This outfit is too naughty to be allowed on Southwest Airlines:

Southwest explained its treatment of Ebbert in a letter to her mother, saying it could remove any passenger "whose clothing is lewd, obscene or patently offensive" to ensure the comfort of children and "adults with heightened sensitivities."

They walked out onto the jet bridge, where Keith told Ebbert her clothing was inappropriate and asked her to change. She explained she was flying to Tucson for only a few hours and had brought no luggage. "I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive," she said. "The shirt? The skirt? And he said, 'The whole thing.'

Keith asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.

Dear Lazyweb, is there yet anything better than PearLyrics for getting lyrics into your ID3 tags in bulk?

In case you don't remember, there was this handy program that would display the lyrics of the currently-playing track, and if it didn't have any, would do some searches.

Then, the author got a C+D from Warner and panicked.

Then, in a marketing coup, Warner sent and "apology" for the "tone" of their letter -- but, notably, never told him that he could continue distributing his program. So they got a lot of credulous good press from the bloggoweenies, and still got what they wanted: fewer people having easy access to lyrics.

(Yeah, I'm looking at you, Boing Boing: they didn't change their behavior one whit, and you passed along their insincere press-release apology anyway without ever noting the nakedness of that emperor.)

Anyway.

My copy of PearLyrics seems not to work so well any more, presumably because whatever hardcoded searches are built in to it have gone somewhat stale. Source was never made available, and the author hasn't stopped hiding under his rock.

Is there anything better?

(Yes, I know there are rumors of Apple building this into the iTunes store, but those rumors are two years old, so I'm not holding my breath. Also the current Yahoo offering is worse than useless, which does not bode well for that in any case.)

Music industry attacks Sunday newspaper's free Prince CD

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

One music store executive described the plan as "madness" while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince's label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway "beggars belief". "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. "It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."

(The other hilarity aside... there's a covermount culture?)

Billboard ban in São Paulo angers advertisers

[...which gets my vote for most shocking! headline of the year.]

The law is "a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash," Roberto Pompeu de Toledo, a columnist and author of a history of São Paulo, wrote in the weekly newsmagazine Veja. "For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost."

But advertising and business groups regard the legislation as injurious to society and an affront to their professions. They say that free expression will be inhibited, jobs will be lost and consumers will have less information on which to base purchasing decisions. They also argue that streets will be less safe at night with the loss of lighting from outdoor advertising.

"This is a radical law that damages the rules of a market economy and respect for the rule of law," said Marcel Solimeo, chief economist of the Commercial Association of São Paulo, which has 32,000 members. "We live in a consumer society and the essence of capitalism is the availability of information about products."

"What we are aiming for is a complete change of culture," said Roberto Tripoli, president of the City Council and one of the main sponsors of the legislation. "Yes, some people are going to have to pay a price. But things were out of hand and the population has made it clear it wants this."

Previously.

Watch the Hacking Democracy democracy documentary playing on HBO this month. It's also available for download from Google video.

As documentaries go, it's not great -- they had about 40 minutes of material that they padded out to 80 minutes with long, lingering pans across rows of machines while the music swells -- but the content is important and infuriating.

Please watch this, because I'm constantly amazed at how many of my friends don't understand the problem with electronic voting machines, and don't know what I'm talking about when I bring this up in person. I've been posting links about this ongoing disaster for years, but I guess all of you are just here for the poop jokes.

The Day That Nothing Happened

The Wal-Mart in the basement of my building sells live frogs in a big aquarium, for eating. I don't know what surprised me more when I moved here - the frogs, or the Wal-Mart. [...] In addition to the frogs there are live turtles, plastic bar code tags threaded through little holes in their shells. [...] This being China, any employee handling food inevitably wears a gauze mask and sanitary outfit that gives the deli counter the feel of a level-3 containment facility.

There are two Chinas - a small urban China that is getting richer, and an enormous rural one that remains desperately poor. Imagine cities in the United States surrounded by rural Mexico and you have the dynamic. [...] What makes the situation exceptionally weird is that this is happening in a country that still professes to be Marxist. And the new Chinese capitalism feels like it was introduced by people whose understanding of it came solely from reading Marx: it is ruthless, exploitative, and contains the seeds of its own destruction. The only hitch is that the inevitable finale - proletarian revolution - is supposed to have already happened.

Wal-Mart's Data Center

Behind a fence topped with razor wire just off U.S. Highway 71 is a bunker of a building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won't even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.

Wal-Mart's ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers - and how much more it would like to know.

"We were contacted about two years ago by somebody who runs a security company that had been asked in a request for proposals for ways they could link video footage with customers paying for their purchases," Albrecht said. "Wal-Mart would actually be able to view photos and video of customers paying, say, for a pack of gum."

