Friday, December 06, 2002
Yes even I was once like you. Of course now I am the Master of
Deception, but that's besides the point. Either way, I got my first
hit of Goatse.
Damn did it hit me. It scarred me for life. It left an image so
rotten and morbid inside my mind that I would never forget about him.
Visiting the Goatse man is like watching porn. Everyone's done it, but noone admits to it. It's dirty. It's not something you want anyone to know you do. Once you've done it you feel different. You want to jump in the shower and scrub until you're skin and bones. You want to go back 5 minutes before you saw this image. You want to do anything that can get rid of this forsaken image. It's probably banned in some country. Probably afghanistan, but everything's banned there. Once you've seen it though, you never forget it.
The initial reaction of people when they see this image is to immediately close it. Whether it's throwing your mouse to the little 'x' in the corner or alt+f4, you immediately close that fucken browser window. You don't want anyone seeing you looking at that! You think about how the hell he managed to open his asshole that wide. The image is in your brain, but not your screen thank god. Unfortunately your brain can't keep small details when it only gets to view an image for 2 seconds.
Oh, and I believe Gold (without checking) is close to lead, which is the middle element, the one which all other elements will one day become, due to decay (am I right or am I pouring it out my ass?).
Thats pretty much it, lead and gold are really close "atomically".
Also, PHP, I heartily recommend O'Reilly's books, they're the shit.
I REALLY want the perl cookbook.
Perl vs PHP is becoming a religious war, like vi vs emax, debian vs $otherdistros gnome vs kde....oh well.
Drink Cobra beer? Do!
SETI? THATS EVEN WORSE.
Excerpted from here http://www.seti.org/science/ufo.html
"Investigations of UFO sightings or alien abductions are not conducted at the SETI Institute. A practical reason for this is that the distance to the star nearest to our own is over 4 light years. That's about 24 trillion (24,000,000,000,000) miles away. With our current rocket technology, it would take around 300,000 years to travel there. This poses a daunting engineering problem even for a more advanced civilization.
In addition to the unlikelihood that we have been visited by extraterrestrials, there is no scientific evidence to prove it. Personal accounts are not physical or verifiable evidence. These reasons are sufficient to exclude UFO's from the research objectives of the SETI Institute. Anyone interested in contacting organizations that do investigate UFO's and other paranormal phenomena can refer to the following:"
And then they give a link to the number one site whose sole purpose is to spout irrational garbage.
Allow me to translate; "..if we accept that some UFOs are alien spacecraft, our life's work will have been shown to be a waste of time...and we will be out of a job, so we are not even going to "go there"."
" Every time you buy software from companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Adobe you hand over much more than just money, you also give up basic freedoms and human rights."
"A whole generation has grown up with the idea that it is normal for them to have no freedom," says Mr Stallman.
"We should destroy the record companies and put an end to institutions that are this arrogant and trying to take away our freedom," he says. [...]
BBC
The bbcnews website is patchy at the best of times. Sometimes they have the mad rantings of pig-ignorant hysteria whipping, witchburning psuedo scientists, and then othertimes, gems of clarity like this one.
Can you say "Senior Editor Needed"?
c) our currency should be SEX.
This is the rich man, in that scenario, having recieved a lot of "payments".
Currency is based on the value 'we' place on precious metals: GOLD. Now why would we want to do something like that? After all, gold is, in practical terms, worthless.
All the gold ever mined would form a cube measuring only 19m on each side.
There is nothing of practical value that can be made of gold that could not be made of another metal with better inherent properties (conductivity, tensile strength and so on).
Gold is rare. Its rarity is very well understood, by just about everyone. It is practically immutable, extremely durable. This is why it, over the other precious metals (which are named that for a reason) has served as currency for thousands of years.
So we all go around (literally, until quite recently) with bits of paper that say "I am worth 10 pounds and if you take me to the bank of England they'll give you about 1.3 grams of gold for me" and it is the trust that there is an intrinsic value associated with the paper that gives it worth. More or less.
