Welcome to "advanced, free and democratic" Europe. For those not-bothering-to-be-bothered-anybody there are, of course, plenty of EU edutainment materials and bedtime stories.
Ironically, many card subjects come to interpret this state of affairs in a contra view (the card helps streamline my dealings with authority, rather than the card is my license to deal with authorities). The Australia Card campaign referred to the card as a license to live.
The above is from the ID Cards FAQ by Privacy International. Highly recommended reading, for the sake of us all.
A more fundamental question:
Why doesn't the UK dump IWF and censorship?
Why should we hope to have 'appropriate' censorship, or hope that censor 'mistakes' can be 'corrected'? When we accept censorship as a tool 'for the common good', and get caught in Byzantine discussions about which speech/'content' is more or less 'harmful' and should be less or more free (instead of adopting a simpler view like the one in the US First Amendment), we are already sliding down a very steep, very slippery slope.
Although not a censorship system per se, it ends up being useful for government-mandated filtering policies (at national or institutional levels) based on ratings by locally blessed (or treaty-sanctified) rating institutions. Political power, bad journalism, and others systematically protesting against the internet as 'the new wild west' repeatedly claim that 'something should be done' to prevent spreading of 'misinformation' (in contrast to 'reference' content) and, ultimately, the infocalypse.
Always beware government abuse of any tools and standards, however useful they may seem at first. As with risks of massive private data archives, hoping standardized ratings systems won't be misused for censorship purposes seems like hoping that water won't wet...
YouTube is a private service but, increasingly, each such 'self-censorship' move seems much less a result of some private spontaneous policy than 'the reasonably safe' course of action under systematic and systemic bullying from state institutions, lobbies, and bad journalism.
Those to whose pressure Google is now bowing, like Joe Lieberman and his sponsors, are both willing and increasingly able to upgrade current censorship policies from bullying-induced 'self-regulation of the industry' into aggressive censorship legislation.
The most honorable Senator Joseph Isadore Lieberman would certainly
not promote widespread media censorship and bullying of the press
concerning so-called
''anti-semitic''self-hate' views on Middle East issues...
Finally, we should not forget some valuable insight on "the domestic
radicalization process" which, with Joseph Lieberman as Chairman,
the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs has included in the report "Violent
Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist
Threat". Apart from minor detais on player
identification, the four-stage model in page 4 seems remarkably
insightful when confronted with recent US history and even with the good Senator's own
radicalizing messages. Will such 'aiding and abetting' discourse be removed from YouTube as part of the ongoing un'unamerican' First Amendment Amendment?
What needs to be put aside for good is the belief that any so-called "momentum" behind ABM and similar schemes comes in some way from an altruistic "industry" intent to free email users from spam when in fact it is one of several attempts to get a "piece of the action" from the most sucessful uses of the Internet based (until when?) on open protocols. Such "altruistic" industry/government moves are usually accompanied by fallacious hand-waving about some impending "tragedy of the commons".
Spam reduction is just one of the baits here; another one is the promise of sharing bits of the money with several players including the end-users, those ultimately affected by the inevitable (but pseudo-authoritavely FAQ-downplayed) security disasters waiting to happen with ABM.
In fact, what this is about is yet another partial privatization of the commons; as your FAQ gently puts it, with this new Internet toll,
"Escrow agencies, ISPs and underwriters will each be able to take a cut off the top of any claimed bonds as services fees, and escrow agencies will be able to make additional money on depositor float. The exact distribution and size of these fees are not known at this time, but we expect them to settle to values that reflect the market for such services and its competitive structure. A fee of as much as 10% in total does not seem unreasonable."
In fact, what the ABM toll builders hope for is not a quasi-extinction of spam. Survival of at least some spam is part of the business model, with spammers playing by ABM rules
being rewarded with the ABM newspeak label of "legitimate marketers".
"Many Fortune 1000 companies, legitimate small businesses and others have shied away from email marketing for fear of being viewed as a "spammer" - something that could compromise the integrity of their brands and their hard-earned reputations. Attention Bonds let these legitimate marketers back into the medium at a lower cost than the alternatives."
