Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.
He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.
Continue reading ‘I Admire Steve Jobs the Way That Teddy Roosevelt Admired Elephants’
A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.
Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:
Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.
We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.
I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.
As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.
In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.
To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.
If you go watch my Hitler video on YouTube, you will now see an annotation stating that I have waived all copyright to it, with the help of Creative Commons‘ CC0 language. It is now in the public domain.
That doesn’t mean anyone can just go around claiming ownership of it though. It means that nobody owns it. It belongs to everybody now. Go do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate it if you give me credit for it, but that’s by no means required.
Anyway, to make this absolutely, positively clear:
To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Hitler reacts to the Hitler parodies being removed from YouTube. This work is published from the United States.
There. Enjoy your gift, world. Merry Kwanzaa or whatever.
Back in November, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart asked me to put on my ridiculous costume and be in their music video. It’s now finished and on the Internets:
I’m the one with the yellow pants.
Copyright © 2009-2010 Zacqary Adam Green
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0
Permissions beyond the scope of this license are available if you scream loudly enough.
Powered by WordPress3.0 and K21.0
Stuff Is Too Complicated; Case In Point: Music Theory
It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.
Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.
Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.
So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).
It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.
So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?
Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.
So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.
You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.
I mean, like, duh.
Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.
My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:
Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.
Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.