Supreme Court Rules, Human Genes are NOT Property, Therefore Cannot Be Patented

In a landmark decision Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that patents belonging to Myriad Genetics on genes linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer, must be overturned. At stake was the idea that a company could isolate a human gene and patent it, a practice allowed for more than 30 years by the US Patent Office. But in a stunning decision by our highest court, the court ruled that simply isolating a gene does not diverge enough from what is natural law. The high court sent the case back to the lower courts to have them argue it out further.

Myriad like many companies who do this kind of work like to make the argument that patents are rewards for the research, and money that goes into this kind of work. The problem with this argument is that all the research in the world can go into deciphering the origins of universal mathematics, that doesn't mean that if you discover why Pi is so prevalent in the universe you get to claim ownership on it.


Human genes are units of hereditary code contained on the Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule. Nothing about that statement should suggest to you in any way that any person or entity could own it. In fact, the existence of DNA predates the existence of human life on this planet, therefore making it impossible for a company to claim such ownership. Claiming ownership on something completely based on the idea that you have isolated it, is a ridiculous argument. If I cut into a cherry pie, and isolate one single cherry from the pie, this doesn't give me the right to ownership, and neither does it give the ownership rights of any company to something contained in DNA. If we allow companies to claim ownership to DNA, then what is stopping them from owning the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the dirt we walk upon. Next, companies will claim they own a particular star in the sky and require a license each time someone looks at it.

Arguing that time and money were spent on isolating a gene, grants them the right to a patent is also a ridiculous argument, but one that at face value seems valid. After all, many of us who work hard expect to be paid for the work we do, why shouldn't these companies also be paid? Everyone likes to be paid, however, when work is predatory in nature, payment shouldn't be granted for this work. What I mean by this is, that these drug and research companies fund these projects not to help people, in fact, based entirely on the record most of these companies have in regards to this practice, the solid motivation for this work is profiteering. Drug companies invest a lot of time and money into making a product that most of the public will never use, because they cannot afford to. Let's say a drug company invests a few million dollars into developing a drug that solves the problem of Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). More than 60 million Americans alone are affected by this disease, making it a very profitable industry. So the drug company has invested a few million dollars into this product, and they release it to market at the staggering cost of $300 a bottle, that's $300 for 30 pills or $10 a pill. Now let's say only 20% of Americans can afford this, either by purchasing the product outright or having insurance subsidize it. That means the company will have made over 3 billion dollars in profits. Now of course, predatory companies like our drug industry know that there is no money in curing a disease, after all, a healthy person is someone who doesn't need to take drugs. So these companies do not develop drugs with the intention of actually curing anything, but rather treating it. This gives them a stream of revenue that will last them the rest of  your life. The fact is, that even with insurance, the premium cost to a consumer on a $300 bottle of pills can be $60, which many Americans cannot afford. However, because most people would rather choose taking a pill to suppress acid production in their stomach, than purchase the foods that might cause this production of acid, most people would choose being hungry over being sick. So many Americans starve to pay for the medicine they need to survive. And I'm only talking about GERD here, many other people suffer from diseases that are much worse, with costs that are much higher to treat. The individuals running these companies have forgotten the old adage that, “good deeds are their own reward.”

In closing, there is no reason to allow these drug companies to patent human genes, they are already allowed to patent the drugs that treat the diseases that come from these abnormal genes, therefore it is redundant to allow this practice. Patenting nature sets a very bad precedence. In the span of human existence we have over time evolved many times, and it is a certainty we will evolve much more. If allowed, companies will be there, trying to stake ownership on the claim of human evolution, a brilliant discovery made by Charles Darwin, and documented in his 1859 masterpiece, “The Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” However, these companies should try and learn something from Charles Darwin. Darwin's life's work was not an investment of time made with the intention of gaining riches or fame, but rather with the intention of progress and human understanding. He spent his life working on evolution because an understanding of our origin was more beneficial to humankind, than personal wealth. All of us owe a great debt of gratitude to Charles Darwin, a pioneer in human progress, without whom maybe the work these companies do, might not otherwise be possible.



If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. - Charles Darwin

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The Last Offensive Volley of A Dying Empire

Last week, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that all of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the US had voluntarily agreed to a deal that would allow copyright holders more control over the ISP's customers. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable, have all agreed to a “graduated response” to customers that are accused of downloading copyrighted works. Under this new system, copyright holders can inform the ISP that a particular IP address was used to download something and the ISP will take action from there.


First Response:

The ISP will begin by sending a customer an email informing them their IP address was detected downloading copyrighted material. The email will likely look very similar to others already sent out at the request of copyright holders. It will say things like, downloading copyrighted works is theft, and that theft is illegal. The email will also contain information where by they can better educate themselves to copyright law. It might also state that if they did not commit the theft themselves, they could have an insecure wifi network, or malware installed on a computer on their network that is acting as an intermediary device.

It will all seem scary but in a pleasant way, not really an accusation as much as a notice that someone out there used your IP address to download something they shouldn't have and if it happened to be you, it's ok because here are some materials that will better educate you. The problem with this is you have now been marked as a thief, your name is entered into a database kept by the ISP in case they are ever subpoenaed. At this point no action is taken, this is just the first warning.

Second Response:

Once this happens again, you will receive another email, this time without all the sugar coating. This email will inform you that you were detected downloading copyrighted content again, and here are some more materials to better educate you.

This education nonsense is really an attempt at behavior modification. You know this from childhood, when you did something that your parents didn't like, they tried to get you to not do it again through education...at least that's how it starts. You've now graduated to a habitual thief, in the eyes of your ISP, a kleptomaniac.

Third Response:

Why you little asshole, downloading again? Now that you have been caught once again, your ISP will send you another email, this time it will contain a link that you must click. Clicking this link will let the ISP know that you have received the emails and have not only been informed of the copyright violation but that you know that it's illegal, you have been caught, and you acknowledge you will stop immediately. At this point they may also send you a certified letter in the mail containing information similar to that contained in the emails you have received.

At this point you have a problem, and its not the downloading. The problem is you have had the giant finger waved in your face, momma screaming at you to stop, and you are minutes away from being sent to your room without supper. Not only that, but she wants you to admit that you've done wrong. This may seem funny but its kind of serious now, you've been elevated to a level where under this new system the ISP can start taking action against you soon. It's not a place anyone wants to be in, especially since so much of our lives is tied to our Internet access now.

Fourth Response:

You will again receive an email, and likely a letter informing you that you have once again violated the law and you need to respond to our demands immediately.

This seems like the final straw before the ISP is forced to begin taking action, at this point you have been well advised of the situation.

Fifth Response:

Having been caught for a fifth time, the ISP must now respond with some kind of action. At this point it seems that the ISP gets to determine what the action will be. At this point your ISP will send you a letter informing you they must take action against your account for copyright violation, this will likely include having your data throttled severely for a short period, having your browser redirected to a portal containing a phone number to call, to get your service reconnected, and possibly a temporary loss of internet service for an unspecified period of time.

At this point they're not fucking around anymore. All of these responses will effect how you interact with the Internet. Having your data throttled is no fun, ask existing AT&T mobile customers if they enjoy it. Being redirected to a portal containing education information and a phone number that you must call in order to have your service restored is no fun either. Who the fuck likes to be lectured, especially by some sheep getting paid $8.50 an hour to read some spoon-fed nonsense off a computer screen in front of them. And having your account disabled for a temporary period is like being stabbed in the chest with an ice pick. Think I'm joking? Have your ever smoked crack or snorted cocaine? If you have, seek help, but if you haven't then you have no idea. Addiction has a serious effect on you when you don't feed it. Ask anyone who has received a temporary ban from World of Warcraft. Sitting around counting the hours, watching the clock, sweat pouring down your face. Trying to find something to do that doesn't involve the game, looking for an alternative, unable to find one. By hour 12 you begin twitching, and speaking in tongues. OK, so its maybe not that serious but do a little experiment. Disconnect yourself from the Internet in every single way for the next three days, let's see how you do. If you are like me, it will be insufferable. Not to mention, what if you use the Internet for business or you need it to support a device like VOIP? Can you live without email, Facebook, and the Twitter?

