Laziness or apathy? Hmmm. I can’t decide.

Dang I haven’t written anything in a while. I’m trying to decide if it was lack of material, laziness, or apathy. Then I realized I didn’t really care what it was, so I’m going with procrastination.

This past weekend I was at home for Father’s day. I cooked steaks, chicken, baked onions, and I made ice cream. I got a new ice cream churn a couple of months back and I’ve been having a problem getting it to freeze up good. This weekend I found out it was because I made the ice cream a little too rich. All the milk fat was keeping it from freezing. Oops, but it tasted so good.

I wanted to catch up with a few things I was reading about, so I’ll put it all up at once.

I may be naive, but this is one of the smartest things I’ve heard come out of Washington in a long time. The broadcast flag is a really bad idea and it will make me think twice about buying a piece of equipment. Why in the world would people want to take a step back from the freedom the good old VCR gives them? People will just have to start ordering things from China and Korea to bypass the regulation.

This really gets me too. First of all, I agree that they have no idea the amount of information storage required to track all the links someone clicks on much less all the information that is transmitted. It’s like asking the cell and telephone companies to keep recordings of all phone calls for a year just in case the US DOJ needs to subpoena them. You know to stop drugs and telephone scams and the pedophiles. You can’t forget the pedophiles. It’s a bunch of bull. The thing is that storage problems won’t be as big a hurdle in a few years. Then it might have a chance of going through. I can’t wait until people break into that database, look for mail order or credit card phone numbers, and get peoples credit cards or other identity information.

Sony’s making it tougher for citizens to listen to music they bought on CD, so that it will make them look for other less legal ways to get their music copied to their mp3 players. At least that’s what it looks like. I don’t buy many cds, because I don’t have that extra money to throw around. Believe me, a lot of people don’t buy music because it costs too much.

I am really looking forward to the outcome of this case. I’m not sure how many people realize it’s importance for freedom of speech and communication, and as a signal of corporate power in the US government. This case has the potential to change a lot, but given some recent rulings, I expect the most uncontroversial wording of the decision possible.

And more shit about the broadcast flag. Let’s hope some more people have some smarts up there in DC. Feel free to follow the link at the bottom of the page for a form to fill out at the EFF.