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I just used my last moderation point to troll rate someone. OK, it was not someone, it was an asshole. Seriously, who are these people that in this day and age can keep spewing racism, sexism, and how they are metrically challenged in the organ department? Guns? F**king Cowards. If you need a gun to defend yourself, you are probably a criminal. Bad boyz? White Bad Boyz? KKK Boyz? You know, if you are an oath keeper, you are already a lying sack of it. Defend the Constitution? You do realize that this means you have to be able to read the Constitution first, so you know what it is you are defending? Else, perchance, you find yourself defending the Protocols of the Teutonic Knights! You know, Nazi shit?

Recently I came across a video of John Cleese explaining Fox News with the insight that you have to know at least enough to be right in order to know you are wrong, and this is exactly what conservatives are lacking. Ah, here it is! Now this is the problem, and it does point out how arguing with these people is really no use at all. Seriously? Cops saying they _are_ the cop that shot the kid? Are they actually saying that they are racist child-murderers? See: too stupid to know that they are stupid.

I think it is nice that Soylent News covers these terribly fascist events in American, if only for the edification of the rest of the world. But let not all these people who do in fact listen to Fox New think that somehow they are right, or even in the majority. Liberals have more guns that conservatives, and they are better shots, since they do not get all emotional about their targets.

So I am not saying that we kick out all the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals and neo-nazis, I am just saying that if you are one of those, expect no mercy from things like reality and logic and humanity, and ethics. We owe you nothing less.

OK, my contributions of late seem to be more complaining than anything. I really try not to smite idiots with negmod points, seriously! But I do hang on to the last few mod points, just in case a late-breaking egregious post should be made. And here is my latest complaint. Mod points come with a nice notification, and even some direction to proper usage. That is all well and good. There also is a date and time of expiration for said mod points. But my expiration time always seems to be an hour off. I am assuming this time is changed to local 24-hour format, no problem. Perhaps Slashcode is unaware that not all time-zones practice Daylight Savings? Or perhaps I am not where I think I am. I guess I could just remember, for Soylent News Mod points, that 18:05 is not 6:05 local time, but in fact 5:05. Wait, is it leap ahead, or fall back, if you do not have Daylight Saving Time? (And what fools think we can save daylight? If we could, the whole solar power at night thing would already be solved.)

Any way, it is probably better that I lose mod points before I can use them in nasty ways. Live long and prosper, whatever time matrix you find yourself in.

Copyrights and patents are bad. They are monopolies. They lead to incorrect thinking about property and ownership. They appeal to the bad in our natures. They provide opportunities for the anti-social to shakedown legitimate businesses. To restrict copying is to restrict sharing of knowledge, and teaching and education. Restrictions take away a natural right that is crucial to the existence and advancement of our civilizations. They are unenforceable. They cannot be enforced through technology such as DRM and copy protection, and they cannot be enforced through policing and legal means. Trying to enforce them is very costly and futile. Copyrights are also not the least of all evils. We have better ways to promote the progress of science and art, we do not need to live with copyright.

Intellectual Property plays on our bad instincts.

A strong emotion that intellectual property wrongly engages is Fear of Loss. We know through experimentation that when presented with a choice in which people already have something but must risk its loss in order to gamble for a much larger gain, at good odds, most people will refuse to take the chance. But when presented with the identical choice except that they do not already possess the things to be risked, more will take the chance. Those who possess copyrights or patents mislead themselves into thinking they are like physical property which can be stolen, and therefore must be guarded from theft. The greedy have tried to hoard these "properties" as if they are gold. Out of fear of small losses that are not real, we overlook big gains for us all. Copyright plays on our instincts in a negative way.

A bad habit of thought that copyright and patents promote is "mother may I". The system default is "no", unless "permission is obtained". This slows down progress both directly because even if permission is freely granted it takes more time and effort just to check, and indirectly by conditioning the public to be compliant and submissive, which makes people less adventurous and therefore less innovative.

Even our language hurts our understanding. Languages reflect the fears of a people, and one fear present in many languages is fear of loss. Many English phrases are needlessly possessive. "I have an idea" or "I've got an idea" could make it sound like I have property rights over the idea, as if I had said "I have a car." Same with "my idea". The language uses the same words for these different cases. It does not make sufficient distinction between the material and the immaterial.

Intellectual Property denies to us the right to share knowledge.

Sharing of knowledge is a right that should be every bit as fundamental as Freedom of Speech and Religion.

The sharing of knowledge, particularly the education and teaching of our young, and our ability to do so far better than any other animal is what lifted us to the top of the animal kingdom. Every ancient civilization employed a writing system. Their value was so obvious and large that no civilized society could do without. The feature we use to distinguish the civilized from the uncivilized is records and record keeping.
While it could be possible to do some record keeping through memory alone, in practice that is impossible. To be remembered, records have to be written.

Now, today, for hustlers to try to tell everyone that knowledge should be kept locked away because it is valuable, is outrageous. They are only trying to set up or maintain a racket with themselves as the kingpins. They would shut down the public library and used book store and ban them if they could.

Copyrights and patents are monopolies, and monopolies are bad.

Monopolies of all kinds share some common features. A monopoly always results in higher prices, poorer goods and services, and slower progress. In recognition of the harm that monopolies cuase, we have outlawed some monopolistic practices.

Opportunists have seen the current system as a chance to engage in Rent Seeking, and have tried to be first to monopolize every idea. The result is a mess in which the truly original ideas must be navigated through a minefield of dubious claims from patent trolls. Because it is far too burdensome to check all existing patents for possible infringements, it forces us to violate rights and risk punishment in order to get anywhere. In a day's work, a software engineer may violate hundreds of patents. Occasionally, the explorers have to take time out to soothe the fears of the uninformed who have only heard that somehow the law is being broken, and to deal with accusations from competitors and enemies seeking to use patents not to claim their just rewards, but to extort victims for money and to stifle competition. All this makes patent and copyright ironic, working against the purpose for which they were enacted, which is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"

Copyrights and patents are an unnatural kind of monopoly in that they can exist only through force of law and custom. Technological means such as copy protection and Digital Rights Management have failed to do more than inconvenience customers, some of whom find it faster and easier to pay the blackmail. To force compliance from the unwilling through technological means is simply impossible. Even those willing to comply cannot always do so, any more than anyone can choose to stop breathing. That leaves legal means, which take a great deal of effort and expense to attempt, and these efforts are not successful either. Nor can they be.

Copyrights and patents are not the only way to promote the arts and sciences.

This simple fact is often quickly overlooked in arguments over the law. Upon hearing that copyrights should be abolished, many people jump to the conclusion that artists will starve and we'll have no more art. This of course presumes a lot of things that simply are not true. Most of all, it presumes that copyright is the only way for artists to make a living.

So, what else is there? We could have nothing. No rewards, but also no restrictions. Art would still be created under those conditions. However the more desirable option would be some form of patronage. Patronage is not a new idea, it has existed for centuries. With current technology we are already doing patronage far better than it could be done in past centuries. There is also advertising, the model that works for broadcast radio and TV. And there are other ways. They are not perfect, but they do not have to be. They only have to be better than copyright, a low bar indeed.

Once in a long while, I post something that is beyond the ken of mere mortals. Unfortunately, mere mortals take this as a disagreement of opinion. But in fact, it is not. I am right, and they are wrong. You may think I am being conceited in this, but I assure you, I have grounds for my position.

So I am wondering why, in the grande scale of things, I am disturbed when some ill-advised comment of mine is appropriately modded down. Yes, I probably had it coming. Yes, it is probably justified. And if I had just waited half a day, this would not have happened. But can't you see that I have gone from a karma rating of 50 to just a paltry 49!! Oh, really, not a big deal. We are all after the same thing here (except for those libertarian free market fucks that are trying to pump the site for all it's worth and then sell us out down the river to some corporation niced.).