Sixth and Final Response:

Your ISP has given you many chances, its now time to take more action. At this point they have the right to not only respond as they have previously, by throttling your account so far back, you think you're using a 300 baud modem, but they can disconnect your service for longer periods or terminate your contract entirely.

At this point if their mitigation services haven't modified your behavior yet, its unlikely that anything they do will have an effect. At this point they will likely terminate your contract, or just permanently throttle your service so it will take you a year to download a single movie.

Your ISP doesn't want to do any of these, they are not the police, and we'll talk about that in a minute but first you need to understand what's really happening here. While the big announcement likes to tout the agreement as a voluntary thing, its pretty clear its anything but voluntary. Let's examine this for a moment. The ISPs (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable) that have agreed to this deal are not only Internet Service Providers, but content providers as well. This means that in addition to providing customers with access to the Internet, they also provide customers access to a variety of other services like music and movies. That's right, in their attempt to become your one stop shop, they have tied together two different services to give you more, and take more of your money. The problem with this is, that while this agreement of services with your ISP better gives you access to Television, Phone, and Internet, it also gives the RIAA and MPAA something better to bargain with. You may not think about it much, but the movies you watch on cable are all licensed up the wazoo, from point to point ending up at the beginning...the MPAA. That means the MPAA ultimately controls the content you watch on your television. And it's not hard to see how this conversation behind closed doors went.

This kind of thing has happened before. In the 1930's fashion was dominated by a group called the Fashion Originators' Guild of America. Then, like it is today, clothing wasn't eligible for copyright and patent protection under the law. So the guild took it upon themselves to enforce their own protection, by limiting access to goods to anyone who wasn't willing to follow their demands. Shop owners were forced into selling only their goods if they wanted to sell them at all. When you hear of something like this, it doesn't immediately fly on to the radar, after all it would make sense, if you were selling something to a retailer you might want to have an exclusivity deal with them. The problem with this kind of underhanded deal is that these organizations enforce punishment upon those who do not follow their rules, and this falls into the domain of a not well known part of the law called, antitrust. Antitrust law is a form of law that was designed to promote market competition by giving everyone equal footing by disallowing anti-competitive conduct by companies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered the Fashion Originator's Guild of America to immediately cease and desist. In 1941, much to the dismay of the Fashion Originators' Guild of America, the Supreme Court ruled that they had violated antitrust laws, upholding the FTC decision and ultimately resulting in the destruction of the Guild. You may remember something similar to this being mentioned some years ago in the case of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Now, as they did back then, Microsoft dominated the marketplace with the Windows Operating System (OS). When the World Wide Web was introduced to the public, companies like Netscape, Opera, Mosaic, and Lynx all clamored for a market share by introducing their own browsers to the world. This kind of competition allowed people to freely explore their options and decide on a browser that they liked to use. Suddenly, Microsoft entered the game introducing to the world a new browser called Internet Explorer. Immediately it was apparent that this browser was an inferior product and almost no one adopted using it. Not willing to lose this war, Microsoft began bundling the product into Windows, so users who had never experienced using an Internet browser before would gain first access to theirs. But Microsoft took it a step further, they introduced the idea that one program could be the default program, and they used it to disallow users choice. A user installing any other browser would find their web pages would only open in Internet Explorer. This would start a war that lasted many years and ultimately involved the courts, deciding that Microsoft couldn't do this as it would violate antitrust laws. Like in 1941, the court decided companies couldn't enforce rules through behavior modification. See where I'm going?

The problem with antitrust law is that it seems every company tries to push the law. Corporations like the MPAA and RIAA want people to follow the laws, but are unwilling to follow laws themselves. If you walk into a store and steal a candy bar, the store owner can't walk you into the street and flog you repeatedly for everyone to see. A store owner doing this would be committing a crime and be punished accordingly. Antitrust laws are in place to prevent corporations from punishing people for violating their rules, a job usually left to governments. The MPAA and RIAA have used their influence with ISPs to create behavior modification in people who don't follow the rules, resulting in forms of punishment. While this kind of thing happens all the time with respect to governments, corporations don't usually take it upon themselves to police the public. The reason for this is that it usually affects the bottom line...money. When a government does this, you are not left with any choice, after all you can't boycott the government. They can enforce their rules, and continue to collect money from you through taxes. However, when corporations do this, they lose customers, resulting in a loss of money. This is because competition allows a disenfranchised person to seek their product elsewhere. The problem with the MPAA, RIAA, and the five major ISPs involved in this deal, they all dominate the marketplace leaving the public little or no choice. These kinds of corporations are called Monopolies. And as history has shown us, monopolization inevitably results in antitrust.

So now that we have established these corporations are violating the law, what can we do about it? Well it is my belief this will ultimately end up in the courts where it should be. In case after case, companies who have violated antitrust through monopoly domination, have been severely punished, sometimes resulting in the destruction of their company, though I don't believe this will happen here. The problem with this kind of thing is that is takes a long time. Time is really on the side of the monopoly, even after  a case is filed against them, they won't have to actually litigate it for years, all the while their draconian tactics allow them more control, and the ability to make more money. So what do we do in the meantime?

Effective July 1st, 2012, this new form of subjugation will take effect, and soon users everywhere will begin feeling the pain of the corporate controlled copyright machine. That is unless we do something to stop them. As I've mentioned, suing the corporations is a first step and I believe it will happen, but an end to the tyranny will likely take a while, so it is incumbent on us as a people to resist this kind of behavior modifiction in the meantime. Below I will outline a couple of tactics that could prove effective against this kind of totalitarianism.

Continue doing what you are already doing, downloading whatever you want to your heart's content. If everyone did this, the ISPs would have no choice but to challenge the RIAA and MPAA, after all at that point, they are losing customers and money. Lose enough money, you have lost your business. This kind of action requires mass adoption to work, a movement like “Occupy Wall street” would be required to have this kind of effect. I like this kind of thing, it establishes a revolution, invoking free speech as a weapon against tyranny. If enough people jumped onto the band wagon this kind of tactic would have the best result, likely stopping the RIAA and MPAA once and for all. Don't discount public outcry, it has been very effective in the past and will continue to be effective in the future. If nothing more, it brings to the attention of policy makers, the general consensus of the public that they are being wronged in some way. While the policy makers, our congress, are continually lobbied through cash bribes from the RIAA and MPAA, that kind of thing pales in comparison to a public dissent. After all, you only make money if you have a job, and as long as we have a democratic republic of elected officials, money doesn't decide policy, votes do. So if you don't like the policies your government has established, vote them out and vote in their place those who suit your needs.

