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Sounds like you like the same books as me, so I hereby introduce a shameless self-plug for an old article which lays all the best ones out. Needs updating though.

You're in good company. Thomas Jefferson made the same arguments. He has a great essay on it, including the following paragraph:

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

A fuller examination of this discussion can be found at K5.

Never give a charity with no purpose your address.

I once gave my address to The March of Dimes Foundation, but that was a mistake.

At present, the only charity with my current address is the local NPR affiliate, and they haven't abused it to my knowledge.

Writing email saying its been virus checked is just a simple form of "Social Engineering" ...

How would you like to have a chip built into your car that automatically charges your bank account $100 for speeding every time you exceed the speed limit?

You wouldn't? But you're breaking the law, shouldn't you want it to be enforced?

There's a difference between enforcing the law and keeping the peace. A good policeman knows when it's proper to warn, when it's proper to arrest, and when it's proper to look the other way.

Here's
what happens when a cop makes a poor decision to enforce laws "by the book." Costs the department hundreds of thousands of dollars just to arrest and detain, and more to defend false arrest lawsuits. K Mart's late-night business also undoubtedly suffers; who will shop there at night, knowing they could be arrested for no reason?

So you don't think our kids say to themselves, gee, dad goes off to the factory every day - he builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction. What's the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?"

> Glory Days? You want Glory Days?

Here's a related story on Kuro5hin. I think these Glory Days may just be selective memory. Nobody wants to remember the bad stuff.

I grew up in the St. Louis area and remember listening to that station, KSHE, in the late 80s. To me, they were Jurassic rock dinosaurs who were oblivious to the exciting new music forms of the time: hip-hop, hardcore punk, and thrash. (KSHE *did* have a metal show but you had to suffer through the Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin ad naseum.)

I heard better music coming out of college radio stations. I also heard KDHX, a great community radio station, when it first went on the air. It's still on the air too, so the glory days are still here!

Patents for an idea makes sense, in part, when an inventor wanted to protect his or her ability to profit or control the result of their effort. Patents and intellectual property protections were designed to prevent people from using your idea or effort to their betterment at your expense.

You're putting the cart before the horse. Patents and Copyright were not introduced in order to protect the business interests of inventors or authors, this was only the means. The ends were to encourage more innovation, as outlined in Section 8 sentence 8 of the US Constitution:

The Congress shall have power (...) To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

These rights (patents, copyright, trademarks and trade secrets, which are only contractual) are now being gathered under the collective, misleading name of intellectual property, in an effort to bypass the original justification of these rights, formerly referred to as exclusivity rights, in order to turn the means into the ends.

So first there were exclusivity rights, which were meant to serve the public, and whose benefits to the inventor/author (or rather, the patent or copyright owner) are merely incidental. Now justification and means are to be reversed. Intellectual property is meant to serve the rights holders, and benefits to society are merely incidental. More importantly, it does not even matter if society as a whole suffers from IP legislation. Logic patents and copyright are or are now intended to be perfect instruments of power for corporations. Large stashes of patents allow large software companies to lock out competition by smaller companies, and monopolize markets. Likewise, large music labels, which now are the copyright holders to almost all songs they release, are successfully lobbying for ever more severe copyright laws in an effort to shut down alternative promotion channels like P2P and independent internet radio stations. The big labels are afraid that, while airwaves are scarce and can easily be controlled by payola, Internet traffic is basically unlimited in range. You cannot have 500 national radio stations since the frequency bands are limited, but you can easily operate 5000 Internet radio stations without any bandwidth collisions. Incidentally, while the RIAA claims to have suffered massive losses due to Internet "piracy", many independent labels have experienced benefits from increased promotion of their music via P2P and other channels such as (the former) mp3.com and independent internet radio.

I see the intellectual property movement as part of a general neoliberal self-referential justification of capitalism, where the original goal of improving living conditions for the population is increasingly irrelevant. Today's capitalism is intended to be implemented for capitalism's sake, not because it would make lives of men better as compared to marketplace economies with a stronger balance between public and private property. The manipulations of the Californian power market, or the privatization of water supplies into monopolists' hands in South America are just two examples of many.

I didn't know trolls submitted articles these days.

You were thinking of Kuro5hin

It's a shame that whenever such a thing is released, people need to spend weeks doing
dot emacs rewrites all over again.

hmm, it went away ;)

Anyway, it's been done, and yes it broke the site.

And here is a rebuttal to the rebuttal. That K5 article was nothing more than an Moore apologist's rant.

And here's a rebuttal of Hardylaw on Kuro5hin.

Personally, I don't like either of them, but until Rush disappears, I'm glad Moore's there.

Open letter to David Hardy

Those who hate Moore are for some reason more dishonest and employ more deceit than Moore himself.

Funny that.

and here is a rebuttal to Hardy Law.

