the excuse was child pornography. Now it's piracy. The effect is to gain control over speech.
I would argue that gaining control over speech is actually the very goal of all these secret talks, not just some ancillary effect.
The powers that be are justifiably scared by all these plebes being able to say whatever they want, and becoming more aware of just how short their end of the stick actually is. The Arab Spring, Occupy, Anonymous... these are but the tip of the potential iceberg, and the rich and powerful are putting some serious effort into chilling these movements right back into frozen immobility.
Knowledge is power, cliche though it may be. And the ability to control what knowledge people have access to, that's power yet again. And that's what makes the internet quite so disruptive.
I am disgusted to discover that a politician would hire people to say nice things about them and bad things about their opponents. This must stop at once.
Indeed. In fact, I've got a lovely bridge to sell to anyone who thinks that something similar isn't already happening in the US, or really, in just about any Internet-savvy nation.
Schafer says he will build a 'classic point-and-click adventure game' in a six-to-eight month time frame, and will document the entire production process for fans to observe and give input on the game's development, which 'will actually affect the direction the game takes.'"
So basically they've made a slow online social interaction game, about making a game.
We have native Americans in South America as well you insensitive clod.
Sure. Except they're generally called indígenos, or in English "indigenous peoples", whereas the term "Native American" in general English speech refers more often to North American groups, and more specifically to groups in the United States. In Canada, the native groups are called "First Nations", for instance.
coincidentally 'reading the sitaution/atmosphere' seems to be a common metaphor that is used/practiced in the japanese culture.
Part of this is historical -- Japanese culture has had more time free of invaders and foreign influences, and more time to hunker down and let stereotypes blossom into full-blown cultural shorthand. Stereotypes are often derided in the US as something to be avoided, partly because the steady flow of immigrants from all over the world pretty much guarantees that a stereotype that applies to one group will be wildly off the mark with another. But when the whole village / city / country has grown up there, sometimes for generations out of mind, there's a lot of shared context, and a lot that you can get across without having to spell it out. That's one of the big reasons that gaijin are such a spanner in the works -- we don't fit the existing cultural constructs. It also means there's more to learn and less forgiveness with regard to cultural literacy -- "well, you're just supposed to know that's how it works!" was a common refrain when my wife and I (both born and raised in the US) ran into things at our workplace that didn't make sense to us.
If you're interested in Japanese mores and how parts of the culture still function, I very highly recommend Ruth Benedict's book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. It was published just after WWII, but much of what it describes is still applicable to modern Japanese culture. One dynamic that's particularly odd for Westerners is the concept of indebtedness: basically reverse karma, where doing something good for someone when they're down is seen as taking advantage of them, because now they owe you. The only people outside of this indebtedness social construct are people acting in an official uniformed capacity. No matter how much Red Cross first-aid training you have, it's considered completely inappropriate for you to help at an accident scene -- unless you are in uniform. Anyway, give Benedict's book a read.
...or Native Americans, who don't exactly have a cultural perception of time at all, and tend to view time in consideration to the task at hand instead.
Care to say which sociolinguistic group? Lumping all Native American cultures and languages together is about as helpful as saying "Europeans, who have a strong cultural perception of tuna fish sandwiches", or "Asians, who believe time flows from their belly buttons".
North America is a continent. There are a *lot* of different people here. There are a *lot* of different cultures and languages here. Speaking broadly about the people native to this place, about all you can say conclusively is that they are native to this place. And at that, only "native" relative to the latecomers who began arriving in the late 1400s. Making sweeping claims that any group this large all shares the same temporal perspective immediately casts doubt on anything else you have to say.
Cary Sherman still thinks this is a battle between "Google and Wikipedia" vs "Media Companies". And that the only reason his companies lost is because the other companies had better PR.
He still doesn't get that what happened was the people who consume the content - content linked to by GOOG, content distributed by Wikipedia, and content licensed by RIAA and MPAA - who finally got off their duffs and exercised their rights as citizens to demand that their elected representatives actually represent them.
No, I think he really does get it -- but it's easier to build a case against Google and Wikipedia as the next big evils to legislate against. Google, Wikipedia, and the open Internet in general are anathema to the old top-down television-and-radio style of content provision. I don't think he's trying to sway public opinion, he's making a calculated misrepresentation to emphasize the perceived danger of these two with Congress and thereby pave the way for the next round of paid-for dubious laws that help narrow the competition. The more the MAFIAA can turn the Internet into just another TV channel, the more they can extend their ride on the gravy train.
He really does get it. And that makes him more dangerous.
If anyone broke anyone, it was Nintendo putting a size 6 Japanese boot in both Microsoft and Sony's ass.... at the same time.
Japanese shoe sizes are metric -- the number is the length of the foot in centimeters. So a "size 6 Japanese boot" would probably actually fit in both Microsoft and Sony's ass, and comfortably too at that... well, if you're into that kind of thing. "At the same time" would make it kind of hard to walk, though.
If your house is robbed and the police show up to investigate should you get a bill? How about a fire? What is the point of taxes to pay for any government services if we have to pay to use them?
That's a fair point. But then I feel compelled to point out that corporations pay far less in taxes than real people do, sometimes no taxes at all. What then?
If a real person is so poor that they don't pay taxes, I consider it fair that they still get to use public services -- that's part of the whole social contract thing. If disaster befalls me and I wind up so poor myself some day, I don't want to be stuck up a certain creek with no access to public services.
If a corporation is so rich that they don't pay taxes, I consider it fair that they be denied use of public services -- this is a basic violation of the whole social contract thing. If the corporation is capable of paying any of its bills at all, its tax bill should be near the top of the list -- certainly above executive bonuses, at any rate.
...and all legislators must be present the entire time...
And awake.
No way, they'd all die of caffeine overdose before one bill was done reading.
Then some other paid-for schmoe would take their place. No, no, the better option for keeping them awake throughout the reading of the bill is to attach electrodes to their genitals and shock them whenever they nod off.
It would be more humane than the social fallout we are all having to deal with (worldwide, I might add) from them passing any old bill that comes through without even reading it.
Hell, I'm a translator, and I'd suffer pretty bad consequences if I tried to breeze through my job without reading anything. I say that Congress should be held to the same real-world standards.
No, we impeach them for obstruction of justice and lying under oath. What they lied about isn't relevant.
For Bob's sake, man, if that were the only criterion we'd have thrown most of the bums into prison, regardless of party affiliation. "Obstruction of justice and lying under oath" might have been the legal crux of the argument, but that was certainly not what Clinton was being impeached for -- he was impeached for riling too many of the wrong people in Congress (and the people who pull Congress's strings).
The Chinese talk about the Mandate of Heaven, putting religious clothing on the old political argument that the ruler ultimately rules with the consent of the ruled, for various values of the set defined as "the ruled". Clinton basically pushed hard enough that he almost lost the Mandate of Heaven in the US. The legal instrument used to pull him down is almost irrelevant.
Windows can be rebooted without touching the keyboard. What a monumental advance.
As someone higher up already said, MS is late to the party.
I've been rebooting my Windows machine for years without touching the keyboard. I use my boot.
No, really -- there's a Reset button on the front of the box, which sits under my desk. So when Windows is acting up, I kick the button. (Admittedly, less frequently as time has passed and they've ironed out the bugs.)
Is there any room in the marketplace for just a straight-up Linux distro anymore?
That depends on what you mean by "marketplace". If this includes free, then sure -- we've still got Slackware, Debian, Mint, and I don't know what all else.
But then, the question is loaded, and presumes that Mandriva's fall is solely due to the marketability of a Linux distro. But looking at the history, Mandriva was never that well run as an organization, with fits and starts and general policy confusion. For all its warts, Canonical's stewardship of Ubuntu at least has a direction. I suffered through many months with broken repo settings and no clear fixes as Mandrake/Mandriva went through a couple of its identity crises and infrastructure paroxysms, and these ultimately prompted me to leave them behind.
