My ass. I can set up RH in a few minutes, light years ahead of the rebootathon that is setting up windows NT.
9. Applying service packs unwisely
Another load of crap, you forgot to mention why it's unwise. I'll tell you. Because Micro$oft insists on including things like filesystem and kernel "upgrades" along with bug fixes. This is blatantly unethical, because some people need bug fixes but can't use them because the "upgrades" will break other programs they need. Flat out bullshit.
Cloning Windows NT (i.e., don't do it)
This one's just hilarious. This dude's obviously never run, administrered, or otherwise been anywhere near a network. There is simply no way to run a pc windows network without cloning. Where I work, it would take an entire day to set up a PC from scratch, installing the OS and all the apps we use; it's not ust a waste of time and money, anyone who has done this sort of work knows how dreadfully boring and sanity depriving it is to endlessly type in serial numbers, reboot, repeat. Cloning takes about 25 minutes. Not to mention ghost takes care of the SID problem. Of course in linux you can just use dd.
It's time people started dumping windows altogether.
There's been some criticism of Raymond's incessant beating the the capitalist drum, and I think that's good. It should be noted that the Free Software movement, as started by RMS, is inherently anti-capitalistic (uh, the GPL is signed by "Ty Coon", "President of Vice", after all) and Raymond I think is really injecting his personal politics here. It doesn't work.
That said, this recent anti-Raymond paper really didn't offer any relevant criticism, ESR is right here. I didn't see anything of value in the work at all.
Some people are saying the Free Software movement is socialist, which I think is also an error (if one uses the term "socialist" as most american understand it). It is highly anarchistic, in the same tradition as thinkers like Rocker and Bakunin. It isn't even remotely socialist, let alone Marxist. I'm not saying RMS has anarchistic politcal roots, but if one is looking for a political parallel, it isn't in socialism or, of all things, capitalism.
Personally, I am rather tired of the arguments for "Open Source" based on "economy" and "practicality". Listen to RMS. It's about FREEDOM. RMS needs to crank it up.
Technology is wonderful, and although I will agree that it makes life more complicated, it also enables humans to communicate more easily. The most interesting technologies of the 20th century to me are in communications.
This article hits on the problem - marketing and advertising based conciousness, but doesn't even remotely go into it in any depth. Television was a bad technology, the internet is better and will eventually replace it. The danger is in seeing the internet an amusement park.
Oh the horror. Proof that shub-internet actually exists, if one thinks even for a moment. I can't believe people are worried about Y2K or the New World Order when there are crawling cthuloid horrors like this running and bleeping and bleating and croaking along our networks right among the more mundane packets of daily email, slashdot posts and Britney Spears mp3's.
At one time I had some hope but better, far better, to live in shameful ignorance than even take slight cognizance of the sanity depriving crawling chaos. Take comfort that the Pope is sanctioning new internet saints and that scientists are the ones responsible for this discovery. Yeah, right.
Say what you want, but when these subterranean horrors meet up with their elders.... I mean, it's not what they done, but what they're a goin' to do.
It was that evil russian hacker dude from Goldeneye. That's who it was. Wringing his hands in front of the graphical display of his hack, showing the little bleeping packets from Moscow to the US. Or maybe it was that russian general from Rambo III, in between torturing little children.
use ipchains to set up a simple masquerading firewall. It needn't have a ton of complex rules (but that's OK if you want).
Then you can use another tool like portsentry which detects portscans, and can be set up to use ipchains rules to automatically drop packets of anyone portscanning you (including your ISP:). Nice program. Another program, logcheck, will scan you rlogs and report (email) all suspicious activity. Look for them on freshmeat.
Then secure your box by removing all services except ssh.
I'd like to see this technology put to good use. It would be nice to have a networkable digital camera with a 500MB disk and a web server built in. The storage methods for cameras absolutely suck these days.
My car, for instance, for all the care I gave it, began to literally fall apart once the 50,000 mile warranty was up. Little bits here and there just started to fall apart. Nothing serious mind you, but I'm putting up with more and more aggravations every day. Sure, my car works, but it aggravates me that it was literally designed to fall apart. They have this "down to a science", I think. My old Volkswagen ghia, which I could almost have kept running indefinitely (well sometimes they just get too old), never had this problem...
