However, the vast majority of readers will clearly understand that the *actual* issue being implied was how one can fund reputable and quality journalism online.
Practically no online sites that are primarily paid by advertisement revenue offer reputable and quality journalism. Sorry to be so blunt and if that hurts the feelings of some journalists and tech writers on/. or Ars, but for quality journalism you have to consult the New York Times, the BBC and a bunch of other online presences of paid newspapers and TV channels (many of which are state-sponsored with constitutional guarantees for their independence), and not "tech blogging and news aggregation site X."
Luckily this does not concern/. because there is no journalism on/. anyway.
how trustworthy, independent journalism can be funded if advertising wasn't cutting it
No site in the world offers trustworthy, independent journalism and is primarily paid from advertisement money. That would be a contradiction in terms.
Exactly. Whether you want to use an ad blocker or not is your personal choice. If destructoid or anyone else's website don't get enough ad revenue, that's their problem. I personally use ad blockers and do not care at all whether websites I frequent vanish because of that or not. Other sites with other sources of revenue will replace them. Or, if not, I will have to pay for my news if I really want it so desparately. (By the same token, of course, I do not care for websites that try to block ad blockers. If I see a popup telling me to switch off my ad blocker, I'll simply point my browser somewhere else.)
It is wrong to claim that the market always regulates itself, after all there are monopolies, business cartels, closed markets, chaotic market behavior and instability, etc., but in this case it does just fine.
And now the media is going along with it without even thinking of the implications.
Anyone who writes a blog for The Wall Street Journal ought to know about the power of words, so perhaps the author just wanted to appeal to the criminal nature of his typical readership.
Artists have no real choice in the matter at all, their only choice is between giving up art and flip burgers at McDonald's and signing the damn contract with the label. "pefer" in this context means about as much as in "Would you prefer to eat shit with strawberries or shit without strawberries?"
If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so.
I wouldn't be so sure. A freedom to fail doesn't exactly imply justice. Your statement is a bit like saying to a homeless "Hey, asshole, why don't you just become an investment banker and make a lot of money?" The media industry has a de facto monopoly over the content. A single artist cannot successfully market himself and anyone who tries to set up an alternative distribution channel for a group of artists will either be forced into bancrupcy with all dirty tricks the modern financial world has to offer or sued into oblivion for patent violations, alleged copyright violations, and so on - most likely, both at the same time.
Heck, even artists who just put their own works on a web page or youtube can be happy if their page is not taken down for alleged infringement.
While I'm sympathetic to discourse ethics and wish you all the best in your intellectual endeavors, I have some critical remarks.
First remark: According to your definition ethics is the same as anthropology. That's not enough. Starting with Plato and Aristotle reasonable moral philosophers have always taken into account empirical data about morality (e.g. akrasia, Plato's concrete suggestions for the education of philosophers, marxist theory/praxis problem), but there is still the problem of the naturalistic fallacy - you cannot derive an ought form an is - and/or the problem of moral relativism. Unless you're really just interested in descriptive ethics as a branch of empirical sociology and instead strife for universally applicable principles, you have to be very careful not to end up with a reflection of your own traded morals. Philosophers and ethicists in particular have an unfortunate tendency to reverse engineer the theses they would wish to obtain back until they get to the 'desired' basis, principles, and presumed anthropological constants.
Second remark: If you wish to take into account empirical data, please take into account all of it! That includes the behavior of tribes on the Andaman island who are allowed to kill any person not belonging to their tribe and who have no sense of property. Also, please use proper quantitative methodology, not anecdotical evidence to support your claims about the alleged 'human condition' (conditio humana)!
As a philosopher who currently works at the borderlines between philosophy of language, logic, and ethics (work that is overlapping with AI research and also working together with computer scientists occasionally), I have something to say about that. You might not like it, though.
Ethics is neither rigorous nor particularly rational nor is most of it axiomatic. Rationality has been undermined for decades now by recent trends like 'moral intuitionism', 'moral contextualism', and 'moral particularism'. These are horrible abominations of the critical thinking culture, 'post-structuralism', and a dumbed-down, politically correct education system, yet they are highly influential. Furthermore, even what is known as 'axiology' in the deontic tradition can rarely be considered axiomatic in the mathematical sense of the word. Axiology mostly concerns normative systems in general without any details and without really formalizing rule conflicts etc. From my personal experience with them, mainstream ethicists also tend to be sloppy thinkers. They often do not think things through, sometimes even ignore obvious problems or impossibility theorems, and many of them are proud of their anti-mathematical attitude. (Like always there are exceptions, I'm just laying out the tendency.)
