The last five years it has been interesting to see deficits turned into opportunities. In this article, it's the unrelenting cold of Scandinavia being used to cool the heat engines known as servers. In the American Midwest it has been turning the unrelenting winds, which used to be cursed and inveighed against, into wind power that is putting more money in people's pockets than they've seen in 100 years.
I am far from capitalism's fan, but it does occasionally produce results better than its proponents intended.
I agree that "digital native" and other terms are contrived and fluid. Rather than argue the definition of terms invented by marketing droids, let's ask the better question of what the next step from the Information Age is.
Ideas precede action, so in that sense there is no limit to the evolution of how we organize and present information. But no matter how ornate our ideas, the physical world is. Ideas influence the material world, to be sure, but put a bullet in your head and no idea in the world will save you.
So it's worth asking if the skills we have gained organizing and processing information on the level of ideas will help us master the physical world better. Can we make our homes, goods, and surroundings reflect the order we have imposed on abstractions housed within 1's and 0's?
I believe they can, and the blood/brain barrier, as it were, is being breached on at least two fronts: 3D printing/additive manufacturing, and bioengineering. If we can materialize CAD drawings and DNA sequences directly, our physical world may come to echo virtual reality more quickly than any of us can now possibly imagine.
The digital natives [sic] will likely look at the physical world and wonder why it does not reflect the virtual one, rather than the digital immigrants [sic] who look at the virtual world and wonder why it does not reflect the physical one. They will probably expand upon the Internet of Things, 3D printing, bioengineering, and do it at the pace they've become used to on the Internet rather than in the pre-Internet material world. Their frustrations, and therefore their actions, will be driven by the physical world's inability to live up to the expectations acquired in their virtual worlds.
For better or worse, I expect that we are sliding down the event horizon of permanent dis-equilibrium until we reach the singularity.
You say this as though gold drops as manna from heaven upon Washington, D.C., and that they then mete that out to those who please them. That is not the case.
The gold comes from the states. States are the foundation of the union, as is indicated in the name of the country, "The United States of America." If states resist the corrupt, unanswerable blather of Washington, D.C., then what financial basis does then the District of Columbia have to oppress the states?
The time is long since past when the corrupt central government enjoyed moral suasion. In modern terms, they have jumped the shark. The time is quite near when the American people, left and right, will pile into their pickups with dogs and axe handles and converge on D.C. to permanently redecorate the place.
Market Economics don't quite apply in this case. It was market economics that put the mine out of business in the first place. The Chinese undercut them until they could not continue.
The recent Chinese trade embargo on rare earth elements did expose the world's strategic vulnerability to the single source in China. Both the US government and the EU woke up in a hot hurry and determined to do what's necessary to revive alternate sources.
The mine and its counterparts elsewhere will, in this case, have the government support they need to to provide critical materiel to industry. Alternative materials may come to the fore eventually, but for now governments will do the necessary.
The Montana state supreme court recently voided the Citizens United ruling that allowed the creation of Super PACs. I hope the great state of Montana strikes another blow for freedom by declaring the TSA and Homeland Security persona non grata in the state. Arrest and detain every one of them for pedophilia, indecent exposure, sexual assault, and their even worse crimes against our First Amendment rights.
Don't care for that in the Union? OK, fine. Montana has enough hydroelectric, coal, natural gas, and oil (Bakken Formation) power to power a small continent, and enough missile fields to do just fine on its own. Worse would be to continue to submit to the Greek Tragedy that has become the United States.
Combine this with intel's solar powered chips and you can spread them like johnny appleseed where they're needed. Or, as a variation, set them up as fileservers with copies of music, movie, and media files and seed them everywhere until the *IAA's give up the ghost for good.
If the government begins to act outside the rule of law, it becomes a tyranny and loses all claim to legitimacy. Citizens of that country might not feel ready to take up arms to correct the situation, but they are certainly justified in slipping the constraints of law in likewise fashion. In other words, if police and government officials think it's mete to surveille private citizens without the sanction of law, then citizens are justified in surveilling those police and government officals, and their families, and their neighbors, etc. without the sanction of law. The tools and technical means are within nearly everyone's reach these days.
