How many thousands upon thousands of people died today?
How many people here know Hans or Nina Reiser?
Every time something like this happens, the tissue brigade (not that one, the other one) comes out berating others for not being all solemn about it. I don't know Hans or Nina Reiser, or their kids. If I could have intervened to stop the murder of this complete stranger, I would have, but pretending that this emotionally affects me in any way, shape, or form, is just being a drama queen.
It reminds me of when I was a kid and we used to drive out to my grandparents house for Easter on Good Friday and between 12 and 3 - the hours we'd be traveling - my mother would insist that there be no music or discussion in the car, because, you know, Jesus suffered on the cross two thousand years ago during those hours (supposedly). And she's screw on this phony bullshit look of solemnity and I'd just want to ask my father, "Is she REALLY serious?"
I wasn't listen to my Walkman, couldn't play electronic games - nothing. I had to sit there in the car in the fucking purgatory of the Poconos and pretend to be really upset about Jesus dying (which is particularly stupid if you already know the end of the story), but lucky me, I had several days, and several hours, of *church* in front of me to look forward to. Hooray.
This particular case is of interest only because many of us use MurderFS (sorry, sorry, shouldn't make light of this), and if we didn't, this murder really wouldn't make a damn bit of difference any more than the thousands of other deaths happening around the world right now.
As for joking about death, murder, mayhem, genocide - as far as I am concerned, the worst atrocities our species are capable of are definitely worth humor. Humor may be the only thing that even comes close to standing up to the very real and unpleasant reality of our own mortality. There is a big difference between joking about this or any other serious event, and somehow taking pleasure in other peoples' loss. Humor takes a little of the wind out of tragedy. Or it's supposed to, anyway.
I don't know Hans or Nina Reiser, nor the guy on his deathbed in Swaziland who is about to expire right now, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend I am in any way emotionally invested in this enough to alter my behavior. This is how the human psyche works, thank god, or we'd do nothing but sob ourselves to death - what matters is what happens to our respective tribes. Everything outside of that is merely fodder for the rest of humanity to go into phony mourning in a display to everyone of how sensitive they are.
This was so widely discussed all over the Internet, I find it difficult to believe anyone didn't know what 4.0 was. People fell all over themselves to make it clear that 4.0 was not intended for primetime use.
I was there in Cupertino in the early days. On my third day of employment I was called into Jobs's office. He was there, alone, in drag. He lifts up the blue skirt he was wearing, and BAM. Cilice.
"You know what this means?" he asks me, twirling a faded Apple ][+ case badge in his hand. "Opus Dei. I have some friends I'd like you to meet."
In walks Gates and Ballmer. Ballmer is in a Masonic apron and Gates says, "You know what Gates translates to in Aramaic? Bilderberger." L. Ron Hubbard (Jobs kept calling him honey-pie) then walks in with an Apple IIe prototype, or so it seems. Opens it up. Juice cans. Ballmer forces me down into the chair with a big meaty hand. In 3 hours, I'd gone clear. They had me in the basement of Novation for a few years with a chip puller, replacing perfectly fine commodity ICs with compromised chips made of pure evil. All of those g-philes about homemade bombs and manufacturing cocaine out of draino? No one in the BBS scene wrote them. They sprang forth onto boards in the middle of the night from those compromised ICs. The concept was to cause disruption and chaos in the suburbs. Why? They wouldn't tell me. But when I'd proven myself by not asking questions, they moved me up through the ranks. OS/2 Warp was mine. As was the scuttling of that product line when it didn't match this infernal cabal's machinations. But I've said too much already.
NeXT? What you don't know is how many of those were sold to the Soviets. You don't see many of them anymore; most of them were made of an unstable polycarbonate which, when exposed to alcohol, denatures into something like sarin gas. But I'm not supposed to be telling you that. The Russians are well known for computing drunk. Vodka. NeXT cube. You know what happens next. How do you think we won the cold war? The NeXT cubes you might have seen are facsimiles. If you've seen one powered on, all you've seen is a hacked version of Windowmaker running on embedded Linux. Don't believe me? Fine, be a sheep.
About a year ago Jobs calls me in. The Pope is there, as is Hubbard (who did not, in fact, expire in the California desert as the Church of Scientology would have you believe). Jobs says, "You know, people are fucking with my OS. I can't have that. Soon, we're going to see hackintoshes all over the god damned Pacific Rim. This is what you're going to do," he says to me. "We're going to start a shell company and we're going to build the worst goddamned hackintosh you can imagine. It should be loud enough to make all of the audio capabilities of the thing damn near useless. Crippled, but intriguing. That's your mantra. Fuck insanely great - the only mantra you have going forward is 'Crippled, but Intriguing.' I want you and my friends here to work it," and he motions behind me.
Standing behind me are 14 original members of the Process Church - Processians, who you might remember from the Manson connection. God and Satan in league. Turns out Jobs was a double agent, working for both the Catholics and Processians. Which side he favored is unclear to this day. But we lit out for Florida in the early morning hours to pull off the Crippled but Intriguing thing.
Jennifer Lopez, who, inexplicably was one of the "original Processians" but had somehow become age-resistant during a joint working of the Temple of Set and the OTO in 1979, says to me, "It is important that this fails. We want to sour the concept of the hackintosh in the mind of the public. It will put this issue to rest, once and for all."
