SOPA-cking Stupid (Not to Mention Unconstitutional...)

There has been much ado about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was proposed in the House; mainly because it is a monumentally stupid piece of legislation. Although it's purpose is described in the bills subtitle as such:

"To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." 

 it would actually act as a huge infringement on First Amendment rights as it is applied to the world wide web (a kind of wonky explanation, as well as links to memoranda from two leading legal scholars on the First Amendment, can be found here). The simplest argument against the legislation is that is unconstitutional because it is both overbroad and too vague; annddd you can get a taste of it on the above tagline with the uber-ominous and open-ended "[...] and for other purposes." Laws must be of a certain specificity and limited in scope so people on both sides of the law, those who are to comply with it and those that are too enforce it, know what exactly they are supposed to do and without empowering the government to enact a sweeping agenda. It is why we don't have laws saying simply "Don't do bad things," and almost every law is replete with definitions of terms in the beginning. Secondly, the bill cedes some enforcement capability to actual copy-right holders (let that sink it. Crazy right?). From the above linked article:

Coupled with this overbroad scope, the bills authorize remedies that lack the usual procedural safeguards, ensuring that even more protected, non-infringing speech will be restricted. Even though a judicial determination is generally required to remove speech from circulation, the House version empowers copyright-holders to send notices to payment processors and advertisers to shut off funding for non-infringing sites that meet the bill's broad definitions. The bills also encourage over-enforcement by making companies immune from suit for mistakenly punishing sites outside even the bills' over-expansive scope.

This is unequivocal nutbaggery. The bill essential says that a copyright-holder can have funding shut off. This cannot be used for nefarious purposes? An uninterested party should not hold this role whether it be a judge or an independent body?

The technocracy of the U.S. immediately responded by speaking out against the bill. We are talking Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Zynga, Mozilla... essentially everyone except GoDaddy and their eccentric (putting it kindly) CEO. After coming under attack from the social news website Reddit, where a broad GoDaddy protest thread led to a proposed boycott of GoDaddy. The site eventually folded to the increasing pressure and announced that it no longer supported SOPA, as well as the Senatorial version in the Protect IP act.

Inside of Congress, however, support still seems strong and there is a decent chance that a version of this disastrous act gets passed. If any of you (6 friends of mine) feel strongly against this as well, please contact your local representative in Congress and your state Senators and tell them to vote no to both SOPA and Protect IP or they lose your vote. The only thing they will strongly react to, aside from the threat of losing money from big business, is losing their position as an elected official.

NERD ALERT- Like a Rolling CERN

I'm taking artistic license on the title, so back up off me. CERN, a.k.a. the European Center for Nuclear Research, had its big reveal today on whether the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had determined the existence, or non-existence, of the Higgs boson. And they revealed (drum roll please)... (dramatic pause to enhance excitement)... (pause/drumroll has gone on too long and now people are annoyed)... that they'd only found hints of the particle and would need another year of data to make any real determination! WOOO! The Higgs boson particle, and thus the excitement about it, is a little bit hard to explain, which is attempted with more success here, but it is essentially the smallest building block of the Higgs field which, according to the Standard Model, gives particles mass. This is disappointing for those hoping to know, either way, but there is, seemingly, a silver lining:

"Given the outstanding performance of the L.H.C. this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012.”

Over the last 20 years, suspicious bumps that might have been the Higgs have come and gone, and scientists cautioned that the same thing could happen again, but the fact that two rival teams using two different mammoth particle detectors had recorded similar results was considered to be good news. Physicists expect to have enough data to make the final call by the summer.

For those, like me, who geek out over this stuff, it only means that we've been thrown a cliff hanger that will bring us back in this summer. Kind of like the "Game of Thrones." That's good enough for me (at least CERN didn't pull a "The Killing"... people will probably be interested enough to come back for Higgs boson in the summer). 

Steve Jobs (RIP), Real Life Seer

An enormous amount of attention has been, quite deservedly, directed at Steve Jobs' life and work since his (way too early) passing earlier this month. One interview that has been making the rounds is his 1985 interview with Playboy. The entire interview is incredibly interesting, inspiring, et al., but I was struck by one exchange in particular...

PLAYBOY: You mentioned investing in education, but isn't the problem finding the funds in a time of soaring deficits?
JOBS: We're making the largest investment of capital that humankind has ever made in weapons over the next five years. We have decided, as a society, that that's where we should put our money, and that raises the deficits and, thus, the cost of our capital. Meanwhile, Japan, our nearest competitor on the next technological frontier—the semiconductor industry—has shaped its tax structure, its entire society, toward raising the capital to invest in that area. You get the feeling that connections aren't made in America between things like building weapons and the fact that we might lose our semiconductor industry. We have to educate ourselves to that danger.

This interview took place in 198-motherfracking-5 mind you. You can replace semiconductors with any number of industries over the past 20 years and see a recurring problem. Presently, if you replace Japan with China and semiconductor with Green Tech, you see an ineffectual US government that never learns anything and thus constantly repeats history. I can already foresee complaints about huge Chinese subsidies and feel the ruptured eardrums from people screaming SOLYNDRAAAA!!! at me, and they certainly have a point. On the flip side, however, those same people are not agitating to try and change the situations. Sure, the Chinese subsidies are overly generous, but the US' are not nearly generous enough. This is an area where we need to compete or we will just continue to cede our hegemonic position (if we already haven't). The US has an issue with debt because of a decade of huge defense spending, driven by two wars, and large tax cuts based upon a failed (repeatedly) economic theory. A problem that has existed (with some relief in between) since  198-stringofcursewordstoovulgartoprintsufficetosayonestartswithaC-5. How about we start looking at a way to change the situation and invest in things like education and green tech? Hmm kay? I mean, c'mon, WWSJD?