It pays the rent but who can get passionate about it?
"Quirky" types grasp this reality firmly. You "strong work ethic" types
don't.
Quirky types put their passion in the only place it can realisticly exist:
in their personal projects.
The hard-clickin work drone, OTOH, in his feeble, balless, uninspired,
fake manner, gets "passionate" about whatever his boss tells him to get
passionate about. That and his paycheck. He couldn't see the beauty of things
in a million years.
Listen up clueless ones: without fat quirky smelly weirdos you'd still
be shivering in the mud and eating grass.
To observe 20 apples is to assume the theories of apple and number
(and their respective relationships to apparent patterns this river of experience).
Apples do not name themselves apples, we do. We are also the definers and counters.
Does the world itself possess a form or is that just a convenient way for
us to organize our thoughts about it?
Data that describes an object at location x-y-z at velocity v
assumes a whole slew of theories like object and space and movement (not to mention observer and observed). You
may call such theories natural (...obvious, compelling...) ones to use when
describing one's world (Newton might) but "natural" sounds to me alot like
unconscious or habitual. In my experience, habits and other unconscious processes
have a tendancy to unravel under close inspection. I've never seen and end
to that unraveling.
I didn't mean to imply that theory building always takes place in
a vacuum but these initial theories upon which later theories are based must
come about somehow. How about we just made them up because it was
convenient to do so? A creative process. We do it all the time. It certainly
pleases Occam.
Do you see beyond your thoughts? Can you tell the difference between an experience and your thoughts about it?
Science, tho making a valiant effort to make it's anthills of theory
logically consistant ones, is ultimately founded upon assumptions that were
not arrived at via a rational process.
The glittering gem of science is a cargo-cult artifact floating in mid-air
just like any other body of theory you might care to name.
It's not a path of truth-divination but a technology. Just like the wheel,
freudianism, voodoo-dolls and electrical engineering. Of limited use (but
useful all the same of course) and, in the face of great infinite whatever,
of ZERO "truth".
Fundamentalism==idea worship. Which ideas one chooses to worship is irrelavent.
A nice keyboard. Programmable panel type thing. Have to be bigger of course. Has it been done. Actually tho, keyboards and the whole "main interface is a bunch of switches" type interface is a dinasaur. Consider the TWITCH GLOVE. Inertial tracking via acellerometers on each fingertip. Neural network for learning user gestures. Infinitely customizable. Emulates chord-keyboard, mouse, blah. No moving parts. Say goodbye to to carpal (chord with MICROTWITCHES! In any position.). Or maybe just an eye that watches your fingers. I know it's been thot of more or less but maybe it just hasn't been done right yet. Why else can't I buy a twitch glove yet? Keyboards are so fuckin Brazil.
Also by Z: Creatures of Light and Darkness. Life, death, robots, sorcerers, and other heavy stuff in an Egyptian-mythological mode. Baaaaaad Aaaaaaaassssss!
Well... the money-making scene is rather fucked. Everyone seems to know it but rarely is it talked about. What's the deal with that? Is it that it's a necessary evil but to point out the evilness of it is considered juvenile? Yelling at the darkness rather than lighting a candle? Hardcore greed-motivation is efficient (whatever that means); but it's ugly, unhealthy, stinky, etc. Like I said, everyone knows it. It's a fucked system and naturally the major hagfishesque players in this system of sewage and rotting meat are the most obviously blatantly fucked. The degree to which you pursue the dollar is the degree to which you are a shiteating spreader of filth and disease. Duh! What's the alternative? When your neighbor starts pissing on trees and waving his gun what alternative do you have but to enter some kind of who-shoots-who-when and piss-distribution standoff? Non-violent non-participation?
Anybody who seeks to make a profit off of your labor is fair game. It's war, after all. Battle to the discomfort- to the quality-of-life-reduction -to the resource pinch. Would you prefer to be incrementally smothered or outright shot?
