Is the basic doctrine here criminal trespass? Compare normal trespass. People are allowed to walk across your land and appreciate the view there unless you have taken very specific measures of placing precisely worded signs at precise intervals (except in Sweden, where people can cross your land, period). Having a fence around the land does not make it trespass to hop the fence. Having a fence and a gate where the gate has a mechanism that swings it open to anyone clever enought to utter "Open sesame" in front of it in no way makes it illegal to cross your land after going through that gate.
Granted, buildings are treated differently. (Is cyberspace inside or outside space for these purposes?) But there's still a general right of public access to places of business as long as the door opens and there's no sign or guard specifically informing you you can't go farther.
Arresting someone for what this kid did is on the level of arresting someone on a shoplifting charge who has merely walked into the store. You've walked in, so you could take something, so you're guilty?
the location, length and number of embedded keys can vary
If they vary on different copies of the same CD, it's trivially easy to run diff and isolate them. If they're the same across all copies of the same CD, they're a bit harder to find, but someone finding them can distribute a patch for the disk image to disables them. There should be a map to where the keys are, and if that's hidden, its address needs to be kept somewhere. Do they plan to rewrite the codes that handles this for each CD, so that its fingerprint can't be simply found and the rest unravelled?
All religions are basically fictions and fictions are good for you, if they're good fictions. Societies need shared myths, and fresh myths are best - thus the shuffling of them over the ages, as new ones supplant old. It's not that the new ones are better - in fact it's much like pop music, where occassionally you get a real advance (Beatles) but more often get trash novelty (fill in current robotic boy group or rapper).
Now, nation states themselves are in large part fictions. So which other fictions should they associate with and invest in? Should a state appropriate, even nationalize, a good fiction when one comes along? Should George II wear his Mickey Mouse hat on state occassions? Should he carry a cross? Should Saddam be let to live a few more years if he'll just play along and dress like Darth?
Even the most "realistic" views of the world are largely fictions. It's time to take conscious control of our choices here; and more than anything it's time for some new religions which are compatible with, but broader than, science. The precise place to find these is the field known as science fiction - duh.
If a programmer presents a wonderful, smiling, confident, accomplished face it's likely to be because they have the normal ethic in our culture of hiding flaws and embelishing accomplishments. Such people belong in marketing (perhaps) but never in programming, since the last thing you need in your programs is a bunch of well-hidden flaws.
The trick isn't to find someone who knows it all, but someone who is aware of what they don't know yet, and is curious enough about it to stay up all night with a puzzle if needed.
With over half the traffic to content-full sites coming in from search engines which my their nature deep link, it's vital for webmasters to use tools like Apache's mod_rewrite to be sure to present the content in the context you desire. By combining this with functions in scripting languages such as PHP you can make absolutely certain that you (1) welcome visitors however they arrive and (2) let them know exactly where they are, with navigation options that will lead them further into your site, rather than the referrer's.
The point isn't to send the people away who, through no fault of their own, don't arrive by the front door. The point is to convert them to your own customers.
How else are television broadcasters supposed to cover their costs?
The other night my housemate and I were wondering, "Is there anything we see advertised on the shows we watch that we actually buy?" At first we couldn't think of anything. Eventually an ad came on for a brand of gasoline I sometimes pump. There are certainly some brands of stuff I don't buy because I'd never want to be associated with the advertising. Has there been any research on the negatives of showing commercials to the sorts of folks who are greatly annoyed by most of them?
But if you really want me to watch commercials as a condition of receiving television - which I don't consider totally a bum deal since I don't watch much television and have never subscribed to cable - then use technology to allow me to see commercials that are about stuff I might have an actual interest in buying. This should be done in a way that can't trace back to me as an individual. I would gladly watch commercials for, say, portable mp3 players - but showing me commercials for cars is just dumb, since I won't be buying a new car in the next 5 years, and you can't tell or show me enough about a car in a minute to interest me anyway.
And please don't show me ads for prescription drugs. The last thing I want to do is justify the further inflation of medical costs to pay for these ads; and I really don't want to think about other people's diseases when I'm trying to relax into some escapist TV - or even focus on the nightly news, for that matter. I mean, old people are depressed, need diapers, and the males can't get it up without help... but do I need to meditate on my still-years-off future decay every time I want to luxuriate in the fires and floods besetting distant parts of our greenhoused world?
Red Hat are a commercial entity, and obviously want to make money. But why don't they offer government organisations like this all the free software they could want, for no money EVER, and just charge them for supporting it?
Why leave it to Red Hat? Any organized band of Open Sourcerors could go into any town and slap together a pretty good infrastructure using cheap hardware and the GPL'd distro and daemons of choice. If they keep a record of the steps taken, this can be posted as a HOWTO. The model of "We'll get it going for free, and then members of our team will compete on the open market for support contracts after the first X months of operation," would have to look better than Microsoft's "We'll get it going for free, and then you're locked into us for decades as a sole-source vendor."
The only question - the critical one - is how to form an anarchic gang of Open Sourcerors into something a town could feel responsible contracting with. First genius to figure that out will have done as much as
Linus to afford us all prosperous consulting careers down the road. So, how to form our Seven Sourceri, and take on the gang terrorizing the town "for its own good"?
Using CGI to make movies to save the price of actors is like improving the horse carriage by inventing an electric buggy whip. Since the human imagination is what it's all about anyhow, direct stimulation of the brain's dream centers is the technology which will prevail.
Let's say that you come up with the first true religion, an attitude so perfect towards the Powers that they grace your every gaze and gesture with convenient miracles. Well, first off, tell folks in your home town - none of them will believe you except for maybe your mom. Then go find some hooker to convert to your truth - she or he will probably be grateful enough for the attention to go along, but hardly in a position to convert the world. Okay, then go out and find about 12 guys for MLM. Generate some pyrotechnics by getting the Powers to help in some evictions of Lesser Powers from their human fan clubs. Throw some wine and bread parties. Perform stupid animal tricks with a jackass. Progress perhaps, but still not much danger of your word really getting out. Then take it to the point of self-righteous paranoia, accuse your closest aids of being ready to betray you, show the Powers that you really aren't cool enough to present the true religion after all, and see how they then justify all your paranoia by setting you up to be a human sacrifice in a very public way. The News at Six picks it up. Shazamm, your word gets out!
If the board members don't have the personal resources to repay such small loans, what the heck are they doing on the board of a going concern? And why did they vote to remove their personal liability if they do fail to repay on schedule? These people should be worth how many millions each? The whole success of SonicBlue depends on being seen as the good guys standing up to sleazy industries. Repaying those ethically questionable loans was correctly brought to the center of the agenda. As a shareholder I demand the immediate resignation of the board.
You might think that Hitler, who got elected with the financial support of big business (while in the US, Henry Ford was a major fan too), wouldn't have resorted to intellectual property to meet his need to acquire vast wealth. Not only did he earn millions in royalties from Mein Kampf, but he got a share in the proceeds from sales of photos of him by his official photographer, on whose behalf he extended the copyright law, showing that there's more than one mousey little guy with an appreciation of the value of his image!
Perhaps if Sony technology had been in place, he would have gained enough through IP control to have been satiated, and not forced take extreme measures to try to make the world a better place through his policy of regime change in neighboring lands. ___
You might look at Invisible Seattle's 1984 BBS-based in.s.omni, a collaborative effort that involved putting kiosks at art shows and in the basement cafe of the Elliot Bay Book Company, along with dial-in access. It used a room-based BBS arrangement plus the assumption of the names and personae of literary-artistic semi-obscure but mythic characters by the principals. As I remember it, it was a lot more fun - and smarter - than anything on the Web. But we were satisfied with such simple toys then.
The principle behind the (bad) decisions is the (somewhat good) notion that the society that shows some favoritism towards economic interests ends up with more of an economy and thus everyone's better off, even though the gravity of the economic interests distorts the local sector of social space-time.
Well, how do we get similar respect for something like the "Open Software Economic Interest Group"? Major economic value is being created here. The whole society, worldwide, can gain benefit by granting a favorable environment in which the OSEIG can carry out its wealth-creating function. We are as worthy of political favoritism as any corporate entity. We are not ever going to see a society in which economic interests are not granted major favors - but how, as an emerging economic interest, do we collect the favors that, if these games are to work right, should be ours (those of us too stupid to sell the old IPO stock in time, anyhow)?
If the process works right, we should be able to even acquire domains of potential use to OSEIG's (and thus the greater society's) economic interests, simply by showing that the pie will be richer for all if those domains are in our hands - not because we're 'better,' but because we represent a larger share of and contribution to economic activity. The current underlying 'corrupt' argument for favoring groups with the most economic juice should favor us. Let's demand, not their end, but their proper and logical application. ___
Replacing the install_docs part of the Makefile with the version from 0.9.6c fixes the problem. I'd quote it here but that violates/.'s "postercomment" compression filter. Anyway, it installs the docs just fine. ___
openssl-0.9.6e (unlike d) goes through an almost endless sequence of refusing to install its man pages because it doesn't like the way the Perl 5.6.1 (also known as "stable") runs its Pod::Man module. Does anyone have a workaround that doesn't involve installing Perl 5.8.0 (not yet promoted to "stable" by the Perl folks)? Heck, does that even work, or are the openssl folks trying to force a downgrade of Perl? CPAN doesn't offer an obvious solution.
I don't really imagine we need the man pages, but putting a dependency like this in the openssl source is thoughtless - right when we're trying to have confidence in the crew there. ___
A major theme of Christian - particularly Catholic - religious art over the centuries is the sexualization of the Infant Jesus. Why do you think so many of the priests are getting into young boys. There may be no clearer case of a link between the contents of artistic expression and truly repulsive, criminal behavior.
The sexualization of Infant Jesus occurs as a displacement of the sexuality of Mary. The site that was defaced by the Italian police, by resexualizing Mary, was bring sexuality back to its healthy focus and helping save future generations of young boys from priestly predation. This good work must be continued. Government repression of the resexualization of Mary leads indirectly to child rape.
But then, considering the state of most state schools, whether in Italy or here, that's what government, at least metaphorically, is largely about anyway. We must reclaim Eden, reject the cannibal rites of Rome, and cease devouring our young in the name of a Mary robbed of a sexuality which shone even to God - that being her triumph. ___
Let's say you have an elaborately-customized server setup. Let's even imagine that some of your storage for both data and programs isn't sitting at a single PC, but is in network-attached storage. Now, you want to upgrade the hardware to 64-bit without having to recompile everything - or maybe just upgrade some of the servers while continue to share program code off the storage.
You get only one answer: AMD. You can take your complexly-configured servers and not have to redo them from scratch. And the hobbiest gains the same advantage - swap drives, compile yourself a 64-bit kernel, and forget about doing a virgin install of Debian 64. ___
There's this great thing that's been happening in Western culture over the last century, which consists in bringing visual intelligence to parity in media with verbal. But there's also this childish notion many tend towards in our culture (in most cultures) that if we valued A over B before, and now we learn that B has special value which had been overlooked in favor of A, then the revaluing of B should also demote A. Thus for instance there are many examples from "feminism" and "culture theory" of the equation of the written word with "linear" thinking and even "patriarchial" ideology, with some notion that this A should be overthrown by B. Well, we don't need the antithesis to triumph, we need the synthesis.
Visually, despite all the new visual media from photography forward, we're still a pretty stupid culture. Most of our smarts are still in texts, from books to the ASCII files that make up most all the code and configuration of *NIX systems. And the main use of computers in business is in preparing, exchanging, storing and searching texts. It's going to be this way for a long time, because text is a place where human beings have established a foundation of collective brilliance that goes far beyond the world's best video collection. It's not going to be replaced by a Matrix-like collective video game anytime soon. And the moves in that direction will likely be rendered by text-based *NIX systems.
Linux is just about there for handling text. AbiWord and OpenOffice will, within the year, have parity with anything else, and price advantage. XFree is anti-aliased. The major thing missing is the equivalent of Quark or PageMaker, and maybe a font front-end that's as simple as Adobe, so that Linux becomes backward compatible with print production.
Computer games aren't anything most offices want to see their employees playing anyhow. What they care about is systems that allow workers to transparently produce and interact with texts. And that's what most independent knowledge workers care about too - even most programmers. Code is text, "higher level" tools that let you draw connections between objects in visual space will continue to suck for all but the most brain-dead programming.
And the only part of the workforce that doesn't need to be literate any more is the unemployed. ___
Intel just laid off thousands of workers, following a reduction in workforce by attrition of a few thousand others. It's an advantage if a firm can be flexible enough to lay off a good portion of its workers during a down time in the market for their products. Transmeta is selling to the same markets as AMD and Intel. Being able to adjust their labor costs more flexibly at in this period might be a demonstration of what in the longer term turns out to be an advantage.
