Slashdot Mirror
Amateur Revolution?
Ant writes "Fast Company's article mentions that networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations from from astronomy to computing. Rap inflects global popular culture from music to fashion. Linux poses a real threat to Microsoft. The Sims is among the most popular computer games ever. These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades."
Rap, for one, started as do-it-yourself music among lower-income black men from distressed urban neighborhoods, recorded by artists on inexpensive equipment and distributed on handmade tapes by local labels. Yet within two decades, rap has become the dominant popular music across the world. In league with Pro-Am music distribution made possible by Napster and Kazaa, it has turned the entire record industry on its head.
;)
And it has now become the same money-hungry scheme that the rest of music is. Silver teeth, 80 gram bling, expensive cars, big houses, "hoes", problems with the law, etc. I don't see the difference between rap stars and more "traditional" music. I give this one 0/100.
Likewise, according to one estimate, 90% of the content in The Sims is created by a Pro-Am sector of The Sims ' playing community, a distributed, self-organizing group whose players are constantly training one another and innovating.
I suppose you could say that's why it is successful. I honestly believe that Quake was so very successful because people could play it the way they wanted to but I still think that the original game had a lot to do with it. If the base gameplay isn't all that great why would people be interested in building on that? I give this one 50/100.
Some professionals will find that unsettling; they will seek to defend their monopolies. The more enlightened will understand that the landscape is changing. Knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will enable professionals and amateurs to combine distributed know-how to solve complex problems.
More importantly the corporations find this unsettling and they have the backing to make it financially impossible for the "amateurs" to compete.
Pro-Am activity will continue to expand. Longer healthy life spans will allow people in their forties and fifties to start taking up Pro-Am activities as second careers. Rising participation in education will give people skills to pursue those activities. New media and technology enable Pro-Ams to organize.
Perhaps it has to do more with intelligent people understanding that they don't appreciate what's going on in the coporate world and they realize that they can at least do a little bit to start change in motion. I am not saying that they will get very far before the corporations do what they can to make the "amateurs" lives miserable but at least it gets the ball rolling.
Pro-Ams could fuel mass participation in formal politics and in social entrepreneurship.
No they most certainly will not. Not unless these "amateurs" get the election process changed to a reality TV style format. People just don't care enough about politics and social entrepeneurship. They want to sit at home and drug their brains with TV. That's all they want out of life. House, two SUVs, a jetski, and 2.75 kids.
Plus, if amateurs were so great the flood of high quality home-made porno would be a ton better than what Vivid puts out. Personally, I'd rather watch the oversized men fuck women with over-sized Nip/Tuck'd boobs and airbrushed looking bodies than watching a fat, hairy, man fuck some underaged looking dark-circle eyed skank on the floor of a Super8 hotel room. That's me though
From the blurb:
Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades.
Corporations, their money, and their slaves will continue to reshape society via their direct control over multiple media outlets (solidified TV/news, radio, Internet) not the public. Grass-roots campaigns have always existed on the fringe and while their causes are noble the masses love to be sheep while thinking they aren't.
It just goes to show that while money can motivate people, passion for the work is a better motivator.
42
For me the difficult part is this - how do you define "professional" and "amateur"? Do you have to be an MCSE to be considered a computing professional? Do you simply have to be paid to do something to be considered a "professional"?
...where does this guy pull this crap? A few isolated events and he's predicting a world-changing trend? Geeze...
Blar.
I realize that many fields are easily accessible to amateurs, yet others remain obviously out of reach. Compare this to selling lemonade on the street corner.
In many fields there is independent innovation. In electronics, for instance, people have been home-brewing radios, amplifiers, computers, etc.. for seemingly forever.
Hoewever, it is technologically and physically impossible to build a cyclotron in your back yard. (Though if memory serves me properly, people have tried to build nuclear reactors from smoke alarm materials in the past).
As always there is a limit to what independents can do by themselves, but that limit is always expanding with newly available tech.
- Strydre -
The Sims is created and supported by EA, a company which has become like the Microsoft / Cisco / Computer Associates of the gaming world: they buy up as many companies as possible so they can profit off the licenses.
The Sims is an excellent game and has a very large fanbase, but don't discount the influence of its very powerful parent company.
For more information, click here.
