StumbleUpon - Aug 26, 2008

Aug 26 2008

What celebrities would look like if they moved to Ohio!

Arts and Life: The Weirdest Mothers in the Animal Kindom

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When he died, his wife commissioned this sculpture, as an expression of her love for him | FrostfireAgel.com

Blog about … » American soldiers after war in Iraq

glumbert - Colbert loses it on the Daily Show

Jennifer Maestre: Colorful Pencil Sculptures | KIWIPULSE // ROCK YOUR WORLD

Deep Dish Pizza Recipe | Free Online Recipes | Free Recipes

Chicken Crap :: Tapestryshopp’d

Just Weird

Photos that Changed the World

snopes.com: Youngest Mother

Music Impresario Jin-Young Park - Executive Articles - Portfolio.com

Illustration portfolio | Personal work | Sleeping Rabbit

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Teaching Wild Animals to Swim

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Al Dente: The Scotch Egg: Sphere of Goodness…or Heart-Attack-on-a-Plate?

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key lime meltaways | smitten kitchen

Discovery of a Vegetarian Spider | Hugg 2.0

Einstein’s chauffeur

20 Best Websites To Download Free EBooks

Interesting StumbleUpon sites for Aug 19

Interesting Stumbled (StumbleUpon) sites for Aug 19

Comcast Gives Cold-Shoulder To Non-Profit School Running Linux | crashsystems.net

Not Eating Out in New York » Blog Archive » Carrot Cake Ice Cream with Cream Cheese Sauce

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Tweety: seekoei storie

Splitcoaststampers - Tutorial

YouTube - Nathan “Flutebox” Lee and Beardyman @ Google, London

Preemie spontaneously breathes hours after pronounced dead - Israel News, Ynetnews

Recipe of the Week: Grandma Broad’s Bran Muffins « Breakfast & Beyond

Bush or Batman - Snotr

The creationist medical dilemma « Unreasonable Faith

Uber - Free Custom Photo Galleries, Slideshows, Blogs, and Websites

Love in the 90s - Beautiful People - Ego Dialogues

Sarah Jane Szikora - Girl with a Broken Heart

The Green Geek

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Amanda Kerik’s WordPress Blog › Create New Post — WordPress

Personal - Bought XP and a DVR

Yeah, so I bought a copy of XP and a DVR for my computer about a week ago.

I, personally, don’t use XP 99% of the time (I favour Ubuntu, and it seems to like me much more as well). But with MS doing the stupid push towards Vista by pulling XP… I figured I’d pick up a copy. My recovery partition can’t last forever after all, and I’d actually like to start from scratch once in my life.

The DVR (DVD recorder aka DVD-RW burner) is something that’s been long overdue as my CD burner keeled over a few years ago and the LG DVR I bought about a year ago needs proprietary drivers.
I tried to get it to work by tinkering with stuff, even updating the firmware. *shakes head* No luck.

I’m hoping I’ll have more luck with the Pioneer one I got.

People who can only legally be punished by a fine, never jail.

Did you know there’s a class of legally recognized people that have minimal consequences for their actions? They can kill people, destroy property, steal amounts of money very few people will ever imagine having, and they get nothing more significant than a fine. They have no social consequences, no jail time, no reason to behave as a moral human being.

And it’s perfectly legal, and worse: It’s completely accepted by our society.

Here, let me give you a non-specific example:

Person A builds a car completely from the ground up. Cuts his own metal, does his own welding. He does the wiring, everything. He knows there’s a problem. It could be a faulty weld, or a weak screw or reusing old wires for the electrical system. He sells said car and it ends up in a crash and kills several people.

His consequence? Jail time and a record.

Person B does the same, but makes several cars. Same knowledge, same problem, same result.

His consequence? A fine. Jail time is never considered - it’s considered too much of a penalty.

Both are recognized under the law as being people, with the rights that all people have.

The difference, however, is that Person B is a corporation.

History:

Corporations were given the rights of people about the same time black people did. They were (at the time) groups of people contracted to do a specific job, and when the corporation was done said job, the corporation was dissolved.

Because corporations were dissolved, and therefore a short-term entity, there was not any reason to put in rules about social responsibility, just about getting the job done and making a profit. If something went wrong, no one person was hung out to dry, it was the fault of the collective.

It made perfect sense at the time.

Over time corporations grew and spread. Today, the corporation is in charge of more people and resources than the government.

