Interesting article on wealth. Read this.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA

I'm not sure if most of you know what this is. It is a copyright law that was passed in 1998 here in the United States of America. Uh, let me just copy the first paragraph from the wikipedia entry, to give you a feel for it:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. The act criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright, not merely infringement of copyright itself, and heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on May 14, 1998 by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended title 17 of the US Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of Online Providers from copyright infringement by their users.

Yeah, so that's about it. It is a huge "fuck you" to those of us who want the freedom necessary to make informed choices in the software-based marketplace. I firmly believe that if something is good enough, I'll buy it, but I'd rather try it first, because there's a lot of shit out there that's being boxed up, wrapped real pretty, and advertised on television as the second coming of whatever-god-you-believe-in. Also, the freedom to do as we please with products we've already purchased would be pretty nice, and I don't know, maybe even something they shouldn't be allowed to arrest us for.

Twenty die as historic seaplane crashes into water

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2436252005

For some reason, I really liked the title of this story. It's Something about the release of twenty souls as a historic seaplane crashes into water, I guess.

When I clicked on the link, it became even more awesome because there was a public service announcement on the page done in flash that showed animated balloons made to look like a penis and a pair of testicles, and the penis balloon deflated. The ad then said not to use cocaine because it damages your sex drive.

A Boring Dream

I had a dream that I got three bags of groceries for less than five dollars. Good groceries, too. Actually maybe it was less than six dollars. Either way it was pretty cheap I'll tell you what. Finals are a good time.

Extremely intense French music video

http://www.icidailleurs.com/nonstop/devantmanuque.mov
Very intense indeed.

Coming Soon: Some Damn Good Reasons NOT to invest in Next-Gen Consoles

This means you, Xbox 360. WE COMIN' FOR YOU, NIGGA!

Recording Industry Out of Their Fucking Minds

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/81101/music-giants-bear-down-on-lyric-search-apps.html

Basically a couple of huge record companies are shutting down the programs that search the internet for lyrics you are listening to. How are such programs illegal? Is it wrong to want to know what the artists are saying? Ha. Do such programs facilitate illegal file sharing? Because I really don't think they do. I mean, a lot of albums don't even come with lyrics in the liner notes so you have to get them from outside sources, like the internet anyway. This is truly insane. I hope they can't get away with this shit for long. Freedom of speech lol

This is cool

Cool that is, until you realize it's part of what was used to train people to kill each other. So that takes away from the cool factor for a little while at least. Killing is inherently uncool in real life.



Graciously copied from http://www.cyber-heritage.co.uk/cutaway/
. Tons more of these can be found at that website.

The End Of The World As We Know it: Life-Changing Events Via Digg.com

As if a billion and one meaningless Web 2.0 entries weren't enough, Digg has been reporting on all kinds of bad news lately. The world is basically over, ladies and gentlemen.

Sharpies are bad for DVD and CDs. What the hell do we do now?

Macromedia is now Adobe. Who's going to compete with Adobe now?

Dogs laugh. Has your dog ever laughed at YOU? Check for disobedience.

X-Men 3. Oh great, we get to see Doctor Frasier Crane play as a mutant genius with blue skin and huge muscles. No one is excited about this.

At least we still have Google Calendar to look forward to in a few days.

Note: I'm actually a big fan of Digg. I'm not the biggest fan of every new website popping up promising ajax and ruby on rails based social networking, previews, betas, rounded borders, color gradients, MS Trebuchet font, and just generally looking like a piece of internet candy, though. I'm not a fan of the new X-Men movie (yet. I really liked the second one actually. It just seems like they're going to drag it into the ground). I am a fan of the idea of Dogs laughing. It is hilarious. I am not a fan of software companies buying up all of their competition. Adobe will really have to prove themselves on this one. It makes little difference to me because I don't use Windows right now, but I'd hate to see their new products become garbage and lack innovation just because they basically have a monopoly. I'm not a fan of the sharpie news. And of course, I am always a fan of Google. Except for that Web Accelerator bullshit. That thing needs to quit trying to come back from the grave. Not a great idea.

Hope the sarcasm wasn't too "advanced" for you guys.

Ohhhhhhh Man.

Brick by brick
the night eclipsed
Pricked by cuticle thorns
Dried the sleep
on nursery slits
Into this life I'm born

Heaven's just a scab away
I'd like to see you after just one taste

Q-Unit

http://members.home.nl/visionx/

Horrible mashups. I listened to a few and almost wished I hadn't. The picture is funny though. Very funny. I love Queen. Rest In Peace, Freddie.

