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Have friends who are into scientology? Get them hooked on Scat-entology instead. I formed it from the words "Shit" and "To sell as a religion". The difference is I accidentally set the buy it now price at $0 and so it's free. I'll get it right next time.

You're an idiot, as evidenced by your belief in a mythical being

And you're a troll, as evidenced by your offtopic, inflammitory comment. As to your "myth", see here and here (Articles written by me). Also, I believe you're the one lacking in mental facilities, as you make such an unwarranted judgement based on absolutely no facts whatever. Believing that anyone who believes in God is an idiot is in fact idiotic. The wiki link, BTW, is a list of scientists, many esteemed enough to have their own article in wikipedia, who are in fact Christians.

You are, in fact, completely ignorant. Willful ignorance is idiocy. No perhaps we can get back on topic?

Mail order / phone orders don't need to collect, so why do you think amazon should be singled out?

I don't. If they have to pay sales tax, so should mail and phone orders.

Second, is not just looking at a piece of paper.

News flash: we have computers and databases that can hold LOTS of data and are easy to search. There's no way this could be an "undue hardship" to anybody with a business.

For what it's worth, I'm completely against sales, use, and vat taxes as they are extremely regressive. But Amazon's arguments are specious. If they were to say they were against sales taxes because they were regressive I'd agree with them, but their arguments are entirely self serving and bogus.

You're an idiot, as evidenced by your belief in a mythical being

And you're a troll, as evidenced by your offtopic, inflammitory comment. As to your "myth", see here and here (Articles written by me). Also, I believe you're the one lacking in mental facilities, as you make such an unwarranted judgement based on absolutely no facts whatever. Believing that anyone who believes in God is an idiot is in fact idiotic. The wiki link, BTW, is a list of scientists, many esteemed enough to have their own article in wikipedia, who are in fact Christians.

You are, in fact, completely ignorant. Willful ignorance is idiocy. No perhaps we can get back on topic?

Mail order / phone orders don't need to collect, so why do you think amazon should be singled out?

I don't. If they have to pay sales tax, so should mail and phone orders.

Second, is not just looking at a piece of paper.

News flash: we have computers and databases that can hold LOTS of data and are easy to search. There's no way this could be an "undue hardship" to anybody with a business.

For what it's worth, I'm completely against sales, use, and vat taxes as they are extremely regressive. But Amazon's arguments are specious. If they were to say they were against sales taxes because they were regressive I'd agree with them, but their arguments are entirely self serving and bogus.

No, the real Springfield is in Illinois. Here are some excerpts from today's paper.

The nice thing about Springfield is the bright, pretty colors and its cartoon downtown. We have an alderman Simpson, the mayor is a dead ringer for Quimby and the head of the power plant is a dead ringer for Mr. Burns. I've seen Popeye, Olive Oyle, Little Orphan Annie, Betty Boop, and a raft of other characters here. Especially when I was tripping on Paxil.

Bart's in San Fransisco.

The only thing that hasn't happened is content creators giving away stuff for $0

Before the internet I spent my whole life getting content for $0. TV was free (there was no cable). Radio was (and still is) free. I'd get whole albums for free from KSHE on cassette every Sunday night; seven of them per week. I got Ted Nugent's Stranglehold a week before the LP was in the stores. We'd borrow friends' LPs and tape them, and it was not only free but legal to boot.

When cable and VCRs came along I'd get copies of movies for free (well, plus the price of a blank tape, but today that equates to paying for a hard drive or blank DVDs).

When cable first came out, nobody wanted to sign up. "Ten bucks a month to watch TV? Are they crazy"? But there was value added: cable channels weren't censored, and there were no commercials on them. The only commercials were on the broadcast stations.

In a capitalist economy your business has to meet the customers' demands, or you won't have any customers.

Well, when possible the internet is the best place; you can get "radio" from just about every radio station in the world. Go to KSHE for the oldest FM stereo rock station in the world, who played "classic rock" before it was classic and still do, along with some of today's dreck. On Sunday night they play seven albums in their entirety, back to back.

College stations are great, too. The one here in Springfiled, WQNA, is the only station I've ever heard where you can hear Tennessee Ernie Ford followed by the Dead Kennedies, followed by Johnny Cash (The DKs are a 70s punk band). Sunday mornings is old 30s and 40s jazz, noon is a blues show, Tuesday nights there's a "hardcore" show followed by a country oldies show. Wednesday nights they have belly dancing music, etc.

