hawkeye’s thoughts of tomorrow

Lamar Smith has revealed himself as an RIAA puppet and more importantly, an idiot. Update: Ok fine, he’s just really an incredibly corrupt tool.

“We want to know exactly what they plan to do to stop illegal downloading on their campuses,” Smith continued in a statement. “Universities have a moral and legal obligation to ensure students do not use campus computers for illegal downloading. These schools do not give away their intellectual property for free, and they should not expect musicians to do so.”

[Public] Universities are not responsible for imparting morals. They should be amoral (not immoral) in their education, unbiased by society’s choices of “good and proper”. The important thing to remember about morals is how fluid they are and how they can be used for evil. In the past it was “immoral” to associate with a person of different skin tone. It’s still “immoral” for two guys or two girls to love each other. A University is not the setting for teaching morals.

Universities are also not responsible for enforcing laws. They have a legal obligation to obey them and comply by the rule of law, but it’s up to police to enforce laws. Making schools play the role of police is unfair to everyone involved.

Last I checked it’s also up to the citizens of a country to make the laws, not multinational cartels. This is the inherent flaw in giving corporations even a subset of the rights of citizens. Corporations should not have the right to hold intellectual property, because they don’t feel, they don’t care, and they never die. IP rights are designed to benefit smart, hard working people for their entrepreneurial spirit, not to allow people who’ve never had an original idea in their lives to profit of the backs of naive, creative types. IP rights were designed to reward innovation, not to allow infinite profit from one good idea. The expiration of copyright was designed to allow of people to take someone’s idea and expand upon it, to better the community of human knowledge through contribution. Does giving Disney an eternal copyright on Mickey Mouse benefit society or Disney? Who do we care about more?

I’ve got a new idea. If you don’t want to share your ideas freely…DON’T. I can live without them. Human beings have an innate desire to create and lack of monetary incentive isn’t going to stop people from making music, writing books, or creating art. If you’re such an amazing artist, people will pay you. Maybe not enough to buy gold chains and bentleys…but isn’t it about wanting to express yourself? If you make enough to live on comfortably and get a chance to free your soul once a night, isn’t that enough? Being an artist isn’t supposed to be easy, most of the best art is rooted in conflict (When was the last time you read a book without conflict?). I don’t wish I had artistic talent so I could make the big bucks. I wish I had artistic talent to hear just that one person say, “Your art really touched me, thank you”, money might be icing on the cake, but the emotional connection and meaning is what I wish I had.

Now I’ll differ a bit on engineering and invention. There’s significant research and development costs¹ involved in that much more related to physical property than art is. I’m not sure of the specifics involved in this, there needs to be some protection, but it needs to be limited enough that you couldn’t just sit on a really good idea forever.

Whew! Ok, I’m done for now.

¹ _{Don’t try to relate this to the artist argument, a Guitar/Violin/Pen/Typewriter/Paintbrush, doesn’t count as a significant cost.}

Bush vetoed the bill, we all know. Moving on, what’s the truth of the matter?

For his part, Bush flew to Florida to meet with military commanders and said the Democratic proposal would turn Iraq into a “cauldron of chaos.”

They don’t clarify and they don’t state very well in the first place, but who’s credited with this quote. Bush? A General Perhaps? John Smith from Huntsville, AL? I’m going to assume it’s bush for now. What if he’s right? We may have gotten involved in this war for the wrong reasons based on lies and misinformation, but don’t we as human beings owe the Iraqis something? We destabilized a country and it doesn’t sit well with me to just leave them on their on. On the other hand of course, if we keep baby-sitting them, will they ever really grow up? (”They started it!” *BOOM*)

I’m not 100% comfortable with the staged pull-out. Bush makes a fair point with his comment of “you don’t tell the enemy when you plan to give up”. The whole idea of saying, “If you guys just terrorize a little longer and harder, we’ll just leave, and you can fend for yourselves” smacks of an awful idea.

I’m also very against Bush vetoing something that has such wide support. He’s just a couple steps away from proclaiming himself dictator (he’s already “The Decider”). Even if the American people are dumb, the way the system is designed, they’re supposed to be in control.

Bush also hasn’t come up with a workable plan for Iraq, so his vetoing a plausible idea, even if it isn’t 100% acceptable, really rubs me the wrong way. Just saying, “Nope, that won’t work.” without coming up with a better alternative is just being difficult. If waiting to see how things go doesn’t involve potentially thousands of lives I’m fine with taking the “wait and see” approach, but we don’t really have that luxury in this case.