The other choice you have is encryption. Encryption is a way for you to hide data through obfuscation. If you have been downloading and haven't used any kind of obfuscation, you really need to start now, especially if you have been using something like bittorrent to download music and movies. Bittorrent makes no attempts at hiding your IP address, after all, its needed to establish a connection from one person to another. My first suggestion would be that you download a program called Peerblock. It's not a perfect solution but it does help. Peerblock works by firewalling yourself from users who connect to your machine from known bad IP addresses. This is achieved through a list of addresses that are constantly updated. When you begin downloading something through bittorrent, other users who are also downloading the same file begin connecting to your machine to supply pieces and receive pieces of the file they don't already have. Because of how this works, it's very easy for a representative of the MPAA to sit on a torrent of “Captain America” and wait for users to connect. They just have to log the IP addresses and store them for future reference. Peerblock will effectively stop this by disallowing users from known bad IP address from connecting to your machine, preventing them from ever getting your IP address. While this prevents someone outside of your network to see your activity, it doesn't prevent your ISP from seeing it. At this point if you are using Internet Explorer, you really need to stop. Besides it being a major vector for security attacks, its not the most configurable browser. I would switch to either Mozilla's Firefox or my favorite choice Google's Chrome browser. Once you have done this it's time to install something called HTTPS Everywhere. HTTPS Everywhere is a tool developed by the EFF to force browsers into connecting to a website only through HTTPS if available, and only through HTTP if unavailable. HTTPS is a way for your browser to interact with a website using HTTP over a secure socket layer(SSL) encrypted connection. This means that the connection between your machine and the website you are visiting is encrypted, protected from the watchful eyes of even your ISP. You may be familiar with HTTPS only if you have ever used a banking site, or sites like Paypal or Amazon to purchase something. HTTPS is generally used to encrypt monetary transactions, and usually when you need to conduct a private transaction the website will force one of these HTTPS connections. However, just because you are not conducting a transaction doesn't mean you can't encrypt your connection. Many sites allow HTTPS to be used anywhere on their site, allowing your entire experience to be private. While this type of tool is very useful in protecting yourself from someone seeing which sites you visit, it doesn't protect you from the files you download from bittorrent, so its a good idea, and another step in the right direction, but not a full solution. So now that you've enabled an IP firewall, and installed a secure browser, you should consider whether you need to encrypt your entire connection. Doing this is the ultimate solution and will prevent anyone from knowing who is downloading and what they are downloading. This can be achieved through a few ways. Tor is one way which this can be done, and although its effective in obfuscating both your IP address and traffic, it wasn't meant to handle the demand of bittorrent so users trying to use it for that intent will find their downloads painfully slow, not to mention my experience with it was not a good one. Browsing just a website using Tor was also painfully slow. Tor works through a process called Onion routing, you know like when you peel away a layer of the onion, you are presented with more layers underneath. It works in the same principle, by connecting users in a chain through the Tor network, no one person has the same IP address they started with. Each time you connect to a new IP address, its like revealing a new layer of the onion, only this onion has tens of thousands of layers to peel. The last option and my favorite is Virtual Private Networking (VPN).

VPN is a way for one computer to connect to another computer directly. Secure VPNs work much like HTTPS except, instead of securing a tunnel between your machine and another machine through the browser alone, this involves securing the entire connection. This kind of tactic prevents anyone but the computer you are connecting to from knowing whats going on. When your ISP looks at your connection all they see is bits of gobblygook. They have absolutely no idea what you are actually doing. They may be able to deduce from your bandwidth allocation that you might be downloading very large files, but that's meaningless as its not a crime to consume endless amounts of bandwidth. As far as they are concerned you may be downloading movies from the Piratebay, watching porn on Redtube, or just enjoying your Netflix or Hulu subscriptions. There are many VPN services available, you need only search google to find them. VPN services are not free, and even if you find one that is free its likely to suck. You want something that isn't terribly slow, and is reliably stable. After all what good is it when you pay for a service that is both slow and you are unable to maintain a connection with.

You may wonder why I entitled this post, “The Last Offensive Volley of a Dying Empire.” It is in my opinion only a matter of time before the RIAA and MPAA die off. As a matter of Natural Selection, those who do not or cannot adapt, die. This is true not only of species but of technology. For so long these corporations have dominated our lives, giving us content at a high price, with no competition and no reason to change. With the invention of the Internet, corporations who's models were built upon a rigid construct and unable to change, fell to those who adapted and flourished in this new world. In all this time, the RIAA and MPAA have fought to stay alive, gripping at every chance they could, using every tactic to maintain control and buying politicians as needed all in an attempt to hold on to a dying philosophy. I don't know how long this battle will last, but it's end will come. The old people and old ways, will die in favor of new people and new ways. And the way we thought yesterday will not be the same way we think tomorrow. I can't help but to think of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers, and the battle of Hornburg, when I think about this. The corporations kind of remind me of the Isengard army of Uruk-hai, marching on Helm's Deep.

Every major empire that has ever existed, has fallen. It's only a matter of time. You may laugh at my comparison of the Orcs of Tolkien's fiction to the soulless corporate executives of the RIAA and MPAA, but Tolkien's stories were allegories of the wars he experienced. This is no different today, make no mistake, we are at war. And much like Tolkien's characters we will make hard choices and sacrifices, but ultimately we will be victorious. I'm not in favor of breaking the law, when the law makes sense. And using the law to protect corporate interests make no sense, because it is detrimental to progress.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.  - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be. - Khalil Gibran

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Copying is Not Theft, its Evolution at Work

Nothing bugs me more than to hear a debate on copyright infringement, because someone inevitably tries to insist that copying is theft and that's why its illegal. You wouldn't allow someone to walk into a Walmart and steal a Compact Disc(CD), so why should you be allowed to steal a song off the Internet. The argument is as flawed as the entire intellectual property system. Copying is not theft, copying is evolution at work.

When we talk about copying, we are really talking about replication. Replication is a process by which something is duplicated, leaving the original unchanged, and allowing the duplicate copy to advance. This process is not to be taken lightly. It's a process which is responsible for all life on this planet, and if life exists elsewhere in the universe, chances are, its because of replication. Replication is as fundamental to the computer as it is to humans.

Think far back, all the way back to about 14 billion years ago. Suddenly, a singularity appears, a fraction of a second later, The Big Bang. In that brief moment all the components in the universe today are created, but they don't actually start out like we see them today, the process takes a long time. In the quickly expanding universe, hydrogen and helium are being distributed everywhere.

Soon this hydrogen and helium naturally coalesce, condensing into what would become the first stars. But these stars are not like the stars we have today, these massive stars are very unstable, and within them a fantastic thing is happening. Hydrogen and helium are combining to make new elements, the heat is becoming more and more intense, the gravity under which all this is happening is growing ever greater, and in moments there is an explosion.

This explosion, called a supernova, is so intense you can't even imagine it, the light from this explosion would be enough to out-brighten all stars in the universe today. All the elements from these stars are flung into the expanding universe. Soon these elements coalesce once again, now made up of clouds of gas, these clouds begin combining into a massive churning ring of energy creating the beginnings of new stars, and like the first stars they too are massive, though not as large as the first ones.

But the gravity of these stars, are also too great and once again they explode, throwing gas and dust into a concentric ring around the center. But at this center is something amazing, a supermassive black hole that's gravity will be responsible for continually churning the gas and dust until the end of time, forming the beginnings of a galaxy. Within this galaxy, the clouds of dust spinning around begin to coalesce once again, forming stars. These stars are tiny compared to the massive stars that once created them, and around these stars clouds of dust begin coalescing into the debris that form planets.

This whole process takes billions of years but in the end we have the planet Earth, but this planet isn't like it is today. The newly created Earth is a spinning ball of molten rock, but slowly over time it cools down, and the process of combining atoms results in the production of water. Now that water has emerged all over the planet, life can begin. Though this process may seem easy, its one of the most complex things found in nature. Only through the process of evolution is life possible.

So in a primordial pool, the beginnings of life were formed. Much of the same process that was used to form the galaxies, stars and planets were used to form life, with one exception. Replication is responsible for the production of life as we know it. As the very first complex molecules began to form, like Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the process of replication began to take hold, rapidly copying information over and over, forming more and more complexity.

These molecules formed into cells, and once again the information was copied, combined and transformed into even more complex life. Over time, this process would move from a primordial pool, to the oceans, and then find itself on land. All the while, this process repeats to finally evolve into all the life that exists on our planet today. 99.99% of the genetic code found in all life on this planet is identical. It is in that .01% that life becomes different.

The process of evolution began a long time ago. Part of the process of evolution is something called natural selection. In the simplest term, natural selection is the process by which lifeforms are discarded to allow stronger lifeforms to flourish. The process of natural selection is responsible for the domination of the lifeforms that exist today.

As the Earth evolved over time, the life that existed also needed to evolve. The environment began to change, and the lifeforms that could survive the change, continued and evolved, while the ones that did not, became extinct. Without replication, the process of natural selection would have resulted in the extinction of all life on earth. You see as molecules formed into cells, this process of natural selection would have destroyed many attempts at the original production of life, resulting in no production of life had it not been for replication. Replication is solely responsible for allowing a clean slate approach to life.

