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Archive for the ‘Issues’ Category

Given what today is, I thought it would be a good idea to say a few words on the current brouhaha. Instead of just enjoying the holiday watching DVDs that is.

Just something I posted on a certain mailing list a few days ago:

I find it hard to believe that ousting GMA now would lead to any true change. We’ve seen what the countless political episodes have exposed: corruption at almost every level of government, both the executive and legislative branches beholden to bribery and extortion. The problems in our government are systemic in nature, and it would take more than the ouster of a single person to effect any meaningful change. Even if we were to find someone *with good intentions* to replace the president, he’s still likely to be swallowed up by the system.
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Posted by Roy in Issues, Roy Tang for President | No Comments

I don’t particularly care one way or another whether Gloria falls out of power or not. I suspect a lot of people don’t. And a lot of people probably don’t give a hoot about Trillianes either. I am however of the opinion that he is an idiot.

What exactly did he hope to accomplish yesterday anyway? The only difference between now and Oakwood a few years ago is that since then he’s gotten the pity vote to actually be able to call himself a senator.

I suppose he thought he could be some sort of spark that could start some sort of neo-Edsa or whatnot. But he’s not good enough for that. I like to think the Filipino people have gotten better at judging the BS coming from the mouth of politicians. Trillianes statements yesterday, full of arrogance and naked ambition, would not have sit well with many, no matter how simple-minded they think we are.

A Manila Penn guard interviewed on TV today summed it all up: “Naapektuhan lang ni Trillianes trabaho namin. Ang dami nyang hotel na nadaanan, bakit dito pa sya pumunta?” That’s my general sentiment: “You’re being troublesome. Go somewhere else.”

Bonus:

There was a media segment during the live coverage where a reporter was describing the actions of the soldiers as they prepared to invade the hotel. He was telling everyone on live TV how the soldiers were hiding near the entrance of the hotel. Way to blow the operation details. What, are they thinking no one inside the hotel can watch television?

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Issues, Philippines | 1 Comment

2 days ago: My brother Alvin and Brian report suspicious activities on the computer in their room. Random Chinese popups appearing, mysterious processes in the taskbar. As needed, virus scans and adware scans are done. Trojans are identified and quarantined, but keep reappearing. Brian plays WoW on the machine despite the issues.

Yesterday: Alvin decides to reformat the machine and begins backing up. Brian plays WoW on the machine in my room instead.

Tonight, around 8 PM: I’m surfing the ‘net at work before I go for the day, I receive an instant message from Alvin telling me they can’t login to the WoW account. I try the password recovery, but it won’t accept my details. I IM Alvin to keep trying, and hurry home.

Around 9:30 PM: I notice emails that tell me that a paid character transfer has been performed on the WoW account. We’ve been hacked! I immediately use the web form on Blizzard’s site to report the incident. I’ve already lost $25 to the hacker.

We still have no idea how it happened. My best guess is a keylogger on the other machine that trapped the WoW account password. We’ve been toning down the WoW-playing lately, so it may be time to kill the account, if Blizzard actually responds in time. In the worst case, I’ll need to have my credit card canceled if Blizzard refuses to help.

Edit 23-Nov 7:37 AM: Around 12:30 AM today, Blizzard reset my account password and notified that they were in the process of character transfer reversal. I immediately went in and updated the details. Very good service, Changed my passwords elsewhere too, for good measure.

More as it develops…

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Games, Issues | No Comments

I’m not sure what some Church leaders are thinking. Calling for an outright ban on The DaVinci Code movie just makes it more popular. At the very least, it’s insulting to the intelligence of their flock - are they saying Catholics don’t have the ability to distinguish fact from fiction by themselves? But then again, this is a nation of Catholics who tend to elect action stars to high office because of all the goody-goody roles they portray in the movies, so maybe the priests have some sort of point.

The best view of this affair has to be from the street vendors who plan to hawk the pirated copies of the movie: If the movie is banned, all the people who would have watched the movie would be buying from them instead! Good times!

As for me, I’m not much into going to the theatre nowadays. I’ll probably watch it someday, probably in the comfort of home. But I’ve read the book, and the movie is said to be a generally faithful adaptation, so I’m not too psyched into seeing it.

Posted by Roy in Issues, Pop Culture | No Comments

There are a handful of issues that would influence the general direction of the human race in years to come. Terrorism, oil scarcity, trade imbalances and worldwide poverty come to mind, and these are the ones most commonly discussed in mainstream media. There is however, another important battle being waged that is far removed from the minds of the everyday person. That battle is Recording Industry vs The People.

