> Socialists assume that people are (or can be) motivated by belief in an ideal...
Nonsense. Socialists are motivated by enlightened self-interest. Think about it, was Karl Marx an idealist or a materialist? Unfortunately this silly idea that socialism is a particularly airy form of idealism, is widely shared by people who know nothing about the theory or history of socialism.
Of course the reason for that is that this fraudulent idea is deliberately promoted and disseminated by anti-socialists, in order to make voters think socialism is inherently impractical, which of course it is not. Somewhere a while back I read a quote by, of all people, Milton Friedman - who, as you know, is in no way pro-socialist. He stated that the single most influential program in twentieth century American politics was that of the Socialist Party in 1928; every one of the items on that platform - which includes such "radical" notions as universal public schools, utility regulation, old-age pensions, etc. - has since been made part of U.S. law. Well, has the U.S.A. been economically successful in this century? and particularly since when those 1928 Socialist Party proposals were incorporated in U.S. law? If you say "yes", then you agree that socialism DOES work in practice.
> But the second piece of the puzzle is hardware and/or software > to take the data from the physical media and display video and play > audio for the movie. That's the piece that you lack.
So if I write the software, then I don't "lack" it, moron. I know that's hard for you to comprehend. You think software falls out of the sky, like manna from heaven. Well, you just continue to believe that, Windows user.
God damn right, and what will drive the last nail in is if "Shrub" Bush take the White House in November. Not that the Democrats are so much better, look at how eager Clinton's Reno's Department of "Justice" has been to trample all over citizens's freedoms, but at least no Dem ever put anybody close to as awful as Rehnquist or Scalia on the Supreme Court, not in my lifetime, anyway. If Shrub wins, expect him to nominate at least another one or two Rehnquist/Scalia clones to the Supreme Court, and then the game's up. The Scalia gang clearly don't believe that any constitutional rights at all exist for anyone besides corporations and cops. Shrub's new revanchist Supreme Court will rule those evanescent "constitutional rights" of yours right out of existence; we'll graduate to a full-fledged police state.
Well, no it's not, you know that and I know that, but the wide public doesn't know Jack and the press are in full propaganda/panic mode over hackers and that evil Internet (as they see themselves being scooped out of business by the likes of a Matt Drudge, that is, a nobody, a zero like you or me, with a web page). Besides, when has unwillingness to promote a lie ever even once restrained a cop on a mission of righteousness or a politician trying to panic a herd of voters into the chute?
An etoy "share" is an artwork, not a financial instrument. Inasmuch as etoy are artists with a certain degree of fame, I suppose an etoy "share" is worth something in terms of money, like a sculpture or a painting, but it does not have the same kind of value as an share of stock, that is, a fractional part of the value of the issuing organization.
> Simple question: what if we made a level 15% flat tax on everyone. > EVERYONE will pay less money, but the higher income people will > drop from the mid 30% range, while lower income families will drop from > mid 20% range. Is that unfair to lower income families? Of course not! > They pay less because they make less, ok?
Don't be so disingenuous.
Instead of making up fictional examples of tax schemes which exist nowhere except in your imagination, suppose we prepare for the forthcoming election by focusing on what the candidates actually propose, OK? If we're going to discuss U.S. poltics, no one is interested in your totally hypothetical "what if we made a flat tax..." business, because NONE of the candidates are talking about a true "flat tax," one which would tax a rich parasite's effortless investment income at an equal rate with the hard-earned wages of a full-time worker.
Like all the slogans of the Republicans, "flat tax" is a lie. Forbes's tax plan is NOT a true "flat tax." It is a free ride for people who's income derives from investments, placing ALL the burdens of Federal taxation of wage-earners. The point I was trying to make, that you elided so lightly over, is that Forbes's so-called "flat tax" plan is NOT flat. It cuts the taxes on his effort-free multi-million dollar income to ZERO, while continuing to levy taxes on wage-earners.
> Live your life and don't worry about what Steve Forbes pays in taxes.
So in other words we working-class types should mind our gardens, keep our noses to the grindstone, keep our mouths shut, and let our social betters make each and all of the economic decisions. Evidently you don't understand how democracy is supposed to work. The basis for democracy is self-interest, after all. You, ashleyb@microsoft.com, with your Microsoft stock options, are free to vote in your best interests, but you insist that I should "live my life" and passively step back from the democratic process.
"Hey, you dumb workies, don't even bother to think about politics. Just keep your eyes glued to the Jenny Jones show. Meanwhile we rich folks will continue to sequester more and more of the wealth in the nation, as is our God-given right."
To Hell with that.
> And I am sure that you have the EXACT same beliefs as your father.
At least I don't drive down to the Veteran's Hospital cemetery and piss on my father's grave. That's a character issue, you know.
