So, if NSI owns the domain name microsoft.com, but MS owns the trademark, what happens the next time MS forget to renew their registration?
Ok, I guess I know what happens if *Microsoft* doesn't pay up -- what happens if a small business with a domain name that consists of a trademarked name defaults? And how can NSI own domain names that consis of trademarked names?
Well, maybe, but claiming that people who aren't accountable for themselves have no need for anonymity is also fundamentally screwed up. IMO.
Maybe its more useful to look at it in terms of monitoring than anonymity. You may rarely be completely anonymous in RL, but there's not the possibility for the kind of centralized monitoring that there is online. Someone mentioned in an earlier post that people have been making home copies -- analog and digital -- of CD's for years and giving them to friends which is illegal, but has not been considered worth anyone's while to prosecute. Not only that, without the capability to centrally monitor this activity, it's basically impossible to prosecute home copying as a crime, unless someone is then distributing and selling the copies. IANAL but it seems to me that there are questions of custom in the case of home recording that are not addressed when we look at this in terms strictly of anonymity and intellectual property. (Not to mention that just because you download an MP3 does not automatically mean that you don't also have a legal copy of the music and want a digital copy for home use, but that's another issue)
As the CNET article implied, it all boils down (again) to the questions of rights of intellectual property, which is so far defined as belonging to corporate entities or patent holders, not individuals, against traditional rights of individuals.
For instance: shopping. In RL I get catalogs in the mail, I browse, I decide what I'm going to buy, I buy things from different suppliers, or don't. Online, I currently can still enjoy some anonymity, at least when I'm browsing. Same thing with magazines: I can read content in RL without betraying any information about myself to the publisher. But the less anonymous I am, the more monitored my habits are, the more *my* habits, thoughts, buying patterns, my patterns of positive/negative response to ads, layout etc are mined, analysed and used to shape the information I see. So far, the legal system has failed to recognize my rights to the information I generate. But as far as I know, it's not illegal yet for me to refuse to give it up to retailers. So there's a really good reason for making myself anonymous right there.
I think you make some really good points about the Ars Digita program. But it's still really appealing to me: Just like Jane Humanist, I got my BA in the humanities in 1985, and now am working as a junior programmer. I *really* feel hampered by my lack of a CS background. You're totally right, I don't have 12 hours a day for a year, but I also don't have 3 hours a day for four years. (Getting the equivalent of a B.S. would actually take a lot more than 3 hours a day for four years, between classes, labs and homework, but hey...)
Two years ago I went back to school full time for the year while working, and it was so hellish that if there was any way I could swing compressing those four years into one, including going into debt to finance my existence for a year, I would.
Given that getting the education I want is going to be a lot of time and money I don't have, and is going to make my life difficult while I'm doing it, the main issue to me is the quality of instruction I get while I'm in school. It's not that I didn't learn *anything* during my year back at school, it's just that the signal to noise ratio was pretty bad. Granted, I was at a community college, but supposedly the curriculum at all my state's colleges, community and four-year, is standardized. My friends who have their bachelor degree's in CS from colleges in my state report pretty much the same situation I found: schools with outdated equipment and software, lab assistants who barely knew how to use word processing software much less help with coding problems, and hours and hours of busy work. So when I look at my choices they seem to be:
1. move out of state to attend a 2 or 4 year program at private or out of state tuition rates;
2. stay where I am and spend a lot of time and money getting what I can out of a second-rate university system
3. disrupting my life for a year (assuming I applied and was accepted) to attend a way-too-intensive program with some very sharp people.
All things considered, #3 sounds best to me. But of course, like you mentioned, I don't have a kid so something like this is vaguely in the realm of the possible.
Drix I agree with you. Let me add my own totally unscientific, possibly wrong-but-it-makes-sense-to-me.02 to what you said -- our bodies are complex systems. So are soils, and plants. Human bodies have evolved to take advantage of the nutrients in plants, which have evolved to take advantage of the minerals etc in soils. It's hard for me to imagine any kind of supplement that could replace the complexity of that. I also stopped eating meat for a long time -- was already kind of anemic when I stopped then wound up in the emergency room after several years of no meat at all. Now I take lots of iron pills every day but they still don't do as much for me when I'm really low as a hamburger does. One last thing: from my current well- (or even over-) fed vantage point, I would rather die than permanently forego chewing, swallowing, tasting and socializing over my meals. Of course, if I were actually starving to death, I would choose otherwise. But food is much more than a nutrient-delivery system, which is another reason I think something like this could/should only be a short-term fix.
