I've simply said that if someone wants to watch TV 16 h/day and sleep for the rest of the time he/she's fully entitled to do so.
Uh huh. Thats why we've got a welfare system, thats why we've got drug control programs, thats why we've got social strife out of control... because 'people should be allowed to do what they want'. Hey, you wanna turn that once-fine establishment into a crack house go right ahead. Its got 'nothing to do with society', who should 'just mind its own business' after all.
I'm not saying that you can't watch TV if you want. All I'm saying is that - in my opinion - its sucking your life away, as it has done to countless millions, and turning you into a robotic plebe unable to form a view of the world without requiring the ability to change channels whenever you see something you don't like. You are being spoon-fed an opinion, being given a life full of fallacies, one that you aren't actually formulating yourself. Spend 16 hours in front of a Television, if you want to... but don't ever rise above it, slave, and see it for what it truly is.
I mean, sure. Go ahead and shoot up... I'm only a guy trying to tell you how much time you're wasting. I don't think I have to be more than that, to do just that. I'm not trying to be your messiah, if thats what you mean by "who are you to tell me?"... just a passing member of the social order of humans in the world, who care enough about things to want to talk about them, rather than just 'watch all about it on TV'.
Again, who are you to tell them how they live their lives and why do you feel so strongly about other people's chosen way of life?
What is Television, that it should be worshiped as the only source of material for ways to live ones life, and what is It that it should feel so strongly about representing - in whatever light it cares - other peoples chosens way of life?
I think its nefarious indeed that we have a situation where a law has been passed (strictly for the sake of economic protection, not cultural) which states we individuals can't record all of the things we see and hear around us, yet others can.
Maybe I should start a company, the purpose of this company will be to preserve the life recordings of every single person who is a member of this corporation, and make those recordings available, forever, without limits.
Call it "Edit Track, Incorporated", and set its charter to allow for all members/users of the service to upload their own experience for storage.
As long as its a new and unique perception, from the eyes of another human being, it should be allowed in the archives, forever, as a record of their experience...
TV is pre-calculated to keep you attached. Nothing you will see on Television will ever actually encourage you to turn the Television off and go outside.
The people who control what appears on Television are a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny subset of the grand order of humanity. They are an elite cult indeed, driven by greed and desire for ratings and (success) as they have defined it, above all else.
Slashdot is a social forum of people. The only value you will ever get out of Slashdot is in the form of the people you meet and engage in discourse with, as a consequence of your own interest and desire. Slashdot is a two-way system, and the sum total of its content is the result of -all- who participate. This is not true of Television.
Television is an evil cult who has taken over the minds of the world and turned them into pliable citizens of a new world order.
Besides, who are you to say what people should be doing with their lives?
You do realize the irony, right? You'd rather have a Television, an inanimate object, determine for you what it is you'll be watching and perceiving for hours a day, than have a living human being, with whom you can discuss the issue, suggest that you do something better with your time?
Okay, go back to your TV set, humanoid. Enjoy the show!
Thing is, why should the onus -only- be on the broadcaster in these cases?
If you've got an indecency complaint to make, you should be able to make your -own- copy of the event.
Copyright laws seem more designed to prevent open criticism of the quality of media, than the actual control of copy of that media. Frankly I think far too many TV and "Mass Media" broadcasters are getting away with nefarious info-war rubbish, and it has gone on too long... the public need education on propaganda, and they -need- the right to record all media they perceive, on persistent and undeniable basis.
Television is the enemy of creativity. There are thousands and thousands of things you can do which are more entertaining, more compelling, and generally more lively than watching Television.
Personally, I find it indicative of the height of decadence in society today that we've got massive government agencies whose sole purpose is to keep content designed for wasting time within certain 'limits' of 'social acceptance'.
I'll tell you whats offensive: the fact that 400,000 people a day are sitting in front of televisions, doing nothing with their lives, and society thinks this is 'normal'. Thats more fucking offensive than a few fucking swear fucking words, I tell you that.
1. Nobody buys CD's. 2. I'd buy an MP3 player if it were branded by my favourite musician. I'd much rather have a "Pink" mp3 gadget, than a "Sony" one...
... the fact that, in quantity, these key-chain USB/MP3 players can be had for as little as $10 per item.
