Proponents of devolution have a valid point. When descisions are made by more local governing bodies, they more directly reassemble the opinion of those directly effected by the outcome of the legislation. I agree, particularly at the town/city level. It's a good general philosophy, but there are some flaws. Any society --democratic republic, corporate oligopoly, anarcho-capitalist, fascist dictatorship-- that has a powerful private sector has organisations willing to buy political interest proportionate to their wealth, not democratic population. Now, you have to be pritty fuckin rich to p0wn a share of congress (not to say the Microsoft, Boeing, GE, Haliburton, etc haven't done it), but any two bit corporation can push around a state legislature with direct campagne contributions, quazi-legal favors, and the threat of capital flight (no state senator/rep wants his consitiuents to loose their jobs because the factory decided to outsource). If we had a real democracy with equil access to a diverse and independent media (which would lead to a multiparty system), both Congress and state government would be directly accountable to the american people and decisions that effect all americans could be fairly made. Real democracy and indipendent criticism are more important prospects for freedom then devolution. Besides, one of the problems (certainly their tyranical compulsory nature is the biggest) with american schools is that funding is based on property tax. Thus poor areas have poor funding. People remain ignorant and economically disadvantaged in certain communities for years. National funding is certainly more equitable and most american's would not be opposed to it. Any libertarian should hold that the first thing the government (state or national) should do is stop regulating public schools, or regulate them in a way that maxamises students rights (ie ban schools from making students attend, ban police without warents or military recruiters from schools).
Government can spend money on educatin if that's what the vast majority want (and they do). We could cut the Department of Defence funding by half and use a quarter of that to fund non-compulsory educational services like free internet access, larger public libraries, and community colleges. In the end we would be spending much more on education then we currently are and could still pay off the deficit and cut taxes, moreover, we would win a lot of friends internationally by not systematically destroying any small nation that challenges our political or economic intrests.
"School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." -- John Taylor Gatto
American high schools often do resemble prisons, and not simply because they tend to be large, impersonal institutions filled with gangs, drugs, and cops or because they tend to prize order above all else. The real parallel is that they are both filled with many people who would rather be elsewhere.
Anyone with a basic understanding of human rights finds compulsory education unconscionable. Forced indoctrination is just about the worst thing short of physical torture you can do to a human being. One can aruge that parents have the right to home/private school their children, but often parent's don't have the economic means to do so, and often private schools, in particular porocial schools, are more coersive and more perverted-- with both the truth and the children themselves--then public schools! Teenagers are free human beings who deserve to have equil access to all kinds of information to rationally decide how they should best spend their time. Who cares if a public school has the funds to provide an OC-3 if they plan on censoring it. The education reform movement needs to stop quibiling about funding and get to the heart of the issue...authoritarian propagandists are destroying humanity's natural curiosity and ability to learn. If you want a better education for yourself and your peers, there's plenty to do: write a book, build a beowulf cluster, get involved in politics (anything involving direct action), smash your local school, get elected to your school board and fire all the administration, reward truency spent doing something more educational and socially benificial then passivly obaying some dogmatic instructor. Public education should be about providing resorces for those who want them; the community college, internet, and municipal library are useful paradigms and we should augment them to provide for a free, as in speech and as in beer, education. Modern pedagogy must become a democratic intrest. If you care about your fellow citizens knowing enough about the world to deserve the right to vote, if you want to work in an economy where sustainability and efficiency supplant bureaucratic monopoly and idiotic policy, if you give a fuck about freedom and knowledge, the time to act is now.
You fucking idiot....you have no who the "left" is. Any member of the Democratic party is a reactionary statist. Any member of the Rebublican is a fascest bent on destrying the world with god on their side. The real left wants less government control over people....but they are smarter then the real right because they know the worst abuses of government are the military and police. Sure, compulsory schooling is unconscionable to anyone with a basic respect for human rights (Forced indoctronation!!! short of genocide, I couldn't think of anything worse)...but schools actually have popular support. If the american people knew how much was being spent on the military what was going on in Iraq, Colombia, Afghanistan, etc they certainly would not vote Democrat or Republican. Schools take so little money compared to the DoD its hardly worth the fiscial conservative's/libertarian's time.
Get the Yahoo service. I used the old second line SBC (It used to be ameritech) DSL for years. I just upgraded a few months ago and am now getting 300kbps easily down (at times over 700kbps). Before I could only get around 60kbps down on average 300kbps max.
Nessus, Ettercap, Snort, pf/netfileter/iptables, John the Ripper, Ethereal, standard OSS stuff like gdb, strings, grep (yes they can very much be security tools), nmap, Kismet, Etherape, tcpdump, Whisker, etc....They are all great, certainly better then any similar commericial product...
It's so easy, an AOL subscribing, Mac using, chimpanzee could figure out the GUI, yet its an extremely powerful tool for any security consultant or script kiddie with a lot of cash. It scans for exploits Nessus style, then tries to exploit them so you don't get all the false posatives Nessus does. It also has the ability to give you a shell on an exploited host and use that to further penitrate a network. It has a built in library of exploits and new ones can be added via a python API. It totally automates the penitration process! (No I do not work for Core Security Technologies)
I've written a few small, text only, c++ programs that would basically grep nmap logs to find potentially vulnerable systems, automatically test exploits on them and then attempt to continue the process recursivly through a nework.. by scanning off the exploited host (new version of scanner/expoiter is uploaded/executed by the original exploit's shellcode). It was buggy, CLI only, and only worked on a small scale with a couple exploits...more proof of concept then usable tool. I wonder if anyone would want to make a core impact style system by extending Nessus?
Sure the image/video may become popular...but it is highly unlikely that someout would go out and rape or murder someone else just to produce a file that would be popular on KaZaa. Someone that sick could probably find many other justifications for their sick behavior. In a capitalist society, however, provided the potential to make millions of $$$, some rather normal sane people will contribute to rape and murder. Take the prevailance of military contractors and organised criminal organisations as examples.
Actually I don't think that post has been moderated at all. It was 1 by default because I have "good" karma. I reposted with some additional information and it got moderated +3.
