Rossotron.com

Do you remember the days when you used to get things in the mail other than bills? When was the last time you wrote someone a REAL letter (outside of Christmas card season?)

Lauowolf pointed me to Mary Robinette Kowal’s post on A Month of Letters challenge.

The idea is simple – in the month of February, commit to mailing one piece of correspondence for every day of the month that the postal service runs in your country.  You can mail postcards, letters, packages.  You can hand-write them, you can type them, you can make a ransom note out of words cut out of the newspaper, if you want.  You can send one out each day of the month, or mail them in a big batch once a week.  But send out REAL MAIL, and brighten someone’s day.  (Challenge part 2 is writing back to everyone who writes to you – I’ll leave this as an extra mission for you, should you choose to accept it.  This message will NOT self-destruct in 5 seconds.)

I’m going to participate, but so far I’m short on addresses of people to write to.  If you’d like to receive some REAL MAIL from me, send me an note with your address to rossruns@gmail.com – I promise not to share it or sell it, just like I promise that if you send me your address, you’ll get something from me in the mail!

And hey, if you want to participate too, awesome! Lauowolf is gathering peoples’ names together to get a circle of ex-Voxers and others in on the fun – if you want to participate, head over here and send Lauowolf your address (the email address is buried in the post on that link), and you’ll get some addresses in return to help you on your way.  And don’t be dissuaded by a whole Month of Letters – if you can only get out 1, or 2, or 5 letters, those are that many more that will go help put a smile on someone’s face.

Back in college, I may or may not have run an mp3-sharing FTP site off my computer that was registered on Oth.net.  My roommates downloaded bootleg “cams” and “screeners” through IRC, and we watched them on a modded Playstation that could play VCDs. I thought nothing of it; we were poor college students.  Everyone was doing it.  This was the age of Napster and college-wide network shares.

In my first apartment after college, in 2001, I had my computer connected up through Time Warner Cable.  One day, they shut off my internet.  When I called to inquire, they said the a record label associated with the RIAA had reported me as in violation of copyright infringement for sharing copyrighted music files.  I think they had a list of about 40-50 tracks they specifically had called out as hosted by my computer available for people to download.

This was before all the RIAA lawsuits started. TWC told me to remove any file sharing software and public access to my music and they would reinstate my internet connection.  No harm, no foul.  I got off with a warning.

Had this been 2-5 years later, I could have been hit with a $3000-$5000 “settlement fee” for the same offense.  Or if I fought it? I might have ended up with a $2 million judgement against me, like Jammie Thomas-Rasset in 2007.  I got lucky.  I don’t download or share music anymore.

Piracy today is rampant.  If you could persuade teenagers to be honest with you, most would tell you they don’t buy music – they have tools to rip the tracks off of the audio in Youtube videos, or they torrent them, or download from sites like the recently-shut-down MegaUpload. Some people boast of terabytes of music in their archives – an amount which would cost any normal purchaser thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to acquire “honestly”.

SOPA and PIPA are obviously flawed measures, and would do a much greater order of magnitude of damage to the internet than any benefit they’d provide to the RIAA and MPAA.  But lobbyists and lawmakers are going to continue to push and push for these kind of regulatory actions because of all this piracy.  The recording and motion picture industries are mired in old technology, and they believe they cannot survive if the piracy continues.  (Whether they actually can or not is something I’ve not seen enough information on to have a firm opinion about, but I suspect that there are enough innovative groups and labels out there that are getting by without the frivolous lawsuits that the RIAA and MPAA’s whole arguments are thrown into a doubtful light.)

So if SOPA and PIPA won’t work, can we eliminate piracy by means other than legislation? Probably not. Especially not if the public mindset continues to be “Everyone’s Doing It”, and people believe they’re immune from reprisal because they’re “just one in a million”, or they’re “just downloading one movie only, and not even a good one at that” (both arguments I’ve actually heard for justifying piracy).

Killing piracy is like curing poverty – idealistically, it would just require enough people to care enough to take action (or stop taking action, as the case may be) to effect change.  Realistically, if parents don’t govern their kids’ behavior, colleges don’t crack down on their students’ activities, and ISPs don’t punish ALL offenders, the number of incidences of piracy is not going to decrease.  And the only way to really get ANY of that to occur is to make piracy not only so illegal, but so prohibitively costly to NOT monitor and protect against it that ISPs, college campuses, and individual families begin to comply.

