I have decided to check my influence by starting a meme. However, I have no creative ability whatsoever to actually make that meme. Ergo, I've decided to dump the responsibility on you by creating the meme of creating crappy memes that won't go anywhere! *laughs evilly*

Today I finally no longer have braces. Now I'll finally be able to eat ribs, which are banned while you're in braces. The only downside is that in certain ways the retainer sucks more than the braces do.

Bush's solution: take away our freedoms!

In hono(u)r of this I made this. Stargate came from here and the truck doesn't really matter because it doesn't take much work to photograph a truck but that Stargate render probably took a lot more work.

It's quite indicative of Digg that this gets almost twice as many diggs as this or this.

Okay, last night or so I downloaded The White Stripes' "Get Behind Me Satan" from iTunes with a $15 card bought as a present(16th birthday, not that it matters). Today, while listening to the Foo Fighters, my iPod decides to freeze(it always seems to freeze while listening to that album, and no, it's not from iTMS, most likely iTunes did something wrong on ripping) so I had to reset my iPod. And the White Stripes wouldn't play anymore. On each song, it waits about a second then goes to the next song and does the same thing until all 14 songs are done. I assume it's lost the DRM key. (Yet another reason why I hate DRM.) Attempting to use the iPod updater doesn't work, gives some weird error. My normal USB drive works in Windows, and my iPod works as a USB stick in Linux. But Windows thinks that my iPod is unformatted and needs to be formatted. I don't want to do that, is there any way to put my DRM keys back in the iPod from the keys on iTunes on Linux? (I have read access to my NTFS drive on Linux, that's not a problem.) In addition, attempting to "Stop Device" doesn't work.

Well, I reached my 25-posts-per-day limit for my "Good" karma(I post too much, especially while avoiding homework) so now I'm writing a Journal entry. This entry is based on a reply to a post from Overly Critical Guy, the infamous troll-fanatic hating anything that the "stereotypical" Slashdotter loves. In said post, I put him falling off of three Pontes Asinorum(the correct Latin plural for Pons Asinorum, meaning bridge of fools and referring to the debate point that only fools attempt to argue) about copyright law. That got me to thinking that we need an index of Pontes Asinorum on various topics for /.

And by the way, since I can't post this reply to OCG's reply to mine tonight:

If piracy isn't theft, as is often repeated in the comments, then people need to stop referring to GPL violations as stolen GPL code.

Music 'piracy'(Unauthorized copying has nothing to do with attacking a ship on international waters): Little direct loss, as most who copy without authorization(especially since the advent of iTunes et al) wouldn't buy the music if P2P and such didn't exist for any of a myriad of reasons, and they would be that more likely to buy some other albums of the band whose music they copied(or even the music they took--remember that much of the stuff you don't pay for isn't that great quality), and they would also be more likely to see the band live if it's touring, something that gets much more money to the artist than record sales. And by the way, artists are divided on music copying, from what I understand the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for example, were more pissed that the leaked copy of Stadium Arcadium was low-quality than anything else.
GPL violations: Clear direct loss, as whatever changes Violator X did are not visible to the community to inspect and improve upon. No gain to anyone except Violator X, and that's only really short-term. What Violator X did is much closer to theft than what Copier Y did. As for your comment about mods, I have seen +4 or +5 posts advocating everything except the GNAA.

"And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

I just recently got a friending(hey, Philip K Dickhead) and my mind got set on a chain of events leading towards this journal entry. I really like the friend/foe system, it's a great way to spot people whose posts you like to read. I primarily use foe for those people whose posts I consider so hopelessly stupid that they make my blood pressure rise. I give a +2 bonus for friends, -3 for foes, +1 for friends of friends and fans, -1 for freaks, and no change for foes of friends--if I remember correctly, these numbers were selected based on the threshhold numbers so that I'd see friends' posts. When I see a post which I really like(or a person friends me), I click on said person's 'page' and, if they have one, read their journal. If they don't have a journal, I click on random posts in their history, which I prefer reading journals to because I think journals tend to show a person's thoughts and opinions better.
Now to fans and freaks: Amazingly, I have more fans than freaks. ;) Although if you remove the fans which I met elsewhere and are fans because of that, you get the same number. Please note that this entire entry was not written to have any structure or purpose.
In conclusion, I look good in red. (Previous statement has no relevance to this, I just thought it up randomly and decided it would sound good here.) I apologize for the hard-to-read-ness of that--I'm too lazy to split it up into paragraphs. :P

Look at the evidence. Look at the detailed fossil record. Look at the 50% of the same fragments of DNA that are common to both us and the banana. This evidence is so convincing that there are more PhDs named Steve(or some variation thereof, women named Stephanie are also allowed for gender-neutrality) that believe in evolution than there are scientists that don't. Now let's go into creationism lalaland and pretend that God just faked all that evidence. Obviously, God did that for a reason, he rarely does something without a purpose. The most likely purpose is that he wants us to believe in Evolution! Why else would he go to so much trouble to fabricate evidence? I cannot think of any reason whatsoever.

Let's go through the facts:

1. Artists make their money from concerts, not CD sales-This one's pretty simple to understand. The amount an artist makes from each CD sale is a small fraction of the actual money the person paid for the CD. Concerts, on the other hand, have a much higher fraction of the money made going to the artists--and if you buy a T-Shirt, the profit from the concert goes up that much. So, in a nutshell, the money made from CD sales is a few pennies compared to the money made from concerts.
2. Casual copying helps the artists-From the last part, a lost CD sale means very little to the artist if it's recouped in the fact that the person it's shared to will be that much more likely to go to the concert if one occurs nearby.
3. DRM only stops casual copying-Look for DRM-breaking tools, and you will find. But random person X looking to share them with his friend won't look for those tools unless he's smart and sneaky. So DRM is no deterrent to the large pirate but is to the casual copier.
4. DRM hurts the artists more than the horribly-named 'piracy' ever could-Add the last two facts together to get this. In addition, this requires the artists continue paying for the labels' marketing, slowing down technological progress. What else is new?

Feel free to use this list against /. trolls that support DRM. Link it in your sig as well.

Look at how the pages are labeled...

I've had some problems with manual kernel configuration on Gentoo, so I'm planning on switching to Debian. Only problem is that I really don't want to have to burn another CD, although I do have a Gentoo LiveCD(I have full access to the network). Am I able to install from that?

Apparently, I'm scum that makes an AC sick...

See?