On the northbound Golden State Freeway north of Dodger Stadium, I was at a dead stop in the fast lane when, in the next lane over, I saw the driver of a black truck roll down his window and flick out his burning cigarette butt. That, in turn, had me burning -- we'd gone through red-alert fire days here recently -- and I rolled down my window and called out across the few feet between us that it's a crime to throw a lighted cigarette onto the road, and that the CHP would cite him if they saw him.

The driver, a 30-something fellow with sleek dark hair, driving an equally sleek dark Ford F-150 truck, smiled cockily and informed me that they'd never ticket him -- he's a sheriff's deputy.

Swell -- an idiot with powers of arrest. Had he never seen a Southern California fire eat up houses and acreage, all started from some roadside embers? I have -- I've covered them. And he's a lawman, and he didn't know the damn law, or care? It's a misdemeanor to throw a lighted cigarette or cigar or a burning match from a vehicle -- even from a sleek, dark Ford truck, even by a sheriff's deputy. The fine can be a thousand dollars. If I'd had powers of arrest, I'd have used them right then and there.

He pulled slightly ahead in the traffic scrum. I wrote down the numbers on his license plate, which, sure enough, was framed by one of those KMA metal frames, code for ''I've got a law enforcement connection and you don't, nyah nyah.'' When I got back to the office, I called the press office of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department, the department whose motto is "A Tradition of Service.''

Look, I said, here's one of your guys -- or at least he says he's one of your guys -- breaking the law, and bragging about it.

Well, the fellow said, with a shrug in his voice, when you have 9,000 deputies, you're bound to have some jerks. I agreed, using a stronger word. Don't you want his license plate? I asked. Check on the guy, at least rap his knuckles for not only ignoring the law and boasting about getting away with it? Not allowed to, the LASO fellow told me. You could call the CHP but they didn't see it, so they probably couldn't do anything.

So he was going to get away with it, I thought.

Let me say one thing, the voice on the phone told me. I perked up. Maybe Deputy F-150 could get what was coming to him after all?

You shouldn't take chances like that, he advised me -- talking to strange drivers like that. Could be dangerous. Around here, you never know who it might be -- maybe some gangbanger, somebody with a gun.

Yeah, I thought. Or some jerk of a sheriff's deputy with an attitude and a Zippo.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America announced this morning the latest wrinkle in its anti-piracy litigation campaign: it's going to target slightly older young people. OK, OK, that's a cheap shot. The major labels' trade group said its new emphasis would be file-sharing on college and university computer networks. Read more about the pros and cons of the labels' strategy at the Bit Player blog.

One of the many tragedies of Darfur is that some of the international community's best-intentioned efforts to stop the slaughter of innocents end up doing more harm than good. A case in point was Tuesday's move by the International Criminal Court to target two suspected ringleaders in Sudan's campaign of ethnic cleansing for prosecution.

The ICC is simply doing its job, and it's an important one. But in the end, its attempts to bring interior minister Ahmed Haroun and militia leader Ali Kushayb to justice might just strengthen the resolve of Sudan's ruling regime to dig in and reject all attempts to resolve the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

The genocidal campaign that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions won't end until United Nations peacekeepers enter the country and start protecting innocent civilians from the soldiers and government-backed militias who are destroying their villages. But the U.N. can't move without permission from the Sudanese government, which isn't forthcoming. This isn't all that surprising: If you were a mass murderer, would you invite the police into your house? There isn't much doubt that many of Sudan's leaders, from President Omar al-Bashir down, should at least be investigated for their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bashir and his fellow goons have reason to fear that if they open the door to international troops, they're opening the door to international lawyers, too. The ICC has just stoked those fears.

Though the U.N. is wrangling over the appropriate sanctions against the Sudanese government, it's hard to imagine it could come up with a stick big enough to prompt Bashir to risk sharing the fate of Saddam Hussein. Which means unless we want to consider some kind of immunity deal for Sudan's leaders -- which would set a horrible precedent -- the diplomatic options for solving this crisis are fast shrinking to the vanishing point.

The folks that run L.A.'s humble international airport finally have something to smile about. Turns out that Airbus will land its A380 on March 19, the day when the mega-jumbo will make its first stops in the United States. Of course, the only reason LAX officials have to soak up the moment is that Airbus  gave them the finger just two weeks ago by reneging on a promise to make the airport its first U.S. stop if LAX accelerates building larger gates to accommodate the plane.

Of course, the landing is merely a publicity event, and LAX can use all the positive PR it can get. But it's hard to imagine that any widespread media exposure would boost the public's (or airlines')  confidence in the airport. Just think: After the A380 touches down smoothly, it taxis past at least three drab terminals -- all congested -- that can barely accommodate today's largest planes. The mega-jumbo then pulls up to a gate built specifically for the A380 at the Tom Bradley International Terminal, which many say represents the cutting edge of bus terminal design. Not exactly the most camera-friendly airport.

After all the hype dies down, LAX officials still have plenty of work to do. (For the record, I plan on stopping by for the WhaleJet's first LAX visit, which I'm sure hoards of airplane spotters are as well.)

