Normally people think a dream is bad because it involve monsters hunting them down and killing their family and such, but nothing's wrong with dreams like that.

A bad dream is when you dream about perfectly normal daily routine during which you discover that you misrememebered and World AIDS Day is actually January 1, not December 1 as you'd believed. Such dreams fill you with misinformation that you have little or no reason to doubt.

Luckily this dream was easily confirmed a dream. World AIDS Day is December 1. Take that, subconscious!

(Why is 'subconscious' a noun? What idiot did that?)

The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed via a P2P service does not amount to distribution. Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending or the copies or advertising that they are available for copying.

Say...I've noticed that when I have Kazaa running and connected, I receive requests to my computer asking if I have such and such files. 'Britney Spears'. 'XXX'. All that good stuff. But when I don't have Kazaa connected, I don't receive these search queries. So...just how do the searchers know when to ask me? I mean, apparently all I've done is set up a shared directory filled with files. I didn't advertise it at all, telling anyone else on the network know I have stuff to share.

No such evidence was presented by the plaintiffs in this case. They merely presented evidence that the alleged infringers made copies available on their shared drives.

Ah, so the judge isn't saying filesharing copyrighted material on Kazaa is legal. He's just saying the CRIA (RIAA of Canada) didn't bother to mention one I-thought-obvious-but-apparently-needing-explicit-stating detail. Whoops!
(Source: PDF, HTML (The results ('CRIA wrong; ISPs of filesharers right') of the appeal of the famous 'file sharing is legal in Canada' decision.))
(Note that Bill C-60 will fix this stupid ruling and lay down the groundwork for a bunch of worse ones in its stead.)

The appeal decision also mentions the old decision that putting a copier and copyrighted material close together isn't authorising someone to violate copyright.
True. Good decision, that was. However, is he claiming that--if the downloaders copied copyrighted music--they did it without authorisation, and therefore the people sending the music isn't to blame? The file sharers didn't authorise the downloading of this music when they, I don't know, installed a p2p program, configured it to share their music, connected it to the P2P network, and knowingly permitted it to then transfer the music to other people over their connection?

So on one forum I hang out at, a troll, in a trite-but-effective bit of trolling, recently declared himself candidate for forum president. Other people decided to run, and held an election and votes were actually cast. But it was never well organised at all, and certainly unofficial.

Then the troll declared himself winner, ignoring the non-troll election, as any idiot except all the ones on the forum knew he would.

So I explained it to them like this:

Chen Shui-Bian is president of China.

Of course, these idiots won't get it. But I think I'm very clever, and I shall preserve this bit of wit here, even though Google (blog search included) doesn't index archived posts. Even if they get zero results, they won't show old blog entries.

Yeah, that totally handles blog spam, dumbasses.

At the ECU costume contest last year, I realised what I just had to do this time around.

the contest goes like this: We each go up onto stage, say who we are (IRL) and what we're dressed as, and walk across the stage, doing our thing. When it was my turn, I proudly stated 'My name is Luca Masters and I'm a guy wearing a cape'.

Of course, I didn't win, and I didn't expect to. I'm not claiming my constume was the best there, but the point is that it wasn't necessarily the /worst/ one their either. Take that, half-assed-costumed contest enterers!

Anyway, I absolutely must give honourable mention to one hoopy frood. He was there tonight, as well as at the /Rocky Horror Picture Show/ costume contest last week. No, he wasn't Dr. Frank-N-Furter. No, he wasn't Timmeh. He was the Black Knight, from /Monty Python and the Holy Grail/, and he should have won if not tonight, at the /Rocky Horror Picture Show/. He got my cheer. That guy rocks. I took some lame pictures of him at the RHPS, but I then lost my camera. Dang.