01.21.12

Why It’s Justified to be a Contrarian

Posted in Site News at 9:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Cross-posted in my personal blog where I write a lot these days

Summary: Personal take on what interests and motivates yours truly

LAST NIGHT I wrote a response to a very dear person. It was long and somewhat personal, so I decided to reduce it somewhat and present it to a wider audience in this blog.

Maybe it would tactless of me to bring this up and show the contrarian side in me, but some of my stronger opinions are better off said than kept inside. I wanted to explain some of my childhood experiences and what led me to the way I am. I very much doubt professional side of my life matters here, so I will focus on inter-personal and generally social aspects.

As a young child I am said to have been very happy, but once I was no longer a baby I became a little more isolated, probably by choice (again, as confirmed by my parents). I was drawn to art and sought encouragement and reaffirmation through that. I am still quite skillful at arts and some might say “creative”, but I abandoned this later on. My mother wanted me to be an architect like her cousin in Florida, so that too penetrated my mind at an early stage. My mother was extremely kind to me in my younger days and I always credit her for that. When I grew a little older I would confront some of my classmates (1st grade at school even). My gym teacher explain to my mom that I was non-conformist — about which he was right. He said that in a positive way, as means of explaining to my mom that I did not blindly accept the norms and acted to their rhythm. I thought for myself and judged things based on reason. This characteristic of mine became both a merit and a point of uniqueness in my adult life, but it was further accentuated when I started working on my Ph.D. in extreme freedom (of expression and action). Much later, in the late 20s perhaps, my non-conformism would extend or evolve to the scepticism movement — if movement it can be called at all. Sceptics demand evidence for claims that are made and challenge dubious claims under the premise that progress will be made assuming we can discard disinformation and bad social practices (sexism, slavery, racism, et cetera). With that in mind, my place in this world since the younger days can hopefully seem clearer. My career path and spotty life of romance (hardly as many relationships as other people in my shoes) can be understood. It was not a priority.

At school I was known as the one who would defend mistreated teachers rather than mischievous students who tormented the teachers to impress peers. It sometimes seemed like my teachers loved me more than my non-friends classmates did (I still get along very well with people far older than myself). I did have a good number of friends, but those who were not my friends were often what I consider “anti-social”. I often wondered what the heck I was doing among those people, whom I did not agree with and wanted never to be associated with (based on their behaviour alone). It was not that I had adversity with modern/Western lifestyle; it was a particular behavioural pattern (partly brought from repressed nations, at least in terms of what’s accepted and endorsed) that I simply could not accept. When I was 16 I decided that I would redo my life and on my own I eventually sorted everything out to this effect. My dad’s view on this was similar to mine all along, but with 4 kids at this stage he did not have the freedom of choice that I did.

Let me explain from a somewhat cynical point of view what these anti-social (or sociopathic) aspects that I speak of are about. They are better explained by some examples of what’s socially acceptable and even commended at times.

1. Speeding on the road as a matter of being cool and taking pride in it, knowing darn well that it is not just a risk to oneself but the surrounding environment too. I strongly confronted people over these issues in my mid-teens, only to be met by hostility (yes, for insisting that laws are obeyed). Yeah, how dare I stand up for legal obedience?
2. Mistreating girls and objectifying them. To explain this, perhaps some contextual information is needed as these practices are in part inherited from less progressive countries, such as Saudi Arabia. In many people it is still generally “uncool” to be a gentleman, but then again, some other countries that consider themselves to be civilised have not yet dodged this medieval tendency.
3. Vocalism as the norm. Raising one’s voice and descending into shouting matches is not the exception when one loses an argument, choosing animal instinct over logic. Being a calm and normally quiet person myself, to be encircled by a pack of loud hyenas can be unpleasant. It also compels one to act alike. This too seems to be part of ancient culture, not necessary Western (speaking of a geographical trend). This vocalism extends somewhat to interrupting of a peer’s speech (sometimes using the might of one’s vocal chords), but to be fair, I see some of the same behaviour here in Britain’s finest places, depending on the person/environment at hand. It’s all down to debating culture and manners. In academia, for instance, people do not act this way, but then again, a lot of their staff lived and worked in different environments too, so there is a correlation there between behaviour and eventuality/locality. In other ways, it’s a correlation of selection, not causality; calm people are finding themselves attached to like-minded people and work peers/colleagues; those whose nature is not compatible get repelled or turned away.

