Thoughts

Well, it has been a while, and for the most part I've been busy.

I'm getting ready to sleep and felt that it might be handy to do some writing to everyone as to an update.

These past couple of weeks have been fairly busy for me. I competed in a Japanese speech contest last Sunday, and swam in a swim meet on Saturday, so I'd been spending quite a bit of time practicing my speech and swimming.

THE SPEECH!

The speech contest was fun in all honesty. There was some Australian lady with a terrible, terrible Japanese accent, but really good Japanese, that gave a talk about the "heart" of Japan. I didn't catch most of it as I left to practice my speech. The Wife mentioned that she said some very interesting things about the nature of Kata in modern Japan. I forget the actual phrases, but she mentioned that in modern Japan the idea of Kata, or the form of something, with form for forms sake. Thus most things were being executed quite inefficiently and without heart, or so I recall. You'll have to ask her about it. Anyway, speech contest went pretty good. Two of The Wife's students gave speeches in English. The guy slurred all his words together and was utterly incomprehensible, though his speech showed an excellent amount of thought. His topic was on the nature of the Japanese constitution in lieu of sending members of the Self-Defense-Force to Iraq. The Japanese constitution says that their military units can only be used in country to defend it. He was concerned about the press of militarization of his currently peaceful country.

As far as I can tell he knows the "real" histories of W.W.II and not what is usually taught (most Japanese textbooks don't mention anything about Nanking, some even suggest that the Chinese welcomed them into their country to protect them).

The Wife's other student, I don't know her name, gave a speech about not losing sight of Japanese culture in an attempt to become like a western nation. She didn't suffer from incomprehensibility, so I didn't have to read her speech to know what she was talking about. She thought that being involved in an international environment called Japanese to recognize and attempt to understand the outside world, but at the same time, understand itself. A pretty good speech all in all.

The only other student giving an English speech talked about the Japanese bathing customs and how foreigners should understand them. I didn't think the speech was very strong, but she had very good pronunciation.

Those judges that were judging on content, felt that The Wife's female student had the best speech, but they were over ruled, meaning the speech contest was merely a measure of pronunciation, and being under the 5 minute time limit, which The Wife's students were not.

The Japanese section of the speech contest was what was really amusing. There were 5 of us, a 26, 25, 22, 14, and 9 year old. So judging I could tell would be interesting to say the least. The 26 year old had been in Japan a year, me, a year and a half, and the 22 year old seven years I believe. The 14 year old came to Japan when she was 5 and had grown up in the Japanese school system, and the 9 year old had been born in Japan. Needless to say, the 9 year old and 14 year old spoke perfect Japanese, of course, they were "nonnative" speakers because they weren't Japanese themselves. As Forest and I were talking, Forest mentioned, they wouldn't even count me as a Japanese, and I recalled a story that we found fairly early on in our stay. Japan likes to proclaim internationalism, and so they champion that fact whenever they can, like "Chinese man becomes head of local PTA," but what you don't see in the headline is that his family has been living in Japan for three generations, both his grandparents and parents had been living here for quite some time. So, even this Chinese man, probably could have competed in the contest. Anyway, even though I lost to the 14 year old and 9 year old. I was pleased with what I did, and had a fun time of it. It was a very good experience. The End.

THE SWIM MEET!

This was by far the most bizarre event I have participated in for quite some time. Everything started at 10:30 PM on Saturday and went until 2:00 AM Sunday. We started with chain walking, where five people had to walk together in a chain. That went on for a half hour, then the continuous swim began, and from 11:00 until 1:30 we were swimming in a relay. My team did okay, we swam 11100 meters, which isn't bad considering the fact that most of my team could not swim a contiguous 50 meters. The top team swam 13200 meters, and they were the local Jr. High and High school swim team, so I'm not at all ashamed of what my team did (I mean when 80% of your team is 50 years old, you just can't expect to keep up with a team of youngin's that swim 4 hours a day). I will say that I outswam most of the people there, with the exception of one coach, who, if I can ever beat I will be very happy. At midnight they turned off all the lights and we had to cross the pool wearing glow stick micky mouse ears. That went on for a half hour, then back to the swimming. Afterwards there was a party and I didn't get home until 3:30 in the morning. I generally enjoyed myself. While we were swimming people would talk to me, but at the party I sat alone for most of it, I was one of the first people to sit down at a table and no one sat next to me :( After some people started to leave, my team invited me over to sit with them and I talked with them a bit, in both Japanese and English. A man gave me advice, "Because your wife is sleeping, she will not be happy if you disturb her when she comes home." And one of the guys was a textile trader and I actually understood a joke.

