My workplace does actually have a lot of users who need the web for work reasons. What just occurred to me is to set up everyone with software for running virtual machines, then put one on each of their machines that has a web browser on it which refreshes and exports it's bookmark file to each user's network share. Is there any free software that can run a virtual machine from inside XP like this, or is that a pay only product?... Bitchin! Looks like VMware player does just this.
Re:You can't win if you don't play
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is just not true. I'm actively using social networking and local bbs's to get me + wife into the local social scene. We're both from out of town and we've moved to a place with very small tight groups of friends who have typically grown up together and are a little nervous about outsiders. It's not a good environment for walking up to people in bars and introducing yourself, but these sites allow you to start goofing around with people anonymously, which then makes them more interested and curious about you when you meet them IRL.
I am the IT department at a small manufacturing company with 120 employees, so that's about 1:120. I do ERP/database, network, files, printer + desktop maintainance. It's a lot of ground to cover, and there are definitely some ugly weeks.
1) Require all businesses to report chemical composition of all gaseous / liquid / solid waste created in any manufacturing operation, along with similar estimates for wastes created by use of said products (ie carbon in gasoline). Require them to pay cleanup costs for each one (obviously this will increase consumer cost for dirty products). Impose fines for people who underestimate how much they're polluting, put people who evade this tax in jail for income tax fraud. 2) Ban imports of products not conforming to 1 as verified by an appropriate UN inspections body. 3) Greatly reduce military expenditures for anything not related to missiles and remote controlled aerial bombardment. There is no need with our level of technology to use our military for anything other than destroying economic and productive infrastructure of expansionary military powers (of which we are currently one). 4) Prosecute previous administration for war crimes. 5) Work with less developed economies to help coordinate and fund sanitation and transportation infrastructure, paying particular attention to developing ways to combat goverment and corporate corruption. 6) Large investments in basic energy, space travel research, asteroid detection / guidance. 7) Develop controls for biotechnology, keeping all equipment that can be used for creating or engineering viruses firmly under surveillance. 8) Go investigate about that supervolcano under Yellowstone that buries the northwest section of the country in ash every 600,000 years and last did this about... 600,000 years ago. 9) Socialized healthcare for everyone under 80, and everyone over 80 up to some reasonable limit. It will eventually be possible to keep people alive indefinitely given sufficient money, and the government has to stop picking up the tab somewhere.
This is a bunch of hooey. In the future, your desktop computer, camera, cell phone, etc will all be one item. You take this along with your terabytes of storage on said item with you, and when you get somewhere you want to do desktop stuff you plug it into a docking station that does network, video, key board and mouse over some kind of USB v4 interface. The iphone is pretty much already there. It needs to be a little faster, and we need to be able to put openoffice on it, and then we're there.
I and all others have a right to an economy that as much as possible allows anyone to participate on equal terms irregardless of each of our own racial, religious and sexual identity. Necessary to this is that you don't allow people to publish commercial speech that specifically excludes a person on the basis of that person's group membership. Free association is important, but we need to make sure our economy respects all human beings. Filthy, thieving robots need not apply.
First of all, I'd like to thank the parent of this reply. You were by far the most thoughtful reply to my original post and I would like to recognize this as the effort it was, and one whose intent I share. We're discussing what kinds of governments are just and thus we're discussing what our own government should strive for. For a long time I felt that the US government's values were crap, but I've since come to realize that my anger and strong feelings about this were because I felt the government was not living up the ideals I was taught as a child. PS I'm drunk and sentimental.
From a US. perspective, you make a lot of good points. I think that you need to look at things from a bigger picture.
The idea of civil rights isn't necessarily immutable. In China, two civil rights considered paramount are the right to eat and the right to be free from fear of crime. These are both worthy goals; from my perspective the first in particular has a lot of merit. My personal method for evaluating these things is Utilitarianism, and as far as I can see, the fact that both the US system and the CHinese system (combined with their respective social values held by the people) result in stable, expanding societies marks them both as successes to a degree. In the US we have free speech; if you explained this concept to a lot of Chinese people, they'd wonder why the hell anyone would want to embarrass themselves by standing up in front of the people in charge and speaking whatever they feel deep down in parts of their minds that are supposed to be very very secret. Lots of people have things to say, but until the cultural pendulum swings in favor of people wanting to speak up all the time, Free Speech isn't going to be as big a deal as making sure the other two thing I mentioned are dealt with.
Once, I showed some chinese friends a newspaper story about this guy that went nuts and cut up his university-age girlffriend with a knife. THEY WENT FUCKING NUTS!!!! They thought this was the most fucked up thing they'd ever heard of, rather than the six o'clock news standard I thought it was, BECAUSE I COME FROM A DIFFERENT CULTURE.
First of all, we're talking about Google news here, which includes many stories from domestic and international press, some of which are very critical of government, media conglomerates, and corporations. It's true that if you look at TV news its all mostly harmless, but the whole reason this is a big deal is because the internet is a mechanism to largely circumvent those controls and get at all the information. That's precisely what makes it so vital. Secondly, there's a big difference between "Rupart Murdoc doesn't choose to spend his money to criticise X" (the case in the US) and "if I criticise X I can be thrown in prison for years" (the case in China) because in China, Free Speech is not valued, obviously by the government, but also it seems in different ways from the US by ordinary people.
Once again, I'm talking about relative efficacy of media institutions. A censored google internet is a better tool than a non-censored one that the CCP could block with a finger snap. Besides... maybe it isn't so hard at all to access the whole database...As for the rest, it's true that you don't get shot for saying what the US gov't doesn't like
I certainly won't claim that the US has a perfect record on human rights or civil liberties. That's why I am very vocal on the subject and have been a member of the ACLU here in the US. The difference, however, is that I am free to say that and free to continue that fight. I can go out and spread that message and those that are convinced can vote to change the government's policies. None of that is true in China, which is one reason why it is false to say the US is no better. Both nations have much room to improve.
I got my card in my pocket right fucking now. I defend the values of MY society and what I think MY society should be against the theocratic fucks every chance I get. Try seriously fighting for the rig
Democracy was born in uneducated peasant societies precisely like those. There is more to a well-balanced, knowledgable person than 'education'.
USA Democracy was intellecutually born in Native American horticultural / hunter-gatherer societies. This is the gold standard of egalitarianism as noone really has any consumer goods to fight over, and everyone has equal access to the level of education needed to acquire status. As for the burgeoning USA itself, it's the same thing; most people were familiar with the political issues of the day as English colonial citizens and thus made decisions based on a relatively common ground of information about the political landscape. Look at the US today; given the growing rift between religious conservatives and social/economic liberal who increasingly despise each other, do you think that's a stable political system? I put $20 on New England seceding by 2050.
Of course people are more than the sum of their "educations." But at the same time, in order for democracy to prosper, you need certain institutions that aren't as strong here as they could be. Take little bites or you'll get sick to your stomach.
South Africa is a relatively uneducated nation, but they've gone a different route from China and opted for a system that enshrines civil liberties and the democratic process. You can't excuse China for abridging basic human rights by saying 'they're letting people go to work and get ahead in life' or 'they're uneducated, any sort of democracy wouldn't work'.
I don't know anything about the political situation in South Africa. Having said that, I excuse the Chinese Communist Party of nothing. I'm seeking to note that their stances and actions are not particularly equivocal with evil.
In the short term, there's some democratic reforms that would go a long way. Two I'd argue for most strenuously would be allowing locals to elect their own governing Communist Party members and not oulawing effective labor unions. I think this would notably cut down on the level of corruption that afflicts rural folks in particular, and for the second would greatly help fight abuses in the new capialist economy; the current government is pragmatic-aurthoritarian, not communist.
Speaking as someone who's been working here for a bit, I have to say two things.
