Personally, I was designing databases when I was 7 years old with the knowledge I was able to cull out of a stack of Byte magazines. I don't think he's particularly unusual.
This is such a joke. What civil liberties and personal rights are you voting to protect? Your right to pirate copyrighted materials on PirateBay? It's called the PIRATE party.
Slashdot has become a sickening pro-piracy website. Have you ever wondered why the big names like John Carmack no longer post here? Why doesn't he deserve to get paid for his work?
Some of us think you anti-piracy people belong in jail. If this trend continues, you very well might end up there. Might want to think about that.
Pretty much anyone who owns shares of company he works in can be considered communist:)
When it's inclusive of all people in the society, it's a communist economy. When it's exclusive and acts to increase power for its members by increasing its share at the expense of other people in the society, it's a conspiracy to disenfranchise others. But your understanding is a lot closer to reality than most.
I'm not going to debate the merits of Communism here... that's a recipie for disaster. Suffice to say that I am limitting myself to actual circumstances as they exist and affect the topics which we are discussing.
The actual circumstances are, you're a bastard step child who is being fed by the commune but isn't doing any work who likes to hang around behind the shed scheming and smoking cigarettes.
When you stop sucking on the teat of the Communist and Socialist countries who are actually making everything that keeps you alive and take responsibility for yourself, then you can start dissing their social systems. Until you do, you're a hypocritical blowhard.
Communism is when everyone on the farm gets to eat the food. Typically, everyone on the farm helps to grow it too. That's communism.
Sometimes Dad makes the decisions about what the plan will be, sometimes the wise old tribal elder makes the decisions about what the plan will be, sometimes the guy with the biggest stick makes the decisions about what the plan will be, sometimes everyone raises their hand and decides together what the plan will be. But that's politics.
If you want transparency and equality, you need to keep the communism, but get the political situation to one where everyone is raising their hands.
There are people in the commercial realm who will claim that the differences between Open Source and Commercial are insignificant, and that the current state of the code should be the sole quality by which they are judged. And the Open Source people will foam at the mouth over it, because the differences are very significant.
Then those same people will turn around and claim that the differences between Free Software and Open Source are insignificant.
Compromises that grant others leverage over you are never insignificant.
Woah easy there cowboy. This "rule" only applies to historical data of the society, not general evidence. If my hard drive crashes or gets wiped, the drive itself, in its sturdy metal casing, will be around for many, many years to come.
Drop it in salt water. Check on it when you retire. See if you still feel the same way.
Tell me, how does viewing yourself as an authority figure on right & wrong work so well with your anarchistic beliefs?
I never claimed to be an anarchist. I believe in systems that are inclusive and subtle and do not manufacture consent where it does not exist. The tyranny of my society precludes me from living by my beliefs. It does this by enforcing estrangement and placing me permanently in the role of a dependent. It also prevents any of you from living by your beliefs. That is what makes me so god damned angry all the time. I have no desire to personally run the world. I just want the systems that allow the arbitrary whims of a few insane and anti-social individuals to be reinforced by the rule of law laid low. There will be no room for leaders until we topple the rulers. To paraphrase Pink Floyd, I know that you are turning away from the pain and downtrodden because you are not free. If you were your own authority figure on what is right and wrong, I believe that you would do things differently.
We need to stop respecting the right of modern feudal lords to remain free and pursue happiness and start respecting the sanctity of the circle of life and peoples right and duty to be directly connected to that which keeps them alive. That is how I define what is right and what is wrong when I look at the world.
Oh, and in case you didn't notice, I'm very inconsistent in my posting history. That's because I enjoy defending the positions that no one else will defend. I find it tells you some very surprising things about WHY people believe in the things they believe in, things you never would have learned if you hadn't taken the devils advocate position. That's why I don't use my real name. It's not because I'm a coward, it's because I don't want to be bound only to say things that I mean.
Yes, you're a sleaze. The fact that someone defaults on payment to you doesn't mean you go do shitty things to other people and justify it by the loss you took. You are one of the people who belongs in the back of the van.
Most of our records would be worthless in a hundred years. Actually, most of them are nearly worthless in a year. Would it really matter to somebody in the future that I spend $15.19 on June 1st at Lulu.com, for example? Because record keeping is so cheap compared to historical examples, we keep a bunch of records nobody would have bothered with in the past.
