Why Veto Makes No Sense

After making it through the House and through the Senate, and being supported by the majority of the US population, the stem cell bill has been vetoed by Bush.

President Bush rejected legislation Wednesday that could have multiplied the federal money going into embryonic stem cell research, using the first veto of his presidency to underscore his stand on the emotionally charged, life-and-death issue.

The House then voted on overturning his veto, but failed to achieve a two-thirds majority (235-193 in favour of overturing the veto).

This underscores why the veto power is kinda ridiculous – a bill can be supported by the majority, make it all the way through the complicated legal procedure to make it almost successful, then one man can say “Nope, I don’t think so.” and it’ll be all over. Granted, this is the first time Bush has used his veto power, but you’d think he’d put his own personal viewpoints aside in favour of those of the populous he is elected to represent. He’s supposed to be there for them, not for his own agenda. One man should never have so much power that he can decide for a nation, against their wishes, just because he believes that it’s the right thing to do. It reminds me of a man named Adolf, really.

Commenting on it all, Bush had this to say:

“It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect.”

Ironic really coming from someone who, during his tenure as Texas governor, executed prisoners at the rate of one every two weeks.

Website Politics

If you’re a regular user of deviantArt, you may or may not be aware of recent events involving key staff members being removed from their positions. I’m not gonna restate info that exists elsewhere already, suffice to say there’s been incidents that the general dA userbase aren’t privy to at this stage.

The rumor and conjecture (some of which is likely to be accurate) points to the actions being motivated by greed – that certain management individuals are just wanting to make a buck out of dA and disregarding its primary purpose as instigated by jark and the other founders – as an online community of art in its many shapes, forms and guises. The almighty dollar rears its head again, and unfortunately events like this and overcommercialisation of resources in this way is only going to be detrimental in the long term. I hope it never happens, but I can see dA degenerating into a completely commercial entity, making paid subscriptions a requirement, bombarding visitors and submitters with advertisements for crap, and any portions of the site that aren’t income-earning quietly removed.

However, one thing the dA community has always had going for it is just that, community. The huge amount of support that has been given to jark after these events is astounding, and as has been said elsewhere, “you wanted to bring the community together, well you got it”. The community that has formed in dA won’t just roll over and take this, as has been evidenced, but how their “rebellion” of sorts works out remains to be seen. Heh, I’m saying “their” when really its “our”. I have a huge amount of respect for people like jark (another name that comes to mind is that of Justin Frankel) – people who have the dream to do something purely for the benefit of others, not for any monetary gain for themselves, and who stand by those beliefs firmly.

As I said, I don’t know the whole story, and in the end very few people will know its truth entirely. But I believe in the Yellow Alien, and I wish you the best of luck in whatever happens for you in the future jark. You’re a rare breed, and I look forward to seeing your next endeavour.

CD Copy Protection and Music Lawsuits

Another effort to curb music piracy, Sony has released “over 10 titles” using a new copy protection scheme known as sterile burning. This scheme lets you make a certain amount of copies, but not copies of copies.

You’d think they’d learn, but nope. Unfortunately, companies like Sony haven’t quite grasped the concept that no matter how hard they try, they will never come up with a completely solid copy protection system. Hell, the last attempts at copy protection were broken by things as simple as a marker pen, or via software written years beforehand! Build a better mousetrap, and nature builds a better mouse, as the saying goes.

The music industry needs to change their focus if they’re gonna survive in this new age of the Internet, broadband, and instant availability of music online. Instead of trying to deal with people pirating their CDs, they should be embracing the new, highly efficient and cost-effective distribution medium that is the Internet. Yahoo! have launched their music subscription service for US$4.99 a month for unlimited legal downloads of music. This sort of direction is where it should be heading, not trying to hold onto legacy technology like the CD. All the money they’re spending developing copy protection systems for their CDs could instead be invested in creating a decent system online for providing their music to the masses. Think about it – no CD production costs, no shipping around the world costs, and instant worldwide delivery. The savings they’d make would mean extra income for them from the music, and, heaven forbid, maybe even extra money for the people that actually made the music! (Although, to be honest, I can’t see that happening unfortunately. But that’s a whole other rant).

The Yahoo! subscription service (ironically enough, “Brought to you by Sony”, as the main page claims) also changes things slightly for those lawsuits against music pirates. You could now argue that the maximum damages they could seek from someone downloading songs is US$4.99, because they couldve got all that music legally via Yahoo!’s service for that price. Whether that argument would stand up in court is beyond my legal expertise, but it is an interesting point.

But in the end, regardless of what steps the industry takes, whether it be pursuing more copy protection methods or of moving to online distribution (and copy protection via DRM and similar technologies) there will always be piracy. Because if you can listen to the music, you can record it. In the most basic sense, stick a microphone next to the speaker and pirate to your heart’s content. The only way to stop this would make the music un-listenable.

And that would be the death of music.

Journalistic Integrity and Tabloid Television

So, yeah, um, lack of entries. Well I kinda forewarned you.

