You read Bill Burroughs and you complain about "run-on verbiage"? Sorry, but something here just doesn't quite compute. Perhaps you are thinking of Edgar Rice Burroughs?
You don't suppose this has anything to do with the new Linux-based joint effort among the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese to create a kanji-friendly operating system? Just wondering. No paranoid conspiracy theory or anything. There *is* a certain element of "getting even" here, though, considering the US shot down a Japanese attempt to sell their own operating system with their computers sold in the US. I don't think we've seen the end of this titanic struggle, by any means.
As do many video games. You can't play an adventure game any more without some kind of cell phone or pager or whatever to communicate with offstage characters. At this rate, some bozo's going to try to patent breathing and it'll sail right through at the Patent Office. Hmmm... "Stop right there, Sonny. No breathing without a consent form from Barney's House of Discount Respiration."
I apologize for picking on the sleepless. I know what it can be like. You might want to consult a good psychiatrist, though. You obviously have some repressed aggression to deal with. Personally, when I get that way, I just find a dentist and beat the shit out of him, but that can have unexpected consequences....
So you determined it was rubbish by sitting on a print out of it and absorbing it by osmosis? Or was it just the link to Randi Rhodes that set you off? You'd better get some more of those little blood pressure pills the doctor gave you because, buddy, we're gonna retake the media from you demented little pinheads and you're gonna hear more of the same for a long time to come. Get used to it.
There is no "the minority" except the minority of one. Is it my imagination or is Slashdot the largest conglomeration of Sophists assembled in one place (at least virtually) in the history of the world?
You've obviously never read "The Turn of the Screw," by Henry James, which points up the fact that sentences are not limited to a few words, but can be perfectly grammatical and quite effective literarily and still take up, in the case of the aforementioned James novel, as much as a full page and more, though this kind of extended sentence structure does require a certain intellectual prowess on the part of the reader not normally required of those, like yourself, who feed on a steady diet of comic books and technical manuals, but then, I would expect nothing less from this bastion of Linux and Java and Microsoft bashing, an attitude with which I heartily agree but do not allow to get in the way of my other interests including the reading of books with sentences of more than a few words, an enumeration of which I will leave to the reader's imagination. Touche!
There was this ethics teacher at Central High School where I went many moons ago. Old Doc Samson, he of the miraculously overstuffed briefcase, would love to state the following: "The majority is always wrong," by which I suppose he meant that principles are not a matter of majority consent. They are a matter of personal reflection and commitment to what is right. That most Americans have never learned this lesson, have not even been afforded the opportunity to consider its consequences, is truly sad. That someone should cite the absence of serious opposition to a family dynasty whose current representative was once a partner of Osama bin Laden's brother is to justify the establishment of tyranny on the grounds of general mental weakness and intoxication with the modern equivalent of the Roman circuses. It is reprehensible. But worse than that, it is a product of the takeover of the media by the forces of neo-conservatism who never present anything but their prepackaged drivel to the all too gullible public. This is your freedom and democracy that we are supposedly exporting to the poor downtrodden Iraqis who at least have the gumption to stand up against a foreign invasion, no matter how high-minded in its original conception.
Forgeting for the moment that you don't even have the balls to hide behind a pseudonym, and also forgeting that folks like you complain on the one hand that folks don't give enough specifics when the whole corporate methodology consists of hiding behind a smokescreen of secrecy and proprietary IP, and on the other hand come up with silly little reposts like this that simply consist of hurling an epithet (look it up if you own a dictionary), what really galls me is that your definition of "troll" seems to be anyone who dares to think about anything but computer code and video games. People died for the freedoms you once took for granted, and not just guys in silly Revolutionary War garb, but millions of men who fought the forces of--no, not naziism and fascism, but--stupidity and ignorance and just plain tunnel vision during two world wars. But then you don't have to worry about the draft any more, so it's "Rah Rah Rah! for the home team and bring me another beer, Mabel" while the folks who joined up to elevate their status in society get shot and mangled and crippled and shipped home in a box as the folks we just "liberated" begin to understand that George's promises of free elections are no more true than his mythical weapons of mass destruction. How dare you....
