I need to update my blogroll. I’ve got a few I need to add, and I’ve just discovered that John Sherck has a weblog. Who knew!?
Today’s post is brought to you by the Creative Commons and BoingBoing.net:
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Shoot someone? Not Smith & Wesson’s fault.
Copy a movie? Grokster’s fault
Good stuff from Daily Koz.
Regarding Grokster:
“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,”
Justice Souter wrote.
Regarding guns:
Senate Republicans on Tuesday moved the National Rifle Association’s top priority ahead of a $491 billion defense bill, setting up a vote on legislation to shield firearms manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits over gun crimes.“The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
[Senator Larry] Craig said such lawsuits are “predatory and aimed at bankrupting the firearms industry,” unfairly blaming dealers and manufacturers for the crimes of gun users.
Link (thanks, Earl!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:36:01 PM
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Both Geoff (Tip of the Quill) and Matt (Basket Full of Puppies) picked up on Karl Rove related news in the very same day! That doesn’t happen very often.
From TotQ:
The possible treason of Karl Rove.:
It’s too big a story to let it be buried. Emails at Time Magazine may reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source, and was responsible for blowing CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover. More details are here, courtesy of The…
From BFoP:
Not just because his autobiographical writings make it abundantly clear that he’s a smart, vengeful asshole with a chip on his shoulder. Not just because (like fellow cartoonist Tom Tomorrow) he excoriates his own readership for being insufficiently supportive (read: remunerative) and equates newspapers’ non-consumption of his wares with censorship. Not just because his moral palette is so starkly black-and-white that it makes Dubya look like a Berkeley cultural studies post-doc.
No, today I hate him for this. Now, you don’t exactly have to drink the lefty-blogger Kool-Aid to think that Karl Rove might just have been up to some shenanigans w/r/t Valerie Plame, or that this is a bad, wicked thing for him to have done. If you felt that way, you might want to bring others around to your point of view–perhaps by citing news reports on the unfolding investigation, or putting Rove’s actions in a moral and political context…
Personally, I’m wondering when someone is going to be held accountable for the outright lies told to the World in an attempt to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation. But I’m kinda simplistic in that regard.
The most tedious thing about living abroad are finances: you have two bank accounts, two sets of credit cards, etc. Now, it is kinda nice, as I have purchasing power (and a verified mailing address) in two countries, and that’s especially nice for purchasing cheap goods in the US (the GBP goes a long way against the US dollar right now). However, paying for the US credit card means getting money from the UK to the US.
Enter PayPal. The setup is kinda slick:
- I send cash from my UK account to Carrie, who has a US account linked to our US bank.
- We pay a 3% fee for the currency exchange.
- Carrie receives an email indicating she has received money from me
- She logs onto PayPal to accept the funds
- She initiates the transfer from PayPal to the US bank account (free)
- Done.
The 3% fee is a very good rate; I think, for an electronic wire transfer from a UK bank to a US bank I’m going to pay something like $50 in fees. So, for small, infrequent transfers ($500 or less, infrequently), this is an excellent way to move money from one place to another.
Of course, if I don’t pay my Visa bill, then I pay interest…
Via BoingBoing:
Spanish copyright society hounds Uni teacher out of job:
Cory Doctorow:
I just got an email from my friend Jorge Cortell, a copyfighter and academic in Spain, whom I met at the Creative Commons España launch this year.
Jorge teaches “Intellectual Property” in the Masters program at the Polytechnic University of Valencia UPV. He proposed to give a talk on the benefits of P2P and talk about the law relating to P2P and copyright in Spain. He proposed to demo what sort of legal uses one could make of copyrighted works from P2P networks, and informed the Spanish collecting society, the national police and the attorney general to let them know what he was up to.
They responded by leaning on the Dean, who cancelled Jorge’s venue. Jorge booked another venue, and the Dean cancelled it. So Jorge moved his talk to the cafeteria, and delivered a five hour session to a packed house.
