The RIAA and MPAA can afford their own lawyers

Should ordinary Americans face jail time for attempted copyright infringement? Should your tax dollars do the enforcement work of Hollywood and the music industry?

Looks like we will soon have a "War on Copyright Infringement," allowing authorities to bypass the usual processes of getting warrants for surveillance, etc. Penalties include seizure of property and mandatory jail time.

While I do support copyright law, I do not believe any crime is so heinous that it should be excluded from the normal processes of our legal system and oversight by our regulatory bodies that exist to prevent abuse.

I've just written to Congress about this proposal using the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Action Center. You can do so as well here.

TECHNOR

Thursday, June 7, Design Within Reach will be displaying this lamp in their NorthWestern Light Design Competition. Thanks, DWR, and all hail TECHNOR!

Gunzip and "untar"

Sick of downloading filename.tar.gz and having to deal with it?

In my .cshrc file I put (with no line breaks):

alias guntar 'gunzip -c \!* | tar -xvf -;/usr/bin/rm \!*'

Then at the csh prompt I can just do:

$ guntar filename.tar.gz

Thanks Harvey!

N.B: the last bit, ;/usr/bin/rm \!*, deletes the original *.tar.gz file.

Far afield

George has been traveling for quite a while now. Tales and pictures for your review include such items as:

• "Right at ten o'clock the power went out to the whole town. It does it every night."
• "pink water buffalo"
• "Thai tattoo"
• "My room was fairly simple and a little bit dark, but it was on a raft of the River Kwai."