I have started using mambo and have found it the easiest installation yet. Upload it, go to your site and the installation routine does all the database for you in just a few screens. You need PHP and MySQL. It is geared for online news/blog/personal site but is scalable for commercial. Once you get the feel for adding articles and such, its a breeze and much more friendly than postnuke and moveable type. Plus, the template system is a cinch (just some include lines for the modules and components). Here is their link.
http://www.mamboserver.com
And my site I set up to keep my family up to date and for some personal musings.
Fujitsu has been making them for years. You can see them in all their glory on www.fujitsu.com. These puppies are near star trek like in their geekness, but alas, they are expensive because they are a full powered PC.
I admit that back in the day and in some cases, the present, unions were and are needed in the instances of corporate abuse. The entertainment industry is kept in check with unions such as Actor's Equity, which has a very noble history in this country. At a time where theatres, managers and promotors were exploiting actors and performers (those who felt compelled to perform despite the pay), the performing community at large got together and said no more. Entire casts would be stranded in the middle of Kansas due to a producer or manager skipping town without the receipts. Costumes, hotel and travel expenses and sometimes scripts were paid for by the performers themselves. There was nothing resembling residuals and forget fair and equitable salary. As one, the community of performers got together and went on strike. Actors Equity was formed and basic rights and demands were laid out. The business community supported them. the public supported them. And they won. Today, Actors Equity still provides those same protections. How many horror stories have you heard about the entertainment corporations trying their best to deny the actors their due, when that actor makes milions for the company? Without the union, the company would run rough shod all over them. But in the IT industry its different.
My skills are in demand currently as a developer. I can spit and find a great paying job. I am not worried about someone else taking my job. If my job is eliminated, I get a week or two off while I go get another one. Even the lower paying salaries in my field are damn better than most. In my field, with one major project, I can GET NOTICED by the CEO or upper management and given more responsibility and thus, a raise. I have the freedom to move from job to job if i want, always increasing my yearly income until I retire. I work for a major southern Telco and the people that started out here 30 years ago are amazed that people move up so fast. They remember when it was normal to stay in one department for five years before moving up. Now, the rate of advancement keeps climbing, especially now with the incredible demand for skill developers.
With a union, all of that changes. You know when your next advancement is, because its in your contract. You don't have the freedom to jump around, especially if your entire career sector is unionized. You certainly can't volunteer to accept a new responsibility because somebody else may file a grievance with a union if they feel you are encroaching on their job. Even if the jobs are disimilar, its like a protracted court case. Do you have the time, energy and money to fight that? And what if your union strikes when you feel in your heart it is wrong? You must strike or quit. Because crossing that picket line can get you blacklisted in other jobs that fall under the same union. Scabs are not to be suffered. So therefore, you change careers or starve until the strike ends. Remember the UPS strike. Not everyone in the union wanted to strike, but they had to because to cross that picket line was to risk threat of injury to yourself or family, or to your career.
At the major Telco I work for, the customer service and technical support people were complaining about their jobs. They wanted to unionize. Nobody could understand why, it seemed they just wanted to complain about working at the low rung of the IT ladder. Its a crappy job sometimes dealing with the public. These people started out at least 30k-40k, got two weeks of vacation, free medical, personal and sick days, bonuses, discount stock purchasing plan, free tuition toward training, a FREE MBA in business, a free cell phone and a whole slew of other benefits. This job rocks as an entry level! And all they did was answer the phone and provide technical and customer support or answered email. Not a glorious job in IT, but hey, we all have to start somewhere. I did, and 3 years later I make over double in salary with a cushy office job developing web pages. I can go where ever i want now. But these people wanted to Unionize over some perceived threat by management. What they didn't realize was, that once they start union proceedings with the company, all bonuses and benefits freeze, for the entire company until a contract is agreed upon. Do you think the rest of the company is going to be happy with them? I doubt it.
The point is, the thought of a union in my field is scary and disconcerting. Those who want protection for their jobs in the IT field are usually those who don't have the skills to find other work if they suddenly are the victim of downsizing. I'm sure I'm painting with a broad brush, but I have the power to bargain my own contract, not rely on some organization who is going to tell me when I will advance and what I can't do as part of my job. The fact is, if you have the skills, you don't want for a job. The job wants you.
Didn't Apple lose the "Look and Feel" war to Microsoft or was that just an out of court settlement? Or course, it doesn't matter if you can't afford to challenge them in court.