The article says that in the past a lot of amatuers where displaced by people who had the right bits of paper to say they could do it. Today a lot the amatuers actually have those bits of paper, for example how many Linux programmers have computer science degrees or even some lower level computing qualification.
Jon Katz? Is that you in there??
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
And it has now become the same money-hungry scheme that the rest of music is. Silver teeth, 80 gram bling, expensive cars, big houses, "hoes", problems with the law, etc. I don't see the difference between rap stars and more "traditional" music. I give this one 0/100.
It doesn't matter what genre you're talking about, there are going to be groups that exploit their popularity the way you said above (bitches and hoes), and there are going to be genuine artists. My roomate forced me to listen to one of his favorite hip-hop groups last weekend. Their entire album was freestyle, but I didn't hear anything about "bling", "ho's" or cars. He was a genuine artist more interested in the realities of life than hip hop fame, which is what it boils down to for every genre.
I sppreciate the sentiment of the article, but many contributors to open source are hardly 'amateurs'. Plenty of OS contributors are paid for their work.
I'll take this mean 'amateurs' in the same way that the atheletes at the olympics are 'amateurs'. Amateurs, sure... but they are also at the top of their craft.
This story is the product of what we in the journalism industry call a "slow news day".
But seriously, what I think the article is hinting towards(although masks it through mountains of hype) is that there is a lot of undiscovered talent in the world - across industries. These people are like the underdogs now, but with help from middle to upper management, can bring their new ideas to life.
So let's not jump to conclusions about who is and isn't going to shape society, hmm?
But of course, amateurs do at times spawn some totally unfeasible and fairy-tale like ideas.
That amateurs can contribute is, in large part, due to the steady price deflation of equipment, especially equipment based on semiconductors. Declines in the cost of a near-studio quality audio rig, software engineering workstation, or a good quality CCD astrophotography camera make these tools accessible. Low cost chips that enable the networking of the amateurs (remember when 2400 baud dial-up was charged by the minute?) so they can work together.
Thank You Gordon Moore!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
At least not any more amatuer then Windows developers. There are plenty of people that develope applications for windows AND linux in their spare time.
But characterizing Linux developers as amatures is deceptive.
There are quite a few that do it for free, but for the vast majority they actually do get paid for the work that they do. One way or another.
Of course people like the kernel developers get snapped up to go work for big companies, and Linus is a millionare...
Think about it. Say you have a large company that depends on a free database app for your core. Like, say, MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Now if your working with MS for MS SQL you have tech support, if something goes wrong you talk to person after person as your problem gets escalated. Eventually, if you pay enough, you may actually have a very knowlegable MS person come out and do hands on help with you. However if you hire a Linux hacker, you have part of the team that does the actual developement on the software that you use working for you. Just a phone call away and he is probably almost personal freinds with the rest of the team and can contact other developers for you.
Not only for problems, but for functionality.
Stuff like that is why many do get paid.
But there are plenty that don't get paid for their work, directly....
Depends on what exactly you mean by "Pro". Many people devote their life to hacking, lots like Olympic athlets devote their time to being amature althets.
Not to say that Linux developers are the cream of the crop, nessicarially. They range the whole gammat from the weekend warrior, to the 15 year old kid that sits on the computer all day, to the professional highly skilled and specialist hacker working on breakthru stuff.
What I think is more of the "amature" revolution, is more about the regular guy standing up and getting noticed for their contributions for the first time.
People tend to think that it's all big business, or government research or university studies that get progress done. That's wrong. 75% of business is small business in the US,and I'd bet that 90% of everything new in the US comes from individuals persuing their dreams.
Artists, programmers, athletes, businessmen. Working on their own for their dreams.
Linux is just one of many examples of this happening.
And it has now become the same money-hungry scheme that the rest of music is. Silver teeth, 80 gram bling, expensive cars, big houses, hoes, problems with the law, etc. I dont see the difference between rap stars and more traditional music. I give this one 0/100.
I was just thinking about this yesterday, when I didn't recognize 1 of the top 5 songs in the country. A radio show was listing them and playing clips, and I knew a couple of the names, but the songs didn't ring a bell. I thought they were all terrible, and I happen to like nearly all kinds of music including rap.
But here is my take on rap - it is in its "disco era". Think about it - Rock and Roll had its roots in the 50s. The 60s were rebellion, and what some consider to be the heart of rock music. The 70s started to slide, we then got Disco. The 80s was an attempt to rebound from that, and alternative music was born.