First, all this shit about the Chinese Government being the evilest thing on earth is nuts. The government here manages to keep social order such that people can get up and go to work everyday, and such that an increasing number of this generation of children have a shot at the kind of economy we like to talk about in the USA; work like a dog and get yourself a better life. Sure there's a ton of people (80% of 1.3 billion) who are farmers and will never see this. Do you think a liberal democracy based on egalitarian ideals could just be stuck onto a society like this where so many people are completely uneducated? The current government is doing the right thing; focusing on decreasing the population to a level that the economy can comfortably support (keep in mind China has very VERY little in the way of natural resources). Granted there are massive problems here, particularly institutionalized corruption of the beauracracy, but you could do a lot worse. China is a police state? The US is MUCH more heavily policed, although if you DO manage to catch the attention of the real Chinese police they WILL shoot you in the head. Nothing ever shows up in the Chinese media that's critical of the government? SO what?! Nothing ever shows up on the USA's useless fucking media that hasn't been approved by the station's marketing department. Besides, you think Chinese people here don't know what's going on? Christ, of COURSE they know they're not getting the whole story. You think these people are stupid?
Which brings me to Google. Given that these days China is hardly Nazi Germany (or Stalinist Russia or even Maoist China), saying that making censorship concessions with the PRC government. is tantamount to an act of evil is just dumb. You have the choice of not giving the Chinese people access to an information retrieval tool that will further entrench the Internet in their lives as a useful (and possibly eventually liberating) tool OR you can just do what you can. I'll take the second one any day. Look, nothing is going to piss the Chinese off worse than a hairy fucking big nosed foreignor walking in and tellin' the way it is about free speech. That's just a dumb idea.
Do you have a spam folder? Save all your spam emails with headers intact. Also export your email address list into a text table. Write perl scripts to parse emails and check for whatever variables you are interested in; what type / size attachment, is the sender in your addr book, does the sender addr appear to be valid or not. You could even try to combine this with your web browser history. The key is that while you still need to build the DB yourself, there's a lot of interesting information you can easily extract with simple scripts and minimal actual work.
Put each document in white business envelopes, numerical labels on each white business evelope, put document inside as it comes in. Put envelopes in one of three boxes; never throw away, throw away in five years, throw away in a year. Maybe have additional box for documents that will only fit in big manilla envelopes.
Write a quick perl script webinterface that records one of several customizable options from a pull down menu (ie grocery receipt, gas bill, heroin expenses) along with the date, the numeric label you just put on, and maybe a sentence additionally describing content as needed. The web interface calls an SQL database and stores the information therein or according to the scheme for your electric system you seem to find awesome.
When you need to find a document, search by type and date or text note, find the label number and box number, and proceed as you might typically.
The only trouble you're going to run into is that evelopes are expensive and take up more space than you might like. Try only using envelopes for stuff not printed on 8.5 by 11; put labels directly on stapled folded versions of these. Alternately, divide files by size of paper and paper weight in a serious and merciless fashion. Alternately, reuse envelopes. Anyone have a better system for actually storing the paper assuming you like the sequential numbering + database scheme?
That's it. That's it! These people have to be fucking stopped.
It was one thing when the consolidation of radio stations combined with neo-payola fixed it so there was nothing but top 40's crap to be heard on the radio, then they try to quash p to p networks and maintain their near complete control over distribution of MY freakin' culture and sue 12 year olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if it looks like they're going to go the additional step and actually start DELETING the $%#$ing art they've gone too far.
I want these pricks out of business with their children out in the street turning tricks for wonderbread. Monday.
GOD I've got a hangover.
SkittleBrau is tasty with
on
Skittlebrau
·
· Score: 1
a forty of old english. Try it. Nine out of ten punk rockers with cirrhosis of the liver swear by it.
My position is and always has been, that this technology represents a fundamental improvement in methods of distributing media, and therefore we need to do whatever has to be done irregardless of legality, to remove any obstacles in our way. Particularly the music industry which I personally dislike. Have you stolen enough media today? Could you have stolen more? Do you have any siblings or friends who aren't yet stealing music? Remember: commercialized control of radio through formats and media consolidation killed radio. Do you want the internet to go the same way?
Here's my question for him. Are we any closer to being able to create viruses able to destroy an entire race, but not affect other races? I know a few races I'd like to be rid of.
