Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill

As if it wasn’t bad enough that we’re facing an economic crisis, an energy crisis, and a potentially endless war that is fueling the economic problems, our elected officials have decided to do this.  Seriously, this is ridiculous.  First the FISA bullshit, and now our government is preparing to sink our tax dollars into helping the RIAA and MPAA with their mafia-styled copyright enforcement.  Once again, it’s time to speak up.  I emailed and called my representative about FISA, and I’ll be doing the same thing here.  Let the corporations deal with their own copyright shit – don’t make us pay for it!

Second Life Is Stupid

OK, so I know this isn’t very new, but I had to post it up here. I feel like everything I could say about Second Life is pretty well encapsulated in this video. What I still don’t understand, though, is why so many academics get so excited about it, when it’s pretty much just them and various types of lonely sexual deviants on there. It’s like they’re trying to turn this thing that has just about been proven to not be culturally viable (the average user only ever logged in for 12 minutes and never logged back in) into something to study when there are plenty of other useful things to study. And now the government is involved, so it’s just going to become an even bigger clusterfuck.

from secondlife.reuters.c posted with vodpod

Anonymous Blogger vs. Ignorant Police Department

I read this article today while perusing Fark.  There’s so much I could say about this, but I think the article speaks for itself.  I would like to point out the involvement of the EFF and ACLU here (as mentioned in the article).  I think that my biggest concern here has to do with the fact that the police department diverted government resources (i.e. tax dollars) in order to treat someone like a criminal for nothing more than exercising his constitutional right to free speech.  Although our officials seem to have forgotten this, we all have the right to criticize our government, either openly or anonymously.

So many of our rights as Americans are founded on freedom of speech.  I applaud “John Adams” and others who use that right to bring injustices to light and (hopefully) effect some positive change.