Sunday, July 28, 2002

Avast Ye Scurvy Dogs, part the second Great summary of where we stand in the battle to retake a future that once seemed so full of promise. In a nutshell, we're losing. Money talks, the people's rights walk. And I quote: "If you or I asked Congress for permission to legally hack other people's computers, we'd be laughed off Capitol Hill. Then we'd be investigated by the FBI and every other agency concerned with criminal violations of privacy and security. Then again, you and I aren't part of the movie and music business. We aren't as powerful as an industry that knows no bounds in its paranoia and greed, a cartel that boasts enough money and public-relations talent to turn Congress into a marionette.  ... The fact that this control would do enormous damage to your rights, and to the future of innovation in a nation that desperately needs more innovation, is apparently beside the point. These are discouraging times. In the past several months, the cartel has won battle after battle in courts and legislatures, with pathetic opposition from the one industry most threatened by this trend. With few exceptions, technology companies are turning into lapdogs for Hollywood and its allies. ... One dollar, one vote? Until you start caring, and acting, that's the way it will be." Tell it, brother Gillmor! This article is an excellent summary of recent developments in this ongoing fiasco. Our rights as consumers are being sold down the river. Read about the Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act, learn about the broadcast flag that'll prevent all you TIVO owners from recording shows so you can watch them when you want to watch them. We are moving backwards rather than forwards technologically. Another sign of the times, I guess. SOURCE: SJ Mercury News: Hacking, hijacking our rights. Dan Gillmor] 8:05:24 PM    comment [] Swimming Lesson We usually think that things are changing around us, rushing by at a mad pace and making us feel unstable, so we try to slow them down. We try to establish a firm footing on what is really shifting ground, which only makes us more uneasy. We act as though we are solid unchanging things that changes happen to, but that is impossible. If we carry the idea through that things are changing, we see for ourselves that we are change, that what is at the heart of things is changingness. What the Buddha said is that it is because we don't see the true nature of things that we suffer. We feel at sea, and we're seasick because we think things should hold still. The Buddha's prescription would be: learn to swim. Impermanence is a great river of phenomena, of beings, things, and events, coming to be and passing away in dependence on each other. This natural order of things includes us, and its laws are our laws. We are an endless moving stream in an endless moving stream. (Jisho Warner, Stone Creek Zendo, Sebastapol, California, taken from the book 365 Zen Daily Readings edited by Jean Smith, 1999, HarperCollins Books) 11:12:49 AM    comment []

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