Another business opportunity for the toll-masters, helping the targetting of spam (sorry, I meant "legitimate marketing"), is suggested by
"Those who have retreated from email marketing for fear of tainting their brand and products can re-enter legitimately and smartly. Those skilled in database marketing may have an added advantage in that they can better refine their target lists. And because it is an economic system that allows the recipients to "signal" and provide information in terms of value and interest back to marketers (the senders), ultimately it makes the marketers smarter and more efficient about how to successfully reach the right targets."
Indeed, one would expect "those skilled in database marketing" to be strong supporters of the ABM strategy.
Even your argument on effects on competition is revealing:
The use of sender bonds will also allow mid-sized ISPs to continue to compete with major ISPs. The biggest players (AOL, Microsoft-MSN/Hotmail, Earthlink, etc.) are very focused on spam because of the added infrastructure costs to carry the traffic of billions of messages each day. Spam now constitutes more than 60% of email. These trafficking costs are huge. But, as hard as it is for the large scale ISPs, it is even harder for the mid-size ISPs, which have fewer resources. Unless the spam problem is addressed in a cost-effective way, small and mid-sized ISPs will keep dropping out, creating less competition and ultimately less choice and value for the consumer, since only the larger ISPs can support and suffer the added costs over time.
Here and elsewhere you seem to presume that all SMTP traffic happens between ISP-owned machines, conveniently forgetting private email servers and even small email providers which are not ISPs,
suggesting, on the email services side, that this would be just some
This Library is a gift to the nation [...] this is a national
celebration, not just of an institution but of the role of libraries
everywhere in providing free and open access to knowledge and
information.
... perhaps you should write Washington Post's Willian Arkin telling how "fantastic" you found his "fiction". Go for it. Pick up your Jane's
reference works on explosive devices, read about cluster bombs, and enlighten Willian Arkin, exposing
his ignorance on military affairs.
On the other hand, maybe you have some proof that Jane's Information Group is too "left-wing"
to provide reliable information on such matters.
Maybe, just maybe, there's a widespread leftist conspiracy going on and I've been fooled by it.
And although having started to read at the age of 4, 34 years ago, I still like to learn from the best. Therefore, I humbly ask you to give me some reading suggestions that will enlighten me
on the True Course of Events and demystify all these left-wing lies (in my ignorance I didn't even know they where left-handed, let alone left-winged) and conspiracy theories I've been told.
I've never even read about "Illuminati", except in fiction works. It's clear that I'm no match for a sub-genius, nay, a genius like you.
Several are the empires and several are the terrors. In your view, maybe a fair punishment should always come with more terror from a larger empire, automatically nice as long as we call it "defense".
The purpose and functions of Iraqi military installations is not the matter here. I have no more sympathy for Iraqi military aggressions (namely, terror against the curdish people, at the time conveniently not-an-issue for the USA) than those of any other nation. I am however curious about which country is yours. Maybe one of those involved in the death of several hundred thousand Iraqi children? Remaining cowardly anonymous is a curious way of showing your patriotic pride.
I hold no such simplistic views on the army of my country (Portugal). Yes, one can say it's here for defense. But it had its share of terror against others. Few or no armies have a "clean" history. War is not a nice, clean affair, whatever the cause and its worthiness. But sometimes it is sadly sadistic and even more ugly than usual. Cluster bombs have nothing to do with the fairy tale commonly told of "surgical attacks against military installations", followed by tiny "collateral damages". But maybe you should write the Washington Post accusing them of carrying conpiracy-theoretical articles on the nature of military technology.
Interesting that you know the expression "conspiracy theory", given your obvious ignorance of history and your apparent reading difficulties.
Such a simple-minded view is the domain of children story books.
Perhaps you should widen your horizons beyond Spider-Man comics and movies.
A pity you don't explain why nothing in John Pilger's view on the Afghanistan campaign is true.
Maybe you have a conspiracy theory of your own to explain why somebody writes that.
Have you at least followed your own country mainstream media when the war on Iraq began?
Wake up. Grow up. You're not in Kansas any more. On the other hand, maybe you are. In any case, go to the local library and read some history books.
Much more interesting than discussing the plausibility of Spiderman.
