Thursday, December 4, 2008
Allegory
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Ten years in the making.
"Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K.""The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
Copyright © 1999, 2001 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger.
All rights reserved. "All of what these 95 Theses hold true for today. It's been ten years since Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger collected these here, how can these problems still exist? If companies were exhibiting a lack of willingness to communicate and cooperate together then, how entrenched must they be in their ways today?
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
We really do love the Dutch
Monday, November 10, 2008
The Sims
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Medias
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Digital Media
Monday, November 3, 2008
Afraid
"The survey found that opinions of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain had hardened considerably, as 9 out of 10 voters who said they had settled on a candidate said their minds were made up, and a growing number of them called it “extremely important” that their candidate win the election. Roughly half of each candidate’s supporters said they were “scared” of what the other candidate would do if elected. Just 4 percent of voters were undecided, and when they were pressed to say whom they leaned toward, the shape of the race remained essentially the same."
I really mean think about it, I would recommend not replying immediatly after reading. Unless, of course, if I am not alone.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
We should be doing this
$22 Billion? Imagine how many of these cities we could have built for the cost of the Iraq war(I did the math: 25 and counting).
"A supply shortage for classes of offshore rigs capable of drilling in up to 10,000 feet of water means that the daily rate that operators pay to rent a high-end, deep-water drilling rig is now $500,000 to $550,000. That’s up from a day rate of $450,000 to $500,000 a year ago-and more than double the price per day on the spot market just three years ago, according to ODS-Petrodata Consulting & Research."
I did the math for you and that $22 billion would be able to sustain one rented offshore drilling rig for about 120 years. However I'm sure you are all aware that this kind of drilling is directly harmful to the environment on top of the harm that the burning of fossil fuels causes.
It isn't often that you find out that a presidential candidate is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds.
Just like the title says.
Why the hell would the Dems pull their punches like this? Why not ask him about it?
Holy shit
You'd think that they would at least want to keep it in the family. Why would they let something like this leak to the press? It could torpedo any faith people have in the potential McCain/Palin administration.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Get This:
I never heard about this, did you?
Monday, October 6, 2008
Look at how advanced they are!
"It gives you an instant community that lets your visitors interact, take part in discussions, ask questions, give answers and express opinions."
Take a peak at their Features section. It lists, very briefly, almost everything that Statzel details about the Strormfront forum.
I'm not trying to take a dig at Statzel, I have no idea what she knows about vBulletin and how prevalent it is. What I am trying to get at is how easy it is for someone with $180 and the determination to create a hugely successful online community to start attracting members.
If there was no white supremacist site on the internet I would actually be kind of shocked, because you don't need to know how to code in html, or any other programming language. With the availibility of web servers (a google search for "web server rental" yields 757,000 results) one need not even own a server to host the website. In order to start and moderate a web forum needs little more than basic computer literacy.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Wording
Hallelujah
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Internet Forums in Real Life
Friday, September 19, 2008
Responce to responces
People who thought it was so different to invade someone's room and catalog everything they saw are having a hard time seeing the other point of view.
The reason that invading someone's home and keeping information about them is wrong is that we, as a society, have decided that it is a morally wrong (and in most cases CRIMINALLY) wrong. The internet has become what is now in our generation.
The online world is effectively a new society, where we are now trying to hash out a new set of morals and ground rules. In order to properly understand the internet you have to completely disengage yourself from the real world and all its social mores. That is not to say that we cannot define the social mores of the internet to mirror those of the real world, but without complete control of the internet resting in the hands of one governing body, it is left to each site to decide for itself what goes.
Back to the raison d'etre of this post. Just because corps are allowed to catalog us now without our consent, and hide the information they have from us does not mean that it has to be that way forever. The argument shouldn't be about whether we feel fine with letting them own our personal information, it should be about whether we want to let it stay that way.
Why should it be up to corps to decide what the rules about internet privacy should be? When big companies try to tell our government what to do people go to prison ala Jack Abramoff.
Responce to BG
"Think about the other countries in the world that are already going into this direction. For example, Tibet has a ban on youtube. Tibet is not the only one as the list is growing. For those citizens, that is what they have been used to so it is nothing new not to have direct access to youtube.
If we start heading into this direction will the government start banning too many websites? Should the government be tasked with this job or should it be some sort of third party agency?"