Imagine if you were in your kitchen making a pie, and you started bringing all the ingredients together, but you weren't quite sure what was required to actually make the pie. Now imagine you could use the process of replication to make your pie. Each time you mixed ingredients together and baked it, without knowing exactly what was needed, it might result in total failure. Maybe your pie had too little flour, or not enough salt, or maybe too much butter. In any case that's a lot of do-overs. But you have replication, so each time you get your ingredients together, you replicate them, so when the ingredients are consumed during the creation of the pie, this won't result in a total loss. Eventually with time, you will produce the perfect pie. So in essence life is a wonderfully complex pie.

Over time, animals developed brains, and once again the process of replication is at work. The brain is like a sponge that can process vasts amounts of information that allow animals to interact with their environment. But without replication information learned by one animal would be useful only to that animal and when that animal died, the information would be lost forever. Through reproduction, animals are given the ability to pass on their genetic code, but children are once again a clean slate, and only through the process of replication do children become useful adults.

Adults pass the information which they have learned, to their children, thus replicating it. The information stored in the adult hasn't changed, but it has been copied to a new brain, which can then be passed on to their children, continuing the process of replication. This process is found in all animals, including humans. It is only through the process of replication that humans have evolved to be the most dominate lifeform on this planet. You may not think about it much, in fact you may have never really thought about it.

Although you have amassed some information through your own discovery, it is more likely that the information contained within your brain was amassed largely through the replication of ideas. Humans are interactive beings, we spend most of our time in the presence of other humans, and quite often that time is spent talking to one another. You may not consider it, but when you speak to another human, the content, your words are being replicated exactly in the mind of the person you are speaking with. In fact our brains are replicating information all the time.

Replication is found in every facet of life, from our schools, to our jobs, to interactions with our friends, family and strangers. We are a culture of beings who have spent our existence sharing information with each other, maybe without ever really truly thinking about it. Without replication humans would learn nothing, because the knowledge contained without one person's brain would die with them. Each human would have to discover the nature of the universe themselves, more information than one person could learn in an entire lifetime. In fact we've been here a long time, so in reality the information each of us can learn today came little by little passing on from person to person from the discovery of things found over the course of their lifetime.

Contained within the knowledge base of human existence are the contents of human thought replicated from human to human over thousands of years. Replication and evolution work together harmoniously, allowing things to evolve that serve to better replicate information. For instance, humans developed speech, then language, then written word. These processes, allow for better replication of information from one brain to another. Although, showing someone how to do something is often better for some, it's not a replacement for the efficiency of writing it down and sharing it with large amounts of people.

After all, each one of us is only one person and we could spend our lives teaching others how to do some specific task, but we are limited by the audience we can reach and the amount of time it takes to teach that audience a particular task. With the discovery of spoken word and then the written word, human society has advanced more than anything else in the world, allowing vast quantities of data to be saved for everyone over the entire span of human existence.

Each one of us owes a debt of gratitude to the ones who came before us that took the time to document their lives. In the end, all we are, is what impact we make on the world. For some of us, having children is our way of passing on information, for others, they give lectures, and still for others they write things down.

Much of the technology that has been invented came through the process of replication, thoughts turn into ideas, ideas into concepts and concepts into inventions. What you may not think about is where do these great ideas come from? Well for most of us, original thought is as unlikely as a pig that can fly, and for that reason alone, most of the inventions you are using today, came not from original thought but from the ideas of others.

Thomas Edison was a great inventor and often credited with the invention of the electric light bulb, however Edison did not invent the light bulb, but merely copied the idea from Humphry Davy. Henry Ford, often wrongly credited with the invention of the self-propelled automobile, was actually invented by Karl Benz. Nikola Tesla, often referred to as the “Father of Wireless Telegraphy”, didn't start out being called that, that's because for a long time the radio was thought to be invented by Guglielmo Marconi, but Tesla's radio actually came years before. Powered flight is often, mistakenly credited with being invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright, however only nine months before, Richard Pearse achieved the same thing.

The difference between the persons who were credited with the inventions and the persons who actually invented them is often merely a matter of timing and marketing. Often inventors show their inventions off to the world, only to find no one is watching or listening. Very often the best inventors are also the best showmen.

A prime example of this is the case of Thomas Edison who is well known all over the world and considered to be one of the most prolific of all time. Thomas Edison was a master showmen, and also quite the business man. So it comes to most a surprise that he had nothing to do with electricity, at least not the modern kind. In truth we owe our modern lives to a not well known, and often misunderstood man, named Nikola Tesla. Tesla's invention of the AC Current that flows in all of our homes and is responsible for powering all the technologies we have today, did not win him any awards, in fact he was not even recognized as the inventor at the time. Tesla was working for George Westinghouse at the time, and Westinghouse took credit for Tesla's work.

Putting the actual inventions aside for a moment, we are left with original thought. This concept is about as foreign to a human as is a human breathing under water. Even the actual inventors, can't truly have invented the product themselves because that would imply that the invention came from an original thought. But as I've already addressed, humans don't really have original thoughts, we are all products of replication, even down to what we wear, drive, drink and eat.

All of us are passed ideas, subliminally, without even knowing, that dictate the functions of our lives. When you see someone eating a slice of pizza, you get a craving to want to have a slice too. You didn't think this up yourself, it came from the deepest recesses of your mind, having tasted or smelled pizza at least once before. The information was copied into your subconscious to be accessed whenever you came in contact with pizza. But what about when I don't see a slice of pizza but suddenly get a craving to eat it? That is still part of the subconscious mind at work, because information in the mind is tied together like strings. You can think of the mind like a large ball of yarn where all the parts of the yarn are touching each other.

You have absolutely no idea in your brain how anything is linked together, this is entirely done automatically by the brain, but you will probably know the second it happens. For some people, seeing that slice of pizza, brings back a childhood memory of their mother slaving over a hot stove, smells of pizza in the air as their mother bakes it, for others it brings back a memory of a time spent in Italy, or of a time when you just had a fantastic slice of pizza. We never really know when this will happen or if it will happen, because most of the inner workings of the mind is still a great mystery to us.

But what we know is that the things we learn, experienced through our own discovery or through the action of others, is stored in our brains through replication. Because of this the idea that any person can truly own a thought is ridiculous beyond comprehension. We are all products of the ideas that came from others before us, and others before them, and so on and so forth. So the things that were done thousands of years before you were born all aided in someway to the knowledge contained in your brain. Intellectual Property is the perceived ownership of an original thought.

The problem with this idea, is how do you really know that the thought you had was original at all? Looking back at that ball of yarn, its easy to understand that an idea which you believed to be original, actually came from the recesses of your mind, conceived in part by sensory input. That is to say, eating a slice of pizza, made me think about inventing a new kind of pizza oven. Even if the pizza oven is new, the idea is not, and you can't possibly claim ownership of an idea, because you didn't invent pizza, ovens, cooking, or fire for that matter. And you didn't invent all the little things that went into making those things possible.

But neither did the inventors who were credited with those inventions, because they too would also be influenced by sensory input, causing them to believe they had an original thought. This cycle continues on until all we are left with are maybe the first humans to ever stand up, pick up a stick and use it to build something.

So while the invention of the computer is certainly a momentous occasion in history, it too owes its very existence to all the inventions and ideas that came before it. Computers are sometimes referred to by intellectual property lawyers as “Theft facilitation devices.” This couldn't be farther from the truth. Computers were invented by humans, and so it would make sense that the knowledge that goes into a computer would be very human like. I'm not saying computers are the same as humans, only that computers are merely an extension of human evolution.

Much like the spoken and written words that came long ago that were used to replicate information, so to is the computer. Computers were never designed with the idea that they would be copying machines, its simply a function of human evolution that found its way intertwined into the design of the computer. We humans are biological replicating machines, wouldn't it make sense that the machines we make to handle our everyday lives might also replicate human behavior. Intellectual property holders like to complain that the computer's primary function is to steal their property by allowing any data to be copied. This has a much less sinister reason than the theft of your intellectual property.