Is it not the case the MS Windows contains (or contained) code from BSD or Linux...

From my recollection, contained is the right word, but it has been a while. A quick Google turned up: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/19/05641/7357 .

--

Here is a terrific intro to using screen... http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935

You can remap the escape key (default: ctrl-A) to anything you want. Add in your ~/.screenrc "escape ^Tt" if you want your escape key to be ctrl-t, for example.

Otherwise you can hit Ctrl-a a (that's control-a, then the letter a) and it'll send a ctrl-a.

There's a decent intro on kuro5hin:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935

The manpage for screen aint bad either (a rarity, it seems).

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2004/6/21/19280/4 046/24#24

You may want to read the article I wrote over at kuro5hin on Christian Reconstructionism. Yes, self promotion. But it ties in closely with your sig.

Marijuana, Mountain Dew and My MCSE

I wrote an article about documentation. If you've got any criticism/feedback I'd love to hear it...

Memo to Slash . The moderation is getting to be overboard. http://arstechnica.com/ http://www.kuro5hin.org/

...but a russion scientist actually predicted this would happen.

Seems more and more people are turning against blogs. :-(

Kinda reminds me of this Kuro5hin article.

I remember a while ago were I had this problem where I couldn't connect to ten percent of the internet. I first noticed I could not connect to Kuro5hin. But I also couldn't connect to some other websites. People on IRC told me they could connect to these sites fine.

I play Magic Online I could get into magic online but 30 percent of the time if I tried to get into a game it would say it could not find the server. Guess the normal server and the servers you play games are different, one or more of those servers was in my "blind spot". I ran a traceroute to kuro5hin and noticed my trace seemed to always get stuck so it never reach kuro5hin.

This problem seems to cleared up a week later

Of course if you wanted to be more old-school you could set up a public-access *NIX login, or even run an old-school BBS type deal via telnet. It would still be a good idea to route people to a website explaining how to get in. For that check out here and here, and here

I can imagine all the kvetching we're about to hear about how mundane and pointless the vast majority of weblogs and personal websites are (ala this and this), and how too many people are jumping online to post what they had for lunch or what they thought of Lord of the Rings or what they did over the weekend or pictures of themselves drinking a beer, and how it's all a bunch of crap. Someone will use the term "signal to noise ratio," someone will use the word "dreck," someone else will say "mundane."

Here's the thing: Even the most mundane minutae of human existence if fascinating compared with the prevailing (but fading) obsession with network topology and computer technology. The Web was not invented so people could talk about the Web. You People -- the technologists on Slashdot -- have had control of the vast majority of original Internet writing for the past ten years, and it's been nothing but CSS this, or XML that, or RPC SOAP OSS GNU GPL PHP this, or PGP that, SSL HTTP HTML DOM .NET blah blah blah ... Webmonkey stuff.

Does technical discussion have its place on a network first used to distribute physics papers and so forth? Of course. Is talking about the network by definition the most boring thing to do on the network? Absolutely. Do I like asking myself easy, rhetorical questions? YES!!!

My point is, people are going to post baby pictures and bad cryptical poetry about their personal lives and recipes for pulled pork and shallow reviews of episodes of popular mindless TV shows, and I think that's brilliant. It means the network is finally open -- FOR WRITING -- by the masses. By people who are not engineers. It means everday people are CREATING media rather than just consuming it. You might think it's dreck, but their friends and family will get something out of it, and every now and then we'll discover someone writing (or singing or designing or photographing or filming) something brilliant and posting it on their blog, and we'll get something the likes of Viacom or Time Warner wouldn't have put in front of us if we paid them to.

And there will finally be more to the Web than tech talk and old media shovelware.

Just had to get that off my chest.

The guy who got booted off AventureMail (2GB free) for trying to test their spam filters? The story is on Kuro5hin, if anyone wants to see it.

positive add:
add

personal asperger's:
asperger's

Actually, if you take enough 30 minute naps during a day (usually 30 minutes every 4 hours) you can get away with as little as 3 hours of sleep PER DAY. It's known as polyphasic sleeping, and it tricks the mind into falling into REM sleep very quickly rather than waiting several hours (as when you only sleep in one 8-hour chunk). You even end up getting MORE REM sleep this way.

Lots of mammals do it naturally, including us as babies, but we are raised by our parents to stay awake all day and sleep at night.

I tried this a few semesters ago to get through a rough finals week. Works great, you even feel more awake than usual. But you have to have a lot of stuff to do, otherwise you bore yourself to sleep ;)

Anyways, I wish Universities and workplaces would have sleep-rooms and schedules separated in 3.5 hour chunks!!

Link: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/720

You can check it out here

Of all the dupes, the lack of effort by the people who run this site. The lack of interesting stories. If so come here
to kuro5shin. Where the slashcode wont fuck you in the ass. If you wanna know what the people who run this site are doing there probably hanging out watching this.
Not to mention seeing what they can fit up in here.
Isn't it time for a change.. Come to Kur05hin!!

