Posted on Saturday 24 March 2007
- Interesting statistics about how alcohol is over two orders of magnitude more deadly than marijuana (even heroin is only twice as deadly as alcohol). At some point, you have do a sanity check on our current society and wonder why there’s so much stigmata against weed compared to beer. I don’t know if there’s ever been a recorded case of someone ODing on weed. Contrast this with how you regularly hear about alcohol poisoning deaths and the like. Plus, I can’t imagine driving under the influence of weed is any worse than DUIs for alcohol. Anybody got any good arguments why alcohol should be legal while maintaining a strict (and expensive) prohibition on weed?
- According to BusinessWeek, YouTube may have met its match with the announcement that News Corp (Fox), NBC, AOL, and others are launching their own video site. I give the new site about 6 months until it fizzles out when users find the interface and (presumably, very limited) content to be craptacular. How many people are even aware that AOL already started their own video sharing site?
- Matt’s First Law of Music Tasteology: With high probability U2 will become one of your top 5 favorite bands at some point in your 20s. Does the empirical evidence of others support this?
- Looking for a new guilty pleasure? Why not try deep fried White Castle sliders? Rumor has it you can actually feel your arteries clogging while you eat it.
- In case you missed a judge ruled the Child Online Protection Act, which is supposed to “protect” minors from porn on the Internet, unconstitutional. Politicians seem to have the notion that if you throw a phrase like combating “porn” or “terrorism” into a bill, it will automatically be accepted without considering the Constitution or its effectiveness in achieving the said goal. Good to see common sense beats them on occasion. Wonderful quote from the judge:
Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.
- Even the creator of the DMCA says it is a failure and blames it on Big Content.
Bruce Lehman, who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute. Lehman explained the U.S. perspective in the early 1990s that led to the DMCA (ie. greater control though TPMs), yet when reflecting on the success of the DMCA acknowledged that “our Clinton administration policies didn’t work out very well” and “our attempts at copyright control have not been successful”.
- The RIAA wins the “Worst Company In America 2007″. I’ve been reading some Peter Drucker lately and he talks about how figuring out how to meet customers needs is integral to a businesses success. It’s pretty clear that RIAA is much more intent on protecting their own existence that meeting the needs of artists and customers. Hence the reason they’ll go the way of the dinosaurs.
- I watched Scent of a Woman a couple of months ago. This is one of those older movies I had never seen but found it magnificent. Got to admit I got a tingle up the spine when Al Pacino made his speech on behalf of Chris O’Donnell. Here’s an excerpt from it:
Now, I don’t know if Charlie’s silence here today is right or wrong; I’m no judge or jury. But I can tell you this: he won’t sell anybody out to buy his future! And that my friends is called integrity, that’s called courage. Now that’s the stuff leaders should be made of. Now I have come to the crossroads in my days, and I have always known the right path, always, without exception, I knew. But I never took it, you know why? Because it’s too damn hard. Now here’s Charlie; he’s come to the crossroads. And he’s chosen a path, it’s the right path. It’s a path made of principle, that leads to character. Let him continue on his journey.
- Joke I heard this week: A father wants to see what his son is going to be when he grows up so when his son is away, he puts on a table four objects: a Bible, a dollar bill, a bottle of whiskey, and a porno mag. He figures if his son takes the Bible then he’ll be a preacher, the dollar bill…a businessman, but if he takes the whiskey or the porn, then he’ll grow up to be a no-good scoundrel.
So his son comes home and walks over to the table. He places the Bible under his arm, puts the dollar in his pocket, starts drinking the whiskey, and thumbs through the porno mag. He’s dad says, “Oh no, he’s going to be a politician!”.
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