Oh yeah, pot's so much safer than tobacco. It only contains far more carcinogens, isn't smoked through a filter, and has been linked to mental illness.
Weed may have more carcinogens and no filter, but who's ever heard of a pack a day pot smoker? Marijuana users don't need to smoke as much as tobacco users to get the desired effect. Pot is also less addictive than tobacco. The link to mental illness hasn't been proven to be causal, just a correlation. Perhaps the population of weed users has a higher incidence of mental illness than the general population because people who are already mentally ill are more likely to use pot as a means of self medication?
Ya...I realized that mistake after I hit submit. No, I'm not one of those people. I don't plan to enroll in university. (Besides, I didn't graduate high school)
This seems to be a reaction with a full lack of understanding about how campus internet works. YOU seem to have a full lack of understanding about how the Internet works.
Why not simply save money by . . . limiting access to common bittorrent ports and the like. ..? LOL politics Portblocking is totally ineffective at stopping file sharing. If you understand anything about TCP/IP, you realize that it's trivial to run any service on any port, or to use some kind of packetfilter to dynamically redirect port usage. You can also tunnel many services through a single channel (ssh for example).
Maybe they should take away your federal student loans if your caught downloading music, they do it if your caught with pot.
Downloading music is perfectly legal. Perhaps you refer to downloading copyrighted music from RIAA signed bands? Why anyone would want to download music from major label musicians (much less buy that shit), is beyond me. I want to relate to an artists view of the world; I want to share their experiences and ideas through their music. Knowing that they signed to the RIAA disgusts me so much that I just can't listen to them anymore. They become corporate shills instead of real human beings.
Why should you get kicked out of school for smoking pot? It's safer than alcohol and tobacco.
When the state and the corporations work tirelessly together to control our lives, we live in a fascist society. Smart people are unable to go to college because of lack of funds, and congress wants to waist money earmarked for education doing the RIAA's bidding. If the filtering is implemented, no doubt it will block all sorts of legitimate p2p usage, create further surveillance of student usage, and be one further step in eliminating free speech on the Internet. I don't know how anyone can still buy major label music without a heavy burden of guilt weighing upon them, nor can I understand how anyone can continue to vote for the two corporate backed parties.
Youth are not animals. You aren't some naive infant from 0-17 and then magically become a mature capable adult on your 18th birthday. Here in the state of IL, the age of consent is 17. So when you're 17, you can have sex with any 17 year old (and I believe 16 year olds too), as well as any adult. Since Laurence v. Texas, you can have any sort of consensual sex you want: orgies, anal/oral/vaginal, S&M, gay/straight/bi, roleplaying, and whatever else your perverted mind can dream up. A 17 year old could fuck your mom or grandma (if she's into it). A 17 year old can drive a car. A 17 year old can work full time. A 17 year old can buy a house, computer, and Internet connection (if he/she can somehow manage to get that kind of cash). Yet we need the state to make sure we use censorware to keep us from viewing breasts? Younger teenagers may have less legal rights than those who are nearly legal adults, but why should anyone be denied their free speech rights? Why should those who are sexually mature (and probably having sex), be denied the right to see representations of sexual activity.
Other than a strong innate respect for those who look similar to me, why should I care about the rights of my fellow human beings? There's no rational selfish reason for me to do so, especially when it comes to those with only distant genetic relations to me. Natural selection works on the genetic level. No organism acts "for the good of the species". This is a common mis-interpretation of biological evolution. My genes have evolved to help themselves survive. They program my body to help itself primarily and it's kin secondarily, and everyone else minimally if at all.*
Moreover, it's against my interests to NOT enslave and plunder weaker minorities. If someone doesn't look like my kin, and I have physical advantages over it, why shouldn't I exploit it? If they can't fight back, why shouldn't I rape them or make them work for me? If I don't, some competitor might, and I'll loose out on food, shelter, or mates.
Our selfish instincts aren't where we get human right. We've adopted human rights to help those who we believe are deserving. Those in power didn't give rights to minorities because they thought it would give more power to the powerful. They did it because social conditions and science made it clear that minorities were as deserving of rights as those who already had them. I argue that science is presently showing us that adult non-human primates are as deserving of rights as young people (who already have some rights).
Our civilization has made social progress. Roughly, in the post-Colombian North America, legal rights first applied to propertied adult white males, then to all adult white males, later to all adult males, and finally to all adults. The natural progression seams to be to eliminate one more barrier and to start giving some basic rights to young humans and to animals with equivalent complexity to them. Clearly babies and chimps are not as intelligent as adults and don't require the same protections. However, some minimal trans-species standards would be appropriate.
*(btw I know that work in sociobiology such as the biophelia hypothesis goes against this idea, but all that has going for it are a series of just so stories. Until someone provides evidence of order/class altruism first of all being heritable behavior traits, and second of all having a actual genetic basis in the wild, biophelia is just wishful thinking)
The human is... human. Which makes it much more interesting for other humans to grant rights to that human.
So we should only grant rights to those who look and act like us? Since I'm white, I can oppress black people since they aren't like me? We should grant rights to all beings proportional to their complexity and ethical ability, not their similarity to ourselves.
If we discovered a species that was as intelligent and ethically capable as an adult human bring, you think we should be free to treat it like shit just because it's different from us? Why are you so bigoted? On the other hand, if you think that such a being should be given the equivalent of adult human rights, why not give the same sort of rights we give to children to animals that are more complex than young children?
I understand that it's selfish to give rights to a category that includes ourselves. In a democratic society, this case of personal selfishness should eventually lead to public good since everyone with a voice should obtain some level of basic freedom and dignity. However not everyone has a voice. The young and the non-human may not be able to speak, but we value their complexity enough that we should treat them well.
There's a discrepancy in how the law is applied to humans and animals. This is because most people don't know what makes us human.
First it's important to note that human rights are not universal. The right to free expression and free assembly, and the most of rest of the rights in the UN charter and US bill of rights are only given to adults. Young humans generally only have the right to life and the right to not be severely abused. Adults are free to subject the young to all sorts of twisted environmental conditions, such as a religious upbringing.
I highly doubt that anyone would seriously consider giving chimps the same rights as adults (the right to trial by a jury of it's peers; it's peers being what? other chimps?) However, I think we should seriously consider treating chimps as well as young children (which sadly isn't that big of a step up from their current status).
You can pretty much legally do whatever you want with a chimpanzee: forcefully train it to do menial tasks, cage it, even dissect it while it's still alive. If anyone did this to a young child, they would be thrown in jail. The only difference between a young child and a chimp is that that child has a slightly greater genetic complexity than the chimp. However, depending on the age of the child, it may be less developmentally complex than the chimp.
We aught to define how human someone is by their developmental complexity. Why shouldn't an adult chimp have the same more more rights than a small child if it is more physically capable, and more importantly, of far greater intelligence than the child? Most people would argue that the chimp cannot have the rights of young humans because kids have the potential to become adult human beings. This argument doesn't hold because few people are willing to universally apply it. A human zygote and fetus have the potential to become fully capable adult humans, yet abortion is legal. Every sperm and egg has the potential to become a human, yet male masturbation and female menstruation are not considered murder. Potential isn't what makes us human. Our ability to perceive our conditions and make rational and ethical decisions defines our humanity.
Religious idiots believe that humans are made different from animals when a "soul" enters their body sometime between conception and adulthood. There is no scientific basis for this. A fully conscious developed brain is what makes us human beings deserving of human rights. Since adult chimps have brains more capable and complex than human infants and toddlers, they aught to have the same or better rights as those kids.
Isn't this the same George Monbiot that 'proved' a few months back that global warming was a hoax?
NO!
I have no idea where you got that from. Monbiot's most recent book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, published in 2006, focuses on the issue of climate change. In this book, Monbiot argues that a 90% reduction in carbon emissions is necessary in developed countries in order to prevent disastrous changes to the climate. He then sets out to demonstrate how such a reduction could be achieved within the United Kingdom, without a significant fall in living standards, through changes in housing, power supply and transport. Monbiot concludes that such changes are possible but they would require considerable political will.
To coincide with the launch of his book, he has created a new website, criticizing both those who deny human influenced climate change and those he believes make "inflated claims about their environmental performance."
Monbiot has been one of the most prolific writers and activists trying to promote sustainable solutions to the problem of global climate change.
When are people going to start using basic encryption (or better yet onion routing and strong anonymity)? There are technical solutions that make all this surveillance useless. We must implement steganographic techniques too so that there's no way to block the crypto.
Half of the people haven't even been charged with a crime in a competent court let alone convicted.
