Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Power Grab
Maple Syrup writes: "Fast Company has an interesting article written by John Ellis about the power shift on the Internet, as large corporate interests use political means to take over what had been a populist medium. The most interesting material comes at the end: 'There are no grass-roots efforts on the Web. The Internet army, which is enormous, hasn't been engaged or conscripted.'"
The EFF is hardly opposition, while they do some great things they are hardly going to topple big business any time soon.
/doing/ things. Hell, do you realize how quickly companies would fall if all of the Nerds went after their asses? Bank records, personnel files, social security numbers, telephone systems, security systems, ordering and tracking systems, even the damn air conditioning wouldn't be safe!
/least/) group of intelligent people dedicated to overcoming any obstacle in their way. Funding? No problem, any half ass can steal funds, and anybody better then a half ass can manage to not get caught (too quickly at least!), you want secrecy? Hah, simple, once you step up from having script kiddies being the main threat to people with actual PhDs even the news media would learn exactly how hard it can be to catch somebody who knows what they are doing.
What is needed is a large group of people who are not afraid of actually getting out there and
Nobody could stop a large (few thousand at
And in the very least, what the fuck could the government do if the entire tech sector turned up against big business all at once? Throw them all in jail? Heh, and watch the rest of the economy go down hill and leave the nation to rednecks and whitetrash? Fat chance. Imagine what the headlines would be "Colleges and universities around the nation shutdown due to seriou staff shortages after FBI raids. In addition, IBM, HP, Compaq, Intel, AMD, and a large number of other companies listed on the Nasdeq have had at least temporarily shutdown due to lack of employees."
They would have no choice but to give in to academia and science as a whole.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
You can cheet on your tax returns. The easiest thing to do is start your own church and donate 50% of your income to it (since 50% is the maximum amount deductable and churches don't have to make their records available to the IRS).
The other option is to start your own business and request that your customers pay in cash. Since cash money is too hard to trace, you'll only have to report the income you recive fromm checks and credit cards plus just enough cash to explain your purchasing habits while keeping you below the "poverty line."
Of course, you might get caught, but since you're talking about using tax evasion as a form of protest that doesn't matter.
If you don't have anything nice to say, shut up you stupid prick.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered M*lda when IDC confirmed that the M*lda market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all slashdot readers. Coming on the heels of a recent slashdot post which plainly states that M*lda has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. M*lda is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Troll Admin comprehensive trolling test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict M*lda's future. The hand writing is on the wall: There may be no future at all for M*lda because M*lda is dying. Things are looking very bad for M*lda. As many of us are already aware, M*lda continues to lose market share; red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Troll leader Anonymous Coward states that there are 7000 users of M*lda. How many users of CmdrTaco are there? Let's see. The number of M*lda versus CmdrTaco posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 CmdrTaco trolls. Kuro5hin trolls on Usenet are about half of the volume of CmdrTaco trolls. Therefore there are about 700 users of kuro5hin trolls. A recent article put smokedot trolls at about 80 percent of the Linux market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 smokedot trolls. This is consistent with the number of smokedot Usenet posts.
Major marketing surveys show that M*lda has steadily declined in market share. M*lda troll is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the troll is to survive at all it will be among troll hobbyists and dilettantes. M*lda continue to falter. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all intents and purposes, M*lda is dead.
Why? Simple...because it's easier to regulate a few big companies then millions of individuals.
The Internet scares the Govt., because it's (now) a populist medium. Joe Citizen...or G.W. Bush are equals on the net, because an IP address is what it is regardless of who's on the computer connected to it. The Governnment can't regulate the 'net, and they want to. In some ways, the pendulum has swung all the way to the right. The communist block imploded because their govts. (try as they did) could not control their access to information about the rest of the world.When the USSR jammed RFE broadcasats, they shifted to another frequency. When Khomeni was kicked out of Iran, he used the Long distance telephone system to dial into Iran from France and disseminate his message, which was playing on thousands of cassettes within Tehran within hours. Now our Government wants to pull the same crap...Problem is, they can't.
Information is a virus that can't be controlled. Just ask the former Soviets.