Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Licensing Update (Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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Back in 2008 with the launch of the twentieth version of this web site, I decided to license the vast majority of content on the site under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. This license gives you pretty much open-ended permission to make copies of my works . . . as long as you attribute them to me, don’t use them to make money, and don’t change them. I occasionally post particular works under less restrictive Creative Commons licenses as well.

On November 25, 2013, Creative Commons introduced the new 4.0 version of their licenses. The updated licenses are clearer and easier to read, no longer require nation-specific ‘porting,’ clarify the attribution requirements, and establish a thirty-day window for correction of license violations.

Creative Commons LicenseAfter reviewing the changes, I have decided to ‘upgrade’ and re-license the content here on Off on a Tangent under the new suite of licenses. Effective January 4, 2014, almost all of the content on the site is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The few content items that were licensed under other Creative Commons licenses are also now re-licensed under the equivalent 4.0 versions.

I use Creative Commons licenses (and support Creative Commons with financial donations from time-to-time) because I believe in a robust copyright system that balances the rights of content creators against the rights of consumers. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) states pretty clearly that copyright was meant to be limited, and that its primary purpose was not just to safeguard profits, but to promote arts and science: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. . . .”

Today, however, copyright terms are so long that they are practically unlimited and everybody seems to think that the purpose is only to protect creators’ rights to profit endlessly from their works. Profit is good, and people are less likely to create new works if they can’t expect to make money from them . . . but fair use is good too, and so is a robust and growing public domain (which requires a reasonable ‘end date’ on copyright protection). A healthy copyright system would strike a better balance between these competing goods.

Impreza WRX in the Snow

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WRX in the Snow
WRX in the Snow

I’ve had my trusty Subaru Outback 2.5i since 2008, and it has always been amazing in the snow. The symmetric all-wheel-drive system that Subaru uses in almost all of their cars has an uncanny way of working just fine in the most adverse conditions. Back in the record-setting winter of 2009-2010, when the Washington, DC, metro area got slammed by three separate blizzards, I was cruising around and getting where I needed to go without any trouble.

Well, now there is a second Subaru in the family. We bought a used 2004 Impreza WRX to serve as a ‘fun’ little car for zipping around on the weekends, and so I could try my hand at being an amateur mechanic on a car that doesn’t really need to be in working condition at any given time. And with today’s three or four inches of snow, I finally got the chance to see how it performs in less-than-ideal road conditions.

And it was . . . fine. With the same basic drivetrain as most other Subarus, including my Outback, it just drove like normal. I was able to get it going a bit sideways by pushing it too far (on empty streets and parking lots where it was safe to do so), but that wasn’t the car’s doing. The big difference between driving the Outback versus driving the WRX in slick conditions is that the WRX is much more powerful . . . which means you have to go really, really light on the throttle or you’re going to spin the wheels and fish-tail. Again, not the car’s fault, it just needs a bit more finesse on snow and ice than the less-powerful Outback 2.5i does.

During my hour-long drive in the snow, I got stuck behind a Ford Fusion (front-wheel drive) that was unable to make it up an incline on a rural, unpaved road. When I arrived, two of its occupants and some helpful neighbors were pushing it up the hill. As they were finally getting out of the way, one of the neighbors walked down to me and asked if I needed a push too. I said, “No, I think I’m fine. Thanks!” I put it in gear, gave it some gas, and let off the clutch. The little hatch-back struggled a bit to get a grip, but then it dug-in and crawled up the hill just fine. No pushing required.

I wish we got more snow around here. . . .

Happy New Year! 2014 Begins

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I wanted to take a moment and wish all of my Off on a Tangent readers a very happy new year. I hope that 2014 will be filled with blessings for each and every one of you.

I suppose it’s right and proper for me to spent a moment looking back at 2013. It was a good year, on the whole, for the Bradford household, although we have spent far too much time in medical facilities. When the year began, Melissa and I both knew that we were going to be having outpatient nasal surgery to correct our respective deviated septa. We didn’t know at the time that Melissa would need two more surgeries later in the year for other issues. Add in a couple of emergency room visits and all the regular checkups and so-on and, well, I’ll be happy if I can avoid seeing the inside of a hospital until June or so.

We also adopted a puppy named Nena. Oh, and Melissa quit her day-job to run her business full-time. All of that madness, combined with a whole lot of other unrelated madness, conspired to make Off on a Tangent far less active than I had planned, so I especially appreciate those of you who have borne with me and keep reading anyway. I am cautiously optimistic that 2014 will be a much more active year on the site, and I’m hoping to maintain a more consistent rate of posts. No promises just yet!