Given that morons like the above clearly exist, do we indeed want to press ahead with this technology right now? Last I checked, all the peoples of the world weren't getting along too great, and the above troll is a good example of why we wouldn't want this to be TOO common / cheap. If we as a community are opposed to secrecy of science we might be better off just waiting a bit on this stuff, at least until some change in humanity (mebbe we all live in space stations scattered around and thus are difficult to disease into non-existance) makes the threat less deadly.
It always seemed to me that in cases of natural monopoly the sensible thing to do would be to nationalize the service or otherwise turn it into a public utility. I'll take a public utility over a single corporation any day as one's mission is to provide a service vs. the other's goal of making dollars.
Roger Zelazny. Probably the best modern mythic author next to Tolkien and the only such author to try and talk about magic and technology as if they were the same thing and under the control of similar mythical forces.
Also H.P. Lovecraft. I predict people will recognize him for the genius he was sooner or later, although he was dismissed as a pulp author by most of the literati in this century.
((( I look forward to the day when I will have the chance to vote for a candidate who speaks honestly, who grasps the centrality of technology and culture in our time, and is willing to raise those important issues in a rational way. That person is unlikely to come out of Washington, or the existing political structure, and is more likely to have grown up reading a site like this.)))
I have issues with waiting for some white hat hero to come along and save me. Are you really comfortable consigning your fate to the off chance that someone who agrees with your own goals will come into a position where they have a realistic chance of winning an election? I am not.
On a larger issue, I don't think that our current system of being forced to choose some politician to run my life is valid. As voting theorists have noted, our system of elections is not at all rational. I think that it is time to look to alternate political systems.
I would be much more accepting of a form of direct democracy. Given that we now possess the technology to perform large scale internet voting, such a system could replace much of our dependence on elected canditates. Another alternative would be the concept of election by lottery; that is, choose at random a rotating sample of perhaps 1000 Americans to act as the legislative body for 5 years, perhaps with assistance from trained moderators and the like.
I am in favor of any movement that puts people in greater control of their own political destiny. Arguments to the contrary claiming that ordinary people lack the training necessary to make such decisions could be similarly levied against a republic (such as ours) or virtually any system other than complete fascism.
-gaffney
Slashdot Mirror
ooo! Virtualbox too!
My workplace does actually have a lot of users who need the web for work reasons. What just occurred to me is to set up everyone with software for running virtual machines, then put one on each of their machines that has a web browser on it which refreshes and exports it's bookmark file to each user's network share. Is there any free software that can run a virtual machine from inside XP like this, or is that a pay only product? ... Bitchin! Looks like VMware player does just this.
This is just not true. I'm actively using social networking and local bbs's to get me + wife into the local social scene. We're both from out of town and we've moved to a place with very small tight groups of friends who have typically grown up together and are a little nervous about outsiders. It's not a good environment for walking up to people in bars and introducing yourself, but these sites allow you to start goofing around with people anonymously, which then makes them more interested and curious about you when you meet them IRL.
You're missing
10. I'm a one man IT department and have a job as long as we don't go out of business.
I am the IT department at a small manufacturing company with 120 employees, so that's about 1:120. I do ERP/database, network, files, printer + desktop maintainance. It's a lot of ground to cover, and there are definitely some ugly weeks.
1) Require all businesses to report chemical composition of all gaseous / liquid / solid waste created in any manufacturing operation, along with similar estimates for wastes created by use of said products (ie carbon in gasoline). Require them to pay cleanup costs for each one (obviously this will increase consumer cost for dirty products). Impose fines for people who underestimate how much they're polluting, put people who evade this tax in jail for income tax fraud.
2) Ban imports of products not conforming to 1 as verified by an appropriate UN inspections body.
3) Greatly reduce military expenditures for anything not related to missiles and remote controlled aerial bombardment. There is no need with our level of technology to use our military for anything other than destroying economic and productive infrastructure of expansionary military powers (of which we are currently one).
4) Prosecute previous administration for war crimes.
5) Work with less developed economies to help coordinate and fund sanitation and transportation infrastructure, paying particular attention to developing ways to combat goverment and corporate corruption.
6) Large investments in basic energy, space travel research, asteroid detection / guidance.
7) Develop controls for biotechnology, keeping all equipment that can be used for creating or engineering viruses firmly under surveillance.
