this one dude owned a domain with a bunch of friends... Gee, isn't that one "dude" Michael, the slashdot editor who posted this ICANN story in the first place??
This brings to mind one of the antitrust lawsuits against IBM, brought by DOJ in 1969 to challenge the monopoly IBM had on the mainframe hardware and software market. IBM was bundling its operating software with the hardware, and would not make it available as separate product. This was intended to prevent rival hardware manufacturers (scroll down a bit) from getting into the IBM-compatible mainframe business.
IBM's business model was classic lock-in. If the software were available to all comers, there'd be no more reason to buy big iron from IBM, except of course FUD ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM...")
So, although it looks on the surface like a trademark dispute, my gut sez MSFT is out to keep Lindows off the desktop.
The greater context of this guy's site is a series of experiments aimed at using plasma generators to provide thrust for a new generation of aircraft. With one type of thruster, they've achieved accelerations up to 480 m/s (for the liquid medium, not the aircraft, not yet.)
This was news to me, and I'm finding the concept and science behind plasma thrusters fascinating (this is a link off the microwave page.)
Good joke, but it was Mastercard (who sued Ralf Nader for using their ad format during the last prez election), check the attrition.org Mastercard spoof gallery for more.
Even today H4's legacy remains very much alive. "What H4 was doing is still current today because in GPS, for example, accurate time standards are required for navigation," said Jonathan Betts. "You'd be surprised how clocks rule our modern lives."
Clocks in heavier gravitational fields tick at a slower rate.
Clocks in faster relative motion tick slower.
So:
A clock at the equator ticks slower than a clock at the north pole, because the relative velocity of objects at the equator is higher than those at the poles (the axis of spin) due to earth's rotation, but,
The equator clock will tick faster because it's located farther from the earth's center of mass (due to earth's spin, it bulges a bit in the middle) resulting in slightly lower gravity- and the effects don't always cancel each other out.
So then,
Relativity predicts that atomic clocks onboard GPS satellites will tick faster by about 50 microseconds per day (compared to ground-based clocks), due to the weaker gravitational field in orbit, but,
They also will tick slower by about 7.2 microseconds per day, due to the satellites' orbital velocity.
GPS's designers compensate for this by changing base time rate for the clocks onboard satellite.
Fun facts:
The cesium atomic clocks onboard GPS satellites are accurate to about one nanosecond, and light travels about one foot in one nanosecond. Hence, the best accuracy of GPS is about one foot.
GPS satellites have been used to experimentally verify that light moves at constant speed at all times/locations visited by earth.
And there are other confirmed predictions as well. One other I've heard is that GPS's radio signals experience frequency shift due to earth's gravitational field (photons want top accelerate but can't surpass C, so the acceleration energy increases their frequency) and this had to be compensated for as well.
Banks loan money and that's where they primarily make their money.
If only this were true, we'd live in simpler times. Banks make much more of their profit in two other areas: investing your deposits in securities and derivatives, and interest during slack time, the time between when you've made a deposit, and when the funds actually become available.
So, Paypal has the same opportunity to make profits with your money the way banks do, by investing it. This and their poor customer service says to me they're a bank.
(Amazing that in this age when all banking systems are interconnected that your transfers and deposits can still take up to a week... that's something the banks didn't want written out of the system during the last revision of banking laws.)
First, there's the well-documented high failure rate of launch vehicals -about 5% for the US, 10-20% for rest of the world. This figure doesn't include experiments or tests.
Second, the atmospheric reentry of one lost rocket schlepping clicking-hot material up the well can lead to the atomization and dispersal of that material in the atmosphere, transforming the earth into a mutants' menagerie.
The Space Shuttle has experienced a lower failure rate than the rest of US launchers, about one in one hundred.
There was an uproar a few years ago, about the Cassini probe. That probe, containing over 32 KG of plutonium, was lifted by a launcher which, at the time, had a one in twenty failure rate, and was due for another.
Additionally, there have already been three catastrophic failures of launchers with plutonium-containing payloads, resulting in world-wide atmospheric dispersal of a hundreds of curies worth of plutonium.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the idea nuclear power or fission-powered space travel. But there remain serious development before it becomes considerably safer. This isn't a marketing campaign, you can't convince knowledgeable people with images of spouting teapots, not when life on this planet is at risk. Nor will risk management white-wash keep people from realizing there's a definite, likely risk that people will die from an accident. [I work in risk management.]
So, what's more important, do we need to do this now, now, now? Or can it wait a decade or three, until we have nuke power better figured out? My vote is to wait a bit.
The current personal income tax is progressive because the proportion that one is taxed increases as income increases.
You can't compare percentages with today's "reformed" tax code, you just can't. Loopholes, deductions, write-offs, and the like make it possible (if not simple) for the upper-income earners to often pay much lower tax than the tax tables specify.
The point could be made that the net result of today's tax system has a regressive shape, or at least not inclined upwardly. Most of the wealthy people I know -who tell me anyways- end up paying sometimes less than I do, a middle-income wage earner. Deductions, shelters, loopholes, personal-service corporations, company-"owned" vehicals and properties.
I don't know where to find one, but probably there exists a chart showing what each income strata pays in taxes, percentage and total amount. It's my guess that middle income earners pay the most in both columns, after deductions and all that other stuff.
Perhaps with the national sales tax concept, there could be exemptions for the working poor. Certainly that'd be little different than the many exemptions that favor upper income earners and corporations today, but at least it'd make it easy on the millions of minimum wage earners. And, that'd benefit business, because with fewer of their dollars going to Uncle Sam, there'd be more for them to spend on goods/services, thus increasing business income.
Focusing on fallout just shows you're xenophobic. Concern for fallout is secondary to the principal event, that of burning a city and its inhabitants off the face of the earth.
Concern for fallout is for residents of neighboring states. The people who got erased just aren't concerned anymore.
In college, I wrote a paper on the physical effects of a one megaton thermo device when detonated at ground level. In practice, missile-delivered devices detonate higher, but a "suitcase" bomb would probably be a ground-level detonation.
Immediate effects will be experienced out to a radius as much as 35 miles -at the outer extremes, hair, clothing and skin catch fire. Closer in, you're incinerated. Within a mile or so of ground zero, you're vaporized, or plasma, even.
The 1 MT device leaves a crater with a radius and depth about that of the Chrysler Building. All matter once located in the crater has been super-heated and vaulted up and out. Nuclear winter ensues. Fallout? Lots.
If there was a lesson to be learned from MS "embedding" IE into the O/S, and if Microsoft was open to learning it, it might be this: that their move to own the browser market ultimately cost them more than it gave them. Maybe. Maybe they earned some customer loyalty, developers who coded to the built-in IE.
Ultimately, out on the 'net, I see sites that are mostly cross-platform. Microsoft took IE's programming interface (HTML, DHTML, CSS, CSS/Javascript, DOM, etc.) in a different direction from their competition, Netscape, presumably to entice then ensnare the marketplace.
But, it didn't happen. Most sites don't use DHTML, except maybe for drop-down menus and the occasional popup. More often you're likely to encounter a Flash-based site than one based on DHTML -or one as richly designed as Flash.
The poster's original question was, "Aren't there OSes now that are perfectly competitive that don't have browsers imbedded in them?"
The answer is, unequivocally, yes. "Imbedded" or embedded means that it's inextricably wired into the o/s code, kernel, whatever. Under Unix operating systems, I can definitively say there is NO browser embedded into the operating system. The browser comes as a *separate* application package, which you must install.
IE for Solaris is/was a *separate* application package which you, as a user, would install under your home directory. Absolutely *no* embedding into the O/S.
Embedding or integrating IE into the O/S is Microsoft's transparent (and so far successful) ploy to keep judges and prosecutors from doing anything constructive about their monopolistic practices. It is a separate application from the core operating system. But Microsoft chose to artificially bind it within the O/S so that it would be hard to remove, either by technician or judge.
I know that, yes, from a protocol and topology standpoint, these are "peers" in a technical sense.
But they don't seem to be filesharing p2p peers, as their only mission seems to be to bootstrap clients into the p2p network by giving them IPs of other filesharing clients and supernodes. On the other hand, if a gnutella user knows an IP of a currently running client, s/he can manually key that in and get bootstrapped. Otherwise, and without a central server to offer IPs of other nodes, a *new* node to the network is unconnected.