Not that I know diddly squat about Linux (I dabble, but I do ass-sucking VB in uncle-humping Windows to pay the bills) but how about a master virtual directory thing. Some kind of central master file locator. A layer of abstraction with some intelligence for browsing or whatever. Obvious? Been done?
The value of a bit-twiddling sock-puppet with business skills is obvious. You can interface with your little plastic box AND interface with the commerce game. Your value as a corporate component has just increased geometrically. Like a prostitute who can take 6 penises at the same time; it's a skillset in demand. I imagine cog of such caliber would warrent the executive-grade KY at the very least.
If you like red (or whatever. I like red) on black you can get big fat LED arrays in panels. Tile your wall. Play something vector-graphixy like Battlezone. Slammin!
I've got another semirelated paraquote: "There can be no compromise. Once a freedom has been exchanged for an advantage, that freedom can be regained only by renouncing that advantage.", by some religious guy.
The temptation to exchange freedom for security is huge. To play a component in the machine. To take root in the corporate titty. It's called the job scene. The temptation (meme? dream? programming?)is so overwhelmingly huge in fact that it blinds us to any possible alternatives. The promise of security and possible (heh) profit is a relative sun to the relative horrible black abyss of the threat of unemployment. We see no other way, so we stick our balls in the vise... But I hate the vise. I hate the machine that made this vise. I hate VISE COMMERCIALS. I hate... my balls? My flesh? A knife is cheap, in fact I have one right here...
I think they hide the can of coke or whatever because the baring of the brand is a heavy deed, to be done intentionally or not at all but never never casually. If the coke logo is to be shown then the coke company wants total control over the context. Otherwise showing it is logo infringement or trademark dandling or some shit like that.
Right now we have commercials and entertainment. Commercials serve business (farmers of humans); entertainment serves the people/cattle. People invest max attention in entertainment and min attention in commercials.
Business does the opposite of course.
Obvious so far?
In the name of grabbing more cattle attention, commercials are made more entertaining and entertainment is made more commercial.
Natural convergence, yes?
In the golden future there will be no commercials, just great entertainment that pushes the business agenda 100%. Pure dreams of wealth and security.
Cattle squeezing efficiency will approach 100%.
Commerce is war. It's wasteful, ugly, etc.
If you have a job then you collaborate. Money grubbing cowardly foolish weakling that you are. Will drugs save us?
So Joe enters 'www.myhomepage.de' into his browser. The browser checks the local list. If 'www.myhomepage.de' isn't found then the lists on peer machines are checked. If still not found then check their peers, ect. A big regularly-updated public service list could also be a peer. However, if the consensus (not the lawyers) think that www.microsoft.com should point at the smokedot server, then so it shall. Just like if everyone said blue was the color of roses and apples then it would be.
Feel free to correct me if any of this looks wrong. I am but an egg.
You've got IP addresses like 192.100.23.3. This isn't human friendly so each IP is associated with a name. The lists that do the associating of names with IPs are kept at various servers around the world.
So far so good?
My question is: Why not keep a list on each machine? I mean, the association between foo.com and 123.45.6.7 is arbitrary, right? It's just a matter of the associating list. Your list wouldn't need to be a list of all addresses, just the ones you've visited or otherwise consider worth keeping around. You could also get associations off other machines on the web. Any other machine. Sure, there could still be central servers for handling giant lists but they wouldn't dictate, just provide a common reference, like a dictionary. Individuals could choose whether or not to use the IP-name associations (like definitions in a dictionary. "Dog" doesn't need to represent the 4-legged tailed thing, just if you want to use the word in communication). You, the surfer, could get new IP-name associations from other machines on the web and they could get them from you, just like it works with spoken languages. Would this be a peer to peer domain name system? (And what is the use of.com,.net etc anyway? Catagorizing for efficiency?).
I think this woul decentralize domain name control?
What if the english language was under corporate control. What if every time you read or heard the word "food" an image of a McDonald's Big Mac appeared in your mind; and the definition "2 beef patties, cheese, lettuce, special sauce, ect..." was in all the dictionaries? Are you seeing my point?