The reality is everything that functions will eventually function no more. Computers typically last ten years, but the disks contained within them, used to store data last even less time, sometimes only a few years. The primary reason why data can be copied on a computer is the same reason why it can be copied from human to human, redundancy. If I sit in front of my computer and type out a long book on my obsession with eating shellfish, a staggering set of 250 pages on the subject, and my computer dies after I finish it, I will have lost all the time, and maybe some of the thoughts I only had while typing away. That information is lost forever, except maybe, the copy that was contained in my mind, parts of which can be recalled maybe only by eating my beloved shellfish.

But computers don't work like that, because if they did we wouldn't be using them as a tool of our everyday lives. Instead, we save a copy of the book on shellfish to the computer's internal disk, we save a copy to a flashdrive, and we also save a copy somewhere in the cloud. You see if we lose any one of these copies we are still okay, and the more we copy, the more redundancy we get. We don't do this just on computers, its really a way of life for most of us.

The government stores endless amounts of paperwork here, there and everywhere, copies of copies all over for everyone to have. We mass produce products all the time, copying over and over again, so if one breaks we have another to take its place. The fact is replication is one of foundations of our existence. Asking a human if he wants to copy and share something is like asking a dog if he wants a bone.

So why is it that 95 % of humans understand that copying and sharing are simply a part of our nature, but that 5% of us who consider themselves intellectual property holders get to dictate what the other 95% of us do? Intellectual property holders are very good showmen. This all goes back to showmanship and marketing. Large corporations with vast amounts of wealth are allowed to use that wealth to indoctrinate others to their ideas. Through much whining, corporations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have tried to convince people they are suffering.

Let's be clear, the RIAA and MPAA don't create anything, unless you count headaches. They are representatives of others who create content and hold these so-called intellectual properties. The problem is that all their attempts at convincing the general public to follow their way of thinking has largely fallen on deaf ears. The reason for this is 95% of us are not greedy, rich corporations and so the complaints they have are largely ignored.

These corporations know that what they really need are like minded individuals, not people who feel the same way about intellectual property mind you, but rather immoral, greedy, whining, rich folks...our Congress. That's right Washington D.C. the place where you can get anything written into law, for the right price. The place where a sense of right and wrong are dictated by the amount of cash funneled into so-called campaign contributions. And so our government who fall in that 5% are allowed to dictate what the other 95% of us are allowed to do. But I can't blame our government entirely, after all this is happening all over the world. Many governments, usually forced on by the US government, are trying to force laws upon their people that contradict human nature.

Copying is not theft. When you copy something, you have a copy and now I have a copy, theft implies that something is taken away. Theft is when I take something from you and I have it and now you have nothing. When I copy something, you still have your copy of it, having suffered no loss at all. In fact in terms of whats good for society, by replicating it, we both have copies and are now better for each having our own copy.

When this country was founded, laws were put into place that protected intellectual property, but only for 14 years, before it went into the public domain. The public domain can be likened to the Internet, in so much as all the knowledge of human existence can be found somewhere on the Internet. The point of the public domain is that all the thoughts, ideas, and inventions of human existence really came from everyone working together to begin with, and really belong to everyone as a whole.

Things in the public domain are saved for eternity to be used by anyone and everyone.

Unfortunately, as we have progressed as a society the ideas of old have gotten lost, mixed in with new ideas that are bad ideas, detrimental to the function of human existence. We are products of replication, we owe everything to it, we must set aside our need to own everything as individuals, and instead think of humanity as a whole. If we continue to hold onto our thoughts, locking them away safely from the prying eyes of others, content in the fact that we own them, we will not learn anything new. It is only through replicated ideas that we evolve, and the second we stop sharing is the second that we stop learning, until one day we all die off, and there are no ideas left to share.

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Yahoo, an Example of Everything that is Wrong with Intellectual Property

On Monday giant tech flop, Yahoo! decided to make good on their threat by suing Facebook for patent infringement. This isn't the first time, and will certainly not be the last time Yahoo! does this. In 2004, Yahoo! sued tech company giant, Google. Google settled the case by giving Yahoo! 2.7 million shares, which Yahoo! immediately sold. Although in 2004, Yahoo! seemed to have a legitimate case against Google, this case against Facebook is considered by most as a huge pile of shit. Yahoo! is essentially claiming that Facebook is infringing on several patents that have to do with ad placement on a web page. I'm not kidding, this is a real case, filed in a California court by Yahoo!, contending that Facebook pay them damages in the millions for placing ads on their site. The worst part is if Yahoo! wins this case, it gives them the legal precedence to go after any site that displays ads on a page. Now personally I hate web ads, so in a way I wouldn't mind seeing this case go all the way with a win on Yahoo!'s side, it would change the way sites monetize, since most of the ad revenue would likely go to pay some kind of licensing fee to Yahoo!, in effect reducing the use of ads altogether. However, another part of me thinks, “this is some retarded bullshit.”


The fact is almost anything you do in life has been done before, almost nothing is ever a completely brand new idea. In my blog post, called “Everything is a Remix,” I explore this subject by talking about the great documentary by Kirby Ferguson. You should check it out if you have the time. Since the beginning of time, new ideas were put forward that allowed the world to progress. But as time passed, less and less new ideas were put forward, and much of the ideas in place today are simply copies of original ideas with small modifications that allow the contributor to call it his or her own work. Although this technically qualifies as Intellectual Property, should you be allowed to copyright, trademark, or patent it? I think not. But let me go even further and deal specifically in the realm of software patents because this is what we are really talking about when we talk about this case against Facebook.

As someone who has programmed software, I know there are only so many ways to do something using a programming language. This is because in reality, computers only understand code in one way. So all the programming that goes into something, really turns into 1s and 0s that the central processing unit (cpu) of a computer can interpret. All programming languages work the same way, some designed to make the experience of programming easier, and some designed to make the code more optimized, but they all do the same thing once compiled, turning a higher level language that can be easily read and understood into something closer to a lower level language like assembly, something more easily understood by the computer. Because of this, almost anything you program will likely have already been programmed by someone else in the same way, even if your program does not do the same thing as another individual's program, much of the same code could be used. And if the person who programmed the code first, decided to patent the code, and they are convinced you violated that patent in your software, you could be facing a court appearance.

This kind of predatory patent litigation has led to invention of the patent troll. A patent troll is either a person or organization who only concerns themselves with owning patents for the sole purpose of litigation. This litigation of course, isn't to defend the work, but rather it's a cash-grab, a way to steal as much money from someone as possible, legally abusing the patent laws we have in place. Software patents are especially vulnerable to these kind of lawsuits because the so-called invention of this type of product may have cost very little, and the copying involved in using the idea, costs nothing. Let's be clear about what patents are supposed to be granted for. The invention of something new, useful and non-obvious, is supposed to be considered the criteria for granting a patent. The problem with software patents is software isn't an invention. Software is nothing more than the interpretation of a language. For example, if someone speaks to you in a language you've never heard but you understand what was said,  have you now invented that? It's ridiculous to claim that you somehow own the bits that a computer needs to understand the command you have given it. Yet, these software patents are granted every day to individuals and corporations for the most mundane shit. And the biggest problem besides the granting of the patents itself, is the idea that by programming some similar or maybe dissimilar action, you could be violating the law. As I've pointed out there are only so many ways to get a computer to do the thing you want it to do, so the chances are, that you are probably violating someone's code whenever you write something. Fortunately, although this takes place all the time, very few cases are actually litigated. This is because most people know when they write something that is likely to be used by a lot of people, if the code is very general, than it shouldn't be patented at all. In the early days of the Internet many new technologies emerged, and if everyone ran out and started litigating the use of these technologies, the world may very well be a different place today.

So now let's get back to Yahoo!. The patents which they contend facebook is violating mostly deal with the placement of ads as I've said, but Yahoo! has even gone a step further contending that Facebook was built upon the work that Yahoo! had put forth before. This is a seriously obnoxious contention, after all I've seen the movie The Social Network and I don't remember anyone from Yahoo! ever being there while Mark Zuckerberg was writing the code that would eventually become Facebook. So let's examine a few of the statements that Yahoo! have made on this matter.

Facebook's entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo!'s patented social networking technology.