Today's happy fun news comes from bruce_schneier, wired_27b_6, & so_very_doomed:

• Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Election Machines: Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways. "This one is worse than any of the others I've seen. It's more fundamental." (See also Voting Machines versus Slot Machines.)

• NSA Creating Massive Phone-Call Database: The NSA is collecting a massive traffic-analysis database on Americans' phone calls. This looks like yet another piece of Echelon technology turned against Americans. "The agency's goal is 'to create a database of every call ever made' within the nation's borders." Note that this database does not just contain phone calls that either originate or terminate outside the U.S. This database is mostly domestic calls: calls we all make everyday. AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth are all providing this information to the NSA. Only Quest has refused.

• Fun With Surveilance: It's important to link this up to the broader chain. One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.

• Domestic spying inquiry killed: The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance. "Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation."

• US energy research is declining: Given the decades-long warnings about a looming world energy crisis - punctuated by the recent spike in crude oil prices - you'd assume the U.S. has been ramping up its research and development spending on energy. Think again. Since 1980, energy research has fallen from 10 percent to 2 percent of total R&D spending. And while the Bush administration lists energy research as a "high priority national need" and points to its recent energy bill as evidence, the 2005 federal budget cuts another 11 percent from energy programs.

Have you encountered this "Verified by Visa" bullshit?

Some web sites now have this extra page their foist on you after you have already entered all your credit card info, where before completing the transaction, you have to fill out a second form with your name, email address, CCV, expiry, and a password. "For your protection." And they make it be a hard password, meaning none of my throwaway don't-give-a-shit passwords work.

It says "your card has been enrolled in Verified by Visa -- at no extra charge!" (Emphasis theirs.) Oh thanks ever so fucking much.

The last time I encountered this, I called Visa and asked them to "de-enroll" my card from it, but this time, the monkey on the phone, as well as the monkey's supervisor, said that if the vendor had signed up for it (TicketWeb in this case) that it was not optional.

Is this true? Do I have to switch banks now? Or do they all have a similar program "for my protection"?

The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure

The rise of worktime was unexpected. For nearly a hundred years, hours had been declining. When this decline abruptly ended in the late 1940s, it marked the beginning of a new era in worktime.

Since 1948, the level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in terms of marketed goods and services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We actually could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or, every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work -- with pay.

How did this happen? Why has leisure been such a conspicuous casualty of prosperity?

Elvis has left the building. Now 30,000 impersonators may have to go as well:

A New York businessman has bought the rights to Elvis's name and likeness and has threatened to ban "unauthorised" Elvis clones.

Robert Sillerman, a billionaire media entrepreneur who owns American Idol, paid $114 million last year for an 85 per cent stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises, which is run by the Presley family. He got control of Graceland, the King's home in Memphis, Tennessee, and control of his name and likeness, but not his music.

Of Elvis impersonators, he said ominously: "If we were going to do a show that was based on Elvis impersonators, then obviously it wouldn't make sense to have unauthorised Elvis impersonators."

Impersonators in America believe that it is inevitable that their industry -- which includes dwarf Elvises, Chinese Elvises and African-American Elvises -- is in for a cull.

Matt Lewis, another Elvis impersonator, said that his agents had been studying the legal ramifications of his status since Mr Sillerman acquired the rights. Some impersonators make $300,000 a year, and Mr Lewis acknowledged that he made "six figures" per annum.

"If they tried to stop me I'd figure out a way to keep going," he said. "We would band together. I have this image of old ladies going to underground shows and giving passwords at the door. There would be underground Elvis speakeasies. Honestly."

AT&T Seeks to Hide Spy Docs

In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn't be used as evidence in the case and should be returned. The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.

AT&T built a secret room in its San Francisco switching station that funnels internet traffic data from AT&T Worldnet dialup customers and traffic from AT&T's massive internet backbone to the NSA, according to a statement from Klein.

The company asked for a hearing Thursday to determine whether the documents could be used in the class-action lawsuit, whether they would be unsealed or whether the EFF would have to return them. The EFF filed a rebuttal, calling that time frame unworkable and accusing AT&T of not following normal court rules.

AT&T's lawyers also told the court that intense press coverage surrounding the case, including Wired News' publication of Klein's statement, was revealing the company's trade secrets, "causing grave injury to AT&T." The lawyers argued that unsealing the documents "would cause AT&T great harm and potentially jeopardize AT&T's network, making it vulnerable to hackers, and worse."

"Netscape.com will be revived again by AOL, and will relaunch soon as a Digg-like user-driven news/aggregation site."

"Metreon's shattered dreams"

This is one of the most ghoulish things I've heard about in a while:

She beat odds; dealer won't pay

When M. Smith was diagnosed with cancer and AIDS in the early 1990s, she was given two years to live. That she is still very much alive today is good news - to everyone but the people who bet big on her dying.

