Author: Our Man in Redmond

There comes a time when you have to stand up and say “I’ve had it.”

Well, I’ve pretty much had it up to here with people telling me to shut my piehole, grab a flag and start marching in step. I have no intention of doing any such thing. I am an American patriot, and dissent is an act of patriotism. America was founded by an act of dissent. Dissent is written into our national DNA. It is one of those things that makes us, us, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let someone tell me I can’t use the right to stand up and raise hell that my political ancestors, and countless men and women both in the military and on the home front, have fought for and died for. Heck, most of us are fighting for it right here and right now.

I happen to think I’m in some pretty good company. Take a look at who’s backing me up on this — and who, conversely, has something to say about what happens when that right to dissent is quashed.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos, Booman Tribune, My Left Wing, and Omir the Storyteller

Good morning! And welcome once again to Sunday Griot! How has your summer been so far? A good one, I hope. Help yourself to coffee and bagels in the back, then come on up and have a seat and we’ll hear today’s story, a reworking of an old Japanese tale called The Silent Debate.

It’s been a while since I did the last Thursday Music Diary, and I think we could use a little rest and relaxation before the next round of watching the irresistable force of the press meeting the immovable object of the Republican Stone Wall.

So, here’s today’s topic: You have the chance to plug an underappreciated musician, album or song. Someone you really like, but no one else is likely to have heard of. (Or maybe they have. If you think the Beatles’ White Album fits the description, well, go for it.) Links to web pages and samples encouraged.

Who, or what, will it be?

— (fold) — (fold) — (fold) — (fold) — (fold) — (fold) — (fold) — (fold) — (fold) —
Believe it or not, I had to think about this one. My tastes in music are either so catholic* that anything I could think of would be familiar to everyone here, or so obscure that no one would be able to find them.

But finally, I settled on Logan Whitehurst and the Junior Science Club. Logan is the drummer for The Velvet Teen, a group about which I know absolutely nothing other than what’s contained in this sentence. He apparently occasionally strikes out on his own, though, aided by only his quirky musical sense, a few trusted aides, a four-track tape deck, a bewildering array of musical instruments and sounds, and a plastic snowman named Vanilla. The results are all over the musical map. For instance his album Goodbye My Four-Track ranges from upbeat pop (How Ya Doin’, Emily?) to goofy rap (The Robot Cat) to They Might Be Giants-inspired science rock (The Volcano Song) to some just plain weirdness (Happy Noodle Vs. Sad Noodle). The sample mp3, Me And The Snowman, was apparently inspired by his relationship with the aforementioned Vanilla. I’m not sure I want to explore that relationship any further, but hey, if it helps him create music like this, what the heck. Some lyrics from the sample:

Maybe you’ve heard of some other famous pairs, like:
Jekyll and Hyde,
Bonnie and Clyde,
Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth,
Courtney and Kurt,
Ernie and Bert,
Superman and Lex Luth-
or, maybe . . .

Hey, for eleven bucks, how can you go wrong?

Runners-up:

Worm Quartet A one-man band from somewhere in New York. I’m not really into punk or profanity, but he makes them funny. Sometimes. Best cuts on Faster Than A Speeding Mullet: Great Idea For A Song, I’m Gonna Procreate, My Wife, Strap-On Brain, and Coffee (2003 Regrind). The Short Bus Suite is more or less worthless, but at least it’s short.

Sudden Death You might not think rap and comedy would mix, and again, I’m not a big rap fan, so I probably don’t get a lot of the jokes, but this guy is funny. Omir’s picks: Dead Rappers, Spam, and especially Inner Voice.

* It’s a great word. Look it up.

Ah, good morning! Good morning! Welcome back to Sunday Griot! I’m so glad to be back after a week off. I had a fine vacation, even if you take into account that the baseball team we went up to watch dropped all three games we saw.

So I’m back today with a story that’s been kicking around the back of my mind for a while. I don’t know whether going to the movies yesterday brought it to the front or not, but it probably doesn’t hurt that the movie — and the story — both have a great deal to do with bats.

An open letter to George W. Bush

Dear Mr. Bush:

I know you’re a busy guy, what with running the world and everything, but in light of today’s tragedy, I’m feeling a little vulnerable and insecure and I wanted to ask you if you would do one small thing for me:

Please, tell me again.
Tell me again about the weapons of mass destruction.

Tell me again how invading Iraq has made me safer from al-Qaeda.

