Except for the jerk part, your assertion is accurate. Woz was and is brilliant.... Jobs OTOH was a narcissistic panty-boy with sociopathic tendencies (lying, conning, getting others to do his work then claiming it) who's "contribution" lives on in its pure, distilled form in Apple's lawsuit against Samsung.
1)Twitter 2) Facebook 3) Smart Phones and 4) [reader's choice]... it's as if there's a war not FOR your attention but ON your attention .
Here's a little true story that highlights the relative value of "keeping up" with spending the same time in serious dedicated study and thought.
When I was in high school, I had a buddy whose dad was a full math prof. at an Ivy League. His house didn't have a TV
If you asked this guy:"why no TV?", he'd say that most of that stuff was of no real interest and if anything really big happened, someone would tell him about it.
We all thought of him as eccentric and maybe he was.
Then 9-11 happened and he left his job at the uni to go head up a new department at the NSA which was based around his specialty.
Some people "keep up" with events and other people...well, they have a hand in making those events.
What a loaded question. "Does it reflect badly and cause of loss of reputation", what... that someone calls a batshit crazy religion batshit crazy? Didn't hurt Mark Twain's reputation much.
Hold them personally responsible for damages from anyone addicted to this shit.Pierce the corporate veil and go after individuals directly. If they declare bankruptcy, make the judgments non-bankruptable, you know, like student loans. Which is the bigger crime- trying to get an education of selling heroin and lying about how dangerous it was?
That period in world history when people in corporations could commit any crime whatsoever and get away with it as long as it was big enough... fast coming to a close in three... two.... one...
Google+ can fucking blow me. Apparently, unless you took your grade school American history in the US, you don't *get* what part anonymous speech, starting with Paine and Franklin, played in American history and what it means to Americans culturally and historically to be able to say what they want when they want the way they want using whatever literary or social devices they think will best serve their ends.
Google+ is a walled garden of another kind- a walled garden of people willing to submit their identities and their opportunity for free as in psychologically-socially-and-politically speech at any bunch of personalities who form themselves into the role of "service provider". These people are obsessed with the notion that the missing step in the Underwear Gnome chain is, "and then we make everyone give us their real identity !!".
You know what? My life means something to me, and and it's not going to be reduced, limited, attenuated or otherwise obstructed by the my failure to see today what implications someone's arbitrary demands can have on my tomorrow.
Essentially this turns the internet into a small town. People leave small towns and go to big cities for a lot of good reasons and one of those is to escape the gossipy nature of those places where your reputation gets fixed early on and stays forever. Sorry if you're stuck in the public spotlight forever and there's no escape for you, Google guys, but perhaps counting your billions will serve as some form of consolation.
Banning anonymous speech is culturally short-sighted, historically ignorant and politically incendiary. No one but professional loud mouths, professional opinionators, and tenured profs is going to offer a frank opinion on jack lest it be used against them in some unforseen way later in life.
But it's deeper than that. There's a reason Franklin and Paine published anonymously. Some things need to be said despite what people want to hear. Someone has to play Cassandra. It's hard enough finding the courage to tear yourself away from comforting illusions, adding onto that a tax most ordinary people literally have no way to bear- loss of a job, loss of friends, loss of opportunity- makes truth tellers, anonymous and otherwise, that much more unlikely to emerge. And this in a time when truth tellers are so desperately needed.
So people are buying other than PCs.. and??? and??? Do you own a PC? Does everyone you know own a PC? DO you plan to go on owning a PC? Does your PC give you the premium user experience? Does your PC "do stuff" that your phone and table can't? Do you do serious work on your PC?
Certain business interests would like to see the end of personal computers because those interests have bet big on computing as a service models where you pay every time you use a computer... it's a metering business scheme where once PCs are no longer financially viable, they start ratcheting up the rates and rewriting the TOS to formally exclude any kind of data privacy at all... this would be of course long after any kind of data privacy had been defacto wiped out.
So periodically, we have to hear more stories about how the future of computing is in the cloud - only partially true - and how "the network is the computer".. and this kind of crap.
Some business interests who just GET OFF on thinking they are controlling the direction of society and try to plan and shape the choices society has and makes have it in for your home PC. People who get going on this kind of jihad are fundamentally imbalanced and more than a little fascistic.
You don't sit around and hatch plans that involve you maintaining and having unfettered access to everyone's information except the very rich who can afford PCs and therefore private data . You don't daydream about what kind of power over other people's business efforts you'll have once and how you'll be able to shape outcomes and pick winners and losers once everyone has to submit the details of those business aspirations to you and your buds. But that's because you're not psychotically fixated on acquiring a much power for yourself as you possibly can, which is to say your chromosomes are normal.
Fuck the author of this article and the fucking horse the guy who fucking paid him to write it fucking rode in on.
This is the same good reason Sun wouldn't let Microsoft go off and branch (break) Java. It shatters the ecosystem with various things working on various branches and the ordinary end user not being able to distinguish what's what and finally just leaving to go somewhere else. There is no evilness going on here, there's just the fact of what does happen . Facts are facts, not evil plots. Like it or not, there has to be some control somewhere for engineering to work. Google's pretty easy to get along with but that doesn't mean that there aren't players who will try to take advantage of that fact for whatever reason and force Google to act to protect the overall ecosystem.
Reality WILL assert itself just in the way it wants, because that's what reality IS. Romney and Paul and and the CATO Institute and all the other instruments of the Koch brothers denial machine can tell all the lies they want;, it's still going to happen, and when it does, when that series of circumstances which was taken from very very very unlikely to very highly probable finally actually materializes, it will be, amongst other things the end of the " conservative movement".
If you think Saddam lived to see a loss of political and personal power, that's nothing compared to what's coming down the pike at American conservatives libertarians and Republicans and the subset of evolution-denying, science-denying Christians.