The first paper money was issued by the Bank of England in the 1690s. But it was not widely used or trusted. Banknotes began to be issued in quantity in 1797 when an economic crisis stopped the Bank making payments in coins for more than �1. It issued the first �1 notes in March that year. Notes for �2, �5, �10, and �15 are also known. These notes continued until 1828 and values up to �1000 were issued in small numbers. They were all very simple, hand-signed and until 1808 numbered by hand as well. From 1817, after the troubles of the wars against Napoleon and France were over, the gold sovereign became used and trusted as the common unit for �1. For most people, who weekly wages were less than �1, the sovereign more than fulfilled their needs. Wealthy people though needed higher value currency and from 1829, when the Bank stopped issuing �1 and �2 notes, it continued with the �5 note.
The concept of legal tender is often misunderstood. Contrary to popular opinion, legal tender is not a means of payment that must be accepted by the parties to a transaction, but rather a legally defined means of payment that should not be refused by a creditor in satisfaction of a debt. This makes legal tender a rather narrow legal concept that has little to do with the way in which most payments are made. In practice, people are often willing to accept payment by cheque, standing order, debit or credit card - in fact by any instrument that they are confident will deliver value.
In 1759, gold shortages caused by the Seven Years War forced the Bank to issue a �10 note for the first time. The first �5 notes followed in 1793 at the start of the war against Revolutionary France. This remained the lowest denomination until 1797, when a series of runs on the Bank, caused by the uncertainty of the war, drained its bullion reserve to the point where it was forced to stop paying out gold for its notes. Instead, it issued �1 and �2 notes.
The Restriction Period, as it was known, lasted until 1821 after which gold sovereigns took the place of the �1 and �2 notes. The Restriction Period prompted the Irish playwright and MP, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, to refer angrily to the Bank as "... an elderly lady in the City". This was quickly changed by cartoonist, James Gillray, to the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, a name that has stuck ever since.
The first fully printed notes were issued in 1855, an event that brought relief to the Bank's team of cashiers, who no longer had to sign each note individually. The practice of writing the name of the Chief Cashier as the payee on notes was halted in favour of the anonymous "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ...", which has remained unchanged on notes to this day. The printed signature on the note continued to be that of one of three cashiers until 1870, since when it has always been that of the Chief Cashier.
The First World War saw the link with gold broken once again; the Government needed to preserve its stock of bullion and the Bank ceased to pay out gold for its notes. In 1914 the Treasury printed and issued 10 shilling and �1 notes, a task which the Bank took over in 1928. The gold standard was partially restored in 1925 and the Bank was again obliged to exchange its notes for gold, but only in multiples of 400 ounces or more. Britain finally left the gold standard in 1931 and the note issue became entirely
fiduciary, that is wholly backed by securities instead of gold.
Anyway, this bizarre collective illusion keeps society running in a capitalist way with exchange of goods being a darn sight easier than bartering.
Some people have been trying to bring back the gold standard. This and the superb e-cash, invented by Dr Chaum, are excellent, but the sheeple are just too STUPID to understand how they work, and the incredible benefits that would be had from useing them. Paypal is a slim shadow of what a true e-cash economy could be like.
But. Why gold? The idea should be that there is only a finite amount, so nobody can 'make' gold and get rich quick.
That isnt just the idea, thats the reality this is why Alchemists tried so hard for centuries to synthesise it.
But why not something that is relevant to the current society?
Because different people assigne a different value to the same non-rare things. You might have a china plate that you think is worth my electric bycycle; it may be the case that the value of the two things are comparable, but how do I know this? Currency, whose value is well understood solves this problem. We both know how much a pound coin is worth, and from that, we can extrapolate the value of almost anything. Currency is a point of intersection between strangers, so that negociation can be made, whilst minimizing the risk that you will be cheated.
I know this is all abstract from the start so it may as well be based on... salt or granite or comet fragments or moon rock or penguins.
None of these things has a value like currency, because you cannot easily take them somewhere and exchange them for something else. They are not "fluid". Currency as an intermediary, solves this problem. You can carry it around with you, and unlike Penguins, you dont have to feed it. Currency does have something in common with comet fragments however, in that it burns a hole in your pocket.
Har Har.
