thanks for your interest in Slashdot works. It has come to our attention, after careful and long consideration, that your remarks may be utterly insignificant.
It seems that every reader has its own perception of what is an high standard of journalistic works ; while some among us agree with your well tought points, many others consider them just another put down by yet another jerk on the internet that still hasn't managed to take our audience away , maybe because his works aren't known yet or maybe because they are so irrelevant few people cares.
We would like to recommend you an alternative career path that involves less criticizing and an increased production of something good enough to grab attention and hold it as long as it is needed to become "famous on the internet".
They don't want to sell, I think they want to lease. Actually it is not even a lease, it is a concession to exercise a personal, time limited audiovisual perception of the movie/album/ebook/younameit. This is far more profiteable then selling a copy or leasing it, but it also implies making sure you can't make a good enough copy of your perception.
Which is the problem : I don't care about inexpensive content (which is crap most of the times anyway) I want my electronic devices good for a copy, good to produce, good to reproduce without paying royalties or asking permission to parasitic rentiers ; I don't want anybody means of control inside my devices.
Imagine the following : Guthenberg didn't have control over the content of the bible, but he had means to reproduce other books. Suddendly, the bible wasn't the only and most copied piece of "knowledge" , much to the detriment of oscurantist who would have liked some "sacred text" to become sort of universal reference manual for everything.
The revolution wasn't much into producing more copies of valuable content, but in making means of reproduction avaiable, literally creating a media that can be enjoyed by many and produced by many.
I wonder if folks like you ever take a step back and LISTEN to what you actually say, and compare it to reality.
Reality ? You see the average income per capita is 37,500 in US and it has +- 300 million inhabitants then look at Norway and you see they have the same income per capita, but Norway have 4,5 million inhabitans !
Norway GDP for is $194.7 billion (2005 est.) , USA GDP is $12.41 trillion (2005 est) , but from the point of view of the worker their average income is the same. Which one buys the most and what can be bought ?
One would also think that such a mighty supreme economy as that of US, thanks to economies of scale, would give a LOT more value to his citizens then a little economy as that of Norway , yet it doesn't.
What gives ? Where is the value being concentrated or wasted ?
Maybe we can use a different wording : ad hominem is used to attack the messenger when attacking him distracts from hearing and analyzing the message.
By analogy
a) if we observw that the messenger (the one who brings the message) smells b) that doesn't imply the message (what he states/says) itself smells
similarly
a) if we observe that the messenger has a track record of spewing false information b) that doesn't imply the message (what he says) is necessarily false
The facts that the messenger is known to be a misleading person just makes us him trust less and double and triple check his message even more then usual. Ad hominem exploits the logical fallacy of thinking that property of the messenger are the same property of the message, for the purpose of distracting from a deeper analysis of the message.
Relax dude , are you getting paid for defending them ?
And the further fact is, our burgeoning free enterprise system, including "evil corporate America," is what has made all this low-priced tech feasible in the first place--not to mention giving jobs to every one of the small-minded punks here and elsewhere who would rather depend on simple-minded stories they can get those puny brains around, than actually THINK with them.
Not really
a) skilled grossly underpaid workers and technicians, researchers made low-priced tech feasible, corporate only partially financed them b) jobs were given to small minded punks because there was profit to be made, not because they are punks or small minded
Certainly, risks were taken and reward for the risks were taken many many times again, sometimes one few thousand times more often then necessary.
So relax , dude. Do you ever defend yourself or your loved one so vigorously, or only your employers ?
Nope it's a not a tu quoque. If you read carefully I wrote that you are correct. What I did is compare and contrast, in which I put the two crimes in comparison , the contrast coming from the striking difference in dimension and relevance of the effects of each crime and the punishment that actually reaches each crime.
A tu quoque would have been : Big Time Enron criminals steal and that is wrong. Yet the criticism can't come from one who steals music ! ( which is distracting attention from the fact Big Time Enron criminal can be criticized by anybody regardless)
Try looking at industry diversionary tactics, ordinary joes don't use them, they are harmeless in this domain and undefended.
RIAA could be much, much bigger assholes about it. You are correct. Make a copy of a song , without even stealing it : get slapped with fine, eventually get your credit destroyed and inserted on some sort of parallel state database of "crook". Really a criminal !
Steal billions, corrupt people, destroy the savings of millions of people , a-la Enron: get a slap on the hand and get elected.
Justice works, except when you are rich then you can buy the outcome and you are more equal then others.
Now here's The list of companies that factually support RIAA behavior regardless of their pro-customer statements. Do you want your money to support RIAA ?
It would be nice to learn how to really drive a car and regain control in certain situations without panicking.
That would be useful, if for some reason the ABS or the traction control fails, one will have an hard time suing the manufacture from the grave:-) if they are lucky or from wheelchair, but people never think it may happen to them.
It happens, mostly because there are waaay to little trained drivers and some people (not that many, but some) just can't and shouldn't drive. More training and difficult situation training should be rewarded, maybe with a reduction on some car related price or tax.
I always ran into walls at Sun, company politics, and that never worked out too well. When I was at Stanford there was a rule: The best engineering wins. Simple, straightforward. If your engineering is better than the other guy's, yours got the blue ribbon. Well at Sun, and at companies in general, it's different. It's the politically correct software that gets productized.
Which is recipe for disaster as technology wins 9 times out of 10. Audio compression + internet + PC are reshaping the music business kicking freeloader rentier companies away from the profits ; if the CEO CIO and whatnot were to decide the fate of technology, MP3 was certainly going to be canceled.
Obviously the abovesaid managers will complain that MP3 reduced the value of music and that Mp3 caused more unemployement, less developement of music etc etc. They are right when they say MP3 collapsed their artificial scarity profit scheme, their copyright abuse and incredible overpricing.
Imagine what cool technology is being canceled right now, because of that reasoning.
"Free" market model , in the way it is often sold by many spin doctors, is a subset or a reinterpretation of the perfect competition market model (PCMM)
If did you homework and your studying you know that PCMM is founded on some hypothesis and particulary on the following one
- Perfect information -
Which translates in layman terms : a) everybody with no exception knows always exactly what they need to know to take a rational decision to buy or sell b) they know what they need to know exactly when they need it, there is no delay interfering with the decision c) all the players in the market have the same information at the very same time
These assumption are unrealistic in the sense that they will NEVER be met, but maybe they can be closely approximated ; people familiar with the calculus concept of limit know what kind of approximation I am referring to.
Now for the "self adjusting market" : market isn't an abstract person, an omnipotent god that works on his own, decides on his own and naturally always balance itself ; that is a delusion sold by some spin doctor to sell the story of Adam Smith (one of the first economists of all times) talking about "invisible hands" doing good for everybody in the market. They connected this notion of "invisible force" to "self balancing" to create the impression of market as "necessarily balacing for the best of everbody" , expecially for the consumer.
That would happen if consumers had perfect information and constantly made rational choices and if power concentration like monopoly choosed to follow market demand. That doesn't happen : few key players can influence the way products are perceived (see Microsoft) on a scale big enough to affect the whole market, even when they don't control the market by means of restricting or enlarging offer.
Anything can be constructed as information that, in wrong hands, could be used to harm innocents. Therefore one needs to limit the restriction to the information that could confer a measurable, significant advantage to potential abuser and that couldn't otherwise obtained by other sources or derived by interpretation of other informations.
That restriction is necessary for two reason
a) one can't use the blanket cover "everything we say is needed is secret just because we say so" because any Republican, Democrat or Ass-o-crat will abuse it given half a chance
b) secrets are so only for a very limited amount of time : leaks will occour, people will talk, betrayal is to be assumed as likely. Believing that a secret will last enough time is taking a big bet with luck , expecially when there are better alternatives.
The potential for abuse is immense : look at Enron and how the lack of investigative powers of investors, combined with their ignorance and lack of will allowed a bunch of highly paid "experts" to completely ruin the lifes of many.
Porn is considered harmful because it shows people can do something else, more entertaining, far more interesting then going die for the motherland.
Who would ever go to war, if they knew they could lose their loved ones AND lose good old sex ?
If males were taught that having good sexual relationship with a woman will both make them and the womens happy and become less aggressive , males would be less likely to go around with big guns and great cars and whatever they kind will "impress" or "win" them the sexual favours of a woman. Less tense relationship between sex makes BOTH less tense, hence more likely to become friendly to each other and forget fighting and stress.
Woman are more then happy to have sex they don't care about the big car and when they do they do because they want the money behind the car, not the car itself. Because money represent security in our twisted society, they don't care about a brute with a gun that can kill the universe, women prefer life to death and so do men.
I blame the religions that distort sexuality for the damages they did : there is no such concept as SIN, God isn't in the sky judgeing you, don't listen to that ideas that are only used to repress and control you.
The day you can be arrested because you forgot the password to your files, that day forgetting will become a criminal offence and you will become a slave.
No they are NOT going to lose money, they are going to suffer loss of buying power due to presumed inflation of prices ; there isn't any actual cash flow happening because of presumed future inflation.
Certainly they could try to maintain their buying power, but offering this singular management power to ONE entity means they will seize the opportunity and overcharge even more to satisfy insatiable shareholders AND regain value.
The cost of producing one unit of service isn't going to increase that much, so it's basically a licence to print money without doing ANYTHING to increase the value transfered to customer or to reduce the price.
It's monopoly, the situation preferred by any rational capitalist and it harms the consumer unless the good is sold at cost, which will NEVER happen in private enteprise.
"Free markets" don't decide anything, human beings do. THere is no invisible "god like" hand of Market, it's a delusion and a piece often misinterpreted of Adam Smith work.
Consumers and everybody else enjoy a benefit when they actually can choose between two or more solutions to the same demand/need, because more choices bring increased likelyhood one fits a need better by being less expensive or more adapting.
Yet the offer of more choices doesn't necessarily or always come from competiting behaviors, as they can also come from cooperating behaviors ; in other words, all that is required is will to give more choice in a sustainable fashion. As Nash brilliantly shown, sometimes cooperation is much better then competition.
So why choose competition ? Because experiences shows producers then to become monopolies and to remain monopolies ; they don't necessarily exercise the cooperation option, because cooperation is usually harder to achieve and maintain then pure military-fashion order-and-obey. Monopolies also obtain enormous extraprofits and don't have any reason to give them up.
Competition should introduce clashes between companies to the advantage of consumers, but that doesn't happen "naturally" because markets tolerate CARTELS..monopolies get togheter to reduce the benefit of the consumer (so called consumer surplus) for no other reason that they can and it is profiteable. Sometime they dress up or appear to be as oligopolies with minor competition, just to look like they are fighting.
That is only marginally better then a monopoly, because in a oligopoly the surplus of the consumer is reduced by action of more then one oligopolist, instead that by action of one monopolist. Indeed the additional choices are sometimes more fitting to demand of more people, which is considered good or better by many ; yet that doesn't happen by design, it's almost entirely accidental.
We don't live in a perfect world and Bill Gates knows that well ; ideals exist as abstract paradigms and in that they look perfect like numbers , but they almost always need to be approximated in reality.
Bill obliquely suggests that by paying the price of some censorship chineses will buy themselves an information network that would not be implemented by an ideologically opposed government which is well aware of the dangers of propaganda, being an excellent producer of it. By incrementing the flow of information, Bill is suggesting , the most popular ideals will eventually find expression and the network will be there to help their propagation.
1. Premise : if you accept some censorship of internet 2. Conclusion: then you will have an intranet which will help greatly build an habit for unrestricted information exchange
That's certainly possible, yet the western experience is suggesting people is using the net MOSTLY like a n advanced television set, getting CONTENT from some an increasingly restricted number of servers..maybe writing some blog and sending some email, both very easily monitored.
I can imagine filtering technology being used to find "dangerous dissenters" and turning their words INSTANTLY into incomprensible noise or benign disagreement with the party line...it wouldn't be suppressing information, it would be reshaping it in realtime so that the ruling party has less problem.
Such filtering technology shouldn't exist, but as long as demand backed by a lot of money exists somebody will work hard on it and implement it , while making it illegal will not be a problem. Like cigarettes, their consumption for personal use shouldn't be forbidden, its mass production should..then people would learn how hard it is to produce their drug.
Similarly, let people invent themselves their censoring technology without government oblique financing.
YOU don't get it. With only privates and no government, who's supposed to impose an open standard for public records and do so with public records of voting , transparent rulemaking ? You'll NEVER get an open standard if any company can avoid that, it's not as much profiteable as a closed one and it costs more to implement.
Indeed there's a failure in corrupt politicians, not in presence of a government.
Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google.
I'll also ask myself if Google generated any wealth or if some investor moved their wealth into Google stock by valuing it and paying for it at very high prices. Please remember that moving money isn't the same as generating wealth, no matter how "creative" (in the criminal sense) your accounting can be.
That doesn't obviously imply Google isn't introducing some interesting innovation and selling some advertising space..they apparently do, but they didn't create the money spent to buy their stock..they just gave a motivation.
Will it be a success ? Only if these who bought the stock will manage to sell it before anything bad happens..so far some CEOs did cash out part of their stock and this isn't always good news for other stock owners.
The key is helping you find your brain. The dude was looking after an OPEN standard that would have given you MORE choice..as opposed to a M$ Library or M$ Swimming Pool or M$ Anything that you can damn be sure will be closed source, close standard.
Only a government as a weight big enough to impose OPEN standard without actually forcing anybody to lose money..but hey, your corrupt representative keep getting lobby money to fuck up anything that benefits the masses.
They key is corrupt politicians, not government where government does same or better then privates.
Slashdot Mirror
True, meanwhile explain me how people is going to rebuild the inet from scratch ?
Dear Sir,
thanks for your interest in Slashdot works. It has come to our attention, after careful and long consideration, that your remarks may be utterly insignificant.
It seems that every reader has its own perception of what is an high standard of journalistic works ; while some among us agree with your well tought points, many others consider them just another put down by yet another jerk on the internet that still hasn't managed to take our audience away , maybe because his works aren't known yet or maybe because they are so irrelevant few people cares.
We would like to recommend you an alternative career path that involves less criticizing and an increased production of something good enough to grab attention and hold it as long as it is needed to become "famous on the internet".
Again, thanks for your interest in our works.
Sincerely,
pro-forma Slashdot cabal
You forgot that if they can corrupt the gubment they can corrupt the FTC as well
They don't want to sell, I think they want to lease. Actually it is not even a lease, it is a concession to exercise a personal, time limited audiovisual perception of the movie/album/ebook/younameit. This is far more profiteable then selling a copy or leasing it, but it also implies making sure you can't make a good enough copy of your perception.
Which is the problem : I don't care about inexpensive content (which is crap most of the times anyway) I want my electronic devices good for a copy, good to produce, good to reproduce without paying royalties or asking permission to parasitic rentiers ; I don't want anybody means of control inside my devices.
Imagine the following : Guthenberg didn't have control over the content of the bible, but he had means to reproduce other books. Suddendly, the bible wasn't the only and most copied piece of "knowledge" , much to the detriment of oscurantist who would have liked some "sacred text" to become sort of universal reference manual for everything.
The revolution wasn't much into producing more copies of valuable content, but in making means of reproduction avaiable, literally creating a media that can be enjoyed by many and produced by many.
Primitive yes, but not far away from today managing techniques
I wonder if folks like you ever take a step back and LISTEN to what you actually say, and compare it to reality.
Reality ? You see the average income per capita is 37,500 in US and it has +- 300 million inhabitants then look at Norway and you see they have the same income per capita, but Norway have 4,5 million inhabitans !
Norway GDP for is $194.7 billion (2005 est.) , USA GDP is $12.41 trillion (2005 est) , but from the point of view of the worker their average income is the same. Which one buys the most and what can be bought ?
One would also think that such a mighty supreme economy as that of US, thanks to economies of scale, would give a LOT more value to his citizens then a little economy as that of Norway , yet it doesn't.
What gives ? Where is the value being concentrated or wasted ?
Maybe we can use a different wording : ad hominem is used to attack the messenger when attacking him distracts from hearing and analyzing the message.
By analogy
a) if we observw that the messenger (the one who brings the message) smells
b) that doesn't imply the message (what he states/says) itself smells
similarly
a) if we observe that the messenger has a track record of spewing false information
b) that doesn't imply the message (what he says) is necessarily false
The facts that the messenger is known to be a misleading person just makes us him trust less and double and triple check his message even more then usual. Ad hominem exploits the logical fallacy of thinking that property of the messenger are the same property of the message, for the purpose of distracting from a deeper analysis of the message.
Relax dude , are you getting paid for defending them ?
And the further fact is, our burgeoning free enterprise system, including "evil corporate America," is what has made all this low-priced tech feasible in the first place--not to mention giving jobs to every one of the small-minded punks here and elsewhere who would rather depend on simple-minded stories they can get those puny brains around, than actually THINK with them.
Not really
a) skilled grossly underpaid workers and technicians, researchers made low-priced tech feasible, corporate only partially financed them
b) jobs were given to small minded punks because there was profit to be made, not because they are
punks or small minded
Certainly, risks were taken and reward for the risks were taken many many times again, sometimes one few thousand times more often then necessary.
So relax , dude. Do you ever defend yourself or your loved one so vigorously, or only your employers ?
That would prevent coyotes from falling !
Nope it's a not a tu quoque. If you read carefully I wrote that you are correct. What I did is compare and contrast, in which I put the two crimes in comparison , the contrast coming from the striking difference in dimension and relevance of the effects of each crime and the punishment that actually reaches each crime.
A tu quoque would have been : Big Time Enron criminals steal and that is wrong. Yet the criticism can't come from one who steals music ! ( which is distracting attention from the fact Big Time Enron criminal can be criticized by anybody regardless)
Try looking at industry diversionary tactics, ordinary joes don't use them, they are harmeless in this domain and undefended.
RIAA could be much, much bigger assholes about it.
You are correct. Make a copy of a song , without even stealing it : get slapped with fine, eventually get your credit destroyed and inserted on some sort of parallel state database of "crook". Really a criminal !
Steal billions, corrupt people, destroy the savings of millions of people , a-la Enron: get a slap on the hand and get elected.
Justice works, except when you are rich then you can buy the outcome and you are more equal then others.
Now here's The list of companies that factually support RIAA behavior regardless of their pro-customer statements. Do you want your money to support RIAA ?
It would be nice to learn how to really drive a car and regain control in certain situations without panicking.
:-) if they are lucky or from wheelchair, but people never think it may happen to them.
That would be useful, if for some reason the ABS or the traction control fails, one will have an hard time suing the manufacture from the grave
It happens, mostly because there are waaay to little trained drivers and some people (not that many, but some) just can't and shouldn't drive. More training and difficult situation training should be rewarded, maybe with a reduction on some car related price or tax.
Quoting Yeager
I always ran into walls at Sun, company politics, and that never worked out too well. When I was at Stanford there was a rule: The best engineering wins. Simple, straightforward. If your engineering is better than the other guy's, yours got the blue ribbon. Well at Sun, and at companies in general, it's different. It's the politically correct software that gets productized.
Which is recipe for disaster as technology wins 9 times out of 10. Audio compression + internet + PC are reshaping the music business kicking freeloader rentier companies away from the profits ; if the CEO CIO and whatnot were to decide the fate of technology, MP3 was certainly going to be canceled.
Obviously the abovesaid managers will complain that MP3 reduced the value of music and that Mp3 caused more unemployement, less developement of music etc etc. They are right when they say MP3 collapsed their artificial scarity profit scheme, their copyright abuse and incredible overpricing.
Imagine what cool technology is being canceled right now, because of that reasoning.
"Free" market model , in the way it is often sold by many spin doctors, is a subset or a reinterpretation of the perfect competition market model (PCMM)
If did you homework and your studying you know that PCMM is founded on some hypothesis and particulary on the following one
- Perfect information -
Which translates in layman terms :
a) everybody with no exception knows always exactly what they need to know to take a rational decision
to buy or sell
b) they know what they need to know exactly when they need it, there is no delay interfering with the decision
c) all the players in the market have the same information at the very same time
These assumption are unrealistic in the sense that they will NEVER be met, but maybe they can be closely approximated ; people familiar with the calculus concept of limit know what kind of approximation I am referring to.
Now for the "self adjusting market" : market isn't an abstract person, an omnipotent god that works on his own, decides on his own and naturally always balance itself ; that is a delusion sold by some spin doctor to sell the story of Adam Smith (one of the first economists of all times) talking about "invisible hands" doing good for everybody in the market. They connected this notion of "invisible force" to "self balancing" to create the impression of market as "necessarily balacing for the best of everbody" , expecially for the consumer.
That would happen if consumers had perfect information and constantly made rational choices and if power concentration like monopoly choosed to follow market demand. That doesn't happen : few key players can influence the way products are perceived (see Microsoft) on a scale big enough to affect the whole market, even when they don't control the market by means of restricting or enlarging offer.
Anything can be constructed as information that, in wrong hands, could be used to harm innocents. Therefore one needs to limit the restriction to the information that could confer a measurable, significant advantage to potential abuser and that couldn't otherwise obtained by other sources or derived by interpretation of other informations.
That restriction is necessary for two reason
a) one can't use the blanket cover "everything we say is needed is secret just because we say so" because any Republican, Democrat or Ass-o-crat will abuse it given half a chance
b) secrets are so only for a very limited amount of time : leaks will occour, people will talk, betrayal is to be assumed as likely. Believing that a secret will last enough time is taking a big bet with luck , expecially when there are better alternatives.
The potential for abuse is immense : look at Enron and how the lack of investigative powers of investors, combined with their ignorance and lack of will allowed a bunch of highly paid "experts" to completely ruin the lifes of many.
Porn is considered harmful because it shows people can do something else, more entertaining, far more interesting then going die for the motherland.
Who would ever go to war, if they knew they could lose their loved ones AND lose good old sex ?
If males were taught that having good sexual relationship with a woman will both make them and the
womens happy and become less aggressive , males would be less likely to go around with big guns and great cars and whatever they kind will "impress" or "win" them the sexual favours of a woman. Less tense relationship between sex makes BOTH less tense, hence more likely to become friendly to each other and forget fighting and stress.
Woman are more then happy to have sex they don't care about the big car and when they do they do because they want the money behind the car, not the car itself. Because money represent security in our twisted society, they don't care about a brute with a gun that can kill the universe, women prefer life to death and so do men.
I blame the religions that distort sexuality for the damages they did : there is no such concept as SIN, God isn't in the sky judgeing you, don't listen to that ideas that are only used to repress and control you.
The day you can be arrested because you forgot the password to your files, that day forgetting will become a criminal offence and you will become a slave.
No they are NOT going to lose money, they are going to suffer loss of buying power due to presumed inflation of prices ; there isn't any actual cash flow happening because of presumed future inflation.
Certainly they could try to maintain their buying power, but offering this singular management power to ONE entity means they will seize the opportunity and overcharge even more to satisfy insatiable shareholders AND regain value.
The cost of producing one unit of service isn't going to increase that much, so it's basically a licence to print money without doing ANYTHING to increase the value transfered to customer or to reduce the price.
It's monopoly, the situation preferred by any rational capitalist and it harms the consumer unless the good is sold at cost, which will NEVER happen in private enteprise.
No they didn't. If somebody did violate Patriot Act it's the guy who sold the info to the commercial database and the databases for buying the info.
I commend your decision to leave that slow, confused inefficient credit card company.
Problem is your decision, taken alone, is worthless as it will be recorded as an "incident" with little consequences and quickly forgotten.
"Free markets" don't decide anything, human beings do. THere is no invisible "god like" hand of Market, it's a delusion and a piece often misinterpreted of Adam Smith work.
..monopolies get togheter to reduce the benefit of the consumer (so called consumer surplus) for no other reason that they can and it is profiteable. Sometime they dress up or appear to be as oligopolies with minor competition, just to look like they are fighting.
Consumers and everybody else enjoy a benefit when they actually can choose between two or more solutions to the same demand/need, because more choices bring increased likelyhood one fits a need better by being less expensive or more adapting.
Yet the offer of more choices doesn't necessarily or always come from competiting behaviors, as they can also come from cooperating behaviors ; in other words, all that is required is will to give more choice in a sustainable fashion. As Nash brilliantly shown, sometimes cooperation is much better then competition.
So why choose competition ? Because experiences shows producers then to become monopolies and to remain monopolies ; they don't necessarily exercise the cooperation option, because cooperation is usually harder to achieve and maintain then pure military-fashion order-and-obey. Monopolies also obtain enormous extraprofits and don't have any reason to give them up.
Competition should introduce clashes between companies to the advantage of consumers, but that doesn't happen "naturally" because markets tolerate CARTELS
That is only marginally better then a monopoly, because in a oligopoly the surplus of the consumer is reduced by action of more then one oligopolist, instead that by action of one monopolist. Indeed the additional choices are sometimes more fitting to demand of more people, which is considered good or better by many ; yet that doesn't happen by design, it's almost entirely accidental.
We don't live in a perfect world and Bill Gates knows that well ; ideals exist as abstract paradigms and in that they look perfect like numbers , but they almost always need to be approximated in reality.
Bill obliquely suggests that by paying the price of some censorship chineses will buy themselves an information network that would not be implemented by an ideologically opposed government which is well aware of the dangers of propaganda, being an excellent producer of it. By incrementing the flow of information, Bill is suggesting , the most popular ideals will eventually find expression and the network will be there to help their propagation.
1. Premise : if you accept some censorship of internet
2. Conclusion: then you will have an intranet which will help greatly build an habit for unrestricted information exchange
That's certainly possible, yet the western experience is suggesting people is using the net MOSTLY like a n advanced television set, getting CONTENT from some an increasingly restricted number of servers..maybe writing some blog and sending some email, both very easily monitored.
I can imagine filtering technology being used to find "dangerous dissenters" and turning their words INSTANTLY into incomprensible noise or benign disagreement with the party line...it wouldn't be suppressing information, it would be reshaping it in realtime so that the ruling party has less problem.
Such filtering technology shouldn't exist, but as long as demand backed by a lot of money exists somebody will work hard on it and implement it , while making it illegal will not be a problem. Like cigarettes, their consumption for personal use shouldn't be forbidden, its mass production should..then people would learn how hard it is to produce their drug.
Similarly, let people invent themselves their censoring technology without government oblique financing.
YOU don't get it. With only privates and no government, who's supposed to impose an open standard for public records and do so with public records of voting , transparent rulemaking ? You'll NEVER get an open standard if any company can avoid that, it's not as much profiteable as a closed one and it costs more to implement.
Indeed there's a failure in corrupt politicians, not in presence of a government.
Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google.
..they just gave a motivation.
I'll also ask myself if Google generated any wealth or if some investor moved their wealth into Google stock by valuing it and paying for it at very high prices. Please remember that moving money isn't the same as generating wealth, no matter how "creative" (in the criminal sense) your accounting can be.
That doesn't obviously imply Google isn't introducing some interesting innovation and selling some advertising space..they apparently do, but they didn't create the money spent to buy their stock
Will it be a success ? Only if these who bought the stock will manage to sell it before anything bad happens..so far some CEOs did cash out part of their stock and this isn't always good news for other stock owners.
The key is helping you find your brain. The dude was looking after an OPEN standard that would have given you MORE choice..as opposed to a M$ Library or M$ Swimming Pool or M$ Anything that you can damn be sure will be closed source, close standard.
Only a government as a weight big enough to impose OPEN standard without actually forcing anybody to lose money..but hey, your corrupt representative keep getting lobby money to fuck up anything that benefits the masses.
They key is corrupt politicians, not government where government does same or better then privates.