Well now, I'm a prorgammer who's also in the business of appreciating (and promoting) music. For me, music IS the drug, but I can respect people who need a little psychoactive help to get into that mental state. That said, I am a hedonist by nature... If someone's goal in life is to enjoy themselves, I think they're my kind of person, as long as it's not to the detriment of everyone around them.
If they can't get by with gigs and t-shirts, they're doing it wrong and deserve to fail.
My own business didn't take off overnight, just because I showed up with a screwdriver and gaudy business card. It took off because I busted my ass for years to build it up. Music for profit is a business, and must be built from the ground up, just the same. You write good tunes, you put on good concerts, you identify your market, you establish relationships with other bands, promoters, producers, etc. You keep working at it until all that investment starts paying off, and if it doesn't, you either fucked up, or you're offering a product for which no one wants to pay.
I sure as shit would not buy someone's shirt or pay to see them, if all they played were Limp Bizkit covers, but that's what a lot of kids today are doing. Playing absolute shit to disaffected hormonal preteens, and wondering why, five years in, they're still not globe-trotting bazillionaires. I should know, because I'm operating a label:) I actually encourage my acts to give free tunes online, because it generates a ton of buzz and goodwill that pays off in spades down the road. Just look at Die Antwoord, as a prime example. They're a niche act from South Africa that has toured worldwide to great success, and yet their first album was posted on their web site, in its entirety, free to all visitors. I bought the commercial re-release, I bought the merch, I've seen them live. They've made about $60 from me, just by posting free music online, because it was GOOD music. Multiply that by the 2300 people who showed up to that one concert, and that's a pretty nice chunk of coin for a relatively unknown act. Now multiply that by the hundreds of shows they're played, and I'd call that a thundering success.
How much money has Rihanna made from me ? ZERO. I wouldn't even download her shit for free. So what's the difference ? I actually WANT Die Antwoord to succeed, I'm interested in their offerings, I appreciate what they're doing, and the entertainment they're providing me is worth every penny. I've played that free album more times than I can remember, it gets stuck in my head. Rihanna, she just makes me reach for the mute button. The more I hear her crap on the radio, the more I feel compelled to strangle puppies. Puppies with Rihanna's album cover taped to their cute little faces.
I don't know who Finland's most popular musical franchise might be, but it's a safe bet that if they need lobbyists to write up laws to secure their income, chances are they suck. Chances are I wouldn't ever sign them to my humble little label. Chances are I'd cheer if they got run over by a drunk driver. You're not allowed to call it art, if you're not investing your entire being into the work.
The fact that you've taken a full-time job says a lot about your home business. Me, I'm doing the opposite: I'm taking part-time contracts to fill out my weeks, until the business picks up enough momentum to keep me busy. My goal is to make the business my full-time job and a dominant source of income, but that takes time.
It's one thing to look at a part-time job, even self-employment, as a means to pad your party fund though college, but if you don't see a real future in that line of work, don't be calling it "your business". The window washing service sounds like just that, a revolving door for unskilled laborers. No continuity, no growth potential, no one's "baby".
It's diametrically opposed to the spirit of TFA, which is to give people time and resources to create something big. If I didn't have to worry about income for the next two years, you can be sure I'd bust my ass pursuing a number of innovative projects, that have been slowly brewing in the back of my head. It's like a series of stepping stones. Right now I'm taking consulting gigs to pay the bills, so I can work on my business project. Once that launches, if it does well enough, I'll ditch the consulting and tackle my next challenge, and so on. Personal income is merely an side-effect of the business, to keep the issue of money off my mind so I can focus on my creative processes. If personal income is the end-goal, then it's not a business, it's merely a job.
Or, he could correctly assess that modern education is just another extension of the predatory lending scheme, and bypass it, which he did.
If he were paying off loans, he'd still have to pay them $100k on top of that, as salary for the two years. I can tell you, in no uncertain terms, I gained NOTHING from college. I walked away with a mountain of debt, and a jaded view of the entire system. The handful of profs that were worth the headspace, they were always getting shit on by the administration, because they refused to tow the line and made all the others look like book-flinging orangutans, which they were. Unionized, talentless, uninvested, xenophobic, corporate welfare sycophants.
