Categories
Personal

Jason’s Rules of Philosophy

Today, Bets and I undertook a massive task: to go through the accumulated papers of 10 years, and dump what needed to be dumped. We just threw out a 4 drawer filing cabinet, and it was packed with useless papers. One of these papers was the following, from my time at OU as a Master’s student in philosophy. My observed rules of the academic study of philosophy.

  1. Whenever someone says “I will show” they probably won’t.
  2. Any ethical argument that relies on a Nazi example is automatically at question.
  3. The non-philosophical default setting for metaphysics is realism; for ethics is relativism; and for logic is ignorance.
  4. Even diehard Idealists won’t step in front of a bus
  5. “Ceteris Paribus” conditions aren’t and won’t

If any of that makes any sense, you paid attention in Intro to Philosophy.

Categories
Digital Culture

Keeeeenaaaaadaaaaaa!!!!!

Tetsuo!!!!

Man. Gotta have me one of these. Talk about serious geek.

Categories
Master's Paper Personal

Going to bed now.

Another night of the Master’s Paper. Bibliography = check. Abstract = check. Subject headings = check. All formatting = check. All that’s missing is that seal of approval from Paul, which hopefully comes this weekend.

Master's Paper Progress

Categories
Digital Culture

Here’s a prediction…

Someone in SILS next year will take one of these two new Open Source Social Networking systems, install it, and finally the dream of SILSter will be realized.

Peopleaggregator and Slashter

Categories
Digital Culture

Wow…

….finally, after many, many hours of work, and countless evenings up late, finally the Master’s Paper is finished.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues Media

P2P ruled legal in Canada

A Canadian Federal Court ruled today that file-sharing via shared directories (a la P2P software) is perfectly legal and does not violate Canadian copyright law.

Story here.

Allow me to reiterate: “Screw you, RIAA CRIA, you bunch of money grubbing litigious jerkwads.”

Update: link to decision here.

Categories
Digital Culture Media

P2P research right here at Carolina…

From BoingBoing, a story about an economics professor here at UNC that’s come to the conclusion that (*gasp, shock*) illegal downloading of music doesn’t actually affect album sales.

A quote from the paper: “Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale…high selling albums actually benefit from file sharing. ”

Allow me to translate the gist of the paper to non-academic speak for those not at a University:

“Screw you, RIAA, you bunch of money grubbing litigious jerkwads.”

Categories
Master's Paper Personal

It’s 3am..do you know where your sanity is?

Statistics for Master's paper - 3am, 03/29/04

Categories
Master's Paper Personal

Master’s Paper update

  • 31 pages
  • writing the conclusion
  • found lots of damning evidence on the ALA website about their copyright policies
  • pretty happy with the way its going
  • just like in 28 days later, the end is very fucking nigh
Categories
Digital Culture

Get some Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig’s newest book, Free Culture, is available for download on his website, licensed under a Creative Commons license.