lilfluff

The TL;DR summary: "Gee kids, nice FIRST Robotics Club. We'll let you have the robot since you whined so cutely, but we'll keep the computers and cash. Now scram. Get out of here you foolish nerds."

I was thinking that someone ought to warn Franklin High in Oregon that they might want to do something like reinstate the FIRST Robotics club (like the students will trust the school now) or let them have their funds and any of the tools and equipment that they purchased themselves back. That way at least the tone would change to "School shuts down club" instead of "School shuts down club and teaches kids to trust authorities to steal from them." But since this is now being passed along by people with national levels of attention, like oh, the Mythbusters crew, I think this now qualifies as starting to go viral.

Franklin High banishes its robotics club; may keep its cash

also_huey presents his prediction of The Endgame of Discrimination, which is mildly crude, but to the point.

(Makes mental note: Try to avoid being an idiot or jerk.)

Spurred by some tweets and a LJ posting of djinni's, comes the idea of the Hot Chocolate Party.

Here is my thoughts on what the position of the Hot Chocolate Party should be.

• Have a mug of cocoa, it's good for you.


• We all live here, so remember when you fight, you're fighting with family


• When the voices get too loud -- come calm down with some hot chocolate, we'll even add your preference of marshmallow (mini's, full size, spoonfuls of fluff)


• Neither side has a monopoly on truth, both the liberal and conservative world view are valuable




• One serves to remind us of our values, our history, and tradition


• One tells us to live up to our values, and considers if some traditions are better left to the past.




• Chocolate rules! Coffee drools! (Er, wait, that might be a more personal comment there :p)


• Everything is better with some cocoa (there, that's better).


• Extremists lead to ruin, no matter which world view they claim to enforce.


• No, really, we're serious about the cocoa. It's far better we sit and talk than for us to fight, even if we walk away still disagreeing with each other.

In case you're wondering if I'm serious? This is definitely a Ha ha, Only Serious post. One that is both humorous, and yet contains truth to hopefully be considered.

So, what do you think the Hot Chocolate Party should stand for?

To: Every company in the world
Re: Data/Sync/Etc Cables

If your gadget needs a cable there is an answer for that. It is called USB. If for some reason you don't want to use USB there is FireWire. Or, if it makes sense you might use an external SATA cable.

If you use a proprietary cable then you are part of the problem. You may think you have a valid reason for using a proprietary cable. This most likely means you are actually in need of a clue-by-four applied vigorously to your backside.

If you use a proprietary cable then you need to have your IP stolen, your employees poached by other companies, and for your company to suffer the death of a thousand lawsuits.

Do I sound irked? I do hope so, because I am.

(Oh, and Apple, yes I'm looking at you as I type this)

Edit: And after finally getting the cable and copying the music over, I found the whole process annoying enough I spent money I shouldn't be spending to replace the whole thing. Picked up a SanDisk Sansa Fuze+ 8GB player. Double the capacity of the old nano, takes mp3s, ogg, jpegs, and video files (although I'm not entirely sure why I would want to watch video on a two inch screen). Good news: It uses a USB cable for syncing and charging. Bad-ish news: it uses a "micro-b" size USB cable. Good-ish news: Since this is what cell phones are moving to, I shouldn't have trouble picking up spares.

This started as a comment elsewhere, but grew large enough I decided to make it a post.


I think a large part of the problem with copyright law today is that much of the law is pre-Internet and the powers that be (both government and in the major corporate publishers) are reluctant to change the law in anything but a "Squeeze tighter" direction. Ever increasing copyright lengths (really, are you really going to be encouraged to do more work because your great-great-grandchildren instead of just your great-grandchildren will have possession of the copyright?). I think of it in some ways as being like the 13 Colonies and Britain. Declaring independence was not inevitable. Had parliament and the crown been willing to look for a compromise position then the Commonwealth Realms might well include us as well as Canada, Australia, Jamaica, etc.

But currently you have things like Adobe initially saying that, "Yes, reading an ebook to your child is a license violation," music companies suing students and initially saying "We'll make this go away if you let us tell you what degrees you may and may not work towards" (and only backing off when the college said, "Whoa, what? We may have to rethink whether or not we will cooperate with your information requests"), DVDs that use 'copy protection' that doesn't actually prevent commercial pirating operations (or even give them a moments headache) but does help them prevent you from fast forwarding through ads like you could on VHS and does make it illegal for you to attempt to make use of fair use rights, and a Congress that happily puts in another extension to copyright length whenever the earliest Mickey Mouse works are about to expire. And the more they do this the more average people start to see copyright as something illegitimate, something akin to their city using eminent domain to seize the land homes are one and hand it over to developers who just happened to make campaign donations. And that is a bad thing because copyright *IS* worthwhile and worth keeping. Useful things like open source licenses are only enforceable because of copyright law. Get right of that and they aren't even worth they paper they aren't printed on.

