30 Jul 02 Not Really Lincoln’s Words …

I’m a bit discouraged with the world nowadays. It seems that legislation to aid corporate greed and reduce your rights is being introduced in a hydra-like fashion. Cut down one stalk, have it ruled unconstitutional (first try: CDA, second try: COPA, both ruled unconstitutional), and some senator or representative will just doggedly try to reintroduce something exactly like it. Lately, it’s been senators and representatives with a lot of pork in the barrel trying to enshrine corporations until “all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed.” (Words commonly but falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but nevertheless, methinks, true.)

Senator Biden introduced an amendment to an anticounterfeiting bill that will make it a federal felony to bypass media conglomerates’ “digital rights management” protections — even if, for example, it’s just because the Key2Audio copy protection won’t let you play your legally purchased CD where you want to listen to it, such as on a Mac, portable MP3 player, DVD player, or PlayStation. You could be in prison for up to five years and have to pay $25,000 per offense. (Hmm. Wonder if the reason he likes to make things illegal is so he can generate more business for the lawyers and law firms that have paid him a few shekels shy of a million dollars.)

And incredibly, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have convinced Representative Rick Berman, to whom they gave well over $180,000, to introduce a bill that would allow them to legally hack and do “denial of service” attacks (and various other cyberwar-like nastiness) in order to prevent the transmission of copyrighted works. Definitely the wrong way to go about it, and as some have pointed out, a violation of the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

There were two people’s reactions to the “Let The MPAA/RIAA Get Away With ANYTHING” Bill (it doesn’t have a ‘proper’ name yet) who really stood out. One guy wrote:

First, copyright holders were allowed to take you to civil court for theft of copyrighted material, which was all well and good. Then, the big guys realized that civil proceedings cost them money, so they paid for a law (DMCA) that would make copyright violations a criminal offense so the government would foot the bill. And now that they aren’t getting the results they wanted from the government they want to legalize vigilante justice? I guess buying your politicians in bulk really pays off.

The other one is a series of very good talking points, but I’ll just give you a link to it instead of reprinting it here.

Add that to things like Italy hacking into an American website to eliminate ‘illegal blasphemy’, companies trying to claim a patent on things like the ‘JPEG’ file format (used by all websites, digital cameras, etc.) and the concept of website ads … every one is just so damn greedy, trying to put their hands on something they have absolutely no right to.

And, if you never heard of why we arrested an entirely innocent Russian programmer (and this was before September 11, back in a time when we were usually more careful to preserve the civil rights of foreign nationals) and held him for a very long time, then you should read up about what we did to Dimitri Skylarov thanks to that piece of crap called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

That’s, by the way, why I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU. They fight shit like this, sometimes even successfully. (Of course, until I see that they’ve cashed my renewal check, I may be a temporarily lapsed member of the ACLU.)

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That’s just the legislative shit that’s going on, and that stuff above makes me fear for the future. The following just pisses me off …

The fact that Apple is charging full price for the next version of its operating system. I don’t get it, you respond. Well, let me clarify: most software developers offer a retail price and an upgrade price. The upgrade price is for people who own the previous version of their software; the retail price is for someone buying it new.

So, for example, when I bought the utterly fantastic mail client Mailsmith, it would have cost me $99 (if it hadn’t been on sale for $20 off). But when I want to upgrade to their next big version, it’ll cost me $39. I don’t have to pay $100 because I supported them by purchasing their previous version, and they want to continue to have me as a customer.

Apple Computer said, “Hell with that. We’re going to charge everybody full price.” They did this at the same time that they announced they were changing their free iTools service to a $100/year “.Mac” service, which evidently they will be integrating a lot of their applications with.

(I keep trying to remind myself that less than five years ago, I was fairly comfortable with an NEC PowerMate 1 that ran MS-DOS v3.2. No “digital rights management” crap, no “we have the right to hack into your computer to check your copyrights,” no “we’re going to build your next computer so others have free access to it,” etc. Still, I’d rather have to pay exorbitant stuff to Apple than to Bill Gates; generally, Steve Jobs doesn’t have his head up his ass quite as much as Gates does. And at least Amazon’s offering a $50 rebate, meaning I can in the end pay just $79. That’s doable, and this way I can still keep my OS up-to-date.)

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My ISP has begun blocking Topica because evidently they spam. All well and good (and, by the way, you notice how the legislators never do anything about spam, although they’re willing to get their feet involved with digital rights management and all that crap? it’s so obvious they’re in bed with business!), but this means I’m not getting my weekly e-mail from Macworld Weekly or from the update list that Jessamyn keeps for her journal, because ALL mail from there is getting blocked. Crappy, eh?

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I’m concerned about the Anachronic Army. They’ve really not been doing too well lately, although they seem to be doing better.

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A few weekends ago, I sat and talked with my Quicken program for a little bit, and figured out that over the last two years, I’ve paid $2,000 in finance charges on my credit cards alone. Isn’t that insane? I’ve decided that I’m going to start making massive credit card payments in the hopes of getting my balance down.

