LA Times:

A fed­eral judge sen­tenced Kerry Gon­za­lez, a 24-year-old insur­ance under­writer, to six months of home con­fine­ment for post­ing a rough ver­sion of the movie “The Hulk” on the Inter­net two weeks before the film hit the­aters in June.

U.S. Dis­trict Judge Ger­ard E. Lynch in New York also gave Gon­za­lez three years of pro­ba­tion, fined him $2,000 and ordered him to pay $5,000 in resti­tu­tion to Vivendi Uni­ver­sal Enter­tain­ment, par­ent com­pany of Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios, which released the movie. Gon­za­lez had faced up to three years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for felony copy­right infringement.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

The Den­ver Post takes a look at the con­tro­versy over file trad­ing by hark­ing back to the early days of satel­lite TV. Excerpt:

… How did the home satel­lite TV indus­try go legit? It was a long, drawn-out bat­tle that involved Con­gress, the courts, plenty of copy­right attor­neys and tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. In short, new rules allowed satel­lite TV com­pa­nies to buy access to pro­gram­ming con­trolled by cable com­pa­nies and there­fore com­pete head-on with cable. The home satel­lite TV indus­try devel­oped its own sig­nal encryp­tion as well as descram­bler boxes avail­able to pay­ing subscribers.

Those changes, along with the devel­op­ment of 18-inch satel­lite dishes, helped cre­ate one of the most suc­cess­ful consumer-electronics prod­ucts of all times. When DirecTV launched in 1994, it sold 1 mil­lion units in the first year. …

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

I met Michael Lewis at a new media con­fer­ence back dur­ing the dot­com go-go days when he lamented how he coulda been a mil­lion­aire had he just accepted an offer to write a crappy col­umn for TheStreet.com.

Well, Lewis is doing all right these days. (See JD’s Book­store for his lat­est book, Mon­ey­ball.) In the Sun­day New York Times Mag­a­zine, he wades into the Cal­i­for­nia recall mess with All Pol­i­tics Are Loco. (Why the edi­tors gave a plural verb to pol­i­tics escapes me.)

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

I’ve been lucky to run into sev­eral high-quality peo­ple through this weblog, includ­ing two tech wiz­ards who’ve been help­ing me wth my blog prob­lems. Damien New­man (a pro­gram­mer at Mov­able­Type and pro­pri­etor of mdn stu­dio) advised me to lose my indi­vid­ual entry archives, which take up as much as 323MB of stor­age space. I did so, but had to restore them when MT wouldn’t let me rebuild any­thing. (There was a bet­ter way, but I appar­ently got some erro­neous advice in the MT Sup­port Forum.) Damien returns Sun­day after a note­wor­thy week­long trip.

Kynn Bartlett, who’s a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor to these parts — and whose cred­its include chief tech­nol­o­gist of Idyll Moun­tain, the Kynn.com site, the Shock & Awe Blog, the Inland Anti-Empire Blog and who’s the author of CSS in 24 Hours — stepped in for sev­eral min­utes today. He, too, sug­gested I lose the indi­vid­ual entry archives. I did so but, just as the day before, MT lay down and died on me (giv­ing me error mes­sages when I tried to rebuild all files). But then Kynn bor­rowed my log-in, did the exact same thing, and dang if it didn’t work. Some­times you just have the touch. So now I’m mov­ing on to the Great Tran­si­tion to TypePad.

Kynn also asked me what this blog runs on. I con­fessed my igno­rance. He let me know about the Net­craft site, which informs that my web­site and blog are run­ning Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6c PHP/4.2.3 on Linux.

So I’m a Linux guy with­out even know­ing it. Cool.

And speak­ing of Linux, today the NY Times Mag­a­zine has a Q&A with Linus Tor­valds.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Once upon a time, when I was Sun­day mag­a­zine edi­tor of the Sacra­mento Union, San Fran­cisco writer Joan Gonick wrote for me almost every week. Now she’s writ­ing about her brain tumor.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

The press con­tin­ues to probe Gen. Wes Clark’s fit­ness to be president.

The Octo­ber Atlantic Monthly takes a hard look. And in this week’s Newsweek (with Clark as the cover boy), Evan Thomas has a back­grounder on Clark, the Water Walker.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Busi­ness Week Online con­ducts a short news­maker q&a with Howard Rhein­gold. How Will “Smart Mobs” Play Out? Tech trend-spotter Rhein­gold says these fluid, Net/cell-phone com­mu­ni­ties have still-unmet entre­pre­neur­ial promise

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

It’s a lit­tle strange to go to your email in-box and see emails from well-known celebrities.

In this case, it wasn’t a hoax. I’ve got­ten emails in the past 24 hours (albeit mass mail­ings) from Mar­tin Sheen and Rob Reiner, both ask­ing for con­tri­bu­tions to Howard Dean’s cam­paign. (I’ve opted in to receive Dean mailings.)

I don’t for a minute think that Sheen or Reiner com­posed their emails (it was undoubt­edly a Dean staffer), but they did lend their names and sup­port to the fund-raising effort.

Now let’s see if Michael Moore comes out with a fund-raising email for Gen. Wes­ley Clark.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Last week­end I reported on the weird stuff hap­pen­ing with my Mov­able­Type archives. When­ever I rebuild my 7-month-old site, it adds 230 megabytes to my ISP’s servers. This is a bit of a prob­lem, because I’m allowed only 200 megabytes total for my web­site and my blog. And it’s strange because I have cre­ated less than 4 megabytes of data on this blog.

It hap­pened again yes­ter­day when I rebuilt my site (which includes indi­vid­ual archiv­ing). So for the sec­ond time this week, I maxed out my stor­age limit, and Dreamhost cut off my email. (It’s still down.)

So this will be a tech-heavy week­end. I’ll be mov­ing my blog to Type­Pad, with a bit of a redesign, a new url, and all that jazz. And I’ll be chang­ing host­ing ser­vices because I can’t deal with the eight to 10-hour lag time of Dreamhost cus­tomer sup­port (with no live chat and no phone sup­port), even though I’m only halfway through a year­long ser­vice agree­ment that I paid up front. Frus­trat­ing, to say the least.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Salon: We were both pro­fes­sion­als. Now I’m sweep­ing up pop­corn, my hus­band is sell­ing motor­cy­cles, and our house is on the block. There are a lot of us these days.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post