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Living Room / Re: 16K word sample of my sci-fi ebook, due on Amazon and B&N in October
« Last post by 40hz on June 15, 2013, 10:24 AM »^Same here! Thx for serving as a little kick in the butt K-Man! 
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We’ve seen the impact that Bitcoin can have on the future of payments. But money is not the only area that the movement is influencing. Bitmessage is a protocol that implements some of the ideas of Bitcoin into communications.
Given the pressure on technology companies to cooperate with governments regarding services like email, those looking for a private way to communicate could find Bitmessage’s concept quite interesting.
We live in a time where cloud computing has become the norm for our digital services. That means that a lot of our information is actually stored in data centers scattered around the globe. This has provided us with convenience in the form of access to our data from anywhere. At the same time, however, we are losing a sense of control and security over our communications whether it is via chat, email or on social networks.
Enter Bitmessage:
Bitmessage is like Bitcoin in that it is a decentralized, peer-to-peer protocol. Unlike using an add-on component for email similar like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Bitmessage is a unified system that encrypts every message. The whole point of the platform is to keep your communications secure. And on top of that, it keeps secure the members of the communication: not only is the content of messages protected, but the sender and receiver of those messages is kept secret as well.
According to the official Bitmessage whitepaper, even those who use encryption standards such as PGP find it an overwhelming process. In this way, one can think about Bitmessage as a decentralized email server.
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Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct.
If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption.
Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self.
Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.
in the private sector it's pretty much impossible to put together a database as comprehensive as what the government can gather by force-CWuestefeld (June 14, 2013, 07:52 PM)
Thanks for the headsup, 40hz.-ewemoa (June 14, 2013, 09:11 PM)
A daily must visit if you're at all into FOSS.@40hz, your name will be included under Proofreader's in "Acknowledgments" in next upload.-kyrathaba (June 14, 2013, 07:06 PM)
Where the hell do you find these graphics?-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2013, 12:37 PM)
what constitutes a "Proper Start"-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2013, 11:36 AM)
The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we're wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain!
Dear Christian,
as you probably are aware of, there are recurring discussions on the
package duplication between the official Debian archive and the
debian-multimedia.org ("d-m.o" from now on) that you maintain.
AFAIK, the Debian team in charge of maintaining multimedia packages
(that I'm Cc:-ing) is not happy about the duplication and has approached
you about that [1], providing some evidence of the troubles that it
causes to them and to Debian users that also happen to use d-m.o. OTOH
I'm sure you are maintaining d-m.o to provide a useful service to Debian
users, when some of the packages you distribute are not available in
Debian proper.
[1] http://lists.alioth....12-March/025498.html
Personally, I think that principle is fine, but I'm worried about the
duplication part. Not only due to the troubles that it might cause to
users, but also for the apparent waste of maintenance energies. Energies
that could be put into better use if you and the pkg-multimedia team
could find a way to collaborate, and to do so contributing to the
*official* Debian packaging of the concerned software.
I have no specific opinion on the technical claims that d-m.o causes
trouble to official Debian packages. That might be true or not. Ditto
for your allegations of conflict of interest in the maintenance of
ffmpeg or libav in Debian. But I observe that *in* Debian we do have
mechanisms to solve that kind of issues, if and when they arise. As long
as you keep on doing your work outside Debian instead of raising your
concerns within Debian, we'll have to keep on assuming that what is
being done in Debian is fine and is entitled to the official status that
come with the name "Debian".
Thinking about it, I think we should choose one of the two possible way
forward:
1) You and the pkg-multimedia team reach an agreement on
which-packages-belong-where. One way to settle would be that for
every package that exist in the official Debian archive, the same
package should not exist in d-m.o, unless it has a version that does
not interfere with the official packages in "standard" Debian
installations. Another way would be to rename packages and sonames.
I understand that such agreements would give a sort of "advantage" to
the pkg-multimedia people over d-m.o, but that seems to be warranted
by the fact that they are doing the official packaging, while you're
not. If, as I hope, you could start doing your packaging work
(wherever possible) within Debian as well, things would be different
and we could consider solving potential technical conflicts in the
usual Debian way.
2) You stop using "debian" as part of the domain name of your
repository, which is confusing for users (e.g. [2,3]). That would
allow each part to keep on doing what they want in terms of
packaging, but at least would remove any of the existings doubts
about the official status of d-m.o.
[2] http://bugs.debian.o...rt.cgi?bug=660924#20
[3] http://bugs.debian.o...rt.cgi?bug=668308#47
I can imagine that would be a painful step for you to take, given the
well established domain name. But it seems fair to ask you to do so
if we couldn't manage to find an agreement between you and the
official Debian packaging initiative of software you're maintaining
in an unofficial repository.
We could also consider various in-between solutions, such as adding
suitable prominent disclaimers on your website explaining that your
initiative is not affiliated with the Debian Project, that it might
cause technical incompatibilities with official packages, and that the
donations you're collecting are for you personally and not for the
Debian Project.
I hope we can reach an agreement on (some variants of) point (1). I'm
personally convinced d-m.o could offer a very useful service to Debian
users, for packages that are not part of the official archive. But d-m.o
really needs to do so in a way that doesn't get in the way of official
packaging activities, otherwise it will remain a perennial source of
conflicts, to the detriment of both parties.
What do you think?
Cheers.
PS we really want this discussion to be public, so please keep the
pkg-multimedia-maintainers list Cc:-ed, as requested with my M-F-T
header. I'll otherwise take the liberty to forward your replies to
the list myself.
> Dear Christian,
Hi,
[...]
> We could also consider various in-between solutions, such as adding
> suitable prominent disclaimers on your website explaining that your
> initiative is not affiliated with the Debian Project, that it might
> cause technical incompatibilities with official packages, and that the
> donations you're collecting are for you personally and not for the
> Debian Project.
Did you read the donate page ? There is no ambiguity.
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/donate
> I hope we can reach an agreement on (some variants of) point (1). I'm
> personally convinced d-m.o could offer a very useful service to Debian
> users, for packages that are not part of the official archive. But d-m.o
> really needs to do so in a way that doesn't get in the way of official
> packaging activities, otherwise it will remain a perennial source of
> conflicts, to the detriment of both parties.
>
> What do you think?
I'll move to a new domain name (without debian), for that I need
time. Maybe 3 or 6 months should be enough, I don't know exactly.
Christian
I can't help but think that this is a test bed for something much larger and more insidious.-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2013, 06:40 AM)
That's more like the SJ I know... let your cynicism flow!-wraith808 (June 14, 2013, 07:38 AM)
Users warned to remove Debian Multimedia repository
The Debian project is warning users that the unofficial Debian Multimedia repository now has to be considered unsafe. According to the Debian maintainers, the debian-multimedia.org domain is not being used by the maintainers of the unofficial repository any more and is now registered to a party unknown to the Debian project. This means that the repository is no longer safe to use and users should remove it from their sources.list file as soon as possible.
In its announcement, the Debian project is recommending that users check their systems by running
grep debian-multimedia.org /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
which will show debian-multimedia.org in its output if the user has the untrustworthy repository enabled. Meanwhile, Debian developer Steve Kemp has asked the community to create a tool for the distribution to easily manipulate entries in the sources.list file as Debian currently does not ship such a tool. At the moment, users have to edit their repository sources with a text editor.
Using unofficial repositories always represents a security risk and this example clearly shows one of the reasons, as the project usually does not have any control over such repositories. Since the new owners of the debian-multimedia.org domain are unlikely to have access to the signing keys for the expired repository, the security risk is somewhat mitigated as long as users do not install unsigned packages. In any case, removing the repository from one's sources file as Debian recommends is the best procedure to follow.
Anyone finding it enjoyable?-kyrathaba (June 13, 2013, 05:51 PM)
)The Curious Case of Mr. Li
It's not the best alien gaff ever made, but I don't think it's creator deserved to go to jail.[/i]
"Shortly after he proudly posted photographs of his alien on the internet, he was arrested by the police for five days for "fabrications" that "disturbed the public order".
Mr Li was forced to admit that he had indeed sought to use his model, held together with chicken wire and glue, to mislead his fellow Chinese about the existence of celestial creatures."
It boggles the mind this was worthy of official attention. Gaffs, and gaff based hoaxes in particular, have a long and proud history around the world. Alien bodies are a huge part of the UFO subculture, challenged only by the Bigfoot fans in terms of the sheer number of "specimens" that pop up.
Yes, but this isn't usually regarding subversive speech,-CWuestefeld (June 13, 2013, 09:12 AM)
I do agree that this kind of thing can have a stifling effect, I just put it low on my list of concerns about the world -- at least in the ABSTRACT.-mouser (June 13, 2013, 07:21 AM)
“The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…”
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“A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.”
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“Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.”
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“Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers. ”
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“A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject. ”
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“He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall.”