I personally find the issues surrounding modern copyright and digital restrictions management to be very interesting and the paths we seem to be on to be very disturbing.  An example of this would be HR-4569 AKA the "Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005".  Essentially it is a bill that would attempt to limit the content that is passed over "analog" signals by requiring that the manufacturer of any equipment which uses such standard signals to adhere to a secure standard to prevent copyright infringement.   Basically it is an attempt to close the so-called Analog-Hole which a person might use to say transfer digital content out through an analog signal and therefore remove any restrictions that the content had on it in the first place by forcing manufacturers to

In the case of this particular bill, manufacturers would have to adhere to the VEIL standard (nice, friendly name, right?).  Of course, if you would like to know how this standard works so as to make a determination about whether or not this is a fair standard to both consumers and authors, you need to cough up 10K in order to take a look at even the decoding side of things.  A good argument about this is made by Professor Ed Felten from Princeton on his blog.  A sample...

Great, eh?  I'm sure that there are few content developers out there at mydd, and I'm sort of curious if people have some thoughts about the slew of copyright law changes that we've seen over the years and whether or not they really few like any of them are really helpful, or more like they are designed for giant, old businesses attempting to keep their business models intact in the face of great change.

I was feeling kinda restless at work today and finding that Bejeweled 2 wasn't enough to disperse my over-caffeinated state of boredom when I struck upon an idea to amuse myself.  Freeper Fishing!  Previous visits to detestable freeper land had always left me needing to knee someone in the groin, but it occurred to me that it might be a bit of fun to post some over-the-top wingnut responses to their threads and see if I could build myself a little following as a true right-wing idiot.  Sort of like trolling in reverse with the intention of maybe even changing a few minds by extrapolating insane conservative opinions to the next stage and thereby demonstrating the lack of a thought process in their beliefs.  I definitely had myself chuckling under my breath here a few times before getting banned in like the course of a hour.  Here is how it went.

There's more...

Even after reading all these entries that say this was a big win, I just don't understand it.  It's not like we, as democrats, were protesting the nominations of even a large number of nominations.  It was, in effect, basically three specific ones that have said and ruled in such extreme ways that they needed to be blocked and protested. I felt like everytime that Frist said he was going to nuke the senate he sounded like a total extremist and even kinda like a terrorist for crying out loud.  It seems like if you can muster the entire minority to agree that a slim majority is going too far in a small number of the total cases presented, that your argument is pretty valid, and indeed these judges seem like they are outside what would amount to a supermajority of American's believe in.

Hence turning over these nominations in order to save what is kinda a childish sounding procedural issue and only potentially to save the chance to use it if a worse case occurs down the road seems like a loss to me.  We were protesting these judges in the first place, not proud of the filibuster, which is essentially obstructionist.  But instead of stopping any of their nominations, now it's a win for us to have kept what the public seems to view as an annoying tactic?  I feel duped by this and almost like the debate was changed to something else when it was us who started it in the first place and we were suckered into saving it rather then standing firm on what brought us to use it.  Weren't these nominations the exact "extraordinary circumstances" that were apparently agree upon to only use the tactic in from now on?  I can't even see how that makes any sense.  Obviously some of the republican senators saw that this was an extreme move to change the rules of the senate in order to force these judges down our throats, so why not at least trade one or two of them (Brown and Owens) for allowing the others (Pryor)?

I don't think that the republicans ever really gave that much of a rats ass about filibustering.  They wanted these judges, knew they couldn't get them, but somehow now they have, and they don't even have to look like fascists in order to get it.  Great.

As liberals we seem to spend a lot of time responding to the nonsense that conversatives throw at us, and it’s a problem.  Personally, it seems like it might be something that we sort of like to do, as being rationalists we like to tangle with logical fallacies and defeat them, but sometimes it feels like we are in one of those chase scenes where we are trying to catch a mugger who keeps throwing things in our path and we’re spending all of our time putting things back where they were before continuing the pursuit, like some sort of super hero with OCD.   In the end, we aren’t catching many of the bad guys because of this.

I think we can put our rationalism to better use.  We need to spend the time answering each other’s questions about our beliefs and working out reasonably consensus answers and not bothering to explain ourselves unless someone really wants to know.  Also, we need to dig at the underlying evils that their beliefs sit upon and bring them to light.  For instance,

Mr Bush, I noticed your tax cuts benefited you greatly, you received xxxx dollars back from the government, why is it that you believe you being wealthier benefits the middle class and working families?

Of course he does, actually.  It’s something that he has believed all his life, but its not something that he can say without severe political damage.  We can use this on a great many of the talking heads and pundits as well.

I noticed that you are promoting the ban on gay marriage, why are you a homophobe?

Again, of course he is, but would never let himself be titled that way, yet its an easy association to make and should be asked over and over again, and it’s the dead on truth.

