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(Americans for Safe Access) Policing pot in Colorado is about to get a lot more complicated. The kick-in-the-door raids SWAT teams have long employed could now cost cities hundreds of thousands of dollars following two landmark court decisions upholding the state's constitutional protection of medical marijuana. Under the rulings, police departments are required to return any marijuana and paraphernalia taken from state-sanctioned growers, and can be sued by those growers if the crops aren't preserved.

The largest case thus far involves Kevin Dickes, who intends to sue the Denver suburb of Aurora for over $360,000 in pot damages. It comes less than a month after a judge ordered the return of an estimated $200,000 of medical marijuana to a couple in Fort Collins.

Dickes, a 38-year-old Desert Shield Marine who suffers from debilitating pain after catching grenade shrapnel in the Gulf, says he was treated worse by Colorado police than by anyone in Iraq. In April, 2007 officers raided his home after receiving a tip from a neighbor and, according to his lawyer Robert J. Corry Jr., threw the disabled veteran to the ground, held him at gunpoint and ransacked his home. They found 71 marijuana plants, at least 65 of which they confiscated illegally, and they charged Dickes with felony cultivation. After eight months of legal wrangling, the Arapahoe County district attorney dismissed the charges, determining that Dickes was in fact a certified grower. But, by then, his plants were long dead.

Read more:
http://www.safeaccessnow.org/article.php?id=5387

(Computerworld) -- Scientists in the U.S. and Japan have successfully used a monkey's brain activity to control a humanoid robot -- over the Internet.

This research may only be a few years away from helping paralyzed people walk again by enabling them to use their thoughts to control exoskeletons attached to their bodies, according to Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University and lead researcher on the project.

"This is an attempt to restore mobility to people," said Nicolelis. "We had the animal trained to walk on a treadmill. As it walked, we recorded its brain activity that generated its locomotion pattern. As the animal was walking and slowing down and changing his pattern, his brain activity was driving a robot in Japan in real time."

Nicolelis said he has been working on this research project for 10 years.

A year ago, doctors implanted 64 electrodes and a computer chip into the brains of two rhesus monkeys. Then last Thursday, the group was ready to start recording electrical signals from 200 of the animal's brain cells as it walked on a treadmill.

Those signals were transmitted over the Internet to scientists at the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, where researchers fed the information into a humanoid robot that immediately began to respond to the monkey's brain activity -- walking at the same pace, slowing down when the monkey slowed, and changing its walking pattern to exactly match the animal's.

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From ZDNet: "Google and Matsushita's Panasonic unit are jointly developing televisions that display Internet content such as photos and videos.

The TVs, to be launched this spring, will allow users to directly browse and access videos from YouTube, a video-sharing Web site owned by Google, and view Picasa Web Albums, a free online photo-sharing service from Google, Panasonic said in a statement on Monday.

"Panasonic's cooperation with YouTube and Google's Picasa Web Albums exemplifies our commitment to leading the natural evolution of the Internet and extending it to the high-definition television," Panasonic Consumer Electronics Vice President Merwan Mereby said in the statement.

Late last year, Matsushita, the world's top plasma TV maker, said it would take control of a liquid crystal display joint venture and may build a new factory, marking a major shift in its strategy for the flat-panel TV market.

Matsushita has until now invested aggressively in plasma displays in the belief that it was the most cost-effective technology for flat TVs bigger than 37 inches, while procuring LCD panels to make TVs for the smaller sets."

For more info: Bijou Theatre Calendar (March 2008)

(Computerworld) -- The attorney for a woman recently ordered by a Minnesota jury to pay $222,000 in damages for violating music copyrights said Thursday he is asking the judge hearing the case to consider reducing the amount to about $150.

"We are asking the judge to go below the statutory guidelines, though the government says you can't," said Brian Toder, attorney for Jammie Thomas, in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). He hopes to convince the judge to apply a punitive damage standard in arriving at a lower final number, instead of the statutory damage standard that has been applied in the case, he said.

In its lawsuit, the RIAA claimed that Thomas had illegally shared 1,702 songs belonging to six music labels over the Kazaa file-sharing network. The case itself focused on a representative sample of 24 of those songs. After a four-day trial in October, a federal jury in Duluth, Minn., decided Thomas should pay the six music labels $220,000, or $9,250 for each of the 24 songs that were the focus of the case. Under the law, she faced damages ranging from a statutory minimum of $750 per infringement to $150,000 per infringement for willful violations.

