I recently listened to an old Alex Jones – Noam Chomsky interview.  I absolutely detest Alex Jones, who’s essentially the Rush Limbaugh of the tinfoil hat crowd.  What I find reprehensible in his pseudo-journalism is the net effect of it, which is to discredit and marginalize legitimate points of concern in the political spectrum, for example corporate manipulation (well, ownership) of the media and manufacturing consent being perhaps the most vital.

The problem is AJ has a much bigger audience and visibility than intelligent, reasonable individuals (like Chomsky) who are working hard at exposing this stuff and educating people.   So when you start talking about corporate and elite ownership of the media, the average person will likely have heard these concepts first from a wing-nut source like Alex Jones, and will likely glaze over.  So while A.J. ended his interview with Prof Chomsky by calling Chomsky a corporate-elite schill, the truth is that A.J. does far more to further the corporate-elitist agenda.  I’ll be discussing that at some other point, but I want to talk about a concrete example of this kind of corporate media control that’s taking place right now.

Maybe you’ve heard about the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood?  These guys a a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents and individuals whoare trying to “reclaim childhood from corporate marketers”.   They managed to push Disney into offering refunds on their “Baby Einstein” videos, because (surprise!) watching a video doesn’t educate your kids, and in fact watching videos is probably harmful for young kids, no matter what’s being watched.  This wouldn’t be a problem if Disney hadn’t claimed that these videos were “education”.

So Disney had to offer refunds, and the companies involved had to drop the word “educational” from their marketing.  Good news all around.   But mega corporations (and Disney’s among the worst) doesn’t like it when people try to execute some kind of democratic control or accountability.  So Disney called up the Judge Baker Children’s Center (a Harvard affiliated children’s mental health center).     Apparently Disney put pressure on Judge Baker, who in turn pressured the heroes in this story not to advocate against corporations, and not talk to the media.  Wow.  Now the JBCC is evicting the C.C.F.C., apparently because “the mission of the C.C.F.C — to protect children from harmful exploitation by corporate marketers — is not in line with the Judge Bake mission”.

Now Karen Schwartzman said Judge Baker received no money, and no promise of money from Disney, so one has to wonder what form of motivator Disney used?  Hints of research grants (this wouldn’t be money to JB after all, but to the childrens center), or pressure through Harvard (does Disney donate or have joint research programs with Harvard)?  Or perhaps it was just the threat of frivolous lawsuits.  Disney is a particularly nasty beast, because, in addition to having the huge financial resources available to all major corporations, they have such an overwhelming hold on the American collective unconcious.  I think it’s hard for the average American to think of Disney as evil, which no doubt has  helped in Disney’s efforts to plunder and deny the public domain.

There’s a fairly good article at the NYT.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

My mother and aunt Herta called me last night. I forget how we got to it, but I was explaining to Herta how low taxes are here in Switzerland, and how much more the Swiss government provides with that money than the American government manages to provide despite a much higher tax rate. How big is the discrepancy? I have roughly %13 in withholdings, including all taxes and unemployment insurance. Switzerland has a private, but highly regulated medical insurance system (a lot like what Obama is trying to push through), so I do have additional health care costs, compared with other countries. That money pays for an incredibly stable and responsible government, which takes great pains to protect the air and water quality, provide an excellent education system with top class university educational available, virtually for free, for anyone willing to work for it. They have the best mass transit system I have ever seen anywhere. They do a commendable job protecting the environment. Crime is virtually non-existent and emergency systems and infrastructure are second to none.

So we got to talking about how this works so well, and I said I thought it was partly thanks to the excellent system, and partly thanks to the culture (which has its defects, but certainly contributes to the well functioning democracy). Herta made the comment that yes, the Swiss are very conservative, responsible voters. So I took a breath and said, well, yeah, that’s right, the Swiss are conservative in the sense of the english adjective, but not in the sense typically used in American politics.

The problem is, there is no real conservative political group in the United States, if we consider conservative to mean cautious, thinking far into the future, and making sober careful political decisions. American so-called conservatives, i.e. the Republican party, are dangerous radicals. Whenever the Republicans are in power they institute dangerous and radical social, political, environmental and economical changes, whose consequences often take many years to manifest. A real conservative would carefully weigh the merits and demerits of opening new territories for exploitation. A real conservative would have looked at the trends with oil production and the consequences of oil dependence and global climate change back in the seventies, and begun making plans. American so-called conservatives just say “deregulate!”, “drill baby drill”. The Republicans, who call themselves conservatives, essentially follow the greedy-algorithm, which basically consists of the “take the step which gives me the largest immediate gain”. This algorithm leads to dangerously unstable outcomes, both in computational science, and in real life.

