A catchy theme: Let's misbehave
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After a year of Men Behaving Badly (and one too-fast-to-be-true woman), Spygate barely made the list of most notable transgressions in sports. Compared with serial dopers, point shavers, dog killers, vandals, sexual harassers, and stripper-slammers, the Patriots' playing at Candid Camera was a mere naughty-naughty.
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Readers remark on cyber mugging, tree hugging, and de-bugging. Plus: Links to our most popular blog posts.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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AMHERST -- Sometimes we get a bit too cute in this business. We occasionally fall into the trap of ignoring the obvious. But this will not be one of those occasions.
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You know that annoying tune  that you can't place or get out of your head?
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Human error is the offered explanation, but bloggers are joyously pairing "M.P.A.A." with âbogus,â âbotched,â âgrossly inflatedâ and âlying.".
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How Fools can capitalize on the current interest rate environment.
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One indicator can steer you away from small-cap shenanigans.
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Tycho:   One of the questions during a a panel at PAX had to do with the italicised line at the end of each day's post.  They're almost always song lyrics, and back before we were paying for bandwidth (and before RIAA rape gangs were prowling the web) these lines used to link directly to the MP3.  I maintained the practice afterward because it's sort of like a song of the day, and I like the idea that someone might be struck by a strange turn of phrase and seek out a piece of music.  It also serves as a gauge of my mental state at the moment.  Today's song, for example, is Stan Rodgers' incredible live version of the sea shanty "Rolling Down To Old Maui," which Pandora kicked out after about a week of tuning the station.  I've listened to it about thirty times today.    The person who asked the question at the con complimented my musical tastes, and I accepted the compliment, but I'm almost always late to the scene.  I just bought Interpol's "Turn On The Bright Lights," for chrissakes.  I'm mostly lucky to know people who do have unique library.  I told him I would mention a few of my favorite bands on the site, but then I forgot.  Essentially, it's music that cool people were listening to a decade ago (where applicable).  I am a musical carrion bird.    He wanted me to list off a few bands, and I said I would last week, but then I forgot.  These are the first ten albums I could think of.    "Starless" by Shiner
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SINGAPORE (Reuters Life!) - You know that annoying tune  that you can't place or get out of your head?
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We all have a string of ''F''s on our records, whether we acknowledge them or not.
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A few "harmless habits" can rob you of buckets of cash over time. Here's how to win back your money ... and sanity.
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Sometimes, it pays to be a looky-loo.
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Please quote me on this Stob There's another of those lists of supposedly amusing/sage/cute adagesÂ going around, bouncing from blog to email, accumulating fresh contributions and occasional edits and doing all the meme-ish things that memes do. This one differs from all the others that you have deleted irritably from your email inbox in that it includes a contribution taken from this very column.â¦
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All right, look, we&#39;ve got a year  and a half to the election, right? So let&#39;s cut to the chase,  forget about the issues these clowns are going to be avoiding  anyway, and get down to what really matters: the campaign song.
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Opera CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie gives us a video tour of his OLPC prototype. Can you guess which browser it's running? In Monkey Bites. In Monkey Bites.
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F-bombs away! Fans of open-mic celebrity blunders rejoice!â¦