Sunday, September 2, 2007

grandiose bullshit medley

This is going to be a masterpiece of crap.
It all started today around 4:30 am when I was watching Zone Reality. I'm starting to like channels like Zone Reality more and more each day, in contrast to some channels I grew up with like Discovery. I learned English mostly by watching TV. Cartoon Network and Discovery. Now that cartoons are translated and spoken in Romanian, I don't watch them anymore. I can't imagine a bigger step to dumbing down the infant population than translating cartoons to Romanian and dubbing them over. I --- learned --- English --- from --- cartoons - you-fucking-idiots. But of course, it's cooler to learn it from multi-k$ courses. It's not cool when a high-school student argues with his teacher over the existance of the word "informatics". On the other hand, English words are penetrating common Romanian in a very annoying fashion. I mean, we have native words for 'job', 'rating', 'poll', to 'apply' for something, and so on. But no, we don't use them anymore. 'Cause it's not k00l, you know, not modern, not trendy. But people that have some kind of authority and influence with the masses don't concentrate on this. No, they dub over Western cartoons so that in the end we don't know how to speak neither proper Romanian, nor proper English. We're losing both our culture, and a proper coverage of Western culture. We're defacing our own language AND getting less and less proficient with international languages such as English. Which I learned from cartoons and perfected with the help of some good teachers. And why all this? So that some incompetent translators and lousy actors can get paid for it. Ok, maybe they're not all incompetent and lousy, but when someone says "about 10 miles" and you translate "about 16.1 kilometers", you can be called anything but competent. (For example.) Happens everytime with movies. At least they are only subtitled, for the moment. There are bigger xenophobes out there who dub even these over. How stupid need you be to dub a movie over? Are your viewers so illiterate / incapable of distributed attention to just read the subtitles? Sheesh. On the up side, my cable company now broadcasts cartoons in two languages and my tv tuner can decode both. So now I can watch cartoons like they were created. With all the untranslateable language puns and twists in place. But most TVs don't have that feature, so the vast majority of children are deprived of the benefit of learning the most important international language, the language of the Internet, in a natural fashion. Instead, they hear their parents 'apply' for a 'job' that will bring them some more 'cash', without understanding where those damned words come from. It's a double-fucking-paradox. It seems that everything was better when I was younger and that everything is getting worse by the minute. I learned a lot of stuff from Discovery as a child. Now I only see cars, muscle cars, hot rods, cars, some more cars, a little more cars, then some remote-controlled cars, and cars. And the 104th re-run of How It's Made episode 5 on both Discovery and Discovery Science at the same time. Oh, and Romanian commercials featuring female voices with over-emphasized bass and either skinny or dumbly-monotonous male voices. No wonder people download shows over the Internet. Oh well. At least I got to see a documentary about Death Row on Zone Reality. To be fair, I've seen similar ones on both Discovery and National Geographic. Bottom line is, in the U.S., the most 'democratic' and 'free' country in the world, more than 100 people were sentenced to death and then acquited following appeal, in the last 30 years. Well. Either some of those are criminals that were wrongly acquited and are now living among us^H^Hthem, or some of them were wrongly convicted in the first place, or some of the other thousands that had their sentence carried out were wrongly murdered by the state. Or all 3 choices. Why the fuck do I wear a Texas t-shirt? Because they have a town called Corpus Christi there? Fuck. No, because my mom gave it to me and it's nice, but hell. Dude. The State murders people. Probably. I have no direct evidence, I can't tell that for sure. But most probably, the state kills innocent people. What the fuck. That's wrong, dude! The death penalty should be abolished. And prison security increased, and more resources put into re-habilitation programs. But hell, what do I know. I know nothing. The state doesn't really care that much about the security of its citizens, or the rehabilitation of criminals, or the killing of innocent people. It cares about its image. It needs people to still find it acceptable and respect its authority so that the economy works as a whole and some_kind_of_average(people, mood) equals "everyone's happy". But the people that are unlucky enough not to afford good a good defence attorney, or who