What a way to bring down a month. SOPA, IPA, and Now ACTA, makes me wish that alphabet soup had thrown up on someone else’s lawn. I’m a pretty even dude when it comes to politics, I dislike everyone and I’m pretty sure everyone is out to do me wrong. I like things both liberal and conservative, but nothing will actually get me up off my duff quicker than censorship and IP problems. I despise Intellectual property laws, and the organizations that make their living off other people’s thoughts. Think me one original idea, based off of nothing you have ever heard, or seen or read. you can’t you as you sit there right now are a product of the environment you experienced, the sum of your past mistakes, and triumphs. no one should be able to legislate what part of your past you can create from.
We move from ranting about serious subjects, to discussing zombie kill plans, We hit on Accents, and make fun of everyone, even ourselves. From Geek to Groan, this episode has some great puns, some good information and some hearty laughs.
Certain things in life need to be enjoyed to their fullest. Close your eyes, sip by gentle sip taking the world’s cares and pushing them to the side for one mug at a time. Do this enough and your problems might melt away.
I was recently sent a wonderful care package by NeedCaffeine.com a fine purveyor of Coffee Beans, Loose Leaf Tea, and Espresso Machines. They wanted to show off their new design, and the designer in me lept at the chance to eyeball and give my opinion, while the coffee nut was happy to have some Intelligentsia Coffee. You see the famed roaster has a wonderful reputation but there are very few places you can buy their coffee online. NeedCaffeine just so happens to be one of those places, if not the only place that I’ve found outside of the roaster’s own.
The roasted date on the bag is a great indicator of just of quickly the orders are filled. No chance for old coffee, just good coffee.The coffee is unbelievable. Sweet berry notes, and a wonderful aroma that makes you stand up and try to find a mug stat. The Flying Blend lived up to the literature that came with it. I don’t drink my coffee with anything but coffee in the mug so having a roaster confident enough to suggest enjoying their coffee sans help is a bonus. My only regeret was that i didn’t request whole bean. but the coffee arrived fresh and very promptly.
If you get a chance you need to stop by NeedCaffeine.com to grab some of this blend. Available in one and five pound bags. I’ve had a hard time brewing other things with this stuff in the house! For more actions shots check out the gallery below.
*Full disclosure: i was sent these products at no cost to me by the folks at needcaffeine.com, for review and sampling. No outcome, positive or otherwise was promised. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
So far we have fought for net nuetrality, and may or may not have won. We hit SOPA where it hurts, and PIPA is reeling. It’s alphabet soup. The latest head to pop up with this hydra is ACTA. It isn’t a US law, or a UK law. this is an international treaty, designed to protect a stranglehold on knowledge that some companies claim. It will quite simply stifle creativity, allow for simple and easy censorship of ideas. and invade your privacy in ways you would shudder to think about.
Just watch this video, which explains better than I can. I really want to get back to making funny posts, and silly jokes. but the serious topics keep coming back.
As a general FYI and news of the Day bump, The votes for both PIPA and SOPA have been put on hold, it doesn’t mean they are dead, and with wonderful rhetoric like This Gem from
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), “But the day will come when the Senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem. Somewhere in China today, in Russia today, and in many other countries that do not respect American intellectual property, criminals who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.”
So an industry that employ’s a decent number of people here, but produces all of its promotional items abroad, gets a pat on the back. Millions of jobs lost right there senator.
How can a US law punish someone in another country. I’m pretty sure there are laws in Iran you may have violated today, should we ship you there to face punishment? It makes no sense. All these type of laws do is frustrate and censor citizens in your own country. They can stop a daycare from painting mickey mouse on a wall in Florida but they can’t stop anyone anywhere else from stealing a nickle.
Man I’ve done a lot of ranting lately… Where’s my coffee.
Yesterday wasn’t fun for me. I lost money, and lost a lot of fun. I lost ad revenue from people coming to my tiny little corner of the internet and clicking on an ad or two. Reading a funny post or learning a thing or two. Perhaps listening to the podcast that was supposed to record live last night. I’m not a hard hitting news site, and we all know this. This is where you come for a very niche brand of bad humor, good gadgets and fun. This isn’t a place for political machinations. Hell this isn’t a place that usually uses the word machinations… let alone spells it right both times.
This was the response from former congressman, and now MPAA chief Chris Dodd on Yesterday’s Strike
“Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.
It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.
A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.” ~Chris Dodd
Abuse of power? or a showing of strength. I can’t think companies would give up revenue and annoy their uses for no reason.
“If 50 people, yes 50 people a day walk in an sing alice’s restaurant and walk out… then, that, my friends is a movement” ~Alro Guthrie
With all apologies to Arlo for shoving the quote out in a hamfisted way, we have a movement. And people are starting to learn what is happening behind the closed doors in Washington. An educated populace is a dangerous one. You can’t kill a movement.
There are 94 million reasons for the Congress to listen to the MPAA, all of them fronting George Washington. None of those reasons has anything to back it up beyond a old fashioned payoff.
The reasons to keep the internet as it is are much more concrete. The bills as they stand break functionality, will loose people big and small real money and don’t add anything to the equation, in fact the process that the bill would implement would basically set us back years in terms of productivity and cooperative and collaborative work. The DCMA is a fine way to take down content that infringes upon people’s rights. It works, it has oversight. And the onus is on the copyright holder to complain if they feel their work is being misused.