They're comparing getting arrested and being thrown in jail to getting arrested and being thrown in jail. The difference is, even after Galileo's arrest and conviction, he was still free to do scientific research in his house, and the police surveillance couldn't have been too close or onerous, becauise Galileo did manage to smuggle out his manuscripts to Holland. By contrast the chances are excellent that Mr. Johansen, if convicted, will be deprived of access to his computer for several years.
If this issue is important to you, and you want to do more than just complain, then the first thing you want to do is give the EFF some money NOW. The EFF hires lawyers, you know, and what Mr. Johansen needs right now more than anything else is a lawyer. You can join the EFF within the next three minutes if you go to this page.
Don't wait! It might already be too late to salvage your freedom.
Before you go blathering like that, go look at either Dubya's proposal for a tax cut or even worse, little Stevie Forbes's proposal. Dubya's plan gives 60 percent of the tax cut to the top ten percent of incomes, as though that income category needs further aggrandisement. Forbes's proposal goes further to abolish capital gains taxes altogether.
Forbes inherited four hundred million dollars from his dad. (The senior Forbes, incidentally, was fond of hanging out in gay biker bars. By way of gratitude for this inheritance, Forbes Jr. publicly abuses gays and favors legislation to deprive them of their civil rights.) Forbes Jr.'s inheritance means that by simply investing his fortune in something as mindless as Dow Jones index funds, he has a risk-and-work-free income of at least forty million dollars a year - with the stock bubble of the last few years, make that a hundred million a year. Well, according to Forbes's so-called "flat tax" proposal, the median wage earner will pay several thousand dollars in Federal taxes on the ~$45K income for which he works two thousand hours a year. And what shall little Stevie pay on his absolutely effortless $100M/year? Zero.
This is what Republicans call "fair tax reform," and since you're too lazy to look at the details closely, you obviously think it's a swell idea. Multimillionaires and billionaires, who do examine those details in detail, think these "reforms" are just wonderful, like Christmas in April, of course.
And to think I used to believe that/.ers habitually practiced arithmetic.
If you pulled this kind of legislative crap on college students in, say, Boston, it would be unconstitutional on the grounds of "cruel and unusal punishment." But not in Arizona.
I used to live in Tucson so I know. At night in Arizona, the weather is almost always delightfully comfortable, there aren't swarms of bugs that come out at sunset to drive you nuts like here in Florida, and just a few miles out of town there is all the seclusion you could ever want, so the college "kids" can just grab a blanket and a bottle of wine, drive out into the desert, and fuck on a dune under the stars. I can tell you for damn sure that that's lots better than making it in some cramped dorm room.
Well, I'd give "credit," if that's really the right word, to Ridley Scott (or whoever it was that wrote the screenplay) for "Blade Runner." Philip Dick never wrote any story entitled "Blade Runner." He did write the novel called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" upon which, allegedly, the "Blade Runner" script was based, but the two are so different that one can scarcely see even a bit of resemblance, much less a direct lineage.
In fact, right before the movie came out the producers offered Dick $250,000 to suppress the original and vastly superior "Androids" and in its place to write a novelization of their script. Dick needed the money, but on his agent's good advice he turned them down.
There's a very interesting overview of Dick's life and works in this article at Hermenaut.
> We, the people, are the "corporations". We build them. People run > them. People who, at the end of the day, are no worse than we are.
This is laughable. You complain about Katz's unjustified generalizations and then you come forth with a howler like this. Yeah, sure, you and I are the same as Bill Gates and Steve Case. Except of course that they are multibillionaires and we aren't, and between them they control corporations with a total value of around a trillion dollars and we don't, and in the real world that does amount to something of a difference.
You go on to compare the massive social destruction routinely wrought worldwide by giant corporations equally with your sense of offense at seeing Katz post an article on slashdot with the equivalent of a higher moderation score than yours. Right, and first-degree murder is about the same thing as jaywalking too. Have you no sense of proportion at all?
> Show me *WHY* it is inevitably the case that any corporation must > be nothing but soul-sucking evil. Show me *WHY* I should believe > that the mere existance of a megacorp is a violation of all I hold dear.
Well, I would suggest that you start by reading Capital by Marx and Engels, but I don't suppose you will ever do so. It is an awful lot of pages, and it is an infamously heretical book, and you wouldn't want to be caught out violating the heresy laws now, would you? Anyway, despite your Show me *WHY*s, my guess is you don't really want to be shown anything which conflicts with your fact-free, a priori Randite preconceptions.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:GNU Free Documentation License
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GPL for Books?
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· Score: 1
That's funny, the crack about how word processor generated HTML is so ugly and crabby that, for purposes of this license, it is to be considered as opaque as a proprietary word processor data format. I presume RMS is referring to that weirdass gibberish, spiced with unportable "smart quotes" and the like, which Microsoft Word extrudes when you tell it to export to HTML. I guess it follows that one can't license the entries in the Obfuscated C contest under GPL, because even if you do get the source you have to go through such contortions to figure out how it works.
