I'm not sure why I'm bothering to reply to this, since nobody ever reads a thread on Slashdot for more than a day or so after it was posted anyway, but you make some points that I felt should not stand uncommented on...
That you don't know better is no excuse. Yes, Doubleclick could tell you more about the information they collect -- but they don't have to. The Coors beer company would prefer you not to know that there are better beers in the world than theirs -- and yet they are not defrauding you by failing to tell you this.
Your analogy is flawed. When Doubleclick violates my personal privacy, they do not merely hide from me information that would allow me to make more informed consumption decisions (as in your Coors example). They do violence to me by taking something of value from me -- my personal information -- without my consent, or even my knowledge. More and more, we are seeing the acknowlegement that an individual's personal information has economic value -- witness the SEC's recent decision that trading demographic information for stock constitutes a monetary transaction, not a "get something for free" transaction. Viewed in this light, DoubleClick's actions are theft, not mere misdirection.
Nobody here is duelling in the streets. There is contention, yes: there is a debate on over what the future of the Web should look like; that debate is being played out in software, data, and protocols. Yet there is no violence going on. Nobody is forced to fund Doubleclick or to use a browser s/he doesn't want. You, OTOH, seek to introduce violence to the situation.
I see. When government, which (in the United States, at least) is elected and guided by popular consensus, steps in to mediate a dispute, we are introducing armed thuggery. I would contend that, when someone takes something of value from me without my knowledge, they have done violence to me. When a corporation seeks to do violence to the broad population for its own profit, I see no moral problem with calling on the common defense of law. The situation is really no different than if Union Carbide decided to dump toxic chemicals into the rivers that provide my groundwater. Should my only recourse be to invest in Poland Springs?
Government isn't about cooperation. Government is about violence.
I usually don't have a beef with informed libertarianism, but knee-jerk libertarianism is another matter. If you really believe this, then tell us -- under what circumstances would government action be called for? Rape? ("If only she hadn't dressed so provocatively...") Murder? ("If only he hadn't mentioned that huge life insurance policy...") Yes, government is about violence. That's because, in many ways, life is about violence. Reasonable governments deploy violence in the defense of the well-being of their citizenry. This is a moral and justified application of violence. The alternative is the "every man for himself" anarchism in which life is nasty, brutish, and short, and nobody has time to code Open Source software because they are too busy preying upon each other for food and shelter. You may disagree with some ways in which government acts on our behalf, but to dismiss government entirely because it uses violence is to turn yourself over to the tender mercies of all the other violent forces in the world, which you can't vote out of office or impeach.
You make a good point, but like all things, it's possible to take a good point too far. Saying
Why complain about Doubleclick? Their actions need not have any effect whatsoever on you. You have every right to protect yourself. Are you using the Junkbuster Proxy yet? Do you have a comprehensive blockfile?
is a little like saying "Why complain about car thieves? Their actions need not have any effect whatsoever on you. You have every right to protect yourself. Have you installed an anti-theft device yet? Do you keep a Doberman in the back seat?"
See, thing is, you are completely free to do those things -- but we have and enforce laws against car theft anyway. Why? Because
no security device is 100% guaranteed to prevent car theft
we as a society have decided that car theft is a Bad Thing
The same points apply to privacy on the Net. No security measure is 100% secure -- if you filter out cookies, for example, watch as Microsoft rolls out some new tracking mechanism in IE7 that does an end-run around your proxy. And more and more, a societal consensus seems to be forming that violation of privacy online is a Bad Thing. (If it wasn't, you can bet the FTC wouldn't be moving in this direction.)
Point being, yes, you can and should defend your personal privacy on the Net. But this does not obviate the potential improvement we could see if privacy was protected by law as well as by individual action. Not to mention that the vast majority of people aren't technically proficient enough to install and configure Junkbuster, or edit their HOSTS file -- are you saying that their privacy is somehow less sacrosanct than yours?
The bottom line -- saying "don't rely on the government to protect you" is silly. Of course there are things individuals can do to enhance their own privacy. But there is also room for reasonable regulation in this space. We have laws settling lots of other disputes that used to get settled by individuals duelling in the streets, and we're generally better off for having them, I think. I have yet to hear any persuasive argument why the outcome will be any different on this issue.
You make some good points, but I think you took some portions of my argument too literally. Of course neither the Federalists nor the Democratic-Republicans were arguing specifically about corporate power in the 1790s. However, arguments about business and trade, the core issues that affect corporations, were extremely common. Tariff issues and free versus restricted trade were bitterly partisan issues -- so much so that many New England states threatened to secede from the nascent Republic over them.
Your primary objection to my argument seems to center around the use of the word "corporations", which you object to because corporations did not exist in the Revolutionary era. Well, maybe not in the strictest sense of the word, but creating legal entities to spread the risk of a business enterprise around was nothing new for them; joint-stock companies had been around for a long time, and indeed had financed many of the earliest colonial ventures. The rise of a prosperous merchant class in the American colonies was what drove the Revolution (a war over trade tariffs, don't forget), and the Federalists were certainly eager to encourage and promote the growth of business, both at home and for export abroad. Just because "corporations" hadn't been created yet doesn't mean that the Federalists weren't responsive to business interests over the interests of the broad mass of people.
Now, the battles of the Federalist era were hardly the biggest reason why we are where we are today -- that honor would have to go to the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are legally equivalent to people, which I think history will eventually judge indefensible. But we can't just say that the founding fathers were all "geniuses" who were out for the noble aim of Bettering the People. There were clearly class and economic issues driving the political conflicts of the Federalist era, and those class and economic issues are the same ones that face us in the age of corporate politics.
I'm really not sure what to make of this article. It's hardly controversial in this forum to say that corporatism is bad, but to say that it somehow contradicts the dreams of the Founding Fathers indicates that Katz's grasp on American history is tenuous at best.
The Founders were actually split on the subject; after the Revolution, they eventually split into two camps. The Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, had the philosophy of individualism that Katz speaks of; Jefferson wanted America to basically stay an underdeveloped nation of small-scale farmers. The Federalists, on the other hand, wanted to see America develop quickly, and were very supportive of corporate expansion through programs like the founding of the Bank of the United States, America's first central bank. The Federalists included powerful figures such as George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, and they basically controlled the government through the early days of the Republic until they overreached and tried to criminalize criticism of their programs through the Alien and Sedition Acts. (Read American Aurora by Richard Rosenfeld for a great treatment of the tyranny the Federalists tried to impose on us.)
So the tension between corporations and individuals is hardly new -- it's been with us since the founding of the Republic, and it will probably be with us forever. We can, and should, take steps to limit the power corporations hold over the public sphere -- but to claim that somehow America was an idyll of untrammeled individualism until big bad Time Warner came along is to demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of our common history.
I once read somewhere that while it wasn't intended, the films "Time Bandits", "Brazil", and "12 Monkeys" form an odd trilogy of movies produced by Terry, representing three phases of life. "Time Bandits" as childhood, "Brazil" as middle age, and "12 Monkeys" as old age.
Actually, you're only 2/3rds right. While Gilliam has said that he never set out to create a formal "trilogy", he realized after the fact that the themes of three of his films do track the progression of the life of the dreamer from birth to death: Time Bandits showing the dreamer as a child, Brazil depicting the dreamer in adulthood, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (not 12 Monkeys) showing the dreamer in old age. The three movies in the "trilogy" were all written by Gilliam (which allowed him to shape the storyline to fit his ideas), but he did not write 12 Monkeys (he was brought in by Universal as a hired director to film an already-written script).
Gilliam's films are almost uniformly fascinating to watch and think about, even the less artistically successful ones such as Baron Munchausen and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Anyone who is interested in Gilliam's work can find lots of great info in two books: The Battle of Brazil by film critic Jack Mathews, chronicling the struggle on Gilliam's part to get Brazil released with its original ending, and Gilliam on Gilliam, a series of interviews in which Gilliam talks about his life and work. Both are excellent reads.
Great, another GUI. They aim to make Linux as easy to use as Windows. Say what? The plain fact is that Windows isn't easy to use in any traditional sense of the term. Windows is just familiar for most people -- they've just internalized its quirks and contradictions. The same goes for MacOS; neither is particularly intuitive in the sense that it would be immediately apparent to someone who'd never seen a computer before how it works. We define these interfaces as "easy" only because the basic premises of the GUI have had 15 years to percolate through the population. Moreover, the whole idea of the GUI is showing its age. The first popular GUI was for the Apple Macintosh, and was designed to handle 400K disks that could hold a few files. Today essentially the same interface is being used to manage 30GB disks that hold millions of files. The result is chaos; folders within folders within folders ad infinitum. More and more, people resort to finding ways to work around the file system rather than working within it; watch how often a new user has to go to Sherlock or the Windows "Find" command to figure out where his or her file went. Managing files on a modern PC via a GUI has become a little like trying to bail out a battleship with a thimble. So, while it's great and all that someone is working to develop Yet Another GUI, I'd be more interested in seeing some of these smart people devoting some time to coming up with an interface that will do to GUIs what GUIs did to CLIs. Is there anyone more interested in developing The Next Big Thing than in refining the Last Big Thing?
I'm amazed that nobody has commented on how this is coming from the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), which has repeatedly proven itself to be utterly clueless when it comes to the Internet it is charged with protecting.
The NIPC's director, Michael Vatis, seems bent on using every single hiccup on the Net to prove how Essential and Important (TM) the NIPC is. When the Melissa virus hit, NIPC was running around screaming about the end of the world. After that the NIPC was warning about the evil "Y2K viruses" that never really existed (oops!). (The NIPC alert I linked to is a scream; it basically says that there are lots of Nasty Viruses out there, and that, if someone could write a Nasty Virus, they could probably write a Y2K virus, so you should panic immediately.) Now, since Melissa and Y2K failed to destroy civilization, the NIPC is beating the drum over the DoS issue, calling a bunch of script kiddies who inconvenience some people "cyber terrorists".
