Just when you thought the broadcast flag had been defeated, Hollywood tries to sneak it in with an appropriations bill:

Story here.

Here’s the letter that I wrote to my representatives:

Have you ever recorded a program on your VCR so that you could watch it later? You may not be able to do that in the very near future. Hollywood has come up with something called a “Broadcast Flag,” designed so that they may decide whether you can record a show for later viewing or not.

The Broadcast Flag was defeated by the courts as an FCC policy. In a last-ditch effort, Hollywood is trying to sneak it in with an appropriations bill.

I can’t see why you’d support it, unless maybe someone from California happened to give you some money. Did they? Do you have children? You probably have living parents. When they complain that they can’t record their favorite show from the TV any more, will you admit to them that it’s your fault?

As a representative of *people*, I urge you to support the freedom of those people to do what they will with publicly broadcast material.

Please do the right thing and don’t let this rider make it through. Do it not only for we, your constituents, but for your family. For yourself.

Please write. You’ve plenty to lose and nothing to gain if you stand by.

My Futurama quote generator, which is just piped output from fortune, is the leading page on my site with nearly 2000 hits a month.

Crazy. People have it bookmarked on their homepages and such.

Robert scoble farts and half the internet argues over whether they heard him say, “Excuse me!”

The other half debates what it smells like.

Not to knock his writing. I don’t have a problem with it. But wow, even the tiniest thing he says can make the front page of Slashdot and flood my RSS aggregator with links back to it. It’s Scoblemania.

I don’t know about yours, but my body didn’t come with an owner’s manual. At least the Michigan Heart and Vascular Institute provides one for the cardiovascular system.