Elections in India

Many people claim electioneering in India is a sham, with people having convictions as diverse a larceny, looting and murder standing up for elections.

This leads to a country wide apathy among youth towards the political process, a very worrying trend. There are sites promoting boycotting the elections, this is a very wrong approach in my opinion. As Maurice Chavez puts it "If you don't vote you get morons incharge", and that has been the situation all along.

I tried a google search for the manifestos of all the alphabet soup parties BJP,INC,UPA,BSP,AIADMK...ad infifnitum. Coudn't find a single one, instead found a buncha forums and ads prmoting everything from country wide socialism to nationwide genocide. Even the lok sabha website has no details on my constituency's MP (one Mr. Ananth Kumar Bangalore South), the browser just hangs and crashes. This is complete alienation, no manifesto, no details am I just supposed to vote for a symbol.

Also the campaigning is horrific all i see is the Lalu's Maya's and Gowda's threatning an vying for seats like its some commodity in their control. A overhaul is in order right about now and boycotting the process is definitely not the solution.

I think this election is dependent on the youth of India, lets bring about lasting change. I urge all to get their voter's ids made, and exercise their franchise on D-Day.

Last.fm: Music Industry's police arm

Just think for one second...what is last.fm's purpose....

Well they keep a track of ALL music you play. And as we very well know things like music file fingerprinting (stamped by legit rippers like itunes ripper) exist, so its quite easy to know if the music you listen to is original or a violation of copyright protection or not.

Then lets look at DRM, a concept which aims to restrict you who plays what on which hardware, thats the level of control record companies are willing to impose upon you.

Therefore imagine a breach of the last.fm database, these companies will know exactly who is legit and who is not.

Already within the united states people from ages 7-80 are dragged to courts like common criminals for using software like limewire, Bit Torrent to infringe upon copyrights. These people have no morality and will stoop to any level to account for their lost money.

So picture this the MPAA (music producers association of america: the evil lobbying arm of the record companies) buys over last.fm and has access to their database. They will know who you are, what you listen to and how much jailtime you gotta serve.

Lets take a look at an example:

Mettalica (pirate haters) were due to reease their newest studio album "Death Magnetic" however before it was released last.fm showed this for the number of listeners.

Now isnt that scary....they can know who posted these scrobbles and from where...i.e know who owes what to mettalica...

The only thing stopping them is that pesky privacy agreement..but then who really cares about the privacy of a pirate(read evil-stealing-child-molesting-scum by the MPAA).....

This Sem's Linux Project: Genetic Algorithms

Well, this semester we have Linux System Programming, so, needed a project idea.
Have you all noticed the random seed being generated during boot up, well i that seed is also saved during shut down and added to the "Entropy Pool".
So what my idea is, that i can take the seed and generate a set of members from it and apply genetic generations to ir to make it more random.
Although, the fitness equation will have to be somehow depending on the amount of randomness.
The generator can be found in random.c and the the script in the "init" folder.

Mumbai Attackers: Islamist fanatics or Islamabad's Automatons

Right now the atmostphere among the youth of india is charged with emotion, against terrorism, relegion and so forth. Common Knee-jerk reaction, but are we being mature and analusing the situation?????

I was reading an article "Dont Do An AMERICA" by Michael F. Scheuner (Ex-CIA director) and these words really struck me as true "Perception is Reality". I mean many times just what we percieve becomes reality for us. And once that perception is formed it is hard to accept its foundation may be wrong.

For Example i was travelling by train and spoke to a kid, who was barely and 3-4 years old and didn't yet know the meaning of 'college', one of my friends asked him if he knew what Pakistan was, he gave a look of complete acceptance and told "Enemy! My enemy". It was shocking what influence today's parenting has come to, or rather the effects of media on young minds. Now that kid will grow up with that perception, never question it and will be unable to question its foundation.

I feel a serious perception/reality check is in order for India.

Linmodem: A true testament to eminent faliure of closed source systems

Now finally last thing left to configure is the modem....but wait there seems to be symlink to /dev/modem.....find out that Winmodems a.k.a SoftModems are only supported on windows...great..Well none of these modem companies have bothered releasing open source drivers for thier modems...Lets see...

Playlist Trouble

Im the kinda guy who saves playlists for every occasion, like "Peaceful evening" or "Hectic Day" or "Practical Exam" hence after migrating to mplayer/vlc i was faced with a huge crisis to rebuild the playlists.....i wrote a script...stuck in my desktop at college \, now trying to remake that script...lets see

Ordeal with Acer 4520

Just installed Fedora 8, initially display didn't function, however the old Nvidia drivers saved me...Now for the audio, modem, webcam etc etc....

Just curious though....Whats the beef with winmodems vs linux....too frustrating....