However, a monopoly is required for the most fair distribution of a common property. And bandwidth is a "natural" monopoly, i.e. no matter how much you deregulate it, everyone's still gotta pull from the same resource. This will not change until there are truly separate competing networks, not running on the same wires.
Of course, this assumes our society values the fair distribution of common property.
This doesn't mean that those running the monopoly-service will do so in the interests of those provided with the service. Private companies have no accountability to their customers in a monopoly (deregulation only helps where it is not a natural monopoly). An example of deregulation for natural monopolies is the California electricity market debacle.
This (accountability) is why, while not terribly efficient, government agencies manage monopolies with greater fairness than private entities. Non-profits and co-ops also assure more even access and distribution.
Note that our democratic political process is an example of this: not very efficient (authoritarianism is the most efficient at running a state), but allows most people to be included (somewhat) in the process.
I know this isn't much help for our unfortunate poster, but for those of you about to look for jobs via an employment agency, here's some great advice from the Better Business Bureau:
It's a quick read, and I've found it invaluable as I start my job search. It explains how to find and what you can expect from an ethical/effective employment agency, how to get what you really want from them, and how to steer clear of the bad ones.
And we had to decide : Either we will be regular Shareware or we will bundle other software.
The first solution would lead to absolute popularity loss. Because the people are VERY unlikely to pay if they don't really need to.
and
As I say : In these times the targeted advertising bundling is the only solution for popular programs if they want to stay free.
I'd agree that Shareware programs have the potential to be less popular than equivalent Freeware programs for that very reason. But wouldn't they be made Shareware in order to pay the cost of the bandwidth and equipment that is costing so much? Fewer downloads, while they may be bruising to the ego, mean fewer server and bandwidth issues from heavy traffic, and thus are cheaper to run as a hobby. That is why you're writing this software non-commercially, right?
This is a great reason to write elegant, extraordinary software: people love it so much, they're willing to offer time, money, assistance, equipment, or bandwidth in the form of a mirror. Thus your software can remain free (as in beer). What a nifty idea, if an old-fashioned one, that distributes the work of heavy downloads amongst many sites. On the 'Net you don't have to be the single source for something you want to share. You can acquire a Fan Club (or just enthusiastic supporters or a social network) that freely offers assistance in gratitude for the clever thing you've freely contributed. The Gift Economy does work, but it requires integrity, openness, and gifts that are actually valuable (and maybe a non-combative attitude).
Email with unsnipped quotes makes my brain hurt, and so, out of consideration for my email recipients, I trim my posts. However, some email readers make trimming quoted text nearly impossible, or at least a serious pain in the neck.
An example is Lotus Notes. It has lots of nifty functions, but its Reply and Forward functions leave a whole lot to be desired. To include an original message in a reply or forward, the whole thing is appended at the end, as with other text-based software. But the original is not quoted out, simply separated from the expected typing space at the top by the header. Furthermore, this header is a whitespace-heavy mess which you don't see in Lotus Notes, but can clearly see in text-based readers. Even more: you can't change your line length (fixed at 72), so you can't reduce the possibility of mis-wrapped text.
To avoid creating unnecessarily large reply messages, I'll just copy the whole message to the clipboard, and add all the quote prefixes. It's a lot of work, so maybe it's a good thing: it encourages me, and conscientious writers, to trim posts heavily. Unfortunately, it really encourages huge messages or messages with no quoted text at all!
In all, it makes me embarrassed to reply to people who are not using Lotus Notes.
A fascinating theory, one backed up by evidence, is that autism is an autoimmune disorder, where the immune response is directed against chemicals in the brain (specifically, the myelin sheath).
For those unfamiliar: an autoimmune disorder is a disease where, basically, your immune system has gone haywire and attacks self-cells. The most familiar one is allergies.
Autism, Autoimmunity, and Immunotherapy gives a nice synopsis of the theory, with explanation of connection to autistic characteristics to back it up. Interestingly, there may in fact be a connection between vaccines and autism, with viruses acting as teratogens in young developing brains. But it needn't be vaccines; cytomegalovirus (caught from the mother?) was one explored factor.
OK, so how does this have anything to do with Silicon Valley, or geeks? Maybe it's the onslaught of very many challenges to a young child's immune system, all at once as vaccines. Kids today do get more vaccines, and in greater combination, than a generation ago (even when we still had vaccines for smallpox). I have no doubt that kids in Silicon Valley get ALL their shots, and then some. Income and access to broad healthcare may be a better predictor than "geek factor".
