RSS + JabberD = Instant Distributed XML Transfer
on
RSS & BT Together?
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· Score: 1
RSS and Jabber are a natural fit. It seems like the idea of transmitting XML through an IM framework and letting the publishers server take the hit for Images/Multimedia files would make sense on the price/performance stance.
But if you really wanted to distribute everything, you could offload the image/multimedia to some sort of P2P scheme, and as the resources are published, seed the P2P network. RSS feeds would just have to send a jabber update with the P2P resource location, then the client would recieve the update and start streaming the content from the seed servers. Mirror sites could cache everything for old style web backward compatibility. Viola, instant (or close to) distributed web publishing.
or is this guy really missing the point? The beauty of the Mono project is not that it's an open source version of a Microsoft interface, but that it's a technology created by Microsoft and now adopted by the Open Source community so as to keep it in the "public domain" (so to speak, I know I'm using the term "public domain" very loosely when considering licenses such as the GPL).
Microsoft can change whatever interfaces they want at this point, the technology is out there and actively being developed. This is a far better scenario than what Sun created with Java. Open Source demands now have the freedom to dictate the direction of Mono. If Mono is a success, then Microsoft will be forced to address the market that is using it and open their API's or suffer a withersome death at the hands of Open Source hackers using Mono. Worst case scenario, Mono is not that huge a success, and it becomes the communities job to write code that interfaces with Windows morphing API's. I fail to see how Mono loses in either scenario.
Frankly I think the creation of Mono was one of the most brilliant moves by the open source community ever. Take a technology that MS is depending on for their future products, and pull the behemoth's own "embrace and extend" maneuver in the Open Source community. Other projects should be as visionary.
I think that McBride and Cronys really do believe in their heart of hearts that people are not capable of organizing, co-ordinating, and for that matter, producing functional code, without the direct support of some company as a mastermind.
And for our parts, we will believe that no two-bit, no-product-offering, failing-company, front-for-a-bunch-of-tech-vultures in Utah is capable of mounting a massive media FUD campaign without the corporate sponsership of Micro$oft.
We understand the motivation, now we must follow the trail of money.
Is there any validity in Linux users and advocates creating a class action suit against SCO to either retract their charges or at least publicly retract those portions that claim damages from Linux? IBM can defend themselves, but the Linux community must stand for itself. It's easy to show in speculative terms how this lawsuit and the FUD surrounding it have hurt Linux adoption. It seems that Linux (and those that defend it) should be allowed to sue for damages.
Oddly enough I posted a question to "Ask Slashdot" about a year ago on this same topic. It didn't get posted then.
I was almost slapped with a liable case for things I'd posted in my weblog regarding my rocky relationship and diovorce. I was suprised to hear from my ex a year later that if I didn't remove my web log she would seek a liable suit. Consulting with a lawyer brought me to the conclusion that there was a right to privacy for anyone regardless of how public that record might be and as long as a reader can reasonably figure out who you're defaming, then there is a case for liable. Conclusions that I drew balancing personal philosophy and the legal consultation. It still could have made for an interesting case (although it wasn't worth wasting money on).
The important lesson. Use codnames. I changed all the references in my blog to a character name from Butterfield 8 which I thought conveyed my ex-wife fairly. Better yet, leave names out completely.
lay in keeping Microsoft from strongarming vendors into selling windows to their customers?
How about this for a solution? Let Microsoft sell whatever version of Windows they want, but let consumers buy whatever OS they want with the hardware they want. Seems a lot easier than 48 different versions of Windows (which Microsoft admits to being non-modular, something I want out of my OS -I also like a lot of threads though-).
Does it mean that since the focus has turned away from illegal business practices and focused on the structure of the OS, that Microsoft has already won against the charges of unfair competition?
> TV is still the most reliable and trusted media.
This is a purely relative stance. And one that should not be propagated as accurate.
I, for one, listened to the news on television and found it repetitive and void. Trusted sites like CNN, BBC, Slashdot, and a handful of other sites were far more reliable in the timely nature of their releases and the quality of information. There were a few rumors that got posted, there were retractions once verification was made. But by large I heard more speculative and unsubstantiated rumors through television (and via word of mouth) then I did on the net. It got to the point that I stopped watching TV and listening to people, and just started reading and refeshing...
