ryan.freebern.org

Recently I was thinking about the whole copyright/software patents/DRM/DMCA kerfuffle, and it struck me that it’s a very interesting story with a lot of neat characters, and it would make a great documentary along the lines of “This Film is Not Yet Rated”. I discussed it with friends, all of whom agreed that it could make a great film. There could be interviews with Jon Johansen (of DeCSS fame), Bruce Schneier, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Steve Jobs, Page and Brin, maybe even an anonymous informant from within the RIAA or MPAA.

Today, I watched a video of Cory Doctorow giving a talk about these topics (his favorites) at Google. You can watch on YouTube if you’re interested. It’s an hour long including the Q&A session at the end, but Doctorow is a compelling speaker and it’s a great talk if you care about information freedom and the future of technology. The reason I bring it up, though, is that thirty minutes into his talk (at 30:45, actually), he offhandedly mentions that he’s “doing some consulting on a movie” that Kirby Dick, the creator of “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” is doing.

So I think that, given Doctorow’s involvement, maybe Dick is actually in the process of making that copyright/software patents/DRM documentary that I dreamed up. You heard it here first!

I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t care about the Oscars this year. In 2006, according to this page, there were 354 movies released. I saw 9 of them in theatres: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand, Casino Royale, Borat, V for Vendetta, The Illusionist, A Prairie Home Companion, Marie Antoinette, and The Notorious Bettie Page. Of those, I didn’t enjoy Borat, I was unimpressed by Marie Antoinette, and I thought The Illusionist, Dead Man’s Chest, and The Last Stand didn’t live up to what they could have been. The two movies from that list I really loved — Prairie Home Companion and V for Vendetta — didn’t get any Oscar nominations. So, meh.

I don’t have a lot of movie-watching time, but I do like to keep on top of the stuff considered really great. Which movie released in 2006 that I haven’t seen do you think is really worth seeing?

Many people are becoming more environmentally conscious in general and opting for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Even those who don’t care about the environment are watching the steady rise of gas prices and realizing that fuel efficiency is good for their wallet. As a result, SUV sales have been declining fairly consistently for the last two years.

Last year, GM lost over $10 billion due to its focus on SUVs and large trucks and disregard for compact cars and trucks. Investors got scared. GMAC, their financing arm, is weakened and about to be partially sold. Their credit rating has been dropping lately, and they’ve been given a negative outlook by investment firms.

So what does GM do to reassure its investors that things will be okay? How do they say “look, we know what’s causing the problems, and we’re going to correct it”? That’s right: by increasing production of its full-size SUVs, the same ones that they haven’t been able to sell for the past year. Good move, GM.

Meanwhile, sales of hybrids continue to climb at an astonishing rate. Ford has realized this; why hasn’t GM?

Boing Boing: Big theater chains refuse to show Soderbergh’s “Bubble”

Soderbergh is taking a novel approach to distributing this movie, one that I’ve thought of in the past: he’s releasing it in theatres, on pay-per-view television, and on DVD all on the same day. His rationale is that movies are already hitting the internet the same day they hit theatres, so why not give people other options than illegally downloading it?

The movie theatres, understandably, are upset. They say giving people these options will decrease their profits. This is potentially true, and I’m curious to see how it goes.

However, occasionally I’ll see a movie in a theatre, and love it so much that I’d be willing to buy the DVD immediately, if it were available. If the movie theatres simply set up a DVD stand in their lobby where you could purchase the DVD of a movie you just saw, at a lower price than in a DVD store, by presenting your ticket stub, I bet lots of moviegoers would take advantage of it.

In any case, bravo to Soderbergh for attempting to tackle the movie-downloading problem through unconventional means. Instead of engaging in pointless lawsuits that have been proven to discourage nobody, this approach is productive and thoughtful, and could help to update the film industry’s business model to compete in today’s high-bandwidth world.

Edit: Mark Cuban, who owns Landmark Theaters (which is the only chain actually showing “Bubble”), agrees with me, but is a much more eloquent guy, so go read his post.

Browncoats Rise Again. The fund-raising drive to revive Joss Whedon’s Firefly. (Warning: loud Flash movie.)

A group of Firefly fans is trying to raise enough money to produce 24 new episodes of Firefly. That’s $24 million, they estimate. While I’d love to see this happen, I somehow just can’t see that kind of money being raised. But if you really love the series, go donate! At the very worst, all the cash donated will end up going to a charity of Joss Whedon’s choosing.

When she gets too burned out on studying, Sarah’s been playing the game “Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life” on our GameCube since I bought it for her for Christmas. It’s a lot like both Animal Crossing and The Sims in that you’re controlling a character in all aspects of his life, as he attempts to run his farm, make friends, engage in romance, and more.

Meanwhile, I’m attempting to learn basic Italian for our upcoming trip. I’ve been using the short lessons at LearnItalianPod.com as well as at the BBC website, and I’ve got a book out of the library to help me.

While watching Sarah play for a few minutes the other day, it struck me that combining these two activities could quite possibly be the best way to learn a new language. When I start learning a language, I find it pretty easy to learn the rules of grammar: how to construct sentences, in what order to place words, how to manipulate endings to form plurals, etc. What I have trouble with is learning enough vocabulary that I would feel comfortable, or at least not totally lost, in all the various situations I might find myself.

Harvest Moon takes your character and has him engage in a large number of common real-life activities: cooking, shopping, ordering food, looking for people, exchanging small-talk, sleeping, cleaning up, and so on. What if, instead of all English, it began the game by replacing a few common words with words in another language. Instead of “bring your milk to this cooler,” it could tell you to bring your latte to the cooler. Instead of picking a flower, you’d pick a fiore. Instead of your cow being hungry, it could be affamata. Slowly, as the game progressed, more and more common terms could be replaced with their foreign equivalents. At some point, new characters could appear who only spoke in Italian, and you’d have to figure out what they’re saying in order to interact. Eventually, all the text in the game could be in Italian, and if the change was gradual enough, over the course, of many dozens of hours of play, the player might not even miss a beat.

This would, I think, work better than other methods, because 1) people love playing videogames, and will gladly do them for hours, even if they don’t necessarily understand all the words, 2) part of playing games is solving puzzles, so players’ brains would just interpret the foreign language as another type of puzzle, and 3) all the words used would be shown in a familiar sort of context, with visual cues to aid in understanding.

Videogames appeal to young and old alike, so this could potentially be a great learning tool for anyone. Kids are naturally more adept at learning languages, too, so it would work even better for them. And the marketing opportunities are tremendous: sell it to videogamers as a game, or to parents or educators as a learning tool.

I use AudioScrobbler, a service provided by Last.fm that keeps track of what songs I listen to when. Even though I know anyone can observe my listening habits and judge me based on that, I don’t let it affect what I listen to. As you can see on my profile page, along with such inarguably fantastic music as Thievery Corporation, Zero 7, and The Ditty Bops, I’ve also got some remarkably cheesy artists like Neil Diamond and Mannheim Steamroller.

If you use AudioScrobbler, do you try and show off your good musical tastes and hide your poor ones? Or do you choose to not care, like me, and just listen to whatever strikes your fancy?

Recently, our good friend Bill O’Reilly announced (emphasis mine):

I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. I am not going to let it happen. I’m gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that.

My question is: if a terrorist is someone who uses terror to achieve political goals, does this mean Bill O’reilly is a horrorist? Shouldn’t our government be working overtime to eliminate self-proclaimed domestic horrorists? Why haven’t we raised the horror alert level?

Bill’s horrible promise is part of his ongoing War on Decency. He is actively trying to make Christianity look like an oppressive, intolerant, hate-filled philosophy by claiming that Christians (85% of the country, he claims) think anyone who says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is effectively anti-Jesus.

Earlier, Bill said this only applies to America:

They don’t have to say “Merry Christmas” in China, OK? They can say whatever they say in China, “Happy Winter.” All right? “We like pandas.” Say whatever you want.

I think we should let Bill know that we all want him to have a wonderful holiday season this year, no matter what he celebrates. That’s why I’ve created this simple, printable “We Like Pandas!” card that you can print out, fold, add a personal greeting to, and send to him. Click here to download the PDF (275 kb). Once it’s printed, simply trim along the dotted line, then fold the paper in half twice (top-to-bottom, then left-to-right) to make it into a card that will fit nicely into a standard #10 letter envelope. Write a friendly message inside, and send your card to the following address:

Bill O’Reilly
c/o Fox News Channel
1211 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10036

Let’s all wish Bill O’Reilly a happy holiday season! Leave a comment here if you send a card — let’s see how many of these he gets!

Grr. I just start to like the Catholic church a little more, and they go and do something as stupid as banning gay priests. Oh well. The more people they ban from the priesthood, the weaker the church will become. At some point they’re going to have to realise that they need to move toward the present, and lift the celibacy requirement and/or start allowing women, or else they’ll end up suffering from an even more severe priest shortage than they already have.

Yesterday, the Vatican released a statement saying Christians should trust science. It said that Darwin’s theory of evolution is compatible with Genesis, that creationism and “intelligent design” are dangerous and could lead to religious fundamentalism, which it indicated is bad, bad, bad.

This is fantastic. Far too often, the news I see about Christians is depressing: intolerance toward homosexuals, attempting to push crackpot non-scientific “theories” into our schools and call them science, telling AIDS-stricken African nations that condoms don’t help fight the spread of HIV. So seeing yesterday’s statement was heartening: a strong denunciation of fundamentalism, and an embracing of science alongside faith. It just makes me feel better.

In other religious news: there’s going to be a Flying Spaghetti Monster bible! This is awesome. If you haven’t heard of Pastafarianism, now’s the time to learn. It’s a satirical religion designed to refute the sort of pseudo-science espoused by intelligent design proponents, and man, has it taken off. Now Bobby Henderson, the guy who thunk it up, has been given an $80,000 advance to write its bible, which is due out in February next year. That’s so cool.

Update: My friend Josh Giesbrecht alerted me to a news story that says evangelical Christians are campaigning for clean air laws. Yay! More good churchy news! This is funny, because I recently asked Sarah, “Hey, doesn’t the Bible say we should respect the earth and all of God’s creation? Why aren’t all Christians also outspoken environmentalists?”

Seeing the Peanuts television special “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” on TV was something I looked forward to every Halloween when I was a kid. It was on TV tonight, and is still amusing, and now nostalgic as well.

A year ago, the excellent online speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons published a short story that fans of the Peanuts special will appreciate. I’m linking to it now because even if you’ve read it before, it’s still wonderful: The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard. Happy Halloween, and enjoy.

Strange Horizons, which is entirely volunteer-run despite paying its contributors well and being considered a professional fiction market, is conducting a fundraising drive. They hoped to raise $3000 this month, but their meter only shows about $600 so far. If you enjoy the story, and want to help keep a great zine in business, please donate a few bucks. I just did.

Wow. A baby that developed outside her mother’s uterus was successfully delivered via caesarian section in Ontario, Canada this April. A doctor there said:

“We won’t see another case like this in my lifetime. A case like this won’t happen in the lifetime of my colleagues either.”

I guess that doctor and all of his colleagues must be dead now, because it just happened again, this time in the U.K.