In today's issue:
Insomnia
Ghirardelli dark chocolate
Why appeals to greed won't work with Open Source software developers
So, post-LAN insomnia has completely tackled me this week. Until last night, I found it utterly impossible to sleep for longer than three hours at a time. Monday night, I didn't fall asleep until 6:00AM Tuesday morning, making my 7:00AM alarm a little more than unwelcome. To make a long story short, I ended up taking yesterday off work. I went back to bed for another three hours and then putzed around the house the rest of the day. I got a little more organizing done in preparation for the Big Move™, played some Generals and watched a couple of movies. Note to self - you still don't like football movies, Sam. Stop trying.
Thoroughly exhausted, I went to bed at 9:00PM last night (at least two hours earlier than I normally do) and promptly woke up at 3:00AM this morning (at least four hours earlier than I normally do). WTF is wrong with me? So here I sit, clacking away at my keyboard, listening to a bit o' Tool and playing some Civ2.
Not helping with my sleeping problem, I'm sure, has been the big bag of Ghirardelli dark chocolate squares I've been munching on since Monday. I love Jessi, but sometimes I wonder if she's trying to give me diabetes (<3). I've got four of them left, and I've just set them aside and vowed that I will save them for work later this morning. We'll see how that goes. My can of Cherry 7Up is gone, so I have nothing to wash them down with if I decide to eat them. Perhaps my overwhelming desire for a thirst-quenching beverage will save me from these four tiny squares of 60% cocoa death.
On advantage to being up so early is being able to catch all the hideous cable news programs that I missed last night because I was doing something better and less damaging to my brain (okay, not really an advantage).
After watching my DVR'd episodes of Scrubs and The Office, I navigated the cable box in the general direction of the three major cable news outlets (CNN, MSNBC and Fox News) - all of which happen to be located within ten or fifteen channels of one another. Not to be disappointed, I found my fix of deliciously biased and ignorant "reporting" on FNC in the form of Your World with Neil Cavuto. I don't know what ol' Neil was doing yesterday when they filmed this drivel, but the show was being guest-hosted by some vapid gasbag. I'm not going to say he was a bad journalist, just not what you might classically call "good."
So Vapid Gasbag is talking about the recent Supreme Court deliberation over file-sharing technologies. As usual, he has no grasp of the concept. His first guest is Mark Gorton, CEO of LimeWire and co-founder of the Lime Group. His primary assertion, as always, is that technology itself is never a crime and that the entertainment industry has been trying for decades to quash innovation in the interest of keeping their visegrip on content distribution. Okay, well-spoken Mark. He also stated that the technology behind LimeWire (Gnutella) is Open Source, so no matter how many companies the MPAA and RIAA have their goons in Washington shut down, they can never kill the technology ("goons" is my wording, not Mark's). In closing, he suggested that software like LimeWire is no more enabling people to steal than the Cisco routers that move traffic across the Internet. Steady on, Mark.
The look on Vapid Gasbag's face when the term "Open Source" hit the table was one of utter confusion. It was awesome.
Vapid Gasbag then discusses the issue with some ape of a lawyer lobbying for the "copyright industry" and Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA. Yay.
Ape Lawyer says something stupid. Valenti begins rattling off stock MPAA propaganda, along the way pointing out that if people don't respect copyrights, software developers like LimeWire could be in danger as well.
Eh? LimeWire is free, jackass. They don't charge, they don't make a dime off of it. Gnutella, the technology it runs on, is Open Source.
That's when it struck me. Industry hitmen like Valenti don't get it because they can't fathom the fact that someone would want to create something and then give it away. They don't understand Open Source, so they can't understand why the rest of us aren't as worked up about P2P as they are. Do I think people should be allowed to steal intellectual property (as protected under current U.S. law)? No. But that doesn't mean I think the technology (which *does* have legitmate, legal use, whether they want to admit it or not) should be illegal. The "ownership" of information is going away, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe not any time soon, and certianly not as long as men like Jack Valenti have anything to say about it. But it's going away.
-A tired and frustrated Sam, 6:44AM
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