Actually, american law has always been about the rich people using government to abuse others to their gain. It's just now becomming a government where the people have a snowball's chance in hell of fighting back.
Some of that trend is good, some of it scares the hell out of me. Either way, it's happening.
"We'll buy your home!" "21" Monitors for just 399!" and the infamous Electronic filing crap scams.
Counties are starting to outlaw this because it's getting almost impossible to see oncomming traffic at some suburban intersections for the forrest of small neon yellow, red and orange signs.
The people will be on "our" side ( the side of the people who don't want DRM hardware/software) because of catchy commercials which slant the ability to copy as a "right".
Anybody who watches those Gateway commercials, or anything like them, will immediately associate Gateway as standing up for the little guy, and side with them. Anyone smart enough to look deeper, will immediately side with "us" because DRM is invasive and inherantly problematic. It's a win-win situation so yes, the vast majority of public opinion will be on "our" side.:-)
Yes. My wife makes me watch it so as you can see I barely even remember the name. Some show on some TV station about a bunch of idiots running around the world and a network trying to make it look dramatic.:-)
On NBC while watching the Great Race. It was funny as hell.
My wife rolled her eyes and it gave me the perfect chance to let her know *why* they were running that commercial.
Now that Gateway has clearly chosen sides, I think we can start selling tickets to the battle royall:
"In this corner weighing in at a puny few billion in stated revenues is MPAA, AOL/Time Warner/CNN, RIAA and the BSA. In the Far corner, weighing in at an incalcuable sum is Gateway, IBM, Sun, Dell, Apple and all the people. This ain't really gonna be a long fight folks so don't blink."
Preachers (albeit self-inflated ones), Theologians, Prophets and madmen have been doing that for years, albeit with little success.
The primary problem is that the raw data cannot predict the movement of society, so therefor conjecture must be used. The conjecture is based on a hypothesis which is based on one of the obove basic viewpoints: religion vs. lack-thereof, pessimissm vs. optimism and basic intelligence of the average human vs. lack-thereof.
Unless the person who writes the simulation is a prophet or exceptionally gifted, the software will be as flawed as any other model.
I have no certifications, and I only picked up Linux a couple of years ago. I set up a couple of firewalls and a DNS/DHCP server. Installed a couple of Apache servers with PHP and now I'm the company Unix guru.
The simple fact is I hardly know my ass from my elbow compared to most Linux geeks, but I can cope because I know how to ask for help. I've even documented how to ask for help, with "Don't EXPECT the channel operators in IRC to help you. Ask nicely, or they will kick you. Under no circumstances should you turn on CAPS LOCK while in a channel." etc in my system admin handbook I will soon be unleashing on the rest of our team.
I'm a total n00b and I can do it. This is probably the way it is at many corporations, although I don't work at many, just this one.:-)
Please don't ever mention Oracle obtaining Sun again.
Oracle corporation employs programmers which know little-to-nothing nothing at all about the following concepts:
Source Control
Indentation/Formatting
API
Static Linking
Kernels
Filesystems
Debugging
Oracle is a fine database - but it would be worthless if the 5 programmers in the world who understand its source code suddenly died or contracted Alzheimers: which isn't really unlikely considering that they will be getting old long before they can explain that mess to anyone.
Sun saw the light: their days were numbered. Eventually Linux will surpass Solaris in the one remaining area that matters: SMP. After that Sun is in biggo trouble. They are better off grabbing Linux and coaching embrasure of their hardware, Linux software and Java for platform independance. IBM buying them makes sense for IBM because IBM already plays nice with Linux. Oracle buying them will mean that Solaris will become iexorably tangled up with Java and Oracle and turn into a very very nasty mess.
I want to see IBM buy Sun, build a kernel module JVM running at near-compiled speed, and open Java up completely.
We bought some copies of RedHat because we needed the support.
We recently switched all of our hosting equipment from M$ to RehHat (thanks largely to yours truly and the M$ machines' continued insistance on crash-and-burn computing).
The problem for RedHat is that I can get more and better support from #linuxhelp (take your choice of IRC undernets), Linuxdoc or just about anywhere else than I can from some guy at the corporation. I know the OS, and it doesn't take much time to find answers to stuff I don't know.
When I start trying to do undocumented stuff or I start having bizarro problems with the JVM, shared libraries or something else then the RH support guys don't know as much about the problem as I do.
I want to go to people who write the kernel, the libraries, the product or whatever isn't working and ask them. Online. For free.
I think the comments about going to a "club" style support system makes a hell of a lot more sense.
That is where you really are misreading Jesus. Jesus only spoke to individuals, not to governments.
Many people gloss over certain things Christ said in order to support their dictatorial objectives. Jesus expressly said many times when asked about tough-to-follow precepts: "not all can keep this(these) sayings".
The point of Christianity was "Not of works, lest any man should boast." The Law (Old Testament) was given to the Jews to show that they were incapable of righteousness through works. That was emphasized by Jesus when he gave the Saducies and Pharasis a verbal tonguelashing about how they were trying to use by-the-letter inerpretations of the law (like divorce is fine for any reason, from Deut.)
Jesus told us how we needed to be living in order to be as righteous as the bible commanded. He knew we couldn't, and that was the point.
I'm no angel. I've been worse than most atheists most of my life. I'm saved in spite of, not because of, my actions.
"So you see, Christians invented communism before Marx [wrote about it]. - better?;-)
Sorry 'bout that. I knew Marx didn't invent communism but I keep thinking the average/. reader doesn't care about the nitty-gritty details. He made it popular, or at least famous, and that's what I was really trying to show/say.
As a matter of simple fact, when the Christian first started they "had all things common" because we (the Christians) were supposed to be beyond greed and stuff. [Acts 2:44, 4:32]. So you see, Christians invented communism before Marx. We also figured out it didn't work. Paul expressly said it was a bad idea later in Corinthians.
The problem is that perfect societies attract bad people and good people, and in a society built on a model where you can read "to each according" you should immediately see "to each according to how I see he deserves it". As long as the person executing the statement is perfect: no problem. As soon as someone less-than perfect gets ahold of the purse strings things start going very very badly because communism is all about trust and when that breaks down the system breaks down.
So no, we aren't told that communism is bad by our parents simply because of a lack of freedom. We were told communism was bad because our (American's) parents grew up predominately protistant and protestants came from Christian Catholics who learned about communism from Paul who said it was a bad idea.
Sounds like a closet communist trying to show that the GPL and open-source support communism.
I think they are more like democracy, allowing everyone to know the truth and everyone to have a vote. Everybody knows humanity as a whole is greedy and collectivly ignorant of its own well-being. The only reason that open-source really works is because it has more of a republic-style structure. There are very smart people working in a tight-knit group for the good of the software and those that use it. They don't allow just anybody to get their hands on the code (read that as modify the CVS tree), and if the community doesn't like what's going on in it they fork and create a new small tight-knit group that does the same thing a different way.
The problem with extending this philosophy to government is that software can passively take away the goods of the closed-source guys by the rules of supply and demand. Try to take away governments candy and you are going to pick a fight. They don't have to compete, they RULE.:-)
Let's spend a ton of time and effort and money developing and deploying DSL to the masses. It's "More than they'll ever need" is what they kept saying.
Just like 256KB of Sipp memory was more than I'd ever use in 93, and that 1GB HD (Gasp) would be impossible for me to filll up.
It's pointless to keep asking "Why the hell don't they learn." They aren't dumb. They want to be able to bitch and whine to the government so that their pocket polititians can convince everyone else to look at their woes instead of what they are doing. They are raping the consumer with "local market monopolies" perpetuated by county and city regulations which keep out competitors.
I'm speaking mostly about Bell South, I don't know about most of the rest, other than the company I used to work for.
