When Elephants Dance

by

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

by

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.

I’m all moved in

by

This weekend kicked much butt. Rick came over both Saturday and Sunday to lend a hand, Candice let us use her truck, and between the two of us, we managed to get me completely moved this weekend. The entire process went much faster than I’d anticipated — the majority of the stuff came over on Saturday, with just a couple trips on Sunday to move the computer stuff over. As it stands now, all that’s left at the Shoebox is some cleaning stuff and my iMac, so I can keep the webserver online until the end of the month.

The new apartment (i’m going to have to come up with a name for this one — any suggestions?) isn’t completely finished, but the important stuff is unpacked and up and running (bed, A/V equipment, ‘puters, etc.). My after-work project for the next week or so is going to be going through all the boxes and getting completely situated in here.

So…that’s it for now. I’m in the new apartment — yay! :D

New e-mail addy redux

by

I’ve updated the original ‘New e-mail addy‘ post to reflect this, but the e-mail addy I thought was going to work…won’t. So, my real new public e-mail address is djwudi@myrealbox.com. Sorry for the confusion….

Oh, and incidentally, if you for any reason need a new e-mail address, give the guys at MyRealBox a try. Looks to be a good deal.

I hate your politics!

by

Yeah, well I hate your politics, too! Beautifully written, very funny, and very true.

Liberals: …Liberals are politically able to have all sorts of freaky mammal sex but typically don’t; good liberal foreplay is a permission slip and three layers of impermeable barriers. The only vaguely liberal person we know of who seemed to enjoy sex in the last 30 years is Clinton, and look what he got out of it….

Conservatives: …Conservatives don’t actually bother to spend time with people who are not conservative, and thus become confused and irritable when people disagree with them; fundamentally can’t see how that’s even possible, which shows an almost charming intellectual naivete….

Libertarians: …Never got over the fact they weren’t the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it…. Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn’t actually involve real live humans….