Hard to believe, but apparently true.

This is from infos-du-net.com:

« Vous allez arrêter de publier vos logiciels. [...] [Nous sommes prêts à] poursuivre les auteurs de logiciels libres continuant de divulguer leur code source [...] ». Vendredi 18 novembre 2005, au ministère de la Culture, la Société des Auteurs Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique a pris tout le monde de court.

La SACEM s'attaquant aux LL (logiciels libres) ? Ce n'est pas une plaisanterie, c'est une réalité soutenue de surcroît pas la SNEP (Syndicat National de l'Edition Phonographique) et SCPP (Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques), autres défenseurs puissants de la musique et des droits d'auteur en France. Mais ou est le rapport entre les douces notes que protègent farouchement ces gardiens de la culture et l'informatique ? La réponse est simplement le vote sur l'amendement "VU/SACEM/BSA/FT Division Contenus" de la loi DADVSI qui fait tant parler d'elle ces dernières semaines.

Anyone out there who can fill in the blanks?

We arrived late Wednesday night.

On Thursday morning we went around the corner from our hotel to have breakfast. It had rained the night before, the skies were cloudy, and there was a cool breeze.

I walked over to Waterloo Station and found that the Underground was closed due to "a power failure". It wasn't until I got back to the hotel that I learned of the bomb attacks, which as it happens were all north of the Thames, on the other side of the river from us.

If you have any interest in what's going on in China beyond the CNN level of China-is-booming-they're-taking-our-jobs, I highly recommend EastSouthWestNorth, a graphically bare-bones but content-rich site filled with local stories of all sorts.

When I watched the Senate Armed Forces Committee question Rumsfeld and the generals the other day, only Kennedy and Byrd were off-topic. Everybody else was onside with the Pentagon: build up the political side, build up the Iraqi defense forces, hold the line in the meantime, and eventually we will see a functioning democracy, a moderate, free Iraq--with perhaps a small, persistent, but manageable insurgency continuing more or less indefinitely. Lots of talk about positive polling in Iraq: the vast majority support US presence, and think that things are getting better. The troops, too, are happy to be there, feel great about the mission, and are appreciated by the vast majority of locals. Insurgents and their supporters constitute 'one-tenth of one percent' of Iraqis. And although Kennedy and Byrd were clearly not buying this, they also were ineffective in putting forward an alternative view.

Why? Because the only alternative is too radical for them.