Considering the moderating history of characters like you, I doubt very much if this guy is just trolling for karma points. He is, as distinguished from folks like you, actually expressing a political opinion about a specific piece of legislation, the so-called Patriot Act, which you obviously haven't read or you wouldn't be calling for specifics. That you're not bright enough to see the writing on the wall just puts you in the category of a lot of Germans before World War II. It doesn't make you objective and it doesn't make you enlightened. It just makes you look stupid, which isn't surprising because you obviously are. Some folks take freedom seriously. Others have the Constitution printed on toilet paper and think it's funny to wipe their butts on it. Guess which category you fall into? You want to give away your rights, go right ahead. You try to give away MY rights and you will answer for it. You think the Republicans will be in power forever? Don't take any long odds on little George staying out of jail for subversion of the electoral process. Stealing elections is a federal crime.
You really don't have a clue, do you? You think the fact that a bunch of little piggies feeding at the corporate trough represent anyone but their own greedy little power hungry selves? You think because after being subjected to a bunch of hot-button advertisements, people actually vote for them, that they somehow represent the best interests of the population?
Is that why the VOA is so easy to get here in Maryland? Maybe they're targeting all those Arabs in DC. I guess they could be considered "foreign." After all, our dear president seems to think they're the root of all evil, even to the point of targeting their journalists in Iraq.
"...back it up with at least a little bit of evidence."
I believe the preferred English expression is "Catch 22." You can't get to the Windows code--in fact it's a fundamental violation of the shrink-wrap agreement if you even attempt to reverse engineer it or just take a peek--but you insist on "evidence." There was a movie a while ago called "Screamers," in which AMBs (Autonomous Mobile Blades) would cut up soldiers, then drag them underground to be used in the manufacture of next generation weapons. Sound familiar?
Perhaps the Borg analogy is more to your liking? You are certainly familiar with M$'s overt policy of defeat or absorption? What was the line from Star Trek? It's hard to get here in the People's Former Republic: "Resistence is futile. You will be assimilated." Do you seriously think this is limited to the overt sphere?
As for the idiot who modded me down to "Untouchable," does anyone need any further proof? Just who exactly ARE these guys? You don't suppose they would like to identify themselves and their present employers and give a concise explication of their thought processes? Just for the record? After all, we don't want anyone here to imagine that their opinions are not being taken seriously in Washington. Come now, you're not afraid of a little daylight are you?
I suspect there's a lot more for them to worry about than spyware. Does anyone here seriously think that Bill Gates actually wrote the first version of Windows from scratch? Do you seriously think he has the intellectual capacity of a Linus Torvalds? You think SCO is a pain in the ass? Imagine someone with some spare bucks taking Bill and Company to court for borrowing their code. The mind boggles...
[Just an aside--but have you noticed that any suggestion that our elected representatives and their minions in Washington aren't pure and righteous as the driven snow gets consistently modded down by a seeming core of embedded government stooges? And this on a website with the political distribution of a Slashdot? Are they really THAT afraid of a bunch of informed geeks? Did you realise you were that important?]
"the foregoing powers"
The "foregoing powers" DO NOT include creating a federal police force, nor are they "vested by this constitution in the government of the United States."
Were you asleep the day they explained this in school, or do you just not understand the concept of a federal system?
The FBI is a huge problem. The FBI is an unconstitutional federal police force:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
John Ashcroft is guilty of subversion of the constitution. I just hope Kerry has the balls to prosecute these bastards, including Shrub for stealing the last election.
"The FBI will attempt to work with any provider in order to get the data they need to investigate a crime. If that is impossible to do in a 'reasonable amount of time' they have little choice but to confiscate the equipment in order to copy the existing data from the machines to conduct a forensic investigation. A reasonable amount of time is generally a couple of hours to a day. Believe me, the last thing some poor special agent wants to do is sift through TBs of customer crap and put a company out of business or under financial hardship."
So which field office do you work in, you disgusting minion of Ashcroft?
Not to even mention internet radio, but you can rent time on WBCQ shortwave (transmitter located in Maine) at ridiculously low prices and broadcast to the entire planet. And you can say virtually anything you want, though your listeners are limited to those with enough perception to own a world-band radio. The funny thing is that the owner started out in pirate radio.
Sorry. But the point was that there wouldn't have been a Newton or space travel without the basic concept that the sun didn't orbit around the Earth.
What was the topic again?;-)
Hey, it took centuries to get around to using Copernicus's orbital equations with spacecraft. This is the beauty of basic research. It eventually has a practical use, but you can't base its validity on how long it takes to use it. And you have to distinguish between research and the ability to invent something. As John W. Campbell once pointed out, the Classical Greeks had everything necessarily to invent the phonograph, though it wasn't until Edison that somebody got around to doing it. In that particular case, it was the mental rut into which the Greeks had worn themselves that kept them from making much practical progress, thus leading to the return to power of irrational religion and the eventual rise of the Dark Ages.