SOPA / PIPA would allow the US Government to shutdown sites first, without a hearing. Upon receiving a complaint. What says the party in power doesn’t use this to shut down a particularly explosive story about one of its members, keep it out of the news long enough to win an election. This is censorship, plain and simple. This is not protecting jobs this is controlling information.
No one is defending piracy. We are rejecting censorship, in any form. Instead of standing up an old business models, innovate. Instead of locking people into content streams and milking them for money at every turn allow them to own their content and take it with them as they see fit. The piracy will go down. People quite simply don’t want to buy DVD’s or disks of any sort. they want files, and will pay for files, as long as the files can be played where they want them to play.
Movies have not lost their revenue due to piracy, but because going to the movies is expensive and the economy sucks. Movies need to be really good for people to throw down coin in a down-turned economy. And that is just logic.
SOPA and PIPA are great examples of how things are really broken in our government. The constituents stand up and say they don’t want something to pass, it shouldn’t pass. Government by the people, not by the bank. A business does not get to vote, and does not get calls it an abuse of power? No my friends we elect people to make that laws. the congress shouldn’t be taking their ques from companies.
You want power? You need to fight. You want to negotiate you have to ask for things you would be willing to cut to get what you really want.
The biggest problems with the SOPA and PIPA legislation that everyone saw right off the bat was DNS filtering. You force sites off the internet by blocking their website from being recognized by DNS, the system that basically runs how the internet works.
DNS as a short example: Every computer connected to the network has a unique address, like a phone number that is that computers signature as it travles about online. There are a host of rules for what address your machine ends up with, and most machines have temporary numbers, when you connect you are given a number dynamically (DHCP), but websites have a Static Address, and DNS is the phonebook that translates www.yahoo.com to 98.139.180.149. Try it… both go to the same place. Big sites have the whole address to themselves, like yahoo, google ect.
but little sites like www.caffination.com -> 74.208.150.174 share the same number with other sites. And its the job of the DNS to sort all of that out.
Well with all of that explanation MPAA has taken the most offensive portion off the table. SOPA and PIPA live on, without the obvious flaw. now the problems which remain are just as bad, but a little less obvious. The laws would require the content providers to police everything that is ever submitted for possible copy-write violation, think about the volume of videos that youtube gets. should someone have to watch every single one as it is submitted. Would you be ok if it took a couple of months for your news and reports to get out?
The laws would also would attempt to legislate non us sites with a US law. How would you feel is Russia passed a law crippling a site you use?
This is like Haggling the MPAA and their friends never really wanted DNS filtering, but how much does it chill you that a company is talking about taking things out of our laws? An organization is negotiating with lawmakers on what they want. The system isn’t supposed to work this way, but it does and its about time it stopped.
We here at the CaffiNation don’t take our freedoms lightly. And we are banding together with Boing Boing, Google and many other websites to show people what the internet means to our society. Bad legislation that gives unchecked power to not only disable sites, but to do so in a hamfisted way, which can very easily break the way the internet functions.
This doesn’t just affect people in the USA, but everywhere. But the problem is that we are the only ones who can can change things. Here is the short explanation. via Michael Geist ”
While there is little that people living outside the U.S. can do to influence SOPA and PIPA, there are many reasons why it is important for everyone to participate in tomorrow’s SOPA protest.
First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect in countries around the world.
Second, non-U.S. businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection.
Third, millions rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry, posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in an open source software project, or reading a posting on Boing Boing, the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If non-Americans remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they rely upon silenced by this legislation.
Fourth, the U.S. intellectual property strategy has long been premised on exporting its rules to other countries. SOPA virtually guarantees that this will continue.”
Why bother breaking things to try and support business models with legislation? Thats the easy part, the people who have the money have the means to grease the wheels of government. Its time to shine a light on that slimy practice and remind the lawmakers who puts them in those hallowed halls.
I’m always looking for something to spice up the show, like a fine curry one show is never quite like the next. But after 6 years its hard to see the differences some times. I’d love for people to email in and share what they like and don’t about the show. Where should we be spending our time? What do you want to hear more about? Less About? it’s your show we just host it.
CES is happening, and I’m not there. So pay attention to people who are. Like Norbert! He and the fine folks with TPN, have all the goodies.
Tonight’s show is full of puns, a ton of in jokes and a great vibe throughout. We hit on everything from Mario to Makerbots, we touch on Star wars, Coffee, and of course lots of off beat news and happenings
Vinnie Jones, known for playing tough guy roles such roles as Big Chris in” Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels”, Sphinx in “Gone in 60 Seconds, has recently starred in a commercial for “The British Heart Foundation“, where he is promoting “Hands-Only CPR” And in today’s society, I believe people would prefer Hands-Only CPR to what is usually taught.
The CaffiNation Podcast has been running since January 9th 2006, and Since April of 2006 we have been part of the fine folks at the Techpodcast Network. As it is their custom the fine folks at the TPN are winging their way to Las Vegas for CES, the consumer Electronics show. Basically a week long technology festival where all the vendors unviel thier most awesoem stuff, smaller developers get to showcase their wares, and only the best and brightest of tech shines.
We also have a friend of the Show rocking it out as a man on the Street. Norbert Davis is hunting for the best in Totally Cool Tech, So make sure to check out those websites in the coming days. But the CaffiNation will have the live stream of the TPN events on our homepage for the Duration of the conference!
Bringing the news fo the day, the rants of the hour and stealing the sign of your times. 
Thanks for Listening & Stay Caffeinated!
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