We then proceeded to discuss Enochian magick and grimoires and all the casual kinds of stuff you normally discuss with an electronics-savvy death cult in a 1979 Econoline van on the way to Florida, and so we got there and set up shop.
I could be killed for posting this. But take it under advisement. There are dark fucking AEONIC FORCES behind this thing, and if you can figure out the kind of gematria Jobs is into, you'll figure out what Psystar *really* means (in A
It disturbs me that anyone would read a tech enthusiast site like zdnet without ad blocking, but clearly that must be the case......or MAYBE they stretch it across 11 pages because evil people like me are blocking ads and people must watch more ads to make up lost revenue...
Curious what percentage of Slashdotters use ad-blocking software.
I have never met a Windows user who was happy with Quicktime. It has been years since I installed it but I recall it insisting on taking up space in my tray and thinking, "You arrogant CUNT."
You know what media related app rocks? Irfanview. Ever use it? God, if only all applications were like Irfanview with its useful little file association checkboxes. Man.
Never steal my focus. Ever. For any reason. Unless and until you can give me an orgasm while doing it. Then steal my focus. Steal the shit out of it. Steal the shit out of it like there is no tomorrow.
But until then, seriously, fuck off. The ability to control focus in Linux Windows Managers, small singular feature though it is, is one of the things that makes me happiest about using Linux. And by happy I mean not seething with rage and resentment.
In the end, the only way anything will change in ways which significantly impact our future will be through government directive:
(1) Industry will always be concerned with maximizing returns, which, at least in the US, they are required to do by laws. If this means using nonbiodegradable parts and polluting, they'll do that. The "do no evil" concept in business is a marketing concept, by which people are massaged to use a company's products because of the veneer of social responsibility, and the masturbatory pleasure of "doing good" by buying supposedly "green" companies' products.
(2) Consumers cannot and will not control themselves. They feel put-upon by the suggestion that they should do without anything for the purpose of environmental benefits, worker safety, fair wages, . There are exceptions - so-called "green consumers," but they are a minority, and mocked by the rest as effete NPR-listening, latte-drinking liberals. The focus will always be on where these people fail to be perfectly green consumers; any positives in their lifestyle will be dismissed in favor of pointing out their hypocrisies or weaknesses.
(3) Brand fetishism. Whatever you do, don't pick on a company that makes products that have sentimental value to people. Especially don't ever pick on Apple. Or in this case, Nintendo. Or Ford, if you're talking to a Ford driver, or Chevy if you're talking to a Chevy driver.
Whether free market people like it, whether planned-economy authoritarians like it, the only way anything will change is via government action, whether this is through taxation and tariffs, banning of certain materials, and so on. Whether or not people will tolerate government action like this, or whether the positives will outweigh the negatives, are other questions, but I am convinced that substantial change will only happen if it is forced upon people by government directive. I am not sure I like the idea of government directives about anything. I am not sure the benefits will outweigh the negatives, especially in terms of the proverbial slippery slope. Governments start "doing" power on the weekends with friends. Then a little bump during the week, just to get through. Before you know it, they're stone cold regulation junkies, victimizing anyone they have to just to get a "hit." I understand this.
But I still think...
As long as the governments of the world are unwilling to pass what many would consider draconian regulations on industry, we will continue to toxify the planet because for all their bluster, consumers will tolerate anything except higher prices and inconvenience, and industry will tolerate everything except for the things that affect them, personally.
The other problem is that people continued to be focused on the packaging of messages rather than the content. So if you're a white guy with dreadlocks with a fuck-the-man t-shirt, everything you may be saying about a certain issue may be correct, and people might do well to heed your warning, but people will be smugly satisfied in ignoring you because they don't like how you look - they will spend at least five times the effort mocking you than they will building their own coalition or working toward the social goal in question.
Whether this is stupid or not is irrelevant to the concept that this is a fact. Accordingly, Greenpeace's biggest sin is being Greenpeace. We can agree, for example, that declining fish stocks and the big slick of plastic in the Pacific is a bad thing, but the minute someone tries to do something - anything - under the Greenpeace logo, hearts and minds are lost because the inner compulsion to hate "a bunch of whiny hippies at sea" outweighs the desire to fix the oceans. People could, in theory, join Greenpeace and try to change its direction, but it is far easier to slag them on the Internet and do nothing. Which is what people do, the same way they rant about their political parties but won't go to a party meeting (or even vote in most cases). This, too, is reality. Sl
Either way, Cape Cod is nasty. About a decade ago, I took one of my first road trips to Cape Cod, expecting foggy beaches, lighthouses, all that cool New England stuff. What I found was relentless development - just, insane, crowded, endless homes and businesses.
Really horrible. I'm surprised they let that happen. We drove all the way out to the end there, and it's alright I guess out there near the end but, man, it was not what I expected at all.
No one wants people yelling fire in crowded theaters. No one wants that kind of dangerous sociopathic bullshit, and this example is always brought up whenever someone attempts to rationalize some kind of restriction on speech or expression. Sometimes the example (which I believe comes from a Supreme Court case, so it apples mainly to the United States though I've seen it brought up generally regarding free speech anywhere) is vaguely relevant to what is being discussed, but usually it is not.
I have to seriously wonder whether it would simply be far better - safer, for freedom, in the long run, to forbid all restrictions on freedom of speech.
In other words, decriminalize yelling fire. If it meant that we wouldn't have to put up with politically correct horseshit like this, the censorhip of pornography because some people have an infantile fear of sex, the squashing of anti-government rhetoric under the guise of anti-incitement or anti-sedition efforts, and bookburnings, I think the price is worth it.
