I love Radiohead, and hate countree moo-sik,
but you really have to listen to this:
[link]

[link]

It seems that our idiotic neo-con wannabe government (robo Harpo) is once again trying to ram some very restrictive inbred legislation down Canadian throats. If this updated Copyright Act amendment were to pass:
- copying a file from a CD you purchased to your iPod would be illegal
- downloading a song from a P2P network would get you a $500 fine, per song!
(even if you owned the CD!)
- copying a recorded or time-shifted program from your Tivo or PVR would be illegal
- unlocking a locked cell phone (to use on another carrier) would be illegal
- owning unlocking software would get you jail time!
- using deCSS of similar decrypting program just to play your legit DVD on Linux,
that would be illegal!
- hacking your DVD player (or PC internal DVD drive) to handle multi region play - illegal!
- using your $10 Chinese DVD player (without proper MPEG licenses) would be illegal!
- using any of your music as background for your YouTube posted video -illegal!
(yes, there is a doctrine of "fair use" , but not since the RIAA treats all music listeners
as criminals...)

Basically, it's an open invitation for the likes of the American RIAA and MPAA to sue Canadians cross-border and run roughshod over our privary, rights, and music.
We've been preached that performance works such as music and movies are are actually PROPERTY, like cars, and thus require protection from stealing, just like cars.
At least when you buy a car, you own it. Ford can't come knocking on your door and say they want it back or that they want to make sure you don't let anyone else drive it!
The don't have that right; you have a receipt. But MUSIC, oh, that's a different animal, they want us to believe (after taking our money). They want to rent it to us.

Look at the way iTunes works now. You really don't own the music you "buy". You are only renting it. In fact if Apple decided to nuke your tunes, they'd be all gone. They are all tied to your account, and not to local copies you have on your PC. If your account were to be disabled, stolen, hijacked or compromised, all your music could be rendered unplayable in an electronic microsecond. The upside is that if your PC was stolen, you could retrieve all your rented music onto your new computer, but let's make it clear, that the music is NOT your property, it's Apple's, since they control it. They can give it back to you, if you are nice.

Yes, I know stealing it stealing, but it's not exactly the same, borrowing bits as stealing a diamond ring (or a bag of chips) from a store. For example, I have something like 30+ gigs of mp3 music, for which I have only about 300 CDs I've purchased. Am I a thief? Maybe I've listened to a song once, twice, or maybe never. I don't share those songs, I don't deprive the artists from revenue. If I don't play music I really like more than once, I'd likely never buy it either! The reality of music CD packaging is that you get one or 2 good tracks and rest is pure tripe. Worse, the way most music is viewed as now (by the seller/producer) is not that you OWN it. You really are only having a very limited right to listen to it. For now, you can legally make a copy to listen to in your car, but if this bill passed you won't be. Next time you get pulled over for speeding, the cop may demand a full copy of your iPod and ding you $500 for every song you have on there! I don't put it past the American psycho-cop mentality to cross the border, with RIAA sponsored Music-Police harassing people at every street corner. Welcome to your new police state, people!

So at 30 gigs of music ( though it might be 50 gigs by now), say 10,000 songs, at $500 dollar fine is $5 million dollars! However if I were to buy each song on iTunes for 99 cents, I'd spend only $9900 ! So which is it, what is a song really worth!?

You might say to me, just go out and buy the music! I do, if I can. Most what I like
to listen to is no longer available, only available in used shops, on vinyl or cassette, so there is little recourse. For music I like, music I listen to regularly, I will spend money, so long as the music company doesn't try to hijack and infest my computer (like the infamous Sony rootkit fiasco). But those bastards won't get my money if they bury the music so deep in protection schemes, rules and regulations and excessive restrictions on how and where I can enjoy that music. So, I will take my chances. In the meantime, I suggest you try to support band ands music companies that maximize profits for the actual performers and not the parasitic record labels, advertizers and assorted pimps.

Do you think you won't get caught? Think again! Almost all filthy ISPs are now using sleazy application filtering - bandwidth throttling, to degrade P2P, torrent etc services. So they know exactly who, when and what (down to the filename) you download and share. The onus would then not be on the RIAA to determine this, they'd simply have the legal right to subpoena (on mass) records on all copyright infringers and send them the bills, as they have been doing in the the United States of Amerca (land of the free!).
Pay the bill or they take you to court - criminal court!

