Lovely…Some people bought videos through Google, and nowthey’ve been told that that their videos will be taken away.
This is what the RIAA and MPAA want. They want you to buy stuff, and then they want to keep making you buy it again, and again, and a again, and again.
Patents are already hamstringing innovation in the US, and now it seems that actually buying a video is a thing of the past too.
Hopefully, some lawyer will go medieval on Google’s tuchas.
It turns out that Will Heaton, Bob Ney’s chief of staff, wore a wire to get the goods on him for the feds.
No honor among thieves, I guess…Except, of course, the Omertà that the Bush administration seems to be able to enforce.
So now the blithering idiots who think that copyright is property want to apply copyright to designer fashion.
Let’s get this straight: It’s for the useful arts and sciences. Says so in the constitution.
What’s more, there is plenty of fashion (most of it sucky) being made out there. There is no need to encourage production of more tacky handbags.
IP is about encouraging production of beneficial things, inventions, arts, etc. It’s not about allowing people to print their own money so that they can make bigger campaign donations to you, senator butthead Schumer.
AT&T censored anti-Bush lyrics on a webcast by Pearl Jam. This is why we want to put net neutrality into law.
Note: I am quoting the press release in its entirety, because permission is implied by posting a press release.
LOLLAPALOOZA WEBCAST: SPONSORED/CENSORED BY AT&T?
08.08.07After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast.When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them.
During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:
– “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung); and
– “George Bush find yourself another home.”
This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media.
AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.
Aspects of censorship, consolidation, and preferential treatment of the internet are now being debated under the umbrella of “NetNeutrality.” Check out The Future of Music or Save the Internet for more information on this issue.
Most telecommunications companies oppose “net neutrality” and argue that the public can trust them not to censor..
Even the ex-head of AT&T, CEO Edward Whitacre, whose company sponsored our troubled webcast, stated just last March that fears his company and other big network providers would block traffic on their networks are overblown..
“Any provider that blocks access to content is inviting customers to find another provider.” (Marguerite Reardon, Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: March 21, 2006, 2:23 PM PST).
But what if there is only one provider from which to choose?
If a company that is controlling a webcast is cutting out bits of our performance -not based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations – fans have little choice but to watch the censored version.
What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it’s about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band.
The complete version of “Daughter” from the Lollapalooza performance will be posted here soon for any of you who missed it. We apologize to our fans who were watching the webcast and got shortchanged. In the future, we will work even harder to ensure that our live broadcasts or webcasts are free from arbitrary edits.
If you have examples of AT&T censoring artist performances around political content, it’s a good thing for everyone to know about. Feel free to post examples on the official Pearl Jam Message Pit.
Kansas????
Yes, Kansas. The State GOP there has formed loyalty committee.
TOPEKA – The state Republican Party is forming a loyalty committee so that it can punish officers who endorse or contribute to Democrats.
…
The state committee’s actions struck a sour note for some Republicans, particularly moderates on issues such as abortion. Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist, suggested the loyalty committee could prove a “public relations disaster.”
“Ironically, it smacks most of the Communist Party,” Beatty said Monday. “That’s the kind of public irony that most parties try to avoid — the party of freedom telling people they have no freedom.”
Gee. You think????? Josef Stalin is laughing in hell.
And, Kobach said, the grounds for removing someone from office are fairly narrow: They must publicly endorse or contribute to a non-Republican running in Kansas.
“This rule will operate primarily as a deterrent,” Kobach said. “My anticipation is that once the rule is in effect, you won’t see too many elected party leaders engaging in this kind of behavior.”
Vee must all Goose schtep in unison.*
But Andy Wollen, president of the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority, a moderate group, mused about the GOP creating a “grand high inquisitor.”
“When you hear the term loyalty committee, what runs through your mind?” he said. “Joseph McCarthy. George Orwell.”
Cloud supports the loyalty committee, even though he has run afoul of conservatives who dominate the party leadership.
He earned their public criticism for signing a fundraising letter for Wollen’s group in March, criticizing the party’s leadership and suggesting people give to the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority.
You know, in America, people are supposed to have the right to call their party leaders right wing nutcase wackjobs, particularly when they are right wing nutcase wackjobs.
If they could hook a dynamo to George Orwell’s grave, we’d power all of California.
*Yes, I know, mixing Nazis and Communist is a very mixed metaphor thing.
