Sex, Drugs & Unix

Tuesday, November 21st

"Open Source" is dead, says El Reg



The Novell-Microsoft deal certainly shows Redmond's desire to draw a line between the "free"and "open" communities. In an interview on Friday, Bill Gates was effusive in his praise for the "purity" of Richard Stallman, the original author of the GPL.

Did the term "Open Source" mean anything, any longer?

"They're going to have to co-opt a new vocabulary," thought Moglen, "because the old vocabulary just died on them."

"I agree with you. This was the week 'Open Source' ceased to be a useful phrase because it denoted everything up to and including Microsoft's attempts to destroy free. Language is subject to this problem. Since the beginning of time uprising movements have taken pleasure in perverting the language of criticism used against them by the ancien regime - the 'brave beggars' of the Netherlands, and Yankee Doodle, and the Whigs and the Tories - it's all the same terms of dis-endearment turned into a weapon. But the game is also played by modern propaganda in the other direction - by turning language into the property of the guy on top: Fox News "Fair & Balanced (tm)".

"What Microsoft did to 'Open Source' was what Stallman always said could be done to it: first you take the politics out, and when the veal has been bleached absolutely white, you can cover it with any sauce you like. And that's what Microsoft did, and 'Open Source' became the sauce on top of Microsoft proprietarianism. And once that process has been completed they have to go after the next vocabulary."

And now?

"So now they're going to try the hard work of cracking 'Freedom'. Free, well that means stuff you don't pay for..."

link

Jim on 11.21.06 @ 02:01 PM PST [link]


Thursday, November 9th

Something wicked this way comes


So, Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House (elect), and the Democrats now control both sides of Congress. Who is third-in-line of succession? The Speaker of the House, thats who.

The Democrats are now quite close to having it in their power to force-out both Bush and Cheny, via Articles of Impeacement. Even without impeachment, after snatching the House with the closest thing to a crushing mandate ever likely in a system biased in favour of the incumbents, the Democrats now have their hands on the investigative machinery of Capitol Hill.

They can hire lawyers and detectives; they can subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify under oath; they can mount show trials - or indeed real trials - subjecting their enemies to torment under the glaring klieg lights of the world media.

This is a powerful weapon, as Bill Clinton learned when Newt Gringrich stormed the House in 1994, breaking the half-century stranglehold of the Democrats. Newt’s Republicans did not rest until they had impeached the president for perjury and abuse of office in the Paula Jones/Lewinsky saga - even if the meaker Senate later opted for acquittal.

It is an even more powerful weapon in the hands of the Democrats, who can broadly count on supporting fire from the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Newsweek, Time, and the big three TV networks - mostly Beltway liberals by cultural instinct. It was this Congressional-media synergy that gave Watergate its extra bite, dooming Richard Nixon.

Every individual in top echelons of the Bush administration who has done anything wrong over the last six years in power can now expect to see every vile detail exposed in one of those menacing wood-pannelled chambers on the Hill.

While the House can file articles of impeachment with a simple majority, the Senate needs a 2/3rds majority to put them in force. Unfortunately, we probably can't get the extra 15 votes in the Senate. Otherwise, we would probably be a mere six months from the first female president of the USA. Hillary would be so... fucked.

I anticipate that the Senate will soon get a rug-cleaning, courtesy of the Democrats. If they can force 15 more seats to turn Democrat in the next year, they have a shot at taking down the entire Bush machine.

Would Teheran now be cranking up its nuclear weapons programme and supplying Hizbollah with missiles if the US now had three aircraft battle groups and a few army corps deployed against it in the Persian Gulf? Hardly likely.

Indeed, a seriously rattled Iran came forward offering pre-emptive concessions in early 2003 when America was preparing its Iraq armada. The bitter truth for George Bush is that he has unleashed the very Axis of Evil he aimed to contain.

The Democrats will harry him to his political grave for this.

And all this against the backdrop of a housing market crash, with the risk of recession in 2007 rising by the day.

The price of new homes was down 9.7 percent in September from a year earlier, the worst fall since the slump of 1981. The US Federal Reserve now talks of “ghost towns” to describe the bust flattening the once red-hot markets of Arizona and Florida.

The army of estate agents, surveyors, builders, and the like, made up 55 percent of the 2 million jobs created by the US economy from 2000 to 2005. Cash withdrawn from home equity reached 6 percent of GDP last year.

If you believe the US economy can hum along briskly for another two years as this prop is smashed away, I’ve got an ocean-front property in Arizona that I could sell you.

For better or worse, the perfect storm is gathering with malevolent intensity right above the Oval Office.


With all thy gifts America,
Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,
Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee--with these and like of
these vouchsafed to thee,
What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving,)
The gift of perfect women fit for thee--what if that gift of gifts
thou lackest?
The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee?
The mothers fit for thee?

Jim on 11.09.06 @ 05:04 AM PST [link]


Wednesday, November 8th

The terrorists win


If George Bush is to be believed, terrorists around the world have won a major victory as Democrats take control of the U.S. House of Representatives. (And with some luck, the Senate too.)

Good thing George Bush is not to be believed. It's a little early to say that my hope in the American electorate is restored, but just maybe there is hope for the world yet.

Good night, and good luck
Jim on 11.08.06 @ 02:05 AM PST [link]


Saturday, November 4th

Apple Doth Not (always) Suck

music: David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel - Poison

So back on approximately October 6, I sold my 12" PowerBook G4 (which to my wife's physical therapist, to replace her aging Dell. She's delighted, and her kid's now call me the "Apple Man", so I'd guess they're delighted too.

Because nothing sucks so much as an aging Dell that runs XP.

We went on vacation (to the Big Island) the following week. I was notebook-free for a week, except for the Nokia 770. When we got back from vacation, the wife nearly insisted that I go buy a new MacBook. I was willing to wait it out, and see what Apple released before or at MacWorld, but she insisted. In fact, she took me to the Apple store, where I purchased a Core Duo Macbook Pro, and then bought me a very nice steak dinner at Morton's.

Its God-awful nice to be able to run a small Debian image in a Parallels VM while not having to deal with the (cough cough) "linux desktop". (Gag me.) I have to run linux and freebsd to get my work done, but I don't want to suffer with the egregeous hack they call Gnome. (KDE doth suck as well, though less so than Gnome.)

Less than a week later, Apple, with no fanfare or warning, upgraded the MacBook Pro from Core Dueo @ 1.83GHz to Core Duo 2 @ 2.16GHz (nearly 40% faster between the clockspeed bump and the faster internal architecture, while consuming less power), increased the standard drive size from 80MB to 120MB, the standard RAM size from 512MB to 1GB, silently added an 802.11n "Airport" card, and a host of other, more minor features.

So, after fretting about it for a bit, I finally decided to backup, wipe and re-package my original MBP and head back to ye olde Apple Store to see if they would do the right thing.

Short story, they did, and I am a very happy camper. They even gave me a new AppleCare subscription, since I'd already used the one I bought for the original MBP.

In-turn, I bought an identical model for my wife, to replace her "too heavy, too big" less than one year-old Dell notebook. Because there is nothing that sucks so much as an aging Dell running XP. (Also, the taxman cometh, and we buy the hardware for the company.)

Then I took the kid out for BBQ and flirted with a couple strippers who were sitting at the bar drinking Lemon Drops before heading across the street to work. The kid's name is "Hunter Speed", after all, so he'll have to know about these things sooner than you might expect.

As I speak, the backups are being restored, .Mac has synced in everything, and life is resuming on the new machine. And yes, it is way faster.

So, for all of you yahoos out there who complain about how Apple are stingy theives, or declare that "Apple Bites", here is a counter-example.

Not a bad night.

Jim on 11.04.06 @ 02:14 AM PST [link]


Thursday, November 2nd

Fuck the Republican Party


America, the good ol' USA, is a country that was brought into existence by groups of terrorists and insurgents aided by foreign powers. Its first rallying document was the Declaration of Independence, essentially a list of reasons why King George III and the British sucked shit-covered balls. However, no matter what that hand-scrawled Declaration told the colonists, a good many people living in Massachusetts or Maryland had a far simpler answer: "Why revolt against the British? Because fuck them, that's why."

The history of great movements in this nation, or indeed, of any nation, is a tale of people who finally become so fed up with the status quo that all of the rational reasoning mounts and piles up until it all boiled down to a simple "Fuck them." ("Them" being, of course, whoever the powerful are in a historical moment.) The French Revolution, the American civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa are all uprisings of the average person, through whatever means necessary, be it the ballot box, legislative process, or the violence of the gun. These leveraging the required force against those who are dicking them over.

Sometimes it doesn't turn out for the best and sometimes things get even worse (see the media-manipulated Republican "revolution" of 1994 with its thick-headed motto of "Throw the bums out"), but such is nearly always the end result of constant, endless disempowerment of the masses, the unending thrum of voices calling wrong what the people know in their gut is right and true.

Now, even through the deadening fog of Fox "News" rhetoric, multiple jobs, dying pensions, depleting health care, mounting credit card debt, a looming housing crash, near force-feed of fatty foods, soul-leaching reality TV, the entire cultural apparatus telling us we must want more and more crap (new house, new car, new computer, new spouse, new clothes, new life), the dead-ends of public debate, government-instilled paranoia, dementia and racism masked as religious faith, the unsubtle shove towards xenophobic isolation, an antagonistic corporate media, the vicious street-beating death of American intellectual thought, and Bush-worship masked as patriotism, through it all we have come to this moment, frightening and exhilarating in its implications, where we, as a majority, are looking at the ruin and waste that surrounds us, piles of shit that we are told are mountains of gold, and we can finally, in this savage season of late 2006, at long last come to say, "You know what? Fuck them."

Fuck them for trying to make us believe that America's acts of mass destruction, its bumblings into conflagration and apocalypse, in Iraq and elsewhere are actually just speed bumps, commas, if you will, on the road to a peaceful world of democratic nations bowing down to blow the softening cock of American hegemony.

Fuck them for holding themselves up as arbiters of morality and when they were confronted with a simple moral equation, they cast their lot with savages and genocidal maniacs. No, not the embryonic stem cell research vote, you backwards ass anti-science fundamentalist fucks. On torture and judicial rights, where even those who proclaimed themselves defenders of the detained and imprisoned ended up dancing like slut marionettes on a puppet pole in the Oval Office when it came down to actually, say, defending the detained and imprisoned.

Fuck them for making Americans hated around the world, as if we're all ex-Nazis or, maybe more accurately, members of Pinochet's Chilean army back in the day, squandering the real triumph of America as a beacon of rights and fairness. However unreal that image was, it's better than being "that big ass country that tortures innocent people."

Fuck them for leaving New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to die, as if somehow those parts of the country were gangrenous toes that could just be cut off.

Fuck them for telling us we're too stupid or traitorous to understand what it is they're doing in trying to re-make the earth in their image, for keeping secrets in the name of their own security while literally and figuratively selling out ours.

Fuck them for lying to us about so goddamn much, about science, about their own policies, about what they actually, really were recorded saying, about what's genuinely important, like the out of control debt and the melting planet, instead trying to get us to think that, if a couple of guys wanna get married or if some pop singer's tit jumps out of her blouse, God will smash the earth with his mighty Bible-club of divine justice.

Fuck them all, all the Republicans in Congress, all members the conservative spooge-bucket brigade, all their corporate masters yanking on their nipple clips and shoving cold cash up their asses for their obeisance, all the liars and sinners and avaricious rats of the evangelical right, and especially all the fuckwads in the White House. They all had their chance and they fucked it up far beyond any offered excuse of incompetence.

Come Tuesday, put down the bong, get up off the counch, brush off the crumbs of Doritos and Halloween candy and walk toward voting booth, no matter where, with that rage burning in you, and vote them into oblivion.

And if come Wednesday morning it turns out they've dicked us over one more time by hacking the vote, by screwing with the polls, then maybe we've reached a point in this America where it's time to flee...

or fight.

Jim on 11.02.06 @ 07:18 PM PST [link]




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