At first I thought your plagiarism charge was a bit spurious until I compared the two articles. Whereas I would not go so far as to accuse her of that, she definately was influenced by Steve's article and paraphrased the scenario into her own language. It comes across as anecdotal, but nonetheless, the similarities are too numerous to discount. She should have given credit, no argument.
Courtney's article does raise some other issues that are important to this whole dialogue and I for one agree to what she (and Steve) have to say. I would hate to see though that this paraphrasing of Steve's article detracts from the issue at large. She is calling Universal's bluff and they now have to make good on their claims.
Sorry man, have to do this. Forgive me. The phrase is "There AIN'T no such thing as a free lunch" (TANSTAFFL). Robert Heinlein wrote about it in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" about a penal colony on the moon becoming a soveriegn state. great book.
technology has finally come into their hands
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 4
Maybe, just maybe, technology has finally allowed the media/entertainment industry to do what they always wanted to do, and that is control all aspects of culture and how you use it. Follow my logic here.
In today's entertainment world, culture is becoming defined by what we watch on TV, movies, books we read and the music we listen to. The exchange of ideas takes place easily over these mediums and popular thought is shaped by these corporations. When you can control the ideas of a civilization with the culture then you can derive unlimited income from them. Kids buy clothes pop stars wear, buy their music and watch their movies. We read the books on the New York times best seller lists and we buy the music we hear on radio stations that are owned by huge media corporations. We go to the concerts that are produced by the record labels. Essentially, our pop culture is produced, packaged and distributed and sold to us. We ingest it and come back for more. Like it or not, pop culture defines too many people's thoughts and ideas, so in effect, the media/entertainment industry owns culture and therefore owns our ideas.
Now comes the internet and a way to disseminate information anonymously and without cost. It is a boon for the free thinkers in the world who were beginning to become scarce. We can now exchange ideas without worrying about license fees and become famous without selling our souls and living rights to a mega corporation. The internet seems to threaten these very same media types' very existance. They can't control everyone and in this world, there are plenty of talented musicians, writers and artists that are not published for one reason or another who are more talented than the tripe they sell us in conventional avenues. Take MP3.com. I listen to music from there all the time and love it. I especially love it because the music is great and I would never have heard their music before without the site. A writer who has written an incredible work of fiction can now get world wide exposure and popularity over the net. From there they can enter the mainstream world of publishing. There are plenty of ways to make money under this business model. Just look at Linux. The point is, the net, and computers for that matter, appear to have become the magic genie in a bottle that breaks the strangle hold over the current businees model, which seeks to line the pockets of these greedy corporations and allow them to own everyone's creativity for their own purposes. It has been proven time and time again that the music industry would control every aspect of your music listening enjoyment if they could. Historically they have fought every type of recording, playing on unauthorized decks, and fair use. Luckily, the courts have told them you can't own a person's right to fair use. But what if this new digital age has played right into their hands?
With computers, they can now strictly determine how and when and where you enjoy their "art". They can control how much, what reader you use and who is enjoying it. They would have it so that you can't even loan your music out. Remember DIVX? You couldn't even share movies or play them on another person's DIVX player. And you had to keep purchasing more playing time. It was one of the first tests of this new trend. We are heading down a road where you can download a book or album and listen to it at your convenience, provided you use their player or reader, and you don't give it to anyone under ANY circumstances whatsoever. How many times has someone loaned you a good book, you read the book, and promptly went out and bought that author's other works? That will be gone forever if they had their way. Remember, they want you to enjoy their product on their terms, not yours. And they can do it now, with computers. When in the past they were frustrated with thir inability to completely control their product, now they see a way in which to do. And that brings me to the privacy issue.
On the internet, information is gold. Demographics. Tracking. Spending habits. AOL has made a fortune on selling user profiles. Equifax until recently sold your credit report to any company wishing to target consumers more efficiently. DoubleClick is poised to become the king daddy of all privacy violators if they are not already there. The fact is, my spending habits are gold to these people, another revenue source for them to exploit. Ebooks and downloadable music are just another way to gather more information so that they can sell it. And your privacy goes out the window. And don't delude yourself into thinking that privacy is not at stake here. Remember, these are people who actually say "We are customizing our service so that your shopping experience will be easier and more enjoyable. We are doing this for you because you asked for it." We didn't. I didn't ask for my every movement and purchase to be tracked so that it can sold to who ever has a large expense account. If you walked into a Blockbuster video and they suggested a movie you might want to see based on preferences, you might ask them why do you think I would want to see it. They then proceed to tell you all the things you have watched and bought all week long and every video store and bookstore and department store you visited. You would feel violated. That is what is happening on the web right now. Who needs Big brother when free enterprise can watch over you for them?