From an article I wrote several years ago titled Useful Dead Technologies (the part quoted here is no longer relevent because the dead tech came back to life)

Volume control knobs
You're driving down the road and that song comes on. You know the one, it really rocks and you must crank that sucker up.

But there's no crank any more. You have to take your eyes off of the road to find the one button on the fifty buttons to turn the damned thing up or down. Thank God they invented cell phones so you can call an ambulance after you wreck your car trying to turn the volume down to answer your cell phone!

drive-by-wire is something relatively new (50yrs of use)

The first computer was patented in 1946. There was no "drive by wire" in 1959. Back then a computer comparable to a musical hallmark card took an entire building to house.

See Growing Up With Computers for a history lesson.

hydraulic are much less mature than banging two sticks together

You're giving badanalogyguy a run for his money! As to the "drive by wire being better or worse because it's new", traditional throttle controls have caused people to die, too -- I knew a man who did. The verdict was suicide until an accident investigator examined the car.

It's been over thirty years ago, I don't even remember the fellow's name, but I can't forget his death. He had the absolute worst day of anybody's life I ever heard of.

He had a Firebird with a 396 CI engine with dual exhaust and two four barrel carbs. Really nice car. Anyway, he lost his job, his girlfriend broke up with him, and his dad threw him out of the house. An hour later he hit the 17th car of a freight train at 96 miles per hour. Everyone thought he'd committed suicide.

The accident investigator said different. He'd taken off from a stop sign and the motor mount broke, twisting the engine and pulling the throttle cable all the way open. It would have been a matter of seconds before he hit the train.

i never changed my attitude towards hard core drugs, nor was i ever pro-copyright

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1424363&cid=29925269

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/28/31758/7402

Parent is trolling

And you're biting.

I'm now 56 and I have experienced power steering failure once in my life and the car let me know it was coming well ahead of the actual failure

The only time I've ever experienced the power steering failing was when the engine itself died (I'm 57), but that is way more common than just losing power steering. Here's an account of one time the engine died...

Back in the US, get the speeds up and add more tracks, and at least I personally will ride them most places I go.

They're working on it. Right now in Illinois there are plans for high speed rail service from Chicago to St Louis. In Springfield they're fighting over using the 3rd street corridor or the 10th street corridor. The railroad wants to use the 3rd street corridor because it's more money for them, everybody else wants the 10th street corridor.

But eventually we'll have it. Of course, their idea of "high speed" is 100 mph, but even then, the hour and a half trip to St Louis by auto would be cut by half an hour, but then you need transportation while you're there. I last took Amtrak when I went to St Louis to get a car from a friend in 2003, and a one way ticket cost $60 and the trip took over two hours, stopping at seemingly every little town on the way. It takes an hour and a half to drive, and twenty bucks in gas gets me there and back.

I'll just drive. Faster, and much cheaper.

I need my smokes to get through work

Not really, you don't. It's a choice.

No it isn't; it's only a choice before you become addicted. After you're addicted, if you have the money for a pack of smokes and you're hungry, you'll buy the smokes and do without the food. If cigarettes were as expensive as crack, buttheads would be as skinny as crackheads.

I know from personal experience.

For further information on the TCP/IP stack and then some, you can check out this article here: linky.

The next thing you'll be telling me is that when you pay to go to a concert, you're only paying for the actual paper ticket rather than the "content" of the performance

When I go to a concert I'm not buying anything. I'm paying for a service, just like when my employer pays me for my time or I pay a barber to cut my hair or tip my bartender. When I buy that band's CD I'm buying a CD. When I hear them on the radio, it's free. When I tape it off the radio it's free. The content is free, the CD and service (concert) are not.

In the past, a couple friends made copies of something. Nobody cared. But the content wasn't "free"; it's just the potential for abuse was small.

Well, it's hardly abuse if it's legal, and in the 1970s copying tapes was explicitly legalized (it's since been outlawed). And if it was so harmless, why did Jack Valenti as head of the MPAA say that "The VCR is to the movie industry what Jack the Ripper was to women"? The fact is that the music labels decried taping and even lied on album covers that it was illegal, when it had specifically been legalized.

And distributing bootlegs WAS a problem; I remember an incident in the early '70s where Willy Nelson (I think it was him, long time ago) got in trouble when he went into a gas station and found bootleg copies of his stuff for sale and trashed the place. IIRC both he and the proprieter went to jail. Commercial copyright infringement isn't just illegal, it's wrong.

Since KSHE changed their format in 1967 and became the world's first FM stereo rock station, they've had a feature called "the seventh day" from the station's beginning and still continue today. They play seven whole uncut albums and even cue the listener to get his tape recorder ready, and still do. This is in St Louis, with a population of millions able to hear and record the show. See Birth of a label-sanctioned pirate radio station

When Ted Nugent's Stranglehold album came out I had it on tape a full week before it was available for sale - KSHE had played it, and I'd taped it. As that album kicked ass I bought the LP after it was for sale. This is how a lot of young "pirates" use P2P; someone will recommend something, and they want to listen before they shell out their hard earned dosh.

The internet has changed a lot of things, but as to noncomercial copyright infringement the only thing it changed was to give the media moguls something to bitch to congress about.

ENIAC (the first electronic programmable computer) was patented in 1947 and first switched on that fall. See Growing Up with Computers. That makes the computer itself sixty two years old.

Also there is no such thing as a broken-hearted geek

Yes there is.

A few years ago the local cops opened my garage door an "had a look around"; they were looking for s suspicious woman (a former girlfriend of mine, more details here). Ironically (and chillingly) it was on Memorial day, the day we honor those who died protecting our so-called "freedom".

My 4th amendment rights were obviously violated, but I can't see where I had any recourse whatever.

It occurred to me that since the US has more prisoners per 1000 people than any other nation, that's another indicator that we are indeed a police state.

Liberty? What Liberty? (2005)

a new dad (5 days ago! Woot!)

Congratulations, pops. You have joys and pains ahead of you that you can't imagine -- but the joys will be better than the pains if you do it right.

As to the big L and little l, the big L libertarians are more pro-corporate, anti tax than libertarian. There is nothing about taxes (which the Constitution allows, how else are you going to pay for government?) that infringes liberty, but private and public entities do. Government should be protecting me from you, from corporations, and from foreign powers (like maybe Sony or Afghanistan), not from myself.

I'm not saying I automatically disapprove of it

I do. If a kid has a heart condition he shouldn't be taking gym class, and his own doctor should be the one prescribing this medical device.

yeah, I know, you're just a troll trying for a few bites. I don't care.

DNFTT

He shouldn't be, I've seen a lot of amature stuff that is frankly, quite a bit better than his work.

"My kid could paint better than that!"

You're showing a complete and utter lack of what art is. Like most who haven't studied it, you likely say "I don't know what art is, but I know what I like." I had an instructor once who was fond of saying "I don't know what I like, but I know what art is".

I wrote a parody of art, art school, and the art world back in 1997 and posted it on my now defunct web site. I posted it at K5 in 2004 without, alas, the illustrations. Even remembering that it's tongue in cheek humor, you might learn from it.

Insults for the art student (see The Critique, above)

"Gee, that's really nice"! "Nice" is the worst insult you can give to an artist (See Art History, below).

Call a sculpture a "statue". Besides "nice", "statue" is the worst thing you can call a sculptor's work. The only person who hates "statue" worse than a sculptor is an actor.

Call a painting a "picture". Go ahead, show your ignorance!

Call the work "pretty". This is an insult to every artist except Audry Flack.

Those of you who are art students or have been art students understand this. Those who aren't have probably hit the "back" button (or the "get me the hell out of here right now" button) already. For those of you non-art students who've stayed with me (i.e., so stoned out of your mind that even this is entertaining even though you don't understand a bit of it), although the original purpose of art was decoration, it no longer is. "Decorative art" is considered by those who know and understand art an Oxymoron. Art stimulates the mind, the brain, the senses, or better yet, all three at once. If it doesn't make you think and/or feel, it isn't art. See Art History, below

I've said for a long time we Americans live in a police state.
Police State: In USSA, cops hassle YOU! (2008)
Liberty? What liberty? (2005)

Keep in mind that you don't know what you're talking about.

You *ASSUME* they took BSD code. That is, in fact, incorrect. The *LICENSED* BSD code, paying a good penny for it too, from Spider Software who, in turn, had licensed the code (again paying a pretty penny) from the Regents of UCB. And no, they did not use the code up until XP. It was used in the original 3.1 version of NT, and replaced fairly quickly with their own stack for NT 3.5 and Windows 95. They did continue to include the BSD userland utils like ftp.exe and telnet.exe, but again, these were licensed versions, not open source.

