Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

about this kid that decides to break copyright law on a scale the record industry can only dream of, gets prosecuted, and decides that death is better* than indentured servitude as he would have to pay off a huge fine and/or jail for the rest of his life, and deciding to do so even before actually appealing to a judge for leniency which is often granted in copyright cases.

really.  i don't care.  he wasn't a hero, he was a thief who got caught.

Is there a problem in that publishers often don't redistribute royalties to the authors?  of course there is.  in some cases it is contractual (the author accepts the initial advance in lieu of fighting for accounting which often doesn't amount to much).  in other cases, yes, the publishers are being jerks through bad accounting practices.  this latter case happens in ALL the creative industries, from records that never recoup in spite of selling hundreds of thousands, to Lord of the Rings never making a profit on 1 billion in ticket sales collectively.

but if one is going to practice civil disobedience to raise awareness for an issue, one should accept the consequences of that.  Any 'academic' should know that, from Emerson, to Thoreau, MLK Jr, and even Jesus, all of whom accepted the jail time that came with the disobedience they practiced.

This kid didn't.  he cut an ran.  he wasn't a hero, he was a coward.

and I have no sympathy at all.

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* I'm aware that he suffered from depression, as is the case in most suicides, and that the prosecutors involved ignored that and refused to come to some arrangement, but all things being equal, the law is the law.  He simply shouldn't have done that if he wasn't able to deal with the inevitable consequences of prosecution.

Every once in a while you see a poll result that just leaves your jaw agape. Here’s a perfect example. A Public Policy Polling survey over the weekend asked who respondents thought was more responsible for the death of Osama Bin Laden, President Obama or Mitt Romney.

Now the answer to this should be obvious, since Romney could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Not so to Republican voters in that state, apparently, since only 38% of them answered Obama — with 15% saying Romney gets more credit and 47% saying they don’t know. I’m dumbfounded.

There is a scam originating from this phone number. You are called (in this case, my wife was but they were asking for me) and informed you have been sued and must call this number 704-464-1068 (a Charlotte number, hence my reporting it to North Carolina). When you call, you are told about some credit card debt, usually a negligible amount (in this case, about $668) and that they have been trying to reach you for years (in this case, since 2009 going to 2011).

They may have some personal information on you but in my case it was almost 20 years out of date.

They also claim the client* is Wachovia, but Wachovia has been Wells Fargo for several years now**.

The main part of the scam is that they are willing to settle 'pennies on the dollar' (typical scam catch phrase) provided you give them your financial data. I of course did not. If I was really being sued, the settlement would still go through a proper collections agency that's BBB certified or directly through the bank itself.

After failing enough 'sniff tests', I googled and found others harassed by the same operation: http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-704-464-0168/1 . At no point did I give them any new personal information other than the city I live in.  As I did not lose any money, I have no need of 'resolution' - I just think this likely illegal operation should be stopped.

If you'd really like to support gays and lesbians in a world lousy with Chick-fil-As, how about this tactic instead: From now on, don't fucking eat at Chick-fil-A if you are a person who believes gays are equal to you and deserving of equal treatment under the law. No equivocating and no buying back karma with pity donations to gay-rights groups. Simply avoid the chain for as long as it upholds its homophobic ties. Full stop.

Is this really that hard to do? Is Chick-fil-A so delicious that people are willing to ignore their most cherished principles in order to eat a couple handfuls of its sodium-drenched chicken wads? I haven't eaten Chick-fil-A in about a decade, but the last time I did, I don't remember it being all that spectacular. The meat was average and the buns were soggy, soaked through with butter and brine from anemic pickle discs. It certainly wasn't good enough food to get me to forsake my belief that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. Which is why, when I found out Chick-fil-A's Southern Baptist leaders believed otherwise, I stopped eating there and started eating at the thousands of other places that serve greasy, hastily made, inexpensive sandwiches.

The short story is that the driver of the pickup, a nineteen year old with no previous accidents or traffic violations, slammed into the back of the semi after it had slowed for construction. The pickup was then crushed by the first school bus, which was impacted by the second school bus. The first bus ended up sitting on top of the semi, both axels completely off the ground, with the remains of the pickup crushed below it. While it is impossible to know if the driver of the pickup was texting at the moment of the impact, according to the NTSB they had “sent or received 11 texts in the 11 minutes immediately before the crash”.

The problem with this article, and the attempt by the NTSB to use it to gain public momentum in their quest against distracted driving, is that much of the fault lies with the driver of the first school bus. No mention is made regarding the bus driver’s responsibility to follow a safe distance, nor to pay attention to road conditions farther than the bumper of the vehicle directly ahead. An article from the Huntington Post, posted just after the accident happened in August of 2010, makes no specific mention of the time of day or if there were any low-visibility conditions. However the photos show the accident scene during daylight hours and there are no obvious reasons why the bus driver would have been unable to clearly see what was happening ahead.

The emphasis on cell phones and texting dangers become even less significant when, towards the end of the article, they admit “Investigators also found significant problems with the brakes of both school buses involved in the accident. A third school bus sent to a hospital after the accident to pick up students crashed in the hospital parking lot when that bus’ brakes failed.” Yet of course “the brake problems didn’t cause or contribute to the severity of the accident, investigators said”.

Any responsible driver will admit that texting while driving is certainly not a safe activity, and while we can debate if it is more or less dangerous than eating, shaving, dealing with the kids, or any of the millions of things we do behind the wheel that don’t involve piloting the car the NTSB is spinning this story into a cell phone/texting safety issue. The article itself even points out that the driver was breaking the law, as Missouri already bans any driver under 21 from texting while driving. How further laws would have worked to prevent this tragedy is not explained.

If we are going to ban the use of portable devices while behind the wheel, it should be based on actual facts as they relate to the safety of those devices and not ignore the simple lack of driver training and skill that is truly the real cause behind many of these types of accidents.

There was a time, admittedly so long ago that liberals freely roamed the political landscape, when banks made profits and didn’t have to have to gouge customers. In fact, they made profits, and debit cards hadn’t even been invented yet (terrifying, isn’t it, kids?). How did they do this?

National Public Radio announced Sunday that its new CEO would be Gary Knell, CEO of the Sesame Workshop, home of Sesame Street. What do you think?