"Unlike some other grassroots journalism type of projects like Indymedia, which is a very far left type of thing written by activists, we strive to be a neutral, high-quality source of basic information." Isn't this the pot calling the kettle black. First of all Jimbo Wales is a millionaire, so if anyone is disconnected with the grassroots it's Jimbo Wales. The closest he has come to grass roots is probably giving some instructions to the people who tend his lawns for him, while reading through some of the Ayn Rand novels he says he loves so much. Of the 100+ admins of English Wikipedia all that are not either apolitical or far-right crazies can be counted on a hand, a hand missing some fingers at that. He usually stays out of Wikipedia day-to-day stuff, but has deigned to come in and drive off left-wing users (and admins, the few there have been, somehow) with nasty e-mails.
If you want to see real grassroots, Indymedia is grassroots. Grassroots is not just a technology, it is a process, and the two are intertwined more than one might see initially. Every Indymedia center is autonomous, and has many individuals contributing to it, if some millionaire comes down and sees that and says it is "very far left", well, I don't even know what the hell a millionaire would think of as very far left, probably everybody outside of his yacht club.
Anyone can post to Indymedia, so it is about as "biased" as Slashdot forums are. Different Indymedia's have different moderation policies, administrators have the option of "hiding" posts, which is like making them have a score of -1, people can still read them, if they want. Some IMC's have user rankings, although they're not up to Slashdot's technical level yet. It really depends on which IMC it is - some of them do no moderation, some of them do more than others. If you don't like it, you can start your own one, there are two in the Bay Area because they disagree over different things such as those policies (and they have enough volunteers in the Bay Area that they can have two IMCs).
Anyone with eyes can see what's happening here. There is a fiscally conservative corporate media but people get fed up with it. Community groups and volunteers start Independent Media Centers, started by, run by and controlled by the community. In walks a millionaire and plops down a lot of money and servers and says what grassroots organizations have done is "very far left" and his will be "neutral" compared to that - I'm not sure how far right a millionaires version of neutral is when he considers the open IMC newswire "very far left".
I'm really not sure of what the point of all of this will be, it's just going to end up being a rehash of the major news stories. It will be combining different sources and rewriting it so it will be GFDL, so that's one small good thing. This whole thing seems stupid, either go to corporate news or Indymedia, this millionaire wanting you to work for him for free while he *subtly* retains editorial control is a joke. Just watch Fox News if you like that, or go on Indymedia if you like that.
Despite talk in the US about socialism as if anyone in the US knew even a little about it, most Americans have no idea what the tenets of socialism are. One of the core concepts is that all wealth is created by workers (an idea which was widely held, including by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and all the early Classical economists, and didn't become associated with socialism until pro-capitalists veered off with their ideas that workers didn't create all wealth. The ownership of capital is not what is important because a machine needs someone operating it to create wealth. Someone operating a machine for eight hours a day keeps several hours worth of the wealth he creates in wages, while the capital owner expropriates some of the wealth the worker creates in the later hours of the day. Thus, the real issue for capital owners is their expropriation of all the "surplus" wealth a worker creates during the hours of the day where the worker is not keeping the wealth he creates via wages.
Thus it is inherently a *social* relationship, not a relationship between people and objects. The idea that commodities have some inherent value other than the labor-time congealed in them is commodity fetishism, e.g. perceiving objects as having value without seeing their value is due to labor time congealed in them.
I don't think taxing assets would work, since the basis of wealth is the work done by workers, some of it being taken as profits by the capitalist. Taxing profits would seem closer to reality, although even this has its catch-22's. Every tax, rent, interest and especially profit ultimately comes out of the wealth a worker creates, and that has to be recognized.
I feel that articles on topics like Quantum Mechanics can come out OK on Wikipedia. Perhaps the ability to do quality control is necessary in the software, although I am suspicious of many of the people complaining about anti-elitism on Wikipedia.
As far as pages pertaining to say Israel and Palestine, I think quality control is hopeless. I am perfectly happy to get into flame (or revert) wars on Wikipedia, but even I'm scared to go into that section. Different people have very different views on certain historical and political issues. I do not mind the idea of some kind of peer review for scientific articles, but I would be very suspicious of such a process related to say the Israel and Palestine pages, or the Northern Ireland pages, or the George W. Bush and John Kerry pages and so forth. Wikipedia already have administrators who are ideological fanatics. I'm thinking of four of them right now - two are hard-core right-wingers, one is a social democrat (Americans would say liberal) who is nonetheless fanatically anti-communist, and the other is far-left.
I don't believe objectivity exists in historical and political matters. Wikipedia incorporates the now public domain 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and some of the material in there would appear biased, racist, sexist and so forth to our modern eyes. English Wikipedia is mostly comprised of citizens of England and its former colonies, including the US. Relative to the half of the world living on less than $2 a day and whom have never made a phone call, these are relatively privileged people, and Wikipedia is a subset of even these people since Internet users and Wikipedians are more likely to be college-educated than from some ghetto or even a blue-collar household. This alone makes for a very elitist and skewed view of the world. For example, in the 1950's, there were lots of accusations in the US that the Bandung Conference was some kind of communist ploy, which in my opinion is far removed from reality. A person from India or some other third world country would have had a more realistic view of this I think. Then again, the rest of the world has some odd ideas about the US, perhaps they watch Baywatch, Friends, and shows like that and think that is what life in the US is really like.
The link in the article to Wikinfo is a fork of Wikipedia, one run by a right-wing Wikipedia user who thinks Wikipedia is too left-wing. There are forks by left-wing people who think Wikipedia is too right-wing by left-wing users as well - the "liberal Democrat" DKosopedia and the anarchist English Anarchopedia and Infoshop's OpenWiki. Wikipedia articles are GFDL so forks are easy.
Wikipedia should be able to handle science articles on biology and so forth, although speciality forks might appear by people who realize the Man's conspiracy to cover up the reality of orgone energy (please consult Robert A. Wilson). More likely, people will realize Wikipedia pages on the Israel/Palestine conflict will always be in flux depending on the time of day, and will go off and start wikis pertaining to primarily politics and history and other social science types topics. But outside of what touches upon the social world, Wikipedia should be able to handle it.
I decided a few weeks ago to switch from Windows to Debian Linux on my machine which has a sound card, graphics card and so forth. One reason I switched was because Linux easily supported my Linksys 802.11b Wireless USB adapter (once I downloaded the drivers off sourceforge), while installing the drivers for it on Windows broke all of my networking badly - it was a mess.
Two worries were preventing me from doing it. One was a worry about the inability to send a Microsoft Word format document like a resume in an e-mail, but of course, you have the ability to do that in Linux currently, and I guess for now, legacy Word programs force Microsoft to maintain backwards compatibility. The second worry, a more real one, was games. I knew the latest versions of Doom, Warcraft, Everquest and so forth were on Microsoft and not Linux. This turns out to be more substantial than my vague uneasiness over the ability to send Word format documents (which of course, for now, you can send in Linux).
What I did is install Debian 3.0 ("woody"). I played some games with lightweight graphics capability like Freeciv or Xboard, but then wanted something more hardcore so I downloaded Tux Racer. It was slooooow when I played. Averaging 0.7 frames per second actually. So then I read I needed drivers for my specifics graphics card to get it to a higher fps rate. I began installing the non-free kernel modules for it, but it was unhappy with the versions of some Debian 3.0 packages, especially XFree86 (xserver-common). I was also having some problems with my H-P PSC (Printer-Scanner-Copier) and its Linux drivers because Debian 3.0 had an ancient version of Python and so forth. So I decided to upgrade from stable version Debian 3.0 ("Woody") to testing version Debian 3.1 ("Sarge").