... and in any case, "military instalations" were the alleged targets. If you summarize the article like that and like to use language consistently,
will you refer to military installations in your country (whatever it is) as "terrorist installations"? Or is "terrorist" simply the Iraqi word for "military"?
Oh, well. And the rest will always be "collateral damage", of course.
Perhaps you need to look up "terror" on a dictionary,
search for the *official* US definition of "terrorism" and compare it with the use of cluster bombs. If you are unable to imagine where terror is higher, then you probably never felt terror.
Either that or you are in the business of public relations, in these matters somewhat less honourable
than, let's say, prostitution.
These are very sad news to read in the morning.
With very few exceptions, I have been a daily Slashdot user for a very long time, perhaps from almost the beginning. I have recommended it to lots of others. I have regarded Slashdot with a level of respect difficult to describe. I have participated as editor in one of the many slashdot-inspired fora.
Today I wake up and become afraid that soon the cluetrain may not stop here any more.
Yes, I am aware that getting advertisers is not as easy as it once was. Yes, I am aware that bandwidth is far from free. Could other sources of expense here be replaced by voluntary work?
Are we talking about supporting Slashdot survival expenses or about OSDN profit levels? Perhaps OSDN is unable to consider those questions separately. Perhaps Slashdot participants and readers can.
In spite of all the differences between participants here, there seems to be something very strong which we can call a "Slashdot community". It seems to me something too precious to scatter, and I suggest a lot of reflexion before Slashdot becomes simply another
site adopting obnoxious ephemeral fashionable advertising tactics like huge ad images.
Maybe I am wrong, but my view is that those ads can only be good from the greedy point of view of those interested in short term profit but with no respect for the future of the places where those ads are shown. For those simply buying and selling with no regard for content and communities, huge WWW ads may be the winning strategy of the day. For those with a genuine interest in ensuring the future of a site and its community, I believe the same ad strategy can be suicidal.
Having started to use Mozilla, I now have the habit of disabling banner ad viewing. But I never considered doing that for Slashdot. In fact, contrary to my practice on other sites (where I automatically ignored the ads even before blocking them), I have even followed your banner ads a lot of times; they
worked as specialized ads on a specialized magazine. But do not expect this atitude to remain the same if Slashdot starts using the kind of intrusive ad specimens we have seen at online trade rags. I will certainly try to block them.
Considering that we are talking about Slashdot,
maybe the above (viewing ads now, blocking them later if they become huge) is a common attitude among many of your readers. Yes, perhaps many others do not know how to block ads with proxies or don't have a browser which makes that easier. But can Slashdot afford to alienate those with
the minimal "level of technical expertise" needed to block ads?
Of course I prefer to pay directly for something I consider important than seeing it flooded with ads and (with a false impression of low or zero price) paying through advertisers.But would annoying ads really be the motivating factor for doing this? Maybe yes, maybe no.
There is always the risk that what is perceived as the annoying entity is Slashdot itself, not the ads by themselves. And then Slashdot expenses with bandwidth may become lower for a sad reason: less participants. "Participants", not only "readers";
contrary to what a TV ad a few years ago menaced,
here in slashdot with some kinds of advertising
there will be "a lot less news". And people to read them.
There is something I once thought of for Slashdot-like fora which could be much more interesting than huge banners, but I do not have a clue about its commercial feasibility: there could be special articles inserted among the normal ones, but clearly marked as beeing payed by advertisers. In these articles a company would say whetever it wanted about its products; they could just contain mindless marketroid speech or (much more appealing to Slashdot participants) interesting technical info about the stuff they are trying to sell. Ideally, one would also be able to comment on these articles as for any others.
At its best, it would not be advertising-as-usual. It would involve more than an art department and some content-free sentences.
But is advertising-as-usual the best way to reach this audience?
I also hope Slashdot will be here another four years, and many more. I just hope that the expensive reality associated with making this site happen will not become less expensive because of less readers. And, even more important, because of less participants.
