All cars should have a remote-controlled kill switch that is governed by a threshhold system. With every new car comes a remote control with a unique ID. So, if you see a really dangerous/drunk driver swerving all over the road, doing 150 mph, etc., etc., you point and click your remote on him. If X number of people click on him within Y amount of time, his car shuts off and he has to wait an hour before he can go again. Plenty of time for the cops to come pick him up.
There are things to figure out, to be sure. You can't just have a car screech to a halt, but you could have one brake steadily to a stop and pull off to the side of the road. And sure, you could get a turkey who'd build a remote control with randomly rotating id so he alone could KO somebody's ride, but that turkey would in all likelihood be one us geeks; and I'm fine with that.
You're 100% right. If re-elected, Bush and his cronies will do everything in their power to get us, the rabble, under control. That's why this has to stop now. Get off your butt, register to vote, help out on the campaign of a candidate running against Bush, and throw his and Ashcroft's ass out of office.
It depends on you, and nobody but you to get it done.
I think there should be a karma credit for being ahead of the/. editorial curve. This is about the fourth time this has happened. grumble grumble grumble
Seems to me that one way or another, the RIAA and content companies in their present form will die. Fans already know about P2P and file sharing, and that is not going to go away until the day they can implant restrictor chips in our heads, cripple every computer, and monitor every communication/sound wave on earth (READ: never).
But your skills such as yours are valuable, and I don't see the need for them going away. However, instead of working for a record company in the future, I wonder if you won't work for musicians themselves in much the same way that a band probably currently hires an accountant, lawyer, or agent.
Have you and your colleagues thought about this sort of scenario, and have any of you talked about forming an agency/consultancy in this way that would work for artists instead of the other way around?
It seems to me that you folk have a golden opportunity to help artists avoid the tyranny of the record labels and capture the money that currently goes to Mottola and Rosen. It would also do the world a great service by putting the final nail in the coffin of the content companies, but that's only if you care about the rest of us.
I am part of the Dean campaign here in Brooklyn, and I am qualified to label the campaign net savvy. Over the past 6 years I've built massive e-commerce sites, B2B, non-profit, and many other sorts of web-projects. I used to work with asp/sql server, now mostly in L.A.M.P. And I'm not the only one. Three-quarters of the people in the campaign work in tech or internet-related professions, from coders to DBAs to sysadmins to designers to information architects. Furthermore, almost without exception all of those people use OSS. Yes, OSS, the same constituency as those who read/. In fact, through/. I have accidentally stumbled upon other Dean campaigners, and through the Dean campaign I have accidentally stumbled upon other/.-ers. If that doesn't define a net-savvy campaign, then I defy you to come up with a better definition.
But even without that, using Meetup and MoveOn, blogs and online contributions does make you net-savvy, because it is ground-breaking and it is working. They have used the internet as a tool to organize, raise money, and turn Dean from a little-known name into the front runner in the democratic field. That, my friend, makes you net savvy. Measure that against Bush, who won't even let you email him anymore.
It means the same thing as when the bank forecloses on your house: they seize all your assets, give your debtors pennies on the dollar (lenders have enormous influence over the operation of a corporation; they are expected to use it and should. Witness who had to pony up when Long Term Capital Management went belly up. Yup, it was Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that were forced to bail it out), revoke all your patents and licenses and trademarks, and basically do everything you need to to put a corporation out of business for good.
Your point about what happens to the employees is a good one, and one that Adbusters never addressed. I'll take a stab: the employees lowest on the totem pole are paid the handsomest severances, the reasoning being that as the lowest on the totem pole they had the least influence/role in the company's misdeeds. The size of the severance decreases rapidly as you move up the ladder, with middle-management on a case-by-case basis. Chances are, they knew something but did nothing. Upper management gets nothing and goes to jail, period.
Is it bad for the market? No, not really. Because all the competitors who behave legally and ethically swoop in to fill the void. Expanded market share probably means they'll hire more people, and who better to hire than the innocent but well-trained ex-employees of the doomed firm? What about middle-managers, you ask? Well, during a merger or takeover they never get to keep their jobs anyway. Same difference.
I read in Adbusters once. It was about revoking corporate personhood. Used to be that corporations existed at the sufferance of the public. They were allowed to operate for fixed periods of time, like 5 or ten years. Sort of like the Hudson's Bay Company. At the end of that time they had to petition to renew their right to exist. If they behaved badly, they were squashed like bugs.
Then there was a landmark case in this country back in the 1800's (Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad) that established that corporations are legal persons. They have all the rights that an actual person has, except they exist potentially forever and don't have any of the responsibilities that you and I have. So essentially General Electric is in the eyes of the law an incredibly large, multi-billionaire. But unlike you or I, GE cannot now be put to death for its crimes.
Adbuster suggested that either we revoke corporate personhood, or we institute the death penalty for corporations that cannot behave. Ahem, can anyone think of any corporations we might apply this to?
There are a couple myths about this stuff that we need to dispel.
The first myth is that the troubles we're having organizing are not the sole province of engineers, who supposedly don't understand people or politics all that well. It's a problem with any group of people you're trying to organize. Even lawyers, who you would think are really excellent at that sort of thing, bicker forever trying to get anything organized.