Giant Prehistoric Scorpions...In Scotland?!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4486830.stm

Aside: I would be a lot less stressed for time if I started sleeping more normal hours. The semester is almost over...and I may quit the Geek Squad soon, just to try to enjoy free time again.

No Time To Update Today, So:

Here are some MC Paul Barman lyrics. I'm mostly alone in my deep appreciation for Barman's wit, intelligence, and feigned (or is it?) immaturity. Notice the clever usage of all the letters of Barman's name at the beginning of the third verse (MC Paul Nathaniel Barman).

Verse 1:

My brain makes the earth dark but I'm hung like a birthmark

I like to suck toes yours secrete fructose

I make paintings based on grids just like Chuck Close

I'm old school like Aztecs but new in other aspects

If you want sex with me be prepared for bad sex and slapstick

Even Chapstick won't help my chapped dick

When I'm with a naked chick I use a faker dick

A turkey baster laced with Elmer's to make it stick

My ex fled to Reykjavik, we really were trying

Ohhh your so wet, "My pussy's crying"

I need an eye exam and a vagina with no diaphragm

Or condom, I'm pond scum, I'm going to buy a lamb

And when we make love I'll picture titty humping

which looks like a Venn Diagram

Ewww, this isn't dope I feel like I'm pissing Scope

Lamby's a misanthrope

I asked her to stop moving, does she listen? Nope

The sheep was a clone so I was a creep on the phone

Now I'm sleeping alone

With her photo on my nightstand in a sepia tone

Oh yeah and you know that...

"Paul Bar-Bar-Barman"



Chorus:

The joy of your world is Paul Barman!!!

Beautiful, Beautiful Barman

Yes the joy of your wwoorrlldd is Paul Barman!!!

Beautiful, Beautiful Barman



Verse 2:

After this rap I'll be in Napoli, happily

Proposing to my chosen under an apple tree

"Let's get married," I don't walk, I get carried

By a motorcade of voter-age women on rollerblades

In cute sleeveless shirts exposing their shoulder blades

But I'm a lonely guy since my honeypie ran off with Ione Skye

Now I've got nothing whatsoever, ugly-broke-arrogant, but so clever

When I write rhymes on brown bags and in shower steam

Me and Paul are the power team

We'll leave you deflowered with a mouth full of sour cream

Gobble this obelisk

"Paul Bar-Bar-Barman"



Chorus:

The joy of your world is Paul Barman!!!

Beautiful, Beautiful Barman

Yes the joy of your wwoorrlldd is Paul Barman!!!

Beautiful, Beautiful Barman



Verse 3:

My close pals, aunts, uncles, leaders, Nations, and towns

Hamlets and neighboring islands, everyone

Landlords, bosses, and relatives, moms and newborns

Somehow when I act thirteen, I'm a virgin girl's tractor beam

This one was dressed to kill from her head to my testicle

She was from west of Phil-ly and spoke well of it

She said, "Just for the hell of it let's not be celibate."

I got all higgledy piggledy, it's a big relief

When I take off my fig uh leaf

She said that, "Let's get at this" but her cat and an unpotted cactus

Sat on her mattress

that sure made it saturated with sharp thorns and cat piss

I put on a hiphop beat while she whipped off the topsheet

She said, "Come to bed I like my undergrads underfed

They amaze how they stay up days on mayonnaise and Wonderbread."

I dove in her cervix a lot like Sir Mixalot

This interlude is for the women I've interviewed about the clitoris

and how to make it less hit-or-miss

Should we be gentle?, Is it all mental?

I won't use a dental dam 'cause it discurges

my urges to submerge in her jizz

She said, "My goodness you should juss use clues that's nonverbal

You're too vigorous if my clitoris, for example, turns purple"

It was time to copulate but we didn't want to populate

So my bold groin reached for my gold coin proooophylactic

I unwrapped it, you can't know how I felt

It wasn't a gold coin condom, it was chocolate Chanukah gelt

The white part crumbled on her tummy and the rest began to melt

Foiled again.....

My Linux Desktop Is Awesome!

If you are interested in pursuing a Linux Desktop, let me know. I could write up a guide or maybe just talk via email or instant messaging or something.

Linux is exciting.



