Steaming Turd

Wikipedia is one of my favorite websites of all time. A bit ago, while surfing through Wikipedia, I happened to click through to some articles about various Interstate highways. I guess I’m a little bit of a “road geek”, as some people call it, as I’m fascinated by the architecture, history, and confluences of highways, roads, little dirt paths, and the identifiers we’ve given to them.

Anyway, since Wikipedia is locked currently for a software upgrade, I am unable to give some updates to a couple of pages. But I can mention what I want to update here, and share with my very few readers some of the interesting stuff I’ve found.

The page for I-90 mentions that in Cleveland, there’s a ninety-degree bend in the highway in the middle of downtown called Dead Man’s Curve. (My friends in Cleveland all know about this, so I’m not sure who I’m really talking to at the moment, hehe.) Anyway, I thought some nice additions to the Wikipedia article would be a link to a page with pictures near the curve, as well as a link to the Google Maps satellite view of the area. I was also going to include some information about the Innerbelt project, and its plans to redirect I-90 along a less deadly alignment sometime in the next decade.

The page for I-71 says that its terminus in Louisville is called “Spaghetti Junction” by the locals. I’m planning to add a link to the Google Maps satellite view. Note that when I saw the picture, I about busted a gut because that whole thing in the middle is all the I-71/I-64/I-65 interchange. No wonder they call it Spaghetti Junction.

The page for I-64 mentions the steep-grade portion that runs through West Virginia between Beckley and Lewisburg, WV. I’m planning to include a bit about the automated speed advisory system that WVDOT has installed at the top of the steep grade, which is roughly 7% for about 5 miles and requires two emergency truck ramps. (One of the ramps is pitched downhill at almost the same grade as the highway, and ends in a big pile of gravel beyond which there is, er, nothing… nothing but a long trip down into the valley below.) Sadly, the Google Maps aerial view is low-resolution, and you can’t see the emergency ramps in the pictures.

Hopefully that will all help me remember to post those additions onto Wikipedia later. Until then, enjoy the opportunity to peek into my externalized memory!

So I’ve watched the Greatest American episodes featuring the Top 100 and Top 25 nominees so far. The Top 100 list was abysmal, as I’ve already mentioned, while the Top 25 list actually had interesting things to say about all the nominees. However… I started watching the Top 5 episode, which consisted of five groups of “fans” each sitting in a group in some studio audience seats, along with Matt Lauer as host, and with panelists Dennis Miller, Ann Coulter, and Randy Jackson, quite possibly the Moe, Larry, and Curly (respectively) of the historical panelist world.

Anyway, the format of the Top 5 show was incredibly annoying. It consisted of people arguing for their candidate being named the Greatest American, providing insightful commentary that was met by applause from their section and boos and catcalls from the other sections. These are great Americans, perhaps (maybe, possibly) the five greatest Americans of all time, and people are booing them? Interspersed among this was commentary from the panelists, usually consisting of some witty banter from Dennis Miller, some annoying opinions from Ann Coulter, and some horrifying “insight” from Randy Jackson that would make great Americans like Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Condoleezza Rice spin in their graves, except that half of them aren’t dead yet.

I managed to stomach about twenty minutes of this appalling display, at which point I stopped watching in disgust and went on to watch a couple episodes of Gasaraki, which I picked up on sale at a comic book store out in Willoughby the other day. It was a far better use of my time.

I happened across this article concerning efforts made by the New Mexico ACLU to remove a member from a local chapter’s board because that member also was a participant in a Minuteman border patrol group. Quoth the article:

We’re not going to tolerate anyone depriving anyone of liberty without due process of law, not going to tolerate vigilante groups on the border without speaking out against them, and without monitoring.

This is a perfect example of the political hypocrisy exhibited by the ACLU, a group which claims to protect civil rights, but which always chooses the political “left” when both sides are arguably meritorious of civil rights protections (see abortion rights versus abortion protest rights for another good example). In this case, the Minutemen are exercising their rights to assemble peaceably and their rights to speak freely, and in the process, are apprehending criminals (illegal immigrants) in the act of committing a crime (illegally crossing the border). Yet the ACLU chooses to support only the civil rights of illegal immigrants, despite no evidence being established that the Minuteman movement is anything but a peaceful attempt by private citizens to secure the Mexican border, and despite the fact that illegal immigration is closely tied with other criminal activity such as drug and weapon smuggling (which also results in the deprivation of civil rights via property crime and violent crime).

Edit: As it turns out, the ACLU, among its various levels and chapters of organization, is often conflicted in what to support and how to support it. The example of abortion rights versus abortion protest rights turns out to be a really good example of this phenomenon as well.

