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You know, I’m not sure that you can. The more I dig into this, the less I think so. Or at least, not without a whole heck of a lot more work.

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Do I own it, or what?

By: Tateru Nino

Dear Australian judiciary,

If I were to buy a cement mixer, I could turn it into an artwork. I could modify it to act as a washing machine, if I wanted.

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Hijack hijinks

By: Tateru Nino

An emerald If you’re a user of the Emerald viewer, your computer was recently hijacked (along with half-a-million or so of your fellow Emerald users) to attack a Web-site on the Internet.

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Stop that game!

By: Tateru Nino

Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video-game following the fictional story of a man of Sicilian descent who joins an Italian crime family in the period around 1950, a time when Italian crime families were near the height of their power and influence. It’s a familiar theme, having been portrayed in books, games, movies and television for decades.

UNICO National, the largest Italian American service organisation in the USA who have never seen or played the game, nor apparently been in contact with anyone who has (because at the time of their complaint, it had not been released) are calling it “a pile of racist nonsense” and demanding that the game not be released until all Italians and Italian-Americans are removed from it.

It strikes me that this would result in a rather substandard story.

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While I think of it, there are a couple of interesting quirks to copyright assignment agreements under USA law.

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A few weeks ago, I was walking the couple of kilometres from home to the mechanic to collect the car. On the way, I wound up walking for a short ways behind a couple of teenage high-school girls, maybe 13, if I’m any judge of these things. One was telling the other about how to trade pornography online without being tripped up by filtering software or school administrators checking network logs.

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Being that we’ve just hit the anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, I’m once again led to wonder why Linden Lab fails to handle important discussions in text, rather than voice.

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In recent years, the term ‘piracy’ has come to be applied to the unauthorized copying of music, movies and computer software. Oodles of sales are lost, we’re told, because of this kind of piracy.

That’s the third kind of piracy. Traditionally, there are two other kinds. The first, of course, is the ocean-going sort, but it’s the second kind of piracy that makes all the others pale into insignificance.

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Nick Ross at ABC’s “The Drum” has this to say on the Australian Mandatory Internet Filter:

“Championed by Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, the $30million+ filter is being sold by Labor as an internet block for child pornography, bestiality and extreme pornography with ‘wide ranging support from the Australian public’ and ‘only minimal opposition against’.

But after a new, lengthy investigation it transpires that virtually none of this is true.”

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