My suggestion, fight them. Don't use ebooks. Don't use downloadable music with a purchasing scheme. Use Gnutella instead of Napster (distributed and open source instead of central and closed. Read their company profile and who is funding them and see what road they are heading down.) Don't use any form of entertainment that helps fulfill their dream of total culture domination, because once all of culture is controlled like a product, then all is lost. Fight them anyway you can. Look at DIVX, which is a perfect example I mentioned earlier. They were tracking people's viewing habits so that they could target ads, and they were trying to lock you into being able to watch their movies on only approved machines with a purchasing model that assured a constant revenue if you wanted to watch the same thing again. Without these contraints, they has no business model. There was no choice in their scenario and it failed miserably. Why? We fought back. We put up web pages. We encouraged all not to buy one and convinced them it was wrong to buy the product. And we won. We can fight back.
Jon, I must say bravo on the two articles and for your hard work. You wrote a wonderful piece the first time that clued us in to the problem, at which time I almost blew a gasket when I went to the site, and the second article after meeting with them was a fantastic wrap up to the whole problem our country is facing. I believe that the media and the politicians are one in the same and have the same objectives and practices. Others have stated in the past that the government controls the media, but let's assume that isn't true. Both parties attempt to manipulate public opinion with little facts, hearsay and orwellian techniques. The politician looks at what the current problems are and tries to convince the public the problem is worse than it really is and that he/she is the only one working on it. A politician's job from day one is to prepare for the next election. The main stream media's job is to find a problem, attribute it to any fad, deviance, political agenda, video game, movie or anything else any self-respecting alarmist may latch onto and exploit that angle for all it is worth. A good case is that now a year has passed since Columbine and we are finding that most of what was reported about those two murderers was distorted, taken out of context, just plain wrong and in some cases out right fabrication. WAVE is a natural result of these two entities, an attempt by some people in power to convince others that "hey, I'm doing something about it!" and Pinkerton is a company that is merely making a profit off the hysteria. Unfortunately, they have no concern about the nazi-esque ramifications of this problem. "Not our problem. we're just providing a service. They came up with the idea". What about the companies during WWII in Germany and Japan that used slave labor? Some of the companies are still in operation today. They can use the same argument. "We didn't start the war. We're giving these people a job, otherwise they would be dead." I applaud you Jon for letting us know about this problem./. has shown that net activism does work, and even though Pinkerton really doesn't any intention of listening to us, others will and we must not allow this to continue. Keep up the fight against those who inflate phantom statistics, create programs to "solve" the problem and then proceed to piss on the personal rights of children and adults. Never give up!
This is an idea that has been popping around for awhile. Microsoft may eventually come out with its own form of linux. To what advantage? Money. Pure and simple. How do they make money? Marketing. In my company, a major telco in the southeast that rhymes with TellMouth, we are allowed to use Linux on our workstations, or we can use WindowsNT. For our production servers we use Solaris and a couple of NT boxes (which are being phased out). Our powers that be would use Linux in a production environment if they were assured that it would be supported and that there was a substantial support package. They don't trust Linux yet. They want accountability along with a brand name. Now, since Microsoft has these things, it doesn't matter that their version of Linux may be worse, or that it may violate the GPL or just have a modified KDE that emulates just about everything NT does. Microsoft's marketing department has succeeded in fooling the entire world that their OS is the best and most stable, when smarter heads know otherwise. These same demon seeds can convince the powers that be in my company and many others that Microsoft's brand of Linux is better because they have "standardized" it and made it more "compatible" with MS products. Remember, the truth does not enter this hypothetical world at any time. As long as Microsoft's marketing department gets in full swing behind a Microsoft Linux, then we run the risk of people believing it really is better. My opinion is that no matter how much Microsoft gets involved with Linux, all of their intentions should be mistrusted. This is a company that either destroys its competitors, buys them, or does its best to undermine their business. Its a huge game to them. Who gets the most toys. Any venture in the Linux market can mean only one thing to me. Beware! Of course, I could be a little paranoid...
