Explaining the details of the crime in a press release, the RIAA stated that this new form of piracy goes beyond digital media exploiting an innate bug in the way music is heard to make copies into the human brain itself.
¨Basically, when you remember something, your brain has made a copy of it. Copyright prohibits copying anything without our consent and ergo, this is a crime.¨
The RIAA fears that there have been untold lost CD sales already due to people stealing music in this manner (coloqially known as ¨remembering¨). What is worse says the release, is that often people will remember a song they hear on the radio or television or at a friends house, and then decide they don´t like it – costing the artists a sale they would have had, had the person not remembered how bad the song was.
On top of this memory inately allows music to be utilized in other illegal ways including derivative works (known in the vernacular as ¨humming¨ a song).
While it is true that memory doesn´t always provide perfect quality copies, and people will often only remember parts of a song some people do in fact remember songs in their entirety, especially if they copy it to their brains multiple times as memory has the ability to fill in missing bits each time a song is received, the RIAA is frank about it all: Everytime somebody remembers a song, he is guilty of thef, and besides what about people with photographic memories ?

Appart from legal action against perpetrators, the RIAA is simultaneously pursuing legislative and techincal measures to curb the activity. A bill currently pending before the US congress will demand and extension of the CSSCA and DMCA protections to the human brain.
¨Basically if the bill passes, it will be legally required for all newly-made human babies to have genetic protection software installed which will prevent music from being remembered¨ said sponsoring congressman Geemee Cash.
On the technical front Sony-BMG is taking the lead with a new generation of CD copyprotection. A sony programmer who wishes to remain anonymous describes the system:
¨Essentially we are coating all new cd´s with a thin-layer of crystalized LSD, when heated by the CD-laser the LSD reverts to liquid and then to gass form, the listener then breaths it in, effectively destroying their abillity to remember the song they heard.¨

These moves however have not been without controvercy, a spokesman for the EFF responded by declaring that remembering music is an explicity allowed copyright exception under section 17 of the US copyright law, the fair-use statute and similiar laws internationally. The EFF went further to declare the RIAA´s plans for genetically preventing music-memory as a ¨gross invasion of privacy¨ stating that ¨how people choose to make new human beings is one of the most sacredly private matters in the law¨.
When asked about SONY/BMG´s proposed new LSD-layer copyprotection the EFF spokesman snorted and said ¨That´s just crazy, it´s even worse than that whole rootkit debacle – and besides it wouldn´t work ! The last time Japanese engineers mixed drugs and music we ended up with Kareoke !¨

***********
PS. This post is a parody… (I hope).

Clicky

Now whether or not the current reruns are set before or after the “selling out” I can’t say, not having enough context, and to make things even more difficult the exec’s seem to think chronology is something that happens to other people, so the first episode I saw was Will Ferrel’s last guest starring Winona Rider shortly after that whole “shoplift my way back into the limelight” business, the second I saw (several months later) must apparently have orriginally been done during the 2000 elections, as it shows Will Ferrel making a huge spoof of Bush’s “middle of the road” campaign and complete lack of commitment on any point at all (man was America ever in for a shock … middle of the road… yeah right).
What I can say is that I haven’t actually enjoyed it all that much. The sketches aren’t funny for the most part, the music has no soul… frankly the only thing that makes it worth watching is the in-between dialog – that’s the only bit where these talented commedians, these master fun-makers actually seem to have the balls to make some fun of things. Sketch based satire is of course one of the hardest forms of comedy to pull off, but I’ve seen most of these actors in their other work and they do have what it takes… so why is it that on this show, the moment they stop improvising to talk and start to act a sketch, they wilt like last weeks daisies ?

My theory… Will was right, this is a sold out show, talented performers are only as good as the network allows them to be. Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to keep watching “Whose line is it anyway”, at least they are (still?) not afraid to make fun of anything.

___________________________

We all know that Telkom has ridiculously high telecoms charges -
that’s no secret.

But whenever a comparison is made to other countries, Telkom has a
tantrum like a spoilt child stating that it’s unfair to compare South
Africa to other countries.

I decided to do a little comparison to show how expensive it really
is… so here are the results of the investigation.