Jon Healey will be chatting live today, at 1 p.m. Healey is a member of the Times editorial board and author of the Bit Player blog, which tracks the shifting border between entertainment and technology. In recent weeks, Healey has:

• criticized the FCC for obstructing the XM/Sirius merger;
• mused over the growing DRM battle;
• moderated a Zócalo event on broadband TV; and
• condemned efforts to turn MySpace into another arm of the nanny state.

Now's your chance to give Healey a piece of your mind. Go to chat.latimes.com for free registration, then follow the link to "Opinion Chat." If you can't make it to the chat, email us at chat@latimes.com and we'll pass your question along to Healey.

(If you have any problems with login or chat, please let us know at chat@latimes.com.)

The suicide bombing that killed more than 20 at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan while Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting ... it had to make you wonder:

What would happen if anything happened to Dick Cheney? It's not an unreasonable question, or a cruel one. The man has a famously bad ticker, and now this.

Who might George W. Bush select as a successor to Cheney as vice president? Now ordinarily this could be a hot-ticket job, what with a presidential election coming up in less than two years. It might be considered an anointing of a Bush successor in the GOP ranks, a singling out of somebody to take the Republican reins and ride that horse to victory.

But with the Iraq war going on, and on, and on, the potential vice presidents might be inclined to run -- the other way. Consider Hubert H. Humphrey, who was already Lyndon Johnson's vice president when Johnson chose not to run for another term, leaving it to Humphrey to slog through the 1968 election with his boss' war slung around his neck like a particularly stinky albatross. The Democratic peace-party candidates lacerated him as a war surrogate. Even the perennial politician Richard Nixon was much more his own man, with a ``secret plan`` to end the war, than was Humphrey.

So who might Bush turn to in the event of such a loss? McCain? Giuliani? Maybe bring Bill Frist back into the lists? Bob Dole, again? Mitt ''at large'' Romney?

Or Jeb? Come to think of it, the job is so unappealing at present and so unpromising for the future that it might only be blood ties, not political ones, that could persuade anyone to take the job. Right, bro?

The Wall Street Journal Online reports that the U.S. Supreme Court’s charm offensive will continue with an appearance by Justice Stephen Breyer March 17 on “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” an NPR quiz show. Breyer, who is known for lengthy disquisitions from the bench during oral arguments, may be too much of a good thing for the show. On the other hand, he in indisputably brainy and well-read. Next stop: Celebrity Jeopardy!?

When I first heard (out of one ear cocked to the TV news) that “Titanic” director James Cameron had had produced a documentary about a purported “lost tomb of Jesus,” I visualized Leo DiCaprio standing on a mausoleum shouting, “I am the king of the Jews.” An Associated Press story about the documentary doesn’t incline me to take this ”bombshell” any more seriously, though I suppose I’ll watch the program.

    I gather that Winston Smith has joined the White House staff.

    Mr. Smith -- the protagonist of ``Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' a man we meet as the clocks are striking 13 -- works in Oceania for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents. In fact, he's a guy applying Wite-Out to history, obliterating the unpleasant, the unseemly, the inappropriate. So of course he's welcome in the Bush White House.

    I know he's working there because of what I read on the dailykos website: that the White House websites have been ''Wited out,'' scrubbed clean of some of Dick Cheney's more awkward remarks, like the one in March 2003, when he told ``Meet the Press'' that he believed that American troops in Iraq will be ``greeted as liberators.'' Ditto his May 2005 remarks to Larry King about those ''last throes ... of the insurgency.''

    I know this is upsetting, this blandly malevolent -- well, it can't be called rewriting history, can it? More like un-writing history. But I've given it some thought, and here's the bright side: if the vice president keeps on talking like a Lewis Carroll character, it's very possible that Winston Smith will one day be ordered just to obliterate Cheney altogether.

Public radio broadcaster KCRW in Santa Monica recently touted a $600,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation to support the station's efforts online. This was the silver lining of a cloud, however. In the view of KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour, the more a public station succeeds online, the more it undermines its survival. Get her perspective at the Bit Player blog.

The Academy Awards and politics have always gone together like pickles and chocolate (think Marlon Brando's bizarre refusal of his best actor Oscar in 1973 because he was upset about the treatment of American Indians, or Michael Moore's embarrassing 2003 acceptance speech), but the political undertones of last night's telecast made me wince more than usual. This time, the political cause du jour happened to be a very important issue -- global warming. But after seeing the glitterati's attempts at consciousness-raising, I begin to think that the best thing Hollywood could do for the environment would be to shut up about it already.

Climate change took center stage largely because Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" was nominated for two awards and won both. Gore himself mugged with Leonardo DiCaprio in a semi-amusing take on Gore's presidential ambitions, with the actor fawning over the former vice president because of his leadership in the global-warming debate. Singer Melissa Etheridge turned up the heat with her acceptance speech, a ramble on the need for self-sacrifice and action to save the planet. Yet urgent entreaties for self-sacrifice, when they come from super-wealthy celebrities who would not feel the impact of a carbon tax even if one were imposed, do not play well in Peoria. And while Etheridge, who is proudly gay, had every right to kiss her wife on the lips and thank her for her support during her speech, it's not the sort of thing that wins friends and influences people in Middle America. There are plenty of conservatives who are on the fence about global warming, but this kind of thing pushes them right off it and into the arms of Exxon-Mobil.

Gore's film is great, and probably deserved the Oscar. But when it comes to politics, most movie stars would do better to let the movies talk for them.

