I'm inclined to agree. Too much is being read into this. The 'team' model just wasn't viable until the last decade. Networks weren't fast enough to do it with people, and AI wasn't good enough to do it without them (Daikatana! ahahaha).
However most combat through history has occurred between groups, and while individuals may distinguish themselves, they rarely are the fulcrum upon which the entire battle shifts. There isn't anything inherently 'collectivist' in that, and I say that as a rabid individualist.
I am familiar with Otlet's work, and while he was visionary, you're now attempting to put DaVinci over the Wright brothers. The vast difference between electronic and mechanical is as important as the distinctions between powered flight and gliders, the modern era and the Renaissance. You might as well argue that whomever caveman invented language itself is the one who deserves credit.
I'll grant that access to the early internet was more communication than content driven, but that may be ultimately a meaningless distinction. Communication, as social networking has recently demonstrated, IS content. The internet not coincidentally grew like the phone system, and the most developed nations were at the center, adoption crept outward. English has just happened to be the lingua franca (such an ironic phrase) of world commerce since roughly the mid 19th century. Consequently, everybody with significant business interests spoke (or hired translators for) English regardless of where they were geographically.
In case you haven't been paying attention, national laws effecting actions taken by organizations and individuals exist everywhere. While the US may disapprove of China's internet laws/regulations/policies and may voice that disapproval, it has not tried by some technical means to overthrow them.
Your example of ccTLDs shows your ignorance of the issue. Guess who decides who gets a ccTLD? The Swiss entity ISO. LOL. That's because when IANA was still part of ISI at USC the division's director didn't want the ISI/IANA to have the responsibility of deciding what was a valid country and what wasn't.
(German car manufacturers DO dictate how manufacturers build THEIR cars. Or perhaps you've never heard of 'manufacturing under license'? But that of course isn't what you meant to say. Too bad the idea you were trying to form doesn't make any sense in terms of the reality of patents and manufacturing and is a terrible analogy.)
It always amuses me when "progressives" trot out the same old tired "dastardly deeds of the evil US Empire" list. Perhaps you can name one major world power in history without blame? Don't worry, I'll wait.
History is all the same, and in purely relative terms I think the US is pretty close to the top of the morality and ethics pile when viewed in wider perspective. Spain completely wiped out civilizations more advanced (except perhaps for the whole human sacrifice thing) than the ones we forced onto reservations (a state of existence which although initially disadvantageous has ultimately made them rich at our expense, which is as much revenge as they're probably due). France fought insurgencies in Africa with a brutality that makes the treatment of collateral damage in Iraq look like a kindergarten game. Britain beat the crap out of China for the sole purpose of forcing them to buy their drugs. The Manchus killed millions of Han Chinese just because they wouldn't cut their hair for chrissake! (I suppose you've never even heard of the queue order?) I could go on and on about Russia, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Japan, India, etc. etc. Every country that has ever wielded significant power has abused it. Period. Full stop. So singling out the US for indictment is a childish gambit.
The logical conclusion of the fact that more moderate but still onerous filtering is being introduced in other free and democratic nations is that makes the risk greater. What happens when you amalgamate (small amount of no filter policies) with (larger amount of filter policies)? You think that the no filter policy is going to win out? The average or middle will more likely be found in between the current filtering policies of free and totalitarian states! A situation worse than Australia or Germany et al face now! I'm not rolling those dice because of some vague and vaporous potential protocol gains.
Software patents, while also objectionable to me, are not directly related to censorship on the internet. Unless you want to equate/conflate intellectual property issues with censorship, regardless of how different the motivations are. I would see that line of reasoning as disingenuous.
What I have learned in all my years of study of socio-political changes through history is that good things come slowly and bad things come quickly (exceptions exist). Could other democracies add positive elements to internet policy? Yes. However, it will be the negative elements that come first, and they will be worse in the near term. I for one am not willing to gamble on the chilling effects such changes would have on the closer, more immediate future.
