I know it's easy to be cynical. Hey, I am quite realistic about my chances. But Australian politics IS different to US politics. Whilst we have two (or three depending on who you ask) major parties, we do also have several minor parties in the Senate which keep a lot of the laws in check. It is here that I am aiming.
There's a quote that goes something like: "All evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing." If you play into the idea that you will never change anything, then you never will.
Our party policies are being shaped in real time via the internet on our forums. The policies will be a direct reflection of the wishes of our Members. This is fundamentally as democratic as it gets, and it ensures that the policies people really want will gravitate to the top. Thus we will be a party not of one or two issues, but of as many issues as our Members feel need to be issues.
Why not visit our site and see for yourself, and post your own thoughts directly to us? See sig for link.
As others have pointed out, this still needs to be passed through both Houses.
However, you can help me by taking your frustrations and channeling them into supporting me run for election, so if successful I CAN do something about it directly.
In fact, if you are so inclined, why not run yourself, either as an independent or as part of my new party?
Interested? See my sig for my party website and jump into our forums there to voice your thoughts.
Well, whilst I am not YET in parliament, I do read and post to/.
See my sig for my nascent political party here in Oz.
I can tell you that we as a party will NOT encourage paper based petitions, but rather we will encourage emails and postings to our forums where the party hierarchy will always be active and responding to posts.
Snail mail to MPs is a waste of resources IMHO. I'm more than capable of reading emails and postings in forums, so why shouldn't other politicians be? (rhetorical question!!)
Anyway, drop into our forums and support us so we CAN get into parliament and do something to stop these types of draconian laws.
I started a political party here in Australia in January, in the hope of getting 500 members and getting ourselves on the federal ballot for this upcoming election.
Currently we have 11 members. This is pretty slow going. If you're Australian, take a moment to visit our site (see sig for link). Slashdot our PO Box with membership forms if you think we are worthy!!
The only real way to fight this sort of law is to actually get yourself into the political system by running for and winning in the election. So that's what I intend to do. If you want to help, visit our site and drop into the forums there, or simply read what we are about and see if our ideals match yours. We are based primarily on the internet and have set ourselves up as an open source tech savvy party, meaning that not only do we use open source, but we are making all our documentation, reports and discussions open as well. This is really the only way to make politics accountable again.
You may also want to consider running for parliament yourself (either through us or by starting your own party - you can even use our Constitution etc as a basis!).
Anyway, visit us and if interested tell your friends. This is the only way in today's society of getting this sort of law repealed.
Use this simple quote that will stick in impressionable people's minds:
"Ogg - it's like MP3, only better"
It makes them think, and ask followup questions such as "Why?" You can then tell them why. But START with this simple quote that is catchy and easy to remember and place everywhere:
The cost of being sued is more than the cost of paying "protection money" is what you meant to say, right?
Face it, this is as much extortion as the RIAA suing children and then "settling" for a fraction of that amount, but with guaranteed payment. The government should be using the RICO Act to nail all the offending parties. That they don't speaks volumes about their allegiances....
Here is our Party Constitution's wording on what would constitute a valid vote.
Currently we do not have such a process in place (we've only just begun operating), and from talking to various
people on the issue, it appears that most experts regard this as impossible
to implement. I'd like to think that eventually someone will create such a system,
as it would open the world's democracies up to far more representation than
they currently enjoy.
Online Voting Security
3.51 For online voting to be considered secure, it needs to be open
to outside scrutiny and have at its heart the ability to verify that only an
authorised Member has cast a vote in the proper manner.
3.52 An online vote must fulfil the following criteria to be considered
valid:
a. The Member must be able to cast their vote such that only they know
how they voted;
b. The Member must be able to verify that their vote has been correctly
registered, both at the time of casting the vote and at any other time after
the event;
c. The Member must only be able to vote once per issue;
d. The vote must be correctly registered at the server;
e. The server must be able to prove it has not been tampered with;
f. The server's hardware and software must be open to scrutiny at any
time and independently verifiable by a third party;
g. The server must be able to check the authority of a Member to cast
a vote, but not retain specific identifiable information on how a Member voted
after the event without that Member providing a hash key for verification purposes.
