Is anyone else reminded of the Castlewood Orbs? "Cough cough, grumblesmurf, X gigabytes. Is that with or without compression? Um...um, well, with. But -- hey, where are you going?"
Give it time. Hey, things are moving faster every day.
Yes, culture has evolved in the sense that violence is not increasing; rather, our tolerance for violence as an acceptable means of social interaction is decreasing.
The responsibility of "who shall protect the children" rests where it always has -- with the legal guardians of the child. Every child develops the capacity to make moral judgments at a different pace. Being a parent should mean helping your child become an adult, not become a clone of yourself, and certainly not to remain a child. I see increasing numbers of people every day my age (30ish) and older who can only, as William Gibson put it in Idoru, only express their twin desires of murderous rage and infantile desire by pressing the buttons on a television remote and voting in presidential elections. Just a symptom of all the ways we teach children that Thinking Is Bad.
It does children no service to be anything less than scrupulously honest. While four-year olds may not need to know how to use condoms, feeding them BS that says, for instance, all substances are equally morally and physically Bad, only encourages harmful patterns of abuse, not responsible use or voluntary abstention.
Who decides what is education, and what is brainwashing and indoctrination? Only someone who believes that one size truly fits all, and has the gall to believe that they have the right to force the rest of the world into line, would dare. Try to please everyone, and you end up pleasing noone.
And to tie this back to the beginning: The ancient Greek children who witnessed incredible violence and cruelty on a daily basis did not all grow up to become despots and tyrants. Of course, most Americans seem concerned only with themselves or the current fads-or-politically-approved-oppressed-classes.
When Bill Clinton deplores the "culture of violence" while sending troops to shoot and bomb people in Kosovo who aren't even in his legal or political jurisdiction; when those who supposedly protect and serve us gas and burn men, women and children without a properly served warrant or any evidence of wrong doing, shoot an unarmed woman holding an infant and then taunt and mock her family through megaphones for days while their bodies rot in the sun; when a Japanese newspaper deplores "the warped strains of 'an advanced society'" when their leaders have only recently started acknowledging the Rape of Nanking and the so-called "noble class" systematically disarmed the poor for centuries by making it illegal to own swords and other weapons (thus prompting the development of many of the martial arts)....
Then, folks, there is some serious hypocrisy and denial going on.
My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I'd not do so. This manner of thinking you find fault with is my sole consolation in life; it alleviates all my sufferings in prison, it composes all my pleasures in the world outside, it is dearer to me than life itself. Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness... If then, as you tell me, they are willing to restore my liberty if I am willing to pay for it by the sacrifice of my principles or my tastes, we may bid one another eternal adieu, for rather than part with those, I would sacrifice a thousand lives and a thousand liberties, if I had them. These principles and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations, the deeper they root my principles in my heart, and I openly declare that no one need ever talk to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return for their destruction.
His book on Japan was similar: Vintage humor throughout, and then a surprisingly sober, thoughtful reflective piece at the end. In fact, the last chapter of his Japan book was one of the best things he's ever written, humorous or otherwise.
Whatever he writes, though, I don't think we have to worry about Dave calling for net regulation; in an interview with Reason magazine, he effectively debunks the myth that freedom is bad "because then everyone would have sex with dogs." Great stuff.
Wasn't GTK developed because the authors of the GIMP needed/wanted it, and only used after the fact as a basis for GNOME? The article claims GTK was developed specifically for GNOME from the beginning.
BTW, I also agree that the new moderation process has overall been more of a Good than a Bad Thing.
Hot on the heels of the Lothar Hardware Recognition Project which Mandrake announced. This could be the start of a beautiful relationship; I can't wait to see what VA and Mandrake can do together!
"You treat children as slaves, and you're surprised when they despise you and your institutions? You lock them up in cages, and act surprised when they kill their keepers?" [As well as their so-called "peers"]
It's understandable that homeschoolers have this stereotyped image of being sheltered, unsocialized, what have you, etc. But all the evidence shows that [home|un]schooled children typically feel comfortable interacting with just about anyone, of any age. If anything, it is the slavecamps ("schools") which are unnatural in this respect; it segregates children by age, whereas [home|un] schooled children typically interact with people of all ages in their community. If you look for yourself -- locate some chapters in your area and go to a meeting, for instance -- you can see this for yourself, perhaps. Teaching the difference between right and wrong, and holding people to minimum standards of civilized behavior, doesn't qualify in my book as brainwashing or being overly restrictive; we do both agree that the goal should be to teach independent thinking, it seems.
(Speaking on a personal level, I set my threshhold as low as possible because, like Katz, I want to see it all, even things I may disagree with, even things which may make me angry. Part of maturing is thinking before you act, including communications, electronic and otherwise. I allow others to think whatever they want, but their actions are a different matter.)
I've learned to be with the world and not of it, as St. Paul[?] said. And as Ken Kesey said, "Take what you can use and let the rest go by."
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
And also why I specified the ".misc" home-school newsgroup, rather than the ".christian" one.
If you read the group for yourself, you can see that most Christians who home school are not the ones who seek to enslave others, and that growing numbers of secular, atheistic, agnostic or just plain "semi-spiritual, non-organized" religious folks are also discovering the benefits of freedom in this area.
I agree wholeheartedly with the previous poster's concluding paragraph, btw.
"If either the right wing or left wing gained control of this country, it would flap around in circles." (Frank Zappa)
"Free your mind, and your ass will follow." (George Clinton)
Voluntary cooperation becomes much easier when forced cooperation is abolished.
"Home schooling" and "unschooling" aren't that difficult. If you don't know how to teach a subject, you help your child find someone who can, and locate sources they can use to learn on their own, or with you and/or their siblings. The single greatest legislative achievement to make this more practical for "the masses" is to remove the compulsory attendance laws.
If you peruse misc.education.home-school.misc on Usenet, you will find that increasing numbers are finding how rewarding this approach can be, for themselves and their children.
"...it's nice when young people learn how good it can feel to help others, out of the goodness of our hearts. But the lessons learned by slave laborers -- shirking, sabotage, resentment, and escape -- are quite different."
Anyone who asks this question is either painfully sheltered, willfully ignorant or deliberately, maliciously part of the problem. Yes, the Internet and readily available weapons are at fault, and the usual band of fascists, both closeted and "out", are happily pimping the dead to further their totalitarian agendas. How many of those who claim to have "no idea why this could have happened" ever spent the night awake, crying, praying for something, anything, to keep them home the next day, or forever? How many spent their entire school years in that state? How many have repressed those memories, and try to maintain the fiction that childhood is the happiest time of one's life? Does thinking make their brains hurt that badly? Or do they simply hate their past so much that they believe every child must suffer in the same way? John Taylor Gatto writes: "Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community...Interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will earn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even."
Succinctly: Free software/open standards foster freedom of choice. The more you learn, the more potentially self-sufficient you are; running, say, Trinux, or one's own DNS server (not a caching one, but a full one) with a high-speed connection, are potentially very dangerous -- to others if their power is abused, to you if you don't take the time and effort to learn, and do it right. But the potential freedom and self-sufficiency they offer makes them very attractive to those willing to make the journey. Likewise, those who learn how to program, or learn any skill which decreases reliance on others. The more independent every individual is, the easier (and potentially, more rewarding) voluntary cooperation becomes.
Linus has always been a very easy-going, approachable, humble person. These qualities, and others, have helped him work with the large number of Linux contributors, and avoid being too much of a Cult of Personality, and for a long time he deliberately avoided conflict or even the appearance of arrogance or superiority. The Comdex speech had me ROFL, because I think Linus is finally confident enough to be more obviously tongue-in-cheek. The comments regarding non-coders and business types are so obvious that anyone taking them seriously should have their head surgically removed, since it isn't doing them any good. Linus is relaxed enough to let it all hang out. We got the guns, AND we got the numbers! Who wouldn't be as smug as a penguin (or a daemon) about now?
Just in case anyone has been confused by the multiplicity of bogus matches for MP4 in search engines, the *real* MPEG (you know, the people who come up with the standards...like www.w3.org?) are at http://drogo.cselt.stet.it/mpeg/
To quote Akbar and Jeff, "Damn the law!" Write it, export it, use it. Fsck Tha Man, and all that. Stop saying "yes massa" and meekly taking your seat in the back of the bus.
All non-Lynx browsers available for Linux boil down to this sentiment for me. When there's a fast, clean, GPL'd shell surrounding Gecko, with keyboard equivalents that blend the best of MSIE, Opera and Lynx, with plugins that replicate the functionality of Alexa and Altavista Discovery, I'll be farting through silk; 'til then, anything but Lynx is strictly for "emergencies", and definitely not an experience I would call pleasant.
Dejanews is still a reasonably good choice for Usenet, so with the advent of Google (and the multitude of other choices), leaving Alta Vista behind is no great loss. I was already starting to see vast quantities of irrelevant "porn hits" in most of my AV search results anyway, and Google quickly proved itself given identical criteria. Thumbs up!
Gads. This just seems like the flip side of Big Brother's attempt to turn "volunteer" work into being mandatory to receive a driver's license, high school diploma, etc. When Humpty Dumpty gets to redefine words at his whim... Just another inch down that slippery slope. It's only your rights; suck it!
Phoole childe. *Real* libertarians, anarchocapitalists and individualists know to choose the best product, regardless of who makes it. *Real* lovers of freedom would not have written such an idiotic mercantilist, protectionist rant that puts _Das Kapital_ to shame. *Real* lovers of freedom always insist on getting the best product at the best price. *Real* lovers of freedom know the difference between voluntary and involuntary... but hey, these guys already proved their cluelessness many times over.
I never liked the 1st Amendment analogy either, but I have observed in the past that since the gubmint implicitly considers encryption to be "munitions", that its possession and use would be more strongly defended on 2nd Amendment grounds; the right of self- defense is not abrogated or precluded on the basis of the tool one uses.
I tried Display Doctor under Win95 and Win98 back when I ran them, and both times it tragically hosed things to the point where I had to reinstall the OS (big surprise, right?).
I tried the Linux version. X still worked, but SVGAlib apps wouldn't run because of improper library links. Even after I uninstalled, the settings were still hosed. Thankfully, installing the latest SVGAlib (which I figured was long overdue anyway) fixed everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Give it time. Hey, things are moving faster every day.
Intellectual Property != Internet Protocol.
The responsibility of "who shall protect the children" rests where it always has -- with the legal guardians of the child. Every child develops the capacity to make moral judgments at a different pace. Being a parent should mean helping your child become an adult, not become a clone of yourself, and certainly not to remain a child. I see increasing numbers of people every day my age (30ish) and older who can only, as William Gibson put it in Idoru, only express their twin desires of murderous rage and infantile desire by pressing the buttons on a television remote and voting in presidential elections. Just a symptom of all the ways we teach children that Thinking Is Bad.
It does children no service to be anything less than scrupulously honest. While four-year olds may not need to know how to use condoms, feeding them BS that says, for instance, all substances are equally morally and physically Bad, only encourages harmful patterns of abuse, not responsible use or voluntary abstention.
Who decides what is education, and what is brainwashing and indoctrination? Only someone who believes that one size truly fits all, and has the gall to believe that they have the right to force the rest of the world into line, would dare. Try to please everyone, and you end up pleasing noone.
And to tie this back to the beginning: The ancient Greek children who witnessed incredible violence and cruelty on a daily basis did not all grow up to become despots and tyrants. Of course, most Americans seem concerned only with themselves or the current fads-or-politically-approved-oppressed-classes.
When Bill Clinton deplores the "culture of violence" while sending troops to shoot and bomb people in Kosovo who aren't even in his legal or political jurisdiction; when those who supposedly protect and serve us gas and burn men, women and children without a properly served warrant or any evidence of wrong doing, shoot an unarmed woman holding an infant and then taunt and mock her family through megaphones for days while their bodies rot in the sun; when a Japanese newspaper deplores "the warped strains of 'an advanced society'" when their leaders have only recently started acknowledging the Rape of Nanking and the so-called "noble class" systematically disarmed the poor for centuries by making it illegal to own swords and other weapons (thus prompting the development of many of the martial arts)....
Then, folks, there is some serious hypocrisy and denial going on.
My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I'd not do so. This manner of thinking you find fault with is my sole consolation in life; it alleviates all my sufferings in prison, it composes all my pleasures in the world outside, it is dearer to me than life itself. Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness... If then, as you tell me, they are willing to restore my liberty if I am willing to pay for it by the sacrifice of my principles or my tastes, we may bid one another eternal adieu, for rather than part with those, I would sacrifice a thousand lives and a thousand liberties, if I had them. These principles and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations, the deeper they root my principles in my heart, and I openly declare that no one need ever talk to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return for their destruction.
Whatever he writes, though, I don't think we have to worry about Dave calling for net regulation; in an interview with Reason magazine, he effectively debunks the myth that freedom is bad "because then everyone would have sex with dogs." Great stuff.
BTW, I also agree that the new moderation process has overall been more of a Good than a Bad Thing.
Hot on the heels of the Lothar Hardware Recognition Project which Mandrake announced. This could be the start of a beautiful relationship; I can't wait to see what VA and Mandrake can do together!
Burning of the schools not too far away
It's the government schools, stupid
"You treat children as slaves, and you're surprised when they despise you and your institutions? You lock them up in cages, and act surprised when they kill their keepers?" [As well as their so-called "peers"]
(Speaking on a personal level, I set my threshhold as low as possible because, like Katz, I want to see it all, even things I may disagree with, even things which may make me angry. Part of maturing is thinking before you act, including communications, electronic and otherwise. I allow others to think whatever they want, but their actions are a different matter.)
I've learned to be with the world and not of it, as St. Paul[?] said. And as Ken Kesey said, "Take what you can use and let the rest go by."
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
If you read the group for yourself, you can see that most Christians who home school are not the ones who seek to enslave others, and that growing numbers of secular, atheistic, agnostic or just plain "semi-spiritual, non-organized" religious folks are also discovering the benefits of freedom in this area.
I agree wholeheartedly with the previous poster's concluding paragraph, btw.
"If either the right wing or left wing gained control of this country, it would flap around in circles." (Frank Zappa)
"Free your mind, and your ass will follow." (George Clinton)
Voluntary cooperation becomes much easier when forced cooperation is abolished.
See
http://www.sepschool.org/faq.html, the Separation of School and State FAQ.
If you peruse misc.education.home-school.misc on Usenet, you will find that increasing numbers are finding how rewarding this approach can be, for themselves and their children.
I would urge you also to read "Let's Blackmail the Young into Doing Good" at http://www.infomagic.com/liberty/vs99 0414.htm for a somewhat related rant. Relevant quote:
"...it's nice when young people learn how good it can feel to help others, out of the goodness of our hearts. But the lessons learned by slave laborers -- shirking, sabotage, resentment, and escape -- are quite different."
Anyone who asks this question is either painfully sheltered, willfully ignorant or deliberately, maliciously part of the problem. Yes, the Internet and readily available weapons are at fault, and the usual band of fascists, both closeted and "out", are happily pimping the dead to further their totalitarian agendas. How many of those who claim to have "no idea why this could have happened" ever spent the night awake, crying, praying for something, anything, to keep them home the next day, or forever? How many spent their entire school years in that state? How many have repressed those memories, and try to maintain the fiction that childhood is the happiest time of one's life? Does thinking make their brains hurt that badly? Or do they simply hate their past so much that they believe every child must suffer in the same way? John Taylor Gatto writes: "Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community...Interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will earn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even."
Succinctly: Free software/open standards foster freedom of choice. The more you learn, the more potentially self-sufficient you are; running, say, Trinux, or one's own DNS server (not a caching one, but a full one) with a high-speed connection, are potentially very dangerous -- to others if their power is abused, to you if you don't take the time and effort to learn, and do it right. But the potential freedom and self-sufficiency they offer makes them very attractive to those willing to make the journey. Likewise, those who learn how to program, or learn any skill which decreases reliance on others. The more independent every individual is, the easier (and potentially, more rewarding) voluntary cooperation becomes.
Linus has always been a very easy-going, approachable, humble person. These qualities, and others, have helped him work with the large number of Linux contributors, and avoid being too much of a Cult of Personality, and for a long time he deliberately avoided conflict or even the appearance of arrogance or superiority. The Comdex speech had me ROFL, because I think Linus is finally confident enough to be more obviously tongue-in-cheek. The comments regarding non-coders and business types are so obvious that anyone taking them seriously should have their head surgically removed, since it isn't doing them any good. Linus is relaxed enough to let it all hang out. We got the guns, AND we got the numbers! Who wouldn't be as smug as a penguin (or a daemon) about now?
Just in case anyone has been confused by the multiplicity of bogus matches for MP4 in search engines, the *real* MPEG (you know, the people who come up with the standards...like www.w3.org?) are at http://drogo.cselt.stet.it/mpeg/
To quote Akbar and Jeff, "Damn the law!" Write it, export it, use it. Fsck Tha Man, and all that. Stop saying "yes massa" and meekly taking your seat in the back of the bus.
That would kick serious butt. I (and many others I know) would probably buy those by the six-pack.
All non-Lynx browsers available for Linux boil down to this sentiment for me. When there's a fast, clean, GPL'd shell surrounding Gecko, with keyboard equivalents that blend the best of MSIE, Opera and Lynx, with plugins that replicate the functionality of Alexa and Altavista Discovery, I'll be farting through silk; 'til then, anything but Lynx is strictly for "emergencies", and definitely not an experience I would call pleasant.
Dejanews is still a reasonably good choice for Usenet, so with the advent of Google (and the multitude of other choices), leaving Alta Vista behind is no great loss. I was already starting to see vast quantities of irrelevant "porn hits" in most of my AV search results anyway, and Google quickly proved itself given identical criteria. Thumbs up!
Gads. This just seems like the flip side of Big Brother's attempt to turn "volunteer" work into being mandatory to receive a driver's license, high school diploma, etc. When Humpty Dumpty gets to redefine words at his whim... Just another inch down that slippery slope. It's only your rights; suck it!
Phoole childe. *Real* libertarians, anarchocapitalists and individualists know to choose the best product, regardless of who makes it. *Real* lovers of freedom would not have written such an idiotic mercantilist, protectionist rant that puts _Das Kapital_ to shame. *Real* lovers of freedom always insist on getting the best product at the best price. *Real* lovers of freedom know the difference between voluntary and involuntary... but hey, these guys already proved their cluelessness many times over.
I never liked the 1st Amendment analogy either, but
I have observed in the past that since the gubmint
implicitly considers encryption to be "munitions",
that its possession and use would be more strongly
defended on 2nd Amendment grounds; the right of self-
defense is not abrogated or precluded on the basis
of the tool one uses.
Those who use "white trash" as a pejorative should read Jim Goad's
_Redneck Manifesto_ and be forced to work in the cotton fields wearing blackface.
I tried Display Doctor under Win95 and Win98 back when I ran them, and both times it tragically hosed things to the point where I had to reinstall the OS (big surprise, right?).
I tried the Linux version. X still worked, but SVGAlib apps wouldn't run because of improper library links. Even after I uninstalled, the settings were still hosed. Thankfully, installing the latest SVGAlib (which I figured was long overdue anyway) fixed everything.
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton
Thousands of people have made the open source community what it is today, and continue to do so.
Every one of them deserves our thanks.