Internet

Contact Your Senators and Congress Members: Tell Them You Oppose SOPA and PIPA

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Contact information is here.

My Congressman is Danny Davis. It appears that he has not announced a position. I left a polite message asking him to vote against SOPA.

My two Senators are Mark Kirk and Richard Durbin. Kirk has come out against PIPA. Bully for him. I contacted his office and registered my approval.

I called Sen. Durbin’s office, and the person on the phone gave a well-rehearsed explanation of why the Senator supports PIPA.

I suggest that Illinois residents continue to call Sen. Durbin, and if possible have good reasons why PIPA is no good.

He may shift if the volume of contacts is large enough.

Keep working on this, please.

Update: I note that this issue seems to be a genuine example of Left / Right opposition to a naked power grab by one element of the Politico-Big Business Complex.

It is similar to the sliver of overlap on the Venn Diagram between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement: The one thing everyone who is not already an insider is opposed to is Crony Capitalism. See this post.

Does the Main Adversary at last come into view?

One can hope.

Information on SOPA and PIPA here.

Taking a Stand

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I heard on the way in to work this morning that Google was blacking out today in sympathy with Wikipedia, over the legislation currently working its way through the Democratic controlled Senate that supposedly will censor the internet. I haven’t had the time or energy to read what the actual legislation says, so I really don’t have a comment on that.

I checked over at Wikipedia and they are indeed blacked out.

So I went over to Google and as of this writing, their NAME is blacked out, but the search engine functionality is working the same as always. Oh huge stand Google.

I have been using Bing for a while now and it works just fine.

Kindle Fire

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Huzzah! My Kindle Fire arrived just in time for the weekend. I ordered the (p)leather holster for that but it appears that it may be on back order. Oh well. Full report to come after I play with this thing.


“They Still Have Libraries? Give Everybody an iPad.”

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This article was featured on Drudge today (do you really have to hat tip Drudge anymore?). It is about the library staff all mad at Mayor Rahm for cutting the budget to the libraries.

In the comments, one guy (I think smartly) said the title of this post.

I think he is partially right. The new Kindle Fire (which I have an order in for and will review when it gets to me sometime later this month) is only $199. The cheap Kindles are only $79 now. Kindles come with tens of thousands of free titles of classic books that everyone should be reading anyways. That is the most exciting part of getting a Kindle Fire for me, the ability to have this immense database at my fingertips, for free (after the initial cost).

I imagine if you took the list of “frequent flyers” who actually USE the library (not just hang out there, I mean those who really check out books and return them) and bought them ALL Kindles for $79, or even the nice new version for $199, that you would be WAY ahead of the budget it costs to run all of those brick and mortar relics, the staff, and all the rest.

This way, a library would still be partially subsidized, but part user fee as well (if you don’t like the classic titles, buy your own), so folks like me, who haven’t set foot in a real life library in decades would perhaps feel a bit better about paying for libraries.