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."