I want to see web sites stop popping up their crappy interstitial pages I have to click through to get to contact, almost all of which implore me to subscribe to their stupid e-mail lists (not happening, ever, specifically because of how they pushed).
I want to see websites stop forcing me through "OMG LOOK AT ALL OUR NEW FEATURES" slides every time I log in.
Put a lil.
A lil.
Flashing thing on the side or something. But get the fuck out of my face.
ALL autoplay bullshit must end (fuck you cnn.com. I mean fuck you for about a hundred other reasons but especially fuck you for that.)
The sheer number of browser extensions I install to try to protect what is left of my privacy and stop apeshit web developers from engaging in screen bukkake has become absurd.
This is not what the Web was supposed to be.
And *yes*, I would be fine with about 2/3rds of the damn Web collapsing for want of ad revenue if what was left was clean and user-friendly. I have reached that point.
I'M MAD PEOPLE.
A CRAZY, MAD, WILD-EYED, BIG-BOTTOMED ANARCHIST.
I WAS HERE EARLY AND YOU WILL HEAR ME.
(they will not hear me. no need to point that out.)
I'm 40 now and I can't think of a single thing from chemistry I've ever used. I can't even remember anything from the class.
Then again as a counterpoint I've never really used electronics, which I had 4 years of in high school, but I swear I think back to that class frequently when problem solving, from "split-halving" a problem to logic gates to make flowcharts and so on. Probably more than any class I had, electronics really taught me how to break down a problem and put together a solution.
I get the idea of a "core curriculum" to expose students to things, but I remain unsure as to whether things are currently makes much sense. I took chemistry, which went fairly into depth, but at the cost of not taking physics (chemistry satisfied the requirement). I'd rather have had a class which touched on each of these subjects for perhaps a quarter to half a year, spread out over two years, than a full year of chemistry, with the option to take a more in-depth science course for years three and four.
But I have to say, nothing I learned in chemistry stuck or was useful like electronics was.
I love history but I think it is taught poorly -- that's an area ripe for consolidation and fixing...social studies and English in general.
Mail from USC-ISI rcvd at 8-APR-76 1202-PST Date: 8 APR 1976 1110-PST Sender: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI Subject: MSGGROUP# 314 Welcome Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-AI) From: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI To: [ISI]Mailing.List: Message-ID:
Please add RMS@MIT-AI (Richard Stallman) to your MsgGroup mailing list, or obtain a new copy form [ISI]Mailing.List;56.
Richard and Ken Harrenstien (KLH@MIT-AI) have been perusing the MsgGroup Proceedings and have raised a number of issues that I think are well worth discussion.
So, Welcome to MsgGroup. Enjoy. See you in the discussions, Stef
Mail-from: BBN-TENEXA rcvd at 22-JUL-75 0617-PDT Date: 22 JUL 1975 0904-EDT Sender: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA Subject: MSGGROUP# 099 The Attention Subfield in The MAILSYS Address Fields. From: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA To: [ISI]Mailing.List: Cc: HENDERSON, RBRACHMAN, ULMER Message-ID: Reference: Kirstein "The Attention Field", Msggroup #82.
Discussion of Kirstein's message of July 7.
The problem is that one MAILBOX sometimes serves a group of users or projects. How can the messages, as they arrive, be brought to the attention of different users? And how can they be sorted out at a later date?
There are three ways that the current MAILSYS system can handle this:
(1) Use the KEYWORDS field to store the appropriate keywords, names, names of projects, or whatever.
The KEYWORDS field takes a text string as its argument. The idea is that it will usually consist of words, separated by commas, but this is not at all required.
Ex: KEYWORDS: WHATZIT, WHOSIS
The KEYWORDS field can be displayed in a long-form SURVEY with the command
>SURVEY,(CR)
>>KEYWORDS (CR)
>>(CR)
If you wish to search the KEYWORDS field with a READ or SURVEY command, you can first set up a FILTER:
>FILTER (CR)
>>REQUIRE KEYWORDS (CR)
>>(CR)
Then you can perform the sort and store the selected messages in a file with
>READ,(CR)
>>FILTER (CR)
>>OUTPUT (CR)
>>(CR)
The commands can be typed in the abbreviated mode, of course.
(2) Use the "Attention Subfield" of the MAILSYS address fields (TO, CC, and BCC).
As currently implemented, the MAILSYS address field has the form
= , ,...
where
= @ ()
which is displayed as
Name at Host (Attn: Text String)
Ex: Mooers at BBNA (Attn: WHATZIT)
Until now, the documentation of showed the form
= @ (, ,... )
and the idea was (and is) that in future versions of MAILSYS,
could be the primary user assigned to a multi-user MAILBOX, and the names in the parentheses could be secondary users authorized to use the MAILBOX. Whether the secondary users should be assigned identities in the system so that MAILSYS can parse and check them in -- at least in the local directory -- is an interesting point for debate.
