Web links related to the Back of the Book program of January 20, 2003
It's Sunday evening 2/2/2003 19:40:54 and this page is done. I got to the below topics plus some more on this program. We also read some more E-mails and some interactive stuff from listeners live on a Web based board.
Here is the latest on the saga of Pacifica. The big meeting of the interim Pacifica National Board has been changed to February 28-March 2, in Berkeley, CA, to discuss the bylaws.
Here's the WBAI schedule. Don't blame me if it's not accurate, I didn't make it up I'm only relaying it. Here's a schedule made by a listener who has Web links for various programs and producers.
Our colleagues from Off the Hook now have both a RealAudio streaming web cast operating, and a new MP3 stream both of which were working at about 6:33 PM last night. The MP3 feed is now the preferred feed.
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The Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI, has revamped its Web site and now has something called the Pacifica Lounge where you can post messages about Pacifica, WBAI and other Pacifica radio stations. This may be a good thing, and of course there are other, long term fora in which to participate.
We had some good news and some bad news about on-line issues like free speech and copyrights on this program.
In Norway a court found Jon Johansen, known as “DVD Jon” in that country, not guilty of breaking any laws about movie piracy when he wrote and distributed a program called “DeCSS,” about which I've spoken on the program in the past, which unlocks DVDs that people own. Unfortunately, it's being appealed by the Motion Picture Association. Interesting what can happen in a country whose judges and legislators are not owned by big business interests, like the MPAA. And apparently the MPAA doesn't have any concerns or moral qualms about subjecting the teenager to what in America would be double jeopardy.
In other good news the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan has ruled that Network Associates, a software company, has violated the free speech rights of its customers by including as a condition of buying their software that “The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc.” The company is updating the language on their products and may face a fine of millions of dollars. Network Associates' licensing language was only the worst of the restrictions that software companies try to impose on the people who buy their products, but other companies may well find themselves in court some time in the future as well.
And then there was the bad news. The Supreme Court by a 7 to 2 decision upheld the right of the best Congress that money can buy to extend copyright protection to 95 years. Although they upheld the copyright law extension, which serves the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and other big copyright holders, some of the Supreme Court justices made mention of the fact that this is a bad law. How grand that in America is this sort of stupid law for the rich and greedy passed and enforced.
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I am no fan of vegetables and most fruits, but a scientist has raised a serious alarm about bananas as we know them possibly not being available in another ten years or so. This is more serious than an issue of people not being able to decorate their corn flakes with disks of the fruit. Bananas are an important daily staple of the diets of an estimated 400 million people around the world. The golden age of food may be starting to unravel at the beginning of the 21st Century.
Albert Einstein had predicted over a century ago that gravity propagated at the same speed as light in a vacuum. An experiment using the American Very long Baseline Array of radio telescopes plus a 100 meter radio telescope in Germany has pretty much proven Einstein's assumption to be correct. Although they only sought to prove that gravity propagates at less than infinite speed, which most scientists figured was probably the case, they were able to show that gravity acts at the same speed as light in a vacuum with an accuracy of 20%. Measurements involving gravity are very hard to do because of gravity's ubiquity and the fact that three's no way to shield from it. For more details on the experiment look at the Astronomy Magazine site.
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We did indeed do some interactive communication during this program with listeners on the Goodlight board. We'll do it again in the future, too.
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We went through a bunch of mail on the program. Much of it was snail mail, but here are the E-mails we read on the air.
By the time that you read this the Winter Solstice will have passed and the Sun will be starting to sit longer in the Western sky. Bring on the light!!!!!!
Yes, the above greeting isn't going to be there anymore by the time you get to it. Oh well.
Pickles was feeling kind of badly during part of this program and so couldn't reply. We'll see if she wants to read some of the mail, however.
Zigman has sent us another greeting.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI. But there is an Internet list called “Free Pacifica!” which you can subscribe to, and these issues are discussed there. If you subscribe to it you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.
If you want to subscribe to the “Free Pacifica!” list just click on this link and follow the instructions, and you'll be subscribed. Could open your eyes a little bit.
The above list has occasionally produced a high volume of E-mail because of the attention that these issues have drawn. If you would prefer to subscribe to a low volume list that only provides announcements of events related to these issues then subscribe to the FreePac mailing list.
Another list that's sprung up is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. This one is very lively and currently includes over 400 subscribers coast to coast. Being lively, of course, it sometimes also gets a bit nasty. All sorts of things are happening on this list. With that warning in mind, you can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too, although you'll have to deal with Yahoo! to do so.
There is also the more WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. This one has a great many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary board that's just totally out of hand.
The “Goodlight” Web based message board has expanded to cover all Pacifica stations.
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