Market Anarchist Blogs

Just a quick thought…

Via Digg:

The Futian People’s Court in Shenzhen, China, handed down sentences to 11 ringleaders of the world’s largest software counterfeiting syndicate today.

The pirates were responsible for manufacturing and distributing more than an estimated $2 billion (£1.4 billion) worth of ‘high-quality’ counterfeit Microsoft software.

Their sentences, which ranged from a year and a half to 6.5 years, are the longest ever handed down for intellectual property crimes in China.

…on behalf of American corporations, mind you.

First, consider that Chinese courts are handing down rulings at the behest of an American corporation. Then consider that the common argument in favor of the state is that some organization needs to have a monopoly on the use of force in a given geographical location.

Excuse me while I attempt to shake this overwhelming sense of irony. Fill in why.

Just a quick mention of something I just discovered. I know it’s been out for awhile, but be nice - I catch on slow.

Dropbox.

Basically, you sign up for an account, and get 2GB of storage space. Then, you can proceed to associate several computers (or just one account) with your account. With the client software installed, you’ll get a directory - My Documents/My Dropbox is the default on Windows machine.

Basically, the gist is this: all files you dump in your Dropbox directory are synced to the server. You can then access, modify, etc. those files on the server from any other computer* on which you have the software installed. So, you can be working on something at home, dump it in the Dropbox folder, go to work, and access it from there if you’ve installed the client there as well.

The kicker? Even if you don’t have the client installed, you should be able to get to your files through a web browser (assuming it’s a semi-modern browser). The second kicker? Revision history. You can make a change to a file, and the change will be retained for awhile.

As for security, well, the EULA stated that Dropbox retains the right to snoop on the files that you dump in your box, so be aware of that if you’re a wee bit paranoid. Maybe not a good place to dump financial information or the fetish porn collection.

Anyway, thought I might mention it. It has worked flawlessly for me. I’ve been moving from machine to machine a lot, and at school often work with a personal swappable lab drive (that I have full permission to install software on). Even though we’re past the horrid days of 3.5″ floppy sneakernetting, having to dump stuff on a USB drive (where did I put that thing anyway!?) to go between two machines can still be annoying.

* With a supported OS. Right now, the claim is that those include Windows (I’m assuming of the NT-kernel-using variety), Linux, and Mac OS. I can only vouch for having tried the first.

Aspire One, in Seashell White and Sapphire Blue.

A late birthday/early Christmas gift for me was a shiny new white Acer Aspire One, one of the forerunners of the so-called “netbooks.” My model has a 160GB hard drive, 1GB of memory, and Windows XP Home. As with all other Aspire One models, it has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270. I got mine with a 6-cell battery.

Really, it’s been great so far. I love the concept of the “netbook” even if I’m not a big fan of the buzzword (or, for that matter, the catch-phrase “cloud computing“).

My old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 6000, was a good enough laptop, and exactly what I needed when I bought it, but I got to the point of seeking something far more mobile. And, considering my trusty old Inspiron dumped two batteries and two A/C adapters, thus making it far less useful qua mobile computer, I wanted something with God-like battery life (and if not God-like, as close as possible). My old laptop had been in a state of battery-lessness for about 6 months, and the A/C adapter was going, too. Rather than dump the money to replace another battery and A/C adapter (which may have died after a few months too), which would have been more than half of a decent new netbook, I decided to give up the ship. Not sure if I’ll ever buy a Dell laptop again, but somehow I doubt it. Anyway…

Mobility is the idea behind these subnotebooks, netbooks, ULCPCs, or whatever term you prefer. Naturally, I wanted one, and my decreasing trust in my aging workhorse laptop coincided. In any case, some thoughts on my Aspire One after  a few days’ use:

Pros

• It is small! But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The keyboard and the touchpad will take some getting used to. As another example, the home and end keys occupy the space just to the right and left of the up arrow, sharing a key with PgUp and PgDn, necessitating using the Fn key for use. One of those things that will take getting used to.
• Great battery life. If you get one, I strongly advise getting the 6-cell battery. It’ll make the machine heavier, true, but it’s hard to argue with 4+ hours of battery life. The spec pages slate it at 5-5.5+ hours, but that’s likely under low load. The longest I drained it was 3-3.5 hours of constant use, and when I stopped working on it, the meter claimed the battery had another 25% left.
• Almost all the hardware worked great out of the box, the only exception being wireless flakiness that went away with a driver upgrade (see below). The resolution is great considering it is a small monitor. The USB 2.0 is, well, as fast and functional as we’ve come to expect from the standard, and the presence of card readers (for which I have occasional use) is nice.
• Convenient switch for the wireless on the front right. Also, the Fn key handles a lot of cool toggles and hardware settings (brightness, volume, etc.).
• Handles multitasking well. While the wireless was initially being flaky, the performance dipped (general TCP/IP confusion no doubt ticking off the XP kernel), but with that problem fixed, not a problem. I’m doing fine with Firefox open (multiple tabs), Abiword, several file transfers over the network, Foobar2k, and Pidgin.

