Town Hall Meeting

29 May 2006

An Inconvenient Truth

Filed under: — Al @ 1:58 pm

I went to a 10pm showing last night and the place was full, which is great, and the parking lot looked like 5% of the cars were hybrids! I think this film is excellent. It is a documentary of Al Gore doing a presentation about global warming that he has performed over 1000 times, as he says in the movie. The reason I liked it is it lays out the problem piece by piece, including the history, the science, the arguments against it, and then gives solutions at the end that we can all do to fix the problem. And it is fixable. He gives the example of the great progress we have had as a global community in fixing the ozone layer.

A part of the movie that I was waiting for and it did deliver on was showing just how much America pollutes compared to the rest of the world. I think the average American (as do some in my own family) thinks that America has the strictest environmental laws in the world and thus does not pollute nearly as much as most others. Well, neither of those things are true, as this film points out. America’s fuel economy standards are half that of China, Europe, Taiwan, and Japan. And American pollutes more global warming causing chemicals than all other countries, and if you remove Europe, all other countries combined.

An Inconvenient Truth

They have a website called climatecrisis.net which you can check out for ideas on how to start living a life that contributes less and less to global warming. You can see the trailer here.

Encrypted (and thus private) Phone Call Technology Released

Filed under: — Al @ 1:33 pm

Philip Zimmermann, who brought us PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for encrypting email for free, has just released encrypted VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol aka internet phones) software. See the story in the NY Times here. The name of the free software is Zfone. You can download Zfone free here.

13 May 2006

If You Are an ATT/SBC, Verizon, or BellSouth Customer…

Filed under: — Al @ 3:23 pm

Working For Change has sent out an email asking people to email their phone company if you disagree with the NSA spying program and are not happy with paying a company for this kind of phone service. Here are the links:

* Contact AT&T: www.consumer.att.com/contact?source=body
* Contact Verizon: www22.verizon.com/CustomerSupport/ContactUs/
* Contact BellSouth: www.bellsouth.com/contactus/index.html

If you need any more motivation other than just being angry, I truly believe that direct action against a corporation is more effective than asking a politician to do it for you!

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