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Enough with the "humans are hard" complaint, please! I'm down with folksy attitude about people and all, but fundamentally it gives the social-science flakes fuel and excuses their whole field from scientific rigor. And there's science to be had here.

Evolutionary psychology has its roots in sociobiology, and attributes human behavior directly to selection pressures. By guessing at likely past conditions under which humans evolved (the "ancestral environment") and examining current behavior not explained by the standard model (embraced by said flakes, and which has been around since the start of the 20th century), ev. psych'ers have made some damn good strides in explaining the way people and social networks *really are* - without resorting to feel-good theory.

Of course, just because we can explain something wonderful doesn't at all mean we will explain it away.

Yes - all the details have not been worked out. This is left as an exercise for the creative readers. CA anyone?

Good reads can explain it better than I can:

The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, who also writes for Slate;
The classic, definitive Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby-edited tome on ev. psych;
Stephen Pinker's eminently readable The Language Instinct, which was my bridge from linguistics to this;
and Nonzero, for the advanced topics...

Be enlightened, grasshoppers.

These two examples probably work against your argument. Kenneth Lay will probably be found guilty of insider trading and have to disgorge any profits he made. He may face heavy civil and criminal penalties, also. Bernard Ebbers is out at Worldcom and his $360 million loan to buy now nearly worthless Worldcom stock was not forgiven. Considering that much of Mr. Ebbers assets were tied up in now nearly worthless Worldcom stock, I'd say he's bankrupted as well.

Note, however, that both Lay and Ebbers took hunderds of millions out before they tripped over their own, um, feet. If Ebbers hadn't gotten involved in a margin call, and thus athwart both the big brokerages and the SEC, I doubt he would have had any trouble slipping out of his current situation.

And while my heart and my gut would dearly love to see Lay, Fastow, etc. pay some sort of civil and/or criminal price, I doubt very much that will happen. Al Dunlop was far more clearly on the wrong side of the law, and he has slipped away with very little punishment.

If one wanted to be truely cynical, once could point out that if Lay were actually prosecuted, then Cheney and White might be next, and we can't have that can we?

sPh

No you provide a basic news grouping and ordering service, this sumarizes the articles based off of many different sources. This is sort of like Slate's Today's Papers feature except for articles and not just the days news.

While lots of sites have changed from free to paid Slate.com did just the opposite.
It change from paid to free.

If anyone is still reading this thread after all the uninformed extremist anti- and pro- American ranting, there is an excellent article currently over at Slate that explains the real political problems of this mission as opposed to the laughable conspiracy theories about oil you're reading about here.

May be a little unrelated but can't stop myself from offering my own comments on the cost associated with subscription

Slate.com which competes for the same market as Salon ran a subscription experiment couple of years back. They ended up signing about 26000 subscribers. They were charging only $19.95/year, which is a pretty low price point considering that it was costing several times that much, even on the very best campaign, to acquire a subscriber. The cost of acquisition was averaging between $50 and $100, so obviously Slate was losing money on every subscriber we signed up.

Eventually, they decided to go free again.

Slate has only 40 employees while Salon has double the number - I therefore except their costs to much more.

I think even with the $72/year that Salon is charging
they are losing money. I would be suprised if they switch back to being a free ad-based site.

Who cares if he's had the family name for centuries, he's trying to squat on MS's product!

D*mn KDE1 clipboard...this was the intended link...

Paid Subscription has hardly been "skipped over". It's been tried and it seems to works in some places and not others.

Slate tried subscription when they launched. In fact there was a great deal of coverage specifically because they were trying a subscription model. Slate is no longer charging a subscription fee.
thestreet.com also had a paid subscrption model that failed.
The Wall Street Journal charges a yearly fee for online access to what is basically the content of the print paper. They've been doing this for years, and it seems to be successful for them (though I wouldn't really know).
There are probably too many other examples to list, but it's a model that's been tried and largely been failure.

I'm expecting at least localized outages. Particularly the drudgereport.com site, since Drudge has pledged to post the results of exit polling. Slate and National Review, which in the past have posted this only-available-to-the-press (i.e. not supposed to be released to the public) data, but have said they won't this time. This will cause a great deal of traffic at the Drudge site, which has been crashed in the past by some breaking stories. It wouldn't surprise me if that resulted in related 'spill-over' outages, like everyone trying to call a particular telephone exchange at one time.

Thanks. That's all I was asking for really.

