"It is illegal to behave in an intelligent fashion without permission. We have articulated all the intelligent ways in which a human can behave that we are aware of, and you are not permitted to behave in any of these ways unless you have paid for the privilege. If you have no money, you are permitted to work like a slave in the employ of someone who has already paid. If you do not wish to do so, you are permitted to starve to death."
According to our rulers, whom we may disagree with but still materially obey, this is progress.
Incidentally, they also own the land, the sea, the skies, and your sorry ass. Better put your head down and get to work.
Has anyone ever noticed that it's hard to eliminate an armed and active military force, and yet you can eliminate those who created the weapons with a brick and a rope?
You're not asking the right questions, so you don't understand the motives. How do you control what people hear and still allow them all to speak? You monopolize the megaphone, then you put the people who are saying what you want heard in front of it.
The economic "competition" was always a sham, it supported the illusion that time in front of the megaphone was based on merit, to more effectively sell the messages. Taxation without representation will still work though.
It's evil to buy electricity that costs $1 and sell it to the producers competitors for a discounted rate when the only reason you're getting it under cost is because someone signed a piece of paper they shouldn't have. When you bring no value, but you get reward off someone elses labour, you're an evil, anti-social leech. It's pretty cut and dried.
I guess I'm shocked...I've ever seen it put forth before that people should feel an obligation to have a family and raise kids.
I frankly, don't see the need to. I don't have any kids (that I know of)...and if I had, I wouldn't have reached the level in life that I am at now. I don't need kids for support...I'm saving, puttin g back for retirement.
That's because you're an idiot. Do you understand supply and demand? Do you understand that when you are old, there will be a massive demand for young people to wipe your ass and bring you food, and there won't be enough supply. So, it doesn't really matter how much paper you have saved for retirement. Assuming there isn't an outright economic collapse, which is not a safe bet right out the gate, but we'll assume, there's still going to be two groups getting cared for. Those who are so uber rich as to make you look like a chump, and those who earned the love of their kids enough that their kids choose to care for them and ignore you.
The gambit now is, create a draconian police state, then ship in enough immigrants to fulfil the need, but keep them enslaved, so they can't go "Hey, we outnumber these grey haired bastards... lets change the laws so we don't have to respect their rules and their needs, lets just hang them out to dry and take over."
My ex had that happen in her country of Mauritius. The Indians moved in, then they just stopped giving votes or jobs to those who weren't Indian by descent.
Course, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you agree with me, or not, or if you want to change things, or you don't. It's all inevitable anyways at this point. Enjoy your illusions.
I'm not at all happy about what's been happening to our civil rights, our constitution or our country's image in the world. The last eight years have been a boon to the corporations and a disaster for the rest of us. Our elected officials are either too lazy, too stupid, too scared or too much beholden to the corporations. It is on their watch that the PATRIOT act, the TSA and the DMCA have been passed.
So, it's not just the young who lose, it's all of us. Some of us old geezers feel just like you do.
And by the way, you're damn right we have a sense of entitlement. Entitlement to do what we want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Entitlement to human rights and fair use of copyrighted material. Entitlement not to be treated as suspected terrorists every time we board an aircraft.
Exactly.
You think you're entitled to do what you want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. And now that you did what you wanted, you wake up and there's grey hair everywhere. The decision to save money hiring the old experienced guy instead of taking responsibility for nurturing the young guy who doesn't know leaves the young guys helpless and inexperienced and unable to pick up the reigns now that you're tired and old. The decision to treat children and families as an individuals preference rather than the most pressing social need of all left society facing a future where there isn't enough population to sustain the infrastructure.
You did this, with your choices, with your inattentiveness, with your passing the buck to other people, to other nations, or just dropping the ball entirely and denying that you were ever responsible.
And now you think your hard work and your pieces of paper are going to magically deal with these issues, because you are entitled to the retirement your parents had, even though you didn't bear the large families that support such a retirement.