Since we already have “privatized” 401(k) benefits, why are you for cutting social security benefits for the sick and elderly who have spent a lifetime paying for them.

They have no idea how to make up the huge shortfall of funds that will happen from cutting social security taxes (which is the only thing that “privatization” means, period), so I’d assume that cutting benefits for people who already paid for them is the only solution that is possible (other then quadrupling the already enormous deficit).

I think its interesting that each time you say "praise god" or something close to that in church you are probably saying the last thing that each of the 9/11 terrorists said before they crashed their planes and kill thousands of people.  Do you ever wonder why you find yourself believing the same thing they do?

Remind people what the face of religious extremism looks like.  Many of these things will probably bring them to a frothing Bill O’Reilly-esque rage, but nonetheless it’s just a truth and we don’t have to apologize for it.

You’re constantly saying that you believe in the sanctity of life, yet are personally responsible for the deaths of over 125 people while governor of Texas, and untold tens of thousands of Iraqis.  Why are 4 cell zygotes more important to you then actual living people?

These could go on and on, and possibly refined as well, but even just as is and written quickly I think they would be really affective.  We just need to have confidence in our own beliefs because they are just better and not worry as much about explaining them to people whose minds we can’t change.  We also need to calmly and consistently attack these major points of hypocrisy that underlie conservative beliefs and expose them for what they really are: irrational and selfish.  Maybe it's seems dirty or negative to go this route, but really, it's it worst to let the truth go unnoticed?

Stand up to your fricking god.

God does not want you to force a woman to have a baby that she cannot or does not want to have.  God wants you to mind your own dam business, unless you just want to offer your empathy and assistance.

God wants you to try and put yourself in the shoes of others instead of judging.

God does not think highly of those who spend so much effort on people who have never taken a breath versus the elderly, the sick and the poor. (social security, health care and taxes people!)

God wants you to get off the dam sofa and go run around instead of stewing on what other people are doing with or putting into their bodies.

God wants you to try pot.  No really, it’s god’s “I’m sorry for making this world such a bitch sometimes” gift.

God does not want gay people to have a type of sex that disgusts them in the same way that gay sex disgusts you.  It definitely does not disgust god, just you by the way.

God likes it when people want to rejoice in their mutual love, no matter what form it takes.

God does not think that any “institution” is more important then the happiness of people who make up “institutions”.  God does not put things before people.

God hopes that you will care for the natural world around you.

God does not want you to go to war.  (Read this one until it really sinks in)

God does not recall that “supporting your troops” was written anywhere in any religious text, ever, and is mystified why people think that.

God is not pleased with anyone fighting the idiotically titled “holy war”

God is not pleased with the rich who fight to get richer.

God is not going to punish anyone who worked their whole life to learn and understand instead of to judge and assume.

God is not going to punish anyone who worked their whole life to build and create instead of destroying and killing.

God is not going to punish anyone who worked their whole life to love and be compassionate instead of moralizing and demonizing.

If your god is telling you any of the latter things, STAND UP TO YOUR FUCKING GOD, because in case you haven’t noticed, your god wouldn’t even make a good human being.

The Second Dark Ages

Yeah, this is really bad.  I wish Kerry hadn’t conceded, because I still think there is a chance that Ohio can be pulled out.  Now even if they still even bother to count those provisional ballots anyone who cries out that Kerry won will sound like a fringe element because even Kerry says that he lost.  Blech.

This is just really bad.  I don’t understand how a president with the record that Bush had and the lack of majority that he had four years ago could possibly have gotten upwards of 8 million more people to vote for him then last time.  I don’t remember hearing anything about some huge republican ‘get out the vote’ movement until late last night, combine that with exit polling that doesn’t match results and the fact that so-called “provisional” or challenged ballots in most cases are heavily democratic and the whole thing smells really fishy to me.  I think ‘get out the vote’ in republican-speak means what we thought it meant before yesterday which is that they just found tons of ways to ‘get the votes thrown out’.  I suspect that another election has been stolen by the party of the ends justifying the means.

I suppose I have no other evidence then this is the same party of Watergate, the same party that dealt with the Iranians before they were elected in order to sink Carter, and the same party of Rove and his resume of political under handiness.  The same party that has been selling the fear of everything from terrorism to women who fall in love with other women to ‘complex’ national medical insurance as somehow the methods to get people to come out and vote.  Whatever.  The stole the election again.  Somehow.

Every proposal to ban same-sex marriage passed by a significant margin, hate-bills every single one of them.  I wonder how many would have passed if they included the wording “one man, one women, one marriage one lifetime.”   Yeah right.  Hypocrites.