Had Smith perished on schedule, Life Partners Inc. would have made $60,000 on a $90,000 wager - a 66 percent return on the investment. Instead, the company that expected to make a profit on Smith's life insurance policy wound up spending $100,000 more keeping her alive.

Now, Life Partners' attempt to wriggle out of the relationship has led to one of the most morbid contract disputes ever filed in New Jersey Superior Court.

This is a pretty badly written article, in that I have a hard time telling who exactly is sueing whom, and on what basis, but I think what's going on is that the company is trying to simply pretend that they never had a contract with this woman in the first place. But the truly horrifying part is that this line of "investment" exists at all!

"They're not a charity. These people win by having her die fast. They were not counting on a revolution in the treatment of AIDS," notes Cohn, of the Cozen O'Connor firm, who took Smith's case for free.

Life Partners' president and General Counsel, Scott Peden, declined comment about the lawsuit - which he said he believes is the first of its kind in the company's 15-year history of helping "thousands of terminally ill patients."

We didn't buy her health insurance. There's no value there, it doesn't benefit us," Peden told me in a brief phone interview Friday.

Kurt told me about this a while ago, but I hadn't read his full write-up of it until now. Wow, isn't TV awesome? VH1 has this horrid show where they go harass former members of 80s bands and try to browbeat them into doing a reunion show for free. They tried that with Information Society, and it... didn't go well:

InSoc vs. TV!

What irritated me throughout this process, but especially when they intruded into my company's building, was that they seemed to be walking in this cloud of unreality about the true nature of what was going on. Somehow they just seemed to think that once everyone realized that "it's for TV! it's for TV!", that suddenly no one would really mind the disruption and lack of respect for real people doing real work to create real content. As though they were just above the hum-drum reality of real people leading real lives, and that they were exempt from all social constraints because it's FOR TV! It offended me. If they wanted to do this, they could have told the truth up front, they could have made a damned appointment, they could have cleared it with my company's management. And god, they lured Paul to Burbank from Topanga telling him they were going to give him WORK! OMG! He has two kids to support, ferchrissakes. Paul didn't seem too upset by it, but I felt outraged for him.

PearLyrics is a program that displays the lyrics of the currently-playing track in iTunes: it gets the lyrics from the ID3 tag in the MP3 file, or if they aren't in there, it searches for them on a few different web sites, and then saves them into the MP3s.

It's very handy: I managed to use it to download the lyrics for almost half of my music collection in one fell swoop.

Except that the author got a "Cease and Desist" letter from Warner/Chappell Music, who seem to think that his program -- which is, basically, nothing more than a specialized web browser -- is somehow in violation of their copyrights.

But, the author doesn't have the time or money to risk a lawsuit, so he panicked and pulled it.

Update: fiyin has a mirror of it and a torrent on his site. There's another mirror at thock.com. And another here. Another list of mirrors here. If you know of more mirrors, please let me know.

Update 2: Some press (which is almost entirely cut-and-paste rephrasery from Pearworks -- a gem of journalism, really): Music giants bear down on lyric search apps.

Update 3: More press, mostly about the attack on the lyrics sites themselves:

"The Xerox machine was the big usurper of our potential income," he said. "But now the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we're taking a more proactive stance."

Update 4: The PearLyrics site now says that Warner/Chappell has "apologized" for the "tone and substance" of their take-down letter. But that means nothing, because the software remains unavailable. Once you can again download PearLyrics from the developer's site, I'll believe that their apology means a damned thing.

US Patent 0030181295: Sexy Pelvic Extension Frame:

"Worst. Fembot. Evar."

[0005] With respect to beauty, while the term "a sexy walk" is part of the common parlance, its definition is analogous to the definition of pornography--"I know it when I see it." Catwalk models are trained to walk in such a way as to exaggerate the motion of the pelvis. There is currently no device that can be used to develop a "sexy walk." By visually amplifying the motions of the pelvis, an individual can be trained to exaggerate the movement of the pelvis and thereby develop a "sexy" walk.

[0006] Accordingly, a device, such as the pelvic extension frame disclosed herein, can provide numerous benefits to athletes in a sport-related venue, to patients in a medicine-related venue and to individuals in a beauty-related venue.

Half a million dollars of Federal tax money used to paint a billboard on a plane!

Salmon-Thirty-Salmon:

A local nonprofit agency, the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, gave Alaska Airlines a $500,000 grant to paint the jet. The money came out of about $29 million in federal funding U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and his congressional colleagues have appropriated to the marketing board, created in 2003, to promote and enhance the value of Alaska seafood. The senator's son, state Sen. Ben Stevens, is chairman of the agency's board of directors.

(Previously. Also.)