The Discovery Channel is running a set of programs called “Greatest American”, where humble American citizens get to vote for the top 100, then top 25, then top 5, and finally, top 1 greatest Americans of all time. I missed the original airing of the top 100 show, but it reran this morning, and I got done watching it a little while ago.

My fellow Americans: What were you people thinking?! This was, for the most part, the most ridiculous compiled-by-committee-of-the-general-public list ever. In the top 100 were Madonna, Tom Hanks, Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, and many, many others that, quite simply, aren’t all that great - certainly not top-100 great. Evidently, “greatness” today is defined by one of a few things:

1. I just saw X do something on TV last week, and it was great. I’m voting for them!
2. I’ve got an axe to grind about some political issue, and X represents my opinion in the public eye. They must be great!
3. X got shot and killed. That automatically makes someone great.
4. I don’t want to seem like a history idiot, and I’ve heard people say that X was great. He died a long time ago, right?

All said, I ended up agreeing with maybe 20% of the bottom 75 in the list, and roughly half of the top 25 (the ones who moved on for the next round of voting). The rest of the nominees (which consisted largely of entertainers) were quite simply ridiculous. So ridiculous, in fact, that host Matt Lauer made comments of incredulity concerning many of the picks, and gave a brief tutorial concerning greatness at the start of the second show in the series.

In Responsum: Made of Meat

Hurray! I got my first weblog spam today. Some moron tried to advertise their online gambling website in a comment. As it turns out, Wordpress can be configured to send me an e-mail anytime somebody posts a comment to my weblog, and the very last thing in the e-mail is a direct link to delete the comment. One click to delete and one click to confirm, and this house is cuh-lee-an.

Note that if I start getting spammed regularly, I’ll require registering (which is also functional currently) and logging in before commenting, but for now I’ll leave things as-is.

The EFF is reporting that the Senate Appropriations Committee has released the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill with a substitute amendment recommended that doesn’t include the Broadcast Flag. While vigilance is still required to keep this and other technology-banning sledgehammers away from our TVs and PVRs, it’s probably safe to say that this particular battle has been won for the good guys (you know, the consumers, the TV watchers, the citizens of the United States).

The downside is that while the case has garnered a ton of attention on technology- and freedom-oriented weblogs, it didn’t get a mention at all in the Appropriations Committee, and so there’s no mainstream media coverage of the victory to put into the public eye the efforts of content producers to suppress our ability to time- and space-shift TV programming, skip commercials, and rewind/rewatch. The only way that these freedoms will end up guaranteed for the digital age is if the average citizen on the street knows about them. It’ll happen eventually if things continue on their current path, once all TVs are digital-ready and consumers realize that they can’t get a digital PVR to do the things their old VCR used to (or their old analog-tuning TiVo, for that matter). At that point, though, we was too late (or we will be, anyway), and it’ll be like putting toothpaste back into the tube trying to get rid of the hardware-based DRM that will be required to watch cable TV. Look for that to happen by 2010.

Rumor has it that the movie industry’s Senatorial lapdogs in Appropriations (probably Ted Stevens of Alaska) are going to try to sneak in a rider on the commerce appropriations bill that would legislate the FCC’s failed broadcast flag, where the FCC’s own efforts failed due to overstepping their bounds. Anyway, the chances of getting such a provision removed after the bill makes its way out of committee and into the whole Senate are small, so action needs to be taken now to remove and block the provision.

Why is this important? Well, the broadcast flag would make it impossible to digitally record television shows in an “unprotected” state that are broadcast over the public airwaves. The purpose of the provision is to require that all TV, PVR, and other device manufacturers make their devices comply with the broadcast flag. This means that the same right and ability we have today with regular PVRs and old VCRs to record a TV show and watch it later (aka time-shift), record a TV show and watch it on another TV in your house or at a friend’s house (space-shift), skip commercials, fast-forward, and rewind, would disappear once the federally mandated shift to digital TV occurs, approximately during 2007. By then, however, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

(Note that the same sorts of restrictions are already taking place in the cable industry, but this is through pressuring cable companies to restrict content rather than trying to create a governmental mandate. In other words, in the cable arena, we’re probably already screwed, and our only hope there is the DMCRA.)

What can you do? You can call your Senator today, if he or she is on the Appropriations committee, and you can tell all your friends about this and impress upon them the need to call in as well. There is a list of committee members with phone numbers at this page. At this other page, there is a list of members of the subcommittee considering the bill this afternoon (Tuesday) - if your Senator is on that list, calling them this morning is even more important. Also on that second link are some guidelines for what to say to the staffer who answers the phones.

Admittedly, I don’t usually call my Congressional representatives. Usually, I use e-mail or their crappy webforms to submit my opinions. But I did my civic duty today and called Senator DeWine’s office, and I hope there were at least a few other people who called as well.
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Update A note of good news: Apparently, the CJS Appropriations subcommittee referred the bill to the full committee without amending it. The possibility of getting screwed over is still there - the full committee could introduce the changes - but the further the bill goes along, the less likely some screwy provision is to creep into it.

The bill goes for markup in the full committee on Thursday. I don’t know whether this will take more than one day, though.
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Another update And some even more fantastic news: Staffers were deluged with calls opposing the broadcast flag.

We can only hope that this will also spur interest in bills like the DMCRA and the BALANCE Act.

As some of you might have noticed (out of the six or seven of you who read this blog), I’ve recently added a link to my webpage to the Creative Commons project. I just wanted to take a moment and explain what Creative Commons is and why it’s important.

Long ago, the purpose of copyright was to, as the U.S. Constitution put it, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. Since then, copyright has been changed from a system intended to benefit society as a whole by encouraging cultural innovation, to a system where access to copyrighted works is severely restricted through techological and statutory means. The only arenas where “fair use”, or the legal use of copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s permission, is still the norm rather than the exception are journalism and academia. (And still, I think journalism gets it wrong, since citation of sources is so infrequently practiced.)

Anyway, seeing the need for a reaffirmation of copyright as a tool to benefit society as a whole, Lawrence Lessig founded the Creative Commons, an organization supporting a licensing scheme where media authors can explicitly give some of the rights normally associated with copyright and give them to the public, while still holding certain rights in reserve (hence, the “some rights reserved” line on the image to the left). Thus, authors can share the content they produce freely, allowing others to enjoy the works they produce as well as create derivative works from that content, while protecting that content from things like unauthorized commercial use, mis- or non-attribution, or imposing stricter licensing terms on derivative works.

Think of it as a sort of “open source” movement for books, blogs, music, movies, paintings, photos, and whatever other media is out there.

I’ve released the content of my weblog under one particular variation of the Creative Commons license, because I want others to be able to share the material I write with each other or even to create derivative works from it, without fear of reprisal. But I’ve put restrictions on the use of that content, listed at the left. One, anyone who uses this material must properly attribute its authorship to me. I wrote it, so I should be recognized for my work (or lack thereof) whenever it appears elsewhere on the web. Two, anyone who uses this material must not use it for commercial purposes (e.g., publishing it in a book and then selling the book). If someone wants to do that, they must contact me for permission first. (Note that Google and other web indexing sites are commercial ventures that index and cache my website, but I have no plans to sue them for that!) And three, anybody using this content must release their content under the same license I used. (Note that certain uses of my content, like a brief quote of something I wrote, could fall under “fair use”, meaning they are free to use that quote regardless of my licensing terms. U.S. copyright law outlines some of the things that constitute fair use.)

Some of you might also wonder why I have a new clause next to the “submit comment” button. Well, I’m making my content available under the CC license, and so if someone comes along and wants to archive or mirror my website, I want them to be able to mirror the whole thing, including the comments I receive. Therefore, I require that anybody who comments on my weblog join me in releasing our content under the Creative Commons license.

Other content out there on the web uses the CC license, including lots of weblogs, as well as much of the content featured through Gnomoradio and iRate radio. While Wikipedia doesn’t use CC, it does use the GNU Free Documentation License, which imposes the extra requirement (beyond the requirements the CC license has) that the content be distributed only in a format which open-source software can edit.

Anyway, in closing, I’m a bit of a crusader against what copyright has become. Copyrights last for the life of the author plus 70 years (or 95 years total for works generated by corporations), and the prospects of much of the content created in the mid-1900s ever entering the public domain are dashed every time the terms get close to expiring. The common reference is to Mickey Mouse, who was first seen in the animated film Steamboat Willie in 1928, but which won’t escape copyright in the U.S. until the 2020s (despite it already being in the public domain in Canada, Russia, Australia, and elsewhere). Combine that with the sorts of content access control that media companies want to impose, and you have a recipe for public outrage - but once that happens, it’ll already be too late.

More on that some other time.

I submit for your inspection this site. When you click on the pics, think “muahahaha” to yourself when you see the result. It worked on everybody except Richard Simmons.

I don’t generally subscribe to the organic foods movement, but this was quite amusing and clever:

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