The Police @ The Staples Center - 6/20/07

After a twenty four year hiatus, the gentlemen of The Police brought forth their inimitably singular sound, serenading a record-breaking crowd at the Staples Center last night with over 20,000 people in attendance.

Sting, looking like a buff and affable Malcolm Mcdowell, was not the egomaniac many expected to see on stage. Rather, he was vital and focused and seemed at ease. Andy, transfixed and charmingly intent, didn't smile at all, but Stewie, with his gloves and jingly chimes, beamed from ear to shining ear.

Their performance was nothing like the comedy of errors Copeland described on his blog. Minus a few minor timing issues, the boys sounded like...boys. Not like old men. Not like a cruise ship flashback act. They sounded like The Police. There were a few moments that bordered on jammy, but largely they played true to form. A brilliant concert....well done......

...this is a picture of Jennifer Aniston taking a picture. I know, major excitement.

SETLIST / The Police @ The Staples Center - 6/20/07
Message In A Bottle
Synchronicity II
Walking on the Moon
Voices Inside My Head
Don't Stand So Close
Driven to Tears
The Bed Is Too Big
Truth Hits Everybody
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Wrapped Around Your Finger
De Do Do Do De Da Da Da
Invisible Sun
Walking In Your Footsteps
Can't Stand Losing You
Roxanne
King of Pain
So Lonely
Every Breath You Take
Next To You

Photos by Lisa Brenner

The Best Current Music Artists

My tastes in music are varied. Tastes vary from Dance/Techno to Rock to Classical. The genre of particular interest these days contains artists usually dropped in the "alternative" category (whatever that means). Strangely, these artists are currently all receiving a lot of air-time and chart success.

Here are my favourite 'alternative' artists (alphabetical):
The All-American Rejects
Black Eyed Peas
Blink-182
Bowling for Soup
Coldplay
The Dandy Warhols
Death Cab for Cutie
Duncan Sheik
Fall Out Boy
Foo Fighters
Goo Goo Dolls
Green Day
I-94
Jesse McCartney
Keane
The Killers
Lilly Allen
My Chemical Romance
Relient k
Rihanna
Robbie Williams
Ryan Cabrera
Sean Paul
Semisonic
Snow Patrol
Sugarcult
The Vines
Yellowcard
The Idan Raichel Project

iTunes cracked

The current (?) version of iTunes, 7.1.1 has been cracked by the QTFairUse6 project. Now is the time to uncripple your purchased iTunes tracks (especially those brutally expensive, hard-to-rip audiobooks) before Apple spends more engineering dollars to punish you for wanting to "think different," "switch" and otherwise enjoy the stuff you bought from them. Link (via Digg)

Update: Note that this crack is only for Windows -- Mac users are still punished for buying from Apple.

Interactive copyright navigator

Cory Doctorow:
Here is a cool interactive Copyright Navigator that goes through the fundamentals of U.S. Copyright Law." This is a pretty intuitive way fo exploring what copyright does and doesn't do. Link (Thanks, Sarahfenix!)

FBI and MPAA train Swedish copyright cops

The MPAA and the FBI have gone to Sweden to train six cops in the art of fighting copyright infringement. Sweden is home to the Bittorrent tracker PirateBay, and is the birthplace of the Pirate Party, an international political movement dedicated to destroying the entertainment industry. The Pirate Party arose in the wake of a raid on the PirateBay's ISP, instigated by a Member of Parliament. The MP acted illegally in ordering the raid, and he did so at the behest of the MPAA and the US State Department.

This US meddling in domestic affairs so outraged Swedes that they sided with the Pirate Party in great numbers, throwing their lot in with local rogues in favor of American bullies.

Apparently, the MPAA hasn't learned its lesson: when you intervene in local politics in Europe, locals see you as an evil representative of American hegemony. It's like they want the pirates to win!

In an effort to help stamp out pesky Swedish pirates, FBI agent Andrew Myers and the MPAA have given a group of six Swedish police officers extensive training on how to effectively combat piracy and catch people who engage in illegal downloading from the internet...

Together, Agent Myers and the MPAA's instruction to this new Swedish anti-piracy unit ranged from rules and regulations governing copyright enforcement and piracy, to examples of anti-piracy initiatives in other countries that have already proven effective. The most shocking revelation is a report of a lecture given by the MPAA in which officers were shown the ins and outs of movie camcording, or "CAM-ing."

When the police were asked about possible conflict of interest by having a private interest group such as the MPAA involved in the training of enforcement personnel, they apparently saw none.

credit Cory Doctorow

Democracy Player gets even better

Democracy Player, the killer free Internet TV app, is edging closer to 1.0. The new version fixes a ton of little bugs and cleans up the UI even more. Democracy is like iTunes for Internet TV, without the DRM. Just tell it what channels you like (or pick from a huge menu, or your favorite YouTube or Google Video keywords) and it will download a steady stream of programming with BitTorrent. Democracy uses VLC to play back video, so it doesn't matter whether you're trying to view a QuickTime, WMV, or plain MPEG (or DivX, or FLV, or whatever...) -- it just works. And because Democracy has BitTorrent built it, it's cheap and easy to publish your own Democracy channel -- the more popular your channel gets, the cheaper it is to serve and the faster your fans get your video.

Democracy runs with equal ease on Linux, MacOS and Windows. It's solid, easy to use, and free. (Democracy also has a new Ubuntu repository for fetching binaries of the latest versions)

Refined interface. simpler, smoother, easier to use.

Share menu. New ’share’ menu on each item lets you email a video or post to Video Bomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit...

Pause / Resume downloads. Long awaited! You can now pause and resume any download or all downloads.

Better BitTorrent support. BitTorrent performance is significantly improved.

Financial Times poll on DRM

This is a link to a poll currently taken at the Financial Times of London. It simply asks, 'Should music companies drop DRM?'" Link