Category: Politics

Tetris made of people

Quite literally, what it says.

It’s snowing again. 

Daughter Katie’s coming over this afternoon and We Will, We Will Deadwood.  Hopefully the transit system is up to the task of getting her here.

I found a hilarious critique of Libertarianism on line.

Last night I dreamed I was back in the High Park area of Toronto.  I guess I’m sick of looking at stucco houses.  I miss many things about Toronto; I miss seeing the CN Tower and I miss a lot of the friends I have there (Tammy, Catherine, Dave, Jan and others).  I miss Kensington Market the way it was, I miss the colour of Lake Ontario on a windy fall day, I miss being able to ice skate outside in the wintertime.

Sometimes I wish I could live in three places at once, because there are things I miss about Montreal too.  I miss the Dorval circle and the absolutely craziness of the town when the festivals like the Jazz festival and Just For Laughs were on; I miss how people dress with more style and drive with more verve (and frankly, consistently better than the unwashed hordes of incompetents who adorn the roads in Vancouver); I miss being able to hear Inuktitut spoken in the street; I miss skating in La Centre de la Nature in Laval, the best outdoor skating venue in Canada; I miss the wild variety of the weather, even.

DRM letter to Mr. Prentice

Dear Sir:

I am not in favour of the Canadian government legislating what it cannot adequately and clearly explain, in the light of the powerful interests pushing for the DRM legislation.  I am not in favour of how fast, given the other important matters facing Canadian legislators, the bill is going through.

I am a content producer.  I hope to some day make my living using the internet as a songwriter and op-ed writer. I have a burning interest in copyright law and I’d be leery of supporting the incoming legislation without more explanation.

I have uploaded a song, currently on Youtube, which is protected under a creative commons licence.  BUT what will happen under this new law if I make a video and this video is uploaded to a server that uses drm software? Can I remove that protection from my own video? As I understand the legislation, I can not modify or kludge any DRM that any legal entity attaches to my work even though I control the copyright.  As the person who made the content in the first place, this is a real kick in the head, and not exactly a spur to my creativity, unless it’s to put more rants about DRM legislation on my site.

If I understand the legislation correctly I won’t be able to adopt new technologies for old content.  Let me tell you something.  I work with geeks and they are NOT sending you emails or begging you to reconsider the legislation.  They will merely, because it’s what geeks DO,(small edit here) subvert and end-run EVERYTHING your government tries to enact with respect to this legislation, and they will laugh at your discomfiture and ignorance (and mine, frankly) while they are doing it.  I have absolutely NO ability to circumvent DRM.  But some of my friends, who are REFUSING TO COMPLAIN about this legislation because they don’t want to be singled out for special treatment later, sure as heck do.

Did you ever consider that the technology to support this DRM was made by human beings who may just have built a ‘back door’ into it which will make the legislation the laughing stock of the free world?

My rights as a content creator are going to be messed over by this legislation, from everything I see, and my friends and colleagues will work tirelessly to pull the teeth of the legislation as fast as you can enact amendments to it! Seems like a waste of time, and an attempt to wring the last little bit of lobbying money from buggy whip media industries.

Don’t do it Mr. Prentice.  The flood of emails and letters you are getting is now the same weight as a tombstone for your political career; please let me know that you’re smarter than the rest of your government, and more far-sighted than the frightened media moguls who are trying to buy a few more years of profits on the back of your career.

Allegra Sloman

I am indebted to Douglas Green, who posted to a CBC website, for providing me with a template for this letter.  If I had a way to contact him and ask his permission, I would have done it, but somehow I don’t think he’d mind.  The link to his comment of November 29 is here 

The unexpected losses

Update to this post. 

 

I’ve been pondering the Storm Worm.  Since I’ve been thinking about a piece of software that is a ‘contiguous and not quite self-aware artificial intelligence’ for the last year or so as part of a fiction, finding out about the Storm Worm has made me very uneasy.

My first problem is direct and unequivocal – personally unpleasant.  I make a living from the inertnests.  The VOIP lines that carry the customer voices to me are dependent on the existence and functioning of the internet, which is beginning to look like another Ponzi scheme.  The contact management software is also web based.  Even if by some miracle we were able to switch back to ‘land lines’ after the internet crashes – and it will, and more than once – driving so many voices back to copper will put international telephony into turmoil.

My second problem is unpleasant for my children. Who will benefit from international telephony and the internet crashing?

Think about it.

Essentially, everybody who hates science; everybody who hates freedom; the buggy whip media; and the richest people on earth, who will be insulated from the worst of it. Theocrats, neo-cons, the super-rich and newspapers all have something in common now; imagine if they were able to bring porn, citizen journalism and science to its knees in a single stroke; imagine if various governments in the world were able to profit immediately thereby by locking up anybody they felt like with impunity because there was no one to report on it and the hysteria that surrounded the collapse of the internet made all geeks suspect.

I should have been name Cassandra, so filled am I with dire predictions.  It may be the Russian Mafia behind it… and I’d bet money that’s so – but like 9/11 more than one interest group will profit by the collapse of the internet.

What on earth can I do about it? Is there a silver lining?

Events in Bolivia

Sometimes I feel very isolated from world affairs – then they strike at my friends and family. This is verbatim from Leo Makela. I am very grateful for the opportunity to repost.

Hi all,

You may or may not have been aware of the incidents in Bolivia:

Bolivian airline nastiness

We have more personal details.

Last week Kevin flew down to Tarija Bolivia for the International Tae Kwon Do Pan-American tournament. He went with Master Lu and another student from Ottawa and another 3 participants flew from Toronto. The tournament was great (Kevin got Silver in patterns) and he loved Tarija, especially the girls.

However,

On the way back they were waiting in Santa Cruz, Bolivia to board an American Airlines flight to Miami when the dispute between the Airlines and the local airport authorities occurred. American Airlines refused to pay the extra fee that the local authorities were demanding (about $2000). After a couple of hours of stand-off the pilot and aircrew suddenly left the departure lounge, boarded the aircraft and (without permission from the control tower) took off – abandoning about 140 passengers in the departure lounge, including the Canadian, American and Puerto Rico TKD teams.

Then the airport authorities told the passengers to collect their checked luggage and leave the airport. Kevin got his luggage and tried to return to the departure lounge to rejoin the other people on the team. Security guards tried to stop him but he pushed through. Then he and other TKD people faced off against about 1/2 dozen riot police who appeared carrying batons. They refused to leave until people were reunited and some settlement was made. The Canadian consulate, the American consulate and the local senator got involved and finally transportation was arranged to take the Canadians, Americans and Puerto Ricans to the Cortez Hotel.Thank God Taekwon Do people, especially our own master, Master Phap Lu know people “in high places”.

The next day the TKD masters refused an offer by American Airlines to fly them out “sometime during the weekend”. Instead, on a strongly worded recommendation by the Canadian consulate and Foreign Affairs in Canada they paid the local airline about $500 per person to fly them to Miami immediately. Darn good thing too – they left around 11:30 Wed night and on Thursday the army stormed the airport.

From Miami, after considerable argument, they managed to get booked to O’Hare in Chicago and then to Ottawa. Finally, around 6:00 pm on Thursday they arrived at the Ottawa airport. Kevin and the others were thrilled to be home in Canada and of course all of us were relieved to have them back. We along with John and Val all showed up to pick them up.

It remains to be seen whether we will be able to get any compensation from American Airlines. – At least everyone returned safe and sound. This incident may severely restrict future international TKD
competitions in the future.

Good luck with that, Mr. Wisdom

I am sorry to report it, but you HAVE no rights left. 

All you have is the inherent laziness and slowness of bureaucracy to help you now, because your fellow citizens don’t even know what’s on the bill of rights.

In other news, European Parliament takes a cosmic whizz on Creationism.  Chances of this happening in the US and Canada.  Zip, Nada, Nix, Nyet, not a freakin’ chance.  This should be required reading for every goddamned politician on the planet.  The wording is bang on.  Please read it.

Why would somebody ask for ‘more ranting’?

Tonight I would like to rant about the lack of menstruation rituals in our culture. Tonight I’m going to take the man’s view, as the woman’s view about it isn’t nearly transgressive enough for me ce soir la. Jeez, where’s an accent grave when I need one…
If I was a man, I would want rituals and predictive patterns in young women’s lives that preserved their fertility for their true purpose, namely, making babies with me and not with other men. Having some kind of ceremony where it was drilled into the girl’s head that she had one shot at the childbearing game and if she slept with the wrong guy it was game the fuck over would be useful if my strategy for access to childbearing women meant I was employed and civil. Mind you, if my strategy is to just rape the shit out of her and hope for a lucky plug, it’s still better than if she was really trying to save it for the right guy. Her body may betray her and pop an egg for me. I’d be the ‘wrong guy’ – but I’d still be first. Now, the sperm competition theory of fucking, which holds that guys enjoy sharing girls because if you’re second (or later) you come way harder (your sperm will ‘wash away’ that of your, uh, competitor/buddy), so if you let your buddy go first, because you don’t really care if you get her pregnant, and you’d prefer to come harder because of your wiring, you’ve more or less dropped out of the discussion about breeding. You’ve actually given some consideration to the notion, which is why you’re wearing a condom while all of these shenanigans are going on. I mean, it’s still rape, but there’s a different angle. You get it now? All different styles of thinking about ‘the breeding thing’ lead to different results in terms of how it affects the woman’s life. Oh, sorry, I’ve gone back into the women’s way of thinking about this, ‘scuse me all to hell.

So mOm, did I make you laugh really hard on the phone tonight, or what?

Back to the subject at hand. Women should have menstruation rites so that they actually have two whole chunks of time to think about fertility without having to do any work. That is, in part, what rituals are all about. It’s about the whole “stop working and start thinking” thing that has made humanity what it is. Having enough excess capacity in your life to be able to stop and think is what makes for civil life. Having the spare time to develop morality makes morality. Leisure, in short, makes ethical life possible. But don’t worry, in the end it’s all about sex. Yeehaw. Hurry hurry love.
Did I ever say why it was I refer to my mother as mOm? It’s because when I spell her title that way, it is the “Kilroy was here” or “Clem” sign. See his hands, on either side of his head? Te he. But I also do it because of where I got the idea of it, pOp – which is a clown face with a big nose in the middle. Squint and you’ll see.