Morning News Items

Could Hollywood hack your PC? – this law, yet again, gives the RIAA and MPAA the ability to use whatever means necessary to block file trading, regardless of whatever potential damage is done to consumers, and makes it next to impossible for consumers to be compensated if they go too far and cause actual damage. This quote in particular bothers me:

“It’s a good bill,” Gene Smith, a spokeswoman for Berman, said on Monday. “It’s always hard to defend theft and piracy–this bill just puts into the hands of the copyright owners technologies that are already being used by the pirates.”

Let that sink in for a little while. They want to give copyright owners the same tools that pirates are using. Is this not the same thing as saying “If you get robbed, you have the legal right to break into someone’s house and look for the things that got stolen, if you happen to suspect that they are the one who took it, and if you’re wrong, and you damage the person’s house, oh well!”? It’s the same logic, is it not? Of course they wouldn’t pass a law that let average citizens defend their rights however they deem appropriate, but corporations? Sure! Remember these people come election time.

Blogger is looking for a customer support rep. If you live in San Fran. this would actually be a pretty cool job to have! (link lifted from Christine)

A note about the blogroll lists. I have a bunch more links to add, people I either visit or read in my news aggregator everyday, but in some cases I haven’t quite decided yet which category they fall into. Obviously, the categories are mostly just for my benefit, but I like to have some consistency in what I’m doing over there. Also, I’ve decided not to add any links until I get the Current Affairs list to grow a little bit. Unfortunately, it seems like most current affair/news blogs either suck, or are written with such a “I’m always right and you’re always wrong” attitude that I can’t stand reading them.

One last thing, if I ever become a really popular blogger and have a huge enough audience that people come here just to suck up to me in my comments or in my email, in hopes that maybe, just maybe I’ll link to them, or wave to them in my webcam (OK, I’m not female so that’s unlikely, but still you get the idea), so they can pretend for a minute that I actually spend any amount of time thinking about them when I really don’t, I’ll stop doing this. No wait, on second thought, I won’t stop doing this, but I will use my pulpit to tell these people to get a life! (Insert your own examples here, I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of it!)

Hmm I seem to be rather irritable today, don’t I? 🙂

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