Blackmoor Vituperative

It looks like the NSA is actually doing something useful for a change, rather than just spying on American citizens.

I love Lawrence Lessig. He is one of a tiny handful of clueful people that actually gets some attention from the media. If only lawmakers paid attention.

You have probably heard it by now, but Apple has announced that all music on iTunes will be free of DRM.

iTunes is still AAC-only, so I won’t be using iTunes, myself. Still, this is a milestone in the fight against the corrupt Digital Rights Mafia.

When I was in my late teens, dirt poor, and new to credit cards, I learned very quickly that I could get a cash advance on one card to pay the minimum amount due on another card. As the amount I owed spiraled upward along with the minimum payments, I realized that this strategy would have one inevitable outcome. So why is this simple economic lesson beyond the ken of the sages running our government?

After betting the farm, the Benz, the Rolex and the college fund, Congress is about to take another $800 billion economic stimulus gamble. But economists say it may be time for an intervention.

The federal budget deficit already is projected to reach an unheard of $1.2 trillion this fiscal year, and President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, under review by lawmakers, would only add to the deficit.

That’s on top of a $700 billion financial rescue, a $17 billion auto bailout and the first $150 billion stimulus (that’s the one approved right before the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression).

So where does it end?

(from Economists Warn Against Feeding ‘Trillion-Dollar Deficits’, FOXNews.com)

Anyone over the age of 20 who has ever had a credit card knows where it ends. So why don’t our elected representatives?

From YouTube, we have more evidence that smoking is cool.

Any excuse to play with fire in public is cool in my book.

In the world of the TV sitcom “Seinfeld,” Festivus is a goofy, high-tension Christmas substitute dreamt up by George Costanza’s angry dad. Revelers gathered around an aluminum pole and couldn’t leave until someone pinned the head of the household to the floor.

Festivus is still good for a laugh among “Seinfeld” loyalists, even 11 years after the episode was first broadcast.

Funny, but nobody’s laughing much about the Festivus pole that popped up under the dome of the Illinois Capitol this week.

(from Festivus pole goes up in the Illinois Capitol, and the gripes begin, Pantagraph.com)

The T-Mobile G1 will receive a number of minor software improvements in January 2009, according to http://www.googleandblog.com.

(And no, the apostrophe is not a typo.)

Strange days ahead for NASA. They announced a while back that they were going to start relying more on the private sector, and now the Obama collective seem intent on dismantling the agency altogether.

President-elect Obama seems intent on burning down the house of cards that is NASA, presumably to replace it with an agency that can actually design worthwhile missions without wholesale wasting of taxpayer dollars. First, we learned that the transition team has been circling around NASA’s Constellation program.

Now, today I read that Obama is basically going to outsource a good bit of NASA engineering to the Defense Department. Bloomberg reports that Obama may force NASA to use DOD rockets, which will be cheaper and ready sooner than NASA’s planned Ares (right), which isn’t slated until 2015.

And this is all in the context of China’s rapidly advancing space program, which definitely has Pentagon eyebrows raised.

China’s military carried out a spacewalk in 2008, plans to land a robot on the moon in 2012 and a man on the moon thereafter. Meanwhile, the US will be hitching rides with Russia between 2010 when the shuttle is scrapped and 2015 (at the soonest) when Orion is to be launched.

It’s no secret Obama’s team wants to scrap NASA’s Ares rocket. The Pentagon’s Delta IV and Atlas V rockets are “basically developed,” says John Logsdon of the National Air and Space Museum. “You don’t have to build them from scratch.”

(from NASA craft may ride on Pentagon rockets, ZDNet)

Remember Worlds.com? The 3D pioneer is still around and they’re ready to sue. In fact on Christmas Eve, the company sued NCSoft, for violating patent ‘690, a system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.

NCSoft’s games, such as Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars and Lineage, are all said to violate the patent. And NCSoft is just the start. World.com’s IP lawyers feel that they have a “very robust patent,” reports Virtual Worlds News.

(from Worlds.com patent litigation could ripple through virtual worlds, ZDnet)

Even if patents on software were not inherently absurd (and they are), this is a patent on something which had been widely implemented and had even appeared in movies decades before Worlds.com applied for their patent in 2000. Even EverQuest was using virtual avatars for a year prior to Worlds.com’s patent application. Surely the USPTO had heard of EverQuest? How clueless could they possibly be? What technologically illiterate boob signed off on this?

In what may be the most backward suggestion I have heard from Microsoft, they are suggesting making computers more like cell phones — and not in a good way.

You may have noticed that competition and increasing sophistication on the part of consumers is steadily pushing cell phone companies away from the “lock in” model and toward a model where the service and the telephone are entirely separate. This is universally hailed by a good thing by everyone that matters. You might be old enough to remember the bad old days before the AT&T breakup, when the phone company owned your phone, and told you what you could do with it. This is more or less the position cell phone companies are in today, although the pressure to compete is slowly killing off this absurd business model.

Well, Microsoft thinks we should go back to those bad old days when some company could tell you what you could do with your property and when. Remember back in the 1990s, when AOL would give you a $200 rebate on a computer, if you signed up for a year or two of AOL? Microsoft’s idea is just like that, except you wouldn’t be able to use the computer for anything other than AOL — not without paying extra.

Remember back in the 1990s, when Circuit City hatched the Divx scheme, which was an attempt to make it so that every time you watched a DVD, that you would have to pay for it? After all, why pay for something once, when you can pay for it over and over again? Microsoft’s idea is just like that, except rather than losing access to Battlefield Earth if you decide not to pay the rental fee, Microsoft would have you lose your tax records, your business correspondence, and the photos of your grandchildren.

I have a hard time believing that even the dolts at Microsoft are stupid enough to think that this would be a good idea. I think it is more likely that this is a preemptive application to prevent a competitor from patenting the idea, a tactic that only makes sense because of how utterly borked our patent system is.