When people call for the unfettered free market, they are really calling for these sorts of larcenous behaviors.
One of the little observed parts of the 2005 bankruptcy law allows American firms to go venue shopping for places with phony tax laws, phony regulation and phony courts to avoid any consequences of their actions.
Creditors may argue that the main case should proceed in the U.S. To do so they must show the U.S. bankruptcy judge that the hedge funds had their “center of main interests” in the U.S, said Robin Phelan, of Haynes & Boone, who represented hedge fund InverWorld Inc. in its 1999 liquidation in the Caymans.
Because the two hedge funds were incorporated in the Cayman Islands, that’s presumed to be the center of main interests, according to Phelan.
Of course, the plaintiffs are not angels either, investing in predatory lending as a way to make money.
If there were only a way for both sides to lose.
While the news that senior Pentagon officers seems like a stupid infraction of the rules, I see it as part of a larger, and more troubling picture.
Specifically, if one follows what is going on in the Christian Dominionist Movement, this is clearly a part of the pattern, along with things like the bigotry and harassment at the Air Force Academy, of the Religious Right create a military amenable to a Religious coup that would create a theocracy in the US.
They have been calling for this for years.
Four military generals, two in the Air Force, violated ethical standards by appearing or participating in a Christian fundraising video filmed inside Pentagon hallways, according to the Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office.
Maj. Gens. Peter Sutton and Jack Catton Jr. did not secure approval to promote the evangelical group Christian Embassy while they were in uniform, according to the inspector general. Two Army brigadier generals, Vincent Brooks and Robert Caslen Jr., are accused of the same.
He says America is plagued by a self-anointed, highly influential, and insular so-called Foreign Policy Community which spans both political parties, and this assesment is absolutely correct.
I’m not sold on Obama. I’m leaning towards Edwards in fact, but his statement that using a nuclear weapon to take out one individual, and in the process taking out a whole city, is counterproductive and ….well …. insane…is spot on.
Glenn Greenwald’s point about the general uselessness of the Washington foreign policy establishment is correct.
My only quibble is that it should not be limited to the foreign policy establishment.
I see this as a classic market failure. Bob Nardelli being named head of Chrysler is an indication of how corrupt and self serving our “manager” class has become. (Full disclosure, I worked for this guy when I was at GE Transportation Systems working on locomotives, but I never met him).
Here is a guy who engineered massive stock losses at Home Depot, and walked away with bonuses as a result….Great steward of shareholder value there…huh?
He’s gotten the job because it’s a way for other managers to guarantee that they fail upward too.
This is corrupt, plain and simple.
He said he hoped his own compensation would not become an issue in Chrysler’s ongoing contract talks with the United Auto Workers union.
Yes, I sure you don’t want that to be an issue, you contemptible greedhead.
Nardelli said Chrysler’s established restructuring plan is adequate but added that as a private company the automaker will look to move quickly to monetize some assets, with a focus on cash flow rather than reported earnings.
That one’s pretty easy to read: Cerberus bought Chrysler for what amounts to a few magic beans, and they are going to treat it like a chop shop treats a Lexus.
Our system of values in the US is more f%$#ed up than Osama bin Ladens.
There has been a long history of Boeing and the Department of Defense attempting to cut a deal to avoid competition on this program. In fact, a DOD official went to jail over this.
They have now jointly come out with a statement that the tanker order should not be split, claiming that the logistics and development duplication would be prohibitive.
This is a lie. There are numerous airlines that operate both the B-767 and the A-330.
As to development costs, both manufacturers are making flying these tankers in preparation of delivery overseas customers.
What is true is that it would completely politically untenable to shut Boeing out of this deal, and by adding this sort of requirement, you make Boeing the only choice.
Well, it looks like John Boehner and the employess of Fox News are filthy traitors who whould be locked away foir the rest of their life. I expect the administration to pursue this investigation with all diligewnce that it did the leaking of the name of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame.
A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration’s wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president’s spying powers.
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court’s decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.
I keep forgetting, it’s OK if you are a Republican.
It’s be a bit less serious if those pig felchers called the “blue dog coalition” didn’t fold like a bunch of overcooked broccoli this weekend to give Bush and his evil minions™ everything that they wanted.
We can now all be spied on at Abu Gonzalez’s say so.