Cons

• Flaky wireless at first. I did all the Windows Updates shortly after first boot, and the wireless got flaky sometime during the update-and-reboot process. The wireless was so flaky that the performance of the machine dipped quite a bit - no doubt Windows wasting processor cycles trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. In any event, finally I went to the Windows Update site again and updated my wireless drivers (and the wired ones for good measure) from the official Windows update site. After a reboot, things are much smoother - smooth enough that I’m running several apps without incident.
• The two USB ports on the right side (for the record, a third is on the left) are too close together. I can’t fit my PNY Attache and the dongle from my wireless USB mouse in the side-by-side USB ports. Not a huge deal - I usually only use two USB devices at a time simultaneously, so I can plug one into either side and be okay.
• I’m just not digging the touchpad, but I’ve become used to carrying a wireless USB mouse in my laptop case these days anyway. Maybe it’ll grow on me - the buttons being on the left and right side (not underneath) will take some getting used to.
• I would consider the slight bloatware to be a minor gripe - at the same time I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised how little there was. Certainly by no means the worst I’ve seen, and besides ditching McAfee, not much of a problem.
• Minor gripe: Systray glut. Relatively easy to clear up (see the previous item).

Other Thoughts

• The first boot was sort of a  slow process, predictably. It seemed to take this order: BIOS POST, of course, then boot up Windows; here, the familiar Windows OEM “what’s your name” and “name your computer”  stuff. At this point, I believe there was a reboot. Finally, the normal user account was auto-logged in, at which point an Acer-provided batch file initialized driver installation. Patience, my son.
• Why Office 2007? This one just seems like a “I’m Microsoft’s bitch” statement. Mine shipped with a trial copy of Office 2007 (Home and Student crippleware, I believe). Kind of invites the question, “hey, isn’t the idea cloud computing?” The office suite is supposed to be on the cloud, I thought. Not really a gripe, but just a thought. With the 160GB hard drive, to be fair, I must say that it almost makes this little guy sort of a hybrid netbook. Oddly, it doesn’t feel out of place that I’ve already installed a couple dozen apps to the hard drive.
• Flash seems to bog the processor down a bit. Still, I am more inclined to blame Flash more than I am inclined to blame this laptop, the processor, or even Windows.
• I haven’t put it through its paces yet, so I’m waiting (and hoping) that I’ll be able to do some light virtual machine work on the machine considering how much we use virtualization at school. I’ve heard of people gaming on them lightly, so maybe some VBox or VMware tinkering will go decently.
• The presence of a hidden recovery partition is usually, for my purposes, not really welcome. But in this case, when the machine doesn’t ship with XP install disks and has no optical drive, the presence of the recovery partition to restore defaults is a nice little warm-and-fuzzy. (Still, I am going to see about getting a copy of my install disks sent to me so that I can slipstream a USB-booted, lightweight spin of WinXP using nLite.)

All in all, I love it. The Aspire One has been out for awhile, and from what I’m seeing so far, Acer has its ducks in a row. I’m hoping my glowing fawning over my new toy continues.

I’m a bit late about this, but I just read via StumbleUpon about “Pirates of the Amazon.” I’ll warn you that it doesn’t seem possible to download this at all through “normal” channels - perhaps the plugin exists in some out-of-mainstream channel.

But, here’s the thing. Is it some “hot” digital bootleg content, like a leak of some unreleased Hollywood blockbuster-to-be or the full discography of a contemporary pop star? Nope. It’s a funny parody plugin that is a mashup plugin in the true sense. In a very strict, no-bullshit sense, I can frankly say the plugin harms nobody. It doesn’t involve hacking anybody’s computer or, least of all, Amazon.com’s servers.

That didn’t stop obnoxious, uptight people from stopping it.

What is it, you’re asking?  It’s a mash-up. No more, no less. It modified how Amazon.com’s pages were rendered - by the client web browser - such that a page for xyz would include a link to a torrent on The Pirate Bay. Ballsy? Sure. Paradoxical? Sure. Revolutionary? I dunno. It’s a mashup. Cute, I suppose. If you want to get all preachy and say it was in “bad taste,” be my guest, reverend.

