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Agreed. But it can also go too far.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/20/jenki ns_on_donahue/
as seen on
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/20/204923 5&mode=thread&tid=149

Courtney's Salon article in 2000 was interesting, but Steve Albini did the math better in his 1994 rant in Maximum Rock'n'Roll #133:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.

(many detailed explanations and figures later...)

The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

In fact, some of Courtney Love's rant and Steve Albini's rant have some similarities:

Albini (1994): "The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."

Love (2000): "So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven."

Sounds suspiciously familiar.

But if that doesn't scare you, what about the prospect of a United States getting what is effectively yet another intelligence agency in the middle of a war between the existing two?

I dismissed this article, about the author of this book as a little overstretched last week - but the more I look around the more real it seems.

Ok, so now I'm being hattish...

The Constitution is worth fighting and dying for.

I had a lot of time to think about stuff like this during my military service. Lots of nights on guard staring out in the black with nothing to do.

I came to the conclusion that whatever it is, the willingness to kill or die for something is a sure sign of that you have simply become too fanatical.

Once you've accepted that something is worth killing or dying for, you will also become easier to manipulate. Don't give me that "no. not me". I know better than that. I've been manipulated too. There are always other ways to correct things, and many chances have been lost if you come to the point were you see no other alternative than violence. Just don't let them pass by.

The moment it becomes just another piece of paper we use to wipe our ass with

AFAICS, Bush is wiping his ass with your Constitution every day. Are you going to do something about it? Or are you just going to write about it on /. and let the chances slip by?

To say that either France or Germany, or any country which uses the government to muzzle it's citizenry is just as free as America is fucking ludicrous.

Yup. Sure. Try saying something like sex abstinence programs is meaningless at best, according to all recognized international research. Then come back and report how far you got. If you report success, then we can start talking about the relative merits of free speech in different jurisdictions.

In Europe, like in the US, the ideal is to counter speech with speech. In fact, there's the European Court of Human Rights, and there has been rulings that saying things like "All imigrants should be sterilized upon arrival" is protected speech. It is quite unlikely that many of the proposed things will stand up in that court.

Let the politicians get on with the censorship stuff for a couple of years. It'll fail, and they'll realize it. Then, they'll be more receptive.

I have lobbied for government funding of a project that aims to use RDF to provide metadata to make it easier to find opposing viewpoints, and so fulfil the ideal of counter speech with speech. It has met some interest, but far from enough to get it off the ground. But that's the kind of things that geeks can do to preserve freedom of speech.

Ever heard of 'Free speech zones?' If anyone can't handle free speech, it's your president.

No, it that were the case there would be no reason to adapt the book at all. If you're going to trade on the good name of a book to draw an audience you have some duty to repay that by giving them something based on what they came to see.

I'd disagree with that. A case in point is Adaptation , a great film, but one which has very little to do with what it was based on ( The Orchid Thief ). The book provided inspiration for what the movie turned out to be, and I suspect most moviegoers were glad they got what they did instead of a straightforward adaptation.

Actually, scaling the text to the screen is difficult, but scaling the container size on a well-designed site is trivial. The web was designed with this standard in mind. If you fiddle with your window size right now, you will notice that the white space after the Slashdot logo compresses, text moves out of the way, and the main box shrinks down until the site is readable at 640 * 480 (though, lower than that and you get scroll bars).

This should be the norm, as it is the functional base which the web was designed for. Even hyperactive sites like wired exhibit this behavior. But if you look at salon, the layout has far fewer dependencies yet is fixed width. Why?

Because being in an insecure industry, web designers are very trend-conscious, and less technically inclined designers create sites that are fixed width. Boo to that.

"The Internet is just a big scam"
-Ray Bradbury

"[Bush] is wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a shithead."
-Ray Bradbury

Source.

While direct payola was made illegal quite a long time ago, it still exists. This is probably not a shock for the more jaded people here. But the extent that it is implemented might be shocking to some that are not in music.

