I support this 100%. By bribing politicians to extend the copyright period, the global media corporations have stolen the public domain. For that reason, they have forfeited any claim to any intellectual property that they believe that 'own'.
Suppose that you have bought a car and are making regular monthly payments on it. After five years you have one more payment to make and the ownership of the car is completely yours. The finance company bribes a politician, who puts a rider into a huge bill that can't be prevented from passing into law, and suddenly all the monthly payment schedules for cars are doubled. You won't own the car for another five years and you must continue to make monthly payments on it in order to prevent it from being repossessed. It's great for them, bad for you.
The copyright laws work the same way. For a set period, everyone must pay to consume the copyrighted material. After that period is over, the consumption of the material is free. By extending the period that the public must pay in order to consume this material, the public has had their free access stolen from them. This theft vastly exceeds any financial loss from people ignoring copyrights. And the copyright period has been extended every time that it has been set to expire. Which is a consistent pattern of criminal behavior. The global media companies, under the RICO act of the USA, are criminal organizations and have no legal right to demand people be placed in prison or be fined for accessing what they claim is copyrighted material.
The USA courts think nothing about stealing a person's house or car if they are found with a few pennies worth of cannabis on their person. This is 'asset forfeiture' and is a sweet little legalized theft business for the police and their associates.
When we make copies of materials that a supposedly 'owned' by the global media corporations, we are making a citizen's 'asset forfeiture' of the property acquired by these criminal organizations through illegal means, through the theft of the public domain.
There is no such thing as 'theft' of intellectual property. There is only the use of violence to either remove or protect the world's culture from the use by the people of the world. Everything else is just a legal smokescreen.
Nobody has any intellectual property rights to anything anymore in the information age. If you understand this basic concept, you will be able to make intelligent and balanced decisions concerning your own use of cultural resources and 'intellectual property'.
We have two words in English which completely change their meaning depending on the tone of speaker. Those words are 'fuck' and 'shit'. The verb 'to fuck' basically means to have sex and the noun 'shit' literally means excrement.
However the f word is used as a general purpose intensifier and the s word as a general noun for contempt. Or it can be any collection of undifferenciated objects.
These words are illegal in most public mass media usages and are socially unacceptable in formal conversation. But their endless variety of use can be explored in popular 'gangster rap' and 'hip-hip' musical styles. This music and R-rated Hollywood films show the usage of the words in average American life and display the wide range of meaning according to their tone.
Whether this is similar to tone usage in Mandarin I don't know.
I thought about this question and concluded that there were five levels of translation:
1- word for word translation.
2- phrase translation.
3 - paragraph translation
4 - conversational business level
5 - diplmatic and literary level
I suspect that each level requires an order of magnitude of more computing power than the previous level.
By the scale above, I believe that Babelfish is on level two and SYSTRAN is on level three.
I have used the SYSTRAN box to sell things on eBay to people in other countries that don't speak english. Sent and received e-mails would go into the SYSTRAN box for translation to and from Italian. The sales went well. The funds were placed into my PayPal account and the items shipped by airmail to the buyers. Positive feedback ratings all around.
It's when I realized that the 'Earth was flat', according to Thomas Friedman's bestseller.
Two things could be done with this complex. Turn it into a museum, say The Museum of the Apocalypse. Include a amusement park, a bar, a cannabis 'chill center', a dance hall for raves, etc...
Or sell it to modern billionaires who are more important than the British Prime Minister.
After all, it's not like the 10000 Hydrogen bombs and 1000 ICBMs actually went away. They're still around. Which means that an underground shelter might still be a wise precaution.
Better yet, turn it into an art museum. That way, if the bombs do go off and the urban center surfaces of the planet are destroyed, the great art masterpieces will be saved for the human survivors living a hundred generations after WarDay.
In Community College, when I was studying to be an Electronics Technician, we had to take two full classes of Physics. Normally I wouldn't care, but I had a lot of more important things to do. Plus the textbook cost a week's wages. Plus, nothing in the physics classes had any direct relevance to electronics. Plus, I was too old to give a shit about a required class in background peripheral subjects.
So, at the last class there was a final exam, and for the first time in my life I was confronted with a test in which I didn't know one single correct answer.
Fortunately, I was able to use logical comparative analysis to pass the test. I compared the answer of the person on the left of me with the answer of the person on the right of me. If they were the same, then that was my answer too. If different, I took the answer of the person who looked smarter (nerdier in a Physics class perspective).
I have no shame about doing this. I signed up to become an Electronics Technician, not a Physics student. I recommend this to anyone in school. Learn everything possible about your field: cheat on everything else. Whenever possible, use technology to give yourself proficency in areas that you chose not to learn. I'm talking spell checkers here, guys, for the present. In the future, learn to trust and use machine language translators. Unfortunately there is no spell checker on this Windows computer that I am currently using in the library. Why not?
In an era where our entertainment has come to define us and to fill, however (un)completely, the spiritual void that we inherited from the Boomers,...
The Boomers inherited their "spiritual void" from the genocidal war that killed 70 million people a decade before they were born, and the 'Great War' twenty years before that slaughtered an entire generation of European males for nothing.
Plus the boomers inherited an insane structure of military leaders on both sides of the Berlin Wall that were ready, willing, and able to burn the world and kill everyone over a minor disagreement of political doctrine.
