> Remember that 'Law' thing? It's what keeps even the suits from doing whatever the h*** they want? You play by some rules, its okay. You skip, not.
What the suits in the DMA have always wanted is rules that let them spam our email the way they spam our telephones. But what the DMA wants for my mail spool is of no concern to me.
The day that DMA members pays for my internet access (the way, for instance, they pay for our "free" television), they're welcome to send me anything they want.
You continue with: >The sociological purpose of business concerns gathering themselves into 'companies' is to utilize the strength of numbers, and variable skills of those numbers, and provide shelter if things come along to harm the business. Ahem. > The sociopathical purpose of a chain letter is... obvious.
I love the way you mince words - "sociological" has no meaning in the context of your sentence, other than that it begins with "socio". But to address your point, rather than flame your spelling -- is there a "sociological purpose" (I think you really meant "social benefit derived from") for business? Absolutely! Are chain letters sent by moronic sociopaths? Just as absolutely!
But when a business uses its "strength in numbers" to abuse people, they are exhibiting behavior just as sociopathic as any two-bit relay-raping scumbag. Was the Exxon Valdez any more acceptable because the disaster was caused by a company with a drunken tanker captain, rather than a psychopath pouring oil in the bay? Is it any less theft because the thief wears a suit?
Business is good. Email marketing via confirmed opt-in is very good. Spam is theft. Learn the difference.
interiot writes: > maybe we could pull a social engineering trick here: > > * Concede that certain kinds of spam (eg. JCPenny sales) are less agressive and annoying than other forms of spam (eg. porn/get-rich-quick) > [...snip interiot's scheme which appears, at least to me, to be all about "get people mad at get-rich-quick hucksters who won't use ADV but allow companies like JC Penney's, who would use ADV, to spam at will " ] > * Public opinion will become more negative towards the get-rich-quickers (because they're not playing by the rules), and perhaps that'd be enough to keep the "bad spam" to a dull roar.
My apologies if I've misunderstood your post, but what the ring-tailed rambling fsck!?!
If you think there's a distinction to be made between "good spam" (from "good companies") and "bad spam" (from "scamming scuzzballs", you're playing straight into the hands of the DMA. The only "social engineering trick" here is that the DMA is trying to pull the wool over our eyes by making us believe that theft of service is OK as long as the thief wears a suit.
Spam is not about content. It never has been. Spam is about theft. JC Penney has no more right to consume my diskspace and network bandwidth (and if I'm on a wireless link, reading mail through a cellphone, my money) than Joe Chickenboner in his beer-can-littered trailer.
There's no "good spam" vs. "bad spam". It's unsolicited. It's commercial. It's email. It's theft. If you steal my resources, you get your connectivity yanked. If you're Joe Chickenboner, you lose your dialup. If you're a big mainstream company considering spamming, search for the term "mainsleaze". Look up what "RBL" stands for too. Big companies who spam get the same treatment, it just costs them more and takes a little bit longer.
Legitimate businesses do not steal potential customers' resources in order to market their products. Legitimate businesses which attempt to do so cease to be legitimate. Spamming will cost you your reputation and ultimately sales.
In defence of JC Penney, (to the best of my knowledge), they're only being mentioned here as a hypothetical example. The only spam I ever received from JC Penney's was when their insecure relay was raped a few years ago and used to send me a Make Money Fast. I looked them up on whois, and reported it (and the originating IP address of the spammer) to JC Penney's registered technical contact. The administrator wrote back within a few hours, and was quite embarassed and eager to secure his company's server to prevent such abuse in the future.
> > [Murkowski's bill gave us more spam by legitimizing it through its advocacy > of Subject: labelling, the CO law will have the same problem] > > The whole point of this is that if all the spam starts containing ADV: that > makes for a very easy text filter, which most email programs support.
So what?
By the time the Subject: line is read, the damage is already done - the SMTP transaction is complete, the bandwidth has been consumed to send it, and the diskspace wasted to store it.
I have no desire to live in a world in which 30% of/var/spool/mail is composed of spam which only gets filtered after it's transmitted. I want a world in which the spam doesn't get sent in the first place.
A law that says "Go ahead, spam all you want as long as you put ADV: in the Subject: header" doesn't solve the fundamental problem, namely that spam is theft of privately-owned resources.
Would you say that all junk faxes are OK if labelled "Junk Fax! Throw me out!"? That telemarketing calls, regardless of "get me off your list" preferences, can be made at all hours of the day or night, so long as the droid who calls you at 3 in the morning says "I'm a telemarketer! I guess you just want another hour to think about our exciting offer!" before calling you again at 4am?
The junk fax law isn't too bad. In the US, junk faxes are worth $500 for the first offence. The TCPA isn't great (as it allows telemarketers the first call free) and it's hard to collect evidence and sue, but it's still possible. Both of these laws got watered down from what the general public wanted (extermination) due to the influence of pro-harassment organizations such as the DMA.
Consequently, despite the aforementioned laws, I still see junk faxes and get telemarketers calling me. I'm drawing my line in the sand here. I don't want to see more spam and filter it out - I want it, and those who send it, exterminated. I want the cost of spamming driven so high that today's spammers will be forced to find honest ways of making a living, like pimping their grandmothers for crack.
Any law that allows someone to abuse my resources, but denies me the right to sue his ass into the stone age, isn't worth passing. It's my FAX machine, my phone line, and my mail spool.
I support laws which say "Fsck with the private property of our citizens at your peril". I oppose laws which say "You can abuse other people's property as long as you follow a few rules". I vote and contribute to campaigns accordingly.
At $10/pop, no individual recipient of non-ADV-tagged spam is going to pursue legal action. The Washington state law that allows recipients of spam to sue for $500 is infinitely superior to the CO law.
Remember Murkowski's bill? Now that we've got the Colorado law, we'll see tons of spam with "ADV:" in the subject line, and the language "Since we used ADV: this isn't spam, nyaah nyaah nyaah". This law legitimizes spam, rather than prohibiting it.
ISPs can sue for $10/message. Sure, that's millions of dollars. But how many ISPs are gonna spend the bucks on lawyers just to sieze some spammer's 1965 trailer, collection of beer cans, and a few rotting buckets of chicken bones?
Good:
The only potentially-useful aspect of the ISP provisions would be for an enterprising individual to set up an open mail relay in Colorado, and wait for it to get attacked by spammers.
Hear me out on this; I'm not advocating open relays. Just a relay that's "open enough to give the spammer enough rope to hang himself". Sendmail on such a box could be configured to allow the first 100 spams to go through, (resulting in minimal harm to end users), and to then silently drop the next few thousands of spams on the floor. While spammers don't have the millions of dollars required to make it worth an ISP's while to sue, many probably do have $1000 or so in seizable assets, which makes it worth the while of individual Coloradans operating specially-configured relay "honey traps" to hunt the spammers down for fun and profit.
What to do next is obvious -- use the logs to grab the spammer's IP address, contact the NOC at the spammer's ISP and mention that your relay has been attacked, and that you'd like to sue the spammer under the Colorado law. Even if you require a lawyer to obtain the spammer's identity, the cost should be minimal, particularly with the overwhelming weight of evidence of the spammer's guilt on your side.
Once you have the spammer's identity, send a demand letter to the spammer for $500 to settle out of court - if he ignores the demand letter, drag him into court for the full $1000.
Repeat, once for every spammer who attacks the relay. Finally, you too can make money fast with responsible bulk email!
An excellent analysis and comparison - it's high time someone did it.
My general experience with Christians is that most of 'em are sheeplike - and follow along with what they're told by their church leaders. This leaves them ripe for manipulation by the hardcore coercive fundie groups such as those you've described. Much in the way a Scientologist will introduce the cult in an office - "it's just the management technology, you don't have to believe the religious parts of it" - it's easy for radical groups to infiltrate otherwise-legitimate churches.
The most effective response is much like the one used in the Scientology wars -- inoculation against the coercive memeset before the kids get into college (i.e. and are isolated from their ordinary peer groups and support mechanisms, thereby rendering them more vulnerable to attack).
The average run-of-the-mill Christian would probably be just as apalled at the heavy-handed fundie tactics as they are at the Scientologists'. Problem is, unless they've already got finely-tuned bullshit detectors, many of them see the word "Christian" and automagically assume there's no coercion going on. "Look, it says 'Christian' right there on the label! It's gotta be good for you!"
Mad props to my youth leader - I had a traditional Christian (Baptist, even!) upbringing, went to church, did the whole shebang - but our youth pastor spent at least one month every year with the high-school kids analyzing cults, both of the "Christian" and "pagan" varieties, and teaching us how to spot bullshit and manipulation from genuine faith. As a result, many of us included "all religion" in the "bunk" category and eventually abandoned the faith. Looking back, I think the guy knew this would happen - but figured that was a far preferable outcome than having any of us get sucked into the cult vortex.
That youth pastor of mine had faith. Not some moronic sheeplike blind devotion, but a sincere belief that if he gave us the tools we needed to think for ourselves, that we'd make the right decisions, and that God's will would be done even if many of us (myself included), having acquired those tools, subsequently used them to abandon religion altogether. That takes guts. That's faith. Beware of any group whose leaders tell you otherwise.
Chaosgrrl writes: > J.Random Public doesn't want to be confused by the facts. [... ] They want to feel good about their actions [... ] > The more the spread [the meme] and get approval and agreement from other citizens, the >more justified they feel in holding this meme [... ] They'll only discard it if enough people whom they > respect laugh at them and tell them what fools they were for buying the meme in the first place. > > The only answer I can think of is for us to go out and laugh at anyone we hear propagating these inaccuracies.
Humor is an effective weapon - possibly the best use thereof has been the alt.religion.scientology wars.
Here are a couple of representative USENET posts: Post 1 Post 2
The effectiveness of humor against the $cieno meme complex has been demonstrated pretty effectively. Of course, it's hard not to laugh at someone who spends $300K to find out that the source of his personal problems involves volcanoes, H-Bombs, and an evil Galactic Overlord named Xenu, particularly when cult doctrine considers "joking and degrading" a high crime. (Solution obvious: Make everything a degrading joke about the cult - then stand back and watch cult members go apeshit, labelling everyone but themselves criminals, much to the amusement of anyone watching. Give a cult enough rope and it'll hang itself.)