In fact, nothing gets on commercial radio without being paid for. The only exceptions are college radio, and specialty shows like Dr. Demento and local music shows (such as local Anaestetic on WXRT in Chicago).

How does it work if it's illegal? It's actually very simple. Each radio station is locked in with an "Independent Promoter" who helps the labels get their songs played on the radio. The IPs, as they're called in the industry, are also not supposed to pay for songs to be played, but they do anyway, under the table. Also promotions such as vacations and other items end up going to Radio CEOs rather than listeners. The IPs are more like a toll authority for each station. Often, they make exclusive contracts with stations so that they are the sole IP for a particular station. Since they're "Independent" the law does not take them into account.

This is well documented in the industry, and I'd recommend reading Pay For Play if you're interested in the topic.

I learned this from a lot of research. I am in an independent band, and so when we made our first album, I researched this to find out how to get on Commercial radio. I was very surprised to find out the truth. I have a collection of links on our website if you are interested in more articles on this topic.

By the way, as a musician, I'd rather that they abolish the laws on Payola. I want the payments to be on the table, rather than under it. After all, companies pay to get their items on shelves of grocery stores and consumer stores like Best Buy. Is it so shocking that radio is any different? There is too much money bet on bands to succeed that there would be any doubt that airtime is paid for. IPs are an unintended, legislated middleman. They serve no legitimate purpose, and in fact, make it even more expensive to get played on the radio. Let me be specific: If my band's music somehow got played on a radio station, the IP's would bill my band. If we didn't pay, they'd rip it from the playlist. IP's are the enemies of good music, and radio, and I want the artificial legislation that created them to be abolished.

http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/index.html

If you haven't read Salon's coverage from the last couple years, you really should. There's a very good reason that Clear Channel stations play drastically narrower content than independent stations: the music industry collectively pays literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year to decide what gets played.

As far as I'm concerned, this new tactic of announcing up front what they're doing is 100 times better than the system described in the articles I linked. I still find it revolting that they so successfully determine the musical tastes of a nation, but I'm glad they're not hiding it.

(Incidentally, running songs as advertisements isn't a suddenly discovered loophole. It's mentioned in an article from 2002 that paying a radio station to decide what gets played is illegal, "unless they announce the sponsorship on air." What's new is the idea that people might not care.)

To quote from a Salon article entitled The Best Game Ever:

But beneath these primitive graphics is a game of such richness and endless variation it usually takes years to master, if at all. ... With the all-text Nethack, the preferred graphics card is your mind's eye. This enables you to feel real terror, say, at the approach of an innocuous letter "C" hopping toward you across the screen -- since it represents the cockatrice, an occult-spawned dungeon fowl whose bite turns heroes to stone. With little predigested visual mediation between game play and your imagination, you'd often get the sense that you were, so to speak, playing against the game itself.

The best graphics are those that don't get in the way of the game.

If I had to rewrite Unix from scratch, I could do it in a summer, easily," says Joy. "And it would be much better. A much, much better job. The ideas are old."

... so how long until the VCs take over? :)

Interesting thing about the wireless ISPs in Eastern WA is that they are intensely competing for coverage. To the point of knocking down each others repeaters, towers, antennas, etc. Yakima County police are using the 802.11(?) spectrum to network their mobile units. Certain people were broadcasting white noise or amping up the power on their transmitters enough to bring the sherrif out . They should be getting their own spectrum within a year, but for now the money they're saving by using off the shelf equipment makes up for the wait.

"There's clearly a difference between a picture of a woman casually naked (e.g., what you might find in National Geographic) and a picture of, for example, a woman in stockings and heels holding her vagina open and licking her lips, as one might find in your average softcore magazine (to the extent they haven't all gone out of business)."

Yes, there is difference, like you said: One she is casually naked and in the second she is in stockings and heals holding her vagina...etc. The question becomes, from this difference does any harm emerge because she is engaged in the second pose? If there is any harm, then I've yet to hear an argument for it as yet.

Outside of other factors I don't see any reason why children in National Geographic style nudity are harmed in any way. I'm not convinced the same is true for Penthouse style nudity. I haven't seen solid evidence so I can't claim statistical support for my concern, but I'll be a lot happier when CGI gets good/cheap enough to make this whole question moot.

