Petition for Congressional Term Limits

George Washington once said "The people must remain ever vigilant against tyrants masquerading as public servants."

 Our forefathers saw political service as solemn duty and responsibility, but not as a career. Too often we have seen abuses of legislative power come from the long tenure of legislators in Congress and the relations they build with special interests. If we cannot have campaign finance reform then we must impose term limits to ensure that the civil liberties of the People come before preferential treatment to special interests with deep pockets no individual could ever hope to match.

Having new people in Congress every few years ensures complacency is dissolved and that more Americans have the opportunity to serve and offer their experiences to the legislative process.

Please sign the petition today at http://wh.gov/KmP

There's Gold in Them Thar Asteroids

I firmly believe than the best way for mankind to solve the aliments that plague us on Earth is venture out into the cosmos.  Now I would love to live in the Utopian future of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek but at this point I would settle for the more realistic reality of Joss Whedon's Firefly.

Assuming capitalism continues to play dominate role in society and the reality the non-renewable resource do eventually run out (sorry drill, baby, drill folks; it's true) we need to look elsewhere.  I believe that the time is ripe to expand beyond our purely scientific pursuits in space and begin to exploit the resources to enrich our all of humanity.  I think the first step we ought to take is the mining of asteroids.  Aside from the R&D that will be required (and the associated byproducts that will come out of it to better humanity, think DARPAnet leading to the Internet) it is just a darn cool vision that mankind is finally making the first steps to permanent presence into space.

Take for instance the asteroid Eros.  It is conservatively estimated to contain 20,000 million tons of metals such as platinum, gold, and aluminum, each!  Put it another way, there is more precious metals easily accessible on Eros than has ever been excavated from Earth.  Think about that.  We can stop mining our homeworld, let it heal, and instead exploit uninhabitable asteroids for a lot more loot.

So, are we up for it?  Are we ready to seize the gold in them thar asteroids?

Hollywood is Chasing a Phantom Menace

I think the movie industry was so afraid of what happened to the music industry that they put too much effort in combating the illusion of mass piracy of video material. I will concede piracy of music due to much smaller file size, thus easier to share over the average Internet connection, was more of a "real problem". By chasing a phantom problem for video and not adopting to an iTunes-esque business model they were not contending with the real issue. What has really killed (and will continue to do so even more) the VIDEO entertainment industry is the fact that everyone can now produce high quality content and we all have access to a free distribution channels such as as YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Also, Hollywood focuses way to much on quantity of movies than their quality.  But that's another issue altogether.

Just as the dead tree book industry is on it's last legs due to the excessive cost of distributing dead trees to brick and mortar stores, so to is the old movie distribution model. Why would any smart business person print off 1,000 of books with no real knowledge of the actual demand. eBooks are created once (all upfront cost) and then can be reproduced for free (no tail costs). Same is happening with physical media such as DVDs, CDs, and Blurays. Physical media has upfront costs, tail costs, and at best you are guessing at what the demand will be. With virtual goods you set it and forget it. Case in point, I threw together an old college thesis into an ebook and throw it up on Amazon for no reason other than morbid curiosity of the process required to go from Word Doc to an on sale eBook.  Over the course of a few weeks with 0 advertising I made $10 from a paper I wrote 10 years ago. Now I sure as heck am not quitting my day job, but that's actual cash from someone who has no inspiration to be a writer, who never hired an agent or publisher, put $0 to market the "book", and spent about 30 minutes from having the idea to putting a book up to actually having it online and ready for Amazon's review. By my math, that is a 100% ROI. Spent nothing, made $10. I was able to buy a footlong Subway sandwich that week!

Back to the original point, just as it is darn simple to put a book up on Amazon, so too will it be simple to produce Hollywood-esque quality video and distribute outside the "dead cellulose" channels. Think it can't happen? Comedian Louis C.K. threw together a comedy video for $200K, bypassed all the normal distribution and made it available DRM-free, and all he asked was for $5 via PayPal. 12 days later he had made over $1,000,000. Boom baby. 

So Hollywood you can keep fighting phantom piracy concerns with your overbearing and Draconian attempts (Hello ACTA, and SOPA, and PIPA, and you too DMCA) to silence people. But we will win. There is a great movie, I believe ya'll produced it, call "V for Vendetta". Check it out. Or you can join the rest of the world and innovate and recreate yourself for the 21st century. The choice is yours and it is yours to lose.  Cause trust me, most people (geeks aside) don't have the patience or the bandwidth to download the amount of video you claim.  Plus, is it ever good business sense to make your customers the enemy?

The Battle Is Won, The War Still Wages

SOPA/PIPA may be dead. But the fight for our rights continues. Next up is HR 1981 with the very cleverly titled "The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011" because really, who would vote against protecting children? But just like one should never judge a book by it's cover, you shouldn't judge a bill by it's title.  Here are some highlights from this article.

"Bill H.R.1981 contains legal responsibility for any Internet Service Provider to keep detailed records of "your Internet activity for 12 months, your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and any IP-addresses you've been assigned."

"As Rep. James Sensenbrenner says, (R-Wisc.): "It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I'm not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children."

So trust me my friends, while we MAY have won the SOPA/PIPA battle, we are far from winning the civil liberties war. Protecting children from predators is of a paramount importance, even more so than protecting the financial gains of artists and their middlemen, errrr, I mean labels and studios. But again, when it comes to the Internet, you can't let lawyers craft legalese that amounts to a blunt instrument that clobbers the civil rights of those who don't break the law. I would urge those lawmakers behind HR1981 to go talk to the Facebooks, Twitter, Google, and Craigslist of the world to help craft a law that actually protects children AND still preserves our civil liberties and avoids a dystopian future, a la "1984".