Why is this great, "in quantity"? Well, I know plenty of unsigned artists whose mp3's are floating around the internet, promoting them, who can now offer "Albums" on these MP3 devices, custom-like, to their loyal fans.
Mark my words: CD's are dead. Static MP3's are dead.
Long-live the value-added MP3-player-bundled-with-new-tracks website freelance musician upsell!
I dunno, in a twisty sense I think it is sort of insightful. That a few Americans get their feathers ruffled by such statements doesn't mean its Flamebait, necessarily.
Fact is, the RIAA is only able to exist and propagate its tendrils of control because the public don't do anything about it. It makes no sense to have such draconian restrictions on technology; yet that is what is happening, behind the curtains.
Because someone doesn't come forward and sponsor a bill to protect the emerging P2P industry, before it is/crushed/defeated/degraded/monopolized by existing powers, these powers are able to sponsor their own bills.
Americas' freedoms, and the so-called glories of its citizenry are one thing. But farcical banter about what is 'right and wrong' about America, while lobbyists and special control interests are writing new laws for you, and only for you, is another thing entirely.
RIAA is getting away with this bullshit simply because the American public are too lazy, and too irresponsible, to actually rise up and do something about it. As long as the Television Always Works After Dinner, most people don't give a damn what their politicians are doing to protect the right of free speech, free media, and free culture.
P2P networks are of the people, and for the people, and NOTHING ELSE. So far.
The American government is working pretty hard to change that. Lord knows, it dislikes it whenever anything else of the people, and for the people comes along to lure the masses from its protectionist skirts...
More evidence of the US government being completely owned by corporate interests.
Thing is though you can't avoid corporate interest. Corporate interest is the fundamental strength of the American economy.
Without corporations creating and defeating and dominating new markets, America goes poor.
Its one thing to resist the New World Order. Its another thing entirely to live in it. It is upon us, there is nothing left to do (armed revolt? no. civil disobedience? no. none of these things work any more)... but get corporate.
Me, Inc. is the only path to survival in the New Global Order.
So glad someone else is taking the initiative and polluting the public spheres' perception of the ".NET" thing. I intentionaly did -not- read this article at first since I saw the ".NET" bit and figured "bah... some boring shit about some more boring shit I don't want to know anything about from those Microsoft shits"...
Cool. Hope we all get ".NET"-deprogrammed/-programmed eventually. I would hate to have seen that word piracy actually result in yet another 'product from Microsoft' world view.
I was wondering, that bit about the cloud, do they mean that the ring of sky that Titan has traced around Saturn has thus far gotten 'dense' enough that its a single 'cloud', encompassing both Saturn and the rings?
Kind of a 'ring of Titan' that has captured the planet and its lesser minions?
If so, thats pretty interesting. Might be useful to know how that works, if we're going to get any terraforming done in the next 100 years.
Maybe its just the memory of that distant summer holiday in Spain, the one with the 3 British tourist girls, a swimming pool full of loose coins from the pockets of drunk tourists, a pool nobody but me could dive to the bottom and retrieve, literally, handfuls and handfuls of change from, and the Crazy Climber cabinet, tucked away in the corner away from the noise and madness of those coin-drop machines (and Pacman)...
Whatever it is, Crazy Climber still, to this day, sucks me in. I can't play it for shorter than 10 minutes... it just gets me. Sure, its nostalgia, but you can't buy nostalgia, at any price, so complaining about nostalgia is stupid. Get it where you can, when you can, and live for it!
Yeah, I too was wondering about that FOD issue... wouldn't it suck if they have to take the cockpit apart looking for M&M's before they can re-launch again. I don't understand why he felt he could do that, actually... maybe the cockpit on SS1 is pretty sparse?
While the Linux system might be difficult to maintain, it can be done.
Every user gets their own session, their own homedir, their own.dotfiles, and it Just Works.
Once this is set up, and X is running, its done. No maintenance. Multi-head is actually "X" and Unix at its greatest.
Put OpenOffice.org on there and you've got what you need to run the average office, for whatever business.
All that time you're wasting now, in the "difficult to maintain" department, you know... re-formatting every PC in the office, re-installing c:\winnt32\, removing IE, 'fixing the e-mail system', installing new Virus patches, etc. will now be free time you can apply to actually customizing your -one computer office system- to the task of your business, easily, and maybe learn a few Open Source skills on the side, as well.