3.53 In the event that an online vote is questioned as to its validity
and integrity, there must be a way to conduct a recount for up to one month
after the vote.
You can download a full copy of our Constitution by visiting the URL in my
sig, and learn more about what we stand for if interested.
The problem of content and transmission today have to do with one thing - making money for someone. Everybody thinks in terms of paying for either bandwidth speed or throughput, or paying for content exclusive to one provider. This is not going to get us anywhere.
What I envision is much simpler - pay for a piece of hardware once(high speed wireless transmitter/receiver with intelligent peer routing), and then the bandwidth is not paid for by anyone, because there's no traditional infrastructure to set up. If a company would just make this type of equipment it could set free all those who currently are beholden to their ISP/cable companies for "giving" them a certain amount of bandwidth in exchange for $$$. If you make these wireless internet nodes in such a way that they auto-aggregate and reorder themselves based on surrounding nodes, you would effectively have unlimited bandwidth (to the limit of transmission tech of course) not monopolised by anyone. Much like Bittorrent, the more nodes you had, the faster it would be. Conversely, you could have high power models for remote areas to transmit/receive further.
It's a paradigm shift in thinking (since the very notion of not needing to pay constantly for access is foreign to most), and I don't have all the technical answers to this sort of idea, but surely the idea itself has merit?
OpenOffice.org - for when Microsoft Office
documents refuse to open in Microsoft Office!!
It's not like you love Microsoft anyway is it? I mean, you're using an Apple....
OK, I for one am still using my purchased copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 (in Windows). However, I am trying to get rid of ALL my paid for apps in favour of freeware alternatives, that I can give to others on CD to use on a fresh install of Windows. I consider this the first step to weaning myself and others off Windows completely - prove that free software can be as good as or better than paid for apps.
For the most part I have it all down - Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org - the three basic apps any user needs to be productive are all there AND are superior to their commercial equivalents. The missing piece of the puzzle is a graphics editor. I have tried GIMP on two occasions, and both times I found the lack of single interface and weird ways of doing things to be constraining, to the point where if I couldn't work it out, there wasn't much point trying to give it to my parents to work out! I held hope that on seeing the announcement of a new user interface, it would finally match (roughly) the UIs of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Alas, no such luck.
Well, now my question is this - what freeware applications do you know of that I can give to others as a graphics editing app. It doesn't need to do full CMYK etc, but I'd like it to have at least equivalent functionality to my old PSP5. Note that I'm not asking for open source necessarily. Free is good enough for now. I've tried Serif Software's "free" option but it isn't really free and I can't store it on CD because it wants a key that expires.
So Slashdotters - Free, Windows OS graphics app, single document interface, equivalent to PSP5 or similar - does it exist?
Freedom for corporations, not individuals
on
Buzzword du Jour: DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
See, you make the classic mistake of thinking that when they say "freedom", they mean YOUR freedom.
They don't.
They mean freedom as in "We are now free to bilk the consumer in perpetuity, thanks to this wonderful Digital Restrictions Management tech we've put in place."
1. Use DVD Decrypter in File mode
to rip movies to hard drive/storage area in separate folders. Remove UPOs at same time for convenience.
2. Create a web page on your server which links to each starting VOB in that
folder with the name of the movie. Customise as necessary into Genre etc if
desired.
3. Associate VOB files with your choice of DVD player software. Set player
software to go into fullscreen mode and disable screen sleep.
4. Use remote mouse or whatever with video interface to computer to choose appropriate
movie and voila!
Give it a couple of years when a reasonable proportion of the population is using it. Suddenly the holdouts have become the minority, and are then pressured into complying with the usual taunts: "You must be a terrorist if you don't want your iris on file!"