What is considered the 'spiritual void' of the Boomers is actually a reasonable and humanistic retreat from the religious cult of omnicide (the destruction of all human life on earth) that infused the leaders of the world when the boomers came to maturity.
As for the sexuality of those who create the myths and plays of our culture, it is their concern. We admire the characters that they create, and respect the skills of the writers and actors that created them. If the actors wish to exclaim that an aspect of their personality, such as their sexuality, was an important aspect of their development of the character that they created, then fine.
I'm constantly amazed that in graduate level management classes it is still taught that low-level employees should be thrown away like a used tissue. I never occurs to them that a 'disposable' employee is a rare asset to the company.
This is because the company can use the disposable employee to take charge of special projects that have the potential of bringing the company a lot of money if successful but can be safely fired and covered up if the project doesn't work out. Usually the disposable employee is young, unmarried, and without children and other dependents. They are often bored, smart, well-trained, under-utilized, and restlessly willing to do something out-of-the-box or even extreme.
Traditionally taught management dictates that these people be just tossed away. But this is crazy because these employees give you the ability to reinvigorate your company with special risky projects with the minimum amount of exposure to bad consequences. If it doesn't work out, you can blame it all on a 'low-level new employee unaware of legal agreements invoked before their hire', as Microsoft has done in this case. If it does work, cover the illegal aspects and promote the 'low-level employee' who took the risk and made it work. In other words, give them health insurance and job security.
This is quite Machiavellian. Nevertheless, all large corporations are Machiavellian and these strategies should be taught in graduate-level business school.
Hello, Thank you, I wrote this from the PC in the public library. Each person only gets an hour. I also had some eBay stuff to sell. The library uses MS Internet Explorer and eBay only seems to work with IE. So I didn't have a lot of time to polish the satire. But satire has to be a little weak, because if it were really good and strong, then people would get angry and unpredictable. Someday when I perfect this craft, I hope and dream of going to Hollywood! Wish me luck.
There are basicly two Americas now: the red states (rednecks) and the blue states (blue noses). This isn't a state division so much as it is an urban vs. rural/suburban division. Its roots go back to the division between the original settlers of the USA who came two-three hundred years ago and the people whose ancestors immigrated here a hundred years ago.
The reds are not going to go green - ecology - earth-friendly - global-consciousness or whatever you want to call it. They are direct descendents of the Indian killers who believe that God has given them America as a promised land to do whatever they want with it with His blessing. They are the ones with the $30000 absurdly oversized giant 4x4 trucks parked out in front of the WalMart. These are the people who form the alliance between the fundamentalist churches and the multi-national corporations. They consistently vote against their own economic interest in the belief that allowing the global corporations free reign will get them a guaranteed ticket to heaven. They vote for the most reactionary politicians, fly flags on their giant trucks, and support with their children's blood any crypto-fascist or bone-headed foreign policy war or adventure. They support Jesus; they hate big government and liberals. As as the US economy holds together and they keep getting their checks from the feds, they will be 100% against any form of going green or environmental protection simply on principal. These people would rather kill you than listen to you explain about the long-term consequences of their bone-head mentality. These people aren't unique to the USA, but there are some many more of them in the USA than elsewhere because the USA has so much more money than other places.
The blues are primary city people. They are much more open to adapting to international environmental policies and going green. However their only hope of implementing a change in US government policy is to break the connection between the fundamentalists and multi-national corporations. Since they don't have the ability to offer the reds a ticket-to-heaven and would impose restrictions on the pollution generated by the corporations, their current prospects are bleak (Especially since they don't count the votes). These people will individually buy 'green' products, but they won't have any influence on the policies of the major corporations. As for getting WalMart to do anything progressive, forget it. It's a lost cause there.
The only way to get the USA to adopt 'green' policies is unbalance their economy. Whether this will happen without any serious organized international attempt to do is currently anyone's guess. But will the American people voluntarily adopt 'green' policies, don't hold your breath. It's most unlikely.
...ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials.
This statement is manifestly absurd.
You can have all the ideas and innovations in the world, but in the reality, if you don't have land, energy, and raw materials, you don't have shit.
Having ideas and innovations only means anything when you have land, wealth, and control of the means of violence to maintain control of your land and wealth.
The notion that 'intellectual property' such as ideas and innovations have any inherent value is nothing more than a fantasy for the fools who allowed their country to piss away its entire manufacturing base in return for the illusion that they could maintain control of this manufacturing capacity by the mere generation of 'ideas'. If that were true then anyone could become a millionair by simply smoking stong cannibus; an activity that ensures that person doing it has lots of meaningless and absurd ideas.
In the real world, it's actual physical things that matter, not ideas and innovations. 'Intellectual property' is what you give to people when you've stolen their possessions so that you have time to get away before they realize that you've convinced them to trade their birthright for bullshit.
If '..ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials', then show me any intelligent person who would actually trade their land, energy and raw materials for your 'ideas and innovations'.
Rule #1 of modern warfare: Never believe your own propaganda.
My EULA on all my software, regardless of any written or implied language in the 'agreement', is interpreted by me, the primary user, to be:
(1) The possessor of this software, regardless of how the possessor came to be in possession of the software, is entitled to do whatever the fuck they want to with the software. Included but not restricted to: giving the software to whoever the fuck I want, for any or no compensation that I so chose; examining and altering the software in any fashion that I chose; commenting negatively or positively on the quality of the software, in totality or part, in any forum that I chose to, public or private.