The common thread here is that the Net is a nasty, brutish place, and only the big tough NIPC can protect us.
I'm not sure why they keep doing this, unless Vatis is such a publicity hound that he will take any excuse to "alert" people of "threats", even if those alerts do more damage than help by panicking people into distrusting the reliability of the Net. His fearmongering has become so blatant and counterproductive that he's become a favorite target of ridicule for Rob Rosenberger, the crusader for common sense regarding computer viruses.
Sure, it's bad that these big sites are suffering DoS. But it's not "terrorism", and slinging around that word only proves how cushy daily life for most people in America truly is. It's hard to imagine anyone rationally being able to compare congestion at Yahoo! to blowing up a federal building. Maybe if Vatis stopped to think for a moment before lunging to get his agency in front of the cameras of the press, he'd realize this too.
Jeez, how things change. When Katz first appeared on Slashdot, I was sure that his participation would be a Good Thing -- I used to like most of his HotWired columns, and he seemed like a decent enough guy with some interesting things to say. But like I said -- whoa, do things change.
This article has got to be one of the most self-absorbed things I've ever read. It is nothing but one long boo-hoo about how rough and tumble Slashdot is, and how hard it is for "outsiders" to participate. Now, Katz very PC-ly starts off identifying "outsiders" as women and people of color, but instead of addressing actual ways in which the Slashdot community marginalizes these folks (which would have been a valuable discussion to have), he quickly veers off instead into a discussion of how Slashdot marginalizes him! It's like Katz is that guy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, screaming "'elp! 'elp! I'm being repressed!"
The whole article can be summarized as follows: "I like the idea of Slashdot, but it is too focused on this technology stuff instead of stuff I'm interested in. And whenever I try to make Slashdot into what I want it to be, rather than what the community wants it to be, people flame me. This community should be open to anyone, even people who have no interest in the subjects under discussion. Boo-hoo."
Jon, I have news for you. Slashdot works. I've been participating in online communities since 1985, and Slashdot is one of maybe three or four I've encountered that gets it right. Discussions too rowdy for you? Browse at +1 or +2 -- I do this and it's amazing how little junk you find at that setting. Don't like a topic area? Filter it out in your Preferences. And if you're a good citizen, your Karma goes up and you get recognition and responsibility. Slashdot works amazingly well given the constraints it operates under. (Not to mention that if you think this is a free-fire zone, you've clearly never spent any time on Usenet.) The cream rises to the top of the discussions, and the stupid juvenile stuff stays at the bottom, easily filtered out. This is how Things Should Be!
The biggest problem here isn't Slashdot, Jon -- it's your expectations of what Slashdot should be. Here's an idea -- rather than sitting on an ivory perch posting articles about how much Slashdot needs "fixing", why don't you swear off your columns for a month and come participate, by posting in the discussions. Build up your Karma, take a few hits, and be a part of the community for a change, rather than wagging your finger at us for not living up to what you think we should be. I think that if you actually used Slashdot rather than just philosophizing about it, you'd be pleasantly surprised. On the other hand, you could just dismiss my post as another useless rant from someone who is out to flame poor Katz. Anyone want to place bets on which option he'll take?
The most insightful commentary I've seen on the merger so far isn't anything in this article -- it's Robert X. Cringely's take. Cringely proposes that, rather than seeing the merger as a sign of AOL optimism about its future, it should be seen as a sign of AOL's pessimism, especially regarding the market fortunes of Net companies.
It makes sense when you think about it. AOL stock has gone through the stratosphere based largely on the idea that AOL is a 'pure Internet play'. Buying a big old media company will end this perception and put a drag on the growth of the stock value. So why should AOL buy Time Warner outright, when they could get the same access to TW content through a less formal partnership, while preserving their hyper-performing stock value?
Cringely argues that AOL is betting that being a 'pure Internet play' isn't going to be a huge benefit for much longer -- in fact, it may become a liability if and when the market bubble bursts. If that happens, suddenly the Amazons of the world look like awful investments as their valuations are "corrected". But AOL doesn't look as bad, because it's got real-world value based on its ownership of Time Warner's many established brands, as opposed to the purely theoretical value that many Net companies have. In other words, AOL knows that it's had a terrific run at the tables, and it's cashing out its chips and socking the money into the bank before its streak turns sour. It's buying insurance while it can still afford to. It's turning its virtual wealth, represented by stock valuation (which could disappear overnight if the public mentality changed) into real wealth, in the form of Time Warner's media properties (which will hold value no matter how the winds blow).
Is this the complete rationale behind the merger? Well, probably not. But viewed in this light it sure does look like a vote of no confidence in the Internet Economy on the part of Steve Case & Co.
The real reason Lucas snubbed DVD is that DVD didn't use his precious THX standard and instead went to Dolby's new AC3 sound standard.
Nope. THX is not a digital audio format like AC-3, it's a process for certifying the presentation quality of movie sound, regardless of what format the sound is presented in. The 3 major surround sound formats in theatres today are Dolby Digital AC-3, DTS, and Sony SDDS. A theatre (or piece of home theatre equipment) using any of these formats can be THX certified, as long as it conforms to Lucasfilm's quality guidelines. So the decision to standardize DVD-Video sound on AC-3 in no way threatens Lucasfilm or THX. (Lots of high-end AC-3 home theatre components are, in fact, THX-certified.)
As much as I respect Roger Ebert, I have to say that he's just missing the point completely here.
Ebert contends that film-based systems will be better than digital in the future because film will provide a better-quality image than digital can; and on this count, I think he's absolutely right. Even uncompressed DV lacks the "warmth" (for lack of a better term) of film, and the MaxiVision system he touts sounds like it provides an image that nobody in the DV world can hope to match.
The problem is, image quality is unimportant. Now, before everyone gets up in arms here, think for a second. Who is clamoring for image quality that is better than today's films? General audiences? Nope, they are happy with the cruddy image from a poorly set up projector in a shoebox theater in their shopping mall. Theater owners? Nope, they make more money by dividing their space into multiple small, low-tech screens rather than lovingly setting up one beautiful screen and cutting the number of movies they can show by 11/12ths. Studios? Nope, they know that what makes them money: formulaic movies with name stars presented on as many screens as possible. If they could make money presenting more striking images, they'd all be doing IMAX films by now.
So where it counts -- money -- MaxiVision & other advanced film systems are irrelevant, because nobody wants them bad enough to pay for them. Digital, however, is a different story. Digital offers a big money benefit to one of these players -- the studios -- because it cuts dramatically one of the biggest cost in distributing a film: prints & advertising.
P&A is one of the biggest line items on a film's budget, running into millions of dollars. Each theater which is going to show your film needs a "print" (an analog dupe of the film) to run through their projector. In fact, they need more than one, because prints wear out or get scratched or otherwise start to die after awhile. When you consider that each print is absurdly expensive, and that a movie that "opens wide" goes to 2,500+ theaters, you can see how this gets expensive quick.
Digital changes all this. Suddenly you can stop sending reels of film around (which are expensive) and start sending around magnetic disks (which aren't). Even better, you could conceivably ship the image via a fiber optic cable or satellite connection and avoid "prints" altogether. Then "P&A" just becomes "A" and you've just saved millions, which to a Hollywood executive means that his project is that much more likely to be profitable and thus advance his career.
So, while I understand Ebert's position and wish that we lived in a world where he was right, where the quality of the experience was the prime factor, we don't, and he's wrong. Digital will overtake film, not because it's better, but because it's cheaper -- and even the most beautiful MaxiVision 48 images won't convince the Hollywood moneymen to ignore that math.
... to watch Katz continue to shoehorn whatever's in the news today into his standard schema of "geeks" and "tech" and whatnot, no matter how well the topics fit together.
"Techno-idealism"? How on Earth does what's been happening in Seattle have anything to do with technology? It has more to do with social science than computer science -- people feel threatened because a faceless Other is making rules that affect their lives, and they have no recourse if they don't like the world the Other is building for them. So they go to protest -- peacefully -- and then people on both sides overreact (as is common when crowds face police) and things get out of hand. Where in this description do the words "Internet" and "technology" fit? They don't. The growth of technology is one big story in the modern era, but it's not the only story, and we don't need to pretend somehow that all events in our lives spring from a Prime Mover called Mother Internet -- or that the only way to invest significance in an event is to somehow associate it with the tech world. To do so cheapens both the important changes that tech has wrought on the world, and the other movements and ideas that affect our lives and times.
Seattle is an important moment. It could very well mark the end of the political era we think of as the "90s", which began with the Gulf War and George Bush's New World Order, and the start of the next era, the backlash to the globalization, corporatization, and McDonaldization of the planet. That's the story that'll come out of the Battle of Seattle, not that some rioters had Web sites or carried PalmPilots or whatever. Of course some of them have Web sites. A percentage of any random sample of people these days will turn up some with Web sites -- but correlation does not imply causation, and those Web sites did not spark the flames in Seattle, Jon. Those flames were sparked by the anger and fear of people who feel themselves being stripped of their freedom and dignity by tiny elites and the social forces those elites command. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
The Right Interface for the Job
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Interface Zen
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· Score: 4
The problem isn't limited to input devices. This article got me thinking about something I've been wondering about for awhile -- the recent tendency to use a 'standard' interface for various tasks, rather than a purpose-built, optimal interface.
It seems like there are dozens of companies these days that want their interface design to be the One True Interface to All Things. The best example of this is Microsoft, which every couple of years makes noise about how toasters and refrigerators should be controlled with some variant of Windows. But MS isn't the only offender -- lots of Internet companies do this too, by forcing you to use an HTML front-end to their resources rather than designing software for the purpose.
Don't get me wrong, I can see the reason for this approach -- once you've learned the One True Interface, you're set, you don't have to learn anything else. The problem is that trying to force all devices to share the same interface means that some of those devices are going to feel clunky -- or, worse, be downright unusable.