LimeWire seems to remember peer IPs from previous sessions, as I just deleted the startup server IPs from the config and restarted it, and it has no trouble connecting to gnutella.
Whether Kazaa / Morpheus / Grokster / Fasttrack is true p2p is in debate, and mostly this question is due to Kazaa's shutting Morpheus down. Without any other facts, Fasttrack's status as true p2p isn't disproven, but it could just as easily be a software switch or "lease" renewal.
When my LimeWire client first connects, where does it go to get IPs of other peers? A central server. Does this make Gnutella not p2p? I don't think so.
When my Grokster client first starts up, it also connects to an IP within a relatively small range -a central server (ethereal tells me this much.) When Morpheus clients connect to the same central servers, they are probably being identified as Morpheus clients and being denied the list of peer IPs, and whatever authorization Kazaa's built in to their protocol.
That's one of the best user interfaces i've seen..
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: 2
...on a database of any kind, ever. Bravo, and for the link to extremeprogramming as well, also important.
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
The cable company charges you a fixed price, which goes to pay not just the cable network and infrastructure necessary to deliver NTSC to the back of your tube. Part of that money also gets kicked over to the program producers (in the form of syndication fees, showing rentals, etc.), plus channels and producers sell commercials based on cable viewership.
This model doesn't translate to the internet's current model. To adjust it to fit means your ISP would charge you more, and pay fractional pennies per hit to the websites you view.
Darwinism would soon take over, imo. Sites that are interesting, compelling, or have just sheer gravity due to mass interest would receive dollars in exchange for serving their content to visitors.
This has been proposed many times, but I doubt it's going to happen, because there's enough freebie/donated/volunteer websites filling many peoples' needs. That, or sites that survive otherwise are supported by their product or service.
isn't very honest. My recollection about HCFCs (the replacement for CFCs used in compressed aerosol cans) was it was presented by industry.
Bezene? Environmentalists' choice? Another example of industry's reaction to the environmentalists. Even if, but the correlation between leaded gas use and childhood lead-related disease complex is strong and proven. In countries where leaded gas is still used (most of the rest of the world), urban urchins have higher lead blood serum levels -South American cities are an excellent example.
"irrational attitude" -ad hominem attacks are certainly a sign of rational thinking!
"Emotional action without fact checking or a reality feedback loop almost invariably produces either a random disaster, or the exact opposite of the intended action. Environmentalism is no exception."
As a "reality feedback loop", try living in countries where environmental controls don't exist: again, Latin America, where beaches are so polluted with raw sewerage that you can't go there for risk of typhoid and other feces-transmitted diseases. Try living on the shores of the Rio Pinheiros or Rio Tamanduates in Sao Paulo, Brasil, which are essentially open sewerage canals!
Re:Indymedia and WRH are crap
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Nooo, that's riiight, we all need to just shut up and let our "elected" "leaders" pilot this thing wherever they want to take it. Whether perfectly truthful or not, Indymedia and its cousins are doing what early American press owners were doing: making available information about their "leaders" that would otherwise be difficult to come by.
Of course, use it with your own judgement. Many of the statements made on WhatReallyHappened.com are not easily proven. However, they need to be made, and some of them are not all that implausible.
For example, as a New Yorker, I am still angry that our military had no timely protective response to two, count 'em, TWO! commercial jetliners crashing into my city's tallest buildings. And it opens up a passle of questions that remain unsatisfactorily answered to this moment. Why weren't fighter jets in the air over DC, like immediately?? Why didn't Bush order protective action? After decades of cold-war alert, did the military really just do a deer-in-the-headlights routine? I don't buy it. It's clearly on the record that he allowed himself to continue to be preoccupied -and did not engage his advisors or military liaisons- with his visit to a school, even after being notified of the attacks. That's plain suspicious.
So, if our government won't investigate itself, others must. Balance is necessary in our universe.
Hey, what I'm garnering from this conversation could turn into a kind of public accountability project. Where today "we, the people" have little means for keeping tabs on who our representatives are making deals with, whether they're keeping their promises, how they're spending our money, a p2p spotter network could be a very useful kind of public hacktivism-- politicians will know this is happening, they won't be able to overtly stop it (freedom of the press! http://www.indymedia.org), and we can all better from it.
Not that I expect it'll have *any* real impact on the majority living in status quo land -they *like* keeping their heads in the sand... it's warm and cozy where you don't have to make hard decisions or change yourselfs.
There's already a very elementary version of this network happening -not p2p, but on websites, it's that one above, Indymedia, the Independent Media Center. People today can upload video on whatever, photos or audio on whoever. It'll happen, just give it time. It needs to happen.
Show me proof for this thesis -to my knowledge and experience, it doesn't exist in the organic world. Life has evolved toward concealment.
Look, the evidence is all around you. Have animals become creatures who advertise their presence to their predators? No, the opposite has occurred.
I argue that corporations, entities whose survival is predicated on separating people from their money, are humans' contemporary natural predators -particularly in a world where we have few, if any, macroscopic organic enemies left.
Therefore, do we want or need to advertise our presence to our predators? The same empirical observation about animals applies to us, that we don't need this.
Except that more than twice as many registered Democrats voted for Bush than the total votes received by Nader for the election, Democrats included. So stop blaming Nader and start looking at what's wrong with the so-called "Democratic" Party!
and in the current public mood, perfect for urban combat
How would these helicopters help in such situations? They could be used to douse protesters with pepper spray and tear gas directly from above -no need to send police into a crowd anymore! How to distinguish those pesky so-called "free-speech" protesters from window-smashing anarchists? Just equip the copters with face recognition software! Officers can put their time to better use photographing crowd members' faces to feed back into the system!
Have an rowdy situation unfolding? Simply arm these copters with fletchers full of sleeping potion, and you can rest assured they'll be hauled off to the slam, where they belong!
(In New York City, this past Saturday we saw one of the largest turnouts for a global trade-related protest in... ever, perhaps. The main march had, by NYPD estimates, over 14,000 participants -CNN said "hundreds"... sheesh. I was there, it was thousands. In several situations, the NYPD broke up peaceful gatherings and rallies, clubbed participants, and took them off in ambulances and paddywagons. Check out the coverage on http://www.indymedia.org.)
Slashdot Mirror
this one dude owned a domain with a bunch of friends...
Gee, isn't that one "dude" Michael, the slashdot
editor who posted this ICANN story in the first
place??
Went to see if Winux.* was registered, but they're taken, natch. Interesting thing is, nnone of those sites was registered.
While this suit appears to be just about the Windows trademark, it smells like MSFT is defending the Windows-compatible O/S turf. Other than OS/2, there's yet to be a fully binary-compatible Windows knock-off. That it took a company with IBM's resources to do it is significant. (Although I did just find this: "REAL/32 is a sophisticated, 32-bit, real-time, multi-tasking, multi-user DOS/Windows compatible operating system.")
This brings to mind one of the antitrust lawsuits against IBM, brought by DOJ in 1969 to challenge the monopoly IBM had on the mainframe hardware and software market. IBM was bundling its operating software with the hardware, and would not make it available as separate product. This was intended to prevent rival hardware manufacturers (scroll down a bit) from getting into the IBM-compatible mainframe business.
IBM's business model was classic lock-in. If the software were available to all comers, there'd be no more reason to buy big iron from IBM, except of course FUD ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM...")
So, although it looks on the surface like a trademark dispute, my gut sez MSFT is out to keep Lindows off the desktop.
The greater context of this guy's site is a series of experiments aimed at using plasma generators to provide thrust for a new generation of aircraft. With one type of thruster, they've achieved accelerations up to 480 m/s (for the liquid medium, not the aircraft, not yet.)
This was news to me, and I'm finding the concept and science behind plasma thrusters fascinating (this is a link off the microwave page.)
Plus, there's a far more interesting experiment, where he shows you how to build your own plasma panel.
Good joke, but it was Mastercard (who sued Ralf Nader for using their ad format during the last prez election), check the attrition.org Mastercard spoof gallery for more.
Clocks in heavier gravitational fields tick at a slower rate.
Clocks in faster relative motion tick slower.
So:
A clock at the equator ticks slower than a clock at the north pole, because the relative velocity of objects at the equator is higher than those at the poles (the axis of spin) due to earth's rotation, but,
The equator clock will tick faster because it's located farther from the earth's center of mass (due to earth's spin, it bulges a bit in the middle) resulting in slightly lower gravity- and the effects don't always cancel each other out.
So then,
Relativity predicts that atomic clocks onboard GPS satellites will tick faster by about 50 microseconds per day (compared to ground-based clocks), due to the weaker gravitational field in orbit, but,
They also will tick slower by about 7.2 microseconds per day, due to the satellites' orbital velocity.
GPS's designers compensate for this by changing base time rate for the clocks onboard satellite.
Fun facts:
The cesium atomic clocks onboard GPS satellites are accurate to about one nanosecond, and light travels about one foot in one nanosecond. Hence, the best accuracy of GPS is about one foot.
GPS satellites have been used to experimentally verify that light moves at constant speed at all times/locations visited by earth.
And there are other confirmed predictions as well. One other I've heard is that GPS's radio signals experience frequency shift due to earth's gravitational field (photons want top accelerate but can't surpass C, so the acceleration energy increases their frequency) and this had to be compensated for as well.
Time be time.
So, Paypal has the same opportunity to make profits with your money the way banks do, by investing it. This and their poor customer service says to me they're a bank.
(Amazing that in this age when all banking systems are interconnected that your transfers and deposits can still take up to a week... that's something the banks didn't want written out of the system during the last revision of banking laws.)
First, there's the well-documented high failure rate of launch vehicals -about 5% for the US, 10-20% for rest of the world. This figure doesn't include experiments or tests.
Second, the atmospheric reentry of one lost rocket schlepping clicking-hot material up the well can lead to the atomization and dispersal of that material in the atmosphere, transforming the earth into a mutants' menagerie.
The Space Shuttle has experienced a lower failure rate than the rest of US launchers, about one in one hundred.
There was an uproar a few years ago, about the Cassini probe. That probe, containing over 32 KG of plutonium, was lifted by a launcher which, at the time, had a one in twenty failure rate, and was due for another.
Additionally, there have already been three catastrophic failures of launchers with plutonium-containing payloads, resulting in world-wide atmospheric dispersal of a hundreds of curies worth of plutonium.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the idea nuclear power or fission-powered space travel. But there remain serious development before it becomes considerably safer. This isn't a marketing campaign, you can't convince knowledgeable people with images of spouting teapots, not when life on this planet is at risk. Nor will risk management white-wash keep people from realizing there's a definite, likely risk that people will die from an accident. [I work in risk management.]
So, what's more important, do we need to do this now, now, now? Or can it wait a decade or three, until we have nuke power better figured out? My vote is to wait a bit.
The point could be made that the net result of today's tax system has a regressive shape, or at least not inclined upwardly. Most of the wealthy people I know -who tell me anyways- end up paying sometimes less than I do, a middle-income wage earner. Deductions, shelters, loopholes, personal-service corporations, company-"owned" vehicals and properties.
I don't know where to find one, but probably there exists a chart showing what each income strata pays in taxes, percentage and total amount. It's my guess that middle income earners pay the most in both columns, after deductions and all that other stuff.
Perhaps with the national sales tax concept, there could be exemptions for the working poor. Certainly that'd be little different than the many exemptions that favor upper income earners and corporations today, but at least it'd make it easy on the millions of minimum wage earners. And, that'd benefit business, because with fewer of their dollars going to Uncle Sam, there'd be more for them to spend on goods/services, thus increasing business income.
Focusing on fallout just shows you're xenophobic. Concern for fallout is secondary to the principal event, that of burning a city and its inhabitants off the face of the earth.
Concern for fallout is for residents of neighboring states. The people who got erased just aren't concerned anymore.
In college, I wrote a paper on the physical effects of a one megaton thermo device when detonated at ground level. In practice, missile-delivered devices detonate higher, but a "suitcase" bomb would probably be a ground-level detonation.
Immediate effects will be experienced out to a radius as much as 35 miles -at the outer extremes, hair, clothing and skin catch fire. Closer in, you're incinerated. Within a mile or so of ground zero, you're vaporized, or plasma, even.
The 1 MT device leaves a crater with a radius and depth about that of the Chrysler Building. All matter once located in the crater has been super-heated and vaulted up and out. Nuclear winter ensues. Fallout? Lots.
If there was a lesson to be learned from MS "embedding" IE into the O/S, and if Microsoft was open to learning it, it might be this: that their move to own the browser market ultimately cost them more than it gave them. Maybe. Maybe they earned some customer loyalty, developers who coded to the built-in IE.