It's nice that you assume that the Administration is innocent until proven guilty. I just wish they would return the favor and practice due process with their victims instead of engaging in rendition, torture, indefinite detention, disappearances, and etc all before any legal trial. I'd rather live in a republic than a junta.
Gates will join the ranks of other honorable Harvard grads: Theodore Kaczynski (unibomber) Jeffrey Skilling (corporate criminal) Lawrence Summers (world bank neoliberal, economic neoimperialist) Jack Valenti (MPAA bully) Henry Kissinger (war criminal) Robert McNamara (war criminal) George W. Bush (war criminal) Alberto Gonzales (war criminal) Barack Obam<i>Iran</i> (wanna be war criminal) Alan Dershowitz (apologist for Israel's war crimes) Charles Murray (right wing pseudoscientist) Ted "series of tubes" Stevens Antonin Scalia (third branch of the Republican party)
but then again, Harvard also produced: Russ Feingold (the only Senator to vote against the PAT RIOT act) Ralph Nader (the best alternative to corporate rule we've had over the past 20 years) Irene Khan (Secretary General of Amnesty International) Samuel Adams (held a nice tea party) Alfred Kinsey (dared to study sex) James D. Watson (DNA!) EO Wilson (sociobiology) William S. Burroughs (digg the words, man) Marvin Minsky (managed to do something useful with AI) Daniel Ellsberg (exposed the Viet Nam war from the inside) Edward Said (tells the trust about Palestine) Paul Farmer (tireless humanitarian MD) Al Franken (makes fun of the war criminals) Paul Graham (hacker and painter) Robert Tappan Morris (hey! the worm was a neat proof of concept!) Helen Keller (deafblind radical iww) Tim O'Reilly (probably the reason you know anything about software) Richard Stallman (our prophet) Henry David Thoreau (civilly disobedient)
and of course.... Natalie Portman (hot grits!)
(I'm sure I left plenty of interesting folk off either list, but I don't know everyone who went to Harvard;-) )
I always wanted to run a custom Linux firmware on a Linksys WRT54G, but when I went to several stores, all I saw on the box was the model number, not the version number. Some versions are compatible, others have different hardware and are not, but all the boxes look the same. This is rather strange considering most versions (presumably the free software compatible ones) already run Linux by default! Why don't companies proudly advertise the fact that they run Linux and that it is hackable? Those are useful features! The same goes for zipit wireless messengers. All run Linux, but the manufacture released a new version that cryptographically locks out the ability to load the device with a custom firmware, so you need to modify the hardware if you want to use these neat and inexpensive little computers as pocket web browsers, ssh clients, ogg players, or other cool things like that. By default they are only useful as an IM device. Why do companies go out of their way to stop their users from improving their own hardware and in the long run, doing free development work for the company? Why don't corporations want essentially unpaid dedicated employees?
I also would love to have a media player that runs Rockbox, but various hardware is in different stages of rockbox support. It seams like there would be a significant market for products that advertise the fact that they work with free software firmwares right on the box. It's a shame that many industries view "proprietary" as a feature, as something developed uniquely and innovatively by one company. Anything proprietary should instead be suspect of being buggy because there is no way for the public to verify it's security, it probably has poor support for open standards, and it's probably feature limited and uncustomizable.
If you want to control your life instead of your boss controlling it, you need to join a democratically run union. United we bargain, divided we beg. IT is no different from any other industry. The working class and the employing class have different interests. The bosses are already organized, why aren't we?
I got a laptop from system76 and thought it was a pretty good deal. I guess the prices are more competitive in that market than with desktops. Also have you considered warranty issues? Sometimes it's easy to get RMA returns for your parts from newegg, other times it can be a hassle. My whole system76 system is warrantied and supported for a year (and I could have bought support for longer). You also have to account for the fact that it takes some of your time to put together your own system, and moreover, most users couldn't figure out how to do it. At lot of things are cheaper to DIY than buy. You can build chairs or go to IKEA. Some people do carpentry for a hobby or do it to save money, but for most, it's just easier to buy furniture that someone else manufactures and assembles. The same is true for computers. So if you're going to buy a fully finished and supported machine, you might as well avoid the Microsoft tax and buy one that is not broken (defective by design through DRM), and is supported by knowledgeable people, not English as a second language speakers reading out of some manual and telling you to reformat at every hickup.
Dell couldn't manage to support GNU/Linux, but lets not forget that Dell doesn't really support Windows either. Sure it's impossible to explain to your average user that the Internet and their web browser are different things. This doesn't change if the browser is IE or Firefox or Konqueror. However, as a "geek" I regularly need to provide tech support to friends and family. I have a much easier time doing this once I have switched them over to Ubuntu from Windows. It's simply more user friendly and secure. If you are looking for a new PC, I would highly recommend system76, not any big OEM that functions as a division of Microsoft.
I can donate hardware and sysadmin man-hours, but I need either space, electricity, and bandwidth or money (which can obviously get me space, power, and bandwidth). I have lots of platforms just sitting in storage, and I plan to ebay most of it unless someone can get help for an interesting and useful project like this. The architectures I can provide are as follows:
4x Sgi o2 (MIPS both R10k and r5k) currently running IRIX, but I could install Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD Compaq with Xeons (eight way SMP 4GB RAM) Debian or FreeBSD Sun (four way SPARC64 SMP 2GB RAM) running Solaris, but I could install Linux Sgi octane2 (MIPS R14k 1GB RAM) IRIX HP visualize J6700 (dual SMP PA-RISC64 4GB RAM) running Debian, could install HP-UX HP precision book (PA-RISC32) running HP-UX, could install Linux or OpenBSD Sun (SPARC64) running OpenBSD, could install Linux or Solaris Plenty of boring x86 machines, some older PA-RISC32 junk, and probably other RISC boxen that I forgot about....
Send an email to unixclan REMOVE THIS IF YOU ARE NOT A BOT @ gmail.com If you think you can help me host an alternative compile farm.
Aren't there plenty of Dell models that cost more than what it would cost to build an equivalent system? When you buy a computer from an OEM, you are paying for testing (the hardware and software is known to work with each other, so you shouldn't need to spend hours hunting around for drivers and configuring devices) and support (warranties, trouble shooting, and additional help). If you don't need those things, feel free to build your own system. If you do, compare the support you get with dell to the support you get with system76.
Dell will only provide free software pre-installed when they start to loose marketshare to companies that provide installation and support of GNU/Linux on desktops and laptops. Why not buy your next computer from system76?
Just yesterday I was looking at getting a new laptop, and was dismayed because everything came with Vista. . . I've heard more good things about Ubuntu than any other Linux version, I would rather buy a laptop with Ubuntu than Vista.
0. Install wireless NIC to In-Flight Entertainment System 1. Connect to wireless WAN and Internet 2. Install web server and post link to slashdot 3. Short sell airline stock 4. ??? 5. Profit!
I'm not sure if this is a troll or what, but if you really think that someone like Lamont -- who couldn't get elected in one of the Bluest states in the country -- typifies what Americans want, you've been spending too much time smoking dope in Boston or L.A.; people want out of Iraq, sure, and are pretty pissed about what they perceive to be American jobs lost to outsourcing and imports, but to equate that with some wellspring of progressivism/socialism is a mistake.
I live in a precinct and county that consistently vote Republican. My congressional district is "represented" by Dennis Hastart, who was until recently the most powerful Republican in the House. My town is basically trying to kick non-whites out through a series of nationally reported racist ordinances. I do not live in Boston or LA, but smack in the middle of the Midwest. I won't comment on my personal habits, but I've only been around people who were using pot once in the past year or so. The American people don't support the left on the wedge issues of immigration, gay marriage, evolution, etc. However, when it comes to economics, they are vastly more left wing than the Democratic party. Most Americans want more regulation of corporations, higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes on the working, and single payer nationalized healthcare. Socialism really is in the best interests of working America and that's why the first openly socialist member of the senate was just elected.
Well, as a Minnesotan, I can tell you that he kinda was. We're a fairly liberal state as it is, but Wellstone was pretty left-leaning even for us.
I always thought that rural Minnesota was inhabited by moderate Lutherans who didn't really care about politics. The MN cities have a mixed range of opinion, but the Minnesotans I know who REALLY care about politics are all either anarchists or revolutionary communists. Superior, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Winona all appear to have their fair share of radicals. I really haven't met many liberals outside of black neighborhoods (leftists and liberals have less in common than liberals and conservative). Most of the white middle class is moderate and/or apathetic. Most people who are wealthy or religious nuts are right wing reactionaries. You find a few real conservatives (who tend to lean Libertarian). I think Liberalism is slowly becoming irrelevant.
