From TheWrap.com: Feds Join Hands With H’wood in Anti-Piracy Initiative

From the article: “The launch of ‘Operation in Our Sites,’ a new U.S. initiative aimed at internet counterfeiting and piracy, was announced on Wednesday. But what makes this initiative different is that it partners law-enforcement officials with representatives of the entertainment industry.”

Great. Largest deficits in history, and your tax dollars are being spent to help the rich corporations in what is essentially a civil matter. Gotta love the government…even Joe Biden is in the MPAA’s pocket.

Looks like AOL is rejecting the Digest (or at least the most recent issue) across-the-board; if you are an AOL subscriber and received Vol. 2010 #114, let me know, please.

In the meantime, please complain to them, not to me…there isn’t anything I can do about it at this point. No other system seems to cause as much trouble as AOL…

My wife and I both got new cell phones, almost on the same day. And this has caused all kinds of issues in the household, primarily divided into two groups of problems: the first, unfamiliarity with the new gizmos, and the second, a determination among various manufacturers to make absolutely certain it ain’t easy to transfer personal information like contact lists.

My old phone was a Sony Ericsson Z520a, a great little phone, but a little constricting when trying to make to-do lists, memos, and the like on-the-road…so I bought an LG Cookie (over on the left) at a great price; it’s a touch-screen phone that accepts java applications (so I’m not locked into someone else’s idea of what I can run on my own phone) and so far I kinda like it…it’s everything a modern phone should be (which tends to mean about everything except a telephone), and even handles importing vCard-format contacts, which I should have been able to get out of my old phone, but for some reason couldn’t. So I wasted a whole lot of time manually sending the contacts one-at-a-time from the SE to the LG via bluetooth. Once on the LG, editing was relatively easy what with the various input methods including phone keypad, QWERTY keyboard, and even handwriting-recognition (although there’s no programmer in the world good enough to program a device to recognize my writing!). Using down-time, I was able to get my contact list looking pretty good.
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Not sure quite why, and it is not all AOL addresses that are bouncing, but each recent issue had a subset of addresses that are bouncing with a hard (500-level) error. The error message implies the problem is with the recipient address, but it wouldn’t be the first time an AOL misconfiguration caused the error message to be wrong.

Not sure what to do other than monitor the situation, since the error is definitely in the AOL servers, not the Digest server. But in the meantime, if you’re not receiving issues and AOL is having trouble getting mail to me, feel free to use the Contact the Webmaster button over on the sidebar to get ahold of me. (Hum…I should change that to “Contact the Curmudgeon…”)

From The New York Times: Amish Farming Draws Rare Government Scrutiny

From the article: “…Farmers…are facing growing scrutiny for agricultural practices that the federal government sees as environmentally destructive. Their cows generate heaps of manure that easily washes into streams and flows onward into the Chesapeake Bay.”

From The Paid Death Notices at the New York Times: HIMAN BROWN Paid Death Notice

From the paid death notice: “(He) died peacefully at his home in Manhattan on Friday June 4th 2010 at 8:13pm.”

Much thanks to Doug Douglass for posting the info to the OTR Digest.

From The New York Times: Google to Give Governments Street View Data

From the article: “Google is bowing to the demands of four European governments and says it will begin surrendering the data it improperly collected over unsecured wireless networks.”

English translation: “All your data are belong to us.”