The second myth is that you have to have complete unanimity of opinion for an activist group to work. No organized group of humans in the world is a monolith. There are factions within everything. Saying that techies could never get their acts together because there are the BSD vs. Linux factions, the vi vs. emacs factions, or the debian vs. suse factions makes about as much sense as saying that the Sierra Club could never exist because there are the back-to-the-land, vegetarian, vegan, organic food, naturalist, and activist anti-corporate factions within it. The thing to remember that all an organization needs to do is capture enough overlap between all the factions in a given area.
The third myth is that we can't make a difference because we're all just average folks without the ear of the government. If we're not billionaires, the thinking goes, then how could we possibly get officials and representatives to listen to us? The answer is, numbers and time and a little effort more than make up for lack of billions of dollars. Do you think that the folks involved in the Civil Rights movement were wealthy? How about all the poor and untouchables marching with Gandhi? Did they have oodles of coin? The truth is, the Civil Rights movement, Feminist Movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, and all the others most of us have been weaned to think were incredibly huge and amazing and all-encompassing were tiny compared to the internet-organized and inspired protests and movements that have sprung up in the past year alone. And we made those happen.
Yes, some might say, but what difference have those really made? Bush is still in office, we're mired in the quagmire of Iraq anyway, the economy still sucks, and the *AA's are still stripping us of civil liberties with impugnity. But under the media pastiche the powers that be are running scared. Why do you think they're doing what they're doing to take away our rights and shackle our minds? Because we are the ones who really have the power, and they know it. They know they're on the brink of being swept aside, and that's why they're fighting like hell to keep us, the rabble, down.
We already forced them to back down over the Total Information Awareness program. We've also started to be heard in congress over what the RIAA's doing. That senator who upbraided them about their scorched earth campaign against internet users spoke up because he got enough heat from you and me.
The conclusion is that we techies can and are making a difference. So don't give up, pitch in!
1. A lot of people have said it already, but installing new applications is a pain in the tuckus
2. changing the screen resolution. playing with modelines and sync rates at the risk of my display exploding is not my idea of fun. and no, x-configurator is no better.
3. RTFM responses from junior highschool students to legitimate requests for help. Google didn't help, or gave me an answer in Portuguese, and no it really didn't occur to me to read the FAQ on fuzzwurzle.com/blips/linux? You know, the FAQ that is not archived and has been moved to its new home at mxlplix.org/ribbons which no longer exists?
4. General pain in the ass that it is to configure anything, install anything, upgrade anything, or modify anything. Even when I've gotten something to work after hours of effort, the fix I finally get to work does not always work for the next machine I have to do the same thing on, nor do I always remember what that fix was by the time I have to do it again.
OK, we all hate and loathe the RIAA and MPAA and we will bring them down. I think it's time to start planning for a post-RIAA world order.
First, and most fun, should come the war-crimes tribunal. Hilary Rosen, Jack Valenti, Congressmen Berman, Tauzin, Hatch, and Hollings, and all the top execs at the content companies should be put in stockades in public squares around the country so that music fans and citizens can throw CDs, cassettes, and excrement at them (sorry, triply redundant, that.). Then we put them in strait jackets, put them in rubber rooms, and force them to listen to N'Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, and all of their terrible music until their ears bleed and they're reduced to piles of gibbering insanity. Then we'll give them a life sentence in a nice asylum where they can finger paint and watch Barney with expressions of childlike wonder.
Then we designate a national holiday to mark our liberation, to be celebrated by amateur musicians, thespians, and artists performing free in public plazas and parks across the land. We'll show movies outdoors against the sides of buildings, like in the old days, and have carnival booths where you can pay a nickel to take a whack at Lars and the Metallica boys. Ahhh, can you see it?
I've said it a couple times recently on/. The EFF is a great organization, but they're more analogous to the ACLU. That is, they take legal action as opposed to lobbying government. Then you have mighty membership-driven organizations like the AARP that can and often do bring congressmen and corporations to their knees. What we need is something like that for tech.
You don't need to have a staff of thousands and millions in the bank to create one. You just need a handful of motivated individuals with a vision, and a few computers. I would say that on that front we're well-covered here on/., no? Look at MoveOn.org. That's like three guys who built that, and look at the difference it's having on Dean's presidential campaign. You just need to make a lense to focus all the anger out there over what the *AA's are doing.
But you're right, this might not be the best place to build something. If you and others are interested in doing something like this, email me at dakong27 at yahoo dot com.
This isn't Nazi Germany yet. They haven't quite yet started rounding us up and sending us to the camps. But we can't just sit here and do nothing.
Crushing CDs with a steamroller is not a significant or sensible event by itself. No such theater is, by itself. It is the political symbolism behind it that matters. Why did the patriots dump the tea into Boston harbor? Was it because they hated tea? Was it really a good thing to do, on the face of it? It just made the harbor dirty, wasted a whole lot of tea, and probably caused a brief spike in the local price of tea, ironically hurting the average joe. So why did they do it? Because they wanted to send England a message: we object to your levying taxes without our having a say-so. Likewise crushing CDs or some other protest (whichever you all think would work) would not be about hatred of CDs, but sending a message to the RIAA and government that we object to their actions.
I agree with both of you that most people never take action. The topmost word and first reaction for most people is "Can't!" That is why every movement and social change in history has started with a few, just a handful of highly motivated individuals with a vision. That's why we don't need and don't have to expect that everyone out there will suddenly agree with us and work to change the laws. We just need to get our acts together and go to work. We understand the problem, and have some good ideas about how to solve it, so let's do it already.
We'll have to brave ten thousand NO's, the first couple thousand coming from the enlightened denizens of these very pages, but we only have to get to one yes.
I would love to put together an event like that in Union Sq. in New York, right in front of the Virgin Megastore. Have a few thousand of the "pirate" masses turn out, throw their old CDs in a heap, and then pulverize them with a steamroller. How's that for sending a message to the RIAA and the powers-that-be? Betcha that would make the front page of every paper in the world.
I find the easiest and most effective way to explain OSS and why Linux is great is to liken it to a collaborative scientific project like the human genome project or the race to cure cancer. The public has been conditioned for years by movies, tv, and print to wrap their heads around the idea of thousands of scientists in white lab coats using their enormous brains to create things that are great for industry and humanity. And to some extent the public has come to grasp that that's how the Internet itself evolved. So if you tap into that image of hordes of geniuses working for humanity, the reaction goes from "Huh?" to "Wow."
Then you show them quake playing on your linux laptop and hey presto! Instant convert.
However, as a footnote, folks, linux really, really needs to become easier to install/uninstall new programs and to configure if we really want the average Joe to buy in completely...
But will it mean they're done politically? They've bought an awful lot of politicians in Washington, no matter what our honored lobbiest guest said here a couple days ago. (If Bill Clinton and other top pols show up to a going-away party for Hilary "Wicked Witch of the East" Rosen, I would say they have bought influence.)
My question is, the media like to talk about how the average person doesn't know what file sharing is and what the issues at stake are, but if there are 60 million people doing it then how can that possibly be true? If one fifth of the population of your country does anything on a regular basis, then how can you seriously claim that they don't understand what that activity is? It seems like so many other ridiculous claims ginned up by journalists like that disgraced NYTimes reporter, and repeated unthinkingly by the rest of the news crowd.
OK, so if that's bunk, and those 60 million people do understand what is at stake with file-sharing, then why aren't they making themselves heard in the government? Why isn't that anger translating politically? My theory is there is no membership organization they can focus their voice through. If we had something like the AARP or NRA for online freedoms, my bet is you'd start seeing politicians learning to dance to our tune in an awful hurry. (and no, the EFF is not that organization. they do great work, but a membership organization they are not).
What on earth makes anyone think they deserve our money? The great music they promote? The way they gently nurture budding artists? How about how they promote honesty in our government? Bah!
Pay them nothing. Let them starve the way they let their artists starve. How on earth did we ever get to a place where a company can claim to own our culture, and even worse, have a lot of average joes believe that's the way it has always been?
Folks, we the people own our culture collectively. Yes, artists create, but without people watching/listening/enjoying the creation, it don't count for diddly squat. It's a conversation, you see, and twisting it into a monologue is just nuts.
So get up from the keyboard and do something about it. I personally am working hard on the Howard Dean presidential campaign, but take whatever approach you like. Just do something.
Through the crazy fortunes of the New York IT industry these last couple of years, I find myself heading up a QA team in an office in Midtown Manhattan. They're basically a bunch of out of work actors moonlighting as online product reviewers. So, I untangle the mess my predecessor left (who got fired because it was a mess) and I figure the reviewers should be able to get through X number of products a day. But they're not. I can't figure it out. Then I catch them chatting on AIM or Yahoo IM all day.
So I'm thinking, and decide to wipe their machines and install a nice RH distro on all of them. Set them up with StarOffice, Mozilla, and Samba and hey presto they're doing 50% more products per day now (I'm not naive--I know they're gonna write emails, but it's not the time sink IM-ing is). Furthermore, their old Pentium machines are faster, and I can SSH into their boxes to fix anything that's wrong.
That last bit is key, because the tech dept. at this company is so bad they don't even know what an IP address is. But, they like to spy. There are cameras everywhere, and believe me, they ain't protecting national secrets at this place. So I figure, if they like to spy on you with cameras, they probably also like to spy on your computer. So with linux, no more spyware.
send him a contribution, or just a kind letter thanking him for his efforts. Then explain to him that copyright infringement is not theft; it's just copyright infringement. Then if you get that far, gently suggest that content companies have bastardized the entire concept of copyright law, and that it should be done away with.
Hell, if this is News for Nerds, it oughta be a special t-shirt. Maybe it could come with a chip in the collar that emits the sound of a CPU fan, kinda the low woo-woo-woo sound we all know and love. How about smart nano-fibers that resist coffee, jelly donut, and mountain dew stains? How about luminescent threads that only spell something out in the dark?
Or my absolute dream: a shirt that uses the peltier effect to cool you down in the summer. That I'd buy.
I wonder. On the one hand, there are 60 million Americans out there ending the old media cartels one download at a time, and that's a very good thing and it's revolutionary. But on the other hand, the online community seems utterly paralyzed in terms of taking real political action against those powers-that-be who are trying to take our rights away. Whether it be privacy or the DMCA or monopoly behavior, everytime they announce some new scheme to disenfranchize us, the answer from the online community is a deafening silence.
The EFF is a very good organization, and they're doing a lot of good work on our behalf. But they're more like the ACLU of cyberspace than, say, the Sierra Club or NRA. What we need is a membership organization that can carefully target politicians like Tauzin or Berman who do not vote our way. When millions of voters and campaign contributors speak, then, and only then, does the government listen.
You see, everything the CCP does is aimed at reaffirming their legitimacy as the one and ruling party. There is a Chinese space program to go to the moon. There is a program to build a navy to rival the US's. There was their version of linux, and now there's this project.
I admire their technical prowess, but they're not doing it with the good of humanity in mind. It's all about proving that they're not trapped in luohouzhuyi, literally "fall-behind-ism." They've failed as a communist party, so now the only thing keeping them in power is trying to prove that they're making China strong enough to resist foreign interference. That's what this project feels like to me.
I hope the content companies don't thrive online. I look forward to seeing them die off. Four years ago I thought that if they switched to something like what iTunes is now that they would make wads more cash, and music fans would be far better off. But they've done too much wrong for there to be any way out.
However, the end of the content companies will not be the end of art or music. There will always be art and music as long as people want to create and be entertained. But instead of content companies that own you the artist body and soul, they will be publicists and advertisement companies that work for you. They will also be much smaller with no monopoly power.
Artists will eventually realize that through a system like iTunes they can cut out the RIAA and take the lion's share of the price of a download themselves. Services like Kazaa will help fans who are too risk averse find out about new music for free, and a number of them will probably opt to spend the money they would once have spent on CDs on concert tickets and merchandise instead. So that too will benefit artists.
And without a cartel brainwashing the public into thinking Britney Spears is good music, there will be a lot more diversity and a lot more creativity out there. I believe that if we can beat back the RIAA and their employees in Congress there's a new cultural golden age out there waiting for us.
If you put a matter de-compiler right next to the universal constructor, then you're really cooking. Figure near 100% recycling. Think Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future.
But the official definition of economics is "the problem of scarcity." So if you don't have scarcity anymore, what does happen? Think I'm gonna go to work and take orders from the PHB anymore? Not on your life. I can stay home and have my UC build me pizzas and sodas until the cows come home. Get tired of your Honda, well then de-compile it and have the UC build you a Ferrari. No need to work to earn the $60,000 differential you'd have to cover now. So I predict the first thing you'd see is the death of capitalism and the 19th century monopoly model you see now.
But if you think the *AA's are horribly nasty industries trying to take everyone down with them, you can only imagine how vicious all those capitalists will be. UC's would be a moment of fantastic liberation for mankind which will allow everyone to do what they want to for a living instead of what they have to, but the capitalists won't see it that way. They like looking down their noses at the rest of us peons and telling us what to do. They won't give that up without a bloody fight.
We feel strongly that everyone should comply with the requirements of all laws.
So, Rosa Parks should not have sat in the White section of that bus, because it was illegal? Gandhi should not have broken British laws because they were, well, laws? Should every single American who exceeds the speed limit go to prison? Should every one of the 50 million Americans who share files on P2P networks instantly go to jail?
Hmmm, lemme think about it for a minute...NO! As somebody on/. pointed out a while back, accepting a law bought by a corrupt, self-serving multinational or trade group as what is right is ludicrous. I invite these lawyers, and folks like them, to go back and read Durkheim again. He said something interesting about what constitutes a crime: when a sufficient number of a society come to regard an act not as a crime, but as normal, then that act in fact is not a crime. Can you throw an entire population in jail, or have them executed? Can five lawyers from the DoJ really take it on themselves to per/prosecute 50 million people as criminals, or is it they who should modify their behavior?
For better or worse, folks, this is how people in government think. All the talkin' at 'em in the world is never going to change their behavior, so we must compel them to go somewhere else, and do something else. That means standing up and doing something, not just posting about it on Slashdot.
it only makes sense that companies will seek ways to expand their available labor supply. the greater the supply, the lower the price. during the dot-com era, the supply was tight and programmers of all ilk and ability made a lot of money. it was a rare moment when a sector of the labor market was able to extract nearly monopoly rents from capital.
but capital is far more able to flow to optimal conditions than labor is. nike can flow its money to labor supplies in india, but the laborers here can't follow it. even for a quarter of the salary of an american programmer, an indian programmer is still getting paid a princely sum relative to the rest of his society. i'm sure many american programmers wouldn't mind moving there and enjoying the same lifestyle. but they can't. visa issues.
in a fair world, the ceo's job should be outsourced too, sure, but in an even fairer world labor should be able to move as freely as capital. and in the world that i wished we lived in, the supply of capital would be just as elastic as the labor supply.
but it isn't. face it: either you own, or you are owned. there aren't many of the former, and they want to keep it that way. look at how hard the riaa is fighting to keep control.
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All cars should have a remote-controlled kill switch that is governed by a threshhold system. With every new car comes a remote control with a unique ID. So, if you see a really dangerous/drunk driver swerving all over the road, doing 150 mph, etc., etc., you point and click your remote on him. If X number of people click on him within Y amount of time, his car shuts off and he has to wait an hour before he can go again. Plenty of time for the cops to come pick him up.
There are things to figure out, to be sure. You can't just have a car screech to a halt, but you could have one brake steadily to a stop and pull off to the side of the road. And sure, you could get a turkey who'd build a remote control with randomly rotating id so he alone could KO somebody's ride, but that turkey would in all likelihood be one us geeks; and I'm fine with that.
You're 100% right. If re-elected, Bush and his cronies will do everything in their power to get us, the rabble, under control. That's why this has to stop now. Get off your butt, register to vote, help out on the campaign of a candidate running against Bush, and throw his and Ashcroft's ass out of office.
It depends on you, and nobody but you to get it done.
I think there should be a karma credit for being ahead of the /. editorial curve. This is about the fourth time this has happened. grumble grumble grumble
Seems to me that one way or another, the RIAA and content companies in their present form will die. Fans already know about P2P and file sharing, and that is not going to go away until the day they can implant restrictor chips in our heads, cripple every computer, and monitor every communication/sound wave on earth (READ: never).
But your skills such as yours are valuable, and I don't see the need for them going away. However, instead of working for a record company in the future, I wonder if you won't work for musicians themselves in much the same way that a band probably currently hires an accountant, lawyer, or agent.
Have you and your colleagues thought about this sort of scenario, and have any of you talked about forming an agency/consultancy in this way that would work for artists instead of the other way around?
It seems to me that you folk have a golden opportunity to help artists avoid the tyranny of the record labels and capture the money that currently goes to Mottola and Rosen. It would also do the world a great service by putting the final nail in the coffin of the content companies, but that's only if you care about the rest of us.
I am part of the Dean campaign here in Brooklyn, and I am qualified to label the campaign net savvy. Over the past 6 years I've built massive e-commerce sites, B2B, non-profit, and many other sorts of web-projects. I used to work with asp/sql server, now mostly in L.A.M.P. And I'm not the only one. Three-quarters of the people in the campaign work in tech or internet-related professions, from coders to DBAs to sysadmins to designers to information architects. Furthermore, almost without exception all of those people use OSS. Yes, OSS, the same constituency as those who read /. In fact, through /. I have accidentally stumbled upon other Dean campaigners, and through the Dean campaign I have accidentally stumbled upon other /.-ers. If that doesn't define a net-savvy campaign, then I defy you to come up with a better definition.
But even without that, using Meetup and MoveOn, blogs and online contributions does make you net-savvy, because it is ground-breaking and it is working. They have used the internet as a tool to organize, raise money, and turn Dean from a little-known name into the front runner in the democratic field. That, my friend, makes you net savvy. Measure that against Bush, who won't even let you email him anymore.
It means the same thing as when the bank forecloses on your house: they seize all your assets, give your debtors pennies on the dollar (lenders have enormous influence over the operation of a corporation; they are expected to use it and should. Witness who had to pony up when Long Term Capital Management went belly up. Yup, it was Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that were forced to bail it out), revoke all your patents and licenses and trademarks, and basically do everything you need to to put a corporation out of business for good.
Your point about what happens to the employees is a good one, and one that Adbusters never addressed. I'll take a stab: the employees lowest on the totem pole are paid the handsomest severances, the reasoning being that as the lowest on the totem pole they had the least influence/role in the company's misdeeds. The size of the severance decreases rapidly as you move up the ladder, with middle-management on a case-by-case basis. Chances are, they knew something but did nothing. Upper management gets nothing and goes to jail, period.
Is it bad for the market? No, not really. Because all the competitors who behave legally and ethically swoop in to fill the void. Expanded market share probably means they'll hire more people, and who better to hire than the innocent but well-trained ex-employees of the doomed firm? What about middle-managers, you ask? Well, during a merger or takeover they never get to keep their jobs anyway. Same difference.
I read in Adbusters once. It was about revoking corporate personhood. Used to be that corporations existed at the sufferance of the public. They were allowed to operate for fixed periods of time, like 5 or ten years. Sort of like the Hudson's Bay Company. At the end of that time they had to petition to renew their right to exist. If they behaved badly, they were squashed like bugs.
Then there was a landmark case in this country back in the 1800's (Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad) that established that corporations are legal persons. They have all the rights that an actual person has, except they exist potentially forever and don't have any of the responsibilities that you and I have. So essentially General Electric is in the eyes of the law an incredibly large, multi-billionaire. But unlike you or I, GE cannot now be put to death for its crimes.
Adbuster suggested that either we revoke corporate personhood, or we institute the death penalty for corporations that cannot behave. Ahem, can anyone think of any corporations we might apply this to?
There are a couple myths about this stuff that we need to dispel.