I compared the time and costs involved in downloading 100GB of data
over Telkom’s fastest ADSL offering (1Mbps) with the time and costs
involved in flying to Hong Kong, visiting an Internet café,
downloading 100GB of data at their fastest speed (1Gbps), and flying
back.

Yep… that’s quite a challenge! And here are the details:

Telkom

Line speed = 1Mbps

Download Size = 100GB

Estimated Download Time 9.5 days

ISP (34 x 3GB accounts @ R269) = R 9,146.00

Line Rental (ADSL) = R 680.00

Line Rental (Residential Voice) = R 92.28

TOTAL = R 9,918.28

Hong Kong

Line speed = 1Gbps

Download Size = 100GB

Estimated Download Time 13 minutes

Flight (SAA) = R 7,942.00

Internet Café (average cost @ HKD20) = R 17.43

TOTAL = R 7,959.43

Difference: Hong Kong is cheaper by R 1,958.85

So to sum up… it’s cheaper and quicker to fly to Hong Kong if you
want to download 100GB of data!

I haven’t got the time to work out where the two converge, but it just
shows how badly we’re being ripped off!

That said, any software migration is a tricky business, no less so for a person on his own PC so it’s smart to go about it the right way.
Herewith then, my generic howto for preparing to venture into the world without windows (a side effect of it being the world without walls…), most of this has been written about before, but I’ll try to do the short concise version.

I would recommend grabbing one of the linux live cd versions (of course I suggest OpenLab) and trying it out first, find out what you like, and more importantly try out the applications related to what you do, see what’s missing, and also what you will gain. Then look at the “missing” list, ask your geek friends or local LUG about running them in wine or finding replacements.
Once you’ve done that, look at what remains on the “missing” list. Now rate them by how critical they are. Can you do your job without them ? Sometimes the answer will be no, unfortunately it takes time to replace every computing tasks (although in reality there is 10 000 times as many free software projects as proprietary ones – I kid you not) so some things we don’t have yet. If there is only a few, then you should look at a dual-boot for the interim, this may in fact be a good choice even on the mid-term to allow you to migrate at your own pace, but it’s only worth the effort if you do promise yourself to use your linux system as much as you can in order to eventually leave the old system behind (litterally, if you don’t then why bother).
Either way, you are now ready to install GNU/Linux on your machine, either by itself or as a dual-boot system. In either case, you will need to partition and format at least part of your hard drive so the most important thing at this stage is to do a full backup of all your data (you should do that about once a week anyway), if you are going for a dual-boot, install the other operating system first using about half the drive. GNU/Linux is good at seeing that you have another OS and sharing with it, some other OS’s are not so good at dealing with dual-boots, so this way round let’s you utilize the compatibility features of your new system.
If an OS install of any variety is daunting to you, this is the time to call a geek friend and ask for help, ideally, also let him spend a little time installing any critical fixes released by the distro and showing you how to do this yourself, and most importantly, how to install new software on your chosen distro so that you can add what you need (note to the heek in question, show kpackage or synaptic or gslapt or whatever the appropriate GUI tool is, leave the commandline for when your friend herself is ready to venture there).
And voila, you are ready to begin your journey into the free world. Like any exploration, it’s an adventure and that adventure will become it’s own reward.

This is where I get annoyed by a lot of my fellow protestants, the more orthodox among them still believe that psalms must be sung to the somber orderly music of the renaiscance church. Firstly I’ll argue the “orderly”, rock has no less order in it’s structure than the others, in fact all music is equally ordered – that’s one of the basic things that make it music.
More importantly, to claim that this is higher art is ridiculous, not that some of it isn’t pretty, but it was written in a clasistic system that measured the quality of art by how difficult it was to reproduce and more importantly by the ammount of specialist training you needed to understand it. The problem with this “classical” church music is that it goes against the very grain of what protestantism is supposed to be about – it makes church songs unsingable to most people. Worst it was almost certainly not the
music those songs were written for !
We have no idea what those melodies sounded like of course, since David and his contemporaries didn’t have ANY notation.
We do know that no two cultures’ music sounds the same so we can almost certainly guarantee it didn’t sound like renaiscance western music.