Then the 5% who STILL hold out will find they can't travel anywhere anymore.
I know this is meant as a joke, but think about it this way - who did you want to win in Star Wars? Lucas may have screwed the second trilogy, but he sure understood how the forces of evil may start off with good intentions and slowly but surely stray from the path through power and corruption. That's about where the US is today - it's rapidly becoming the Empire when it started out as the Old Republic.
I've begun a political party here in Australia called Net
Effect, which is based on the internet.
Right now we only have 10 people who have decided to become members. We need
500 to become a registered federal political party, so we can get on the ballots
and fight our recently agreed to Aus-DMCA thanks to the new FTA our government
signed with the US.
If you're Australian (anywhere, not just living here), please visit and make
your views known in our forums, and if interested become a member.
If you are another nationality, you can still be a forum participant and advise
us on how we should go forward to fight this sort of thing. We want to harness
good ideas from everywhere, not just our own country, and in return give those
same ideas to everyone else who wants to use them. Open source politics, as it should be.
If a police officer asks you for ID, just tell him that you will produce ID if he does the same. Is he asking for your driver's licence? Ask for his. If he refuses, ask why. Then use that same excuse when telling him he can't see yours.
Kiddie pron and terrorism. Music and movie sharing. All the usual suspects are dragged out whenever [lobby group] needs to implement a new measure to watch you online and offline.
Your point about even viewing kiddie pron being a crime is at the heart of why their "studies" are fundamentally flawed. Anyone who has any "evidence" that kiddie pron is a massive problem is themselves guilty of viewing it, possibly downloading and categorising it. How did they do their study? By guessing how much is out there?
To me, kiddie pron seems an invaluable tool to frame someone (as with Scott Ritter) such that the court of public opinion will convict them regardless of the real truth of planted evidence. The fact that no one acknowledges this scares me, because it means no one will question when some is found on someone's computer, whether it really WAS downloaded by the person found with it.
Certainly. You don't have to borrow it; you can have it:) I am in favour of copyleft and see no problem in reusing my ideas for the common good. In fact, should you be interested (no matter what country you are from), I'd welcome you to visit my Australian political party website/forum and see more of how I am trying to change things for the better:
www.neteffect.org.au
Using the quote for a sig is a great idea, as it will constantly show others the other way of viewing advertising.
Actually, they covered the tipping/clear bottle decryption routine here in Australia with a recent competition (not sure what it was for, I just remember the bottles).
Instead of having clear PET bottles of Pepsi, they made them from PET injected with silver colouring, making them opaque and therefore unable to be tipped to see what the cap said.
Simple solution to a simple problem, and the bottles actually stood out as an added bonus on the shelves.
"In return, the commercial helps pay for the programming you're seeing. That's the trade; your resources in trade for entertainment / information and their message."
Incorrect. Your argument is a cleverly crafted fallacy spun by media companies to justify ads. In reality, YOU are the product (target demographic) being SOLD to the companies BY the media channels. Remember, the media companies are paid by the companies that advertise, so it is in the media companies' interest to ensure their target audience matches what the advetising companies want. Telling you that you get free entertainment because of the ads is just the way to make you feel better about having your favourite show broken up every five minutes.
Your point about cars got me thinking - all these attempts to hack the XBox are great, but why not try hacking and replacing the BMW's iDrive system instead? It is apparently a GUI nightmare, with not many people being comfortable with it, so why not try to replace it with a better system?
Making robots resemble humans is, in my opinion, counter-productive.
Instead, let's create facsimilies of creations such as Chii, from the Chobits anime. It's better to be on the artificial side of the uncanny valley, and make cute bishoujo robots:)
Who here WOULDN'T want a cute persocom as their assistant??!!
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's easy to be cynical. Hey, I am quite realistic about my chances. But Australian politics IS different to US politics. Whilst we have two (or three depending on who you ask) major parties, we do also have several minor parties in the Senate which keep a lot of the laws in check. It is here that I am aiming.
