No, he didn't plan on being a martyr perhaps, but I'll wager he did enjoy thoughts of becoming a counter-cultural hero of sorts.
The man wrote software to circumvent Adobe's encryption. Fine. He (HIM, not just his company) then sold it for a profit using American credit card systems. He didn't give it away to help the blind or any bleeding-heart nonsense like that. He broke the law, flaunted it and got busted. His fscking problem, IMHO.
All this 'Free Dimitry' nonsense is embarassing. Predictable, but embarassing.
I think the bottome line hovers somewhere around the idea that if a child can learn to enjoy the active and competitive elements of video and computer games, they have a higher likelihood perhaps of willingness to undertake/approach (mentally) active and competitive elements of life.
Most games involve some degree of reading and most encourage some sort of fantasy/ideation in the mind of the player, tapping near if not quite into the same vein that a good story taps into.
There's also the idea of Flow, which is thought by some to be crucial for our mental well-being. Flow is the senation of 'forgetting yourself' in an activity, which could be meditation, sex, rock-climbing, a good book, movie or video game. People who can't find flow in creative activities may find it in crime and acts of aggression instead or, most commonly, in drug and alcohol abuse.
It may even lead to small improvements at the physical reaction level. Visualization techniques are fairly-well accepted to be of measurable benefit to training for physical and athletic activities. Video games in many cases might prove to be a sort of active visualization.
Are video games the ultimate cure for everything? No, but they may prove to not quite be the idle time-wasters they are commonly assumed to be. This is not a professional study by any means, but it provides some interesting food for thought.
According to a blurb on the site these machines are being used largely to assist in filling innocent people's minds with western religious garbage.
The following is a PAID ADVERTISEMENT from our sponsors.
Hi There! I'm Troy McLure, and I'm here to tell these starving, oppressed Africans about the deal of of Lifetime! Sure you people are hungry now, but in exchange for your personal integrity and common sense we're willing to help you convince yourself that your suffering here is a wonderful and fullfilling way to accrue spiritual bonuses that will pay off BIGTIME when you reach those pearly gates! Order now, and soon you'll be saying "Oh boy! Thank you Jesus, I can't wait to die!"
When not even the Nat'l Academy of Sciences or the head-in-the-sand Bush administration denies the reality of Global Warming, it would take a masterly writer to come up with...
While the Bush administration may have acquiesced to pressure not to outrightly deny the 'reality of global warming', I wonder if you can point me to some sort of document in which they acknowledge that global warming does in fact exist ('global warming' as directly attributed to the pollutive aspects of modern industry, not simply the fact that the world today is warmer than it was a little while ago).
I say flexible because, more often than not, when you research (however humbly) both sides of an issue, you usually can't help but see degrees of truth and delusion on both. This makes it less pleasing to hurl brimstone at those with whom you disagree, but makes you a far better human being/animal overall!
When the scientific community at large is as divided as they currently are about a topic that is as 'hot' (no pun intended) as this one is, we certainly owe it to ourselves to research all sides as best we are able.
Otherwise, we are simply choosing and supporting a side as thought it were a religion.
Passion is powerful, but rarely a direct indicator of truth, and any passion, once raised, becomes it's own motivator.
We should ignore our passions until we have explored both sides. More often, however (and I'm guilty of this too), we choose the side that appeals to us (for whatever reasons reasonable or otherwise) and then seek out high-status opinions to support our chosen point of view.
Always give the Devil his due. By exercising honesty and integrity, your final position will be much stronger and more flexible, imho.
An RSI-free keyboard would have to take the opposite tactic from the 'no force' approach. Bring back the Big Iron. No one ever got RSI from an old Royal manual typewriter.
They won't have to be attacked directly. All MSoft needs to do is court a powerful ally in Germany, stuff them full of company perks/exclusive deals/whatever and then lean on them to silence their noisome neighbors. Wait 'n see, and I'll bet you that if these guys get spanked, they'll get spanked by one of their own.
