And yet the inevitable legal battle will be anything but. If the name wasn’t a dead giveaway, Kim Dotcom’s actions have made it clear that he simply doesn’t care about playing by the rules set down by the government. After all, this is the same man who, prior to founding Megaupload, made millions through insider trading and embezzlement. Doctom is also a whale: Megaupload is a giant among file-hosting websites and even more so among those that are known for hosting copyrighted material. So it’s understandable that the government, after witnessing the intense opposition to SOPA, decided to attack online copyright infringement from the other side. Legislation in the spirit of SOPA has popped up from time to time in the past, under monikers such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 and the PRO-IP Act of 2008. SOPA is simply a reiteration of anti-piracy legislation, all designed to restrict the scope of legal activity on the Internet.

However, the track record for the courts is just as bad. Cases such as MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.; A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.; and Patti Santangelo v. RIAA all point to an unsatisfying answer to the issue of copyright infringement: It depends. Even if the charges pan out against Megaupload, the resulting decision will have a limited reach. The U.S. government cannot hope to get the kind of broad power that SOPA would grant it by appealing to the judicial branch. So why do it at all?

One answer is that it wanted to send a message. By taking down a large, publicly visible corporation, the U.S. sends an anti-piracy message that is necessary after backing down from the passage of SOPA. If slinking away from SOPA made the government seem weak at all, surely the arrest would save face and retain the image of the U.S. as tough on crime.

But if this was the goal, it too was an immense failure. In response to the Megaupload arrests, hacker group Anonymous launched a series of distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and took down the Department of Justice and other government websites. In one of the larger attacks made by the group, the DoS made it clear that sending a signal is not enough: As long as the government wants to significantly interfere with the Internet, there will be people who will fight until their last breath.

If there’s something to be taken away from these events, it is that no piece of legislation or government action will effectively curtail Internet piracy. We as a society must fundamentally rethink the way we view copyright in light of the Internet and change the way we deal with the commerce of intellectual property. Until we do, pointless disputes of this kind will continue to occur, and the Kim Dotcoms around the world will be vainly arrested, only for others to spring up in their place. We can no longer hold onto our archaic intellectual property laws. We may not need to get rid of them altogether. But they must change.

It may be true that student printing on campus has seen a reduction since the plan was put into place, but it does not follow that any paper was actually saved, and in reducing the use of printers on campus the University may have managed to achieve the appearance of waste reduction while actually changing nothing.

Last year, Student Technology Services (STS) officials found “piles” of printed pages in student labs that were printed for personal reasons, including invitations, announcements and general co-curricular needs. One might be tempted to think that now, with those piles of pages absent from the trays of printers, less frivolous material is being printed. But those needs don’t go away just because printing is no longer free. Student groups still need flyers, events still need invitations, and students still need to write term papers. The only difference is that now students have an incentive to go off-campus whenever heavy-duty printing is needed, since the University’s printing rates are outrageously high for any sort of bulk printing. Additionally, it would be premature to conclude that waste has been reduced without considering how many students purchased personal printers after hearing about the printing restrictions. STS’ confidence in any environmental savings as a result of the restrictions ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, the problems that the printing ban creates in pursuit of saving paper are obvious and well known. The sluggish pace of the Olin Library computers was infamous when I was a freshman, and the addition of a clunky printing system makes the process even slower.

Should the printer fail to connect to the server, as is often the case, one has to repeat the entire process over again on another computer. Printing on the way to class can easily become a nightmare, and having to portion out an additional 20 minutes every time a paper is due in class, in my case twice a week, is unacceptable. I have yet to connect successfully on my first attempt.

And downsides aren’t justified for the average user. According to STS, more than 90 percent of students will not exceed the $40 limit given to on-campus students—in other words, they aren’t the significant contributors to paper waste on campus. It’s the top 10 percent who are wasting the most, and they are the ones going to FedEx, Kinko’s and OfficeMax. The printing policy creates the illusion of savings while only washing the University’s hands of the matter.

If Wash. U. is committed to reducing paper waste, it should take steps to make paper as superfluous as possible. The University could provide an online system for paper submission, or create virtual bulletin boards. They could encourage online textbooks. They could actually try to reduce the need for students to use paper on campus. Trying to reduce campus printing is not the same goal, and will not result in the same benefits. This printing ban might help Wash. U.’s image, but it will not help the environment.