Are there any experts on the issue that aren’t politically biased, that can come up with a solution that:

You know what. Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two. I’ll take a good and fast solution. I don’t care how much it costs. We can find more money, we can’t find more people (well, you know what I mean, once someone’s dead they’re dead, even if we can always reproduce).

Ok, here’s something funny instead.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

This is it, Obama’s lost, Hillary’s lost, Edward’s lost. The Democrats have lost the next election. They’ve elected Jenni Engebretsen as their “Deputy CEO of Public Affairs”, don’t recognize the name, she was previously the Director of Communications for the RIAA. Which means any day now we’ll start to see the democrats suing small children, the elderly, and the handicapped.

Then again, the RIAA hasn’t really lost a lot of face considering what they’ve been doing, maybe she is a good choice…

BoingBoing [Via Gizmodo]

I wasn’t going to post it, but I saw this and had to share. Edwards response about voting for the war:

For the future, it has made it much clearer to me what I would do under similar circumstances. Which is gather the information as best I could. Get people who have a very different view in front of me to express their view. Be certain that I had all the contrary information, and not be swayed by the advocacy of one side or the other, but instead make a very independent judgment about what makes sense under the circumstances. That’s what I’d do.

O_O

Wow, that’s the completely opposite side from Bush’s ideology of, “I’m right because I’m divinely inspired…and ’cause I said so”.

I saw an article over at ArsTechnica today about a report released by The World Economic Forum. It shows the US falling way behind in the NRI (Network Readiness Index), which sounds like a bullshit indicator to me, but let’s go with it for the sake of argument. I can’t get FTTH, I have to pay unbelievable amounts for cable, we’re easily years behind most of the developed world in cell-phone technology, we’re extremely dependent on fossil fuels, and public transit is almost non-existant (except for a few select cities), so let’s just assume for a minute that the U.S. is a little bit behind the rest of the world. I think there’s a few reasons behind this, but let’s start with the one that jumped to mind first:

The average age in the 110th Congress is 62, the youngest of which is John Sununu at 43 years old (Wikipedia). Currently you must be 35 for Presidency, 30 for the Senate, or 25 for the House of Representatives (Wikipedia). However, in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, the age you can be elected is 18. They seem to be doing pretty well overall. I’d say it looks like the 18 year olds aren’t ruining the government with their “inexperience”, so what’s the point of restricting government offices to older people? Sure, I don’t want an 18 year-old to be in charge of the country, but how bad would it be to see a few of the younger generation shaking things up in Washington? Perhaps someone who would question things like the DST change benefits, giving massive subsidies to already profitable oil companies, and “The Surge!”. In my experience 18 year-olds are much more likely to question things than their older brethren, and it sure would be nice to see Washingtonians squirming as they have to explain their hair-brained schemes to someone who doesn’t just see things differently, but lives in a different world entirely.

How many 60 year olds do you know that have a firm grasp on copyright law, the internet, foreign policy, or modern economics? I’m certainly not saying they can’t understand these things, some people stay knowledgeable and “hip” into their 80’s and 90’s even, but those are not the normal case. There’s a place for the older generation in politics, but I don’t think they should so thoroughly dominate it.

We currently have politicians in office that think the telecoms should be allowed to rob the government for billions of dollars with no recourse. That giving a contract to Diebold for unproven voting technology just because it has the word “electronic” is a good idea. That sending a miniscule percentage of extra troops to a country in a civil war is going to defeat an ideology. I’m willing to see what the alternative is to that kind of psychosis.

Apparently the DST change didn’t result in any power savings. Seems the mornings offset the evenings, who’d have thought? ArsTechnica already did the hard work of layering heaps of thick sarcasm in their commentary about the DST change. Rather than add my own I’ll just link it.

ArsTechnica: DST change: no savings, no point

The TSA’s “Red Team” (they’re like super-heroes!) has been testing airport security and found out that despite the absence of toothpaste and swiss army knives, bombs and IEDs are still perfectly easy to get on planes.

“The good news is we have our own people probing and looking and examining the system,” said Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Democrat in the 7th congressional who sits on the House Homeland Security and transportation committees. “The bad news is they’re finding weaknesses.”

What a wonderful quote, I wonder if he does Play-by-Play commentary in his spare time?

If they miss something that’s obvious, often times that could happen, we will pull them off the line and retrain them,” said Security Director Earl Morris at TSA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

My advice would be more along the lines of…don’t hire idiots in the first place. Perhaps something in the interview like:


“If a woman tells you the bandage on her leg isn’t a bomb…but it’s setting off the metal detector, you should”:

• A. (In a friendly manner, not accusing) Ask her what surgery she had that would cause the metal detector to go off, ask her if she would mind taking off the bandage in a private screening room
• B. Rip off the bandage while yelling, “I found a trrrrrrrist!”
• C. Take her word for it, after all, she’s not brown.

“There’s very little substance to security,” said former Red Team leader Bogdan Dzakovic. “It literally is all window dressing that we’re doing. It’s big theater on TV and when you go to the airport. It’s just security theater.” *snip*
Dzakovic was a Red Team leader from 1995 until September 11, 2001. *snip*
Dzakovic, who is currently a TSA inspector, said security is no better today.

Can someone explain to me why, if you believe it doesn’t do any good, you would continue working for the TSA? Are the benefits particularly good (I’m sure they are), like enough to outweigh knowing that every day you work for an organization that wastes billions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to make people feel safer than they actually are while simultaneously making travel about as enjoyable as eating broken glass. I feel less safe just knowing people like that work for the TSA.

“We have a very robust program of which we are very proud, in which we utilize testing at all of our airports every single day,” said Morris.

I don’t give a flying rat’s ass if you’re proud of your system, what bearing does that have on it’s efficacy? He’s also apparently an idiot since he’s still maintaining its robust, when it was proven not to be.

According to the GAO, screeners at 15 airports missed 90 percent of the explosives and guns agents tried to sneak past checkpoints.

That’s kind of deceptively worded. Does that mean that 15 airports had 90 percent of the mistakes? or that 15 airports each failed 90% of their tests. Because one of those is fixable and the other isn’t.

Most test results, including results from the Red Team, are secret, classified as SSI or sensitive security information. Morris says they do not make them public because they could point out holes in the system.

…what? If there are holes in the system…YOU FUCKING FIX THEM! NOW! Why shouldn’t this all be public knowledge? For the money we’re paying them there shouldn’t be a single god-damn hole in the system. Why not make it a big open project? I’d say this is a place where the wisdom of crowds would excel. Ask 1 million people, “If you were a terrorist, how would you blow up a plane?” I bet they’d get some answers they never even imagined being possible. More importantly if they opened up the process they might get experts (on say, explosives) commenting on things instead of untrained bureaucratic buffoons who make decisions like banning toothpaste and bottled water.

Original Story from 9News

This just in, John McCain is an idiot (or hires idiots which makes him look like an idiot…which is close enough). This is yet another reason why politicians who are old and senile shouldn’t be allowed to run (let’s say, over 50). These are the people who set the tone for the future, do you really want someone who doesn’t even understand the future is?

By the way, WTF happened to McCain? How did the Republican party castrate him so completely? Anyone remember when he had his own opinions and wasn’t just one of Bush’s parrot creatures? He just went away one day and came back a Stepford Wife.

Finally noticed an email in my Inbox from the Obama campaign pushing the Iraq War De-escalation bill again, didn’t think too much of it till about half-way through where it says.

On this page, you can also find a link to various ways you can assist troops in the field, veterans who’ve returned home, and the families of those whose service we honor. And so as we work to get them out of harm’s way in Iraq, please take a moment to do something for those who have sacrificed most.

The site actually links to AmericaSupportsYou.mil, so it’s not like they created their own page or anything (nor is there really a reason to when a resource already exists). It struck me as an interesting twist to push the “Support the Troops” rhetoric at the same time as the “Stop the Iraq War” rhetoric, since the Republicans have tried so hard to make them polar opposites.

Finally noticed an email in my inbox from Barackobama.com. Seems he’s trying to get his message out about his Iraq War De-escalation Act. Comes with an interesting link too. He actually wants people to sign on to it, it’s almost as if he cares what people think, it’s even got a comments box. Why have none of the other campaigns implemented something to this effect? Only reason I can come up with is that they’re idiots.

Even if you don’t agree with the Act (which is linked in it’s entirety on that page, not hidden away to be passed under the cover of darkness) there’s no denying how brilliant this is when you consider how apathetic the populace has become. Sending out a, “Hey, this is what I stand for, tell me what you think.” email to gauge the public’s opinion is genius. Admittedly he’ll be getting a biased sampling, but he’ll still get opinions that might differ slightly (like mine). It’s cheaper than the current polling methods and I can’t imagine it’s any worse. Plus it will make people feel like they might actually have some say in the political process (even if they don’t).

Obama might be the first candidate to pull the tech-savvy-bleeding-heart-college-student vote, and if he does he’ll blindside all the other candidates.