Stay Free! Daily

The Church of Ticketmaster

My friend was searching for tickets to Cavestomp and came across this captcha:

As he put it, "even the church wouldn't tack a $9 surcharge on top of a $35 ticket purchase..."

Thanks M*I*K*E

A kinder, gentler assertion of rights

A recent article about my neighborhood in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had a very forward-thinking copyright notice at the end.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007 All materials posted on BrooklynEagle.com are protected by United States copyright law. Just a reminder, though -- It's not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph, (40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues. So please keep posting, but not the entire article.

It strikes me as a really genteel way of merging social convention with copyright law in a way that acknowledges fair use and the rights of the original author. If your magazine goes behind a pay-wall, though, I'm still posting the whole thing.

And I apologize to the good folks at the BDE for posting the whole copyright notice.

A

The War on Emoticons

The International Herald Tribune had a great article yesterday about the insidious creep of emoticons into emails between "adults." It starts light:

There are many ways to console someone when a multimillion-dollar business deal falls through.... [Alexis Feldman] was working on a major deal when, "at the 23rd hour," she received "an e-mail from the broker saying: 'Sorry, my client is not interested in the space, too bad we couldn't make the big bucks' " And then there was a frown face emoticon.

Oddly enough, the article gets deadly serious:

Christopher Michel, the founder and chairman of Military.com, a military and veteran affairs Web site, said that usage of emoticons had grown "hyper-pervasive" in his communiqués even with admirals at the Pentagon, where they provide a certain cover for high-ranking leaders to comment on sensitive matters.  "A wink says quite a lot," said Michel, a former lieutenant commander in the navy. "An admiral could say a wink means a thousand different things - but I know what it means. It's a kind of code."

How the hell did these little slugs, designed to clear up ambiguity and appropriate only for IM's between half-literate teenagers, morph into the military's solution to 'plausible deniabilty'?

I almost can't wait for Alberto Gonzales's next attempt to justify his lies about the domestic surveillance program. "The cameras weren't on me when I was answering your question, Senator, but as I'm sure you recall, I was sticking my tongue out of the left side of my mouth. I have asked the stenographer to add that to the record of my testimony."

The Internet Makes Us Dumberer

The Pew Institute issued yet another study about how stupid Americans are, and how we are getting stupider. (Query: At what point do the scientists decide Americans are as dumb as possible and stop studying this? Check back in November 2008, I guess.) Wired's take on the story is "despite the Internet, we are less informed."

Despite the internet? Through that lens, this study is no surprise at all: Let's foist the most distracting blink-box in history on a nation of idiots begging to be distracted and see if they linger on the boring parts.

The capitalist response to Sicko

Google started taking its first steps into evil when it allowed China to begin filtering content. It took its first big local step when it encouraged HMO's to buy GoogleAds using Sicko as a keyword to counter the message of the movie. (This is yet another reason why Stay Free! is an Ad-Free Blog - it is hard enough to rouse ourselves to provide content for the blog; we'd hate to be undone by our own sidebar.)

The Google founders do seem like good guys, and the motto "Do No Evil" is a noble sentiment. Alas, this is another bit of proof that incorporating one's company is a lot like getting bit by a vampire - no matter how good a person you were before the bite, and no matter how hard you want to still be that person, you are eventually going to start drinking human blood.

In any event, we are big fans of Sicko and you really should watch the movie (it's free!).

(Movie link via Liam)

The libertarian response to Sicko

I'm on an email list devoted on iatrogensis—medical problems created by medical treatments—that has a strong libertarian contingent, so I've had a chance to read several right-wing critiques of Michael Moore's new movie, Sicko.

I agree with one popular criticism: Moore should have acknowledged that Cuba is a hell hole. But I've yet to find any serious argument debunking the main point: that American health care is seriously screwed. In fact, the critiques all follow pretty much the same formula. Most cite inconsequential anecdotes of bad health care experiences in Canada, England, and the other countries Moore visited. The more substantial criticisms point out that people in, say, Canada and England may face long waits for medical care, that hospital infection rates are high, and that some people may be denied care if that care is deemed "experimental."

...and so?  I'm still waiting for a problem that's not also common in America. Canada has long waits in emergency rooms? Been to an American E.R. lately? England has high rates of hospital-induced infections? America's private market hasn't solved that problem yet either. (The iatrogensis email list was created to respond to the problem of hospital-borne disease in the US!) Experimental treatments are explicitly excluded from all American health care plans—and the insurers get to decide what counts as "experimental," even if a treatment plan has evidence of past success.

The one thing Canada, England, and the other countries don't have in common with the US is 47 million people who are uninsured. That feat is America's alone. For many of those people, that means no medical care at all. Somehow America has managed to have the worst of both worlds—we have all of the disadvantages of the other healthcare systems without the advantages: 47 million uninsured, relatively low life expectancy, high infant mortality, and low overall health compared to other industrialized nations. (See This New Yorker story.)

The only complaint that makes sense applies only to those Canadians, Europeans, and Cubans who have so much money that they can afford whatever health care they want, when they want it. Okay, you win: if you're super rich, America is the place to be. But Sicko wasn't created for the super rich; it was created for the rest of us.

Carrie on Consumerist

While not working on Stay Free!, Carrie does home improvement. A lot of this means going outside and the outside is not always friendly to her. To minimize the inevitable mosquito assault, she did some research and product testing on mosquito avoidance techniques and products. Her findings are over at Consumerist.

Uh, Cartoon Network…You're Supposed to Pay for Advertising.

Did Cartoon Network's marketing team learn nothing from their Aqua Teen Hunger Force Boston bomb scare debacle? The one that resulted in $2 million in fines and the resignation of the network's general manager? (Not to mention that the eventual ATHF movie was a bigger bomb than any device planted in Beantown.)

And now they're resorting to splog. This week, I checked in on the messageboard for the band the db's, where I had once before uncovered corporate comment spam. There was now another very random posting which asked:

Does anyone watch Storm Hawks? It’s on Mondays on CN… does anyone remember if it’s the cute girl Piper who rides the heliscooter or if it’s the big strong guy, Junko? My friends and I all watched the first episode, but no one can agree.

I poked around on the Internet and found the same sentences posted on several other sites. Digging deeper, I found dozens of web pages with this alternate text:

Did anyone catch Storm Hawks on Cartoon Network? I watched it, and I was impressed by the way it looked! The animation was really smooth, but it looked like they used CGI too to make it look more realistic. What did anyone else think?

And who knows which other variations are out there. Listen, Cartoon Network, I know it's hard to grab the kids' attention these days. I know you have to think "outside the box." And I know you probably have a $2 million hole in your marketing budget. But show an ounce of class and try to play by the rules. Or else you're going to spend a lot more time in court, and attorney-at-law Harvey Birdman won't be able to help you.

NCAA Says "Don't Promote Our Product"

Apparently not content with the miniscule coverage given to college baseball, the NCAA has decided that it prefers "virtually zero." A reporter for the largest newspaper in Kentucky was thrown out of a University of Louisville game in the College World Series because "it is against NCAA policies" to liveblog the game. It remains to be seen how much liveblogging this actually stops because NCAA policy only prevents him from liveblogging from the event - and the event was broadcast nationally, live. Also, someone in the crowd might own a PDA.

A lot of people are accusing the NCAA of copyright enforcement thuggery but I think that the NCAA is actually just being the ultimate internet purist: bloggers don't belong in the press box; they should be at home in their pajamas.

(Via CSTB)

Spamtastic!

I'm no Spamusements, but I'd like to take a moment for more spam-based miscellany.

1) In the spirit of Toby the Rabbit, we were forwarded this email from reader Tosha:

>Hello my friend!
>
>I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices [at an online pharmacy
>I have no intention of linking to] are bad.
>
>Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..
>
>My dog and I are still alive :)

I point out that "1-800" while kindly toll-free, is not actually a complete number. And that the website had a .hk domain; perhaps a joke about eating one's dog is not the best tactic.

2) I received an email with the subject "Best way to improve your credit score"; I didn't read it but I'll bet it said "Pay your bills, asshole."