Why should there be any need for some organization be tasked with policing the internet? The internet is the wild west, even if people decide that they want some kind of web monitoring going on, it is not in their right to force it on the rest of us. Granted there are businesses that make tons of money by supplying handy internet censorship for almost every corporation in America, but those are fundamentally different. Or are they? Technically they work exactly the same, by blocking certain websites from a specific set of ip addresses.
The same argument that corps use to defend their web restrictions are the same as those used by whole nations.
The difference is that when you're at work you may not be allowed to see something, but you can just go home and look at any of those websites that you couldn't whilst at work. However, if you can't look at those sites at home, there is no way you can go to work and see them.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Everything is public?
What is the internet if it is not an ONLINE UNIVERSE, the only difference is that we have yet to lay down rules as to what is OK for other people to see and know. That is why it needs to be US the people, not mega-corps, who need to decide what is fair game.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Interspantion
That begs the question of whether the internet had any limits to begin with. I think the fact that the internet grew so rapidly was due to the fact that, by its very nature, it's a limitless universe. There is potentially unlimited amount of storage space on it for any and every type of medium.
Who is to say what should have been the speed at which the internet expanded, also. It seems like it expanded as fast as it should have. It was something so new, there was a California-esque gold rush, during the dot com explosion, but that was just a way of learning how much our society could handle.
So perhaps its better to say that the internet grew at the appropriate speed, and it is totally limitless and has been from the start.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
An Exercise in Futility
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
We Are Legion
We are legion.
We are one.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
We will crush anything that stands in our way.
But we will be hailed as saviours of the internet.
/b/rothers, MAN THE HARPOONS!
Friday, September 5, 2008
Fingers to Fingers Again
Oh my! Why have we been so blind? No no! It was forced onto us…it’s just the way thesystem works! It wasn’t our fault! How could we have rebelled? But now, now we are enlightened!
We can be free from the burdens of spoon-fed education!
We will now take control of our learning!
Just as long as Prof. Dean comes in and tells us what we have to have read by Tuesday.
My, my, aren’t we all little activists?"
This is exactly what the internet is a great tool for discussion. People activly want to make a controversy, it's just easier to do on the internet.
Recent Discovery
Thursday, September 4, 2008
I am a Hijacker
I took control of the conversation that my group was having, I made people think that all I wanted out of the class was "learning how to learn." I do want to learn about how politics and the internet interact (I'm a PolySci Major too, you know). But I feel that learning how to control our own education is far mor valuable than learning how Obama's campaign revolutionized party politics on the internet or whatever else. If you learn how to teach yourself even to a limited degree it is something that will ALWAYS be relevent no matter what it is you are trying to learn. It could be something as menial as tying a tie, or something as intense as learning how to lead a non-violent civil action group.
System Broken Parts Needed
Why are you so uncomfortable telling someone what you want to learn? It isn't your fault, that is for sure. You have been conditioned to let other people tell you what is appropriate for you to learn. You say "I am a Political Science Major" then they respond with a list of classes for you to take.
Then tell the prof "I want to learn" then they respond with a list of information that they want you to learn and remember. If you were to tell me that this is the way things should be I will tell you right now that I am going to laugh in your face.
While I am not saying that you should not let others teach you things, I am saying that you shouldn't let the dictate what it is you learn completly. There is a time and a place for being told what is the right thing to learn. I will freely admit that I too need that kind of instruction. How could I not? I have never really had the chance to tell a professor or a teacher what it is that I want to learn. This certainly is not the environmet for learning about bow ties and World of Warcraft, but it is the place to stear the conversation towards what YOU want to learn, at least to some limited degree.
Frag the System
I am blunt. I will say what I think when I think it. I don't intend to offend people, but I am not foolish enough to believe that people will take what I say with no offence. So if you do take offence to what I say, please be kind enough not to think that I tried to insult you.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Face to Face/Fingers to Fingers
Because pre-judgments are almost solely based on appearance, communications that are face to face between people who are strangers tend to not be as useful because people will not listen to people who they would pre-judge to be less intelligent or less informed than they are. With finger based communication, there is so much less of a opportunity for someone to be prejudged because of their appearence, so people who look 'weird' will have a far better chance to get their message accross online than they ever would in a face to face situation.
It definielty matters if an interaction happens face to face. Neither form is truly better than the other, but they do both have their advantages. The internet is great for expressing ideas that are controversial while real world incounters are ideal for getting across information that you want people to see as legitimate.