At present, the attention subfield is available for any kind of flag. It has the advantage of being in the TO, CC, and BCC fields, where you would normally look for an addressee, and the disadvantage that MAILSYS can't sort on it.
In the address fields, MAILSYS will FILTER only for address lists and will not touch the stuff inside the parentheses, whether it consists of duly authorized names or not.
Future versions of MAILSYS will certainly have to filter and sort on the Attention Subfields of messages.
(3) It is also possible to put the attention flag at the beginning of the SUBJECT field, e.g.,
Ex: SUBJECT: WHATZIT: More thoughts on the Attention Problem.
Then you can search for WHATZIT with a FILTER.
This has the advantage that the attention flag shows up on a normal short-form SURVEY, and the disavantage that the subject field is, perhaps, not a very logical place for an attention flag.
I hope this clarifies matters. I have changed the on-line documentation to reflect the system as it is now.
Can someone tell me what a "cable" is? I am looking at the link in the story, and it looks like the kind of thing you'd see slowly printing off of a teletype machine in a 1970s political thriller.
What is the purpose of sending cables rather than encrypted e-mails?
Who maintains the "cable" system and what standard does it run on? Is it like old-school TTY or is it like fax or what? Do these get delivered over regular phone lines or some other network? What kind of "cables" are involved in transmitting "cables?"
Back in 1985 or so, I remember reading all of the anti-piracy stuff that was being put out by software companies, all of which essentially amounted to this argument:
If people pirate stuff, there won't be any monetary incentive to create, and:
* The video game industry will dry up and no one will make any more video games.
* The business software industry will dry up and no one will make any business software.
* The record industry will die and no one will make any music.
In 2011, is there any more appropriate reply than "LOL"?
At bare minimum, they need to stop making stupid arguments. "We are losing revenue which we could rightfully pocket if piracy were stopped" is far more honest here, however anyone else feels about piracy. Or "sharing." Or whatever people call it.
People need to drag out the "Don't Copy That Floppy!" stuff from the early days, and rather than laugh at how dated the pitch looks, use it as an example of how fucking stupid the argument is, as it has no basis whatsoever in reality. I seriously wonder who the affected industries think they're impressing with the "OMG piracy - the pump don't work 'cos the vandals took the handle! SOFTWARE FAMINE ICE AGE WASTELAND COMING!" argument, because this is such a laughably shit argument.
The First Amendment issues are obvious here, but I have to say, we relegare ourselves to a pack of dumb animals if we make the point that watching something or reading something or playing violent video games means we're going to freak out and imitate or otherwise follow the directions of anything contained within.
We are not three year olds. We can watch hateful, obscene, or otherwise nasty crap and we can make the decision not to be a bunch of zombies about it. Unless and until we insist that people think for themselves and be responsible for their actions, (and law should mandate it - meaning, you can't use "I watched a bunch of nasty stuff and it influenced me therefore the crime I committed isn't my fault" argument) we condemn ourselves to a kind of tyranny where government is the adult who steps in and treats us like impressionable toddlers. Freedom is contingent upon critical thinking and personal responsibility, and I am not willing to accept shackles because there are a smattering of idiots among us who are incapable of it.
The logic that we have to stop thoughtcrime because it might spread or influence people is chilling.
The United States needs to ignore the UK's demand, and the UK, if it insists, can certainly petition google to take action on this.
But unless we rely on the idea that free people in a free society can think critically, why not just invite the government into our lives completely? Why even have a free society, if we're really just animals, a few videos away from going on some kind of horrible killing spree? Why go through the pretense of insisting that human beings are capable, through independent thought and taking responsibility for their actions, of liberty?
The "categorically not allowed in the UK" bit could not, as an American, concern me less -- and should the United States attempt the same kind of argument with the UK in the future, the UK can and should ignore the United States's demands to infringe the right of people to say and read/watch what they like.
The alternative, where the government makes this decision that there's just stuff we can't watch, is scary.
Maybe what we should do is start a "Psst, do you REALLY need that Internet connection?" campaign veiled as a frugality-during-the-recession thing for all of these assholes who apparently use 5 gig a month on their Internet plans.
Just start cold calling people.
Be all up in shawtys grill like,
"Sup boo, says here y'all only use like 5 gigs of data a month."
"Well I just sometimes like to e-mail my grandson."
"Do you think that the expense of an Internet connection for a responsible senior on a fixed income is justifiable during these troubled times? Go to the library yo."
And so on.
Then we can shut these fucking companies up already about how their average customer apparently uses the Internet to write "LOL cupcakes" on Twitter every 4 days, and that represents the average Internet user.
