In an essay entitled How I Lost The Big One,  Lessig provides us all with a valuable learning experience from the time when he took Eldred vs. Ashcroft  to the Supreme Court and lost.  Logical arguments are not enough, people have to feel in their guts the importance of Free Culture, otherwise they won’t lift a finger to defend it.  Logical arguments aren’t going to overcome the inertia and power of the monopolies.  We’ve got to aim for people’s hearts.

It is very painful to see our friend and hero Lawrence Lessig flagellating himself, however; I hope that he can leave this behind him, and help us take the fight into the future without carrying this weight upon his shoulders.

Today Luke and I gave a CS lunch talk about Free Culture, and rose_garden took excellent notes on our talk, which resulted in me posting way too much on her livejournal entry about it. Why don’t you join in the discussion and post your thoughts?

I also came across some other cool things, such as Nutch, a project to build an open-source search engine. I think this is VITAL, and I’m shocked that nobody has done it before. The Open Directory Project is wonderful, but we really need an open source search engine to go with it, otherwise we are at the mercy of Google, or even worse maybe Microsoft someday (shudder). I found this while reading up on search engines on technologyreview.com, which has a fantastic article called Search Beyond Google.  This also mentioned Mooter, which tries to break down search results into categories that it refines for you as you continue searching.

Finally, I discovered the Roadmap to Online Music Fun, which is kind of cute, but unfortunately leaves out some efforts like Magnatune, which is the awesomest online music label in existence. I really intend to write up something comparing all of the online music services, but I need to do homework first…

So I just saw the best ending to a movie EVER!  It was the ending to Dead or Alive, “A full-gore gangster story! Takashi Miike is the Japanese Tarantino…only much faster” -Jeffrey M. Anderson, San Francisco Examiner.  I don’t actually recommend this movie, because the rest of it was largely a waste of time, but the ending more than made up for it!  Which doesn’t mean that I’ll ever watch it again…

Read on for spoilers

If you have seen my bike, please contact me! I believe that it was stolen somewhere between 11PM and 2AM this morning from in front of McCabe Library. I was flyering for the SCDC movie tonight with Luke, and when I went back to get my bike, it was gone! Either somebody took it or I left it some other place that I don’t remember. So please, keep your eye out for a red bike with a black squishy seat, with a white LED headlight and a red LED taillight. This is the bike that was in the NY Times. The headlight has changed since that picture was taken, to a small tubular headlight, but it is otherwise exactly the same. The brand name is “Giant”, and it has a silver cord-thing for a bike lock.

OK, this decision is BS, see it for yourself.  There’s no way this will survive appeal.

Defying U.S. Supreme Court, Kansas Court Upholds 17-Year Prison Sentence of Bisexual Teenager

Hey folks, we still haven’t found a drummer for the band (if you know a drummer in or around Swarthmore please get them to contact us!), so this is extremely premature, but what do you think of these band names? I would like to get some sort of temporary band name at least so I can name the band webpage, but I don’t know if I’ve found anything useable yet.

Please leave a comment saying why you voted the way you did!
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There was a fascinating article on the demise of Firefly on fireflyfans.net, where the author says with some justification that the show’s heroes were patterned after an idealized Confederacy from the American Civil War, minus the slavery issue, and that this may have had a role in the show’s termination.  The claim that I’m uncertain about, however, is that the author says the Civil War was not fought over slavery, it was fought over state’s rights.  How much truth is there to this statement?  I know Abe Lincoln said that he didn’t care about freeing the slaves, just preserving the Union, but I remember from my high school history class that slavery was a pretty big issue at the time.  Then again, the winners write the textbooks, and I went to school in the North… how biased was my US History education?

One of the issues with the Web is that blogs are often meant as a way to communicate with one’s friends, but it’s hard to keep jerks from finding them and using them against you without relatively inconvenient systems like password protection (that make it hard to show your entries to a new person).
— arctangent

Which is of course one of the things that makes LiveJournal great!  The Friends system makes it easy to add and remove people’s access privileges.

Actually, part of my personal philosophy is that you shouldn’t do anything that you can’t defend, and that you should be willing to do and defend any actions that are morally right even if they are unpopular. As I think Confucious said, “the quality of a man is determined not by what they do when they are being watched, but how they behave in private.”  If you have made a mistake in the past, it should not bother you to freely admit that you’ve been in error if you have in fact learned from your mistake.  People have the right to change their minds, and it is OK, for instance, for you to have smoked marijuana in the past even if you are straightedge now.  Otherwise, people wouldn’t be able to grow and develop, they would be locked into whatever morality (or lack thereof) their parents chose for them.

The only problem is that privacy is necessary in oppressive, non-Libertarian societies where people will interfere with your life even when you’re just minding your own business, and they will try to enforce their morality upon you.  If I were gay in a society that lynched gay people, I probably wouldn’t come out on my blog despite this personal philosophy.

How do you folks feel about my personal philosophy?  Should I be embarrassed of it, or does it make sense? 😉

Arrgh!  Plato is so full of crap!  Why is his logic so broken?  He was a pretty smart guy, why did he have to use BAD arguments when he was perfectly capable of using GOOD arguments?  If he just wanted to get somewhere fast, without using good logic to get there, why didn’t he just save everyone’s time and declare assumptions by fiat?

That said, Plato is pretty cool.

Today I read up on Satanism, because sinsofthedove is vaguely Satanic and I wanted to know what that meant and why it appealed to her.  Satanism isn’t just the polar opposite of Christianity, there are few variants, and the Satanists that we are interested in are the “occultists” or “modern satanists”, because that’s the group Finlay identifies with.  Basically it boils down to a philosophy reminiscent of Ayn Rand or Nietzsche, and a religion where the self or ego is worshipped as “Satan”.  I think I like most of what they have to say, check out their main organization the Church of Satan.  I like the fact that they’re not evangelistic, and I like their emphasis on getting people to think for themselves.  They have one weird thing on their agenda, they want all churches to be taxed (they are purposefully not tax-exempt), because a strong church shouldn’t need tax exemption to survive, and they seem to think that other lesser churches would upchuck and die if taxed?  I’m not a big fan of taxes myself, the less taxes the better I say, but this certainly is an interesting idea, from an interesting group of people.

Also, being dark all the time seems depressing.  I go through periods of wearing all black, but I switch it up with my bright orange hoodie and my Hawaiian shirts.  That’s my general problem with gothy people.  Not enough variety.  To misquote Henry Ford, “they’ll wear any color as long as it’s black”.   Shake it up folks, don’t fall into a routine!  Not that all Satanists wear black or anything….