Let's start a rumor that there's OIL in them thar lunar hills. Cheney's hand will be up GW's ass within seconds to have him "articulate" a new national priority of lunar exploration. They will invoke all kinds of lofty ideals, and use the lunar program to justify more coal-fired power plants here on earth. Oh, and of course, the need to invade Iraq.
YES, Apple is a hardware company, but I would also not ignore the fact that software is an important part of their business as well.
Indeed. If Apple were just a hardware company, it would have moved over to Windows long ago and advertised its well-designed hardware in those tschotschke catalogs for wealthy midlife-crisis males. No, MacOS is just as central to Apple as its hardware. The big issue I see discussed here, and I'm glad to see it discussed, is whether MacOS and the ideas behind it could be or should be a larger part of Apple's identity than its commitment to Moto/IBM-based lifeforms.
"There are millions of cats in shelters and with rescue groups that need homes, and the last thing we need is a new production strategy for cats."
This "DNA bank service" for cats a symptom of how people love the idea of animals more than real animals themselves. There is an inexhaustable supply, at least now that Asshole Frist is Senate Majority Leader, of cats needing homes, yet some people are looking to throw their money after hopeless duplication of a now-gone pet.
Just because some people voted in a right-wing clone as president, doesn't mean we have to burden the animal world with the same nonsense.
I think the big issue is clarity in the contract between the ISP/web-host and site owner.
If an ISP tells me it's going to scan my site and whack files it thinks might be illegal, at least I'm warned and can take my business elsewhere.
The fact that the victim in question was not warned, and that the ISP not only deleted legal personal property of the site owner, had no way of distinguishing between legal and "illegal" (for sake of argument) content, and obviously didn't care, doesn't speak well for the ISP.
This reminds me of the kind of thing AOL used to do (I've had no contact with them in a long time; but I can't imagine things have changed). But then, AOL reserves the right to screw anyone, anytime, and puts it in writing for those who can read the droppings of attorneys.
Only a government which views millions of its own people - and of course millions of its neighbors - as expendable would dream of using fission devices in light of what's now known about the cumulative effects of low-level radiation.
Before America Online introduced an "early teen" Parental Control setting in Nov. 1997, there had been a nearly two-year window in which increasingly adult content was accessible to early teens whose parents weren't willing to keep them set at "kids only," and parents weren't told.
AOL volunteers were noting that teens were popping up in fora where they might be targetted, and yet AOL management refused to warn parents that certain areas accessible to their early teens might not be appropriate to them. I was then a volunteer, mostly answering questions about mailing lists, and tried to get some action on this point - at least alerting parents - from inside, with no luck.
Finally I reported AOL to the NYS Attorney General's office, Bureau of Consumer Affairs, claiming that AOL allowed parents to think their kids were safe when it was extremely easy for any of them to wander into areas that were explicitly adult. AOL responded to the complaint by explaining their Parental Controls settings, acting as if I were a clueless parent that only need to know which buttons to push. At the same time they took steps to curtail the "overhead" access I had on their system at that time and which I used for volunteering, except the AOL employee who I worked with at that time agreed with my stance and refused to pull it.
Finally AOL introduced their "early teens" setting, and the issue became moot. The introduction coincided with a reallocation of volunteers to police the Kids Only area, and "children" became the big mantra of the "Community Leaders Organization."
The interesting thing is that AOL has never admitted its hole in Parental Controls, nor will they ever.
I did learn some interesting things during this period. For instance, there was a swelling of sting operations on AOL, run by different investigative agencies, out to catch predators targetting kids. In my opinion, if that's the scope of their operation, more power to them. But at least one of these teams who contacted me about my letter to the NYS AG were not interested in the open barn door at AOL, they were less interested in the mundane aspects of giving parents of perhaps half-a-million or a million kids the ability to decide effectively on their kids' access than to bust another lone sleazoid predator, which gets big headlines.
Basically, the large corporations have a lot to answer for if we're really concerned about protecting children in this society. Big services like AOL lie, simply, and someone should keep looking over their shoulder - not as big brother, but simply to ensure that they deliver what they promise. Consumer protection would help a lot. There are deeper issues in the society which have led to an epidemic of teen depression, and which may leave kids more vulnerable than before to predators - and yet our schools focus on busting kids dressing in black. Parents and schools need epidemiological information - a LOT of teens are depressed, and this is not just the way it is in each generation. Finally, the role the media, advertising and the fashion industry play in all of this needs to be examined.
In all of this, I think packet sniffing is a rather inefficient way to protect children in our society. I suspect the sting operations run by state, local and feds are already doing a lot to bust up the more blatant abuses. In my opinion, the rest of the problem can be addressed by looking at what's hiding in plain sight.