I would also vote for TeX... I have been using it for 10 or more years now, suggested it to a lot of (satisfied) fellow students and co-workers, ranging from computer experts to novices (saw thousands and thousands of pages being written on it), and never saw buggy behaviour (except in an old commercial DVI driver for HP LaserJets, solved by downloading the free emTeX implementation back then). No other program has been with me since IBM PC XTs and VMS machines until present-day machines with Linux and other Unix variants, since 9-pin dot matrix printers to high-resolution color devices. I still remember my amazement when I first looked at math written with TeX and printed on a 9-pin printer, when I was struggling to write some texts including very simple math on Wordstar (using classical typewriter tactics, of course). When one starts looking at the source, one notices it is more than a wonderful hack: it is truly a piece of fine art, revealing very brilliant, dedicated and educated minds (Donald Knuth and collaborators) behind it. It a pity that, even in academic environments, lots of people are still ignorant about TeX and come out of their offices frustrated about the latest MS Word crash or incompatibility. And The Texbook is a beautiful work (even if takes time to be fully appreciated), as one would expect from the scholarly source of the "Art" volumes.
This was a fine legacy to the mankind, one of the best examples of free software and of GOOD, almost impossibly good software. As a friend of mine quotes, near a link to Don Knuth's home page:
.. solve calciamentum de pedibus tuis locus enim in quo stas terra sancta est
("put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground").
Before applauding CNN's (or others') free software coverage as impartial and deeper than usual, perhaps we should consider who is advertising there. I haven't been following CNN for some time now, but Oracle seems to have been a major advertiser... And Oracle has been flirting with Linux, agains Microsoft, for some time now. Remember the ads warning (threatening?) us that "without publicity there would be a lot less news"? I saw those on CNN first. Basically we were being reminded that we are on the hands of advertisers. Our attention is the real product, and their real customers are advertisers. Sadly, it may be only business as usual for CNN. Even if money makes them consider what we think is worthy to be considered. Read Chomsky and be careful.
Yes, I remember books.com too, from the time they were accessible via telnet only and then their move to the WWW. I made my first online shopping there. They had a very nice service. Their interfaces where never as good as those of Amazon, but I still continued to buy some books to them. They offered ebooks too... It was a pleasure to return there.
Until one day... they were bought (by Cendant, I believe). Suddenly, the spirit was gone. Only the name remained. They moved to Windows servers. Their interfaces were horribly broken, their uptime a disaster. Marketing at its worst was there to ruin it all.
The BookStacks we knew and love, the BookStacks that should be praised in any history of the bold online commerce pioneers, had died. For some of those who had been on the Internet since before the WWW big bang, it was a very, very sad day.
As seen recently in the French case, restrictions on use of cryptography are lifted, or its use is encouraged, mostly when that is in the interest of the corporate world, even when it is done allegedly in the interest of personal privacy.
As many have commented already, giving a unique ID to each processor is neither an interesting way to promote secure e-commerce nor required to protect buyers against overclocking. But there may be several unconfessed reasons for promoting such measures.
In principle we could avoid disclosing CPU ids, but imagine that in some way most of the commercial online services start requiring access to our CPU ids for granting access permission. This may be forced by government or become part of "standard" corporate policy in their quest for more and more private consumer information.
Then either you comply and give away another part of your privacy or you don't comply and, as e-commerce and other online services become more and more predominant, your options become increasingly limited.
We already have many interesting examples: credit cards and cellular phones are already means to disclose our shopping habits and our location, for instance. Yet it is becoming quite difficult for many of us to avoid using them.
Electronically identifying and tracking our cars, our phones, our computers, even our pets, is just the beginning. As biometric security systems get cheaper and more effective, we will probably see their usage spreading widely. Soon you may have to show your iris or a fingerprint to access common services which now require a simple password or a PIN. Then YOUR BODY will be electronically identified and tracked, everywhere. Paraphrasing Philip Greenspun (http://photo.net/philg/), this is a future so bright you'll have to wear sun glasses.
I've just sent the comment below to AOL. The quotation is from "The Dogs of War" by Pink Floyd. By the way, I find the full lyrics of that song (see for instance http://holly.colostate.edu/~xartan/lyrics/moment.h tm) to best most appropriate for describing what is happening with the media and, unfortunately, more and more on the Internet too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Good morning, America Online, Inc.
You have mail. From me.
To show my indignation concerning your arrogance on your presumed ownership of the expression "You have mail".