There's the canonical case of shouting "fire!" in a crowded movie theatre. There's also fraud -- outright lies intended to deceive and defraud are not protected either, and can be successfully prosecuted. Murdoch's entire business seems to consist of this. And, if memory serves, it's also why the equivalent of Fox News Canada was not allowed to open up shop -- the Canadian courts deemed it inappropriate to hawk known lies as news.
Fuck Austria. Fuck Australia. Fuck Belgium. Fuck Bulgaria. Fuck Canada. Fuck the Czech Republic. Fuck Denmark. Fuck Finland. Fuck France. Fuck Greece. Fuck Hungary. Fuck Ireland. Fuck Italy. Fuck Japan. Fuck Latvia. Fuck Lithuania. Fuck Luxemburg. Fuck Malta. Fuck Morocco. Fuck New Zealand. Fuck Poland. Fuck Portugal. Fuck Romania. Fuck Singapore. Fuck Slovenia. Fuck South Korea. Fuck Spain. Fuck Sweden. Fuck the UK. Fuck the USA.
That's a lot of fucking. I hope you brought enough condoms.
More seriously, don't confuse the countries for the few dickheads in those countries who are fucking things up. I've been to a good handful-and-some of the 30 countries you've listed, and most of the people I've met have been decent sorts.
Narrowing the field to just the assholes in charge, the people in these countries responsible for drafting and then signing ACTA generally look a lot like this guy. I don't know about your preferences, *I* certainly don't want to fuck 30 different versions of that.
Now, if you had instead said, "beat them upside the head (and elsewhere) with a cluebat until they personally and intimately understand the extent of the damage they're doing to everyone else", I'd be booking my flights right now.
What I find odd is that Germany didn't sign it. That's the biggest economic power in the EU. I'd like to see the reason for that.
I think you've answered your own question. They are solidly standing on their own feet, and thus are less willing to bend over in response to bullying.
I don't know enough about what's going on with Google to really tell one way or the other; as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
That aside, it appears that you are conflating legal with moral. The two have some overlap, but it bears noting that there are yawning chasms between them in some areas.
... it's the morality of knowingly allowing something which is illegal...
You seem to be saying that an illegal act is by definition immoral. By that argument, it would be immoral to have a bathtub in your house in Virginia, or to wear high heels in Carmel, CA, and it would very nearly have been immoral to have properly round circles in Indiana. There are tons of laws on the books that are still technically in force, but have passed into irrelevance and remain as a sort of legal appendectomy-in-waiting.
The converse would be that a legal act is by definition moral. By that argument, pre-US-Civil-War slavery was perfectly moral in the South, because it was perfectly legal. I think most everyone here can see the logical failings of this proposition.
Whether it SHOULD be illegal has no bearing on the issue.
If you're going to argue about the morality of what someone has done, sure, the issue of whether the action *should be* legal/illegal has no bearing on the issue of whether or not the action is moral. But by the same token, whether their action *is* actually legal or illegal also has no bearing—"legal" and "moral" are orthogonal qualities.
Interesting comparison. Process Explorer right now shows 1.06 GB virtual, 885 MB private. If memory serves, their "private bytes" = actual memory. The numbers were higher when I posted earlier.
Thanks for about:memory, I didn't know that one. That shows different numbers, including:
Slashdot Mirror
the excuse was child pornography. Now it's piracy. The effect is to gain control over speech.
I would argue that gaining control over speech is actually the very goal of all these secret talks, not just some ancillary effect.
The powers that be are justifiably scared by all these plebes being able to say whatever they want, and becoming more aware of just how short their end of the stick actually is. The Arab Spring, Occupy, Anonymous... these are but the tip of the potential iceberg, and the rich and powerful are putting some serious effort into chilling these movements right back into frozen immobility.
Knowledge is power, cliche though it may be. And the ability to control what knowledge people have access to, that's power yet again. And that's what makes the internet quite so disruptive.