Doesn't this make you question the presumption that we're at the pinnacle of human technological achievement? The more technologically advanced we get, the less durable the things we create seem to be... it implies that the more technologically advanced an ancient culture was, the less evidence there will be that they ever existed.
How do you guys feel about the DRM in hospitals when you read about this stuff? The people you entrusted (willingly or not) to wield your political authority for you are determined to see it happen. Calls the validity of the whole system into question, doesn't it?
I'd like to meet your coworker in the alley behind where you work. If you give him a whole bunch of whiskey so that he can barely stand before he gets there, maybe I could offer you some money once the trunk of my car shuts?
You give the population the chance to shape their own society for a change, you should expect that what they create for themselves won't resemble what currently exists and won't have the same priorities or measure of success as what currently exists. If that doesn't happen, the system is corrupted. The only way that this initiative can be made consistent with the views of the established order is to corrupt it to the point of uselessness and hypocrisy.
When you say "realistic goals", all you really mean is "goals that are realistic while still holding XXX sacrosanct". What you mean is, "freedom within the narrow bounds of what the tyranny allows".
You reveal yourself to be an enemy of freedom. Wave and say hi.
Linux just isn't ready for the child locating system yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check where their children are located, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.
The analogy is horribly flawed: The stars identified Jews so they would be discriminated against by other people as well as by the state (e.g. employers, benches, certain events, buildings etc.)
I'm confused... I thought the stars were intended to identify people who adhere to racist ideologies so the rest of the people could watch out for them. Their holy books unequivocally support racism against outsiders, do they not? Mouldy old books aside, those who follow the orthodoxy don't marry outside their own race, and are punished with ostracism if they do. And, of course, the crimes of the nation of Israel make even the worst recantation of the holocaust look petty by comparison...
Yes, I think the Scientologist chose very appropriately when he compared his organization with Judaism...
I was married to one (bulimic). Advertising was not to blame--deep rooted insecurities and personal flaws were.
Doesn't happen in a vacuum. Nations all over the world recently instituted laws regarding the minimum BMI models for mass marketing campaigns must meet, because people all around the world recognize that the harm is real, and are attempting to "mitigate" it. Your harsh and bitter judgment about your ex-wife is rather irrelevant...
Here's a much better and shorter answer to the questions you pose in your response: ignore it.
Just so you are aware, there are millions of people in the world who suffer from eating disorders. I've spoken with many women, young and old, who suffer from them. I've spoken with people who are trying desperately to establish some sort of positive self image for themselves, only to be confronted with a photoshopped image of some woman who only exists in a graphic designers wet dream. 5 minutes later, they're sticking their fingers down their throat and burning their esophagus or simply refusing to eat. Often, they die from this behavior.
This is just one subset of society. They are not the only ones. But they are an excellent real world example of advertising LITERALLY killing people.
I think you are putting way to much stock in how a few minutes of advertising can adversely affect your life. Just ignore them, fast forward, or hit the DVD Menu button and skip all that crap. Seriously the only way to avoid all of what you call "corporate propaganda" is to live in a cave, never buy anything and live a completely self-sufficient life, never have any contact with the outside world, never again read anything, listen to anything, or watch anything. Then you would truly be "free" of the corporate shackles. (As a bonus you could also realize that you've had people shouting in your ears their whole life and that you never realized how much your thinking had been muddled - in the silence of your cave.)
Ahh... now you're telling me it's impossible and/or impractical. Which is great, because it just so happens I already did it. As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of pieces for members of an eating disorder recovery group on how to avoid all the negative imagery and get healthier. It's on a private forum, so I'll just stick it in here.
With this tool, you can remove advertisements, filter out sites you don't ever want to see in your search results, and remove google tracking. Which may screw up Muses website statistics tracking, but will prevent you from becoming a target for advertisements specifically related to eating disorders and dieting etc.
If you take the time to install and set up these tools, you will be amazed at the difference.
This mail reader has a built in spam blocker that learns how to identify spam as you mark things as spam/not spam. This will go a long way towards keeping your mailbox advertisement free.
Once you've got that installed, you want to be using it to read your web based mail, like Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.
Once you've installed this, you'll be able to view your mail from all these websites without having to see their banners and other assorted crap.
After this is all done, you should set up folders for every piece of mail you expect to receive, and filters to automatically move them there. This will prefilter your pile, and your learning spam filters will also prefilter.