I think we’ve entered a new Dark Age.  Or perhaps more then anything it’s just dawned on me that we’ve already been entrenched in one for awhile now.   I mean, really, what new ideas do conservatives really have?  By definition they are not even about that.  They like the old ways, they want to roll back any change that progresses over the years, and I think we are about to see another batch of it, probably the worst yet.  They hate new ideas.

I’m so angry and depressed about this.  I don’t want another four years of this shit.  I don’t want them doing things in the name of me and my country that I can’t stand to watch.  I don’t want them spending my money on it.  I don’t want to hear their lies anymore.

I don’t want to hear how we are fighting terrorism by conducting a campaign of “shock and awe” on an entire country.

I don’t want to be told that I support the Taliban and that I’ll still probably want to ‘come together’ after this election.

I don’t want to hear that the idea of ‘coming together’ is supposed to mean that I’ll suddenly start supporting their views without question.

I don’t want people who seem to have little care for their fellow man writing laws that tell us what love is supposed to be about.

I don’t want to be told how its important for all of us that the rich don’t have to pay taxes as long as they are making their money off the stock market or through giant executive bonuses.

I don’t want to hear how its Walmart and SUVs that make this country great.

Anyone want to form a new country?

When you running against an incumbent in any race, what sort of image does it project that your current full time job is trying to convince people that you should have the full time job of your opponent?  It seems like there is a potential for a natural perception that the incumbent might be better qualified simply because while they are also running a campaign, they are still performing the duties of the job in the first place.

I remembering watching Primary Colors recently where the lead character ends up running against a candidate who is using his campaign as a blood drive and it struck me as a brilliant thing to do.  I know that it's a little crazy to copy a movie for a real life political maneuver, but I like the idea that while a candidate is running their campaign that they also took on something that they turned into a sort "job" that they could get their volunteers to help out with.  So even if they lose their race, they've managed to find a way to contribute something to society, not to mention possibly eliminated the perception that all they are doing is competing for a job with someone who is already doing it.

Like for instance, imagine the kind of juice Kerry could get by visiting and working with disabled American veterans of this and other wars and encouraged the people who volunteered for his campaign to do the same thing.  It obviously wouldn't be about politics, it would be about working for a cause that he really has to believe in (and hopefully does) while he has the spotlight to do it, but the politic gains from volunteering 10-12 hours a week from his campaign could be very real, and if nothing else, the campaign will have done something good for the country no matter what happens in November.

Yeah, I was a Deaniac.

This article details how a theater operator in CA is ignoring the MPAA's R rating for Fahrenheit 9-11, and it raises a couple of interesting points.

Having seen it, the R rating is totally unjustified.  There is a really grainy distance shot of a public beheading in Saudi Arabia (that you might not even know what was going on if the voice over didn't explain it to you), and there is a gruesome shot of a girl with arm torn to bits in Iraq, but it is only held for a second, and John Ashcroft sings a couple of verses of a song he wrote himself.  These things, except the Ashcroft tone deafness and cliché lyrics are certainly less violent then many many movies with a PG-13 rating so it did seem like there was something political about the rating itself.  Initially, I admit that I didn't think it was that big of a deal though simply because it would only affect people who couldn't vote anyway.   Even the article headline made me think that maybe the owner was just trying to make a few extra bucks and get publicity at the same time, but his stated reason of the possibility of people less the 17 being drafted to go to Iraq definitely changed my mind.

There is a possibility of a draft in the near future.  There has been no definite statement that troops will be withdrawn from Iraq, and the population at large still polls low on the idea.   More troops are actually needed in order to keep Iraq secure then are already there.  Volunteer rates are dropping because of the war, and there are few troops available to call up to relieve the 24,000 and climbing that are there past their supposed limits for combat duty.

These facts are a problem.  Big time.  My personal solution would be to pull out now stating simply that we shouldn't be occupying a country we have supposedly set free.  I doubt things could get too much worse then they are now, and if they do then at least it would be likely that the UN could step in some way.  Of course, this hurts our national pride or dignity or something like stupid like that.  Didn't Nixon run on the "exit with dignity" idea in 1968 regarding Vietnam?  Didn't the search for dignity last him another five years and even then he resorted to invading Cambodia and just pulling out anyway?

Running on the idea that a draft needs to be reinstituted is sheer suicide, but lets face it, if Bush gets reelected and is no longer concerned about needing to be voted in again, will this be the route he takes in order to continue pushing an insane colonialist this administration has pursued in Iraq?