On top of that, if I really wanted to know what was going on, there were repeaters of the local police scanners set up in various sites streaming everything from Real Audio to MP3. I got to hear first hand as traffic jams were piling up in DC and people were getting out and leaving their cars in the middle of the street. I was horrified to know that with all of this happening, there were still people being held up at ATM's and other petty crimes taking place.
The amount of information availible, and its quality were astounding. It's like normal periodicals though, you don't go to the grocery store to read hard news. On the internet, you don't go to drudgereport.com to get accurate updates of world news.
It ultimately boils down to the fact that news is only as accurate and effective as the receptical it's stored in. If that recepticle wears the vacent stare of a slobbering idiot, you have to consider the source. And to be perfectly frank, after a few hours of TV news, that's exactly what the anchors looked like as they struggled to say anything relevant.
Re:Why is a civilian spouting off about war?
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 1
Okay, another civilian here. How about this, instead of sticking to an anit-Katz stance which we get loud and clear, how about sharing some of the knowledge you do have.
You make interesting points about geography, strategic positioning, and artillery choices. Not to mention defenses that can render all of that useless.
Katz makes some interesting points that you don't address, like the fact that terrorist cells are decentralized. We have terrorist cells active in the US now, and if you believe otherwise, you're blind or stupid. How is going to war with Afghanistan going to solve that problem?
Technology can be used as an intelligence gathering maneuver that will aid in the placement of troops and other resources. Personally, I think that you're brute force position will fail ultimately, and the reason for this is because of what I know about computing and technology.
Decentralized processing can process much greater loads of information than can a single CPU. This trend and logic seems to be something that terrorist cells have been able to use to their advantage.
Now, as far as how to combat that? We have to redefine our out dated military strategies and put into effect some sort of mechanism that can combat a distributed, non-centralized attack. It's sort of like combatting a DDOS in a way. You gather intelligence, not from the source itself, but the metadata that you recieve from the attack, then you resond accordingly by dropping certain packets. Likewise, in defense of this sort of attack, and indeed, taking an offensive position as well, we have to gather as much information as is humanly possible, use a distributed method of analysing it, and respond in a very pointed, targeted method. No broad sweeping attack plan will work in this or any other case where national boundaries are non existant, and politics are beyond the scope of international diplomacy.
While it's true that I would love for someone like you with such a firey will and obvious strength to fight this battle, it would be nice to put a little extra effort in while planning the attack. And yes, will will have to depend on technology both old and new as a tool to help define the parameters of that attack.
Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper, and more "drinking community" friendly to just disable the ignition system when alcohol is detected? Granted there are plenty of other issues surrounding this that make it scary use of technology, but why not use it proactively rather than punatively. Seems to me that this is very telling of the inventors mindset.
From my own perspective, I would rather my car give me the hint, "Hey don't drive. Take a cab or wait to sober up" then having a cop do it.
Is that Sun and HP, two of the biggest proponanats for CDE have finally taken the long outdated position of Dropping CDE and moved towards Gnome instead. Is this a slap in the face to either the KDE community or a huge boon for the Gnome community? I seriously doubt it. They got tired of trying to sell CDE when there are better, more aesthetically pleasing alternatives out there, Gnome and KDE are both examples of this. CDE sucked, it was ugly, motif is outdated and there are better libraries out there. So why would Sun and HP not want to drop the dead weight and throw their development weight behind something else? The question is why gnome? Why not something else. Rewriting CDE would be a huge undertaking. So using a codebase that is already established makes a lot of sense. And the potential licensing issues with QT for a commercial entity might very well be more than negligable. Hence Gnome make sense because all of the libraries are open source and therefore free. What does Sun get? A desktop that is fully functional, pleasing to use and look at, and costs them nothing other than a few developers time to make sure the port to Solaris functions. It makes sense from Suns position of trying to increase shareholders value, less expenditure on licensing costs equals a greater dividend at the end of the day. And Solaris users win in the end by getting something better and more functional than CDE. So, what if you want to run KDE on your Ultra 30 instead on Gnome? Port it and install it. Hack the QT-free libraries to run on Sparc, hack the KDE sources to run on Sparc, and install it. Better yet, after you get it working, make a package of it and upload it to Sun Freeware, so that you can share it with the rest of the world! That way everyone has the choice of what Unix Desktop they prefer. This is an issue of choice and as long as there are interested KDE developers and interested Gnome developers, both systems can and will flourish. The community wars between the two are rediculous, get over it...