I hate to tell you this, but if you insist on barking at the moon with paranoidal tendancies you can at least get your facts straight. The swastiska is an old folk symbol for fertility and luck, not a pure race symbol. In Winston Salem NC there is a settlement called Old Salem from the 1600's. It was a Moravian town that is now a tourist attraction as most of it has been preserved and restored. In the old houses on display, the headboards of the beds have very ornate and beautifil swastikas on them, for fertility. Leave it to Hitler to screw up using that symbol for everyone else. Conspiracies are fine, just be sure you know your facts first. It makes you a little bit more credible.
Slashdot Mirror
I have started using mambo and have found it the easiest installation yet. Upload it, go to your site and the installation routine does all the database for you in just a few screens. You need PHP and MySQL. It is geared for online news/blog/personal site but is scalable for commercial. Once you get the feel for adding articles and such, its a breeze and much more friendly than postnuke and moveable type. Plus, the template system is a cinch (just some include lines for the modules and components). Here is their link.
http://www.mamboserver.com
And my site I set up to keep my family up to date and for some personal musings.
http://www.snappermorgan.com
Fujitsu has been making them for years. You can see them in all their glory on www.fujitsu.com. These puppies are near star trek like in their geekness, but alas, they are expensive because they are a full powered PC.
My skills are in demand currently as a developer. I can spit and find a great paying job. I am not worried about someone else taking my job. If my job is eliminated, I get a week or two off while I go get another one. Even the lower paying salaries in my field are damn better than most. In my field, with one major project, I can GET NOTICED by the CEO or upper management and given more responsibility and thus, a raise. I have the freedom to move from job to job if i want, always increasing my yearly income until I retire. I work for a major southern Telco and the people that started out here 30 years ago are amazed that people move up so fast. They remember when it was normal to stay in one department for five years before moving up. Now, the rate of advancement keeps climbing, especially now with the incredible demand for skill developers.
With a union, all of that changes. You know when your next advancement is, because its in your contract. You don't have the freedom to jump around, especially if your entire career sector is unionized. You certainly can't volunteer to accept a new responsibility because somebody else may file a grievance with a union if they feel you are encroaching on their job. Even if the jobs are disimilar, its like a protracted court case. Do you have the time, energy and money to fight that? And what if your union strikes when you feel in your heart it is wrong? You must strike or quit. Because crossing that picket line can get you blacklisted in other jobs that fall under the same union. Scabs are not to be suffered. So therefore, you change careers or starve until the strike ends. Remember the UPS strike. Not everyone in the union wanted to strike, but they had to because to cross that picket line was to risk threat of injury to yourself or family, or to your career.
At the major Telco I work for, the customer service and technical support people were complaining about their jobs. They wanted to unionize. Nobody could understand why, it seemed they just wanted to complain about working at the low rung of the IT ladder. Its a crappy job sometimes dealing with the public. These people started out at least 30k-40k, got two weeks of vacation, free medical, personal and sick days, bonuses, discount stock purchasing plan, free tuition toward training, a FREE MBA in business, a free cell phone and a whole slew of other benefits. This job rocks as an entry level! And all they did was answer the phone and provide technical and customer support or answered email. Not a glorious job in IT, but hey, we all have to start somewhere. I did, and 3 years later I make over double in salary with a cushy office job developing web pages. I can go where ever i want now. But these people wanted to Unionize over some perceived threat by management. What they didn't realize was, that once they start union proceedings with the company, all bonuses and benefits freeze, for the entire company until a contract is agreed upon. Do you think the rest of the company is going to be happy with them? I doubt it.
The point is, the thought of a union in my field is scary and disconcerting. Those who want protection for their jobs in the IT field are usually those who don't have the skills to find other work if they suddenly are the victim of downsizing. I'm sure I'm painting with a broad brush, but I have the power to bargain my own contract, not rely on some organization who is going to tell me when I will advance and what I can't do as part of my job. The fact is, if you have the skills, you don't want for a job. The job wants you.
Didn't Apple lose the "Look and Feel" war to Microsoft or was that just an out of court settlement? Or course, it doesn't matter if you can't afford to challenge them in court.
At first I thought your plagiarism charge was a bit spurious until I compared the two articles. Whereas I would not go so far as to accuse her of that, she definately was influenced by Steve's article and paraphrased the scenario into her own language. It comes across as anecdotal, but nonetheless, the similarities are too numerous to discount. She should have given credit, no argument. Courtney's article does raise some other issues that are important to this whole dialogue and I for one agree to what she (and Steve) have to say. I would hate to see though that this paraphrasing of Steve's article detracts from the issue at large. She is calling Universal's bluff and they now have to make good on their claims.