If I stipulate to the concept that yelling fire in a crowded theater, or, in fact, inciting to riot is a bad thing, my question is whether or not this would be a worthwhile price to pay for a permanent end to all forms of censorship, and the proverbial tyranny over the mind of man. The danger, of course, isn't that yelling fire would cause a stampede. It would, the first few times some asshat did this. But in the long run, much like like car alarms, people would ignore legitimate warnings.
Would that be a price worth paying if it wiped out any possibility of censorship - if by so doing, you established a precedent that freedom of speech is absolute? (I don't know that it would do that, but I'm speaking hypothetically as a mental exercise.)
To summarize: Is complete freedom of speech worth having, even if it is sometimes dangerous? Even if it might cause a riot or stampede, or create a racist out of thin air?
I think it is. I am beginning to think that, I really do nor recognize nor accept (to the extent that I am willing to bear the consequences) any form of censorship or suppression of ideas. Banning so-called "hate speech" is predicated upon the elitist notion that people cannot think for themselves, and that the government ought to do that thinking for them (by purging speech that could lead to "antisocial thoughts").
Even if this happens in smiling, hockey playing, maple-leaves-and-Bob-and-Doug-happy-go-lucky Canada, make no mistake - this is a form of tyranny. It may not affect you personally because you're not a racist or see no value in racist speech, but it is a personal attack on your right to decide for yourself what you think nonetheless.
Opposing racism is well intentioned. Restricting racist speech - the very act of controlling what people say and therefore what people think, is no way "well intentioned" or "misguided." It is based on the belief that the government is somehow superior and above the individual, and may do thinking for the individual, deciding what is appropriate and what is not.
I don't care what country it happens in. It is wrong in Myanmar. It is wrong in Britain. It is wrong in the United States, where I live, and it is wrong in Canada.
Fuck censorship, and fuck any government that does it.
All of these threads turn into this irritating tit for tat about, "Well, the American is critical, therefore let me show him how his government censors," and so on, which *COMPLETELY MISSES THE POINT*. This ought to be like Amnesty International. Freedom of speech is a basic human right, and as a species we all ought to stand against it together.
Or else you can let the government do your thinking for you - let it decide what might upset, frighten, or incite you to violence.
This is good, because I plan on running a cluster in Hell. What I would like to know is whether or not it is resistant to gay christian right republicans, because there will be a lot of them there.
I don't want to no gay christian republicans all up in my box (And I mean that in every conceivable way).
Also, in the event that hell freezes over, or snowballs do, in fact, have a chance, or we experience, merely, a cold day in hell, I need to know whether it will survive a hard freeze. I for one continue to be disappointed in the fact that servers like this don't come with notoriously insulating Unix beards. By which I mean Unix beards, the dudes, not Unix beards, the beards. We could cut one open like a tauntaun (Unix beard, the dude) and stick the box inside.
And then there is smugness shielding. I don't want Satan all up in my grill about uptimes lasting an eternity, which I totally fucking plan on attaining. I for one will not be rebooting every 48 hours for some stupid Vista upgrade.
Also, do the gates of hell constitute a "firewall"? There's a lot of fire there, and it is kind of wallish. Is port 80 open? Does god forbid export of strong crypto to hell? Are codecs free in the afterlife? Will I be sued by SCO? Because you know they'll all be in hell, and you know Satan has strong connections with Microsoft and lots of capital.
There will be a lot to navigate (I hear the ferry o'er the river styx is completely wallpapered in hardcore pornographic images of Maureen O'Gara in flagrante delicto with Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs.
The challenge is in helping Americans understand that the modern US corporation is not Rearden Metal. That it is not an exception to the rule, but, in fact, the rule, that corporations use the state against their competitors and customers, climb into bed with government, will accept any government handout or bailout, and in fact take not one ounce of damn pride in any product they sell above and beyond the bottom line - in other words, every modern corporation will sell you a bag of shit and call it platinum if people will buy. Just as we see Sony selling aesthetically and morally void rap music and then launching into moral tirades against "pirates", pirating software (as we saw this past week), and selling CDs with "rootkits" on them, the challenge is to make Americans understand how rotten and corrupt corporate leadership and their golden parachutes have become.
This is *not* the "American way" or the kind of rugged new world laissez-faire capitalism I think Americans think they are protecting when they resist regulation of these companies.
Generally speaking I think many Americans see government regulation or involvement in business as the sort of involvement they themselves dread in the small businesses they, themselves, may own. I think people think of being audited by the IRS or having their property seized and tend to think of big business as being in the same boat.
When we can divorce the honest inventor, the small businessman, or even the large single proprietorship from the deformed, mutated shadow of private enterprise that the modern corporation represents, maybe then we will see people take a stand and resist some of these excesses, but not until then.
You cannot simply point at the horribleness of the modern conglomerate and say, "resist that, you idiot," because a great many people in the US do not see it this way.
On a personal level, the single most frustrating thing about being an American, by which in this context I mean a citizen of the United States, is my own inability to convince people that they are being told what they want to hear and seeing what they want to see. This is my own opinion; I may be no less enlightened than anyone else in this country (and may in fact be blinded by my own prejudices), but this is the thing that most frustrates me nonetheless. Life here tends to be a lot of jump-cut imagery of American flags, fast cars, and fat wallets -- interspersed, of course, with romantic military imagery; a sense that we are guardians of all that is decent and fine and just about humanity. But it is just a simulation - in fact, it is a lie.
