When people think college sports, they're typically thinking of the big players: men's football and men's basketball. These are the most popular sports, the ones that fill the stands, draw the alumni, supposedly increase alumni donations to the school, and are aired on television.

I hate them.

These two sports, at least for the bigger schools, are professional sports. The team management, the schools, engage in unethical collusion to artificially deflate athlete salaries. Clearly these are professional sports. If they were just for fun and school spirit, would their coaches be some of the highest paid people in the university? Would schools build massive stadiums to house gthem? But by falsely labeling the athletes are "amateur" the schools can unethically impose restrictions on the athletes to keep their costs down. Schools get many of the benefits of a minor league football and basketball team, but don't have to pay what the market would bear. (Of course, the free market, like a cockroach, is hard to keep down. Thus every few years there is a crackdown and it's discovered that schools are breaking the rules to attract top players, offering them cars, prostitutes, cash, and more.) The professional leagues appreciate this because they get the benefits of a minor league without having to actually manage it.

This makes me very angry.

Baseball gets it right. There are professional minor leagues. Minor league players typically aren't paid much, but they can charge what the market will bear. The player and a college don't need to lie about giving a damn about a good education; it's all about the game. Players who are skilled enough move up to the major leagues whenever they are ready, a player who isn't can fall back to the minor leagues.

This was all bad enough, until I learned something new, but something I should have realized. Colleges are paid to use their student athlete's likenesses. (backup) To play, a student must sign away the rights to their very face. This sickens me. At this point a college can't make any plausible claim that this is an amateur sport. Third parties are willing to buy, and the colleges are willing to sell, the right to use a player's name and face in a video game. The colleges are trading on the commercial value inherent to these players. This is overt professional use. It is shameful, unethical, and absolutely should be illegal.

I am absolutely sickened.

(I bear no ill will toward the less commercial college sports, nor honestly professional sports, just few cases where the label "amateur" is used to abuse the poor athletes. And I have nothing but pity for the poor college athletes who much suffer under this system. A career in professional sports is rough on the body, and an athlete generating value for their parent organization deserves the right to negotiate for as much pay as they can. Having years of one's inherently limited career stolen by a college is foul.)

Buying Amazon Kindle books? Amazon may take books you "purchased" away from you. (backup) From the article, "As one of my readers noted, it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table."

Amazon can take your books away from you. In the future more and more books will be published in online form only, and if they all have DRM systems like Amazons, a book can be unpublished. It's as if you never had it. You can learn about the dangers of a society where history can be rewritten in this way in Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. But don't look for it on your Kindle, since that's one of the books that was unpublished.

Amazon claims the books were never legal in the first place. They were essentially digital bootlegs. However, if Barnes & Noble were sloppy and accidentally sold bootleg books to customers, they would have no right to break into your home and take them back.

If you purchase something locked with DRM, you don't actually own it.* You have a license to access it. That license can be revoked for a variety of reasons, all out of your control.

* To be clear, if you buy a random book off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, you legally own that specific copy. You do not receive, nor do you need a license to read it, lend it out, resell it, quote from it, or use it as bird cage liner. Copyright law limits your right to make copies, it does not eliminate ownership.

(2009-07-24: Typo fix.)

Under the Bush/Cheney administration, America tortured people. We waterboarded someone more than 180 times in a single month. We slammed people into walls. Bush, Cheney, and other scum were so chickenshit that they decided to "protect" America by lowering our standards. We needed to destroy human rights to protect... well, something or another. This was a dark period of American history. We descended so low that far too many people were willing, and sadly still are willing, to defend torture. I'm glad it's over, and I hope we can recover quickly. I want America to again be a shining city upon the hill, a beacon of hope, the highest standards against which all others are compared; not just a cowardly, petty nation lashing out blindly.

(2009-04-23: Typo fix)

20 years ago the Exxon Valdez oil tanker trashed much of the Alaskan coastline. The cause? Not a drunk captain, but a broken radar that Exxon refused to fix. It would have been an easy fix, but Exxon failed to carry legally required damage control systems. Exxon lied about it. The livelihoods of perhaps 30,000 people were destroyed, and Exxon has been fighting this entire time to avoid paying them. It looks like they'll finally be paying up... about $16,000 to each victim. Your entire way of life destroyed? Surely $16,000 will cover that. Of course, it won't help the victims who have died since then.

