Sam's L33t Journal

This weekend was great. Saturday evening went to the Sunset Catina with DJ for some excellent food and drink. Sunday I went to Tropic Thunder with film club, which was good dumb fun.

A variety of things to comment on:

• I've heard some people suggest John McCain secretly wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade. That's simply not the case; it can hardly be secret when it's on his website. Not worried though, as Obama continues a solid campaign while McCain continues to kick himself in the mouth repeatedly.
• sabotabby presents a parable about US healthcare. Also interesting is this libertarian essay on how the government created this healthcare crisis by "solving" the last one. While I'm on a libertarian bent, here's another interesting one on fiat money and why it seems to work. Really interesting history.
• Bill Nye has a new TV show. Bill Nye. The Science Guy. I'm excited.
• Two blog posts on ampersands. Seriously.
• A post on why the SAT is still useless crap that colleges should drop like a bad habit.
• United Airlines bumps a family from a flight, ruining a $10k+ vacation (to visit a dying relative, among other things), lies about it, finally gives the family a refund, but refuses to write a letter allowing the family to claim the insurance on their trip.
• An immigrant dies in US custody with undiagnosed spinal cancer, deported because papers were sent to the wrong address.
• A recipe for Avocado Lime Pie with Coconut Cream.
• A bunch of MIT students ended up in a legal controversy for revealing security vulnerabilities of the MBTA payment system. The MBTA management is showing their usual preference for security theater over real security.
• A court ruled that violating copyleft licenses is copyright infringement, not contract violation. Good decision, to be applauded. Copyleft licenses are not contracts, the are unilateral statements by the copyright holder of which copyright rights they relinquish under which conditions.

AACS (the content protection system for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies) has been cracked. Cory Doctorow's analysis is right on: DRM costs years and billions and is rendered totally useless by some hackers in a week or so of spare time.

To make the story more amusing, the AACS is now sending bogus legal threats against everyone who posts a number. Specifically, this number:
9-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Amusingly, Digg (a popular social link-sharing site) tried to censor the story, but gave in after that provoked a virtual riot from its users.

Update: The number is now on over 700,000 webpages and has sparked a variety of artistic renditions, including this song. It's really hard for anyone to suppress information on the internet once it starts to spread.

I'd say "Thugs vs. Pirates", but the RIAA has terrible aim.

Anyways, I recently ran across this excellent article: The RIAA vs. John Doe, a Layperson's Guide to Filesharing Lawsuits. This is a must-read for anyone who's not already super-informed about the issue.

On a related note, I linked to Cory Doctorow's talk at Microsoft recently. Here's a link to another talk of his, this one given at Olin College.