Tell me again about how we were greeted as liberators, with flowers and smiles.

Tell me again how major combat operations over there have ended.

Tell me again how the mission was accomplished.

Tell me again how we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.

Tell me again how a volunteer force that no one wants to volunteer for, armed with equipment they have to buy themselves, is winning a war against an enemy that is everywhere and nowhere.

Tell me again how Burger Kings and spas in a heavily fortified Green Zone in the middle of chaos and destruction are making the people of Iraq feel less like taking their poverty and frustration out on Americans and their allies.

Tell me again about how funneling my tax money to Haliburton instead of to the soldiers in the field is making their job easier.

Tall me again how mercenaries being paid ten times what the troops in uniform get are improving morale among the troops.

Tell me again how curtailing my liberties here at home is making me safer.

Tell me again how making it look like you’re making me safer instead of making me safer, is making me safer.

Tell me about how a second Patriot Act is going to make things better.

Tell me about how what happened this morning in the London transit system couldn’t have happened to King County Metro Transit, or the New York subway, or the Atlanta Metro, or the MET system in Billings, Montana.

Tell me again how my friends and I caused all this.

And tell me about how, if you and your friends are allowed to stay the course we’re on, it’s all going to get better.

Please, sir?

Just one more time?

You know how I love a good story.

The news is up on Pamela Jones’ excellent techno-legal weblog Groklaw,
where she quotes Bloomberg News:

Read on to find out in English what this means, and why you might care.
Let me see if I can explain this in non-technical terms: Computer software is really just a way to take one set of numbers and tell your computer how to come up with another set of numbers. Since a computer reduces everything to numbers, such sets of instructions — called algorithms — are a computer’s essence. When I’m typing this text, the computer takes the numbers that the keyboard generates and translates them into numbers that are displayed on my screen and sent across the wire to Booman’s server, where another algorithm tells his server how to store them. If I want to listen to an MP3 file, an algorithm takes the numbers in that MP3 file and converts them into the numbers the sound card understands so it can tell my headphones what to do. If I want to sort my address book, an algorithm tells the computer how to do it.

You use algorithms all the time too, for everything from long division to how to store food in your pantry (soup cans on the second shelf, heavy stuff on the floor, and so on). Computers use many of these same algorithms, they just do it much faster than you and I do. Remember, too, that when I say “computer” I am refering to cell phones, your car, the digital-to-analog converter in your cable box, and any other device that uses software in its operation.

Now then. Let’s say that someone could legally own a way of sorting food in a pantry, and could charge you a fee every time you used their process for sorting your pantry. Worse yet, let’s say that someone could claim legal ownership for any method of sorting a pantry, so no matter what method you used, you would have to pay them every time you rearranged the creamed corn. Sound absurd? Of course, but in essence that is what software patents are about. A company that patents a sorting algorithm, for instance, can forbid any other company from using that algorithm in their software without paying a fee to use the patent. In an extreme case the company could forbid competitors from using the patent at all.

(In many ways this has been a gross oversimplification, and for those who understand the law or technology better than I do, I apologize. I’m trying to get past the boring stuff so I can illustrate some of the issues involved.)

Let’s see if I can illustrate this with an example. Suppose I were to develop a new type of long-term storage that increases capacity tenfold for a given cost. In other words, you’d pay roughly the same amount for a 1000 gigabyte Omir drive that you’d pay today for a 100 GB hard drive. Great, huh? Well, not so fast. What happens if I decide to patent the software used to access the drive, and only license it to Windows users? Sorry, Macheads. Too bad, Linux penguinistas. And don’t even think about using it with your iPod or PDA. Why would I do that? The motive doesn’t matter; the potential for abuse does.

Or let’s take a real-world example. If you go to Amazon.com, you can use a feature called One-Click Ordering to pick up that copy of Don’t Think Of An Elephant! you have your eye on. You can’t do that at BarnesandNoble.com, or Powells.com, or anywhere else, though, because Amazon.com has a patent on using a single click to order. I kid you not. And the reason? As stated by CEO Jeff Bezos, it’s precisely to keep sites like Barnes and Noble from doing the same thing.

Software patents have been allowed in the US for some time; Wikipedia has a discussion on the subject. The European Parliament’s initial aim, prodded by large companies like Siemens and Microsoft and Nokia, was to harmonize EU patent law and make it more in line with American law. The proposed law voted down today would have allowed the patenting of inventions that combine software and hardware (such as the battery monitoring device mentioned in the blockquote above). Oddly enough, several companies, including Nokia and Microsoft, did not like the current proposal, precisely because it did not go far enough in software patentability. They wanted software to be patentable on roughly the same scale it is here in the US.

