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So there's an easy way of solving this: somebody just needs to figure a way of getting Tetris exhibited in a gallery, and problem solved.

Screw Tetris -- I miss loading ANSI.SYS, connecting to various BBSs and watching the terminal scroll all the beautiful ANSI / ASCII (actually CodePage 437) art at 14.4Kbps. I spent months designing artwork & animations in with cp437 + ANSI for my own BBS, clearly some was trash or utilitarian, but many others were beautiful art. Hell, I even created a multi-player Tetris door game for my BBS using ANSI to update the movements (the line noise interspersed randomly created beautiful abstract art that put elephant or even monkey made paintings to shame).

Just recently I figured out how to change the Linux terminal to codepage 437 & "watched" my old BBS graphics, and tons more art from the archives. (Hint: I Use a small Perl script to read chars from the file and output them to the terminal at the desired bitrate for better emulation -- use an actual VT, not the terminal emulator).

Yes, ANSI art has been on exhibit (some even with custom built scolling picture frames), so it is indeed (by your definition) art.

Some links with pics from some of the exhibits: aitek dh foxgirl1 foxgirl2 t12 joe grand skully doug pinguino

I posit that if some moron converts digital photos to push-pin by number, and manually fills pixels according to the computer's algorithm, and that gets considered "art"; Then ANSI / ASCII graphics (manually filling text cells with color & symbols to make pictures WITHOUT THE COMPUTER TELLING YOU WHAT TO COLOR WHERE) must be art too.

If novels can be "art", then look no further than old text adventure games, or MUD door games to prove that games can be art.

So there's an easy way of solving this: somebody just needs to figure a way of getting Tetris exhibited in a gallery, and problem solved.

Screw Tetris -- I miss loading ANSI.SYS, connecting to various BBSs and watching the terminal scroll all the beautiful ANSI / ASCII (actually CodePage 437) art at 14.4Kbps. I spent months designing artwork & animations in with cp437 + ANSI for my own BBS, clearly some was trash or utilitarian, but many others were beautiful art. Hell, I even created a multi-player Tetris door game for my BBS using ANSI to update the movements (the line noise interspersed randomly created beautiful abstract art that put elephant or even monkey made paintings to shame).

Just recently I figured out how to change the Linux terminal to codepage 437 & "watched" my old BBS graphics, and tons more art from the archives. (Hint: I Use a small Perl script to read chars from the file and output them to the terminal at the desired bitrate for better emulation -- use an actual VT, not the terminal emulator).

Yes, ANSI art has been on exhibit (some even with custom built scolling picture frames), so it is indeed (by your definition) art.

Some links with pics from some of the exhibits: aitek dh foxgirl1 foxgirl2 t12 joe grand skully doug pinguino

I posit that if some moron converts digital photos to push-pin by number, and manually fills pixels according to the computer's algorithm, and that gets considered "art"; Then ANSI / ASCII graphics (manually filling text cells with color & symbols to make pictures WITHOUT THE COMPUTER TELLING YOU WHAT TO COLOR WHERE) must be art too.

If novels can be "art", then look no further than old text adventure games, or MUD door games to prove that games can be art.

Welcome to Wikipedia - common sense means nothing, and they actually have to have ESSAYS on what constitutes "Wikilawyering", "Gaming the system", and pretty much every tactic that is adopted by asshole "admins" and their followers but forbidden to everyone else (even if you're trying to counter their own bad-faith scumbaggery).

Remember - you can learn a lot from what former admins write regarding how Wikipedia really works.

The result of this re-appraisal was the publication in 1999 of The Last Ring-bearer - a re-thinking of Tolkien's story in real-world terms. Dr. Yeskov, a professional paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life from fossil remnants, performs essentially the same feat in The Last Ring-bearer, reconstructing the real world of Tolkien's Arda from The Lord of the Rings - the heroic tales of the Free Men of the West written in that world. We have a pretty good idea how well heroic tales map to reality from our own world.

The work was published with great acclaim in Russia and Europe, but no attempt was made at publishing in the US due to the litigiousness of the Tolkien family. It is available as a free download in both the original Russian and in English .PDF at Live Journal

Wikipedia is at best a joke, at worst a farce. Analyses of what's wrong with Wikipedia - insular central circle of power-hungry xenophobes calling the shots, constant wikilawyering and assumption that anyone new is automatically an "invader", scandal after scandal after scandal... wikipedia is a great resource if you want a single page for every freaking pokemon, and a lousy resource for documentation of anything that happened prior to 1990.

And don't even think of going near Wikipedia if you want to try to correct a problem article. Remember Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia. Given the way their "culture" works, I don't wonder that women don't want to go near it - after all, women are notoriously more sane than men, and nobody with an ounce of sanity would want to get involved with the incestuous circle-jerk that makes up Wikipedia's power structure.