Michelle Nahmad | Student Life

Perhaps the most revealing sign of the University’s attitude towards the system is how horribly outdated it is. The system was originally introduced with the promise that every class would be part of some cluster or another. While that may well have been the case in 2001, it has yet to be fully updated since then, and several interesting classes get passed up because they contribute nothing to one’s distributions. Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society; Cold War Culture: Aesthetics and Politics 1945-2005; Infectious Diseases: Past, Present and Future…If any of these classes gets you excited, sit back and relax, because none of them is offered in a cluster. Granted, this would be a minor concern if students could create their own clusters, but seniors simply can’t, and underclassmen must individually petition for up to one created cluster. In practice, this leads to several frustrated students who must relegate their last year to filling out clusters that have little relevance to them. If someone happens to be interested in all of the classes in a given cluster, fulfilling these distribution requirements is a breeze. But most students simply don’t find the arbitrary listing of clustered classes to be classes they are truly interested and engaged in, and, for many, they end up a pointless chore.

But perhaps I’m being unfair—surely Wash. U. gives enough time for students to take elective credits in addition to their distribution requirements. This is admittedly true for some students, but it depends heavily on one’s major. While a literature major requires only 30 credits for completion, a biology major requires virtually as many credits in the first year alone. This is the biggest failure of the cluster system: It disproportionately hurts some students more than others. Most students with lenient majors will have plenty of time and space to easily fill out their cluster requirements and still have room for elective classes. Yet an equally large number of students with more intensive majors are left struggling to meet the minimums by their last semester, and the cluster system makes no distinction between the latter and the former.

Of course, plenty of loopholes exist to make this process slightly more tolerable. For example, under the Shared Attribute Principle, whichever distribution area applies to the cluster can also apply to one class within the cluster. This means that a cluster with two NS courses and one TH course can have the TH count as an NS. Problems in Philosophy suddenly counts as a natural science class as much as Physical Chemistry I and II do, which begs the question: If clusters can be so easily defeated by loopholes, why have them at all?

Wash. U. is slated to remove the cluster system starting next year, so most of my worries are moot. Beginning in the fall of 2012, incoming students will be spared having to deal with the obtuse, convoluted cluster system. Hopefully the University will have the foresight to pick a simpler, less-confusing system or ideally do away with distributions altogether. Because, at the end of the day, we just don’t need a regimented system to help us balance our coursework. We don’t need a Shared Attribute Principle, or eight required “Language & the Arts” credits. We are all capable as students to determine what intellectual territories we want to explore outside of the boundaries our major. We’re smart kids; we can figure it out ourselves.

Like most standard currencies, Bitcoins operates through an exchange and can be used wherever the currency is deemed legitimate. However, unlike most standard currencies, Bitcoin transactions are anonymous and encrypted and can be used solely over the Internet for the exchange of goods and services. The transactions involving Bitcoins, while comparatively few in number, have exponentially increased in the past several months. However, the technology is plagued by a lack of stability, security and liquidity, and the currency is still in its infancy.

Although debates rage over the practicality of Bitcoins, it’s unlikely that virtual currency will ever go mainstream or feasibly replace “hard” currency. But the emphasis on large-scale feasibility misses the forest for the trees. Currently, several websites such as Wikileaks accept Bitcoin donations, but aside from these niche uses, Bitcoins are largely used to facilitate encrypted, legally dubious transactions over the Internet. Virtual currency thus occupies a quasi-legal status similar to Napster: a legal technology being implemented primarily for the use of illegal activity.

In this light, Bitcoins have much more relevance in the ever-shifting field of Internet piracy. Law enforcement officials are currently frustrated by the currency’s existence, since transactions involving Bitcoins are impossible to trace to individual users, and accordingly, Bitcoins represent an expansion in Internet piracy. Users can now not only anonymously violate copyright infringement but also can anonymously traffic drugs and other contraband online.

Online currency is thus symptomatic of a larger phenomenon: the ability of individuals to mask themselves over the Internet. While in the past, online transactions were limited to credit or debit card purchases and thus traceable by law enforcement, the nature of Bitcoins permit only the transactions—and not the identity of the users involved—to be published publically.

This shift completely changes the character of online piracy. Previously, online piracy was marked by the free exchange of copyrighted materials, largely uploaded by volunteers for the sake of spreading information and content over the web. Piracy thus largely remained “grassroots,” so to speak. However, the introduction of Bitcoins, coupled with the rise of illegal online transactions, adds a monetary element into the mix. Now, there is a distinct financial incentive to engage in illegal activity on the Internet, and specifically, a distinct financial incentive to organize. Is it only a matter of time before we begin to see online drug cartels?

Internet piracy, in the form of copyright infringement, is relatively benign. The producers of copyrighted media lose out financially, but nobody besides the individual consumer is monetarily better off. Yet the new forms of piracy that are proliferating on the Internet are far more dangerous. Any time big money is involved, the threat of violence invariably looms close.

Currently, such a threat is a bit off into the distance, as statistical methods currently used by law enforcement officials would make any large-scale transactions easily traceable. But this only applies to the status quo. If Bitcoins do not find a way to make such transactions possible while maintaining anonymity, another virtual currency very well may.

There is no easy solution to these problems that arise with online currency. But one thing is certain: We cannot treat them merely like the piracy that existed in the past, nor can we treat them like just another currency. Rather, we must recognize that online currency is like nothing we have ever encountered before.

Apple has become inextricably tied to its founder, and the future of the company seems uncertain in an industry where certainty is worth its weight in gold. Apple as a corporation is no stranger to uncertainty, however, and Jobs’ departure should come as a surprise to nobody.

That Steve Jobs has lasted several years while enduring a notably aggressive form of cancer is nothing short of a miracle—yet few seem to recognize this.

The market’s immediate reaction to Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple could only be described as vicious, and while recovery after the open swiftly followed, the brief lack of investor confidence was obvious. We can understand why in 2004 Jobs originally hesitated in announcing his diagnosis. Immediately after he did so, his apprehensions came true: Apple’s stock dipped significantly, if only for a short while. Fortunately, the stock rebounded, even as the climate of Apple’s execs has since been one of intense anxiety.

After all, Jobs is viewed as Apple’s hero: He is not only the strategic force behind Apple’s ingenious takeover of the music industry but also the creative muse that inspired the design of the iPhone. Should he pass away, there is no obvious successor, as Ballmer is to Gates, and although Jobs has more or less passed the torch to Timothy D. Cook, it seems unlikely that he could replace Jobs in any sense. It doesn’t even seem likely that anyone could replace him at all—Jobs has meticulously formed the company in his image, and such control leaves Apple with little momentum. To be sure, the next few years of Apple are more or less laid out, with Verizon’s adoption of the iPhone and a few more revisions to its current lineup. But long-term goals are unknown.

Oddly enough, this uncertainty is not reflected in Apple’s performance. Many investors have more or less resigned themselves to the ups and downs of Jobs’ health, and the stock performance, while dipping as all stocks do upon receiving bad news, has stabilized, and Apple continues to be a thriving force. Insofar as Apple has been shaped by Steve Jobs, it has also been shaped by uncertainty. It will be exciting to watch Apple in the next few years, but Apple has proven itself to be quite resilient in the face of enduring uncertainty.

Adobe is at the center of this conflict, with the relatively recent purchase of Flash technology from Macromedia in 2005. Flash as a multimedia platform currently dominates the technological currency of online video: Even independent video aggregation sites aside from YouTube overwhelmingly use Flash, and only now has a competitor risen from the ashes of such atrocious failures as Gnash and Swfdec: HTML5. HTML5 would probably be doomed to the fate of all the other failed implementations before it if not for the strong support of its founding consortium, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Members include individuals from the Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software and, of course, our friends at Apple. Steve Jobs has viciously denounced Flash as unstable and buggy, and is aggressively marketing HTML5 as a successor, implementing HTML5 and, conspicuously, not Flash, in Apple’s mobile devices. This, however, raises a fundamental question: Even if Flash is superior to HTML5 as a technology, do we have any other reasons to prefer the latter over the former? I contend that yes, we do.

The problem with Flash is that ultimately, it is not an open platform. As it currently stands, because of intellectual copyright laws, Adobe has a de facto monopoly on the Internet video business: If you want to have a video-sharing site, add video-sharing capabilities to your Web site or even append videos to your blog, you’re going through Adobe and specifically through Flash. This in itself is not a legitimate reason to prefer one system over another. So what if Adobe has control over a disproportionately large percentage of the market as long as its functionality is adequate for the demands of video output? I personally do not take much stock in the mentality that open software is always better than privately developed and copyrighted software.

But I do think that open software has a distinct advantage over closed software in one crucial area: its ability to evolve. Some technologies are perfectly adequate despite a poor pace of software development. Microsoft Word is 90 percent of what it used to be back in 1995, and yet 15 years later, the function of word processors is exactly the same: We just need a screen to write on. Contrast this with online video—unlike word processing, online video is a constantly changing landscape, with developments in bandwidth allocation, video processing, video encoding and video playback all affecting the technology itself. Five years ago, high-definition playback on streaming video was a complete nonissue, and now it is quickly becoming the standard. Adobe, on the other hand, has consistently failed to keep pace with technology. I suspect that this is not due to any particular failure on Adobe’s part (unlike Acrobat Reader, quite possibly the worst software ever developed), but rather that no private entity can keep up. The Internet moves at a breakneck speed, and standards that can be dynamically developed via collaborative efforts on the part of individual users over time are the only way to match the speed at which the Internet develops. Any standard for future playback must have the ability to develop alongside, and not in response to, the development of the Internet. HTML5, being an open standard, allows for this flexibility, and so is much more forward-looking. I can’t be confident in saying which technology will prevail, but I can at least argue which standard is better, and if it ends up with me huddling HTML5 like an old discarded Betamax player, well, so be it.

Ultimately, the choice to eat meat could be regarded as an ethical issue, but it is undoubtedly, among other things, an aesthetic issue. People don’t eat meat because they enjoy the thought of animals dying en masse in slaughterhouses across the globe, but because they enjoy the taste of roasted animal flesh. Are they justified in that belief? Should they be forced to care? Perhaps. But ultimately, most people put their bellies before their morals—and rightfully so.

Perhaps animals ought to be treated in kinder terms, and I want to be very clear about where I stand: I do think that factory farming, or any other inhumane method of slaughtering and breeding animals, should be replaced by more humane methods of raising and killing animals. But I don’t think there is an extra obligation to refrain from killing animals altogether­—after all, there is no real “meaning” to a cow’s life, other than to be killed for the cow’s meat. Animals need to end life to propagate their own, and this is an undeniable fact of nature.

Sure, animals might lead a hard life on the range, what with the neutering and branding and penned-in spaces. But is it really that much worse than the average human’s life? Sure, factory farming is cruel, but surely raising animals in a free-range environment would be far kinder to the animals than in nature: Remember that it takes a wolf roughly half an hour to kill a cow, and the poor cow stays alive through most of this time as it gets eaten alive.

Of course, we also draw incredibly arbitrary lines between what we think is worthy of living or not. What about insects? Viruses? Sure, perhaps they cannot feel pain, but what about the tons of mice and small rodents that are the collateral damage of large-scale agricultural farming? The best way to avoid that would be to grow a garden in your backyard, with no pesticides or other ways to protect your plants from predators, and to eat nothing else. Inconvenient? Sure, but so is veganism—if morality was truly a matter of convenience, we’re all just as guilty as the next.

Ultimately, I’m not trying to argue that eating meat is moral, or that vegans are immoral. In fact, at the heart of my argument is that the world is an inherently immoral place, with injustices and suffering across the world. Sure, we can do our part to limit suffering, but at the point where some people condemn others for causing some select organisms to suffer while killing (directly or indirectly) other organisms themselves, there’s something to be said about consistency. Every ounce of effort made and every dollar spent toward a vegan diet could be used elsewhere to help actual human beings, who always come before animals. Starving children in Africa or crying pigs in the slaughterhouse? The world’s a tough place.

AJ is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at asundar@wustl.edu.

There are certainly some instances in which this theory sounds plausible: Not so long ago, it was considered very exciting for a woman to reveal only her ankle, something that roughly serves the same function that a low-cut T-shirt might serve today. The less that is left for imagination, the less scintillating sex becomes in general, and from this point of view, the argument becomes more compelling.

The issue is not so simple, however. At what point could any culture, in the name of preserving all that is sexual and exciting, justifiably repress others from expressing however much sexual content they choose? That kind of a rationale seems silly on its face, but it raises the question: Why are we so quick to repress others’ sexuality? It seems intuitive that people should not be walking down the street naked constantly, if not solely for the sake of the children (as if any kid hasn’t already been introduced to the wonderful world of the Internet). Yet this strong intuitive nature could very well merely be the product of culture, and at the point where that’s true, it becomes hard to objectively defend sexual prudency. Consequently, the “American way” seems more and more indefensible.

Perhaps that is missing the forest for the trees: I think that the more reasonable position to take is that everyone is different when it comes to sex. What turns one person off turns another person on, and 2girls1cup is simultaneously shock show and fap fodder for people across the globe. Some people like feet, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand that—nor should I. We can perhaps look at the U.S. instead as a constantly moving flux, the people within it undergoing sexual revolution and evolution simultaneously. Under this view, we could end up finding some altogether fantastic fetish sometime down the road—and with new technology inventing weird, perverted devices such as the Fleshlight, well…who knows what we will think of next.

Until now. With the advent of Amazon’s Kindle, and later Apple’s i-Pad, e-books are finally making their way into mainstream consumption and consequently into mainstream piracy. E-book piracy has actually been around for quite awhile, albeit in small pockets of elite private BitTorrent trackers. The ethics of piracy put a new spin on that of college students, however: What are the ethical implications of e-textbook piracy?

To be sure, most students find textbooks to be overpriced, and the major explanation for their price lies in costs of distributions and updates (and not, interestingly enough, the intellectual merit of the work, as it is with music, movies and the like). With electronic books, however, this factor is taken out of the equation altogether—and since textbooks are arguably less about artistic creativity and more about compilations of facts, the case for copyright for textbooks becomes harder to defend.

Then again, e-books themselves could be lower in price, to the point of reasonableness. However, practice has shown this not to be the case—while e-books are in their distributional infancy, the track record so far has indicated that they are priced only modestly lower than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Still, even though it would likely be cheaper to buy a Kindle DX or iPad and cheaper e-books over four years, it’s even more tempting to buy a reader and then pirate the books—and the more attention e-books attract in the mainstream media, the easier it will be to locate and download the files.

Plus, since text takes up far less space than video, audio or images, large numbers of e-books can be downloaded far more rapidly than other forms of media, and in large bulk compilations. It may not be that much longer until we see the advent of a pirate library—a compendium of thousands, maybe even millions of books, that can be stored on a $100 external hard drive. Is this something to revere or revile? I personally am in awe of such a compendium of human knowledge being so easily accessible. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t mind paying for it.

Of course, the fundamental moral questions of piracy remain the same, and the same arguments can be hashed out in e-book debates as in the Napster debate. But e-books add a lot to the debate, especially when it comes to already overpriced textbooks. My personal stance is that the bookstore better start lowering their prices, or I might take to the high electronic seas. Yargh.

AJ is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at asundar@wustl.edu.

Yet the real fear of information condensation is its ability to alienate. For sure, one could read Twitter for an hour and consume more information than a whole day with a novel—between that and Wikipedia, an endless amount of knowledge exists right at our fingertips: and yet how much of it is really worth reading? If social media conglomerations like Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia exponentially increase the amount of information available to us, they only marginally increase the amount of useful information pertinent to us. Along with this overflow of information, and decreasing signal-noise ratios, what about texture? Could a text conversation ever truly convey the nuance and subtlety of an actual sentence? To be sure, even literature abstracts from reality, but the worst offender by far is that which never even formulates a real sentence.

There is of course an upshot: With increased access to collaborative content necessarily comes increased communication and interactivity with people regardless of distance—and while there is something to say about privacy, the fact that we can communicate with people across the globe with little to no effort is astonishing, and that truly could outweigh any potential drawbacks that the condensation of information has on us.

But the same technology that is suitable for making any level of communication between people possible is not necessarily the ideal method of communicating when it is possible through other means. Do me a favor: Next time when you’re on your cell phone, type out your text. See what kind of responses you get—if for nothing other than shock on your friend’s face, it will be worth it.