Happy New Year

Monday, 5:58 pm

By Kate

Dec

31

2007

I should be getting myself into the kitchen, any minute now, to fix a dish to take across the street tonight for New Year’s Eve celebrating. Isn’t that convenient? I don’t have to drive anywhere. I can walk to the party and I can walk home. Not more than 100 feet, either way.

I’m making stuffed potato skins. Yum.

Before I go, however, I thought I’d share this article (via Talking Points Memo) from the Washington Post about a dumb dinosaur industry that is working tirelessly to assure its own extinction. You just couldn’t come up with a more horrible business plan than aggressively suing your customers, while offering no alternatives that remotely address 21st century technology and convenience. Yes, we’re talking about the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They are now suing individuals who ripped legally purchased CDs to store and play on their very own computers. Sharing those songs is not the issue. Just having copies of songs from your legally purchased CDs on your computer (and probably other portable devices) is, they claim, illegal. Good luck with that. Like we’re all going to drag around with a CD player and our entire CD libraries so we can listen to our tunes whenever and wherever. The thing I want to know, that the article doesn’t get around to addressing, is how the RIAA found out that the guy they’re suing had copies of his CDs on his computer. I’d really like to know to know the answer to that.

Tomorrow, I shall be back to the regularly scheduled programming with some odds and ends.

Hope you all have a safe and enjoyable New Year’s Eve.