Were you aware that Yahoo! had a social network, I wasn't. Head on over to Yahoo! and see if you can detect this social networking they are talking about. As I remember it, Yahoo! was nothing more than a search engine for much of its life. So what I can gather from this claim, is that Yahoo! believes they own the rights to any page which displays scrolling topics, features a user database that users have to login and configure to make their own, and the ability for persons to chat with each other. Wow those are some big claims. Having been on the Internet for a long time, I can recall the old days before Google as the search empire it is today. In those days you used Altavista, and then Yahoo! to search. At no time, did Yahoo! feature a page that had any kind of social presence whatsoever, never requiring users to login to the site, or setup profiles, or give them the ability to chat with each other. Although, they do have a chat client, Yahoo! Messenger, this came much later after the invention of ICQ Messenger. In fact as I recall, they came pretty late to the game on that one.

For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo! got there first and was therefore granted patents by the United States Patent Office to protect those innovations. Yahoo!'s patents relate to cutting edge innovations in online products, including in messaging, news feed generation, social commenting, advertising display, preventing click fraud, and privacy controls. These innovations dramatically improve user experience, privacy, and security and enhance the ability to connect with users.

Again, big claims. If I head over to Yahoo!, I see none of the impressive technologies they claim to own.  What's worse is their claim to having gotten to the US Patent office first, which means while others were content with not claiming ownership to something so general that everyone was using it already, you assholes took the attitude, that if they are not going to claim it, we will. It doesn't take a genius to know this whole thing is bullshit, after all if Yahoo! really did invent all this, they had it first and had a site that Facebook was designed on, wouldn't it stand to reason that everyone would be Yahooing right now instead of Facebooking? Instead, the little community Yahoo! has built, distances itself from them with each passing day. And although Yahoo! would like to claim this is because Facebook has built an empire on the back of Yahoo!, its even more simple than that, Yahoo! just sucks balls. I can't remember the last time I wanted to use Yahoo! for anything at all. I mean seriously, how many people actually visit their site anymore, I can't imagine they are flocking to Yahoo! for their search engine anymore, as they don't even do the searches themselves, since Yahoo! is now using the Microsoft Bing engine to handle their searches. I think if not for the properties they have purchased over the last few years they might have already disappeared, and this really brings us to why Yahoo! is suing Facebook at all.

Right now Yahoo! is like a passenger on a sinking ship, and like anyone in that situation they are simply looking for a lifeboat. Facebook has built an empire that has positioned itself to be the most dominant social experience on the Internet now, and for the next few years, at least until a new Facebook emerges. For that reason they seem like an easy target for a desperate sinking company like Yahoo!, who is essentially on their way down. I don't know how long it will be, but if Yahoo! doesn't win this lawsuit, and I highly doubt they will, they may only have a matter of years before they become something like America Online (AOL). AOL once dominated the US in providing users with a community that has access to the Internet, but in recent years they have become nothing more than a site that provides email and chat. I expect that five years from now, we might see Yahoo! treated in much the same way.

From the perspective of Yahoo!, they might truly believe they have the right to these patents and maybe they do. After all, our government has has allowed these kinds of frivolous patents to merge themselves in with real patents causing this kind of nonsense in the first place. I've spoken at length, my disdain for copyrights, trademarks and patents, many times over. We live in a world where everyone wakes up each day hoping to have that one big idea, but not for the benefit of mankind, but for the purpose of greed. You see corporations have used and abused our Constitution over the last two hundred and twenty three years, not to advance the progress of the science and arts that benefits us all, but rather to make and hold on to vasts amounts of wealth for the benefit of themselves. This kind of greed has seeped into the mind of the commoner who is not content with just being average, living a life of modest means and helping to promote the progress of the world in which he or she lives in. Instead everyone wants to be rich, and why not, I want to be rich too. We'd all like to be rich, but the fact is that's not how it works. If everyone could be rich, then all we would have to do is print enough money to give everyone the same amount. This world doesn't work on monetary equality, because there isn't some unlimited set of funds out there. The way it works is that there is a limited amount of wealth that has to be distributed, not evenly, out to everyone. In order for one person to get rich, someone who is rich or several people who are rich, have to give up some of their wealth. This is why there is such a huge gap between the wealthiest 1% and the poorest 99%.

Our children are growing up in a vastly different world than the one that came before them. In this new world, we create things, not to better mankind, but to amass personal fortune. In this new world, less and less new ideas will emerge, stifled by the stranglehold of copyrights, trademarks, and patents all designed to protect the wealth of the greedy 1%. Only through the dismantling of our copyright, trademark and patent laws can we evolve. You need to ask yourself a question? Would you rather live in world where greedy corporations dictate the laws of the land, allow people who cannot pay to die from disease, and control the progress of science to be dictated by the costs involved. Or would you rather live in a world without borders, disease, hatred, or greed. Only through the education, promotion and progress of science can these latter things be achieved, but first we must do something radical, we must set aside the laws that allow these corporations to control ideas. Once we have achieved this, there is no idea that cannot be allowed to flourish and everyone will flourish with it. This may seem like a dream and maybe it is, but maybe without dreams brilliant ideas are not even possible.

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FBI Director Compares Hacker Group Anonymous to 9/11 Terrorists

Well, it was only a matter of time. In 2001, as a response to the attacks on 9/11, your Congress wrote into law a piece of legislation that would be used to slowly erode the rights secured to you under the United States Constitution, called the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (US PATRIOT ACT). In 2002, they further strengthened their strangle hold on its citizens by passing the Homeland Security Act, forming a Government establishment of control of all parts of law enforcement under one single organization, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This law created under the guise of national security, allows the DHS to enforce upon american citizens oppression like never before. Ordinary citizens can have their freedoms, secured by the US Constitution, summarily violated without probable cause and without a warrant. The Patriot Act allows the US Government to search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist in a terror investigation, a direct violation of the IV Amendment of the US Constitution. It further allows the Government to jail Americans indefinitely without a trial, another direct violation of the US Constitution, Amendment VI. The list goes on and on, but maybe the worst offense is the right of your Government to silence free speech. That's right contained within the Patriot Act is a provision that allows the Government to prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone the Government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation. This is in direct violation of Amendment I of the US Constitution, maybe the most important freedom we have, the right to speak freely and openly without Government intrusion or censorship.


Under these laws anyone can be accused of being a terrorist, thus having their rights taken away without cause, without trial, and without proper authority to do so. Accuse someone of being a terrorist and that is considered worse than being a murderer, a rapist, or a child molester. After all, even murderers, rapists, and child molesters get their day in court. When the Patriot Act was first established it was widely condemned by attorneys and law professors all over the US. Many believed, and rightly so, that this law would be used to usurp justice and establish a tyranny by which our Government could take away the rights of anyone who might actually want, and fight for their freedoms. Accuse Joe Schmo of being a terrorist and he is locked in a jail cell, never to be seen or heard from again.

So it should be no surprise then, that just about any crime can be linked to terrorism these days. Anyone the Government doesn't want made a public spectacle of, can be accused of terrorism and carted away. And that leads me to the point of this post. Recently you may have heard, that in the middle of the night, under total secrecy, our Government arrested twenty-five alleged members of the hacker group Anonymous. With the apparent help of a top ranking member of the group, working as an informant, the FBI arrested these individuals and carted them off to jail.

FBI Director Robert Mueller, said in a statement that "Cyber attacks will soon become one of the biggest threats to America’s safety, possibly surpassing the threat level posed by terrorism."

And there you have it, he has officially stated that modifying a computer's code, and stealing that code, is equivalent to the worst crime ever committed on US soil. The murder of nearly 3000 of it's citizens is evenly comparable with identity theft, bank fraud, or copyright infringement.

Mueller also stated, "In the not too distant future we anticipate that the cyber threat will pose the number one threat to our country."

Really? The Number One threat? You mean, hacking a computer is worse than Cancer, AIDS, Obesity, Heart Disease, Murder, Rape, Child Molestation, Drug Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Slavery, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical Weapons and Bombs, Solar Flares, Coronal Mass Ejections, Gamma Ray Bursts, Supernovae, and Black holes.