I don't really see anything here worth the attention -- this really just looks like an attempt to generate traffic.
Move along, nothing to see here.
...No, really. It's quite dull and profoundly uncontroversial.
I read that as "astrosurfing program" and it sounded a lot better than a couple of hired goons shilling for Uncle Vlad. Oh well...
For make glorious People's Republic of Brah, brah.
I am disgusted to discover that a politician would hire people to say nice things about them and bad things about their opponents. This must stop at once.
Indeed. In fact, I've got a lovely bridge to sell to anyone who thinks that something similar isn't already happening in the US, or really, in just about any Internet-savvy nation.
Schafer says he will build a 'classic point-and-click adventure game' in a six-to-eight month time frame, and will document the entire production process for fans to observe and give input on the game's development, which 'will actually affect the direction the game takes.'"
So basically they've made a slow online social interaction game, about making a game.
Down the rabbit hole we go! Fun!
This is brilliant
No no, that should read This is brillant!
Certainly on par with a lot of The Daily WTF postings, only now on a managerial level. Joy!
We have native Americans in South America as well you insensitive clod.
Sure. Except they're generally called indígenos, or in English "indigenous peoples", whereas the term "Native American" in general English speech refers more often to North American groups, and more specifically to groups in the United States. In Canada, the native groups are called "First Nations", for instance.
Cheers,
coincidentally 'reading the sitaution/atmosphere' seems to be a common metaphor that is used/practiced in the japanese culture.
Part of this is historical -- Japanese culture has had more time free of invaders and foreign influences, and more time to hunker down and let stereotypes blossom into full-blown cultural shorthand. Stereotypes are often derided in the US as something to be avoided, partly because the steady flow of immigrants from all over the world pretty much guarantees that a stereotype that applies to one group will be wildly off the mark with another. But when the whole village / city / country has grown up there, sometimes for generations out of mind, there's a lot of shared context, and a lot that you can get across without having to spell it out. That's one of the big reasons that gaijin are such a spanner in the works -- we don't fit the existing cultural constructs. It also means there's more to learn and less forgiveness with regard to cultural literacy -- "well, you're just supposed to know that's how it works!" was a common refrain when my wife and I (both born and raised in the US) ran into things at our workplace that didn't make sense to us.
If you're interested in Japanese mores and how parts of the culture still function, I very highly recommend Ruth Benedict's book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword . It was published just after WWII, but much of what it describes is still applicable to modern Japanese culture. One dynamic that's particularly odd for Westerners is the concept of indebtedness: basically reverse karma, where doing something good for someone when they're down is seen as taking advantage of them, because now they owe you. The only people outside of this indebtedness social construct are people acting in an official uniformed capacity. No matter how much Red Cross first-aid training you have, it's considered completely inappropriate for you to help at an accident scene -- unless you are in uniform. Anyway, give Benedict's book a read.
Cheers,
...or Native Americans, who don't exactly have a cultural perception of time at all, and tend to view time in consideration to the task at hand instead.
Care to say which sociolinguistic group? Lumping all Native American cultures and languages together is about as helpful as saying " Europeans, who have a strong cultural perception of tuna fish sandwiches", or " Asians, who believe time flows from their belly buttons".
North America is a continent. There are a *lot* of different people here. There are a *lot* of different cultures and languages here. Speaking broadly about the people native to this place, about all you can say conclusively is that they are native to this place. And at that, only "native" relative to the latecomers who began arriving in the late 1400s. Making sweeping claims that any group this large all shares the same temporal perspective immediately casts doubt on anything else you have to say.
... the future is now (or something)...
Die Zukunft ist jetzt! (oder etwas)...
Cary Sherman still thinks this is a battle between "Google and Wikipedia" vs "Media Companies". And that the only reason his companies lost is because the other companies had better PR.
He still doesn't get that what happened was the people who consume the content - content linked to by GOOG, content distributed by Wikipedia, and content licensed by RIAA and MPAA - who finally got off their duffs and exercised their rights as citizens to demand that their elected representatives actually represent them.
No, I think he really does get it -- but it's easier to build a case against Google and Wikipedia as the next big evils to legislate against. Google, Wikipedia, and the open Internet in general are anathema to the old top-down television-and-radio style of content provision. I don't think he's trying to sway public opinion, he's making a calculated misrepresentation to emphasize the perceived danger of these two with Congress and thereby pave the way for the next round of paid-for dubious laws that help narrow the competition. The more the MAFIAA can turn the Internet into just another TV channel, the more they can extend their ride on the gravy train.
He really does get it. And that makes him more dangerous.
If anyone broke anyone, it was Nintendo putting a size 6 Japanese boot in both Microsoft and Sony's ass.... at the same time.
Japanese shoe sizes are metric -- the number is the length of the foot in centimeters. So a "size 6 Japanese boot" would probably actually fit in both Microsoft and Sony's ass, and comfortably too at that... well, if you're into that kind of thing. "At the same time" would make it kind of hard to walk, though.
Cheers,
If your house is robbed and the police show up to investigate should you get a bill? How about a fire? What is the point of taxes to pay for any government services if we have to pay to use them?
That's a fair point. But then I feel compelled to point out that corporations pay far less in taxes than real people do, sometimes no taxes at all. What then?
If a real person is so poor that they don't pay taxes, I consider it fair that they still get to use public services -- that's part of the whole social contract thing. If disaster befalls me and I wind up so poor myself some day, I don't want to be stuck up a certain creek with no access to public services.
If a corporation is so rich that they don't pay taxes, I consider it fair that they be denied use of public services -- this is a basic violation of the whole social contract thing. If the corporation is capable of paying any of its bills at all, its tax bill should be near the top of the list -- certainly above executive bonuses, at any rate.
...and all legislators must be present the entire time...
And awake.
No way, they'd all die of caffeine overdose before one bill was done reading.
Then some other paid-for schmoe would take their place. No, no, the better option for keeping them awake throughout the reading of the bill is to attach electrodes to their genitals and shock them whenever they nod off.
It would be more humane than the social fallout we are all having to deal with (worldwide, I might add) from them passing any old bill that comes through without even reading it .
Hell, I'm a translator, and I'd suffer pretty bad consequences if I tried to breeze through my job without reading anything. I say that Congress should be held to the same real-world standards.
No, we impeach them for obstruction of justice and lying under oath. What they lied about isn't relevant.
For Bob's sake, man, if that were the only criterion we'd have thrown most of the bums into prison, regardless of party affiliation. "Obstruction of justice and lying under oath" might have been the legal crux of the argument, but that was certainly not what Clinton was being impeached for -- he was impeached for riling too many of the wrong people in Congress (and the people who pull Congress's strings).
The Chinese talk about the Mandate of Heaven, putting religious clothing on the old political argument that the ruler ultimately rules with the consent of the ruled, for various values of the set defined as "the ruled". Clinton basically pushed hard enough that he almost lost the Mandate of Heaven in the US. The legal instrument used to pull him down is almost irrelevant.
Cheers,
Windows can be rebooted without touching the keyboard. What a monumental advance.
As someone higher up already said, MS is late to the party.
I've been rebooting my Windows machine for years without touching the keyboard. I use my boot.
No, really -- there's a Reset button on the front of the box, which sits under my desk. So when Windows is acting up, I kick the button. (Admittedly, less frequently as time has passed and they've ironed out the bugs.)
Is there any room in the marketplace for just a straight-up Linux distro anymore?
That depends on what you mean by "marketplace". If this includes free, then sure -- we've still got Slackware, Debian, Mint, and I don't know what all else.
But then, the question is loaded, and presumes that Mandriva's fall is solely due to the marketability of a Linux distro. But looking at the history, Mandriva was never that well run as an organization, with fits and starts and general policy confusion. For all its warts, Canonical's stewardship of Ubuntu at least has a direction. I suffered through many months with broken repo settings and no clear fixes as Mandrake/Mandriva went through a couple of its identity crises and infrastructure paroxysms, and these ultimately prompted me to leave them behind.
