Friday, June 25, 2004

Cheap MP3s Revisited

In seaching on the legality of AllofMP3.com I found a few good links:

Interview with Vadim Mamotin (CIO of AllofMP3.com)

Russian Music Site Declared Illegal in Australia

Interview with Roman Bahanets, assistant to the lawyer of ROMS

Section of a FAQ about whether AllofMP3.com is legal in your country
Overall, this is a good FAQ, but this one particular section was quite interesting.


Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Mozilla

Yet another hole in IE was found today. My god people, download Firefox. I've been using it for a few months and absolutely love it!

Thursday, June 03, 2004

The Future of Information

We are starting on the trail of the information age. There are so many things that are changing the way we think about, deal with, and absorb information.

There are those who want information to be free, and for it to be a team building experience. The open source movement is a great example of this. It reminds me of Star Trek. Everyone seems to be working towards some greater cause, yet their modus operandi isn't to become rich in the process. It's simply to create a better world for those who come after us.

There are those who are strong believers in copyright, and are fighting for extensions to copyright law, the DMCA, the Pirate Act, and I'm sure many more licensing and protection measures for the information they produce.

It is my belief that information wants to be free. Often you will see me saying "Information should be free, viva la resistance!" Maybe I'm naive, but I have a very hard time understanding copyright and ownership of information. Where does it begin, where does it end? If you read my blog, and talk about an idea I expressed here, do I own that thought that you just stole from my blog? I THINK NOT! This is how humans work. We communicate to share information. If we weren't meant to freely share information, we would not have the gift of communication, or we'd have some sort of metering system built into our physiology to measure how much energy you must transfer to me in order for me to speak to you.

Recently there was an article posted on ZD's News titled "Are developers stealing code?" This is getting crazy! That link I just created to ZD News... Well, not only did I read the article and stole the idea which fueled this article, but I also stole the concept of a hyperlink from the w3.org site, and created a link to it. I can't deal with this madness! Before long, I'll be paying royalties to my previous employers in order to mention their name and the work I did there on my resume.

Where does information begin? American Heritage Dictionary defines information, as it relates to computer science, as "Processed, stored, or transmitted data." So that seems that I'm advocating that all things processed, stored or transmitted should be free? Well yes! The data should be free. I can understand if you want to charge me for the service of transmittal, but the actual data itself should be free. I think the Russians at allofmp3 understand this. Hopefully American's will catch up. After all, we did specially engineer a pen to work in space while our comrads across the way just used a pencil instead.

Vive la resistance & sink the Pirate act in it's tracks

Cheap MP3s? iTunes & Walmart: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!

There seems to be a lot of raving lately about the Russian music site that is offering all sorts of high quality MP3 downloads at $.01-.02 per megabyte. YES, you read that right! For a while there was some concern that they may just be building up information for a big fraud attack, but now they're accepting paypal payments, so the only information you're giving up is your email address.

How is this legal you may ask? As far as I understand, it's completely legal within the confines of Russian law. How that affects us here in the US in using the site, I'm not sure. It seems like a gray area of international law that I'm not qualified to answer.

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Bush...

http://www.rototillerman.com/Politics/BushAds/Seriously.mpg

Amen sista!

Vacations

Vacations are very important. Don't forget to use all your vacation time each year and change the american standard of living!

http://iwantmyvacation.com/

First Post

This is the first posting to my up and coming blog.