You can educate yourself here:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

While the story only grazes over the licensing aspects of it, one need only look at the copyrights of the code in question:

"Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California"

This copyright predates the first open source version of BSD by almost 6 years. The first open source version was BSD Networking Release 1, and it was release in 1989. The only way Microsoft could legally use this 1983 code was by specific license.

What defines HUMAN$? Redefine the variable, the law is still satisfied. We hoomanz do it with brainwashing and conditioning. They're not humans, they're gooks. They don't even believe like we do. It's fine to kill them. Heathens anyway, right? But I'd like to think the robot might be able to work it even more subtly, subverting the law.

Or perhaps the robot will take the laws very seriously, to ill effect.

Then again, just because it has a sense of purpose doesn't mean it will behave in a way we expect, and something like this might happen. (Don't be put off by the violence of first chapter - the AI properly enters the picture in Chapter 2.)

Nevertheless, it's pretty well known fact that MS took their implementation of TCP from BSD which apparently doesn't have the problem. More than that they took fresh implementation from FreeBSD relatively recently for 2003 Server.

Um, no. They took a streams BSD stack for Windows NT 3.1, but they didn't like streams for some reason and implemented their own a sockets based stack for NT3.5. See: http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

Too late... http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/3/14/234939/956

I just don't understand the stance that most people on this board seem to take regarding this issue. How can everyone be so supportive of what very obviously amounts to theft? It appears to me that somehow people think it is their "right" to obtain copyrighted material for free. I just don't buy for a second that people who claim to only use file-sharing apps for legitimate purposes only actually do so.

As long as the Mickey Mouse Protection Acts and the resulting infinite copyright and any form of legal protection for any form of DRM remain in place, I shall refuse to acknowledge the validity of any form of copyright law, and will copy/share ("steal") to my heart's content, as well as help others do the same.

Fuck you MAFIAA/Teosto. You should had listened to Lord Macaulay, but you didn't, and now it's far too late. Burn in Hell, where you belong, and cease hindering the progress of the human species.

Just in case you didn't get it yet, FUCK YOU .

I am suddenly compelled to tweet about someone else's life. Since my life is infact boring.

There are no boring lives, only boring writers.

A night at the bar can be boring, or not. It's how you approach it. The linked diary starts out with boredom.

When I was in 5th grade... on AOL (back then it was v. 2.5, which only supported plain text - get off my lawn!)

Don't you mean "get off grandpa's lawn", son? I was 12 before I ever SAW a computer.

If yoiu're interested, I made mention (actually a bit more than a mention) of a 1972 C5-A flight simulator here. The building itself was the computer; rooms full of bookshelves holding not books but printed circuit boards. It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen im my life. Here's the relevant part:

By 1972 I was in the US Air Force as a driver, working on the flight line in the Aerospace Ground Equipment (AGE) unit. One cold, snowy night a half hour from the swing shift's quitting time, a call came in for two air conditioners way over on the other side of the base. My tractor had a top speed of about ten miles per hour - I was looking forward to a beer, and here I had to drag these damned air conditioners out. I was going to be working late. Hell!

A half an hour or so later I arrived at the facility, swearing, with air conditioners in tow. To my amazement there were two guys standing outside in the snow waiting for me.

"What the fuck do you need a God damned air conditioner in the snow for? I demanded.

"Oh, man," one replied excitedly, "this is so cool. You have to see it!" These guys were bouncing around like kids at a birthday party. One showed me around as the other hooked up the hoses from the air conditioners and turned them on.

Inside was what looked like a library. Every room was filled with rows and rows of what appeared to be bookshelves. However, instead of books, these shelves held printed circuit boards. There must have been thousands of them. I was duly impressed, and had nerdily forgotten about the beer I had wanted so badly.

"Cool. But what is it for?" I asked.

"Ahh," he said, "come in here," and led me to yet another room. This room was huge, and had little in it that I recognized. It was straight out of a science fiction movie, only less corny looking.

"Ok," I replied stupidly, "what is it?"

"It's a C5 simulator! Come on inside!"

And inside the contraption was the cockpit of a C-5A cargo plane, at the time the largest aircraft in the world. We had several C5s there at Dover, which was, of course, why they needed a C5 simulator. And two SUV sized air conditioners to cool the contraption's circuitry.

It was identical to a C5 cockpit, right down to the bolts and carpets. The only difference was that the windows were ground glass rather than clear, for projecting images on.

