Ha ha! I saw the word, "Nuke" and realized I'd misread the name.
Here's an applicable quote from the other Mark. . .
"An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."
(And one of my favorites. ..)
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it."
Two wrongs don't make a right in my book either, and the whole logic of "the pot calling the kettle black" doesn't make the kettle any cleaner.
Do you "Turn the other cheek" and "Forgive and forget" as well?
Mind programming comes in all kinds of easily consumed sound-bitten little packages. Predators love people who roll over so nicely. It might be wise to re-think a few things before you end up being somebody's dinner. --You've already got the chops; we need more people who prize honor and courage, but unless one strips away the gunk on the machine, then even people with the potential for good remain part of the problem.
In my book, "Honor" includes defense of the weak, or at the very least, refraining from morally condemning them for the crime of being at the wrong end of the stick.
Microsoft is a successful player in a punishing system designed to keep people over-worked and needy. People are going to starve over the next couple of years directly as a result of predatory business practices and what those practices have collectively done to the economy. Stealing from thieves is not a crime as far as I see it. It's just deserts. Because at the end of the day, the corporate behemoth cannot suffer or die. The humans that beast was supposed to serve, however, can suffer and die, and that trumps moral obligations to a paper monster. Social responsibility should be reserved for people, not heartless machines.
But guilt and self-flagellation have been taught well to the slaves whose livelihoods depend on how high they jump when commanded.
Is it legally right to keep an over-payment? No. But the social contract I 'signed' upon my birth is not one I have willingly agreed to. Born into bondage means, to me, an unspoken right to kill the slave master and escape whenever I get the chance, and I will certainly not feel guilty about doing that. In a system designed from the ground up to enslave the population of the planet through debt, the system as a tool of the enemy. I will never defend the enemy no matter what crimes are done to it. I will cheer.
As it happens, the system is currently self-destructing. Good. It was inevitable. The only bad part is that people will suffer, but that too was pre-planned by those who invented fractional banking and the idea of the interest bearing Federal Reserve note. Population control was always the goal. --Hopefully whatever system replaces it will actually serve humanity. If that ever happens, then theft from the collective wealth will then truly be theft from the people, and then I might start to care and call names. But right now, the downtrodden slave is not my target of ire.
I keep hearing about how Obama represents a "Mixed Bag".
Whatever. The whole show keeps moving forward. Keep an eye out for the "Amero".
And when the rocks start falling, people will be willing to follow this president to the shelters. Just remember, that barbed wire is for our protection. Don't be alarmed by the fact that it's facing inwards. I'm sure there will be a good rationalization for that.
Recordable memory technology available to the public will only ever be allowed increase at a set rate over time.
We hear whispers of astonishing technologies over the years. Sci-fi words like, 'Holographic' and 'Crystal' float like mist, but then nothing. And amazingly storage technology seems to grow only at a steady, reliable pace using the most mundane, already-tooled up factory standards. Heck, the holographic disk thing was released last year after the steady commercial creep of the 'cutting edge' had passed it by. Probably allowed to exist because it was considered a small-fry potato by the military.
I find it frustrating that the public is treated like a retarded child. Everybody knows that the real state of the art is well-funded and kept secret. And yet we all still cheer like fools when some 'new' advancement is made, as though our lives in the public sector are anything but fastidiously planned. There isn't any chance or invention for us. Who the heck knows what the state of real cutting edge technology is today? I have some educated guesses, some verifications, and the kinds of things we were capable of doing ten years ago would make certain aspects of Star Trek look like the "Toys R Us" version. But the people who could tell us, and some of you spineless cogs visit here, are under writs of secrecy.
The public is stuck in a neurotic state of cognitive dissonance. We know there's a real score, but we act like the one we're given is the whole deal, even to the point where we forget that it's not even close.
Oh my!
Touched a nerve there, didn't I? --Was it the phrase, "Spineless cogs" or simply pointing out an obvious truth that nobody likes to think about? --The reaction against which (moderation into negative troll dust) is indeed the purest expression of, "A neurotic state of cognitive dissonance" as you're likely to get. Other than shooting a person dead for talking about the elephant in the living room, that is.