The genetic component may be the inheritance of susceptibility to certain autoimmune disorders, like allergies. How many geeks do you know have allergies? This theory also includes other environmental factors that may instigate autoimmune disorders. (And as someone noted, Silicon Valley's got a serious groundwater contamination problem.)
And if you just can't learn enough, here's the Autism Autoimmunity Project.
How Asperger's Syndrome fits into all this, I haven't a clue.
Now personally, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for the right to download some number of tracks a month, in an unrestricted format, and/or to sample (stream, whatever) from a catalog before buying. Then I'd burn my own CDs.
The artists could make just as much as they do now. But the record labels are wedded to their high-overhead business models and don't care what the customers want.
there IS one! (yay!) samael notes in comment (#2653326) a lovely online service i hadn't heard of - Emusic.com. (although redundant, i mention it as you managed to miss the original post, and it's exactly what you want.) being a finicky industrial/experimental music fan, i checked it out to verify that they wouldn't have anything i was interested in.
i was wrong. it is inexpensive ($15/mo for 3 months), a broad catalog with lots of weird/rare stuff, you get to keep the MP3s and do whatever you like with them, the artists get paid - everybody wins.
should this service actually make a profit, your understandably cynical predictions of record label bait-and-switch may be averted. this assumes that a whole bunch of us like it and use it.
I work with GIS professionally (ARC/Info), so it's refreshing to see an open source GIS package.
There are tons and tons of FREE DATA out there for you to grab and peruse. One caveat, most data will be proprietary formats, such as ARC export, ARC shapefiles, ERDAS, and others. SDTS (spatial data transfer standard) is "open" but a pain in the neck to use. I note with glee that FreeGIS has conversion tools for all these formats.
Some places to start your search for FREE GEO DATA, places that I found very handy:
Their essence remains through the ages. What enthralls us is the hero's mastery of resources available to him (or lack thereof, for anti-heroes, comedies, or tragedies). With the stereotypical "action" flick, the hero demonstrates mastery and skill with guns,
cars, explosives, and fighting. The "modern/tech" hero shows mastery with technology. How is Matthew Broderick's character in "Wargames" so different from Neo in "The Matrix"? Neo wins in spite of the tech that is used to brainwash the common person.
The audience is never rooting for the "tech" to win, but for the hero who cleverly uses the tech. The difference between the "action" movies and the "tech" movies is that the hero's mastery lies in muscles vs. brains; the old jocks/geeks thing.
I'm very familiar with the aforementioned cited works, and countless similar ones.
I heartily agree with many Slashdot posters, a lot of those kinds of problems are not as common any more since people are more aware of them. But, as a female in computer science, growing up interested in computer science, there are more subtle social forces still at work.
Everyone's familiar with high-school peer-pressure, right? So you're a geeky girl in high school, like computers and science and math, enjoy reading too. You'll quickly discover you're a social pariah: "Popular" boys won't like you, because you don't fit their model of how a "cute" girl should be. Similarly, "popular" girls won't like you either, because your intelligence is threatening to their status.
But most importantly, geeky boys won't like you either. I'm not entirely certain why, but from lurking on Womengamers and noting the comments of many male posters (notes like "all girls SUCK at first person shooters!", etc.), I get the idea it's some sort of turf thing. Geeky girls are threatening to geeky boys? I certainly experienced that!
If you have no social support network, no one to spend your afternoons with playing on the computer or sharing your ideas and mistakes or just talking, your resolve to pursue computer science shrivels. You have to have incredible self-confidence to withstand the taunting from your most natural social allies. Why try, if everyone is going to give you hell for playing with computers?
Mercifully, I eventually wound up at a totally geeky high school (NC School of Science and Math), but most girls aren't so lucky.
this series struck me as in need of as many opinions as possible, such that it encouraged me to delurk, to suggest some reasons why women don't *appear* to post as much:
while about 50% of Web users are female, significantly fewer are in tech jobs or have tech avocations to be sufficiently interested enough in/. to visit, or hear about it through the grapevine (as i did)
how do you know which of us are women? i certainly didn't have to contribute a DNA sample or submit to a physical to get my/. account
maybe female lurkers don't post much because what they'd like to say has already been said, and being polite folk, don't want to contribute to "me too!"
perhaps women's approach to message boards and other kinds of online posting is to watch conservatively, observe the "standard" of behavior on a given forum, and post when she feels she's gotten the hang of the conversation style
those rude enough to consider their relentless tirades against JonKatz important enough to post in the first place, probably won't care that they're also committing "me too!"
if, as you say, the majority of flamers are adolescent boys, maybe it's just that adolescent girls have other (equally silly) things to do
maybe lurkers/posters of all genders/races/flavors have good Netiquette, social skills, and conversational clarity, they're just *mature*
i'm not frightened away, and i really appreciate the intellectual "sharpening" that can be gained on cutthroat fora such as/.