(2) I, the primary user of the software, accept that the maker of the software offers no assurance, either explicit or implicit, that the software in any way, works for the purpose or any purpose that I, the primary user, acquired it for. Nor, do I, the primary user, make any assumptions that the data produced by the software be accurate, correct, realistic, are in any applicable to the purpose that the software was acquired. Regardless of the consequences of the use of this software, the makers or providers of the software to the primary user will hold no liability for any fucking thing that can happen as a result of interaction with the software on any level.
This is what I am agreeing to when I click on I agree. The lawyers for large software corporations have this incomprehensibly weird idea that anyone would agree to clause #2 without the corporation's acceptance of clause #1.
One of the unfortunate side effects of the 1970s was the replacement of all the soft white street light bulbs with orange-yellow sodium vapor bulbs. Sodium vapor bulbs use less energy. All the night lighting went from soothing soft white to light orange. Orange, as you may recall, is the color of madness.
I've never liked yellow-orange streetlights. It's one of those things that never gets noticed. But the difference can be really appreciated if you go to a wealthy neighborhood where white light bulbs are still used. However, unless you're older and white, it's going to be a short time before the 'security guards' drive up with tasers and ask you what you're doing. If you're truthful and tell them that 'you're digging the cool white groove of the light, baby', then they will do what all mercenaries do when encountering a civilian harmlessly enjoying life, they will kidnap and assault you for their amusement.
Anyway, a return to soft white lighting in the night will be most welcome.
from the lead... Scammers have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy. They say the American guy has a good life. There's this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way.'
Now if I were a white man in North America who made his living by stealing and defrauding black people in Africa, and if I were to say in an interview that "Black Africans are stupid and greedy. The African has a good life. For every dollar they lose, the UN and various relief agencies will pay them back in some way."...
You can believe that there would be an international effort to track me down and crucify me. Newspapers from Boston to Brunei would be calling for my head in the editorial pages. Third world intellectuals from every two-bit sleazy little slave-trading 'daylight democracy' would be lined up outside the UN waiting to get the opportunity to demand that I be turned over to the 'International Court of Justice' and how my statements were 'typical of white America's long history of Imperialism and systematic oppression'.
But a bunch of black Africans can make a career of defrauding thousands of people in the West, and toss off racist and ignorant comments as a justification and people just say " well that's what they are and that's what they do"
My college roommate once did a performance art project by learning how to say "Do you have a cigarette? Do you have any spare change?" in 40 different languages. He went to all the foreign students who were hanging out in the student center cafeteria for a month and asked them to translate the phrases into their home languages. He told them that he wanted to learn to mooch his way completely around the world.
He took off to Zurich, Switzerland to perfect his craft. But Zurich is the last place on earth that anyone should go to learn to be a begger. So he was back in town a month later: broke, busted, disgusted.
When the American 60's TV situation comedy "Hogan's Heroes" was finally able to be shown in Germany, there was the delicate issue of the various 'Heil Hitler' salutes done by the various Nazi officers. Delicate because this gesture is illegal (as I understand it) on television shows in the post-war German Republic.
So, (I'm been told) whenever anyone makes a stiff arm salute, the voice-over dubbing says "Look how high the corn grows!".
I wonder if young Germans ever insult their bosses and superiors by calling them 'corn growers' as an oblique reference to their acting like fascist assholes.
After all, the Newton was just a rehash of...well...um...er...
The Go Company pen computer
The Momenta Company pen computer
The PI Systems Company pen computer
Just a few that I can remember from the time. There were others. Apple never does anything new. It puts other people's good products into an Apple package and puts out a press release. Then the news media people, who all use Apple computers, go bonkers.
Apple products are like the products of the high fashion industry. High style, pretty people, good quality fabrics and tailoring, fantastic press coverage. But completely worthless for the mass marketplace.
In other words, I can go to my local library building (or even online: http://www.cml.lib.oh.us/) and reserve just about any DVD, CD, book, or magazine that I could ever want.
You know, without being ironic, you might consider not telling people about this feature available at most urban library systems. It would be reason that the media corporations use to shut down the public libraries (or reduce them to only being able to distribute non-copyrighted materials).
However, on the other hand, it might not matter even if everyone did know that they can get anything (except porn) for free through the public library system. People have been conditioned to feel that pleasure and status comes from actually buying these items. Therefore an identical viewing of a DVD, or listening to a CD, or reading of a book from the libary would be considered far less valuable and worthwhile than its purchase at the mall.
Perhaps this is the avenue that the **AAs should use to convince people not to copy media products. "The pleasure comes from the buying, not the viewing" -might work, as long as people continue to have lots of money.
While hundreds of millions of songs have been downloaded and shared, only a few hundred thousand book files have been. There simply isn't the demand for books and literature that there is for music files.
For example, I scanned and OCR'ed several of my favorite books and made the files available on Kazaa. Years later, there hasn't been one single download of the book files in ASCII that I've put on Kazaa. People simply aren't interested.
The published book format is a culture that will not transfer to the Napster-Kazaa file-sharing people. The book publishers are totally clueless and are talking nonsense when they say that millions of copies of a book title will not be sold if the book's text is available for free on-line. They are projecting a paranoia over a non-existent phenomenon (massive book file-sharing in the magnitude of music file-sharing).
