“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
— Patrick Henry
Month: July 2006
07/22/2006
Federal judge Vaughn Walker has ruled that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) case against AT&T can proceed, despite the government’s claim that divulging information about the NSA wiretapping program– of which AT&T was a major component– will severely damage national security. The unbelievable “state secrets” defense raised by the government has been struck down by Judge Walker with a deft statement:
To defer to a blanket assertion of state secrecy here would be to abdicate that duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired. The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.
This is great stuff, and despite the fact that the government will undoubtably appeal and continue to do everything it can to squash the case, it’s a minor victory for supporters of privacy rights.
07/22/2006
A group of fans of the science-fiction television show Firefly, who pushed and supported the cast through the making of the (rather good) movie Serenity, have just released a documentary that basically shows the involvement of the fans and how their work kept the show alive and led to the movie.
Interestingly, they’ve released the entire documentary as a freely downloadable movie. This isn’t some back-room hack pasted together in iMovie– it’s a professional-quality full-length movie. Perhaps the best thing I’ve seen about it is their statement regarding why they released it for free:
In our opinion, the modern state of copyright is counter productive to creativity and free culture. It puts unnatural restraints on “fair use”, hinders the creative process, and has fundamentally destroyed an entire industry before it was even born.
Amen. Although I respect the intent of copyright, the current practices engaged by such organizations as the RIAA, MPAA, U.S. Congress, Disney, and a hundred other corporations interested more in profits than in serving their customers are deplorable. They’ve turned copyright into a system whose sole goal is profit, with no regard for the actual protection of ideas, as the original framers of copyright law intended.
I hope more groups follow the lead of the Firefly crowd. We’re already seeing it in the music industry, as more and more artists release their songs and albums in Creative Commons format– allowing free download, distribution, and remixing. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s a start.
07/17/2006
An awesome entry from today’s Fark Photoshop contest.
07/17/2006
Woo hoo! I learned to wakeboard last weekend… what a blast.
It’s a load of fun, at least until you catch a wave and smack the water face-first at 40mph…
07/13/2006
I’ve always liked the opening title music for The Hunt for Red October. Tonight I’m listening to various soundtracks while I work, and this one came up in the queue. Curious, I hit the “Lyrics” tab in AmaroK to see if I could finally learn what those crazy Russian guys are singing about.
AmaroK didn’t let me down:
07/09/2006
I spent a couple of hours today putting the finishing touches on my shiny new and improved photo album, in the hopes that I’ll finally be a little better about keeping it updated. The old one was database-driven, written about five years ago, and terribly difficult to manage– which explains why the most recent photos were almost two years out of date. The new one is much simpler, and allows me to quickly upload big batches of images.
Now, of course, I open myself to friends and family perusing the album to find compromising pictures of me or the fam…
07/07/2006
People are funny about spam. Since I run about a dozen domains for various personal things, there are spammers out there who invent addresses on those domains and send their crap. The downside is every now and then someone gets all mad at me because they think I’m the one sending the spam, when in fact I have nothing to do with it and moreover can’t do anything to stop it.
But today I got this message from a guy named Scott, who apparently thought that Wilfred Bolton had written to him pitching some miracle drug or stock tip. Notice that Wilfred’s e-mail address is the easy-to-remember oabdiiunjnja@davinci-projects.org, which any reasonable person would immediately recognize as something fake. But oh well, Scott sent the message in the hopes that I would remove him from “my email campaign”.
Sorry to disappoint you, Scott, but Wilfred (or one of his other made-up buddies) is probably going to continue harassing you…
07/07/2006
Sometimes the first line of a news article is all you need:
A Magnolia, Delaware man sustained burns to his hand and face after using gunpowder to light to up his barbecue grill Monday night.
Wow… uhh… there’s really nothing else to say. I’m sure the neighborhood kids were impressed, though.
07/07/2006
Senator Stevens, after his hilariously awful description of “the internets” the other day, has apparently come out with some clarification for those who simply couldn’t follow the discussion about trucks and tubes:
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck, or locomotive, or autogyro.
It’s a series of tubes.
If you don’t understand this think of a cannoli, the delicious Italian dessert that Silver Screen magazine says is the favorite dessert of popular ballad crooner Frankie Sinatra. If you fill those tubes with enormous amounts of cream cheese, like free movies, there is no room for the spumoni, which is like your messages. Then your spumoni has to get in the line and gets delayed. The result is a flavorless, bland cannoli, and millions of young bobbysoxers are crushed because their fan internets don’t get delivered to Frankie.
Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that cream cheese on the internet tubes. I hasten to remind my Senate colleagues of what happens when you have too much cheese in your diet: painful clogging. Our job is to provide the legislative bran to keep the internets regular.
Okay, maybe Senator Stevens didn’t actually say that. But he probably would have if given a chance for a filibuster.