jimsjournal
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One night a couple of weeks ago Nancy and I were talking about something and then we both laughed as we realized that we were using computer jargon (tongue-in-cheek) to describe an every day situation.
Then, a week ago Friday night Nancy had been channel-surfing (having tired of whatever project was currently being featured on HGTV) and came upon CSPAN (or perhaps CSPAN2?) where Scott McNealy (CEO of Sun Microsystems) was giving a presentation to some industry group. It was a very interesting talk and it was followed by a question-and-answer session that featured a number of clever and entertaining responses by McNealy. As the program ended I turned to Nancy and told her that we obviously and without question had to be classified as being geeks: here we were, ten o'clock on a Friday night and what were we doing? Being entertained by a high tech CEO delivering a speech about the future of the Internet and computer technology, etc. on CSPAN2!
I've signed onto Autumn Leaves, a new Burb for online journals whose authors have reached double nickel (i.e., are now age 55) or beyond.
Click on the graphic to check it out.There must be a fair amount of traffic through that site 'cause I've had at least twenty hits from there over the past three or four days.
And speaking of cool links, Amanda is an Australian (they are turning out a lot of online journalers and winning tennis players, aren't they?) who, among other interesting efforts, maintains a list of online journals that have notify lists. I thought that was really cool and planned to email her and ask to have my journal added to her list when I discovered that my site was already listed there.... Check it out... the list is at Tell Me Dammit
While I'm pasting in links here, I've got a more disturbing link... I assume you are aware of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which was used by Adobe in urging the criminal persecution (oh, is that supposed to be prosecution?) of Dmitry Sklyarov and which is such an outrageous assault on both our freedoms and our finances by the major media conglomerates and the congresscreeps whose votes their campaign financing (yeah, sounds classier than bribes) have purchased. The fallout from this is still coming down... not just the international embarassment of the Sklyarov case... but now the increasing number of academic researchers who are pulling down learned articles out of fear of prosecution. (Oh, those media companies claim it is an overreaction, but it's their lawyers who actually threatened at least one of these scientists.) But you ain't heard nothing yet... The latest assault is being prepared even now by Senator Fritz Hollings and the big media lobbyists would mandate embedded "copyright" protection in all PCs and consumer electronic devices and would make it a civil and criminal offense to sell or even to possess any such equipment that is not equipped with federal government approved control mechanisms to prevent that device from being used to copy or to play any non-approved copy of any song, video, book, article, etc. (First offense, up to $500,000 fine and up to five years in prison; second offense up to double those figures.) You might as well forget about copying TV programs to watch at a different time or about making a backup copy of anything. The details are being worked out even now by secret committees of industry members... Secret? Yes, it seems these meetings have been excempted from open-meetings rules (and from anti-monopoly rules as well)... Check out it out here They think you won't notice 'cause you will be too busy reading about Congressman Conduit, and the smoke and mirrors debates about social security, and Survivor and Big Brother, etc. to notice who the real Big Brothers are.
Hey, but what can you expect from the same government that (as stories in today's papers reported) that spends billions in "farm relief" to help save down-trodden "family farms" but which actually gives almost all of the support payments to a few huge agri-business conglomerates and a collection of multi-millionaire farmers.
Okya, time to just post this before I get myself all worked up... and it's not Democrats vs Republicans.. it is just plain corrupt politics... and those, of whichever party, who claim that the blame belongs on the other party are just outright liars.
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