I see how stachatory rape should not be considdered rape (as long as all participants consent and are not coersed)...But child porn laws are just as wrong. They criminalise possession of pictures of what is potentially legal consentual activity (even activity that the vast majority of the population would find attractive...for example 17 year old lesbians). But I am so pro free speech I would even say possession of snuff videos, real pictures of rapes, murders, etc should be legal. You aren't harming anyone by copy a picture off the net. If anything you are exposing a sick and evil element of society. Buying snuff videos would be another matter because that would encourage their manufacture. It would provide the economic incentave to commit real hanous crimes, thus the buyer of such films should be partially responsable for the crimes. This should be true for any rape/molestation video/image regardless of the age of the victum.
Child porn law's are absurd. The only necessary law regarding sexual activity should be a ban on rape. I agree that adults that have sex with young children are sick. (Adults that knowingly lie to children or force them to do useless or harmfull physical or mental activity....as many public school teachers do....are sick as well) I should be able to own any pictures I want. Teenagers have sex with each other. They always have; they always will. Defining an adult as one over 18 when humans generally become sexually mature at a much younger age is wrong. If teenagers (not 18 or 19 year olds like legit porn sites define teen, but real teenagers: 13-17) have consensual sex with each other and decide to take some pictures and upload them to the net, anyone who wants should be able to download them. I wonder what would happen if some minor took pictures of themselves and a parterner engaging in consentual sexual activity, and years later is caught with the images? There are all kinds of cases where noone is harmed by so called "child" pron. Safe trusting consentual sex is a fun and socially benificial activity. Excessive conservatism is just going to turn us into a more regressive backward god fearing people. Yes....many teens are not ready and do stupid things. Often this is because conservatives have sheltered them from pron, education, and frank discusions about fucking. Many "legal adults" are also too immature to have safe sex. When society arbritrarily sets 18 as the age of consent, we are just encouraging both minors and adults to not take the law serously.
(even on slashdot its hard to speak out on free speech...when I defended the right to send any email your bandwidth would allow, I was accused of being a spammer...I would not be surprised if I were labeled a rapeist for defending "child" pronography)
It should be emphasised that emergence is not simply strange unpridictable events (those can generally be attributed to human ignorance or inaccuracy). Reality above the quantum level is purely deturministic and even at the quantum level the Bohm interpritation and Bverett many-worlds interpritation allow for purly causal links and thus are deturministic. While an emergent phenomenon at the macroscopic scale does not directly exist at the microscopic scale, its existence at macroscopic scales can still be explained (perhaps after a substantial amount of rigorous or semi-rigorous mathematical analysis) by the laws of physics at microscopic scales, taking into account the interactions between all the microscopic components of a macroscopic object. Thus emergent phenomena can demonstrate why a reductionistic physical theory, viewing all matter in terms of its component parts, which in turn obey a relatively small number of laws, can hope to model complex objects such as living beings. However, by the same token, emergent phenomena serve to caution against greedy reductionism, because the microscopic explanation of an emergent phenomenon may be too complicated or "low-level" to be of any practical use. For instance, if chemistry is explainable as emergent from interactions in particle physics, cell biology as emergent from interactions in chemistry, humans as emergent from interactions in cell biology, civilizations as emergent from interactions of humans, and human history as emergent from interactions between civilizations, this does not imply that it is particularly easy or desirable to try to explain human history in terms of the laws of particle physics. (This has not dissuaded some people from hypothesizing that highly complex, emergent phenomena such as human history can be described in terms of simpler laws which are more commonly associated to more fundamental theories.
-shamelessly stolen from wikipedia -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
The problem people have when talking about emergence is the misinterpritation of the word sum. Literally the quantative complexity of a system can increese with the addition of eliments by a quantity greater then the sum of each eliment's complexity. Anyone who has studied networks knows this. This does not imply that we cannot understand the system. Throwing choas theory into the mix just further confuses people. Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. Choatic systems also are more then just entropic systems (entropy in information theory is a measure of information (as opposed to redundency)..is is realated but not equivilant to the entropy defined in statistical mechanics). Its certainly easy to get bogged down in the semantics of all this, but the heart of the matter is: everything in the real world is a complex system and cannot be fully perdicted by humans although this is not due to some inherant randomness, it is because of our limits in measurement and information processing and the fact that every system in the real world is interdependent with some other.
Over two years ago I bought a Toshiba laptop at Best Buy:
14 inch LCD DVD drive 56k modem 10/100 ethernet 2 pcmcia slots ATI radeon (works fine with linux opengl drivers) 256 megs ram (I upgraded to 512) 1.5ghz PIV Windows XP Home (formated it and installed Debian 3 usb (version 1 not 2 unfortunatly) ports.
The only thing that sucked was the soundcard/speakers and the Microsoft tax. It only cost $600. Acording to moore's law (I know technecally it's about density, not price or performance) that kind of computer should be down to $300 by now (half price at the 18 month mark, and I give it a little extra leway.) Other machines have gone WAY down in price. I just bought a sun machine: 2 gig ram 4 way SMP (450mhz each) 4 redundant power supplies It cost me $200 and runs solaris 10 great. It would have cost me at least $2,000 two years ago. Why is PC hardware, particularly laptops, still so expensive? On the high end the specs are going up so the price/performance ratio is higher, but at the low end, things have stagnated or even gotten more expensive. Cheap laptops cost more now then they did years ago. New SD-RAM is more expensive then it used to be and often more expensive then faster DDR RAM. CPU performance has also grown slowly in the low end dispite the constant clockspeed increeses. It took the desktop over a decade since the technology was available (the mips R4000 came out in 1991) to go 64 bit.
Intel is certainly part of the problem in spite of their recent 180 on the mhz myth and adoption of AMD64 for the Xeon. I have a pentium II 450mhz system with 512k L2 cache, and a PA-RISC system with 1.5meg L1 cache. I even have an ancient sgi Indy with a 200mhz mips processor with 1meg cache. Why do new Celerons still only have 256k L2 cache and PIVs only have 1meg L2 cache? Up to about 2 megs you will still get significant performance increeses by adding more cache. I understand the Itanium2 has a 9meg on chip L3 cache, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons its price/performance ratio stucks ass. However, there is a happy medium between the PIV and Itanium when it commed to cache. AMD is in the same boat with a 1meg L2 on the Athlon64.