These are just 3 examples, but many more could be given. In the age when “bad” means “good” (especially exemplified with black dialect in the US) we lose hope in sincerely good behaviour. It’s worse than rebellion, as rebels often have just causes to support, not something to prove through mistreatment of fellow human beings.

My rejection of militarisation is a separate but important point. One has to remember that students are not taught proper history at school. The curriculum is built to brainwash children in a particular way. Except studying of ancient history, there is — in some states — bible studies and then a time leap to the 20^th century. They are not properly taught the history and politicians now gain power by pretending to have am imminent threat of existence, thereby recruiting for free and highly dangerous labour a lot of young people who die for an imperialist, expansionist agenda driven by nationlism and self-righteous claims of permission from above. The people who are joining the army are too young and immature to think for themselves and they are well indoctrinated in school — to the point where resisting the unthinkable does not cross their mind. The army makes people more aggressive, brutal, merciless, and rough. This is not acceptable in my eyes and to participate in such a system is to endorse and strengthen it. This whole part of the rant could be written a lot more eloquently, but it would require more thinking to be coherent. The short story is, the Western industry is excessively reliant on production of objects that kill people (not farming that feeds people), at one stage or another in the pipeline (metal industry, software for “defence” purposes). I wish never to spoil my identity and unleash bursts guilt by associating myself with this self-justifying, over-hyped, and self-serving (to leaders in power) game of Risk. People who served any military around the world resent me for this stance, but as I keep insisting, had there been a just (defensive) war, where on purely humanist factors there was a cause in joining the diffusion of the situation, I would be the first to join and even carry a firearm (if it needs to come to this). In most cases, based on history, people in power brainwash the population into thinking there is constant threat (like the “war on terror”) as it gives those in power yet more power and distracts the population away from the real war — class war. It’s an old trick and it has been used for millennia. The last think a leadership wants or needs is an informed public, unionised, eager to address real social injustices domestically or internationally.

This leads me to the last point, which is about racism. It is not good inductive reasoning, it’s an appeal to animal instinct and perhaps a decline to barbarism. In most countries there is some notion of “underclass”, but in some places it seems further exacerbated by the open use of labels, which television and broadcast at large permit, ruining people’s brain and breaking social constructs (removing the glue us human beings naturally have, perhaps sympathy/ubuntu). It is divisive and it produces unneeded hostility. The unifying umbrella ceases to be welfare of our fellow humans to whom we are innately compassionate; instead, it becomes nationalism (“us” versus “them”, where “them” typically refers to other/neighbouring nations or another mindset).

What it all boils down to is this; one needs to think objectively of how to serve society in a humane, productive way. Life is a journey not of money-making but of harmonious living, ideally with the education of others to the point where they too can appreciate it and improve their behaviour despite the constant brainwash.

As a sort of disclaimer, it is possible that adolescents in more countries are more or less the same, but I only grew up in one country with one set environment and a good school, so I might be too hard on those whom I know when it fact it’s an age phenomenon, not a demographic one. █

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Links – MegaUpload SOPA Updates.

Posted in Site News at 1:25 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

Censorship

• SOPA a controversy against the Open Source world

• Busta Rhymes Backs Megaupload, Says Record Labels Are The Real Criminals

  Musicians say they were getting a better deal with MegaUpload and are angry the site was taken down.

• Megaupload wasn’t just for pirates: angry users out of luck for now

  This story details some of the many non infringing uses and advantages of the service. The main reason people use file sharing services is that ISPs don’t provide reasonable bandwidth and non free software is intentionally limited and insecure. The software most people get with their computers lacks utilities like OpenSSH. US upload rates are still comparable to analog DSL and ISPs often block and rate limit anything that looks encrypted. Open Spectrum and free software are ways around this kind of censorship.

• How SOPA and PIPA Affect US Websites and Companies ~pj

  So, when folks continue to allege that the bills target only illegal foreign sites, do they know better?

  Groklaw does a SOPA opinion round up, quoting engineers, artists and lawmakers.