Sorry man, have to do this. Forgive me. The phrase is "There AIN'T no such thing as a free lunch" (TANSTAFFL). Robert Heinlein wrote about it in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" about a penal colony on the moon becoming a soveriegn state. great book.
In today's entertainment world, culture is becoming defined by what we watch on TV, movies, books we read and the music we listen to. The exchange of ideas takes place easily over these mediums and popular thought is shaped by these corporations. When you can control the ideas of a civilization with the culture then you can derive unlimited income from them. Kids buy clothes pop stars wear, buy their music and watch their movies. We read the books on the New York times best seller lists and we buy the music we hear on radio stations that are owned by huge media corporations. We go to the concerts that are produced by the record labels. Essentially, our pop culture is produced, packaged and distributed and sold to us. We ingest it and come back for more. Like it or not, pop culture defines too many people's thoughts and ideas, so in effect, the media/entertainment industry owns culture and therefore owns our ideas.
Now comes the internet and a way to disseminate information anonymously and without cost. It is a boon for the free thinkers in the world who were beginning to become scarce. We can now exchange ideas without worrying about license fees and become famous without selling our souls and living rights to a mega corporation. The internet seems to threaten these very same media types' very existance. They can't control everyone and in this world, there are plenty of talented musicians, writers and artists that are not published for one reason or another who are more talented than the tripe they sell us in conventional avenues. Take MP3.com. I listen to music from there all the time and love it. I especially love it because the music is great and I would never have heard their music before without the site. A writer who has written an incredible work of fiction can now get world wide exposure and popularity over the net. From there they can enter the mainstream world of publishing. There are plenty of ways to make money under this business model. Just look at Linux. The point is, the net, and computers for that matter, appear to have become the magic genie in a bottle that breaks the strangle hold over the current businees model, which seeks to line the pockets of these greedy corporations and allow them to own everyone's creativity for their own purposes. It has been proven time and time again that the music industry would control every aspect of your music listening enjoyment if they could. Historically they have fought every type of recording, playing on unauthorized decks, and fair use. Luckily, the courts have told them you can't own a person's right to fair use. But what if this new digital age has played right into their hands?
With computers, they can now strictly determine how and when and where you enjoy their "art". They can control how much, what reader you use and who is enjoying it. They would have it so that you can't even loan your music out. Remember DIVX? You couldn't even share movies or play them on another person's DIVX player. And you had to keep purchasing more playing time. It was one of the first tests of this new trend. We are heading down a road where you can download a book or album and listen to it at your convenience, provided you use their player or reader, and you don't give it to anyone under ANY circumstances whatsoever. How many times has someone loaned you a good book, you read the book, and promptly went out and bought that author's other works? That will be gone forever if they had their way. Remember, they want you to enjoy their product on their terms, not yours. And they can do it now, with computers. When in the past they were frustrated with thir inability to completely control their product, now they see a way in which to do. And that brings me to the privacy issue.
On the internet, information is gold. Demographics. Tracking. Spending habits. AOL has made a fortune on selling user profiles. Equifax until recently sold your credit report to any company wishing to target consumers more efficiently. DoubleClick is poised to become the king daddy of all privacy violators if they are not already there. The fact is, my spending habits are gold to these people, another revenue source for them to exploit. Ebooks and downloadable music are just another way to gather more information so that they can sell it. And your privacy goes out the window. And don't delude yourself into thinking that privacy is not at stake here. Remember, these are people who actually say "We are customizing our service so that your shopping experience will be easier and more enjoyable. We are doing this for you because you asked for it." We didn't. I didn't ask for my every movement and purchase to be tracked so that it can sold to who ever has a large expense account. If you walked into a Blockbuster video and they suggested a movie you might want to see based on preferences, you might ask them why do you think I would want to see it. They then proceed to tell you all the things you have watched and bought all week long and every video store and bookstore and department store you visited. You would feel violated. That is what is happening on the web right now. Who needs Big brother when free enterprise can watch over you for them?
