Aw, crud — Wired’s reporting that in addition to the CBDTPA bill that’s going through the Senate, a representative is planning on introducing a similar bill to the House. Double-plus-ungood.
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
She’s not one of my favorites anyway
More reasons copy-protected audio CD’s are a Bad Thing: Celine Dion may be hazardous to your Mac.
Going up…way up
I am so stoked about the possibilities that could come of this. According to an article on Space.com, within 12 years we could have space elevators stretching 62,000 miles above the earth, capable of hauling payloads to the top every three days. Too freakin’ cool.
Ebert on copy protection
The way to launch a new CD is to get it talked about — not to insult potential fans by making it unplayable on their equipment even after they buy it legitimately.
— Roger Ebert, adding his voice to the many taking a stand against copy-protected CDs.
When Elephants Dance
Michael Fraase’s ‘When Elephants Dance‘ is an excellent summation of the current flap over digital rights and the dangers in the entertainment industries current drive to control everything. This should be required reading for anyone who listens to music, watches movies, or uses a computer.
This CBDPTA bill is scary
Just in case folks haven’t figured out how sweeping the Hollings-Feinstein bill, aka CBDTPA is, well, keep reading.
The CBDTPA says that if I were to write and sell this BASIC program…
10 INPUT A$ 20 PRINT A$…after the regulations take effect, I would be guilty of a federal felony. That’s up to five years in prison and up to a $500,000 fine. Distributing my two-line application without charging for it, either via handing out floppies or by posting it on a website would be at least a civil offense and, depending on the circumstances, a crime as well.
It’s no joke. CBDTPA regulates ‘any hardware or software that reproduces copyrighted works in digital form.’ My program above does that, especially if my BASIC interpreter permits arbitrarily long strings.
— Declan McCullagh, in ‘CBDTPA bans everything from two-line BASIC programs to PCs’
The rest of the article is well worth reading, also. This bill is just plain scary.
Copies are evil
Aw, crud. Republican Alaskan senator Ted Stevens has joined the (if you’ll excuse me) idiots backing a bill that would ban the sale of all electronic devices without embedded copy-protection chips, according to this WIRED story. This is a Bad Thing, for reasons which Cory makes clear over at Boing Boing.
Google vs. Scientology 2
Google has replaced the links it removed yesterday after a fight with the Scientology organization. This still shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
More site reorganization
If you’re a regular visitor, you’ve probably noticed by now that I’ve moved things around a bit. Basically, I’m working on simplifying the site, especially the first page that people see when they show up, trying to make things a bit less overwhelming (since I do tend to babble).
In essence, the first page of the site now serves as a table of contents/overview of what’s on the site. The table of contents that used to be on the left hand side of the page now fills the main content area, while the Long Letter blog itself has been moved to its own page. The links listed in the right sidebar have been split between the pages — more general links on the main page, and more blog-related links on the Long Letter page.
Lastly, I was able to set the entry for The Long Letter up so that it will always show a short summary of the most recent five entries in the blog. Clicking on the title of the blog will load the main page, while clicking on the title for the individual posts will jump to that entry on the main page.
Overall I think these will help simplify things. Feel free to e-mail or comment if you’ve got any thoughts on all this, of course.
How many inches?!?
As if it weren’t bad enough that I’ve been lusting over a 22″ Apple Cinema Display since they came out, yesterday at MacWorld Tokyo they had to go and introduce a 23″ version. Too bad I don’t have a spare $3500 lying around. Also introduced was a new, higher-capacity (10Gb) version of the iPod.