From torrentfreak.com, “One of the biggest cases in file-sharing history ended last week with The Pirate Bay Four sentenced to huge fines and jail time. Today it is revealed that far from being impartial, the judge in the case is a member of pro-copyright groups – along with Henrik Pontén, Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky. There are loud calls for a retrial.”
Please see the torrentfreak.com article HERE for more information.
Image used under CC license from ImmolationCentral
Just flying the flag, you should already know the story, it’s all over the media: The Pirate Bay admins were ‘found’ guilty of ‘contributory copyright infringement’. I’m stealing someone’s comparison from the comments over on the Lifehacker post, Daniel Wired says, “Piratebay never hosts files, they only link to other users in their website. A weapon manufacturer that develops guns or knives, they provide the product, but they never actually commit the crime. Is it just to prosecute the manufacturers because they are indirectly involved with a murder?”
A few links to show what blogs I like to read ( LOL ):
http://lifehacker.com/5216483/bittorrent-site-the-pirate-bay-admins-found-guilty-sentenced-to-a-year
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/17/pirate-bay-defendant.html
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/pirateverdict.html
Did the title get your attention? I’m sure it’s been said many times in different ways but I just want to throw my version out there: The human race should not require the threat of almighty impending doom or holy finger shaking to inspire compassion. It’s sad that I have to preface it this way, but I am not an Atheist – I just think they have some good ideas. I am not religious per se either, but more a spiritual and ethical person. I don’t need someone else to tell me that harm is wrong. I don’t need a doctrine to say I shouldn’t kill another person. If you can’t make that out for yourself, then there’s the evil right there. Personally, my ethics and interpretation of the interactions in the world probably go a little beyond what most modern people even put thought into. My son is taught that the meal on the table comes from living creatures, and we need to be thankful for their sacrifice. It almost sounds familiar doesn’t it? Except I’m not telling him just to be thankful to an omnipotent being, but to the creatures themselves who gave their lives (not necessarily willingly) so that we may eat.
I love Bill Maher, but I don’t agree with him on everything. (Hence he’s an Atheist, and I’m not.) Atheism in and of itself promotes disbelief in anything magical or supernatural. I think that’s really somewhat impractical in the long run. Yes, I understand skepticism, and a quest for proof and truth. What I’m getting at though is that a disbelief itself does not prove something isn’t real either. Take magnets as an example. We all know about magnetic fields and their interactions. What if there really are other such interactions around us that we as of yet know nothing about? Put more bluntly: You don’t have to believe to let others believe. It’s just a question of how far a person is allowed to take their beliefs. I say the line is simple to spot, it’s right there between you and everyone else. So long as your beliefs are not forced upon, do not interfere with, and cause no harm to anyone outside yourself you just feel free to believe anything you like. That’s your right. However, I would like at least a little consideration before you go praying for me – ASK! I might not want your prayers. I might not trust that what you pray for me is in my best interest. Shouldn’t that be up to me?
So maybe that’s something else we need to take care of. A unified ideal of individual freedom of and from religion. Honestly, we need to take it full course and have a unified ideal of individual freedom period. After all, so long as your crack smoking doesn’t affect my life, the only right I should have is to tell you I don’t agree with it.
I use Conky on my Ubuntu system to keep me aware of what all is going on in my system. For those of you who don’t know, “Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD.” I was irritated when I found the basic way to display file system information such as free space/total space was to hard code each volume into the conky config file. So, I spent a few hours relearning basic, then converting my brain into linux shell scripting, and wrote a script to automagically do it for me. See the section under MOUNTED DEVICES in the screenshot below.
–EDIT– I improved my script and it is no longer separate files. To display mounts, simply add this line to your conky config:
${execpi 30 grep -v -E ^fuse\|^udev\|^lrm\|^securityfs\|^binfmt\|^devpts\|^tmpfs\|^varlock\|^varrun\|^sysfs\|^\/proc /etc/mtab | cut -d” ” -f2 | while read line ; do
echo $line ‘${goto 160}${fs_used ‘$line’} ${alignr}${fs_size ‘$line’}’
done }
To download my Conky config, click HERE.
You know what I love? The spin words “costing the industry”, “costing record companies”, etc. Why are they spin words? Cost implies they are actually paying something, or losing something they already had. In fact, it’s simply that they are not getting a piece of revenue. I realize this is semantic, but when it comes to things like these propaganda and PR are really what make or break it. I like to say “Record companies allege they would make an additional $x Billion were it not for file-sharing.”
…allege because the recording industry likes to pretend it is a constant that the people downloading mp3s would just as well purchase the music otherwise. (Obviously, because there’s no other way they are out any money – they didn’t produce the mp3s, they didn’t spend the time ripping cds, etc.) That’s not the case. A large portion of mp3 downloads are ’sample’, where a potential fan downloads a song to make a decision whether or not it’s worth listening to.
How to find neighbors who think they are registered but probably aren’t – Boing Boing
“Project Vote has now posted online lists of people (with their addresses) who filed registration applications in various counties but who were not put on the voter rolls by election authorities because of alleged or actual deficiencies in their applications.”
In keeping with the theme from last week’s post, today I’d like to say a little about voter registration. I personally think voluntary voter registration borders on moronic. By requiring voluntary voter registration voter turnout is lower, and it seems to me to be one more piece of information that can be used to track you. As for the latter, I would know because I have spent some time assisting in repossession and tracking people. For instance, if I were to use a few publicly available resources I could obtain the following information from your voter registration: Full name, Date of Birth, Gender, Maiden Name, County, Precinct, Physical Address, Mailing Address, Voting History – Election Date, Election Type, Election Party, Election Voting Method
Continue reading ‘So what about “registering” to vote? What’s up with that?’
Watch this short clip with Bill Maher, he makes a great comparison about terrorism and our rights.
I just watched a video by Penn Jillette in his “Penn says…” series, entitled Cynicism. It reminded me that I haven’t made any posts explaining my stance on voting and elections. Well, here goes.
Let’s start with the basic mechanics of the presidential election in the United States. I think the WikiPedia article explains it best in the following snips:
The Electoral College consists of 538 popularly elected representatives who formally select the President and Vice President of the United States.[1] The Electoral College is an example of an indirect election.
Rather than directly voting for the President and Vice President, United States citizens cast votes for electors. Electors are technically free to vote for anyone eligible to be President, but in practice pledge to vote for specific candidates[2] and voters cast ballots for favored Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates by voting for correspondingly pledged electors.[3] Most states allow voters to choose between statewide slates of electors pledged to vote for the Presidential and Vice Presidential tickets of various parties; the ticket that receives the most votes statewide ‘wins’ all of the votes cast by electors from that state. U.S. Presidential campaigns concentrate on winning the popular vote in a combination of states that choose a majority of the electors, rather than campaigning to win the most votes nationally.
More after the break!
Continue reading ‘Voting, elections, and BS’
I know it’s not a hot topic, but here’s a personal opinion. I was on youtube watching political mashups, like George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People. I thought I would throw a definition out there. Looting: stealing products. Survival: stealing food that people should be giving you in the first place. See the difference? Looting = stealing stuff you don’t need. Survival = keeping yourself and your loved ones ALIVE by any means necessary. I’m sorry, but if something happened where I am and I ran a grocery store or anything like that I’d have left the doors unlocked and a sign that said TAKE WHAT YOU NEED AND NO MORE. If a guy breaks into your house to steal a sandwich, give him the sandwich he obviously needs it more than you!
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