Bush the second eliminated the pagan religion from official military recognition, so those practicing pagan rites no longer have the services of a military chaplin, as muslims and Christians do.
While I may agree with Bush that it's not a "real" religion (not anymore anyway) - I disagree with his position that we have any right to declare that to be a fact, and to deny a significant group of people their right to practice their religion while they serve in the military, defending MY nation and it's freedom.
Bush Jr. is undoing the Constitution and Bill of Rights line by line.
I agree that 25 cents a song is MY personal, reasonable price-point. For moderately crippled files.
But MILLIONS of users of Apple's iTunes serves disagree. $1 is their reasonable price-point.
I have to say I'm actually quite pissed at these "irresponsible consumers" - when the market agrees to a bad deal, it's like Capitalism has gone wrong somehow.
but this is the standard that has been set. People willingly paid for it. Millions of people. Just like hundreds of millions of people were willingly paying $20 for a CD not too long ago.
That's because the RIAA is NOT in the music business. They are in the IDOLOTRY business. The dominance and submission business. They manufacture music star idols. They may be talented music stars (the good quality junk to get you hooked), or they may be crap, or they may be very talented performers, but uncreative as hell, but there's still the illusion of the romance of creativity and art going on there - because that is the product they are selling.
And when a teenie bopper buys a CD - it's not about musical appreciation. It's about idol worship. It's about sex, money, and power. And if you don't see that, you're naive.
Giving away your money is giving away your power, willingly, to a dominant figure, your idol whom you worship. The extravagant lifestyle is simply a means for the idol to demonstrate it's dominance over the worshipper. (The Israelites could have made a clay calf. They made a golden calf).
The human animal has a drive towards dominance and submission. It's a holdover from more primative times - and apes, wolves, lions, many, many other animals also have this drive. It's nature. It's how decisions which affect an entire group are made among creatures who cannot talk or communicate higher ideas, especially where the timeliness of the decision is life-or-death. The animal with the dominant trait makes the decisions, and gets the mating rights, and passes the dominance along to some of the offspring.
This whole deal is simply an exploitation of that drive.
While it may be that music itself plays a primitive role in dominance and submission (dance to MY beat, listen to my mad sax skillz), on an intellectual level, music really does not have to have anything to do with dominance and submission, and I think it's that dissonance that's got everybody confused. The conflict between their animal urges for dominance, control, submission and worship, and their human intellectual urges to simply enjoy good music, and to be creative.
I never downloaded from P2P, but back in 1997/98/99 timeframe, at my old place of employment, we had a server share with about 100 gigs of mp3's.
With absolute disregard to exactly what was up there, I simply copied and burned every single track up there to CD and took them home.
Due to media damage, poor initial track quality (bad rip, or other corruption), burn errors (when you're burning 100 gigs of CD's over a period of months you get careless, mistakes are made), etc. and also due to my listening, and discarding the tracks I don't like, perhaps 20% of those original tracks still survives today in pristine listenable condition.
And of those, I've systematically attempted to replace everything I really liked with legitimate CD copies, as time and cash permits. Quite a few of those tracks are of bands I bought on vinyl back in the 70's and 80's, and can no longer listen to because my turntable wore out, and nobody makes replacement parts for it, and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $5000 to get a replacement just to listen to music in a very inconvenient format (who's going to flip sides for me every 15 minutes while I'm working on my car and have grease up to my elbows?). And why should I pay ANOTHER $20 to re-purchase the exact same music?
But the fact remains, it takes a certain amount of cost, effort, and overhead to maintain a perfect digital music library over time, and the use of the term "infinite perfect digital copies" is an inflammatory buzzword, which really distorts the facts of this issue.
Disregard my behavior of wanting to own legitimate copies, (and thereby "cancelling out" my copyright crimes over time). There's still a degradation. Perhaps not of the level of audio recordings (I have a case full of about 100 tapes of albums I recorded back in the 1980's, a few actually still have some signal on them - but all have degraded past the point of being of enjoyable quality).
Well, by THAT logic, then everything is a legal fiction, because there's really only one natural law: The Survival of the Fittest. So - if you don't like my taking of your so-called intellectual property, FINE, I'll kick YOUR ass, ignore YOUR lawyers, then fight your hired goons on the street, and we'll see who wins. (as the police drag the offender bleeding off the street into the back of a squad car). . . .