The most disturbing part is this. . .
The more I learn about human nature, about auto-reactions, about willingly self-imposed slavery and above all, about how virtually everything people say to themselves and to others is a lie either conscious or unconscious, the more I understand how those driving the machine can do so with such callous disregard for humanity. --I don't agree with it, but I certainly find I understand its origin.
Recordable memory technology available to the public will only ever be allowed increase at a set rate over time.
We hear whispers of astonishing technologies over the years. Sci-fi words like, 'Holographic' and 'Crystal' float like mist, but then nothing. And amazingly storage technology seems to grow only at a steady, reliable pace using the most mundane, already-tooled up factory standards. Heck, the holographic disk thing was released last year after the steady commercial creep of the 'cutting edge' had passed it by. Probably allowed to exist because it was considered a small-fry potato by the military.
I find it frustrating that the public is treated like a retarded child. Everybody knows that the real state of the art is well-funded and kept secret. And yet we all still cheer like fools when some 'new' advancement is made, as though our lives in the public sector are anything but fastidiously planned. There isn't any chance or invention for us. Who the heck knows what the state of real cutting edge technology is today? I have some educated guesses, some verifications, and the kinds of things we were capable of doing ten years ago would make certain aspects of Star Trek look like the "Toys R Us" version. But the people who could tell us, and some of you spineless cogs visit here, are under writs of secrecy.
The public is stuck in a neurotic state of cognitive dissonance. We know there's a real score, but we act like the one we're given is the whole deal, even to the point where we forget that it's not even close.
The Empire State Building-climbing beast and the Miyamoto video game creation exist as part of the same mythology in my head. What I forgot was that the world beyond my skull has a less squishy filing system. --It's probably why I get such a kick out of metaphoric language.
I eagerly raced over to Wikipedia wondering how in the world somebody had managed to make a legal metaphor so evocative that it conjured images of giant apes hurling barrels at Italians. A metaphor which called upon my geek childhood video game roots and was perfect for a court case dealing with software piracy. Even before reading the word-logic, it was already jumping off the page!
Such a metaphor is far beyond my writing abilities, so I was practically wetting myself in the anticipation of seeing a true master at work.
And then everything got lame and the color vanished from my world.
I know a couple of restaurant owners. Reviews are only half of the story. Positive word of mouth is really vital; restaurants are by their very nature dependent on the bricks & mortal business style. They can't even do mail order, so a bad reputation leading to the loss of repeat business can destroy them.
This one place in my town was making an easy million per year, most of that from repeat customers eating there a couple times a month, some as often as two and three times a week. Then the owner cashed out and the new owner let things slide. You can make a LOT of money on a successful restaurant, or you can lose a lot of money on a restaurant very fast. It only takes a couple of bad experiences for a patron to stop coming around. If 100 regulars take away their $20 to $50 per week, then that's a catastrophic loss just on it's own. But that means 100 people are no longer saying, "I know this great place. . !" and are instead saying, "My favorite place is under a new dick-head owner and it totally sucks! Don't go!", then the damage can be almost impossible to recover from. The restaurant in question went from being a fifteen-year gold mine success story to closing its doors within just 18 months.
In the restaurant biz, word of mouth really matters, so the place you're talking about is probably already suffering.
Everybody here, EVERYBODY, has done something 'illegal' with their computer at some point. Chances are, everybody in the West with a computer is a criminal.
It might even be safe to say that everybody in the West is a criminal, computer or no.
When a society gets to that point, certain events are generally predicted.
And hey, we're seeing them.
But that's okay. When the smoke fades and the dust settles, I believe we're due for the invention of warp drive.
A large company in the Energy sector is going to have a hiring system which will probably include a proper background check. It might even be required by the late Bush policies. This means they'll know about your credit history, blood type, political affiliations and any unpaid parking tickets, --and certainly any convictions of pedophilia or the lack thereof. You've got bigger things to worry about than sloppy Google searches.
You know they make drugs now that can really help you with your paranoia problem. Look into it, seriously.
Yeah, but they don't make original, clever comebacks. That's the problem with mass-produced goods, though the average consumer can't tell the difference. It's all little ketchup packs to the Muggles. We paranoid types, however, can usually spot a knock-off.