Rap has its roots in the early 80s. I would call the late 80s/early 90s the "60s" of rap. It really showed that it wasn't going away and made a mark on the world. But I think that we are now in the Disco age of rap, where it is all just posing and people trying to cash in. For the most part, the art and creativity is out the window. I just wonder what the "80s" of rap will bring.
But you cannot discount rap any longer. It truly comes from the grassroots and I think fits the intent of this article. Now the STATE of rap is questionable, but I don't think you can question its legitimacy and power.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"Rap, for one, started as do-it-yourself music among lower-income black men from distressed urban neighborhoods, recorded by artists on inexpensive equipment and distributed on handmade tapes by local labels. Yet within two decades, rap has become the dominant popular music across the world."
Two decades ago... when Run DMC "walk this way" with Aerosmith, right? Can't get much more amateur than that.
Rap? "... the dominant popular music across the world." I don't think so. Maybe if you include the various ins-and-outs of hip-hop and pop-hop, you get closer... but still, I wouldn't call it dominant.
"Likewise, according to one estimate, 90% of the content in The Sims is created by a Pro-Am sector of The Sims ' playing community."
I'd guess at least 90% of the worlds video games are created by amateurs. Doesn't mean that they have 90% of the audience, not by a long shot.
It doesn't help that the article's author is a one trick pony... For months, years, whatever, Charles Leadbeater has been doing this "Amareur Revolution" crying, just check google. I'm not sure what would make this article stand out.
"People just don't care enough about politics and social entrepeneurship."
n in gReading/howprwor.htm
I think you'll find that's because their voices are unheard. In America, in Britain, your vote doesn't count. Turnout and engagement is correspondingly low.
If you take a look at the democracies of Europe however, people are far more engaged in politics and the turnouts during elections are on average far higher than the US or UK. That's because their voice can be heard, every vote counts...
The difference is proportional representation:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/Beginn
Deleted
The submitter appears to have misspelled 'infects'.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
In much the same way that over-paying 20-something year old ameteur html coders did not create a "new economy" so this too will fizzle.
Most notably, Rap has not been an ameteur medium since the time when public enemy became big and the labels decided to push it. Unless you are an affancido (sp?) of Rap, none of the people you have heard of are 'ameteurs' except in the artifically created sense that eminem, vanilla ice, the village people and the monkees are 'ameteurs'. Rap has been a slick, professional and tightly-controlled form of expression for almost two fucking decades now.
Mod me flamebait if you like, but as someone who's lived through the "grunge", the "alternative" and the "internet" revolutions this -to me- stinks to high heaven of yet more masturbatory and self-congratulatory hot air.
Which is appropriate, as the "revolution" being touted signifies nothing.
After reading that article, the question arises: What exactly is the difference between a "professional" and an "amateur?"
In my view, there is none. Both groups are comprised of people devoted to their crafts, with the knowledge and passion to succeed. It may be that professionals are more likely to have learned their crafts under the tutelage of a master craftsman or through some sort of schooling, while an amateur is more likely to have learned his trade "on his own" but in most cases, there is a large crossover. Many professionals learned their trade themselves without much tutelage and many amateurs actually have some formal training in their field.
Rather than say it's a professional vs. amateur situation, I'd be more likely to term it as a for-a-living/on-your-spare-time type of thing, because oftentime, being labeled an amateur means that you somehow don't know as much as a professional, but that is often wrong. It's more that they are all professionals, but some do it just for a paycheck or recognition, some do it just because they love it, but (hopefully) most do it for both.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
There's the implication of better quality work or a better attitude, but in reality that has nothing to do with professional/amateur status.
Deleted
In a larger scale analysis, the speed of targeted communications has always determined the speed of advancement throughout history.
Examples abound:
- Greek military advancements (Phalanx) - after city-states bonded, writing popular
- Renaissance - after plague's social dislocation allowed workers to travel, talk
- Renaissance (multiple causes)- after Guttenburg / printing press allowed/instigated mass literacy
- Galileo's experiments - after mail is regularly possible between him and many other scientists
- Industrial revolution - after enough discoveries, shared by scientists mailing each other, built on each other's work to create steam power and other major inventions
- Edison's "invention factory" putting bright minds and enough tools all in one Menlo Park building complex
- FireFly TV show - computing machinery advanced enough to simulate other worlds coupled with good writing (though, the Profoundly Evil (Murdoch's) Fox 'targeted' communication with NeoCon fundamentalists means 'advancement' sometimes == social regression / repression)
This list is incomplete but gives an idea.When people can talk with other people interested in the same things, easily, quickly, and in an organized manner, the rate of change (advancement, usually)(viewed through their eyes) can really increase.