• This Internet Spring Could Lead to an Internet Awakening

  As an industry, we’ve been able to rationalize that bad laws and politics don’t matter, but now we’re waking up. More importantly, this has also gotten the attention of “the Internet,” meaning a lot of the people who use the Net. That includes some really smart Hill staffers who believe in the democratic potential of the Net.

• Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood

  Referring to Hollywood, Y Combinator wrote: ”The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.” The blog post, which was titled “Kill Hollywood,” also offered advice to start-ups and entrepreneurs who wanted to help to hasten its demise.

  This is a good idea and it’s time has come. Digital production and distribution are so cheap that there’s no longer a reason for resources to be concentrated in any one place or for a small number of firms to have a lock on our imaginations.

• RFS 9: Kill Hollywood

  How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

  The silly, pro-Microsoft and anti-Google statements in this article almost kept me from linking to it.

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IRC Proceedings: January 20th, 2012

Posted in IRC Logs at 12:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channels now

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Regulators Paranoid About Android, Miss the Real Issue

Posted in Antitrust, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 11:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Developments on the patents front and how they affect the Linux-powered Android platform

THERE is usually danger that proprietary software vendors will hijack the voice of FOSS ones. The infiltration which we previously mentioned is further promoted by Microsoft-friendly circles. It is a true danger when FOSS is being hijacked (and Microsoft lobbyists, for example, call themselves “FOSS patents”).

There has been a campaign designed to derail Google’s acquisition of patents that would defend Android. Microsoft lobbyists participated in this campaign. According to this update from Bloomberg:

Regulatory reviews mean the purchase by Google is likely to be completed in 2012, Libertyville, Illinois-based Motorola Mobility said in November. Google plans to use Motorola Mobility’s more than 17,000 patents to protect supporters of its Android software in licensing and legal disputes with rivals such as Apple Inc. (AAPL) — and also move into the hardware business.

More here:

European Union regulators restarted their antitrust review of plans by Google Inc., the biggest maker of smartphone software, to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.

The European Commission set a new deadline of Feb. 13 to rule on the deal. It stopped the review on Dec. 6 to seek more information from the companies.

Where were the regulators when Microsoft extorted a lot of companies using patents. With more patents on software being granted, the regulators are missing the point. The one new example says:

EliteForm’s PowerTracker uses patent-pending algorithms and the latest in 3D computer vision to track the movement of athletes during strength exercises without the use of wired attachments.

Patents on algorithms? That is not allowed in Europe.

To quote more from Bloomberg:

The number of patents in litigation between Apple Inc. (AAPL) and a Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (MMI) unit was narrowed by a judge who invalidated two of them, said Apple didn’t infringe a third and found that issues with five others required a trial.

Apple is losing its case against Motorola and new patents from its patent worship sites suggest that monopolies on Siri are coming:

That application, published this morning by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and picked up by Patently Apple, details an “Intelligent Automated Assistant.” The filing, dated January 2011, comes some nine months after Apple’s acquisition of Siri the company, and includes numerous diagrams of the software in use.

Sadly for Apple, on the Android side there are also many patents that can be used defensively and Ericsson/Sony is among those with an arsenal (the Microsoft lobbyist tries to spin it against Android). Moreover, Larry Ellison’s attack on Android is failing again:

The parties in Oracle v. Google have been busy debating whether or not Oracle should be allowed to submit yet a third expert damages report, after the judge found the first two were ridiculous. He didn’t accept the way Oracle came up with such huge damages numbers, the very ones that made headlines when the case was new.

And more remarks from Mr. Pogson can be found here.

A few days ago we wrote about the patent allegations/charges from Oracle allegedly being conceded and here is more on that:

In a surprise detail, Oracle also claimed that Sun Microsystems was looking to get into the smartphone game. Oracle wrote, “Sun had plans and the means to use that intellectual property to develop a smartphone platform that would have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues. These plans were undermined by Google’s release of an incompatible Android for free.”

Oracle’s claim that Sun was looking to develop a smartphone operating system is an interesting one given that the firm’s Java Mobile Edition was hardly setting the world alight when Apple’s IOS came out, let alone Google’s Android. It will be interesting to see what, if any, evidence Oracle has to back up this statement.

