No on Bill S. 3325! This is actually important!

So, I have been reading a lot about copyright issues lately, and today I read on the Public Knowledge Blog that the US Senate is close to passing the Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill.  The official title is "A bill to enhance remedies for violations of intellectual property laws, and for other purposes", but I view the bill as a way for the MPAA and RIAA to get the taxpayers to pay for the 6,000 annual lawsuits that they file every year.  


     Many of these lawsuits are frivolous in nature, and as a result they are settled out of court, for significantly less than the cost of the lawsuit, because defendants cannot afford to pay legal fees in excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend themselves, nor can they pay the millions of dollars the organizations ask to recieve.  The way that the MPAA and RIAA intend on cutting costs is to have the Senate pass a bill to allow the Department of Justice to sue American citizens on their behalf. 


There are a few things wrong with this picture: the Department of Justice is being involved in civil lawsuits, the Department of Justice is representing corporations, and it relieves the copyright holders the responsibility to enforce their own copyrights.  I do not like the idea that our government is doing the dirty work for the content industry in this country, however I must admit that I do like the clause about defendants receiving free legal representation (especially because these types of court cases can be drawn out as long as a decade.)  


However, I am worried about one tiny piece of information that also ties very closely to this matter.  The NET act of 1998.  NET stands for No Electronic Theft.  This takes normal copyright infringement cases, and turns a civil infraction into a felony.  If the DOJ is enforcing copyrights, then many of these civil cases could actually play through to completion (rather than settling out of court), and the results from the civil cases can be used as evidence in criminal (felony) cases.  This is especially bad because technically, according to recent estimates, means that almost a quarter of all Americans are felons. 


The other part that worries me is that the MPAA and RIAA have been known to take on ridiculous cases such as: a student who modified an intranet search engines to allow the users to search by any file type($12,000: his college fund), or the twelve year old girl who downloaded 1 song ($2,000: her life's savings).  Both of these cases were multi million dollar lawsuits, and the defendants settled out of court because they had no money to defend themselves, but is it right to make the taxpayers pay to enforce cases that take years to fight?  Shouldn't we restrict how much the MPAA and RIAA can sue for?  Shouldn't the fee be close the the fair market value of the product plus a reasonable fee?   If you stole a CD from the shelf, it would be a misdemeanor, but if you download that same album off of the Internet it's a felony; is that justice?


I know I don't have all the answers, but Bill S. 3325 is not the solution.  We need to restrict the authority of the MPAA and RIAA, not expand it.  


Here is a letter expressing concerns in more legal\professional terms


Later,


 SteveO


P.S.: Call your Senator, or loose your freedom.  It's your choice.

So... the 3.0 crunch is almost over!

I'm at work.  Still...

So, We only have to work about 3 or 4 hours today... basically we just need to run a sanity pass...

Then we get ready to ship!  So, I know I get next weekend off.  I get tomorrow off too!

Just to recap... I had the 1st off... other than that, I've worked every day sense August 25th.  So at least the crunch is almost over!

So, other than that... Jaani has been hating me... and I really haven't had much of a social life other than going to the bar for James' birthday... but that puts be back into the situation I was in last summer, where I made a lot of money, but never had time to spend it.  So, it really just makes sure I can save money.

I guess, things are good.  A little repetitive... but not bad.  I'll be going home in a couple hours, then I'll be off tomorrow.

Anyway... that's a quick update...

Later,

     SteveO

What's new with me...

Well, lately I've been keeping too busy.  I've been doing my usual Ubuntu nightly build testing at home... I've been testing out Google's new Chrome web browser... (which is the coolest thing ever... aside from the lack of plugins...)  I worked last weekend...  I had Monday off to be a bump on my couch... I found a few family members on facebook to add as friends... I added about 30+ people from St Hugo... (Who would ever think I would be able to find people from elementary school 10 years later...)  plus, which I'm really excited about (not that finding out that nobody I knew in Michigan lives in Seattle isn't cool in it's own kind of way...)  I have nearly labeled every face in my Picasa photo collection.  hehe...

Now, if someone wants pictures that I have of them, I can simply perform a search for that person, and pull up all the pictures.  Plus I found out that I am extremely vein or something because I have 344 pictures with my face in them.  I also have 337 with Evelyn's face... and trailing behind that I have 68 pictures with my brother's face.  kind of crazy.

I guess the interesting thing is that while I can see all those pictures, I really can't tell you how many are public... actually I could look it up, but I don't want to.

So... that's what I've been doing.  I will be working again this weekend.  I might even start talking to more people on facebook.  I have like 100 something friends now... and yea, I am too busy for my own good...

ok, so that's all for now.

Later,

     SteveO

A birthday, I'm working this weekend, & Jaani & I went to the park...

So, yesterday was Jame's Birthday!  So I went down to Tacoma, where I met James, George (his brother), Shelly (Evelyn's Sister), Evelyn, Kait, Twila, and Anthony (in that order, Counter-Clockwise around the table away from me...).  We went to a brewery in down town Tacoma first, then we went to this club called Swiss after that.  About 2AM I walked Evelyn and Shelly back to Evelyn's house (2 blocks away). 


Then, I had to wake up this morning and go in to work.  I got in around 11AM, and I will be going home shortly... around 7:30 or 8, but I'll be coming back in tomorrow... We had croissant sandwiches for lunch... pasta from California Pizza Kitchen for dinner... who wouldn't come in to work? 

I braught Jaani in with me today!  He loved it too.  He had dinner right here in my cube.  At lunch, I walked him over to the dog park (really close to my work) and he ran around for about an hour, then came back and slept under my desk.  He has been so good today, I just wish I could bring him every day... but that's against company policy.  I have heard a few reasons why... I know they used to allow dogs, but then one of two things happened: either there was a flea epidemic among pets in one of the buildings (which cost a lot of money get rid of them...), or someone had allergies and complained. 

I'm not sure which one is true... actually, I have heard both stories from equally creditable people, but I don't have any way to prove/disprove either story.

Anyway... I must get back to work, I just wanted to give a little update.

Later,

     SteveO

P.S. Today was such a nice day, and I almost feel completely better!  I just have a little bit of a runny nose. 

Got back from the Hackathon

So, anyone who has been following my twitter feed (which seems to only be uncle bill... at least via twitter) would know two things (well, at least one) First, today was the Google appengine hackathon. Second, I just got the best firefox extension EVER, and I think the word ever deserves both bold and capitol letters.

About the hackathon. It was a lot of fun. I learned how to deploy an appengine application for the public, and I wrote an application that does just about exactly what Google Reader does, but a little more social oriented. See, I created a site that uses your Google account to authenticate access. Once you log in, you can add RSS or Atom feeds to the app, then share the app with any Google account you invite. It is really a tool that takes all the posts that you look at for longer than 5 seconds, and merges them into one RSS feed that can be subscribed to by all the people you invite. Basically it is a way to share the news articles you read with other people around you.

My next step for the application, is to ensure that all items that both you and your "followers" read is merges into a shared reading list. Meaning that the service can be used to initiate conversations about the news articles. This process involves two things: compairing the feeds you read with the feeds others read, and add a form page to allow you to directly email people about the articles you have both read. I think it's so cool to be working on this. When I'm done, I'm going to deploy the app, publish a tutorial for the source code on the Frizzlefry Tech Blog, and start trying to get people to actually use my app. It will be really cool!

The other highlight for today (and yesterday) is this new extension for firefox that I got names Ubiquity. The idea is that if I hit +Space in firefox a command line style box appears in the upper right corner of the web page I am viewing. The service automatically will use my gmail address book (if i'm logged into Google) to figure out what I mean by "email ". Because I use both first and last names in all of my contact lists, the service can figure out who I mean almost every time. I can use either a name or email address.

The best part though, if I don't specify text, ubiquity will automatically insert the web page I am viewing, or any text I select from a website into the command. That means I can select a good quote from a website, then say "email " and it will add the quote to the beginning of the email message, allowing me to finish the message as I see fit. or, the same command will add a link to the web page I am currently viewing if I don't say anything else.

The plugin also does a lot more than just email though. Anyone can write scripts for their own site, and I can choose to install those scripts for additional functionality. Already included in the list of sites that support the beta stage addon are: twitter, a bunch of search engines, emaill address lookup, yahoo search, msn search, check and add to google calendar, language translator, general purpose converter, digg, flickr, International Movie Database, wikipedia search/link, Google maps, weather, word count, tinyurl, youtube, yelp, browser controls, and a bunch of developer tools.

Needless to say for the modern computer nerd, this is an essential tool.

So, that's what I was doing today. It was fun.

So, that's all for now.

Later,

SteveO

P.S. I am starting to feel much better. My bronchitis has really cleared up, and my cough is amost better. Oh yea, by the way I got bronchitis last week, but I feel much better now.

I remember the last few time I've moved...

I was reading my news feeds this morning, and I saw this comic up at xkcd... It just reminded me about every time I move... trying to figure out where the best wifi collection is...

I think I've been here before... multiple times.



"We need a special holiday to honor the countless kind souls with unsecured networks named 'linksys'."

--The guy that does xkcd.com













Later,

SteveO

I finally framed it!

So, after many years, of sitting around the house... most of the time it was actually rolled up and stored away somewhere... this totally awesome Picaso style painting of me done by my friend Heather Morgan finally got a frame!

So I hung it up today, on the wall just above the bass that matches the one in the picture. It was painted in 2002 with oil pastels... that's about all I know about it, but I love it!

That's about all. Talk to you all later.





Later,

SteveO