With that logic, they should tax type-A personalities more, because, though they enjoy working 100-hour weeks, they cost the rest of us more money by being at higher risk for heart attacks and strokes.
The way it was explained to me by a proselytizing muslim was, that yes, Jesus both is and isn't the Son of God. He's the Son of God in that, all men are Sons of God.
But he's not the literal Son of God the way Christians believe it, or the way Roman Pagans believe Hercules is the literal Son of Zeus.
On the surface, this line of reasoning means to not be offensive to Christians. But unfortunately ends up being so when you follow it to it's conclusion.
Despite how much I detest spam, and would like to see every dirty rotten spammer strangled by his or her own entrails on Pay Per View, I see this as just the absolute worst wrong approach.
Especially in light of how badly the US's system of checks and balances has been skewed and manipulated in recent years.
This is something that needs to be very carefully considered. We need to tread lightly here, and our rights should not be traded for political grandstanding. (gee, wouldn't YOU like to be the senator who can claim he "defeated spam"?).
I think that first of all, we need to be honest here and admit that the email protocol, as a standard, is simply weak. In that it so easily allows spoofing of sent-from addresses.
I'm not proposing that the current email standard be eliminated. There are a lot of great reasons why we need to keep it, including the very real NEED for people to be able to send email anonymously.
But I think that there is a real need in the marketplace for either a new email standard protocol, or a revision to the existing one, which: 1. Forbids anonymous access - anyone who sends must be verified and accountable for what he or she sends. 2. Secure - Does not permit spoofing, etc. 3. Is cross platform, free, open, all that good stuff.
Then build laws around THIS system, which forbid unsolicited commercial use.
What could this be used for that regular email cannot currently be used for? How about communication between geographically separated parents and children? Right now, I can't give my kids email access for fear of them opening a spam with a picture of mr. goatse.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and "protect the children" is the "killer app" of that necessity. The person who comes up with a viable solution, and gets it to the right marketing channel will become rich.
... and even worse, a lot of software companies lately, don't want to hire guys at our level any more. The more economical business model for them is to let these tough problems go unsolved, and hire massive numbers of dumb phone monkeys to answer calls, and drag customers through pointless hoop-jumping until they just give up.
I would gladly switch to OpenOffice or Star Office, on strictly "political" grounds.
BUT In my job, pretty much all documentation is done in Word. Fairly simple boilerplate, as far as functionality goes - it translates well to Open/Star Office. But we use a Document Management System, Hummingbird OpenDocs (weep for me), which has an interface to Word, including a few menu items, etc, which allow Word to open files directly from OpenDocs.
It's simply impossible to do some of the same things with Open Office. And getting my employer to change to a different DMS is similarly impossible. (tens of thousands of employees worldwide).
This is actually the ONLY application that keeps us Windows-dependent.
Crap, now that I think of it, it's almost trivial to do that today. If you have a machine with 640 Megs of spare RAM sitting around - simply detect the mount of the CD, copy it to a RAM disk, then spoof the mount with the RAM disk. . .
It's not just finding the best tool for the job, it's about DEFINING THE SCOPE of what the "job" is.
If the job is: writing documents - then, in a certain sense, MS Office might be the best tool.
But if the job is: writing documents which may have historical significance - using MS Office opens yourself to generations of future extortion and forced migration to preserve file-format compatability.
And even this grossly oversimplifies the scope of how Requirements for government contractors are defined. It's not all that simple. The more simplified you get, the more MS Office looks like a no-brainer. But when the person defining the requirements really looks at every aspect of a solution, Open Source is the no-brainer. Especially when you take the spirit of fundamental documents like The Constitution and Bill of Rights into account, and what they mean, and how it was intended that government should work, what functions it should fill in society as a whole. The whole point of government is to fulfull a social purpose: ". . . in order to form a more perfect union. . . " Handouts of our Tax Money to a private corporation which will ultimately hold PUBLIC PROPERTY captive - is NOT in the Public Interest!
