Come on, cops aren't that scary. And you'll make the evening news, which will draw attention to invasion of privacy outside of slashdot circles. The cops might rough you up a little, but they're not going to hurt you that badly.
Or use a variation on the prank. Fill all your innoncent unencrypted emails with key phrases like "Plans are under way for the assanination of Nike CEO Phillip Knight..." It will set of the alarms at headquarters or whatever, a technician will have to review the email, and see that it is garbage. Waste their time.. it's way more fun than encryption alone.
I've been trying to, but haven't yet, made a habit of encrypting all email traffic that comes from me. It's inconvient sometimes, but probably worth it. It's a habit worth keeping, because even though government is only just starting to monitor our internet traffic (yeah right..) many corporations already can and do.
I would also suggest organizing mock terrorist and organized crime cells. Have fun with the cops by sending logistics data back and forth between friends about assasinations, pipe bombs etc. Don't encrypt these, but make them sound serious. If they want to read our emails, then we should fuck with them.
This kind of stuff is especially serious for activists. Increasingly in Ontario at least, activists are being painted as terrorists. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty is being labled as a terrorist organization for its campaign to defeat the nasty provincial government. Police powers really scare me, because I organize direct action which could be construed as terrorism by authorities trying to keep dissent in check. The actions that I organize are all nonviolent, nobody ever gets hurt, nothing ever gets damaged, but my rights to dissent actively (ie. more than just letter writing) could quickly disappear in this climate.
I know it's really important to make money, and I know that you guys must've done a lot of work on YDL before releasing it, but I really do take issue with holding back on releasing the iso for free.
Because no matter how much work was done at TerraSoft, when it gets right down to it, most of the code was written by somebody else. And it wasn't written so that you guys could make money off of it, it was written for everybody, on the condition that if changes were made to it that they would be available for everybody too.
Is it even legal under the GPL to delay the free release like that? It certainly is a grey area.
See also: Adbuster's corporate crackdown campaign website. Adbusters has been advocating the use of laws that already exist to revoke corporate charters. These laws are already in the books in Canada and in the US.
On the site is a.pdf of a phoney "Corporate Charter Revocation" form that some Canadian activists posted all around the headquarters of a mining company, and the stock market. The company's share too a dive.
The reasoning behind real corporate dissolutions (besides the joke ones) is that corporations have massive power, have the same rights as natural humans and because of their massive wealth still manage to evade the laws. There is no real accountability from corporations. Having the threat of dissolution return could cause some of them to smarten up, ie. tobacco companies, Avant!, FireStone, etc.
Because the economy can be run in different ways that does not cause this horrible pollution.
Our "quality of life" is such an illusion. Having the "right" to drive your car everywhere does not make your life better, it makes you lazy, it isolates you from your surrondings, caging you into a small box, it encourages urban sprawl which reduces farmland space and forest space, and it makes our cities stink.
We only think that cars make our lives better because we see so many car commercials on televion. Advertising wouldn't be a 1/6 of the economy if it didn't have at least some results.
Our doctrine that there must be economic growth for there to be prosperity is ridiculous. The earth has finite resources, and we're already seeing the results of this (not just with pollution and resource depletion, but also the horrible gap between the haves and the have-nots.)
What we need is a sustainable economy. Because what we're doing cannot be done indefinetly, and because of that our economy is going to collapse whether we like it or not. It's time to stop draining the capital and instead living off of the interest, to use a financial analogy.
The ecological deficit we are setting ourselves up for is enormous. That's what my signature means with "Live simply so that others may simply live." Stop polluting and start walking, riding a bike or taking the bus everywhere you go. You'll get much more exercise, it's much less stressful, you can let your mind drift and relax, knowing that you're doing what is right.
Regulations alone won't fix our environment problem, we need a change in our consumer culture, where economic self interest is the the faith, and growth (which is another way of saying resource depletion, or unfair distribution of finite resources) is the measurement for whether or not we're doing ok.
Look seriously into your lives and try to discover the ways that you can cut down on waste, practical things like always recycling, using reusable containers instead of plastic bags, never use anything disposable at all, always turn the lights off, consider eating more vegetables and doing research on which foods (or any product for that matter) cause the least stress on the ecosystem.
Do it a little bit at a time, but don't take forever either. The simple lifestyle is not necessarily the amish lifestyle, or a demoted one in anyway at all. Sell your car and see how much money you have for other things that really do matter. Ever wonder how many hours you've worked just to pay for that one damned thing anyways?
If you care at all for the future of your children, or anybody else's, or you want to think of yourself as someone who honestly isn't a selfish consuming hog oblivious to the effects of your gluttony, then these are things you should seriously consider. And reject the idea that an end to pollution leads to a lesser quality of life! It's the other way around!
I never thought I'd consider this, but I think I'm going to boycott Eazel.
I'm not going to get militant about it, aside from this post on/. I'm probably not going to do much more than just not use Nautilus specifically to avoid using the Eazel services.
It's downright unfair and dishonourable to develop a product and a brand identification, and then once the product is out, lay off more than 1/2 the staff that had been necessary for developing it. Don't forget it's not just the coding that goes into something like Eazel (and developers were dismissed) but also the product strategy and marketing that must've gone into developing the idea behind something like the Eazal Services that they plan to offer.
