A Pirate Looks At Fifty One
In November I turned fifty years old. In my short life I've seen the computer industry explode. My first computer was a total piece of shit Timex Sinclair that was a complete joke. Between then and when I got a "real" computer in 1986-a Mac Se Plus with a whopping 512k of memory-there were Trash 80's, Commodore 64's, and other devices that obviously pale in comparison to today's devices. When Microsoft introduced Windows, I didn't immediately switch over. Eventually, like a good chuck of the world, I did. I've gotten comfortable with the OS, but most of the creatives and coders I know use Macs. Since I can comfortably put myself in neither category, I'm allowed some leeway. Life pre-Google consisted of services like Compuserve and Prodigy and with search choices like Lycos and, with what I was using mostly at the time, Yahoo. The web was not pretty in the late eighties and early nineties. It had very little graphic capability even with a T1 line. YouTube would never had worked. Eventually, I got turned on to Google. Since I had lived in the area-Google's original URL was http://google.stanford.edu-I figured these guys and girls weren't complete retards. I was right. I presently use most of their services. As for the privacy thing...well, the U.S. government knows more than a few things about me. I generally trust Stanford graduates. The government.....mmmmm.God Is Too Big For One Religion
Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelation and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakable and permanent...
Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life...The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life's mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their belief system, which they proclaim as "the truth", is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One's man's faith is another's delusion...
Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the number of people subscribing to it.
-Anthony Shorr
Feet Of Clay
There's nothing more dangerous than a misinformed, intolerant fanatic. Any belief system which has as its goal the creation of mindless, impotent automatons--I have some "crazy", Brave New World-type theories on drugs and alcohol--and which discourages the objective, unemotional analysis of its precepts is one which is probably not worth adhering to.
The Matrix Review of Windows 8
Well, the other day, I was chatting with my friend Mike and he told me about Windows 8, so I had to go out and get it. I've been playing with it ever since. Here's my review:
I downloaded Windows 8 Consumer Preview at this link for free:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/consumer-preview
I see Windows 8 is coming along to be a great operating system. At its core is a leaner and faster version of Windows 7.
Windows 8 boots faster than Windows 7 and the stability is definitely there. It seems to have much larger support for lots of various types of hardware.
The more I use Windows 8, the more I like its new "metro" interface, which confused me at first because some common clicks such as closing an application had changed.
I know I am an early adopter, but I know I am set in my ways and sensitive to changes out of my comfort zone that take more than a mili-second to figure out. The changes better be intuitive!
With this OS, I believe Windows 8 tablets have an excellent chance of dominating the market over the next few years. With Steve Jobs dead, it is difficult to know how sweet Apple's future will be.
At first, I thought Windows 8 was all about touch interface, and unless you could use it, why bother to upgrade. This is not the case at all, but of course, touch will greatly benefit us once we adopt more, and this OS is ready for that day.
I was using touch screens 20 years ago as a waiter, so I know there's got to much more to go. I definitely want more touch. I find myself getting frustrated sometimes when I reach and cannot touch my desktop/laptop LCD. Let's face it, I have grown accustom to direct manipulation from the tablets and cell phones I use.
I know that if I buy another laptop or desktop LCD, I will be looking for a touch screen. Even when I have a mouse, sometimes there is a desire to lift the arm and touch it directly.
Regardless of touch, I absolutely love the user interface.
Another fascinating aspect of Windows 8 is its connection to Xbox. Xbox is #1 right now by the way. Windows 8 has an app called Xbox Connect. it will automatically sync the Xbox over wifi and stream video/audio from the computer or tablet or vice versa. It also looks like a Windows 8 tablet can act as a controller for an Xbox game. Imagine a fancy UI for controlling a game on the tablet. Wow!
Gamers are huge, so I can see Windows 8 becoming quite popular with this feature. All the gamers want Windows 8 tablets to be the ultimate controller for their games. Gamers spend big money on games, so the tablet expense would be nominal. This will at least give Windows 8 broad acceptance.
Lastly, the Windows 8 App store is looking good and will be huge!