Slashdot Mirror
Monopolies do not equals Commons
However, a monopoly is required for the most fair distribution of a common property. And bandwidth is a "natural" monopoly, i.e. no matter how much you deregulate it, everyone's still gotta pull from the same resource. This will not change until there are truly separate competing networks, not running on the same wires.
Of course, this assumes our society values the fair distribution of common property.
This doesn't mean that those running the monopoly-service will do so in the interests of those provided with the service. Private companies have no accountability to their customers in a monopoly (deregulation only helps where it is not a natural monopoly). An example of deregulation for natural monopolies is the California electricity market debacle.
This (accountability) is why, while not terribly efficient, government agencies manage monopolies with greater fairness than private entities. Non-profits and co-ops also assure more even access and distribution.
Note that our democratic political process is an example of this: not very efficient (authoritarianism is the most efficient at running a state), but allows most people to be included (somewhat) in the process.
http://www.bbb.org/library/employ.asp
It's a quick read, and I've found it invaluable as I start my job search. It explains how to find and what you can expect from an ethical/effective employment agency, how to get what you really want from them, and how to steer clear of the bad ones.
The first solution would lead to absolute popularity loss. Because the people are VERY unlikely to pay if they don't really need to.
and
As I say : In these times the targeted advertising bundling is the only solution for popular programs if they want to stay free.
I'd agree that Shareware programs have the potential to be less popular than equivalent Freeware programs for that very reason. But wouldn't they be made Shareware in order to pay the cost of the bandwidth and equipment that is costing so much? Fewer downloads, while they may be bruising to the ego, mean fewer server and bandwidth issues from heavy traffic, and thus are cheaper to run as a hobby. That is why you're writing this software non-commercially, right?
This is a great reason to write elegant, extraordinary software: people love it so much, they're willing to offer time, money, assistance, equipment, or bandwidth in the form of a mirror. Thus your software can remain free (as in beer). What a nifty idea, if an old-fashioned one, that distributes the work of heavy downloads amongst many sites. On the 'Net you don't have to be the single source for something you want to share. You can acquire a Fan Club (or just enthusiastic supporters or a social network) that freely offers assistance in gratitude for the clever thing you've freely contributed. The Gift Economy does work, but it requires integrity, openness, and gifts that are actually valuable (and maybe a non-combative attitude).
this is exactly the the function of a Political Action Committee. is there such a thing? i tried to find any, all i got is: New Yorkers for Fair Use
An example is Lotus Notes. It has lots of nifty functions, but its Reply and Forward functions leave a whole lot to be desired. To include an original message in a reply or forward, the whole thing is appended at the end, as with other text-based software. But the original is not quoted out, simply separated from the expected typing space at the top by the header. Furthermore, this header is a whitespace-heavy mess which you don't see in Lotus Notes, but can clearly see in text-based readers. Even more: you can't change your line length (fixed at 72), so you can't reduce the possibility of mis-wrapped text.
To avoid creating unnecessarily large reply messages, I'll just copy the whole message to the clipboard, and add all the quote prefixes. It's a lot of work, so maybe it's a good thing: it encourages me, and conscientious writers, to trim posts heavily. Unfortunately, it really encourages huge messages or messages with no quoted text at all!
In all, it makes me embarrassed to reply to people who are not using Lotus Notes.
For those unfamiliar: an autoimmune disorder is a disease where, basically, your immune system has gone haywire and attacks self-cells. The most familiar one is allergies.
Autism, Autoimmunity, and Immunotherapy gives a nice synopsis of the theory, with explanation of connection to autistic characteristics to back it up. Interestingly, there may in fact be a connection between vaccines and autism, with viruses acting as teratogens in young developing brains. But it needn't be vaccines; cytomegalovirus (caught from the mother?) was one explored factor.
OK, so how does this have anything to do with Silicon Valley, or geeks? Maybe it's the onslaught of very many challenges to a young child's immune system, all at once as vaccines. Kids today do get more vaccines, and in greater combination, than a generation ago (even when we still had vaccines for smallpox). I have no doubt that kids in Silicon Valley get ALL their shots, and then some. Income and access to broad healthcare may be a better predictor than "geek factor".
The genetic component may be the inheritance of susceptibility to certain autoimmune disorders, like allergies. How many geeks do you know have allergies? This theory also includes other environmental factors that may instigate autoimmune disorders. (And as someone noted, Silicon Valley's got a serious groundwater contamination problem.)
And if you just can't learn enough, here's the Autism Autoimmunity Project. How Asperger's Syndrome fits into all this, I haven't a clue.
there IS one! (yay!) samael notes in comment (#2653326) a lovely online service i hadn't heard of - Emusic.com. (although redundant, i mention it as you managed to miss the original post, and it's exactly what you want.) being a finicky industrial/experimental music fan, i checked it out to verify that they wouldn't have anything i was interested in.
i was wrong. it is inexpensive ($15/mo for 3 months), a broad catalog with lots of weird/rare stuff, you get to keep the MP3s and do whatever you like with them, the artists get paid - everybody wins.
should this service actually make a profit, your understandably cynical predictions of record label bait-and-switch may be averted. this assumes that a whole bunch of us like it and use it.
There are tons and tons of FREE DATA out there for you to grab and peruse. One caveat, most data will be proprietary formats, such as ARC export, ARC shapefiles, ERDAS, and others. SDTS (spatial data transfer standard) is "open" but a pain in the neck to use. I note with glee that FreeGIS has conversion tools for all these formats.
Some places to start your search for FREE GEO DATA, places that I found very handy:
- Starting the Hunt
- USGS Geospatial Data Clearinghouse
- GIS Data Depot
- Global Topographic Data
- EROS Data Center - satellite/remote sensing data
- Earth Explorer
Hopefully, this'll get you on your way. Good luck, and have fun!The audience is never rooting for the "tech" to win, but for the hero who cleverly uses the tech. The difference between the "action" movies and the "tech" movies is that the hero's mastery lies in muscles vs. brains; the old jocks/geeks thing.
trish
I heartily agree with many Slashdot posters, a lot of those kinds of problems are not as common any more since people are more aware of them. But, as a female in computer science, growing up interested in computer science, there are more subtle social forces still at work.
Everyone's familiar with high-school peer-pressure, right? So you're a geeky girl in high school, like computers and science and math, enjoy reading too. You'll quickly discover you're a social pariah: "Popular" boys won't like you, because you don't fit their model of how a "cute" girl should be. Similarly, "popular" girls won't like you either, because your intelligence is threatening to their status.
But most importantly, geeky boys won't like you either. I'm not entirely certain why, but from lurking on Womengamers and noting the comments of many male posters (notes like "all girls SUCK at first person shooters!", etc.), I get the idea it's some sort of turf thing. Geeky girls are threatening to geeky boys? I certainly experienced that!
If you have no social support network, no one to spend your afternoons with playing on the computer or sharing your ideas and mistakes or just talking, your resolve to pursue computer science shrivels. You have to have incredible self-confidence to withstand the taunting from your most natural social allies. Why try, if everyone is going to give you hell for playing with computers?
Mercifully, I eventually wound up at a totally geeky high school (NC School of Science and Math), but most girls aren't so lucky.
trish
- while about 50% of Web users are female, significantly fewer are in tech jobs or have tech avocations to be sufficiently interested enough in
/. to visit, or hear about it through the grapevine (as i did) - how do you know which of us are women? i certainly didn't have to contribute a DNA sample or submit to a physical to get my
/. account - maybe female lurkers don't post much because what they'd like to say has already been said, and being polite folk, don't want to contribute to "me too!"
- perhaps women's approach to message boards and other kinds of online posting is to watch conservatively, observe the "standard" of behavior on a given forum, and post when she feels she's gotten the hang of the conversation style
- those rude enough to consider their relentless tirades against JonKatz important enough to post in the first place, probably won't care that they're also committing "me too!"
- if, as you say, the majority of flamers are adolescent boys, maybe it's just that adolescent girls have other (equally silly) things to do
- maybe lurkers/posters of all genders/races/flavors have good Netiquette, social skills, and conversational clarity, they're just *mature*
i'm not frightened away, and i really appreciate the intellectual "sharpening" that can be gained on cutthroat fora such asTrish