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Oh yeah, pot's so much safer than tobacco. It only contains far more carcinogens, isn't smoked through a filter, and has been linked to mental illness.
Weed may have more carcinogens and no filter, but who's ever heard of a pack a day pot smoker? Marijuana users don't need to smoke as much as tobacco users to get the desired effect. Pot is also less addictive than tobacco. The link to mental illness hasn't been proven to be causal, just a correlation. Perhaps the population of weed users has a higher incidence of mental illness than the general population because people who are already mentally ill are more likely to use pot as a means of self medication?
Ya...I realized that mistake after I hit submit. No, I'm not one of those people. I don't plan to enroll in university. (Besides, I didn't graduate high school)
This seems to be a reaction with a full lack of understanding about how campus internet works.
.? LOL politics
YOU seem to have a full lack of understanding about how the Internet works.
Why not simply save money by . . . limiting access to common bittorrent ports and the like. .
Portblocking is totally ineffective at stopping file sharing. If you understand anything about TCP/IP, you realize that it's trivial to run any service on any port, or to use some kind of packetfilter to dynamically redirect port usage. You can also tunnel many services through a single channel (ssh for example).
Maybe they should take away your federal student loans if your caught downloading music, they do it if your caught with pot.
Downloading music is perfectly legal. Perhaps you refer to downloading copyrighted music from RIAA signed bands? Why anyone would want to download music from major label musicians (much less buy that shit), is beyond me. I want to relate to an artists view of the world; I want to share their experiences and ideas through their music. Knowing that they signed to the RIAA disgusts me so much that I just can't listen to them anymore. They become corporate shills instead of real human beings.
Why should you get kicked out of school for smoking pot? It's safer than alcohol and tobacco.
When the state and the corporations work tirelessly together to control our lives, we live in a fascist society. Smart people are unable to go to college because of lack of funds, and congress wants to waist money earmarked for education doing the RIAA's bidding. If the filtering is implemented, no doubt it will block all sorts of legitimate p2p usage, create further surveillance of student usage, and be one further step in eliminating free speech on the Internet. I don't know how anyone can still buy major label music without a heavy burden of guilt weighing upon them, nor can I understand how anyone can continue to vote for the two corporate backed parties.
Youth are not animals. You aren't some naive infant from 0-17 and then magically become a mature capable adult on your 18th birthday. Here in the state of IL, the age of consent is 17. So when you're 17, you can have sex with any 17 year old (and I believe 16 year olds too), as well as any adult. Since Laurence v. Texas, you can have any sort of consensual sex you want: orgies, anal/oral/vaginal, S&M, gay/straight/bi, roleplaying, and whatever else your perverted mind can dream up. A 17 year old could fuck your mom or grandma (if she's into it). A 17 year old can drive a car. A 17 year old can work full time. A 17 year old can buy a house, computer, and Internet connection (if he/she can somehow manage to get that kind of cash). Yet we need the state to make sure we use censorware to keep us from viewing breasts? Younger teenagers may have less legal rights than those who are nearly legal adults, but why should anyone be denied their free speech rights? Why should those who are sexually mature (and probably having sex), be denied the right to see representations of sexual activity.
Other than a strong innate respect for those who look similar to me, why should I care about the rights of my fellow human beings? There's no rational selfish reason for me to do so, especially when it comes to those with only distant genetic relations to me. Natural selection works on the genetic level. No organism acts "for the good of the species". This is a common mis-interpretation of biological evolution. My genes have evolved to help themselves survive. They program my body to help itself primarily and it's kin secondarily, and everyone else minimally if at all.*
Moreover, it's against my interests to NOT enslave and plunder weaker minorities. If someone doesn't look like my kin, and I have physical advantages over it, why shouldn't I exploit it? If they can't fight back, why shouldn't I rape them or make them work for me? If I don't, some competitor might, and I'll loose out on food, shelter, or mates.
Our selfish instincts aren't where we get human right. We've adopted human rights to help those who we believe are deserving. Those in power didn't give rights to minorities because they thought it would give more power to the powerful. They did it because social conditions and science made it clear that minorities were as deserving of rights as those who already had them. I argue that science is presently showing us that adult non-human primates are as deserving of rights as young people (who already have some rights).
Our civilization has made social progress. Roughly, in the post-Colombian North America, legal rights first applied to propertied adult white males, then to all adult white males, later to all adult males, and finally to all adults. The natural progression seams to be to eliminate one more barrier and to start giving some basic rights to young humans and to animals with equivalent complexity to them. Clearly babies and chimps are not as intelligent as adults and don't require the same protections. However, some minimal trans-species standards would be appropriate.
*(btw I know that work in sociobiology such as the biophelia hypothesis goes against this idea, but all that has going for it are a series of just so stories. Until someone provides evidence of order/class altruism first of all being heritable behavior traits, and second of all having a actual genetic basis in the wild, biophelia is just wishful thinking)
The human is... human. Which makes it much more interesting for other humans to grant rights to that human.
So we should only grant rights to those who look and act like us? Since I'm white, I can oppress black people since they aren't like me? We should grant rights to all beings proportional to their complexity and ethical ability, not their similarity to ourselves.
If we discovered a species that was as intelligent and ethically capable as an adult human bring, you think we should be free to treat it like shit just because it's different from us? Why are you so bigoted? On the other hand, if you think that such a being should be given the equivalent of adult human rights, why not give the same sort of rights we give to children to animals that are more complex than young children?
I understand that it's selfish to give rights to a category that includes ourselves. In a democratic society, this case of personal selfishness should eventually lead to public good since everyone with a voice should obtain some level of basic freedom and dignity. However not everyone has a voice. The young and the non-human may not be able to speak, but we value their complexity enough that we should treat them well.
There's a discrepancy in how the law is applied to humans and animals. This is because most people don't know what makes us human.
First it's important to note that human rights are not universal. The right to free expression and free assembly, and the most of rest of the rights in the UN charter and US bill of rights are only given to adults. Young humans generally only have the right to life and the right to not be severely abused. Adults are free to subject the young to all sorts of twisted environmental conditions, such as a religious upbringing.
I highly doubt that anyone would seriously consider giving chimps the same rights as adults (the right to trial by a jury of it's peers; it's peers being what? other chimps?) However, I think we should seriously consider treating chimps as well as young children (which sadly isn't that big of a step up from their current status).
You can pretty much legally do whatever you want with a chimpanzee: forcefully train it to do menial tasks, cage it, even dissect it while it's still alive. If anyone did this to a young child, they would be thrown in jail. The only difference between a young child and a chimp is that that child has a slightly greater genetic complexity than the chimp. However, depending on the age of the child, it may be less developmentally complex than the chimp.
We aught to define how human someone is by their developmental complexity. Why shouldn't an adult chimp have the same more more rights than a small child if it is more physically capable, and more importantly, of far greater intelligence than the child? Most people would argue that the chimp cannot have the rights of young humans because kids have the potential to become adult human beings. This argument doesn't hold because few people are willing to universally apply it. A human zygote and fetus have the potential to become fully capable adult humans, yet abortion is legal. Every sperm and egg has the potential to become a human, yet male masturbation and female menstruation are not considered murder. Potential isn't what makes us human. Our ability to perceive our conditions and make rational and ethical decisions defines our humanity.
Religious idiots believe that humans are made different from animals when a "soul" enters their body sometime between conception and adulthood. There is no scientific basis for this. A fully conscious developed brain is what makes us human beings deserving of human rights. Since adult chimps have brains more capable and complex than human infants and toddlers, they aught to have the same or better rights as those kids.
Isn't this the same George Monbiot that 'proved' a few months back that global warming was a hoax?
NO! I have no idea where you got that from. Monbiot's most recent book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, published in 2006, focuses on the issue of climate change. In this book, Monbiot argues that a 90% reduction in carbon emissions is necessary in developed countries in order to prevent disastrous changes to the climate. He then sets out to demonstrate how such a reduction could be achieved within the United Kingdom, without a significant fall in living standards, through changes in housing, power supply and transport. Monbiot concludes that such changes are possible but they would require considerable political will.
To coincide with the launch of his book, he has created a new website, criticizing both those who deny human influenced climate change and those he believes make "inflated claims about their environmental performance."
Monbiot has been one of the most prolific writers and activists trying to promote sustainable solutions to the problem of global climate change.
When are people going to start using basic encryption (or better yet onion routing and strong anonymity)? There are technical solutions that make all this surveillance useless. We must implement steganographic techniques too so that there's no way to block the crypto.
Half of the people haven't even been charged with a crime in a competent court let alone convicted.
It's nice that you assume that the Administration is innocent until proven guilty. I just wish they would return the favor and practice due process with their victims instead of engaging in rendition, torture, indefinite detention, disappearances, and etc all before any legal trial. I'd rather live in a republic than a junta.