The first myth is that the troubles we're having organizing are not the sole province of engineers, who supposedly don't understand people or politics all that well. It's a problem with any group of people you're trying to organize. Even lawyers, who you would think are really excellent at that sort of thing, bicker forever trying to get anything organized.
The second myth is that you have to have complete unanimity of opinion for an activist group to work. No organized group of humans in the world is a monolith. There are factions within everything. Saying that techies could never get their acts together because there are the BSD vs. Linux factions, the vi vs. emacs factions, or the debian vs. suse factions makes about as much sense as saying that the Sierra Club could never exist because there are the back-to-the-land, vegetarian, vegan, organic food, naturalist, and activist anti-corporate factions within it. The thing to remember that all an organization needs to do is capture enough overlap between all the factions in a given area.
The third myth is that we can't make a difference because we're all just average folks without the ear of the government. If we're not billionaires, the thinking goes, then how could we possibly get officials and representatives to listen to us? The answer is, numbers and time and a little effort more than make up for lack of billions of dollars. Do you think that the folks involved in the Civil Rights movement were wealthy? How about all the poor and untouchables marching with Gandhi? Did they have oodles of coin? The truth is, the Civil Rights movement, Feminist Movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, and all the others most of us have been weaned to think were incredibly huge and amazing and all-encompassing were tiny compared to the internet-organized and inspired protests and movements that have sprung up in the past year alone. And we made those happen.
Yes, some might say, but what difference have those really made? Bush is still in office, we're mired in the quagmire of Iraq anyway, the economy still sucks, and the *AA's are still stripping us of civil liberties with impugnity. But under the media pastiche the powers that be are running scared. Why do you think they're doing what they're doing to take away our rights and shackle our minds? Because we are the ones who really have the power, and they know it. They know they're on the brink of being swept aside, and that's why they're fighting like hell to keep us, the rabble, down.
We already forced them to back down over the Total Information Awareness program. We've also started to be heard in congress over what the RIAA's doing. That senator who upbraided them about their scorched earth campaign against internet users spoke up because he got enough heat from you and me.
The conclusion is that we techies can and are making a difference. So don't give up, pitch in!
1. A lot of people have said it already, but installing new applications is a pain in the tuckus
2. changing the screen resolution. playing with modelines and sync rates at the risk of my display exploding is not my idea of fun. and no, x-configurator is no better.
3. RTFM responses from junior highschool students to legitimate requests for help. Google didn't help, or gave me an answer in Portuguese, and no it really didn't occur to me to read the FAQ on fuzzwurzle.com/blips/linux? You know, the FAQ that is not archived and has been moved to its new home at mxlplix.org/ribbons which no longer exists?
4. General pain in the ass that it is to configure anything, install anything, upgrade anything, or modify anything. Even when I've gotten something to work after hours of effort, the fix I finally get to work does not always work for the next machine I have to do the same thing on, nor do I always remember what that fix was by the time I have to do it again.
OK, we all hate and loathe the RIAA and MPAA and we will bring them down. I think it's time to start planning for a post-RIAA world order.
First, and most fun, should come the war-crimes tribunal. Hilary Rosen, Jack Valenti, Congressmen Berman, Tauzin, Hatch, and Hollings, and all the top execs at the content companies should be put in stockades in public squares around the country so that music fans and citizens can throw CDs, cassettes, and excrement at them (sorry, triply redundant, that.). Then we put them in strait jackets, put them in rubber rooms, and force them to listen to N'Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, and all of their terrible music until their ears bleed and they're reduced to piles of gibbering insanity. Then we'll give them a life sentence in a nice asylum where they can finger paint and watch Barney with expressions of childlike wonder.
Then we designate a national holiday to mark our liberation, to be celebrated by amateur musicians, thespians, and artists performing free in public plazas and parks across the land. We'll show movies outdoors against the sides of buildings, like in the old days, and have carnival booths where you can pay a nickel to take a whack at Lars and the Metallica boys. Ahhh, can you see it?
I've said it a couple times recently on /. The EFF is a great organization, but they're more analogous to the ACLU. That is, they take legal action as opposed to lobbying government. Then you have mighty membership-driven organizations like the AARP that can and often do bring congressmen and corporations to their knees. What we need is something like that for tech.
/., no? Look at MoveOn.org. That's like three guys who built that, and look at the difference it's having on Dean's presidential campaign. You just need to make a lense to focus all the anger out there over what the *AA's are doing.
You don't need to have a staff of thousands and millions in the bank to create one. You just need a handful of motivated individuals with a vision, and a few computers. I would say that on that front we're well-covered here on
But you're right, this might not be the best place to build something. If you and others are interested in doing something like this, email me at dakong27 at yahoo dot com.
This isn't Nazi Germany yet. They haven't quite yet started rounding us up and sending us to the camps. But we can't just sit here and do nothing.
Crushing CDs with a steamroller is not a significant or sensible event by itself. No such theater is, by itself. It is the political symbolism behind it that matters. Why did the patriots dump the tea into Boston harbor? Was it because they hated tea? Was it really a good thing to do, on the face of it? It just made the harbor dirty, wasted a whole lot of tea, and probably caused a brief spike in the local price of tea, ironically hurting the average joe. So why did they do it? Because they wanted to send England a message: we object to your levying taxes without our having a say-so. Likewise crushing CDs or some other protest (whichever you all think would work) would not be about hatred of CDs, but sending a message to the RIAA and government that we object to their actions.
I agree with both of you that most people never take action. The topmost word and first reaction for most people is "Can't!" That is why every movement and social change in history has started with a few, just a handful of highly motivated individuals with a vision. That's why we don't need and don't have to expect that everyone out there will suddenly agree with us and work to change the laws. We just need to get our acts together and go to work. We understand the problem, and have some good ideas about how to solve it, so let's do it already.
We'll have to brave ten thousand NO's, the first couple thousand coming from the enlightened denizens of these very pages, but we only have to get to one yes.
I would love to put together an event like that in Union Sq. in New York, right in front of the Virgin Megastore. Have a few thousand of the "pirate" masses turn out, throw their old CDs in a heap, and then pulverize them with a steamroller. How's that for sending a message to the RIAA and the powers-that-be? Betcha that would make the front page of every paper in the world.
I find the easiest and most effective way to explain OSS and why Linux is great is to liken it to a collaborative scientific project like the human genome project or the race to cure cancer. The public has been conditioned for years by movies, tv, and print to wrap their heads around the idea of thousands of scientists in white lab coats using their enormous brains to create things that are great for industry and humanity. And to some extent the public has come to grasp that that's how the Internet itself evolved. So if you tap into that image of hordes of geniuses working for humanity, the reaction goes from "Huh?" to "Wow."
Then you show them quake playing on your linux laptop and hey presto! Instant convert.
However, as a footnote, folks, linux really, really needs to become easier to install/uninstall new programs and to configure if we really want the average Joe to buy in completely...
But will it mean they're done politically? They've bought an awful lot of politicians in Washington, no matter what our honored lobbiest guest said here a couple days ago. (If Bill Clinton and other top pols show up to a going-away party for Hilary "Wicked Witch of the East" Rosen, I would say they have bought influence.)
My question is, the media like to talk about how the average person doesn't know what file sharing is and what the issues at stake are, but if there are 60 million people doing it then how can that possibly be true? If one fifth of the population of your country does anything on a regular basis, then how can you seriously claim that they don't understand what that activity is? It seems like so many other ridiculous claims ginned up by journalists like that disgraced NYTimes reporter, and repeated unthinkingly by the rest of the news crowd.
OK, so if that's bunk, and those 60 million people do understand what is at stake with file-sharing, then why aren't they making themselves heard in the government? Why isn't that anger translating politically? My theory is there is no membership organization they can focus their voice through. If we had something like the AARP or NRA for online freedoms, my bet is you'd start seeing politicians learning to dance to our tune in an awful hurry. (and no, the EFF is not that organization. they do great work, but a membership organization they are not).
What on earth makes anyone think they deserve our money? The great music they promote? The way they gently nurture budding artists? How about how they promote honesty in our government? Bah!
Pay them nothing. Let them starve the way they let their artists starve. How on earth did we ever get to a place where a company can claim to own our culture, and even worse, have a lot of average joes believe that's the way it has always been?
Folks, we the people own our culture collectively. Yes, artists create, but without people watching/listening/enjoying the creation, it don't count for diddly squat. It's a conversation, you see, and twisting it into a monologue is just nuts.
So get up from the keyboard and do something about it. I personally am working hard on the Howard Dean presidential campaign, but take whatever approach you like. Just do something.
Through the crazy fortunes of the New York IT industry these last couple of years, I find myself heading up a QA team in an office in Midtown Manhattan. They're basically a bunch of out of work actors moonlighting as online product reviewers. So, I untangle the mess my predecessor left (who got fired because it was a mess) and I figure the reviewers should be able to get through X number of products a day. But they're not. I can't figure it out. Then I catch them chatting on AIM or Yahoo IM all day.
So I'm thinking, and decide to wipe their machines and install a nice RH distro on all of them. Set them up with StarOffice, Mozilla, and Samba and hey presto they're doing 50% more products per day now (I'm not naive--I know they're gonna write emails, but it's not the time sink IM-ing is). Furthermore, their old Pentium machines are faster, and I can SSH into their boxes to fix anything that's wrong.
That last bit is key, because the tech dept. at this company is so bad they don't even know what an IP address is. But, they like to spy. There are cameras everywhere, and believe me, they ain't protecting national secrets at this place. So I figure, if they like to spy on you with cameras, they probably also like to spy on your computer. So with linux, no more spyware.
Yep, stealth linux works for me.
send him a contribution, or just a kind letter thanking him for his efforts. Then explain to him that copyright infringement is not theft; it's just copyright infringement. Then if you get that far, gently suggest that content companies have bastardized the entire concept of copyright law, and that it should be done away with.
Hell, if this is News for Nerds, it oughta be a special t-shirt. Maybe it could come with a chip in the collar that emits the sound of a CPU fan, kinda the low woo-woo-woo sound we all know and love. How about smart nano-fibers that resist coffee, jelly donut, and mountain dew stains? How about luminescent threads that only spell something out in the dark?