7-1/4?! Wow, imagine measuring it to fractional accuracy!
Mine used to be pretty big - well adequate anyway - but over a period of years the demoralizing effect of running exclusively Microsoft operating systems all day long shrunk and withered it to the point...let's not go into the dismal, humiliating details.
But then, at the last moment when I was wallowing in impotent despair and I had given up hope, I stumbled upon this book with a Slackware CD bound inside the back cover. Though I was listless and apathetic, I installed it anyway, and instantly I beheld the mighty majestic bash command-prompt, my luck changed. After just a few rounds of Doom I could feel my BFG9000 getting a full load of shells, so to speak.
By gee, I'm still quite the Linux new-B, but at least as far as my unit goes, I've made a full recovery, and the future looks even brighter than ever! Thank you, thank you, and thank you again, RMS and Linus and the whole penguin-lovin' GNU crew, thanks to you-all ah'm a reel man again!
I do the same thing on my company's NT boxes; I make several 2GB FAT16 drives. Users whine because there are so many drive letters but tough. Not only can you copy files off in an emergency, but if your FAT gets booglarized you can sometimes fix it in place with a little judicious use of a disk editor. (I've had to do this a few times, earning immense respect for my amazing voodoo system-fixing abilities at the office.) I suppose if NTFS were documented then you could do something similar with a damaged NTFS partition, but as we all know the NTFS format is a deep dark secret that you, the lowly mudcrawling customer, are not allowed to know. Also if you're crazy enough to have Win9x as an boot-up alternative, you can access those same FAT16 partitions.
But if you need to get files off an NTFS partition, go look on a search engine and check out a product called NTFSDOS. It was made by a company called (if I remember correctly) Winternals and it used to be free a couple years ago. NTFSDOS is an MS-DOS driver that mounts all the NTFS partitions it can find as read-only. It's small enough that you can fit it on a bootable floppy. It doesn't support NT user permissions, all files are visible and copyable, so it's the mother of all security holes, but if an unauthorized user can get physical access to your server you've got worse security problems than NTFSDOS anyway (think "a disgruntled unauthorized user carrying a wood axe"). At any rate, when your NT system goes belly-up and you want to copy off the files trapped in an NTFS partition, NTFSDOS can save the day for you.
Winternals also had some utilities with which you could fix an NT system that would blue-screen on startup. Those weren't free but they weren't unreasonably priced either. Another cheap repair I've done on NT systems which blue-screened before they'd boot is to look at the list of drivers on the blue screen, then boot up in DOS and rename all the drivers that don't seem absolutely necessary. You get a load of error messages because NT can no longer find drivers it is trying to load, but sometimes you can get the system to boot and then maybe you can undo whatever awful thing you did (typically installing a new program) that screwed up your NT box so bad.
>...The truth of this is evident with Judas Iscariot who pretended > to love Christ, but in the end Christ's statement, "Did I Myself not > choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?", (John 6:70), > proved correct when Judas betrayed Christ.
Evidently the original author of this lovely nonsense has never read Jorge Luis Borges's Three Versions of Judas (in the collection Ficciones).
>...One does not hypocritically say they love satan, like many > hypocritically say they love God.
Oh yeah? What about that opportunist Marilyn Manson?
By the way, this post of yours (which you admit down the thread is copied from some loony teenage zealot who - ho ho hee hee ha ha - actually meant it seriously) is screamingly funny. I laughed and laughed. I like to laugh, so thank you for posting, even though the only way this could get any further off-topic would be to post it in Etruscan.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:This is sad, but I think we all saw it coming
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RIAA Sues MP3.com
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· Score: 1
> Most adults I know, and most serious music collectors I know, realize > MP3 for what it is - piracy, and avoid it like the plague, not because > they do not understand how to use it, but because they realize it is illegal.
I am a middle-aged adult, and I am not a criminal. I like mp3 because it allows me to burn a whole lot of songs, over a hundred tracks, onto a single CD. Wouldn't you rather carry around one CD than ten or fifteen? The relatively low quality of the playback system's speakers makes the sound quality difference with mp3s insignificant. And if I leave one of my mp3 CDs in a hot car and it gets ruined, then I'm only out a couple of bucks. At work, I can copy a bunch of tracks onto the hard drive of my PC without wasting gigabytes of disc space. And all this is perfectly legal. I have never stolen one single track of music. Every one of my mp3s I've made came from a CD I bought and own.
I just don't see how you can make any bootleg-proof scheme for on-line distribution that allows me to carry around the end product like I can now with ordinary CDs. Either you pay for a track or an album and then you download a file, in which case the file can simply be copied and bootlegged, or you have to go to the seller's server every time you want to play a track. That second alternative is way lousier than simply buying the physical CD, since once you have possession of the CD you can carry it anywhere you like, play it in your car, etc.; there's even a well-established precedent that buyers of CDs can make copies of the tracks for personal use, which is my legal justification for ripping all those mp3s off my own CD collection.
I don't see how you can stop copying from any kind of music media. In the end the unencrypted output must be turned to analog voltage to drive a speaker. Capture that output into a sound card and presto you have a copy of the track you want. The sound quality is marginally diminished and noise is introduced, but if you have a reasonably good CD deck, preamp and sound card it's no worse, I think, than you get when you play an original CD through, say, a boom-box, or anything less than the best of sound systems and speakers. I suspect that the analog devices at the beginning and end of the chain, microphones and speakers, do more damage to the perfection of sound reproduction than all other links in the entire recording-to-playback process.
At any rate it is my conviction, and it has been for decades, that a certain amount of illicit copying and sharing of music seves as a major stimulus to the music industry. The argument that "if listeners can get it for free, they won't buy it" is bogus. After all, when you listen to music on the radio, isn't that free? And yet all music companies and all recording artists are always very eager to get their music played on the radio, not just because of the radio royalties, but also because that's how their customers find out about it. The same goes for this mp3 trading that is so popular these days. People trading mp3s hear musicians they otherwise would never have heard of, and if they like what they hear, they go to the store to buy more CDs by those musicians.
> If you install AOL, you deserve the consequences.
Yeah, right, but if some schmuck in my office installs AOL's God-awful access software on the PC in his office and it trashes his networking setup, his consequence is a nice relaxing afternoon doing nothing, while at the same time my consequence is I probably have to rebuild his PC from the ground up, starting with fdisk. Not that I have anything better to do with my time.
God yes I remember that awful rubbish, their "AOL adapter." It would even break TCP/IP on your LAN! Like if you can "surf" the "net" using AOL, why would you ever need access to the files on your company's file server, right?
At the time I assumed that anyone who could make a GUI as thoroughly ugly and nasty as the so-called "AOL browser" was simply incompetent. But since then they've bought Netscape, which is full of competent programmers. And here it's happening again! So now we can only assume they are doing this on purpose.
Well, we all knew all alnog that AOL sucks. But with their assimilation of Time/Warner, now we have two gigantic evil empires nakedly striving to ruin the Internet. Ecch.
You and those lying lawyers from the MPAA can repeat, over and over and over again until your heads fall off, that DeCSS was designed for the sole, specific purpose of bootlegging DVDs, but that won't change the fact that it was designed to make a viewer for legally-purchased commercially-manufacturd DVDs that would work on Linux. If I were the judge and a lawyer tried with a straight face to sell me the load of FUDmatic hogwash you're vending out here, I'd throw the bastard in jail for contempt of court.
So whatever any statute says is all right by you, hey? I've got dead relatives in Europe who "did the crime" and "did the time"; the "crime" was being a Jew and the "time" was spent in a concentration camp. You can just guess where I invite you to stick your stupid little rhyme.
Please note that I refrained from using profanity in this post, which was a strain and more than you deserve.
...unless of course the Gestapo won't let him read material printed on paper either. I wouldn't put it past them either. Mitnick's sentence was longer than many people have served for deliberately killing a human being, his trial was pure prosecutorial showboating and vindictiveness, and all the people who are posting "he got what he deserved because he violated the almighty statutes" ought to be aware of that fact and shut up for shame.
Anyway, it seems to me that even if his terms of probation prohibit him from using a real computer he should still be allowed to use a WebTV.
When I first came to Florida in 1962 I was amazed to see that Negroes had their own clearly labeled separate water fountains in public places, and they were subject to arrest if they used the white people's drinking fountain. Their "rights," or more properly their lack of rights, were not apportioned on an individual-by-individual basis, but by the group in which the were born.
<TROLL>You must be a member of a privileged group, probably a white male, or else I certainly wouldn't have to spell this out for you.</TROLL>
My twelve year old daughter knows more about HTML, Photoshop and Painter than I do. tilleyrw, please don't be an "ageist." (Did I just commit a neologism?)
I mean, Katz didn't say one damned word about your theological razzmatazz or any of you wonderful, wacky folks who subscribe to it, not one single solitary word, and yet here you are get up on tiptoe yowling about it.
I can understand complaining when somebody kicks you in the ass. But you're complaining because Katz somehow neglected to kiss your ass.
There are millions, no billions of us, who not only do not keep you and your fellow theophiles and your deep'n'meaningful personal relationships with the Nazarene at the very forefront of their consciousnesses, but who just don't care one bit about those relationships, or any of you. Not at all. Get used to it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
ps: by the way, and I quote, "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward."
Slashdot Mirror
> Socialists assume that people are (or can be) motivated by belief in an ideal...
Nonsense. Socialists are motivated by enlightened self-interest. Think about it, was Karl Marx an idealist or a materialist? Unfortunately this silly idea that socialism is a particularly airy form of idealism, is widely shared by people who know nothing about the theory or history of socialism.
