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Well, I’m working on typing up a letter to the USCO for the following:

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Copyright Office

37 CFR Part 201
[Docket No. RM 2005-11]
Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies

AGENCY: Copyright Office, Library of Congress

ACTION: Notice of inquiry

More information at: http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr57526.html

Take the time to review the letter and see if there is anything else I should include in there…

Throughout history feel good politics have constantly threatened our rights as citizens of the United States. They seek to protect ordinary citizens from themselves. This is not the stance that the government should take when it comes to legislation. Legislation should be passed to protect an individual from outside harm, not themselves. The DMCA, especially the anti-circumvention aspect of the DMCA, is one such legislation that has over stepped its bounds. United States Citizens do not need protection from themselves, but protection from the media companies that wish to keep these laws on the books. Being an Information Studies graduate of Florida State University I have had much exposure to copyright issues and have always believed in the right of Fair Use. The DRM, Digital Rights Management, systems in effect today take away our rights to Fair Use and the anti-circumvention tools are the only ones that allow us to fight back.

Being an earlier adopter of CD technology for music and data backup, I have witnessed countless examples of “BitRot” on these discs and I can only assume that this degeneration will present itself on all future media also. As such to protect my investments in such media, I must have the Right and Capability to make legal backups of the media. Under the current DMCA and copyright law we have the Right to make Fair Use copies and backups for our own personal use, but the Anti-Circumvention clause makes it impossible to do such legally.

If the USCO wishes to promote fair use and the ability of individuals to make personal backups of their investments then they must allow circumvention and even push for legislature that makes DRM technology that work against Fair Use in technology illegal. If the USCO can’t protect an individual’s right to copy their own personal property for personal use, then how will they ever protect or guarantee the Library Institutions that right.

Well, as most of you already know, Hurricane Wilma came and visited us recently.. For those of you who have been trying to get ahold of Laura and myself, we are fine and matthew’s ok. Laura’s at her Folk’s house if you want to reach her. Of course they don’t have working phone though

So where to begin… First off let me say that we will have photographs up as soon as we get some power in the house to download them off of the camera..

Sunday night we went to bed realizing that the hurricane was coming straight for us but was going to probably be more like a tropical storm than anything else… Those were the famous last words of almost everyone in south florida before this storm. On monday morning we woke up and the winds started. They weren’t that bad and we had power. We watched things blow around but nothing too bad. We had weathered far worst last year with Jeane and Francis. Around 10:30, or maybe it was 11:00 the Eye had arrived and we went out to meet the neighbors. It’s amazing that the only time you meet the neighbors is in a bad storm like this. We discovered that a tree had fallen and landed on one neighbors brand new VW jetta and there were some fences down, the old ones that shouldn’t have been standing as is. Nothing to major and everyone was in good spirits and ready to take on the back half. AKA the weaker half of the storm… Another flaw in our thinking…

When the winds started to pick up 30 – 45 minutes into the calmness we all went back inside. While sitting in my living room watching the spectacle I started to notice that the wind was blowing dead on my living room and I was watching debris fly towards us. I forced the wife and 16 month old onto the stairs where we would be safer than sitting in front of the glass watching it. After about 30 minutes of sitting on the stairwell the glass in the living room shattered spraying glass everywhere around the house. We grabbed the dog, matthew, and went under the stairwell. Once everyone was safe I went looking for the cats. I only found one cat and that stupid one was trying to escape through the whole in the house … I grabbed her and through her in with us.

Now I’ve been through good hurricanes and bad hurricanes, but I’ve never had one puncture the house before. The amount of pressure that was building up inside the house was astronomical. Matthew was screaming because he wasn’t allowed to play and because of his ears popping over and over again. Me and Laura being divers were able to equalize quite easily every couple of seconds to make up for the 120mph winds gusting into our house. Once the gusts died down and the roar subdued, about 40 minutes or so under the stairs, we grabbed everyone and thing and ran upstairs so we weren’t cramped anymore. We rode out the rest of the storm in our bedroom.

