It’s a nice song, so besides being able to sing it, I thought it’d be fun to play it on a keyboard/piano. The chords are pretty straightforward. Here they are:

C G F E | F G C (G/C)

They’re all major chords, and they’re each one measure long, except the final G can sometimes be just C major for another measure (like at the end of the song). The | is just to divide the eight measures into groups of four so that it’s easier to read. Those chords are repeated the whole song. The melody is pretty easy as well, especially once you have those chords down. If you play the Rumble Fish intro, the melody begins as ABCD|E with E being played at the same time as the chords begin playing. The actual melody (the singing part) begins on E.

That’s the Rumble Fish version. The original is in G major, with the sung melody beginning on B, and with the following chords:

G D C B | C D G (D/G)

Anyway, for those who find this useful, enjoy playing the song!

But earlier this week, the Swedish media reported new information that the judge who decided the case is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, an organization of industry people fighting against “piracy,” along with—surprise!—the people who represented the recording industry in the case against The Pirate Bay. Knowing this, it’s definitely hard to see that judge ruling in favor of TPB. I guess we were onto something when we thought it was weird that they’d been convicted so easily. The defendants are now planning a retrial. (via Ars)

Slightly unrelated to this latest bit of news, this short post at brokep’s blog sums up what’s going on here. This is why more people like you and me should become lawyers.

From pages 249-250:

Technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.

To resist this threat, we need specific changes to reestablish a balance between control and creativity. Our aim should be a system of sufficient control to give artists enough incentive to produce, while leaving free as much as we can for others to build upon and create.

In setting this balance, there are a few ideas to keep in mind. First, we live in a world with “free” content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We refer to plots in movies to tell jokes without the permission of the director. We read books to our children borrowed from a library without any payment for performance rights to the original copyright holder. The fact that content at any particular time is free tells us nothing about whether using that content is “theft.” Similarly, an argument for increasing control by content owners needs more than “they didn’t pay for this use” to back it up.

Second, and related, the reason perfect control is not our aim is that creation is always the building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the earlier appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free society; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Finally, while control is needed, and perfectly justifiable, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection… Before the monopoly should be permitted, there should be reason to believe it will do some good—for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

And from page 265:

The law is the instrument through which a technological revolution is undone. And since we barely understand how the technologists built this revolution, we don’t even see when the lawyers take it away. As activist and technologist John Gilmore has put it, in a line that captures the puzzle of this book: “[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. . . . I think,” Gilmore continues, “we should embrace the era of plenty, and work out how to mutually live in it.”

Finally, this last paragraph of the book is compelling:

We move through this moment of an architecture of innovation to, once again, embrace an architecture of control—without noticing, without resistance, without so much as a question. Those threatened by this technology of freedom have learned how to turn the technology off. The switch is now being thrown. We are doing nothing about it.

Time to begin Free Culture.

So, briefly, what’s usable (and totally free!) on a Mac these days?

Colloquy

Colloquy was the IRC client I started using when I first got my MacBook. Importantly, it makes every attempt to conform to the Mac Human Interface Guidelines. It seems decent, but to an mIRC user like me the interface can actually end up slightly frustrating. A possibly more major problem I had was that it would randomly run up the CPU usage really high once in a while, causing the CPU fan to turn on. I’d then have to close the program and start it up again. I’m not sure if it’s been fixed by now, but I’m sure they’ve made some progress overall since then, at least. In any case, Colloquy has a few problems, but it’s certainly usable; I just don’t prefer it.

X-Chat Aqua

Until yesterday, for about a year, I used X-Chat Aqua. In terms of configurability, X-Chat Aqua is pretty good. It has rather extensive options, just as an mIRC user (or an X-Chat user…) would expect to have, and, similarly, the interface is okay but definitely could be better. It’s not out of Alpha yet (and development seems to have stalled a bit) but still seems stable enough.

However, there are some problems with it common to other ports from Windows/Linux (e.g. MS Office); assigning a Space to it in Spaces preferences does nothing. But I would still say that, overall, X-Chat Aqua really isn’t bad. (X-Chat Aqua may be comparable to an older and shareware—but still maintained—Mac IRC client called Snak. I also tried it and don’t think Snak is really worth the bother since X-Chat Aqua does pretty much a similar job.)

