Well, Lessig isn’t running, which is probably a good thing for his sanity.
Copyright This by a man who knows more about aquaculture than you or I, argues for an Intellectual Property Tax to hold responsible those who hold copyrights to pay a tax on their copyrighted holdings. This does conflict with the “lifetime of the creator” type of argument, but by the same token we have corporate entities with no lifetimes holding copyrights.
Perhaps more important than Obama for President?
Stanford U Law professor Lawrence Lessig, of the creative commons movement. Is thinking about running for Congress under an interesting plan to remove monetary influence from congressional politics, watch his ten minute video here.
I was just in Houston, TX yesterday. I have a feeling Obama will do OK in Texas. Just a feeling.
“Last 10 minutes of Barack Obama’s speech in Milwaukee on 2/16 where he responds to Hillary Clinton’s recent criticism he is all talk – and good speeches don’t necessarily produce results.”
[update]
It’s interesting to note that some of Clinton’s campaign staffers zeroed in on the “” just words? “” just words? for plenty of reasons. Obama shot back with, “yeah, duh, I know the original speaker of those words and we’ve talked about the ideas in them.” The obvious one being that Obama is friends with Deval Patrick who used the same speech, but also that… the quote itself quotes 3 uncited sources, which are famous enough not to be cited. Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts has talked this over with Obama and is glad that his ideas got a wider audience. For indeed, it is the ideas that matter. When in this above speech Obama mentions how hope is the fuel that drives the efforts behind positive legislative change, that’s the real idea here. And indeed, that’s a transcendental truth.
And here is my favorite article on plagiarism The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem.
Also, I’m reminded of this story from GWB (I believe it’s in his book, which I must read, called A Charge to Keep): “His mother had drilled it into him that it was wrong when writing to repeat words already used. Having employed “tears” once in the essay, he sought a substitute from a thesaurus she had given him and wrote “the lacerates ran down my cheeks”.” I got that quote direct from here.
So in the end, Clinton’s staffers had to say that they couldn’t guarantee the originality of anything Clinton said either (citation needed) and… well… I’m sure someone somewhere got kerfluffled.
I’ve been taking Depakote ER in some dosage or another for… 7 years now. The longest I’ve ever gone without it was about a week. Now, with the recent shooting at NIU, covered in excruciating detail by most media, we have the info that the shooter had recently suspended some (as of now) unknown medication. One can bet that it was some sort of psychoactive drug.
So this leaves me in an interesting conundrum which I have faced for the past 7 years. What would I do if for some reason I couldn’t keep taking this drug, Depakote? For example, the FDA recently outlawed OTC Quinine, which seemed nonsensical to me as my Mom takes it for leg cramps, but they did it. Or for example, the DEA outlawed cocaine tinctures and the US outlawed alcohol for a bit there too. PCP was sold as the prescription drug Sernyl for a couple of years then outlawed. Certainly the side effects of PCP seem worse than the side effects of Depakote, but the Depakote side effects can kill you if you have certain liver conditions. Depakote (valproic acid) certainly injures more per user than Quinine did… (someone else can find the stats on that and prove me wrong)…
But yeah, back to the main topic here… what if drug X becomes illegal and the side effects of people stopping taking it aren’t just psychosis, but psychopathosis? One could imagine a horror movie (28 days later, the happening) type scenario as people could no longer fill their ’scripts.
This is all just conjecture and babbling, but I think that lawful drug use has been legislated into illegal drug abuse so often and so capriciously that this sort of scenario deserves some thought.
The LA Record has been around for… 3 years now and they are sort of retooling… I did some reviews and previews for them before, like here… My latest review of HDR and Jessie Deluxe at Charlie O’s is here.
Is it a conflict of interest for me to be in a couple bands and simultaneously review other bands? Nah. It’s not a zero sum game.
I knew I would find something, something, if I just kept looking…
More here at scopeboy.com.
Yeah, so in high school, I loaned my bike to a friend of mine and it got stolen from his front yard. Fast forward 12 or so years and my (Fuji Sagres 2001?) bike got stolen from my front yard. Just goes to show that the West University Park neighborhood of LA is as dangerous to bikes as Jamestown NY. It also shows that I’m dumb for leaving my bike lock at school. So now I am riding an old Raleigh that I bought for $30. It works for now.
The number of shots fired on my block this past week was greater than 5, probably higher than the number of shots fired in Jamestown in the same week. They were all in quick succession and didn’t hit anybody. Someone up on Jefferson was not so lucky
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article, from its conservative perspective, on how Hillary’s current universal healthcare mandate is as utterly failed as ever. Not failed in the sense that it wouldn’t cover all Americans if it passed, but failed in the sense that the same sort of idea failed in 1993 or so. The WSJ still calls it Hillarycare, they can even recycle the terms used to defeat it originally. Back when 5.25″ floppies were still around to some degree.
So why put up a Democratic presidential candidate on the democratic side that Rush Limbaugh is supporting under the catchphrase “Keep her in it, so we can win it” ? Why put up a Democratic presidential candidate who’s only attempt at drafting legislation from the executive branch led to the “Contract with America” rebirth of the Gingrich Republicans? Seriously? Her brand of divisive politics plays right into the hands of those who wish the exact opposite of her stated goals.
Give Barack Obama some money, PLZTHX. At least he understands compromise is better than failing all over again.
[ADDENDUM]
Andrew Sullivan has a nice article which makes this same point regarding health care: The Unemotional Case For Obama.
My Dad was telling me the other night to go look up the articles page on Gene Fields’ GFI website. So I did, here is a link to it. Interesting articles on him working for Fender R&D. Little known fact, he designed the awesome and rare Fender Starcaster guitar… seen here:
courtesy of DK.
The world should always pay attention to a new pedal from Z. Vex. This is his take on a high compression distortion here. That’s just a bunch of video demos of the pedal which has yet to be released.
Speaking of unreleased pedals, this Ping Pong Delay should be coming out from Build Your Own Clone this month (Feb 2008). I don’t quite get if it has a stereo out, though… Which I thought was the point of ping pong delays::
I build the BYOC DOD 440 clone and it rules. It’s a funky envelope filter. They’ve also updated that and put a video up of that too, but you’ll have to find that yourself.
Be well, rock on.
PS Obama won my congressional district!