Against Hedonism 2004-11-30

Skip to the bottom if you don't like philosophy.

The other day, I talked about Shameless. I give Shameless a capital first letter because the way that Shameless works is a philosophy. While Shameless is not an official religion, many people are willing to give it that status. In the same way that a person would give Title Case to Christianity, I give Shameless Title Case as a joke. But today, I'll give Shameless a new name that makes more sense to those who are not in on the Shameless. Shameless is Hedonism. I have talked a bit about Hedonism before. But I haven't gotten into exactly what I meant when I said things about hedonism. Here's the lowdown on hedonism as I see fit to explain:

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Spam

Spam is shameless, but I was willing to do it today. My brother suggested that it is the only way to get a job. I use my skills (programming) and honed new skills (Perl) to achieve this task, something that sets me apart from other prospective employees. It reduced the work of sending resumes by many times. While the idea of spam is technically wrong, used correctly, I do not believe that many people would fault me for it. I have been out of work for 4 years. That is too long. My debts are huge. So I went against my philosophy of not making a nuisance of myself and sent 100 emails in 15 minutes (10 seconds hard coded sleep between each send). Since I didn't route them through any single server, it could not hurt anyone directly. However, I have no idea whether it will have negative effects. Spam is assumed to be -- if not illegal -- immoral. But while situations like phishing, 419 scams, pornography, and male enhancement are very easy to condemn, getting a job is a totally different question. If I get a job from this, will spam be justified in the case of poor people looking for money? Not many people on slashdot are very sympathetic to a hacker who wrote software to exploit open relays. Slashdot is usually very kind to hackers. Why not Fahrenheit? Well, that is not very different from what I did. I wrote software that exploited corporation's lack of protection against open relays (specifically my own linux workstation running sendmail) and sent one e-mail to each corporation. I didn't even put a disclaimer at the bottom. Who needs a spam disclaimer when businesses ask for contact from prospective employees? This is the nature of e-mail: when you post your e-mail, you are inviting people to e-mail you. While you certainly don't invite people to talk about your miniscule reproductive organ, there is nothing beyond morals that stops a person. There it is! _MORALS_ -- In capital letters, it loses some credibility, no? That is because spam loves capital letters. While most netizens understand netiquette, newbies (n00bs) and assholes love to abuse netiquette. Is there a point to my current rant? Here it is plain and simple:

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Shameless

There's an Anime Music Video that says:

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Free your mind

Greetings, I'm back with an interesting lesson. While I'll try to stay away from ranting, I'll probably devolve into it towards the end. The lesson today is freeing your mind. *cough* I won't pretend that I have some secret that will allow you to be free. I will tell you a bit about what I did to expand my thinking in one area from small to large. Is it usable for topics like politics? Think twice before using this method to form an idea on any topic. Will it give you super powers and allow you to ace college classes? No.

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