Rares Archives Things

… Finally, I’ll say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. Not better or worse, just different. You may find that people treat you harshly because you can create software, maybe using words like “nerd”. Maybe you’ll find that because you can dissect their logic that they hate arguing with you. You may even find that simply knowing how a computer works makes you annoying and weird to them.

To this I have just one piece of advice: they can go to hell. The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out. When they treat you like this, just remember that this is your journey, not theirs. Being different is not a crime, and people who tell you it is are just jealous that you’ve picked up a skill they never in their wildest dreams could acquire.

You can code. They cannot. That is pretty damn cool.

Finishing words of Zed Shaw’s “Learn Python The Hard Way”. Damn good inspiration ;-)

There goes my last drop of hope for humanity, wasted forever, like the oxygen these people breathe.

The unabashed ending of a story about idiots. Idiots who just now realized the Titanic disaster wasn’t fiction. Full article here.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

~E.E Cummings (via theimpossiblecool)

Equality is a political, not a biological concept […] The ideal of political equality arose from the Enlightenment’s insistence that since no one has access to absolute truth, no one has a moral right to impose his values and beliefs on others. In any case, there is every prospect that biotechnological progress will enhance human dignity by ameliorating rather than exacerbating physical and intellectual inequalities.

Ronald Bailey reviews The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America

But perhaps more importantly, the [Wikileaks] docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven’t really got much of it.

An article on Motherboard, revealing a deal between Anonymous and Wikileaks to expose, among other things, the US’s reckless corporate-funded spying on its own citizens.

Any movie, book, song, or piece of software can be easily obtained for free on the Internet. Because of this, virtually *any* sale of a movie, book, song, or piece of software can be considered a voluntary donation.

In other words, for quite a few years now, the whole entertainment industry has been running on the donation model. If the donation model didn’t work, then the industry would have died a long time ago. Instead, it’s alive and thriving.

Apparently, you can trust a lot of people to pay a lot of dollars.

Anonymous comment on a torrentfreak story, exposing the hard facts about the donation model. Those greedy copyright pigs should be thankful for what we’re feeding them already.