Well, unless they happen to be the governor of California...

While the state considers and considers whether to ban lead ammunition so that the California condor has a better chance of avoiding extinction, Tejon Ranch went ahead and did it. Sometimes things are really that simple.

Managers of the giant private hunting reserve said recent studies convinced them lead ammunition was the major contributor to lead poisoning of condors. Other types of ammunition are readily available and not all that expensive. So why not?

Ranch managers said a couple of years ago that they were willing to ban lead if the government did the same. Then they decided not to wait. It's a canny move, especially since the ranch wants to develop 5% of its land amid the Tehachapi Mountains, and faces fierce objections in part because of concerns over condors. Banning lead bullets--a more important step toward saving the endangered carrion eaters--takes some of the wind out of environmentalists' sails.

The timing is sweet because the state Fish and Game Commission is poised to consider its own regulations on lead bullets after years of foot-dragging. Tejon Ranch already has made the state look slow, and if the commission doesn't act, it now will look simply out of touch.

    Did you notice, in the Academy Awards montage of decades of Oscar-winning foreign films, that the Academy had to pander to the lowest priggish denominator, and the FCC, even for a flash of a moment?

    It wasn’t on the screen even long enough for me to recognize the film, but in the scene, the character was extending a middle finger -- and the Academy producers digitized the digit. They scrambled the image so you wouldn’t see the flip-off finger, even though anatomically that was the only finger it could be, and even though everyone who’s completed second grade has seen that gesture.

  Pitiful.

  I watched the Oscars in the company of a two-time Academy Award winner, the nephew of an Oscar winner, the son of a renowned British actor, and sundry creative folk, and amid all the joshing and droll commentary, everyone fell silent during the montage of Oscar-winning foreign films of the past.

    They were so stunning, so simple, so human and humane, that you couldn’t help thinking how many of the American-made ‘’best pictures’’ would fare in comparison. It isn’t about the quality of the acting, it’s about the scale and the message of the American winners: big-sweep blockbuster pictures about war and gore and crime, and the musicals and spectacles … and not very often thoughtful, intimate, complex films about the passions and joys and torments of ordinary life.

     Maybe it’s a case of huge Hollywood budgets fueling the drive to make huge motion pictures, and maybe it’s a function of a big industry in a big and important country making movies to match its brawn. But oh, ``La Strada,’’ ``Black Orpheus,’’ ``A Man and a Woman,’’ ``Closely Watched Trains,’’ ``Z’’ –  if there were an international trade deficit for brilliant, award-winning small films, Hollywood would be up to its neck in red ink of its own making, or unmaking. 

I had two reactions to the withdrawal of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack from the 2008 Democratic presidential race. The first was the conventional observation that the field has been depopulated of once and present governors (Mark Warner of Virginia and Evan Bayh of Indiana pulled out earlier), leaving only New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson able to play the “I’ve actually run something” card.

My second reaction to the Vilsack withdrawal was more parochial: There goes my hometown’s bid to elect a president! My former colleagues at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had the same idea: The lead on their Vilsack story said: “Pittsburgh native Tom Vilsack's run for the Democratic nomination for president never got out of the starting block.”

I have written before about the endearing inferiority complex of people in my native city, who, like Canadians, are known for piping up to friends from more cosmopolitan places that this celebrity or that is one of us.  But Pittsburghers have been notably absent from even the most capacious lists of would-be presidents. The last Burgher whose name passed the lips of the Great Mentioner was the late Sen. John Heinz, who was killed in 1991 in a plane crash.

There were other might-have-beens. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a native Pittsburgher, briefly ran for the GOP nomination in 2000. Former Pennsylvania Govs. Dick Thornburgh (whose campaign slogan for Congress was "Thornburgh as in Pittsburgh") and Tom Ridge (a native of the Pittsburgh area who grew up in Erie) achieved national prominence as Cabinet members. But no one talks about them as potential presidents anymore.

With the precedent of Arnold Schwarzenegger in mind, perhaps Pittsburghers should coalesce behind a show-biz celebrity from the Burgh. But should it be Dennis Miller, Michael Keaton or Jeff Goldblum? I know: Charles Grodin in 2008!

Six months from now most of us won't remember whose names were in ''the envelope'' at the Academy Awards.

But the world will no doubt remember how the Academy told us all to pronounce the word ``Babel.''

Surely there's always an official Oscar pronunciation guide -- not all of those names come trippingly off the tongue. I expect there are a few in the Kodak Theatre who stumbled over ''Pan's Labyrinth'' the first time.

So which will the Oscars decree it to be: ``Bay-bel''? Or ``Bab-el.'' as in ''rabble''? Never mind the dictionary -- whatever Oscar dictates, the rest of us will obey. Or is that Obie?

Tamar Jacoby and Mark Krikorian finish up the immigration Dust-up with some educated guesses about what the coming political season will hold: ruthless crackdowns? craven cowardice? bold innovations? all of the above? Get the whole week's debate right here.

And reactions to this week's debate continue to trickle in. Kevin Johnson at ImmigrationProf Blog gives the debate some attention, and Brian Doherty at Reason gets a lively discussion going, featuring an appearance by the LoneWacko himself.

