Zombie Nation

Why don't Americans stand up for themselves anymore? I look around, and I see our civil liberties being eroded left and right, and relatively few people are complaining.

The U.S. government can hold you indefinitely without legal representation. All it takes is a supposed threat to national security (real, imagined, or fabricated), and you can be locked away for a very long time. Most people I've spoken to about this think it only happens to bad people, such as terrorists. Our government has become so secretive, who knows?

Orlando has an ordinance making it unlawful to feed homeless people. An activist group has intentionally violated the ordinance, and now at least one man is facing a judge and jury. Activists rarely achieve hero status, however. They're usually demonized.

It's not just government bodies behaving badly. I saw an article yesterday where schools are banning any kind of physical contact between students, whether it be holding hands or giving someone a "high five". This is ridiculous. I guess we are all supposed to exist in these little bubbles of isolation. It's stupid, not to mention unrealistic. The students should band together and all hold hands one day to show school officials they are not going to stand for it.

I doubt that will happen, though. No one wants to make waves and stand out. We've all turned into a bunch of consumer zombies. We're all too busy talking on our cellular phones, playing Playstation 3, watching HDTV, listening to our iPods, and surfing the Internet to care what goes on around us.

User-Friendly Software

There's no doubt that computers are easier to use today than they've ever been, but there is still room for improvement.

My Yahoo Messenger window recently started taking up the full screen when I got a message...and then some. So each time I would get a message, I'd have to resize the window to make the close button visible. After some google searching, I found that I needed to set my desktop resolution to smaller numbers and then back to the current resolution to fix the problem. That's intuitive!

Another unintuitive procedure happened to me a few months back when I upgraded iTunes, and it wouldn't play any of the music I had purchased prior to the upgrade. I actually had to create a dummy user account, open iTunes with it, sync my iPod to that account, and then finally log back into my original account and re-sync the iPod with it.

iTunes 7 + iPod 1.2 Firmware

The problem I reported earlier about not being able to get a game working on my iPod is worse than I thought. Apparently, since I've upgraded the firmware to 1.2, I cannot play ANY content that is DRM'd. Thanks, Apple. You guys are doing a bang-up job on these firmware updates.

I've even tried something Apple refers to as the Five R's, which includes restoring the firmware. I managed to restore the firmware to 1.1, but I still cannot play anything that is DRM'd.

This is really a problem, as I have a lot of songs I've purchased from the iTunes Music Store that are now unplayable on my iPod. This is pretty ironic, as I was starting to believe that DRM isn't as evil as previously thought. I can still play the DRM'd songs on my computer, so it's not a total loss.

*Sigh*