Some Links

Federal judge says you can break DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyright -- this is excellent news, in my opinion. DRM is a pointless annoyance anyway, and courts ruled many years ago that someone who bought a piece of software was allowed to make backup copies for personal use, so it only makes sense that we should be allowed to break the DRM on a movie, and e-book, a game, or whatever that we've legally purchased if it's become a pain in the butt, or if we want to make a backup of that for our own personal use. Of course, some of the publishers would love to force us to re-purchase our entire electronic libraries every time a hard drive crashes or a book reader is stolen, but it seems there's a judge who disagrees. Good to know at least one circuit court is on the consumer's side.

Funny, smart commentary about burqa bans -- the idea of a government body dictating what people can wear, short of the really riciculous exception examples cited in this piece, is ludicrous. If Moslem women want to wear a burqa then they should be able to. Anyone who wants to wear a burqua, or a veil, or a T-shirt saying "Our Government Is Full of Idiots!" should be able to do so. Banning a traditional item of clothing which causes no harm to anyone is an outrageous infringement of freedom, and racist to boot.

Period Speech -- this xkcd comic pretty much says it all about various writers' attempts at period speech. (It also applies to various kinds of accents and dialects used by writers who apparently have never been exposed to same.) It's easy to see how silly it looks when our era is one of the ones being mangled, but plenty of writers trying to write "medieval" or "Southern" or whatever sound pretty much like this.

Jane Austen's Fight Club -- this is a really wonderful video. :D I'm not usually one for videos, but my husband e-mailed me this one and I was LOLing. Watch and enjoy. :D

[Edited because embedding the video didn't work. :/ ]