Increasingly, I think if you found these "average Internet users," they'd be the same people who have recalibrated the taste buds of people in this country so that you can't actually get *hot* as in *spicy* food anywhere. I just picture those assholes sitting there twittering "omg this salsa is hot 8P" while scarfing down corn chips with Old El Paso "MEDIUM" salsa.
I hate those assholes. They're ruining it for everyone.
I think it'd be an interesting thing if music players had a way of kicking micropayments to the artists in question, especially considering how pliable I am (and probably other music fans are) during something like the guitar solo in Pink Floyd's "Time." Or pick whatever moves you.
On portable players, which will probably at some point all be connected to the Internet somehow, these micropayments could be queued, to dump when next plugged into a networked computer. Desktop players could do it directly. Each could potentially draw out of a Paypal account. You could imagine a button on the players specifically for this purpose. A "love" button.
What's interesting to me about this is it would link the music and the musician directly to the fan through the musical experience itself, while cutting out the increasingly unncessary industry entirely. I don't know of many music fans who are opposed to paying artists - it's paying the cigar chompers that they tend to object to.
As "piracy" of electronic data cannot be controlled whatever anyone thinks of the morality of it, I also like the bounty idea, which I've brought up in other places. An artist records an album and holds it up until an account is filled with a pre-determined amount of his choosing, say $250,000, at which time the music is released, universally. This would allow hardcore fans to pull campaigns together to compensate artists while unleashing *their* favorite music upon the world as a kind of gift. Artists could determine exactly how much they needed to make in advance. If fans of things will camp out for tickets days in advance, you could even picture them holding bake sales to raise ransom money for new albums.
It would encourage artists to make use of pre-existing social media like facebook and even (double shudder) myspace, mailing lists, and so on, and stay connected to fans. It would further alleviate the stress of seeing ones works spread across the Internet, because that would be the expected result once the bounty was paid. It would contribute to a massive worldwide cultural database. It would involve fans in promoting and being a giant online "street team" for music they love.
Music fans would become patrons of their favorite artists. The two ideas above in combination would allow a bulk sum to be paid on delivery, plus "residuals" as people are all enraptured at 3am dancing around spastically to "Transmission" who want to kick the surviving members of Joy Division a little love.
There are of course issues with this which would need to be worked out. It would probably involve most artists going independent (though I can see some kind of artistic co-operative, or co-operatives forming to make promotion and online distribution - that is to say hosting mp3 - no, flac or something like it - files online - easy to do).
Oh GOD, it will never end now. Entire new generations will be quoting this stuff over and over until we all gouge our eyeballs out with sporks. Monty Python, the Led Zeppelin IV of humor, will continue to be the millstone around all of our necks.
Seriously I love Python, I guess. I think I do. I forget. I think after the 50,000th time of having to sit through Holy Grail, I could no longer tell how I once felt.
I'm going to cry.
Thank you Python, thank you - it's wow, I'm inspired like I am by the Top 500 Classic Rock Songs of All Time they do around Labor Day each year because like Layla or Hotel California, I just gotta hear the Parrot sketch ONE MORE TIME because it is so funny, it's like, oh, saying a Rosary or something, you don't really get the whole gestalt of the experience until the 9000th Hail Mary.
Someday when we are all extinct aliens will be digging through our garbage and they will record one thing in their logs: "We left after exploring only.0000000000000000005% of Internet content because we couldn't take the 'Knights Who Say Ni!' references *ANYMORE*."
Oh god, kill me now. I suppose I should look on the bright side (err, yeah). I've got at best another 40 years left or so on this planet.
See, that's the problem. There is a line in a Billy Bragg song which goes, "As long as you're comfortable, it feels like freedom."
And that is the problem here. Until we become impoverished, and our bellies rumble with emptiness, nothing *can* be done because people will simply suffer the lack of motivation brought on by the piles of plastic and electronic widgets they've accumulated. Our wealth, relative to the rest of the world, is a hugely demotivating factor. And this isn't even just crass consumerism. It is also the perfectly reasonable desire to have a roof over our heads and enough food to eat, which most of us do.
Until these things impact people personally in a way they can feel in their stomachs, or in the marks left by cuffs around their wrists - until it is their children being hauled off to secret prisons, nothing will happen, because the fear of losing middle class comforts will always outweigh their anger against the government. The reason the US government has gotten away with this war is because they were smart enough not to draft anyone. It just doesn't affect enough people in more than an abstract sense.
My comments are never made in historical ignorance; this one especially. We are addicted; euphoric from our own wealth. The epitaph for us will be, "...at least we had our iPods." Our laptops and cars and Nintendo Wiis keep us warm and sucking our thumbs and typing angrily in our blogs while government power continues to grow.
The anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Haymarket riots, the Paris commune, and the French and American revolutions all came from something far more visceral than an abstract political idea.
The more any of us owns, the more we have to lose by standing up against the State.
As soon as someone dips their toe in the water and realizes that, in addition to all of the other legal transgressions committed by the government in recent years, they can get away with this to.
By "get away," I mean that they can forcibly take down a website and the public reaction will be a bunch of angry blogging and a noisy protest march, both of which completely unfaze the government (nor does the direct action (aka vandalism, aka hissy-fits) of the so-called anarchists).
Considering that this was as much as anyone did when the government started a war under either deliberately false pretenses, cherry-picked intelligence, or outright incompetence, I think there are those already thinking about outright censorship, which they'll cloak in some kind of undead HUAC-style (except having to do with "terrorism") rhetoric. I don't think this is some dark conspiracy where they're twisting their mustaches and laughing easily. Rather, the urge of this government and the power behind it is a line on a project plan somewhere, mapped to some kind of sick bottom line.
The same was the result of monkeying with the electoral system, and the same is the result of the various crackdowns on protesters, illegal detention of supposed "combatants", extraordinary rendition, and so on. Angry blogging and impotent protests.
The issue here is that no one is really willing to risk their neck to confront the government, or those who are, are unwilling to commit legal or literal suicide in doing so when the most solidarity they can hope for is people posting a bunch of angry shit on the Internet when they are arrested or worse.
This administration is laughing in the face of our impotence as citzens. They've probably always felt this way about us, but are now doing it in our faces.
There's nothing we can do. We have made this military-industrial corporatist complex into a religion of sorts, and they have addicted us to it - our jobs count on it - and they've basically got our nuts in a vice. They've taken a whole lot already. You can bet they'll take more, and with the witless approval of between 40 and 60% of US citizens, too.
Interesting shots. Good camera. Although, I think I would have handled the situation differently.
I probably would have walked over and said, point blank, "I know you guys are dealing drugs out of here because it is obvious. And in terms of that, it's none of my business, until it affects me personally.
To that end, it's important to me that my property remain undamaged and unvandalized, and that this area remain safe. If I have problems on my property because of your little enterprise, we're going to have problems."
As it is, with the kid giving your camera the middle finger, clearly they see you as an adversary and while these look like a bunch of dumb kids for the most part, I'm not sure I'd want to cultivate that kind of relationship with drug dealers in any case.
I'm not being judgmental as I don't know your full situation or the context of what else you've done. I'm just sayin'.
3 people in my house (12 year old girl and two 36 year old adults) -- I am by far the biggest bandwidth user. I torrent a bunch of weird stuff, and watch movies and television via Hulu and Netflix, along with a smattering of youtube videos. I also do backups of some remote websites a few nights a week. Also, I work from home, but the usage there accounts for perhaps 1% of this or less (there is this weird idea the industry has that telecommuting is somehow bandwidth intensive - what is intensive is torrenting or streaming video content, neither of which ever happens on my job).
Anyway, this is with vnstat, which is available for Linux. It runs on my router so this really is the grand total for the home:
Oct '07 62.66 GB
Nov '07 70.33 GB
Dec '07 112.86 GB
Jan '08 84.45 GB
Feb '08 61.16 GB
Mar '08 56.57 GB
Apr '08 94.83 GB
May '08 168.23 GB
Jun '08 148.78 GB
Jul '08 143.43 GB
Aug '08 184.32 GB
I am a Comcast customer. Note that in February we cancelled television service permanently. A lot of the increase is streaming bandwidth for the smattering of television shows we watch via Hulu and Netflix. Not sweating the Comcast cap yet (August was a heavy torrent month), but I'm wondering if it's going to be a problem in a year to two years' time.
Would still like to see tiered pricing - a cheaper 100 gig cap for a bit cheaper, and then a 400 gig cap for more.
I have no idea about your friend, but about 1/3 of the cars I get into, my head either brushes against the ceiling or forces my neck downward because of lack of head clearance, and I'm 6'1". Perhaps your friend is in fact driving a Tardis, and not "normal cars."
I think people just like to be comfortable when driving long distances. I really think that's about it. Maybe some kind of psycho-sexual-social influence explains things like Escalades, but I really think it's about comfort.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to see web sites stop popping up their crappy interstitial pages I have to click through to get to contact, almost all of which implore me to subscribe to their stupid e-mail lists (not happening, ever, specifically because of how they pushed).
I want to see websites stop forcing me through "OMG LOOK AT ALL OUR NEW FEATURES" slides every time I log in.
Put a lil.
A lil.
Flashing thing on the side or something. But get the fuck out of my face.
