Tweeting

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RIP Eduard Khil

For those who aren't familiar with his work, Eduard Khil was a Russian singer. Khil became known to a western audience in 2010 when a 1976 recording of him singing a non-lexical vocable version of the song "I Am Glad, 'Cause I'm Finally Returning Back Home" became an Internet meme, known as "Trololo".  The video is embedded below. I hope it brings a smile to your face, as it did mine. Mr. Khil passed away June 4, 2012.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

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Catholic Intellectual Property Rights

With the recent flap about the Feds seizing domains I've been thinking about intellectual property rights (IPR). As one acquaintance put it "when the Feds make a law that turns 90% of the world into criminals there is something wrong with the law." Now, I doubt that 90% of the population shares files illegally, but I do agree the law in this matter is ridiculous.

I discussed this before, in the post "Your Digital Rights". While there is a legitimate case for a content producer to be paid for his labor, I believe goods (including intellectual goods) should be priced in a way that respects the consumer, not gouges him. How many people would bother to illegally copy a movie if you could buy it for a dollar, and retain the right to watch it? Or perhaps rent it for $0.50? IP law is stifling innovation and economy rather than promoting it.

So I started to consider what the Church might have to say. I don't really have time to give this all the research it deserves, but I didn't want to let the topic go by. In "Ethics in Internet" the Pontifical Council for Social Communications writes:

It is imperative “that the gap between the beneficiaries of the new means of information and expression and those who do not have access to them...not become another intractable source of inequity and discrimination”. Ways need to be found to make the Internet accessible to less advantaged groups, either directly or at least by linking it with lower-cost traditional media. Cyberspace ought to be a resource of comprehensive information and services available without charge to all, and in a wide range of languages. Public institutions have a particular responsibility to establish and maintain sites of this kind.

As the new global economy takes shape, the Church is concerned “that the winner in this process will be humanity as a whole” and not just “a wealthy elite that controls science, technology and the planet's resources”; this is to say that the Church desires “a globalization which will be at the service of the whole person and of all people”.

At the 48th series of meetings of WIPO the Vatican issued the following declaration (apologies for the poor automated translation):

The ration d'être  of the system of intellectual property protection is the promotion of literary, scientific or artistic work and, in general, the creative for the "common good". Therefore, the protection provides a statutory right of the author or inventor's recognition of ownership of his work and to a certain degree of economic return. At the same time, it serves the material and cultural progress of society as a whole. According to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "Everyone has the right to protection of moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author." Ultimately, the protection of intellectual property recognizes the dignity of man and his work, which becomes an expression of the growth of individual personality and the common good and contributes to it.

Pope Benedict XVI writes, in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate:

On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care.

Some may say that with all the problems of the economy we shouldn't make IPR a central issue. Yet it can be argued that at least some of our economic woes (if not many) are due to inequities arising from the application of improper or unjust intellectual property rights.

For more information check out Elèutheros, a Catholic Approach to Computer Science. Their manifesto declares:

On the basis of official Church documents like Encyclicals [Free Software's surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine] and CEI directorates [Software Libero, Comunicazione e Missione], we are convinced that there are strong ideal affinities between Christianity, the philosophy of Free Software [The Free Software Definition] and the adoption of Open Formats and Protocols [The Frequently Asked Questions of the Eleutheros Project]. We believe it is evident that the usage of such instruments is much more in line with Catholic Doctrine than fully closed, non Free solutions.

Elèutheros is an association of Catholics whose mission is to serve the Catholic Church through promotion and development of an always increasing harmony between the doctrinal principles mentioned above and the concrete choices made in the Information Technology field at all levels in the ecclesiastical world: from Parishes to Dioceses, from School to Congregations, up to Bishop Conferences and the Vatican itself.

Pretty cool!

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Who won? I dunno

Today is election day in the US. The polls predict a huge swing against the democratic party, for reasons the democrats don't seem to understand. I can tell them what it is, at least according to everyone I know. They have taken their majority as a mandate to push a social agenda, rather than what it was, a dissatisfaction with the previous administration. The mandatory insurance law they call health care "reform" was wildly unpopular, yet it was pushed through despite the will of the people. Likewise for appointments to offices, such as supreme court justices and federal judges. Likewise for economic policies which, rather than checking the spending of the previous administration, greatly expanded spending and taxation. My hope is that whoever gets elected today doesn't take their election as a mandate to follow their own agenda, but to bring America back to economic sanity, and to restore individual freedoms that have been trampled on in the last 10 (or 50) years.

But I digress. There is a bigger problem with this year's vote. I don't have confidence we'll know who won. Yet another victory for inappropriate technology!