With the wind died down to where the rain didn’t sting you anymore we ventured outside again. That is when we discovered the damage. Most people’s air conditioners were either toppled over on their roofs or sitting in their neighbors patios after being ripped off the roofs. 1 in 4 cars had at least one broken window. 2 or 3 houses facing the wrong direction had broken windows and doors, the framing on most houses had spots where it was either exposed or ripped off. For us though we had the broken sliding glass door, a broken rear window on Laura’s car, a broken side view mirror on laura’s car, a snapped fence post and the gate door had been ripped right off the hinges. Ohh and we had lost our Garbage Cans …

I went over to my mom’s house and discovered that all of her fencing was gone and that her patio was 3 houses down in pieces. Same with her neighbors, all fencing gone and all screen rooms and patios gone. They faired pretty well though with very little structural damage to the house.

All in all, it seems our neighborhood was one of the bad neighborhoods, but everyone is ok and everyone is alive. Things are getting back to normal as the sliding glass door should be replaced today and the rear window on laura’s car is replaced tomorrow. We have running water again as of yesturday although we have to boil it but it is just nice to be able to flush a toilet.. Gas is impossible with 3 – 6 hour lines and them rationing it so you can only replenish what you lost waiting in line. Electricity.. Who the hell knows… But I do have land line phone service, but I am the only one I know with it so I don’t know how long that will last.

So I need lots of funding to try my new idea.. I want to farm asteroids to keep available for busting up hurricanes. I’m figuring on creating enough of a disturbance or fluctuation in the eye of the hurricane by flinging asteroids, VERY LARGE ASTEROIDS, into the center of hurricanes from space. I’m hoping this would slow down and disrupt the hurricane enough to make them safer for all man kind. So basically I need a space ship to tow asteroids back to orbit with, a couple super computers to calculate the trajectories of the asteroids, and someone good enough to pilot the space ship on those trajectories and release the asteroids… If we act quick enough we may be able to stop Wilma…

Ok.. Very short rant here…

WTF happened to America? We used to lead the way in so much and now we are falling so far behind.. If you have read the recent studies you see that we are not 16th in Broadband access.. How is it that France, Korea, and so on, have 16x faster broadband access for half the price as us?

WTF happened to America? We used to get alot of the cool gadgets either first or sooner or later… Now you look at countries like Korea blowing us away with cool shit.. They’ve just got Carbon Fiber laptops announced today. Add onto that all the cool cell phones they get that we don’t and the fact that almost all of Asia has portable sattelite tv available to them also.

Our we regulating ourselves out of the world market? What exactly is holding us back from taking advantage of all this new technology in the world? I can understand the problem with broadband is our expanse and the unwillingness of the monopolies to allow someone else to compete on the same ground of them. But why can’t we even get carbon fiber laptops? Why are we just now starting to join the HD revolution 5 maybe 10 years behind everyone else? Free-er enterprise would probably correct alot of these problems. After all bellsouth doesn’t offer 20mb internet connections for 20 bucks a month because they have no real competitor. Their closest is the cable companies which have a stake in holding the prices up to.

It just seems like 10 years ago we were innovating the world and leading it and now we are behind almost everyone….

The vacation is over, and my legs hurt like a son of a …..

Well it wasn’t much of a vacation but me and WanderingFremen went to Halloween Horror Nights on sunday. In short, it was alot of fun but I don’t know if I would do it again…

Now let me give the long version.

WanderingFremen and I purchased our vacation to HHN15 via the universal vacation reservation thingy. We got a really good deal that included:

1 Night Hotel Stay at a Resort Hotel – Pacific Royal or something like that
2 Tickets to HHN15
2 Express Passes to HHN15
1 5×7 photo
And early admission to HHN15 at 4:00 instead 6:30 like everyone else.

On the drive up there I was twitching to test out my car. I’ve had this car for over a year now and have put two oil changes in it. That means it is now safe to start trying to top the car out. I came around my usual bend right after ft. pierce where the turnpike travels dead west for a bit and slowed down to give myself a mile or two before any other cars and then floored it.

80 mph….90 mph…. 100 mph… 110 mph… 115 mph…. 120 mph… Must brake.. God Damn minivan….. Brakes shake.. Brakes wobble. Brakes really don’t do well at high speed… But we slow down to 80 in enough time anyways…. Good thing I don’t drive fast all the time cause then I would have to replace these brakes as they really can’t handle the heat and pressure of high speed driving.

About 2 hours after leaving Ian’s house we are parking at the Hotel and checking in… First issue with trip…. PAY FOR PARKING… Yeah I know it was only 7 buxs but come on. I am paying 150 a night to stay in your hotel and you are going to nickle and dime me over parking? We proceed to our room and I can say that overall the hotel was very nice… It had a certain level of refinement that the disney resort hotels didn’t have and felt more like a luxurious hotel. But again Universal’s Resorts aren’t as themed for kids as Disney which is where Disney shines.

We proceed to drop off our stuff and I go to take a dump… What do I find in my brand spanking new hotel room???? Someone’s dirty shirt hanging on the door and used towels on the towel bar. Quick phone call downstairs by WanderingFremen and situation is corrected as they were not there when we got back.

We walked downstairs around the pool and to the boat dock and took the boat immediatly to City Walk. The proximity of the resorts to the parks isn’t funny. They are litteraly sitting on top of each other so the boat ride was quick and easy.

At city walk we immediatly proceeded to Margaritaville for drinks and food. They were able to seat us alot quicker than I expected and I chowed down on a Crab Cake sandwich and slurped on a Double Margarita. Yummy. Excellent food. Excellent flirty service. Atmosphere was a bit cramped though and not as laid back or relaxed as I would have liked.

We took our two glasses and wandered around city walk blowing off another hour before we could enter the park…

Ok, now Universal’s idea of early entry is completely different than Disney’s idea of early entry. At a disney theme park if you get in early you get to ride almost all the rides before the crowds get there… Not true at Universal because they are “Shutting Down” the park for the day visitors and “Opening” the park for the HHN15 visitors. So what this means is you get into the park 2 hours early, you spend maybe your first 45 minutes in the park riding two rides, Dr. Doom and Spiderman, and then you are ushered around the park from one ride to the next being told that the ride is closed and will re-open somewhere between 15 minutes and 45 minutes. Of course they never do re-open until 6:00 PM. So basically early admission at universal was useless cause it just allowed us to walk around the park and get frustrated at all the rides we couldn’t ride.

When the HHN15 extravaganza finally opens we head on over to the first house.. It was filled with nasty bikers scantily clad females. I found myself glancing in all the corners like I usually do at haunted houses and catching all the pranksters before they even had a chance to prank me. This obviously wasn’t going to work if I was going to have any fun so I vowed for the rest of the night just to follow pathway and not glance around too much.

The next house was a children of the corn throwback where the students of a school had killed all the teachers. This one was creepy cause of all the little people but not really scary.

Next we came up to our first HHN15 Wait Line… This one was waiting outside Body Collectors as the house hadn’t opened yet. Once it did open though we got right in and this one was a human slaughter house. One guy in the house really got me though as he came straight towards me then blew an air compressor into my gut.. I screamed like a little girl and ran.

I ran right outside the house and proceeded to scream in pain. Aparently the body collectors had stolen my ligaments cause both of my legs were cramped to the point I had to sit down in the middle of the walk way right then and there and you could see the knots in my legs. Damn dehydration… After about 10 minutes of massaging and stretching I was semi ok and we went on.

Dueling Dragons, More Houses, On and Off Minor cramps but nothing too serious and then we are back at Body Collectors again. This time. The same thing happened on the way out except to Wandering Fremen. So we had to sit on our asses some more outside of this house while his cramps relieved themselves.

The park at night was alot different than during the day. They had tons of costumed actors running around with glowing eyes, chainsaws, swords and the like just to scare the shit out of you.

A few other key points. The Bill and Ted’s show was great with all the sexual inuendo and women stripping down to their underwear.

Final Thoughts….

I had alot of fun but I don’t think I would do it again. I like haunted houses and such but for me to let myself go and really enjoy one I need to not be in a constantly flowing line like a herd of cattle. The houses were alot more fun when it was just WanderingFremen and myself walking through them alone than when we were just in queue through them all.

1. Stolen from [info]Dexeron

Heres what you do:
Go to google.com and type “(your name) needs” Then pick the 5 funniest ones there.

If your name is James, you would put this in to the search engine: “James needs”

you got the idea?

Then copy and paste this into your journal with your answers filled in.

****************************************************

1. Joey needs time

2. Joey needs a spanking!

3. Joey Needs a sidekick

4. Joey needs to stand up for himself.

5. Joey needs to quit his job

So I upgraded the gallery, http://www.far2wise.net/gallery/ to gallery 2.0 and I’ve got to say that the install was friggin great. It went in very easily and I was able to import my old gallery flawlessly. The new layout and features also make this system alot better than the old gallery. Anyone using gallery 1.x should definatly consider upgrading as soon as possible, it is painless and well worth it.