So first you mention how Germany and Britain even have questionable positions on internet freedom, and then you suggest that "other advanced democratic countries can balance out totalitarian undemocratic countries"? That's some real good reasoning right there.
(I don't know how my anon box got checked, but I wrote this earlier.)
Cost is not the point. It might be cheaper to bulldoze the building, but it also vastly increases the likelihood of your being caught and prosecuted.
'Harder' is relative. Significantly harder? No. Somewhat or a little harder? Yes. It is still a layer. I also don't see how it's annoying as I very infrequently add devices to my network. I suppose if you put together whitebox notebooks for a living and had to test new wireless clients all the time it would be impractical, but if you only have to make changes a couple times a year for some people visiting, that's really too much?
Of course HTML exists, and while it may have been developed in Europe by a British-born engineer, it was itself a second generation of work whose foundation began with the work of American engineers, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Oh, snap!
Your attempt to invalidate my argument is very weak. Of course having many different roots/registrars is a bad idea. That's why nobody does it. Why do you think even huge countries like China never carry out their threats to create independent networks? It's not like there's some international law that says they can't. The US created the network, and more importantly, they created and/or host the bulk of the content for the network. When other nations around the world started thinking about computer networks, it was a stark choice. Either create a network from scratch at huge expense with little to no content that nobody would want to use and couldn't pay for itself (re-invent the wheel) OR connect to the network and loads of content that the US already had. So, duh, everybody wanted to connect to the US network because that was where they could watch webcams of coffee getting made.
And in your mind, if we wanted sovereignty, when those countries wanted access to our cool shit, we should have said 'ha, ha, no, that's just for us, go fuck yourselves!'
Yeah, whatever. We have no problem sharing our coolness, but that doesn't mean that whoever gets a piece gets to dictate terms for the whole thing. That still makes ZERO ethical sense.
Funny how nobody complains about those bases or the force projection of aircraft carriers when they're the first line of emergency assistance in major disasters like the 2004 tsunami.
Microcenter kicks ass. A month or so ago I was looking to get an Antec 1200 locally because S&H is expensive on cases and found Microcenter. I was able to order stuff online and then just go pick it up from their will call. I probably will be doing that a fair amount as there is no Fry's around here (moved from WA to VA).
Australia is introducing filters too as most/.ers know. They just didn't fit my more extreme parameter of 'anything' that undermines the state or social norms. I don't like any level of censorhip, but I wanted to focus on those countries who have policies that are the most irredeemable.
That's like comparing two people on the street to a newspaper. It's virtually impossible to monitor all phone conversations in real time and act instantly on any one of them. It's not at all impossible to crawl the internet and censor at will either decisively or automatically to a filter (and eventually by request to the hosts themselves). Phone censorship is not simply infeasible technically, but individual person to person calls are inconsequential compared to a page that gets millions of hits.
You're basically arguing the merits of Boeing vs. EADS as a way to discredit the Wright brothers. It doesn't matter so much who invented which protocol as who networked computers in the first place. Not to mention that hardware vs software/firmware/protocol is not a chicken vs. egg matter. Hardware always comes first, and those designs come from the US. (IBM, Cisco, 3Com/USR, Intel, AMD, etc. etc.)
You do know that the opinion of other countries like China, Bahrain, Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North AND South Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, UAE, Yemen, etc. is 'censor it for any reason that might potentially undermine the state or social norms.' Yeah, we really need their input.
If my network is so awesome that my neighbor wants to spend his own money and time to connect to it that does not give him any rights or entitlements over what still remains my network. Why is that Americans seem to be the only ones who can grasp basic ethical constructs like this? Oh, that's right, because we design everything and the rest of the world just whines about how they're entitled to our work.
You wanting it modded up because you agree with it is no better than modding it down for disagreement. It was modded down because he says Americans are all stupid and raises issues completely unrelated to the topic as "evidence". That's flamebait.
Funny how the "terminally stupid" laid the whole foundation for the internet in the first place which is why everybody whines about how the US controls it.
