August, 6, 2002 archives

it looks like the supreme beings of leisure (or maybe just some members?) are releasing a new album (or something) on september 10th. woohoo!

bud selig allegedly cooked the books to show that major league baseball was a money-losing venture. this is a surprise?

the bits about the 60-40 rule are almost comical. long-term player contracts are debts, but long-term broadcasting deals aren't assets? remember this next time you're voting for some bond measure that would fund a new stadium for these crooks.

i'm sure that allowing police departments to use intellectual property law to control how they are portrayed on television is exactly the sort of thing the authors of the constitution had in mind. this must promote the progress of science and useful arts in some way that i'm just missing.

so i went to the berman thing. people are stupid. (his p2p bill didn't come up.)

most of the discussion focused on the middle east, particularly iraq, and social security and healthcare issues. (not shocking—i was clearly thirty years too young to be part of the audience.)

some tips if you want to ask a question at a town-hall event like this:

• be brief.
• be polite.
• have a point.
• know the difference between the federal, state, and local governments.

everyone who asked a question was polite, but nearly everyone failed on at least one of those other aspects, especially the first.

(and on the berman side, they could have anticipated the need for mics for the audience, and used staffers to pick people from the audience in a more streamlined, and probably equitable, fashion. and cut down the opening remarks—people are going to ask about the obvious issues again, anyways.)

a special mid-month charity bonus (thanks to my speaking fee from oscon): electronic frontier foundation

hmm, speaking of tevas....