Okay, I have to confess something. I found a story talking about the movie listed below and actually posted the link before I watched the entire film itself. I did skip to the money shot taken from the overpass showing the cars holding back the wave of cars behind them. After having watched the whole thing, I am downgrading my recommendation on watching it. The idea and the project really struck a chord with me and I get very jazzed up whenever I think about the absurdity which the 55 limit on Atlanta interstates embody. I really hate the concept of allowing legislation to pass that has the concept of "make everyone a criminal and then have the freedom enforce or prosecute anyone at your leisure or indiscriminately."

This isn't a case of Atlanta actually wanting people to drive 55 on these roads. It's not as if you are trying to justify driving 75 by saying "everybody is doing it." Everybody really is doing it. I think a great video to shoot would be a trip across the ATL on 75, 86, and 20, with a kicker of a trip around 285 in a lone car doing 55 and record the number of people who pass you per minute/mile. Better yet I would love to setup a video camera on an overpass and by using software and distinguishing marks on the road, passively calculate the speed of every single vehicle for a 24 hour period. The histogram of that would be a thing of beauty. I would love to then take that data and make it publicly available for anybody trying to defend a speeding ticket on these roads until the judicial branch would finally sit up and take notice.

Another law that I think is absurd and unconstitutional to boot is the lovely DMCA. I know that stealing music, movies, and any other IP is wrong and bad. However, the DMCA is about 2 orders of magnitude too powerful to accomplish the goal of curbing piracy (which is a fools errand in it's own right). The DMCA actually makes tampering with any DRM or DRM technology, even on your own machine, completely illegal. No qualifiers, no circumstances to meet; just plain illegal. This way , everybody is in violation at some point or another. If you make any waves, the RIAA, or MPAA, or some other AA is gonna come and take all your money and maybe toss you in the clink for a bit to think about the horrible horrible things you have done.

I heard a story somewhere that in the Russia of yesteryear, it was illegal to take Russian currency out of the country. The international airport was setup in such a way that the carts you could rent to carry your luggage were located in an area that was technically outside of the country in the international zone. The machines that rented the carts only took Russian currency. Ergo, anybody pushing a cart is a criminal.

I don't know what I want to do about this, but I wish there was something I could do. I know in this crazy country/world there are much more important things to work on, but this actually seems like something that would be doable.

A Meditation On the Speed Limit - Google Video

I gotta write about this. It's just beautiful.