Recently, in my town, a little local company went up against the MPAA. They make a dandy entertainment system that sucks all your DVDs onto a hard drive, so you can play them easily on your TV, or PC in any room in the house! Great! Well, not according to the MPAA. The DVD licensing association (thanks to the MPAA) insists that the PHYSICAL DVD be inserted in a jukebox and verified to be proper and real, before allowing it to be played! The MPAA lost the case, and freedom triumphed, but under this new law, that small win will be erased: it will be illegal to copy any DVD material at all! It doesn't matter if you can prove you bought that copy of Nemo, even if it's sitting right on top of the TV, in the eyes of the MPAA (and probably soon the Canadian government) you are a pirate and criminal!

So what will be the outcome of this? Simple. As in all cat and mouse games, the mouse simply gets smarter, until eventually the cats catches it, and then the cycle starts again.
I expect that "private sharing software" will come out - allowing you to share your music collection with only your most trusted friends. All communications will be encrypted. Alternate underground firmware loads for popular MP3 players will come out that ignore Apple, Microsoft, Sony DRM and scramble the music, so if caught, there will be no evidence to be used against you.

Thank you, Industry Minister Jim Prentice, for dumping this steaming dung pile of a bill, just before you and your cronies take off for the summer, hoping it will quietly pass. Be sure to enjoy your American entertainment lobbyist kickbacks, and be assured that if your measly minority government falls because of this bill, it will be because of YOU!

The revolution begins with you people! Time to sharpen the pitchforks! It's time to bring this nonsense to an end! Stupid governments, stupid wars, stupid laws.
Bring them all down!

Instead of spending trillions on killing innocent civilians, let's spend the money instead on healthcare, education, scientific research and paying the police to do what they need to do - apprehend the REAL criminals: murderers, drug dealers, rapists, child molesters and politicians.

I have two friends, women. They themselves were friends long before I met either of them, and in the last few years, they were the best of friends. I write "were" because as far as I can tell, they are friends no more, and neither will discuss it. This saddened me greatly, so I write this short treatise on friendship, their friendship, in hopes that one or both will bite their tongues, swallow their pride, kiss and make up and resume their friendship, OR officially call it quits, say good-bye forever and end it, instead of living in limbo. For those of you with a short attention span, please feel free to stop here.

Friendship! What a beautiful thing! Long before any of us blurred our realities with hormones, lust and sex, there was friendship. Simple, pure and innocent friendship. In our earliest youth, we meet someone, we decide we liked them and if they liked us, voila, we were "friends". In those days of pre-school or Kindergarten, we found it essential to find and make friends, since it was our first opportunity to make social contacts outside of our families. So important in those formative years,we got something that perhaps we could get from no other source- validation - a believable secondary source that clearly said we were "good" and "worth it". We liked someone, and they liked us back. It's as complex and simple as that. Sure, we have parents, siblings, but they ~have~ to like us, or live with or at least put up with us. Friends have no natural obligation to do so. Why does one human pick another to befriend, ally themselves with, protect, defend, comfort, console and... trust? Certainly, in a merely evolutionary sense, to make ourselves vulnerable like this is bad, however the benefits must outweigh the detriments. Apart from combating loneliness, making friends is a way of protecting ourselves, from the harshness of the world, and particularly from the harshness of other people that are not your friends. In Kindergarten or grade 12, your friends will defend and protect you, even if you do not need it, for there is safety in numbers. But there is something else, not just a survival instinct; there is joy of friendship. We are ~happy~ to have friends, to see them, to spend time with them, discover their lives, personalities and intricacies of their minds, as well as open ourselves to be discovered. And therein lies the danger too - another person out there that knows YOU, all your dirty little secrets, what makes you tick, what ticks you off, and most importantly, they know how to hurt you. As in all relationships, there is joy and pain. There are inevitably disagreements, discussions, fights. ..And make-ups, where all things are forgiven, amends made and the friendship is resumed, hopefully (but not always!) a little stronger (or sadly a crumbling wall with another missing brick). This is the double edged sword of friendship, to get, you have to give. And there is risk.

What is it that makes friendships persist, or terminate? There is a saying - "Birds of a Feather Flock Together", which obviously means that we seek and keep friends that are similar to ourselves. Maybe similar interests (even one), similar histories, common language etc., but ~something~ attracts us to this person, and it is not sexual!*
It's no surprise that we seek people that resemble us - a kind of narcissism - we reflect ourselves in our friends. We choose friends with characteristics or traits we possess or admire or even lack. We are also happy to know that we are not alone in our thoughts and opinions - "who we are" - and that at least one other person agrees or sympathizes with us. Unfortunately, with passing time and experience, new friends, spouses, jobs, and distance, friends can drift apart and relationships attenuate, weaken. Like a marriage, or any relationship, friendships take some effort on both sides, and without that visible effort, neither party can feel that the venture is longer viable or worthwhile. The End of Friendship. But does this really need to happen? Think about it. People never really change, not at their cores. Whichever things initially attracted you to that person, that person still possesses, no? So unless YOU yourself have drastically changed (or your friend has), the friendship can be salvaged! I'm not saying that it can be how it was on the first day. Nor would you want it to be, Think of all times you spent together, shared experiences, suffering. Was your friend there for you? Did they offer to help you without thinking? Who did you share your innermost thoughts with? Who helped you through the toughest times in your life? Do all these things mean nothing? All those experiences changed you both, and in some way made you who you are today- your lives are indelibly intertwined forever! It doesn't matter that you do no have the exact same personalities or interests - that would be too boring! But there does have to be an element of the same validation and respect that initially created your friendship, and this you-just-for-the-sake-of-you, is hard to verbalize and communicate, too often assumed.