John Montoya

goatse.cx

HOW THE HELL IS NAPSTER MAKING MONEY?

In case no one has noticed, I believe Slate and Salon have both done articles (here for the Slate one, can't find the Salon one) showing that Napster isn't a money-making thing. Isn't it a bit preposterous to accuse Napster of being more acquisitive here?

I'm not saying Metallica has no IP rights here, just, Napster seems to have no profit model.

Once and for all, Jon: if you are for freedom and privacy, let me post the text of every book you've written to the web and allow it to be viewed and downloaded.

Heck, I can do one better. I've got friends over at Slate magazine... they post opinion pieces (that's the raison d'etre for them actually)...

... so how about this: we just get all of Katz' articles, and publish them, one by one, in Slate. I could probably get my friends at The Stranger (a Seattle free newspaper) and the Seattle Times to publish them too.

We'd see exactly how long Katz' stance on copyright would hold -- based on how long it would take for him and/or Andover to sue the papers. After all, if he's being published, he should be paid - right?... otherwise it's a copyright violation.

Simon

I could try, but then again you can find out from the horse's mouth...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Interesting... Slate is owned by Microsoft. Slate posted an article this morning titled "What's the Difference Between CEO's and Chairmen?". Coincidence??? :)

The article is actually rather interesting for those who don't know the answer. Anyway, here's a link:

http: //www.slate.com/Code/explainer/explainer.asp?Show= 1/12/00&idMessage=4361

Here is a good link to Slate.

-----

I know the Willie Horton issue was raised initially by a Democrat; I believe (but could be mistaken) that it was Al Gore's campaign that used it first.

Yes and no. Mostly no. As explained about a month ago in thi s little article in Slate, Gore was in fact the first person to bring up the Willie Horton issue--that a convicted murderer had raped someone while on a state-sponsered furlough from prison, and that Dukakis had not immediately cancelled the furlough program. Which, as the guy in Slate notes, was a salient point to make.

But what he didn't do was saturate the airwaves with sensationalistic commercials that played on white America's racial fears, which is what the Bush campaign did. In fact, he only brought up the issue once, at a debate, and didn't mention the fact that Horton was black, or even mention him by name.

The reason the Willie Horton ads marked a lowpoint in American democracy wasn't because there wasn't a substantive issue there--there was--but because the Bush campaign paraded the image of the "scary black homocidal rapist" around to draw the votes of skittish whites. It was absolutely racist marketing, and it worked.

On the other hand, nowhere in the Slate article does it give George W. any particular credit for the Willie Horton ads, so they may have had little to do with him.

What's ironic here is that while Canada is actually taking the lead in this to legitimize mp3s, the only hold-out company from the Audio Video Licensing Agency, Universal Music, is actually a Canadian owned company (owned by Seagram of Montreal).....

... a company that *ALLEGEDLY* made most of its early money in defiance of U.S. law by Rum-Running.

Too Chicken-Shit for fear of legal repercussions to indentify myself.

What disturbs me most?

That Al Gore appeared at Microsoft, ostensibly to make a "courtesy call," and spoke at length to a group of particularly wealthy Microsoft executives?

Or that Al Gore was the sixth presidential candidate to make that same "courtesy call" so far this year.

That Al Gore fumbled through a couple of questions about the Jackson findings of fact

Or that none of the five other candidates to visit Microsoft have had anything to say about one of the biggest legal and economic issues that the next president will have to consider.

That Al Gore got to write a self-serving "I love me, and you should too" piece in Microsoft's E-zine, Slate.

Or that nobody in the media has suggested that this is an example of Microsoft blatantly trying to curry favor with a candidate.

That the putative reason for letting Gore write the piece was the fact that his daughter Karenna interned at Slate.

Or that nobody--during the time that Karenna Gore was on the masthead of Slate as an Editorial Assistant, wondered if it wasn't extremely coincidental that Microsoft had provided the vice president's daughter with a job.

That none of the other candidates has demanded equal time (we know at least that Steve Forbes can write)

Or that I'd probably be disgusted at how self-serving those articles would be, too.

But I will say this...

If Al Gore can a finger (he used the singular) on the ALT-CTRL-DELETE button (he used the singular again), he's probably capable enough to have invented the Internet.

Slate has its own thread of comments on the article that can be seen here. There are several good comments and A LOT of flames. Maybe they should impliment a moderation system over there.