I was not specifically refering to constitutional prohibitions on the limiting of freedom of speech by the government. It is my personal opinion that freedom of speech is important in any environment, whether governmental or not. And whether this broader protection is guaranteed by any legal document or not, it is certainly a basic human right to be able to speak your mind as long as you don't infringe on the rights of others, for instance, my right not to have to wade though 500 pieces of junk email everyday.
Focusing on what is actually happening here, at the very least it appears that a particular company is using its monetary power to usurp the courts for the purpose of shutting up someone who, again at the very least, appears to be bringing up some rather embarrassing points about the history of a particular corporate executive associated with that company. It is certainly important that the public in general and investors in particular be aware of this history, for it directly affects the viability of that company.
The flaw in the system seems to be that it requires significant sums of money to defend oneself against this kind of attack, so that, in my own humble opinion, it is incumbent upon the courts to see that any such misuse is punished to such an extent that it dissuades others from attempting to protect their good names by stifling all suggestion that that good name may have been purchased with advertising dollars and not with acts of merit.
In any event, I just sent the following email to their corporate lawyers, who, amazingly enough, go by the acronym MOFO:
Gentlemen:
First let me say that your corporate name, MOFO, sounds as if it were specifically designed to strike fear into the hearts of anyone you deal with. Or perhaps you just don't understand the slang meaning of the term MOFO.
I have just read the article, "Behind the Infinium Phantom Console," at the HardOCP site against which you have apparently issued a nasty letter in your best lawyerly legalese. I am curious, since I take the idea of freedom of speech quite seriously, just why exactly your client and you refused to supply the above mentioned site with any information as to what exactly you found inaccurate or distressing about that article. Personally, I found it quite enlightening and informative. Just for the record, just what exactly DO you find inaccurate about this story? I am always interested in learning the truth and I look forward to your reply so that I may further my knowledge of this company and its director.
I wasn't trying to be snide...well, maybe I was. But this sort of thing has been going on for a while. Opium was a favorite pre-battle drug during Classical times.
Slashdot Mirror
You read Bill Burroughs and you complain about "run-on verbiage"? Sorry, but something here just doesn't quite compute. Perhaps you are thinking of Edgar Rice Burroughs?
You don't suppose this has anything to do with the new Linux-based joint effort among the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese to create a kanji-friendly operating system? Just wondering. No paranoid conspiracy theory or anything. There *is* a certain element of "getting even" here, though, considering the US shot down a Japanese attempt to sell their own operating system with their computers sold in the US. I don't think we've seen the end of this titanic struggle, by any means.
As do many video games. You can't play an adventure game any more without some kind of cell phone or pager or whatever to communicate with offstage characters. At this rate, some bozo's going to try to patent breathing and it'll sail right through at the Patent Office. Hmmm... "Stop right there, Sonny. No breathing without a consent form from Barney's House of Discount Respiration."
I apologize for picking on the sleepless. I know what it can be like. You might want to consult a good psychiatrist, though. You obviously have some repressed aggression to deal with. Personally, when I get that way, I just find a dentist and beat the shit out of him, but that can have unexpected consequences....
So you determined it was rubbish by sitting on a print out of it and absorbing it by osmosis? Or was it just the link to Randi Rhodes that set you off? You'd better get some more of those little blood pressure pills the doctor gave you because, buddy, we're gonna retake the media from you demented little pinheads and you're gonna hear more of the same for a long time to come. Get used to it.
There is no "the minority" except the minority of one. Is it my imagination or is Slashdot the largest conglomeration of Sophists assembled in one place (at least virtually) in the history of the world?
You've obviously never read "The Turn of the Screw," by Henry James, which points up the fact that sentences are not limited to a few words, but can be perfectly grammatical and quite effective literarily and still take up, in the case of the aforementioned James novel, as much as a full page and more, though this kind of extended sentence structure does require a certain intellectual prowess on the part of the reader not normally required of those, like yourself, who feed on a steady diet of comic books and technical manuals, but then, I would expect nothing less from this bastion of Linux and Java and Microsoft bashing, an attitude with which I heartily agree but do not allow to get in the way of my other interests including the reading of books with sentences of more than a few words, an enumeration of which I will leave to the reader's imagination. Touche!