I’m also planning to re-start development on the next big site update: version 24. It was about half-finished when life forced me to abandon development. In addition to a refreshed look, you can look forward to a more ‘responsive’ design that will give you a more consistent and complete experience across the full range of phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. Stay tuned; more information to follow.

All in all, I’m looking forward to a more stable and active year in 2014 . . . but I really don’t know what God has in store for me, for you, for our nation, or for our world. As John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” Regardless, I am pretty sure it will be fun to watch, observe, and write about, and I hope you’ll keep coming back to join me on the journey. God bless.

Another One Bites the Dust

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One by one, the bygone technology greats are dying off. There was an impressive string of die-offs in 2009, with the Encarta encyclopedia, CompuServe service provider, and GeoCities free web hosting all shutting down. More recently we lost Palm, and it looks like we might be on the verge of losing BlackBerry too. These services, and others, were the tech titans of their time—either because they were really great, or at least because they were pioneers that laid the groundwork for better things to come. With better vision, better management, and better luck, they could have become the Wikipedias, Googles, Facebooks, and Apples of today . . . but instead they foundered, languished, and died.

And now we say farewell to the Winamp media player—one of the earliest MP3 jukeboxes to hit the Windows PC and a real pioneer in digital music. AOL, née America OnLine, officially shut Winamp down on December 20, although they might have fired their web site managers too early because Winamp.com and the players’ download links are all still live today. Grab it while you still can.

Winamp’s real glory days ended about the same time that the U.S. government shut down the Napster file sharing service [on tenuous legal grounds]. The player lived on with occasional updates . . . and I would argue that it was still one of the best media players on the Windows platform right up until the end. It was Apple that really revolutionized digital music with the iPod and iTunes, even though that honor could just as easily gone to Winamp if AOL had managed it properly after taking over in 1999.

With iTunes preloaded on every Mac, and an improved Windows Media Player preloaded on every Windows PC, most computer users didn’t see the need for Winamp anymore . . . but I liked it, and many other music lovers with expansive MP3 collections did too. I used iTunes for a good long time, but as my collection got bigger (and Apple’s software quality took a depressing nose-dive) I made the switch to Winamp. It served me very well right up until the day that AOL announced its demise, at which point I moved to MediaMonkey—a similarly no-frills, down-to-earth, powerful music management application that chews through thousands and thousands of tracks without a hitch.

Life goes on, but Winamp is another one of those products that will continue to bring back fond memories, even long after it’s gone to the great bit-bucket in the sky.

HealthCare.gov: Still Not Working (For Me)

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HealthCare.gov—the U.S. government’s web site that is meant to facilitate health insurance sales under the Affordable Care Act (‘ObamaCare’)—went live, at least in a sense, on October 1. I decided to give it a shot a week or two later and see what it would cost to insure myself under President Barack Obama’s (D) signature law. I didn’t get very far.

It’s old news now that the site didn’t work properly for the vast majority of visitors, and it didn’t work right for me either. So I waited a few more weeks. The media kept telling me that it was getting better every day, and, sure enough, my second attempt let me get all the way through the application process . . . only to fail at the very end with a cryptic, nonsensical error. Oh well.

Then I tried again a couple of days later, and the site told me that it was unable to verify my identity. Funny, the government usually has no problem verifying my identity. The Internal Revenue Service accepts my identity when I send them my taxes. The Federal Communications Commission accepted it when I got my General Mobile Radio Service license. The Social Security Administration sends me estimates of how much money I will get if the system is still working when I retire. The Transportation Security Administration lets me get on planes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation approves my firearm purchase every time I go through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. I’ve been through a Department of Defense background check too. The Department of Education happily accepts my student loan payments.

But HealthCare.gov—which is supposedly ‘fixed’ now for the ‘vast majority’ of users—still can’t figure out who I am, and it still won’t let me proceed through the identity verification step. An unexpected error occurred. It gives me the option to call the ‘Marketplace Call Center’ to try and work through the issue, and occasionally I get an inexplicable screen telling me to call the Experian help desk—a private credit rating bureau—because, you know, the government needs Experian’s help to figure out who I am.

Anyway, I don’t feel like sitting on hold for six hours to satisfy my idle curiosity. Maybe this time next year, when the employer mandates kick-in and we all get dropped from our employer plans, the site will let me see what plans I’m eligible for. In the mean time, this is about all that the new and improved HealthCare.gov has to offer me:

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.