Yes, I mod down posts, especially if they are ethanol fueled and full of racism, misogyny, and ignorance of too many categories to be categorized. Or Republican. We need to stand up for reason, science, evidencem and logical thinking. Any religious stuff is right out, and any libertarian/Republican economic ideology is on the same level. No bias, no prejudice, just that bullshit needs to be called bullshit, and not allowed to pass as polite conversation.

We are the last best place on the internet. We are People, we are soylent. We have to act like people, people who can think, reason, argue according to the rules of logic. That is all I ask. I hope it is not too much.

Now we're a few weeks in, and most stories when I come here are re-treads of things that I read on Slashdot a few days earlier. There's no point commenting on them, because I've already commented on the ones I'm interested in on Slashdot. Everyone else seems to feel the same way, because I rarely see a story with more than 10 comments. For a site that is meant to be all about the comments, that's an abject failure.

How could this have been solved? Well, as I proposed around launch time, the editors could have made a point of commenting on each story to prime the pump. When a story scrolls off the bottom of the front page with fewer comments than there are editors, then it's a failure. It means that either editors are posting stories that they're not interested in (in which case, why are they posting them?) or that they don't actually visit the site (in which case why are they editors?).

The only stories currently on the front page with more than 12 comments are 'people opting for dumb phones instead of smartphones' (which I'm just about to read - sounds like a typical rehash of the 'I have no self control so I'm going to use crappy technology to limit my exposure to stuff' story) and 'SCOTUS Signals Support for Corporate Religion?'. Where's the tech news? Are there any people here interested in discussing tech stories?

It feels like the staff gave up after the public temper tantrum between two of them and the community followed.

Wonder how much I would have to bribe someone to get an insanely high user number. Some number in the hundreds of billions would do. Trillions or more would be better, but it would need to be in scientific notation. Damn near NO ONE would actually count the zeros. Errr - wait - there probably are anal retentive geeks out there. Or obsessive compulsive nerds. Yeah, some few would count the digits.

Anyway - with some crazy high number, I can post from the far distant future. Infuriating nonsense, like, "Yes, Apple is still around today. They haven't innovated anything for centuries though. About all that's left of Apple, is their manufacturing facility in orbit around Mars, where they make a few specialty items for the Chinese Space Marines."

YES!! ICANHAZJOURNAL!

Of course, knowing me, this may very well be the last entry I ever make in the journal.

Hi everyone,

I don't think that anyone will bother reading this journal. But it's a journal after all, and I have a spare minute (which doesn't happen often), because I'm commuting back home right now.

So I think that our new news site is great and I look forward into the bright future. No need to compulsively check /. again, because I know that better news will be here. And also if I stumble on something worthy, I will submit it too.

The "/." brings me to the question of how do we abbreviate our new site? SN? Barrabas was talking about how he wanted to setup a name submission form, with automatic checking if domain is available. Heck I even bought three domains that I wanted to suggest as possible names for voting, to prevent namesquatting. Also Barrabas elaborated about how he sees this as a two stage voting process, to make sure that the best name is selected. Understand me well - I'm not trolling that SN is a bad name, I just wonder if this planned voting on name was cancelled or there simply wasn't enough time, because bringing up slash is a plenty of work already.

But also, it is a relief to have this our great new site here. The old one became unbearable in recent years.

Also this place could become a real journal for me, when we will have MathJax support. Then I could write down my thoughts using language superior to english, and then I will even enjoy writing this journal. I wish that I had time to help implementing that myself. Heck here I am proposing a bounty: I will give 0.5 BTC to the person that will make MathJax a reality on this site. To claim the bounty just post a reply here with link to git commit, and a BTC address. Of course after it works here on this site :)

You can also find me on IRC as cosurgi, but sometimes I am away longer than a day or two. However I always stay logged in. If you want to say hi, you are welcome. If you start with "cosurgi:" then irssi client will highlight you in yellow, and I will notice you even after few days.

well, happy Soylenting!