FeedsCrushKerry.com to Congressional Republicans: “Stay Out of the Rathergate Mess - We Don’t Want (Or Need) Your Help”
…get this idiotic idea out of your head, and do something useful, like continuing to cut our taxes, and starting to eliminate wasteful spending.”
Who needs government anymore, anyway? We’re happy enough running an election on our own.
This posting is probably riddled of errors. I’m going on memory, so email me if things don’t seem to match up, and I’ll try to correct it.
I have a slight bit of nostalga about the early internet and BBSs. We had a 14.4k modem with my dad’s laptop in about 1993-4, and I wasn’t really certain what to do with it. Eventually I looked for a local BBS. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how I knew what a BBS was - perhaps a library book helped me - but I found some in the newspaper or White Pages and gave it a shot.
Why do I bring this up? textfiles.com, an archive of BBS era and early internet txt files. Complete with ASCII art (Not work safe, but it would be really hard to be offended by it.)
I tried to be rebellious by reading about hacking, cracking, phreaking, blue boxes, green boxes, and then more sinister things like credit card fraud (carding), the anarchists cookbook and its spinoffs, lockpicking, and how to destroy a cars engine with sugar. How to get high off banana peels. Of course, I didn’t do any of these things, but hours of study taught me that such things existed.
Just look at the Jollyroger’s Cookbook - Chapter 59 is how to build a green box for free pay phone calls. As Jollyroger says :
“Paying the initial rate in order to use a red box (on certain fortresses) left a sour taste in many red boxers mouths, thus the green box was invented”
Which sits happily by the mercifully short Chapter 60, how to build a portable grenade launcher. There is 160 chapters of this stuff in the Jollyroger’s cookbook alone.
But the BBS world of which I intermittedly visited for about a year or so - when my dad had his laptop home and I could use the phone - looks remarkably like the internet today, at least as far as the topics were concerned. Percentage wise, it was more focused on computers. When two computers connect together, the topic is naturally computers. But we have self-concious humour - this from a guide to writing TXT files themselves:
4. YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A -REAL PIRATE-, BUT IT HELPS. YOU ALSO DON’T -HAVE- TO BE STONED, BUT IT HELPS.
And jokes. So many jokes. Alcoholics Tax Return. The various genres of joke collections: The canonical lists of lawyer jokes; 50 fun things to do on a final.
We finally got the internet in about 1995, thanks to a neverending stream of monthly free trial disks. I continued to look for these sorts of things. But the possibilities were much, much greater. Year 9 (1997) I got my own computer, even. The internet was restricted to dad’s laptop, he had the only modem, so the internet was mainly used at school. Rotten.com was a favorite of Year 9 boys - I’m pleased to see it is still available. Fun was had trying to kick each other off the school’s network. WinNuke was very, very popular.
Why have I brought all this up?
(Good question, impatient reader)
There is a clear connection in my mind between those anarchist cookbooks and the ideology of the internet. The internet is the wild west, an area where there is no law, there is no authority. Internet users tend to resent intrusions by government into the online world - you can’t tame the internet and make it safe. And the economics of the internet stop at the water’s edge (I know you love a good mixed metaphor.) Once you have paid to get onto the internet, the compulsary payments stop. Compare the early 90s fears of a modem tax to resentment over the proposed Canadian terror tax on internet connections and phone calls.
Censorship is a similar issue. The internet has always been used as a method to get around government censorship. It’s international, so without universal inforcement you can’t completely ban anything. You can’t trace it. Sure, you can try, but its impossible to keep up with the changing technology. The anarchist’s cookbook isn’t available in bookstores, but it is more than easily available on the internet. Pornography is heavily legislated against but, on the internet, I keep getting emails from girls who want to show me their webcam.
The internet is a civil libertarian’s dream. (It can even be a left-wing anarchists dream, there is no need to purchase access to Kazaa.) It is inherantly anti-regulation, anti-authoritarian. This is what thrived back in the BBS days - the idea that nothing was banned, nothing was against the rules. The hackers and phreakers would be arrested when they tried to transfer this attitude to the real world - fair enough, but their online activities acknowledged no such authority. Online they were invincible.
This has real-world implications. Illegal music and movie downloads won’t stop, ever, for this reason. Downloaders are invincible. Sure, some will get sued. But you can’t 1) find everybody downloading and 2) sue everybody downloading. And if somebody is downloading, using a new, harder to detect method, they will tell their friends. If person A is getting free movies and music, then person B wants in. They may not know anybody who has been sued, which in their mind makes them invincible. Or the new method that person A is using will make them invincible. Bittorrent is the obvious contemporary example.
