Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience == Total fuckwad.
There are several counter examples of this law, but it is generally applicable to normal young men.
Just remember that someone will always have anonymity. People who run telco have phone anonymity. People who broadcast have broadcast anonymity. People who run newspapers have print anonymity. Restrictions on publication in any of these forms of communications simply gives the total fuckwad a larger audience. As anyone can verify by watching "classic" broadcast TV, the fuckwads don't even have to have talent when they have power.
The greater fuckwad theory is:
Total Fuckwad + Larger Audience = Bigger Fuckwad
Freedom minimizes annoyance because it limits the relative power of abusive people.
As an amateur psychologist and observer of human nature I'd guess anyone who thinks "lulz" is cool isn't a very sophisticated thinker; this bunch are probably just alienated kids.
Alienated? Is that the nice word for asshole? The world is full of them. Most grow out of it.
You don't have to go very far to find paid assholes. M$, telcos, the RIAA are all engaged in some very rough and ugly astroturfing and cracking.
They people raising the alarm over ACs are those who want an exclusive power to harass. Broadcasters, telcoms and software companies are used to having these powers and backing them up with the entire legal system. They want to exert and extend that centralized control over the internet and anonymity is incompatible with that. Eliminating our privacy and freedom to hamper assholes won't limit those who control the switches. They will continue to harass those who annoy them. When the rest of us have lost our freedom and privacy, the assholes will act with impunity.
Oh, right, DRM isn't bad, because it has large, multi-national corporations giving large campaign contributions-- err, I mean, supporting it.
Once you understand the target audience, the meaning is entirely innocuous. He's talking to people who work for big dumb companies, the kind that use NTFS and commercial encryption that we know won't work:
But the real give away is "perpetrator". He's advising corporate people who know what they are doing is illegal. When someone blows the whistle or makes them a scapegoat, and the wrong doing is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, every step taken to cover ass is evidence of intent and knowledge. Without using as many words, the author is discouraging the use of his product for this purpose.
The morals of all of the above are a further condemnation of non free software, if not capitalism itself. A self interested capitalist will report and avoid immoral people. There's no honor among theives. The free software vendor, on the other hand, polite to paying customers and would never think of doing something like this.
He said, "If Bush wins, I'm going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France," and then he did. In hindsight, this guy had great forsight. He missed the Department of Homeland Security, TSA, Freedom Fries and other red neck/Nazi stupidity.
I'd be a little annoyed if the brain surgeons in our intelligence agencies -- who I, along with the rest of the taxpayers, bankroll -- weren't at least aware of Wikipedia.... they're not doing anything I wouldn't expect them to be doing.
I do NOT want my government spending my money on disinformation. It's bad enough when they publish it openly, but lying about who you are while you vandalize a public resource is much worse. Freely elected governments are supposed to represent the opinions of their people, not brainwash them.
I fully expect that the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, etc., probably have propaganda agencies astroturfing Wikipedia and other web sites to their own advantage. This is what countries do.
No, that is what tyrants do. They also murder those who oppose them. They do both of these things because they are fucking everyone. They have placed their self interest above yours and do what it takes to keep that position.
this sort of activity has tripled in the last six months. I read that on wikipedia somewhere.
I think you are remembering a CNN, CW, or M$NBC story. You know, the people who continue to tell you free software, free encyclopedias, free textbooks, and freedom itself are unpossible.
should those who contribute more (I don't know what the threshold would be) be required to reveal more personal identification details in order to ensure some level of transparency?
Freedom yields truth. There is great incentive for contributors to identify themselves. Part of the reward for editing is recognition. Truth, however, requires anonymity and multiplicity. Freedom gives you as much truth as is possible and restrictions, licenses and all that reduce it.
Just as there need to be multiple, independent news organizations, there needs to be multiple independent organizations providing what Wiki does. The reason ABC, BBC and others broadcasters are suspect is because there are so few of them. It's easy to corrupt a small number of organizations. Imagine every University in the world, every high school even, running it's own Wikipedia. That kind of network would be impossible to corrupt.
How do you do that? That's where freedom comes in again. Wikipedia is free, so everyone can copy what they want. University departments and news organizations can independently decide who they trust and who to copy. In a system like that, bad eggs can be tossed out and MI5, North Korean Communists and other bully boys will have more than they can do.
Um, Dell selling more Linux PCs is not the same as Dell saying Vista has failed.
Dell selling gnu/linux shows that M$ has lost it's ability to coerce vendors and that's a very good indicator of Vista's failure, if Acer's announcement was not enough for you. M$'s coercive ability used to come from profits, if Dell could profit from Vista, they would. Without vendor support, the M$ monopoly is over. They can advertise until they have spent every penny of their billions, but that won't fix Vista's bugs or make it sell when gnu/linux works better. Vendors are going to sell what works and makes them money. Good night and good riddance, M$.
M$ Fanboy dedazo ignorantly imagines another seven years of XP:
You mean when "M$" stops supporting it in 2014, or are you referring to something else?
Why anyone would want to run XP as a primary OS today is hard to fathom, but M$ is not going to help you do it for the next seven years. Have a look at talk like this:
Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions at Microsoft,... It's possible, Cherry added, that Microsoft might find itself forced to recognise more reality in the future. "At some point, they might have to consider [further] limiting the availability of XP," to push people to Vista.
XP does not make enough money to support the M$ monopoly so it's going to get the axe.
Other governments are not going to allow their pet companies to be squashed by the current US pet company. Eliminating M$ will not usher in freedom on it's own, but diversity of software makes free software much easier.
I've not heard of any small or even medium sized OEM looking to market to the everyday PC consumer "switching to Ubuntu as their OS of choice".
Is Acer big enough for you? Vista has let them, and they claim everyone else, down. If there was money to be made from M$ in the future, no one would dare say or do these things, but there's not. Non free has failed and $200 gnu/linux computers are going to take over the market.
What I'd like to know is how many of the boxes sold with preinstalled linux, actually get used as linux boxes.
I'd say 100%. Dell already has cheaper freeDOS and no OS computers but they did not sell. People asking Dell for gnu/linux are asking for gnu/linux friendly hardware. They can get the same from white box makers who charge less.
If anything Dell underestimates gnu/linux installs. There are many people at business and state locations that must purchase Dell due to licensing requirements. They have site licenses for Windoze and set procedures for buying PCs. None of those are ever reported as gnu/linux but many are converted anyway. Dell has said that they won't sell gnu/linux to businesses, let's hope they change their mind and start counting.
Besides that, the upgrade train has moved on but fallen over a cliff. Vista is a dissaster.
I'm waiting for a Microsoft rep to go to Dell's offices and say "You know, we really can't give you the volume discounts that we've been offering you if you continue to sell those Linux laptops".
and Dell would be happy to report such a thing to the DOJ. Why? Because Vista is buggy and not selling. The vendor revolt is on and there will be nothing but more of this. The upgrade train is out of steam, and vendors need to sell something before smaller vendors eat their lunch with $200 gnu/linux PCs that are about to flood the market.
Just think of it as 1993, but this time the good guys win. The non free software monopoly was crazy from the start, now it's over.
Actually, I think the $200 Asus EEE is more the way to go than cheap desktops. Laptops are already outselling desktops, so a mobile offering makes more sense to focus on.
All sorts of big beige boxes can be replaced with a compact, sub $200 computer. Don't count the market for desktops out yet - as M$ breaks XP there will be a wave of replacement buying and upgrades. All of those XP boxes already have nice LCDs, replacing XP with a $200 gnu/linux box would be cheaper than another XP or Vista install by far.
Real energy savings come from the free software Slashdot uses and advocates every day. Real energy waste comes from using software that's intentionally wasteful from a company that hasmade power management difficult for everyone.
Certainly condolences to the families, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make these deaths any more or less special than any other.
That sounds heartless and cruel, but it would be the best thing for the company and everyone else who works there. This is an industrial accident. It's terrible and deserves an investigation like any other. People are not supposed to die at work and all safeguards should be in place. Anything else is taking chances with other people's lives for money, the moral equivalent of murder. At the same time, society should not blow it out of proportion. Immoral people take advantage of that kind of emotional response to pass laws to their advantage. It already takes billions of dollars to break into the space business, an accident like this can be used to make even that impossible. This accident strikes most of us because these people are the lucky few who are living a science fiction fantasy. Keeping a cool head is the best way to make sure there's more of this work to go around.
Awww, who am I kidding? Scaled Composites is bought. The parent company is going to fire them all anyway.
If you just XOR the data and tell people it's RSA-4096 99.44% of them are going to just accept that it's true (after googling to find out what RSA means) and send you the $300.
No, they are going to look for a "free decoder program," ha ha ha. Oh, the joys of non free software.
Jokes aside, this trojan is aimed at corporate users. If it's easy to fix, big dumb companies will tell their sheep to bring forth their problems and fix them. If the creeps had been bright enough to use real encryption, there would be no solution and embarrassed users will try to fix the problem themselves. Of course, paying $300 to an extortionist will get you nothing more than another request for money unless they want to sell you back each file. For more evidence of this, see Vista pricing.
I guess when your primary business model is going down in flames, you need to co-opt someone else's.
It would be great if M$ would GPL their work and become a normal software company instead of the freaky, paranoid monster it is. Fat chance. This site is pure PR to sell yet another SDK for non free crap.
M$ needs to do something, because Vista is a marketplace flop and the vendor revolt is on. Without vendor support, what do they have? Nothing.
In fact, [free software is] almost guaranteed that it does infringe software patents (both those existing now, and those that will be granted in the future).
Free Software is less likely to violate and be abused by patents. If you patent well known methods, you are a patent troll. Those mostly attack established companies like M$, who have money and are much less careful about what they do. This is why M$ continues to be stung with multiple billion dollar judgments. The patent system needs reform and software patents need to be abolished, but M$'s attempts to FUD free software with them are absurd.
There's no reason to hold Microsoft-written code to a different standard to other code. If it's free it's free.
M$'s past and ongoing behavior is a very good reason to stay far away from their code. If M$ wants to liberate their software, they can copy left it and surrender their tremendous patent portfolio to the public good. They have no such intentions and their "shared source" initiatives have been more like sharecropping than freedom. We're talking about a company that recently threatened one of their own MVPs for improving their "free" compiler.
I like that link because it shows a clear pattern of behavior and the author is credible. It was written by a former MicroSoft fan who read now destroyed court records. Those records proved that M$ planned not only a technical sabotage of DRDOS, they also planned a PR attack on it. This is behavior they continue today.
I also like pointing to the case of Steve Barkto, when showing how old M$'s astro turfing efforts are.
If they are not paying you to be so annoying, you need to find a more productive hobby. This one is getting you nowhere.
Me neither, but we are not average users. The average user has been on the upgrade treadmill long enough to know they are working hard to stand still, but they don't see an escape yet. Many of them wish they never saw a computer and are ready to give up.
Vista is failing in the marketplace because M$ continues to play their stupid monopoly tricks. Vista is the most restrictive and buggy version of Windoze yet. They are currently making life hard for anti-virus makers, Google, Firefox, iPod, Palm and OpenOffice, even Adobe. As usual, the M$ replacements are technically inferior. Between that and all of the MAFIAA friendly digital restrictions Vista is still a disaster that people are avoiding.
To compensate M$ is doing what it usually does, claiming everything good for themselves, sabotaging and lying about everyone else. They have been playing the blame game for a long time now, sabotaging the competition and them blaming them for the problems. In this case, they are desperate to claim all of the goodness of free software for themselves and cause confusion about real free software. OOXML, is that "Open Office XML"? No, it's M$'s confusing term for it's incomplete and patent encumbered new Office format. "Shared Source", is that something new from Debian? No, it's the usual "what's ours is ours and what's yours is ours" way of stealing your work. Free software is their main competitor, so they are going to try to say they are all the good things free software is and that free software has all the problems they do because "complex systems" just act that way.
This kind of thing would be laughable if it were not for the billions of dollars they have to spend pushing it all out. People want a new Office format, a new computer and a new GUI like they want a hole in their head. M$'s shoddy stuff has damaged the entire industry's reputation. It's finally come home to them in poor sales, but the same poor sales are going to hurt everyone else too.
Slashdot Mirror
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience == Total fuckwad.
There are several counter examples of this law, but it is generally applicable to normal young men.
Just remember that someone will always have anonymity. People who run telco have phone anonymity. People who broadcast have broadcast anonymity. People who run newspapers have print anonymity. Restrictions on publication in any of these forms of communications simply gives the total fuckwad a larger audience. As anyone can verify by watching "classic" broadcast TV, the fuckwads don't even have to have talent when they have power.
The greater fuckwad theory is:
Total Fuckwad + Larger Audience = Bigger Fuckwad
Freedom minimizes annoyance because it limits the relative power of abusive people.
As an amateur psychologist and observer of human nature I'd guess anyone who thinks "lulz" is cool isn't a very sophisticated thinker; this bunch are probably just alienated kids.
Alienated? Is that the nice word for asshole? The world is full of them. Most grow out of it.
You don't have to go very far to find paid assholes. M$, telcos, the RIAA are all engaged in some very rough and ugly astroturfing and cracking.
They people raising the alarm over ACs are those who want an exclusive power to harass. Broadcasters, telcoms and software companies are used to having these powers and backing them up with the entire legal system. They want to exert and extend that centralized control over the internet and anonymity is incompatible with that. Eliminating our privacy and freedom to hamper assholes won't limit those who control the switches. They will continue to harass those who annoy them. When the rest of us have lost our freedom and privacy, the assholes will act with impunity.
[Poster: frustrated because not enough people understand computers] Idiot: Sounds like somebody couldn't get a date for the prom!
She got invitations but they were all from idiots.
Oh, right, DRM isn't bad, because it has large, multi-national corporations giving large campaign contributions-- err, I mean, supporting it.
Once you understand the target audience, the meaning is entirely innocuous. He's talking to people who work for big dumb companies, the kind that use NTFS and commercial encryption that we know won't work:
But the real give away is "perpetrator". He's advising corporate people who know what they are doing is illegal. When someone blows the whistle or makes them a scapegoat, and the wrong doing is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, every step taken to cover ass is evidence of intent and knowledge. Without using as many words, the author is discouraging the use of his product for this purpose.
The morals of all of the above are a further condemnation of non free software, if not capitalism itself. A self interested capitalist will report and avoid immoral people. There's no honor among theives. The free software vendor, on the other hand, polite to paying customers and would never think of doing something like this.
He said, "If Bush wins, I'm going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France," and then he did. In hindsight, this guy had great forsight. He missed the Department of Homeland Security, TSA, Freedom Fries and other red neck/Nazi stupidity.
I'd be a little annoyed if the brain surgeons in our intelligence agencies -- who I, along with the rest of the taxpayers, bankroll -- weren't at least aware of Wikipedia. ... they're not doing anything I wouldn't expect them to be doing.
I do NOT want my government spending my money on disinformation. It's bad enough when they publish it openly, but lying about who you are while you vandalize a public resource is much worse. Freely elected governments are supposed to represent the opinions of their people, not brainwash them.
I fully expect that the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, etc., probably have propaganda agencies astroturfing Wikipedia and other web sites to their own advantage. This is what countries do.
No, that is what tyrants do. They also murder those who oppose them. They do both of these things because they are fucking everyone. They have placed their self interest above yours and do what it takes to keep that position.
this sort of activity has tripled in the last six months. I read that on wikipedia somewhere.
I think you are remembering a CNN, CW, or M$NBC story. You know, the people who continue to tell you free software, free encyclopedias, free textbooks, and freedom itself are unpossible.
A Jesus that's lame? Didn't he cure himself?
should those who contribute more (I don't know what the threshold would be) be required to reveal more personal identification details in order to ensure some level of transparency?
Freedom yields truth. There is great incentive for contributors to identify themselves. Part of the reward for editing is recognition. Truth, however, requires anonymity and multiplicity. Freedom gives you as much truth as is possible and restrictions, licenses and all that reduce it.
Just as there need to be multiple, independent news organizations, there needs to be multiple independent organizations providing what Wiki does. The reason ABC, BBC and others broadcasters are suspect is because there are so few of them. It's easy to corrupt a small number of organizations. Imagine every University in the world, every high school even, running it's own Wikipedia. That kind of network would be impossible to corrupt.
How do you do that? That's where freedom comes in again. Wikipedia is free, so everyone can copy what they want. University departments and news organizations can independently decide who they trust and who to copy. In a system like that, bad eggs can be tossed out and MI5, North Korean Communists and other bully boys will have more than they can do.
Um, Dell selling more Linux PCs is not the same as Dell saying Vista has failed.
Dell selling gnu/linux shows that M$ has lost it's ability to coerce vendors and that's a very good indicator of Vista's failure, if Acer's announcement was not enough for you. M$'s coercive ability used to come from profits, if Dell could profit from Vista, they would. Without vendor support, the M$ monopoly is over. They can advertise until they have spent every penny of their billions, but that won't fix Vista's bugs or make it sell when gnu/linux works better. Vendors are going to sell what works and makes them money. Good night and good riddance, M$.
M$ Fanboy dedazo ignorantly imagines another seven years of XP:
You mean when "M$" stops supporting it in 2014, or are you referring to something else?
Why anyone would want to run XP as a primary OS today is hard to fathom, but M$ is not going to help you do it for the next seven years. Have a look at talk like this:
XP does not make enough money to support the M$ monopoly so it's going to get the axe.
Other governments are not going to allow their pet companies to be squashed by the current US pet company. Eliminating M$ will not usher in freedom on it's own, but diversity of software makes free software much easier.
I've not heard of any small or even medium sized OEM looking to market to the everyday PC consumer "switching to Ubuntu as their OS of choice".
Is Acer big enough for you? Vista has let them, and they claim everyone else, down. If there was money to be made from M$ in the future, no one would dare say or do these things, but there's not. Non free has failed and $200 gnu/linux computers are going to take over the market.
Here's what it looks like:
What I'd like to know is how many of the boxes sold with preinstalled linux, actually get used as linux boxes.
I'd say 100%. Dell already has cheaper freeDOS and no OS computers but they did not sell. People asking Dell for gnu/linux are asking for gnu/linux friendly hardware. They can get the same from white box makers who charge less.
If anything Dell underestimates gnu/linux installs. There are many people at business and state locations that must purchase Dell due to licensing requirements. They have site licenses for Windoze and set procedures for buying PCs. None of those are ever reported as gnu/linux but many are converted anyway. Dell has said that they won't sell gnu/linux to businesses, let's hope they change their mind and start counting.
Besides that, the upgrade train has moved on but fallen over a cliff. Vista is a dissaster.
I'm waiting for a Microsoft rep to go to Dell's offices and say "You know, we really can't give you the volume discounts that we've been offering you if you continue to sell those Linux laptops".
and Dell would be happy to report such a thing to the DOJ. Why? Because Vista is buggy and not selling. The vendor revolt is on and there will be nothing but more of this. The upgrade train is out of steam, and vendors need to sell something before smaller vendors eat their lunch with $200 gnu/linux PCs that are about to flood the market.
Just think of it as 1993, but this time the good guys win. The non free software monopoly was crazy from the start, now it's over.
Actually, I think the $200 Asus EEE is more the way to go than cheap desktops. Laptops are already outselling desktops, so a mobile offering makes more sense to focus on.
All sorts of big beige boxes can be replaced with a compact, sub $200 computer. Don't count the market for desktops out yet - as M$ breaks XP there will be a wave of replacement buying and upgrades. All of those XP boxes already have nice LCDs, replacing XP with a $200 gnu/linux box would be cheaper than another XP or Vista install by far.
I predicted Dell's announcement three days ago. Vista has failed in the market place and the vendor revolt is on, as evidenced by bold statements from the fourth largest PC maker. With vendors now backing gnu/linux, M$'s monopoly is over. Good Riddance, this will be good for everyone.
The tipping point is here.
Real energy savings come from the free software Slashdot uses and advocates every day. Real energy waste comes from using software that's intentionally wasteful from a company that hasmade power management difficult for everyone.
Certainly condolences to the families, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make these deaths any more or less special than any other.
That sounds heartless and cruel, but it would be the best thing for the company and everyone else who works there. This is an industrial accident. It's terrible and deserves an investigation like any other. People are not supposed to die at work and all safeguards should be in place. Anything else is taking chances with other people's lives for money, the moral equivalent of murder. At the same time, society should not blow it out of proportion. Immoral people take advantage of that kind of emotional response to pass laws to their advantage. It already takes billions of dollars to break into the space business, an accident like this can be used to make even that impossible. This accident strikes most of us because these people are the lucky few who are living a science fiction fantasy. Keeping a cool head is the best way to make sure there's more of this work to go around.
Awww, who am I kidding? Scaled Composites is bought. The parent company is going to fire them all anyway.
If you just XOR the data and tell people it's RSA-4096 99.44% of them are going to just accept that it's true (after googling to find out what RSA means) and send you the $300.
No, they are going to look for a "free decoder program," ha ha ha. Oh, the joys of non free software.
Jokes aside, this trojan is aimed at corporate users. If it's easy to fix, big dumb companies will tell their sheep to bring forth their problems and fix them. If the creeps had been bright enough to use real encryption, there would be no solution and embarrassed users will try to fix the problem themselves. Of course, paying $300 to an extortionist will get you nothing more than another request for money unless they want to sell you back each file. For more evidence of this, see Vista pricing.
I guess when your primary business model is going down in flames, you need to co-opt someone else's.
It would be great if M$ would GPL their work and become a normal software company instead of the freaky, paranoid monster it is. Fat chance. This site is pure PR to sell yet another SDK for non free crap.
M$ needs to do something, because Vista is a marketplace flop and the vendor revolt is on. Without vendor support, what do they have? Nothing.
In fact, [free software is] almost guaranteed that it does infringe software patents (both those existing now, and those that will be granted in the future).
Free Software is less likely to violate and be abused by patents. If you patent well known methods, you are a patent troll. Those mostly attack established companies like M$, who have money and are much less careful about what they do. This is why M$ continues to be stung with multiple billion dollar judgments. The patent system needs reform and software patents need to be abolished, but M$'s attempts to FUD free software with them are absurd.
There's no reason to hold Microsoft-written code to a different standard to other code. If it's free it's free.
M$'s past and ongoing behavior is a very good reason to stay far away from their code. If M$ wants to liberate their software, they can copy left it and surrender their tremendous patent portfolio to the public good. They have no such intentions and their "shared source" initiatives have been more like sharecropping than freedom. We're talking about a company that recently threatened one of their own MVPs for improving their "free" compiler.
Obnoxious M$ Fanboy dedazo asks an amusing question:
Why do you keep using the same [link about DRDOS]?
I like that link because it shows a clear pattern of behavior and the author is credible. It was written by a former MicroSoft fan who read now destroyed court records. Those records proved that M$ planned not only a technical sabotage of DRDOS, they also planned a PR attack on it. This is behavior they continue today.
I also like pointing to the case of Steve Barkto, when showing how old M$'s astro turfing efforts are.
If they are not paying you to be so annoying, you need to find a more productive hobby. This one is getting you nowhere.
I really wouldn't mind a new computer.
Me neither, but we are not average users. The average user has been on the upgrade treadmill long enough to know they are working hard to stand still, but they don't see an escape yet. Many of them wish they never saw a computer and are ready to give up.
Vista is failing in the marketplace because M$ continues to play their stupid monopoly tricks. Vista is the most restrictive and buggy version of Windoze yet. They are currently making life hard for anti-virus makers, Google, Firefox, iPod, Palm and OpenOffice, even Adobe. As usual, the M$ replacements are technically inferior. Between that and all of the MAFIAA friendly digital restrictions Vista is still a disaster that people are avoiding.
To compensate M$ is doing what it usually does, claiming everything good for themselves, sabotaging and lying about everyone else. They have been playing the blame game for a long time now, sabotaging the competition and them blaming them for the problems. In this case, they are desperate to claim all of the goodness of free software for themselves and cause confusion about real free software. OOXML, is that "Open Office XML"? No, it's M$'s confusing term for it's incomplete and patent encumbered new Office format. "Shared Source", is that something new from Debian? No, it's the usual "what's ours is ours and what's yours is ours" way of stealing your work. Free software is their main competitor, so they are going to try to say they are all the good things free software is and that free software has all the problems they do because "complex systems" just act that way.
This kind of thing would be laughable if it were not for the billions of dollars they have to spend pushing it all out. People want a new Office format, a new computer and a new GUI like they want a hole in their head. M$'s shoddy stuff has damaged the entire industry's reputation. It's finally come home to them in poor sales, but the same poor sales are going to hurt everyone else too.