Digital Rights Molestation

That's right, molestation. We are seeing more and more of this technology, which pretends to protect media content from so-called piracy. For decades, the concept of fair-use (the notion that, laws aside, it is our prerogative to do honest things with content that we legitimately own licence to—like make copies of it for backup, or to put it on a different type of medium, better suited to some way that we want to use it, or even use a bit of it in our answering machine announcement) has been accepted as par for the course. Even in the face of DRM and 9 years of the DMCA's disallowence of bypassing it, fair-use has remained standing.

Now, the powers that be (mostly by virtue of wealth, attained in no small part by bleeding artists dry, then discarding them—often to wallow and die in abject poverty and pestolence—whilst raking in billions from their work) want it cast in stone, that circumventing DRM for any reason—even fair-use—shall be forbidden. (Boucher and Doolittle Introduce Fair Use Bill. Wired, 27 feb 2007)

At this point, we'd be far better off if the content megacorporations were dismantled. Sure we'd have fewer big ticket movies and musical acts. But then, how many manufactured bands and mindless action adventures do we really need? The easing of homogenous market saturation, would make room for more of the smaller-scale stuff that's actually interesting and creative.

The entities behind the MPAA and RIAA have been hollering "foul" and getting laws passed in the name of anti-piracy, that impose technological restrictions that do absolutely nothing to prevent real piracy. Anyone who has tried, in the past century, to get their own small slice of the industrial pie, knows that their real agenda is to keep the little guys out.

Now they see technology that allows anyone to publish their work to a worldwide audience, for a few hundred dollars, and they're racing to block the new road (just as they tried to stop R-DAT and high-speed cassette—two technologies which, in their respective times, raised the quality with which small operations could make field recordings), by—once again—yelling "pirates!" and attempting to require content restric— "protection" on all digital media, and to make it as close as possible to being explicitly illegal to copy any "protected" content, and spreading propaganda that has some people actually believing that it's illegal to "download music" even with the copyright holder's permission.

That's right. Some people actually think that it's illegal to download any music—not just the RIAA fill dirt. My sister—who makes some of her music freely available, with no restriction upon copying and passing around—has encountered people who won't download it, because they think that it is against the law to do so! She tells them, "But i'm the copyright-holder; i am giving you permission!" "But it's downloading music", they retort, "And downloading music is illegal!" And around it goes.

Our society is being raped.

The Nose Of Osirus

I realised today that i'd missed a bit of the political commentary, in The Firesign Theatre's How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All (1969). When i first heard it, many years ago, i didn't know about the Phallus of Osirus.

When Set tore Osirus' body into pieces and cast them about, his penis fell into the Nile, and was eaten. So, when Isis reassembled him, she made him a new one, of clay and magic, so that she could conceive a child (Horus) by him. (And i thought greco-roman mythology was kinky. Apparently, the ancient egyptians had yet dirtier minds—of which this is but one small example.)

The obelisque (the tapered square shaft, topped with a pyramid—of which the Washington Monument is an example) is a symbol of this. It's not just abstract art; it is specifically the penis of Osirus. One stands prominently in the Vatican (within a circle, no less—symbolising intercourse).

So, as i woke today, the lines

"Osirus! What has happened to your nose!"
"I have just returned from Rome..."

came to mind. It hit me like a ton o' bricks. Laughed my kiester off.

An idle blog is the blogger's blogground

Just a post to mention that i haven't posted in 2½ months. But i have tweaked the template a little more. I finally put my own links in the sidebar, and shrank the text to avoid wrapping.

And that's my blobby little post.

MS-WTF2k

Last week i took delivery of a spanking new Seagate 250 gigabyte (232 gibibyte) hard drive. Friday i undertook the task of transplanting my Windows 2000 installation to it. The system had been sprawled across 5 FAT32 volumes for a long time, and i was well ready to be done with juggling act.

One thing that i had to contend with, was the fact that i had Win2k living on F: rather than the usual C:. After boinking with it a bit, i managed to break it. So i decided that this would be a good time to make a fresh start. So—after a transient install to one of the old drives, to get a working environment that knew how to handle drives larger than 128GiB (which requires Service Pack 3 or later, and setting a flag in the registry). I formatted the new drive as one 232GiB NTFS volume, installed Win2kPro+SP4 on it, and have been slowly building the system back (minus the things that i don't use anymore, anyway).

One of the more basically stupid things that i've discovered (which, of course, was not evident under FAT32—which does not support per-user access control) is that—unlike what i'm accustomed to with unixoid operating systems—Administrator does not have full access to everything. As Administrator i can grant any user access to any file; but it seems very weird to need to. I'd already discovered, a couple of weeks ago, that there is no way to aquire admin privileges, without changing the whole user context (including home folder and HKEY_CURRENT_USER), other than belonging to the Administrators group. So i've resigned myself to being stuck with that less than ideal security situation.

Win2k acts differently when running on NTFS—beyond the expected. For Example, under C:\Documents and Settings\ (an absurdly long folder name, that i've long wished that i could change to something short and sweet, like "users"), where i used to have:

Administrator\
All Users\
BSP\

i now have:

Administrator\
Administrator.THETASIGMA\
All Users\
All Users.WINNT\
BSP\
BSP.THETASIGMA\

WTF? I can see if it wanted the system name on the user folders (though i don't see the need—nor did Win2k, when i was running it on a FAT32 volume); but why both ways? And where did it pull ".WINNT" from? The machine was *never* named that! Sure, it's the name of the core OS; but can i put things in there that will magically apply to all WinNT users, the world over? Of course not!

I'm running MS-WTF2k

Why did i start this 'blog?

The absurd truth is that it was the only way that i could post a comment to a friend's 'blog. So, by way of unnecessarily limited software design, i was compelled to begin my first 'blog.

Mind you, it's only my first, if you don't include activity on various BBSs (bulletin board systems) in the 1980s and '90s, or the various other conceptually identical technologies that keep popping up here and there, to be tauted as if they are something new.

What's behind my eyes?

Lots of things. Some of them even make sense.

If a tree falls in the forrest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? It depends upon how you define sound

If sound is the physical phenomenon of pressure waves, then yes. If it is not considered sound until it is perceived, then no. From there one might then wonder if anything even exists if it is not perceived.

One might also wonder why someone would think that ctrl-s should end an editing session. The usual behaviour is to save and continue. Ah well. Life tends to be good at being annoying.