Because all in all, it was pretty weak. But then not all X-files viewers are/. readers as well. We all know that Gibson has done some amazing stuff, and X-files has been drawing us all in for a long time. To broascast the concepts of real technology to the mass public as well as present some futuristic horror oriented storyline in an hour means that there will be a lot lost in the translation (read, dumbing-down). Although I can't say I think they did it effectively, it's just necessary. How many people do you run into on a day to day basis that misuse the word 'download'? It's common for peole to use the word out of context and away from anything even resembling the original meaning. Personally I thought it was a kind of funny insider joke that they so blatently misused 'download' and many other bits of jargon. The friends I watched with were sucked into the general story rather than the technical mistakes.
I have to admit however that the technical mistakes made it an episode I probly won't watch as a rerun, regardless of how hot Scully looked in body armor;-)
Including all the time spent doing independant study for certifications and such (The new educational system isn't excluded to the universities anymore after all) I easily spend between 50-75 hours a business week working. Including weekend hours that generally don't get logged it's probly more like 75-80 hours...
I've been using a Blackbox 8 port KVM for all of our new sun boxes that are being staged for clients and our own use for the past few months. This thing is a life saver and reliable as any I've seen. At my old job, I used a Cybex 8 port KVM for pc's as well and it was a solid box, but I have to say, out of the two, I like the blackbox better (odd considering I heard rumors of Cybex manufacturing the Blackbox units, I could be wrong though)
I think that in some ways you make a descent argument here but I don't think you really go far enough with it. The fundamental flaw here was not that these kids played Doom, or listened to Marilyn Manson, or dressed in black trenchcoats. The fundamental issue was that these kids were left alone with these things and never really connected to anything outside of that. The parents probly did the best they knew how but were they really there from the tiem their kids were born with the love and support that they needed? Or did they go about their daily business and ignore the various signs that were there saying that their kid was screaming out for help? I seriously doubt that these parents were attachemnt oriented and thought their kids love and connection on a daily basis. I don't want to sound like I'm blaming it all on the parents, because there were definately more factors that that.
Lets through in the video games and the internet and Marilyn Manson though and look at the role they could have played. Violent Music, while a definate form of expression (and one that even I connect with, being a fan of MM) does not in and ov itself motivate one to kill. Nor does violent thought in and of itself. The videogames could very well have been active in breaking down the barriers between reality and fantasy, but why would that be possible. If all a person has to connect with is a violent video game, then perhaps that's all they will know. If all a person knows is a violent fantasy of killing before being killed, you can see that there is a potential problem without me pointing it out. And the internet... As we know the internet is a tool for communicating and gathering ideas and spreading them. But it is a tool moer than a media. It is what we make of it. I can go on the internet and for months at a tiem never have contact with another human being on it, it is my decision about how I use the tool that allows me to communicate with other people or shut them out completely. In my case I choose to share my thoughts but that does not mean that most of the flames I will recieve from posting this will have any bearing on my life. Because I choose to ingnore the input and seek my own agenda which is to not bother reading or writing to people who don't like my ideas or my input. Who's to say these kids were part of an internet propigated "gang," I'm not saying they weren't, but I think that the impact was way less than is being emphasised. In the end, I believe that it is too difficult to pidgeon hole someone into a course of behavior that is dictated by music and video games and the internet by themselves. No, there was more to it... I think that these kids were let down by their families first off, probly because the parents didn't know how to effectivly divy up thie time between work and family and still make ends meet without feeling very drained themselves. This is a feeling that is growing in America and will probly continue. Secondly I believe that the school let these kids down, because they had no outlet for these intelligent children that they wanted to take part in, and because they failed to make them feel comfortable in any social type setting. The community and other kids let these kids down for not breaking through and not connecting with these boys early on and giving them status in the social ranking of the community. It is important for children to feel a part of something even if it is something small. Other kids and other parents should have reached out to include these kids in something other than what they could devise on their own. Alienation doesn't go aware just because you ignore it, often times it comes back to bite you.
This is what is happening today, more and more parents are having children that they can't devote the time to because they are too worried about the lives they want to lead than the ones they do lead. They don't take the time on a daily basis from the childs earliest years to make them feel loved, to bring them in and make them a part of the family unit. They send them to school where the only thing that they can find to connect to are drugs, music, and games. The other kids make fun of them, only driving them farther away. Teachers and priciples look at them as troubled children and pidgeon hole them that way, driving them further into a hole. They go home and play quake and have fun, and listen to loud crunchy music and have fun, and escape their depression for a while, breaking down what's real for a while. And we're suprised when they start fantasizing about all those monsters in doom being the monsters that are keeping them in that hole. Go figure that we've created a ticking time bomb, look at how many times these kids have been labeled and criticised and let down before they ever got to that point. And when they fell so low and have they're boundaries torn down to such a point, and still people ridicule or even worse, ignore them. It makes perfect sense that as an eighteen year old with hormones pumping and real life closer than ever, they just wanted to explode.
