flog

Goddamn, this song is just too good.

I am just an aging drummer boy, and in the wars I used to play,
and I've called a tune to many a torture session.
Now they say I am a war criminal, and I'm fading away.
Father, please hear my confession.

I have legalized robbery; called it belief.
I have a-run with the money; I have a head like a thief.
Re-written history with my armies and my crooks.
Invented memories; I did burn all the books.
And I can still hear his laughter,
and I can still hear his song.

The man's too big.
The man's too strong.

Well I tried to be meek; I have tried to be mild.
But I spat like a woman, and I sulked like a child.
I have lived behind walls that have made me alone.
Striven for peace, which I never have known.
And I can still hear his laughter, and I can still hear his song.

The man's too big.
The man's too strong.

Well the sun rose on the courtyard, and they all did hear him say.
"You always were a Judas, but I got you anyway.
You may have got your silver, but I swear upon my life
your sister gave me diamonds, and I gave them to your wife."
Oh, father, please help me for I have done wrong.

The man's too big.
The man's too strong .

I've always taken the aphorism to mean two things. First, it is a dictum or moral statement that I should be free to use information (including data, source code, and digital content) and modify or adapt it to my use after I have procured it (free as in speech, not beer). Second, it is a statement of fact that because of the evolution in digital technology it is becoming increasingly cheaper and easier to distribute information, therefore, even premium content will eventually get redistributed in a free format (the RIAA's continued inability to quash file-sharing backs me up on this one).

What follows is an excerpt from Vin Crosbie's article Information Wants to Be Free (or Does It?) where he takes a look at the quip with an eye toward economics.

"The Real Problem

Progress of new information technologies (such as the Internet) has dropped the true price of information online into an abyss, one today's transactional infrastructures can't yet handle. The gravity of that situation has temporarily pulled the price down to zero. Sound straight out of an economics textbook? Here are two real life examples.

Time magazine can charge $3.95 per print copy, but it won't find users willing to pay that much per month for access to its Web edition. Time's online users might be quite willing to pay $0.25 per month. Likewise, users of The End of Free -- the incongruously free content Web log about the end of free content online -- might not be willing to pay $5 per month for access, but they may be willing to pay $0.10. The problem for Time and The End of Free are the service fees that MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and even PayPal charge to process $0.25 or $0.10 transactions. The fees are larger than the transactions themselves. As current infrastructures can't process the prices online users might be willing to pay, the sites can't charge anything at all. They're free access.

The price of online information hasn't actually hit zero, but it has fallen to a level where it can't be easily transacted. Hey, who said the path of technological progress is always smooth?

If you're a content provider or publisher stymied by the inability to sell at new, lower prices users are willing to pay for information, what do you do?

You withdraw from online or find ways to make your content intrinsically more valuable (more about the latter in my next column).

If Brand's Dictum is a bitter pill for publishers and content providers to swallow, they can take comfort that they aren't in the computer chip business. A transistor costs one millionth of what it once did. If Brand's Dictum were as severe as Moore's Law, today's edition of The New York Times would contain 100 million pages and cost a quarter-millionth of a penny (assuming its publisher didn't long ago go bankrupt)."

Below is a Wordle based on the list of authors of the books I have read over the past 7 years or so. You can click the image to go to my "gallery". It requires enabling Java but it's just about worth it.



I heard about wordle from WO2.

These are the sorts of idiots amongst whom I have the pleasure of driving to work every Tuesday thru Friday:

1. A rotund bitch driving a miniature hatchback, caught up to me while I'm going 5 over the posted speed limit (40 MPH). Shortly after that, the speed limit went up to 50MPH so I stayed at 45 so she could pass me using the 0.25 mile passing zone right there. There was an oncoming vehicle 0.75 miles down the road so she did not pass. I sped up to 52 MPH while she yo-yoed back and forth for 12 miles - through two back to back 0.3 mile long pass zones (both without oncoming traffic). After the last passing zone, I slowed down to 42 MPH (I hate cocksuckers who tailgate but don't pass).

Finally, the cunt passed me on a bridge 2 miles after the last passing zone, crossing a double yellow line to do so.

