If the dictatorship is there for 40 years, and they're radio nuts trying to censor everyone, they know your address. Especially with that big antenna on the roof.
The point is that the internet is crime and must be controlled. It's not just communication, freedom of expression. It's mostly crime. Copyright abuse, financial fraud, child porn, pedophilia, terrorism, prostitution, drugs, that's what the internet is about. The solution is to identify everyone that connects each time with an ID, and log all activity all the time. Then we'll have no crime. If you argue about freedom, you are told to not confuse your freedom with taking liberty with other people's safety and well being. The proper response, I think is not fall into the trap of choosing between crime or monitoring the public. It's best to say fine, full transparency, full monitoring, let's get rid of crime. Let's monitor what everyone does, all the time. Biometric readers on every doorway, every intersection, every car, phone, and computer. Full publishing of all that data. Of course, the public first needs to trust the people controlling those records, so we need to monitor them. The public needs to monitor everyone in government, all the time, even when they are not on the job, because they could commit crime anywhere, abuse public data. Let's get rid of crime, monitoring all the US spy groups, the police, everyone in DC. Then, when we trust govenment is not full of criminals, we'll move on to monitor the public, too. Otherwise, we'll have government criminals monitoring innocent public. And that sounds terribly dangerous.
Wikileaks popularized leaks, as Napster did p2p. Legal or not to authorities, the people have approved and adopted it, and it cannot be squashed so easily, short of a legal massacre. There is no going back, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat out of the bag, change is here, either side with progress and change, or with the establishment and status quo. Assange being prosecuted and imprisoned will encourage people, release him and the same will happen.
We won, so we can claim our spies were nice and didn't harm anyone!
As of today, that's true. History goes on being written. Capitalism is entering crisis, too. When both socialism and capitalism are completely discredited, maybe we will have some better quality debate how to distribute labor, social decision making, and rewards/benefits.
Same for the United States if the voters of a state elect a fundamentalist or an atheist.
Hmm I think the US has democratically elected a couple of drunks and nutjobs before. As many countries have. Italy's got one for a while now. Yep, people have the right to democratically screw themselves royally, and it's nobody's busieness, if that was the people's choice, they have to deal with it.
"Legit" under standard current US law. That's not the only social circle most people are a part of, and not the only code most anyone abides by. There are rules galore in society - company policies, group behavior codes, clubs, game rules, social morals, principles, culture, tradition, decency, politics, neighborhoods, philosophy, religion, heck, just name a group, and they will have their body of rules, and some sort or another of enforcement or lack thereof. I'll wager this guy breaks a tad too many of these rules for a bunch of people, and is taking his chances. Some might be lawyers, skilled in the art of interpreting laws into purposes they were not meant for. Some might have more respect for other policies and codes, and other enforcement forms. I know I wouldn't want to be in this business with him.
What would be nice are some alternatives that people can use to transport data long distances in such adverse conditions. Though I think it's been answered, it's basically ham radio, long distance dialups, satphones and little else.
Oh. And documentation. Real, full blown, accurate documentation. Yes, some (many?) commercial products have sucky documentation, but open source software is terrible in my experience.
One word - HBGary. I think the fact that there are dozens of government spy groups doing what is now clearly proven by the HBGary leaks is a great demonstration of the "paper democracy" system we all are fooled to believe in. Sabotage, espionage, public opinion manipulation, lies and deceit are all integral and, worse, fully accepted and primordial parts of the current political system. Informed, knowledgeable, open, fair and vigorous debate on real issues, are now the equivalent of naive, foolish, utopian, sidelined idealists. If you neutrally compare the "debate" of left-vs-right common-man activists, you will find many common complaints, although they fight each other like mortal enemies. They both claim control of the wealthy elites, and abuse of the common people, manipulation by the media, favor of corporations, and they are both saying the truth there. They are only mistaken in their belief that the other side is responsible, while they don't actually combat their stated foe - the wealthy, controlling elites, the 1% who own 90% of everything, who are actively funding their confusion, fanning their flames toward each other. Standard divide and conquer, the old British rulers passed the manipulation skills to the new American rulers, the same as the old rulers.