It could one day be true. It isn't now. We talk it, but we sure as hell don't walk it.
If the United States really lived by its values, man, it'd really be something to see.
But there is no easier way to hypnotize, blind, and anesthetize an American than simply waving a flag in front of their face.
This drives me fucking nuts. It's not the only problem, but it's a big one.
Freenet is more like a distributed, anonymous document store. You upload a document to it, and it then lives in the distributed ether of freenet. Tor is used more for person-to-site, or person-to-person communications.
I have a hard time telling here whether you're serious or not, but really, more people hate Microsoft than love any alternative. Most casual computer users I have met (therefore I very carefully make no broad sweeping statements about "all" of any population of people), gripe constantly about Windows but use it anyway.
You know, the other thing is, really, the concept of physical media must just die and people who fetishize physical media need to understand that there is nothing stopping them from burning a CD, then downloading the artwork in PDF and printing it out at Kinkos.
It is interesting to me that the discussion about CDs continues. One of the biggest reasons I don't buy CDs is *I don't want physical CDs taking up space* when I'm just going to rip them anyway. I have hundreds of CDs in plastic cases sitting in a dark cabinet now for years, doing nothing.
As for the artwork, have you ever scanned in a CD cover, and noticed how..."dotty" it is? A high resolution PDF could potentially give you a much higher quality print - maybe one that would look good the size of a poster, if you wanted to hang it up.
You eliminate plastic (which is nonbiodegradable), save money on shipping, save money on the gas it takes to ship and run the factories (and more pollution). Now obviously, record companies want to be able to endlessly repackage their shit and sell physical media so it's not in their best interest, but if all music was available in FLAC with downloadable artwork, I, for one, would never buy a CD again, ever.
One argument I don't get is the "I really like to feel and touch something I bought." When you take into account printing the artwork and burning a CD, I have to assume that what is left is an unhealthy consumerist habit that can be unlearned.
I wonder if all of these other arguments about why the industry is dying are going to be moot. I wonder if the industry is just going to give up on CDs at some point.
Question for those of you under the age of 18 reading this:
How many of your peers would prefer a physical CD rather than what I suggest above - FLACS+artwork in digital form?
I am curious, among those who want physical media, how it correlates with age - people who grew up in the physical media age vs. people for whom things have always been available in digital form online.
Crappy independent basement-produced music : Good independent basement-produced music
==
Crappy professionally produced music : Good professionally produced music
I cannot think of a single album in the top 40 for the past 5 years I have considered buying. Yeah, it's more expensive to make the latter, but it certainly doesn't motivate me as a purchaser to want to buy it. I'd rather have great music produced on a cassette player in someone's dorm room than crap music produced in a music studio. And those "99 bands who didn't make it" that the record company took a risk on probably sucked. As did, most likely, the one that made it.
Audiophiles may feel differently. To me, it's all a cavalcade of derivative crap, independent or company-produced. It has probably always been this way.
Internet rule: Porn (esp. cryptoporn, porn intertwined with the subject of the forum, like hot BSD Babes) and anti RIAA/MPAA stories are always at least virtually on topic, everywhere.
(*) The sooner music stops being a viable business the better. The sooner people just record for the love of it and put it up on the net for free, the better. I'll hunt it down. I can google. I can read music blogs. No problem.
(*) Even the utter annihilation of the music industry (something I don't see happening) would not mean the end of music. Walk down any cultural center in any city in the world and there are musicians who can't stop playing. Some people can't stop playing for 5 minutes even if you want them to. Every other person I meet is a self-described musician. A large percentage of those people really want to do it professionally.
I really wish I didn't have to work for a living, but you know, I find it hard, working a soul-sucking dayjob, to feel bad for some musician who has to have one too. I am unconvinced that songwriting itself is "work." Touring is work. The business side of music is work, but I'm hoping to see that go away, leaving people and their instruments to do the magic. If it's such hard work, don't do it. Civilization will march on. There will be enough others to fill the gap. There are ten million songs that will never make a dime being written as I write this.
The consolation prize is the musicians will still get laid more than I will because they are musicians. That's the magic of music. So enjoy that. But I can see no reason why any rockstar should be a multimillionaire when there are teachers funding school supplies out of their own wallets, or poverty such as it exists in the third world still exists. (I'm all for musicians making a decent wage or salary if they're good enough.)
I love music. I'm even willing to pay a little bit for it. I am triply more likely to *donate* to a musician than I am to buy the commodity he has transformed his music into.
I'm jealous of musicians. I wish I was one, and I wish I could make music, because I think music is important in a non-financial way. But if I did, I sure as hell couldn't live with the pretentiousness of posing as a musician, as opposed to a normal guy who "makes music" as an expression of my mind and spirit.
Should the day come when there are no more rock stars, I will applaud that.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please.
How many thousands upon thousands of people died today?
How many people here know Hans or Nina Reiser?
Every time something like this happens, the tissue brigade (not that one, the other one) comes out berating others for not being all solemn about it. I don't know Hans or Nina Reiser, or their kids. If I could have intervened to stop the murder of this complete stranger, I would have, but pretending that this emotionally affects me in any way, shape, or form, is just being a drama queen.
It reminds me of when I was a kid and we used to drive out to my grandparents house for Easter on Good Friday and between 12 and 3 - the hours we'd be traveling - my mother would insist that there be no music or discussion in the car, because, you know, Jesus suffered on the cross two thousand years ago during those hours (supposedly). And she's screw on this phony bullshit look of solemnity and I'd just want to ask my father, "Is she REALLY serious?"
I wasn't listen to my Walkman, couldn't play electronic games - nothing. I had to sit there in the car in the fucking purgatory of the Poconos and pretend to be really upset about Jesus dying (which is particularly stupid if you already know the end of the story), but lucky me, I had several days, and several hours, of *church* in front of me to look forward to. Hooray.
This particular case is of interest only because many of us use MurderFS (sorry, sorry, shouldn't make light of this), and if we didn't, this murder really wouldn't make a damn bit of difference any more than the thousands of other deaths happening around the world right now.
As for joking about death, murder, mayhem, genocide - as far as I am concerned, the worst atrocities our species are capable of are definitely worth humor. Humor may be the only thing that even comes close to standing up to the very real and unpleasant reality of our own mortality. There is a big difference between joking about this or any other serious event, and somehow taking pleasure in other peoples' loss. Humor takes a little of the wind out of tragedy. Or it's supposed to, anyway.
I don't know Hans or Nina Reiser, nor the guy on his deathbed in Swaziland who is about to expire right now, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend I am in any way emotionally invested in this enough to alter my behavior. This is how the human psyche works, thank god, or we'd do nothing but sob ourselves to death - what matters is what happens to our respective tribes. Everything outside of that is merely fodder for the rest of humanity to go into phony mourning in a display to everyone of how sensitive they are.
Fuck that shit.
This was so widely discussed all over the Internet, I find it difficult to believe anyone didn't know what 4.0 was. People fell all over themselves to make it clear that 4.0 was not intended for primetime use.
I was there in Cupertino in the early days. On my third day of employment I was called into Jobs's office. He was there, alone, in drag. He lifts up the blue skirt he was wearing, and BAM. Cilice.
"You know what this means?" he asks me, twirling a faded Apple ][+ case badge in his hand. "Opus Dei. I have some friends I'd like you to meet."
In walks Gates and Ballmer. Ballmer is in a Masonic apron and Gates says, "You know what Gates translates to in Aramaic? Bilderberger." L. Ron Hubbard (Jobs kept calling him honey-pie) then walks in with an Apple IIe prototype, or so it seems. Opens it up. Juice cans. Ballmer forces me down into the chair with a big meaty hand. In 3 hours, I'd gone clear. They had me in the basement of Novation for a few years with a chip puller, replacing perfectly fine commodity ICs with compromised chips made of pure evil. All of those g-philes about homemade bombs and manufacturing cocaine out of draino? No one in the BBS scene wrote them. They sprang forth onto boards in the middle of the night from those compromised ICs. The concept was to cause disruption and chaos in the suburbs. Why? They wouldn't tell me. But when I'd proven myself by not asking questions, they moved me up through the ranks. OS/2 Warp was mine. As was the scuttling of that product line when it didn't match this infernal cabal's machinations. But I've said too much already.
NeXT? What you don't know is how many of those were sold to the Soviets. You don't see many of them anymore; most of them were made of an unstable polycarbonate which, when exposed to alcohol, denatures into something like sarin gas. But I'm not supposed to be telling you that. The Russians are well known for computing drunk. Vodka. NeXT cube. You know what happens next. How do you think we won the cold war? The NeXT cubes you might have seen are facsimiles. If you've seen one powered on, all you've seen is a hacked version of Windowmaker running on embedded Linux. Don't believe me? Fine, be a sheep.
About a year ago Jobs calls me in. The Pope is there, as is Hubbard (who did not, in fact, expire in the California desert as the Church of Scientology would have you believe). Jobs says, "You know, people are fucking with my OS. I can't have that. Soon, we're going to see hackintoshes all over the god damned Pacific Rim. This is what you're going to do," he says to me. "We're going to start a shell company and we're going to build the worst goddamned hackintosh you can imagine. It should be loud enough to make all of the audio capabilities of the thing damn near useless. Crippled, but intriguing. That's your mantra. Fuck insanely great - the only mantra you have going forward is 'Crippled, but Intriguing.' I want you and my friends here to work it," and he motions behind me.
Standing behind me are 14 original members of the Process Church - Processians, who you might remember from the Manson connection. God and Satan in league. Turns out Jobs was a double agent, working for both the Catholics and Processians. Which side he favored is unclear to this day. But we lit out for Florida in the early morning hours to pull off the Crippled but Intriguing thing.
Jennifer Lopez, who, inexplicably was one of the "original Processians" but had somehow become age-resistant during a joint working of the Temple of Set and the OTO in 1979, says to me, "It is important that this fails. We want to sour the concept of the hackintosh in the mind of the public. It will put this issue to rest, once and for all."
We then proceeded to discuss Enochian magick and grimoires and all the casual kinds of stuff you normally discuss with an electronics-savvy death cult in a 1979 Econoline van on the way to Florida, and so we got there and set up shop.
I could be killed for posting this. But take it under advisement. There are dark fucking AEONIC FORCES behind this thing, and if you can figure out the kind of gematria Jobs is into, you'll figure out what Psystar *really* means (in A
It disturbs me that anyone would read a tech enthusiast site like zdnet without ad blocking, but clearly that must be the case... ...or MAYBE they stretch it across 11 pages because evil people like me are blocking ads and people must watch more ads to make up lost revenue...