Remember hanging chad? Imagine that times a million. Because this year 33 states will allow "Internet voting". What the perceived need for this is I can't imagine. But I do know it's a bad idea. From "Is it Secret? Is it Safe?":

...Washington, D.C., conducted a pilot project to test its new electronic voting system for the collection of overseas and military absentee ballots. The system was opened to the public to test how secure and usable it was.

Within 36 hours, a team of University of Michigan computer students and teachers had taken it over. They changed votes, "elected" a Star wars robot chairman of the City Council, and installed the school’s fight song, “Hail to the Victors,” which would play 15 seconds after someone voted.

“Without the hacking of the District of Columbia system we would never have known how vulnerable Internet voting systems are,” said John Bonifaz, legal director of Voter Action. 

“It showed that it wasn’t just a domestic problem of vote security but a matter of national security,” he said, referring to a second problem the U. of Michigan hackers discovered as they took over the system.

According to J. Alex Halderman, the professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the hacking effort, they weren’t alone inside the system. They tracked two other computers trying to hack in -- one that originated in China and another in Iran.

“Internet voting is a crazily insecure and unreliable system that most rational computer scientists think is an absurd way to vote,” Boniface [sic] said. [emphasis mine]

I have to disagree with the statement "...we would never have known how vulnerable Internet voting systems are" however. A quick search of just one site yielded dozens of articles, like this one from 2006 "How to Steal and Election by Hacking the Vote". Of course, this article deals with hacking a voting machine at a polling place, but think for a minute. If we can't guarantee the integrity of a vote on a machine that is in a physically secure location, with monitored access and physical human verification of each voter who enters the voting booth, what chance do we have with a machine that is open to the Internet, with no human able to monitor who is doing what to it?

The general public is led to believe that their Internet transactions are secure for purchasing and for banking (they are not), so why not voting? Voting is a much more difficult problem, because not only  must the transaction be secure, it must be secret and tamper proof. If somebody purchases a TV with my credit card online it is detectable and correctable, and in the worst case, I dispute the bill at the end of the month and the credit card company "eats" the cost (e.g. takes it our of profits and adjusts rates accordingly). Similarly for my bank. This is not possible with my vote, however, because (in theory) nobody know which vote is mine, or who it was for. Nobody is going to call me and say "we got a suspicious looking vote from you for the communist party - can you verify it please?"

As the aforementioned article says "I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are". I will predict in advance that controversy will ensue from anomalies in this election, and further predict that they will ultimately be ignored.

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Think think think

...and the first person he though of was...

Winnie the Pooh?

No, General McCrystal. Does anyone but me think that this is all too convenient (for someone). I'm not sure if he ruffled Obama to get reassigned or if Obama decided to become ruffled to pick a new general, or both, but it's fishy.

In other news, a South African doctor invents a condom with "teeth". Finally a condom whose use is not immoral. I wonder how effective it would be, though, since rape is generally about violence more than sex. I would think a rapist caught in that trap would murder the rape victim. I am also dubious about the claim that it requires a doctor to remove it. I can't imagine that it could not be cut off.

In a stunning example of government gone wrong California license plates may go digital. What's the benefit? advertising dollars for the state. What's the down side? Cost, for drivers, for the initial plates, and for replacing them when they break in fender benders, get caught on curbs, get hit with items being put in the trunk, etc. Oh, and let's not forget the cost of batteries, and the extra toxins that will go into landfills. Not to mention whether or not it is even constitutional for a government to require citizens to advertise for third parties. What happens when an atheist's license plate displays an ad for a mega church? I can see the lawyers getting rich already.

speaking of government gone wrong and constitutions, the senate committee has approved the "Internet kill switch" bill. Words fail me. Some points of interest in the bill:

These emergency measures will expire after 30 days unless the President orders an
extension.

Oh, well, that makes it all right - as long as the president has to issue an order every 30 days he can control the Internet all he wants. Also

The Act will provide liability protections to owners/operators that comply
with the new risk-based security requirements.

So now the government is the insurer of private businesses as well.  I encourage you to read the bill. There's much more insanity than I can convey here. The amazing thing is that nobody's running down the streets with pitchforks about this.

No blog post is complete without some "nucular" stuff. I came across this article about a Brooklyn man who built a homemade fusion reactor. I read about fusors before. Remember Philo T. Farnsworth? The boy who invented TV in the 1920s? Even less well known is that he invented a fusion reactor in the 1960s.

For those not familiar with fusion, it all starts with Einstein's famous E = MC². That is, energy and mass are equivalent. It turns out if you break apart an atom into protons, neutrons, and electrons, and put them together again in a different configuration, you can turn one element into another, and the new configuration has a slightly different mass than the old one. The difference in mass becomes energy. Iron and its neighboring elements have the lowest mass configuration, so you can get energy either by breaking up a heavier element into something smaller (which is called fission) or squishing two or more lighter elements into a heavier one (which is called fusion).

"Normal" nuclear reactors are fission reactors, and break uranium and its neighbors into lighter elements. The fusor takes deuterium, which is a kind of hydrogen and turns it into the next heavier element, helium. What's cool about the fusor is that it can be built with "common" items, since it doesn't need any restricted or exotic materials to make it work. Don't start looking for a fusion powered car just yet, though. The fusor is a laboratory experiment, and it takes more energy to make it run than is produced by the fusion inside it. If I had infinite time and money a fusor is one of the first things I'd play with, though.

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What does Mike read?

Due to the wild acclaim of my previous post listing various things found on the interwebs I thought I'd have another go at it. This week I found:

• A complete list of things attributed to global warming.

• How to Feed the World. A bit simplistic, but it makes you think about why people go hungry.

How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

• An article on Abortion and Substance Abuse. This is an aspect of abortion that I hadn't considered before.

• A post about how homosexual rights lobbyists were hoist with their own petard.

• Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) disappoints by ridiculing people who believe in demons. What does he know about the subject? There's a long blog post in there, but I don't have the time to write it now.

• I found a good site for movie reviews. By "good" I mean that I generally agree with the reviews I read of movies I have watched, and find the reviewers to be well informed and knowledgeable about the movies they are reviewing.

• An interesting post about atheists who are called upon to investigate miracles.

• ...and last but not least, a grandmother in the UK who owns a pet shop was fined 1000 pounds and forced to wear an electronic tag for selling a goldfish to a fourteen year old boy.

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Round about the Internet

So what to blog about? Well, the health care bill, for one. But so many people are writing such excellent posts about it I have little to add that you can't read more eloquently elsewhere. Plus I have had lots to do this year, and have had little time for composing posts that require a lot of research. So I was thinking...

I follow blogs. Lots of blogs. I don't get to keep up with them all the time, but when I do I often get ideas for posts of my own that I don't have time to write. So I thought I would occasionally post something with just links or a short blurb about articles on the internet that I found interesting. I hope you will find them interesting too. But what about a clever name?

When I was in high school I had a friend who had a shortwave radio. We used to sit up nights and listen to stations from around the world. The two shows we listened to a lot were "The Father Bill Ayers Show" on HCJB (Heralding Christ Jesus' Blessings) in Quito Ecuador, and "Round About the Soviet Union" on Radio Kiev. "Round About..." had a variety of short segments on various topics, usually about similarities between the US and USSR, or the wonderful improvements tat Communism had brought to the Soviet states. So I decided to crib the name, in case you were wondering. Anyway, without further ado, some actual content.

This week I was reading a blog post of Jill Stanek's on using google labs to show the world depopulation crisis. It has some interesting visualizations of the depopulation of the world due to decreased birth rates and ineffectiveness of contraception use in preventing HIV. Sadly, I know many people who will look at all sorts of graphs, scientific papers and peer reviewed research and say "yes, but the world is overpopulated" or "yes, but we need to distribute condoms to fight HIV", and then call me ignorant for not seeing the obvious "facts" that these things are "true".

In a surprise ruling, Catholic Care won a suit against a law in the UK which would have forced them to either give up their faith or their adoption agency. I say surprising, because I would have thought such a ruling less likely in the UK than the US and I can't see it happening in the US. So a big "good for you" to our cousins in the UK!

The "Our Sunday Visitor" blog has a piece about someone in St. Peter's Square calling for the Pope to excommunicate Pelosi and Biden for supporting abortion. While inappropriate, I would like to see some definitive guidance on how the Church should approach these matters. At least from my view our stance seems to be uncoordinated and rules are not being applied consistently. I realize that this is under the authority of different bishops, who have different opinions on these matters, but I like consistency.

The Archidiocese of Washington has a piece on what Jesus might have looked like. For those who don't have time to read it, the answer is the image at right (although the article is filled with caveats about speculation, especially as it pertains to the Shroud of Turin). It also features a cool YouTube video "The many faces and titles of Christ".

From "The Economist" a frightening story on "Gendercide":

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

So many pro-aborts (like Hillary Clinton) insist on a woman's "right" to an abortion, yet condemn women who have abortions for gender selection. If you believe the woman had that right, what a hypocrite to then condemn her for making it!

"Vocal Minority" has this interesting graphic on "Democracy Denied" showing how the Obama administration is getting around the legislative branch of our government. Of course, the Judicial branch has been doing this for years as well.

The Department of Homeland Security has an article, and no, this is not a spoof site, but the real thing, on "Could Airborne, Parachuting Bears Catch Bin Laden?" From the article:

“Overnight, Parachute some bears into areas [bin Laden] might be,” the innovator wrote. “Attempt to train bears to take off parachutes after landing, or use parachutes that self-destruct after landing.”

And that's all I have for now. If people like this I'll try to make it a regular thing. Please let me know what you think.

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