This Nerd Heard…

So the RIAA has gone after Yuri Shutovsky for copyright infringement.  Our good friend Yuri (no, I don’t really know him) has an alibi during the time that this alledged copyright violation occured.  It seems that he was on an extended trip to Russia.   He even offered up his passport showing that he has entry and exit stamps proving that he was in Russia during this time.

Not to be deterred by such trivial details, the RIAA has asked a judge that Yuri turn over all hard drives in his possession as well as the names and addresses of everyone who has ever used his computer.  Unsuprisingly, the judge has sided with the RIAA and has required that he turn over all of this information.  They even asked (very politely, I’m sure) that his work place be required to turn over all information about any computer that he has ever used while in their employ.

Even though Mr. Shutovsky was in Russia during the time of the alledged violation the RIAA believes that  “regardless of who was using the PC at the time, Yuri Shutovsky is responsible for whatever copyright infringement may have occurred by virtue of his paying for broadband from Verizon” (Arstechnica).  By that very argument, Verizon is also responsible for whatever copyright infringement occured because they allowed someone to commit copyright infringement through their network.

But, we all know that RIAA would never go after Verizon.  Why? Because Verizon has enough money that they can afford to hire attorneys competent enough to defend themselves against such a baseless lawsuit.

Here’s a tip to all you record labels out there.  Quit trying to scare your customers into you buying your product.  I know that downloading pirated music is illegal and I honestly don’t understand why people choose to do so.  I can’t understand it because I can’t understand why most people would want to listen to the crap that you sell.  Instead, focus your time, energy, and money on finding and promoting music that is worth buying.  Once you do that, learn to charge a reasonable fee and guess what? People WILL pay for your music.

Scaring your “customers” into paying for your service reminds me an awful lot of the racketeering performed by the Mafia.  In fact, maybe Mr. Shutovsky should sue the RIAA for racketeering?  I’d love to see that civil suit.

That’s right, someone stole my work email address. The culprit was no hacker though, it was the CEO of my company who took it from me. Why would he want my email address? Well his administrative assistant has a name that is almost identical to my own. In fact, the only difference between our first and last names is one letter.

His assistant and I have peacefully coexisted ever since she started working at our company about 6 months ago. Occassionally, someone inside the company would incorrectly send emails to her instead of me. The reason they do this is because they use auto complete to type in the address for them automagically and my name comes before hers alphabetically.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, he decided this morning that I needed a new email address. His office didn’t contact me, ask me how I felt, anything like that. I got an email from our IT department asking me what my middle initial was so that they could adjust my address. Of course, several months ago his assistant asked me if it was okay for us to switch addresses. I objected then since I had been using that email address for about 3 years and felt that it was too inconvenient since the problem only seems to be an internal one. Changing email addresses wouldn’t fix an internal problem because they are using their address book auto complete, and not just typing in the wrong address. So, his office already knew that I was oppossed to the idea.

Anyway, so I responded to our IT departments email and made sure that the President’s assistant got my response. I told them that I believed strongly that the problem was caused by people being careless, and not because of my address. I also told them that the change would be rather inconvenient because I couldn’t remember all of the mailing lists I was subscribed to, that it might inconvenience customers, vendors, and other people, but the IT department said their hands were tied.

That wasn’t at all surprising. I just think that it is absurd that my email address of many years hsould have to change because of a perceived problem by the CEO. I have several friends who have had to deal with this problem for over 4 years. I’m willing to bet $1000 that it doesn’t even fix the problem. I’m going to laugh if I get some super confidential email after all this fuss was made over my email address.

The best part of all was that the IT department didn’t even tell me before they made the change. They just did it and it caused my email to go down. I was without email for hours because of this.

Some of you may remember how at the same time I started this site, I also installed the Whisper Aire 2000 whole house fan. In that post I complained about how it was a bit nosier than I expected it to be. Well I’m able to tell you now that the fan is so quiet you wouldn’t even know that it was on.

Well, that could be that it’s just not working. I used it about a month ago without any problem and now it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. I’ve contacted the company but their website doesn’t even list the product anymore. That’s not a good sign. It makes it seem like they’ve had so many problems with this product that they just want to pretend that it never even existed. Or, at the very least, that they had nothing to do with it.

In any event, I am currently cranky about the whole thing. I went up into the attic and made sure there were no visible problems with the wiring and what not. It’s on the same circuit as my internet so it must have power. I even flipped the thing off, waited and flipped it back on to see if maybe some breaker needed to be reset. The thing is still dead.