The Situation:
It is easy to claim copyright over anything you personally produce.
There appears to be no significant penalty for wrongful accusation of copyright infringement.
They are paving the way for copyright infringement accusations (*3) to cause revocation of internet access.
The Solution:
Make some copyright material.
Accuse the children of every European politician, every senior public servant and every corporate executive of copyright infringement, three times.
We have computers. This could be done quite efficiently.
Sit back and watch.
eventually.
All of the wonderfully humane things we do like assisting difficult childbirth, lowering child mortality, vaccination, corrective surgery etc etc etc. are great.
Great for us in the here-and-now as individuals. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Longer term however, these behaviors change the survive-and-breed criteria for humans.
Like-it-or-not, this will weaken the gene pool. We will end up with more and more people than can not survive without expensive medical intervention.
I don't think anybody fancies eugenics. The only way out that I can see is that we must eventually start introducing germ-line fixes to the gene pool.
Fix things permanently rather than just in a single generation. The folks crying out that we're playing god should recognize that we're already doing that by way of the medical interventions we already do. We're just being slightly incompetent gods.
TV is a sequential access medium and therefore totally inappropriate for direct democracy access by the masses. In the medium of TV, the message would indeed be tedium.
It all needs to be search-able, cross-linked and able to be interactively commented on. Once we can all directly get to the thing we really care about to comment and vote and influence, the medium and tedium will not be associated.
Sound Bites just implement association and association is the basis of our emotional responses.
Mass media typically just hit us with sound bites, knowing that most people will just skim the news. They see Obama and Muslim in one sentence and even if it's saying that he's not one, Obama-Muslim is still the association created in many minds. Couple this with a Muslim- Terrorism association similarly constructed and Obama is now connected to that too.
The association creates an emotional response and that is what drives most people.
It's not about logic. Just association.
This is well understood by spin doctors. You may notice that newspaper articles contain spin in the form of opinion and association building sound bites at the beginning but still include the actual facts at the very end. They do this knowing full well that most people won't read to the end and parse the data and process the logical inconsistencies but they can still provide counter arguments about bias by pointing to the end and saying "Look we really did include all the facts".
If GPS and remote imaging (think Google Earth) have proven anything, it is that technology initially developed for military purposes, and extremely expensive for initial civil use, will eventually reach the point where it forms part of our daily lives without us ever being conscious of the massive investment to get to that point.
If the massive investment has to keep on happening in relation to the number of users, then we probably will be aware of it because we'll be paying for it in a monthly fee and companies will have bidding wars for their slice of the bandwidth.
It doesn't cost the military anything to have millions of GPS users using their GPS system because the satellites take a passive role. It is the device in your hand doing the calculations based on signals and timing from a few satellites.
On the other hand, a communications network actually has a limited resource in the form of bandwidth to be consumed by the millions of potential users.
Slashdot Mirror
The Situation:
It is easy to claim copyright over anything you personally produce.
There appears to be no significant penalty for wrongful accusation of copyright infringement.
They are paving the way for copyright infringement accusations (*3) to cause revocation of internet access.
The Solution:
Make some copyright material.
Accuse the children of every European politician, every senior public servant and every corporate executive of copyright infringement, three times.
We have computers. This could be done quite efficiently.
Sit back and watch.
eventually. All of the wonderfully humane things we do like assisting difficult childbirth, lowering child mortality, vaccination, corrective surgery etc etc etc. are great. Great for us in the here-and-now as individuals. I wouldn't have it any other way. Longer term however, these behaviors change the survive-and-breed criteria for humans. Like-it-or-not, this will weaken the gene pool. We will end up with more and more people than can not survive without expensive medical intervention. I don't think anybody fancies eugenics. The only way out that I can see is that we must eventually start introducing germ-line fixes to the gene pool. Fix things permanently rather than just in a single generation. The folks crying out that we're playing god should recognize that we're already doing that by way of the medical interventions we already do. We're just being slightly incompetent gods.
TV is a sequential access medium and therefore totally inappropriate for direct democracy access by the masses. In the medium of TV, the message would indeed be tedium. It all needs to be search-able, cross-linked and able to be interactively commented on. Once we can all directly get to the thing we really care about to comment and vote and influence, the medium and tedium will not be associated.
Sound Bites just implement association and association is the basis of our emotional responses.
Mass media typically just hit us with sound bites, knowing that most people will just skim the news. They see Obama and Muslim in one sentence and even if it's saying that he's not one, Obama-Muslim is still the association created in many minds. Couple this with a Muslim- Terrorism association similarly constructed and Obama is now connected to that too. The association creates an emotional response and that is what drives most people.
It's not about logic. Just association.
This is well understood by spin doctors. You may notice that newspaper articles contain spin in the form of opinion and association building sound bites at the beginning but still include the actual facts at the very end. They do this knowing full well that most people won't read to the end and parse the data and process the logical inconsistencies but they can still provide counter arguments about bias by pointing to the end and saying "Look we really did include all the facts".
If GPS and remote imaging (think Google Earth) have proven anything, it is that technology initially developed for military purposes, and extremely expensive for initial civil use, will eventually reach the point where it forms part of our daily lives without us ever being conscious of the massive investment to get to that point.
If the massive investment has to keep on happening in relation to the number of users, then we probably will be aware of it because we'll be paying for it in a monthly fee and companies will have bidding wars for their slice of the bandwidth.
It doesn't cost the military anything to have millions of GPS users using their GPS system because the satellites take a passive role. It is the device in your hand doing the calculations based on signals and timing from a few satellites. On the other hand, a communications network actually has a limited resource in the form of bandwidth to be consumed by the millions of potential users.