ALL autoplay bullshit must end (fuck you cnn.com. I mean fuck you for about a hundred other reasons but especially fuck you for that.)
The sheer number of browser extensions I install to try to protect what is left of my privacy and stop apeshit web developers from engaging in screen bukkake has become absurd.
This is not what the Web was supposed to be.
And *yes*, I would be fine with about 2/3rds of the damn Web collapsing for want of ad revenue if what was left was clean and user-friendly. I have reached that point.
I'M MAD PEOPLE.
A CRAZY, MAD, WILD-EYED, BIG-BOTTOMED ANARCHIST.
I WAS HERE EARLY AND YOU WILL HEAR ME.
(they will not hear me. no need to point that out.)
If you're not hysterically paranoid, you're not sane.
I'm 40 now and I can't think of a single thing from chemistry I've ever used. I can't even remember anything from the class.
Then again as a counterpoint I've never really used electronics, which I had 4 years of in high school, but I swear I think back to that class frequently when problem solving, from "split-halving" a problem to logic gates to make flowcharts and so on. Probably more than any class I had, electronics really taught me how to break down a problem and put together a solution.
I get the idea of a "core curriculum" to expose students to things, but I remain unsure as to whether things are currently makes much sense. I took chemistry, which went fairly into depth, but at the cost of not taking physics (chemistry satisfied the requirement). I'd rather have had a class which touched on each of these subjects for perhaps a quarter to half a year, spread out over two years, than a full year of chemistry, with the option to take a more in-depth science course for years three and four.
But I have to say, nothing I learned in chemistry stuck or was useful like electronics was.
I love history but I think it is taught poorly -- that's an area ripe for consolidation and fixing...social studies and English in general.
Mail from USC-ISI rcvd at 8-APR-76 1202-PST
Date: 8 APR 1976 1110-PST
Sender: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI
Subject: MSGGROUP# 314 Welcome Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-AI)
From: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI
To: [ISI]Mailing.List:
Message-ID:
Please add RMS@MIT-AI (Richard Stallman) to your MsgGroup mailing
list, or obtain a new copy form [ISI]Mailing.List;56.
Richard and Ken Harrenstien (KLH@MIT-AI) have been perusing the
MsgGroup Proceedings and have raised a number of issues that I
think are well worth discussion.
So, Welcome to MsgGroup. Enjoy. See you in the discussions,
Stef
Begin forwarded message
Mail-from: BBN-TENEXA rcvd at 22-JUL-75 0617-PDT
Date: 22 JUL 1975 0904-EDT
Sender: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA
Subject: MSGGROUP# 099 The Attention Subfield in The MAILSYS Address Fields.
From: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA
To: [ISI]Mailing.List:
Cc: HENDERSON, RBRACHMAN, ULMER
Message-ID:
Reference: Kirstein "The Attention Field", Msggroup #82.
Discussion of Kirstein's message of July 7.
The problem is that one MAILBOX sometimes serves a group of users
or projects. How can the messages, as they arrive, be brought to
the attention of different users? And how can they be sorted out
at a later date?
There are three ways that the current MAILSYS system can handle
this:
(1) Use the KEYWORDS field to store the appropriate keywords,
names, names of projects, or whatever.
The KEYWORDS field takes a text string as its argument. The idea
is that it will usually consist of words, separated by commas,
but this is not at all required.
Ex: KEYWORDS: WHATZIT, WHOSIS
The KEYWORDS field can be displayed in a long-form SURVEY with
the command
>SURVEY,(CR)
>>KEYWORDS (CR)
>>(CR)
If you wish to search the KEYWORDS field with a READ or SURVEY
command, you can first set up a FILTER:
>FILTER (CR)
>>REQUIRE KEYWORDS (CR)
>>(CR)
Then you can perform the sort and store the selected messages in
a file with
>READ,(CR)
>>FILTER (CR)
>>OUTPUT (CR)
>>(CR)
The commands can be typed in the abbreviated mode, of course.
(2) Use the "Attention Subfield" of the MAILSYS address fields
(TO, CC, and BCC).
As currently implemented, the MAILSYS address field has the form
= , , ...
where
= @ ()
which is displayed as
Name at Host (Attn: Text String)
Ex: Mooers at BBNA (Attn: WHATZIT)
Until now, the documentation of showed the form
= @ (, , ... )
and the idea was (and is) that in future versions of MAILSYS,
could be the primary user assigned to a multi-user
MAILBOX, and the names in the parentheses could be secondary
users authorized to use the MAILBOX. Whether the secondary users
should be assigned identities in the system so that MAILSYS can
parse and check them in -- at least in the local directory -- is
an interesting point for debate.