This way of thinking is exploitative of workers (coders are workers too) and perhaps I was naive thinking that an open source company would be above this. I guess this happens all the time, at open source companies too, and this is just the eye-openner for me.
But to make a 1.0 release of a much anticipated product (would it have been anticipated w/o the efforts of the marketing types released?) and that very day and then turn around and fire half your staff is not the behaviour of a company that I think deserves my patronage, free product or not.
This is why employee loyalty no longer exists, because of stories like this.
Don't worry, Noam Chomsky is not the be all and end all of alternative thought regarding the economy. He does have serious insights that unfortunately get overlooked all the time.
The best way to handle any omissions that you're concerned with in Chomsky's work is not to disregard it all together, but to contend against it. Chomsky's just one guy, and for one guy he's presented a very clear, objective, non-ideological outview on a lot of important issues, from democracy to the media as propoganda.
Free trade hasn't created massive unemployment in Canada, but it has created massive underemployment, and I'm no economist, but I'm sure there would still be more and better jobs w/o NAFTA.
I don't have anything against free market capitalism, I'm for it. I'm against the current system, which I think is unfair and short sighted. I am for something like a Green Tax shift, stop taxing income and capital, but start taxing land use and resource extraction and emissions. I'm also concerned about some of the anti-capitalist virtues of the modern corporations (in real life, not in theory land)
And I refuse to use a broad brush stroke and condemn all acts of popular will to be wrong. It's not that government intervention is bad, it's that our governments are.
First of all, I'm glad you feel strongly enough about these things to post anonymously.
Blocking the streets is a legitimate form of protest. It gets noticed, and it gets results. Nobody gets hurt, and the media is forced to give more balanced coverage, which means that more people know about what is going on.
Were the students in Tiannaman Square wrong to block those streets? There is nothing violent about linking arms and refusing to move, or making your body go limp to be harder to detain.
As for the workers earning less than or around a dollar in third world countries actually appreciating their shit-ass jobs, you're not really taking everything into consideration here. These third world countries often have IMF imposed economic sanctions that demand a certain portion of their economies be open to foreign investment and that they most export a great deal instead of developing domestic markets.
The very reason these corporations are there, manufacturing in third world countries is because the labour standards don't exist there that do here. There is no excuse for this kind of exploitation.
Nor is there an excuse for the reckless exploitation of the environment. The earth belongs to everyone, not just the west, and not just the rich. How foolish are we to be draining our capital instead of living off the interest?
The simple, unalterable fact about sustainablity is that if we continue using our natural resources in a way that we cannot do indefinetely, our economy will collapse whether we like it or not. Once the biodiversity has been depleted past a certain point, we will REALLY start to notice the effects.
That is what is important about environmentalism, eliminating the ecological deficit. Don't give me these stories that environmentalism is detrimental to the economy, it's the other way around. Economic progress is killing the planet. Environmental protection is not bad for the economy, a short-tern gain driven economy with no foresight towards sustainablity is what will kill our economy.
Finally, government intervention is not automatically bad. Regulation is how a group of people (read democracy, or the population) decides how things should be run. Regulation and democratic government account for things that an open market never could. Things like ensuring against anti-competitive monopolies, the right for workers to organize into unions, making sure that the earth will still have trees and bears and fish for future generations not just to see, but to interdepend with in a great big web of life we're only beginning to understand.
The problem you have isn't with government intervention. The problem in the US, Canada and most other "democracies" in the world isn't that the government intervenes. THe problem is that the governments have become corrupt, debate has been quieted and the population doesn't participate, it is reduced to mere consent.
This still does not change the fact that the police were unfairly targeting protestors, not just vandals. Acting this way, the police are being used to try preventing a social movement.
They've been used like this in the past too. The Civil Rights movement comes to mind.
I sympathize with the frustration and anger felt by those who committed these violent acts, but I in no way condone them. It's easy to understand why they could be so angry, but it's important to remember that using violence to replace one regime will just result in another violent regime.
In no circumstance should protestors ever resort to violence or vandalism. But the very fact that the media coverage was about some broken windows and not the enormous gap between rich and poor, the threat free trade and globalization poses to worker's rights, the earth and all those who walk it shows just how unbalanced we are in treating this issue.
See, you just haven't seen the actual video footage then. It was not a violent, rioting mob. There was a small handful of assholes committing violent acts. There's video footage of the protestors linking arms together to prevent those idiots access to the stores.
The police knew this too. They didn't have nor should have done the mass arrests they did. The arrests weren't constrained to those who were committing violence and vandalism.
Seattle was not a riot. The police used a few vandals as an excuse to break up a peaceful demonstration. Their responsibility was to enforce the law, and remove the people who were breaking shit. They went well beyond their responsiblity in those days. It should not have been made illegal to wear a gas mask. It should not have been made illegal to carry signs or express an opinion about the WTO for those days in the city of Seattle.
The police weren't controlling a violent and unruly mob, they were lifting the masks off of students and teenagers to spray potentially lethal OC spray in their faces. They were pointing shot guns in the faces of harmless demonstrators who has linked arms to block the street as a legitimate form of protest.