The book-buying community is completely different from the music-buying masses. It has different income levels and social perspectives. Even if published books were forced to be distributed for free by mandated law, the book community would still create ways to financially compensate the authors and publishers. Not much compensation, but enough to maintain the culture and community. The only reason why copyright pirates would mass distribute copies of book-text files without paying copyright fees would be to gain social prestige, and copyright pirates are focused on making money discretely, and not any form of social climbing. And this is more so the further that one gets away from Hollywood.
Even without going into the issue that no one likes to read books on the computer screen or laptop, the idea that having book text available for download will severely affect the (limited and tiny) profitability of the book publishers simply doesn't make sense in the real world. The threat simply doesn't exist. The ability to have 10,000 titles of book text on a 40 cent DVD-ROM will complement and enhance the book market, not destroy it.
Just because the banking overseers and some bankers agree that this measure could reduce identity theft, it doesn't follow that this two-level ID system will actually come into wide usage. Sure they passed a regulation mandating it at a time in the future.
But this mandate can be quietly suspended, extended, or admended when it becomes apparent to the people who live in the real world how difficult it would actually be to get working.
But even if it does come to pass, and you do have put your eyeball up against a laser to get $30 cash from your ATM, you can always take your money out of the idiot bank and put it into another one that doesn't impose such draconian madness. Like a bank that is outside the USA. If you had put most of your money in a Canadian bank last year, your money would be worth 35% more given the rise in the Canadian dollar to the American dollar.
Need cash? Then use a PayPal debit card that is linked to your Canadian bank account. Have your paychecks automaticly deposited into your Canadian bank account. Have a local bank account that is for check writing only and doesn't require invasive biometrics to access.
I doesn't hurt to get some money out of the USA. With the USA being the world's biggest debtor nation, the entire world hating the USA, and new alteratives like the Euro available as a benchmark global currency, it's not as if the US dollar is going to be rising in value against the other major currencies. And the rise of inexpensive global communications networks and accessible easy-to-use private-bank international debit cards like the PayPal card makes all the financial tranaction work nearly transparent. Fuck the little corner bank and their eyeball machine!
Yes, and all developers, even small startups with possibly innovative products, have the resources to code the thousands of lines necessary.
Share the code for all the standards. Don't reinvent the wheel. Have each company code one standard and freely share the code with all the rest of the companies.
This idea that every company hires programmers to write the same functions for the same types of programs is just total nonsense that should have been abandoned in the mid 1980's.
If there are legal problems, then just set up a subsiduary of the company in a country where you don't have these idiotic legal problems and sell your code from that country.
No seriously, You have nearly unlimited code and storage space for your programs in modern PCs. You have intelligent and hard-working programmers. And you have the specifications for the various 'standards'.
So just code all the 'standards' into your program so that it just fu*king works!, regardless of what is or becomes the 'standard'. Please spare your customers all the BS excuses as to why the program that they bought doesn't function correctly.
I can't believe that the CEO of Intel is worried about the loss of US scientific positioning. He does everything possible to drive people OUT of the technical and engineering professions.
This is the guy who's company insists that you have college degrees and take a drug test before they will even consider you for a temp position working in any technicial position in his company.
Did I say temp? Goodness me, I meant perma-temp. Work for years as a 'contract' employee with no health insurance, job security, advancement, or benefits.
Intel sucks. Check out the FACEIntel website for more information. I spent a week at Intel ten years ago. I sure hope that I never have to go back there. Unless you are one of the top twenty people in the world at what you do, Intel is a total dead-end company. And if you are one of the top twenty people in the world in your speciality, why the hell would you want to work at Intel? It's a 'sixth sense' company; already dead but doesn't know it.
In Germany (where I live) employees' wages were nicely rising along with the overall productivity until about 1990. Since the beginning of the 90s, however, raises in wages barely compensate the inflation.
I believe that the productivity gains in Germany achieved since 1990 has been invested into the development of the eastern part of the country. Perhaps this is the economic equivalent of the amount of energy needed to change states of matter. When ice turns to liquid water, it takes a lot of energy to do the process. The temperature of the water doesn't change as it absorbs much heat.
Perhaps when the eastern part of Germany leaves completely the Dr behind and becomes equal in wealth and productivity to the western parts, the wages of all Germans will rise again in league with productivity.
If Congress doesn't deliver a Broadcast Flag pronto, warns the letter, content producers will abandon free, over-the-air broadcast TV.
Isn't NTSC broadcasting, that is to say, free over-the-air TV, scheduled to end on New Year's Eve 2006 anyway?
This is great opportunity for the TV industry to wave their nuts.
If the absurd bill doesn't pass, they just let the NTSC broadcasts shut down (as they have been scheduled to do for the past ten years) and claim that they shut it all down because Congress ignored their threats.
If the stupid law passes, they claim that it happened because they united together as an industry and made serious threats to shut down free over-the-air broadcasting.
Meanwhile they don't notice that anyone with an IQ over 95 is watching much television anymore. They're hustling hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisement revenues from companies trying to sell junk to people who can't afford it because they all have near-minimum wage jobs.
The last time that I watched television there were something like five commercials for SUVs in a row. Anyone who hasn't bought an SUV by now isn't going to run out and do so at midnight after having put up with five obnoxious commercials for these idiot machines.
Television sucks. It doesn't matter what the program is or the actors or the writers or whether it's on broadcast or cable. If it's on television, it sucks. It's simply the fundamental nature of the medium. It will never get better or change, because it can't. Leave it to the losers.