Think about this. Just the fact that we've been delayed in acting in light of a known reality by this specific easily identified portion of our electorate means something very significant which no one is really talking about. It means democracy has already failed.
There may be food riots next year or the year after, there may be forced rationing of food with price and wage controls; the weather may proceed monotonically from last year onwards moving only to equally bad or worse. The climate may get into a positive feedback loop where the oceans finally begin to give up the heat they've been sequestering as they begin to die taking the base of the food chain with it. No one really know how the powder keg is going to explode, but the fact that we CAN TELL that we are now inarguably in this precarious position, where our possible extinction is on the table at all, means that democracy has demonstrably failed.
Because deniers held sway, because we as a nation and a society were delayed in acting as a result of a failure in the political process, then by definition, democracy has failed to protect its citizens from the most depraved and criminal elements within it.
It has failed to keep it citizens safe and to sustain itself and the world into the future. That's what is true now.
What Obama and the CIA et. al,. need to do now, the most civilized and least disruptive thing to do, is throw enough elections so that Democrats control both houses in November. They then need to neutralize the terrorists' funding sources and remove those voices in our media and body politic who are leading the denial charge. Then a full scale economic Marshall Plan holding nothing in reserve needs to be undertaken in coordination with the rest of the world's nations, most of whom who have been ready to go for decades now.
We need to fund alternative energy sources and research until we've completed this moon shot, or died trying .
The voices of doubt and dissent need to be systematically crippled and silenced using any means that achieves that ends.
Nothing is unlawful now for the duly elected and lawfully empowered guardians of our national security because the United States is facing a mortal terrorist threat that makes 9-11 look like a Sunday picnic with the cast of the Andy Griffiths Show.
The President needs to suspend democracy and the usual laws that define it the same way Lincoln did, and act against the terrorists within this nation's borders unilaterally, decisively and without compunction.
He does not need to announce that he's doing this however.
It's not LIKE WW3; it's not analogous to WW3 it IS WWIII and this war is a total absolute war, with one final and binary outcome- either we stop them and deal with AGW through every means at our disposal, or they destroy human civilization for all time.
You have a choice. You can either signal to your President and your legislators that this is the worst thing ever to threaten humanity and you expect them to act accordingly, or you effectively let David and Charles Koch walk through your front door, point a pistol at the temple of your sleeping children and pull the trigger.
That's the choice you have. That's reality, whether you choose to face it or not.
Put it this way. The Koch brothers know what the truth is about global warming but they nevertheless lead a lie campaign with the specific goal to obscure that truth so no action is taken.
Ask yourself- who does that? Who literally sets about to destroy a large part human civilization so that their wealth and power will not be diminished and so their enemies will not be proved right? Who sets about to literally deconstrcut human civilization , killing hundreds of millions or billions of people in the process, so they can rebuild it to their liking?
What kind of person does that?
A person who needs to be stopped by the US government through any means necessary for the sake of humanity itself and all future generations That's who.
It's called Oppositional Defiant Personality Disorder and you can read about it here. For people not inclned to follow links, see if you think this matches the profile of your average Tea Partier, - Breitbarter, Ann Coulter denier:
From wiki:
Signs and symptoms
Throwing repeated temper tantrums
Excessively arguing with adults or other authority figures
Actively refusing to comply with requests and rules
Deliberately trying to annoy or upset others, or being easily annoyed by others
Blaming others for your mistakes
Having frequent outbursts of anger and resentment
Being spiteful and seeking revenge
Swearing or using obscene language
Saying mean and hateful things when upset
In the case of climate change deniers, you really have to break out people at the grassroots from the "thought leaders".
The Koch brothers are almost certainly sociopaths, that is, they are perfectly aware that the case for AGW is rock solid- their own studies have shown as much:
but they don't want to take the economic hit to their fortunes that cap and trade, for instance (which may now be too weak to do much good, thanks to their success in denying climate change ) would impose.
Legally, it just comes down to mass murder / crimes against humanity. They know the truth. They deny the truth. They do so to retain power, money and the status that comes with those things and also to thwart and frustrate the actions of people they loathe- to act out their spite. That's a sociopath.
At the grass roots level, you have a lot of spite and an unwillingness to admit you're wrong and your enemies were right about this or any topic. But why are the Ayn Randers and free market ideologues deniers in the first place? Answer: they are distinguished by having oppositional defiant personality disorder. In a nutshell, people with ODP loathe, deny and will defy -even unto their own personal destruction - the validity of any kind legitimate societal or earned authority. That's why they think they have the standing to argue with PhDs who have spent decades learning the arcana highly technical subject matter. That's why they think that their homegrown theories about climate and paleo-climatology and "common sense " rebuttals of scientists are somehow legitimate and deserving of being given equal footing to the those of research scientists. To do otherwise is to submit to and admit the legitimacy of, an authority they are incapable of earning will never personally possess.
Not only do they think their arguments have some scientific validity, but they also consider that they themselves are the best judges of which argument is correct. So like all mental illness, it's a sealed system with elaborate defenses against all intrusion by the forces of rationality.
The fact that a large portion of America can be accurately described this way is troubling, At least 20-30% of the population is "hard right" in this way on this topic and effectively incapable of processing reality. Since they're not going to change their mind, and they sense that they're outnumbered, they look for force multipliers in legislation and electioneering to keep themselves in power. Thus the new run at Jim Crow laws. Thus citizens united where money is used to substitute for democratic majority opinion. Thus also the serially lies that not only the Koch Brothers spew forth but also Paul Ryan indulges in. Lying is indeed a force multiplier against majority opinion; since the majority of people actually aren't crazy, they will coalesce on shared solution as soon as they coalesce on a shared perception of the problem. The goal then has to be to stop them from coalescing on a shared perception of the problem ,
You know what my computer is to me, aside from the app I am using> It' s my mouse, my kb and my screens. That's it. How much of that stuff just doesn't work on Linux? A lot. Any decent mouse or trackball, one that I can use to get real work done, one beyond left / right/ middle button doesn't support Linux. For me, start there. I hit that snafu, and I just gave up.