There was this ethics teacher at Central High School where I went many moons ago. Old Doc Samson, he of the miraculously overstuffed briefcase, would love to state the following: "The majority is always wrong," by which I suppose he meant that principles are not a matter of majority consent. They are a matter of personal reflection and commitment to what is right. That most Americans have never learned this lesson, have not even been afforded the opportunity to consider its consequences, is truly sad. That someone should cite the absence of serious opposition to a family dynasty whose current representative was once a partner of Osama bin Laden's brother is to justify the establishment of tyranny on the grounds of general mental weakness and intoxication with the modern equivalent of the Roman circuses. It is reprehensible. But worse than that, it is a product of the takeover of the media by the forces of neo-conservatism who never present anything but their prepackaged drivel to the all too gullible public. This is your freedom and democracy that we are supposedly exporting to the poor downtrodden Iraqis who at least have the gumption to stand up against a foreign invasion, no matter how high-minded in its original conception.
Forgeting for the moment that you don't even have the balls to hide behind a pseudonym, and also forgeting that folks like you complain on the one hand that folks don't give enough specifics when the whole corporate methodology consists of hiding behind a smokescreen of secrecy and proprietary IP, and on the other hand come up with silly little reposts like this that simply consist of hurling an epithet (look it up if you own a dictionary), what really galls me is that your definition of "troll" seems to be anyone who dares to think about anything but computer code and video games. People died for the freedoms you once took for granted, and not just guys in silly Revolutionary War garb, but millions of men who fought the forces of--no, not naziism and fascism, but--stupidity and ignorance and just plain tunnel vision during two world wars. But then you don't have to worry about the draft any more, so it's "Rah Rah Rah! for the home team and bring me another beer, Mabel" while the folks who joined up to elevate their status in society get shot and mangled and crippled and shipped home in a box as the folks we just "liberated" begin to understand that George's promises of free elections are no more true than his mythical weapons of mass destruction. How dare you....
Considering the moderating history of characters like you, I doubt very much if this guy is just trolling for karma points. He is, as distinguished from folks like you, actually expressing a political opinion about a specific piece of legislation, the so-called Patriot Act, which you obviously haven't read or you wouldn't be calling for specifics. That you're not bright enough to see the writing on the wall just puts you in the category of a lot of Germans before World War II. It doesn't make you objective and it doesn't make you enlightened. It just makes you look stupid, which isn't surprising because you obviously are. Some folks take freedom seriously. Others have the Constitution printed on toilet paper and think it's funny to wipe their butts on it. Guess which category you fall into? You want to give away your rights, go right ahead. You try to give away MY rights and you will answer for it. You think the Republicans will be in power forever? Don't take any long odds on little George staying out of jail for subversion of the electoral process. Stealing elections is a federal crime.
You really don't have a clue, do you? You think the fact that a bunch of little piggies feeding at the corporate trough represent anyone but their own greedy little power hungry selves? You think because after being subjected to a bunch of hot-button advertisements, people actually vote for them, that they somehow represent the best interests of the population?
Is that why the VOA is so easy to get here in Maryland? Maybe they're targeting all those Arabs in DC. I guess they could be considered "foreign." After all, our dear president seems to think they're the root of all evil, even to the point of targeting their journalists in Iraq.
"...back it up with at least a little bit of evidence."
I believe the preferred English expression is "Catch 22." You can't get to the Windows code--in fact it's a fundamental violation of the shrink-wrap agreement if you even attempt to reverse engineer it or just take a peek--but you insist on "evidence." There was a movie a while ago called "Screamers," in which AMBs (Autonomous Mobile Blades) would cut up soldiers, then drag them underground to be used in the manufacture of next generation weapons. Sound familiar?
Perhaps the Borg analogy is more to your liking? You are certainly familiar with M$'s overt policy of defeat or absorption? What was the line from Star Trek? It's hard to get here in the People's Former Republic: "Resistence is futile. You will be assimilated." Do you seriously think this is limited to the overt sphere?
As for the idiot who modded me down to "Untouchable," does anyone need any further proof? Just who exactly ARE these guys? You don't suppose they would like to identify themselves and their present employers and give a concise explication of their thought processes? Just for the record? After all, we don't want anyone here to imagine that their opinions are not being taken seriously in Washington. Come now, you're not afraid of a little daylight are you?
I suspect there's a lot more for them to worry about than spyware. Does anyone here seriously think that Bill Gates actually wrote the first version of Windows from scratch? Do you seriously think he has the intellectual capacity of a Linus Torvalds? You think SCO is a pain in the ass? Imagine someone with some spare bucks taking Bill and Company to court for borrowing their code. The mind boggles...