8) Go investigate about that supervolcano under Yellowstone that buries the northwest section of the country in ash every 600,000 years and last did this about... 600,000 years ago.
9) Socialized healthcare for everyone under 80, and everyone over 80 up to some reasonable limit. It will eventually be possible to keep people alive indefinitely given sufficient money, and the government has to stop picking up the tab somewhere.
This is a bunch of hooey. In the future, your desktop computer, camera, cell phone, etc will all be one item. You take this along with your terabytes of storage on said item with you, and when you get somewhere you want to do desktop stuff you plug it into a docking station that does network, video, key board and mouse over some kind of USB v4 interface. The iphone is pretty much already there. It needs to be a little faster, and we need to be able to put openoffice on it, and then we're there.
From Yahoo Finance/GOOG:
Market Cap (intraday)6: 192.87B
Enterprise Value (9-Oct-07)3: 177.78B
Trailing P/E (ttm, intraday): 50.15
Forward P/E (fye 31-Dec-08) 1: 31.46
How many Linux servers does Google have?
IBM + GOOG > MSFT
Kill! Kill! Kill!
I and all others have a right to an economy that as much as possible allows anyone to participate on equal terms irregardless of each of our own racial, religious and sexual identity. Necessary to this is that you don't allow people to publish commercial speech that specifically excludes a person on the basis of that person's group membership.
Free association is important, but we need to make sure our economy respects all human beings.
Filthy, thieving robots need not apply.
First of all, I'd like to thank the parent of this reply. You were by far the most thoughtful reply to my original post and I would like to recognize this as the effort it was, and one whose intent I share. We're discussing what kinds of governments are just and thus we're discussing what our own government should strive for. For a long time I felt that the US government's values were crap, but I've since come to realize that my anger and strong feelings about this were because I felt the government was not living up the ideals I was taught as a child. PS I'm drunk and sentimental.
From a US. perspective, you make a lot of good points. I think that you need to look at things from a bigger picture.
The idea of civil rights isn't necessarily immutable. In China, two civil rights considered paramount are the right to eat and the right to be free from fear of crime. These are both worthy goals; from my perspective the first in particular has a lot of merit. My personal method for evaluating these things is Utilitarianism, and as far as I can see, the fact that both the US system and the CHinese system (combined with their respective social values held by the people) result in stable, expanding societies marks them both as successes to a degree. In the US we have free speech; if you explained this concept to a lot of Chinese people, they'd wonder why the hell anyone would want to embarrass themselves by standing up in front of the people in charge and speaking whatever they feel deep down in parts of their minds that are supposed to be very very secret. Lots of people have things to say, but until the cultural pendulum swings in favor of people wanting to speak up all the time, Free Speech isn't going to be as big a deal as making sure the other two thing I mentioned are dealt with.
Once, I showed some chinese friends a newspaper story about this guy that went nuts and cut up his university-age girlffriend with a knife. THEY WENT FUCKING NUTS!!!! They thought this was the most fucked up thing they'd ever heard of, rather than the six o'clock news standard I thought it was, BECAUSE I COME FROM A DIFFERENT CULTURE.
First of all, we're talking about Google news here, which includes many stories from domestic and international press, some of which are very critical of government, media conglomerates, and corporations. It's true that if you look at TV news its all mostly harmless, but the whole reason this is a big deal is because the internet is a mechanism to largely circumvent those controls and get at all the information. That's precisely what makes it so vital. Secondly, there's a big difference between "Rupart Murdoc doesn't choose to spend his money to criticise X" (the case in the US) and "if I criticise X I can be thrown in prison for years" (the case in China) because in China, Free Speech is not valued, obviously by the government, but also it seems in different ways from the US by ordinary people.
Once again, I'm talking about relative efficacy of media institutions. A censored google internet is a better tool than a non-censored one that the CCP could block with a finger snap. Besides... maybe it isn't so hard at all to access the whole database...As for the rest, it's true that you don't get shot for saying what the US gov't doesn't like
I certainly won't claim that the US has a perfect record on human rights or civil liberties. That's why I am very vocal on the subject and have been a member of the ACLU here in the US. The difference, however, is that I am free to say that and free to continue that fight. I can go out and spread that message and those that are convinced can vote to change the government's policies. None of that is true in China, which is one reason why it is false to say the US is no better. Both nations have much room to improve.
I got my card in my pocket right fucking now. I defend the values of MY society and what I think MY society should be against the theocratic fucks every chance I get. Try seriously fighting for the rig
USA Democracy was intellecutually born in Native American horticultural / hunter-gatherer societies. This is the gold standard of egalitarianism as noone really has any consumer goods to fight over, and everyone has equal access to the level of education needed to acquire status. As for the burgeoning USA itself, it's the same thing; most people were familiar with the political issues of the day as English colonial citizens and thus made decisions based on a relatively common ground of information about the political landscape. Look at the US today; given the growing rift between religious conservatives and social/economic liberal who increasingly despise each other, do you think that's a stable political system? I put $20 on New England seceding by 2050.
Of course people are more than the sum of their "educations." But at the same time, in order for democracy to prosper, you need certain institutions that aren't as strong here as they could be. Take little bites or you'll get sick to your stomach.
I don't know anything about the political situation in South Africa. Having said that, I excuse the Chinese Communist Party of nothing. I'm seeking to note that their stances and actions are not particularly equivocal with evil.
In the short term, there's some democratic reforms that would go a long way. Two I'd argue for most strenuously would be allowing locals to elect their own governing Communist Party members and not oulawing effective labor unions. I think this would notably cut down on the level of corruption that afflicts rural folks in particular, and for the second would greatly help fight abuses in the new capialist economy; the current government is pragmatic-aurthoritarian, not communist.
>>Am I the only one here who remembers Tiananmen Square?
Am I the only one here who's heard of the Kent State Massacre?
Speaking as someone who's been working here for a bit, I have to say two things.
First, all this shit about the Chinese Government being the evilest thing on earth is nuts. The government here manages to keep social order such that people can get up and go to work everyday, and such that an increasing number of this generation of children have a shot at the kind of economy we like to talk about in the USA; work like a dog and get yourself a better life. Sure there's a ton of people (80% of 1.3 billion) who are farmers and will never see this. Do you think a liberal democracy based on egalitarian ideals could just be stuck onto a society like this where so many people are completely uneducated? The current government is doing the right thing; focusing on decreasing the population to a level that the economy can comfortably support (keep in mind China has very VERY little in the way of natural resources). Granted there are massive problems here, particularly institutionalized corruption of the beauracracy, but you could do a lot worse. China is a police state? The US is MUCH more heavily policed, although if you DO manage to catch the attention of the real Chinese police they WILL shoot you in the head. Nothing ever shows up in the Chinese media that's critical of the government? SO what?! Nothing ever shows up on the USA's useless fucking media that hasn't been approved by the station's marketing department. Besides, you think Chinese people here don't know what's going on? Christ, of COURSE they know they're not getting the whole story. You think these people are stupid?
Which brings me to Google. Given that these days China is hardly Nazi Germany (or Stalinist Russia or even Maoist China), saying that making censorship concessions with the PRC government. is tantamount to an act of evil is just dumb. You have the choice of not giving the Chinese people access to an information retrieval tool that will further entrench the Internet in their lives as a useful (and possibly eventually liberating) tool OR you can just do what you can. I'll take the second one any day. Look, nothing is going to piss the Chinese off worse than a hairy fucking big nosed foreignor walking in and tellin' the way it is about free speech. That's just a dumb idea.
Do you have a spam folder? Save all your spam emails with headers intact. Also export your email address list into a text table. Write perl scripts to parse emails and check for whatever variables you are interested in; what type / size attachment, is the sender in your addr book, does the sender addr appear to be valid or not. You could even try to combine this with your web browser history. The key is that while you still need to build the DB yourself, there's a lot of interesting information you can easily extract with simple scripts and minimal actual work.
Ta!
-petertgaffney
Get a label gun.
Put each document in white business envelopes, numerical labels on each white business evelope, put document inside as it comes in. Put envelopes in one of three boxes; never throw away, throw away in five years, throw away in a year. Maybe have additional box for documents that will only fit in big manilla envelopes.