Ethicists also do not agree upon common definitions of the foundations of their discipline. Words like 'value', 'reason', 'normative system', or 'justification' have no commonly agreed meaning among professional moral philosophers. If you doubt my words, just ask them. Write an email to 10 famous moral philosophers and ask them about their definition of these words (not definitions according to school X, which they can of course repeat but do not agree with). You will be surprised about how different the answers will be. Amongst philosophers you will likely find any opinion on a moral topic you can imagine and quite a few nonsensical ones you cannot imagine.
I'm not saying that moral philosophy is useless, otherwise I wouldn't do it, I'm just saying that like in other branches of philosophy around 80%-90% of the texts in it are crap or, to be more modest, not much more than a source of inspiration and certainly not rigorous, as you have suggested. Personally, I would not trust a moral philosopher any more to make moral decisions than I would trust the morality of any other educated and seemingly reasonable person. Perhaps I would even trust them a bit less, because they tend to be moralists (in the bad sense of the word) and also lack a sense of realism sometimes. Still I believe that most of them would be reasonable enough not to voluntarily work in a weapon research programme...
All of what I said includes "military ethics" which is a niche about as small as the "philosophy of football."
Not only that, I would not go anywhere near such a machine unless I knew exactly how it was programmed, how its programs have been audited and formally verified, and what kind of safety mechanisms have been built in. Seriously, as long as not at least as much safety evaluation is put into this machine's software as is put into civilian fly-by-wire airplanes it's just a matter of time until the first machine operator will die.
The post-process effects and a generall lack of resolution of sharpness in combination with wrong colors make games look so cartoonish. When I look around on a sunny day I see:
1. sharp objects even far away (in other words, depth of field != blurriness at a distance),
2. *everything* is crystal sharp (even at high resolution game graphics tend to be too blurry due to AA and if you switch minimal AA off you get shimmering artefacts)
3. no matter what people claim, my vision does *not* blur when I turn my head - at least not in the way that "motion blur" effects do,
4.same for objects at high speed, they don't appear to be blurred to me - never ever,
5. bright objects shimmer and whirr much less in reality than in games,
6. environments are less colorful in reality,
7. there is more small movement in reality than even CryEngine can reproduce,
8. HDR is often exaggerated; shadows are less dark in reality and my eyes adapt extremely fast to changes in lighting conditions, so fast that it's usually not noticable (exception: extreme changes like leaving a very dark room into bright sunlight),
9. detail at distance and field of view are much higher in reality than in games
Okay, 7 & 9 are performance issues, but I still sometimes wonder whether perhaps many game devs are vision impaired?
I have often have doubts whether these fighter planes really have any use nowadays. Especially dogfighting seems to be a bit outdated in times of cheap shoulder launched surface to air missiles. Moreover, there are drones, cruise missiles, etc. These planes look a lot like super-expensive adult toys to me. Could someone who knows more about military strategy explain to me for what purposes these kinds of planes are needed? What is the strategy behind them? What about cost/benefits? Is such a plane capable of evading the amount of modern surface to air missiles you could buy for its price?
However, as others have pointed out quite convincingly already, if you're the victim of a date rape suffering from PTSD with flashbacks, it's a good idea simply not to attend a talk titled "sex +/- drugs: known vulns and exploits" rather than complaining about it and/or preventing it from being given.
> If you're defective, you should get that fixed. Not expect the rest of us to modify our behavior.
This statement is the de facto definition of white male privilege.
If by "definition" you mean "whatever just fits my personal motivation for talking about 'definition' without really considering what the other person has said", then yes. That would be the wrong definition of "definition", though.
He won't need any of this. For 10K he should be able to afford a shark pool and a pussycat to pet. That and some evil laughter will suffice to keep the burglars away.
The foreign policy of the USA can NEVER, EVER be, "let's just mind our own business and try to help out where we can, and then for the most part other countries will leave us alone." That didn't work for the US in 1917 or 1941 or 2001. It completely ignores history.
You're right about that. Isolationism doesn't work.