Yes, be careful. Don't get caught. The police have guns and you don't yada yada. But if recorded conversations of the chief of police exchanging sweet nothings with his mistress and video footage of an MP jacking off in a porn shop start surfacing perhaps they'll do a re-think of pissing on the public's rights the way they are. Especially if you used a common tagline like "Free Australia" so they all know it's being done for a reason.
We. Are. At. Peak. Water! C'mon, people, at the rate we're consuming water there will be none left for future generations. Won't someone please think of the children?
This topic is important to more than just Iranians. The events of the Arab Spring and developments across Europe, Asia, and America indicate we average folks are going to need a truly free means of communicating soon if not now. It has to be impossible for governments or corporations to blackout communications anywhere, so that their misdeeds cannot go unwitnessed.
I know that separate projects exist to tackle this problem in different ways. B.A.T.M.A.N.'s ad hoc network protocol is one. Point-to-point information transfer via laser is another. Balloon-born "satellites" is another. I also read recently that the Zetas gang in Mexico had built their own separate cellular network.
How can we hoi poloi implement these redundant networks at low- to no-cost, with maximum ease of use so that censorship will become impossible?
The guys responding in the (you can almost hear the) butch tone, well gee duh of course there's no work in FOSS! say 'MS shill' to me far more loudly than the original poster. Give me a break. Have you ever had a mission-critical project hovering on failure because of flaws in MS software that your oh-so-helpful tech support rep in India can't even grasp, much less solve? Well, I have, and lemme tell you it's a position I never put my business in again. FOSS is the only way to go if you ever, truly want to get the job done because at the end of the day you can make it work yourself if you have to.
The other posters who have recommended embedded work such as in Android are the ones you should be listening to. There are significant areas of tech now that rely exclusively on FOSS to function. High-end rendering like what they do at Pixar? FOSS. High-end trading systems in Finance? FOSS. Any kind of advertising/social media/startup/innovators? FOSS. In fact, in a down economy, the attractive cost profile of FOSS means it's proliferating even further.
So assess what your particular area of expertise is, and begin a focused search accordingly. Asking the question on Slashdot is a good start. Just be sure to disregard the comments from the peanut gallery about closed-source: they're either actual MS shills or complacent techs who fear the rapidly approaching tipping point that will end their personal gravy train. They put me in mind of a haiku from Basho: "When the eyes of hawks darken, quails call."
Is it me, or is it the more we learn about the inner workings of our government via WikiLeaks, social media, and other channels that it becomes clear the last thing on earth any reasonably intelligent person should ever do is give their trust or dollars to the government or big corporations?
As a young man I had an impression of at least certain departments of the government as being competent, such as the FBI, CIA, and State Department. The first of those to fall was the CIA, with whom I had personal contact in the late 90's; calling them room temperature IQ's would be an effusive compliment. Then the FBI botched investigation after investigation throughout their lab screw-ups. And their modus operandus seemed to increasingly be to frame their suspects and violate the basic constitutional rights of innocent Americans. The State Department's sign-off on yellow-cake uranium was the first big blow to my confidence in that bunch; the next big strike against them was breezing through their application process only to wonder why it was no people of color made it; and the nail in the coffin was Cablegate.
Now, maybe DARPA has mettle left. The SEALs seem to prove themselves again and again. Apple and Google appear to be effective. But why do we cede so much to all the rest, given how shot through with corruption, collusion, and incompetence they are, and at such horrific cost?
We are, many of us, so much brighter and better and deserving of more to have our collective potential so utterly frustrated by such dross. It's not an information problem so much anymore. We have any one of dozens of channels to chose from to communicate. Is it a question of will or organization? As refugees from the system of ritual abuse constituted by the status quo, are we constitutionally unable to work with others cohesively or deeply afraid of bullies who will walk up and punch us?
I struggle with this because I see the deep intelligence of so many of my colleagues and of the general community on/., and I wonder what challenges we could not surmount if we could break free of our learned social inhibitions. We have all grown up in a world ruled by salesmen, thugs, and psychopaths, but that's not the world I'd like to leave to my kids. I'd like them to live in a world led by artists, engineers, scientists, and humanitarians.
If the government is going to hover drones over our backyards to watch our every move, then it is entirely appropriate and necessary for average Americans to park drones over the backyards of Congressman X and Giant Banker Fuck Y, and trace their every move and broadcast them live on the intertubes. But let's not stop there. MicroUAVs and cockroach/rat cams that worm inside their compounds and walls and listen to every shady deal and embarassing detail and relay that to the curious Public would be most excellent, too. After all, why should they be worried if they have nothing to hide?
These days, the barrier to entry for these technologies is so low and affordable that a great many Americans can turn the pointy end of that surveillance stick around and hoist them on their own petard.
is corruption and problems. They ought to be excised and punished as a rogue state. Note, I'm not a right- or left-wing partisan, just an American who grew up when this country was known as the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."
The TSA ought to be expunged as the totalitarian body they are. The Department of Homeland Security ought to be dissolved and its members stripped of their citizenship and exiled to North Korea on the basis of the name of their agency alone.
The FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, and their attendant bodies need to be spanked firmly for violating the constitutional rights of all Americans over the last 20 years. That means, their Directors and employees who issued and obeyed illegal orders ought to go to prison for the rest of their lives.
If that happened, I'd reckon the integrity of the Republic to have been preserved. But I'm not naive, and I know that that will never happen.
As such, the only answer is for American citizens to bring the government and its backers to justice by force. As a man of peace and a father, I don't relish that at all. But neither do I want my kids to grow up as slaves.
It's sobering indeed to contemplate another 20 years loving and nurturing my family in an increasingly totalitarian country vs. a personal life-ending confrontation with tyranny in the name and cause of freedom. But in my heart I can't see any other way. I was raised a patriot. In my mind and heart I meant the oath we all took to uphold and defend the freedom America stood for. But now the unthinkable has happened and the political entity known as the United States has so far departed from the premise of the oath we took that we cannot possibly reconcile the two; we can either support the path of freedom, or we can uphold the United States.
I know that enough of my compatriots, supposed "left" and "right," share that conviction to make a difference. I know that the subversion of our freedom is not yet widespread enough and deep enough to reverse that bedrock faith. I know that despite the prevalent apathy, supported and abetted by those in power, there is not enough corrosion to avert the will of the American people to assert their freedom.
Is not comprised of intelligent, capable people. It is comprised of sycophants, and those who enable them. It does, however, possess unlimited resources, nearly unlimited power to invade every area of life, and they can, if necessary, send evil men in dark clothing to kill you and your family.
As such, they are a real threat to life and liberty, but one that can be defeated if their opponents are creative and can shut the hell up about their vulnerabilities until they strike the coup de grace.
1 in 3 American children now lives in poverty. Our government holds prisoners indefinitely without trial and tortures them. It has given entire industries get out of jail free cards after they broke the law (telecoms w/ spying, in case you weren't paying attention). Now it's turning a blind eye to a public admission of bribery from the spokesperson for another entire industry. It's also violating our constitutional rights on a daily basis with complete impugnity.
By what measure does this not equal "bad enough?" Oh, no, wait, I get it. YOU have enough to satisfy your material needs. YOU have a job. YOU have not lost YOUR house. None of YOUR family has suffered. Yet. So all this must be in everyone else's imaginations. Everyone else must be simply melodramatic.
In case you haven't been paying attention, people have been voting. The entire government has entirely changed hands twice in the last 10 years. And you know what? NOTHING has changed. So please tell me another fairy tale about how, gosh, all we need to do is get off our butts and vote.
Wake up, or shut up. The rest of us want our country back.
The *AA's have declared war on the free internet, and governments everywhere are getting on board with that after seeing the Arab Spring use its tools to overthrow their governments and generally stop doing what they're told. We saw with the SOPA protest how effective we can be when we work together, because there are vastly more of us than there are of them.
