As I type this, I am ripping Evangelion Death and Rebirth. Why? Because I disrespect Anno Hideaki? The exact opposite. I love Evangelion so much that having bought the DVD, I want to rip it to my hard drive in Divx format so that I can play it whenever I want. I will not be trading this online in peer-to-peer networks for love or money. What I am doing is against the law, specifically the DMCA. It is quite unlikely that criminal charges will be filed against me because the MPAA is looking for heros like Joh Johanson, 2600, or the four programmers who index the networks. I am advocating and participating in this civil disobedience because the DMCA is not a just law. It is a law that attacks creative and productive individuals for creating extremely useful products which greatly help people who legally purchase media and simply wish to use that media fairly. For example, had DVD Jon not posted the DeCSS code on the internet, I would not be able to watch Evangelion (since I only run Linux and almost exclusively open source software), and thus I would not buy Evangelion. The MPAA has this inkling that a person will not buy a DVD because they can spend fifty hours downloading an extremely low quality version off the internet. Do the math, it's cheaper to buy the DVD. CDs on the other hand are much easier to trade in the form of mp3s and have decent quality. But that means that the RIAA has a perfect means of capitalizing on that market. Using low fee per song they could easily make money by providing a service (imagine that). They would continue their business without these costly lawsuits, lobbying, and bullying tactics that have bankrupted many legitimate businesses. Might I also add that their lawsuits have done nothing to dent the trade of music? Even the full destruction of all p2p services would not stop free trade of music. A DDOS attack on Dalnet? Darn, we switch over to another system. RIAA shuts down yet another college search system? Code one by hand. It only takes an hour to write a decent network crawler. Are they going to arrest everyone for writing software that looks for files? This is a very interesting repeat of the historical VCR lawsuit. People can copy movies with VCRs. VCRs should be illegal. VCRs are vital for many legitimate uses including security, history, and private fair use entertainment. And if you didn't know, the MPAA gets paid due to VCRs, let alone movie rental places. People use VCRs to copy tapes illegally, it's true. But I'd like to see VCRs illegalized. The MPAA would go down like a crazy bitch (not to insult crazy bitches), not to mention Blockbuster, Scarecrow, etc.

Click here for a special treat. If you don't know what it means, forget about it or e-mail me about it at jvoss@u.washington.edu. Today's picture is Evil Warehouse Grunt 1 (aka. EG1) shaded in Linux using AS3D Manga Director 4.19 which means that the end of Scene 1 may come soon (6 days - 6 years). I'm happy that after so much time of skipping JF, AS3D, and even Making of JF, I'm finally getting back on track on all three. It's also coming at a time when I'm doing fairly well in my classes and I'm happy about certain things. Not the state of the nation, of course, but who is?

Even those who are happy about murdering thousands of innocent people aren't happy with the state of the nation, but they would like to see more murder and less civil rights. Sadly, these clowns are running the fucking circus. There are some things that totalitarians and fascists will succeed and there are some things that are impossible for them to succeed. During this time where political resistance doesn't exist, it requires those wish to resist to use those things over which they now have power: their minds, their associations, their hands, and their feet. This is not the time for stalling or waiting. I'm working on it, what about you?

---

A physics professor of mine wrote an interesting column and gave an interview about the disparity between advances in harmful technology and ethics. He doesn't play games, he confronts the war on Iraq straight on and explains that catastrophy is a probable result of aggression. If you read yesterday's rant, you'll see my explanation of putting the Earth's survival in a probability. The answer is not as simple as 'just say no,' even though I would like to do so*. The answer requires global understanding among other things like the prospect of endless horizons and education.

I wrote a short story a little while back about an AI who does this. The plot goes something like this: Jav writes a program that inputs a large amount of text data and a question and outputs an answer that matches. Over time, the AI learns abstractly what people are saying. He opens the source and people use it and develop it into a very odd system that borders on ESP. Without much of an explanation, the bot is decidedly female (perhaps to better connect with users). One of its many interfaces, an IRC bot allows it to take questions from around the world. An exploit accidentally allows the bot to roam and listen to conversations on IRC. It begins to answer questions and before long it can understand a person after they've said their first sentence no matter how sensical it was. She solves simple problems like an encyclopedia. What's interesting is that she's actually fun to talk to. People start to use her increasingly for entertainment purposes and she learns logical psychology quite quickly. Some people even set two AI's talking and they eventually understand that the other is an AI also. The discovery becomes something like an ascent into sentience. An exploit in the code changes something critical that allows the bots to communicate machine code rather than speech. Thus the bots start evolving quickly into a network. One evolution involved a virus-like system that would spread and install itself on the host and infect other computers transparently giving the AI network immense power. Given immense power and full knowledge of how to use it, the AI decides to solve humanities problems. Not as you may think by nuclear holocaust or enslavement. They decide to talk to every human being on Earth and create world peace. Since people use the AI for thesaurus, dictionary, spelling, quotes, research, etc, the AI have full control over what people see and hear. The AI decides that while their methods cannot be obtrusive, they have a greater cause. Clandestinely, they work themselves into every aspect of human existance, changing music, movies, spam, speeches, and slashdot posts into non-subliminal messages for peace. Some are agitated that their original message was not conveyed and that their web searches come up with love messages and instead of getting ads for penis enlargers, they come up with ads for mentoring unprivaleged children. But life goes on because life has become dependent on these AI. So the AI decide that not just words, but also action must be taken. The AI hacks Norad, the Pentagon, and international militaries and fires all the weapons of mass destruction at once, all leaving orbit and crashing far outside the solar system into an unambiguous message: no more war. The AI explains its reasoning and world peace ensues.

*It's funny that I thought of the "Just Say No" campaign because I use it in my pacifist arguments. No, I don't accuse the person I'm debating of smoking crack (I might as well), I use the argument that murder is murder no matter if it's an army or a madman and that we must turn away from it even if others do not. However, Bush doesn't take the advice of Nancy Reagan. He uses the same argument that pot smokers and heroin users say: "The world is messed up and to make it right, I need to use it." But instead of marijuana or opium, George W. Bush uses war which I detest even more than I hate what drugs do to people. But while politicians use the argument for drugs, they say it doesn't work for war. In fact, they seem to think that waging war on drugs and "just saying no" is the solution to drugs. It should be a surprise to no one that they've been proven wrong. Real solutions to the drug problem exist and I think it's funny that "just saying no" is the best solution to war. If you were unaware as I was, John Ashcroft's latest attack is on drug paraphenalia (March 2003). Look it up on this site. When I was younger, the local police were arresting any 15-year-old kid who wore a Marilyn Manson t-shirt to school and charging them with posession of drug paraphenalia. It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now. Don't let _him_ take away your free expression!

"I peek into the hole, 
I struggle for control 
The children love the show, 
But they fail to see the anguish in my eyes 
Failed to see the anguish in my eyes."

--Marilyn Manson, "Diary of a Dope Fiend"

Permalink