There's a quote that goes something like: "All evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing." If you play into the idea that you will never change anything, then you never will.
Our party policies are being shaped in real time via the internet on our forums. The policies will be a direct reflection of the wishes of our Members. This is fundamentally as democratic as it gets, and it ensures that the policies people really want will gravitate to the top. Thus we will be a party not of one or two issues, but of as many issues as our Members feel need to be issues.
Why not visit our site and see for yourself, and post your own thoughts directly to us? See sig for link.
As others have pointed out, this still needs to be passed through both Houses.
However, you can help me by taking your frustrations and channeling them into supporting me run for election, so if successful I CAN do something about it directly.
In fact, if you are so inclined, why not run yourself, either as an independent or as part of my new party?
Interested? See my sig for my party website and jump into our forums there to voice your thoughts.
Well, whilst I am not YET in parliament, I do read and post to /.
See my sig for my nascent political party here in Oz.
I can tell you that we as a party will NOT encourage paper based petitions, but rather we will encourage emails and postings to our forums where the party hierarchy will always be active and responding to posts.
Snail mail to MPs is a waste of resources IMHO. I'm more than capable of reading emails and postings in forums, so why shouldn't other politicians be? (rhetorical question!!)
Anyway, drop into our forums and support us so we CAN get into parliament and do something to stop these types of draconian laws.
I started a political party here in Australia in January, in the hope of getting 500 members and getting ourselves on the federal ballot for this upcoming election.
Currently we have 11 members. This is pretty slow going. If you're Australian, take a moment to visit our site (see sig for link). Slashdot our PO Box with membership forms if you think we are worthy!!
The only real way to fight this sort of law is to actually get yourself into the political system by running for and winning in the election. So that's what I intend to do. If you want to help, visit our site and drop into the forums there, or simply read what we are about and see if our ideals match yours. We are based primarily on the internet and have set ourselves up as an open source tech savvy party, meaning that not only do we use open source, but we are making all our documentation, reports and discussions open as well. This is really the only way to make politics accountable again.
You may also want to consider running for parliament yourself (either through us or by starting your own party - you can even use our Constitution etc as a basis!).
Anyway, visit us and if interested tell your friends. This is the only way in today's society of getting this sort of law repealed.
Want to build Ogg Vorbis mindshare?
Use this simple quote that will stick in impressionable people's minds:
"Ogg - it's like MP3, only better"
It makes them think, and ask followup questions such as "Why?" You can then tell them why. But START with this simple quote that is catchy and easy to remember and place everywhere:
"Ogg - it's like MP3, only better"
The cost of being sued is more than the cost of paying "protection money" is what you meant to say, right?
Face it, this is as much extortion as the RIAA suing children and then "settling" for a fraction of that amount, but with guaranteed payment. The government should be using the RICO Act to nail all the offending parties. That they don't speaks volumes about their allegiances....
Here is our Party Constitution's wording on what would constitute a valid vote. Currently we do not have such a process in place (we've only just begun operating), and from talking to various people on the issue, it appears that most experts regard this as impossible to implement. I'd like to think that eventually someone will create such a system, as it would open the world's democracies up to far more representation than they currently enjoy.
Online Voting Security
3.51 For online voting to be considered secure, it needs to be open to outside scrutiny and have at its heart the ability to verify that only an authorised Member has cast a vote in the proper manner.
3.52 An online vote must fulfil the following criteria to be considered valid:
a. The Member must be able to cast their vote such that only they know how they voted;
b. The Member must be able to verify that their vote has been correctly registered, both at the time of casting the vote and at any other time after the event;
c. The Member must only be able to vote once per issue;
d. The vote must be correctly registered at the server;
e. The server must be able to prove it has not been tampered with;
f. The server's hardware and software must be open to scrutiny at any time and independently verifiable by a third party;
g. The server must be able to check the authority of a Member to cast a vote, but not retain specific identifiable information on how a Member voted after the event without that Member providing a hash key for verification purposes.