Some of the posts at the above blog are awesome reads and point to an alarming pattern of abuse of the United States’ judicial system by large corporations with armies of lawyers at their disposal waging a war against ordinary American citizens. The scary part is that the agenda the RIAA is pushing with its’ strong-arm tactics seems to point towards a conclusion that because sharing of copyrighted material is detrimental to their business model, all file-sharing should be considered as criminal activity.

At a time that the world is supposedly entering an Age of Information, the outcome of this battle threatens to pull the upcoming age in one of two directions: On one side, a world where large companies monopolize the creation and delivery of content to the addicted consumer masses. On the other side, a world where people can choose to share their own creations freely and without fear of being branded as communists, a world where people have the choice to patronize freely-shared creations or those offered for a fee.

While these are concerns under American law only, the very nature of the distribution system being challenged - the internet - makes this a global issue as well. Though “the internet” is still only a vague concept in the minds of the majority of the world’s citizens, the day will eventually come when almost everybody is online. The question is, when that day comes, would you want to live in the world the RIAA is building?

Posted by Roy in Issues, Tech | No Comments

Lest I be accused of avoiding the real world by writing about TV shows while events start to unfold which may or may not plunge our nation into chaos, I suppose I should put my two cents into the matter. For those who read this text in the future at a time when all these links are broken, the current President of the Phillipines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has declared a state of national emergency today, claiming that a broad alliance encompassing traditional oppostion groups and the far left and the far right are trying to bring her down. Ironically, she did this on the 20th anniversary of the People Power revolution.

Now, I can’t pretend to be smart enough to realize the legal implications of today’s events, nor can I provide some detailed analysis of how we keep doing this sort of thing to ourselves over and over again, nor am I old enough to note any eerie similarities with the events during Marcos’ time.

What I do know is that whoever advised the President to proclaim a state of emergency at this stage is either an idiot, or an agent of the political opposition out to take her down. I would like to think that any Philippine President, especially one undergoing questions of her legitimacy, would stay away from anything that would show people that she really was the monster they all claimed she was. A threat of curtailing our democractic freedoms in order to handle a “coup” that is not even visible to the people (much less a clear and present danger) can only be construed as an attempt to desperately hold on to power.

Yesterday, I was informed through the usual SMS channels that there might be some sort of trouble during the next couple of days. I shrugged it all off, knowing full well that no matter how many warm bodies the opposition manage to pay off to join their rallies, nothing would happen until they presented a viable alternative to the people, an alternative so blindingly obvious people would have to be idiots not to want it. All GMA had to do was weather the storm, same way she did the whole impeachment fiasco, and she would survive. She just had to avoid “biting” at all the forces taunting her, avoid doing anything patently stupid such as declaring martial law.

Well, it wasn’t martial law, but it was still stupid. And just the sort of mistake her opponents have been waiting for. But will they be able to capitalize on it?

Posted by Roy in Issues, Philippines | No Comments

…or so he claimed.

The conversation started off easily enough, he said the MMDA over at Megamall were staring him down for daring to wait for me to run up to his cab. For some reason, he soon digressed into how earlier that day he had witnessed a man snatch a cellphone from a young woman inside a jeepney. The young woman was of course dumbstruck as the perp made his escape. My host candidly told me that if only he’d had a passenger to watch his cab for him, he would have stepped out of his cab (he was deep in traffic) and given chase himself.

As if to make sure that I believed he would be capable of such a thing, he related how he had once survived a hold-up attempt by three young men, killing one of them in the process. He described the encounter as one that left him wounded and bloody all over.

He also displayed quite a disdain for drug addicts, as he recounted the time some guy asked to be brought to the pier while carrying a bag of shabu in the early morning. Our heroic (?) taxi driver made it a point to choose a route that brought him past a police checkpoint, and he used his headlights to signal to the cops that there was something fishy, so they were flagged down for checking. He told the cops that he didn’t care about the taxi fare, just wants to be rid of the guy.

Then there was the time a snatcher was running past his cab, and he opened the driver-side door to smash into the guy. Once the perpetrator was on the ground, he proceeded to kick him down and even broke his wrist. (He gave me a small demo by flopping around his hand.) He said he then left the guy to the barangay tanods, as a gift. “Regalo ko na sa inyo yan,” were his words, he said.

Then we went into the inevitable litany of how soft we were on crime. Apparently he had worked in Saudi for more than 10 years, and he preferred the Saudi method of eye for an eye; when a thief was caught in Suadi Arabia, his hands were cut off. He pshawed away any talk of human rights, saying that if a person was guilty he should just be killed right away. He professed a hatred of criminals and drug addicts and implied that he enjoys any chance to deliver some beatdown on them.

