Tony Pierce has a list of things that he likes about our country. God, I love his writing (especially the complete disregard of punctuation). Oh, and Tony's taking donations so he can buy a car, in case you have some spare credits in your PayPal account that you would like to give him.
2:21:44 PM
Carolyn Elfant writes about a recent Louisiana Supreme Court decision that, in her view, requires lawyers to "shoot themselves in the foot."
12:48:54 PM
“Matrix Reloaded” is, unlike the first film, a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie, and in places a ludicrously campy conventional comic-book movie. It feels not so much like “Matrix II” as like “Matrix XIV”—a franchise film made after a decade of increasing grosses and thinning material. The thing that made the Matrix so creepy—the idea of a sleeping human population with a secondary life in a simulated world—is barely referred to in the new movie; in fact, if you hadn’t seen the first film, not just the action but the basic premise would be pretty much unintelligible."
Here's his description of Zion:
"Like every good-guy citadel in every science-fiction movie ever made, Zion is peopled by stern-jawed uniformed men who say things like “And what if you’re wrong, God damn it, what then?” and “Are you doubting my command, Captain?” and by short-haired and surprisingly powerful women whose eyes moisten but don’t overflow as they watch the men prepare to go off to war."
The Matrix Reloaded is now teeming with villans:
"The Matrix, far from being a rigorously imposed program, turns out to be as porous as good old-fashioned reality, letting in all kinds of James Bond villains. (They are explained as defunct programs that refused to die, but they seem more like character ideas that refused to be edited.)"
The painful scene with Merovingian, the over-the-top francophile:
"the Merovingian ... announces that 'choice is an illusion created between zose wis power and zose wisout' as he constructs a virtual dessert with which he inflames the passion of a virtual woman. The stunning Monica Bellucci appears as his wife, who sells out his secrets in exchange for a remarkably chaste kiss from Neo, while Trinity looks on, smoldering like Betty in an “Archie” comic.
Go read the whole review because the best part is his analysis of why the first movie was so wonderful and intriguing. I think I'm going to go watch it again after reading his review, and hopefully erase some of the awful memories from the new movie.
Each time Congress passes a law extending the term of copyrights it means that works that might otherwise pass into the public domain (where they can be used for free by our information-hungry citzenry) don't. Only a very small percentage of the works that get these perpetual extensions are actually being exploited commercially. In short, no one cares about most of them. And yet they remain locked up.
Why? Because the people who own the works that can be commercially exploited have no economic interest in passing a law that contains a creative exception for unexploited works. And unless someone with money proposes a law, or an exception to a law, no one in Congress will listen. Even if someone comes up with a brilliantly creative solution that protects the corporate interests.
Larry Lessig has come up with such a perfect solution, which he explains here. And, apparently, he is having trouble getting a person in Congress to even introduce the legislation (Larry is only an exceptionally intelligent and well-informed law professor, who is an expert in Copyright law and the Internet, so what would he know about drafting a law that solves a Copyright problem, right?)
So, since he can't get the attention of Congress on this matter, he needs your help. Let's beseige our congresspersons with emails, and letters, and banners and whatever we can come up with to alert them to Lessig's very simple solution. All we want is someone to sponsor the legislation that Lessig is proposing. Is there anything unreasonable about that?
