One June 1, photographers throughout Los Angeles will gather at the Hollywood and Highland Metro Station to peacefully protest against the unnecessary treatment they have received from security guards (particularly the white shirts), LAPD, and LASD while photographing in public places, and on the Metro.

Make signs, T-shirts, and be sure to bring your cameras (still and video). Sign ideas as well as other ideas should be posted here. We need things that will make us stand out as a cohesive group.

Start Time: 11:00am, June 1
Location: Hollywood and Highland, 6801 Hollywood Los Angeles, CA 90028

At about 1:30pm we will board the Metro and travel to Union Station

Start Time: 2:00pm
Location: 800 N Alameda St Los Angeles, CA 90012
Contact: info@discarted.com

Link, Link to Flickr group

See also: Taking pictures on LA's Red Line violates the "9/11 Law"

(Image: Photographing the photographer, a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike photo from Naixn's Flickr stream)

[O]n April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

...

“The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy,” [Salerno's girlfriend Caitlin Cooper] recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. “Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?”

Twelve hours later, when Mr. Salerno was granted a five-minute phone call, he called Ms. Cooper and denied saying anything of the kind. Instead, he said, the asylum story seemed to be retaliation for his insisting on speaking to his embassy.

After being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was taken to the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va., where he ended up in a barracks with 75 other men, including asylum-seekers who told him they had been waiting a year.

California’s Supreme Court ruled 4-3 today that the state may no longer exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage.  In In re Marriage Cases, a consolidation of the cases brought on behalf of 14 same-sex couples as well as the City of San Francisco under the California state constitution, the Court ruled that the marriage ban violates the state’s fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship and the state constitution’s equal protection clause.

According to the controlling opinion:

Our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibility to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.

We conclude that, under this state’s Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity according a union traditionally designated as marriage.

“The court’s decision today upheld the highest ideals of fairness and opportunity that are embodied in the California Constitution,” said Shannon Price Minter, Legal Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who argued the case on behalf of 14 same-sex couples and two organizations, Equality California and Our Family Coalition.

Currently, lesbian and gay couples may legally marry in Massachusetts, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and South Africa. In 2007, an Iowa trial court held that Iowa’s marriage ban violates the Iowa Constitution. That case is now before the Iowa Supreme Court. A lawsuit challenging the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage in Connecticut is also pending before the Connecticut Supreme Court. 

Anticipating this ruling, opponents of same-sex gay marriage are attempting to amend the California Constitution to discriminate against lesbian and gay couples. A group funded by numerous out-of-state interests hopes to qualify an initiative on the November ballot that would ask voters to alter the constitution by denying gay and lesbian couples the freedom to marry, which the court upheld today. The California Secretary of State has not yet determined if the initiative has qualified for the November ballot.

The Max Planck Institute has released a new survey of worldwide BitTorrent traffic finding that Comcast and Cox are the chief offenders for throttling traffic, and that they block at all hours of the day and night.

The study is here:

http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/results/

The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:

“This study is further proof that the largest cable companies are hiding behind ‘network management’ excuses when caught throttling the legitimate traffic of their customers. This study clearly shows there is no blocking at peak usage times, or on certain busy days. The study found the ‘percentage of blocked connections remains high at all times of the day. Our data suggests that the BitTorrent blocking is independent of the time of the day.’

read more

FAA Says Emergency Medical Helicopters Need Safety Improvements:


Three men died last weekend when an emergency medical-services helicopter crashed near Madison, Wis., and this week the FAA responded with an update on its work to address safety concerns about such flights. The NTSB reported on the helicopter emergency medical services fleet in 2006, and asked the FAA to impose stricter requirements on all such operators. "While the FAA has not ruled out proposing new or changing existing rules, the agency has prompted significant short-term safety gains that do not require rulemaking," the FAA said in a statement on Tuesday. The agency said it is focusing on better training for flight crews; encouraging the use of technology such as night-vision goggles, radar altimeters, and terrain awareness and warning systems (though such systems don't work optimally in helicopters, the FAA says); and more detailed, airline-type FAA oversight for operators. "Safety improvements are needed," the FAA said.

Its common side effects are very much in keeping with the world the House Republicans have striven to build: nausea, apathy, constipation, fatigue, vertigo, sexual dysfunction, sweating, memory loss, and - and I swear I am not making this up – “electric shock-like sensations also called ‘brain zaps.’”

Its less common side effects are equally awesome in their appropriateness.

And when the Food And Drug Administration reviewed the ad copy that included the tagline, “The change you deserve,” it took issue with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Effexor, saying that the company made “unsubstantiated superiority claims.” Sounds like the GOP have picked an ironically accurate tagline for their efforts!

Democratic lawmakers were no less gleeful. The Washington Post reports:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) called reporters into his office. “Democrats, not drugs, is what the American people need,” he said. He flashed the Effexor side effects on a large flat-screen television. “Nausea, up to 58 percent,” Hoyer said. “Actually it’s higher than that for Republicans.”

For House Republicans, the diagnosis is obvious: They are suffering from Election Anxiety Disorder.

…. And Hoyer didn’t even mention the warning label, which states that patients should be watched to see if they are “becoming agitated, irritable, hostile, aggressive, impulsive, or restless.”

This is an example of a second-comer’s use doing harm to the second-comer. Rather than free riding, which doesn’t seem to have been the GOP’s intent at all, the slogan can easily be tarred with inappropriate connotations. Reciprocally, though this use is clearly not actionable dilution, it’s easy to see how it could harm the brand—Effexor’s been dragged into a political battle that really has nothing to do with it, and the side effects that provide political ammunition might not seem so funny (or so bad) if one were actually treating depression.