This is law, not code, so "probably will" ;-) But yes - a GPL violation is a copyright violation, and the FSF and SFLC know just how to communicate that. So it's all good,

In the case of Android tablets violating the GPL, Matthew Garrett has been doing sterling work chasing up violators and ... asking for their code. And guess what, it often works fine. Mind you, he's the guy who successfully DMCAed the MPAA.

Google copycatting will cost them Googlebucks.

Tom Callaway has done tremendous work cleaning up the Chromium codebase and one of the things he found is that Google just grabs stuff without thinking.

They say things like they need to fork, they can't use existing versions, they need to copy code wholesale into their codebase, etc. He's proven them wrong on those counts by systematically replacing all their half-baked crap with system libraries. They don't seem to regard licenses very highly either.

The same think happened with the Android kernel. That's why it was dropped from mainline Linux, it was largely crap. They're now doing it right.

BUT ... the question for Google is whether waiting a couple years to do it all right would have been better. No - they've made tremendous headway into the handheld computer market with Android over the past couple years. I bet they did break some rules. I also bet any awarded damages will be far less than the amount they stand to make as the handheld market leader.

In this case, being sneaky pays.

I see a lot of ad hominem in your post and zero worthwhile discussion.

Here, I'll give you some more to think about in return:

Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's anti-expert bias and culture via Kuro5hin.

Confession of a former wikipedia gamer (via Archive.org because his website no longer exists).

Journal of a former wikipedia admin - great stuff here documenting how "gaming the system" by non-admins and admins alike works, including how organized groups work very hard to ensure that they pick off or drive off those of differing opinions "one by one" to ensure that "consensus" can never change (see the "Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia" section).

Cites and Insights carries a long history of articles on the subject.

The underlying flaw with Wikipedia is exactly as Jason Scott posited, your ungrounded ad hominem attacks notwithstanding. It is comprised primarily of, and run by, people who have created an alternate language, an alternate political scheme, and an insular and closed circle into which "breaking in" is a matter of proving that you can waste hours upon hours upon hours of time chasing "edit count", learning to speak the acronym-code, sucking up to the most abusive of people when they do something that anyone else objects to and calling for the objectors to be banned.

Once upon a time, Wikipedia had a bunch of "guilds." Most of them have been cleansed, but ancillary "subpages" remain and are still indexed. Shi'a Guild, Sunni Guild, Israeli Guild, Muslim Guild, Deletionist Guild, Preservationist Guild, Guild of Copy Editors, and on and on. You'll notice most of them have vanished, along with membership pages.

Do you think they actually vanished? No. But as per "WP:CANVAS", which forbids "organized" editing, they vanished from Wikipedia. Which is to say, nothing changed except that they now organize in private e-mail lists and IRC channels rather than out in the open. You can still see the same behavior to this day; hit an article one of them is "protecting", and you'll have the rest of the "guild" swarming you in minutes.

The same's true for Wikipedia admins - the more corrupt, the worse. The old Durova hit list affair hasn't slowed them down, because there are at least a dozen (probably more than 25) email lists just like it where administrators "coordinate" their actions behind the scenes. Page 2 of the article does a great job analyzing the paranoid-delusional aspects of a "committed" wikipedia-admin's personality and actions.

Plenty of former wikipedia admins have seen the light.

Twice. Once for the "high school hacker's notebook", and once for the 2004 followup to Neal Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line". And you want something better? Fine. I built this last year.

Also, your logic is wrong. When you say something is inversely proportional to the lack of something, you are saying it is directly proportional.

Also, I wouldn't call this the "true geek spirit", but that's a matter of taste. I'd say it more of a rave-inspired thing.

Also, I don't think you're actually sorry.

Hater haters gonna hate.

I've certainly seen this discussed among my Russian social peers, with the general mood of "Americans are letting political correctness eat away their minds". One of my contacts living in America has posted a poll. Interestingly, the Russian translation of Huckleberry Finn loses almost all the degrading verbal context: "negr" is not an offensive word, and "injun" got flattened into "Indian". In Russia, Huckleberry Finn is a very popular book for children, even though I found it considerably more "adult" compared to the adventures of Tom Sawyer. And I still think it's one of the best anti-racist books ever written.

Uses the armel Debian userland in a disk image and chroot.
http://pavelmachek.livejournal.com/73828.html
Been something actually making me thinking of finally getting a smart phone.

1181. When asked what game we want to LARP, Frogger is not an option.

from 1900 Things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG.

No kidding.

Wikipedia tried to hush up scandal after scandal after scandal. The Durova "hit-list" scandal. The Essjay scandal. The "Jimmy was cleansing his girlfriend's wikipedia page" scandal. The "Jimmy was embezzling money" scandal. The Wikia/Wikimedia financial embezzlement scandal. "Sam Blacketer", Sockpuppet Admin. Wikipedia Scanner's revealed abuses. The Siegenthaler scandal. Gary Weiss as "Mantanmoreland" and Wikipedia administrators' refusals to investigate and accept evidence on the problem.