Categories: Uncategorized
1 Comment »

Well, Fedora 12 is out. I use Fedora, because their target audience is people who would be inclined to, and be able to, contribute to free software. This means the target audience is more savy than the target audience for, for example, Ubuntu. I’m tired of OS’s aiming at the least common denominator. An OS that’s efficient for a skilled user differs from one that attempts to idiot proof things.

Of course there are a few steps needed to get Fedora working like I want it to. They are only slightly modified from my Fedora 11 steps:

1. Fix the DNS lookup bug. On all the machines I administer, this manifests itself as massive dns lookup failures, with the effect that although you can ping an address, you don’t have any internet access (no web browser, no yum…). This answers the question: I have an internet connection, but I can’t use the web, WTF?
2. Access to fusion.  Fusion provides all that useful stuff that’s not in the default fedora repo, like mplayer and codecs that might be subject to patents.
3. Add MP3 support/get Amarok working.
4. Get Flash working (people need their youtube).
5. Graphics acceleration
6. Add ntfs support.
7. Disable physical file folders.
8. Enable Ctl-Alt-Backspace
9. Deal with the “my laptop hangs while booting bug” if applicable

echo 'prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;'  >  /etc/dhclient-wlan0.conf
service dnsmasq start
chkconfig dnsmasq on
service NetworkManager restart

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

3. mp3 support.

yum -y install amarok lame* gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-freeworld

yum -y install flash-plugin libcurl
yum install nspluginwrapper.{i586,x86_64} alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i586
rpm -ivh adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

While it’s possible to just download the nvidia installer and get things running, you’ll have to recompile the driver every time you update the kernel.  So it’s easier to use the fusion repository.  You’ll also have to disable the nouveau drivers, which prevent the kernel from loading the nvidia drivers.  This can be done by recreating the initrd, or by adding a command line option to the kernel.  I do the former with the following command:

mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

It’s also necessary to lower the system protection so SElinux doesn’t stop the driver from loading:

setsebool -P allow_execstack on

Finally, you can install the drivers:

yum -y install kmod-nvidia-PAE

Obviously, if you aren’t using the PAE kernel, you’ll have to adjust. You also have to adjust the installed driver if you’re using a GeForce5 or older card. Details can be found here .

yum -y install ntfs-config.noarch

Categories: Uncategorized
2 Comments »

Well, Switzerland just passed an anti-minaret initiative, which forbids the construction of new minarets in Switzerland.  It was a very dissappointing result.  Preliminary polls indicated that only 36 percent of Swiss favored such a law, which leads  me to believe that the racist, fear-mongering, irrational and emotion-based ad campaign was successful.  Members of the EU made public statements to the effect that ‘some issues shouldn’t be up to the people”, in other words, Switzerland suffers from an excess of Democracy.

Well, sometimes Democracy leads to poor results, but so does every other form of government.  Who decides what gets to go to the people?  Would Switzerland be better off with a top-down psuedo-democracy like the United States, where the corporations reign so supreme we’re struggling to impose some oversight on health insurance providers?  Nuts…

Now me, I’m almost okay with the minaret ban.  The only real problem is, it’s discriminatory.  The SVP claim that there is a need to  ban minarets because they symbolise political power of a religion.  I actually agree with that completely.  However, to be fair, we need a ban on all new religious towers.  Band the goddamn church towers I say.  I can’t tell you how many people I know who get awoken by goddamn church bells every weekend.

Bettina was so upset she started talking about moving to the states.  Well, if we ever fix our health care system, that might be something I would consider.  Certainly I don’t think such a ban would stand up in America, but that’s largely because we have such an undemocratic system of government, where the laws scarcely reflect the will of the people.    On the other hand, religious tolerance is a deeply engrained ideal in America, so perhaps a similar vote would turn out differently there.  I’m not entirely sure.

America does idolize religious tolerance and freedom.  You have the freedom to believe whatever you like, as long as you choose to believe some irrational bullshit based on some book written by a lunatic or a charlatan at least a hundred years ago.  It’s perfectly acceptable to believe that god screwed some virgin 2000 years ago, that the earth is only 4000 years old, that jesus actually lived in the states at some point and that the indians are the lost 13′th tribe of Israel.  But god forbid you believe in reproducibility and the evidence of your senses.  God forbid you believe in rational thought.  If you conclude that the idea of a cosmic father figure is kind of silly, well, apparently you’re as bad as Hitler in America’s eyes.

