OK, if you are trying to enable the subwoofer laptop, you will probably not succeed because the kernel (as of 3.1.0) does not have the necessary ALSA codec configuration that enables the output pin for the subwoofer.

Here are the steps to work around that:

• Download this file: http://people.canonical.com/~diwic/temp/alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh-dkms_1.0.23.diwic_all.deb
• Unpack it using ark or some other archiver.  Inside of it there will be two files:
  • control.tar.gz
  • data.tar.gz
• Unpack data.tar.gz in a temporary directory.  You'll note a directory usr was created
• Inside that directory, there is a src/alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh-1.0.23.diwic -- move that alsa-hda... directory into /usr/src, and change its ownership to root using chown -R
• Inside that directory which you just moved to /usr/src, there is a dkms.conf file with an OBSOLETE line -- bump the version number in that OBSOLETE line to 3.99.1 or something high
• Install the dkms RPM using yum install -- also install the RPM called kernel-devel
• Now run the command dkms add alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh/1.0.23.diwic
• Now run the command dkms install alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh/1.0.23.diwic
• Now let's test -- to test, kill all applications using the audio devices (like PulseAudio), rmmod snd-hda-intel snd-hda-codec-hdmi snd-hda-codec-realtek, modprobe snd-hda-intel and start PulseAudio or other audio playback applications again.  Play some audio -- you should hear and feel the subwoofer playing now
• Reboot to the same kernel (or redo the procedure above for the newer kernel you just rebooted into), and your audio drivers should have enabled the subwoofer

This article was culled from Does the subwoofer in your ASUS laptop not work under Fedora?.

Corporations don't exist.  Not in the sense that you and I exist.

Yes, this sounds crazy.  This probably comes as a shock to you, so let me explain in detail.

What a corporation is, is a special type of legal fiction with a number of magical privileges that give them disproportionate amounts of power over people like you and me. Privileges such as taxes only on profits, corporate immunity shield, fixed rather than progressive tax rate, and thousands of other examples of preferential treatment compared to actual people. While there are many other legal fictions, such as "state", or "city", or "nonprofit", here I will be speaking exclusively about the legal fiction that we call "corporation", and all of its implied privileges.

Note how I said a legal fiction. Corporations do not exist. This is a factually, observably true statement, recognized even by the legal profession (the experts in making up things that don't exist). All that actually and observably exists, is a bunch of papers in a filing cabinet sitting on a big building, likely in a place called "Delaware" or whatever your capital city is. It is very important that you understand this observable truth; if you don't get this or you don't believe me, ask a lawyer friend of yours for confirmation: "Are corporations legal fictions?" -- he will confirm this to you. They don't actually exist. Just like souls, or unicorns, or leprechauns, don't exist.  I mean, there are stories written about leprechauns -- that doesn't mean leprechauns exist, though.

All that is really and observably happening, is that people operating under the name "government" play pretend that corporations do exist, and force everybody else to play their game of pretend, such that resisting to play along could quite literally cost you your life. I'm thinking of, e.g., a lawyer doing business under the name of "Corporation X" suing you; then, the people doing business as "government" will play along the charade and, if they find you "guilty", they will drag your sorry ass in a large cage, full of violent sociopaths.

As the obvious result of the actions of "government", everybody just acts as if corporations really "existed". We all just assume that a gigantic con is "true", because openly stating that the emperor has no clothes could very well cost you your life.

Made it so far? OK, then it should be clear by now that a corporation is a fiction.

However, the corrupt privileges that "corporations" carry (like the privilege to sue "on behalf of the corporation" I just used as an example), are very observably and tangibly real; they are granted to theowners of the "corporation" (actual flesh and blood human beings, in this case). And those privileges are exclusively granted by those assholes operating under the name "government".

So, if government disappears, what happens?

Well, the very idea of "corporation" becomes instantly meaningless, because there's nobody to recognize the "existence" of any "corporation", or to compel anybody to (counterfactually) recognize their "existence", much less grant owners of "corporations" the corrupt "corporate" privileges.  Nobody comes at you and tells you "The magical unicorn in the sky says you have to stop doing this thing", right?  So, in a world where the enforcer of corporations has vanished, who would say "The magical corporation says you have to stop doing certain things"?

In a world without a magical entity imposing corporate rule on everybody, all that remains for the human eye to see is buildings and groups of people, without any more magical privileges that make those people powerful over individuals like you and me. Now, you could call these remaining groups of people "cooperatives" or "companies" or "clubs" or "groups", but you can't rationally call them a "corporation" any more because, without the government mandating that everybody believe in the existence of corporations, they are no longer a corporation in any meaningful sense of the word.

Here comes the final mind-blowing realization. Without those special privileges they used to dominate you, without the large amounts of money that "belonged" to the "corporation", how exactly are those "ex-corporation-owning" people going to dominate you?

Do you see now, the enormity of what is at stake when people suggest abolishing corporate privileges? Do you see now, why corporations will never be abolished as long as government exists?

I highly suggest you investigate the history of the concept of corporation, why it was invented and what actual purpose it has (I'd summarize it thus: it's a symbiotic corrupt relationship between government sociopaths and private business sociopaths, of privileges in exchange for allegiance). It's a fascinating topic and I'm sure you'll love it.

This article was culled from Corporations are fictions. They do not exist..

I think that, if you need to stop a person who is imminently about to kill or badly assault someone else, and in stopping that person, you kill him whether deliberately or by accident... I think that's perfectly fine.  This is 100% consistent with the non-aggression principle.

Note how  we do not need to resort to crazy bullshit like laws declaring killing "unlawful" or other religious scriptures declaring killing "a mortal sin", to deduce this obvious moral fact that killing in self-defense or defense of others is perfectly ethical.  In fact, as a matter of course, all religious texts nearly always include exceptions to murder, expressly designed to excuse the rulers anyway, so relying on them is simply error.

I don't, however, think that after-the-fact killing of a person (whatever the circumstances) is either ethical or accomplishes anything constructive. Not for the victim. Not for society. Not for the killer. I find it highly offensive to decent people's ethics, that a murderer is taken to trial, at the cost of four million dollars, then killed, and on top of this egregious charade, the victim and society are made to foot the fucking bill for this circus of false "justice". It's utterly retarded, insult on top of injury, designed to only appease the basest human beings.

We live in this world where the punitive, retaliatory, vindictive nature of our "justice" system is taken as a given that is entirely unquestionable. Once people start questioning it, and looking at retributive, defensive and restorative justice (the only true kinds of justice), the world will change; in other words, true justice will only come about once the ethics of non-aggression -- which almost all of us already live on a daily basis -- become crystal-clear to everyone.

This article was culled from Is it ever okay to kill someone?.

Precise Report

As promised, hereby is my report on Precise Pangoline, due in April 2012 as Ubuntu LTS 12.04.

• Working multi-screen setup (had problems with the right screen on 11.10)
• System is stable (11.10 was really unbearable)
• Fast (It feels a lot faster from cold start to desktop. Improvement also on Suspend/Hybernation)
• Sometimes things break (skype & spotify mainly) but after a dist-upgrade  (yes, using the terminal for updates as the software center seems REALLY broken) it is all good again!

Ubuntu Norge Update

And, I am stepping down as Contact Member for the Nowegian LoCo team. So please welcome Jo-Erlend Schinstad as the new contact for the team. For me this means two things:

• Peace of mind
• Being able to contribute to Ubuntu Norge activities without the implicit overhead of being the main responsible person

Hopefully this will translate in more team activity. I am already planning a great release party for Precise in Oslo.

And cannot leave without my promised screenshot:

Antecedentes

Desde Marzo 2011 he realizado análisis sobre el uso de Twitter en Ecuador. Pueden ver mi reporte de Marzo y Agosto. Para este reporte usaré una metodología distinta y explicaré toda la problemática y data disponible para poder medir de forma confiable cuántos usuarios de Twitter hay en Ecuador.

El problema

Existe una sola fuente de información autoritativa sobre el número de cuentas de Twitter que hay en una región geográfica: Twitter, Inc. Lamentablemente, esta fuente de información no es pública, y tampoco emite reportes periódicos sobre el volumen de uso de su plataforma para países como Ecuador.

Twitter no fue hecho para que sepamos la ubicación de las personas. Así de sencillo.

Y, si no podemos preguntarle a Twitter cuantos usuarios tiene en una región particular, ¿podemos preguntarle al resto de Internet cuanta gente los visita desde Twitter y una región particular?

Dos de los productos más populares para estadísticas en sitios Web, Google Analytics y StatCounter, proporcionan a sus respectivos dueños información sobre la procedencia de las visitas desde sitios como YouTube, Twitter o Facebook. Y quizás estos dueños podrían ofrecer algo de esa inteligencia al público.

StatCounter publica reportes sobre el uso de navegadores, sistemas operativos y procedencia de redes sociales, o lo que ellos llaman market share de redes sociales. Para el caso de Ecuador, StatCounter estima que 4.56% de los usuarios de Internet en el país que usan redes sociales utilizan Twitter, a Diciembre 2011. En Junio 2011 ese número era de 2.92%.

Al mismo tiempo, el INEC estima que hay un 29% de penetración de Internet en Ecuador, lo que arroja una cifra de 4,148,994 personas usando los datos del Censo. Esto significa que según StatCounter, hay unas 189,194 cuentas de Twitter en Ecuador. Usando los números del MINTEL (ligeramente por encima del 35%, de acuerdo a una proyección) y el crecimiento poblacional de 1.95%, hablamos de 235,664 cuentas. Muy, muy cercano a mi número.

Por otro lado, Google Trends for Websites estima que unas 60 mil personas visitan al día la página twitter.com. Esto no contaría a las personas que usan clientes no Web, y por supuesto tampoco contempla el hecho de que no todas las personas usan Twitter a diario. Pero además, derivar el número de cuentas de Twitter en Ecuador solo por las visitas a twitter.com es inexacto.

No quiero decir que estos números no sean interesantes o valiosos (de hecho desde mi último estudio StatCounter me ha dado resultados valiosos y conservadores), solo creo que vale la pena aplicar una metodología más parecida al uso que le damos a esta red social. Y que, además, tomar únicamente este enfoque puede ser erróneo como ya dijo el COO (ahora CEO) de Twitter en 2010: ver los visitantes de twitter.com no es lo mismo que ver el número de cuentas, la mayoría de la gente solo consume Twitter (ver artículo en Techcrunch)

Así que esta es la data que tenemos. Pero ninguna de las dos fuentes usa una metodología proactiva, sino más bien pasiva, esperan que alguien haga click en el link de un tweet y cruzan los dedos para que la mayoría de esos clicks vayan a sitios que cuenten a las personas y poder medir así su procedencia.

Buscando el número

Desde 2009 una empresa llamada Sysomos recopila los tweets de decenas de millones de usuarios de Twitter en el mundo, y saca información de ellos, que a la vez publica (a gotas) en algunos posts de su blog. Por ejemplo, en este estudio exploran el uso de Twitter a nivel internacional, en este el crecimiento de la plataforma y en este algunas ideas importantes sobre la calidad en el uso de esta red social.

¿Cómo lo hacen? Construyendo una red, observándola y aplicando minería de datos sobre el corpus de información.

Bajo esta premisa, empecé mis pruebas en Marzo 2011 viendo los followers de las cuentas ecuatorianas más seguidas (construyendo la red), por ejemplo, La Flaca Guerrero, o Juan Fernando Velasco. Asumía que si alguien seguía a varios de esta lista, era muy probable que fuese un ecuatoriano/a en Twitter, y así generé los dos primeros reportes (cuyos enlaces están al principio del post) que arrojaron unas 105 mil cuentas en Ecuador para Agosto 2011.

También observaba la zona horaria del usuario, que se define en las preferencias de la cuenta. Dentro de la lista de zonas horarias de Twitter solo existe "Quito", que representa a UTC-0500, la Hora Continental. Asumo que si alguien eligió explícitamente "Quito", en vez de Bogotá o EST (Miami) era una cuenta de Ecuador. Esto fue un poco polémico, porque algunas cuentas grandes en Estados Unidos eligieron Quito, y algunas cuentas grandes en Ecuador eligieron por ejemplo Eastern Time, aunque representaban un número pequeño de la muestra.

Cambios

En esta ocasión, decidí observar otros factores, como por ejemplo, el location (campo de libre texto) o la descripción (o bio). Así que no solo uso la zona horaria sino también estos dos campos y hago esto para un corpus de usuarios tomado de los followers de decenas de cuentas ecuatorianas. En un futuro voy a usar la API de geolocalización de Twitter, pero ya Sysomos había mencionado que muy pocos tweets vienen con esta información por lo que ellos recurrían a sus propios algoritmos (como yo lo hago) para determinar la ubicación.

Técnicamente, además, cambié la base de datos de SQLite3 a MongoDB luego de probar MySQL efímeramente. Estoy hospedando la DB en un servidor propio pero también usé para pruebas un servicio gratuito con Mongolab. He usado alternativamente VPS en Amazon y en Linode, y ha funcionado bien. Sigo usando Perl y Net::Twitter para el trabajo, y el andamiaje con shell scripts para que todo corra en un trabajo.

El análisis se toma casi 3 días enteros correr, principalmente por el rate limit que impone Twitter al robot.