Microsoft is part of the problem, but this certainly isn't the case for this walmart computer. It might be a step in the right direction, but the industry can produce better desktops and laptops cheaper.
Over two years ago I bought a Toshiba laptop at Best Buy.
14 inch LCD ATI radeon (works fine with linux opengl drivers) 256 megs ram (I upgraded to 512) 1.5ghz PIV Windows XP Home (formated it and installed Debian 3 usb (version 1 not 2 unfortunatly) ports. The only thing that sucked was the soundcard/speakers and the Microsoft tax. It only cost $600. Acording to moore's law (I know technecally it's about density, not price or performance) that kind of computer should be down to $300 by now (half price at the 18 month mark, and I give it a little extra leway.) Other machines have gome WAY down in price. I just bought a 2gig ram, 4 way SMP (450mhz each) ultrasparc machine. I cost me $200 and runs solaris 10 great. It would have cost me at least $2,000 two years ago. Why is PC hardware, particularly laptops still so expensive?
School years are around 180 days in the US... What an intresting coincidence that he could be put in jail for that ammount of time.
Jail is a prison for the body, compulsory education a prison for the mind. Given a choice between the two, I'll take jail any day. The student was more then justified in his actions. Most schools have extensive monitoring of students including the use of security cameras, random "drug" searches, and varous other methods of privacy invasion(a friend of mine who was kicked out of HS for subverting network security showed me a web accessable section of the school lan...(this was the best funded public school in the state) they had a secret searchable database that contained a psychological profile of every student along with standard information: age, grades, ssn, address). If you dare attempt to transcend the passive role assigned to you; if you even look like your going to help other students learn about history (you must be an anarchaist), chemestry (you will be accused of making bombs and drugs) or computer science (you'r a hacker), you will be interogated or expelled. Public education is a system that imposes ignorance on those too young and therefore too curious and independent minded to be good workers. It breaks them down to either drug induced apathy, or complacent submission. If we are ever to have a population with some conception of how technology, society, and self function, we must destroy the high schools. A just, equitable, and sustainable society cannot be built when our fellow citizens are subject to the forced indoctronation of dogmatic bullshit like nationalism and religion. Both public and parocial high schools are amoung the most destructive forces facing creativity, intellectual development, and society itself.
PS/2 keyboards and mice are free. You can find them in dumpsters or get them at best buy for like $5 with a $5 mail in rebate. 14 inch VGA CRT monitors are better then free. Buisnesses will PAY you to pick them up and cart them off.
For everything else $100 can get a functional barebones PC if you buy used. Maybe:
a Socket 7 motherboard with a 500mhz AMD K6-2 (unless you are playing doom3, encrypting large files, or running a couple distributed clients in the background, 500mhz is enough cpu power)
256-512megs of PC-100 SDRAM (I know the prices for new SDRAM is worse then for new DDR....but you can find old ram if you look around)
Simple video card that can do opengl (an ati rage 128 works great...you can buy one used for $5 and it will play quake3 at 30fps on a pentiumII system...and it does have linux drivers)
cdrom (not DVD or R or RW)- practically free...I have a stack of functional cdrom drives sitting right next to me right... now pulled from comps found dumpster diving.
A small IDE hard drive for saving files could be used... 1 gig maybe...the os should be knoppix on the cdrom to prevent users from fucking things up.
Many of these parts/computers are just laying around with noone to use/buy them. The problem is, shipping them to Africa would cost more then they would sell for on ebay.
Why the BSDL represents the anarchy to come
on
Why I Love The GPL
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
[I am re-posting this]
Even putting your work in the public domain puts it within the legal but immoral intellectual property system. However, the BSDL grants the rights I wish people could automatically have. The GPL places unnecessaries and restrictions on users/programmers and perpetuates the intellectual property system. I personally don't think the law should have any say in IP, but if I must license my code, I want to point out what rights I wish people had.
I personally think business should be allowed to use whatever license they want...they can even use some of my code in their proprietary licensed product. If the license is too restrictive, people should be smart enough not to buy that product or to just break the terms of the EULA...but it should be up to the consumer. The only thing anyone should not be allowed* to do, is cause real harm**. People can express anything they want, even if their expression entails reiterating an idea, c function, poem, etc that they did not author. Copyright, patents, and licenses are all restrictions on free speech. People also have the right to do whatever they want to their own property or body or the property or body of someone else with consent. Ideas, code, etc, are not property because they can be copied infinitely at no cost. When you "steal" a song from the RIAA, the RIAA still has the original! Free market economics (and even most command econ) is based on the idea that there are unlimited demands and wants, but only a finite supply of products. This is only true in an IP economy in that there's an insatiable demand for NEW ideas; the old ones can be copied until everyone has as many as they want. The profit motive that drives the demanded innovation is also totally scewed because people are simply more creative if they aren't directed by a private tyranny (corporation). Good art does not come from a marketing department, a better source might be an eccentric who produces what they find beautiful, not what sells. Good music doesn't come from the RIAA, it comes from some innovator on an indy label who is willing to risk not sounding exactly like every top 40 hit. All intellectual innovation is plagerism and "theft" because there is nothing new in the world. Everyone learns from those around them and imporves or expands on older concepts.
Although many exellent programmers (OSS and proprietary) are now well paid by big business, what most/.ers don't realize is that OSS has already won out in terms of influence! You don't have to look at Linux to see the results free software. The internet and TCP/IP is a free open standard implemented by a combination of capitalism (western ISPS, hardware/software developers), socialism (the university system, libraries, other public access, public funded R&D, much of it from the DoD), and anarchy (the actual content on the net itself). MS windows has BSD code in it. Apple's Darwin IS BSD. SUN/Solaris will soon be opening its code (its been illegally available for a while now). There are easily accessible underground source distributions of Cisco IOS too. Moreover, the programmers at places like Microsoft are standing on the shoulders of giants. Even if they weren't able to directly access old code bases, their conceptual training in computer science and software engineering came from a university system where the free exchange of ideas is quite highly valued.
