>make you sign away all rights to _anything_ you
>produce while working for the company (note: I
>don't say 'on company time, or with company
>equipment').
Yey another reason to work in a *civilized* state like California. Such contracts are illegal and unenforceable here. Even if you *DO* sign one, such as in a generic "boilerplate" contract with a company that has operations in many states, some of which might enforce such clauses... they are all null and void here.
As a matter of fact, when I signed on to my current job (first job of mine in CA), there was an addendum to my contract explicitly stating all of the above, and declared any such clauses in the main contract to be null and void in accordiance with California law.
Nice to see that SOME states actually give a crap about the people who live and work there. Virginia, OTOH, was, IIRC also one of the first states to enact UCITA. Too bad for Nullsoft that they neglected to think of things like this when they sold out to AOL.
You won't see me setting foot in a festering backwoods hellhole like VA with neanderthal laws like they have there, much less living or working in the place.
Another VERY important reason to release early is to prevent your code from being forcebly supressed by certian entities that have it in for independent open source developers.
Witness the Gnutella/Nullsoft saga. To employ a couple of bad cliches, Gnutella just barely dodged the RIAA's bullet, but is not out of the woods yet.
For those of you not familiar with the story, Nullsoft are the fellows who developed WinAmp, and were subsequently bought by AOL with the promise that they would be independent within the company. Their next project was to be a new file-shareing program that, unlike Napster, would allow ANY kind of file to be transferred, and would not be reliant on centrally located servers. Not only that, it was intended to be a GPLed program from the very start.
Well, you might also know that AOL recently aquired Time-Warner, notorious member of the RIAA *AND* MPAA. Well, TW turned on Steve Case and ordered him to put a stop to Nullsoft's latest creation. And put a stop to it he did.
Fortunately, the wego guys suceeded in getting ahold of the source and have been producing binaries. But the FAQ seems to indicate that there are still legal issues with the source code, so there is no source available for a program that was INTENDED BY ITS CREATORS to be open sourced.
If Nullsoft had the foresight to released the source under the GPL at the first opportunity, with the first release, BEFORE Gnutella appeared on time warner / RIAA / metallica's radar, this problem would not exist. The source would be out under the GPL and I suspect that development would have proceeded much faster than it has (it's been at ver 0.56 for HOW long now???).
Or imagine if Jon Johnson had delayed the release of deCSS. The MPAA could possibly have acted to supress him in time to destroy the code before the world had redistributed.
If you're working on code that might challange the business model, compete with, or in any way irritate, someone who ALREADY has tons of money, such as RIAA/metallica, or the MPAA, or microsoft, etc. it's DEFINATELY the best idea to "get the geinie out of the bottle", as soon as you can.
That way, even if *you* are persecuted, your IDEAS cannot be realisticly suppressed.
(I would hope that if Napster DOES lose against the RIAA/metallica, that Fanning's last act of defiance before the company's execution would be to GPL the entire source for everything. I would have a LOT of respect for anyone with that kind of courage and integrity)
That other fellow who replied to you saying that evolution is an incontrovertable fact is full of shit. But then those who purport creation to be the same are more so full of shit.
This is simple scientific method stuff, folks!!!
You ARE correct in that evolution should be called a hypothesis and not a theory. But you seem to have no idea what a theory *IS*.
>Calling it theory implies proven fact,
Which is absurdly false.
What a theory implies is that you have a conducted a repeatable (that's VERY important) experiment whose results support your hypothesis.
Now, what be "proven facts" would be things like:
"This skeleton (A) I dug out of the ground has X amount of Carbon 14 isotopes in it"
"This other skeleton (B) I dug out of the ground has a similar bone structure, but a larger braincase and has Y carbon 14 isotopes in it, making it Z million years more recent than the first skeleton"
Now, a hypothesis is a logical premise that fits all the known facts: "Well, it appears that, given A and B are closely related, B is more advanced than A, and B is Z million years younger than A, A evolved over time to become B"
For evolution to be a THEORY, someone would have to have conducted an (REPEATABLE!!!) experiment, subject to peer review, that offers support to the hypothesis. This has, to my knowledge, not happened for evolution (tho I COULD be wrong).
Now, for evolution to be a "proven fact", or a law, there's an entire array of headache inducing proofs, where you'd have to demonstrate mathmetically that there is NO other POSSIBLE explination for the known facts. There are very few scientific LAWS compared to the number of theories.
Unfortunately for the bible thumping crowd, creationism doesn't even have enough going for it to be considered a hypothesis, much less a theory.
From a newtonian physics POV, any given object, or set of objects with mass can be reduced to a single point on which forces (like, say, gravity) will act upon.
So, say you have two objects A and B. A can be a battleship, a person, an 1KG lead weight, a planet, etc. The center of mass is the point where all forces can be (simplisticly) be judged to act. So, if you're a person (object A), your CoM is in the lower-mid torso. If you put on a heavy backpack (object B), the CoM moves toward your back (the system of objects now has a common center of mass C), out of alignment with the vector of gravity force (perpendiclar to the ground) so the set of objects, you AND the backpack is like to fall over.
Now, jump into space, and substitute two equal-massed objects for A and B. In a closed system, A and B will share a common center of mass, point C, around which they will orbit.
Now, if B has a larger mass than A, the center of mass will be closer to B, and A AND B will orbit the center of mass (C).
Now, make B MUCH more massive than A... say A is the mass of the Earth and B is the mass of the Sun. C is now MUCH closer to B than A. But A and B STILL ORBIT C.
Now, cease treating A and B as point masses... they now have diameters. C, the center of mass is still a point. In the case of the Earth(A) and the sun(B), C, being much closer to B than A, is WITHIN the diameter of the sun. Therefore A (Earth) appears to be orbiting B (the sun), but in reality, both are orbiting C (the center of mass of the set of objects that contain the Earth and the sun). C just happens to be within the diameter of the sun.
The same can be said of the Earth and the mood. Only Luna is MUCH more massive compared to Earth than Earth is compared to the Sun. In this case, point C is approximately 1000km beneath the surface of the Earth.
Now, heep in mind that this is a VERY simplistic explination written by an exhausted person about to crash for the night. I am, of course, neglecting objects D..*, instead pretending that the universe consists of only two masses. I'm also neclecting every OTHER force acting on the objects, and prolly a handful of other things as well.
But that IS the general gist of what I think the previous poster meant.
(here's to hoping the infinity symbol up there shows up correctly)
>The number of people murdered by out-of-control >governments this century is in eight digits.
... I think that estimate is somewhat conservative. I would guess nine digits.
For a quikie rundown...
stalin's purges to socialise the USSR are estimated at 20 mil or so, that's NOT including all of the soviet citizens murdered by rulers other than stalin.
The nazis (hmm, does this invoke Godwin's law?) got 6 million European Jews.
pol pot took out several hundred thousand Cambodians.
Who even knows how many Chinese died in mao's "great leap forward". I've never heard of an accurate number being agreed upon. Most guesstimates I've run across place the number in the tens of millions.
Now, that's ONLY the major players in the genocide game. That does NOT count the numerous wannabes in the "murder your own citizens" competition.