On May 4, the Dean ordered the director of Jorge’s program to demand his resignation, which he tendered. The Vice-Dean then added insult to injury by issuing a statement saying that Jorge had never taught at the university (!), in a surreal, Stalinist purge (Jorge has taught at the University for five years).
This is a shameful act of censorship and a betrayal of the principles of academic freedom. It’s a national shame that Spain’s powerful collecting societies can simply order the termination of any university teacher who teaches things that displease them.
Link
If you lived in the UK right now, the new Honda Element would cost you around £9000 to purchase (assuming you could get the US price for it). Of course, you would actually have to purchase it from an importer, so it would be marked up by a factor of 2, meaning the vehicle would cost £18,000, or $33,100.
The 15.9 (US) gallon tank in the Honda Element is around 13 imperial gallons, or approximately 60 litres. Since one US gallon is 3.785 litres, and it gets roughly 25 miles to the gallon, it must get around 25 miles to 3.785 litres, or 6.6 miles to the litre.
A litre of petrol (gas) in the UK right now costs around 89p, or £0.89. One British pound is converting to 1.83985 dollars at the moment (wholesale, not with transaction and conversion fees). So, one litre of fuel costs $1.64. Put another way, you can travel six miles in Britain for $1.64 in a Honda Element.
A full tank on the Honda Element costs $98, in the UK.
If you think the USA won’t reach these kinds of prices, just wait. Current US prices are around $2/US Gallon, or $.52/litre, or 28p/litre. But, I’m confident that the USA will get there—petrol prices will eventually stabilize with the rest of the world, and if the war and systematic gutting of social security don’t work wonders on the US economy, then realistic fuel prices will. That 20 mile commute to work will suddenly cost $5.50, each way.
And then the US will wish the government had invested in public transport instead of fuel subsidies.
Note: You can simulate this cost, right now, in the USA, by driving a Hummer H2. It has a 32 gallon tank ($198 to fill in the UK), and gets 9.6 miles to the gallon, or 2.5 miles to the litre. For $1.64, you can drive 2.5 miles in the UK in a Hummer H2.
I can walk 2.5 miles in around 30 minutes.
Via BoingBoing, I found this wonderful quote from John Scalzi, Sci Fi author:
Let’s ask: Who are pirates? They are people who won’t pay for things (i.e., dickheads), or they’re people who can’t pay for things (i.e., cash-strapped college students and others). The dickheads have ever been with us; they wouldn’t pay even if they had the money. I don’t worry about them, I just hope they fall down an abandoned well, break their legs and die of gangrene after several excruciatingly painful days of misery and dehydration, and then I hope the rats chew the marrow from their bones and shit back down the hollows. And that’s that for them.
As for the people who can’t pay for things, well, look. I grew up poor and made music tapes off the radio; my entire music collection from ages 11 to 14 consisted of tapes that had songs missing their first ten seconds and whose final ten seconds had DJ chatter on them; from 14 to 18, I taped off my friends; from 18 to 22 I reviewed music so I could get it for free. And then after that, once I had money, I bought my music. Because I could. As for books, I bought secondhand paperbacks through my teen and college years. Now I buy hardbacks. Again, because I can. Now, being a writer, you can argue that I’m more self-interested in paying for creative work than others, but I have to honestly say that I don’t know anyone who can pay for a book or a CD or a DVD or whatever who doesn’t, far more often than not.
I don’t see the people who can’t pay as pirates. I see them as people who will pay, once they can. Until then, I think of it as I’m floating them a loan. Nor is it an entirely selfless act. I’m cultivating a reader — someone who thinks of books as a legitimate form of entertainment — and since I want to be a writer until I croak, that’s a good investment for me. More specifically, I’m cultivating a reader of me, someone who will at some point in the future see a book of mine of the shelf, go “Scalzi! I love that dude!” and then take the book off the shelf and take it to the register.
