Kucinich and Colbert

Dennis Kucinich appears on the Colbert Report (if this doesn't work, try this)

Gonzales Resigns!

In the seemingly never-ending march toward the total resignation of the entire administration, Alberto Gonzales has resigned from his post as Attorney General. In my opinion, Mr. Gonzales had, like Rumsfeld before him, been a buffer between the public and the vice-president, a sort of whipping boy, who took the blame for what were clearly the vice-president or president's bad decisions.

To me this seems like paving the way for Bush's own resignation. Think about it: the replacements have never been the old cronies who would risk all for their President. They are politicians themselves, and won't go down willingly for Bush.

It's certainly a start.

A Departure

This may be a bit of a departure from my normal writing, but I think this song really does capture some of my philosophy.

For those of you who are wondering, yes, this song is from a Disney movie, Pocahontas, and it took me a few times hearing it to really take it for what it is, to appreciate what the lyrics are saying. So sit back, relax, put your prejudice behind you, and just listen to the words of wisdom.

Hope you enjoyed that!

I am often told, when arguing about religious beliefs, that without religion one cannot have moral justice. One cannot call Hitler immoral if one has no "objective" standards of morality. But Hitler, along with Pope Urban II, who authorized the crusades, and Osama bin Ladin, who was responsible for the deaths of 2,947 on September 11th, 2001, believed that he was doing the right thing, and the moral thing, and the thing which would lead him to paradise. In fact, all three of these men believed this because of a religious book which claimed objective moral teaching. There is nothing particularly malicious in the bible itself, of course, but rather in the fact that moral beliefs are dictated or taught, rather than carefully meditated on and chosen. I hope the following will be a decent response to both problems, that of defining morality within the confines of atheism, and that of creating a code of morality which may be truly objective because of its room for subjectivity.
There can be no gods. The existence of a god dilutes the perfect purity of the ideal religion, which is no religion at all but rather a pure moral code. If we choose to do something because of what our god's interpreter (a religious leader) has told us, we must accept the possibility that this interpreter has mistook or lied about the most moral course. The basic element of morality is suffering and happiness. The solution to any moral dilemma is then, in theory at least, to think what the effects of each choice will be for those involved: which will cause the most happiness and the least suffering. Each human being must independently decide for him or herself what to weigh in the balance. For example, do humans count as much as other animals? Is a fly, with no nerves or brain to speak of, as important as a mammal which can feel real pain? Is a child or some other helpless person more important, on the grounds that, left to their own devices, they would not do the right thing for themselves? What about a human fetus? Or someone who is guilty of a heinous crime? There is no universal truth in any of this. Every human being must decide the answers for him or herself.
To me the answer to each of these questions is clear, and I use those answers in my everyday life to determine my opinion on the moral problems facing us today. For example, abortion, on which I hold the typical left-wing view. I challenge anyone who claims to be pro-life to answer this question: is the life of a living being with less brain cells than a fly, whose life as an unwanted child will almost certainly be painful, more important then the lifestyle of a young woman who has inadvertently become pregnant.
Through these decisions one can form a system of morality independent of dogma.

NovellHatSoft-CanoniSpire

In an amazing turn of events, CanoniSpire has merged with Novell, Red Hat, and Microsoft to form NovellHatSoft-CanoniSpire. The new conglomerate will produce Winux, a proprietary, Linux-based, Windows lookalike, which will come without the security flaws common to Windows.

NovellHatSoft-CanoniSpire has been lobbying congress to pass a "software rights management act" which will assign copyright for the Linux kernel and GNU utils to a new "GPLv0," which will be a non-viral, BSD-type license, written by the newly employed RMS, who accepted a job offer from the company this morning.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said "Finally, we have a Free Software solution which can challenge desktop Windows. Well, at least we have a Free Software-based solution which can challenge SnApple's new SolariMac Desktop," referring to the merger of Sun Microsystems and Apple Computer.

Steve Ballmer, who just hours ago had joined the Linux Foundation and was claiming to have accepted surrender, said he was "glad that the merger is under way," and hopes "to see it carried out to its logical conclusion by a Winux Vista release this summer."

Linus Torvalds was unavailable for comment.

If GPL were software (and source code were multimedia)...

... The FSF would be against GPLv3.

Imagine: some software/music, say GCC, is released/distributed under GPLv2. People can do whatever they want with it: redistribute it, reuse it in their own source code/music, or whatever. Then GPLv3 comes out. Suddenly the software/music won't work on/play in your hardware/software.

How is this different from DRM?

The FSF has gone so far to fight against DRM that it has created some of its own. In my opinion, this is the same mistake Lenin made: a far right totalitarian regime was replaced by a far left totalitarian regime.

Viral licenses are incredibly dangerous because they put someone like the FSF in charge of something they didn't write: imagine Linux without the GNU utilities. So RMS, who wrote some section of the code, controls the whole.

I really hope this isn't true, so if someone disagrees please comment extensively.

Idiosyncrasy

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