I don't know if it was because I damaged my brain as a teenager by smoking pot or what, but when I was 13, I was writing cp/m command interpreters in assembler for the TRS-80 we had at school, and I wrote a ton of stuff in basic. Then I got a TI-99/4a and wrote a bunch more basic stuff, some games. But I never got an IBM, never got into C programming. Not until I was an adult.
Here it is, 20 years later, and, as an "integrator type" I routinely solve OS-level problems, and do performance tuning that most programmers I know simply cannot grasp. Yet I've always struggled to get even a basic grasp on programming. I guess I've written some pretty wild batch files in the past few years.
I've read through several C books, but I've never found anything worth my time to write. And the industry uses mainly C++, Java, and VB. (and PL/SQL).
So lately, I've dived into shell scripting, sed and awk, but still, it seems like it was a total waste of time. There's nothing practical to do there that applies to my job. I'd like to transition to a development-level career. Mainly for the money. I mean, I LOVE working with computers, and I love solving problems. But coding just doesn't click with me. I end up using trial and error more than anything else, because documentation is just so unclear and unspecific.
And very recently, I've been forced to learn a little VB because a developer I'm working closely with is kind of transitioning into a management position, and he's been using me essentially to do his coding for me while he deals with the more bureacratic issues. (Talk about a language that doesn't make any damn sense at all!).
A buddy of mine is in the same boat, and he's trying to self-teach Java, from books. He's also getting nowhere.
Where does one start? It seems like anything out there that is easily learnable, isn't practical. Anything practical, is extremely expensive to get into. I guess that's supposedly not the case if you're in the Linux world, and not even exposed to Windows.
There was a/. article about a year or so ago about a Microsoft initiative to develop a scripting language that was an enhancement to the DOS environment, was object oriented, and was an interface to.NET functionality.
Sounded like an unholy hybrid of command.com, csh, and ActiveX.
I used to have this toy "robot tank" that had six wheels, a "laser", and a keypad. You'd punch in the program, and realize that it would never do what you wanted because it was so innacurate. (ie. "rotate 90-degrees" was often anywhere from 60-120 degrees.)
But it was fun for f*cking with my neighbor's cat.
if there were ever an angle that would justify the legal wrangling that would be required to pass a law that would ban spam, (and the Internet anonymity that spam relies on), this would be it.
"won't somebody please think of the children" pulls any American's hearstrings a lot louder than "right to privacy" or "right to free speech" or "right to make lots of money". (but not necessarily "right to bribe congressmen").
The spam problem, at it's root, is born from Internet anonymity. Internet anonymity is a powerful rights issue. As long as Internet anonymity exists, spam will exist, whether it's banned or not.
This is a very sticky issue - and it became a sticky issue when the Internet was changed from a network of academic and scientific interests to a commercial enterprise. It was not a well-thought-out plan. This was unforseen fallout.
Clearly, there have been huge benefits to humanity at large from this transition. But these are some very thorny issues to work out. In the end, it just doesn't make sense to combine the Information Superhighway that will educate and enlighten with the freewheeling Las Vegas style business environment it's become. How do we reconcile it?
It's not as simple as quoting Zappa; "Protecting the children is a good way to raise a generation of kids that can't stick up for themselves."
I have young kids, and I do not let them surf the internet or read email unsupervised for this very reason. And probably won't until they're 16. It becomes a VERY time-consuming task for a well-meaning parent. I'm certainly not afraid of explaining homosexuality to my kids. I'm not afraid of my 9 year old son seeing a breast. I'd be worried about him watching a film of a guy getting it on with a donkey. I'd be especially worried about my daughter watching a "BDSM scene" castration mpeg. Most adults can't handle watching that stuff.
My brother collects Kalishnikovs and derivatives. He has over a dozen. Including a Galil (probably the nicest one to shoot of the bunch) and a Chinese one from the 1960's.
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It's not a structure, it's a pile of rocks. And it unfortunately didn't sustain it's own culture looting of it's marble covering.
And I'll lay foot in Egypt when the bombing stops. I don't risk my life for tourism.
Bush the second eliminated the pagan religion from official military recognition, so those practicing pagan rites no longer have the services of a military chaplin, as muslims and Christians do.
While I may agree with Bush that it's not a "real" religion (not anymore anyway) - I disagree with his position that we have any right to declare that to be a fact, and to deny a significant group of people their right to practice their religion while they serve in the military, defending MY nation and it's freedom.