Yeah buddy everyone shares your weirdo spent-too-long-in-the-lab philosophical conclusion that consciousness is nothing but behavior and therefore its presence can be positively and certainly deduced from outward behavior and what's more such things are worthy of human rights if not now, then in the near future, and therefore your fucking blabber moth "someone pay attention to me" utterance isn't what it so clearly appears to be - the activity of vestigal neural pathways first formed when you parents praised you and showered you with attention for saying something "really smart" when you were like, five.
Good job. Here's the net effect of your intellectual masturbation / attempt to recreate your personal special childhood warmth that came with being the center of everyone's attention:
people who read your worthless, mundane, unoriginal ejaculations but who nevertheless haven't pondered such things previously will be reinforced in their prejudice that academic researchers are whacky and out of touch with reality and what they think can safely and routinely be ignored.
Fucking good job, fucknut. Why don't you do this. Why don't you get her fuck out of your fucking lab and go visit the fucking Congo where humans are still struggling to achieve fucking human rights while they live lives of near total fucking slavery supplying your lab with the fucking cassiterite it fucking needs.
most readers know the shit-pit of IP maximalists / true believers who have shepherded in the current system of "business patents" and ",method patents" and "software patents" better by their initials CAFC.
It's important to call things by their common names.
For those not familiar with the CAFC, here's a brief backgrounder:
The short-take is the CAFC is stuffed to the gills with Reagan, GW, and W Ayn Rand freaks who think anyone who ever cut a fart and cleared a room has done something "innovative and useful" and deserves a patent.
The longer story is the CAFC was created under Reagan with nation-wide jurisdiction, (which makes it more influential than any other national circuit court ) special subject matter (patents) and only "optional" oversight by SCOTUS which means it's usually the last stop for decisions on patent matters irrespective of how fucking crazy and ignorant those decisions ware or how disastrous follow on consequences. IP attonreys love he CAFC because its been so reliable in fulfilling its (unspoken) mission statement- ram as much IP up the world's ass as you possibly can because everything is some form of private property, there is no such thing as a commons or shouldn't be, and the more private property there is in the hands of the smallest group of people possible, the more the world looks like what Jesus and Ayn Rand (choose one) meant it to be.
That's why they're so active in overturning huge numbers of carefully considered decisions of the lower courts, and just making up what the fuck ever law they want from their positions on the bench... that Reagan made-
and they shed crocodile tears when their insane interpretations and overturning of lower court decisions blows everything the fuck up and turns whole industries into innovation free, IP attorney goldmining zones
They're sort of to innovation what Greenspan, Rubin and Summers were to the economy.. Maoist-level acolytes and zealots for a psycho version of How The World Works with the power to force everyone else's life to be part of the Grand Experiment.
There must be corruption of the rankest sort involved here. You're telling me these judges aren't invited to parties of friends, which are indirectly paid for by lobbyists of the corporations and law firms who are the ultimate beneficiaries of this courts radical decisions, at which parties they have the fantastic good luck not just to overhear highly reliable stock tips but also become the focus of strikingly good looking women who are unnaturally attracted to them and proceed to suck them off to completion in the 15th unused bedroom of the party house on like, regular basis?
Is that what you're telling me? Is it??? Is it??? Because I don't believe you.
Which is exactly why I never donate used clothing or shoes to Goodwill. So what if they wash them? Prove to me that no DNA survives the washing process. DNA survives a lot of stuff- giving rise to certain techniques in paleo-anthropology. In fact , that wash probably only hurts your chances at a defense, the same way having your password hacked on your wireless hurts you more in your illegal download defense than if you had left your WIFI open to anyone.
Prosecutor: the defendant claims that her DNA was found at the crime scene as a result of donating clothes to your Goodwill store. Do you wash all the clothes before you sell them, Mr. Proprietor?
Mr. Proprietor: Yes sir, every item is thoroughly washed before it's put up for sale.
Prosecutor: No further questions your honor.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'are there a million black holes waiting to hoover up all sentient life from the universe or are there 100 million black holes waiting to hoover up all sentient life from the universe? ' Well to tell you the truth, in all the chaos I myself can't remember how many black holes I made. So let me ask you, punk. Do you feel lucky ?
In the stupid , value destroying, lawyer nanny state world that IS software patents, this is exactly right.
See, software IS a machine - the specific machine that the software turns your general purpose CPU into for however long the program runs . IN fact, this is EXACTLY what IP apologists claim when they say there is no difference between software and hardware patents and in fact, there is nothing clearly distinguishable AS a software patent (their STUPID claim, not mine)
Which is why we can't pass legislation against it! HAW HAW HAW HAW !!!
So if the iPhone runs on a different chip than the previous art, they are not the same machine, so the previous art cannot be applied !!! HAW HAW HAW HAW!!!
Of course, that would also imply that if the Samsung runs on a different chip from the iPhone, then none of Apple's patents can be upheld against Samsung either.... hey.. wait a darn minute here...
Oh, I get it. The sense and logic of software patents is not to be found in the internal coherence of the ideas or the laws that permit them or the effect it has on innovation or the economy, it's to be found in how much coke it puts up the nose of IP attorneys and their clients !!!
Shit, why didn't someone just tell me that going in?
1) I would not have done what Assange did for, on account of the deleterious effects on national security. Releasing shit on bankers and politicians is fair game- endangering sources and methods we need for serious reasons is really, really not O.K. He is not Ellsberg in my view; he's not getting a hold of proof the government lied about matters of national security. He's just data dumping everything and anything. Too bad if no one wants to help you sort it out before you dump. That's no excuse. In that case, you have some work ahead of you and if you can't do that work, then you've bit off more than you can chew and whose fault is that? It's not enough to have good intentions- you have to be competent in the follow through, especially if someone's life is at stake.
