Lil Mike's Last Known Thoughts & Random Revelations...: Search Inside the Music... Songs of War, Data Storage Law & Cosmic Rays

Maybe call me slow, but I just found out that Neil Young started a section on his website awhile back called Songs Of The Times, and there are over a 1000 free tunes you can listen to from various songwriters known and unknown. All deal with the timely subjects of war, patriotism, our foolish leaders and the state of the world we are living in.

image from Neil Young video

Here are just a few tracks that piqued by attention, go visit Neil's Living With War site here for more...

Bad Religion - Let Them Eat War
from The Empire Strikes First

Nils Lofgren - Frankie Hang On
from the album Sacred Weapon

Steve Forbert - The Bagdhad Dream

Walter Egan - Love In a Time of War

MC Hammer w/ Andre Williams - Bring Our Brothers Home

BRING OUR BROTHERS HOME
by MC Hammer
listen here

With all due respect, I haven't been in your shoes

And I know it must be hard with all the things you goin' through,
Got the world on your shoulders, everybody's watchin' you,
Keep us all safe and out the same mouth we hate you,
I voted for you, til this day I don't regret it
When the funk popped off, you was there in a second,
Showed what it is, taught them cowards a lesson,
If they wanna go to war, GW ah get at em'
You did what we needed, in our darkest hour,
While our peoples was dying, in those burnin' twin towers,
Never before, had we seen it like this
The enemies we lookin' for, was livin' in our mist,
So we brought it to em' and we hit em' where it hurt,
Stuck they heads in the sand and knock they dicks in the dirt,
They know what it is Sir, job well done,
Now pick up the phone and tell our boys come on home,

Bring Em Home bring our brothers home
Too much dying, they been gone to long,
The people cryin', that this war is wrong,
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

In a world that's so cold and nobody knows
what this life has in store we can let it go....let it go

And now they got the House and now they got the Senate, but it ain't
what you got, it's what you do with it,
everybody's watchin' you, to see what it do
politics,is politics, you better make some moves
Living in a glass house you don't throw stones,
All eyes on ya'll now you sittin' on the throne,
We listen close, don't sing the same songs,
Cause in two more years it's more votin' goin' on,
It's not about you, you can hit the door,
it's about them youngsters out fightin' the war,
Clean up the game, we done made a mess,
We done our best, and we pass the test,
We hit'em in the desert,
Blast'em in the caves,
Tanks through their cities,
And Sadaam gone hang,
They know what it is, Sir job well done,
Now pick up the phone and tell our boy's come on home,

Bring Em Home bring our brothers home
Too much dying, they been gone to long,
The people cryin', that this war is wrong,
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

In a world that's so cold and nobody knows
what this life has in store we can let it go....let it go

I support you Sir and we got no beef,
I'm just a rapper, you Commander and Chief,
From out of my mouth, my heart do speak
So everything I'm saying Sir, is what I believe,
I do believe that the children are our future,
So why leave' em open where them rats can shoot'em?
If we leave 'em there, them suicides gone do'em
drive past the front line and run right into them,
They don't value life, so it ain't no talking to them,
They say when they die, a bunch of virgins gone screw them,
Now you tell me, what kind of ish is that?
We took'em to war, now it's time to fall back
I support you and the war on terror,
and I prayed for you, when you made that error,
This is not the enemy, this is from a friend,
Bring our boy's home and in the end we all win,

Bring Em Home

Bring Em Home , bring our brothers home
Too much dying, they been gone to long,
The people cryin', that this war is wrong,
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

In a world that's so cold and nobody knows
what this life has in store we can let it go....let it go

The world is changing,
Life is changing,
But we can make it,
Yes we can,
Yes we can

Immortal Technique - Bin Laden (Geniewiz unspeakable remix )

The Beat Meters & Sons of Emperor Norton - Irrational Anthem

Tim Easton - Jesus Protect Me From Your Followers
from his album Ammunition

------------ Search Inside The Music ---------------

Researchers at Sun Microsystems are working on technology that goes beyond mere meta data to recommend music and hope to revolutionize the "shuffle" play. They are attempting to create machines that can listen, and use processing algorithms to identify and recognize similarities in music. Aside from training machines to analyze tunes, Sun's crew are digging into digital music users listening habits and discovered interesting things about music discovery, and what is driving listening habits.

