[Sussex] Definetly No Linux Thread here

[The ol' tealeg]

Firstly,

Way down the bottom of this very long post in some UNIX/LINUX relevant
content, but it won't make sense unless you read all of the stuff about
politics and society first - if you have time please read it - if not,
it isn't relevant so move on, nothing to see here ;)

STeve wrote:
------------
> I'd stay away from doing any major work if I were you, unless you want
> to find out how good your backups are.  :-)

Backups.. weeee don' neeeed no steenkin backups  ;)

> You must only have seen the last few years of it.  WDY, when it
> started, had a much longer title.

When I watched it as a young child it still had the very long title and
the original theme music... by the time I was about 12 it had
metamorphised into WDY?  and frankly it was rubbish - keeping up with
the times is something that destroys many a good program.

> Wasn't that because Mr. Starr and the rest of the band didn't sound 
> liverpudlian enough?

As far as I know it was because the Beatles themselves had nothing
to do with the film, they weren't required to approve it and George
Harrison at least claimed he didn't know of it's existance until it was
released in the cinema. 

The soundtrack was put together by George Martin from existing
songs(like"Nowhere man" and"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", tracks that
didn't make other albums(like"All together now") and his own
instrumental compesitions.  The voices were all done by actors.


> But any weird character would have done, having watched documentaries
> on the best animators they do put in references and tributes to
> classic cartoons and movies from the past.  Look at Shrek as a good
> example of this.
> 
> Now not all animators get to work on independent productions.  Good
> money is spent to have the ads made, and I agree with you that they
> have a very well planned and crafted agenda.  But the animator then
> has some freedom in interpreting the script.  The script called for
> some wacky land with colourful creatures indicative of an active
> imagination.  The artist saw an opportunity to pay homage to the
> cartoons of his childhood.

That sounds reasonable.

> Much of what you said there I agree with, but I think you see the
> world far more cynically than it is.  Yes there are some very
> exploitive people out there, but not every one is.

I did try and say (in one of the opening sentances) that I don't believe
that people actively start out with these kinds of adgendas when they
make adverts, just as I do not believe that Bill Gates is in any way
evil - he's just doing what he thinks is best for his business. 

We all do our jobs and try to do them well. A marketeers job is to
encourage people to buy goods - years of research have made people very
good at this. Sometime in the early 20th century the early marketing
professionals started getting interested in Sigmund Freud - principally
because one of those great early marketing men was Freud's nephew. 
Advertising since then has been increasingly focused on our fears and
desires rather than telling us the strengths and benefits of a product. 
During the 1960's American marketeers worked out that it is possible to
create markets for products no-one ever needed or wanted by creating new
fears and desires.  The princple markets created back then were for
deodorants and beauty products.

Nobody at Lever for instance ever wanted to do any harm when they (along
with the marketeers) created a market for deodorants, they just wanted
to make a bit more money for their company.  However, as we have later
seen, the mass marketing of aerosol deodorants may have had a
significant detremental effect on our planet.

Right now there are desire based markets for clothing and mobile phones
(and a whole lot of other junk).  Switch on your TV and you'll see a lot
of adverts about "embarresing mobile phones".  OK, I don't know about
you, but for me there is nothing embarresing about a mobile phone, I've
had mine several years, is battered to hell, but it works when I need it
to - however the message in the advert is this: 

If your mobile phone isn't less than six months old, then you're never
going to get laid again.

.. this, is not true, as I am married and therefore never get laid
anyway :) *joke*

For a portion of society this becomes a truism - in the same way when I
was at school I was ridiculed by my peers for having a pair of Gola
football boots instead of Nike or Reebok ones.  The most common crime in
this country today is the theft of mobiles phones amongst teenagers (the
protagonists are almost always their peers!) - because ownership of the
latest phone has become a status symbol and is a factor in how "cool"
you are.

So, here we have a market creating desire that people cannot all afford
to fulfill - so we have theft.  We also have another razor to divide
people by - kids on my bus get teased by other kids because they don't
have a cool phone, or worse because they don't _have_ a phone.  