People in western-aligned countries feel inspired by Egypt, by rebelling. They feel oppressed too, but they don't know where or who to rebel against. It's simple, the rulers everywhere have big outdoor signs with fake faces, fake logos, fake slogans - propaganda. They lie to people, have them work for little, and give them false dreams and trash in return. Some rule with guns, some rule with lies, but the result is the same. People are used. Their life feels empty. Future prospects of real change seem small. Eating from garbage or colorful paper McDonalds food changes nothing important in your hopes and aspirations. Some feel trapped by the body, some feel trapped by the mind. All are trapped and used. We are ruled by money, guns, and lies, whether hidden or visible, pretty or ugly, manipulative or grotesque.
And the MPAA would likewise see any candidate for the House or Senate proposing a return to a sane copyright term as a looney. For one thing, a sane copyright term would involve pulling out of the World Trade Organization, as WTO requires TRIPS, and TRIPS requires Berne, and Berne requires life+50.
Great! A whole society just got strong motive to combat copyright with renewed enthusiasm. Many people thought they were just fighting for free movies and music... but when they find out they are actually protesting the WTO and their unfair laws, both passively and actively, they will be much more inspired!
As far as I can tell, the Internet found its funding model. Television. Tons of empty, pointless, inoffensive and bland "content", paid for by the real boss - advertising of worthless products. Millions of sites stand up for no purpose other than for the walls to hold up ads.
Socialism is dead, and capitalism is the walking dead. For capitalism to function, more stuff must be continually made and sold. It doesn't really matter what the stuff is, but stuff has to be sold constantly, in large amounts, consuming work/jobs, material, transport, put the whole socity to make stuff. Nobody cares what the stuff is. That's only possible if the stuff doesn't last very long. If everyone produces garbage, stores garbage, transports garbage, advertises garbage, buys garbage, and makes money on garbage, it's OK, because everyone is employed and busy and the economy is working. What the stuff is doesn't matter, it's entirely secondary and unimportant. The more waste there is, the more stuff needs to be produced. Waste is not only good for capitalism, nowadays capital basically depends on waste. While there is still no well known, easily adopted replacement for capitalism, and socialism clearly shows it doesn't work either, inisiting on what doesn't work at this point is only holding back imagination to invent other work distribution and reward systems that would be better. Socialism is dead, and capitalism is the walking dead. The future needs imagination and courage to abandon the dead.
What would be interesting is to see if some investment can be directed toward funding open source. It's more than fair, a huge amount of these operations depend on open source. I favor setting up threshold pledge funds -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
I agree that it should be statewide and not left up to the counties..
If elections mattered, they would be standardized, inspected, secure, and convenient. Like getting money out of an ATM - that matters, apparently, because it works flawlessly, in any city around the world, 24 hours, no matter where your account is. Voting, reflecting it's importance as compared to money, only is possible in certain ways, is insecure, easy to fraud, and the results are always wrong and unverifiable.
Well, let me know your old address in Oregon.. If your not going to be mailing your ballet in, I'll give you $20 and mail it in for you.
All these non-presential voting systems can be exploited this way. Mail or Internet. Don't know how often it happens in the US but in many places an Internet voting system would quickly lead to a vote-buying campaign, with your voting verified and paid by voting in a few regular unmarked houses, but which everyone knows. Lots of poor people sell their votes, happily, saying they don't care, nothing will change anyway. I know campaigners pay voters and threaten them with something if they don't fulfill the promise, even if the voting system is secret and works. People are afraid that they actually can verify the vote somehow. These voters are typically poor, uneducated, and afraid.
I think the best bets for Linux/open source these days are the myriad small systems that are coming out, and home users. The small systems are as far away from Wintel as can be. Home users on the other hand are relatively easy to please, they use fewer apps, and they choose freely. I think they also make great research for usability, they are more accessible, etc. It's easier to get a Linux desktop that will please millions of teenagers to switch voluntarily that convince corporate sleuths that all their functionality will be available.
