8 Ways to Sunday

The United States’ telephone excise tax was established in 1898 as a luxury tax to help fund the Spanish–American War. It’s been a very long time since we were fighting with Spain or phone service was a luxury item, and the IRS has finally caught up with the present.

The phone tax is being abolished in the new year, and American tax payers are eligible for a refund of their last three years of tax payments. If you’ve used traditional, cellular, or VOIP phone service in the last three years, you’ve got some money coming to you from Uncle Sam.

Here’s the catch: you only have one chance to claim this refund, by filing some special information with your 2006 tax return. Phone tax payments are rolled into your phone bill — much like how sales tax is paid at the same time you buy a candy bar or bag of grapes — so you’ll need copies of your last three years of phone bills to get the best refund. If you don’t have or can’t get those records, then you’ll have to make do with the IRS’s standard refund based on your number of exemptions.

The IRS has a FAQ on its website that gives basic instructions on how to claim your refund. More specific guides are also available for businesses and individuals.

(Props: Dallas Morning News)

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…)

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.

from Queen of Wands, ©2003 Aeire

Over the weekend, I stumbled across a web comic called Queen of Wands that I’d definitely recommend to fans of the genre. Written and drawn by a woman who calls herself Aeire, the comic has a story arc and characters that make it worthwhile to follow from the very beginning. One of the best things about QoW, however, is the occasional one-off strips that stand on their own.

My favorite of these is this strip, which spoofs Captain Planet and the Power Rangers to vent the author’s occasional desire to speed up natural selection a bit. It seems that stupid people are breeding and taking over the world, and all that stands in the way is a team of spunky teenagers with the power to invoke Charles Darwin and his Chainsaw of Natural Selection. There’s a great follow-up a week or so later, in which the comic’s leading lady — who has little patience for the aggressively stupid — feels compelled to do some gene pool disinfection of her own and is barely kept from killing a customer by her boss.

If you liked those, you’d probably also get a kick out of the occasional appearances of the Grammar Nazi — an old lady who fights (violently) against poor spelling, bad grammar, and the scourge of netspeak. The best of these is probably “The Grammar Spork.” The strip has it all: foaming at the mouth, furniture chewing, eyeball removal by plastic kitchen utensil, and a low price of just four payments of $29.95. Get your own Grammar Spork™ today, for quick and easy relief from the pain of poor grammar.

Opera Software’s famously fast and standards-compliant web browser will be performing surfing duties for the users of Wii, Nintendo’s oddly-named next-generation game console. As far as I know, this will make Wii the first console with a “real” web browser built in.

With the Xbox 360 currently retailing at $300 and $400* — and the PlayStation 3 set to sell for $500 and $600* — the $250 Wii is sure to be a hit with cost-conscious gamers and cash-strapped parents. One more reason for web developers to test pages in Opera.

(Props: Digital Trends)

Updates

• 6/4/2006 @ 2:40 AM — More details on Opera’s Wii browser from WiiSpot.com
• 6/6/2006 @ 12:32 PM — Cubed3.com interviews Scott Hedrick, Opera Software’s Executive Vice President in charge of Opera for Devices, about the Wii browser. Opera’s web site has the press release about the Opera–Nintendo venture.