OTHER!

I was quite worried that I would be swamped and I've been quite dilligent in trying to maintain my schooling this week, but it turns out that I didn't need to fear, a programming project has been pushed back another week so I can do that this coming week.

And I make my appearance...

The Wife speaks, and now I get to refer to the other as The Husband? Hum. Perhaps I will go with the Kansai "danna," but it just looks funny in English. I wish I had a cutsie nickname for him. Ah well.

In things I have discovered today--there is (maybe) another planet! They are calling it Sedna after an Inuit goddess of the ocean. Nothing is official yet, though. (Plus it might have a moon!)

I also have run across an interesting article about British history, with new discoveries based on isotopes found in ancient teeth. How far could isotope research go? What other historical trends we take for granted could be challenged with this?

This is the sum total of my first ever post. Expect more!

Thoughts

Oh yeah, also played roleplaying roulette, didn't get what I wanted, but it was cheap. Ended up with a copy of The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game by Decipher, and a silver anniversary D&D, by TSR, now owned by Wizards of the Coast, collectors set which included a copy of the original D&D rules as well as several of their published modules. I must say LoTR RPG is actually fairly well put together from what I've read so far. It does a decent job in capturing the feel of the world which includes the differences of culture. Certainly it is less complex than its predecessor MERP or "Middle Earth Roleplaying Game."

Thoughts

Okay, back on topic. As I was saying, I think that the FSF and the GNU project are very important to maintaining an open and vibrant industry in technology and so I tend to agree with the comments below. I also believe that credit be given where credit is due, however, this is where it gets tricky. In 1998 the DMCA was passed, this, in general applied copyright and patent laws to the digital arena, while adding new provisions to stop people from circumventing protection schemes. Unfortunately, the DMCA is overly broad and is being used in numerous cases to crack down on legitimate research and development of competing technologies, Dr. Felten's case just being one of them. The problem is both with the broadness of the law, but also of the threat of litigation that it brings. In fact, several of the cases being brought to court on the DMCA are being dismissed or overturned by higher courts, however, as the letter from Dr. Felten shows, the cost of engaging in the litigation alone can keep people from publishing works. The biggest example of a legal battle that has not gone well for the side of the RIAA or MPAA is the DeCSS case of Jon Lech Johansen of Norway. Even in California the DVD CCA, a group of entertainment and technology companies, has backed down. Anyway, the only problems I really have with the law come from its very broad terms and its use as a threatening stick, regardless of the actual feasibility of the case. I was having this argument with R from shigaraki, and I do see his side of it, as someone who is planning to publish in scientific journals. However, I don't want my publishing to be threatened by legal action, as I doubt I will have the money to deal with it. There were a lot of things I was uncertain of during the argument, as it has been several years since I've studied digital rights management. I mean, I did write an API for DRM in 2001 and so I had to be quite familiar with the terms and the law. I knew I had problems with it, but wasn't entirely certain what they were, but now, after a bit of research again, I have rediscovered what they are. There are, of course, other things involved, such as the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act which further threaten legitimate and "fair use" practices. I think this letter by the ACM puts it very well, "Any further legislative action -- such as the SSSCA -- which focuses on constraining or outlawing technology instead of penalizing behavior can only serve to weaken our educational systems, impede our technological dominance, and interfere with our electronic security. Anyway, I think that about sums up what I think about that for now. I'm not going to say I have it figured out, but I wanted to let those of you who read it know that R, I am not going to dismiss your point of view. You made me do some searching and I found what I needed to know. It wasn't that any of the examples I gave were in fact illegal by the DMCA, it is okay to reverse engineer to develop an interoperable system (DeCSS), just that it can be threatened by legal action. I hope also that I made you do the same.

In other, lighter news, Aku Ender apparently had a rippin' show last Friday. You can read about it at his place.

