The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998 at the behest of the music and movie industries, has done little to benefit anyone except a select group of companies who have used its provisions to establish, maintain and expand a virtual stranglehold on the entertainment industry. The cartel which has arisen after this act does not benefit consumers at all; rather, it gouges them for as much money as they can possibly suck out, corrupts modern technology, and sets back the state of the art.The remainder of this message is encrypted using an algorithm which provides virtually no security, but which (if I were so inclined) would open you up to lawsuits if you decrypted it without my permission.
I want to take a moment to give a warm welcome to our newest readers, the Open Source Center of the Central Intelligence Agency. Welcome to Homeland Stupidity!
These updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity focus exclusively on election and voting issues, a major issue with the 2004 elections still in doubt and the 2006 elections fast approaching.
Government bureaucrats are the same everywhere. That is, they're stupid. And today's stupid bureaucrat is Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma.
Was the 2004 presidential election stolen? Well, as it turns out, it's easier to rig an election than to rig a Las Vegas slot machine.
Last week President George W. Bush toured the National Security Agency to offer his support to NSA employees. A photo accompanying a Washington Post article about the visit showed some sort of global threat display in the background, and Boing Boing, among others, have been going crazy over the fact that this photo contains completely unclassified information that anybody can display right on their own computers. Today I'm going to tell you what that display was, where the information came from, why people are overreacting, and what NSA is really doing.
UPDATE: Want an account with wordpress.com? Just start up Flock, click on "blog" on the start page, then click WordPress. You'll get the special Flock users only signup page.Just moments ago I got an email from Flock advising that a Developer Preview was available. So I decided to try it out. It's most definitely changed quite a bit from version 0.1, the last version I reviewed. And this time, I took a few screenshots.
It's been a while since I've done one of these, mainly because of the blasted weather. So, here's another short collection of bits of government gone awry.
In an obscure policy decision published last Friday, the FCC decided that the FBI would have veto power over what software Americans can run on their computers.
Are you a Google AdSense publisher? Do you worry about accidentally clicking on your own ads and being thrown out of the program? I have a solution for you.
Forbes magazine has named WordPress Best of the Web in its Blog Tools category, saying that version 1.5 puts it squarely ahead of Movable Type.
The debate rages over whether Windows and proprietary applications or Linux and open source applications are more secure, but is it the right question to ask?
The latest release of the WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin includes the #1 most requested feature (and in fact, so far the only requested feature). Is it actually working?
I'm pleased to announce version 0.3 of the WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin. Based on reports that it actually works, I've changed its status from "pre-alpha" to "alpha." In addition, the following improvements are in this new version:
I hate spam. I really hate spam. And I hate comment spam on my site. A few of you noticed about 764 of them yesterday morning when you visited here. I thought I was fairly well protected against comment spam, but the spammers are getting smarter. So I decided to raise the stakes a bit. Introducing the WordPress SpamAssassin plugin.
I make no secret about my love for Linux, and I make no bones about it either. I understand many of you still run Windows and you have good reasons (and sometimes really bad ones) for doing so. But if you must run Windows and connect it to the Internet, please take some steps to secure it, not only for your own sake, but for the rest of us.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
Gardner Goldsmith explains why claims by politicians that consumers can become "irrational" and why claims by the same politicians that government can help "fix" markets are both false and misleading. He also explains what the terms Praxeology and Epistemology mean, which is key in understanding how to place free markets in their proper place among human history.
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