A portable toilet for Bob Dylan's hired help [paging William Zantzinger!] at his southern California compound is stinking up the oceanside neighborhood, and the folks across the street say they regularly fall ill from the stench.

Malibu homeowners Cindy and David Emminger said this morning that they have tried to contact the larger-than-life folk-rock icon about the smell, but they have had no success. The Emmingers said they also failed to get relief from the city or the company that owns the toilet.

The stink is so bad, Cindy Emminger said, that the couple and their 8-year-old son have had to move to the basement to flee the two-year-old smell. She said the odor is not from bodily waste but is "a really strong chemical smell" coming from the toilet.

She said she and her son have thrown up and suffered burning eyes and severe headaches as a result. Her husband has dodged symptoms so far, she said.

"I thought it was a scam"

A middle-aged New Hampshire woman is baffled to be accused of downloading songs like Jigga My Nigga using BearShare, and she ignored a host of court papers because she thought they were some kind of scam. That decision nearly cost her a massive amount of money.

By Nate Anderson | Last updated March 16, 2009 10:34 AM CT

Though the RIAA says it has stopped its large-scale litigation strategy against suspected file-swappers, the music trade group has decided that it will continue those cases that were already in process before last winter. When put this way, the whole process sounds antiseptic and rather boring, but it continues to affect real people like middle-aged New Hampshire woman Mavis Roy, who was baffled when the music labels accused her of sharing songs like Real Niggaz, Jigga My Nigga, and Da Rockwilder using BearShare. Unable to afford a lawyer, Roy was confused by the legal documents she received.

"I thought it was a scam and I was being pressured to send them money for something I have never done," she eventually wrote the court in a letter.

The case was brought early in 2008. Roy was served with papers; she never responded. Within a few months, she was in default in a federal court case, and all that remained was for the judge to agree with the labels on how much money Roy would pay.

Fortunately for Roy, at this point she replied. She personally wrote the court a letter, explaining that she had not understood the notices, thought they were some kind of scam, and could not afford a lawyer to look into them. "I have never downloaded nor do I even know where to go to download," she wrote. "I feel they should have to show me something that proves this was done by me." She didn't know what to do next.

From slashdot:

Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming
from the bandwidth-available-but-not-to-you dept.

rsk writes "For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis."

Price for Closure of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp by 12/09

Scooter Libby pardon (Well, scratch that!)

Caroline Kennedy to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat

Some other pertinent sites and stories:

• politico's list of 10 Bush pardons to watch for
• Making His List: Presidential Pardons and Torture
• Last day for Bush to issue pardons, commutations

What a delightful ring "IP Enforcement Coordinator" has to it, eh? It brings to mind stuffed teddy bears and picnics in the park with old friends.

Our pals at idolator, along with cnet, have the lowdown on "a new piece of RIAA-backed legislation... heading through Congress [that] would create an office within the White House for someone called the 'IP Enforcement Coordinator.'" It could happen very quickly.

Yikes!

Re: Intellectual property: Isn't it time for Mickey Mouse and Scrabble and Meet the Beatles to hit the public domain? They're all at least 45 years old, and Mickey is 80, for crying out loud. I don't know what a good number for the amount of time something is protected by copyright should be -- 5 years? 10 years? 25 years? -- but 45 to 80 is absurd.

From idolator: "The American Library Association was less excited, stating 'There is absolutely no reason for the federal government to assume this private enforcement role.'"

Is this an opportunity for somebody? I want a hemi-terabyte model, and they'd been getting bigger and bigger. But now they got smaller, and one size fits all.

Our good friends at dvice capture it pretty well:

Apple discontinues 160GB iPod Classic, new model holds only 120GB… WTF?

What just happened? Apple's iPod Classic — the one that looks the most like the original — used to come in two sizes: 80GB and 160GB. Today Apple upgraded the smaller model to 120GB ($249) but discontinued the larger one? Huh?

Have we reached the upper limit of how much space someone's music collection can possibly take up? That's doubtful, and in any case, we could use more room for storing our songs in lossless format, thanks very much. Why no 240GB version, Apple? Then you'd still be the big dog, and we'd still be on our way to a 1TB iPod. Stop trampling on my dreams!