Slashdot Mirror
I support this 100%. By bribing politicians to extend the copyright period, the global media corporations have stolen the public domain. For that reason, they have forfeited any claim to any intellectual property that they believe that 'own'.
Suppose that you have bought a car and are making regular monthly payments on it. After five years you have one more payment to make and the ownership of the car is completely yours. The finance company bribes a politician, who puts a rider into a huge bill that can't be prevented from passing into law, and suddenly all the monthly payment schedules for cars are doubled. You won't own the car for another five years and you must continue to make monthly payments on it in order to prevent it from being repossessed. It's great for them, bad for you.
The copyright laws work the same way. For a set period, everyone must pay to consume the copyrighted material. After that period is over, the consumption of the material is free. By extending the period that the public must pay in order to consume this material, the public has had their free access stolen from them.
This theft vastly exceeds any financial loss from people ignoring copyrights. And the copyright period has been extended every time that it has been set to expire. Which is a consistent pattern of criminal behavior. The global media companies, under the RICO act of the USA, are criminal organizations and have no legal right to demand people be placed in prison or be fined for accessing what they claim is copyrighted material.
The USA courts think nothing about stealing a person's house or car if they are found with a few pennies worth of cannabis on their person. This is 'asset forfeiture' and is a sweet little legalized theft business for the police and their associates.
When we make copies of materials that a supposedly 'owned' by the global media corporations, we are making a citizen's 'asset forfeiture' of the property acquired by these criminal organizations through illegal means, through the theft of the public domain.
There is no such thing as 'theft' of intellectual property. There is only the use of violence to either remove or protect the world's culture from the use by the people of the world. Everything else is just a legal smokescreen.
Nobody has any intellectual property rights to anything anymore in the information age. If you understand this basic concept, you will be able to make intelligent and balanced decisions concerning your own use of cultural resources and 'intellectual property'.
We have two words in English which completely change their meaning depending on the tone of speaker. Those words are 'fuck' and 'shit'. The verb 'to fuck' basically means to have sex and the noun 'shit' literally means excrement.
However the f word is used as a general purpose intensifier and the s word as a general noun for contempt. Or it can be any collection of undifferenciated objects.
These words are illegal in most public mass media usages and are socially unacceptable in formal conversation. But their endless variety of use can be explored in popular 'gangster rap' and 'hip-hip' musical styles. This music and R-rated Hollywood films show the usage of the words in average American life and display the wide range of meaning according to their tone.
Whether this is similar to tone usage in Mandarin I don't know.
I thought about this question and concluded that there were five levels of translation:
1- word for word translation.
2- phrase translation.
3 - paragraph translation
4 - conversational business level
5 - diplmatic and literary level
I suspect that each level requires an order of magnitude of more computing power than the previous level.
By the scale above, I believe that Babelfish is on level two and SYSTRAN is on level three.
I have used the SYSTRAN box to sell things on eBay to people in other countries that don't speak english. Sent and received e-mails would go into the SYSTRAN box for translation to and from Italian. The sales went well. The funds were placed into my PayPal account and the items shipped by airmail to the buyers. Positive feedback ratings all around.
It's when I realized that the 'Earth was flat', according to Thomas Friedman's bestseller.
Two things could be done with this complex. Turn it into a museum, say The Museum of the Apocalypse. Include a amusement park, a bar, a cannabis 'chill center', a dance hall for raves, etc...
Or sell it to modern billionaires who are more important than the British Prime Minister.
After all, it's not like the 10000 Hydrogen bombs and 1000 ICBMs actually went away. They're still around. Which means that an underground shelter might still be a wise precaution.
Better yet, turn it into an art museum. That way, if the bombs do go off and the urban center surfaces of the planet are destroyed, the great art masterpieces will be saved for the human survivors living a hundred generations after WarDay.
In Community College, when I was studying to be an Electronics Technician, we had to take two full classes of Physics. Normally I wouldn't care, but I had a lot of more important things to do. Plus the textbook cost a week's wages. Plus, nothing in the physics classes had any direct relevance to electronics. Plus, I was too old to give a shit about a required class in background peripheral subjects.
So, at the last class there was a final exam, and for the first time in my life I was confronted with a test in which I didn't know one single correct answer.
Fortunately, I was able to use logical comparative analysis to pass the test. I compared the answer of the person on the left of me with the answer of the person on the right of me. If they were the same, then that was my answer too. If different, I took the answer of the person who looked smarter (nerdier in a Physics class perspective).
I have no shame about doing this. I signed up to become an Electronics Technician, not a Physics student.
I recommend this to anyone in school. Learn everything possible about your field: cheat on everything else. Whenever possible, use technology to give yourself proficency in areas that you chose not to learn. I'm talking spell checkers here, guys, for the present. In the future, learn to trust and use machine language translators. Unfortunately there is no spell checker on this Windows computer that I am currently using in the library. Why not?
In an era where our entertainment has come to define us and to fill, however (un)completely, the spiritual void that we inherited from the Boomers,...
The Boomers inherited their "spiritual void" from the genocidal war that killed 70 million people a decade before they were born, and the 'Great War' twenty years before that slaughtered an entire generation of European males for nothing.
Plus the boomers inherited an insane structure of military leaders on both sides of the Berlin Wall that were ready, willing, and able to burn the world and kill everyone over a minor disagreement of political doctrine.
What is considered the 'spiritual void' of the Boomers is actually a reasonable and humanistic retreat from the religious cult of omnicide (the destruction of all human life on earth) that infused the leaders of the world when the boomers came to maturity.