Bush Jr. is undoing the Constitution and Bill of Rights line by line.
" that you cant even replicate today"
apparently, you've never been to las vegas. . .
I agree that 25 cents a song is MY personal, reasonable price-point. For moderately crippled files.
But MILLIONS of users of Apple's iTunes serves disagree. $1 is their reasonable price-point.
I have to say I'm actually quite pissed at these "irresponsible consumers" - when the market agrees to a bad deal, it's like Capitalism has gone wrong somehow.
but this is the standard that has been set.
People willingly paid for it. Millions of people.
Just like hundreds of millions of people were willingly paying $20 for a CD not too long ago.
That's because the RIAA is NOT in the music business. They are in the IDOLOTRY business. The dominance and submission business. They manufacture music star idols. They may be talented music stars (the good quality junk to get you hooked), or they may be crap, or they may be very talented performers, but uncreative as hell, but there's still the illusion of the romance of creativity and art going on there - because that is the product they are selling.
And when a teenie bopper buys a CD - it's not about musical appreciation. It's about idol worship. It's about sex, money, and power. And if you don't see that, you're naive.
Giving away your money is giving away your power, willingly, to a dominant figure, your idol whom you worship. The extravagant lifestyle is simply a means for the idol to demonstrate it's dominance over the worshipper. (The Israelites could have made a clay calf. They made a golden calf).
The human animal has a drive towards dominance and submission. It's a holdover from more primative times - and apes, wolves, lions, many, many other animals also have this drive. It's nature. It's how decisions which affect an entire group are made among creatures who cannot talk or communicate higher ideas, especially where the timeliness of the decision is life-or-death. The animal with the dominant trait makes the decisions, and gets the mating rights, and passes the dominance along to some of the offspring.
This whole deal is simply an exploitation of that drive.
While it may be that music itself plays a primitive role in dominance and submission (dance to MY beat, listen to my mad sax skillz), on an intellectual level, music really does not have to have anything to do with dominance and submission, and I think it's that dissonance that's got everybody confused. The conflict between their animal urges for dominance, control, submission and worship, and their human intellectual urges to simply enjoy good music, and to be creative.
They're only THEORETICALLY perfect copies.
I never downloaded from P2P, but back in 1997/98/99 timeframe, at my old place of employment, we had a server share with about 100 gigs of mp3's.
With absolute disregard to exactly what was up there, I simply copied and burned every single track up there to CD and took them home.
Due to media damage, poor initial track quality (bad rip, or other corruption), burn errors (when you're burning 100 gigs of CD's over a period of months you get careless, mistakes are made), etc. and also due to my listening, and discarding the tracks I don't like, perhaps 20% of those original tracks still survives today in pristine listenable condition.
And of those, I've systematically attempted to replace everything I really liked with legitimate CD copies, as time and cash permits. Quite a few of those tracks are of bands I bought on vinyl back in the 70's and 80's, and can no longer listen to because my turntable wore out, and nobody makes replacement parts for it, and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $5000 to get a replacement just to listen to music in a very inconvenient format (who's going to flip sides for me every 15 minutes while I'm working on my car and have grease up to my elbows?). And why should I pay ANOTHER $20 to re-purchase the exact same music?
But the fact remains, it takes a certain amount of cost, effort, and overhead to maintain a perfect digital music library over time, and the use of the term "infinite perfect digital copies" is an inflammatory buzzword, which really distorts the facts of this issue.
Disregard my behavior of wanting to own legitimate copies, (and thereby "cancelling out" my copyright crimes over time). There's still a degradation. Perhaps not of the level of audio recordings (I have a case full of about 100 tapes of albums I recorded back in the 1980's, a few actually still have some signal on them - but all have degraded past the point of being of enjoyable quality).
Well, by THAT logic, then everything is a legal fiction, because there's really only one natural law: The Survival of the Fittest. So - if you don't like my taking of your so-called intellectual property, FINE, I'll kick YOUR ass, ignore YOUR lawyers, then fight your hired goons on the street, and we'll see who wins. (as the police drag the offender bleeding off the street into the back of a squad car). . . .
