Ad Terras Per Aspera

The New York Times is running an article about the public discussion between Lawrence Lessig (the Stanford University professor who is so against criminalized file sharing it hurts) and Jeff Tweedy (the leader of the band Wilco).

They both agree that people have a right to culture, and I agree with them. I’m always on the look out for something new. Something that is actually new, and isn’t the same rap or pop rehash you find on MTV or VH1, something that isn’t complete shit. The only way to do this is to download it: I’m not buying a CD if I don’t know what it sounds like first. If I did that, I would be potentionally rewarding them for producing shit.

I also think that by attempting to shut out people who want to distribute your music over the Internet (who ultimately are your fans) is an unbelievably stupid thing. Free bandwidth to distribute things is hard to come by, so is free publicity. If you want to make an honest living, then let your fans do the right thing. By charging $25 a CD for shitty music, and try to sue your fans for doing the right thing only means you’re stealing money from your fans.

Well, it was bound to happen: someone goes to jail for trying to spend legal tender. I’ve been trying to think of something witty to say about this for the last twelve hours, but this is so unbelievably retarded that my mind has just been flooded with Stupid Rays^TM to prevent any witty remarks from surfacing.

In this post-9/11 world, the terrorists have already won: terrorist, thy name is high school drop out working at Best Buy! That’s another thing I don’t get. How can you blame the actions of a (hopefully soon to be fired) high school dropout working the cash register on the actions of a group of terrorists? Blowing up the World Trade Center, sure. Blowing up the Pentagon, sure. Blowing up soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, sure. Having someone arrested for trying to spend legal tender, only if Satan is forecasting flurries and a chance of ice-coated brimstone.

If anything, high school dropouts are what’s wrong with this country, not a few empty tents and camels in the middle of a desert. We should wage a war on stupidity, and not wage a war on terrorism. We should drop the hammer on the Department of Education, not drop the hammer on a couple of third world countries. We should make school books, not war.

Teachers and parents alike should be trying to further the education of children, not give them a gun and ship them off to a foreign country to fight. The United States used to be one of the most well educated and well respected countries in the world, and now our educational standards have dropped to what some third world countries have.

And because of that, we’ve put a poor innocent person in jail because he tried to pay using legal tender. I wonder if its too late to move to Canada…

I found this pretty cool science fiction story, Cradle’s Children. Its pretty decent, though a little dry. It needs polishing up, so go leave comments on what you liked and what you didn’t.

Arcade aficionado Andy Hofle has come up with the ultimate method of reliving the arcade years of our youth, the Arcade Ambience Project: three tracks of arcade bliss, filling your had with the sounds of the sounds of the 80s. Almost makes me wanna dig out MAME and play some old school Pacman or Joust on it.