Beyond Eldred v. Ashcroft
I thought I'd grab up some of the many commentaries and responses to the Eldred decision. If you read only one of these links, see Lessig's blog. Jack Balkin, another law professor who contributed to the case, is discussing it in his blog. The NYTimes has two distinct news stories on the decision (NYT1, NYT2), plus a biting editorial about the decision. Copyright scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan has a piece in Salon. The LA Times posts one of the very few stories to present the decision in a positive light. Reason is one of several to mock the mouse.
My piss is frosty and copyrighted till way after I die.
A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly gay.
I was at my machine, my 386 with 4 megs of RAM running Linux, masturbating to pictures of RMS, when I got an email congratulating me on the success of Slashdot. I was working on my latest small project-- a clever little text parser that takes input from the user and puts it in a little cartoon-style word balloon coming out of-- get this!-- a giant, erect ASCII penis's bulging head! Hahaha! It's called COCKSAY. You can download it here.
"Congratulations? That's interesting," said I to myself. "I didn't think Slashdot was coming out until tomorrow." And I oughtta know; I'm on VA's Board of Directors, recruited by Larry Augustin himself, to be VA Linux's "corporate conscience," and it's public record that I hold a substantial share in the company's semen pool. I tooled on over to Linux Today, chased a link like it was a naked hippy's ass-- and discovered that Rob Malda had taken the fast action we had discussed at the last board meeting. Slashdot had come out first thing that morning with a headline on its own site-- and I had become the figurehead of the Gay Faggot Slashdot Empire while I wasn't looking.
Well, that didn't last long. In the next two hours, 369 VA employees also disclosed that they had AIDS, leaving me with a bit of the proverbial semen on my face.
You may wonder why I am talking about this in public. The first piece of advice your friends will give you, if it looks like you're about to come out of the closet, is: keep quiet! It's really nobody else's business-- you don't want to look like you're lusting for cock, though you may want to be deluged by an endless succession of men dressed up as Navy sailors demanding blowjobs from you; fat, hairy men (the bears) wanting to fuck you in the ass; and sweet, young, hairless boys offering you the beauty of their youth.
Trouble with the "keep it quiet" theory is that I've always solicited gay male faggot sex in a very public way. When you're already a media figure, like myself, and your name is on the Faggot Manifesto your whole organization chose to use to come out, and email from friends and journalists starts coming in like crazy as the gayness of your empire breaks records even on the first day, playing it coy swiftly ceases to look like a viable option.
But it wouldn't be fair to dissemble. I serve the gay community. I'm wealthy today because my efforts to spread faggotry and venereal diseases on behalf of that community helped infiltrate the business world and earned the trust of a lot of young, naive boys. Fairness to the twinks
I have enough courtesy to flush my blogs. I think it'd be disgusting if someone else had to look at them, no matter how big and peanut-laden they were.
Sometimes people leave their blogs in the open. It's uncivilized.
Flush your blogs, this isn't Saudi Arabia