I've been using NT4 since it came out, and I didn't have the slightest idea that QBASIC was in there. I know QBASIC is not the world's greatest programming language but it sure beats nothing at all. And I can assume it is on every one of the NT machines at my office.
I gave up on BASIC about ten years ago when I realized that I had learned at least nine versions of it (including Timex-Sinclair BASIC and Wang BASIC-2), and none of them had anything in common; if you wanted to write something in BASIC #9 all that knowing BASICs #1 through #8 did for you was confuse the Hell out of you. But if there's a programmming language already installed by default on every PC in the office, I guess I'm going to have to brush up my QBASIC skills again. Thanks a million, greenrd, for this unexpected piece of good news!
So if you're so concerned with the bandwidth on the infected machine, have the virus code monitor CPU usage and network bandwidth and restrict its own usage to, say, ten percent of maximum or less. This makes it both less destructive - you wouldn't be shutting down anyone's machine, just redirecting otherwise unused CPU cycles - and more stealthy too.
If one criterion for the "success" of a virus or worm is the scope of its circulation, then it seems to me the guy who wrote this latest thing is screwing up. (Or more likely, he just hacked a few changes onto some existing code, probably ILOVEYOU, sure wish someone would post this new one so I could have a look at it.) This is entirely aside from the incomprehensible malice that's displayed by such a nasty payload, what a jerk. You're sure going to notice when something wipes practically all the files on your PC. It seems to me that a really well-written virus would be more subtle.
Well, we can see you would never make it in the nuclear arms business. In the day, Teller would have denounced you as a traitor for such soft-heartedness.
No, what you want is to set off a bomb designed to release a big load of neutrons deep in a salt mine. That shoots into the atmosphere an enormous jet of vaporized radioactive sodium. Short half-life, high, high radiation level, plus, sodium being such an active ion the uptake in organisms is really really good. That'll teach those f*&^ing Roosians to f%$# with Hungary!
The U.S.A. was aware as early as September 1945, with the defection of Ivan Gousenko in Ottowa, that the atom bomb's secrets had been compromised. That was four years before the Soviets managed to detonate their first nuclear bomb, and thirteen years before the crackpot scheme that is the subject of this article.
It is so laughable to claim that this plan to nuke the moon would have any effect upon "slavery or liberty." Once both sides had gotten together the wherewithal to destroy the opposing country, which happened in the mid-50s, "slavery or liberty" had next to nothing to do with the continuation of the arms race; it was a scam to rob the taxpayer. What nuking the Moon would have achieved, if anything at all, was only to enrich a handful of California defense contractors.
Everyone knows that the Moon influences, some say entirely controls, the romantic life of human beings. No moon, no love, no more children, extinction, death, doom, dust.
Generals and politicians are impotent and useless without all the ordinary people to fight and bleed and die, for their spurious "honor," in their place. You think any of those glittering heroes actually ever placed themselves in the line of fire in France, like my father, a U.S. Army Master Sergeant, did for over a year? No, they were all careful not to do anything that might get their uniforms mussed, in case a photo opportunity might arise.
I believe that plutonium is quite pyrophoric. If you blew a bunch of plutonium up with a shaped charge into the open air it would surely catch fire and then spray forth a thick cloud of plutonium oxide, killing anybody who came in contact with it by inhalation. Of course this would still be immeasurably preferable to a nuclear bomb explosion.
Not anymore. Now they just fly overhead and kill polyethelene sheets masquerading as bridges, painted logs masquerading as cannons, carboard boxes masquerading as tanks...and hospitals, elementary schools, television studios, refugee columns, power stations and sewage treatment plants by remote control.
In a world where televised images predominate in the "minds" of "citizens," such acts constitute victory.
People don't often mention this, but the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities was a bluff. Truman told the Japanese government that we had a limitless supply of bombs which we were prepared to drop on a weekly basis until Hirohito surrendered unconditionally. Truman was lying; in four years of maximum effort we had only come up with enough U235 for one gun bomb and enough Pu239 for three implosion bombs. After Nagasaki we had exactly one Pu239 core left, and then the cupboard would have been bare for several months.