This is a danger as well as a blessing. Every society has malcontents / miscreants / criminals, and (just remember junior high school) sometimes the only thing holding them back is the encouragement of one really inventive and charismatic bad guy/gal.
I, for one, welcome our newfound Pro-Am Inventor Overlords!
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Many of these people are not really amateurs. Some of them are making a living at these pursuits, although admittedly not as good a living as the so-called professionals.
What is happening is that cheap technology is negating the advantage that Big Corporate Money gives to corporations or to business people who have some serious capital, either personal monies or loaned monies.
I cannot overstate how great this makes me feel or how important it is.
I see much of human interaction in the economic marketplace, in the world of employment and jobs and commerce, as akin to interactions in animal society, especially the way that social animals interact, and in animal sibling interactions.
In America, at least, it all comes to nature, red of tooth and claw.
What happens is that the more powerful entities use current advantage, monetary advantage, to snuff out competition, and then, ironically, they call it the "free market."
You see many examples of this: one young male in the lion pride was get bigger than the others, and use that advantage to drive off the other males, and then mate with the females.
But cheap technology is like some sort of vitamin supplement that evens up the competitors.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
A professional does the job, even when they don't want to do. An amateur does it whenever they feel like it.
Being a professional doesn't mean you're any good at it (e.g. look at all the "professionals" in our fields (IT/Med/Law/Bus/etc) that have degrees, yet they're as dumb as a box-of-rocks).
Getting paid to be a professional is strictly a bonus.
I'm not a doctor, but I play one in bed.
I've always thought amateur porn was WAY better than the professional stuff!
So you're saying that corporate stuctures somehow ruin productivity, stifle innovation and creativity, and turn the skills you once loved into the job you dread from the first moment you wake up in the morning? It's news to me but OK, if you say so...
First to fall away is control of the flow of ideas. That flow has been bottlenecked by the recentralization of control of mass media in the 20th century leading to a new form of theocracy.
The events following this release of theocratic control over thought occur with a great deal of interrelationship including all manner of "amateur":
Liberalism in its original form from the Reformation and Enlightenment, meant human experimentation (e.g.: "laboratory of the States") but experimentation requires experimental controls. Therefore the prime cause for concern was not that there be agreement between parties but that disagreeing parties find ways to separate from one another to form experimental groups, allowing control groups to preserve older ways. The Age of Exploration was therefore consequent to the Enlightenment.
In the present instance we can take a not too emotional issue such as cloning as a probable "heresy" over which such issues are arising. (There are other, far more motional issues such as homosexual marriage, racial separatism, pedophillia, infanticide, etc. that we can address similarly.) There are attempts in the UN to ban cloning globally under protocols similar to bans on nuclear weaponry. Like most other social experiments people are conducting or wish to conduct, the various entities are proposing that they have world-wide jurisdiction. The conflict isn't over the technologies but over the social experiments allowed or disallowed.
This is a legitimate concern as the globe becomes smaller due to transport and communications technologies. Preemptive controls will increasingly impose on all aspects of life for security's sake. Liberty will dissipate just as it has been with the increase of all forms of centralized control. Soon there will be no more experiments in social forms save those dictated by the sort of individuals attracted to the centers of power, hence the only legacy of humanity will be the destruction of the planet.
The solution is to make the globe bigger and leave earth to the true control groups.
Humanity must find ways of dispersing life to lifeless environments, there to take up residence and leave the earth to the true conservatives -- perhaps limited to hunting and gathering with stone-age technology. Anything else would continue the destruction of vital control groups, not just hunter-gatherers but entire species such as great apes, while depriving humanity of the liberty to conduct its experiments.
The real question of legitimate use of central power isn't over whether to allow this or that experiment but whether the central power is doing everything in its power to disperse life.
