Yeah, I know things suck for now, especially for geeks. There's a party in power that won't take away your precious guns (because it doesn't fear them) but is friendly with H1-B-hiring corporations and is starting to look national-security-obsessed. (As a teen, Condoleeza Rice had pinups of the Dulles brothers, while Cheney's gonna pay off his defense-industry buddies by fomenting a pocket war somewhere).
But fear not. If you hate the Democrats, hey, they're gone. If you hate Republicans, they're damaged goods. With neither side having a mandate, your political activity might actually amount to something, about like the Shas party decides Labor-Likud deadlocks in Israel. Just don't skip the country like you'd quit a shitty dotcom. Stand and fight. On the techie front, do all you can to shoot holes in any pretensions to cyber-lockdown or corporate hegemony.
For the record, I live in Amsterdam. It's not bad, and the government is liberal on things most geeks might care about. Booze is cheap, while gasoline is expensive. Guns are definitely not allowed, though. Amsterdam, at least, has enough trouble with guns, what with a large gun-running bust last fall and the occasional Yugoslav mob payoff killing (one victim was a landlord, hooray!).
The bureaucracy is a hassle, with rules for everything. There is no unregulated space in NL. A few big drawbacks: The national security service (BVD) got their ISP wiretap law passed; cultural cleansing of squatters by the Amsterdam mayor to open up loft space for yuppies and webvertising boys; people staring at you a lot; Dutch people don't give you much chance to practice the local language.
I've lived here 2 years and I like it a lot. I plan to stay long enough to win resident alien status, but I won't give up my U.S. citizenship.
If you have serious experience in IP routing, serious web programming, or *nix, then you're hot here. The pay's not what you'd like, but it costs "only" as much as living in, say Adams-Morgan in DC or Montrose in Houston (my only basis for comparison). Tax is high (about as much as living in DC), but they don't blow the money on prisons or wars on drugs.
Nepto
Plutune
Eris (is this already an asteroid?)
Cosmo
Fungo
@
#
$
%
*
Duspec
Barstow
Qwertyuiop
Etaoinshrdlu
Potrzebie
Mxyzptlk
Bizarro-world
Solaris
Shaggy Planet
Kerberos
If you can find an 8-10K mile long cylindrical object to spin with it, you could call it/.
Jeepers, it's heading straight for us!
Thank you and good night
...because if it's being peddled to schoolkids it's obviously not strong enough for adults!
Creating hoaxes, urban legends, rumors, etc. is really an art/science. British comedian Chris Morris did a lot of this a year or so ago on his show "Brass Eye." He got a Tory MP worked up over a deadly new recreational drug called "Cake," from Prague (or Budapest?). It appeared as a giant yellow pill and was a sort of super-amphetamine. Trouble was, it also gave users huge goiters. When trying to alert hoax victims to the "danger," Morris even described it as a "made-up" drug. He became so good at this it became his schtick.
A good media virus is often structured, like a real virus, in three parts--a payload of false information, wrapped in a sheath of prejudice-friendly verisimilitude (and some truth), propelled by a sense of urgency in getting the word out.And just as a virus flourishes when the host's immune system is weak, a media virus thrives in the absence of good information. Just about every good urban legend follows these rules.
Did anyone notice that Ms. Rosen twice mentioned "demand creation" as a value-added service? So part of the $15 for that CD goes to choking MTV international with the latest from Britney Spears? Delete your Napster files now, lest we be deprived of a single image of that pneumatic jailbait (what America really wants; hence the pedophilia paranoia)!
When we get the bandwidth, I want to start seeing old Batman episodes in their original, unbutchered-by-Turner form. I want to see stuff that's been sued out of existence, such as "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story."
And how about a Gnutella-type browser for reading the pro-drug files Hatch wants to ban?
I never could get excited about buying a new TV to watch the same old programming anyway, and it looks like a lot of people agree so far. It would have been a shame had this happened to a format that really mattered. Did Sony et al really want this? Operation Footbullet once again.
Uh, I don't know about that "freedom" part. Mossadegh and his Tudeh party weren't saints (nor am I rooting for the Ayatollah), but the Shah and SAVAK (the secret police) certainly had fun getting their revenge after this sloppy coup. Not much freedom afterward. Saving lives (except their own) wasn't high on the agenda of the coup plotters.
This does raise the question of how far to go in exposing secrets. We've lately had more and more confirmation that our guardians are often incompetent, arrogant fools. Most governments do a crap job of guarding our secrets and quickly abuse the privilege. We need more exposure of official nonsense, especially the dangerous kind. The question is: who draws the line and where?