I'm damned sure nobody at Vodaphone or Orange ever meant for that to
happen, they certainly didn't plan it - but they did want to create that
desire.

Equally I am sure that no record company execs, film execs, gansta'
rappers or actors ever wanted two girls to get shot at a party in
Birmingham.  The actors and rappers want to reflect life in some of the
poorer and more violent communities that exist in the USA, from which
several of them stem.  The execs want to make money from records and
films portraying those people, they promote them as "cool" because that
what sells, but in the act of doing so they create an image of what
people aspire to be in order to be cool - that image is of a gun totting
gangster and once people acquire guns (no matter what their motives for
doing so) they will eventually get used.

The sad truth is we live in a society where we can't see pictures of
dead bodies lying on the street on the TV (because it is upsetting) but
we can allow large companies to glamourise the carrying of weapons.

I'm not in favour of censorship - I don't think we should ban artists
from singing, or making films about anything.  I do however think that
people should be exposed to the consequences of the terrible things that
happen in the world.  I also think that some measure need to be taking
to control the marketeers - it is not unprecedented to call for a ban on
childrens advertising - this has certainly happened in other countries
- to the extent that they do not suffer from as many bullying problems
or the demands from children upon thier parents to get them _the_
latest toy, phone, trainer, etc...  ..if you don't grow up a consumer,
you may not become one.

It is the role of a government to pass legislation to protect us from
people who actions would do us harm.  If you suffer from mental illness
you can be sectioned so as to avoid the liklihood of you doing yourself
or anyone else harm - even though this was never your intention.  If you
speed in your car consistenly you can loose yur license so you don't end
up killing somebody - even though it was not your intent to cause anyone
harm - you may just enjoy driving fast, you may be in a hurry, but still
the law exists to protect us all.

I do not believe that, just because the perpetraitors of acts that are
damaging to society happen to be doing so in the pursuit of profit for
shareholder of a large corporation, they should be allowed to continue
in those acts once they are proven to be harmful.  The advertsiing of
cigerates is an area where we have moved in the right direction -
encouraging people to smoke is damaging, banning it's advertising is the
act of a responsible government.  If advertising mobile phones is a
root cause of a common crime then shouldn't that be banned as well, or
at least that style of advertising?

The answer to that depends on your view on freedom.  Just remember this
though, for a human being there is no such thing as total freedom -
where there is society and civilisation there is organisation -
organisation in society requires things of humans that implicitely
remove freedom from the equation (be that communist, capitalist or
anywhere in between).  If you walk away from society (towards hoboism or
anarchy) then you will find the pressures of suvival mean you have no
freedom other than the freedom to choose between survivng and not
surviving.  If you accept this then you accept the role of governance in
removing certain freedoms from society - what you have to question is
whether businesses are becoming more powerful than governments.  The
last body that held more power than the government (or monarchy) in
England was the catholic church - if you want to see the results of
their influence over society then go to Google and look up the following
words: Martyr, Inquisition, crusade, "civil war", "Guy Fawkes",
excommunicate, "preist hole", racisim, "war crimes",
"antidisestablishmentaralistic thought".


> It is not by intension to turn this into a political rant, but...
> I still believe that most politicians go into politics because they
> really do want to change the world.  To effect a change they need to
> get into Government, and that requires that their party wins an
> election. Spin doctors and their like can help in this.  But
> underlying all the spin and mud slinging most (if not all) politicians
> want to help people and make the world a better place.  I just do
> agree with what is/the route to a better world.  Now that is "real"
> politics.

I agree with this theory totally.  However, I think the electoral
process has taken over from the "better world" for most succesful
politions.

The problem here is that the policies are moderated by an electorate and
unfortunately the opinions of the masses are shaped by the media.  It is
a sad truth that if you recieve the news through the Daily Mail or the
Sun then your as likely as not to have no concept of there being a
difference between an illegal immigrant and an assylum seeker and so the
policies that a created to appeal to these people reflect that view
point.