And while we're on the subject of the Co$ and censorware, as a followup to my "Censorship is for suckers" thread -- is it any wonder that the very same Cult of $cientology ordered all its members to use it's own custom-branded version of Cybersitter on their home PCs?
Now - if you're a God-fearing Christian, why on earth would you rely on a solution advocated by a satanic cult that believes that the whole Jesus story was merely an "R6 implant" - a false memory artificially-implanted into our collective unconsciousness by evil alien overlords? I'm sure glad my library is following the lead of the Cult of $cientology and using censorware!
This leads to another propagable meme: The only "major" "religious" organization to mandate its members' use of censorware is the Cult of $cientology. Why are we following the lead of a god-denying UFO cult? Do you want to trust your children's safety to a group of software companies, when at least one of them has already demonstrated a willingness to develop a custom version of their product to a nut cult that believes Jesus Himself was merely an fake memory implanted in us by aliens? Do the censorware merchants have no shame? How stupid do the censorware peddlers think we are?
In an unrelated thread, someone wrote: > Besides, "Censorware allows your children to see porn!" is a much catchier headline then "Censorware keeps your children from seeing 'The offspring'". It'll make the evening news much more often.
I've quoted it here because to me, this is all about propagability of memes. Some people evaluate memes based on truth values, but most don't. Truth is not a predictor of propagability of memes, and in order to win this battle, we need memes that can propagate as well among the fundie crowd as they do among the Slashdot crowd. .
Let's consider the memeset of our "enemy" here, and that Offspring lyric that got posted. Our enemy probably knows "The Offspring" as "that band that sings about beating people up and being a rowdy teenager". Blocking Offspring isn't a bug to these people, it's an accidental feature.
Those Offspring lyrics - put yourself in the brain of a stereotypical fundie and read the lyrics: "When will the world listen to reason / I have a feeling it'll be a long time / When will the truth come into season / I have a feeling it'll be a long time.."
Now, since you're a fundie, and you know that Offspring isn't "Christian Rock", you can only assume that they're not talking about "the world waking up to the realization that Christ is the One True Savior". In fact, you probably suspect that they're trying to get your kids to "wake up" and snap out of their fundie-raised upbringing. What we/.ers think of as "think for yourself" is - in the hardcore fundie mentality, "the sin of pride", a rebellion against God's divine authority that puts man at the center of their universe, not God - oh, the horror!
Do I agree with that logic? Not on your life. But $10 worth of hot grits down Jerry Falwell's pants says that the people who want blocking software do. And THEY'RE the ones propagating the memes right now, which is why we're losing this war.
We need to stop pretending that our opposition cares about the First Amendment. We know damn well they don't. Stop pretending that our audience cares about the First Amendment. They're too ignorant to care about things when the meme of "saving the chiiilllldrun is worthwhile at any cost" shows up. From a memetic warfare standpoint, the logical alternative is to take the battle to a level the sheeple can understand, and that means to start scaring them into submission the same way our opponents have been doing, and that means a memeset that propagates among fundies.
An audience of people who stand up and say "I used your filtering software last year and read about donkeys fucking little girls! You said you made your filters better, but I can still see that goddamn link!" is an audience ready to get my proposed meme:
Filterware isn't about protecting the children. It's a scam that can never work. The companies that write it and sell it are lying to you.
Unlike "You're blocking good sites too", where our idea of "good" is just as bad as pr0n to our enemies, this is a useful meme.
Consider: It appeals on the gut level - to paranoia, by accusing "big business" of running a scam on "the little guy", and describes a world in which Godless Amoral Corporations are trying to pull the wool over Your Preshus Chilldrun's eyes by hawking snake oil that can never work. They're not really for Jesus, they're just trying to make a buck in His name. (The fact that this is true isn't relevant -- it's that it's easily believed to be true that counts.)
More importantly - this meme gives its holder a sense of superiority. "I know censorware doesn't work. I know it's a crock. I know something other people don't know, which makes me better than other people!".
Finally - it doesn't conflict with their existing memeset. Our whining about the First Amendment makes us feel superior, because most of us realize that there are principles at stake beyond religious bickering. But it conflicts directly with the "God Uber Alles" meme that so heavily infects the fundie set. To these people, a theocracy is a Good Thing, and the First Amendment is a threat. But even the most diehard theocrat can see that "Being a Sucker" is a bad thing.
To summarize -- if you wanna do memetic warfare, pick memes that are easily reproduced. Pick memes that make their holders happy by reinforcing their propagators' self-esteem. And make sure you pick a meme that doesn't require modification to the existing memes held by your target audience.
It's what they've done to us so successfully with "We're for God, the children, and apple pie. They're for porn and using the first amendment as a lame excuse." When we whine about the First Amendment - it's taken for whining, because our argument says "there are things more important than your religious beliefs" - our meme conflicts with theirs and gets thrown out.
My proposed "You're being sold snake oil. Don't be a sucker" meme is every bit as true as our arguement about the First Amendment, but unlike the constitutional argument, it doesn't conflict with their existing complex of religious memes. You can go on thumping the bible and beatin' up faggutz and lezzbein' femminizt radikulz or whatever the hell else it is that hardcore fundies get off on - but you can do it without censorware.
Because You're Not A Sucker. And Censorware is for Suckers. Because it doesn't work. Because it never will work. And because it's all a scam being run by people who are invoking the name of God to make a quick buck. May they burn in hell, Amen.
Valenti: > > "The principle occupation [of the MPAA] is to make sure that American movies move freely and unhobbled around the world,"
SteveB: > "I did not have sex with that woman," says Clinton.
I think you picked the wrong Clinton quote. Clinton's memorable "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" would be more appropriate.
Valenti's definition of "freely and unhobbled" is based on axioms so wholly different than ours that he comes across as being clueless to us.
To us, content is content - a movie on film or a movie as a bitstream are the same thing. There's no difference between buying a DVD and playing it in a dedicated DVD player, or using DeCSS and playing it on our Linux boxen. We've "paid for our content" (the physical disc upon which the bitstream resides), and can view it using whatever mechanism we see fit. The medium upon which it resides or the source from which it's transmitted are immaterial.
Valenti doesn't see it that way - there are two types of content in his world; blessed content whose distribution and use is under his control, and unblessed content, which must be stamped out. The NFL/SuperBowl analogy was a good one -- to the MPAA (and in music, to the RIAA), content that moves without the rituals of payment and licencing is Bad Content, and must be eliminated. Content that moves after someone pays for it is Good Content, and (the unstated assumption in his argument) only Good Content should be able to "move freely and unhobbled". Of course, any movement beyond what's prescribed by the licensing restrictions renders it into Bad Content. (See the earlier Slashdot thread on "Is SDMI a consumer nightmare", and the discussion of domains through which a user is allowed to move files.)
To us, that's hogwash - "freely" and "unhobbled" are meaningless if they mean "only through Valenti's distribution channels". What's "freedom" if it's only "freedom to agree with Valenti's view of the world"? But to an MPAA exec, "through approved distribution channels where our sales reps have sold ad time or licencing rights" are the only imaginable ways in which content can be distributed. Anything outside of that ceases to be "Good Content", and must therefore - a priori be "piracy" and worthy only of extermination.
Valenti's not as clueless as he looks - he's merely arguing from an axiom set that's wholly alien to us.
It's a bit like the old Zen koan: the man who meditated on the ox for a year, asked to leave his room, replying "But my horns won't fit through the door". Valenti's notions of "free and unhobbled" are circumscribed by the licensing/distribution restrictions of his own making. I have no doubt that he's being sincere when he says "free and unhobbled" - but just like Clinton, it depends on what the words mean to him.
Katz: > > "If he's right, the dilemma is enormous: we have no particular place to go as a species. > > We lack a common or universal goal beyond our pre-determined biological nature."
Hard_code: > Well...duh... You must have missed Existentialism
And for those not into existentialism, he also missed Carl Sagan.
Had Katz written "If he's right, I [Katz] have an enormous dilemma", I'd have no beef. But he didn't. He projected his psychological needs onto all of us, and I'm calling him on it.
As Sagan might put it - the history of humanity is one of humblings. Jerusalem is not the center of the earth. The Earth is not at the center of the universe. The Sun is not at the center of the galaxy. And the galaxy isn't at the center of the universe either. To be sure, we're incredibly lucky - a universe not created for us managed to evolve us anyways. But it's a damn big universe, and it's not so surprising that somewhere, something like this happened - namely consciousness providing an evolutionary advantage and nature selecting big brains over big teeth and claws, and we're the result.
To assert anything beyond that smacks of hubris of the highest nature. Geocentrism, heliocentrism, the notion that the Milky Way was the entire universe, the notion of the "ascent" of man as the pinnacle of evolution - we've made these mistakes so many times before, must we really make them again, merely to satisfy Jon Katz' need for "a purpose to the species beyond biology?"
The lack of any common or universal goal is a feature, not a bug. Our consciousness enables us to transcend the limitations of our biology. Individuals can choose, for instance, to risk their lives going to the moon, or Mars, or beyond, rather than rutting mindlessly to spawn the next generation. They can dedicate their lives generating marvelous works of art - whether in paint, song, or code.
In short - we can do anything we choose to do - individually, and maybe even collectively - because we have no purpose, not in spite of the fact that we have no purpose.
hattig writes: > Whilst I am alive there is only one of me (luckily) but if I decide to upload my > brain somewhere and plug it into a simulated living environment so it lives on, > then you could end up with multiple hattigs, all of them with identical memories up to the age > they were uploaded, and then all diverging as they went off to think their own thing.
Precisely! Given a brain-uploading technology, forking off multiple instances of your consciousness is trivial. (Re-integrating the knowledge acquired by multiple copies of you into a single brain would probably be impossible, though.)
I don't know why so many a bunch of UNIX geeks, of all people, are having trouble understanding the implications of being able to digitally-reproduce a brain!
In financial and entertainment news today, merger mania continues. Tackhead news services reports that the Cult of $cientology has recently been acquired by the MPAA.