Between the two, you'll have an ever shrinking pile of messages that "might" be spam to wade through and mark as "is spam" or "is not spam".
--//--
How to avoid advertising in your multimedia:
Stop paying for cable television. Disconnect your service, and use the money you save to buy a DVD burner for backup, a video card for your computer that supports TV-Out, and a large external hard drive that you can use to carry files to and from your fr
Or you can just stick the disc in the player, go make popcorn and when it's ready the movie has reached menu. What's so difficult about it?
I'm not talking about media you purchase, but media you rent.
Ripping it is faster, more convenient and removes the corporate propaganda. If I can't remove the propaganda, I won't watch it at all, and I won't let my kid watch it.
You would be surprised how jarring it is once you've freed yourself from it... like someone who grew up in the city going camping for a month in the wilderness, then coming home to realize that they've had people shouting in their ears their whole life and that they never realized how much their thinking had been muddled and their senses numbed by what was being done to them until they finally got free of it.
Once you actually experience it for yourself, you start to feel like someone who just realized they've been abused their whole life and didn't know.
I'd bet that ripping the DVD takes more than a minute.
You spend a few seconds setting it up, and it runs while you're making popcorn. Then you can stick the disc in the closet and watch your movie across the LAN without being forced to sit through propaganda every time you watch. It's a good deal more convenient, even if you do own the original media.
Technology that restricts peoples access to knowledge and culture is evil. There is no justification for its existence that isn't derived from someones desire to create a hostile and unfriendly environment, then charge people for relief from the consequences of that environment. That is a fundamentally evil thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I was designing databases when I was 7 years old with the knowledge I was able to cull out of a stack of Byte magazines. I don't think he's particularly unusual.
This is such a joke. What civil liberties and personal rights are you voting to protect? Your right to pirate copyrighted materials on PirateBay? It's called the PIRATE party.
Slashdot has become a sickening pro-piracy website. Have you ever wondered why the big names like John Carmack no longer post here? Why doesn't he deserve to get paid for his work?
Some of us think you anti-piracy people belong in jail. If this trend continues, you very well might end up there. Might want to think about that.
Pretty much anyone who owns shares of company he works in can be considered communist :)
When it's inclusive of all people in the society, it's a communist economy. When it's exclusive and acts to increase power for its members by increasing its share at the expense of other people in the society, it's a conspiracy to disenfranchise others. But your understanding is a lot closer to reality than most.
I'm not going to debate the merits of Communism here... that's a recipie for disaster. Suffice to say that I am limitting myself to actual circumstances as they exist and affect the topics which we are discussing.
The actual circumstances are, you're a bastard step child who is being fed by the commune but isn't doing any work who likes to hang around behind the shed scheming and smoking cigarettes.
When you stop sucking on the teat of the Communist and Socialist countries who are actually making everything that keeps you alive and take responsibility for yourself, then you can start dissing their social systems. Until you do, you're a hypocritical blowhard.
Communism is when everyone on the farm gets to eat the food. Typically, everyone on the farm helps to grow it too. That's communism.
Sometimes Dad makes the decisions about what the plan will be, sometimes the wise old tribal elder makes the decisions about what the plan will be, sometimes the guy with the biggest stick makes the decisions about what the plan will be, sometimes everyone raises their hand and decides together what the plan will be. But that's politics.
If you want transparency and equality, you need to keep the communism, but get the political situation to one where everyone is raising their hands.
They're true Americans all right...
Indeed.
There are people in the commercial realm who will claim that the differences between Open Source and Commercial are insignificant, and that the current state of the code should be the sole quality by which they are judged. And the Open Source people will foam at the mouth over it, because the differences are very significant.
Then those same people will turn around and claim that the differences between Free Software and Open Source are insignificant.
Compromises that grant others leverage over you are never insignificant.
Woah easy there cowboy. This "rule" only applies to historical data of the society, not general evidence. If my hard drive crashes or gets wiped, the drive itself, in its sturdy metal casing, will be around for many, many years to come.
Drop it in salt water. Check on it when you retire. See if you still feel the same way.
Tell me, how does viewing yourself as an authority figure on right & wrong work so well with your anarchistic beliefs?
I never claimed to be an anarchist. I believe in systems that are inclusive and subtle and do not manufacture consent where it does not exist. The tyranny of my society precludes me from living by my beliefs. It does this by enforcing estrangement and placing me permanently in the role of a dependent. It also prevents any of you from living by your beliefs. That is what makes me so god damned angry all the time. I have no desire to personally run the world. I just want the systems that allow the arbitrary whims of a few insane and anti-social individuals to be reinforced by the rule of law laid low. There will be no room for leaders until we topple the rulers. To paraphrase Pink Floyd, I know that you are turning away from the pain and downtrodden because you are not free. If you were your own authority figure on what is right and wrong, I believe that you would do things differently.
We need to stop respecting the right of modern feudal lords to remain free and pursue happiness and start respecting the sanctity of the circle of life and peoples right and duty to be directly connected to that which keeps them alive. That is how I define what is right and what is wrong when I look at the world.
Oh, and in case you didn't notice, I'm very inconsistent in my posting history. That's because I enjoy defending the positions that no one else will defend. I find it tells you some very surprising things about WHY people believe in the things they believe in, things you never would have learned if you hadn't taken the devils advocate position. That's why I don't use my real name. It's not because I'm a coward, it's because I don't want to be bound only to say things that I mean.
Yes, you're a sleaze. The fact that someone defaults on payment to you doesn't mean you go do shitty things to other people and justify it by the loss you took. You are one of the people who belongs in the back of the van.
Most of our records would be worthless in a hundred years. Actually, most of them are nearly worthless in a year. Would it really matter to somebody in the future that I spend $15.19 on June 1st at Lulu.com, for example? Because record keeping is so cheap compared to historical examples, we keep a bunch of records nobody would have bothered with in the past.
Doesn't this make you question the presumption that we're at the pinnacle of human technological achievement? The more technologically advanced we get, the less durable the things we create seem to be... it implies that the more technologically advanced an ancient culture was, the less evidence there will be that they ever existed.
How do you guys feel about the DRM in hospitals when you read about this stuff? The people you entrusted (willingly or not) to wield your political authority for you are determined to see it happen. Calls the validity of the whole system into question, doesn't it?
I'd like to meet your coworker in the alley behind where you work. If you give him a whole bunch of whiskey so that he can barely stand before he gets there, maybe I could offer you some money once the trunk of my car shuts?
...
It would mean a lot to me
Someone mod this guy up. He's got the right idea.
I apologize for having an extreme urge to shape new ideas into something tangible and workable. Good luck with your witch hunt!
Thanks, but it's not necessary... I'd have a harder time finding sand on the beach than finding witches around here...
You give the population the chance to shape their own society for a change, you should expect that what they create for themselves won't resemble what currently exists and won't have the same priorities or measure of success as what currently exists. If that doesn't happen, the system is corrupted. The only way that this initiative can be made consistent with the views of the established order is to corrupt it to the point of uselessness and hypocrisy.
When you say "realistic goals", all you really mean is "goals that are realistic while still holding XXX sacrosanct". What you mean is, "freedom within the narrow bounds of what the tyranny allows".
You reveal yourself to be an enemy of freedom. Wave and say hi.
Linux just isn't ready for the child locating system yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check where their children are located, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.
I'm a deep halfling, you insensitive clod!
The analogy is horribly flawed: The stars identified Jews so they would be discriminated against by other people as well as by the state (e.g. employers, benches, certain events, buildings etc.)
I'm confused... I thought the stars were intended to identify people who adhere to racist ideologies so the rest of the people could watch out for them. Their holy books unequivocally support racism against outsiders, do they not? Mouldy old books aside, those who follow the orthodoxy don't marry outside their own race, and are punished with ostracism if they do. And, of course, the crimes of the nation of Israel make even the worst recantation of the holocaust look petty by comparison...
Yes, I think the Scientologist chose very appropriately when he compared his organization with Judaism...
1986
BYTE: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do you think will use the GNU system when it is done?
Stallman: I have no idea, but it is not an important question.
And, 22 years later... the answer is, every person on earth who owns a computer.
Ok... I need to know...
What the hell is a UMD, and what makes a UMD-less device significant?
I was married to one (bulimic). Advertising was not to blame--deep rooted insecurities and personal flaws were.
Doesn't happen in a vacuum. Nations all over the world recently instituted laws regarding the minimum BMI models for mass marketing campaigns must meet, because people all around the world recognize that the harm is real, and are attempting to "mitigate" it. Your harsh and bitter judgment about your ex-wife is rather irrelevant...
Here's a much better and shorter answer to the questions you pose in your response: ignore it.
Just so you are aware, there are millions of people in the world who suffer from eating disorders. I've spoken with many women, young and old, who suffer from them. I've spoken with people who are trying desperately to establish some sort of positive self image for themselves, only to be confronted with a photoshopped image of some woman who only exists in a graphic designers wet dream. 5 minutes later, they're sticking their fingers down their throat and burning their esophagus or simply refusing to eat. Often, they die from this behavior.
This is just one subset of society. They are not the only ones. But they are an excellent real world example of advertising LITERALLY killing people.
Who cares, though, right? Profits are up.
I think you are putting way to much stock in how a few minutes of advertising can adversely affect your life. Just ignore them, fast forward, or hit the DVD Menu button and skip all that crap. Seriously the only way to avoid all of what you call "corporate propaganda" is to live in a cave, never buy anything and live a completely self-sufficient life, never have any contact with the outside world, never again read anything, listen to anything, or watch anything. Then you would truly be "free" of the corporate shackles. (As a bonus you could also realize that you've had people shouting in your ears their whole life and that you never realized how much your thinking had been muddled - in the silence of your cave.)
Ahh... now you're telling me it's impossible and/or impractical. Which is great, because it just so happens I already did it. As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of pieces for members of an eating disorder recovery group on how to avoid all the negative imagery and get healthier. It's on a private forum, so I'll just stick it in here.
--//--
How to avoid advertisements on the web:
If you're not using Firefox, you should be.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Once you've got Firefox, you should install tools to protect you from advertising. First one is Adblock Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
This lets you block advertisements, and is configurable.
Next, if you want to block particular sites completely, you can use this tool, called BlockSite:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3145
After you've done all this, you can customize Google to remove certain items you don't want to see with the CustomizeGoogle add on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743
With this tool, you can remove advertisements, filter out sites you don't ever want to see in your search results, and remove google tracking. Which may screw up Muses website statistics tracking, but will prevent you from becoming a target for advertisements specifically related to eating disorders and dieting etc.
If you take the time to install and set up these tools, you will be amazed at the difference.
--//--
How to avoid advertisements in your mail:
First, install Thunderbird:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
This mail reader has a built in spam blocker that learns how to identify spam as you mark things as spam/not spam. This will go a long way towards keeping your mailbox advertisement free.
Once you've got that installed, you want to be using it to read your web based mail, like Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.
So you need to install the Webmail add on.
http://webmail.mozdev.org/
Once you've installed this, you'll be able to view your mail from all these websites without having to see their banners and other assorted crap.
After this is all done, you should set up folders for every piece of mail you expect to receive, and filters to automatically move them there. This will prefilter your pile, and your learning spam filters will also prefilter.
Between the two, you'll have an ever shrinking pile of messages that "might" be spam to wade through and mark as "is spam" or "is not spam".
--//--
How to avoid advertising in your multimedia:
Stop paying for cable television. Disconnect your service, and use the money you save to buy a DVD burner for backup, a video card for your computer that supports TV-Out, and a large external hard drive that you can use to carry files to and from your fr
Or you can just stick the disc in the player, go make popcorn and when it's ready the movie has reached menu. What's so difficult about it?
I'm not talking about media you purchase, but media you rent.
Ripping it is faster, more convenient and removes the corporate propaganda. If I can't remove the propaganda, I won't watch it at all, and I won't let my kid watch it.
You would be surprised how jarring it is once you've freed yourself from it... like someone who grew up in the city going camping for a month in the wilderness, then coming home to realize that they've had people shouting in their ears their whole life and that they never realized how much their thinking had been muddled and their senses numbed by what was being done to them until they finally got free of it.
Once you actually experience it for yourself, you start to feel like someone who just realized they've been abused their whole life and didn't know.
I'd bet that ripping the DVD takes more than a minute.
You spend a few seconds setting it up, and it runs while you're making popcorn. Then you can stick the disc in the closet and watch your movie across the LAN without being forced to sit through propaganda every time you watch. It's a good deal more convenient, even if you do own the original media.
Technology that restricts peoples access to knowledge and culture is evil. There is no justification for its existence that isn't derived from someones desire to create a hostile and unfriendly environment, then charge people for relief from the consequences of that environment. That is a fundamentally evil thing.