In recent news, Atari has sued God for patent infringement. Patent #6,370,256,375 covers a "two-dimensional wrap-around domain," such as the one in Pac-Man. A spokesman for Atari is reported as stating, "Although this violation appears to be in three dimensions, we beleive it is a close derivative and still covered by the patent." When it was pointed out that the patent was not issued until the late 1900s C.E., Atari responded with, "It may be very well that God created this before we did, but there is no prior art since the evidence did not surface until after our patent was granted. If it were the case that clear evidence was given beforehand, our patent would be invalidated. However, here, the patent holds."
Ah, but a government who is willing to spend dozens of billions of dollars on a war on oil (which is only worth some number of dollars per 55-gallon drum) could easily spend far, far more on a war on drugs, where even the tiniest amounts of substances can fetch fairly high prices. They have ungodly, staggering amounts of money to throw away on nearly any inane project. Why not paralellize? If there are billions of pieces of mail, and only some hundreds of thousands of minutes in a year, just manufacture millions of the scanners, and you're all set. Plus, if you filter out the credit card offers, you only have millions of pieces of mail to scan, not billions;)
Yes, you can, actually. smitty is simply an interface to a whole bunch of commands which do all the "real work." smitty, in fact, keeps logs of everything it does, and it logs every command it runs. From the smitty logfiles, you can figure out what commands to run to do particular tasks.
Unfortunately, my RS6k box has a dead power supply right now, so I can't pull up a list of any of the obscure commands needed to do any of these things.
Except that under unix/linux, you just need a script. Someone should write this into a very nice Bourne-compatible script and put it up on the web somewhere (or does such a thing already exist?)
Enable/disable: 0. AIX users... sorry. 1. If chkconfig exists in $PATH, run chkconfig appropriately (IRIX) 2. If/var/rc.config.d/$name exists, change contents (HPUX) 3. If/etc/init.d/$name exists, link/unlink/etc/rc?.d/[SK][0-9][0-9]?([0-9])$name (SysV) 4. If/etc/rc.d/rc.$name exists, chmod 700/600 (Slackware) 5. If/etc/rc.d/rc.{?,inet?,local} exists, and grep $name succeeds, run a quick ed script to comment out lines, or, chmod a-x `which $name` (Slackware) 6. If/etc/rc exists and we're on Ultrix, run an ed, awk, or perl script to comment out the [ -f `which $name` ] &&... lines. 7. If/etc/rc.conf exists, grep/ed the appropriate line 8. If inetd is running, grep/etc/inetd.conf and use ed script to comment/uncomment 9. If xinetd is running, grep/etc/xinetd.conf and use awk or perl script to comment/uncomment appropriate block
Stop for non-inetd: 0. AIX users... again, sorry. 1. If/sbin/init.d/$name exists, run/sbin/init.d/$name stop (HPUX) 2. If/etc/init.d/$name exists, run/etc/init.d/$name stop (SysV) 3. If/var/run/$name.pid exists, kill `cat/var/run/$name.pid` 4. If pkill exists in $PATH, run pkill $name 5. If pidof exists in $PATH:/usr/freeware:/opt/sfw:{/usr,/opt}/gnu, run kill `pidof $name` 6. If killall exists in $PATH and we're on linux, run killall $name 7. Else, do the old ps aux/-aux/-efl|grep "\\(^\\| \\)$name "|grep -v grep|cut... trick to get the PID, and kill that PID
For rehashing inetd.conf, do the same thing but with -HUP. For rehashing xinetd.conf, do the same thing but with -USR1.
Erm, I know this doesn't cover many systems, but I only have about a dozen different flavors of Unix that I work with, so I can't do all of them, sorry.
