innocent bystander //a weblog

Detail of original by glockgal.  Click on image to see her work!


Wednesday, May 09, 2001

5:27 PM: 

what if i had to make a speech for my high school's graduation? i just read that someone has to do that, and he's only 30. he isn't super successful, or super accomplished. what to say? what to tell the kids?

i don't like the way graduation speeches are. i didn't like the high school ones and i didn't like the college ones, especially when i revisited them as the older relative of the graduate. the stuff they say isn't true. education and hard work will make you neither successful nor happy. even philosophical revelations will not make you happy.

what would i tell them that life is about, then? maybe i could start by squashing the happiness myth. nothing will make you happy. nothing will make your life good. you simply have to become happy. your life simply has to be good. people have the cause and effect sequence wrong. they think those things are effects when they are really causes. okay, so that down. now what?

i think i would tell them that working will suck. i'll tell them i haven't really liked any of my jobs longer than eight months. i'll tell them that they'll realize their careers can't make them happy. that it may be hard for them to find a good significant other. that, over their lives they'll have to reevaluate their relationships with their family, friends, acquaintances, gods. that it will be hard and it will be a fight, but it will be a good fight. but that there will be no rest. i don't know.





Monday, May 07, 2001

10:33 AM: 

ClickZ : Net or .Net, That Is the Question
Microsoft has made its stand clear. Everything is an economic transaction.

You can't give and receive any information product -- not music, not images, not words, and certainly not software -- without an underlying contract covering what that person may and may not do with it.

Without a signed, attached license agreement, every information transaction is either outright theft or part of a conspiracy to commit theft. Anyone who disagrees is either criminally mistaken or a criminal.

Holy Digital Divide! Forget about whether the poor can access information over the Internet. Everything you've heard, seen, and read comes with economic strings attached. The bridge to the 21st century turns out to have been a toll bridge.

Microsoft's campaign against free software systems (like Linux, Apache, or anything subject to General Public License) is quickly turning into the first great First Amendment controversy of the 21st century.

Isn't it wierd to think that Microsoft is basically subverting millenia of the consumption of literature, music, art, and ideas by humans? Can you imagine that all the bards who ever recited Beowulf would be criminals according to this. In the past, control over information was the specialty of governments and churches. Now Microsoft has decided that it's its specialty, too.

From the article:

Freedom of speech depends on freedom to read, hear, and watch -- free from criminal suspicion.



 

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