Ultimately, out on the 'net, I see sites that are mostly cross-platform. Microsoft took IE's programming interface (HTML, DHTML, CSS, CSS/Javascript, DOM, etc.) in a different direction from their competition, Netscape, presumably to entice then ensnare the marketplace.
But, it didn't happen. Most sites don't use DHTML, except maybe for drop-down menus and the occasional popup. More often you're likely to encounter a Flash-based site than one based on DHTML -or one as richly designed as Flash.
The poster's original question was, "Aren't there OSes now that are perfectly competitive that don't have browsers imbedded in them?"
The answer is, unequivocally, yes. "Imbedded" or embedded means that it's inextricably wired into the o/s code, kernel, whatever. Under Unix operating systems, I can definitively say there is NO browser embedded into the operating system. The browser comes as a *separate* application package, which you must install.
IE for Solaris is/was a *separate* application package which you, as a user, would install under your home directory. Absolutely *no* embedding into the O/S.
Embedding or integrating IE into the O/S is Microsoft's transparent (and so far successful) ploy to keep judges and prosecutors from doing anything constructive about their monopolistic practices. It is a separate application from the core operating system. But Microsoft chose to artificially bind it within the O/S so that it would be hard to remove, either by technician or judge.
I know that, yes, from a protocol and topology standpoint, these are "peers" in a technical sense.
But they don't seem to be filesharing p2p peers, as their only mission seems to be to bootstrap clients into the p2p network by giving them IPs of other filesharing clients and supernodes. On the other hand, if a gnutella user knows an IP of a currently running client, s/he can manually key that in and get bootstrapped. Otherwise, and without a central server to offer IPs of other nodes, a *new* node to the network is unconnected.
LimeWire seems to remember peer IPs from previous sessions, as I just deleted the startup server IPs from the config and restarted it, and it has no trouble connecting to gnutella.
Whether Kazaa / Morpheus / Grokster / Fasttrack is true p2p is in debate, and mostly this question is due to Kazaa's shutting Morpheus down. Without any other facts, Fasttrack's status as true p2p isn't disproven, but it could just as easily be a software switch or "lease" renewal.
When my LimeWire client first connects, where does it go to get IPs of other peers? A central server. Does this make Gnutella not p2p? I don't think so.
When my Grokster client first starts up, it also connects to an IP within a relatively small range -a central server (ethereal tells me this much.) When Morpheus clients connect to the same central servers, they are probably being identified as Morpheus clients and being denied the list of peer IPs, and whatever authorization Kazaa's built in to their protocol.
...on a database of any kind, ever. Bravo, and for the link to extremeprogramming as well, also important.
I'd throw into the mix the very important software component design book, "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" [ISBN 0-201-63361-2]
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
The cable company charges you a fixed price, which goes to pay not just the cable network and infrastructure necessary to deliver NTSC to the back of your tube. Part of that money also gets kicked over to the program producers (in the form of syndication fees, showing rentals, etc.), plus channels and producers sell commercials based on cable viewership.
This model doesn't translate to the internet's current model. To adjust it to fit means your ISP would charge you more, and pay fractional pennies per hit to the websites you view.
Darwinism would soon take over, imo. Sites that are interesting, compelling, or have just sheer gravity due to mass interest would receive dollars in exchange for serving their content to visitors.
This has been proposed many times, but I doubt it's going to happen, because there's enough freebie/donated/volunteer websites filling many peoples' needs. That, or sites that survive otherwise are supported by their
product or service.
to arrive... they're the best thing for preventing those nasty athlon core meltdowns.
isn't very honest. My recollection about HCFCs (the replacement for CFCs used in compressed aerosol cans) was it was presented by industry.
Bezene? Environmentalists' choice? Another example of industry's reaction to the environmentalists. Even if, but the correlation between leaded gas use and childhood lead-related disease complex is strong and proven. In countries where leaded gas is still used (most of the rest of the world), urban urchins have higher lead blood serum levels -South American cities are an excellent example.
"irrational attitude" -ad hominem attacks are certainly a sign of rational thinking!
"Emotional action without fact checking or a reality feedback loop almost invariably produces either a random disaster, or the exact opposite of the intended action. Environmentalism is no exception."
As a "reality feedback loop", try living in countries where environmental controls don't exist: again, Latin America, where beaches are so polluted with raw sewerage that you can't go there for risk of typhoid and other feces-transmitted diseases. Try living on the shores of the Rio Pinheiros or Rio Tamanduates in Sao Paulo, Brasil, which are essentially open sewerage canals!
Nooo, that's riiight, we all need to just shut up and let our "elected" "leaders" pilot this thing wherever they want to take it. Whether perfectly truthful or not, Indymedia and its cousins are doing what early American press owners were doing: making available information about their "leaders" that would otherwise be difficult to come by.
Of course, use it with your own judgement. Many of the statements made on WhatReallyHappened.com are not easily proven. However, they need to be made, and some of them are not all that implausible.
For example, as a New Yorker, I am still angry that our military had no timely protective response to two, count 'em, TWO! commercial jetliners crashing into my city's tallest buildings. And it opens up a passle of questions that remain unsatisfactorily answered to this moment. Why weren't fighter jets in the air over DC, like immediately?? Why didn't Bush order protective action? After decades of cold-war alert, did the military really just do a deer-in-the-headlights routine? I don't buy it. It's clearly on the record that he allowed himself to continue to be preoccupied -and did not engage his advisors or military liaisons- with his visit to a school, even after being notified of the attacks. That's plain suspicious.
So, if our government won't investigate itself, others must. Balance is necessary in our universe.
had one too many bowls of Sugar-Frosted Chocolate Bombs(tm) this morning...
Adbusters.comc om
Indymedia.org
WhatReallyHappened.
All interesting media, culture, and commerce critique websites.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Jon Katz would've posted Disinfo, but dog bless him anyway.
Hey, what I'm garnering from this conversation could turn into a kind of public accountability project. Where today "we, the people" have little means for keeping tabs on who our representatives are making deals with, whether they're keeping their promises, how they're spending our money, a p2p spotter network could be a very useful kind of public hacktivism-- politicians will know this is happening, they won't be able to overtly stop it (freedom of the press! http://www.indymedia.org), and we can all better from it.
Not that I expect it'll have *any* real impact on the majority living in status quo land -they *like* keeping their heads in the sand... it's warm and cozy where you don't have to make hard decisions or change yourselfs.
There's already a very elementary version of this network happening -not p2p, but on websites, it's that one above, Indymedia, the Independent Media Center. People today can upload video on whatever, photos or audio on whoever. It'll happen, just give it time. It needs to happen.
Also check out http://www.witness.org.
"Information wants to be free"
Show me proof for this thesis -to my knowledge and experience, it doesn't exist in the organic world. Life has evolved toward concealment. Look, the evidence is all around you. Have animals become creatures who advertise their presence to their predators? No, the opposite has occurred.
I argue that corporations, entities whose survival is predicated on separating people from their money, are humans' contemporary natural predators -particularly in a world where we have few, if any, macroscopic organic enemies left.
Therefore, do we want or need to advertise our presence to our predators? The same empirical observation about animals applies to us, that we don't need this.
Except that more than twice as many registered Democrats voted for Bush than the total votes received by Nader for the election, Democrats included. So stop blaming Nader and start looking at what's wrong with the so-called "Democratic" Party!
and in the current public mood, perfect for urban combat
... ever, perhaps. The main march had, by NYPD estimates, over 14,000 participants -CNN said "hundreds"... sheesh. I was there, it was thousands. In several situations, the NYPD broke up peaceful gatherings and rallies, clubbed participants, and took them off in ambulances and paddywagons. Check out the coverage on http://www.indymedia.org.)
How would these helicopters help in such situations? They could be used to douse protesters with pepper spray and tear gas directly from above -no need to send police into a crowd anymore! How to distinguish those pesky so-called "free-speech" protesters from window-smashing anarchists? Just equip the copters with face recognition software! Officers can put their time to better use photographing crowd members' faces to feed back into the system!
Have an rowdy situation unfolding? Simply arm these copters with fletchers full of sleeping potion, and you can rest assured they'll be hauled off to the slam, where they belong!
(In New York City, this past Saturday we saw one of the largest turnouts for a global trade-related protest in