Encryption can be broken with less effort than a physical wall. It's also fundamentally naive to propose that one layer of security of any kind is the silver bullet that makes all other layers unnecessary. I use encryption and MAC address lists together because it means that if somebody wants to get in they have to do two things instead of just one. Can people still get in? Duh. Everybody should already know that wireless network security is about making a harder target than the one down the street.
With the disclosure that I am not a sys/net admin, I was just yesterday having a discussion about the implementation of AD integration at different organizations. I recently moved from an organization that had absolutely awesome, stable and reliable AD integration (across over 80 sites coast-to-coast as well as independent remote users over VPN no less) to another organization that has terrible AD integration. It's not the platform, it's the people. If you have a really good team of sys/net admins a Windows domain can run like clockwork and be integrated with tons of non-MS applications. If your team of admins is just a bunch of wankers who learned everything they know from a book and then think that they can then run a network for a multi-national corporation, then yes, you will have a lot of downtime and stupid crashes.
Where did I say anything about not believing the science? Nice strawman, go put it in a field somewhere. I said I didn't like the social consciousness or consumer trends that stem from the 'green movement'. I also parenthetically referenced actual climatological facts that others ignore. At no time did I say "I don't believe in theory x." However you're too lazy to address my points, so you made up one that was convenient. Then you call me lazy. I believe the term for that is "projecting." Maybe you should try to find a therapist to help you sort that out.
What bothers me most is the underlying premise that 'change is bad' as well as 'extinctions are bad'. If the macro-climatological changes are primarily anthropogenic (which considering the changes in the influence of the sun over the last few centuries is doubtful), so what? The reason life exists at all in the way it does today is due to microbes that changed the composition of the atmosphere drastically from an anoxic state to the relatively oxygen-rich state it occupies today. Should we invent a time machine and stop these out-of-control life forms from radically changing the environment and causing a mass extinction of other bacteria? Why not, who needs animals when you could have anaerobic bacteria forever.
Change, even when caused by the byproducts of a set of organisms, even when that causes a mass extinction, is not categorically bad. Most humans are so sentimental that they have no vision. They become attached to whatever animals they think are cute and cuddly and think that those animals should live forever, even when the environment changes and the species are just simply not viable anymore. That's how life, natural selection and adaptation work. 99% of species that have lived on the Earth are now extinct. People need to get over all their subjectivity about this and move on. Extinction happens for a reason, and there IS NO MORALITY TO THE CAUSE.
There is a trend lately in the behavior of humanity to try to freeze the progress of changes in the biosphere because (I believe) subconsciously people are afraid of what form it will take subsequent to those changes. They don't like the fact that their "favorite animals" like pandas and eagles are barely hanging on whereas cockroaches and crows are doing well. They're afraid of coastlines changing like somehow we can keep the same geography forever. Maybe we can think of a way to blame plate tectonics on industries too. The planet and its life are not some kind of static work of art hanging in a museum (although if you're a creationist you might think that), it's constantly changing, always has, and will until the sun swallows it. The planet produced us too.
I weigh about 145 at 6' which is almost underweight on the BMI; however, I am clearly anti-green.
Firstly because most greens are bunch of ignorant sheep who want on the band wagon just to feel morally superior and don't understand jack shit about the biosphere and climatology. (You know, things like the fact that the 19th century was the coldest period in the last ten thousand years, and that any increase in temperature using the last century or two as baseline would look extreme. Never mind how much warmer the holocene maximum was, it's the end of the world!)
Secondly because the tone and direction of green trends is now solidly in the hands of corporations who are using it to sell the same old shit except now those products have been nerfed in the name of "energy efficiency" and "natural ingredients" such that now people pay more money to feel good about themselves and get things in return that fulfill their purposes half as well as they used to. Fuck that.
Slashdot Mirror
I have avoided Bioshock for that reason. I'm not enthusiastic about how it demonizes objectivism for a cheap plot point.
I'm inclined to agree. Too much is being read into this. The 'team' model just wasn't viable until the last decade. Networks weren't fast enough to do it with people, and AI wasn't good enough to do it without them (Daikatana! ahahaha).
