Posted without comment.

A man appeared before a Tulsa County judge Thursday on an allegation that he had sex with a horse while he was a student in Oklahoma State University’s veterinary medicine program.

A good piece from Marco Arment about why we shouldn’t hang our hats on SOPA’s demise and how to affect real change with content providers.

So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.

President Obama sings Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo Theatre in New York. Not bad.

A funny video by Eliot Glazer.

(via: kottke.org)

Nilay Patel:

The United States Justice Department filed charges against MegaUpload today, calling the file-sharing service an “international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy.”

[…]

The complaint alleges that MegaUpload, founder Kim Dotcom, and his team are responsible for $175 million in “criminal proceeds” and “more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners.”

I am certainly not pro-piracy, but the notion that pirated content is a direct loss to the content provider is slightly fallacious. That is to say, people who pirate content would generally not purchase in the absence of piracy as a means of procurement. Meaning, if someone steals a $2.99 app or a $15.99 movie, it is questionable to say those are equivalent harms to the copyright owners. There are exceptions, however. For instance, when mobile applications require the use of servers to store and transfer data, pirated versions cause a substantive harm to the owner. The pirated copy is using resources that aren’t reimbursed through the sale of the app.

Nilay also makes another great point that should resonate given the current debate on SOPA. Namely, the U.S. already has actionable laws to respond to these cases.

While SOPA has been tabled for the moment, the MegaUpload case should prove to be a flashpoint for the issue in the months to come: both an example of how large the claimed piracy problem has become and how the US can already enforce its laws with broad international support.

Also of note: in response to the takedown, hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for attacking the websites of the Department of Justice, Universal Music, RIAA, and MPAA.

A disturbing article about femicide in Asia.

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

The article is motivated by an upcoming movie, It’s A Girl.

Laurence Klotz:

At this point, I, and I believe everyone else in the room, was agog. I could scarcely believe what was occurring on stage. But Prof. Brindley was not satisfied. He looked down sceptically at his pants and shook his head with dismay. ‘Unfortunately, this doesn’t display the results clearly enough’. He then summarily dropped his trousers and shorts, revealing a long, thin, clearly erect penis. There was not a sound in the room. Everyone had stopped breathing.

File this under “things I won’t be doing when presenting my Ph.D. dissertation”.

An amazing two-lane traffic simulation from Dr. Martin Treiber.

Who was not yet amazed by traffic jams or stop-and-go waves, seemingly appearing “out of nothing”, without any obvious cause? We investigate these instabilities and other aspects of nonlinear traffic dynamics by developing and simulating mathematical models: Microscopic traffic models describe the motion of each individual vehicle.

[…]

You will see, how the interplay of perturbations and bottlenecks together with a high traffic flow will cause various types of traffic breakdowns.

(via: Ryan May)

Arik Hesseldahl, AllThingsD:

Last year, for the first time since 2001, the U.S. market for personal computers shrank, according to separate research reports issued yesterday by the research firms Gartner and IDC. The year 2011 was, by IDC’s reckoning, the second-worst year in the PC industry’s history.

Sounds gloomy …

So who grew? Apple. It saw its shipments grow by 18 percent in the quarter, according to IDC, and by 21 percent in the Gartner report. As of the end of the year, IDC said, Apple’s share of the U.S. market amounted to 10.7 percent, which is up from 8.8 percent a year ago.

… unless you’re Apple. If everything goes as expected at the Q1 2012 earnings report, Apple will have outpaced the P.C. market for 23 consecutive quarters.

David Kravets, WIRED:

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to clarify on what grounds public schools may punish students for their off-campus online speech.

The justices have not squarely addressed the student-speech issue as it applies to the digital world — one filled with online social-networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others. The issue before the justices tests whether public schools may discipline students who, while off campus, use social-networking sites to mock school officials.

The lower courts have been all over the map on the First Amendment issue because they maintain they have been saddled with a Vietnam War-era high court precedent that predates the internet.

The issue hasn’t been touched in 43 years. A lot has happened in that time.