are otherwise unlucky, don't really count. Nor do the people that work at NASA doing leading-edge research, that are required to allow severe intrusion of their privacy for 'national security' reasons. Oh well. Maybe they will succeed with their lawsuit. But why the hell am I defending NASA? I mean, they blew up two shuttles and killed two crews even if they were warned about the severe problems they were having. I'm not defending them, in fact screw them, I'm defending human rights. Fuck it, not only does the Church / do the Churches try to control every aspect of everyone's sex life, now the state is questioning people about it. By the way, there's nothing in the U.S. constitution that prohibits the state from controlling its citizens' sexual behavior. Or so I understood, I'm no expert. All in all, until a few years ago it was illegal in many U.S. states for two people to engage in 'sodomy', 'actions against nature' or other vague words meant to refer anal or oral sex. In some cases it was between homosexual men, in other cases it extended to heterosexual couples as well. Around 2000-something these laws were finally overturned in some supreme court. Dude! In the third millenium and the 21st century (which BTW if you don't count years from zero and you don't because there were no computers and addressable memory then, starts in 2001 and not in 2000 like everyone said), people can't have anal sex in the United States of America. Cool. Read Wikipedia, then check with more 'reliable' sources if you don't believe me. Well. At least there's free speech. Kind of. For now. For instance, I don't know if I can dump all this putrid bullshit on a server located here. I probably can, because I hate inciting to racism, violence, underage sex or stuff like that and therefore I don't do that. On the other hand, I hate the Church(es) for example. They passed some law here that don't allow you to offend religions/churches/whatever anymore. There are laws like that in many 'civilized' places around the world, and ultimately, they're probably good. But I still hate religion and the churches that enforce it because, apart from their distorted vision on physics and biology, they are constantly trying to control people's sex lives. Dude! In Christianity I think it all starts from Mary. She supposedly gave birth to the Son of God without prior sexual intercourse with a male, which is of course the natural way of creating children. No, the Holy Spirit couldn't have entered a body created from human flesh through normal, God-created sex. It had to enter an unfertilized egg and fertilize it. Dude. Why? Because the Church says that sex is impure. It's dirty and it's a sin. By making Mary a virgin and also making her the mother of the Son of God in the stroies, the Church has a really strong argument against sex. I so fucking hate that. Ok, I fucking understand that when there were no doctors and no condoms, sexually transmitted diseases mandated that people have as few sex partners as possible in order to limit transmission. You couldn't teach people that, so the saints / enlightened dudes / whatever told it to them in a form they respected. And there are a lot of social reasons for which the religious dogmas and norms around the world are the way they are. So yes, religion has always had its good parts. And it still has. And we need a certain degree of stability in society. But it's the twenty-fucking-first century now and times have changed and some traditions need to die and religion needs an upgrade! Free Love! But no, I'm telling total bullshit here. A lot of dudes are trying to bring their own 'upgraded' religion and mostly all they've come up with is crap. No. Things are good just the way they are. Let them evolve. No. We are surrounded by crap. But hopefully I can say all this. I don't know. If it's not allowed, I don't care, I can delete it. I can even apologize. My mind will still be free. Hopefully. I could then probably disperse this stuff over some underground networks, but I'm afraid few people care about this so then I won't. I heard the news this morning: Chinese authorities launched some kind of 'virtual cops' that look like policemen and are embedded/overlaid in web pages and are clickable. With more and more computer scientists and hackers in the U.S. refraining from publishing cryptographic research for fear of the DMCA (even its name sounds horribly stupid), and with the possibility of limiting the cryptographic strength of Internet communication between private users by law, how much til the formerly free world becomes an Orwellian nightmare akin to a living dead machine with money instead of blood and brain-numbed human beings instead of cells? Will I need to go deep into the mountains to teach my children technology, for fear of being traced by Big Brother? I certainly hope not. I mean, scientists and hackers are doing reasearch in order to discover