ICANN wanted the money now, and would make an agreement later. Is it just me, or is puting money down before you know what the product is just bad business sense? What the hell was ICANN thinking?
Who is ICANN supposed to represent, anyway? Isn't that the whole problem? It seems to have started as some kind of quango with the blessings of the U.S. Government, with Esther Dyson at the helm. It's great politics, trying to corporatize the internet name space with a US-centric approach, then invoicing "foreigners" without their prior agreement - all this from a country so far behind on its UN dues that if it were the electric bill we'd all be cooking with sterno.
If we want permanent and positive change, I think there are two things to face. First , it's going to come about more slowly than anyone would like, in order to get everyone (or nearly everyone) on board. Second, the ultimate outcome will have a more international flavor, and will probably be criticized by Americans as inefficient, inelegant, etc.
I guess those of us who don't like it will just want AOL and the mega-ISPs to buy everything else up and impose their own rule. Oh wait... never mind.
Sorry, but given the whole tense legal situation around the DeCSS fiasco at the moment, what was he thinking about doing this? Yeah sure it wasn't *real*, but anyone who thought about it for half a second would have realised that this would cause him trouble, real or not.
Right. Don't cause trouble. Don't make waves. The lawyers know best.
The major corporations are going to try to take a yard for every inch legislatures give them in the narrowing of civil liberties. The time to fight them is now, not when you're allowed only to post about what you did last summer and what brand of breakfast cereal you happen to like. [Sounds depressingly like an AOL chat room, doesn't it?]
Many university administrators are gutless wonders, although some were professors, and I would have hoped that someone at Oxford would have asked questions first and shot later.
Apps is right. Supporting Darwin on Intel requires Cocoa - the former "Yellow Box" which at one point was going to be implemented on Intel under NT using DLLs. That particular approach went away, but since lots of folks have Intel iron lying around, applications written in Java or Objective C++ to run on top of Darwin should be portable.
-Dave
Re:This is, I think,a very important point
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LonelyNet
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Think of the ways in which people use the Net to connect: kids to parents....
There've been published observations, and I've seen this with my own family and by others' anecdotes, that today's geographically-dispersed families are more closely connected by the net and email than they have been when limited to long-distance phone calls, postal mail and infrequent visits.
In this case, the fact that other forces separate family members can be mis-attributed to our being "less" connected to them the more we're on the net.
Another variation of this "selection error" can be seen if you can accept for argument's sake that people with LESS need for face-to-face contact on less important levels are more likely to be the early adopters of online technologies.
Wouldn't people living far from relatives, and people with less need for close interactions be more lonely without technologies which make communications more convenient and less expensive?
With a few exceptions (e.g., addictive personalities), I'd suggest that the glass is half-full, at least.
It's interesting that corporations - which are given status of legal persons by the states - are being granted far more rights and privileges than individuals, who are also legal persons.
When have you heard of (e.g.,) a plumber operating under a d/b/a seeking a court's permission to check the hard drives of some of his assistants or subcontractors to see if they really were sick last Friday, or just wanted to hit the beach?
On the flip side, it is possible for states to revoke the corporate status of corporations. There was a campaign against Philip Morris in New York state prior to the last US Senate election, led by AdBusters. The rationale was that Philip Morris had lied to the American public on issues such as tobacco/cigarette safety, and had tried to hook youth on cigarettes, and as such did not deserve to operate as a corporation in NY State. I think we need to emphasize that the legal status of corporations should not grant them greater powers over individuals than individuals themselves have with respect to each other; we also need to pierce corporate veils more often and hold individuals responsible for crimes against individuals and public safety.
Here where I work, if we try to visit a site that is being blocked then we are given a page with a request form for that page. If we request that it be unblocked then it is submitted to a staff of real people that either unblock it or email you there reasons for not doing so.
What about a teen, say, never finding out certain new things because a large number of pages returned by a search engine query are unavailable. Not knowing if these pages will be useful from just the search engine output, will the kid have his parent ask that every single page be enabled?
Enabling individual pages through a bureaucracy is rather lame.
I'm also interested in perspectives on what is acceptable. Who makes the determination, and according to whose guidelines? The same people who think kids'll do ok with a lot of gore and violence but not with sex? I guess kids need to be protected against the Bible too, right?