At present, the attention subfield is available for any kind of
flag. It has the advantage of being in the TO, CC, and BCC
fields, where you would normally look for an addressee, and the
disadvantage that MAILSYS can't sort on it.
In the address fields, MAILSYS will FILTER only for address lists
and will not touch the stuff inside the parentheses, whether it
consists of duly authorized names or not.
Future versions of MAILSYS will certainly have to filter and sort
on the Attention Subfields of messages.
(3) It is also possible to put the attention flag at the
beginning of the SUBJECT field, e.g.,
Ex: SUBJECT: WHATZIT: More thoughts on the Attention Problem.
Then you can search for WHATZIT with a FILTER.
This has the advantage that the attention flag shows up on a
normal short-form SURVEY, and the disavantage that the subject
field is, perhaps, not a very logical place for an attention
flag.
I hope this clarifies matters. I have changed the on-line
documentation to reflect the system as it is now.
---Charlotte
Can someone tell me what a "cable" is? I am looking at the link in the story, and it looks like the kind of thing you'd see slowly printing off of a teletype machine in a 1970s political thriller.
What is the purpose of sending cables rather than encrypted e-mails?
Who maintains the "cable" system and what standard does it run on? Is it like old-school TTY or is it like fax or what? Do these get delivered over regular phone lines or some other network? What kind of "cables" are involved in transmitting "cables?"
I am genuinely curious.
Back in 1985 or so, I remember reading all of the anti-piracy stuff that was being put out by software companies, all of which essentially amounted to this argument:
If people pirate stuff, there won't be any monetary incentive to create, and:
* The video game industry will dry up and no one will make any more video games.
* The business software industry will dry up and no one will make any business software.
* The record industry will die and no one will make any music.
In 2011, is there any more appropriate reply than "LOL"?
At bare minimum, they need to stop making stupid arguments. "We are losing revenue which we could rightfully pocket if piracy were stopped" is far more honest here, however anyone else feels about piracy. Or "sharing." Or whatever people call it.
People need to drag out the "Don't Copy That Floppy!" stuff from the early days, and rather than laugh at how dated the pitch looks, use it as an example of how fucking stupid the argument is, as it has no basis whatsoever in reality. I seriously wonder who the affected industries think they're impressing with the "OMG piracy - the pump don't work 'cos the vandals took the handle! SOFTWARE FAMINE ICE AGE WASTELAND COMING!" argument, because this is such a laughably shit argument.
The First Amendment issues are obvious here, but I have to say, we relegare ourselves to a pack of dumb animals if we make the point that watching something or reading something or playing violent video games means we're going to freak out and imitate or otherwise follow the directions of anything contained within.
We are not three year olds. We can watch hateful, obscene, or otherwise nasty crap and we can make the decision not to be a bunch of zombies about it. Unless and until we insist that people think for themselves and be responsible for their actions, (and law should mandate it - meaning, you can't use "I watched a bunch of nasty stuff and it influenced me therefore the crime I committed isn't my fault" argument) we condemn ourselves to a kind of tyranny where government is the adult who steps in and treats us like impressionable toddlers. Freedom is contingent upon critical thinking and personal responsibility, and I am not willing to accept shackles because there are a smattering of idiots among us who are incapable of it.
The logic that we have to stop thoughtcrime because it might spread or influence people is chilling.
The United States needs to ignore the UK's demand, and the UK, if it insists, can certainly petition google to take action on this.
But unless we rely on the idea that free people in a free society can think critically, why not just invite the government into our lives completely? Why even have a free society, if we're really just animals, a few videos away from going on some kind of horrible killing spree? Why go through the pretense of insisting that human beings are capable, through independent thought and taking responsibility for their actions, of liberty?
The "categorically not allowed in the UK" bit could not, as an American, concern me less -- and should the United States attempt the same kind of argument with the UK in the future, the UK can and should ignore the United States's demands to infringe the right of people to say and read/watch what they like.
The alternative, where the government makes this decision that there's just stuff we can't watch, is scary.
My favorite is the misspelling of "retarded" in the annotation. Few things warm my heart more than that.
You know who else used a similar throttling scheme?
Nazi Germany.
Maybe what we should do is start a "Psst, do you REALLY need that Internet connection?" campaign veiled as a frugality-during-the-recession thing for all of these assholes who apparently use 5 gig a month on their Internet plans.
Just start cold calling people.
Be all up in shawtys grill like,
"Sup boo, says here y'all only use like 5 gigs of data a month."
"Well I just sometimes like to e-mail my grandson."
"Do you think that the expense of an Internet connection for a responsible senior on a fixed income is justifiable during these troubled times? Go to the library yo."
And so on.
Then we can shut these fucking companies up already about how their average customer apparently uses the Internet to write "LOL cupcakes" on Twitter every 4 days, and that represents the average Internet user.