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But when I do pay off my debt, I think I want to sell my iMac on eBay and then get a Mac laptop, either a PowerBook or an iBook. <HomerDrool>Gharffffflllll …</HomerDrool>

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Summer heat and humidity has this incredible lethargic effect on me. I gotta move next year, if not to a place that has central air, then to a place with decent enough windows that they can hold a good strong window unit with a lot of BTUs …

24 Jul 02 The Sound of Her Voice

Today, I was riding in on the subway, and a couple sat next to me speaking about their travel plans. And what, for some reason, really got to me was her voice. It had a certain melody to it, and I realized that a lot of women have very lyrical voices, if you just listen to the way they express themselves.

21 Jul 02 Heat Wave!

It’s currently 11:48 am here as I write these words, but unfortunately, it’s already an actual temperature of 89 degrees; the RealFeel (new-fangled heat index) is 102, or 98 in the shade. What’s worse is the temperature is supposed to steadily climb until 3:00 pm, when we’re supposed to hit an actual temperature of 99, which will have a corresponding RealFeel of 107. Yeah, one-hundred-frickin’-seven degrees.

Have I ever mentioned to you, gentle readers, that I live in an apartment that is on the fourth floor, and that my building has no elevator? Furthermore, that my windows probably have not been replaced since the building was first constructed in 1923, and that, as a result, they are so loose that a window-mounted air conditioner does no good, since its cooled air goes right out of the gaps in the loosely-fitted frames?

I’m not in for a pleasant afternoon. Fortunately, in about a half an hour, I am heading over to one of my lawyer’s house (she actually lives only a few blocks away), where I’m going to give a try at handling some of the problems on her Windows machine. I gave her a disclaimer that I’m better with Macs and might not be able to help, but she’d like me to give a try anyway.

I’ll leave you for now with two links I’ve ran across and would like to share with you.

This essay expresses my feelings about the whole RIAA and ‘music piracy’ thing very well. And this man’s experience must be read to be believed.

08 Jul 02 Yes, I’m Still Around …

It’s still ninety degrees out, at eight o’clock in the evening. We were supposedly going to get some rainstorms today that were supposed to drop the temperature down. But looking at the local radar, there’s a line of storms just about crossing Milwaukee and heading our way, so it should hopefully get here in a few hours and cool things down.

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I helped my folks move over the July 4th extended weekend. They stopped renting and took a mortgage on a nice little home that is closer to where each of them works. It was a lot of heavy lifting, but worth it; there is a certain essential pleasure to a difficult physical project that culminates in a large accomplishment, you know? On Saturday, we had some of my dad’s colleagues come over with their pickup trucks and trailers and move the very heavy stuff. (It was a bit amusing yet touching to see that his colleagues, in their early thirties, adopted a sort of protective behavior around my dad, making sure to get the real heavy stuff so that he didn’t exert himself too hard. I was doing so as well, but they often beat me to the punch!)

Interestingly enough, the last load we ran over Saturday night was a simple one: the two cats that my parents have. One is an older, orange and brown cat who is the veteran of a couple of moves; he obviously was a little unnerved, but laid down flat on the seat, putting his head down flat. The other one is a gray and black cat that’s much younger, and he was scared beyond belief. (He would not go into the carrier, no matter how long my mother tried.) He was hyperventilating — panting, his jaw staying open — and no matter how much I pet him and whispered soothingly, he kept letting out a petrified meowish yelp every few seconds.

And, as we were about 80% of the way there, the poor guy lost control of his bladder … all over my shirt and shorts. Despite the extreme unpleasantness of being pissed on by a cat, I didn’t yell or even change my voice. After all, they say that cats have the intelligence and emotional development of a two-year-old … what sort of creep could yell at a frightened two-year-old? I imagine he really didn’t sync into the idea that this was a moving vehicle he was in, and as a result, I think he sort of had what would be the equivalent of a bad LSD trip in a human.

Unfortunately, the washer was too much of a racket to use that late at night (and unfortunately very near the hiding spot that the poor guy chose to hide in the new house), and their dryer hadn’t been hooked up yet. So, Mom was kind enough to wash shirt, shorts, and drawers in the kitchen sink. Unfortunately, I didn’t have something to change into … that pair of shorts was the only one I had brought home! So I just grabbed a new T-shirt (I had brought plenty of those) and hit the hay, only to be kept up nearly half the night by coughing from all the dust kicked up from the move.

It was actually a bit of a pleasure to return to work today … no prolonged physical labor or bodily reactions of frightened cats to deal with *grin* …

And for all of you kindhearted readers who are wondering … by all reports, the guy is back to his usual playful self. He body-slammed the older orange-and-brown one and chased him around the apartment, and seems to be doing pretty well, according to the folks.

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I went up in an airplane on Sunday, believe it or not! My dad is a manager of an airport … nothing huge like O’Hare or anything, just a little local airfield with a couple of runways and some hangars. Still, it’s pretty cool. Well, they were having a fundraiser on Sunday, and one of the things they were offering were 10- or 20-minute rides in a small aircraft. I took a ten-minute ride. It was pretty damn fun! You really feel the G-forces when banking, taking off, or landing … but damn, it was quite a sensory experience. Real hands-on. I got some good shots, too.