LimeChat

I’m glad I found LimeChat the other day. Relatively new and under development, it has some of the mIRC familiarity just as in X-Chat Aqua but with an arguably better interface and easier setup. It’s functional, yet certainly lightweight, and it doesn’t look bad, as far as IRC clients go, at all. I’ve yet to run into any real problems with it, except I almost just kept using X-Chat Aqua until I found the LimeChat keyboard shortcuts to switch between channels easily (cmd + up/down). They definitely should have shown how to do that in the program itself instead of just on the website/documentation.

Anyway, I’d really currently recommend LimeChat for any OS X IRC user. If I find any problems, I’ll update this, and if anyone has further comments, please do make them!

Where do my priorities lie right now? More specifically, where do I think my priorities should lie? In other words, I don’t follow this strictly, but maybe I should… Well, it’s really some mix of what I should follow and what I do follow. Anyway, without further ado, let’s organize this in tiers in which, within a tier, priorities are dynamically close to equal (relative to items in other tiers).

top tier

• God/prayer (I definitely need to improve here…)
• family
• friends
• schoolwork

high tier

• music (including piano)
• getting distracted philosophizing (more like simply collecting my thoughts and/or thinking about metaphysics, contemplating my existence, and so on)

third tier

• Rice Go club
• Rice Thresher

fourth tier

• other club activities (Hong Kong Student Association, Rice Taiwanese Association, etc.)
• StarCraft (with the whole Collegiate Starleague thing going on)
• swimming
• playing Go for fun, improving myself, and sharpening my mind

bottom tier (still priorities nonetheless)

• taking the time to explore interests related to some goals in life (i.e. cyber law, Lessig)
• clearing up my reading list (extremely slow progress at the moment)
• redesigning this blog (creating Pax Asiana v4) and fixing technical problems
• blogging (oops)

Yeah, so blogging is a priority of some sort at least. I’ve just scarcely found the proper combination of inspiration, time, and energy recently. I’ve (almost) always believed that blogging should be done whenever one feels like it, but I really should push myself to blog more. Sorry about that.

Another thing to notice is that Super Smash Bros. Brawl is not listed as a priority. I do it in between different things (although not so much recently) to relieve some stress, but it’s not something I take seriously; it’s really, really just for fun.

One final thing—I’d definitely appreciate prayer for my family. Thanks.

Akinator is pretty cool (http://en.akinator.com/). You think of a real or fictional character and play the game twenty questions with this genie dude interface. If you don’t know what twenty questions is, you are basically asked questions about the character you’ve decided on, to which you respond yes or no (although with this thing you can also choose “probably/partially,” “probably not/not really,” or “I don’t know”). After twenty questions it tries to guess the character.

For fun, here’s a list of characters it did and didn’t get correctly for some of my friends and me:

Characters it guessed correctly:

• Suzumiya Haruhi (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya)
• Lelouch Lamperouge (Code Geass)
• Euphemia li Britannia (Code Geass)
• Setsuna F Seiei (Gundam 00)
• Tieria Erde (Gundam 00)
• Osaka (Azumanga Daioh)
• Light (Death Note)
• Arbiter (Halo)
• Hydralisk (StarCraft)
• Captain Falcon
• Captain Planet
• Jolin Tsai
• Richard Stallman
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Anubis
• Condoleezza Rice
• Otto von Bismarck
• Ron Paul
• Armin van Buuren
• Tony the Tiger
• Longcat

Characters it didn’t guess correctly:

• Taeyeon (SNSD) — it guessed BoA
• Younha — it guessed BoA
• Sarah Kerrigan (StarCraft) — it guessed Tanya (Red Alert)
• Marine (StarCraft) — Jim Raynor (StarCraft)
• Archon (StarCraft) — Tassadar (StarCraft)
• Gold Roger (One Piece) — Sir Crocodile (One Piece)
• Ma Ying-jeou — Hu Jintao
• Charles Darwin — Isaac Newton

Mostly everyone condemns terrorism and has a multitude of problems with it by now, so I want to turn the American consumer’s attention to the Black Friday incident at a Long Island Walmart. As he was opening the doors, a man died as he was trampled on by people rushing into the store.

