Some things just make you blink.
A Day in the Life is reporting that MSN is only blocking the words democracy and freedom in the name of a blog, the post title, and the URL, but NOT in the body copy.
Hmmm. So much for the censorship charge if this is true.
Robert, did you really think about this before you said it?
I have a romantic view of baseball, and it is always startling when confronted with the reality that baseball is a business first, and the national pastime second. It is, after all, a game. Games have rules, and rules are to be followed. I’ll boo Sosa because he corked his bat. I’m not fond of pitchers who throw at batters. This is baseball, not hockey. Courtesy and sportsmanship are supposed to count for something.
In yesterday’s game between the Nationals and the Angels, Washington manager Frank Robinson called for the umpires to check Brendan Donnelly’s glove for foreign substances. Lo and behold, pine tar. Illegal. Against the rules. Section 8.02(a)2 “[the pitcher may not] Apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball.” It’s a pretty clear rule. Pine tar is a foreign substance. Tossing pine tar balls is illegal.
What did Donnely have to say?
“It’s not like I’m using it to doctor the ball,” said Donnelly, who faces a possible suspension. His glove was sent to the Commissioner’s Office for further review. “I want to know that I have a good grip on the ball and I’m not going to kill people.”
Even though it is essentially illegal, Donnelly admits to using pine tar occasionally to control the pitch in cold or sweaty conditions, but not to cheat.
Uh, transferring pine tar to the ball is illegal. Having it on your person, illegal. It’s cheating.
Play by the rules, and don’t whine and make excuses when you don’t and get caught. Keep my idealism for the game alive.
Addendum: Marco Scutaro had a big hit with two out in the bottom of the 9th to break a 2-2 tie with Mets. Nicely done Marco!
Congressman Rick Boucher is a rare animal indeed: a man looks at the bigger picture of intellectual property and tries to determine the appropriate balance intended by the founding fathers in creating patents and copyrights. I first became aware of the Congressman when he guest blogged on Lawrence Lessig’s weblog, where he showed surprising sense. He has written a guest editorial for news.com, where he suggests that in exchange for enacting the FCC’s Broadcast Flag rule, Congress should restore fair use rights which were destroyed by the DMCA.
Hmmph.
I can’t help but think that this is a bargain with the devil. The DMCA should never have restricted the fair and unregulated uses of copyrighted material. It was a travesty: one that robbed the American people their rightful property. I’m not sure why Congressman Boucher thinks that we should pay for giving back a right which never should have been taken.
And make no mistake: the Broadcast Flag does nothing for consumers. In the page I linked above, Congressman Boucher claimed to fear a culture where everything was “pay per use”. That is precisely the kind of world that the Broadcast Flag is designed to create. The Broadcast Flag is an annoyance to consumers. It means that transferring your time shifted video from your TiVo to your PDA will be a hassle. That transferring it to your Unix box will be a bigger hassle.
When Mr. Glickman says:
“So why should I care about a so-called broadcast flag regulation? The answer is simple. I want to make certain that the American people will continue to have the opportunity to see our movies and television shows on free television in the digital age.”
First of all, just where is this “free television”? I live in the bottom of a valley, so over the air broadcasts are basically impossible. I pay $45 a month or so for my traditional analog cable from Comcast. I don’t have free television, and as time goes on, fewer and fewer Americans do.
Next, there is currently no broadcast flag, and yet there seems to be no shortage of programming. One could, of course, make claims as to its quality, but one presumes that there could be only a single reason for not having better programming: the almighty dollar.
Really, what Mr. Glickman is saying that “if we made more money, we could create more programming, and the Broadcast Flag will enable us to make more money.” Glickman expects us to sign off on this, and we will see this new programming as a result. It sort of reminds me of the ideas that were floated early in the early days of Cable TV. “Pay us, and you can have fewer commercials!” they said. Uh huh. We all know how that worked out.
Giving teeth to the FCC Broadcast Flag resolution in exchange for restored fair use is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul: it doesn’t really make any sense.
I recognize you are one of the “good guys”, Congressman Boucher, but I think you can come up with a better idea than this.
Although, perhaps no better compromise.
Okay, okay, it’s not really a gem, except in the sense that it’s interesting to read an early example of utter and complete mumbo jumbo. Occult Chemistry, by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater is an extensive, detailed, and complete description of chemistry as revealed to the authors through clairvoyance. Published in 1919, the exact nature of elements was still fairly new: Rutherford had proposed his planetary model of the atom in 1911. Still, this had to have been considered craziness of the highest order, even in 1919.
A quote, just to give the flavor:
I remember the occasion vividly. Mr. Leadbeater was then staying at my house, and his clairvoyant faculties were frequently exercised for the benefit of myself, my wife and the theosophical friends around us. I had discovered that these faculties, exercised in the appropriate direction, were ultra-microscopic in their power. It occurred to me once to ask Mr. Leadbeater if he thought he could actually see a molecule of physical matter. He was quite willing to try, and I suggested a molecule of gold as one which he might try to observe. He made the appropriate effort, and emerged from it saying the molecule in question was far too elaborate a structure to be described. It evidently consisted of an enormous number of some smaller atoms, quite too many to count; quite too complicated in their arrangement to be comprehended. It struck me at once that this might be due to the fact that gold was a heavy metal of high atomic weight, and that observation might be more successful if directed to a body of low atomic weight, so I suggested an atom of hydrogen as possibly more manageable. Mr. Leadbeater accepted the suggestion and tried again. This time he found the atom of hydrogen to be far simpler than the other, so that the minor atoms constituting the hydrogen atom were countable. They were arranged on a definite plan, which will be rendered intelligible by diagrams later on, and were eighteen in number.