And as long as Linus is there, all you suckers will line up to work for them again in a year or two when their market comes back and they rehire. You're not gonna stay away just because your or some friends of yours once got layed off, are ya? ___
Albany sits on a pretty nice conjunction of Interstates running to NYC, Boston, Montreal & points west, not to mention the Taconic Parkway running to NYC via Armonk. The city may be dreary, but the countyside in every direction is quite fine, surrounded as it is by the Adirondacks (one of the largest parks in the country), the Catskills, and the Green Mountains of Vermont, so the second home and ski-ing opportunities are wide open. It's also a good distance from any terrorist target (unlike NYC and Boston), and it's not in Texas. ___
So the trick for a Webcaster would be to also be an "FCC-licensed radio broadcaster," which means all the college stations could Webcast. It also brings in the issue of what the minimum cost is to become FCC-licensed. Are there HAM licenses that allow for music broadcasts?
How much should we focus on Linux, as compared to the broader front of *nix? Solaris is converging with Linux; and OSX is, as a *nix, a lot closer to Linux than OS9 was. Is there anything wrong with a world in which *nix beats Microsoft on the OS front, and we end up with a market that's 40% OSX, 30% Linux, 15% Solaris, 5% *BSD and a 10% Windows remnant? Sun's coming around to understanding the game this way. How do we get Apple to join in?
People become terrorists because they are terrified. A Muslim whose education at a madrasas has consisted totally of reading the Koran for its power, is terrified by the powers we in the West gain from our books and films and (relatively) free communnications, so, terrified, they seek to return the terror to what they see as its source.
When I was training typical office workers in using computers back in the 80s, the most difficult hurdle was that most of them were terrified that the computer was sentient enough to become offended if they did something 'stupid' and intentionally punish them for their mistakes. Just as Muslims see a god in their book, even 'modern' Americans tend to see gods in their boxes - and both are terrified that those gods will punish them if they stray, even in ignorance, from their presumed commandments.
And now the Congress is terrified of computer networks, and seeks to terrorize those who appear to be favored by special powers by the new network gods, who must be made fearful of Congress's powers lest they reach out through the networks to strike them dead.
Lesson: Anyone whose power source is different from your own is guilty of witchcraft (whether that source is more or less advanced than yours makes little difference - thus 'modern' medicine derides 'witch doctors'). Since that witchcraft terrorizes you, you must hold the witches in check by terrorizing them in return. This is all simple anthropology.
Sometimes the witches (fundamentalist Muslims) are trying to kill you; sometimes they (sysadmins) aren't. The key to maximizing peace is overpowering the first group either with new culture or, if that fails, with containment or death; and overpowering your own paranoia regarding the second group, by whatever means are available. The tricky part comes if our own Congress continues towards behavior equivalent to that of fundamentalist Muslims. Our first course should be to ease their paranoia. ___
I don't hack graphics code, but I've used graphics programs enough to know that there are usually a number of ways to get to a particular end result with an image. If Microsoft IP were dropped from OpenGL, are there other functions that would produce equivalent output, or are the patents so broad as to cover what the output even looks like, not just the methods used to get to that look? ___
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, buildings are treated differently. (Is cyberspace inside or outside space for these purposes?) But there's still a general right of public access to places of business as long as the door opens and there's no sign or guard specifically informing you you can't go farther.
Arresting someone for what this kid did is on the level of arresting someone on a shoplifting charge who has merely walked into the store. You've walked in, so you could take something, so you're guilty?
If they vary on different copies of the same CD, it's trivially easy to run diff and isolate them. If they're the same across all copies of the same CD, they're a bit harder to find, but someone finding them can distribute a patch for the disk image to disables them. There should be a map to where the keys are, and if that's hidden, its address needs to be kept somewhere. Do they plan to rewrite the codes that handles this for each CD, so that its fingerprint can't be simply found and the rest unravelled?
Now, nation states themselves are in large part fictions. So which other fictions should they associate with and invest in? Should a state appropriate, even nationalize, a good fiction when one comes along? Should George II wear his Mickey Mouse hat on state occassions? Should he carry a cross? Should Saddam be let to live a few more years if he'll just play along and dress like Darth?
Even the most "realistic" views of the world are largely fictions. It's time to take conscious control of our choices here; and more than anything it's time for some new religions which are compatible with, but broader than, science. The precise place to find these is the field known as science fiction - duh.
The trick isn't to find someone who knows it all, but someone who is aware of what they don't know yet, and is curious enough about it to stay up all night with a puzzle if needed.
The point isn't to send the people away who, through no fault of their own, don't arrive by the front door. The point is to convert them to your own customers.
Can someone please copy it into a message? Stupid tech-hostile site. About as usable as a spacecraft that's always "right side up" in space.
The other night my housemate and I were wondering, "Is there anything we see advertised on the shows we watch that we actually buy?" At first we couldn't think of anything. Eventually an ad came on for a brand of gasoline I sometimes pump. There are certainly some brands of stuff I don't buy because I'd never want to be associated with the advertising. Has there been any research on the negatives of showing commercials to the sorts of folks who are greatly annoyed by most of them?
But if you really want me to watch commercials as a condition of receiving television - which I don't consider totally a bum deal since I don't watch much television and have never subscribed to cable - then use technology to allow me to see commercials that are about stuff I might have an actual interest in buying. This should be done in a way that can't trace back to me as an individual. I would gladly watch commercials for, say, portable mp3 players - but showing me commercials for cars is just dumb, since I won't be buying a new car in the next 5 years, and you can't tell or show me enough about a car in a minute to interest me anyway.
And please don't show me ads for prescription drugs. The last thing I want to do is justify the further inflation of medical costs to pay for these ads; and I really don't want to think about other people's diseases when I'm trying to relax into some escapist TV - or even focus on the nightly news, for that matter. I mean, old people are depressed, need diapers, and the males can't get it up without help ... but do I need to meditate on my still-years-off future decay every time I want to luxuriate in the fires and floods besetting distant parts of our greenhoused world?
Why leave it to Red Hat? Any organized band of Open Sourcerors could go into any town and slap together a pretty good infrastructure using cheap hardware and the GPL'd distro and daemons of choice. If they keep a record of the steps taken, this can be posted as a HOWTO. The model of "We'll get it going for free, and then members of our team will compete on the open market for support contracts after the first X months of operation," would have to look better than Microsoft's "We'll get it going for free, and then you're locked into us for decades as a sole-source vendor."
The only question - the critical one - is how to form an anarchic gang of Open Sourcerors into something a town could feel responsible contracting with. First genius to figure that out will have done as much as Linus to afford us all prosperous consulting careers down the road. So, how to form our Seven Sourceri, and take on the gang terrorizing the town "for its own good"?
Using CGI to make movies to save the price of actors is like improving the horse carriage by inventing an electric buggy whip. Since the human imagination is what it's all about anyhow, direct stimulation of the brain's dream centers is the technology which will prevail.
Let's say that you come up with the first true religion, an attitude so perfect towards the Powers that they grace your every gaze and gesture with convenient miracles. Well, first off, tell folks in your home town - none of them will believe you except for maybe your mom. Then go find some hooker to convert to your truth - she or he will probably be grateful enough for the attention to go along, but hardly in a position to convert the world. Okay, then go out and find about 12 guys for MLM. Generate some pyrotechnics by getting the Powers to help in some evictions of Lesser Powers from their human fan clubs. Throw some wine and bread parties. Perform stupid animal tricks with a jackass. Progress perhaps, but still not much danger of your word really getting out. Then take it to the point of self-righteous paranoia, accuse your closest aids of being ready to betray you, show the Powers that you really aren't cool enough to present the true religion after all, and see how they then justify all your paranoia by setting you up to be a human sacrifice in a very public way. The News at Six picks it up. Shazamm, your word gets out!
If the board members don't have the personal resources to repay such small loans, what the heck are they doing on the board of a going concern? And why did they vote to remove their personal liability if they do fail to repay on schedule? These people should be worth how many millions each? The whole success of SonicBlue depends on being seen as the good guys standing up to sleazy industries. Repaying those ethically questionable loans was correctly brought to the center of the agenda. As a shareholder I demand the immediate resignation of the board.
You might think that Hitler, who got elected with the financial support of big business (while in the US, Henry Ford was a major fan too), wouldn't have resorted to intellectual property to meet his need to acquire vast wealth. Not only did he earn millions in royalties from Mein Kampf, but he got a share in the proceeds from sales of photos of him by his official photographer, on whose behalf he extended the copyright law, showing that there's more than one mousey little guy with an appreciation of the value of his image!
Perhaps if Sony technology had been in place, he would have gained enough through IP control to have been satiated, and not forced take extreme measures to try to make the world a better place through his policy of regime change in neighboring lands.
___
You might look at Invisible Seattle's 1984 BBS-based in.s.omni, a collaborative effort that involved putting kiosks at art shows and in the basement cafe of the Elliot Bay Book Company, along with dial-in access. It used a room-based BBS arrangement plus the assumption of the names and personae of literary-artistic semi-obscure but mythic characters by the principals. As I remember it, it was a lot more fun - and smarter - than anything on the Web. But we were satisfied with such simple toys then.
The principle behind the (bad) decisions is the (somewhat good) notion that the society that shows some favoritism towards economic interests ends up with more of an economy and thus everyone's better off, even though the gravity of the economic interests distorts the local sector of social space-time.
Well, how do we get similar respect for something like the "Open Software Economic Interest Group"? Major economic value is being created here. The whole society, worldwide, can gain benefit by granting a favorable environment in which the OSEIG can carry out its wealth-creating function. We are as worthy of political favoritism as any corporate entity. We are not ever going to see a society in which economic interests are not granted major favors - but how, as an emerging economic interest, do we collect the favors that, if these games are to work right, should be ours (those of us too stupid to sell the old IPO stock in time, anyhow)?
If the process works right, we should be able to even acquire domains of potential use to OSEIG's (and thus the greater society's) economic interests, simply by showing that the pie will be richer for all if those domains are in our hands - not because we're 'better,' but because we represent a larger share of and contribution to economic activity. The current underlying 'corrupt' argument for favoring groups with the most economic juice should favor us. Let's demand, not their end, but their proper and logical application.
___
Replacing the install_docs part of the Makefile with the version from 0.9.6c fixes the problem. I'd quote it here but that violates /.'s "postercomment" compression filter. Anyway, it installs the docs just fine.
___
openssl-0.9.6e (unlike d) goes through an almost endless sequence of refusing to install its man pages because it doesn't like the way the Perl 5.6.1 (also known as "stable") runs its Pod::Man module. Does anyone have a workaround that doesn't involve installing Perl 5.8.0 (not yet promoted to "stable" by the Perl folks)? Heck, does that even work, or are the openssl folks trying to force a downgrade of Perl? CPAN doesn't offer an obvious solution.
I don't really imagine we need the man pages, but putting a dependency like this in the openssl source is thoughtless - right when we're trying to have confidence in the crew there.
___
A major theme of Christian - particularly Catholic - religious art over the centuries is the sexualization of the Infant Jesus. Why do you think so many of the priests are getting into young boys. There may be no clearer case of a link between the contents of artistic expression and truly repulsive, criminal behavior.
The sexualization of Infant Jesus occurs as a displacement of the sexuality of Mary. The site that was defaced by the Italian police, by resexualizing Mary, was bring sexuality back to its healthy focus and helping save future generations of young boys from priestly predation. This good work must be continued. Government repression of the resexualization of Mary leads indirectly to child rape.
But then, considering the state of most state schools, whether in Italy or here, that's what government, at least metaphorically, is largely about anyway. We must reclaim Eden, reject the cannibal rites of Rome, and cease devouring our young in the name of a Mary robbed of a sexuality which shone even to God - that being her triumph.
___
Let's say you have an elaborately-customized server setup. Let's even imagine that some of your storage for both data and programs isn't sitting at a single PC, but is in network-attached storage. Now, you want to upgrade the hardware to 64-bit without having to recompile everything - or maybe just upgrade some of the servers while continue to share program code off the storage.
You get only one answer: AMD. You can take your complexly-configured servers and not have to redo them from scratch. And the hobbiest gains the same advantage - swap drives, compile yourself a 64-bit kernel, and forget about doing a virgin install of Debian 64.
___
There's this great thing that's been happening in Western culture over the last century, which consists in bringing visual intelligence to parity in media with verbal. But there's also this childish notion many tend towards in our culture (in most cultures) that if we valued A over B before, and now we learn that B has special value which had been overlooked in favor of A, then the revaluing of B should also demote A. Thus for instance there are many examples from "feminism" and "culture theory" of the equation of the written word with "linear" thinking and even "patriarchial" ideology, with some notion that this A should be overthrown by B. Well, we don't need the antithesis to triumph, we need the synthesis.
Visually, despite all the new visual media from photography forward, we're still a pretty stupid culture. Most of our smarts are still in texts, from books to the ASCII files that make up most all the code and configuration of *NIX systems. And the main use of computers in business is in preparing, exchanging, storing and searching texts. It's going to be this way for a long time, because text is a place where human beings have established a foundation of collective brilliance that goes far beyond the world's best video collection. It's not going to be replaced by a Matrix-like collective video game anytime soon. And the moves in that direction will likely be rendered by text-based *NIX systems.
Linux is just about there for handling text. AbiWord and OpenOffice will, within the year, have parity with anything else, and price advantage. XFree is anti-aliased. The major thing missing is the equivalent of Quark or PageMaker, and maybe a font front-end that's as simple as Adobe, so that Linux becomes backward compatible with print production.
Computer games aren't anything most offices want to see their employees playing anyhow. What they care about is systems that allow workers to transparently produce and interact with texts. And that's what most independent knowledge workers care about too - even most programmers. Code is text, "higher level" tools that let you draw connections between objects in visual space will continue to suck for all but the most brain-dead programming.
And the only part of the workforce that doesn't need to be literate any more is the unemployed.
___
Intel just laid off thousands of workers, following a reduction in workforce by attrition of a few thousand others. It's an advantage if a firm can be flexible enough to lay off a good portion of its workers during a down time in the market for their products. Transmeta is selling to the same markets as AMD and Intel. Being able to adjust their labor costs more flexibly at in this period might be a demonstration of what in the longer term turns out to be an advantage.
And as long as Linus is there, all you suckers will line up to work for them again in a year or two when their market comes back and they rehire. You're not gonna stay away just because your or some friends of yours once got layed off, are ya?
___
Albany sits on a pretty nice conjunction of Interstates running to NYC, Boston, Montreal & points west, not to mention the Taconic Parkway running to NYC via Armonk. The city may be dreary, but the countyside in every direction is quite fine, surrounded as it is by the Adirondacks (one of the largest parks in the country), the Catskills, and the Green Mountains of Vermont, so the second home and ski-ing opportunities are wide open. It's also a good distance from any terrorist target (unlike NYC and Boston), and it's not in Texas.
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So the trick for a Webcaster would be to also be an "FCC-licensed radio broadcaster," which means all the college stations could Webcast. It also brings in the issue of what the minimum cost is to become FCC-licensed. Are there HAM licenses that allow for music broadcasts?
How much should we focus on Linux, as compared to the broader front of *nix? Solaris is converging with Linux; and OSX is, as a *nix, a lot closer to Linux than OS9 was. Is there anything wrong with a world in which *nix beats Microsoft on the OS front, and we end up with a market that's 40% OSX, 30% Linux, 15% Solaris, 5% *BSD and a 10% Windows remnant? Sun's coming around to understanding the game this way. How do we get Apple to join in?
People become terrorists because they are terrified. A Muslim whose education at a madrasas has consisted totally of reading the Koran for its power, is terrified by the powers we in the West gain from our books and films and (relatively) free communnications, so, terrified, they seek to return the terror to what they see as its source.
When I was training typical office workers in using computers back in the 80s, the most difficult hurdle was that most of them were terrified that the computer was sentient enough to become offended if they did something 'stupid' and intentionally punish them for their mistakes. Just as Muslims see a god in their book, even 'modern' Americans tend to see gods in their boxes - and both are terrified that those gods will punish them if they stray, even in ignorance, from their presumed commandments.
And now the Congress is terrified of computer networks, and seeks to terrorize those who appear to be favored by special powers by the new network gods, who must be made fearful of Congress's powers lest they reach out through the networks to strike them dead.
Lesson: Anyone whose power source is different from your own is guilty of witchcraft (whether that source is more or less advanced than yours makes little difference - thus 'modern' medicine derides 'witch doctors'). Since that witchcraft terrorizes you, you must hold the witches in check by terrorizing them in return. This is all simple anthropology.
Sometimes the witches (fundamentalist Muslims) are trying to kill you; sometimes they (sysadmins) aren't. The key to maximizing peace is overpowering the first group either with new culture or, if that fails, with containment or death; and overpowering your own paranoia regarding the second group, by whatever means are available. The tricky part comes if our own Congress continues towards behavior equivalent to that of fundamentalist Muslims. Our first course should be to ease their paranoia.
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I don't hack graphics code, but I've used graphics programs enough to know that there are usually a number of ways to get to a particular end result with an image. If Microsoft IP were dropped from OpenGL, are there other functions that would produce equivalent output, or are the patents so broad as to cover what the output even looks like, not just the methods used to get to that look?
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