Why is it that we expect/. or time.com to pay real money to provide us with free content?
It's up to them. They exist and they are interesting, so we come and contribute our time and attention. God bless 'em if they can how to leverage that into cash.
VALUE is for the most part based on scarecity, but on the web there's no scarcity of real estate OR attention to soak it up. A very unique situation!
The attention a clever site recieves is the only reward it will ever get. It's a very powerful reward, but it won't pay the rent.
There are a lot of very clever sites out there and more being borne every minute. If KuroShite or Slashcock or whatever close their doors to non-micro-paying customers, they will have given up a full half of that which drew so many eyeballs in the first place, that is to say the ability to observe and/or participate without any sort of payment, be it in terms of cash or personal information. The tide of eyeballs is massive but extrememly delicate. It turns and shifts elsewhere at the slightest resistance.
All this pseudo-intellectual drivel of mine cowers, of course, at the altar of Porn Almighty!
Vices, real or imagined, will always get a quick buck from someone.
The dream of free and easy money pouring in from a web-site is proving to be just that, a dream. It doesn't matter if you're pets.com or some schmork with a reasonably interesting idea and some web-space. The money AIN'T comin' in, even if people's attention does.
Slashdot is the Prime Example. It is easily one of the most popular and dynamic sites on the web, yet it's only real hope for revenue is by selling access to readers eyeballs through banner ads and maybe some 'product placement' in terms of story content. That's it.
So very, very much is possible and available on the web at virtually no cost, that the idea of paying for content seems ludicrous, which it is.
All the same, I can imagine the frustration that must arise when you create a popular site that draws billions of eyeballs only to find that you still have to work for a living!
The Web is poised for a return to Glory Days like we've never seen before, where Information, Creativity and Communication are there own rewards.
The Wild West of the Internet has proven to be extrememly fertile, but money still doesn't grow on trees, even though for a while there a lot of us thought it did. On with the Show.
It's not like ancient man had the tools nessecery to kill off a sufficient quantity of any animal as to drive it to extinction
They sure as heck did, especially in cases of the huge, lumbering wooly-mammoth type animals. In the beginning, such animals were hunted at close-quarters by spear-holding humans. Kills were hard-earned with frequent human casualties until an innovation called the atlatl enabled much smaller bands of hunters to kill much more easily and with far fewer casualties. Various difficulties involving population growth and over-hunting insued, with lasting ramifications for our old wooly pals!
I think it stems slightly less from the food we eat and slightly more from the fact that we're so spread out and sub-urbanized that no one walks or rides a bike any more. We sit and drive EVERYWHERE because we have to. I'll wager there's less obeisity in cities then there is in the 'burbs, but that's unsubstantiated spec'lation at this point.
Whatever resurgence there is right now in talk radio, it is all (and I do mean ALL) owed, for better or worse, to Howard Stern.
EVERY radio station now has a show with a central host accompanied by a pair of chatty co-hosts and a sound effects/sound byte engineer. Most of them are annoying in there desparate failure to approach the self-deprecating humor, interpersonal interplays and spontenaity (or successful illusion of spontenaity) that make's Howard Stern's show so staggeringly successful.
It's kind of like when Nirvana came out with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and a whole new wave of bands scratched their heads and said "Loud...then soft...then loud again. Cool!" Dynamics were re-introduced to pop music for the first time in a long time.
The Stern format is interesting and is probably here to stay, if people can find the courage to do it their way instead of imitating his.
You've got your damn email and you've got your damn HTML. What you do with it is up to you. If your efforts at 'congregating' with your revolutionary friends on the web are so easily thwarted, well, you must be pretty damn stupid.
As far as 'revolution-supressing devices' are concerned, I'm all for them. Too many 'revolutions' are called for by those who have given up on their own lives and mistakenly believe that everyone else feels the same (or worse, 'should' feel the same but aren't 'enlightened' enough to) and that a 'clearing of the board' by force will somehow leave them in a better position. The selfishness of this position sickens me, and anything that aids in nipping these tantrums in the bud has my enthusiastic support.
The Jobs-onian loudmouths are just being silenced by time and the drying supply of 'mad-money'.
Real revolutions occur away from the lights and the soap-boxes. They chug quietly in the background until, for some usually unforseeable reason (which, afterwards, all the 'revolutionaries' will say they foresaw), will shrug or shift in someway that forces everyone and everything to change their footing very quickly, some successfully and some not.
Real revolutions are more like acts of nature, beyond the grasp (but on the lips) of the Pundits and Polititians.
Imagine that...email, high-speed "written" communication without hindrance by distance or border, now viewed as commonplace.
The Bottom Line, if you will of Internet technology has already been reached, that is to say, HTML and email. Those two things (glued together and empowered by things like DNS) are the A#1 undeniable miracle of the Internet. The rest is fluff. Powerful and interesting fluff to be sure, but if we we were all to suddenly be reduced to 33bps dialup connections tomorrow, the real (useful and productive) structure and substance of the Internet would be unharmed.
A ten-second web video sound-bite from CNN is kind of cool, but infinitely slower in every regard compared to some text and a few photos.
Exchanginge email and searching/viewing/posting documents and pictures are the most amazing and earth-shattering aspects of this new 'internet culture'.
Slashdot Mirror
Not being allowed to leave California is one of the most Cruel and Unusual punishments I can imagine.
No, he didn't plan on being a martyr perhaps, but I'll wager he did enjoy thoughts of becoming a counter-cultural hero of sorts.
The man wrote software to circumvent Adobe's encryption. Fine. He (HIM, not just his company) then sold it for a profit using American credit card systems. He didn't give it away to help the blind or any bleeding-heart nonsense like that. He broke the law, flaunted it and got busted. His fscking problem, IMHO.
All this 'Free Dimitry' nonsense is embarassing. Predictable, but embarassing.
Still going strong. The rest has always been flashy imitations gussied up in fluff and hype.
It's an intelligent counter to a lot of otherwise Passionate Nonsense.
I think the bottome line hovers somewhere around the idea that if a child can learn to enjoy the active and competitive elements of video and computer games, they have a higher likelihood perhaps of willingness to undertake/approach (mentally) active and competitive elements of life.
Most games involve some degree of reading and most encourage some sort of fantasy/ideation in the mind of the player, tapping near if not quite into the same vein that a good story taps into.
There's also the idea of Flow, which is thought by some to be crucial for our mental well-being. Flow is the senation of 'forgetting yourself' in an activity, which could be meditation, sex, rock-climbing, a good book, movie or video game. People who can't find flow in creative activities may find it in crime and acts of aggression instead or, most commonly, in drug and alcohol abuse.
It may even lead to small improvements at the physical reaction level. Visualization techniques are fairly-well accepted to be of measurable benefit to training for physical and athletic activities. Video games in many cases might prove to be a sort of active visualization.
Are video games the ultimate cure for everything? No, but they may prove to not quite be the idle time-wasters they are commonly assumed to be. This is not a professional study by any means, but it provides some interesting food for thought.
According to a blurb on the site these machines are being used largely to assist in filling innocent people's minds with western religious garbage.
The following is a PAID ADVERTISEMENT from our sponsors.
Hi There! I'm Troy McLure, and I'm here to tell these starving, oppressed Africans about the deal of of Lifetime! Sure you people are hungry now, but in exchange for your personal integrity and common sense we're willing to help you convince yourself that your suffering here is a wonderful and fullfilling way to accrue spiritual bonuses that will pay off BIGTIME when you reach those pearly gates! Order now, and soon you'll be saying "Oh boy! Thank you Jesus, I can't wait to die!"
/ADVERTISEMENT
When not even the Nat'l Academy of Sciences or the head-in-the-sand Bush administration denies the reality of Global Warming, it would take a masterly writer to come up with...