3.53 In the event that an online vote is questioned as to its validity and integrity, there must be a way to conduct a recount for up to one month after the vote.
You can download a full copy of our Constitution by visiting the URL in my sig, and learn more about what we stand for if interested.
The problem of content and transmission today have to do with one thing - making money for someone. Everybody thinks in terms of paying for either bandwidth speed or throughput, or paying for content exclusive to one provider. This is not going to get us anywhere.
What I envision is much simpler - pay for a piece of hardware once(high speed wireless transmitter/receiver with intelligent peer routing), and then the bandwidth is not paid for by anyone, because there's no traditional infrastructure to set up. If a company would just make this type of equipment it could set free all those who currently are beholden to their ISP/cable companies for "giving" them a certain amount of bandwidth in exchange for $$$. If you make these wireless internet nodes in such a way that they auto-aggregate and reorder themselves based on surrounding nodes, you would effectively have unlimited bandwidth (to the limit of transmission tech of course) not monopolised by anyone. Much like Bittorrent, the more nodes you had, the faster it would be. Conversely, you could have high power models for remote areas to transmit/receive further.
It's a paradigm shift in thinking (since the very notion of not needing to pay constantly for access is foreign to most), and I don't have all the technical answers to this sort of idea, but surely the idea itself has merit?
OpenOffice.org - for when Microsoft Office documents refuse to open in Microsoft Office!! It's not like you love Microsoft anyway is it? I mean, you're using an Apple....
OK, I for one am still using my purchased copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 (in Windows). However, I am trying to get rid of ALL my paid for apps in favour of freeware alternatives, that I can give to others on CD to use on a fresh install of Windows. I consider this the first step to weaning myself and others off Windows completely - prove that free software can be as good as or better than paid for apps.
For the most part I have it all down - Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org - the three basic apps any user needs to be productive are all there AND are superior to their commercial equivalents. The missing piece of the puzzle is a graphics editor. I have tried GIMP on two occasions, and both times I found the lack of single interface and weird ways of doing things to be constraining, to the point where if I couldn't work it out, there wasn't much point trying to give it to my parents to work out! I held hope that on seeing the announcement of a new user interface, it would finally match (roughly) the UIs of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Alas, no such luck.
Well, now my question is this - what freeware applications do you know of that I can give to others as a graphics editing app. It doesn't need to do full CMYK etc, but I'd like it to have at least equivalent functionality to my old PSP5. Note that I'm not asking for open source necessarily. Free is good enough for now. I've tried Serif Software's "free" option but it isn't really free and I can't store it on CD because it wants a key that expires.
So Slashdotters - Free, Windows OS graphics app, single document interface, equivalent to PSP5 or similar - does it exist?
See, you make the classic mistake of thinking that when they say "freedom", they mean YOUR freedom.
They don't.
They mean freedom as in "We are now free to bilk the consumer in perpetuity, thanks to this wonderful Digital Restrictions Management tech we've put in place."
1. Use DVD Decrypter in File mode to rip movies to hard drive/storage area in separate folders. Remove UPOs at same time for convenience.
2. Create a web page on your server which links to each starting VOB in that folder with the name of the movie. Customise as necessary into Genre etc if desired.
3. Associate VOB files with your choice of DVD player software. Set player software to go into fullscreen mode and disable screen sleep.
4. Use remote mouse or whatever with video interface to computer to choose appropriate movie and voila!
Of course it's optional.... for now.
Give it a couple of years when a reasonable proportion of the population is using it. Suddenly the holdouts have become the minority, and are then pressured into complying with the usual taunts: "You must be a terrorist if you don't want your iris on file!"
Then the 5% who STILL hold out will find they can't travel anywhere anymore.
It's what they refer to as the slippery slope....