An Apache/PHP/MySQL-based business app being developed by an enthusiastic software hacker (it could be the whole group, with their own PHP scripts...) focused on computerizing his/their business process, paired to a single cheap PC that 4 people can be using at the same time, is good Starter Business Manna... put a smart business app on a Single PC which is dead-easy to maintain (hint: it just runs), make sure Single PC is cheap, and it works, and you've got a 3rd world economic power-station.
Think of the rows and rows and rows of low- to middle-class businesses you can see in any average big-city, and now add a small, affordable computing system that -4 people can play with at once- in each box in the row.
Most people buy multiple-PC's for the office just so that they can have access to a 'broader computing system' that they then try to tie together with all kinds of other bone-dead 'systems' like 'shared Access databases' and whatnot, over some network (which requires even more hardware and maintenance)... whereas having everything 'local', on a single system with sufficient power (RAM) to cater to the needs of busy people, is entirely feasible, and cuts out a -lot- of the reasons for most modern PC maintenance...
Its gotta get easier to multi-head PC's. It just does. The single-user hardware paradigm needs to be shifted. Microsoft -need- new licenses from new 'complete system' hardware to propel their buggy OS, whereas Linux only -needs- you to use it.
So the combination of silicon production abilities, and plant-cell growth efficiency, and a little of Moore and more... might give us extremely more powerful, much cheaper to produce, solar cells.
Hope so, anyway. I'd much rather be invading a country for their spinach than their oil.
If I have to buy a PC these days (and sometimes, I do) then I try to get one from a vendor who is hep enough to know that throwing in the box a few live-boot-CD's of, say, devil-linux or knoppix, or gentoo, is likely to get them a repeat customer...
One reason I have found, or associated with this on the vanilla-box shop front (they are all over the world), is that unlike some Microsoft-weenie environments (where everything is served you on a very expensive platter, and its an entirely different odor), the guys in Linux beige-box shops usually ship pretty good hardware.
You would expect anyone knowing and using linux well enough to understand some of the reasons you select good hardware for computing systems, and this generally reflects well in the way they run a shop. If there are multiple live-boot-CD's in the box (vendor 'thank you' package)
I think this is sort of a global, open language, which is visible in vanilla-pc box shops, all over the world. (Or at the places I've been so far, not sure about Istanbul yet...)
I always go back to the guys who are promoting linux. Anyone doing that, at any level, is worth the effort of knowing.
i'd like to see a robot that can take those beads and 'form print a 3 d scultpure' with them, placing and heating 3 or 4 beads at a time, then 'heat-gluing' them together, gradually, over time.
i'd do it from the bottom, up, so the whole thing just grows.
-that would rock, and there'd be bonus points for using mindstorm, i suppose...
Maybe they're not abandoning white, maybe the new machines will have 'some' aluminum and 'some' white bits.
I believe that apple make the white/aluminium distinction so that there's a "pro" line in their market perception, but i think a lot of people buying macs also consider the design of the iMac to be a little 'pro'/'fad'-ish, and thus not really worth the investment in lieu of just going for a base G5 or higher setup (or a powerbook)... so maybe Apple will close that mindset by moving it all the the screen, and putting a little white/aluminium box on the side, with all that implies...
Pretty much, for me, Java's promises have been delivered by the linux kernel, as a whole, pitched with whatever stuff i can roll with it. Write "once, run on anything" is as much about build tools as it is JIT-interpreters.
And I've always had a bit of a thing for C. The 7 or 8 Java projects I've been involved in were -fun- from a programming perspective, but it still feels like a cocktail language that gives itself its own reasons for existence.
I don't really think its safe to say that about C, which is fundamentally still 'just another assembly language'.
Complete kernel and libkits assembled with sharp C/bin's, are just as nice a package to deliver, even still, as say, a.jar file or some such thing...
Java was a good lesson, and still is. It is a productive language. But this can be said of any language and its use in an application framework, really, and for me, the vmlinuz+/libs+/bin subsystem does what Java promises.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing special about television.
...
oh, really? why watch it then? thats all 'normal', what you see on TV, is it?
heh heh. maybe its too late for this one
I've simply said that if someone wants to watch TV 16 h/day and sleep for the rest of the time he/she's fully entitled to do so.