The ongoing behavior of the harassing, abusive assholes who call themselves "administrators" on Wikipedia and operate in ways that have been well documented, over and over again.

Why don't people donate to Wikipedia? Let's face it, if Wikipedia deserved it - if it were a worthwhile institution - they wouldn't be nearly having this much trouble. But they don't deserve it, so people don't donate. It's really that simple.

I have a friend who recently had his first book published. To his dismay, he found that the ebook version had been posted up on the Pirate Bay almost within hours of release. He didn't quite see it as a life-and-death issue, though. In fact, he's decided to make the digital version of his book available for free, legally, and so far it's been working out well for him.

The Internet changes the rules, and those who refuse to play by those new rules are facing a long, bitter, losing fight. From that perspective, it's maybe not so surprising that they'd be irrationally angry about it.

It means third party, Internet connected, managed services.

For example, a company that offers network connected scalable processing and bandwidth services is offering "cloud" services.

Like Amazon.com, for example. Amazon.com offers this as one of their services. They used to sell this service to some-one called "Wikileaks".

Interesting fact: Amazon stopped selling those services to Wikileaks, and lied about why. Amazon claimed they were suspending the hosting because Wikileaks had published 250,000 embassy cables without vetting them first. But this was untrue. Questions have been asked as to why Amazon.com did this, and Amazon.com claimed this false smear in order to deflect the allegation that they had done so under government pressure, something they denied in the same press release.

Now the Feds are announcing a massive move over to cloud computing, a move that will result in hundreds of millions of dollars to those companies who get the contracts.

I wonder why Amazon.com dropped Wikileaks as a customer. And why they felt the need to lie about why. And why they did this just before hundreds of millions of dollars became available for services like the ones they offer, from an organization that really doesn't like Wikileaks.

Over 17 Years - subversionhack:

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/1093.html

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/1745.html

Subversionhack Archive:
(expired certificate)

https://tagmeme.com/subhack/a/

Over 17 Years - subversionhack:

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/1093.html

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/1745.html

Subversionhack Archive:
(expired certificate)

https://tagmeme.com/subhack/a/

The author's thoughts on the "apology" are here.

She basically had the same reaction we all did: What a load of crap.

- the number of "patrollers" of unblock requests who are anything-but-civil and who do nothing but slap each other on the back about how rude they can get away with being until they provoke someone into crossing a "ban line." You know, kind of like stuff like this where they keep poking and prodding merely because they can.

- the way that organized gangs play the "kill them one at a time" and "get our pet admin to declare them sockpuppets or meatpuppets" games. Look at the Wikipedia articles on Felafel and Za'atar; a group of deranged, racist muslims got together and decided they wanted to strip any reference to "evil jews" about the food. And, since they had a couple of racist administrators on their side, their will was done. These days, even the two FOOD articles look like slanted attack articles.

- The way that certain entrenched personalities get away with abuses at will, especially playing "scarlet letter" games and falsely accusing people of being sockpuppets. Even worse, the way that many of these have - since they play to the political or racist sympathies of other entrenches - have climbed the ladder and are now administrators or worse. "Orangemike" and "Dreamguy" are two nasties, Dreamguy particularly being one who shows major ownership issues on any article related to fantasy or mythology and who is not above accusing people - without any evidence or proof or even editspace collision - of being "Enviroknot", or any one of another dozen names that are instant, without question or proof, ban words.

- The fact that corruption got to the point where the Checkuser tool is now an "orf wiv 'is 'ead" guilty-only attack. Get accused of being a "sockpuppet", and you're done, no matter what. There IS no proving your innocence of this charge, and the only administrators who will ever even touch an unblock request are the totally corrupt ones like Fisherqueen, Bwilkins, Tnxman, Smashville...

- Then there's the fact that the corrupt admin sector of Wikipedia organizes secretly to keep their hit-list up to date, as do the various entrenched POV-groups that maintain control on many articles.

No, really look at this:

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/history/myer80.pdf

I had a fellow Researcher send this to me this morning - it blows the lid off of what I've been speaking (LOUDLY) and writing about for years - here and other places, basically Subversionhack:

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/

https://tagmeme.com/subhack/a/

^ 2nd site has Certificate Expiration problem ^

Chertoff article:

"Chertoff told ZDNet UK at the conference that cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure could put thousands of people at risk. "I can envision attacks with catastrophic consequences, with serious loss of life," said Chertoff. "If someone took down an air-traffic control system, we would have devastating loss of life."

"Cold War" is a bit extreme, Red Teams would be a better response.
When you have a hack within the truly elite league such as (the) Subversion(hack) you really need to envision the possibilities of a thousand little fires all within the confines of your neighborhood - honestly.

