Dinhternet

My com­puter at home is act­ing up. I knew that the ATi 4800 series ran hot, so I got a ver­sion of my card that had a bet­ter fan, but appar­ently that isn’t enough or the fan is dying or some­thing, because my video card keeps over­heat­ing and forc­ing my sys­tem to shut down.

Now that I’ve beaten Fall­out 3, not sure if I need the video card for any­thing, so I might just pull it out tonight. The on-board video can han­dle web brows­ing and play­ing videos fine, and that’s all I’ll be doing until Fall­out 4 comes out or some other 3-D game catches my fancy. Plus I’ll be sav­ing some energy. If you’re read­ing this, I hope you’re happy, Gina L!

I was also think­ing about get­ting net­work stor­age, but it would go to waste since my fam­ily is split­ting up this sum­mer. Plus I’m try­ing to save money for other things. Maybe if needed wher­ever I end up, I’ll recon­sider. Since gam­ing isn’t a big con­cern for me any more, huge net­work stor­age and a lap­top could be a lot more prac­ti­cal for me.

What if every­thing in the world was more like Wikipedia?

Besides the more obvi­ous changes in edu­ca­tion, I think an area that would really be turned on its head is adver­tis­ing. What if all the ads you see and hear had to cite sources to prove their claims?

I bring this up because of the recent news of MGMT suing Sarkozy of using their song with­out per­mis­sion at an event and in online videos. As the arti­cle points out, it is extremely ironic because Sarkozy and his party have been push­ing very strongly worded anti-filesharing laws.

I don’t know how MGMT’s views on copy­right line up with mine, so I won­der if they are really try­ing to get paid for this, or if they are using the sit­u­a­tion to spread brand aware­ness.

When I was in Japan, every com­mer­cial on TV started with text at the bot­tom giv­ing you infor­ma­tion about the back­ground music, sim­i­lar to the start of music videos. I won­der if more musi­cians would open up on copy­right if they received credit, even non-monetary, for their efforts and contributions.

Wow, this is some pretty fucked up shit. For­eign­ers can hon­estly win argu­ments against Amer­i­cans through Godwin’s Law now.

By the way, when Omar Khadr’s (one of those chil­dren men­tioned in the arti­cle above) lawyers released these inter­ro­ga­tion videos online, it cre­ated a big stir in the media.

And not always in the righteous-outrage way. There were Amer­i­cans who laughed, and said he deserved it all. (My grand­fa­ther was one of them, and he didn’t even know what Khadr was charged with.) Really? Even if he did really kill an Amer­i­can sol­dier with a grenade in a fire­fight (and the Pen­ta­gon admit­ted they have no proof of this), did he really deserve this? He was cap­tured at the age of fif­teen, and has been held for the last six years in Guan­tanamo. That’s nearly a third of his life! And we have video proof of tor­ture, which occurred God knows how often dur­ing his stay in Cuba. Even the sick­est Amer­i­can ser­ial killers got bet­ter treat­ment than that.

I can’t even begin to imag­ine what his psy­cho­log­i­cal state is. He’s so eager to get out of there, he’s the only detainee will­ing to go through a mil­i­tary tri­bunal now rather than wait for the Supreme Court’s recent deci­sion to work itself out and get a reg­u­lar trial.

Oh, and fun fact I learned today… even if Khadr and the other detainees win their tri­als and are found inno­cent of their crimes, they can still be held indef­i­nitely by the US gov­ern­ment until the Pres­i­dent over­turns their sta­tus as “enemy com­bat­ants,” or ends our “War on Terror.”