Last night I was able to watch all of the Star Wars "Clone Wars" cartoon. I can now tell you what happened to make General Grievous cough. I recommend watching the cartoon before seeing the movie. It actually made the movie make more sense. The cartoon ends right where the movie begins. So I am about to give away the ending of the cartoon. General Grievous smoked 3 packs a day. J/K. Apparently Mace Windu was trying to stop General Grievous from stealing Chanceler Palpatine and he used the force to break apart his lung container. Thus he now coughs. General Grievous is really cool in the cartoons, but in the movie we all questioned why he was there. I now know the answer is to appease the cartoon watchers. The cartoon can be found on Bit-torrent - the latest in file-sharing utilities. People often wonder what my stance is on file-sharing. It really depends on the intent of the person downloading it. If the intent is to distribute things commercially for profit then it is stealing. If the intent is to have a backup copy of something you have already seen then it is fair use. Keep in mind in the computer world you are not taking anything from anyone, you are putting duplicate bits on your computer. So it is not sharing or stealing, it is copying. In today's day and age though, the new term "intellectual property" is coined so that copies are now considered stealing as well. The idea is that after we already have physically shared our thoughts with others we still own those thoughts, even after people use it. For example, say I take a book like Tom Sawyer and I want to share it. I would write each sentence down and give it 100 people. After a while all of those people would have an exact copy of Tom Sawyer leaving the original intact. But, I never wrote Tom Sawyer. Was it mine to share? Well, I paid money for the book, it was my property then. If I own something I should have the right to copy it and give it to others for free. What if I stood on a stage and read Tom Sawyer aloud and others heard me. Should they pay the creator? They are recieving the direct thought coming right out of me that is coming right out of the book. Instead, when we buy a book we still are not the owners of the idea. What in effect happens is that property rights have become lessened. We never really own anything. It becomes so that only people who create are owners. This system works for the most part, but it has many drawbacks. The law itself is skewed to the max. A recent bill got passed that put a 10-year jail sentence on file-sharers who put something out before it is released. So let me get this straight, you can murder, rape and pillage and maybe get 5 years, but file-sharing is worse than that? See in this country the real property owners(the creators) have all of the rights in the world. Because they make the most money, they lobby and get the most rights. Consumers are denigrated to thieves and have no property rights even though they may purchase said property. What is happening is similar to Object Oriented programming. We own just one instance of an object when we purchase it and not the object itself. It gets kept in our memory, and in reality we can anything we want with it, but the creator forbids us. So what do you think you own? What do you have that someone else hasn't created? For most of us, we own nothing. We have no property rights, no lobbies and can get sued to death for copying. That's my biggest gripe about the whole thing, creators have too many rights. I'm not saying they shouldn't have any, it's just that real physical owners need rights too and not just creators. viva la revolution! Anyways, just had to get that off my chest. Happy Memorial Day! I guess since I'm 30 I'm becoming more cynical.

Thought of the Day
If it's the Psychic Network why do they need a phone number?
Robin Williams