Gigs Shrugged

On Wikipedia, a community proposal has been made to remove Jimbo Wales from his postition of absolute authority.  Wales has always enjoyed a title of “benevolent dictator”, even though he dislikes that particular wording.

It is unknown what such a proposal might mean, as Wales would still be on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.  The proposal has currently garnered mixed results, with about half of the comments positive and half negative.

After hours of work, this is what I came up with.  YMMV

mencoder tv:// -tv input=1:norm=ntsc:driver=v4l2:width=720:height=480:alsa:adevice=hw.0:amode=2:audiorate=44100:forceaudio:immediatemode=0:buffersize=64 -o file.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=4000 -oac mp3lame

What are “PG” Regions, groups, events, and classifieds?

There are some landowners and Residents who desire a Second Life experience distinct from the activity that occurs in Mature and Adult Regions.  Region owners who wish to host this sort of Second Life experience should designate their Regions as PG.  A Region may be designated PG so long as it does not advertise or make available any content that is suggestive of any (even mildly) sexual or violent themes, or references to social drug or alcohol usage.

For instance, institutions such as universities, conference organizers, and real world businesses whose users may not wish to view or interact closely with the broader Second Life experience may designate their Regions as PG to achieve this added level of protection and segregation.

Since Linden Lab will probably deny this policy ever existed in a couple months after they silently change it, I’m posting it here.

I’m off to have a beer now.  Oops, I guess that means this blog post is no longer PG.

I found this today:

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article taking from the federal government the power of borrowing. I now deny their power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender. I know that to pay all proper expenses within the year would in case of war be hard on us. But not so hard as ten wars instead of one. For wars would be reduced in that proportion besides that the State governments would be free to lend their credit in borrowing quotas.

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private By Thomas Jefferson

Every dollar in existence is backed by exactly 1 dollar of debt. It is impossible to increase the money supply without increasing aggregate debt. It’s also impossible to decrease debt without decreasing the money supply by the exact same amount.

That’s one reason the Fed is pumping out money like crazy, and congress is spending it. As the debt markets unravel, people are paying off debts, and other debts are being declared total losses and being written off and new debt isn’t being offered as much… all of this causes money supply contraction.

So why are they spending and creating so much money?

The optimistic answer is that they are doing it to prevent deflation. The cynical answer is that they are spending money because they can, giving it to political friends in massive pork spending contracts, and the Fed giving directly to politically friendly bankers, in the most massive wealth redistribution scheme this country has ever seen. Except it’s not the socialist kind of wealth redistribution, it’s the kind where a corrupt government transfers money from everyone to its political friends. The worst sort of crony corrupt capitalism. And yes, Obama is a party to it.

Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.

-James Garfield, 20th President

I had a problem for a long time now that Firefox would go forward or back while I was trying to type into a text box. I discovered, somewhat by accident, the cause of this today.  It turns out if you have a wheel mouse that uses detents to scroll in discrete increments, sometimes the wheel can stop between detents, depending on which mouse you have.   A few seconds or minutes later, the mouse wheel will “pop” into place, normally just causing a little unintended scrolling.  This happens with a lot of Microsoft Mice apparently.

But when you are holding the shift key, say because you are typing in a text field and capitalizing a letter, instead of scrolling, the wheel popping into place will cause you to navigate away from the page you are on, potentially losing all that you typed.  It’s extremely frustrating, and it doesn’t happen often enough to realize what is causing it most of the time.

Here is the solution, for Linux and Windows at least:

Go to about:config and change mousewheel.withshiftkey.action to 0.  This makes the wheel scroll even if shift is held down.  This prevents firefox from losing text that you type with unintended navigation.

So if Firefox is going forward and back randomly while you try to type a message, this may very well be the cause.

The passage below is reminder of how far Linden Lab has gone from their original dream of being “bigger than the web”.  Self-limiting decisions such as this “adult ghetto”, banning people for “unacceptable fantasies”, and in general, moving further and further from the concept of a common carrier, and turning into something more and more like AOL in 1995…  a sandboxed playground for kids and people who can’t figure out how to use anything better.

Linden Lab wrote, in December 2006:

We could never write a set of rules that would work for all people all the time, nor could we enforce them across a population that is growing so rapidly. Instead, we believe that the best way to foster communication and expression is to put power into the hands of the people by giving you better tools for local control. And that’s what we’ve been doing for several months now. [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a libertarian for a while.  Mostly small L, but the party guys don’t bother me too much, even if I do think they are a little extreme.  It used to be the case that libertarians would tend to defend the idea of “intellectual property rights”, after all, something with “property rights” in its name surely is something worthy of libertarian defense.

In recent years though, it seems there has been a shift.  Increasingly, libertarians are recognizing that “intellectual property” is largely government tinkering with the free market, similar to price controls or anti-gouging laws.  It’s not a clear cut case either way, however.  Creative output is the fruit of someone’s labor, after all.

I noticed this shift a while back, and it seems that others have too.  Today I got the Mises Daily email, and it included a book review for “Against Intellectual Property” by David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin.  Being good capitalists, mises.org themselves are offering the book for sale.  I have not yet read the book, but its existance in the bookstore of mises.org is a strong sign of the times:  “Intellectual Property” has lost yet another former ally.

For the first time ever, the Second Life Peak Monthly Cash Flow economic statistic has shrunk in seven out of nine income categories.  In the two other categories, it remained nearly flat.  Residents with significant L$ income of over $200 per month dropped from 4377 to 4277, a loss of 2.2%.  The November data indicates continuation of the slowdown that was first seen in October’s data.

Linden Lab has also censored the data regarding islands lost per month, claiming that it wasn’t an accurate reflection.   The massive loss of islands is a direct result of Linden Lab’s disasterous price increase on Openspaces.  December data will likely be worse, continuing the Second Life recession.

I just finished a site for the dramatic kitty video.  So cute hehe.

Fuck Apple for starting this idea that PC=Windows.  Fuck Microsoft for running with it.  Hundreds of Operating Systems run on a PC.