Anybody who proposes pacifism is either not concerned with the best interests of the US, or is a dumbass.
That's a complete non-sequitur. It is a proven fact that the post 9/11 "war on terror" has increased terrorism and that's also not very surprising. If you occupy a country, be it Afghanistan or Iraq, there will be a huge number of fighters in this country who will strife to free themselves from occupation, and since the warfare is asymmetric they will become terrorists, since they could otherwise not achieve their goal. You know, Al Qaeda's main goal has always been to get US out of Saudi Arabia - a dictatorship and a big ally of the US. Interventionist politics and CIA coups such as those in Chile, Iran or Egypt that seem to have been forgotten by many are and have always been the biggest recruitment tool for enemies of the US.
Pacifism works well when it is accompanied with economic and cultural embrasement via international contracts and the usual clandestine intelligence work. You can be pacifist without hailing terrorists and fundamentalists. Signing international contracts means giving away power but in the long run makes conventional wars between countries impractical. A good start for the US would be to finally ratify the International Criminal Court document like 121 other nations did. The US have signed it already but they refuse to ratify it and even vowed military action against ICC should they ever get the idea to persecute a US citizen. Signing and at the same time threatening military action, that's schizophrenic and tells you something about how fucked up and clueless US foreign policy really is. If you're so clueless about international relations (thanks to Harvard, btw), then of course you'll resort to violence at every possible occasion.
i assume you don't buy anything from india or china? Do you get excited like that all the time or only when the CEO explicitly spells the mainstream doctrine out? That's how the huge majority of stuff is made, deal with it.
You're a cynic. Would you also hapily buy clothes from a company whose CEO brags about employing children and keeping his workers in a slave camp?
You can't change the whole world at once but you've got to start somewhere, and starting with companies whose CEOs are obvious assholes seems to be a reasonable thing to do.
Why would anyone need color on a calculator? It just drains battery life! I'd rather like to see standard batteries with long life, a small form factor, tons of easy to use functions including CAS, good keys, and an outstanding printed manual. Apart from the form factor various older HP and TI calculators fit this description, but I'd love to see something like the Casio Slim but with CAS and RPN.;-)
It's no big deal. If some monopolist messed around with a single platform it would be easy to replace html with an ad hoc markup language, make a browser for that and ignore all previous standards. I'm not joking. There is really nothing magic about document markup and "mobile" application frameworks, almost any undergraduate CS student could come up with something better than what we have now, and an alternative WWW would be adopted very swifty if the old one for some reason became inconvenient to most users.
To give the doubters an example, I'm pretty sure that I could come up with my own SXML-based version of the web with embedded sandboxed, just-in-time compiled scripting language and my own fast browser within a few days or weeks at maximum, just by using existing HTTP(S) for the clients/servers and gluing together some existing Racket libraries. And I haven't even studied CS. I'm sure some smarter people could come up with something better and faster in even less time. Of course, as long as there is no pressing need, this would be quite a futile exercise.
Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more than you ever will.
What a shallow comparison! There are people whose main motivation does not come from how much money they can make or how much power they can gain over others. RMS's motivation does not even remotely have anything to do with Bill Gates' motives or 'comparing of penis length' type rituals such as 'Who has had most influence on PCs?'
People who are mainly motivated by power and greed tend to ridiculde and diminish the achievements of these people. But in the long run, their rantings doen't count. In two hundred years from now people will very likely still read the novels of Thomas Pynchon, but absolutely nobody will give a fuck about the iPhone 5. (Apple and Microsoft will probably not even exist any longer in 200 years. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the free software movement will be alive and well in 200 years from now, even if it might have been outlawed by then.)
They're doing it and Wikileaks acts against it. What's your point? Surely governments and wikileaks are two completely different kinds of entities with completely different aims and purposes, just because Wikileaks advocates government transparency doesn't mean or imply in any way that they ought to advocate wikileaks transparency. There is no "paradox" to start with.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the vast majority of readers will clearly understand that the *actual* issue being implied was how one can fund reputable and quality journalism online.
Practically no online sites that are primarily paid by advertisement revenue offer reputable and quality journalism. Sorry to be so blunt and if that hurts the feelings of some journalists and tech writers on /. or Ars, but for quality journalism you have to consult the New York Times, the BBC and a bunch of other online presences of paid newspapers and TV channels (many of which are state-sponsored with constitutional guarantees for their independence), and not "tech blogging and news aggregation site X."
Luckily this does not concern /. because there is no journalism on /. anyway.
how trustworthy, independent journalism can be funded if advertising wasn't cutting it
No site in the world offers trustworthy, independent journalism and is primarily paid from advertisement money. That would be a contradiction in terms.
Exactly. Whether you want to use an ad blocker or not is your personal choice. If destructoid or anyone else's website don't get enough ad revenue, that's their problem. I personally use ad blockers and do not care at all whether websites I frequent vanish because of that or not. Other sites with other sources of revenue will replace them. Or, if not, I will have to pay for my news if I really want it so desparately. (By the same token, of course, I do not care for websites that try to block ad blockers. If I see a popup telling me to switch off my ad blocker, I'll simply point my browser somewhere else.)
It is wrong to claim that the market always regulates itself, after all there are monopolies, business cartels, closed markets, chaotic market behavior and instability, etc., but in this case it does just fine.
And now the media is going along with it without even thinking of the implications.
Anyone who writes a blog for The Wall Street Journal ought to know about the power of words, so perhaps the author just wanted to appeal to the criminal nature of his typical readership.
Artists have no real choice in the matter at all, their only choice is between giving up art and flip burgers at McDonald's and signing the damn contract with the label. "pefer" in this context means about as much as in "Would you prefer to eat shit with strawberries or shit without strawberries?"
If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so.
I wouldn't be so sure. A freedom to fail doesn't exactly imply justice. Your statement is a bit like saying to a homeless "Hey, asshole, why don't you just become an investment banker and make a lot of money?" The media industry has a de facto monopoly over the content. A single artist cannot successfully market himself and anyone who tries to set up an alternative distribution channel for a group of artists will either be forced into bancrupcy with all dirty tricks the modern financial world has to offer or sued into oblivion for patent violations, alleged copyright violations, and so on - most likely, both at the same time.
Heck, even artists who just put their own works on a web page or youtube can be happy if their page is not taken down for alleged infringement.
While I'm sympathetic to discourse ethics and wish you all the best in your intellectual endeavors, I have some critical remarks.
First remark: According to your definition ethics is the same as anthropology. That's not enough. Starting with Plato and Aristotle reasonable moral philosophers have always taken into account empirical data about morality (e.g. akrasia, Plato's concrete suggestions for the education of philosophers, marxist theory/praxis problem), but there is still the problem of the naturalistic fallacy - you cannot derive an ought form an is - and/or the problem of moral relativism. Unless you're really just interested in descriptive ethics as a branch of empirical sociology and instead strife for universally applicable principles, you have to be very careful not to end up with a reflection of your own traded morals. Philosophers and ethicists in particular have an unfortunate tendency to reverse engineer the theses they would wish to obtain back until they get to the 'desired' basis, principles, and presumed anthropological constants.
Second remark: If you wish to take into account empirical data, please take into account all of it! That includes the behavior of tribes on the Andaman island who are allowed to kill any person not belonging to their tribe and who have no sense of property. Also, please use proper quantitative methodology, not anecdotical evidence to support your claims about the alleged 'human condition' (conditio humana)!
As a philosopher who currently works at the borderlines between philosophy of language, logic, and ethics (work that is overlapping with AI research and also working together with computer scientists occasionally), I have something to say about that. You might not like it, though.
Ethics is neither rigorous nor particularly rational nor is most of it axiomatic. Rationality has been undermined for decades now by recent trends like 'moral intuitionism', 'moral contextualism', and 'moral particularism'. These are horrible abominations of the critical thinking culture, 'post-structuralism', and a dumbed-down, politically correct education system, yet they are highly influential. Furthermore, even what is known as 'axiology' in the deontic tradition can rarely be considered axiomatic in the mathematical sense of the word. Axiology mostly concerns normative systems in general without any details and without really formalizing rule conflicts etc. From my personal experience with them, mainstream ethicists also tend to be sloppy thinkers. They often do not think things through, sometimes even ignore obvious problems or impossibility theorems, and many of them are proud of their anti-mathematical attitude. (Like always there are exceptions, I'm just laying out the tendency.)
Ethicists also do not agree upon common definitions of the foundations of their discipline. Words like 'value', 'reason', 'normative system', or 'justification' have no commonly agreed meaning among professional moral philosophers. If you doubt my words, just ask them. Write an email to 10 famous moral philosophers and ask them about their definition of these words (not definitions according to school X, which they can of course repeat but do not agree with). You will be surprised about how different the answers will be. Amongst philosophers you will likely find any opinion on a moral topic you can imagine and quite a few nonsensical ones you cannot imagine.
I'm not saying that moral philosophy is useless, otherwise I wouldn't do it, I'm just saying that like in other branches of philosophy around 80%-90% of the texts in it are crap or, to be more modest, not much more than a source of inspiration and certainly not rigorous, as you have suggested. Personally, I would not trust a moral philosopher any more to make moral decisions than I would trust the morality of any other educated and seemingly reasonable person. Perhaps I would even trust them a bit less, because they tend to be moralists (in the bad sense of the word) and also lack a sense of realism sometimes. Still I believe that most of them would be reasonable enough not to voluntarily work in a weapon research programme ...
All of what I said includes "military ethics" which is a niche about as small as the "philosophy of football."
Bye asshole, we're glad you're leaving. Don't let the door hit you anus!
Not only that, I would not go anywhere near such a machine unless I knew exactly how it was programmed, how its programs have been audited and formally verified, and what kind of safety mechanisms have been built in. Seriously, as long as not at least as much safety evaluation is put into this machine's software as is put into civilian fly-by-wire airplanes it's just a matter of time until the first machine operator will die.
The post-process effects and a generall lack of resolution of sharpness in combination with wrong colors make games look so cartoonish. When I look around on a sunny day I see:
1. sharp objects even far away (in other words, depth of field != blurriness at a distance),
2. *everything* is crystal sharp (even at high resolution game graphics tend to be too blurry due to AA and if you switch minimal AA off you get shimmering artefacts)
3. no matter what people claim, my vision does *not* blur when I turn my head - at least not in the way that "motion blur" effects do,
4.same for objects at high speed, they don't appear to be blurred to me - never ever,
5. bright objects shimmer and whirr much less in reality than in games,
6. environments are less colorful in reality,
7. there is more small movement in reality than even CryEngine can reproduce,
8. HDR is often exaggerated; shadows are less dark in reality and my eyes adapt extremely fast to changes in lighting conditions, so fast that it's usually not noticable (exception: extreme changes like leaving a very dark room into bright sunlight),
9. detail at distance and field of view are much higher in reality than in games
Okay, 7 & 9 are performance issues, but I still sometimes wonder whether perhaps many game devs are vision impaired?
I have often have doubts whether these fighter planes really have any use nowadays. Especially dogfighting seems to be a bit outdated in times of cheap shoulder launched surface to air missiles. Moreover, there are drones, cruise missiles, etc. These planes look a lot like super-expensive adult toys to me. Could someone who knows more about military strategy explain to me for what purposes these kinds of planes are needed? What is the strategy behind them? What about cost/benefits? Is such a plane capable of evading the amount of modern surface to air missiles you could buy for its price?
No attempt to troll, I'm honestly interested.
However, as others have pointed out quite convincingly already, if you're the victim of a date rape suffering from PTSD with flashbacks, it's a good idea simply not to attend a talk titled "sex +/- drugs: known vulns and exploits" rather than complaining about it and/or preventing it from being given.
> If you're defective, you should get that fixed. Not expect the rest of us to modify our behavior.
This statement is the de facto definition of white male privilege.
If by "definition" you mean "whatever just fits my personal motivation for talking about 'definition' without really considering what the other person has said", then yes. That would be the wrong definition of "definition", though.
He won't need any of this. For 10K he should be able to afford a shark pool and a pussycat to pet. That and some evil laughter will suffice to keep the burglars away.
The foreign policy of the USA can NEVER, EVER be, "let's just mind our own business and try to help out where we can, and then for the most part other countries will leave us alone." That didn't work for the US in 1917 or 1941 or 2001. It completely ignores history.
You're right about that. Isolationism doesn't work.
Anybody who proposes pacifism is either not concerned with the best interests of the US, or is a dumbass.