Take, for example, the whole WinCE vs. PalmOS war. On its face, you'd think people would prefer WinCE devices, since they're already familiar with the Windows interface. But (based on my observations, not any hard research) it seems to me that people vastly prefer the Palm interface, which is optimized for handheld devices, rather than Windows, which really wants you to have a big, roomy display to work well. In other words, people are willing to learn a new, unfamiliar interface if doing so offers them substantive productivity benefits -- which would seem to give savvy product developers an incentive to follow Mr. Christiansen's advice to optimize the interface for the task.
This trend is only going to get worse as computing intelligence is embedded in more and more consumer devices. The temptation will be very strong for those developing software for such embedded systems to leverage interface designs they already have, rather than create from scratch. With more and more of a car, for example, being run by software, it's not hard to imagine MS someday proposing that you run your AutoPC through a modified Windows interface, even though such an interface would be totally inappropriate for the task at hand. Let's hope that more product & software designers take note of the evidence that people prefer optimized interfaces and don't automatically rule them out.
In short, just because the NSA, FBI, CIA, and others can spy on you doesn't mean that they will, or that they even want to.
Even if people aren't in fact generally being surveilled, there is a definite effect when people feel that they could be being surveilled at any time. It has a chilling effect on democracy -- people become afraid to say things that may be controversial or unpopular when it's possible that Big Brother could use those statements against them in some way. When public discourse is stunted like this, democracy suffers.
And what about when the surveillance goes beyond public policy matters and becomes a tool to give force to the prejudices and petty hatreds of the men who control the cameras? J. Edgar Hoover made a career out of using intelligence collected under official auspices to destroy the lives of people he just happened not to like, for whatever reason. Does it have any bearing on the public good whether, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. cheated on his wife? Hoover thought so. Hoover decided that any black man who talked about freedom for his long-suffering people was a Communist by definition, and spent untold taxpayer dollars spying on King's private life in order to find some silver bullet that he could use against him. And this wasn't an isolated case -- Hoover kept tabs on anyone and everyone who he could use some leverage over. And anyone who dared speak out against this could count on having Hoover's cameras pointed at them next. This gave Hoover great power -- and his power knew no bound, no accountability. Secret government by its nature is un-democratic government.
Your main point seems to be that people should shut up and sit down because they're not important enough for anyone to pay attention to, and even if they were nobody's being dragged away in Black Marias yet. But "security through obscurity" only works when you're willing to forfeit your right to participate in public life, a right which no free man or woman who wishes to make a difference in society should be asked to surrender. And the fact that we have what freedoms we enjoy today springs from the efforts and sacrifices of people who knew that if you wait until the secret police are at your door to protest the loss of your freedom, you've waited too long.
Back when Wired was still worth reading, they ran a pretty good article called "The Making of the President 2000" (which is archived for free browsing on their Web site) comparing Al Gore's and Newt Gingrich's efforts to position themselves as the tech-savviest politico in preparation for the 2000 election. Of course, the article, which originally was published in the December 1995 issue, is a little dated; remember, this was back in the full flush of the Republican Revolution, when Gingrich looked like a revolutionary conservative leader and not a broken, slightly pathetic figure. But it's still worth reading for anyone interested in how Gore's ideas about tech developed to where they are today.
It is wrong to enforce with violence that which can be ensured with intelligence. The technology (intelligence) to stop ANYONE from imposing on your communication is there already. If you want to be sure that people are not imposing on your communications the choice is yours (see GPG, pgpPhone, etc). Making this a law (violence) can only be harmful, the effort is better spend allowing the technologies to mature and proliferate.
How does guaranteeing one's right to privacy equate to violence? Americans currently enjoy a range of Constitutional protections against government abuse. Amendment I guarantees that the government can't shut you up based on your viewpoints, and can't prohibit you from worshipping whatever deity you prefer. Amendment II guarantees that you can have the means to defend yourself should the government attempt to illegitimately impose its will upon you. Amendment III guarantees that the government can't seize your property for purposes of national security. Amendment IV guarantees that the government can't seize or search your personal effects without a warrant and probable cause to suspect you of having committing a crime. And on and on and on. These are not your average laws which are aimed at regulating the behavior of Joe Citizen through government sanction -- these are aimed at regulating the behavior of Big Brother by posting for all to see the list of things that he isn't allowed to do!
How does this equate to doing violence? It seems to me that it prevents violence. Don't forget that, in many countries where the citizens don't enjoy specific written protections such as these, the only recourse against government abuse is to take up arms. We have the option of giving the government a good smack upside the head in the court system, which seems like a much more healthy way to run a country to me.
And to presume that "intelligence" can preserve your security against these threats is silly and naive. Do you honestly believe that PGPfone will protect you if the National Security Agency decides they want to listen to your phone calls? Remember, no encryption scheme is perfect and every cypher can be broken given that enough resources (man-hours and computing power) are thrown at it. And the NSA can bring a colossal amount of resources to bear on the problem of getting around the defenses you "intelligently" mount -- a much larger amount than you, as someone who presumably has some job in life other than encrypting all your communications, can muster. Not to mention the snooty elitism of assuming that it's somehow OK if the government listens to private communications as long as it's only those dumb people who don't know how to set up PGP (in other words, about 98% of the population) who are affected.
I know that you're trying to articulate a libertarian viewpoint, but it seems like you're taking it to a ridiculous extreme. If you're truly a libertarian you should love the Bill of Rights. You should memorize the thing! It's not some silly law taking your freedoms away -- it's guaranteeing your freedoms, right there in writing! And how can it be bad, from a libertarian standpoint, to add "privacy" to the list of specificially protected freedoms?
We've almost reached the point where it's less surprising to hear about a government agency that abuses its powers than it is to hear about one that doesn't. It's not just Echelon, either -- abuses abound; for example, CNN is reporting that politicians of both parties regularly lean on the IRS to force audits of their political opponents. Now, I'm generally a politically liberal kinda guy, but in this kind of atmosphere it's not hard to understand why some people feel compelled to keep a firearm in their homes, just in case the Government decides to come after them.
Of course, stocking up arms for the End Times isn't a productive solution, either. It seems to me that the big problem here is that Americans don't have a clear right to privacy in their communications -- we only have patchwork protections from case law, which provides a legal gray area where the government can fit things like Echelon. So what can we, as citizens, do? Well, maybe we should amend the Fourth Amendment, which currently protects your private property from illegal government seizure, to extend to non-physical personal property (i.e. electronic communications) as well.
Currently, Amendment IV reads as follows:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'd propose adding a few simple words (which I'll denote in bold):
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, effects, and all personal communications, regardless of medium, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Now, IANAL, and I'm certainly willing to be flexible on the wording, but it seems to me that an addition along these lines could have many salutory effects:
It would finally end the uncertainty as to whether or not Americans have a full-fledged right to privacy by elevating it to the same level as the right to speak freely or bear arms
It could bring electronic communications up to the same standard of protection as, say, letters you keep in your desk drawer, which AFAIK can't be seized w/o a search warrant
It would still allow wiretaps for national security or compelling law enforcement purposes, while making huge, broad-based wiretaps like Echelon clearly and undoubtedly unconstitutional
It would send a powerful message that we're fed up with this kind of unacceptable behavior from our government
Now, I'm generally not a fan of tinkering with the Constitution, which has worked remarkably well for 200+ years. But I'm simply amazed that something as obtrusive, as invasive, as downright un-American as Echelon isn't unconstitutional on its face. In an age of digital communications and restrictions on hard encryption, when it's orders of magnitude easier for the State to intrude on our privacy then it is for us to protect ourselves, I think that a right to privacy is every bit as important to our freedom as are the other rights we enumerate in the Bill of Rights. And if we have to wrest that right back from the state by enshrining it in the highest law of the land, then maybe it's time to do just that.
I've thought that IT analysis firms were a waste of money since the OS/2 debacle back in the early 90s. Go to your local library and get a PC Magazine from 1990 or 1991 -- you'll see dutiful reporting of the latest analysis firm announcement that OS/2 would supplant DOS in 2 years. Even when it was clear to anyone with a brain that Windows was going to beat the tar out of OS/2, the reports persisted.
Why does this happen over and over again? Well, why do people buy Gartner Group reports? To learn that current trends are going to continue? Of course not; people buy these reports so that they don't miss the big changes, the ones that remake the face of their industry -- and which could put them out of business if they don't keep up with the rate of change.
The problem is, the analysis firms make their judgements about what the Next Big Thing is by looking at the market leaders and asking what they are doing. On its face, this makes some sense; after all, who knows more about a market than the market leader? So the analysts work closely with IBM (in the old days) or MS (today), for example, to divine what's going to happen next in the OS marketplace. And the market leader, rationally enough, says "The Next Big Thing is our evolutionary upgrade product, which will add great features and preserve compatibility." So the analysts take demand for the current product, apply a fancy demand curve to it, and predict that the evolutionary upgrade will see exponential growth in demand over the next 3-5 years, and this is The Next Big Thing.
The problem is, revolutionary change never comes from the market leader! It almost always comes from some small, hungry, unknown (or less known) firm that is less worried about cannibalizing current product lines than it is about building the absolute best product. But these are the very firms that fly under Gartner's radar -- because they're not the market leader yet. So Gartner leans on its old sources, which of course are going to predict that current trends will continue to follow a nice steady upward-sloping demand curve. Why would the market leader anticipate revolutionary change? The market leader will do anything to prevent revolutionary change!
So the analysis firms lean on IBM advice on OSes right when Microsoft is about to eat IBM's lunch, they lean on MS sources right when Linux is about to clean MS's clock, and ten years from now they'll all be palling around with people from Red Hat (or whoever) when The NEXT Next Big Thing roars along and steals the spotlight again. And all the clueless PHBs in the world will scratch their heads and wonder how the high-priced analysts could have gotten things so wrong -- while the high-priced analysts scramble, two or three years behind the folks in the trenches, to get to know the geniuses du jour.
