Pug’s Place

I’ve been meaning to donate to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and haven’t gotten around to it. Lo and behold I find that a fair number of people have decided to donate on November 5th. Of course the day one donates doesn’t make much difference in the Ron Paul campaign, but it seems like as good a day as any and it gives me a specific day to do my donating, so I won’t put it off as I’ve been doing.

So… remember, remember the Fifth of November.

P.S.: Graphs are impressive.

I ran across an ABC story titled “Stupid In America” which echos many negative things about our public school system which I’ve been saying for some years. Many of which can be summed up by crying, “Competition, please!”

I like one of the final points brought up in this article in particular. In response to a teacher claiming competition is bad for human beings, children and education, the author makes a nice free-market reply quoted below in context for your humor:

“To say that competition is going to improve education? It’s just not gonna work. You know competition is not for children. It’s not for human beings. It’s not for public education. It never has been, it never will be,” [Ruth Holmes Cameron, a Florida teacher] said.

Why not? Would you keep going back to a restaurant that served you a bad meal? Or a barber that gave you a bad haircut? What if the government assigned you to “your” grocery store. The store wouldn’t have to compete for your business, and it would soon sell spoiled milk or stock only high profit items. Real estate agencies would sell houses advertising “neighborhood with a good grocery store.” That’s insane, and yet that’s what America does with public schools.

At any rate, I hope this article proves fairly influential since, of course, it’s preaching a viewpoint I favor. Feel free to post your own comments in reply to this post, of course.

On an unrelated note, this journalist doesn’t know the difference between a yard and an inch whilst reporting about a Japanese rat snake befriending its meal…

A young Star Trek fan goes to school one morning and recites his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance, is written up by his teacher and suspended by the principal. His heinous words were:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.

This fan is Birdie’s son “8″ and the story Birdie tells on her blog is touching and entertaining, as are many of the comments. Of course, this is old news now, but I just ran across it.
Want a T-Shirt with the new pledge on it? Go here: http://www.cafepress.com/beautydishstuff. I’m thinking Graham needs one…

All I’ve ever done during pledge time at school is pledge allegience to Queen Mab and our mighty state of Hysteria…

My orphan works site has not turned out to be the way of submitting Orphan Works comments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge (along with FreeCulture.org) have built OrphanWorks.org. It uses none of my code (only my form layout) but look at the footer on the page — FreeCulture.org is listed alongside the EFF and PK as brothers-in-arms. Niftiness.

E wrote a blog entry holding various peoples’ opinions on flag burning to which I replied two days ago. It’s a fairly interesting conversation if only because those who have so far stated they oppose the practice of (political) flag burning have yet to offer any logical arguments, only appeals to emotion (”I think it’s disrespectful therefore it’s bad!” types of comments). Theresa also has replied with a trio of well-thought-out refutes which deserve careful reading by anyone who believes there should be a law against flag burning.

If anyone knows of a worn flag here in Gainesville which we could retire, I’d be interested in leading a proper, civilian-done burning ceremony… but one with posters around it that say, “This flag retirement is an act of protected political speech.”

Anyone who wishes to weigh in on the issue, please do so on E’s blog — I’ve disabled comments on this post for that reason.

Well, crap. It appears that high school students, in general, favor government censorship and think that the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Most think flag burning is illegal and that the government has the right to restrict indecent material on the ‘net.

…

This slashdotter points out that “Of course they don’t know (about the First Amendment), we don’t allow them to!” Heh. High schools generally grant few rights to their students, so I suppose finding that most of them believe in censorship isn’t that mind-blowing of an observation.

I think at some point in the past I pointed out that our Bill of Rights has a preamble which all the history books leave out, but for the sake of completeness I’m going to just go ahead and paste it in here for the education of all my readers. Enjoy and be amazed, for the Bill of Rights supersedes the powers of our Constitution and cannot be altered legally by the government:

The First 10 Amendments to the
Constitution as Ratified by the States
December 15, 1791
Preamble

Congress OF THE United States
begun and held at the City of New York, on Wednesday
the Fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.:

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

The Library of Congress’ Copyright Office issued a Request for Comment some time ago about what to do with so-called “orphaned” copyrighted works, things that are still protected under copyright, but their creator/custodian has been out of contact for an absurd amount of time (FreeCulture.org of course wants those works brought back into the public domain). Nobody on the Internet has made it easy to submit a comment to the Copyright Office yet, so Gavin Baker asked me to write a web-form to make it easy. There were some problems with this:

1. The CO’s requirements said that comments must be submitted as attachments. So I had to find and integrate (read, debug…) a MIME-capable PHP email routine.
2. As Prof. Lessig said, “this could be a real source of irritation to the copyright office if people abuse it.” So thus I implemented an email verification step, which meant I added a database layer to the script, and the script became an application.
3. It’s also supposed to get the word out about Free Culture, so I added the ability to sign up for our primary mailing lists straight from the form. *THIS* meant I had to find a function to perform HTTP POST operations from within PHP, or in other words access a website and fill out a form automatically for the user. That took a few minutes, but now this voodoo is with the scri– application now too.

A couple hundred other little things went into it, too (okay, maybe a couple tens of other little things ). But now it’s online. It is not, however, very informative. That’s not my responsibility, thank goodness.

Amazingly, Prof. Lessig typed out my name in a conversation with Gavin (the one which contained the above quote). I feel touched and amazed. Maybe I’m just easily amazed, but it’s not every day that someone with Prof. Lessig’s notoriety refers to you.

From the Associated Press…

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government agency in charge of airport security spent nearly a half-million dollars on an awards ceremony at a lavish hotel, including $81,000 for plaques and $500 for cheese displays, according to an internal report obtained by The Associated Press.

Awards were presented to 543 Transportation Security Administration employees and 30 organizations, including a “lifetime achievement award” for one worker with the 2-year-old agency. Almost $200,000 was spent on travel and lodging for attendees.

I feel so safe now!

Anyway, if you’re reading this you should be complaining to the TSA, but more importantly be complaining to U.S. Congressman Jeff Miller and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson (assuming you live in NW Florida). I write these gentlemen several times a month, you should too.

By JOE SHARKEY

Published in the New York Times, November 23, 2004

At a security checkpoint recently at the Fort Lauderdale airport, Patti LuPone, the singer and actress, recalled, she was instructed to remove articles of clothing. “I took off my belt; I took off my clogs; I took off my leather jacket,” she said. “But when the screener said, ‘Now take off your shirt,’ I hesitated. I said, ‘But I’ll be exposed.’ ” When she persisted in her complaints, she said, she was barred from her flight.

the screener said, ‘Now take off your shirt,’

… Read the rest…

If you live on-campus at UF and you don’t want to be left out of emerging technologies, you should sign this petition.

Time to post it far and wide.