The Proletariat Congress

In a foolish, unguided move today, the Swedish court hearing the trial, at which the Pirate Bay was the star, it declare its founders to be guilty and sentenced them to one year in jail. All because the court held that the founders aided users in engaging in copyright infringement.

If that is the reasoning for this, then shut down the whole goddamn internet! Every link will invariably link to some kind of copyrighted material. I know I likely am linking to something that is copyright. I too am guilty. After all, I am linking to the Pirate Bay from the image above. After all, it’s just a link until you decide to actually take the material. A link is simply a link until you do something with the material.

Advertising is a kind of linking. It is just telling you what is there and where to find it. A link is just that. What the person does is their responsibility.

I believe in the internet and I will not give up just because some court somewhere has decided it wants to give into the whims of corporate bullies who apply collective, punitive punishment to their paying customer base in the form of DRM.

If the music and films being produced are such garbage that people won’t pay to see them, then perhaps the industry should take note and stop pumping out utter garbage en masse and start giving us quality again if they want to see people pay for the goods. I know I won’t pay for garbage. I would have no qualms with downloading it, but I would never pay for low quality garbage.

If prices weren’t so high and quality was a sure thing, filing sharing would go down. Too bad the industry is run by a bunch of moronic twats who have their collective head shove twenty thousand leagues up its ass to see this.

Once again, the NDP are the champion of the average Canadian.

Cell phone carriers Telus and Bell are going to be, next month charging their users for every incoming text message, spam or not. Each of these messages will cost 15-cents. The problem with this is that the person receiving has no control over the messages that he or she will receive and the person sending it likely already has a plan to cover it or they don’t mind stomaching the cost of sending a single message.

By this logic, spammers will already be paying for a plan and it would likely cover the process of sending an unlimited number of messages. The receiver doesn’t want spam. We hate it in our mail, we hate it in our blogs, we hate it in our email. We hate it period. So why should we have to pay for this? I’ll tell you why; some poor CEO is only able to afford one luxury vacation this year instead of two.

Fortunately for Canadians, despite our very closed market, we do have two options, Rogers (the least of the three evils) and my preferred carrier Virgin (who I am currently with an enjoying an incredible cell phone plan because they don’t feel the need to gauge me at every turn).

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that we as Canadians are being just plain fucked over because the Conservatives don’t want to open up the market to foreign competition, which would drastically reduce our dependence on these large oligopolies.

Even if we don’t open our market, we as consumers deserve protection from unscrupulous corporations out to make an easy buck.

Even if you don’t fundamentally agree with the NDP on most issues, I believe this is one time when you will want to. Do yourself a favour and visit the link at the top of this entry. Click on the nice picture. You know you want to.

It is bound to happen to most of us sooner or late. It will happen to you. You may not know it now, but it will happen and when it does, it will irritate you to no end. Am I talking of death or tax? No, this is the other thing in life that can be considered inevitable: Windows XP turning on its user!

It happen to me! And why did this horrible thing happen to me? What could I have been possibly doing at the time to deserve having this happen to me? Was I looking at a website I shouldn’t be looking at or was I doing something else equally as naughty? What could I have possibly done to incur the wrath of Microsoft, who feels it necessary to treat legitimate users like common thieves?

What did I do to deserve this? I was only trying to plug my MP3 player into a USB port on the back of my computer and I unplugged my USB mouse. Now, when I plugged my mouse back in, I found it wasn’t working and I tried to reset the wireless receiver for my mouse as well as the mouse. Upon failing to do so, I got a pop-up window telling me that it was an unrecognisable USB device, so I rebooted.

Upon rebooting back into Windows, I encountered a window telling me that “significant changes” were made to my hardware so I had to reactivate Windows. I had known about this kind of thing (see: Namaste, Microsoft)but until tonight, it had never happened to be before. Alas…

Mind you, I haven’t had this install of Windows up for long. I recently got a better desktop (Athlon Dual-core 4200+) than the one I had before, which was an Athlon AMD 3200+ , and I had to upgrade from my old, loyal faithful 60gig IDE drive since my newer machine had no way for my IDE drive to work. So, on my first SATA drive, I installed my copy of Windows XP Pro (Vista is too buggy for my liking and takes way too much file control away from me) and I had no problems with my legitimate product key. This was back in December of 2007.

Now when Windows Activation pops up, after your first boot, it kindly informs you that you have 3 days to register your product. It registered successfully. Fast forward to today where my itsy-bitsey little itty-witty action of unplugging my wireless USB mouse triggers a ’significant change’. So, now I can’t even use my legitimate key.

I wasn’t even touching any part of the MoBo. It was something as meaningless as a mouse. Mice break all the time. Why should Windows think that this is a ’significant change’? Do they want to inconvenience their clients; their business clients whose last concern is that replacing a mouse would amount to a loss of productivity because they have to reactivate Windows in order to continue business? Or do they reserve this “privilege” for home users who are likely to only buy a Windows (genuine) product once every few years?

Microsoft is nothing else knows how to make the Windows experience nothing short of aggravating. Thanks to this, I, or rather my husband, (since I’m at work tomorrow), has to call Microsoft’s ’support’ desk to resolve this. Too bad I’m going to miss the fireworks.

A couple of months ago, I made an offer to the author of the demodulated blog. I made an offer for the author to make a guest appearance in my blog. They agreed to do so and will be making an entry at a later date. At the same time, the author asked if I would do an article for his blog. At the time, when I agreed to, I said I would make a link here so that any of my readers wanting to see the article could head on over to read it.

The Art of Rampaging is the article I wrote for the blog. Unlike the majority of my posts here, this one is about Oblivion, a first person fantasy game that I’ve played for a long while, on and off. It’s not necessarily a game review so much as just a commentary about a certain aspect of the game itself.

Head on over to the demodulated blog to read it if you’re interested.