snowdeal.org

“Imperialism is the factor in American policy, not just since 1898, but in fact long before it when we were expanding across this continent and taking away Indian lands in order to enlarge the territory of the United States. We have been an imperial power and an expansionist power for a very long time. It will continue regardless of whether we have Republican or Democratic administrations in power. In fact, it’s hard to tell who would be more likely to further the ends of imperialism. The Democrats or the Republicans, Bush or Gore? I mean yes, in domestic policy you can find some differences among them. Look at the appointments to the Attorney General, environmental affairs, and so on….but in foreign policy, it’s very hard to find a difference.”

“…deja could get a message from post to archive in under 20 seconds; google currently does it in, um, 36 hours. i watched several deja engineers optimize that down to 20 seconds — it took them almost 2 years to get it that fast. is google going to be willing to invest that much time and energy, for something that isn’t even their core product? what about all the time deja put into spam protection? gone. posting interface? gone. five years of bookmarks, all over the world’s browsers and web sites? gone, and without any good way to restore or redirect them, ever. email services? gone. personalization software, saved groups, tracked threads? all gone.”

“How much did you pay to Deja.com for this access that saves you all these hours? Nothing, you say? How strange, then, that their business model didn’t lead to profitability or even survival. How strange, also, that Google wouldn’t want to incorporate and support the codebase of a company that couldn’t turn these resources into profit. The expectation of free stuff is starting to decline, but this guy’s gut reaction reveals how much we’ve been lulled into it.”

“Mathie humour was identified as the sense of humour shared by those in the process of attaining a degree in Mathematics. People who are working on degrees in Science or Applied Science, even if their department is Mathematics, may not share the same sense of humour. People who have achieved their degrees and are no longer students may not share the same sense of humour, probably because they are no longer subject to courses with wierd profs, late night assignment-work and cramming, and don’t waste as much time playing card or board games with other students. ”

“The free software and open source movements, for example, love to talk about licensing, which is really a set of social contracts that attempt to reconcile ideas about the nature of software with ideas about the nature of business. That’s what’s happening between culture and infrastructure, at the governance level of the chart. If you want proof of the cultural nature of open source and free software licensing, consider these two facts: Not one of these licenses has ever been tested in a court of law; and Not one business has dared to try. I think that’s evidence of civilized behavior by both the hacker and the business communities.

I think we’re only beginning to discover, right here where we make infrastructure, that what’s most human about business is what each of us does for all of us.”