~Caliban

To see a bizarre exercise in journalistic "objectivity," check out Slate's take on the ruling.

In (ahem) brief: Investors have been expecting the judge to rule against Microsoft for months. Therefore, before the judge issued the FoF, the MSFT stock price already took the effect of a negative ruling into account.

Remember, a company's day-to-day stock prices are not based on what it "realistically" (in some ideal universe of rational omniscient analysts) is worth, or what it "should" (according to someone's moral standards) be worth -- they're based on what the investors think it's worth.

In (ahem) brief: Investors have been expecting the judge to rule against Microsoft for months. Therefore, before the judge issued the FoF, the MSFT stock price already took the effect of a negative ruling into account.

Remember, a company's day-to-day stock prices are not based on what it "realistically" (in some ideal universe of rational omniscient analysts) is worth, or what it "should" (according to someone's moral standards) be worth -- they're based on what the investors think it's worth.

The Net's 1960? by Jacob Weisberg

Thurow throws around metaphors like --"Think of the United States as a giant corporation, a General Motors, say." Then he tells his readers to imagine this giant corporation competing with other ones--Toyota, say.

But of course, as Krugman points out, this is an utter nonsense metaphor. Countries and economies don't go out of business, as companies do, they don't have anything like the same variables, and in fact the entire metaphor of international economic competition is misleading and worthless.

All of this is by way of saying that Thurow is by no means respected by real economists; he is a classic interventionist political meddler, as far as they are concerned. So it's not surprising to hear this kind of suggestion coming out of him.

There's an interest ing article in Slate...

Why does interesting appear above with an embedded space?

The actual HTML code is:

<P>
There's an
<A
HREF="http://www.slate.com/Code/Moneybox/Moneybox. asp?Show=9/9/99&idMessage=3579">i nteresting article in Slate</A>...
</P>

There's an interest ing article in Slate about quirky TV ads for Dreamcast that are running in Japan only.

The ads star an actual senior managing director of the company, a man named Yukawa Hidekazu, who looks much like what you imagine Japanese salarymen look like. In the first, Yukawa eavesdrops on two kids saying, "Sega video games suck. Playstation is much better." Melancholy, Yukawa heads to a bar, gets drunk, and on his way home scuffles with some thugs, who beat him up. The commercial ends with him collapsed in the doorway of his house, as an offscreen voice exhorts, "Come on, Mr. Yukawa, get up!"

{The ads have] made Yukawa a cult hero. He's recorded a hit single, a love song to the Dreamcast, and Sega printed up a limited edition of six phone cards with his image on them. At a games conference in October, people lined up for hours to have their pictures taken with him.

Bookmark this article under "OSS Advocacy". Also take a look at his article on debugging. This is a in-the-trenches Microsoft coder; the poster child for propriatary commercial software development. He offers a first hand account of how the whole system works. It is (unwitting, I'm sure) proof of the issues OSS claims to combat.

In these articles, the author (Andrew Shuman) documents various development issues. These include marketing driving development, a "demand" for new features vs. efficiency to run on less-than-cutting-edge hardware (note that features apparently wins out), backward compatability, the complexity of bug hunting... just to name a few. The OSS mantra promises to solve these issues.

I'm not entirely sure if this article was meant to be satire. The tone seems to shift rather suddenly and I begin to get the idea that the author begins to seriously pleed his case. Either way, there's value to be found in it. And it doesn't neccessarily involve a good, fuzzy feeling about "bloat".

"Sorry to pick your post to comment on, but it illustrated the point I want to make better than some others."

No problem - isn't that why the Internet was invented?

"So quick are we to judge a plot hole as an error. We see an inconsistency like you've pointed out above, and automatically assume that it's wrong. What if it is just a significant fact?"

Well, that's certainly possible. However, I would find it easier to accept if there were more structure or coherency to either the economics or politics of the SW universe. One never gets (or at least _I_ never get) from TPM a sense that there is a workable social structure working behind the scenes.

"Slate" had a similar discussion about the econmics of SW. Contrast that with the world Tolkien created: I have run across 300 page, thesis-quality discussions of the economics of Middle Earth.

Oh well, it really is just entertainment and in the long run no big deal. But I guess what bothers me is how much better it could have been.

sPh

As I noted in my previous missive, what's wrong with the United Federation
of Planets being a Rainbow Coalition?

As Slate notes today in Is Star Wars Racist? Star Wars has a lot to answer to in this department.