Keep in mind another word for a copyright violator is 'potential voter' (I really wish I could remember who I first heard saying this). If the various concerned groups on all sides of the issue don't sit down and look for a reasonable compromise then some politicians might start looking at some of the more extreme push-back positions as a way to increase popularity. And I've heard of some extreme positions. Not merely banning software patents but software copyright as well. Or putting software in a separate category with a much shorter length (heard as little as six years suggested) due to the speed at which things computer related change. There is the Founders Copyright movement which suggests rolling back copyright terms to 14 years, with only the first term automatic and the one allowed renewal requiring registration (the argument being that if something is viewed as holding value then the owner will take the time to renew it, and if they can't be bothered to fill out the paperwork then why not let it fall into the public domain).

Or, possibly even more likely than drastic reductions in copyright length is the dreaded "T" word. I've heard people ponder a number of times, "If Intellectual Property is property, then perhaps there should be a property tax on it. If Mickey Mouse is going to be copyrighted forever then shouldn't the Disney Corporation pay the public for that privilege and not just congressional campaign funds?" And won't those moves to strike back at the major corporations be oh so fun for small businesses and individuals who get caught up in it? "We see that you have a blog. You will need to fill out form SE-IP-EZ, the worksheet is only two pages long, that's easy isn't it? Oh, you have two blogs? Well then you'll need to fill out one for each, plus another for your Flickr account. What? No, of course this isn't already taken care of by your having paid income taxes on your salary. Next you'll claim you shouldn't have to pay taxes on your house just because you already pay income taxes."

Now, this is the point where one would commonly point to the Japanese and their hands off attitude towards Dojinshi (fan comic books, and related works including written fiction, visual novels, etc). And the Japanese have found a compromise position that works for them. The people making fan comics, etc, do in fact sell them for cold hard cash (a position that would have even many American fan fiction supporters frothing at the mouth) but in return voluntarily restrict the number of copies made. The various publishers turn a blind eye to the fact that this whole market is in violation of Japanese Intellectual Property laws, and in return the next generation of comic book writers, artists, programmers, etc, come to them already having learned to fit their work into standard lengths and write/draw on a deadline. One could say that the Dojinshi market it like the media version of minor league sports, where people learn the basics and the majors go to recruit new talent.

But there is that pesky bit above, "turn a blind eye to the fact that this whole market is in violation of Japanese Intellectual Property laws". Get new management in one of the companies and there could be a team of lawyers walking the isles of the next Comiket handing out preprinted cease and desist letters left and right. I've heard this is unlikely because the companies would fear turning their fans against them, that if say (for the sake of argument) Sunrise was to start going after Gundam dojinshi, you'd see otaku burning their model collections and emailing the TV stations saying, "Take Gundam XYZ off and put something else, something NOT by Sunrise in its place or we'll boycott the whole station and all your advertisers". Maybe that does keep it in check. But as for me, I'd prefer more than just an unwritten gentlemen's agreement when you consider the potentially hefty penalties for IP violations.

Boing Boing has started a habit of posting something unicorn related after they post something disturbing. Well, my last post was more angsty and I don't have any unicorns on hand to post a picture of. So I'll post a snippet of something I found online about Mister Rogers and a link to the post.

As for Mister Rogers himself…well, he doesn't look at the story in the same way that the boy did or that I did. In fact, when Mister Rogers first told me the story, I complimented him on being so smart—for knowing that asking the boy for his prayers would make the boy feel better about himself—and Mister Rogers responded by looking at me at first with puzzlement and then with surprise. "Oh, heavens no, Tom! I didn't ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted his intercession."

Can You Say... Hero

Mister Rogers, someone who could see a boy who had survived abuse and not look down on him and think, "Oh what a poor pitiful boy," but see instead a survivor and think, "If only I can have his help, maybe if I ask he will pray for more."

Nobody is perfect, but anyone could do well to hold Fred Rogers for someone to look up to.

I have to say, from this review their epic series "World War II" sounds like something SyFy's budget movie division would release. I really need to thank squid314 for warning about how unrealistic it is. (And BoingBoing for linking to the post)

I'll put my view short and sweet. The only damage I can see that fanfic has ever done to a published author or publisher is damage done not by the fanfic but by the author and/or publisher's reaction to it.

As for those who call it theft. Fine. Show me the novel sent back to the publisher because, "Some darn fanfic author went and wrote a fanfic and all the ink evaporated off the original book's pages." Show me the police report about the damage done to the author's front door when the fanfic author sat down to write and spectral thugs kicked in the door and started carrying off the author's notebooks. What? No such evidence? Well... Dang. Maybe you should start using a different word than theft. I mean, even the RIAA and MPAA are kinda-sorta thinking of abandoning the term piracy to describe the activities they complain of.

