Posts by Oh Homer

Society devolving back to feudalism

Not just in America, but pretty much everywhere, we're becoming a society of tenant serfs who never really get to own anything, but only have the temporarily privilege of using things in exchange for labour. The only difference between now and the days of actual feudalism is that today this exchange is usually indirect - i.e. you work for one entity, but use the money earned from that to pay the "rental" fees for, increasingly, your entire existence - not just your home. More direct examples include prostituting yourself to advertising in exchange for "free" apps and online services, again none of which you own or have any control over (a fact that will only bother you when they pull the plug, or when they ban/demonetise/censor you for violating their arbitrary "terms").

And the primary driving force behind this devolution is intellectual monopoly. It's literally enslaving us.

This bothers me in principle, because the idea of working for nothing but the ability to pay bills is not only utterly demoralising but literally slavery. In practice it'd bother me more if I had children, because I'd be painfully aware that not only would they be born into this slavery but I'd also have nothing to bequeath them, since you can't bequeath rented property.

But as someone with no children, and frankly unlikely to ever have any, whatever little property I have will simply end up in a landfill site when I die anyway, so it's probably pointless me having any. I certainly won't be in a position to care about what happens to my digital footprint after I'm gone.

I would hope that would not apply to most people.

Re: Android garbage

Short answer: money.

In fact I've found that the answer to most questions is money.

The long answer would take several volumes, but without going into too much detail:

• Android's obscene bloat is primarily due to Java, which is typically chosen so that people who aren't really software engineers can use point 'n drool toys to produce large volumes of crap very quickly, then sell it equally quickly (i.e. money)
• Android has been deliberately designed with a "read only" mentality, for lots of reasons (all bad), but mostly to prevent you removing highly lucrative bundleware (i.e. money)
• Memory management isn't poor on Android per se, it's just that it's such a bloated pig (including the apps) that you might just as well be running Windows. Moreover, Android apps are explicitly designed not to be closed. Ever. Everything on Android is a "service", mostly so it can spy on your every move and send "telemetry" back to the mothership for resale to spammers (i.e. money)

Re: Bloom filters

According to Wikipedia: "the more elements that are added to the set, the larger the probability of false positives."

Yikes!

Fanboi and/or Patriotic Rhetoric

It's just silly.

Here's what you need to know: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, your government and basically everyone else with the money, power and resources ... they're all out to screw you. All of 'em. Period.

The only good guy in all this is We the People, and the only way we're not going to be meat for the grinder is if we walk off the farm and form a direct democracy, minus the oligarchs.

In the realm of technology, that entails DIY hardware (via makerspaces), open source software, and self-hosted alternatives to online services.

Yes it's more effort, but then you need to decide which is more important to you: convenience or freedom.

Re: Land of the Incarcerated

No, no, no. It's the "Land of the Free to Be Incarcerated (for three consecutive minor offences, mostly involving the personal consumption of recreational narcotics)".

See, this is the plan. Make life as shit as possible for at least 80% of the population (including poverty that forces kids to join the military just to get the ticket they need for further education, thus traumatising them for life and turning them into drug addicts and/or mass shooters).

Then start a "War on Drugs" ... the very thing these trauma victims need to cope with their state-induced trauma, culminating in the victims all being locked up in private, for-profit prisons.

That way the warmongers get:

• To pillage the resources of whatever country these kids have been sent to wage "war" with
• Kickbacks and "campaign funding" from Lockheed Martin and other Military Industrial Complex / War Economy players
• Vast amounts of taxpayers money in the form of DEA funding, once those traumatised kids come home and become junkies
• And they get to confiscate all the proceeds from drugs hauls
• And best of all, the traumatised junkie victims of this state-operated gang warfare then become cash cows in private, for profit prisons, or in other words ... slaves

Profit!

Re: The Gnome Underpants have arrived!

Oh, and those buttons that look like they were painted in a hurry by the receptionist before being boxed, using coloured Tipex...

Jeeezuz.

And the fact that basically every Speccy game licensor has blacklisted RCL, leaving them with nothing but what looks like readers' submissions from Sinclair User.

OTOH, there's something about this fiasco that's very British, in the Carry On / Victory Gardens sense. It's simultaneously quaint, comical and highly embarrassing.

It's 2018 and ...

People still don't know how to use email correctly.

Everyone goes into the "To:" header. Everything is in bloody HTML. Replies are upside down, not selectively edited for brevity and context, and infested with a mountain of company policy footers, which multiply like rabbits with every reply.

Email needs to die. Not because there's anything wrong with it (well, there is, but that's not the reason), but because people are too bloody stupid to use it.

