The Supreme Court on Jan. 18 upheld a 1994 law granting copyright protection to a large number of foreign works that had been freely available in the public domain. The ruling was a victory for the movie, music and publishing industries, which argued that granting copyright protections for the foreign works was an important step in securing reciprocal overseas rights for U.S. works. The decision means some musicians and other artists will have to keep paying to use the now-copyrighted foreign works. Congress enacted the measure to bring the U.S. in compliance with the Berne Convention, an 1886 treaty providing for international recognition of copyrights. The court, by a 6-2 vote, said Congress acted within its powers in granting the protections. "Congress determined that U.S. interests were best served by our full participation in the dominant system of international copyright protection," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court. The ruling defeated a challenge by a group of orchestra conductors, performers, educators and others who argued that Congress exceeded its powers by restricting their ability to perform, share and build upon foreign works that once had been free for use.
BRENT KENDALL and JESS BRAVIN http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204555904577168752017626174.html

Phrases from Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris, a novel of deception and revenge set in a private school
the blackboard and his smug cousin, the chalkboard
Suits and their natural enemy, the Tweed Jacket
a good teacher knows that there is fake anger and real anger
I was hooked, lined and sinkered
a word or two of Latin speaks volumes to the fee-paying parents
Joanne Harris is the author of Five Quarters of the Orange, Chocolat and the co-author with Fran Warde of My French Kitchen, The French Market.

Publishers are convinced that viewers of Downton Abbey who obsessively tune in to follow the war-torn travails of an aristocratic family and its meddling but loyal servants are also literary types, likely to devour books on subjects the series touches. So they are rushing to print books that take readers back to Edwardian and wartime England: stories about the grandeur of British estates (“Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle” by the Countess of Carnarvon); the recollections of a lady’s maid (“Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor” by Rosina Harrison); and World War I (“A Bitter Truth” by Charles Todd), the bloody backdrop to the show’s second season, which had its premiere in the United States Jan. 8 on PBS, drawing 4.2 million viewers. Book publicists have swarmed Twitter, where “Downton Abbey” has been endlessly discussed and analyzed, to drop suggestions and link to alluring titles in both their e-book and print editions, borrowing hashtags like #downtonabbey and #downtonpbs that are already in heavy circulation. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/business/media/mad-for-downton-publishers-have-a-reading-list.html

Today's networks are suffering from unnecessary latency and poor system performance. The culprit is bufferbloat, the existence of excessively large and frequently full buffers inside the network. Large buffers have been inserted all over the Internet without sufficient thought or testing. They damage or defeat the fundamental congestion-avoidance algorithms of the Internet's most common transport protocol. Long delays from bufferbloat are frequently attributed incorrectly to network congestion, and this misinterpretation of the problem leads to the wrong solutions being proposed. A network with no buffers has no place for packets to wait for transmission; thus, extra packets are dropped, creating an increasing loss rate and decreasing throughput, though the received packets would have the same constant delay. To operate without buffers, arrivals must be completely predictable and smooth; thus, global synchronized timing is critical to avoiding loss. Such networks are complex, expensive, and restrictive (i.e., they lack the flexibility of the Internet). A well-known example of a bufferless network is the original telephone network before packet switching took over. Adding buffers to networks and packetizing data into variable-size packets was part of the fundamental advance in communications that led to the Internet. The fundamental transport protocol of the Internet is TCP/IP. TCP's persistence is testimony both to the robust and flexible design of the original algorithm and to the excellent efforts of the many researchers and engineers who have tuned it over the decades. TCP made use of the idea of pipesize and the knowledge that there was reasonable but not excessive buffering along the data path to send a window of packets at a time—originally sending the entire window into the network and waiting for its acknowledgment before sending more data. JIM GETTYS and KATHLEEN NICHOLS Read much more at: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2071893

What does TCP/IP stand for? Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
http://www.acronymfinder.com/Transmission-Control-Protocol%2FInternet-Protocol-(TCP%2FIP).html

A brownie supplier to Ben & Jerry's ice cream, a skateboard maker and a payday lender are among the hundreds of existing businesses that plan to incorporate as "benefit corporations" in coming months. They will be taking advantage of a new and untested corporate charter, available in only a half dozen states, allowing a company's governing board to consider social or environment objectives ahead of profits. The legal structure is intended to shield the board from investor lawsuits. That anything other than maximizing shareholder value should be considered in a company's decision-making normally can open the door to investor suits. The idea has its share of critics. "For an investor, this is a terrible idea," says Charles Elson, who teaches corporate governance at the University of Delaware. "The structure creates a lack of accountability," he adds, so if the management of a benefit corporation makes a bad decision, "there's very little you can do about it as a shareholder." Others say that companies can simply add specific goals into their articles of incorporation under existing corporate codes, making a benefit-corporation designation unnecessary. It costs about $30 to incorporate as a benefit corporation, not including fees paid to outside lawyers. The incorporation isn't to be confused with "B Corp" certification, which is a privately administered program to label companies aiming to tackle social and environmental problems. ANGUS LOTEN
Find list of states with benefit corporation laws at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203735304577168591470161630.html

On August 25th, 1994, Jimmy Buffett crashed his Grumman G-44 Widgeon, N1471N, while attempting to takeoff in the waters off Nantucket, Massachusetts. The airplane nosed over, and Jimmy was able to swim to safety, sustaining only minor injuries. Buffett credits his survival to Navy Survival Training he had to complete before being able to ride in an F-14 Tomcat from the deck of an aircraft carrier.
http://www.buffettworld.com/incidents/widgeon-seaplane-crash/

On January 16, 1996, Jimmy Buffett’s Grumman HU-16 Albatross, dubbed the Hemisphere Dancer, was shot at by Jamaican authorities as he taxied in the waters near Negril. The Jamaicans had mistaken it for a drug-runner’s plane, though Jimmy had “only come for chicken.” On board the plane was Chris Blackwell from Island Records and U2′s Bono and his family. Buffett penned a tune about the incident: “Jamaica Mistaica”, which appeared on the 1996 album Banana Wind. See excerpt from the song plus Bono's account of the incident at: http://www.buffettworld.com/incidents/jamaica-mistaica/

Russian cuisine Learn about caviar, Beef Stroganoff, created for Russian Count Alexander Grigorievitch Stroganoff (1795-1891), vodka, Strawberries Romanoff, created for Romanoff Czar Nicholas II (ruled 1894 -1917), in the early 1900s by famous French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, and desserts named for Anna Pavlova and Nadezhda Pavlova. See pictures, including those of General Prince Piotr Bagration, whose 30 year military career included 20 campaigns and 150 battles. Bagration was one of the Russian heroes of the Napoleonic War, and important figure in Tolstoy's War and Peace and his wife, Princess Katerina, for whom Bagration soup was created by Antoine Careme, the "King of Chefs and Chef of Kings." http://www.frccusa.org/Cuisine.html