... because 'people should be allowed to do what they want'. Hey, you wanna turn that once-fine establishment into a crack house go right ahead. Its got 'nothing to do with society', who should 'just mind its own business' after all.
... but don't ever rise above it, slave, and see it for what it truly is.
... I'm only a guy trying to tell you how much time you're wasting. I don't think I have to be more than that, to do just that. I'm not trying to be your messiah, if thats what you mean by "who are you to tell me?" ... just a passing member of the social order of humans in the world, who care enough about things to want to talk about them, rather than just 'watch all about it on TV'.
Uh huh. Thats why we've got a welfare system, thats why we've got drug control programs, thats why we've got social strife out of control
I'm not saying that you can't watch TV if you want. All I'm saying is that - in my opinion - its sucking your life away, as it has done to countless millions, and turning you into a robotic plebe unable to form a view of the world without requiring the ability to change channels whenever you see something you don't like. You are being spoon-fed an opinion, being given a life full of fallacies, one that you aren't actually formulating yourself. Spend 16 hours in front of a Television, if you want to
I mean, sure. Go ahead and shoot up
Again, who are you to tell them how they live their lives and why do you feel so strongly about other people's chosen way of life?
What is Television, that it should be worshiped as the only source of material for ways to live ones life, and what is It that it should feel so strongly about representing - in whatever light it cares - other peoples chosens way of life?
I think its nefarious indeed that we have a situation where a law has been passed (strictly for the sake of economic protection, not cultural) which states we individuals can't record all of the things we see and hear around us, yet others can.
Maybe I should start a company, the purpose of this company will be to preserve the life recordings of every single person who is a member of this corporation, and make those recordings available, forever, without limits.
Call it "Edit Track, Incorporated", and set its charter to allow for all members/users of the service to upload their own experience for storage.
As long as its a new and unique perception, from the eyes of another human being, it should be allowed in the archives, forever, as a record of their experience
Television is not the same as Slashdot.
TV is pre-calculated to keep you attached. Nothing you will see on Television will ever actually encourage you to turn the Television off and go outside.
The people who control what appears on Television are a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny subset of the grand order of humanity. They are an elite cult indeed, driven by greed and desire for ratings and (success) as they have defined it, above all else.
Slashdot is a social forum of people. The only value you will ever get out of Slashdot is in the form of the people you meet and engage in discourse with, as a consequence of your own interest and desire. Slashdot is a two-way system, and the sum total of its content is the result of -all- who participate. This is not true of Television.
Television is an evil cult who has taken over the minds of the world and turned them into pliable citizens of a new world order.
Besides, who are you to say what people should be doing with their lives?
You do realize the irony, right? You'd rather have a Television, an inanimate object, determine for you what it is you'll be watching and perceiving for hours a day, than have a living human being, with whom you can discuss the issue, suggest that you do something better with your time?
Okay, go back to your TV set, humanoid. Enjoy the show!
Thing is, why should the onus -only- be on the broadcaster in these cases?
If you've got an indecency complaint to make, you should be able to make your -own- copy of the event.
Copyright laws seem more designed to prevent open criticism of the quality of media, than the actual control of copy of that media. Frankly I think far too many TV and "Mass Media" broadcasters are getting away with nefarious info-war rubbish, and it has gone on too long... the public need education on propaganda, and they -need- the right to record all media they perceive, on persistent and undeniable basis.
Television is the enemy of creativity. There are thousands and thousands of things you can do which are more entertaining, more compelling, and generally more lively than watching Television.
Personally, I find it indicative of the height of decadence in society today that we've got massive government agencies whose sole purpose is to keep content designed for wasting time within certain 'limits' of 'social acceptance'.
I'll tell you whats offensive: the fact that 400,000 people a day are sitting in front of televisions, doing nothing with their lives, and society thinks this is 'normal'. Thats more fucking offensive than a few fucking swear fucking words, I tell you that.
Easy:
...
1. Nobody buys CD's.
2. I'd buy an MP3 player if it were branded by my favourite musician. I'd much rather have a "Pink" mp3 gadget, than a "Sony" one
... the fact that, in quantity, these key-chain USB/MP3 players can be had for as little as $10 per item.
Why is this great, "in quantity"? Well, I know plenty of unsigned artists whose mp3's are floating around the internet, promoting them, who can now offer "Albums" on these MP3 devices, custom-like, to their loyal fans.
Mark my words: CD's are dead. Static MP3's are dead.
Long-live the value-added MP3-player-bundled-with-new-tracks website freelance musician upsell!
I dunno, in a twisty sense I think it is sort of insightful. That a few Americans get their feathers ruffled by such statements doesn't mean its Flamebait, necessarily.
/crushed/defeated/degraded/monopolized by existing powers, these powers are able to sponsor their own bills.
...
Fact is, the RIAA is only able to exist and propagate its tendrils of control because the public don't do anything about it. It makes no sense to have such draconian restrictions on technology; yet that is what is happening, behind the curtains.
Because someone doesn't come forward and sponsor a bill to protect the emerging P2P industry, before it is
Americas' freedoms, and the so-called glories of its citizenry are one thing. But farcical banter about what is 'right and wrong' about America, while lobbyists and special control interests are writing new laws for you, and only for you, is another thing entirely.
RIAA is getting away with this bullshit simply because the American public are too lazy, and too irresponsible, to actually rise up and do something about it. As long as the Television Always Works After Dinner, most people don't give a damn what their politicians are doing to protect the right of free speech, free media, and free culture.
P2P networks are of the people, and for the people, and NOTHING ELSE. So far.
The American government is working pretty hard to change that. Lord knows, it dislikes it whenever anything else of the people, and for the people comes along to lure the masses from its protectionist skirts
More evidence of the US government being completely owned by corporate interests.
... but get corporate.
Thing is though you can't avoid corporate interest. Corporate interest is the fundamental strength of the American economy.
Without corporations creating and defeating and dominating new markets, America goes poor.
Its one thing to resist the New World Order. Its another thing entirely to live in it. It is upon us, there is nothing left to do (armed revolt? no. civil disobedience? no. none of these things work any more)
Me, Inc. is the only path to survival in the New Global Order.
So glad someone else is taking the initiative and polluting the public spheres' perception of the ".NET" thing. I intentionaly did -not- read this article at first since I saw the ".NET" bit and figured "bah ... some boring shit about some more boring shit I don't want to know anything about from those Microsoft shits" ...
Cool. Hope we all get ".NET"-deprogrammed/-programmed eventually. I would hate to have seen that word piracy actually result in yet another 'product from Microsoft' world view.
Titan isn't habitable, you say?
I thought Titan was one of the reasons hydrothermal vents were so interesting?
I was wondering, that bit about the cloud, do they mean that the ring of sky that Titan has traced around Saturn has thus far gotten 'dense' enough that its a single 'cloud', encompassing both Saturn and the rings?
Kind of a 'ring of Titan' that has captured the planet and its lesser minions?
If so, thats pretty interesting. Might be useful to know how that works, if we're going to get any terraforming done in the next 100 years.
Crazy Climber.
...
... it just gets me. Sure, its nostalgia, but you can't buy nostalgia, at any price, so complaining about nostalgia is stupid. Get it where you can, when you can, and live for it!
Maybe its just the memory of that distant summer holiday in Spain, the one with the 3 British tourist girls, a swimming pool full of loose coins from the pockets of drunk tourists, a pool nobody but me could dive to the bottom and retrieve, literally, handfuls and handfuls of change from, and the Crazy Climber cabinet, tucked away in the corner away from the noise and madness of those coin-drop machines (and Pacman)
Whatever it is, Crazy Climber still, to this day, sucks me in. I can't play it for shorter than 10 minutes
Yeah, I too was wondering about that FOD issue ... wouldn't it suck if they have to take the cockpit apart looking for M&M's before they can re-launch again. I don't understand why he felt he could do that, actually ... maybe the cockpit on SS1 is pretty sparse?
While the Linux system might be difficult to maintain, it can be done.
.dotfiles, and it Just Works.
... re-formatting every PC in the office, re-installing c:\winnt32\, removing IE, 'fixing the e-mail system', installing new Virus patches, etc. will now be free time you can apply to actually customizing your -one computer office system- to the task of your business, easily, and maybe learn a few Open Source skills on the side, as well.
