You forgot the essential component: he then delivered Thompson's body to the nearby dog food factory, where he is turned in to a new brand of dog food.
The caste system is primarily based around Hindu ideas, but non-Hindus are also judged under it. Only 7% of the nation (I may be wrong about this) are outside of the caste system. Other religions are placed, depending on area and sect, in to parts of the caste. For instance, Muslims have and are frequently untoucheables, as are some Jews. Christians are all over the map depending on where they are in India.
The caste system has sometimes even transferred out of India. British Indian immigrants sometimes hold on to elements of the caste system.
I wouldn't say that the UK legal world is virtue enfleshed, but it might be due to the fact that you have to take a slightly more significant financial investment and risk in order to launch legal action, making it so that assholes like Jack Thompson have to actually stump up a fair few more pennies if he was getting pissy about computer games in Britain rather than in the USA. That, and the fact that our school system sucks a little bit less than the American one does (compare American and British reactions to creationism: it's a valid theory, say middle America - it's a completely bonkers and stupid thing that mouth-breathing fundies believe, says Britain).
That said, the people who stir up the sort of rubbish Thompson gets up to aren't lawyers in Britain. They're far too busy working in the City firms and for the Government and making bucketloads. No, it's the journalists who do all this nonsense.
Of course, if you're shopping around for DSL in Britain, I'd avoid the company being advertised in your sig (PlusNet). I used them for about a week, and I got nothing but bad service and FUD Newspeak from the customer services.
Well, then, that's where the third part of my suggestion comes in to it. If it's that much of a problem, you open up the source code, grep through it, and recompile.
You have to draw a line somewhere. Are we going to rename Firefox because it subconsciously endorses the combination of fire and foxes. Perhaps some animal rights group is going to get pissy about it? Perhaps a group of anarchists is going to get annoyed that KRuler codifies in to it's name the fact that we need to be ruled. I've got a note-taking app on my desktop called Tomboy. Surely, this name could cause problems for certain feminist or lesbian groups.
Nobody has the right not to be offended. If it's such a big deal for this particular oppressed minority, a grep-replace-recompile could sort the problem out.
If the government are paying money for free software, they're even more stupid than I ever imagined. I run GIMP (and, once the torrent is done, GimpShop) on four computers in my home running Windows, Linux and OS X. Never have I ever spent any money on it - it's either been included with my Linux distro or has been available for a small download. That's because it's free software, and has no licence fees.
"Edgy", perhaps, but economically sound. And they've got a right to get enraged if the precious "agencies [and...] the corporate and non-profit world" are spending money on Firefox or the GIMP or OpenOffice or any other free software. It's free as in beer.
Of course, if it's a matter of the mentally impaired not being offended, it wouldn't take particularly long to open up the source code, grep for the word "GIMP" and replace it with "Happy Bunny Image Software" or whatever, then recompile a non-offensive version, even release it. It's free as in freedom, too.
unless the got it by other means, in which case they're not going to use the Gimp anyway
Counterpoint: Linux. No amount of copyright infringement of Photoshop affects the user interface of GIMP on Linux, except, perhaps, as a secondary effect.
I've never had to give my university (or my college: the University of London comprises many different colleges) my National Insurance number (our Social Security Numbers). The only people who've had access to that during my time at college have been (a) the local county government and (b) the Student Loan Company. Basically, the local government use it to assess how much loan they are going to give me and the SLC, which is a privately-run company who give students interest-free loans from the government, who actually drop the money in to my account.
Most universities in Britain do offer what are called hardship payments or hardship loans. These are grants/loans (I've seen them from between £100 and £3,500) which are available for students who need to pay for unexpected financial needs - ie. emergency healthcare, death of family, other disasters, etc. In the case of a hardship grant, then social security details might be useful.
Hmm. I'm not sure you've got your finger right on it regarding outsourcing. Take tech support. Tech support needs to be appropriate to the level of the user. If I call up a supplier because their router doesn't work (or I can't get it to work), and I quite clearly tell them that I'm not an idiot, I don't need the "move your mouse down and left-click on the Start menu, now go to control panel" treatment.
And I used not to get that. An old ISP I used from way-back-when, for instance, had the ordinary tech support line, and a line that gets you direct through to the geeks which they gave out to customers who weren't newbies (generally, the people ringing in to tell them their servers are borked and didn't need to have a hand-held guide on how to set up dial-up networking). It could have been just small-local-company friendliness, but it was useful.