2) The rape case against him is a joke. Look into it from any reputable source and you'll see that it's a manufactured device to lose him public sympathy (he's a sex offender!!!) and specifically and obviously an attempt to split his would-be united sympathizers- leftists, including of course feminists
3) The whole thing is obviously and transparently the US trying to make sure that he doesn't go unpunished no matter what and to set an example of him to others. There is no other actual motivating factor for this guy's prosecution/ persecution.
4 The fact that the US media have been obedient sheep in the face of this, reporting what the US wants them to report in just the way they want it reported is also disgusting in the extreme.. they COULD tell it like it is - the whole thing is fascinating and telling and important. They COULD something other than lie about it. but there's a reason they won't and here it is:
The whole issue of whether a reporter has the right , that is can do so without going to jail , to reveal classified information to the public and in the public interest has never been fully adjudicated in the US. No one actually knows what the legal limits on reportage, reporters and newspapers are in this highly sensitive arena and they'd rather not find out.. If the obvious case - Assange releasing classified documents and claiming it's in the public good and the US government was lying to its people- if that case were tried, what might come down from the courts in the way of a ruling might be something very ugly as seen from the perspective of the free press. They don't want to go there until they absolutely have to and they sure as shit don't want to go there with THIS case with THIS guy at THIS time. It's a loser all the way around.
So they mouth the words of whatever script the US government is typing up and just don't GO there.
That's why the US press is being so negligent in this case. Better he should be arrested and tried for rape or tried in a military setting out of the sight of the press once he falls into the hands of the US.
5) The US has a totally legitimate point that this guy recklessly endangered national security. Without secrets, without operational secrets and without an ability to protect assets, the US's ability to protect its interests and people takes a major major blow. This can't be allowed to come to pass.
6) Assange is an idiot for doing what he did the way he did it. Don't emulate him- he's not a hero, he's a guy who wanted to be a hero and wasn't up to the task, didn't have the discipline, the operational capacity, the judgement for it. Maybe there's something nefarious regarding the US we all need to know about. Lots of hardworking, perfectly sincere people in the US government ALSO would want to know about anything of this nature. Dumping terabytes of classified data and having some nuggets of worthwhile,but predictable, wrong-doing by some players fall out as a consequence is NOT uncovering coordinated, self-conscious, systemic and ongoing law-breaking at the highest levels of government ala the Pentagon Papers.
Nevertheless, now that we're here, what happens in this case and to this idiot matters a lot
So WHAT if there are holes filled with people who are unprofitable for the monopolies to service? That's the Free Market at work. In 50 or 80 years, the same Free Market will produce a Solution. That's how pure Free Markets work, and if you don't like it, then you're a socialist.
How do you expect to create a permanent underclass if some people don't have better opportunities than others from birth? Don't you know how we run things around here?
The same was true in the 60s with that damn Civil Rights Bill that every good libertarian opposed:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/20/rand-paul-tells-maddow-th_n_582872.html
Those slaves had only been free for less than 100 years. Another two, three hundred, and the Free Market would have decided they were worth serving lunch to at lunch counters after all.
What we DON'T need is Big Government coming in like they did with their whole socialist rural electrification project in '35
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#United_States
and deciding who the market should serve and what the market can charge.
Romney / Ryan 2012 !! End Socialism in America !!!
Look, it's not interesting, much less scientific to group all these things together and then treat them as a unit. They don't represent anything other than a set created by the author's imagination.
In fact we did almost destroy ourselves by ignoring then denying that CFCs were causing a hole in the ozone layer. If denialists had carried the day, enough UV radiation would be coming through the ozone to deconstruct the DNA of almost all life. The fact that we fought that fight against deniers and won is the only thing that made a difference - the alternatives to CFCs were always there ready for the "innovators" to put to use "saving" us.
You cannot throw a real and present danger - global warming and GHG emissions for which we have no sure, ready solution except changing our behaviour through the application of laws - in with likes of DDT and other things which were harmful, yes, bad ideas, yes but not truly apocalyptic in nature the way global warming is. And if you nevertheless DO throw them in together, you cannot draw conclusions about them en masse because in fact they are completely causally unrelated to each other. That's it.
What this idiot is saying is in effect "I have the same feeling about global warming as these other things gave me, and therefore they forma natural, causally linked group with similar outlooks and similar solutions. So who the fuck cares how it makes him feel and how is it relevant to the particular mechanics of the specific problem we now face?
This is folk wisdom. If folk wisdom had a solution for global warming, we would have heard about it by now.
Look you have no privacy on FB whatsoever including not just remarks like this guy made ( "I am going to do X soon" can't be taken as a quip, hyperbole or anything else.. you just said you were going to do X. ) but also anything and everything else you do or say. FB has the right to share those things with its commercial partners which includes future prospective employers who, in an ongoing and regular fashion , aggregate data on individuals just for the purpose of making hire / no hire decisions. They don't need you to turn your password over to them, and they don't even need you identify your FB account. That's all in the user agreement.
Early on, FB employees FAMOUSLY made bets on whether girl X was going to dump boy Y based on messages girl X thought were private. In fact, they have had and still have have and will always have 100% access to every single thing you write for all time, and it's all scanned for anything they consider criminal or otherwise interesting, howsoever they choose to define interesting. So interesting includes things like "binge drinker" "smoker" "promiscuous" "manipulative" and especially especially the stuff they can deduce about you given the habits of your circle of friends which they call 'aggregate data" where the "aggregate" is exactly two or three people....that's right.. every time your friends do something outrageous, algorithms which compute "aggregate data" change YOUR profile.
Where do you think their multi-billion dollar monetization comes from, from the ability to conclude that you're a likely buyer of the next boy-band keychain?
Look, don't use FB. Don't use walled gardens generally because a walled garden viewed from the inside is really just a prison complete with a warden who ends up telling you what you can and cannot do with your life. .
