hawkeye’s thoughts of tomorrow

>rent a car bulgaria another nerdy test. The Wordpress iPhone app.

Okay, so I wanted to test Jott on Wordpress and see how well it blog. If you could mobile blog, you can be a pretentious dush bag, even easier than normal love blogging. That is a truly something amazing. listen

Powered by Jott

UPDATE: Not too bad really, and I think it’s my cellphone to blame for part of it.

I’d never really considered it, but apparently gas stations are getting screwed just as badly as we are on higher priced oil. Kinda makes you suspicious that big oil’s trying to establish dominance over the entire vertical market, which is kind of a bad idea since they’re already treading on thin ice. People will eventually switch to alternate fuel sources, if they keep getting squeezed they eventually snap.

JSonline (via Reddit)

Good news everyone! Japanese girls are getting even hotter.

[via Reddit]

I’m really divided on this. On one hand, there’s the the “The web is truly becoming it’s own world” on the other hand…W…T…F…

World of Warcraft VISA (Via - MAKE)

Lamar Smith has revealed himself as an RIAA puppet and more importantly, an idiot. Update: Ok fine, he’s just really an incredibly corrupt tool.

“We want to know exactly what they plan to do to stop illegal downloading on their campuses,” Smith continued in a statement. “Universities have a moral and legal obligation to ensure students do not use campus computers for illegal downloading. These schools do not give away their intellectual property for free, and they should not expect musicians to do so.”

[Public] Universities are not responsible for imparting morals. They should be amoral (not immoral) in their education, unbiased by society’s choices of “good and proper”. The important thing to remember about morals is how fluid they are and how they can be used for evil. In the past it was “immoral” to associate with a person of different skin tone. It’s still “immoral” for two guys or two girls to love each other. A University is not the setting for teaching morals.

Universities are also not responsible for enforcing laws. They have a legal obligation to obey them and comply by the rule of law, but it’s up to police to enforce laws. Making schools play the role of police is unfair to everyone involved.

Last I checked it’s also up to the citizens of a country to make the laws, not multinational cartels. This is the inherent flaw in giving corporations even a subset of the rights of citizens. Corporations should not have the right to hold intellectual property, because they don’t feel, they don’t care, and they never die. IP rights are designed to benefit smart, hard working people for their entrepreneurial spirit, not to allow people who’ve never had an original idea in their lives to profit of the backs of naive, creative types. IP rights were designed to reward innovation, not to allow infinite profit from one good idea. The expiration of copyright was designed to allow of people to take someone’s idea and expand upon it, to better the community of human knowledge through contribution. Does giving Disney an eternal copyright on Mickey Mouse benefit society or Disney? Who do we care about more?

I’ve got a new idea. If you don’t want to share your ideas freely…DON’T. I can live without them. Human beings have an innate desire to create and lack of monetary incentive isn’t going to stop people from making music, writing books, or creating art. If you’re such an amazing artist, people will pay you. Maybe not enough to buy gold chains and bentleys…but isn’t it about wanting to express yourself? If you make enough to live on comfortably and get a chance to free your soul once a night, isn’t that enough? Being an artist isn’t supposed to be easy, most of the best art is rooted in conflict (When was the last time you read a book without conflict?). I don’t wish I had artistic talent so I could make the big bucks. I wish I had artistic talent to hear just that one person say, “Your art really touched me, thank you”, money might be icing on the cake, but the emotional connection and meaning is what I wish I had.

Now I’ll differ a bit on engineering and invention. There’s significant research and development costs¹ involved in that much more related to physical property than art is. I’m not sure of the specifics involved in this, there needs to be some protection, but it needs to be limited enough that you couldn’t just sit on a really good idea forever.

Whew! Ok, I’m done for now.

¹ _{Don’t try to relate this to the artist argument, a Guitar/Violin/Pen/Typewriter/Paintbrush, doesn’t count as a significant cost.}

Bush vetoed the bill, we all know. Moving on, what’s the truth of the matter?

For his part, Bush flew to Florida to meet with military commanders and said the Democratic proposal would turn Iraq into a “cauldron of chaos.”

They don’t clarify and they don’t state very well in the first place, but who’s credited with this quote. Bush? A General Perhaps? John Smith from Huntsville, AL? I’m going to assume it’s bush for now. What if he’s right? We may have gotten involved in this war for the wrong reasons based on lies and misinformation, but don’t we as human beings owe the Iraqis something? We destabilized a country and it doesn’t sit well with me to just leave them on their on. On the other hand of course, if we keep baby-sitting them, will they ever really grow up? (”They started it!” *BOOM*)

I’m not 100% comfortable with the staged pull-out. Bush makes a fair point with his comment of “you don’t tell the enemy when you plan to give up”. The whole idea of saying, “If you guys just terrorize a little longer and harder, we’ll just leave, and you can fend for yourselves” smacks of an awful idea.

I’m also very against Bush vetoing something that has such wide support. He’s just a couple steps away from proclaiming himself dictator (he’s already “The Decider”). Even if the American people are dumb, the way the system is designed, they’re supposed to be in control.

Bush also hasn’t come up with a workable plan for Iraq, so his vetoing a plausible idea, even if it isn’t 100% acceptable, really rubs me the wrong way. Just saying, “Nope, that won’t work.” without coming up with a better alternative is just being difficult. If waiting to see how things go doesn’t involve potentially thousands of lives I’m fine with taking the “wait and see” approach, but we don’t really have that luxury in this case.

Are there any experts on the issue that aren’t politically biased, that can come up with a solution that:

You know what. Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two. I’ll take a good and fast solution. I don’t care how much it costs. We can find more money, we can’t find more people (well, you know what I mean, once someone’s dead they’re dead, even if we can always reproduce).

Ok, here’s something funny instead.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

So I’m in the wrong business. QVC hosts make up to $500,000 a year according to an article from the NYT. It’s a quick interesting little read about the TV shopping industry. I also learned that QVC stands for Quality, Value, Convenience…which I somehow never knew.

The Biggest Sell is the Audition

This is it, Obama’s lost, Hillary’s lost, Edward’s lost. The Democrats have lost the next election. They’ve elected Jenni Engebretsen as their “Deputy CEO of Public Affairs”, don’t recognize the name, she was previously the Director of Communications for the RIAA. Which means any day now we’ll start to see the democrats suing small children, the elderly, and the handicapped.

Then again, the RIAA hasn’t really lost a lot of face considering what they’ve been doing, maybe she is a good choice…

BoingBoing [Via Gizmodo]

The Washington Post asked Joshua Bell to play in the DC subway as a test of what people would do. In a bitter sort of commentary on the state of life in America, they did nothing. He got completely ignored by the passers-by. This article is just heartbreaking, especially to someone who loves music.

Pearls Before Breakfast