Unfortunately I believe that this is only the beginning. It's not going to go away until on the most fundamental family layer, we start to deal with our children as what they are, human. Full of all the good that we are, and the bad. We need a social structure that allows us to spend time with our kids, a work environment that is more focused on family, and healthy workers than profit. And more schools that have less children, more teachers, and lots of active learning rather than lectures that bore and build discontent. And most importantly room for all children to learn to grow and connect with eachother, not to learn to create outcasts. This is the only way we can start to change this in a healthy and constructive manner. Taking into account for human behavior, it's not possible to have a hippy dippy land that everyone is going to be idealic parents and we're going to have idealic schools where all the kids are nice to eachother and all the teachers are great at motivating their students to do something other than fantasize about something other than today's lecture. But it is definately time that we as a community (as all communitys that make up the US, and the world) start taking a real hard introspective look at what we do to perpetuate the current behaviors and start working on real ways to move closer to that ideal that we seek. Until then, acts like this will continue.
While fundamentally I agree with your conclusion that ShutUp Software is limiting in the communal sense, I have to say that the inclusion of these filters is a great liberating feature for most. In reading/. while I don't post replys often it usually tends to be because the content relavent posts are buried beneath a deluge of ph*ck you and First Comment posts. Filtering out these in any way is a great help in my limited reading time to get to the meat of the discussion without having to drift through the flotsom. But as far as posting articles go, if a posted article does not meet my tastes, it is just as easy to not read it in whole than to ignore everything that poster ever submits. And much less limiting. Perhaps if more people found it within themselves to use that discretion when reading instead of simply (and simple mindedly) blocking out all articles. They would be acting upon the intelligence they try to exude through their flames.
Slashdot Mirror
RSS and Jabber are a natural fit. It seems like the idea of transmitting XML through an IM framework and letting the publishers server take the hit for Images/Multimedia files would make sense on the price/performance stance.
But if you really wanted to distribute everything, you could offload the image/multimedia to some sort of P2P scheme, and as the resources are published, seed the P2P network. RSS feeds would just have to send a jabber update with the P2P resource location, then the client would recieve the update and start streaming the content from the seed servers. Mirror sites could cache everything for old style web backward compatibility. Viola, instant (or close to) distributed web publishing.
or is this guy really missing the point? The beauty of the Mono project is not that it's an open source version of a Microsoft interface, but that it's a technology created by Microsoft and now adopted by the Open Source community so as to keep it in the "public domain" (so to speak, I know I'm using the term "public domain" very loosely when considering licenses such as the GPL).
Microsoft can change whatever interfaces they want at this point, the technology is out there and actively being developed. This is a far better scenario than what Sun created with Java. Open Source demands now have the freedom to dictate the direction of Mono. If Mono is a success, then Microsoft will be forced to address the market that is using it and open their API's or suffer a withersome death at the hands of Open Source hackers using Mono. Worst case scenario, Mono is not that huge a success, and it becomes the communities job to write code that interfaces with Windows morphing API's. I fail to see how Mono loses in either scenario.
Frankly I think the creation of Mono was one of the most brilliant moves by the open source community ever. Take a technology that MS is depending on for their future products, and pull the behemoth's own "embrace and extend" maneuver in the Open Source community. Other projects should be as visionary.
I think that McBride and Cronys really do believe in their heart of hearts that people are not capable of organizing, co-ordinating, and for that matter, producing functional code, without the direct support of some company as a mastermind.
And for our parts, we will believe that no two-bit, no-product-offering, failing-company, front-for-a-bunch-of-tech-vultures in Utah is capable of mounting a massive media FUD campaign without the corporate sponsership of Micro$oft.
We understand the motivation, now we must follow the trail of money.
Is there any validity in Linux users and advocates creating a class action suit against SCO to either retract their charges or at least publicly retract those portions that claim damages from Linux? IBM can defend themselves, but the Linux community must stand for itself. It's easy to show in speculative terms how this lawsuit and the FUD surrounding it have hurt Linux adoption. It seems that Linux (and those that defend it) should be allowed to sue for damages.
