Digital DRMs
Last night I had a DRM…
“Mr Gates? You bought a SpeedStar 2000 XL GT from us a couple of months ago?”
“Yes, what a sports car! 180 mph! Vroom…!”
“Yeah, well, we’ve discovered a bug in the Engine Management System and you need to bring it in. The engine could seize at high speeds.”
“Oh, okay.”
“And you’ll have to sign the updated warranty agreement.”
“Why? There’s a fault, so you’re obliged to fix it. Why should I sign anything?”
“Well, the fix involves limiting the top speed to 60 mph and adding phone-home capability to the on-board GPS.”
“Hell, man! I don’t want a sports car that only does 60! And I don’t want my GPS to phone home!”
“Can’t have one without the other. If you don’t sign, your brand new car stays a deathtrap.”
“So what’s the GPS phoning home for?”
“In case you go out of you home state, Mr Gates. Seems some states want to charge a visiting fee.”
“But I could get it all for free in a Ford! Dammit, I’m going to get my lawyers to rip that agreement apart and my lawyers are the best in the world!”
“I know…they’re the people who wrote it. You see, the EMS runs under Windows.”
“Gak!”
Dream on…drm off.
—
Scribbled years ago by someone named Checkout from Wilders security forums
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The Incorporated States of America
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech
(Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under the 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans,
There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary.
The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn’t passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today.
RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
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H & M – A Company Run By Douchebags
[Update at the bottom]
This is one of the most despicable things I’ve ever heard of. A retailer in New York City called H & M cuts up unpurchased clothing before throwing it away.
This leaves the homeless people who have to dig through garbage for their survival unable to use these clothes. Just down the street from that store is a collection point for a charity group that distributes clothing to the poor. These people at H & M have got to be the most massive assholes ever born.
They refused to talk to the reporter before that story was filed. Now that it’s published, I bet they’ll release a statement soon to the effect that “we do this to prevent someone else from picking them out of the trash and selling them.”
Even if that is true – and it sounds perfectly plausible – it still doesn’t change the fact that the people at H & M are massive, fucking assholes.
I’ll concede that they have no obligation to donate their unsold merchandise to charity – although that would be right thing to do. Whatever – I’ll concede the point. But these assholes go to the extra effort and expense to destroy the clothing before discarding them.
If these douchebags are willing to pay someone to sit there with a box cutter (or scissors or *whatever*) cutting up perfectly wearable clothing, they can pay that same person to dump the clothes into a wheelbarrow and wheel it down to the clothing collection site.
Or even just throw them out intact, which would require LESS effort than what they do now.
H & M is on my shitlist now. That company is managed by world-class assholes and I will never spend so much as a penny in one of their stores.
Update:
Yeah, that figures. I’m two days late writing about this. They’ve already been shamed into halting this despicable activity. (h/t to Faerie Kat)
Damage control in the face of overwhelmingly bad publicity doesn’t excuse the fact that it happened in the first place and they are still douchebags, but at least they’re going to stop doing this. And I’m still not going to shop there.
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Do you prefer winner take all, district-by-district or straight popular vote?
The President of the United States is chosen according to how many votes each candidate receives in the electoral college. This is why it was so important to learn just who won the state of Florida back in 2000. This system gave us the Presidency of George W Bush instead of Al Gore, despite the fact that more people voted for Al Gore.
There are three systems of counting votes in a presidential election in the United States, two of which vary by state:
- Winner take all, where the winner of the popular vote in a given state receives every electoral vote. Most states use this system today.
- District-by-district, where the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district wins only that district’s electoral vote. Maine uses this system.
- Straight popular vote, which is simply a count of how many people voted for each candidate. Although this number is important, it is the winner of the electoral vote that is elected president.
If you could decide which of these systems were used nation-wide, which election method would you choose to choose the President of the United States?
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How Olympia Snowe is making herself appear relevant
Olympia Snowe is the one Republican who so far has voted in favor of any health reform bill. People are starting to wonder why we’re paying her so much attention.
There is an old (and, some say, possibly dirty) trick to getting attention in Washington. If everyone is voting for something, you can generate attention for yourself if you’re the only person to vote against it.
Everyone wants to know why you’re against it. You’re in the papers, they’re talking about you on the radio and you end up on TV to explain yourself. The media never fails to fall for this, even though they realize they’re being had.
On the other side of the coin, if everyone around you (like, say, the entire Republican Party) is voting against something, just imagine how much attention you’ll get if you vote for it.
Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Just google “Olympia Snowe”.
I’m not saying that this is why she voted to move the reform bill out of her committee. For all I know, she might be the one Republican who wants to serve her constituents. Surely there must be at least one of those left in D.C.
Right?
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Why I stopped watching the Olympic Games
I learned today that President Obama has flown to Copenhagen on a mission to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago.
I can’t bring myself to care about the Olympics Games anymore. It has very little to do with sports these days. The whorish catering to the corporate sponsors has grown to such an absurd level that it ruins the entire event for me.
In 2008, NBC refused to broadcast the opening ceremonies live, waiting instead to air them at primetime. NBC also refused to broadcast the most popular events live, again choosing to show them only during primetime, long after everyone already knew the outcome. They flatly refused to stream the popular events on the web, choosing instead to stream only the more obscure and less popular events.
Show up to an event carrying bottled water from Aquafina (made by Pepsi) while Coke is sponsoring the games? They’ll throw you right out of the stadium. That happened in Athens, in 2004.
The Olympic committees always vastly overestimate the legal reach of their trademark on the word “olympic.” For years, the Olympic committees have threatened to sue countless local business owners in every host country for using variations of the word “olympic.” Most of these actions are against people who are clearly trying to capitalize on the interest in the games but, without fail, they always carry it too far.
This hostile behavior is inflicted upon business owners often in cases where their businesses have used the word for several years and have nothing to do with sports. In 1996, when the games were hosted in Atlanta, the owner of a Greek restaurant, the Olympic Cafe in Savannah, Ga, lost a lawsuit with the US Olympic Committee and was forced to rename his business to Olympia Cafe.
I wish good luck to Chicago, but I don’t watch the games anymore, regardless of what city they’re in. The Olympic Games have become the Worldwide Exhibit of Corporate Sponsors and I refuse to have anything to do with that.
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Vengeance is not justice – The Troy Davis case
An example of just how irrational Americans can be at times is the Troy Davis case. Davis was convicted in 1991 of murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Ga in 1989. He was sentenced to death. Amazingly, his sentence has not yet been carried out, although it looks like it will happen next month.
There are very real reasons for believing that the wrong man has been convicted of this crime.
Davis was convicted based on the eyewitness testimony of nine people. Seven of those nine people have since recanted, saying that police pressured them into making statements that were untrue. There is also a very real possibility that one of the remaining two witnesses might be the person who actually killed Officer MacPhail.
Four of the jurors who served in the Davis trial believe now that they made the wrong decision, based on bad evidence, and they have written to the Georgia Parole board to say so.
The prosecutor in the Troy Davis case, Spencer Lawton, has been cited in the past for misconduct and for withholding evidence from defendants. A number of Lawton’s convictions have later been overturned, including death penalty cases.
This is the context in which Troy Davis was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
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Dear leftwingers, please don’t act like a rightwinger
I don’t know who coined the phrase “question everything” but that is how I approach life. That is my motto.
If someone is claiming to have new information about something, I don’t just accept their claim at face value. I want to know where they got their information and why they think it means what they are claiming. I ask myself if it makes any sense, if the source of the information is credible and if there are other sources of information to back it up.
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Twitter is forcing me to unfollow people
***
I want to start this with a disclaimer. I am not writing this to scold anyone that I follow or to ask them to change how they use Twitter. This rant is aimed squarely and solely at the people at Twitter Inc.
***
I have reached a roadblock in my use of Twitter. I cannot follow any more people who interest me. In fact, the more interesting a person is, the less useful Twitter becomes if I follow that person. This strange and seemingly contradictory situation is entirely Twitter’s fault.
Twitter treats messages that begin with @username as being addressed to that user and so most other followers won’t see them. Up until May, you had three options in how to deal with those messages from the people you follow. You could choose to see all of them, only the ones addressed to other people you follow or only the ones addressed directly to you.
If you were using Twitter in May of this year, you probably remember the controversial @reply change. Twitter Inc. found it necessary to change Twitter.com so as to remove the ability of people to see @replies from people they followed that were addressed to people they did not follow. It was causing a large strain on their network and the option simply had to go. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Unfortunately, Twitter also removed the option to not see the @replies addressed to other people you do follow. When one person I follow says something to another person I follow, I see that conversation in my own stream, even though the message wasn’t addressed to me.
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Should internet anonymity go away?
The answer is no.
Since he asked for it right at the bottom of this article (read it because I’m not summarizing it here), this is an email I just sent to Robert Cringely.
What’s more important: privacy & anonymity or identity & responsibility?
Why don’t we compare the pros and cons?
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The Out Campaign