More software makes a better OS. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and every OS, project or language depends on the programmers. Linux has few programmers, some of who work only on a part-time basis. Efforts to get more coders, like Google's Summer of Code, are some of the most efficient efforts to promote open source. I favor efforts that reward or incentivate open-source coders, such as awards, competitions, the threshold pledge system, or RSPP-Rational Street Performer Protocol, stuff like that. So people can freely code open-source stuff at leisure, and have reasonable expectations of achieving more than publishing the code and peer recognition, in case the project comes out good.
At what point, exactly, did it become lawful for all of the largest corporations of an industry to organize in their collective best interests
At the same time the democracy became merely formal, and not real. We have a democracy mostly as a formality. The campaign, elections, and changes in government are carried out. Nobody cares because the results matter little, change little. The parties, candidates, proposals and the policies are fixed outside of elections, in various channels. Real decisions, of things that matter, are made in these various "associations", some publicly known, some secretive, some open meetings that are limited or manipulated, some closed meetings, and so on. The more you want real democratic decisions in a merely formal democracy, the more you will find yourself being pushed towards the side of powerless, parallel, unofficial, or underground organizations. There is really only one principle - whatever the goal, to get real democracy, you *must* get millions of participants. Otherwise you have some small, formal or unrepresentative group. If we'd have a "day of copyright rage", getting millions of civil-disobedience copyright-breakers in public squares, with (logically) police trying to break them up, we'd get real policy debate.
That means our company "has" euhm... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.
It's the flip side of anonymity. Lots of lies, since everyone gets to hide their face.
This movie had the best comments I ever saw about intellectual property. http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/ Hmm right after Steve Jobs and Pablo Picasso's comment "Good artists copy, great artists steal".
Slashdot Mirror
Bust out the ham radios and brush up on your CW!
If the dictatorship is there for 40 years, and they're radio nuts trying to censor everyone, they know your address. Especially with that big antenna on the roof.
I think you mean ... nobody IS doing anything, not nobody CAN do anything.
Correct. So do something.
The point is that the internet is crime and must be controlled. It's not just communication, freedom of expression. It's mostly crime. Copyright abuse, financial fraud, child porn, pedophilia, terrorism, prostitution, drugs, that's what the internet is about. The solution is to identify everyone that connects each time with an ID, and log all activity all the time. Then we'll have no crime. If you argue about freedom, you are told to not confuse your freedom with taking liberty with other people's safety and well being. The proper response, I think is not fall into the trap of choosing between crime or monitoring the public. It's best to say fine, full transparency, full monitoring, let's get rid of crime. Let's monitor what everyone does, all the time. Biometric readers on every doorway, every intersection, every car, phone, and computer. Full publishing of all that data. Of course, the public first needs to trust the people controlling those records, so we need to monitor them. The public needs to monitor everyone in government, all the time, even when they are not on the job, because they could commit crime anywhere, abuse public data. Let's get rid of crime, monitoring all the US spy groups, the police, everyone in DC. Then, when we trust govenment is not full of criminals, we'll move on to monitor the public, too. Otherwise, we'll have government criminals monitoring innocent public. And that sounds terribly dangerous.
Wikileaks popularized leaks, as Napster did p2p. Legal or not to authorities, the people have approved and adopted it, and it cannot be squashed so easily, short of a legal massacre. There is no going back, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat out of the bag, change is here, either side with progress and change, or with the establishment and status quo. Assange being prosecuted and imprisoned will encourage people, release him and the same will happen.
A jillion things take "priority" over freedom of expression. A list and analysis of every single case would make a nice book.
We won, so we can claim our spies were nice and didn't harm anyone!
As of today, that's true. History goes on being written. Capitalism is entering crisis, too. When both socialism and capitalism are completely discredited, maybe we will have some better quality debate how to distribute labor, social decision making, and rewards/benefits.
Same for the United States if the voters of a state elect a fundamentalist or an atheist.
Hmm I think the US has democratically elected a couple of drunks and nutjobs before. As many countries have. Italy's got one for a while now. Yep, people have the right to democratically screw themselves royally, and it's nobody's busieness, if that was the people's choice, they have to deal with it.