It’s not inherently bad to want to get some better deals on a Friday morning. (I actually really enjoy Black Friday.) But what’s bad is selfishness to the point of totally ignoring everybody around you and even stepping on someone in order to achieve a goal. If you’re a friend of mine reading my blog, you wouldn’t do this, but even so, it’s really sad to hear that something like this happened. I mean, this guy was a temporary worker there that morning just trying to earn some money and get his job done, and terrible, unreasonable things happen to him. Obviously he wasn’t murdered, but he was killed by the ignorance and selfishness of others. Don’t let this happen around you. They should have just done the whole lining up deal like we have around here to prevent such inane tragedies.

Is it really? It’s definitely pretty bad, that is, bad enough so that a Republican administration wants to spend $700B to alleviate the economy—alleviate the economy—and not save it, because it’s impossible to totally prevent a recession at this point, but only to make sure it’s not so bad as it could be. It’s also certain that we’re not feeling the full effects of the crisis quite yet and that it’ll last for some time. On the other hand, some people, at least, are probably going too crazy about it, when, really, the good times are going to eventually roll in again. Maybe it’s just my outlook on life, though.

Next, we should think about whether the state doing this and that to simply help alleviate the effects on the economy is going to work. I’m not sure exactly what to think about it. From a purely laissez-faire perspective, one would think it’s crazy. And it very well might be. But, as my parents explained to me, what investors want right now is confidence and assurance, or else the market just goes straight down. The bailout plan may do just that, even if it’s not going to help that much realistically, but it does at least a positive illusion or impression so that investors want to keep their money in the market.

Even so, we have to ask if that’s a wise use of government money, because, hey, that’s seven hundred billion dollars, and it’s not from thin air; it’s our money being spent to alleviate the problems of some huge, once extremely profitable companies who were fiscallly irresponsible. Speaking from a strictly constitutional and free market perspective, it is the wrong thing to do, but with the way people expect the government to do things for them these days, it might be worse to show investors a rough lesson by ignoring their pleas. The government, most believe, has to do something, even if there’s a chance it might not work.

But the government shouldn’t have to do that something. So then what should it do? Something or nothing? Follow constitutional principles or be pragmatic? It’s hard for me to say outright that one of those options is right and one is not, because both have their pros and cons. Maybe the government should do something, but not to that extent and not of that nature. Who knows, anyway? I’m pretty sure the government isn’t so sure of itself, either, and neither is either major presidential candidate, no matter what policy they espouse.

WOW! FROG EGGS?!

I have to write this post sometime or another. So here goes.

This summer, I was in Taiwan on a Taiwanese government program for four weeks called Assisting Individuals with Disadvantages. We taught English to kids for two weeks; the first week, we were being “trained” to do the job, and the last week we went on a tour of Taiwan. It was amazing, really. My teaching group, eight of us, formed a pretty awesome group of friends. My roommates from the training week were also cool. The students I taught were a lot of fun, and we were close enough for me to cry a little bit at the closing ceremony—one of my students had written a speech in English and read it aloud to an extremely appropriate piano playing in the background. And even in the final week, I got to know some sugoi people pretty well, thanks to the KPop song Tell Me by the Wonder Girls (long story? not really, but maybe I don’t feel like explaining it, haha).

I miss a lot of random things about Taiwan. For example—everybody has and will continue to mention this, but it’s true—7-Eleven is awesome there. At Seven (what people call it there), you can buy any type of drink—bottled milk tea, various kinds of bottled teas, Supau, Japanese drinks like Pocari, even various kinds of… alcohol—as well as onigiri, good instant noodles, and other random good stuff. Don’t forget they always have air conditioning, too. Seven is so much of an oasis in Taiwan that we even tried (yes, tried) to walk there in a typhoon. Not kidding.

Things are cheap in Taiwan. Of course, this is an American’s point of view because the standard of living doesn’t require as much money over there (and there’s no minimum wage). I miss paying less than a dollar for a large cup of bubbletea. My students were shocked to hear that I paid about 300 NT ($3 USD) at home… Food in general is extremely cheap (and really good); $3 for a decent, cooked, meal, anyone? And note that this $3 meal isn’t simply three fast food items off the dollar menu at Wendy’s. Even clothes, for once, are cheap there. You can buy decent fobby/Asian-trendy shirts for, say, $10-15 there. Or less. So I actually bought a few clothes there.