This NAVY paper of 1980 should get you up to speed.
If you have a Slashdot account, review my post on this and things will become a bit more clear.

The first of my links should give you a good over all.

We haven't terraformed Mars because the exact way to get it done has not been predicted, yet.

You should grab any hard-sci fi anthology on terraforming and/or Mars and look into it. Some fairly serious scientists write some of these short stories and put a lot of truly scientific effort into it. One guy who works somewhere in the space-related fields wrote a story detailing how it would be more or less truly impossible to build Mars an atmosphere conducive to human life for reasons related to gravity.

I think we should all be seriously disillusioned about terraforming and all heavy space industry in general. If you'd like a fuller opinion on it, read my essay "Space Travel: Unfit for Humanity". :) http://eyenot.livejournal.com/1009497.html

This is the future.

The major problem now is that 99% of all good edits submitted to wikipedia are reverted anyways as false positives.

The reason for this is that corrupt administrators do nothing to stop it, and corrupt idiots wanting to become admins just sit all day on the semi-automated tools like "Twinkle" or "Huggle" reverting anything in sight to get their edit counts up.

The real issue is disinformation, which is vastly more subtle. The only defense is fact-checking or seeking out references.

While true, the larger problem with wikipedia is, and has always been, cadres of editors who carry around administrator support to ban any opposing viewpoint, picking off anyone who comes to their "owned" articles one at a time so as to prevent a consensus change. I spent a good amount of time analyzing the writings of a former wikipedia administrator who gave up on the whole thing, as well as the old writings of another one who, after being part of the corrupt system a long while, somehow stepped on the wrong toes and got finally tossed out. Comparing them to wikipedia behavior today, it's apparent that nothing has changed and the whole system, especially the "administrators", "bureaucrats", and "arbitration committee", are completely corrupt.

You can dig up all the sources you want; all they have to do is scream how it's not a "real" source, or simply revert-war you as a group and then accuse you of "breaking 3RR", and you're toast. Have the temerity to reveal an organized campaign by these groups in an unblock request, and they'll send along one of the Wiki-Assassins like Sandstein, FisherQueen, Barek, or the various other "unblock patrollers" to abuse you, harass you, and finally just hound you into something they can use to push for an indefinite ban. Often, they'll just out-and-out lie, claiming someone ran "checkuser" (a tool that NEVER comes up with a response other than guilty) and that you are a "sockpuppet" of someone else.

Then he has an online journal, where he wrote about this:
http://brotherguy.livejournal.com/31731.html

Matthew Garrett filed a copright violation case at US customs against the JooJoo tablet manuacturer: blog post (see last paragraph). This may be an interesting way to put pressure on manufacturers: if the customs actually start seizing shipments, I'm sure the sources start appearing pretty fast :)

On the other hand, Matthews earlier posts on JooJoo should discourage anyone from actually buying one...

The problem is that the SSN is so closely tagged to everything you do, just knowing it makes stealing an identity way too easy.

I'm not positive that's the problem -- as turbidostato pointed out, it's supposed to be an identification token, not a password. Trouble is, banks, CC companies, etc. commonly use this (perhaps coupled with something lame like DOB) as just that.

For example, from your clearly visible email address, I know you have a livejournal account (contains your birthdate, hometown, full name, etc.), you frequent Amazon (which shows a picture of you, some personal info, etc.), and so forth -- all from a simple google search.

Thing is, I can't easily steal your identity, because you've only supplied your handle, but no password. I believe that's what turbidostato's saying; we should be able to talk about our SSN the same as our email address, as our handle and password should be (but aren't) separate.

Yep. You're talking about the second most corrupt asshole in the whole Wikipedia hierarchy, second only to Jimbo himself.

Then again, "corrupt" and "wikipedia admin" ought to be a combined entry in the thesaurus anyways.

Revert David Gerard, and you're going to have yourself an instant life ban. Revert one of the people he protects, likewise. It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, have good reason, or even have the weight of "community consensus" behind you - he'll simply ban enough people, lie and claim "oh they were all sockpuppets", and there you go, poof, no more "consensus." He keeps a sitting list of people to accuse as sockpuppets that will get someone a "no questions asked" ban - look at the number of times his shitheaded tool followers accused people, with no evidence or reasons, of being "Enviroknot", or "Pigsonthewing", or any of a dozen other names.

Take a good look at "Dreamguy", one of his followers with extreme ownership issues over anything "fantasy fiction." This asshat got into a tiff with someone and accused them of being "Enviroknot" a few years ago. Response from corrupt ass DG? "instant ban, no questions."

He pioneered most of the tactics described in detail by former wikipedia admins, he was the one who set up most of the Wikipedia "organize in private" setups (like the Durova List) that makes people think "cabal"... because, yes, if you didn't know, corrupt assholes like him actually DO organize behind the scenes, hold secret trials, and determine who to harass and attack.

