Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown notice against one of Lawrence Lessigs presentations that was posted online.  Here is that presentation, reposted.  I recommend watching every minute of it, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two:

I want to know who at Warner Music thought it was a good idea to assault the founder of Creative Commons, and one of the most renowned free culture activists in the world about copyright policy.  Surely a Stanford University Law professor, board member of the Software Freedom Law Center and a former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation would know a thing or two about fair use.  And this is fair use.

Consider the irony in this.

I can’t help but scream out of sheer frustration with the dictators of read-only culture.  Situation like this, this and this, don’t help those feelings.

Written by user rachabomb.

On the surface, Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity appear to oppose each other’s views of faith, however, in a more thorough analysis of the texts, one can see they are making the same claim. The intention of this paper is to examine the concept of faith, then apply it to the similarities and differences between Kierkegaard’s and Feuerbach’s arguments in order to establish a claim which supports that both philosophers agree that faith is a phenomenon that can only be obtained through the acceptance of the absurd. For the purpose of providing a foundation for my claim, I will first define faith as the acceptance of the absurd, then clarify its meaning by examining the phenomenon of the absurd.

I will then introduce each philosopher’s concept of how one must obtain faith, then further exemplify them by using the biblical examples of Abraham to illustrate Kierkegaard’s argument (that faith is derived from the strength of the absurd), and of Jesus turning water into wine to illustrate Feuerbach’s argument (that faith is derived through the ability to imagine miracles). Through the reflection of these examples, I will demonstrate how both these arguments must be included with one another. The conclusion of my argument will claim that if Kierkegaard’s concept of the strength of the absurd and Feuerbach’s concept of the ability to imagine miracles must be mutually inclusive within the phenomenon of faith, then both philosopher’s arguments of how faith must be obtained agree with one another. Read the rest of this entry »

Take Action

Kindle DRM is showing it’s ugly face in the form of bad customer service.  Turns out, if you return too many Kindle books, Amazon might lock you out of your account and prohibit you from purchasing from the site.

The fact that Amazon.com has the power, and the EULA to edit your collection of Kindle books remotely, and deny you access to your own purchased material, is scary enough.  But the software DRM present in the Kindle books prevents sharing, and swapping.  The thing is defective by design.

Defective By Design is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation, started to bring awareness to consumers about the dangers of DRM.  They came up with a clever way to tell Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, to stop putting DRM into the Kindle.  Send Gerbers peach-flavored baby food to him, en masse.  I implore you to spend 2 dollars, or more, and send a message to Jeff.

Take Action

S. 773, the Cyber Security Act of 2009, was introduced by Senator John Rockefeller (D, WV) with Senators Evan Bayh (D, IN), Bill Nelson (D, FL), and Olympia Snowe (R, ME) as cosponsors.

Leslie Harris of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT):

“The cybersecurity threat is real, but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Granick:

“Essentially, the Act would federalize critical infrastructure security. Since many of our critical infrastructure systems (banks, telecommunications, energy) are in the hands of the private sector, the bill would create a major shift of power away from users and companies to the federal government. This is a potentially dangerous approach that favors the dramatic over the sober response.”

In forums and comment threads across the internet, users are typing in all caps, scared that this act will give the president unfettered power to “SHUT DOWN THE INTERNET”. I’ve read the bill, and it is as scary as everybody makes it out to be, but let me remind you:  one cannot simply shut down the Internet, that’s virtually impossible.

There are a few ways for you to understand this legislation:

1. Read the full text of the bill, and use your superb linguistic abilities to comprehend it.  Here’s the full text.

2. Read this bill breakdown in it’s entirety, it’ll take awhile, but you’ll understand everything about the bill and you’ll know pretty well how to talk about the bill with others.  In bold lettering throughout the text, you’ll find key points which you can follow if you’re speed reading it.

3. If you’re lazy, just skip to the summary at the bottom.  You’ll get the main points of the bill, but it’ll be out of context and you won’t be well-read enough to discuss the bill with others.

I’ve broken the bill down into each section.  I summarize what each section proposes and provide excerpts of the sections.  Have fun.

Section 2, (6):

Paul Kurtz, a Partner and chief operating officer of Good Harbor Consulting as well as a senior advisor to the Obama Transition Team for cybersecurity, recently stated that the United States is unprepared to respond to a ‘cyber-Katrina’ and that ‘a massive cyber disruption could have a cascading, long-term impact without adequate co-ordination between government and the private sector.’.

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In books three and four of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, he outlines his troubling path towards God’s truth and morality.  He explains the nature of suffering and how he embraced the vices in society in order to satisfy some need for fulfillment.  As Augustine explains these troubles in his life, he attempts to reach for some underlying truth that he states can only be found in God (Saint Augustine Confessions, Book 4: 24).

Unlike books one and two that mainly talked about his folly as a young man, books three and four express his basic philosophical views of the nature of goodness and truth.  He begins book three by discussing the ideal of suffering, or at least his definition of it.  Suffering is naturally a negative aspect of life, and he viewed the entire world and everything in it as some form of suffering (Confessions, 3: 3).  He goes as far as to say that even compassion is a form of suffering because it needs some sort of negative feeling to exist (Confessions, 3:4).  As he studied in Carthage, he began to explore the world of Philosophy.  In his studied he realized that there was some truth that needed to be discovered in order to obtain some special sense of fulfillment, but at this time, Augustine was still very vile in his mind and blind to what this truth was.  He compares this state of mind as eating in a dream:

“Food pictured in dreams is extremely like food received in the waking state; yet sleepers receive no nourishment, they are simply sleeping.” (Confessions, 3: 10)

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Import more lemons and fatalities decrease!

correlation has never implied causation and never will.  This is an extremely important phrase that is the basis of the FSM, and one of the strongest arguments against videogame legislating politicians and lawyers.

It’s a logical fallacy to assume that the amount of lemons imported from Mexico has anything to do with the amount of fatal car wrecks in the U.S.

Or that the decline in piracy since the 1800’s (the “arrghh!” sort of piracy) has led to the onset of global warming.

Or that the rise in violent crime is a direct result of the increase in popularity of video games.

Or that Hurricane Katrina, and the 2006 Tsunami are acts of “God” because of our “lack of respect”.

Knowing this logical fallacy can significantly improve your ability to debate issues of statistics or trends.

Read about the phrase, starting here

Full story

Thje “Creation and Internet” bill is a piece of French legislation, backed by President Sarkozy, that would put stif penalties on Internet users caught downloading illegal material.  The bill would implement a three-strikes rule, allowing ISP’s (or forcing them), to disconnect repeat offenders of the new law.

The legislation passed both houses on the first reading, but during the final vote in the National Assembly, a bunch of Socialists (as in the political affiliation, not the swear) showed up to a nearly empty chamber, and tilted the vote against the bill, 21-15.

The bill is nicknamed HADOPI because of a clause in the text proposing the creation of a High Authority for the dissemination of works and protection of rights on the Internet.

Full Story

A National fiber broadband network to reach 90% of Australia’s residents with speeds of 100mbps and up.  The partially government funded infrastructure overhaul will cost approximately AUS$43 billion over the next 8 years, and the network will be available for any ISP to use.

The government intends to create a public/private company to contruct the network, and 51% of the company will be owned by the government.  Five years after the development of the network, the government will sell off all of it’s share of the company, leaving it in the hands of the private sector.

What’s still unclear is what rules the government will impose on the use of the fiber lines, and whether there will be regulations preventing monopolization of the network.  Not to mention how the private company will operate when the government relinquishes its majority share.

This is another reason why mainstream media is a terrible source for news.  This is not news, this is a bunch of morons talking about their opinions regarding an irrelevant subject.

Clarifying the meaning of “conservative”

First of all, today’s “republican” is a neoconservative, not a conservative. The early republican party supported hard money (i.e. a gold standard), were anti-slavery, opposed entering into World War I, and World War II, and opposed membership in the League of Nations (now the United Nations). Although the republican platform began to shift toward a more liberal (I don’t mean that as an insult) stance with the election of Richard Nixon, and even more so with Ronald Reagan, there still persisted a bit of the non-interventionist belief. Republicans opposed intervention in Somalia and the Balkans in the early 1990’s and, in 2000 George W. Bush ran for president on a platform of non-interventionism and “no nation-building”.

No central bank, no government welfare, non-interventionist foreign policy; these are conservative values. But the definition has changed, hence the term “neoconservative”. Today’s republicans subscribe to a unilateral, GTFO-of-our-way foreign policy with a focus on military might (and pre-emptive war) as opposed to diplomacy. They are in love with the idea of central banking and government bailouts, and they want to expand the United States role in United Nations and the “global market”. Today’s republicans are not conservative, nor are they sensible, practical, or objective in their opinions. They are neocons. Ronald Reagan, George H Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, Rudy Juliani, Mitt Romney, Bill Orielly, Leo Strauss, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfield, to name a few.

ewww, I feel all biased and opinionated now…but you get the idea.

I found this quiz on Lew Rockwell’s site that gauges your political alignment. Read the explanation, then click the link to take the quiz. At the end it lets you guess which alignment you think you might fit under the most. I chose left-libertarian, and that’s what it calculated. A while back I came to the conclusion that I was a “progressive-libertarian”. I’m glad I was pretty much right about that (according to his quiz anyway).

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dmccarthy/dmccarthy14.html

a foreign policy of freedom

The war on Iraq was illegally initiated. Congress passed a war resolution, allowing the executive branch the authority to practically wage the war themselves, instead of constitutionally declaring war. A neocon would rationalize that Saddam Hussein is evil, might have weapons of mass destruction, and might be connected to the Al Qaeda network, and that we need to stop Saddam before he does any more damage. He may see a moral obligation to wage war against Iraq, or he may even see it as a religious obligation. So a neocon would vote YES on the war resolution, and in so doing break the law.

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