Currently, it can only be expected that companies like you are going to try to trademark every single bit of our lives, including our language. And then sell us what used to be free.
Please stop trying to convince us about some form of AOL commitment to open source development. You have shown your true face even to those naive enough to have believed you.
Have a nice day, America Online, Inc., and thank you for your attention to these "consumer comments".
"For hard cash, we will lie and deceive Even our masters don't know the web we weave"
P.S. I hereby deny America Online, Inc. permission for usage of my email address for any purposes---except replying to this message or reproducing it in its entirety on the World Wide Web---including but not limited to marketing purposes or disclosure to third party companies, government officials and law enforcement agencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to "advanced, free and democratic" Europe. For those not-bothering-to-be-bothered-anybody there are, of course, plenty of EU edutainment materials and bedtime stories.
The above is from the ID Cards FAQ by Privacy International. Highly recommended reading, for the sake of us all.
A more fundamental question:
Why doesn't the UK dump IWF and censorship?
Why should we hope to have 'appropriate' censorship, or hope that censor 'mistakes' can be 'corrected'? When we accept censorship as a tool 'for the common good', and get caught in Byzantine discussions about which speech/'content' is more or less 'harmful' and should be less or more free (instead of adopting a simpler view like the one in the US First Amendment), we are already sliding down a very steep, very slippery slope.
Although not a censorship system per se, it ends up being useful for government-mandated filtering policies (at national or institutional levels) based on ratings by locally blessed (or treaty-sanctified) rating institutions. Political power, bad journalism, and others systematically protesting against the internet as 'the new wild west' repeatedly claim that 'something should be done' to prevent spreading of 'misinformation' (in contrast to 'reference' content) and, ultimately, the infocalypse.
Always beware government abuse of any tools and standards, however useful they may seem at first. As with risks of massive private data archives, hoping standardized ratings systems won't be misused for censorship purposes seems like hoping that water won't wet...
YouTube is a private service but, increasingly, each such 'self-censorship' move seems much less a result of some private spontaneous policy than 'the reasonably safe' course of action under systematic and systemic bullying from state institutions, lobbies, and bad journalism.
Those to whose pressure Google is now bowing, like Joe Lieberman and his sponsors, are both willing and increasingly able to upgrade current censorship policies from bullying-induced 'self-regulation of the industry' into aggressive censorship legislation.
The most honorable Senator Joseph Isadore Lieberman would certainly not promote widespread media censorship and bullying of the press concerning so-called ''anti-semitic' 'self-hate' views on Middle East issues...
All of this may end up affecting no more than a few bomb-making tutorials and turbant fashion-shows, non?
Anyway, Senator Lieberman deserves much praise for his deep concern about videos disseminating propaganda and showing `gratuitous violence or people getting "hurt, attacked, or humiliated."'.
Finally, we should not forget some valuable insight on "the domestic radicalization process" which, with Joseph Lieberman as Chairman, the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has included in the report "Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat". Apart from minor detais on player identification, the four-stage model in page 4 seems remarkably insightful when confronted with recent US history and even with the good Senator's own radicalizing messages. Will such 'aiding and abetting' discourse be removed from YouTube as part of the ongoing un'unamerican' First Amendment Amendment?
No, those are still valid for e-learning in higher education.
Indeed. Firing randomly into civilian areas would be a terrible waste of US taxpayers' support for accurate aiming and thorough bulldozing.
Which kind of 'proven enterprise stability' would be provided by the additional JVM layer? Marketing flare stability?
What needs to be put aside for good is the belief that any so-called "momentum" behind ABM and similar schemes comes in some way from an altruistic "industry" intent to free email users from spam when in fact it is one of several attempts to get a "piece of the action" from the most sucessful uses of the Internet based (until when?) on open protocols. Such "altruistic" industry/government moves are usually accompanied by fallacious hand-waving about some impending "tragedy of the commons".
Spam reduction is just one of the baits here; another one is the promise of sharing bits of the money with several players including the end-users, those ultimately affected by the inevitable (but pseudo-authoritavely FAQ-downplayed) security disasters waiting to happen with ABM.
In fact, what this is about is yet another partial privatization of the commons; as your FAQ gently puts it, with this new Internet toll,
In fact, what the ABM toll builders hope for is not a quasi-extinction of spam. Survival of at least some spam is part of the business model, with spammers playing by ABM rules being rewarded with the ABM newspeak label of "legitimate marketers".
Another business opportunity for the toll-masters, helping the targetting of spam (sorry, I meant "legitimate marketing"), is suggested by
Indeed, one would expect "those skilled in database marketing" to be strong supporters of the ABM strategy.
Even your argument on effects on competition is revealing:
Here and elsewhere you seem to presume that all SMTP traffic happens between ISP-owned machines, conveniently forgetting private email servers and even small email providers which are not ISPs, suggesting, on the email services side, that this would be just some
June 20, 2002: The Librarian of Congress is to librarianship as a fireman in Fahrenheit 451 is to firefighting.
Another sad day for the greatest Library mankind has ever created.
On the other hand, maybe you have some proof that Jane's Information Group is too "left-wing" to provide reliable information on such matters. Maybe, just maybe, there's a widespread leftist conspiracy going on and I've been fooled by it.
Ooops. How did you find that out so quickly? Omniscience is hard to beat. I'll never have such fast access to hard facts.
You win. Now I know you know better.
Got me. There is no oil or gas near the Caspian Sea. Neither is the USA interested in a pipeline through Afghanistan. Maybe just paranoid delusions spread by some left-wing faction of the DOE.
And although having started to read at the age of 4, 34 years ago, I still like to learn from the best. Therefore, I humbly ask you to give me some reading suggestions that will enlighten me on the True Course of Events and demystify all these left-wing lies (in my ignorance I didn't even know they where left-handed, let alone left-winged) and conspiracy theories I've been told.
I've never even read about "Illuminati", except in fiction works. It's clear that I'm no match for a sub-genius, nay, a genius like you.
Several are the empires and several are the terrors. In your view, maybe a fair punishment should always come with more terror from a larger empire, automatically nice as long as we call it "defense".
The purpose and functions of Iraqi military installations is not the matter here. I have no more sympathy for Iraqi military aggressions (namely, terror against the curdish people, at the time conveniently not-an-issue for the USA) than those of any other nation. I am however curious about which country is yours. Maybe one of those involved in the death of several hundred thousand Iraqi children? Remaining cowardly anonymous is a curious way of showing your patriotic pride.
I hold no such simplistic views on the army of my country (Portugal). Yes, one can say it's here for defense. But it had its share of terror against others. Few or no armies have a "clean" history. War is not a nice, clean affair, whatever the cause and its worthiness. But sometimes it is sadly sadistic and even more ugly than usual. Cluster bombs have nothing to do with the fairy tale commonly told of "surgical attacks against military installations", followed by tiny "collateral damages". But maybe you should write the Washington Post accusing them of carrying conpiracy-theoretical articles on the nature of military technology.
Interesting that you know the expression "conspiracy theory", given your obvious ignorance of history and your apparent reading difficulties. Such a simple-minded view is the domain of children story books. Perhaps you should widen your horizons beyond Spider-Man comics and movies.
A pity you don't explain why nothing in John Pilger's view on the Afghanistan campaign is true. Maybe you have a conspiracy theory of your own to explain why somebody writes that.
Have you at least followed your own country mainstream media when the war on Iraq began?
Wake up. Grow up. You're not in Kansas any more. On the other hand, maybe you are. In any case, go to the local library and read some history books. Much more interesting than discussing the plausibility of Spiderman.
... and in any case, "military instalations" were the alleged targets. If you summarize the article like that and like to use language consistently, will you refer to military installations in your country (whatever it is) as "terrorist installations"? Or is "terrorist" simply the Iraqi word for "military"?
Oh, well. And the rest will always be "collateral damage", of course.
Perhaps you need to look up "terror" on a dictionary, search for the *official* US definition of "terrorism" and compare it with the use of cluster bombs. If you are unable to imagine where terror is higher, then you probably never felt terror. Either that or you are in the business of public relations, in these matters somewhat less honourable than, let's say, prostitution.
These are very sad news to read in the morning. With very few exceptions, I have been a daily Slashdot user for a very long time, perhaps from almost the beginning. I have recommended it to lots of others. I have regarded Slashdot with a level of respect difficult to describe. I have participated as editor in one of the many slashdot-inspired fora.
Today I wake up and become afraid that soon the cluetrain may not stop here any more.
Yes, I am aware that getting advertisers is not as easy as it once was. Yes, I am aware that bandwidth is far from free. Could other sources of expense here be replaced by voluntary work? Are we talking about supporting Slashdot survival expenses or about OSDN profit levels? Perhaps OSDN is unable to consider those questions separately. Perhaps Slashdot participants and readers can.
In spite of all the differences between participants here, there seems to be something very strong which we can call a "Slashdot community". It seems to me something too precious to scatter, and I suggest a lot of reflexion before Slashdot becomes simply another site adopting obnoxious ephemeral fashionable advertising tactics like huge ad images.
Maybe I am wrong, but my view is that those ads can only be good from the greedy point of view of those interested in short term profit but with no respect for the future of the places where those ads are shown. For those simply buying and selling with no regard for content and communities, huge WWW ads may be the winning strategy of the day. For those with a genuine interest in ensuring the future of a site and its community, I believe the same ad strategy can be suicidal.
Having started to use Mozilla, I now have the habit of disabling banner ad viewing. But I never considered doing that for Slashdot. In fact, contrary to my practice on other sites (where I automatically ignored the ads even before blocking them), I have even followed your banner ads a lot of times; they worked as specialized ads on a specialized magazine. But do not expect this atitude to remain the same if Slashdot starts using the kind of intrusive ad specimens we have seen at online trade rags. I will certainly try to block them.
Considering that we are talking about Slashdot, maybe the above (viewing ads now, blocking them later if they become huge) is a common attitude among many of your readers. Yes, perhaps many others do not know how to block ads with proxies or don't have a browser which makes that easier. But can Slashdot afford to alienate those with the minimal "level of technical expertise" needed to block ads?
Of course I prefer to pay directly for something I consider important than seeing it flooded with ads and (with a false impression of low or zero price) paying through advertisers.But would annoying ads really be the motivating factor for doing this? Maybe yes, maybe no. There is always the risk that what is perceived as the annoying entity is Slashdot itself, not the ads by themselves. And then Slashdot expenses with bandwidth may become lower for a sad reason: less participants. "Participants", not only "readers"; contrary to what a TV ad a few years ago menaced, here in slashdot with some kinds of advertising there will be "a lot less news". And people to read them.
There is something I once thought of for Slashdot-like fora which could be much more interesting than huge banners, but I do not have a clue about its commercial feasibility: there could be special articles inserted among the normal ones, but clearly marked as beeing payed by advertisers. In these articles a company would say whetever it wanted about its products; they could just contain mindless marketroid speech or (much more appealing to Slashdot participants) interesting technical info about the stuff they are trying to sell. Ideally, one would also be able to comment on these articles as for any others.
At its best, it would not be advertising-as-usual. It would involve more than an art department and some content-free sentences. But is advertising-as-usual the best way to reach this audience?
I also hope Slashdot will be here another four years, and many more. I just hope that the expensive reality associated with making this site happen will not become less expensive because of less readers. And, even more important, because of less participants.
I would also vote for TeX... I have been using it for 10 or more years now, suggested it to a lot of (satisfied) fellow students and co-workers, ranging from computer experts to novices (saw thousands and thousands of pages being written on it), and never saw buggy behaviour (except in an old commercial DVI driver for HP LaserJets, solved by downloading the free emTeX implementation back then). No other program has been with me since IBM PC XTs and VMS machines until present-day machines with Linux and other Unix variants, since 9-pin dot matrix printers to high-resolution color devices. I still remember my amazement when I first looked at math written with TeX and printed on a 9-pin printer, when I was struggling to write some texts including very simple math on Wordstar (using classical typewriter tactics, of course). When one starts looking at the source, one notices it is more than a wonderful hack: it is truly a piece of fine art, revealing very brilliant, dedicated and educated minds (Donald Knuth and collaborators) behind it. It a pity that, even in academic environments, lots of people are still ignorant about TeX and come out of their offices frustrated about the latest MS Word crash or incompatibility. And The Texbook is a beautiful work (even if takes time to be fully appreciated), as one would expect from the scholarly source of the "Art" volumes.
This was a fine legacy to the mankind, one of the best examples of free software and of GOOD, almost impossibly good software. As a friend of mine quotes, near a link to Don Knuth's home page:
("put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground").Before applauding CNN's (or others') free software coverage as impartial and deeper than usual, perhaps we should consider who is advertising there. I haven't been following CNN for some time now, but Oracle seems to have been a major advertiser... And Oracle has been flirting with Linux, agains Microsoft, for some time now. Remember the ads warning (threatening?) us that "without publicity there would be a lot less news"? I saw those on CNN first. Basically we were being reminded that we are on the hands of advertisers. Our attention is the real product, and their real customers are advertisers. Sadly, it may be only business as usual for CNN. Even if money makes them consider what we think is worthy to be considered. Read Chomsky and be careful.
Yes, I remember books.com too, from the time they were accessible via telnet only and then their move to the WWW. I made my first online shopping there. They had a very nice service. Their interfaces where never as good as those of Amazon, but I still continued to buy some books to them.
They offered ebooks too... It was a pleasure to return there.
Until one day... they were bought (by Cendant, I believe). Suddenly, the spirit was gone. Only the name remained. They moved to Windows servers. Their interfaces were horribly broken, their uptime a disaster. Marketing at its worst was there to ruin it all.
The BookStacks we knew and love, the BookStacks that should be praised in any history of the bold online commerce pioneers, had died.
For some of those who had been on the Internet since before the WWW big bang, it was a very, very sad day.
As seen recently in the French case, restrictions on use of cryptography are lifted, or its use is encouraged, mostly when that is in the interest of the corporate world, even when it is done allegedly in the interest of personal privacy.
As many have commented already, giving a unique ID to each processor is neither an interesting way to promote secure e-commerce nor required to protect buyers against overclocking. But there may be several unconfessed reasons for promoting such measures.
In principle we could avoid disclosing CPU ids,
but imagine that in some way most of the commercial online services start requiring access to our CPU ids for granting access permission. This may be forced by government or become part of "standard" corporate policy in their quest for more and more private consumer information.
Then either you comply and give away another part of your privacy or you don't comply and, as e-commerce and other online services become more and more predominant, your options become increasingly limited.
We already have many interesting examples: credit cards and cellular phones are already means to disclose our shopping habits and our location, for instance. Yet it is becoming quite difficult for many of us to avoid using them.
Electronically identifying and tracking our cars, our phones, our computers, even our pets, is just the beginning. As biometric security systems get cheaper and more effective, we will probably see their usage spreading widely. Soon you may have to show your iris or a fingerprint to access common services which now require a simple password or a PIN. Then YOUR BODY will be electronically identified and tracked, everywhere. Paraphrasing Philip Greenspun (http://photo.net/philg/), this is a future so bright you'll have to wear sun glasses.
I've just sent the comment below to AOL.h tm) to best most appropriate for describing what is happening with the media and, unfortunately, more and more on the Internet too.
The quotation is from "The Dogs of War" by Pink Floyd. By the way, I find the full lyrics of
that song (see for instance http://holly.colostate.edu/~xartan/lyrics/moment.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Good morning, America Online, Inc.
You have mail.
From me.
To show my indignation concerning your arrogance
on your presumed ownership of the expression
"You have mail".
Currently, it can only be expected that companies
like you are going to try to trademark every
single bit of our lives, including our language. And then sell us what
used to be free.
Please stop trying to convince us about some
form of AOL commitment to open source development.
You have shown your true face even to those naive
enough to have believed you.
Have a nice day, America Online, Inc., and thank you for your attention
to these "consumer comments".
"For hard cash, we will lie and deceive
Even our masters don't know the web we weave"
P.S. I hereby deny America Online, Inc.
permission for usage of my email address for any purposes---except
replying to this message or reproducing it in its entirety on the World
Wide Web---including but not limited to marketing purposes or disclosure
to third party companies, government officials and law enforcement agencies.