Most industries are quite in tune with the "planned obsolesence" ("process optimization", in industry parlance) concept, which is ruinous to the customer, but there isn't anything one can do about it. Microsoft (and most windows software) software is even more deplorable still, but it's essentially the same thing: keep the product cycle churning. Don't let the customer stop to think. In the auto industry, they make things seem better by creating a "fake company" (Saturn: and by "fake" I mean it is designed to present the customer the illusion of competition) which markets itself as "a different kind of company", when, in reality, it's the exact same bullshit that GM makes elsewhere. In the software industry we have the MacIntosh (Apple fans please calm down, it's not personal). It's funny how people just lap this shit up (but mostly, the "lapping up" is done in commercials which are of course not real).
All I can say is thanks, Richard Stallman and friends.
As for vandalism, it's a crime. Period. You know the saying that the right to swing a punch stops at the other person's nose? That holds for corporate property, as well. Activists like Nader, who speak and provoke debate, are being a lot more principled than wannabe "protesters" who defile a page, think they're all that, and probably could not even articulate a remotely intelligent argument about why they claim the "right" to do so.
I forgot something.
The "science" of marketing has left rational discourse behind long ago. It's no longer a matter of which product is better or why one should buy it or how it could be useful to you. What does reason mean in an environment where it isn't GOOD/BAD or QUALITY/CRAP but GEEKY/SEXY and COOL/DORKY?
You have to fight fire with fire. Fighting the brazenly irrational market culture, which produces tons of useless trash by the shipfull, with rational argument is pointless. It's like using a spitball against an aircraft carrier. So yes, I support web site defacement, as well as bulletin board defacement, and whatever else you can think of. These thing have the effect of jarring one's conciousness slightly, hopefully enough to show it the absurdity of the image driven and completely irrational intellectual obscenity of the marketeer.
There was, actually, a significant amount of Soviet-sponsored infiltration into US and British networks and populations. For instance, the KGB subverted intelligence officers (Kim Philby, Aldrich Ames, etc) who attained *high* ranks (Russia Desk, anyone? And Philby, at one time, looked to be the next *head* of British Intel.
Philby - whoops! that was long before the Reaganite era - 1940's. Ames - a better example, but these are spies, turning coat on other spies. Really, little to do with you or me. The fact still stands that "terrorism" in the 1980's as put forth by the popular media in the US was largely a fabrication, right along with the "drug war". "Terrorism" is simply convenient propaganda nomenclature, designed to stir up public fears and get them to support the police force instituted to "fight" it.
And then, what of US sponsored "terror" in third world coutries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia, Viet Nam)? Is terror "ok for me, but not for you"? It works both ways. The greatest madnesses of cultures are not apparent to them until much later.
(KGB supported)... Ditto the anti-'Nam movement.);
Well, naturally the KGB was trying to stir up as much crap as they could, but WRT Viet Nam, they simply didn't need to. There was enough popular sentiment that they simply needn't get involved, so your assertion is dubious, to say the least. God forbid that the Viet Nam war might be considered unjust and odious (it was). You blithely ignore that most of the anti war sentiment had nothing to do with the KGB.
Incidentally, based on the best estimates at the time regarding conventional and nuclear assets, there were some periods during which our calculations suggested that a Soviet first strike could actually *work*.
Pay an think tank enough money and they will tell you anything. That's what they're for. What does "could work" mean? Total global devastation?
I believe any honest student of Soviet history could not possibly come to any conclusion that the system was facing imminent and total collapse starting with the Brezhnev era.
As for vandalism, it's a crime. Period. You know the saying that the right to swing a punch stops at the other person's nose? That holds for corporate property, as well. Activists like Nader, who speak and provoke debate, are being a lot more principled than wannabe "protesters" who defile a page, think they're all that, and probably could not even articulate a remotely intelligent argument about why they claim the "right" to do so.
The problem is that there is virtually no other way to communicate. People like Ralph Nader are almost silent in comparison to the media. As I said, the whole "problem" could be alleviated by corporations placing uncensored feedback forums on their sites. Instead we get the same one-way pipeline of marketing drivel supported by government sponsored "crackdowns". The gripe I have (which you did not even address, preferring to tangentize on government spies) is that vandals (a misdemeanor) are being persecuted as terrorists (a capital crime). The rebellion is incohate, groping, untutored and largely even unprincipled. But I'm not buying into the propaganda. The net isn't theirs, and their unwavering arrogance warrants action.
Interesting how dissenters and defacers of corporate web sites are now deemed "terrorists". Of course anyone who thinks knows that the "communist terrorist" scares of the Reagan years and beyond is largely a fiction of the corporate media and its government supported mechanisms and popular literature (Tom Clancy, Rambo movies, anyone?): exactly parallel to the "Red Scare" of the 50's. The language used in this article is positively alarming, and is supported by our governments treatment of these "vandals": they actually are being persecuted as terrorists criminals, not vandals, and are given the stiff penalties that would normally be reserved for hardened criminals. This is pure propaganda: designed to induce fear in the public to promote and excuse the incarceration and villification of the "menace". To be sure, there are criminals using cracking skills for truly immoral purposes, but the propaganda model is meant to obscure that - so that the public cannot make the distiction - that's the point.
"True Hackers" can dismiss crackers as "script kiddies" all they want (and much of the characterizations are true), but dissent is a healthy part of a democracy. It is a good and necessary thing. It's not as if there isn't anything to be pissed about in our society. I personally like the fact that kids are defacing corporate web sites! It should be rigorously pointed out that most of the cracking done is harmless defacement and meant to embarass and deride, not destroy. This is culture jamming, not criminal activity. Anyone who subscribes to the "defaced" mailing list knows that.
I guess the final solution would be to dope everyone up on television, ritalin and zoloft (the drugs that our system condones out of hand of course - just don't smoke pot!!!) so that they just can't think anymore, a country of bleary eyes zombies getting their buttons pushed. It is only so long before the mind rebels against this sort of horrid nonsense.
The corps need to realize that the internet is NOT television. The days of manufactured infotainment (what a horrid term - I didn't come up with it) are numbered, they know that, and they're trying with all their might to turn the internet into a more muscular version of television, a vast theme park and entertainment delivery system for the mind.
The vertically integrated modern media corporation truly represents the greatest threat to free speech ever in our supposedly "free" society. They need to be cracked. They would have us think that the true dissenters of our society are the puffy lipped, slender, androgenous models that grace the slick pages of Details and GAP storefronts. Pretty soon we won't know better.
They need to know that we will talk back, by any means necessary. This is just the powerful plutocrat, disgusted that people have found a new weapon against their methods of order, authority and control (what charter of our country gave them any authority, anyway?). Personally, I'm tired of people having any power over me whatsoever.
The solution here is for crackers to organize better. What bother me a little is not the "horror of defaced sites" (OH MY GOD!) but the problem that most of this dissent is inarticulate and untutored. We are now presented with the amusing spectacle of the corporate media (I refuse to give them the moniker "Free Press" - they don't deserve it) telling us that the "black hat" hackers are the ones ridiculing the corporate machinery and the "white hat" hackers are the gainfully employed citizens... er... consumers using their "security skills" for the "greater good". I believe someone once said that if one looks hard enough, you will find the one who profits from something, and therein lies the spark that powers the machinery. If there was any honesty to this, the corporations would have uncensored feedback forums on their web sites, not the same bland conduits of market babble that we're so used to from the traditional media.
Now it's fairly obvious that they're lobbying the federal government to protect themselves - who will in turn, in an ironic twist, use our tax dollars to launch a media campaign in order to protect them. The sad truth is that there really isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it but keep cracking web sites. But that's our "democracy" for you.
In the late ninties we have seen a drastic decrease in Pizza Hut awareness, and that is not just a national problem, but a global one. I'm personally hoping that this tremendous humanitarian effort will at least partially remedy the problem. All national Pizza Hut awareness indices have dropped sharply in the last year, especially since the rise of subversive gourmet/micro-pizzarias in our crime infested inner cities. So Pizza Hut has been chased back into the wilderness of small town strip malls and Wal Mart co-locations. They've given a last ditch effort with the ingenious all-you-can-eat-buffet idea, but it's too little, too late.
Not enough people over the world know of Pizza Hut. Imagine the decrepitude of third world and communist countries who know nothing of double crust, butter crust, extra thick or pan pizzas? What about the grease? Do they get enough grease? My God, haven't they ever questioned whether or not they need Pizza Hut? Has it ever even occured to them? Finally they're getting the chance, and I can't believe the decidedly unpatriotic and totally un-american views of some of our more liberal panty-waisted limp wristed slashdotters. It's disgusting.
I'm holding in my hand a list of twenty nations that do not have Pizza Huts. When this rocket ship fires, the people will have truly spoken! We need a global, unified, subsidized pizza distribution, delivery and point-of-purchase (POP) infrastructure. The time is now!
The Matrix did suck; it had a great image - Neo waking up in his slime pod - but it was a downhill plunge from there. There are so many things one could've done with the metaphor (having someone show you that everything you thought was true simply isn't). From that point it just degenerated into a cheap ultra violent action flick, but one supposes it was exciting enough. Certainly better than Lucas' dismal, odious abomination of market culture that we were subjected to.
Then, what was with the bizarre "christian" imagery: "trinity", the messaianic nature of Neo. None of that makes any sense. What a muddled movie.
From what I gather, Muay Thai seems to be the best striking.
However, any striker who doesn't have any grappling abilities will simply get his ass kicked by almost any grappler; wrestling, BJJ, whatever.
Other thing no one mentions: striking arts are much harder on your body. Most strikers burn out or get injured long before grapplers do. Some of the shit muay thai guys do is basically self mutilating machismo (kicking tree trunks with your shins, etc.).
duh.. people spout this crap but the truth is that a grappler is in a better position over a striker to eye gouge and ear bite or whatever the fuck pussy move you can name.
No one practices that shit because, well, you don't need to. It's not technique.
I have this totally whacked slave-master fantasy-morality thing going that has no basis in reality or reason and I want to force it down everyone's throats so that I can feel better about my place in the universe right under god's ass.
I understand why people use and need Macintosh computers. They're easy to use, etc.
That said, what annoys me is Apple's ridiculous "think different" advertisements. There is nothing more establishment than Apple, they're a corporation just like any other, out to make money - nothing more. The idea that one is some sort of "rebel" by using an Apple computer is just ludicrous, it's like the Saturn of the computer world. Just part of the ongoing media blitz to commodify dissent, realized in GAP, Saturn and Apple computer ads. In this sense Apple is even more disgusting than Microsoft to me, because there is little more intellectually obscene than turning dissent into a product. This crap really is the crowning jewel of the baby boomer marketeer.
Of course all this seems absurd to anyone that uses a Free OS.
Yech. The last thing the world needs is another slave driving IP droid. Edison was the Bill Gates of the early 20th century. We need more Nikolai Teslas, not more greedy money grubbing patent stealing lawyer types.
K Office is coming along quite nicely and actually looks better than Star Office anyway. There already KLyx for those that really need something like that. KOffice will force Corel and Sun, maybe even Microsoft (by then who knows) into at least keeping their suites "free beer".
Slashdot Mirror
My ass. I can set up RH in a few minutes, light years ahead of the rebootathon that is setting up windows NT.
Another load of crap, you forgot to mention why it's unwise. I'll tell you. Because Micro$oft insists on including things like filesystem and kernel "upgrades" along with bug fixes. This is blatantly unethical, because some people need bug fixes but can't use them because the "upgrades" will break other programs they need. Flat out bullshit.
This one's just hilarious. This dude's obviously never run, administrered, or otherwise been anywhere near a network. There is simply no way to run a pc windows network without cloning. Where I work, it would take an entire day to set up a PC from scratch, installing the OS and all the apps we use; it's not ust a waste of time and money, anyone who has done this sort of work knows how dreadfully boring and sanity depriving it is to endlessly type in serial numbers, reboot, repeat. Cloning takes about 25 minutes. Not to mention ghost takes care of the SID problem. Of course in linux you can just use dd.
It's time people started dumping windows altogether.
There's been some criticism of Raymond's incessant beating the the capitalist drum, and I think that's good. It should be noted that the Free Software movement, as started by RMS, is inherently anti-capitalistic (uh, the GPL is signed by "Ty Coon", "President of Vice", after all) and Raymond I think is really injecting his personal politics here. It doesn't work.
That said, this recent anti-Raymond paper really didn't offer any relevant criticism, ESR is right here. I didn't see anything of value in the work at all.
Some people are saying the Free Software movement is socialist, which I think is also an error (if one uses the term "socialist" as most american understand it). It is highly anarchistic, in the same tradition as thinkers like Rocker and Bakunin. It isn't even remotely socialist, let alone Marxist. I'm not saying RMS has anarchistic politcal roots, but if one is looking for a political parallel, it isn't in socialism or, of all things, capitalism.
Personally, I am rather tired of the arguments for "Open Source" based on "economy" and "practicality". Listen to RMS. It's about FREEDOM. RMS needs to crank it up.
This article hits on the problem - marketing and advertising based conciousness, but doesn't even remotely go into it in any depth. Television was a bad technology, the internet is better and will eventually replace it. The danger is in seeing the internet an amusement park.
The problem is capitalism.
At one time I had some hope but better, far better, to live in shameful ignorance than even take slight cognizance of the sanity depriving crawling chaos. Take comfort that the Pope is sanctioning new internet saints and that scientists are the ones responsible for this discovery. Yeah, right.
Say what you want, but when these subterranean horrors meet up with their elders .... I mean, it's not what they done, but what they're a goin' to do.
kapitalisticheskie cobachki! Znaem myi vas!!
the neck is too small for his nano-vibrato.
I can't think of anything more annoying than a high pitched Ymkme Plmkreem.
use ipchains to set up a simple masquerading firewall. It needn't have a ton of complex rules (but that's OK if you want).
:). Nice program. Another program, logcheck, will scan you rlogs and report (email) all suspicious activity. Look for them on freshmeat.
Then you can use another tool like portsentry which detects portscans, and can be set up to use ipchains rules to automatically drop packets of anyone portscanning you (including your ISP
Then secure your box by removing all services except ssh.
It isn't too hard.
I'd like to see this technology put to good use. It would be nice to have a networkable digital camera with a 500MB disk and a web server built in. The storage methods for cameras absolutely suck these days.
I'd like to see this technology put to good use.
It would be nice to have a networkable digital camera with a 500MB disk and a web server built in.
The storage methods for cameras absolutely suck these days.
What are you smoking? :-)
Since when does the industry dictate to the rest of us what we will, and will not, see and do?
When did it stop doing that? :-(
"Censoring the net will be bad for the economy"
"Open source development produces better quality software"
Phooey.
My car, for instance, for all the care I gave it, began to literally fall apart once the 50,000 mile warranty was up. Little bits here and there just started to fall apart. Nothing serious mind you, but I'm putting up with more and more aggravations every day. Sure, my car works, but it aggravates me that it was literally designed to fall apart. They have this "down to a science", I think. My old Volkswagen ghia, which I could almost have kept running indefinitely (well sometimes they just get too old), never had this problem ...
Most industries are quite in tune with the "planned obsolesence" ("process optimization", in industry parlance) concept, which is ruinous to the customer, but there isn't anything one can do about it. Microsoft (and most windows software) software is even more deplorable still, but it's essentially the same thing: keep the product cycle churning. Don't let the customer stop to think. In the auto industry, they make things seem better by creating a "fake company" (Saturn: and by "fake" I mean it is designed to present the customer the illusion of competition) which markets itself as "a different kind of company", when, in reality, it's the exact same bullshit that GM makes elsewhere. In the software industry we have the MacIntosh (Apple fans please calm down, it's not personal). It's funny how people just lap this shit up (but mostly, the "lapping up" is done in commercials which are of course not real).
All I can say is thanks, Richard Stallman and friends.
I forgot something.
The "science" of marketing has left rational discourse behind long ago. It's no longer a matter of which product is better or why one should buy it or how it could be useful to you. What does reason mean in an environment where it isn't GOOD/BAD or QUALITY/CRAP but GEEKY/SEXY and COOL/DORKY?
You have to fight fire with fire. Fighting the brazenly irrational market culture, which produces tons of useless trash by the shipfull, with rational argument is pointless. It's like using a spitball against an aircraft carrier. So yes, I support web site defacement, as well as bulletin board defacement, and whatever else you can think of. These thing have the effect of jarring one's conciousness slightly, hopefully enough to show it the absurdity of the image driven and completely irrational intellectual obscenity of the marketeer.
Philby - whoops! that was long before the Reaganite era - 1940's. Ames - a better example, but these are spies, turning coat on other spies. Really, little to do with you or me. The fact still stands that "terrorism" in the 1980's as put forth by the popular media in the US was largely a fabrication, right along with the "drug war". "Terrorism" is simply convenient propaganda nomenclature, designed to stir up public fears and get them to support the police force instituted to "fight" it.
And then, what of US sponsored "terror" in third world coutries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia, Viet Nam)? Is terror "ok for me, but not for you"? It works both ways. The greatest madnesses of cultures are not apparent to them until much later.
Well, naturally the KGB was trying to stir up as much crap as they could, but WRT Viet Nam, they simply didn't need to. There was enough popular sentiment that they simply needn't get involved, so your assertion is dubious, to say the least. God forbid that the Viet Nam war might be considered unjust and odious (it was). You blithely ignore that most of the anti war sentiment had nothing to do with the KGB.
Pay an think tank enough money and they will tell you anything. That's what they're for. What does "could work" mean? Total global devastation?
I believe any honest student of Soviet history could not possibly come to any conclusion that the system was facing imminent and total collapse starting with the Brezhnev era.
The problem is that there is virtually no other way to communicate. People like Ralph Nader are almost silent in comparison to the media. As I said, the whole "problem" could be alleviated by corporations placing uncensored feedback forums on their sites. Instead we get the same one-way pipeline of marketing drivel supported by government sponsored "crackdowns". The gripe I have (which you did not even address, preferring to tangentize on government spies) is that vandals (a misdemeanor) are being persecuted as terrorists (a capital crime). The rebellion is incohate, groping, untutored and largely even unprincipled. But I'm not buying into the propaganda. The net isn't theirs, and their unwavering arrogance warrants action.
Interesting how dissenters and defacers of corporate web sites are now deemed "terrorists". Of course anyone who thinks knows that the "communist terrorist" scares of the Reagan years and beyond is largely a fiction of the corporate media and its government supported mechanisms and popular literature (Tom Clancy, Rambo movies, anyone?): exactly parallel to the "Red Scare" of the 50's. The language used in this article is positively alarming, and is supported by our governments treatment of these "vandals": they actually are being persecuted as terrorists criminals, not vandals, and are given the stiff penalties that would normally be reserved for hardened criminals. This is pure propaganda: designed to induce fear in the public to promote and excuse the incarceration and villification of the "menace". To be sure, there are criminals using cracking skills for truly immoral purposes, but the propaganda model is meant to obscure that - so that the public cannot make the distiction - that's the point.
"True Hackers" can dismiss crackers as "script kiddies" all they want (and much of the characterizations are true), but dissent is a healthy part of a democracy. It is a good and necessary thing. It's not as if there isn't anything to be pissed about in our society. I personally like the fact that kids are defacing corporate web sites! It should be rigorously pointed out that most of the cracking done is harmless defacement and meant to embarass and deride, not destroy. This is culture jamming, not criminal activity. Anyone who subscribes to the "defaced" mailing list knows that.
I guess the final solution would be to dope everyone up on television, ritalin and zoloft (the drugs that our system condones out of hand of course - just don't smoke pot!!!) so that they just can't think anymore, a country of bleary eyes zombies getting their buttons pushed. It is only so long before the mind rebels against this sort of horrid nonsense.
The corps need to realize that the internet is NOT television. The days of manufactured infotainment (what a horrid term - I didn't come up with it) are numbered, they know that, and they're trying with all their might to turn the internet into a more muscular version of television, a vast theme park and entertainment delivery system for the mind.
The vertically integrated modern media corporation truly represents the greatest threat to free speech ever in our supposedly "free" society. They need to be cracked. They would have us think that the true dissenters of our society are the puffy lipped, slender, androgenous models that grace the slick pages of Details and GAP storefronts. Pretty soon we won't know better.