ChickClick is an annoying site, IMHO. If you base an entire article on what people say in its chat rooms, you're going to wind up with -- no, not reportage of a ground-breaking trend, but the opinions of a lot of annoying lusers. I mean, you could find plenty of sites where lots of men who don't really care about the technology behind the site congregate, and interview them and call it representative of men's use of the web. But you wouldn't. So why should women be covered any differently? If you *really* want to try to assess how women are affecting the tech world and vice-versa, you would have to talk to a lot more women. As you can see from the posts, a substantial amount of women don't see themselves fitting the stereotypes JonKatz described.
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Ok, I guess I know what happens if *Microsoft* doesn't pay up -- what happens if a small business with a domain name that consists of a trademarked name defaults? And how can NSI own domain names that consis of trademarked names?
Maybe its more useful to look at it in terms of monitoring than anonymity. You may rarely be completely anonymous in RL, but there's not the possibility for the kind of centralized monitoring that there is online. Someone mentioned in an earlier post that people have been making home copies -- analog and digital -- of CD's for years and giving them to friends which is illegal, but has not been considered worth anyone's while to prosecute. Not only that, without the capability to centrally monitor this activity, it's basically impossible to prosecute home copying as a crime, unless someone is then distributing and selling the copies. IANAL but it seems to me that there are questions of custom in the case of home recording that are not addressed when we look at this in terms strictly of anonymity and intellectual property. (Not to mention that just because you download an MP3 does not automatically mean that you don't also have a legal copy of the music and want a digital copy for home use, but that's another issue)
As the CNET article implied, it all boils down (again) to the questions of rights of intellectual property, which is so far defined as belonging to corporate entities or patent holders, not individuals, against traditional rights of individuals.
For instance: shopping. In RL I get catalogs in the mail, I browse, I decide what I'm going to buy, I buy things from different suppliers, or don't. Online, I currently can still enjoy some anonymity, at least when I'm browsing. Same thing with magazines: I can read content in RL without betraying any information about myself to the publisher. But the less anonymous I am, the more monitored my habits are, the more *my* habits, thoughts, buying patterns, my patterns of positive/negative response to ads, layout etc are mined, analysed and used to shape the information I see. So far, the legal system has failed to recognize my rights to the information I generate. But as far as I know, it's not illegal yet for me to refuse to give it up to retailers. So there's a really good reason for making myself anonymous right there.
Two years ago I went back to school full time for the year while working, and it was so hellish that if there was any way I could swing compressing those four years into one, including going into debt to finance my existence for a year, I would.
Given that getting the education I want is going to be a lot of time and money I don't have, and is going to make my life difficult while I'm doing it, the main issue to me is the quality of instruction I get while I'm in school. It's not that I didn't learn *anything* during my year back at school, it's just that the signal to noise ratio was pretty bad. Granted, I was at a community college, but supposedly the curriculum at all my state's colleges, community and four-year, is standardized. My friends who have their bachelor degree's in CS from colleges in my state report pretty much the same situation I found: schools with outdated equipment and software, lab assistants who barely knew how to use word processing software much less help with coding problems, and hours and hours of busy work. So when I look at my choices they seem to be:
1. move out of state to attend a 2 or 4 year program at private or out of state tuition rates;
2. stay where I am and spend a lot of time and money getting what I can out of a second-rate university system
3. disrupting my life for a year (assuming I applied and was accepted) to attend a way-too-intensive program with some very sharp people.
All things considered, #3 sounds best to me. But of course, like you mentioned, I don't have a kid so something like this is vaguely in the realm of the possible.
Drix I agree with you. Let me add my own totally unscientific, possibly wrong-but-it-makes-sense-to-me .02 to what you said -- our bodies are complex systems. So are soils, and plants. Human bodies have evolved to take advantage of the nutrients in plants, which have evolved to take advantage of the minerals etc in soils. It's hard for me to imagine any kind of supplement that could replace the complexity of that. I also stopped eating meat for a long time -- was already kind of anemic when I stopped then wound up in the emergency room after several years of no meat at all. Now I take lots of iron pills every day but they still don't do as much for me when I'm really low as a hamburger does. One last thing: from my current well- (or even over-) fed vantage point, I would rather die than permanently forego chewing, swallowing, tasting and socializing over my meals. Of course, if I were actually starving to death, I would choose otherwise. But food is much more than a nutrient-delivery system, which is another reason I think something like this could/should only be a short-term fix.
ChickClick is an annoying site, IMHO. If you base an entire article on what people say in its chat rooms, you're going to wind up with -- no, not reportage of a ground-breaking trend, but the opinions of a lot of annoying lusers. I mean, you could find plenty of sites where lots of men who don't really care about the technology behind the site congregate, and interview them and call it representative of men's use of the web. But you wouldn't. So why should women be covered any differently? If you *really* want to try to assess how women are affecting the tech world and vice-versa, you would have to talk to a lot more women. As you can see from the posts, a substantial amount of women don't see themselves fitting the stereotypes JonKatz described.