Pretty sad. But if you're in the technology business and you can't take the time to really understand the technology you work with, or to muster up some love for the market you serve, you probably deserve whatever nasty fate befalls you by hiring megacorps to do your thinking for you.
I understand what you are trying to say (I think), but the explosion in growth in the low-end is because the prices are falling. This makes PC's more accessible to people who aren't willing to spend $$$ on a computer. In other words, different consumers are buying the cheap PC's, not the older PC consumers who have been buying every couple years. And definitely not the hardcore gamer.
Exactly! Exactly! Yes, all the action is at the low end because prices are falling. Why do you think prices are falling? It's because demand for the Latest and Greatest is extremely soft. Nobody needs a 1GHz Athlon to do anything except play the most demanding games -- and the audience for the most demanding games is tiny. For every hardcore member of a Quake clan, there are ten people for whom "computer gaming" means firing up Deer Hunter for an hour a week. What's more, it's the Deer Hunter audience that is the one that's growing by leaps and bounds -- and you can bet that that audience isn't going to shell out $300 every year to get the Latest and Greatest 3D card. Hardcore gamers will? Who cares? "Hardcore gamers" are already an eensy tiny segment of the market.
I also believe that this enthusiast 3d market has a chance to expand and grow over time into more main stream. Sure, it's a toy now, but being able to render near photo-realistic worlds in real time in response to user inputs...that has potential. As the internet and technology grow and find new ways to solve problems, I think we may see some very neat applications for 3d technology.
OK, so we may see some neat 3D applications in the future that require massive polygon-pushing. Can anyone honestly say that we will see consumer versions of these applications within the next 3 years? If not, why should anyone pony up for the beefiest 3D card? Why not wait until these vaporous applications materialize and buy then, when the cards will be even beefier -- and cheaper to boot?
One final note, I just helped my girlfriend order a new Dell computer. It's not bottom of the barrel cheap, but it was only $1100. It included an Aureal 3d chipset sound card. Sound isn't a commodity. Common, "good enough" sound is a commodity.
OK, so you are too demanding for an el cheapo sound card. That's great. Heck, I'm too demanding for an el cheapo sound card, when it's my own money on the line. But don't confuse techno-literate Slashdot readers like you and I with the broad buying public. "Common, good enough sound" is plenty good for the Deer Hunter crowd, and common, good enough 3D will be good enough for them too.
Now.....ugh. Your argument is the equivalent of saying that people will be happy with their PIII 550's next year and won't ever need to buy an Athlon 1 GHz. This...makes no sense at all.
But you're proving my point! Have you looked at the PC hardware marketplace recently? Most people are happy with P3 550's. In fact, most people are happy with K6-350s! All the action in the consumer marketplace is happening at the low end around cheap PCs, not at the high end around 1GHz Athlons. Nobody but a few enthusiasts (myself included) gives a hoot about 1GHz Athlons.
Why is this? Because for the vast majority of computing tasks, a K6-350 is... Good Enough (TM). The increase in utility for the average user from a CPU upgrade becomes vanishingly small -- certainly smaller than the difference in price. And when an upgrade's cost exceeds its perceived utility, people won't make the upgrade -- which leads to commoditization and integration.
Sound cards have already pushed speakers to their limits . Video cards have a long, long way to go.
Again, the issue here is not theoretical limits of graphics processing. You could make sound cards that would wring even more accuracy and fidelity out of PC speakers if you wanted to. The issue is increase in performance versus increase in cost. Most people think they won't see enough of a benefit from a 1GHz CPU to shell out a premium for it; most people think they won't see enough of a benefit from a 256-bit Sound Blaster to shell out a premium for it; and soon, most people won't see enough of a benefit from a Voodoo6 to shell out a premium for that, either -- regardless of how many more polygons you can squeeze out of it. Once the hardware gets Good Enough, most people stop caring if it will ever get any better.
I fail to understand why this stuff excites people. I've always thought that the market for add-on 3D graphics cards was going to develop a lot like the market for add-on sound cards did, and so far I'm seeing nothing that indicates otherwise.
What I mean is -- consider for a moment how the market for add-on sound cards developed. Up to 1992, sound on the x86 PC was basically nonexistant, unless you owned a flaky almost-compatible like the Tandy 1000. Then the multimedia tidal wave hit and suddenly there was consumer demand for hardware sound support -- and a market sprang up to fill the demand.
Once the demand for sound cards sprang up, the market developed through 3 distinct stages in the next 5 or so years:
Race for Market Position: Five thousand companies hit the market selling sound cards that are all completely incompatible with each other. Software developers pull their hair out trying to decide which to support. Consumers pull their hair out trying to decide which to buy. Eventually one (Creative Labs' Sound Blaster) ekes out enough sales to justify making it the default choice for software developers to support, which launches a virtuous circle of consumers buying it because that's what the software supports and developers supporting it because that's what the consumers have.
Hegemony through De Facto Standards. Soon the virtuous circle described above means that, for good or ill, the Sound Blaster becomes the de facto standard in the marketplace. Other products either become Sound Blaster compatible or are consigned to the margins. Creative maintains its profit margins by releasing a new board every so often(SB, SB Pro, SB16, SB32), upping features and performance. But eventually the feature set becomes Good Enough (TM) for most users, and adding new features becomes a less and less compelling reason for consumers to upgrade. (In the sound card market, this happened, IMHO, with the release of the Sound Blaster 16.) This puts downward pressure on prices, which broadens the market for these Good Enough products (and strains the market for the latest and greatest), which leads to...
Integration and Commoditization. The fact that suddenly the hardware is cheap enough for everyone to own leads to integration -- the Good Enough hardware starts to become part of the motherboard, and the software APIs get rolled into the OS. This effectively kills the mass market for upgrade hardware -- if you can get a Good Enough sound card built right into your PC at the point of purchase, why spend $200 for the Latest and Greatest, especially since you'll never use most of those snazzy features anyway?
So this is where we are today in sound cards -- while a few enthusiasts care about buying the latest Sound Blaster Live! or whatever, the vast majority of users are happy with the 16-bit audio that's hardwired into their motherboards. It's Good Enough!
And that's what's going to happen in the 3D card marketplace, IMHO, fairly soon. We've already passed through stage 1 (I remember agonizing over whether to buy a Voodoo1 or a Rendition Verite card) and stage 2 (with 3Dfx milking their brand name for all it's worth through the Voodoo3). But now Good Enough 3D hardware is starting to come integrated on motherboards, and 3Dfx's Voodoo-only APIs have been almost entirely forsaken in favor of Direct3D, which is integrated into the OS. I've run 3D games on cheapo PCs using this integrated hardware, and while the performance isn't great, it's Good Enough -- while the add-on card companies fight over which card can provide 80 fps in Q3Test, or other "features" which would be lost on the average consumer anyway. So watch for it -- in a year I'd be amazed if there's still a market for whizbang add-on cards. Most people will be just fine with the Voodoo2-level hardware they'll get free with their PC.
Technology isn't good or evil, it just exists. People create things and solve problems, and technology is both the solution to problems, and the source of new ones. To ascribe words like good or evil or tragic to technology is to ignore the problem that we are trying to address in making technology.
You're missing the point. Though he may not realize it, Katz isn't talking about small-t technology, he's talking about big-T Technology, which I would argue is a way of looking at the world rather than any specific invention.
Think of it this way. A longer-lasting light bulb is small-t technology. It is morally neutral. Now, say that society looks at this light bulb and decides that, since it lasts longer, the whole problem of 'night' has been solved -- now you can keep your factories running 24 hours a day. This is Technology, and it is most certainly not morally neutral -- it has its good elements (higher productivity, more jobs) and its bad (stress on families from working odd hours, fatigue from people disconnecting from the natural rhythms of the day/night cycle), but it's not neutral. The light bulb is, the presumption that technical innovation equals social progress is not.
Another example -- if the modern USA is a Technological society, the former USSR was an Ideological society. That is, the common assumption was that society and progress were driven by strict adherence to ideology. Now the small-i term "ideology" encompasses everything from Libertarianism to Fascism, but big-I Ideology is about people filtering all their experiences through the prism of whatever their ideology is -- just like we, more and more, filter our experiences through the technology that we surround ourselves with.
Now look at the Tomorrowland that Katz is talking about. The old-style Tomorrowland is a shrine to the Technological outlook: a world in which everyone is thrifty, brave, and clean simply because they ride zippy monorails to work and have fusion-powered dishwashers in their kitchen. This is Technology at its ridiculous extreme -- assuming that the more small-t tech we accumulate, the more virtuous we will be. Of course, real life is much messier than that; people are people, and no amount of George Jetson streamlining can round the jagged edges off of human nature.
That's the tragedy of Technology -- that we persist in assuming that it will somehow save us from the unpleasantness of ourselves. Of course it won't. But like the Russians, who gave up their Ideological outlook only when it had completely worn out their society, we'll probably have to discover this for ourselves, the hard way.
What I can't understand is why mail readers have to support every HTML tag to begin with. Sure, there are some advantages to formatted email, but why on earth would you need to embed Java/JavaScript/ActiveX/etc. in an email message? What possible utility could come from doing this? And even if you could come up with a good reason, wouldn't a few decent uses for the technology be less important than huge gaping security holes like this?
This isn't a problem related to just email, either -- eBay has (or had a few months ago, anyway) a similar vulnerability, because it allows users to embed HTML into descriptions of their items for sale. Because they allow any HTML tag, this opens the door for malicious, active code to be embedded into an auction item; the best-known example of this is the eBayla bug, which uses javascript to steal passwords from people browsing your auction.
IMHO, the right course for any product that wants to support HTML that isn't a Web browser is to support a subset of HTML -- like Slashdot does for posting "HTML Formatted" posts. Allow people to add harmless formatting tags such as B, A, or BLOCKQUOTE, but ignore tags such as EMBED or SCRIPT. This may ruin the day of anyone who's implementing a Java-based accounting package with an e-mail interface, but it would make life substantially nicer for all the rest of us.
"Cyber-warfare" is hype run amok, a solution in search of a problem. There is absolutely no way in which this new buzzword redefines military operations. I'd be amazed if you can even get two "cyber-warfare experts" who can agree on what it means, much less what its alleged ramifications are.
Let's start with the least ridiculous definition: "cyber-warfare" as hacking into essential systems to pilfer critical data. How dumb do you have to be to connect systems with critical/classified data to the public Internet? The best defense is not encryption -- it's taking the box off the worldwide network! That's why US Dept. of Defense policy is to disconnect all classified systems from the Internet -- any gains you get from connectivity are more than outweighed by risks. Now, this isn't to say that you won't get lucky and find an important system that's connected externally (in fact, it looks like DoD may have been just this stupid), but counting on your enemy to be completely stupid does not a strategy make.
The next level of "cyber-warfare" is supposedly hacking to disable critical commercial systems, like computers controlling nuclear power plants or hydroelectric dams. These may be less secure than government systems, but the irony is that the countries we're most likely to fight -- Iraq, North Korea, etc. -- are also the least likely to have sophisticated computers controlling these systems. They're much more analog than that. Sure, there are countries have these kinds of systems, but those countries -- England, France, Germany, Japan -- are the ones we're least likely to fight!
There's some history here that I think is pertinent. In the 1930s, the US was one of the few countries in the world that was developing a strategic bombing plan for the event of war with Germany. The Army Air Corps did extensive economic and sociological research and decided that the bombing plan should be centered around knocking out the German electric grid. The reason? Because the American electric grid was highly centralized and therefore vulnerable to air attack! It turned out, when war came, that the German system was nothing like ours; it was more decentralized and thus less vulnerable. But the point is that the planners had made the mistake of being trapped in their own experiences rather than looking hard at the enemy -- they were planning to war against themselves. That's behind the fallacy of cyber-warfare too: "cyber-warfare" is most useful against a highly networked, information-age economy -- in other words, against the U.S. In the wars we're likely to fight, though, cyber-warfare will be about as useful as lobbing spitballs. I just hope that nobody has to get killed before DoD figures that out.
ASPs are a good idea, but they won't kill off local applications completely. There are a number of reasons why:
Security. Would you entrust confidential corporate communications to a Hotmail account? OK, now ask yourself if you would entrust the spreadsheet with all the juicy details of your Top Secret business plan to MSExcel.com.
Usability. Just about every web-based application suffers from having to use HTML as a front-end. HTML is great but it is NOT the One True User Interface to Everything -- it's optimized for browsing hypertext, not word-processing or spreadsheet navigation. See Jakob Neilsen's excellent Alertbox column on this subject for more detail.
Performance. Most people are still accessing the Web through modem connections. This makes it difficult to supply data-intensive applications online, and it also adds the extra burden of having to log on to get to your application (which, unlike installing new software, is not a one-time annoyance).
The article claims that Microsoft is developing a version of Office that would work over the web. Suuuure. Microsoft always claims to have a version of its products in the pipeline that works with whatever the buzzword of the moment is (remember Windows for Pen Computing?). They do this to look like they're on top of developments in the industry and to scare off potential challengers, not to develop killer apps for new technologies. Besides, if all applications were Web-based, Microsoft's desktop monopoly would be meaningless, and we all know how seriously they take THAT.
So, maybe in a few years, when bandwidth improves and security improves and some other things improve, ASPs will be universal. But for now they're better for niche applications than they are for general use -- they're just not ready for prime time yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to reply to this, since nobody ever reads a thread on Slashdot for more than a day or so after it was posted anyway, but you make some points that I felt should not stand uncommented on...
Your analogy is flawed. When Doubleclick violates my personal privacy, they do not merely hide from me information that would allow me to make more informed consumption decisions (as in your Coors example). They do violence to me by taking something of value from me -- my personal information -- without my consent, or even my knowledge. More and more, we are seeing the acknowlegement that an individual's personal information has economic value -- witness the SEC's recent decision that trading demographic information for stock constitutes a monetary transaction, not a "get something for free" transaction. Viewed in this light, DoubleClick's actions are theft, not mere misdirection.
I see. When government, which (in the United States, at least) is elected and guided by popular consensus, steps in to mediate a dispute, we are introducing armed thuggery. I would contend that, when someone takes something of value from me without my knowledge, they have done violence to me. When a corporation seeks to do violence to the broad population for its own profit, I see no moral problem with calling on the common defense of law. The situation is really no different than if Union Carbide decided to dump toxic chemicals into the rivers that provide my groundwater. Should my only recourse be to invest in Poland Springs?
I usually don't have a beef with informed libertarianism, but knee-jerk libertarianism is another matter. If you really believe this, then tell us -- under what circumstances would government action be called for? Rape? ("If only she hadn't dressed so provocatively...") Murder? ("If only he hadn't mentioned that huge life insurance policy...") Yes, government is about violence. That's because, in many ways, life is about violence. Reasonable governments deploy violence in the defense of the well-being of their citizenry. This is a moral and justified application of violence. The alternative is the "every man for himself" anarchism in which life is nasty, brutish, and short, and nobody has time to code Open Source software because they are too busy preying upon each other for food and shelter. You may disagree with some ways in which government acts on our behalf, but to dismiss government entirely because it uses violence is to turn yourself over to the tender mercies of all the other violent forces in the world, which you can't vote out of office or impeach.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
You make a good point, but like all things, it's possible to take a good point too far. Saying
is a little like saying "Why complain about car thieves? Their actions need not have any effect whatsoever on you. You have every right to protect yourself. Have you installed an anti-theft device yet? Do you keep a Doberman in the back seat?"
See, thing is, you are completely free to do those things -- but we have and enforce laws against car theft anyway. Why? Because
The same points apply to privacy on the Net. No security measure is 100% secure -- if you filter out cookies, for example, watch as Microsoft rolls out some new tracking mechanism in IE7 that does an end-run around your proxy. And more and more, a societal consensus seems to be forming that violation of privacy online is a Bad Thing. (If it wasn't, you can bet the FTC wouldn't be moving in this direction.)
Point being, yes, you can and should defend your personal privacy on the Net. But this does not obviate the potential improvement we could see if privacy was protected by law as well as by individual action. Not to mention that the vast majority of people aren't technically proficient enough to install and configure Junkbuster, or edit their HOSTS file -- are you saying that their privacy is somehow less sacrosanct than yours?
The bottom line -- saying "don't rely on the government to protect you" is silly. Of course there are things individuals can do to enhance their own privacy. But there is also room for reasonable regulation in this space. We have laws settling lots of other disputes that used to get settled by individuals duelling in the streets, and we're generally better off for having them, I think. I have yet to hear any persuasive argument why the outcome will be any different on this issue.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
You make some good points, but I think you took some portions of my argument too literally. Of course neither the Federalists nor the Democratic-Republicans were arguing specifically about corporate power in the 1790s. However, arguments about business and trade, the core issues that affect corporations, were extremely common. Tariff issues and free versus restricted trade were bitterly partisan issues -- so much so that many New England states threatened to secede from the nascent Republic over them.
Your primary objection to my argument seems to center around the use of the word "corporations", which you object to because corporations did not exist in the Revolutionary era. Well, maybe not in the strictest sense of the word, but creating legal entities to spread the risk of a business enterprise around was nothing new for them; joint-stock companies had been around for a long time, and indeed had financed many of the earliest colonial ventures. The rise of a prosperous merchant class in the American colonies was what drove the Revolution (a war over trade tariffs, don't forget), and the Federalists were certainly eager to encourage and promote the growth of business, both at home and for export abroad. Just because "corporations" hadn't been created yet doesn't mean that the Federalists weren't responsive to business interests over the interests of the broad mass of people.
Now, the battles of the Federalist era were hardly the biggest reason why we are where we are today -- that honor would have to go to the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are legally equivalent to people, which I think history will eventually judge indefensible. But we can't just say that the founding fathers were all "geniuses" who were out for the noble aim of Bettering the People. There were clearly class and economic issues driving the political conflicts of the Federalist era, and those class and economic issues are the same ones that face us in the age of corporate politics.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
I'm really not sure what to make of this article. It's hardly controversial in this forum to say that corporatism is bad, but to say that it somehow contradicts the dreams of the Founding Fathers indicates that Katz's grasp on American history is tenuous at best.
The Founders were actually split on the subject; after the Revolution, they eventually split into two camps. The Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, had the philosophy of individualism that Katz speaks of; Jefferson wanted America to basically stay an underdeveloped nation of small-scale farmers. The Federalists, on the other hand, wanted to see America develop quickly, and were very supportive of corporate expansion through programs like the founding of the Bank of the United States, America's first central bank. The Federalists included powerful figures such as George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, and they basically controlled the government through the early days of the Republic until they overreached and tried to criminalize criticism of their programs through the Alien and Sedition Acts. (Read American Aurora by Richard Rosenfeld for a great treatment of the tyranny the Federalists tried to impose on us.)
So the tension between corporations and individuals is hardly new -- it's been with us since the founding of the Republic, and it will probably be with us forever. We can, and should, take steps to limit the power corporations hold over the public sphere -- but to claim that somehow America was an idyll of untrammeled individualism until big bad Time Warner came along is to demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of our common history.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Actually, you're only 2/3rds right. While Gilliam has said that he never set out to create a formal "trilogy", he realized after the fact that the themes of three of his films do track the progression of the life of the dreamer from birth to death: Time Bandits showing the dreamer as a child, Brazil depicting the dreamer in adulthood, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (not 12 Monkeys ) showing the dreamer in old age. The three movies in the "trilogy" were all written by Gilliam (which allowed him to shape the storyline to fit his ideas), but he did not write 12 Monkeys (he was brought in by Universal as a hired director to film an already-written script).
Gilliam's films are almost uniformly fascinating to watch and think about, even the less artistically successful ones such as Baron Munchausen and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . Anyone who is interested in Gilliam's work can find lots of great info in two books: The Battle of Brazil by film critic Jack Mathews, chronicling the struggle on Gilliam's part to get Brazil released with its original ending, and Gilliam on Gilliam , a series of interviews in which Gilliam talks about his life and work. Both are excellent reads.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
I'm amazed that nobody has commented on how this is coming from the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), which has repeatedly proven itself to be utterly clueless when it comes to the Internet it is charged with protecting.
The NIPC's director, Michael Vatis, seems bent on using every single hiccup on the Net to prove how Essential and Important (TM) the NIPC is. When the Melissa virus hit, NIPC was running around screaming about the end of the world. After that the NIPC was warning about the evil "Y2K viruses" that never really existed (oops!). (The NIPC alert I linked to is a scream; it basically says that there are lots of Nasty Viruses out there, and that, if someone could write a Nasty Virus, they could probably write a Y2K virus, so you should panic immediately.) Now, since Melissa and Y2K failed to destroy civilization, the NIPC is beating the drum over the DoS issue, calling a bunch of script kiddies who inconvenience some people "cyber terrorists".
The common thread here is that the Net is a nasty, brutish place, and only the big tough NIPC can protect us.I'm not sure why they keep doing this, unless Vatis is such a publicity hound that he will take any excuse to "alert" people of "threats", even if those alerts do more damage than help by panicking people into distrusting the reliability of the Net. His fearmongering has become so blatant and counterproductive that he's become a favorite target of ridicule for Rob Rosenberger, the crusader for common sense regarding computer viruses.
Sure, it's bad that these big sites are suffering DoS. But it's not "terrorism", and slinging around that word only proves how cushy daily life for most people in America truly is. It's hard to imagine anyone rationally being able to compare congestion at Yahoo! to blowing up a federal building. Maybe if Vatis stopped to think for a moment before lunging to get his agency in front of the cameras of the press, he'd realize this too.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Jeez, how things change. When Katz first appeared on Slashdot, I was sure that his participation would be a Good Thing -- I used to like most of his HotWired columns, and he seemed like a decent enough guy with some interesting things to say. But like I said -- whoa, do things change.
This article has got to be one of the most self-absorbed things I've ever read. It is nothing but one long boo-hoo about how rough and tumble Slashdot is, and how hard it is for "outsiders" to participate. Now, Katz very PC-ly starts off identifying "outsiders" as women and people of color, but instead of addressing actual ways in which the Slashdot community marginalizes these folks (which would have been a valuable discussion to have), he quickly veers off instead into a discussion of how Slashdot marginalizes him! It's like Katz is that guy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, screaming "'elp! 'elp! I'm being repressed!"
The whole article can be summarized as follows: "I like the idea of Slashdot, but it is too focused on this technology stuff instead of stuff I'm interested in. And whenever I try to make Slashdot into what I want it to be, rather than what the community wants it to be, people flame me. This community should be open to anyone, even people who have no interest in the subjects under discussion. Boo-hoo."
Jon, I have news for you. Slashdot works. I've been participating in online communities since 1985, and Slashdot is one of maybe three or four I've encountered that gets it right. Discussions too rowdy for you? Browse at +1 or +2 -- I do this and it's amazing how little junk you find at that setting. Don't like a topic area? Filter it out in your Preferences. And if you're a good citizen, your Karma goes up and you get recognition and responsibility. Slashdot works amazingly well given the constraints it operates under. (Not to mention that if you think this is a free-fire zone, you've clearly never spent any time on Usenet.) The cream rises to the top of the discussions, and the stupid juvenile stuff stays at the bottom, easily filtered out. This is how Things Should Be!
The biggest problem here isn't Slashdot, Jon -- it's your expectations of what Slashdot should be. Here's an idea -- rather than sitting on an ivory perch posting articles about how much Slashdot needs "fixing", why don't you swear off your columns for a month and come participate, by posting in the discussions. Build up your Karma, take a few hits, and be a part of the community for a change, rather than wagging your finger at us for not living up to what you think we should be. I think that if you actually used Slashdot rather than just philosophizing about it, you'd be pleasantly surprised. On the other hand, you could just dismiss my post as another useless rant from someone who is out to flame poor Katz. Anyone want to place bets on which option he'll take?
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
The most insightful commentary I've seen on the merger so far isn't anything in this article -- it's Robert X. Cringely's take. Cringely proposes that, rather than seeing the merger as a sign of AOL optimism about its future, it should be seen as a sign of AOL's pessimism, especially regarding the market fortunes of Net companies.
It makes sense when you think about it. AOL stock has gone through the stratosphere based largely on the idea that AOL is a 'pure Internet play'. Buying a big old media company will end this perception and put a drag on the growth of the stock value. So why should AOL buy Time Warner outright, when they could get the same access to TW content through a less formal partnership, while preserving their hyper-performing stock value?
Cringely argues that AOL is betting that being a 'pure Internet play' isn't going to be a huge benefit for much longer -- in fact, it may become a liability if and when the market bubble bursts. If that happens, suddenly the Amazons of the world look like awful investments as their valuations are "corrected". But AOL doesn't look as bad, because it's got real-world value based on its ownership of Time Warner's many established brands, as opposed to the purely theoretical value that many Net companies have. In other words, AOL knows that it's had a terrific run at the tables, and it's cashing out its chips and socking the money into the bank before its streak turns sour. It's buying insurance while it can still afford to. It's turning its virtual wealth, represented by stock valuation (which could disappear overnight if the public mentality changed) into real wealth, in the form of Time Warner's media properties (which will hold value no matter how the winds blow).
Is this the complete rationale behind the merger? Well, probably not. But viewed in this light it sure does look like a vote of no confidence in the Internet Economy on the part of Steve Case & Co.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Nope. THX is not a digital audio format like AC-3, it's a process for certifying the presentation quality of movie sound, regardless of what format the sound is presented in. The 3 major surround sound formats in theatres today are Dolby Digital AC-3, DTS, and Sony SDDS. A theatre (or piece of home theatre equipment) using any of these formats can be THX certified, as long as it conforms to Lucasfilm's quality guidelines. So the decision to standardize DVD-Video sound on AC-3 in no way threatens Lucasfilm or THX. (Lots of high-end AC-3 home theatre components are, in fact, THX-certified.)
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
As much as I respect Roger Ebert, I have to say that he's just missing the point completely here.
Ebert contends that film-based systems will be better than digital in the future because film will provide a better-quality image than digital can; and on this count, I think he's absolutely right. Even uncompressed DV lacks the "warmth" (for lack of a better term) of film, and the MaxiVision system he touts sounds like it provides an image that nobody in the DV world can hope to match.
The problem is, image quality is unimportant. Now, before everyone gets up in arms here, think for a second. Who is clamoring for image quality that is better than today's films? General audiences? Nope, they are happy with the cruddy image from a poorly set up projector in a shoebox theater in their shopping mall. Theater owners? Nope, they make more money by dividing their space into multiple small, low-tech screens rather than lovingly setting up one beautiful screen and cutting the number of movies they can show by 11/12ths. Studios? Nope, they know that what makes them money: formulaic movies with name stars presented on as many screens as possible. If they could make money presenting more striking images, they'd all be doing IMAX films by now.
So where it counts -- money -- MaxiVision & other advanced film systems are irrelevant, because nobody wants them bad enough to pay for them. Digital, however, is a different story. Digital offers a big money benefit to one of these players -- the studios -- because it cuts dramatically one of the biggest cost in distributing a film: prints & advertising.
P&A is one of the biggest line items on a film's budget, running into millions of dollars. Each theater which is going to show your film needs a "print" (an analog dupe of the film) to run through their projector. In fact, they need more than one, because prints wear out or get scratched or otherwise start to die after awhile. When you consider that each print is absurdly expensive, and that a movie that "opens wide" goes to 2,500+ theaters, you can see how this gets expensive quick.
Digital changes all this. Suddenly you can stop sending reels of film around (which are expensive) and start sending around magnetic disks (which aren't). Even better, you could conceivably ship the image via a fiber optic cable or satellite connection and avoid "prints" altogether. Then "P&A" just becomes "A" and you've just saved millions, which to a Hollywood executive means that his project is that much more likely to be profitable and thus advance his career.
So, while I understand Ebert's position and wish that we lived in a world where he was right, where the quality of the experience was the prime factor, we don't, and he's wrong. Digital will overtake film, not because it's better, but because it's cheaper -- and even the most beautiful MaxiVision 48 images won't convince the Hollywood moneymen to ignore that math.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
... to watch Katz continue to shoehorn whatever's in the news today into his standard schema of "geeks" and "tech" and whatnot, no matter how well the topics fit together.
"Techno-idealism"? How on Earth does what's been happening in Seattle have anything to do with technology? It has more to do with social science than computer science -- people feel threatened because a faceless Other is making rules that affect their lives, and they have no recourse if they don't like the world the Other is building for them. So they go to protest -- peacefully -- and then people on both sides overreact (as is common when crowds face police) and things get out of hand. Where in this description do the words "Internet" and "technology" fit? They don't. The growth of technology is one big story in the modern era, but it's not the only story, and we don't need to pretend somehow that all events in our lives spring from a Prime Mover called Mother Internet -- or that the only way to invest significance in an event is to somehow associate it with the tech world. To do so cheapens both the important changes that tech has wrought on the world, and the other movements and ideas that affect our lives and times.
Seattle is an important moment. It could very well mark the end of the political era we think of as the "90s", which began with the Gulf War and George Bush's New World Order, and the start of the next era, the backlash to the globalization, corporatization, and McDonaldization of the planet. That's the story that'll come out of the Battle of Seattle, not that some rioters had Web sites or carried PalmPilots or whatever. Of course some of them have Web sites. A percentage of any random sample of people these days will turn up some with Web sites -- but correlation does not imply causation, and those Web sites did not spark the flames in Seattle, Jon. Those flames were sparked by the anger and fear of people who feel themselves being stripped of their freedom and dignity by tiny elites and the social forces those elites command. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
The problem isn't limited to input devices. This article got me thinking about something I've been wondering about for awhile -- the recent tendency to use a 'standard' interface for various tasks, rather than a purpose-built, optimal interface.
It seems like there are dozens of companies these days that want their interface design to be the One True Interface to All Things. The best example of this is Microsoft, which every couple of years makes noise about how toasters and refrigerators should be controlled with some variant of Windows. But MS isn't the only offender -- lots of Internet companies do this too, by forcing you to use an HTML front-end to their resources rather than designing software for the purpose.
Don't get me wrong, I can see the reason for this approach -- once you've learned the One True Interface, you're set, you don't have to learn anything else. The problem is that trying to force all devices to share the same interface means that some of those devices are going to feel clunky -- or, worse, be downright unusable.
Take, for example, the whole WinCE vs. PalmOS war. On its face, you'd think people would prefer WinCE devices, since they're already familiar with the Windows interface. But (based on my observations, not any hard research) it seems to me that people vastly prefer the Palm interface, which is optimized for handheld devices, rather than Windows, which really wants you to have a big, roomy display to work well. In other words, people are willing to learn a new, unfamiliar interface if doing so offers them substantive productivity benefits -- which would seem to give savvy product developers an incentive to follow Mr. Christiansen's advice to optimize the interface for the task.
This trend is only going to get worse as computing intelligence is embedded in more and more consumer devices. The temptation will be very strong for those developing software for such embedded systems to leverage interface designs they already have, rather than create from scratch. With more and more of a car, for example, being run by software, it's not hard to imagine MS someday proposing that you run your AutoPC through a modified Windows interface, even though such an interface would be totally inappropriate for the task at hand. Let's hope that more product & software designers take note of the evidence that people prefer optimized interfaces and don't automatically rule them out.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Even if people aren't in fact generally being surveilled, there is a definite effect when people feel that they could be being surveilled at any time. It has a chilling effect on democracy -- people become afraid to say things that may be controversial or unpopular when it's possible that Big Brother could use those statements against them in some way. When public discourse is stunted like this, democracy suffers.
And what about when the surveillance goes beyond public policy matters and becomes a tool to give force to the prejudices and petty hatreds of the men who control the cameras? J. Edgar Hoover made a career out of using intelligence collected under official auspices to destroy the lives of people he just happened not to like, for whatever reason. Does it have any bearing on the public good whether, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. cheated on his wife? Hoover thought so. Hoover decided that any black man who talked about freedom for his long-suffering people was a Communist by definition, and spent untold taxpayer dollars spying on King's private life in order to find some silver bullet that he could use against him. And this wasn't an isolated case -- Hoover kept tabs on anyone and everyone who he could use some leverage over. And anyone who dared speak out against this could count on having Hoover's cameras pointed at them next. This gave Hoover great power -- and his power knew no bound, no accountability. Secret government by its nature is un-democratic government.
Your main point seems to be that people should shut up and sit down because they're not important enough for anyone to pay attention to, and even if they were nobody's being dragged away in Black Marias yet. But "security through obscurity" only works when you're willing to forfeit your right to participate in public life, a right which no free man or woman who wishes to make a difference in society should be asked to surrender. And the fact that we have what freedoms we enjoy today springs from the efforts and sacrifices of people who knew that if you wait until the secret police are at your door to protest the loss of your freedom, you've waited too long.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Back when Wired was still worth reading, they ran a pretty good article called "The Making of the President 2000" (which is archived for free browsing on their Web site) comparing Al Gore's and Newt Gingrich's efforts to position themselves as the tech-savviest politico in preparation for the 2000 election. Of course, the article, which originally was published in the December 1995 issue, is a little dated; remember, this was back in the full flush of the Republican Revolution, when Gingrich looked like a revolutionary conservative leader and not a broken, slightly pathetic figure. But it's still worth reading for anyone interested in how Gore's ideas about tech developed to where they are today.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
How does guaranteeing one's right to privacy equate to violence? Americans currently enjoy a range of Constitutional protections against government abuse. Amendment I guarantees that the government can't shut you up based on your viewpoints, and can't prohibit you from worshipping whatever deity you prefer. Amendment II guarantees that you can have the means to defend yourself should the government attempt to illegitimately impose its will upon you. Amendment III guarantees that the government can't seize your property for purposes of national security. Amendment IV guarantees that the government can't seize or search your personal effects without a warrant and probable cause to suspect you of having committing a crime. And on and on and on. These are not your average laws which are aimed at regulating the behavior of Joe Citizen through government sanction -- these are aimed at regulating the behavior of Big Brother by posting for all to see the list of things that he isn't allowed to do!
How does this equate to doing violence? It seems to me that it prevents violence. Don't forget that, in many countries where the citizens don't enjoy specific written protections such as these, the only recourse against government abuse is to take up arms. We have the option of giving the government a good smack upside the head in the court system, which seems like a much more healthy way to run a country to me.
And to presume that "intelligence" can preserve your security against these threats is silly and naive. Do you honestly believe that PGPfone will protect you if the National Security Agency decides they want to listen to your phone calls? Remember, no encryption scheme is perfect and every cypher can be broken given that enough resources (man-hours and computing power) are thrown at it. And the NSA can bring a colossal amount of resources to bear on the problem of getting around the defenses you "intelligently" mount -- a much larger amount than you, as someone who presumably has some job in life other than encrypting all your communications, can muster. Not to mention the snooty elitism of assuming that it's somehow OK if the government listens to private communications as long as it's only those dumb people who don't know how to set up PGP (in other words, about 98% of the population) who are affected.
I know that you're trying to articulate a libertarian viewpoint, but it seems like you're taking it to a ridiculous extreme. If you're truly a libertarian you should love the Bill of Rights. You should memorize the thing! It's not some silly law taking your freedoms away -- it's guaranteeing your freedoms, right there in writing! And how can it be bad, from a libertarian standpoint, to add "privacy" to the list of specificially protected freedoms?
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
We've almost reached the point where it's less surprising to hear about a government agency that abuses its powers than it is to hear about one that doesn't. It's not just Echelon, either -- abuses abound; for example, CNN is reporting that politicians of both parties regularly lean on the IRS to force audits of their political opponents. Now, I'm generally a politically liberal kinda guy, but in this kind of atmosphere it's not hard to understand why some people feel compelled to keep a firearm in their homes, just in case the Government decides to come after them.
Of course, stocking up arms for the End Times isn't a productive solution, either. It seems to me that the big problem here is that Americans don't have a clear right to privacy in their communications -- we only have patchwork protections from case law, which provides a legal gray area where the government can fit things like Echelon. So what can we, as citizens, do? Well, maybe we should amend the Fourth Amendment, which currently protects your private property from illegal government seizure, to extend to non-physical personal property (i.e. electronic communications) as well.
Currently, Amendment IV reads as follows:
I'd propose adding a few simple words (which I'll denote in bold):Now, IANAL, and I'm certainly willing to be flexible on the wording, but it seems to me that an addition along these lines could have many salutory effects:
Now, I'm generally not a fan of tinkering with the Constitution, which has worked remarkably well for 200+ years. But I'm simply amazed that something as obtrusive, as invasive, as downright un-American as Echelon isn't unconstitutional on its face. In an age of digital communications and restrictions on hard encryption, when it's orders of magnitude easier for the State to intrude on our privacy then it is for us to protect ourselves, I think that a right to privacy is every bit as important to our freedom as are the other rights we enumerate in the Bill of Rights. And if we have to wrest that right back from the state by enshrining it in the highest law of the land, then maybe it's time to do just that.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
I've thought that IT analysis firms were a waste of money since the OS/2 debacle back in the early 90s. Go to your local library and get a PC Magazine from 1990 or 1991 -- you'll see dutiful reporting of the latest analysis firm announcement that OS/2 would supplant DOS in 2 years. Even when it was clear to anyone with a brain that Windows was going to beat the tar out of OS/2, the reports persisted.
Why does this happen over and over again? Well, why do people buy Gartner Group reports? To learn that current trends are going to continue? Of course not; people buy these reports so that they don't miss the big changes, the ones that remake the face of their industry -- and which could put them out of business if they don't keep up with the rate of change.
The problem is, the analysis firms make their judgements about what the Next Big Thing is by looking at the market leaders and asking what they are doing. On its face, this makes some sense; after all, who knows more about a market than the market leader? So the analysts work closely with IBM (in the old days) or MS (today), for example, to divine what's going to happen next in the OS marketplace. And the market leader, rationally enough, says "The Next Big Thing is our evolutionary upgrade product, which will add great features and preserve compatibility." So the analysts take demand for the current product, apply a fancy demand curve to it, and predict that the evolutionary upgrade will see exponential growth in demand over the next 3-5 years, and this is The Next Big Thing.
The problem is, revolutionary change never comes from the market leader! It almost always comes from some small, hungry, unknown (or less known) firm that is less worried about cannibalizing current product lines than it is about building the absolute best product. But these are the very firms that fly under Gartner's radar -- because they're not the market leader yet. So Gartner leans on its old sources, which of course are going to predict that current trends will continue to follow a nice steady upward-sloping demand curve. Why would the market leader anticipate revolutionary change? The market leader will do anything to prevent revolutionary change!
So the analysis firms lean on IBM advice on OSes right when Microsoft is about to eat IBM's lunch, they lean on MS sources right when Linux is about to clean MS's clock, and ten years from now they'll all be palling around with people from Red Hat (or whoever) when The NEXT Next Big Thing roars along and steals the spotlight again. And all the clueless PHBs in the world will scratch their heads and wonder how the high-priced analysts could have gotten things so wrong -- while the high-priced analysts scramble, two or three years behind the folks in the trenches, to get to know the geniuses du jour.
