Okay, so the EFF ninja is actually me carrying a pair of very heavy
hammocks and a load of camping supplies at the Om Festival. But the EFF
does need your support in the fight for bloggers’ rights,
specifically…
EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit group of passionate people—lawyers,
technologists, volunteers, and visionaries — who depend on your support
to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is
particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from
individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight
—and win—more cases.
You Have the Right to Blog Anonymously. EFF has fought for your
right to speak anonymously on the Internet, establishing legal
protections in several states and federal jurisdictions, and developing
technologies to help you protect you identity. With your support,
EFF can continue to defend this right, conducting impact litigation to
establish strict standards to unmask an anonymous critic in more
jurisdictions.
You Have the Right to Keep Sources Confidential. In Apple v. Does, EFF is fighting to establish the reporter’s privilege for online journalists before the California courts. With your support, EFF can defend news bloggers from subpoenas seeking the identity of confidential sources in more jurisdictions.
You Have the Right to Make Fair Use of Intellectual Property. In OPG v. Diebold,
Diebold, Inc., a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, had sent
out copyright cease-and-desist letters to ISPs after internal documents
indicating flaws in their systems were published on the Internet. EFF
established the publication was a fair use. With your support, EFF can help fight to protect bloggers from frivolous or abusive threats and lawsuits.
You have the Right to Allow Reader’s Comments Without Fear. In Barrett v. Rosenthal, EFF is working to establish that Section 230, a strong federal immunity for online publishers, applies to bloggers. With your support, EFF can continue to protect bloggers from liability for comments left by third parties.
(This is one issue with which I am personally acquainted — see the entry about Quick Boys Movers.)
You Have the Right to Protect Your Server from Government Seizure. In In re Subpoena to Rackspace.
EFF successfully fought to unveil a secret government subpoena that had
resulted in more than 20 Independent Media Center (Indymedia) news
websites and other Internet services being taken offline. With your support, EFF can hold the government accountable for investigations that cut off protected speech.
You Have the Right to Freely Blog about Elections. EFF has
advocated for the sensible application of Federal Election Commission
rules to blogs that comment on political campaigns. With your support, EFF can continue to protect political blogs from onerous campaign regulations.
You Have the Right to Blog about Your Workplace. EFF has
educated bloggers on their rights to blog about their workplace and
developed technologies to help anonymous whistle bloggers. With your support, EFF can help shape the law to protect workplace bloggers from unfair retaliation.
You Have the Right to Access as Media. EFF has educated bloggers
on their right to access public information, attend public events with
the same rights as mainstream media, and how to blog from public
events. With your support, EFF can fight for bloggers right to access as media.
Know Your Rights and Prepare to Defend Them. EFF has created the Legal Guide for Bloggers to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger and a guide on How to Blog Safely. With your support, EFF can expand and update these guides.
And that’s why this blog is sporting this button:
[courtesy of tweebiscuit] And now, a
graphic explanation of one of the problems with voice dictation
software…
Yeah, it’s an old joke, but I found it
amusing.
Let me take a moment to say that the readers of this blog are great
people. One particular example: Janis, who’s taken the Google Maps API
(that’s short for Application Programming Interface, a set of “hooks”
that lets one computer program be controlled by another) and used it to
create a lovely and useful web application called The Beer Hunter:
Those of you who aren’t from the province of Ontario may be unfamiliar
with how you buy beer, wine or liquor here. Booze can only be bought at
one of four types of places:
“The Beer Store”.
Its formal name is “Brewer’s Retail”, and it used to sport signs that
bore those words, but since everyone called it “The Beer Store”, they
re-branded in the 1990s. Since the liquor stores are owned by the
provincial government, many people believe that the Beer Store is also
under the same ownership. This is not the case. The lion’s share is
owned by swillmeisters Labatt (which these days is owned by Belgium’s InBec) and Molson (actually Molson-Coors). The remaining sliver is owned by Sleeman, makers of some actually drinkable stuff. It is, as the Beer Hunter site puts it, a cartel.
The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, a.k.a. LCBO.
This one is owned by the Goverment of Ontario. A few of years ago, in
response to calls to allow privately-owned liquor stores, the
provincial government sponsored TV ads in which “Augur” from the craptactular locally-produced TV series Earth: Final Conflict
talked about how the LCBO generates CDN$1 billion in government revenue
every year, and wasn’t that just dandy? In other words — the
government spent tax money on ads talking about how great booze taxes
were. I wish I’d thought up that scam.
There is one small upside: the better LCBO branches — you know, the
ones in higher-tax bracket neighbourhoods — have a great selection and
are some of the most beautifully-appointed liquor stores anywhere.
Independent microbreweries. The good beer is available from Accordion City’s selection of micros, such as Amsterdam, Mill Street and Steam Whistle
(sometimes known as “Skunk Whistle”, as the Steam Whistle brewery tends
to serve their oldest, just-past-its-freshness date beer at events
hosted at their brewery).
The Wine Rack.
I know little about this independent wine store other than the fact
that they somehow got a deal in which they can sell wine and other
non-beer, non-pure-liquor beverages.
There are no other places in which you can buy beer, liquor or wine. No
beer in convenience stores (most of the civilized world lets you do
this). No wine, either (you can buy cheap wine in convenience stores in
Quebec). No private liquor stores, and no liquor in the grocery (like
in Nevada).
I’ll leave it to the readers to debate the pros and cons of Ontario’s booze distribution channels in the comments.
The Beer Hunter is a web application that uses Google Maps’ API to
display the locations of the beer, liquor and wine stores in Toronto.
Each store type is represented by an icon, and clicking on its icon
gives you store details and whether it’s still open. Pictured below is
the nearest liquor store to Tucows, where I work:
This is a very useful site. Janis, a salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword — well done!
Categories
Feliz Cumpleaños, Maria!
(And here’s hoping that my Spanish-by-way-of-Tagalog isn’t too sloppy!)
Happy birthday to Maria “Adventures in Downtown Toronto” Davo! See you at your party tonight.
Some quick notes on last Friday’s entry about the pillow fight at Dundas Square…
Intelligent Design
In the comments for my entry in which I rebut Colby Cosh’s comments about the pillow fight, one commenter talks about David Warren’s ‘angry and somewhat bizarre apologia for intelligent design’, which s/he suspects is due to the fact that it’s supposed to be part of the neocon credo.
I am beginning to believe that the refusal to follow generally accepted scientific principles is the neocon equivalent of the fear of “acting white”.
This often-debated notion goes as follows: black students create peer pressure to do poorly by taunting those who excel academically, saying that they are “acting white”.
This theory is nothing new. I remember a discussion about it with a bunch of my friends at the Diefenbaker club (not really a club, but what a group of friends of mine who were proto-neo-cons back in ’91 called themselves) at Mackintosh-Corry Hall, a regular hangout at Crazy Go Nuts University.
I remember giving them some mild but unrebuttable annoyance by remarking that “for us Asian kids, ‘acting white’ means ‘completely sucking at math, science and videogames.'”
Back to the point I’m trying to make: I will posit that Warren and a number of his ilk are leaning towards ID because belief in evolution is “acting liberal”. This is the white “acting white”.
Kill ’em all
In that same entry, I remark about how little fun hanging out on the Western Standard cruise would be. Comment away, but can we cool it with the sinking and torpedoing jokes? It brings the discourse down to Ann Coulter’s level. There isn’t much that separates suggesting that the cruise ship be torpedoed and Ann Coultersims like the classic “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
By the bye, the word is spelled “torpedo”, not “torpedoe”.
Coverage
BlogTO went to the pillow fight; go check out their writeup.
There’s also a Flickr photoset covering the event.
An anonymous commenter who went wrote about how it was a bit creepy — they went there for fun, in the same spirit as that annual tomato fight in Spain,but instead felt co-opted as the anti-gun rally seemed to be using the event as a lure. If this was the intent, it would be as dishonest as those “wear denim if you support cause X” days in universities and high schools.
Where I was
I didn’t attend the pillow fight, owing to a prior commitment that I had forgotten about when I first made the posting. You see, I’d promised the wife and my friend Jessie that I would take them to another crazy mob event scheduled for that weekend: the 30th Annual William Ashley Warehouse Sale. That trip was worthy of its own blog entry; I’ll post one later.
I mean, dude, that William Ashley gold coin (redeemable for merchandise) that we got as a wedding present wasn’t going to spend itself, was it?
The Colbinator writes about my Dundas Square Pillow Fight entry…
Nothing against the Accordion Guy, but his headline “Pillow Fight in Dundas Square This Sunday”
suddenly made me loathe my own generation. Flash mobs, cuddle parties,
neo-burlesque, robot pets, emo, speed dating, network gaming
tournaments, live-action remakes of cartoons… I suppose if you’d
really been on the ball, you could have figured out in advance what
would pass for a culture amongst a bunch of grown-up latchkey kids,
couldn’t you?
Nothing
against you either, Colby — you’re a hundred-watter in a sea of cheap
IKEA tealights — but I’ll take the pillow fight over that dreadful all-neocons-all-the-time Western Standard cruise you’re going on this December. I suspect there will be more active culture in last week’s yogurt than with this group of funboys. You look like the only one of the bunch who doesn’t need to up his dietary fibre intake.