The Oracle versus Google Android battle has stalled twice over arguments about the amount of damages. Whether Oracle’s latest ploy will result in any of its patent claims being put in front of a jury is unclear at this point.

If true, then it marks a small victory for Android, but the Microsoft lobbyists try to spin as it bad news.

In other news, Microsoft might pay Alcatel soon:

A jury awarded Alcatel-Lucent $70 million after Microsoft was found to have stolen a Day patent in its Outlook software.

More here;

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Microsoft Patent-Infringement Case Dismissed

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)’s patent-infringement lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., (MSFT) the world’s largest maker of software, was dismissed by a federal judge after both companies asked to end the case.

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff granted the joint motion to end all claims in the suit with each side agreeing to bear its own costs, according to a filing Jan. 17 in San Diego. No information was given on a possible settlement of the dispute.

In July, a jury awarded Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent $70 million in damages. Huff reduced the award to $26.3 million on Nov. 10.

Alcatel-Lucent sued over technology in Redmond, Washington- based Microsoft’s Outlook program and two other applications.

The case is Lucent Technologies Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 07-02000, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

And more here:

Alcatel-Lucent’s patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest maker of software, was dismissed by a federal judge after both companies asked to end the case.

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff granted the joint motion to ends all claims in the suit with each side agreeing to bear its own costs, according to a filing yesterday in San Diego. No information was given on a possible settlement of the dispute.

Microsoft was probably required to pay. Maybe it will also learn a lesson about the patent system, one lawsuit at the time (I have purchased an Alcatel phone for this reason), then withdraw from its anti-Linux blackmail. And speaking of Microsoft, its racist side (deleting black people) is arguably resurfacing again in a patent:

Microsoft faces accusations of potential racism related to its patent for a new pedestrian-friendly map application.

To be fair, geography/demography and race are not the same thing. Microsoft gets flak nonetheless, for a patent so stupid that its existence alone is offensive to human civilisation. █

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OpenSUSE and SUSE: Shutdown, Removals, and New Software for Macs

Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A roundup of SUSE news and OpenSUSE in particular

SUSE is a project/product that Microsoft uses to tax GNU/Linux. It recently got a boost from a VMware/Dell deal, as we covered some days ago.

The “community” side of it shut down due to problems and later in protest (just the other day). It’s about SOPA. There is also ongoing maintenance:

It’s now the beginning of a new year (happy 2012 everybody!) and I’m writing about some changes that happened at the end of the last year and the period right after the openSUSE 12.1 release. Especially Coolo has used this to do a big cleaning up of our factory distribution touching most of openSUSE’s 4000+ source packages this way.

There are some new graphics from Andres [1, 2, 3] and packaging of new stuff, but then again we also find removals (discontinuing support for 32-bit Xen host in openSUSE12.1). The project is not as prominent as it used to be, so there is generally little activity there. The community manager will be at FOSDEM based on this post:

Oh, and yes, I plan to be at FOSDEM. And so should you – all your friends will be there!

Also about FOSDEM from another member of the project:

Our stand is going to be on the Ground Floor of Building K from 9am on Saturday 4th February till 6pm on Sunday 5th February

SUSE folks hope for Google funding:

I really hope most of the students will stay around and continue the amazing work they do if not openSUSE in FLOSS generally.

Michal Hrušecký writes about OpenStack in a few posts and also mentions MySQL in OpenSUSE. There is a new derivative of version 12.1 out and current usage of OpenSUSE is assessed by a member. Back in the old days (around SuSE 8.1, the distribution came with some neat Web development tools. Wolfgang writes about one of them:

I’m not a web designer really but I happen to be kind of responsible for packaging two web authoring applications in openSUSE which are SeaMonkey’s Composer and KompoZer. While the SeaMonkey integrated editor is somewhat limited (AFAIK) KompoZer (which was forked from Nvu at some point) has more advanced features. But KompoZer development seems to be pretty slow and it misses quite some of the new web stuff which is around nowadays. In addition the current version is BETA for quite some time now and seems to have a major issue in openSUSE 11.4 and 12.1.

last but not least, Novell is targeting Macs now, not GNU/Linux. To quote its latest announcement:

Novell Kanaka for Mac helps IT organizations eliminate manual work-arounds to integrate their Mac users. The plug-in uses native Mac* AFP protocol support making it the most comprehensive and advanced cross-platform server for mixed Windows*, Linux* and Mac clients.