The men and women in Congress know this.  Every day, lobbyists from the RIAA and MPAA hound them with this truth.  And so they work to develop bills like SOPA and PIPA to fight back.  Yes, these bills are horrendous and could break the internet as we know it today.  If they do come to a vote next week, they probably won’t pass.  But that doesn’t mean they’re going to just go away.  Just like music and movie piracy, the legislation to combat piracy is going to keep popping up, rearing its ugly head until the lobbyists can ram through something to help out the record and movie labels (assuming anything can, at this point).

So stay strong, stay informed, and keep fighting against censorship, but be aware that it’s going to be a long battle ahead.  Oh, and if you can, consider obtaining your music and movies legally instead of bootlegging them.  It’s not going to end the piracy, but I’d REALLY hate to see your name on the next lawsuit filed by the RIAA/MPAA.

Hmm, it is all starting to make sense now.

Reminds me of a Da Vinci drawing...

And of course, this also reminds me of the famous Groucho Marx quote:

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

(Click to enbiggen)

1. We’ve got at least one individual with very strong passive-aggressive tendencies in the office.  They also apparently don’t know how to use their spell-check program, although they did quite a nice job at the formatting for the “Low Coffee Level” contestants.  (I would have centered the headings above the blank spaces, but that’s just a personal preference.)
2. We’ve got at least one smartass in the office (not counting myself [and I did not write either the note or the response])
3. I am almost positive this is going to escalate into a conflict of epic proportions, and the only solution will be to nuke the coffee machine and have everyone start drinking tea.  Stocking up on my Earl Grey, just in case.

If it’s been a while since you read the fairy tale, let me quickly recap:

• Youngest son’s inheritance is a cat.
• Puss demands and receives a pair of boots.
• Puss proceeds to hunt and catch animals in the forest and present them to the King as gifts from the fictional Marquis de Carabas.
• Puss tells his master to strip naked and hide in the river while he cons the King and his daughter into thinking the young man is the Marquis de Carabas and has been robbed.
• Puss runs ahead and coerces the peasants along the road into telling the King that the fields, farms, and game preserves he passes all belong to the Marquis de Carabas.  Puss threatens to cut them up into mincemeat if they don’t comply.
• Puss enters a castle where an ogre lives, tricks the ogre into turning into a mouse, kills and eats him, and claims ownership of the castle for his master.
• The King, impressed by the wealth of the “Marquis”, gives the impostor his princess’ hand in marriage and makes him heir to the throne.
• Puss lives high on the hog and only chases mice when he feels like it, thereafter.

My thoughts:

1. Puss is kind of a dick.
2. This sounds oddly like the set of actions that created the last big Real Estate Bubble.
3. This is the best example I can find in literature where lying is rewarded, where an apparently completely undeserving individual (the third son) ends up on top of it all through trickery and deception, and appearance and wealth are stressed above all other things as the driving forces for marriage.
4. I’m pretty sure I’m going to avoid reading this story to my kids until they’re old enough to understand how truly twisted it is.

michelle-said posted a hilariously tragic story about how she got her laptop, Chardonnay Lionheart, addicted to cheap eBay power cords.  Yes, Michelle is an enabler.  But enough about her; the most important part of her story is not the sad spiral of decay that her poor Macbook Pro has fallen into, but rather its name.

Chardonnay Lionheart.

That is one truly awesome name for a laptop.

And you know what?

My poor laptop has been struggling along under the weight of my numerous endeavors for YEARS now with the same lack of respect I bestow on my garbage can.

My car has a name (Abe, aka The Silver Sparrow).

My children have many names (not all of them fit for company).

Hell, even my house has a name (Casa de Bedlam).

But my poor computer? It is as anonymous as, well, Anonymous.

So now, I am engaging in a quest.  A quest for the perfect name.

I expect it will end one evening with the storm looming outside and the windows blowing open, and I will shout my laptop’s given name into the raging tempest and save Fantasia from The Nothing.

Oh wait, sorry, that’s already been done.  Scrap that last paragraph.

Ok, I actually expect it will end one evening with me cleaning the fingerprint-smudged screen and, after closing the laptop’s cover and giving it a single pat on its hard casing, speaking aloud the words, “That’ll do, __________.  Good night.”

So here’s to finding the perfect name.  My laptop has faithfully stood by me for years of unquestioning service – it’s about time I show it how much I care for it in return.