Soon cash will become extinct and everything will be electronic. So the basis for currency will change.
like it says above, the basis of currency right now is fiduciary, and it is not based on Gold, so nothing will change there. Electronic money will not take over any time soon. The Nat West MONDEX project failed utterly, so did ecash. The former because your last 300 transactions were exposed to whoever want to see them, and there were arbitrary limits to how much you could spend, the latter because of the sheer stupidity of the unwashed 10th.
There may only be one currency with any luck.
that would be a disaster.
But will it still be based on an abstract irrelevant impractical metal? Or maybe RAM, for example, will be the basis.
as long as its not volatile RAM....har!
Nice bottle of wine?
perishable. useless as currency
New hovermobile?
segway? :]
24,000 Megs please.
Paying in chips for egg & chips?
Fuggedabhatit®
Thursday, December 05, 2002
Claus, I know, I just cracked up when I saw it....doesnt it just sum up Efnet IRC? So cruel, horrid..."You were kicked by <$op>, <$reason>".
You know the score.
Here are the rest:
http://www.ermac.org/Images/
15) Blogger: Have you ever heard that old saying, "make a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door?" Well, in their own way, Blogger made a "better mousetrap". They made creating your own website and getting it hosted so quick and simple that anyone could do it. Then as the whole "world was beating a path to their door" they let it all slip away. Horrible technical problems, non-existent technical support, and grindingly slow hosting became the rule with their service, not the exception. The people who revolutionized creating your own website and inspired terms like "blogs", "blogging", "blogosphere", etc, have turned blogger into the "Geocities" of their industry. Now Blogger is only for amateurs to cut their teeth on before they move on to better digs. That's sad...
http://www.rightwingnews.com/
"The Perpetual War Portfolio is an evenly weighted basket of five stocks poised to succeed in the age of perpetual war. The stocks were selected on the basis of popular product lines, strong political connections and lobbying efforts, and paid-for access to key Congressional decision makers."
wow!
http://www.dack.com/war/portfolio/
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
By the way, the humor about the Rump(ofsteelskin)feltd quote, is that "evidence of..." has been used to counter skeptics for years, and now, all of a sudden, rumplestiltskin picks it out of the air to justify bombing the shit out of people.
Good enough evidnce to bomb and kill people, but not good enough to prove that UFOs piloted by you know whos are absolutely real.
Now "Thats Real!®"
I saw "Bowling for Columbine" this evening at the cinema. Canada looks better and better every day, especially when you watch "The Orielly Factor".
Then of course, there is the pancake incentive.
1. Why are 'they' hiding? One minute's appearance in Trafalgar Square would suffice.
This is the classic "White House Lawn" argument that the skeptics keep coming up with year after year. Absence of evidence is not Evidence of absence. These are the words of Donald Rumpsfeldt.
2. Why are people afraid? I know there are many answers... including religious faith, government propaganda, Hollywood... Fear of the unknown? We know nothing about anything as it is. What will happen tomorrow?
As the tenured resident scientist at Irdialani Limited, its your job to tell us that!
3. Why governmental suppression of information? Our best interests? No. Power, tech, money? Maybe. To maintain a state of fear (of the 'unknown')? Thats my best guess.
This is a good question...personally, if anyone, anywhere could get a hold of a silent anti gravity device that could lift tonnes of wieght and float at 200 feet for thousands of miles, this would be "A Bad Thing®". And God only knows what other incredible technology these being have, that once let loose, would catastrophically change everything over night. Perhaps its better that everything remains "primitve" until the earths population is more sedate and culturally homogenous.
Thats what I would do, for certain.
Uh u oh time to put away these childish flat earth, circled by the sun and planets in perfect circles ideas and face THE FACTS David Whitehouse!
BBC Science editors view of UFOs.
Ah yes, the pathetic establishment rears its backwards and ugly head! I read that link yesterday. Astounding, and frankly not very surprising.
These are the same people who burned witches, astronomers, and for 50 years, violently "opposed" the idea of Black Holes when they were first postulated.
If you want to really understand what is happening in the minds of kooks like David Whitehouse (the man who wrote that piece of trash) then you need to read this:
The Logical Trickery of the UFO Skeptic
Of course, imbeciles like David Whitehouse have not seen any evidence, will not point to links that have it, nor read them when they are given them.