Here is an interesting chart I've compiled about movie openings over the last 18 months or so. Compiled here:

Movie         $1,000's per theater   # of theaters
F 911                 27.6               868
Passion               27.6              3043
Shrek 2               26.0              4163
Matrix 2              25.5              3603
Day After             25.1              3425
Harry Potter 3        24.3              3855
Bruce Almighty        24.6              3483
X Men 2               22.9              3741
Finding Nemo          20.8              3374
LOTR 3                19.6              3703
LOTR 2                17.1              3622
Hulk                  17.0              3660
Van Helsing           15.2              3575
2 Fast 2 Furious      14.8              3408
Bad Boys 2            14.6              3186
Pirates of Carribean  14.3              3269
Matrix 3              13.8              3502
Troy                  13.7              3411
Scary Movie 3         13.7              3505
Freddy V Jason        12.1              3014
T-3&                  12.6              3504

These are the top 20 per-theater openings, excluding limited engagements (films being shown in just a hand full of theaters).    For starters I just want to tell everyone they ought to try some original movies for a change.  All but seven of these movies are sequels, and many of the others, Troy, The Day After Tomorrow are not exactly getting too far away from other recent successful movies.

The other thing is that obviously, Fahrenheit 9-11's showing on this list is flat out amazing.  It's a total anomaly, having on average about one quarter as many theaters, but just about maximizing the gross per theater everywhere.   I'm sure an argument could be made that it wouldn't be on this list at all if it made it into the standard 3000 or so screens that other blockbusters seem to get, but my personal experience is that most of my friends who showed up to see the film were turned away because it was sold out, and my brother and I have already made the trip twice since I saw it on Friday to see it together, only to find even matinee showings were booked solid.  So while it's probably a good bet that it wouldn't top the above list if the number of venues to see it tripled or quadrupled, I think it still would have had a good showing here and would have at least doubled it's total weekend gross of roughly 23 million (numbers seem to vary on this, but all concede that it has already broken the record for box office totals for a documentary)

One of the most poignant things about observing this is that the distributor of a movie is usually the entity which makes the most money off a film, especially in the first few weeks after it opens.  So what we have seen here is that Disney has willingly declined a huge payday, something in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 million dollars (who knows, maybe even more!) in gross revenues, which even for a company the size of Disney has a pretty substantial effect on the bottom line.  I mean, unless they really don't know their own business, it probably wasn't too hard to predict that this movie was going to have this kind of huge opening too.  Playing studio executive here for a moment, I can see that even though it's a documentary it's got some great stuff going for it: a built in audience that is anticipating it, winning best picture at Cannes, a lot of "buzz" in the press and on the internet, Academy Award winning director and a timely controversial subject matter.  A little bit of marketing to show people that it's also a funny and entertaining film and not just an art house make you think leave you depressed movie and we are talking easy huge weekend at your middle american mall cineplex.

Of course, Disney declined to do this.  

It's a strong statement when anyone turns down 50 million or more dollars.  It seems to actually run in the face of the idea of free market economics or a corporation's main desire of existence being to make money for its investors.  It would seem to be an act of social consciousness on the part of Disney, except of course for the obvious fact that they are taking a stance against a filmmaker who has stood for such corporate responsibility his whole career.  Instead it becomes an act of suppression of such ideas.  It's even at odds with the "we're a non political operation" official line Disney has stated for its reasons for not releasing the film.  Cha.  Why sign on to a Michael Moore project in the first place then?  It was very much a political statement, and they very much are saying that it's not the fact that this movie is political, but the way in which it is political that they are against.

As for the movie itself, definitely go see it.  Never has political activism felt so much like sitting and watching a good movie.   It is a good movie too.  It certain is partisan against the current administration, but constructs a very strong argument that, if nothing else, a person with the history, associations, dealings and actions of Bush simply should not be trusted to also hold the reigns of power.

You can't drop bombs on it, strafe it, guidance lock it or run it down with a platoon of tanks. You can't spy on it, find out where its hiding and send black ops after it. You can't have generals draw up plans to defeat it, you can't have "specialists" torture it to find out what it knows, you can't strip it naked, whip it and humiliate it.

You can't even define it.

How do you know when you've beaten it? Will it surrender to you, wave a white flag, come out from its cave and lay down its arms for you? Will it sign a peace accord with you? Will it live up to the articles of restitution? Will you hang its stuffed corpse on your wall as a trophy?

Will it stop when you no longer have fear in your heart?

You have no knowledge of history or what life is like outside your own backyard. There is no deterrence for someone who is already willing to sacrifice their life. You don't know how long acts of violence have been carried out by the sad crazed and desperate. You don't understand your own culpability or that there is nothing you can do that will prevent it.

But you should know better then to play its game.

Have you ever used violence or the threat of violence to get your way? Do you feel that sometimes force is the only option, the only thing that some people understand? Do you take an eye when your eye is taken?

How many times do you turn the other cheek before striking back?

Do you really understand desperation? What is the worst thing you ever did out of frustration? Is this what makes you "the good" and the target of "the evil" of the world? Do you understand poverty, self-worth, shame or hunger? What is corruption, oppression and isolation to you? Who is "us" and who is "them"? What are we for that they are against?

What are you besides fear?

You can't be at war with terrorism.