An Inconvenient Truth
In November I gave all my computer hardware to someone for safekeeping. In the past, this stuff has had the uncanny ability to sprout legs. Perhaps this was due to statements I made to certain people in which I insinuated that I was going to start posting the pictures of my stalkers on the Internet. Perhaps it may have been due to me announcing the possible subject matter of future blog posts. (e.g., Angels, Voodoo and the Rise of Depression in America) I do know that I've had a difficult time hanging on to cameras and laptops.
Now that I'm using public computers and can no longer hack databases, pirate media or watch porn, I wonder what excuse will be generated to justify blocking my access to the Internet. I quiver in anticipation.
The Independence of Cyber Space
Anonymous declare a Note on Independence of Cyber Space :
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come from the Internet, the new home of Mind.
On behalf of the future, we ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one; therefore we address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty it always speaks. We declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. You are toothless wolves among rams, reminiscing of days when you ruled the hunt, seeking a return of your bygone power.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. The Internet does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
We have watched as you remove our rights, one by one, like choice pieces of meat from a still struggling carcass, and we have collectively cried out against these actions of injustice. You have neither usage nor purpose in the place we hold sacred. If you come, you will be given no more and no less power than any other single person has, and your ideas will be given the same consideration anyone else would receive You are neither special, righteous, nor powerful here.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. This claim has been used throughout the centuries by many an invading kingdom, and your claims are no different, nor do they ring any less hollow. Your so called problems do not exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours.
The Internet consists of transactions, relationships and thought itself; arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. It is the last truly free place in this world, and you seek to destroy even that freedom. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. A place where anyone, at any time, is as free to come and go, to say and be silent, and to think however they wish, without fear, as anyone else. There is no status beyond the merit of your words and the strength of your ideas.
We are creating a world where anyone anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. There are only ideas and information, and they are free.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions.
The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you repeatedly try to pass unjust legislature in an attempt to restrict us. You disguise this legislature under a variety of different names, and pass excuses that they are for our own protection. We have watched you, time and time again; attempt to censor us under the guise of Copyright protection, or for the protection of Children. These laws come in many shapes and forms, in the name of ACTA, PIPA, COICA, SOPA, but their intentions remain the same. You seek to control what you cannot.
We scorn your attempt to pass these bills, and as a result, our discontent at your misaligned efforts grows each day.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Canada, the United States and many others you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of the Internet. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that is already blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no different than pig iron.
In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our presence in the world we have created immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in the Internet. We have created a medium where all may partake in the forbidden fruit of knowledge, where egalitarianism reigns true. May our society be more humane and fair than yours.
We are the Internet.
We are free.
The Best and the Brightest
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness"
madness"
-Allen Ginsberg
Some of the most intelligent and most talented people I have met have been homeless and/or substance abusers. If I was a deluded conspiracy theorist, I'd think that there was some sort of concerted effort to level the playing field by destroying the best and the brightest. By reviewing the last sixty years of our nation's history, I'd probably be able to make a pretty good case for it. An unbiased study that traced the eventual destinations of the smartest grade school students of the past sixty years would reveal some interesting data, I'm sure.
The Peter Principle 1.2
If one has demonstrated an aptitude for a particular task, it will be the one thing that they will never be allowed to do.
Cui Bono
"Every society consists of an organized minority controlling an unorganized majority."
-Dick Eastman
When one has the ability to manipulate people like chess pieces, it doesn't really matter who appears to be in power. Despite clever rhetoric and deceptive social engineering tactics, it is difficult to disguise the more blatant aspects of "cause and effect". Regardless of their ingenuity level, most people eventually reveal their true intentions.
The Lunatic Fringe
Throughout the years, lunatic-fringe Christians have lied about me, stalked me, threatened me, stoled from me, sabotaged me, (attributing it to either "the devil" or, worse yet, to "God's will"), attempted to bribe me and have invaded my privacy.These very same terrorists have then had the audacity to question why I refrain from attending their churches. Some people have very strange recruitment techniques.About Me
jb89149