On the cult's side, reasons for the merger included $cieno infiltration into Hollywood for the past 20-30 years in order to provide a sheen of legitimacy for the beleagured cult, as well as a surplus of Operating Thetans out panhandling for money now that org revenues have crashed following the CO$'s "Operation Foot Bullet" and public buggering on the Internet in recent years.
On the MPAA's side, they cited a need for individuals with experience in controlling the dissemination of dangerous information embedded in court documents, and "The Cult of $cientology was the obvious choice; they've got experience in these sorts of things that nobody else has."
The MPAA appears to have already started to put the Cult's Operating Thetans to good use; at least one lover^H^H^H^H^Htrusted confidante of Cult Leader David Missedcabbage was quoted as saying
"Look, Dave's desperate for money for the cult, and snce everybody
knows the story about the volcanoes and Xenu, there's not much point in having most our OT3 through OT7s sitting around in court libraries pretending to read the court documents containing our Seekrit Skript00rz in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Anti-Religious Bigots (tm-CO$) who might check the documents out and copying them and spreading them on the 'net.
It seemed only fair that we send our now-unemployed OTs where they can do what they do best - checking out DVDCCA lawsuits containing copies of DVD decryption source code and pretending to read those before Anti-Copyright Bigots (tm-MPAA) start copying the source and spreading it on the net. Besides, it's more fun than trying to levitate ashtrays."
The merger has resulted in a shakeup on the board of the MPAA; the new board will be composed of executives who have all proven themselves "more capable" than conventional executives through $cientology training, which traditionally starts with a "Communications Course", and goes upwards from there. When asked for comment, the new Chair of the MPAA managed to splutter
"Our lawyers now have full control over MEST: Matter, Energy, Space, and Time are ALL OURS! MUHAAHAHHHAHHAHH! The psychiatrists won't stop us! The Germans won't stop us! The anti-religious bigots won't stop us! The open-sourcers won't stop us! NOTHING shall stop us in our drive to Clear(tm-CO$) the planet! And Tom Cruise and John Travolta are straight, goddamnit, STRAIGHT! Anyone saying otherwise will be DISPOSED OF QUIETLY AND WITHOUT SORROW! We are INVINCIBLE! WE ARE THE NEW FACE OF THE CULT OF THE DEAD CLAM!!!"
...before lapsing into complete gibberish for several minutes, before concluding with something about how Scientology saved his life, got him off drugs, and if I'd only take one communications course... whereupon your faithful reporter concluded the interview and got the hell out of dodge.
Members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, opon hearing the latter part of this outburst, are reputedly planning an IPO next week, proceeds of which will be used to sue the newly-merged MPAA-CO$ organization into oblivion on grounds of trademark dilution.
The CdC has neither confirmed nor denied plans to use a portion of the proceeds to purchase a thermonuclear weapon, and in a joint venture with a new orbital technology from Gold And Appel Transfers, Inc., dust off from Occupied Clearwater and nuke the site from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
(Background: For those who don't know the story, yes, the CO$ really did send cult members to court libraries, and had them sit at desks all day long, looking at the cover of the library's sole copy of the court documents that contained their sekrit skripturez, in order to prevent "unauthorized" people from reading them, copying them, and posting them to the 'net. The effect this had on the distribution of the court documents in question was, of course, about as good as the effect the MPAA and DVDCCA's suits have had on the distribution of DeCSS.)
Brings to mind another question -- ignoring clickthroughs, for a dialup ISP, what's their breakeven point on a heavy user? That is, if they're budgeting for 15h/month/user, how much are they losing when a binary leech starts slurping down 100-150 hours per month? (Assume 100h == roughly 1G traffic on a dialup link)
For an ISP with a good newsfeed, that's probably all local traffic from their NNTP server to the dialup user. For an ad-supported ISP, that's probable all remote traffic to a third-party NNTP (or NNTP-via-HTTP, I'd guess through a server presenting decoded binaries as downloadable URLs to the end-user) provider.
My guess is that both ISPs are losing money. But which one is losing it faster, and why? (The big ISP, despite all the traffic being local, or the "free" ISP with clickthrough revenue, but having to pay for all the offsite traffic *and* probably not having the installed base of lines to support as many leeches as the pay-ISP?)
> It was the legal equivalent of whapping them upside the head with a large, meaty salmon. I loved it.
Agreed.
While it may or may not have been the most wise or prudent response that could have been written, I think we're all in agreement on one thing - for responding to an MPAA demand letter with accusations of perjury, this guy's proven that he doesn't merely have brass balls, but that he actually goes "clank" when he walks down the street:-)
Amen, amen, amen! Moderators, give that AC more points! This story isn't off on the wrong foot, he's off on the wrong leg!
Corporations are individuals in the eyes of the law. They can be sued. They can even be convicted of crimes. Their directors can be held personally accountable for their [i.e. the corporation's] actions. Being an individual under the law is why corporations exist! There's a reason why you aren't on the hook to pay the bills when a company you own shares in blows up, and that reason is that the corporation is a legal entity unto itself. The corporation is responsible for paying its bills -- the shareholders aren't.
The first line of the post from Mr. Rideau says it all: "in my interpretation [... ] companies are not individuals and have no right as such".
While I happen to think the bugroff license is cute and witty, the fact remains that the law is not terribly interested in Mr. Rideau's gross misinterpretation of the notion of the corporation's rights as an individual. Slashdot dropped the ball on this one. The GPL is as sound today as it was yesterday. We don't know how well it'll stand up in court, but if it's defeated, it certainly won't be because of some cockamamie "interpretation" that says corporations lack rights as individuals under the law.
> I wouldn't describe most of our sensory input as random, though it is certainly noisy.
Yeah - I should have said "chaotic" instead of "random".
> Is there some way a hardware-driven random number generator could help you "clean up" noisy images?
Actually, I remember seeing exactly such a thing - someone added some noise to an image, and the lines in the "noisier" image stood out better.
I can't find the link to that site, I saw it months ago.
I did, however, find "The Use of Analogue Noise in the Clarion Cochlear Implant to Improve Signal Coding" (Morse and Boyle), on this site. As near as I can figure from the abstract, previous studies hinted that adding noise to speech signals helps them become more audible in models of the cochlear nearve - these guys tried (and succeeded) in replicating the theory by adding noise to an implant in a live human being.
See also "The Effects of Additive Gaussian Noise on Speech Recognition in Cochlear Implant Studies" (Throckmorton and Collins), abstract a few pages deeper into the page. "Results indicate that the addition of sub-threshold noise to speech prior to signal processing improves both vowel and consonant
recognition." (though the degree varies from sound to sound and person to person.)
>If random events played such a significant role in the much larger size circuits of the human
mind, you'd think by now we'd have evolved compensatory mechanisms. Our brains are meant
to process and react to our environment, not invent new random data.
On compensatory mechanisms: Who says we haven't? Perhaps epilepsy is merely what happens to a brain when one or more of these mechanisms fails?
On random data: And what is the input into your ears and eyes, if not "random" data? Yes, our sensory processing mechanisms are engineered to process and react to external stimuli -- but many of those stimuli are essentially random.
Sorry, Mr. Penrose. Yelling "tubules" and "quantum" over and over again in Emperor's New Mind doesn't refute hard AI. It just means that the CPU in the deterministic Turing machine may need an embedded random-number generator based on a random physical process.
> On a related Illuminati note, did anyone notice that Mr. Gates retired on 1-13... adds up to 5 and 1+1 =2 23!
*evil grin*, it's all part of the plan...
Hey, I don't know about you, but if I were worth a billion from a recent IPO, I'd think $40M a small price to pay to paint a black flag with a 23K (yes, it'd have to be 23-karat, not 24:-) golden apple logo on the side of a space station.
To anyone who thinks the money could be "better spent elsewhere" - however bad Mir's present condition, until we get cost-per-pound-to-orbit down to under $100, the cost of keeping Mir alive is cheap compared to the cost of deorbiting it and sending up another station 10 years down the road. Given NASA's track record with the Shuttle, my money's on a privately-owned, run-for-profit Mir over ISS any day. Is flying there risky? Sure. But what's life without risk? If Oracle execs can go deep-water yacht-racing, and Virgin execs can try to fly balloons around the world, why shouldn't some billionaire strap himself into a Proton, cross his fingers, and go for the ride of his life?
From the article: "through his Bermuda-based holding company Gold & Appel," ...at which point I promptly spewed coffee all over my desk.
Anyone who's read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea should be rolling on the floor now in peals of giddy laughter. Given that Anderson is on the board of Roton, I'd say the Mir effort is probably serious, and I applaud him for the wonderful in-joke he's playing on fnord NASA and the rest of the "government fnord space bureaucracy" with his whimsical choice of names.
But then again, maybe that's just what the Illuminati fnord want you to believe.
The following was shamelessly stolen from SkeptiNews:
Just when you thought the continuiiiiing story of "Mir in Space" couldn't get any weirder, another Western business partner has emerged to save Mir and convert it into that anti-news stalwart "an orbiting space hotel for billionaires". This time, who should it be but Gold & Appel Transfers, of the Cayman Islands. Yup, "Gold & Appel Transfers": last observed in Shea and Wilson's ILLUMINATUS! trilogy as the front organisation for neophile outlaw Hagbard Celine and his Legion of Dynamic Discord. Terrifyingly for the few who still believe that book to be fiction, G&A is a real company with funds of over $300 million. President Walt Anderson made his money as co-founder of Esprit Telecom, and is now a major investor in the Space Frontier Foundation and the Roton, the orbital transfer system that looks like a beanie. G&A have already offered $21 million to the Russian govt to maintain Mir in a serviceable orbit, with more, they say, to come. It's unclear whether the group of investors can really rustle up the huge cash needed to maintain Mir; but wouldn't it be nice if, when the ISS finally boots in the 22nd century, NASA found that a bunch of Discordians had beaten them to it? http://mercurycenter.com/premium/front/docs/mir13. htm
I used to check out www.mp3.com for reviews on hardware until I realized that all they do is rehash press releases from companies that for the most part, don't even have products released. Going to the home pages of the companies themselves is of even less use; there's virtually no useful technical information available.
I'd like to see a standard set of tests any CD-based MP3 player should follow. Call it a benchmark - a torture test for any device purporting to call itself a CD-based MP3 player. At a very first draft, I'd like to see the following checklist in any review of MP3 hardware, and my thoughts on what should be required behavior in any such device, and what behavior would be "nice to have" but not essential.
CBR support I: Playback of files with constant bit rates of 96/44, 128/44, 160/44, 192/44, 256/44, 320/44. (Required: All. You might convince me that 320/44 is a "preferred", but embedded CPUs are fast enough now that if you can do 256, you should be able to do 320.)
CBR support II: Playback of files with low constant bit rates. Some old-time radio material or spoken-word material is encoded at 24, 32, or 64. Because it's mono, this is good; there's no real loss of quality. (Preferred: All. May be a requirement for some users.)
VBR support: Does it play back Xing/VBR at all the Xing/VBR quality settings? If not, what playbacks are supported? (Required: All.)
Media support: CD-R? CD-RW? Both? (Required: Both)
File display: Filenames? ID3 tag contents? Both? (Required: ID3-tag-first, then if no ID3 tag, the filename)
Filesystem: ISO-9660? Joliet? That next-generation-universal-filesystem? All of the above? (Required: ISO-9660 and Joliet. Only ISO-9660 should be required if and only if ID3 tag support makes the display of 8.3-munged Joliet filenames unnecessary.)
File layout: Files in current directory? Files in recursive subdirectories? (Required: All. Directory-searching is computationally trivial.)
Non-MP3 files: If you put a README.TXT file or a WINAMP.M3U playlist on your disc, is the player smart enough to not try to play it as an MP3? (Required: *.mp3 get played. All else skipped. Preferred: Support for at least one playlisting file format.)
For your typical 64M handheld, none of this matters. But if you've already got 10-15 CD-Rs full of burned MP3s, you care about whether they'll play on your new device. You care about the encodes you worked on from restoring all your old vinyl stuff will also play. You care about whether or not your practice of using subdirectories (or not!) on your CD-Rs as you burn them will screw up your player. Damn it all, you care about whether the device handles your data.
If mp3.com and the other reviewers of MP3 playback devices won't do it, and the manufacturers of MP3 playback devices won't disclose their specs, then we should.
What else belongs on the checklist that any MP3-CDR player should be expected to do before we plunk down our money to be first on the block to own one? What other files, directory layouts, and filesystems belong in Tackhead's Box Of Benchmark CD-Rs when he goes to Fry's or CC to try out the latest toy?
(Aside: As someone who doesn't use Joliet, and who renames his MP3s to 8.3 before burning to ISO-9660 CD-R, this AD-600A sounds pretty good if the firmware in the boxes they're selling supports VBR!)
While making the (valid!) argument that piracy wasn't a real threat to software and music and video products before, jim states:
> The first rule in mass-market money making is the guy with the best distribution channels wins.
That's just it, though! That's not why copy protection is stupid, that's why they're doing it.
If your distribution channel is free MP3s over the 'net, you may get listeners, but you don't get paid.
If your distribution channel is free copies of Netscape over the 'net, the same applies. If it's IE4 bundled with Win98, you do get paid.
If your distribution channel is copy-protected locked-up proprietary crap, you don't get listeners, but you DO get paid. And you get a full record of their listening habits, which you can resell by working in cahoots with snail-mail spammers like the DMA. If it's DIVX-style pay-per-listen, it's even easier, because you know when they're home and what they're listening to - for $0.50, I'll tell your telemarketers when your targets come home and you can call them 30 seconds after they turn the stereo on.
The war between MP3 and crappy-proprietary-copyprotected-shite is all about who controls the product. Technology has enabled us to give bit-for-bit perfect copies of music to our friends for free, rather than trading analog tapes, a freedom we've never had before. But it's also given the record companies the power (through, for instance, steganographically-added watermarks) to track everything you listen, and everyone with whom you share it - total control far exceeding what they've ever had before.
The only issue left is how to balance the abuse of our technologically-enabled freedom (MP3 piracy) against the abuse of technologically-enabled control (vendor lock-in, DIVX-style pay-per-play trackable music).
On that issue, I'm firmly and proudly on the side of the pirates. Why? Any abuse-by-piracy of MP3s and DVDs is an accident; MP3 and DeCSS were never developed with the intention of pirating music or video, whereas the abuse-by-control of the RIAA, CCA, the DIVX consortium, and the rest of the gang of intellectual-property pointy-hairs is always designed into their products with malice aforethought.
Make no mistake about malice aforethought. While copy-friendly (i.e. marketer-hostile) file formats are not a threat to present methods of distribution of music or video, they're a serious threat to the kind of Brave New World the entertainment industry wants to bring about in the future.
As you say - the guy with the best distribution channel wins. But RIAA is no longer content to control the music channel to your record store - there's more money in having control all the way from the recording studio to your eardrums, the technology to do so is now feasible, and that is why they see MP3 as a deadly threat.
Thank you for clarifying this. I echo your comments.
A UDP is not invoked lightly. It is invoked as a last resort against a set of servers that have resisted or ignored all reasonable requests to participate within the USENET community.
If @Home is incapable or unwilling to act as a responsible member of the USENET community, news admins are fully within their rights as owners of their news servers to reject traffic from @Home's users.
Similarly - by aliasing out the "udpcancel" site in the path, news admins who wish not to participate in the UDP are fully within their rights to ignore it.
This isn't about "censorship" or a "Cabal" (TINC). This is about the rights of news administrators to choose for themselves whether or not to accept traffic from a site that has demonstrated a clear inability or unwillingness to clean up its act.
To @Home users: The problem is with the management of the company who (poorly) administers your news servers. The proper course of action is to contact your @Home technical support or customer service reps and tell them that you want @Home's managment to authorize @Home's news administrators to take the actions required to bring @Home out of the UDP. While the rep you speak with on the phone can't help you, the message will eventually be heard by @Home management. While it's regrettable that the situation went as far as it did, the precedent for the UDP is good; UDPd firms generally do clean up their acts, and USENET is the better for it.
> many geeks are very understanding and considerate. Therefore many girls end > wanting them as friends, not as lovers. This is a real problem,
...only if you want a lover and a friend isn't "enough" for you:)
Relationships can come and go for the oddest of reasons. Friendships require far less maintenance and can also last a lifetime.
As one of the geeks that can't be bothered with the messiness and "analog"ness of sexual relationships (anyone remember that section of Hackers, by Steven Levy, that describes why the TMRCers never bothered with relationships?), I find a "just friends" arrangement ideal for me.
I'm presently rooming with one of my "just friends". We each have our own spaces; she to read and do research for her career, I to geek out and hack on hardware and software. We both work long hours, seeing each other sporadically during the week. Frankly, we're both too involved and interested in our careers to make time for a relationship (with each other or anyone else) and have sufficiently-differing longterm goals that a relationship between us would be silly anyway. If we want to have a bottle of wine and a good steak, however, we'll make some time and go out on the town to enjoy some the finer things in life, and neither of us has to worry about what happens after.
If you ask a woman out (whom you already know as a friend, we're not talking about strangers in a bar here) and she gives you the LJBF line - Let's Just Be Friends - it ain't the end of the world. She just might be sincere about it.
One more benefit of having a "just friend" - when you do get into a relationship with someone, you'll always have someone you can go to when you need a straight answer on something:
"Hey, Just-Friend, does she
really care when I leave the toilet seat up, or is she just being weird and trying to pick a fight?"
"Yes, she really does care! If you want to get laid again, put the seat down! Y'know how the toilet doesn't seem to get as filthy as it used to when you were a bachelor? That's not an accident! If you want to get laid right, try cleaning the toilet even if you don't think it needs cleaning!"
(Any similarity between that post and any conversations I've had is purely a coincidence. Honest. Guys, don't bother cleaning the toilet. Really. The Men Of Silicon Valley don't want your women, and none of them paid me $500 too add this paragraph.)
> We have no way to
keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers,
Web site designers, e-do gooders and
nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check.
Sure we do. It's called the "off button". Watch the last
10 minutes of The Osterman Weekend or any 10 minutes
of Max Headroom.
> Look at media coverage of sensational stories --
like the death of Princess Di, the O.J. Simpson trial,
the Monica Lewinsky mess or the recent electoral nightmare.
One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things does not belong.
> In the absence of a Regulon,
information could proliferate to the point that it overwhelms us.
The key thing about the 'net is that you are the Regulon.
Di entered my mental killfile the minute her brains entered the cement
post. She serves only as a reminder that Darwin (funny you should
mention him) weeds out the stupid from the gene pool without
regard to one's heritage. Get in a car with a drunk driver,
get outa the gene pool. The months of hysteria afterwards were just filler to sell ads.
OJ entered my mental killfile the minute he decided not to spray
his brains all over his white Bronco. No more gore, not interested.
The rest was just filler to sell ad space.
Lewinsky? The minute Starr decided "it's about sex", figuring he'd be able to piss off enough Republicans in Congress to impeach and convict, rather than "it's about the real crimes", it was over. The public might have been able to care about the other crimes, but nobody gives a wet slap about sex today. Starr failed to realize that the age when sex mattered is long gone. The congresscritters read the polls, and knew damn well the voters didn't care, and voted accordingly. Everything from Al Gore lying to defend Bill in January to the debate over impeachment-versus-censure was just filler between the commercials. (But seeing Bubba choke up on the cigar question was fun;-)
The election mess was amusing to watch - but you only had to read
one or two stories a day. What court's ruling, whether it's stacked
with Democrats or Republicans, and when it rules. It was only worth
watching because the answer would have affected the financial markets,
who had bet heavily on a Bush victory - every time a pro-Gore ruling
came out, holders of put options made a bundle as the market dropped
100 points in the next minute or two.
Basically, there was a buck to be made on the news conferences in
the presidential mess, and the rest was just filler.
That was my Regulon. Cut down OJ to an hour of watching a Bronco, Di to 15 minutes of laughter, Lewinsky to half an hour reading the Starr report and 5 minutes giggling at Bubba on the cigar issue, and the election fiasco to an hour or two a day and some nice trading profits.
Naah, with 150-odd articles posted by the time I replied to your post, had I not included it in a thread that was displayed on the first page, nobody would've read it, but thanks for the nice thoughts.
Your point about politicians creating (or more accurately, oversimplifying for purposes of manipulating the public with) problems is also key to this debate - if there's no crisis, there's nothing for the government to fix. The "War On Drugs" is probably the best example of a manufactured crisis in recent times.
Ditto to your comments on people not understanding the effects of multiple variables. Of course, when there's one cause and one effect, the manufactured crises are simpler to offer solutions to, and the solutions can be simpler to understand. Sheep seem to love simple things.
The truth (some problems can't be solved, others can be solved but would require everyone to change their value systems, and still others exist only as distractions to keep the people looking in the wrong direction while power is taken away from them) would frighten the sheep. The War On Drugs is probably the best example because all three truths apply simultaneously!
By the way, (and I know that in the context of this thread, you were merely using the guns/crime as an example along with fedbucks/betterschools and Lewinskis/economy) lax gun laws aren't the cause of the crime problem, but not for the reason you suggest. The real reason for crime is lack of moral laws. If we'd just put the Ten Commandments in the classroom and make the kids read them out loud every day, we'd have a generation of kids so damn moral that we'd eliminate the need for gun laws of any kind in the first place. For suggesting otherwise, you must be either a pagan or a communist. I'm running for office, not because I like the power and the glory, but because it's my God-given duty to protect America's innocent children from people like you. (For folks jumping in on this thread and reading it out of context, that's a joke!)
The saddest thing is that I'd never have been able to even conceive of such a preposterous joke had some politician not already beaten me to it by suggesting exactly that. On Slashdot, someone suggesting that the Ten Commandments in School would prevent crime would be flamed to a charred husk for being such an utter doofus for expecting anyone to take him seriously. Put him in Congress and he'll get a diehard bunch of fundies to support him; the source of money which will ensure his re-election.
Slashdot Mirror
What the suits in the DMA have always wanted is rules that let them spam our email the way they spam our telephones. But what the DMA wants for my mail spool is of no concern to me.
The day that DMA members pays for my internet access (the way, for instance, they pay for our "free" television), they're welcome to send me anything they want.
You continue with: ... obvious.
>The sociological purpose of business concerns gathering themselves into 'companies' is to utilize the strength of numbers, and variable skills of those numbers, and provide shelter if things come along to harm the business. Ahem.
> The sociopathical purpose of a chain letter is
I love the way you mince words - "sociological" has no meaning in the context of your sentence, other than that it begins with "socio". But to address your point, rather than flame your spelling -- is there a "sociological purpose" (I think you really meant "social benefit derived from") for business? Absolutely! Are chain letters sent by moronic sociopaths? Just as absolutely!
But when a business uses its "strength in numbers" to abuse people, they are exhibiting behavior just as sociopathic as any two-bit relay-raping scumbag. Was the Exxon Valdez any more acceptable because the disaster was caused by a company with a drunken tanker captain, rather than a psychopath pouring oil in the bay? Is it any less theft because the thief wears a suit?
Business is good. Email marketing via confirmed opt-in is very good. Spam is theft. Learn the difference.
> maybe we could pull a social engineering trick here:
>
> * Concede that certain kinds of spam (eg. JCPenny sales) are less agressive and annoying than other forms of spam (eg. porn/get-rich-quick)
> [
> * Public opinion will become more negative towards the get-rich-quickers (because they're not playing by the rules), and perhaps that'd be enough to keep the "bad spam" to a dull roar.
My apologies if I've misunderstood your post, but what the ring-tailed rambling fsck!?!
If you think there's a distinction to be made between "good spam" (from "good companies") and "bad spam" (from "scamming scuzzballs", you're playing straight into the hands of the DMA. The only "social engineering trick" here is that the DMA is trying to pull the wool over our eyes by making us believe that theft of service is OK as long as the thief wears a suit.
Spam is not about content. It never has been. Spam is about theft. JC Penney has no more right to consume my diskspace and network bandwidth (and if I'm on a wireless link, reading mail through a cellphone, my money) than Joe Chickenboner in his beer-can-littered trailer.
There's no "good spam" vs. "bad spam". It's unsolicited. It's commercial. It's email. It's theft. If you steal my resources, you get your connectivity yanked. If you're Joe Chickenboner, you lose your dialup. If you're a big mainstream company considering spamming, search for the term "mainsleaze". Look up what "RBL" stands for too. Big companies who spam get the same treatment, it just costs them more and takes a little bit longer.
Legitimate businesses do not steal potential customers' resources in order to market their products. Legitimate businesses which attempt to do so cease to be legitimate. Spamming will cost you your reputation and ultimately sales.
In defence of JC Penney, (to the best of my knowledge), they're only being mentioned here as a hypothetical example. The only spam I ever received from JC Penney's was when their insecure relay was raped a few years ago and used to send me a Make Money Fast. I looked them up on whois, and reported it (and the originating IP address of the spammer) to JC Penney's registered technical contact. The administrator wrote back within a few hours, and was quite embarassed and eager to secure his company's server to prevent such abuse in the future.
> of Subject: labelling, the CO law will have the same problem]
>
> The whole point of this is that if all the spam starts containing ADV: that
> makes for a very easy text filter, which most email programs support.
So what?
By the time the Subject: line is read, the damage is already done - the SMTP transaction is complete, the bandwidth has been consumed to send it, and the diskspace wasted to store it.
I have no desire to live in a world in which 30% of /var/spool/mail is composed of spam which only gets filtered after it's transmitted. I want a world in which the spam doesn't get sent in the first place.
A law that says "Go ahead, spam all you want as long as you put ADV: in the Subject: header" doesn't solve the fundamental problem, namely that spam is theft of privately-owned resources.
Would you say that all junk faxes are OK if labelled "Junk Fax! Throw me out!"? That telemarketing calls, regardless of "get me off your list" preferences, can be made at all hours of the day or night, so long as the droid who calls you at 3 in the morning says "I'm a telemarketer! I guess you just want another hour to think about our exciting offer!" before calling you again at 4am?
The junk fax law isn't too bad. In the US, junk faxes are worth $500 for the first offence. The TCPA isn't great (as it allows telemarketers the first call free) and it's hard to collect evidence and sue, but it's still possible. Both of these laws got watered down from what the general public wanted (extermination) due to the influence of pro-harassment organizations such as the DMA.
Consequently, despite the aforementioned laws, I still see junk faxes and get telemarketers calling me. I'm drawing my line in the sand here. I don't want to see more spam and filter it out - I want it, and those who send it, exterminated. I want the cost of spamming driven so high that today's spammers will be forced to find honest ways of making a living, like pimping their grandmothers for crack.
Any law that allows someone to abuse my resources, but denies me the right to sue his ass into the stone age, isn't worth passing. It's my FAX machine, my phone line, and my mail spool.
I support laws which say "Fsck with the private property of our citizens at your peril". I oppose laws which say "You can abuse other people's property as long as you follow a few rules". I vote and contribute to campaigns accordingly.
- At $10/pop, no individual recipient of non-ADV-tagged spam is going to pursue legal action. The Washington state law that allows recipients of spam to sue for $500 is infinitely superior to the CO law.
- Remember Murkowski's bill? Now that we've got the Colorado law, we'll see tons of spam with "ADV:" in the subject line, and the language "Since we used ADV: this isn't spam, nyaah nyaah nyaah". This law legitimizes spam, rather than prohibiting it.
- ISPs can sue for $10/message. Sure, that's millions of dollars. But how many ISPs are gonna spend the bucks on lawyers just to sieze some spammer's 1965 trailer, collection of beer cans, and a few rotting buckets of chicken bones?
Good:Hear me out on this; I'm not advocating open relays. Just a relay that's "open enough to give the spammer enough rope to hang himself". Sendmail on such a box could be configured to allow the first 100 spams to go through, (resulting in minimal harm to end users), and to then silently drop the next few thousands of spams on the floor. While spammers don't have the millions of dollars required to make it worth an ISP's while to sue, many probably do have $1000 or so in seizable assets, which makes it worth the while of individual Coloradans operating specially-configured relay "honey traps" to hunt the spammers down for fun and profit.
What to do next is obvious -- use the logs to grab the spammer's IP address, contact the NOC at the spammer's ISP and mention that your relay has been attacked, and that you'd like to sue the spammer under the Colorado law. Even if you require a lawyer to obtain the spammer's identity, the cost should be minimal, particularly with the overwhelming weight of evidence of the spammer's guilt on your side.
Once you have the spammer's identity, send a demand letter to the spammer for $500 to settle out of court - if he ignores the demand letter, drag him into court for the full $1000.
Repeat, once for every spammer who attacks the relay. Finally, you too can make money fast with responsible bulk email!
My general experience with Christians is that most of 'em are sheeplike - and follow along with what they're told by their church leaders. This leaves them ripe for manipulation by the hardcore coercive fundie groups such as those you've described. Much in the way a Scientologist will introduce the cult in an office - "it's just the management technology, you don't have to believe the religious parts of it" - it's easy for radical groups to infiltrate otherwise-legitimate churches.
The most effective response is much like the one used in the Scientology wars -- inoculation against the coercive memeset before the kids get into college (i.e. and are isolated from their ordinary peer groups and support mechanisms, thereby rendering them more vulnerable to attack).
The average run-of-the-mill Christian would probably be just as apalled at the heavy-handed fundie tactics as they are at the Scientologists'. Problem is, unless they've already got finely-tuned bullshit detectors, many of them see the word "Christian" and automagically assume there's no coercion going on. "Look, it says 'Christian' right there on the label! It's gotta be good for you!"
Mad props to my youth leader - I had a traditional Christian (Baptist, even!) upbringing, went to church, did the whole shebang - but our youth pastor spent at least one month every year with the high-school kids analyzing cults, both of the "Christian" and "pagan" varieties, and teaching us how to spot bullshit and manipulation from genuine faith. As a result, many of us included "all religion" in the "bunk" category and eventually abandoned the faith. Looking back, I think the guy knew this would happen - but figured that was a far preferable outcome than having any of us get sucked into the cult vortex.
That youth pastor of mine had faith. Not some moronic sheeplike blind devotion, but a sincere belief that if he gave us the tools we needed to think for ourselves, that we'd make the right decisions, and that God's will would be done even if many of us (myself included), having acquired those tools, subsequently used them to abandon religion altogether. That takes guts. That's faith. Beware of any group whose leaders tell you otherwise.
> J.Random Public doesn't want to be confused by the facts. [
> The more the spread [the meme] and get approval and agreement from other citizens, the
>more justified they feel in holding this meme [
> respect laugh at them and tell them what fools they were for buying the meme in the first place.
>
> The only answer I can think of is for us to go out and laugh at anyone we hear propagating these inaccuracies.
Humor is an effective weapon - possibly the best use thereof has been the alt.religion.scientology wars.
Here are a couple of representative USENET posts:
Post 1
Post 2
The effectiveness of humor against the $cieno meme complex has been demonstrated pretty effectively. Of course, it's hard not to laugh at someone who spends $300K to find out that the source of his personal problems involves volcanoes, H-Bombs, and an evil Galactic Overlord named Xenu, particularly when cult doctrine considers "joking and degrading" a high crime. (Solution obvious: Make everything a degrading joke about the cult - then stand back and watch cult members go apeshit, labelling everyone but themselves criminals, much to the amusement of anyone watching. Give a cult enough rope and it'll hang itself.)
And while we're on the subject of the Co$ and censorware, as a followup to my "Censorship is for suckers" thread -- is it any wonder that the very same Cult of $cientology ordered all its members to use it's own custom-branded version of Cybersitter on their home PCs?
For reference:
Co$ Censors Net Access for Members, and The Scientology Net Censor.
Now - if you're a God-fearing Christian, why on earth would you rely on a solution advocated by a satanic cult that believes that the whole Jesus story was merely an "R6 implant" - a false memory artificially-implanted into our collective unconsciousness by evil alien overlords? I'm sure glad my library is following the lead of the Cult of $cientology and using censorware!
This leads to another propagable meme: The only "major" "religious" organization to mandate its members' use of censorware is the Cult of $cientology. Why are we following the lead of a god-denying UFO cult? Do you want to trust your children's safety to a group of software companies, when at least one of them has already demonstrated a willingness to develop a custom version of their product to a nut cult that believes Jesus Himself was merely an fake memory implanted in us by aliens? Do the censorware merchants have no shame? How stupid do the censorware peddlers think we are?
> Besides, "Censorware allows your children to see porn!" is a much catchier headline then "Censorware keeps
your children from seeing 'The offspring'". It'll make the evening news much more often.
I've quoted it here because to me, this is all about propagability of memes. Some people evaluate memes based on truth values, but most don't. Truth is not a predictor of propagability of memes, and in order to win this battle, we need memes that can propagate as well among the fundie crowd as they do among the Slashdot crowd. .
Let's consider the memeset of our "enemy" here, and that Offspring lyric that got posted. Our enemy probably knows "The Offspring" as "that band that sings about beating people up and being a rowdy teenager". Blocking Offspring isn't a bug to these people, it's an accidental feature.
Those Offspring lyrics - put yourself in the brain of a stereotypical fundie and read the lyrics: "When will the world listen to reason / I have a feeling it'll be a long time / When will the truth come into season / I have a feeling it'll be a long time.."
Now, since you're a fundie, and you know that Offspring isn't "Christian Rock", you can only assume that they're not talking about "the world waking up to the realization that Christ is the One True Savior". In fact, you probably suspect that they're trying to get your kids to "wake up" and snap out of their fundie-raised upbringing. What we /.ers think of as "think for yourself" is - in the hardcore fundie mentality, "the sin of pride", a rebellion against God's divine authority that puts man at the center of their universe, not God - oh, the horror!
Do I agree with that logic? Not on your life. But $10 worth of hot grits down Jerry Falwell's pants says that the people who want blocking software do. And THEY'RE the ones propagating the memes right now, which is why we're losing this war.
We need to stop pretending that our opposition cares about the First Amendment. We know damn well they don't. Stop pretending that our audience cares about the First Amendment. They're too ignorant to care about things when the meme of "saving the chiiilllldrun is worthwhile at any cost" shows up. From a memetic warfare standpoint, the logical alternative is to take the battle to a level the sheeple can understand, and that means to start scaring them into submission the same way our opponents have been doing, and that means a memeset that propagates among fundies.
An audience of people who stand up and say "I used your filtering software last year and read about donkeys fucking little girls! You said you made your filters better, but I can still see that goddamn link!" is an audience ready to get my proposed meme:
Filterware isn't about protecting the children. It's a scam that can never work. The companies that write it and sell it are lying to you.
Unlike "You're blocking good sites too", where our idea of "good" is just as bad as pr0n to our enemies, this is a useful meme.
Consider: It appeals on the gut level - to paranoia, by accusing "big business" of running a scam on "the little guy", and describes a world in which Godless Amoral Corporations are trying to pull the wool over Your Preshus Chilldrun's eyes by hawking snake oil that can never work. They're not really for Jesus, they're just trying to make a buck in His name. (The fact that this is true isn't relevant -- it's that it's easily believed to be true that counts.)
More importantly - this meme gives its holder a sense of superiority. "I know censorware doesn't work. I know it's a crock. I know something other people don't know, which makes me better than other people!".
Finally - it doesn't conflict with their existing memeset. Our whining about the First Amendment makes us feel superior, because most of us realize that there are principles at stake beyond religious bickering. But it conflicts directly with the "God Uber Alles" meme that so heavily infects the fundie set. To these people, a theocracy is a Good Thing, and the First Amendment is a threat. But even the most diehard theocrat can see that "Being a Sucker" is a bad thing.
To summarize -- if you wanna do memetic warfare, pick memes that are easily reproduced. Pick memes that make their holders happy by reinforcing their propagators' self-esteem. And make sure you pick a meme that doesn't require modification to the existing memes held by your target audience.
It's what they've done to us so successfully with "We're for God, the children, and apple pie. They're for porn and using the first amendment as a lame excuse." When we whine about the First Amendment - it's taken for whining, because our argument says "there are things more important than your religious beliefs" - our meme conflicts with theirs and gets thrown out.
My proposed "You're being sold snake oil. Don't be a sucker" meme is every bit as true as our arguement about the First Amendment, but unlike the constitutional argument, it doesn't conflict with their existing complex of religious memes. You can go on thumping the bible and beatin' up faggutz and lezzbein' femminizt radikulz or whatever the hell else it is that hardcore fundies get off on - but you can do it without censorware.
Because You're Not A Sucker. And Censorware is for Suckers. Because it doesn't work. Because it never will work. And because it's all a scam being run by people who are invoking the name of God to make a quick buck. May they burn in hell, Amen.
> > "The principle occupation [of the MPAA] is to make sure that American movies move freely and unhobbled around the world,"
SteveB:
> "I did not have sex with that woman," says Clinton.
I think you picked the wrong Clinton quote. Clinton's memorable "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" would be more appropriate.
Valenti's definition of "freely and unhobbled" is based on axioms so wholly different than ours that he comes across as being clueless to us.
To us, content is content - a movie on film or a movie as a bitstream are the same thing. There's no difference between buying a DVD and playing it in a dedicated DVD player, or using DeCSS and playing it on our Linux boxen. We've "paid for our content" (the physical disc upon which the bitstream resides), and can view it using whatever mechanism we see fit. The medium upon which it resides or the source from which it's transmitted are immaterial.
Valenti doesn't see it that way - there are two types of content in his world; blessed content whose distribution and use is under his control, and unblessed content, which must be stamped out. The NFL/SuperBowl analogy was a good one -- to the MPAA (and in music, to the RIAA), content that moves without the rituals of payment and licencing is Bad Content, and must be eliminated. Content that moves after someone pays for it is Good Content, and (the unstated assumption in his argument) only Good Content should be able to "move freely and unhobbled". Of course, any movement beyond what's prescribed by the licensing restrictions renders it into Bad Content. (See the earlier Slashdot thread on "Is SDMI a consumer nightmare", and the discussion of domains through which a user is allowed to move files.)
To us, that's hogwash - "freely" and "unhobbled" are meaningless if they mean "only through Valenti's distribution channels". What's "freedom" if it's only "freedom to agree with Valenti's view of the world"? But to an MPAA exec, "through approved distribution channels where our sales reps have sold ad time or licencing rights" are the only imaginable ways in which content can be distributed. Anything outside of that ceases to be "Good Content", and must therefore - a priori be "piracy" and worthy only of extermination.
Valenti's not as clueless as he looks - he's merely arguing from an axiom set that's wholly alien to us.
It's a bit like the old Zen koan: the man who meditated on the ox for a year, asked to leave his room, replying "But my horns won't fit through the door". Valenti's notions of "free and unhobbled" are circumscribed by the licensing/distribution restrictions of his own making. I have no doubt that he's being sincere when he says "free and unhobbled" - but just like Clinton, it depends on what the words mean to him.
> > "If he's right, the dilemma is enormous: we have no particular place to go as a species.
> > We lack a common or universal goal beyond our pre-determined biological nature."
Hard_code:
> Well...duh... You must have missed Existentialism
And for those not into existentialism, he also missed Carl Sagan.
Had Katz written "If he's right, I [Katz] have an enormous dilemma", I'd have no beef. But he didn't. He projected his psychological needs onto all of us, and I'm calling him on it.
As Sagan might put it - the history of humanity is one of humblings. Jerusalem is not the center of the earth. The Earth is not at the center of the universe. The Sun is not at the center of the galaxy. And the galaxy isn't at the center of the universe either. To be sure, we're incredibly lucky - a universe not created for us managed to evolve us anyways. But it's a damn big universe, and it's not so surprising that somewhere, something like this happened - namely consciousness providing an evolutionary advantage and nature selecting big brains over big teeth and claws, and we're the result.
To assert anything beyond that smacks of hubris of the highest nature. Geocentrism, heliocentrism, the notion that the Milky Way was the entire universe, the notion of the "ascent" of man as the pinnacle of evolution - we've made these mistakes so many times before, must we really make them again, merely to satisfy Jon Katz' need for "a purpose to the species beyond biology?"
The lack of any common or universal goal is a feature, not a bug. Our consciousness enables us to transcend the limitations of our biology. Individuals can choose, for instance, to risk their lives going to the moon, or Mars, or beyond, rather than rutting mindlessly to spawn the next generation. They can dedicate their lives generating marvelous works of art - whether in paint, song, or code.
In short - we can do anything we choose to do - individually, and maybe even collectively - because we have no purpose, not in spite of the fact that we have no purpose.
> Whilst I am alive there is only one of me (luckily) but if I decide to upload my
> brain somewhere and plug it into a simulated living environment so it lives on,
> then you could end up with multiple hattigs, all of them with identical memories up to the age
> they were uploaded, and then all diverging as they went off to think their own thing.
Precisely! Given a brain-uploading technology, forking off multiple instances of your consciousness is trivial. (Re-integrating the knowledge acquired by multiple copies of you into a single brain would probably be impossible, though.)
I don't know why so many a bunch of UNIX geeks, of all people, are having trouble understanding the implications of being able to digitally-reproduce a brain!
It's all in the man page for fork(2).
On the cult's side, reasons for the merger included $cieno infiltration into Hollywood for the past 20-30 years in order to provide a sheen of legitimacy for the beleagured cult, as well as a surplus of Operating Thetans out panhandling for money now that org revenues have crashed following the CO$'s "Operation Foot Bullet" and public buggering on the Internet in recent years.
On the MPAA's side, they cited a need for individuals with experience in controlling the dissemination of dangerous information embedded in court documents, and "The Cult of $cientology was the obvious choice; they've got experience in these sorts of things that nobody else has."
The MPAA appears to have already started to put the Cult's Operating Thetans to good use; at least one lover^H^H^H^H^Htrusted confidante of Cult Leader David Missedcabbage was quoted as saying
The merger has resulted in a shakeup on the board of the MPAA; the new board will be composed of executives who have all proven themselves "more capable" than conventional executives through $cientology training, which traditionally starts with a "Communications Course", and goes upwards from there. When asked for comment, the new Chair of the MPAA managed to splutter
Members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, opon hearing the latter part of this outburst, are reputedly planning an IPO next week, proceeds of which will be used to sue the newly-merged MPAA-CO$ organization into oblivion on grounds of trademark dilution.
The CdC has neither confirmed nor denied plans to use a portion of the proceeds to purchase a thermonuclear weapon, and in a joint venture with a new orbital technology from Gold And Appel Transfers, Inc., dust off from Occupied Clearwater and nuke the site from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
(Background: For those who don't know the story, yes, the CO$ really did send cult members to court libraries, and had them sit at desks all day long, looking at the cover of the library's sole copy of the court documents that contained their sekrit skripturez, in order to prevent "unauthorized" people from reading them, copying them, and posting them to the 'net. The effect this had on the distribution of the court documents in question was, of course, about as good as the effect the MPAA and DVDCCA's suits have had on the distribution of DeCSS.)
For an ISP with a good newsfeed, that's probably all local traffic from their NNTP server to the dialup user. For an ad-supported ISP, that's probable all remote traffic to a third-party NNTP (or NNTP-via-HTTP, I'd guess through a server presenting decoded binaries as downloadable URLs to the end-user) provider.
My guess is that both ISPs are losing money. But which one is losing it faster, and why? (The big ISP, despite all the traffic being local, or the "free" ISP with clickthrough revenue, but having to pay for all the offsite traffic *and* probably not having the installed base of lines to support as many leeches as the pay-ISP?)
Agreed.
While it may or may not have been the most wise or prudent response that could have been written, I think we're all in agreement on one thing - for responding to an MPAA demand letter with accusations of perjury, this guy's proven that he doesn't merely have brass balls, but that he actually goes "clank" when he walks down the street :-)
Corporations are individuals in the eyes of the law. They can be sued. They can even be convicted of crimes. Their directors can be held personally accountable for their [i.e. the corporation's] actions. Being an individual under the law is why corporations exist! There's a reason why you aren't on the hook to pay the bills when a company you own shares in blows up, and that reason is that the corporation is a legal entity unto itself. The corporation is responsible for paying its bills -- the shareholders aren't.
The first line of the post from Mr. Rideau says it all: "in my interpretation [ ... ] companies are not individuals and have no right as such".
While I happen to think the bugroff license is cute and witty, the fact remains that the law is not terribly interested in Mr. Rideau's gross misinterpretation of the notion of the corporation's rights as an individual. Slashdot dropped the ball on this one. The GPL is as sound today as it was yesterday. We don't know how well it'll stand up in court, but if it's defeated, it certainly won't be because of some cockamamie "interpretation" that says corporations lack rights as individuals under the law.
Yeah - I should have said "chaotic" instead of "random".
> Is there some way a hardware-driven random number generator could help you "clean up" noisy images?
Actually, I remember seeing exactly such a thing - someone added some noise to an image, and the lines in the "noisier" image stood out better.
I can't find the link to that site, I saw it months ago.
I did, however, find "The Use of Analogue Noise in the Clarion Cochlear Implant to Improve Signal Coding" (Morse and Boyle), on this site. As near as I can figure from the abstract, previous studies hinted that adding noise to speech signals helps them become more audible in models of the cochlear nearve - these guys tried (and succeeded) in replicating the theory by adding noise to an implant in a live human being.
See also "The Effects of Additive Gaussian Noise on Speech Recognition in Cochlear Implant Studies" (Throckmorton and Collins), abstract a few pages deeper into the page. "Results indicate that the addition of sub-threshold noise to speech prior to signal processing improves both vowel and consonant recognition." (though the degree varies from sound to sound and person to person.)
On compensatory mechanisms: Who says we haven't? Perhaps epilepsy is merely what happens to a brain when one or more of these mechanisms fails?
On random data: And what is the input into your ears and eyes, if not "random" data? Yes, our sensory processing mechanisms are engineered to process and react to external stimuli -- but many of those stimuli are essentially random.
Sorry, Mr. Penrose. Yelling "tubules" and "quantum" over and over again in Emperor's New Mind doesn't refute hard AI. It just means that the CPU in the deterministic Turing machine may need an embedded random-number generator based on a random physical process.
*evil grin*, it's all part of the plan...
Hey, I don't know about you, but if I were worth a billion from a recent IPO, I'd think $40M a small price to pay to paint a black flag with a 23K (yes, it'd have to be 23-karat, not 24 :-) golden apple logo on the side of a space station.
To anyone who thinks the money could be "better spent elsewhere" - however bad Mir's present condition, until we get cost-per-pound-to-orbit down to under $100, the cost of keeping Mir alive is cheap compared to the cost of deorbiting it and sending up another station 10 years down the road. Given NASA's track record with the Shuttle, my money's on a privately-owned, run-for-profit Mir over ISS any day. Is flying there risky? Sure. But what's life without risk? If Oracle execs can go deep-water yacht-racing, and Virgin execs can try to fly balloons around the world, why shouldn't some billionaire strap himself into a Proton, cross his fingers, and go for the ride of his life?
"through his Bermuda-based holding company Gold & Appel,"
Anyone who's read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea should be rolling on the floor now in peals of giddy laughter. Given that Anderson is on the board of Roton, I'd say the Mir effort is probably serious, and I applaud him for the wonderful in-joke he's playing on fnord NASA and the rest of the "government fnord space bureaucracy" with his whimsical choice of names.
But then again, maybe that's just what the Illuminati fnord want you to believe.
The following was shamelessly stolen from SkeptiNews:
Just when you thought the continuiiiiing story of "Mir in Space" couldn't get any weirder, another Western business partner has emerged to save Mir and convert it into that anti-news stalwart "an orbiting space hotel for billionaires". This time, who should it be but Gold & Appel Transfers, of the Cayman Islands. Yup, "Gold & Appel Transfers": last observed in Shea and Wilson's ILLUMINATUS! trilogy as the front organisation for neophile outlaw Hagbard Celine and his Legion of Dynamic Discord. Terrifyingly for the few who still believe that book to be fiction, G&A is a real company with funds of over $300 million. President Walt Anderson made his money as co-founder of Esprit Telecom, and is now a major investor in the Space Frontier Foundation and the Roton, the orbital transfer system that looks like a beanie. G&A have already offered $21 million to the Russian govt to maintain Mir in a serviceable orbit, with more, they say, to come. It's unclear whether the group of investors can really rustle up the huge cash needed to maintain Mir; but wouldn't it be nice if, when the ISS finally boots in the 22nd century, NASA found that a bunch of Discordians had beaten them to it? http://mercurycenter.com/premium/front/docs/mir13. htm
(Fnords? What fnords? I don't see any fnords!)
I'd like to see a standard set of tests any CD-based MP3 player should follow. Call it a benchmark - a torture test for any device purporting to call itself a CD-based MP3 player. At a very first draft, I'd like to see the following checklist in any review of MP3 hardware, and my thoughts on what should be required behavior in any such device, and what behavior would be "nice to have" but not essential.
- CBR support I: Playback of files with constant bit rates of 96/44, 128/44, 160/44, 192/44, 256/44, 320/44. (Required: All. You might convince me that 320/44 is a "preferred", but embedded CPUs are fast enough now that if you can do 256, you should be able to do 320.)
- CBR support II: Playback of files with low constant bit rates. Some old-time radio material or spoken-word material is encoded at 24, 32, or 64. Because it's mono, this is good; there's no real loss of quality. (Preferred: All. May be a requirement for some users.)
- VBR support: Does it play back Xing/VBR at all the Xing/VBR quality settings? If not, what playbacks are supported? (Required: All.)
- Media support: CD-R? CD-RW? Both? (Required: Both)
- File display: Filenames? ID3 tag contents? Both? (Required: ID3-tag-first, then if no ID3 tag, the filename)
- Filesystem: ISO-9660? Joliet? That next-generation-universal-filesystem? All of the above? (Required: ISO-9660 and Joliet. Only ISO-9660 should be required if and only if ID3 tag support makes the display of 8.3-munged Joliet filenames unnecessary.)