Thing is, the best thing that can happen is that we manage to divest ourselves of responsibility for you old bastards and turn our limited resources to caring for and creating more young people. The worst thing that can happen is that we exhaust what little we have in a misguided attempt to care for you as our civilization spirals towards oblivion.
Why do you think the property values are going down? It's not specultation, it's surplus. There aren't enough people to fill the houses, therefore, they are practically worthless. You'll be trading your deeds for a hunk of bread before it's all done, if anyone is even interested.
As far as I'm concerned, you and your entire generation can go to hell, and any of the young people who idolize your way of life can go with you.
If you want to take action, work on breaking our dependence on their central infrastructure. Look into how you can get people involved in setting up mesh networking in your area, then do it. You do that, you totally take the existing controls out of the loop.
Waving money around isn't going to accomplish squat. The things that need to be done run contrary to the things that create scarcity, control and profit, so people motivated by money aren't going to be interested. Save your money to buy the raw materials you need to get started.
Personally, I'm working on creating a local culture around the RepRap project, and once I get that rolling, I'm going to create web infrastructure to upload and share the 3D models that it consumes. I envision something that resembles eBay, except free, and if you see something you like, you just print it. If there's mesh networking infrastructure in place to prevent authorities and IP holders from shutting this down at a central point, it's going to be almost impossible to assert control over what people can make with the tools.
Step up. There's lots of work to do, and the potential for a great new way of life.
There are too many old people waving money around, not enough young people to do the work to keep society operating, and not enough cheap oil to cover the missing labour. The old people have a sense of entitlement, and they lack the sense of interconnection that would preclude them from sacrificing our future on the alter of their comfortable old age.
So, the agenda is going to be, deprive the young of more and more, paying particular to attention to young immigrants who haven't been indoctrinated into the incumbent system through centrally controlled education. This way, you can bully them more effectively. Make sure you keep them divided so you can keep em under control.
These things are all inevitable. It's a generational war to the death. It doesn't matter what particular law is fought or not fought, or who gets elected. It doesn't matter how many pieces of paper with numbers on them get shuffled around. None of these meaningless activities alter the nature of the problem, none of them will change how it all pans out, none of them will change when it all pans out, it's simply a matter of towering inevitabilities rooted in flawed cultural values that were created long ago finally coming to their natural and painful conclusion.
All you can really do is laugh and try to be psychologically prepared for the coming conflict.
Repeated exposure to the horror can desensitize individuals and help them stay calm enough to reprocess what happened and get beyond it.
Great... so they desensitize individuals to horrific things, then chuck them back amongst the population like piles of dogshit under the snow. Why don't they just call the program Making Monsters?
In all seriousness, they need to give these men NurseWhores to reconnect them with other people, not help them kill whatever humanity remains with vividly brutal video games. If this is how they're fixing them, they should just call them casualties of war and kill them quickly and painlessly.
Is there anything you CAN'T do? I'm sure there's some edge cases but damn if I notice them.
Run a server. If you can run a server, you can do ANYTHING a computer can be programmed to do. The limits are your imagination.
The fact that you're ignorant about what you can do and don't care that you're not permitted to do doesn't mean other people aren't being restricted. The way things work right now is a perversion of how the internet was engineered to operate.
If you're one of the people who has enough static IP addresses to serve your needs, you're better off with IPv4, because that will make sure you're among the few who do. Increasing supply doesn't serve those who already have enough, which would be those interviewed.
If you like things the way they are, where the restricted number of static IPs makes it impossible for the great unwashed to have a voice and the web is coming to resemble a television set more each day, well, you're not going to be supportive of IPv6. Plenty for everyone means no leverage, which means no profit. Which means IPv6 isn't going to get business support from the IT sector any time soon.
What the hell does one have to do with the other? You may as well have said "It will work just as well as before, because I'm jumping on one foot". The fact that you can't make them listen to you doesn't impede the capacity to cast a more critical eye on a known bullshit artist, and it doesn't impede the capacity to consider the history and motivations of the speaker.
