so, it's pretty obvious to everybody reading this site that tommy's taken up a personal crusade against scientology. good on him. it seems like a pretty freaky thing. if you've been reading this site for a while, you know that i also have had my bouts of "how the fuck can anybody subscribe to this bullshit?" about the organized religion.

but so far, we've just been bitching about it on our blog. ANYBODY can do that. i'm thinking we should really take it to the next level...you know, real journalism. some hard-hitting investigation that'll take us to the upper echelons of the blogosphere, where i have been longing to reside for ages. you know what i'm talking about: a journey into the deep, dark underbelly of scientology - a visit to the headquarters of the church, which are conveniently located about two blocks away from my office! FIELD TRIP!!!

look, it'll be fun. here's what i'm imagining. we take a bottle of grey goose. we drink it. straight up. we trip across the street into the scientology center, we listen to one of the daily lectures on dianetics (or even better: go to a sunday service!) maybe we get e-metered; maybe we don't. doesn't matter. we come back, hopefully unculted, write clever, snarky article about our experience; get contacted by salon or slate, become famous, etc etc, hopefully don't get struck down by l. ron hubbard and his ilk. have great, wonderful time!

so. who's in?

UPDATE: woah. woah, woah, woah. greta van susteren is a scientologist? man. i always kind of liked her.

Scott emailed me a few pictures, and said it'd be okay to share 'em with the internet. So here you go. Click on the photos for full-sized versions.

And I bet you thought Afghanistan was just full of poppies

"myself and Cpl Owen as we watch close air support give some bad guys a bad day"

"me and some of the Afghan National Army soldiers after we did a joint patrol in a really hairy area"

The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously in favor of the entertainment industry in MGM v. Grokster. Disappointing, to be sure, but the net's early IANAL consensus seems to be that the ruling is fairly limited. The decision states:

One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright ... is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses.

That would seem to indict Grokster for basing its business model on infringement, but exempt applications like BitTorrent that are promoted as being meant for distributing legal content.

Regardless of the specific contours of liability that emerge from this decision, it seems likely that there'll be a lot less investment in companies developing consumer media technology. In the hardware space, this is a real shame -- the next Tivo will take that much longer to emerge.

But for software, it's probably irrelevant. The open source movement is well-positioned to avoid Grokster-style liability, and doesn't need to find brave venture capitalists in order to ship a product. With private industry slowed by litigation, open source offerings already dominate P2P. This decision will probably cement that position.

(crossposted at Begging To Differ)

this weekend, if you can believe it, i went to both (both!) nats games at RFK stadium and totally, thoroughly enjoyed myself, even though we lost on sunday. i think baseball game attending will be my new summer hobby. forget the fact that i know zero about the sport and couldn't name two players on the d.c. team - for $10 a ticket, it's better than an in-theater movie, *and* you can get drunk off of your face!

my only question is this (and perhaps those more well-versed in stadium and baseball talk can provide me the answer): what's wrong with RFK, and why must we build a new stadium? RFK seems lovely. it's super easy to get to on the metro or by driving (from my three-game experience). replace some of the seats, move the outfield in a bit closer so not as to waste so much space back there, and maybe spruce up a bit of other stuff. put in more ATMs, for sure. anything else? i don't know. maybe i'm an idiot. but it seems like a nice place to me. which might be because i'm tipsy every time i go there.

UPDATE: it has been proved, in an 18-point manifesto by scott in the comments, that i am indeed a drunk idiot when it comes to suggesting that RFK is a decent stadium. but then again, y'all already knew that.