Curious what percentage of Slashdotters use ad-blocking software.
I have never met a Windows user who was happy with Quicktime. It has been years since I installed it but I recall it insisting on taking up space in my tray and thinking, "You arrogant CUNT."
You know what media related app rocks? Irfanview. Ever use it? God, if only all applications were like Irfanview with its useful little file association checkboxes. Man.
I love Irfanview. I miss it.
It was in the article:
http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000001048,39419834-10,00.htm
Would mod you up if I had mod points. Simply put:
Never steal my focus. Ever. For any reason. Unless and until you can give me an orgasm while doing it. Then steal my focus. Steal the shit out of it. Steal the shit out of it like there is no tomorrow.
But until then, seriously, fuck off. The ability to control focus in Linux Windows Managers, small singular feature though it is, is one of the things that makes me happiest about using Linux. And by happy I mean not seething with rage and resentment.
You fool no one. I have it on good authority that Exherbo will be the official distribution of...
DEF LEPPARD.
That's right, DEF *fucking* LEPPARD.
Why pour on hatorade when you can pour some sugar on?
Since you're living in 2002, please do what you can to stop the war!
Thanks!
In the end, the only way anything will change in ways which significantly impact our future will be through government directive:
(1) Industry will always be concerned with maximizing returns, which, at least in the US, they are required to do by laws. If this means using nonbiodegradable parts and polluting, they'll do that. The "do no evil" concept in business is a marketing concept, by which people are massaged to use a company's products because of the veneer of social responsibility, and the masturbatory pleasure of "doing good" by buying supposedly "green" companies' products.
(2) Consumers cannot and will not control themselves. They feel put-upon by the suggestion that they should do without anything for the purpose of environmental benefits, worker safety, fair wages, . There are exceptions - so-called "green consumers," but they are a minority, and mocked by the rest as effete NPR-listening, latte-drinking liberals. The focus will always be on where these people fail to be perfectly green consumers; any positives in their lifestyle will be dismissed in favor of pointing out their hypocrisies or weaknesses.
(3) Brand fetishism. Whatever you do, don't pick on a company that makes products that have sentimental value to people. Especially don't ever pick on Apple. Or in this case, Nintendo. Or Ford, if you're talking to a Ford driver, or Chevy if you're talking to a Chevy driver.
Whether free market people like it, whether planned-economy authoritarians like it, the only way anything will change is via government action, whether this is through taxation and tariffs, banning of certain materials, and so on. Whether or not people will tolerate government action like this, or whether the positives will outweigh the negatives, are other questions, but I am convinced that substantial change will only happen if it is forced upon people by government directive. I am not sure I like the idea of government directives about anything. I am not sure the benefits will outweigh the negatives, especially in terms of the proverbial slippery slope. Governments start "doing" power on the weekends with friends. Then a little bump during the week, just to get through. Before you know it, they're stone cold regulation junkies, victimizing anyone they have to just to get a "hit." I understand this.
But I still think...
As long as the governments of the world are unwilling to pass what many would consider draconian regulations on industry, we will continue to toxify the planet because for all their bluster, consumers will tolerate anything except higher prices and inconvenience, and industry will tolerate everything except for the things that affect them, personally.
The other problem is that people continued to be focused on the packaging of messages rather than the content. So if you're a white guy with dreadlocks with a fuck-the-man t-shirt, everything you may be saying about a certain issue may be correct, and people might do well to heed your warning, but people will be smugly satisfied in ignoring you because they don't like how you look - they will spend at least five times the effort mocking you than they will building their own coalition or working toward the social goal in question.
Whether this is stupid or not is irrelevant to the concept that this is a fact. Accordingly, Greenpeace's biggest sin is being Greenpeace. We can agree, for example, that declining fish stocks and the big slick of plastic in the Pacific is a bad thing, but the minute someone tries to do something - anything - under the Greenpeace logo, hearts and minds are lost because the inner compulsion to hate "a bunch of whiny hippies at sea" outweighs the desire to fix the oceans. People could, in theory, join Greenpeace and try to change its direction, but it is far easier to slag them on the Internet and do nothing. Which is what people do, the same way they rant about their political parties but won't go to a party meeting (or even vote in most cases). This, too, is reality. Sl
Either way, Cape Cod is nasty. About a decade ago, I took one of my first road trips to Cape Cod, expecting foggy beaches, lighthouses, all that cool New England stuff. What I found was relentless development - just, insane, crowded, endless homes and businesses.
Really horrible. I'm surprised they let that happen. We drove all the way out to the end there, and it's alright I guess out there near the end but, man, it was not what I expected at all.
No one wants people yelling fire in crowded theaters. No one wants that kind of dangerous sociopathic bullshit, and this example is always brought up whenever someone attempts to rationalize some kind of restriction on speech or expression. Sometimes the example (which I believe comes from a Supreme Court case, so it apples mainly to the United States though I've seen it brought up generally regarding free speech anywhere) is vaguely relevant to what is being discussed, but usually it is not.
I have to seriously wonder whether it would simply be far better - safer, for freedom, in the long run, to forbid all restrictions on freedom of speech.
In other words, decriminalize yelling fire. If it meant that we wouldn't have to put up with politically correct horseshit like this, the censorhip of pornography because some people have an infantile fear of sex, the squashing of anti-government rhetoric under the guise of anti-incitement or anti-sedition efforts, and bookburnings, I think the price is worth it.