Or my absolute dream: a shirt that uses the peltier effect to cool you down in the summer. That I'd buy.
I wonder. On the one hand, there are 60 million Americans out there ending the old media cartels one download at a time, and that's a very good thing and it's revolutionary. But on the other hand, the online community seems utterly paralyzed in terms of taking real political action against those powers-that-be who are trying to take our rights away. Whether it be privacy or the DMCA or monopoly behavior, everytime they announce some new scheme to disenfranchize us, the answer from the online community is a deafening silence.
The EFF is a very good organization, and they're doing a lot of good work on our behalf. But they're more like the ACLU of cyberspace than, say, the Sierra Club or NRA. What we need is a membership organization that can carefully target politicians like Tauzin or Berman who do not vote our way. When millions of voters and campaign contributors speak, then, and only then, does the government listen.
I admire their technical prowess, but they're not doing it with the good of humanity in mind. It's all about proving that they're not trapped in luohouzhuyi, literally "fall-behind-ism." They've failed as a communist party, so now the only thing keeping them in power is trying to prove that they're making China strong enough to resist foreign interference. That's what this project feels like to me.
I hope the content companies don't thrive online. I look forward to seeing them die off. Four years ago I thought that if they switched to something like what iTunes is now that they would make wads more cash, and music fans would be far better off. But they've done too much wrong for there to be any way out.
However, the end of the content companies will not be the end of art or music. There will always be art and music as long as people want to create and be entertained. But instead of content companies that own you the artist body and soul, they will be publicists and advertisement companies that work for you. They will also be much smaller with no monopoly power.
Artists will eventually realize that through a system like iTunes they can cut out the RIAA and take the lion's share of the price of a download themselves. Services like Kazaa will help fans who are too risk averse find out about new music for free, and a number of them will probably opt to spend the money they would once have spent on CDs on concert tickets and merchandise instead. So that too will benefit artists.
And without a cartel brainwashing the public into thinking Britney Spears is good music, there will be a lot more diversity and a lot more creativity out there. I believe that if we can beat back the RIAA and their employees in Congress there's a new cultural golden age out there waiting for us.
If you put a matter de-compiler right next to the universal constructor, then you're really cooking. Figure near 100% recycling. Think Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future.
But the official definition of economics is "the problem of scarcity." So if you don't have scarcity anymore, what does happen? Think I'm gonna go to work and take orders from the PHB anymore? Not on your life. I can stay home and have my UC build me pizzas and sodas until the cows come home. Get tired of your Honda, well then de-compile it and have the UC build you a Ferrari. No need to work to earn the $60,000 differential you'd have to cover now. So I predict the first thing you'd see is the death of capitalism and the 19th century monopoly model you see now.
But if you think the *AA's are horribly nasty industries trying to take everyone down with them, you can only imagine how vicious all those capitalists will be. UC's would be a moment of fantastic liberation for mankind which will allow everyone to do what they want to for a living instead of what they have to, but the capitalists won't see it that way. They like looking down their noses at the rest of us peons and telling us what to do. They won't give that up without a bloody fight.
So, Rosa Parks should not have sat in the White section of that bus, because it was illegal? Gandhi should not have broken British laws because they were, well, laws? Should every single American who exceeds the speed limit go to prison? Should every one of the 50 million Americans who share files on P2P networks instantly go to jail?
Hmmm, lemme think about it for a minute...NO! As somebody on /. pointed out a while back, accepting a law bought by a corrupt, self-serving multinational or trade group as what is right is ludicrous. I invite these lawyers, and folks like them, to go back and read Durkheim again. He said something interesting about what constitutes a crime: when a sufficient number of a society come to regard an act not as a crime, but as normal, then that act in fact is not a crime. Can you throw an entire population in jail, or have them executed? Can five lawyers from the DoJ really take it on themselves to per/prosecute 50 million people as criminals, or is it they who should modify their behavior?
For better or worse, folks, this is how people in government think. All the talkin' at 'em in the world is never going to change their behavior, so we must compel them to go somewhere else, and do something else. That means standing up and doing something, not just posting about it on Slashdot.
it only makes sense that companies will seek ways to expand their available labor supply. the greater the supply, the lower the price. during the dot-com era, the supply was tight and programmers of all ilk and ability made a lot of money. it was a rare moment when a sector of the labor market was able to extract nearly monopoly rents from capital.
but capital is far more able to flow to optimal conditions than labor is. nike can flow its money to labor supplies in india, but the laborers here can't follow it. even for a quarter of the salary of an american programmer, an indian programmer is still getting paid a princely sum relative to the rest of his society. i'm sure many american programmers wouldn't mind moving there and enjoying the same lifestyle. but they can't. visa issues.
in a fair world, the ceo's job should be outsourced too, sure, but in an even fairer world labor should be able to move as freely as capital. and in the world that i wished we lived in, the supply of capital would be just as elastic as the labor supply.
but it isn't. face it: either you own, or you are owned. there aren't many of the former, and they want to keep it that way. look at how hard the riaa is fighting to keep control.