September 12th, 2008
I’ll warn our listeners right out front here that there’s not going to be much politics talk tonight. Quite frankly, I’m just too disgusted with the inability of the major media outlets to use the word “lie”.
As in, “John McCain and Sarah Palin continue to lie about their records.” See, it’s so simple. If someone is lying about their past, habitually lying about their past, it might be kind of important to say something about it to the people who are listening to them.
You know, because people might start believing them?
Like how people think that Sarah Palin is some kind of government reformer… that’s certainly the campaign rhetoric. It’s also most certainly not the truth. Nothing in her record indicates that she’s going to reform government, unless you believe that the government needs to incorporate more ideas from the radical evangelical Christian right.
Likewise oil drilling, torture of prisoners, deficit spending, war-mongering, and appointment of reactionary conservative judges to courts all across the land. A McCain administration would be just like the last eight years, only older and meaner.
No thanks.
We’ll return to the politics next week. This time around, you’re listening to the Timothy Jordan Show on the 12th of September, in the eighth year of the century.
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Instead of politics, we’ll be covering news on the technology front, starting with your electronic rights.
The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee early this morning with overwhelming support from the Democratic committee leadership. Four Republican members voted against the bill, possibly fulfilling a one-day pledge to do no evil.
The Property Rights Act isn’t about your property, it’s about the copyrighted intellectual property of the major content publishers, from the Recording and Movie industries, to software publishers, and the nation’s pharmaceutical companies.
The bill, now headed to the Senate floor, would authorize the President to create a national “copyright czar” overseeing copyright enforcement across Federal agencies, as well as to establish a copyright task force within the FBI.
While attorneys with Department of Justice are currently able to bring prosecutions against major copyright infringers, people who are making thousands of copies of CDs, or selling counterfeit drugs, most prosecutions have been carried out by the industries themselves. The burden of proof for civil prosecutions by the industry is significantly lower than prosecutions at the criminal level.
The PRO-IP Act, as it’s known in short hand, would let Federal prosecutors issue civil suits against suspected copyright infringers. In order to aid the Feds, it would also establish grants to fund up to 90% of the cost for state and local law enforcement officers to investigate copyright violations.
This is about creating a national copyright police, and the criminalization of wide swaths of the U.S. population. Making matters worse, the bill allows for seizure and forfeiture of property involved in copyright violations. Inadvertently steal a song, and lose your house.
It sounds like a wild exaggeration, but the same kind of provisions were implemented in the Reagan-era War on Drugs. People have lost their homes over a bag of weed in their car.
When contacted by groups opposed to the bill, co-sponsor Senator Feinstein said that, “With rampant counterfeiting and piracy taking place, we must continue to do all we can to safeguard our artists, authors, and inventors.”
Unfortunately the bill does a lot more to protect the companies which distribute content, rather than the content creators themselves.
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In better news out of Capitol Hill, Senator Herb Khol has asked the major telecoms to explain just why the price of text messaging has effectively doubled in the three years since industry deregulation lead to four companies providing service to 90% of the American public.
Three years ago, according to the Senator, the average cost to send a text message was 10 cents. These days it’s 20 cents.
He’d like to know just what has changed in terms of cost, or technical factors to justify a doubling of the price in the last three years.
And so would we.
• Sen. Khol asks about text message prices
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NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has been agitating behind the scenes against Bush Administration space policy.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, an internal NASA email from Griffin to his top advisors, the Bush decision to cancel the Shuttle program in 2010, “is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision.”
The three-ship shuttle fleet is currently scheduled to be grounded in 2010, leaving a four-year gap before the follow-on Orion crew launch vehicle is ready to carry astronauts into space. Given current tensions with Russia, it’s unlikely that Congress will authorize the purchase of additional Soyuz crew transfer flights to the International Space Station. With the Shuttle grounded, and NASA unable to fly on Russian hardware, the International Space Station would only be accessible to Russian Cosmonauts.
Facing these challenges, it’s pretty clear that the Shuttle can’t be retired, although the Bush Administration refuses to consider this option. Administrator Griffin is directing his staff to start preparing a Plan B, where shuttle flights after 2010 would either be fully funded, or pulled from the lunar landing program. The latter option would obviously delay an anticipated 2018 return of American astronauts to establish a permanent presence on the moon.
Apparently Griffin has embraced reality in anticipation of seeing a new boss elected in November.
• Orlando Sentinel, Griffin internal email
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Ahh, it’s gonna be nice to get back into space.
Editor’s Note: Due to monkey problems the Award of Excellence is only available via this week’s podcast.