A lot of what I learned about the outside world growing up in pre-net southeast PA came from books, outside of school. The library was an interesting place where I could see new things, check 'em out, and read further if a sample was interesting. Had the librarians been ordered by the town in those years to watch closely what I was checking out at ages 10-13 or 14, I could very well have ended up like some of my classmates, staying in their hometown and thinking themselves worldly and sophisticated while they repeat their father's GOP complaints that "Problem is, nobody wants to work these days," and other jewels of social commentary.
Librarians applied some filtering, of course, in the books they ordered and carried, but their scope was pretty wide. The librarian's ethos seems to be to provide as much access to as many people as is affordable and practical. The entire process of book publishing back then also constituted a filter against many unpopular ideas or views, but we didn't see that operate in the open.
The internet brings several issues into sharp focus. The entire process of authoritativeness comes into question. To me, the odds of a 15-year-old seeing online adult graphics aren't that worrisome, because the kid probably has seen far worse on a premium cable channel or scarfed up some magazines at his/her local 7-11. Where the net poses real challenges for all of us is in the issue of what's true - how we know what we claim to know. If a student decides to research the holocaust, s/he'll find (probably) more sites denying its existence than sites which provide careful factual background to that tragedy. Because everyone's a publisher, we can't expect history and other 'common knowledge' to be transmitted reliably unless we help young people learn to think critically, to look at sources, to be able to tell if they're being propagandized. Censorship of any kind goes against this kind of education, because blanket banning of T&A today (even if it could be done reliably) at public sites could mean banning of information on the theory of evolution tomorrow.
But where is the free production platform? Does Quicktime have a free tool to generate the live streams?
For live streaming, you can use Sorenson's Broadcaster with or without Darwin Streaming Server (you can use the server to reflect a multicast so folks can access streams over the internet). The product page is at http://www.s-vision.com/produ cts/SorensonBroadcaster/.
To set up movies, music files, etc. on your server, you can use Apple's $30 QuickTime Pro (a reg# upgrade to the free download). This will allow you to export media into hinted format for streaming.
This business seems to me to be the intersection of different industry segments' propaganda, all "coming true."
First, Micro$oft pretends that Windows is easy to use and own, despite its tinkertoy nature and inherent problems and instabilities.
Then, AOL in particular and other services go along with well-funded campaigns based on the notion that using the internet is as easy as putting in a CD and clicking a button. Of course, AOL especially has given up any pretense of encouraging its members to learn what they're doing on line, to participate in online communities as responsible people, to understand anything about their environment, etc. So it's not very far from this to the current situation, which is based in part on Windows' not-so-easy-to-use characteristics. People are tempted to just say yes and get the install over with, and apparently, woe to s/he who does so.
Now, imagine you're Ms/Mr Big Exec at MSN, Plodigy, whatever, and you've just given out tons of $400 rebates to sign up lots of people people buying computers... and they 'try' AOL 5.0 and now can't access your service, but are committed to paying for it. Sort of the 'just plug it in and click' chickens coming home to roost.
Maybe some of you people should think about all the good respect for the rule of law has done for humanity before you casually brush it aside.
If someone wants to write and sell a software product, more power to them. However, should they have the right to suppress criticism of their software, and of how it's put together? I don't think so. Part of the "law" protects free speech, and an essential part of the working of any market is freely available information about products, sellers and prices. Suppress information about software products and you contribute to a market failure in that industry. Maximizing information is a goal of all advocates of the market, be they liberal or conservative...
What I've noticed is that most of the data we're accumulating is quickly becoming useless. 10 year old schoolwork isn't something so worthy of archiving. The data you really want to keep shouldn't be very large anyway...
This may be true of households and many businesses, however there are government requirements for keeping data for things like clinical trials and funded research which are subject to this problem.
There is also a public-interest issue here. Imagine if the tobacco industry, which has in effect lied to the public and hence murdered for the past three or four decades, had been required to have its research data archived in a retrievable format. Another example is the archived PROFS email correspondence of the National Security Council members during the Reagan era, which led to the smoking guns of the Iran-Contra scandal. A final example: a small city near where I live recently had difficulties deciding in what its City Charter actually said, because of poor recordkeeping of its officially adopted amendments over the years.
While most data is of little use to us after a year or a few years, there are longer-term projects and public-interest requirements that make it a public issue. True, I doubt if anyone would want to save most of those Letterman Top-10 lists, blonde-jokes and similar net-chaff for very long. I do think the Stephen Wright stuff will endure, however....
There was a similar story on PBS awhile back concerning the 1960 Mars probes' telemetry data. The data were archived at a university in (I believe) the Northwest. Test reads of that data suggested that about 20% of the tapes' contents were no longer readable.