By this criterion there is not a single legitimate central point of power in the world, but the worst offenders of all are those nations of European diaspora who are destroying their pioneering heritage with supposed "liberal" policies that dictate universal open borders, "diversity" via EEOC regulations down to the granularity of small mom and pop businesses, by subjecting such an enormous proportion of a family's income political redistribution that all are forced to focus their energies on politics rather than pioneering. All of these things are dictating the social experiments that are politically correct for those pioneering populations and are endangering not just those populations, but life itself as technological civilization is bottled up in an increasingly dangerous pressure-cooker.
Seastead this.
Charles Lindbergh was a mail pilot before he made the first flight ever across the atlantic (L.I. to Paris).
All the original "elite hackers" of the early information age were total amateurs.
Every "professional" was once an amateur. Our culture has come to identify a slick suit, fancy title and wad of cash with skill and ability. Being a "pro" means you have proven yourself to the mainstream, maybe that you were a better amateur than some others, maybe that you were in the right place at the right time. Years of experience are good, yes. So is imagination, fresh perspective, and untapped potential.
A point? uh... (digs furiously) uh...raincheck?
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
No they most certainly will not. Not unless these "amateurs" get the election process changed to a reality TV style format. People just don't care enough about politics and social entrepeneurship. They want to sit at home and drug their brains with TV. That's all they want out of life. House, two SUVs, a jetski, and 2.75 kids.
Stop getting all your facts about the population from the internet, step out of your moms house and look around the big blue room (no not IBMs wiring closet). Politics is fronted by the elected officials they make the decisions we want or they do not. Organized groups can have a HUGE impact on those officials starting with the not so good example of the 'flash mobs' at the RNC. People will learn though what is and is not effective. I am on several political lists and when issues I care about are mentioned I and other like minded souls respond. I have written enough times to my congressman that when I met him at a public library luncheon he recognized my name. He told me that writing a congressman with your views is like casting more than ten votes...why because less than one in 10 people write them (and yes that is write as in on paper). Imagine if in your hometown you organized 20 people to write your congressman on issues. That would carry real power and influence.
The "amateur revolution" is hardly new ... in fact a brief look back at most pop culture / technology revolutions would reveal that those responsible were barely out of highschool / college.
... when in general almost all popular music comes from artists in their late teens.
... when in fact the top operating systems today have their roots in college dropouts / 20 somethings who you would hardly call experts.
...
The article talks about Rap music
The article talks about Linux
The article talks about games. How old was John Carmak when he build his first 3D gaming engine?
Fresh ideas coming from "amateurs" is the norm
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Amateur astronomers have always had a big impact, there is nothing new going on here. Many comets are found by amateurs, as (until recently, when the process was automated) were many extra-galactic supernovae. Likewise, many amateurs have devoted a great deal of time to monitoring variable stars.
In many cases, these observations are not done by professionals because the return on each *individual* observation is small, and they could not justify the time. But there is singificant synergy, since a researcher interested in (say) variable stars has access to many different light curves from each star thanks to the work of amateurs.
The technology used by amatuers has improved, with cheap CCDs and computers -- but the same technology has also made professional instruments much more effective than they were in the days of photographic plates and clockwork drives.
To my mind (as a theoretical physicist who started out as an amateur astronomer in junior high) an analagous activity is bird watching: professional ornithologists use a huge amount of use of data gathered by amateur "birders", who are often exceptionally knowledgeable about the species they look at, and who gather data from a love of observing the natural world. But this is not high tech, so Fast Company didn't see it.
Yeah man! Just like Microsift did to Linux! Oh wait...They haven't crushed Linux dispite having billions of dollars and a huge company of full of highly-paid professionals.
I guess it's pretty hard to compete with people who don't need any backing.
Rap music wasn't promoted by "Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs" unless you mean sneakerNet. Decidedly low-tech, ghetto kids invented rap with turntables from garbage cans, because they couldn't afford any instruments, and no one in the Bronx was throwing away guitars. They couldn't even get on the radio for years, so playgrounds and cassette tapes were their medium. By the time even analog FM radio started playing them, they were already a cultural institution, which radio and video networks (like MTV and ClearChannel) have largely destroyed, transforming cool smartass party kids into glossy spokesmodels product for global consumer brands. Some "rap" is still bubbling underground, with its original spirit, riding both social and digital networks.
--
make install -not war
What the stories author failed to understand is that these Pro-Ams have always been around, its just that now the author is an adult and has opportunities to join adult organizations.