[Just an aside--but have you noticed that any suggestion that our elected representatives and their minions in Washington aren't pure and righteous as the driven snow gets consistently modded down by a seeming core of embedded government stooges? And this on a website with the political distribution of a Slashdot? Are they really THAT afraid of a bunch of informed geeks? Did you realise you were that important?]
"the foregoing powers" The "foregoing powers" DO NOT include creating a federal police force, nor are they "vested by this constitution in the government of the United States." Were you asleep the day they explained this in school, or do you just not understand the concept of a federal system?
"This is a huge problem."
The FBI is a huge problem. The FBI is an unconstitutional federal police force:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
John Ashcroft is guilty of subversion of the constitution. I just hope Kerry has the balls to prosecute these bastards, including Shrub for stealing the last election.
"The FBI will attempt to work with any provider in order to get the data they need to investigate a crime. If that is impossible to do in a 'reasonable amount of time' they have little choice but to confiscate the equipment in order to copy the existing data from the machines to conduct a forensic investigation. A reasonable amount of time is generally a couple of hours to a day. Believe me, the last thing some poor special agent wants to do is sift through TBs of customer crap and put a company out of business or under financial hardship."
So which field office do you work in, you disgusting minion of Ashcroft?
7.415 MHz
Not to even mention internet radio, but you can rent time on WBCQ shortwave (transmitter located in Maine) at ridiculously low prices and broadcast to the entire planet. And you can say virtually anything you want, though your listeners are limited to those with enough perception to own a world-band radio. The funny thing is that the owner started out in pirate radio.
Sorry. But the point was that there wouldn't have been a Newton or space travel without the basic concept that the sun didn't orbit around the Earth. What was the topic again? ;-)
Hey, it took centuries to get around to using Copernicus's orbital equations with spacecraft. This is the beauty of basic research. It eventually has a practical use, but you can't base its validity on how long it takes to use it. And you have to distinguish between research and the ability to invent something. As John W. Campbell once pointed out, the Classical Greeks had everything necessarily to invent the phonograph, though it wasn't until Edison that somebody got around to doing it. In that particular case, it was the mental rut into which the Greeks had worn themselves that kept them from making much practical progress, thus leading to the return to power of irrational religion and the eventual rise of the Dark Ages.
I was not specifically refering to constitutional prohibitions on the limiting of freedom of speech by the government. It is my personal opinion that freedom of speech is important in any environment, whether governmental or not. And whether this broader protection is guaranteed by any legal document or not, it is certainly a basic human right to be able to speak your mind as long as you don't infringe on the rights of others, for instance, my right not to have to wade though 500 pieces of junk email everyday.
Focusing on what is actually happening here, at the very least it appears that a particular company is using its monetary power to usurp the courts for the purpose of shutting up someone who, again at the very least, appears to be bringing up some rather embarrassing points about the history of a particular corporate executive associated with that company. It is certainly important that the public in general and investors in particular be aware of this history, for it directly affects the viability of that company.
The flaw in the system seems to be that it requires significant sums of money to defend oneself against this kind of attack, so that, in my own humble opinion, it is incumbent upon the courts to see that any such misuse is punished to such an extent that it dissuades others from attempting to protect their good names by stifling all suggestion that that good name may have been purchased with advertising dollars and not with acts of merit.
Doesn't there actually have to BE a product?
In any event, I just sent the following email to their corporate lawyers, who, amazingly enough, go by the acronym MOFO:
Gentlemen:
First let me say that your corporate name, MOFO, sounds as if it were specifically designed to strike fear into the hearts of anyone you deal with. Or perhaps you just don't understand the slang meaning of the term MOFO.
I have just read the article, "Behind the Infinium Phantom Console," at the HardOCP site against which you have apparently issued a nasty letter in your best lawyerly legalese. I am curious, since I take the idea of freedom of speech quite seriously, just why exactly your client and you refused to supply the above mentioned site with any information as to what exactly you found inaccurate or distressing about that article. Personally, I found it quite enlightening and informative. Just for the record, just what exactly DO you find inaccurate about this story? I am always interested in learning the truth and I look forward to your reply so that I may further my knowledge of this company and its director.
Regards,
[deleted]
I wasn't trying to be snide...well, maybe I was. But this sort of thing has been going on for a while. Opium was a favorite pre-battle drug during Classical times.
The Germans pioneered in this research during World War II. They called it "benzedrine."