1. You shouldn't be sueing potential customers either! 2. Mind where you tread... Because it's legal to share most bands' files... just not the big, major, money-sucking bands. Many small and local bands are glad to have the exposure. My band, for example, tries to encourage file-sharing of our songs;) 3. Yeah, but it's ethically very cruel to take away a poor man's possessions. Most people don't care about laws... they simply follow personal ethics. To me, it is better to make your own decisions about right and wrong than blindly following the words of rich white male politicians. 4. Copyright is a good invention, because it ensures that artists will want to create works that will wind up in the public domain after 14 years. Wait... no, copyrights last much longer than that! And new copyright laws somehow get retrofitted to old copyrights... isn't that similar to creating a law against something and then going back and punishing people who perpetrated the now-illegal thing under the new law? That particular thing is unconstitutional, and I don't think it's any surprise that many people get pissed about the similar situation with copyrights.
Innovation, changing society, can lead to good or bad. It's not some clear-cut evil thing. Freedom to innovate is freedom to break rules... for hackers and other clever people, with good intentions, this can lead to cutting through layers of crap and figuring something out for what it really is, solving a problem directly, and possibly confusing and/or irritating people in the process.
There's lots of bullshit out there which isn't doing the majority of people any good... and, in fact, is doing good to a very small number of people and hurting everyone else in the process. That kind of stuff needs to go away, and innovation is the way to do it.
Good innovation is finding a better way to do things that makes life safer, easier, more enjoyable, or more tasty, like hot grits on a statue (just kidding!).
But, I would argue that some innovations will only push society along the path toward total commercialization, loss of identity, universal culture, and monopolization. A society built in this manner is weak, because everybody will share the same weaknesses... so if you can knock one man down, you can take control of the whole culture. Some significant amount of diversity is the best tool for survival and stability (in a big-picture sense)---nature shows us that.
So, really, anything which makes our lives more commercialized or monopolized, while it may appear at first glance to be potentially useful, might contribute to a major problem down the road of losing the diversity that makes us strong.
But, I could be totally off my rocker... after all, I am no longer rocking, and I can't seem to find the armrests on this here piece of carpet.
(Yes, I realize I am somewhat America/Euro-centric. Forgive me.)
I don't mind filling out virtual paperwork for several hours to register a domain name. I *do* mind paying money. I am cheap that way.
Of course, robots can fill out paperwork, too, but there are things that can slow down robots (limits on the # of domain names allowed registered to a specific person or from a specific IP in a certain period of time, requiring snail mail correspondence or a phone call, having some sort of slight randomness be introduced in the paperwork to make parsing by non-humans difficult and chancy, requiring a description of the purpose and use of the domain which is compared to the descriptions for other domains (check for keywords, synonyms of keywords, mispellings of keywords, and if a certain similarness threshold is reached, alert some administrator of the two similar domain), require administrator intervention for similarly-spelled domains, etc.). Of course, with some of these things, you introduce the possibility of the registrar screwing over people it doesn't like by being able to say things like "Your domain registration is unacceptable [for some reason or another]" just to be assholes, but, with adequate legal documentation, you could always take them to court if you really had to...
Yes, because we aren't supposed to know that we have crotches! We aren't supposed to know what sex is, because sex is a dirty, horrible, evil misdeed, because it spawns more humans, and for chrissakes, isn't six billion enough?
(I'm still not sure I understand what exactly is wrong with grabbing your crotch in public. I mean, if you're specifically trying to sexually harrass someone, that's one thing, but besides that, why should anyone care?)
And when the owner of a domain is running an open relay, or has a glaringly obvious security problem, or has a problem with their site (and webmaster@ bounces), the courteous thing to do, e-mailing them to inform them of the problem, can no longer be done if there is no e-mail address available.
Or, sometimes you get people who register domains through some co-hosting service and then launch attacks against your box/network through the service. Usually, the e-mail for the domain registration will be someone in charge who can give the asshole due justice.
It is not a frequent thing when I must resort to WHOIS to contact a site owner, but sometimes it happens and it's fairly important.