The humid weather deserves a mention. Yes, it’s hot in Taiwan, but I don’t think it’s really noticeably worse than Houston. Different from Dallas, yes, but that’s to be expected. And it’s not that I like that type of weather, but it’s definitely manageable.

In general, it was a lot of fun being put right into the culture. In Hualien, it was always funny seeing a street big enough for one car, with a car going through, then a car trying to get through from the other side, causing one to reverse a little bit, all the while motor scooters and maybe random bikes try to squeeze through. Hualien City itself has exactly one McDonald’s, one Starbucks, and one KFC, I believe, and this allows it to be considered a big enough city. One of each of those may not sound like much, but there are many, many random tea stands and a good number of tasty ice places… as well as a manga rental shop (a Blockbuster for manga, I guess) maybe here and there.

I miss Taiwan, all the people I met there, my relatives, too, that I don’t get to see very often. It’s all a part of my heritage, like Hong Kong.

He gave what would seem to be a fairly standard talk on his philosophy and ethics of Free Software (as well as how we should all support this endeavor). Because I hadn’t heard the whole thing together as a whole, I thought it was really interesting to get to hear all this from him.

Now, I’m in COMP 140 (a new introductory computer science class at Rice) this semester. Online, one of my two professors for the class posed these questions online, “Everyone who uses free software loves it and there are legions of dedicated people contributing to the free software movement. But should, as Richard Stallman proposes, software be fundamentally free and open? Shouldn’t software developers be financially compensated for their intellectual creations or is there some larger societal need that is more important?” I responded just a little bit ago (and I probably wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the extra credit involved, since I need to work on a lot of other stuff, too). This is what I wrote:

Software does not have to be necessarily free, as defined by rms. Although free software benefits all of us, allowing software to be copyrighted and giving the author freedom should still be permitted. Both free and unfree software may benefit users (to highly varying degrees) and in different ways. Many have always argued that the market simply cannot support the development of free software if software were free, but there are certainly instances today of companies investing their resources in developing free software—for investment and eventual profit. The games industry has yet to embrace the free software philosophy, but it is economically possible; a very large group of highly interested gamers can pay companies money to develop free software. This seems unlikely now, but what would be needed is a shift in culture and circumstances to force people to do something like this. Even so, multiplayer online play for games could still be paid for by advertisements or monthly fees to play on the server.

In any case, totally abolishing current models of software distribution by law seems fairly radical. After all, copyright, to a certain extent, is embedded in the Constitution and defended by Jefferson, again, only to a certain extent (yet even so, most people and politicians would hardly care either way). Thus, copyright, and not just copyleft, should be allowed a continued existence in the context of software. I still, however, believe that modern copyright and software patents are far overreaching and too restrictive. Entrenched corporations holding their copyrights tend to become blind and forget about true innovation, since it becomes increasingly trivial to their short-term profits (see Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas). Even if all software doesn’t have to be free, copyright reform continues to be increasingly necessary as corporations and their lobbyists accelerate their copyright extensions and restrictive amendments to the law, taking away already existing freedoms from users.

So I don’t really agree with rms on all points, but I certainly support his crusade to some extent, hate DRM (yes, digital restrictions management… I found it funny how he never mentioned what the acronym originally comes from as set by corporations, “digital rights management”), and all that good stuff. But as a proud Mac OS X and Quicksilver user, I highly value practical software (not necessarily not free), yet I am also highly interested in supporting certain ideals, like liberty. I’d like to add a disclaimer to what I’ve just said, though; my opinion on this matter is certainly subject to change.

I also really want to explore and write more about this topic, but alas, not now… There are many other things I’d have liked to blog about before writing this, but I already wrote that response for my class, so I figured I might as well post it here. I guess I’ll write next about Taiwan and my experience there.

And finally, without further ado, here’s a picture with me and rms himself, but not in his saintly Church of Emacs outfit. Haha…