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the jerk part, your assertion is accurate. Woz was and is brilliant.... Jobs OTOH was a narcissistic panty-boy with sociopathic tendencies (lying, conning, getting others to do his work then claiming it) who's "contribution" lives on in its pure, distilled form in Apple's lawsuit against Samsung.
Fuck Apple.
Proof positive my manager is slacking off and posting on slashdot.. hey, Karl, get back to work, asshole.
1)Twitter 2) Facebook 3) Smart Phones and 4) [reader's choice]... it's as if there's a war not FOR your attention but ON your attention .
Here's a little true story that highlights the relative value of "keeping up" with spending the same time in serious dedicated study and thought.
When I was in high school, I had a buddy whose dad was a full math prof. at an Ivy League. His house didn't have a TV
If you asked this guy :"why no TV?", he'd say that most of that stuff was of no real interest and if anything really big happened, someone would tell him about it.
We all thought of him as eccentric and maybe he was.
Then 9-11 happened and he left his job at the uni to go head up a new department at the NSA which was based around his specialty.
Some people "keep up" with events and other people ...well, they have a hand in making those events.
What a loaded question. "Does it reflect badly and cause of loss of reputation", what... that someone calls a batshit crazy religion batshit crazy? Didn't hurt Mark Twain's reputation much.
http://www.salamandersociety.com/marktwain/
So I guess the answer is no.
Hold them personally responsible for damages from anyone addicted to this shit.Pierce the corporate veil and go after individuals directly. If they declare bankruptcy, make the judgments non-bankruptable, you know, like student loans. Which is the bigger crime- trying to get an education of selling heroin and lying about how dangerous it was?
That period in world history when people in corporations could commit any crime whatsoever and get away with it as long as it was big enough ... fast coming to a close in three ... two.... one ...
Google+ can fucking blow me. Apparently, unless you took your grade school American history in the US, you don't *get* what part anonymous speech, starting with Paine and Franklin, played in American history and what it means to Americans culturally and historically to be able to say what they want when they want the way they want using whatever literary or social devices they think will best serve their ends.
Google+ is a walled garden of another kind- a walled garden of people willing to submit their identities and their opportunity for free as in psychologically-socially-and-politically speech at any bunch of personalities who form themselves into the role of "service provider". These people are obsessed with the notion that the missing step in the Underwear Gnome chain is, "and then we make everyone give us their real identity !!".
You know what? My life means something to me, and and it's not going to be reduced, limited, attenuated or otherwise obstructed by the my failure to see today what implications someone's arbitrary demands can have on my tomorrow.
Essentially this turns the internet into a small town. People leave small towns and go to big cities for a lot of good reasons and one of those is to escape the gossipy nature of those places where your reputation gets fixed early on and stays forever. Sorry if you're stuck in the public spotlight forever and there's no escape for you, Google guys, but perhaps counting your billions will serve as some form of consolation.
Banning anonymous speech is culturally short-sighted, historically ignorant and politically incendiary. No one but professional loud mouths, professional opinionators, and tenured profs is going to offer a frank opinion on jack lest it be used against them in some unforseen way later in life.
But it's deeper than that. There's a reason Franklin and Paine published anonymously. Some things need to be said despite what people want to hear. Someone has to play Cassandra. It's hard enough finding the courage to tear yourself away from comforting illusions, adding onto that a tax most ordinary people literally have no way to bear- loss of a job, loss of friends, loss of opportunity- makes truth tellers, anonymous and otherwise, that much more unlikely to emerge. And this in a time when truth tellers are so desperately needed.
It's really just Common Sense http://www.ushistory.org/paine/commonsense/.
Too bad Google doesn't have much of that left.
So people are buying other than PCs.. and??? and??? Do you own a PC? Does everyone you know own a PC? DO you plan to go on owning a PC? Does your PC give you the premium user experience? Does your PC "do stuff" that your phone and table can't? Do you do serious work on your PC?
Certain business interests would like to see the end of personal computers because those interests have bet big on computing as a service models where you pay every time you use a computer... it's a metering business scheme where once PCs are no longer financially viable, they start ratcheting up the rates and rewriting the TOS to formally exclude any kind of data privacy at all... this would be of course long after any kind of data privacy had been defacto wiped out.
So periodically, we have to hear more stories about how the future of computing is in the cloud - only partially true - and how "the network is the computer" .. and this kind of crap.
Some business interests who just GET OFF on thinking they are controlling the direction of society and try to plan and shape the choices society has and makes have it in for your home PC. People who get going on this kind of jihad are fundamentally imbalanced and more than a little fascistic.
You don't sit around and hatch plans that involve you maintaining and having unfettered access to everyone's information except the very rich who can afford PCs and therefore private data . You don't daydream about what kind of power over other people's business efforts you'll have once and how you'll be able to shape outcomes and pick winners and losers once everyone has to submit the details of those business aspirations to you and your buds. But that's because you're not psychotically fixated on acquiring a much power for yourself as you possibly can, which is to say your chromosomes are normal.
Fuck the author of this article and the fucking horse the guy who fucking paid him to write it fucking rode in on.
This is the same good reason Sun wouldn't let Microsoft go off and branch (break) Java. It shatters the ecosystem with various things working on various branches and the ordinary end user not being able to distinguish what's what and finally just leaving to go somewhere else. There is no evilness going on here, there's just the fact of what does happen . Facts are facts, not evil plots. Like it or not, there has to be some control somewhere for engineering to work. Google's pretty easy to get along with but that doesn't mean that there aren't players who will try to take advantage of that fact for whatever reason and force Google to act to protect the overall ecosystem.
People think my sig is just hyperbole. Wrong.
Reality WILL assert itself just in the way it wants, because that's what reality IS. Romney and Paul and and the CATO Institute and all the other instruments of the Koch brothers denial machine can tell all the lies they want;, it's still going to happen, and when it does, when that series of circumstances which was taken from very very very unlikely to very highly probable finally actually materializes, it will be, amongst other things the end of the " conservative movement".
