Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

-Mark Twain (allegedly - a lot of stuff gets falsely attributed to him)

I first heard about the copyright on Happy Birthday To You when watching Aaron Sorkin’s Sport’s Night:

http://youtu.be/OP9U_mslaWU

(BTW - I don’t remember that show having a laugh track. Quite jarring)

I felt just as incredulous as that guy. Still, even the most obvious things, like zippers, have to come from someone’s brain. I didn’t think about it again for years. Until this June when Boing Boing, Ars, and NPR covered the story that a film maker is suing the copyright holders. He just made a whole documentary about Happy Birthday and so he has a pretty good handle on exactly where it came from. Turns out he believes it should not be in copyright. So he’s suing Time Warner for collecting copyright fees on something it shouldn’t hold the copyright on. Supposedly it makes Time-Warner $2 million a year so they could end up with a HUGE bill if the film maker can turn it into a class action lawsuit. However, considering how much money Time-Warner would be liable for, you can be certain they’ll bring their best lawyers to play. It should be a pretty interesting fight.

Lots of technologist have been suggesting that the entertainment industry should view illicit Internet sources of their products as indicative of unmet demand. Netflix is doing just that.

Senior executives from Netflix have explained their method for choosing which programs to license for the service: they buy the rights to the most-pirated shows in each territory, because that’s where the demand is.

“The problem with internet quotes is that you can’t always depend on their accuracy”.

– Abraham Lincoln -1864

[caption id=“attachment_7342” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civ 5 - Against Dave - Choosing Meritocracy[/caption]

Once again we made a choice to go with a new guiding principle in our governance. This time it was Meritocracy. By rewarding those who do the best work, our citizens become happier.

[caption id=“attachment_7347” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civ 5 - Against Dave - Trade Route[/caption]

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

A break from the Scarlett photos as all the photos in this photo time capsule are from Baltimore Comic-Con. As I mentioned before, I’m sad I couldn’t go this year, but I did get to go to the pretty awesome Color Run in Brooklyn. Perhaps those photos will make it next year!

I heard about this on Boing Boing and then a month later on Marketplace: a sushi restaurant in New York that has eliminated tipping. Sushi Yasuda decided that instead of making people sit there at the end of the meal and agonize over how much to give the wait staff, they’ll just pay them the right amount and not charge the patrons tip. This means that they had to raise prices accordingly, approximately 18%, but I’m quite supportive of that. If there’s one thing I’ve come to hate, especially as money has become more tight since the baby was born, it’s that the true price of eating out is hidden from me. I don’t want to have to take out my calculator and do a bunch of math (sum everyone’s entree and add 18%) to know the true cost of the meal. I want to have a reasonable idea as I order how much money I’m going to spend. This also gets around the issue that comes up everywhere from Reservoir Dogs to any time tipping is brought up on the Internet: how much is the right amount to tip and is it ever ok not to tip? Everyone has crazy different rationals on this and I think just including the tip in the price and paying a living wage gets around that. Really, the only people who benefit from the current system are the credit card companies and restaurants who see us ordering more than we can actually afford because the prices aren’t higher. If a federal living wage law were passed, everyone’s prices would go up at once and restaurants wouldn’t have to worry about being at a competitive disadvantage for raising prices.  Then again, maybe it’s not a bad thing to be a first mover while people still think of tipping as customary:

http://youtu.be/OINa46HeWg8

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite.

If I may step out of the fictional narrative mode I’ve been using for a few weeks now, I have to say that it’s a shame these two games are my first Civ games in somewhere between 6 months and a year. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to my brain for the first half dozen or so turns in which I wondered what in the world this Chinese-specfic building the “Paper Maker” was. Although, in my recollection, Civ IV also had the Cho Ku Nu for the Chinese Unit, it had Pagodas or some other either cultural or happiness producing building. It was only after being annoyed for Civ V not allowing me to see what it does while loading (I thought one of the older Civ games did allow you to hover over the special units and buildings to see what they do) that I went onto the Civ V Wikia during my lunch break. To quote the Bluth family, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” It’s meant to give the Chinese a huge early science boost that would help me not only combat the fact that I’m up in the arid north, but also would help me get a head start on Wonders. (I never have problems with Wonders when I’m only playing with AI, but my brothers often make it to the Wonders before me) Luckily for me, the game in which I have the biggest challenge - Dan and Dave - is also the slowest-going. So I’ve wasted less turns doing the wrong thing in that game than I have in the game with Dave.