So why does this matter to the average American? Well, currently software patents in EU countries are left up to local laws, which vary widely. In those companies where software is patentable, the patents will tend to wind up in the hands of a few large corporations, because they are the ones with the money to develop and acquire the patents, and they will then have the economic muscle to enforce them. They won’t enforce them on each other, for the most part — they tend to have licensing arrangements with other large companies, each company allowing the other to use its patents in return for the same privilege. No, for the most part they’ll use the patents to force out small innovators who come up with something that looks like one of the Big Boys’ patents and who don’t have the money to defend themselves against a patent infringement suit.

This is where my personal interest comes in. I am one of those small developers. I haven’t written anything that would get the attention of the big companies, nor do I think I’m likely to anytime soon. But it is entirely possible that somewhere along the way, a company like Sun Microsystems or Toshiba will slap a cease-and-desist order on someone developing free software of the Free Software variety, who can’t defend himself from a massive lawsuit and is therefore forced to give up a labor of love. Just think what would happen had someone patented the RSS software syndication model. The RSS feed I announced earlier today (in this diary) would have to be pulled down. I get no money from it, I did it for the good of the community; but it would have to be pulled down all the same.

Some of these large companies say they want software patents to “protect innovation.” That is an Orwellian construct; the innovation would only be by those who can afford it. In countries without software patents, the real innovation — the kind where you can take an open algorithm, write it up, protect it via copyright and cast it out upon the waters — would still be allowed. But as PJ notes on Groklaw, this fight is not over. The big companies are rich and powerful, they want to stay that way, and they are used to getting what they want. Happily, the fight is not over from the pro-innovation side either. Direct action from ordinary Europeans was in large part responsible for getting this voted down, and with some vigilance, Europe may still have a level playing field for software.

Hey fellow Frogponders,

I have a new toy you might be interested in testing. Details after the fold.

Fair warning: If you have no experience with RSS, you may not be interested. On the other hand, if you use RSS at all, or tend to read Booman Tribune a lot, or would like a (possibly) more convenient way of keeping up with BT, this just could be for you.

– – – – (fold) – – – – (fold) – – – – (fold) – – – – (fold) – – – –
First, a brief introduction for those of you who don’t know: RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s basically just a way of quickly describing the contents of a website in a computer-friendly way. (It’s also the basis for podcasting, which I may take up in a future diary. But I digress.) You use a program called an “aggregator” to read RSS. Yahoo has one built in that you can use with your My Yahoo page, if you have one. Firefox has the Sage extension that integrates an aggregator into the browser. There are standalone aggregators for Windows, Linux and Mac; if you know of a good one, feel free to suggest it below.

If you go down to the bottom right-hand corner of most BooTrib pages, you’ll see a little orange-and-white “RSS” icon. Don’t click it right now — you’ll lose your place! That shows that Booman Tribune has an RSS “feed.” The BooTrib RSS feed, however, only covers the front-page stories.

Enter Omir’s handy-dandy new diaries feed. It covers the 60 most recent diaries, and marks the recommended ones. In Sage, for instance, when you have the BooTrib Diary feed loaded you can click on a diary in the left-side panel and it will open up automatically, or you can hover your mouse over the name of the diary and see the above-the-fold copy. This might give you an idea of whether the diary will be worth your attention.

To use the feed, point your aggregator to the following URL:

http://www.moosegrins.com/bootrib/bootrib.rss

There are some things the RSS feed will not do. It won’t tell you whether a recommended diary is regular-recommended or world-recommended. It can’t track the fact that a diary was on the recommended list, but is not longer. It won’t make your coffee, it won’t pick up your husband’s dirty socks when he leaves them laying around in the middle of the living room floor, and worst of all, it might break in ways that I haven’t anticipated. That’s why I’m looking for testers. Feel free to pound on the feed and tell me where I’ve gone wrong (or right).

Above all, share and enjoy.

This afternoon I got to thinking about the diary Steven D posted about how Col. Bob Pappas Thinks Liberals Are Cowards. His central thesis is that if “liberals” had been in charge in 1776, the American Revolution would never have happened because “liberals” are too cowardly to stand up to tyranny and injustice.

Ahem.