This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the UFO subject, the ostritch posturing of "scientists", too small minded and rigid with stupidity to accept some simple facts.
OMG, Ive been trolled!!!!!
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
I'm certainly not confusuing cold with cool. Cool is everything associated with James Dean posing and Miles Davis' Birth of Cool. It is inhuman posturing, a distancing from the heat and passion that regularly occurs within this flesh. I am interested in countering that, and lending my support to those artists who celebrate and sing the body electric.
Why the metric system is wrong
Author takes 'The Measure of All Things' (CNN) -- The meter is a crock. Originally, you see, the metric unit of distance was supposed to be one ten-millionth of the span from the north pole to the equator. But the Earth isn't a perfect sphere -- it's an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles -- and every meridian isn't equal because the Earth isn't perfectly smooth, either. So the meter is an average, a compromise -- a figure agreed upon by men, not handed down by nature. It's arbitrary, in other words. [...] His book stresses the importance of a uniform system and how one is developed. In the United States, the reluctance to adopt the metric system caused trouble as recently as 1999, when NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter failed because engineers used English measurements instead of metric. [...] This is a lie, the orbiter failed because NASA mixed imperial and metric measurements incorectly, not because they "used English measurements instead of metric". CNN
Monday, December 02, 2002
Demographics and the Dustbin of History:
Karl Zinsmeister's essay Old and In The Way presents a startling � but all too plausible � forecast of Europe's future. To the now-familiar evidence of European insularity, reflexive anti-Americanism, muddle, and geopolitical impotence, Zinsmeister adds a hard look at European demographic trends.
What Zinsmeister sees coming is not pretty. European populations are not having children at replacement levels. The population of Europe is headed for collapse, and for an age profile heavily skewed towards older people and retirees. Europe's Gross Domestic Product per capita (roughly, the amount of wealth the average person produces) is already only two-thirds of America's, and the ratio is going to fall, not rise.
Meanwhile, the U.S population continues to rise � and the U.S. economy is growing three times as fast as Europe's even though the U.S. is in the middle of a bust! Since 1970 the U.S. has been more than ten times as successful at creating new jobs. But most impportantly, the U.S.'s population is still growing even as Europe's is shrinking � which means the gap in population, productivity, and economic output is going to increase. By 2030, the U.S will have a larger population than all of Europe � and the median age in the U.S. will be 30, but the median age in Europe will be over 50.
Steven den Beste is probably correct to diagnose the steady weakening of Europe as the underlying cause of the increasing rift the U.S. and Europe's elites noted in Robert Kagan's essay Power and Weakness (also recommended reading). But Kagan (focusing on diplomacy and geopolitics), Zinsmeister (focusing on demographic and economic decline) and den Beste (focusing on the lassitude of Europe's technology sector and the resulting brain drain to the U.S.) all miss something more fundamental.
Zinsmeister comes near it when he writes "Europe's disinterest in childbearing is a crisis of confidence and optimism.". Europeans are demonstrating in their behavior that they don't believe the future will be good for children.
Back to that in a bit, but first a look on what the demographic collapse will mean for European domestic politics. Zinsmeister makes the following pertinent observations:
1. Percentage of GDP represented by government spending is also diverging. In the U.S. it is roughly 19% and falling. In the EU countries it is 30-40% and rising.
2. The ratio of state clients to wealth-generating workers is also rising. By 2030, Zinsmeister notes, every single worker un the EU will have his own elderly person 65 or older to provide for through the public pension system.
3. Chronic unemployment is at 9-10% (twice the U.S.'s) and rising.
4. Long-term unemployment and drone status is far more common in Europe than here. In Europe, 40% of unemployed have been out of work for over a year. Un the U.S. the corresponding figure is 6%.
Zinsmeister doesn't state the obvious conclusion; Euro-socialism is unsustainable. It's headed for the dustbin of history.
Forget ideological collapse; the numbers don't work. The statistics above actually understate the magnitude of the problem, because as more and more of the population become wards of the state, a larger percentage of the able will be occupied simply with running the income-redistribution system. The rules they make will depress per-capita productivity further (for a recent example see France's mandated 35-hour workweek).