I know this is meant as a joke, but think about it this way - who did you want to win in Star Wars? Lucas may have screwed the second trilogy, but he sure understood how the forces of evil may start off with good intentions and slowly but surely stray from the path through power and corruption. That's about where the US is today - it's rapidly becoming the Empire when it started out as the Old Republic.
I've begun a political party here in Australia called Net Effect, which is based on the internet. Right now we only have 10 people who have decided to become members. We need 500 to become a registered federal political party, so we can get on the ballots and fight our recently agreed to Aus-DMCA thanks to the new FTA our government signed with the US.
If you're Australian (anywhere, not just living here), please visit and make your views known in our forums, and if interested become a member.
If you are another nationality, you can still be a forum participant and advise us on how we should go forward to fight this sort of thing. We want to harness good ideas from everywhere, not just our own country, and in return give those same ideas to everyone else who wants to use them. Open source politics, as it should be.
If a police officer asks you for ID, just tell him that you will produce ID if he does the same. Is he asking for your driver's licence? Ask for his. If he refuses, ask why. Then use that same excuse when telling him he can't see yours.
Kiddie pron and terrorism. Music and movie sharing. All the usual suspects are dragged out whenever [lobby group] needs to implement a new measure to watch you online and offline.
Your point about even viewing kiddie pron being a crime is at the heart of why their "studies" are fundamentally flawed. Anyone who has any "evidence" that kiddie pron is a massive problem is themselves guilty of viewing it, possibly downloading and categorising it. How did they do their study? By guessing how much is out there?
To me, kiddie pron seems an invaluable tool to frame someone (as with Scott Ritter) such that the court of public opinion will convict them regardless of the real truth of planted evidence. The fact that no one acknowledges this scares me, because it means no one will question when some is found on someone's computer, whether it really WAS downloaded by the person found with it.
"Do you mind if I borrow that thought for a sig?"
:) I am in favour of copyleft and see no problem in reusing my ideas for the common good. In fact, should you be interested (no matter what country you are from), I'd welcome you to visit my Australian political party website/forum and see more of how I am trying to change things for the better:
Certainly. You don't have to borrow it; you can have it
www.neteffect.org.au
Using the quote for a sig is a great idea, as it will constantly show others the other way of viewing advertising.
Actually, they covered the tipping/clear bottle decryption routine here in Australia with a recent competition (not sure what it was for, I just remember the bottles).
Instead of having clear PET bottles of Pepsi, they made them from PET injected with silver colouring, making them opaque and therefore unable to be tipped to see what the cap said.
Simple solution to a simple problem, and the bottles actually stood out as an added bonus on the shelves.
"In return, the commercial helps pay for the programming you're seeing. That's the trade; your resources in trade for entertainment / information and their message."
Incorrect. Your argument is a cleverly crafted fallacy spun by media companies to justify ads. In reality, YOU are the product (target demographic) being SOLD to the companies BY the media channels. Remember, the media companies are paid by the companies that advertise, so it is in the media companies' interest to ensure their target audience matches what the advetising companies want. Telling you that you get free entertainment because of the ads is just the way to make you feel better about having your favourite show broken up every five minutes.
Your point about cars got me thinking - all these attempts to hack the XBox are great, but why not try hacking and replacing the BMW's iDrive system instead? It is apparently a GUI nightmare, with not many people being comfortable with it, so why not try to replace it with a better system?
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it...
Morgui!!
Making robots resemble humans is, in my opinion, counter-productive.
:)
Instead, let's create facsimilies of creations such as Chii, from the Chobits anime. It's better to be on the artificial side of the uncanny valley, and make cute bishoujo robots
Who here WOULDN'T want a cute persocom as their assistant??!!
Hmmm, let's see:
1. Microsoft has stated it wants to win the search engine war.
2. MSNBC (Microsoft owned) puts out story calling Google insecure because it invades your privacy.
3. MSN Search comes out with "secure, private searching" for only $9.95 a month.
4. Profit???
Conclusion: This is nothing more than a FUD story designed to sow the seeds of doubt about Google.