Hum dee dum

Right now I'm putting off studying for my cs252 midterm. I've been working non-stop all week and just finished taking my cs236 midterm that I studied all day for, so I'm finding it difficult to work up the desire to spend my Friday night studying for another midterm.

Now for some blogging!

Ubuntu 7.04 beta was released today. I'm really liking this new version of Ubuntu because it's more compatible with a lot of my hardware, especially the wifi on my laptop. I also like the sleek new glossy theme. In my opinion it is the first professional looking theme that Ubuntu has ever had. Coupled with some slick communist wallpaper I got from interfacelift.com, I have one snappy machine!

I'm really excited about a new program I found out about called LinuxMCE (Linux Media Center Edition). I haven't had a chance to use it yet because their site has been dead ever since digg.com ran a story about it, but the video they have on their site, linuxmce.com, looks absolutely fantastic. Tara and I watch a lot of DVDs, and I listen to a lot of music, so it seems like something that's right up my alley. One of the coolest looking features is the built in home automation. For $60 you can get a controller from home depot to hook up to your computer so LinuxMCE can dim the lights automatically when you insert a DVD. Also, if your computer has a bluetooth adapter, you can use your cell phone as a remote control. If you have multiple computers throughout the house set up with LinuxMCE, you can set it up so that your media will follow you as you walk around the house. For instance, if I'm watching something in the living room and I walk to the kitchen, it will start playing it in the kitchen instead. It does this by detecting which computer your cell phone is nearest to.

Another thing that interests me a lot lately is the topic of ethics in digital duplication. I am not a pirate of movies, games, music, or anything else, but I am repeatedly amazed at how poorly the RIAA and MPAA treat their consumers. I am not surprised to see more people turning to piracy every day. These days, even if you purchase a DVD or a CD, you still don't have rights to the product that you have bought. It doesn't become your property in any way. The media vendors reserve the right to tell you exactly how you are allowed to consume the product. For example, two years ago I bought a Foo Fighters CD that had DRM (digital rights management) software on it that only allowed the music to be played directly from the CD, or in the form of WMA files that could only be played in Windows Media Player. If you wanted to play the music on an iPod, or in my case a PDA, you were out of luck. Why would they do this? They say it's to prevent piracy. However, that argument is absurd because the pirates will always find another way of getting a high quality copy available for download without any DRM. All that the DRM accomplishes is to thwart the paying customer from using the music in the way they would like. Who wins? The pirates! The pirates are the only people who get a copy that is completely portable. The paying customer loses because they can't use the media how they would like, and the media company loses because they drive off customers.

Another thing that concerns me are the random lawsuits being filed by the RIAA. They will sue absolutely anyone, it doesn't matter if the person being sued has ever used a computer or even listened to music, they are a candidate for a lawsuit. What really concerns me is that the government has done nothing to stop this flood of random lawsuits. Apparently, anyone with enough money for the lawyers can file as many lawsuits as they can fund. If it turns into a profitable business for them from the few that they win, then so be it. Statistically, they're likely to win some of them whether or not they're based in fact (most people use computers and most people listen to music), and they also have other financial incentives because the campaign of terror will keep many would-be pirates buying CDs rather than downloading.

Well, like I've said, I'm no pirate, but I also have no love for merchants of greed. I appreciate people like those who contribute to Ubuntu and Linux in general who are willing to allow duplication of digital information without reservation. I understand that artists must be paid, but let's be honest, they're not the ones pocketing most of the money. Some of them make millions of dollars, but considering that they sell multiple-millions of albums, that's a drop in the bucket. I think Linus Torvalds (the founder of Linux) is one of the greatest people of our time, mainly because he established the precedent for truly free information in the main stream.

Alright, time to put that tirade to rest.

I watched a really interesting documentary last night about black hole theory. It was mostly about the information paradox. The example that is used is that if you are an observer, and you watch someone fall into a black hole, you will see them disintegrate at the event horizon (well, actually they'd disintegrate much sooner, but this is just an example). The even horizon is the point of no return where even light won't return from once it has gone beyond that point. From the point of view of the person who is falling into the black hole, however, they will pass beyond the event horizon and nothing will happen, no disintegration. So technically the person would be both dead and alive at the same time, right? Actually, the person never disintegrated at all. It is impossible for information to disappear from the universe, which is what would happen if the person passed beyond the event horizon. The person does pass beyond the horizon, but the information about that person remains in the universe, smeared across the surface of the event horizon. That's the theory anyway, but I'm not going to volunteer to be the one who tries it out.

I've been doing some interesting programming lately. For the first time ever, I've made a program that saves data by serializing it (a better way to save data that just writing it to a text file), and also I've made a program that can launch other programs. In Java, these are both very simple procedures, and I'm surprised that it took me this long to learn how easy it is. Pretty soon I'll be making the program send out e-mails, which is also a simple procedure in Java. Still, it's exciting because I've often wondered how to do these things.

Well, I'm done for now. I think I might be able to get some studying done now that I've had a little time to do something else. School is great, but I'm getting burned out. Good thing the semester will be over soon!