I don't know what eWeek reporters are like, but most reporters are looking for "BIG NEWS," and they will press and press you until you say that something is "revolutionary." Personally, my suspicion is that ESR may actually be making fun of those recent TV commercials that suggest such-and-such product is the culmination and perfection of the history of the human race. ESR seems to be one of those guys that has a very dry sense of humor that comes off as egocentric to people who aren't used to it.
But, that could just be me...
I know this tool is not anything to write home about, but given the fact that it is another free software tool which does something similar to $100,000 commercial packages, it may be another tool in the open source arsenal. Not sure how big of a role it will actually play against SCO, though, since IBM et al are likely well able to spend $$$ proving the annoying dog of SCO wrong.
It would be an interesting experiment to take a very-very-old distro and make it secure. It would be even cooler if someone wrote patches for all the exploits found in older code and put up a site where you could download patches and updates to ass-old versions of linux. I have a few ancient boxen which could afford that! I would love to see a timeline, though.
I find it interesting that we look at the correspondence between infrasound and "spooky feelings," apply Occam's razor in the way we see fit, and conclude that this is a simple cause-and-effect. We overlook the lack of any explanation for/why/ humans might even be able to process this information. Personally, I would attribute any evolved correspondence to the dangers inherent from approaching thunderstorms and stampeding elephants, but who knows? I'd like to see some MRIs done that try to look at the neural circuitry and how it's behaving.
The ancient mystics would have used Occam's razor to conclude the simplest explanation: some ambiguous external force. In other words, in ancient culture, Occam's razor would really have meant we were invoking spirits, because we can use "spirits" as an extremely simple mystical explanation for everyday phenomena.
In our modern skepticism, the "obvious" conclusion is, interestingly, different from the "obvious" conclusion another culture might draw.
Who else thought of this when seeing this headline: Ten billion people coming your way Ten in 2010, Ten in 2010 -- bad religion
And if they're all on the Internet, we will *definitely* need 10 terabits... and if Big Brother is watching that much traffic, I'm sure there will be SCSI/RAID tech that can write that fast.
As I skim through some of these very interesting and well-thought-out replies such as yours, I regret the radicalness present in my original post, although perhaps it was for the best, since it created a thread which has generated a lot of useful insight.
You make a good point when you say, "Does the requirement to honestly label the content of a -commercial- message really affect your freedom that much? Business -do not- deserve the same rights that private individuals do."
That's a very good point; businesses do not deserve the same freedoms and pleasures that individuals can receive! A business's goal is typically to make money (otherwise it would go out of business... hehe, get it?;), which is more selfish than most people's goal in life: have fun, accomplish some things, and be nice to some people. Judging on the giving-to-society aspect, it is clear that, in general, individuals are more intellectually and emotionally useful to society, although businesses provide more goods, and that means individuals are Very Important People.
It *is* really funny how the media is becoming so embedded in our lives (assuming you mean the U.S. or a country with a similar society)... and if it weren't for the Discovery Channel, my TV would probably have been toast ages ago.... *g*
I guess it's that my fear of organized justice as being something exploitable, unfair, and inhuman... I would rather have a vengeful vigilante on my heels than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and weeks of my life fighting for myself in court just to end up wasting years in jail, because some big corporation has more money and power than me and disagreed with me about something.
(But, I am rather surprised to see how everyday-normal slashdotters are... there seem to be almost no anarchists, extremists, or serious rebels here, which is unforunate because I hate it when cool places are filled with normality, decency, and everything that escapists and surrealists despise. Where am I supposed to find my fantasy world where I can escape from everything? If the Internet is not the place for small, free communities, then where *is* the right place? Or am I just not looking in the right spots online?)
But, see, my logical argument is: if there's restrictions places on e-mail, then what's to stop people from silencing me using these restrictions? Suppose I send out e-mails from time to time to various people I have not talked to before but have seen online because I think they might be interested in my band. Now, technically, this is probably "unsolicited commercial e-mail;" but, I feel it's reasonable because (a) it's not mass-mailing; (b) these people are probably interested; (c) I'm not rude or obnoxious about it; and (d) I'm not trying to sell them anything in particular. Now, if there are bans or restrictions on UCE/spam, they could be applied to me if someone decided they didn't like me. I might find myself in legal trouble for doing the online equivalent of finding cool-looking kids out on the street and asking them if they've heard of my band. Some would argue that seeking people to contact is the wrong approach; those people have probably never started a band (or, they had a big crowd of friends who were supportive and contacted their friends, their friends of friends... word-of-mouth advertising).
(P.S.: When did I whine about my "rights"? <g> Anarchy and a free Internet are not rights; they are incredibly priveleges that continue to amaze me every day with the things they can teach me about myself.)
As much as I hate spam, it really bothers me to see any laws which restrict my behavior online. I consider the Internet to be something futuristic, where individuals are free to choose their own code of ethics, rather than having one dictated to them in a larger society, and individuals are free to interpret others' actions as they want and defend themselves as they want. I know that's not very realistic, but the quasi-anarchy "back in the good old days" before the Internet was Serious Business, before the Web was Important was something amazingly freeing and fulfilling. I do not want other people just discovering the realm of computers and global communication to be shoved into just another restrictive, judgemental society like the one in which we all participate in Real Life.
Spam ruins the online experience in the same way that mass-marketed commercialism does, and I hate to see the Internet become a thing of money and corporate power and not of freedom and individual power, but imposing restrictions doesn't seem to address the issue. However, maybe the problem will always be impossible to solve, because with freedom comes greed, and with freedom comes abuse...
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What I find interesting is the idea in the article that "maybe computers aren't totally under their owner's control."
When *are* they? The owner can choose what software to install, sure, but the EULAs means that the software vendor will never be responsible for their own code, and since the owner doesn't get to examine the code, there's no way to make sure your computer is under your control, since most PC hardware requires special drivers that require proprietary code, and most PC mainboards only work with specific proprietary BIOSs.
So then, are computers truly "secure" to begin with? Can we trust *anything* a computer says?
There are all sorts of industrial software packages out there that have specific subroutines to track the user's actions on data, to prevent lab data from being manipulated before it reaches the reports; the datafiles can be signed and authorized. But what about the infamous "trusting trust" problem? We can't necessarily "trust" the operating system the apps run on, even if we can trust the apps themselves. We can't trust the compilers. Of course, Microsoft is getting into "secure computing" aka "trustworthy computing", but why should I trust someone who only wants my money? Why should I trust a monopolizer?
When will we see a Computer User's Bill of Rights?
When will we see a Commercial Software Secure Standard?
When will we see reliable and reputable, under penalty of legal action, firms which check and authorize "secure" code from companies?
What happens when someone makes a mistake?
And, pray tell, what will we do with all the hobbyists? Will we have two seperate Internets, one commercial and one hobby? Two seperate computer industries?
What happens when someone gets the "bright idea" of merging the two, and we start again from square one?
How many questions did I just ask? How many flaws are in my logic? What's the ratio between them? What's the square root of 286,374,448,236,845,235,744,345? How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?
I've seen a number of irate customers, not understanding why they have to start their purchase all over again because the cash register got a blue screen.
I don't know, but he didn't even link to Ardalambion (at least not that I saw but I might be blind), a fantastic site for all sorts of info about the langauges of Tolkein.. TONS of information on Elvish Preshley.
(Wow. Shit. I remembered that URL *exactly*, even after not really going there in years...
Wow... Coherent:) Man would I love to play with that.. although maybe just on an emulator. The real thing might have too overpowering of a musty odor, and the amber and green screens might make my eyes hurt.
No, it does, because text is something fairly universal to anybody who has any means to communicate in speech or word. It just might need to be translated...
Slashdot Mirror
The PM is to distinguish from 16 AM. Otherwise, confusion could result. ;)
In recent news, Atari has sued God for patent infringement. Patent #6,370,256,375 covers a "two-dimensional wrap-around domain," such as the one in Pac-Man. A spokesman for Atari is reported as stating, "Although this violation appears to be in three dimensions, we beleive it is a close derivative and still covered by the patent." When it was pointed out that the patent was not issued until the late 1900s C.E., Atari responded with, "It may be very well that God created this before we did, but there is no prior art since the evidence did not surface until after our patent was granted. If it were the case that clear evidence was given beforehand, our patent would be invalidated. However, here, the patent holds."
Ah, but a government who is willing to spend dozens of billions of dollars on a war on oil (which is only worth some number of dollars per 55-gallon drum) could easily spend far, far more on a war on drugs, where even the tiniest amounts of substances can fetch fairly high prices. They have ungodly, staggering amounts of money to throw away on nearly any inane project. Why not paralellize? If there are billions of pieces of mail, and only some hundreds of thousands of minutes in a year, just manufacture millions of the scanners, and you're all set. Plus, if you filter out the credit card offers, you only have millions of pieces of mail to scan, not billions ;)
What I don't get is this "blanket license."
Where is my portion of the money? I am an artist!
Is this "blanket license" something done by the RIAA? I am not affiliated with them, so it won't cover me.
Yes, you can, actually. smitty is simply an interface to a whole bunch of commands which do all the "real work." smitty, in fact, keeps logs of everything it does, and it logs every command it runs. From the smitty logfiles, you can figure out what commands to run to do particular tasks.
Unfortunately, my RS6k box has a dead power supply right now, so I can't pull up a list of any of the obscure commands needed to do any of these things.
Oh yah, I forgot, if this fails, repeat with/without prefixes of "in." and "rpc.", and suffix of "d".
Except that under unix/linux, you just need a script. Someone should write this into a very nice Bourne-compatible script and put it up on the web somewhere (or does such a thing already exist?)
/var/rc.config.d/$name exists, change contents (HPUX) /etc/init.d/$name exists, /etc/rc?.d/[SK][0-9][0-9]?([0-9])$name (SysV) /etc/rc.d/rc.$name exists, chmod 700/600 (Slackware) /etc/rc.d/rc.{?,inet?,local} exists, and grep $name succeeds, run a quick ed script to comment out lines, or, chmod a-x `which $name` (Slackware) /etc/rc exists and we're on Ultrix, run an ed, awk, or perl script to comment out the [ -f `which $name` ] && ... lines. /etc/rc.conf exists, grep/ed the appropriate line /etc/inetd.conf and use ed script to comment/uncomment /etc/xinetd.conf and use awk or perl script to comment/uncomment appropriate block
/sbin/init.d/$name exists, run /sbin/init.d/$name stop (HPUX) /etc/init.d/$name exists, run /etc/init.d/$name stop (SysV) /var/run/$name.pid exists, kill `cat /var/run/$name.pid` ... trick to get the PID, and kill that PID
Enable/disable:
0. AIX users... sorry.
1. If chkconfig exists in $PATH, run chkconfig appropriately (IRIX)
2. If
3. If
link/unlink
4. If
5. If
6. If
7. If
8. If inetd is running, grep
9. If xinetd is running, grep
Stop for non-inetd:
0. AIX users... again, sorry.
1. If
2. If
3. If
4. If pkill exists in $PATH, run pkill $name
5. If pidof exists in $PATH:/usr/freeware:/opt/sfw:{/usr,/opt}/gnu, run kill `pidof $name`
6. If killall exists in $PATH and we're on linux, run killall $name
7. Else, do the old ps aux/-aux/-efl|grep "\\(^\\| \\)$name "|grep -v grep|cut
For rehashing inetd.conf, do the same thing but with -HUP. For rehashing xinetd.conf, do the same thing but with -USR1.
Erm, I know this doesn't cover many systems, but I only have about a dozen different flavors of Unix that I work with, so I can't do all of them, sorry.
1. You shouldn't be sueing potential customers either! ;)
2. Mind where you tread... Because it's legal to share most bands' files... just not the big, major, money-sucking bands. Many small and local bands are glad to have the exposure. My band, for example, tries to encourage file-sharing of our songs
3. Yeah, but it's ethically very cruel to take away a poor man's possessions. Most people don't care about laws... they simply follow personal ethics. To me, it is better to make your own decisions about right and wrong than blindly following the words of rich white male politicians.
4. Copyright is a good invention, because it ensures that artists will want to create works that will wind up in the public domain after 14 years. Wait... no, copyrights last much longer than that! And new copyright laws somehow get retrofitted to old copyrights... isn't that similar to creating a law against something and then going back and punishing people who perpetrated the now-illegal thing under the new law? That particular thing is unconstitutional, and I don't think it's any surprise that many people get pissed about the similar situation with copyrights.
Innovation, changing society, can lead to good or bad. It's not some clear-cut evil thing. Freedom to innovate is freedom to break rules... for hackers and other clever people, with good intentions, this can lead to cutting through layers of crap and figuring something out for what it really is, solving a problem directly, and possibly confusing and/or irritating people in the process.
There's lots of bullshit out there which isn't doing the majority of people any good... and, in fact, is doing good to a very small number of people and hurting everyone else in the process. That kind of stuff needs to go away, and innovation is the way to do it.
Good innovation is finding a better way to do things that makes life safer, easier, more enjoyable, or more tasty, like hot grits on a statue (just kidding!).
But, I would argue that some innovations will only push society along the path toward total commercialization, loss of identity, universal culture, and monopolization. A society built in this manner is weak, because everybody will share the same weaknesses... so if you can knock one man down, you can take control of the whole culture. Some significant amount of diversity is the best tool for survival and stability (in a big-picture sense)---nature shows us that.
So, really, anything which makes our lives more commercialized or monopolized, while it may appear at first glance to be potentially useful, might contribute to a major problem down the road of losing the diversity that makes us strong.
But, I could be totally off my rocker... after all, I am no longer rocking, and I can't seem to find the armrests on this here piece of carpet.
(Yes, I realize I am somewhat America/Euro-centric. Forgive me.)
I don't mind filling out virtual paperwork for several hours to register a domain name. I *do* mind paying money. I am cheap that way.
Of course, robots can fill out paperwork, too, but there are things that can slow down robots (limits on the # of domain names allowed registered to a specific person or from a specific IP in a certain period of time, requiring snail mail correspondence or a phone call, having some sort of slight randomness be introduced in the paperwork to make parsing by non-humans difficult and chancy, requiring a description of the purpose and use of the domain which is compared to the descriptions for other domains (check for keywords, synonyms of keywords, mispellings of keywords, and if a certain similarness threshold is reached, alert some administrator of the two similar domain), require administrator intervention for similarly-spelled domains, etc.). Of course, with some of these things, you introduce the possibility of the registrar screwing over people it doesn't like by being able to say things like "Your domain registration is unacceptable [for some reason or another]" just to be assholes, but, with adequate legal documentation, you could always take them to court if you really had to...
Yes, because we aren't supposed to know that we have crotches! We aren't supposed to know what sex is, because sex is a dirty, horrible, evil misdeed, because it spawns more humans, and for chrissakes, isn't six billion enough?
(I'm still not sure I understand what exactly is wrong with grabbing your crotch in public. I mean, if you're specifically trying to sexually harrass someone, that's one thing, but besides that, why should anyone care?)
And when the owner of a domain is running an open relay, or has a glaringly obvious security problem, or has a problem with their site (and webmaster@ bounces), the courteous thing to do, e-mailing them to inform them of the problem, can no longer be done if there is no e-mail address available.
Or, sometimes you get people who register domains through some co-hosting service and then launch attacks against your box/network through the service. Usually, the e-mail for the domain registration will be someone in charge who can give the asshole due justice.
It is not a frequent thing when I must resort to WHOIS to contact a site owner, but sometimes it happens and it's fairly important.
