Pac Bell's Internet arm sues music industry over file-sharer IDs:

Pacific Bell Internet Services jumped into the contentious music-downloading fray late Wednesday, filing a lawsuit against the recording industry and questioning the constitutionality of the industry's effort to track down online music sharers.

In a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Internet service provider PBIS, operated by San Antonio-based SBC, alleges that many of the subpoenas served against it by the Recording Industry Association of America were done so

(from Associated Press, via SFgate.com).

Cool Pictures: Stereo Images, Time for Space - 'Experimenting here with a way to present stereo images on the screen by simply putting the right and left images in an animted gif' (from The Well).

The chairman of the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations Thursday began an inquiry into the music industry's crackdown against online music swappers, calling the campaign 'excessive' (from Associated Press, via KansasCity.com).

The Cult of ID - Our strange obsession with driver's license photos. By Christopher Hitchens:

At Oxford, where two rivers meet, there is a private stretch of the bank (or there used to be) called 'Parson's Pleasure.' Since Victorian times, this shaded resort was reserved for male dons who wished to swim and sunbathe in the nude. A barrier prevented any stray punts or boats from interrupting this idyll, and women and girls understood that this retreat was off-limits. One day, however, while the river was higher and faster than usual, a ladies' boating party was swept through the barrier and into the all-male backwater. Shrieks and giggles from the boat, and a sudden, protective downward reaching of the hands on the part of all bathers on the bank. All but one. The late Sir Maurice Bowra, Hellenist and epigrammist, raised his hands to shield his craggy visage. There they all stood or sat until the fair intruders had sailed past, whereupon a general outbreak of sheepishness occurred, punctuated by Bowra saying: 'I don't know about you chaps, but I'm known by my face around here'

(from Slate).

Aha:

The anti-globalization protesters in Montreal badly missed the chance to make their case. While they shouted about the evils of the global economy - "sweatshops," "corporate imperialism," "cultural genocide," and the rest - all of this has been entirely negative.

Instead, they ought to have cited as role models those countries that have completely turned their backs upon the global economy. Two such poster nations for the anti-globalization movement come immediately to mind. North Korea for one. Burma for the other.

Both function entirely outside the global economy, not merely in terms of almost no trade and incoming investment, but equally in terms of no cultural and political contact with the outside world, with foreign publications and broadcasts banned, and with almost no visitors allowed in to contaminate the people.

These two countries, and a few others such as Iraq, while run by Saddam Hussein, and Cuba (in part there because of the U.S. embargo), are as close as it's possible to get to fulfilling the anti-globalizers' dream. Except that everywhere that dream is actually applied, the result is a nightmare of economic backwardness and political repression.

I'm mocking of course. But only to show the complexity of the issue

(from TheStar.com).

US Search Teams Find Buried Iraqi Jets - At least one Cold War-era MiG-25 interceptor was found when searchers saw the tops of its twin tail fins poking up from the sands, said one Pentagon official familiar with the hunt. He said search teams have found several MiG-25s and Su-25 ground attack jets buried at al-Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad (from Associated Press, via Yahoo News).

Pot to Kettle... Come in Kettle... :

'It's looking more and more like a case of mass deception,' Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said after Kay briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee

And, no, Senator Kennedy was not refering to a certain car, a certain bridge and a certain woman. Some Senators confuse incomplete intelligence (btw intelligence is by nature incomplete) with deception (from Associated Press, via Yahoo News).