Perhaps IT curricula (the kind that train people who say, "I don't code, I manage") can include a kind of data life-cycle management approach. The costs of updating both hardware- and software-based storage formats on an ongoing basis are probably less for crucial data than the cost of a crash-recovery project once the data are urgently needed. An analog would be the fact that maintenance of large Cobol-based systems was considered unglamorous, unsexy, and a backwater job, until Y2K concerns made those jobs quite remunerative for awhile.
Have you tried compiling Apple's Darwin Streaming Server under Linux? It's open source, easily configurable, and Apple doesn't charge by the stream.
True, people are still waiting for a Linux QT client, but your fears about Micro$oft domination of streaming may be premature.
There are some IT types who will adopt MS streaming just because it comes from Redmond, but these folks are no different than the IT types who used to grasp at any solution IBM offered, because it came from IBM. We used to call them dinosaurs.
What if the pro-privacy community dug up names and all kinds of personal info on the executives involved in making these decisions at Double-Click, and spread it all over the net? Sort of a taste of one's own medicine.
Corporations don't feel anything, people do, and the people who make these kinds of decisions - and who lie about them - often feel they can act with impunity.
A couple of things are missing from the article. For instance, the CompuServe 2000 software (sent to CIS users to encourage them to upgrade) is basically AOL 5.0 with a different skin, and it behaves the same way and can cause the same problems.
Another thing I found on a friend's Win95 system: Neither the CS2000 or AOL5.0 installer could install the MSIE portion, rendering either install near-useless, and the error messages were, well, Microsoft's. Some casual polling reveals that this is not an uncommon problem, either.
Finally, CS's technical support (recently bolstered by AOL tech support staff who were transferred) were not particularly helpful to my friend. One would think stuff like this could be rationally debugged and not require exorcists.
I agree with the choice of Neal Stephenson, although I'd suggest the honor be shared with Bruce Sterling. Both have been busy showing us the future we're collectively making, and both are solid craftsmen. I was awed by Cryptonomicon on several levels, really liked "In the beginning..." and thoroughly enjoyed Sterling's Distraction. Both writers take chances and show us where we've been and where we are - or might be - going.
Clearly, there are many other areas where a 'net person of the year' might be selected from. Linus, Red Hat, and any one of dozens of folks who have made a major difference; but the folks who reflect the whole enterprise back to us are deserve recognition because the recognition encourages people to look more closely at their ideas.
Sales taxes are often routed to both state government and to county governments. Here in NY State, roughly half the sales tax is kept by the state capital, and the rest is forwarded to the county of record.
While I like the idea of a tax-free mode of shopping (be it mail-order or online), others on here have raised several good points: first, that even mail order firms are starting to collect taxes, at least in states where they have branch offices or facilities; second, that giving middle- and upper-class consumers access to circumvent state and county taxes is as regressive as the county/state sales tax in the first place, since the monies not collected by the jurisdiction will have to be made up for by those without the access (or the credit) to shop online. This is even less fair than the sales tax itself.
I happen to like Oregon's approach, myself: no sales tax, higher state income tax brackets and a stiff gasoline tax, the latter paying for roads. Sales taxes hurt the poor most, and if the last several decades in the US are any evidence, they don't encourage savings, either.
Conclusion: I'm resigned to net-shopping being taxed, eventually. I think asking taxpayers to estimate their purchases is pretty ludicrous, but eventually the e-merchants will play ball, with the help of some inter-state agreements or federal legislation. Whether you think governments should be taxing all this money in the first place is really a separate question.
My job used to take me to area colleges, and last year at one small school's Education Dept. I happened to look over term project posters by Elementary Ed. students while waiting to see someone. One poster was about ADHD and the use of ritalin. It stated the percentage of children, primarily boys, who are currently medicated in the early grades. I don't remember the exact figure, but it was surprisingly high, something like 1/8th or 1/7th of all boys in certain grades. This really worries me, because you're right - scientists think they know certain things about the brain and its chemistry, but do they really understand how the mind works? I don't think so. Another point you raise is side effects: I've always been very conservative about medication; at one point several years ago I considered one of the SRIs during a particularly bad path, but after reviewing the likely and possible side effects I opted to maintain purely drug-free therapy, which was effective. Not everyone is on the cusp as I was; I have some relatives who must take certain meds in order to function in their lives - they are in constant medical review as they age; not only do some drugs damage the liver, others wreck the kidneys, cause sexual dysfunction, etc. I'd consider an informed choice like that appropriate in mid-life or with an extremely severe condition, but kids?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start a rumor that there's OIL in them thar lunar hills. Cheney's hand will be up GW's ass within seconds to have him "articulate" a new national priority of lunar exploration. They will invoke all kinds of lofty ideals, and use the lunar program to justify more coal-fired power plants here on earth. Oh, and of course, the need to invade Iraq.
