So there I was this morning feel a wierd combination of creativity and romance.
So I decided to try and realize this image I had in my head. The result as seen below (click to see the full-size version) raises the age old question: "can sincerity replace actual talent ?"
I’ll just leave the answer as an excercize for the reader.
¨There is a new form of music piracy running rampant around the world, and your children could be involved placing you at risk of legal persecution¨ - the recording industry association of America (RIAA) warned parents to keep watch of their children´s activities in order to curb this new form of theft, stating ¨we will not hesitate to use the full power of the law to punish those who steal our intelectual property and parents will be held accountable for the actions of their children.¨
The RIAA´s South-African counterpart ASAMI echoed these thoughts.
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 !¨
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PS. This post is a parody… (I hope).
Richard Stallman is best known as founder of the Free Software Movement, and I have written about that, and this man here many times before.
Now those of you who know Stallman, will find the first parts of this interview to be ‘refreshers’, things you’ve read before. But in the second half, he addresses things like other social inequities, globalism and similiar issues, how free software relates and differs and why those who seek to serve freedom in other parts of society should push for it in the digital realm as well.
Also look out for some interesting discussion on Ghandi.
it seems that heads are heading to cape town this weekend for the sessions ekapa.
will be coming out from my hide out to join the masses this summer and will try to get some pics whilst there.
i don’t know about the Jozi dudes but cape town seems to be getting a lot of slices of the art world of mzantsi.
is cape town the new big thing and are cape town artist now the big deal? Are cape town artists and galleries in?all eyes on ekapa!!
Those of you with Satelite will know that the series channel is showing old reruns of Saturday Night Live on Saturday nights (apparently the television executives do not see any logical inconsistencies anywhere in that sentence).
I actually don’t have satelite, but my parents do so when I visit over weekends I sometimes watch the SNL reruns.
Now prior to this, my total knowledge of SNL was that
1) Tiny Toons once did a spoof of it (called weekday afternoon live), with as special guest start
a Bart Simpson rip-off.
2) It gets mentioned in a very powerful line in Coyote Shivers’s song Sugarhigh
3) Andy Kaufman used to be in it (which I know from having watched Man on the Moon)
4) Will Wheaton says they used to be great but they sold out
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.
This was sent to me by a colleague. Worth a laugh.
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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!
Well he asked me the question, so I reckoned I owe him an answer. The answer is as simple as yes or no, and being an advocate for software freedom, of course I believe everybody should use free software even if there is some initial inconvenience for them simply because the freedoms gained are more valuable than convenience.
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.
Now if notation cannot even handle one of the most popular present day western instruments, imagine how bad it gets with other cultures. Bach tried to emulate tribal music - he was even further off than he thought since their entire scale system was different, he could get a near fake but the notation he worked in was simply not able to represent the melodies of his inspiration.
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.