Granted, the Direct Action movement is still nascent, and we're still working on ways to guarantee that the violent idiots will not show up and spoil our protests, but it would be wrong to say that Seattle was a violent mob.
That's why it's important to watch videos like "THis is What Democracy Looks Like" and to read people like Noam Chomsky and John Ralston Saul so we can understand that what is presented in the media is not always what really happend, and to understand that hardly everything is covered in the media anyways.
I don't condone violence, and I don't think it is a legitimate form of protest. But I still think it's disgusting that the US had such a horrible reaction to a few windows being broken (ie. police violence, painting the anti-globalization movement as a bunch of violent anarchists) when nothing is said in the mainstream media about the US endorsed atrocities that happen all over the world.
A few windows got broken. So what. The US sold arms to Indonesia so it could invade East Timor. Millions of people wear Nike shoes produced by people working for 16 cents an hour, 80 hours a week.
A few broken windows on the way to forming a massive, non-violent citizens movement is a small price to pay for freedom, human rights and an environment worth living in, especially considering the prices already being paid by the less fortunate living in third world nations.
Has anyone who thinks that the US is above the violent treatment of protestors seen any of the footage from the WTO Protest in Seattle?
Anyone who still believes that the US believes in the spirit of civil disobediance, or that American (or Canadian for that matter... see Quebec City, A20) citizens actually have the right to peacefully assemble, or a right to expression should check out "This is What Democracy Looks Like" produced by the Indy Media Centre.
It is a 72 minute documentary compiled from the footage of over 100 activists who attended the demonstrations. Lots of Universities have been doing screenings of the film leading up to the FTAA protest in Quebec City in April, so if you see a poster for it, whether you believe in globalization or not, you should check it out.
Not watching this film is remaining ignorant. You don't have to agree with everything in it, but be warned, if you have any respect for freedom, this film will make you ANGRY.
I think it's better if there is no ideal distribution. Then all of the others will be forced to mimic it or quit.
You hear lots of people saying all the time "I wish Windows was more like this.." and others going "I wish Windows was more like that..." The same applies for a lot of things. "I wish the car's stick shift was a little more to the left." or "I wish there were cinammon oreos."
What's great about Linux, and all other free software projects, is that it can be all these things to all these different people.
We're going to have to get used to the fact that everybody has different needs from their operating system. That is the major failure of Windows, it has to be all things for everybody because marketing 15 different distributions would be difficult. But not impossible.
And that is what Linux gets criticized for a whole lot, that there isn't just one clear "Linux" choice. We need to wake up and realize that we DON'T want there to be just one Linux. No complicated product like an operating system can be all things to all people. Mandrake or Redhat might end up being the end user distro, while Slackware or Debian might dominate the server market. Or both. Or vice-versa.
We like free software because of choice and diversity. Don't let people tell you these things should be taken away. Offer them your suggestions on what's best for them, but don't forget to respect their choice aswell.
Linux, all of the GNU software, Apache, KDE and all the rest seem to be doing fine so far without any sort of foreboding, interventionalist standards group deciding on one unified, mono-Linux.
I guess the point I'm really trying to make is, why are we (as a community) trying so hard to compete with Microsoft's Evil Empire? It doesn't really matter if Linux or BSD or Apache or KDE or GNOME becomes mainstream. What is important is that the option is there, and people seem to be flocking towards what is being developed.
Another way of looking at it is this: Free Software does not have to mimic Microsoft and other commercial software in order for it to be worth the effort. As it stands, the Linux desktops that I use are plenty easy enough for average users, and if there's any sort of a demand for it to become easier, some company or group is going to suppy it.
The free software movement isn't about replacing commercial software, it's about providing alternatives. Merely by the organic way that the movement has been growing (more people get involved, more people are contributing, the products are getting better and easier and more refined etc.) An analogy for free software could be the markets: the best projects are going to attract more users, develop reputations and therefore attract more developers.
Trying to use a heavy handed coalition to guide the development of the free software movement won't work, and definetely won't be accepted. The "vi or emacs?" question is quickly being replaced by "gnome or kde?" with a handful of sideline contenders. No consortium could ever successfully select between GNOME and KDE... it sounds like too much like central planning, which is shortsighted and can never keep up with the diversity of an open market.
If GNOME and KDE continue to develop seperately from each other, and both refuse to adopt any sort of consistency between the two (ie. do we need another aRts to be developed for GNOME?) the end result will be that one of the two will join the sidelines, or perhaps the market will produce bindings or wrap arounds to compensate for the inconsistencies.
Where is free software heading? Only time will tell, and the "open ideas market" will be the judge.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter of Linux never replaces the Evil Empire. It'd be nice, but the option is already there for people, and the free software alternative keeps getting better everyday. Stuff that doesn't keep up will be left behind naturally, not by some clear decision. Standards will develop de facto from user acceptance.
Finally, it is perhaps exactly the diversity that the author points to as a flaw, that actually gives the free software movement it's vibrancy. It's great because it can meet so many needs, from regular computer users to geeks who post on slashdot.
The way that people interact and exchange information over the internet has been one of your favourite topics.