Gates will join the ranks of other honorable Harvard grads:
;-) )
Theodore Kaczynski (unibomber)
Jeffrey Skilling (corporate criminal)
Lawrence Summers (world bank neoliberal, economic neoimperialist)
Jack Valenti (MPAA bully)
Henry Kissinger (war criminal)
Robert McNamara (war criminal)
George W. Bush (war criminal)
Alberto Gonzales (war criminal)
Barack Obam<i>Iran</i> (wanna be war criminal)
Alan Dershowitz (apologist for Israel's war crimes)
Charles Murray (right wing pseudoscientist)
Ted "series of tubes" Stevens
Antonin Scalia (third branch of the Republican party)
but then again, Harvard also produced:
Russ Feingold (the only Senator to vote against the PAT RIOT act)
Ralph Nader (the best alternative to corporate rule we've had over the past 20 years)
Irene Khan (Secretary General of Amnesty International)
Samuel Adams (held a nice tea party)
Alfred Kinsey (dared to study sex)
James D. Watson (DNA!)
EO Wilson (sociobiology)
William S. Burroughs (digg the words, man)
Marvin Minsky (managed to do something useful with AI)
Daniel Ellsberg (exposed the Viet Nam war from the inside)
Edward Said (tells the trust about Palestine)
Paul Farmer (tireless humanitarian MD)
Al Franken (makes fun of the war criminals)
Paul Graham (hacker and painter)
Robert Tappan Morris (hey! the worm was a neat proof of concept!)
Helen Keller (deafblind radical iww)
Tim O'Reilly (probably the reason you know anything about software)
Richard Stallman (our prophet)
Henry David Thoreau (civilly disobedient)
and of course....
Natalie Portman (hot grits!)
(I'm sure I left plenty of interesting folk off either list, but I don't know everyone who went to Harvard
I always wanted to run a custom Linux firmware on a Linksys WRT54G, but when I went to several stores, all I saw on the box was the model number, not the version number. Some versions are compatible, others have different hardware and are not, but all the boxes look the same. This is rather strange considering most versions (presumably the free software compatible ones) already run Linux by default! Why don't companies proudly advertise the fact that they run Linux and that it is hackable? Those are useful features! The same goes for zipit wireless messengers. All run Linux, but the manufacture released a new version that cryptographically locks out the ability to load the device with a custom firmware, so you need to modify the hardware if you want to use these neat and inexpensive little computers as pocket web browsers, ssh clients, ogg players, or other cool things like that. By default they are only useful as an IM device. Why do companies go out of their way to stop their users from improving their own hardware and in the long run, doing free development work for the company? Why don't corporations want essentially unpaid dedicated employees?
I also would love to have a media player that runs Rockbox, but various hardware is in different stages of rockbox support. It seams like there would be a significant market for products that advertise the fact that they work with free software firmwares right on the box. It's a shame that many industries view "proprietary" as a feature, as something developed uniquely and innovatively by one company. Anything proprietary should instead be suspect of being buggy because there is no way for the public to verify it's security, it probably has poor support for open standards, and it's probably feature limited and uncustomizable.
If you want to control your life instead of your boss controlling it, you need to join a democratically run union. United we bargain, divided we beg. IT is no different from any other industry. The working class and the employing class have different interests. The bosses are already organized, why aren't we?
In the field of biology, I always found reading Richard Dawkins or E.O. Wilson more entertaining than reading fiction. Science is stranger and more fascinating than anything we can imagine.
I got a laptop from system76 and thought it was a pretty good deal. I guess the prices are more competitive in that market than with desktops. Also have you considered warranty issues? Sometimes it's easy to get RMA returns for your parts from newegg, other times it can be a hassle. My whole system76 system is warrantied and supported for a year (and I could have bought support for longer). You also have to account for the fact that it takes some of your time to put together your own system, and moreover, most users couldn't figure out how to do it. At lot of things are cheaper to DIY than buy. You can build chairs or go to IKEA. Some people do carpentry for a hobby or do it to save money, but for most, it's just easier to buy furniture that someone else manufactures and assembles. The same is true for computers. So if you're going to buy a fully finished and supported machine, you might as well avoid the Microsoft tax and buy one that is not broken (defective by design through DRM), and is supported by knowledgeable people, not English as a second language speakers reading out of some manual and telling you to reformat at every hickup.
Dell couldn't manage to support GNU/Linux, but lets not forget that Dell doesn't really support Windows either. Sure it's impossible to explain to your average user that the Internet and their web browser are different things. This doesn't change if the browser is IE or Firefox or Konqueror. However, as a "geek" I regularly need to provide tech support to friends and family. I have a much easier time doing this once I have switched them over to Ubuntu from Windows. It's simply more user friendly and secure. If you are looking for a new PC, I would highly recommend system76, not any big OEM that functions as a division of Microsoft.
I can donate hardware and sysadmin man-hours, but I need either space, electricity, and bandwidth or money (which can obviously get me space, power, and bandwidth). I have lots of platforms just sitting in storage, and I plan to ebay most of it unless someone can get help for an interesting and useful project like this. The architectures I can provide are as follows:
4x Sgi o2 (MIPS both R10k and r5k) currently running IRIX, but I could install Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD
Compaq with Xeons (eight way SMP 4GB RAM) Debian or FreeBSD
Sun (four way SPARC64 SMP 2GB RAM) running Solaris, but I could install Linux
Sgi octane2 (MIPS R14k 1GB RAM) IRIX
HP visualize J6700 (dual SMP PA-RISC64 4GB RAM) running Debian, could install HP-UX
HP precision book (PA-RISC32) running HP-UX, could install Linux or OpenBSD
Sun (SPARC64) running OpenBSD, could install Linux or Solaris
Plenty of boring x86 machines, some older PA-RISC32 junk, and probably other RISC boxen that I forgot about....
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Aren't there plenty of Dell models that cost more than what it would cost to build an equivalent system? When you buy a computer from an OEM, you are paying for testing (the hardware and software is known to work with each other, so you shouldn't need to spend hours hunting around for drivers and configuring devices) and support (warranties, trouble shooting, and additional help). If you don't need those things, feel free to build your own system. If you do, compare the support you get with dell to the support you get with system76.
Dell will only provide free software pre-installed when they start to loose marketshare to companies that provide installation and support of GNU/Linux on desktops and laptops. Why not buy your next computer from system76?
Just yesterday I was looking at getting a new laptop, and was dismayed because everything came with Vista. . . I've heard more good things about Ubuntu than any other Linux version, I would rather buy a laptop with Ubuntu than Vista.
You should check out System76.
0. Install wireless NIC to In-Flight Entertainment System
1. Connect to wireless WAN and Internet
2. Install web server and post link to slashdot
3. Short sell airline stock
4. ???
5. Profit!
I'm not sure if this is a troll or what, but if you really think that someone like Lamont -- who couldn't get elected in one of the Bluest states in the country -- typifies what Americans want, you've been spending too much time smoking dope in Boston or L.A.; people want out of Iraq, sure, and are pretty pissed about what they perceive to be American jobs lost to outsourcing and imports, but to equate that with some wellspring of progressivism/socialism is a mistake.
I live in a precinct and county that consistently vote Republican. My congressional district is "represented" by Dennis Hastart, who was until recently the most powerful Republican in the House. My town is basically trying to kick non-whites out through a series of nationally reported racist ordinances. I do not live in Boston or LA, but smack in the middle of the Midwest. I won't comment on my personal habits, but I've only been around people who were using pot once in the past year or so. The American people don't support the left on the wedge issues of immigration, gay marriage, evolution, etc. However, when it comes to economics, they are vastly more left wing than the Democratic party. Most Americans want more regulation of corporations, higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes on the working, and single payer nationalized healthcare. Socialism really is in the best interests of working America and that's why the first openly socialist member of the senate was just elected.
Well, as a Minnesotan, I can tell you that he kinda was. We're a fairly liberal state as it is, but Wellstone was pretty left-leaning even for us.
I always thought that rural Minnesota was inhabited by moderate Lutherans who didn't really care about politics. The MN cities have a mixed range of opinion, but the Minnesotans I know who REALLY care about politics are all either anarchists or revolutionary communists. Superior, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Winona all appear to have their fair share of radicals. I really haven't met many liberals outside of black neighborhoods (leftists and liberals have less in common than liberals and conservative). Most of the white middle class is moderate and/or apathetic. Most people who are wealthy or religious nuts are right wing reactionaries. You find a few real conservatives (who tend to lean Libertarian). I think Liberalism is slowly becoming irrelevant.