I, of course, was tempted to play devil’s advocate and argue for the side of human rights, but I realized that this was a guy who had confessed to killing someone before! Granted, I’m not robbing him, but I might get at least a poke in the eye for disagreeing with him!

Now me, I’ve never witnessed a single snatching or holding-upping or anything like that on the mean streets of metro manila. This man was giving me insights on how it was to truly live on the streets. And I found myself thinking, at least at that level there are still people who reject the rampant criminality that apparently pervades our streets (however ends-justify-the-means his reasoning may be).

The taxi driver remarked that robbers and snatchers always say something like “I just needed money to buy milk for my baby”, which is a totally BS excuse. Many hundreds, if not thousands of our countrymen struggle everyday trying to make a decent, honest living, and as long as there are people able to walk that road, “I had to do it to survive” is *not* an excuse.

That sort of petty crime on the streets is a vicious cycle, and even if you say that it’s caused by poverty, it also causes poverty by itself…more often than not the victims are just the sort of people who have worked extra hard to be able to save up for something decent. As the taxi driver mentioned, many of the snatched cellphones are probably not even yet fully paid for. It’s a case of poverty feeding upon itself.

We wandered into more discussions about gun control, the situation in America and Saudi Arabia and almost always his solutions came back to some form of harsh and inhumane punishment or perhaps vigilantism. Maybe it’s not a bad idea; imagine how much safer Metro Manila might be if we had some sort of Batman-like character prowling the night and scaring the hell out of would-be criminals?

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Issues, Philippines | No Comments

The response of the western world to the recent backlash against published cartoon depictions of mohammed could be described as the unavoidable result of two completely distinct cultures clashing against each other. On one hand, Islam dictates that any such depiction of the prophet Mohammed are considered as blasphemy; on the other hand, Western media views it as a free speech issue; since every other religion in the world tolerates media lampooning, why shouldn’t Islam? Arguably, other faiths also have a certain threshold of tolerance for religious mockery beyond which they would mercilessly tear down whatever publication dared to print it. The only difference is that the theshold for Islam is a lot easier to break.

People are dying now, from riots against Danish embassies in protest of the actions of the Denmark papers. Western-cultured individuals would question why any intelligent human being would rail against a government for the actions of its’ media outlets. But these radicals are the sort that don’t understand the virtues of the free press. The sheer number of Muslims reacting violently is a testament as to how many of the freedoms that we in the Western-oriented world take for granted can be considered as unimaginable in some cultures.

The frightening thing is that with all the tension between the Western world and Islam right now, these small things are the sort that could be used as an excuse to trigger a third world war. And someone may have even added fuel to the fire on purpose.

Posted by Roy in Issues | No Comments

In a few months people will forget anyway.

Yesterday 74 people died in a tragic stampede. The reason? Crowding to get into the one-year anniversary show of a local noontime variety show. Wowowee.

This is ridiculous, an obvious barometer showing how desperate many of our countrymen have become. The show was offering prizes in the form of raffle draws and contests, and many were hoping to win a house and lot or at least some cash to help them get by. Many of them were poor and coming from far-flung places even outside the metro.

Shocking how these people look up to Willy Revillame, host of Wowowee, as some sort of Messiah who can uplift them out of their poverty. And some paid dearly with their lives.

I remember during the days of the “Pera o Bayong” contest that there would be literally hundreds of would-be contestants hanging out near the ABS-CBN compound hoping to win a big prize. I remember thinking that these people spend hours in line, many probably coming back day after day; if they could just devote themselves to some sort of honest work they would have had far better chances of improving their lives.

While I say a prayer for those whose lives were lost, I’m glad I have the luxury of thinking that crowding in with thirty thousand people for a chance to win some cash is just too much hassle.

Posted by Roy in Issues, Philippines | 2 Comments

My brother estimates we have at least a hundred pirated copies of PS2 games. (Please don’t lecture me in any way on piracy, I’ve said my piece before.)

In any case, we have spent at least ten thousand pesos (roughly two hundred american) on pirated PS2 games. And out of those hundred copies, some games we have two or three copies of (due to the problems generally associated with illegal copies); Out of all those pirated games, I’d make a conservative estimate that at least 20 games were actually playably good. We got good playing time out of them, and it was a good experience overall. So the effective cost per good game comes out to around five hundred pesos (roughly ten american dollars). This number is important, because this magic number is the price at which it becomes worthwhile for us to buy an original game.

When I make a game, I will price it in this range.

Posted by Roy in Games, Issues | No Comments