Well slashdot wont post this, but I think its news for nerds:
News.com is reporting that RMS and a bunch of New Yorkers for fair use crashed a commerce department hearing on digital rights management. Invited parties were the MPAA, Walt Disney, the Recording Industry Association of America, Microsoft, Intel, News Corp. and others, totalling about 20 industry representatives, but no Free software folk. After protesting inside the hearing, a representative of the group was allowed to speak, but RMS was kept from talking to the panel.

Recent corporate scandals show that there has been alot of shady accounting going on in the buisness world. Shuffling money around, creating dummy corporations, claiming things as revenue that shouldnt be. All of these things lead to an increased distrust in corporate governance. Where was the oversight? Where was the SEC? Where were the boards of directors? Heck, where were the shareholders? Ultimately every "oversight" party was too interested in watching their stock portfolio balloon to notice that the baloon was filled with a bunch of hot air.
    In this trying time we look for leadership to appear from some quarter. Somone to show us the way out of the quagmire we seem to have found ourselves in. In steps the Federal Government, the granddaddy of shady accounting. Ever hear of "black budget" projects? I bet enron would have loved to have been able to do that. "Im sorry, we cant tell you what we are spending on that project, Its a matter of Company Security". How about swapping money earmarked for social security or medicare, or the SEC to pork projects. "Yes I know we budgeted $100 Million for maintainance, but I need a new private jet". People learn from example, and congress is setting a bad example. Congress needs to have an audit done on it and then follow the auditors recommendations. Knowing congress, they would probably pick Arthur Anderson.

Some more reflections on NYC. Even though I realize that great strides have been made in the last few decades in cleaning up the city of New York, its still a dirty city. One of my friends who came withcommented that "after visting New York, the buildings here dont seem so big anymore" To which I added, "Or as Ghetto"
      New York has alot of people. If you dont live there or have never visited, you can understand abstractly that 10 million people live in the 5 bouroughs, but until you've been there and seen all these people all running around on their own tasks, you have no idea how many people live there. And that leads to problems. In DC, the metro is clean, theres no gum on the floor, the walls and floor are generally clean and theres no trash lying around. Thats because the DC Metro runs from 5AM to 1 AM weekdays, so theyve got a 4 hour window to clean up. The Subway runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week, except when it doesnt. So I can understand why things would tend to get a little messy. But the whole subway system needs to have a pressure washer taken to it. Simply hosing down the floors and walls would go a long way towards making the system nicer to travel in.
      I never saw any rats or cockroaches in the subway, so thats a start, but seriously, how can you have pride in something thats that dirty. And if you try to tell me that "well if they clean it, it will just get dirty again" Would you eat at a restaurant that had that attitude about its eating areas? About its bathrooms? About its dishes?. I hope that NYC gets the 2012 Olympics and uses some of that money to clean up the subway. Then again, the Olympics should be about sport, and not about urban renewal, but thats what its getting to. But I digress...
      In general i feel that this country is too messy, I see so many people every day littering, throwing cigarette butts out car windows, etc. Maybe people just dont care about keeping the country looking nice, oh well, im digressing again.
      Back to NYC. Id hate to see what the city would be like during a garbage strike, its bad enough as it is. They could probably build another island out of the garbage the throw out every day. Oh wait, I forgot about Staten Island ;-)

So I just got back from my first trip to NYC this weekend, and I had a few interesting observations.
      The first has to do with homeless people. NYC has a homeless problem. Not a big problem, it could definetly be worse, but a problem nonetheless. Now homeless people, being homeless, tend to sleep in one of several places:
A homeless shelter, with limited spaces, but comfortable and clean(er).
A bench somewhere, Cold and hard
A subway grate, warm and hard.
        NYC has decided to solve the problem of bums sleeping on benches everywhere by.... Removing any place to sit down in the entire city. The extent to which NYC has gone to keep people standing is evidenced by where they have to put signs to keep people from sitting on stuff. At the top of the empire state building there is a gift shop, and the gift shop has stuff on shelves, and one of the shelves has an end cap with products on it, and that end cap has a lip that comes out right at about seat height. They put a sign on that that says " Please do not sit on the shelf" In grand central station they have big signs that say "Sitting on the stairway is strictly prohibited" Now having been in several train stations I can understand the problem that they have with homeless people living there. Theres a liuttle park in times square that has some benches in it. The city put a fence around it and locked the gate. There was a bum sleeping on the bench though
      There are two things I find wrong with this anti sitting attitude, one, youre not solving the homeless problem! You still have a bunch of homeless people, now they just sit on the floor, or sleep on the subway grates. Two, the only way to get around nyc is by walking or standing on the subway, people need a place to sit down.
    Ultimately NYC is solving a symptom to the homeless problem and not the problem itself. Removing benches will not help people find jobs, or get them the psychological help they need. Only a sustained effort of the city to help these people and provide places form them to stay that are off the street will at least start to solve the problem. Then maybe we can all take a load off.