If I stipulate to the concept that yelling fire in a crowded theater, or, in fact, inciting to riot is a bad thing, my question is whether or not this would be a worthwhile price to pay for a permanent end to all forms of censorship, and the proverbial tyranny over the mind of man. The danger, of course, isn't that yelling fire would cause a stampede. It would, the first few times some asshat did this. But in the long run, much like like car alarms, people would ignore legitimate warnings.
Would that be a price worth paying if it wiped out any possibility of censorship - if by so doing, you established a precedent that freedom of speech is absolute? (I don't know that it would do that, but I'm speaking hypothetically as a mental exercise.)
To summarize: Is complete freedom of speech worth having, even if it is sometimes dangerous? Even if it might cause a riot or stampede, or create a racist out of thin air?
I think it is. I am beginning to think that, I really do nor recognize nor accept (to the extent that I am willing to bear the consequences) any form of censorship or suppression of ideas. Banning so-called "hate speech" is predicated upon the elitist notion that people cannot think for themselves, and that the government ought to do that thinking for them (by purging speech that could lead to "antisocial thoughts").
Even if this happens in smiling, hockey playing, maple-leaves-and-Bob-and-Doug-happy-go-lucky Canada, make no mistake - this is a form of tyranny. It may not affect you personally because you're not a racist or see no value in racist speech, but it is a personal attack on your right to decide for yourself what you think nonetheless.
Opposing racism is well intentioned. Restricting racist speech - the very act of controlling what people say and therefore what people think, is no way "well intentioned" or "misguided." It is based on the belief that the government is somehow superior and above the individual, and may do thinking for the individual, deciding what is appropriate and what is not.
I don't care what country it happens in. It is wrong in Myanmar. It is wrong in Britain. It is wrong in the United States, where I live, and it is wrong in Canada.
Fuck censorship, and fuck any government that does it.
All of these threads turn into this irritating tit for tat about, "Well, the American is critical, therefore let me show him how his government censors," and so on, which *COMPLETELY MISSES THE POINT*. This ought to be like Amnesty International. Freedom of speech is a basic human right, and as a species we all ought to stand against it together.
Or else you can let the government do your thinking for you - let it decide what might upset, frighten, or incite you to violence.
It still hasn't gotten weird enough for me.
***TRIAD*** for DEPARTMENT of HOMELAND SECURITY!
This is good, because I plan on running a cluster in Hell. What I would like to know is whether or not it is resistant to gay christian right republicans, because there will be a lot of them there.
I don't want to no gay christian republicans all up in my box (And I mean that in every conceivable way).
Also, in the event that hell freezes over, or snowballs do, in fact, have a chance, or we experience, merely, a cold day in hell, I need to know whether it will survive a hard freeze. I for one continue to be disappointed in the fact that servers like this don't come with notoriously insulating Unix beards. By which I mean Unix beards, the dudes, not Unix beards, the beards. We could cut one open like a tauntaun (Unix beard, the dude) and stick the box inside.
And then there is smugness shielding. I don't want Satan all up in my grill about uptimes lasting an eternity, which I totally fucking plan on attaining. I for one will not be rebooting every 48 hours for some stupid Vista upgrade.
Also, do the gates of hell constitute a "firewall"? There's a lot of fire there, and it is kind of wallish. Is port 80 open? Does god forbid export of strong crypto to hell? Are codecs free in the afterlife? Will I be sued by SCO? Because you know they'll all be in hell, and you know Satan has strong connections with Microsoft and lots of capital.
There will be a lot to navigate (I hear the ferry o'er the river styx is completely wallpapered in hardcore pornographic images of Maureen O'Gara in flagrante delicto with Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs.
I need a server up to the challenge. Is this it?
The challenge is in helping Americans understand that the modern US corporation is not Rearden Metal. That it is not an exception to the rule, but, in fact, the rule, that corporations use the state against their competitors and customers, climb into bed with government, will accept any government handout or bailout, and in fact take not one ounce of damn pride in any product they sell above and beyond the bottom line - in other words, every modern corporation will sell you a bag of shit and call it platinum if people will buy. Just as we see Sony selling aesthetically and morally void rap music and then launching into moral tirades against "pirates", pirating software (as we saw this past week), and selling CDs with "rootkits" on them, the challenge is to make Americans understand how rotten and corrupt corporate leadership and their golden parachutes have become.
This is *not* the "American way" or the kind of rugged new world laissez-faire capitalism I think Americans think they are protecting when they resist regulation of these companies.
Generally speaking I think many Americans see government regulation or involvement in business as the sort of involvement they themselves dread in the small businesses they, themselves, may own. I think people think of being audited by the IRS or having their property seized and tend to think of big business as being in the same boat.
When we can divorce the honest inventor, the small businessman, or even the large single proprietorship from the deformed, mutated shadow of private enterprise that the modern corporation represents, maybe then we will see people take a stand and resist some of these excesses, but not until then.
You cannot simply point at the horribleness of the modern conglomerate and say, "resist that, you idiot," because a great many people in the US do not see it this way.
On a personal level, the single most frustrating thing about being an American, by which in this context I mean a citizen of the United States, is my own inability to convince people that they are being told what they want to hear and seeing what they want to see. This is my own opinion; I may be no less enlightened than anyone else in this country (and may in fact be blinded by my own prejudices), but this is the thing that most frustrates me nonetheless. Life here tends to be a lot of jump-cut imagery of American flags, fast cars, and fat wallets -- interspersed, of course, with romantic military imagery; a sense that we are guardians of all that is decent and fine and just about humanity. But it is just a simulation - in fact, it is a lie.
It could one day be true. It isn't now. We talk it, but we sure as hell don't walk it.
If the United States really lived by its values, man, it'd really be something to see.
But there is no easier way to hypnotize, blind, and anesthetize an American than simply waving a flag in front of their face.
This drives me fucking nuts. It's not the only problem, but it's a big one.
Well I mean, the stories are out there. You can google them yourself and choose to believe them or not. What do you want, packet inspection logs?
Freenet is more like a distributed, anonymous document store. You upload a document to it, and it then lives in the distributed ether of freenet. Tor is used more for person-to-site, or person-to-person communications.
Not the "does she like me" and Ubuntu t-shirt bit, but the open source is better than Windows stuff.
I have a hard time telling here whether you're serious or not, but really, more people hate Microsoft than love any alternative. Most casual computer users I have met (therefore I very carefully make no broad sweeping statements about "all" of any population of people), gripe constantly about Windows but use it anyway.
You know, the other thing is, really, the concept of physical media must just die and people who fetishize physical media need to understand that there is nothing stopping them from burning a CD, then downloading the artwork in PDF and printing it out at Kinkos.
It is interesting to me that the discussion about CDs continues. One of the biggest reasons I don't buy CDs is *I don't want physical CDs taking up space* when I'm just going to rip them anyway. I have hundreds of CDs in plastic cases sitting in a dark cabinet now for years, doing nothing.
As for the artwork, have you ever scanned in a CD cover, and noticed how..."dotty" it is? A high resolution PDF could potentially give you a much higher quality print - maybe one that would look good the size of a poster, if you wanted to hang it up.
You eliminate plastic (which is nonbiodegradable), save money on shipping, save money on the gas it takes to ship and run the factories (and more pollution). Now obviously, record companies want to be able to endlessly repackage their shit and sell physical media so it's not in their best interest, but if all music was available in FLAC with downloadable artwork, I, for one, would never buy a CD again, ever.
One argument I don't get is the "I really like to feel and touch something I bought." When you take into account printing the artwork and burning a CD, I have to assume that what is left is an unhealthy consumerist habit that can be unlearned.
I wonder if all of these other arguments about why the industry is dying are going to be moot. I wonder if the industry is just going to give up on CDs at some point.
Question for those of you under the age of 18 reading this:
How many of your peers would prefer a physical CD rather than what I suggest above - FLACS+artwork in digital form?
I am curious, among those who want physical media, how it correlates with age - people who grew up in the physical media age vs. people for whom things have always been available in digital form online.
Crappy independent basement-produced music : Good independent basement-produced music
==
Crappy professionally produced music : Good professionally produced music
I cannot think of a single album in the top 40 for the past 5 years I have considered buying. Yeah, it's more expensive to make the latter, but it certainly doesn't motivate me as a purchaser to want to buy it. I'd rather have great music produced on a cassette player in someone's dorm room than crap music produced in a music studio. And those "99 bands who didn't make it" that the record company took a risk on probably sucked. As did, most likely, the one that made it.
Audiophiles may feel differently. To me, it's all a cavalcade of derivative crap, independent or company-produced. It has probably always been this way.
Internet rule: Porn (esp. cryptoporn, porn intertwined with the subject of the forum, like hot BSD Babes) and anti RIAA/MPAA stories are always at least virtually on topic, everywhere.
"It's just the way it is. Get a better job if you can't afford it."
Oh, I don't think he was complaining. I think he was suggesting that there might be other, simpler, cheaper alternatives.
Your comment is interesting. From my perspective:
(*) The sooner music stops being a viable business the better. The sooner people just record for the love of it and put it up on the net for free, the better. I'll hunt it down. I can google. I can read music blogs. No problem.
(*) Even the utter annihilation of the music industry (something I don't see happening) would not mean the end of music. Walk down any cultural center in any city in the world and there are musicians who can't stop playing. Some people can't stop playing for 5 minutes even if you want them to. Every other person I meet is a self-described musician. A large percentage of those people really want to do it professionally.
I really wish I didn't have to work for a living, but you know, I find it hard, working a soul-sucking dayjob, to feel bad for some musician who has to have one too. I am unconvinced that songwriting itself is "work." Touring is work. The business side of music is work, but I'm hoping to see that go away, leaving people and their instruments to do the magic. If it's such hard work, don't do it. Civilization will march on. There will be enough others to fill the gap. There are ten million songs that will never make a dime being written as I write this.
The consolation prize is the musicians will still get laid more than I will because they are musicians. That's the magic of music. So enjoy that. But I can see no reason why any rockstar should be a multimillionaire when there are teachers funding school supplies out of their own wallets, or poverty such as it exists in the third world still exists. (I'm all for musicians making a decent wage or salary if they're good enough.)
I love music. I'm even willing to pay a little bit for it. I am triply more likely to *donate* to a musician than I am to buy the commodity he has transformed his music into.
I'm jealous of musicians. I wish I was one, and I wish I could make music, because I think music is important in a non-financial way. But if I did, I sure as hell couldn't live with the pretentiousness of posing as a musician, as opposed to a normal guy who "makes music" as an expression of my mind and spirit.
Should the day come when there are no more rock stars, I will applaud that.