US FIRST

As a lot of people who know me realize I am addicted to FRC. Well, over the last couple years I have realized that FRC is failing in its goal. It wants to encourage cooperation between people. Bond them together because they share a passion. But at its heart it is a competition. This doesn't encourage open sharing, it encourages teams to keep secrets and not share knowledge. I am a firm believe in open source technologies, be it hardware or software. Today I was told that I shouldn't post pictures of what we can do. Being a new mentor I have to comply at least for the mechanical portion of things.  This is not the spirit of FIRST, yes we should play to win, but we should also play to help others.  This is a battle I have fought for 4 years I feel now, and will always feel, that free flow of information is more important than winning. Knowing I helped one team out with a question, or taught one person something new, or made someone realize something wasn't impossible is infinitely more valuable to me than seeing ONE win.

FIRST recognizes this, the two highest awards aren't for robots. They are for inspiring other teams, for helping other teams, for spreading what FIRST is actually about. If I wanted competition I'd be in battlebots. I want education, intelligence, not some stupid frivolous competition.

Republican Primary

Tonight I am watching the campaign speeches from the Republican canidates. I have concluded that John McCain is the only Republican I will vote for, I said it 8 years ago and I say it again, I feel that McCain is not just out to get money, nor to satisfy his supporters. McCain, I feel, truly loves America. Not to say that the other canidates do not. I feel McCain loves everything America represents. What do I mean by that? He is proud of who he is, what he thinks, in short he is proud of himself, is that conceited or wrong? No. America is about being who one really is. McCain says that he is a Republican, I really don't see that all the time. He doesn't always vote along party lines. Thats good. Did you know that George Washington hated the idea of a multi-party system? Yeah thats right, he hated them because you get people who vote not on what they feel, who say not what they think, they instead say what the party says.

This is going to be a short post, I don't have much to say. Just my views on the political scene right now. Between Democrats I must say, I doubt Hillary can win a general election. She is too intimidating to some people. Sadly she may get the nomination purely because she is a woman. As for Obama, if he beats Clinton he will take the Presidency. Anyone who can take on the Clinton machine and win should be able to beat anyone the Republicans can muster. McCain is the strongest canidate and could potentially take on Clinton but I do not feel that hes stands a chance against Obama. 

Windows Licensing

I run a Mac. Why? Cuz I prefer them over Windows. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm saying one is better for ME than the other. But I still have to use Windows occasionally on my Mac. I own 2 XP Pro licenses and 1 Vista Ultimate license. Now should I not be allowed to use those licenses for whatever I choose? Microsoft says no. They say that my license is invalid if I change the virtual machine settings in Parallels. Why is that? Piracy. Ok guess what, at this point I think it would be more time efficient to pirate Windows than to go and argue with them about it. Why? Simple, I tried doing it the right way and they caused me a problem. Why is that? Because they are worried about piracy. This gets into the same reason DRM fails. If they are going to tell me how I am allowed to use something I purchased why should I purchase it from them when I can get it somewhere else and not be forced into their restrictive license? So I will TRY to do it legit one more time and if it takes more than 30 minutes on the phone with them I am officially DONE dealing with Microsoft.

FIRST Robotics competition

Kickoff for the FRC 2008 game was yesterday. The game this year is FIRST Overdrive which is just a fancy name for going in circles while playing with balls. Quite frankly, I am disappointed in it. The removed the auton period and allowed limited human control during a new 'hybrid' mode. Ok yes auton was hard... wait no it wasn't. There was no excuse not to have an auton mode. For the last two years FIRST has been downplaying the auton mode. I understand that it is intimidating but really I do not feel that it is as difficult as it is made out to be. It is a simple series of if statements. Not hard at all...The least they could of done was to allow use of the camera or some way of using a sequence of button presses. But they banned both of those. So basically... we have humans controlling auton mode now. Which is boring.

Oh and this game is gonna SUCK to watch. That is all for now