Increasingly, I think if you found these "average Internet users," they'd be the same people who have recalibrated the taste buds of people in this country so that you can't actually get *hot* as in *spicy* food anywhere. I just picture those assholes sitting there twittering "omg this salsa is hot 8P" while scarfing down corn chips with Old El Paso "MEDIUM" salsa.
I hate those assholes. They're ruining it for everyone.
I think it'd be an interesting thing if music players had a way of kicking micropayments to the artists in question, especially considering how pliable I am (and probably other music fans are) during something like the guitar solo in Pink Floyd's "Time." Or pick whatever moves you.
On portable players, which will probably at some point all be connected to the Internet somehow, these micropayments could be queued, to dump when next plugged into a networked computer. Desktop players could do it directly. Each could potentially draw out of a Paypal account. You could imagine a button on the players specifically for this purpose. A "love" button.
What's interesting to me about this is it would link the music and the musician directly to the fan through the musical experience itself, while cutting out the increasingly unncessary industry entirely. I don't know of many music fans who are opposed to paying artists - it's paying the cigar chompers that they tend to object to.
As "piracy" of electronic data cannot be controlled whatever anyone thinks of the morality of it, I also like the bounty idea, which I've brought up in other places. An artist records an album and holds it up until an account is filled with a pre-determined amount of his choosing, say $250,000, at which time the music is released, universally. This would allow hardcore fans to pull campaigns together to compensate artists while unleashing *their* favorite music upon the world as a kind of gift. Artists could determine exactly how much they needed to make in advance. If fans of things will camp out for tickets days in advance, you could even picture them holding bake sales to raise ransom money for new albums.
It would encourage artists to make use of pre-existing social media like facebook and even (double shudder) myspace, mailing lists, and so on, and stay connected to fans. It would further alleviate the stress of seeing ones works spread across the Internet, because that would be the expected result once the bounty was paid. It would contribute to a massive worldwide cultural database. It would involve fans in promoting and being a giant online "street team" for music they love.
Music fans would become patrons of their favorite artists. The two ideas above in combination would allow a bulk sum to be paid on delivery, plus "residuals" as people are all enraptured at 3am dancing around spastically to "Transmission" who want to kick the surviving members of Joy Division a little love.
There are of course issues with this which would need to be worked out. It would probably involve most artists going independent (though I can see some kind of artistic co-operative, or co-operatives forming to make promotion and online distribution - that is to say hosting mp3 - no, flac or something like it - files online - easy to do).
Well thank God, because now people won't download shit for free anymore and instead buy it on amazon.com.
I'm going to send you to a vivisectionist.
Oh GOD, it will never end now. Entire new generations will be quoting this stuff over and over until we all gouge our eyeballs out with sporks. Monty Python, the Led Zeppelin IV of humor, will continue to be the millstone around all of our necks.
Seriously I love Python, I guess. I think I do. I forget. I think after the 50,000th time of having to sit through Holy Grail, I could no longer tell how I once felt.
I'm going to cry.
Thank you Python, thank you - it's wow, I'm inspired like I am by the Top 500 Classic Rock Songs of All Time they do around Labor Day each year because like Layla or Hotel California, I just gotta hear the Parrot sketch ONE MORE TIME because it is so funny, it's like, oh, saying a Rosary or something, you don't really get the whole gestalt of the experience until the 9000th Hail Mary.
Someday when we are all extinct aliens will be digging through our garbage and they will record one thing in their logs: "We left after exploring only .0000000000000000005% of Internet content because we couldn't take the 'Knights Who Say Ni!' references *ANYMORE*."
Oh god, kill me now. I suppose I should look on the bright side (err, yeah). I've got at best another 40 years left or so on this planet.
See, that's the problem. There is a line in a Billy Bragg song which goes, "As long as you're comfortable, it feels like freedom."
And that is the problem here. Until we become impoverished, and our bellies rumble with emptiness, nothing *can* be done because people will simply suffer the lack of motivation brought on by the piles of plastic and electronic widgets they've accumulated. Our wealth, relative to the rest of the world, is a hugely demotivating factor. And this isn't even just crass consumerism. It is also the perfectly reasonable desire to have a roof over our heads and enough food to eat, which most of us do.
Until these things impact people personally in a way they can feel in their stomachs, or in the marks left by cuffs around their wrists - until it is their children being hauled off to secret prisons, nothing will happen, because the fear of losing middle class comforts will always outweigh their anger against the government. The reason the US government has gotten away with this war is because they were smart enough not to draft anyone. It just doesn't affect enough people in more than an abstract sense.