1930: Ellen Church becomes the world's first airline stewardess, working a Boeing Air Transport flight from Oakland, California, to Chicago. The flight takes 20 hours and involves 13 stops along the way.

Church, a registered nurse from Iowa, was so enamored of flying that she became a certified pilot. She approached BAT (the forerunner of United Airlines) looking for a pilot's job, a futile hope for women in those days. But the BAT exec did like Church's other suggestion: that commercial airliners carry nurses on board.

Smelling a publicity coup, and figuring that on-board nurses would help quell the public's fear -- very real at the time -- of flying, he sold her proposal to the boys at the top. BAT hired eight nurses, including Church, for what it thought would be a three-month experiment.

These weren't just any nurses, though.

Even then, there were strict physical requirements for what BAT referred to as "sky girls." In addition to being a registered nurse, the successful candidate had to be single, under 25, no taller than 5-feet-4, and she could weigh no more than 115 pounds. And although it wasn't written down anywhere, the prospective stewardess had to be attractive, at least to the guy doing the hiring.

So they were trim and petite, which did not necessarily suit the rigors of the job. That's because the first stewardesses did a lot more than merely serve passengers, pass out airsick bags or take a pulse now and then. They were expected to haul luggage, screw down loose seats, help with fueling the plane and finally, at day's end, help the pilots push the plane into the hangar.

Glamorous? You bet.

Like a lot of other service jobs, working conditions for stewardesses -- flight attendants in today's parlance -- only improved with their determination to organize and use the power of the union to obtain better pay and benefits.

As for Church, she worked as a stew for 18 months before being grounded as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. She returned to nursing, but her flying days weren't over yet: During World War II, she served as a captain in the Army Nurses Corps, receiving the Air Medal for distinguished service in the European Theater.

After the war, Church continued her nursing career in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was killed in a horseback riding accident in 1965.

The airfield in her hometown of Cresco, Iowa, is named in her honor.

Source: Various

The case in question involves now-deceased rapper The Notorious B.I.G., whose album Ready to Die incorporated an unlicensed sample of "Singing in the Morning" from the Ohio Players after a Hendrix sample was denied clearance. The sample made its way onto the final album and even onto reissued albums. Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records, which control the rights to the song, sued. A district court ruled in their favor; Bridgeport took the $150,000 maximum in statutory damages, while Westbound sought compensatory and punitive damages. Westbound scored big, earning $366,939 from the jury along with punitive damages of a whopping $3.5 million.

In appealing the ruling, Universal argued that the punitive damages award was "grossly excessive and should be vacated or at least reduced." The reason? It's excessive. The brief quotes a Supreme Court ruling that said, "In practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process." Universal pointed out that the award in question was "approximately 10 to 1, far above the line of unconstitutional impropriety."

Link

I don't blog much about the minutae of the cascade of digital music-related lawsuits in part because there are people who obsessively blog these things and I've lost patience with it over the years. One place that hasn't lost patience and generally does a very good job with the details is Recording Industry vs The People.

Yesterday they published an entry that caught my eye because it goes to the heart of something I've been wanting to see for a while: someone is trying to kick the legs out from under the set of suppositions that the RIAA are using to sue the pants off everyone and anyone.

Here's a short list of things the RIAA would like us to believe and have (by and large) gotten judges to agree with:

• You are not allowed to make MP3 copies of tracks on CDs you legally own


• Placing MP3s into a file directory that might be accessed from outside your computer is equivalent to giving away copies


• An IP address is equivalent to a personal identifier

There are more, of course, but let's focus on these for a moment as we've further developments to discuss in Atlantic v. Howell, a case I pointed to in December of last year. At that point, there was contention over whether the Cartel were backtracking on the question of whether CD owners have the right to rip their own CDs.

Well now we a judge rejecting the RIAA's motion for summary judgement in the case. If the judge had bought into the RIAA's premises above the case would've been another slam-dunk win for the Cartel. Instead Judge Wake appears to be ready to change his earlier stance and agree with the defendants (and their EFF counsel) that simply placing copies in a directory is not a "distribution". This is key because if there's no distribution then there's no copyright infringement.

Furthermore, there's a good question to be argued as to whether the defendants are even the ones who put that MP3 file there. Such an issue would be settled by a trial, but the RIAA doesn't want trials. Its jihad is based on filing and rapidly settling thousands of these lawsuits. Having them go to trial would prove time-consuming, risky, and expensive even if the Cartel won.

For a large variety of reasons, the Cartel can't afford to wage this war in the court trial dockets. It needs to be conducted in the mass, scalable fashion whereby the threat of the judiciary is used to extort payment from consumers... err, victims... err, named defendants.

Despite the amount of time this case has already dragged out, it's still in the very early stages. As Eric Bangeman pointed out in his ars technica story on the denial, Judge Wake's reasoning is at odds with other judges' decisions on similar issues. For the great majority of cases, the RIAA is being successful in its jihad. My guess is that they'll argue this case a little further to see if Judge Wake can be swayed back. If he continues to rule against them, they'll drop the case before it goes to trial - they have no incentive to get an actual verdict on the books against them and an appeal would be even more expensive. So long as the tide continues to run in their favor, the Cartel can keep going even if it has to drop a case now and then. To truly kick the legs out from under them would require an act of Congress or a decision by a much higher-level court. Neither will happen soon.

Enchanting nudibrach glam-shots:

Marilyn sez, "David Doubilet is the Annie Leibowitz of the marine gastropod world. He took all but two photos in this amazingly beautiful gallery of nudibranchs to accompany a feature story on the same subject in the June Nat Geo magazine, online now."

Link to article, Link to gallery)

(Thanks, Marilyn!)