better protection algorithms, while crackers are cracking the weak algorithms unhindered and gaining profit from it. The former are prohibited by the DMCA to work on certain systems and topics, while the latter do it anyway because they don't go public, they don't write their names on scientific papers and publish them, they work underground. You could hypothetically define a "protection bit" and set it to "one" in a music file and write some software that doesn't allow you to copy it. No encryption no nothing. If someone writes a new software that simply ignores that bit, that's illegal. If someone publishes the location of that bit in the file so that anyone can set it to zero again and use the original software to copy the files, that's illegal. Well, actually it's probably not. That's an extreme example just to get the idea. There need to be "reasonable measures" in place, but they don't have to be strong or secure in any way. There's justice for you, sawing off its left hand and right foot. Oh, and just to complete the puzzle of the world falling apart around me, let's check this out. Some blokes at MIT made a system that transmits energy without wires. Oh wow. Now I can power my laptop without plugging in the power cord, I can get power wirelessly. Woooooooow. And it's called "WiTricity" Wooow that's so Coool. Big fucking stale bucket of crap. It's old technology, in fact it's more than a hundred years old and it was invented by TESLA, the same guy who invented the method used everywhere in the world to carry electrical energy from the power plant to the consumers! And it's based on the work of a lot of guys that did physics and maths and philosophy a hell of a fucking lot of years ago when people still thought that God was angry when lightning streaked across the sky. But Tesla was just a madman born a few hundred miles from where I live who did some weird stuff in his lab. He's not MIT, he doesn't do overrated Media and AI (childish people and stupid robots) and he doesn't market WiTricity. No, he's just smart and plays with resonant circuits. It took more than 100 years after the brilliant mad genius patented the stuff to "imagine a future in which wireless power is feasible". Hey, let me tell you something. There is no wired/wireful electricity. Electricity is fields. It lives in space-time. It needs no wires. It's wireless by nature. 'Electrical' energy flows around the wires, not through them. They just guide it by means of mobile electrical charges. So take your WiTricity and you know what to do with it. At radio frequency of course. To their merit, they acknowledge the technology and concepts as being old, but with no significant past interest. Well, that's the problem. We're so profit- and instant-results-driven that we forget what progress is. And that's why, when all my high-school friends were going to MIT and other famous schools in the States to learn science and engineering and lots of humanities, I stayed at the Bucharest Polytechnic drinking beer in The Jack till morning, hacking hardware and coding software. And speaking English on the 'net. Because that's what the Net is all about. Fuck internationalization, double-fuck i18n, if it's Global it has to be English. I hate it when I google something technical like hacking the Linux kernel and the top two hits are in Japanese. Or German, or Russian, or Polish, or Czech, or Portugese, or Romanian so that nobody gets offended. Of course, I'm wrong, I know. I should disable non-English results. I can't afford to do that, what if I miss something? I also know I'm a hypocrite, for I also discuss in Romanian on Romanian forums, but that's somehow wrong too. It's knowledge lost to a minority, globally speaking. The Net should be global, international, thus English.

1 comment:

etor said...

1. Well, the thing with 16.1km does'n happen that much anymore, they've learned. However they keep on translating 'a couple of weeks' by an exact '2 weeks' which is not really correct and is also annoying, bringing, again, precision there where imprecision was meant.

2. Point of dubbing is so that housewives can do housework while listening (not much to see in those) to their favourite soap.

3. I would like to point out that for some, and from some points of view, the 'free' world is an orwellian nightmare.

4. You do have a point. However we well know that a) people need religion and church and b) enlightened people means less controllable masses and therefor fewer slaves to work 247 for those who want a light life to live (me, you, for ex). I know the system is somewhat wrong, but it does work quite fine also.

And 5. Why support one language or another? Language is just a consequence of cultural differences. I do believe that languages are to be different and you are always welcome to learn more languages, as the more you know the easier will it be to learn the ones that relate to them.