No evidence is no evidence. Agreed, that doesn't mean there isn't any harm, but it does mean the onus is on people who say there is harm to back up their claims with evidence or argument.

"One other point. The age of puberty has been steadily declining (as a result of better nutrition, and yes it happens to people fed hormone-free meat too). The age at which one is emotionally mature has IMO been increasing as well (possibly because society has become more complex tho I'm guessing here), but that's harder to measure. What we're left with are people who become fertile at a much younger age (and much less mature) than when our behaviour evolved."

Your point about puberty steadily declining seems true, according to a few articles here, here, and here. However, the age of consent is not decreasing with this current reality. This only compounds the problem as individuals are being locked away, then branded as sex offenders for the rest of their life upon release, for having sex with sexually mature individuals that are below the official age of consent.

"Being attracted to a pubescent, but underage, person isn't technically pedophilia; there's another term for it (ephebophilia?)...It's not so understandable to be attracted to a four year old, and be aware that the children in softcore KP are frequently that young."

I disagree. It is hard to determine the mind of evolution. The Bonobo Chimps often have intergenerational sexual activity, so puberty is not always a de facto requirement, as in this case, for sexual behaviour. Another sexual behaviour that was until recently outlawed in America was that of homosexual anal sex. Homosexuality too does not seem, on the face of it, to have any evolutionary advantages. However, it stands to reason if homosexuality evolved with humans, and so many other animals, it likely plays, or played, a beneficial function. Pedophilia seems even more common then homosexuality in the population (statistics if you have them, they are so hard to find on this issue), and if its with us the question is why? One answer is that it serves or did serve some purpose. If it did not and was instead harmful, early human tribes that practiced pedophilia would have naturally been wiped out. They were not, so that is the conundrum.

Child porn is to the UK what terrorism is to the US: the the giant bogeyman used to justify all kinds of restricstions on freedom.

Excessive consumption of fast food IS the enemy.

Is McDonald's marketed as an indulgence, or as something that should be daily consumed? Here are the themes from McDonald's advertising:

McDonald's is Your Kind of Place (1967)
You Deserve a Break Today (1971)
We Do it All for You (1975)
Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheese pickleso nionsonasesameseedbun (1975)
You, You're The One (1976)
Nobody Can Do It Like McDonald's Can (1979)
Renewed: You Deserve a Break Today (1980 & 1981)
Nobody Makes Your Day Like McDonald's Can (1981)
McDonald's and You (1983)
It's a Good Time for the Great Taste of McDonald's (1984)
Good Time, Great Taste, That's Why This is My Place (1988)
Food, Folks and Fun (1990)
McDonald's Today (1991)
What You Want is What You Get (1992)
Have you Had your Break Today? (1995)
My McDonald's (1997)
Did Somebody Say McDonald's (1997)
We Love to See You Smile (2000)

Notice the themes of "Today", and "everyday good feelings"? Do McDonald's ads portray the reality of eating its food on a daily basis?

God forbid the government somehow finds out he's got pictures of his kids breastfeeding or in the bath. They'd definitely be happy to get his sick perverted ass off the streets or, at the very least, fuck up his life horribly before saying, "Oops, I guess maybe that photo wasn't kiddie porn after all...".

Granted, nobody else is likely to ever check out the photos on his iPod... But you're naîve if you think family photos are necessarily benign.

Check out this article

Makes very good points as to why one should leave their wireless completely open so that anyone could get on it... (yes, you read that properly). Well, it's good provided you use P2P on a regular basis. A very nice way to cover your tracks.

Being unsecure isn't always bad ;)

I think Brown is somehow trying to imply that Linux is an illicit underground copy of Unix. In Soviet Russia (no this isn't a joke, really) and the East Bloc, banned books were distributed underground by copying (not only photocopying, but sometimes with a typewriter too). Samizdat could also properly be used to refer to the famous Jons Lions Book "A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System", which was driven undergound by AT&T because it contained so much UNIX source code. Salon has a story abou the Lions book and AT&Ts attempts to suppress it. In the old days, this book was secretely copied and distrubited by people who wanted to see how UNIX worked internally.

As is the usual case, this would all be a moot argument if the whole world would set aside what it thinks it knows and let ME make all the important decisions.

My declaration to remove all the current problems with so-called "interference" (listen up HAMs, you guys complain the most about "interference", at least on Slashdot): Software defined digital radio

Seriously though, one of the issues that has been brought up with a software radio is that "interference" isn't what it's portrayed to be. Radio waves don't collide with one another, the way that "intereference" implies. Interference is actually an artifact of the low quality analog recievers we use to listen to radio. Their selectivity leaves a whole heckuva lot to be desired. A radio with greater selectivity (the ability to distinguish two radio boadcasts with similar carrier frequencies, even those coming form the same source) can eliminate this dated notion of interference.

Read This Salon article on the subject and be converted to the new way of thinking about "interference". Or not :)

P.S. This article was the subject of a previous Slashdot article.

Actually, "total information", if done correctly, is better than the traditional methods. Or you would prefer to be prosecuted and tried based on partial information?

while that's absolutely true, no questions, its also not exactly the issue. this issue is: what does the government do with this information other than prosecute real and genuine baddies? (n.b. real and genuine baddies are few and far between)

for example, historical use of personal information (such as which groups people participate in) without any respect at all for the legality, but rather for the political content of those groups, lead to egregious violations of indivduals rights, such as COINTELPRO in the 60s...

this sort of data mine leads to malicious prosecution today, for example the malicious prosectution of this man....

if we can reasonably assume that our government does not have our best interests at heart, and will use personal information in mallicioius, illigal, or overtly political ways, then there is a very real impetus for reducing their ability to obtain it in the first place... to argue that "total information"... is better than traditional methods because of how it could work prosecutoraly is to completely ignore the covert and mallicious ways it can be used (again, see COINTELPRO).

This all reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate-world-history, The Years of Rice and Salt.

That said, playing the game taught me a hell of a lot about organization, being a naturally-disorg-ey person.

You are right. I think a good study would be one that took into account how open-source actually affects the economy. As I use open-source mainly because I don't want to pir8, I would not pay the gobs of money that equivalent software demands esp for home use.

My guess would be that open-source people are those who cant afford the closed-source equivalents and those who dont want to steal it as well as those aiming to be l33t.

Another good study would be how many of those outsourcing companies in other countries use pirated software. Here are some stats:

• Software piracy costs $245 million in India
• 94% piracy in russia
• 92% in china

Now the cost of piracy in Canada is similar to that of India. I can imagine that this is due to home users. How many people in India have a home computer? Where does the pirated software end up then?

This is not an attack on any of those countries. Just that sensible people would think about these issues

I do think there are some valid questions about the sustainability of a sector that depends on giving stuff away for free. Note: Open-source!=free beer :) I also think that there is a nice balance between closed source and open source.

Or should we just play it safe due to the likelyhood of potential legal wranglings with large commercial interests and start calling it The Symantec Web before the boys in charge decide to open up a keg on your hippy ass!!! I'm sure El Capitan would be none too pleased, but hey! You certainly can't please everybody! These are the times we're living in!

Amazing how easy it is to feell like a gray haired grumpy old man at 35 when it comes to the web! eeehhh...when I was a kid, we had 4 KAAAAY of CORE MEMORY...1 MHz and NO SHOES! and we LIKED IT!!!

Bricklin sent waves of laughter through the auditorium by reading a passage from Lammers' interview with Bill Gates in which the young Microsoft founder explained that his work on different versions of Microsoft's BASIC compiler was shaped by looking at how other programmers had gone about the same task. Gates went on to say that young programmers don't need computer science degrees: "The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems."[my emphasis]

Bricklin finished reading Gates' words and announced, with an impish smile, "This is where Gates and [Richard] Stallman agree!"

The "Programmers at Work" panelists were full of optimism about new opportunities to reinvent software -- in the mobile-phone world (where, Scott Kim noted, the constraints of small screens and tiny memory made it feel "like the early days" again), in the new universe of RF tags, and in the still-unfolding saga of global networking. Bob Carr reminded everyone that technology transformations usually take 20 years to unfold -- "I remember thinking in 1987 that the PC industry was mature, it was over" -- and that the Internet is only halfway through that cycle.

Still, that picture of Bill Gates dumpster-diving for operating-system code was hard to shake. Finding new ways to think about programming and to make better software demands a willingness for pioneers to open up their work so others can learn from it. "Getting the software industry on a more open, fair and level playing field," as Hertzfeld put it, is a prerequisite for any leap forward in the programming world. Software patents are a looming train wreck; competition in most "end-user" software is largely a distant memory. Simonyi's technical bottleneck is also a social, political and business logjam.

Everybody just read this dweeb's suggestion in yesterday's article!

I'm amazed at the whiners in this thread who are willing to wait for a magic pill that might help them grow muscles and lose fat, when everything you need is available now. There are plenty of sources of information on the Internet, none of which you need to pay for, about how to hack your metabolism.

It's quite simple. Work out six times a week, alternating three days of heavy weights (high mass, low reps) for max. 45 minutes, with three days of high intensity aerobics (20 mins at 90% of Maximum Heart Rate). On the seventh day, rest. Work out at least two hours after eating (to ensure your glycerides in the blood are at their lowest), ideally in the morning before breakfast, which should be high in protein.

Eat six small meals a day (space them out at two hour intervals.) Relax your eating restrictions on your rest day (this is when you can treat yourself -- but note your body's reaction to whatever you eat.) Monitor your caloric intake -- don't starve yourself, because you need to keep a good level of protein and vitamin input to build muscle.

This worked for me. I'm in my mid-forties, and managed to lose 25 pounds (11 kg), and get the body fat level down to 15%. I walk around 45 km per week on top of this exercise program, and have never felt better. I leg-press 100 kg, and do curls with 50 kg, with good technique.

The bottom line -- whatever you're doing now, you can improve. Just find the time, and DO IT.

That would be Robert Novak and petswareshouse.com.

First for a quick comment on the review, it was quite good, but I would have been mad at all the spoilers if I hadn't already read the book.

I just finished the Confusion today and I had far less problems keeping track of the characters than I did in Quicksilver. As soon as I started forgetting who a given character was, there would be a subtle reminder. There wasn't even a 'dramatis personae' in the Confusion if that indicates anything. For me, the first book seemed to keep getting bogged down in names and historical drivel, while the second book was very informative while still a page turner.

There's a very good review on Salon which says it much better than I have. To quote a bit of it:

But if you didn't like the first installment, oppressed by its seeming plotlessness, its profusion of minutiae about life during the late 17th century, and its endless disquisitions on Puritan religious life and the genealogical interconnections of European royalty, then no matter what the reviewer says about the second, you're still unlikely to give it a go.

Readers who require clear evidence that there is, actually, a plot, before they will commit to a project that, when finished, will be about as long as Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" and will include almost as many digressions and side journeys. ...

Plunge away! "The Confusion" finally does start to connect the dots, and where "Quicksilver" bogged down, "The Confusion" leaps nimbly forward, like the hero Jack the Vagabond King, hopping from crocodile head to crocodile head as he attempts to survive the Trial of Ordeal ordained by the Ceylonese pirate Queen Kottakkal.

sorry to say but the major record labels and the RIAA are TOTALLY useless. here's an example: unknown musician earns prifits The RIAA likes the way it used to be with radio payola and marketing and retail distribution because THEY controlled what the prices were and they were always needed. Now, with internet distribution, any musician can put themselves on the web and by low cost means ( p2p, word of mouth, internet pages,blogs, etc), unknown musicians can get themselves known while earning decent money from their fans thru playing live, selling cd's and t-shirts and fan memorabilia.