The last such effort was a total disaster.

The last such effort was a total disaster.

I wrote a piece on Kuro5hin a few days back. Is this what you're talking about?

Anyone read the short novel he Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect? Near the end the main character, Caroline, rows across a huge ocean (on another planet) to reach someone.

AMD Spermon?
AMD Sempr0n?

I'd like to applaud the marketing people at AMD for showing that even though you are severely retarded, you can still come up with a name for a a discount CPU.

And cheers to AMD for having such enlightened hiring practices! Most companies reserve the mentally deficient for IT jobs.

that's what it is.

and people might be interested in knowing that there is also a third party critique of the rebuttal to the rebuttal posted over at k5 with a pretty mature comment tree of its own.

Critique of Ken Brown's response

I have to concur with the other anonymous type person. The Karma is a disposable piece of crap. I wrote about this about a week ago.

Yep, something I point out in my K5 diary where I respond to Ken Brown's response.

Ratio of BIND domains serviced to installs: 24,335,752 / 340,345 = 71.5 domains/server.

Ration of MS DNS domains to installs: 2,165,143 / 101,781 = 21.27 domains/server.

Ratio of TinyDNS domains to installs: 5,405,266 / 12,130 = 445.6 domains/server!

Despite only having 2% of the installs, TinyDNS serves 15% of all domains on the internet. Obviousy it is very capable, and has few to no exploits available for it. Why don't more people use TinyDNS if it's so capable?

Because they haven't read how easy it is to setup!

This is a little off topic, but this post reminded me of an "online book" on kuro5hin about 'living forever' because of human intervention (indirectly even). There was a post on slashdot awhile back about it (here - note: I *HATE* the slashdot old-story search)

anyway, the online book is here

HOWTO: Make bad documentation look good

Voting Nader is obviously not voting "not Bush.".

yet another AC with a brain. nice. you might enjoy The Fork in the Road: A Political Morality Play in One Act over on K5.

Next big thing? How would you have time. You still "help run [K5] with Rusty"!

With (much) respect, I'd put the death at closer to 18 months, pretty much after rusty's huge burst of rented enthusiasm after the fund drive ran out. It didn't have to be that way. It could so easily have gone the way he promised.

It's quite obvious (in retrospect) from rusty's diary history. A big burst in July-September 2002, then a swift tailing off that dissolves into rambling about yachting and rubbing his wood. And one, count it, one diary in 2004, on January 1st.

Sad, really, that he can't just let it die.

Next big thing? How would you have time. You still "help run [K5] with Rusty"!

With (much) respect, I'd put the death at closer to 18 months, pretty much after rusty's huge burst of rented enthusiasm after the fund drive ran out. It didn't have to be that way. It could so easily have gone the way he promised.

It's quite obvious (in retrospect) from rusty's diary history. A big burst in July-September 2002, then a swift tailing off that dissolves into rambling about yachting and rubbing his wood. And one, count it, one diary in 2004, on January 1st.

Sad, really, that he can't just let it die.

The analysis of rusty's March 26th announcement is shoddy. There never was anonymous posting on K5, and no "trials" for news users were announced. The announcement was that each new user would have to be sponsored by an existing user, and that if the new user was banned, the sponsor would be too.

Whatever the practicality of that, what actually happened is that since March 26th, new user registration on Kuro5hin has been closed. The sponsorship system has not been turned on (or implemented, although rusty claimed it was effectively done when he announced it). It's just closed. As of the time of writing, you cannot create a new account on Kuro5hin, and so you cannot post.

The catalyst for all this was some users posting links to a badly photoshopped fake image of rusty's wife's head on a porn body. rusty's reaction was instant and extreme. The accounts were banned and several other long term trolls were purged in the aftermath. To this day, the criteria for banning is still unclear.

It should be noted that rusty has previously removing rating abilities, banned and anonymised (i.e. wiped commands of) accounts, and IP blocked posters at his sole whim and discretion. The freedom of Kuro5hin is the freedom to things rusty's way or not at all. The trouble with having a benign dictator is that he's still a dictator. Without oversight, there's no security.

Of course, rusty can do whatever he wants with his site. Except that, in his own words, after taking $70K (or $35K or $45K or $80K or whichever of his various figures and calculationg that you want to believe) it's not his site. "I think the clearest way I can put it is: you just purchased Kuro5hin.org". Well, that's a funny kind of ownership.

K5 might recover. Stranger things have happened, and a (sketchy) article on prime numbers just made it to the front page, so there are still non-trolls there. They just don't contribute much content any more.

In the long term though, it can't recover its past popularity without new users, that's for damn sure. The salient lesson: dictators are never a good idea, no matter how benign. In fact, the more benign they appear, the harder they can finally snap.