YES, Apple is a hardware company, but I would also not ignore the fact that software is an important part of their business as well.
Indeed. If Apple were just a hardware company, it would have moved over to Windows long ago and advertised its well-designed hardware in those tschotschke catalogs for wealthy midlife-crisis males. No, MacOS is just as central to Apple as its hardware. The big issue I see discussed here, and I'm glad to see it discussed, is whether MacOS and the ideas behind it could be or should be a larger part of Apple's identity than its commitment to Moto/IBM-based lifeforms.
-d
"There are millions of cats in shelters and with rescue groups that need homes, and the last thing we need is a new production strategy for cats."
This "DNA bank service" for cats a symptom of how people love the idea of animals more than real animals themselves. There is an inexhaustable supply, at least now that Asshole Frist is Senate Majority Leader, of cats needing homes, yet some people are looking to throw their money after hopeless duplication of a now-gone pet.
Just because some people voted in a right-wing clone as president, doesn't mean we have to burden the animal world with the same nonsense.
I think the big issue is clarity in the contract between the ISP/web-host and site owner.
If an ISP tells me it's going to scan my site and whack files it thinks might be illegal, at least I'm warned and can take my business elsewhere.
The fact that the victim in question was not warned, and that the ISP not only deleted legal personal property of the site owner, had no way of distinguishing between legal and "illegal" (for sake of argument) content, and obviously didn't care, doesn't speak well for the ISP.
This reminds me of the kind of thing AOL used to do (I've had no contact with them in a long time; but I can't imagine things have changed). But then, AOL reserves the right to screw anyone, anytime, and puts it in writing for those who can read the droppings of attorneys.
Dave
Only a government which views millions of its own people - and of course millions of its neighbors - as expendable would dream of using fission devices in light of what's now known about the cumulative effects of low-level radiation.
Dave
A comment on the "protect our children" stuff.
Before America Online introduced an "early teen" Parental Control setting in Nov. 1997, there had been a nearly two-year window in which increasingly adult content was accessible to early teens whose parents weren't willing to keep them set at "kids only," and parents weren't told.
AOL volunteers were noting that teens were popping up in fora where they might be targetted, and yet AOL management refused to warn parents that certain areas accessible to their early teens might not be appropriate to them. I was then a volunteer, mostly answering questions about mailing lists, and tried to get some action on this point - at least alerting parents - from inside, with no luck.
Finally I reported AOL to the NYS Attorney General's office, Bureau of Consumer Affairs, claiming that AOL allowed parents to think their kids were safe when it was extremely easy for any of them to wander into areas that were explicitly adult. AOL responded to the complaint by explaining their Parental Controls settings, acting as if I were a clueless parent that only need to know which buttons to push. At the same time they took steps to curtail the "overhead" access I had on their system at that time and which I used for volunteering, except the AOL employee who I worked with at that time agreed with my stance and refused to pull it.
Finally AOL introduced their "early teens" setting, and the issue became moot. The introduction coincided with a reallocation of volunteers to police the Kids Only area, and "children" became the big mantra of the "Community Leaders Organization."
The interesting thing is that AOL has never admitted its hole in Parental Controls, nor will they ever.
I did learn some interesting things during this period. For instance, there was a swelling of sting operations on AOL, run by different investigative agencies, out to catch predators targetting kids. In my opinion, if that's the scope of their operation, more power to them. But at least one of these teams who contacted me about my letter to the NYS AG were not interested in the open barn door at AOL, they were less interested in the mundane aspects of giving parents of perhaps half-a-million or a million kids the ability to decide effectively on their kids' access than to bust another lone sleazoid predator, which gets big headlines.
Basically, the large corporations have a lot to answer for if we're really concerned about protecting children in this society. Big services like AOL lie, simply, and someone should keep looking over their shoulder - not as big brother, but simply to ensure that they deliver what they promise. Consumer protection would help a lot. There are deeper issues in the society which have led to an epidemic of teen depression, and which may leave kids more vulnerable than before to predators - and yet our schools focus on busting kids dressing in black. Parents and schools need epidemiological information - a LOT of teens are depressed, and this is not just the way it is in each generation. Finally, the role the media, advertising and the fashion industry play in all of this needs to be examined.
In all of this, I think packet sniffing is a rather inefficient way to protect children in our society. I suspect the sting operations run by state, local and feds are already doing a lot to bust up the more blatant abuses. In my opinion, the rest of the problem can be addressed by looking at what's hiding in plain sight.
