The Local Community Radio Act was introduced yesterday by Representatives Mike Doyle and Lee Tarry.  The act was originally introduced in the 110th congress and garnered widespread support; both Barack Obama and John McCain support the bill, but it never came to a Senate vote.

But now it’s back, and more popular than ever.  Cory Fischer-Hoffman of the Prometheus Radio Project had this to say about the bill:

“now is the time to clarify public interests by localizing more media ownership.  As media outlets are increasingly consolidated, local voices are being forced off the airwaves.”

The average cost for setting up a commercial radio station in 2003 was about 2.5 million dollars.

In 2000, the FCC began licensing low-power FM (LPFM) channels for use by local organisations such as churches, community organizers, and artist groups, but the National Association of Broadcasters successfully lobbied congress to place restrictions on the power output and spectrum space of these LPFM stations.

Representative Mike Doyle believes “It is in everyone’s interest to promote community radio.”

Free Press has started an initiative to get the bill passed.  Go and send a letter to your representatives, support is likely to be very high for this bill, but only if they know it’s there.  Inform them of the bills importance, so that local communities can flourish just a bit more.

In Book VIII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he outlines the ideals of friendship and explains how it relates to the Greek view of eudiamonia. Aristotle’s ideal of friendship is based on the pursuit of excellence and his general thought in Book VIII is to explain how only people who are good and actively pursuing excellence can have a lasting friendship (N.E. 1156b7-13).

The first aspect that will be discussed is how Aristotle stresses the importance of friendship. Aristotle defines friendship as a type of excellence that is necessary for life (N.E. 1155a4-5). He continues to say that even the powerful need friends:

“For even the wealthy or those who rule over or dominate others are thought to need friends more than anything – since what use would such prosperity be if they were deprived of the possibility of beneficence, which occurs most, and is most to be praised, in the relation to friends?”

(N.E. 1155a6-10) Read the rest of this entry »

And it’s codenamed “Karmic Koala”. Mark Shuttleworth writes about what he hopes to achieve with 9.10 server edition and desktop edition:

During the Karmic cycle we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image. Ubuntu-vmbuilder makes it easy to create a custom AMI today, but a portfolio of standard image profiles will allow easier collaboration between people doing similar things on EC2.

EC2 , or Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud, is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. EC2 makes server operation faster by significantly reducing configuration time, and server capacity is elastic, so you only pay for what you need, when you need it.

Or you can make your own cloud, on your own hardware, with the Eucalyptus project.

On the desktop side of things, the focus is on netbooks:

So the good news is, boot will be beautiful. The bad news is, you won’t have long to appreciate it! It only takes 35 days to make a whole Koala, so we think it should be possible to bring up a stylish desktop much faster. The goal for Jaunty on a netbook is 25 seconds, so let’s see how much faster we can get you all the way to a Koala desktop. We’re also hoping to deliver a new login experience that complements the graphical boot, and works well for small groups as well as very large installations.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is also getting some attention with this development cycle. The developers are shoving Moblin technology into the netbook version of Ubuntu, and considering the Alpha version of Moblin is suppose to be able to boot in 15 seconds, that’s very exciting news.

The default theme for 9.10 may not be brown any more, the new theme(s) will be revealed at the Ubuntu Developers Conference, May 25-29, in Barcelona.

Cloud-computing is a fascinating concept and I am glad to see so much focus on it coming from FOSS community.

That is, they removed it from the Steam version of the game. But the retail version will still be infected by the DRM.

From Steampowered.com:

“This game was delivered with both Sony SecuROM and Steam digital rights management technology. This patch will remove the SecuROM technology from the game as well as remove the game-specific SecuROM license from your machine. The game will continue to be protected by Steam technology.”

Steam is DRM in it’s own right, however much more flexible and not quite as annoying. Steam has proven to be very good at preventing piracy, while at the same time maintaining strong support from it’s users.

GNUMP3d is magic, or at least it felt that way after I installed it. From the site: GNUMP3d is a streaming server for MP3s, OGG vorbis files, movies and other media formats.