Oh... speaking of which, the examples I've mentioned thus far are only examples of governments murdering their *OWN* citizens. I've not even guessed at the deaths caused when governments have decided that they's just LOVE to annex that land next to their own; trouble being, that it usually belongs to someone else who's willing to fight to keep it.
Add in Germany (damn... did I just do ANOTHER Godwin???) and Japan's little plan to take over the world about sixty years ago, and I think you'll EASILY get into nine digits. To say nothing of the REST of the wars of the 20th century.
So, I'm with the anonymous coward here (damn is THAT a strange occurance). Governments gone rogue are a LOT more of a concern than J. Random Lunatics such as mcveigh, koresh, arafat, et. al.
They're obfuscating the issue by lieing about "internet culture". The choice quote being:
>"Napster is causing a vast number of consumers >to believe that free music on the Internet is >an entitlemant."
... which is a flat out lie. The notion of "if it's on the internet then you're free to use it" did *NOT* originate from Napster.
For the VAST majority of its existence (most of which predates Napster (and, for that matter, the web)), the "internet culture" has been one of shareing. If there was something on the net that was pretty nifty, and you saw a use for it, you were perfectly free to grab a copy and put it to (fair) use, or if it was GPL software, modify it and redistribute. Hell, I taught myself HTML and javascript by surfing the web, and if a page did something I thought was cool, viewing the source and shamelessly learning from the original. That was a much better way (for me) to learn than any HTML book I've run across. And there was never any real problem with this, because if you wanted any cred, you recriprocated by uploading anything YOU do, just in case someone else thinks it's nifty, and someone ELSE might like it.
And there was never any problem with that. The whole point of the net was to share data. (well, okay, originally the whole point was to survive a nuclear attack, but the most common (post DARPA(whose involvement in what is NOW known as the internet was rathar short))use was shareing of knowledge).
It wasn't until VERY recently that giant corperate monoliths such as the RIAA noticed the net, and decided to turn it into their own private playground. They want to destroy the old, free, permissive, sharing culture, impose a meatspace culture on it, and turn it into nothing more than one more marketing demographic.
OF COURSE there is going to be a culture clash.
But to claim that Napster just came along to a perfectly controlled, orderly, on-line marketplace, and just suddenly declared "if it's on the net it's free", is pure FUD, plain and simple. That culture was always there. It's the RIAA who is the uninvited interloper trying to destroy a culture, *NOT* Napster.
>Linux is not gonna be the OS of choice for gamers >until the games start coming out for it at the >same time or sooner than they come out for >windows.
Do you read John Carmack's.plan updates? Apparantly not. Try going back in his.plan archives to the very end of Quake 3's development. You'll see something intresting.
See, iD released the golden masters for the Linux, Macintosh, and windoze versions of Quake3 ON THE SAME DAY!!! That was Carmacks plan for many months prior to the release of Quake 3. But look closer at the.plan... You will see where he mentions that, despite the golden masters being delivered simultaniously, the companies involved in the distrobution, production, etc. had let it be known to iD that they planned to INTENTIONALLY drag their heels on the Mac and Linux versions, and see to it that they didn't hit the stores until WELL after the windoze version did.
Loki and MacSoft do great work. But entire distrobution / production / retail chains they are not.
Particularly telling is the fack that Loki had the production CDs completed by their own supplier, but the company supplying the packaging was intentionally witholding, from Loki, all of the packageing materials (the box, manual, jewel case, etc.) Loki worked around this by shipping Quake 3 CDs alone to those who ordered directly from them, and sending the packageing materials later. But if you perfer to shop at a conventional store, you were SOL.
Now, an exercise for the reader:
Who, in the technoogy industry, has a vested intrest in making alternative operating systems look bad by delaying the Macintosh and Linux versions of software, as opposed to the windoze version? Who has the power to bully the distrobution chain into bending to his will? And who has shown absolutely no restraint in the abuse of that monopoly power?
>If you blocked any file with the word "Metallica" >in its filename, that would make it so much more >difficult to trade Metallica's works that most >people would no longer bother.
I have a friend who is in a Ska band. One of their songs is entitled "Metallica Sucks Donkey Dick" (no, that's not a joke, they really DO have a song by that name. Oh, and it predates even the existence of napster. They wrote it because they are of the opinion that metallica sold out when they released the black album, and that it, end everything since, has... well... sucked donkey dick).
They have said, *publicly* at their shows, that they "don't give a flying fuck" if people make and distribute MP3s of their music.
So if Napster conspires with metallica/RIAA to block any files with *metallica*.mp3 in their name, how does my friends music, which the band HAS given permission to distribute, get through?
Sounds like restraint of trade and abuse of monopoly power on the part of RIAA to me.
>How hard would it be to set up an option in the >installer for "command line only"?
Well, it's not an option in the installer, but in the developer preview versions of OS X, you can kill -9 all of the Aqua gooiness and be left with a big honkin fullscreen tcsh shell.
I don't see how they could take that ability away in the final version unless they deny their customers the root login, keeping it for service techs only or something. From what I can tell by using DP4, it does NOT appear that that is in the cards. You have to su (well, a graphical equivelent) from user to root whenever you want to change important system settings. They've put a good deal of work into making su functionality as transparant as possible. Denyng root NOW would mean throwing away a good deal of work already done.
Plus, I imagine that if they *DID* deny the buyer the root login:
1) They would be pubicly roasted alive by nearly everyone... a PR nightmare to say the least.
and
2) It would be cracked soon enough anyway, so there'd really be no point
So it's not bloody likely that Apple would deny OS X buyers root on their own boxen. So I say just modify rc.d to your hearts content.
(I won't bother to respond to your pathaetic attempts to insult me, but just in case this is an actual response, vs. a feeble attempt at trolling...)
>If the Judge is siding with anyone it's not >metallica.
Have you been paying attention this last month or so??? metallica has been the primary bitch for the RIAA the whole time, with dr dre and m&m being the secondary attack dogs!
>I've never looked at Napster as something that >you loot and pillage free music from...I don't >even remember who did the study (my brain is >fried from working in a callcenter environment) >but it was found that people who use Napster are >actually buying more music. Forgive me if I don't >go to the store and spend 16 dollars on a CD, >only to find out all but 2 tracks suck. I also >think that Napster was a great place for smaller >labels to be heard.
And where did you get the idea that I thought differently? My point wasn't about my MP3 useage. My point was about how supprising and dissapointing it is that someone in San Francisco could be so clueless. That, and the fact that it's VERY supprising to see a San Franciscian whoreing out to the RIAA. If you lived here, you'd know how anti-corperate-giant, anti-profit-in-general this city can be. Hell, just go to sfbg.com and read some of the editorials from the Guardian.
Actually, if you'd read any of my previous posts on the Napster issue, you'd know that my Napster useage is similar to that which you described. The simple fact is that MP3 files do *NOT* live up to the quality of red book audio if you play them on a stereo that doesn't suck. Therefore, if the MUSIC doesn't suck, I'll still be buying CDs (well, not for the forseeable future (not from any of the RIAA labels anyway)). It pisses me off to no end that the RIAA/metallica is trying (sucessfully, it would seem) obfuscate the issue by lieing about the technology, the service, and the users, from all angles, at every opportunity. "Perfect digital copies of the studio recordings" my ass! These guys should work for microsoft, they're so good at slinging FUD!