Pretty sad. But if you're in the technology business and you can't take the time to really understand the technology you work with, or to muster up some love for the market you serve, you probably deserve whatever nasty fate befalls you by hiring megacorps to do your thinking for you.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Exactly! Exactly! Yes, all the action is at the low end because prices are falling. Why do you think prices are falling? It's because demand for the Latest and Greatest is extremely soft. Nobody needs a 1GHz Athlon to do anything except play the most demanding games -- and the audience for the most demanding games is tiny. For every hardcore member of a Quake clan, there are ten people for whom "computer gaming" means firing up Deer Hunter for an hour a week. What's more, it's the Deer Hunter audience that is the one that's growing by leaps and bounds -- and you can bet that that audience isn't going to shell out $300 every year to get the Latest and Greatest 3D card. Hardcore gamers will? Who cares? "Hardcore gamers" are already an eensy tiny segment of the market.
OK, so we may see some neat 3D applications in the future that require massive polygon-pushing. Can anyone honestly say that we will see consumer versions of these applications within the next 3 years? If not, why should anyone pony up for the beefiest 3D card? Why not wait until these vaporous applications materialize and buy then, when the cards will be even beefier -- and cheaper to boot?
OK, so you are too demanding for an el cheapo sound card. That's great. Heck, I'm too demanding for an el cheapo sound card, when it's my own money on the line. But don't confuse techno-literate Slashdot readers like you and I with the broad buying public. "Common, good enough sound" is plenty good for the Deer Hunter crowd, and common, good enough 3D will be good enough for them too.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
But you're proving my point! Have you looked at the PC hardware marketplace recently? Most people are happy with P3 550's. In fact, most people are happy with K6-350s! All the action in the consumer marketplace is happening at the low end around cheap PCs, not at the high end around 1GHz Athlons. Nobody but a few enthusiasts (myself included) gives a hoot about 1GHz Athlons.
Why is this? Because for the vast majority of computing tasks, a K6-350 is... Good Enough (TM). The increase in utility for the average user from a CPU upgrade becomes vanishingly small -- certainly smaller than the difference in price. And when an upgrade's cost exceeds its perceived utility, people won't make the upgrade -- which leads to commoditization and integration.
Again, the issue here is not theoretical limits of graphics processing. You could make sound cards that would wring even more accuracy and fidelity out of PC speakers if you wanted to. The issue is increase in performance versus increase in cost. Most people think they won't see enough of a benefit from a 1GHz CPU to shell out a premium for it; most people think they won't see enough of a benefit from a 256-bit Sound Blaster to shell out a premium for it; and soon, most people won't see enough of a benefit from a Voodoo6 to shell out a premium for that, either -- regardless of how many more polygons you can squeeze out of it. Once the hardware gets Good Enough, most people stop caring if it will ever get any better.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
I fail to understand why this stuff excites people. I've always thought that the market for add-on 3D graphics cards was going to develop a lot like the market for add-on sound cards did, and so far I'm seeing nothing that indicates otherwise.
What I mean is -- consider for a moment how the market for add-on sound cards developed. Up to 1992, sound on the x86 PC was basically nonexistant, unless you owned a flaky almost-compatible like the Tandy 1000. Then the multimedia tidal wave hit and suddenly there was consumer demand for hardware sound support -- and a market sprang up to fill the demand.
Once the demand for sound cards sprang up, the market developed through 3 distinct stages in the next 5 or so years:
So this is where we are today in sound cards -- while a few enthusiasts care about buying the latest Sound Blaster Live! or whatever, the vast majority of users are happy with the 16-bit audio that's hardwired into their motherboards. It's Good Enough!
And that's what's going to happen in the 3D card marketplace, IMHO, fairly soon. We've already passed through stage 1 (I remember agonizing over whether to buy a Voodoo1 or a Rendition Verite card) and stage 2 (with 3Dfx milking their brand name for all it's worth through the Voodoo3). But now Good Enough 3D hardware is starting to come integrated on motherboards, and 3Dfx's Voodoo-only APIs have been almost entirely forsaken in favor of Direct3D, which is integrated into the OS. I've run 3D games on cheapo PCs using this integrated hardware, and while the performance isn't great, it's Good Enough -- while the add-on card companies fight over which card can provide 80 fps in Q3Test, or other "features" which would be lost on the average consumer anyway. So watch for it -- in a year I'd be amazed if there's still a market for whizbang add-on cards. Most people will be just fine with the Voodoo2-level hardware they'll get free with their PC.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
You're missing the point. Though he may not realize it, Katz isn't talking about small-t technology, he's talking about big-T Technology, which I would argue is a way of looking at the world rather than any specific invention.
Think of it this way. A longer-lasting light bulb is small-t technology. It is morally neutral. Now, say that society looks at this light bulb and decides that, since it lasts longer, the whole problem of 'night' has been solved -- now you can keep your factories running 24 hours a day. This is Technology, and it is most certainly not morally neutral -- it has its good elements (higher productivity, more jobs) and its bad (stress on families from working odd hours, fatigue from people disconnecting from the natural rhythms of the day/night cycle), but it's not neutral. The light bulb is, the presumption that technical innovation equals social progress is not.
Another example -- if the modern USA is a Technological society, the former USSR was an Ideological society. That is, the common assumption was that society and progress were driven by strict adherence to ideology. Now the small-i term "ideology" encompasses everything from Libertarianism to Fascism, but big-I Ideology is about people filtering all their experiences through the prism of whatever their ideology is -- just like we, more and more, filter our experiences through the technology that we surround ourselves with.
Now look at the Tomorrowland that Katz is talking about. The old-style Tomorrowland is a shrine to the Technological outlook: a world in which everyone is thrifty, brave, and clean simply because they ride zippy monorails to work and have fusion-powered dishwashers in their kitchen. This is Technology at its ridiculous extreme -- assuming that the more small-t tech we accumulate, the more virtuous we will be. Of course, real life is much messier than that; people are people, and no amount of George Jetson streamlining can round the jagged edges off of human nature.
That's the tragedy of Technology -- that we persist in assuming that it will somehow save us from the unpleasantness of ourselves. Of course it won't. But like the Russians, who gave up their Ideological outlook only when it had completely worn out their society, we'll probably have to discover this for ourselves, the hard way.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
What I can't understand is why mail readers have to support every HTML tag to begin with. Sure, there are some advantages to formatted email, but why on earth would you need to embed Java/JavaScript/ActiveX/etc. in an email message? What possible utility could come from doing this? And even if you could come up with a good reason, wouldn't a few decent uses for the technology be less important than huge gaping security holes like this?
This isn't a problem related to just email, either -- eBay has (or had a few months ago, anyway) a similar vulnerability, because it allows users to embed HTML into descriptions of their items for sale. Because they allow any HTML tag, this opens the door for malicious, active code to be embedded into an auction item; the best-known example of this is the eBayla bug, which uses javascript to steal passwords from people browsing your auction.
IMHO, the right course for any product that wants to support HTML that isn't a Web browser is to support a subset of HTML -- like Slashdot does for posting "HTML Formatted" posts. Allow people to add harmless formatting tags such as B, A, or BLOCKQUOTE, but ignore tags such as EMBED or SCRIPT. This may ruin the day of anyone who's implementing a Java-based accounting package with an e-mail interface, but it would make life substantially nicer for all the rest of us.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
"Cyber-warfare" is hype run amok, a solution in search of a problem. There is absolutely no way in which this new buzzword redefines military operations. I'd be amazed if you can even get two "cyber-warfare experts" who can agree on what it means, much less what its alleged ramifications are.
Let's start with the least ridiculous definition: "cyber-warfare" as hacking into essential systems to pilfer critical data. How dumb do you have to be to connect systems with critical/classified data to the public Internet? The best defense is not encryption -- it's taking the box off the worldwide network! That's why US Dept. of Defense policy is to disconnect all classified systems from the Internet -- any gains you get from connectivity are more than outweighed by risks. Now, this isn't to say that you won't get lucky and find an important system that's connected externally (in fact, it looks like DoD may have been just this stupid), but counting on your enemy to be completely stupid does not a strategy make.
The next level of "cyber-warfare" is supposedly hacking to disable critical commercial systems, like computers controlling nuclear power plants or hydroelectric dams. These may be less secure than government systems, but the irony is that the countries we're most likely to fight -- Iraq, North Korea, etc. -- are also the least likely to have sophisticated computers controlling these systems. They're much more analog than that. Sure, there are countries have these kinds of systems, but those countries -- England, France, Germany, Japan -- are the ones we're least likely to fight!
There's some history here that I think is pertinent. In the 1930s, the US was one of the few countries in the world that was developing a strategic bombing plan for the event of war with Germany. The Army Air Corps did extensive economic and sociological research and decided that the bombing plan should be centered around knocking out the German electric grid. The reason? Because the American electric grid was highly centralized and therefore vulnerable to air attack! It turned out, when war came, that the German system was nothing like ours; it was more decentralized and thus less vulnerable. But the point is that the planners had made the mistake of being trapped in their own experiences rather than looking hard at the enemy -- they were planning to war against themselves. That's behind the fallacy of cyber-warfare too: "cyber-warfare" is most useful against a highly networked, information-age economy -- in other words, against the U.S. In the wars we're likely to fight, though, cyber-warfare will be about as useful as lobbing spitballs. I just hope that nobody has to get killed before DoD figures that out.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
ASPs are a good idea, but they won't kill off local applications completely. There are a number of reasons why:
The article claims that Microsoft is developing a version of Office that would work over the web. Suuuure. Microsoft always claims to have a version of its products in the pipeline that works with whatever the buzzword of the moment is (remember Windows for Pen Computing?). They do this to look like they're on top of developments in the industry and to scare off potential challengers, not to develop killer apps for new technologies. Besides, if all applications were Web-based, Microsoft's desktop monopoly would be meaningless, and we all know how seriously they take THAT.
So, maybe in a few years, when bandwidth improves and security improves and some other things improve, ASPs will be universal. But for now they're better for niche applications than they are for general use -- they're just not ready for prime time yet.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz