Blackmoor Vituperative

The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation’s largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

[…]

“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said Comcast has “arbitrarily” blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so.

(from FCC chief says Comcast violated Internet rules, Yahoo! Finance)

That is remarkable. I am not used to seeing the FCC as the good guys.

The 5 real reasons to avoid iPhone 3G

• iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can’t be on everyone’s phones.
• iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology.
• iPhone exposes your whereabouts and provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge.
• iPhone won’t play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.
• iPhone is not the only option. There are better alternatives on the horizon that respect your freedom, don’t spy on you, play free media formats, and let you use free software — like the FreeRunner ().

We can trade our freedom and our money to get something flashy on the surface, or we can spend a little more money, keep our freedom, and support a better kind of business. If we want businesses to be ethical, we have to reward the ones that are. By not enriching companies that want to take away our freedom and by rewarding those that respect us, we will be helping to bring about a better future.

In solidarity,

John, Josh, Matt, and Peter

(from Defective By Design)

A very sad article about plastic.

Amazon is really putting some effort into making DRM-free MP3s commercially viable. They have a “Five for five Friday” deal where five albums are $5 each. That’s not bad at all. You might consider checking them out.

For the first time in U.S. history, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that individual Americans have the right to own guns for personal use, and struck down a strict gun control law in the U.S. capital.

Supreme Court finds individual right to own guns (from Yahoo! News)

I am amazed at this decision. The Supreme Court actually upholding the Constitution? I am flabbergasted.

Maybe the murder rate in in our nation’s capital will drop a bit now that law-abiding people are able to own the tools to defend themselves. No guarantee of that, but it seems a reasonable outcome to expect, based on evidence from other municipalities.

Maybe this will make people take a look at the rest of the Bill Of Rights, and wonder what the heck happened to it. Maybe this will remind people what the USA is supposed to be: the land of the free.

I have not blogged anything on here in a while. I am burned out on role-playing, and I have become so jaded that posting politics seems a waste of time. However, this speech by Chris Dodd gives me, dare I say it, hope.

I do not know this Dodd fellow, and for all I know, he might be a crackpot of epic proportions (probably not, but he’s in Congress, so who knows?). But I like what he is saying here. Well, no, I don’t like it. I hate it, because I wish it did not need to be said. But I am glad that someone is saying it.

A custom figure maker called Sillof has created a series of figures for a Steampunk version of Star Wars that is really quite nifty. Check it out.

I am so sick of being treated like a criminal, being humiliated and having my most intimate personal life violated, every time I apply for a job. Twenty, or even ten, years ago, the employers who considered it their right to humiliate potential employees were the exception. I could, and did, tell them that no one with any self respect would consent to such treatment by their employer, and walked out. Today, it has become the norm. If you walk away from employers who demand to pry into your personal life, you don’t work.

This is an egregious violation of basic human rights — is not dignity and the sanctity of one’s person the most basic of all human rights? We are people, not farm animals to be poked and prodded and tested and forced to submit samples of our bodily fluids for absolutely no reason. If the standards of quality at ConHugeCo are so low that they can’t tell the drunk/high employees from the ones who are doing their jobs, then something is Seriously Wrong at ConHugeCo, and humiliating their employees will not fix that!

In the 1970s, a law was passed in the USA making it ILLEGAL for an employer to require a lie detector test, while now, 30 years later, it is simply taken for granted that employees will submit to the humiliation of drug testing before being allowed to work. How far we have fallen in such a short time!

Where is the outrage? Why am I the only person who looks at this monstrous trend and denounces it, while everyone else meekly submits or blithely makes excuses for it? This is a sad, sad statement on the “the land of the free”.

Please write to your Federal and state legislators, asking them to sponsor legislation to put an end to this gross abuse of employer power. Congress.org has a simple form that will automatically find and email your Federal and state representatives.

Charlton Heston, who won the 1959 best actor Oscar as the chariot-racing “Ben-Hur” and portrayed Moses, Michelangelo, El Cid and other heroic figures in movie epics of the ’50s and ’60s, has died. He was 84.

(from Film legend Charlton Heston dead at 84, Yahoo! News)

Since at least the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there,” said one researcher quoted in a February dispatch in London’s The Independent. An oceanographer predicted that the Patch would double in size in just the next decade. A 2006 United Nations office estimated that every square mile of ocean contains, on average, 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

( The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”, from TreeHugger)