So let’s try a thought experiment. We could try to guess how David’s songs might have sounded, by comparing it to modern day music with a similar lyrical structure. Ignore all gospel, there is no resemblence at all between modern gospel and the psalms. Structurally the psalms, particularly those of David find their closest contemporary paralels in rock balads. Rock balads themselves have a lot of
inspiration from minstrel balads of the middle ages, which it turns out were played on the later descendants of the same instruments that David used (particularly the lyre).
So if authenticity of worship (supposedly the prime protestant goal) was truly sought -we should be singing psalms to the acompiment of melodies more similar to “Low man’s lyric” or “Cold November Rain” than to the stuff we normally get !

Not that my point is to talk much about Church, or even to single out protestants that much, it’s just that I know them because it’s the church-culture I was raised in.

So what am I talking about ? Music as a universal. We’ve established that music sounds different for each culture, yet all people can recognize it as music. Why is this ?
Scientists have no fixed answers, but they believe that music is not handled by the speech centers of the brain (which is why lyrics are so often heard wrong, thousands of people love a song “This guys’s in love with you” which ACTUALLY goes “The sky’s in love with you”), it’s handled by something much deeper, the same rhythm centers that control other rhythmic things in our bodies – like heartbeat.
Music reaches right down into the soul, into the absolute lowest levels of our brains and triggers emotions from their most ancient “on” buttons. Music remains a human universal, because of this – because in a very real way even the most contemporary music will always be primitive, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t BE music.

So Bach got it wrong when he used tribal music as the intro to “The rites of spring” to give it a “primitive feel”, the reality is that music he took inspiration from was just as contemporary as the music he was creating (for that time), this doesn’t change that he created one of the better symphonies, it does mean that what he intended to achieve with it was impossible in that way.

Music is a universal, but there is no universal music. Every culture has a different musical scale. Music notation as we know it, can in fact only be used to write down western music, and even then only those newer than the 1500′s or so.
This is because for starters, western music before that used completely different scales (which ones we don’t know for sure, but some of them like Gregorian chants still survive). And worse, it cannot even truly represent all western music since then.
A good example is guitars, notation can and does efficiently encode most known classical guitar pieces (with only a few exceptions like some Spanish balads that incorporate moments of using the guitar box as a percussion instrument – slapping it – in between the notes). Classic guitars however have only two ways they can be played, strumming or chords, both of which notation knows about.
Electric guitars on the other hand add several other techniques. For starters there’s “choking” (what Hendrix invented), where the guitar is played like usual, but the notes are pressed right up against the guitar-base – this doesn’t work on classical guitars because the notes would be too soft, but electric guitars have amps. Notation has now way of indicating -play this A right up against the head, yet it gives your songs a very different emotional feel.
And that’s not the worst of it.
Now try sliding, sliding is a technique where electric guitarists press the strings flat using a hollow object of some sort, a short metal pipe can work but beer-bottles are often employed. Sliding causes the slide-object to vibrate a note in harmony with the chords played – effectively you’re playing two instruments at once in harmony now – try writing notation for THAT one.
And that’s not even the most important electric guitar technique of all – what electric guitarists are most famous for is the “rapid strum” where the same note is played over and over so fast that it sounds like it lasts for a very long time, usually introducing a “howl” sound into the note.
Metal-players particularly love the howl as an emotive expression. But notation has no idea what to make of that, since no other instrument can be played that way, a a violin with a six meter bow would maybe come close.
So guitarists, especially rock-guitarists tend to prefer writing their songs down as riffs.

This week however, saw the founder of RedHat, Bob Young resign from the board of directors.

What makes Young of particular interest is his later venture, the one he will now be involved with full-time. Young founded lulu.com the online alternative publishing house (my own book “Batteries not included” is published by lulu), which opened up the doorway for many writers who simply would not sell out far enough for the mainstream publishing world to accept them, to nevertheless get their work out there and read.

Young has now left the software world behind permanently to focus on this contribution to the world of the arts, and more power to him I say.

—-
“Apollo 11 was ten years ahead of schedule – that means as an author, I have to adjust all my timelines, we’re on the moon and it’s 1969 – that means that what I predicted for 2001 is now suddenly more likely to exist in 1981″ – Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 – A space oddesey, October 3rd 1969.

I feel cheated.

It’s now 2006. Not only are we not anywhere near the tech that we Clarke anticipated for 1981, we didn’t even get there in 2001. Where’s my jetcar ? I want my lasergun damnit ! Oh and those x-ray glasses… mmm…
But I digress. What went wrong ? A hundred and fifty years ago the first scifi author (unless you count Dante) Jules Verne wrote a manuscript called “Paris 1939″. He predicts a city where people drive cars (this appears to be the first usage of the phrase ‘horseless carriage’) and filled with electric lights everywhere – including streetlamps. Since the lightbulb wasn’t even invented yet. His publisher refused to print the book calling it “just too farfetched”. His daughter inherrited the manuscript who passed it on to her daughter, who published it to “rectify the acuracy of grand-dads storytelling vission”
Former South African Minister of the external, Pik Botha was a writer before entering politics. In 1951 he writes a story called (translation): The value of a heart. In this story, he has Joseph Stalin undergo a heart transplant. Once more the story remained unpublished for being “too unlikely”. So Mr. Botha left scifi and spent the rest of his short writing career doing romances and (rather silly) detective stories.
Less than 10 years later, the first heart transplant happened right here in South Africa.

So SCIFI authors have predicted some things remarkably well. Yet amazingly, the best of the best just doesn’t seem to match. Most profound innovation of the end of the twentieth century – the personal computer. Nobody, not one saw that one coming. They all worried about the giant computers in the corps getting too powerfull – nobody saw the ones in our homes.
Once they were there, the next great predictions were wearable computing (watches that think), and voice recognition. So far those two have materialized, but been rather a let-down (though wearable computing is growing).
So the greatest inventions, they didn’t even expect (somehow none of the scifi writers, renegades that they are, and inspiration to renegades – ever really believed in the renegades who read them, for it was those renegades (particularly Steve Wozniak) who brought us the one thing no company on earth would have thought could be sold), and we got none of their greatest promisses.

There is no reliable cryogenics system for multicelled creatures. There is no cure for cancer yet. The flying car is still just something you see in movies. Personal space travel is just a dream, and even the X-prize won’t change that very soon. The world where space ships are as simple a piece of ownership as a car today is still as far away as ever.

What’s worse, we are still stuck on some things which scientists and scifi authors called “outdated” fourty years ago. Most notably the internal combustion engin – and fossil fuels. Things which we already have better alternatives for. The cheapest being methane conversion for any car. Methane is free – governments are only too greatfull to get rid of what to them is just a waste product, you can today, for a small outlay convert any car to run on a free fuel that causes absolutely no polution. Yet there are less than 100 of them in the world.
The reason is simple: politics. Political pressure by large oil companies (and countries) keep us dead set on a course of self-destruction when we have multiple ways out – the methane conversion is just the most easilly and immediately viable.
Of course they tell you there are safety issues – as if those didn’t exist in gasoline cars earlier – fix them ! It’s easier than an electric car that still needs to have a polluting power plant somewhere.

I feel cheated. What the hell happened to the world ? The IT industry has been through dosens, that’s dosens of major revolutions in the past fourty years. Vaccuum tubes became transistors became microchips became microcomputers became home computers. Punch card binary became assembler became top down programming became modular programming became object orientation.
And even now we are on the verge of the next major breakthrough – practical nanotech, and quite likely not too long after that, quantum computing.
So why the hell are cars still essentially the same as they were in 1893 ? Why on earth are powerplants still basically what they were in 1925 ?
Innovation has not stopped, if anything the pace has picked up – but where we needed it most, it hasn’t happened. I don’t buy it. Something else is stopping the innovations from realizing into products. Something with power and money and a vested interest in the status quo – which leaves not too many usual suspects !!
I feel cheated.
The world has been cheated.
We’ve been cheated out of our very future.
Any chance you think that we can still wake up in time to take it back ?

Thus it is inspiring to see that the free software foundation has decided to honour those projects which use free software in ways that are beneficial to a wider part of the social sphere. This is a subtle way to remind those projects just where this software came from. These projects bring benefit in a wider part of the social sphere, but they must remember that bringing freedom is a noble goal in itself and not be afraid to capitalise on it, even if we have come to live in a world that considers individual freedom a swearword – that makes it even more important for especially civil uplifted projects to hold it as a high virtue.