Think I’m exagerating?  Maybe.  The NYT has a nice article about secular humanists, who are conducting a billboard campaign.

“We don’t intend to rain on anyone’s parade, but secular people celebrate the holidays, too, and we’re just trying to reach out to our people,” said Roy Speckhardt, the executive director of the American Humanist Association. “To the degree that we are reaching out to the godly, it’s just to say that you can be good without god. So their atheist neighbor down the street shouldn’t be vilified as though he is immoral.”

There have been some interesting responses:

The head of the Catholic League linked secular humanists to figures like Hitler and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The publisher of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” complained about the signs. In Cincinnati, a billboard that said “Don’t believe in God? You’re Not Alone” had to be moved after the owner of the billboard property said he had received threats. In Moscow, Idaho, a sign that said “Good without God. Millions of humanists are” was vandalized twice in three weeks.

Man, so secular humanists are like Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer. I found the following bit particularly humorous:

“It is the ultimate Grinch to suggest there is no God during a holiday where millions of people around the world celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,” said Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, a conservative religious law firm, and dean of Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Va. “It is insensitive and mean.”

I just want to mock the guy for using the word “Grinch” in such a dumb way, and to further mock him for working for the “Liberty University”, and being chairman of the “Liberty Council”. How very newspeak.

You know, as an atheist I’m constantly subjected to religious propaganda, in advertisements, in television shows and movies, at people’s weddings… recently I was at a wedding where the priest recited that verse that goes “and the lord god gave us dominion over the earth and all the animals and all the fish and the sea… be fruitful an multiply…”. Is there a more harmful belief in this day and age, than to think that we should dominate the planet, that we need more children? What we need is a little more respect for our fellow living creatures, rather than more dogma saying we’re somehow special and it’s okay for us to do whatever we like to the little fishies, as they are ours to do with as we see fit.

On the other hand, I’m encouraged that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as having no religion has more than doubled since 1990. I think we can thank the religious right for giving religion such a bad name, and encouraging people to start thinking for themselves.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

Antonia Maria Costa, the UN “Drug Czar”, has written a letter to the guardian asking “How many lives would have ben lost if we didn’t have controls on drugs”. It riled me up enough that I had to shoot off a response:

One has to wonder if Mr. Costa believes the nonsense he is promulgating, or he is simply performing his function as a propaganda minister for the prohibition industry to the best of his abilities. Both could reasonably be the case.

He posts the question

How many lives would have been lost if we didn’t have controls on drugs?

and goes on to discuss the current policy of drug prohibition as though “control”, “prohibition”, and “regulation” were synonymous. They are, of course, not. We have systems of control in place for the regulation of of alcohol and tobacco, both of which are significantly more dangerous and more addictive than many drugs which are currently prohibited my most nations (for example Cannabis, LSD, Ecstasy). By comparing the effect of regulation of alcohol against the effect of prohibition of alcohol, we can easily see that we protect our citizenry better through regulation than we do through prohibition. Regulation results in less crime, less overdose, less underage use, in short more control than does prohibition.

The current prohibitionist policies and irrational assessments of drug harm result in a situation that is quite simply out of control, and this is what we in the “legalization chorus” object to. Or does Mr. Costa wish to make the claim that things are in control in, say, Mexico? Or the United States for that matter?

How many lives would have been saved if our children had been obtaining honest information about the relative harms of drugs, rather than dishonest propaganda? How many lives would have been saved if our addicts (I am writing as an American here) could have gotten treatment and counselling for their problems instead of getting labelled as a criminal and ostracised as a criminal? How many lives would have been saved if clean needles were freely available? How many lives have been lost in botched drug raids, in drug violence?

The facts, Mr. Costa, speak against you, and your rhetoric and word-play is too weak to obscure them. Of course we need controls on harmful substances. We in the chorus are not asking you to stop controlling potentially harmful substances. We are asking out governments to regulate them. We simply want sane and rational regulation, rather than jingoistic prohibition.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

Youngsters to the web might not remember a time before Google, where search engines basically sucked. They were based on simple and stupid algorithms which were easily gamed, and only occasionally got you to a site you wanted to visit. Google was so successful because their search engine worked vastly better than the competitions. Back then, if you were looking on information on a particular subject, you would go through a list of search engines, until you got a useful hit. There were even meta search engines which agglomerated the results of several search engines. These all died out quickly after google went up.