Anyway, there's paranoia and there's poking fun at the ACs. (Don't worry about the Redmond thing. I was just doing that to invalidate you. I'm sure they only hire the best for their P.R. needs.)
Post short, post often, post using talking points from Redmond, and always use some unimaginative variant of the phrase, "but this is ridiculous" in each installment. Tick off "Post Anonymously". Collect paycheck.
Maybe if you earn enough, you can buy back your soul. Or do you get reprimanded for being outed?
Irrelevant musings of a NY Times writer with nothing else he could think of to submit to his editor that week.
It took decades of infrastructure building and programming and public training to make the internet what it is now.
You'd have about as much luck saying, "The English language is broken beyond repair. What we need to do is build a new one from the ground up!"
This is a silly, unrealistic idea in the same league as the one about fixing global warming by flying 10,000 jet planes day and night for years to dump chemicals in the atmosphere. Agreement on the broken-ness of the current system isn't even unanimous.
The only way to do it, other than all governments and heads of industry and media getting together to build a new internet, (uh huh,) would be to build a new system of protocols on the existing infrastructure, and try to convince people to abandon their current system. (Replace all their routers and modems?) "The first 12 months are free, and we'll bundle it with your phone bill, and anyway we're phasing out the old internet and migrating everybody over to. . . Oh wait, that's more like evolution than re-building from the ground up, which means it's still the same internet but with more appendages. . , which are backwards compatible with all the billions of dollars of technology currently in computers, homes, offices, telephone poles, data centers. .."
All other arguments aside. . , and please, ALL of them, the bottom line here is the whole "bread and circuses" thing.
Movies and television entertainment programming will only die when the empire falls.
Mind control via media is simply too important to lose, and the media owners know this. --And the most powerful advertising has nothing to do with overt station breaks. If the main character in a show is sipping a coke, or beating up a 'terrorist' then that's just as effective, if not more so, than placing a traditional ad spot. You can't really put up full-on propaganda ads and get away with it nearly so easily.
The entire file-sharing alarm is a four-part combination of. . .
1. Stupid hubris on the part of the pirate, (My downloading actually matters).
2. Greed from low-level management who don't understand the system they're employed by, (Self-explanatory).
3. Clever distraction, (What REAL story will be going down during TPB nonsense?)
4. A wonderful excuse to make sure everybody is guilty. (If the offense is globally condemned, which it will be, then you get to put pretty much anybody in jail except the most conservative wankers who would probably support your flag even if it is planted in a pile of burning homeless people. You know who you are.)
Good medicine is only for responsible races. I wonder what we'd actually do with a second chance. If we blow it, I'd be tempted to just deliberately poison the water. Oh, wait. . .
Think about it. If Amazon has the right to sell a book in a format which can be played as an audio book, then they can directly make an "audio book" and sell that. Period. The two are identical.
You clearly haven't done the Coke/Pepsi thing with audio books and text-reader programs.
Once upon a time, I had a job where the tasks were mindless enough that the better part of my brain was able to appreciate an audio book while I worked. Kept me sane over the course of a year or so. One evening I tried an experiment; I'd just downloaded a hundred thousand words of research document and I was anxious to dig into it, but I had to go to work. So I got the bright idea of bringing a laptop with a high-end speak & spell type program and it and just listening to the compy read the document out to me. It seemed like a straight forward idea. But aside from spending the better part of a day off screwing around trying to get this seemingly simple plan to work, the end result was pretty hopeless.
Yes, you could understand it. . , sort of, but. . , holy cow! (Look at that last sentence, for instance. An actor would get that instantly and make it a fun sentence to hear read out loud. By contrast, it would take a lot of human tweaking to hand-hold a computer through the same obstacle course of inflection and emotive variables to speak the same line half-way convincingly, let alone in a way which is entertaining.)
Even a nameless voice actor can do a brilliant job on a reading compared to the best computer program. Nobody, to my knowledge anyway, has yet marketed an AI capable of an even mildly convincing artificial voice capable of taking raw text and reading it correctly. There's no, "Again but with more feeling" command on any drop down menus. With the level of human-involved tweak which would be required to make a single book sound close to right, you could hire a voice actor to read a couple dozen books or more. Basically, until we have a good AI, this isn't going to be an issue, and when that happens, the world will see changes more alarming than the demise of the humble audio book.
But otherwise, your thinking offers some interesting food for thought.
That many people coordinating themselves, presumably using the intertubes. . ?
If even one person was caught on a security camera or ratted out for having $300,000 in cash under the bed. . , or has mental issues and throws a hissy-fit and decides to name names. Well that person could get everybody caught.
So that means the information security being used by the organizers will have to have been reliable. Lucky for them, they're hackers, so they're pretty smart. Unfortunately for them, they're hackers, which means they think they're pretty smart. Usually such people work from within the protective embrace of anonymity. But once you step out those doors, you're just a conceited geek in a world filled with real people and physical objects and chaotic patterns emerging from the interaction of those people and things.
My guess is that this adventure was not a product of the same people who bring us Storm Worms and digital age mob crime. Too many countries. This sounds more like the kind of group who cracks games. They'll have awesome systems for moving data around without anybody knowing. Or that's what they'll think anyway. After fifteen years, I'm sure they've built up some hubris. How good are hackers at knowing exactly how much spying has been done with this whole wire-tap thing and similar?
I wonder if they were conned into doing this by some kind of spook agency. It would certainly make wire-tapping look good and the kind of people who argue against it look bad. Who knows?
The real tragedy is that by the time they all get rounded up, the currency they stole won't be worth enough to pay for their one phone call. sigh.
Everybody on Slashdot uses some form of proxy software to prevent annoying ads, yet amazingly I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them who hasn't figured out how to watch an internet video when they feel like it. You're yelling at nothing. Why?
when you announce that you don't use these technologies, all you show us is that you are indulging in some sort of odd attention-seeking disorder with a strange misplaced pride
Ah. I See.
Translation: "I feel threatened by people with strong opinions and decisive behavior."
If you want to watch TV or surf the web in whatever manner best suits you, then go right ahead. Nobody cares. --However, feeling the need to have popular consensus on your side while you do so is garden variety cowardice.
In order to determine what a person is all about, memory is vital. In the world of "Forgive & Forget" and "Turn the Other Cheek" we fail to see patterns and find ourselves at a disadvantage.
Are you kidding me? I wouldn't dare imply that you had a Western Bias! What I said was that you were a, Nihilist. (Maybe you confused the two terms because they sort of rhyme if you say them fast.)
Nihilists are not capable of holding any loyalties except to their own egos. (The last thing to go as people dissolve.) You'd sell out the East, West, North or South in a heartbeat if it meant winning a few quick self-esteem points. But in order to sell, you need a cardinal point upon which to set up your card table, -which is why you were indeed promoting the West's brand of human destruction. Come on. You're embarrassing yourself. --It's not like you haven't dragged this dead horse around the block before. Are you honestly suggesting that you have since become a tweedy student with nothing but a dispassionate interest in the affairs of human kind? Nobody mouths, 'America' 'Democracy' and 'Free-Speech' with quite the same self-serving timbre as you. Geezuz. A little self-respect, man! Do I have to go pull up all the frickn' links for everybody to see?
So don't waste my time with your dumb posturing and falsetto innocence. You know exactly what you're saying and the effect it has.
And the point is this: there's another shooting war in the offing, possibly nuclear this time, and I'll be damned if we're all helped even one inch closer to it because a vile little worm like you is skulking around the playground seeking cheap and selfish ways to look cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha ha! I saw the word, "Nuke" and realized I'd misread the name.
Here's an applicable quote from the other Mark. . .
"An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."
(And one of my favorites. . .)
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it."
-FL
Two wrongs don't make a right in my book either, and the whole logic of "the pot calling the kettle black" doesn't make the kettle any cleaner.
Do you "Turn the other cheek" and "Forgive and forget" as well?
Mind programming comes in all kinds of easily consumed sound-bitten little packages. Predators love people who roll over so nicely. It might be wise to re-think a few things before you end up being somebody's dinner. --You've already got the chops; we need more people who prize honor and courage, but unless one strips away the gunk on the machine, then even people with the potential for good remain part of the problem.
-FL
In my book, "Honor" includes defense of the weak, or at the very least, refraining from morally condemning them for the crime of being at the wrong end of the stick.
Microsoft is a successful player in a punishing system designed to keep people over-worked and needy. People are going to starve over the next couple of years directly as a result of predatory business practices and what those practices have collectively done to the economy. Stealing from thieves is not a crime as far as I see it. It's just deserts. Because at the end of the day, the corporate behemoth cannot suffer or die. The humans that beast was supposed to serve, however, can suffer and die, and that trumps moral obligations to a paper monster. Social responsibility should be reserved for people, not heartless machines.
But guilt and self-flagellation have been taught well to the slaves whose livelihoods depend on how high they jump when commanded.
Is it legally right to keep an over-payment? No. But the social contract I 'signed' upon my birth is not one I have willingly agreed to. Born into bondage means, to me, an unspoken right to kill the slave master and escape whenever I get the chance, and I will certainly not feel guilty about doing that. In a system designed from the ground up to enslave the population of the planet through debt, the system as a tool of the enemy. I will never defend the enemy no matter what crimes are done to it. I will cheer.
As it happens, the system is currently self-destructing. Good. It was inevitable. The only bad part is that people will suffer, but that too was pre-planned by those who invented fractional banking and the idea of the interest bearing Federal Reserve note. Population control was always the goal. --Hopefully whatever system replaces it will actually serve humanity. If that ever happens, then theft from the collective wealth will then truly be theft from the people, and then I might start to care and call names. But right now, the downtrodden slave is not my target of ire.
-FL
I keep hearing about how Obama represents a "Mixed Bag".
Whatever. The whole show keeps moving forward. Keep an eye out for the "Amero".
And when the rocks start falling, people will be willing to follow this president to the shelters. Just remember, that barbed wire is for our protection. Don't be alarmed by the fact that it's facing inwards. I'm sure there will be a good rationalization for that.
-FL
Recordable memory technology available to the public will only ever be allowed increase at a set rate over time.
We hear whispers of astonishing technologies over the years. Sci-fi words like, 'Holographic' and 'Crystal' float like mist, but then nothing. And amazingly storage technology seems to grow only at a steady, reliable pace using the most mundane, already-tooled up factory standards. Heck, the holographic disk thing was released last year after the steady commercial creep of the 'cutting edge' had passed it by. Probably allowed to exist because it was considered a small-fry potato by the military.
I find it frustrating that the public is treated like a retarded child. Everybody knows that the real state of the art is well-funded and kept secret. And yet we all still cheer like fools when some 'new' advancement is made, as though our lives in the public sector are anything but fastidiously planned. There isn't any chance or invention for us. Who the heck knows what the state of real cutting edge technology is today? I have some educated guesses, some verifications, and the kinds of things we were capable of doing ten years ago would make certain aspects of Star Trek look like the "Toys R Us" version. But the people who could tell us, and some of you spineless cogs visit here, are under writs of secrecy.
The public is stuck in a neurotic state of cognitive dissonance. We know there's a real score, but we act like the one we're given is the whole deal, even to the point where we forget that it's not even close.
Oh my!
Touched a nerve there, didn't I? --Was it the phrase, "Spineless cogs" or simply pointing out an obvious truth that nobody likes to think about? --The reaction against which (moderation into negative troll dust) is indeed the purest expression of, "A neurotic state of cognitive dissonance" as you're likely to get. Other than shooting a person dead for talking about the elephant in the living room, that is.
The most disturbing part is this. . .
The more I learn about human nature, about auto-reactions, about willingly self-imposed slavery and above all, about how virtually everything people say to themselves and to others is a lie either conscious or unconscious, the more I understand how those driving the machine can do so with such callous disregard for humanity. --I don't agree with it, but I certainly find I understand its origin.
-FL
Recordable memory technology available to the public will only ever be allowed increase at a set rate over time.
We hear whispers of astonishing technologies over the years. Sci-fi words like, 'Holographic' and 'Crystal' float like mist, but then nothing. And amazingly storage technology seems to grow only at a steady, reliable pace using the most mundane, already-tooled up factory standards. Heck, the holographic disk thing was released last year after the steady commercial creep of the 'cutting edge' had passed it by. Probably allowed to exist because it was considered a small-fry potato by the military.
I find it frustrating that the public is treated like a retarded child. Everybody knows that the real state of the art is well-funded and kept secret. And yet we all still cheer like fools when some 'new' advancement is made, as though our lives in the public sector are anything but fastidiously planned. There isn't any chance or invention for us. Who the heck knows what the state of real cutting edge technology is today? I have some educated guesses, some verifications, and the kinds of things we were capable of doing ten years ago would make certain aspects of Star Trek look like the "Toys R Us" version. But the people who could tell us, and some of you spineless cogs visit here, are under writs of secrecy.
The public is stuck in a neurotic state of cognitive dissonance. We know there's a real score, but we act like the one we're given is the whole deal, even to the point where we forget that it's not even close.
-FL
You're thinking of Donkey Kong.
Ha ha! I am indeed.
The Empire State Building-climbing beast and the Miyamoto video game creation exist as part of the same mythology in my head. What I forgot was that the world beyond my skull has a less squishy filing system. --It's probably why I get such a kick out of metaphoric language.
-FL
I eagerly raced over to Wikipedia wondering how in the world somebody had managed to make a legal metaphor so evocative that it conjured images of giant apes hurling barrels at Italians. A metaphor which called upon my geek childhood video game roots and was perfect for a court case dealing with software piracy. Even before reading the word-logic, it was already jumping off the page!
Such a metaphor is far beyond my writing abilities, so I was practically wetting myself in the anticipation of seeing a true master at work.
And then everything got lame and the color vanished from my world.
sigh.
-FL
I know a couple of restaurant owners. Reviews are only half of the story. Positive word of mouth is really vital; restaurants are by their very nature dependent on the bricks & mortal business style. They can't even do mail order, so a bad reputation leading to the loss of repeat business can destroy them.
This one place in my town was making an easy million per year, most of that from repeat customers eating there a couple times a month, some as often as two and three times a week. Then the owner cashed out and the new owner let things slide. You can make a LOT of money on a successful restaurant, or you can lose a lot of money on a restaurant very fast. It only takes a couple of bad experiences for a patron to stop coming around. If 100 regulars take away their $20 to $50 per week, then that's a catastrophic loss just on it's own. But that means 100 people are no longer saying, "I know this great place. . !" and are instead saying, "My favorite place is under a new dick-head owner and it totally sucks! Don't go!", then the damage can be almost impossible to recover from. The restaurant in question went from being a fifteen-year gold mine success story to closing its doors within just 18 months.
In the restaurant biz, word of mouth really matters, so the place you're talking about is probably already suffering.
-FL
You know malware is getting big when autistic and/or Russian hackers hire copy editors so they don't sound like, well, hackers.
-FL
Everybody here, EVERYBODY, has done something 'illegal' with their computer at some point. Chances are, everybody in the West with a computer is a criminal.
It might even be safe to say that everybody in the West is a criminal, computer or no.
When a society gets to that point, certain events are generally predicted.
And hey, we're seeing them.
But that's okay. When the smoke fades and the dust settles, I believe we're due for the invention of warp drive.
-FL
Good grief. I guess the lesson here is, "Contrary to any rational notions, we all live in a Terry Gilliam film".
-FL
A large company in the Energy sector is going to have a hiring system which will probably include a proper background check. It might even be required by the late Bush policies. This means they'll know about your credit history, blood type, political affiliations and any unpaid parking tickets, --and certainly any convictions of pedophilia or the lack thereof. You've got bigger things to worry about than sloppy Google searches.
That's my rough guess, anyway.
Good luck!
-FL
You know they make drugs now that can really help you with your paranoia problem. Look into it, seriously.
Yeah, but they don't make original, clever comebacks. That's the problem with mass-produced goods, though the average consumer can't tell the difference. It's all little ketchup packs to the Muggles. We paranoid types, however, can usually spot a knock-off.
Anyway, there's paranoia and there's poking fun at the ACs. (Don't worry about the Redmond thing. I was just doing that to invalidate you. I'm sure they only hire the best for their P.R. needs.)
Cheers!
-FL
Ha ha!
I see they have a system of Slashdot mod-point distribution around Microsoft.
Look, you chumps, you had a shot with Windows 7, but this DRM crap is going to kill it.
-FL
Post short, post often, post using talking points from Redmond, and always use some unimaginative variant of the phrase, "but this is ridiculous" in each installment. Tick off "Post Anonymously". Collect paycheck.
Maybe if you earn enough, you can buy back your soul. Or do you get reprimanded for being outed?
-FL
Point well taken.
My auto-reaction, I think, resulted from the apparent fear-mongering and the ulterior motives I felt were detectable behind the NY Times piece.
Cheers and thank-you for your comment!
-FL
Irrelevant musings of a NY Times writer with nothing else he could think of to submit to his editor that week.
It took decades of infrastructure building and programming and public training to make the internet what it is now.
You'd have about as much luck saying, "The English language is broken beyond repair. What we need to do is build a new one from the ground up!"
This is a silly, unrealistic idea in the same league as the one about fixing global warming by flying 10,000 jet planes day and night for years to dump chemicals in the atmosphere. Agreement on the broken-ness of the current system isn't even unanimous.
The only way to do it, other than all governments and heads of industry and media getting together to build a new internet, (uh huh,) would be to build a new system of protocols on the existing infrastructure, and try to convince people to abandon their current system. (Replace all their routers and modems?) "The first 12 months are free, and we'll bundle it with your phone bill, and anyway we're phasing out the old internet and migrating everybody over to. . . Oh wait, that's more like evolution than re-building from the ground up, which means it's still the same internet but with more appendages. . , which are backwards compatible with all the billions of dollars of technology currently in computers, homes, offices, telephone poles, data centers. . ."
Ugh. Why are we even talking about this. . ?
-FL
All other arguments aside. . , and please, ALL of them, the bottom line here is the whole "bread and circuses" thing.
Movies and television entertainment programming will only die when the empire falls.
Mind control via media is simply too important to lose, and the media owners know this. --And the most powerful advertising has nothing to do with overt station breaks. If the main character in a show is sipping a coke, or beating up a 'terrorist' then that's just as effective, if not more so, than placing a traditional ad spot. You can't really put up full-on propaganda ads and get away with it nearly so easily.
The entire file-sharing alarm is a four-part combination of. . .
1. Stupid hubris on the part of the pirate, (My downloading actually matters).
2. Greed from low-level management who don't understand the system they're employed by, (Self-explanatory).
3. Clever distraction, (What REAL story will be going down during TPB nonsense?)
4. A wonderful excuse to make sure everybody is guilty. (If the offense is globally condemned, which it will be, then you get to put pretty much anybody in jail except the most conservative wankers who would probably support your flag even if it is planted in a pile of burning homeless people. You know who you are.)
-FL
Or the chickens and pigs.
Good medicine is only for responsible races. I wonder what we'd actually do with a second chance. If we blow it, I'd be tempted to just deliberately poison the water. Oh, wait. . .
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Think about it. If Amazon has the right to sell a book in a format which can be played as an audio book, then they can directly make an "audio book" and sell that. Period. The two are identical.
You clearly haven't done the Coke/Pepsi thing with audio books and text-reader programs.
Once upon a time, I had a job where the tasks were mindless enough that the better part of my brain was able to appreciate an audio book while I worked. Kept me sane over the course of a year or so. One evening I tried an experiment; I'd just downloaded a hundred thousand words of research document and I was anxious to dig into it, but I had to go to work. So I got the bright idea of bringing a laptop with a high-end speak & spell type program and it and just listening to the compy read the document out to me. It seemed like a straight forward idea. But aside from spending the better part of a day off screwing around trying to get this seemingly simple plan to work, the end result was pretty hopeless.
Yes, you could understand it. . , sort of, but. . , holy cow! (Look at that last sentence, for instance. An actor would get that instantly and make it a fun sentence to hear read out loud. By contrast, it would take a lot of human tweaking to hand-hold a computer through the same obstacle course of inflection and emotive variables to speak the same line half-way convincingly, let alone in a way which is entertaining.)
Even a nameless voice actor can do a brilliant job on a reading compared to the best computer program. Nobody, to my knowledge anyway, has yet marketed an AI capable of an even mildly convincing artificial voice capable of taking raw text and reading it correctly. There's no, "Again but with more feeling" command on any drop down menus. With the level of human-involved tweak which would be required to make a single book sound close to right, you could hire a voice actor to read a couple dozen books or more. Basically, until we have a good AI, this isn't going to be an issue, and when that happens, the world will see changes more alarming than the demise of the humble audio book.
But otherwise, your thinking offers some interesting food for thought.
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That many people coordinating themselves, presumably using the intertubes. . ?
If even one person was caught on a security camera or ratted out for having $300,000 in cash under the bed. . , or has mental issues and throws a hissy-fit and decides to name names. Well that person could get everybody caught.
So that means the information security being used by the organizers will have to have been reliable. Lucky for them, they're hackers, so they're pretty smart. Unfortunately for them, they're hackers, which means they think they're pretty smart. Usually such people work from within the protective embrace of anonymity. But once you step out those doors, you're just a conceited geek in a world filled with real people and physical objects and chaotic patterns emerging from the interaction of those people and things.
My guess is that this adventure was not a product of the same people who bring us Storm Worms and digital age mob crime. Too many countries. This sounds more like the kind of group who cracks games. They'll have awesome systems for moving data around without anybody knowing. Or that's what they'll think anyway. After fifteen years, I'm sure they've built up some hubris. How good are hackers at knowing exactly how much spying has been done with this whole wire-tap thing and similar?
I wonder if they were conned into doing this by some kind of spook agency. It would certainly make wire-tapping look good and the kind of people who argue against it look bad. Who knows?
The real tragedy is that by the time they all get rounded up, the currency they stole won't be worth enough to pay for their one phone call. sigh.
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"Appendix of history"? --Are you kidding me?
Man, that's one dead scarecrow!
Everybody on Slashdot uses some form of proxy software to prevent annoying ads, yet amazingly I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them who hasn't figured out how to watch an internet video when they feel like it. You're yelling at nothing. Why?
when you announce that you don't use these technologies, all you show us is that you are indulging in some sort of odd attention-seeking disorder with a strange misplaced pride
Ah. I See.
Translation: "I feel threatened by people with strong opinions and decisive behavior."
If you want to watch TV or surf the web in whatever manner best suits you, then go right ahead. Nobody cares. --However, feeling the need to have popular consensus on your side while you do so is garden variety cowardice.
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In order to determine what a person is all about, memory is vital. In the world of "Forgive & Forget" and "Turn the Other Cheek" we fail to see patterns and find ourselves at a disadvantage.
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attack me on my so-called phantom western bias
Are you kidding me? I wouldn't dare imply that you had a Western Bias! What I said was that you were a, Nihilist. (Maybe you confused the two terms because they sort of rhyme if you say them fast.)
Nihilists are not capable of holding any loyalties except to their own egos. (The last thing to go as people dissolve.) You'd sell out the East, West, North or South in a heartbeat if it meant winning a few quick self-esteem points. But in order to sell, you need a cardinal point upon which to set up your card table, -which is why you were indeed promoting the West's brand of human destruction. Come on. You're embarrassing yourself. --It's not like you haven't dragged this dead horse around the block before. Are you honestly suggesting that you have since become a tweedy student with nothing but a dispassionate interest in the affairs of human kind? Nobody mouths, 'America' 'Democracy' and 'Free-Speech' with quite the same self-serving timbre as you. Geezuz. A little self-respect, man! Do I have to go pull up all the frickn' links for everybody to see?
So don't waste my time with your dumb posturing and falsetto innocence. You know exactly what you're saying and the effect it has.
And the point is this: there's another shooting war in the offing, possibly nuclear this time, and I'll be damned if we're all helped even one inch closer to it because a vile little worm like you is skulking around the playground seeking cheap and selfish ways to look cool.
-FL