Ars Technica points us at both an article from The Economist which questioned the accuracy and methology of the BSA in determining of piracy to businesses, and the terse and unresponsive reply from Beth Scott of the BSA.
Reproduced here in full:
SIR —
Your article on software piracy was extreme, misleading and irresponsible ("BSA or just BS?", May 21st). The headline was particularly offensive. The implication that an industry would purposely inflate the rate of piracy and its impact to suit its political aims is ridiculous. The problem is real and needs no exaggeration.
Piracy probably is a problem for businesses. The question is: how much of a problem is it? In the BSA’s world, every pirated copy of software is a lost sale. They, like the MPAA and the RIAA, don’t realize that software, like movies and music, are incredibly elastic commodities. If faced with actually having to buy them for current market price, most people would simply do without rather than pay for them. In strictly economic sense, this severely limits the potential losses. It’s like saying that if you doubled tolls on the Bay Bridge, you’d make twice as much money. What really would happen would be that less people would travel over the Bay Bridge. Effects on actual revenue are considerably harder to predict.
I don’t support piracy, but the BSA is full of BS.
Yesterday I did some thinking bout how to prevent more of the spam that floods (or at least leaks into) my sight, and decided to give a whirl to SecureImage, a plugin that implements a CAPCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) . You’ve seen these before: type in the mangled numbers and letters that you see in the box. I’m considering this a test: if you think it is a huge nuisance and I should take it down, leave a note here (okay, you’ll have to do it once) or send me an email at my usual mailbox.
Here’s to a spam free future. At least for now.
I like Wikipedia. I think it is a great resource, maintained by the efforts of many talented and knowledgeable individuals, even in the face of what amounts to continuous attempts at vandalism.
Wikipedia has been subject to some criticism. John C. Dvorak thought that Google’s involvement in the project spelled its demise. Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger noted some procedural problems in an article for kuro5hin. But few have been utterly as self-serving as, you guessed it, the king of self promotion, Dave Winer:
Scripting News: 6/11/2005
The Wikipedia history of podcasting has been carefully rewritten to eliminate any mention of my work. The open approach has the same problem that the proprietary one has, it can easily be manipulated by people with an axe to grind. It’s nice that they give such prominent credit to Chris Lydon and Adam Curry, but the technical innovation in both cases was my work. And my podcasts were the inspiration for Curry’s. How is WIkipedia going to prevent from this from happening again? That’s a serious issue. It’s not the first time it’s happened. This is why I’ve never been a strong advocate of Wikipedia.
Winer’s problem seems to not be with the project itself, but just that perhaps for a short interval, it doesn’t serve to kiss his ass in the way that he feels he’s due.
Addendum: I’ve removed the Scripting News from my bloglines list, but Winer bleats keep showing up in other locations, like Jon Udell’s blog. Is there no way to escape the Winer whine?
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had 1300 or so comment spam messages enter my queue. I thought I’d make a graph to see what they look like.
I don’t believe this includes spams which are automatically blacklisted: there are messages that I had to mark as spam by hand.
Dan Gilmor had a short .mp3 response to the news that Microsoft was cooperating with the Chinese government to censor weblogs on MSN. I ranted about this a couple of days ago, it seems that Dan is of like mind.
A Minute with Dan: Don’t Mention Democracy | Bayosphere
“It’s easy enough to understand why our craven corporate giants are doing the dictators’ bidding. But Microsoft and Google, like so many others, rose to enormous wealth and influence by leveraging the freedom they enjoy in the United States. They may be serving their shareholders’ interests. But what they’re doing is not honorable. Why does money trump honor? Is this really the American way?”
Amen, Dan.
This podcast is mostly a recap of my discussions with Amy on why I blog, and some meandering thoughts about spam filtering.
Something no blogger should be without: the EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers. I’ve only skimmed it, but there seems to be a lot of good information there.
No, it’s not brainwagon, but it looked like this guy had to really work to take the crown away from me.
Courtesy of Alan at Amy’s blog.
In one of his recent posts, Robert Scoble reveals a certain pragmatism when it comes to human rights.
When doing business in various countries and, even, various states here in the US, we must comply with the local laws if we want to do business there.
And, as a shareholder in Microsoft, I think it would be a bad decision to decide not to do business in China.
Tell me Robert, when you are willing to curb your sense of moral outrage simply to appease your shareholders, why should we bother to listen to you on any subject?
Doesn’t your eagerness to overlook basic human rights abuses in pursuit of bucks for your corporate masters give you any cause for introspection?
After months and months of trial, the King of Pop has been acquitted on all counts. Just prior to the verdict, I had this exchange with my wife via IM:
(14:10:17) TheWife: Michael jackson verdit coming up soon.
(14:11:36) Me: ooh. bets?
(14:11:57) TheWife: Guilty, all counts!
(14:12:20) Me: nah.
(14:12:24) ***Me bets he walks.
(14:15:47) TheWife: Ng for 1,2,3
(14:16:03) TheWife: What a bunch of crap
(14:16:31) ***Me pats his back for his keen insight into human nature, then hangs himself in disgust.
Whether Jackson is innocent or guilty, he is downright creepy. No 46 year old man invites preteen boys over for sleep overs. Then again, no parent in their right mind would consent to letting their children sleep over in a 46 year old man’s home.
Bleh. I need a shower.