Thomas filed a post-trial motion asking for the jury award to be slashed, or to have a new trial. She argued that the jury award was far in excess of any actual damages the music labels might have suffered and therefore was unconstitutionally excessive. Thomas argued that since the music labels made just around 70 cents per song, even the minimum statutory damages of $750 were excessive.

I recently had a heated debate with two colleagues of mine about the proliferation of human knowledge on a scale previously unknown to mankind. Yes, I'm talking about the Digital Revolution. My argument is that ignorance should eventually become looked down upon, and that the pusuit of knowledge will be an expectation and responsibility. My counter-parts argued that I come from a privileged background and cannot perceive the depth of the education problems in poorer environments. OK, soooooo Africa? Well, thanks to ongoing programs such as the $100 laptop program, that excuse will soon disappear.

The release of vast amounts of course content from MIT, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, FREE to EVERYONE with an internet connection and internet device is another such service to humanity that will render ignorance either obsolete or offensive.

(Computerworld) -- "MIT has put its entire curriculum of 1,800 undergraduate and graduate courses online, making the courses available for free to any user with an Internet connection and a Web browser.

First announced in 2001, MIT's OpenCourseWare includes syllabuses, homework assignments, exams, reference materials and video lectures when available. The information is published under an open license that allows for reuse, distribution and modification of the materials for noncommercial purposes, said OCW spokesman Steve Carson.

The most recent funding request by Bush would bring the total Iraq war expenditures to $611 billion. Boston.com got to wondering what exactly $611 billion could buy, and it's pretty amazing to see the kinds of afflictions that could have been addressed by diverting funds away from the war and to more pertinent and popular avenues.

The most interesting purchase is a buyout on world poverty. The World Bank estimates that "$54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth. At the upper range of those estimates, the $611 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world's poor for seven years."

Read more:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/gallery/251007war_costs/

From TheSeminal.com:

"I can see the writing on the wall. The album is dying.

Highly successful artists have started abandoning albums as a way to make money. They are now giving away their music for free. Instead of selling albums, they are concentrating on building their fan bases, putting out quality art, and making their bread through touring and merchandising.

First, Prince decided to give away his latest album Planet Earth in copies of the British tabloid The Mail this past summer. Predictably, the record industry was scared, with music retailers launching lawsuits and investigations and pulling Prince’s other records from the shelves.

Next, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails urged fans to steal his albums, saying, “If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, [and] pay $4 through PayPal.”

Finally, Radiohead has told the world that we should pay what we want for their upcoming album In Rainbows. The album will be available as a download and users will really be able to name their price, or even pay nothing at all.

Together, these artists have sold over 55 million albums. They have dozens of top 10 hits to their names. These artists arguably understand the record business better than anyone and they’ve collectively decided that the album isn’t for making money anymore. This isn’t an isolated incident. This is a trend.

(Reuters) -- The head of the Federal Communications Commission declined to investigate reports that phone companies turned over customer records to the National Security Agency, citing national security concerns, according to documents released on Friday.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin turned down a congressional request for an investigation because a top intelligence official concluded it would "pose an unnecessary risk of damage to the national security," according to a letter National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell sent to Martin on Tuesday.

Intelligence officials "support your determination not to initiate an investigation," McConnell wrote to Martin.

At issue are reports last year that some big telephone companies allowed the U.S. government access to millions of telephone records for an antiterrorism program.

Link:
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(IDG News Service) -- Swedish police are expected to decide later this week whether a criminal case is warranted against 10 major music and movie companies over their alleged efforts to disrupt The Pirate Bay, one of the largest file-sharing search engines.

If Swedish police decide to pursue a criminal complaint, the Pirate Bay will be spared the time and expense of pursuing its own civil suit against the companies, Peter Sunde, one of a small circle of volunteers in Sweden that runs the Web site, said on Tuesday.

The Pirate Bay, with an estimated two million daily users, is a search engine for torrents, or small files used to trade content between computers via a peer-to-peer network. Media companies say the site is used mainly to enable the illegal trading of copyright files and have sought its closure.

But the Pirate Bay struck back last Friday, filing a criminal complaint in Sweden against content companies that hired MediaDefender Inc., a company that specializes in disrupting peer-to-peer networks. The Pirate Bay alleges that MediaDefender attacked its operations by distributing fake torrent files and other methods.

It is charging the media companies, which include the Swedish subsidiaries of Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, with infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks and other hacking and spamming offenses, according to its blog.

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