El número

• 30 cuentas ecuatorianas famosas se reparten 1'585,041 seguidores únicos. La vasta mayoría de estos seguidores no están en Ecuador por tratarse de medios y figuras públicas reconocidas a nivel internacional como Rafael Correa o Antonio Valencia.
• Hay 200,887 cuentas que han colocado 'Quito', 'Guayaquil', 'Cuenca' o 'Ecuador' en sus location o bios. El número sube a 265,236 si contamos los que han definido la zona horaria Quito en su perfil, pero ya hablamos de los inconvenientes de este enfoque. En todo caso, si tomo los que tienen la zona horaria Quito y tuitean en castellano, el número es 255,743.
• La mayoría, unos 105 mil, abrieron su cuenta en 2011. En promedio, en 2011, cada día 290 ecuatorianos/as han abierto una cuenta en Twitter.
• Bajo esta nueva metodología reviso mi número de Agosto a 167,544.
• 32,345 cuentas dicen Quito en su location, 47,911 dicen Guayaquil y el resto dicen Ecuador en su location o bio (curiosamente, mira el número de tweets por día para estos términos en Twitter)
• Las cuentas con más tweets (status updates) son: @erika1083, @ppviche, @davidmacias1989, @dhanna, @ecuajorge, @luistomala, @pame_555, @jennympwecuador, @senior_h y @nanarodriguez. En la infografía que haré en base a este post voy a manejar la tasa de tweets/día, que es mucho más significativa.
• Las cuentas más antiguas son @andresmujica @jos @androbtech @feru @degozu @gusfalconi @fernandopacheco @wantan @adricaice @moplin y @paulyalvear. Estas cuentas se crearon entre el 29 de enero y el 7 de marzo de 2007. De forma curiosa, estas cuentas no necesariamente tienen muchos followers, muchos tweeps o muchos status updates, de hecho algunas como @degozu tuvieron un solo tweet en 2008, algunos pocos en 2009 and so on...
• Las cuentas a las que analicé sus seguidores fueron: @presidencia_ec @eluniversocom @elcomerciocom @diario_hoy @flacaguerrerog @ecualink @juanfervelasco @estefaniespin @teleamazonasec @ecuavisa @revistavistazo @quehacer_hoy @movistarec @claroecua @ecuainm @miabuelasabia @mashirafael @earcos @carolinajaume @domenicamena @abdalabucaram @csuasnavas @ayflaca @35pais @rafaellugon @mostachoelfacho @auzfabian @nunoacosta @lolacienfuegos y @antov25

¿Quieres sacar estadísticas tú mismo? ¡Adelante! Descarga la DB, en BSON, de las 265K cuentas (incluyen las que tienen zona horaria Quito) aquí y en Excel aquí.

Algunas gráficas

Crecimiento en el número de cuentas de Twitter en Ecuador. Se puede apreciar el rápido crecimiento, que se ha mantenido desde 2010. Pero, ¿cuántas cuentan se crean al mes? ¿hay periodicidad? ¿hay picos?

Número de cuentas de Twitter creadas al mes en Ecuador. Se pueden apreciar picos de crecimiento en momentos como: febrero-abril 2010, junio-agosto 2010, diciembre 2010-febrero 2011, julio 2011-agosto 2011, siendo el más grande este último, ya que en el mes de Agosto 2011 se crearon 12,471 nuevas cuentas, eso es, 415 por día.

¿Por qué no 1 millón? ¿O 650 mil?

Se especuló en un medio de comunicación que existían 650 mil cuentas de Twitter en Ecuador. Aparte de los resultados del estudio de Diciembre 2011 con la metodología nueva (es decir los números que acabas de leer), hay algunos factores que me hacen dudar de esa cifra, por ejemplo:

• La penetración de Internet en Ecuador es de menos de 4 millones de personas, según el INEC. Asumir que 15% de ellas usan una red social que, en el imaginario popular, sigue siendo segunda o tercera en la lista de preferencias de los internautas ecuatorianos me parece arriesgado.
• En Enero 2010, Sysomos estimó que Chile tenía un 0.51% de los usuarios de Twitter del mundo, después de Brasil y México. Para esa fecha estimaría unos 102 millones de usuarios de Twitter (a juzgar por el user_id de @Presidencia_EC, creada en Enero 2010) por lo que Chile tendría en ese momento 502 mil cuentas, ¿podría Ecuador tener más?
• Además, Chile tenía en 2009 una penetración de Internet sobre los 7 millones de personas. 1 millón de usuarios de Twitter ahora significaría que Ecuador tiene una mayor tasa de uso de Twitter que Chile, que en 2010, fue juzgado como uno de los Top 3 países en América Latina en el uso de esta red. O que la penetración de Internet es mayor.
• Finalmente, conocemos iniciativas en redes sociales como Facebook, que son usadas (según StatCounter) al menos 1 orden de magnitud más que Twitter, donde "no se puedo llegar al millón" (de fans) siempre reconociendo que FB sigue siendo la red social más usada en el país

En algo aciertan, en Marzo 2009 habían solo unas 2 mil cuentas. Y el abismo es tal, que calculando con los números del MINTEL (metiendo 1.4 millones de personas más al cálculo) con una penetración de Twitter de alrededor del 5%, hablamos de un diferencial de 70 mil cuentas, no de 450 mil.

¿Y ahora?

Con esta data estoy preparando una infografía sobre tweets/día, índices de Klout, tasas seguidores/friends, etc. También voy a usar la API de geolocalización de Twitter aunque esperaría un porcentaje demasiado bajo de tweets con información de localización. En todo caso, estaré publicándola aquí, puedes seguirme (@bureado) para el update.

DrMandible on Reddit is "against wage slavery", and defines it as such:

A wage slave is somebody who is compelled to work in a job as a direct alternative to starvation.

Note how there is an equivocation in there, hidden in the italicized text. Oh yes, the passive voice can be used for tricking people to great effect. This phrasing is intentional: it is the key in selling the myth of "wage slavery" -- the conclusion that "entrepreneurs enslave their employees".

The standard argument for the idea of wage slavery goes something like this:

1. Slavery is compelled labor.
2. The employee working a shitty job is compelled to work that shitty job.
3. Thus, the employee working a shitty job is a wage slave.

This "wage slavery" argument is very convincing. It is potent because all human beings already accept premise #2: every one of us is, indeed, compelled to work (in one sense of the word). The "thing" that compels people to work, is reality. No one, not even the richest man, can escape the fact that, if one just consumes and consumes resources without doing anything productive, one will eventually starve and die. This circumstance of reality applies to everyone.

To leverage this generally accepted fact into "wage slavery", DrMandible relies on the ambiguity of the verb "to compel" to execute a masterful bait-and-switch. He expects you to infer a hidden premise that makes "is compelled" equivalent to "entrepreneurs compel":

1. Slavery is compelled labor.
2. The employee working a shitty job is compelled by reality to work that shitty job.
3. (Hidden premise) "Your bodily needs compel you" is the same as "entrepreneurs compel you".
4. Thus, the employee working a shitty job is a wage slave.

This is the "rabbit-out-of-the-hat" dirty language trick that proponents of "wage slavery" use.

Of course, DrMandible takes great care not to state this implication explicitly -- the trick relies on keeping this hidden, because once you make it explicit, it's beyond obvious that the argument conflates two different meanings of "to compel": a person having to work to avoid hunger (first meaning) is entirely different from a person having to work to avoid being brutalized, kidnapped or killed at the hands of another person (second meaning). They rely on the first meaning of "to compel" (to which we're all subject), to deliberately elicit in other people the emotional response, mental imagery and moral revulsion that normal people associate with the second meaning of "to compel": actual slavery. It's rank emotional manipulation.

Formally stated, this is the correct argument without equivocations:

1. Slavery is labor compelled by another person.
2. The employee working a shitty job is compelled by reality to work that shitty job.
3. Thus, the employee working a shitty job is not a wage slave.

So, for DrMandible to conclude that the entrepreneur paying a "shitty" wage is "enslaving" people or "compelling" them in any way, is irrational.

DrMandible continues to explain to us what makes wage slavery "wage slavery":

The operative consideration is choice. [...] But when a person must choose between a job she hates (or even between several jobs she hates) or else starve

Before the "wage slavemaster" makes an offer for a shitty job, the employee has these choices:

1. Being self-employed.
2. Starting a business.
3. Starving to death.

After the "wage slavemaster" has twirled his mustache, adjusted his monocle, and offered the employee a "shitty" job, this is the map of choices:

1. Being self-employed.
2. Starting a business.
3. Accepting the shitty job.
4. Starving to death.

This is proof positive that, contrary to the claim that an employee has no choice whatsoever, the actions of the "wage slavemaster" have increased choice for the employee.

But, somehow, magically, you don't see this. You, instead, reach the illogical conclusion that a person offering you a shitty job is somehow decreasing your choice.

It's a mystery of mysteries how a person can claim "more choices is less choice"...

The trick explained above is used over and over by anarchists of the communist variety in their doctrinal justifications. They routinely see aspects of reality, and then they reinterpret those facts to blame them on their "sworn enemies". For example, when they say "property is violence", they're blaming the rightful owner of an object (who acquired it peacefully and without coercion) for the fact of reality that things are rivalrous.

Their doctrine can always be refuted by iteratively clearing up concepts and going straight to the facts, because it always comes down to fundamental denial of concrete, observable facts. This is why they always fog, equivocate, attack and insist on remaining in the abstract, when they see you go for the concrete: because they already know they are wrong.

It's nothing new that they do this. A man emotionally determined to make logical and rational mistakes to justify his beliefs, will make them regardless of his stated commitment to justice, ethics or truth. This man will be capable of the worst manipulations in the service of his own "peace of mind", because he has already become a master at manipulating himself.

Update: the peeps at the Mises Forums weigh in.

This article was culled from On wage slavery.

Happy New Year everyone!

As I have done before both in Barcelona and Valencia, next week I will be visiting friends and family in both locations. If you have some spare time I would love to meet local FLOSS people to talk about business development, the present of Open Source, communities and what you think the future brings for us.

Preferred topics are Web Technology in general and specifically Drupal, Ubuntu and Varnish Cache; I am always up for a meetup with beer, wine and tapas!

From Wikipedia:

The labor theories of value (LTV) are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity.

A simple counterexample:

I save in gold. Now, I have two choices -- I can buy ounces of gold in the form of coins like Canadian Gold Maple Leaves, or I can buy ounces of gold in the form of gold bars.

For PAMP Suisse bars, the amount of energy expended into giving them their final shape is the same as for Canadian Gold Maple Leaves, the elaborate and intricate design is the same in terms of effort and attention to detail, and the final shape is produced to specifications of the same accuracy as for Maple Leaves.  In each case, the amount of labor -- energy -- expended to produce the final commodity, and the amount of original commodity expended to produce the final commodity, is exactly the same.

So, the LTV would predict that PAMP Suisse bars and Maple Leaves should be equal in terms of value.  That is, we ought to see gold buyers willing to give up the exact same (money, time, effort) in exchange for either Maple Leaves or Suisse bars, and they shouldn't prefer either over the other.  Same inputs, same labor, remember?

Except PAMP Suisse bars really don't have the same value as Maple Leaves. Observing reality, gold Maple Leaves command a higher price than PAMP Suisse bars (always around 3% to 5% higher). That is to say, buyers are willing to give up more for coins, than they are willing to give up for bars.

Ooops, LTV!  What happened?  How does the LTV explain that?

Well, LTV cannot explain that. Unless "roundness" of an object means that some supernatural magical labor skill was used to make the object, then LTV clearly predicts one thing, and reality says another. When theory and reality contradict, that means the theory is wrong.

Therefore, we have deduced that the LTV is wrong.

So how could we go about explaining this disparity in prices then?

Well, it's very simple to me.  I'd use the subjective theory of value.  It states that the value of an object is not related to the labor that went into making the object.  The value of an object is (so says the theory) a function of the particular buyer's preferences (see above) where labor is only a small factor, along with time preference, perceived utility of the object, and many more seemingly-"irrational" or circumstantial individual factors that the evaluator judges on the spot.  That is, you can only know the value of a thing in relation to a person and how much he is actually willing to give up for the thing right now.

Right?

So, for me, it's pretty clear that more people want coins than the people who want gold bars, thus the prices of each item are adjusted to match by the sellers. Why?   Meh!   Maybe they like the roundness of coins. Maybe they like the particular design. Maybe they are coin collectors. Maybe people are conditioned to perceive rounds "more like money" than bars. Who the fuck knows, the theory doesn't care anyway.  All we know is the observable fact that people are willing to give up more to get coins, compared to bars that are exactly the same in every aspect but shape.  This proves beyond any doubt that, in matters of gold purchases, most people prefer the round thing over the rectangular thing, all other things being the exact same.

Now, and consistent to the subjective theory of value, there should be a small portion of people who do in fact prefer different things than what the majority prefers, all else -- labor or inputs -- being the same.  Remember that the labor theory of value makes no such contemplation for varying individual preferences, whereas it's the core element in the subjective theory of value.

That is to say, in matters of gold purchases, we should see people who do actually prefer the rectangular thing over the round thing.

I am living proof of that.  I am part of that group.  I care about melt value of the metal more than the shape it was cast into.  I value the precious metal more than I value the way it is shaped or the labor that went into it. So, what I do, is I get the bars, because my personal preference is that bars get me the most precious metal for a given amount of money, and I don't give a damn about the shape. In that sense, this exchange is more advantageous to me than getting coins would be, because it adjusts to my own subjective preferences much better than other people's preferences.

There you go.  Labor theory of value disproven.  Subjective theory of value proven.

This article was culled from The labor theory of value is a lie.

This article was culled from How North Korea sells its people into slavery.

I think it's a lot more consistent than first glance would suggest. Here's the principle I've seen acted out numerous times:

1. I want something

2. Because I want something, someone owes it to me.

3. I have not attained what I want.

4. Therefore, someone is being unfair.

5. As a result, I am angry, and I will act out my anger until someone is punished, or I am rewarded.

Everything else is just intellectual clutter, and emotional white-noise. The behavior is actually quite infantile, with one exception: infants do not yet know how to rationalize their unmet needs into false obligations on others.

The fundamental (but false) principle that my unmet need constitutes an absolute obligation on someone to provide it to me, is essentially an echo from an infancy deprived of basic nurturing. Everyone you see in those parks once needed, but never got, a parent ready to devote himself entirely to his child's well-being - and later, pushed his guilt for that failure into his child, who then internalized the unmet need and projected the desire to resolve it onto the world.

As such, as long as we continue to treat children as chattel, we will continue to exist in a world of politics and war.

As posted by Greg in the FDR boards.

This article was culled from OWS analyzed in bullet list form.

I am always amazed that people promote this argument: "If things turn bad in an anarchism society it will transform back to what we have today, therefore I oppose an anarchist society and support what we have today."

Quoting a_ht from /r/anarcho_capitalism.

This article was culled from "...and therefore, I advocate the status quo".

The shining foreheads of truth!

This article was culled from SOPA, piracy, censorship and the end of the Internet.

As the UWN team, sabfl, other members of our community and even Chuck, I am now shutting down operations here until after Christmas and thus will be mostly away from the computer from tomorrow until next week. Christmas in Germany is up for me this year

Today I decided to follow the advice from Martin Albisetti (aka Beuno) calling on Ubuntu power users to upgrade to Precise Pangolin. So, please, do yourself a favor: I have used Ubuntu 11.10 (aka Oneiric Ocelot) and it has been painful. The experience so far with Precise has been precisely the opposite Really:

• My working laptop has had 64-Bit Oneiric installed since Beta1 was released. It has sluggish. It has managed my docking station and a two external monitor setup pretty bad. I did not feel I have a Lenovo X200, Dual Core with 4GB RAM anymore. So I decided to move to 12.04. The update itself was pretty quick and the experience right after has been smooth so far:
• It feels that the overall boot and login experience is faster
• Spotify does not randomly hang
• Chromium, Firefox and Opera are now pretty stable
• Usage of two external screens does not put the computer down for no special reason (kernel panic and reboot)
• Unity 3D and 2D are more solid. And faster
• Evince is not sluggish anymore. Yay!
• The Software Center starts up faster. When it does not crash, of course, it is quite slow. I recommend to use the terminal and fall back in love with apt for the time being
• Recommendation: Make Gedit rock with Seif’s Dashboard plugin!
• Next up is my girlfriend’s Asus netbook, which has become close to unusable after putting 11.10 into it. And the mic still does not work with skype and gtalk (it never did), although it works when using gnome-sound-recorder. It works perfectly nuder Windows 7… Go figure.

I will keep you updated regarding the Precise update and will fill out bugs as I find them. Expect more feedback and one screenshot, or more, later.

Happy holiday everyone!

1. Place a thumb tack at point A.
2. Place a thumb tack at point B.
3. Draw a line between the two using a piece of string.  Ensure lots of poor people, utterly dependent on you, are watching.  Promise your spectators that you'll rob everyone on the side of the line opposite to where your spectators are.
4. Move the line repeatedly by moving the thumb tacks, until you manage to get a big cheer from your audience.
5. Kink the string where your property is, excluding you and your "friends".

Bingo.  There's your line.  You have now discovered how to use "democratic geometry" to rob the most productive and richest, (then pocket a huge amount for yourself) and then give the (rest of the) stolen property to the poor.

This article was culled from How to determine who's robbed and who gets the loot in democratic socialism.

1. Place a thumb tack at point A.
2. Place a thumb tack at point B.
3. Draw a line between the two using a piece of string.
4. Move the line repeatedly by moving the thumb tacks, until the property of those richer than you is "property" and the property you have is "possessions".

Bingo.  There's your line.  You have now discovered how to expropriateviolently rob those on the other side of the line.

Of course, you need to be prepared for poorer people to draw their own lines to accommodate their desires to rob you.

On a more serious note:

Traditionally, and according to Marxist theory, the line dividing what's public and what's private (translation: what's up for grabsrobbery, and what's not) is supposed to be drawn across capital goods vs. consumption goods.

However, as any person who has ever worked or had a business can tell, since any consumption/capital good can be a capital/consumption good depending on the use you give them, the line is most obviously entirely arbitrary and intentionally designed to rob the most wealthy and productive people, who usually buy capital goods to produce more stuff.  Using your car for an independent business of your own?  Sorry, your car now belongs to "the people" (and by "the people", what they really mean is the handful of rulers).

And that mass theft is exactly what happened, every time, in every place and every time communism was attempted.

This article was culled from How to determine what is property and what are possessions in communism.

As long as the citizens of a nation have the freedom to choose to leave the country, and avoid doing business within the country, then the taxes and regulations made are not theft.

In this short sentence, your fictional interlocutor is falsely excusing the rank moral perversities that his favorite laws order.

The first thing to note is that, with that "argument", you can defend every perversity known to man.  That alone should point out the rank falsehood of the "argument".

The second thing is that the excuse "if you don't like it, giiiiiiiit outttt" is so trite, that it's been used for every single perversity that mankind has ever inflicted on itself.  You name it, the excuse has been used: war, conscription, robbery, extortion, slavery, assault, Mafia protection rackets, rape.  Heck, even South Park has mocked it openly.

Now here's what's going on when someone tries to deny your moral objections using this excuse:  when you present to him the fact that his system of ideas is morally perverted, then (instead of addressing that perversity) he changes the subject to the red herring "you can giiiit outttt".

It's a red herring -- a distraction tactic -- because the fact that you could avoid a violent threat by fleeing, doesn't change the moral nature of the threat.  This is a particularly potent red herring, too:

1. The statement sneaks into the conversation the false idea that "by not leaving, you're consenting to the aggression".  This is, of course, a manipulative lie too -- your interlocutor is telling you "since you have a choice to avoid being a victim, then you're to blame if you're victimized".  It's called "blame the victim".
2. The statement also relieves your interlocutor from having to morally evaluate the moral corruption he wants to victimize you with.  As long as you're distracted by the red herring, he does not need to address your moral objections.
3. The tactic is also a blatant lie, since the vast majority of people actually don't have the false choice he presents, for a variety of reasons.

The "get out" excuse is very popular and easy to identify, since it's the adult version of the exact same excuse that bad, punitive parents give to their children when they're victimizing their children: "Ah, you didn't eat your vegetables, now I'm going to punish you by not letting you watch TV, you see, you had a choice, if you had eaten your vegetables, you would be watching TV right now".  It's a sad testament to morality that your interlocutor's style of rank manipulation (like most moral perversities) begins at home.

It is because of all the above that I can safely conclude: any person using this excuse is a moral coward, who knows he can't defend his proposals on the basis of ethics, so he resorts to manipulative lies.

In short: a wannabe robber telling people "You could avoid robbery by not walking down my alley" is neither a saint, nor has he turned robbery into charity.  He's just a manipulative robber, and nothing more.

This article was culled from "If you don't like it, you can get out".

Abolishing government in itself is not the solution. A sufficient number of the population must first understand how to live in a society based entirely on voluntary interactions absent of coercion and violence (such as state taxation [see the helpful youtube video George Ought to Help]) or else they will just seek out new rulers as in Somalia. Just as freeing all of the slaves in the middle of the night in 1800 wouldn't have ended slavery, abolishing government without first spreading the ideas of liberty and teaching and understanding of voluntaryism would not bring prosperity.

Taken from bananosecond's comment on Reddit.

This article was culled from Abolishing government is not enough.

This article was culled from Being in your underwear = "disorderly conduct". Being handcuffed in your underwear = "law and order".

I quote from Mac Stevens' site:

This is a rare audio for me; we have very few recordings from court proceedings.  Judges tend to be afraid of being recorded.  Despite the rules permitted recordings, judges, especially traffic court judges, always refuse recordings.

My opinion is recordings are refused because most traffic court judges are gutless psychopaths; they tend to have extreme anger issues and fly into screaming fits of rage when asked simple questions.  Why would they want to public to see or hear their screaming fits?

This is from a traffic “hearing” done on the phone a few months ago.  It was done on the phone, the court was on one line, and I was on another.  Yes, this may be considered the heinous crime of practicing law without a license.  Where would they prosecute that?  It involved a court in Oregon, a defendant in California and I was in Arizona.

This traffic court judge insisted there was a valid cause of action and he had jurisdiction.  He has no patience at all when questioned about this though.  He is repeatedly asked how many elements are in a valid cause of action and where they are presented in the complaint.  The judge refuses and insists the man I was helping did not want to proceed.

If there was a valid cause of action, then the judge would have calmly answered the question.  That’s how honest people conduct themselves.  Instead he got mad and continued the trial to another day.  Of course, there was no trial as the cop conveniently did not show up.  The ticket was thrown out and no failure to appear charge was issued against the cop even though he blew off a subpoena.  All my messages to the sheriff’s department regarding why the cop did not show went unanswered.

We know why though.  Traffic courts are run by criminals in black robes and uniforms.

Follow the link above to hear the recording with the "judge".

This article was culled from Psychos in black robes: traffic "court" edition.

This article was culled from You can be anything!.

This article was culled from The ethics of private property: "Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe can do whatever he pleases; but...".

YouShallKnow from Reddit illuminates us with his "knowledge":

Before you participated in our economy, before you drew benefits from it in the form of wages, you understood that you'd be taxed. But you choose to take a job and earn wages despite the foreknowledge that you'd be taxed.

...

And to answer your subtly misguided sock-store analogy, yes, if the person understood that they'd be robbed if they chose to go into a particular store, and made that decision anyway, yes, they'd be consenting to being robbed. Particularly if they were not forced to enter the store in the first place

Here, he is making the argument that, because Person X got a job, he implicitly or explicitly agreed to be taxed on his wages.  That, supposedly, makes "taxation voluntary".

Of course, if YouShallKnow was consistent with his beliefs, he'd be going around the world, spreading the gospel that rape victims "consented" to being raped by going into the clubs where they were raped.

But that's not what I want to focus on right now.  What I want to focus on, is this: "your job contract specifies tax withholding" is a retarded argument to make in favor of the false conclusion "taxation is voluntary".  I am going to disprove it by pointing out a single, observable fact.

This "argument" falsely frames the job contract as if the tax withholding clause was voluntary -- in other words, as if the employer had a choice whether to withhold taxes or not.  Of course, the employer doesn't have a choice -- if he resists the order to withhold taxes on his employees, he is put in a cage. He is forced to withhold taxes because of a violent threat against him.

So, contrary to YouShallKnow's claims, there is a violent, aggressive threat used to enforce taxation.  Only it's directed at the employer rather than at the employee.  This fact completely disproves the erroneous conclusion "taxation is voluntary".  Which (at the risk of sounding pedantic) leaves us with the only other alternative: taxes are, indeed, collected through threats of aggressive violence, thus taxation is not voluntary. 

Now, I'll say this in "defense" of withholding tax: it is one of the great "innovations" in the "business" of tax farming.

See, by threatening business owners with violence to get them to withhold taxes:

• People doing business as "government" don't have to spend so much money threatening every person.
• Furthermore, since business owners have much more to lose, and they are already threatened to disclose way more information than employees are, this organized robbery tactic is far more effective than going after each person.  Why threaten a hundred million people to get a thousand bucks from each, when you can threaten a thousand people to get a hundred million from each?
• And, of course, withholding tax hides the threats used to collect it.  To me, that's the single most important effect of withholding tax vis a vis collecting taxes directly.  When the violence is focused on a small group of people rather than on everyone at large, people perceive it less, which makes people complain less.  Thus, withholding tax makes it easier to convince useful idiots like YouShallKnow of the lie "taxation is voluntary"; after all, since they are not the direct targets of the threat, and their limited intellects only consider their most immediate relationships, it's a given that their interactions will erroneously appear "voluntary" and "peaceful" to them.

Of course, threatening business owners to get them to make their employees sign self-incriminating papers, does not change the moral nature of the threat.

To recap: when it comes to interactions with the state, there's always a gun in the room; for every interaction being exposed for what it truly is -- violent, aggressive and immoral -- there's always a statist who is willing to pretend the gun is a banana, at the cost of their very own sanity.

This article was culled from "Taxation is voluntary because you signed a contract with your employer agreeing to tax withholding".

The government is not a voluntary entity.  It is not a group of people who participate in the peaceful market.  This is not an opinion, but a conclusion based on observable fact:

The robber obtains his income by presenting the victim with a choice: your money or your life (or, at least, your health) – and the victim then yields his assets. Or, to be more precise, the robber presents the victim with a choice between paying immediately or waiting until the robber injures him. In this situation both parties do not benefit; instead, the robber benefits precisely at the expense of the victim. Instead of the consumer’s paying, guiding, and being benefited by the producer’s activity, the robber is benefiting from the victim’s payment. The robber benefits to the extent that the victim pays and loses. Instead of helping expand the amount and degree of production in society, the robber is parasitically draining off that production. Whereas an expanded market encourages increases in production and supply, theft discourages production and contracts the market.

We are now in a position to analyze government and its relationship to the market. Economists have generally depicted the government as a voluntary social institution providing important services to the public. The modern “public choice” theorists have perhaps gone furthest with this approach. Government is considered akin to a business firm, supplying its services to the consumer-voters, while the voters in turn pay voluntarily for these services. All in all, government is treated by conventional economists as a part of the market, and therefore, as in the case of a business firm or a membership organization, either totally or in part neutral to the market.

It is true that if taxation were voluntary and the government akin to a business firm, the government would be neutral to the market. We contend here, however, that the model of government is akin, not to the business firm, but to the criminal organization, and indeed that the State is the organization of robbery systematized and writ large. The State is the only legal institution in society that acquires its revenue by the use of coercion, by using enough violence and threat of violence on its victims to ensure their paying the desired tribute. The State benefits itself at the expense of its robbed victims. The State is, therefore, a centralized, regularized organization of theft. Its payments extracted by coercion are called “taxation” instead of tribute, but their nature is the same.

Murray Rothbard.

This article was culled from The state is a criminal organization.

This article was culled from If House M.D. was real.

This article was culled from "I could just murder you".

Reprinted from here.

About 6-7 years ago, I was in a philosophy class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (good science/engineering school) and the teaching assistant was explaining Descartes.

He was trying to show how things don't always happen the way we think they will and explained that, while a pen always falls when you drop it on Earth, it would just float away if you let go of it on the Moon. My jaw dropped a little. I blurted "What?!" Looking around the room, I saw that only my friend Mark and one other student looked confused by the TA's statement. The other 17 people just looked at me like "What's your problem?" "But a pen would fall if you dropped it on the Moon, just more slowly." I protested.

"No it wouldn't." the TA explained calmly, "because you're too far away from the Earth's gravity." Think. Think. Aha! "You saw the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, didn't you?"

I countered, "why didn't they float away?"

"Because they were wearing heavy boots." he responded, as if this made perfect sense (remember, this is a Philosophy TA who's had plenty of logic classes). By then I realized that we were each living in totally different worlds, and did not speak each others language, so I gave up.

As we left the room, my friend Mark was raging. "My God! How can all those people be so stupid?" I tried to be understanding. "Mark, they knew this stuff at one time, but it's not part of their basic view of the world, so they've forgotten it. Most people could probably make the same mistake."

To prove my point, we went back to our dorm room and began randomly selecting names from the campus phone book. We called about 30 people and asked each this question: 1

1. If you're standing on the Moon holding a pen, and you let go, will it
a) float away,
b) float where it is,
or c) fall to the ground?

About 47 percent got this question correct. Of the ones who got it wrong, we asked the obvious follow-up question:

2. You've seen films of the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, why didn't they fall off?

About 20 percent of the people changed their answer to the first question when they heard this one! But the most amazing part was that about half of them confidently answered, "Because they were wearing heavy boots."
 

MORE ON THE BURNING QUESTION OF HEAVY BOOTS

I decided to settle this question once and for all. Therefore, I put two multiple choice questions on my Physics 111 test, after the study of elementary mechanics and gravity.

13. If you are standing on the Moon, and holding a rock, and you let it go, it will:
(a) float away
(b) float where it is
(c) move sideways
(d) fall to the ground
(e) none of the above

25. When the Apollo astronauts wre on the Moon, they did not fall off because:
(a) the Earth's gravity extends to the Moon
(b) the Moon has gravity
(c) they wore heavy boots
(d) they had safety ropes
(e) they had spiked shoes

The response showed some interesting patterns! The first question was generally of average difficulty, compared with the rest of the test: 57% got it right. The second question was easier: 73% got it right. So, we need more research to explain the people who got #25 right but did not get #13 right!

The second interesting point is that these questions proved to be excellent discriminators: that is, success on these two questions proved to be an extremely good predictor of overall success on the test. On the first question, 92% of those in the upper quarter of the test score got it right; only 20% of those in the bottom quarter did. They generally chose answers (a) or (b). On the second question, 97% in the upper quarter got it right and 33% in the lower quarter did. The big popular choice of this group was (c)...33% chose heavy boots, followed closely by safety ropes at 27%.

A telling comment on the issue of fairness in teaching elementary physics: Two students asked if I was going to continue asking them about things they had never studied in the class.

The conversation that ensued after reading this article

Nonporous suggests:

That was really interesting. So what do you think is the chief hurdle exactly? Is it that the free market is "not part of their basic view of the world, so they've forgotten it"?

It seems like the problem in that heavy boots situation is a desire to not be wrong. When I look at the list of cognitive biases I think it could be identified as anchoring or belief bias. Is this what you think is one of the chief hurdles?

derKapitalist responds:

Yes, that's exactly it. I might actually prefer the term "narrative" over "worldview", however. A worldview can be all-encompassing, whereas a narrative necessarily leaves things out. Stories skip around from scene to scene, but they're supposed to at least give you the important, necessary stuff so you can make logical sense of everything. And I mean that literally: you suppose that you have all necessary information. But what if you don't! How would you know the narrative you've been running with has been false all along? You'd need to encounter something which contradicts it.

Government schools give us all the narrative that government intervention into the market is a good thing. Teddy Roosevelt: trust-buster, the New Deal got us out of the Great Depression, etc. That narrative is internally logically consistent; to question it, you'd have to encounter evidence which you can see contradicts it, and how easy that is depends both on how hard you're looking and how readily available the contradictions are, i.e. how deeply they intervene in your life. SOPA intervenes in the lives of those who, till now, haven't looked. Whereas before they may've believed government intervention to generally be a good thing, they must now at the very least see that there are strong and notable exceptions, and this will force some of them to reconsider their previously held narrative, due to how deeply SOPA is capable of encroaching on their lives.

I don't mean this to sound like a condemnation of them, however. This happens to all of us. We all have our narratives, and necessarily so. Human beings can't parse every single bit of information that comes their way, so you leave some of it out and hope the puzzle pieces still fit. Why did it take us so long to come up with evolution, for example? All the information was there: animals breeding, changing from generation to generation. That's all you needed to notice. We selectively bred dogs for centuries without ever thinking about how that concept might apply on the macro scale. Why did this take so long to see? Why, because we already had a narrative that explained where animals came from: God created them as-is (and that's a very difficult narrative to falsify). So, obviously, we weren't about to look very hard.

Sorry for the length. As I said, I've been thinking about this a lot.

This article was culled from Heavy boots.

I am a slave.

So are you and everyone you know.

I don't even know what its like to live as a free man. Neither do you or anyone that you know. That is a fact. A sad fact but very real.

We live in a world totally regulated and mediated by The State. There is nothing we can do that is not recorded, licenced, tabulated, reviewed or required by The State. We are forced to work to earn dollars that are required to live in this world. You cannot own anything without paying taxes. Which means every dollar you earn is owned in part by the state.  When the fruits of your labor must forcibly be given to the state, that is the definition of slavery.

When I mention this reality to people, they usually react with anger or confusion.

Those who get angry and protest that they are free and that I am full of it, are (I believe) actually closer to knowing the truth than those who react with confusion.

The confused don't even know what I mean by slavery. They may ask me what I mean or just shake their head and ignore me.

But those who get angry are acting on instinct. The anger they feel is directed at me, is actually their own subconscious venting their impotent rage at being slaves but are unable to face the truth consciously.

It's depressing, I know.

Increasingly, however, I have found that many more people are in agreement with me. Recognition of your slave status is the first step to liberation. Those who accept that they are slaves have the ability to understand the true state of humanity at this point in history. When enough people recognize and accept that they are indeed slaves, only then will we be able to cast off the shackles and claim our sovereignty.

The best slaves are always the ones unaware of their slavery. I am hopeful, for my fellow slaves seem to be waking up. When enough of us awaken to our true status, only then can claim our true unalienable rights.

The State is the ultimate slave master and we must rise up and break our bonds. We need not react with violence. We can just walk away, ignore the slave masters. When we have had enough, when we finally wake up, when we can clearly see the machinery of slavery at work, then we can turn our backs on the state forever.

It is my hope that when my son is himself a father, people will look back on our belief in the reality of The State and our former slavery and think of it as a curious belief like believing the world is flat.

Agora!

Reprinted from here.

This article was culled from Confessions of a slave.

Intellectual monopolies are not property

What is theft and why is it wrong?

"Theft" does not apply to intangibles

How the idea that copying is theft came about

This article was culled from Intellectual monopolies are not property, and duplicating them is not theft.

The lie, right there, underpinning it all: "There is no difference between stealing something from a store and stealing copyrighted content on the Internet". It is so entrenched now, that this corrupt scumbag cites case jurisprudence in support of this lie, when the cited case law has nothing to do with the crime of theft.

Gentlemen, the monopolists have won the propaganda war to pervert the ethics of property and the notion of theft in their favor.

And that is why we have already lost.

This article was culled from The struggle for property rights and free intellectual creations is already lost.

...but it had to be done.

Please report any problems through the contact form.

This article was culled from Updated to Plone 4.1.

Corruption doesn't come from business to invade government -- it comes from government and invades business.

Here's a short list of government officials who moved on to work for government-sanctioned cartels that caused economic and environmental disasters.

This article was culled from For those who say that corporations influence government....

Unfortunately, the fix requires opening the laptop case.

Once you have exposed the touchpad's other side (about two-thirds into the video), carefully remove the sticky tapes on top of the metallic film, and making sure not to leave any sticky goo behind it (but watch out, don't scrape it -- use the sticky tape to remove the goo). There should be five and they should be greyish in color.

Put your machine back together. The problem will be fixed.

This article was culled from How to solve touchpad problems with the ASUS G73Sw.

This article was culled from My time machine.

If you're using ZFS on Linux as part of a home NAS solution, you might want to make your disks sleep when they are not in use.

Here are the steps:

Keep cron jobs in check

Check your crontab, /etc/cron.hourly and /etc/cron.d directories. Neutralize or modify any cron jobs that take place more than one time a day, so they happen at the same time.

Check for daemons that do periodic scans

Make them defer their scans for later, or configure them so they scan all together at the same time.

Disable unnecessary daemons

Self-explanatory.

Mount all your filesystems noatime

For regular filesystems, you can set mount option noatime in fstab. For ZFS, a zfs set atime=off poolname command will accomplish the same.

Find files modified in the last day or so

Now that you have no reason to worry about access time updates causing disk writes, you can issue this command:

find / -mmin -1

This find command will give you an idea of what files have been modified in the last day. Check for on-disk directories or files that are modified recently (in other words, ignore anything coming from pseudo-filesystems like /dev, /proc or /sys). We'll be moving them to flash storage.

Relocate directories and files to non-rotating media

Get a cheap USB drive (does not need to be big) and format it as ext4 (technically, you could set up another ZFS pool there too). Then, set it to be mounted in /var/volatile on your fstab.

You can now move directories that contain frequently modified files there. After you're done moving those directories, you can symlink them from their original location. So, for example, you would move /var/log to /var/volatile/log, then creating a symbolic link to /var/volatile/log named /var/log.

At this point, it would be wise to make a cron job to nightly back the contents of this USB drive up (think rsync -a) to a backups directory somewhere in your pool.

OK. If you've moved the most frequently modified files to /var/volatile, your disks will be idle unless you are actually using your file server. Now it's time to take advantage of that idleness.

Finally, tell your disks to power off when they're idle

In your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file, you can add one of these commands for each one of your rotating disks (sda, sdb...):

hdparm -S 120 /dev/sda

The -S 120 parameter tells the disk to go to sleep every ten minutes. So, if nothing has read or written to the disk for ten minutes, the disk will enter a non-rotating, very low-power mode.

This article was culled from Tip: letting your ZFS pool sleep.

Theodoric giving me a heads-up in response to my comment:

I found this definition helpful, so thanks. I think Stef has mentioned in the past that law was never designed to apply to the ruling class, and this is confirmed by my recent reading of David Starkey's "Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII" which contains a fascinating insight of social organisation in England in the 16th century. Monarchs, their cohorts, blood line and the aristocracy in general were absolutely not subject to any form of law. It also occurs to me that the initial application of law automatically gave rise to the concept of privilege, privus: the self + lex; law, i.e. a law unto oneself. The fact that endless phrases promoting the concept of equal justice under the law appear in flourishing lettering for all to see on law courts throughout the world is actually a testament (as everyone knows) to the fact that it is completely untrue.

My original comment:

Law is the antithesis of justice. It is the antithesis of peace. It is the antithesis of order. It is the coercive replacement of social norms. Law is the collection of arbitrary orders invented by a monopoly of violence. So, excuse me if I interpreted you as saying that you were saying "property requires government" -- but my interpretation fits the facts and the everyday usage of the words you used.

It is not a law to say "this hat that I am wearing is mine, and if you attempt to steal it, I will use violence to defend it" -- it is just the valid conclusion deduced from valid ethical premises. Law would be "everybody is prohibited to rob, except for this little group that just oh so coincidentally happens to give the orders, in which case robbery is expressly permitted".

This article was culled from "Equal justice under the law" is a lie.

Doctorates in the University of Life.

Juanita is a fifteen year old girl in Central America. Her brothers and her dad earn ~$100 a month mixing cement. Stinking of beer, they yell at her from Friday to Sunday to fry them snacks with her mother. Well, at least they talk to her during these days. From Monday to Thursday, she's ignored, because they have work to do, and football matches to watch. They order her to bed early, so they can't miss "Decisiones" on TV.

It's the piercing that sells her, right?

Her brothers have posters with girls that look like that. They even bike to the cybercafé and send messages to them through Twitter. Each brother has "his own girl". Even their father, almost blind from an industrial accident (cement dust is not kind to corneal tissue) enjoys looking at them. Until, that is, Juanita comes home with her grades.

At her ripe age of fifteen, Juanita already knows -- through her friends -- that guys enjoy the company of prostitutes at all ages. That nearby circus-like structure, full of whores, is where all of them go. Contemplating her future isn't pleasant: she understands that staying there dooms her to be miserable like her mother, fantasizing emotions through re-runs of "Gata Salvaje" or "The daughter of the Mariachi" while she does laundry, cleans the house up, and withstands abuse and infidelity.

The solution for all the Juanitas of the world is clear: tits. She's got to become a mijita. She has to hook up with a hardened criminal -- preferably a drug dealer -- who can afford her "rescue", her "reinvention" and eventually her "graduation" to hotwife or other desirable item. She'd rather have the world see her as a desirable whore than spend her life frying snacks for the same-old same-old poor machistas.

Ironically, this new narrative has been cleaned up and translated for mass media:

Yep, that's correct, a TV show called "Without tits, there's no paradise".

The common complaint is not that the TV stations profit from the very same tragedy that they create... it's that the book is better than the telenovela.

While Juanita makes a phone call to get in touch with the local leader of the Mara Salvatruchas, Univisión breaks all records: in September 2010, Univisión wins in ratings over English-speaking TV networks in the United States. Univisión's programming (telenovelas) competed with American networks' reality TV shows, and won... demonstrating that the true religion of Latin America is television.

The most interesting fact, of course, is that most of the media content aired through Univisión, Venevisión and Telemundo (the big three in the telenovela production world) is primarily produced in L.A. and Miami. These three TV networks offer us wonders like the poverty porn of "Primer Impacto", the Social Darwinian outlook of "The war of the sexes" and the I.V. infusion of occidental values in "Caso Cerrado".

These networks are the property of the richest Latin families of the planet. For example, Venevisión belongs to the Cisneros Group, whose valuation is around ~5 billion dollars. If you go to Caracas, Venezuela, and ask for a Coke on any restaurant, you'll receive a puzzled look. Why? Because Diego Cisneros decided that in 1940, when he obtained the monopoly of sodas and decided to sell Pepsi-Cola instead, kicking the competition off Venezuela.

But, before we go into those details, let's focus on the first picture. These three girls are the famous "Senators" of the "Republic of Sports", a TV show that airs through all of Sunday in Univisión, and is heavily watched in North and Central America. They're experts in saying nothing... that is, nothing smart, nothing that interferes with the basest desires of their audience -- all they do is jump, smile and send kisses while they read the idiocies that Juanita's brothers tweet to them.

So, where did I get this picture from?

You'd guess I got it from the Web site of the show itself, right?

Nope. Guess again.

Outta my ass then? That's a reasonable guess, right?

Nope again. I pulled that out from the Web property called Univisión Health.

Let's meditate for a minute on that. How big of a scandal would this picture create, if CNN airs this picture on a health segment to, say, talk about obesity?

It would be enough to bankrupt CNN on the spot.

But, you see, the audience for Univisión Health is an entirely different one. That is, their audience is composed of people who aren't completely miserable, thus they have the luxury of reflecting over the social role of media. The fact that Univisión can afford to transfer these images from the world of sports shows -- men's kingdom -- into the world of health "news" segments, shows us that the real audience for this network is Juanita.

And the message from these shows to Juanita is rudimentary, but clear:

If you are a woman, and you want to escape from the Third World, you have to sell your ass. Look at your father, look at your brothers, look at how they idolize and drool over these prostitutes. School? Bitch please, don't make me laugh -- your mom got good grades too.

This article was culled from Univisión teaches you to be an escort.

This article was culled from How taxes really work, explained so a child could understand.

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