·:[ Stream of Consciousness… ]:·
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The ‘Protect America Act’ (clearly a use of the term ‘protect’ with which I was unfamiliar) is due to expire soon.  The Senate is considering it’s replacement and today the Senate failed to pass an amendment that would have removed the immunity granted to the telcos for all manner of illegal activities under the guise of ‘protecting our freedoms’.

Just be sure I have this right…  the Government asks the telcos to perform illegal wiretaps while waving the ‘it’s your patriotic duty to comply’ flag.  The telcos succumb to the ‘pressure’, roll over and illegally dump the contents of the ‘tubes in the Government’s lap.

The public (the folks they’re trying to ‘protect’, right) get wind of it and start raising a stink.  The Government responds by retroactively granting immunity to the telcos so the ‘public’ can’t sue them and get the details of just what was going on.

Do you feel protected?  Well, do you punk?  I feel hoodwinked!

Senate caves, votes to give telecoms retroactive immunity

I spied this on the slog into work this morning; I almost wet myself. This, and many other guffaw inducing objects advocating freedom of thought are available at CafePress.

I must say that I agree with the ‘freakish’ness of all the items mentioned in this author’s post.  Frankly, I’m somewhat embarrassed when I travel abroad and the folks I am visiting ask me “WTF are you nitwits doing?!?!?  You are surprised that the rest of the worlds hates you?”.

I simply shrug and tell them, it’s not my fault, I didn’t vote for the clown.  And, as it turns out, neither did most people, but that is a different discussion.

This is when I repeat to myself “less than a year… less than a year…”.

Top 5 things I saw in America which, as a Canadian, freaked me right out « Paulitics: Paul’s Socialist Investigations

I live on a fairly busy street and the amount of trash that we collect from drive-by dumping is astonishing.  The majority is beverage containers but there is also a good amount of plastic of various forms.  I thought we had a lot until I read this article.

All that plastic that you dump into the trash doesn’t always end up in a landfill/incinerator.  We consistently throw away one small grocery bag’s worth of ‘trash’ on a weekly basis; we recycle one, sometimes, two bins of glass/plastic/metal weekly.  By weight we recycle far more than we trash.  Sadly, we are still in the majority.

I weep for the future of our planet; it won’t matter to me because I’ll be nicely decomposed by the time this really comes to a head but for those Billions of us still around it’s going to suck big time unless we start making significant changes NOW.

The plastic killing fields - Environment - smh.com.au

Oddly, the same week where Lori and I were talking about the inbalance between spending on ’special ed’ and support for ‘gifited’ programs I stumble upon this piece from TIME magazine.

It makes many great points but a few of the items really struck me:

American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn’t even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs.

and then later:

But since at least the mid-1980s, schools have often forced gifted students to stay in age-assigned grades–even though a 160-IQ kid trying to learn at the pace of average, 100-IQ kids is akin to an average girl trying to learn at the pace of a retarded girl with an IQ of 40.

Thus continues our countries headlong rush to mediocrity.

While we as a society rush to support those that are below the norm we allow to lay fallow those that are our best hope of improving the lives of everyone.

Are We Failing Our Geniuses? - TIME

This piece by George Ou starts out with a description of carrier peering arrangements and moves into the various pieces of legislation pending to regulate Internet traffic & services.  A worthwhile read by an informed party with no skin in the game.

» A rational debate on Net Neutrality | George Ou | ZDNet.com

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors have approved a city-wide ban on plastic bags from supermarkets.

I am constantly surprised at the reaction I receive when I ask for paper bags rather at the grocery store.  I often get the ‘why would you want to do that?’ look from the high-school aged droid working the register.  I sometimes get the deep ‘oh-no-he-didn’t, this old fart is going to make me reach down below the counter and drag out those dingy paper bag things that give me paper cuts’ look.

To which I return my ‘I’m doing this to save the World for insipid, ungrateful little wretches like you so just drop the ‘tude and do what I say’ look.

Our little household of two adults generates one small bag of ‘trash’ weekly.  Yes, the bag is plastic but in this case it is justified.  We’re not always real good at eating all the leafy veggies we buy and what remains after they have been in the ‘frigde for awhile is a fifth state of matter; not exactly liquid, not quite solid, but with a significant gaseous component.  Anyway, to dispose of that in a paper bag would be… umm…  impossible.

However, when recycle day comes along bi-weekly we put out two heaping bins of ’stuff’.  Our recyclables outweigh our trash by a factor of 15.  Our town is also in the enviable position of getting paid for each pound of recyclable material that is picked up.   So not only are we saving the World for insipid, ungrateful little wretches we’re also lowing our tax bill.

San Francisco to ban plastic grocery bags - CNN.com

I visited Australia 12+  years ago and found it to be a beautiful place with welcoming people.  However, I  discovered a mindset that I likened to the Wild West days of the US; a deep seated biggotry against the native peoples and a belief that all natural resources were infinate.  It seems they have gotten over at least the second bit.

Too bad the bulbs over the heads of our ‘government’ have already burnt out and are therefore incapable of new ideas.

Australia to ban old-style light bulbs

I’m reminded of a line from the original Star Wars movie “The more you tighten your grip the more systems will slip through your fingers.”

DRM is the grip holding the ‘premium commercial content’ (is there ‘premium content’ that isn’t commercial?) hostage in your PC releasing only when you and your PC are deemed worthy to watch it/listen to it. Vista brings this grip to an entirely new tightness, grabbing your PC by the silicon and squeezing.

Regardless of how much MS uses the term ‘enabling’ to describe the new DRM ‘features’ in Vista doesn’t change the fact that they are adding complexity and resource requirements that do nothing but benefit content creators.  Why should I pay extra (in the form of compliant hardware and resource utilization) for something I’m very likely to never use?

This behavior only emboldens those that these protections are meant to thwart; content pirates.  They are trying to battle basic human nature; the more you try to control a ‘vice’ the more people will try to outwit/ignore/topple that control.  This will only stop the dumb pirates, the smart ones will hire a Chinese professor or two to break the system and keep on churning out pirate discs at a fraction of what the studios/labels charge.

The end result is that the consumers pay to make to the pirates smarter.  Ouch.

Windows Vista Team Blog : Windows Vista Content Protection - Twenty Questions (and Answers)

That’s “command line interface” for the non-geeks in the house; aka ‘cmd prompt’, aka ‘dos box’, aka ‘C prompt’…

I saw this bumper sticker the other day.

It will come as a surprize to no one that it was not attached to an American car.