Peer-to-peer file sharing has been the dominant means of sharing entertainment via the Internet. Its use has grown steadily since the early 2000’s, following the decline of Napster. “Fair use” is the rationale given by Internet users who illegally download movies, music, games, and anything else you can wrap in a digital format to share with the world. Since many students will turn to peer-to-peer file sharing during the winter break, it is worth mentioning a few tips that will help folks use the service effectively.

Most importantly, the files you download do not appear out of thin air. They are stored on a computer known as a server which make the files available to your computer. On peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, this server is most often the person who downloaded the file prior to you. Thus, each person who downloads a file becomes a server, known in the peer-topeer network as a seed. Everyone who downloads a file is expected to upload it to others in the swarm, or group of computers that are actively serving a particular file. You might compare the process to a potluck, where everyone who attends is expected to bring a dish of food. Just as you would not arrive at a potluck empty-handed, you should not download files from the peer-to-peer network without uploading them to others. In other words, don’t be a leech!

So that everyone can enjoy the great benefits of peer-to-peer file sharing during the holiday season, follow these tips to ensure the network remains viable!

• Maintain an upload ratio of at least one half. This means you should upload at least half of the amount of content you download. For example, if you download an 800 megabyte movie, allow the file to seed until you have shared at least 400 megabytes. Pay attention to the statistics shown in your file sharing program.

• Configure your router or firewall to allow incoming connections. Some firewalls can interfere with your ability to upload files, so ensure port forwarding is properly configured and test your connection.

• Seed your files twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To make a longstanding impact on the peerto- peer community, consider leaving your computer powered on indefinitely so that files you download will always be available to other users. Build or purchase a computer with low power requirements and high capacity hard drives for this purpose.

• Use private trackers. A tracker is the server that maintains a list of Internet users who are actively sharing the file. Most torrent search websites (for example, Torrentz.com) only browse public trackers, available to anyone. Private trackers (what.cd, for instance) require registration and in some cases are only available by special invitation. Not only will you find rare files that are unavailable elsewhere, but private trackers reward users for maintaining high share ratios and the transfer rates typically exceed anything available publicly.

They come out in droves, groggy from the festivities of yesterday. They make lines like snakes, looping and curling around the beige consumer castles. Read the full story

Veteran’s Day is the day that a grateful nation honors and thanks its Veterans for their sacrifice in the service of our nation, the United States of America. Read the full story

America needs help! The Swine Flu is taking lives and will be taking more within the year; you need to get vaccinated! Here, let me give you this shot that hasn’t been completed or properly tested yet. Don’t give me that look. I’ll just give you a small dosage; you’ll be fine…for now.

The Swine Flu has scared many people, or was that just the media? The media and even the Health Administration have been making false accusations about the Swine Flu courtesy of the massive drug corporations. The vaccine is said to be the Swine Flu itself, and yes you are being injected with the virus in small dosages so your body may fight it off, but according to a former Finnish Provincial Medical Officer we haven’t been told that it also contains the bird virus and the human virus. Read the full story

It’s amazing how much beauty surrounds us in a single day as we go about our tasks. Imagine how much beauty is often missed. Just driving around on a single day and staring out the windows, stopping and staring into the sky, across the horizon, looking for something different, something pleasing, something new.. something to accentuate the feelings of the day.

Out making deliveries I took these pictures of the beautiful autumn sky and took some time out of my day to simply sit and stare at it, and think about it, and smile.

Have a look, I suggest you do the same!

It seems many integral parts of our American society are detrimental to the emotional and physical health of the people. In our country, the bulk of society seems captured by a lifestyle devoid of meaning.

The word philistine defines a type of individual who is at their core, foolish, brash and uncaring. This person is smug and ignorant, as well as indifferent to the matters of the world. They refuse selfcultivation. Intellectual pursuits, moral values, and philosophy are of no importance to this person. They are common people, comfortable in apathy and extremely limited in tastes and ideas. The endless race for wealth is perhaps one of the most disturbing social trends that can be observed in modern society.

An entire nation, it seems, sold on dreams of expensive ‘things’ and exotic vacations, now most of them working hard for barely enough to pay for the gas required to get to work every day. Some flourish in the 40-hour-work-week, for others it is torture. The jobs people don’t want to work are the jobs the eighteen to twenty-one year old seems to inherit. The patterns of living and paying often seem like a form of elaborate control, one we cannot escape because it exists as a requirement for living.

Owning is required for existing; consuming is required even in the most basic needs such as food. Money has been built into the foundation of our society. The transfer of wealth is how our economy works and grows. It’s a tunnel vision sort of lifestyle obsession that doesn’t seem to ever slow down at times.

The social order has all. Morning shower, eat, leave for work. Mid-morning arrive at the job and begin working. Eat a lunch in the workplace commons and then return to work. Smoke cigarettes on breaks and count the hours on the clock. Late evening and first to the gas station to fill up, then home. Get home exhausted and flop down on the couch and turn on the television set. Eat a bit of dinner, brush the teeth, make love to the spouse (or your hand), go to sleep and start it all over the next day.

I’ve heard a lot of defenses against this argument. Most simply say ‘Hey it’s just the way things are, so quit bitching.’ Maybe so. Maybe we were just born with a raw deal. They needed cashiers and grocery baggers, and we needed something to do… badly.

I could understand, though, if the job was one you sincerely loved. Still it seems we have no time left for study, learning. The word ‘learn’ is so often associated with memories of stacks of homework you once had to do on subjects that did not interest you. Thankfully the sometimes downright ugly thought of learning becomes more appealing when the study is of things personally important. It seems in modern culture the idea of learning makes many sick; such as those fresh out of high school. Let the sunshine in. Any explorer understands the importance of learning. Exploring is learning is living. Simply observing things with fresh eyes can bring realizations of the true natural motive behind money and power: Greed.

The only way, it seems, to cure ourselves of this misguided direction in our lives is to redirect our dreams and desires to things that are really important to us. We were sold on dreams that were never ours long before we even understood what a dream really was. Our dreams exist within the framework of the social patterns, and this is the greatest part of the problem. We have to look outside this framework, outside the box, for the things that are truly important to us. Society shouts, “Find a job you love, find a home you love, fill your home with objects you love and build a family you will love, and we promise, yes, we promise you will be happy for the rest of your days!”

We know now this sales pitch is false. These things will not make us happy; they will make us sick in consumerism. They will slowly wear away on us, until we are so lost that we see no possibility or desire of escaping the cage built around us.

I’m here now to tell you now: We can’t let this happen! It consumed our parents, our grandparents, but we’re smarter now, we’re starting to get it. We’re starting to catch on, and that means everything. But it leaves us somewhere cold and uncertain in the end. The pulling questions remain: “What do we do now? Where do we go from here?” It all comes down to a simple question that we all must ask ourselves. That question is: “What am I passionate about?” This question is asking what we love, what we think about all the time, what fascinates us, what we want to do, what we want to spend innumerable hours on. This question asks of us, what do we love, and begs the next question: “Do we love it enough to make it the purpose of our life?” You might think, ‘you’re making too much of this!’ A life is just a life…well, fuck that idea. How can we dethrone ourselves to beggars and peasants when we are, in fact, sentient human beings, with lives and dreams to fulfill? If we would only find them with the same tenacity that we would chase them with, we could take the world..

Get excited about life, pick the real dreams and the right directions and head out into the world to do great things. It’s the only way to do it; think outside the box, escape this mind-numbing social order and create occupations out of the things you love, the things you feel most passionately about. It’s all out there, grab it, and make it your own.

Walking the streets in the depth of night, the cold pressing into me from all sides; not knowing if I’m going to survive; it’s so invigorating in the winter months. Read the full story

We are the home of the brave and the land of the free. We have the largest number of shopping malls and the most McDonalds restaurants. Ours is the country that perfected the notion of “rags to riches” success, a place where the average person can make his or her dreams come true with a little bit of faith in the system, and a whole lot of hard work. We are even the country that thousands of immigrants move to every year with the intention of gaining a better life. So, is it possible that Americans could be wrong about something so mundane as driving on the right side of the road? Read the full story

This is my reset button, my refocusing tool; this short piece helps me clear my mind. It pulls apart existence on a personal level that seems to ground and focus the brain. Seed is attempting to place a mindset of clarity through a form of what I would call introspective intellectual meditation. In addition, it poses a simple question.

You wake up. You open your eyes. Another day.

You begin to think about the coming minutes and hours, the way to work, what you will eat. You see the structure that has been built around you your entire life. From the day you were born, every single year, every single memory, every event of your life stacked up and up and up to create the human being you are now.

You live in the moments that are passing by. Once a moment passes it becomes a memory.

Stop. Go all the way back to when you opened your eyes this morning.

Stop and wipe the slate clean, push away all those structures and patterns and memories and images and doctrines and faces, and rules and boundaries.

Push it all away for a moment. Just an open sky remains. An open sky in your mind. Free to wander anywhere, free of the limits imposed by our memorable lives.

You are a single human. One of a family. A family of a neighborhood. A neighborhood of a community. A community large as a township. One of several townships that encompass the metropolitan area of a city. A city connected to several other cities within the lines of a county. One county of many becoming a state, and one state in a union of states called a country. A country that includes hundreds of cities, towns, neighborhoods, families and people.

These countries vast and large link together with continents and oceans. Within the entire world there are various countries controlling every single square inch of the entire known world. They are all meshed together one by one, as you scope out to see the beautiful blue-green sphere we call home. Earth. Look at our home and our society; wonderful and mysterious. It is a gift.

We come back to you, a single individual. One entity, though vastly important. The universe like a pond of crystal clear water streaked with waves, swirls, currents and an often quiet immobility so still one’s reflection appears. Like a tiny pebble dropped into the pond, your thoughts, ideas and actions ripple through the world affecting everything and everyone in infinitely complex patterns. Our lives like a constant rainfall shake the universal pond, shaping everything in our world, seen and unseen.

You are here and it is now.

What will you do?

Without being overly dogmatic I think we can break students into these two categories: the ignorant and the stupid. Let me first say that we are all students of some kind and so we are all more or less ignorant and stupid. Read the full story