"Legit" under standard current US law. That's not the only social circle most people are a part of, and not the only code most anyone abides by. There are rules galore in society - company policies, group behavior codes, clubs, game rules, social morals, principles, culture, tradition, decency, politics, neighborhoods, philosophy, religion, heck, just name a group, and they will have their body of rules, and some sort or another of enforcement or lack thereof. I'll wager this guy breaks a tad too many of these rules for a bunch of people, and is taking his chances. Some might be lawyers, skilled in the art of interpreting laws into purposes they were not meant for. Some might have more respect for other policies and codes, and other enforcement forms. I know I wouldn't want to be in this business with him.
What would be nice are some alternatives that people can use to transport data long distances in such adverse conditions. Though I think it's been answered, it's basically ham radio, long distance dialups, satphones and little else.
And buy from the corner grocery. Locally produced stuff. On foot. You just cut out a half dozen international corporate middlemen.
Oh. And documentation. Real, full blown, accurate documentation. Yes, some (many?) commercial products have sucky documentation, but open source software is terrible in my experience.
Get a horde of tech writers to contribute to OSS.
How are we going to get it.
The best boycott I ever heard of was buy-nothing - boycott the consumer-think http://www.google.com/search?q=buy+nothing
One word - HBGary. I think the fact that there are dozens of government spy groups doing what is now clearly proven by the HBGary leaks is a great demonstration of the "paper democracy" system we all are fooled to believe in. Sabotage, espionage, public opinion manipulation, lies and deceit are all integral and, worse, fully accepted and primordial parts of the current political system. Informed, knowledgeable, open, fair and vigorous debate on real issues, are now the equivalent of naive, foolish, utopian, sidelined idealists. If you neutrally compare the "debate" of left-vs-right common-man activists, you will find many common complaints, although they fight each other like mortal enemies. They both claim control of the wealthy elites, and abuse of the common people, manipulation by the media, favor of corporations, and they are both saying the truth there. They are only mistaken in their belief that the other side is responsible, while they don't actually combat their stated foe - the wealthy, controlling elites, the 1% who own 90% of everything, who are actively funding their confusion, fanning their flames toward each other. Standard divide and conquer, the old British rulers passed the manipulation skills to the new American rulers, the same as the old rulers.
People in western-aligned countries feel inspired by Egypt, by rebelling. They feel oppressed too, but they don't know where or who to rebel against. It's simple, the rulers everywhere have big outdoor signs with fake faces, fake logos, fake slogans - propaganda. They lie to people, have them work for little, and give them false dreams and trash in return. Some rule with guns, some rule with lies, but the result is the same. People are used. Their life feels empty. Future prospects of real change seem small. Eating from garbage or colorful paper McDonalds food changes nothing important in your hopes and aspirations. Some feel trapped by the body, some feel trapped by the mind. All are trapped and used. We are ruled by money, guns, and lies, whether hidden or visible, pretty or ugly, manipulative or grotesque.
And the MPAA would likewise see any candidate for the House or Senate proposing a return to a sane copyright term as a looney. For one thing, a sane copyright term would involve pulling out of the World Trade Organization, as WTO requires TRIPS, and TRIPS requires Berne, and Berne requires life+50.
Great! A whole society just got strong motive to combat copyright with renewed enthusiasm. Many people thought they were just fighting for free movies and music... but when they find out they are actually protesting the WTO and their unfair laws, both passively and actively, they will be much more inspired!
As far as I can tell, the Internet found its funding model. Television. Tons of empty, pointless, inoffensive and bland "content", paid for by the real boss - advertising of worthless products. Millions of sites stand up for no purpose other than for the walls to hold up ads.