This fixed my HP PSC problems with Python versions. I am still struggling with Mesa, OpenGL and so forth, and right now can not run tux-racer. I have newer version of Mesa then I did with Debian 3.0, but I'm told my newer one is out-of-date by Tux Racer (whereas my older one was not). I haven't even tried to put the special drivers for my graphics card driver in (which needed the newer version of XFree86).
Anyhow, I've been using UNIX since 1989, and have been a UNIX sysadmin since 1996, and getting Mesa/OpenGL packages working on Debian is giving me trouble, I can imagine what it would be like for someone less experienced. Plus, even if I do get Mesa working for Tux Racer, I will have to be fortunate enough to have graphics acceleration support for my card in Linux. And then, even if those two birds get knocked down, how many games are there out there for Linux with those capabilities - Tux Racer? One or two more? What else? I already know that ease-of-setup for graphics is easier in Windows than Linux (system upgrade, then Mesa problem, followed by looking for graphics acceleration support for my card which may or may not be a problem), how does it stack up against DirectX for the same equipment?
Of course, for free systems, one good thing is I can be part of the solution. I have over a decade of UNIX experience, but only recently has my C programming gotten semi-decent (if that - I can write an OK program in a month, but then it takes me a year to debug all the thread race conditions, buffer overflows and so forth I seem to leave about). Even so, it is very daunting for me to feel I can contribute to these sorts of projects. I know a lot about how the Gnutella protocol so I have a leg up on other people looking to contribute to them - but looking over the code and seeing all of the linked lists, pointers to pointers, calls to GLib and so forth, I wonder if I can ever make a contribution to them since unlike full-time developers, I only have the faintest ideas how things like linked lists work. The learning curve to be able to contribute to these projects is somewhat steep in my opinion, although I always hear stories about kids who stumble over some code, begin sending contributions, and begin running some major project while a teenager, like the guy who maintains the Linux 2.4 kernel I run on my machine.
While you're at it, you might also want to question the person I'm responding to, who apparently can't search their way out of a paper bag.
As I said, I've already looked over this stuff on MSDN. Perhaps you missed where I said I'm looking for "simple information". I already said I looked over this information and found it was not simple (e.g. fairly complex) for a simple hello world program. Since I said I already looked over it, I don't know why you make the assumption that I have not already looked over it, and then post a link to it saying I don't know how to search for it. I said I couldn't find a simple explanation, not that I couldn't find an explanation. You're going off on a ridiculous tangent. Perhaps you could have assumed I don't know how to compile instead of assuming I don't know how to find Microsoft's byzantine hello world for Windows program. The problem is not that I can't find it, which I did, a long time ago, but that the information is as much, if not more, opaque and confusing then one would find looking for this information on UNIX
You said
I prefer MSDN [microsoft.com]. Call me when Unix has something that even approaches the ease of use
I do not find what you linked to "easy to use". The first page you linked to says "This section assumes that you have used Windows-based applications and therefore are already familiar with windows, menus, and dialog boxes in Microsoft® Windows®." Well, I'm not familiar with any of that, that's why I was looking for a "Hello world" sample (as I said before, I am somewhat familiar with MS-DOS programming, not Windows programming). So then I click on the GENERIC.C program and get a 189 line program to make Windows do a hello world. If not for copyright I'd post it all here to show how long it is for such a simple thing. This fits neither my "simple" standards, nor do I think it is more of an "ease of use" than Windows.
You seem to be missing the point. I could find the example. If one spent enough time rooting around the byzantine MSDN and messing around, one could eventually understand what everything in the code example meant. This is not in dispute. The question is whether MSDN and Microsoft is much more of an "ease of use" than UNIX alternatives as you state. I would say it is not.
MSDN? I know a little something about programming for MS-DOS - closesocket() not close() and that sort of thing. But the Windows GUI I did not, so I went to MSDN to try to figure out how to do a simple "Hello world!" in Windows (Windows, not DOS - I already said I know that).
"Call me when Unix has something that even approaches the ease of use and the amount of readable samples, explanations etc. of key APIs. And no, the System V paper manuals don't count." - ha! Call *me* when MSDN can put up some simple information on how to do a "hello world" program in Windows. God forbid you want to use multiple windows which are tabbed or something.
Please take this person's notion that MSDN is world's above what Linux or some other UNIX has with a grain of salt. Also, docs.sun.com and sunsolve.sun.com have always worked adequately for me.
I should point out that I've been using UNIX since 1989 and have been a UNIX sysadmin since 1996, but I don't feel like going into the Unix Haters Handbook type arguments - Windows is the main alternative, so I will talk about the *one* thing Windows (currently) does better instead, that is not a result of their monopoly.
I just made a big Linux commitment - I have a new system and an old system - the new one (bought in 1999) was running Windows 98, the old one (bought in 1996) was running Debian. I had a ton of trouble getting my Linksys USB 802.11b wireless adapter to work with Windows 98, but it worked fine on the old system. Also, I had these stupid "Compaq Windows 98 recovery" CD's which were horrible as they wiped my C (which I expected) and D (which I didn't expect) drive when I tried to reinstall my Windows network junk. I said screw it, I installed Debian on the C drive, and got my phone number list from the D drive as a device (grep number/dev/whatever, cat/dev/whatever |strings > file), then re-installed Debian. So now I have Debian on both systems.
I have things working good - I got my network card running, my Linksys USB 802.11b running (actually easier with Linux than Windows), my soundcard working and I used MPlayer to watch some AVI's, MOV's, WMV's and MPG's, and xmms to listen to some mp3's.
The one serious thing I think about is being able to read and especially write Microsoft Word documents, especially to write a Microsoft Word resume and send it somewhere. I can do that in Linux though, of course, and even if I had a problem I have access to Windows machines. Another thing I think about is video format - will I be able to read the latest AVI's, MOV's and so forth? That's not as important as beign able to write a Word document (resume) though. Which is possible in Linux anyhow.
The other major thing is games - Warcraft, Diablo, Doom, Age of Empires and what have you. X-Box, Playstation, Gamecube all compete with the "PC" (meaning Windows in this case), not Linux. I think this is a bigger issue. Microsoft trying to lock people into incompatible Microsoft Word documents, video formats and so forth is one thing, completely dominating on the games front is another - that is really a lack of function in GNU/Linux, not something resulting from Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
Now that I have made a commitment to Linux on my main desktop, which has a decent graphics and sound card, I'm going to check out some of the Linux games that are out there. I'm not even an expert on how far Linux has to go - even if Linux had an equal to ActiveX, is it on enough desktops with enough customers so that doing an Everquest for Linux would be worth it? All I know is that with some exceptions, major game companies don't release their games on Linux.
The solution of course is to help it along myself. The problem is my C/C++ programming is OK, but not that great, besides which I have other time commitments. Oh well, Xboard chess works for me, so that will keep me happy for now.
The linked article has a link to an Eric Raymond article on terminology. However, the model Raymond uses seems flawed to me - very flawed.
Raymond notes that a search on Sourceforge for "open source" versus "free software" is 97%+ versus
Despite this, the words free software don't appear on my project's Sourceforge page. After reading this, perhaps I'll put those words up there. Looking around at other projects, I see one on page two of a Google search for "free" on Sourceforge that one project aims to develop free (GPL) speech recognition tools. This project seems to be one saying it is in the Stallman "faction" although since they say "free (GPL)...tools" instead of "free software", Eric Raymond doesn't count them.
More importantly, let's look at the license, are people issuing the "open source" BSD ones or the "free" GPL ones? 40434 projects are GPL while only 4194 projects are BSD. In fact, 6479 projects are LGPL, so even the GPL lesser license beats BSD.
I actually edited this article and removed the word riot, although I was not the first one to do this. English soldiers put up a roadblock blocking Irish marchers from marching to the middle of their own city, and when the hell does some foreign army have the right to come into a foreign country and block native people from where they want to go in their own city? Anyhow, a small group argued with the soldiers over the roadblock while the majority of people went way down a side street, and the shooting took place where the side street was, not blocks away where the roadblock and argument with a small group was, which was not a riot anyhow. My personal opinion is there was a plan by the English to assassinate Bernadette Devlin that day that failed. The idea that there was a spontaneous riot that was "dealt with" is a joke, the British tried to do everything they could to *provoke* a riot yet failed. Then they lied and said they'd been fired upon although not only were no soldiers from England hit, they never recovered any bullets except those that came from the English guns. My grandparents were in Ulster during the Black and Tan war and suffered Orange pogroms before that so this all is not such unexpected behavior from the English. They should stop whining about Lord Mountbatten and the Grand Hotel and Canary Wharf and mortars fired at 10 Downing Street - if they want their problems with Ireland over with they should just pack up and go back to their own god-damned country. Thanks for your post though, you just reminded me I should send a $20 gift to Noraid this Christmas.
On the design front this is just like Napster. Bittorrent trackers are a point of manual centralization on the Bittorrent network, and is obviously what these people are going after. This type of centralization is the antithesis of p2p, and is why Napster is no more while Gnutella (Limewire, Bearshare, Morpheus...) thrives.
The Bittorrent protocol certainly has a good design, and its clients like Azureus improve on this. But the centralization is a fatal flaw, especially this sort of manual centralization with trackers. What we need is a truly de-centralized protocol, incorporating the advances of Bittorrent, and getting rid of the drawbacks.
"Unions deserve no special government protections - if they can't convince people to join, too bad for them."
What special government protections? The RT work for less law is government getting involved in a contract between unions and companies. In states that don't have these laws, unions and companies are free to come to any type of contract they want with one another. RT work for less laws are a special government protection for corporations, not for unions.
Wal-Mart was behind this. The major financial forces behind passing the RTW for less law were Wal-Mart, Kerr-McGee and whatever the name of the company is of Gaylord who publishes the Daily Oklahoman. You would be correct in saying that Wal-Mart was not obviously prominent in the campaign - Gaylord was very much so, and Kerr-McGee didn't make too much of a secret of it. But Wal-Mart provided a lot of funding for the effort. And while Gaylord and Kerr-McGee naturally enough would take a lead in this for Oklahoma, Wal-Mart has been behind this effort in all 50 states.
46% of Oklahomans voted against this law, so I don't know how the opposition was all out-of-town astroturfers or that there was "no opposition". Wal-Mart is who is coordinating the national effort, and their financial contributions regarding this are a matter of public record. I also know that the campaign for this was primarily focused on evangelical churches, just as Coburn's recent campaign was and Inhofe's before him, especially in rural eastern Oklahoma.
As far as it being a good law or not, it depends on a variety of factors. If you have a lot of money, it is a good law, if you don't make much money, it is a bad law. I would say that it is a bad law economically for 80% of the population, a good law for 1% of the population, and for 19% of the population its sort of a wash.
What the law does is imposes government regulation on contracts between unions and businesses. It declares that unions and businesses can not come to certain types of agreements. It is not even a free market bill, since in a free market a union and business would be able to come to any type of contract they want. This makes it illegal for employers to come to certain agreements with unions which favor the union. It's the government helping big business screw workers. And 54% of Oklahomans voted for it, praise the Lord.
I don't know that much about fossil fuels, the atmosphere and so forth.
I am however, very familiar with how large corporations do PR campaigns. It always strikes me as spooky how a large corporations sees a profit problem, hires a PR agency giving it millions of dollars, whereas the PR agency does things such as write bogus reports from "independent" institutes saying whatever the company wanted (Linux was not written by Linus Torvalds, smoking tobacco is not bad for you, whatever...), as well as a media campaign which includes commercials, the "independent" institute people going on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and if they're lucky, the major corporate news stations as well.
For example, I've been tracking Wal-Mart and the Walton family's giving in this regard. Two of the things they try to do is privatize education and create what we call "right-to-work-for-less" laws. I care more about the latter than the former, but I've been researching the former more lately. The Walton family is obsessed with privatizing education, giving massive amounts of money to efforts to do so, including giving
$10,492,047.38, just in 2003, to the
Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation America. They've also given millions in the last year alone to a variety of such education privatziation organizations, as have the foundations of other billionaires and millionaires such as the Olins, Scaifes and so forth. One of their jobs is to "astroturf", e.g. make fake it appear that a fake grassroots campaign exists to privatize education. Many of the privatize education groups have black and Hispanic faces at the top of the organization to talk to the press. These foundations also create scholarship foundations (for private schools only) to put a humanitarian face on the effort, and the scholarship front of this massive effort draws in people like Charles Rangel, Will Smith and people like that. These people are very clever and you wouldn't believe how tens of millions of dollars from the Wal-Mart billionaires alone can change the public discourse. And of course, the Olins, Scaifes and so forth are involved with this, even Bill Gates is peripherally involved.
My point is to stress how big money can generate all this talk you hear about privatization of education, charter schools, how our schools are failing and the need for tests and so forth. I am not deeply concerned with this relative to other issues, I'm just using it as an example, and I have been following it lately. I've been more concerned with Wal-Mart and the Walton Family and other businesses very successful campaign to do away with labor laws, or create bad labor laws around the country. They passed a right-to-work-for-less law in Oklahoma a few years ago, mostly by focusing on the massive evangelical churches in Oklahoma and preying on job and unemployment fears, the law passes something like 50.1% to 49.9% on a referendum. They're pushing these laws all over the country - they're even trying in Pennsylvania which is scary, because one thinks of Pennyslvania as a union state. Anyhow big money combined with a public which is more apt to be accepting Jesus as their personal savior in evangelical churches then seeking rank-and-file run militant labor unions can lead to all sorts of wacky laws passing.
Which is why the attitude on Slashdot about global warming scares me. Admittedly I am not an expert on chemical reactions with fossil fuels. I only have seen this show before: some group with no axe to grind and is objective as one can be says there is a problem (tobacco causes cancer, whatever...). Big corporations hire lawyers, PR firms, their own "experts" blah blah blah attacking this effort. Soon they're putting commercials on TV, catch phrases and so forth. Soon I hear the same thing coming out of people's mouths at lunchtime, they're complaining about trial lawyers or so
I am developing a p2p app, and keep up with what is going on in p2p development. Some of what I'm reading here is wrong, so I'll make some points.
One is that the Bittorrent protocol is thusfar the best protocol for transferring large files. The clients are designed to transfer large files. The Edonkey/Kademlia protocol exists to transfer large files as well, but it is just not as good as Bittorrent. It is much slower.
p2p has to be looked at as a process. There is the search for information. There is the response to the search. Then there is the request to download a file. Then there is the download of the file. Each of these parts is separate and important. In Bittorrent, only the last part, the download is decentralized. The prior parts are not decentralized, are not p2p - even the request to download goes to a centralized torrent.
Despite this, Many people figure that Bittorrent's partial file sharing, protocol attributes and program attributes are what make the downloading good. Of course, having a good source of current holders of the file - partially or fully, is important, as is having a good hash of the file, or multiple hashes in the case of Bittorrent. But this can all probably be done via p2p as well.
As far as the comments on hashes and file integrity, this is not a problem at all. There are many ways to deal with this. If you want, you can still have a central torrent, but you could only check it once instead of many times. Or maybe there could be distibuted PGP signatures of the validity of certain hashes.
As far as other comments, I'm interested in this so I'm glad to know, although I agree its vaporware until release.
As far as Freenet, encryption, IP addresses and so forth - I think for technical innovation reasons, unencrypting, non-masking p2p technologies need to be developed for now. I'm also glad, alongside this, anonymous, IP masking, encryption-capable p2p networks like Freenet are being created. And once p2p becomes mature, I hope the technologies implement any encryption and anonymity that does not put in too much overhead. Turn it on by default, and let people manually turn it off if they want.
As far as copyrighted material and so forth, I really could give a damn. Big corporations hate the idea of sharing, and trying to kill something like Linux or a GPL open p2p protocol and client is instinctive to them, just like the enclosure of the commons was.
And as far as non-centralization being one of the benefits of Bittorrent, and decentralizing ruining it, I completely disagree. As I said before, file integrity and hashes are not a problem, you can do PGP signatures on hashes or something. Any problem can be dealt with. Bittorrent is good because it is the best protocol to deal with partial file sharing of large files. Any of its centralized features can be decentralized, some of them very easily, as I'm sure Freem is doing.
I agree with everything you said, accept you label this as Gnutella1 which I think can be confusing, because some idiot created a bogus protocol called Gnutella 2.
Gnutella 0.4 is probably a better description of this. Because Gnutella 0.6 handshaking protocol allows for the existence of Ultrapeers, which the original handshake (0.4) did not.
Unfortunately as a US taxpayer, I have to finance US military aid to Turkey to the tune of billions of dollars. Locking up people who write about the Kurds in Turkey is small potatos, the Turks have been massacring Kurds for years. If anyone remembers, they even invaded Iraq (which the US administration didn't want) just to kill Kurds that were in Iraq. This is the thing that Saddam Hussein was lambasted for - gassing Kurds (although the US sent him helicopters after he did that of course too). Yet the Turks have been doing it, are doing it, and will be doing it. This never appears on the US corporate media of course, just the tragedy that a candidate not on the privatization fast track might win the Ukranian election.
The idea of globalization is overblown. The global economy was more globalized during the days of the British empire than it is today. The telegraph was a major breakthrough for globalization, but there hasn't been anything beyond that that revolutionized globalization, globalization meaning a production and trade of commodities in a more far-flung manner.
It's true that American jobs are going to India and China. This is correct and it's a bad thing. But it is not the only reason, the corporate press reports stresses that for ideological reasons. Jobs, from factory jobs to computer jobs are automated out of existence. Jobs also disappear when profit rates fall and capital investment falls (that's cyclical though). Supposedly jobs automated out of existence magically reappear as new jobs paying the same or higher wage. Keynes didn't think so, and despite the rhetoric, the US government and "business community" doesn't think so either. Nor do they act different than their thinking, whatever they say. US business has benefited from massive government subsidies, usually with the words military or defense bandied about. What created the Internet? DARPA - Defense Advanced blah blah blah. What was the original name of the Interstate Highway System? The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
Just a glance at this article shows the typical dot-com BS rhetoric. With IT wages falling for the past few years (and higher unemployment for the sector, the two things of course being related), I don't like hearing this BS any more. "Property: Our notions of property are being reshaped in the new era. There is a trend away from privatization and towards a 'managed commons' method of production and distribution." On the contrary, despite some labor-hours spent writing Linux and so forth (before being sued by well-heeld companied for copyright infringement, having the Alexis De Tocqueville Institute do a job on you, Microsoft twisting government arms to hurt you etc.), there is a massive worldwide trend towards privatziation. You can bet Bush will be privatizing many things with his friends in Congress, and that adds up to a lot lot lot more value than this shiny GPL stuff. Half the world lives on $2 a day and would easily be considered malnourished by our standards, there is a hell of a lot of production of commodities around the world, mostly food, then textiles as well as oil/coal and so forth and all of that adds up to a lot more labor hours than a few programmers typing away. Having mentioned Bush, it is a lot like being a white collar worker in the Bay Area and everyone you know is voting for Kerry in San Francisco and suddenly you find out there's hundreds of millions of Americans in the fly-over state who polls show voted for him because they think Jesus is coming with the Rapture or something. You may not see the bottom of the iceberg, but its mass is far more significant than that which you can see.
These herbicides kill all kinds of plant life. When it is put down, it kills coca plant life as well as whatever non-coca farmers are growing. With resistant coca plants, it means these herbicides are only killing off what farmers who are not growing coca are growing. This herbicide spraying has had a massively negative effect on non-coca farmers.
The spraying is the initiative of the United States, which has been involved in Colombia's affairs ever since it stole the land for the Panama Canal from Colombia. Coca is grown in the north and the south, but the north is not sprayed - only the south. That is because the coca growers in the north are US-friendly and the coca growers in the south are in FARC controlled areas, a movement which among other things, wants the US out of Colombia's affairs. The south growing coca is a new phenomenom, for years FARC banned it, so all the coca grown and sent to the US in the 1970s was from the US friendly north. It only became a "problem" when the south began growing it. The US army colonel who supposedly was leading anti-drug efforts was actually involved in an operation to ship drugs to the United States.
Right now Phillip Morris is pushing the deadly tobacco drug on Chinese people. Can you imagine if China sent planes over to the US and began dropping herbicides on fields all over the US south? This is completely ridiculous, and whenever someone from south Colombia fights back against this, of course it's called "terrorism" and is used as justification for why this is necessary.
I don't think this whole thing is the US government being misguided, I think it is the US government being misleading, especially to the American people. Plenty of countries ship drugs to the US, if the product (such as marijuana) is not grown here already. But only Colombia gets this attention, only Colombia gets sent one billion a year to fight the FARC...uh, I mean, to fight coca farmers. Coca is the WMD's of Colombia - it is the excuse for doing what they *really* want to do.
Why is Colombia so important? Because Venezuela, Colombia (and from recent discoveries, Bolivia) have massive amounts of oil. The US powers-that-be want to control these natural resources. Arauca is one of the more oil-rich regions, and dozens of trade unionists in that region alone have been murdered this year. Hundreds of Colombian trade unionists are murdered every year, and the US sends one billion a year in military aid, crop destruction and so forth in order to add fuel to the fire. These policies are lobbied for by corporations like Occidental Petroleum, and I see only the most sinister motives behind their and the US's efforts in Colombia. Of course, the whole coca thing is a big WMD-like front for the real reasons, but if the US wanted to stop the global drug trade it should stop shipping tobacco to China. Hell, the US helped England invade China in order to push heroin on them over a century ago.
For years Netscape was hands down better than IE, so I always used Netscape. The first version of IE released that wasn't God-awful that I can recall was IE 3 (late 1996), but Netscape 3 was still so much better. Then IE 4 was an improvement over that, and Netscape 4 was actually, for me, a disappointment. In my eyes they were equal, or perhaps Netscape had a slight advantage, but a small one. It was barely worth it to keep downloading Netscape over my 28.8k line, but I did anyway.
Then in 1998, AOL bought Netscape and I threw in the towel, I finally resigned to using IE on my Windows machines (which were usually at work - at work I either use a desktop thats Linux, Solaris or Windows, at home, Linux). IE had caught up, and with AOL owning Netscape, using Netscape felt less like the "rebel" position.
Then through partially through the lobbying of Jamie Zawinski, Mozilla was released, and I became interested again. I downloaded it - and I liked it. Tabs. Cookie/Password/Form managers. View Image option on web pages. Other features I like I'm probably forgetting. And Mozilla is free software, something which is important to me. It's free software, it's not Microsoft, and it's better than Microsoft! After downloading Mozilla for the first time I became a confirmed Mozilla user.
Obviously humans can do more with less. Twenty to twenty-five thousand genes means only twenty to twenty-five proteins to work with. And a lot of those genes and proteins are basically junk - stuff we needed previously, say one million years ago, or farther back, but no longer necessary now.
The chimpanzee body is almost exactly like the human, opposable thumbs and all. A very small percentage of humans have hair, fur practically, covering their entire body, and they look like big chimpanzee bodies. Our bodies are for all intents and purposes chimpanzee bodies, minus the hair (thats the most visible change from common descent), and generally larger, though not always so. The main changes are in the brain. And not many genes had to change to create our unique brains. It is probably only a handful of genes that make us human. A handful of genes that make proteins that cause more neurons to be built, or which allow us to use speech to communicate, or something like that. Science is always a lesson in humility, and I think it's likely this is the case.
When the elected Nicaraguan government did the same thing to newspapers for the same type of reasons (actually the newspapers down there were much more flagrant than Indymedia is being accused of), Reagan said Nicaragua was becoming a totalitarian regime, and the US should invade the country.
Unlike other countries, it's very rare for Americans to come together and work in a way that might be perceived a threat to the power of the powers-that-be, specifically the idle class that lives off the profit generated by American workers. This type of repression is uncommon because American workers so rarely come together to form our own media, organize in unions and so forth. One reason is because of a sort of Catch-22 that a society of isolated, individualized people has less of a foundation to come together to do so. Another is the massive machine - the world's largest army, prison system, intelligence system, military-industrial complex, lobbying efforts, corporate media, PR industry, fundamentalist churches, corporate law firms and so forth that attacks such efforts for workers to organize together and have their own voice. Faced with attacks by such, people become like Pavlovian dogs and go to their atomized lives of individualized exploitation, and buck the system less. Nonetheless, I think American workers will continue to try to organize together, but I pray that that the US machine continues to get foreign pressure, especially from workers organizing in foreign countries.
Indymedia is one of the few medias out there, one of almost the only medias out there that is not corporate owned and controlled, where anyone can file stories, and which is run and read by working people. Of course the corporate world and their government stooges would see that as a threat.
The charges are of course nonsense. If Chavez in Venezuela or Castro or Cuba or some other figure did this, Bush would be decrying the totalitarianism of their government right now and the rest of the corporate TV talking heads would nod their heads. Indymedia has open publishing but when "illegal content" is posted it erases it (unless it sues not to like in the Diebold case). I think that legally the idea that there is so much potential "illegal content" out there is ridiculous to begin with, and is something to be thought about. Most of the stuff posted was already floating around the net before someone posted it on Indymedia.
The problem I guess is Indymedia is a little too free for the corporate soft money bought stooges in Washington DC. They want Indymedia to be more self-censoring, letting any Tom Dick or John Q. Public have his unfiltered say is a little too dangerous. It's ironic that Indymedia is around the world, even in places like Palestine, Colombia and other places you'd expect these crackdowns, but it's the US security forces who are so often attacking this medium.
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If you want to see real grassroots, Indymedia is grassroots. Grassroots is not just a technology, it is a process, and the two are intertwined more than one might see initially. Every Indymedia center is autonomous, and has many individuals contributing to it, if some millionaire comes down and sees that and says it is "very far left", well, I don't even know what the hell a millionaire would think of as very far left, probably everybody outside of his yacht club.
Anyone can post to Indymedia, so it is about as "biased" as Slashdot forums are. Different Indymedia's have different moderation policies, administrators have the option of "hiding" posts, which is like making them have a score of -1, people can still read them, if they want. Some IMC's have user rankings, although they're not up to Slashdot's technical level yet. It really depends on which IMC it is - some of them do no moderation, some of them do more than others. If you don't like it, you can start your own one, there are two in the Bay Area because they disagree over different things such as those policies (and they have enough volunteers in the Bay Area that they can have two IMCs).
Anyone with eyes can see what's happening here. There is a fiscally conservative corporate media but people get fed up with it. Community groups and volunteers start Independent Media Centers, started by, run by and controlled by the community. In walks a millionaire and plops down a lot of money and servers and says what grassroots organizations have done is "very far left" and his will be "neutral" compared to that - I'm not sure how far right a millionaires version of neutral is when he considers the open IMC newswire "very far left".
I'm really not sure of what the point of all of this will be, it's just going to end up being a rehash of the major news stories. It will be combining different sources and rewriting it so it will be GFDL, so that's one small good thing. This whole thing seems stupid, either go to corporate news or Indymedia, this millionaire wanting you to work for him for free while he *subtly* retains editorial control is a joke. Just watch Fox News if you like that, or go on Indymedia if you like that.
Thus it is inherently a *social* relationship, not a relationship between people and objects. The idea that commodities have some inherent value other than the labor-time congealed in them is commodity fetishism, e.g. perceiving objects as having value without seeing their value is due to labor time congealed in them.
I don't think taxing assets would work, since the basis of wealth is the work done by workers, some of it being taken as profits by the capitalist. Taxing profits would seem closer to reality, although even this has its catch-22's. Every tax, rent, interest and especially profit ultimately comes out of the wealth a worker creates, and that has to be recognized.
As far as pages pertaining to say Israel and Palestine, I think quality control is hopeless. I am perfectly happy to get into flame (or revert) wars on Wikipedia, but even I'm scared to go into that section. Different people have very different views on certain historical and political issues. I do not mind the idea of some kind of peer review for scientific articles, but I would be very suspicious of such a process related to say the Israel and Palestine pages, or the Northern Ireland pages, or the George W. Bush and John Kerry pages and so forth. Wikipedia already have administrators who are ideological fanatics. I'm thinking of four of them right now - two are hard-core right-wingers, one is a social democrat (Americans would say liberal) who is nonetheless fanatically anti-communist, and the other is far-left.
I don't believe objectivity exists in historical and political matters. Wikipedia incorporates the now public domain 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and some of the material in there would appear biased, racist, sexist and so forth to our modern eyes. English Wikipedia is mostly comprised of citizens of England and its former colonies, including the US. Relative to the half of the world living on less than $2 a day and whom have never made a phone call, these are relatively privileged people, and Wikipedia is a subset of even these people since Internet users and Wikipedians are more likely to be college-educated than from some ghetto or even a blue-collar household. This alone makes for a very elitist and skewed view of the world. For example, in the 1950's, there were lots of accusations in the US that the Bandung Conference was some kind of communist ploy, which in my opinion is far removed from reality. A person from India or some other third world country would have had a more realistic view of this I think. Then again, the rest of the world has some odd ideas about the US, perhaps they watch Baywatch, Friends, and shows like that and think that is what life in the US is really like.
The link in the article to Wikinfo is a fork of Wikipedia, one run by a right-wing Wikipedia user who thinks Wikipedia is too left-wing. There are forks by left-wing people who think Wikipedia is too right-wing by left-wing users as well - the "liberal Democrat" DKosopedia and the anarchist English Anarchopedia and Infoshop's OpenWiki. Wikipedia articles are GFDL so forks are easy.
Wikipedia should be able to handle science articles on biology and so forth, although speciality forks might appear by people who realize the Man's conspiracy to cover up the reality of orgone energy (please consult Robert A. Wilson). More likely, people will realize Wikipedia pages on the Israel/Palestine conflict will always be in flux depending on the time of day, and will go off and start wikis pertaining to primarily politics and history and other social science types topics. But outside of what touches upon the social world, Wikipedia should be able to handle it.
Two worries were preventing me from doing it. One was a worry about the inability to send a Microsoft Word format document like a resume in an e-mail, but of course, you have the ability to do that in Linux currently, and I guess for now, legacy Word programs force Microsoft to maintain backwards compatibility. The second worry, a more real one, was games. I knew the latest versions of Doom, Warcraft, Everquest and so forth were on Microsoft and not Linux. This turns out to be more substantial than my vague uneasiness over the ability to send Word format documents (which of course, for now, you can send in Linux).
What I did is install Debian 3.0 ("woody"). I played some games with lightweight graphics capability like Freeciv or Xboard, but then wanted something more hardcore so I downloaded Tux Racer. It was slooooow when I played. Averaging 0.7 frames per second actually. So then I read I needed drivers for my specifics graphics card to get it to a higher fps rate. I began installing the non-free kernel modules for it, but it was unhappy with the versions of some Debian 3.0 packages, especially XFree86 (xserver-common). I was also having some problems with my H-P PSC (Printer-Scanner-Copier) and its Linux drivers because Debian 3.0 had an ancient version of Python and so forth. So I decided to upgrade from stable version Debian 3.0 ("Woody") to testing version Debian 3.1 ("Sarge").
This fixed my HP PSC problems with Python versions. I am still struggling with Mesa, OpenGL and so forth, and right now can not run tux-racer. I have newer version of Mesa then I did with Debian 3.0, but I'm told my newer one is out-of-date by Tux Racer (whereas my older one was not). I haven't even tried to put the special drivers for my graphics card driver in (which needed the newer version of XFree86).
Anyhow, I've been using UNIX since 1989, and have been a UNIX sysadmin since 1996, and getting Mesa/OpenGL packages working on Debian is giving me trouble, I can imagine what it would be like for someone less experienced. Plus, even if I do get Mesa working for Tux Racer, I will have to be fortunate enough to have graphics acceleration support for my card in Linux. And then, even if those two birds get knocked down, how many games are there out there for Linux with those capabilities - Tux Racer? One or two more? What else? I already know that ease-of-setup for graphics is easier in Windows than Linux (system upgrade, then Mesa problem, followed by looking for graphics acceleration support for my card which may or may not be a problem), how does it stack up against DirectX for the same equipment?
Of course, for free systems, one good thing is I can be part of the solution. I have over a decade of UNIX experience, but only recently has my C programming gotten semi-decent (if that - I can write an OK program in a month, but then it takes me a year to debug all the thread race conditions, buffer overflows and so forth I seem to leave about). Even so, it is very daunting for me to feel I can contribute to these sorts of projects. I know a lot about how the Gnutella protocol so I have a leg up on other people looking to contribute to them - but looking over the code and seeing all of the linked lists, pointers to pointers, calls to GLib and so forth, I wonder if I can ever make a contribution to them since unlike full-time developers, I only have the faintest ideas how things like linked lists work. The learning curve to be able to contribute to these projects is somewhat steep in my opinion, although I always hear stories about kids who stumble over some code, begin sending contributions, and begin running some major project while a teenager, like the guy who maintains the Linux 2.4 kernel I run on my machine.
As I said, I've already looked over this stuff on MSDN. Perhaps you missed where I said I'm looking for "simple information". I already said I looked over this information and found it was not simple (e.g. fairly complex) for a simple hello world program. Since I said I already looked over it, I don't know why you make the assumption that I have not already looked over it, and then post a link to it saying I don't know how to search for it. I said I couldn't find a simple explanation, not that I couldn't find an explanation. You're going off on a ridiculous tangent. Perhaps you could have assumed I don't know how to compile instead of assuming I don't know how to find Microsoft's byzantine hello world for Windows program. The problem is not that I can't find it, which I did, a long time ago, but that the information is as much, if not more, opaque and confusing then one would find looking for this information on UNIX You said
I prefer MSDN [microsoft.com]. Call me when Unix has something that even approaches the ease of use
I do not find what you linked to "easy to use". The first page you linked to says "This section assumes that you have used Windows-based applications and therefore are already familiar with windows, menus, and dialog boxes in Microsoft® Windows®." Well, I'm not familiar with any of that, that's why I was looking for a "Hello world" sample (as I said before, I am somewhat familiar with MS-DOS programming, not Windows programming). So then I click on the GENERIC.C program and get a 189 line program to make Windows do a hello world. If not for copyright I'd post it all here to show how long it is for such a simple thing. This fits neither my "simple" standards, nor do I think it is more of an "ease of use" than Windows.
You seem to be missing the point. I could find the example. If one spent enough time rooting around the byzantine MSDN and messing around, one could eventually understand what everything in the code example meant. This is not in dispute. The question is whether MSDN and Microsoft is much more of an "ease of use" than UNIX alternatives as you state. I would say it is not.
"Call me when Unix has something that even approaches the ease of use and the amount of readable samples, explanations etc. of key APIs. And no, the System V paper manuals don't count." - ha! Call *me* when MSDN can put up some simple information on how to do a "hello world" program in Windows. God forbid you want to use multiple windows which are tabbed or something.
Please take this person's notion that MSDN is world's above what Linux or some other UNIX has with a grain of salt. Also, docs.sun.com and sunsolve.sun.com have always worked adequately for me.
I just made a big Linux commitment - I have a new system and an old system - the new one (bought in 1999) was running Windows 98, the old one (bought in 1996) was running Debian. I had a ton of trouble getting my Linksys USB 802.11b wireless adapter to work with Windows 98, but it worked fine on the old system. Also, I had these stupid "Compaq Windows 98 recovery" CD's which were horrible as they wiped my C (which I expected) and D (which I didn't expect) drive when I tried to reinstall my Windows network junk. I said screw it, I installed Debian on the C drive, and got my phone number list from the D drive as a device (grep number /dev/whatever, cat /dev/whatever |strings > file), then re-installed Debian. So now I have Debian on both systems.
I have things working good - I got my network card running, my Linksys USB 802.11b running (actually easier with Linux than Windows), my soundcard working and I used MPlayer to watch some AVI's, MOV's, WMV's and MPG's, and xmms to listen to some mp3's.
The one serious thing I think about is being able to read and especially write Microsoft Word documents, especially to write a Microsoft Word resume and send it somewhere. I can do that in Linux though, of course, and even if I had a problem I have access to Windows machines. Another thing I think about is video format - will I be able to read the latest AVI's, MOV's and so forth? That's not as important as beign able to write a Word document (resume) though. Which is possible in Linux anyhow.
The other major thing is games - Warcraft, Diablo, Doom, Age of Empires and what have you. X-Box, Playstation, Gamecube all compete with the "PC" (meaning Windows in this case), not Linux. I think this is a bigger issue. Microsoft trying to lock people into incompatible Microsoft Word documents, video formats and so forth is one thing, completely dominating on the games front is another - that is really a lack of function in GNU/Linux, not something resulting from Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
Now that I have made a commitment to Linux on my main desktop, which has a decent graphics and sound card, I'm going to check out some of the Linux games that are out there. I'm not even an expert on how far Linux has to go - even if Linux had an equal to ActiveX, is it on enough desktops with enough customers so that doing an Everquest for Linux would be worth it? All I know is that with some exceptions, major game companies don't release their games on Linux.
The solution of course is to help it along myself. The problem is my C/C++ programming is OK, but not that great, besides which I have other time commitments. Oh well, Xboard chess works for me, so that will keep me happy for now.
Raymond notes that a search on Sourceforge for "open source" versus "free software" is 97%+ versus Despite this, the words free software don't appear on my project's Sourceforge page. After reading this, perhaps I'll put those words up there. Looking around at other projects, I see one on page two of a Google search for "free" on Sourceforge that one project aims to develop free (GPL) speech recognition tools. This project seems to be one saying it is in the Stallman "faction" although since they say "free (GPL)...tools" instead of "free software", Eric Raymond doesn't count them.
More importantly, let's look at the license, are people issuing the "open source" BSD ones or the "free" GPL ones? 40434 projects are GPL while only 4194 projects are BSD. In fact, 6479 projects are LGPL, so even the GPL lesser license beats BSD.
I actually edited this article and removed the word riot, although I was not the first one to do this. English soldiers put up a roadblock blocking Irish marchers from marching to the middle of their own city, and when the hell does some foreign army have the right to come into a foreign country and block native people from where they want to go in their own city? Anyhow, a small group argued with the soldiers over the roadblock while the majority of people went way down a side street, and the shooting took place where the side street was, not blocks away where the roadblock and argument with a small group was, which was not a riot anyhow. My personal opinion is there was a plan by the English to assassinate Bernadette Devlin that day that failed. The idea that there was a spontaneous riot that was "dealt with" is a joke, the British tried to do everything they could to *provoke* a riot yet failed. Then they lied and said they'd been fired upon although not only were no soldiers from England hit, they never recovered any bullets except those that came from the English guns. My grandparents were in Ulster during the Black and Tan war and suffered Orange pogroms before that so this all is not such unexpected behavior from the English. They should stop whining about Lord Mountbatten and the Grand Hotel and Canary Wharf and mortars fired at 10 Downing Street - if they want their problems with Ireland over with they should just pack up and go back to their own god-damned country. Thanks for your post though, you just reminded me I should send a $20 gift to Noraid this Christmas.
The Bittorrent protocol certainly has a good design, and its clients like Azureus improve on this. But the centralization is a fatal flaw, especially this sort of manual centralization with trackers. What we need is a truly de-centralized protocol, incorporating the advances of Bittorrent, and getting rid of the drawbacks.
What special government protections? The RT work for less law is government getting involved in a contract between unions and companies. In states that don't have these laws, unions and companies are free to come to any type of contract they want with one another. RT work for less laws are a special government protection for corporations, not for unions.
Not if they have very little to say like this one.
Good luck in your efforts to define liberalism other than how 99% of the world defines it.
46% of Oklahomans voted against this law, so I don't know how the opposition was all out-of-town astroturfers or that there was "no opposition". Wal-Mart is who is coordinating the national effort, and their financial contributions regarding this are a matter of public record. I also know that the campaign for this was primarily focused on evangelical churches, just as Coburn's recent campaign was and Inhofe's before him, especially in rural eastern Oklahoma.
As far as it being a good law or not, it depends on a variety of factors. If you have a lot of money, it is a good law, if you don't make much money, it is a bad law. I would say that it is a bad law economically for 80% of the population, a good law for 1% of the population, and for 19% of the population its sort of a wash.
What the law does is imposes government regulation on contracts between unions and businesses. It declares that unions and businesses can not come to certain types of agreements. It is not even a free market bill, since in a free market a union and business would be able to come to any type of contract they want. This makes it illegal for employers to come to certain agreements with unions which favor the union. It's the government helping big business screw workers. And 54% of Oklahomans voted for it, praise the Lord.
I am however, very familiar with how large corporations do PR campaigns. It always strikes me as spooky how a large corporations sees a profit problem, hires a PR agency giving it millions of dollars, whereas the PR agency does things such as write bogus reports from "independent" institutes saying whatever the company wanted (Linux was not written by Linus Torvalds, smoking tobacco is not bad for you, whatever...), as well as a media campaign which includes commercials, the "independent" institute people going on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and if they're lucky, the major corporate news stations as well.
For example, I've been tracking Wal-Mart and the Walton family's giving in this regard. Two of the things they try to do is privatize education and create what we call "right-to-work-for-less" laws. I care more about the latter than the former, but I've been researching the former more lately. The Walton family is obsessed with privatizing education, giving massive amounts of money to efforts to do so, including giving $10,492,047.38, just in 2003, to the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation America. They've also given millions in the last year alone to a variety of such education privatziation organizations, as have the foundations of other billionaires and millionaires such as the Olins, Scaifes and so forth. One of their jobs is to "astroturf", e.g. make fake it appear that a fake grassroots campaign exists to privatize education. Many of the privatize education groups have black and Hispanic faces at the top of the organization to talk to the press. These foundations also create scholarship foundations (for private schools only) to put a humanitarian face on the effort, and the scholarship front of this massive effort draws in people like Charles Rangel, Will Smith and people like that. These people are very clever and you wouldn't believe how tens of millions of dollars from the Wal-Mart billionaires alone can change the public discourse. And of course, the Olins, Scaifes and so forth are involved with this, even Bill Gates is peripherally involved.
My point is to stress how big money can generate all this talk you hear about privatization of education, charter schools, how our schools are failing and the need for tests and so forth. I am not deeply concerned with this relative to other issues, I'm just using it as an example, and I have been following it lately. I've been more concerned with Wal-Mart and the Walton Family and other businesses very successful campaign to do away with labor laws, or create bad labor laws around the country. They passed a right-to-work-for-less law in Oklahoma a few years ago, mostly by focusing on the massive evangelical churches in Oklahoma and preying on job and unemployment fears, the law passes something like 50.1% to 49.9% on a referendum. They're pushing these laws all over the country - they're even trying in Pennsylvania which is scary, because one thinks of Pennyslvania as a union state. Anyhow big money combined with a public which is more apt to be accepting Jesus as their personal savior in evangelical churches then seeking rank-and-file run militant labor unions can lead to all sorts of wacky laws passing.
Which is why the attitude on Slashdot about global warming scares me. Admittedly I am not an expert on chemical reactions with fossil fuels. I only have seen this show before: some group with no axe to grind and is objective as one can be says there is a problem (tobacco causes cancer, whatever...). Big corporations hire lawyers, PR firms, their own "experts" blah blah blah attacking this effort. Soon they're putting commercials on TV, catch phrases and so forth. Soon I hear the same thing coming out of people's mouths at lunchtime, they're complaining about trial lawyers or so
One is that the Bittorrent protocol is thusfar the best protocol for transferring large files. The clients are designed to transfer large files. The Edonkey/Kademlia protocol exists to transfer large files as well, but it is just not as good as Bittorrent. It is much slower.
p2p has to be looked at as a process. There is the search for information. There is the response to the search. Then there is the request to download a file. Then there is the download of the file. Each of these parts is separate and important. In Bittorrent, only the last part, the download is decentralized. The prior parts are not decentralized, are not p2p - even the request to download goes to a centralized torrent.
Despite this, Many people figure that Bittorrent's partial file sharing, protocol attributes and program attributes are what make the downloading good. Of course, having a good source of current holders of the file - partially or fully, is important, as is having a good hash of the file, or multiple hashes in the case of Bittorrent. But this can all probably be done via p2p as well.
As far as the comments on hashes and file integrity, this is not a problem at all. There are many ways to deal with this. If you want, you can still have a central torrent, but you could only check it once instead of many times. Or maybe there could be distibuted PGP signatures of the validity of certain hashes.
As far as other comments, I'm interested in this so I'm glad to know, although I agree its vaporware until release.
As far as Freenet, encryption, IP addresses and so forth - I think for technical innovation reasons, unencrypting, non-masking p2p technologies need to be developed for now. I'm also glad, alongside this, anonymous, IP masking, encryption-capable p2p networks like Freenet are being created. And once p2p becomes mature, I hope the technologies implement any encryption and anonymity that does not put in too much overhead. Turn it on by default, and let people manually turn it off if they want.
As far as copyrighted material and so forth, I really could give a damn. Big corporations hate the idea of sharing, and trying to kill something like Linux or a GPL open p2p protocol and client is instinctive to them, just like the enclosure of the commons was.
And as far as non-centralization being one of the benefits of Bittorrent, and decentralizing ruining it, I completely disagree. As I said before, file integrity and hashes are not a problem, you can do PGP signatures on hashes or something. Any problem can be dealt with. Bittorrent is good because it is the best protocol to deal with partial file sharing of large files. Any of its centralized features can be decentralized, some of them very easily, as I'm sure Freem is doing.
Gnutella 0.4 is probably a better description of this. Because Gnutella 0.6 handshaking protocol allows for the existence of Ultrapeers, which the original handshake (0.4) did not.
Unfortunately as a US taxpayer, I have to finance US military aid to Turkey to the tune of billions of dollars. Locking up people who write about the Kurds in Turkey is small potatos, the Turks have been massacring Kurds for years. If anyone remembers, they even invaded Iraq (which the US administration didn't want) just to kill Kurds that were in Iraq. This is the thing that Saddam Hussein was lambasted for - gassing Kurds (although the US sent him helicopters after he did that of course too). Yet the Turks have been doing it, are doing it, and will be doing it. This never appears on the US corporate media of course, just the tragedy that a candidate not on the privatization fast track might win the Ukranian election.
It's true that American jobs are going to India and China. This is correct and it's a bad thing. But it is not the only reason, the corporate press reports stresses that for ideological reasons. Jobs, from factory jobs to computer jobs are automated out of existence. Jobs also disappear when profit rates fall and capital investment falls (that's cyclical though). Supposedly jobs automated out of existence magically reappear as new jobs paying the same or higher wage. Keynes didn't think so, and despite the rhetoric, the US government and "business community" doesn't think so either. Nor do they act different than their thinking, whatever they say. US business has benefited from massive government subsidies, usually with the words military or defense bandied about. What created the Internet? DARPA - Defense Advanced blah blah blah. What was the original name of the Interstate Highway System? The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
Just a glance at this article shows the typical dot-com BS rhetoric. With IT wages falling for the past few years (and higher unemployment for the sector, the two things of course being related), I don't like hearing this BS any more. "Property: Our notions of property are being reshaped in the new era. There is a trend away from privatization and towards a 'managed commons' method of production and distribution." On the contrary, despite some labor-hours spent writing Linux and so forth (before being sued by well-heeld companied for copyright infringement, having the Alexis De Tocqueville Institute do a job on you, Microsoft twisting government arms to hurt you etc.), there is a massive worldwide trend towards privatziation. You can bet Bush will be privatizing many things with his friends in Congress, and that adds up to a lot lot lot more value than this shiny GPL stuff. Half the world lives on $2 a day and would easily be considered malnourished by our standards, there is a hell of a lot of production of commodities around the world, mostly food, then textiles as well as oil/coal and so forth and all of that adds up to a lot more labor hours than a few programmers typing away. Having mentioned Bush, it is a lot like being a white collar worker in the Bay Area and everyone you know is voting for Kerry in San Francisco and suddenly you find out there's hundreds of millions of Americans in the fly-over state who polls show voted for him because they think Jesus is coming with the Rapture or something. You may not see the bottom of the iceberg, but its mass is far more significant than that which you can see.
The spraying is the initiative of the United States, which has been involved in Colombia's affairs ever since it stole the land for the Panama Canal from Colombia. Coca is grown in the north and the south, but the north is not sprayed - only the south. That is because the coca growers in the north are US-friendly and the coca growers in the south are in FARC controlled areas, a movement which among other things, wants the US out of Colombia's affairs. The south growing coca is a new phenomenom, for years FARC banned it, so all the coca grown and sent to the US in the 1970s was from the US friendly north. It only became a "problem" when the south began growing it. The US army colonel who supposedly was leading anti-drug efforts was actually involved in an operation to ship drugs to the United States.
Right now Phillip Morris is pushing the deadly tobacco drug on Chinese people. Can you imagine if China sent planes over to the US and began dropping herbicides on fields all over the US south? This is completely ridiculous, and whenever someone from south Colombia fights back against this, of course it's called "terrorism" and is used as justification for why this is necessary.
I don't think this whole thing is the US government being misguided, I think it is the US government being misleading, especially to the American people. Plenty of countries ship drugs to the US, if the product (such as marijuana) is not grown here already. But only Colombia gets this attention, only Colombia gets sent one billion a year to fight the FARC...uh, I mean, to fight coca farmers. Coca is the WMD's of Colombia - it is the excuse for doing what they *really* want to do.
Why is Colombia so important? Because Venezuela, Colombia (and from recent discoveries, Bolivia) have massive amounts of oil. The US powers-that-be want to control these natural resources. Arauca is one of the more oil-rich regions, and dozens of trade unionists in that region alone have been murdered this year. Hundreds of Colombian trade unionists are murdered every year, and the US sends one billion a year in military aid, crop destruction and so forth in order to add fuel to the fire. These policies are lobbied for by corporations like Occidental Petroleum, and I see only the most sinister motives behind their and the US's efforts in Colombia. Of course, the whole coca thing is a big WMD-like front for the real reasons, but if the US wanted to stop the global drug trade it should stop shipping tobacco to China. Hell, the US helped England invade China in order to push heroin on them over a century ago.
Then in 1998, AOL bought Netscape and I threw in the towel, I finally resigned to using IE on my Windows machines (which were usually at work - at work I either use a desktop thats Linux, Solaris or Windows, at home, Linux). IE had caught up, and with AOL owning Netscape, using Netscape felt less like the "rebel" position.
Then through partially through the lobbying of Jamie Zawinski, Mozilla was released, and I became interested again. I downloaded it - and I liked it. Tabs. Cookie/Password/Form managers. View Image option on web pages. Other features I like I'm probably forgetting. And Mozilla is free software, something which is important to me. It's free software, it's not Microsoft, and it's better than Microsoft! After downloading Mozilla for the first time I became a confirmed Mozilla user.
Obviously humans can do more with less. Twenty to twenty-five thousand genes means only twenty to twenty-five proteins to work with. And a lot of those genes and proteins are basically junk - stuff we needed previously, say one million years ago, or farther back, but no longer necessary now.
The chimpanzee body is almost exactly like the human, opposable thumbs and all. A very small percentage of humans have hair, fur practically, covering their entire body, and they look like big chimpanzee bodies. Our bodies are for all intents and purposes chimpanzee bodies, minus the hair (thats the most visible change from common descent), and generally larger, though not always so. The main changes are in the brain. And not many genes had to change to create our unique brains. It is probably only a handful of genes that make us human. A handful of genes that make proteins that cause more neurons to be built, or which allow us to use speech to communicate, or something like that. Science is always a lesson in humility, and I think it's likely this is the case.
Absolutely correct. Those are good sources on the ITAA, as are Disinfopedia's.
Actually citizens of the UK (in the six counties of north Ireland) have been living in such a state since 1922. It's called the Special Powers Act.
Unlike other countries, it's very rare for Americans to come together and work in a way that might be perceived a threat to the power of the powers-that-be, specifically the idle class that lives off the profit generated by American workers. This type of repression is uncommon because American workers so rarely come together to form our own media, organize in unions and so forth. One reason is because of a sort of Catch-22 that a society of isolated, individualized people has less of a foundation to come together to do so. Another is the massive machine - the world's largest army, prison system, intelligence system, military-industrial complex, lobbying efforts, corporate media, PR industry, fundamentalist churches, corporate law firms and so forth that attacks such efforts for workers to organize together and have their own voice. Faced with attacks by such, people become like Pavlovian dogs and go to their atomized lives of individualized exploitation, and buck the system less. Nonetheless, I think American workers will continue to try to organize together, but I pray that that the US machine continues to get foreign pressure, especially from workers organizing in foreign countries.
Indymedia is one of the few medias out there, one of almost the only medias out there that is not corporate owned and controlled, where anyone can file stories, and which is run and read by working people. Of course the corporate world and their government stooges would see that as a threat.
The charges are of course nonsense. If Chavez in Venezuela or Castro or Cuba or some other figure did this, Bush would be decrying the totalitarianism of their government right now and the rest of the corporate TV talking heads would nod their heads. Indymedia has open publishing but when "illegal content" is posted it erases it (unless it sues not to like in the Diebold case). I think that legally the idea that there is so much potential "illegal content" out there is ridiculous to begin with, and is something to be thought about. Most of the stuff posted was already floating around the net before someone posted it on Indymedia.
The problem I guess is Indymedia is a little too free for the corporate soft money bought stooges in Washington DC. They want Indymedia to be more self-censoring, letting any Tom Dick or John Q. Public have his unfiltered say is a little too dangerous. It's ironic that Indymedia is around the world, even in places like Palestine, Colombia and other places you'd expect these crackdowns, but it's the US security forces who are so often attacking this medium.