Novell is not focused on what it said it would focus on. It’s just more proprietary software. So to those who wonder what happened to Novell, we’re keeping abreast and reporting. █

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EPO Advisory Board Likes Patents

Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Paper pushers want to tax computing

Summary: The appointment of more people whose stance on the subject of patents leaves little room for objectivity

THE EPO is losing its credibility as the unitary patent seems closer to being imposed on the public against people’s will and arguably against the rules [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

The EPO sets up a biased board:

Using studies and analyses supplied by the EPO and external partners, the board will also provide early warnings on sensitive issues, and make policy recommendations.

As the FFII’s president put it:

By nominating such people, the EPO fails to think outside of the patent microcosm

Watch the list of those people, it’s quite telling. The EPO is in the business of granting patents, and therefore it is naturally biased and inclined to grant more of them. The unitary patent would mean more business for the lawyers and a global patent system seems like a scary destination, which is further exacerbated by the realisation that patent lawyers start thinking global:

The firm’s advanced IP services include access to 11 million Japanese patents and 4.9 million Chinese patents, both searchable in full English texts.

What would the point of that be if not to pollute one country’s monopolies with another’s? Patents are a taxing mechanism, they in no way serve the public. Scholarly findings on this subject are clear. █

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With Microsoft Infiltration at the BBC, Time to Abolish or Privatise the BBC

Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft at 11:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The call to reform the BBC (or discard it as a news source) is now accompanied by a long list of items

AFTER YEARS of writing about the BBC we decided to make a BBC wiki page wherein we accumulate relevant posts. We are going to push for disclosure and reform at the BBC, mostly in the interest of truth coming out, not manufactured consensus.

This was partly inspired by a list that Slated had accumulated and to name the more recent examples from the site:

# Microsoft’s infiltration of the BBC: “the iPlayer is not what it claimed to be, it is built top-to-bottom on a Microsoft-only stack, the BBC management team who are responsible for the iPlayer are a checklist of senior employees from Microsoft who were involved with Windows Media.”
# The “cross-pollination of Microsoft and the BBC”: Microsoft’s former IPTV platform Mediaroom and Zune chief, Daniel Danker, infiltrates the BBC’s Audio & Music, Vision, iPlayer, online search, and online products and services divisions
# Microsoft’s £20 million bribe to the BBC: Undisclosed “funding compromised media objectivity”
# BBC’s Chief Technology Officer, John Linwood, is a Microsoft mole: “John spent 11 years at Microsoft beginning as an Architectural Consultant in 1993 then progressing to occupy a variety of senior positions within its MSN business.”

We weren’t aware of that last one, which we had missed. The one before the last is about Gates, who actually paid the BBC more than once (many millions) and it shows. The Gates Foundation controls many other publications/media outlets through financial strings. This helps gag critics.

The famous criminal, Bill Gates, is now a Microsoft/patents lobbyist and he is going to lobby the EU Parliament later this month, according to this program. We will hopefully find more time this month to cover the mischiefs of the Gates family, and the ringleader in particular. He continues to profit by promoting patents which he paints as “charity” — a subject I had to explain to a professor whom I met here earlier today. As a biology professor he could see what I was getting at. Take for instance Gates' relationship with Novartis and mind these new Novartis patent monopolies from the news:

A patent is a window into a company’s activity that may never show up in a press release.

No, that’s not what a patent is. And the BBC won’t explain it correctly, either. As we showed many times before, Novartis and companies like it (which make up the Gates Foundation) artificially elevate the price of drugs and price them out of reach to many, rendering them dead. Where Gates comes in is the lobbying for governments to give taxpayers’ money for private profit (Novartis et al., which Gates invests in) and ‘free’ samples to create dependence and PR for Mr. Gates. With the watchdog press suspended (strings attached), do not expect to hear this from corporate media. But this is known to many experts in the field. Many are too shy to speak out about it. When they do speak out about it, the press ignores, or labels them “jealous”. █

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01.20.12

Links 20/1/2012: Linux Survey, Linux 3.3 RC1

Posted in News Roundup at 9:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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