Being as the Internet came out of a decades-long government project financed by taxpayers, and that a good chunk of the R&D costs for hard drives and such came from government, usually military, contracts, I'd question how much competition and capitalism has to do with Internet success from the mid 1990s until now. Government spending billions on a project over decades of time and then handing it over the corporations does not sound like the standards competitive capitalism story I am told about in the corporate media.
From the article - "From the talk today, it seems that Microsoft have appreciated the difficulty of persuading the passionate Linux folk. One Microsoft exec described the anti-Microsoft feelings as a 'jihad.'"
Yes, that's subtle, comparing Linux advocates to Al Qaeda and Iraqi rebels. This is after Jim Allchin calling Linux a "destroyer", Ballmer calling it a "cancer" and so forth.
I take it as a matter of faith that Microsoft desires to destroy Linux. Part one is public relations, part two is getting the government to go after it.
It didn't escape my attention that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Ken Brown is saying he's looking into the employment agreements of Linux contributors to see if any of the employers might own the copyright to off-hours work of Linux contributors. I remember a prominent case a few years ago where some developer wrote something after work and his employer sued him later saying it belonged to them even if it wasn't work related. The battle stretches from the workplace, to the government, to big business as far as I can see - the employment agreements wage slaves have to sign due to poor collective bargaining power helps lead to the destruction of Linux (or perhaps just a monkey wrench like the one that stalled BSD for years and years in litigation). It is already having an effect - Linus is spending time worrying about legal nonsense instead of developing the kernel. It doesn't just go away when ignored, Microsoft and company seem to desire some sort of primitive accumulation of the digital commons. The solution is to look into the OSDL and their Linux legal defense fund and that sort of thing. The travesty of employment contracts which comes in to haunt Linux has to be fought in workplaces. These people are playing for keeps. And it has already had an effect if you think about it.
In the past two days, I have dealt with three Windows users problems - two family members and a friends. The friend had tried to install a peripheral (a digital camera) that messed up her whole system that it wouldn't boot up - that took about an hour or two to fix over the phone. One family member had a problem with their network access - I sat at the computer and it took me two hours, I reinstalled the device driver for the network card. The other family member said AIM didn't work - I reinstalled AIM, which took 15-30 minutes. I've sat at both of these computers, and like so many non-experts computers, their machines are filled with spyware and 10 programs that load at startup.
Also, recently I have been doing commits to Sourceforge with CVS - when Sourceforge changes something it is a two second change on Linux, and an over an hour change on Windows with WinCVS, Plink and so forth. Doing the development is just so much easier on Linux. Plus I get free tools like Valgrind on Linux that you don't find for free on Windows.
The last improvement in Windows was from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, which made getting your hands on Trumpet Winsock unnecessary as PPP dialup had been incorporated. That was 9 years ago. On the other hand, I can think of a lot of things that Windows has done to cripple itself and cause me headaches - instead of sending a normal install-from-scratch CD with a new PC, I have a bunch of OEM "repair" CD's - blah. What a pain. Then there's their monkeying around with booting so as to try to discourage a machine that can dual boot to both Windows and Linux.
I also don't like how Windows sends some packets off to Redmond when I first sign onto the Internet for the first time with a PC - what the hell is that? I remember the Melissa virus writer was caught because Microsoft Word secretly (or at least only in technical specs a few dozen Microsoft developers know about) embedded his UUID or name or whatever in Microsoft Word documents so the FBI could catch him. I don't want every message I sent out incorporated with some kind of information so Big Brother can come after me. You keep eharing about how Microsoft Word documents have all of this "extra information" that winds up embarrassing someone - what the hell, just incorporate the text I want in there. Not my command line history or whatever.
Which brings me to the point of you have no idea what Windows is doing. With Linux you can just look at the source. Anyhow, other things I hate about Windows? You have to reboot after doing ANYTHING! Jesus, if you're doing a bunch of stuff you have to reboot the machine 10-11 times. Linux, and especially Solaris, can handle most of the same exact stuff with 0 reboots.
Then there's the Windows registry. I remember having an old version of NT (3.51 or something). Any editting of the registry by the user would null and void the technical support. So if you wanted the machine to have 16 IP addresses, how would you deal with that? Only one way - edit the registry. Some programs only worked if you editted the registry. The registry sucks in general.
Anyhow to summarize - it's less the crappy design decisions like the registry, needing to reboot after almost any change and so forth that puts me off the most - what puts me off is how every new version of Windows doesn't have improvements, but extra crippling to try to make it harder for you to use any alternative to Windows or to try and share ("pirate") Windows (with the anti-piracy features and methodology being very annoying for licensed users). What puts me off is how it is closed source, and the FBI is tracking down virus writers through secret information embedded in Word documents, and how new Windows installations send off packets of data to Redmond - I don't like the idea that Big Brother is looking over my shoulder, who knows what Uncle Sam, or the pointy-headed bosses at Microsoft will have embedded in the next release of Windows, post Patriot Act? I am not too impressed with the design of Windo
I've found if two companies are involved with something, it's always the other company that is to blame. If there were dropped packets or slowness between machines we had at Level 3 and machines we had at Globalcenter, the fault would always be the other one from whoever's tech support I was asking. Same with carriers and network providers, Verizon blamed the ISP, the ISP always blamed Verizon.
One time I was working with an application server called NetDynamics running on a Solaris machine when NetDynamics tech support said "It's a problem with Solaris, it's a Sun problem". I yelled at him "Sun bought you last year, you ARE Sun!!!" He stammered and said "Yaa, that's true...but it is a problem with Solaris". Ugh.
"For-profit businesses don't exist to provide jobs, they exist for profit."
Correct!
"Starting a business involves a lot of money, time, and risk (9 out of 10 new businesses fail during the first year, 9 out of 10 remaining fail within 5 years)."
The two important forces at play here are the workers and the people providing the capital, the owners. A business, starting or not, does involved a need for capital, correct.
As far as requiring time, well, not really for the owner. He can just hand it over the a mutual fund manager who decides to invest in an IPO or buy a stock. These portfolio or mutual fund managers and other white collar executives are the people spending this sort of time making decisions than the owner. So I would not say that the owner spends much time at all. These managers are workers working for the owner as well, although they're a bit different than the other workers. But they are workers nevertheless, and thus the ones spending the time. So I disagree that time is spent on the owner's side
As far as risk, I would say there is no risk. The owner could refuse to invest money unless there was enough pre-orders so that there would be no risk in investing money. That he chooses to put his capital in to use, without knowing whether or not people will buy the product he is putting out will be bought by people is a choice made by him. That he chooses to take this risk is his business.
If you see a need for government control of industries on the ownership level, and a need for government control on the labor level, then we have to start asking why don't we get some of the niceties workers in the socialist (social democrat really) dominated countries of Europe have. It's funny to hear bosses rail against government interference in them running their companies - but then call on the government to get involved in breaking the power of the people working for them. It just shows what a farce it is that they desire to be "free" of the government.
Unions also mean "I'm going to fuck the customers for my gain". I see, when a worker and owner can't agree to a wage rate negotiation, it's the worker's fault, since he should always take whatever is offered him. I think this says more about your point of view (e.g. a manager, who acts in the interest of the owner) than anything else.
As far as CA grocery workers, they struck one chain and were locked out of two other chains. So it was more of a lockout than what you call it, a strike. As far as Wal-Mart, the solution is to unionized Wal-Mart - if GM and Ford could be unionized, so to can Wal-Mart be unionized.
If you think not having a union means job security, ask the textile workers in North Carolina.
No unions means you get paid the same amount whether you work 8 hours a day or 12 hours a day.
I will take my chances with the union, than you, I actually have a life.
Many people think that IT workers are not unionized, but that is not the case, some IT workers in telecommunications, government and aerospace are organized, they are even organized in a council, which has petitioned Congress regarding overtime for IT workers, against high H1-B visa quotas and so forth.
The CWA is also trying to
organizeIT workers. The Techs Unite mailing list is very busy. They also have regular meetings that local IT workers go to in various cities.
I'm quite happy with this happening. I think the most important thing is that it be recognized that IT work is skilled, professional work, that both the CWA and the companies understand this. Some unions have handled this well like SAG, the actors union - I would say Robert DeNiro is highly skilled, although in a different manner than myself. I would not mind CWA rules that I have to be paid overtime after 40 hours, or be paid to be oncall and so forth however. A union would raise wages (as unions always do), lower overwork (overtime would be paid), lower unemployment (less overworked people means more jobs) and be a very good thing.
Workers are hired because they create wealth for a company - if they didn't they wouldn't be hired. Since expenses are not wealth created by workers, but rather the material they are adding wealth to, the wealth creation done by a worker goes to one of two places - the workers who created the wealth in the form of a wage, or the owners in the form of a profit. A union, an organized workforce, is a means of leverage for the workers to keep more of the wealth that they created. It's quite odd to hear that an organization whose purpose is to keep more of the wealth that the people working to create it is the "lazy" organization, while the other side, full of idle class heirs like Paris Hilton who've never worked a day in their life are not painted by that brush, but rather they and their sycophants try to paint the workers with that brush. These idle class heir parasites wouldn't know work if it hit them over the head.
It is not a stretch at all to link Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Jose Padilla, and the legal statements that the Geneva convention does not have to be followed, that Jose Padilla, an American citizen, does not deserve a trial and can be detained indefinitely by the state if it so wishes to (destroying the Fifth Amendment write to habeas corpus ("nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"), and see a pattern of denying national and international rights to humans, and then on the other hand seeing rights given and extended ("intellectual property") to intangible legal entities.
As far as why "they" hate "us" - considering myself as a worker, and the people ordering the attacks on Iraq (and Haiti, and sending "military aid" to Colombia and Israel and everywhere else) as members or flunkies of the idle class; and after looking at Abu Ghraib, the CIA role in overthrowing democratic Chile, El Mozote, the CIA role in overthrowing Mossadegah in Iran, the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, the Vietnam war, the "secret bombing" of Cambodia, the billions in arms to Israel, Colombia, the war in Iraq, the recent invasion of Haiti and so on and so forth, all while on the day Pat Tillman was killed him sahring the NY Times cover with a GI who came home from Iraq - on welfare...the US idle class elites making a class war on the workers at home and against the working people of the world abroad, I certainly find myself in the "they" category, and the parasitical idle class elite, and perhaps you, depending on your allegiance, in the "us" category. My "us" is with the working class, not the idle class, which is a synonym for US foreign policy which is barbaric, terroristic and monstrous, and which I am quite unfortunately financing through my tax dollars. My only satisfaction is knowing one day, like Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas II, the Paris Hiltons of the world will get their comeuppance.
It's not "reality"...the "U.S." is yet another non-sentinent entity. What you're saying is one entity recognizes the existence of another entity. It's like saying my clock recognizes the existence of my toaster. In fact what you're saying is even more vague, as the Ebay corporation and the US government are both not tangible, like my clock is.
How can Paypal have rights, Paypal is a fucking COMPANY. It's sheets of paper and a stock prospectus. When people start thinking a non-living entity like Paypal can have "rights", you start seeing how people think how people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time who wind up in Abu Ghraib no longer have rights. That so many people argue for rights for these legal constructs controlled by a tiny elite (the wealthiest 1% or so), and on the other hand argue that so-called "illegal combatants" on Guantanamo Bay (a military base the US has in a country that has officially asked the US to leave) have no rights (or even Americans like Jose Padilla), you can see how degenerate the mentality of some in the US has become, especially among some of the white collar workers.
That sucks. I just got a DSL line and threw Freenet up on my computer at home. It really makes you think of what a Nazi-like authoritarian world we live in that even a few people using a little p2p network that gives them some degree of anonymity is a threat to the system, as it might help put them beyond the jackboot of authority.
Freenet is a p2p pioneer - it actually came out before Gnutella did, and only one month after Napster launched. I like the applications that use it like Frost as well. Of course, a project like Freenet takes a lot of development time, needs lots of high-bandwidth 24/7 nodes running it and updating, and pile all of the authoritarian, anti-freedom people on top of that and you can see why awesome things like Freenet have trouble getting off the ground.
