email failure

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Quoting an advertiser (one who makes them):
>> 
>> "If you're not paying for the service, then you are the product."

Richard Vickery:
> A citizen does not, nor ought need to, pay anyone for the rights of
> the office of citizenship. Slavery is an abolished practice, yet your
> advertiser has just stated in this quote that slavery is alive and
> well. Is it not time to rethink this?

I think you've gone way off tangent with the civil rights response.  I
was just talking about free email services, which aren't offices of
government, but business enterprises.  I'm not saying it's a good thing,
that *you* are the product, I'm just pointing out the circumstances.
It's how capitalism works.  Just about all of these things exist to make
money.  There are very few totally altruistic enterprises, and even Red
Hat is using us with Fedora for their own purposes.   Either they make
you pay for the product, or they make someone else pay for it.  And to
make someone else pay for it, they provide them with a service that
satisfies them, too.  And how would they do that?  By *using* you.

Going even further way off topic, but I don't really think slavery has
been abolished, it's just changed.  Think about this:  Are you
self-sufficient, or do you *need* to have a job?  Is your land large
enough that you can grow all your own food, catch all your own water, or
is it so small that you need to do something (work for someone else,
usually) to survive.  If you can't be totally self-sufficient, and
independent, then you're not really free.  In this day and age, many of
us are slaves to the bank, with near life-long mortgages.  And we're
slaves to the government, one way or another.  We have to have a job to
pay for what we need, and to pay for what the government demands from
us.  A tax on this, a tax on that, for every damn fool thing they want
to do, never mind the things that are justifiable and worthy of
distributing the cost across the population.

> At least I have a massive voice that is listened to at the university.

That statement's just ripe for making jokes with, but I'll let the
opportunity pass.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.