Since I have an award-winning classic antique show car, I don't think I'd like someone else making a perfect copy of it. I worked too hard on it.
With that logic, they should tax type-A personalities more, because, though they enjoy working 100-hour weeks, they cost the rest of us more money by being at higher risk for heart attacks and strokes.
No, wait, they already DO tax them more. . .
The way it was explained to me by a proselytizing muslim was, that yes, Jesus both is and isn't the Son of God.
He's the Son of God in that, all men are Sons of God.
But he's not the literal Son of God the way Christians believe it, or the way Roman Pagans believe Hercules is the literal Son of Zeus.
On the surface, this line of reasoning means to not be offensive to Christians. But unfortunately ends up being so when you follow it to it's conclusion.
Despite how much I detest spam, and would like to see every dirty rotten spammer strangled by his or her own entrails on Pay Per View, I see this as just the absolute worst wrong approach.
Especially in light of how badly the US's system of checks and balances has been skewed and manipulated in recent years.
This is something that needs to be very carefully considered. We need to tread lightly here, and our rights should not be traded for political grandstanding. (gee, wouldn't YOU like to be the senator who can claim he "defeated spam"?).
I think that first of all, we need to be honest here and admit that the email protocol, as a standard, is simply weak. In that it so easily allows spoofing of sent-from addresses.
I'm not proposing that the current email standard be eliminated. There are a lot of great reasons why we need to keep it, including the very real NEED for people to be able to send email anonymously.
But I think that there is a real need in the marketplace for either a new email standard protocol, or a revision to the existing one, which:
1. Forbids anonymous access - anyone who sends must be verified and accountable for what he or she sends.
2. Secure - Does not permit spoofing, etc.
3. Is cross platform, free, open, all that good stuff.
Then build laws around THIS system, which forbid unsolicited commercial use.
What could this be used for that regular email cannot currently be used for? How about communication between geographically separated parents and children? Right now, I can't give my kids email access for fear of them opening a spam with a picture of mr. goatse.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and "protect the children" is the "killer app" of that necessity. The person who comes up with a viable solution, and gets it to the right marketing channel will become rich.
... and even worse, a lot of software companies lately, don't want to hire guys at our level any more. The more economical business model for them is to let these tough problems go unsolved, and hire massive numbers of dumb phone monkeys to answer calls, and drag customers through pointless hoop-jumping until they just give up.
... and what sucks is that we make about 2/3-1/2 of what even the most simple-minded programmers make. That's what curls the hairs on my ass.
I would gladly switch to OpenOffice or Star Office, on strictly "political" grounds.
BUT
In my job, pretty much all documentation is done in Word. Fairly simple boilerplate, as far as functionality goes - it translates well to Open/Star Office. But we use a Document Management System, Hummingbird OpenDocs (weep for me), which has an interface to Word, including a few menu items, etc, which allow Word to open files directly from OpenDocs.
It's simply impossible to do some of the same things with Open Office. And getting my employer to change to a different DMS is similarly impossible. (tens of thousands of employees worldwide).
This is actually the ONLY application that keeps us Windows-dependent.
Okay, so, instead of saving up for 6 months of unemployment and quitting, just save up the same amount of money for lawyers first.
The "wrongful termination" route is just a big joke.
Crap, now that I think of it, it's almost trivial to do that today.
If you have a machine with 640 Megs of spare RAM sitting around - simply detect the mount of the CD, copy it to a RAM disk, then spoof the mount with the RAM disk. . .
It's not just finding the best tool for the job, it's about DEFINING THE SCOPE of what the "job" is.
If the job is: writing documents - then, in a certain sense, MS Office might be the best tool.
But if the job is: writing documents which may have historical significance - using MS Office opens yourself to generations of future extortion and forced migration to preserve file-format compatability.
And even this grossly oversimplifies the scope of how Requirements for government contractors are defined. It's not all that simple. The more simplified you get, the more MS Office looks like a no-brainer. But when the person defining the requirements really looks at every aspect of a solution, Open Source is the no-brainer. Especially when you take the spirit of fundamental documents like The Constitution and Bill of Rights into account, and what they mean, and how it was intended that government should work, what functions it should fill in society as a whole. The whole point of government is to fulfull a social purpose: ". . . in order to form a more perfect union. . . "
Handouts of our Tax Money to a private corporation which will ultimately hold PUBLIC PROPERTY captive - is NOT in the Public Interest!