What we need to do now is to take it to the next level and take the fight to them. Revising copyright is probably a good place to start because there is a greater degree of public awareness about it now. If we push for the complete abolition of the notion of copyright, and push very hard, then the *AA's will be put on the defensive.
More generally we need to expunge government of the clueless, supine creatures who lay down for all this nonsense as well as the pure evil who are screwing us with full awareness of the damage they're doing. With the advent of additive manufacturing this same set of issues is about to spread to every industry, and it's going to intensify with those larger stakes. We can see a new era of human freedom or unprecedented repression, but we won't tilt the balance in our favor unless we all fight hard.
It's important to retain all skilled industries, not just software. And there is plenty of hardware innovation left in America, just visit a Maker Faire sometime and see for yourself. With the new technologies like 3D printing, biohacking, flexible electronics, tattooed circuits, spintronics, and materials advances with graphene and carbon nanotubes, we are about to see an explosive return of manufacturing in this country unlike anything the world has ever seen before. It just won't be the mass-produced, Fordist kind we had before. Rather, it will more resemble the just-in-time model taken to an extreme.
It's going to be a very topsy-turvy, exciting time and unprecedented prosperity and freedom lie on the other side if we can avoid the violent reaction from the current powers-that-be.
My critical path doesn't usually include desktop pro's and con's; my enthusiasm for such questions was exhausted by the great vi vs. emacs crusades in the days of yore.
The recent Canonical debacle with Unity has shaken me out of my complacency. In the early days of desktop linux I flirted with both KDE and Gnome before standardizing on Gnome because it felt easier and I wanted to devote my thought energy to other matters (no disrespect, KDE, it's just how I went on a whim way back then).
And so I stayed for about 12 years. But when I upgraded to oneiric this fall and was slapped in the face by the perversion of nature that is Unity, I tried to revert to Gnome only to find it had atrophied and bloated to near Windows-suck levels. So I started shopping around. Sure, I flirted with the idea of CLI-only, but GUIs do occasionally have value. Then I switched to xfce and haven't looked back. It feels like I got a hardware upgrade.
Some of my peripheral applets are gone, but next to the general performance gain it's a price worth paying.
Once again, my faith in the utter superiority of OSS has been confirmed. In Windoze or Applez land you dance to their tune or else. In Linux, you can be continually born again. Speciation is good.
They're onto something good with this vehicle. In New York, late at night, or even during the day between two points not served well by public transportation, it can be difficult to get around. If it's raining, that's doubly so since you'll never be able to get a cab. But if you had pods of these around the city that could self-drive to their destination, well, then I could see them doing quite well.
This should be done systematically and published in quarterly batches, wikileaks style. If the powers that be, who are destroying our freedom and economy as fast as ever they can, can spy on us then it's time we turned the tables. Give them no place to hide.
It's a Sunday evening, and though they have until February 20th to gather 25K signatures they've gathered more than a third of that in less than two hours.
I'm not registered with them, apparently, and my new registration is not coming through so I'm guessing they're slashdotted.
It indicates to me that, conventional wisdom about the short attention span of the American people be damned, people are still quite worked up about this and are not letting it go. Wouldn't it be funny if this one issue became the floodgate through which the pent up anger about copyright, the economy, corruption, the 1%, and everything else poured out?
Sen. Chuck Schumer's phone line is jammed. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's phone line is jammed, and her contact page is offline. On her Facebook page, the line of comments on the issue is endless and they're 100% opposed to PIPA/SOPA.
As somebody that's watched this country go off the rails the last 30 years in a row, though, in my heart I think the American people need to send a much stronger message to DC, like by burning that town to the ground and salting the earth afterward.
The Chiropractor's Guild will likely come out strongly against this too, because people won't be throwing their backs out carrying around chemistry and physics textbooks.
I have been wanting an affordable eInk/ePaper display the size of a painting that I can hang on my wall and update via wifi so my kids can "paint" pictures on their tablets and upload them to the wall display for the whole family to enjoy (and to encourage them to express themselves and cultivate their artistic talents).
Pixel Qi looks like it's not there yet, but may get there eventually.
Does anyone know if there are other players who are there already?
Slashdot Mirror
The last five years it has been interesting to see deficits turned into opportunities. In this article, it's the unrelenting cold of Scandinavia being used to cool the heat engines known as servers. In the American Midwest it has been turning the unrelenting winds, which used to be cursed and inveighed against, into wind power that is putting more money in people's pockets than they've seen in 100 years.
I am far from capitalism's fan, but it does occasionally produce results better than its proponents intended.
I agree that "digital native" and other terms are contrived and fluid. Rather than argue the definition of terms invented by marketing droids, let's ask the better question of what the next step from the Information Age is.
Ideas precede action, so in that sense there is no limit to the evolution of how we organize and present information. But no matter how ornate our ideas, the physical world is. Ideas influence the material world, to be sure, but put a bullet in your head and no idea in the world will save you.
So it's worth asking if the skills we have gained organizing and processing information on the level of ideas will help us master the physical world better. Can we make our homes, goods, and surroundings reflect the order we have imposed on abstractions housed within 1's and 0's?
I believe they can, and the blood/brain barrier, as it were, is being breached on at least two fronts: 3D printing/additive manufacturing, and bioengineering. If we can materialize CAD drawings and DNA sequences directly, our physical world may come to echo virtual reality more quickly than any of us can now possibly imagine.
The digital natives [sic] will likely look at the physical world and wonder why it does not reflect the virtual one, rather than the digital immigrants [sic] who look at the virtual world and wonder why it does not reflect the physical one. They will probably expand upon the Internet of Things, 3D printing, bioengineering, and do it at the pace they've become used to on the Internet rather than in the pre-Internet material world. Their frustrations, and therefore their actions, will be driven by the physical world's inability to live up to the expectations acquired in their virtual worlds.
For better or worse, I expect that we are sliding down the event horizon of permanent dis-equilibrium until we reach the singularity.
You say this as though gold drops as manna from heaven upon Washington, D.C., and that they then mete that out to those who please them. That is not the case.
The gold comes from the states. States are the foundation of the union, as is indicated in the name of the country, "The United States of America." If states resist the corrupt, unanswerable blather of Washington, D.C., then what financial basis does then the District of Columbia have to oppress the states?
The time is long since past when the corrupt central government enjoyed moral suasion. In modern terms, they have jumped the shark. The time is quite near when the American people, left and right, will pile into their pickups with dogs and axe handles and converge on D.C. to permanently redecorate the place.
Market Economics don't quite apply in this case. It was market economics that put the mine out of business in the first place. The Chinese undercut them until they could not continue.
The recent Chinese trade embargo on rare earth elements did expose the world's strategic vulnerability to the single source in China. Both the US government and the EU woke up in a hot hurry and determined to do what's necessary to revive alternate sources.
The mine and its counterparts elsewhere will, in this case, have the government support they need to to provide critical materiel to industry. Alternative materials may come to the fore eventually, but for now governments will do the necessary.
The Montana state supreme court recently voided the Citizens United ruling that allowed the creation of Super PACs. I hope the great state of Montana strikes another blow for freedom by declaring the TSA and Homeland Security persona non grata in the state. Arrest and detain every one of them for pedophilia, indecent exposure, sexual assault, and their even worse crimes against our First Amendment rights.
Don't care for that in the Union? OK, fine. Montana has enough hydroelectric, coal, natural gas, and oil (Bakken Formation) power to power a small continent, and enough missile fields to do just fine on its own. Worse would be to continue to submit to the Greek Tragedy that has become the United States.
Combine this with intel's solar powered chips and you can spread them like johnny appleseed where they're needed. Or, as a variation, set them up as fileservers with copies of music, movie, and media files and seed them everywhere until the *IAA's give up the ghost for good.
If the government begins to act outside the rule of law, it becomes a tyranny and loses all claim to legitimacy. Citizens of that country might not feel ready to take up arms to correct the situation, but they are certainly justified in slipping the constraints of law in likewise fashion. In other words, if police and government officials think it's mete to surveille private citizens without the sanction of law, then citizens are justified in surveilling those police and government officals, and their families, and their neighbors, etc. without the sanction of law. The tools and technical means are within nearly everyone's reach these days.
Yes, be careful. Don't get caught. The police have guns and you don't yada yada. But if recorded conversations of the chief of police exchanging sweet nothings with his mistress and video footage of an MP jacking off in a porn shop start surfacing perhaps they'll do a re-think of pissing on the public's rights the way they are. Especially if you used a common tagline like "Free Australia" so they all know it's being done for a reason.
We. Are. At. Peak. Water! C'mon, people, at the rate we're consuming water there will be none left for future generations. Won't someone please think of the children?
This topic is important to more than just Iranians. The events of the Arab Spring and developments across Europe, Asia, and America indicate we average folks are going to need a truly free means of communicating soon if not now. It has to be impossible for governments or corporations to blackout communications anywhere, so that their misdeeds cannot go unwitnessed.
I know that separate projects exist to tackle this problem in different ways. B.A.T.M.A.N.'s ad hoc network protocol is one. Point-to-point information transfer via laser is another. Balloon-born "satellites" is another. I also read recently that the Zetas gang in Mexico had built their own separate cellular network.
How can we hoi poloi implement these redundant networks at low- to no-cost, with maximum ease of use so that censorship will become impossible?
The guys responding in the (you can almost hear the) butch tone, well gee duh of course there's no work in FOSS! say 'MS shill' to me far more loudly than the original poster. Give me a break. Have you ever had a mission-critical project hovering on failure because of flaws in MS software that your oh-so-helpful tech support rep in India can't even grasp, much less solve? Well, I have, and lemme tell you it's a position I never put my business in again. FOSS is the only way to go if you ever, truly want to get the job done because at the end of the day you can make it work yourself if you have to.
The other posters who have recommended embedded work such as in Android are the ones you should be listening to. There are significant areas of tech now that rely exclusively on FOSS to function. High-end rendering like what they do at Pixar? FOSS. High-end trading systems in Finance? FOSS. Any kind of advertising/social media/startup/innovators? FOSS. In fact, in a down economy, the attractive cost profile of FOSS means it's proliferating even further.
So assess what your particular area of expertise is, and begin a focused search accordingly. Asking the question on Slashdot is a good start. Just be sure to disregard the comments from the peanut gallery about closed-source: they're either actual MS shills or complacent techs who fear the rapidly approaching tipping point that will end their personal gravy train. They put me in mind of a haiku from Basho: "When the eyes of hawks darken, quails call."
Is it me, or is it the more we learn about the inner workings of our government via WikiLeaks, social media, and other channels that it becomes clear the last thing on earth any reasonably intelligent person should ever do is give their trust or dollars to the government or big corporations?
As a young man I had an impression of at least certain departments of the government as being competent, such as the FBI, CIA, and State Department. The first of those to fall was the CIA, with whom I had personal contact in the late 90's; calling them room temperature IQ's would be an effusive compliment. Then the FBI botched investigation after investigation throughout their lab screw-ups. And their modus operandus seemed to increasingly be to frame their suspects and violate the basic constitutional rights of innocent Americans. The State Department's sign-off on yellow-cake uranium was the first big blow to my confidence in that bunch; the next big strike against them was breezing through their application process only to wonder why it was no people of color made it; and the nail in the coffin was Cablegate.
Now, maybe DARPA has mettle left. The SEALs seem to prove themselves again and again. Apple and Google appear to be effective. But why do we cede so much to all the rest, given how shot through with corruption, collusion, and incompetence they are, and at such horrific cost?
We are, many of us, so much brighter and better and deserving of more to have our collective potential so utterly frustrated by such dross. It's not an information problem so much anymore. We have any one of dozens of channels to chose from to communicate. Is it a question of will or organization? As refugees from the system of ritual abuse constituted by the status quo, are we constitutionally unable to work with others cohesively or deeply afraid of bullies who will walk up and punch us?
I struggle with this because I see the deep intelligence of so many of my colleagues and of the general community on /., and I wonder what challenges we could not surmount if we could break free of our learned social inhibitions. We have all grown up in a world ruled by salesmen, thugs, and psychopaths, but that's not the world I'd like to leave to my kids. I'd like them to live in a world led by artists, engineers, scientists, and humanitarians.
If the government is going to hover drones over our backyards to watch our every move, then it is entirely appropriate and necessary for average Americans to park drones over the backyards of Congressman X and Giant Banker Fuck Y, and trace their every move and broadcast them live on the intertubes. But let's not stop there. MicroUAVs and cockroach/rat cams that worm inside their compounds and walls and listen to every shady deal and embarassing detail and relay that to the curious Public would be most excellent, too. After all, why should they be worried if they have nothing to hide?
These days, the barrier to entry for these technologies is so low and affordable that a great many Americans can turn the pointy end of that surveillance stick around and hoist them on their own petard.
is corruption and problems. They ought to be excised and punished as a rogue state. Note, I'm not a right- or left-wing partisan, just an American who grew up when this country was known as the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."
The TSA ought to be expunged as the totalitarian body they are. The Department of Homeland Security ought to be dissolved and its members stripped of their citizenship and exiled to North Korea on the basis of the name of their agency alone.
The FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, and their attendant bodies need to be spanked firmly for violating the constitutional rights of all Americans over the last 20 years. That means, their Directors and employees who issued and obeyed illegal orders ought to go to prison for the rest of their lives.
If that happened, I'd reckon the integrity of the Republic to have been preserved. But I'm not naive, and I know that that will never happen.
As such, the only answer is for American citizens to bring the government and its backers to justice by force. As a man of peace and a father, I don't relish that at all. But neither do I want my kids to grow up as slaves.
It's sobering indeed to contemplate another 20 years loving and nurturing my family in an increasingly totalitarian country vs. a personal life-ending confrontation with tyranny in the name and cause of freedom. But in my heart I can't see any other way. I was raised a patriot. In my mind and heart I meant the oath we all took to uphold and defend the freedom America stood for. But now the unthinkable has happened and the political entity known as the United States has so far departed from the premise of the oath we took that we cannot possibly reconcile the two; we can either support the path of freedom, or we can uphold the United States.
I know that enough of my compatriots, supposed "left" and "right," share that conviction to make a difference. I know that the subversion of our freedom is not yet widespread enough and deep enough to reverse that bedrock faith. I know that despite the prevalent apathy, supported and abetted by those in power, there is not enough corrosion to avert the will of the American people to assert their freedom.
Is not comprised of intelligent, capable people. It is comprised of sycophants, and those who enable them. It does, however, possess unlimited resources, nearly unlimited power to invade every area of life, and they can, if necessary, send evil men in dark clothing to kill you and your family.
As such, they are a real threat to life and liberty, but one that can be defeated if their opponents are creative and can shut the hell up about their vulnerabilities until they strike the coup de grace.
Please plan accordingly.
> "that's only going to end in one way."
Freedom?
1 in 3 American children now lives in poverty. Our government holds prisoners indefinitely without trial and tortures them. It has given entire industries get out of jail free cards after they broke the law (telecoms w/ spying, in case you weren't paying attention). Now it's turning a blind eye to a public admission of bribery from the spokesperson for another entire industry. It's also violating our constitutional rights on a daily basis with complete impugnity.
By what measure does this not equal "bad enough?" Oh, no, wait, I get it. YOU have enough to satisfy your material needs. YOU have a job. YOU have not lost YOUR house. None of YOUR family has suffered. Yet. So all this must be in everyone else's imaginations. Everyone else must be simply melodramatic.
In case you haven't been paying attention, people have been voting. The entire government has entirely changed hands twice in the last 10 years. And you know what? NOTHING has changed. So please tell me another fairy tale about how, gosh, all we need to do is get off our butts and vote.
Wake up, or shut up. The rest of us want our country back.
The *AA's have declared war on the free internet, and governments everywhere are getting on board with that after seeing the Arab Spring use its tools to overthrow their governments and generally stop doing what they're told. We saw with the SOPA protest how effective we can be when we work together, because there are vastly more of us than there are of them.
