Episode 654

The RIAA does what it does for the artists. That's why it sues their fans. It's just trying to help out the artists. Like songwriters. Although songwriters make a little too much money. That's why the RIAA wants the Copyright Royalty Board to reduce the mechanical rate, so the artists get less money per song. Something isn't making sense to me here. But I'm sure I just don't understand the complexities of the music business. Meanwhile, the N-Gage is back. Woo-hoo! 
==Stories Covered==
*In '08 presidential race, who's the most tech-friendly?
*Apple doubles iPhone, iPod Touch capacity
*Rumor: New MacBook Pros on the way?
*Taiwan group responsible for 90 percent of Microsoft piracy gets four years in prison
*eBay to ban negative seller views
*IFPI sues Baidu, Yahoo China over deep linking MP3s
*RIAA wants songwriter royalty lowered
*N-Gage makes it into software
==From The Phones==
*Chris in Ontario: Your personal devices won't need a bunch of IP addresses.
*Adam in Salt Lake City: HDTV evidence.
*Josh: Rhapsody has MP3s.
==Emails==
===IPv6 information===
Tom & crew,
I just wanted to write in quickly about the coming changeover to IPv6. All recent Operating Systems support IPv6 natively, that is to say XP SP1 and forward, Vista, Apple OS X 10.4 & 10.5 and most flavors of Linux. With that said, the changeover shouldn't really be of any concern to consumers. Most carriers, my company included, plan to run both IPv6 and IPv4 in tandem for quite some time--worst case, the consumer may need to update the firmware on their router our but an new one. From the carrier perspective it isn't about simply updating the firmware on a $49 router; there's hundreds of hours of engineering and millions of dollars of equipment required to make the switch.
In any case, if you're interested, I happen to be fairly close with someone on the board of ARIN, the group that actually distributes IP addresses and determines policy. He may be an interesting interview for the show.
Regards,
Matt in New Jersey
===Fiber optic cable===
OK,
Been listening for about two years (love the show!), and I just had to write in now, because the discussion on fiber optic roll-out by IT managers at Universities really boiled my buttons. We've already been there--back in the 1990s our wonderful government gave tax incentives to telecommunications companies to the tune of around 200 billion dollars to lay fiber optic cable throughout America. This was known as the "National Infrastructure Initiative", and the phone companies promised to wire 86 million homes with fiber optic by 2006. By 2004, only 38 million homes had been wired, and most of those was with DSL (considered "High Speed", but we all know it's truly not when we're moving towards a Video-on-demand Internet). More information can be found here.
Finally, zombies! I can't believe you haven't reported this yet, but scientists have observed a wasp that injects a venom into cockroaches, creating Zombie Cockroaches. The scary thing is that the scientists were able to duplicate the zombification, and could turn it on and off as well. I see massive turnouts in the next election of zombie humans voting for Mitt Romney. 
Thanks,
Steven Blunt
===Internet cables===
Hello again, 
Internet seems to be almost back to normal here, at least enough to listen to the BOL episodes I missed!
Regarding the UAE Internet prices, those prices mentioned were the prices issued by the greedy hotel. I noticed many hotels charging insane amounts of money for Internet access (20-30 euro a day in Germany) so I guess it is "normal" for hotel prices to be that high. Sigh.
The prices in UAE are relatively good. For 4Mbit DSL it costs 450AED, thats about 130$ monthly. Still expensive, but there are no competitors in terms of land lines.
Something similar here in Saudi Arabia, only one company (STC) handling the land lines as well as GSM. We noticed how their prices have dropped and services improved (in the GSM network anyway) when a second provider came in the market (Mobily). Now a third GSM network will enter this year (Zain) as well as a second land line telecom (one of the partners is Verizon apparently). So we hope to see improvements in the land lines as well.
Best regards,
Khaled A.
===Super Smash Bros.===
Hello Buzz town,
The reason that the Super Smash Brothers discs were not working is because the disc is a dual-layer disc.
"Nintendo has come to the conclusion that the problem has to do with dust and tobacco building up on Wii laser units. This affects Smash Bros. Brawl while leaving other titles unaffected because the new fighter uses a dual-layer DVD, which is apparently more sensitive to a dirty lens." 
Love the show,
Brad in Ohio
===Tukwilluh===
Tuk will uh--a town near Seattle. Native American tribe from the Puget Sound area.
Not to be confused with the Nooksak or Chuckanut tribes which are located farther north. No really, those are the names of real tribes.
Robert Yee
Laying cable
Hi Tom, Rafe, and Jason,
On Episode 652, Tom and Rafe had a bit of an argument about tearing up roads to lay cable. Just wanted to let you know that utilities can lay cable underground without trenching (tearing up the ground) by using underground directional boring equipment. I don't know if this counts as a "well actually", but I really hope so.
Thanks for the show,
Jennifer