If you think Saddam lived to see a loss of political and personal power, that's nothing compared to what's coming down the pike at American conservatives libertarians and Republicans and the subset of evolution-denying, science-denying Christians.
Think about this. Just the fact that we've been delayed in acting in light of a known reality by this specific easily identified portion of our electorate means something very significant which no one is really talking about. It means democracy has already failed.
There may be food riots next year or the year after, there may be forced rationing of food with price and wage controls; the weather may proceed monotonically from last year onwards moving only to equally bad or worse. The climate may get into a positive feedback loop where the oceans finally begin to give up the heat they've been sequestering as they begin to die taking the base of the food chain with it. No one really know how the powder keg is going to explode, but the fact that we CAN TELL that we are now inarguably in this precarious position, where our possible extinction is on the table at all, means that democracy has demonstrably failed.
Because deniers held sway, because we as a nation and a society were delayed in acting as a result of a failure in the political process, then by definition, democracy has failed to protect its citizens from the most depraved and criminal elements within it.
It has failed to keep it citizens safe and to sustain itself and the world into the future. That's what is true now.
What Obama and the CIA et. al,. need to do now, the most civilized and least disruptive thing to do, is throw enough elections so that Democrats control both houses in November. They then need to neutralize the terrorists' funding sources and remove those voices in our media and body politic who are leading the denial charge. Then a full scale economic Marshall Plan holding nothing in reserve needs to be undertaken in coordination with the rest of the world's nations, most of whom who have been ready to go for decades now.
We need to fund alternative energy sources and research until we've completed this moon shot, or died trying .
The voices of doubt and dissent need to be systematically crippled and silenced using any means that achieves that ends.
Nothing is unlawful now for the duly elected and lawfully empowered guardians of our national security because the United States is facing a mortal terrorist threat that makes 9-11 look like a Sunday picnic with the cast of the Andy Griffiths Show.
The President needs to suspend democracy and the usual laws that define it the same way Lincoln did, and act against the terrorists within this nation's borders unilaterally, decisively and without compunction.
He does not need to announce that he's doing this however.
It's not LIKE WW3; it's not analogous to WW3 it IS WWIII and this war is a total absolute war, with one final and binary outcome- either we stop them and deal with AGW through every means at our disposal, or they destroy human civilization for all time.
You have a choice. You can either signal to your President and your legislators that this is the worst thing ever to threaten humanity and you expect them to act accordingly, or you effectively let David and Charles Koch walk through your front door, point a pistol at the temple of your sleeping children and pull the trigger.
That's the choice you have. That's reality, whether you choose to face it or not.
who no longer have clients and are now looking for other lines of work
Put it this way. The Koch brothers know what the truth is about global warming but they nevertheless lead a lie campaign with the specific goal to obscure that truth so no action is taken.
Ask yourself- who does that? Who literally sets about to destroy a large part human civilization so that their wealth and power will not be diminished and so their enemies will not be proved right? Who sets about to literally deconstrcut human civilization , killing hundreds of millions or billions of people in the process, so they can rebuild it to their liking?
What kind of person does that?
A person who needs to be stopped by the US government through any means necessary for the sake of humanity itself and all future generations That's who.
It's called Oppositional Defiant Personality Disorder and you can read about it here. For people not inclned to follow links, see if you think this matches the profile of your average Tea Partier, - Breitbarter, Ann Coulter denier:
From wiki:
Signs and symptoms
Throwing repeated temper tantrums
Excessively arguing with adults or other authority figures
Actively refusing to comply with requests and rules
Deliberately trying to annoy or upset others, or being easily annoyed by others
Blaming others for your mistakes
Having frequent outbursts of anger and resentment
Being spiteful and seeking revenge
Swearing or using obscene language
Saying mean and hateful things when upset
In the case of climate change deniers, you really have to break out people at the grassroots from the "thought leaders".
The Koch brothers are almost certainly sociopaths, that is, they are perfectly aware that the case for AGW is rock solid- their own studies have shown as much:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/29/127235/koch-bros-study-finds-global-warming-is-real-and-man-made
but they don't want to take the economic hit to their fortunes that cap and trade, for instance (which may now be too weak to do much good, thanks to their success in denying climate change ) would impose.
Legally, it just comes down to mass murder / crimes against humanity. They know the truth. They deny the truth. They do so to retain power, money and the status that comes with those things and also to thwart and frustrate the actions of people they loathe- to act out their spite. That's a sociopath.
At the grass roots level, you have a lot of spite and an unwillingness to admit you're wrong and your enemies were right about this or any topic. But why are the Ayn Randers and free market ideologues deniers in the first place? Answer: they are distinguished by having oppositional defiant personality disorder. In a nutshell, people with ODP loathe, deny and will defy -even unto their own personal destruction - the validity of any kind legitimate societal or earned authority. That's why they think they have the standing to argue with PhDs who have spent decades learning the arcana highly technical subject matter. That's why they think that their homegrown theories about climate and paleo-climatology and "common sense " rebuttals of scientists are somehow legitimate and deserving of being given equal footing to the those of research scientists. To do otherwise is to submit to and admit the legitimacy of, an authority they are incapable of earning will never personally possess.
Not only do they think their arguments have some scientific validity, but they also consider that they themselves are the best judges of which argument is correct. So like all mental illness, it's a sealed system with elaborate defenses against all intrusion by the forces of rationality.