Times have changed, and the rules regarding corporations need to change as well. We, as humans, see the logic of this, but corporations will fight with everything they have against these changes if presented in / to the government.

We need to change corporations from having the sole purpose of getting more and more profits to acting like a proper member of society.

Corporations WILL fight these changes because being a reasonable and responsible person, and accepting the same consequences as a human would, will severely hamper their profits. It also, logically, means breaking up the super-corporations into smaller entities that are responsible for select jobs (this would minimize the “death knell” effect that freezing a large corporation would cause).

Imagine a corporation being proven to have killed thousands of people; and to have done nothing to have stopped / minimized the deaths. Imagine that same corporation getting the same consequences as a person: the equivalent of jail. All deals and details of their tasks being put on hold for 3 to 10 years.

If people in a corporation knew, and I mean KNEW that if they passed the buck to someone else to stop something risky / dangerous from happening they could completely lose their job and everyone they worked with could lose their jobs… what do you think their choices would be?

The people in the corporation would step up and stop the corporation from acting like a psychopath(1), and be willing to take on what it means to be socially responsible. People would start to work together in a workplace, instead of being mercenaries for money.

The changes to the laws need to be:

• Corporations no longer are completely focused on making profits and nothing else.
• They are responsible for researching the consequences of their actions.
• They are responsible for keeping track of the situation and for changing their actions to minimize / eliminate negative consequences to others.
• They are required to make all research public when it involves the health, safety or environment.
• Any and all research needs to be made public, regardless of the results (positive, neutral or negative).
• Corporations are limited in scope;  they do not cross into other media / realms to limit economic impact.
• Resources that are vital to life (water, air, food) can never be completely privatized.
• They are responsible for all retroactive damage that they have caused.

(1)Characteristics of a Psychopath

• superficial charm (commercials, PR stunts, suppressing negative studies)
• self-centered & self-important
• need for stimulation & prone to boredom
• deceptive behavior & lying ( if laws are passed limiting behaviour in one country, move the work/company to avoid law)
• conning & manipulative
• little remorse or guilt (consequences are monetary and become the cost of doing business)
• shallow emotional response
• callous with a lack of empathy (emotional pleas have little to no effect)
• living off others or predatory attitude (intellectual property theft, forced mergers and acquisitions)
• poor self-control
• promiscuous sexual behavior (mergers, creating subsidiaries to avoid association of brands)
• early behavioral problems (false information given to buyers/partners/marketplace to gain sales)
• lack of realistic long term goals (very few corporations are truly sustainable)
• impulsive lifestyle
• irresponsible behavior (recalls are only issued if the lawsuits will cost more than the recall)
• blaming others for their actions (a manufacturer is responsible for contaminants, not the corporation’s quality control)
• short term relationships (often switching sources based on which has the lowest cost)
• juvenile delinquency
• breaking parole or probation (anti-trust violations)
• varied criminal activity (class action lawsuits)

Personal: I just bought some pretties

Aren’t they pretty? I already have one from the same person, it looks quite a bit like the third one.

Search on eBay for: dicrohaven, s/he’s having an awesome sale on right now!

Personal: Seller on eBay doesn’t accept Paypal

I’ve never seen a seller that insists on credit cards / cheques / etc, but refuses Paypal. To me… this is a huge red flag, despite their 100% happiness rating.

In this particular instance, the seller only accepts credit cards from Canadians, and as I don’t have one (and don’t plan on getting one) I had to ask the seller to cancel the transaction.

Too bad it didn’t work out. Lesson learned - Always filter by “Accepts Paypal”.

Anyone else out there run into this and it turned out well?

[Edit] With a few emails, the guy applied for a mutual cancellation of the whole thing, which was nice as he could have dragged it out and been a jerk about it. From now on I make a point of filtering by Paypal, and usually by BuyItNow. (I hate auctions)

Repost: City Sues Man for Canceling Trash Service

City Sues Man for Canceling Trash Service

SAN CARLOS - A man who claims to have reduced his waste to nearly nothing out of concern for the environment now faces a lawsuit from San Carlos for cancelling his garbage-collection service.

…

The lawsuit, filed by San Carlos Deputy City Attorney Linda Noeske in San Mateo Superior Court on Jan. 22, seeks a permanent injunction forcing House to maintain garbage service. City officials are also seeking to recoup from House the costs of the lawsuit.

I think this is a misunderstanding - the city thinks he’s using a different service, which is against their contract with the garbage collection company, while he maintains that he just doesn’t make that much trash.