He's one of the worst abusers of the "don't bite the newbies", and according to many users, deliberately teaches many of the current worst wikipedia admins - the ones who "patrol", or Troll, the "request for unblock" template and attack, insult, and harangue any user they can find so they can claim "yay I banned someone." You know, people who do stuff like this, who post worthless "replies", leave insults, and generally know that because they are admins or have admin backing, they don't have to care at all about the rules.

David Gerard isn't just a symptom of what's wrong with wikipedia. He's a walking example of the disease.

http://spot.livejournal.com/315383.html

This actually gives details.

Not this antenna. I'll be damned if the "transmission" ground photo /. post and its link were eaten up by /. thresholds, but Google still links to it Hooray for my browsing history.

Check my original post's shadow of a the nearby cemetery's cross (they are forearm-sized.) It's halfway between the two trees that aren't green. It is not from the thombstone itself. Note the relative sizes of trees and larger thombs, and even a lance-like statue casting another shadow to the right. The antenna from russian ground links above is not just a coat-hanger wire, and has a lamppost height and anchoring support structure --that should definitely be as simple to spot as the spire at my cemetery. From Google Earth zoom estimates, both pics are at about the same resolution seen at 400ft of elevation.

On to more mystery!

Not this antenna. I'll be damned if the "transmission" ground photo /. post and its link were eaten up by /. thresholds, but Google still links to it Hooray for my browsing history.

Check my original post's shadow of a the nearby cemetery's cross (they are forearm-sized.) It's halfway between the two trees that aren't green. It is not from the thombstone itself. Note the relative sizes of trees and larger thombs, and even a lance-like statue casting another shadow to the right. The antenna from russian ground links above is not just a coat-hanger wire, and has a lamppost height and anchoring support structure --that should definitely be as simple to spot as the spire at my cemetery. From Google Earth zoom estimates, both pics are at about the same resolution seen at 400ft of elevation.

On to more mystery!

There are further pictures here, including ones of the building that is still being used:
http://kspzel.livejournal.com/55478.html

Really creepy stuff... I've been listening to a live stream of the signal for about two hours now, and at around 11:07 EST, I heard about 30 seconds of what distinctly sounded like high pitched morse code, which apparently a number of people have reported hearing over the last two days at various times.

I have it on right now in the background. There used to be an alternating tone at the top of the hour that kicked in suddenly and always gave me the shivers, but it stopped doing that a few years ago. Sometimes I tune in late at night, since the monotone drone of the buzzer can get pretty psychedelic. Good for coding. Never been lucky enough to catch a voice broadcast, though I did hear some crosstalk once. I even started work on a C daemon to autocorrelate the signal and auto-record any voice transmissions, but that got put on hold.
Pictures of the transmission site: http://alex-odn.livejournal.com/12148.html

Every mention of the Foxconn vs Linux issue should also be accompanied by the following link, which tempers things a little: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/94998.html

Google does have stupid geniuses too

To understand why it failed you must understand what is wave : groupware

Nat was in town, and he stopped by to say hi and chat, and he said, "So we've got this big pile of code we're going to release, and we're going to build an open source wave/groupware system! It's going to be awesome!"

And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

read more on jwz
http://jwz.livejournal.com/444651.html and more http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

and it was written in an "enterprise language" like cobol err Java and in gwt , they practically
murdered java script with that crap and the format for transfering wave data :xml documents
hint it looks more like exchange system and if you wonder why it failed? think sharepoint
and it was addopted by eterprise type systems like : novel , sap and that was the target i think
people who receive messages into a big inbox and where they should reply to support messages for example

i will install pygowave http://pygowave.net/ at my work place http://reea.net/
and i think it will make a a good platform for collaboration : think one big #irc channel where documents and messages can be shared (but from browser) , if i think well maybe skype is better on that

ps: reinventing the mail system is a bad idea when you already have ....gmail (that sucks too but for that i will write another episode) and it was a bad idea that i was alone in my wave
i was expecting something like facebook with hundreds of friends and invites and lot's of spam from the apps but it was just an empty enterprise exchange type system

funny shnitz this is what google wave https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1 told me today in my inbox
https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1
What do you want to master? I want an Free as in freedom wave
something like http://identi.ca/ alternative for propietary twitter system
in fact you can contact me on the pygowave , it's open it's free and you don't need an invite
you just join the system
mariuz@pygowave.net

Should all public information be so readily available that it doesn't require even a modicum of effort to access?

It's true that we have recently undergone a shift from data scarcity to data abundance, and there will be a necessary adjustment period. This leads directly into my next point...

If you took the time to drive over to my place then sure, look to your heart's content. Flew a thousand miles? Enjoy harassing the locals for photo opportunities. But just pulling it all up with the click of a button? That seems qualitatively different somehow.

