What is it that disturbs me?.....hmmm.....The color of this damn blog disturbs me, but that's not what I wanted to talk about. I think two things that bother me the most right now in the US are rights and technology. Of course technology rights are a big thing with me since I'm so into technology. Well what's going on and why am I disturbed? Back when the thoughts of shutting down Napster I began to develop my own opinion of what was going on. Yes, I was one of the millions downloading music from there....does it make it right? No....but I wasn't going to pay $17 for CDs that were utter crap. I had a few speeches and papers that I needed to do for my communications and english classes at my college....so I wrote about Napster. I didn't sit and write about how I just wanted to download music for free forever and ever, I actually wanted to see what was going to happen down the road because of this. What I found scared the crap out of me really, it showed me that in the years to come what we wanted in regards to technological innovation was not going to occur....not because it wasn't thought up or implemented but because someone a few years back made laws that stifled that innovation before it could have even come to bloom. We go theDMCA you can see more info about it at Anti-DMCA, basically I would go to The Electronic Frontier Foundation because they have all the laws, bills that are being introduced, reintroduced....whatever. If you look at the different things that have been introduced you can just tell that these weren't made for the people in mind, in fact the people can protest till they're blue in the face but no one is listening. Does that mean stop telling? stop getting the word out against these rights infringing laws? of course not. Let's take the DMCA for example they have took upon themselves to sue everybody....businesses....individuals....anybody that has any kind of connections with P2P File Sharing, but for christ's sake they sued a 12 yr old girl and 71 yr old man...just recently they wanted to sue a 66 yr old women for $300,000,000.00 I all the zeroes in so you could see how much money that is. (The woman was a case of mistaken identity) Come on now, this is ridiculous....if it's that serious I won't even bother to buy CDs anymore, because this is sure not encouraging me to. Then you got the Copy Protected Media if you do buy CDs. Then you got Internet Censorship going on....but its going on with Google and what something like that does is basically erase whatever it is from existence. Why? because the majority of the people use google to search and if you can't find it in google you probably won't look elsewhere to find it. That's some heavy stuff, but it as well goes unnoticed by the public...then you got things that were supposed to be here to help us which could really be used against us. USA Patriot Act Even this crap with SCO and GNU/Linux is garbage the only thing that all of these issues really shows is that money talks and not everything is done FOR the people. The GNU/Linux issue is of concern to me since I like to run it myself, but the bad mouthing that Mircosfot is doing is pissing me off. I guess the hope for me there is that so many other countries are migrating to GNU/Linux that if there ever comes a time where the US just pasts some crazy law, banning Linux I'll have plenty of other places to live. Well that was my partial rant for the day....gotta go.