Unless several of the key trends undergo a rapid and extreme reversal, rather soon (as in 20 years at the outside) there won't be enough productive people left to keep the gears of the income-redistribution machine turning. Economic strains sufficient to destroy the political system will become apparent much sooner. We may be seeing the beginnings of the destruction now as Chancellor Schr�der's legitimacy evaporates in Germany, burned away by the dismal economic news.
We know what this future will probably look like, because we now know how the same dismal combination of economic/demographic collapse played out in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Progressively more impotent governments losing their popular legitimacy, increasing corruption, redistributionism sliding into gangsterism. Slow-motion collapse.
But there are worse possibilities that are quite plausible. The EU hase two major advantages the Soviets did not � a better tech and infrastructure base, and a functioning civil society (e.g. one in which wealth and information flow through a lot of legal grassroots connections and voluntary organizations). But they have one major disadvantage � large, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places the police dare not go without heavy weapons.
[...]
ESR
Who Owns Ideas? The War Over Global Intellectual Property
by David S. Evans
Foreign Affairs, November/December 2002
A review of: Copy Fights. Edited by Adam Thierer and Wayne Crews. Washington: Cato Institute, 2002, 295 pp. $19.95.
...
[I]ntellectual property protection is not a field of bright lines and clear rules. Protecting ideas always demands a delicate balance between competing objectives and values: stimulating creativity but thwarting monopoly; creating knowledge yet disseminating it broadly; enforcing rules while responding to change. Economic, technical, and social changes have complicated the balance between these competing goals and renewed debate over who should own what ideas and for how long. Nevertheless, it is a time-tested proposition that society benefits enormously when the expression or product of some ideas is owned and exploited for profit. The time has come to discuss once again the limits of that proposition, not its centrality...
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/
Wow, Last.fm: i just signed on and listened to three whoppers in a row: Dr. Octagon, Fennesz and RaviShankar/PhilipGlass.
Speaking of Mr. Glass. I watched Koyaanisqatsi with my extended family on Thanksgiving. It was being shown on public television and most of my relatives had never heard of it or Godfrey Reggio or even Phillip Glass before. The images are enticing, beautiful even. But ultimately they reveal a depressing overall view of the world and our relationship/altercation of it. An appropriate thanksgiving experience, though. A holiday initially devised to set aside time to give thanks to the world for all its splenders that has subsequently turned into a feast of overconsumption. Koyaanisqatsi sheds some much needed light on what there is to give thanks for, and how it is slowly being paved over with shopping malls, McDonalds and 50 lane highways.
Read This!
(Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you? (c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis; The Guardian
"BBC Domesday has become a classic example of the dangers facing our digital heritage," said project manager Paul Wheatley.
"But it must be remembered that time is of the essence. We must invest wisely in developing an infrastructure to preserve our digital records before it is too late."
"We must not make the mistake of thinking that recording on a long-lived medium gives us meaningful preservation,"
BBC
Dutch tapped
"According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel..."
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Friday, November 29, 2002
Hell Bank notes are used in funeral ceremonies in many far-eastern countries to provide money and goods in the afterlife for the dead person. The term "hell" just designates the place where the dead go, and does not carry the negative connotations that it does in the Christian world.
There was a sound of another person being hung high...I must have been mistaken.
Now, on to "Godspeed You Black Emperor".
Naturally, after hearing about them so much from different quarters, the final straw came when my sister told me to check them out.
What a load of unrefined garbage.
That group, sound like a bunch of talentless students who were of the type that used to produce the most tiresome and uninspired "knock-off prog-rock"; dreadful, baleful, directionless soulless, ill concieved, rubbish.
That they are paraded around like something worthwhile is astounding. Even thier words are grey in shade, as witnessed by the spiretless, spineless, dour and moping interviews that can be read online.
That group are so bad, I had to check that I had bought the correct CD, and that some other, older garbage had not been mistakenly put into the jewel case.
Godspeed? Godspeed straight to hell. Do not collect $200.
Uninteresting "compositions" poorly mixing strings and electic guitars. Apalling production that is worse than what can be found on any demonstration tape. Poor musicianship, full stop. Everything about this group shouts "turn off immediately"; a total dead end, an enthusiasm sponge, designed to suck the life out of you, and render you completely inert.