>you've just wasted a lot of time, and a >lot of bandwidth.
Yeah, and picket lines waste a lot of time and a lot of cardboard... flyers kill a lot of trees... but they still work, they still get the message out, they still let the public know of injustice. But forgive me if I'm not up on the latest edition of the social activism handbook. Just what do *YOU* suggest; black backgrounds and blue ribbon GIFs on our websites?
I just can't get over the fact that a judge in SAN FRANCISCO, of all places, would side with metallica, et al. MOST people I've met in the bay area seem to have been much more cluefull.
Granted the city itself does have its contingent of ultra-liberal "money BAD, technology BAD, geeks BAD, economic growth BAD, uh... poverty GOOD, urban decay GOOD" folk. But most people seem to be brighter than that.
Besides, it seems that even the ultra-liberal crowd should've sided with Fanning and Co., seeing as Napster's yet to make a profit, whilst metalica rakes in millions, and their masters, billions, each year.
Dissapointing, to say the least.
Well, I, for one, on general principle, will be downloading the entire metallica, dr dre, and m&m catalog's tonite, before Napster goes offline. I wonder if my ex-roommate's anonymising usenet gateway will accept so large a tarball?
Have you READ any of the interviews with Fanning over the last few months?
He didn't write Napster thinking "I'm going to write this program so that I can start a company, get rich, and be persecuted by the RIAA, dirty metalheads and "gangster" rappers throughout the US of A".
He wrote Napster thinking "Wow... these MP3s are pretty neat, I can listen to a lot of cool music I wouldn't have heard before, and give others the same opportunity, its a shame that it's so hard to find the things tho... mabye I can write a program to make it a little easier...".
So he wrote a program, thought it was pretty cool, and shared it with others. Everyone else thought it was pretty cool too, and some people suggested to him: "hey, this software is really cool, you might be able to make some money off of it, like those WinAmp guys did".
The rest, as they say, is history. The software wasn't written to fit a business plan. A business plan was written (supposedly) to fit the software AFTER THE FACT.
Kinda hard to do change everything without alienating your users (ask Apple about the complaints they're getting from the Aqua demos). And that's NOT something you want to do, especially considering that other projects like Gnutella are rapidly gaining on Napster in it's core competency: "making an MP3 search *EASY* to do".
john Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku: I am not a drone. Remove the collective if
It's prolly small comfort for the paranoid, but...
on
Inside Echelon
·
· Score: 2
>when the executive branch of a govenment also >controls the military (rather than, say, an >elected body of citizens), you are only one quick >coup away from dictatorship.
You might try reading Norman Schwartzkoff's (I'm SURE I spelled that wrong) book: "It Doesn't take a Hero".
Not the growing up part, or the Vietnam or Gulf war memoirs (though they DO paint an intresting picture of the army's evolution over the years (from elite force guarding western Europe from socialist aggression, to degenerate mob during vietnam, back to an elite force of professional volunteers with the best training and hardware in the world (granted the author *IS* a little biased))).
What you should DEFINATELY read is his description of the selection process to become a General (OR, for that matter, an Admrial). It's a VERY rigourous selection process just to get to one star. Above that, the regular promotions board goes away, and advancement requires the approval of damn near half of Washington. In fact, IIRC, a four-star slot actually requires the confirmation of the senate, just like a cabinet post or supreme court chair.
I think it's a pretty good bet, that any soldier who would, at the behest of the president or anyone else, drive his tanks up Capitol Hill, would *NOT* have passed the selection process to become a general and get command of those tanks in the first place.
Of course, I COULD be an irrational optimist, or Schwartzkoff COULD have lied through his teeth (keyboard?)...
... But I'm *FAR* more worried about congress legislating away our freedoms, than any possibility of a coup by the president.
The "skript kiddie" cheater, who reads the cheat codes from isucksogivemecheetcodez.com, and downloads the cheat patches.
vs.
The "hacking cheater, who opens the binary in a hex editor, actually groks what's in there, and figures out the cheat codes, AND mabye WRITES the very patches that he cheats with.
The first kind, is really kind of contemptable. And I, for one, doubt that anyone really buys into his "sk1ll3z".
But the second kind... well hacking up the executable of someone elses game (and generally the source is NOT available in MOST games)... that takes GENUINE skill. And not only to I NOT hold these guys in contempt, but I think that we could agree that THESE guys are due some respect. Patching executables is a dying art in this era of fast and smart compilers, linkers, and assemblers. Hell, most people would never even THINK to even LOOK at an executable in an editor, much less CHANGE anything. My kudos to the guys who can still do it.... and do it well.
No matter WHAT America does, there's going to be SOMEBODY that is going to twist the story around to make us the bad guy.
Funny, if you support the "common man" over the "oppressors" and such, why are you, now, defending the likes of hussain, milosovixh, and castro? Any one of which is a hundred times worse an "oppressor" than clinton could ever hope to be. (you don't see many people their lives risking on home-built rafts, in the straits of Florida, trying to get IN to cuba, do you?).
Now, I don't know anyone who escaped from hussain or milosovich, so I won't bother more with them, but when I lived in Florida, I *DID* meet a number of people who were lucky enough to escape, alive, from castro.
>Second, Castro's crime simply was aiming for Cuba >not to bend over to US interests over those of >its people.
There was also that little matter of allying themselves with an enemy determined to destroy us at all costs ("we will bury you" ring a bell?). Oh, and also that little "pointing nuclear missiles at us from 90 miles away, a distance from which there would have been little or no warning before millions are vaporised" incident just MIGHT have had a bearing on the direction of the US's cuba policy.
>US interests over those of its people.
>Cuba was not a wonderful place before Castro.
If you seriously beleive that castro cares, in the slightest, about "the intrests of his people", or that cuba is a wonderful little "workers paradise", I suggest you visit Miami sometime and ask the people who've BEEN IN CUBA, and been lucky enough to escape with their lives (and most often, with very little else) what it was like.
>Yes, you're right. I don't exempt much of the U.S. >from the "we are the world" mentality. There are >way too many people willing to appease tyrants >rather than support fighters for freedom.
Okay, you think the US should stand up to tyrants and put them down. That's all well and good. I agree. But for every person who thinks that we should NOT appease tyrants, there's someone who, when America DOES fight tyrrany, will accuse the US of "imperialism" or "hipocracy" or other imaginary crimes.
Examples, you ask? Look at the outcry when:
NATO moved to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosova from slobo milosivich's plans for genocide.
America has been decicedly anti-castro for decades now (up until clinton recently decided to start sucking up to him).
We certianly haven't been "appeasing" saddam hussain these last ten or so years.
In each of these cases (and I could name more), where America (okay, and our allies, I'm not leaving you out on purpose) HAS adopted a policy of standing up to tyrrany, there wss as much of an outcry (imperialism, warmongering, etc.) as there would be (from a totally diferent set of people) if we had done nothing, or supported the regime in question.
It's a Kobiyashi Maru situation.