- File layout: Files in current directory? Files in recursive subdirectories? (Required: All. Directory-searching is computationally trivial.)
- Non-MP3 files: If you put a README.TXT file or a WINAMP.M3U playlist on your disc, is the player smart enough to not try to play it as an MP3? (Required: *.mp3 get played. All else skipped. Preferred: Support for at least one playlisting file format.)
For your typical 64M handheld, none of this matters. But if you've already got 10-15 CD-Rs full of burned MP3s, you care about whether they'll play on your new device. You care about the encodes you worked on from restoring all your old vinyl stuff will also play. You care about whether or not your practice of using subdirectories (or not!) on your CD-Rs as you burn them will screw up your player. Damn it all, you care about whether the device handles your data.If mp3.com and the other reviewers of MP3 playback devices won't do it, and the manufacturers of MP3 playback devices won't disclose their specs, then we should.
What else belongs on the checklist that any MP3-CDR player should be expected to do before we plunk down our money to be first on the block to own one? What other files, directory layouts, and filesystems belong in Tackhead's Box Of Benchmark CD-Rs when he goes to Fry's or CC to try out the latest toy?
(Aside: As someone who doesn't use Joliet, and who renames his MP3s to 8.3 before burning to ISO-9660 CD-R, this AD-600A sounds pretty good if the firmware in the boxes they're selling supports VBR!)
> The first rule in mass-market money making is the guy with the best distribution channels wins.
That's just it, though! That's not why copy protection is stupid, that's why they're doing it.
If your distribution channel is free MP3s over the 'net, you may get listeners, but you don't get paid.
If your distribution channel is free copies of Netscape over the 'net, the same applies. If it's IE4 bundled with Win98, you do get paid.
If your distribution channel is copy-protected locked-up proprietary crap, you don't get listeners, but you DO get paid. And you get a full record of their listening habits, which you can resell by working in cahoots with snail-mail spammers like the DMA. If it's DIVX-style pay-per-listen, it's even easier, because you know when they're home and what they're listening to - for $0.50, I'll tell your telemarketers when your targets come home and you can call them 30 seconds after they turn the stereo on.
The war between MP3 and crappy-proprietary-copyprotected-shite is all about who controls the product. Technology has enabled us to give bit-for-bit perfect copies of music to our friends for free, rather than trading analog tapes, a freedom we've never had before. But it's also given the record companies the power (through, for instance, steganographically-added watermarks) to track everything you listen, and everyone with whom you share it - total control far exceeding what they've ever had before.
The only issue left is how to balance the abuse of our technologically-enabled freedom (MP3 piracy) against the abuse of technologically-enabled control (vendor lock-in, DIVX-style pay-per-play trackable music).
On that issue, I'm firmly and proudly on the side of the pirates. Why? Any abuse-by-piracy of MP3s and DVDs is an accident; MP3 and DeCSS were never developed with the intention of pirating music or video, whereas the abuse-by-control of the RIAA, CCA, the DIVX consortium, and the rest of the gang of intellectual-property pointy-hairs is always designed into their products with malice aforethought.
Make no mistake about malice aforethought. While copy-friendly (i.e. marketer-hostile) file formats are not a threat to present methods of distribution of music or video, they're a serious threat to the kind of Brave New World the entertainment industry wants to bring about in the future.
As you say - the guy with the best distribution channel wins. But RIAA is no longer content to control the music channel to your record store - there's more money in having control all the way from the recording studio to your eardrums, the technology to do so is now feasible, and that is why they see MP3 as a deadly threat.
A UDP is not invoked lightly. It is invoked as a last resort against a set of servers that have resisted or ignored all reasonable requests to participate within the USENET community.
If @Home is incapable or unwilling to act as a responsible member of the USENET community, news admins are fully within their rights as owners of their news servers to reject traffic from @Home's users.
Similarly - by aliasing out the "udpcancel" site in the path, news admins who wish not to participate in the UDP are fully within their rights to ignore it.
This isn't about "censorship" or a "Cabal" (TINC). This is about the rights of news administrators to choose for themselves whether or not to accept traffic from a site that has demonstrated a clear inability or unwillingness to clean up its act.
To @Home users: The problem is with the management of the company who (poorly) administers your news servers. The proper course of action is to contact your @Home technical support or customer service reps and tell them that you want @Home's managment to authorize @Home's news administrators to take the actions required to bring @Home out of the UDP. While the rep you speak with on the phone can't help you, the message will eventually be heard by @Home management. While it's regrettable that the situation went as far as it did, the precedent for the UDP is good; UDPd firms generally do clean up their acts, and USENET is the better for it.
> wanting them as friends, not as lovers. This is a real problem,
Relationships can come and go for the oddest of reasons. Friendships require far less maintenance and can also last a lifetime.
As one of the geeks that can't be bothered with the messiness and "analog"ness of sexual relationships (anyone remember that section of Hackers, by Steven Levy, that describes why the TMRCers never bothered with relationships?), I find a "just friends" arrangement ideal for me.
I'm presently rooming with one of my "just friends". We each have our own spaces; she to read and do research for her career, I to geek out and hack on hardware and software. We both work long hours, seeing each other sporadically during the week. Frankly, we're both too involved and interested in our careers to make time for a relationship (with each other or anyone else) and have sufficiently-differing longterm goals that a relationship between us would be silly anyway. If we want to have a bottle of wine and a good steak, however, we'll make some time and go out on the town to enjoy some the finer things in life, and neither of us has to worry about what happens after.
If you ask a woman out (whom you already know as a friend, we're not talking about strangers in a bar here) and she gives you the LJBF line - Let's Just Be Friends - it ain't the end of the world. She just might be sincere about it.
One more benefit of having a "just friend" - when you do get into a relationship with someone, you'll always have someone you can go to when you need a straight answer on something:
(Any similarity between that post and any conversations I've had is purely a coincidence. Honest. Guys, don't bother cleaning the toilet. Really. The Men Of Silicon Valley don't want your women, and none of them paid me $500 too add this paragraph.)
Sure we do. It's called the "off button". Watch the last 10 minutes of The Osterman Weekend or any 10 minutes of Max Headroom.
> Look at media coverage of sensational stories -- like the death of Princess Di, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky mess or the recent electoral nightmare.
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
> In the absence of a Regulon, information could proliferate to the point that it overwhelms us.
The key thing about the 'net is that you are the Regulon.
Di entered my mental killfile the minute her brains entered the cement post. She serves only as a reminder that Darwin (funny you should mention him) weeds out the stupid from the gene pool without regard to one's heritage. Get in a car with a drunk driver, get outa the gene pool. The months of hysteria afterwards were just filler to sell ads.
OJ entered my mental killfile the minute he decided not to spray his brains all over his white Bronco. No more gore, not interested. The rest was just filler to sell ad space.
Lewinsky? The minute Starr decided "it's about sex", figuring he'd be able to piss off enough Republicans in Congress to impeach and convict, rather than "it's about the real crimes", it was over. The public might have been able to care about the other crimes, but nobody gives a wet slap about sex today. Starr failed to realize that the age when sex mattered is long gone. The congresscritters read the polls, and knew damn well the voters didn't care, and voted accordingly. Everything from Al Gore lying to defend Bill in January to the debate over impeachment-versus-censure was just filler between the commercials. (But seeing Bubba choke up on the cigar question was fun ;-)
The election mess was amusing to watch - but you only had to read one or two stories a day. What court's ruling, whether it's stacked with Democrats or Republicans, and when it rules. It was only worth watching because the answer would have affected the financial markets, who had bet heavily on a Bush victory - every time a pro-Gore ruling came out, holders of put options made a bundle as the market dropped 100 points in the next minute or two.
Basically, there was a buck to be made on the news conferences in the presidential mess, and the rest was just filler.
That was my Regulon. Cut down OJ to an hour of watching a Bronco, Di to 15 minutes of laughter, Lewinsky to half an hour reading the Starr report and 5 minutes giggling at Bubba on the cigar issue, and the election fiasco to an hour or two a day and some nice trading profits.
What was wrong with your Regulon?
Screw the grammar. I just wanna see Katz learn the difference between a "1" and an "l". "l953"?
DUDE! It's a computer, not a typewriter! And the Courier font's "1" has been different from the "l" for decades!
Your point about politicians creating (or more accurately, oversimplifying for purposes of manipulating the public with) problems is also key to this debate - if there's no crisis, there's nothing for the government to fix. The "War On Drugs" is probably the best example of a manufactured crisis in recent times.
Ditto to your comments on people not understanding the effects of multiple variables. Of course, when there's one cause and one effect, the manufactured crises are simpler to offer solutions to, and the solutions can be simpler to understand. Sheep seem to love simple things.
The truth (some problems can't be solved, others can be solved but would require everyone to change their value systems, and still others exist only as distractions to keep the people looking in the wrong direction while power is taken away from them) would frighten the sheep. The War On Drugs is probably the best example because all three truths apply simultaneously!
By the way, (and I know that in the context of this thread, you were merely using the guns/crime as an example along with fedbucks/betterschools and Lewinskis/economy) lax gun laws aren't the cause of the crime problem, but not for the reason you suggest. The real reason for crime is lack of moral laws. If we'd just put the Ten Commandments in the classroom and make the kids read them out loud every day, we'd have a generation of kids so damn moral that we'd eliminate the need for gun laws of any kind in the first place. For suggesting otherwise, you must be either a pagan or a communist. I'm running for office, not because I like the power and the glory, but because it's my God-given duty to protect America's innocent children from people like you. (For folks jumping in on this thread and reading it out of context, that's a joke!)
The saddest thing is that I'd never have been able to even conceive of such a preposterous joke had some politician not already beaten me to it by suggesting exactly that. On Slashdot, someone suggesting that the Ten Commandments in School would prevent crime would be flamed to a charred husk for being such an utter doofus for expecting anyone to take him seriously. Put him in Congress and he'll get a diehard bunch of fundies to support him; the source of money which will ensure his re-election.