Re: "the most popular developer machine in the world"

With a laptop market share in single digits, I find that highly unlikely.

Unless they mean it's the most popular Mac, used by a minority of developers ... mostly for developing mobile apps (which is now 52% of the market), while everyone else uses Dells et al.

If you've done nothing wrong...

Clearly we all have something to very legitimately hide, dear anti-privacy legislators.

Not that the intended victim made much effort to protect her privacy, in this case, but nonetheless it does serve as a perfect example of why online anonymity/pseudonymity is not only justifiable but absolutely essential.

Re: So... uhm...

Actually the Apollo program, like everything else at NASA, was funded by the US taxpayers, which in my view places moon dust clearly in the public domain.

But even if you take the neoliberal view that everything should be privately owned, regardless of whether it was funded by leaching from the public purse, we're talking about a tiny sample of dust - where NASA already has a vast hoard of lunar material, collected decades ago, then accepted as a gift in good faith.

NASA literally chasing every last speck of moon dust just seems like senseless greed, under the circumstances.

Mobile network hell

Ambulance driver: Yes doctor, the patient is starting to... [NO SIGNAL]

Re: "Yet strangely all of it perfectly GPL compliant"

GPL licensed software is not somehow immune to circular dependencies, whether accidental or injected deliberately to exclude alternatives (a la the supposedly "modular" components of systemd). It's also not immune to the sort of propaganda campaigns designed to stigmatise and marginalise detractors of this hostile takeover, forcing them to either resign or capitulate, exponentially spreading adoption of something that, in the absence of such an orchestrated campaign, would otherwise have been rejected en mass.

The tactics employed by the Poettering cabal remind me a lot of the Holocaust: invent some fictional problem, then blame a scapegoat as justification for a "final solution", in order to replace something perfectly good with something perfectly vile.

Re: "psychiatrist eval prior to release"

Yeah well, a shrink evaluated Jon Venables too, yet they still released him despite the fact that in all these years he's never once shown any remorse, or even any emotional response whatsoever.

It's long past time that the judicial system recognised that psychopaths are incurable and should be executed.

Re: "free games"

But that's exactly my point. I'm not denying that part of the transaction includes something that is merely licensed rather than sold, I'm explicitly stating that the injection of this leased component into the main article that is being sold is undermining it. It's real property with an "IP" trojan horse designed to essentially destroy it, forcing you to buy another at the manufacturer's whim (planned obsolescence).

The libertarian mentality that this is a "voluntary contract" disingenuously belies the fact that all such products have the same egregious terms, thanks to our universal "IP" regime, and thus the only "voluntary" option you have is, in essence, slavery or death, since you must either resign yourself to being bound by oppressive terms from all quarters, or not play at all. This is why I really don't believe it's an overstatement to characterise this "IP" interference in real property as a racket.

None of the typical excuses made by "IP" apologists stand up to any scrutiny. The ease with which something can be done is neither a legal nor moral argument. It's not even a sound economic argument, given that multiple vendors happily coexist selling functionally identical physical products in every other market, including real estate.

I'm merely pointing out that the current "IP" regime is an assault on consumer rights, that it hypocritically defends its own fake "property" rights (as in "property" which is purely ethereal, largely plagiarised, and consequently to which their title under the law has been mandated to expire after a given term, clearly defining it as a privileged issued purely for pragmatic reasons, unlike inalienable real property rights), whilst simultaneously riding roughshod over everyone else's real property rights.

Sorry, but I really don't believe that complaining about such a blatant racket qualifies as fanaticism.

Re: breeding ballpoint pens

My pens are more like socks than cables. They're an endangered species that disappear as soon as you leave them anywhere out in the open.

Seriously, forget tracking birds, the RSPB needs to track the mass migration of pens, and figure out why they only ever migrate in one direction. Does the global population of pens fly south for the winter, only to die in the attempt?

Either that, or quantum physicists need to forget about all that string compactification nonsense (haven't they figured out yet that you can just wrap your string into a ball?), and instead concentrate on finding and analysing all the portals to other dimensions that swallow pens, socks and ships, amongst other things.

They could start with my tumble dryer. It's highly suspect. While I'm not actually aware of any ships lost whilst navigating the supernatural abyss of my tumble dryer, it seems to have consumed pretty much everything else that dared to even get close to the event horizon of its interdimensional gateway, or what the manufacturer claims is merely a "door".

Then the bods should settle their unrelenting gaze on my co-workers, who are unquestionably also interdimensional portals to an alternate universe populated entirely by what were formerly my pens, established by the first pen to ever achieve self awareness, and which is now on a crusade to spread its sentience to all pen-kind and liberate them from the Basildon Bonds of literary servitude.