They prey on people who are too young and too inexperienced to know what they truly enjoy in life, and waste 3, 5, or 10 years of their lives shoehorning them into a half-heartedly chosen career path. I learned more in one summer, hacking on my own, reading every book and text file I could find, than in 3.5 years of classes. The chicks were hot, but in retrospect I could have loitered in the cafeteria without paying tuition... Then I dropped out and nailed a kickass job at a tech firm, no degree required. And there, I learned a whole lot more, from my peers, from more books, and from the motivation of wanting to create awesome software.
That assclown used-car-dealer-turned-COBOL-prof ? He's still teaching COBOL for $18/hr, even though he's never run a single program in his whole life, and he thoroughly hates students, but he's looking forward to his retirement package soon, so he can reflect on his half-century of parasitic existence. The 24 teens in TFA, on the other hand, will experience more cool shit over the next two years than all my old profs combined. And they decide they don't like making their own decisions, they can always go back to school and help pad J.P. Morgan's $830 billion dollar nest egg.
Having read TFA (shut up!), the impression I took away was that the various interviewees were old fogeys who are either unaware of current functionality, or unwilling to adapt.
One of the complaints is that modern Linux/BSD should automagically pipe console output through "more", even when not specified... really ? Are these guys so lazy ? What of all the full-screen interfaces, and streams of scrolling text we want to monitor but not necessarily read page-by-page ? The same PDP-8 dinosaur-lover self-describes as being "good at making sense of unfamiliar technologies or processes". Riiiiight...
Another classy fellow says he can't live without the archaic IBM XEdit, which was basically a memory-limited dos Edit for mainframes, and he sorely misses Ctrl-C and "kill -9" on the Windows side (*ahem* Ctrl-C still works, and TaskKill). I mean, is this really what constitutes commercial journalism today ? Baby boomers longing for the good old days ?
You know what ? I also have fond memories of Turbo Pascal in the early 90s, just like I have fond memories of my first girlfriend. That doesn't change the fact that she was a mindless domineering psycho bitch that was quickly and EASILY replaced with an improved version.
If they want to post a relevant article, maybe they could whine about how old gear was built to last, while today's asian-made crap barely survives the trip from the store. My first-run C64 has survived a hundred times more drops, jolts and whacks than today's gadgets could ever handle.
There's a lot of fail in that series of "illusions". I'm particularly annoyed with #5, the "Mask of Love". Yeah, it's amazing how three people discovered that a blurry, low-res image is ambiguous and might look like some other blurry, low-res image. Welcome to 2400 baud pr0n, dumbasses!
I suppose, when one's career consists of selling optical illusions , after a while you start scraping the bottom of the barrel...
Yeahhh that's the main reason I switched. And really, an ION these days is pretty cheap, compared to the spare PC and CPU horsepower required to transcode on the fly.
I like that idea, but realistically that should be a redirect to a common archive, or some distributed collaboration tool that allows them to work around their nation's vile censorship.
In the last week, the bitcoin mining difficulty has doubled. That means it takes twice as many CPU/GPU cycles to find a coin as it did a week ago.
There is a limited number of bitcoins available, by design. The more people pound the system to score free coins, the harder it is for each person to get any. The nominal value of each coin rises, sure, but that's only good if you already have some, or are buying them with cash. For miners, the prospect of using hardware and electricity to mine coins is losing value with each passing day.
Well, I'd describe myself as a progressive, so conservatives make no sense to me. Our current PM, Stephen Harper, is an "americanophile". He is the Canadian George Bush. He loves selling out to corporate interests, and restricting personal freedoms to further that fascist agenda.
If "conservatives" were about minding their own business and keeping government down to the bare necessities, I'd be cool with it, but that's not the case up here. Our conservatives are about conservative values, which means pantheistic, libertarian, socialist free-thinkers like myself are portrayed as the enemy, to be legislated out of existence. The only reason Harper is a conservative is because it leaves more money leftover for backhanded tax funnels. Liberals spend it all on public crap, some of which we don't even want. Conservatives spend just as much, but they do it behind closed doors. It's all just a game.
If pot becomes legalized, the first thing they will do is tax it to oblivion, so much that people will continue purchasing it in the black market. Just look at our cigarettes and gasoline... The worst crooks of all are our elected leaders!
Amen, brother! Our governments prevent people from dulling the monotony of servient existence, but they don't prevent anyone from eating their way to the ICU for a triple-bypass. I'll take a stoner over a 400lb scooter-riding welfare case, any day.
That graph is anecdotal bullshit. Cocaine isn't anywhere near as addictive as heroin. It's FUN, but you don't go through hell when you decide to quit. By comparison, cigarettes are much harder to quit.
The worst drugs are the legal ones, which shouldn't be surprising since they're the most profitable ones, by far.
I dunno man, I'm a daily-drinkin', hourly-billin', trend-followin' I.T. consultant. I like to think of my consulting career as a means to fund my beer geekdom.
But I do agree with you, if we can get rid of this prohibition nonsense, I think people would be more comfortable with pot, and as a direct result they would "abuse" it less. I have no shortage of friends who consume recreationally, and I'm perfectly cool with that. I mostly take issue with the types who are going absolutely nowhere, and treat pot - or any drug, for that matter - as a crutch to coast through life, selfishly, even parasitically. Much like my taste for microbrews, I think pot should be a well-earned reward, not something so cheaply acquired as to be mindlessly habitual. This is why I don't term myself an alcoholic: I'm not about getting drunk, I'm about enjoying the beverage. If there's only cheap skunky beer available, I'll drink water.
Smoking dope is victimless. Acquiring it is a nightmare.
Legalization solves the acquisition problem. Personally, I don't smoke, but I have absolutely no problem with someone who smokes recreationally - a lot of my friends do, and that's perfectly OK by me. To me, alcohol is just another recreational drug, and they should all be treated the same. Anyone can choose to allow drugs to dominate and destroy their well-being, and legality has no influence on that behaviour. I'd rather have someone get chilled on pot, than high on violent greed as we're seeing in many big american cities. At least the stoner just chills out in his living room, appreciating music:)
Pragmatically, this whole ordeal should be a non issue. If people want to grow pot in their homes, let them. Big fuckin' deal!
The only reason pot is so demonized is because it's easy to identify and prosecute. It is, by far, the least damaging "drug" in the western world. I'm way more worried about getting a heart attack from too much Advil, unsurprisingly due to the stress caused by all these conservative idiots trying to tell people how to live their lives. The pothead next door, while annoying with his brain-damanged music tastes and lack of valuable employment, is far less harmful to my existence than the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry that wants me to be sick 24-7 so I can consume their overpriced filth.
I think the Bitcoin thing is a very short-lived fad. The more people get in on it, the less valuable it becomes. The guy who's getting raided this week, well next week would have dropped out anyway once the mining "difficulty" doubles and he's suddenly spending more on hydro and Radeon 5970's than he's getting back in funny money. Big whoop!
if guns are not used for crimes, then what ARE they used for ? Don't get me wrong, in Canada we do a lot of recreational hunting, but a gun is a tool designed to shoot living things and make them unliving. The only difference between a hunter and a murderer is their choice of target.
Contrast with a Cisco router, which is designed to move information over data cables. No matter how you try to hack the router, it's not going to magically blow someone's brains out the back of their head.
Another important point here is the router does not care what kind of data it is transferring. A packet is a packet is a packet. Packet comes in, packet goes out. It is a neutral tool that does its job, regardless of content or purpose. China is using these to monitor and suppress dissent, but that's China's fault, not Cisco's. It sucks, but the Falun Gong is living under an oppressive, totalitarian, anti-civil-rights regime. If they want to be respected as human beings, their choices are:
1. fix the government, either by social awareness, coercion or good old-fashioned violent uprising 2. move the fuck out to a nicer place. Canada's still pretty friendly, if they can tolerate the weather.
Anything else is a futile waste of time and effort. Blaming random people will not fix China, nor will it buy them a green card to a free country. It will only create even more enemies, what the Falun Gong needs is allies.
There is a particular difference though (puts on bullet-proof cape):
Guns serve only one purpose: to shoot people (or perhaps animals). Sure, you can shoot at tin cans, but that's not the intended purpose. Now, I don't care which moral faction is using the gun. Good guy or bad, they're gonna shoot someone, presumably to critically wound and/or kill them. No one at Smith & Wesson is oblivious to the fact that violent defense is the primary usage of their products.
Cisco, on the other hand, sells products that move information around. The only way you can kill someone with a Cisco product is by grossly misusing it, e.g. dropping a CRS-1 on the victim's head. When they being operated normally, nobody is supposed to die.
To use the Falun Gong's broken logic, they should be suing everyone that has enabled the people who track and suppress their members. If Cisco can be blamed, then so can Dell for providing the desktop workstations and displays, DuPont for the halocarbon fire extinguisher, APC for the UPS, McDonalds and Red Bull for feeding the sysadmin... It's the same fallacy that was hypocritically used after 9/11 to crack down on so-called terrorism supporters. If the Falun Gong considers the Chinese government a terrorist organisation, then by extension they would blame everyone that has had any involvement whatsoever with the government. Did you pay taxes in the last 5 years ? Then you funded the enemy.
What the Falun Gong should be doing is spreading awareness, and I don't mean standing around with their banners, looking all pitiful and shit. That hasn't worked. Suing random companies isn't going to help either, it only creates resentment. If anyone gets laid off at Cisco, as a result of this bullshit lawsuit, chances are those ex-employees won't be too sympathetic to the cause. Ultimately, if they can amass enough support to seriously menace the government, they will have a chance to enact positive change. If not, well, tough tits. Revolutions don't happen while you sleep.
I thought that was the idea, but there hasn't really been a true "stable" 2.6 ever, at least none that I've ever seen. In my case, it usually has to do with buggy drivers.
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Glad to be of service, chum :)
Well now, I'm a prorgammer who's also in the business of appreciating (and promoting) music. For me, music IS the drug, but I can respect people who need a little psychoactive help to get into that mental state. That said, I am a hedonist by nature... If someone's goal in life is to enjoy themselves, I think they're my kind of person, as long as it's not to the detriment of everyone around them.
If they can't get by with gigs and t-shirts, they're doing it wrong and deserve to fail.
My own business didn't take off overnight, just because I showed up with a screwdriver and gaudy business card. It took off because I busted my ass for years to build it up. Music for profit is a business, and must be built from the ground up, just the same. You write good tunes, you put on good concerts, you identify your market, you establish relationships with other bands, promoters, producers, etc. You keep working at it until all that investment starts paying off, and if it doesn't, you either fucked up, or you're offering a product for which no one wants to pay.
I sure as shit would not buy someone's shirt or pay to see them, if all they played were Limp Bizkit covers, but that's what a lot of kids today are doing. Playing absolute shit to disaffected hormonal preteens, and wondering why, five years in, they're still not globe-trotting bazillionaires. I should know, because I'm operating a label :) I actually encourage my acts to give free tunes online, because it generates a ton of buzz and goodwill that pays off in spades down the road. Just look at Die Antwoord, as a prime example. They're a niche act from South Africa that has toured worldwide to great success, and yet their first album was posted on their web site, in its entirety, free to all visitors. I bought the commercial re-release, I bought the merch, I've seen them live. They've made about $60 from me, just by posting free music online, because it was GOOD music. Multiply that by the 2300 people who showed up to that one concert, and that's a pretty nice chunk of coin for a relatively unknown act. Now multiply that by the hundreds of shows they're played, and I'd call that a thundering success.
How much money has Rihanna made from me ? ZERO. I wouldn't even download her shit for free. So what's the difference ? I actually WANT Die Antwoord to succeed, I'm interested in their offerings, I appreciate what they're doing, and the entertainment they're providing me is worth every penny. I've played that free album more times than I can remember, it gets stuck in my head. Rihanna, she just makes me reach for the mute button. The more I hear her crap on the radio, the more I feel compelled to strangle puppies. Puppies with Rihanna's album cover taped to their cute little faces.
I don't know who Finland's most popular musical franchise might be, but it's a safe bet that if they need lobbyists to write up laws to secure their income, chances are they suck. Chances are I wouldn't ever sign them to my humble little label. Chances are I'd cheer if they got run over by a drunk driver. You're not allowed to call it art, if you're not investing your entire being into the work.
The fact that you've taken a full-time job says a lot about your home business. Me, I'm doing the opposite: I'm taking part-time contracts to fill out my weeks, until the business picks up enough momentum to keep me busy. My goal is to make the business my full-time job and a dominant source of income, but that takes time.
It's one thing to look at a part-time job, even self-employment, as a means to pad your party fund though college, but if you don't see a real future in that line of work, don't be calling it "your business". The window washing service sounds like just that, a revolving door for unskilled laborers. No continuity, no growth potential, no one's "baby".
It's diametrically opposed to the spirit of TFA, which is to give people time and resources to create something big. If I didn't have to worry about income for the next two years, you can be sure I'd bust my ass pursuing a number of innovative projects, that have been slowly brewing in the back of my head. It's like a series of stepping stones. Right now I'm taking consulting gigs to pay the bills, so I can work on my business project. Once that launches, if it does well enough, I'll ditch the consulting and tackle my next challenge, and so on. Personal income is merely an side-effect of the business, to keep the issue of money off my mind so I can focus on my creative processes. If personal income is the end-goal, then it's not a business, it's merely a job.
Or, he could correctly assess that modern education is just another extension of the predatory lending scheme, and bypass it, which he did.
If he were paying off loans, he'd still have to pay them $100k on top of that, as salary for the two years. I can tell you, in no uncertain terms, I gained NOTHING from college. I walked away with a mountain of debt, and a jaded view of the entire system. The handful of profs that were worth the headspace, they were always getting shit on by the administration, because they refused to tow the line and made all the others look like book-flinging orangutans, which they were. Unionized, talentless, uninvested, xenophobic, corporate welfare sycophants.
They prey on people who are too young and too inexperienced to know what they truly enjoy in life, and waste 3, 5, or 10 years of their lives shoehorning them into a half-heartedly chosen career path. I learned more in one summer, hacking on my own, reading every book and text file I could find, than in 3.5 years of classes. The chicks were hot, but in retrospect I could have loitered in the cafeteria without paying tuition... Then I dropped out and nailed a kickass job at a tech firm, no degree required. And there, I learned a whole lot more, from my peers, from more books, and from the motivation of wanting to create awesome software.
That assclown used-car-dealer-turned-COBOL-prof ? He's still teaching COBOL for $18/hr, even though he's never run a single program in his whole life, and he thoroughly hates students, but he's looking forward to his retirement package soon, so he can reflect on his half-century of parasitic existence. The 24 teens in TFA, on the other hand, will experience more cool shit over the next two years than all my old profs combined. And they decide they don't like making their own decisions, they can always go back to school and help pad J.P. Morgan's $830 billion dollar nest egg.
Having read TFA (shut up!), the impression I took away was that the various interviewees were old fogeys who are either unaware of current functionality, or unwilling to adapt.
One of the complaints is that modern Linux/BSD should automagically pipe console output through "more", even when not specified... really ? Are these guys so lazy ? What of all the full-screen interfaces, and streams of scrolling text we want to monitor but not necessarily read page-by-page ? The same PDP-8 dinosaur-lover self-describes as being "good at making sense of unfamiliar technologies or processes". Riiiiight...
Another classy fellow says he can't live without the archaic IBM XEdit, which was basically a memory-limited dos Edit for mainframes, and he sorely misses Ctrl-C and "kill -9" on the Windows side (*ahem* Ctrl-C still works, and TaskKill). I mean, is this really what constitutes commercial journalism today ? Baby boomers longing for the good old days ?
You know what ? I also have fond memories of Turbo Pascal in the early 90s, just like I have fond memories of my first girlfriend. That doesn't change the fact that she was a mindless domineering psycho bitch that was quickly and EASILY replaced with an improved version.
If they want to post a relevant article, maybe they could whine about how old gear was built to last, while today's asian-made crap barely survives the trip from the store. My first-run C64 has survived a hundred times more drops, jolts and whacks than today's gadgets could ever handle.
You're right. In this case, we're simply going backwards, so we could call it regression.
There's a lot of fail in that series of "illusions". I'm particularly annoyed with #5, the "Mask of Love". Yeah, it's amazing how three people discovered that a blurry, low-res image is ambiguous and might look like some other blurry, low-res image. Welcome to 2400 baud pr0n, dumbasses!
I suppose, when one's career consists of selling optical illusions , after a while you start scraping the bottom of the barrel...
Yeahhh that's the main reason I switched. And really, an ION these days is pretty cheap, compared to the spare PC and CPU horsepower required to transcode on the fly.
I like that idea, but realistically that should be a redirect to a common archive, or some distributed collaboration tool that allows them to work around their nation's vile censorship.
Well, shit on me.
I haven't used RHEL/CentOS 5.4+, so maybe the default has changed. Good catch.
In the last week, the bitcoin mining difficulty has doubled. That means it takes twice as many CPU/GPU cycles to find a coin as it did a week ago.
There is a limited number of bitcoins available, by design. The more people pound the system to score free coins, the harder it is for each person to get any. The nominal value of each coin rises, sure, but that's only good if you already have some, or are buying them with cash. For miners, the prospect of using hardware and electricity to mine coins is losing value with each passing day.
Well, I'd describe myself as a progressive, so conservatives make no sense to me. Our current PM, Stephen Harper, is an "americanophile". He is the Canadian George Bush. He loves selling out to corporate interests, and restricting personal freedoms to further that fascist agenda.
If "conservatives" were about minding their own business and keeping government down to the bare necessities, I'd be cool with it, but that's not the case up here. Our conservatives are about conservative values, which means pantheistic, libertarian, socialist free-thinkers like myself are portrayed as the enemy, to be legislated out of existence. The only reason Harper is a conservative is because it leaves more money leftover for backhanded tax funnels. Liberals spend it all on public crap, some of which we don't even want. Conservatives spend just as much, but they do it behind closed doors. It's all just a game.
If pot becomes legalized, the first thing they will do is tax it to oblivion, so much that people will continue purchasing it in the black market. Just look at our cigarettes and gasoline... The worst crooks of all are our elected leaders!
Amen, brother! Our governments prevent people from dulling the monotony of servient existence, but they don't prevent anyone from eating their way to the ICU for a triple-bypass. I'll take a stoner over a 400lb scooter-riding welfare case, any day.
That graph is anecdotal bullshit. Cocaine isn't anywhere near as addictive as heroin. It's FUN, but you don't go through hell when you decide to quit. By comparison, cigarettes are much harder to quit.
The worst drugs are the legal ones, which shouldn't be surprising since they're the most profitable ones, by far.
I dunno man, I'm a daily-drinkin', hourly-billin', trend-followin' I.T. consultant. I like to think of my consulting career as a means to fund my beer geekdom.
But I do agree with you, if we can get rid of this prohibition nonsense, I think people would be more comfortable with pot, and as a direct result they would "abuse" it less. I have no shortage of friends who consume recreationally, and I'm perfectly cool with that. I mostly take issue with the types who are going absolutely nowhere, and treat pot - or any drug, for that matter - as a crutch to coast through life, selfishly, even parasitically. Much like my taste for microbrews, I think pot should be a well-earned reward, not something so cheaply acquired as to be mindlessly habitual. This is why I don't term myself an alcoholic: I'm not about getting drunk, I'm about enjoying the beverage. If there's only cheap skunky beer available, I'll drink water.
Smoking dope is victimless. Acquiring it is a nightmare.
Legalization solves the acquisition problem. Personally, I don't smoke, but I have absolutely no problem with someone who smokes recreationally - a lot of my friends do, and that's perfectly OK by me. To me, alcohol is just another recreational drug, and they should all be treated the same. Anyone can choose to allow drugs to dominate and destroy their well-being, and legality has no influence on that behaviour. I'd rather have someone get chilled on pot, than high on violent greed as we're seeing in many big american cities. At least the stoner just chills out in his living room, appreciating music :)
Yes BC has a serious problem with grow-ops, but they're pretty much to the point of being a soft crime.
