A Series of Tubes

So if you didn’t already know, congress passed a bill that granted retroactive immunity to telecom companies. Basically AT&T and other phone companies were given a get out of jail free card. Voting on the bill was pretty much split with the Democrats opposing immunity and the Republicans granting immunity. The bill came up for a vote twice in the house of representatives, and 94 Democrats changed their vote. The spotlight foundation found that the legislators that changed their votes got more money from the telecom companies.

So that’s all old news since it all happened in June. The new news is that the Democratic National Convention is going on right now and Barack Obama is being officially announced as the Presidential Candidate for the Democrats. The DNC is sponsored by…AT&T.  Every tote bag that every delegate will get will have the AT&T logo on it:

Again this is old news since Glen Greenwald over at salon.com already wrote about it.  The newest news is Read more

I know I recently posted a thing about Lessig but I found another video that I thought was interesting:
http://listics.com/200808204237

Being a lawyer, Lessig does a great job of backing up the points he makes with facts and data.

If you haven’t heard yet there have been 2 firebombs set off at 2 UCSC researcher’s houses. The firebombs were set off in order to terrorize anyone doing animal research. One of the two researchers whose house was firebombed was Professor Feldheim who taught a Neuroscience course that I took. The firebomb that was set off at his house was at his front door requiring him, his wife and his child to escape out of some sort of fire ladder from a second story window.

If you have read my blog before you will note that this is not the first act from animal rights activists (I think animal rights terrorists is a more appropriate name) targeting researchers at UCSC . I’ve been pretty busy so I didn’t have the time to post this earlier or write more about it.

Yesterday there was a rally in support of the researchers and currently there is a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest of the individuals involved.  I hope that the people behind this are stopped before they make another attempt to attack a researcher or their family.

Update:

NPR forum had a segment on the firebombings.  In it they talk to someone who agrees with the tactics used.  It is both interesting and frustrating:

It is a sad sad day for this series of tubes. The founder of the phrase a series of tubes, Senator Ted Stevens, is being charged with not disclosing gifts he received for things like house renovations and a car. Since it is easier to convict Stevens for not disclosing the “gifts” than it is for bribery, the prosecution is pushing for the easier conviction. Let us all ponder this with a song made up of sound samples from Stevens attempting to explain the internet on the Senate floor:

I’ve been a big fan of Lawrence Lessig’s work with creative commons.  I think I made quite a few people watch his lecture on copyright reform.  His latest work is part of the change congress movement.  Here is one version of his change congress lecture:

So on Barack Obama’s website there are various social networking thingamajigs. Since I am not part of the myspace/facebook/whatever crowd I didn’t really care. Turns out that someone made a group on the obama website that I actually cared about. It’s called Senator Obama Please Vote Against FISA.  As of writing this it is the second largest group on his website with 8952 members.

I don’t really expect Obama to change his position back to what it should be.  I’ll probably write to Obama and Feinstein (I haven’t looked it up but I’m guessing that Feinstein is voting for immunity).  The vote to grant immunity to the telecoms for spying on Americans is going in for a final vote sometime after the July 4th holiday.

I am never driving up to San Francisco again.  This is the second time that someone broke my window, looked through the inside of my car, found out that I don’t keep anything valuable in my car, and left me with a broken window and the contents of my glove compartment spread out on the passenger seat.

I can’t believe that I haven’t posted this yet:

A while back I saw this video and started to tie my shoes this way:

I decided to look up a better way to tie my shoes recently because my shoes would get really tight at the bottom and way too lose at the top.  I would keep adjusting my shoes but it was a never ending battle.  Eventually I found this website that has collected a ton of shoelace information in one site.  I would say that I’m surprised to see how much time someone spent putting up all this shoelace information, but when you consider how many pictures there are of things like kung fu cats you realize that the shoelace site is par for the course on the internet.

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