) insightful post, If Only.. If only I was taller. If only I was thinner. If only I was richer. If only the RIAA could sue the P2P networks, music piracy would be reduced and artists of the world would cheer.  The chorus of music from the increased creativity (THat is what the RIAA has promised isnt it ?) unleashed by the P2P ceiling placed over every keyboard and cymbal across the world would cause music sales to skyrocket. Or will they ? Well Grokster vs MGM has apparently removed the “if only” lid from the RIAA. They now are going after LimeWire, Bearshare,  MX and their peers (sorry, had to do it) for as they wrote in their cease and desist notice ” We demand that you immediately cease-and-desist from enabling and inducing the infringement of RIAA member sound recordings ”. Now personally, I think the inducement was to get unknowing users to download spyware so they could profit. But thats me. More importantly, it starts to put the RIAA in put up or shut up terrority. I hope the RIAA  wins this case. I hope they shut them down. I have no more love for these guys than I do Grokster. What I do have love for is protecting individuals rights to use the music they own as they see fit. For making it easy to do backups and protecting our purchases. For protecting the ability of technologists to be creative and invent new and amazing things without having to invest more in legal fees than their ideas. Bearshare, MX, Limewire and 4 others have become the sacrificial lambs. Will their consumption satisfy the RIAA ? Will their destruction reduce the amount of P2P file sharing ? We will find out. Will that satisfy the RIAA, or will it just  embolden them ?. Maybe it will give them confidence to monitor every high school software programming class. Who knows how far they will take it. The good news, it helps removes the excuses. No more “if only”. It will put them on a shaky fence  between Protecting their copyrights and technology terrorists. This gets us closer to seeing who they really are and what they really are trying to accomplish [Blog Maverick] 8:41:34 AM    comment []