A social networking friend of mine from Germany with the name Tobias Roetsch aka Taenaron from deviantART.com started an interesting poll a few days ago. He asked fellow deviants the question:“Do you believe in your government and do you support their decisions?”Within a few days 281 different people voted. Based on the numerous comments in the discussion threads to the poll is it obvious that the deviants who participated in the poll come from all over the planet, the USA, Canada, UK, Australia are only a few of those countries. People from virtually every continent participated. The results were alarming, but not surprising.Only 10% of the people who responded believe in their own government and support what it is doing. Over 50% don’t trust their government at all with more than half of that not trusting any government for that matter. 38% (106) deviants said just partly… 27% (76) deviants said everything is a big lie. They just want to get more power. 26% (72) deviants said No! (Tell me why) 10% (27) deviants said yes! (Tell me why) Well, it wasn’t for long that the discussion was shifting from the generic subject of trust to specific issues, such as the ominously war on terror and the much more real war that is waging in Iraq for more than six years now.Here is are some snippets of the discussions followed by my own rather long responses, which also lead me to write this blog post. Here is the argument between[…]
I was browsing in the Defacto2.net document archive of the PC scene and found a reference to an interesting article written by Stephen Granade titled “Warez, Abandonware, and the Software Industry“.The article discusses in detail the subjects software piracy, copyright with a few on it from a perspective of a new type of software piracy called “Abandonware”.Abandonware provides access to games that are old, out of print and not supported anymore by the software company who created it or owns the copyright. It provides multiple functions; one of which is to provide support for rightful owners of the software to get a replacement, if their copy was damaged or the disk where it was stored on is not readable anymore. It also provides people access to historic games that cannot be acquired legally anymore, since they are not being sold anymore. The third function is to provide current game designers with an archive to study how other game designers in the past worked and how they did things that worked or not.Abandonwares sites often provide also the means to play the old games, especially if they are for hardware platforms that are also unavailable today, such as Apple II, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Super NES and other old Nintendo consoles, Sega consoles, old Sony Playstations, Atari game consoles and home computers. This means are emulator programs for modern computers (mostly Windows PC) that emulate the old hardware platform and load old game code to run on your computer. Even old[…]
I had some fun with copyright laws over the past weeks, mainly regarding video productions I did or re-published. I experienced different things, but one reminded me of a short story that I read over a year ago in the German IT magazine “CT”, which I am still subscribed to here in the US. I first scanned the original article, but then decided to also buy the digital version of the main article, which included this short story on the publisher???s website at Heise.de. I paid one Euro for it, even though I own the print magazine and also the PRO CD-ROMs where the story should also be on. I basically purchased the story three times altogether. I then translated to English as good as I could to make sure that the subtle humor is not lost because of my translation. I hope that what I did was enough to not infringe on any copyright for publishing it on my personal blog. Considering that this is also only a short “box story” within a main article, fair use might be applicable as well. Well, copyright laws and its application are not only hard to obey, but also hard to understand and to know for sure, if you are doing everything 100% alright and perfectly legal, or if something is missing and you are infringing on somebodies copyright. Even if you know what you need, is it sometimes hard to impossible to acquire it. Enjoy the story.About One on the Quest,[…]
You might wonder what this weird title means. It is long and actually a short list. Somebody noted somewhere today something very interesting. The list of today’s top five movies based on number of views at Google Video reads as follows. Zeitgeist (remastered) or Old Ed., alternative URL Endgame- Alex Jones – Blueprint for Global Enslavement The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis America: Freedom to Fascism Money as Debt by Paul Grignon Update March 24, 2008: It’s odd that less than two months after I posted this, ALL 5 videos were taken down from Google Video. Don’t worry, they were uploaded again and again by other people, which is actually fine, because most of the movies were released under the creative commons license that allows free replication and public display for non commercial purposes. All links are fixed for now. Let’s wait and see if it lasts this time. This is pretty remarkable in my opinion. You might ask, why that is, if you don???t know what those videos are about. If this is the case, I would actually suggest watching them all.I recommend watching them in a different order than they rank, start with “Money as Debt” (5), then watch 4 and 1, then 3 and last but not least 2. You won???t be able to watch them all in a row. This is another curiosity considering that Google Video is a social video sharing site where people are supposedly consuming video in only small few minutes??? long[…]
I was sorting some old zip archives on my file server when I stumbled across an old text file from October 1997 with the name “INETSUXX.ZIP”. I was intrigued and checked it out. The FILE_ID.DIZ provided already a glimpse of the things to come. .—————————–.| a short statement about the || actual bulletin board || system scene !!! || changes are needed! |`——————————- — – | COMMENT ON THIS FILE!??! : ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . _.:%[READ:IT]%:._ Here is the entire content of the included text file with the filename “CHANGE.IT!”. It has two authors. The initial author who also created the ZIP file and started spreading it through other bulletin board systems is an anonymous sysop who is mad that the BBS scene was going down the drain and that everybody was switching to use the Internet rather than dialing a BBS. It was modified and extended with comments by PigPen of Poison and Surge. He made some were good and forward thinking statements back then, even though his English language skills are not the best (the text screams for spelling and grammatical errors) and border-line PG13 language used. This is true for both guys by the way. I think it was how we really talked back then. I can’t remember for sure, but the text refreshed some long forgotten memories in me.Okay, here it comes, uncut and uncensored. Original text…. this sux! we had several times to change the whole thing… but no one of us seems to care about the[…]
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