While the Bush administration may have acquiesced to pressure not to outrightly deny the 'reality of global warming', I wonder if you can point me to some sort of document in which they acknowledge that global warming does in fact exist ('global warming' as directly attributed to the pollutive aspects of modern industry, not simply the fact that the world today is warmer than it was a little while ago).
Thanks in advance.
I say flexible because, more often than not, when you research (however humbly) both sides of an issue, you usually can't help but see degrees of truth and delusion on both. This makes it less pleasing to hurl brimstone at those with whom you disagree, but makes you a far better human being/animal overall!
When the scientific community at large is as divided as they currently are about a topic that is as 'hot' (no pun intended) as this one is, we certainly owe it to ourselves to research all sides as best we are able.
Otherwise, we are simply choosing and supporting a side as thought it were a religion.
Passion is powerful, but rarely a direct indicator of truth, and any passion, once raised, becomes it's own motivator.
We should ignore our passions until we have explored both sides. More often, however (and I'm guilty of this too), we choose the side that appeals to us (for whatever reasons reasonable or otherwise) and then seek out high-status opinions to support our chosen point of view.
Always give the Devil his due. By exercising honesty and integrity, your final position will be much stronger and more flexible, imho.
An RSI-free keyboard would have to take the opposite tactic from the 'no force' approach. Bring back the Big Iron. No one ever got RSI from an old Royal manual typewriter.
They won't have to be attacked directly. All MSoft needs to do is court a powerful ally in Germany, stuff them full of company perks/exclusive deals/whatever and then lean on them to silence their noisome neighbors. Wait 'n see, and I'll bet you that if these guys get spanked, they'll get spanked by one of their own.
Or are you betting on an endless supply of enthusiasts with money and time to burn supporting a website?
Yes, yes and YES again.
Why is it that we expect /. or time.com to pay real money to provide us with free content?
It's up to them. They exist and they are interesting, so we come and contribute our time and attention. God bless 'em if they can how to leverage that into cash.
VALUE is for the most part based on scarecity, but on the web there's no scarcity of real estate OR attention to soak it up. A very unique situation!
The attention a clever site recieves is the only reward it will ever get. It's a very powerful reward, but it won't pay the rent.
There are a lot of very clever sites out there and more being borne every minute. If KuroShite or Slashcock or whatever close their doors to non-micro-paying customers, they will have given up a full half of that which drew so many eyeballs in the first place, that is to say the ability to observe and/or participate without any sort of payment, be it in terms of cash or personal information. The tide of eyeballs is massive but extrememly delicate. It turns and shifts elsewhere at the slightest resistance.
All this pseudo-intellectual drivel of mine cowers, of course, at the altar of Porn Almighty!
Vices, real or imagined, will always get a quick buck from someone.
Once again, weep, mourn, get over it.
REALITY: On the Net, space is cheap. Once you're in you're in. There is no easy way to leverage eyeballs into cash. Weep. Mourn. Get over it.
You wan't micropayments? Get a job in Human Services.
The dream of free and easy money pouring in from a web-site is proving to be just that, a dream. It doesn't matter if you're pets.com or some schmork with a reasonably interesting idea and some web-space. The money AIN'T comin' in, even if people's attention does.
Slashdot is the Prime Example. It is easily one of the most popular and dynamic sites on the web, yet it's only real hope for revenue is by selling access to readers eyeballs through banner ads and maybe some 'product placement' in terms of story content. That's it.
So very, very much is possible and available on the web at virtually no cost, that the idea of paying for content seems ludicrous, which it is.
All the same, I can imagine the frustration that must arise when you create a popular site that draws billions of eyeballs only to find that you still have to work for a living!
The Web is poised for a return to Glory Days like we've never seen before, where Information, Creativity and Communication are there own rewards.
