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DMCA Post

Congress enacted the DMCA legislation because it wanted to stop digital "piracy" and illegal copyright circumvention but it did not foresee what DMCA would be used for.

According to EFF, twelve years after it's enactment the DMCA's ban on bypassing DMR has not stopped digital copyright infringement but has been used by company's to instead threaten legitimate research and fair competition with legal action.

The EFF currently has three DMCA exemption requests before the Copyright Offices.  One is allowing amateur creators to use excerpts from DVDs for non-commercial creative re-mixes.  Another is to exempt cell phone "jailbreaking" allowing users to use applications from any source.  The third is to allow cell phone users to use any carrier with a specific cell phone.

I think that the DMCA does need to be changed to allow for more creative uses of technology and research.  The not allowing non-commercial remixes of DVDs seems to be too harsh and I think creative amateurs should be able to make what they want as long as they are not profiting from other's intellectual property.  It is kind of dumb that they only allow att as your carrier if you have an iphone and you can only use apps from Apple's app store but I do see where Apple is coming from.

From reading about the EFF on their website, I think they are doing a good thing defending civil liberties when it comes to technology and the misuses of DMCA.  I hope they continue to fight for the rights of creative users and researchers.

Video Mashup

Golddigger + Beethoven's 5th

Wolfram Alpha VS Google

This is a summary of the comparison between google's search engine and wolfram alpha for answering specific questions.

For the query 'All english words containing the letters "eue"', google returned a number of sites none that seemed to answer the question. Wolfram alpha couldn't understand the question, but modifying it to 'words containing eue' wolfram alpha returned a few results: found the words with that sequence of letters was queue, queues, queued.

For 'How much potassium in 4.7 oz of banana?', wolfram alpha immediately understood the question and returned an answer of 477g. Google returned a number of results, none of which on the first page answered the question.

For 'How old was Barrack Obama on the day you were born?', asked wolfram alpha 'How old was Barrack Obama on June 21st, 1980?' and immediately got the answer: 18 years 10 months 17 days. Google seemed to return a lot of pages that had something to do with what Barrack Obama was doing on June 21st, 1980 but no specific answers to the question.

For 'When is the next solar eclipse in Eugene Oregon', wolfram alpha returned a date and time of: 4:52 pm on Sunday May 20th, 2012 while google search returned a few sites with close answers one of them was the next total solar eclipse visible from salem oregon on august 21, 2017. Not sure which of these answers is correct but I'm guessing that for any solar eclipse wolfram alpha is correct and that the answer the google page had is for a total solar eclipse.

For 'What is the minimum and maximum cost of google stock since it went public?' wolfram alpha returned a couple relevant results, one being a history of google stock price in a graph with minimum value $100.01 and maximum $741.79. Google search didn't seem to return any results that specifically answered the question. Searching for 'minimum price of google stock' did return a page that was a sort of summary of google company and history. On the page they gave the price of their initial public offering of $85 in 2004. Seems that wolfram might not have answered the question successfully for the minimum value.

For 'link the image of the bar code 01234567890' wolfram alpha when asked 'image of bar code 01234567890' returned a link to barcode 01234567890 which had a picture of the barcode. Google search resulted in a lot of pages that didn't seem to answer the question, mostly links to barcode generators. Google image search however found the image fairly quickly.

For 'How many vertices does a icosahedron have?' both google search and wolfram alpha immediately returned an answer: 12.

For 'Distance between Eugene Oregon and Tokyo Japan' wolfram alpha immediately understood the question and returned the answer in various units, miles being 4886. Google search didn't come up with many relevant pages and was unable to answer the question in the first page of results.

For the question 'Average Oregon income per capita?' wolfram alpha returned the answer: $31,930 for 2007. Google search also returned answers on pages where the annual income per capita was listed.

For the last question 'what is the morse code for your first name?' entering 'what is morse code for cy' in wolfram alpha immediately returned the answer. Google returned some relevant pages, one where the letters were listed in morse code and it was easy to find cy.

Overall it seemed that for most answers, if you could ask it clearly in simple terms wolfram alpha was by far the better search to use. It seems that google web search is more suited to finding web pages that are about the topic you're interested in and not answering specific questions while wolfram alpha only returns answers to questions but does it very well. If I'm going to be asking a question I would use wolfram alpha first because if you can ask it right it will give you the fastest answer and usually with the most relevant information.

Search Engine Comparisons

Entering "uss yorktown nt" in the four different search engines listed caused similar results in most of the engines. In the google.com, bing.com, and google.cn the first two entries were a wired article then wikipedia, with baidu.com returning wikipedia as the first entry (no wired). Google.com and google.cn were the same for the first 7 entries then different for the last 3 on the first page. The rest of the results seemed to return different but similar pages.

With "google china censorship" again google.com and google.cn were similar in the results they returned for the first page. Google.com's page had a google blog entry in addition to wikipedia and news articles results, while bing.com didn't have the blog but had news articles and wikipedia. Baidu.com results were mainly news organization pages and what appeared to be a few blogs by the url addresses (a few in chinese so didn't know what those were).

"Tiananmen Square" was the most interesting in the differences between the search engines so far. Both google.com and bing.com had wikipedia articles as well as news articles about the 1989 incident but baidu.com and google.cn both had no page results on the 1989 massacre, a clear issue of censorship. The last two search engines were mostly recent news articles about Tiananmen Square but no where did the chinese search engines report pages about the massacre in 1989.

The last search "Taiwan independence" returned interesting results again as both baidu.com and google.cn most likely censored the Taiwan independence movement web pages that both google.com and bing.com in the US had. All the pages had wikipedia article as one of the first results then google.com and bing.com both had movement pages (assuming these would be for those supporting Taiwanese independence) as the next highest results that were absent in the chinese search engines results pages. It was hard to tell what most of the articles on baidu.com and google.cn were because the descriptions were in Chinese but they appeared to be random news articles instead of the movement pages that google.com and bing.com had.

Overall the search engines appeared to be comparable when it came to things that the chinese government wouldn't censor but very different in things the government doesn't want its people looking at/doesn't want to acknowledge. This is an issue of freedom of speech that is certainly at question in china as is apparent by these search results.

Maybe I'm an alt-aholic...

I wouldn't say I'm at the worst end of the spectrum when it comes to having alts, but I definitely spend a lot of time on them. Blizzard has made leveling them a lot easier with heirloom items and those give you something to spend your excess badges on when you don't need gear or something to sell.

What Zurgat says about leveling the bank alt to 20 for a mount is a good idea imo, gonna try that I think. Anyways, he talks about alts in a post here: http://rrvs.blogspot.com/2009/10/alt-holic.html

And then in another good Warcraft blog, Blunt Girl has a post about alts too: http://bluntgrl.blogspot.com/2009/09/alt-holic.html

Are you an alt-aholic?

Trucks in WoW?

Thought this was pretty funny...