People no longer respect IP law. Downloading/Uploading an MP3 that someone else copyrighted may be illegal, but we all do it. Soon IP law will be a unenforceable anachronism. Its a stupid conservative restriction on civil liberates like the old sodomy laws that were struck down by the USA court system just recently. Hopefully drug laws will go the same way, then laws requiring taxes (when most of that money goes to killing people). The ultimate libertarian dream would be people slowly realizing that government only has power in their minds. Trying to reform IP law with Creative Commons to replace copyright, free access to patents to replace trade secr
OK...so the BSDL doesn't see copyright as immoral. No license does. Even putting your work in the public domain puts it within the legal but immoral intellectual property system. However, the BSDL grants the rights I wish people could automatically have.
I don't understand your slave analogy and how it's logically a similar doctrine (and what it would be logically similar to, my general reasoning, the BSDL?). Are you implying that the GPL doesn't tolerate immoral behavior ("owning slaves") because it doesn't allow re-licensing under a proprietary license. I personally think business should be allowed to use whatever license they want...they can even use some of my code in their proprietary licensed product. If the license is too restrictive, people should be smart enough not to buy that product or to just break the terms of the EULA...but it should be up to the consumer. The only thing anyone should not be allowed* to do, is cause real harm**. People can express anything they want, even if their expression entails reiterating an idea, c function, poem, etc that they did not author. Copyright, patents, and licenses are all restrictions on free speech. People also have the right to do whatever they want to their own property or body or the property or body of someone else with consent. Ideas, code, etc, are not property because they can be copied infinitely at no cost. When you "steal" a song from the RIAA, the RIAA still has the original! Free market economics (and even most command econ) is based on the idea that there are unlimited demands and wants, but only a finite supply of products. This is only true in an IP economy in that there's an insatiable demand for NEW ideas; the old ones can be copied until everyone has as many as they want. The profit motive that drives the demanded innovation is also totally scewed because people are simply more creative if they aren't directed by a private tyranny (corporation). Good art does not come from a marketing department, a better source might be an eccentric who produces what they find beautiful, not what sells. Good music doesn't come from the RIAA, it comes from some innovator on an indy label who is willing to risk not sounding exactly like every top 40 hit.
Although many exellent programmers (OSS and proprietary) are now well paid by big business, what most/.ers don't realize is that OSS has already won out in terms of influence! You don't have to look at Linux to see the results free software. TCP/IP is a free open standard implemented by a combination of capitalism (western ISPS, hardware/software developers), socialism (the university system, libraries, other public access, public funded R&D, much of it from the DoD), and anarchy (the actual content on the net itself). MS windows has BSD code in it. Apple's Darwin IS BSD. SUN/Solaris will soon be opening its code (its been illegally available for a while now). There are easily accessible underground source distributions of Cisco IOS too. Moreover, the programmers at places like Microsoft are standing on the shoulders of giants. Even if they weren't able to directly access old code bases, their conceptual training in computer science and software engineering came from a university system where the free exchange of ideas is quite highly valued. People no longer respect IP law. Downloading/Uploading an MP3 that someone else copyrighted may be illegal, but we all do it. Soon IP law will be a unenforceable anachronism. Its a stupid conservative restriction on civil liberates like the old sodomy laws that were struck down by the USA court system just recently. Hopefully drug laws will go the same way, then laws requiring taxes (when most of that money goes to killing people). The ultimate libertarian dream would be people slowly realizing that government only has power in their minds. Trying to reform IP law with Creative Commons to replace copyright, free access to patents to replace trade secrets and protected patents, GPL and BSDL to replace MS/Adobe/who
Buisnesses and individuals that choose the BSDL should be given the most respect, because the code can be re-liscenced in GPL, CDDL, closed source, etc liscenced. I wonder if one could disign a liscence that is basically the BSDL except it has a provision to ban redistribution in a particular competitor's product. Would that be considdered illegally anti-competative?
knoppix@ttyp0[usr]$ lynx http://www.dec.org.uk [screen changes to ncurses mode] [lynx output exited to pass lameness filter]
Tsunami Earthquake Appeal (p1 of 5)
Logo - Click to go to home page
Click here to continue to DEC website for more information
Click here for FAQ's
BT Logo
Tsunami Earthquake Appeal
DEC TSUNAMI EARTHQUAKE APPEAL
YOU CAN HELP - DONATE ONLINE
-- press space for next page --
Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to go back. H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit/=search
"You took a time bomb and a case of crackers and you made a maelstrom of organic debris then you took a work bench and a rusty anvil and you polished them for everyone to see you have created an unhealthy monster but you're nowhere but nowhere to be found so I guess I'll just cope with my provisions from now until the day theu lay me down you took a babboon and made him perfect you took a lion and stripped him of his pride then you took a million more varieties a scalpel and a sartory and you stitched up a horrible surprise you have created an unsocial monster and you're searched for all over the globe and most belive that things would sure be better if you'd come down here and tell us what you know who is to blame for this? someone tell me please His handiwork is flawed and it's there for all to see mutataions, abberations and blatant anomalies they multiply and give rise to this...monstrosrity you took the most abundant smallest bits of matter and you instilled them with affinity and then you stratified accumulations weeded out bad variations and blended up your unique recipe you have created a powerful monster with direction and purpose all its own and if you were here would things be any different? or are you just a mosaic of thoughts alone?"