What do you think the "information age" is doing to humans regarding their ability to socialize and interact. With the advent of television in the 1950's, there was criticism that television eroded communities by keeping people in their homes. Right now, the so called "MTV Generation" allegedly has the attention span of a 30 second soundbyte.
Many phenomona have been cited as a result of this. Some believe that because so much time is spent infront of televisions, alone, the population is segregated and isolated, unable to work as a community. Others would argue that television technology has merely expanded the community to a national or international level. Still others would refute that this monoculture is dangerous and allows our cultural identity to stagnate.
In the late 90's and now in the early parts of the "new millenium" we've seen an increasing amount of information being transacted over the internet. Does the web as we know it enhance our ability to communicate, or does it further isolate us?
Does a more distributed, decentralized peer2peer model of information exchange promise a type of interaction more natural to humans, or should we be for strategies to prevent further information glut and saturation?
When are people going to stop talking about "bipartisanship" as if it's a good thing? The term itself gives me the creeps, and it seems more like a misnomer for the type of "one party, two heads" situation that Nader was warning about during the election.
Maybe "unipartisanship" is a better word for it than bipartisanship.
Now don't get me wrong, politics could definitely be more civil, professional and focused on issues instead of personality and ideological blow-harding. But that wouldn't be bipartisan-ness.. that would just be professional and serious. Bipartianism rings of too much of a removal of conflict and debate.
But having at least two (and preferably more) parties with differing views is how a democracy is supposed to work. Through a slow and messy process of debate and consensus, the final product is refined. What Washington really needs is things like campaign finance reform so politicians can focus on research and debate and their constituents, instead of paying for the next election. It needs it's electors to demand real debate, not useless personality bashings that would be better placed in courts or panels, instead of clogging an already slow legislature.
So hopefully this bipartisanship stuff will pass. Demand your politicians to be more diplomatic and professional, not for them to act like one big family.
My guess is that the joke industry has been crushed by the Internet and what to stop all the massive joke emails. So I guess forwarding, printing, or telling a joke in public is now illegal without the express written permission of the joke author. The stupid thing is I wouldn't be suprised if the DMCA can be interpreted the same way. Discliamer: The contents of this posting are copyrighted by me and can not be reproduced in part or in whole without express written permission. Fair use rights may apply but you will have to talk to an attorney about that. G'day
SUE ME!:P
Re:Replace Katz with a good columnist
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If everyone thinks that Katz is so bad, then start submitting your own articles and editorials. If they're any better, then I'm sure you'll get published. I happen to like Katz.. and I don't think he should have to apologize for the scope of the things he chooses to write about. He can't write about EVERYTHING, and perhaps it's a good thing that he does write things that are sometimes a little outside of the Slashdot mainstream.
And you're right, you personally can get rid of him, just by disabling his posts in your user preferences.
So that's the solution right there, modify your settings, and if you feel that a certain void needs filling up, do your part. Write, and encourage others to do this aswell. It's not so much a problem of Katz not being a decent or relevant author. The situation you seem to be aware of is a lack of features that you find relevant to you and your life.
And the best way to handle that, is to do it yourself, or at the very least, phrase your proposals like this: "could/. hire some more writers so there's more and better stuff to read?" instead of attacking someone personally and disgracefully.
Isn't Apple worried that bundling DVD playing/writing support into their operating system is unfair competion to the already established MacOS DVD authoring and playing software companies?
that sounds something like the futuristic, intergalactic internet that Orson Scott Card writes about in "Speaker for the Dead" and "Xenocide" (both sequels to "Ender's Game")
I read them a long time ago, but something about how it was quicker for the information to be manipulated on this vast, multinoded energy based network instead of the silicon circuitry of typical hardware.
Who knows? Maybe Card's insights were more than just a really good read?
What I'm wondering is when will people start to notice and talk about Broadcast 2000 as one of the major killer apps for Linux. As far as I can tell, it's been written completely by a group of friends, who have also been responsible for a top notch MPEG-2 library and player, and writing a Quicktime for Linux library (sans sorenson of course).
I mean, maybe they don't want the help or something, but the source code is available, and I think it's an opensource license. And it's being bundled with professional systems too. But you hardly hear anybody ever talking about Linux as a serious semi-professional or indy-film alternative to expensive alternatives like Adobe Acrobat.
Kudos to the Broadcast 2000 developers, they deserve way more recognition than they recieve. Linux can do not just 3D and animation, it's already a decent system for non-linear video editting too.
Ok, so I'm science stupid, but it my universe this seems like it would be somewhat plausible:
I've seen bike lights that are powered by the motion of some part of the bike (ie. the wheel, or collecting wind motion maybe) so the light is actually being powered by the person, no batteries required. Of course, a PDA and cell phone are going to require a lot more electricty.
But what if the telecom/webcam was working off of a rechargeable battery, that while being drained is also being fed by the motion of the bike, and perhaps also solar power (because any energy collected off of the biker's effort will slow them down I guess).
Realistically, the solar/kinetic battery recharging won't be enough, but it could be enough to keep it running all day until nighttime (or whenever the biker is resting) when it could be plugged into the wall for a complete charge?