-Dave
ICANN wanted the money now, and would make an agreement later. Is it just me, or is puting money down before you know what the product is just bad business sense? What the hell was ICANN thinking?
... never mind.
Who is ICANN supposed to represent, anyway? Isn't that the whole problem? It seems to have started as some kind of quango with the blessings of the U.S. Government, with Esther Dyson at the helm. It's great politics, trying to corporatize the internet name space with a US-centric approach, then invoicing "foreigners" without their prior agreement - all this from a country so far behind on its UN dues that if it were the electric bill we'd all be cooking with sterno.
If we want permanent and positive change, I think there are two things to face. First , it's going to come about more slowly than anyone would like, in order to get everyone (or nearly everyone) on board. Second, the ultimate outcome will have a more international flavor, and will probably be criticized by Americans as inefficient, inelegant, etc.
I guess those of us who don't like it will just want AOL and the mega-ISPs to buy everything else up and impose their own rule. Oh wait
Dave
Sorry, but given the whole tense legal situation around the DeCSS fiasco at the moment, what was he thinking about doing this? Yeah sure it wasn't *real*, but anyone who thought about it for half a second would have realised that this would cause him trouble, real or not.
Right. Don't cause trouble. Don't make waves. The lawyers know best.
The major corporations are going to try to take a yard for every inch legislatures give them in the narrowing of civil liberties. The time to fight them is now, not when you're allowed only to post about what you did last summer and what brand of breakfast cereal you happen to like. [Sounds depressingly like an AOL chat room, doesn't it?]
Many university administrators are gutless wonders, although some were professors, and I would have hoped that someone at Oxford would have asked questions first and shot later.
Dave
Apps is right. Supporting Darwin on Intel requires Cocoa - the former "Yellow Box" which at one point was going to be implemented on Intel under NT using DLLs. That particular approach went away, but since lots of folks have Intel iron lying around, applications written in Java or Objective C++ to run on top of Darwin should be portable.
-Dave
Think of the ways in which people use the Net to connect: ....
kids to parents
There've been published observations, and I've seen this with my own family and by others' anecdotes, that today's geographically-dispersed families are more closely connected by the net and email than they have been when limited to long-distance phone calls, postal mail and infrequent visits.
In this case, the fact that other forces separate family members can be mis-attributed to our being "less" connected to them the more we're on the net.
Another variation of this "selection error" can be seen if you can accept for argument's sake that people with LESS need for face-to-face contact on less important levels are more likely to be the early adopters of online technologies.
Wouldn't people living far from relatives, and people with less need for close interactions be more lonely without technologies which make communications more convenient and less expensive?
With a few exceptions (e.g., addictive personalities), I'd suggest that the glass is half-full, at least.
-Dave
It's interesting that corporations - which are given status of legal persons by the states - are being granted far more rights and privileges than individuals, who are also legal persons.
When have you heard of (e.g.,) a plumber operating under a d/b/a seeking a court's permission to check the hard drives of some of his assistants or subcontractors to see if they really were sick last Friday, or just wanted to hit the beach?
On the flip side, it is possible for states to revoke the corporate status of corporations. There was a campaign against Philip Morris in New York state prior to the last US Senate election, led by AdBusters. The rationale was that Philip Morris had lied to the American public on issues such as tobacco/cigarette safety, and had tried to hook youth on cigarettes, and as such did not deserve to operate as a corporation in NY State. I think we need to emphasize that the legal status of corporations should not grant them greater powers over individuals than individuals themselves have with respect to each other; we also need to pierce corporate veils more often and hold individuals responsible for crimes against individuals and public safety.
-Dave
Here where I work, if we try to visit a site that is being blocked then we are given a page with a request form for that page. If we request that it be unblocked then it is submitted to a staff of real people that either unblock it or email you there reasons for not doing so.
What about a teen, say, never finding out certain new things because a large number of pages returned by a search engine query are unavailable. Not knowing if these pages will be useful from just the search engine output, will the kid have his parent ask that every single page be enabled?
Enabling individual pages through a bureaucracy is rather lame.
I'm also interested in perspectives on what is acceptable. Who makes the determination, and according to whose guidelines? The same people who think kids'll do ok with a lot of gore and violence but not with sex? I guess kids need to be protected against the Bible too, right?
- Dave
A lot of what I learned about the outside world growing up in pre-net southeast PA came from books, outside of school. The library was an interesting place where I could see new things, check 'em out, and read further if a sample was interesting. Had the librarians been ordered by the town in those years to watch closely what I was checking out at ages 10-13 or 14, I could very well have ended up like some of my classmates, staying in their hometown and thinking themselves worldly and sophisticated while they repeat their father's GOP complaints that "Problem is, nobody wants to work these days," and other jewels of social commentary.
