My views on Intellectual Property have undergone some pretty drastic changes recently. Just a few years ago I was downloading MP3s because I wanted to listen to music, and I had a vague idea that the laws that made the downloading illegal were somehow flawed.

At this date, my ideas have a bit more form, though I can't promise that they won't be changing in the future. I invite those with opinions on the subject to help me form mine.

There seems to be a lot of argument going on over copyrights (giving an author exclusive rights to their work), trademarks (giving someone exclusive rights to a name or distinguishing feature), and patents (giving someone exclusive rights to an invention or process) recently.

This is important to me in part because I deal in intellectual property fairly often. I'm a programmer by day, and a musician by night (and often a programmer by night, as well).

I get paid to take ideas (often thought up by me) and implement them as software. For entertainment, I often take ideas (thought up by someone who is a better composer than me) and implement them as tasty drum beats in a song.

It is also worth noting that I am of the opinion that if a law or government function is not biblically supportable (based on Biblical case laws), it does not need to exist.

My statements here are based in the idea (which, to the best of my knowledge, is biblically based) that the best type of market is a free market, of the laissez-faire variety. The biblical basis for this statement is subject for other posts and books (and I'm open to more reading material!).

A free market means a general lack of government regulation of products and services. This would include products and services based on "intellectual property," or ideas and information.

Intellectual property laws are a government giving exclusive rights on a concept or piece of data to an individual or business. The traditional argument in favor of these laws is that without them, inventors and creators would be afraid to create anything for fear that their works might be plagiarized.

I do not think that this would be the case in a world where the government did not fight for some sort of special rights for creators or inventors. However, more relevantly, I do not know of any biblical basis for these sorts of laws.

The closest thing to biblical support for IP laws that I have seen is people making a shaky connection from the eighth commandment (do not steal) to the concept of "stealing ideas."

So if intellectual property laws are not biblically supportable, what are they doing? They are doing the same thing that every other man-conceived law is doing: enforcing someone's idea of fairness on others.

We all benefit from the creative works of others – we enjoy useful technology and entertaining media every day. We appreciate the advances that have come at the price of hard work from talented individuals. Our blood boils when we hear of some smart man getting cheated out of the fruits of his labors by others who use his ideas.

Why do we feel this way? Because we believe that somebody is getting less than they deserve, and that makes us righteously indignant. We believe that inventors deserve, at the very least, a comfortable life and the ability to keep inventing if they wish to. And we're willing to write laws that infringe on the rights of others (the right to create what you can with what you own) to try to make it happen.

God is the decider of what man deserves. At most, man should concern itself with enforcing the civil law given to us by God. When it comes to enforcing fairness, we tend to muck it up.

My sister contacted me today, asking my opinions on cloning (a topic of discussion in a book club she attends).

While I know this is a highly debated issue, I don't really know much about the subject. I couldn't recall any clearly defined objections to cloning, and couldn't think of any reason off the top of my head that I would object to it.

After a small amount of research and some discussion with coworkers, here is what I know:

There are three types of human cloning.
1. Therapeutic cloning (cloning cells from an adult)
2. Reproductive cloning (making a cloned human)
3. Replacement cloning (purely theoretical, would involve some combination of the above to regenerate limbs and body parts)

The most-discussed issue seems to be reproductive cloning.

The theory seems to be that a cell with the genetic material to be cloned is merged with an egg cell with it's cytoplasm removed.

Possible objections:
1. Cloning is unsafe at the moment. It is likely that many clones would die in the early stages of cloning before cloning became reliable.

This objection is not an argument against cloning itself being necessarily sinful, but it is an argument against experimenting with cloning.

2. Cloning crosses a line that determines how much control humans should have over their bodies.

This objection seems common, but is very vague. I have heard no good reason for drawing the line at cloning as opposed to organ transplants or artificial insemination with sperm from a donor.

3. There are few/no Biblically legitimate reasons people can give to actually have a child via cloning, thus it is not worth doing.

The third objection, like the first, does not make cloning out to be in itself inherently sinful. It does assume that there would not arise any situation where cloning would be justifiable, thus making it not worth researching.

I'm new to this issue, my opinions are young and have little substance as of yet. At the moment, I'm having trouble understanding why cloning has been singled out as being so objectionable. I would love to hear some good arguments (preferably Biblically supported) one way or the other.

Recently back from watching the Dark Knight, I feel as though I must tell someone about it. Internet, here I come!

I had a friend in college who would watch movies on a screen to his left while he played video games. If you went into his room, there was a good chance that one of two things would be showing to his left: one of the Lord of the Rings movies, or an episode of Angel.

If I had an extra screen in my room, you would probably find Futurama, Firefly, and a few other movies with high re-watchability showing continuously on my wall. It's not hard to imagine Dark Knight being added to that short list.

Christian Bale was, of course, buff and badass.

Whatever you may think about Heath Ledger, the sensationalism surrounding his death does not change the fact that he WAS the Joker. Phenomenal casting there.

It was an epic story, and it was very well told. Christopher Nolan has been added to my list of Storytellers To Watch For – a hard list to make in my ADD addled brain.

I don't regret making Dark Knight the movie that I'll spend my $8/year theater budget on.

If the date is May 31st, and someone tells you about an event happening in exactly one month, what date are they referring to?

It seems generally accepted that May 15th and June 15th are one month apart. But what happens when the following month does not have a date matching the current date?

June does not have a 31st day! Is it possible that a month from May 31st would actually be July 1st, skipping the month of June entirely?

Discuss.

I stumbled upon a random blog post today with some downright sobering truths on it.

The United States federal budget for 2009 is $3.1 Trillion ($3,100,000,000,000).

There are about 303,824,646 people living in the US right now.

The United States government is planning on spending around $10,200 for every person living in the country. Where do you think this money is coming from? (Hint: it's not from some place that actually exists.)

It seems like there should be some sort of insights I should share, but I'm still a bit staggered at the moment. Can anyone really think that this unchecked spending is justified?

Our government is out of control. All they can do is spend money they make up. Gold and guns, people – start investing.

A discussion rages (in many forums, at this moment in my hotel room) about What Software Is Worth and What You Are Paying For When You Buy It.

There are many philosophical arguments (going on in this hotel room, even) but I am going to give my opinion as a consumer here.

To me, as a person who buys software, I see it this way: I am paying someone to get software. Sometimes I pay the person who made the software. Sometimes I pay someone who happens to be publishing the software.

Once I pay someone to get the software, I should be able to do what I want with it. I am willing to pay for support of that software and other services (online play, ahoy).

A software producer may think they are selling me a license to use their software (on N number of computers, perhaps), but whenever they try to enforce that, I generally find myself inconvenienced.

If I find that the cost that the publisher/producer expects me to pay for the software is more then I am willing to pay, I will generally disregard what they want and get the software from someone else (or use the original software in a manner that the producer/publisher considers illegal).

This may include using one license on more computers then they expected. Or downloading their software using bittorrent.

Until recent years, I had no particular method of digesting the internet. There were a couple blogs that I would check on every once in a while to see if there was any new content, and I had 5-10 webcomics that I would visit about daily to check for new episodes.

I found new content mostly by word of mouth, or by specifically searching for something that I thought might exist. How backwards I was!

I've improved my content discovery and digestion methods somewhat since then. My first step was to venture into the world of RSS feeds.

Any web site worth its salt that releases content regularly (on a schedule, or not) has an RSS feed these days. You don't have to worry about what it is, all you need to know is that it tells your RSS reader whenever there's something new for you to look at.

What's an RSS reader? Why, it's simply a handy application that you give RSS feeds to so that it can hold on to them, and let you know when there is something new for you to read. Personally, I use Google Reader.

If you notice yourself visiting any web page to check for new content – trust me, you're doing it wrong. An RSS reader allows you to compile all of the web sites you want to keep up on, so that instead of spending time loading all those web pages you're interested in every day, you can just read up on all the updates that you haven't seen yet.

When it comes to discovering new content, I personally use StumbleUpon – a social networking site without the annoyances that come from interacting with strangers on the internet. You start off by selecting any set of topics that you're interested, and you're ready to Stumble.

Any time you want to see something new, you just click the button inside your browser (it shows up on a toolbar plugin). It takes you to a highly-rated web site that you have not seen on one of the subjects you were interested in. You have the option to indicate whether you do or don't like the site.

I've stumbled on many blogs, webcomics, funny pictures, funny videos, useful applications, and other random web sites that I would never have found without StumbleUpon. If you want to get more out of the internet, I'd reccomend it.

Being a logical geek, I find that just about everything in life can be boiled down to an algorithm or formula. Some are more complicated than others, and I don't understand a lot of them very well, but that doesn't make it not true..

A conundrum that vexed me for some while is the question of what makes art art. I talked to one man who was of the opinion that all it takes to create a poem is to write something with personal meaning, something that need not be accessible or meaningful to anyone else.

This never sat quite right with me, but not having nailed down the definition of what actually makes something art, I didn't have any well thought out retorts at the time. I believed that art should be accessible to a larger audience then the person who created it, but where do you draw the line? Is it art when 50% of the people who see it come away with some appreciation for what you created?

Since then, I have become convinced that accessibility does not actually have anything to do with art. I think most real art is accessible to a large number of people, but its accessibility is not what makes it art.

To me, art seems to be the result of a function that takes two parameters: complexity and coherence. If you have something with high complexity that is totally incoherent, such as many pieces of modern art, I would call it a poor example of art.

On the flip side, if an art piece is coherent and straightforward but has no complexity, I would see little reason to laud it either.

It is when you create something that is both highly complex and yet still understandable that you create what I would call art. It is accessible because it is enjoyable, and it makes a lasting impression for something other than shock value.

It seems there is a lot of low-quality content flying around the tubes these days, and I felt it appropriate to set some sort of minimums. Thus…

I will not read any paragraph longer than ~100 words.

I will delete (or thumb down, depending on the context) any comment that scores a Disagreement Hierarchy rating of 0.

I will lower my opinion of any person who completely ignores proper capitalization in their post or comment.

This list to be updated as I further define my pickiness.

I looked at my traffic statistics today. Very little traffic (I guess if I wanted some, I'd tell more people about my blog).

So I looked at the search strings people used to find my site. A good number of them were my name (hi, Mom). However, I did note that if you want random page hits, it seems to be worthwhile to reference some famous actors in conjunction with the word "boobs" in a post.