Pardon my doofyness but a certain piece of obviousness is just begging to be laid out. Theories are like lossy data compression: You never get a perfect rendition. In fact, if "reality" could be said to contain an infinite amount of information everywhere (I mean, what sets the resolution of a definition, some mythical objective reality or simple satisfaction? How many words are enough?) then any theory made about it must always be infinitely deranged. So mysteries, while easily ignored-to-forgetting from the comfort of your livingroom/office/customary-groove (in fact one might say that an act of intentional ignorance is the bedrock underlying any useful theory. Ignoring the irrelavent.), should be considered the norm to a degree proportional to your elsewhereness.
Yes, people who spend alot of time in front of the computer tend to take everything extremely literally. I've seen it in other people and I've seen it in myself. It tends to fade when you lay off for a few hours/days or so but it also seems to get stronger and more ingrained if you're on the computer for, say, 14 hours day after day. Maybe one of our witchdoctors will write a book about it some day. It's really remarkable when you think about it. It's like a kind-of-temporary dementia/autism that's invisible inside computerland (where nothing has any significant reality outside it's literal meaning anyway) but pretty obviously glaringly fucked up outside of it. Don't expect your computer friends to notice.
Wrong in one example at least. I cranked out shitloads of beautiful code and art up to the point that I entered the job scene. Now I crank out kindergarden crap (VB) for a paycheck and zip else. Work fucks up your head.
Is it just me or does the corporate philosophy of "milk your resources harder and faster" seem kind of poisonous? Do you think DaVinci could have cranked out more paintings of higher quality is some wise creep had deigned to teach him 'Extreme Painting'? Doesn't anyone notice that every cool thing was produced outside of the corporate culture? Look at every groundbreaking inventer/artist/philosopher; they strive for pleasure, not dreams of profit. The best software is open source produced for the joy of creation. Corporations are good at is being efficient, but then so are amoebas and termites. What is a corporation anyway? A machine. A machine designed to deliver the dream of security and wealth to it's stockholders. Are security and wealth so important that we're willing to whore ourselves to any machine that promises to deliver them? I guess the answer is yes. Sincerely, your fellow whore. Deep throating the corporate robocock for 2 years and counting.
What we need to make happen is a workless society, not develop our human-squeezing technology.
In analyzing the phenomenon of someone sticking to their screen 20 hours out of 24 you've got to look at the convenience aspect because computerland is nothing if not convenient. Satisfaction is always just a click away. Maybe it is just pixels blinking on the screen but it's JUST A CLICK AWAY. That counts for a lot. A little satisfaction gained easily is often more readily pursued than a greater satisfaction gained with difficulty. I myself have this scene that goes on: I'm coding. Coding coding coding. I want a break fram my coding so I read my email. Feel like doing something else so I play a videogame or check out Slashdot or just surf. But wait, my options consist of a hell of alot more that just computer stuff. I could go for a walk or visit a friend or a million other things, but I choose the computer option over and over. It's like my perspective is being narrowed by my focus on the computer. Do I forget the world when I'm on the computer alot? What's going on here? It's like it's easier to flow my attention in convenient directions. Like I'm turning into a blob of cosmic laziness.
Hang the drive, or the whole case, from the ceiling by rubberbands/bungees/surgical-rubber-tubing (say, 3 feet or more in length). Damps that vibration right out. Cheap too.
Speaking of getting data around,you ever heard that theory about there being only one electron? The idea is that this universal electron moves both ways in time so the singular appears multiple. So my idea is this: can we put a signal on the "universal electron" that could be recieved by anyone observing the electron *anywhere*? (and is it wiggling with strange vibes (spin?) already? I mean, is it in use?) Our universe may already have a "universal bus" built right in.
Is necessary for what? A pattern of resource-distribution that satisfies your moral/intellectual/esthetic sensibilities? No hope dude. Capitalism is just a program. A machine. Machines never satisfy. What we need is an enlightened dictator. A godking or something. Not some finely-engineered rubber fuck-doll.
Slashdot Mirror
It pays the rent but who can get passionate about it?
"Quirky" types grasp this reality firmly. You "strong work ethic" types
don't.
Quirky types put their passion in the only place it can realisticly exist:
in their personal projects.
The hard-clickin work drone, OTOH, in his feeble, balless, uninspired,
fake manner, gets "passionate" about whatever his boss tells him to get
passionate about. That and his paycheck. He couldn't see the beauty of things
in a million years.
Listen up clueless ones: without fat quirky smelly weirdos you'd still
be shivering in the mud and eating grass.
Get out of the way.
To observe 20 apples is to assume the theories of apple and number (and their respective relationships to apparent patterns this river of experience). Apples do not name themselves apples, we do. We are also the definers and counters.
Does the world itself possess a form or is that just a convenient way for us to organize our thoughts about it?
Data that describes an object at location x-y-z at velocity v assumes a whole slew of theories like object and space and movement (not to mention observer and observed). You may call such theories natural (...obvious, compelling...) ones to use when describing one's world (Newton might) but "natural" sounds to me alot like unconscious or habitual. In my experience, habits and other unconscious processes have a tendancy to unravel under close inspection. I've never seen and end to that unraveling.
I didn't mean to imply that theory building always takes place in a vacuum but these initial theories upon which later theories are based must come about somehow. How about we just made them up because it was convenient to do so? A creative process. We do it all the time. It certainly pleases Occam.
Do you see beyond your thoughts? Can you tell the difference between an experience and your thoughts about it?
Wear shoes and the world is covered with leather.
Science, tho making a valiant effort to make it's anthills of theory logically consistant ones, is ultimately founded upon assumptions that were not arrived at via a rational process.
The glittering gem of science is a cargo-cult artifact floating in mid-air just like any other body of theory you might care to name.
It's not a path of truth-divination but a technology. Just like the wheel, freudianism, voodoo-dolls and electrical engineering. Of limited use (but useful all the same of course) and, in the face of great infinite whatever, of ZERO "truth".
Fundamentalism==idea worship. Which ideas one chooses to worship is irrelavent.
A nice keyboard. Programmable panel type thing. Have to be bigger of course. Has it been done. Actually tho, keyboards and the whole "main interface is a bunch of switches" type interface is a dinasaur. Consider the TWITCH GLOVE. Inertial tracking via acellerometers on each fingertip. Neural network for learning user gestures. Infinitely customizable. Emulates chord-keyboard, mouse, blah. No moving parts. Say goodbye to to carpal (chord with MICROTWITCHES! In any position.). Or maybe just an eye that watches your fingers. I know it's been thot of more or less but maybe it just hasn't been done right yet. Why else can't I buy a twitch glove yet? Keyboards are so fuckin Brazil.
Also by Z: Creatures of Light and Darkness. Life, death, robots, sorcerers, and other heavy stuff in an Egyptian-mythological mode. Baaaaaad Aaaaaaaassssss!
Well... the money-making scene is rather fucked. Everyone seems to know it but rarely is it talked about. What's the deal with that? Is it that it's a necessary evil but to point out the evilness of it is considered juvenile? Yelling at the darkness rather than lighting a candle? Hardcore greed-motivation is efficient (whatever that means); but it's ugly, unhealthy, stinky, etc. Like I said, everyone knows it. It's a fucked system and naturally the major hagfishesque players in this system of sewage and rotting meat are the most obviously blatantly fucked. The degree to which you pursue the dollar is the degree to which you are a shiteating spreader of filth and disease. Duh! What's the alternative? When your neighbor starts pissing on trees and waving his gun what alternative do you have but to enter some kind of who-shoots-who-when and piss-distribution standoff? Non-violent non-participation?
Anybody who seeks to make a profit off of your labor is fair game. It's war, after all. Battle to the discomfort- to the quality-of-life-reduction -to the resource pinch. Would you prefer to be incrementally smothered or outright shot?