Reader Steven Marshall sends in some talking points of his own:

Having read the immigration debate between Tamar Jacoby and Mark Krikorian, I've concluded that both make some sound arguments and some that are just silly.  In the national debate, it seems that one side of the debate wants to make immigration reform punitive (like the idiot congressman who proposed that otherwise law-abiding people struggling for economic survival be made felons) and the other side wants a self-serving capitulation (amnesty).  The scourge of political correctness is also being wielded by the John Lennon crowd ("Imagine there's no countries...") as a cudgel in the debate.

Let's stop being hypocritical here.  "Immigration Reform" are code words for "Kick the Mexicans and Central Americans out."  I don't hear anyone wanting to build a fence along the Canadian border.  Would we even notice or care if 12 million Canadians with a language and culture virtually identical to ours were here?  I don't believe that Americans feel animosity toward Hispanics per se, just the imagined insistence that we adapt to their language and culture rather than them adapting to ours.  Frankly, if my family and I were in the hopeless economic position that the Mexicans are in, I'd sneak across the border, too.

Sorry for the headline ... but there's lots of great stuff out there today. For instance:

Sean Bonner uncorks part five of his fascinating five-part series on California gun-related legislation.

Roman Genn posts his news-caricatures of this week's Obamapalooza.

Nikki Finke reveals a bunch of Oscar spoilers.

Norman Lear bemoans the fact that national journalists are more interested in the Barack/Hillary "pissing" match than the health care crisis.

Halosheaven conducts a fine interview with excitable Angels broadcaster Rex Hudler.

Brian Doherty rediscovers that the term "dismal science," used to describe economics, was originally coined "because its arguments can be used against slavery."

Cory Doctorow writes about free fair-use legal representation for documentary filmmakers.

Eugene Volokh challenges the notion that Josh Wolf's half-year detention is part of a post-Sept. 11 erosion of freedom.

Kevin Drum gives Peter "Fighting Faith" Beinart a hi-five for re-examining his foreign policy worldview while changing his mind about the Iraq War.

Ken Layne recounts last night's O'Reilly Factor, in which Bill Maher's criticism of the president was explained away as a daddy complex.

Firedoglake continues its gavel-to-gavel blog coverage of the Libby trial.

LAist links to an interesting video presentation/adaptation of that New Yorker story on 24 you've heard so much about.

Speaking of video, L.A. Observed show us a militaristic Training Day video, allegedly from the L.A. Sheriff's department in July 2006.

Amy Alkon discovers stupid labeling tricks at Gelson's.

And Mickey Kaus keeps trying to fire bad teachers.

With all the hubbub about Hollywood's copyright battles with YouTube, it's easy to forget that there are entertainment companies out there that actually like the video-sharing site. One example is DMGI Inc. of Sacramento, an aggregator of independently produced music and video. Read about DMGI's reasons for cutting a deal with YouTube (and watch a funny video) at the Bit Player blog.

A man in a Wisconsin city hears a woman’s screams coming from the apartment downstairs –- the cries of a woman who, he thinks, is being raped.

He seizes the only weapon at hand -– a cavalry sword, a family heirloom -– and dashes gallantly off to the rescue.

But there was no damsel in distress. There was only a dame getting screwed for money on a porn video, making all the customary noises which had misled Our Hero.

Sure, James Van Iveren kicked in the door in his search for the wronged woman -– isn’t that what Samaritans do in the movies? –- and he smashed the doorjamb and the lock. And, he said afterwards, he felt ``stupid’’ about the whole thing.

I’m reading along, reading along, waiting for the story’s cozy finish, where the grateful mayor hands him the keys to the city of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin -- evidently named after an explosion in the Scrabble factory -- and I see he got arrested!?

The man who thought he was saving a woman from a fate worse than death should be feted with the Swashbuckler of the Year Award. He should be keynote speaker at the convention of Bodice Ripper and Romance Novelists. And instead he’s facing 33 months in the slammer?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Harlequin romance publishers: step up to the plate. Pay for this man’s defense, pay his fines, pay to fix the door, and hire a lawyer to get the cops to give him back his sword. A couple of years ago a cable network staged a reality competition for the next Fabio to grace the cover of a Harlequin romance. Just put Van Iveren on a horse, hand him his family sword, and you’ve got it: ``Sir James of Waukesha to the Rescue.’’

After he’s finished serving his sentence cleaning up roadside trash on Interstate 94.

The case for television coverage of the Supreme Court is an easy one because only lawyers and justices are affected, not witnesses. It's trickier to make the case for cameras in trial courts, but televised trials do have one advantage: They showcase the diversity of what H.L. Mencken called the American language.

Case in point: The Florida judge who presided -- and so much more -- at Thursday's hearing over the disposition of Anna Nicole Smith's remains. Forget about Broward Circuit Judge Larry Seidlin's emotionalism; how about that Noo Yawk accent? He sounded so much like Mike Myers' female alter ego that I expected him to ask the parties to discuss the case "amongt yourselves."

Televised trials -- which were the staple of Court TV before Nancy Grace -- offer a many-leveled corrective to the way the judicial system is portrayed in movie and TV drama.  In real trials, events do not move swiftly to a denouement and lawyers often stumble,  repeat themselves and  lose their train of thought.

