OwlManAtt’s Blog

Hey kids, just want to make note of the fact that it’s November 30th. End of the month, so everything has been swept into the archive. Woo, Rana-Hana-Kwans-Mas season is here!

I’d just like to point out that I have made various updates to OwlManAtt.com in the past few days. I have removed the link to the RSS feed (although the feed itself still exists, and if anyone wants to use it, they can feel free to ask for a link) and added two new sections: contact and about.

The contact section is a listing of my various contact addresses/names/etc. Please do not abuse them. (I’ve also finally changed my AIM privacy settings, allowing the majority of the world to contact me once again.)

The about section has a breif autobiography. Enjoy.

Announcing the newst addition to the family of useless crap: Fiona, the pentium 2 233mhz w/ 32mb of ram and a 4 gig scsi drive!

It took me two days to get Debian installed on her. I threw everything I had at it, realized the IDE controler was on the fritz, put its scsi card back in, and booted off of my older d-i disc. The old new debian installer took up a tad too much memory, but as Jaldhar Vyas of the Debian project promised, the installer wouldn’t need nearly as much memory when it was done.

I burned a disc with a newer version, and I was golden.

Now, I’m thinking of buying a few more scsi drives and switching this baby to my fileserver. Not sure yet. I *can* buy another monitor, and a 20-ft. cat5 cable or so and set it up as a chat box at my bedside, too. Hm.

Well, back to doing nothing. I’ve got gamenight to attend in a bit.

I’ve just found out some terrible news that I thought would be good to record. GP2 was retired on October 21st, 2004.

Despite everything, this saddens me. Three years of fun for countless people, three years of office politics, three years of work. But as KH said, all good things must come to an end.

To the greater men than I; you have my repect. Thank you, and may she rest in peace.

And so ends another subplot in the tome of Att, with the release of their custom mod’s source code under the GPL. Speed0Light, if you’re out there anywhere, mission accomplished. Thanks to you, too.

Greetings once again, readers. I welcome you to yet another addition of OwlManAtt-screams-like-a-five-year-old-about-some-issue-no-one-gives-shit-about. But before I begin, I’d like to take a moment and make an announcement.

Eron is dead. I used up all of this year’s creativity, and then I got an advance on the next 20 year’s creativity. I spent nearly 60 hours working on that stupid book, and I’m not all that pleased with it. Yes, this is going on the shelf, right with CoE1. (Who knows, now that I said that, I may finish during thanksgiving break.)

That said, I may now begin to whine about the feds.

The feds? Oh boy, I can already see you rolling you eyes. More of my inane paranoia? No, no! Not this time, at least. See?

Read that through, not just the first few lines. The first half only deals with fast-forwarding through advertisements, the second part is where I take offense.

Don’t want to read? I’ll sum it up with this one handy little question, then. Not only does this tell you exactly what my beef with H.R. 2391, but it keeps this article moving right along.

What fuckhead can even dream up such a stupid idea as making peer-to-peer illegal?

Hey, asshole, I’ve got another great idea for you. Why don’t you make taking a shit illegal, too? How about outlawing breathing while you’re at it?

Honestly, I never thought such a stupid idea could even be concocted by a human being, nevermind a government official. As if our IP law isn’t broken enough as it is now…

Why was this even in the bill? Hm, I dunno. I’ll guess that the RIAA bought themselves a few of the corrupt, greedy old bastards in the senate. Why else would anyone put their balls on the chopping block over something as stupid?

First of all, PEER-TO-PEER DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN I’M SENDING AROUND COPYRIGHTED WORKS WITHOUT PERMISSION. You see, in this country, we also have something called ‘INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY BY A PANEL OF YOUR PEERS, HOWEVER STUPID THEY MAY BE’.

P2P networks (Kazaa, Grokster, BitTorrent) have /countless/ legitimate uses. Linux .iso files (600-700 meg files you burn to a CD so you can install linux) are commonly traded on p2p networks. This reduces the load on the distributor’s servers. If the users supply the othe users with the .iso, then the guy who maintains it won’t have to pay half as much for the bandwidth that would be required for people to download it from his server.

There are millions of legitimate files being traded (well within their licenses) on p2p networks. Amature movies, garage-band mp3s, ebooks written by bums like me–all being shared, since people like me don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being published/produced.

P2P is like a gun. P2P itself is not bad. It is up to the user to decide on how they use it; for good or for evil.

Think of it like this: It’s the year 2004, and knives have just been invented. Knives make killing easier! How could anyone come up with such a gruesome thing! The government rushes to ban these little spawns of satan, but the American people have already embraced the blade as a popular dinning tool.

What do we do, what do we do? Billions are using these knives to make their lives simpler, no longer having to tear tough meat up with their hands. But a percent of those billions are also stabbing eachother to death.

Should we ban knives? No. Should we ban guns? No. Should we ban P2P? Hell no.

Honestly, people, I see Titor’s war coming closer ever day. Stand up for yourselves. Defend your rights.

Good night.