2. I and thirty other drivers are sitting at a red light (it's one of those lights, so common in Maryland, that is always red when you come to it - no matter which direction you approach from) when it turns green. I've been shortshifting lately in the Rabbit to conserve fuel (and have realized about an 8 MPG gain using this strategy), but even on the best of days the Rabbit is not speedy at accelerating and the "0-60 in 3 to 4 minutes" sticker advertises that fact. Either way, there was traffic in front of me that it would be physically impossible for me to accelerate faster than. The Subaru behind me was tailgating so closely I could not see the headlights, so I got up to 4th gear/30MPH and just cruised at that speed as traffic in the right-most lane pulled away from me at 3-5 MPH faster than that. The Subara whipped on their turn signal and got into the overcrowded center lane, at which point traffic in that lane jammed to a halt because the next traffic light 0.75 mile down the road was still red. Of course, I kept on cruising in the right hand lane at 30 MPH, arrived at the intersection just after the light had turned green and the stopped cars had cleared out, and left all the traffic in the center lane behind.

If Mr I'm In a Hurry had taken a moment to pull his head out of his ass and followed the poky old diesel VW, he would have not only made it past all the stopped traffic in the center lane but would not have been stopped by the traffic light 0.5 mile down the road at Shady Grove Rd when it turned red shortly after I went through it.

Dawkins and Steve Weinberg engage in a love fest as they discuss science and g-o-d.

Some bat-shit crazy bitch had more abortions than she would like to count before Jesus cleaned up her act enough for her to get a spot on some TV show or something. Why am I supposed to care that she had a few dozen abortions and now feels bad about it? If you ask me she should have a few more.

I've always been fond of the one fewer gods argument because it highlights that just about everyone (except possibly some Hindus and New Age whackos) is an atheist. I disagree that we don't need the word 'atheist' though. Someday, when gods are like Santa, we won't need to point ourselves out with a special label, but that day has not dawned yet.

More evidence that the Church is hip and progressive and not at all populated by a bunch of superstitious old goats.

[quote author="Steve"]Duh.
[/quote]

I drove past this sign on my way home from Pensacola yesterday. I laughed my ass off for 3 miles down the road.

Found a reference to this one on alt.atheism. I decided to seek out the newsgroup again after a many year hiatus.

The Dangers of Auto-Replace

In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don’t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in any of the AP stories they run...leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed “Tyson Homosexual”.

From an article on /. about several ISPs dropping the alt hierarchy:


"Protecting the children (Score:5, Insightful)
by kurt555gs (309278) on Friday July 11, @10:18PM (#24160943) Homepage

Now I can be protected from alt.rec.motorcycles

I'll miss it, but after all, it's for the children.

Also, there should be no "content" on the internet not owned by a benevolent large corporation.

Losing alt.rec.motorcycles is worth it to serve our new masters."

Verizon jumped on the bandwagon and recently dropped the entire alt hierarchy. I'm tempted to fire up a news server along side my gopher server.

Fucking pigs.

I can't shove my fist in your childhood dreams:

...he was gone.

The Doors + Electric Six bootleg featuring remixes of The End and Danger is quite a tasty morsel if you are into dance/trance remixes of cool rock songs.

PS - 100 Bonus Points if you can tell me what Cedarville Luminary I'm ever so subtly making fun of with this flog title

If there were not an internet, it would be necessary to invent one just to exhibit the art of ejaculation.

'In an environment where the ambient temperature is well below the melting point of ice, as it is in most of the universe far from the highly localized effects of stellar heating, any water vapor would readily crystallize into complex, asymmetric structures. Snowflakes would be eternal, or at least would remain intact until cosmic rays tore them apart.

This example illustrates that many simple systems of particles are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transition to more complex structures of lower energy. Since "nothing" is as simple as it gets, we cannot expect it to be very stable. It would likely undergo a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent. As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable."'

-- God: The Failed Hypothesis, Victor J Stenger, p 133.

'Popper restricted falsification (which he equates to refutability) to empirical statements, and declared, "philosophical theories, or metaphysical theories, will be irrefutable by definition". He also noted that certain empirical statements are irrefutable. These are statements that he called "strict or pure existential statements." On the other hand, "restricted" existential statements are refuted. He gives this example:

"There exists a pearl which is ten times larger than the next largest pearl." If in this statement we restrict the words "There exists" to some finite region of space and time, then it may of course become a refutable statement. For example, the following statement is obviously empirically refutable: "At this moment and in this box here there exist at least two pearls on of which is ten times larger than the next largest pearl in this box." But then this statement is no longer a strict or pure existential statement: rather it is a restricted existential statement. A strict or pure existential statement applies to the whole universe, and it is irrefutable simply because there can be no method by which it could be refuted. For even if we were able to search our entire universe, the strict or pure existential statement would not be refuted by our failure to discover the required pearl, seeing that it might always be hiding in a place where we are not looking."