Apple also introduced Genius, a new feature that automatically creates playlists from songs in your library, based on user preferences about which songs go great together. Additionally, you can synchronize your Genius playlists with Apple's own iTunes 8 servers, which will then analyze and combine your information with other users' Genius playlists. iTunes 8 will handle your Genius playlists anonymously. The master plan is simply to use this feature in order to come up with targeted buying recommendations for you, based on a large database of Genius playlists.

When they decide in a couple of weeks that Palin is ready to do so, she'll go and sit down with Brit Hume or Larry King or Charlie Gibson or some other pleasant, accommodating person who plays a journalist on TV and have a nice, amiable, entertaining chat about topics that are easily anticipated.

Palin's handlers initially had suggested it would be a while before she did interviews. Now, there will be several.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will speak at her son’s Army deployment ceremony on 9/11 and spend two days with ABC News crews later this week as part of a McCain campaign plan to increase Americans’ comfort with her as a leader.

Campaign and network officials had said on Sunday that her first television interview would be a sit-down with Charles Gibson of ABC’s “World News.” But it turns out that she is spending much of Thursday and Friday with Gibson — at the ceremony in Fairbanks, Alaska, and at her home in Wasilla, Alaska.

It happens to all Netflix subscribers eventually. Your buddy the film buff drags you to a revival of Antonioni's L'Avventura. To your surprise, you find yourself rapt. Upon returning home, you log in to your Netflix account and move La Notte, the second film in Antonioni's ennui trilogy, to the top of your queue. It arrives a few days later, just as L'Avventura's spell is starting to wear off. You watch Anchorman instead. You totally still want to see La Notte… but now you've mailed Anchorman back and here is Ghost Rider—starring Nic Cage! La Notte can wait. And it does. For weeks. You're never quite in the mood to watch it, but you can't quite bring yourself to return it, either.

More than 1,000 of you sent in e-mails confessing to having sat for days, weeks, months, and even years on everything from All About Eve to Z, the Oscar-winning French drama starring Yves Montand. Renee from North Carolina has conceived and carried a child to term in the time since Fracture, the Anthony Hopkins thriller, arrived in its red envelope. ("I'm sure it's very good, I really want to watch it," she writes.) But the movie you had the most trouble actually watching is....

Criticizing the McCain campaign for refusing to allow reporters to question Sarah Palin, Time's Jay Carney writes:

Political operatives love to talk about circumventing the media and other co-called "elites" -- i.e., independent specialists, observers and thinkers. The operatives convince themselves they can take their candidate's message directly to the people -- on their terms, without all that poking and prodding and skepticism. That's propaganda. In a democratic society, it rarely works for long.

If only that were true. But if there's one indisputable lesson from the last eight years, it's that political propaganda works exceedingly well -- not despite an aggressively adversarial press but precisely because we don't have one....

Of course Carney is right in theory that anyone running for Vice President ought to submit to questioning from the media. But the idea that her doing so will be some great blow against propaganda is wrong for numerous reasons. Who are these great, aggressive journalists who are going to question her in a meaningfully adversarial way in order to expose the falsehoods behind the image that is being created around her?

When they decide in a couple of weeks that Palin is ready to do so, she'll go and sit down with Brit Hume or Larry King or Charlie Gibson or some other pleasant, accommodating person who plays a journalist on TV and have a nice, amiable, entertaining chat about topics that are easily anticipated. Having been preceded by all sorts of campaign drama about her first interview and the excitement that she's not up to the task, her TV appearance will be widely touted, score big ratings, and will be nice entertainment for the network that presents it. It will achieve many things. Undermining propaganda isn't one of them.

This idea that she's some sort of fragile, know-nothing amateur who is going to quiver and collapse when subjected to the rough and tumble world of American journalism is painfully ludicrous, given that -- as the Canonization of the endlessly malleable Tim Russert demonstrated -- that imagery is a fantasy journalists maintain about themselves but it hardly exists. The standard journalistic model of "balance" means that the TV journalist asks a few questions, lets the interviewee answer, and then moves on without commenting on or pointing out false claims, i.e., without exposing propaganda (Carney can check his own magazine to see how that sad, propaganda-boosting process works -- here, here, and here). Few things are easier than submitting to those sorts of televised rituals.