I don't know if it was because I damaged my brain as a teenager by smoking pot or what, but when I was 13, I was writing cp/m command interpreters in assembler for the TRS-80 we had at school, and I wrote a ton of stuff in basic. Then I got a TI-99/4a and wrote a bunch more basic stuff, some games. But I never got an IBM, never got into C programming. Not until I was an adult.
Here it is, 20 years later, and, as an "integrator type" I routinely solve OS-level problems, and do performance tuning that most programmers I know simply cannot grasp. Yet I've always struggled to get even a basic grasp on programming.
I guess I've written some pretty wild batch files in the past few years.
I've read through several C books, but I've never found anything worth my time to write. And the industry uses mainly C++, Java, and VB. (and PL/SQL).
So lately, I've dived into shell scripting, sed and awk, but still, it seems like it was a total waste of time. There's nothing practical to do there that applies to my job. I'd like to transition to a development-level career. Mainly for the money. I mean, I LOVE working with computers, and I love solving problems. But coding just doesn't click with me. I end up using trial and error more than anything else, because documentation is just so unclear and unspecific.
And very recently, I've been forced to learn a little VB because a developer I'm working closely with is kind of transitioning into a management position, and he's been using me essentially to do his coding for me while he deals with the more bureacratic issues. (Talk about a language that doesn't make any damn sense at all!).
A buddy of mine is in the same boat, and he's trying to self-teach Java, from books. He's also getting nowhere.
Where does one start? It seems like anything out there that is easily learnable, isn't practical. Anything practical, is extremely expensive to get into. I guess that's supposedly not the case if you're in the Linux world, and not even exposed to Windows.
There was a /. article about a year or so ago about a Microsoft initiative to develop a scripting language that was an enhancement to the DOS environment, was object oriented, and was an interface to .NET functionality.
Sounded like an unholy hybrid of command.com, csh, and ActiveX.
Haven't heard anything about it since then.
grammAr. . . .
I used to have this toy "robot tank" that had six wheels, a "laser", and a keypad. You'd punch in the program, and realize that it would never do what you wanted because it was so innacurate. (ie. "rotate 90-degrees" was often anywhere from 60-120 degrees.)
But it was fun for f*cking with my neighbor's cat.
if there were ever an angle that would justify the legal wrangling that would be required to pass a law that would ban spam, (and the Internet anonymity that spam relies on), this would be it.
"won't somebody please think of the children" pulls any American's hearstrings a lot louder than "right to privacy" or "right to free speech" or "right to make lots of money". (but not necessarily "right to bribe congressmen").
The spam problem, at it's root, is born from Internet anonymity. Internet anonymity is a powerful rights issue. As long as Internet anonymity exists, spam will exist, whether it's banned or not.
This is a very sticky issue - and it became a sticky issue when the Internet was changed from a network of academic and scientific interests to a commercial enterprise. It was not a well-thought-out plan. This was unforseen fallout.
Clearly, there have been huge benefits to humanity at large from this transition. But these are some very thorny issues to work out. In the end, it just doesn't make sense to combine the Information Superhighway that will educate and enlighten with the freewheeling Las Vegas style business environment it's become. How do we reconcile it?
It's not as simple as quoting Zappa; "Protecting the children is a good way to raise a generation of kids that can't stick up for themselves."
I have young kids, and I do not let them surf the internet or read email unsupervised for this very reason. And probably won't until they're 16. It becomes a VERY time-consuming task for a well-meaning parent. I'm certainly not afraid of explaining homosexuality to my kids. I'm not afraid of my 9 year old son seeing a breast. I'd be worried about him watching a film of a guy getting it on with a donkey. I'd be especially worried about my daughter watching a "BDSM scene" castration mpeg. Most adults can't handle watching that stuff.
How about a massive tax hike for corporations, bundled with a massive tax credit for hiring people?
My brother collects Kalishnikovs and derivatives.
He has over a dozen. Including a Galil (probably the nicest one to shoot of the bunch) and a Chinese one from the 1960's.
Too bad they don't teach MBA's ethics.