Well, the entire screed is a crock of dingoes’ kidneys (except for the first sentence, as I point out in a comment in that diary), but it got me to start thinking: What if various figures in the current administration had been in charge 229 years ago?
If George Bush had been Commander in Chief of the American forces in 1776, he would have sent them south to invade Florida instead of fighting the British.

If Donald Rumsfeld had been in charge of the American forces in 1776, he would have downsized them to make them leaner, meaner and more responsive, and they still wouldn’t have had the equipment, uniforms and supplies they desparately needed. Early in the war, or ever.

If Condoleezza Rice had been our chief diplomat in 1776, she would have angered the French so much that they would never have weighed in on the American side.

If Rush Limbaugh had been alive in 1776, he would have been shouting at the top of his massive lungs in the center of Boston, blaming the Sons of Liberty for the abuses being heaped on the colonies by King George.

If Karl Rove had been alive in 1776 he would have had no qualms revealing the identity of Nathan Hale if it had been in his own interest to do so.

If Jonah Goldberg had been alive in 1776 he would have been calling for people to support the war for independence, while at the same time refusing to pledge his own life, or his fortune, or his sacred honor.

And if Col. Bob Pappas, USMC (Ret.) had been alive in 1776, he would have seen that those who fought for independence believed in freedom of thought and freedom of action. He would have seen that their actions were motivated by a desire to free the common man from intellectual slavery. He would have seen that the patriots who created the United States of America were more interested in the common good than they were with making themselves rich off the status quo.

He would have seen that they were, in fact, liberals.

And I suspect he would be using whatever soapbox he had to denounce those who were disloyal to the Crown. In fact be might even call them cowards. But I suspect he would be doing so from somewhere in Canada.

If you don’t see a Sunday Griot from me this weekend, don’t panic. I haven’t been shipped off to the tropics to work on my tan and eat glazed chicken. I hope. No, I’ll be out of town with the family for the long holiday weekend.

Speaking of the holiday — no, it’s not Canada Day, although that’s a worthy holiday and happening this weekend — before I went out of town I decided to do a little research to find out what this holiday is all about. In the course of that research, I came across this little factoid: Apparently this weekend’s holiday has something to do with a little known and poorly-understood document. So, I was interested to see what the document actually says. I thought you might be too.
Let’s take a look at some selected quotes from this document to see if, as Mark Twain once said, the past doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Well, that more or less rhymes with “If I don’t like a law it doesn’t pass.”

Would this be anything like, oh, say, closing off debate prematurely during a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee by cutting the microphones and telling the ranking Democrat on the committee not to bother trying to schedule any hearings on his own? Nah.

That’s probably akin to not being satisfied with the ratification of 95% of all judges submitted to the Senate.

Can you say “largest expansion of government in history?” I knew you could.

Can you say “lying to start a war?” I knew you could say that too.

Four words: Guantanamo Bay. Extraordinary rendition.

That would be sort of like what happened with the so-called PATRIOT Act, wouldn’t it?

Yes. We are the enemy.

Holy hand grenades, Batman!

Well, I guess we can be glad there isn’t a draft. Even if there are stop-loss orders and coercive military recruiters.

I guess it’s a good thing this document was written a couple hundred years ago by a bunch of rabble rousers who never amounted to anything. I shudder to think what would happen if such a document were proposed today.

Booman nailed it today when he said, and I quote:

You know what? He’s absolutely right. And now that I think about it, I am the enemy, and I’m going to stand up and say so.
If they are trying to organize support for an illegal and immoral war that my sons, both in their twenties with families, could still be sucked into, then damn straight, I’m the enemy.

If they are bankrupting the country to line the pockets of people who already have more money than you and I are ever going to see at the expense of education, health care and social security for the citizens of this country, then damn straight I’m the enemy.

If they want to create a populace that sits numbly in front of their television sets with whatever sludge they decide to serve up pouring into their brains, then damn straight I’m the enemy.

If they want to send my job overseas because it’s cheaper for businesses to do so, then damn straight I’m the enemy.

If they want to make my air unbreathable, my water undrinkable and my landscape unliveable, then damn straight I’m the enemy.

If they want to curtail my rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to worship, freedom from self-incrimination, freedom to own a weapon, freedom to peaceably assemble, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, freedom to vote, and freedom to think and act for myself, damn straight I’m the enemy.

I love this country, and if they’re going to treat me like a traitor for trying to stand up for it, then damn straight I’m the enemy.