Women - tactics and strategy
on
Trigger Happy
·
· Score: 1
Ever notice that women (despite Laura Croft) never get into, well no, obsessed with, video games? You gotta wonder why conformance with that stereotype is so dominant. I'm sure there are exceptions, haven't met any.
My regret is that the stragic games of my youth are dead, replaced by the flashier tactical shooting games. I guess Avalon-Hill never saw animation coming.
It's an election year, the President, 1/3 of the Senate, and the entire House of Representatives are up for election. They're not in the least worried about citizens' reactions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They don't feel there's any significant opposition, so why worry about this treaty? It's going to pass, and be as bad as predicted, and voices in the Slashdot wilderness will wail, to no effect.
If you can legally register to vote in the United States, do so now!
Vote against the parties who promoted and passed by acclaimation or voice vote the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Vote against their candidates for the Presidency, Vice Presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives.
Email each candidate, telling them why they lost your vote. Repeat until either the DMCA is repealed or the candidate repudiates the DMCA. Repeat in the next election, and the next, until the candidates nominated repudiate the DMCA.
If your state has passed UCITA, react the same way at the local level.
If no candidates are available opposing UCITA and the DMCA, valid write-ins or appropriately blank ballots serve nicely as protests. Vote only for anti-UCITA and/or anti-DMCA candidates. Vote Libertarian, Socialist, Green, or Moster Raving Looney, but vote anti-DMCA/anti-UCITA.
It's not impossible that there are more of us than we think, let alone what they think.
If my kid can't get at any political site, and use that information to form political opinions, it's political censorship, and definitely unconstitutional.
So, the Democratic sites can't be blocked, neither can the Greens, nor the Communist Party, USA (I presume they still exist) or even the Ku Klux Klan.
It's not that I want or expect my child to join any of those organised (or disorganised) parties, but I very much want her to see what opinions are out there, and decide for herself.
If your censorware blocks my child's access to any political site, well, people, we have a Federal case.
Using Linux takes you off the market, until something breaks, or unless you succumb to the urge for the latest and greatest.
Meanwhile, you're invisible unless your Linux is a server on the Internet, where Netcraft can find you, nobody needs to know you use Linux.
So far I've seen no foolproof method for noticing Linux desktops. We know, but cannot prove, that there are more desktops out there in the business world than anybody sells on new boxes. Home and school users are even less findable, they tend to be castoff business machines, "obsolete", not even the hardware shows up in the market.
Under the current interpretation of the constitution, a fetus is NOT a human being, else abortion, even the pill, would be illegal, and a miscarriage would be manslaughter.
Which is why various jurisdictions are having trouble trouble prosecuting alcoholic expectant mothers for child abuse. Cases have been successful for nursing mothers.
Shall we consider standing on the sidewalks before Blockbuster Video with appropriate signs and, of course, DeCSS T shirts?
I am seriously contemplating such an action next Friday.
Pornographic DVD's are not encrypted under CSS.
I haven't investigated whether the MPAA won't allow CSS lisences for porn, or whether pornographers just didn't bother to try.
Maybe this will get Microsoft to port IE to Linux.
Has AOL's contract for Internet Explorer with M$ expired? Last I heard it still had a while to run, but the terms might specify that if AOL has a client for a platform, it must be Microsoft Internet Explorer based.
AOL with Internet Explorer for Linux?
I get a couple of warm fuzzies at the idea of AOL for Linux. They dissapate nicely when IE gets added.
There are two Reform Parties, each with its own convention, because a large portion of the Perotistas can't abide Buchannan and decamped to a nearby venue. It has something to do with social (pro-family, pro-life) as opposed to economic (low taxees, more "Defense" budgets) conservatives. Buchannan clearly controls the original site.
Because of the split the reporters are mostly reporting that they're overextended, they only planned on one convention.
Seeing the results of the primary (both electronic and snail-mail ballots, and a breakdown would be amusing, too) will be interesting, but irrelevant. The convention(s) will decide on the nominees. They might even figure out which convention was official by 7 November.
Well, not precisely the next..
Apparently, the new Pirates of the Internet are trading needlepoint patterns. Unlike the RIAA's overblown claims, this showed up in substantial lost profits in a much smaller market. A Time-Warner subsidiary has lost about 40%. The lawyers are loosed.
Freenet-chat posters have decided that we really need a Freenet granny can use.
Nice, polite commentary on basic bugtraq definitions. One small sideswipe at an author conclusively demonstrating he didn't read his homework assignment at all carefully.
This'll work best in cities.
Go to live shows at small venues, bars, coffee houses, small to medium theaters. Buy your CD('s) there, or don't buy at all. Yeah, I'll go to shows on their reputation, and find it was hype. Even when the headline band really and truly sucks, the opening bands may make the expedition worthwhile, surprisingly enough.
You get to support live music (and most musicians like that, apparently touring is fun on a small enough scale).
Smaller venues tend to attract unsigned musicians and you know the musicians are getting their cut when they're selling their own CD's.
A hazard might be getting into the occasional party with musicians (a risk I'll take).
If the French are involved, perhaps this'll give them the leverage to settle for something reasonable, like documenting and publishing Application Programming Interfaces.
Nah!
Thomas Jefferson wrote this at a time when the US cheerfully stole technology.
Once I was a weaver in New England, heir to a labor tradition stretching back to the time when English settlers noticed lots of waterfalls, built lots of dams with water wheels, attached belts to the wheels, and looms to the belts, and found useful employment for surplus country kids. It's skilled labor, no real need for literacy, but skilled.
Oh, and the technology was, in modern terms, pirated. Totally dependant on a millwright who learned his trade well, and illegally emigrated to New England (there were laws againg millwrights emigrating, a somewhat more drastic EULA) where he built looms and spinning jennies and most parts for them, which were then copied by all and sundry.
You've heard of Yankee ingenuity. We stole it.
Now, pretty quickly the mills expanded (and the local country folks split westward to where farming had a bit less to do with dragging rocks out of fields to make picturesque stone fences) and new help, anyone available, was hired. Despite efforts by mill owners to encourage diversity (and discourage organization) about halfway into the first generation enough people got English down well enough to have bitch sessions, shortly followed by attempts to organise unions and/or strikes. (I recommend going to the Bread and Roses Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts presuming it's still held. You can get the details there from a surprising variety of sources.)
Eventually, the TVA made electricity cheap enough to move the mills south where unions had a much harder time organising. It turned out not to be impossible to organise unions in southern mills, though. There's no longer a domestic textile industry.
But Jefferson was watching the adoption of pirated technology, and the results seemed, to him, good.
It's only in recent memory that the US has bothered with foreign copyrights. The first paperback edition (Ace) of The Lord of the Rings in the US paid no royalties to J.R.R. Tolkein. A point noted prominantly by the author on the cover of the second (Ballentine) edition. Although I've read a few complaints prior to that about British authors being published without recompense in the US, those same authors toured the US to much acclaim, got a boost to their income, and generally had all-expnses paid vacations. Corporate control of authors' book tours seems to have made that perk a chore.
And of course, Jefferson would have howled to see 'piracy' applied to "intellectual property". Jefferson knew (and the United States licensed) pirates.
A cwntury or so from now, when the media on which all this valuable digital content has been recorded has deteriorated beyond recovery, the only examples of our our art to survive will be pornography, because that's all that'll have been backed up. Very little of the media content covered under copyright restrictions will survive because very little of the media will survive that long, perhaps a half century at best. Steamboat Willie will go the way of Air Pirate Funnies.
which is better, to lose some middle managers and peons because some of the peons went postal or to take some PR hits? After all, it's not as though the common ruck of your employees (or their middle mangers) are stockholders, and rarely can they get at the policy makers, either to criticise or to assault. If I recall correctly, the whole "going postal" phenomenon started when the US Post Office became the US Postal Service and found a few of its no longer civil servants disgruntled by the push for more efficiency at their expense, and denied them effective outlets for intense frustration.
Linux is cheap, full price for a distro (some sort of paper howto included) is less than half that of Windows without any paper docs (and most of the time, when checking out a new distro, or upgrading an older version, it's free or nearly so). Linux's need is for developers, not customers. At this point, Linux doesn't need users. They're certainly welcome, Grandma is welcome to use Linux, but this is where Grandma learns some new tricks (actually, most of the elders I see want to learn new tricks, if nothing else, to prove they still can). It may not yet be easy to use, but it is getting easier. That might well be why Linux gets new developers, because so often people want it right, and can learn to make it right. For free. Oh, and it's stable. (Lots of people already wanted to make it right). Ironic thing, last April I managed to gain (with timely support from people from Eugene Free Net) representation for the Eugene Unix and GNU/Linux User Group (EUGLUG) at the Oregon Country Fair, a leftover hippy festival. Now, given that Linux was developed by Barefoot Hippy Communists, the most amusing part of this was defending the idea of Linux advocates handing out Linux CD-ROM's to (literally, in some cases, in April, in Oregon) barefoot hippies, some of whom proudly call themselves communist except when they're anarchist, or Republican, or Green, or Wiccan, or Idiosyncratic (my apologies to any overlooked viewpoints). Most of these (often loudly self-proclaimed) hippies are used to Microsoft and Apple (If Linux is a hippy/commie/name-your-own-subversive-conspiracy, why don't the assorted hippy or commie conspirators know of it?). It seems there's a pronounced anti-corporate bias among the Fair Folk. As soon as it became clear that Linux is not a corporation, that indeed, Linux is out of corporate control, and moreover Linux is built on the idea that what software runs your hardware should be yours, not some damned corporation's, (and we wouldn't want purloined software, now would we?) we were in. So if you find your way to the 31st Oregon Country Fair (July 7,8,9, along the Long Tom in Veneta, Oregon) you may find, among the music and crafters' booths, in the Community Village, the Doors of Expression, where you could rap with geeks and cop a free Linux (or free FreeBSD) distro. Or not. Did I mention choice? My best wishes to the Oz Install Fests.
1) Is it running GPL'd software? 2) Does it do something different(ly)? If either answer is "No", it's justifiable in my mind that Linux Today consider it 'not newsworthy'.
Open source's strength is that we don't much have to care about market and sales. HURD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD will still be there as long as their developers care to change, enhance, and build them. (Oh, those Linux folks too). Closed source's weakness is that management can kill a project because Sales/Marketing can't see a way to make money, even though devlopers think the project is a Really Neat Thing. Emacs survived despite management opposition, as did Gnutilla (although not as Gnutilla itself), and that is because once a program is freed to open source, if it has any merit, it survives nicely. You don't even need to spell it right. Open Source needs developers, that it accretes users as well is useful and nice, but it's not all that necessary to the revenue stream . For volunteers to keep hacking away, flaming each others' mad implementations, and producing an environment where the bugs are found and stomped fast, they need feedback, not necessarily revenue. Closed source's development model is dependant on marketing rather than developer mindshare, so that bugs may be ignored until the Sales/Marketing people scream bloody murder because somebody says "ILOVEYOU' and their sales reps are getting lynched for trying to sell the product that just failed to protect user data. It's not about the market, it's about mindshare. While open source is getting more market, and this is aa Good Thing, developers can tinker with it, even lacking a market, because it's fun (and for some, necessary) to have a stable, secure system.
If the corporation unfortunate enough to be defending the breaking of the GPL has any foresight, they'll hire bright, brave lawyers and settle fast. (That would appear to disallow any Microsoft lawyer involved in the anti-trust case). If they lose, the FSF will get some more funding. From the corporation. If they win, that will certainly ease the consciences of more people in any copyright infringements or End User Lisencing Agreement violations that subsequently occur to them. I cannot see any corporate mentality thinking either outcome a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever notice that women (despite Laura Croft) never get into, well no, obsessed with, video games? You gotta wonder why conformance with that stereotype is so dominant. I'm sure there are exceptions, haven't met any.
My regret is that the stragic games of my youth are dead, replaced by the flashier tactical shooting games. I guess Avalon-Hill never saw animation coming.
It's an election year, the President, 1/3 of the Senate, and the entire House of Representatives are up for election. They're not in the least worried about citizens' reactions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They don't feel there's any significant opposition, so why worry about this treaty? It's going to pass, and be as bad as predicted, and voices in the Slashdot wilderness will wail, to no effect.
If you can legally register to vote in the United States, do so now!
Vote against the parties who promoted and passed by acclaimation or voice vote the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Vote against their candidates for the Presidency, Vice Presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives.
Email each candidate, telling them why they lost your vote. Repeat until either the DMCA is repealed or the candidate repudiates the DMCA. Repeat in the next election, and the next, until the candidates nominated repudiate the DMCA.
If your state has passed UCITA, react the same way at the local level.
If no candidates are available opposing UCITA and the DMCA, valid write-ins or appropriately blank ballots serve nicely as protests. Vote only for anti-UCITA and/or anti-DMCA candidates. Vote Libertarian, Socialist, Green, or Moster Raving Looney, but vote anti-DMCA/anti-UCITA.
It's not impossible that there are more of us than we think, let alone what they think.
.
If my kid can't get at any political site, and use that information to form political opinions, it's political censorship, and definitely unconstitutional.
So, the Democratic sites can't be blocked, neither can the Greens, nor the Communist Party, USA (I presume they still exist) or even the Ku Klux Klan.
It's not that I want or expect my child to join any of those organised (or disorganised) parties, but I very much want her to see what opinions are out there, and decide for herself.
If your censorware blocks my child's access to any political site, well, people, we have a Federal case.
Ever notice the lack of cracks reported from China?
Taiwan has been hacking mainland boxes for years, and the reverse is true. Both nets are becoming more secure as a result.
Personally, I'd prefer being vandalised by script kiddies to having a serious crack from some offshore vandal who is protected by his government.
Sort of why I'd prefer cowpox to smallpox.
Using Linux takes you off the market, until something breaks, or unless you succumb to the urge for the latest and greatest.
Meanwhile, you're invisible unless your Linux is a server on the Internet, where Netcraft can find you, nobody needs to know you use Linux.
So far I've seen no foolproof method for noticing Linux desktops. We know, but cannot prove, that there are more desktops out there in the business world than anybody sells on new boxes. Home and school users are even less findable, they tend to be castoff business machines, "obsolete", not even the hardware shows up in the market.
Bad example, at least post Roe vs Wade.
Under the current interpretation of the constitution, a fetus is NOT a human being, else abortion, even the pill, would be illegal, and a miscarriage would be manslaughter.
Which is why various jurisdictions are having trouble trouble prosecuting alcoholic expectant mothers for child abuse. Cases have been successful for nursing mothers.
Beer wants to be drunk. Whiskey wants to be drunker. Neither cares about its cost.
The Whiskey rebellion was about taxation. (Shay lost).
So is it a good idea to have a bunch of cigar-smoking, gun-toting beaurocratic drunks wandering about?
What, that's not the image BATF seeks? Why the name?
Shall we consider standing on the sidewalks before Blockbuster Video with appropriate signs and, of course, DeCSS T shirts?
I am seriously contemplating such an action next Friday.
Pornographic DVD's are not encrypted under CSS.
I haven't investigated whether the MPAA won't allow CSS lisences for porn, or whether pornographers just didn't bother to try.
Maybe this will get Microsoft to port IE to Linux.
Has AOL's contract for Internet Explorer with M$ expired? Last I heard it still had a while to run, but the terms might specify that if AOL has a client for a platform, it must be Microsoft Internet Explorer based.
AOL with Internet Explorer for Linux?
I get a couple of warm fuzzies at the idea of AOL for Linux. They dissapate nicely when IE gets added.
There are two Reform Parties, each with its own convention, because a large portion of the Perotistas can't abide Buchannan and decamped to a nearby venue. It has something to do with social (pro-family, pro-life) as opposed to economic (low taxees, more "Defense" budgets) conservatives. Buchannan clearly controls the original site.
Because of the split the reporters are mostly reporting that they're overextended, they only planned on one convention.
Seeing the results of the primary (both electronic and snail-mail ballots, and a breakdown would be amusing, too) will be interesting, but irrelevant. The convention(s) will decide on the nominees. They might even figure out which convention was official by 7 November.
Well, not precisely the next..
Apparently, the new Pirates of the Internet are trading needlepoint patterns. Unlike the RIAA's overblown claims, this showed up in substantial lost profits in a much smaller market. A Time-Warner subsidiary has lost about 40%. The lawyers are loosed.
Freenet-chat posters have decided that we really need a Freenet granny can use.
Nice, polite commentary on basic bugtraq definitions. One small sideswipe at an author conclusively demonstrating he didn't read his homework assignment at all carefully.
This'll work best in cities.
Go to live shows at small venues, bars, coffee houses, small to medium theaters. Buy your CD('s) there, or don't buy at all. Yeah, I'll go to shows on their reputation, and find it was hype. Even when the headline band really and truly sucks, the opening bands may make the expedition worthwhile, surprisingly enough.
You get to support live music (and most musicians like that, apparently touring is fun on a small enough scale).
Smaller venues tend to attract unsigned musicians and you know the musicians are getting their cut when they're selling their own CD's.
A hazard might be getting into the occasional party with musicians (a risk I'll take).
If the French are involved, perhaps this'll give them the leverage to settle for something reasonable, like documenting and publishing Application Programming Interfaces.
Nah!
Never thought the RIAA and Archer Daniels Midland business practices would map so nicely atop one another.
Thomas Jefferson wrote this at a time when the US cheerfully stole technology.
Once I was a weaver in New England, heir to a labor tradition stretching back to the time when English settlers noticed lots of waterfalls, built lots of dams with water wheels, attached belts to the wheels, and looms to the belts, and found useful employment for surplus country kids. It's skilled labor, no real need for literacy, but skilled.
Oh, and the technology was, in modern terms, pirated. Totally dependant on a millwright who learned his trade well, and illegally emigrated to New England (there were laws againg millwrights emigrating, a somewhat more drastic EULA) where he built looms and spinning jennies and most parts for them, which were then copied by all and sundry.
You've heard of Yankee ingenuity. We stole it.
Now, pretty quickly the mills expanded (and the local country folks split westward to where farming had a bit less to do with dragging rocks out of fields to make picturesque stone fences) and new help, anyone available, was hired. Despite efforts by mill owners to encourage diversity (and discourage organization) about halfway into the first generation enough people got English down well enough to have bitch sessions, shortly followed by attempts to organise unions and/or strikes. (I recommend going to the Bread and Roses Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts presuming it's still held. You can get the details there from a surprising variety of sources.)
Eventually, the TVA made electricity cheap enough to move the mills south where unions had a much harder time organising. It turned out not to be impossible to organise unions in southern mills, though. There's no longer a domestic textile industry.
But Jefferson was watching the adoption of pirated technology, and the results seemed, to him, good.
It's only in recent memory that the US has bothered with foreign copyrights. The first paperback edition (Ace) of The Lord of the Rings in the US paid no royalties to J.R.R. Tolkein. A point noted prominantly by the author on the cover of the second (Ballentine) edition. Although I've read a few complaints prior to that about British authors being published without recompense in the US, those same authors toured the US to much acclaim, got a boost to their income, and generally had all-expnses paid vacations. Corporate control of authors' book tours seems to have made that perk a chore.
And of course, Jefferson would have howled to see 'piracy' applied to "intellectual property". Jefferson knew (and the United States licensed) pirates.
No worry. Porn DVD's aren't encrypted, why should your DVD-RW be encrypted? You aren't worried about any region codes, neither does porn.
A cwntury or so from now, when the media on which all this valuable digital content has been recorded has deteriorated beyond recovery, the only examples of our our art to survive will be pornography, because that's all that'll have been backed up.
Very little of the media content covered under copyright restrictions will survive because very little of the media will survive that long, perhaps a half century at best.
Steamboat Willie will go the way of Air Pirate Funnies.
which is better, to lose some middle managers and peons because some of the peons went postal or to take some PR hits?
After all, it's not as though the common ruck of your employees (or their middle mangers) are stockholders, and rarely can they get at the policy makers, either to criticise or to assault.
If I recall correctly, the whole "going postal" phenomenon started when the US Post Office became the US Postal Service and found a few of its no longer civil servants disgruntled by the push for more efficiency at their expense, and denied them effective outlets for intense frustration.
Linux is cheap, full price for a distro (some sort of paper howto included) is less than half that of Windows without any paper docs (and most of the time, when checking out a new distro, or upgrading an older version, it's free or nearly so).
Linux's need is for developers, not customers. At this point, Linux doesn't need users. They're certainly welcome, Grandma is welcome to use Linux, but this is where Grandma learns some new tricks (actually, most of the elders I see want to learn new tricks, if nothing else, to prove they still can).
It may not yet be easy to use, but it is getting easier. That might well be why Linux gets new developers, because so often people want it right, and can learn to make it right. For free.
Oh, and it's stable. (Lots of people already wanted to make it right).
Ironic thing, last April I managed to gain (with timely support from people from Eugene Free Net) representation for the Eugene Unix and GNU/Linux User Group (EUGLUG) at the Oregon Country Fair, a leftover hippy festival. Now, given that Linux was developed by Barefoot Hippy Communists, the most amusing part of this was defending the idea of Linux advocates handing out Linux CD-ROM's to (literally, in some cases, in April, in Oregon) barefoot hippies, some of whom proudly call themselves communist except when they're anarchist, or Republican, or Green, or Wiccan, or Idiosyncratic (my apologies to any overlooked viewpoints). Most of these (often loudly self-proclaimed) hippies are used to Microsoft and Apple (If Linux is a hippy/commie/name-your-own-subversive-conspiracy, why don't the assorted hippy or commie conspirators know of it?).
It seems there's a pronounced anti-corporate bias among the Fair Folk. As soon as it became clear that Linux is not a corporation, that indeed, Linux is out of corporate control, and moreover Linux is built on the idea that what software runs your hardware should be yours, not some damned corporation's, (and we wouldn't want purloined software, now would we?) we were in.
So if you find your way to the 31st Oregon Country Fair (July 7,8,9, along the Long Tom in Veneta, Oregon) you may find, among the music and crafters' booths, in the Community Village, the Doors of Expression, where you could rap with geeks and cop a free Linux (or free FreeBSD) distro. Or not.
Did I mention choice?
My best wishes to the Oz Install Fests.
1) Is it running GPL'd software?
2) Does it do something different(ly)?
If either answer is "No", it's justifiable in my mind that Linux Today consider it 'not newsworthy'.
Open source's strength is that we don't much have to care about market and sales. HURD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD will still be there as long as their developers care to change, enhance, and build them. (Oh, those Linux folks too).
Closed source's weakness is that management can kill a project because Sales/Marketing can't see a way to make money, even though devlopers think the project is a Really Neat Thing. Emacs survived despite management opposition, as did Gnutilla (although not as Gnutilla itself), and that is because once a program is freed to open source, if it has any merit, it survives nicely. You don't even need to spell it right.
Open Source needs developers, that it accretes users as well is useful and nice, but it's not all that necessary to the revenue stream .
For volunteers to keep hacking away, flaming each others' mad implementations, and producing an environment where the bugs are found and stomped fast, they need feedback, not necessarily revenue.
Closed source's development model is dependant on marketing rather than developer mindshare, so that bugs may be ignored until the Sales/Marketing people scream bloody murder because somebody says "ILOVEYOU' and their sales reps are getting lynched for trying to sell the product that just failed to protect user data.
It's not about the market, it's about mindshare. While open source is getting more market, and this is aa Good Thing, developers can tinker with it, even lacking a market, because it's fun (and for some, necessary) to have a stable, secure system.
If the corporation unfortunate enough to be defending the breaking of the GPL has any foresight, they'll hire bright, brave lawyers and settle fast. (That would appear to disallow any Microsoft lawyer involved in the anti-trust case).
If they lose, the FSF will get some more funding. From the corporation.
If they win, that will certainly ease the consciences of more people in any copyright infringements or End User Lisencing Agreement violations that subsequently occur to them.
I cannot see any corporate mentality thinking either outcome a Good Thing.