And it has other implications. Regulations on speech will remain in the real world, but more and more communication occurs on the unregulatable internet. Speech regulations (on TV, radio) will be a parody of themselves - you can’t stop offensive speech by merely confiscating pamphlets anymore.
I have more to add, but must save it for another evening.
A machine that only another machine could create. Notice the ‘Krupp’ sign. Not only are they alive, but they are Germans too.
Link thanks to Heavy Lifting
Not a complement.
The Democrat Party’s foreign policy is up for sale at eBay! Grab it while its fresh!
Link may go down, so I have taken the liberty to screenshot it here.
Bump for Rambling’s Journal
Is there intense street-fighting in Iran happening right now? Some reports indicate there is.
Shamelessly copying the NYT, The Age has a piece on bloggers which illustrates their maxim perfectly - if you hate John Howard, you’re normal. If you don’t, you are strange and deserve to be studied from afar. How else to explain the absurd use of the phrase Right Wing Death Beasts, and the use of P.J. O’Rourke as some sort of spiritual leader?
A few weeks ago I linked to a TCS piece that used the game President Elect 1988 to predict who would be the winner of the 2004 election. Now Nelson Hernandez, Sr, the man who wrote the engine of the game on his Apple II+ responds, criticising the methodology in the original piece, and providing some insight as to how the 1988 game made its calculations.
The internet: a serious place for serious minds.
Rand Simberg quotes an article by Philip Ball (if that is his real name) on space exploration.
“How otherwise can McDonald’s colonize the Moon (or should that be the Moon®)?” (here)
I really want McDonald’s to open up a moon store. Not because those tasty, tasty burgers would be available to Moonmen, but because of what it implies.
Firstly, you need to have a demand for McDonald’s on the moon. McDonald’s is cheap. Very cheap, which probably means they don’t make a huge amount of money off each burger, once wages and infrastructure are taken into account. (On a more positive note, property would be cheap. I dare say they would buy, not lease, the land.)
In order to justify an entire branch, you will need a large customer base. Not everybody on the moon would eat at McDonald’s every day. (Unless it was for a documentary.) In fact, very few people would eat at the McDonald’s regularly. Breakfast and lunch would be most common - nobody wants to cook on the moon. For dinners there would have to be other restaurants available, higher priced and higher quality.
So far, the presence of a McDonald’s indicates that there are an enormous amount of people on the moon, as well as a variety of restaurants. (Other businesses - i.e. shoe stores, copy-centres, op-shops - are also likely, but I shall avoid such unscientific conjecture)
We then have to tackle the staffing. The assumption is that jobs on a moon colony would be in the higher tax bracket, scientists, explorers, engineers. Most of the key employment would be required highly educated and highly experienced people. But you can’t staff McDonald’s with PhDs. To pay a burger-flipper the wages an engineer would expect would make the whole point of a McDonald’s moot - it would raise the prices so much that there was no demand for Happy Meals. We need minimum wage workers to staff our restaurant. You could ship them there, but who would want to travel to the moon just to dip chips into batter? (I exaggerate - there is a machine for that now.)
The only way you can successfully get minimum wage workers on the moon is by breeding them there. Families. McDonald’s on the moon now requires stable families with teenage youths. And with youths come other infrastructure. Schools. Entertainment. Skate parks.
When they get slightly older they may wish to move to earth for University. But then where do the waiters at the better restaurants come from? You may need some tertiary institution. The most popular course would be rocket science. Woodwork would not be popular, or possible.
Would You Like To Go Ahead With This Today?
I lack the capital, but I urge you to fulfill my dream. Here is the McDonald’s official franchise website. (Moon not available as a location - I would contact them directly. Toll Free Number 1-800-244-6227, or Email franchise.inquiries@mcd.com. Here is the form for franchising (PDF).
You’ll need staff. Advertise at Seek.com.au and CareerOne - Australians are the best workers. Also quite good are Peruvians.
For launching, NASA’s Small business Research Initiative should help you, as should the here.) For true free-marketeers, X-Prize participants may be worth looking into - Scaled Composites looks certain to take out the prize, but after having won may be inundated with requests from competing franchisees, so try the Russian Suborbital Corporation, or Lone Star Space Access.
Before you leave earth, make sure your nearest embassy knows. As your nearest embassy is dependent on Earth’s orbit, you may have to make a lot of calls.