What we need to do now is to take it to the next level and take the fight to them. Revising copyright is probably a good place to start because there is a greater degree of public awareness about it now. If we push for the complete abolition of the notion of copyright, and push very hard, then the *AA's will be put on the defensive.
More generally we need to expunge government of the clueless, supine creatures who lay down for all this nonsense as well as the pure evil who are screwing us with full awareness of the damage they're doing. With the advent of additive manufacturing this same set of issues is about to spread to every industry, and it's going to intensify with those larger stakes. We can see a new era of human freedom or unprecedented repression, but we won't tilt the balance in our favor unless we all fight hard.
It's important to retain all skilled industries, not just software. And there is plenty of hardware innovation left in America, just visit a Maker Faire sometime and see for yourself. With the new technologies like 3D printing, biohacking, flexible electronics, tattooed circuits, spintronics, and materials advances with graphene and carbon nanotubes, we are about to see an explosive return of manufacturing in this country unlike anything the world has ever seen before. It just won't be the mass-produced, Fordist kind we had before. Rather, it will more resemble the just-in-time model taken to an extreme.
It's going to be a very topsy-turvy, exciting time and unprecedented prosperity and freedom lie on the other side if we can avoid the violent reaction from the current powers-that-be.
My critical path doesn't usually include desktop pro's and con's; my enthusiasm for such questions was exhausted by the great vi vs. emacs crusades in the days of yore.
The recent Canonical debacle with Unity has shaken me out of my complacency. In the early days of desktop linux I flirted with both KDE and Gnome before standardizing on Gnome because it felt easier and I wanted to devote my thought energy to other matters (no disrespect, KDE, it's just how I went on a whim way back then).
And so I stayed for about 12 years. But when I upgraded to oneiric this fall and was slapped in the face by the perversion of nature that is Unity, I tried to revert to Gnome only to find it had atrophied and bloated to near Windows-suck levels. So I started shopping around. Sure, I flirted with the idea of CLI-only, but GUIs do occasionally have value. Then I switched to xfce and haven't looked back. It feels like I got a hardware upgrade.
Some of my peripheral applets are gone, but next to the general performance gain it's a price worth paying.
Once again, my faith in the utter superiority of OSS has been confirmed. In Windoze or Applez land you dance to their tune or else. In Linux, you can be continually born again. Speciation is good.
They're onto something good with this vehicle. In New York, late at night, or even during the day between two points not served well by public transportation, it can be difficult to get around. If it's raining, that's doubly so since you'll never be able to get a cab. But if you had pods of these around the city that could self-drive to their destination, well, then I could see them doing quite well.
This should be done systematically and published in quarterly batches, wikileaks style. If the powers that be, who are destroying our freedom and economy as fast as ever they can, can spy on us then it's time we turned the tables. Give them no place to hide.
It's a Sunday evening, and though they have until February 20th to gather 25K signatures they've gathered more than a third of that in less than two hours.
I'm not registered with them, apparently, and my new registration is not coming through so I'm guessing they're slashdotted.
It indicates to me that, conventional wisdom about the short attention span of the American people be damned, people are still quite worked up about this and are not letting it go. Wouldn't it be funny if this one issue became the floodgate through which the pent up anger about copyright, the economy, corruption, the 1%, and everything else poured out?
Sen. Chuck Schumer's phone line is jammed. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's phone line is jammed, and her contact page is offline. On her Facebook page, the line of comments on the issue is endless and they're 100% opposed to PIPA/SOPA.
As somebody that's watched this country go off the rails the last 30 years in a row, though, in my heart I think the American people need to send a much stronger message to DC, like by burning that town to the ground and salting the earth afterward.
The Chiropractor's Guild will likely come out strongly against this too, because people won't be throwing their backs out carrying around chemistry and physics textbooks.
I have been wanting an affordable eInk/ePaper display the size of a painting that I can hang on my wall and update via wifi so my kids can "paint" pictures on their tablets and upload them to the wall display for the whole family to enjoy (and to encourage them to express themselves and cultivate their artistic talents).
Pixel Qi looks like it's not there yet, but may get there eventually.
Does anyone know if there are other players who are there already?