Socialism is dead, and capitalism is the walking dead. For capitalism to function, more stuff must be continually made and sold. It doesn't really matter what the stuff is, but stuff has to be sold constantly, in large amounts, consuming work/jobs, material, transport, put the whole socity to make stuff. Nobody cares what the stuff is. That's only possible if the stuff doesn't last very long. If everyone produces garbage, stores garbage, transports garbage, advertises garbage, buys garbage, and makes money on garbage, it's OK, because everyone is employed and busy and the economy is working. What the stuff is doesn't matter, it's entirely secondary and unimportant. The more waste there is, the more stuff needs to be produced. Waste is not only good for capitalism, nowadays capital basically depends on waste. While there is still no well known, easily adopted replacement for capitalism, and socialism clearly shows it doesn't work either, inisiting on what doesn't work at this point is only holding back imagination to invent other work distribution and reward systems that would be better. Socialism is dead, and capitalism is the walking dead. The future needs imagination and courage to abandon the dead.
What would be interesting is to see if some investment can be directed toward funding open source. It's more than fair, a huge amount of these operations depend on open source. I favor setting up threshold pledge funds -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
I agree that it should be statewide and not left up to the counties. .
If elections mattered, they would be standardized, inspected, secure, and convenient. Like getting money out of an ATM - that matters, apparently, because it works flawlessly, in any city around the world, 24 hours, no matter where your account is. Voting, reflecting it's importance as compared to money, only is possible in certain ways, is insecure, easy to fraud, and the results are always wrong and unverifiable.
Well, let me know your old address in Oregon.. If your not going to be mailing your ballet in, I'll give you $20 and mail it in for you.
All these non-presential voting systems can be exploited this way. Mail or Internet. Don't know how often it happens in the US but in many places an Internet voting system would quickly lead to a vote-buying campaign, with your voting verified and paid by voting in a few regular unmarked houses, but which everyone knows. Lots of poor people sell their votes, happily, saying they don't care, nothing will change anyway. I know campaigners pay voters and threaten them with something if they don't fulfill the promise, even if the voting system is secret and works. People are afraid that they actually can verify the vote somehow. These voters are typically poor, uneducated, and afraid.
I think the best bets for Linux/open source these days are the myriad small systems that are coming out, and home users. The small systems are as far away from Wintel as can be. Home users on the other hand are relatively easy to please, they use fewer apps, and they choose freely. I think they also make great research for usability, they are more accessible, etc. It's easier to get a Linux desktop that will please millions of teenagers to switch voluntarily that convince corporate sleuths that all their functionality will be available.
More software makes a better OS. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and every OS, project or language depends on the programmers. Linux has few programmers, some of who work only on a part-time basis. Efforts to get more coders, like Google's Summer of Code, are some of the most efficient efforts to promote open source. I favor efforts that reward or incentivate open-source coders, such as awards, competitions, the threshold pledge system, or RSPP-Rational Street Performer Protocol, stuff like that. So people can freely code open-source stuff at leisure, and have reasonable expectations of achieving more than publishing the code and peer recognition, in case the project comes out good.
We hail our new king, Chris Dodd and wish him succes in his new function.
That would be neat, holding a mock formal coronation-of-culture-king ceremony for someone posing as Dodd.
At what point, exactly, did it become lawful for all of the largest corporations of an industry to organize in their collective best interests
At the same time the democracy became merely formal, and not real. We have a democracy mostly as a formality. The campaign, elections, and changes in government are carried out. Nobody cares because the results matter little, change little. The parties, candidates, proposals and the policies are fixed outside of elections, in various channels. Real decisions, of things that matter, are made in these various "associations", some publicly known, some secretive, some open meetings that are limited or manipulated, some closed meetings, and so on. The more you want real democratic decisions in a merely formal democracy, the more you will find yourself being pushed towards the side of powerless, parallel, unofficial, or underground organizations. There is really only one principle - whatever the goal, to get real democracy, you *must* get millions of participants. Otherwise you have some small, formal or unrepresentative group. If we'd have a "day of copyright rage", getting millions of civil-disobedience copyright-breakers in public squares, with (logically) police trying to break them up, we'd get real policy debate.
That means our company "has" euhm ... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.
It's the flip side of anonymity. Lots of lies, since everyone gets to hide their face.
This movie had the best comments I ever saw about intellectual property. http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/ Hmm right after Steve Jobs and Pablo Picasso's comment "Good artists copy, great artists steal".