Criminalized generation
So, IPRED is coming to this country, Swedens government is forcing it into effect. Even though there has been quite heavy resistance and a lot of people don’t like it. I agree. It’s a complete nutjob of a law. Before moving on, let me state that I am here discussing the Swedish implementation of the law. This is even further going than the original EU directive COM(2006)0168. The best part is, they just “softened it”. Ie, it was even worse from the beginning.
As has already been said by thousands of others, but it can’t be said enough times. The law moves the burden of the police work from the (almost) objective police to the absolutely partial owners themself. Let’s consider this: We have for centuries had a police force because they are objective. They deal with criminals and they should hopefully not take sides for either part in a case, it’s left to the court to do this.
With IPRED, the entire burden of investigating a crime is moved to the plaintiff. The plaintiff (in this case, the intellectual property owner) or someone working for the plaintiff, finds someone downloading a piece that they “own”. They then move on to demanding the name and contact information of that person from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the Internet address of that specific downloader. Current law does not tell the ISP that it has to comply with the demand. IPRED does. The plaintiff can now move on to the next step below.
The plaintiff are then free to send monetary demands to the “defender”, who will find out about the problem with the monetary demand. The monetary demand is formed as “pay us money or we draw you in front of a court and you will loose a lot more”. Basically, you will have a gigantic mass of people just paying out of freight “who knows, maybe my kids/spouse/visitor did download that song on my computer?”. Or how about framing someone you don’t like, it’s not gonna be hard, trust me. Don’t like your neighbour, go download a free program and hack him, then set up a bittorrent client to keep downloading/uploading from their computer.
Now, this is the basic argument people have against this new law. Unfortunately, it has been cobbled together by retards and rather IQ-free people and been compromised by to such a degree that it’s no longer coherent. One of the sideeffects of this law is that it will become illegal to buy an application or download a open source application and then run on your own computer. The same plaintiff above could sue every single owner of a Microsoft Windows Vista license (for example) if they can find a instance where Vista steps on their patent.
This comes to mind, when one reads IPRED:
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
The dead horse rebeaten to life – How governments keeps banks alive
So, once again it happens, local governments jumps the bandwagons to save big time banks who have done a crap job at making sound and good business. Once again we have people completely misbehaving, and in general doing bad business, getting their wallets lined with more money from the governments to save them.
Personally, I don’t have a belief in either [political] direction really, but I think that if we are going to make a sustainable planetarian (as opposed to the wordinternational, which always tend to exclude countries) economic system, we need to stop promoting the current scenario with promoted competition and then giving our friends (the loosers) prizes for doing bad choices. This is contra-productive in my humble opinion, and stagnates the market and the players in a bad circle.
We have two diametrically opposite choices planetarian economical systems — in reality, no we don’t have these choices, but to make what I believe is a sustainable planetarian system. I refuse to talk about global economy as we’ve already seen where that leads.
The problem
The world willingly entered (yes yes, I’m beating a dead horse as well) a global economic system during the 1990′s, the leaderships and right wing politicos of countries jumped the possibilities, while citizens and left wing politicos where slightly defiant and backwards, something normally attributed to right wing people. Either way, we entered the system, but only partially. Banks (swedbank, hypo real estate, fannie mae, et al) and global mega corporations (ibm, dell, coca cola company, disney, ford, nestle, et al) are using the possibilities to its fullest, they are no longer national entities, they are everywhere and anywhere and noone except themself has a decent window into the ins and outs of their economical structures. And no, no, no — Nasdaq, SEC, NYSEC, and none of the so called third parties have a decent looking glass into these kind of megacorps. In actuality — the ones who where in some part supposed to be our warrants against misbehaviour, where the ones misbehaving the worst in this round.
National governments and local governments are still living in the local economic system, they know part of what is happening, not even close to everything. They are still regarding banks and other megacorps as local entities, which does good for the locals, and which needs local support in bad times. For examples, look at Lehman brothers, Hypo Real Estate or SE-banken back in the days.
Are they really worthy of our [local] support? As it currently stands, the economical machinery doesn’t work. It’s out of sync with reality, fantasy sums of money are passing around every day in the forms of loans and 1′s and 0′s.