However most combat through history has occurred between groups, and while individuals may distinguish themselves, they rarely are the fulcrum upon which the entire battle shifts. There isn't anything inherently 'collectivist' in that, and I say that as a rabid individualist.
I am familiar with Otlet's work, and while he was visionary, you're now attempting to put DaVinci over the Wright brothers. The vast difference between electronic and mechanical is as important as the distinctions between powered flight and gliders, the modern era and the Renaissance. You might as well argue that whomever caveman invented language itself is the one who deserves credit.
I'll grant that access to the early internet was more communication than content driven, but that may be ultimately a meaningless distinction. Communication, as social networking has recently demonstrated, IS content. The internet not coincidentally grew like the phone system, and the most developed nations were at the center, adoption crept outward. English has just happened to be the lingua franca (such an ironic phrase) of world commerce since roughly the mid 19th century. Consequently, everybody with significant business interests spoke (or hired translators for) English regardless of where they were geographically.
In case you haven't been paying attention, national laws effecting actions taken by organizations and individuals exist everywhere. While the US may disapprove of China's internet laws/regulations/policies and may voice that disapproval, it has not tried by some technical means to overthrow them.
Your example of ccTLDs shows your ignorance of the issue. Guess who decides who gets a ccTLD? The Swiss entity ISO. LOL. That's because when IANA was still part of ISI at USC the division's director didn't want the ISI/IANA to have the responsibility of deciding what was a valid country and what wasn't.
(German car manufacturers DO dictate how manufacturers build THEIR cars. Or perhaps you've never heard of 'manufacturing under license'? But that of course isn't what you meant to say. Too bad the idea you were trying to form doesn't make any sense in terms of the reality of patents and manufacturing and is a terrible analogy.)
It always amuses me when "progressives" trot out the same old tired "dastardly deeds of the evil US Empire" list. Perhaps you can name one major world power in history without blame? Don't worry, I'll wait. History is all the same, and in purely relative terms I think the US is pretty close to the top of the morality and ethics pile when viewed in wider perspective. Spain completely wiped out civilizations more advanced (except perhaps for the whole human sacrifice thing) than the ones we forced onto reservations (a state of existence which although initially disadvantageous has ultimately made them rich at our expense, which is as much revenge as they're probably due). France fought insurgencies in Africa with a brutality that makes the treatment of collateral damage in Iraq look like a kindergarten game. Britain beat the crap out of China for the sole purpose of forcing them to buy their drugs. The Manchus killed millions of Han Chinese just because they wouldn't cut their hair for chrissake! (I suppose you've never even heard of the queue order?) I could go on and on about Russia, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Japan, India, etc. etc. Every country that has ever wielded significant power has abused it. Period. Full stop. So singling out the US for indictment is a childish gambit.
The logical conclusion of the fact that more moderate but still onerous filtering is being introduced in other free and democratic nations is that makes the risk greater. What happens when you amalgamate (small amount of no filter policies) with (larger amount of filter policies)? You think that the no filter policy is going to win out? The average or middle will more likely be found in between the current filtering policies of free and totalitarian states! A situation worse than Australia or Germany et al face now! I'm not rolling those dice because of some vague and vaporous potential protocol gains.
Software patents, while also objectionable to me, are not directly related to censorship on the internet. Unless you want to equate/conflate intellectual property issues with censorship, regardless of how different the motivations are. I would see that line of reasoning as disingenuous.
What I have learned in all my years of study of socio-political changes through history is that good things come slowly and bad things come quickly (exceptions exist). Could other democracies add positive elements to internet policy? Yes. However, it will be the negative elements that come first, and they will be worse in the near term. I for one am not willing to gamble on the chilling effects such changes would have on the closer, more immediate future.
Britain is on better terms with a majority of her former colonies than I think any other European power.
So first you mention how Germany and Britain even have questionable positions on internet freedom, and then you suggest that "other advanced democratic countries can balance out totalitarian undemocratic countries"? That's some real good reasoning right there.
(I don't know how my anon box got checked, but I wrote this earlier.)
Cost is not the point. It might be cheaper to bulldoze the building, but it also vastly increases the likelihood of your being caught and prosecuted.
'Harder' is relative. Significantly harder? No. Somewhat or a little harder? Yes. It is still a layer. I also don't see how it's annoying as I very infrequently add devices to my network. I suppose if you put together whitebox notebooks for a living and had to test new wireless clients all the time it would be impractical, but if you only have to make changes a couple times a year for some people visiting, that's really too much?
Of course HTML exists, and while it may have been developed in Europe by a British-born engineer, it was itself a second generation of work whose foundation began with the work of American engineers, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Oh, snap!
Your attempt to invalidate my argument is very weak. Of course having many different roots/registrars is a bad idea. That's why nobody does it. Why do you think even huge countries like China never carry out their threats to create independent networks? It's not like there's some international law that says they can't. The US created the network, and more importantly, they created and/or host the bulk of the content for the network. When other nations around the world started thinking about computer networks, it was a stark choice. Either create a network from scratch at huge expense with little to no content that nobody would want to use and couldn't pay for itself (re-invent the wheel) OR connect to the network and loads of content that the US already had. So, duh, everybody wanted to connect to the US network because that was where they could watch webcams of coffee getting made.
And in your mind, if we wanted sovereignty, when those countries wanted access to our cool shit, we should have said 'ha, ha, no, that's just for us, go fuck yourselves!'
Yeah, whatever. We have no problem sharing our coolness, but that doesn't mean that whoever gets a piece gets to dictate terms for the whole thing. That still makes ZERO ethical sense.
Funny how nobody complains about those bases or the force projection of aircraft carriers when they're the first line of emergency assistance in major disasters like the 2004 tsunami.
Microcenter kicks ass. A month or so ago I was looking to get an Antec 1200 locally because S&H is expensive on cases and found Microcenter. I was able to order stuff online and then just go pick it up from their will call. I probably will be doing that a fair amount as there is no Fry's around here (moved from WA to VA).
ICANN is kind of like the Panama Canal, just waiting for the next Carter to abandon US interests and sovereignty.
Users are users. They just access what other people make. Meanwhile most of the websites are hosted in the US.
Australia is introducing filters too as most /.ers know. They just didn't fit my more extreme parameter of 'anything' that undermines the state or social norms. I don't like any level of censorhip, but I wanted to focus on those countries who have policies that are the most irredeemable.
That's like comparing two people on the street to a newspaper. It's virtually impossible to monitor all phone conversations in real time and act instantly on any one of them. It's not at all impossible to crawl the internet and censor at will either decisively or automatically to a filter (and eventually by request to the hosts themselves). Phone censorship is not simply infeasible technically, but individual person to person calls are inconsequential compared to a page that gets millions of hits.
Your assumption is, at least according to Nationmaster, upside-down: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/int_hos-internet-hosts The US still hosts the majority of websites in the world.
You're basically arguing the merits of Boeing vs. EADS as a way to discredit the Wright brothers. It doesn't matter so much who invented which protocol as who networked computers in the first place. Not to mention that hardware vs software/firmware/protocol is not a chicken vs. egg matter. Hardware always comes first, and those designs come from the US. (IBM, Cisco, 3Com/USR, Intel, AMD, etc. etc.)
You do know that the opinion of other countries like China, Bahrain, Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North AND South Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, UAE, Yemen, etc. is 'censor it for any reason that might potentially undermine the state or social norms.' Yeah, we really need their input.
If my network is so awesome that my neighbor wants to spend his own money and time to connect to it that does not give him any rights or entitlements over what still remains my network. Why is that Americans seem to be the only ones who can grasp basic ethical constructs like this? Oh, that's right, because we design everything and the rest of the world just whines about how they're entitled to our work.
You wanting it modded up because you agree with it is no better than modding it down for disagreement. It was modded down because he says Americans are all stupid and raises issues completely unrelated to the topic as "evidence". That's flamebait. Funny how the "terminally stupid" laid the whole foundation for the internet in the first place which is why everybody whines about how the US controls it.
Encryption can be broken with less effort than a physical wall. It's also fundamentally naive to propose that one layer of security of any kind is the silver bullet that makes all other layers unnecessary. I use encryption and MAC address lists together because it means that if somebody wants to get in they have to do two things instead of just one. Can people still get in? Duh. Everybody should already know that wireless network security is about making a harder target than the one down the street.
With the disclosure that I am not a sys/net admin, I was just yesterday having a discussion about the implementation of AD integration at different organizations. I recently moved from an organization that had absolutely awesome, stable and reliable AD integration (across over 80 sites coast-to-coast as well as independent remote users over VPN no less) to another organization that has terrible AD integration. It's not the platform, it's the people. If you have a really good team of sys/net admins a Windows domain can run like clockwork and be integrated with tons of non-MS applications. If your team of admins is just a bunch of wankers who learned everything they know from a book and then think that they can then run a network for a multi-national corporation, then yes, you will have a lot of downtime and stupid crashes.
Where did I say anything about not believing the science? Nice strawman, go put it in a field somewhere. I said I didn't like the social consciousness or consumer trends that stem from the 'green movement'. I also parenthetically referenced actual climatological facts that others ignore. At no time did I say "I don't believe in theory x ." However you're too lazy to address my points, so you made up one that was convenient. Then you call me lazy. I believe the term for that is "projecting." Maybe you should try to find a therapist to help you sort that out.
What bothers me most is the underlying premise that 'change is bad' as well as 'extinctions are bad'. If the macro-climatological changes are primarily anthropogenic (which considering the changes in the influence of the sun over the last few centuries is doubtful), so what? The reason life exists at all in the way it does today is due to microbes that changed the composition of the atmosphere drastically from an anoxic state to the relatively oxygen-rich state it occupies today. Should we invent a time machine and stop these out-of-control life forms from radically changing the environment and causing a mass extinction of other bacteria? Why not, who needs animals when you could have anaerobic bacteria forever.
Change, even when caused by the byproducts of a set of organisms, even when that causes a mass extinction, is not categorically bad. Most humans are so sentimental that they have no vision. They become attached to whatever animals they think are cute and cuddly and think that those animals should live forever, even when the environment changes and the species are just simply not viable anymore. That's how life, natural selection and adaptation work. 99% of species that have lived on the Earth are now extinct. People need to get over all their subjectivity about this and move on. Extinction happens for a reason, and there IS NO MORALITY TO THE CAUSE.
There is a trend lately in the behavior of humanity to try to freeze the progress of changes in the biosphere because (I believe) subconsciously people are afraid of what form it will take subsequent to those changes. They don't like the fact that their "favorite animals" like pandas and eagles are barely hanging on whereas cockroaches and crows are doing well. They're afraid of coastlines changing like somehow we can keep the same geography forever. Maybe we can think of a way to blame plate tectonics on industries too. The planet and its life are not some kind of static work of art hanging in a museum (although if you're a creationist you might think that), it's constantly changing, always has, and will until the sun swallows it. The planet produced us too.
I weigh about 145 at 6' which is almost underweight on the BMI; however, I am clearly anti-green.
Firstly because most greens are bunch of ignorant sheep who want on the band wagon just to feel morally superior and don't understand jack shit about the biosphere and climatology. (You know, things like the fact that the 19th century was the coldest period in the last ten thousand years, and that any increase in temperature using the last century or two as baseline would look extreme. Never mind how much warmer the holocene maximum was, it's the end of the world!)
Secondly because the tone and direction of green trends is now solidly in the hands of corporations who are using it to sell the same old shit except now those products have been nerfed in the name of "energy efficiency" and "natural ingredients" such that now people pay more money to feel good about themselves and get things in return that fulfill their purposes half as well as they used to. Fuck that.