EMI Records has agreed to sell their entire catalog of music without any restrictions. You can make as many copies as you want to play on your computer, home stereo, car, or any place else you may want to keep music. Of course this is not a de facto allowance to make copies for 50,000 of your closest friends and family members, but there are no technical road blocks to doing it.

Now Microsoft and Apple will be selling the songs without chains. Microsoft has not yet announced the details of how they will be offering the DRM free tunes, but I would bet they will at least match Apple. Apple is offering the unrestricted music at double the quality of their standard downloads for $.40 more per song. The new versions will be $1.39 instead of $.99.

I can still go to Best Buy and get almost any CD for for $16 or less. They offer better audio quality than even the new versions that Apple is offering. Most include booklets and lyrics, and don't forget they can be be copied into any format you like. Apple still only offers AAC format. My car stereo plays MP3s I can put on a memory card or CD. But it won't play AAC. $16 for all of that or $14 for none of it. To me it still seams like a no brainier. But a step in the right direction is still a good thing.

I recently got into a discussion with somebody about driving laws. Specifically anti cellphone laws. My take was that targeting cell phones is monumentally stupid. There are many things people do in cars while driving that are at least as distracting as talking on the phone. The laws regarding driving distractions should be completely generic. It should be illegal to intentionally engage in an activity that distracts from driving while driving. Putting on makeup, filing nails, reading the news paper, physically disciplining kids in the back seat, even eating or drinking. Tickets should be issued for them all.

Beyond that I think it should be far more difficult to obtain a drivers license to begin with. People should be exposed to all types of road conditions, around the year. They should have experience in loosing control of a car and be able to regain it. I propose multimillion dollar driving schools. That have 10+ mile closed courses, and the ability to simulate all kinds of road conditions and scenarios. Those would have to include torrential rain on demand, snow up to 1 foot deep, several cars designed to be involved in collisions. That way people who go through the several hundred hours of the course, will have the experience to handle all the eventualities they may experience on the road, making them far superior drivers.

Now of course this would be expensive. The cost for the course would easily be a couple of thousand dollars. And that would also be part of the point. People would take driving very seriously because it is so difficult and expensive to earn the privilege. And to keep the privilege an obstacle course kind of road test should be passed every 5 years. Or else one would have to go through the whole course to be re-certified.

This would also have benefits beyond road safety as well. Because there are fewer drivers on the roads there would be less congestion and traffic, more people would car pool and use mass transit systems. This would result in less expenditure on road maintenance and building, oil usage, and environmental impact. It would lower accident rates, and by extension, insurance rates would also drop.

However it would require a fundamental change in the way driving is perceived in this country. Everybody knows that driving is technically a privilege. But a privilege that easy to earn, is not largely perceived or treated as one. Poor drivers that have been driving, would not relinquish their keys. The only way for this program to succeed is if it is implemented only with new drivers. People who currently have a license would have to be exempt from the new rules. So the benefits would not be seen for a generation or two. But I still feel this would be the best step toward making our roads safer, and faster.

My take on the recent blogging code of conduct.

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
   No problem. I try everything I can to stop comment spam. That shit pisses me off, way more than any of you.

2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
   Abuse Tolerance Level: 3

3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
   This appears flawed. Anyone can give themselves any name on the internet. Hell for all you know My name might not really be Steven Roy. It could be Jack Thompson, or Steven Jackson. Just because you make somebody give you a name does not mean it's their name.

4. Ignore the trolls.
   Ask anybody who knows me can tell you, some times I like arguments. Hell way back in the day I used to frequent a Flame War newsgroup. But that got boring eventually.

5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
   I thought part of the point of the internet was that so people could communicate in ways other than the telephone. I have to admit, unless the visitor in question already has my phone number, generally I don't want to talk to them on the phone.

6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so
   When I'm in a Flame War I usually try not to tell them things about themselves. Instead it's more fun to set them up to realize it themselves. It often works better, because you don't publicly embarrass them, only privately, so they don't feel the need to retaliate any more. Always remember, you win when your opponent quits.

7. Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.
   Well technically your not saying anything online unless it's a net cast. Your writing things online. But don't worry it's a common mistake.

I make client's photo CD's very simply, just a bunch of JPEG's dropped onto them. Windows XP and OS X both have decent image viewers included, so I never thought it would be a problem. Last week I did some family portraits for my mother's neighbor. When I delivered the CD and loaded it up for her on her computer. I never expected this woman to have a 6+ year old computer running Windows ME. There is no image viewer that lets you scroll through the images nicely. You have to select each one and wait for the CD drive to spin up and load a 4MB JPEG. It took forever.

This kind of machine makes me want to just walk away. Computers should be replaced every 3 to 5 years, depending on what your finances allow.

But it did make me think about the issue. I found a tiny tiny program I can load onto a CD with the images and it will automatically run when the CD is inserted. It's actually very cool, can even play background music and everything. So I think I'll give her a copy with that see if she liked it better.

I just can't care about Easter anymore. My mother tries to make something of it. But she can never let go of things. Nobody else in my family cares anymore. I still dig Christmas. I like the idea that there is one day a year that families drop whatever, and get together. Easter is like a little kid with a lemon aid stand across the street from a smoothie shop. And Christmas is the smoothie shop. I might want to give the kid something to do and buy a lemon aid, but I just got a lemon smoothie, I'm really don't want that much lemon.

Maybe that was a bad example, but I just think Easter is trying to play on the same level as Christmas when it is clearly just an amateur holiday. I still hope you have a happy one any way. Mine was just like any other Sunday.