Librarians applied some filtering, of course, in the books they ordered and carried, but their scope was pretty wide. The librarian's ethos seems to be to provide as much access to as many people as is affordable and practical. The entire process of book publishing back then also constituted a filter against many unpopular ideas or views, but we didn't see that operate in the open.
The internet brings several issues into sharp focus. The entire process of authoritativeness comes into question. To me, the odds of a 15-year-old seeing online adult graphics aren't that worrisome, because the kid probably has seen far worse on a premium cable channel or scarfed up some magazines at his/her local 7-11. Where the net poses real challenges for all of us is in the issue of what's true - how we know what we claim to know. If a student decides to research the holocaust, s/he'll find (probably) more sites denying its existence than sites which provide careful factual background to that tragedy. Because everyone's a publisher, we can't expect history and other 'common knowledge' to be transmitted reliably unless we help young people learn to think critically, to look at sources, to be able to tell if they're being propagandized. Censorship of any kind goes against this kind of education, because blanket banning of T&A today (even if it could be done reliably) at public sites could mean banning of information on the theory of evolution tomorrow.
- Dave
But where is the free production platform? Does Quicktime have a free tool to generate the live streams?
For live streaming, you can use Sorenson's Broadcaster with or without Darwin Streaming Server (you can use the server to reflect a multicast so folks can access streams over the internet). The product page is at http://www.s-vision.com/produ cts/SorensonBroadcaster/.
To set up movies, music files, etc. on your server, you can use Apple's $30 QuickTime Pro (a reg# upgrade to the free download). This will allow you to export media into hinted format for streaming.
-Dave
This business seems to me to be the intersection of different industry segments' propaganda, all "coming true."
First, Micro$oft pretends that Windows is easy to use and own, despite its tinkertoy nature and inherent problems and instabilities.
Then, AOL in particular and other services go along with well-funded campaigns based on the notion that using the internet is as easy as putting in a CD and clicking a button. Of course, AOL especially has given up any pretense of encouraging its members to learn what they're doing on line, to participate in online communities as responsible people, to understand anything about their environment, etc. So it's not very far from this to the current situation, which is based in part on Windows' not-so-easy-to-use characteristics. People are tempted to just say yes and get the install over with, and apparently, woe to s/he who does so.
Now, imagine you're Ms/Mr Big Exec at MSN, Plodigy, whatever, and you've just given out tons of $400 rebates to sign up lots of people people buying computers... and they 'try' AOL 5.0 and now can't access your service, but are committed to paying for it. Sort of the 'just plug it in and click' chickens coming home to roost.
-Dave
Maybe some of you people should think about all the good respect for the rule of law has done for humanity before you casually brush it aside.
If someone wants to write and sell a software product, more power to them. However, should they have the right to suppress criticism of their software, and of how it's put together? I don't think so. Part of the "law" protects free speech, and an essential part of the working of any market is freely available information about products, sellers and prices. Suppress information about software products and you contribute to a market failure in that industry. Maximizing information is a goal of all advocates of the market, be they liberal or conservative...
-Dave
What I've noticed is that most of the data we're accumulating is quickly becoming useless. 10 year old schoolwork isn't something so worthy of archiving. The data you really want to keep shouldn't be very large anyway...
This may be true of households and many businesses, however there are government requirements for keeping data for things like clinical trials and funded research which are subject to this problem.
There is also a public-interest issue here. Imagine if the tobacco industry, which has in effect lied to the public and hence murdered for the past three or four decades, had been required to have its research data archived in a retrievable format. Another example is the archived PROFS email correspondence of the National Security Council members during the Reagan era, which led to the smoking guns of the Iran-Contra scandal. A final example: a small city near where I live recently had difficulties deciding in what its City Charter actually said, because of poor recordkeeping of its officially adopted amendments over the years.
While most data is of little use to us after a year or a few years, there are longer-term projects and public-interest requirements that make it a public issue. True, I doubt if anyone would want to save most of those Letterman Top-10 lists, blonde-jokes and similar net-chaff for very long. I do think the Stephen Wright stuff will endure, however....
-Dave
There was a similar story on PBS awhile back concerning the 1960 Mars probes' telemetry data. The data were archived at a university in (I believe) the Northwest. Test reads of that data suggested that about 20% of the tapes' contents were no longer readable.
