We live in a great country. I wouldn’t want to live, work and raise a family anywhere else. For all of the greatness in the United States, there are flaws. Currently our political system has many. If you haven’t watched Lawrence Lessig’s “Corruption” presentation, please, please, please check it out. You will be pleasantly surprised by the message. His response to what he sees as one of the large problems is this new group: Change Congress. I feel that calling your Congress critter and recommending that they join these pledges is the most important thing that you could do to enact change for the good in th United States right now. Please call, write, or go a knocking, and let your representatives know how they should represent you.

Everex’s TC2502 gPC is the first mass-market $200 desktop computer, featuring a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux and headed for selected Wal-Mart stores.

$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart

Originally from Wired Top Stories

Last week, we wrote about how the big studios, along with some smaller user-generated content sites had put together a bunch of meaningless guidelines for how “user generated content” sites should deal with content that might be unauthorized. The backers of the guidelines insisted that any site that followed the guidelines wouldn’t then get sued over copyright issues. Of course, it seemed a little silly because agreeing to the principles meant giving up the right to do things that were perfectly legal and that a company might find reasonable to grow their business. It also wasn’t a particular balanced document, since it only gave lip service to “fair use.” Apparently to compensate for that, the EFF has come out with its own Fair Use Principles for user-generated content sites that will surely be almost entirely ignored by the studios. While it does help the EFF make the point that fair use is important, but neglected, in the original, it’s unlikely that too many people will notice or care. The studios aren’t interested in anything fair here. Note how ironic it is that a set of principles for a user-generated content site wasn’t developed in the open at all, but passed down as if on stone tablets. This isn’t about a balanced document, it’s about tilting the table in the studios’ favor.

EFF Wants To Tack ‘Fair Use Principles’ Onto Studios’ Content Guidelines

Originally from Techdirt by Mike Masnick