Author: smeg

Hahahahaha

(click image for full size)

This is why people who are not intelligent, diligent, and experienced should not try to work on computer hardware.
It would save the smart bunch a lot of work; though it wouldn’t provide them with humor.

John Stuart Mill

I can’t believe it, but I’ve found myself defending John Stuart Mill’s placing liberty on a pedestal.

A person is trying to argue that we should have the freedom to kill ourselves or allow ourselves be put into slavery. The problem is that these actions remove our freedom, and anything that removes freedom would be unacceptable, under a viewpoint that liberty is the most important and the hindrance of it is not allowed.

A right to freedom means that the right should not be allowed to be removed, as it is a universal right always applicable. The irony is that freedom means responsibility to ensure freedom.

So no, a person’s freedom, even if it only affects their own self, does not authorize them to do whatever they want. It needs to be within respect for freedom as a whole.

Time

I need to reconnect with the rhythms of the universe and the rhythms of life.

We lose our intelligence, our consciousness, our awareness, when we do not realize and personally feel our connectedness and relation to the universe around us.

We are small beings, but through being part of a whole we are more than our individual capacities.

Pantheism mode: now disabled.

Mouse

I have a new mouse for my computer; minor thing, I know.

I’m just very pleased with its design. I find most new mice as overly large and hard to manage, especially considering my hands are not very large. My old one was a smaller one by Kensington, while this one is a larger one by Kensington with a much more distinct design.

Reading

I haven’t read anything recently; because of the heavy amount of reading I had to do in this last semester I put off personal reading. Now, though, I’m feeling like I’m missing something, so I think reading will be a good idea.

The problem is that almost all of my books are up in my college dorm room, which is inaccessible to me during winter break while school is out.

I think the only books I have with me are Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper, The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer, and The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. I’ll probably read the Leroux novel, as it’s more suitable for casual rest reading.

Update: Every time I see the word “reading” I think it’s the name of the British city of the same spelling but pronounced “redding”.

Tempted to buy a video player

Right now I’m considering purchasing either an iPod or a Zune. The iPod does, baseline, what I want, but I don’t like the idea of iTunes or in general Apple mitigating my device. I don’t like how picky it is about video format, not just the use of H.264(which encoding to seems more difficult than other formats), but that it has to be the exact resolution and bitrate or otherwise it won’t work; great for iTunes-purchased content but that’s about it. Also, it’s the same price as the Zune with the Zune having bells and whistles.

I have a number of problems with the Zune, though. The 3×3 feature of the Wi-Fi, in combination to the Wi-Fi not allowing video transfer and not doing anything other than Zune-to-Zune communication means it’s not a very useful feature. The use of the WMV video format, though not quite as good of quality, is more friendly to the kind of conversion I would need to do. Also, the DRM it puts on music kind of conflicts with what I may want to do, and unrightly applies it to items under the Creative Commons. With the Zune, the changes that would make me happy seem to be for a future release, but I don’t want to wait until the end of 2007 to get a player.

Very conflicted. Any ideas, such as alternatives to these that will do what I want, would be nice.

Snow

I “borrowed” the javascript file for the snow on the TeenSpot.com message boards.

But for some reason it only renders correctly in Internet Explorer.

Oh well.

Correction: even in IE(and Wii’s Opera client) it only renders off to the side of the main text section.

Wikipedia

Morons need to quit editing the wikipedia article on TeenSpot with forum vanity and insignificant content.

Things such as post count are not significant to be mentioned on Wikipedia unless it has caused some sort of significant occurrence, such as a site controversy if a policy change occurred or some sort of legal action.

A number is insignificant beyond the forum itself.

I will leave the dumbass doing this nameless as to preserve their pride.

I think the problem is that people do not understand Wikipedia’s concepts such as this one.

Political censorship

In lieu of recent events I feel the need to talk about censorship. Censorship is any intentionally act to inhibit speech that a person otherwise has a right to make. Speech that may be politically damaging is not something to be censored. It may be acceptable to censor in the sake of national security, but minimizing political backlash is not national security; a line is crossed when censorship is used not to protect national security, but to protect a political party in the name of national security.