Moving

Heading out to Washington Friday morning to live and go to school.

The school is called DigiPen, in Redmond (right next to Seattle), the apartment is in Bellevue (about half a mile from the school), and my roommate is a 6-year best-friend who came out here to Utah from Illinois.

His car's towing a big uHaul trailer, so we'll be out there by the 1st when we move in. Needless to say, once I get there I'll probably post a lot more to take my mind off other more pressing concerns such as lack of finances. >.>

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Back to the GPL

I've changed sides again and have returned to the GPL-licensing-side of the Free Software movement. Before now I wanted to just use BSD-style licenses or, a recent favorite, the MIT license. I still like these licenses and I'll probably use them for a lot of my future work, but ideally I now prefer the GPL as more free than the others. Its virology is intermusing: it shackles the user with freedom.

I went away from the GPL because I thought the others seemed more free, with public domain being the freest (as not even copyright remained). But I now see it really depends on your definition of freedom, and whether you think freedom comes from a great light in the sky as rights or needs to be protected (by means of government, law, or social pressures) as privileges. I believe in the general statement that all humans have the right to free speech, but that belief doesn't stop a dictator, and that "right" is not written anywhere in the universe to make it physically impossible to violate (as in faster than light travel so far as we know). No, it's a privilege, and a quick way to set up a protection of that privilege is through government. The majority pay with the currency of freedom, to get protected freedom.

"Group X will have the power to throw individual(s) Y in a place called prison for the rest of her life, violating her 'right' of not being forced to live in a prison, if she kills some other individual(s) Z, which violated his right to life. We the majority J have given Group X this power, which diminishes all our freedoms of no one having more power over someone than that someone, and we acknowledge that some of us may become in the future individual(s) Y."

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Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence

With apologies to Eliezer for using the title, and the one I love for attacking her premise (and double apologies if I remember it wrongly), I think the statement of the title bears repeating frequently. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

"The world's greatest fool may say the Sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out." --Robert Pirsig

There are a vast many real-world examples of reversed stupidity, but I'm only going to try focusing on one. There is an idea of anarchy that, while similar to mine in terms of basic social function, is completely different in terms of economy and technology. To get a broad picture, take an orderly anarchy and add environmentalism.

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HostGator Fail

My boss / the guy I work with (it's more partnership than subordinate, but he pays me) and I use HostGator for our server needs. They're pretty awesome, and affordable for what you get. SSH access, "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth, but perhaps second-most importantly to us is Remote MySQL.

I still suffer the pains of developing locally with a database. The database structure has to be synced with the live server, and sometimes it needs the same data. It's annoying if half-way through my "comment system" branch I think "Oh, this will be a cool feature down the road..." and end up having to modify or add some table both on my local machine and on the live server. Once you have Remote Databases enabled, though, everything is nice. (I guess I can make my computer the remote database enabled one, but my IP changes.)

Anyway, before I get too far off-topic about the niceness of remote databases, I want to mention a brief problem we had today.

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Violence as I see it

I hate violence. I don't approve of its use in any situation, even in "self-defense". I think the people who hold the philosophy that it's better to only use violence as a last resort, and only in defense, are better off than those people who think it's all right to initiate violence. They would argue they're better off than those who never use violence at all, but non-violence isn't without a case study.

That said, if I were going to do violence, I would cast aside all silly notions of honor, fairness, and mercy. I would use every underhanded technique I knew, kick a man when he's down, and upon receiving a plea for the opponent's life I would slaughter him.

Violence, and its great child War, are hideous things. I don't try to pretty them up, I don't try to honor any practitioners. I see bumper stickers reading something like "Against the war; for our troops" and spit in disgust. Who do you think carries out the acts of the war? It's the soldiers, who in my mind are very cowardly and despicable.

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The need for change

"Change the Social Contract? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA." -- Branden Robinson

No, not the Debian Social Contract, but the more familiar one--the one between Government and People.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to provide a place for me to set down in writing my ideas about my own Anarchy (with a capital A) and the various parts of the system which must be defined precisely if I'm to convince anyone of my idea. Also, I'm under no delusion that my ideas as they currently are will hold out for very long; it is a secondary hope that in my writing I will clarify things to myself as well as any readers, and eventually develop a fairly robust system. Of course I'm prepared to question my premises and should they prove incorrect, I'll just have to start over.

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