Tell that to Marc Emery.
Pragmatically, this whole ordeal should be a non issue. If people want to grow pot in their homes, let them. Big fuckin' deal!
The only reason pot is so demonized is because it's easy to identify and prosecute. It is, by far, the least damaging "drug" in the western world. I'm way more worried about getting a heart attack from too much Advil, unsurprisingly due to the stress caused by all these conservative idiots trying to tell people how to live their lives. The pothead next door, while annoying with his brain-damanged music tastes and lack of valuable employment, is far less harmful to my existence than the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry that wants me to be sick 24-7 so I can consume their overpriced filth.
I think the Bitcoin thing is a very short-lived fad. The more people get in on it, the less valuable it becomes. The guy who's getting raided this week, well next week would have dropped out anyway once the mining "difficulty" doubles and he's suddenly spending more on hydro and Radeon 5970's than he's getting back in funny money. Big whoop!
It's what Harper wipes his ass with, every time he has a "great idea".
You must be new here.
Repeat after me:
Computers don't kill people. People kill people; typically using guns.
if guns are not used for crimes, then what ARE they used for ? Don't get me wrong, in Canada we do a lot of recreational hunting, but a gun is a tool designed to shoot living things and make them unliving. The only difference between a hunter and a murderer is their choice of target.
Contrast with a Cisco router, which is designed to move information over data cables. No matter how you try to hack the router, it's not going to magically blow someone's brains out the back of their head.
Another important point here is the router does not care what kind of data it is transferring. A packet is a packet is a packet. Packet comes in, packet goes out. It is a neutral tool that does its job, regardless of content or purpose. China is using these to monitor and suppress dissent, but that's China's fault, not Cisco's. It sucks, but the Falun Gong is living under an oppressive, totalitarian, anti-civil-rights regime. If they want to be respected as human beings, their choices are:
1. fix the government, either by social awareness, coercion or good old-fashioned violent uprising
2. move the fuck out to a nicer place. Canada's still pretty friendly, if they can tolerate the weather.
Anything else is a futile waste of time and effort. Blaming random people will not fix China, nor will it buy them a green card to a free country. It will only create even more enemies, what the Falun Gong needs is allies.
There is a particular difference though (puts on bullet-proof cape):
Guns serve only one purpose: to shoot people (or perhaps animals). Sure, you can shoot at tin cans, but that's not the intended purpose. Now, I don't care which moral faction is using the gun. Good guy or bad, they're gonna shoot someone, presumably to critically wound and/or kill them. No one at Smith & Wesson is oblivious to the fact that violent defense is the primary usage of their products.
Cisco, on the other hand, sells products that move information around. The only way you can kill someone with a Cisco product is by grossly misusing it, e.g. dropping a CRS-1 on the victim's head. When they being operated normally, nobody is supposed to die.
To use the Falun Gong's broken logic, they should be suing everyone that has enabled the people who track and suppress their members. If Cisco can be blamed, then so can Dell for providing the desktop workstations and displays, DuPont for the halocarbon fire extinguisher, APC for the UPS, McDonalds and Red Bull for feeding the sysadmin... It's the same fallacy that was hypocritically used after 9/11 to crack down on so-called terrorism supporters. If the Falun Gong considers the Chinese government a terrorist organisation, then by extension they would blame everyone that has had any involvement whatsoever with the government. Did you pay taxes in the last 5 years ? Then you funded the enemy.
What the Falun Gong should be doing is spreading awareness, and I don't mean standing around with their banners, looking all pitiful and shit. That hasn't worked. Suing random companies isn't going to help either, it only creates resentment. If anyone gets laid off at Cisco, as a result of this bullshit lawsuit, chances are those ex-employees won't be too sympathetic to the cause. Ultimately, if they can amass enough support to seriously menace the government, they will have a chance to enact positive change. If not, well, tough tits. Revolutions don't happen while you sleep.
I thought that was the idea, but there hasn't really been a true "stable" 2.6 ever, at least none that I've ever seen. In my case, it usually has to do with buggy drivers.