By this criterion, it would seem that the existence of God cannot be empirically refuted because to do so would require making an existential statement applying to the whole universe (plus whatever lies beyond). But, in looking at Popper's example, we see this is not the case for God. True, we cannot refute the existence of a God who, like the pearl in Popper's example is somewhere outside the box, say, in another galaxy. But God is supposed to be everywhere, including inside every box. So when we search for God inside a single box, no matter how small, we should either find him, thus confirming his existence, or not find him, thus refuting his existence [by failing to refute the null hypothesis].'

-- God: The Failed Hypothesis, Victor J Stenger, pp 26-27

"That stealing from members of your own community is immoral requires no divine revelation. It is revealed by a moment's reflection on the type of society that would exist if everyone stole from one another. If lying were considered a virtue instead of truth-telling, communication would become impossible. Mothers have loved their children since before mammals walked the earth -- for obvious evolutionary reasons. The only precepts unique to religion are those telling us not to question their dogma."

-- God: The Failed Hypothesis, Victor J Stenger, p 196.

"Some of his most praised contemporaries were, thus, "minor" writers because their fiction either was trivial entertainment (Barthelme and Vonnegut) or it succumbed to philosophical argument (Bellow). Though such fiction might be very good at what it did, its failure to engage real issues with lifelike characters ignores what only good art can address. Charged Gardner: "Teaching people to look at themselves...reminding them what they believe, takes pictures, takes painting, and the most powerful implement in the world for that is art.... When art begins to be only entertaining, only cynical, only ironic [as it has] ... you get in trouble...in civilization, right down to the roots."
...
In a spring 1978 interview for the Paris Review, he was once again at pains to distinguish between "moralistic" writing, which he said didactically espouses traditionally conservative positions, and fiction that is "moral". "I'm talking mainly," he said "...about works of fiction that are moral in their process....Good works of fiction study values by testing them in imagined / real situations, testing them hard, being absolutely fair to both sides. The real moral writer is the opposite of the minister....The writer's job is to be radically open to persuasion....not be committed to one side more than to the other -- which is to say that he wants to affirm life, not sneer at it. But he has to be absolutely fair.""

-- "John Gardner: Literary Outlaw", Barry Silesky, pp 255-256

No doubt...

From here:

"New Music: UNKLE [ft. Josh Homme]: "Chemical" [MP3/Stream]

"Chemical" originally appeared on UNKLE's 2007 album War Stories as an instrumental called "Chemistry". However, according to the London sci-fi electro-rock outfit's James Lavelle, Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme-- who sang on War's "Restless"-- had already come up with a vocal idea for this song but ran out of time to finish it.

Homme's calendar must have cleared up in time for UNKLE's forthcoming fourth proper album, End Titles... Stories for Film, because his croon now hovers over the original string-drenched track. "I'd let nature take control, but it's not possible," he intones. Always a bummer when there are chemicals between us."

Lately, I've been thinking that I should just give up and let my children go god - hoping they will eventually come around to the truth. The number of influences pointing them toward nonsense is immense and I am fighting an uphill battle. Their grandparents, mother, aunts, uncles, neighbors, neighbors' parents, and classmates all espouse nonsense and assume that my children share in the nonsense. I have learned that human children are (hard?) wired to believe anything someone tells them confidently. Critical thinking is an acquired skill. The only people staunching the flow of nonsense are my brother and I.

Ultimately, though, my attempts are abortive because what it comes down to is that my sons "just want to believe in God". Nothing I have to say (problem of evil, inefficacy of prayer, inherent circularity in the idea of a Creator god) confronts that. Just about the only chance I have is pointing out that god is a serious hard core son of bitch, so that they stop wanting to believe in him, but their mother frowns on that sort of "negative argument".

As time goes on I am becoming increasingly aware that aesthetic concerns are the ultimate factor shaping world-views. You believe what you are prepared to accept or what you find pleasing, not necessarily what is best or true, and religions have the ultimate lock-in plan on this one. They fold up and hedge the playing field by brainwashing children before they even have a chance to object.