(In other words, regarding the plugin itself, whatever. Probably not worth the download, in any case - isn’t that what tabs are for? And if you need a web browser plugin to remind you of the existence of torrents… let’s just say you’re not much of a pirate anyway and I doubt the digital content rackets need fear your influence.)

The creation of the plugin didn’t consist of cracking, hacking, compromising, SQL injecting, buffer overflowing, or anything of that variety to Amazon’s servers. There was no malicious digital activity on the part of white hats, black hats, grey hats, technicolor hats, or transparent hats.

It modified how a web page was rendered on your computer - nothing more. That’s it. For the record, that’s the same thing, in essence, done by other Firefox plugins like Adblock Plus, BetterGmail, NoScript, and Greasemonkey (et al.). The point is that, divorced of no-no topics that ignite peoples’ ire, like piracy, this plugin is functionally equivalent to dozens of browser plugins for a bunch of browsers. And I’m sure we can guess that takedown requests for those plugins are in the mail: it took a whole day for Amazon.com to send a take-down request regarding the “Pirates of the Amazon” plugin. No? Non sequitur? Of course. Because those other plugins don’t offend anybody’s no-no meter.

The authors complied with the take-down request. I probably wouldn’t have bothered coding or using the plug-in in any case, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have gone to the pickets over it. But the response of Amazon - not to mention the defenses by some of the more inane commentors over at TorrentFreak defending Amazon - is obnoxious.

There is no rights violation here. It’s a mash-up. Amazon Legal was apparently concerned that the plugin would hurt the e-commerce giant’s bottom line (refusing to do business with an entity, by the by, is not an act of aggression). That, first of all, is silly - people who know they can get damn near anything digital for free don’t need this plugin to track their bits down. If Amazon had the right to send a take-down request to the creators of the plugin, then they (Amazon Legal) have just as much right to demand - knock on wood - that The Pirate Bay itself be shut down (not that I’m inviting it).

Man. I’m at a loss. First, the take-down warning for something that (I submit) would have been forgotten by the next time the Internet blinked. Then, people defending the uptight objections? Bad taste or not, come on, people. Take some downers and chill out. It’s a mashup.

(Don’t ask me why I’m even bothering to pontificate about this - maybe I need something easy to ridicule to try to get back in the blogging saddle.)

The winner of the who-the-fuck-cares award of the week:

For those of you who haven’t heard, Barack Obama will be the first president to have a laptop on his desk at the oval office. (He does however have to give up his trusted Blackberry.)

Well la-dee-frickin’-da!

Just a few thoughts:

The fact that Obama will be the first to have a laptop in the Oval Office may somewhat indicate that past presidents have totally been out of touch with, uhh, a world increasingly leaning on cyberspace. But we already knew that.

That said, the fact that Obama will have a laptop on his desk in the office of the Premier Exploiter doesn’t necessarily mean that Obama is in touch with anything in any meaningful sense.

But wait! There’s more of the meaningless speculation!

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a conversation with Arianna Huffington on MSNBC, today said that he hopes Obama uses a Mac and not a PC. Excuse me Eric (and Arianna) isn’t there another option you may be missing?

Another option? We all know that Linux is being implied, but what of, say, OpenSolaris, ReactOS, or some flavor of BSD? I know Solaris and BSD aren’t exactly known as laptop OSs, but the criticism of the bias defeats itself.

In any event, all that is said as if we’re supposed to care what OS the next President of the United States will use. Other than the fact that perhaps if he was running DOS on his laptop, it could make him less productive as a president - which of course would actually probably be good for Americans.

And I suppose if Obama were found to be using a Mac, his yuppie, hipster, Mac-banging fanboys would probably be responsible for the biggest collective, worldwide outpouring of semen since Emma Watson turned 18.

On a more serious note regarding something that is actually worth noting, it’s what’s implied here that is concerning:

On CNN, Obama has even been labelled the Open Source President by a Republican strategist who quotes from The Cathedral and the Bazaar. (No kidding! You should watch it.)

So given all of that, shouldn’t he use open source?

Let’s take a stand against the command and control systems that create Windows and Macs. No matter who you may have supported in the election, let’s send a message to the office of the President that our government should support open standards and open source.

“Open Source President?” Are you fucking shitting me!?