They need to know that we will talk back, by any means necessary. This is just the powerful plutocrat, disgusted that people have found a new weapon against their methods of order, authority and control (what charter of our country gave them any authority, anyway?). Personally, I'm tired of people having any power over me whatsoever.
The solution here is for crackers to organize better. What bother me a little is not the "horror of defaced sites" (OH MY GOD!) but the problem that most of this dissent is inarticulate and untutored. We are now presented with the amusing spectacle of the corporate media (I refuse to give them the moniker "Free Press" - they don't deserve it) telling us that the "black hat" hackers are the ones ridiculing the corporate machinery and the "white hat" hackers are the gainfully employed citizens ... er ... consumers using their "security skills" for the "greater good". I believe someone once said that if one looks hard enough, you will find the one who profits from something, and therein lies the spark that powers the machinery. If there was any honesty to this, the corporations would have uncensored feedback forums on their web sites, not the same bland conduits of market babble that we're so used to from the traditional media.
Now it's fairly obvious that they're lobbying the federal government to protect themselves - who will in turn, in an ironic twist, use our tax dollars to launch a media campaign in order to protect them. The sad truth is that there really isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it but keep cracking web sites. But that's our "democracy" for you.
In the late ninties we have seen a drastic decrease in Pizza Hut awareness, and that is not just a national problem, but a global one. I'm personally hoping that this tremendous humanitarian effort will at least partially remedy the problem. All national Pizza Hut awareness indices have dropped sharply in the last year, especially since the rise of subversive gourmet/micro-pizzarias in our crime infested inner cities. So Pizza Hut has been chased back into the wilderness of small town strip malls and Wal Mart co-locations. They've given a last ditch effort with the ingenious all-you-can-eat-buffet idea, but it's too little, too late.
Not enough people over the world know of Pizza Hut. Imagine the decrepitude of third world and communist countries who know nothing of double crust, butter crust, extra thick or pan pizzas? What about the grease? Do they get enough grease? My God, haven't they ever questioned whether or not they need Pizza Hut? Has it ever even occured to them? Finally they're getting the chance, and I can't believe the decidedly unpatriotic and totally un-american views of some of our more liberal panty-waisted limp wristed slashdotters. It's disgusting.
I'm holding in my hand a list of twenty nations that do not have Pizza Huts. When this rocket ship fires, the people will have truly spoken! We need a global, unified, subsidized pizza distribution, delivery and point-of-purchase (POP) infrastructure. The time is now!
Then, what was with the bizarre "christian" imagery: "trinity", the messaianic nature of Neo. None of that makes any sense. What a muddled movie.
From what I gather, Muay Thai seems to be the best striking.
However, any striker who doesn't have any grappling abilities will simply get his ass kicked by almost any grappler; wrestling, BJJ, whatever.
Other thing no one mentions: striking arts are much harder on your body. Most strikers burn out or get injured long before grapplers do. Some of the shit muay thai guys do is basically self mutilating machismo (kicking tree trunks with your shins, etc.).
No one practices that shit because, well, you don't need to. It's not technique.
BJJ does kick butt.
No thanks.
answer: nothing
Much great art is pornography. There isn't any reasonable way to distinguish the two.
I understand why people use and need Macintosh computers. They're easy to use, etc.
That said, what annoys me is Apple's ridiculous "think different" advertisements. There is nothing more establishment than Apple, they're a corporation just like any other, out to make money - nothing more. The idea that one is some sort of "rebel" by using an Apple computer is just ludicrous, it's like the Saturn of the computer world. Just part of the ongoing media blitz to commodify dissent, realized in GAP, Saturn and Apple computer ads. In this sense Apple is even more disgusting than Microsoft to me, because there is little more intellectually obscene than turning dissent into a product. This crap really is the crowning jewel of the baby boomer marketeer.
Of course all this seems absurd to anyone that uses a Free OS.
Yech. The last thing the world needs is another slave driving IP droid. Edison was the Bill Gates of the early 20th century. We need more Nikolai Teslas, not more greedy money grubbing patent stealing lawyer types.
K Office is coming along quite nicely and actually looks better than Star Office anyway. There already KLyx for those that really need something like that. KOffice will force Corel and Sun, maybe even Microsoft (by then who knows) into at least keeping their suites "free beer".