IP Piracy in the Philippines – Irony

p>I see that here, Bong Revilla Jr has been honored by an american (I mean, of course, USian) motion picture group for his efforts against piracy. I take it they are lauding him for his crusade, such as it is, against video piracy.

Now, I live in the Philippines, and it is ludicrous that any USian organization would laud any filipino for making a dent (just a dent, there is NO WAY he is making any real difference) in the pirating of movies. I live in Cagayan de Oro city. Pirated movies are everywhere. Pretty much the only movies I can’t find in Cagayan (although I’m sure they’re there, I’ve been approached often enough by hawkers who had the goods right in their hands) are pr0n. I’ve been to Davao, and there, **everything** is available. Finding Nemo, any movie not yet showing, lots of movies that have already show, Pr0n, etc, it’s all there. Now, certainly the last time I was in Manila was long before this award. But when I was there, any visitor to Virra Mall would be fucking overwhelmed by everything that was available. Software was available (anything, any version, any fucking language, even though there weren’t many russian speakers in Manila, you could get russian language anything), movie VCDs were available, DVDs were available (mostly they weren’t really the official DVDs,


although there were some of those too, mostly they were the VCD movies, but packaged on one DVD-medium rather than two VCD media).

It is a joke to give any filipino an anti-piracy award **UNTIL THE FUCKING CDs ARE OFF THE FUCKING STREETS**.

But hey, personally I don’t give a shit. Who cares about Bong Revilla, heya? Who, in the philippines, where the minimum wage (and even in Metro Manila, where the median wage is higher than anywhere else in the country) cares about multinational media companies? When the median wage in Metro Manila (did i say that it was higher than the median wage anywhere else in the country? Oh, I forgot to say that in some parts of the country people STARVE to death [no joke, that is literally true] because there isn’t enough to eat? well, during El Nino season anyway). And, by the way, the cost of any legal CD is at least twice, and often three times the daily salary of regular workers?

There is something wrong with USian media-capitalist values. Perhaps it’s simply ignorance. And if it isn’t, well, I’m not going to much care. And as a practical matter, heh, good luck on the anti-piracy campaign. You sure aren’t going to fucking make a dent in the Philippines until you bribe some corrupt congresspersons to make copyright infringement into a death penalty offence. And do you really want to do that? Oh, you do?!!! well, think about it again. The first pirate given the death penalty will be a cause celebre and will probably cause the DEATH of your fucking corporations.

Mandrake Weirdness

I’ve got quite a lot of Mandrake weirdness. On my dialup gateway, iptables wouldn’t load at all. I cleaned some stuff up (apparently I’d installed newer modutils and such, maybe when I was playing with some cooker RPMs, or when I was playing with a 2.5 kernel. Anyway, I got iptables to insmod. But it’s still not perfect, because I get invalid something errors when I try to add the masquerade rule. So iptables works, but masquerade won’t.

I have just the same problem on the laptop. With:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

# yes, I know that’s not secure, it’s just for example and for simplifying things. In practice there would be filters there.

I get : Invalid argument.

I don’t get that in the vmware linux. So I guess it’s because of installing unsafe RPMs and such. I’ll have to reinstall

on both. Hahay. Better not forget anything when backing up! Heh, last time I lost two or three days worth of email

(had backed up just three days before).

Still Smarting

Dammit, my last wound, from my last motorcycle accident (I am assured there will be more, it is a rite of passage, I suppose, or many rites, or many passages) won’t heal. And it stings, and it smarts, but not always. What’s the deal?

I want it healed so I can start exercising, start swimming (well, my wrist is still sprained, but I think I can deal with that, and if worse comes to worst, I could just do legwork or something).

Bloggers and the dark

There are a lot of good bloggers. Too many to have in the links there. And really, I don’t particularly want to link to people because then they’d link to me. And then this blog would become more self-conscious (or, actually, more other-conscious), and I’d actually have to think about what I say here.

But I should list bloggers, and links, here anyway. Just so that, maybe, I could find them again later. Thus:

Naomi Chana. I don’t think we have anything in common. But those who write well I want to remember so that, when I’m dark and down and could use the help, I can visit them and all without their knowing, gain the benefit of their light.

Local Thesaurus and Dictionary - a technique

I’d love to have the contents of dictionary.reference.com and thesaurus.reference.com (and, for that matter, Encyclopedia Brittanica) on my local machines. So that i wouldn’t have be online to get access. Now, there’s not much chance of getting a CD copy to work since I work in linux and there aren’t any linux readers. Sure I’ve got win4lin, but win4lin has some limitations involving multimedia. And VMware is too slow on this box.

So I’m thinking, it’d be an interesting afternoon’s work to download a bunch of web pages, strip out the unique words in them, add the contents of the unix wordlist, maybe whack a lot of random blogs to a depth of 5 or so. That should cover almost all the words in the English language.

Then, after taking all the unique words out, run them through the thesaurus. Try each word in turn, except if it’s already appeared in a previous thesaurus run. That should give us almost everything right there.

And finally, with our new list of unique words, run them through dictionary.

I wonder what the legal repercussions would be though. Not that it matters. I’m probably not going to do this, and even if I do, it’ll be only for my own amusement. Heh, I probably won’t even use the data, probably deleting it after a week or so. But the legal status would be interesting.

Durian

i brought some durian from davao last trip. i opened one today. I think i waited too long. the first one i opened had spoiled. damn. the second one was good though. i’ll open the third one tomorrow. i couldn’t eat all of the second today, so i took all of the edible stuff and put them in the refrigerator. tomorrow i’ll do the same to the third. it’ll be beautiful .

i’m pretty glad i’ve been buying durian in davao. at least i’ve learned how to open one. it’s not as difficult as i thought. although it is still death defying. a little slip, and one is punctured, gashed, and aerated by lots of little hard spines.

now, if only things would work out and i could go to davao again, profitably. for now, well, davao is not working out and i’ll not be going there for months, probably. aiiyah. well, camiguin is a useful substitute, i suppose. it’s a thin, weak, substitute, but we take what we can get. But I take that back. It’s wonderful there. It just so happens that Davao is closer to my forebrain, and, as it happens, my coeur, than is Camiguin right now.

huh. raining tonight. very strong. i’m afraid that some of my roof might not be strong enough and that it might start raining inside the house. heh, that’s just paranoia, of course. boy, i’m getting pathological. it’s a short trip to the happy farm, me boyo.

Barbie's Cradle

boy, i love Barbie’s Cradle. There are lots of other web pages. I give that one because, well, it’s the first one that came up when I was doing a quick google search .

Barbie has a wonderful voice, and wonderful style. I don’t know anything about the rest of the band (hardly seems like love, I know, but that was metaphorical love, which is not the same as the real thing [hola, vc, sunshine,jgp, beloved]).

and then, there are lyrics (from “Dear Paul") like “will you be my bicycle", and I’m thinking, fuck, my name isn’t paul. damn. .

dilis is da bomb

I just had dinner. Fried dilis. It was lovely. It was more than lovely, it was, otherworldly. Dilis is usually breakfast food. But, ah, we ran out of regular rations today, my helper thought that I was out of the dorm, but I was actually in. Since she thought I was out though, we (what is that **we**??? **she**!, **she**!!! i don’t have anything to do with it, lazy bum) didn’t do the regular marketing.

Fortunately, there is always some little treat left. And tonight it was dilis. I love dilis. I cannot say that enough. Heh, I almost ate it all. Dilis in vinegar. Poetry has nothing on this.

I suppose it’s an acquired taste. It’s **definitely** an acquired smell. In the U.S.A., filipinos are notorious for cooking things which, when the smoke wafts over to the neighbors house, induces blind panic and rage. Dilis is like this. When cooked it smells like burning fish (well, it smells better than that, but that’s just me) and toward the end, you can smell the carbon. I wouldn’t be surprised if, to the uninitiated, it tastes like charcoal .

They are, however, the uninitiated for a reason. These are the very same people who will never grok durian, bagoong, ginamos and balut (well, OK, i agree with them on the balut… it’s edible, but not deep enough to induce a religious experience).

So maybe opera isn't so broken after all

Here I whine that opera is unstable and does a lot of things wrong. Now I’m not so sure. My problems might be configuration related. I’m blogging this now from a different username, with a completely fresh .opera (didn’t exist before this session). I’m not seeing the problems I used to. For instance, while blogging, for instance, the text going under the scrollbar… well, for one thing, the scrollbar is always visible. Unlike in my other instance. Also, in my other setup, I have the zoom percentage set at a default of 120%. This is set at 100% and so i don’t see the text going under the scrollbar. One thing about that though… the text is rather too small for comfortable blogging.

I’ll test some more. For now I’m very interested to see if the browser will be unstable with very many documents open. And then I’ll start to do my fixes to bring it to parity with my other setup (bookmarks, remove the ad thing, switch to text only browser look (i don’t like the icons since i’m not a visual person).