People who were around in the 60's are in power, yes, but certainly no one cool ever got any authority. The current whearabouts of some old radicals:
Abbie Hoffman, Malcom X, the weather underground (as an orginisation), and Herbert Marcuse are dead. Jerry Ruban and John Kerry sold out. Tom Hayden, Howard Zinn and Noam chomksy are old and grey but still writting inspiring things. I can't think of any real leftest who has kept their ideals AND made it in the mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
Proponents of devolution have a valid point. When descisions are made by more local governing bodies, they more directly reassemble the opinion of those directly effected by the outcome of the legislation. I agree, particularly at the town/city level. It's a good general philosophy, but there are some flaws. Any society --democratic republic, corporate oligopoly, anarcho-capitalist, fascist dictatorship-- that has a powerful private sector has organisations willing to buy political interest proportionate to their wealth, not democratic population. Now, you have to be pritty fuckin rich to p0wn a share of congress (not to say the Microsoft, Boeing, GE, Haliburton, etc haven't done it), but any two bit corporation can push around a state legislature with direct campagne contributions, quazi-legal favors, and the threat of capital flight (no state senator/rep wants his consitiuents to loose their jobs because the factory decided to outsource). If we had a real democracy with equil access to a diverse and independent media (which would lead to a multiparty system), both Congress and state government would be directly accountable to the american people and decisions that effect all americans could be fairly made. Real democracy and indipendent criticism are more important prospects for freedom then devolution. Besides, one of the problems (certainly their tyranical compulsory nature is the biggest) with american schools is that funding is based on property tax. Thus poor areas have poor funding. People remain ignorant and economically disadvantaged in certain communities for years. National funding is certainly more equitable and most american's would not be opposed to it. Any libertarian should hold that the first thing the government (state or national) should do is stop regulating public schools, or regulate them in a way that maxamises students rights (ie ban schools from making students attend, ban police without warents or military recruiters from schools).
Government can spend money on educatin if that's what the vast majority want (and they do). We could cut the Department of Defence funding by half and use a quarter of that to fund non-compulsory educational services like free internet access, larger public libraries, and community colleges. In the end we would be spending much more on education then we currently are and could still pay off the deficit and cut taxes, moreover, we would win a lot of friends internationally by not systematically destroying any small nation that challenges our political or economic intrests.
"School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." -- John Taylor Gatto
American high schools often do resemble prisons, and not simply because they tend to be large, impersonal institutions filled with gangs, drugs, and cops or because they tend to prize order above all else. The real parallel is that they are both filled with many people who would rather be elsewhere.
Anyone with a basic understanding of human rights finds compulsory education unconscionable. Forced indoctrination is just about the worst thing short of physical torture you can do to a human being. One can aruge that parents have the right to home/private school their children, but often parent's don't have the economic means to do so, and often private schools, in particular porocial schools, are more coersive and more perverted-- with both the truth and the children themselves--then public schools! Teenagers are free human beings who deserve to have equil access to all kinds of information to rationally decide how they should best spend their time. Who cares if a public school has the funds to provide an OC-3 if they plan on censoring it. The education reform movement needs to stop quibiling about funding and get to the heart of the issue...authoritarian propagandists are destroying humanity's natural curiosity and ability to learn. If you want a better education for yourself and your peers, there's plenty to do: write a book, build a beowulf cluster, get involved in politics (anything involving direct action), smash your local school, get elected to your school board and fire all the administration, reward truency spent doing something more educational and socially benificial then passivly obaying some dogmatic instructor. Public education should be about providing resorces for those who want them; the community college, internet, and municipal library are useful paradigms and we should augment them to provide for a free, as in speech and as in beer, education. Modern pedagogy must become a democratic intrest. If you care about your fellow citizens knowing enough about the world to deserve the right to vote, if you want to work in an economy where sustainability and efficiency supplant bureaucratic monopoly and idiotic policy, if you give a fuck about freedom and knowledge, the time to act is now.
You fucking idiot....you have no who the "left" is. Any member of the Democratic party is a reactionary statist. Any member of the Rebublican is a fascest bent on destrying the world with god on their side. The real left wants less government control over people....but they are smarter then the real right because they know the worst abuses of government are the military and police. Sure, compulsory schooling is unconscionable to anyone with a basic respect for human rights (Forced indoctronation!!! short of genocide, I couldn't think of anything worse)...but schools actually have popular support. If the american people knew how much was being spent on the military what was going on in Iraq, Colombia, Afghanistan, etc they certainly would not vote Democrat or Republican. Schools take so little money compared to the DoD its hardly worth the fiscial conservative's/libertarian's time.
Get the Yahoo service. I used the old second line SBC (It used to be ameritech) DSL for years. I just upgraded a few months ago and am now getting 300kbps easily down (at times over 700kbps). Before I could only get around 60kbps down on average 300kbps max.
But I can't think of a free equivalent of
Core Impact http://www.coresecurity.com/products/coreimpact/in dex.php
It's so easy, an AOL subscribing, Mac using, chimpanzee could figure out the GUI, yet its an extremely powerful tool for any security consultant or script kiddie with a lot of cash. It scans for exploits Nessus style, then tries to exploit them so you don't get all the false posatives Nessus does. It also has the ability to give you a shell on an exploited host and use that to further penitrate a network. It has a built in library of exploits and new ones can be added via a python API. It totally automates the penitration process! (No I do not work for Core Security Technologies)
I've written a few small, text only, c++ programs that would basically grep nmap logs to find potentially vulnerable systems, automatically test exploits on them and then attempt to continue the process recursivly through a nework.. by scanning off the exploited host (new version of scanner/expoiter is uploaded/executed by the original exploit's shellcode). It was buggy, CLI only, and only worked on a small scale with a couple exploits...more proof of concept then usable tool. I wonder if anyone would want to make a core impact style system by extending Nessus?
This should help you out.
http://ceu.fi.udc.es/SAL/G/4/WINGZ.html
Sure the image/video may become popular...but it is highly unlikely that someout would go out and rape or murder someone else just to produce a file that would be popular on KaZaa. Someone that sick could probably find many other justifications for their sick behavior. In a capitalist society, however, provided the potential to make millions of $$$, some rather normal sane people will contribute to rape and murder. Take the prevailance of military contractors and organised criminal organisations as examples.
Actually I don't think that post has been moderated at all. It was 1 by default because I have "good" karma. I reposted with some additional information and it got moderated +3.
I see how stachatory rape should not be considdered rape (as long as all participants consent and are not coersed)...But child porn laws are just as wrong. They criminalise possession of pictures of what is potentially legal consentual activity (even activity that the vast majority of the population would find attractive...for example 17 year old lesbians). But I am so pro free speech I would even say possession of snuff videos, real pictures of rapes, murders, etc should be legal. You aren't harming anyone by copy a picture off the net. If anything you are exposing a sick and evil element of society. Buying snuff videos would be another matter because that would encourage their manufacture. It would provide the economic incentave to commit real hanous crimes, thus the buyer of such films should be partially responsable for the crimes. This should be true for any rape/molestation video/image regardless of the age of the victum.
Child porn law's are absurd. The only necessary law regarding sexual activity should be a ban on rape. I agree that adults that have sex with young children are sick. (Adults that knowingly lie to children or force them to do useless or harmfull physical or mental activity....as many public school teachers do....are sick as well) I should be able to own any pictures I want. Teenagers have sex with each other. They always have; they always will. Defining an adult as one over 18 when humans generally become sexually mature at a much younger age is wrong. If teenagers (not 18 or 19 year olds like legit porn sites define teen, but real teenagers: 13-17) have consensual sex with each other and decide to take some pictures and upload them to the net, anyone who wants should be able to download them. I wonder what would happen if some minor took pictures of themselves and a parterner engaging in consentual sexual activity, and years later is caught with the images? There are all kinds of cases where noone is harmed by so called "child" pron. Safe trusting consentual sex is a fun and socially benificial activity. Excessive conservatism is just going to turn us into a more regressive backward god fearing people. Yes....many teens are not ready and do stupid things. Often this is because conservatives have sheltered them from pron, education, and frank discusions about fucking. Many "legal adults" are also too immature to have safe sex. When society arbritrarily sets 18 as the age of consent, we are just encouraging both minors and adults to not take the law serously.
(even on slashdot its hard to speak out on free speech...when I defended the right to send any email your bandwidth would allow, I was accused of being a spammer...I would not be surprised if I were labeled a rapeist for defending "child" pronography)
It should be emphasised that emergence is not simply strange unpridictable events (those can generally be attributed to human ignorance or inaccuracy). Reality above the quantum level is purely deturministic and even at the quantum level the Bohm interpritation and Bverett many-worlds interpritation allow for purly causal links and thus are deturministic. While an emergent phenomenon at the macroscopic scale does not directly exist at the microscopic scale, its existence at macroscopic scales can still be explained (perhaps after a substantial amount of rigorous or semi-rigorous mathematical analysis) by the laws of physics at microscopic scales, taking into account the interactions between all the microscopic components of a macroscopic object. Thus emergent phenomena can demonstrate why a reductionistic physical theory, viewing all matter in terms of its component parts, which in turn obey a relatively small number of laws, can hope to model complex objects such as living beings. However, by the same token, emergent phenomena serve to caution against greedy reductionism, because the microscopic explanation of an emergent phenomenon may be too complicated or "low-level" to be of any practical use. For instance, if chemistry is explainable as emergent from interactions in particle physics, cell biology as emergent from interactions in chemistry, humans as emergent from interactions in cell biology, civilizations as emergent from interactions of humans, and human history as emergent from interactions between civilizations, this does not imply that it is particularly easy or desirable to try to explain human history in terms of the laws of particle physics. (This has not dissuaded some people from hypothesizing that highly complex, emergent phenomena such as human history can be described in terms of simpler laws which are more commonly associated to more fundamental theories.
e
-shamelessly stolen from wikipedia
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergenc
The problem people have when talking about emergence is the misinterpritation of the word sum. Literally the quantative complexity of a system can increese with the addition of eliments by a quantity greater then the sum of each eliment's complexity. Anyone who has studied networks knows this. This does not imply that we cannot understand the system. Throwing choas theory into the mix just further confuses people. Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. Choatic systems also are more then just entropic systems (entropy in information theory is a measure of information (as opposed to redundency)..is is realated but not equivilant to the entropy defined in statistical mechanics). Its certainly easy to get bogged down in the semantics of all this, but the heart of the matter is: everything in the real world is a complex system and cannot be fully perdicted by humans although this is not due to some inherant randomness, it is because of our limits in measurement and information processing and the fact that every system in the real world is interdependent with some other.
ebay, where else? ;-)
Over two years ago I bought a Toshiba laptop at Best Buy:
14 inch LCD
DVD drive
56k modem
10/100 ethernet
2 pcmcia slots
ATI radeon (works fine with linux opengl drivers) 256 megs ram (I upgraded to 512)
1.5ghz PIV
Windows XP Home (formated it and installed Debian
3 usb (version 1 not 2 unfortunatly) ports.
The only thing that sucked was the soundcard/speakers and the Microsoft tax. It only cost $600. Acording to moore's law (I know technecally it's about density, not price or performance) that kind of computer should be down to $300 by now (half price at the 18 month mark, and I give it a little extra leway.) Other machines have gone WAY down in price. I just bought a sun machine:
2 gig ram
4 way SMP (450mhz each)
4 redundant power supplies
It cost me $200 and runs solaris 10 great. It would have cost me at least $2,000 two years ago. Why is PC hardware, particularly laptops, still so expensive? On the high end the specs are going up so the price/performance ratio is higher, but at the low end, things have stagnated or even gotten more expensive. Cheap laptops cost more now then they did years ago. New SD-RAM is more expensive then it used to be and often more expensive then faster DDR RAM. CPU performance has also grown slowly in the low end dispite the constant clockspeed increeses. It took the desktop over a decade since the technology was available (the mips R4000 came out in 1991) to go 64 bit.
Intel is certainly part of the problem in spite of their recent 180 on the mhz myth and adoption of AMD64 for the Xeon. I have a pentium II 450mhz system with 512k L2 cache, and a PA-RISC system with 1.5meg L1 cache. I even have an ancient sgi Indy with a 200mhz mips processor with 1meg cache. Why do new Celerons still only have 256k L2 cache and PIVs only have 1meg L2 cache? Up to about 2 megs you will still get significant performance increeses by adding more cache. I understand the Itanium2 has a 9meg on chip L3 cache, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons its price/performance ratio stucks ass. However, there is a happy medium between the PIV and Itanium when it commed to cache. AMD is in the same boat with a 1meg L2 on the Athlon64.
