My only comment on Election 2008:

It's not left vs. right, or republicans vs. democrats. It has nothing to do with political parties. Instead the simplest two sides in the most general terms are:

People who don't have much power (financial, political, business, etc...)

vs.

People who have all the power (financial, political, business, etc...)

If you can't change something about your life, your town, your state or the country, that would help not only you but everyone around you, then you have little power. How does that dynamic even interact with your current presidential candidate selection? Think deeply. Discuss (Heh. All three of you left on Slashdot). I think you'll find that election 2008 is the most fruitless of all presidential elections in recent memory. (Don't mistake this for class warfare either. There are varying levels of power in each economic class)

This is a work in progress. I may come back to it. I may never:

No one has "what it takes" to be president. America has reached the limits of what it can do in the world and is failing. There are no good candidates this election because no human on the face of the planet can meet the challenges of 21st century government.

The problem is caused by many parts, but the two biggest are:

1. The failure of the abilities of human consciousness to be able to make multiple decisions quickly and effectively without being swayed by any kind of personal interests. With the conservatives, those personal interests are profits and business. With the liberals, those personal interests are any number of emotionally driven issues which are used to control them.

2. The inability of most of the western world to accept that unless you adjust your expectations to voluntarily live with massive inconvenience, and discipline yourselves to respond appropriately and holistically to those inconveniences, you will fail in your goal to remain a cohesive civilization.

Your response to every problem that has been thrown your way for these past 50 years has become increasingly inadequate. The majority of the cause for that inadequacy is the cult of individuality that arose from the 1960s and 1970s. The lie that the individual is all important has utterly weakened any firm intellectual foundation that once existed previous to the changes born out of that era. Born of that same family is also the dislike and distrust in any organization with any power over individuals. This prevents people from organizing in any productive way to achieve a goal. The more successful the organization, the more it will not be trusted.

You face the threat of environmental disasters on many fronts of which a decent number of our modern technologies can take the blame for causing. How do you respond? You either waste your time and energy protesting the businesses that are responsible. Or you try and create the modern day equivalent of the indulgences of the catholic church and excuse certain polluters because they're throwing money at the problem. Or you just bury your heads in the sand and say, "there is no problem because we can't even prove it's man made".

You face terrorism from a variety of people and groups with self-serving and negative agendas. Instead of trying to find ways to thwart terrorists that involve real security, what do you do? On the one hand, you launch a poorly planned attack on a country that had little to do with terrorist attacks in the world. That attack turns into the current quagmire in Iraq that you have little choice but to remain engaged in now. On the other hand you waste more time arguing and protesting in the name of peace without ever accepting that humans are not a peaceful animal.

Do you even consider that part of the problem for the massive disagreements in directions to take might be caused by the intellectual "software" of one or more cultures being completely incapable of understanding or relating to other cultures? No. That's massively inconvenient to the liberals because it smacks of nationalism or even racism. To the dimwits on the right, it's not even conceivable. They actually labor under the delusion that everyone "good" thinks the way they do.

There is no human solution for the problems you are having. The population of the planet has gotten too big to be managed by human beings. The pace of change has increased tremendously to the point where no human being is capable of keeping up. You are seeing humanity reach the limits of self-governance on a world-wide scale and you are headed for complete failure.

So all of you people with your candidates picked out for this Fall, the joke is on you. You are all failures if you can't understand my warnings. There is no acceptable candidate, nor will there be. Do not deceive yourselves into believing in any kind of solution that human beings create. Humans are nothing more than arrogant, foolish animals with a tenuous and illusory set of laws and rules as your only distinction from other animals.

Holy shit. I leave for a couple years and what happens? The place dissolves. My take:

1. Digg.com: A seething cesspool of filthy and lowly minds with nothing to contribute to the online universe. But they're having a grand old time being that way, aren't they?
2. Multiply.com: Meh. Only reason to be there is old friends who left here. Yeah. I'm there. But I don't have enough free time at the moment to keep up with things.
3. Slashdot.org: With the ejection of the excreta that used to be here over onto the Digg pile, it looks like the tone of the discussions has gone up a bit, but the submissions have slowed to a trickle, so there's not much to talk about anymore. Sad indeed.

Why am I back? Because I'm looking for a fight. As usual. I don't know how long I'll be here though.

Some ass is trying to get my Slashdot password for this account. Screw you mother fucker. Why don't you go get fucked? Maybe eat a dick?

Just a warning to my friends, make sure you use a secure password. However, I don't think that's all that's going on here. I think someone might have found an exploit in the Slashcode that allows them to intercept mail. Maybe...

Whoever the fucktard is, go play in traffic.

I'm still around folks. Maybe some of you have figured out who the "new me" is aleady, maybe you haven't. :) I wouldn't have logged in as T4D if it hadn't been for that ass trying to 0wn my account.

Oh yeah... and FUCK BUSH!

P.S. - The "Ghost of T4D" posts as AC have been me so far. Also, I'm glad to see that Twink of the Mists has deleted his JEs. No one wanted to hear what he had to say anyway. Maybe he took the hint. OK... we can dream can't we?

Out.

It all started about two years ago around this time of the year. Almost exactly. I had been using one of my regular accounts to interact with sush inflexible thinkers as Neocon, Twirlip of the Mists and their friends. There was alot of heated political discussion that was essentially ruining my Slashdot reading. As I've said before, I FUCKING HATE politics and the people who love them. I got pissed off at reading all the bullshit that was circulating in the comments that was passed off as "informed political views" from the neocon losers. Since my wife was off to Washington to protest the saber rattling of our simian Unpresident and I was stuck at home tending to a work related problem I figured, I should be the voice of dissent here on Slashdot. Not "liberal" dissent, mind you. But the voice of anti-corporate dissent. You CAN be a liberal and a capitalist at the same time no matter what the neocons are spinning this week.

So I took my first stab and boy did I hit the jackpot with a nicely crafted troll that got tons of up and down mods and a nice amount of responses. It was carefully written and included links that discredited a lot of what Bush and his peanut gallery were saying at the time. The thing is that I didn't "research" it at all. I just linked a few relevant Google results and made sure that it went on and on for quite a few paragraphs. Enough that it had to force people to click on the "Read the rest of this comment" link. When they DID do that, then I had a nice multiple line "meta-troll". I take credit for being the inventor of the meta-troll as NO ONE did it before I did. It paid homage to the best trolls of days gone by and made light of the dumber trolls plus it threw in a few new ones of it's own. It was exquisite even if I do say so myself. Getting people to read my comment so earnestly only to find it punctuated with nothing but crap at the end was pretty satisfying. This was the perfect way to illustrate to the politically minded people of Slashdot that I DON'T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK.

After a while... my style settled down a bit and I found that people started friending and foeing me. This was new and interesting. It was also interesting to see the interactions with other people. I was quite happy to see that many of my "fans" came from OUTSIDE of the US. I've always felt like a stranger here anyway. Maybe it's because I was raised by a hispanic mother who conluded that Americans can get REALLY silly sometimes. Who knows?

From the beginning, when I chose my Slashdot ID I was trying to think of something that really symbolized what I thought of the neocons. Then I hit upon Trolling4Dollars. It's a semi-regional bit of humor. Where I live there used to be television program in the 60s and 70s called "Bowling for Dollars". This program was undoubtedly duplicated in many other markets in the US. When I read the pap that guys like Neocon and Twirlip of the Mists spat out on a daily basis, I realized that whether they see it or not, they are trolling on behalf of the dollar. They live for money and profit and the corrupt form of capitalism that rules the land today. Their "trolls" are driven by their greed. So my Slashdot ID was me thumbing my nose at them.

What I found endlessly entertaining was that they assumed I was "just a troll" and would probably eventually go away because of their "shining intellect". However, the grandest days for the T4D account were when Twirlip of the Mists and Neocon foed me. Especially Twirlip because he paid lipservice to not caring much about making foes because he's so "open minded". He made a big deal about how humble and gratified that he was that he had so many fans. Just "little old him". But he was an arrogant prick if you weren't on his side. One day he foed me. It seemed to be counter to what he claimed and boy did I enjoy that. When Pudge foed me it wasn't nearly as satisfying. Now, I will be the first to admit that Twirlip is not an idiot. He's a smart person, but he's not on the side of the person who makes less than $50,000 a year let me tell you. To me, that is the most dispicable kind of person. It doesn't matter how smart they are, but if they can't see the value in trying to help others, then I have no respect for them. Oddly, there are things that Twirlip and I did agree about, but he'd pretty much dismissed me even when I pointed them out. Twirlip... it's all in the implementation dude. Your implementation sucks.

Getting back to Slashdot as a whole. It's pretty much ruined. What I used to love about it was that it was like a much nicer version of Usenet news groups. I used to be able to discuss real important stuff like Bash shell tips, getting IP Masquerade and NAT to work under Linux or getting a Quake server up and running. I learned some and I think I also taught people a little too. That's what this place was supposed to be about. The news stories were supposed to be the fodder for the discussion. But once Slashdot got invaded by mouth breathing AOHell users and people started talking about their politics, and then CmdrTaco encouraged all of this, it just went south. (If anyone of my friends has a relationship with Taco, pass this JE along to him I think he needs to read at least this part) Slashdot was a great opportunity to link a bunch of like-minded computer geeks together, throw some interesting tech news at them and then get the discussions going for better or worse. People would trade tips about hardware or software. They would relate horror stories about one OS or another. But in general it was all kept pretty friendly. That's all gone now. To actually survive on Slashdot you need to be a bully otherwise no one notices you. It's truly sad. Truly sad indeed.

My only political statement I'm going to make here is this. If you're an American, I don't care who you plan to vote for in November. I plan to vote for Kerry and my neighbor (who I think is a pretty nice guy) plans top vote for Bush as the sign on his lawn professes. Will I go over and pants him until he changes his mind? No. It's not my place to change his mind as he believes in his candidate for his own reasons as firmly as I do mine. Sure, I'll be vocal about my support of Kerry. I'll be interested in persuading those open to persuasion. But I'm not going to really expect to walk up to a Bush supporter and get him to change his mind. And in the end, regardless of who wins, we're going to have to live with the consequences and the "I told you sos" from either side. In the long run, it's just going to be more of the same. More moved in one direction, then back the other as the population has mass amnesia and forgets how "bad" things were the "other" way. The only thing I want is to make sure that every vote really does count. No dirty tricks. That's the best I can hope for.

I've noticed that some of my fans have dropped away. I imagine that one or another comments I've made regarding religion, OS choice or political views may have been the cause. It could also be something as simple as them wanting to add a different person they like better and I was on the short list. That's fine. There are still people I like regardless of what their reasons for dropping me. (bethanie ;P) I've also noticed some people just dropping out altogether because I think they, like me, are just sick of what Slashdot has become. It's kind of sad because some of them kept EXCELLENT journals. (the_mad_poster ;) ) Then there are the groups of really genuinely nice people who still seem to somehow rise above all the sludge and slime and keep their little group a nice place to be. Thanks for being a fan of T4D (DaytonCIM, Ethelred Unraed, tuxette, Zontar the Mindless, cyranoVR, JeremiahCornelius, SamTheButcher, SolemnDragon, danill, tomhudson, Zeriel, insanecarbonbasedlif, GigsVT). Then the folks who just write damn interesting things regardless of whether they are fans or freaks or friends or foes or neutral or even whether or not I agree with them. (Chacham, BlackHat, PerfessorMultigeek, js7a) There are a ton of other folks that have made my stay as T4D fun and enlightening but I'm running out of time to go through the list... take it as read that I am really glad to have known you all.

I might pop back in and out from time to time with T4D, but my other accounts will likely become more active. I want to pull out of the political discussions and the OS religion wars and see if there is some bit of Slashdot that still does what it used to. Vain hope I know.

Goodbye for now and [insert deity] bless.

P.S. - Please pass this on to anyone who you may be friends with who I mentioned but who may not be friends with me. Thanks. Over and out.

Many of my friends/fans will notice a new person popping up as a fan in the next few days. I'll also start posting in your JEs. So hopefully you'll recognize the snetiments and style. This account will probably be used strictly for toying with the retarded Scott Lockwood trollbots and finally go dormant for a while. Maybe I'll pop up again like Twirlip of the Mists! ;P It's been fun folks. See you on the other side.

To the trollbots. Get a sense of style guys. Even I can troll better than you can and I'M NOT A TROLL!

A challenge: Anyone care to try and analyze my posts content and see if they can track me down? I will give you a few clues. I have five accounts on Slashdot. You'd be surprised at one of them if you have any familiarity with my T4D posts. ;P Finally... *time is of the essence* Let's see if the trollbot slashtards can figure any of this out.

In fact... I think I will.

I have to do a little research, but my wife read last week that in a poll (for what they're worth) that asked what religion Americans identify with across the country, the answer was 41% evangelical/fundamentalist christianity. Sorry, but that just frightens me. When nearly half of the population of the U.S. believes in such a damaging and destructive faith, we are in SERIOUS trouble. It also goes far in explaining why this country is so fucked up. These people need to be educated and shown why their beliefs are extremist and in many cases flawed. It's one thing to believe in god and be nice to people. It's something entirely different to think that your chosen faith is the only game in town and everyone else is destined for hell and damnation. I'm going to see if I can find this poll to link here. Honestly. I thought that in 2004 we'd have less of that thing rather than more.

Update: The closest I could find was this link at ABC.com. Even though it's not quite 40% it's still a little alarming. The numbers break it down a bit more across various demographics. And if I'm being completely and unabashedly honest, it's the WHITE evangelicals that frighten me more than the non-white. Either way, it's still unnerving.

Before anyone jumps to any conclusions about this being a right vs. left thing, I'll say that it's not. I'm specifically asking about personal opinion. If you want to bring up BJs in the oval office vs. coke snorting political marionettes, that's your own look out. The other thing I'll say is that there seems to be a lot of difficulty discussing anything related to sex on /. I haven't figured out why, since contrary to popular belief, many of us "geeks" get some on a regular basis. But it does seem that "geeks" have a problem with actually openly discussing sexuality with people they don't know closely. Odd.

My personal feeling is that drugs are a worse vice than sex because of the damage they do to the most important part of your body: the brain. Sure, you COULD get an STD (possibly life threatening) from casual sex, but if your brain is in good working order, there are plenty of ways to prevent that. I've had a good number of sex partners and was smart enough to know how to avoid STDs, so I know it can be done. On the other hand, every person I know who has fallen victim to drug use has either had a tragic end to their lives, or is miserable now. I've had drug using friends go to jail for committing crimes that were the result of impaired judgement. I've had friends who are currently struggling to get out of poverty but are finding it difficult because they never made it through college due to their drug habits. Being in their mid 30s and having police records doesn't help either. The friends who indulged in very extreme sexual behavior have come out of it just fine. No STDs. No criminal record. And in every case, just a normal life (at worst) where they are now married and have some kids. However, here is the most telling fact in my opinion: the sex focused people can still indulge in their "vice" with no negative impact on their lives whereas the drug focused people seem to fall lower and lower the more they indulge. The only solution for the drug focused people is to completely stop using (a few of my friends fall into this category) otherwise they continue to decline.

What do you think?

DISCLAIMER: If you find profanity offensive, move along.

This is kind of a fill in poll. This morning when I was headed into work, some asshole cut me off and I went into one of my Tube Bar text strings:

"Why you motherfucker cock sucker! Ya yellow rat bastard! You'd fuck your own mother for a nickle you sonuvabitch"!

That always has the effect of putting a smile on my face.

Anyway I started thinking about me and some of my friends and how we actually all have personal curses that we use when we get REALLY pissed off. Back in high school one of my friends had a few choice ones:

1. Geezus CHEEESEBURGERS!!!
2. Ohhh..... COCK!!! (Usually said in a rage with a fairly lengthy pause between both words)
3. What a ball jockey!

Recently another friend of mine came up with one he was particularly happy with:

1. Why that god-cocking mother... (Again said in a rage)

He also has this one:

1. God Mutha.... (Said with a strained voice. Interestingly it's not really a curse per se...)

Still another friend has:

1. What a bunch of asscocks!

Myself, I've got:

1. Mudra Fakah! (Must roll the R)
2. That's just nadtacular! (Said in a mild rage)
3. You sack! (Said with derision. Imagine applied to Metzler.)

My wife uses:

1. Aahhhh... EAT ME! (When someone is bullshitting here and she wants them to know)

So what about you? Do you have any favorite personal curses?

Read this and tell me what you think. I think it's cool AND stupid. Oh... and don't tell me it grosses you out. I'm not going to stand for that sort of thing. We are Devo.

There is a tendency for human beings to assume that everyone else is just like them. It's kind of hard to NOT do that, but eventually we all are able to accept that people CAN be different to varying degrees of success. With that out of the way...

Are there not more geeks who got their start as electronic musicians on Slashdot? I've posted a few JEs and comments over the years and in my various accounts that are related to electronic music. But, I usually get very few responses. Part of me feels like this can't possibly be right as electronic music and technology are virtually married. Hell... that's how I first learned hexadecimal. My old Ensoniq Mirage sampler required that you could count from 0-256 in hex if you really wanted to get anywhere with it. Understanding the signal flow of audio and the routing in a MIDI network translates pretty readily to ethernet networking equipment. Using a computer to make music basically gets you about 75% of the way to being able to be a good network admin at the very least.

Am I wrong in assuming that there must be more geeks here who got into IT via electronic music? Am I falling into that old trap of human nature of assuming that everyone else is like me? I can't be THAT unusual!!!

On another topic: How many of you who are being pretty vocal about voting for Bush actually plan to vote for Kerry secretively? I've talked to a few close friends who have been republicans for a long time, but they aren't happy with Bush. They've told me that they are planning to vote for Kerry but they have Bush signs and stickers on their cars and in their front yards because they need to keep up the appearance. I found this very facinating because it doesn't make much sense. But it leads me to wonder are there more than just the handful of friends I have who feel the same way?

After having worked professionally with computers since 1997 and having gotten only one professional certificiation (an NT4 MCSE which was dead simple to get), I've often wondered about going back to school to get a CS degree. But is it worth it for a 34 year old guy to do this?

My college degree was a BS in Communication (Telecomunication with emphasis on audio production) and was basically just to appease my folks. I've been out of college for over ten years now and the degree only really helped me in terms of being resume helper. Considering that it wasn't a hard science and I suck at math, I imagine I probably have a good deal of catching up to do before I could even pursue a Master's in CS. The thing is that over the past seven years, I've picked up a lot about networking, general OS support, scripting in CMD, Bash, Perl, a little TCL and programming in C (my big project is to really do a lot of C after the kid is born). Computers as a profession never occurred to me before because I mostly used them for music and graphic design. But once I moved to Linux, I got bit by the bug and started to play with computers at a much more advanced level and found it to be enjoyable. The whole D.I.Y. feel of the *nix OSes is much more fun than just using applications on Windows. So... the big question, should I try and take this interest and really hone my skills by getting a CS degree.

Finally, the setback. Like I said earlier, I suck at math. Not that I don't understand it, but I have a severe problem seeing my own mistakes unless someone points them out to me. Once, when I was taking a geometry class in undergrad school, I would literally check my work five times over. This made what should have been a 45 minute homework session more like 4-5 hours. But, I STILL couldn't catch my mistakes. When I would go in to talk to the teacher, they would instantly spot the error. usually a set of transposed digits or a minus sign instead of a plus sign. Even today, when I write something in Perl or Bash, I will make mistakes that I can't see... until the machine points them out. Fortunately, since the machine points them out, I "get" the problem and can usually fix it about 99% of the time. But working with computers hasn't required much actual math for programming in C or writing scripts in Perl/Bash. Instead it seems that logic is much more important and at that I excel. I knew this back in undergrad when I took a deductive logic course and aced it without trying while the rest of the students bemoaned their Cs Ds and Fs. So... in the "real world" of programming, how much math (as in figuring out the calculation before the computer can tell you that you made a mistake) is required?

OK. Hopefully that got your attention. Especially those of you who are electronic musicians like me. I am riding high right now because I just compiled and installed Linuxsampler along with it's GUI interface "QSampler" (can be found in a link from the Linuxsampler page). What is this, you may ask me? And I will tell you... it's a software based sampler akin to the Tascam Gigasampler product for Windows. It's in ALPHA right now, so it's not exactly stable, full featured or reliable. But it's a VERY nice start to something that is likely to beat the pants off of Gigasampler and hardware based turnkey systems. I should know since I've worked with the following samplers:

1. Ensoniq Mirage
2. Emu Emulator III
3. Emu Emax
4. New England Digital Synclavier
5. Roland S550
6. Roland S760

It's quite exciting to see my P4 outperforming my own Roland S760 in terms of sound quality and polyphony. I paid $2400 for the S760 back in 1994 and you'd be hard pressed to find a used one these days for less than $1500, they're that good. But, with the style of playing I have, you can go through 24 notes of polyphony pretty fast. That means it can be a pain to sequence your stuff in muptiple passes from MIDI to audio tracks just to emulate more notes of polyphony. After seeing this program, I'm hoping that within the next few years, my studio will be completely inside my PC with only an 88 key weighted action MIDI keyboard as the interface. It looks like Linuxsampler is going to support Gigasampler and Akai sample formats which opens up a pretty decent library of sounds. However, it would be REALLY awesome to be able to get my hands on old Fairlight samples... :)

I'm happy! Happy!! HAPPY!!!!

Bill and Steve,

I know you guys have a lot on your plate with Windows right now, but I thought I would try and make your life a little easier by solving the piracy problem for you. I've worked out a plan to completely put an end to piracy of Microsoft products and it's just a modification of your current licensing scheme!

Ever since you guys moved to using Windows registration combined with license keys, you've certainly put somewhat of a roadblock to piracy in place. But, people are still pirating Windows. You know that and I know that. I think part of the problem is that you guys were a little soft on the issue. If you really want to stop piracy of your products try this:

1. Keep track of every one of those codes in a database
2. Require that all Windows machines have an always on or "phone home" connection to the internet. No internet? No Windows.
3. Disable a Windows installation if any one of those codes was not generated by MS, thereby destroying all registration key generators
4. Disable multiple Windows installations if there are duplicate registration codes/software keys
5. Get rid of Volume License Key versions of Windows
6. Require users with disabled copies of Windows to buy a new registration key at the full price of a new copy of Windows. This can be extended to people who originally had pirated copies so that they don't lose the data they have on that machine.

These simple changes would most assuredly end Windows OS piracy because it would no longer be possible for people to install Windows on multiple systems without MS's knowledge. This is good because it would end piracy as we know it today. This could be extended to MS software such as Office as well. People would complain but that doesn't really matter as the end goal is to end piracy. Or is it???

UPDATE: I will note that no one seems to want to touch this topic with a ten foot pole. Is it because no one really wants to stop piracy? Including the big companies that purport to loathe it? Is because a lot of you are afraid of being caught with a pirated copy of Windows or other Microsoft products? Is it because a lot of you don't want piracy to stop since it is how you acquire some or all of your software?