Why friendship? Why not mere "acquaintanceship"? That rather depends on what your definition of friendship includes, what class. For example, you have coworkers (5), maybe coworkers you really like (4), people you could spend time outside of work with (3), Then you have 2nd class "friends" - people who you see socially, almost by accident, but you don't really make any effort to maintain or start a closer relationship with. You call them friends, since they are not enemies - they are almost neutral. Then you have your best friend (1st class), your confidant, and soul mate (but in a different way than your spouse/bf/gf). There is a place and need in your life for each of these types, but to dismiss or demote your best friend to acquaintance is also an admission that you were wrong. You made a bad choice, initially, or you misjudged. Could it really be that you were so mistaken?

Don't always assume it's about you (yeah, I know, that excuse "really, it's me, it's not you!") Sometimes your friends may be very busy, at home, school or work. Maybe they are having family or marriage or financial/health troubles and are too proud to talk about them even with you! If your friend is an introvert or prone bouts of depression, isolation etc, it doesn't mean it's your fault. If they are involved in abusive relationships, drugs or alcohol- you have a long road ahead to help them. If you are a good friend, you may get some clue with regular communication - even a "how are you" text or email can help. Also, remember that a solid friendship is not reliant on absolute regular dependency. Your friendship should be stable enough that it can withstand some lapses, with both of you knowing that you are still friends, and not becoming paranoid about being abandoned. Friendship is about trust and confidence, self-confidence.

Why save friendship? Because friendship is a gift we give to ourselves, but delivered from and through another person, someone we cannot control. True friendship is worth saving, even through the ups and downs of life. It's worth saving if only because it is at the same time so natural, and yet goes against the laws of nature, both strengthening and testing us. Friendship is anti-entropic - it is creating something from apparently nothing, and keeping it alive, simply by a bridge of thought and action, by choice.

In my mind, there is no doubt that friendship is a type of love. The Greeks have many names for types of love - and three of them are Agape, Philia and Storge. Agape is a pure love, "love of the soul". Friendship is like this. Storge is fondness through familiarity - that fits too. It is not exactly Philia, friendship-brotherly love, or parent-child love. It is a love of equals, not superior/subordinate. It is more than our jumpy neural nets settling down and getting accustomed to a particular person (psychological affection- getting accustomed to "use to" someone).

Someone once wrote that (romantic) love is "friendship set afire", and thus friendship alone would be what you should have with your life partner, just minus the fire! Many people believe in "friendship first", as often the novelty and monotony of sex wears off, there is still friendship to maintain the relationship. In short, if we demand that our lovers also be our friends, it only underlines that friendship is the prime need and as important (if not more so) than other physical needs.

If only life and love could be reduced to binary simplicity - yes or no. If only we could just walk up to a person and say, "I like you, I want you to be my friend", like when we were 4 years old. That would be that, no embarrassment, no explanation. Just facts. The reality is that an adult doing this today would likely be charged with harassment, or in a work environment, sexual harassment, no matter what the genders. We are taught not to show all our cards, as this makes us vulnerable, especially to rejection. "You show me yours, and I'll show you mine". But who goes first? If friendship is about acceptance and appreciation, then the end of friendship is about denial and rejection. The pain of being cast aside or away is always hard to deal with, creating self doubt, lack of confidence, denial and difficulty in re-creating trust with someone else. Denial? Indeed! You question what you ever saw in that person - how could you have been friends so long, why? Can you ever trust your feelings or intuition ever again? We all have felt the daggers of betrayal and rejection. Even in Kindergarten we were heartbroken when our best friend quietly went and sought someone else as best friend. Those scars were easily healed, but ones from 10 year old friendships will not heal so easily. Sure, eventually, one gives in and takes another leap of faith (in love and friendship both), probably to be hurt once again. Lather, rinse, repeat....

I read a 2006 study that suggested close friendships were on the decline in modern times. Over 25% of those polled stated that they didn't have anybody they considered a close friend or confidant. Oddly, one of the main reasons given was that due to homophobia, particularly close same-sex heterosexual friendships among men are avoided for the sake of appearances. This didn't appear to be the case for women. However, modern times being what they are, we count more people in our circles of friends, as virtual-friends, Facebook, Myspace, MSN, email and even DA-friends. Even though we have often never met these people, they can be more real, and more helpful than our real flesh-and-blood friends, maybe because they are somewhat anonymous and we aren't forced to deal with them in our everyday lives.... does it make them any less friends? Does it make them any more disposable?

So pick your friends carefully and wisely! Don't take them for granted and leave your friendships to fall into disrepair! Tell (or show) your friends regularly that you value them! (even if they are not the needy types)... and remember: jobs, coworkers, boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands, wives can come and go (47% divorce rates!), but real friends can last a lifetime!

Final note: When I was in grade four, my teacher gave us a trick
so we would remember how to spell "friend" - as many of us were
transposing the I and E.
The mnemonic was: "a FRIEND is a FRIEND to the END" ("friend" ends in "end")
So, A-M & ST, take heed! (robo steps down from soap-box)

I end my verbosity with a quote:
"My friends are my estate." - -- Emily Dickinson

To all my friends, see you at the END!
h

P.S.:
Let me know your thoughts, experiences...

*PPS: Some material I came across in my years of scholarly study of love,
indicated that ALL platonic attraction (i.e.friendship) was actually based on SEXUAL attraction, even in same-sex friendships!! That is, not to say that you ~want~ to sleep with all your friends, but that there was a basis, however minute, of sexuality. One mechanism could be that we are attracted to people that share our sexual tendencies, ie. nerds hang out with nerds, players are friends with other players, hoochie-mamas with hoochie-mamas etc. There didn't have to be any direct homo-erotic attraction- no fear! How figure!

[link]

unnamed robots sent me this!
I had to laugh, the interface connectors were all wrong!
the voltage levels too! TTL won't work with 3 volt CMOS!
how could they! silly humans...
nothing more to say.
-robo

This has been making the rounds lately - found on Craigslist in SF.
I'm not sure if it's a real person or story, but it probably is how many
soldiers (or their families) must be feeling. I can't say I disagree!
Not for the faint of heart who are afraid expletives! For foreign readers,
the abundant use of the F-word may refer to acts of procreation
Georgie - keep up the good work!
==============================================

From an Angry Soldier

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Date: 2007-04-10, 1:00PM PDT


I'm having the worst damn week of my whole damn life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-fucking-lutely sick to death of it. What the fuck do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever god damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such fucking experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a god damn thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that fucking hell hole, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

How do I dare say this to you moronic war supporters who are "Supporting our Troops" and waving the flag and all that happy horse shit? I'll tell you why. I'm a Marine and I served my tour in Iraq. My husband, also a Marine, served several. I left the service six months ago because I got pregnant while he was home on leave and three days ago I get a visit from two men in uniform who hand me a letter and tell me my husband died in that fucking festering sand-pit. He should have been home a month ago but they extended his tour and now he's coming home in a box.

You fuckers and that god-damn lying sack of shit they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad.

And you know what the most fucked up thing about this Iraq shit is? They don't want us there. They're not happy we came and they want us out NOW. We fucked up their lives even worse than they already were and they're pissed off. We didn't help them and we're not helping them now. That's what our soldiers are dying for.

Oh while I'm good and worked up, the government doesn't even have the decency to help out the soldiers whos lives they ruined. If you really believe the military and the government had no idea the veterans' hospitals were so fucked up, you are a god-damn retard. They don't care about us. We're disposable. We're numbers on a page and they'd rather forget we exist so they don't have to be reminded about the families and lives they ruined while they're sipping their cocktails at another fund raiser dinner. If they were really concerned about supporting the troops, they'd bring them home so their families wouldn't have to cry at a graveside and explain to their children why mommy or daddy isn't coming home. Because you can't explain it. We're not fighting for our country, we're not fighting for the good of Iraq's people, we're fighting for Bush's personal agenda. Patriotism my ass. You know what? My dad served in Vietnam and NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

So I'm pissed. I'm beyond pissed. And I'm going to go to my husband funeral and recieve that flag and hang it up on the wall for my baby to see when he's older. But I'm not going to tell him that his father died for the stupidty of the American government. I'm going to tell him that his father was a hero and the best man I ever met and that he loved his country enough to die for it, because that's all true and nothing will be solved by telling my son that his father was sent to die by people who didn't care about him at all.

Fuck you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the god damn mother fuckers who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell.