> proving that the LGPL actually have fewer restrictions, > and is therefore more free.
But "free" is a word with multiple meanings, all of them vague as well. For example you could argue that a nation which drafted its citizens into an army which could repel a hostile invasion was free-er than a nation with no draft, which proved impotent against invasion. Or maybe not. Or that citizens who pay taxes, on official demand, to support a police force which makes it possible to walk the streets at night, is free-er than a country which has no police at all and the accompanying crime you'd expect. You might argue the opposite of that too.
"Free" is commonly used to mean "unconstrained," or it could mean "unoppressed," two notions which are sometimes at odds. Excuse me for being so picky over just one word, but I've seen this same argument, based on one meaning of "free," elsewhere in comments to this article, where the word "free" is used as a solid building block in the foundation of a syllogism.
Beside its literal meaning, "free" is also a really great cheerleading word. People love to hear the word "free," they thrill inside a bit whenever they hear it, which is why it is so often employed, in so bewildering a variety of meanings, in so much persuasive writing, such as Mr. Stallman's.
If by "free" what you mean is no restraint, and if that's what you value the most, then it's clear that simple public domain is the way to go; anything less, any license at all, is an attempt to keep a grip on "your property." Not that there's anything so inherently wrong with the idea of "your property," when after all, you wrote it!
Also, if a commercial software company like Microsoft loses capital, it directly affects their software, since the programmers at Microsoft are working for money, and if they stop getting paid then they stop coding immediately. But the Linux developers are not working for money. Even if all the RedHats and VA Linuxes in the world go under, it still will not affect the world-wide Linux development team. And even if corporations decide they can't buy into Linux without there being other big corporations to support it, that won't affect the Linux developers either.
Keeping to my fixed policy of always looking for the silver lining in things, I conceive that the de-marketizing of Linux could be a good thing. Let's imagine some caffeine-soaked hacker hard at work past midnight, expanding the capabilities of Linux by adding some nifty new feature. In the back of his mind he's worrying about Metallica and the RIAA ("Somebody this evil hacker doesn't know, in another far-off country, might possibly use his software to listen to a recording - our property - which otherwise he wouldn't buy anyway! Sue him! Destroy him!"). He also has to worry about the FBI ("So, Congressmen, in the pursuit of upholding the all-important interests of America's burgeoning internet commerce sector, and in order to protect America against terrorists, we are asking for the right to make no-knock, no-warrant raids on any nefarious criminal hacker suspected of being in possesion of anything on this list of proscribed hacking tools: GCC, Perl, EMACS..."). He also has to worry about the American Family Association ("Yes, my brethren and sistern! These hackers, wallowing in their sinister subculture of pornography, drug abuse, body piercing and free speech, are the loathsome spawn of Satan and they must all be burned! Now! Are you with me?")
Atop all these other dismal preoccupations nowadays, it's possible, if our hacker has a gloomy disposition, that he also reflects as follows: "Here I am, it's the middle of the night, and I'm working my ass off trying to make this &^%$# code work. And when I get done and I give it away, then what? Well, some multi-billion dollar company is going to distribute the Hell out of it, for which I will get $0.00, and packs of snobby yuppie jackasses, jabbering to their brokers over their cell phones as the drive around in their BMWs and Benzes, are going to make a killing off all the hubbub. Yecch. Think I'll go play Quake instead."
Now you wouldn't want our imaginary hacker to get depressed, would you? Gee, I sure wouldn't. So let Wall Street go up in smoke, it's all good! Go away, get lost, go bankrupt, you pesky money men, and let our people hack!
Are you sure you need 15V to run your laptop? I've got an old Toshiba Libretto 50 which runs fine on 12V but only after you send it a brief jolt of 15V to convince the power management hardware that there actually is an external power source connected. To get the 12 V I use cheap sealed lead-acid camcorder batteries (Radio Shack 22-187 or equivalent), which I can get for as little as $25 each, and which run my Libretto for about three or four hours or so on one charge. I got the idea and plans from Xin Feng's web page, thanks Dr. Feng! Certainly a little doodad with a couple of 9V batteries will be easier to handle than a big inverter plus your laptop's AC adapter, and you can carry a camcorder battery or two around with you.
My Libretto runs Linux too; in fact it's a bit underpowered for them new-fangled power-suckin MS OSes, but Linux just sprints along on it, though it's a bit of a trick getting it installed because of the weird external floppy drive that doesn't work with Linux boot discs. Basically my trick was to yank the HD and get an adapter so I could hook up the Libretto's 2.5" hard drive to a normal 40-pin IDE connector like you see in a desktop machine.
> I'll fire up emacs and talk with the shrink, he's smarter than you.
Now I have practically unlimited respect for Richard Stallman, but there's no way emacs is smarter than my G 80md. (I held back for a while, G, so you'd have a clear stage from which to lay down yo rap.) Not only is he a philosopher but he's also an artist and you being French it ought to come natural for you to respect an artist. A troll artist that is!
> "It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being > traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."
Of course this is perfectly backwards. With Napster there is no "trading," one gives away copies of the files absolutely for free. In every other transaction concerning Metallica's products that I can think of, including legitimate sales of CDs in stores, one does trade for the music.
One does not ussualy conduct commerce in mundane goods, like yams and corn and tires and TVs, without there being an element of trade, without a profit to be made. In distinction there is a venerable tradition of giving away art works to all comers for free, from the public plays of ancient Athens, through the cathedrals of the Renaissance and the museums of the Enlightenment, to the Free Software movement of today. Given the choice, Metallica place their products in the category of yams and corn, that's all.
> Literacy was far higher in De Tocqueville's time than it is today.
Do you have any statistics on that? I find that very unlikely. And I'm not gonna cheat, though I suppose I could, and ask, "Oh yeah, does that percentage include the slaves?"
> The only thing we need government for is to > build roads, and fund the police and military.