My suggestion, fight them. Don't use ebooks. Don't use downloadable music with a purchasing scheme. Use Gnutella instead of Napster (distributed and open source instead of central and closed. Read their company profile and who is funding them and see what road they are heading down.) Don't use any form of entertainment that helps fulfill their dream of total culture domination, because once all of culture is controlled like a product, then all is lost. Fight them anyway you can. Look at DIVX, which is a perfect example I mentioned earlier. They were tracking people's viewing habits so that they could target ads, and they were trying to lock you into being able to watch their movies on only approved machines with a purchasing model that assured a constant revenue if you wanted to watch the same thing again. Without these contraints, they has no business model. There was no choice in their scenario and it failed miserably. Why? We fought back. We put up web pages. We encouraged all not to buy one and convinced them it was wrong to buy the product. And we won. We can fight back.
Jon, I must say bravo on the two articles and for your hard work. You wrote a wonderful piece the first time that clued us in to the problem, at which time I almost blew a gasket when I went to the site, and the second article after meeting with them was a fantastic wrap up to the whole problem our country is facing. I believe that the media and the politicians are one in the same and have the same objectives and practices. Others have stated in the past that the government controls the media, but let's assume that isn't true. Both parties attempt to manipulate public opinion with little facts, hearsay and orwellian techniques. The politician looks at what the current problems are and tries to convince the public the problem is worse than it really is and that he/she is the only one working on it. A politician's job from day one is to prepare for the next election. The main stream media's job is to find a problem, attribute it to any fad, deviance, political agenda, video game, movie or anything else any self-respecting alarmist may latch onto and exploit that angle for all it is worth. A good case is that now a year has passed since Columbine and we are finding that most of what was reported about those two murderers was distorted, taken out of context, just plain wrong and in some cases out right fabrication. WAVE is a natural result of these two entities, an attempt by some people in power to convince others that "hey, I'm doing something about it!" and Pinkerton is a company that is merely making a profit off the hysteria. Unfortunately, they have no concern about the nazi-esque ramifications of this problem. "Not our problem. we're just providing a service. They came up with the idea". What about the companies during WWII in Germany and Japan that used slave labor? Some of the companies are still in operation today. They can use the same argument. "We didn't start the war. We're giving these people a job, otherwise they would be dead." I applaud you Jon for letting us know about this problem. /. has shown that net activism does work, and even though Pinkerton really doesn't any intention of listening to us, others will and we must not allow this to continue. Keep up the fight against those who inflate phantom statistics, create programs to "solve" the problem and then proceed to piss on the personal rights of children and adults. Never give up!
This is an idea that has been popping around for awhile. Microsoft may eventually come out with its own form of linux. To what advantage? Money. Pure and simple. How do they make money? Marketing. In my company, a major telco in the southeast that rhymes with TellMouth, we are allowed to use Linux on our workstations, or we can use WindowsNT. For our production servers we use Solaris and a couple of NT boxes (which are being phased out). Our powers that be would use Linux in a production environment if they were assured that it would be supported and that there was a substantial support package. They don't trust Linux yet. They want accountability along with a brand name. Now, since Microsoft has these things, it doesn't matter that their version of Linux may be worse, or that it may violate the GPL or just have a modified KDE that emulates just about everything NT does. Microsoft's marketing department has succeeded in fooling the entire world that their OS is the best and most stable, when smarter heads know otherwise. These same demon seeds can convince the powers that be in my company and many others that Microsoft's brand of Linux is better because they have "standardized" it and made it more "compatible" with MS products. Remember, the truth does not enter this hypothetical world at any time. As long as Microsoft's marketing department gets in full swing behind a Microsoft Linux, then we run the risk of people believing it really is better. My opinion is that no matter how much Microsoft gets involved with Linux, all of their intentions should be mistrusted. This is a company that either destroys its competitors, buys them, or does its best to undermine their business. Its a huge game to them. Who gets the most toys. Any venture in the Linux market can mean only one thing to me. Beware! Of course, I could be a little paranoid...
I hate to tell you this, but if you insist on barking at the moon with paranoidal tendancies you can at least get your facts straight. The swastiska is an old folk symbol for fertility and luck, not a pure race symbol. In Winston Salem NC there is a settlement called Old Salem from the 1600's. It was a Moravian town that is now a tourist attraction as most of it has been preserved and restored. In the old houses on display, the headboards of the beds have very ornate and beautifil swastikas on them, for fertility. Leave it to Hitler to screw up using that symbol for everyone else. Conspiracies are fine, just be sure you know your facts first. It makes you a little bit more credible.