My comments are never made in historical ignorance; this one especially. We are addicted; euphoric from our own wealth. The epitaph for us will be, "...at least we had our iPods." Our laptops and cars and Nintendo Wiis keep us warm and sucking our thumbs and typing angrily in our blogs while government power continues to grow.
The anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Haymarket riots, the Paris commune, and the French and American revolutions all came from something far more visceral than an abstract political idea.
The more any of us owns, the more we have to lose by standing up against the State.
As soon as someone dips their toe in the water and realizes that, in addition to all of the other legal transgressions committed by the government in recent years, they can get away with this to.
By "get away," I mean that they can forcibly take down a website and the public reaction will be a bunch of angry blogging and a noisy protest march, both of which completely unfaze the government (nor does the direct action (aka vandalism, aka hissy-fits) of the so-called anarchists).
Considering that this was as much as anyone did when the government started a war under either deliberately false pretenses, cherry-picked intelligence, or outright incompetence, I think there are those already thinking about outright censorship, which they'll cloak in some kind of undead HUAC-style (except having to do with "terrorism") rhetoric. I don't think this is some dark conspiracy where they're twisting their mustaches and laughing easily. Rather, the urge of this government and the power behind it is a line on a project plan somewhere, mapped to some kind of sick bottom line.
The same was the result of monkeying with the electoral system, and the same is the result of the various crackdowns on protesters, illegal detention of supposed "combatants", extraordinary rendition, and so on. Angry blogging and impotent protests.
The issue here is that no one is really willing to risk their neck to confront the government, or those who are, are unwilling to commit legal or literal suicide in doing so when the most solidarity they can hope for is people posting a bunch of angry shit on the Internet when they are arrested or worse.
This administration is laughing in the face of our impotence as citzens. They've probably always felt this way about us, but are now doing it in our faces.
There's nothing we can do. We have made this military-industrial corporatist complex into a religion of sorts, and they have addicted us to it - our jobs count on it - and they've basically got our nuts in a vice. They've taken a whole lot already. You can bet they'll take more, and with the witless approval of between 40 and 60% of US citizens, too.
My attitude is that Australian broadband *especially* sucks, not that ours in the US is great and we're spoiled.
ROTFLHAO? Rolling On The Floor Laughing, Having An Ovaltine?
wot?
Interesting shots. Good camera. Although, I think I would have handled the situation differently.
I probably would have walked over and said, point blank, "I know you guys are dealing drugs out of here because it is obvious. And in terms of that, it's none of my business, until it affects me personally.
To that end, it's important to me that my property remain undamaged and unvandalized, and that this area remain safe. If I have problems on my property because of your little enterprise, we're going to have problems."
As it is, with the kid giving your camera the middle finger, clearly they see you as an adversary and while these look like a bunch of dumb kids for the most part, I'm not sure I'd want to cultivate that kind of relationship with drug dealers in any case.
I'm not being judgmental as I don't know your full situation or the context of what else you've done. I'm just sayin'.
3 people in my house (12 year old girl and two 36 year old adults) -- I am by far the biggest bandwidth user. I torrent a bunch of weird stuff, and watch movies and television via Hulu and Netflix, along with a smattering of youtube videos. I also do backups of some remote websites a few nights a week. Also, I work from home, but the usage there accounts for perhaps 1% of this or less (there is this weird idea the industry has that telecommuting is somehow bandwidth intensive - what is intensive is torrenting or streaming video content, neither of which ever happens on my job).
Anyway, this is with vnstat, which is available for Linux. It runs on my router so this really is the grand total for the home:
Oct '07 62.66 GB
Nov '07 70.33 GB
Dec '07 112.86 GB
Jan '08 84.45 GB
Feb '08 61.16 GB
Mar '08 56.57 GB
Apr '08 94.83 GB
May '08 168.23 GB
Jun '08 148.78 GB
Jul '08 143.43 GB
Aug '08 184.32 GB
I am a Comcast customer. Note that in February we cancelled television service permanently. A lot of the increase is streaming bandwidth for the smattering of television shows we watch via Hulu and Netflix. Not sweating the Comcast cap yet (August was a heavy torrent month), but I'm wondering if it's going to be a problem in a year to two years' time.
Would still like to see tiered pricing - a cheaper 100 gig cap for a bit cheaper, and then a 400 gig cap for more.
Your enlightened righteousness is such that I need sunglasses to read your post, sir.
I have no idea about your friend, but about 1/3 of the cars I get into, my head either brushes against the ceiling or forces my neck downward because of lack of head clearance, and I'm 6'1". Perhaps your friend is in fact driving a Tardis, and not "normal cars."
I think people just like to be comfortable when driving long distances. I really think that's about it. Maybe some kind of psycho-sexual-social influence explains things like Escalades, but I really think it's about comfort.
Considered and rejected. They're being drama queens.