Slashdot Mirror

Hmmm ... is he a catholic? http://www.spunk.org/library/humour/sp001526.html

1.) Slashdotters only rant against copyright because they're pro-piracy and don't want to lose the free ride. The hypocrisy is ridiculous, especially because Slashdot itself has sued other websites over copyright infringement.

I'm anti current copyright law and at the same time I never pirate. For me, breaking the law is something which can be done, but should only be done seriously and for a good reason. My lack of access to "bratz" material does not hurt me. I would only copy illegally on principle. I even buy material such as CDs as long as I know that I can actually copy it.

You attack yet another straw man. In fact you make the standard stupid mistake of assuming that the opinions expressed on a web site are the opinions of that web site. You probably think the letters column in your local newspaper expresses

2.) Copyright protects content creators so that they get paid for their work. Slashdotters don't want people to be paid for their work, because they want to pirate it. All your motives are self-serving, and it's so obvious.

There are many other ways to get paid for work. Firstly, you can charge lots for the access to the first copy. Most of us have nothing against privacy laws and the right not to give out your own stuff. Secondly you could work in an academic institution and be paid for doing the creative work. Thirdly you could look for patrons and sponsors.

Doing work is not sufficient to guarantee work. If you want to sit all day working hard bashing rocks don't come round to me and demand to be paid unless I told you you should do it. There is nothing special about "content creators" that they deserve to get paid for things other people didn't agree to pay for. Any copyright system has to be justified and accepted by both sides.

3.) The GPL is a copyright license. If you disagree with copyright law, then I'm free to do whatever I want with your GPL code.

the thing about law is, that it applies whether you agree with it or not. Your statement is as stupid as the statement "I don't agree with copyright law so I can't go to jail for copying".

I know I'll get modded down for voicing this opinion, because I've posted anti-piracy, pro-copyright opinions in the past and gotten trashed by roving gangs of moderators. Ah, well.

Help, help, I'm being repressed!

You get modded down because your post contains so many logical flaws and mistakes of logic that most people think it's just a troll. I see value in it as an expression of the stuipdity and ignorance of a certain group of people, however, you can't expect to get modded up till you learn to think straight.

Dear pirates--if copyright law is wrong, then the GPL has no legal standing.

An inability to separate moral wrong and right from legal and illegal is going to get you into big trouble if you go to China or, for example, North Korea. Just because something is wrong doesn't mean it isn't a law. In this case the GPL is legal because it is (see the case law; reasons are irrelevant). It's justifiable in the same way as someone shooting you could be completely justifiable. As a form of self defence if you attack them.

What about this?

Because, of course, there is no crime in prison...

Depends which prison. Supermax doesn't have a crime problem, I can tell you that. 23-hour a day lockdown.

Didn't you realize that the state routinely acts as the private police of the wealthy at their behest? Why, a state that doesn't defend its business interests to the total exclusion of the interests of its citizens is hardly a state at all!

Hmm, you know, I might have something there....

Arne is a lonely duck, semi-alcoholic, with poet aspirations. He is always in search of the perfect woman (or any woman at all, for that matter). Arne is very cynical and has strong views on everything. And he is constantly out of money. His leftist/communist views, I suspect, comes mainly from his own low social status, not from any higher political motivation (as he has probably convinced himself)... He usually hangs out on certain bars, pubs and cafes in Stockholm city with his friend Krille Krokodil (the 'alligator'). Other acquaintances of Arne's is a vole and a fox, both of which have succeeded better than Arne, money-wise, but only marginally so.

Arne is a lonely duck, semi-alcoholic, with poet aspirations. He is always in search of the perfect woman (or any woman at all, for that matter). Arne is very cynical and has strong views on everything. And he is constantly out of money. His leftist/communist views, I suspect, comes mainly from his own low social status, not from any higher political motivation (as he has probably convinced himself)... He usually hangs out on certain bars, pubs and cafes in Stockholm city with his friend Krille Krokodil (the 'alligator'). Other acquaintances of Arne's is a vole and a fox, both of which have succeeded better than Arne, money-wise, but only marginally so.

This is not a critique on voting... just one on voting systems. Voting is illegal in many countries, perhaps because it could bring unwanted change? Thus it is fair to assume that voting DOES change things. QED.

So this person's (perhaps random) e-mail fortune sig has much truth to it? (And dual meanings, on which /. has only latched onto one)

So why is voting legal in the States? Perhaps because people cannot change the really important things?
-ponder-

When last has voting really had a profound effect? When last have we voted about issues and not FOR parties? A total swing in the political rulers have not had any noticable effect on the country... hence the opinion that there had been no real need to vote.

More interesting reading HERE.

Coming from a limey perspective, Prescott brings up images of our beloved deputy PM - not a pleasant sight: John Prescott in his prime.

He's also known for being large, rough and prone to overconsumption of reources (2 Jag's) - maybe Intel do know what they're doing.....

Ernesto Che Guevara was a dickhead. Read about it here.

Why don't you stop rallying behind a fucking Stalinist?

Are radical anarchists all alike?

Surely you are too busy poking fun at your former high school classmates to attempt to understand where anarchist ideas of society are comming from. Try reading Chomsky, Emma Goldman, or Anarchist People of Color. These voices will probably expand your view of anarchy more than the image of your classmate. (By the way, what the hell were you doing in 9th grade cool guy? Were you the like Emilio Estevez in the Breakfast Club? Maybe you were like the Fonz? Naw, you were probably pimply and obnoxious, like everybody else that age!)

I attended the WEF protests and I can say (with much video to back this up) that it in no way was it out-of-control. In fact the police were acting in a completely unconstitutional manner, harassing the peaceful demonstrators (check out a Village Voice story about it here). Those people who were arrested at the Saturday were arrested because they were carrying toy police equipment, not because they were doing anything illegal. I think the police thought that the plastic Toys-R-Us batons were going to be used for terrorism or something.

By the way, if you knew anything about the WEF I am sure you would think twice about attending a protest against this unregulated group of businessmen. WEF members include BP Amoco, Exxon and Nike.

Here is a blurb I found about BP Amoco:
In addition to economically destroying the social structure of this once agriculture based society, BP financially supports the Colombian military which is notorious for its human rights abuses. Since 1987, 35,000 noncombatants have been murdered or 'disappeared' primarily by the BP backed military and its paramilitary allies. In 1997, BP admitted that it has provided the Colombian Ministry of Defense with $8 million.

And Nike?:
Nike pays workers less than $2 per day - an amount which is often significantly below a living wage.

Get a clue dude. Who cares if your friend was dirty in 9th grade. You were probably picked on too. Fight some real battles, against jerk-offs like the WEF members. For more info about the WEF read this article.

I agree. You should believe nothing without good evidence.

The article referenced at the bottom of this post provides official U.S. government statistics. (Search on "prison".) An interesting link mentioned there gives another statistic: The murder rate in Washington, D.C. is 170 times the murder rate in Brussels, Belgium.

You can do a Google search for the prison rate in other countries. You will find that European countries have about 1/6 as many of their citizens in prison as the U.S.

"Ever read The Gulag Archipelago?"

Yes, I read that book. During that time in the Soviet Union, there was a far smaller percentage of people in prison than now in the U.S. Also, the Supermax prisons in the U.S. are less humane than Gulag prisons. There is a difference, though; the U.S. apparently has few or no political prisoners.

Check out one prisoner's story: Supermax Prison is Torture and Death. This is not obscure data. I learned about U.S. prisons from a PBS TV program. The two links in this and the previous paragraph are just the 2nd and 4th Google links from a search on "supermax prison".

We live in a time when a well-dressed, educated man or woman in a leadership position will look into your face or a camera, be very clear and logical-sounding, and speak complete nonsense. That's how things got to be such a mess. Tonight on a TV news program a U.S. government official was talking about the "Talley Bahn". He meant the Taliban. From years of experience with this kind of thing, I know it is a good guess that the speaker knows nothing of importance about Afghanistan.

More about the social breakdown: What should be the Response to Violence? .

I think this is backwards - most people realize that some form of government is a good thing. They may not agree on what or how much the government does, but they prefer some form of organization to mob rule.

I disagree with the premise that the only alternative to government is mob rule. I think that it is preferable to be organized in a system that is non coercive. Read some introductory books on Anarchism... Spunk.org is a nice place to start.

What about a libertarian socialist?

I keep seeing these draconian laws being passed by our government, and these orwellian systems being created and implemented by profit- and power-hungry corporations. It seems every day there's a different post to Slashdot describing some new method for controlling the flow of information and the freedoms that we should be taking for granted...

And what are we doing about it? Why do we keep allowing our rights and freedoms to be taken away?

Why are those in power doing this to us? That's easy to answer: Because they can. Because anybody in power will seek to extend their power and control.

Why are we allowing this to happen? I don't know. Some of us are fighting back as much as we can, but most of us simply post to Slashdot and complain.

Listen up! All this bullshit that we've been fed ("We live in a free country!", "The economy is doing great!"), it's all just that: bullshit! We're losing our rights and freedoms on a daily basis, our economy is fake (the drop on last Friday was equivalent to Black Tuesday in 1929), people all over the world are being forced into sweatshop slavery in the name of "economic progress", and our environment is being raped and destroyed at an alarming rate in the name of profit.

And most importantly? The technology that we all love and support is being turned back on us in order to control and monitor people. They're usurping something that they have no right to usurp. We have to put the power of technology back into the hands of the people!

It's time to fight back! It's time for a revolution!

http://www.indymedia.org - Support independant media!
http://www.soaw.org - Why are our tax dollars being spent on training murderers?
http://www.corpwatch.org - So you think only governments can oppress and censor?

http://www.spunk.org
http://www.infoshop.org - Communism is dead, Capitalism is close to it. There is another alternative, and it's time we started exploring it.

http://www.adbusters.org
http://www.rtmark.com
http://www.subvertise.org - Subvertising (also known as adbusting) at it's best.

http://www.ainfos.ca - Keep informed on what is happening in the world, from an anti-authoritarian, grassroots perspective.

http://www.a16.org - Seattle and D.C. are just the beginning.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net

If all the future of technology holds is the promise of toilets that can email, I'm gonna grab an old 386 with linux on it, move out to the boonies, and live out my life in peace and sensibility.

Technology could be used to start a real revolution, but instead we call networked toasters a "revolution" and leave it at that.

I love technology, I really do. But the way these IPO hungry corporations treat it, I'm starting to think John Zerzan may have a point.

Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net

What are you talking about? Amazon can't have the patent on air-- it's taken.
Microsoft got the patent. About five years ago, about the time they bought the Roman Catholic Church.

How were you not aware of this? Apparently you were not a USENET reader, or you definately would have heard about it.

There is no labor/capital axis, and the picture it draws is misleading.

It's between a system of banks, global corporations, absentee ownership, and privately held natural resources designed to funnel the wealth produced by the many into the hands of a few (right, capital) versus a system of cooperatives, collectives, communes, credit unions, small businesses, and employee owned companies designed to allow the exchange of labor (left, labor). Either can be heavily regulated or a free market, authoritarian or libertarian. (Libertarian socialism can be see in the theories of American anarchists from the last 19th and early 20th centuries; perhaps Chomsky is the best-known contemporary thinker along those lines. Authoritarian capitalism can be seen today in Singapore.)

Back on topic. Beware of people who prommise to protect you.

Of course, the state doesn't even promise to protect us; the Supreme Court has made it clear that police forces have no obligation to come to the aid of individual citizens.

Socialism is a form of government which runs most essential industries such as medicine, power, and telecommunucations; controls the people's access to these industries; and charges high taxes. Wealth is redistributed by a central government.

Communism is an _economic_ system where the workers own the means of production and the wealth created is shared by all. Any form of government can be involved in a communist economy but it is usually socialist' this is why many people get the two confused.

to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

Socialist != totalitarian; socialists and capitalists both come in libertarian and authoritarian flavors.

For more on Libertarian Socialism, see this.

As for me, though, I'm a Zenarchist.

Yes, there have been several proponents of anarcho-capitalism. However, anarchist theory has strong anti-capitalist roots. I believe the general consensus among anarchists is that capitalism is a contradiction or a right wing theory instead of a form of anarchism. For a more detailed discussion of this I recommend checking out the anarcho-capitalist section of the anarchist FAQ (it can be found at spunk press, which has a lot of anarchistic material). In general, anarcho-capitalism relies more on the dictionary root of the word anarchism (greek an-without archos-government, chief, ruler) rather than the past of the theory. Still, anarchism does encourage individual thought. The history is the past, and for the present new ideas are needed. If you can make an arguable case that anarcho-capitalism isn't inherently hierarchal, than I for one consider it a form of anarchy.
I am an anarchist.

Anarchism without adjectives (anarchism without adjectives is a theory that anarchists should get along instead of dissmissing the ideas of other anarchists with different ideas as impossible or statist).

This is very sad, yet nothing compared to stuff going on with multinational corporations and oil companies. So people will say, "you must be a communist, that will never work." I agree it will not work, and state controlled communism is a very scarey thing. There is however another political theory that barely gets any recognition at all from the mainstream media, except using it's name to be synonymous with chaos, violence, and psychos. I am not talking about libertarian capitalism (which only seems to be something that exists in america anyway), but true libertarianism, aka libertarian socialism, aka anarchy.


I know this is very slightly off topic, although it's the underlying problems which exist with MS and about every major corporation, and corporation to be. They tend (or seem to) start out as under dogs and nice, but next thing you knmow they're running everyone out of business and using third world countries for cheap labor.


For more information on the theory, I suggest you first read Noam Chomsky books as he points out modern day problems, mainly with capitalism...that way you'll be aware there are actually problems. You may think everything in the world is perfectly all right sitting in your nice house or apartment with a nice expensive computer, telling yourself you fairly earned it and ANYONE can easily do the same if they just try.


Also, I suggest reading Anarchism: From Theory to Practice by Daniel Guerin, who explains it pretty clearly for the average person. If you want to read material from the sources of the theory, I suggest The Essential Kropotkin by Peter Kropotkin (he didn't name the book that himself, it was named that later by the author who put the book together); God and State by Michael Bakunin; Statism and Anarchy by Michael Bakunin; Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker; Bakunin on Anarchy by Sam Dolgoff; and even the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (although he has been linked to be pro-state communism which has been proven to be "bad" as the original Russian philosophers during his time predicted). Karl Marx is one of the most popular socialist philosophers mainly because the Soviet Union massed produced his work, and obviously didn't promote the other philosophers because they opposed the state. There is an interesting (and brief) summary of the Russian revolution that many people might not actually be aware of (what really happened that is) here. There was also a Spanish anarchist revolution in the 1930s that was eventually defeated. I suggest reading The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 by Murray Bookchin if you're interested in that.


There are some good libertarian socialist websites as well. liberty for the people, anarchy library, and spunk library.


You may be interested to know the House has passed an amendment to make flag burning illegal. The only free rights we are semi guaranteed are those in the constitution, and yet we STILL have to fight for those rights as well as those not pointed out in it. Of course corporations don't have to obey the constitution and they can censor whatever they wish...unless you have millions of dollars to fight them in a legal case...and if you are working for them consider yourself fired.


We can really not be free in a world when freedom and knowledge conflict with the best interests of the massively wealthy (and corporations themselves) and the states that promote and spread their existence (such as the US military and CIA promoting right wing and fascist militaries/political parties so US corporations can use the countries natural resources and citizens for cheap labor).


I am remaining anonymous because I do not doubt that some proud patriot or some sort of jerk will flame or stuff my (e)mailbox.


Anyway, before you go attacking political theories you know little or nothing about, I suggest reading these materials. I wish everyone would/could.

This is very sad, yet nothing compared to stuff going on with multinational corporations and oil companies. So people will say, "you must be a communist, that will never work." I agree it will not work, and state controlled communism is a very scarey thing. There is however another political theory that barely gets any recognition at all from the mainstream media, except using it's name to be synonymous with chaos, violence, and psychos. I am not talking about libertarian capitalism (which only seems to be something that exists in america anyway), but true libertarianism, aka libertarian socialism, aka anarchy.

I know this is very slightly off topic, although it's the underlying problems which exist with MS and about every major corporation, and corporation to be. They tend (or seem to) start out as under dogs and nice, but next thing you knmow they're running everyone out of business and using third world countries for cheap labor.

For more information on the theory, I suggest you first read Noam Chomsky books as he points out modern day problems, mainly with capitalism...that way you'll be aware there are actually problems. You may think everything in the world is perfectly all right sitting in your nice house or apartment with a nice expensive computer, telling yourself you fairly earned it and ANYONE can easily do the same if they just try.

Also, I suggest reading Anarchism: From Theory to Practice by Daniel Guerin, who explains it pretty clearly for the average person. If you want to read material from the sources of the theory, I suggest The Essential Kropotkin by Peter Kropotkin (he didn't name the book that himself, it was named that later by the author who put the book together); God and State by Michael Bakunin; Statism and Anarchy by Michael Bakunin; Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker; Bakunin on Anarchy by Sam Dolgoff; and even the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (although he has been linked to be pro-state communism which has been proven to be "bad" as the original Russian philosophers during his time predicted). Karl Marx is one of the most popular socialist philosophers mainly because the Soviet Union massed produced his work, and obviously didn't promote the other philosophers because they opposed the state. There is an interesting (and brief) summary of the Russian revolution that many people might not actually be aware of (what really happened that is) here. There was also a Spanish anarchist revolution in the 1930s that was eventually defeated. I suggest reading The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 by Murray Bookchin if you're interested in that.

There are some good libertarian socialist websites as well. liberty for the people, anarchy library, and spunk library.

Anyway, before you go attacking political theories you know little or nothing about, I suggest reading these materials. I wish everyone would/could.