Rojo

Why must I be such a sarcastic jerk sometimes?
 
First, I'm very thankful for the awards, links, mentions, kudos, etc. that I and this blog have ever received. I'm not here to talk about the people giving the accolades nor am I seeking to diminish their value. Instead, I'm jumping on the freakin' bandwagon!
 

GorillaSushi.com has been nominated for a Bloggers' Choice by Lis,

The girls of this site have gotten one of these from BabyWhisperingLoudly,

And I (and my wang) have been given one of these by Mostly True Stories.

There was one of these from Five4All,

and one of these from Paula The Surf Mom.

and I have a closet full of these but I'll skip the details (to avoid bragging).

Again, thank you to all of the super kind people above and everyone else who's ever linked or mentioned us.
 
Now on to my contribution.

• My award is meant to praise nothing in particular.
• It's meaningless.
• It may just be too edgy for you and your Sunday afternoon canasta group.
• It can be given to friends or to yourself.
• It's totally snarky/sassy.

It's simply called Another Blog Award and it comes in 2 flavors!
 
For the optimist...

Copy the code below to add it to your own site.
<a href="http://www.gorillasushi.com/?q=node/472" target="_blank"><img width="120" vspace="6" hspace="6" height="120" border="0" src="http://www.gorillasushi.com/images/imce/Image/Jason/awards/abaopt.gif" alt="" /></a>
 
And for the pessimist...

Copy the code below to add it to your own site.
<a href="http://www.gorillasushi.com/?q=node/472" target="_blank"><img width="120" vspace="6" hspace="6" height="120" border="0" src="http://www.gorillasushi.com/images/imce/Image/Jason/awards/abapess.gif" alt="" /></a>
 
Am I serious? Sure! New awards are fun and you're likely to really confuse anyone that you give it too. YES, using the code will link back to this post but that's what most awards do - link back to the originator.
 
Use them wisely, my friends.  

This week: Bush ignores yet another section of the Bill of Rights, the FCC cracks down on naughty words, webcasters sense 'the shaft', an update to the question, "Are teenagers allowed to do the nasty?", companies don't like you buying cheap stuff on eBay, Indiana decides that pollution isn't so bad if the price is right, and the FBI is secretly putting crap on your PC.

Really, it was more of a suggestion, anyway - This should be the biggest story of the week, but for some reason, no one's really reporting on it. By signed order directly from President Bush, law enforcement may now freeze all assets of any person found to be "threatening the peace or stability of Iraq" or "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq". But that's not all. The determination of who exactly may be effected under this order is left entirely in the hands of the Secretary of the Treasury; no where does it say that there will be any 'due process' at any point after action is taken, nor does it indicate that there are any constraints (time, evidentiary, or otherwise) to proceed such a freeze, so there's nothing to stop 'freeze and forget' actions with no apparent recourse. It does mention that this applies to people who have taken action, or even associated, with people in violation of this order "directly or indirectly", leaving miles of wiggle room for the Secretary should he ever (for some odd reason) be forced to justify a freeze. We're starting to run out of Amendments to the Bill of Rights that are still...well...our rights. Have these people even read the Constitution? I'm going to be optimistic here and assume that this gets smacked down in court the first time it appears there, but it had better get there fast; this is just scary.

All these G**d*** prudes... - "The Protecting Children from Indecent Programming Act". Has a nice ring of security to it, doesn't it? This newly passed bill allows the FCC to fine broadcasters for the use any expletive at any time, regardless of context (ie slip of the tongue, 'high art', ect). This overrules a previous appellate court ruling as well as the FCC's previous policy of examining curse words on a case-by-case basis, wherein in the right context, even the dreaded F-bomb could be considered acceptable. Do we really need this? I mean, I understand the (crazy) motivation of the Special Interest Groups that demand this sort of thing, but are the current 'case-by-case' rules really not working? Are there even that many times it needs to be applied? And most importantly, isn't there better things Congress could be doing right now?

Enforced abstinence - One of the most divisive sexual assault cases of all time is now headed to the state Supreme Court. The case concerns a male, at the time 17, who was convicted of having oral sex with his girlfriend, at the time 15. Considering that she was underage, he was charged with aggravated child molestation...and sentenced to 10 years in prison. A few things have changed since the ruling a year or so ago, namely the state (Georgia, if this surprises you in the least) has added a "Romeo and Juliet" clause to their child molestation laws, giving the courts wiggle room in judging and sentencing offenders with similar ages. What hasn't changed, however, is the verdict in this particular case. An appellate court judge recently described the sentence as "a grave miscarriage of justice", but declined to act on this. Before I comment, also know that, under Georgia law, the teen would have gotten a lesser sentence had he had actual sex with the girl, since Georgia considers oral sex to be 'sodomy', which is a crime. Now, obviously, there's a whole lot of things going on with this case. First off is the issue of consent. Is an 8 year old able to consent? Of course not. Can a 15 year old? I don't know. Should it matter that the two were of similar age? I certainly think so. If we ignore that, a sizable portion of high schoolers (in an environment that straddles age of consent to some degree) would be in jail right now, from what I've seen. Should he have gotten such an enormous sentence? I don't think so, but that goes back to the other two issues, as well. I think a key point for that is also that the boy had a clean record prior to this; no convictions whatsoever. Regardless of the outcome, I think this case could be a potential good for the nation, in that it demands we come out of our shells and discuss how the law clashes with modern views of sexuality.

The day the music quality sucked - Here's an update on the Internet radio shutdown story from last week. At the time, the deadline had been put on hold for small webcasters while negotiations of a better settlement were worked on. Now, those talks are stalled, and here's why: they are demanding that webcasters impliment a broadcast flag. This, ladies and gentlemen, is bullshit. An end-run around the law, plain and simple. The RIAA has wanted to force broadcast flags (digital information simulcast with TV or radio streams that prevent them from being recorded) for years, and in 2005, Congress actually mandated their use in TVs. However, just before going into effect, a federal court smacked down the mandate, stating that the FCC has 'exceeded their authority'. Yet now, here we are again. With the RIAA using Congress to blackmail small webcasters. "Do as we say, or we'll put you out of business". History has shown us by now that the 'revenue loss' arguments of the media industries are crap. Remember the Betamax Case, where the MPAA tried to have the use of VCRs declared illegal? And did VCRs end up putting the movie industry out of business? No. Blockbuster rather thrived from the proliferation of the devices, regardless of the fact that movies could be taped off of broadcast TV. The same situation applies here. No one's going to attempt to get all of their music from a ripped stream, or even a bulk of it. I find it too much of a hassle to have ever bothered with it at all. More importantly, implementation of a broadcast flag could hurt sound quality, and up bandwidth usage, while providing no benefit whatsoever to the end user, while simultaneously making it illegal for users to create perfectly legal, home-use time shifted stream copies. Remember, kids, there's still a bill languishing in committee that could stop all this madness outright (HR2060), and it's not to late to contact a representative about it.

Low prices? Not on my watch! - eBay, as well as any other online free markets out there, could be in trouble. It started with the recent Supreme Court decision LCLP v. PSKS, which found that, in their situation, LCLP was allowed to refuse to sell their product to any distributor that sold for less than the minimum price they demanded they set. Flash forward to...well, a couple days later. In at least two cases thus far, retailers have cited the decision the demand the takedown of eBay auctions of their products, saying that they, too, have set a minimum price for their retailers, and that EVER selling their items for less is a violation of their contracts with retailers. Not that the eBay sellers had a contract to violate; they're violating someone ELSE'S contract. Those two cases are still in trial, but for the moment, eBay is complying with the takedown order. Naturally, two cases isn't exactly a tidal wave. But this is a dangerous precedent: Supreme Court endorsed price fixing. Best we can really hope for in this case is that they issue a statement clarifying the scope here.

Feeding you toxic waste for a better tomorrow  - This is a big deal in the Chicagoland area, but it's also getting national attention for the sheer audacity of the situation. The Indiana division of the EPA has given BP exemptions from state dumping laws to allow them to drastically increase the amount of ammonia and toxic heavy metals that they dump into Lake Michigan. While their levels will still be below federal levels, this is the first time a company has ever been allowed to increase the amount of pollution they dump into the lake. The state used a little-cited act that allows companies to ignore pollution laws if there is "important social or economic benefits" that would come from the change; the state legislature notes that this change would create up to 80 new jobs. Wait, that's it? This is the reason that Lake Michigan is closed every other week due to it being too dangerous? This is the reason that tourists come away remembering the smell, and not the look of the lake? For cripes sake, this is our DRINKING water (not Indiana's; but we are just a few miles away from the dump site). Listen. We've made our mistakes with the environment; we know this now. So....no more increasing pollution. At all. For any reason. It's just...that...simple.

You will not know until it is too late - Interesting couple of stories that came up this week about how much we can really trust the companies that are supposed to be keeping us safe. Court documents in the case where the FBI was tracking down a high school bomb threat revealed that the agency remotely installed spyware on the suspect's computer to document his every activity online. It alludes to the fact that it was installed through an email, but doesn't go into any of the technical details. The real question here is, how did it get past his anti-spyware applications? The student at one point launched a DoS attack against his school, so we can assume he's not an idiot, and most likely had some degree of protection. This means two possibilities: either the FBI is aware of an undocumented Windows security hole that they've somehow convinced Microsoft and every security researcher out there to keep quiet about, or...they have an agreement with the various anti-spyware companies out there to ignore their product. The latter seems far more likely, so CNet polled the most popular companies out there about their policies. While none of the companies explicitly said that they were ignoring government spyware, most said that if they received a court order telling them to do so, they would comply - and neither Microsoft nor McAfee would comment to whether they have ever received such an order. Which brings us around to the obvious question: why bother? Why are we actually giving these people money when they admit they'll let certain people through? The obvious answer is "because it's better than no protection at all", but I refuse to accept that that's all there is. It's long been an issue that these companies are willing to ignore spyware from 'trusted' sources (such as WildTangent from AOL), but this goes way beyond that; this thing collects data on you and reports back to someone. Suppose someone gets a hold of this thing and reverse-engineers it? The result would be devastating. It all goes back to public disclosure and general transparency: we need to be doing it.

Whew! That's all the energy I've got for this week. Hope you got some insight out of all that, and I'll see you next week with more stuff from all over!