The fact that a large portion of America can be accurately described this way is troubling, At least 20-30% of the population is "hard right" in this way on this topic and effectively incapable of processing reality. Since they're not going to change their mind, and they sense that they're outnumbered, they look for force multipliers in legislation and electioneering to keep themselves in power. Thus the new run at Jim Crow laws. Thus citizens united where money is used to substitute for democratic majority opinion. Thus also the serially lies that not only the Koch Brothers spew forth but also Paul Ryan indulges in. Lying is indeed a force multiplier against majority opinion; since the majority of people actually aren't crazy, they will coalesce on shared solution as soon as they coalesce on a shared perception of the problem. The goal then has to be to stop them from coalescing on a shared perception of the problem ,
You know what my computer is to me, aside from the app I am using> It' s my mouse, my kb and my screens. That's it. How much of that stuff just doesn't work on Linux? A lot. Any decent mouse or trackball, one that I can use to get real work done, one beyond left / right/ middle button doesn't support Linux. For me, start there. I hit that snafu, and I just gave up.
Good job. Here's the net effect of your intellectual masturbation / attempt to recreate your personal special childhood warmth that came with being the center of everyone's attention:
people who read your worthless, mundane, unoriginal ejaculations but who nevertheless haven't pondered such things previously will be reinforced in their prejudice that academic researchers are whacky and out of touch with reality and what they think can safely and routinely be ignored.
Fucking good job, fucknut. Why don't you do this. Why don't you get her fuck out of your fucking lab and go visit the fucking Congo where humans are still struggling to achieve fucking human rights while they live lives of near total fucking slavery supplying your lab with the fucking cassiterite it fucking needs.
It's important to call things by their common names.
For those not familiar with the CAFC, here's a brief backgrounder:
The short-take is the CAFC is stuffed to the gills with Reagan, GW, and W Ayn Rand freaks who think anyone who ever cut a fart and cleared a room has done something "innovative and useful" and deserves a patent.
The longer story is the CAFC was created under Reagan with nation-wide jurisdiction, (which makes it more influential than any other national circuit court ) special subject matter (patents) and only "optional" oversight by SCOTUS which means it's usually the last stop for decisions on patent matters irrespective of how fucking crazy and ignorant those decisions ware or how disastrous follow on consequences. IP attonreys love he CAFC because its been so reliable in fulfilling its (unspoken) mission statement- ram as much IP up the world's ass as you possibly can because everything is some form of private property, there is no such thing as a commons or shouldn't be, and the more private property there is in the hands of the smallest group of people possible, the more the world looks like what Jesus and Ayn Rand (choose one) meant it to be.
That's why they're so active in overturning huge numbers of carefully considered decisions of the lower courts, and just making up what the fuck ever law they want from their positions on the bench... that Reagan made-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Molecular_Pathology_v._Myriad_Genetics http://inventivestep.net/2012/08/16/federal-circuit-holds-isolated-genes-to-be-patentable-subject-matter-again/
They're an equal opportunity infringement -finder , who considerately gives everyone a chance to play the role of IP infringer:
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=cafc
and they shed crocodile tears when their insane interpretations and overturning of lower court decisions blows everything the fuck up and turns whole industries into innovation free, IP attorney goldmining zones
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080728/0236131808.shtml
They're sort of to innovation what Greenspan, Rubin and Summers were to the economy.. Maoist-level acolytes and zealots for a psycho version of How The World Works with the power to force everyone else's life to be part of the Grand Experiment.
There must be corruption of the rankest sort involved here. You're telling me these judges aren't invited to parties of friends, which are indirectly paid for by lobbyists of the corporations and law firms who are the ultimate beneficiaries of this courts radical decisions, at which parties they have the fantastic good luck not just to overhear highly reliable stock tips but also become the focus of strikingly good looking women who are unnaturally attracted to them and proceed to suck them off to completion in the 15th unused bedroom of the party house on like, regular basis?
Is that what you're telling me? Is it??? Is it??? Because I don't believe you.
No. I tried that. I tried everything. It doesn't recognize anything but right and left buttons.
Which is exactly why I never donate used clothing or shoes to Goodwill. So what if they wash them? Prove to me that no DNA survives the washing process. DNA survives a lot of stuff- giving rise to certain techniques in paleo-anthropology. In fact , that wash probably only hurts your chances at a defense, the same way having your password hacked on your wireless hurts you more in your illegal download defense than if you had left your WIFI open to anyone.
Prosecutor: the defendant claims that her DNA was found at the crime scene as a result of donating clothes to your Goodwill store. Do you wash all the clothes before you sell them, Mr. Proprietor?
Mr. Proprietor: Yes sir, every item is thoroughly washed before it's put up for sale. Prosecutor: No further questions your honor.
tick tick tick ..
Jury GILLLLLL TEEEE!!!!! on all charges!!!!!!
She was a denisovan at 10 and a 10 at 2...
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'are there a million black holes waiting to hoover up all sentient life from the universe or are there 100 million black holes waiting to hoover up all sentient life from the universe? ' Well to tell you the truth, in all the chaos I myself can't remember how many black holes I made. So let me ask you, punk. Do you feel lucky ?
In the stupid , value destroying, lawyer nanny state world that IS software patents, this is exactly right.
See, software IS a machine - the specific machine that the software turns your general purpose CPU into for however long the program runs . IN fact, this is EXACTLY what IP apologists claim when they say there is no difference between software and hardware patents and in fact, there is nothing clearly distinguishable AS a software patent (their STUPID claim, not mine)
Which is why we can't pass legislation against it! HAW HAW HAW HAW !!!
So if the iPhone runs on a different chip than the previous art, they are not the same machine, so the previous art cannot be applied !!! HAW HAW HAW HAW!!!
Of course, that would also imply that if the Samsung runs on a different chip from the iPhone, then none of Apple's patents can be upheld against Samsung either.... hey.. wait a darn minute here...
Oh, I get it. The sense and logic of software patents is not to be found in the internal coherence of the ideas or the laws that permit them or the effect it has on innovation or the economy, it's to be found in how much coke it puts up the nose of IP attorneys and their clients !!!
Shit, why didn't someone just tell me that going in?
Perhaps it would be apropo to point out here that games are a stupid waste of your life's time.