I think you have this exactly wrong. It's not qualitatively different, what's bothering you is that it's quantitatively different. In principle, public is public (qualitative). In practice, even though something was "public" it may have been greatly obscured simply by means of the effort required to access it. In this way, technology is holding our feet to the fire and asking us to consider whether we have made law based on how we really feel about this issue or based on what was expedient and convenient at the time with little thought for the future.

I believe we have spent too little time when it comes to things like this thinking about and understanding things in principle, and this has always cast off a number of different side effects that may or may not have been undesirable. For example, you may not like the idea of Google Street View because of the reduction in effort—but consider this: if something in principle is public about you before GSV came along, then your only privacy protection in those matters depends upon the good will of others. You're simply relying on someone else to not have a good enough reason to hire a private investigator to go digging.

This difference between laws that stand on practice v. principle is exploitable by anyone that wants to and has the means to exercise control over someone else. At the governmental level, it is used by tyrannies to keep the people in order: make it impossible to comply with the law and most people won't mind; in practice, those laws won't apply to them or they won't get caught. But god help you if you run afoul of a powerful person's sensibilities in a non-illegal way. Violating non-law can very quickly bring scrutiny on all of the laws for which you (and everyone else, but more importantly you) are not in compliance. (North Korea does this. So does the DMV.)

This is the definition of caprice. When we democratize our policies on privacy and make them exploitable by everyone, we bring transparency. When we bring transparency, we bring recognition to the state of the system. Principle and practice fall into alignment, it doesn't matter which one we're discussing, they've become one and the same. Because the information is democratized, at least we are free to use it against those that would have previously had the means to use it against us.

Nothing I've said above is unique to GSV...it pertains to the freedom of information in general.

So in order to buy an Android phone without a contract, you have to plan to develop software for sale on Android Market.

...or buy it from T-Mobile. You can buy unsubsidized, contract-free, phones from T-Mobile (the great thing is if you do buy the phone unsubsidized, the plans are cheaper now too.)

Stories Slash Boxes Comments Slashdot Search News for nerds, stuff that matters * squiggleslash * Help & Preferences * Subscription * Firehose * Journal * Tags * Bookmarks * Logout * Customize Sections * Main * Apple * AskSlashdot * Book Reviews * Developers * Games * Hardware * IT * Index * Interviews * Linux * Mobile * Politics * Science * Technology * YRO Site Info * FAQ * Bugs * Code Stories * Old Stories * Old Polls * Hall of Fame * Submit Story Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Reply to: Nexus One is sold out * Nexus One is sold out (Score:4) by tepples (727027) writes: FriendFriend of a Friend on 2010-08-09 11:26 (#33189422) Homepage Nexus One In this page, Google wrote: The Nexus One is no longer available for purchase directly from Google. For more information on how to purchase the Nexus One, check out our help center. In this page, Google wrote: The Nexus One is no longer available for direct purchase from Google, but is available through Brightstar for sale to registered developers. Please note that Brightstar's Nexus One purchase page is only accessible to registered developers. So in order to buy an Android phone without a contract, you have to plan to develop software for sale on Android Market. Not everybody who wants a counterpart to iPod Touch that runs Android is interested in developing software for sale on Android Market. Reply to This Post Comment Preview Comment * Re:Nexus One is sold out (Score:?) by squiggleslash (241428) writes: on 2010-08-10 22:53 Homepage Journal So in order to buy an Android phone without a contract, you have to plan to develop software for sale on Android Market. ...or buy it from T-Mobile. You can buy unsubsidized, contract-free, phones from T-Mobile (the great thing is if you do buy the phone unsubsidized, the plans are cheaper now too.) -- My moved journal [livejournal.com] Edit Comment Name squiggleslash [ Log Out ] URL http://squiggleslash.livejournal.com/ Subject Comment

So in order to buy an Android phone without a contract, you have to plan to develop software for sale on Android Market.

...or buy it from T-Mobile. You can buy unsubsidized, contract-free, phones from T-Mobile (the great thing is if you do buy the phone unsubsidized, the plans are cheaper now too.)

Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! No Karma Bonus No Subscriber Bonus Post Anonymously Allowed HTML

1. • URLs http://example.com/ will auto-link a URL Important Stuff * Please try to keep posts on topic. * Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. * Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. * Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. * Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropr

> You can browse the source right here.

No, actually you can't. The link you provided is the official Android source code, but it does not run on the Augen tablet. According to http://mjg59.livejournal.com/126162.html, the kernel source code for this tablet is not available anywhere at all, which is a blatant license violation and I hope Kmart gets sued for this. Note that while most of Android is under the Apache license, the kernel itself is still GPLv2 like any Linux kernel is, which means that it cannot be relicensed.

