Several proof-readers and editors collapsed this Sunday from a psychic shock as President Bush mused openly about writing a book.
Asked if he planned to pen his own book after leaving office in January, Bush said it was a possibility.
“I’m going to think about that, yes — writing a book,” Bush said in an interview with Britain’s Observer newspaper published on Sunday.
Someone please stop him, before this nation loses more qualified proof-readers. It wouldn’t take much, maybe just hide his voice recorder— since I doubt very much he’d actually write anything.
The MPAA is always going on about how they are losing tons of money in the theaters because of pirates. However a CNN article recently pointed out that
Since the first weekend of May, domestic grosses total $1.46 billion, up 4.6 percent from 2007’s, according to Media By Numbers. Factoring in higher ticket prices, actual movie attendance this summer is up 1.6 percent.
But this isn’t the first time someone has pointed out this inconsistency. And an Ars Technica article points out that
US box office doing its biggest year of business ever in 2007, growing 5.4 percent over 2006 and bringing in $9.63 billion
So the question is, how much longer are we going to let the MPAA concoct a “truth” that allows them to push new crappy laws that erode our freedoms? But are we sure they are fibbing? Maybe they made some honest mistakes? Unlikely, the Ars Technica article also reminds up that
It turns out that the MPAA’s college [piracy] numbers were off by a factor of three, a revelation that came after years of hiding the study’s methodology but continuing to lobby Congress with its numbers.
Such gross lies are clearly not innocent. You can expect the same of the laws they’d like to push through.
Being from the North Eastern United States I’ve never felt a real earthquake before. I’ve read that the North East gets them rarely, but they are so weak no one notices. So maybe it would be more accurate to say I’ve never noticed feeling an earthquake before.
Japan changed all that. As of this morning I’ve felt two big-ish earthquakes. Both times I was in bed. The neat part is that Japan has got the system down. I got out of bed a minute after the earthquake and typed “earthquake Japan” into Google. Sure enough, a Japanese government website already had the info.
Take a look (I’m in the light orange part - Fukushima Ken 福島県). 
It might also help to know that a 4 is not a 4 on the Richter scale, but a 4 on the Japan Meteorological Agency seismic intensity scale. The scale goes from 0 to 7. According to wikipedia during a 4 “Many people are frightened. Some people try to escape from danger. Most sleeping people awake.” I was a sleeping person. I did wake. They’re right on the money!
I think that IP is one of the largest issues going and to make it worse, people don’t know anything about it. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Corporations are slowly but surely gathering more and more power over IP, many people think that this is good for businesses because they can protect their interests, but that’s not really what IP is about. IP is more about anti-competitive behavior than anything right now. It is being abused by crooks who extort money from businesses by claiming overly broad and obvious copyrights granted by people who don’t understand the concepts they are certifying. It is also being used by larger companies to lock out newcomers. An example of this is Vonage being sued by Verizon. It is also used to try and kill derivative works, like The Grey Album, by Danger Mouse. Stifling creativity not just in the art but in the sciences as well. IP is used to create artificial monopolies, like MLB saying people can’t disseminate the facts (which are currently not part of IP) of a baseball without authorization. But worse of all it is abused by people who just want to silence others, the DMCA for example has been widely abused to do just that.
IP laws need to be reformed so that they are balanced, so that they protect people first and businesses second. I don’t want to win second place to an artificial person (ie corporation).
By jon
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Posted in random
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Tagged art, baseballe, coporations, copyright, danger mouse, dmca, extortion, free speech, inovation, intellectual property, ip, law, mlb, music, the grey album
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