I, personally, think that in this time and age, unless he lives in a very special area that has farmer’s markets, etc. that it’s impossible to not create trash. A couple on Discovery TV tried it and got it down to minimal, but they couldn’t quite manage it.

The ideal solution to this is to have the cost based on the amount of trash someone creates - and heavy fees for those who create more trash than Pigpen. We only have one world, after all. How? Cameras with passive recording, on which the collectors could make digital marks to point out the large amounts of trash. I’m sure that with today’s technology and facial recognition, they can make trash recognition - trash cans only come in a few different shapes after all.

But companies are lazy, and won’t do it because the income potential could be risky and as we’re all becoming more aware, people would end up paying less over time. Won’t happen, but it should.

On a side note, this is the first and only post I’ve ever had a complaint about “theft” of “paid services”. Most sites like having links and mentionings.  So… I’ve cut out the middle man from the content of this post, because I realized I was sending hits to a [enter your favourite insult here].

Clue: ads are blocked more and more, didn’t you notice that? Get out of the 90’s.

Yahoo! and Open Source … and Richard Stallman?

I nearly fainted and then turned bright red when I got this email:

Hello -

I’m assisting Richard M Stallman of the GNU project. He has asked me to find the email address of the author of
http://amandakerik.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/yahoo-open-source-censorship-an-actual-response/
.
Because there was no address posted on the blog itself, I looked on the web and found this address (my email address here) in an Ubuntu forum post. Are you the author of the blog?

If you are not the author, I apologize for taking your time.

Regards,
Michael Hannon

Ok, perhaps a bit of background… I know who Richard Stallman is, I read a very interesting ebook about him and I’ve admired him ever since. (it’s odd that I didn’t blog about that, but I must have been busy) The very, very short version? He started the GNU project. That’s huge!

I did a bit of checking, and this looks legit, so it should be interesting to see where this goes!

I replied with the very short:

Hi Michael, yep, I’m the author of that post. What are you looking for?
Amanda

To which I got a quick reply of:

Hi -

Thanks!

I was just asked to find your address; I think RMS wants to know more about what happened when your post was deleted. He’ll probably be in touch in the next few days.

Regards,
Michael Hannon

I… well, at the risk of sounding like a teenager… I think this is sooo fucking cool!

[Edit] Ok, update time:

This is the email I got from RMS (Richard M. Stallman):

I saw your blog about the censored Yahoo post, and I get the
impression that you appreciate the freedom aspect of free software.
Would you perhaps like to support the free software movement publicly?

Well, as my friends know, I tend to get ticked off at limits, so duh I’m a supporter of free and open source software.

I replied with:

Quite true, what did you have in mind? Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis (both online and locally) have been persuaded to switch to various open source programs; usually Firefox and GNU/Linux.
I’m wondering about the scope / scale of what you have in mind,
Amanda

The message I got back was an auto-reply (I’ll include it if anyone’s interested), then:

The easiest thing that you could do, that would help us substantially,
is simply to say “free software”. Often our movement is hidden and
forgotten behind the very different idea of “open source”.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
for more explanation of the difference.

It’s useful occasionally to add a little text to clarify that it’s
free as in freedom, not gratis. For instance, to say “free
(freedom-respecting) software”, “free/libre software”, etc. You might
do this for the first mention of “free software” in any article or
message.

If you want to help more, you could do things such as join the FSF,
start a GNU/Linux User Group, start a Free Software Activist Group,
organize anti-DRM protests for DefectiveByDesign.org, become a free
software movement speaker, etc.

Up until this point I had read about the free software / open source debate, but didn’t really grasp the difference. I had assumed that they had a huge amount of overlap (they do, right now), and it was a purple / indigo kind of debate.

After reading the linked article, I see the difference, and I’ll more than willingly go on record to state I’m in favour of free (freedom respecting) software.

Here’s the difference: It’s possible to create an open source version of a limiting technology (activex, drm, etc), but it’s against what free (freedom respecting) software is focused on.

The similarities between the two camps are too numerous to list at the moment, but the underlying values are different. Open source is, as RMS says in his article, purely practical. There are no values, no right or wrong, in open source. The focus is to get software that works. Right, wrong or sideways, if it works, anyone can look at the source, contribute to it, etc it’s open source.

Free (freedom respecting) software ventures into the “is this a good idea” or “is this limiting” areas - to some it’s essentially “is this being written for the right reasons”.