Yes indeed. "Bad®"
The Latest Kissinger Outrage
Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation? [...] Slate
Thursday, November 28, 2002
The caption reads:
"Alun Kirby, found hung by the neck, for disrespecting Ladytron. A member of the crowd said: 'We warned that boy; he had to pay' "
"As you play the album you'll believe Ladytron are the only band you've ever really liked"
(Mixmag ***** Album of the month)
Ladytron
In some flaked out jurisdictions, its illegal to link to a site, let alone link to images in a site. Do a search for "deep linking" to read more of this insanity, or the DECSS fiasco with 2600 being prosecuted (sucessfully) for linking to sites. Sometimes, when someone finds that they are being hit by a popular image, they replace the image with something like this:
which is linked from http://leech.kthxbye.de/leech.gif .
Anyway, the solution that Mikkel gives solves this problem completely, but then, you have to know what you are doing to make it work...
which is linked from http://leech.kthxbye.de/leech.gif .
Anyway, the solution that Mikkel gives solves this problem completely, but then, you have to know what you are doing to make it work...
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
..........
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Easy, Breezy, Beautiful Irdial.
I'd Walk a Mile for an Irdial.
Iirdial is good for you.
For Mash, Get Irdial.
Nobody Does it like Irdial.
Good Irdial Has
Danish Written All Over It. The Advertising Slogan Generator
Danish Written All Over It. The Advertising Slogan Generator
Circle the wagons boys!
WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) - Attorneys for the Bush Administration asked a federal court on Monday to order that documents on hundreds of cases of autism allegedly caused by childhood vaccines be kept from the public. Department of Justice (news - web sites) lawyers asked a special master in the US Court of Federal Claims to seal the documents, arguing that allowing their automatic disclosure would take away the right of federal agencies to decide when and how the material should be released. Attorneys for the families of hundreds of autistic children charged that the government was trying to keep the information out of civil courts, where juries might be convinced to award large judgments against vaccine manufacturers. The court is currently hearing approximately 1,000 claims brought by the families of autistic children. The suits charge that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which until recently included a mercury-containing preservative known as thimerosal, can cause neurological damage leading to autism. [...] Yahoo News
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thank you davros!
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Holy Shiat!
"Suddenly we were electrified by the most awesome, incredible sight we had seen in our entire lives."
"The old web was that to which the limited men distribute the limited information by the limited method."
Ya
"Finland proposes extensive data retention while the country's largest Telco executives arrested for data misuse."
EFFI
Monday, November 25, 2002
Easily shocked? Well if you shop regularly with Boys Stuff, probably not. But Dolly, the very latest in inflatable "comfort", could shock anyone (well, apart from the odd Welshman.) This is the last sexual taboo - and we're going to help you break it.
Rum, Sodomy, The Lash, and "Piracy"!
Academy seizes computers from nearly 100 mids By JESSICA R. TOWHEY, Staff Writer Officials at the Naval Academy have seized nearly 100 midshipmen's computers that allegedly contained illegally downloaded music and movies, sources said. The raid occurred Thursday while students were in class, and a source familiar with the investigation said the computers were being held by the administration. Cmdr. Bill Spann, academy spokesman, confirmed that an investigation into what material is on the computers is under way, but declined further comment. He did say punishment for illegally possessing copyrighted material ranges from a court-martial to loss of leave and other restrictions. Computers are given to each midshipman upon entering the academy. During their four years at the school, mids pay back the value of the computers through deductions from their monthly paychecks. Amanda Collins, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, said yesterday that the Naval Academy was among the colleges and universities around the country that were sent two letters from entertainment industry and educational associations asking them to address Internet piracy and establish policies against it. [...] http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/live/11_23-19/NAV
Friday, November 22, 2002
Karma!