Lead investigator Paul Lamere has developed 3D visualizations that allow users to "fly" through their clustered collections. He's utilized a specially developed internal search engine as well as social tagging data from Last.FM ( which has determined 422 shades of metal) and what he calls folksonomies.

Amongst some of the Sun music findings :

80% of user listening time is concentrated on about 20% of their music.
63 % of the songs on hard drives & I-Pods had not been listened to even once.

further info

28 minute interview with Sun's Paul Lamere & Dana Gardner of Tech World
Beyond The Shuffle Button Discussion

related links:

http://research.sun.com/projects/dashboard.php?id=153
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/55720.html
http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/

in another finding by Lamere did not discussed in the podcast but made clear on his Sun blog:

All that immersion into music research revealed that Emusic is a solid choice for music lovers... I myself have said this on several occasions in the past 6 months, including yesterday, and i am glad to see a distinguished researcher has backed up my own findings. Lamere who is based in Burlington Vermont, could not find the new Deerhoof album at local stores...so he made the plunge into Emusic's free trial when he saw the album offered instantly on their servers.

I gave it a shot, and I'm glad I did. For the price of a CD at the local bookstore, I can get 50 downloads per month from eMusic. The downloads are non-DRM'd high-bit rate mp3s (VBR of at least 192K). The lack of DRM means that I can put the tracks on my iPod (unlike Rhapsody and Napster). eMusic keeps track of what music I've downloaded so I can redownload any purchased track so I don't have to worry about losing my music when my disk dies. The catalog is surprisingly deep. You won't find U2 or the Beatles, but it is a gold mine for indie music. It's no surprise that with its deep, long tail selection of DRM free, high quality music that eMusic is the second largest digital music store - and I think that eMusic, and offerings like it will be the future of music.

Busdriver w/ Abstract Rude - Unecessary Thinking

-----------------------------------

Bad News for Google News...and lots of bloggers?

I keep my homepage set to the url http://news.google.com, which not only offers a glance at alll the latest news coming down the wire, but customization by region, topics , keywords, phrases and names of interest. Well, it appears my news junkie fix is an expensive habit, and may be threatened somewhat by an EU court decision.

A Belgian court, in typically snooty European fashion, has ruled that Google must refrain from publishing "copyrighted content" on it's popular Google News aggregator site in Europe without prior permission. The court ruled Google had also violated "Belgian data-storage law" by archiving stories the papers usually charge for.

The decision came on the heels of a prior ruling that laid out penalties of more than US$1 million per day for violations. The good news for Google is that the new ruling went somewhat in Google's favor by reducing the penalty Google must pay for using unauthorized article extracts & photos to be $32,390 per day. A U.K newspaper has estimated that the fines could total in the $5 million range.

Google indicated Tuesday that it would appeal the Belgian court's latest ruling based on their contention that exemptions in copyright law allowed for publishing brief snippets and abstracts of copyrighted works.

The case, may open a large & expensive can of worms online if European online news providers & content owners can now charge any websites that dare quote & link to their websites without pre-approval. The case does not apply in the US as Google's publishing of synopsis links is considered "Fair Use" under the DMCA.

Global warming Caused By Cosmic Rays Not Humans?

A Danish scientist is causing controversy with his contention that global warming is caused by "cosmic rays" and not earthly emissions. "It was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds," Henrik Svensmark told London's The Sunday Telegraph.

Svensmark's study which bolsters critics of environmental controls over industry & emissions, was released just a week after the U.N. Panel on Climate Change released an authoritative multi scientist endorsed report that definitively said human carbon dioxide releases were responsible for the rapid increase in global warming. For more info on whether Washington will ever get any meaningful legislation passewd on the issue of climate controls , visit AlterNet for the latest.

Sam Brown - Timebomb

Andy Dick - Cosmic Dust

Run Level Zero - Cosmic Penetration

Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game

Tosca - Annanas (Cosmic Rocker Dub)

from "Suzuki In Dub (Continuous Mix)"
by Tosca
released via G-Stone Recordings