Slashdot recently had an article on Data Loss, and how as technology advances, the ability to hold on to archived data decreases. We need to preserve stuff. Of course that assumes we know what the future would like to know about us. What if they want to know what kinds of spam we got every day? What if they want to know what kinds of chain letters we were falling for? This is the kind of stuff thats least likely to be archived. On the plus side there is so much of it that chances are that some of it will remain in the future. What we really need is for the library of congress or some other private or public agency to develop an archival system for all the data we have. There is a way to keep all our data, and that involves constant transofrmation and copying of the data. Each time a new form of data storage comes on the market, the old forms must be transferred over. Heres how it shoudl have worked:
Punch cards get transferred onto tapes, tapes get transferred onto 5-1/4 floppies, 5-1/4 floppies get transferred to 3-1/2 inch floppies, 3-1/2 inch floppies go to CD's, CD's go to DVD's and DVD's go to whatever widespread storage technology replaces them. Thats assuming you dont throw it all on a Hard Drive and then just keep upgrading the drive.
If something like this doesnt start happening soon, were going to lose alot of stuff. Theres already rumors that census data from the 60's is no longer readable because its on magnetic tapes that have broken down. Save the data now, or the future may not know what theyre missing!

Would you classify the following statements as Racist?

The mayor of Birmingham, said that following the Supreme Court ruling two years ago, the NAACP has been encouraging Blacks to apply to move to Birmingham.

He said the Federal Housing Administration offers to lease plots for homes in Black towns for as little as $1,000. Some Blacks are prepared to pay $80,000 for a plot in Birmingham. Other Blacks offer to buy homes from White residents in Birmingham for double the going rate or more, he said.

"There are (Black) political elements that are trying to push the White population out," he said.

However some Blacks are attracted to White areas because the schools, infrastructure and services are much better than in the underfunded Black towns.

Freeman said he is willing to send his children to White schools. "My dream is to live as an equal among equals," he said.

Sound alot like the 60s? You might be surprised about what a find-replace with certain words will get you.

As I reflect on the Fourth of July, I feel that people today, despite their renewed patriotism, still fail to understnad the responsibilities of being an American. Nobody likes that word, responsibility, because it means that theyre going to have to pay for something somehow. They will pay through their work, or through their time or through money. The Constitution of the United states and the bill of rights dont just grant everyone rights and thats the end of it. They represent a social contract, an agreement between all americans about how government and society shoudl be run. This contract does not just give rights away for free, it requires hard work and responsibility by every american.In the past people have seemed to understand this more. During past wars people were willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom. But this is not limited to those in the military. Every american must bewilling to make the ultimate sacrifice so that others may live in freedom. The most recent example of this was during september 11, when ordinary civilians on a hijacked plane gave their lives to protect the united states. Those people died for freedom.
      All I see in response to this heroic act is constrictions of the freedoms set out in the bill of rights and declaration of independance. Restrictions on movement, restrictions on information, Holding people without trial, failure to give citizens access to attourneys, arresting people without charges. Is this the kind of country we want to live in? Is this the kind of country people died to give us? Some things are worth more than peoples lives, and I think that polititians have been falling over themselves so much to "protect" us that they are creating exactly the society we dont want to live in.
        Freedom is not an easy thing to hold on to, yet its rewards are immense. Freedom has made us the society we are today, and without it we would be just another two bit dictatorship. And one of the prices of freedom is that sometimes innocent people must give their lives in protection of it. The best response to september 11 would have been to rebuild, reorganize the law enforcement agencies designed to prevent these kind of crimes and replace doors on planes with stronger ones. But not to pass laws like the USA PATRIOT act that allow law enforcment to arrest people without charging them, hold people without access to lawyers and generally trample on peoples rights. There has to be a balance between protecting peoples freedom and keeping people safe. Without freedom what good are we as a country?