There's a great comic book from 1985, "WRAB: Pirate Television" by Matt Howarth, creator of The Post Bros and Savage Henry. From a floating base in the Bermuda Triangle, a shadowy group hijacked global TV for 10 years and substituted their own programming, designed to undo decades of media-induced passivity and stupidity. It worked, more or less.
One program was called "Dirty Laundry." Each week, WRAB broadcast blueprints unearthed from some secret military-industrial cache or another. You could either try to figure it out (and win by building a working model) or be lazy and wait for the answer the following week. Previous week's answer: RAND Corporation Anti-Gravity Device Mark IV.
We've had something like this for years, of course, though the floating base is new, but Havenco could hold forbidden data that would get The Smoking Gun struck offline in a minute. Will Havenco (or rather their customers) be as successful as their fictional counterpart?
Dirtylaundry.com is owned by Unilever, the soap products company that also owns Ben & Jerry's.
Just like Russia, it's had everything thrown at it and it's still there. They've a right to be proud.
Alpha or whatever they're calling the international space station now will look like that after 15 years of continuous residence, storage of mostly used crap, and space weather. After Skylab and Mir we now know that space station corridors clog up like fatty arteries.
(fulfills on-topic content requirement) I hope the guy realizes they'll put him to work whether something breaks or not.
The future internet will be even more a snarl than it is now, with present and future layers of protocols, tunnels, FreeNets, Walled Cities, and so on making any centralized registry useless. Every player wanting to declare a universal standard wants it to be easily policeable or profitable mainly to themselves, or both. But we don't want to organize more than we have to. A universal standard would be sorta nice, but we can't (and shouldn't) trust the motives of those who are eager for it. So people will just accrete around the standards of their choice. For addressing, you could have IPv6m (military), IPv6c (commercial), IPv6s (spook), IPv6k (krypto; sorry, "s" is already taken). traffic between the entities using the different standards may communicate freely, somewhat, or not at all. They'll have to come up with a new word for balkanization, since the internet will make Bosnia, with its skinny bit in the middle, look as Balkanized as Kansas. Or think of a rat's nest of n-dimensional Klein Bottles. Zones like the hypothetical Walled City will look from one point of view like a single blob (to its members); from another, like an archipelago, and to others it will be invisible. The internet is not just another flat piece of land (with maybe a few caves under it) that can be civilized like any other half-wild territory by sending in US Marshals, Bengal Lancers, or Spetznaz troops. It used to be that if you got tired of civilization, you lit out for the territory. Now you just tunnel back into it, using wasted or uncompressed bits of the "official" internet, or carve out your own. It will happen because we despair of physical escape from stupid bosses, nosy cops or U.S. foreign policy. The few places beyond the reach of these tend to be Libya or Iraq or if you're lucky, Cyprus. And running a south Pacific cyber-libertarian paradise is too much like work. So we might as will live in "civilization" and build our fantasies of another world into the internet, as we are doing. It will happen in a year or three. After that, things will just get weird.
Nettime-l is moderated more actively, by about 5 people on a rotating basis. Even so, it's got a few certifiable or borderline cases on it. Slashdot is much more open, so you can't really compare the two forums. (It's funny, but I find the Slashdot forum to be *less* right-libertarian than the geek community at large. I was impressed by some comments over the Lost Model of EPCOT 2 months ago.)
Speaking of moderation, it seems that to have any kind of intellectual circle you need a human bozo filter or two. The downside is the risk of creating a house paradigm, such as "Way New Economy good," "Country X, right or wrong" or "NATO bad (or clumsy)," according to the moderator's prejudices, or sometimes despite them.
Most intellectual circles are pretty narrow, though, and their best ideas rarely excite anybody outside of them. If you want to find intelligentsia, look for the people whose ideas consistently escape their home intellectual circles, or who add value to a variety of circles.
But it's up to you figure whether the intelligentsia are on somebody's payroll and whether that discounts what they have to say.
Looks like a suburb of Amsterdam: high-density housing to leave lots of room for public space. Some city planning is good, if done intelligently and if it allows some customization by the inhabitants.
To be fair to Walt, a lot of people, few of them fascists, designed big housing/community projects. The cities were industrializing quickly in Europe and the U.S. in the first half of the century, except during the world wars and the Depression. EPCOT suggests he may have formed his ideas about the future in his relative youth, in the 1930s. (This may also explain why Bill Gates was slow to catch on about the internet. I read "The Road Ahead," and it was obvious he grew up reading science fiction written no later than the '70s. Few science fiction writers predicted personal computers, much less an uncontrolled internet. Most envisioned computing resources as a sort of centralized utility. This might also explain why Bill bought the Bettman Archive (now CORBIS), which essentially comprises our visual memories of the early 20th century.)
EPCOT may owe as much to Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius as it does to Hugo Gernsbach. It doesn't seem to have incorporated any ideas formed later than the 1930s or so.
Utopia or dystopia, overtly fascist or not, the results would be tragic in any event. People change. Utopias don't. And that's assuming the technologies that went into creating it work, which they do slightly more than half the time. When things don't work, it's even worse, since everyone has to pretend they do. Happily, real societies are sloppy, because we are sloppy. That strongly suggests the future will be sloppy as well, which is all any honest person can expect. Only death is perfect. That's my philosophy and I'm sticking to it. It's not quite the opposite of tragic, but it's a comfort knowing I (probably) won't end up trapped in someone else's utopia or--worse yet--my own. Anyway, we don't need a utopia to deliver the goods. We have the internet, penicillin, and a few good Goth bands. People on Mars? We'll get there, though life there may be by turns hilarious and depressing, a la Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." But that's the future for you. The above has been partly inspired by "World of the Future," made by Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius, and "We're All Bozos On This Bus," by the Firesign Theater.
Slashdot Mirror
But fear not. If you hate the Democrats, hey, they're gone. If you hate Republicans, they're damaged goods. With neither side having a mandate, your political activity might actually amount to something, about like the Shas party decides Labor-Likud deadlocks in Israel. Just don't skip the country like you'd quit a shitty dotcom. Stand and fight. On the techie front, do all you can to shoot holes in any pretensions to cyber-lockdown or corporate hegemony.
For the record, I live in Amsterdam. It's not bad, and the government is liberal on things most geeks might care about. Booze is cheap, while gasoline is expensive. Guns are definitely not allowed, though. Amsterdam, at least, has enough trouble with guns, what with a large gun-running bust last fall and the occasional Yugoslav mob payoff killing (one victim was a landlord, hooray!).
The bureaucracy is a hassle, with rules for everything. There is no unregulated space in NL. A few big drawbacks: The national security service (BVD) got their ISP wiretap law passed; cultural cleansing of squatters by the Amsterdam mayor to open up loft space for yuppies and webvertising boys; people staring at you a lot; Dutch people don't give you much chance to practice the local language. I've lived here 2 years and I like it a lot. I plan to stay long enough to win resident alien status, but I won't give up my U.S. citizenship. If you have serious experience in IP routing, serious web programming, or *nix, then you're hot here. The pay's not what you'd like, but it costs "only" as much as living in, say Adams-Morgan in DC or Montrose in Houston (my only basis for comparison). Tax is high (about as much as living in DC), but they don't blow the money on prisons or wars on drugs.
Nepto Plutune Eris (is this already an asteroid?) Cosmo Fungo @ # $ % * Duspec Barstow Qwertyuiop Etaoinshrdlu Potrzebie Mxyzptlk Bizarro-world Solaris Shaggy Planet Kerberos If you can find an 8-10K mile long cylindrical object to spin with it, you could call it /.
Jeepers, it's heading straight for us!
Thank you and good night
Creating hoaxes, urban legends, rumors, etc. is really an art/science. British comedian Chris Morris did a lot of this a year or so ago on his show "Brass Eye." He got a Tory MP worked up over a deadly new recreational drug called "Cake," from Prague (or Budapest?). It appeared as a giant yellow pill and was a sort of super-amphetamine. Trouble was, it also gave users huge goiters. When trying to alert hoax victims to the "danger," Morris even described it as a "made-up" drug. He became so good at this it became his schtick.
A good media virus is often structured, like a real virus, in three parts--a payload of false information, wrapped in a sheath of prejudice-friendly verisimilitude (and some truth), propelled by a sense of urgency in getting the word out.And just as a virus flourishes when the host's immune system is weak, a media virus thrives in the absence of good information. Just about every good urban legend follows these rules.
When we get the bandwidth, I want to start seeing old Batman episodes in their original, unbutchered-by-Turner form. I want to see stuff that's been sued out of existence, such as "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story."
And how about a Gnutella-type browser for reading the pro-drug files Hatch wants to ban?
I never could get excited about buying a new TV to watch the same old programming anyway, and it looks like a lot of people agree so far. It would have been a shame had this happened to a format that really mattered. Did Sony et al really want this? Operation Footbullet once again.
This does raise the question of how far to go in exposing secrets. We've lately had more and more confirmation that our guardians are often incompetent, arrogant fools. Most governments do a crap job of guarding our secrets and quickly abuse the privilege. We need more exposure of official nonsense, especially the dangerous kind. The question is: who draws the line and where?
One program was called "Dirty Laundry." Each week, WRAB broadcast blueprints unearthed from some secret military-industrial cache or another. You could either try to figure it out (and win by building a working model) or be lazy and wait for the answer the following week. Previous week's answer: RAND Corporation Anti-Gravity Device Mark IV.
We've had something like this for years, of course, though the floating base is new, but Havenco could hold forbidden data that would get The Smoking Gun struck offline in a minute. Will Havenco (or rather their customers) be as successful as their fictional counterpart?
Dirtylaundry.com is owned by Unilever, the soap products company that also owns Ben & Jerry's.
Alpha or whatever they're calling the international space station now will look like that after 15 years of continuous residence, storage of mostly used crap, and space weather. After Skylab and Mir we now know that space station corridors clog up like fatty arteries.
(fulfills on-topic content requirement)
I hope the guy realizes they'll put him to work whether something breaks or not.
The future internet will be even more a snarl than it is now, with present and future layers of protocols, tunnels, FreeNets, Walled Cities, and so on making any centralized registry useless. Every player wanting to declare a universal standard wants it to be easily policeable or profitable mainly to themselves, or both. But we don't want to organize more than we have to. A universal standard would be sorta nice, but we can't (and shouldn't) trust the motives of those who are eager for it. So people will just accrete around the standards of their choice. For addressing, you could have IPv6m (military), IPv6c (commercial), IPv6s (spook), IPv6k (krypto; sorry, "s" is already taken). traffic between the entities using the different standards may communicate freely, somewhat, or not at all. They'll have to come up with a new word for balkanization, since the internet will make Bosnia, with its skinny bit in the middle, look as Balkanized as Kansas. Or think of a rat's nest of n-dimensional Klein Bottles. Zones like the hypothetical Walled City will look from one point of view like a single blob (to its members); from another, like an archipelago, and to others it will be invisible. The internet is not just another flat piece of land (with maybe a few caves under it) that can be civilized like any other half-wild territory by sending in US Marshals, Bengal Lancers, or Spetznaz troops. It used to be that if you got tired of civilization, you lit out for the territory. Now you just tunnel back into it, using wasted or uncompressed bits of the "official" internet, or carve out your own. It will happen because we despair of physical escape from stupid bosses, nosy cops or U.S. foreign policy. The few places beyond the reach of these tend to be Libya or Iraq or if you're lucky, Cyprus. And running a south Pacific cyber-libertarian paradise is too much like work. So we might as will live in "civilization" and build our fantasies of another world into the internet, as we are doing. It will happen in a year or three. After that, things will just get weird.
Speaking of moderation, it seems that to have any kind of intellectual circle you need a human bozo filter or two. The downside is the risk of creating a house paradigm, such as "Way New Economy good," "Country X, right or wrong" or "NATO bad (or clumsy)," according to the moderator's prejudices, or sometimes despite them.
Most intellectual circles are pretty narrow, though, and their best ideas rarely excite anybody outside of them. If you want to find intelligentsia, look for the people whose ideas consistently escape their home intellectual circles, or who add value to a variety of circles.
But it's up to you figure whether the intelligentsia are on somebody's payroll and whether that discounts what they have to say.
~carlg
To be fair to Walt, a lot of people, few of them fascists, designed big housing/community projects. The cities were industrializing quickly in Europe and the U.S. in the first half of the century, except during the world wars and the Depression. EPCOT suggests he may have formed his ideas about the future in his relative youth, in the 1930s. (This may also explain why Bill Gates was slow to catch on about the internet. I read "The Road Ahead," and it was obvious he grew up reading science fiction written no later than the '70s. Few science fiction writers predicted personal computers, much less an uncontrolled internet. Most envisioned computing resources as a sort of centralized utility. This might also explain why Bill bought the Bettman Archive (now CORBIS), which essentially comprises our visual memories of the early 20th century.)
EPCOT may owe as much to Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius as it does to Hugo Gernsbach. It doesn't seem to have incorporated any ideas formed later than the 1930s or so.
Utopia or dystopia, overtly fascist or not, the results would be tragic in any event. People change. Utopias don't. And that's assuming the technologies that went into creating it work, which they do slightly more than half the time. When things don't work, it's even worse, since everyone has to pretend they do. Happily, real societies are sloppy, because we are sloppy. That strongly suggests the future will be sloppy as well, which is all any honest person can expect. Only death is perfect. That's my philosophy and I'm sticking to it. It's not quite the opposite of tragic, but it's a comfort knowing I (probably) won't end up trapped in someone else's utopia or--worse yet--my own. Anyway, we don't need a utopia to deliver the goods. We have the internet, penicillin, and a few good Goth bands. People on Mars? We'll get there, though life there may be by turns hilarious and depressing, a la Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." But that's the future for you. The above has been partly inspired by "World of the Future," made by Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius, and "We're All Bozos On This Bus," by the Firesign Theater.