Because the comments on this topic have the danger of being too hilarious :)
Seriously, this robot thingamajig inventor's first name is "Hooman"? Does that strike anyone else as a bit too silly for belief?
When they have a device that allows me to slap people over the Internet.
I'd be happy with slapping them upside the head.
Cheers,
Nor should all speech be entirely free.
There's the canonical case of shouting "fire!" in a crowded movie theatre. There's also fraud -- outright lies intended to deceive and defraud are not protected either, and can be successfully prosecuted. Murdoch's entire business seems to consist of this. And, if memory serves, it's also why the equivalent of Fox News Canada was not allowed to open up shop -- the Canadian courts deemed it inappropriate to hawk known lies as news.
Cheers,
Fuck Austria. Fuck Australia. Fuck Belgium. Fuck Bulgaria. Fuck Canada. Fuck the Czech Republic. Fuck Denmark. Fuck Finland. Fuck France. Fuck Greece. Fuck Hungary. Fuck Ireland. Fuck Italy. Fuck Japan. Fuck Latvia. Fuck Lithuania. Fuck Luxemburg. Fuck Malta. Fuck Morocco. Fuck New Zealand. Fuck Poland. Fuck Portugal. Fuck Romania. Fuck Singapore. Fuck Slovenia. Fuck South Korea. Fuck Spain. Fuck Sweden. Fuck the UK. Fuck the USA.
That's a lot of fucking. I hope you brought enough condoms.
More seriously, don't confuse the countries for the few dickheads in those countries who are fucking things up. I've been to a good handful-and-some of the 30 countries you've listed, and most of the people I've met have been decent sorts.
Narrowing the field to just the assholes in charge, the people in these countries responsible for drafting and then signing ACTA generally look a lot like this guy. I don't know about your preferences, *I* certainly don't want to fuck 30 different versions of that.
Now, if you had instead said, "beat them upside the head (and elsewhere) with a cluebat until they personally and intimately understand the extent of the damage they're doing to everyone else", I'd be booking my flights right now.
What I find odd is that Germany didn't sign it. That's the biggest economic power in the EU. I'd like to see the reason for that.
I think you've answered your own question. They are solidly standing on their own feet, and thus are less willing to bend over in response to bullying.
I don't know enough about what's going on with Google to really tell one way or the other; as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
That aside, it appears that you are conflating legal with moral. The two have some overlap, but it bears noting that there are yawning chasms between them in some areas.
... it's the morality of knowingly allowing something which is illegal...
You seem to be saying that an illegal act is by definition immoral. By that argument, it would be immoral to have a bathtub in your house in Virginia, or to wear high heels in Carmel, CA, and it would very nearly have been immoral to have properly round circles in Indiana. There are tons of laws on the books that are still technically in force, but have passed into irrelevance and remain as a sort of legal appendectomy-in-waiting.
The converse would be that a legal act is by definition moral. By that argument, pre-US-Civil-War slavery was perfectly moral in the South, because it was perfectly legal. I think most everyone here can see the logical failings of this proposition.
Whether it SHOULD be illegal has no bearing on the issue.
If you're going to argue about the morality of what someone has done, sure, the issue of whether the action *should be* legal/illegal has no bearing on the issue of whether or not the action is moral. But by the same token, whether their action *is* actually legal or illegal also has no bearing—"legal" and "moral" are orthogonal qualities.
Cheers,
Bwian?
No, theah's no one named Bwian awound heah.
Interesting comparison. Process Explorer right now shows 1.06 GB virtual, 885 MB private. If memory serves, their "private bytes" = actual memory. The numbers were higher when I posted earlier.
Thanks for about:memory, I didn't know that one. That shows different numbers, including:
799.88 MB -- private
690.46 MB -- resident
1,033.78 MB -- vsize
The differences between what the OS reports and what FF itself reports are interesting. Any ideas why?
Cheers,