There’s been a few subjects that I’ve considered posting about, one in particular on rap music that I’m gonna save for later. There was also one about the Mark Lundy mock trial on TV the other day but again, I’ll delay that one a little for now.

I was watching TV during work today, as I usually do, when a mate of mine called me at work to let me know that 60 Minutes were running a story on the next Star Wars movie (anyone who knows me in real life knows that I’m a total Star Wars nutbag) shortly. It turned out that it was an airing of the 60 Minutes piece from the US that I’d already read the transcript for anyways (but it was still neat to see the pictures). But anyway, I’m getting sidetracked.

The story preceeding the Star Wars one was about Australian girls being raped/killed/eaten in Tokyo brothels (I tried to find a referencing link to this but understandably, googling for “tokyo rape cannibalism” doesn’t come up with many decent results). Watching the programme, and comparing it to other 60 Minutes articles I’ve been unfortunate enough to catch, makes me realise how much that programme smacks of scaremongering. Basically, the show is an hour-long television version of the average tabloid, Weekly World News-esque magazine. The only purpose I see for these sorts of articles to be shown is morbid curiosity on the part of some viewers, because the views they’re showing are so far from what is the norm in most cases that its ridiculous. The story I mentioned portrayed Tokyo as an incredibly dangerous destination for foreign girls, and basically said “DO NOT GO THERE”. I’ve never been there myself, nor am I a foreign girl, but from what I’ve heard of people that have been there, and from my own common sense, it doesn’t come across as anywhere near that bad.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this sort of stuff doesn’t happen, but the way the show puts it across is entirely misleading and is borderline slander/libel. Unfortunately, in this day and age, journalistic integrity is a rare find. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons for the rise and rise of blogging like this – its a method for those who are sick of hearing biased information to get their stories and points of view out without having to worry about spin, political sensibilities, or other such bullshit.

Go the blog!

Subtitles, Redubbing, Grammar, Spelling, et al.

Now this is a view I’ve outlined to some people before. I’m not a big fan of redubbing movies into other languages, and to a lesser extent subtitling, because of a few reasons. First and foremost, I believe that no matter how good the translation, you’re always gonna lose some of the nuances that only the original language carries with it.. slang, inference, or whatever. The film was created to be shown in one particular language, and to view it redubbed or subtitled into another language is always gonna be different to that which the director intended it to be seen. This is one of the prime reasons I don’t watch anime – that and the fact they scare me, I mean honestly, who names a series “Ah, My, Me, Strawberry Eggs”?

But anyway, back on topic. I acquired a copy of The Motorcycle Diaries today, along with subtitles. In case you don’t know, the entire movie is in Spanish. Now, I speak Spanish fluently, however its been many years since I’ve actually used it to any extent and I’m therefore rusty. It was good enough to watch Once Upon A Time In Mexico without subtitles when it came out (and granted, most of the movie is in English) but a quick flick-through of The Motorcycle Diaries showed me I wouldn’t have a chance understanding it all – the conversations were way too fast for me to keep up with.

Since I’ve heard good things about the movie, and the concept interested me anyways, I decided to make an exception to my subtitle rule and watch it with subs. However, the quality of the subtitles that I got with it are absolutely shite. Poor translations, obvious grammar errors such as “and” instead of “an”, horrible sentence structure… it makes me wonder whether there are complete translation errors throughout the movie. I found another copy of the subtitles and they had the same issues, so I’m wondering if the original subtitles for the movie are this bad. If so, then whoever made them, and whoever okayed them for release, deserve to be shot. What’s happened to pride in the quality of your work? Does nobody care about doing their jobs properly anymore?

This brings me onto the topic of spelling and grammar. Now I was lucky enough to be brought up by a primary school teacher and to have a photographic memory, so learning to spell words has never been an issue for me. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for me to grasp how other people can have so many issues with spelling simple words. Especially these days, it amazes me how few people know correct spelling and grammar. You see it on signs, buildings, and even in magazines and newspapers these days! Misuse of apostrophes (PLURALS DO NOT HAVE APOSTROPHES!), complete mispelling of words, use of full stops (or periods for you American readers) at the end of headings… it’s terrible.

The amount this happens nowadays is drastically higher than, say, 10 years ago, and its really puzzling to me why this is actually happening. Is it overdependence on spellcheckers on PCs? (note: NO APOSTROPHE!) Is it that teachers are too lazy to teach proper grammar, or do they not even know themselves? The SMS or “txt” phenomenon hasn’t helped this either, neither has IRC and other forms of online chat. Most modern cellphones have dictionaries and predictive text built in so that you don’t need to shorten words so that the recipient needs to spend a couple of minutes translating what you just said into English, so what’s the big deal with it? I had an ex-girlfriend that was incredibly adept at shortening words for txt – she could shorten an eight letter word into “PG” – see if you can guess the word that referred to.

Anyways, now I’ve gone off on a major tangent. Lets hear it for decent subtitling and decent spelling/grammar in general! If you agree with me totally, let me know! If you think I should just deal with it and move on, let me know too!