Quickstuff

If one wishes to be very insecure in the fate of the schoolchildren of America, a new study released says that more people know characters on the Simpsons than their First Amendment freedoms. bradhicks attests some of that to the near-constant bombardment we get in our culture about the Simpsons, be it new episodes or syndicated ones, where all we get about the First Amendment is a civics class (which does squat, if the one I got was anything like the norm) and very little else. The news doesn't really want to put new First Amendment cases and stories on their docket in favor of celebrity gossip. Here's the PDF of the results. I'm not going to say the line about people doomed to repeat their history, because it's not a matter of learning from history, it's learning the history in the first place.

My ZOMG from yesterday has been topped. By a LOLWTFBBQ, no less.

A meme-esque thing, taking swipes at the right of centre:

We all know the Republicans have coopted patriotism, so...what America are you proud of? You have to like something here, otherwise you wouldn't be here or hold opinions about society and politics. What America are you proud of?

I don't necessarily like the undertone that says, "Like something about our country or leave" that sounds suspiciously close to other rather jingoistic slogans I've seen around. But the question is valid - what about this country do you like, whether it's an ideal that's not been realized, a previous freedom that's been ground away now, or some other aspect that may or may not currently exist and that you want to have or have back? If you're fine with things the way they are, that's a valid response, too, although the entire Left might ask you to kindly open your eyes and take another good look at the things that are happening.

Today was spent doing a lot of nothing, although that ended up meaning that I saw the second Ghost in the Shell movie. Tomorrow will be spent doing work for at least some part of it, and the rest, well, the rest will happen as it happens.

(no subject)

Getting off to a proper start, it's a bit of a Seussical day, according to eleme, who says that Dr. Seuss would be one-hundred-two were he still alive today. We still miss his writing style.

Breaking down the enforcement of anti-piracy laws, Free Software like Mozilla Firefox recently gave someone a headache when merchants were selling copies of the available-for-free browser. The difficulty was hat the people who are selling the software are within their rights to do so, according to the licensing agreement. If I recall rightly, the GPL is about source code access and concerns itself with ensuring that anyone can add to the source and that the source is available for free. Now, someone can add a segment to their own version of the GPL that states that no profit can be made off of the distribution of the software, and that is enforceable. Where proprietary software makers would add that segment immediately, along with all the usual "you cannot reverse-engineer this, nor obtain its source, nor add or subtract anything from it, period." that goes into that sort of thing. Might be that the cost of the browser is paying for the media used to create it, or the cost of the shipping of the CDs to the locale. Nothing in the GPL prevents that, either, if I recall correctly. It's just considered to be good practice in a lot of places and across the Free Software world that if you can release it for free as in beer, it's a good idea to do so. After all, if you're following the GPL, they can get your source and compile it themselves for their own systems. (Which is why you're seeing the model change - charge for tech support or for incremental updates or for new features and cool things for the software. Those can be non-GPL things and placed under the "proprietary" lock and key.) Maybe we'll watch priacy laws crumble and have to be reinterpreted to deal with things like the GPL. That would be cool to see. Then, maybe, we can figure out an equitable way of doing business.

I can imagine G.W. Bush doing a tennyspin on the piece of news that says the Patriot Act will be renewed, although I think with a few different provisions enabled and some rules tightened. Still, I see G.W. spinning about going "freedomfreedomfreedomfreedom" with joy. Thanks for that image, urbankotq. It's enjoyable.

Others are calling the charade for what it is, and picketing the White House, requesting U.N. assistance to get rid of the dictators in the White House. We hope they get a good spot where they can be effective and that nobody protesting gets hurt or shot at (Dick might be trying to improve his aim).

While the opposition marshals itself, someone in the GOP pulled a few strings and directed an IRS audit at a group that blew the whistle on DeLay. The group came back clean on the audit. Trying to shame them and discredit them to protect DeLay, possibly? Possibly. Just another strange thing in the story vault.

Oh, yes, and despite what the President said, they were predicting that the levees would break. There were plans and things before the hurricane hit, yet things still turned out as badly as they did. Something's just not right with that. Although, we can chalk up another fib told to the public about big events. What's the count at now, or is it too big to count now?

The last thing is an interesting experiment to try with yourself. Stolen from his journal, fred_smith asks us to grab our interdimensional scooper and find out what's in the multiverse:

Here's the game: All players have an inter-dimensional scooper like the one's on AlternateHistory.com who I stole this idea from. With it, you can pick things up from parallel dimensions. Mostly, what you get is random. The game is: Get cool stuff.

So what do you find on your trip through alternate history?