This is a very interesting article describing why everyone at the Jerusalem Post views Conrad Black’s conviction on fraud with the same glee as HPers did over Fiorina’s departure.
Larry Derfner puts it nicely:
THERE’S ONE other misconception about him that ought to be cleared up – that he was a friend of Israel. Maybe in his words he was, but in his deeds? In his deeds he went as far as he could to gut an Israeli newspaper that’s been around for 75 years, one that’s very important to this country and the Diaspora.
Furthermore, he fired hundreds of Israelis, he destabilized hundreds of Israeli families, for nothing but his own greed. He had more money than even his wife could spend, yet for 14 years he fired as many Jerusalem Post employees as he could manage.
No, Lord Black of Crossharbour isn’t a friend of Israel; he’s as contemptuous of Israelis as he is of anybody else.
He’s due to be sentenced on November 30. He could get up to 35 years in prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. I wish the Post would throw a party that day and invite all the hundreds of people Black pushed out of here to come to the newsroom and wait for news of the verdict. I guess it’s just a fantasy.
But reality ought to be festive enough. There will be dozens of current Post employees, many of them Hollinger survivors, in the newsroom on the day of Black’s sentencing. All will be newspapermen and newspaperwomen, all of them pro-Israel – right-wingers, left-wingers and centrists, religious and secular, all sharing the same hope or prayer.
And on that day, God willing, when a roar of exultation is suddenly heard from the old Jerusalem Post building on Yermiyahu Street, it will mean that there is still some justice in the world.
The New Yorker has an interesting comment on a little piece of Republithug rule gaming.
Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union.
These were the same people who were screaming that a lost (stolen) election in 2000 had to be played under the rules that were there.
Hendrik Herzberg’s final words on this are definitive:
It’s the lotusland equivalent of Tom DeLay’s 2003 midterm redistricting in Texas, except with a sweeter smell, a better disguise, and larger stakes. And the only way Californians will reject it is if they have a chance to think about it first.
Well, it appears that the Australian government is using secrecy as an excuse for covering up their own incompetence:.
As an American, let me say to the Australian general public that I feel your pain. I am rather familiar with corrupt politicans screaming “terrorism” for political gain, and screaming “secrecy” to cover up their screw ups.
Secret material used to cancel the visa of an Indian doctor falsely accused of terrorism cannot be released as it may jeopardize investigations, Australia’s immigration minister said Tuesday.
Kevin Andrews said he wanted to release the “protected material” to demonstrate why he cancelled Mohamed Haneef’s working visa but the Australian Federal Police had advised him against it.
So they are claiming that they had a reason to kick him out of the country, but not enough to hold him, even though, as a result of his initial detention, he has detailed knowledge of Australian interrogation techniques.
Prime Minister John Howard this week ruled out an apology and Andrews dismissed calls for a judicial review of the case, which was the first time tough counter-terrorism laws introduced after 9/11 had been put to the test.Andrews had faced heavy criticism in Australia over his decision to exercise a little-used discretionary power to cancel Haneef’s visa then refuse to reinstate it when the terrorism case against the doctor collapsed last week.
….
Haneef was charged with recklessly supporting a terrorist organisation but returned home at the weekend after more than three weeks in custody when the case against him collapsed due to lack of evidence and bungles by prosecutors.
….
Prime Minister John Howard this week ruled out an apology and Andrews dismissed calls for a judicial review of the case, which was the first time tough counter-terrorism laws introduced after 9/11 had been put to the test.
And is desparately trying to avoid showing that they failed, and theat they are the threat to basic human rights that its critics have always said.
It’s a statistical certainty. When looking at the current “thwarted terrorist attacks”, it’s apparrent that what our state security apparatus is catching are not hardened trained terrorists, but rather fanboy terrorist wannabees.
Even so, if we were to have a competent anti-terrorist effort, another successful attack is inevitable. No defense is one hundred percent.
This is the question that Marty Kaplan asks:
But no more than King Canute could stop the tide, no more than a Big One in California can be prevented, no more than the hundred thousand people who will die in accidents this year will evade their untimely ends, an act of domestic terrorism is inevitable. What counts is how we think about it right now, how we prepare today for when it happens tomorrow, and how we handle it — politically, emotionally, morally — when, as it must, it occurs.