Perhaps the biggest distortion in Hollywood's depiction of trials is the diction of the presiding judges. Casting directors looking for a judicial presence usually choose deep-voiced actors with an impeccable mid-Atlantic accent. But  real judges sound like other people from the communities where the judges live -- or, as in Judge Seidlin's case, where they grew up

One TV series that gives us vernacular verisimilitude is "Law and Order," on which the judges  -- including one played by the writer Fran Lebowitz  -- often sound like honest-to-Gawd New Yorkers. If Fran is busy next season, Dick Wolf should call Judge Seidlin.

Tamar Jacoby and Mark Krikorian continue their debate on immigration, focusing today on migra raids. Jacoby's first salvo is up now, and Krikorian's response will be up shortly, right here.

        We live in a town where people actually sit through the movie credits. We’re all looking for something –a friend’s name, our own, or maybe the good-human seal of approval, that little ‘’no animals were harmed’’ bug.

       The American Humane Association has fielded movie and TV production monitoring units since 1939, when the public was horrified that a horse was forced to jump off a 70-foot cliff – and was killed – just to make a movie. [It was ``Jesse James.’’]

       The pact lasted for a while, but some filmmakers still kept the animal welfare reps off their set – at gunpoint, if necessary. In 1979, they blew up a horse to make ‘’Heaven’s Gate.’’ The idea that a horse died for that bomb of a picture renewed the AHA’s authority.

        But only here at home. The recent filmmaking flight overseas has done more than generate hand-wringing about runaway production: it’s put movie-making out of reach of American humane monitors, which is why the AHA has singled out Oscar-nominated films that ``contain animal action that appears to have put animals in jeopardy and, in some cases, may have caused the animal’s death.’’

        There’s Mel Gibson’s ``Apocalypto,’’ a film drenched in two- and four-legged gore. And the poor sad bear in ‘’Borat,’’ who’s haunted me ever since I saw him. The AHA named ``Blood Diamond’’ and ‘’Last King of Scotland,’’ ``Babel’’ and ``Children of Men,’’ ``Marie Antoinette’’ and ``Notes on a Scandal.’’

       The British-made films worry me less; the corgis and the beautiful stag in ``The Queen’’ were, I like to think, given their own trailers and crafts services. The Brits are for the most part much nicer to animals than we are in this country, where yee-haw commercial ranches sell canned hunts to lazy macho louts who slaughter tame or elderly animals point-blank, just to hang their heads on the walls of their dens as conversation pieces. In a just universe, the animals would have opposable thumbs – and firepower.

        With runaway production, I don’t think the humane ‘’bug’’ is good enough any more. I think movies need an inhumane bug, too. And put it in the titles, not back in the credits – or better yet, in the ads, right alongside the MPAA rating. I’d know where to spend my $10, which, as you know, ain’t chicken feed.

If you enjoyed Scott Hamrah's OpEd "We love to torture!" a while back, listen in to NPR's Talk of the Nation as Hamrah and Entertainment Weekly editor at large Ken Tucker take a closer look at the mainstreaming of torture movies and TV.

Feel like arguing about John McCain? Worried about the illegal immigration...of gringos? Or simply interested in how the Opinion situation at Spring Street looks from inside the tent?

Then come on down for a live chat with Assistant Editorial Pages Editor Matt Welch, Thursday at 2 p.m. PDT. Topics can include, but are not limited to, whether our Long National Nightmare is still going strong, whether the local left is eyeing your home, or what further online tricks the editorial/op-ed factory has up its sleeves.

For free registration, click over to chat.latimes.com and go to "Opinion Chat."

Come early, hector often, and if you can't make it to the chat, email us your questions and we'll pass them along.

Not to get too far down in the weeds of Supreme Court argumentation and patent law, but a few of the comments from today's oral arguments in AT&T v Microsoft suggest that at least some of the justices need to spend a weekend installing software on a PC (or Mac).

At issue is whether Microsoft should be held liable for infringing an AT&T patent every time its Windows operating system was installed on computers outside the United States. Redmond's Finest has already copped to inducing U.S. computer manufacturers to violate the patent; the sound recording functions built into Windows tread on compression technology developed by Bell Labs (the patent expired in 2001, so the infringement claims stop after that point). However, Microsoft denies that it is liable for the operating systems installed on computers overseas.

The facts of the case aren't in dispute, just the interpretation of the law. Microsoft supplied a single master copy of Windows to foreign computer manufacturers, and they copied the software onto the machines they sold. Under U.S. patent law and previous court rulings, firms are liable if they supply all or a substantial portion of the components that foreign manufacturers use to assemble an infringing product, but not if they simply provide a blueprint for those manufacturers. The idea is to prevent patent infringers from avoiding liability simply by having their products built overseas.

According to CNET News.com,

During hourlong oral arguments, some justices pressed attorney Seth Waxman, who represented AT&T, to explain why Microsoft is supplying anything more than a blueprint when it ships software object code on "golden master disks" to foreign manufacturers for duplication and installation on individual machines.
"A machine in Europe is following instructions just the way an artisan would follow a blueprint," Justice David Souter said to Waxman. "What's the difference?"