The people doing the tech support were the computer game generation. But I'd swap back and have the local-friendly-BSD-nerds over "John from Mumbai" any day, since "John" seems unable to talk to me as if I'm not a newbie. If you're getting paid, you shouldn't be giving stupid answers to smart questions (though vice versa is fine).
(More ISP's ought to have a nerd-line so you can just report problems, rather than battle with tech support. I miss my old ISP.)
Just realised that I misused an apostrophe, thus demonstrating that, gloss and veneer aside, I am really nothing more than an angsty-gothy-emo-furry who slits his wrists for attention and moans about the fursecution and puts little x's around my name.
Two words: Sturgeon's Law. The LiveJournal communities I'm on (primarily political, philosophical and academic-related ones - libertarianism, philosophy, lawschool, atheism etc. - plus a few technical/computing ones like geeks, macosx and so on) are filled with reasonably good language, pretty good arguments and lots of interesting links and ideas.
You can't condemn a medium based on the numbers - otherwise we'd be condeming the POP3 and IMAP protocols because they spend a huge chunk of their time pushing "v1@gr@ c1al1z get yuur meds!". Similarly, blogs and LJ, while they have lots of tedious emo nonsense, also have people who think and link.
Condeming a medium for it's numbers is fine for television, where each bad show added reduces the availability of time slots for good shows, but since there's no real opportunity cost (beyond a few SQL queries and a few kilobytes of hard disk space) for putting stuff on the Internet, it's a bit silly to condemn all LJ users and bloggers because many are clueless or uninteresting. It's a free marketplace, and those who don't say interesting stuff don't get read (in theory, if not always in practice).
Yes, it is pretty amazing. I know people at my old school who are getting large chunks of their education from reading Wikipedia and other online sources. It's certainly expanding their minds in a way that their school wasn't, and it wasn't costing them anything beyond a DSL line.
CRTs are evil? Cool, then my Radeon is channelling the biggest dual-headed Satan the world has ever seen.
Counter-point: they can't be that evil. Jack Chick hasn't produced a pamphlet where a bunch of naïve youngsters go out and purchase CRT monitors, then their life goes to shit. Enter their local friendly evangelical Christian LCD seller, who helps them replace their Satanic screens with Godly LCDs. I would pay to see a Chick tract like that.
Simple solution - add the year of entry to the username. The username I have for my college's LAN and email is 'morristm04', for instance. (Of course, my college is rather an exception, since we usually do not have more than about 50 new undergrads each year).
Personally, I prefer $firstname.$lastname or $firstname$lastname.
Insert, "when I was at school, we didn't have the luxury of names! We were just numbers!!!111" rant here.
With celebrities giving their kids names like Prince Michael II, Little Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon, Rocco John, Peaches, Pixie, Tiger Lilie and, worst of all, Fifi Trixibelle, the names which your parents give you should really be taken as a serving suggestion.
Plus, going to parties and social gatherings where everyone knows each other only by online usernames is cool.
That is the problem with the Internet as compared to traditional infrastructures of archiving. Libraries and archives worked on the principle that having a book in n+1 places is better than just having it in n. Irretriveable loss, censorship and so on can not take place so easily if there are multiple copies stored in different places.
The Internet is centralised, in as much as mirroring is a rare thing, and content comes from one place. If I delete a file from my server, you cannot see it again, unless it's been archived. But upon publication of a book under the British copyright system, I'm mandated to send out copies to research libraries, ensuring that I can't change what I've written.
The Internet Archive are doing a good job in setting up the European branch. Basically, they currently have their set up in SF, and are trying to set up in Europe also. This will avoid a certain fault line, as well as any political problems that censorship brings. But, ideally, we'd be building an Internet Archive 2, run by different people, in different locations, to mirror content, in case we find that the current IA does something bad - like what Gracenote did, for instance.
Of course, this could be a final trading block with the record/movie industry - have your DRM, as long as you put non-DRM copies in an archive. (Hopefully, though, it won't come to that. They'll willingly forgo DRM because of consumer demand, and they'll willingly put stuff in archives for the same purpose).
What would be especially cool is if the $1 was sent to ensure archiving of that particular media type. Here in Britain, for instance, when you publish a book, to ensure copyright protection, you have to send out copies to a bunch of major research libraries - it's called "Legal Deposit".
Basically, on publication, you have to send one copy to the British Library in London. Five other libraries have Legal Deposit request status. These are the The Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Cambridge University Library, The National Library of Scotland at Edinburgh, The Library of Trinity College in Dublin and The National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. Legal Deposit request status means that if the libraries request them, they have to supply a free copy. In practice, publishers send out these six copies as a matter of routine. Nice anecdote: I'm a Reader at the British Library (ie. I have a right to request books for research purposes), and when I was working I requested a book. I got it, and tucked inside the sleeve was a rather ragged old letter from the publisher saying words to the effect "Under the Copyright Act, we are mandated to make a legal deposit of this book. Enjoy!". That brightened up my day!
Legal Deposit includes everything - books, newspapers and so on. If it's on paper and is published - ie. made available for sale and distribution - you have to do Legal Deposit.
The {$1^n...$1^n+1} fee could be used to fund these types of non-profit archives, including things like the Internet Archive.
Not only would this ensure accessibility for future generations to the ideas and culture of today, but it would also put ideas, culture and Enlightenment values back up on the agenda.
I'm a free market advocate, who likes small government, and liberty. But copyright law is in the unique position of really requiring a delicate balance. This is something we do not have.
All the main conference stuff has been in English. At the 'speedgeek', common-denominator languages were used in the (non-recorded) short presentations - I was with a German and a Dutch guy (I'm British), we all spoke English, so that's what was used in the presentations.
All the officiating is done in English. A few people are wearing name badges with the country codes or flags of the languages they speak.
If you want to get the videos, try here or here (the former might go offline when the conference packs up tommorow).
Also, there's video footage of the last conference - Hackers at Large. here and here.
I'm getting, over the next few days, as much of this as I can, and will make it available on BitTorrent if the rehash servers go down.
Dunno about IE7, but just discovered this as a result of your comment. I'd give you Slashdot Karma if I had any to give out. So, have psychological karma, a 'pat on the back'. This is cool.
Excellent. That means there's a pre-teen audience all set up and ready for the tentacle fisting extraordinare just about to be broadcast on the Disney Channel.
Dude, you've just written the readme.txt for the new VideoNasties.xpi extension I'm writing for Firefox. It's a fairly simple extension that starts adding nerdy words subliminally in to your web browsing experience, ramping it up over time so that eventually you'll become an über-nerd.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the essential component: he then delivered Thompson's body to the nearby dog food factory, where he is turned in to a new brand of dog food.
The caste system is primarily based around Hindu ideas, but non-Hindus are also judged under it. Only 7% of the nation (I may be wrong about this) are outside of the caste system. Other religions are placed, depending on area and sect, in to parts of the caste. For instance, Muslims have and are frequently untoucheables, as are some Jews. Christians are all over the map depending on where they are in India.
The caste system has sometimes even transferred out of India. British Indian immigrants sometimes hold on to elements of the caste system.
You can get the Onion elsewhere too. I've seen it here in London.
I wouldn't say that the UK legal world is virtue enfleshed, but it might be due to the fact that you have to take a slightly more significant financial investment and risk in order to launch legal action, making it so that assholes like Jack Thompson have to actually stump up a fair few more pennies if he was getting pissy about computer games in Britain rather than in the USA. That, and the fact that our school system sucks a little bit less than the American one does (compare American and British reactions to creationism: it's a valid theory, say middle America - it's a completely bonkers and stupid thing that mouth-breathing fundies believe, says Britain).
That said, the people who stir up the sort of rubbish Thompson gets up to aren't lawyers in Britain. They're far too busy working in the City firms and for the Government and making bucketloads. No, it's the journalists who do all this nonsense.
Of course, if you're shopping around for DSL in Britain, I'd avoid the company being advertised in your sig (PlusNet). I used them for about a week, and I got nothing but bad service and FUD Newspeak from the customer services.
Well, then, that's where the third part of my suggestion comes in to it. If it's that much of a problem, you open up the source code, grep through it, and recompile.
You have to draw a line somewhere. Are we going to rename Firefox because it subconsciously endorses the combination of fire and foxes. Perhaps some animal rights group is going to get pissy about it? Perhaps a group of anarchists is going to get annoyed that KRuler codifies in to it's name the fact that we need to be ruled. I've got a note-taking app on my desktop called Tomboy. Surely, this name could cause problems for certain feminist or lesbian groups.
Nobody has the right not to be offended. If it's such a big deal for this particular oppressed minority, a grep-replace-recompile could sort the problem out.
If the government are paying money for free software, they're even more stupid than I ever imagined. I run GIMP (and, once the torrent is done, GimpShop) on four computers in my home running Windows, Linux and OS X. Never have I ever spent any money on it - it's either been included with my Linux distro or has been available for a small download. That's because it's free software, and has no licence fees.
"Edgy", perhaps, but economically sound. And they've got a right to get enraged if the precious "agencies [and...] the corporate and non-profit world" are spending money on Firefox or the GIMP or OpenOffice or any other free software. It's free as in beer.
Of course, if it's a matter of the mentally impaired not being offended, it wouldn't take particularly long to open up the source code, grep for the word "GIMP" and replace it with "Happy Bunny Image Software" or whatever, then recompile a non-offensive version, even release it. It's free as in freedom, too.
unless the got it by other means, in which case they're not going to use the Gimp anyway
Counterpoint: Linux. No amount of copyright infringement of Photoshop affects the user interface of GIMP on Linux, except, perhaps, as a secondary effect.
I've never had to give my university (or my college: the University of London comprises many different colleges) my National Insurance number (our Social Security Numbers). The only people who've had access to that during my time at college have been (a) the local county government and (b) the Student Loan Company. Basically, the local government use it to assess how much loan they are going to give me and the SLC, which is a privately-run company who give students interest-free loans from the government, who actually drop the money in to my account.
Most universities in Britain do offer what are called hardship payments or hardship loans. These are grants/loans (I've seen them from between £100 and £3,500) which are available for students who need to pay for unexpected financial needs - ie. emergency healthcare, death of family, other disasters, etc. In the case of a hardship grant, then social security details might be useful.
Hmm. I'm not sure you've got your finger right on it regarding outsourcing. Take tech support. Tech support needs to be appropriate to the level of the user. If I call up a supplier because their router doesn't work (or I can't get it to work), and I quite clearly tell them that I'm not an idiot, I don't need the "move your mouse down and left-click on the Start menu, now go to control panel" treatment.
And I used not to get that. An old ISP I used from way-back-when, for instance, had the ordinary tech support line, and a line that gets you direct through to the geeks which they gave out to customers who weren't newbies (generally, the people ringing in to tell them their servers are borked and didn't need to have a hand-held guide on how to set up dial-up networking). It could have been just small-local-company friendliness, but it was useful.
The people doing the tech support were the computer game generation. But I'd swap back and have the local-friendly-BSD-nerds over "John from Mumbai" any day, since "John" seems unable to talk to me as if I'm not a newbie. If you're getting paid, you shouldn't be giving stupid answers to smart questions (though vice versa is fine).
(More ISP's ought to have a nerd-line so you can just report problems, rather than battle with tech support. I miss my old ISP.)
Just realised that I misused an apostrophe, thus demonstrating that, gloss and veneer aside, I am really nothing more than an angsty-gothy-emo-furry who slits his wrists for attention and moans about the fursecution and puts little x's around my name.
Two words: Sturgeon's Law. The LiveJournal communities I'm on (primarily political, philosophical and academic-related ones - libertarianism, philosophy, lawschool, atheism etc. - plus a few technical/computing ones like geeks, macosx and so on) are filled with reasonably good language, pretty good arguments and lots of interesting links and ideas.
You can't condemn a medium based on the numbers - otherwise we'd be condeming the POP3 and IMAP protocols because they spend a huge chunk of their time pushing "v1@gr@ c1al1z get yuur meds!". Similarly, blogs and LJ, while they have lots of tedious emo nonsense, also have people who think and link.
Condeming a medium for it's numbers is fine for television, where each bad show added reduces the availability of time slots for good shows, but since there's no real opportunity cost (beyond a few SQL queries and a few kilobytes of hard disk space) for putting stuff on the Internet, it's a bit silly to condemn all LJ users and bloggers because many are clueless or uninteresting. It's a free marketplace, and those who don't say interesting stuff don't get read (in theory, if not always in practice).
Why come to Europe? Current copyright for authors is life + 70 years. That's not exactly friendly for the public domain.
Yes, it is pretty amazing. I know people at my old school who are getting large chunks of their education from reading Wikipedia and other online sources. It's certainly expanding their minds in a way that their school wasn't, and it wasn't costing them anything beyond a DSL line.
CRTs are evil? Cool, then my Radeon is channelling the biggest dual-headed Satan the world has ever seen.
Counter-point: they can't be that evil. Jack Chick hasn't produced a pamphlet where a bunch of naïve youngsters go out and purchase CRT monitors, then their life goes to shit. Enter their local friendly evangelical Christian LCD seller, who helps them replace their Satanic screens with Godly LCDs. I would pay to see a Chick tract like that.
Simple solution - add the year of entry to the username. The username I have for my college's LAN and email is 'morristm04', for instance. (Of course, my college is rather an exception, since we usually do not have more than about 50 new undergrads each year).
Personally, I prefer $firstname.$lastname or $firstname$lastname.
Insert, "when I was at school, we didn't have the luxury of names! We were just numbers!!!111" rant here.
With celebrities giving their kids names like Prince Michael II, Little Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon, Rocco John, Peaches, Pixie, Tiger Lilie and, worst of all, Fifi Trixibelle, the names which your parents give you should really be taken as a serving suggestion.
Plus, going to parties and social gatherings where everyone knows each other only by online usernames is cool.
That is the problem with the Internet as compared to traditional infrastructures of archiving. Libraries and archives worked on the principle that having a book in n+1 places is better than just having it in n. Irretriveable loss, censorship and so on can not take place so easily if there are multiple copies stored in different places.
The Internet is centralised, in as much as mirroring is a rare thing, and content comes from one place. If I delete a file from my server, you cannot see it again, unless it's been archived. But upon publication of a book under the British copyright system, I'm mandated to send out copies to research libraries, ensuring that I can't change what I've written.
The Internet Archive are doing a good job in setting up the European branch. Basically, they currently have their set up in SF, and are trying to set up in Europe also. This will avoid a certain fault line, as well as any political problems that censorship brings. But, ideally, we'd be building an Internet Archive 2, run by different people, in different locations, to mirror content, in case we find that the current IA does something bad - like what Gracenote did, for instance.
Of course, this could be a final trading block with the record/movie industry - have your DRM, as long as you put non-DRM copies in an archive. (Hopefully, though, it won't come to that. They'll willingly forgo DRM because of consumer demand, and they'll willingly put stuff in archives for the same purpose).
What would be especially cool is if the $1 was sent to ensure archiving of that particular media type. Here in Britain, for instance, when you publish a book, to ensure copyright protection, you have to send out copies to a bunch of major research libraries - it's called "Legal Deposit".
Basically, on publication, you have to send one copy to the British Library in London. Five other libraries have Legal Deposit request status. These are the The Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Cambridge University Library, The National Library of Scotland at Edinburgh, The Library of Trinity College in Dublin and The National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. Legal Deposit request status means that if the libraries request them, they have to supply a free copy. In practice, publishers send out these six copies as a matter of routine. Nice anecdote: I'm a Reader at the British Library (ie. I have a right to request books for research purposes), and when I was working I requested a book. I got it, and tucked inside the sleeve was a rather ragged old letter from the publisher saying words to the effect "Under the Copyright Act, we are mandated to make a legal deposit of this book. Enjoy!". That brightened up my day!
Legal Deposit includes everything - books, newspapers and so on. If it's on paper and is published - ie. made available for sale and distribution - you have to do Legal Deposit.
The {$1^n...$1^n+1} fee could be used to fund these types of non-profit archives, including things like the Internet Archive.
Not only would this ensure accessibility for future generations to the ideas and culture of today, but it would also put ideas, culture and Enlightenment values back up on the agenda.
I'm a free market advocate, who likes small government, and liberty. But copyright law is in the unique position of really requiring a delicate balance. This is something we do not have.
All the main conference stuff has been in English. At the 'speedgeek', common-denominator languages were used in the (non-recorded) short presentations - I was with a German and a Dutch guy (I'm British), we all spoke English, so that's what was used in the presentations.
All the officiating is done in English. A few people are wearing name badges with the country codes or flags of the languages they speak.
If you want to get the videos, try here or here (the former might go offline when the conference packs up tommorow).
Also, there's video footage of the last conference - Hackers at Large. here and here.
I'm getting, over the next few days, as much of this as I can, and will make it available on BitTorrent if the rehash servers go down.
I think everyone went to the showers for the first day or so. Then they went all odd and cold, so everybody's given up.
Dunno about IE7, but just discovered this as a result of your comment. I'd give you Slashdot Karma if I had any to give out. So, have psychological karma, a 'pat on the back'. This is cool.
You can set YubNub as the handler for non-URL content in the FF address bar, or just install it using Mycroft. Same result.
Sexier, because Yubnub is programmed in a language that has a name shared with a Donald Faagen song and a precious stone.
Excellent. That means there's a pre-teen audience all set up and ready for the tentacle fisting extraordinare just about to be broadcast on the Disney Channel.
Dude, you've just written the readme.txt for the new VideoNasties.xpi extension I'm writing for Firefox. It's a fairly simple extension that starts adding nerdy words subliminally in to your web browsing experience, ramping it up over time so that eventually you'll become an über-nerd.