Of course, Exxon is a poor, impoverished company. If they had been forced to pay more in damages, or to actually clean the damaged land, they wouldn't have been able to pay a $400,000,000 retirement bonus to the man who was President of Exxon when the disaster happened.

Read the full story about Exxon's abuse here.

Via Mark Evanier's news from me)

I'm written before about how Copperfield is now an egomaniacal blowhard. He's just phoning it in. But I now know that he's a copyright bully. Check out this fine YouTube video...

Oops, it's gone, because Copperfield claims copyright on it. Okay, maybe they just copied his video. Maybe there is a copyright claim and these are just scum. Except, you can still find the video...

If that doesn't work go here.

Not a single frame of video from the original trick. Copperfield has no copyright claim. This scum abused copyright to keep the secret of his trick. Sorry David, suck it up. Tricks get revealed. It must be doubly embarrassing because these are magicians, nor did they get the information from a leak. No, they just studied the trick and deduced what must have happened. But Copperfield has lawyers. He's apparently scared the Trickbusters into removing all references to his tricks. (If you search online, you can find their analysis of several of his tricks.)

David Copperfield is scum.

Fortunately I don't recommend his shows anyway. Mac King is more fun and cheaper. And I'm optimistic about Spencers: Theatre of Illusion, who Eva and I will be seeing tomorrow.

From Slate:

Two Pennsylvania county judges stand accused of sending thousands of teenagers to juvenile prison in exchange for $2.6 million in bribes from the privately run detention facilities.

Our legal system fails sometimes. And, as the above reminds us, there is occasionally corruption. In this case, two corrupt judges may have incorrectly sentenced thousands of teenagers to prison. Strong protections for the accused, high quality public defenders, and even rights for those found guilty are how we defend against and mitigate these problems.

If you live within 100 miles of the border, you and your vehicle can be searched without probable cause, in violation of the fourth amendment. Two-thirds of US citizens don't have their fourth amendment rights under this reasoning. Absolutely sickening.

Apparently the trick is twisting two Supreme Court rulings: that the Border Patrol is allowed to do random stops to check for illegal immigrants in their areas, and that if a drug dog just happens to alert handlers that there are drugs, that is probable cause. So, just stop everyone to check for illegal immigrants and happen to have a bunch of drug dogs there. Oh, and take advantage of the fact Dogs frequently issue erroneous alerts.

China's totally trustworthy official news agent reported on their glorious, successful space launch. Unfortunately the launch hadn't happened yet.

Knowing a good idea when they see it, McCain's election team started running ad declaring "McCain won the debate-- hands down." several hours before the debate.

I was originally just going to post the China story, but the coincidence is too excellent.

While Disney is running around stretching copyright so that Micky Mouse will never enter the public domain, Disney is perfectly willing to engage in legal trickery to destroy someone else's copyright.

Take the saga of Bambi, by Austrian Felix Salten. The story of the fawn was first published in Germany in 1923 without a formal copyright notice, which wasn't required there. Three years later, Salten republished it with a notice.

In the 1930s, Salten's rights were assigned to Disney, which made the famous 1942 movie. When Salten's heirs renewed the copyright in 1954, they correctly listed 1926 as the year of Bambi's first copyright.

But in a 1994 dispute over royalties with a small publisher that had acquired the Salten family's rights, Disney lawyers said the 1954 copyright was void because it was filed three years too late -- based on the fact that the story was first published in 1923. A federal judge sided with Disney, ruling Bambi was in the public domain.

Though that finding was reversed on appeal, the legal ordeal bankrupted the publisher.

Scum. I hope they lose the copyright to Mickey because of a similar minor detail. They've clearly established that they feel the law should be applied that way.

Since I wrote my original call for the regulation of eBay, I've occasionally looked back on it and wondered if I was too harsh. eBay has now helpfully assured me that they'll keep abusing their monopoly position given the opportunity. (Backup link.) As of next month, sellers can't accept payments by check or money order. It's cash-on-pickup or online only. Want, say, Google Checkout? "Google's and Amazon's products and services compete with eBay on a number of levels, so we are not going to allow them on eBay." That's a surprisingly honest statement that they're using their monopoly in running auction to leverage and advantage in the unrelated area of payment handling. eBay are scum. At this point my primary hope is that they screw up badly enough that they implode, creating a vacuum for real competition. Unfortunately their monopoly power is so great that the screw up would need to be mind-bogglingly large.