I'm not a lawyer, but the question hints that Souter has no idea what software is and what happens when you install it. There's nothing magical about master disks; they contain an installable copy of a software program, just like the packaged version sold in stores. Under Souter's view, the computer code on a master disk is merely a description of a product that ultimately gets built by a computer. But computers don't follow a master disk's blueprint for building a program so much as they copy a program that's already been built for them.

This is not to say that AT&T should win, as it did at the district- and appeals-court levels. The case raises important questions about whether U.S. patents should be enforceable on software copied and sold overseas. But it would be nice to know that before they decide this case, all the justices involved understand what software is.

Within weeks of winning the prestigious Newbery Medal for children's literature--and getting a write-up on our editorials page--Los Angeles librarian Susan Patron is in the news again. This time, as School Me! blogger Bob Sipchen notes, it's thanks to some sensitive readers who couldn't make it past a particular word in "The Higher Power of Lucky"'s second paragraph: "Sammy told of the day when he had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked '62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum."

A number of American classics have been challenged for their liberal use of the N-word (good thing Jesse Jackson simply cut to the chase by seeking to ban the word itself). The 1978 Newbery Medal winner-turned-adventure-film "A Bridge to Terabithia" sparked controversy with its irreligious use of the word "lord". But getting huffy over an anatomical term sets a new low for would-be book-banning hysterics (who, apparently, don't mind the title character's loitering around AA meetings).

As the editorial noted, a Newbery means a children's book will stay in print and in schools for years to come. The only thing that might help make it a more permanent fixture--like Terabithia before it--is a little controversy.

Talk of a fare hike for L.A. buses and rail has put the Bus Riders Union in full attack mode, firing up the kind of organizing drive that made it a major player in local transit planning a decade ago. Its tactic: put volunteers on buses all over the city to hand out flyers calculated to enrage everybody on board, especially if they happen to have brown skin. The goal is to make people think that routine and necessary planning decisions are really part of a campaign of class and ethnic warfare directed at the nonwhite.

Last week, the BRU's target was the Los Angeles Times, for having the audacity to suggest in an editorial that raising fares was a responsible move in the face of a $105-million operating deficit at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Its latest flyer lists prices that it claims are 2007 fare hike proposals from the MTA -- a day pass would rise to $5 from its current $3, a monthly pass would cost $75 (up from its current $52) and a monthly pass for seniors would rise all the way from its current $12 to $37.50. The flyer says the Bus Riders Union "received important information from a reliable source" about the fare hikes. That reliable source, in fact, was L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, the chairwoman of the MTA board, who released the numbers last week in a press release during a fit of pique about a proposal to let runners in the L.A. Marathon ride public transit for free on race day. There's just one problem with the numbers: They aren't real.

The MTA actually hasn't yet made any formal proposals about fare hikes, and contrary to the BRU's assertion that its figures "will be announced publicly in the next couple of weeks," there are no plans to do so. MTA board members don't seem to be in any hurry to open the whole politically explosive debate and can be expected to put off discussion of the matter as long as possible. They have until the end of June to make a decision, since the MTA's fiscal year starts July 1. Meanwhile, the MTA is lobbying for $100 million in state funds that might render an immediate fare hike unnecessary, although even if the agency gets the money, it would only delay the pain of making a fare-hike decision until next year.

Despite all this, Molina didn't just make those fare numbers up; she probably got them from internal proposals about possible fare hikes, or from private discussions with transit planners. They wouldn't be unprecedented. Five dollars for a day pass, for example, is precisely what transit riders pay in Chicago, while in Boston such a pass goes for $9. But they are a bit draconian for Los Angeles, where low fares are a must both to encourage ridership from commuters and to serve our huge population of transit-dependent people. Particularly harsh, and probably politically unfeasible, is the 200% rise in the price of a monthly pass for seniors that Molina cited.

Hopefully, when the real numbers from the MTA come out, they'll be more manageable. Undoubtedly there will be a range of possible fare hikes for consideration by the board, though the lower the fare, the more service will have to be cut. Contrary to the utopian ideas of the Bus Riders Union, that's just the way it works in the real world.

Somewhat to my surprise, I've been impressed the quality of Wikipedia entries, at least the ones that touch on subjects in my editorial writer's portfolio. But I was taken aback by this bio of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, which identifies him right off the bat as a "Jewish-American lawyer" and goes on to expose that the I. in his name stands for Irve, a revelation that is accompanied by three footnotes. Wikipedia's entry for Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby's nemesis, describes the proscutor simply as an "American attorney," though reference is later made to his upbringing in "a working-class Irish American Catholic family."

In our almost-newest feature, Opinion Daily, Michael Newman considers all the reasons Barack Obama should quit smoking—and a few reasons why he shouldn't.

Tamar Jacoby and Mark Krikorian continue to carve up the immigration debate today, asking who dares call it amnesty, and who can afford a war of attrition.

And what would a debate be without ringing commentary from You, the Fabulous Little People? Brent R. Forster, who needs no introduction because he introduces himself, speaks up about Operation Disemployment:

"[T]urning off the magnet of jobs is essential to reducing the demand" I have never read when eliminating jobs actually benefited the people...have you?  People who come to make an honest living, must be accepted, it's the American way.

Dear Californians my name is Brent R. Forster, I live in Arlington, VA and I am providing a rebuttal to building the fence and solution to the "immigration problem".  Walls are medieval tools, built to confine animals or to protect the state from the enemy.  Usually when they are destroyed, the destruction is celebrated.  I would also assume the wall would not blend well with the California landscape and probably force the Mexicans to travel through, and destroy more remote undisturbed terrain.