We all have a general idea of what patents are for. They're around to protect a business' "intellectual privacy" so as to ensure that nobody can just copy what they're doing. What would be the point of research and development if as soon as you've worked out a new product, there is nothing to protect you from everybody and their brother doing the same thing, without having to have invested expensive time and resources into actually developing it.
But honestly, how much research and development could possibly have gone into an idea like individualized URL's? In a sense, a user's home directory (ie. http://www.tao.ca/~jmcnaught/) is an individualized URL, and simply asking people not to tell other's their URL to keep it private is not much of an insight.
Really, shouldn't a patent reflect a protection of a long term investment, specifically hard won insights from research and development?
But then, on another level, how does the idea of intellectual property help to advance humanity? Drug companies using their patents to extort high prices for AIDS treatment from third world countries is a good example of an extremely bad situation related to patents. But on a whole, how much fast could our knowledge of nature and our ability to overcome difficulty progress if humanity was driven to share it's insights?
Perhaps companies should rely on the prestige of their having discovered a process to protect their investments, instead of asking the government to enforce it for them. That attitude is already half-way there, we've all seen certain labs bragging about how many patents have come out of their facilities.
What kind of language can we use to get these (and other) kinds of ideas across the the IP defendants, or perhaps the politicians?
That IP is essentially a monopoly granting process, that it doesn't sit well with the ideas of genuine free trade? Would abolishing IP be the answer, or should we be sitting down and discussing what deserves patents and what does not, and how long they should last?
Slashdot Mirror
Or use a variation on the prank. Fill all your innoncent unencrypted emails with key phrases like "Plans are under way for the assanination of Nike CEO Phillip Knight..." It will set of the alarms at headquarters or whatever, a technician will have to review the email, and see that it is garbage. Waste their time.. it's way more fun than encryption alone.
I would also suggest organizing mock terrorist and organized crime cells. Have fun with the cops by sending logistics data back and forth between friends about assasinations, pipe bombs etc. Don't encrypt these, but make them sound serious. If they want to read our emails, then we should fuck with them.
This kind of stuff is especially serious for activists. Increasingly in Ontario at least, activists are being painted as terrorists. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty is being labled as a terrorist organization for its campaign to defeat the nasty provincial government. Police powers really scare me, because I organize direct action which could be construed as terrorism by authorities trying to keep dissent in check. The actions that I organize are all nonviolent, nobody ever gets hurt, nothing ever gets damaged, but my rights to dissent actively (ie. more than just letter writing) could quickly disappear in this climate.
Because no matter how much work was done at TerraSoft, when it gets right down to it, most of the code was written by somebody else. And it wasn't written so that you guys could make money off of it, it was written for everybody, on the condition that if changes were made to it that they would be available for everybody too.
Is it even legal under the GPL to delay the free release like that? It certainly is a grey area.
On the site is a .pdf of a phoney "Corporate Charter Revocation" form that some Canadian activists posted all around the headquarters of a mining company, and the stock market. The company's share too a dive.
The reasoning behind real corporate dissolutions (besides the joke ones) is that corporations have massive power, have the same rights as natural humans and because of their massive wealth still manage to evade the laws. There is no real accountability from corporations. Having the threat of dissolution return could cause some of them to smarten up, ie. tobacco companies, Avant!, FireStone, etc.
if you run 'file lzip' from a prompt, you learn that the file lzip is actually a jpeg image, and catting lunzip reveals some wonderful poetry.
Does anyone know of any famous lawsuits in the past filed by people who could not handle having an ass made of themselves?
Our "quality of life" is such an illusion. Having the "right" to drive your car everywhere does not make your life better, it makes you lazy, it isolates you from your surrondings, caging you into a small box, it encourages urban sprawl which reduces farmland space and forest space, and it makes our cities stink.
We only think that cars make our lives better because we see so many car commercials on televion. Advertising wouldn't be a 1/6 of the economy if it didn't have at least some results.
Our doctrine that there must be economic growth for there to be prosperity is ridiculous. The earth has finite resources, and we're already seeing the results of this (not just with pollution and resource depletion, but also the horrible gap between the haves and the have-nots.)
What we need is a sustainable economy. Because what we're doing cannot be done indefinetly, and because of that our economy is going to collapse whether we like it or not. It's time to stop draining the capital and instead living off of the interest, to use a financial analogy.
The ecological deficit we are setting ourselves up for is enormous. That's what my signature means with "Live simply so that others may simply live." Stop polluting and start walking, riding a bike or taking the bus everywhere you go. You'll get much more exercise, it's much less stressful, you can let your mind drift and relax, knowing that you're doing what is right.
Regulations alone won't fix our environment problem, we need a change in our consumer culture, where economic self interest is the the faith, and growth (which is another way of saying resource depletion, or unfair distribution of finite resources) is the measurement for whether or not we're doing ok.
Look seriously into your lives and try to discover the ways that you can cut down on waste, practical things like always recycling, using reusable containers instead of plastic bags, never use anything disposable at all, always turn the lights off, consider eating more vegetables and doing research on which foods (or any product for that matter) cause the least stress on the ecosystem.
Do it a little bit at a time, but don't take forever either. The simple lifestyle is not necessarily the amish lifestyle, or a demoted one in anyway at all. Sell your car and see how much money you have for other things that really do matter. Ever wonder how many hours you've worked just to pay for that one damned thing anyways?
If you care at all for the future of your children, or anybody else's, or you want to think of yourself as someone who honestly isn't a selfish consuming hog oblivious to the effects of your gluttony, then these are things you should seriously consider. And reject the idea that an end to pollution leads to a lesser quality of life! It's the other way around!
I'm not going to get militant about it, aside from this post on /. I'm probably not going to do much more than just not use Nautilus specifically to avoid using the Eazel services.
It's downright unfair and dishonourable to develop a product and a brand identification, and then once the product is out, lay off more than 1/2 the staff that had been necessary for developing it. Don't forget it's not just the coding that goes into something like Eazel (and developers were dismissed) but also the product strategy and marketing that must've gone into developing the idea behind something like the Eazal Services that they plan to offer.
This way of thinking is exploitative of workers (coders are workers too) and perhaps I was naive thinking that an open source company would be above this. I guess this happens all the time, at open source companies too, and this is just the eye-openner for me.
But to make a 1.0 release of a much anticipated product (would it have been anticipated w/o the efforts of the marketing types released?) and that very day and then turn around and fire half your staff is not the behaviour of a company that I think deserves my patronage, free product or not.
This is why employee loyalty no longer exists, because of stories like this.
The best way to handle any omissions that you're concerned with in Chomsky's work is not to disregard it all together, but to contend against it. Chomsky's just one guy, and for one guy he's presented a very clear, objective, non-ideological outview on a lot of important issues, from democracy to the media as propoganda.
Free trade hasn't created massive unemployment in Canada, but it has created massive underemployment, and I'm no economist, but I'm sure there would still be more and better jobs w/o NAFTA.
I don't have anything against free market capitalism, I'm for it. I'm against the current system, which I think is unfair and short sighted. I am for something like a Green Tax shift, stop taxing income and capital, but start taxing land use and resource extraction and emissions. I'm also concerned about some of the anti-capitalist virtues of the modern corporations (in real life, not in theory land)
And I refuse to use a broad brush stroke and condemn all acts of popular will to be wrong. It's not that government intervention is bad, it's that our governments are.
Blocking the streets is a legitimate form of protest. It gets noticed, and it gets results. Nobody gets hurt, and the media is forced to give more balanced coverage, which means that more people know about what is going on.
Were the students in Tiannaman Square wrong to block those streets? There is nothing violent about linking arms and refusing to move, or making your body go limp to be harder to detain.
As for the workers earning less than or around a dollar in third world countries actually appreciating their shit-ass jobs, you're not really taking everything into consideration here. These third world countries often have IMF imposed economic sanctions that demand a certain portion of their economies be open to foreign investment and that they most export a great deal instead of developing domestic markets.
The very reason these corporations are there, manufacturing in third world countries is because the labour standards don't exist there that do here. There is no excuse for this kind of exploitation.
Nor is there an excuse for the reckless exploitation of the environment. The earth belongs to everyone, not just the west, and not just the rich. How foolish are we to be draining our capital instead of living off the interest?
The simple, unalterable fact about sustainablity is that if we continue using our natural resources in a way that we cannot do indefinetely, our economy will collapse whether we like it or not. Once the biodiversity has been depleted past a certain point, we will REALLY start to notice the effects.
That is what is important about environmentalism, eliminating the ecological deficit. Don't give me these stories that environmentalism is detrimental to the economy, it's the other way around. Economic progress is killing the planet. Environmental protection is not bad for the economy, a short-tern gain driven economy with no foresight towards sustainablity is what will kill our economy.
Finally, government intervention is not automatically bad. Regulation is how a group of people (read democracy, or the population) decides how things should be run. Regulation and democratic government account for things that an open market never could. Things like ensuring against anti-competitive monopolies, the right for workers to organize into unions, making sure that the earth will still have trees and bears and fish for future generations not just to see, but to interdepend with in a great big web of life we're only beginning to understand.
The problem you have isn't with government intervention. The problem in the US, Canada and most other "democracies" in the world isn't that the government intervenes. THe problem is that the governments have become corrupt, debate has been quieted and the population doesn't participate, it is reduced to mere consent.
They've been used like this in the past too. The Civil Rights movement comes to mind.
I sympathize with the frustration and anger felt by those who committed these violent acts, but I in no way condone them. It's easy to understand why they could be so angry, but it's important to remember that using violence to replace one regime will just result in another violent regime.
In no circumstance should protestors ever resort to violence or vandalism. But the very fact that the media coverage was about some broken windows and not the enormous gap between rich and poor, the threat free trade and globalization poses to worker's rights, the earth and all those who walk it shows just how unbalanced we are in treating this issue.
The police knew this too. They didn't have nor should have done the mass arrests they did. The arrests weren't constrained to those who were committing violence and vandalism.
Seattle was not a riot. The police used a few vandals as an excuse to break up a peaceful demonstration. Their responsibility was to enforce the law, and remove the people who were breaking shit. They went well beyond their responsiblity in those days. It should not have been made illegal to wear a gas mask. It should not have been made illegal to carry signs or express an opinion about the WTO for those days in the city of Seattle.