Granted, I’d like to see Microsoft buried up to its eyeballs in dirt. If I’d never have to deal with a Windows license ever again, I’d be ecstatic. Apple, on the other, gets away with patent- and copyright-related bullshit that would cause a crowd of angry townspeople to lynch Bill Gates and burn his mansions if Microsoft were to try the same crap.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if the government supports open standards and open source software. Why would government officials support that anywho? 1) The Federal government has been propping up closed source software and hardware lock-in situations through the copyright and patent rackets for decades; why expect an about-face with the inauguration of the Messiah of the New Order? 2) Government officials rarely “support” anything worth supporting anyway (outside of their stump speeches, of course), so why expect the president’s use of an open source OS (even if he could, indeed, be persuaded to use Linux or BSD or what have you) to be of any concern?

Maybe what these zealots are hoping is that if Messiah Obama starts using Linux, his followers might take a look, too.

Egads. I really wish people would stop bringing open source software into politics and vice versa.

(In a related vein, am I the only one who can’t shake the fact that this Obama infatuation is reminiscient of the Kennedy administration?)

I know I’ve been away for awhile again. But, just a (probably) quick thought.

Via Digg, I see a link to this semi-ridiculous bundle of shit:

One significant fact that would grab the attention of federal and local office-holders (at least in private), charged with juggling budgets, is the vast stream of revenue each of the country’s 50 states would realize as a result of selling marijuana, like cigarettes, on the open [sic] market, with every pack or pouch of pot fetching several dollars in “sin taxes.” The government could regulate the potency and purity of the marijuana, and sell it for a reasonable, if high, price, nearly obliterating the black market, thus further making a significant dent in the ranks of those who profit from manufacturing and selling large amounts of the drug. Like alcohol and tobacco, vendors would be prohibited from selling marijuana to those under 21, and the requisite health warnings would be prominently placed on each unit sold.

First, of course, as an anarchist, I favor the complete and utter legalization and deregulation of the distribution, possession, and consumption of all chemical substances. Given.

Next, let’s set aside the fact that the author first writes about an “open market” and then enumerates a laundry list of all sorts of ways to regulate “legalized” weed to the hilt once it is nominally legalized. Not to mention if nominally-legalized weed were this heavily regulated, the black market for weed would be far from “obliterated” -create enough disinsentive to trade legally, and black markets will spring up. A lot of the people who advocate nominally legalizing weed in conjunction with draconian regulation thereof should entertain the though that - perhaps - implementing both (legalization and severe regulation) in lockstep would probably result in only denting the black market.

In the aforementione situation, people would often still be getting their weed through “illicit” means, just to skip the process of hoop-jumping the “for your own good” regulations. All this is not to mention that folks under the arbitrary-as-usual mystical/magical age of 21 would continue to get weed illegally out of necessity - such as by asking friends to buy it for them, as happens now with booze and with tobacco (check your local listings for what exact age your State considers you a reasonable human being).

All the proposed Miss Nancy regulations of the proposed legalized weed (surgeon general’s warnings, age restrictions) speak for themselves. Paternalism and the nanny state are insulting to those of us who can make our own decisions, so as far as I’m concerned, those sorts of sissified conditionals can be thrown out the proverbial window.

I’ve become more and more convinced that the problem regarding “liberty issues” like this is not so much the prohibitions as the attitude toward them even amongst people who want to see them done away with.

To wit:

1. The set of folks who feel compelled to go before “our” politicians to beg for some change in policy, rather than going through with living one’s life (pro-drug legalizers and people begging the state in favor of “gay marriage” or whatever the fuck you want to call it come to mind). Freedom is not about appealing to the public office. Freedom is a personal project. Want to be free? Make it so as much as you can - but have some dignity and don’t go to the state rulers or some other authority to petition for it.
2. The set of folks who advocate the liberalization of some state policy because, “hell, we could tax it and finance ‘our’ deficit!”

I think most potheads get #1. Lord knows that the Hunter Thompsons, Jim Morrisons, and Timothy Learys of the world didn’t really go begging for the “right” to use drugs - they already knew they possessed that right, so they did it, and the ordinances and statutes on the books be damned.

The problem I see is pro-legalization folks (users or not) who want to legalize weed so that the government could tax the shit out of it. These are the sort of folks who want to help finance the same sickos in federal and state capitals who made the drugs illegal in the first place!

Could there possibly be any worse of a reason to adopt a pro-legalization stance than the argument that weed should be legalized so that the government will have more money to finance its predations? Come on.

While I’d like to see a world where pharmacies and petrol stations could stock weed if the owners damn well pleased, if weed were to be legalized and as heavily regulated as this article advocates, I sure as hell hope people would continue to resort to their black market dealers anyway - just to deprive the rulers in Washington and state and county seats the oppurtunity to rape the plebians of even more of their hard-earned dollars.

And, of course, to stick it to these arm-chair “freedom lovers” who advocate this sort of “legalize it to tax it” shit.