That's a complete non-sequitur. It is a proven fact that the post 9/11 "war on terror" has increased terrorism and that's also not very surprising. If you occupy a country, be it Afghanistan or Iraq, there will be a huge number of fighters in this country who will strife to free themselves from occupation, and since the warfare is asymmetric they will become terrorists, since they could otherwise not achieve their goal. You know, Al Qaeda's main goal has always been to get US out of Saudi Arabia - a dictatorship and a big ally of the US. Interventionist politics and CIA coups such as those in Chile, Iran or Egypt that seem to have been forgotten by many are and have always been the biggest recruitment tool for enemies of the US.
Pacifism works well when it is accompanied with economic and cultural embrasement via international contracts and the usual clandestine intelligence work. You can be pacifist without hailing terrorists and fundamentalists. Signing international contracts means giving away power but in the long run makes conventional wars between countries impractical. A good start for the US would be to finally ratify the International Criminal Court document like 121 other nations did. The US have signed it already but they refuse to ratify it and even vowed military action against ICC should they ever get the idea to persecute a US citizen. Signing and at the same time threatening military action, that's schizophrenic and tells you something about how fucked up and clueless US foreign policy really is. If you're so clueless about international relations (thanks to Harvard, btw), then of course you'll resort to violence at every possible occasion.
i assume you don't buy anything from india or china? Do you get excited like that all the time or only when the CEO explicitly spells the mainstream doctrine out?
That's how the huge majority of stuff is made, deal with it.
You're a cynic. Would you also hapily buy clothes from a company whose CEO brags about employing children and keeping his workers in a slave camp?
You can't change the whole world at once but you've got to start somewhere, and starting with companies whose CEOs are obvious assholes seems to be a reasonable thing to do.
Why would anyone need color on a calculator? It just drains battery life! I'd rather like to see standard batteries with long life, a small form factor, tons of easy to use functions including CAS, good keys, and an outstanding printed manual. Apart from the form factor various older HP and TI calculators fit this description, but I'd love to see something like the Casio Slim but with CAS and RPN. ;-)
Google could start by cutting off their own funding. It's not as if there weren't any pirated music or movies on Youtube ...
Fucking hypocrites.
To satisfy your curiosity, I'm the AC who posted the very first post (and no other AC post in this thread). I live and work in Portugal.
Germany, Italy, Estonia, Latvia and Hungary all use indirect elections...
However, what "indirect" means in the elections of these countries is quite different from what it means in the US electoral system...
You should really get a basic clue about electoral systems first before even starting to compare apples with bananas.
It's no big deal. If some monopolist messed around with a single platform it would be easy to replace html with an ad hoc markup language, make a browser for that and ignore all previous standards. I'm not joking. There is really nothing magic about document markup and "mobile" application frameworks, almost any undergraduate CS student could come up with something better than what we have now, and an alternative WWW would be adopted very swifty if the old one for some reason became inconvenient to most users.
To give the doubters an example, I'm pretty sure that I could come up with my own SXML-based version of the web with embedded sandboxed, just-in-time compiled scripting language and my own fast browser within a few days or weeks at maximum, just by using existing HTTP(S) for the clients/servers and gluing together some existing Racket libraries. And I haven't even studied CS. I'm sure some smarter people could come up with something better and faster in even less time. Of course, as long as there is no pressing need, this would be quite a futile exercise.
The concept itself is not stupid. As it happens, though, most of the people who use the prefix "cyber-" are stupid.
Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more than you ever will.
What a shallow comparison! There are people whose main motivation does not come from how much money they can make or how much power they can gain over others. RMS's motivation does not even remotely have anything to do with Bill Gates' motives or 'comparing of penis length' type rituals such as 'Who has had most influence on PCs?'
People who are mainly motivated by power and greed tend to ridiculde and diminish the achievements of these people. But in the long run, their rantings doen't count. In two hundred years from now people will very likely still read the novels of Thomas Pynchon, but absolutely nobody will give a fuck about the iPhone 5. (Apple and Microsoft will probably not even exist any longer in 200 years. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the free software movement will be alive and well in 200 years from now, even if it might have been outlawed by then.)
Governments can't follow the same rationale?
They're doing it and Wikileaks acts against it. What's your point? Surely governments and wikileaks are two completely different kinds of entities with completely different aims and purposes, just because Wikileaks advocates government transparency doesn't mean or imply in any way that they ought to advocate wikileaks transparency. There is no "paradox" to start with.