You read slashdot, that means you respect numbers, right? These industrialized countries which have national health care achieve longer life expectancies than the U.S. with its profit-driven corporate-extortion system, at between 50 and 75 percent of our cost.
Returning to the subject, which is public primary schools, I know of no country in all the world that entrusts the whole of its elementary education to private enterprise. You want us to be the first? You want to experiment? With my kids?
I don't have good figures, so this is at best an educated guess, but just from regularly looking at the crime news in the papers, I'd be willing to bet a decent amount of money that playing football is strongly correlated with violent crime, especially strong-arm assault and rape.
Between the egomania arising from the typical jock's sense of impunity, with typical high-school or college administrations treating him as though he were rich or something like that, and the psychological effects of all that disgusting chronic hormone-abuse, it makes perfect sense to assume that being a jock is a red flag warning of sociopathy.
You may find this hard to believe, but my oldest daughter, who is graduating from high school next month, has gotten a first-rate high school education in a public "magnet school," Tampa Bay Tech, in Tampa, Florida.
Yes, Florida! I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. I went to Florida public schools thirty years ago, and back then my school was absurdly bad. Not that they couldn't have been worse - at least my school's teachers didn't, for example, physically abuse the Jews in their classes because those Jewish students wouldn't accept that Christian Coalition parody of Jesus as their personal Savior. But I hardly learned anything in my high school classes and I was bored practically to madness. In contrast, my daughter's classes have been really hard and challenging, so she will be well prepared for her college classes next year. I wish I could have gone to a school as good as hers when I was her age.
The secret to the success of the "magnet schools" is that if a student is lazy or a troublemaker, the school authorities are allowed to kick him right out and send him back to the ordinary, high-school-as-day-care schools.
My biggest problem with the "magnet school" program is that it is too exclusive. It's great if you can get in, but for every student that is accepted into the program there are three applicants. As the "magnet schools" don't cost significantly more than the regular schools, which, as you rightly note, are more accurately described as baby-sitting compounds than educational institutions, I don't see any reason why the local school board doesn't immediately expand the "magnet school" program so that all the applicants, or at least all the ones who are academically qualified, can get in.
Incidentally, all three of my kids skipped out of public schools for the first few grades, instead doing home-schooling.
Why doesn't every family home-school? The answer should be obvious. When I was a kid, the average U.S. family had one parent with an outside job and one parent who stayed at home and kept house. On that single income, that average family was able to afford a house, a car, a TV, and the rest of the usual middle-class trappings. But in the last thirty years or so, the wealthy class, who control the prices and wages for the rest of us, have arranged things so that if the average family wants to own a house, both parents must work. While inflation disguises the effect, the fact remains that the American working class has thus gotten a massive effective pay cut over the last generation. Productivity is up, too, but that rich, powerful minority sequesters every cent of the excess wealth that is produced, resulting in America's ever-widening gulf between the median income and the income of the richest fraction.
Yeah, it's real neato. It used to be, before I got a TW cable modem running into a $250 P-100 running Linux and ipmasq, that the only way people in my office could get to the internet, and thus to email, was by running a modem into the telephone line. Several people had AOL accounts of their own, not knowing any better. Well, they'd get hold of a modem and grab their AOL CD, and install away on the PC at their desk, so they could do that email thing right? and that Satanic AOL Adapter would insensibly insinuate itself deep into their PC's system, and the next time they booted up, gee, they couldn't get to their files on the I: drive any more, is the network down?
But that was a version or two back, and the AOL interface might have changed some since then, maybe even for the better. I mean, surely all the guys that wrote the one I had such fun with have all been brutally murdered by now, haven't they? And it so happens that I have to put together a new computer tomorrow at work, and there has got to be one of those "500 hours FREE!" CDs of theirs lying around, so, aren't I curious? Hmmm....naah.
You know, these business idiots can never leave well enough alone, and even now you bet there are memos fluttering around the offices of TW/AOL about how they can "synergize" the combination of AOL and TW's cable modem service. I use TW's RoadRunner at three sites. It works great and I like it, but I have to wonder and unhappily anticipate, how and when are they going to screw it all up?
It wouldn't have anything to do with the way that every new computer I see has their tickytacky software pre-installed on it, or the fact that most houses get their introductory offer CDs in the mail, attached to the newspaper, or stuffed into various merchandise about once every month, would it? But I think the most important thing is that their cheesy Win9x interface software automatically installs all the crap you need to punch your way out to the net with a whole lot less effort than their competitors's stuff.
This is slashdot, right? lots of tech types at least familiar with PCs here, right? OK readers, raise your hands, please, if you have ever, over the telephone, walked someone through installing TCP/IP in Win9x for a connection to a regular ISP. My, that's a lot of hands. Wsn't that remote telephone installation a pain in the ass? Remember where you told Mr.-or-Ms. New-B to go get his Windows installation CD, and the reply "Well I've got one but I don't know where it is..."? Remember the part where you explain to him or her what a DNS server's IP address is, and how one goes about finding it? (Catch-22 - you search the "support" section of the ISP's web page!) All these technicalities probably seem trivial to slashdot readers, but they are a sheer wall of incomprehension barring the new, computer-ignorant user. Hell, not that I am a hot hacker and I never took CS in college or anything like that but I wrote my first production C program six years before the day I first tried getting connected to a regular ISP out of Win9x, and I still couldn't get it to work until I called the ISPs 1-800 number and had a tech walk me through TCP/IP configuration.
In contrast, when the sucker, I mean user, sticks in that fatal AOL CD, and it loads up his system with all that bizarre toxic system software they use (don't get me started on that God Damned AOL ADAPTER &^%$#%$^&*), at least that user doesn't have to supply much more than the local area code, his desired AOL screen name, and his credit card number. Your Grandma can install AOL on her new Presario with a 95+% likelihood of success, and that's why AOL is so hot today. The guy who designed and implemented the AOL install is a true unsung genius and the true secret Promethean fountainhead of the vast AOL fortune. I'll bet that money-wise, he didn't get jack as a reward for all his boundless wealth-creation either, alas.