As for the sexuality of those who create the myths and plays of our culture, it is their concern. We admire the characters that they create, and respect the skills of the writers and actors that created them. If the actors wish to exclaim that an aspect of their personality, such as their sexuality, was an important aspect of their development of the character that they created, then fine.
I'm constantly amazed that in graduate level management classes it is still taught that low-level employees should be thrown away like a used tissue. I never occurs to them that a 'disposable' employee is a rare asset to the company.
This is because the company can use the disposable employee to take charge of special projects that have the potential of bringing the company a lot of money if successful but can be safely fired and covered up if the project doesn't work out. Usually the disposable employee is young, unmarried, and without children and other dependents. They are often bored, smart, well-trained, under-utilized, and restlessly willing to do something out-of-the-box or even extreme.
Traditionally taught management dictates that these people be just tossed away. But this is crazy because these employees give you the ability to reinvigorate your company with special risky projects with the minimum amount of exposure to bad consequences. If it doesn't work out, you can blame it all on a 'low-level new employee unaware of legal agreements invoked before their hire', as Microsoft has done in this case. If it does work, cover the illegal aspects and promote the 'low-level employee' who took the risk and made it work. In other words, give them health insurance and job security.
This is quite Machiavellian. Nevertheless, all large corporations are Machiavellian and these strategies should be taught in graduate-level business school.
Hello, Thank you, I wrote this from the PC in the public library. Each person only gets an hour. I also had some eBay stuff to sell. The library uses MS Internet Explorer and eBay only seems to work with IE. So I didn't have a lot of time to polish the satire. But satire has to be a little weak, because if it were really good and strong, then people would get angry and unpredictable. Someday when I perfect this craft, I hope and dream of going to Hollywood!
Wish me luck.
There are basicly two Americas now: the red states (rednecks) and the blue states (blue noses). This isn't a state division so much as it is an urban vs. rural/suburban division. Its roots go back to the division between the original settlers of the USA who came two-three hundred years ago and the people whose ancestors immigrated here a hundred years ago.
The reds are not going to go green - ecology - earth-friendly - global-consciousness or whatever you want to call it. They are direct descendents of the Indian killers who believe that God has given them America as a promised land to do whatever they want with it with His blessing. They are the ones with the $30000 absurdly oversized giant 4x4 trucks parked out in front of the WalMart. These are the people who form the alliance between the fundamentalist churches and the multi-national corporations. They consistently vote against their own economic interest in the belief that allowing the global corporations free reign will get them a guaranteed ticket to heaven. They vote for the most reactionary politicians, fly flags on their giant trucks, and support with their children's blood any crypto-fascist or bone-headed foreign policy war or adventure. They support Jesus; they hate big government and liberals. As as the US economy holds together and they keep getting their checks from the feds, they will be 100% against any form of going green or environmental protection simply on principal. These people would rather kill you than listen to you explain about the long-term consequences of their bone-head mentality. These people aren't unique to the USA, but there are some many more of them in the USA than elsewhere because the USA has so much more money than other places.
The blues are primary city people. They are much more open to adapting to international environmental policies and going green. However their only hope of implementing a change in US government policy is to break the connection between the fundamentalists and multi-national corporations. Since they don't have the ability to offer the reds a ticket-to-heaven and would impose restrictions on the pollution generated by the corporations, their current prospects are bleak (Especially since they don't count the votes). These people will individually buy 'green' products, but they won't have any influence on the policies of the major corporations. As for getting WalMart to do anything progressive, forget it. It's a lost cause there.
The only way to get the USA to adopt 'green' policies is unbalance their economy. Whether this will happen without any serious organized international attempt to do is currently anyone's guess. But will the American people voluntarily adopt 'green' policies, don't hold your breath. It's most unlikely.
This statement is manifestly absurd.
You can have all the ideas and innovations in the world, but in the reality, if you don't have land, energy, and raw materials, you don't have shit.
Having ideas and innovations only means anything when you have land, wealth, and control of the means of violence to maintain control of your land and wealth.
The notion that 'intellectual property' such as ideas and innovations have any inherent value is nothing more than a fantasy for the fools who allowed their country to piss away its entire manufacturing base in return for the illusion that they could maintain control of this manufacturing capacity by the mere generation of 'ideas'. If that were true then anyone could become a millionair by simply smoking stong cannibus; an activity that ensures that person doing it has lots of meaningless and absurd ideas.
In the real world, it's actual physical things that matter, not ideas and innovations. 'Intellectual property' is what you give to people when you've stolen their possessions so that you have time to get away before they realize that you've convinced them to trade their birthright for bullshit.
If '..ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials', then show me any intelligent person who would actually trade their land, energy and raw materials for your 'ideas and innovations'.
Rule #1 of modern warfare: Never believe your own propaganda.
My EULA on all my software, regardless of any written or implied language in the 'agreement', is interpreted by me, the primary user, to be:
(1) The possessor of this software, regardless of how the possessor came to be in possession of the software, is entitled to do whatever the fuck they want to with the software. Included but not restricted to: giving the software to whoever the fuck I want, for any or no compensation that I so chose; examining and altering the software in any fashion that I chose; commenting negatively or positively on the quality of the software, in totality or part, in any forum that I chose to, public or private.
(2) I, the primary user of the software, accept that the maker of the software offers no assurance, either explicit or implicit, that the software in any way, works for the purpose or any purpose that I, the primary user, acquired it for. Nor, do I, the primary user, make any assumptions that the data produced by the software be accurate, correct, realistic, are in any applicable to the purpose that the software was acquired. Regardless of the consequences of the use of this software, the makers or providers of the software to the primary user will hold no liability for any fucking thing that can happen as a result of interaction with the software on any level.
This is what I am agreeing to when I click on I agree. The lawyers for large software corporations have this incomprehensibly weird idea that anyone would agree to clause #2 without the corporation's acceptance of clause #1.
One of the unfortunate side effects of the 1970s was the replacement of all the soft white street light bulbs with orange-yellow sodium vapor bulbs. Sodium vapor bulbs use less energy. All the night lighting went from soothing soft white to light orange. Orange, as you may recall, is the color of madness.
I've never liked yellow-orange streetlights. It's one of those things that never gets noticed. But the difference can be really appreciated if you go to a wealthy neighborhood where white light bulbs are still used. However, unless you're older and white, it's going to be a short time before the 'security guards' drive up with tasers and ask you what you're doing. If you're truthful and tell them that 'you're digging the cool white groove of the light, baby', then they will do what all mercenaries do when encountering a civilian harmlessly enjoying life, they will kidnap and assault you for their amusement.
Anyway, a return to soft white lighting in the night will be most welcome.
from the lead... Scammers have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy. They say the American guy has a good life. There's this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way.'
...
Now if I were a white man in North America who made his living by stealing and defrauding black people in Africa, and if I were to say in an interview that "Black Africans are stupid and greedy. The African has a good life. For every dollar they lose, the UN and various relief agencies will pay them back in some way."
You can believe that there would be an international effort to track me down and crucify me. Newspapers from Boston to Brunei would be calling for my head in the editorial pages. Third world intellectuals from every two-bit sleazy little slave-trading 'daylight democracy' would be lined up outside the UN waiting to get the opportunity to demand that I be turned over to the 'International Court of Justice' and how my statements were 'typical of white America's long history of Imperialism and systematic oppression'.
But a bunch of black Africans can make a career of defrauding thousands of people in the West, and toss off racist and ignorant comments as a justification and people just say " well that's what they are and that's what they do"
Now is that racist, or what?
My college roommate once did a performance art project by learning how to say "Do you have a cigarette? Do you have any spare change?" in 40 different languages. He went to all the foreign students who were hanging out in the student center cafeteria for a month and asked them to translate the phrases into their home languages. He told them that he wanted to learn to mooch his way completely around the world.
He took off to Zurich, Switzerland to perfect his craft. But Zurich is the last place on earth that anyone should go to learn to be a begger. So he was back in town a month later: broke, busted, disgusted.
When the American 60's TV situation comedy "Hogan's Heroes" was finally able to be shown in Germany, there was the delicate issue of the various 'Heil Hitler' salutes done by the various Nazi officers. Delicate because this gesture is illegal (as I understand it) on television shows in the post-war German Republic.
So, (I'm been told) whenever anyone makes a stiff arm salute, the voice-over dubbing says "Look how high the corn grows!".
I wonder if young Germans ever insult their bosses and superiors by calling them 'corn growers' as an oblique reference to their acting like fascist assholes.
After all, the Newton was just a rehash of...well...um...er...
The Go Company pen computer
The Momenta Company pen computer
The PI Systems Company pen computer
Just a few that I can remember from the time. There were others.
Apple never does anything new. It puts other people's good products into an Apple package and puts out a press release. Then the news media people, who all use Apple computers, go bonkers.
Apple products are like the products of the high fashion industry. High style, pretty people, good quality fabrics and tailoring, fantastic press coverage. But completely worthless for the mass marketplace.
In other words, I can go to my local library building (or even online: http://www.cml.lib.oh.us/) and reserve just about any DVD, CD, book, or magazine that I could ever want.
You know, without being ironic, you might consider not telling people about this feature available at most urban library systems. It would be reason that the media corporations use to shut down the public libraries (or reduce them to only being able to distribute non-copyrighted materials).
However, on the other hand, it might not matter even if everyone did know that they can get anything (except porn) for free through the public library system. People have been conditioned to feel that pleasure and status comes from actually buying these items. Therefore an identical viewing of a DVD, or listening to a CD, or reading of a book from the libary would be considered far less valuable and worthwhile than its purchase at the mall.
Perhaps this is the avenue that the **AAs should use to convince people not to copy media products. "The pleasure comes from the buying, not the viewing" -might work, as long as people continue to have lots of money.
While hundreds of millions of songs have been downloaded and shared, only a few hundred thousand book files have been. There simply isn't the demand for books and literature that there is for music files.
For example, I scanned and OCR'ed several of my favorite books and made the files available on Kazaa. Years later, there hasn't been one single download of the book files in ASCII that I've put on Kazaa. People simply aren't interested.
The published book format is a culture that will not transfer to the Napster-Kazaa file-sharing people. The book publishers are totally clueless and are talking nonsense when they say that millions of copies of a book title will not be sold if the book's text is available for free on-line. They are projecting a paranoia over a non-existent phenomenon (massive book file-sharing in the magnitude of music file-sharing).