Record industry attempts to stop the swapping of pop music on online networks such as Kazaa will never work. So says a research paper prepared by computer scientists working for software giant Microsoft. The four researchers believe that the steady spread of file-swapping systems and improvements in their organisation will eventually make them impossible to shut down. They also conclude that the gradual spread of CD and DVD burners will help thwart any attempts to control what the public can do with the music they buy. Doomed disks The paper was prepared for a workshop on Digital Rights Management, (DRM), at the US Association for Computing Machinery's annual conference on Computer and Communications Security. Digital Rights Management describes attempts to stop people copying music from CDs and sharing the tracks via peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Madster. To stop this piracy some music makers are starting to produce CDs that will not play on computers. Websites such as the Campaign for Digital Rights are documenting which CDs will and will not play on home computers. The music industry as a whole is also using the courts to shut down file-swapping systems and so far has enjoyed some successes. Alicia Keys, AP CDs by artists such as Alicia Keys are copy protected But Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman write that ultimately these attempts at control will fail. The success that the music industry has had in stopping file-swapping on systems such as Napster was due entirely to the fact that many of them rely on a few people to provide most of the material being swapped. By targeting these super-swappers the record industry could severely restrict how much music is available to the majority of members who take without sharing. The researchers point out that the growth of consumer broadband and cheap data storage will mean the numbers of people willing to swap is growing and will soon outstrip attempts to shut them down. The growth of instant messaging systems will also contribute to this gradual loss of control. The rising numbers of recordable CD and DVD drives are also making it much easier for consumers to create their own music compilations and share them with friends which could also stymie anti-piracy work. Price fix The paper also pointed out the technical flaws in DRM systems and said that, so far, all of them have been defeated. In one case the CD protection system designed to stop people playing the disks on a computer was foiled by using a marker pen to cover the outer ring of a disk. The authors reserve strongest criticism for watermarking systems which put invisible markers in music that stops tracks being passed around and shared. But the "severe" commercial and social problems inherent in such schemes plus their technical shortcomings mean that they are "doomed to failure", warn the authors. The paper's researchers emphasise that it represents their opinions rather than those of Microsoft, but their conclusions are likely to make uncomfortable reading for music industry executives. In essence, say the researchers, file-swapping systems have already won. The only way for music companies to compete is on the same terms by making music easy to get hold of and cheap to buy. Evidence gathered by critics of the music industry has shown that CD prices have steadily risen over the past few years and may have contributed to the slump in sales as much as the rise of file-swapping systems. In late September five music companies and three music retailers were fined more than $143million after being found guilty of fixing CD prices too high. So says the BBC
You can listen to some of those Daniel Quinn Antarctica field recordings on this radio show, which just happens to be Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel Fame. I wish I could stay awake to hear his show on the radio, but it is on from 3-6 AM. Perfect hours to listen to this stuff, but scheduled as sleep time for me. Alas, the wonders of archived radio on WFMU!
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The Lifeboat Project is interesting:
This is clearly wrong:
"The Fermi Paradox refers to the question mark that hovers over the data point that we have seen no signs of extraterrestrial life. This tells us that it is not the case that life evolves on a significant fraction of Earth-like planets and proceeds to develop advanced technology, using it to colonize the universe in ways that would have been detected with our current instrumentation. There must be (at least) one Great Filter � an evolutionary step that is extremely improbable � somewhere on the line between Earth-like planet and colonizing-in-detectable-ways civilization. If the Great Filter isn't in our past, we must fear it in our (near) future. Maybe nearly every civilization that develops a certain level of technology causes its own extinction."
This is correct:
"'Plants' with 'leaves' no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous 'bacteria' could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the 'gray goo problem.' Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term 'gray goo' emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident."
The rest is frightening/fascinating. Man without Earth is a hard thing to accept, and for certain, there will be some that say that there is no "true Man" without Earth.
Ive said it before, these experimenters must be stopped. There are at best, a few thousand people with the ability to destroy everything permanently. Better that they be "prohibited" rather than everything be destroyed.
The idea that a modified plant could spread and out compete every other living plant is not hard to imagine, even for the lowest dullard. Still, modified plants are released into the wild week after week. It is nothing less than criminal negligence.
Prohibition might not be enough:
"Biotechnology is advancing rapidly, and by 2020 there will be thousands � even millions � of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster. My concern is not only organized terrorist groups, but individual weirdos with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses. Even if all nations impose effective regulations on potentially dangerous technologies, the chance of an active enforcement seems to me as small as in the case of the drug laws."