Expansion: Attacking fanfic is also self-destructive behavior in my opinion. There are the people who will watch your show's original broadcasts or buy the book in hardcover release. There are the people who will watch the reruns and buy the paperbacks. These are the people who will lend a copy of the first book in a series to friends, getting them to go out and start buying them as well. You know, you've got a word for them, customers. You've got a word for what you gain from them, money or profits.

As some know, back in the 90s one of my first jobs was working for two years in a hospital kitchen. Not as a chef but as a glorified dishwasher. The official title was, "Food Service Technician" which makes it sound like I was being called in to do maintenance on broken sauces. "Ah! There is your problem, you used a Phillips Parmesan in the sauce and this recipe needs a Flat Head Parmesan cheese..." When in reality the job was about 3/4s dish washing and floor mopping and about 1/4 madly assembling trays for patient dinners (I worked evening shift).

Now some of my coworkers were a little, shall we say odd? Not that I can point fingers much at people being non-mainstream, but then I'm just making an observation and not an accusation. There was the one who went to night clubs nearly every night and somehow managed to either still arrive sober in the morning or could fake it well enough to never had problems. Another voluntarily lived in a camper shell on the back of his pickup truck in order to help save money to fund a hopefully lavish retirement by saving no less than 2/3rds of every paycheck on a bad month (good luck, I'm still rooting for you!). So, unusual but generally fun people to hang around. That was evening shift. Now morning shift on the other hand was made up mostly of fairly mainstream people as near as I can tell. All but for one who I think was not quite mentally all there. The kind of person who would toss a steak knife at you not because he was angry, but because it seemed the easiest and fasted way to pass them to you... So, yeah, nice guy but not all there.

One perk of the job was that we got almost free meals. You might say, "Uh, Steve? Hospital food?" But it was actually good stuff. About the time I started they'd scored in the top bracket of a survey that lumped hospitals in with hotels and resorts. Now we certainly didn't serve five star gourmet meals, but while basic what was made was made well. And there were nice things available. My addiction for cheesecake was cemented while working there, and especially my love of pumpkin cheese cake. And of course there was the frozen yogurt machine. I recall that the nutritionists had to remind some of the doctors that, "Just because the machine says Fat Free does not mean it is calorie free," when they wondered how they could be gaining weight.

So, the story I am remembering happened while I was enjoying one of those nearly free meals. I had arrived at the register just about the time that someone took their frozen yogurt up, saying they were glad that the machine always had vanilla. Seems that the other flavor that day was Butter Pecan and they couldn't stand that flavor. I remember this because shortly after I paid a couple dollars for my well filled tray (Amazing how staying on your feet all day keeps your weight down even on a poor diet, but that's a subject for another post) the previous customer came back up to ask if today's vanilla was some kind of special flavored vanilla. No, came the answer, it was the same vanilla we always had. But the customer thought it just didn't taste like vanilla. It tasted... Well, having thought about it, it seemed to taste a bit like Butter Pecan.

The clerk at the register, being in a good mood, suggested that perhaps the person had filled their bowl from the wrong tap and offered to let her return the first one and prepare another. This time the customer made sure she filled the bowl from the side labeled "Vanilla". And this time she was even more certain that it tasted like Butter Pecan. This, both the customer and clerk agreed was rather strange. Especially since a quick taste test showed the the side labeled Butter Pecan was most definitely butter pecan. A quick note was prepared and placed on the machine stating that both sides were butter pecan flavor and a refund issued to the customer. Of course something like this does get the attention of the supervisors, who asked the all important question, "What happened here?"

This was when they realized that the machine had been loaded at the very end of the day shift. It was in fact the first day that our friend who was not quite all there had been allowed to fill the machine. When asked about it he didn't hesitate to describe how it went. Top opened up just like he had been shown. And both sides were filled with the yogurt base mixture, just like he had been shown and without spilling a drop. With the yogurt base in he added a package of vanilla flavoring to the vanilla side and then realized he had a problem. When he compared how much yogurt base he put in the butter pecan side to the directions on the flavor packet he realized that he would have a half container of butter pecan flavoring left over... But, as he explained, he quickly realized there was an obvious solution. Butter pecan was his favorite flavor of all yogurt and ice cream flavors, so he would be nice and share the leftover flavoring with everyone by adding it to the vanilla side. No one could get too angry with him. After all, he wasn't trying to be bad or mean or anything like that. To his mind he was doing everyone a favor. It was his all time favorite flavor and he was sharing it with everyone.

I seem to recall that he was eventually allowed to fill the yogurt machine again, just with very specific directions not to mix flavors. The steak knives on the other hand remained off limits.

If you haven't watched Patrick Jean's video Pixels yet, then do so, it is made of awesome and niftiness.

Pixels!