Full-size screenshot(click again once it loads to enlarge to the full 1280x1024 so you do not lose any detail): http://img499.imageshack.us/my.php?image=linuxdesktop1128055bv.png

This Post Is Powerless

Power is something that's pretty hard to figure out. What is power? How can we get power? What is power? What is power? Let's take man and woman for example. Man has an overt power over woman in most cultures. Even here in western society, where things are supposed to be equal, or at least getting there, you'd be hard pressed to find one person who truly believes that women are more powerful than men. At least as far as show of power goes. As undeniable as this is, it is equally undeniable that any woman can have power over most men. There's a certain kind of hypnosis they are capable of. I've been a victim. I assume most men have. It's a bitch, it's a doozy, you do things you would never expect yourself to do. So really, the power balance between men and women is very well...balanced.

I believe that in all seemingly unequal power struggles, the power balance could be equalized or shifted, were the opressed party to realize that they have something that the oppressor wants. This is the case in all power struggles. Everyone has something to bring to the table. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel powerless, think about what it is that the person who holds power over you wants from you, and deny them that. See how the power shifts.

Christmas:

It's partly about enjoying things you didn't know you needed or wanted, but all of a sudden you do.

A relatively recent picture of me

Glorious.

Google As An Internet-Age Christ Figure?

I was driving to the grocery store to pick up a few last-minute things for Thanksgiving, and I started thinking about the future, and Google's place in it. I thought of the possibility that our age could have a new Christ-figure: this very company. I imagined a world where the resentment that people are beginning to harbor for Google grew bigger, and it was hated, and denounced. In this world people would hate Google simply because they were something that in their minds could not exist: a benevolent corporation. In the end, Google would end up having its servers and power over the internet, or internet usability tools, however you want to look at it, stripped away. People would forever remember what Google tried to do: make the internet a better place, where information was easier to access for everyone.

I don't really believe that Google is this way, necessarily, but I do like them and their services. This is just something that I thought about, absent-mindedly, while driving to the grocery store.

Light On The Updates. Here's A Cool Link!

Updates will be light in the following days because it's Thanksgiving. We're expecting three dozen people here. I have a paper due Monday that I haven't started, too. I work Black Friday. In retail. At Best Buy. Et Cetera.

But anyway, since it is the week of Black Friday and people will no doubt be returning things en masse because they are unhappy with them or something, or maybe just because it's the holiday season and soon or later you might want this as a reference, here is a nifty site that shows you the best way to get in touch with a real live person at those customer support numbers you're supposed to call. I know you probably hate being led in circles on those numbers. I sure do.

http://www.paulenglish.com/ivr/

Have an excellent holiday.

Hard Drive Story, Or, Insights On Fooling Around With Linux And The Future Of Operating Systems

So, I built my new PC about a month ago. This is the story of this PC, up until now.

The first step to building this new PC occurred in September, actually. Back then I purchased the motherboard I would be building the system around. It was MSI's K8N Neo4 Platinum board. It came recommended from the shsc.info website, a wiki that is run by the members of SomethingAwful's "Serious Hardware / Software Crap" forum.

In October I ordered the rest of the parts. Good stuff. I won't bore you with the rest of the system specs, but just know that it runs all current games very, very nicely. What is important for this post, is the hard drive. The brand is Maxtor. It's a SATA drive, which is like the new standard for connecting your hard drive to your motherboard. It's 300GB.

I have had some problems with this drive. When I first installed Windows, I went to the Event Viewer. It's just a common habit for me. I do this to see if everything went smoothly. The Event Viewer tracks hardware / software errors that have been reported to windows. I didn't expect anything to be there, but there was an error. Paging error on this brand new, gigantic, SATA disk. Oh no! I just wrote it off as a first time starting error thing, like maybe my drive was just trying to get used to this system.

This was not the case. For weeks on end when I booted my PC it was very hit-or-miss. Sometimes it would boot in a reasonable time (1 minute or less), sometimes it would take 5-10 minutes to boot, other times it wouldn't boot into windows at all: it would just hang on the splash screen. The event viewer reflected these boot problems.

Eventually I admitted that this wasn't going to get better, so I formatted the drive. This was a pain in the ass, but of course I transferred all important files to another PC in the house while I reinstalled. I did a complete format, hoping that maybe something was just corrupted.

Things were ok...for a while. Then the same thing started again.

Flash forward to the first or second week of November. On a whim, I upgraded my chipset drivers (the chipset is NForce 4). Things seemed to get better. I was happy. The computer was happy, everyone was happy.

Flash forward to last week. I get a hankering to install Linux. My chosen distro? Ubuntu. I liked Ubuntu a lot because they sent me like 10 free install packages, and I had heard from lots of places that theirs was the distribution to go with at this point in time. I had tried the LiveCD from one of my many install CDs too, and it was rock solid. So I go to install, make Linux partitions, etc...no go. My partition will not resize, for some reason. I'm in the Ubuntu installer, trying to resize. No error message, nothing. I try resizing through Partition Magic. This too, does not work. So once again, the second time in less than a month, I am formatting my brand new drive. The drive partitions perfectly with Windows installed all over again. Hmm. Not sure what is going on at this point. Actually, right now I still don't know why it would not partition. But I installed Linux, which I will get into in a little bit, and I was able to easily choose between Windows and Linux. Of course Windows booted slow as hell. I begun to suspect that there was really something wrong with my hard drive.

I ran Maxtor's PowerMax diagnostic software to see if I could get an RMA number to take advantage of my 3-year warranty on the drive. This took a long time, much longer than I was expecting. Three hours long. The program reported absolutely zero errors on the drive. Did I mention Linux booted fast as lightning, every time, without fail? And Windows, of course did not, it was still a crapshoot.

So, this must be a problem with Windows, right? After posting my problem on the SH/SC forum, someone finally replied with a link to this thread on Nvidia's forums. Hey, how about that! It appears that Maxtor SATA drives, of the exact same kind that I have, and maybe even some other vendors' drives too, have problems with the NForce4 chipset! How about that? And what's a remedy? To upgrade the chipset drivers? Oh, of course. No wonder Windows boots so slow sometimes! No wonder this seemed to go away when I upgraded my chipset drivers! No wonder...I didn't make this connection before? Shit. Anyway, I still get a few of these errors in my event log, but far fewer. And Windows has been starting up just fine. I believe in the near future that this problem will be totally rectified.

Now, on to discussion about Ubuntu Linux.

It has been a long time since I seriously fooled around with Linux. It has come a long way in two years. For the average user it is far easier to navigate, operate, and be productive in a Linux environment. If you are such a user, or any user really, Ubuntu is a great distro to try out, to see if you might like Linux.

When I first booted into Linux, all of my essential hardware was detected immediately right off the bat. I loved it. There is an excellent guide here to getting started with Ubuntu 5.10, and it really helped me get things working the way I wanted them to. One of the first things I did was create a partition separate from my Windows and Linux partitions, a FAT32 type partition, to hold all of my documents, games, music, and other files that I might want to have access to from both operating systems. The reason for FAT32? It is a file system that both operating systems can read / write to. Linux cannot write to an NTFS file system (the system that Windows XP uses), and Windows cannot even read from an ext3 file system, which is used by Linux. So I created this FAT32 partition, and it serves this function, and another: If I need to reinstall either OS, my files are relatively safe from destruction here on this separate partition.

Let me reiterate, this guide is awesome for getting started with Ubuntu Linux.

Now, you ask, why would you want to use Ubuntu Linux? This is why: it is free. Completely free. All of the software is free to download. It can do many of the things that Windows can, and some it can't. In my opinion, the music player amaroK is the COOLEST music player out there on any Operating System. Beats the shit out of iTunes. Hell, it is even cooler than foobar2k in my opinion. I still use and love Foobar on windows though. If you get a new computer in the future and don't want to shell out a few hundred dollars for Windows, I highly recommend you look into Linux as an alternative. With very little work, you can be running a completely legally free operating system that is every bit as functional as Windows.

Another reason to try Linux is to broaden your horizons. It is interesting to see that there's more out there than Windows! There's more than one way to do things, more than one way to organize your files, more than one way to start up an operating system, more than one way to do everything you do right now with windows, and these ways are all perfectly good and right in their own respects. You may even learn that you prefer Linux to Windows. Me, I'm kind of stuck. I like both. If Linux had better gaming support I just might switch. If you look at Windows Vista, the new version of Windows that is supposed to be coming next year, you will see a lot of it is influenced by Apple's Mac OSX. If you look closer, you will see that a lot of it is also influenced by features that are found in the various Linux Desktop Environments. When you get right down to it, all 3 major operating systems appear to be converging on many points. They're all starting to look better, following Apple's example. They cater to both power users and the newbie alike. I believe that in a matter of years, unless someone pulls out some drastic new feature, that it will boil down to a matter of choice. Now many would argue that right now it is a matter of choice, but if you want to play all the best games, you really have to use Windows right now. What I mean by a matter of choice is this: You no longer have to have an intimate knowledge of computers to enjoy the Linux experience.

Each OS does something better than the other right now. The great thing is that many things that are supposedly exclusive to one OS can be emulated on different operating systems. Hell, we are even looking at the possibility of installing OSX on regular old PCs now (I have tried this. It was cool!). With all of the OSes adopting similar hardware now, we're really looking at some interesting convergence points in the future.