I believe that if we hadn't bluffed those Japanese political leaders into surrendering before an invasion, then in the course of that mass infantry invasion of Japan the U.S.A. would have committed a slaughter against the Japanese civilian population that would have left us, before the eyes of history, down in the same abattoir of brutality with the Gestapo. Some time before the nuclear bombings, the U.S. Air Force had officially declared that "there are no civilians in Japan," that every square foot Japan was an appropriate target for massive aerial bombardment; and that on their side, all the adult women in Japan had been drafted into their Army.
Before the Allies could get their hands around Hitler's neck they had to hack their way through millions upon millions of German civilians whom that coward had interposed between himself and his foes. That's the true nature of twentieth century war: those big hero leaders, the ones with all the fine insipiring phrases, the ones depicted in martial poses in the statues at war memorials, cower behind hosts of slavedriven draftees, and behind them, hosts of civilians. While the working class get starved, shot, gassed and bombed, their glorious leaders enjoy port and cigars, glory and fame down in their safe bunkers. As this century began, we were fighting a world war about every generation or so, by which timetable we should now have fully recovered from WWIII and be in the opening stages of WWIV right now.
Old Doc Oppenheimer put an end to that shit but good! Thanks to his marvelous invention, not only was death in war democratized, but far better, the leaders who might start such a war suddenly became target #1. It took six years of combat to get to Adolf Hitler's bunker. An Adolf Hitler who dared to start a World War Three today would be radioactive dust twinkling in the stratosphere before the first day was through.
To the ruling class, people like you and me were, are, and always will be merely disposable things, and that's why they light-heartedly wasted seventy-five million of us in the first two World Wars. So proud and bold are they that they'll fight, for their honor, to the very last one of us. But when a shift of technique changed the rules so it was their own gilded asses first and foremost on the dying line, well, just look at the results! No more World Wars. No more ever.
I never heard of the Russian project, which is hardly a big surprise considering the top secret Soviet culture, but if I remember right the USAEC version of this was called "Project Plowshare." There was a scheme to dig a second cross-isthmian canal in Nicaragua which would have required about sixty nuclear explosions. God DAMN technologists sure are stupid; give them the plans for a great big bomb and the first and last thing they "think" is "Woweee, where can we set this thing off!"
Fun with Amazon's One-Click Shopping, or "you mean you didn't order five hundred copies of Joy of Preteen Sex?"
Doesn't Amazon's proprietary exclusivepatented HANDS OFF IT'S OURS AND YOU CAN'T HAVE IT One-Click Shopping system use cookies to save buyers those arduous extra clicks? And doesn't this mean that someone using this exploit can then get your personal buyer's information? ("Your," not "my", at least until Amazon stops suing people right and left.)
Gee, I guess it's a good thing that Amazon has defended their patent so vigorously, or else customers of other companies would be equally at risk.
By the way, this is off-topic, but I figure readers would be amused. Who is to blame for the "ILOVEYOU" worm? Those funloving Filipino folks who wrote it? Microsoft, for making their scripting language so insecure and so easy to subvert? Why no. According to those geniuses in Congress, the $15-billion dollars in damages (I wonder why they didn't say "$15-trillion" or $15-quadrillion" as long as they were pulling numbers out of thin air) are due to the slackness and irresponsibility of McAfee, the anti-virus vendor. I've got to be kidding, right? Well, check it out.
You know, there are lots of really, really bad ideas floating around in science fiction. Let's definitely keep them away from The Man in the High Castle, especially the Germans... Come to think of it, given their laws against Nazi literature in Germany, is Man in the High Castle (or Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream) even legal to publish there?
They also need to stay clear of David Bunch's Moderan, Barry Malzberg's Beyond Apollo, Larry Niven's Jigsaw Man, Gene Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz.
Good one! I wish I had moderator rights right now so I could throw a point toward this excellent, wacky troll.
Oddly I find this post especially charming because I myself agree that Americans (that is, U.S. citizens, "USians," in this context I want to exclude all the millions of Americans who live in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, etc.) are more irrational than the human norm - in this I agree with Mencken, who stated that we share our specially excessive national dumbness and hysteria with the Russians - and also I feel that our "USian" gun fetish is both aesthetically disgusting and also a pointless danger to life and limb.
The gleeful irrationality of this post, swooping and looping as it does in and through and out of Capital and Exodus, does kind of undermine my position. But over and above all these political considerations, I like art and I can appreciate a literary job well done, and this is one! So you go, troll!
What a lot of hogwash. Whether a political party is left-wing or right-wing is best determined by finding out what they call themselves. The Nazis explicitly and persistently described themselves as "right-wing" and moreover they set themselves up in contrast to and in opposition to the communists, who were universally described as "left-wing." You go back to school and learn history as it was, not as your airy ideology would arbitrarily fantasize it to have been.
> surely they will be even more aroused after > playing an actual game where all their senses > and their bodies are used.
First, a disclaimer. I loathe sports. Mencken once suggested that all golfers should be prohibited from public office; I go one step further and propose that all admitted sports fans should be disallowed from voting altogether. In addition they should pay double taxes and be forced to wear dunce caps when in public. Now that I've made my personal prejudices clear, I'd like to play Devil's advocate here.
I spent about a decade doing outdoor construction work for a living. Admittedly, while it was physical labor, in contrast with competitive sports, it was not particularly antagonistic in nature; the closest it came to being aggressive was when I had to attack and chop out a survey line with my machete. But it was my experience that after a few hours of hard physical labor, I always felt a pleasant and relaxed sensation, and I was not the slightest bit inclined toward violence, quite the contrary.
It's possible that the problem with video games is not just the aggressive mental tension they induce, but that psychical aggressiveness combined with the complete physical torpor induced by sitting still in a chair for hours on end, with even the movement of your head and eyes damped down to stasis, as you focus on the computer screen. You get all the mental tension of combat, together with none of the release of strenuous physical activity.
I'm 45 years old. Probably most slashdot readers are younger, and thus healthier and more supple than I am. Last year I bought Quake II for my eight-year-old son (who loves it, and who is, by the way, the happiest and most good-natured little boy I ever met). I played it a few times. Every time I got deep into fragging, when I finally gave up, I would discover that it was three or four in the morning, I was soaked in sweat like some dope fiend coming off a binge, and my body ached all over like I had been beaten from the strain of holding myself rigidly in position before the monitor. I had to give it up! By comparison the after-effect of a ten-mile hike under the Florida sun is a gentle caress.
The U.S. murder rate is three times higher than that of Canada. Same continent, same language, same high level of industrialization, same TV shows and pop songs, and I'm even given to understand they have video games up there. But the U.S. murder rate is 6 per 100,000 per year, while Canada's is 2 per 100,000 per year.
I know it's trendy to blame all the problems of the world on video games these days, and I can understand how venal pseudo-scientists might be eager to cash in on that fad, but I don't much care. Why don't these psychologists stop wanking off over video games and study those numbers, and try to figure out why it works out that way?
> What people are talking about here is 10yo or > something being raped in front of a camera; > quite a different matter.
Sorry, but you're wrong. You're just plain wrong. And the reason you've made the mistake you did is because you are French.
As a Frenchman, you can not grasp the idea that a simple, chaste photo of a nude or semi-nude seventeen-year-old woman could possibly be thought of as an instance of child pornography, nor that any sane government would ever consider imprisoning the possesor of such as photograph as a worse criminal than a violent, sadistic rapist.
Well, do yourself a big favor and stay out the the U.S.A., this sex-sick madhouse. In the U.S.A. any photograph of a seventeen-year-old woman with her breasts visible may be legally held to be not merely pornographic but an instance of child pornography.
You might imagine, as a Frenchman, that if that photograph had been taken by a world-renowned art photographer the law enforcement agencies might be willing to grant an exemption. But that's your sane French logic talking; in the U.S.A. the exemption works entirely in the other direction. Today U.S. citizens spend more on porno than on all other movies and theatre performances put together. But who did the the law come after? Did they try to shut down any of the thousands of vendors of pure obscenity without any redeeming artistic value at all? No, they tried to prosecute bookstores for selling the works of the internationally acclaimed art photographers David Hamilton and Jock Sturges.
> "Gayness" IS WRONG, and I can say that I know > no gay people who are truly happy people.
I can believe that there you aren't lying, troll, as I don't suppose you know any gay people at all.
Anyway, look around, not everyone shares your prejudice. Plato, for example, says you are wrong. What is truth? Who knows which of you is right?
Let time sort it out. Provided that the human race has not wiped itself out of existence by then, a century from now, thoughtful, educated people will still be reading Plato. Will anybody alive then know or care about your opinions? Even now, I don't.
T1s are not fiber, my company has a T1 coming in and all it is is ordinary twisted pair copper wires. Of course the line has been tested and is guaranteed and all, when you follow it back to the CO there's a lot of difference, but the wire coming through the wall is indistinguishable from the twisted pair coming into my house. (Which supports a regular telephone together with cheap 64/256 ADSL, but my house line tested OK for up to 768/768 DSL.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:Why do they assume motives are selfish?
on
Why Do Open Source?
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· Score: 2
If it selfish to want to do something for your own profit and it's selfish to do something for a "higher" (i.e. non-profit-oriented) goal which fulfills this mysterious, vague need for "self-actualization" (which sounds to me a lot like "one's need to do what one wants to do"), then after all that, can you name one conscious act which is not motivated by some variety or other of selfishness? If you can't, then if all volitional acts are motivated by selfishness, doesn't "selfish" become an entirely superfluous word? Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Good to see you're paying attention. Of course it's not the copyright holders of Lovecraft's books that are responsible for the hijacking of the public domain. No, the entire world gets robbed of its intellectual heritage on behalf of the God damned Disney/ABC corporation and that repulsive little cartoon rat of theirs.
That sounds like a joke; I wish it were but it's not.
Yours WD "Die Mickey DIE!" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
Digitizing the contents of the Library of Congress (which, incidentally, does not get copies of every book printed) would be an absolutely immense job. Even if they restricted the scope of the project to only books in the public domain, it would still be a vast project, which would require a very large budget, that the Library of Congress has not got. (The 1999 budget for the Library of Congress, which includes the expenses of the U.S. Copyright Office, was $296-million.) Such a task, being very labor intensive, would also take many years, maybe even decades. Even assuming such an extravagant project were funded tomorrow, which would be great but which is extremely unlikely considering the priorities of Congress, by the time the LOC got the program organized and started publishing data, a few years would have passed, and by that time you could expect a lot more people, worldwide, to have enough bandwidth that downloading a multi-megabyte.PDF file would not be especially difficult.
Also keep in mind that a single pop song in.MP3 format is several megabytes. By comparison, Sams "Teach yourself Linux in 24 Hours," a six hundred page book, is a 14MB.PDF. So an entire book in.PDF format is the equivalent of maybe ten or fifteen minutes of minutes of music. Think how popular.MP3s are; anyone with enough bandwidth to get.MP3s off the net has enough bandwidth to get whole books in.PDF format.
In text format, it only gets better. Here are two directory listings off my PC:
At least it wasn't when I went to Washington five years ago. You could enter the building, which is very beautiful, and you could go on a guided tour, but what you could not do is what you'd expect to do in a normal library: get a book of the shelf, sit down somewhere, and read it. The stacks are very restricted.
So if you thought this guy had an elitist, exclusionary attitude before, now you know it's even worse than you thought!
Oh well, if these jokers won't digitize the public domain books in their collection, at least I will. I've got all of volume one of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea," and all of volume one and three hundred pages of volume two of Marx and Engels's Capital scanned in and cleaned up as ready-to-print pages. If I ever get caught up on my work I'll started cleaning up the OCR output files - this weekend I hope. Free free freeee! I love public domain books! Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using NT4 since it came out, and I didn't have the slightest idea that QBASIC was in there. I know QBASIC is not the world's greatest programming language but it sure beats nothing at all. And I can assume it is on every one of the NT machines at my office.
I gave up on BASIC about ten years ago when I realized that I had learned at least nine versions of it (including Timex-Sinclair BASIC and Wang BASIC-2), and none of them had anything in common; if you wanted to write something in BASIC #9 all that knowing BASICs #1 through #8 did for you was confuse the Hell out of you. But if there's a programmming language already installed by default on every PC in the office, I guess I'm going to have to brush up my QBASIC skills again. Thanks a million, greenrd, for this unexpected piece of good news!
I'll bet MS took it out of Win2K, though.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
So if you're so concerned with the bandwidth on the infected machine, have the virus code monitor CPU usage and network bandwidth and restrict its own usage to, say, ten percent of maximum or less. This makes it both less destructive - you wouldn't be shutting down anyone's machine, just redirecting otherwise unused CPU cycles - and more stealthy too.
If one criterion for the "success" of a virus or worm is the scope of its circulation, then it seems to me the guy who wrote this latest thing is screwing up. (Or more likely, he just hacked a few changes onto some existing code, probably ILOVEYOU, sure wish someone would post this new one so I could have a look at it.) This is entirely aside from the incomprehensible malice that's displayed by such a nasty payload, what a jerk. You're sure going to notice when something wipes practically all the files on your PC. It seems to me that a really well-written virus would be more subtle.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
So what, doesn't it fit in the margin of this post? Wouldn't want humanity to miss out on this, watch out for buses.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Well, we can see you would never make it in the nuclear arms business. In the day, Teller would have denounced you as a traitor for such soft-heartedness.
No, what you want is to set off a bomb designed to release a big load of neutrons deep in a salt mine. That shoots into the atmosphere an enormous jet of vaporized radioactive sodium. Short half-life, high, high radiation level, plus, sodium being such an active ion the uptake in organisms is really really good. That'll teach those f*&^ing Roosians to f%$# with Hungary!
Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The U.S.A. was aware as early as September 1945, with the defection of Ivan Gousenko in Ottowa, that the atom bomb's secrets had been compromised. That was four years before the Soviets managed to detonate their first nuclear bomb, and thirteen years before the crackpot scheme that is the subject of this article.
It is so laughable to claim that this plan to nuke the moon would have any effect upon "slavery or liberty." Once both sides had gotten together the wherewithal to destroy the opposing country, which happened in the mid-50s, "slavery or liberty" had next to nothing to do with the continuation of the arms race; it was a scam to rob the taxpayer. What nuking the Moon would have achieved, if anything at all, was only to enrich a handful of California defense contractors.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Besides, no moon, then no spoon in June...
Everyone knows that the Moon influences, some say entirely controls, the romantic life of human beings. No moon, no love, no more children, extinction, death, doom, dust.
Then again that might not be such a bad thing after all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Hey, you know what they say about omelets and eggs.
Ruthlessly yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Generals and politicians are impotent and useless without all the ordinary people to fight and bleed and die, for their spurious "honor," in their place. You think any of those glittering heroes actually ever placed themselves in the line of fire in France, like my father, a U.S. Army Master Sergeant, did for over a year? No, they were all careful not to do anything that might get their uniforms mussed, in case a photo opportunity might arise.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I believe that plutonium is quite pyrophoric. If you blew a bunch of plutonium up with a shaped charge into the open air it would surely catch fire and then spray forth a thick cloud of plutonium oxide, killing anybody who came in contact with it by inhalation. Of course this would still be immeasurably preferable to a nuclear bomb explosion.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Not anymore. Now they just fly overhead and kill polyethelene sheets masquerading as bridges, painted logs masquerading as cannons, carboard boxes masquerading as tanks...and hospitals, elementary schools, television studios, refugee columns, power stations and sewage treatment plants by remote control.
In a world where televised images predominate in the "minds" of "citizens," such acts constitute victory.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
People don't often mention this, but the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities was a bluff. Truman told the Japanese government that we had a limitless supply of bombs which we were prepared to drop on a weekly basis until Hirohito surrendered unconditionally. Truman was lying; in four years of maximum effort we had only come up with enough U235 for one gun bomb and enough Pu239 for three implosion bombs. After Nagasaki we had exactly one Pu239 core left, and then the cupboard would have been bare for several months.
I believe that if we hadn't bluffed those Japanese political leaders into surrendering before an invasion, then in the course of that mass infantry invasion of Japan the U.S.A. would have committed a slaughter against the Japanese civilian population that would have left us, before the eyes of history, down in the same abattoir of brutality with the Gestapo. Some time before the nuclear bombings, the U.S. Air Force had officially declared that "there are no civilians in Japan," that every square foot Japan was an appropriate target for massive aerial bombardment; and that on their side, all the adult women in Japan had been drafted into their Army.
Before the Allies could get their hands around Hitler's neck they had to hack their way through millions upon millions of German civilians whom that coward had interposed between himself and his foes. That's the true nature of twentieth century war: those big hero leaders, the ones with all the fine insipiring phrases, the ones depicted in martial poses in the statues at war memorials, cower behind hosts of slavedriven draftees, and behind them, hosts of civilians. While the working class get starved, shot, gassed and bombed, their glorious leaders enjoy port and cigars, glory and fame down in their safe bunkers. As this century began, we were fighting a world war about every generation or so, by which timetable we should now have fully recovered from WWIII and be in the opening stages of WWIV right now.
Old Doc Oppenheimer put an end to that shit but good! Thanks to his marvelous invention, not only was death in war democratized, but far better, the leaders who might start such a war suddenly became target #1. It took six years of combat to get to Adolf Hitler's bunker. An Adolf Hitler who dared to start a World War Three today would be radioactive dust twinkling in the stratosphere before the first day was through.
To the ruling class, people like you and me were, are, and always will be merely disposable things, and that's why they light-heartedly wasted seventy-five million of us in the first two World Wars. So proud and bold are they that they'll fight, for their honor, to the very last one of us. But when a shift of technique changed the rules so it was their own gilded asses first and foremost on the dying line, well, just look at the results! No more World Wars. No more ever.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I never heard of the Russian project, which is hardly a big surprise considering the top secret Soviet culture, but if I remember right the USAEC version of this was called "Project Plowshare." There was a scheme to dig a second cross-isthmian canal in Nicaragua which would have required about sixty nuclear explosions. God DAMN technologists sure are stupid; give them the plans for a great big bomb and the first and last thing they "think" is "Woweee, where can we set this thing off!"
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Fun with Amazon's One-Click Shopping, or "you mean you didn't order five hundred copies of Joy of Preteen Sex?"
Doesn't Amazon's proprietary exclusive patented HANDS OFF IT'S OURS AND YOU CAN'T HAVE IT One-Click Shopping system use cookies to save buyers those arduous extra clicks? And doesn't this mean that someone using this exploit can then get your personal buyer's information? ("Your," not "my", at least until Amazon stops suing people right and left.)
Gee, I guess it's a good thing that Amazon has defended their patent so vigorously, or else customers of other companies would be equally at risk.
By the way, this is off-topic, but I figure readers would be amused. Who is to blame for the "ILOVEYOU" worm? Those funloving Filipino folks who wrote it? Microsoft, for making their scripting language so insecure and so easy to subvert? Why no. According to those geniuses in Congress, the $15-billion dollars in damages (I wonder why they didn't say "$15-trillion" or $15-quadrillion" as long as they were pulling numbers out of thin air) are due to the slackness and irresponsibility of McAfee, the anti-virus vendor. I've got to be kidding, right? Well, check it out.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You know, there are lots of really, really bad ideas floating around in science fiction. Let's definitely keep them away from The Man in the High Castle, especially the Germans... Come to think of it, given their laws against Nazi literature in Germany, is Man in the High Castle (or Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream) even legal to publish there?
They also need to stay clear of David Bunch's Moderan, Barry Malzberg's Beyond Apollo, Larry Niven's Jigsaw Man, Gene Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Good one! I wish I had moderator rights right now so I could throw a point toward this excellent, wacky troll.
Oddly I find this post especially charming because I myself agree that Americans (that is, U.S. citizens, "USians," in this context I want to exclude all the millions of Americans who live in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, etc.) are more irrational than the human norm - in this I agree with Mencken, who stated that we share our specially excessive national dumbness and hysteria with the Russians - and also I feel that our "USian" gun fetish is both aesthetically disgusting and also a pointless danger to life and limb.
The gleeful irrationality of this post, swooping and looping as it does in and through and out of Capital and Exodus, does kind of undermine my position. But over and above all these political considerations, I like art and I can appreciate a literary job well done, and this is one! So you go, troll!
Your fan, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> The fascists were left wing.
What a lot of hogwash. Whether a political party is left-wing or right-wing is best determined by finding out what they call themselves. The Nazis explicitly and persistently described themselves as "right-wing" and moreover they set themselves up in contrast to and in opposition to the communists, who were universally described as "left-wing." You go back to school and learn history as it was, not as your airy ideology would arbitrarily fantasize it to have been.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> surely they will be even more aroused after
> playing an actual game where all their senses
> and their bodies are used.
First, a disclaimer. I loathe sports. Mencken once suggested that all golfers should be prohibited from public office; I go one step further and propose that all admitted sports fans should be disallowed from voting altogether. In addition they should pay double taxes and be forced to wear dunce caps when in public. Now that I've made my personal prejudices clear, I'd like to play Devil's advocate here.
I spent about a decade doing outdoor construction work for a living. Admittedly, while it was physical labor, in contrast with competitive sports, it was not particularly antagonistic in nature; the closest it came to being aggressive was when I had to attack and chop out a survey line with my machete. But it was my experience that after a few hours of hard physical labor, I always felt a pleasant and relaxed sensation, and I was not the slightest bit inclined toward violence, quite the contrary.
It's possible that the problem with video games is not just the aggressive mental tension they induce, but that psychical aggressiveness combined with the complete physical torpor induced by sitting still in a chair for hours on end, with even the movement of your head and eyes damped down to stasis, as you focus on the computer screen. You get all the mental tension of combat, together with none of the release of strenuous physical activity.
I'm 45 years old. Probably most slashdot readers are younger, and thus healthier and more supple than I am. Last year I bought Quake II for my eight-year-old son (who loves it, and who is, by the way, the happiest and most good-natured little boy I ever met). I played it a few times. Every time I got deep into fragging, when I finally gave up, I would discover that it was three or four in the morning, I was soaked in sweat like some dope fiend coming off a binge, and my body ached all over like I had been beaten from the strain of holding myself rigidly in position before the monitor. I had to give it up! By comparison the after-effect of a ten-mile hike under the Florida sun is a gentle caress.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The U.S. murder rate is three times higher than that of Canada. Same continent, same language, same high level of industrialization, same TV shows and pop songs, and I'm even given to understand they have video games up there. But the U.S. murder rate is 6 per 100,000 per year, while Canada's is 2 per 100,000 per year.
I know it's trendy to blame all the problems of the world on video games these days, and I can understand how venal pseudo-scientists might be eager to cash in on that fad, but I don't much care. Why don't these psychologists stop wanking off over video games and study those numbers, and try to figure out why it works out that way?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> What people are talking about here is 10yo or
> something being raped in front of a camera;
> quite a different matter.
Sorry, but you're wrong. You're just plain wrong. And the reason you've made the mistake you did is because you are French.
As a Frenchman, you can not grasp the idea that a simple, chaste photo of a nude or semi-nude seventeen-year-old woman could possibly be thought of as an instance of child pornography, nor that any sane government would ever consider imprisoning the possesor of such as photograph as a worse criminal than a violent, sadistic rapist.
Well, do yourself a big favor and stay out the the U.S.A., this sex-sick madhouse. In the U.S.A. any photograph of a seventeen-year-old woman with her breasts visible may be legally held to be not merely pornographic but an instance of child pornography.
You might imagine, as a Frenchman, that if that photograph had been taken by a world-renowned art photographer the law enforcement agencies might be willing to grant an exemption. But that's your sane French logic talking; in the U.S.A. the exemption works entirely in the other direction. Today U.S. citizens spend more on porno than on all other movies and theatre performances put together. But who did the the law come after? Did they try to shut down any of the thousands of vendors of pure obscenity without any redeeming artistic value at all? No, they tried to prosecute bookstores for selling the works of the internationally acclaimed art photographers David Hamilton and Jock Sturges.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> "Gayness" IS WRONG, and I can say that I know
> no gay people who are truly happy people.
I can believe that there you aren't lying, troll, as I don't suppose you know any gay people at all.
Anyway, look around, not everyone shares your prejudice. Plato, for example, says you are wrong. What is truth? Who knows which of you is right?
Let time sort it out. Provided that the human race has not wiped itself out of existence by then, a century from now, thoughtful, educated people will still be reading Plato. Will anybody alive then know or care about your opinions? Even now, I don't.
Sincerely WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
T1s are not fiber, my company has a T1 coming in and all it is is ordinary twisted pair copper wires. Of course the line has been tested and is guaranteed and all, when you follow it back to the CO there's a lot of difference, but the wire coming through the wall is indistinguishable from the twisted pair coming into my house. (Which supports a regular telephone together with cheap 64/256 ADSL, but my house line tested OK for up to 768/768 DSL.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If it selfish to want to do something for your own profit and it's selfish to do something for a "higher" (i.e. non-profit-oriented) goal which fulfills this mysterious, vague need for "self-actualization" (which sounds to me a lot like "one's need to do what one wants to do"), then after all that, can you name one conscious act which is not motivated by some variety or other of selfishness? If you can't, then if all volitional acts are motivated by selfishness, doesn't "selfish" become an entirely superfluous word? Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Good to see you're paying attention. Of course it's not the copyright holders of Lovecraft's books that are responsible for the hijacking of the public domain. No, the entire world gets robbed of its intellectual heritage on behalf of the God damned Disney/ABC corporation and that repulsive little cartoon rat of theirs.
That sounds like a joke; I wish it were but it's not.
Yours WD "Die Mickey DIE!" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
Digitizing the contents of the Library of Congress (which, incidentally, does not get copies of every book printed) would be an absolutely immense job. Even if they restricted the scope of the project to only books in the public domain, it would still be a vast project, which would require a very large budget, that the Library of Congress has not got. (The 1999 budget for the Library of Congress, which includes the expenses of the U.S. Copyright Office, was $296-million.) Such a task, being very labor intensive, would also take many years, maybe even decades. Even assuming such an extravagant project were funded tomorrow, which would be great but which is extremely unlikely considering the priorities of Congress, by the time the LOC got the program organized and started publishing data, a few years would have passed, and by that time you could expect a lot more people, worldwide, to have enough bandwidth that downloading a multi-megabyte .PDF file would not be especially difficult.
Also keep in mind that a single pop song in .MP3 format is several megabytes. By comparison, Sams "Teach yourself Linux in 24 Hours," a six hundred page book, is a 14MB .PDF. So an entire book in .PDF format is the equivalent of maybe ten or fifteen minutes of minutes of music. Think how popular .MP3s are; anyone with enough bandwidth to get .MP3s off the net has enough bandwidth to get whole books in .PDF format.
In text format, it only gets better. Here are two directory listings off my PC:
04/08/00 01:05p 2,513,894 07_she_said_she_said.mp3
08/15/94 12:23p 5,582,655 shaks12.txt
10/22/96 08:22a 2,251,136 shaks12.zip
That first is one single song, two minutes and thirty-seven seconds long. The next two contain the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
(PS: I ripped that entirely legal .MP3 myself, from my own legitimate, commercial copy of the CD, so fuck you, Valenti.)
At least it wasn't when I went to Washington five years ago. You could enter the building, which is very beautiful, and you could go on a guided tour, but what you could not do is what you'd expect to do in a normal library: get a book of the shelf, sit down somewhere, and read it. The stacks are very restricted.
So if you thought this guy had an elitist, exclusionary attitude before, now you know it's even worse than you thought!
Oh well, if these jokers won't digitize the public domain books in their collection, at least I will. I've got all of volume one of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea," and all of volume one and three hundred pages of volume two of Marx and Engels's Capital scanned in and cleaned up as ready-to-print pages. If I ever get caught up on my work I'll started cleaning up the OCR output files - this weekend I hope. Free free freeee! I love public domain books! Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net