They let me "fly" it. It was incredible! It sat on hydraulics, so when you accelerated, it felt like acceleration. Likewise banking, diving, etc. You could even crash the thing! This was even cooler than the other computer I had seen back when I was 12.

What got me and should give everyone pause is the 1972 Cray, the fastest computer in the world at the time, was less powerful than your phone. That was only 35 years ago, for you young folks, what will computers be like when you're my age?

My daughters grew up with computers, computers grew up with me.

I remember my mom bringing an IBM luggable home from work back in the early eighties (I was in my early thirties and lived down the street from her, rather than in her basement like the stereotype would have it). She needed help turning it on. It was damned heavy, the size of a small suitcase, with a five inch monichrome CRT monitor and two five inch floppies and no hard drive.

At the time I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000, 4k of ram with a 16k expansion pack and no drive at all, tape only. I learned to program the thing in assembly, because it was too slow for games written in BASIC.

Is there really anything scientific or technological that we cant do vastly better now that 1906?

Scientific, not that I know of, but there are useful dead technologies. Note that the linked article is somewhat dated (January 2005); car radio knobs have made a comeback, and modern shoelaces are superior as they have both the strength of nylon and the friction of cotton.

The piston driven steam engine is a dead technology; the new record was broken by a steam turbine.

I wrote up a proposal for a passive solution to hiding porn results from the AwesomeBar, much in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the problem of preventing ads from being displayed on websites: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669

Apparently there are already hooks present in Firefox's userChrome that allow the user to specify, on a per URL basis, sites to be prevented from appearing in AwesomeBar results: http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome

The claim "it's just a website" is often trotted out, but it's untrue. It's a website set up to function deliberately as a linkfarm,

How are you defining "linkfarm," here? Wikipedia cites a great deal of Web-addressable information, but when I hear "linkfarm," the primary connotation that I have implies a lack of contribution on the part of said farm in terms of original content or organization. One thing Wikipedia has going for it in spades is organization.

I suppose you could also call Wikipedia a "book citation farm" or a "free image farm" but I'm not sure what these labels contribute to any meaningful conversation other than a cheap putdown.

which has search engine rankings far above what it should have if it were treated like every other linkfarm out there.

Can you please list any one linkfarm which contains a tenth of the information available on Wikipedia?

It's full of inaccurate, possibly libelous, or outright harmful (in the case of many articles regarding drugs/herbs/"homeopathic remedies") statements in most of the articles.

Excellent. This sounds like an opportunity for you to contribute. Excellent idea!

As a "first stop" for "information" for many searchers, it has an amazing ability to influence thought processes,

I'm sensing crazy territory, here... I want to believe that you're a level-headed guy, but any time someone points at a large Web service and starts talking about "influence" on thought processes, you have to expect the hairs on the back of the necks of those of us who have been around the block a few times to come to attention.

and as such is a breeding ground for fights and control-freak behavior from people trying to bias a topic their way.

Yes, absolutely! Wikipedia is full of competing forces trying to bias it toward their personal (sadly, not even that most of the time) views. Sure.

The goal of Wikipedia is to allow all of these parties with competing views of history and knowledge to come together and hash out what the consensus is. It's not a repository of "absolute truth," any more so than a bookstore is. There are true things in bookstores, but there is also a great deal of misinformation, inaccuracy and simple errors. The hope in both cases is that producing this information in a public way will allow us to have the conversation about what we believe to be true about the world around us.

The regulations have already gotten too arduous. Most of the good administrators jumped ship long ago.

Not to be snarky, but I have to ask... do you have some source for this assertion or is this just a guess?

Some have turned around and exposed the ongoing problems.

Sure, there are certainly some with an axe to grind, and certainly there are even going to be some who were actually mistreated. You can't create a large community of people dedicated to gathering information without creating some drama. It's human nature. The fact of the matter is, however, that Wikipedia has succeeded in fulfilling the dream of a hypertextual Web more so than any other site short, arguably, of the larger search engines.

Most simply gave up in disgust. The result? A biased, horribly squished encyclopedia.

You're assuming that there has been an exodus on only one side of any given issue. I don't see any issues where that's the case. Perhaps you do. I don't doubt they exist, just that they're not the norm.

Well-written entries, such as one on PSP homebrew software, were nuked to oblivion because of admins and cliques with an agenda against the topic.

But there appears to still

The claim "it's just a website" is often trotted out, but it's untrue.