I believe in the radical (apparently) idea that each person is responsible for his / her actions, and that putting limits that are illegal to break only stops the people who have good intentions from doing it - and just succeeds in taking away their rights. People who are determined to do what they want, will do it.

This is why DRM on music is very short sighted - it only limits those who don’t have the interest to get around it, which admittedly is a lot of people. It doesn’t stop the official target - people that want to go around DRM will. But then we get into the next question: is DRM really for the people who “steal” music?

I see us being marched towards a Microsoft version of music - you don’t ever get to buy it, you rent it. You “license” it. You get to “rent” a song for each type of media player you want to play it on, which always has a “renewal” date - when you pay again to be able to play the same music as before. You don’t pay? You lose the music.

Am I the only person who sees something wrong with this? (They’re already doing it by the way, it’s just not systematic right now.)

Yahoo! Answers and the Deleted Answer, a resurgence of interest

Ok, there seems to be a renewal of interest over my posts regarding a deleted answer from Yahoo! Answers I blogged about over half a year ago.

As far as I can see this whole thing was a domino effect of:

1. Someone didn’t like my answer and flagged it. Either someone with a high rank, or several people with medium ranks. Or it could have been the person who asked the question.
2. Someone at Yahoo (who is probably ignorant about open source) made a quick decision and moved on.
3. Someone got an e-mail reply from me regarding the letter saying my answer was deleted, but they didn’t respond immediately.
4. Someone found out about my blog posts and contacted me, further explaining Yahoo’s reasoning.
5. Someone got my official dispute and forwarded it onto the person in #4, who restated the same reasoning.
6. Someone from #3 looked over the situation and decided to reverse the deduction of points.

All in all, do I think it’s a systematic bias against open source? No, I don’t see firm proof of this. Do I think it was malevolent / a conspiracy? No.

[edit] But, do I think that Yahoo’s without it’s biases? No, it’s guaranteed to have it’s priorities in some areas that would lend it to being biased. It’s logically impossible to not be biased in some way.

I think it was a culmination of a few people with not enough info and not enough time. It happens.

So why did I blog about this? Like I’ve said before, I wanted to see if this was a one-off or if it was a systematic policy that no one talked about. I also wanted to see if making a small fuss about something I disagree with would make a difference. It did, but not in the ways I was aiming for - I wanted to provoke a change in Yahoo, not be a tipping point for people to boycott Yahoo.

Don’t get me wrong, Yahoo’s got a lot of issues; for example their chat has a nasty habit of kicking people off for no reason or just not working properly. I personally object to the blending of the Yahoo and MSN chat networks, but they’re not my companies, not my choice. I’d just use Pidgin for this “problem”.

Looking back, I think the things that still annoy me are:

1. The person who originally asked the question didn’t get to see my answer, even after the decision about it’s “violating the rules” was overturned
2. I didn’t get an apology from anyone
3. The person in #5 came across as quite abrupt and dismissive
4. Nothing changed, except a few people’s perception of Yahoo

So what’s the result? A few people are ticked off at Yahoo, a few people are ticked off at me. People are now discussing whether open source should be censored, people are talking about whether open source is a viable replacement for Windows. I got my little bit of time in the spotlight.

Beyond that, I can’t see the ripples that my pebble caused in the lake of the world, but I flatter myself that the ripples will continue in their own way for a while.

On a tangent: a few people have said I’m too patient, too idealistic and too forgiving. What do you think?

Problems with Uninstalling Google Toolbar

I’m writing this quick note from a computer I’m fixing - the previous owner had various things installed, and one of them was the Google Toolbar.

Now, I’ve always thought of Google in a positive light, but after today… there will always be that thread of frustration tainting the view.

Ok, short version: The computer had Google Toolbar installed, and I tried to uninstall it. It uninstalled fine on the Admin account, but on a different account with near admin privileges it just wouldn’t get lost!

I tried a total of 7 times (uninstall, restart, check to see if it’s there) to get rid of it and it wouldn’t get the f—- off the computer, so I went into the folder on the harddrive that holds the extensions and found the folder that held the Google Toolbar. Hit the delete key and check? Gone…. FINALLY!

Details: I tried to uninstall it from the add-ons area as well as the uninstall option hidden in the toolbar itself. Each time it promised me that it would be gone, and each time I came back it was in my face insisting I set the search engine, etc etc etc.

Extra annoyance factor: it wouldn’t go away by clicking on the close button. Google: sometimes I have better things to do than to answer your stupid questions about which search engine I want and if I want to “help” you with stuff.