I’ve been to the Minnesota State Fair twice so far this year (and will be going again on Saturday.) Last Sunday we walked up to Machinery Hill and they had a huge display of old tractors there.
I love old tractors.
Enjoy the photos.
More photos below the fold so you don’t have to download them all unless you want to.Continue reading →
The DNC moves us another step towards the future envisioned by Robert Heinlein in “If This Goes On“.
Who is going to play the role of Nehemiah Scudder?
Commuter Flights Grounded Thanks To Bumbling TSA Inspector
They’re the government… and remember, they’re here to help. A bumbling inspector with the Transportation Safety Administration apparently has some explaining to do, after nine American Eagle regional jets were grounded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday.
Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage… reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes’ noses as handholds.
“The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers,” one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. “They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder.”
The full story (along with a nice rant from the editor) is here.
I agree. It’s time to rein in the TSA and rework it.
If you travel outside the United States this summer, you can kiss your right to privacy, and perhaps your laptop, digital camera and cell phone, goodbye.
Did you know…
1. Border security can seize your laptop, cell phone or camera with no suspicion or explanation. And keep it indefinitely, and share the data with anyone they want to.
2. Many airports use scanners that conduct a virtual ” strip search” of passengers.
3. There are over one million names on the terrorist watch list. Including names that match former Department of Justice officials, small children and grandmothers.
4. The TSA recently expressed interest in having every airline passenger wear “electro-muscular disruption” bracelets that could be used to shock passengers into submission.
Traveling shouldn’t mean checking your rights when you’re checking your luggage. It’s time for some sanity when it comes to security.
I just asked my members of Congress to rein in travel abuses by the Department of Homeland Security. You can learn more about this and email your members of Congress at the ACLU website.
I saw this video over on the Angry Toxicologist’s blog and man is it hawt!
Of course, it’s the Dandy Warhols!
From Hack-A-Day comes this video presentation about why you should not talk to the police without a lawyer. It’s well worth the 28 minutes.
You should also watch the second half where a police detective gets up and tells about the techniques he uses to get people to talk to him.
From BoingBoing comes a research paper into the copyright issues surrounding the song “Happy Birthday To You”.
I’ll have to download this paper and read it later, but the abstract sure looks interesting:
“Happy Birthday to You” is the best-known and most frequently sung song in the world. Many – including Justice Breyer in his dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft – have portrayed it as an unoriginal work that is hardly worthy of copyright protection, but nonetheless remains under copyright. Yet close historical scrutiny reveals both of those assumptions to be false. The song that became “Happy Birthday to You,” originally written with different lyrics as “Good Morning to All,” was the product of intense creative labor, undertaken with copyright protection in mind. However, it is almost certainly no longer under copyright, due to a lack of evidence about who wrote the words; defective copyright notice; and a failure to file a proper renewal application.
The falsity of the standard story about the song demonstrates the dangers of relying on anecdotes without thorough research and analysis. It also reveals collective action barriers to mounting challenges to copyright validity: the song generates an estimated $2 million per year, and yet no one has ever sought adjudication of the validity of its copyright. Finally, the true story of the song demonstrates that a long, unitary copyright term requires changes in copyright doctrine and administration. With such a term, copyright law needs a doctrine like adverse possession to clear title and protect expectations generated when, as with this song, putative owners do not challenge distribution of unauthorized copies for more than 20 years. And Copyright Office recordkeeping policy, which currently calls for discarding correspondence after 20 years and most registration denials and deposits after five years, must be improved to facilitate resolution of disputes involving older works.
Over two hundred unpublished documents found in six archives across the United States have been made available on a website that will serve as an online appendix to this article.
From BoingBoing comes this 1990 film of a Rally Car running up Pikes Peak.
I’ve been seeing links to the new Weezer video for Pork and Beans all over the intertubes, but I’ve never clicked on it.
Today I clicked on it. It is full of total intertubic awesomeness! They must have had so much fun contacting all these internet phenomenons to make this video.
Watch it and see how many you can pick out.