Thanks for the link. It's a shame the original link didn't have it. Good stuff. This one in particular gave me some chills: http://pics.livejournal.com/sergey_larenkov/pic/000029eg/

He's done quite a few: http://sergey-larenkov.livejournal.com/

Throwing insults at open source gets you +5 on Slashdot - I'd never thought I'd see the day.

If you want an example of an open source social networking site, take a look at Livejournal. Are you seriously telling me that the closed source Facebook is a better website than Livejournal? The UI is far better than Facebook, it's easy to use and doesn't have bugs, plenty of documentation, and was doing all this long before Facebook.

Aside from your comments being false (I use Windows personally, but I tried Ubuntu recently and found it worked and looked just fine; I didn't even need documenation), you're missing the point. This is more about open standards than open source as such. If you bother to RTFA:

Just like open standards for e-mail and the Web broke users free from proprietary closed networks of the early 1990s, so too could a new set of standards allow people to share their thoughts, photos and comments across the Internet, regardless of what social networking services they use

It's clear that it's more about open standards, than necessarily open source alternatives. If there were open standards, yes there'd be a load more "Facebooks", but closed source sites would still be free to make use of them - just as we have closed source email clients. So even if you believed that giving away source somehow made an application terrible, you'd still be okay.

I take it you must absolutely hate email then, because that's based on open standards like SMTP? Obviously all email clients must have terrible UIs, no documentation, and be a pain to install, by your logic...

Reminds me of a little known story by Alan Moore with art by Mark Beyer called The Bowing Machine except it's not a comic ...

Wow, that realization only took 17 years:

subversionhack:

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/

Are you under the impression that social programs can't be socialist?

Socialism is the principle that people can work together for the common good rather than competing with one another. People organizing, through the government, to ensure they all have access to quality healthcare is certainly an example of that. Universal Healthcare has, historically, was a concept created and promoted by the socialism movement.

Universal Healthcare is not about the profit motive. It's not about people competing with one another for resources, and shareholders making a buck. It's about people working together for something that's good. It's the very definition of socialist. And that's not a bad thing.

Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Reply to: Re:Will be a hard pill to swallow... * Re:Will be a hard pill to swallow... (Score:2) by pnewhook (788591) writes: Alter Relationship on 2010-07-15 23:29 (#32922822) Universal heath care is a good thing but it is not socialist. Its a social program - completely different. Reply to This Post Comment Preview Comment * Re:Will be a hard pill to swallow... (Score:?) by squiggleslash (241428) writes: on 2010-07-16 8:21 Homepage Journal Are you under the impression that social programs can't be socialist? Socialism is the principle that people can work together for the common good rather than competing with one another. People organizing, through the government, to ensure they all have access to quality healthcare is certainly an example of that. Universal Healthcare has, historically, was a concept created and promoted by the socialism movement. Universal Healthcare is not about the profit motive. It's not about people competing with one another for resources, and shareholders making a buck. It's about people working together for something that's good. It's the very definition of socialist. -- My moved journal [livejournal.com] Edit Comment Name squiggleslash [ Log Out ] URL http://squiggleslash.livejournal.com/ Subject Comment

Are you under the impression that social programs can't be socialist?

Socialism is the principle that people can work together for the common good rather than competing with one another. People organizing, through the government, to ensure they all have access to quality healthcare is certainly an example of that. Universal Healthcare has, historically, was a concept created and promoted by the socialism movement.

Universal Healthcare is not about the profit motive. It's not about people competing with one another for resources, and shareholders making a buck. It's about people working together for something that's good. It's the very definition of socialist. Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! No Karma Bonus No Subscriber Bonus Post Anonymously Allowed HTML

1. • URLs http://example.com/ will auto-link a URL Important Stuff * Please try to keep posts on topic. * Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. * Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. * Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. * Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you are having a problem with accounts or comment posting, please yell for help.

I'm one of those who still hasn't upgraded (I wrote about it today on LJ), as all my machines at home are AMD machines, and SP3 had problems on AMD machines. See this Slashdot discussion in particular.

Does anyone know if those problems have been resolved? I'll be glad to upgrade if I know I'm not going to be dealing with BSODs.

Except the article seems to be talking about something more like LiveJournal friends groups where not only can you make lists of your friends, you can actually use them for something. Seriously, on Facebook I have one friends group that I use for family / business contacts that has the maximum privacy settings (i.e. I'll friend them, but they basically see a blank profile), and everyone else. There is no option for making a status update only for one group of friends. I think you might be limit to limit by album for photos... but no one uses it because the interface is so well hidden.

On LiveJournal, every single post you make has a clear option of public, friends-only, private, or just a specific friends group. The UI for friends groups makes them very easy and quick to create and edit. Around 4-6 years ago, a good number of the people I knew in high school used LiveJournal (with varying levels of how often they posted), and everyone knew about the friends-only features and at least sometimes used them. These were not geeky people or privacy nuts. Real privacy features get used. Facebook just does not have them.