I don't know what eWeek reporters are like, but most reporters are looking for "BIG NEWS," and they will press and press you until you say that something is "revolutionary." Personally, my suspicion is that ESR may actually be making fun of those recent TV commercials that suggest such-and-such product is the culmination and perfection of the history of the human race. ESR seems to be one of those guys that has a very dry sense of humor that comes off as egocentric to people who aren't used to it.
But, that could just be me...
I know this tool is not anything to write home about, but given the fact that it is another free software tool which does something similar to $100,000 commercial packages, it may be another tool in the open source arsenal. Not sure how big of a role it will actually play against SCO, though, since IBM et al are likely well able to spend $$$ proving the annoying dog of SCO wrong.
It would be an interesting experiment to take a very-very-old distro and make it secure.
It would be even cooler if someone wrote patches for all the exploits found in older code and put up a site where you could download patches and updates to ass-old versions of linux. I have a few ancient boxen which could afford that!
I would love to see a timeline, though.
I find it interesting that we look at the correspondence between infrasound and "spooky feelings," apply Occam's razor in the way we see fit, and conclude that this is a simple cause-and-effect. We overlook the lack of any explanation for /why/ humans might even be able to process this information. Personally, I would attribute any evolved correspondence to the dangers inherent from approaching thunderstorms and stampeding elephants, but who knows? I'd like to see some MRIs done that try to look at the neural circuitry and how it's behaving.
The ancient mystics would have used Occam's razor to conclude the simplest explanation: some ambiguous external force. In other words, in ancient culture, Occam's razor would really have meant we were invoking spirits, because we can use "spirits" as an extremely simple mystical explanation for everyday phenomena.
In our modern skepticism, the "obvious" conclusion is, interestingly, different from the "obvious" conclusion another culture might draw.
Who else thought of this when seeing this headline:
Ten billion people coming your way
Ten in 2010, Ten in 2010
-- bad religion
And if they're all on the Internet, we will *definitely* need 10 terabits... and if Big Brother is watching that much traffic, I'm sure there will be SCSI/RAID tech that can write that fast.
http://fz.os.us.eu.org/ i didn't want to seem like i was advertising...
You have a very nifty perspective on anarchy. I like it =)
As I skim through some of these very interesting and well-thought-out replies such as yours, I regret the radicalness present in my original post, although perhaps it was for the best, since it created a thread which has generated a lot of useful insight.
;), which is more selfish than most people's goal in life: have fun, accomplish some things, and be nice to some people. Judging on the giving-to-society aspect, it is clear that, in general, individuals are more intellectually and emotionally useful to society, although businesses provide more goods, and that means individuals are Very Important People.
You make a good point when you say, "Does the requirement to honestly label the content of a -commercial- message really affect your freedom that much? Business -do not- deserve the same rights that private individuals do."
That's a very good point; businesses do not deserve the same freedoms and pleasures that individuals can receive! A business's goal is typically to make money (otherwise it would go out of business... hehe, get it?
It *is* really funny how the media is becoming so embedded in our lives (assuming you mean the U.S. or a country with a similar society)... and if it weren't for the Discovery Channel, my TV would probably have been toast ages ago.... *g*
I guess it's that my fear of organized justice as being something exploitable, unfair, and inhuman... I would rather have a vengeful vigilante on my heels than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and weeks of my life fighting for myself in court just to end up wasting years in jail, because some big corporation has more money and power than me and disagreed with me about something.
(But, I am rather surprised to see how everyday-normal slashdotters are... there seem to be almost no anarchists, extremists, or serious rebels here, which is unforunate because I hate it when cool places are filled with normality, decency, and everything that escapists and surrealists despise. Where am I supposed to find my fantasy world where I can escape from everything? If the Internet is not the place for small, free communities, then where *is* the right place? Or am I just not looking in the right spots online?)