Of course the reason for that is that this fraudulent idea is deliberately promoted and disseminated by anti-socialists, in order to make voters think socialism is inherently impractical, which of course it is not. Somewhere a while back I read a quote by, of all people, Milton Friedman - who, as you know, is in no way pro-socialist. He stated that the single most influential program in twentieth century American politics was that of the Socialist Party in 1928; every one of the items on that platform - which includes such "radical" notions as universal public schools, utility regulation, old-age pensions, etc. - has since been made part of U.S. law. Well, has the U.S.A. been economically successful in this century? and particularly since when those 1928 Socialist Party proposals were incorporated in U.S. law? If you say "yes", then you agree that socialism DOES work in practice.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> But the second piece of the puzzle is hardware and/or software
> to take the data from the physical media and display video and play
> audio for the movie. That's the piece that you lack.
So if I write the software, then I don't "lack" it, moron. I know that's hard for you to comprehend. You think software falls out of the sky, like manna from heaven. Well, you just continue to believe that, Windows user.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
God damn right, and what will drive the last nail in is if "Shrub" Bush take the White House in November. Not that the Democrats are so much better, look at how eager Clinton's Reno's Department of "Justice" has been to trample all over citizens's freedoms, but at least no Dem ever put anybody close to as awful as Rehnquist or Scalia on the Supreme Court, not in my lifetime, anyway. If Shrub wins, expect him to nominate at least another one or two Rehnquist/Scalia clones to the Supreme Court, and then the game's up. The Scalia gang clearly don't believe that any constitutional rights at all exist for anyone besides corporations and cops. Shrub's new revanchist Supreme Court will rule those evanescent "constitutional rights" of yours right out of existence; we'll graduate to a full-fledged police state.
Take the current full-bore legal assault upon open-source software to the next step. I wouldn't put it past such a Supreme Court to rule that possession of gcc could be considered a felony. After all, isn't that the master software tool that those villainous, felonious "hackers" all use to break into high-security Internet messaging systems and manufacture malicious, insidious, destructive computer viruses?
Well, no it's not, you know that and I know that, but the wide public doesn't know Jack and the press are in full propaganda/panic mode over hackers and that evil Internet (as they see themselves being scooped out of business by the likes of a Matt Drudge, that is, a nobody, a zero like you or me, with a web page). Besides, when has unwillingness to promote a lie ever even once restrained a cop on a mission of righteousness or a politician trying to panic a herd of voters into the chute?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
An etoy "share" is an artwork, not a financial instrument. Inasmuch as etoy are artists with a certain degree of fame, I suppose an etoy "share" is worth something in terms of money, like a sculpture or a painting, but it does not have the same kind of value as an share of stock, that is, a fractional part of the value of the issuing organization.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Simple question: what if we made a level 15% flat tax on everyone.
> EVERYONE will pay less money, but the higher income people will
> drop from the mid 30% range, while lower income families will drop from
> mid 20% range. Is that unfair to lower income families? Of course not!
> They pay less because they make less, ok?
Don't be so disingenuous.
Instead of making up fictional examples of tax schemes which exist nowhere except in your imagination, suppose we prepare for the forthcoming election by focusing on what the candidates actually propose, OK? If we're going to discuss U.S. poltics, no one is interested in your totally hypothetical "what if we made a flat tax..." business, because NONE of the candidates are talking about a true "flat tax," one which would tax a rich parasite's effortless investment income at an equal rate with the hard-earned wages of a full-time worker.
Like all the slogans of the Republicans, "flat tax" is a lie. Forbes's tax plan is NOT a true "flat tax." It is a free ride for people who's income derives from investments, placing ALL the burdens of Federal taxation of wage-earners. The point I was trying to make, that you elided so lightly over, is that Forbes's so-called "flat tax" plan is NOT flat. It cuts the taxes on his effort-free multi-million dollar income to ZERO, while continuing to levy taxes on wage-earners.
> Live your life and don't worry about what Steve Forbes pays in taxes.
So in other words we working-class types should mind our gardens, keep our noses to the grindstone, keep our mouths shut, and let our social betters make each and all of the economic decisions. Evidently you don't understand how democracy is supposed to work. The basis for democracy is self-interest, after all. You, ashleyb@microsoft.com, with your Microsoft stock options, are free to vote in your best interests, but you insist that I should "live my life" and passively step back from the democratic process.
"Hey, you dumb workies, don't even bother to think about politics. Just keep your eyes glued to the Jenny Jones show. Meanwhile we rich folks will continue to sequester more and more of the wealth in the nation, as is our God-given right."
To Hell with that.
> And I am sure that you have the EXACT same beliefs as your father.
At least I don't drive down to the Veteran's Hospital cemetery and piss on my father's grave. That's a character issue, you know.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
They're comparing getting arrested and being thrown in jail to getting arrested and being thrown in jail. The difference is, even after Galileo's arrest and conviction, he was still free to do scientific research in his house, and the police surveillance couldn't have been too close or onerous, becauise Galileo did manage to smuggle out his manuscripts to Holland. By contrast the chances are excellent that Mr. Johansen, if convicted, will be deprived of access to his computer for several years.
And you're next, Gormley .
Have fear, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If this issue is important to you, and you want to do more than just complain, then the first thing you want to do is give the EFF some money NOW. The EFF hires lawyers, you know, and what Mr. Johansen needs right now more than anything else is a lawyer. You can join the EFF within the next three minutes if you go to this page.
Don't wait! It might already be too late to salvage your freedom.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...EFF member since 11:51PM EST today...
Before you go blathering like that, go look at either Dubya's proposal for a tax cut or even worse, little Stevie Forbes's proposal. Dubya's plan gives 60 percent of the tax cut to the top ten percent of incomes, as though that income category needs further aggrandisement. Forbes's proposal goes further to abolish capital gains taxes altogether.
Forbes inherited four hundred million dollars from his dad. (The senior Forbes, incidentally, was fond of hanging out in gay biker bars. By way of gratitude for this inheritance, Forbes Jr. publicly abuses gays and favors legislation to deprive them of their civil rights.) Forbes Jr.'s inheritance means that by simply investing his fortune in something as mindless as Dow Jones index funds, he has a risk-and-work-free income of at least forty million dollars a year - with the stock bubble of the last few years, make that a hundred million a year. Well, according to Forbes's so-called "flat tax" proposal, the median wage earner will pay several thousand dollars in Federal taxes on the ~$45K income for which he works two thousand hours a year. And what shall little Stevie pay on his absolutely effortless $100M/year? Zero.
This is what Republicans call "fair tax reform," and since you're too lazy to look at the details closely, you obviously think it's a swell idea. Multimillionaires and billionaires, who do examine those details in detail, think these "reforms" are just wonderful, like Christmas in April, of course.
And to think I used to believe that /.ers habitually practiced arithmetic.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If you pulled this kind of legislative crap on college students in, say, Boston, it would be unconstitutional on the grounds of "cruel and unusal punishment." But not in Arizona.
I used to live in Tucson so I know. At night in Arizona, the weather is almost always delightfully comfortable, there aren't swarms of bugs that come out at sunset to drive you nuts like here in Florida, and just a few miles out of town there is all the seclusion you could ever want, so the college "kids" can just grab a blanket and a bottle of wine, drive out into the desert, and fuck on a dune under the stars. I can tell you for damn sure that that's lots better than making it in some cramped dorm room.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Well, I'd give "credit," if that's really the right word, to Ridley Scott (or whoever it was that wrote the screenplay) for "Blade Runner." Philip Dick never wrote any story entitled "Blade Runner." He did write the novel called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" upon which, allegedly, the "Blade Runner" script was based, but the two are so different that one can scarcely see even a bit of resemblance, much less a direct lineage.
In fact, right before the movie came out the producers offered Dick $250,000 to suppress the original and vastly superior "Androids" and in its place to write a novelization of their script. Dick needed the money, but on his agent's good advice he turned them down.
There's a very interesting overview of Dick's life and works in this article at Hermenaut.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> We, the people, are the "corporations". We build them. People run
> them. People who, at the end of the day, are no worse than we are.
This is laughable. You complain about Katz's unjustified generalizations and then you come forth with a howler like this. Yeah, sure, you and I are the same as Bill Gates and Steve Case. Except of course that they are multibillionaires and we aren't, and between them they control corporations with a total value of around a trillion dollars and we don't, and in the real world that does amount to something of a difference.
You go on to compare the massive social destruction routinely wrought worldwide by giant corporations equally with your sense of offense at seeing Katz post an article on slashdot with the equivalent of a higher moderation score than yours. Right, and first-degree murder is about the same thing as jaywalking too. Have you no sense of proportion at all?
> Show me *WHY* it is inevitably the case that any corporation must
> be nothing but soul-sucking evil. Show me *WHY* I should believe
> that the mere existance of a megacorp is a violation of all I hold dear.
Well, I would suggest that you start by reading Capital by Marx and Engels, but I don't suppose you will ever do so. It is an awful lot of pages, and it is an infamously heretical book, and you wouldn't want to be caught out violating the heresy laws now, would you? Anyway, despite your Show me *WHY*s, my guess is you don't really want to be shown anything which conflicts with your fact-free, a priori Randite preconceptions.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
That's funny, the crack about how word processor generated HTML is so ugly and crabby that, for purposes of this license, it is to be considered as opaque as a proprietary word processor data format. I presume RMS is referring to that weirdass gibberish, spiced with unportable "smart quotes" and the like, which Microsoft Word extrudes when you tell it to export to HTML. I guess it follows that one can't license the entries in the Obfuscated C contest under GPL, because even if you do get the source you have to go through such contortions to figure out how it works.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
7-1/4?! Wow, imagine measuring it to fractional accuracy!