Do the math: In the greater metropolitan area of Atlanta, GA there are about 3,142,857 people, of which I estimate about 1/3 have phones (students, families, etc...). At an extreemly conservative estimate of $40/phone bill per month (and none of that is DSL) Bell South groses about $125,714,280/month from Atlanta alone.
Based on the fact that I have worked for a large telecomm company I can (probably over-)estimate their total number of employees at about 25,000 with perhaps 8,000 service techs(probably BS, because they take forever to respond to a call) in Atlanta which is their base of operations. At an average rate of $12/hr for a 40 hour week they can pay these 8,000 full-time employees $15,360,000/month.
I know my estimates are probably grossly inaccurate on the conservative side, but they aren't even touching this monopoly's corporate revenues! All of the telecomm companies are making money hand-over-fist as fast as they can pump their friggin arms (all 24,000 of them:-) ).
I'm glad more people don't understand the problem because their would probably be riot if they did.
Re:Let's look at this realistically...
on
Hospital Robots
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· Score: 1
I didn't say it was easy.
"...about being imported into a country " Nobody said we import them like cargo. Just open the doors and they will come by choice.
I realize as much as the next guy that there needs to be governing rules concerning immigration, but if the us would just stop trying to play socialist democracy then most of those problems would go away. The majority of the US's citizens were immigrants once, and most didn't speak english too well.
We adapted.
People have always had it backwards...
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 1
It's a slow breech birth of an overgrown and mutated child, but it's still a BEGINNING.
When you can't interface with your computer unless you have a chip to certify your usage of the hardware: then they know exactly *who* is at the computer. Processes that are not signed are not allowed to run by the hardware.
It's not that infeasible.
"Secret Satanist plot" - Give me a break. Are you are really so ignorant as to believe that just because a person is a Christian and believes the prophesy of Revelations they must believe in a secret conspiracy? Our beliefs do not mean we think there is a conspiracy theory among humans. As a matter of fact, I think it is the genuine belief that there is no such thing as Satan will be why governments are going to make those prophesies come true.:-)
But please, go ahead and try to prove there isn't a God. I need a good chuckle. Hell, just try to come up with a pseudo-convincing story about where life came from. I'd be convinced that you were smarter than the average toadstool if you could do it. As it is: the theory of evolution takes a hell of a lot more faith than belief in God.:-)
Let's look at this realistically...
on
Hospital Robots
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· Score: 0, Redundant
This bot takes over menial tasks...
In the world today we have millions of people with no job and no prospects, starving to death. They would gladly work their whole life doing this "menial job" for a tiny fraction of what this robot costs, eating barely anything and bless the ground you walked on for letting them do it.
But of course our highly advanced evolved society would never let another person live like that... if we have to see it. This is BS. Let's help each other help ourselves by using the wasted humanity on earth first, then worry about wasting resources on machines.
Forget this better-than-thou crap of saying that no person should work a menial job while turning our backs on people living a less-than-menial life which is far too short because they (pick one: starve, die of disease, get murdered because they are "useless" to the killers, etc...). Talk about double standards.
The United States is the most sparsely populated landmass in the world. We have plenty of room for people willing to immigrate and make their lives better. I'm not talking about slave labor; I'm talking about inexpensive labor.
But we all know that we will continue to live in a dream world perpetuated by clueless "enlightened" college graduates who would rather see starving third-world countries as a cause to bitch about than actually do anything about the situation.
I would also like to state for the record that I am not at all suggesting that we take the approach used by the Spanish conquistadors and barbarous English(tm) murderers and slavers who wanted to help other peoples by proselytizing and enslaving them. Give people a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
And install it in Hawaii. Those Somoans even eat that sh*t at nice restaurants!
Yuck
Eww
QUICHE!?
Cookbook!?
Actually, american law has always been about the rich people using government to abuse others to their gain. It's just now becomming a government where the people have a snowball's chance in hell of fighting back.