I will pull a weird example from a game I’ve played for quite some time, eve-online (It has it’s own problems, admittedly), to show how numbers can be misguiding. Recently, there’s been a gigantic war between two different factions — GBC and NC. Normally all “kills” are gathered on specific webpages for each alliance, GBC has several alliances, and NC has several alliances as well. Now looking at any one of those alliances killboards for a big battle, you always have the “local“, ie the alliance who owns the killboard, looking as if they came out as the winner of the battle. Now, go over to an alliance on the other side, it looks the same way, the “locals” where winning. In this case, you only get a partial overview of the fight — you get the losses of that specific alliance but none of the others, but since everyone from all alliances on one side are sharing the kills, all the kills are showing up on any one of the respective alliances killboard.
This [eve fights] alone is hard to get accurate numbers on unless you do some serious data aggregation and acquisition, now let’s try to get accurate numbers for a real life company operating in 50+ countries, especially if anyone at any level in that company has something to hide? And if the one who has something to hide, is the one who is supposed to be supervising the market?
Choices
The situation as it looks is untenable, we are currently fighting a fire with fire, and most likely moving problems from one place to another.
There are of course, several different choices imho, but to be perfectly logical, there are a few different changes that must be made.
Choice number one, go liberal. Do not engage in saving the different banks in financial crisis, let them be devoured by bad choices and the strong ones survive. The problem is, how do you make this work on a planetary level? Ie, if the banks in your region are not saved, they get a disadvantage in comparison to banks from regions which have regional support in bad times, hence putting darwinian rules out of the calculation. In other words, a planetary agreement must be reached for this to happen.
Choice number two, go all out socialistic, save the banks, but in return all the banks should either be run in such a way that their own proceeds will pay for either their own demise (Ie., make them pay for some kind of government run insurance, which must reach a zero result over a defined timeline), and also make the figureheads and CEO’s of financial institutions and banks personally responsible for what happens inside their organisation. Make it personally hurt whoever is responsible. This also requires quite a lot of unison between countries as to not provide too much leeway for any one of the banks around.
In summary, something needs to be done about this. Every 15-20 years or so we have another financial crisis due to more and more greed, and mostly it’s about the same type of people doing the same type of mistake over and over again.
IKEA and stuffs
Once again we’ve been to IKEA. Once again, we got back home with a ton of stuff. Picked up a lot of smaller things we needed, lights, bowls, etc. Also, we went by jysk and finally found a half-decent tv-bench. We didn’t really love it, but agreed that with some white paint, we could actually stand it for a year or two. It’s taken almost a year of bickering to finally find a tv bench that we both can agree to buy. Hilarious 
.
To sum it all up as simple as possible, we have no really good space to put a tv at, either its a bad angle towards the sofa, or it’s in the middle of the floor, or we have a too small space for most tv benches. Also, I have a htpc + a huge amplifier, both are … not quite sure, but both chassis looks to be based on 4U rack-mountable machines (H16xW43xD43cm approx), and both need to fit in the tv-bench. Annoyingly, almost 90% of all tv-benches havent been planned to fit that size HTPC/amplifiers. It’s a standardized size, sure it’s the absolute largest standard size you will see on this type of hardware, but it’s still standard.
Let’s take an example, the chassis of both machines are 16cm high. Out of maybe 10 benches we found that have “high” shelfs for dvd’s etc, only 1 or possibly 2 could fit a 16cm machine. The rest where around 15,5cm, or sometimes simply not deep enough, etc. Why the hell is there a common form factor, and the designers of furniture can’t deign themselfs to look it up and design the furniture to hold the common hardware?
Anyways, we did find a few benches that could’ve worked… except… they where so freakishly ugly it’s not even funny. Take EINA avlastningsbord for example. Looks decent on the pictures there, but in reality the material/finish looks like cardboard box that’s been standing out in the rain and then dried up. Lerberg was actually a candidate, just because it was so cheap, and we only need to use it as long as we live in this apartment. Check out the max load of it though, 10kg?? We couldn’t even have put the tv on it, and we only have a 20″ LCD tv. Not to talk about the 25kg htpc or 16kg amplifier. Flärke was another really cheap option, except… it simply doesnt fit with our furniture, and it doesnt look very good, AND machines doesnt fit in the bench.
Either way, we found a bench finally – at jysk. They didnt have it in store yesterday, so hopefully I’ll be able to pick it up today at another store. Can’t find any pictures of it, so just saying it looks half decent at least .
Re: “Miljövän rasar mot flygshow”
http://www.gp.se/gp/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=113&a=442174
I need to comment on this news story as it really annoyed me.
I’ve personally grown up with airplanes and airshows very close to me as my father was a pilot, I have quite a few old friends that are pilots, and I’ve always been interested in airplanes and I admit that this might have coloured my perspective very heavily. However, the hypocrisy and bullshit, if you excuse my language, that Lotta Holmberg spews forth is just plain wrong.
Before she even considers throwing stones in her own glass house, she should contemplate how she herself is living. She’s even so mentally deficit as to admit that she hasn’t even stopped her “yearly trip to the sun”. Now, let’s do some really simple math on this.
Let’s consider how many people get anything from a trip with a charter airplane “to the sun”, approximately 200-500, let’s say 400 to err on her side. Average trip time from this country to “a place in the sun” would be approximately 5-6 hours airtime, so a grand total of 12 hours both ways. Split the airtime per passenger, 12/400 which turns into 1.8 minutes per person on the airplane.
Now, let’s consider the airshow. There was a grand total of maximum 6 hours or so of airshows per day, average of 3-4 airplanes in the air at all times (rounding to 4 to be nice to you), so a grand total of 6*2*4 = 48 hours in the air during the whole airshow. 45000 persons visited the airshow and had a great time, making for a total of 48/45000 hours per person and which turns into… tada, a massive 3,84 seconds airtime per visitor.
To make it simple, let’s make the assumption “all airplanes turns out as much green gases as any other” (your charter aircraft is gigantic in comparison and shiny new with perfect green engines (yeah as if, you freakin mooch going with the cheapest 30 year old crap airplanes on the market and still flying commercially), while “mine” at the airshow are very small, but at the same time very old so probably having a bad efficiency with a big exhaust of gases in comparison to their engine size). So, 1.8 minutes = 108 seconds, divided by 3.84 seconds, 28.125x less gas output per person in comparison to your “yearly trip to the sun”.
I got about 50 other reasons why airshows are a good thing and needs to be there, and why you should keep your mouth shut. Please stop throwing stones in a glass house and stop putting your feets in your own mouth.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to visit 420 airshows to use up as much green gases as you have done with your “yearly trips to the sun” — calculated based on you being old enough to have been on 15 “yearly trips to the sun” vs Göteborg Aero show.
Crispy burnt hungover wreck
It’s been a long and rough weekend. Friday started out easily, just softing at home and preparing for the day after…
Saturday was the big day, Göteborg Aero Show 2008 
. It’s such a damn long time since I was last at an airshow, but it was awesome. I loved it so much. I’ve seen all the old nice airplanes, heard a lot of news (well, news to me, I’ve been out of the loop for a long time now). My sister managed to run into old friends of my father, and we got a vip visit to some really sweet airplanes .
We also got to see some really nice airshows. I think in general, it was a very nice show, but there was a few kinks. If I understood it correctly, this was the first sh
ow that these people planned so I have full respect if a few things didn’t turn out perfect (practice makes perfect after all). Also the people planning it didnt anticipate just how big success the airshow would be, which made for some minor kinks as well. None of this was really a big problem. The biggest problem I noticed was that we had to wait 45 minutes in line for food (they kept running out). Also, the spitfire had some problems with the ignition, so they had to cancel that flight during the saturday schedule, which made me very sad as it’s always been one of my favourite aircrafts.
Also, a big big big downer, swedish airforce is so horribly low on funds so they can no longer fly their airplanes properly from what I’ve heard on the news. It showed at this airshow as they didn’t fly the jas 39 gripen at all. They had a rather … weak display of 3 gripen on the ground, that was it from what I saw (except for a few helicopters as well). Privately funded groups, fantasts and hobbyists did more of a show than the military did.. I’m not blaming the airforce, I’m pretty much blaming the idiots in suites running this country. Damn hippies.
Once we left the airshow, unfortunately had to leave 30-45minutes early due to crayfish party and to get ahead of the lines from the airshow, I realized that I had burnt my face to a crisp pretty much.
I got home, showered, switched clothes, and ran down to go to the crayfish party, met my girlfriend in the door, and she started laughing like a maniac and went on to thank me for preparing so vigoriously the entire day for the crayfish party (even coloring myself for it)…
Either way, we went for the crayfish party, I winded up getting overly refreshed, fell asleep on a clapping chair for almost 45 minutes. See image for a demonstration of what kind of chair it was. I’m still sore today from that .
And today, we winded up starting the day with cleaning up a bit in the apartment, doing dishes, and so forth before my mother + sister + kid came for a visit. Nice day in general imho.
Long entry .
British boffins perfect process to make any item ’100% waterproof’
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/27/new_waterproofing_technology_pioneered_by_uk_firm/
This looks cool, damn that has applications from hell. I wish I came up with stuff like that. Well, more than the general idea of “oh, lets make everything hydrophobic”, to the “hm, if we do like this, then maybe we can make anything hydrophobic”. Ideas are easy to get, to actually implement and get an idea on how to do it is harder. Maybe if you’ve spent as much time doing physics and chemistry, as I’ve spent doing computers, it gets easier… “Turn on the flux capacitor Mr Scott!”
Slow grasswidow evening
Filed under: Configuration Management, Development, Frozentux.net, Personal
What do you do when you are home alone a saturday evening? Personally, I web2.0′d my life (i got facebook, a blog, remember the milk, dipity, evernote, and decided to rewrite/update my webpage). Also, I really got started building the Fokker DR.1.
To update frozentux.net, I screwed around a bit with eclipse pdt. I want to do this since I think the whole site looks pretty awful. I was ok with it “back then”, but not any more. I’ve been using eclipse for a few months to code c, c++, qt and I’ve grown rather fond of it. My first time with eclipse left me… well, let’s just say i went back for a few years to vim and loved it. Still wish there was a decent vim/eclipse plugin as i love vims command/edit mode.
I digress. Basically, what I did was Install subversion, make a copy of frozentux.net in subersion and a few other projects in there. I setup subversion with apache2. I know I suck that haven’t done this before. After that, I installed pdt, subclipse and a few other modules in eclipse and got it all working together. I think I might like the subclipse module, but still got a few things I need to find out.
I’m gonna get started on rewriting frozentux today I hope. Now, going for a walk first.
First entry (a.k.a. I’ve joined the dark side, I’m blogging)
Ok, I’m blogging? Now what? 
. Nah, I’m hoping to use this site as a place to collect information about what I’m currently working on etc. Maybe an introduction?
Yes, I’m the idiot behind frozentux.net, yes i wrote the iptables and ipsysctl tutorial stuff a long time ago. It’s unfortunately a long time ago, and rather rusty. I grew very tired of it during the last update of the iptables tutorial (even earlier actually, but lets keep it simple). I’m not sure at this point if i will try to get it rolling again, but it is possible, depending on how much work it will be to update it.
Other projects i’ve been boring myself with as of late:
- Coding (trolltech qt/qtopia calculator, notepad, other stuff to learn the qt api etc). I love QT to be honest, wonderful so far, and you can do hilarious stuff with the stylesheets. Need this for work.
- Working on some model aircrafts (a balsa built RC one in the countryside which i only have access to very seldom and a guillow’s balsa scale Fokker DR.1 at the moment). I need relaxation from computers once in a while, this is _awesome_ stuff to relax with.
- Still some general security stuff, been a while since, feels nice to be back on homefield once in a while.
- Started web2.0′ing my life, Ie I now come with shiny buttons and instead of tcp sockets i come with a http api. Seriously just trying this blogging, twitter, dipity, ping.fm stuff, some stuff will stay, some i’ll get bored with. EverNote will stay, _awesome_ stuff. Remember the milk will be investigated… it has potential;).
- Some testing to do with my HTPC, using ubuntu and mythtv… this will get a lot of attention soon as I got seriously pissed at mythtv some time ago. To those gurus at it, apologies, but it sucks as far as ive seen so far, and it was a while since i did any work on it, but it needs to be revisited. Graphics was horribly buggy, some weirdness with unpacking/loading images etc which took close to 5-10 minutes on startup and so forth.
Added V@csin reselling
This day the V@csin retail section was added. It was a long time coming, and it is finally here. V@csin is an excellent antivirus and antispam solution for all companies. I have by now personally used the V@csin solution for close to half a year, and it is currently blocking circa 13.000 spams per month, and only some 200-250 spams get through per month. That is, some 400-450 spams per day is blocked, while less than 10 spams per day get through. If you are interested, look at the <a href="http://www.frozentux.net/vacsin.php">V@csin</a> page on this site.