You can't please everybody, so you take the middle ground, pick your battles, and try to do what's in the best intrests of your citizens. And, all too often, just wind up pissing everybody off.
Sux to be president, eh? Who was it again who said, of the presidency, that anyone who WANTS the job, should, by no means, be allowed to have it?
Well, the way it reads to me, it seems that in any 30 day period the total is NOT actually FIXED, but can only grow at a gradual rate.
So automating hunger site clicks would STILL grow the total donations (if the script was adopted widely enough, that is). It just wouldn't make it grow too rapidly.
But even if there WERE an absolute maximum per month, that would NEVER grow... it's still do good to keep the donations pegged up against that maximum limit.
There are plenty of proggies out there for automating (or simulating) web-surfing activity. Mostly, these are for the purpose of ripping off AllAdvantage, or some of the other "pay to surf" sites.
Are any of these GPLed? If so, one or more could be modified to be put to very GOOD use (for a change). If you can simulate mouse clicking on a given link good enough to fool AllAdvantage, it sould be easy enough to duplicate the principle so as to automate accessing the hunger site link.
Imagine if every geek out there were to drop this script in cron, set to run every 24 hours (as the site claims this is the max. That would rack up a healthy cart of food, yes?
But even better, how *DO* they know to only allow one access a day? The obvious answers would be that they log your IP address, or they set a cookie. IP logging would be problamatic for THEM, as many people are on dialups with dynamic assignment. So they may disqualify one IP address even though there's a new user trying to donate.
But if it's a cookie-based method, wouldn't it be simple enough to script an automatic removal of that cookie, making it possible to donate MUCH more often than once/24 hours?
Thoughts? Ideas?
I think I'll start messing with THS tonite to see if I can figure an easy way to do this.
There's an RPG out there called Aeon. I THINK it's made by the same guys who make those vampire RPGs. It takes place in 2120. Earth was invaded in the 21st century by aliens called "Abberants", and just barely won with China nuking the Abberants' bases down to bedrock from orbit. Man then established colonies throughout the solar system, a few interstellar ones via big ships that amplify the human mind to make it possible to psionically teleport. China runs most of the show, via their space superority, and human telepaths (plus telekinetics, teleporters, and a few others) are forced to be part of the "Ministry" a la Babylon 5's PsiCorps.
The point? Oops, lemme get back to it.
Anyway, in 2120, the second wave of Abberants arrives to invade Earth again. One of the settings in this RPG is a battlestation in orbit around Jupiter. Now, Jupiter, as you know, has a magnetic field that makes Earth's look like a kitchen magnet. These battlestations around Jupiter use their movement through Jupiter's magnetic field to power huge laser cannons that put out power in the terawatt (!) range to defend against this second wave of attacks.
I looked through this "Aeon" book in the bookstore a few times when it first came out. I haven't seen it in a LONG time tho. I don't think it sold very well, compared to the vampire RPGs and I think it got cancelled.
It was a pretty nifty looking thing tho, if you can find a copy in a used bookstore somewhere.
... and its not what I thought it would be. And they DO have some intresting points. I STILL perfer the MacOS GUI tho... and if the reports that OS X will have tcsh installed by default.... nirvana.
Okay, some elements of aqua suck, but Ars would have us beleive that it's all defined in XML files that root can edit. I know first thing *I*'m gonna do is put all of the window widgets back in the right place. (to hell with Steve's "trafic light" metaphor)
>massive neural strain induced by too much cofee)
Heh... does half a box of penguin mints a day, + coffee + tea + Dr. P + some mini thins count? We just made a massive deadling yesterday and everyone was really pushing to get our beta deployed by today. Last nite was the first time in a week I slept more than 4 hours. I feel much better now.
But yeah, even when I'm calm and well rested, I tend to get too defensive when microdrones go on the rampage and bash anyone who dares not to follow the banner of bill (howz about Linux *ON* a Mac (yellow dog) does that make me TWICE the heathen?).
I just hope Easel is less of a resource hog than Gnome. I STILL think the Mac team came up with the best interface yet invented, but my main Linux box is still a K6 running SuSE. And it DRAGS under Gnome.
(how gates got to limo I dunno, but theres SOMETHING not kosher in andover land)
But check out this book:
Coporate Cults: The Insidious Lure of the All-Consuming Organization
by: Dave Arnott
Hardcover - 256 pages 1 Ed edition (October 1999) AMACOM; ISBN: 0814404936 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.02 x 9.31 x 6.27
I won't bother with an Amazon link given the patent related sentiment about them, just plug into your favorite booksellers search.
Anyway, Arnot goes into lurid detail about how several companies (particularly micro$oft) *DO* in fact, have indoctrination and assimilation programs crafted to break down te inductee'd individuality and turn them into drones in the collective.
A number of other posters have mentioned that they do know, PERSONALLY, drones who exhibit all the cult-like symptoms Arnott describes. Well, this is how they got there.
Remember in Microserfs, what the protagonists were like before they were fortunate enough to escape? Well, as scary as it sounds, that's how these guys REALLY are!
Later in the thread "estanislao martinez" claims it remembers:
>Back in the good times, whenever the editors >were thinking of making any changes to the >system,
To which emmons rightfully points out that it's userID is GREATER THAN 200K.
It has also, in the past, claimed to remember people being "out to get" shengan in the days before his (apparantly temporary(unfortunately)) banishment from the editorial pool.
Now, my userID is in the 62K range, and I joined/. only shortly before shengan crossed the line by comendering/. as his personal soap box, and disabling comments after spewing forth a sermon about how evil the US is for it's foreign policy (enforcing the UN-mandated sanctions against iraq, IIRC).
Clearly, no one with a 200K+ userID would have been around then. UNLESS it is a troll. "estanliao martinez" is a such a troll. It is a made up character, a fraud. You should all have realised THAT much from its posting history.
A while back, an anonymous coward was circulating a link to "martinez"'s postings in the illicit "inchfan" forum, announcing the creation of the character. I, unfortunately, lost that link. AC, if you're there, a repost would be really cool.
Not only all that, it SLIPS OUT OF CHARACTER when you get it pissed off! Examine this quote from it in the following story (It is archived, so you'll have to scroll down, or search for its username):
>I repeat, I have *taught* logic. I have studied >First Order Logic, Dynamic Logic, Modal Logic, >Hybrid Logic, Type Theory, Model Theoretic >Semantics, Substructural Logics, Feature Logics, >and some more. At grad level. I'd advise you to >not take my knowledge here for granted.
Note, in particular, the last sentance. Now, where have we heard THAT before? Which phony personality did it fall back to?
Everybody remember st-st-st-steven w-w-w-woston, of "jjjjulius games", who just HAPPENS to be close, personal friends with just about EVERY major player in the industry and community, from John Carmack to Scott Draker to Linus? Gets previews of EVERY bit of new hardware? And has his contributed code to EVERYthing fron Doom to Quake3 to the Linux kernel itself? And who'se character is EVERY bit as condescending as "estanislao martinez"?
It is baiting all of you. Quit biteing.
Oh, if only Slashdot had killfiles....
john Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku: I am not a drone. Remove the collective if
Wrong direction (OFFTOPIC)
on
Caffeine Vault
·
· Score: 2
>I've climbed a 14000+ft. mountainwith no ill >effects. Are you maybe thinking of 300psi?
