8 Ways to Sunday

I may be the last person on earth to learn about this. Back in late June, Senator Ted Stevens (R, AK) regaled the Commerce Committee with a nearly 11-minute rant about his opposition to a proposed net neutrality amendment to a communications bill. That may not sound very interesting, but it was Sen. Stevens’s… unique attempt at explaining the workings of the Internet that brought this otherwise obscure speech to public attention. (more…)

I just noticed that the word count on this blog recently passed one hundred-thousand. That’s more than some novels.

Wow.

For some reason, I can’t get this out of my head today:

Well the movie star
Yeah, she crashed her car.
But everyone said she was beautiful,
Even without her head.
Everyone said she was dangerous.

— “Movie Star,” by Cracker

Independently-owned bookstores often struggle to remain competitive against giants like Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com. If you’d like to support locally-owned book sellers, BookSense.com is a good place to start. It’s the Internet arm of a national marketing campaign that the site describes thusly:

What is Book Sense?

Book Sense is a national marketing campaign on behalf of the independent bookstores of America. It is both a local and national effort to shine a light on the knowledge and diversity of independent bookstores, via the Book Sense Bestseller List — now running in more than a dozen newspapers as well as monthly in U.S. News and World Report and on CSPAN — and Book Sense Picks — a monthly selection of eclectic new books chosen by independent booksellers.

Book Sense also offers a gift card welcome at hundreds of participating independent bookstores nationwide! And then there is, of course, BookSense.com.

What is BookSense.com?

BookSense.com is a family of independent-bookseller websites. (And it’s the e-commerce arm of the American Booksellers Association’s Book Sense program.)

When you visit a BookSense.com virtual bookstore, you will experience the knowledge and passion of independent booksellers who share their love of books with their customers and their communities. You’ll have access to information and news about local authors, store events, and myriad staff recommendations — and you will also be presented with content that reflects the collective wisdom of booksellers from all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

To get started, enter your ZIP code in the form labeled “Find a Store with Book Sense.” I found six bookstores in nearby Wichita, only two of which I’d heard of before.

(Props: pythonfood.com)

Updates

• 11/7/2006 @ 3:26 AM — I didn’t notice it at first, but there’s a more fine-grained store search available as well. Search by store name, city, specialty, etc.

Discovered on Uninnovate, this video takes less than sixty seconds to cover some of the biggest problems with digital rights management (DRM) technology:

If you’re unfamiliar with DRM, it’s basically a kind of computer program that’s embedded in the media you purchase — store-bought DVDs, iTunes downloads, etc. — that keeps you from using your computer to create copies of that media or even keeps you from playing it on certain devices. The idea is to prevent Internet piracy, but the problem comes when DRM keeps law-abiding consumers from doing perfectly legal things with their movies and music. Unfortunately, that problem crops up pretty frequently.

The video seems to be the work of “Defective by Design,” a Free Software Foundation campaign against DRM. If you’d like to learn more about how DRM violates your rights, and what you can do about it, here are a few places to start:

• Here’s another video: ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind gives a more detailed explanation of how DRM screws you over, and suggests the technology be renamed Content Restriction Annulment and Protection (CRAP).
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent mini-site devoted to explaining the issues surrounding DRM.
• The Defective by Design website has a list of places where you can buy DRM-free media.
• Wikipedia’s article on fair use rights will help you understand what you’re losing by buying DRMed media. You can also get more background on the controversy over DRM in this article.
• The Digital Freedom website has some info about how DRM hurts artists and others, as well as consumers.

Updates

• 11/05/2006 @ 11:30 PM — Added a brief explanation of what DRM does for those who aren’t familiar with the technology.