It's unfortunate that my programming skills are such that I can't make much of a contribution to Freenet - and that my monetary situation is such that I can't afford even a small donation. My programming skills are improving however, and perhaps my monetary situation will improve as well. I enjoy developing p2p applications because it is intellectually challenging and also because I feel its ultimate aims are good. Not all problems can be solved technically though. A boycott of sorts might be good - perhaps there should be a campaign to use eGold instead of Paypal for paying, and let Paypal know about it. Not only could people receiving money stress eGold, or some other competitor, or even drop Paypal, but people contributing money can refuse to use Paypal. I'm really sick of all of this crap!
In my research about how big business fights against free software (and also fights for offshoring and H1-B visas), I've found two things are usually done. One, they lobby Congress to make laws in their favor, and sometimes have lawyers sue to enforce those laws after they're instated. In other words they try to get government to enforce what they want. The second major thing they do is PR - they try to get stories in the news media towards their point of view. This is seen as a necessary buttress to part one.
Anyhow, the Disinfopedia wiki keeps track of organizations such as the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. It is a wiki, so anyone can add information about them (including you).
I've given a lot of thought to this, and others have probably given more than me.
The old saying 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration is true in this case. I think a lot of people have had this idea, but it takes a lot of work. For example, in the very first post on Slashdot about Gnutella, twoseparate people had the idea that hashes (both mentioned the CRC hash) would be a good idea to implement on the network. Which indeed it was, but it would take quite a while before any client implemented hashing (SHA1 in Gnutella's case), and then there is the question of how much time it takes to get into other clients and be in the majority of responses in the network. In fact, someone mentioned that tigertree made an even better hash than SHA1 and people want to begin implementing that as the next generation Gnutella hash now. No idea how long that will take. The point is that people obviously had the idea for hashing immediately, but it was quite a while before one saw query responses (or "hits") with hashes, and a while after that before it became commonplace for a query hit.
Actually I'll go a little more into the hashing - you mention one attack, here's another. Gnutella currently only hashes the whole file afterward, if you know of a good hash (say through Bitzi), you won't know if the file is good or bad until afterwards. So if you are downloading a file from three sources, and one of them is bad, it will corrupt the file. That's why tigertree is a solution - you can hash any portion of the file and see if it's good or not.
Anyhow, regarding meta information and so forth - a lot of it has been centralized on web sites. Edonkey, Kazaa (which is more clunky) and Gnutella all have hash web sites. Actually, the Edonkey hash web sites have been going under left and right in the past months due to receiving legal letters. After all, that's all Napster was right, a centralized store of meta information about files? The meta-information needs to be distributed more. People need to be able to rate files and then sign their rating, then maybe there can be key rings where people sign that they trust this person or moderate this or that.
It can be done, some of it being trial and error I'm sure. But it takes a lot of work. I am a really crappy C programmer, but I wrote a Gnutella servent (server/client) that can connect to Gnutella, search for a file and download it. I just knocked a lot of bugs out of it and once I'm sure all of the bugs are gone I will add the features of allowing incoming connections as well as sharing files. After I get all the basic features, and the ones needed for running on the modern Gnutella network, I will begin working on hashing, trust and that sort of thing.
If I were a better developer I would contribute to one of the existing free software projects that ran on an open p2p protocol. But I am not, and barely know C, let alone C++, C#, Java and Python. I don't want my crappy programming skill to bring down another client, for now it's limited to my client. Anyhow, eventually I think we'll see a system like this. It take a lot of labor-time though - you mut learn a programming language, and then you have to program, dealing with sockets, threads, user interfaces and that sort of thing along the way.
The Situationists made the powers-that-be so nervous, that when they helped catalyze the revolt in 1968 that had virtually every blue collar worker in France on strike, it was the French Communist Party that ultimately had to put it down.
You can be sure Debord would put a gun to his head before doing R&D for the Intel corporation. In his last book, he said he feared the spectacle would try to integrate even his ideas in some borg-like fashion, and thus he had to be even more cryptic than he already was. It seems his fears have come true. Paulos is spectacular all the way.
Richard K. Miller,
President,
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
This is a school that is funded by the
Olin Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of anti-labor causes in the US. The Olin's are multi-millionaires and fund to the tune of millions a year causes that are the most strident in screwing workers and helping millionaires and billionaires. There are not many wealthy American families on the front lines of what they must perceive as a class war as them. The only other ones I can think of are the Coors family, and to some extent Richard Mellon Scaife.
I read through this article and what is he saying? Nothing but a lot of bullshit. But other people here have mentioned that so I'll just throw up a red flag about who he's connected to (and paid by).
I should also mention that if there's a "problem" they'll always say it is American workers versus Indian workers. As if we're in a race and have to compete - working longer hours for the same amount of money, improving our skills so we generate more profit for the bosses and so forth. What is not mentioned is overwork, that if American workers and Indian workers got overtime pay, unemployment would fall (as people would be cut down to 40 hours work per week), and wages would rise, since supply of IT labor hours would shrink, increasing the price.
I am really tired of hearing the bullshit. The problem is not with the IT workers, we can administrate and program just as well as we could five years ago, if not better. The problem is with the people who control the capital, and their broken-down economic system which has the sole purpose of making profit for them. The only way to fix anything of this for ourselves is to talk to other IT workers who are of a similar mind (which there are many of), organize together and do something together. The sum is greater than the total of all of the parts. There are already nascent efforts out there working towards this, we just have to join up with them and push them along.
Programs that other countries often put under separate departments are put under the umbrella of the military in the US. You know the national highway system? It came from the National Interstate and Defense Highways and was called the National Defense Highway System. One of the original arguments for its funding was military purposes. Of course, there is the Internet as well. It was created by public funding through the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and was originally called ARPAnet. Thus it was created through decades of funding through the defense department.
For whatever reason, it is not politically possible in the US to push through a need for the government to create an "information superhighway" or a national highway system for motorized vehicles for infrastructure (actually, a footnote if someone really is interested in the national highway system's creation would be to look at national railroad strikes from the Great Upheaval of 1877 to Truman having the US army seize control of the operation of railroads in 1950 due to a looming strike). It seems the only way it's possible to get the government to spend money is to manufacture a need for "national security" so the national highway system is for defense, teh Internet is for defense and whatnot. Other industrialized nations do not have this problem, and much has been made about how this is actually economically damaging to the US. For example, Europe directly funds Airbus, while the US must fund aerospace research by having Boeing manufacture military planes, and then spend money transforming that technology to commercial aerospace. That transition due to this uniquely American problem costs the US, and lets other industrialized countries gain due to this quirk.
The US has dominated the world for decades economically, but nowadays the EU, with its common currency and economic borders down has a GDP the size of the US, and a currency worth more than the dollar. Asia's economy has crises from time to time, but has grown and is growing at an enormous rate. With Japan as the solid base, South Korea behind it, China and India behind them, and the Asian tigers behind them, there is some stiff economic competition and there is no way the US will be able to match the growth rate of the region, even with CAFTA. I see current US leadership (Republican and Democrat) flailing to maintain a US world position that it can no longer hold, the only thing the US dominates in currently is military because that's where all the spending is. The bottom line is the US is having trouble realizing it is no longer ruler of the roost in terms of having the economic dominance it had decades ago, and I think this will have to be learned the hard way in terms of and economic (and thus military) collapse of some sort at some point.
I was looking at an unemployment and job loss statistical page not long ago and Massachusetts was #1 on the list out of 50 states. So while the US job market overall is not that great, it's particularly bad where you are right now.
The reality is, there is a lack of demand for IT labor hours right now. And there is an over supply of people willing to work right now at a wage level that is equal to what their skill level was being paid several years ago. This lack of demand from all I have read is across the spectrum - it affects people with one, five, ten and twenty years experience. Lots of people I know with a lot of experience are unemployed, and the data I look at reflects that. So skill increase will not help much as far as I can see. You've already tried that anyhow. Some people here are saying to "network", basically to look harder than the next guy for jobs, but lots of people are doing this more and more increasingly. It's like a game of musical chairs where the chairs keep decreasing and the advice is "run faster than the next guy".
The social solution to this is obvious. IT workers working nowadays are not working 40 hour weeks, they're working 50 and 60 hour weeks. Three IT workers working 40 hour weeks are doing the same amount of work as two working 60 hour weeks. If people working now cut back on the hours working, there would be more jobs. While the bosses and their sycophants always portray this as an individual thing between a boss and a worker, it is anything but. The bosses and owners have done massive lobbying as an organized unit to try to change the law so that the few IT workers currently eligible for overtime now won't get it any more. Since the organized IT worker force to counteract the well-organized, well-funded IT company campaign to to do this is weak and small currently, this law will probably pass and you will be worse off.
The IT bosses and owners are all acting as basically one organized unit and using their pull as such in Washington DC and elsewhere. The sycophants here are telling you that the hours of free work beyond 40 hours that you do is an individual thing between you and your boss that is your individual responsibility to be in a contract, and a union or the government should not come in and put pressure to help you out there. They also tell you to increase your skills (although, as you've said, it's done nothing for you), or to "network" more than the next guy to find the few job slots that open up - perhaps you can grab it faster than the next guy if you're quick enough.
Of course the real answer is you need to communicate and organize with other IT workers, and join or form some type of association, union, guild or whatever which acts independently but also puts pressure on the government. Otherwise you just have hundreds of thousands of individual little mice or birds running around trying to find diminishing pieces of food.
The USA has un-to-date plans to invade: [...] Mexico
Well, putting aside the Mexican-American war, don't forget that General Pershing marched into Mexico with his troops in 1914 during the Mexican revolution. I don't think the US is on the verge of invading Mexico right now, but the Foreign Affairs crowd is much more concerned about Mexico than most people probably realize. Don't forget that Clinton bailed out their economy in 1995. Steve Forbes also called Mexican immigration a "safety valve for domestic dicontent in Mexico". For now massive illegal immigration, billion dollar bailouts and so forth have prevented problems needing more extreme measures from US business interests- although there has been militancy in Northern Mexico, as well as of course the Zapatistas in the South. US business interests would not allow these groups to take over, period.
I can assure you that the US had a very active hand in Italian politics after World War II, from the WWII invasion of Italy, to the 1948 elections to the 1960's and 1970's and beyond. PCI (the Italian Communist Party) won over one third of the vote in 1976, losing to the Christian Democrats by a few points, you can be sure that the US would not have sat back and watched an Italian socialist/communist coalition ally with the Warsaw pact, just as a communist revolution in France in May of 1968 would not have been allowed. As all of the diplomatic correspondence released afterward openly states.
Einstein's most famous political essay was probably "Why Socialism?, which appeared in the first issue of the Monthly Review.
The first thing he addresses in it is what someone here already responded, why does it matter what an expert (or genius) on physics thinks about political matters? His first answer is that since physics is a physical science, e.g. a "real" science, while economics is a social science, pretty much anyone can have an opinion on a social science and have it be of possible equal validity since there's no scietific method of finding a "correct" answer. He also says that the violent, predatory nature of the existing system intrudes on a scientific study of political economy (for example, property "rights" are enforced by...force). His second answer is that this is a social-ethical question more than a scientific question. So in other words, he dismisses the notion that there are experts in economic or social matters whom one can objectively say know more than the average person. It would be like a theologian telling an atheist he understands the nature of the universe better than the average person.
As far as socialism, it never really made much of an inroads in the USA. If it's dealt with it all, it's said that it's "big government"...which sounds more like good old American New Deal Democrat liberalism. It's kind of like Plato's cave, the only reference to the body of socialism would be the shadow of liberalism. Einstein came from Europe where socialism was quite a big thing (as was communism) in the 20th century (in the east and the west - the largest political party in France was communist until 1956, Italy practically elected a communist government in 1976 losing by 5% of the vote, Germany's parliament was majority socialist and communist prior to Hitler, Spain had an anarchist/communist war against fascism in 1936 and was under a military dictatorship for decades afterward, and so on and so forth - socialism, anarchism and communism dominated Europe in the 20th century alongside fascism and Christian democrats). Einstein was steeped in these politics in Europe and had a much more intimate understanding of them then most Americans would. I've found most Americans think they know a lot about 20th century European history and the political philosophies of socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism and so forth, but they really don't. For example, you always hear how the USSR "forced" Hungarians to be communist. You'd never have known Hungary had had a bolshevik revolution in 1919, which lasted until Romania invaded. Of course, Russia had some influence on eastern Europe, but the US could be said in many respects to have "forced" France and Italy to be capitalist - especially Italy - the post-war elections were a total fraud, and as late as 1976 there were secret plans drafted by the USA to have NATO invade Italy if they voted communists into power in the 1976 election, which nearly happened. I don't know which is more disturbing - that Americans know so little about all of this, or that they know so little about all of this but think they do know all of this.
When you're chatting privately with someone normally in IRC (/msg), your conversation is going over the IRC servers. Thus, any IRC server admin can theoretically read all of these "private" messages. With DCC chat, a direct connection is made between IRC clients so that the conversation is between these two IP's, separated from the IRC servers. Of course, the conversation could be monitored from other places then of course and then you can start talking about encryption and so forth but that's another story.
But yes, the DCC protocol is used for more than file sharing. I've been using IRC since at least early 1992, and I have used DCC send and receive from time to time, very rarely for a sound file or video game. Usually it is for a text file, or a photograph, or a C program, or something like that. If you want to stop technological innovation because you fear it might hurt the profit of some corporation, then you might want to consider how the automobile, the telephone, and other instruments can be used for similar purposes.
There is a constant drive in capitalism to get more work out of "human resources" every single day. There are only two methods of doing this: either, if there's no pay for overtime, extend the amount of worktime (e.g. pay someone ths same amount of money for 9 hours work that they used to do for 8), or speed up the amount of work done in an hour. The former method can only be pushed up to the natural limit of the 24 hour day, and people have to sleep, so the latter is usually the preferred method.
Having to do more work every day in the same amount of time is inherently stressful. It's kind of like a Tetris game where the pieces keep falling faster and faster. The stress is probably in realizing your desire to comply with this speedup is ultimately going to lead to a situation where things are coming so fast that you'll be unable to handle them and at that point things will collapse. And by then you will be totally frazzled mentally and emotionally. It's the same in white collar programming/adminning or on a blue collar assembly line. Centuries ago in Europe, the workers used to wear wooden shoes called sabots. When the factory boss would speed things up too much, they'd throw their sabots into the gears of the machines. That's where the word sabotage comes from.
Slashdot Mirror
Being as the Internet came out of a decades-long government project financed by taxpayers, and that a good chunk of the R&D costs for hard drives and such came from government, usually military, contracts, I'd question how much competition and capitalism has to do with Internet success from the mid 1990s until now. Government spending billions on a project over decades of time and then handing it over the corporations does not sound like the standards competitive capitalism story I am told about in the corporate media.
Yes, that's subtle, comparing Linux advocates to Al Qaeda and Iraqi rebels. This is after Jim Allchin calling Linux a "destroyer", Ballmer calling it a "cancer" and so forth.
I take it as a matter of faith that Microsoft desires to destroy Linux. Part one is public relations, part two is getting the government to go after it.
It didn't escape my attention that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Ken Brown is saying he's looking into the employment agreements of Linux contributors to see if any of the employers might own the copyright to off-hours work of Linux contributors. I remember a prominent case a few years ago where some developer wrote something after work and his employer sued him later saying it belonged to them even if it wasn't work related. The battle stretches from the workplace, to the government, to big business as far as I can see - the employment agreements wage slaves have to sign due to poor collective bargaining power helps lead to the destruction of Linux (or perhaps just a monkey wrench like the one that stalled BSD for years and years in litigation). It is already having an effect - Linus is spending time worrying about legal nonsense instead of developing the kernel. It doesn't just go away when ignored, Microsoft and company seem to desire some sort of primitive accumulation of the digital commons. The solution is to look into the OSDL and their Linux legal defense fund and that sort of thing. The travesty of employment contracts which comes in to haunt Linux has to be fought in workplaces. These people are playing for keeps. And it has already had an effect if you think about it.
Also, recently I have been doing commits to Sourceforge with CVS - when Sourceforge changes something it is a two second change on Linux, and an over an hour change on Windows with WinCVS, Plink and so forth. Doing the development is just so much easier on Linux. Plus I get free tools like Valgrind on Linux that you don't find for free on Windows.
The last improvement in Windows was from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, which made getting your hands on Trumpet Winsock unnecessary as PPP dialup had been incorporated. That was 9 years ago. On the other hand, I can think of a lot of things that Windows has done to cripple itself and cause me headaches - instead of sending a normal install-from-scratch CD with a new PC, I have a bunch of OEM "repair" CD's - blah. What a pain. Then there's their monkeying around with booting so as to try to discourage a machine that can dual boot to both Windows and Linux.
I also don't like how Windows sends some packets off to Redmond when I first sign onto the Internet for the first time with a PC - what the hell is that? I remember the Melissa virus writer was caught because Microsoft Word secretly (or at least only in technical specs a few dozen Microsoft developers know about) embedded his UUID or name or whatever in Microsoft Word documents so the FBI could catch him. I don't want every message I sent out incorporated with some kind of information so Big Brother can come after me. You keep eharing about how Microsoft Word documents have all of this "extra information" that winds up embarrassing someone - what the hell, just incorporate the text I want in there. Not my command line history or whatever.
Which brings me to the point of you have no idea what Windows is doing. With Linux you can just look at the source. Anyhow, other things I hate about Windows? You have to reboot after doing ANYTHING! Jesus, if you're doing a bunch of stuff you have to reboot the machine 10-11 times. Linux, and especially Solaris, can handle most of the same exact stuff with 0 reboots.
Then there's the Windows registry. I remember having an old version of NT (3.51 or something). Any editting of the registry by the user would null and void the technical support. So if you wanted the machine to have 16 IP addresses, how would you deal with that? Only one way - edit the registry. Some programs only worked if you editted the registry. The registry sucks in general.
Anyhow to summarize - it's less the crappy design decisions like the registry, needing to reboot after almost any change and so forth that puts me off the most - what puts me off is how every new version of Windows doesn't have improvements, but extra crippling to try to make it harder for you to use any alternative to Windows or to try and share ("pirate") Windows (with the anti-piracy features and methodology being very annoying for licensed users). What puts me off is how it is closed source, and the FBI is tracking down virus writers through secret information embedded in Word documents, and how new Windows installations send off packets of data to Redmond - I don't like the idea that Big Brother is looking over my shoulder, who knows what Uncle Sam, or the pointy-headed bosses at Microsoft will have embedded in the next release of Windows, post Patriot Act? I am not too impressed with the design of Windo
One time I was working with an application server called NetDynamics running on a Solaris machine when NetDynamics tech support said "It's a problem with Solaris, it's a Sun problem". I yelled at him "Sun bought you last year, you ARE Sun!!!" He stammered and said "Yaa, that's true...but it is a problem with Solaris". Ugh.
Correct!
"Starting a business involves a lot of money, time, and risk (9 out of 10 new businesses fail during the first year, 9 out of 10 remaining fail within 5 years)."
The two important forces at play here are the workers and the people providing the capital, the owners. A business, starting or not, does involved a need for capital, correct.
As far as requiring time, well, not really for the owner. He can just hand it over the a mutual fund manager who decides to invest in an IPO or buy a stock. These portfolio or mutual fund managers and other white collar executives are the people spending this sort of time making decisions than the owner. So I would not say that the owner spends much time at all. These managers are workers working for the owner as well, although they're a bit different than the other workers. But they are workers nevertheless, and thus the ones spending the time. So I disagree that time is spent on the owner's side
As far as risk, I would say there is no risk. The owner could refuse to invest money unless there was enough pre-orders so that there would be no risk in investing money. That he chooses to put his capital in to use, without knowing whether or not people will buy the product he is putting out will be bought by people is a choice made by him. That he chooses to take this risk is his business.
If you see a need for government control of industries on the ownership level, and a need for government control on the labor level, then we have to start asking why don't we get some of the niceties workers in the socialist (social democrat really) dominated countries of Europe have. It's funny to hear bosses rail against government interference in them running their companies - but then call on the government to get involved in breaking the power of the people working for them. It just shows what a farce it is that they desire to be "free" of the government.
As far as CA grocery workers, they struck one chain and were locked out of two other chains. So it was more of a lockout than what you call it, a strike. As far as Wal-Mart, the solution is to unionized Wal-Mart - if GM and Ford could be unionized, so to can Wal-Mart be unionized.
If you think not having a union means job security, ask the textile workers in North Carolina.
No unions means you get paid the same amount whether you work 8 hours a day or 12 hours a day. I will take my chances with the union, than you, I actually have a life.
The CWA is also trying to organize IT workers. The Techs Unite mailing list is very busy. They also have regular meetings that local IT workers go to in various cities.
I'm quite happy with this happening. I think the most important thing is that it be recognized that IT work is skilled, professional work, that both the CWA and the companies understand this. Some unions have handled this well like SAG, the actors union - I would say Robert DeNiro is highly skilled, although in a different manner than myself. I would not mind CWA rules that I have to be paid overtime after 40 hours, or be paid to be oncall and so forth however. A union would raise wages (as unions always do), lower overwork (overtime would be paid), lower unemployment (less overworked people means more jobs) and be a very good thing.
Workers are hired because they create wealth for a company - if they didn't they wouldn't be hired. Since expenses are not wealth created by workers, but rather the material they are adding wealth to, the wealth creation done by a worker goes to one of two places - the workers who created the wealth in the form of a wage, or the owners in the form of a profit. A union, an organized workforce, is a means of leverage for the workers to keep more of the wealth that they created. It's quite odd to hear that an organization whose purpose is to keep more of the wealth that the people working to create it is the "lazy" organization, while the other side, full of idle class heirs like Paris Hilton who've never worked a day in their life are not painted by that brush, but rather they and their sycophants try to paint the workers with that brush. These idle class heir parasites wouldn't know work if it hit them over the head.
As far as why "they" hate "us" - considering myself as a worker, and the people ordering the attacks on Iraq (and Haiti, and sending "military aid" to Colombia and Israel and everywhere else) as members or flunkies of the idle class; and after looking at Abu Ghraib, the CIA role in overthrowing democratic Chile, El Mozote, the CIA role in overthrowing Mossadegah in Iran, the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, the Vietnam war, the "secret bombing" of Cambodia, the billions in arms to Israel, Colombia, the war in Iraq, the recent invasion of Haiti and so on and so forth, all while on the day Pat Tillman was killed him sahring the NY Times cover with a GI who came home from Iraq - on welfare...the US idle class elites making a class war on the workers at home and against the working people of the world abroad, I certainly find myself in the "they" category, and the parasitical idle class elite, and perhaps you, depending on your allegiance, in the "us" category. My "us" is with the working class, not the idle class, which is a synonym for US foreign policy which is barbaric, terroristic and monstrous, and which I am quite unfortunately financing through my tax dollars. My only satisfaction is knowing one day, like Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas II, the Paris Hiltons of the world will get their comeuppance.
It's not "reality"...the "U.S." is yet another non-sentinent entity. What you're saying is one entity recognizes the existence of another entity. It's like saying my clock recognizes the existence of my toaster. In fact what you're saying is even more vague, as the Ebay corporation and the US government are both not tangible, like my clock is.
How can Paypal have rights, Paypal is a fucking COMPANY. It's sheets of paper and a stock prospectus. When people start thinking a non-living entity like Paypal can have "rights", you start seeing how people think how people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time who wind up in Abu Ghraib no longer have rights. That so many people argue for rights for these legal constructs controlled by a tiny elite (the wealthiest 1% or so), and on the other hand argue that so-called "illegal combatants" on Guantanamo Bay (a military base the US has in a country that has officially asked the US to leave) have no rights (or even Americans like Jose Padilla), you can see how degenerate the mentality of some in the US has become, especially among some of the white collar workers.
Freenet is a p2p pioneer - it actually came out before Gnutella did, and only one month after Napster launched. I like the applications that use it like Frost as well. Of course, a project like Freenet takes a lot of development time, needs lots of high-bandwidth 24/7 nodes running it and updating, and pile all of the authoritarian, anti-freedom people on top of that and you can see why awesome things like Freenet have trouble getting off the ground.
It's unfortunate that my programming skills are such that I can't make much of a contribution to Freenet - and that my monetary situation is such that I can't afford even a small donation. My programming skills are improving however, and perhaps my monetary situation will improve as well. I enjoy developing p2p applications because it is intellectually challenging and also because I feel its ultimate aims are good. Not all problems can be solved technically though. A boycott of sorts might be good - perhaps there should be a campaign to use eGold instead of Paypal for paying, and let Paypal know about it. Not only could people receiving money stress eGold, or some other competitor, or even drop Paypal, but people contributing money can refuse to use Paypal. I'm really sick of all of this crap!
Anyhow, the Disinfopedia wiki keeps track of organizations such as the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. It is a wiki, so anyone can add information about them (including you).
The old saying 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration is true in this case. I think a lot of people have had this idea, but it takes a lot of work. For example, in the very first post on Slashdot about Gnutella, two separate people had the idea that hashes (both mentioned the CRC hash) would be a good idea to implement on the network. Which indeed it was, but it would take quite a while before any client implemented hashing (SHA1 in Gnutella's case), and then there is the question of how much time it takes to get into other clients and be in the majority of responses in the network. In fact, someone mentioned that tigertree made an even better hash than SHA1 and people want to begin implementing that as the next generation Gnutella hash now. No idea how long that will take. The point is that people obviously had the idea for hashing immediately, but it was quite a while before one saw query responses (or "hits") with hashes, and a while after that before it became commonplace for a query hit.
Actually I'll go a little more into the hashing - you mention one attack, here's another. Gnutella currently only hashes the whole file afterward, if you know of a good hash (say through Bitzi), you won't know if the file is good or bad until afterwards. So if you are downloading a file from three sources, and one of them is bad, it will corrupt the file. That's why tigertree is a solution - you can hash any portion of the file and see if it's good or not.
Anyhow, regarding meta information and so forth - a lot of it has been centralized on web sites. Edonkey, Kazaa (which is more clunky) and Gnutella all have hash web sites. Actually, the Edonkey hash web sites have been going under left and right in the past months due to receiving legal letters. After all, that's all Napster was right, a centralized store of meta information about files? The meta-information needs to be distributed more. People need to be able to rate files and then sign their rating, then maybe there can be key rings where people sign that they trust this person or moderate this or that.
It can be done, some of it being trial and error I'm sure. But it takes a lot of work. I am a really crappy C programmer, but I wrote a Gnutella servent (server/client) that can connect to Gnutella, search for a file and download it. I just knocked a lot of bugs out of it and once I'm sure all of the bugs are gone I will add the features of allowing incoming connections as well as sharing files. After I get all the basic features, and the ones needed for running on the modern Gnutella network, I will begin working on hashing, trust and that sort of thing.
If I were a better developer I would contribute to one of the existing free software projects that ran on an open p2p protocol. But I am not, and barely know C, let alone C++, C#, Java and Python. I don't want my crappy programming skill to bring down another client, for now it's limited to my client. Anyhow, eventually I think we'll see a system like this. It take a lot of labor-time though - you mut learn a programming language, and then you have to program, dealing with sockets, threads, user interfaces and that sort of thing along the way.
The Situationists made the powers-that-be so nervous, that when they helped catalyze the revolt in 1968 that had virtually every blue collar worker in France on strike, it was the French Communist Party that ultimately had to put it down.
You can be sure Debord would put a gun to his head before doing R&D for the Intel corporation. In his last book, he said he feared the spectacle would try to integrate even his ideas in some borg-like fashion, and thus he had to be even more cryptic than he already was. It seems his fears have come true. Paulos is spectacular all the way.
Richard K. Miller,
President,
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
This is a school that is funded by the Olin Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of anti-labor causes in the US. The Olin's are multi-millionaires and fund to the tune of millions a year causes that are the most strident in screwing workers and helping millionaires and billionaires. There are not many wealthy American families on the front lines of what they must perceive as a class war as them. The only other ones I can think of are the Coors family, and to some extent Richard Mellon Scaife.
I read through this article and what is he saying? Nothing but a lot of bullshit. But other people here have mentioned that so I'll just throw up a red flag about who he's connected to (and paid by).
I should also mention that if there's a "problem" they'll always say it is American workers versus Indian workers. As if we're in a race and have to compete - working longer hours for the same amount of money, improving our skills so we generate more profit for the bosses and so forth. What is not mentioned is overwork, that if American workers and Indian workers got overtime pay, unemployment would fall (as people would be cut down to 40 hours work per week), and wages would rise, since supply of IT labor hours would shrink, increasing the price.
I am really tired of hearing the bullshit. The problem is not with the IT workers, we can administrate and program just as well as we could five years ago, if not better. The problem is with the people who control the capital, and their broken-down economic system which has the sole purpose of making profit for them. The only way to fix anything of this for ourselves is to talk to other IT workers who are of a similar mind (which there are many of), organize together and do something together. The sum is greater than the total of all of the parts. There are already nascent efforts out there working towards this, we just have to join up with them and push them along.
For whatever reason, it is not politically possible in the US to push through a need for the government to create an "information superhighway" or a national highway system for motorized vehicles for infrastructure (actually, a footnote if someone really is interested in the national highway system's creation would be to look at national railroad strikes from the Great Upheaval of 1877 to Truman having the US army seize control of the operation of railroads in 1950 due to a looming strike). It seems the only way it's possible to get the government to spend money is to manufacture a need for "national security" so the national highway system is for defense, teh Internet is for defense and whatnot. Other industrialized nations do not have this problem, and much has been made about how this is actually economically damaging to the US. For example, Europe directly funds Airbus, while the US must fund aerospace research by having Boeing manufacture military planes, and then spend money transforming that technology to commercial aerospace. That transition due to this uniquely American problem costs the US, and lets other industrialized countries gain due to this quirk.
The US has dominated the world for decades economically, but nowadays the EU, with its common currency and economic borders down has a GDP the size of the US, and a currency worth more than the dollar. Asia's economy has crises from time to time, but has grown and is growing at an enormous rate. With Japan as the solid base, South Korea behind it, China and India behind them, and the Asian tigers behind them, there is some stiff economic competition and there is no way the US will be able to match the growth rate of the region, even with CAFTA. I see current US leadership (Republican and Democrat) flailing to maintain a US world position that it can no longer hold, the only thing the US dominates in currently is military because that's where all the spending is. The bottom line is the US is having trouble realizing it is no longer ruler of the roost in terms of having the economic dominance it had decades ago, and I think this will have to be learned the hard way in terms of and economic (and thus military) collapse of some sort at some point.