Nope. He means 300 ft. You've just got your directions mixed up. Remember he was just talking 'bout SCUBA diving? He means 300ft UNDERWATER.
At those depths, a 21% O2 mix (such as air) will cause you to die of oxygen toxicity within minutes. Oh, and that 78% N2? At those pressures N2 becomes intoxicating, and you suffer from nitrogen narcosis... to say nothing of the bends when you come back up.
For deep diving, a very low O2 mixture is used, generally 5% O2 or less. And to prevent nitrogen narcosis and the bends, an inert gas, usually helium, is mixed with the oxygen.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't worry about them running out of money anytime soon.
Now, as to why Linus would be in business with someone like allen in the first place, that's completely open to speculation.
john
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Haiku:
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>produce while working for the company (note: I
>don't say 'on company time, or with company
>equipment').
Yey another reason to work in a *civilized* state like California. Such contracts are illegal and unenforceable here. Even if you *DO* sign one, such as in a generic "boilerplate" contract with a company that has operations in many states, some of which might enforce such clauses... they are all null and void here.
As a matter of fact, when I signed on to my current job (first job of mine in CA), there was an addendum to my contract explicitly stating all of the above, and declared any such clauses in the main contract to be null and void in accordiance with California law.
Nice to see that SOME states actually give a crap about the people who live and work there. Virginia, OTOH, was, IIRC also one of the first states to enact UCITA. Too bad for Nullsoft that they neglected to think of things like this when they sold out to AOL.
You won't see me setting foot in a festering backwoods hellhole like VA with neanderthal laws like they have there, much less living or working in the place.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Witness the Gnutella/Nullsoft saga. To employ a couple of bad cliches, Gnutella just barely dodged the RIAA's bullet, but is not out of the woods yet.
For those of you not familiar with the story, Nullsoft are the fellows who developed WinAmp, and were subsequently bought by AOL with the promise that they would be independent within the company. Their next project was to be a new file-shareing program that, unlike Napster, would allow ANY kind of file to be transferred, and would not be reliant on centrally located servers. Not only that, it was intended to be a GPLed program from the very start.
Well, you might also know that AOL recently aquired Time-Warner, notorious member of the RIAA *AND* MPAA. Well, TW turned on Steve Case and ordered him to put a stop to Nullsoft's latest creation. And put a stop to it he did.
Fortunately, the wego guys suceeded in getting ahold of the source and have been producing binaries. But the FAQ seems to indicate that there are still legal issues with the source code, so there is no source available for a program that was INTENDED BY ITS CREATORS to be open sourced.
If Nullsoft had the foresight to released the source under the GPL at the first opportunity, with the first release, BEFORE Gnutella appeared on time warner / RIAA / metallica's radar, this problem would not exist. The source would be out under the GPL and I suspect that development would have proceeded much faster than it has (it's been at ver 0.56 for HOW long now???).
Or imagine if Jon Johnson had delayed the release of deCSS. The MPAA could possibly have acted to supress him in time to destroy the code before the world had redistributed.
If you're working on code that might challange the business model, compete with, or in any way irritate, someone who ALREADY has tons of money, such as RIAA/metallica, or the MPAA, or microsoft, etc. it's DEFINATELY the best idea to "get the geinie out of the bottle", as soon as you can.
That way, even if *you* are persecuted, your IDEAS cannot be realisticly suppressed.
(I would hope that if Napster DOES lose against the RIAA/metallica, that Fanning's last act of defiance before the company's execution would be to GPL the entire source for everything. I would have a LOT of respect for anyone with that kind of courage and integrity)
john
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Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
That other fellow who replied to you saying that evolution is an incontrovertable fact is full of shit. But then those who purport creation to be the same are more so full of shit.
This is simple scientific method stuff, folks!!!
You ARE correct in that evolution should be called a hypothesis and not a theory. But you seem to have no idea what a theory *IS*.
>Calling it theory implies proven fact,
Which is absurdly false.
What a theory implies is that you have a conducted a repeatable (that's VERY important) experiment whose results support your hypothesis.
Now, what be "proven facts" would be things like:
"This skeleton (A) I dug out of the ground has X amount of Carbon 14 isotopes in it"
"This other skeleton (B) I dug out of the ground has a similar bone structure, but a larger braincase and has Y carbon 14 isotopes in it, making it Z million years more recent than the first skeleton"
Now, a hypothesis is a logical premise that fits all the known facts: "Well, it appears that, given A and B are closely related, B is more advanced than A, and B is Z million years younger than A, A evolved over time to become B"
For evolution to be a THEORY, someone would have to have conducted an (REPEATABLE!!!) experiment, subject to peer review, that offers support to the hypothesis. This has, to my knowledge, not happened for evolution (tho I COULD be wrong).
Now, for evolution to be a "proven fact", or a law, there's an entire array of headache inducing proofs, where you'd have to demonstrate mathmetically that there is NO other POSSIBLE explination for the known facts. There are very few scientific LAWS compared to the number of theories.
Unfortunately for the bible thumping crowd, creationism doesn't even have enough going for it to be considered a hypothesis, much less a theory.
john
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Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
So, say you have two objects A and B. A can be a battleship, a person, an 1KG lead weight, a planet, etc. The center of mass is the point where all forces can be (simplisticly) be judged to act. So, if you're a person (object A), your CoM is in the lower-mid torso. If you put on a heavy backpack (object B), the CoM moves toward your back (the system of objects now has a common center of mass C), out of alignment with the vector of gravity force (perpendiclar to the ground) so the set of objects, you AND the backpack is like to fall over.
Now, jump into space, and substitute two equal-massed objects for A and B. In a closed system, A and B will share a common center of mass, point C, around which they will orbit.
Now, if B has a larger mass than A, the center of mass will be closer to B, and A AND B will orbit the center of mass (C).
Now, make B MUCH more massive than A... say A is the mass of the Earth and B is the mass of the Sun. C is now MUCH closer to B than A. But A and B STILL ORBIT C.
Now, cease treating A and B as point masses... they now have diameters. C, the center of mass is still a point. In the case of the Earth(A) and the sun(B), C, being much closer to B than A, is WITHIN the diameter of the sun. Therefore A (Earth) appears to be orbiting B (the sun), but in reality, both are orbiting C (the center of mass of the set of objects that contain the Earth and the sun). C just happens to be within the diameter of the sun.
The same can be said of the Earth and the mood. Only Luna is MUCH more massive compared to Earth than Earth is compared to the Sun. In this case, point C is approximately 1000km beneath the surface of the Earth.
Now, heep in mind that this is a VERY simplistic explination written by an exhausted person about to crash for the night. I am, of course, neglecting objects D..*, instead pretending that the universe consists of only two masses. I'm also neclecting every OTHER force acting on the objects, and prolly a handful of other things as well.
But that IS the general gist of what I think the previous poster meant.
(here's to hoping the infinity symbol up there shows up correctly)
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
>governments this century is in eight digits.
... I think that estimate is somewhat conservative. I would guess nine digits.