He then added, "We need to take lessons learned from terrorism and apply them to cybercrime."

What he means is, we need to lock these criminals up in a 5x9 ft. cell with no contact with the world, disallowing them access to a lawyer, or even letting their family know if they are dead or alive.


"…we confront hacktivists, organized criminal syndicates, hostile foreign nations that seek our state secrets and our trade secrets, and mercenaries willing to hack for the right price,” he said.

So anyone who doesn't agree with the views of US Government is labeled a terrorist.

He actually then goes on to ask corporations to do their part by working together with the Government in matters of cyber security, saying, "We must work together to safeguard our property, to safeguard our ideas and safeguard our innovation."

And there you have it folks, the crux of the case. It's all about business, nothing more, nothing less. In fact, this statement sounds very familiar, like it came right out of the playbook of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It's these acts of Facism, that lead us on the slippery slope to a new form of Government called the Corporatocracy. I surmise this may have been the intention of the Patriot Act all along, rumors and conspiracy theories aside, terrorism is big business in this country. Billions are spent on technology, weapons, and man power all in the name of national security. Corporations are getting richer, and the citizens fronting the bills, are getting poorer.

In a post to twitter, the hacker group Anonymous inquired, “So according to the FBI's new logic, hacking a company is WORSE than an event like 9/11, which resulted in 1000s of deaths? #FearMongering,”


In the not too distant future I anticipate that the number one threat to our country is not cybercrime, but rather an inflated, antiquated, tyrannical Government run by and for corporations with the interests of its citizens pushed aside in favor of laws protecting a greedy, immoral and evil corporate authority.

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Kirk Cameron is an Ignorant Douchebag

On Piers Morgan Tonight, Cameron declares that Homosexuality is unnatural. Of course he must not actually know what that means, or he wouldn't have said it. Human Beings didn't appear one day out of the blue. We evolved over time, coming from...NATURE. 

Yes we humans, in fact, all animals come from Nature, therefore we are natural and anything we do is also, Natural. Natural is defined as existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind. Humans didn't invent homosexuality. I'm sure had someone invented it, it would have been patented and licensed out to people, but that's another issue. 


It seriously pisses me off when someone makes this ignorant claim without a foundation to stand on. You have absolutely no scientific evidence to back up such claims. No, apparently all you have is the "Word of God" as defined by The Holy Bible. Well since I live in reality and don't eat spoon fed nonsense, and actually care about how the world and the universe works, I don't presume that some magic man in the sky sprinkled fairy dust one day and the world and everything in it just appeared out of thin air. 

Wow, it kind of sounds ridiculous when I say it, doesn't it? Yet, that's what a lot of ignorant people believe. The claim that homosexuality is unnatural cannot be backed up by anything but conjecture, where as the claim that homosexuality is perfectly natural is supported by overwhelming evidence.

Bruce Bagemihl writes in his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, that homosexual behavior has been observed in close to 1,500 species. It can be found in Mammals, Birds, Fish, Reptiles, Amphibians, Insects, and other invertebrates.

• Mammals observed displaying homosexual behavior
• Birds observed displaying homosexual behavior
• Fish observed displaying homosexual behavior
• Reptiles observed displaying homosexual behavior
• Amphibians observed displaying homosexual behavior
• Insects observed displaying homosexual behavior
• Other Invertebrates displaying homosexual behavior

Mistakenly many people on that side of the argument like to say you can't have homosexuality in non-humans since the term homosexual refers to human sexuality. However, they would be wrong, the etymological origin of the word homosexual is derived from the Greek word homos 'same' and not the Latin word homo 'human'. Some say it was the Greeks who invented homosexuality, however as I've already pointed out, its part of nature, a part of evolution. 

This may be hard to swallow for some, particularly those on the evangelical side, but sex isn't all about reproduction. Evidence shows that while sexual reproduction is both a requisite and beneficial part of existence, it cannot be the primary driving force for that existence. If reproduction were the primary driving force, than all life would reproduce asexually. Asexual reproduction is the purest, simplest, and most efficient form of reproduction. But if asexual reproduction is the most efficient form of reproduction, than why did males and females evolve? 

Sexual reproduction involving males and females is both costly and highly inefficient. Natural Selection dictates that all life, the simplest to the most complex, must exist for a reason. Even if we do not fully know or understand that reason, it still exists, just out of the reach of human understanding. So I surmise that somewhere along the evolutionary line, asexual reproduction was discarded in favor of sexual reproduction because it benefited that life. 

We are only now starting to understand some of the benefits of sex, including a reduction in overall stress, an increase in the production of immunoglobulin A (boosting immunity), the consumption of calories, improvement of the cardiovascular system, the production of endorphins (decreasing pain), and the promotion of better sleep, not to mention the benefits you receive from those benefits. So sex has a cascading beneficial effect on the body.

So in closing, Evolution is natural. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both part of evolution. For reasons we don't fully understand, some animals prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality and vice versa. As I've already pointed out Natural Selection dictates that everything exists for a reason, even if we don't know why, so even if you don't understand it, just assume that homosexuality is beneficial to humans, if it were not, than Natural Selection would have discarded it long ago.

Kirk Cameron on Piers Morgan Tonight...

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The Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Just a Tad Shinier Than The Previous Turd

So hopefully everyone who is reading this has already read my previous blog entry on Windows 8, where I sighted my numerous complaints. If you haven't read it please check it out, its entitled Why Windows 8 Will Fail, at Least In the Desktop Market...

Okay so now that I've gotten that out of the way, yesterday in Barcelona, Microsoft released its consumer preview of Windows 8. Immediately people started scrambling to get the download as fast as possible before the servers get clogged. The ISO is over 3GB, however Microsoft provided a nice little alternative to that in the form of an in-place upgrade install tool. The tool basically looks at what you have installed and only downloads and installs what is necessary to give you the consumer preview update. It's a very small file, took seconds to download.


Several people were reporting that if you wanted to install the consumer preview you would have to ditch the developer preview, this is just not true. I installed it just fine, using the upgrade tool. The tool will show you any applications it can upgrade and any it cannot. It then asks you what you'd like to do, install a fresh copy with no previous user files, or install a copy with your settings and files. I wanted to see how well the tool worked, so I chose to keep my previous settings and installed it. I know I have complained a lot about Windows 8, and I will have complained a lot more by the time you finish reading all this. Here's a couple of things I want to not complain about first, the in-place upgrade tool. Seriously whether Windows 8 flops or is successful, at least Microsoft has gotten this right. It is almost entirely automated and when its not, it's asking you a couple of important questions. It's exactly the way I would want an upgrade done. The second thing I liked was this was a little peppier than the developer preview, I figured they would fix a lot of the sluggishness I was feeling and I was right they did. And now on to the complaining.

After loading Windows 8 consumer preview for the first time, I was introduced to the Metro interface. It looks a little better, but not by much. So I clicked on desktop to see if anything changed and it looked ever so slightly better, but its still a turd compared to Windows Vista and Windows 7. I immediately noticed something odd, the Start button was missing. So I moved my mouse around and pulled it to that corner and nothing. So I figured maybe you need to use Metro to find it, so then I tried searching for a way to get back to Metro and couldn't find one. In the developer preview it was easy for me, on the desktop I'd just clicked the start button and it would yank me into Metro, clearly a bug, but useful for returning to Metro. The problem was, the start button was now gone, and there were no icons on the desktop to help, no shortcuts, no bars, I was screwed. I spent five minutes trying to figure out how the hell I was going to get back into Metro without having to reboot. It felt like if I was given a machine with only DOS on it, and someone removed the dir command. So several minutes later, on pure chance I hovered for a second in the top right corner of the desktop and a transparent menu appeared on the right of the screen. In the menu, I see an option called Start, so I assume this must be where they put the Start button, so I click it. And...It wasn't the start menu at all, it brought me right back to Metro. So I clicked on the Desktop tile and it occurred to me, the assholes at Microsoft have probably completely replaced the Start button with a shortcut to Metro, so on the desktop, I click my trusty Windows key on my keyboard and sure enough, up pops Metro. Here is a video of my experience:

So I click back into the desktop, I cannot believe the start button and start menu are completely gone. What a bunch of assholes. So having realized not only were they assholes for drastically changing a staple of Windows since 1995, they were assholes for making hidden features. You see Microsoft when you change something someone is so used to, they can do it in their sleep and on top of that hide it from plain sight, you earn the "Biggest Assholes in the World" award. It's like going to the home of a blind man, and rearranging all his furniture while he's away. The biggest problem with Windows 8 is its absurdly unintuitive. Frankly, I think people are going to need a manual to use it, which is tragic since manuals probably haven't been needed for windows since the days of Windows 95. So after my blood pressure dropped a little, I started moving the cursor all over the place, then I found that if I pull the cursor close enough to the edge of the screen in the lower left corner, a small box appeared. So I tried to click on the box, which promptly disappeared again. So I moved the cursor back and when it appeared, I tried again. It promptly disappeared again, so I tried again, this time I tried to right-click, still nothing. Ok, seriously this is starting to piss me off. I had no idea what to do, so I fidgeted with the mouse, moving it back and forth in the corner and clicking frantically, first with the left mouse button and then with the right, and suddenly a menu appeared. I realized now, you literally have to be right on the edge, touching the corner perfectly and then right-click the mouse to get the menu to appear. At first glance, I thought it was a context menu, since it didn't look like the start menu. Then sadly I realized Microsoft had fucked with the start menu making it an ugly gray dialog box with system shortcuts. I took a video showing you what it looks like and what you have to go through to see it.

I took a video of various things including my experience with the new Task Manager. I warn you its nothing special. Check the video to see what it looks like.

Here is a video I took of the new Internet Explorer version 10. Check it out, its radically different in every way. I hope it won't look like this on Windows 7.

In this video you will see what Windows Explorer looks like now, its a copy of the Windows 7 version of explorer with a Ribbon interface. Check it out:

So I wanted to get a video of me playing with a bunch of Apps, check it out. Its a little longer than the previous videos, so I added music to it to help pass the time, and since I'm only commenting on some of the stuff I'm playing with I figured it would be a better experience.

I point out a couple of times during these videos how unintuitive Windows 8 actually is. It was while trying to shutdown Windows 8, that I found another blockade. I show you just how hard it is to find the Windows Shutdown command. While it seems easy after the fact, when I first went looking I just couldn't find it.

So I gave this version much more of a chance than the developer preview, which was a complete piece of shit. This preview is still shit, just a little shinier I guess. Everything about the OS screams, "Come and play with me, I'm a cartoony reincarnation of my once former glorious self." You know those cell phones you give old people and children under six, you know the ones with like three buttons on them you have to program. That's what Windows 8 feels like to me, it wants so bad to be one of these:

Instead its one of these:

I think if Microsoft wants even a chance at success with Windows 8, they need to lose Metro as a primary component of Windows. I'm sure its really nice on a tablet, but it sucks major donkey shit on a computer. If they are determined to have this Metro UI be part of Windows, they need to redesign some of the OS. First, when you setup Windows for the first time, it should detect you are not using a tablet and ask you if you'd like to disable Metro and just use the standard desktop. That's a perfectly acceptable way to make Windows 8 a little better. The next thing they can do is fix my fucking Start button and Start menu. If they want any chance at convincing consumers to hand over $300+ for an OS, or $800+ for a new computer they better fix this now before its too late. Consumers do not adapt to change very well. Microsoft already saw this with Windows Vista which flopped. Human beings like changes to be made gradually over time, not all at the same fucking time. It's how greedy oil companies trick consumers into forking over $5+ a gallon for gas. They didn't just raise the price of gas from a dollar to five dollars, they did it gradually over a decade. It's like the boiling frog anecdote. Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water and he will immediately jump out, however put that same frog in a pot of cold water and slowly raise the temperature to a boil, and the frog will boil with it. The last thing Microsoft can do to make Windows 8 more tolerable is fix the malware problem once and for all. If consumers have more to gain than lose, they're certainly more likely to pay for it. 

Almost everyone in this world has had their computer compromised at one time or another by something malicious. At least those people who don't consider themselves to be tech savvy. Considerable time, effort and money are spent trying to solve the problem. Consumers are bombarded daily with attempts to compromise their computers, and many of them have ineffective or no software that will protect them from the problem. Microsoft has the ability to lock down the kernel, preventing much of this code from actually harming the system. They could also take steps to prevent this kind of code from even getting on the system. Windows Defender was a good tool to include with Windows Vista and Windows 7, but it doesn't protect against everything and it stacks up poorly against other products of the same type. Then Microsoft took a major step by releasing Security Essentials, which combined an Anti-Virus solution with a Anti-Spyware solution making it one of the more effective tools in the fight against malware. So while anyone can download this software free of charge, it does not come included with Windows 8. This is a major boneheaded move on the part of Microsoft in my opinion. Also they definitely need to do something about Internet Explorer. While Internet Explorer 9 made great strides toward solving this problem, it is still a vector for infection. Microsoft needs to take a couple more steps in my opinion, first block ads by default. While some ads are harmless tools that allow sites to monetize, most ads are used to bring a user to either an infected site, or used simply to execute code that will cause them to be infected. If you want ads, then either one build a database of known good ad hosts, maybe set something up like the Certificate authority, or two only allow ads that do not run using flash, java, active x, or another scripting language. The second thing that could be done is to setup an intermediary between the browser and the source of a url. That is, when a user clicks on any url, the browser first checks the link through a third-party system that can scan the source of the link to determine whether its safe, and return it to the browser. If the link is not safe, the user gets a message telling them it has been blocked for their safety. Obviously if the user knows the source to be safe or wants to assume the risk, then you have an option for it to be temporarily disabled. This gives them security but also freedom. And lastly, Microsoft needs to release Internet Explorer as open source. The two other major browsers, Chrome and Firefox are both open source. By allowing the community to check the source code of the browser, exploits can be found, and patched more quickly, as well as give programmers an opportunity to develop additions to the browser to help improve and secure it. It would also make the browser more available by allowing developers to port it to a different OS. There is no reason to keep Internet Explorer as a closed source, they don't make money from it, its caused them only grief since they started making it and although they do have browser supremacy right now, over time that will change as Chrome is becoming more widely adopted. I did see something interesting with Internet Explorer 10 while I was looking at it in Windows 8. Much like Google and Mozilla, Microsoft has added the ability for the browser to update itself as soon as there are changes. This allows them to quickly get vital code changes to the browser when needed. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but it won't help Windows 8.

I think about one more thing Microsoft can do to help sell Windows 8. Bundle Microsoft Office with it, at least in the Home Editions. You don't need to give consumers access to all of the tools, most people have no use for Infopath, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Outlook, or Visio. Just give them the basics, Word, Excel and Powerpoint for free. It will help save consumers some cash, by not having to purchase the suite for a couple of apps. Most people have no idea what most of those applications are actually used for with the exception of Outlook, but Outlook is dated for average users. Its now used mostly in corporate settings with an exchange server. I think most people today have some kind of webmail, its rare for anyone to still have a pop3 account to get their mail. And although Outlook can be configured to get webmail, since most people are in their browsers probably 99% of the day, it may be more convenient to get it from the web. Also most people feel its safer if they store their email online, at least from the perspective of disk failure. Why store thousands of emails locally on a hard disk that is just waiting to fail, when you can store them in a cloud where you can get tons of free space that is protected by redundant backup solutions.

So those are a few things Microsoft could do to help sell Windows 8. Of course no amount of help is going to solve the arrogance they have shown toward the consumers who buy their products. While this kind of thing may fly with consumers when it comes to Apple products, I doubt very much that it will fly for Microsoft. If you want to be innovative, inventive and hip, then give people a choice. Give them two competing products, and ask them to choose. You can say, "Hey would you like this outdated, insecure, pretty, standard, product or would you like something new? Something that can be used on many types of hardware, features cutting edge technology and was built with the mobile user in mind." You may not get the result you wanted but at least people will be given the choice. And that's all people really want.

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