Some of that trend is good, some of it scares the hell out of me. Either way, it's happening.
"We'll buy your home!"
"21" Monitors for just 399!"
and the infamous Electronic filing crap scams.
Counties are starting to outlaw this because it's getting almost impossible to see oncomming traffic at some suburban intersections for the forrest of small neon yellow, red and orange signs.
The people will be on "our" side ( the side of the people who don't want DRM hardware/software) because of catchy commercials which slant the ability to copy as a "right".
:-)
Anybody who watches those Gateway commercials, or anything like them, will immediately associate Gateway as standing up for the little guy, and side with them. Anyone smart enough to look deeper, will immediately side with "us" because DRM is invasive and inherantly problematic. It's a win-win situation so yes, the vast majority of public opinion will be on "our" side.
Yes. My wife makes me watch it so as you can see I barely even remember the name. Some show on some TV station about a bunch of idiots running around the world and a network trying to make it look dramatic. :-)
On NBC while watching the Great Race. It was funny as hell.
My wife rolled her eyes and it gave me the perfect chance to let her know *why* they were running that commercial.
Now that Gateway has clearly chosen sides, I think we can start selling tickets to the battle royall:
"In this corner weighing in at a puny few billion in stated revenues is MPAA, AOL/Time Warner/CNN, RIAA and the BSA. In the Far corner, weighing in at an incalcuable sum is Gateway, IBM, Sun, Dell, Apple and all the people. This ain't really gonna be a long fight folks so don't blink."
Preachers (albeit self-inflated ones), Theologians, Prophets and madmen have been doing that for years, albeit with little success.
The primary problem is that the raw data cannot predict the movement of society, so therefor conjecture must be used. The conjecture is based on a hypothesis which is based on one of the obove basic viewpoints: religion vs. lack-thereof, pessimissm vs. optimism and basic intelligence of the average human vs. lack-thereof.
Unless the person who writes the simulation is a prophet or exceptionally gifted, the software will be as flawed as any other model.
I have no certifications, and I only picked up Linux a couple of years ago. I set up a couple of firewalls and a DNS/DHCP server. Installed a couple of Apache servers with PHP and now I'm the company Unix guru.
:-)
The simple fact is I hardly know my ass from my elbow compared to most Linux geeks, but I can cope because I know how to ask for help. I've even documented how to ask for help, with "Don't EXPECT the channel operators in IRC to help you. Ask nicely, or they will kick you. Under no circumstances should you turn on CAPS LOCK while in a channel." etc in my system admin handbook I will soon be unleashing on the rest of our team.
I'm a total n00b and I can do it. This is probably the way it is at many corporations, although I don't work at many, just this one.
Please don't ever mention Oracle obtaining Sun again.
Oracle corporation employs programmers which know little-to-nothing nothing at all about the following concepts:
Source Control
Indentation/Formatting
API
Static Linking
Kernels
Filesystems
Debugging
Oracle is a fine database - but it would be worthless if the 5 programmers in the world who understand its source code suddenly died or contracted Alzheimers: which isn't really unlikely considering that they will be getting old long before they can explain that mess to anyone.
Sun saw the light: their days were numbered. Eventually Linux will surpass Solaris in the one remaining area that matters: SMP. After that Sun is in biggo trouble. They are better off grabbing Linux and coaching embrasure of their hardware, Linux software and Java for platform independance. IBM buying them makes sense for IBM because IBM already plays nice with Linux. Oracle buying them will mean that Solaris will become iexorably tangled up with Java and Oracle and turn into a very very nasty mess.
I want to see IBM buy Sun, build a kernel module JVM running at near-compiled speed, and open Java up completely.
Now that would be sweet.
We bought some copies of RedHat because we needed the support.
We recently switched all of our hosting equipment from M$ to RehHat (thanks largely to yours truly and the M$ machines' continued insistance on crash-and-burn computing).
The problem for RedHat is that I can get more and better support from #linuxhelp (take your choice of IRC undernets), Linuxdoc or just about anywhere else than I can from some guy at the corporation. I know the OS, and it doesn't take much time to find answers to stuff I don't know.
When I start trying to do undocumented stuff or I start having bizarro problems with the JVM, shared libraries or something else then the RH support guys don't know as much about the problem as I do.
I want to go to people who write the kernel, the libraries, the product or whatever isn't working and ask them. Online. For free.
I think the comments about going to a "club" style support system makes a hell of a lot more sense.
That is where you really are misreading Jesus. Jesus only spoke to individuals, not to governments.
Many people gloss over certain things Christ said in order to support their dictatorial objectives. Jesus expressly said many times when asked about tough-to-follow precepts: "not all can keep this(these) sayings".
The point of Christianity was "Not of works, lest any man should boast." The Law (Old Testament) was given to the Jews to show that they were incapable of righteousness through works. That was emphasized by Jesus when he gave the Saducies and Pharasis a verbal tonguelashing about how they were trying to use by-the-letter inerpretations of the law (like divorce is fine for any reason, from Deut.)
Jesus told us how we needed to be living in order to be as righteous as the bible commanded. He knew we couldn't, and that was the point.
I'm no angel. I've been worse than most atheists most of my life. I'm saved in spite of, not because of, my actions.
That was just plain mean moderator (-1). :P
Let the two keep it up and they might just sue each other into financial ruin and kill two birds withone stone. :-)
"So you see, Christians invented communism before Marx [wrote about it]. - better? ;-)
/. reader doesn't care about the nitty-gritty details. He made it popular, or at least famous, and that's what I was really trying to show/say.
Sorry 'bout that. I knew Marx didn't invent communism but I keep thinking the average
I can do that with an 802.11 card and a remote desktop client running on a slim tablet, terminal, laptop or whatever.
Nobody said communism in and of itself was wrong.
As a matter of simple fact, when the Christian first started they "had all things common" because we (the Christians) were supposed to be beyond greed and stuff. [Acts 2:44, 4:32]. So you see, Christians invented communism before Marx. We also figured out it didn't work. Paul expressly said it was a bad idea later in Corinthians.
The problem is that perfect societies attract bad people and good people, and in a society built on a model where you can read "to each according" you should immediately see "to each according to how I see he deserves it". As long as the person executing the statement is perfect: no problem. As soon as someone less-than perfect gets ahold of the purse strings things start going very very badly because communism is all about trust and when that breaks down the system breaks down.
So no, we aren't told that communism is bad by our parents simply because of a lack of freedom. We were told communism was bad because our (American's) parents grew up predominately protistant and protestants came from Christian Catholics who learned about communism from Paul who said it was a bad idea.
:-)
Sounds like a closet communist trying to show that the GPL and open-source support communism.
:-)
I think they are more like democracy, allowing everyone to know the truth and everyone to have a vote. Everybody knows humanity as a whole is greedy and collectivly ignorant of its own well-being. The only reason that open-source really works is because it has more of a republic-style structure. There are very smart people working in a tight-knit group for the good of the software and those that use it. They don't allow just anybody to get their hands on the code (read that as modify the CVS tree), and if the community doesn't like what's going on in it they fork and create a new small tight-knit group that does the same thing a different way.
The problem with extending this philosophy to government is that software can passively take away the goods of the closed-source guys by the rules of supply and demand. Try to take away governments candy and you are going to pick a fight. They don't have to compete, they RULE.
Let's spend a ton of time and effort and money developing and deploying DSL to the masses. It's "More than they'll ever need" is what they kept saying.
:-) ).
Just like 256KB of Sipp memory was more than I'd ever use in 93, and that 1GB HD (Gasp) would be impossible for me to filll up.
It's pointless to keep asking "Why the hell don't they learn." They aren't dumb. They want to be able to bitch and whine to the government so that their pocket polititians can convince everyone else to look at their woes instead of what they are doing. They are raping the consumer with "local market monopolies" perpetuated by county and city regulations which keep out competitors.
I'm speaking mostly about Bell South, I don't know about most of the rest, other than the company I used to work for.
Do the math: In the greater metropolitan area of Atlanta, GA there are about 3,142,857 people, of which I estimate about 1/3 have phones (students, families, etc...). At an extreemly conservative estimate of $40/phone bill per month (and none of that is DSL) Bell South groses about $125,714,280/month from Atlanta alone.
Based on the fact that I have worked for a large telecomm company I can (probably over-)estimate their total number of employees at about 25,000 with perhaps 8,000 service techs(probably BS, because they take forever to respond to a call) in Atlanta which is their base of operations. At an average rate of $12/hr for a 40 hour week they can pay these 8,000 full-time employees $15,360,000/month.
I know my estimates are probably grossly inaccurate on the conservative side, but they aren't even touching this monopoly's corporate revenues! All of the telecomm companies are making money hand-over-fist as fast as they can pump their friggin arms (all 24,000 of them
I'm glad more people don't understand the problem because their would probably be riot if they did.
I didn't say it was easy.
"...about being imported into a country " Nobody said we import them like cargo. Just open the doors and they will come by choice.
I realize as much as the next guy that there needs to be governing rules concerning immigration, but if the us would just stop trying to play socialist democracy then most of those problems would go away. The majority of the US's citizens were immigrants once, and most didn't speak english too well.
We adapted.
It's a slow breech birth of an overgrown and mutated child, but it's still a BEGINNING.
:)
We are just getting started.
When you can't interface with your computer unless you have a chip to certify your usage of the hardware: then they know exactly *who* is at the computer. Processes that are not signed are not allowed to run by the hardware.
:-)
:-)
It's not that infeasible.
"Secret Satanist plot" - Give me a break. Are you are really so ignorant as to believe that just because a person is a Christian and believes the prophesy of Revelations they must believe in a secret conspiracy? Our beliefs do not mean we think there is a conspiracy theory among humans. As a matter of fact, I think it is the genuine belief that there is no such thing as Satan will be why governments are going to make those prophesies come true.
But please, go ahead and try to prove there isn't a God. I need a good chuckle. Hell, just try to come up with a pseudo-convincing story about where life came from. I'd be convinced that you were smarter than the average toadstool if you could do it. As it is: the theory of evolution takes a hell of a lot more faith than belief in God.
This bot takes over menial tasks...
In the world today we have millions of people with no job and no prospects, starving to death. They would gladly work their whole life doing this "menial job" for a tiny fraction of what this robot costs, eating barely anything and bless the ground you walked on for letting them do it.
But of course our highly advanced evolved society would never let another person live like that... if we have to see it. This is BS. Let's help each other help ourselves by using the wasted humanity on earth first, then worry about wasting resources on machines.
Forget this better-than-thou crap of saying that no person should work a menial job while turning our backs on people living a less-than-menial life which is far too short because they (pick one: starve, die of disease, get murdered because they are "useless" to the killers, etc...). Talk about double standards.
The United States is the most sparsely populated landmass in the world. We have plenty of room for people willing to immigrate and make their lives better. I'm not talking about slave labor; I'm talking about inexpensive labor.
But we all know that we will continue to live in a dream world perpetuated by clueless "enlightened" college graduates who would rather see starving third-world countries as a cause to bitch about than actually do anything about the situation.
I would also like to state for the record that I am not at all suggesting that we take the approach used by the Spanish conquistadors and barbarous English(tm) murderers and slavers who wanted to help other peoples by proselytizing and enslaving them. Give people a choice.
hehehe. All the images on the page are .jpeg. You have to link to the .jp2 images. That's why you are still seeing artifacts.
When I joined the mile low club it actually relieved several tons of pressure per square foot.
Or perhaps the light is comming through the window, and the maze is the way out?