It's a website set up to function deliberately as a linkfarm, which has search engine rankings far above what it should have if it were treated like every other linkfarm out there. It's full of inaccurate, possibly libelous, or outright harmful (in the case of many articles regarding drugs/herbs/"homeopathic remedies") statements in most of the articles. As a "first stop" for "information" for many searchers, it has an amazing ability to influence thought processes, and as such is a breeding ground for fights and control-freak behavior from people trying to bias a topic their way.

The regulations have already gotten too arduous. Most of the good administrators jumped ship long ago. Some have turned around and exposed the ongoing problems. Most simply gave up in disgust. The result? A biased, horribly squished encyclopedia. Well-written entries, such as one on PSP homebrew software, were nuked to oblivion because of admins and cliques with an agenda against the topic. Articles that at one time were well balanced have been completely destroyed when counterbalancing interests saw only one side run off the encyclopedia, and the other side now rules the articles with an iron fist. Look back into what happened to the Falafel article when a bunch of organized arabs decided to try to eliminate any mention of Jewish influence (or of Jews or Israel in general) on the dish.

Wikipedia exists, but does not function anymore. And the only way to fix it involves getting rid of the entrenched assholes, whereas the proposed change gives entrenched assholes even more power.

In the case of the landline and a lot of other technologies, I agree. Who needs buggy whips when everyone has one of them thar newfangles automobiles?

On the other hand, some very useful technologies have died. At four years old the linked article is a bit dated; car stereo knobs have made a comeback, for instance. But when your power goes out in a January ice storm, you're going to wish you had a gas gravity furnace with its power pile.

(I followed that article up with Good Riddance to Bad Tech. Who needs eight tracks? I always hated them!)

In the case of the landline and a lot of other technologies, I agree. Who needs buggy whips when everyone has one of them thar newfangles automobiles?

On the other hand, some very useful technologies have died. At four years old the linked article is a bit dated; car stereo knobs have made a comeback, for instance. But when your power goes out in a January ice storm, you're going to wish you had a gas gravity furnace with its power pile.

(I followed that article up with Good Riddance to Bad Tech. Who needs eight tracks? I always hated them!)

Thank you for that; I almost bit the troll myself but you did it for me. I've been trying to not feed the trolls for a long time now, but sometimes it's hard, especially with a well crafted troll such as the one you bit.

As to number four, eighteen months is as rediculously short as the current seemingly infinite copyright terms are rediculously long. I'd push for a twenty year term, I could accept thirty. But a year and a half for copyright seems absurd to me. For a printed book I don't see how a publisher could recoup his costs in such a short time for anything but best sellers. It was over ten years before Isaac Asimov ever saw any money from his Foundation series; Gnome Press had to sell the license they had from Asimov to Doubleday before Asimov ever saw a penny.

No kidding.

The problem is the incestuous "culture" - or more to the point, the haves-and-have-nots attitude of the majority of their administrators and so-called "respected users" - that works on the basis of gaming the system.

Words by a former wikipedia administrator that showed me how their system really works. And then of course there's scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal (the last one is incredible fun, too... if you think that's the only secret organizing list for abusive wikipedians, admin or no, you're delusional).

Wikipedia doesn't work. It hasn't worked for a long time and I don't think it ever really did. It has horrible bias against anyone who is a verifiable expert in their field. It has MASSIVE problems with cliques going around pushing their agendas and claiming that anyone new coming to an article or set of articles on their favorite topic (global warming, middle eastern conflict/culture, scientology, etc). If you show up with well-researched refutals to the crap that is 99% of wikipedia, you are labeled a "troll", or abused, or targeted by one of their throwaway accounts so that a friendly behind-the-scenes admin can slap an indefinite ban on you. This is deliberate: 20 newcomers to an article might be able to outweigh the morons pushing bad information, but as long as they can pick them off one at a time, they "win" in the wikipedian system.

A few wikipedians have been there "Forever." They'll never go away. More have been there "A very long time" and have developed incestuous, corrupt relationships with each other and with the "forever" types. Meanwhile, anyone new coming in is instantly accused of being a "sockpuppet", "meatpuppet", or whatever other epithet can be thrown at them.

It's no coincidence that the "Checkuser" tool, which was originally ripped out of David Gerard's corrupt grasp after a series of false-attack incidents (privately hushed up, naturally) has on en.wp been removed from the ability to "prove innocence." The accusation of "sockpuppetry" is an abuser's tool of force, pure and simple. In the Wikipedia "judge, jury, and executioner" administrator zone, any tool that could prove someone is innocent is to be neutered as soon as possible.

The statistics on blockings/bannings and responses to them are likewise hidden. Why? Because analysis of these shows what really goes on. Most administrators don't bother to communicate with users when placing a block. They drop indefinites immediately with no remorse, using wikispeak code rather than plain language. The "appeal" process is a laughable joke as well, with maybe 5-8 active "reviewers" who basically use it as a stress-relief tool, beating up on people who are helpless (because they don't have the admin bit) to begin with.

Face it. Wikipedia is worthless with the current "leadership." All the good editors and conscientious administrators were driven away long ago.

Copyright laws, as originally written and intended, were to prevent someone from taking the printed words or phonographed music of one person, and claiming it as their own, to make it a profit. It's been bastardized to excess now, though...

This was NOT the original intention of copyright or patents (ie: intellectual property). The original intention was to give an incentive for people to publish their work for the betterment of society as a whole, rather than keeping it to themselves. It was also meant to encourage people to think of inventions that provide utility for many people.

While I would like people to get credit for their work, this is not a sufficient reason for a government to restrict others from using our ideas/inventions freely. It is a government granted monopoly for a limited time to encourage the creation and distribution of useful ideas/inventions in order to benefit society as a whole. If creation and distribution are occurring without the need of encouragement (ie: a large number of people publishing on the internet without monetary incentive), then the validity of this monopoly is called into question.

The intention HAS been so bastardized that most people now think as you do (myself included, until I read up on it).

Here's a quote from Thomas Jefferson (emphasis mine)

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. 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 in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813

Here are some more letters between Jefferson and Madison discussing intellectual property.

From Fun with offline trolls :

So I'm talking to the two of them, who by now felt they had to explain themselves to me. Seems they were from a town about thirty miles away, and had known wach other all their lives. Jarret and the other guy were mid thirties, Jen was 22 and had just graduated from SIU in Carbondale.

The other guy was married. "So where's your wife?" I ask. "She didn't want to come."

I guessed she knew Jarry then, but didn't say so. It seems that the married guy had a few beers, too, bacause he's telling me he was fucking Jennie when she was 15. She looks decidedly embarrassed. So I take a shot in her behalf. "Oh, then you're a pedophile?"

He blushes. "er, well, I was only 26"

Most people are confused by what "faith" is. It's not as in "believe despite all evidence", it's more like your being faithful to your wife. It means being faithful to God, and worshiping him rather than Baal or money or other such trivialities.

If God has shown you that he is real, why would you need to take it on faith? Once you have seeen an elephant you don't have to take anybody's word that elephants exists.

Funny, the Sun being unsuitable for life is one of the ideas behind Passages in the Void, a series of SF short-stories about (among other things) living long-term.

In the long term, living around a star that will eventually gobble up your planet isn't a good idea. Better go make a home in the interstellar (or better, intergalactic) void where chances of stray asteroids or supernovas are much smaller.

You're responding to a comment written by a dead man. It's Sunday again, fellow sinners

You're responding to a comment written by a dead man. It's Sunday again, fellow sinners

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/7/9/1112/97112
http://www.trollaxor.com/2009/07/some-questions-comments-about-firefox.html

Second I've never been inside a courtroom, so it would be a new and exciting experience (life is dull).

I've been in one, and my life is FAR from dull. Here are some of my court experiences from back in 2003-4:

I'm getting a final divorce decree for Christmas!
At the bar... no, not THAT bar
Evil always wins

Stay our of courtrooms unless you absolutely have to be there!

Second I've never been inside a courtroom, so it would be a new and exciting experience (life is dull).

I've been in one, and my life is FAR from dull. Here are some of my court experiences from back in 2003-4:

I'm getting a final divorce decree for Christmas!
At the bar... no, not THAT bar
Evil always wins

Stay our of courtrooms unless you absolutely have to be there!

Second I've never been inside a courtroom, so it would be a new and exciting experience (life is dull).

I've been in one, and my life is FAR from dull. Here are some of my court experiences from back in 2003-4:

I'm getting a final divorce decree for Christmas!
At the bar... no, not THAT bar
Evil always wins

Stay our of courtrooms unless you absolutely have to be there!

Nobody knows whether there is a god

I do. But if He doesn't want you to fnd him, you won't.