You hear a great tune on Internet radio or at a friend’s house and want to download it. You look for a legal service that carries it, but the only one you find is overpriced and is hampered by anti-copying technology and other restrictions so that it will only play on one kind of player (which you may or may not own), so you can’t add that song to an MP3 CD collection for use in your car. Or do anything else with it that you might want. Conversely, you can easily download an unrestricted, therefore fully-useful, version of that song from illegal sources. Other than its illegality, the bootleg version is superior to the legal version in every way — and it’s free, too. Which will you choose? Now let’s look at how U.S. immigration laws offer potential immigrants a similar choice.
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Last night Bradenton city officials met with Village of the Arts residents and gallery owners for the first time in three years. The local paper ran a story about that meeting this morning that got the gist of it right, but didn’t come to grips with the main issue: that the Village of the Arts is one of few attractions that gives Bradenton a unique identity, and deserves the city’s support for that reason alone.
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“Overpopulation” is a word we don’t hear much these days. Once upon a time (like 30 or 40 years ago) we worried that too many people would put too much strain on our planet’s resources, and a whole lot of us thought it might be a good idea to limit populations or even to reduce them.
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Shot from the N. side of I-75 about 2 miles west of Naples, Florida. Cut to 30 seconds because there’s really not that much *to* a wildfire; it just goes on and on. (I have the original tape — a few minutes more of the same — in case anyone is interested.) Note that there are no firefighters in sight…. just flames dancing merrily out in the boonies, part of a series of blazes pouring smoke and haze all over central and southern Florida. If you thought swamps couldn’t burn, you were wrong. Enough drought, and we’ve had plenty lately, and a swamp is dry grass and trees and bushes, easy to ignite.
This hasn’t spread widely beyond Net-oriented media yet, but the independently-created Barack Obama MySpace page was taken away by the official Obama campaign from the man who built it — and who pumped it up to over 160,000 friends. The guy seems to have cooperated with the official campaigners all the way, right up until they wanted to control the page themselves. He then asked them to hire him as a consultant (which would have been a damn smart move, since he was a proven, loyal online community builder). Instead, the Obama folks asked him how much he’d take as a one-time payment. He told them. They decided it was too much and, instead of negotiating, got MySpace to give them control of the URL.
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