Not that I know diddly squat about Linux (I dabble, but I do ass-sucking VB in uncle-humping Windows to pay the bills) but how about a master virtual directory thing. Some kind of central master file locator. A layer of abstraction with some intelligence for browsing or whatever. Obvious? Been done?
The value of a bit-twiddling sock-puppet with business skills is obvious. You can interface with your little plastic box AND interface with the commerce game. Your value as a corporate component has just increased geometrically. Like a prostitute who can take 6 penises at the same time; it's a skillset in demand. I imagine cog of such caliber would warrent the executive-grade KY at the very least.
If you like red (or whatever. I like red) on black you can get big fat LED arrays in panels. Tile your wall. Play something vector-graphixy like Battlezone. Slammin!
I've got another semirelated paraquote: "There can be no compromise. Once a freedom has been exchanged for an advantage, that freedom can be regained only by renouncing that advantage.", by some religious guy.
The temptation to exchange freedom for security is huge. To play a component in the machine. To take root in the corporate titty. It's called the job scene. The temptation (meme? dream? programming?)is so overwhelmingly huge in fact that it blinds us to any possible alternatives. The promise of security and possible (heh) profit is a relative sun to the relative horrible black abyss of the threat of unemployment. We see no other way, so we stick our balls in the vise... But I hate the vise. I hate the machine that made this vise. I hate VISE COMMERCIALS. I hate... my balls? My flesh? A knife is cheap, in fact I have one right here...
I think they hide the can of coke or whatever because the baring of the brand is a heavy deed, to be done intentionally or not at all but never never casually. If the coke logo is to be shown then the coke company wants total control over the context. Otherwise showing it is logo infringement or trademark dandling or some shit like that.
Right now we have commercials and entertainment. Commercials serve business (farmers of humans); entertainment serves the people/cattle. People invest max attention in entertainment and min attention in commercials. Business does the opposite of course. Obvious so far? In the name of grabbing more cattle attention, commercials are made more entertaining and entertainment is made more commercial. Natural convergence, yes? In the golden future there will be no commercials, just great entertainment that pushes the business agenda 100%. Pure dreams of wealth and security. Cattle squeezing efficiency will approach 100%. Commerce is war. It's wasteful, ugly, etc. If you have a job then you collaborate. Money grubbing cowardly foolish weakling that you are. Will drugs save us?
Uh yeah. Rental is better than free. Secrecy fosters understanding better that open communication. Sure.
So Joe enters 'www.myhomepage.de' into his browser. The browser checks the local list. If 'www.myhomepage.de' isn't found then the lists on peer machines are checked. If still not found then check their peers, ect. A big regularly-updated public service list could also be a peer. However, if the consensus (not the lawyers) think that www.microsoft.com should point at the smokedot server, then so it shall. Just like if everyone said blue was the color of roses and apples then it would be.
Feel free to correct me if any of this looks wrong. I am but an egg. You've got IP addresses like 192.100.23.3. This isn't human friendly so each IP is associated with a name. The lists that do the associating of names with IPs are kept at various servers around the world. So far so good? My question is: Why not keep a list on each machine? I mean, the association between foo.com and 123.45.6.7 is arbitrary, right? It's just a matter of the associating list. Your list wouldn't need to be a list of all addresses, just the ones you've visited or otherwise consider worth keeping around. You could also get associations off other machines on the web. Any other machine. Sure, there could still be central servers for handling giant lists but they wouldn't dictate, just provide a common reference, like a dictionary. Individuals could choose whether or not to use the IP-name associations (like definitions in a dictionary. "Dog" doesn't need to represent the 4-legged tailed thing, just if you want to use the word in communication). You, the surfer, could get new IP-name associations from other machines on the web and they could get them from you, just like it works with spoken languages. Would this be a peer to peer domain name system? (And what is the use of .com, .net etc anyway? Catagorizing for efficiency?).
I think this woul decentralize domain name control?
What if the english language was under corporate control. What if every time you read or heard the word "food" an image of a McDonald's Big Mac appeared in your mind; and the definition "2 beef patties, cheese, lettuce, special sauce, ect..." was in all the dictionaries? Are you seeing my point?