For a quikie rundown...
stalin's purges to socialise the USSR are estimated at 20 mil or so, that's NOT including all of the soviet citizens murdered by rulers other than stalin.
The nazis (hmm, does this invoke Godwin's law?) got 6 million European Jews.
pol pot took out several hundred thousand Cambodians.
Who even knows how many Chinese died in mao's "great leap forward". I've never heard of an accurate number being agreed upon. Most guesstimates I've run across place the number in the tens of millions.
Now, that's ONLY the major players in the genocide game. That does NOT count the numerous wannabes in the "murder your own citizens" competition.
Oh... speaking of which, the examples I've mentioned thus far are only examples of governments murdering their *OWN* citizens. I've not even guessed at the deaths caused when governments have decided that they's just LOVE to annex that land next to their own; trouble being, that it usually belongs to someone else who's willing to fight to keep it.
Add in Germany (damn... did I just do ANOTHER Godwin???) and Japan's little plan to take over the world about sixty years ago, and I think you'll EASILY get into nine digits. To say nothing of the REST of the wars of the 20th century.
So, I'm with the anonymous coward here (damn is THAT a strange occurance). Governments gone rogue are a LOT more of a concern than J. Random Lunatics such as mcveigh, koresh, arafat, et. al.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
>"Napster is causing a vast number of consumers
>to believe that free music on the Internet is
>an entitlemant."
... which is a flat out lie. The notion of "if it's on the internet then you're free to use it" did *NOT* originate from Napster.
For the VAST majority of its existence (most of which predates Napster (and, for that matter, the web)), the "internet culture" has been one of shareing. If there was something on the net that was pretty nifty, and you saw a use for it, you were perfectly free to grab a copy and put it to (fair) use, or if it was GPL software, modify it and redistribute. Hell, I taught myself HTML and javascript by surfing the web, and if a page did something I thought was cool, viewing the source and shamelessly learning from the original. That was a much better way (for me) to learn than any HTML book I've run across. And there was never any real problem with this, because if you wanted any cred, you recriprocated by uploading anything YOU do, just in case someone else thinks it's nifty, and someone ELSE might like it.
And there was never any problem with that. The whole point of the net was to share data. (well, okay, originally the whole point was to survive a nuclear attack, but the most common (post DARPA(whose involvement in what is NOW known as the internet was rathar short))use was shareing of knowledge).
It wasn't until VERY recently that giant corperate monoliths such as the RIAA noticed the net, and decided to turn it into their own private playground. They want to destroy the old, free, permissive, sharing culture, impose a meatspace culture on it, and turn it into nothing more than one more marketing demographic.
OF COURSE there is going to be a culture clash.
But to claim that Napster just came along to a perfectly controlled, orderly, on-line marketplace, and just suddenly declared "if it's on the net it's free", is pure FUD, plain and simple. That culture was always there. It's the RIAA who is the uninvited interloper trying to destroy a culture, *NOT* Napster.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
>until the games start coming out for it at the
>same time or sooner than they come out for
>windows.
Do you read John Carmack's
See, iD released the golden masters for the Linux, Macintosh, and windoze versions of Quake3 ON THE SAME DAY!!! That was Carmacks plan for many months prior to the release of Quake 3. But look closer at the
Loki and MacSoft do great work. But entire distrobution / production / retail chains they are not.
Particularly telling is the fack that Loki had the production CDs completed by their own supplier, but the company supplying the packaging was intentionally witholding, from Loki, all of the packageing materials (the box, manual, jewel case, etc.) Loki worked around this by shipping Quake 3 CDs alone to those who ordered directly from them, and sending the packageing materials later. But if you perfer to shop at a conventional store, you were SOL.
Now, an exercise for the reader:
Who, in the technoogy industry, has a vested intrest in making alternative operating systems look bad by delaying the Macintosh and Linux versions of software, as opposed to the windoze version? Who has the power to bully the distrobution chain into bending to his will? And who has shown absolutely no restraint in the abuse of that monopoly power?
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
>in its filename, that would make it so much more
>difficult to trade Metallica's works that most
>people would no longer bother.
I have a friend who is in a Ska band. One of their songs is entitled "Metallica Sucks Donkey Dick" (no, that's not a joke, they really DO have a song by that name. Oh, and it predates even the existence of napster. They wrote it because they are of the opinion that metallica sold out when they released the black album, and that it, end everything since, has... well... sucked donkey dick).
They have said, *publicly* at their shows, that they "don't give a flying fuck" if people make and distribute MP3s of their music.
So if Napster conspires with metallica/RIAA to block any files with *metallica*.mp3 in their name, how does my friends music, which the band HAS given permission to distribute, get through?
Sounds like restraint of trade and abuse of monopoly power on the part of RIAA to me.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
>installer for "command line only"?
Well, it's not an option in the installer, but in the developer preview versions of OS X, you can kill -9 all of the Aqua gooiness and be left with a big honkin fullscreen tcsh shell.
I don't see how they could take that ability away in the final version unless they deny their customers the root login, keeping it for service techs only or something. From what I can tell by using DP4, it does NOT appear that that is in the cards. You have to su (well, a graphical equivelent) from user to root whenever you want to change important system settings. They've put a good deal of work into making su functionality as transparant as possible. Denyng root NOW would mean throwing away a good deal of work already done.
Plus, I imagine that if they *DID* deny the buyer the root login:
1) They would be pubicly roasted alive by nearly everyone... a PR nightmare to say the least.
and
2) It would be cracked soon enough anyway, so there'd really be no point
So it's not bloody likely that Apple would deny OS X buyers root on their own boxen. So I say just modify rc.d to your hearts content.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
>If the Judge is siding with anyone it's not
>metallica.
Have you been paying attention this last month or so??? metallica has been the primary bitch for the RIAA the whole time, with dr dre and m&m being the secondary attack dogs!
>I've never looked at Napster as something that
>you loot and pillage free music from...I don't
>even remember who did the study (my brain is
>fried from working in a callcenter environment)
>but it was found that people who use Napster are
>actually buying more music. Forgive me if I don't
>go to the store and spend 16 dollars on a CD,
>only to find out all but 2 tracks suck. I also
>think that Napster was a great place for smaller
>labels to be heard.
And where did you get the idea that I thought differently? My point wasn't about my MP3 useage. My point was about how supprising and dissapointing it is that someone in San Francisco could be so clueless. That, and the fact that it's VERY supprising to see a San Franciscian whoreing out to the RIAA. If you lived here, you'd know how anti-corperate-giant, anti-profit-in-general this city can be. Hell, just go to sfbg.com and read some of the editorials from the Guardian.
Actually, if you'd read any of my previous posts on the Napster issue, you'd know that my Napster useage is similar to that which you described.
The simple fact is that MP3 files do *NOT* live up to the quality of red book audio if you play them on a stereo that doesn't suck. Therefore, if the MUSIC doesn't suck, I'll still be buying CDs (well, not for the forseeable future (not from any of the RIAA labels anyway)). It pisses me off to no end that the RIAA/metallica is trying (sucessfully, it would seem) obfuscate the issue by lieing about the technology, the service, and the users, from all angles, at every opportunity. "Perfect digital copies of the studio recordings" my ass! These guys should work for microsoft, they're so good at slinging FUD!
