does net neutrality stand a chance?

27B Stroke 6:

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.

Just read it. You’ll learn something, though not what you might expect.

Just to be clear, below the fold is a rundown of some of the positions people are taking on this.
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Continue reading “does net neutrality stand a chance?”

Friday Random Ten+One: Backdated Edition

Cheat / The Clash / Black Market Clash
Dissolve / Elvis Costello / When I Was Cruel
Badge / Cream / 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of Cream
Change Your Mind / Camper Van Beethoven / Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
Me In Honey / R.E.M. / Out Of Time
The Name of This Thing Is Not Love / Elvis Costello & The Imposters / The Delivery Man
Here’s To You / The Silos / The Silos
Hackensack / Fountains Of Wayne / Welcome Interstate Managers
Writing the Book of Last Pages / Let’s Active / Big Plans for Everybody
Hallelujah / k.d. lang / Hymns of the 49th Parallel
The Sinister Minister / Béla Fleck & The Flecktones / Live Art (Disc 2)

pinholga notes

Time to document the various modifications I had added to my Holga.

This is the way it looks now with wirenut-based cable release affixed. If you do this, be careful not to glue the wirenut so close to the shutter release. As it is now, I have to use a cable release all the time, until I glue or screw something to the shutter release that I can use.

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The white stripe on the lens is my poor man’s macro setting: unscrewing the lens past that point means it comes off in your hand. But it should give an additional margin of close-focus capability.

I added a pinhole insert today, with a bit of foamcore and square of brass shim stock.

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My plan was to cut a circle to fit the lens opening, but that was before I tried cutting foamcore with a utility knife. I rejiggered it to use a tightly fitting strip, anchoring it to the little bump where the lens stop screw used to live.

A view of the pinhole insert from the back side, showing the brass shim.

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Observant Holga fans will wonder about the light area inside the center of the lens opening. I added a real f/16 aperture to the camera when I saw that the aperture selector is meaningless in stock Holgas. A little bit of a pop can, a 1/8 inch hole and some glue is all you need.

not how I read it

Mark Pilgrim’s list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users:

Cory Doctorow: Mac guru and software developer Mark Pilgrim recently switched to Ubuntu Linux after becoming fed up with proprietary Mac file-formats and the increasing use of DRM technologies in the MacOS.

What I read was more like “I lost a bunch of my own metadata that I didn’t back up.

Seriously, what better way to gin up a bunch of traffic than to encourage some new fanboy wars?

And Cory’s predictable rants about DRM are tiresome: does he really think Apple likes the DRM arms race? I guess someone has to defend the “death before DRM” position but I find it a little disingenuous to leave the media companies out of these rants: they are the ones behind it.

At the same time, I don’t consider Apple a victim, more a conflicted middleman. They would likely sell more iPods and MacBooks without DRM, as the presence of those technologies forces some buyers elsewhere. Has anyone ever bought a DRM-disabled product because of the DRM component?

I didn’t think so.

why do comedians explain civil rights so well?

Orrin Hatch’s Flag Burning Remix:

The fact that the [flag-burning] proposal was defeated by only one vote (no thanks to California’s often bewildering Democrat Diane Feinstein) is disturbing, however, and it got me thinking of comedian Bill Hicks’ infamous rant about flag burning from years back. Hicks’ words resonate strongly in the current political climate, and for today’s review, I’ve remixed the classic monologue with some strident guitar jams courtesy of the one and only Government Issue, the results of which I humbly offer to you now. [Download MP3]

George Carlin? Mort Saul Sahl? Lenny Bruce? Jon Stewart?

neither evangelical or judgmental

At least I try not to be.

Meg lays it out on food choices (I hope my reply to her original post didn’t provoke her second point). But I think her first point may be more true than she fears. I don’t think most people have their eyes open.

Veganism, foie gras and personal choice:

Since my return to meat, I’ve learned more about food and garnered more pleasure from eating and sharing food with friends than I had in years. My culinary world has expanded in ways I’d never imagined — I’ll actually order bone marrow and liver when I’m out to dinner. And I’m more engaged and aware of food production methods and practices than I ever was as an AV. I eat with eyes wide open, with the full knowledge that an animal was bred and slaughtered for my consumption. And I am OK with that.

This leads to what angers me about the recent foie gras bans, PETA, and animal rights activists in general. First, there’s the assumption you must be eating meat because you’re ignorant of where it comes from. I support efforts to educate consumers about factory farming (though I draw the line at the propaganda activists produce that utilize intellectually dishonest methods to support their “arguments”) but trying to convince anyone of anything by initiating an argument with an insult isn’t particularly effective.

Second, there’s the moral superiority that oftentimes accompanies said argument. Great, YOU made YOUR choice because it aligned with YOUR values and beliefs. That does not mean your choice is right for me, and your condescension isn’t going to convince me of anything. Keep your veggie burger, and leave me my Shake Shack.

As with everything in life, eating is a series of personal choices. The more education we have, the better choices we can make. I believe in personal responsibility and the freedom to make choices, and I don’t think the government should be in the business of restricting them. Factory farms, whether they produce milk or eggs or beef or berries, are environmentally unsound and cruel. And I do not support food produced in this fashion (with I’d wager about a 95% success rate in reality). In my ideal world, everyone would be aware of the conditions under which their food is produced and we’d all purchase humanely treated meat and organic vegetables.

I disagree with the argument that government has no place in restricting choices but I think there should be more information, ie transparency, available to the consumer. I think food production is an abstraction to many people. To many, beef is a sliced shrink-wrapped commodity, not the product of a lengthy food chain that includes petrochemical fertilizers, antibiotics, indigestible (for the animal) feeds, and somewhere in there, a cow. I think there’s an argument against scale and industrialism underscoring Pollan’s book and the whole Slow Food movement. Economies of scale and efficiencies are fine for commodities like cars and TVs, but not for salad greens, cheeses, and meats.

Who had a burger for lunch and can say “I eat with eyes wide open, with the full knowledge that an animal was bred and slaughtered for my consumption. And I am OK with that.”

they don’t make ’em like this anymore

Daily Kos: Our Founding Moonbat:

It has been said that his journalism is “unfair” and “vicious” and “takes a back seat to everyone, including Jayson Blair, in terms of ethics”, that it “might well have been the best fiction written in the English language”, that “every dip of his pen stung like a horned snake”, and that he was “loose cannon” whose “ninety-proof prose” incited the “rabble”. His lifelong political enemy called him “the great incendiary” and a “master of the puppets”, deplored his “obstinacy and inflexible disposition”, and also accused him of “defalcation” (a quaint expression for embezzlement). It’s been said that “like most men contending solely for a principle he was distinctly a ‘trouble-maker.'” And finally, the authorities declared that his “offenses are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration but that of condign punishment.”

Some fire-breathing excerpts interwoven within the piece. Bracing stuff . . . and all too apropos.