Read the original announcement

Actually, it refers to possibly the most misunderstood theory in the history
of quantum physics.
It all started as a thought experiment by Shroedinger (the physicist), who
suggested the following:
Say you have a cat in a box.
The box is hooked up to poison gas source.
That in turn is controlled by a switch, which is activated if the quantum
state of an atom is 1 and not 0.

Now, because of Heisenberg, if you try to SEE what the quantum state is,
you’ll change it ! Because quantum states decay, it will change over time,
but you cannot predict WHEN it will happen – and kill the cat.

So until you look in the box – is the cat dead or alive ?

Shroedinger’s intention was to prove that a Grand Unified Theory of physics
would not explain or predict the entire universe – a cat can only be either
dead or alive, but even though you’ve simplified it to a system where a
single particle quantum state determines this – you nevertheless cannot
predict the final outcome.

Then a bunch of physicists who didn’t like this, met up in Bern and held a big
conference about Shroedinger’s cat. Is it alive ? Is it dead ?
Eventually they decided: well bugger this, we must be able to predict. So they
invented a new state. Saying that until you look the cat is BOTH alive and
dead and everything in between. This is known as the Bern convention.

This has had a huge impact on quantum physics, not the least of which was to
lead to a whole lot of otherwizse sane scientists inventing the multiverse
theory – which would be almost fine if it didn’t basically imply that with
every decision you make you create a new universe – all of us !
It’s a sort of an ultimate science-making-man-god thing, where there must now
exist a universe in which I did not click send !

Shroedinger himself callled the Bern Convention “nothing less than a cop-out”

All of which brings us to the single best outcome of the whole thing.
It gave us the only use for the html blink tag which shouldn’t be punishable
by death – observe:

(Note most modern browsers no longer have a working blink tag, but in older days that would have worked if it was in html).

Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy snappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gwerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sictseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.

You find yourself feeling the loneliness of the people in the streets below
Each alone. Each empty. Solitary in a crowd of other strangers
And in your head Valiant Swart is playing a sad lovesong to the evening sky
And you realize, ours alone is to answer why. Everyone still strangers.

And you shake your head at the sightless eyes
and spin on your heel and stomp back to reality, a milion things to do.
And you put on your headphones and drown your sentimentality
in Karen Zoid stew.

* Technology: Well some other creatures are tool users, but indeed no other species have taken tool use to anything like the levels we have.
* Crime: This is almost really unique, in other social animals rulebreaking is very rare – it’s usually too dangerous. When it is risked it is usually a sign of a coming usurption attempt. Humans just break the rules because we can, for a milion reasons, the rarest of which is probably that we believe the particular law to be wrong and want to replace/become the government.
* Murder: Again, not unique, other creatures of this planet do kill and they do kill their own kind. In fact every species does, it’s debatable however if any of them do it as often as we do… oh wait, spiders and mantisses kill their mates – that’s gotta up the numbers. Mother scorpions look so protective with their babies on their backs – false image actually, she isn’t carrying them – they are hiding. If one falls off, he is mommy’s lunch. What we can say is that we, without a doubt, have the highest rate of killing both of ourselves and of other species of any known vertebrate.
* Sex for pleasure: Everybody knows that animals just do it when their fertile without giving it much thought and purely to procreate right ? Sorry, another fairy tale. Chimps and Dolphins also have sex purely for pleasure, outside of eustrace periods. Well not all chimps, only the Bonobo’s actually, our closest genetic relatives. And they got the whole shebang, masturbation, foreplay, mutliple position (in trees too !) and yes orgies – a film of bonobo’s in their natural habitat could be mistaken for a porn film for people with a hair fetish. Their entire society is built upon sex. It reminds me of my all-time favorite line from star trek. “They make love at the drop of a hat”, “Any hat”. In fact, their life of serial sexual encounters pretty much whenever their not eating (their world is to them a paradise with little to fear and no starvation) is probably exactly how we used to be. Until we decided to walk on two legs and go live in grass with lions anyway. By the way, bonobo’s with their free practise of a society built on sex, well they don’t seem to care much about genders, both females and males frequently give sexual pleasure to their own genders. Our closest family on this planet are a race of bisexual perverts who average over 100 sexual encounters with different partners of inconsequential gender every single day.
* Rape, rape is the counterpoint to sex for pleasure. With the practise comes the need for consent. It’s absense is one of the worst crimes one human can do against another. Whatever the rapists and victims gender, rape is guaranteed to cause trauma, it’s the ultimate betrayal of trust. Bononbo’s don’t have rape, they get around the need for it by never saying no. Unlike humans they really are always in the mood and always consent. Yet they do have initial approaches to test for willingness. Even though they reaction has never been known to have been a no, they nevertheless ask consent, quite moral of them eh. However just as we think that there is something unique to us, uhoh. Remember there is a third species here that has sex for pleasure. They are not as closely related to us genetically as bonobo’s but they have bigger brains and their social structure bears more resemblance to ours actually. They are also one of the only species of wild animal that seeks out human contact willingly and frequently. They are of course dolphins. And dolphins do rape. They gang-rape. Gangs of young male dolphins are known to corner of a young female and serially rape her.
* War, ah yes war. War is almost unknown among vertebrates, territorial struggles exist but are rarely if ever fatal for any members of the packs fighting. War is not just murder, it is murder squared. Murder justified for some reason and done on massive scales. Only a few other species practise it, ants being a notable example. What all the war-mongering species have in common is that they are not thinking species, they are species that blindly obey orders – orders themselves created from a blind following of instinct. Perhaps there is a lesson there. The only other species with soldiers, are worse than sheep, killing without thinking about it. Following orders without caring. They show a remarkable and sad resemblence to the state human beings enter whenever war happens to us.
* Advanced language. Well other species have languages. Chimps, elephants, dolphins, wales pretty much every intelligent species can communicate with others. But nobody does it like we do. We took language to a whole new level, a level where it occupies more than 30% of our physical brainspace. It is the tool we use to study the world (mathematics is just a language) so in fact we have technology like we do purely because we have language like we do. We have poetry, stories, conversations, fights, and yes even blog posts.

So are we special ? Not as special as we like to think, but we do have one thing that nothing else has. We can truly communicate with each other, we can convey meaning better than anything else alive. So most of the things we usually think of as uniquely human are horrible and we end up feeling grateful that they aren’t uniquely human. It turns out there is only one thing that we have and no other species has. This is of course love. I don’t care what scientists say about this – I’ve heard the arguments and it’s bullshit they can’t find the explanantion (because their looking in the wrong place) so they discount it’s existence. You can measure a lot of brain activity of of someone in love and conclude that they are merely horny and jealous but like I said – you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re like Terry Practchet’s ‘auditors’ breaking paintings and sculptures down to look for beauty. Love is real, it’s the only thing (in it’s many incarnations) that is truly unique to us. We don’t have sex just for pleasure, well we do but sometimes we do it to show love. Love is our most powerful invention. I think we made love. We made it out of a combination of advanced language and sex for pleasure. Advanced language allowed us to share and bond with another human in ways no other species can match. Sex for pleasure allowed us to show the intensity of the resulting emotions through an act of ultimate caring and kindess. Put them together and you have the little starting blocks love was built out of, but synergetically it has become so much more than it’s constituent parts.
Then when we had love, love started guiding things other than our bonding with one other person. It became our prime motivator, the happiest people do their dayjobs because they love what they do. As a member of the Brazilian ministry of culture pointed out once: the root word for amatuer is amor – love. The greatest professionals are the amatuers, the ones who do it for love.
And we also mixed love with tool use. We started using tools to create new ways to convey love, a new language form where all the words mean love. This new language is art. And yes I do believe every artwork ultimately means love. A warpainting, why would it move us if we didn’t care for the people it showed, or the ideals they stood for ? Why would we bother to paint it? We paint warpaintings out of love for someone or something. That too me is the beauty of art. I didn’t list it on top because art is not something uniquely human, it is unique to ius, but is isn’t something. The reason ever art student spends two years debating the definition of art and never finding a good answer is because art isn’t something, art is a language, and the language is made up entirely of an infinity of synonyms for the word love and since you can never convince me that we can ever have enough ways to say I love you you can never convince me that we don’t need art – we need it more than we need everything else together.