Write a quick perl script webinterface that records one of several customizable options from a pull down menu (ie grocery receipt, gas bill, heroin expenses) along with the date, the numeric label you just put on, and maybe a sentence additionally describing content as needed. The web interface calls an SQL database and stores the information therein or according to the scheme for your electric system you seem to find awesome.
When you need to find a document, search by type and date or text note, find the label number and box number, and proceed as you might typically.
The only trouble you're going to run into is that evelopes are expensive and take up more space than you might like. Try only using envelopes for stuff not printed on 8.5 by 11; put labels directly on stapled folded versions of these. Alternately, divide files by size of paper and paper weight in a serious and merciless fashion. Alternately, reuse envelopes. Anyone have a better system for actually storing the paper assuming you like the sequential numbering + database scheme?
That's it. That's it! These people have to be fucking stopped.
It was one thing when the consolidation of radio stations combined with neo-payola fixed it so there was nothing but top 40's crap to be heard on the radio, then they try to quash p to p networks and maintain their near complete control over distribution of MY freakin' culture and sue 12 year olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if it looks like they're going to go the additional step and actually start DELETING the $%#$ing art they've gone too far.
I want these pricks out of business with their children out in the street turning tricks for wonderbread. Monday.
GOD I've got a hangover.
a forty of old english. Try it. Nine out of ten punk rockers with cirrhosis of the liver swear by it.
My position is and always has been, that this technology represents a fundamental improvement in methods of distributing media, and therefore we need to do whatever has to be done irregardless of legality, to remove any obstacles in our way. Particularly the music industry which I personally dislike.
Have you stolen enough media today? Could you have stolen more? Do you have any siblings or friends who aren't yet stealing music?
Remember: commercialized control of radio through formats and media consolidation killed radio. Do you want the internet to go the same way?
-petertgaffney
Given that morons like the above clearly exist, do we indeed want to press ahead with this technology right now? Last I checked, all the peoples of the world weren't getting along too great, and the above troll is a good example of why we wouldn't want this to be TOO common / cheap. If we as a community are opposed to secrecy of science we might be better off just waiting a bit on this stuff, at least until some change in humanity (mebbe we all live in space stations scattered around and thus are difficult to disease into non-existance) makes the threat less deadly.
It always seemed to me that in cases of natural monopoly the sensible thing to do would be to nationalize the service or otherwise turn it into a public utility. I'll take a public utility over a single corporation any day as one's mission is to provide a service vs. the other's goal of making dollars.
Shadow...Over.....Innsmouth
Roger Zelazny. Probably the best modern mythic author next to Tolkien and the only such author to try and talk about magic and technology as if they were the same thing and under the control of similar mythical forces.
Also H.P. Lovecraft. I predict people will recognize him for the genius he was sooner or later, although he was dismissed as a pulp author by most of the literati in this century.
((( I look forward to the day when I will have the chance to vote for a candidate who speaks honestly, who grasps the centrality of technology and culture in our time, and is willing to raise those important issues in a rational way. That person is unlikely to come out of Washington, or the existing political structure, and is more likely to have grown up reading a site like this.)))
I have issues with waiting for some white hat hero to come along and save me. Are you really comfortable consigning your fate to the off chance that someone who agrees with your own goals will come into a position where they have a realistic chance of winning an election? I am not.
On a larger issue, I don't think that our current system of being forced to choose some politician to run my life is valid. As voting theorists have noted, our system of elections is not at all rational. I think that it is time to look to alternate political systems.
I would be much more accepting of a form of direct democracy. Given that we now possess the technology to perform large scale internet voting, such a system could replace much of our dependence on elected canditates. Another alternative would be the concept of election by lottery; that is, choose at random a rotating sample of perhaps 1000 Americans to act as the legislative body for 5 years, perhaps with assistance from trained moderators and the like.
I am in favor of any movement that puts people in greater control of their own political destiny. Arguments to the contrary claiming that ordinary people lack the training necessary to make such decisions could be similarly levied against a republic (such as ours) or virtually any system other than complete fascism. -gaffney