Pardon my doofyness but a certain piece of obviousness is just begging to be laid out. Theories are like lossy data compression: You never get a perfect rendition. In fact, if "reality" could be said to contain an infinite amount of information everywhere (I mean, what sets the resolution of a definition, some mythical objective reality or simple satisfaction? How many words are enough?) then any theory made about it must always be infinitely deranged. So mysteries, while easily ignored-to-forgetting from the comfort of your livingroom/office/customary-groove (in fact one might say that an act of intentional ignorance is the bedrock underlying any useful theory. Ignoring the irrelavent.), should be considered the norm to a degree proportional to your elsewhereness.
Yes, people who spend alot of time in front of the computer tend to take everything extremely literally. I've seen it in other people and I've seen it in myself. It tends to fade when you lay off for a few hours/days or so but it also seems to get stronger and more ingrained if you're on the computer for, say, 14 hours day after day. Maybe one of our witchdoctors will write a book about it some day. It's really remarkable when you think about it. It's like a kind-of-temporary dementia/autism that's invisible inside computerland (where nothing has any significant reality outside it's literal meaning anyway) but pretty obviously glaringly fucked up outside of it. Don't expect your computer friends to notice.
Wrong in one example at least. I cranked out shitloads of beautiful code and art up to the point that I entered the job scene. Now I crank out kindergarden crap (VB) for a paycheck and zip else. Work fucks up your head.
Is it just me or does the corporate philosophy of "milk your resources harder and faster" seem kind of poisonous? Do you think DaVinci could have cranked out more paintings of higher quality is some wise creep had deigned to teach him 'Extreme Painting'? Doesn't anyone notice that every cool thing was produced outside of the corporate culture? Look at every groundbreaking inventer/artist/philosopher; they strive for pleasure, not dreams of profit. The best software is open source produced for the joy of creation. Corporations are good at is being efficient, but then so are amoebas and termites. What is a corporation anyway? A machine. A machine designed to deliver the dream of security and wealth to it's stockholders. Are security and wealth so important that we're willing to whore ourselves to any machine that promises to deliver them? I guess the answer is yes. Sincerely, your fellow whore. Deep throating the corporate robocock for 2 years and counting. What we need to make happen is a workless society, not develop our human-squeezing technology.
In analyzing the phenomenon of someone sticking to their screen 20 hours out of 24 you've got to look at the convenience aspect because computerland is nothing if not convenient. Satisfaction is always just a click away. Maybe it is just pixels blinking on the screen but it's JUST A CLICK AWAY. That counts for a lot. A little satisfaction gained easily is often more readily pursued than a greater satisfaction gained with difficulty. I myself have this scene that goes on: I'm coding. Coding coding coding. I want a break fram my coding so I read my email. Feel like doing something else so I play a videogame or check out Slashdot or just surf. But wait, my options consist of a hell of alot more that just computer stuff. I could go for a walk or visit a friend or a million other things, but I choose the computer option over and over. It's like my perspective is being narrowed by my focus on the computer. Do I forget the world when I'm on the computer alot? What's going on here? It's like it's easier to flow my attention in convenient directions. Like I'm turning into a blob of cosmic laziness.
Hang the drive, or the whole case, from the ceiling by rubberbands/bungees/surgical-rubber-tubing (say, 3 feet or more in length). Damps that vibration right out. Cheap too.
Speaking of getting data around,you ever heard that theory about there being only one electron? The idea is that this universal electron moves both ways in time so the singular appears multiple. So my idea is this: can we put a signal on the "universal electron" that could be recieved by anyone observing the electron *anywhere*? (and is it wiggling with strange vibes (spin?) already? I mean, is it in use?) Our universe may already have a "universal bus" built right in.
Is necessary for what? A pattern of resource-distribution that satisfies your moral/intellectual/esthetic sensibilities? No hope dude. Capitalism is just a program. A machine. Machines never satisfy. What we need is an enlightened dictator. A godking or something. Not some finely-engineered rubber fuck-doll.