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There is some ado here. Basically, if you have information that you really care about that you want to publish online, it is probably better to just go with one of the numerous discount hosts, rather than using a free publishing service. I might use blogspot for mindfarts. For ideas I want to develop further in more detail, I just pay out $50 bucks a year it costs for a web host.

The point of a free publishing service is that you provide free content that they will display in ways that make money to pay the hosting costs. Such companies will always be adding features and changing formats. A format change might increase or reduce the numbers of ads displayed along with your content. There legal language has to include terms to allow such changes, or the site is pretty much guaranteed to perish.

BTW, every publishing mechanism has some sort of compromise.

The article introduces the reader to the reason to why the lack of DRM would not lead to mass piracy. It is because people in developed countries are (or at least used to) have a highly developed sense of ethics.

People do not generally "pirate" an electronic text in order to sell it for a profit. They do it in order to get the text itself, for their own use.

There is one major exception to this rule. But that involves people who can operate openly on a mass production scale in countries which do not enforce international intellectual property rights.

DRM came to play because there was a massive effort to engage in automated copyright infringement. We could have completely avoided DRM if cultural institutions, like Universities, came out against mass piracy. Instead the wanks in the academia came out spouting nonsense about how mass piracy was the new social revolution that would transform society.

Since our cultural institutions were lauding mass piracy, individuals wanted to be part of the technology revolution felt compelled to join in on the piracy frenzy.

The market for DRM was created by content owners looking at the mass piracy advocated by our social insitutations and decided that they needed excessively instrusive mechanisms to protect the content they created.

It was the mass automation of piracy coupled with social leaders egging people on that created the need for DRM. IMHO, if it were not for that idiocy, we could have gotten by enforcing copyright with the individual sense of ethics as this article contends.

Nice link.

I disagree strongly with the IETF's assumption that the creation of a TLD leads automatically to censorship and mandates about what is and is not porn. Regulation and existence of TLDs are different matters. The IETF's document even notes that many conservative groups are opposed to the extension because they think they will have a better chance of getting antiporn laws passed without the extension.

The extensions could be added without mandates that porn sites move to the extension. If they existed without regulations, what you would see is web site owners using the TLDs to target their audience.

I agree that the creation of the TLDs would create a temptation to impose mandates and censorship. This is a correlation between ideas and not a necessity and the IETF suggests.

I do understand the point of view of the IETF. There are popular dialectics that holds that our society is created by the linguists who define the terms of the debate. People holding this philosophical view would see the introduction of TLDs as new terms in the debate that lead immediately to censorship.

Personally, I think that view is whacked. Yes, the introduction of .kids and .xxx would lead to debates about what is apropriate for kids and what is porn. I do not see them leading necessarily to mandates.

If the TLDs were created without mandates, the main thing you would see is marketers using the domains specifically for items targetting either the kids or porn market. Web designers would end up using the .kids and .xxx domains to define their market.

This thing where marketers define a market is akin to commissars defining content. However the game of marketers defining markets is not censorship.

I disagree with the belief that the creation of the TLDs would lead immediately to censorship. The creation of the TLDs would probably lead to a great deal of discussion about what is porn and with is apropriate for kids. My experience is that the conclusions to such debates is that these are important issues that we as individuals need to decide, but that we should not be quick to force our judgments on others. I think such debates are healthy and that the creation of the TLDs would expand the vocubulary used in the debate. I reject the idea that they new TLDs lead to mandates and censorship.

My second reading of the RFC has me a bit worried that the primary concern of the authors of the document is to stifle the debate that would occur if we expanded our vocabulary with the TLDs.

They have fallen out of favour because the establishment no longer actively promotes those ideas...

The word establishment is closer to what I was thinking about when referring to librarians. Librarians, bookstores, publishers and critics are all part of a system which has influences on what gets read. Many people take great pride in the amount of influence that they have on the climate of opinion of the day.

The author of today's article probably feels part of this great cultural filter than is challenged by the democratizing effects of blogs.

My point was that blogs are NOT a challenge to journalism. They ARE a challenge to the established filters that are in place. Blogs help determine which books and magazines people read, etc.. They do not replace journalism, but will affect the amount of public attention given to journalistic works. Blogs are a threat to the establishment. They are not a threat to scholarly research or journalism.

I suspect that the ideas of the young Franklin are much more in tune with the minds of today's bloggers than Marx. Marx is the hero of the centrallized intelligensia. Franklin is hero to independent thinkers.

Usually really great things are translated into tons of languages. If it isn't available in english, it probably wasn't worth reading.

Yes, but none of these translations is ever pure and true to form. You really don't appreciate the dramatic differences between English translation and German original until you understand some of the profound differences in sentence structure. For example, it is possible that one of the reasons that many German philosophers prefer dialectics to syllogisms is that the German verb often comes at the end of the sentence. Such things are lost in translation.

As for the proximity argument. That is changing. It used to be that an American would have a months travel to a land of a different language. With planes it became a days travel. Now, we are a click away from different languages.

The fastest growing segments of the Internet and IT are outside the US at the moment...for US companies to maintain their top position, they need to learn to localize. So linguistic skills are paramount.

I agree, giving someone a one size fit all content management program with the idea that it will make their online experience a wonderland is absurd. I will just lead to a lot of work and unhappiness.

Personally, I think people are better off playing with a variety of programs. For example, you might try an online gallery with Yahoo, oFoto or those types of programs. Geocities pages are easy to maintain. There's tons of multiuser genealogy sites. If a person wants a simple home page for articles, I would just stick with one of the big blog companies.

The diversity approach gives people a chance to learn what they like and don't like. Online happiness comes from playing with different things. Instead of getting something large in scope, I would look to smaller things.

For example, there is a new railroad tycoon program out, I was thinking of getting that for the paternal unit. I wrote a PHP program so the maternal unit could publish her philosophical thoughts. Even an extremely limited scope web page for parents takes a great deal of work.

...The next thing people are going to start saying is that people kill for their religion...

The 20th century provides a large number of examples where people were encouraged to go on massive killing sprees for various mistaken beliefs. There are big piles of bodies in Europe, Russia, China, Korea, Cambodia, the Middle East, etc.. I doubt the Rwanda massacre happened just because a bunch of Hutus had bad essences that made them prone to kill others. They were manipulated into it.

History seems to show that there are things the people get taught that makes them extremely horrible, disgusting gross people.

One of the worst beliefs, IMHO, is that everything is just a game and that I am out to get as much as possible in the game...despite the number of bodies I leave in my wake.

There are ways that you can screw with people's minds that can make those people monsters. Video games probably play a very important role in many children's lives these days. The game manufacturers simply compete on much graphics and sensations they can put in a minute of gaming. However there also needs to be people who worry about what the games teach.

I don't fall for the fundamentalists arguments that unchristian/satanic video games teach bad behaviors, but I do see a need for people to think about what we teach with video games, and what happens when people get too much entertainment and not enough real life.

If you see religion as a myth created by man, then all the killing going on their now is the result of century old fantasy games.

Belief systems do matter, but there is not a blanket statement of video games are bad and church on Sundays is good. I think the main hope is for people to develop a good solid understanding of logic and common sense.

The Roots of Sound Rational Thinking.