(Via Slashdot.)

Apparently weddings are for greedy people.

When Eva and I went to arrange tuxedos, the clerk was happy to remind me that if I got a certain minimum number of tuxedos, one, presumably mine, would be free. The implication was that I could pad out the wedding party or number of ushers, make them pay for their tuxedos, and get mine free. Foul.

I also learned that some places offer you "free gifts" when you put certain minimum prices or numbers of things in your wedding registry. The minimum that stuck in my mind was the $1,000 of crystalware for some "gift" or another.. If you, and apparently your friends, are so wealthy that you actually think $1,000 of crystalware is an appropriate gift, you hardly need a free gift. Besides, isn't more than enough that your friends are kinda choosing to present you with a gift. I feel kinda dirty having a registry at all, it makes me feel like I'm asking for gifts which is absolutely not my intention. Getting bribed to make my registry larger is pretty foul.

Finally, Eva found a gem here on Amazon: "If the honeymoon is the newlyweds' reward, wedding gifts are the royalties that keep coming in." What a profoundly offensive sentence. If you're marrying the love of your life, do you need a reward, let alone royalties? Foul.

By avoiding a number of traditional things, Eva and I have avoided a lot of a the sleaze that I'm told permeates the wedding industry. But we still see bits and pieces oozing out of the edges.

Added 2008-09-08: Aaron's comment below pointed out to me that my introduction, "Apparently weddings are for greedy people" could easily be interpreted as being hostile to the entire idea of gift giving. That was not my intention. I was trying to convey the impression that the wedding industry as a whole gave me, that a a couple should have grotesque sense of entitlement that drowns out what is actually important.

Bioshock has unacceptable DRM. If the publisher ever folds, or decides to stop supporting the authentication servers, the game will lock up and never legally work again. They promised they would eventually remove it. They have now admitted that they lied. The authentication system will be in place forever. They now claim that if they stop supporting Bioshock, they'll remove it. Riiight. They're going to stop supporting and making money on a game, but they'll spend a bit more to unlock it?

As is usually the case, if you pay for a legal copy of something with DRM, you get crippled functionality. If you download an illegal copy, you get full functionality.

In a small victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. What's depressing is how close this was. The dissenting opinion sickens me; that four justices are willing to abdicate their responsibilities as one of the three equal branches of government turns my stomach. Apparently "strict constructionist" means "roll over for whatever the other two branches want, ignoring your duties as a check and line of last defense on them."

(Via Mark Evanier's news from me.)

It's time to regulate eBay.

I don't like it. I'm never happy when government needs to step into the free market. But the free market isn't the magical fairy that many think it is. Sometimes the free market fails, badly, and needs to be smacked around until it behaves. Monopolies are just such a failure. eBay is a monopoly, a natural monopoly at that. Worse, eBay is abusing their monopoly position.

Online auctions are a natural monopoly. As a seller, you want to sell your product to the largest number of buyers possible. More buyers means more potential bidders, more potential bidders means higher sales prices. And of course buyers will flock to the location where there are more sellers; you're more likely to find what you're looking for. It's a feedback loop, the network effect. The only places where eBay has competition are places where eBay has chosen to exit the market. Thus, there is competition in online gun sales, but not for most other areas.

Okay, so eBay is a natural monopoly. That doesn't mean they're abusing their position. but they are. First, the pricing. In a properly functioning free market, the cost for a good or service will be just a bit above the cost to provide the good or service. If the price is higher than that, someone else should step in as competition. Of course, if you have a monopoly, it's not feasible for someone else to step in. For eBay, this is obviously nonsense. Let's say I want to sell an old magazine. I list it for $1 minimum and it sells for $5. (This may sound silly, but I have in fact purchased an old magazine for $5.) eBay charges $0.68 for this. That doesn't offend me too much. I'm prepared to believe that it will cost eBay something aroud $0.68 to carry my listing. Okay, but now I've got a more expensive book, I list at $15 and sell at $25. Now eBay wants $2.53. What more did ebay do for that extra $1.85? Absolutely nothing. That's damn near free money. Some of real value, like a rare book, listed at $50 and sold at $100? eBay enjoys $7.69, overwhelmingly profit. Must be nice. A real life auction house can at least make some claim to charging a percentage; you're paying for security and authentication of the item. The auction house acts as an trusted escrow agent, ensuring that the buyer pays up and that what is being solid is what is delivered. eBay provides none of that. eBay views your $5 book and your $100 book the same; they give it same amount of effort, almost none. If something goes wrong, it's all your problem, eBay washes their hands.