Microsoft is part of the problem, but this certainly isn't the case for this walmart computer. It might be a step in the right direction, but the industry can produce better desktops and laptops cheaper.
Over two years ago I bought a Toshiba laptop at Best Buy.
14 inch LCD
ATI radeon (works fine with linux opengl drivers) 256 megs ram (I upgraded to 512)
1.5ghz PIV
Windows XP Home (formated it and installed Debian
3 usb (version 1 not 2 unfortunatly) ports.
The only thing that sucked was the soundcard/speakers and the Microsoft tax. It only cost $600. Acording to moore's law (I know technecally it's about density, not price or performance) that kind of computer should be down to $300 by now (half price at the 18 month mark, and I give it a little extra leway.) Other machines have gome WAY down in price. I just bought a 2gig ram, 4 way SMP (450mhz each) ultrasparc machine. I cost me $200 and runs solaris 10 great. It would have cost me at least $2,000 two years ago. Why is PC hardware, particularly laptops still so expensive?
School years are around 180 days in the US... What an intresting coincidence that he could be put in jail for that ammount of time.
Jail is a prison for the body, compulsory education a prison for the mind. Given a choice between the two, I'll take jail any day. The student was more then justified in his actions. Most schools have extensive monitoring of students including the use of security cameras, random "drug" searches, and varous other methods of privacy invasion(a friend of mine who was kicked out of HS for subverting network security showed me a web accessable section of the school lan...(this was the best funded public school in the state) they had a secret searchable database that contained a psychological profile of every student along with standard information: age, grades, ssn, address). If you dare attempt to transcend the passive role assigned to you; if you even look like your going to help other students learn about history (you must be an anarchaist), chemestry (you will be accused of making bombs and drugs) or computer science (you'r a hacker), you will be interogated or expelled. Public education is a system that imposes ignorance on those too young and therefore too curious and independent minded to be good workers. It breaks them down to either drug induced apathy, or complacent submission. If we are ever to have a population with some conception of how technology, society, and self function, we must destroy the high schools. A just, equitable, and sustainable society cannot be built when our fellow citizens are subject to the forced indoctronation of dogmatic bullshit like nationalism and religion. Both public and parocial high schools are amoung the most destructive forces facing creativity, intellectual development, and society itself.
PS/2 keyboards and mice are free. You can find them in dumpsters or get them at best buy for like $5 with a $5 mail in rebate. 14 inch VGA CRT monitors are better then free. Buisnesses will PAY you to pick them up and cart them off. For everything else $100 can get a functional barebones PC if you buy used. Maybe: a Socket 7 motherboard with a 500mhz AMD K6-2 (unless you are playing doom3, encrypting large files, or running a couple distributed clients in the background, 500mhz is enough cpu power) 256-512megs of PC-100 SDRAM (I know the prices for new SDRAM is worse then for new DDR....but you can find old ram if you look around) Simple video card that can do opengl (an ati rage 128 works great...you can buy one used for $5 and it will play quake3 at 30fps on a pentiumII system...and it does have linux drivers) cdrom (not DVD or R or RW)- practically free...I have a stack of functional cdrom drives sitting right next to me right... now pulled from comps found dumpster diving. A small IDE hard drive for saving files could be used... 1 gig maybe...the os should be knoppix on the cdrom to prevent users from fucking things up. Many of these parts/computers are just laying around with noone to use/buy them. The problem is, shipping them to Africa would cost more then they would sell for on ebay.
[I am re-posting this] Even putting your work in the public domain puts it within the legal but immoral intellectual property system. However, the BSDL grants the rights I wish people could automatically have. The GPL places unnecessaries and restrictions on users/programmers and perpetuates the intellectual property system. I personally don't think the law should have any say in IP, but if I must license my code, I want to point out what rights I wish people had. I personally think business should be allowed to use whatever license they want...they can even use some of my code in their proprietary licensed product. If the license is too restrictive, people should be smart enough not to buy that product or to just break the terms of the EULA...but it should be up to the consumer. The only thing anyone should not be allowed* to do, is cause real harm**. People can express anything they want, even if their expression entails reiterating an idea, c function, poem, etc that they did not author. Copyright, patents, and licenses are all restrictions on free speech. People also have the right to do whatever they want to their own property or body or the property or body of someone else with consent. Ideas, code, etc, are not property because they can be copied infinitely at no cost. When you "steal" a song from the RIAA, the RIAA still has the original! Free market economics (and even most command econ) is based on the idea that there are unlimited demands and wants, but only a finite supply of products. This is only true in an IP economy in that there's an insatiable demand for NEW ideas; the old ones can be copied until everyone has as many as they want. The profit motive that drives the demanded innovation is also totally scewed because people are simply more creative if they aren't directed by a private tyranny (corporation). Good art does not come from a marketing department, a better source might be an eccentric who produces what they find beautiful, not what sells. Good music doesn't come from the RIAA, it comes from some innovator on an indy label who is willing to risk not sounding exactly like every top 40 hit. All intellectual innovation is plagerism and "theft" because there is nothing new in the world. Everyone learns from those around them and imporves or expands on older concepts. Although many exellent programmers (OSS and proprietary) are now well paid by big business, what most /.ers don't realize is that OSS has already won out in terms of influence! You don't have to look at Linux to see the results free software. The internet and TCP/IP is a free open standard implemented by a combination of capitalism (western ISPS, hardware/software developers), socialism (the university system, libraries, other public access, public funded R&D, much of it from the DoD), and anarchy (the actual content on the net itself). MS windows has BSD code in it. Apple's Darwin IS BSD. SUN/Solaris will soon be opening its code (its been illegally available for a while now). There are easily accessible underground source distributions of Cisco IOS too. Moreover, the programmers at places like Microsoft are standing on the shoulders of giants. Even if they weren't able to directly access old code bases, their conceptual training in computer science and software engineering came from a university system where the free exchange of ideas is quite highly valued.
People no longer respect IP law. Downloading/Uploading an MP3 that someone else copyrighted may be illegal, but we all do it. Soon IP law will be a unenforceable anachronism. Its a stupid conservative restriction on civil liberates like the old sodomy laws that were struck down by the USA court system just recently. Hopefully drug laws will go the same way, then laws requiring taxes (when most of that money goes to killing people). The ultimate libertarian dream would be people slowly realizing that government only has power in their minds. Trying to reform IP law with Creative Commons to replace copyright, free access to patents to replace trade secr
OK...so the BSDL doesn't see copyright as immoral. No license does. Even putting your work in the public domain puts it within the legal but immoral intellectual property system. However, the BSDL grants the rights I wish people could automatically have.
/.ers don't realize is that OSS has already won out in terms of influence! You don't have to look at Linux to see the results free software. TCP/IP is a free open standard implemented by a combination of capitalism (western ISPS, hardware/software developers), socialism (the university system, libraries, other public access, public funded R&D, much of it from the DoD), and anarchy (the actual content on the net itself). MS windows has BSD code in it. Apple's Darwin IS BSD. SUN/Solaris will soon be opening its code (its been illegally available for a while now). There are easily accessible underground source distributions of Cisco IOS too. Moreover, the programmers at places like Microsoft are standing on the shoulders of giants. Even if they weren't able to directly access old code bases, their conceptual training in computer science and software engineering came from a university system where the free exchange of ideas is quite highly valued. People no longer respect IP law. Downloading/Uploading an MP3 that someone else copyrighted may be illegal, but we all do it. Soon IP law will be a unenforceable anachronism. Its a stupid conservative restriction on civil liberates like the old sodomy laws that were struck down by the USA court system just recently. Hopefully drug laws will go the same way, then laws requiring taxes (when most of that money goes to killing people). The ultimate libertarian dream would be people slowly realizing that government only has power in their minds. Trying to reform IP law with Creative Commons to replace copyright, free access to patents to replace trade secrets and protected patents, GPL and BSDL to replace MS/Adobe/who
I don't understand your slave analogy and how it's logically a similar doctrine (and what it would be logically similar to, my general reasoning, the BSDL?). Are you implying that the GPL doesn't tolerate immoral behavior ("owning slaves") because it doesn't allow re-licensing under a proprietary license. I personally think business should be allowed to use whatever license they want...they can even use some of my code in their proprietary licensed product. If the license is too restrictive, people should be smart enough not to buy that product or to just break the terms of the EULA...but it should be up to the consumer. The only thing anyone should not be allowed* to do, is cause real harm**. People can express anything they want, even if their expression entails reiterating an idea, c function, poem, etc that they did not author. Copyright, patents, and licenses are all restrictions on free speech. People also have the right to do whatever they want to their own property or body or the property or body of someone else with consent. Ideas, code, etc, are not property because they can be copied infinitely at no cost. When you "steal" a song from the RIAA, the RIAA still has the original! Free market economics (and even most command econ) is based on the idea that there are unlimited demands and wants, but only a finite supply of products. This is only true in an IP economy in that there's an insatiable demand for NEW ideas; the old ones can be copied until everyone has as many as they want. The profit motive that drives the demanded innovation is also totally scewed because people are simply more creative if they aren't directed by a private tyranny (corporation). Good art does not come from a marketing department, a better source might be an eccentric who produces what they find beautiful, not what sells. Good music doesn't come from the RIAA, it comes from some innovator on an indy label who is willing to risk not sounding exactly like every top 40 hit.
Although many exellent programmers (OSS and proprietary) are now well paid by big business, what most
Buisnesses and individuals that choose the BSDL should be given the most respect, because the code can be re-liscenced in GPL, CDDL, closed source, etc liscenced. I wonder if one could disign a liscence that is basically the BSDL except it has a provision to ban redistribution in a particular competitor's product. Would that be considdered illegally anti-competative?
knoppix@ttyp0[usr]$ lynx http://www.dec.org.uk
/=search
[screen changes to ncurses mode]
[lynx output exited to pass lameness filter]
Tsunami Earthquake Appeal (p1 of 5)
Logo - Click to go to home page
Click here to continue to DEC website for more information
Click here for FAQ's
BT Logo
Tsunami Earthquake Appeal
DEC TSUNAMI EARTHQUAKE APPEAL
YOU CAN HELP - DONATE ONLINE
-- press space for next page --
Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to
go back. H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit
playing god? perhaps we can do better.
"You took a time bomb
and a case of crackers
and you made a maelstrom of organic debris
then you took a work bench
and a rusty anvil
and you polished them for everyone to see
you have created an unhealthy monster
but you're nowhere but nowhere to be found
so I guess I'll just cope with my provisions
from now until the day theu lay me down
you took a babboon
and made him perfect
you took a lion
and stripped him of his pride
then you took a million more varieties
a scalpel and a sartory
and you stitched up a horrible surprise
you have created an unsocial monster
and you're searched for all over the globe
and most belive that things would sure be better
if you'd come down here and tell us what you know
who is to blame for this?
someone tell me please
His handiwork is flawed
and it's there for all to see
mutataions, abberations and blatant anomalies
they multiply and give rise to this...monstrosrity
you took the most abundant smallest bits of matter
and you instilled them with affinity
and then you stratified accumulations
weeded out bad variations
and blended up your unique recipe
you have created a powerful monster
with direction and purpose all its own
and if you were here
would things be any different?
or are you just a mosaic of thoughts alone?"
--Chimaera, Bad religion
This was an issue addressed in the documentary film "The Corporation";
http://the1.no-ip.com
(If you like it, buy a copy)
Now Ramsey Clark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey_Clark/ can serve a second term.
but plan9 will always have a warm place in the hearts of geeks.
People who were around in the 60's are in power, yes, but certainly no one cool ever got any authority. The current whearabouts of some old radicals: Abbie Hoffman, Malcom X, the weather underground (as an orginisation), and Herbert Marcuse are dead. Jerry Ruban and John Kerry sold out. Tom Hayden, Howard Zinn and Noam chomksy are old and grey but still writting inspiring things. I can't think of any real leftest who has kept their ideals AND made it in the mainstream.