8 days and 23 hours.
That’s how long it took Race Across America winner Jure Robic. He started in Oceanside, CA and finished in Annapolis, Maryland yesterday.
Amazing.
Month: June 2008 Page 5 of 8
Some very smart commentary over at the Agonist.
And yes, I mean yours. You are probably aware of the recent Associated Press-instigated skirmish, and if not, well, here’s a mostly decent summary. The short version is that AP threatened small web sites with lawsuits for quoting the headlines and ledes of some of its stories. While the the AP is being fairly aggressive about it (pushing for a licensing fee to quote up to 25 words of any AP story) right now, I suspect they’ll find that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. But this story is just another reminder of where we’re heading. Nielsen Hayden gets to the quick of it:
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.
The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property†law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.
If you think he (and I) are overreacting, look a little deeper into what’s going on with our information infrastructure.  The network is transforming to enable pervasive monitoring and technical control over content, the control over that network is consolidating into a group that appears to be more willing to adopt common policies, and the laws are being rewritten to criminalize any attempts to avoid the exercise of this emerging control. That chokehold by a few may not matter to you (or at all) when it’s the next Miley Cyrus single, but it certainly should when we’re talking about the details of the next corruption scandal or natural disaster response.
Next time you need something important, remember to avoid this place:
When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, [Virginia] the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.
That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy” — meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.
I wonder if the “pharmacist” will query purchasers about their sexual practices beforehand, and refuse to sell Claritin to someone that had sex the night before, but not for the primary purpose of procreation. WWMPD?
Lawmakers are hoping for a breakthrough this week on changes to national security legislation that has divided Congress for months: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
[ . . . ]
Senior Congressional officials said they hoped to seal an agreement early this week and quickly vote in the House and Senate on legislation[.]
Yes, I’m sure they’d like to rush it through as quickly as possible, what with the bipartisan tradition of selling out citizens’ civil rights for the interests of the telecom companies.  So what’s the big compromise?
After weeks of talks, lawmakers have worked out a deal that would allow federal courts to settle the question of whether the telecommunications companies should be protected because they were assured their participation was legal.
Something tells me that that’ll turn out to be something other than what it appears. Let’s not hurry legislation that’s designed to bury wrongdoing.
Seems like Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General, has cleaned up New York to such an extent that he can now spend his time convincing ISPs to shut down access to gigantic swaths of the Internet:
Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.
[ . . . ]
No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.
Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups–out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.
Ah. All you have to do is yell “CP!” in a crowded theatre, and any subsequent trampling is okay, it seems. It’s been years and years since I’ve been on Usenet, but it – including many alt.* groups – occupies a special place in my own personal online history. It was a place for advanced debate and discussion when the first HTML standards hadn’t even been settled. Usenet hosted the first forum that ever resulted in me getting on a plane to go meet a group of friends I’d never seen in real life (circa 1994).  While I’ve long since moved on, it still appears to be a busy host to exactly that kind of interaction. But hey, Andrew Cuomo needs an issue to run on, and Verizon wants a bit of credit to trade with the regulators, so lets slash and burn the place.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaWs79v0ugE[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHnJ4hxYNGo[/youtube]
And, of course
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF-m7Qet6xo[/youtube]
Sigh. Only the good die young.