Perhaps IT curricula (the kind that train people who say, "I don't code, I manage") can include a kind of data life-cycle management approach. The costs of updating both hardware- and software-based storage formats on an ongoing basis are probably less for crucial data than the cost of a crash-recovery project once the data are urgently needed. An analog would be the fact that maintenance of large Cobol-based systems was considered unglamorous, unsexy, and a backwater job, until Y2K concerns made those jobs quite remunerative for awhile.
- Dave
Have you tried compiling Apple's Darwin Streaming Server under Linux? It's open source, easily configurable, and Apple doesn't charge by the stream.
True, people are still waiting for a Linux QT client, but your fears about Micro$oft domination of streaming may be premature.
There are some IT types who will adopt MS streaming just because it comes from Redmond, but these folks are no different than the IT types who used to grasp at any solution IBM offered, because it came from IBM. We used to call them dinosaurs.
-Dave
What if the pro-privacy community dug up names and all kinds of personal info on the executives involved in making these decisions at Double-Click, and spread it all over the net? Sort of a taste of one's own medicine.
Corporations don't feel anything, people do, and the people who make these kinds of decisions - and who lie about them - often feel they can act with impunity.
-Dave
That's right. In a few years' time, collectors will be bidding up the prices of beige hardware. Imagine that.
-Dave
A couple of things are missing from the article. For instance, the CompuServe 2000 software (sent to CIS users to encourage them to upgrade) is basically AOL 5.0 with a different skin, and it behaves the same way and can cause the same problems.
Another thing I found on a friend's Win95 system: Neither the CS2000 or AOL5.0 installer could install the MSIE portion, rendering either install near-useless, and the error messages were, well, Microsoft's. Some casual polling reveals that this is not an uncommon problem, either.
Finally, CS's technical support (recently bolstered by AOL tech support staff who were transferred) were not particularly helpful to my friend. One would think stuff like this could be rationally debugged and not require exorcists.
-Dave
I agree with the choice of Neal Stephenson, although I'd suggest the honor be shared with Bruce Sterling. Both have been busy showing us the future we're collectively making, and both are solid craftsmen. I was awed by Cryptonomicon on several levels, really liked "In the beginning..." and thoroughly enjoyed Sterling's Distraction. Both writers take chances and show us where we've been and where we are - or might be - going.
Clearly, there are many other areas where a 'net person of the year' might be selected from. Linus, Red Hat, and any one of dozens of folks who have made a major difference; but the folks who reflect the whole enterprise back to us are deserve recognition because the recognition encourages people to look more closely at their ideas.
-Dave
Sales taxes are often routed to both state government and to county governments. Here in NY State, roughly half the sales tax is kept by the state capital, and the rest is forwarded to the county of record.
While I like the idea of a tax-free mode of shopping (be it mail-order or online), others on here have raised several good points: first, that even mail order firms are starting to collect taxes, at least in states where they have branch offices or facilities; second, that giving middle- and upper-class consumers access to circumvent state and county taxes is as regressive as the county/state sales tax in the first place, since the monies not collected by the jurisdiction will have to be made up for by those without the access (or the credit) to shop online. This is even less fair than the sales tax itself.
I happen to like Oregon's approach, myself: no sales tax, higher state income tax brackets and a stiff gasoline tax, the latter paying for roads. Sales taxes hurt the poor most, and if the last several decades in the US are any evidence, they don't encourage savings, either.
Conclusion: I'm resigned to net-shopping being taxed, eventually. I think asking taxpayers to estimate their purchases is pretty ludicrous, but eventually the e-merchants will play ball, with the help of some inter-state agreements or federal legislation. Whether you think governments should be taxing all this money in the first place is really a separate question.
My job used to take me to area colleges, and last year at one small school's Education Dept. I happened to look over term project posters by Elementary Ed. students while waiting to see someone. One poster was about ADHD and the use of ritalin. It stated the percentage of children, primarily boys, who are currently medicated in the early grades. I don't remember the exact figure, but it was surprisingly high, something like 1/8th or 1/7th of all boys in certain grades. This really worries me, because you're right - scientists think they know certain things about the brain and its chemistry, but do they really understand how the mind works? I don't think so. Another point you raise is side effects: I've always been very conservative about medication; at one point several years ago I considered one of the SRIs during a particularly bad path, but after reviewing the likely and possible side effects I opted to maintain purely drug-free therapy, which was effective. Not everyone is on the cusp as I was; I have some relatives who must take certain meds in order to function in their lives - they are in constant medical review as they age; not only do some drugs damage the liver, others wreck the kidneys, cause sexual dysfunction, etc. I'd consider an informed choice like that appropriate in mid-life or with an extremely severe condition, but kids?