I just installed a #SOPA blackout plugin for WordPress on the blog that no one but Google reads and it occurred to me, rather than content providers turning their sites black, why not start blocking gov’t netblocks? Congressional offices don’t need the internet, do they? They can use the telephone or a FAX machine, maybe go to the library. Though if I was a librarian and a SOPA sponsor or his staff tried to use the public terminals, I might be inclined to turn them away: you have to know how it works before you can use this, and those people plainly don’t get it.

We know that torrent downloads have been traced to governments everywhere, even our own. Seems to me the best option is a variant of how we deal with email spam: a realtime blacklist. Any organization that attacks free speech should be banned from accessing any website that objects to those attacks. I can see a special 503 error page that makes plain why they can’t be served at this time.

Imagine if email relays refused to send mail from .gov addresses (just the legislative branch), just sent them all back with an error explaining why their mail is undeliverable. Web page loads would fail, display a simple black and white message that “This content cannot be served to you at this time. Users in your domain have engaged in copyright infringement which means your domain is banned. Have a nice day.”

Maybe it’s unworkable, maybe not enough sites would do it, certainly no large ones. But I am tired of this being labelled a technology problem when it’s really a business problem. Someone abuses a technology, be it the internet or a hammer, it’s not the person who made the tool who is at fault but the person using it and in this case, the organization claiming injury.

by the time you’ve seen this, it’s likely too late.

It will be a fitting irony if George W Bush’s greatest legacy to the country is that he has so damaged the Republican party that it has permitted the (non-crazy) citizens of the US to elect their first non-white president. Not that he will ever see it that way.

[From TBogg » If you live in this world You’re feelin’ the change of the guard ]

I was thinking the same thing earlier today, that instead of a more entrenched hard-right Republican majority, he leaves an energized Democratic party, has created a political environment that has gotten millions of people to register and vote for the first time in their lives, and will see his agenda — tax cuts for the wealthy, wars in the mideast, politicization of everything — dismantled piece by piece over the next couple of years.

I looked at my collection and while I have a few that come in at that length, a range of 2:40-2:45 yields 162 items or 7.3 hours of music. At exactly 2:42*, this is what I get:

Route 67 | 2:42 | Let’s Active | Big Plans for Everybody Wildwood In The Pines | 2:42 | Johnny Cash | Personal File (Disc 2) Get Up | 2:42 | R.E.M. | Green Thinking About You | 2:42 | Radiohead | Pablo Honey Providence | 2:42 | Sonic Youth | Daydream Nation Oceans | 2:42 | Pearl Jam | Ten Coda: Marine 475 | 2:42 | King Crimson | Thrak Sheila Take A Bow | 2:42 | The Smiths | Louder Than Bombs Blitzen Trapper | – Wild Mountain Nation | 2:42 | 550 Blitzen Trapper | KEXP Song of the Day Get Outa Ma Pagoda | 2:42 | Chris Spedding | The Very Best Of Rusty Chevrolet | 2:42 | Da Yoopers | Culture Shock The Operative | 2:42 | Magazine | Scree Rarities 1978 – 1981 I Wanted So | 2:42 | Johnny Cash | Personal File [Disc 1] Baby Plays Around (Demo) | 2:42 | Elvis Costello | Spike Bonus Disc Holy Love | 2:42 | The Blue Nile | Peace At Last Sheila Take A Bow | 2:42 | The Smiths | The Best Of The Smiths, Vol. 1 Lovely Rita | 2:42 | The Beatles | Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band I Will Always | 2:42 | The Cranberries | Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? Larks’ Tongues In Aspic,Part Three (Live) | 2:42 | King Crimson | Frame By Frame [4 - 1969 (Live)] Take Me For A Little While | 2:42 | Dave Edmunds | Repeat When Necessary This Charming Man | 2:42 | The Smiths | The Best Of The Smiths, Vol. 1 Bones | 2:42 | Foot Village | SXSW 2008 Showcasing Artists I See You | 2:42 | Adrian Belew | Here Michelle | 2:42 | The Beatles | Rubber Soul How Great Our Lord | 2:42 | Randy Newman & others | Randy Newman’s Faust Walk Like an Egyptian | 2:42 | The Puppini Sisters | The Rise and Fall of Ruby Woo

• by exactly, I mean make a playlist with a range of 2:41 – 2:43 and pull the 2:42 tracks from that: seems to give a better result.

Anyone else remember the scene from The Kids Are Alright described here?

The Who had 10 minutes left to fill on the LP. Kit Lambert, The Who’s manager, suggested to Pete Townshend that he write “something linear… perhaps a 10 minute song.” Townshend responded by saying that rock songs are “2:50 by tradition!” Lambert then told Townshend that he should write a 10 minute story comprised of 2:50 songs.

[From A Quick One While He's Away by The Who Songfacts]

I recently discovered some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache.

When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just “yourusername@gmail.com.” Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:

• Append a plus (“+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.
• Insert one or several dots (“.”) anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn’t recognize periods as characters in addresses — we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added “+donation” when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete.

[From Official Gmail Blog: 2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address]

It took us nearly two millenia and oceans of blood to reduce these savages to a noisome rump. We can spare a little attention to remember why we did it. [From BIG-TIME NEGOTIATORS, FALSE HEALERS AND WOMAN-HATERS. A bride wants...]