another dose of politics for you

Lawrence Lessig, most well known for founding Creative Commons, and writing about free culture, has endorsed Obama, with a very well made and convincing video, here.

Also rocking my socks this week is a music video taken from the original source material of Obama speaking in New Hampshire on the night of the primaries.

If you haven't watched that speech, I highly recommend it, if it doesn't quicken your heartbeat a bit, I think you're probably dead inside.

I'm going to quote a bit of it here, that really stuck with me:

"We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier... Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can."

That's been a rallying call of mine, throughout my life, and to hear it repeated in such a positive and powerful way by a politician, it really gives me hope. As long as people have told me I can't do things, I've always responded that "Yes, I can." And it turns out that quite often, just believing that makes it possible. It's a truly American credo, one of belligerence and hope combined, one of confidence and exuberance and forward thinking. That was a damn fine speech.

we're a democracy, dammit

One major reason I can think of for not supporting Hillary Clinton for the nomination (well, one of very, very many), is that I don't like the idea of our country being run by dynasties.

I mean, jesus, this country has been run by the Bush/Clinton dynasty for 20 goddamn years now. I don't want to make it an even quarter of a century.

There's a danger here, in that we need to cycle in new people, with new ideas, and not get used to a certain name being the person you have to go to for leaders. We don't need American Royal Families. It's time to break the chain and get some new blood in there, and shake this country up a bit, because I don't like where we've been going.

20 years! I still can't believe that. An entire generation of Americans has never known a leader who wasn't a Bush or Clinton.

moon landing conspiracy theories

You know, in all the discussions I've seen of conspiracy in the moon landing, I'd never heard of the mirror that we left there. It pretty much destroys all the conspiracies, yet it's not talked about much. Neil and Buzz left a mirror there, pointed back at earth, in 1969.

I've been watching a documentary about gravity here, and it turns out that astronomers are able to bounce a laser off the mirror that we left there, and use it to measure quite accurately the distance between the earth and the moon.

Now, if you hit the surface with a laser, the photons don't make it back. It takes an incredibly accurate telescope and a lot of patience to hit that little mirror. If there wasn't a mirror there, the experiment wouldn't work.

What's awesome about this is that it's repeatable! You can go to an observatory with a telescope mounted laser, just like this documenter did, and test the theory. Boom, there's the mirror, we landed on the moon. Shut the hell up, wackos.

customer service is dead

You used to be able to walk into a store and talk to the owner.

Next, you called a help line, and talked to some kid reading a 3 ring binder.

That was too expensive, so we hired Indians who don't understand your problems to help you with your problems.

Following that, we got lots of websites where you can only fill out a web form, and someone will help you, eventually.

Google has taken the next step, and told people to fuck off completely.

I've got a problem with Noobtoob's streaming feed on Youtube. It's all documented right here in a forum post.

Why is it in a forum post, where I'm begging for help, and no one is listening? Because Google has decided that they won't help you at all with anything that breaks. They set up a forum, so you can beg for help from other people who are there to beg for help. Needless to say, it doesn't work very well.

If you go to their help pages, you can click through FAQs, but there's NO contact information anywhere. There is literally no way to get help from anyone. You can't even fill out a form begging someone to help. Once, I found a page where there was a text field, and I begged that they would help me with my Youtube/Adsense problem.

I got no response, so I went back to use the text box again... and they had REMOVED it, I shit you not. There was one place on the entire site where you could try to contact a person, and it was a mistake that they fixed.

So, this is the future. Web 2.0, community-generated help forums, with thousands of people screaming into the night and no one listening. I guess if enough people complain on forums or blogs, they'll read about the problem in a website, and then decide it's big enough to fix. I never thought I'd miss Indian call centers.

It's mind bogglingly unfriendly and stupid, but I guess it's cheaper than helping people. Because, you know, Google is short on money.