...) focused on computerizing his/their business process, paired to a single cheap PC that 4 people can be using at the same time, is good Starter Business Manna ... put a smart business app on a Single PC which is dead-easy to maintain (hint: it just runs), make sure Single PC is cheap, and it works, and you've got a 3rd world economic power-station.
... whereas having everything 'local', on a single system with sufficient power (RAM) to cater to the needs of busy people, is entirely feasible, and cuts out a -lot- of the reasons for most modern PC maintenance ...
Every user gets their own session, their own homedir, their own
Once this is set up, and X is running, its done. No maintenance. Multi-head is actually "X" and Unix at its greatest.
Put OpenOffice.org on there and you've got what you need to run the average office, for whatever business.
All that time you're wasting now, in the "difficult to maintain" department, you know
An Apache/PHP/MySQL-based business app being developed by an enthusiastic software hacker (it could be the whole group, with their own PHP scripts
Think of the rows and rows and rows of low- to middle-class businesses you can see in any average big-city, and now add a small, affordable computing system that -4 people can play with at once- in each box in the row.
Most people buy multiple-PC's for the office just so that they can have access to a 'broader computing system' that they then try to tie together with all kinds of other bone-dead 'systems' like 'shared Access databases' and whatnot, over some network (which requires even more hardware and maintenance)
Its gotta get easier to multi-head PC's. It just does. The single-user hardware paradigm needs to be shifted. Microsoft -need- new licenses from new 'complete system' hardware to propel their buggy OS, whereas Linux only -needs- you to use it.
So the combination of silicon production abilities, and plant-cell growth efficiency, and a little of Moore and more... might give us extremely more powerful, much cheaper to produce, solar cells.
Hope so, anyway. I'd much rather be invading a country for their spinach than their oil.
If I have to buy a PC these days (and sometimes, I do) then I try to get one from a vendor who is hep enough to know that throwing in the box a few live-boot-CD's of, say, devil-linux or knoppix, or gentoo, is likely to get them a repeat customer
One reason I have found, or associated with this on the vanilla-box shop front (they are all over the world), is that unlike some Microsoft-weenie environments (where everything is served you on a very expensive platter, and its an entirely different odor), the guys in Linux beige-box shops usually ship pretty good hardware.
You would expect anyone knowing and using linux well enough to understand some of the reasons you select good hardware for computing systems, and this generally reflects well in the way they run a shop. If there are multiple live-boot-CD's in the box (vendor 'thank you' package)
I think this is sort of a global, open language, which is visible in vanilla-pc box shops, all over the world. (Or at the places I've been so far, not sure about Istanbul yet
I always go back to the guys who are promoting linux. Anyone doing that, at any level, is worth the effort of knowing.
i'd like to see a robot that can take those beads and 'form print a 3 d scultpure' with them, placing and heating 3 or 4 beads at a time, then 'heat-gluing' them together, gradually, over time.
...
i'd do it from the bottom, up, so the whole thing just grows.
-that would rock, and there'd be bonus points for using mindstorm, i suppose
Maybe they're not abandoning white, maybe the new machines will have 'some' aluminum and 'some' white bits.
... so maybe Apple will close that mindset by moving it all the the screen, and putting a little white/aluminium box on the side, with all that implies ...
I believe that apple make the white/aluminium distinction so that there's a "pro" line in their market perception, but i think a lot of people buying macs also consider the design of the iMac to be a little 'pro'/'fad'-ish, and thus not really worth the investment in lieu of just going for a base G5 or higher setup (or a powerbook)
If I'm using Unix tools on Windows, then its not Windows' tools I'm using. Its Unix tools.
And as for 'bashing Windows', I've been doing that now for 20 years, and I've had plenty of good reasons all this time, believe me.
Pretty much, for me, Java's promises have been delivered by the linux kernel, as a whole, pitched with whatever stuff i can roll with it. Write "once, run on anything" is as much about build tools as it is JIT-interpreters.
And I've always had a bit of a thing for C. The 7 or 8 Java projects I've been involved in were -fun- from a programming perspective, but it still feels like a cocktail language that gives itself its own reasons for existence.
I don't really think its safe to say that about C, which is fundamentally still 'just another assembly language'.
Complete kernel and libkits assembled with sharp C
Java was a good lesson, and still is. It is a productive language. But this can be said of any language and its use in an application framework, really, and for me, the vmlinuz+/libs+/bin subsystem does what Java promises.