My solution would be to learn how to absorb the "immigrant worker" into the local and federal economy.  Instead of building a fence to keep people out, work with the Mexican people to let them in! Develop a way that the American people and Government can be compensated  along with the Mexican people and maybe you can save another pointless destruction of beautiful environment and wasting millions of tax dollars.  This country was built by immigrants, know matter how may generations pass must tax paying Americans are immigrants of this land.

Monitoring the border is still essential but, it should be done with technology and less conventional tactics, like building a fence.  If a man or woman wants to work and a "magnet of jobs" exists then learn how to control and profit not reject

B

Meanwhile, Greta Anderson of the Center for Biological Diversity says, "'Our Wall' is not my wall...

    
      O.J. Simpson's past may be worth less than his future -- but you probably knew that already. More than a decade after a criminal jury found Simpson not guilty, but a civil jury found him liable for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman, the Goldman family is still trying to collect some of the $33.5 million Simpson was ordered to pony up for both deaths.

       Now they've won a small -- a very small -- victory. Royalties from Simpson's movies,  commercials and TV shows will henceforth be going to the Goldmans.

        I don't expect there's much in the way of residuals for Simpson's memorable work in ``Circus of the Stars,'' episode 13. I doubt that Hertz will be reviving its signature O.J. dash-through-the-airport spot, evocative as it is of the image of Simpson hurrying to catch a plane to Chicago in the wake of the slaughter of his ex-wife. And if Honeybaked ever revives its newspaper ad of O.J. standing over a piece of ham with a big knife in his hand, someone's advertising career will be well and truly cooked.

       As for movies, Simpson's attorney declared that the sum of residuals from Simpson's movie roles [remember the ''Naked Gun'' series] was ``less than 39 cents.'' So the Goldmans can claim perhaps the greatest legal victory of moral righteousness over moola since the artist Whistler sued the art critic Ruskin for libel over Ruskin's assessment that a particular Whistler painting was ``flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.'' Whistler won his libel suit -- but only one farthing in damages, a coin worth about a quarter of a cent.

       I don't know what legal strategy the Goldmans plan to pursue now, but if that's true about the ``less than 39 cents,'' then maybe the next lawsuit in the never-ending Simpson saga should be Simpson v. whoever guided his career, for not getting him a better back-end deal for all those ``Naked Gun'' movies.

      The judge wouldn't let the Goldmans lay claim to any future Simpson earnings, like the money he makes signing autographs, and until he can verify the contract, the judge says he won't decide whether Simpson must turn over the reported million-dollar advance for the ill-fated ``If I Did It'' -- you know, the book that killed Judith Regan's publishing career.

Mark Krikorian and Tamar Jacoby tangle over that perennial question -- are illegal immigrants taking our jobs? Day Two of our immigration debate can be found right here.

The Viacom-YouTube telenovela took another turn today when Sumner Redstone's firm announced a distribution deal with Joost, the online TV outlet that's built on a file-sharing network. Joost's network has little in common with its founders' first celebrated creation, Kazaa, or even with YouTube. But it adds an interesting third prong to the media conglomerate's strategy for circumventing everybody's favorite online video site. Read more on this topic at the Bit Player blog.

Remember that whole unpleasant business about the Hollywood-newspaper verb, "to ankle"? Benjamin Zimmer has provided the definitive (and corrective) word. Sample:

The origin of the perambulatory sense of ankle, later extended in show business to quitting or getting fired, is not entirely obvious. We could compare it to other names of body parts that get applied to walking or running by the process of synecdoche, as in the expressions leg it, foot it, and hoof it. Ankles, however, seem like an odd anatomical choice, despite the historical presence of colloquialisms for bipedal motion such as ankle express (in HDAS and DARE) and ankle-cart (in "A Word List From Southeast Arkansas," AmSp, Feb. 1938, in the expression "Hitch up your ankle-cart").

My column from today about American retirees (some of them illegal) changing the face of the central Mexico town of San Miguel de Allende talked a bit about the town's expat newspaper, Atencion San Miguel. Reading the "On My Mind" column therein by Joseph Dispenza reminded me anew that hell hath no sadness like an expatriate chagrined at how his "discovery" has been ruined by ... expatriates. The opening two grafs:

In this South of the Border Brigadoon, the recent appearance of monolithic supermarkets, multiplexes and fast-food franchises has many of us wakening to the sober realization that our idllic bubble may have burst. If one more superstore moves in, we may have to leave here and move to the next good place that still retains its enchantment -- its soul.

But what is happening here may not be merely a local issue. Towns a cities everywhere, it seems, are in the process of an inexorable debasement, a crumbling of culture under the weight of overdevelopment and overpopulation to the point of a bleak and depressing blandness. There may not be a next good place.

Well, there's always Cuba!