>you've just wasted a lot of time, and a
>lot of bandwidth.
Yeah, and picket lines waste a lot of time and a lot of cardboard... flyers kill a lot of trees... but they still work, they still get the message out, they still let the public know of injustice. But forgive me if I'm not up on the latest edition of the social activism handbook. Just what do *YOU* suggest; black backgrounds and blue ribbon GIFs on our websites?
TGFG
(Thank God For Gnutella)
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
Granted the city itself does have its contingent of ultra-liberal "money BAD, technology BAD, geeks BAD, economic growth BAD, uh... poverty GOOD, urban decay GOOD" folk. But most people seem to be brighter than that.
Besides, it seems that even the ultra-liberal crowd should've sided with Fanning and Co., seeing as Napster's yet to make a profit, whilst metalica rakes in millions, and their masters, billions, each year.
Dissapointing, to say the least.
Well, I, for one, on general principle, will be downloading the entire metallica, dr dre, and m&m catalog's tonite, before Napster goes offline. I wonder if my ex-roommate's anonymising usenet gateway will accept so large a tarball?
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
He didn't write Napster thinking "I'm going to write this program so that I can start a company, get rich, and be persecuted by the RIAA, dirty metalheads and "gangster" rappers throughout the US of A".
He wrote Napster thinking "Wow... these MP3s are pretty neat, I can listen to a lot of cool music I wouldn't have heard before, and give others the same opportunity, its a shame that it's so hard to find the things tho... mabye I can write a program to make it a little easier...".
So he wrote a program, thought it was pretty cool, and shared it with others. Everyone else thought it was pretty cool too, and some people suggested to him: "hey, this software is really cool, you might be able to make some money off of it, like those WinAmp guys did".
The rest, as they say, is history. The software wasn't written to fit a business plan. A business plan was written (supposedly) to fit the software AFTER THE FACT.
Kinda hard to do change everything without alienating your users (ask Apple about the complaints they're getting from the Aqua demos). And that's NOT something you want to do, especially considering that other projects like Gnutella are rapidly gaining on Napster in it's core competency: "making an MP3 search *EASY* to do".
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
>controls the military (rather than, say, an
>elected body of citizens), you are only one quick
>coup away from dictatorship.
You might try reading Norman Schwartzkoff's (I'm SURE I spelled that wrong) book: "It Doesn't take a Hero".
Not the growing up part, or the Vietnam or Gulf war memoirs (though they DO paint an intresting picture of the army's evolution over the years (from elite force guarding western Europe from socialist aggression, to degenerate mob during vietnam, back to an elite force of professional volunteers with the best training and hardware in the world (granted the author *IS* a little biased))).
What you should DEFINATELY read is his description of the selection process to become a General (OR, for that matter, an Admrial). It's a VERY rigourous selection process just to get to one star. Above that, the regular promotions board goes away, and advancement requires the approval of damn near half of Washington. In fact, IIRC, a four-star slot actually requires the confirmation of the senate, just like a cabinet post or supreme court chair.
I think it's a pretty good bet, that any soldier who would, at the behest of the president or anyone else, drive his tanks up Capitol Hill, would *NOT* have passed the selection process to become a general and get command of those tanks in the first place.
Of course, I COULD be an irrational optimist, or Schwartzkoff COULD have lied through his teeth (keyboard?)...
john
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vs.
The "hacking cheater, who opens the binary in a hex editor, actually groks what's in there, and figures out the cheat codes, AND mabye WRITES the very patches that he cheats with.
The first kind, is really kind of contemptable. And I, for one, doubt that anyone really buys into his "sk1ll3z".
But the second kind... well hacking up the executable of someone elses game (and generally the source is NOT available in MOST games)... that takes GENUINE skill. And not only to I NOT hold these guys in contempt, but I think that we could agree that THESE guys are due some respect. Patching executables is a dying art in this era of fast and smart compilers, linkers, and assemblers. Hell, most people would never even THINK to even LOOK at an executable in an editor, much less CHANGE anything. My kudos to the guys who can still do it.... and do it well.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Funny, if you support the "common man" over the "oppressors" and such, why are you, now, defending the likes of hussain, milosovixh, and castro? Any one of which is a hundred times worse an "oppressor" than clinton could ever hope to be. (you don't see many people their lives risking on home-built rafts, in the straits of Florida, trying to get IN to cuba, do you?).
Now, I don't know anyone who escaped from hussain or milosovich, so I won't bother more with them, but when I lived in Florida, I *DID* meet a number of people who were lucky enough to escape, alive, from castro.
>Second, Castro's crime simply was aiming for Cuba
>not to bend over to US interests over those of
>its people.
There was also that little matter of allying themselves with an enemy determined to destroy us at all costs ("we will bury you" ring a bell?). Oh, and also that little "pointing nuclear missiles
at us from 90 miles away, a distance from which there would have been little or no warning before millions are vaporised" incident just MIGHT have had a bearing on the direction of the US's cuba policy.
>US interests over those of its people.
>Cuba was not a wonderful place before Castro.
If you seriously beleive that castro cares, in the slightest, about "the intrests of his people", or that cuba is a wonderful little "workers paradise", I suggest you visit Miami sometime and ask the people who've BEEN IN CUBA, and been lucky enough to escape with their lives (and most often, with very little else) what it was like.
john
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>from the "we are the world" mentality. There are
>way too many people willing to appease tyrants
>rather than support fighters for freedom.
Okay, you think the US should stand up to tyrants and put them down. That's all well and good. I agree. But for every person who thinks that we should NOT appease tyrants, there's someone who, when America DOES fight tyrrany, will accuse the US of "imperialism" or "hipocracy" or other imaginary crimes.
Examples, you ask? Look at the outcry when:
NATO moved to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosova from slobo milosivich's plans for genocide.
America has been decicedly anti-castro for decades now (up until clinton recently decided to start sucking up to him).
We certianly haven't been "appeasing" saddam hussain these last ten or so years.
In each of these cases (and I could name more), where America (okay, and our allies, I'm not leaving you out on purpose) HAS adopted a policy of standing up to tyrrany, there wss as much of an outcry (imperialism, warmongering, etc.) as there would be (from a totally diferent set of people) if we had done nothing, or supported the regime in question.
It's a Kobiyashi Maru situation.
You can't please everybody, so you take the middle ground, pick your battles, and try to do what's in the best intrests of your citizens. And, all too often, just wind up pissing everybody off.
Sux to be president, eh? Who was it again who said, of the presidency, that anyone who WANTS the job, should, by no means, be allowed to have it?
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
So automating hunger site clicks would STILL grow the total donations (if the script was adopted widely enough, that is). It just wouldn't make it grow too rapidly.
But even if there WERE an absolute maximum per month, that would NEVER grow... it's still do good to keep the donations pegged up against that maximum limit.
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
There are plenty of proggies out there for automating (or simulating) web-surfing activity. Mostly, these are for the purpose of ripping off AllAdvantage, or some of the other "pay to surf" sites.