Take for instance Ham radio operators, one of the more interesting things to do is joining huge worldwide networks to "pass traffic" (messages) from place to place. MARS, the Military Affiliate Radio System is Amateurs used to pass personal messages from military personnel to their families back in the US. This still is used but has really fallen by the wayside with cell phones and e-mail and the like.
Starting in the 60's Ham radio operators launched a series of satellites constructed by unpaid amateurs (www.amsat.org) AMSAT-OSCAR 7, launched in 1974 still being listed as semi-operational. These amateurs have since 1961 launched a series of 50 other satellites.
Amateurs and groups of amateurs a century ago in the 1910's fostered a world wide revolution called the aeroplane. Some of their groups like the Aviator Club in France still exist.
Voulunteer organizations run by people that I guarantee look at the organization in a professional light are nothing new. Fraternal organizations like Elks or KOC or OddFellows, or any of a thousand others (http://www.exonumia.com/art/society.htm) all have declining and aging memberships. This is not because people are not doing the same kind of joining or voulunteering, Its just that instead of putting on the goofy hat and going to the lodge on friday night, everyone is putting on the goofy hat and joing the rest of their StarCraft clan on-line on friday night.
Even the authors own point that some of these Pro-Ams are astronomers is foolish. Perhaps 99 percent of all astronomers EVER have been amateurs, and many comets have been discovered over the past 100 years by amateurs or groups of amateurs. Are these amateurs working any less professionally than somone being paid for the work?
There are millions of small groups of unpaid amateurs producing research and journals and inventions and discoveries. To think that there is anything unique or new about this is just plan wrong. The author of the article has made the fatal error that many young people make of believing that they have discovered some truism of the human condition that their and only their generation has come up with, and that anything more than 20 years old is worthless. Perhaps the author should remember how his own industry came to be and remember that no one got paid to run the Homebrew Computer Club.
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
The only difference between pros and amateurs is the amount of time they spend on something and the price of their tools. Telescopes are becoming commodities just like computers. The internet allows people to collaborate and check out the same object and keep up to date on the latest developments.
It doesn't matter much if your being paid, it's how much time and work you put into what your doing and how much it costs to have the proper tools to help you out.
Astronomy and Programming now have very low barriers to entry and are easy to collaborate. It just broadeds the base of those fields. To get the the top you still need super computers or things like the Keck Observatory that are very hard to come by - for now.
I think most libertarian minded people would agree that artificial barriers to entry into segments in society are a BadThing (eg like the guilds of old). The idea that amateurs would be excluded from science, music, medicine, or any field just because they don't belong to a group goes against the grain of modern free society. So I agree with the author in spirit.
That said, however, I disagree with the author on most points because the article assumes that such artificial barriers exist across most of society. IMHO, for the most part, they do not. In the case of science and medicine -- these are *very* hard and critical professions -- the barriers to entering these professions are not artificial; they are nessecary. I for one don't want a doctor-on-the-weekends treatmenting me. Likewise, I don't think most people can train themselves to research and develope nano-technology. I'm not saying that most people can't go into such fields if they choose, it just requires a life-long commitment. Nor am I implying that one needs to pay huge $$$ to pursue such a career -- many of the state funded universities offer the same opportunies as the ivy leage schools.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
According to my Oxford dictionary, the original meaning of amateur was "One who loves or is fond of" - from the French amare (to love). I like this definition - I think that an intrinsic love for the subject is what distinguishes an amateur from a professional. An amateur could be paid, but would keep working even if they are not.
A similar word, usually used in a derogative way is dilettante - "A lover of the fine arts; originally one who cultivates them for the love of them rather than professionally, and so = amateur as opposed to professional ... later applied ... to one who interests himself in an art or science merely as a pastime and without serious aim or study." (OED)
It is based on the French word dilettare - to delight.
Compare this with the word Professional which my OED tells me is based on the word Profession - "The declaration, promise or vow made by one entering a religious order; hence the action of entering such an order; the fact of being professed in a religious order."
So we have two pictures - the professional who has made a serious, solid, institutional commitment; and the amateur/dilettante who is in it purely for the love and delight. It is not surpising that the professionals look down on the amateurs and mistrust their pleasure. It is also not surprising that the history of science and technology is full of breakthroughs made by amateurs.
I agree with the premise of the article - as we become richer and live longer lives more and more of us are able to spend time indulging our love and delight and make significant contributions as amateurs.
You're probably right, if only because eventually rap artists will run out of other music to sample.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."