Cory is losing sleep

but he needn’t. In “We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell” he despairs of DRM in HTML5 and the industry’s push to have it all ratified by W3C, but there’s nothing new here. Industry has always been pushing some broken DRM scheme in net standards, whether it’s Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX, QuickTime, Sony’s root kits, … And we’ve all just discarded one after the other precisely because of the brain-dead restrictions they imposed. The fact that the new HTML standard says we need to support the latest incarnation doesn’t mean that browsers will all be including it, just the corporate ones from Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like. If the people providing the media want to lock their creations up, let them. There’ll be a sea of open source Creative Commons please just watch this artistic production that will happily do an end run around all the locked down stuff. And if it’s good, and we care about it, it’ll be successful on its own terms. Cory knows all this, he’s been doing it himself for years. Buck up, man.

Obamacare: this is me!

ProPublica wrote a story about a couple in CA that sound just like Shelley and I. Our healthcare costs are about to go up by 70%. We support the law, but in our case (and it appears 2-3% of the general population) it’s going to hurt badly; my insurance will be my second highest expense behind my mortgage.

How do we fix this? Jeez, the guy even looks like me!