Just a quick thought I just had about voting, inspired by a recent brainstorm within our research group. In an election, your ballot remains secret, so that you cannot be unduly influenced by others. When elected representatives vote on laws, however, their voting record is supposed to be public (let’s discount those sleazy hand votes […]
A couple of days ago, Mitt Romney, our Massachusetts Governor, joined the Bash-France club. Meanwhile, the right-wing movement RightMarch has just released a song called “Bush Was Right,” whose lyrics include (PDF), out of nowhere, the line “France was wrong.” My Litmus Test continues. If you bash France for no particular reason, as a diversion, […]
People are in shock that Sony is effectively installing spyware to help them in their DRM effort. How dare Sony surreptitiously install a program on your computer that effectively overrides the operating system’s default behavior when reading CDs? Haven’t they gone too far? Yes, of course they went too far. But the line was crossed […]
Voting is terribly hard to administer. I voted yesterday in Boston. I was handed voting lists by partisans about 50 feet outside the voting location, which is technically illegal. Once I came into the voting location, the overeager voting administrator confiscated my “voting paraphernalia,” even though it’s technically perfectly okay for me to come in […]
Jason Matusow, Director of Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative, is a smart guy. I’ve heard him speak in person. He’s managed to keep his job for a few years while weathering unfriendly crowds and debates with the likes of Larry Lessig. So, clearly, when he says the following, I can only imagine it’s planned FUD: But […]
“But if you look at the streets it wasn’t about Rodney King, It’s bout this fucked up situation and these fucked up police. It’s about coming up and staying on top and screamin’ 187 on a mother fuckin’ cop.” — Lyrics from “April 26, 1992”, by Sublime A friend gently poked me yesterday to write […]
Right about now, CNN’s US homepage features the riots in Paris. Meanwhile, Le Monde’s front page features the secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe. I guess we’re all the same: denial, denial, denial, focus on someone else’s issues.