The old way of distribution is not working anymore. radio stations and fans with eclectic tastes Fans are not willing to listen to the same old pop-trash "madonna" "michael jackson" "nirvana" songs. Since the internet, people's tastes in music has opened up to include a lot more musicians even on the extreme ends. In the metropolis areas, radio stations playing the same old pop-trash are declining in popularity and the stations getting popular are the ones who include the "left field out there" bands. In a way, i kind of worry that when the "left field out there" bands get popular, the major record labels starts recruiting them, too which is what they want AGAIN ----->>CONTROL OVER DISTRIBUTION & HYPING in order to make more money for themselves.

but to your statement, no, the big record companies ARE USELESS. The major record labels thrived on putting a half dozen bands out there who had the looks and had the one hit which they'd HYPE all over the place so that they could get the CLUELESS masses to buy just those few bands and profit by the millions$$$. If you are "extremely talented as a musician," you still are earning loads of money. In the rollingstone article i listed, notice the new bands that are earning the loads of money?? The big bands may not be earning billions as before but they sure aren't among the working stiff di*ks like us out there. A lot of the bands being helped now are the middle tier bands and musicians who in the pre-p2p days wouldn't be able to get the major record label backing for HYPE and payola anyway. ( Thank you Courtney!!! )

The FBI WANTED to investigate the Bin Ladens before the 9/11 attacks because they suspected a plot. However, Bush and his administration blocked the investigation for unknown reasons. A head FBI official even resigned because he was so frustrated that they couldn't investiage what they say clearly as troublesome activities.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=103&row =0

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 293682,00.html

http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/ar ticleshow?art_id=1030259305

http://dir.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/12/b ush/index.html

Don't blame the FBI for not investigating, blame the justice department and the higher ups.

Why don't they base it on an open-standard language like C++ or C#, or a "academic" language like Smalltalk, Squeak, or MIX? That would be much better than supporting the pedophiles who support Java?

First off - yes, the merger made no fucking business sense whatsoever.

Watching it unravel was a great window into two disparate (and ultimately, mutually-exclusive) corporate cultures interact.

The most telling example was the reaction of "West Coast" (AOL/dotcom) culture with "East Coast" (Time-Warner/traditional media) culture when it came to what to do with their respective stocks/options.

West Coast culture says "W00hoo! The business rationale for this is pretty silly, but look at our stock price! People actually believe the hype. I could cash in my options and have fuck-you money , plus a few shares left over in case things work out. AWESOME!"

East Coast culture says "This is huge... but you can't just cash in your options -- that would take away your only motivation to make it work! Everyone'll look at you funny. Where's your loyalty? This kind of thing could get you kicked out of the country club! How could you?" (Or for 95% of East Coast employees, "What are these 'options' things again? And why do these West Coast people all seem to have them, and why are they so happy? I thought you had to be in a country club to do that sort of thing!")

OK, I'm stereotyping both the East and West coast cultures here, but you get my drift. When the worldviews of two sets of employees are that far apart, and especially when things start to go wrong, you're going to end up with a lot of bitterness from the boardroom on down, and such a merger is a recipe for disaster even when it does make business sense.

Was the merger a disaster? Sure. Are the old-line guys back in charge? Yup. But who really won? I'd argue that the AOL shareholders are the winners here, regardless of who's in charge of rehabilitating the broken down shell of the media giant.

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

Isolating Cuba is critically important. That's why we have five times as many treasury agents enforcing the embargo against Cuba as we have enforcing the ban against financing terrorism Associated Press.

Since most of us on this site like "open" and "freedom" so much, the Salon article about Open Source Fiction might be interesting reading.
_____________
coming soon: geek hangout at this url

Correction: TotalFinaELF.

Another article: The United States of Oil. Quote from the article: "The bin Laden family and other members of Saudi Arabia's oil-wealthy elite have contributed mightily to several Bush family ventures, even as the American energy industry helped put Bush in office." [My emphasis]

The issue here is that there is a lot more happening than most U.S. taxpayers suspect. They pay for the U.S. government, and they have a right to a complete understanding.

Thanks for the opening, I love looking up liks like this. Here's where some of Microsoft's big bucks came from:

• LA, 1998, $300,000, total cost to the district was five million dollars.
• 2001, Philidelphia $300,000 and a thoughtful analysis of the whole scam titled, "Microsoft to schools: Give us your lunch money!"

Want some more, bugni man? That Microsoft has bullied cash strapped public schools over copying stupid stuff like M$ Word is a shameful matter of public record. Free software, of course, comes with no such strings attached and works as well or better over judicial extortion ware.

If the assholes worry about people like me pointing out their shameful behavior, they should refrain from it in the first place. I'm happy people like you and him are bothered by my little posts.

I think it has been long ago since the concept "art" was something that people could take without questioning. In fact, it is so much open for questioning as to make it virtually meaningless. If the term "art" has no meaning then this discussion, interesting as it may be, has no point.

I have a personal story too. One day I went to have lunch in a museum. Some of the exhibition rooms were open, so I walked inside. Oops, I thought, this must be being worked on, because all I can see is *strings*, just a few here, a few there, tied from the floor to a wall, or from a wall to the ceiling. Nothing, nothing else. So I walk through another room, same thing. Another room, same thing. I noticed that the security guards were having a kick out of my expression, and then I got it. *That* was the exhibit. Strings. Tied to the walls. That was *art*. Why ?

Perhaps the whole reason for it being art was its pointlessness. Sort of like the guy who painted an iceberg red, or wrapped a building in cloth. What is the point ?

Then you come and tell me: Videogame makers have a point: making money. Well, then look no further! Here is videogame art. On the other hand, who is it that works (at anything) *only* for money ?

NOt that I totally disagree with you, but for many of us there is no dollar figure we can put on our time to justify demanding money in exchange for that time. Sometimes, the fact that the time was spent is more important than how much money we can make off of it.

In any case, if you really expect to be paid for your creative work, don't go into music.

Boycotting the record industry right now is more important than ever, not solely because of their attack on P2P, but because the musicians upon which they built their empire have always been under siege from the labels themselves. Find other ways to support the musicians you like, but if it were me, I'd let the poor fuckers starve if they continue to support the record labels. You know, capitalism being what it is and all. ;)

I had not heard of this series of books until now. All I can say is: "wow." I like Salon's take on the series.

I love voting, and think every who can, should. I hate the low voter turnout we see in the US of A.

But at the same time, I don't need to see Hank the angry dwarf as president.

Also, in case anyone's interested, you can first visit:

http://salon.com/news/cookie.html

And not have to watch the commercial. If, say, you don't have a browser that supports the flash advertisements, or are just really impatient.

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

If you want to support the rape and exploitation of little girls, that's your problem.

Check out what a software office in India really is like.

For those of you that have no idea wtf Isikoff's story was:

Conservative (and unreadably lame) Drudge's original story
Liberal Salon's slant
Liberal (for the US) BBC's slant
Washington Post's slant

I'd call the Washington Post conservative & pro-big gov't at the same time, but I'm a Liberal (big L). My pinko parents used to think the Washington Post is the bee's knees. Now we're pro-secession San Franciscans. I'm convinced that when the big one hits, it'll be the rest of North America that falls into the ocean.

Very fitting is 0wnz0red by Cory Doctorow, the Nebula award l0ser from two stories ago.

low-tech oyster mushrooms eat diesel fuel:

Bioremediation of Diesel Contaminated Fuel with Mushrooms

http://www.thebreeze.org/archives/4.14.03/news/n ew s1.shtml
|
| Senior John Templeton in his thesis entitled "Bioremediation
| of Diesel Contaminated Soil with the use of Mushrooms,"
| discussed his research with the oyster mushroom and how
| he used it in attempts to remove diesel fuel from contaminated
| soil specimens.
|
| According to Templeton, diesel fuel is made up of complex
| hydrocarbons, which have double carbon bonds, thus making
| them hard to degrade. However, he said mushrooms are a type
| of decomposer and are known to both breakdown and absorb
| various compounds, including certain petroleum products.