The system in the UK involves winning seats - funnily enough those
"seats" are drawn up within regional lines that are defined by the
Government.  THose lines change from time to time, they changed in the
60's, the 70's and the 80's.  Right now the labour government is
considering changing them again.  Why do they do this?  Easy - if you
had a region called mid sussex that included Crawley along with East
Grinstead, Horsham, etc.. you'd take a lot of Tory voters (East
Grinstead, Horsham..) and lump them in with a very large number of
labour voters (Crawley).  So, if you were a tory party in power and you
looked at a map and saw that you had three seats, one was borderline
Tory or labour and two were definite labour seats, you might choose to
combine the two adjascent seats that are both labour, and split the
borderline area into two seats (one definite labour and one definte
tory).  The result, well now you have two definite labour seats and one
definte tory seat - before you had two definite labour seats and a
borderline seat.  As the Tory part had achieved this succesfully, the
Labour party are now wishing to redress the balance a little (because
they are now much less popular than they were five years ago).

How do we stop all this, simple:  proportional representation - one vote
for ever man/woman for a government.  We should end the facade that each
MP is in some way interested in a local area (that he/she more than
likely doesn't even live in) and give them specific roles within a
party.  Moreover, parties should not be allowed to advertise but should
be given equal television and radio coverage.

Furthermore.  Anyone entering parliament should be explicitly banned
from holding shares in any company.  They should not be allowed to
recieve gifts of _any_ value from companies - they are well paid to be
in parliament (and I would expect them to actually _be_ in parliament)
and our servants of our nation, not of big businesses.

INtroduce those rules and maybe you'd see a return to the views that
we'd like to believe our politicians start out with.

> Only the over cynical have lost all innocence, or maybe see a world
> where innocence is lost.  Sitting here in my sister's home, with my
> god-daughter bouncing up and down on a chair as a write, I see someone
> who hasn't lost her innocence.  That will start to happen when she
> starts to be educated in our over-crowded schools.  With all the test
> and standards that are required of our children today where is the
> room for individuality and creative expression?  It is my job, with
> her parents, to show here how to be a non-confirming member of society
> - now there is an oxymoron.

A noble plan.  You are right, and you have an advantage - you are a
member of a small percentage of society with obove average intelligence
- you have an education that taught you to question things and form your
own opinion.  I understand now, more than ever why some adults choose to
educate their children at home.  

> Geoff, check your cynic chip, I think you've been feeding it 12V when
> it should only be connected to a 5V rail :-)

:)

My cynicism is born from idealism.  I am a dreamer of dreams - I am one
of those people, I am told, that should become a politician.  Maybe I
should, but the catch 22 is you have to swallow the bitter pill of
todays political system to have the opportunity of creating a better one
tomorrow.  I wonder if anyone has the strength to withstand the bribary
and corruption (and if indeed the system will allow you any power
without accepting it).  For my part I have rejected two jobs because of
my principals.  Before joining Rentokil I turned down a well paid
position at British American Tobacco, and last year I turned down a
consultancy job at a firm (Co-owned by Microsoft and Accenture) because
they wanted me to go into firms and use my UNIX expertease to convince
them that they should move to Microsoft software by pointing out
failings in UNIX but by out-right lying about Microsoft products.  That
job paid £80,000p/a - I thought about it for a day and then wrang up and
said "no".  There was an aweful lot of tempation to just take that money
and run with it, but ultimately I would have hated myself for it, so I
didn't even go for the second interview that I am told was only a
formality.

I like to think I am a better person for my idealism.

<snip>
> Maybe the Internet will change that.  If you travel into work then you
> will use the ammenities of the town.  If the Internet allows you to 
> work at home then you have access to the town ammenities as much and
> will use the local shop more.  Maybe the village community sprit will
> return.  I hope so.

You history is good.  You vision is nice, and I see elements of it
already - unfortunately British business needs to break it's
attendance culture before this can happen on any real scale - maybe
someday.

> 			* * * * 
> 
> Nik, see what you started here.  Only little comment about a Blue
> Meanie in an ad and Geoff and I go off the deep end.

Yes.. I realise this is not the appropriate forum.. but if you only
speak at the appropriate fora then you only ever preach to the
converted ;)

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk 
tealeg at member.fsf.org
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