NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Thu, 12 May 2005
Papers, Please
Well, we now have a National
I.D. card. It passed the Senate yesterday 100-0, because the
Republican Party attached it to a funding bill
that had to be passed. Bruce Schneier has a pretty cogent analysis of
the situation here.
A trillion dollars in deficits in five years; the PATRIOT act; the
Department of Homeland Security; intervening in well established areas
of state's responsibilities in the Terri Schiavo case, and now we have
to present papers to travel, to open a bank account, to do almost
anything else in this country.
Tell me again about how the so-called Republican Party is dedicated
to small government, fiscal responsibility, and personal freedom. Your
country is well on its way to becoming a religious dictatorship, you
friggin' idiots. And you won't even notice until the storm troopers
come for you. 'Cause Rush Limbaugh and Fox -- the only place where you
get your news -- are too busy discussing runaway brides and washed-up
rock star child molesters.
Present your papers and show your Bible, Citizen, or give cause as
to why you should not be detained as a suspected Enemy of The State.
Posted at 11:37 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
Sat, 07 May 2005
The Good Guys Actually Win One
From Boing Boing -- Thanks, Cory:
V-TV DAY: WE WON THE BROADCAST FLAG FIGHT!
This morning, the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals struck down the loathsome Broadcast Flag, ruling that the FCC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate what people do with TV shows after they've received them.
My first day on the job at EFF was at the first meeting where they were
negotiating the Broadcast Flag, a set of rules for restricting the
features of digital television devices to those that were approved by
the Hollywood executives who tried to ban the VCR. The rules set out to
ban the use of Open Source/Free Software in digital television
applications, and to require hardware components to be designed to be
hard or impossible to create open drivers for. Fox exec Andy Setos told
me that we were there to create "a polite marketplace" where no one
would be allowed to disrupt his business model without getting his
permission and cooperation first (cough planned economy cough commies
cough).
I'm honored and thrilled to have been part of the gigantic
upswelling of public outcry over this naked attempt to bootstrap the
studios' limited monopoly over copying movies into an unlimited
monopoly over the design of every device that might be used to copy a
movie.
And to the studio execs whom I faced across the table, who
shouted at us and excluded us and told us that this was going to happen
no matter what: NEENER NEENER NEENER.
The next move here is that the studios will take this to
Congress and try to get a law passed to make this happen. No chance.
They got ZERO laws passed last year. This year the best they've been
able to accomplish is making it slightly more illegal to videotape
movies in the theatre.
The fact is, elected lawmakers are not suicidal enough to break their constituents' televisions. Watch and see: over the next year, we're all going to roast any lawmaker who so much as breathes the words "Broadcast Flag" in a favorable tone.
"In the seven decades of its existence, the FCC has
never before asserted such sweeping authority. Indeed, in the past, the
FCC has informed Congress that it lacked any such authority. In our
view, nothing has changed to give the FCC the authority it now claims."
116k PDF Link
Posted at 09:54 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
Thu, 05 May 2005
Oh By The way...
Happy Cinco de Mayo. Or, at least, happy once-a-century 05/05/05...
Posted at 17:08 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
Phew...
From Metafilter comes:
1.7 million deaths in the U.S. and 180-360 million dead globally. That's the estimate of the impact of the next influenza pandemic from Michael Osterholm, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine.
He warns that almost every public health response to the inevitable
emergence of pandemic influenza A strain is unplanned or inadequate: A
vaccine would take minimum six months (and millions of fertilized
chicken eggs); there are no plans to setup and staff the temporary
isolation wards or replace dead health-care workers; nor are there
detailed plans for handling the number of dead bodies. Given the deeply
interconnected nature of the global economy a pandemic would be
impossible to stop and wreak havoc in every nation. "Frankly the crisis
could for all we know have started last night in some village in
Southeast Asia," said
Dr. Paul Gully, Canada's deputy chief public health officer. "We don't
have any time to waste and even if we did have some time, the kinds of
things we need to do will take years. Right now, the best we can do is
try to survive it. We need a Manhattan Project yesterday."
Wow. Enjoy this summer; next winter might not be so great...
Posted at 13:44 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