Oddly enough I posted a question to "Ask Slashdot" about a year ago on this same topic. It didn't get posted then.
I was almost slapped with a liable case for things I'd posted in my weblog regarding my rocky relationship and diovorce. I was suprised to hear from my ex a year later that if I didn't remove my web log she would seek a liable suit. Consulting with a lawyer brought me to the conclusion that there was a right to privacy for anyone regardless of how public that record might be and as long as a reader can reasonably figure out who you're defaming, then there is a case for liable. Conclusions that I drew balancing personal philosophy and the legal consultation. It still could have made for an interesting case (although it wasn't worth wasting money on).
The important lesson. Use codnames. I changed all the references in my blog to a character name from Butterfield 8 which I thought conveyed my ex-wife fairly. Better yet, leave names out completely.
lay in keeping Microsoft from strongarming vendors into selling windows to their customers?
How about this for a solution? Let Microsoft sell whatever version of Windows they want, but let consumers buy whatever OS they want with the hardware they want. Seems a lot easier than 48 different versions of Windows (which Microsoft admits to being non-modular, something I want out of my OS -I also like a lot of threads though-).
Does it mean that since the focus has turned away from illegal business practices and focused on the structure of the OS, that Microsoft has already won against the charges of unfair competition?
I guess MS Outlook is industrial idiocy then...
> TV is still the most reliable and trusted media.
This is a purely relative stance. And one that should not be propagated as accurate.
I, for one, listened to the news on television and found it repetitive and void. Trusted sites like CNN, BBC, Slashdot, and a handful of other sites were far more reliable in the timely nature of their releases and the quality of information. There were a few rumors that got posted, there were retractions once verification was made. But by large I heard more speculative and unsubstantiated rumors through television (and via word of mouth) then I did on the net. It got to the point that I stopped watching TV and listening to people, and just started reading and refeshing...
On top of that, if I really wanted to know what was going on, there were repeaters of the local police scanners set up in various sites streaming everything from Real Audio to MP3. I got to hear first hand as traffic jams were piling up in DC and people were getting out and leaving their cars in the middle of the street. I was horrified to know that with all of this happening, there were still people being held up at ATM's and other petty crimes taking place.
The amount of information availible, and its quality were astounding. It's like normal periodicals though, you don't go to the grocery store to read hard news. On the internet, you don't go to drudgereport.com to get accurate updates of world news.
It ultimately boils down to the fact that news is only as accurate and effective as the receptical it's stored in. If that recepticle wears the vacent stare of a slobbering idiot, you have to consider the source. And to be perfectly frank, after a few hours of TV news, that's exactly what the anchors looked like as they struggled to say anything relevant.
Okay, another civilian here. How about this, instead of sticking to an anit-Katz stance which we get loud and clear, how about sharing some of the knowledge you do have.
You make interesting points about geography, strategic positioning, and artillery choices. Not to mention defenses that can render all of that useless.
Katz makes some interesting points that you don't address, like the fact that terrorist cells are decentralized. We have terrorist cells active in the US now, and if you believe otherwise, you're blind or stupid. How is going to war with Afghanistan going to solve that problem?
Technology can be used as an intelligence gathering maneuver that will aid in the placement of troops and other resources. Personally, I think that you're brute force position will fail ultimately, and the reason for this is because of what I know about computing and technology.
Decentralized processing can process much greater loads of information than can a single CPU. This trend and logic seems to be something that terrorist cells have been able to use to their advantage.
Now, as far as how to combat that? We have to redefine our out dated military strategies and put into effect some sort of mechanism that can combat a distributed, non-centralized attack. It's sort of like combatting a DDOS in a way. You gather intelligence, not from the source itself, but the metadata that you recieve from the attack, then you resond accordingly by dropping certain packets. Likewise, in defense of this sort of attack, and indeed, taking an offensive position as well, we have to gather as much information as is humanly possible, use a distributed method of analysing it, and respond in a very pointed, targeted method. No broad sweeping attack plan will work in this or any other case where national boundaries are non existant, and politics are beyond the scope of international diplomacy.
While it's true that I would love for someone like you with such a firey will and obvious strength to fight this battle, it would be nice to put a little extra effort in while planning the attack. And yes, will will have to depend on technology both old and new as a tool to help define the parameters of that attack.
Regards.
All it takes is one person pissing in the pool to ruin it for the rest of us...
Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper, and more "drinking community" friendly to just disable the ignition system when alcohol is detected? Granted there are plenty of other issues surrounding this that make it scary use of technology, but why not use it proactively rather than punatively. Seems to me that this is very telling of the inventors mindset.
From my own perspective, I would rather my car give me the hint, "Hey don't drive. Take a cab or wait to sober up" then having a cop do it.
Is that Sun and HP, two of the biggest proponanats for CDE have finally taken the long outdated position of Dropping CDE and moved towards Gnome instead. Is this a slap in the face to either the KDE community or a huge boon for the Gnome community? I seriously doubt it. They got tired of trying to sell CDE when there are better, more aesthetically pleasing alternatives out there, Gnome and KDE are both examples of this. CDE sucked, it was ugly, motif is outdated and there are better libraries out there. So why would Sun and HP not want to drop the dead weight and throw their development weight behind something else? The question is why gnome? Why not something else. Rewriting CDE would be a huge undertaking. So using a codebase that is already established makes a lot of sense. And the potential licensing issues with QT for a commercial entity might very well be more than negligable. Hence Gnome make sense because all of the libraries are open source and therefore free. What does Sun get? A desktop that is fully functional, pleasing to use and look at, and costs them nothing other than a few developers time to make sure the port to Solaris functions. It makes sense from Suns position of trying to increase shareholders value, less expenditure on licensing costs equals a greater dividend at the end of the day. And Solaris users win in the end by getting something better and more functional than CDE. So, what if you want to run KDE on your Ultra 30 instead on Gnome? Port it and install it. Hack the QT-free libraries to run on Sparc, hack the KDE sources to run on Sparc, and install it. Better yet, after you get it working, make a package of it and upload it to Sun Freeware, so that you can share it with the rest of the world! That way everyone has the choice of what Unix Desktop they prefer. This is an issue of choice and as long as there are interested KDE developers and interested Gnome developers, both systems can and will flourish. The community wars between the two are rediculous, get over it...
Because all in all, it was pretty weak. But then not all X-files viewers are /. readers as well. We all know that Gibson has done some amazing stuff, and X-files has been drawing us all in for a long time. To broascast the concepts of real technology to the mass public as well as present some futuristic horror oriented storyline in an hour means that there will be a lot lost in the translation (read, dumbing-down). Although I can't say I think they did it effectively, it's just necessary. How many people do you run into on a day to day basis that misuse the word 'download'? It's common for peole to use the word out of context and away from anything even resembling the original meaning. Personally I thought it was a kind of funny insider joke that they so blatently misused 'download' and many other bits of jargon. The friends I watched with were sucked into the general story rather than the technical mistakes.
;-)
I have to admit however that the technical mistakes made it an episode I probly won't watch as a rerun, regardless of how hot Scully looked in body armor
Including all the time spent doing independant study for certifications and such (The new educational system isn't excluded to the universities anymore after all) I easily spend between 50-75 hours a business week working. Including weekend hours that generally don't get logged it's probly more like 75-80 hours...
I've been using a Blackbox 8 port KVM for all of our new sun boxes that are being staged for clients and our own use for the past few months. This thing is a life saver and reliable as any I've seen. At my old job, I used a Cybex 8 port KVM for pc's as well and it was a solid box, but I have to say, out of the two, I like the blackbox better (odd considering I heard rumors of Cybex manufacturing the Blackbox units, I could be wrong though)
How much do you think Bowie is making from Microsoft to push their tech for two weeks before the album is released?
PS-- sorry for the horrible spelling, obviously my spell checker is somehting I connect with totally too, I should have used it here ;-)
I think that in some ways you make a descent argument here but I don't think you really go far enough with it. The fundamental flaw here was not that these kids played Doom, or listened to Marilyn Manson, or dressed in black trenchcoats. The fundamental issue was that these kids were left alone with these things and never really connected to anything outside of that. The parents probly did the best they knew how but were they really there from the tiem their kids were born with the love and support that they needed? Or did they go about their daily business and ignore the various signs that were there saying that their kid was screaming out for help? I seriously doubt that these parents were attachemnt oriented and thought their kids love and connection on a daily basis. I don't want to sound like I'm blaming it all on the parents, because there were definately more factors that that.