Thoughts

Well, it has been quite a while since I've updated this for no good reason really. The weather is finally turning nice and I have doffed my coat in favor of the lighter, more comfortable sweater. I must say, I have been encouraged by Aku Ender's tales of martial prowess in the past couple of weeks in sparring his Tang Soo Do instructor. I hear that he did very well. It inspired me to go to the river where I spent ages observing three beautiful black cranes moving through the river. I took their movements into my memory and retired to the mountain where I practiced them until I successfully perfected the Three Black Crane style. I took many challengers and all fled before me. I think this has to do more with them not expecting a gaijin on top of the mountain sitting there meditating on the book I was reading than my fierce moves.

Life

I'm also sort of busy translating a speech into Japanese for a speech contest which I mentioned a little earlier. The topic was on "My Impressions of Japan," which is a pretty large topic. The Wife was going to do the contest, but decided she didn't have the time so I took her speech on Tea, of course it's been pared down to the most simplistic Japanese, but since Tea has sort of become one of my hobbies, I figured that the topic would be at least fun and inoffensive.

School

We've moved from formal proofs to formal automata in computer security. I love this stuff, but I know people sort of glaze when I start talking about it, so I'll leave it at that.

I was reading recently an article from ACM's "Queue" publication on the relevance of GNU Tools. The article, "GNU Tools, Still Relevant?" discusses a bit of the political nature of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), but also the relevance in the market of GNU. Moglen, a Columbia University professor of law, states, that:

The Monopoly and other "owners" have temporarily deluded the world into thinking that the free exchange of ideas, which has so successfully characterized Western science since the sixteenth century, is an inappropriate basis for technological, as opposed to basic scientific, progress. Our goal is to provide a mixed theoretical and practical demonstration that freedom is the only morally satisfactory basis for innovation in software, and beyond software in other forms of human intellectual effort. Far from being irrelevant, we are more important every day."

Obviously some of the political views of the FSF are clearly evident in this quote, but I tend to agree with him. There is a lot of innovative, free software coming from different sources, sourceforge being, perhaps, the most well known. The FSF hopes to creative an economy where information has a "zero marginal cost," which means changing the ways companies make money. Most Linux distros make money by selling CDs with the operating system, but also performing maintenance on those distros. Similarily there are many online sevices that are now renting movies for $ .99, suggesting that the new economy is going to be based on making information available to everyone, but the services to do so will generate the income. Moglen goes on to say that

if the media and software monopolies manage to hold onto those monopolies, "the result would be vast profit margins for them, at the expense of exclusion for those who cannot afford knowledge and culture" at artificially high prices and "who out to have free access to music, art, learning, software, and bandwidth."

Thoughts

I just found this article and I was quite amazed. Imagine being able to find user IDs and passwords using google. Well, you can. Later.

Thoughts

Well, I watched へえ　へえ　へえ　again tonight. It is an amusing show. It was suggested to us by a friend of ours as an excellent show to work on our Japanese. Since it goes over the trivia several times, slowly, it is fairly easy to pick up something of what is going on. One of the things I learned tonight, 99% of all calico cats are female and Godzilla flew in Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) by using his atomic breath. I missed this one, but they had it in the recap, apparently there was at one point in time in Japanese history a Ninja strike. Just imagine, you're attempting to compete with your neighbors, but don't know what the Jones' have, so you have your ninjas investigate and find that the Jones' just bought a new gun of some sort. You get one yourself, but you're still nervous but when you try to send your ninjas again they say no way, you're not paying us enough for the danger. What do you do? Apparently not pay your mystical assassins. I'm not sure if, as a ruler, that would be a good policy, but apparently the ninjas wouldn't stand for it and had themselves a strike. The power of the people... backed by mystical killing powers, which reminds me of the Ninja wars that took place in the early 16th century as part of the Onin no Ran and Sengoku Jidai. The Koga ninja houses, not physical houses, but groups, asserted their power as a political force and actually halted the armies coming north from kyoto. They began to set up the new Japanese capital at present day Otsu, seeing as it had a lovely view of Biwako. However, an infusion of Buddhist Monks coming up with the Shogun quickly subdued the Ninja Insurrection, but for a period of about 3 months, Japan was in control of the Koga Ninjas. Later.

Thoughts

I just have one thing to add right now and that is a link to a site, True Stories. The home page also has some interesting pictures, but they are primarily of models so they lacked the natural weirdness of Japan. I'm going out walking now, and I'm hoping to get some of my own pictures. So ta ta.