This by itself seems deeply suspicious. But far more damning is their decision to force users to use an unrelated service, PayPal. In the UK, you must accept PayPal in some categories, and can only accept PayPal for video game consoles. In Australia, you must accept PayPal, period. Come June 17 in Australia, it's PayPal, cash on delivery, and nothing else. In the US, sellers are specifically forbidden from using competitor Google Checkout.

This is abuse of monopoly, nothing more. They've proven they can't play nice with their natural monopoly, so they deserve to be regulated.

I hate the Olympics.

I like the idea of the Olympics: athletes from across the world competing in a neutral event. It's an opportunity to see our fellow man in a positive light. It promotes peace and open mindedness. It inspires us by showing us some of the best athletes in the world.

However, the International Olympic Committee are petty, money grubby scum.

The IOC censors atheletes. They can blog, but they can't interview other competitors, they can't include photographs of the events, they can't even discuss their competition. All of this is done to protect their profits.

Meanwhile, the IOC clamps down on any possible use of the word Olympics. Writing a guidebook on the Olympic Pensinsula. Better not try to call it that in the title. A restaurant owner born in a town at the base of Mount Olympus is told to remove Olympics from it.

The IOC is scum. The evidence for the economic boom from hosting the Olympics is decidedly uncertain. This isn't about the sports and the international goodwill. This is just simple profiteering. I don't mind capitalism, but I object to using an undeserved reputation. US cities should stop bidding on these handouts to the IOC.

So I purchased Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened online. In doing so, I'm supporting small game companies, as the game isn't, as available at retail. I did so without the benefit of the demo, buying blind. I paid $30, more than I'll usually pay for a small game. I'm going out on a limb here, trusting a company I really know nothing about. And what do I get in exchange for my trust? A fresh Starforce infection. Installing a game shouldn't necessitate installing a device driver (potentially making my system less stable, as with any driver), and rebooting. I trusted you, Focus and Frogwares, and in exchange you treat me like a criminal who needs a tracking bracelet; a tracking bracelet that occasionally malfunctions and fucks up my computer. For bonus fun, I only get to "activate" the game three times. So if I reinstall it a few times, it will stop working. Worse, if Focus goes out of business (which seems likely, given that they're a company I've never heard of and who hold their customers in such low resolve), the authentication system will simply stop working. I regularly reinstall old games I've enjoyed, but that's not likely to be an option for this game. I'll keep this in mind in the future: Frogwares and Focus don't trust their customers, infects their games with malware developed by unethical Russians who encourage illegal copying of games. I sure as hell don't trust them. (Edit: It's Frogwares, not Frogware)

Well, it's too late now to return the game. (Of course, it was too late the moment I bought it.) I hope the game's good and that I can clear the infection when I'm done. I guess I was considering a reinstall of Windows anyway.

I've ranted about DRM before. Yesterday DRM bit me directly. I bought a PlayStation 2 to play both games and movies. Yesterday it stopped playing movies. No warning message, no errors, the disks simply wouldn't spin up. At first I simply assumed the drive was broken, but then discovered that games still play fine. A bit more experimentation revealed that a small number of my video DVDs still played fine. A Sherlock Holmes DVD from NetFlix played fine. So did a student film a friend of Eva's made. So did a bunch of the more suspicious Japanese imports. The mainstream movies all failed.

What seperates the two categories? DRM, in this case the Content Scrambling System or CSS. For unknown reasons my PS2's ability to handle DRM protected disks failed.

If the PS2 didn't support DVD DRM the PS2 would have been cheaper and it would have one less part that could fail. If I had bought bootlegs instead of legal versions of movies, I would have gotten cheaper DVDs that still worked. Congratulations big media; you're continuing to give consumers good reasons to prefer bootlegs over legal copies.

This sort of idiocy can be worse. DRM subsystems in next generation video game consoles and televisions can break.