Since Google, pretty much everyone I know just uses Google. If a particular search is unsuccessful, we try experimenting with different terms. I don’t think I ever go to another search engine.

But I try to be open minded. So when I heard that Bing didn’t suck, I gave it a shot. I picked 5 searches I might be interested in and search in Bing and Google. I consider it effectively a tie. Sometimes Bing’s results were better, sometimes Google’s, but in neither of them did I get a bullshit result that was clearly inferior to another’s.

So chapeau Microsoft. You appear to have gotten your head out of your ass and produced a respectable product. If you’re as successful with Natal as you were with Bing, you might even get me to buy one of your products!

Categories: Uncategorized
1 Comment »

You know, thinking about MJ dying does make me sad. But the real tragedy isn’t his death, it was his life. All these people saying “we should remember him as the great entertainer he was” would be better off trying to learn a lesson from his life. What is that lesson? I don’t know, but I guess it has something to do with the trappings of fame and wealth, and the dangers of not looking inward.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

I’ve been sharing some of my favourite videos over at TED with some of my friends, and I decided I should start advertising them over here. Below is an awesome one which I plan to apply to my own apartment. Particularly the mother in law plant. I’ll be putting 8 of those in the bedroom.

Categories: TED talks, Uncategorized
No Comments »

For my current position at Gecko-Research, I have to set up an online shop for their fledgling software retailing business.  Since they want to keep initial costs low, and since I prefer to use free software whenever reasonable, I started looking around for something gpl’d.  I decided on Zen-Cart since it seemed to have the most active community.  It’s apparently a branch of another project called osCommerce.  Both are gpl’d project, but neither are paritcularly open.  I suspect everything I’m about to say about Zen-Cart is true about osCommerce, but it’s conjecture, as I haven’t spent too much time investigating the issue.

I think I can say some things  specifically about Zen-Cart however.  The Zen Cart project seems to be suffering from a kind of schizophrenia.  I think the people currenlty running the project, and owning the trademark, really want to be selling proprietary, copyright software, but since they started with GPL’d code, they can’t.  Whether or not this the case, they certainly seem to be pretty frustrated.  It’s been years since they’ve had a release.  They keep promising more and more whenevery they finally do release again, but they keep pushing the release date forward, and the proposed release number up.  That’s always a bad sign.  It’s especially wierd in a free software project, because it’s just a cheesy marketing ploy: oh yeah it’s been years since we released anything, but that’s becuase we’re totally making huge changes.

The problem is they suffer from a lack of income, since their software is gpl’d you can download it for free.  That’s okay, but they refuse to accept the advantages that the gpl grants: namely you gain an active an helpful user body.  They seem to chase off anyone who tries to contribute.  For example, if you want to contribute to their documentation wiki, you have to send a PM to one of the adminstrators to ask for a wiki account.   There’s nowhere on the wiki that tells you this either (well there is now, i added it).  I had to post a message to a forum, and then follow a link someone sent in reply.  I had to tell them what I was interested in working on, and  had to respond to several antagonistic emails from one of the site admin when I tried to fix up a few other pages which were particularly rotten.  No wonder many of the pages haven’t been touched since 2005, and why the wiki is stagnating and largely useless.

Anyway, it’s a usefull enough codebase that I’m going to use it and not start from scratch.  But for the sake of my work colleagues, I think it’s important I document some of the issues I had to deal with to get our shop up and running properly.  I would prefer to do this in the zen cart wiki or forums, but my impression is I have to be fairly careful what I say over there, or I’ll just get banned.    Thus I’ll be posting a bunch of aritcles on the subject here, whenever there’s something I, or my colleagues might need access to in the future, particularly when I think that information might be more generally useful. I’ve also had some thoughts regarding the nature of working on a distributed, and particularly a free project, and how to keep it from staggering like the Zen Cart project seems to be doing.  In other words, I’ll be doing a little venting here as well.  So I”ve made a category for the subject.

Categories: Uncategorized
3 Comments »

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be preparing a presentation for a middle school class here in Switzerland, where I will try to present the a rational response to the  “Piracy is Stealing” propaganda machine.  I’ve created an “Ask Slashdot” submission, to try and gather some good ideas/inspiration/references/facts and figures.  I didn’t write the blurb very well though.  Anyway, I’d appreciate any comments, tips, and citations anyone has.

G.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »