Find the source of source of campaign contributions for your congressperson.
Author: rjnagle
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Senator Hatch’s Music
Amidst a ho-hum article about another Senator decrying mp3 piracy, I was tickled to discover that Sen. Hatch was “a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song-writing royalties.” Holy cripes! Look at his music website. As much as I disagree with his political philosophy, I’ve grown to admire the man’s life story. Unlike other national politicians, who claimed to be middle-class, here was a senator who truly grew up from humble origins and has a pretty good sense of what the common man thinks. Perhaps the music hobby is a vanity for him, but it heartens me that some Senators have hobbies at all.
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US Tortures Prisoners
Accounts of mistreatment of Afgani prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are pretty shocking.
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Freedom: For or Against?
Freedom: For or Against?, a commencement address, by Johns Hopkins president William R. Brody.
Then she laid down some Tarot cards at his fingertips, studied them intently for several minutes, and said: “You will be poor, and miserable, until you are 45 years old.”
“And then?” said my friend rather hopefully. “What happens when I’m 45?”
She said: “By then you’ll be used to it.”
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Reference of Commercial File Types. Useful.
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Parsiminious XML
Parsimonious XML is an interesting approach to making XML more readable.
Cobian backup is a cool Windows backup program by Luis Cobian.
Eric Hellweg wrote a fascinating profile of Waste p2p chat by Justin Frankel who resigned amidst scandal from Nullsoft. According to reports, Justin wrote Justin when he was about 18 and did gnutella a few years later. What Justin did was wrong from a legal standpoint, but it shows the conflict that exists between the anarchic share-the-code mentality that exists in open source and corporate attempts to share this impulse.
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Technical Book Reviews
A good site with book reviews of technical books. Of course, don’t forget my own technical book review site. Not updated recently with my slashdot posts though. I recently posted a book review of a Special Edition Using Staroffice on slashdot.
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Embedded Editor for Zope
Epoz is a mature zope embedded editor product.
Mjablonski has written a lot of zope products, including a zope html-to-pdf conversion tool .
I’m not going to link here, but the various tutorials on traceback are just plain silly. It would be good to know who links to you, but it has to be manually inputted. No way!
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Bush threatens to veto all peacekeeping operations!
The council last year voted 15-0 to grant immunity from prosecution to peacekeepers in U.N.-backed missions from countries that had not approved the treaty for the ICC. At that time, the Bush administration threatened to veto all U.N. peacekeeping missions, one by one. From reporter Evelyn Leopold on the 1 year exemption to ICC jurisdiction granted to USA .
Ponder that for a moment. Admittedly ICC is a controversial subject about which honest people can disagree, and nations must act according to their national interests. But for the Bush Administration to say, “we are going to veto every UN peacekeeping mission until you fix this,” sounds absurd.
Followup: This sentence was deleted. Possibly incorrect?
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Two Questions for Lessig
A PBS newshour discussion about copyright generated a Slashdot discussion. . Here are two questions I posed.
For Mr. Oppenheim:
The value that the entertainment industry has traditionally brought to the artist has been production and marketing. But costs of producing artistic works has plummeted, and many would say that “viral marketing”(through the sanctioning of alternative/free distribution channels) is cheaper and more effective anyway. Given the ever-shrinking royalty percentages and restrictive nature of entertainment contracts, why does it still make economic sense for artists to sign up with major media companies?
For Mr. Lessig:
Nobody ever put a gun to an artist’s head to sign an unfair contract with the entertainment company. These contracts are freely entered into because both parties believe it in their respective self-interests. Why then is legislative tampering necessary? Isn’t the problem self-correcting? If enough artists get screwed or perceive themselves as getting screwed by signing up, they won’t sign up, or they will insist on more favorable terms. Why then should Congress hamstring the ability of artists and companies to enter into contracts? To justify legislative intervention, it seems to me that you would need to demonstrate that entertainment contracts are instrinsically predatory and exploitative.
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VHS-to-Mpeg Converter
Finally, an easy way to convert VHS files to your computer. It requires 2.0 USB interface. While looking for Cassette-to-mp3 conversion methods, I found an online service, cassettes2cds that can do it for under $10.