There are reasons - nefarious or otherwise depending on your interpretation - but at the end of the day you can do it if you're willing to patch and install a self-signed kernel. I did it myself for Vista SP2, and it works fine. It may not work fine for you. I figured it's well worth it to get 4GB vs. 3GB without the hassle of upgrading.

______

Those of you who know me in even the most casual way may be shocked to hear me say: I want to do some programming in Windows.

One would think that one would simply go out and download a compiler and an SDK (a bit fat wad of compiler headers, link libraries, and documentation) -- or perhaps buy a CD-ROM containing same -- and you'd be completely set to develop any kind of Windows application.

You'd be wrong.

What's available is a hopelessly confusing mashup of tools to develop native applications, VisualBASIC applications, .NET virtual machine applications, Web applications (for IIS only, natch), database-driven applications and, if you're very nice and pay lots of money, Microsoft Office plugins. And, just to make it hard, all these tools are hidden underneath a cutesy Integrated Development Environment which passively-aggressively makes it as cumbersome as possible to figure out what's actually going on under the hood -- you know, the sorts of things a professional programmer would want to know.

Okay, fine, just give me the tools and docs to develop native C/C++ apps. "Oh, no no no," says Microsoft, twirling its moustache, "You have to pick one of our product packages." Packages? "Oh, yes, there's Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Standard, Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Team System, and Visual Studio Grand Marquess with Truffles and Cherries."

After looking at the six-dimensional bullet chart of features, I think that Visual Studio Express may get the job done, since it comes with a C/C++ compiler and will compile native apps. "Quite so," says Microsoft whilst placing a postage stamp on a foreclosure notice, "provided you're only writing console apps -- you know, programs that run in a command window. If you want to develop full Windows GUI apps, then you'll need additional libraries which aren't necessarily included with Visual Studio Express."

Ah, so VS Express will only let me develop "toy" applications and, if I want to do anything more advanced, I should download and install the complete Windows SDK which, amazingly, is free. "Well, you could do that," says Microsoft after tying Nell to the sawmill. "But the SDK doesn't really integrate very well with the IDE. And there's still some link libraries which only ship with Visual Studio Standard or better."

Fine. I'll look at buying Visual Studio Standard. And then maybe I can get to improving this device driver. "Device driver!?" says Microsoft, blotting the blood spatters off its hat. "Heavens, no, that's not included with anything. You need to download and install the Driver Development Kit for that. And you may or may not need the DDK for each version of Windows you intend to support. Not to worry, however; they're all free downloads..."

*fume* And people wonder why I've avoided this clusterfuck for the last 25 years. Ever since the Visual Studio 6 days, I've been smacked in the face with this braindamage every time I've tried doing the slightest exploration of Windows development.

So: Can anyone with modest Windows development experience tell me what Visual Studio flavor to get and which addons to download if I want to:

• Write native Windows applications and device drivers in C/C++,
• Debug said applications and device drivers,
• Not give a damn about "wizards" trying to write my code for me,
• Not give a damn about database, Web, VisualBASIC, or .NET development.

I wonder if they make Transformers[tm] porn? Rule 34 FTL :[

Of course they do. There's a reason why Megatron keeps Starscream around.

Wikipedia's approach isn't even close to an "honest attempt", however. The methods by which their administrator clique treats outsiders are ridiculously jackbooted; organized groups have been able to get a few admins in place and then simply use them to run roughshod over anyone who comes in in good faith to try to repair the damage done by partisans taking over articles.

There was a kerfluffle a few years ago when an organized Arab group went nuts trying to remove the Hebrew translations of certain regional (common to both Israel, Syria, Lebanon, etc) dishes like Za'atar and Felafel. The end result was the bannings of anyone who tried to defend it, on behest of the organized crew. Just one example, but a common theme. When the various organized groups (the "Shi'a Guild", etc) who were organizing to POV various articles on wikipedia were told "not in public", they didn't vanish, they just moved to outside forums like soundvision.com and started organizing from there.

And who can forget the various scandals like the Durova's Hit-List Scandal?

Or the time they altered the rules so that an administrator can call someone a "sockpuppet" at any time, and NO amount of proof - not even a "checkuser", because they changed the rules so that "checkuser" can ONLY establish guilt, not innnocence - can ever clear their name?

The phrase "honest attempt" should not be used in conjunction with Wikipedia. The whole way the system's set up is just corrupt, top to bottom.

Hate to break up of the controversy with facts, but this disclaimer is just boilerplate the distributor puts on all of his products. He publishes lots of public domain works and he got sick an tired of people complaining about the language or mores.

You can get the full story on his blog: http://warrenlapine.livejournal.com/

I've known Warren for years. If he had been trying to make a point, he would flat out say that was what he was doing.