Those monopolies which you list are so heavily regulated by various governments that they are, in a sense, part of public government, and not privately-run companies motivated solely by the quest for increased profit. Otherwise, your local electric company would charge as high a price as the market could bear, and poor people would spend their nights in the dark. (For a case in point read chapters 27 and 28 of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, "The Path To Power.")
In distinction, what this article is describing is a news monopoly which is not regulated by the government, and through it, by the voting population. Instead, the news media to a great extent control that government, by shaping the opinions of the voters. The whole threat of privately-managed, unregulated monopolies is that "we the market" can't "cut these folks down to size."
are you referring to the government itself, or the people residing within the state? the latter seems more likely...
instead go here and read the article itself; it deals with environmental pollution.
And where you say
the tenth point, "The U.S. and NATO Deliberately Started the War with Yugoslavia", just seems pathetic.
it's awful to hear you uncritically buy into the official story, that's the whole point of the article! The NATO assault against Yugoslavia - the aerial slaughter of the Albanian refugees and the Serbian civilians, the precision bombing raids against schools and hospitals, that appalling attack against the Chinese embassy which the CIA still asks us to accept as an accident, the targeting of the Serbian television outlets (which, I'll s-p-e-l-l out for you, was intended to prevent their side from broadcasting bombing-campaign video from the ground to the world; that is, the real target was your consciousness) - the whole deliberate hypocritical exercise in neo-fascism - read the "Project Censored"citation here - was sold to the American public by a systematic program of lies - "PSYOPS" - out of the news media in direct collaboration with U.S. military intelligence.
Think about what you know for a minute: how long ago did you become acquainted with the place name "Kosovo"? and who where and how did "Kosovo" come to your attention? and what "facts" do you know - the more accurate word is believe about the last three years's events in Kosovo? The answer: what the giants of the mass media, under the direct, immediate supervision of Army intelligence specialists in "pychological operations," want you to believe. And on the basis of this paper-thin synthetic "belief," after merely reading the title of the article, you dismiss that article as "pathetic."
As far as what you interpret as left-wing bias at Project Censored: such a bias may exist, but so what? While groping in the ddark-and-fog of nescience, trying to get a handle on what's going on in this farflung world, it's only good sense to take advantage of existing inter-party animosities. I rely on left-wingers to alert me to the follies, excesses and crimes of the right wing, and I rely on right-wingers to do the same regarding the follies, excesses and crimes of the left. So should you.
> Insanity, wrap your warm and arousing arms around > me and keep away the cold, pallid tendrils of > sanctioned normalcy. Let the insane create, innovate > and explore and leave the sane to sit in their offices > counting numbers and selling their soul so they can > go home and feed the mouths of their offspring for one more day.
Excuse, or don't excuse, the ill-temper of this reply. But I can't fucking wait for this guy to find his own self in that office, with that chronic clinical insanity of his so debilitating that he can't create innovate or explore shit any more these last few years, and all he can do is count numbers and feed his kids; then, as the mind-eating illness deepens, he starts to get to the point where he can't even do that; and then let's see how the fuck he likes it. Being depressed all the fucking time is shit, it grinds your life to mud, and there is nothing nothing nothing at all worthwhile or redeeming about it.
How much does the average American spend on cable TV? And what does he get out of it? Let's see; he gets so-called news, that's so befouled with propaganda and advertising that he'd be better off without it, total value zero or less, and besides and beyond that, he gets entertainment, he gets fantasy.
Let me bypass for now any critique of the goodness or lousiness of the mass-entertainment media. When that TV watcher, or movie-goer, or novel-reader is taking in that entertainment, what's going on in his head? Well, it's a fair guess that when a guy in a theatre watches James Bond driving the exotic sports car with the amazingly beautiful babe in the short skirt next to him, he, the watcher, projects his fantasy-self into that driver's seat. It ain't real, everybody knows that, but that diverting fantasy is worth the cost of the movie ticket.
In order to enjoy a similarly unrealistic fantasy, one that I compose in my own head out of an odd lot of various old acquisitive dreams, I buy a lottery ticket every couple of weeks. I have been able to calculate the likelihood of winning a lottery since I was about twelve; I'm perfectly aware that for all practical purposes, it is equal to zero.
but they don't actually enforce the tax. If I, a Florida resident, buy a $2000 computer from out of state, whether I buy it via mail order, a long-distance telephone call, or from a web page, by law, I am supposed to send the sales tax in to the Department of Revenue.
Not one private individual in a hundred does this of course, but it is the law. In fact, when I ask around, it turns out that practically no one even knows that such a law exists. However, many businesses do pay the sales tax on interstate purchases, because they might get audited.
The Federal Constitution may prohibit taxing a seller in another state, but in Florida the legal reasoning is that sales tax is levied against the buyer; the seller merely collects the sales tax from the buyer to forward to the state.
I think this is merely a fairness issue; why should our local businesses, in effect, subsidize big interstate operations like amazon.com? And why should businesses which are fixed in place, due to the nature of their merchandise - I'm thinking of, for example, hardware stores, automobile dealerships, pool supply stores, nurseries - subsidize stores which happen to sell products better adapted to interstate transportation? If taxpayers are really concerned about this being a stealthy method to increase taxes, which is not a completely unreasonable consideration, then states could tax interstate and in-state sales alike at a slightly lower rate, so that the total revenue stays the same.
I'll admit that I would like to see the internet/stockmarket bubble pop sooner rather than later, as the resulting damage to the overall economy would probably be less; and eliminating the effective subsidy of these absurd internet companies with their P/E ratios of 1500 to 1 might, I hope, help kill off this twenty-first century tulipm ania faster.
Keep in mind that when this bubble does pop, it won't be the high-flyers who will get stuck with the bill. It will be just like with the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout (which was President Bush's very first act in office). When the boom goes bust the guilty rich will keep all their illicit profits; to relieve the inflationary pressure upon holders of securities, more-god-than-man Alan Greenspan will promptly engineer massive unemployment; and those of us in the working classes who still have jobs will cover, out of our taxes, all the losses.
Yeah, sure, that Saudi theory you find so enchanting works just great. You understand, don't you, that if you had happened to have been born in Saudi Arabia there would be about a one-hundred-to-one chance that you would be in that rights-free class that gets their hands chopped off for trivial offenses, rather than being, as you fantasize, in that lofty class which decides, from far above, who gets chopped.
You might not like life so well in that class. You might dislike it so much that, sooner or later, you might find yourself in the streets doing what the Iranians did, which was to charge His Majesty's guards's machine guns and overrun His Majesty's Palace; whereupon, of course, you would probably just find yourself under a new-and-different yet somehow-the-same dictatorship, next year.
Hell, if you admire Saudi-style totalitarianism so very much, why don't you move on to the next logical step: Khmer Rouge-style justice? By God, if you simply kill everyone just watch that all-important crime rate drop to zero.
"Tell that bold Prussian that praises slaughter, slaughter brings rout."
It isn't like any normal consumers can afford > one of those chips anyways.
Well I sure can't. But 1 GHz chips I can't afford means remaindered or price-slashed 700 MHz chips that maybe I can afford. Not that you need a fast machine to run Linux - my Linux box is a P5-100 - but if you're running an MS OS, damn buddy, think how fast Turbo C v.2 is gonna run on one of those! Go Intel & AMD!
Microsoft confessed responsibility today for the epidemic of exploding CPUs, which they attribute to a bug in their new "Hardware Upgrade Wizard." CEO Steve Ballmer explained in an interview today on MSNBC:
"Microsoft has recently been severely criticized for 'bloatware,' or large, resource-intensive programs which require modern, high-performance systems to achieve adequate performance. But we at Microsoft are devoted to bringing our customers new, innovative technologies, to take users 'where they want to go today.' And since the hardware exists today, giving us the opportunity to work out our new visions for twenty-first century computing, we feel it is our obligation to use it to the maximum degree possible."
"However, we're fully aware that this trend toward greater functionality, and hence toward greater complexity and size of the code, might leave our customers with 'legacy systems' in the lurch, so to speak. So we have spent over three hundred million dollars in a secret project to develop our unique and patented 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard'. With this exciting new technology, we can remotely rewrite the traces in the silicon substrate of you CPU chip while it is running!. The 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard' is capable of engraving components in-situ right upon the silicon chip of your own old, obsolete CPU, with a feature size of less that 0.07 microns. Thus, even on the relatively small chip in a 386 CPU, we can fit the entire circuitry of an up-to-date Pentium III chip; and since the trace size is so small, that new re-engraved chip, with over eight million components, actually runs cooler and with a smaller current consumption than it did, pre-re-engraving, when it was a 386 with a mere 360,000 components. Thus any putative problem arising from the yeast-like growth of our code base becomes, simply, 'no problem.'"
"And we decided, rather than releasing this new application for download from our website, instead, in the playful spirit of April Fools, we would surprise all our faithful customers by remotely upgrading their old, slow PCs without their knowledge, so that the next time they turned them on, the lucky users would discover that they now enjoyed, absolutely for free, the sizzling performance of a new, state-of-the-art system!
The method we used to remotely install the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard' was a variation on the standard "Melissa" email trojan-horse, using the exclusive 'Virus Propagation Wizard' built in to every copy of our popular, best-of-breed Outlook email client software. Our engineers started sending out our little surprise gift on Sunday, March 26, 2000."
"To our dismay, reports started filtering in over the next few days about a small, unforeseen bug in the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard,' somehow un-caught in our extensive beta testing program, where the energy released in the course of the in-situ re-engraving, rather than being released slowly and being drawn off and dissipated by the heat sink, instead is released all at once over a period approximately equal to time it takes photons to cross the width of the chip, in a fashion similar to a Q-switched laser, resulting in a violently exothermic burst of hard radiation."
"All of us here at Microsoft are deeply sorry about the property damage and loss of life caused by this unforseeable software 'glitch.' However, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. We at Microsoft explicity deny any legal liability for any unfortunate side-effects of the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard.' Anyone who was affected by this software malfunction clearly must have clicked through the license agreement for Microsoft Outlook. You will see, in section 114A, paragraph 32, line 178, of the license agreement for Microsoft Outlook, a clear disavowal of any responsibility 'for damages or injuries arising from the use of the Software.' Thus we are clearly exculpated from liability for any resultant damages."
"In other words: You bought it, now you eat it! Suckers."
I know this is off-topic in slashdot and all but did you say BEEFHEART FIRST EDITIONS? And where can I get these things? Specifically where can I get Lick My Decals Off Baby, that I've been looking for for about five years now? I really would appreciate a pointer.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:hey, I have an idea...
on
Two By Katz
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> This was almost a year ago that that stuff > happened, I don't think it's recent anymore.
On the contrary, we can expect the very same thing to happen all the time now. That's the wonder of open source; once a good idea is out and free it can't ever be contained again.
What do you mean "standards"? When I think of standards I think of organizations like ISO and the excruciatingly detailed documents they publicly issue and maintain. In contrast a.) MS "standards" change every three years, and b.) no one outside MS is allowed to know what those "standards" are.
I may be too obtuse to get the joke and you could just be kidding, but I'm not kidding.
Slashdot Mirror
> proving that the LGPL actually have fewer restrictions,
> and is therefore more free.
But "free" is a word with multiple meanings, all of them vague as well. For example you could argue that a nation which drafted its citizens into an army which could repel a hostile invasion was free-er than a nation with no draft, which proved impotent against invasion. Or maybe not. Or that citizens who pay taxes, on official demand, to support a police force which makes it possible to walk the streets at night, is free-er than a country which has no police at all and the accompanying crime you'd expect. You might argue the opposite of that too.
"Free" is commonly used to mean "unconstrained," or it could mean "unoppressed," two notions which are sometimes at odds. Excuse me for being so picky over just one word, but I've seen this same argument, based on one meaning of "free," elsewhere in comments to this article, where the word "free" is used as a solid building block in the foundation of a syllogism.
Beside its literal meaning, "free" is also a really great cheerleading word. People love to hear the word "free," they thrill inside a bit whenever they hear it, which is why it is so often employed, in so bewildering a variety of meanings, in so much persuasive writing, such as Mr. Stallman's.
If by "free" what you mean is no restraint, and if that's what you value the most, then it's clear that simple public domain is the way to go; anything less, any license at all, is an attempt to keep a grip on "your property." Not that there's anything so inherently wrong with the idea of "your property," when after all, you wrote it!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Also, if a commercial software company like Microsoft loses capital, it directly affects their software, since the programmers at Microsoft are working for money, and if they stop getting paid then they stop coding immediately. But the Linux developers are not working for money. Even if all the RedHats and VA Linuxes in the world go under, it still will not affect the world-wide Linux development team. And even if corporations decide they can't buy into Linux without there being other big corporations to support it, that won't affect the Linux developers either.
Keeping to my fixed policy of always looking for the silver lining in things, I conceive that the de-marketizing of Linux could be a good thing. Let's imagine some caffeine-soaked hacker hard at work past midnight, expanding the capabilities of Linux by adding some nifty new feature. In the back of his mind he's worrying about Metallica and the RIAA ("Somebody this evil hacker doesn't know, in another far-off country, might possibly use his software to listen to a recording - our property - which otherwise he wouldn't buy anyway! Sue him! Destroy him!"). He also has to worry about the FBI ("So, Congressmen, in the pursuit of upholding the all-important interests of America's burgeoning internet commerce sector, and in order to protect America against terrorists, we are asking for the right to make no-knock, no-warrant raids on any nefarious criminal hacker suspected of being in possesion of anything on this list of proscribed hacking tools: GCC, Perl, EMACS..."). He also has to worry about the American Family Association ("Yes, my brethren and sistern! These hackers, wallowing in their sinister subculture of pornography, drug abuse, body piercing and free speech, are the loathsome spawn of Satan and they must all be burned! Now! Are you with me?")
Atop all these other dismal preoccupations nowadays, it's possible, if our hacker has a gloomy disposition, that he also reflects as follows: "Here I am, it's the middle of the night, and I'm working my ass off trying to make this &^%$# code work. And when I get done and I give it away, then what? Well, some multi-billion dollar company is going to distribute the Hell out of it, for which I will get $0.00, and packs of snobby yuppie jackasses, jabbering to their brokers over their cell phones as the drive around in their BMWs and Benzes, are going to make a killing off all the hubbub. Yecch. Think I'll go play Quake instead."
Now you wouldn't want our imaginary hacker to get depressed, would you? Gee, I sure wouldn't. So let Wall Street go up in smoke, it's all good! Go away, get lost, go bankrupt, you pesky money men, and let our people hack!
Optimistically yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Are you sure you need 15V to run your laptop? I've got an old Toshiba Libretto 50 which runs fine on 12V but only after you send it a brief jolt of 15V to convince the power management hardware that there actually is an external power source connected. To get the 12 V I use cheap sealed lead-acid camcorder batteries (Radio Shack 22-187 or equivalent), which I can get for as little as $25 each, and which run my Libretto for about three or four hours or so on one charge. I got the idea and plans from Xin Feng's web page, thanks Dr. Feng! Certainly a little doodad with a couple of 9V batteries will be easier to handle than a big inverter plus your laptop's AC adapter, and you can carry a camcorder battery or two around with you.
My Libretto runs Linux too; in fact it's a bit underpowered for them new-fangled power-suckin MS OSes, but Linux just sprints along on it, though it's a bit of a trick getting it installed because of the weird external floppy drive that doesn't work with Linux boot discs. Basically my trick was to yank the HD and get an adapter so I could hook up the Libretto's 2.5" hard drive to a normal 40-pin IDE connector like you see in a desktop machine.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I'll fire up emacs and talk with the shrink, he's smarter than you.
Now I have practically unlimited respect for Richard Stallman, but there's no way emacs is smarter than my G 80md. (I held back for a while, G, so you'd have a clear stage from which to lay down yo rap.) Not only is he a philosopher but he's also an artist and you being French it ought to come natural for you to respect an artist. A troll artist that is!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> "It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being
> traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."
Of course this is perfectly backwards. With Napster there is no "trading," one gives away copies of the files absolutely for free. In every other transaction concerning Metallica's products that I can think of, including legitimate sales of CDs in stores, one does trade for the music.
One does not ussualy conduct commerce in mundane goods, like yams and corn and tires and TVs, without there being an element of trade, without a profit to be made. In distinction there is a venerable tradition of giving away art works to all comers for free, from the public plays of ancient Athens, through the cathedrals of the Renaissance and the museums of the Enlightenment, to the Free Software movement of today. Given the choice, Metallica place their products in the category of yams and corn, that's all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Literacy was far higher in De Tocqueville's time than it is today.
Do you have any statistics on that? I find that very unlikely. And I'm not gonna cheat, though I suppose I could, and ask, "Oh yeah, does that percentage include the slaves?"
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> The only thing we need government for is to
> build roads, and fund the police and military.
You read slashdot, that means you respect numbers, right? These industrialized countries which have national health care achieve longer life expectancies than the U.S. with its profit-driven corporate-extortion system, at between 50 and 75 percent of our cost.
Returning to the subject, which is public primary schools, I know of no country in all the world that entrusts the whole of its elementary education to private enterprise. You want us to be the first? You want to experiment? With my kids?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I don't have good figures, so this is at best an educated guess, but just from regularly looking at the crime news in the papers, I'd be willing to bet a decent amount of money that playing football is strongly correlated with violent crime, especially strong-arm assault and rape.
Between the egomania arising from the typical jock's sense of impunity, with typical high-school or college administrations treating him as though he were rich or something like that, and the psychological effects of all that disgusting chronic hormone-abuse, it makes perfect sense to assume that being a jock is a red flag warning of sociopathy.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You may find this hard to believe, but my oldest daughter, who is graduating from high school next month, has gotten a first-rate high school education in a public "magnet school," Tampa Bay Tech, in Tampa, Florida.
Yes, Florida! I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. I went to Florida public schools thirty years ago, and back then my school was absurdly bad. Not that they couldn't have been worse - at least my school's teachers didn't, for example, physically abuse the Jews in their classes because those Jewish students wouldn't accept that Christian Coalition parody of Jesus as their personal Savior. But I hardly learned anything in my high school classes and I was bored practically to madness. In contrast, my daughter's classes have been really hard and challenging, so she will be well prepared for her college classes next year. I wish I could have gone to a school as good as hers when I was her age.
The secret to the success of the "magnet schools" is that if a student is lazy or a troublemaker, the school authorities are allowed to kick him right out and send him back to the ordinary, high-school-as-day-care schools.
My biggest problem with the "magnet school" program is that it is too exclusive. It's great if you can get in, but for every student that is accepted into the program there are three applicants. As the "magnet schools" don't cost significantly more than the regular schools, which, as you rightly note, are more accurately described as baby-sitting compounds than educational institutions, I don't see any reason why the local school board doesn't immediately expand the "magnet school" program so that all the applicants, or at least all the ones who are academically qualified, can get in.
Incidentally, all three of my kids skipped out of public schools for the first few grades, instead doing home-schooling.
Why doesn't every family home-school? The answer should be obvious. When I was a kid, the average U.S. family had one parent with an outside job and one parent who stayed at home and kept house. On that single income, that average family was able to afford a house, a car, a TV, and the rest of the usual middle-class trappings. But in the last thirty years or so, the wealthy class, who control the prices and wages for the rest of us, have arranged things so that if the average family wants to own a house, both parents must work. While inflation disguises the effect, the fact remains that the American working class has thus gotten a massive effective pay cut over the last generation. Productivity is up, too, but that rich, powerful minority sequesters every cent of the excess wealth that is produced, resulting in America's ever-widening gulf between the median income and the income of the richest fraction.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, it's real neato. It used to be, before I got a TW cable modem running into a $250 P-100 running Linux and ipmasq, that the only way people in my office could get to the internet, and thus to email, was by running a modem into the telephone line. Several people had AOL accounts of their own, not knowing any better. Well, they'd get hold of a modem and grab their AOL CD, and install away on the PC at their desk, so they could do that email thing right? and that Satanic AOL Adapter would insensibly insinuate itself deep into their PC's system, and the next time they booted up, gee, they couldn't get to their files on the I: drive any more, is the network down?
But that was a version or two back, and the AOL interface might have changed some since then, maybe even for the better. I mean, surely all the guys that wrote the one I had such fun with have all been brutally murdered by now, haven't they? And it so happens that I have to put together a new computer tomorrow at work, and there has got to be one of those "500 hours FREE!" CDs of theirs lying around, so, aren't I curious? Hmmm....naah.
You know, these business idiots can never leave well enough alone, and even now you bet there are memos fluttering around the offices of TW/AOL about how they can "synergize" the combination of AOL and TW's cable modem service. I use TW's RoadRunner at three sites. It works great and I like it, but I have to wonder and unhappily anticipate, how and when are they going to screw it all up?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It wouldn't have anything to do with the way that every new computer I see has their tickytacky software pre-installed on it, or the fact that most houses get their introductory offer CDs in the mail, attached to the newspaper, or stuffed into various merchandise about once every month, would it? But I think the most important thing is that their cheesy Win9x interface software automatically installs all the crap you need to punch your way out to the net with a whole lot less effort than their competitors's stuff.
This is slashdot, right? lots of tech types at least familiar with PCs here, right? OK readers, raise your hands, please, if you have ever, over the telephone, walked someone through installing TCP/IP in Win9x for a connection to a regular ISP. My, that's a lot of hands. Wsn't that remote telephone installation a pain in the ass? Remember where you told Mr.-or-Ms. New-B to go get his Windows installation CD, and the reply "Well I've got one but I don't know where it is..."? Remember the part where you explain to him or her what a DNS server's IP address is, and how one goes about finding it? (Catch-22 - you search the "support" section of the ISP's web page!) All these technicalities probably seem trivial to slashdot readers, but they are a sheer wall of incomprehension barring the new, computer-ignorant user. Hell, not that I am a hot hacker and I never took CS in college or anything like that but I wrote my first production C program six years before the day I first tried getting connected to a regular ISP out of Win9x, and I still couldn't get it to work until I called the ISPs 1-800 number and had a tech walk me through TCP/IP configuration.
In contrast, when the sucker, I mean user, sticks in that fatal AOL CD, and it loads up his system with all that bizarre toxic system software they use (don't get me started on that God Damned AOL ADAPTER &^%$#%$^&*), at least that user doesn't have to supply much more than the local area code, his desired AOL screen name, and his credit card number. Your Grandma can install AOL on her new Presario with a 95+% likelihood of success, and that's why AOL is so hot today. The guy who designed and implemented the AOL install is a true unsung genius and the true secret Promethean fountainhead of the vast AOL fortune. I'll bet that money-wise, he didn't get jack as a reward for all his boundless wealth-creation either, alas.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Nice shot, mkwilbur! Thanks!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Those monopolies which you list are so heavily regulated by various governments that they are, in a sense, part of public government, and not privately-run companies motivated solely by the quest for increased profit. Otherwise, your local electric company would charge as high a price as the market could bear, and poor people would spend their nights in the dark. (For a case in point read chapters 27 and 28 of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, "The Path To Power.")
In distinction, what this article is describing is a news monopoly which is not regulated by the government, and through it, by the voting population. Instead, the news media to a great extent control that government, by shaping the opinions of the voters. The whole threat of privately-managed, unregulated monopolies is that "we the market" can't "cut these folks down to size."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Don't say
are you referring to the government itself, or the people residing within the state? the latter seems more likely...
instead go here and read the article itself; it deals with environmental pollution.
And where you say
the tenth point, "The U.S. and NATO Deliberately Started the War with Yugoslavia", just seems pathetic.
it's awful to hear you uncritically buy into the official story, that's the whole point of the article! The NATO assault against Yugoslavia - the aerial slaughter of the Albanian refugees and the Serbian civilians, the precision bombing raids against schools and hospitals, that appalling attack against the Chinese embassy which the CIA still asks us to accept as an accident, the targeting of the Serbian television outlets (which, I'll s-p-e-l-l out for you, was intended to prevent their side from broadcasting bombing-campaign video from the ground to the world; that is, the real target was your consciousness) - the whole deliberate hypocritical exercise in neo-fascism - read the "Project Censored"citation here - was sold to the American public by a systematic program of lies - "PSYOPS" - out of the news media in direct collaboration with U.S. military intelligence.
Think about what you know for a minute: how long ago did you become acquainted with the place name "Kosovo"? and who where and how did "Kosovo" come to your attention? and what "facts" do you know - the more accurate word is believe about the last three years's events in Kosovo? The answer: what the giants of the mass media, under the direct, immediate supervision of Army intelligence specialists in "pychological operations," want you to believe. And on the basis of this paper-thin synthetic "belief," after merely reading the title of the article, you dismiss that article as "pathetic."
As far as what you interpret as left-wing bias at Project Censored: such a bias may exist, but so what? While groping in the ddark-and-fog of nescience, trying to get a handle on what's going on in this farflung world, it's only good sense to take advantage of existing inter-party animosities. I rely on left-wingers to alert me to the follies, excesses and crimes of the right wing, and I rely on right-wingers to do the same regarding the follies, excesses and crimes of the left. So should you.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Insanity, wrap your warm and arousing arms around
> me and keep away the cold, pallid tendrils of
> sanctioned normalcy. Let the insane create, innovate
> and explore and leave the sane to sit in their offices
> counting numbers and selling their soul so they can
> go home and feed the mouths of their offspring for one more day.
Excuse, or don't excuse, the ill-temper of this reply. But I can't fucking wait for this guy to find his own self in that office, with that chronic clinical insanity of his so debilitating that he can't create innovate or explore shit any more these last few years, and all he can do is count numbers and feed his kids; then, as the mind-eating illness deepens, he starts to get to the point where he can't even do that; and then let's see how the fuck he likes it. Being depressed all the fucking time is shit, it grinds your life to mud, and there is nothing nothing nothing at all worthwhile or redeeming about it.
Sincerely WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
How much does the average American spend on cable TV? And what does he get out of it? Let's see; he gets so-called news, that's so befouled with propaganda and advertising that he'd be better off without it, total value zero or less, and besides and beyond that, he gets entertainment, he gets fantasy.
Let me bypass for now any critique of the goodness or lousiness of the mass-entertainment media. When that TV watcher, or movie-goer, or novel-reader is taking in that entertainment, what's going on in his head? Well, it's a fair guess that when a guy in a theatre watches James Bond driving the exotic sports car with the amazingly beautiful babe in the short skirt next to him, he, the watcher, projects his fantasy-self into that driver's seat. It ain't real, everybody knows that, but that diverting fantasy is worth the cost of the movie ticket.
In order to enjoy a similarly unrealistic fantasy, one that I compose in my own head out of an odd lot of various old acquisitive dreams, I buy a lottery ticket every couple of weeks. I have been able to calculate the likelihood of winning a lottery since I was about twelve; I'm perfectly aware that for all practical purposes, it is equal to zero.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
but they don't actually enforce the tax. If I, a Florida resident, buy a $2000 computer from out of state, whether I buy it via mail order, a long-distance telephone call, or from a web page, by law, I am supposed to send the sales tax in to the Department of Revenue.
Not one private individual in a hundred does this of course, but it is the law. In fact, when I ask around, it turns out that practically no one even knows that such a law exists. However, many businesses do pay the sales tax on interstate purchases, because they might get audited.
The Federal Constitution may prohibit taxing a seller in another state, but in Florida the legal reasoning is that sales tax is levied against the buyer; the seller merely collects the sales tax from the buyer to forward to the state.
I think this is merely a fairness issue; why should our local businesses, in effect, subsidize big interstate operations like amazon.com? And why should businesses which are fixed in place, due to the nature of their merchandise - I'm thinking of, for example, hardware stores, automobile dealerships, pool supply stores, nurseries - subsidize stores which happen to sell products better adapted to interstate transportation? If taxpayers are really concerned about this being a stealthy method to increase taxes, which is not a completely unreasonable consideration, then states could tax interstate and in-state sales alike at a slightly lower rate, so that the total revenue stays the same.
I'll admit that I would like to see the internet/stockmarket bubble pop sooner rather than later, as the resulting damage to the overall economy would probably be less; and eliminating the effective subsidy of these absurd internet companies with their P/E ratios of 1500 to 1 might, I hope, help kill off this twenty-first century tulipm ania faster.
Keep in mind that when this bubble does pop, it won't be the high-flyers who will get stuck with the bill. It will be just like with the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout (which was President Bush's very first act in office). When the boom goes bust the guilty rich will keep all their illicit profits; to relieve the inflationary pressure upon holders of securities, more-god-than-man Alan Greenspan will promptly engineer massive unemployment; and those of us in the working classes who still have jobs will cover, out of our taxes, all the losses.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Wanna get fussy
your last post was not haiku
instead it's senryu
Ah so WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, sure, that Saudi theory you find so enchanting works just great. You understand, don't you, that if you had happened to have been born in Saudi Arabia there would be about a one-hundred-to-one chance that you would be in that rights-free class that gets their hands chopped off for trivial offenses, rather than being, as you fantasize, in that lofty class which decides, from far above, who gets chopped.
You might not like life so well in that class. You might dislike it so much that, sooner or later, you might find yourself in the streets doing what the Iranians did, which was to charge His Majesty's guards's machine guns and overrun His Majesty's Palace; whereupon, of course, you would probably just find yourself under a new-and-different yet somehow-the-same dictatorship, next year.
Hell, if you admire Saudi-style totalitarianism so very much, why don't you move on to the next logical step: Khmer Rouge-style justice? By God, if you simply kill everyone just watch that all-important crime rate drop to zero.
"Tell that bold Prussian that praises slaughter, slaughter brings rout."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It isn't like any normal consumers can afford
> one of those chips anyways.
Well I sure can't. But 1 GHz chips I can't afford means remaindered or price-slashed 700 MHz chips that maybe I can afford. Not that you need a fast machine to run Linux - my Linux box is a P5-100 - but if you're running an MS OS, damn buddy, think how fast Turbo C v.2 is gonna run on one of those! Go Intel & AMD!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Microsoft confessed responsibility today for the epidemic of exploding CPUs, which they attribute to a bug in their new "Hardware Upgrade Wizard." CEO Steve Ballmer explained in an interview today on MSNBC:
"Microsoft has recently been severely criticized for 'bloatware,' or large, resource-intensive programs which require modern, high-performance systems to achieve adequate performance. But we at Microsoft are devoted to bringing our customers new, innovative technologies, to take users 'where they want to go today.' And since the hardware exists today, giving us the opportunity to work out our new visions for twenty-first century computing, we feel it is our obligation to use it to the maximum degree possible."
"However, we're fully aware that this trend toward greater functionality, and hence toward greater complexity and size of the code, might leave our customers with 'legacy systems' in the lurch, so to speak. So we have spent over three hundred million dollars in a secret project to develop our unique and patented 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard'. With this exciting new technology, we can remotely rewrite the traces in the silicon substrate of you CPU chip while it is running!. The 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard' is capable of engraving components in-situ right upon the silicon chip of your own old, obsolete CPU, with a feature size of less that 0.07 microns. Thus, even on the relatively small chip in a 386 CPU, we can fit the entire circuitry of an up-to-date Pentium III chip; and since the trace size is so small, that new re-engraved chip, with over eight million components, actually runs cooler and with a smaller current consumption than it did, pre-re-engraving, when it was a 386 with a mere 360,000 components. Thus any putative problem arising from the yeast-like growth of our code base becomes, simply, 'no problem.'"
"And we decided, rather than releasing this new application for download from our website, instead, in the playful spirit of April Fools, we would surprise all our faithful customers by remotely upgrading their old, slow PCs without their knowledge, so that the next time they turned them on, the lucky users would discover that they now enjoyed, absolutely for free, the sizzling performance of a new, state-of-the-art system!
The method we used to remotely install the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard' was a variation on the standard "Melissa" email trojan-horse, using the exclusive 'Virus Propagation Wizard' built in to every copy of our popular, best-of-breed Outlook email client software. Our engineers started sending out our little surprise gift on Sunday, March 26, 2000."
"To our dismay, reports started filtering in over the next few days about a small, unforeseen bug in the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard,' somehow un-caught in our extensive beta testing program, where the energy released in the course of the in-situ re-engraving, rather than being released slowly and being drawn off and dissipated by the heat sink, instead is released all at once over a period approximately equal to time it takes photons to cross the width of the chip, in a fashion similar to a Q-switched laser, resulting in a violently exothermic burst of hard radiation."
"All of us here at Microsoft are deeply sorry about the property damage and loss of life caused by this unforseeable software 'glitch.' However, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. We at Microsoft explicity deny any legal liability for any unfortunate side-effects of the 'Hardware Upgrade Wizard.' Anyone who was affected by this software malfunction clearly must have clicked through the license agreement for Microsoft Outlook. You will see, in section 114A, paragraph 32, line 178, of the license agreement for Microsoft Outlook, a clear disavowal of any responsibility 'for damages or injuries arising from the use of the Software.' Thus we are clearly exculpated from liability for any resultant damages."
"In other words: You bought it, now you eat it! Suckers."
Recklessly courting a libel suit, I remain,
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> German is very guteral and so even saying
> "I love you" sounds like you're declaring war!
Well, Christ, when you say "I love you" you are declaring war.
Yours WD "purple heart" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
I know this is off-topic in slashdot and all but did you say BEEFHEART FIRST EDITIONS ? And where can I get these things? Specifically where can I get Lick My Decals Off Baby , that I've been looking for for about five years now? I really would appreciate a pointer.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> This was almost a year ago that that stuff
> happened, I don't think it's recent anymore.
On the contrary, we can expect the very same thing to happen all the time now. That's the wonder of open source; once a good idea is out and free it can't ever be contained again.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
What do you mean "standards"? When I think of standards I think of organizations like ISO and the excruciatingly detailed documents they publicly issue and maintain. In contrast a.) MS "standards" change every three years, and b.) no one outside MS is allowed to know what those "standards" are.
I may be too obtuse to get the joke and you could just be kidding, but I'm not kidding.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net