The book-buying community is completely different from the music-buying masses. It has different income levels and social perspectives. Even if published books were forced to be distributed for free by mandated law, the book community would still create ways to financially compensate the authors and publishers. Not much compensation, but enough to maintain the culture and community. The only reason why copyright pirates would mass distribute copies of book-text files without paying copyright fees would be to gain social prestige, and copyright pirates are focused on making money discretely, and not any form of social climbing. And this is more so the further that one gets away from Hollywood.
Even without going into the issue that no one likes to read books on the computer screen or laptop, the idea that having book text available for download will severely affect the (limited and tiny) profitability of the book publishers simply doesn't make sense in the real world. The threat simply doesn't exist. The ability to have 10,000 titles of book text on a 40 cent DVD-ROM will complement and enhance the book market, not destroy it.
Just because the banking overseers and some bankers agree that this measure could reduce identity theft, it doesn't follow that this two-level ID system will actually come into wide usage. Sure they passed a regulation mandating it at a time in the future.
But this mandate can be quietly suspended, extended, or admended when it becomes apparent to the people who live in the real world how difficult it would actually be to get working.
But even if it does come to pass, and you do have put your eyeball up against a laser to get $30 cash from your ATM, you can always take your money out of the idiot bank and put it into another one that doesn't impose such draconian madness. Like a bank that is outside the USA. If you had put most of your money in a Canadian bank last year, your money would be worth 35% more given the rise in the Canadian dollar to the American dollar.
Need cash? Then use a PayPal debit card that is linked to your Canadian bank account. Have your paychecks automaticly deposited into your Canadian bank account. Have a local bank account that is for check writing only and doesn't require invasive biometrics to access.
I doesn't hurt to get some money out of the USA. With the USA being the world's biggest debtor nation, the entire world hating the USA, and new alteratives like the Euro available as a benchmark global currency, it's not as if the US dollar is going to be rising in value against the other major currencies. And the rise of inexpensive global communications networks and accessible easy-to-use private-bank international debit cards like the PayPal card makes all the financial tranaction work nearly transparent. Fuck the little corner bank and their eyeball machine!
Yes, and all developers, even small startups with possibly innovative products, have the resources to code the thousands of lines necessary.
Share the code for all the standards. Don't reinvent the wheel. Have each company code one standard and freely share the code with all the rest of the companies.
This idea that every company hires programmers to write the same functions for the same types of programs is just total nonsense that should have been abandoned in the mid 1980's.
If there are legal problems, then just set up a subsiduary of the company in a country where you don't have these idiotic legal problems and sell your code from that country.
No seriously, You have nearly unlimited code and storage space for your programs in modern PCs. You have intelligent and hard-working programmers. And you have the specifications for the various 'standards'.
So just code all the 'standards' into your program so that it just fu*king works! , regardless of what is or becomes the 'standard'. Please spare your customers all the BS excuses as to why the program that they bought doesn't function correctly.
I can't believe that the CEO of Intel is worried about the loss of US scientific positioning. He does everything possible to drive people OUT of the technical and engineering professions.
This is the guy who's company insists that you have college degrees and take a drug test before they will even consider you for a temp position working in any technicial position in his company.
Did I say temp? Goodness me, I meant perma-temp. Work for years as a 'contract' employee with no health insurance, job security, advancement, or benefits.
Intel sucks. Check out the FACEIntel website for more information. I spent a week at Intel ten years ago. I sure hope that I never have to go back there. Unless you are one of the top twenty people in the world at what you do, Intel is a total dead-end company. And if you are one of the top twenty people in the world in your speciality, why the hell would you want to work at Intel? It's a 'sixth sense' company; already dead but doesn't know it.
In Germany (where I live) employees' wages were nicely rising along with the overall productivity until about 1990. Since the beginning of the 90s, however, raises in wages barely compensate the inflation.
I believe that the productivity gains in Germany achieved since 1990 has been invested into the development of the eastern part of the country. Perhaps this is the economic equivalent of the amount of energy needed to change states of matter. When ice turns to liquid water, it takes a lot of energy to do the process. The temperature of the water doesn't change as it absorbs much heat.
Perhaps when the eastern part of Germany leaves completely the Dr behind and becomes equal in wealth and productivity to the western parts, the wages of all Germans will rise again in league with productivity.
Irony is not just the place where all the Iranians come from.
If Congress doesn't deliver a Broadcast Flag pronto, warns the letter, content producers will abandon free, over-the-air broadcast TV.
Isn't NTSC broadcasting, that is to say, free over-the-air TV, scheduled to end on New Year's Eve 2006 anyway?
This is great opportunity for the TV industry to wave their nuts.
If the absurd bill doesn't pass, they just let the NTSC broadcasts shut down (as they have been scheduled to do for the past ten years) and claim that they shut it all down because Congress ignored their threats.
If the stupid law passes, they claim that it happened because they united together as an industry and made serious threats to shut down free over-the-air broadcasting.
Meanwhile they don't notice that anyone with an IQ over 95 is watching much television anymore. They're hustling hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisement revenues from companies trying to sell junk to people who can't afford it because they all have near-minimum wage jobs.
The last time that I watched television there were something like five commercials for SUVs in a row. Anyone who hasn't bought an SUV by now isn't going to run out and do so at midnight after having put up with five obnoxious commercials for these idiot machines.
Television sucks. It doesn't matter what the program is or the actors or the writers or whether it's on broadcast or cable. If it's on television, it sucks. It's simply the fundamental nature of the medium. It will never get better or change, because it can't. Leave it to the losers.