Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Apple iTunes & Amazon MP3

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Overview

I purchase my music legally. My collection—over 4,200 songs—has been laboriously obtained over many years through legitimate music retailers, and I allow myself a monthly budget of about $20 for buying music (sometimes more, sometimes less depending on my other, more important financial obligations). I am, needless to say, a music lover. Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Aerosmith, Matchbox Twenty, Yo-Yo Ma, the Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, Chicago, Maroon 5, Eminem, Metallica, John Denver, the Eagles, and Vladamir Horowitz are just a few of the names in my collection—I have fairly eclectic and wide-ranging taste.

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Website 19.1 Revision

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Today I lunched a minor revision to Off on a Tangent, bringing the version to 19.1. This is a relatively minor update, as I am generally very happy with the look and functionality of v19. The only big change is that the site now spans to the width of your browser window, which will make the big-screeners happy, and a spiffy little JavaScript I wrote automatically decides how many pictures of me to display in the header bar to fill the variable space. I also made the name of the site a bit bigger. As an aside, the Joomla 1.5 release is [finally] approaching, so I’m starting to give some thought to Website 20. If you have ideas, send them in soon!

Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic

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This, my friends, is why we need laws about Net Neutrality. Independent testing shows that Comcast, the second largest Internet service provider, actively interferes with BitTorrent file sharing by its customers. BitTorrent, while sometimes used for the illegal transfer of copyrighted material, is also used by hundreds of legitimate companies and organizations to quickly distribute large files. For example, OpenOffice.org, Ubuntu Linux, and other organizations with large downloadable products each offer and encourage downloading with BitTorrent. I’d bet that Verizon and other ISPs discriminate against BitTorrent traffic too (I am starting to have strange issues sharing legal ‘torrents’ myself). I have a right to use my Internet connection for whatever kind of legal data traffic I want, and it is time to protect that right by law.

The views expressed in this post are mine and mine alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, Web.com.

Why ‘No Child’ Was Needed

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Karin Chenoweth writes in the Washington Post this morning exactly what needs to be said about the ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB) law. The oft-ballyhooed line that teachers must now ‘teach to the test’ and fail to do anything original or creative in their teaching may be true, but teachers teaching to a test is better than the pre-NCLB situation where most teachers didn’t bother to teach anything at all. It’s a curious bit of revisionist history to pretend our schools were any better before NCLB than they are today. They weren’t. We need a wholesale redesign of how we educate people in this country, and NCLB was a [very small] step in the right direction. My only major complaint about NCLB is that it does far too little.

Chrysler Workers Strike: An[other] Opportunity

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After General Motors workers went on strike a few weeks ago, I was optimistic that GM would stick it to the unions the way I recommended in my piece on Fixing the American Auto Industry. They didn’t. Today, UAW workers went on strike against Chrysler, providing another opportunity to break the UAW. I’ve always had a soft-spot for Chrysler vehicles, much more so than for Ford or GM cars, and I’m hopeful that Chrysler’s new owners—Cerberus Capital Management—call the UAW’s bluff and put them in their place. As a privately owned company, Chrysler is in the best position to change things for the better. Take the opportunity, take the risk, and run with it.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.