Mine used to be pretty big - well adequate anyway - but over a period of years the demoralizing effect of running exclusively Microsoft operating systems all day long shrunk and withered it to the point...let's not go into the dismal, humiliating details.
But then, at the last moment when I was wallowing in impotent despair and I had given up hope, I stumbled upon this book with a Slackware CD bound inside the back cover. Though I was listless and apathetic, I installed it anyway, and instantly I beheld the mighty majestic bash command-prompt, my luck changed. After just a few rounds of Doom I could feel my BFG9000 getting a full load of shells, so to speak.
By gee, I'm still quite the Linux new-B, but at least as far as my unit goes, I've made a full recovery, and the future looks even brighter than ever! Thank you, thank you, and thank you again, RMS and Linus and the whole penguin-lovin' GNU crew, thanks to you-all ah'm a reel man again!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I do the same thing on my company's NT boxes; I make several 2GB FAT16 drives. Users whine because there are so many drive letters but tough. Not only can you copy files off in an emergency, but if your FAT gets booglarized you can sometimes fix it in place with a little judicious use of a disk editor. (I've had to do this a few times, earning immense respect for my amazing voodoo system-fixing abilities at the office.) I suppose if NTFS were documented then you could do something similar with a damaged NTFS partition, but as we all know the NTFS format is a deep dark secret that you, the lowly mudcrawling customer, are not allowed to know. Also if you're crazy enough to have Win9x as an boot-up alternative, you can access those same FAT16 partitions.
But if you need to get files off an NTFS partition, go look on a search engine and check out a product called NTFSDOS. It was made by a company called (if I remember correctly) Winternals and it used to be free a couple years ago. NTFSDOS is an MS-DOS driver that mounts all the NTFS partitions it can find as read-only. It's small enough that you can fit it on a bootable floppy. It doesn't support NT user permissions, all files are visible and copyable, so it's the mother of all security holes, but if an unauthorized user can get physical access to your server you've got worse security problems than NTFSDOS anyway (think "a disgruntled unauthorized user carrying a wood axe"). At any rate, when your NT system goes belly-up and you want to copy off the files trapped in an NTFS partition, NTFSDOS can save the day for you.
Winternals also had some utilities with which you could fix an NT system that would blue-screen on startup. Those weren't free but they weren't unreasonably priced either. Another cheap repair I've done on NT systems which blue-screened before they'd boot is to look at the list of drivers on the blue screen, then boot up in DOS and rename all the drivers that don't seem absolutely necessary. You get a load of error messages because NT can no longer find drivers it is trying to load, but sometimes you can get the system to boot and then maybe you can undo whatever awful thing you did (typically installing a new program) that screwed up your NT box so bad.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> ...The truth of this is evident with Judas Iscariot who pretended
> to love Christ, but in the end Christ's statement, "Did I Myself not
> choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?", (John 6:70),
> proved correct when Judas betrayed Christ.
Evidently the original author of this lovely nonsense has never read Jorge Luis Borges's Three Versions of Judas (in the collection Ficciones).
> ...One does not hypocritically say they love satan, like many
> hypocritically say they love God.
Oh yeah? What about that opportunist Marilyn Manson?
By the way, this post of yours (which you admit down the thread is copied from some loony teenage zealot who - ho ho hee hee ha ha - actually meant it seriously) is screamingly funny. I laughed and laughed. I like to laugh, so thank you for posting, even though the only way this could get any further off-topic would be to post it in Etruscan.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Most adults I know, and most serious music collectors I know, realize
> MP3 for what it is - piracy, and avoid it like the plague, not because
> they do not understand how to use it, but because they realize it is illegal.
I am a middle-aged adult, and I am not a criminal. I like mp3 because it allows me to burn a whole lot of songs, over a hundred tracks, onto a single CD. Wouldn't you rather carry around one CD than ten or fifteen? The relatively low quality of the playback system's speakers makes the sound quality difference with mp3s insignificant. And if I leave one of my mp3 CDs in a hot car and it gets ruined, then I'm only out a couple of bucks. At work, I can copy a bunch of tracks onto the hard drive of my PC without wasting gigabytes of disc space. And all this is perfectly legal. I have never stolen one single track of music. Every one of my mp3s I've made came from a CD I bought and own.
I just don't see how you can make any bootleg-proof scheme for on-line distribution that allows me to carry around the end product like I can now with ordinary CDs. Either you pay for a track or an album and then you download a file, in which case the file can simply be copied and bootlegged, or you have to go to the seller's server every time you want to play a track. That second alternative is way lousier than simply buying the physical CD, since once you have possession of the CD you can carry it anywhere you like, play it in your car, etc.; there's even a well-established precedent that buyers of CDs can make copies of the tracks for personal use, which is my legal justification for ripping all those mp3s off my own CD collection.
I don't see how you can stop copying from any kind of music media. In the end the unencrypted output must be turned to analog voltage to drive a speaker. Capture that output into a sound card and presto you have a copy of the track you want. The sound quality is marginally diminished and noise is introduced, but if you have a reasonably good CD deck, preamp and sound card it's no worse, I think, than you get when you play an original CD through, say, a boom-box, or anything less than the best of sound systems and speakers. I suspect that the analog devices at the beginning and end of the chain, microphones and speakers, do more damage to the perfection of sound reproduction than all other links in the entire recording-to-playback process.
At any rate it is my conviction, and it has been for decades, that a certain amount of illicit copying and sharing of music seves as a major stimulus to the music industry. The argument that "if listeners can get it for free, they won't buy it" is bogus. After all, when you listen to music on the radio, isn't that free? And yet all music companies and all recording artists are always very eager to get their music played on the radio, not just because of the radio royalties, but also because that's how their customers find out about it. The same goes for this mp3 trading that is so popular these days. People trading mp3s hear musicians they otherwise would never have heard of, and if they like what they hear, they go to the store to buy more CDs by those musicians.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> If said schmuck was to set his office on fire once
> a month, he would be gone.
I must say that if he set the office on fire I'd prefer it, as I would get the day off too.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Moral:
> If you install AOL, you deserve the consequences.
Yeah, right, but if some schmuck in my office installs AOL's God-awful access software on the PC in his office and it trashes his networking setup, his consequence is a nice relaxing afternoon doing nothing, while at the same time my consequence is I probably have to rebuild his PC from the ground up, starting with fdisk. Not that I have anything better to do with my time.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
God yes I remember that awful rubbish, their "AOL adapter." It would even break TCP/IP on your LAN! Like if you can "surf" the "net" using AOL, why would you ever need access to the files on your company's file server, right?
At the time I assumed that anyone who could make a GUI as thoroughly ugly and nasty as the so-called "AOL browser" was simply incompetent. But since then they've bought Netscape, which is full of competent programmers. And here it's happening again! So now we can only assume they are doing this on purpose.
Well, we all knew all alnog that AOL sucks. But with their assimilation of Time/Warner, now we have two gigantic evil empires nakedly striving to ruin the Internet. Ecch.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You and those lying lawyers from the MPAA can repeat, over and over and over again until your heads fall off, that DeCSS was designed for the sole, specific purpose of bootlegging DVDs, but that won't change the fact that it was designed to make a viewer for legally-purchased commercially-manufacturd DVDs that would work on Linux. If I were the judge and a lawyer tried with a straight face to sell me the load of FUDmatic hogwash you're vending out here, I'd throw the bastard in jail for contempt of court.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> An old aphorism hold here:
> If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
So whatever any statute says is all right by you, hey? I've got dead relatives in Europe who "did the crime" and "did the time"; the "crime" was being a Jew and the "time" was spent in a concentration camp. You can just guess where I invite you to stick your stupid little rhyme.
Please note that I refrained from using profanity in this post, which was a strain and more than you deserve.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...unless of course the Gestapo won't let him read material printed on paper either. I wouldn't put it past them either. Mitnick's sentence was longer than many people have served for deliberately killing a human being, his trial was pure prosecutorial showboating and vindictiveness, and all the people who are posting "he got what he deserved because he violated the almighty statutes" ought to be aware of that fact and shut up for shame.
Anyway, it seems to me that even if his terms of probation prohibit him from using a real computer he should still be allowed to use a WebTV.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Groups don't have rights, people do.
When I first came to Florida in 1962 I was amazed to see that Negroes had their own clearly labeled separate water fountains in public places, and they were subject to arrest if they used the white people's drinking fountain. Their "rights," or more properly their lack of rights, were not apportioned on an individual-by-individual basis, but by the group in which the were born.
<TROLL>You must be a member of a privileged group, probably a white male, or else I certainly wouldn't have to spell this out for you.</TROLL>
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
My twelve year old daughter knows more about HTML, Photoshop and Painter than I do. tilleyrw, please don't be an "ageist." (Did I just commit a neologism?)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I mean, Katz didn't say one damned word about your theological razzmatazz or any of you wonderful, wacky folks who subscribe to it, not one single solitary word, and yet here you are get up on tiptoe yowling about it.
I can understand complaining when somebody kicks you in the ass. But you're complaining because Katz somehow neglected to kiss your ass.
There are millions, no billions of us, who not only do not keep you and your fellow theophiles and your deep'n'meaningful personal relationships with the Nazarene at the very forefront of their consciousnesses, but who just don't care one bit about those relationships, or any of you. Not at all. Get used to it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
ps: by the way, and I quote, "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward."