25. January, 2003 - Congrats Kate & Bob
- Hey! My friend Kate's getting married today. Zow! I found out last night and nearly got on a plane to San Francisco.
- It took a flash movie to bring home another reason I really like my TiVo. See you can run the TiVo in 2x speed, and the closed-captions still work (at least on networks that actually broadcast them). It means you can zip through shows at double-speed and all you miss is the soundtrack, but you can still read the words people are saying. It's not perfect, and I wish TiVo would hook up some spiffy software to make the audio play at double speed without pitch-shifting, but as it is, I find that the average movie on TV (2 hours running time) can take as little as an hour to watch. Skip the commercials, and you're down to about 80 minutes, then fast-forward some of the boring parts, and you can cut the total time-commitment almost in half. Useful!
- The Economist offers a radical rethink of copyright. Fourteen years, with one fourteen year extension possible. Talking about the current system, they say:
The alternative is to return to the original purpose of copyright, something no national legislature has yet been willing to do.
Amen. The shorter-term copyrights would have to be enforceable, but I don't think I'd have much problem with that as long as there was hope of things that were initially published before my parents were born ever hitting the public domain.
- I expect an attack on Iraq. the Atlanta Journal Constitution has information related to when. Mid-February is likely because that will cause the least disruption in oil prices. [Jim]
- Internet traffic broadly affected by electronic attack which kept me from updating last night. Grr. [strib]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Sat, 25 Jan 2003 11:00:59.