I know I’m only a small fish in a very, very, large pond, but SOPA is still potentially very dangerous for me. I don’t post copyrighted materials on my blog, but I do post links to that material, and to identify that material I usually copy and paste the headline so that you will know you have gone to the correct link. Under SOPA this blog could be taken down because of that. It gets even worse, under SOPA my blog could be blocked because someone else using a WordPress blog posted copyrighted materials and the entire wordpress.com domain gets blocked, somewhat akin to killing a mouse with a wrecking ball. I know that sounds bad but we haven’t even begun to plumb those depths yet, there would be no court review required to do this. That’s right some corporation could just call some flunky in the government and say “My copyrighted material was used without my permission on xxyy.com”, .net, or .whatever and then entire domain could be blocked without even specifying the material in question or notifying the site owner as to the nature of the material so it could be removed. Let’s say you are a FaceBook User, a great number of the visits to this blog start from a FaceBook link. The way SOPA is written FB could be shut down because people use copyrighted images in their avatars, like me. My avatar is a Creative Commons image that was created as an avatar image, but it uses a copyrighted character as inspiration. I don’t think Berkley Breathed objects, but a similar situation with Jim Davis could be different if my stage name was “Garfield” instead of “Opus”. So, contact your Congresscritter, your Senator, and tell them that SOPA is very bad, that just putting the mechanism in place to enforce it would be bad.
Up first because it’s in TX is this wreck in Houston. Car driver hits, critically injures cyclist in north Harris County From the comments the cyclist was getting ready for a left turn and was hit from behind in the left turn lane. This is a very vulnerable situation for a cyclist, because most drivers are stupid and do not expect to see a bicycle making a left turn in the left turn lane and so tend to not see a bicycle there. Also the cyclist can either go into head-on traffic or fast moving traffic to the right to avoid a hit-from-behind wreck in his or her lane, and generally a cyclist is moving slowly at this point in preparation for the left turn.
In the most deadliest state in the US to walk or ride a bike 6 years running, another cyclist is in collision with a motor vehicle. Cyclist in critical condition after collision with truck Comments from people claiming to be witnesses left with the article indicate there may have been another vehicle involved that left the scene but did not actually “collide” with the cyclist, and that it may have forced the cyclist into the parked truck.
Still in FL, a rare bike wreck. Motorcyclist hits boy on bicycle, dies Usually because of the small profile of both vehicles bicyclists and motorcyclists only get close enough to scare each other, very rarely do they collide and even more rarely does one of the operators get killed. This was an intersection wreck, if the child had been trained to use intersection protocols this wreck might have been prevented.
A NV wreck with an unknown mode. Bicyclist killed in Sunday hit-and-run in Pahrump OK it has been a long time since I did my hit-and-run rant, I used to wish they would seal the drivers up in a cage full of rabid wolverines, induce a cat allergy and hog-tie them in a room full of kittens, and numerous other slow tortures, but I have mellowed in my old age in the decade since I was a hit-and-run victim. In cases of hit-and-run fatalities do the same thing I suggest for drunk driver fatalities: Handcuff the driver to the steering wheel of his car and recycle it into bicycle parts, on live national television. I don’t know which would scare people more, seeing the driver get killed or the car getting run through the shredder.
And that’s all the links I have today.
Billed @$0.02, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 