Are any of these GPLed? If so, one or more could be modified to be put to very GOOD use (for a change). If you can simulate mouse clicking on a given link good enough to fool AllAdvantage, it sould be easy enough to duplicate the principle so as to automate accessing the hunger site link.
Imagine if every geek out there were to drop this script in cron, set to run every 24 hours (as the site claims this is the max. That would rack up a healthy cart of food, yes?
But even better, how *DO* they know to only allow one access a day? The obvious answers would be that they log your IP address, or they set a cookie. IP logging would be problamatic for THEM, as many people are on dialups with dynamic assignment. So they may disqualify one IP address even though there's a new user trying to donate.
But if it's a cookie-based method, wouldn't it be simple enough to script an automatic removal of that cookie, making it possible to donate MUCH more often than once
Thoughts? Ideas?
I think I'll start messing with THS tonite to see if I can figure an easy way to do this.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
There's an RPG out there called Aeon. I THINK it's made by the same guys who make those vampire RPGs. It takes place in 2120. Earth was invaded in the 21st century by aliens called "Abberants", and just barely won with China nuking the Abberants' bases down to bedrock from orbit. Man then established colonies throughout the solar system, a few interstellar ones via big ships that amplify the human mind to make it possible to psionically teleport. China runs most of the show, via their space superority, and human telepaths (plus telekinetics, teleporters, and a few others) are forced to be part of the "Ministry" a la Babylon 5's PsiCorps.
The point? Oops, lemme get back to it.
Anyway, in 2120, the second wave of Abberants arrives to invade Earth again. One of the settings in this RPG is a battlestation in orbit around Jupiter. Now, Jupiter, as you know, has a magnetic field that makes Earth's look like a kitchen magnet. These battlestations around Jupiter use their movement through Jupiter's magnetic field to power huge laser cannons that put out power in the terawatt (!) range to defend against this second wave of attacks.
I looked through this "Aeon" book in the bookstore a few times when it first came out. I haven't seen it in a LONG time tho. I don't think it sold very well, compared to the vampire RPGs and I think it got cancelled.
It was a pretty nifty looking thing tho, if you can find a copy in a used bookstore somewhere.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
Have you been paying attention these last few years?
Hell, have you been paying attention these last few WEEKS?
Oracle just caught (albiet using somewhat (morally if not legally) questionable investigatory tactics) gates at it *AGAIN* only a few weeks ago!!!
Okay, sure, mabye it's perfectly legal (I think) for gates to fund these "grass roots" organizations to use as propaganda tools.
But hell, in this very article, there are quite a few people who actually admit (or, at least, claim) to be in the employ of the collective itself.
The astroturfers are out there. It's a fact. Just because you might think there's nothing wrong with it, does NOT mean it isn't happening!
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
... and its not what I thought it would be. And they DO have some intresting points. I STILL perfer the MacOS GUI tho... and if the reports that OS X will have tcsh installed by default.... nirvana.
Okay, some elements of aqua suck, but Ars would have us beleive that it's all defined in XML files that root can edit. I know first thing *I*'m gonna do is put all of the window widgets back in the right place. (to hell with Steve's "trafic light" metaphor)
>massive neural strain induced by too much cofee)
Heh... does half a box of penguin mints a day, + coffee + tea + Dr. P + some mini thins count? We just made a massive deadling yesterday and everyone was really pushing to get our beta deployed by today. Last nite was the first time in a week I slept more than 4 hours. I feel much better now.
But yeah, even when I'm calm and well rested, I tend to get too defensive when microdrones go on the rampage and bash anyone who dares not to follow the banner of bill (howz about Linux *ON* a Mac (yellow dog) does that make me TWICE the heathen?).
I just hope Easel is less of a resource hog than Gnome. I STILL think the Mac team came up with the best interface yet invented, but my main Linux box is still a K6 running SuSE. And it DRAGS under Gnome.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
(how gates got to limo I dunno, but theres SOMETHING not kosher in andover land)
But check out this book:
Coporate Cults: The Insidious Lure of the All-Consuming Organization
by:
Dave Arnott
Hardcover - 256 pages 1 Ed edition (October 1999)
AMACOM; ISBN: 0814404936 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.02 x 9.31 x 6.27
I won't bother with an Amazon link given the patent related sentiment about them, just plug into your favorite booksellers search.
Anyway, Arnot goes into lurid detail about how several companies (particularly micro$oft) *DO* in fact, have indoctrination and assimilation programs crafted to break down te inductee'd individuality and turn them into drones in the collective.
A number of other posters have mentioned that they do know, PERSONALLY, drones who exhibit all the cult-like symptoms Arnott describes. Well, this is how they got there.
Remember in Microserfs, what the protagonists were like before they were fortunate enough to escape? Well, as scary as it sounds, that's how these guys REALLY are!
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
>Back in the good times, whenever the editors
>were thinking of making any changes to the
>system,
To which emmons rightfully points out that it's userID is GREATER THAN 200K.
It has also, in the past, claimed to remember people being "out to get" shengan in the days before his (apparantly temporary(unfortunately)) banishment from the editorial pool.
Now, my userID is in the 62K range, and I joined
Clearly, no one with a 200K+ userID would have been around then. UNLESS it is a troll. "estanliao martinez" is a such a troll. It is a made up character, a fraud. You should all have realised THAT much from its posting history.
A while back, an anonymous coward was circulating a link to "martinez"'s postings in the illicit "inchfan" forum, announcing the creation of the character. I, unfortunately, lost that link. AC, if you're there, a repost would be really cool.
Not only all that, it SLIPS OUT OF CHARACTER when you get it pissed off! Examine this quote from it in the following story (It is archived, so you'll have to scroll down, or search for its username):
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/28/1832229.s
>I repeat, I have *taught* logic. I have studied
>First Order Logic, Dynamic Logic, Modal Logic,
>Hybrid Logic, Type Theory, Model Theoretic
>Semantics, Substructural Logics, Feature Logics,
>and some more. At grad level. I'd advise you to
>not take my knowledge here for granted.
Note, in particular, the last sentance. Now, where have we heard THAT before? Which phony personality did it fall back to?
Everybody remember st-st-st-steven w-w-w-woston, of "jjjjulius games", who just HAPPENS to be close, personal friends with just about EVERY major player in the industry and community, from John Carmack to Scott Draker to Linus? Gets previews of EVERY bit of new hardware? And has his contributed code to EVERYthing fron Doom to Quake3 to the Linux kernel itself? And who'se character is EVERY bit as condescending as "estanislao martinez"?
It is baiting all of you. Quit biteing.
Oh, if only Slashdot had killfiles....
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
>effects. Are you maybe thinking of 300psi?
Nope. He means 300 ft. You've just got your directions mixed up. Remember he was just talking 'bout SCUBA diving? He means 300ft UNDERWATER.
At those depths, a 21% O2 mix (such as air) will cause you to die of oxygen toxicity within minutes. Oh, and that 78% N2? At those pressures N2 becomes intoxicating, and you suffer from nitrogen narcosis... to say nothing of the bends when you come back up.
For deep diving, a very low O2 mixture is used, generally 5% O2 or less. And to prevent nitrogen narcosis and the bends, an inert gas, usually helium, is mixed with the oxygen.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if