Is there any doubt that the Bush administration, and its dead-ender allies in the Republican Party and the media, will use an act of domestic terrorism as a fresh opportunity to further demonize their political opponents and further compromise the Constitution? Will they truly be able to resist the temptations of martial law, emergency powers, and the phony prerogatives of the unitary executive in wartime? In Britain, in Israel, in Spain, in Ireland, we have seen political leaders decline the invitation to demagoguery that domestic terrorism has offered, and instead to put violence in perspective, to refuse to compromise reason and democracy, to summon their citizens to remain themselves rather than become their enemies. When the unthinkable happens to us again, will the politicians who pissed away the unity following 9/11 in the sands of Iraq have the moral wherewithal to remind us that no matter how grief-stricken we may be, the sky has not fallen and the republic has not failed?
If I could manage to be smarter about risk than I usually am, I would worry less about the possibility of terrorism, and more about the probability that the same chickenhawks who exploited it before to sell us on war without end, will exploit it again to sing the virtues of temporary fascism.
We know that the Bush and his Evil Minions™ are incompetent, and that their code places power and personal loyalty above everything else.
Even if we grant them that they have some limits, and that they won’t let a terrorist attack happen for political gain, and I DON’T grant them the benefit of the doubt, we know that another attack will happen, and that they will use this as an excuse to consolidate political advantage.
How do we deal with this fact?
In staring at the rubble that was a bridge on CNN today, the question is “why?”
Speaking strictly as an engineer, I can say that there was either a point load, or a tensile load (the strength of ceramics over time in tension is zero) leading to a failure.
That misses the big picture.
The big picture is that at least since the 1970s, the United States has created prosperity, or the illusion of prosperity, through eating its seed corn.
Eating one’s seed corn is a metaphor. It refers to a farmer eating seed that is reserved for planting the next year. It feeds his belly now, but creates a disaster the next season.
Through the systematic dismantling of protections on things workers rights and speculative investments, along with literally running infrastructure constructed over 40 years ago into the ground, we have created a little pop.
Things seem fine, but at some point, the poper must be paid.
Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) is submitting a motion to impeach Alberto Gonzalez.
It reads as follows:
Resolved: That the Committee on the Judiciary shall investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Alberto Gonzales for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Truth be told, I’d much rather see a motion that inserts “for lying to congressional committees and investigators in violation of applicable laws, and” right after his name.
It’s clear that he’s lying. It’s clear that he has lied for Bush since his days in Texas.
Impeach Gonzalez now. Impeach Cheney tomorrow. Impeach Bush the day after.
Mr. “Internet Tubes” appears to be on his way to an indictment, and hopefully jail.
If you want to see the effect of oil on governance, one only has to look at Alaska. When I left, in 1969, this sort of stuff was unheard of.
Found money is corrupting.
It turns out that a major source for MI5 was rendered, and tortured by the CIA in one of their gulags.
An Iraqi who was a key source of intelligence for MI5 has given the first ever full insider’s account of being seized by the CIA and bundled on to an illegal ‘torture flight’ under the programme known as extraordinary rendition.
One of the items of significance is just how much MI5 were the poodles of the CIA.
A report by Parliament’s intelligence and security committee last week disclosed that, although the Americans warned MI5 it planned to render al-Rawi in advance, in breach of international law, the British did not intervene on the grounds he did not have a UK passport. The government claimed he was the responsibility of Iraq, which he fled as a teenager when his father was tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
This had to come from 10 Downings street. Once again, Blair is Bush’s poodle.
Disgraceful.
Once again, it appears that part of the military’s account of Tillman’s death is a lie.
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman’s side started praying.
“I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me,” Sgt. Bryan O’Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. “He said something like, ’Hey, O’Neal, why are you praying? God can’t help us now.”’
Tillman’s intent, O’Neal said, was to “more or less put my mind straight about what was going on at the moment.”
“He said, ’I’ve got an idea to help get us out of this,”’ said O’Neal, who was an 18-year-old Army Ranger in Tillman’s unit when the former NFL player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.
O’Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” again and again when he was killed, O’Neal said.
A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman’s death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O’Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain’s testimony, outlined in some 2,300 pages of transcripts released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
There is something of greater significance here. It is that a Chaplain lied about this.
Christian conservative Dominionists have had the infiltration of the military as a goal for some time, look at the discrimination as the Air Force academy, and Tillman was known to be an Atheist.
I think that this guy chose to lie to investigators to further that agenda.