Why did I like it so much? Because it’s true. In particular, I think about how much software I buy now that I’m on my own (and, significantly in debt). I have no problem paying for good software. Perhaps it is because I know what it takes to make software come into being. Perhaps I’m just more responsible than I used to be. But it makes me feel good to know that I’ve helped support someone who, by writing a good piece of software, has made my life… easier, in a way.
Ecto. OmniGraffle Pro. OmniOutliner Pro. PDFPen (I use this to annotate all the electronic versions of the articles I make use of in my research—invaluable). Snapz Pro. Salling Clicker. iLife ’04. Someday, OS X 10.4.
Yes, I am glad people write free software. But I’m also glad to support people who write good tools that I can use to do cool stuff.
I missed it; perhaps I should sign up for the Skype announcement emails…
So, for 15 Euros/year, I can get voicemail. For 30 Euros/year, I can get a SkypeIn number in the US, UK, or a host of other countries; this number comes with voicemail. So, from any place that I have ethernet, I can
- Make phone calls (SkypeOut)
- Receive phone calls (SkypeIn) from landlines
- Receive voicemail
That’s pretty slick. The voicemail is of limited use unless you have the SkypeIn, I would think; or, unless you use Skype heavily with a group of people. Either way, I still have to sort out my home network, because right now Skype causes our poor little modem/router/wifi point to wibble over in a hurry.
It is also interesting that I could get my parents a SkypeIn number in the UK, and use it to call them (or, visa-versa). That is, you can buy a SkypeIn number on the other side of the ocean, and let people call you on your computer for local or near-local rates at the other end.
This is so slick; if I was doing consulting work, and wanted to make it easy for clients around the world to call me, I’d pick up a number in a handful of countries; this way, clients in the US, UK, and Hong Kong (wow) for 90 Euros/year. That’s cheap compared to, say, a typical mobile phone contract in the UK. And, unlike a typical phone, I can check that voicemail regardless of where I am in the world—any WiFi enabled Starbucks, for example. That’s simply wacky.
Skype will rule the world. Or, the next-generation version of it. However, they were first to market, and got the equation right: software for free, charge for services. And the services were ones that people wanted. Frankly, I’m impressed.
Too bad it takes down my home network. That needs to be improved…
Update: Incredible. I can even get a SkypeIn number for both mine and Carrie’s home area codes. That is insane. That means that our parents could easily just call a local number to call us. Simply wacky.
I’ve decided I like reading Media Matters. I’ve no love for bad reporting, and they do a great job of watching the people who should be watching the people in charge.
Or something like that.
For example, I hadn’t caught wind of the payments made by the RNC to Maggie Gallagher to promote and preserve marriage as an institution in America. That’s really sad.
Pictures like the one at right have recently made the rounds of the net; apparently, an AP reporter dug them up via a filesharing client or some similar mechanism. I’m not so interested in the story of where the photos came from, per se, but I am interested in how people respond to these pictures, and the kind of questions/debate they raise.
For example, following a thread at signonsandiego.com:
From:  simon  (Dec 04, 2004 14:35 PST)
Imagine that's your father with the bag on his head.
To which we get the response
From:  Belle  (Dec 04, 2004 14:37 PST)
Imagine that was your husband in uniform...
But this response, by far, is the most interesting:
From:  Belle  (Dec 04, 2004 14:40 PST)
Or imagine those were your sons...why are you sympathizing with the enemy that killed innocent people at will?
The reason this response is wonderful is because, if you take the collection of photos as a whole, you cannot tell whether Belle is referring to the US or Iraqi combatants.
Granted, from the context of other comments, we know that Belle is referring to the US troops. However, I doubt that Belle has considered what choices she might have made in the last three years were she a woman who grew up and lived in Baghdad, facing the invasion (and continued occupation) of her homeland by a foreign nation. I don’t believe she has a context in which to even begin considering the question.
Then again, she may know something I do not.