I was looking at an unemployment and job loss statistical page not long ago and Massachusetts was #1 on the list out of 50 states. So while the US job market overall is not that great, it's particularly bad where you are right now.
The social solution to this is obvious. IT workers working nowadays are not working 40 hour weeks, they're working 50 and 60 hour weeks. Three IT workers working 40 hour weeks are doing the same amount of work as two working 60 hour weeks. If people working now cut back on the hours working, there would be more jobs. While the bosses and their sycophants always portray this as an individual thing between a boss and a worker, it is anything but. The bosses and owners have done massive lobbying as an organized unit to try to change the law so that the few IT workers currently eligible for overtime now won't get it any more. Since the organized IT worker force to counteract the well-organized, well-funded IT company campaign to to do this is weak and small currently, this law will probably pass and you will be worse off.
The IT bosses and owners are all acting as basically one organized unit and using their pull as such in Washington DC and elsewhere. The sycophants here are telling you that the hours of free work beyond 40 hours that you do is an individual thing between you and your boss that is your individual responsibility to be in a contract, and a union or the government should not come in and put pressure to help you out there. They also tell you to increase your skills (although, as you've said, it's done nothing for you), or to "network" more than the next guy to find the few job slots that open up - perhaps you can grab it faster than the next guy if you're quick enough.
Of course the real answer is you need to communicate and organize with other IT workers, and join or form some type of association, union, guild or whatever which acts independently but also puts pressure on the government. Otherwise you just have hundreds of thousands of individual little mice or birds running around trying to find diminishing pieces of food.
Well, putting aside the Mexican-American war, don't forget that General Pershing marched into Mexico with his troops in 1914 during the Mexican revolution. I don't think the US is on the verge of invading Mexico right now, but the Foreign Affairs crowd is much more concerned about Mexico than most people probably realize. Don't forget that Clinton bailed out their economy in 1995. Steve Forbes also called Mexican immigration a "safety valve for domestic dicontent in Mexico". For now massive illegal immigration, billion dollar bailouts and so forth have prevented problems needing more extreme measures from US business interests- although there has been militancy in Northern Mexico, as well as of course the Zapatistas in the South. US business interests would not allow these groups to take over, period.
I can assure you that the US had a very active hand in Italian politics after World War II, from the WWII invasion of Italy, to the 1948 elections to the 1960's and 1970's and beyond. PCI (the Italian Communist Party) won over one third of the vote in 1976, losing to the Christian Democrats by a few points, you can be sure that the US would not have sat back and watched an Italian socialist/communist coalition ally with the Warsaw pact, just as a communist revolution in France in May of 1968 would not have been allowed. As all of the diplomatic correspondence released afterward openly states.
The first thing he addresses in it is what someone here already responded, why does it matter what an expert (or genius) on physics thinks about political matters? His first answer is that since physics is a physical science, e.g. a "real" science, while economics is a social science, pretty much anyone can have an opinion on a social science and have it be of possible equal validity since there's no scietific method of finding a "correct" answer. He also says that the violent, predatory nature of the existing system intrudes on a scientific study of political economy (for example, property "rights" are enforced by...force). His second answer is that this is a social-ethical question more than a scientific question. So in other words, he dismisses the notion that there are experts in economic or social matters whom one can objectively say know more than the average person. It would be like a theologian telling an atheist he understands the nature of the universe better than the average person.
As far as socialism, it never really made much of an inroads in the USA. If it's dealt with it all, it's said that it's "big government"...which sounds more like good old American New Deal Democrat liberalism. It's kind of like Plato's cave, the only reference to the body of socialism would be the shadow of liberalism. Einstein came from Europe where socialism was quite a big thing (as was communism) in the 20th century (in the east and the west - the largest political party in France was communist until 1956, Italy practically elected a communist government in 1976 losing by 5% of the vote, Germany's parliament was majority socialist and communist prior to Hitler, Spain had an anarchist/communist war against fascism in 1936 and was under a military dictatorship for decades afterward, and so on and so forth - socialism, anarchism and communism dominated Europe in the 20th century alongside fascism and Christian democrats). Einstein was steeped in these politics in Europe and had a much more intimate understanding of them then most Americans would. I've found most Americans think they know a lot about 20th century European history and the political philosophies of socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism and so forth, but they really don't. For example, you always hear how the USSR "forced" Hungarians to be communist. You'd never have known Hungary had had a bolshevik revolution in 1919, which lasted until Romania invaded. Of course, Russia had some influence on eastern Europe, but the US could be said in many respects to have "forced" France and Italy to be capitalist - especially Italy - the post-war elections were a total fraud, and as late as 1976 there were secret plans drafted by the USA to have NATO invade Italy if they voted communists into power in the 1976 election, which nearly happened. I don't know which is more disturbing - that Americans know so little about all of this, or that they know so little about all of this but think they do know all of this.
But yes, the DCC protocol is used for more than file sharing. I've been using IRC since at least early 1992, and I have used DCC send and receive from time to time, very rarely for a sound file or video game. Usually it is for a text file, or a photograph, or a C program, or something like that. If you want to stop technological innovation because you fear it might hurt the profit of some corporation, then you might want to consider how the automobile, the telephone, and other instruments can be used for similar purposes.
Having to do more work every day in the same amount of time is inherently stressful. It's kind of like a Tetris game where the pieces keep falling faster and faster. The stress is probably in realizing your desire to comply with this speedup is ultimately going to lead to a situation where things are coming so fast that you'll be unable to handle them and at that point things will collapse. And by then you will be totally frazzled mentally and emotionally. It's the same in white collar programming/adminning or on a blue collar assembly line. Centuries ago in Europe, the workers used to wear wooden shoes called sabots. When the factory boss would speed things up too much, they'd throw their sabots into the gears of the machines. That's where the word sabotage comes from.