The police weren't controlling a violent and unruly mob, they were lifting the masks off of students and teenagers to spray potentially lethal OC spray in their faces. They were pointing shot guns in the faces of harmless demonstrators who has linked arms to block the street as a legitimate form of protest.
Granted, the Direct Action movement is still nascent, and we're still working on ways to guarantee that the violent idiots will not show up and spoil our protests, but it would be wrong to say that Seattle was a violent mob.
That's why it's important to watch videos like "THis is What Democracy Looks Like" and to read people like Noam Chomsky and John Ralston Saul so we can understand that what is presented in the media is not always what really happend, and to understand that hardly everything is covered in the media anyways.
I don't condone violence, and I don't think it is a legitimate form of protest. But I still think it's disgusting that the US had such a horrible reaction to a few windows being broken (ie. police violence, painting the anti-globalization movement as a bunch of violent anarchists) when nothing is said in the mainstream media about the US endorsed atrocities that happen all over the world.
A few windows got broken. So what. The US sold arms to Indonesia so it could invade East Timor. Millions of people wear Nike shoes produced by people working for 16 cents an hour, 80 hours a week.
A few broken windows on the way to forming a massive, non-violent citizens movement is a small price to pay for freedom, human rights and an environment worth living in, especially considering the prices already being paid by the less fortunate living in third world nations.
Anyone who still believes that the US believes in the spirit of civil disobediance, or that American (or Canadian for that matter... see Quebec City, A20) citizens actually have the right to peacefully assemble, or a right to expression should check out "This is What Democracy Looks Like" produced by the Indy Media Centre.
It is a 72 minute documentary compiled from the footage of over 100 activists who attended the demonstrations. Lots of Universities have been doing screenings of the film leading up to the FTAA protest in Quebec City in April, so if you see a poster for it, whether you believe in globalization or not, you should check it out.
Not watching this film is remaining ignorant. You don't have to agree with everything in it, but be warned, if you have any respect for freedom, this film will make you ANGRY.
You hear lots of people saying all the time "I wish Windows was more like this.." and others going "I wish Windows was more like that..." The same applies for a lot of things. "I wish the car's stick shift was a little more to the left." or "I wish there were cinammon oreos."
What's great about Linux, and all other free software projects, is that it can be all these things to all these different people.
We're going to have to get used to the fact that everybody has different needs from their operating system. That is the major failure of Windows, it has to be all things for everybody because marketing 15 different distributions would be difficult. But not impossible.
And that is what Linux gets criticized for a whole lot, that there isn't just one clear "Linux" choice. We need to wake up and realize that we DON'T want there to be just one Linux. No complicated product like an operating system can be all things to all people. Mandrake or Redhat might end up being the end user distro, while Slackware or Debian might dominate the server market. Or both. Or vice-versa.
We like free software because of choice and diversity. Don't let people tell you these things should be taken away. Offer them your suggestions on what's best for them, but don't forget to respect their choice aswell.
I guess the point I'm really trying to make is, why are we (as a community) trying so hard to compete with Microsoft's Evil Empire? It doesn't really matter if Linux or BSD or Apache or KDE or GNOME becomes mainstream. What is important is that the option is there, and people seem to be flocking towards what is being developed.
Another way of looking at it is this: Free Software does not have to mimic Microsoft and other commercial software in order for it to be worth the effort. As it stands, the Linux desktops that I use are plenty easy enough for average users, and if there's any sort of a demand for it to become easier, some company or group is going to suppy it.
The free software movement isn't about replacing commercial software, it's about providing alternatives. Merely by the organic way that the movement has been growing (more people get involved, more people are contributing, the products are getting better and easier and more refined etc.) An analogy for free software could be the markets: the best projects are going to attract more users, develop reputations and therefore attract more developers.
Trying to use a heavy handed coalition to guide the development of the free software movement won't work, and definetely won't be accepted. The "vi or emacs?" question is quickly being replaced by "gnome or kde?" with a handful of sideline contenders. No consortium could ever successfully select between GNOME and KDE... it sounds like too much like central planning, which is shortsighted and can never keep up with the diversity of an open market.
If GNOME and KDE continue to develop seperately from each other, and both refuse to adopt any sort of consistency between the two (ie. do we need another aRts to be developed for GNOME?) the end result will be that one of the two will join the sidelines, or perhaps the market will produce bindings or wrap arounds to compensate for the inconsistencies.
Where is free software heading? Only time will tell, and the "open ideas market" will be the judge.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter of Linux never replaces the Evil Empire. It'd be nice, but the option is already there for people, and the free software alternative keeps getting better everyday. Stuff that doesn't keep up will be left behind naturally, not by some clear decision. Standards will develop de facto from user acceptance.
Finally, it is perhaps exactly the diversity that the author points to as a flaw, that actually gives the free software movement it's vibrancy. It's great because it can meet so many needs, from regular computer users to geeks who post on slashdot.
What do you think the "information age" is doing to humans regarding their ability to socialize and interact. With the advent of television in the 1950's, there was criticism that television eroded communities by keeping people in their homes. Right now, the so called "MTV Generation" allegedly has the attention span of a 30 second soundbyte.
Many phenomona have been cited as a result of this. Some believe that because so much time is spent infront of televisions, alone, the population is segregated and isolated, unable to work as a community. Others would argue that television technology has merely expanded the community to a national or international level. Still others would refute that this monoculture is dangerous and allows our cultural identity to stagnate.
In the late 90's and now in the early parts of the "new millenium" we've seen an increasing amount of information being transacted over the internet. Does the web as we know it enhance our ability to communicate, or does it further isolate us?
Does a more distributed, decentralized peer2peer model of information exchange promise a type of interaction more natural to humans, or should we be for strategies to prevent further information glut and saturation?
Maybe "unipartisanship" is a better word for it than bipartisanship.
Now don't get me wrong, politics could definitely be more civil, professional and focused on issues instead of personality and ideological blow-harding. But that wouldn't be bipartisan-ness.. that would just be professional and serious. Bipartianism rings of too much of a removal of conflict and debate.
But having at least two (and preferably more) parties with differing views is how a democracy is supposed to work. Through a slow and messy process of debate and consensus, the final product is refined. What Washington really needs is things like campaign finance reform so politicians can focus on research and debate and their constituents, instead of paying for the next election. It needs it's electors to demand real debate, not useless personality bashings that would be better placed in courts or panels, instead of clogging an already slow legislature.
So hopefully this bipartisanship stuff will pass. Demand your politicians to be more diplomatic and professional, not for them to act like one big family.
My guess is that the joke industry has been crushed by the Internet and what to stop all the massive joke emails. So I guess forwarding, printing, or telling a joke in public is now illegal without the express written permission of the joke author. The stupid thing is I wouldn't be suprised if the DMCA can be interpreted the same way. Discliamer: The contents of this posting are copyrighted by me and can not be reproduced in part or in whole without express written permission. Fair use rights may apply but you will have to talk to an attorney about that. G'day
SUE ME! :P
And you're right, you personally can get rid of him, just by disabling his posts in your user preferences.
So that's the solution right there, modify your settings, and if you feel that a certain void needs filling up, do your part. Write, and encourage others to do this aswell. It's not so much a problem of Katz not being a decent or relevant author. The situation you seem to be aware of is a lack of features that you find relevant to you and your life.
And the best way to handle that, is to do it yourself, or at the very least, phrase your proposals like this: "could /. hire some more writers so there's more and better stuff to read?" instead of attacking someone personally and disgracefully.
These are platforms I'd like to see some porting being done for:
Other people's brains (remote access, perhaps X-10 integration)
Garage door opener (so I can apply sound themes to it, and replace the "so 1991" screeching)
Alarm clock (see garage door opener)
Pets (obediance school in any C, Perl, or any language you want).
I read them a long time ago, but something about how it was quicker for the information to be manipulated on this vast, multinoded energy based network instead of the silicon circuitry of typical hardware.
Who knows? Maybe Card's insights were more than just a really good read?
I mean, maybe they don't want the help or something, but the source code is available, and I think it's an opensource license. And it's being bundled with professional systems too. But you hardly hear anybody ever talking about Linux as a serious semi-professional or indy-film alternative to expensive alternatives like Adobe Acrobat.
Kudos to the Broadcast 2000 developers, they deserve way more recognition than they recieve. Linux can do not just 3D and animation, it's already a decent system for non-linear video editting too.
I've seen bike lights that are powered by the motion of some part of the bike (ie. the wheel, or collecting wind motion maybe) so the light is actually being powered by the person, no batteries required. Of course, a PDA and cell phone are going to require a lot more electricty.
But what if the telecom/webcam was working off of a rechargeable battery, that while being drained is also being fed by the motion of the bike, and perhaps also solar power (because any energy collected off of the biker's effort will slow them down I guess).
Realistically, the solar/kinetic battery recharging won't be enough, but it could be enough to keep it running all day until nighttime (or whenever the biker is resting) when it could be plugged into the wall for a complete charge?
Alternative energy rocks!
But honestly, how much research and development could possibly have gone into an idea like individualized URL's? In a sense, a user's home directory (ie. http://www.tao.ca/~jmcnaught/) is an individualized URL, and simply asking people not to tell other's their URL to keep it private is not much of an insight.
Really, shouldn't a patent reflect a protection of a long term investment, specifically hard won insights from research and development?
But then, on another level, how does the idea of intellectual property help to advance humanity? Drug companies using their patents to extort high prices for AIDS treatment from third world countries is a good example of an extremely bad situation related to patents. But on a whole, how much fast could our knowledge of nature and our ability to overcome difficulty progress if humanity was driven to share it's insights?
Perhaps companies should rely on the prestige of their having discovered a process to protect their investments, instead of asking the government to enforce it for them. That attitude is already half-way there, we've all seen certain labs bragging about how many patents have come out of their facilities.
What kind of language can we use to get these (and other) kinds of ideas across the the IP defendants, or perhaps the politicians?
That IP is essentially a monopoly granting process, that it doesn't sit well with the ideas of genuine free trade? Would abolishing IP be the answer, or should we be sitting down and discussing what deserves patents and what does not, and how long they should last?