Nobody likes to pay for free software, but you'd think the MPAA might be a little more careful than the average person to read a program's licensing terms. The Hollywood trade group starred in a blogosphere mockumentary over the Presidents Day weekend after a software developer complained that the MPAA had used his handiwork without giving him credit. The software's author, Patrick Robin, distributes the Forest Blog blog-creating technology for free under a "linkware" license -- that is, those who use it must provide links on all their blog pages back to Robin's main website. Otherwise, they have to pay a small fee. Robin said he came across a few blog pages on the MPAA site last October that had been created with his software, but all the links to Forest Blog had been removed. So he sent the organization a note and forgot about the issue until earlier this month, when he came across the same pages again. He went public with his complaint, quickly prompting the MPAA to remove the pages and send him an explanation. The pages were part of a test that was never meant to be seen by the public, the MPAA told Robin, and had the group decided to use the software, it would have paid him for a commercial license.

Here's a comment from Kori Bernards, the press spokeswoman who, sadly, had to deal with this issue on Presidents Day instead of hanging out at the multiplex:

While researching different blogging software, we tested a program that ultimately was never used at all. The software was later left dormant on our internal servers when it should have been pulled down - an oversight we corrected immediately when it was brought to our attention. No organization takes copyright issues more seriously than the MPAA. If we had purchased this software, we would have credited and compensated the owners appropriately. We regret the crossed signals that occurred internally and will ensure it doesn't happen again.

The point here isn't that the MPAA left some stuff on its servers too long; it's that it violated the simple terms that the, ahem, copyright owner set for using his work. Those terms required users not to remove the links to his company's site unless they bought the product. It's a bit like saying that a movie on DVD can't be shown in a bar or restaurant unless an extra fee is paid. Perhaps this would have been easier for the MPAA to understand had Robin forced them to read an Interpol warning while his software was being installed on their servers. At any rate, here's hoping the MPAA revives the blog project so CEO Dan Glickman can have an open forum for exchanging views with the public.

The Manhattan Institute's Tamar Jacoby and Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies kick off our new feature "Dust-up," a weeklong debate on issues great and small. Jacoby and Krikorian will be devoting this week to the ever-popular topic of immigration, and today's discussion centers on the proposed border wall. Watch all week for the rest of the debate, and put in your own two cents in the comments.

Last week's column by Venezuelan ambassador Bernardo Alvarez was part of our new "Blowback" feature, allowing for longer replies to our coverage than is typically afforded in the Letters page. To the extent that we can do so without vanishing into interminable orifices of self-reference, we'd like to keep up the discussion of Blowbackable items. And Hugo Chavez always draws a crowd. So without further ado, here's what  Hicksville, NY's Bret P. Wallach had to say about Alvarez' column:

Why do you allow a puppet of Venezuela's dictator, Hugo Chavez, to write an editorial in your paper? You have just lowered your paper to their standards.

They've made careers out of speaking the lines that other people wrote, so who can blame them for wanting a few seconds more to utter their own?

Oscar winners have gotten everything but the hook for making overlong speeches, so what -- besides publicity -- is the motivation behind Delta Air Lines offering a round-trip ticket to anywhere, to Oscar winners who hit the acceptance-speech mark of under 45 seconds? What's a trip to Paris compared to the wrath of a producer, an agent, whose name is lost to the tyrant Brevity?

Anyway, the Oscars producers have already made it clear that it's 45-seconds-and-out. Not only have nominees been given tape recorders with a 45-second limit so they can try to practice to time, but at the nominees' luncheon, producer Laura Ziskin -- who evidently consulted special-effects whizzes to make this happen -- had her speech burst into flames right in her hands after 45 seconds, to make the searing point: 45 seconds and out.

As for me, I think the time-clock tyranny should be up to the audience. Oscar acceptance speech time is relative; as Albert Einstein supposedly explained relativity, sitting on a hot stove for a minute feels like an hour, but talking to a pretty woman for an hour feels like a minute.

Two minutes from Helen Mirren or Peter O'Toole wouldn't be enough ... but we'd be squirming and looking at our watches after 10 seconds of ... well, I won't name names. If I did, someone might leave mine off an already overlong Oscar thank-you list.

Two suitcase bombs on the Friendship Express train killed over 60 people and injured dozens late Sunday night in Dewana, India. India and Pakistan responded in typical fashion. High-level officials expressed outrage that terrorists would try to disrupt the peace process and promised to keep it on track. Lower-level officials and the usually anonymous "security officers" and "intelligence analysts" pointed fingers across the border and deflected blame.

Still, it's better than canceling negotiations, cutting ties, and putting troops on the border, which were some of the old methods the countries chose to respond to terrorist attacks. A particularly alarming attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 spurred all of these reactions, including a two-year cancellation of the decades-old Friendship Express. (It fared better than another train between the two countres, the Thar Express, which was shut down for forty years following a war.) The train service connects major Indian and Pakistani cities and is one of a few (often symbolic) confidence building measures that the countries have maintained.

The train bombing will test -- and hopefully cement -- several of the new CBMs the countries are trying to put into place, including a joint counter-terrorism task force. It's important considering that one of the best links that the countries could create is also one of the most problematic in the eyes of the U.S: a gas pipeline going from Iran through Pakistan and into India. The pipeline has been in talks for years but the countries hope they can sign an initial agreement in June.

Unbowed by blistering reviews, Dinesh D’Souza is defending his new book “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.” 

In a screed that could just as easily be titled “Blame America First,” D’Souza  attributes some of the Islamic unease with America to what might be called homosexual panic. He quotes