But, see, my logical argument is: if there's restrictions places on e-mail, then what's to stop people from silencing me using these restrictions? Suppose I send out e-mails from time to time to various people I have not talked to before but have seen online because I think they might be interested in my band. Now, technically, this is probably "unsolicited commercial e-mail;" but, I feel it's reasonable because (a) it's not mass-mailing; (b) these people are probably interested; (c) I'm not rude or obnoxious about it; and (d) I'm not trying to sell them anything in particular. Now, if there are bans or restrictions on UCE/spam, they could be applied to me if someone decided they didn't like me. I might find myself in legal trouble for doing the online equivalent of finding cool-looking kids out on the street and asking them if they've heard of my band. Some would argue that seeking people to contact is the wrong approach; those people have probably never started a band (or, they had a big crowd of friends who were supportive and contacted their friends, their friends of friends... word-of-mouth advertising).
(P.S.: When did I whine about my "rights"? <g> Anarchy and a free Internet are not rights; they are incredibly priveleges that continue to amaze me every day with the things they can teach me about myself.)
As much as I hate spam, it really bothers me to see any laws which restrict my behavior online. I consider the Internet to be something futuristic, where individuals are free to choose their own code of ethics, rather than having one dictated to them in a larger society, and individuals are free to interpret others' actions as they want and defend themselves as they want. I know that's not very realistic, but the quasi-anarchy "back in the good old days" before the Internet was Serious Business, before the Web was Important was something amazingly freeing and fulfilling. I do not want other people just discovering the realm of computers and global communication to be shoved into just another restrictive, judgemental society like the one in which we all participate in Real Life.
Spam ruins the online experience in the same way that mass-marketed commercialism does, and I hate to see the Internet become a thing of money and corporate power and not of freedom and individual power, but imposing restrictions doesn't seem to address the issue. However, maybe the problem will always be impossible to solve, because with freedom comes greed, and with freedom comes abuse...
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What I find interesting is the idea in the article that "maybe computers aren't totally under their owner's control."
When *are* they? The owner can choose what software to install, sure, but the EULAs means that the software vendor will never be responsible for their own code, and since the owner doesn't get to examine the code, there's no way to make sure your computer is under your control, since most PC hardware requires special drivers that require proprietary code, and most PC mainboards only work with specific proprietary BIOSs.
So then, are computers truly "secure" to begin with? Can we trust *anything* a computer says?
There are all sorts of industrial software packages out there that have specific subroutines to track the user's actions on data, to prevent lab data from being manipulated before it reaches the reports; the datafiles can be signed and authorized. But what about the infamous "trusting trust" problem? We can't necessarily "trust" the operating system the apps run on, even if we can trust the apps themselves. We can't trust the compilers. Of course, Microsoft is getting into "secure computing" aka "trustworthy computing", but why should I trust someone who only wants my money? Why should I trust a monopolizer?
When will we see a Computer User's Bill of Rights?
When will we see a Commercial Software Secure Standard?
When will we see reliable and reputable, under penalty of legal action, firms which check and authorize "secure" code from companies?
What happens when someone makes a mistake?
And, pray tell, what will we do with all the hobbyists? Will we have two seperate Internets, one commercial and one hobby? Two seperate computer industries?
What happens when someone gets the "bright idea" of merging the two, and we start again from square one?
How many questions did I just ask? How many flaws are in my logic? What's the ratio between them? What's the square root of 286,374,448,236,845,235,744,345? How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?
I've seen a number of them running Windows.
I've seen a number of irate customers, not understanding why they have to start their purchase all over again because the cash register got a blue screen.
I don't know, but he didn't even link to Ardalambion (at least not that I saw but I might be blind), a fantastic site for all sorts of info about the langauges of Tolkein.. TONS of information on Elvish Preshley.
(Wow. Shit. I remembered that URL *exactly*, even after not really going there in years...
Craziness.)
Wow... Coherent :) Man would I love to play with that.. although maybe just on an emulator. The real thing might have too overpowering of a musty odor, and the amber and green screens might make my eyes hurt.
No, it does, because text is something fairly universal to anybody who has any means to communicate in speech or word. It just might need to be translated...
:-P
Don't be so literal