Lets through in the video games and the internet and Marilyn Manson though and look at the role they could have played. Violent Music, while a definate form of expression (and one that even I connect with, being a fan of MM) does not in and ov itself motivate one to kill. Nor does violent thought in and of itself. The videogames could very well have been active in breaking down the barriers between reality and fantasy, but why would that be possible. If all a person has to connect with is a violent video game, then perhaps that's all they will know. If all a person knows is a violent fantasy of killing before being killed, you can see that there is a potential problem without me pointing it out. And the internet... As we know the internet is a tool for communicating and gathering ideas and spreading them. But it is a tool moer than a media. It is what we make of it. I can go on the internet and for months at a tiem never have contact with another human being on it, it is my decision about how I use the tool that allows me to communicate with other people or shut them out completely. In my case I choose to share my thoughts but that does not mean that most of the flames I will recieve from posting this will have any bearing on my life. Because I choose to ingnore the input and seek my own agenda which is to not bother reading or writing to people who don't like my ideas or my input. Who's to say these kids were part of an internet propigated "gang," I'm not saying they weren't, but I think that the impact was way less than is being emphasised. In the end, I believe that it is too difficult to pidgeon hole someone into a course of behavior that is dictated by music and video games and the internet by themselves. No, there was more to it... I think that these kids were let down by their families first off, probly because the parents didn't know how to effectivly divy up thie time between work and family and still make ends meet without feeling very drained themselves. This is a feeling that is growing in America and will probly continue. Secondly I believe that the school let these kids down, because they had no outlet for these intelligent children that they wanted to take part in, and because they failed to make them feel comfortable in any social type setting. The community and other kids let these kids down for not breaking through and not connecting with these boys early on and giving them status in the social ranking of the community. It is important for children to feel a part of something even if it is something small. Other kids and other parents should have reached out to include these kids in something other than what they could devise on their own. Alienation doesn't go aware just because you ignore it, often times it comes back to bite you.
This is what is happening today, more and more parents are having children that they can't devote the time to because they are too worried about the lives they want to lead than the ones they do lead. They don't take the time on a daily basis from the childs earliest years to make them feel loved, to bring them in and make them a part of the family unit. They send them to school where the only thing that they can find to connect to are drugs, music, and games. The other kids make fun of them, only driving them farther away. Teachers and priciples look at them as troubled children and pidgeon hole them that way, driving them further into a hole. They go home and play quake and have fun, and listen to loud crunchy music and have fun, and escape their depression for a while, breaking down what's real for a while. And we're suprised when they start fantasizing about all those monsters in doom being the monsters that are keeping them in that hole. Go figure that we've created a ticking time bomb, look at how many times these kids have been labeled and criticised and let down before they ever got to that point. And when they fell so low and have they're boundaries torn down to such a point, and still people ridicule or even worse, ignore them. It makes perfect sense that as an eighteen year old with hormones pumping and real life closer than ever, they just wanted to explode.
Unfortunately I believe that this is only the beginning. It's not going to go away until on the most fundamental family layer, we start to deal with our children as what they are, human. Full of all the good that we are, and the bad. We need a social structure that allows us to spend time with our kids, a work environment that is more focused on family, and healthy workers than profit. And more schools that have less children, more teachers, and lots of active learning rather than lectures that bore and build discontent. And most importantly room for all children to learn to grow and connect with eachother, not to learn to create outcasts. This is the only way we can start to change this in a healthy and constructive manner.
Taking into account for human behavior, it's not possible to have a hippy dippy land that everyone is going to be idealic parents and we're going to have idealic schools where all the kids are nice to eachother and all the teachers are great at motivating their students to do something other than fantasize about something other than today's lecture. But it is definately time that we as a community (as all communitys that make up the US, and the world) start taking a real hard introspective look at what we do to perpetuate the current behaviors and start working on real ways to move closer to that ideal that we seek. Until then, acts like this will continue.
While fundamentally I agree with your conclusion that ShutUp Software is limiting in the communal sense, I have to say that the inclusion of these filters is a great liberating feature for most. In reading /. while I don't post replys often it usually tends to be because the content relavent posts are buried beneath a deluge of ph*ck you and First Comment posts. Filtering out these in any way is a great help in my limited reading time to get to the meat of the discussion without having to drift through the flotsom. But as far as posting articles go, if a posted article does not meet my tastes, it is just as easy to not read it in whole than to ignore everything that poster ever submits. And much less limiting. Perhaps if more people found it within themselves to use that discretion when reading instead of simply (and simple mindedly) blocking out all articles. They would be acting upon the intelligence they try to exude through their flames.