The Wild West of the Internet has proven to be extrememly fertile, but money still doesn't grow on trees, even though for a while there a lot of us thought it did. On with the Show.
It's not like ancient man had the tools nessecery to kill off a sufficient quantity of any animal as to drive it to extinction
They sure as heck did, especially in cases of the huge, lumbering wooly-mammoth type animals. In the beginning, such animals were hunted at close-quarters by spear-holding humans. Kills were hard-earned with frequent human casualties until an innovation called the atlatl enabled much smaller bands of hunters to kill much more easily and with far fewer casualties. Various difficulties involving population growth and over-hunting insued, with lasting ramifications for our old wooly pals!
I think it stems slightly less from the food we eat and slightly more from the fact that we're so spread out and sub-urbanized that no one walks or rides a bike any more. We sit and drive EVERYWHERE because we have to. I'll wager there's less obeisity in cities then there is in the 'burbs, but that's unsubstantiated spec'lation at this point.
I did, but not nearly as much as this guy. I still have them Little Black Books to prove it, too!
So would that be 'roobi', 'loobi' or 'ryubi'?
; )
Whatever resurgence there is right now in talk radio, it is all (and I do mean ALL) owed, for better or worse, to Howard Stern.
EVERY radio station now has a show with a central host accompanied by a pair of chatty co-hosts and a sound effects/sound byte engineer. Most of them are annoying in there desparate failure to approach the self-deprecating humor, interpersonal interplays and spontenaity (or successful illusion of spontenaity) that make's Howard Stern's show so staggeringly successful.
It's kind of like when Nirvana came out with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and a whole new wave of bands scratched their heads and said "Loud...then soft...then loud again. Cool!" Dynamics were re-introduced to pop music for the first time in a long time.
The Stern format is interesting and is probably here to stay, if people can find the courage to do it their way instead of imitating his.
You've got your damn email and you've got your damn HTML. What you do with it is up to you. If your efforts at 'congregating' with your revolutionary friends on the web are so easily thwarted, well, you must be pretty damn stupid.
As far as 'revolution-supressing devices' are concerned, I'm all for them. Too many 'revolutions' are called for by those who have given up on their own lives and mistakenly believe that everyone else feels the same (or worse, 'should' feel the same but aren't 'enlightened' enough to) and that a 'clearing of the board' by force will somehow leave them in a better position. The selfishness of this position sickens me, and anything that aids in nipping these tantrums in the bud has my enthusiastic support.
The Jobs-onian loudmouths are just being silenced by time and the drying supply of 'mad-money'.
Real revolutions occur away from the lights and the soap-boxes. They chug quietly in the background until, for some usually unforseeable reason (which, afterwards, all the 'revolutionaries' will say they foresaw), will shrug or shift in someway that forces everyone and everything to change their footing very quickly, some successfully and some not.
Real revolutions are more like acts of nature, beyond the grasp (but on the lips) of the Pundits and Polititians.
The 'failure' of the net, in a commercial sense, could be what saves it in the end, forcing us to actually do something intelligent with it!
1. Enlightened/chaotic discussions on forums like Slashdot.
2. Free exchange of scientific ideas and data.
3. Single point of org for all of the world's porn.
Imagine that...email, high-speed "written" communication without hindrance by distance or border, now viewed as commonplace.
The Bottom Line, if you will of Internet technology has already been reached, that is to say, HTML and email. Those two things (glued together and empowered by things like DNS) are the A#1 undeniable miracle of the Internet. The rest is fluff. Powerful and interesting fluff to be sure, but if we we were all to suddenly be reduced to 33bps dialup connections tomorrow, the real (useful and productive) structure and substance of the Internet would be unharmed.
A ten-second web video sound-bite from CNN is kind of cool, but infinitely slower in every regard compared to some text and a few photos.
Exchanginge email and searching/viewing/posting documents and pictures are the most amazing and earth-shattering aspects of this new 'internet culture'.
Everything else is extra and expendable.