1) I would not have done what Assange did for, on account of the deleterious effects on national security. Releasing shit on bankers and politicians is fair game- endangering sources and methods we need for serious reasons is really, really not O.K. He is not Ellsberg in my view; he's not getting a hold of proof the government lied about matters of national security. He's just data dumping everything and anything. Too bad if no one wants to help you sort it out before you dump. That's no excuse. In that case, you have some work ahead of you and if you can't do that work, then you've bit off more than you can chew and whose fault is that? It's not enough to have good intentions- you have to be competent in the follow through, especially if someone's life is at stake.
2) The rape case against him is a joke. Look into it from any reputable source and you'll see that it's a manufactured device to lose him public sympathy (he's a sex offender!!!) and specifically and obviously an attempt to split his would-be united sympathizers- leftists, including of course feminists
3) The whole thing is obviously and transparently the US trying to make sure that he doesn't go unpunished no matter what and to set an example of him to others. There is no other actual motivating factor for this guy's prosecution/ persecution.
4 The fact that the US media have been obedient sheep in the face of this, reporting what the US wants them to report in just the way they want it reported is also disgusting in the extreme.. they COULD tell it like it is - the whole thing is fascinating and telling and important. They COULD something other than lie about it. but there's a reason they won't and here it is:
The whole issue of whether a reporter has the right , that is can do so without going to jail , to reveal classified information to the public and in the public interest has never been fully adjudicated in the US. No one actually knows what the legal limits on reportage, reporters and newspapers are in this highly sensitive arena and they'd rather not find out.. If the obvious case - Assange releasing classified documents and claiming it's in the public good and the US government was lying to its people- if that case were tried, what might come down from the courts in the way of a ruling might be something very ugly as seen from the perspective of the free press. They don't want to go there until they absolutely have to and they sure as shit don't want to go there with THIS case with THIS guy at THIS time. It's a loser all the way around.
So they mouth the words of whatever script the US government is typing up and just don't GO there.
That's why the US press is being so negligent in this case. Better he should be arrested and tried for rape or tried in a military setting out of the sight of the press once he falls into the hands of the US.
5) The US has a totally legitimate point that this guy recklessly endangered national security. Without secrets, without operational secrets and without an ability to protect assets, the US's ability to protect its interests and people takes a major major blow. This can't be allowed to come to pass.
6) Assange is an idiot for doing what he did the way he did it. Don't emulate him- he's not a hero, he's a guy who wanted to be a hero and wasn't up to the task, didn't have the discipline, the operational capacity, the judgement for it. Maybe there's something nefarious regarding the US we all need to know about. Lots of hardworking, perfectly sincere people in the US government ALSO would want to know about anything of this nature. Dumping terabytes of classified data and having some nuggets of worthwhile ,but predictable, wrong-doing by some players fall out as a consequence is NOT uncovering coordinated, self-conscious, systemic and ongoing law-breaking at the highest levels of government ala the Pentagon Papers.
Nevertheless, now that we're here, what happens in this case and to this idiot matters a lot
So WHAT if there are holes filled with people who are unprofitable for the monopolies to service? That's the Free Market at work. In 50 or 80 years, the same Free Market will produce a Solution. That's how pure Free Markets work, and if you don't like it, then you're a socialist.
How do you expect to create a permanent underclass if some people don't have better opportunities than others from birth? Don't you know how we run things around here?
The same was true in the 60s with that damn Civil Rights Bill that every good libertarian opposed: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/20/rand-paul-tells-maddow-th_n_582872.html Those slaves had only been free for less than 100 years. Another two, three hundred, and the Free Market would have decided they were worth serving lunch to at lunch counters after all.
What we DON'T need is Big Government coming in like they did with their whole socialist rural electrification project in '35 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#United_States and deciding who the market should serve and what the market can charge.
Romney / Ryan 2012 !! End Socialism in America !!!
Look, it's not interesting, much less scientific to group all these things together and then treat them as a unit. They don't represent anything other than a set created by the author's imagination.
In fact we did almost destroy ourselves by ignoring then denying that CFCs were causing a hole in the ozone layer. If denialists had carried the day, enough UV radiation would be coming through the ozone to deconstruct the DNA of almost all life. The fact that we fought that fight against deniers and won is the only thing that made a difference - the alternatives to CFCs were always there ready for the "innovators" to put to use "saving" us.
You cannot throw a real and present danger - global warming and GHG emissions for which we have no sure, ready solution except changing our behaviour through the application of laws - in with likes of DDT and other things which were harmful, yes, bad ideas, yes but not truly apocalyptic in nature the way global warming is. And if you nevertheless DO throw them in together, you cannot draw conclusions about them en masse because in fact they are completely causally unrelated to each other. That's it.
What this idiot is saying is in effect "I have the same feeling about global warming as these other things gave me, and therefore they forma natural, causally linked group with similar outlooks and similar solutions. So who the fuck cares how it makes him feel and how is it relevant to the particular mechanics of the specific problem we now face?
This is folk wisdom. If folk wisdom had a solution for global warming, we would have heard about it by now.
Early on, FB employees FAMOUSLY made bets on whether girl X was going to dump boy Y based on messages girl X thought were private. In fact, they have had and still have have and will always have 100% access to every single thing you write for all time, and it's all scanned for anything they consider criminal or otherwise interesting, howsoever they choose to define interesting. So interesting includes things like "binge drinker" "smoker" "promiscuous" "manipulative" and especially especially the stuff they can deduce about you given the habits of your circle of friends which they call 'aggregate data" where the "aggregate" is exactly two or three people ....that's right.. every time your friends do something outrageous, algorithms which compute "aggregate data" change YOUR profile.
Where do you think their multi-billion dollar monetization comes from, from the ability to conclude that you're a likely buyer of the next boy-band keychain?
Look, don't use FB. Don't use walled gardens generally because a walled garden viewed from the inside is really just a prison complete with a warden who ends up telling you what you can and cannot do with your life. .