Isolationism is history.
Get over it. Just as we here hope for the improvement of a global system
and the global tools like debian to use it, so the entire government and
economy is wrapped up in it. Whether we like it or not, capitalism
demonstrates that it's lots cheaper that way, and the market rules.
What worries me, is that there are large organizations which try to
manipulate the rules. The main reason the open source movement is taking
off, is that the programmers like myself have realized that whatever you
craft, they have enuf lawyers and enuf judges to keep you in court
forever, and that it is *they* who will get the patent, (and the profit)
and not the artist who created it.
And just as the USA has tried to manipulate the rules, others in other
regions have realized this, and as a result have adapted, and quit
investing so much in a game which they cannot win.
One of the things we could do, is offer a minimal setup that would fit
on a floppy, which was able to get online, and from that bootstrap,
download the connectivity to post on this list.
One of the problems we have, is that the communication which people
receive has been limited to the transnational media and/or the
traditional received authority. The former reflects the priorities of
the governments and transnational corporations which are terribly short
sighted, threatening ecological disaster. The latter tries to keep the
women barefoot and pregnant. The only thing they want, they only thing
they have always wanted, is more sons to go into battle to steal more
women for the alpha male warrior class leaders. That's what they been
doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, for 5000 years.
If you have the time to read this, you are not likely in either set
above. But to increase the numbers, and therefore the power, of those
who can read this list, we would do well to examine the entire setup,
not just the operating system. You can go into the gray/surplus computer
hardware market and buy all the parts for a computer
(case,mthbd,dram,kybd,mouse,monitor) for less than 200$- *retail*. Right
now, the 20$ mthbds and 20$ cpus are good for 300-600 mhz, which will
run debian just fine.
but- from your modem on, *they* own all the rest of the hardware and
software. I dont trust the bastards. I Know they dont have the
competence they claim, and I see the sabotage software take hits on them
all the time. The last report I saw said that windoz has 95 *million*
lines of code. Neither Gates, nor anyone else, has a handle on it. It
includes software which has been stolen, and I already know of one case
where a programmer, fearing he'd be screwed, inserted sabotage code in
his work in that event.
For the near term, ASAP, we should setup a VPN with a way for debian
users and servers to communicate with each other which has virtually
*NO* windoz servers inbetween. Ironically, such a system already exists
in parts of rural India and the developing world. They dont have phone
lines. each village put up a pc hooked to a radio transceiver, and went
long range wireless. Each village is solar powered. It dont matter what
happens to the government, dont matter what happens to the telephone
system, dont matter what happens to the interent, the villagers can
still contact friends and family in the region.
Villagers are way ahead of us. Which is why Isolationism is History. If
the net takes a serious hit from sabotage or just plain simple stupid
greed cutting corners, and it goes down, the police and law enforcement
can go down, banking and credit card servers will quit, the economy will
tank, and we'll see a crash that makes the 1929 debacle look like a
fender bender.
I have hacked into the binary of Microsoft code. It is like a house
that, as soon as it was built, the carpenters walked out, and left their
tools in the hallway for the new owners to trip over. Breakpoints and
error traps are all over the place. These code snippets can be
deliberately, or inadvertantly triggered. To get an idea of the scale of
the problem, consider ATTRIB.EXE, which is used to mark files with
A)rchived, S)ystem, H)idden, R)ead only. Pretty simple. The usual MS
version runs about 25-30,000 bytes. But if you go to the dos hacker tool
lists, you can find ATTR.COM ... all 627 bytes of it. What does
Micky$loth do with the other 25,000 bytes? Nobody knows.
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