To build off the patience issue from my last entry, Im going to talk about bandwidth. I dont thin that there is enough of it. Even so-called "broadband" technologies arent enough for current needs. I can find plenty of mp3's of my favorite songs on morpheus, kazaa, etc, but I cant find music videos. People simply arent sharing them. With the rise of TIVO and similar devices it should be fairly simple to share videos as easily as people share music, but nobody does. Why? Bandwith, or the lack of it. Nobody is willing to wait an hour for the latest Tenacious D video to download because theyve been spoiled by their DSL line and MP3's. Back when 14.4 was king, it woudl take an hour to download an MP3 and that was pretty good.I would have jumped at the chance to download music videos at dsl speeds, and I still would, except nobody shares them.
        The other possibility is that nobody likes music videos and they only want to listen to the music. This might also be why MTV doesnt do videos anymore except at 9 AM on a saturday morning (Yes Im up watching MTV at 9 AM on a saturday morning, Im a loser,I know) But I like music videos, even if i dont nescisarily like the music (damn Kylie Minogue is hot)
        At any rate, I think that people do like music videos and would share them if they could be downloaded quick enough, which must mean that bandwidth is too low, even with dsl and cable modems. Wi-fi could change that and I hope it does, then you could essentially ramp up the bandwidth to whatever the spectrum will bear, which is a heck of a lot. You only have to change a central broadcasting station instead if stringing wire through the ground.
      Ultimately I feel that wi-fi will take over, since it is a much more elegant solution, and as i have said before, people have no patience for waiting for things to download, or anything else for that matter ;-)

I think that people today have lost their sense of Patience. Everything has to happen two seconds ago. People need to realize that some things happen on longer timeframes. Society changes on the decade to century timeframe, not on the millisecond timeframe. Some people expect poverty and racism and other societal problems to just go away like that, but they wont, at least not on that timeframe. That isnt to say that people should stop working to stop racism and change society, its just that they should be in for the long haul, and not expect it to happen overnight.
      Take Poverty for example. 100 years ago, the US was a third world nation by todays standards. People lived on dollars per day, in crowded slums around polluting cities. And look at where weve come today: People live in crowded suburbs around polluted cities but not on dollars per day!
    Oh well, at least I have a computer now, 100 years ago no amount of money could get you that.

Does anyone else besides me see the stupidity of the Israli-Palestinian conflict? I mean, Isreal is mostly desert anyways, it has no real natural resources to speak of, yet these two peoples are going at it like they were fignting over the land of milk and honey. Well technically they are fighting over the land of milk and honey but that was a long time ago, the milk had gone bad and the bees have all been africanized.

        Bad bees, bad! OWWW! OWWWW!! Oh theyre defending themselves somehow! But I digress...

        Yassar Arafat could end the conflict in a couple of years by simply folowing the tenets of Ghandi and MLK Jr in nonviolent resistance. The palestinians have already shown that they are willing to die for their cause, surely theyre willing to be beaten, hosed, tear gassed and spend time in jail for their cause.
Palestinians: Heres what you do; Dont like settlements in your territory? Those settlers have to get food and supplies somehow. Sit down in the road 24 hours a day, round the clock. If they try to airlift food in, sit on the rinway. Put yoru body between the israilis and the settlements. The israilis will respond predictibly, bring in the tanks guns etc. Dont fight, just sit there while the tanks come. Nothing garners more international attention than seeing children getting run over by tanks. International favor turns your way, and intense pressure on israel to stop running over people with tanks ensues. And you get what you want, a palestinian state.

        Unless of course you just want to kill as many Israelis as possible, in which case youre doing a good job. Ditto for the israilis. A wise man once said:" If two parties want peace, nothing will stand in the way of peace. If two parties want war, nothing will stand in the way of war."

Well I suppose I should write something insightful and witty, instead of just cribbing off of robert frost, even though he kicks ass.
          Lets look at the recent decison to remove the use of "Under God" from the pledge of allegiance. I totally support this decision, even though it probably puts me in the minority of americans. I find it extremely hard to believe that most americans can be so blind to people of other faiths. Would a hindu be comfortable saying "Under God"? Probably not. Would a Christian be comfortable saying "Under Vishnu"? Again, I doubt it. Part of being an american is that everyone who is a citizen is just as much an american as anyone else. The answer that most christians respond with when asked about "what about people who dont beleive in the judeo-christian god" is simply "well if they dont want to they dont have to say the pledge"
        Basically what that says is if you dont believe in god, you arent an american because you arent allowed to say the pledge.What about all those non christian americans who love this country? What about them? Shouldnt they feel just as comfortable pledging allegiance to the flag that represents the freedoms they came here to get? Why should they feel excluded from this country? I think the phrase "under god" seeks to exclude non christian people from the country, which more and more means immigrants from india, china, africa etc. If you want seperation of church and state, then you cant say that there is only one god, simple as that.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)