I’m going to take the liberty of walking you through the set up:

Step 1 - open up a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install gnump3d

it will install in /var/music, so navigate there from the terminal with this:

cd /var/music

GNUMP3d uses this folder to share content, so you’ll want to link your music libraries and movie libraries to this folder. To do that, use this command while still in the /var/music directory:

sudo ln -s path/to/my/music/folder/music music

obviously, replace “path/to/my/music/folder/music” with your own path. Mine would be /home/glenn/MyFiles/music, and the reason you type music on the end is to make a folder within /var/music that will ‘contain’ all your music. Do the same for your movies or whatever else you want to stream:

sudo ln -s path/to/my/movies/folder/movies movies

Read the rest of this entry »

“If I have all this money they claim, someone has apparently stolen it from me.”

That was Peter Sunde’s twitter response to IFPI’s Peter Danowsky on his claim that the Pirate Bay was “organized crime on a grand scale” and that they netted “significant revenues.”

Day three of the trial consisted of a lot of talk about damages, and the plaintiffs argued that the amount of the damages (13 million USD) reflects the cost of aquiring a global distribution license, and a global preview license (for the content that was leaked before air date).

Because of yesterdays developments regarding the charge of assisting in copyright infringement, the defense called for their clients to be acquitted.

Gottfrid Svartholm’s lawyer made the point that users control the content on The Pirate Bay, and the four defendants have no control over it.

Per E Samuelsson, Lundström’s lawyer, pointed to an EU directive regarding e-commerce:

Section 42, EU directive 2000/31/EC:

The exemptions from liability established in this Directive cover only cases where the activity of the information society service[e-commerce service] provider is limited to the technical process of operating and giving access to a communication network over which information made available by third parties is transmitted or temporarily stored, for the sole purpose of making the transmission more efficient; this activity is of a mere technical, automatic and passive nature, which implies that the information society service provider has neither knowledge of nor control over the information which is transmitted or stored.

While it can easily be argued that the Pirate Bay does not control the content on it’s site, they surely know about it.

Day three finished early, and so far the trial is ahead of schedule.  It looks like the Pirate Bay is winning.

Day one of the trial against the Pirate Bay saw the lead prosecutor Håkan Roswal, who claimed to be an expert in computer crime, fail to start his powerpoint presentation.  though a trivial situation, it’s a fun example of just how out-of-touch the prosecution is.

The defendents, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, and Fredrik Neij, who have been extremely confident that they’ll win the trial, all pleaded not-guilty.

The charges amount to assisting in copyright infringement on a commercial-scale, and the plaintiffs (Warner Bros., MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal), are claiming thirteen million dollars in damages.

Right off the bat, day two of the trial went very well for the accused.  According to Fredrik Neij, the prosecution misunderstood how BitTorrent works, and he pointed out that Roswal couldn’t prove the torrents presented as evidence the day before were in fact using The Pirate Bay as a tracker.  The prosecution had to alter it’s charge of ‘assisting copyright infringement’ to read ‘assisting in making available infringing material’.

Torrent Freak has a summary of the events of day one of The Pirate Bay trial. This trial could have world-wide repercussions for file-sharing, so please, pay attention.

The Pirate Bay Trial - First Day in Court

In an effort to close the 15 billion dollar budget deficit, New York Governor David Paterson proposed a 4% tax on all internet downloads. The proposal is raising eye-brows, considering the tax would likely not benefit the state, and may even harm it.

For businesses based in New York, sales tax on goods distributed within the state makes sense. Otherwise Internet tax should not exist.

If I buy an item from Newegg.com, which is based in California, I shouldn’t have to pay California sales tax, because I don’t live in California. On the other hand, I shouldn’t have to pay my states sales tax, because Newegg.com isn’t based in my state.

It should be that simple. The Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) is not necessary, and potentially dangerous for consumers.

More information:

Background of ITFA (PDF)

E-Commerce Taxation Links

Reader Rant sends us an update on the Large Hadron Collider:
It looks as if the LHC is going to be turned back on for experiments almost a year after it was first activated. There was a magnet problem in one of the numerous sectors. With the project hopefully back on track this tremendous marvel of physics and engineering could bring a whole new era of understanding energies. Of course there is still debate among the community whether or not the whole project will uncover as much as its managers hope, or will just provide some insight into established theories. I’m hoping for some more information on Higgs. Of course my real rant comes with the whole Obama admin “putting science in tis rightful place.” But how can our scientists and universities compete with the EU when our government cuts funding, we instead get the privilege of some input and resources compared to having the ability to compare findings.

The LHC will come back online in the fall of this year.