The whole point is to be able to bring your trust in a persons character to the table when you don't have the capacity to critically judge what they're saying. If people weren't insulated from the capacity to bring such determinations to bear in their economic decisions, things wouldn't be so fucked up in the first place. As it stands, half the time wielding economic power without applying critical judgment to what the recipient will do with that power after you give them the money is considered criminally prejudicial.
Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed.
No. All systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed IF you allow anonymous involvement.
If you remove anonymity from the equation, efforts to game the system won't work, because people can then filter you out after you demonstrate that you're a liar or a manipulator.
Sigh. If people are dumb enough to fall for Sarah Palin, the lipstick on McCain's pig, how can we hope to educate them about how this scheme would usher in the dystopia RMS warned us about in "Right to Read"?
The answer is, usurp control of the right-revocation system. Use it to revoke the rights of set top boxes to play back recordings of the most popular shows on television. Use it to revoke the rights of computers to run software in some hospitals, but restrict your activities to the software that controls accounting and payroll. Use it to revoke the rights of computers to run the most popular games, en masse.
No real harm done to anyone, no ones safety put at risk, but everyone will be forced to pay attention and contemplate how much worse it could have been.
Like if you'd revoked more important software in the hospital, or if you'd just revoked the odd newscast instead of whatever crap is popular on TV these days, or if you'd revoked all the productivity software at the office instead of just games.
In my opinion, it is a victory for those pushing DRM that we're talking about movies and music in the first place.
I was also a bit scared by the time I was done with it all. Lindberg cites not only the pitfalls that are out there, but backs it up with case history that illustrates his points.
I know case studies are important, but it would be nice to see more statisical evidence of the impact of bad IP policy in addition to anecdotal.
So, were you claiming that the case history is false, or are you claiming that the case history does not support the conclusion that legal risk exists?
So, do you really think that if intellectual property law were not present, the world would just throw its hands up in the air and say "Oh well, no more artists, no more musicians, no more actors, no more programmers, no more writers, no more journalists."
Is that really what you think would happen as a result?
Have you ever been in a combat situation? I admittedly have not but have many friends and relatives who have.
Yes, I have. Aside from my military and martial arts training, I've faced gangs, I've faced knives and chains and baseball bats, I've faced guns, I've been shot at, I've beaten ringleaders till they had to be put in the hospital, then testified against them and put them in jail, I've had my face broken and my ribs broken and my nose broken, I've seen friends get stabbed repeatedly, I've seen friends have pieces amputated from their body with hatchets. You have no fucking idea the things I've seen, you naive little man.
So, can I ask, how many revolutions you've actually been a part of, shieldwolf?
Just the one I'm building. The trick is, start building organizational models and infrastructure that allows people to say to themselves "I don't need to be part of the old group because this group fills all the needs that kept me." Somewhere along the way, if you do it right, you gather enough people together that the incumbents feel threatened. Then they try to use force against you, to break what you have built. Then, those who treasure what you have built will fight to defend it. That is when the revolution actually begins.
Give me a break, and go get an education. Just try not to shoot anyone in the meantime.
Right... put myself in debt to a corrupt banking system, so I can waste a few years abasing myself to people I don't respect, so I can be specialized further away from the capacity to care for myself and indoctrinated into a system that thinks of me as a cross between a cog and a steer. That will really fix things.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is illegal to behave in an intelligent fashion without permission. We have articulated all the intelligent ways in which a human can behave that we are aware of, and you are not permitted to behave in any of these ways unless you have paid for the privilege. If you have no money, you are permitted to work like a slave in the employ of someone who has already paid. If you do not wish to do so, you are permitted to starve to death."
According to our rulers, whom we may disagree with but still materially obey, this is progress.
Incidentally, they also own the land, the sea, the skies, and your sorry ass. Better put your head down and get to work.
Has anyone ever noticed that it's hard to eliminate an armed and active military force, and yet you can eliminate those who created the weapons with a brick and a rope?
Didn't say it was "Free in the monetary sense", said it was DRM free. DRM doesn't start and end at copying.
Can I open this music up in Audacity and cut a sample out of it? No.
Can I convert it to another format for my music player? No.
Is it DRM free? No.
Is this a bunch of misleading bullshit? Yes, yes it is.
If it's free, why do we have to watch propaganda?
Gee, this makes me want to rush out and develop for that platform. Right after I finish strapping the wings on to this pig...
You're not asking the right questions, so you don't understand the motives. How do you control what people hear and still allow them all to speak? You monopolize the megaphone, then you put the people who are saying what you want heard in front of it.
The economic "competition" was always a sham, it supported the illusion that time in front of the megaphone was based on merit, to more effectively sell the messages. Taxation without representation will still work though.
Hmm... didn't they used to be some important international standards body at one point, before they got into the marketing business and went under?
I thought they were already gone...
Why is this news?
Are you questioning the judgment of the Miniluv??
That is a clear case of crimethink.
I'm calling thinkpol.
Yes, most American's are quite well aware of what the War on the Impoverished has cost us.
There, fixed that for you...
It's evil to buy electricity that costs $1 and sell it to the producers competitors for a discounted rate when the only reason you're getting it under cost is because someone signed a piece of paper they shouldn't have. When you bring no value, but you get reward off someone elses labour, you're an evil, anti-social leech. It's pretty cut and dried.
I guess I'm shocked...I've ever seen it put forth before that people should feel an obligation to have a family and raise kids.
I frankly, don't see the need to. I don't have any kids (that I know of)...and if I had, I wouldn't have reached the level in life that I am at now. I don't need kids for support...I'm saving, puttin g back for retirement.
That's because you're an idiot. Do you understand supply and demand? Do you understand that when you are old, there will be a massive demand for young people to wipe your ass and bring you food, and there won't be enough supply. So, it doesn't really matter how much paper you have saved for retirement. Assuming there isn't an outright economic collapse, which is not a safe bet right out the gate, but we'll assume, there's still going to be two groups getting cared for. Those who are so uber rich as to make you look like a chump, and those who earned the love of their kids enough that their kids choose to care for them and ignore you.
The gambit now is, create a draconian police state, then ship in enough immigrants to fulfil the need, but keep them enslaved, so they can't go "Hey, we outnumber these grey haired bastards... lets change the laws so we don't have to respect their rules and their needs, lets just hang them out to dry and take over."
My ex had that happen in her country of Mauritius. The Indians moved in, then they just stopped giving votes or jobs to those who weren't Indian by descent.
Course, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you agree with me, or not, or if you want to change things, or you don't. It's all inevitable anyways at this point. Enjoy your illusions.
I'm not at all happy about what's been happening to our civil rights, our constitution or our country's image in the world. The last eight years have been a boon to the corporations and a disaster for the rest of us. Our elected officials are either too lazy, too stupid, too scared or too much beholden to the corporations. It is on their watch that the PATRIOT act, the TSA and the DMCA have been passed. So, it's not just the young who lose, it's all of us. Some of us old geezers feel just like you do. And by the way, you're damn right we have a sense of entitlement. Entitlement to do what we want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Entitlement to human rights and fair use of copyrighted material. Entitlement not to be treated as suspected terrorists every time we board an aircraft.
Exactly.
You think you're entitled to do what you want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. And now that you did what you wanted, you wake up and there's grey hair everywhere. The decision to save money hiring the old experienced guy instead of taking responsibility for nurturing the young guy who doesn't know leaves the young guys helpless and inexperienced and unable to pick up the reigns now that you're tired and old. The decision to treat children and families as an individuals preference rather than the most pressing social need of all left society facing a future where there isn't enough population to sustain the infrastructure.
You did this, with your choices, with your inattentiveness, with your passing the buck to other people, to other nations, or just dropping the ball entirely and denying that you were ever responsible.
And now you think your hard work and your pieces of paper are going to magically deal with these issues, because you are entitled to the retirement your parents had, even though you didn't bear the large families that support such a retirement.
Thing is, the best thing that can happen is that we manage to divest ourselves of responsibility for you old bastards and turn our limited resources to caring for and creating more young people. The worst thing that can happen is that we exhaust what little we have in a misguided attempt to care for you as our civilization spirals towards oblivion.
Why do you think the property values are going down? It's not specultation, it's surplus. There aren't enough people to fill the houses, therefore, they are practically worthless. You'll be trading your deeds for a hunk of bread before it's all done, if anyone is even interested.
As far as I'm concerned, you and your entire generation can go to hell, and any of the young people who idolize your way of life can go with you.
If you want to take action, work on breaking our dependence on their central infrastructure. Look into how you can get people involved in setting up mesh networking in your area, then do it. You do that, you totally take the existing controls out of the loop.
Waving money around isn't going to accomplish squat. The things that need to be done run contrary to the things that create scarcity, control and profit, so people motivated by money aren't going to be interested. Save your money to buy the raw materials you need to get started.
Personally, I'm working on creating a local culture around the RepRap project, and once I get that rolling, I'm going to create web infrastructure to upload and share the 3D models that it consumes. I envision something that resembles eBay, except free, and if you see something you like, you just print it. If there's mesh networking infrastructure in place to prevent authorities and IP holders from shutting this down at a central point, it's going to be almost impossible to assert control over what people can make with the tools.
Step up. There's lots of work to do, and the potential for a great new way of life.
There are too many old people waving money around, not enough young people to do the work to keep society operating, and not enough cheap oil to cover the missing labour. The old people have a sense of entitlement, and they lack the sense of interconnection that would preclude them from sacrificing our future on the alter of their comfortable old age.
So, the agenda is going to be, deprive the young of more and more, paying particular to attention to young immigrants who haven't been indoctrinated into the incumbent system through centrally controlled education. This way, you can bully them more effectively. Make sure you keep them divided so you can keep em under control.
These things are all inevitable. It's a generational war to the death. It doesn't matter what particular law is fought or not fought, or who gets elected. It doesn't matter how many pieces of paper with numbers on them get shuffled around. None of these meaningless activities alter the nature of the problem, none of them will change how it all pans out, none of them will change when it all pans out, it's simply a matter of towering inevitabilities rooted in flawed cultural values that were created long ago finally coming to their natural and painful conclusion.
All you can really do is laugh and try to be psychologically prepared for the coming conflict.
"Freedom in the US is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want."
That is the best sig I've seen in a long time.
Repeated exposure to the horror can desensitize individuals and help them stay calm enough to reprocess what happened and get beyond it.
Great... so they desensitize individuals to horrific things, then chuck them back amongst the population like piles of dogshit under the snow. Why don't they just call the program Making Monsters?
In all seriousness, they need to give these men NurseWhores to reconnect them with other people, not help them kill whatever humanity remains with vividly brutal video games. If this is how they're fixing them, they should just call them casualties of war and kill them quickly and painlessly.
Is there anything you CAN'T do? I'm sure there's some edge cases but damn if I notice them.
Run a server. If you can run a server, you can do ANYTHING a computer can be programmed to do. The limits are your imagination.
The fact that you're ignorant about what you can do and don't care that you're not permitted to do doesn't mean other people aren't being restricted. The way things work right now is a perversion of how the internet was engineered to operate.
If you're one of the people who has enough static IP addresses to serve your needs, you're better off with IPv4, because that will make sure you're among the few who do. Increasing supply doesn't serve those who already have enough, which would be those interviewed.
If you like things the way they are, where the restricted number of static IPs makes it impossible for the great unwashed to have a voice and the web is coming to resemble a television set more each day, well, you're not going to be supportive of IPv6. Plenty for everyone means no leverage, which means no profit. Which means IPv6 isn't going to get business support from the IT sector any time soon.
What the hell does one have to do with the other? You may as well have said "It will work just as well as before, because I'm jumping on one foot". The fact that you can't make them listen to you doesn't impede the capacity to cast a more critical eye on a known bullshit artist, and it doesn't impede the capacity to consider the history and motivations of the speaker.
The whole point is to be able to bring your trust in a persons character to the table when you don't have the capacity to critically judge what they're saying. If people weren't insulated from the capacity to bring such determinations to bear in their economic decisions, things wouldn't be so fucked up in the first place. As it stands, half the time wielding economic power without applying critical judgment to what the recipient will do with that power after you give them the money is considered criminally prejudicial.
Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed.
No. All systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed IF you allow anonymous involvement.
If you remove anonymity from the equation, efforts to game the system won't work, because people can then filter you out after you demonstrate that you're a liar or a manipulator.
Sigh. If people are dumb enough to fall for Sarah Palin, the lipstick on McCain's pig, how can we hope to educate them about how this scheme would usher in the dystopia RMS warned us about in "Right to Read"?
The answer is, usurp control of the right-revocation system. Use it to revoke the rights of set top boxes to play back recordings of the most popular shows on television. Use it to revoke the rights of computers to run software in some hospitals, but restrict your activities to the software that controls accounting and payroll. Use it to revoke the rights of computers to run the most popular games, en masse.
No real harm done to anyone, no ones safety put at risk, but everyone will be forced to pay attention and contemplate how much worse it could have been.
Like if you'd revoked more important software in the hospital, or if you'd just revoked the odd newscast instead of whatever crap is popular on TV these days, or if you'd revoked all the productivity software at the office instead of just games.
In my opinion, it is a victory for those pushing DRM that we're talking about movies and music in the first place.
I was also a bit scared by the time I was done with it all. Lindberg cites not only the pitfalls that are out there, but backs it up with case history that illustrates his points. I know case studies are important, but it would be nice to see more statisical evidence of the impact of bad IP policy in addition to anecdotal.
So, were you claiming that the case history is false, or are you claiming that the case history does not support the conclusion that legal risk exists?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
Is it that you're trolling?
Maybe you just don't understand the meaning of the word "Anecdotal"...
So, do you really think that if intellectual property law were not present, the world would just throw its hands up in the air and say "Oh well, no more artists, no more musicians, no more actors, no more programmers, no more writers, no more journalists."
Is that really what you think would happen as a result?
Have you ever been in a combat situation? I admittedly have not but have many friends and relatives who have.
Yes, I have. Aside from my military and martial arts training, I've faced gangs, I've faced knives and chains and baseball bats, I've faced guns, I've been shot at, I've beaten ringleaders till they had to be put in the hospital, then testified against them and put them in jail, I've had my face broken and my ribs broken and my nose broken, I've seen friends get stabbed repeatedly, I've seen friends have pieces amputated from their body with hatchets. You have no fucking idea the things I've seen, you naive little man.
So, can I ask, how many revolutions you've actually been a part of, shieldwolf?
Just the one I'm building. The trick is, start building organizational models and infrastructure that allows people to say to themselves "I don't need to be part of the old group because this group fills all the needs that kept me." Somewhere along the way, if you do it right, you gather enough people together that the incumbents feel threatened. Then they try to use force against you, to break what you have built. Then, those who treasure what you have built will fight to defend it. That is when the revolution actually begins.
Give me a break, and go get an education. Just try not to shoot anyone in the meantime.
Right... put myself in debt to a corrupt banking system, so I can waste a few years abasing myself to people I don't respect, so I can be specialized further away from the capacity to care for myself and indoctrinated into a system that thinks of me as a cross between a cog and a steer. That will really fix things.