And so we must stop developing the tools before we reach this point. This is doable, because the people making the tools are numbered in the tens.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
E - PLURIBUS - UNUM
(Alafia Pudim) Selfish desires are burning like fires among those who horde the gold, As they continue to keep the people asleep and the truth from being told. Racism and greed keep the people in need from getting what's rightfully theirs, Cheating, Stealing and Double Dealing as they exploit the people's fears. Now Dow Jones owns the people's homes and all the surrounding land, buying and selling their humble dwelling in the name of the master plan. Cause paper money is like a bee without honey with no stinger to back him up, And those who stole people's gold are definitely corrupt. Credit Cards, Master Charge, Legacies of Wills, Real Estate, Stocks and Bonds on coupons, paper bills. Now the U.S. Mints on paper prints, millions every day, and use the Eagle for their Symbol, 'cause it's a bird of prey. Now the laurels of peace and the arrows of wars, are clutched very tightly in the eagle's claws, filled with greed and lust, and on the back of the dollar bill is the words "In God We Trust". But the Dollar bill is their only God and they don't even trust each other; and for a few dollars more they'd start a war to exploit some brother's mother. Then there's the Pyramid that stands by itself, created by Black people's knowledge and wealth, and over the Pyramid hands the Devil's eye, that stole from the truth and created the lie. Now Annuit means an endless amount stolen over the years, and Coeptis means a New Empire of Vampire millionaires, and Novus is a latin word meaning something new, and Ordo means a way of life chosen by a few. Seclorum is a word that means to take from another, knowledge, wisdom and understanding stolen from the brother. Roman numerals on the base of the Pyramid's face tell the date they began to exist, when they established this branch of hell in 1776. Now they are thirteen layers of stone on the Pyramid alone an unfinished work of art For 33 1/3 is how high as a Mason can go without falling apart. Thirteen stars in the original flag, 13 demons from the Devil's bag! 13 berries and 13 leaves! 13 colonies of land grabbing thieves! 13 arrows in the Eagle's claws, 67 corporations wage the Devil's wars, 13 stripes on the Eagle's shield, and these are the symbols on the U.S. Seal. Now on the front of the Dollar Bill to the Right of Washington's head, is a small seal in the shape of a wheel with a secret that's been left unsaid. The symbols in the middle represent the riddle of the scales, the ruler and the key, The Square rule is a symbol from the craft of Masonry. The scales represent Libra, the balance of the seventh sign, they also represent the just-us which you and I know is blind. The key unlocks the mysteries of the secrets of the seal, so that only the Govern-U-Men will know what they reveal. The four words above from the last parts of, the secrets of the seal, and tells how they fooled the people into thinking paper money was real. Now Theasaur means the treasuries, where they store the gold they stole, and Amer means to punish like the slaves they bought and sold. Then Septent means seven, like 1776 when the thirteen devils gathered to unleash their bag of tricks. Then Sigil means the images they've created to fool the world, like the colors on old Glory the flag they unfurled. Now Red's for the color of the Indian Man, White's for the devils who stole the land, Blue's for the eyes that hypnotized with the tricks and traps they've sprung and even to this very same day they all speak with forked tongue. And so the power's in the hands of the ruling classes, playing God with the fate of all the masses, so the people don't get any in the land of the plenty CAUSE E PLURIBUS UNUM MEANS "ONE OUT OF MANY". "One Out Of Many" by The Last Poets
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
BUSTED
Please (!) do NOT listen to internet music streams (radio stations) on work computers. Our internet lines pretty decent but they really can't handle the load of various people downloading or listening to music. The result is, at best, slow access for others trying to do their work. At worst, various business processes that rely on the lines working normally encounter problems.
packet-sniffing bastards. grrrrrrrrrr.
"Gotta, gonna gonna"
�The thing you�ve gotta remember,� says Berryman, �is that even if you record to analog tape, it�s gonna get bumped to a CD anyway � it�s gonna get digitized at some point down the line.�
For their analog-to-digital conversion, Coldplay relies on Apogee and Prism audio interfaces. �We try to keep the conversion rate as high as possible, really, just to keep all the definition and clarity,� he explains.
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