Don't like it? Move to a company with no copyright - and not many artists.
Company? I assume that's a simple typo. Of course, it could be a delightful double-entendre in which you're implying that we live in a country in which laws are being written by companies to their benefit, and to the detriment of the average citizen. Doesn't seem to support your argument, though, so I guess it has to be a typo.
Not many artists? Since when are people who make art for money artists?
The part of the interview that amused me the most was:
believe that there are four -- oh shit! (Lars takes care of something in the background) -- I believe that there are sort of like four links in the food chain here.
Milk boiling over? Bongwater spillage? Hot girl on televison? Inquiring minds want to know...
My rate of CD purchasing, pre Napster: Approximately three CDs per year.
Number of CDs I've bought since I started sharing MP3s: one. (Radiohead's The Bends, best $15 I've spent in a while)
Assuming that I buy another CD by the time a year is up, (I consider this highly likely) then my CD consumption will have fallen by one. I can attribute this drop pretty directly to MP3s, so I'd say this pernicious act of file sharing by me has cost the music industry roughly fifteen bucks.
Of course, the benefit to me, in terms of being able to listen to more music, better music, and a wider variety of music, exceeds fifteen dollars by at least an order of magnitude, so I'm having a hard time crying my eyes out for the poor record executives.
For years I've wondered why McDonald's(TM) is still staffed entirely by human beings, when surely frying the fries and wrapping the burgers takes no more discretion or insight than a robot could muster.
Here's a passage from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Moderate me down for unoriginality if you must, but I think that he poses the question qute elegantly. Plus, Down and Out is a great book, and you should read it if you have not already.
I think one should start by saying that a plongeur (dishwasher) is one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten to fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a plongeur; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and they think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work - but it is necessary - we must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a plongeur's work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering.
Is a plongeur's work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a plongeur. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may only be supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.
(George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p103/104)
Of course I was speaking in general terms. Obviously people give things away now: but an economy based upon gifts or charity cannot be as prosperous as ours. It's a simple impossibility.
More prosperous does not equal better. I am a proponent of capitalism, and all the benefits it brings, but there are much better values out there than making money.
Sure, there will still be *some* art if no one's paying for it, but NOT in the quantity that we have today. This is not difficult:
Oh boy! Quantity! That's exactly what I want to see when I want some art. Nothing better than crap, as long as there's lots of it.
Those who steal from musicians are not only robbing the producers of music; if a culture of larceny builds around that theft, eventually there will be nearly zero producers of music. It's unavoidable. Very few people are willing to give away the fruits of their labor. This is part of why communism is such an abominable lie.
That's a nice set of strawmen. Let's see... a) It's not theft, it's copying-without-permission. b) You are saying that people should act against their own best interest in order to support the interests of the group. And then you go and diss Communism. c) People often give away their labor for free. Probably the degree to which they do varies from culture to culture. If you think it's best that people never labor for free, fine, but defend the inevitable consequences.
There's no reasonable solution to this mess. Bitching about 'theivery' is not going to change the fact that infomation is a non-excludable good. I hope sometime soon reason will prevail, and there will be sensible laws governing intellectual property drafted.
The net result of this "system" (to be very generous) of Stallman's would be the eradication of productivity in whatever sphere it was applied. Music -- gone. Books -- gone.Art -- gone. Software -- gone. This is simple economics.(emphasis added)
So what you're saying, is that if art were not bought, then people would stop producing it. Or, to be more accurate. Art would not be produced by people who wanted to sell it, and would only be made by people who were making it for the fun of it.
Imagine the hell we'd live in, if the only art we were able to see was someone's expression of emotion. How would we survive, so far from the comforting world where art is something you pick up at the store to decorate your home?
This is a really shitty idea. We definitely don't need a computer moderating for us. If we need more moderation, then assign more people as moderators. A computer won't do better than it's programmed, and it's programmed by one person - which means our filtering is the result of a single set of values rather than a distributed set.
I think it would be neat, not because we really need a computer program to moderate for us, but just as a challenging problem to write an AI for.
Probably genetic algorithms would be a good way of going about it. The AI could train by comparing itself to human moderators, there's certainly enough data out there for it. The big problem, the one that makes it near impossible to do though, is having sensible criteria for how the program will evaluate a block of text as being 'insightful' or 'funny.' If you can do this, then you have made a huge breakthrough in the field of AI.
In fact, a computer that has true artificial intelligence will 'do better than it's programmed,' as it will be able to learn as it goes, provided it gets feedback on the success or failure of its options. Also, who's to say that we wouldn't have multiple AIs each with a different set of values, combining to do moderation just like us humans?
When you look at a fresh page of comments, which do you think more often: "These comments were definitely moderated by humans." or "What were these moderators smoking?"
I don't know why I read Katz's little diatripes anyway. They're entertaining, sure, and I suppose they make me think about a particular subject, even if only by mentioning that subject. I guess the problem is that they're *too* entertaining. I'm coming to realise that having nothing of substance is a bit of theme in Jon's articles.
One particular sentence caught my eye:
But individualism, which has increasingly retreated to and thrived on the Internet, doesn't really have a coherent ideology, almost by definition.
Just what is this? Is it saying anything? It says that individualism has 'retreated to the Internet.' I assume this means that Jon has constructed some sort of device for measuring where individualism is, and has monitored individualism scurrying its furry little legs onto the net. Actually, since Jon never gives a clear picture as to what he means by individualism, and ascribes to it many contradicting qualites, it's hard to imagine he could build such a device.
(Example of contradiction: While individualism might commonly mean 'the philosophy of acting as an individual,' Jon goes on and on about how "Individual wants this," and "Individualism values that," as if it were a collectivist movement.)
Of course, in the exact same sentence, Jon goes on to recognize that 'Individualism doesn't really have a coherent ideology.' So, what exactly has been imparted by this one sentence paragraph? Nothing, in my humble opinion. Of course, this hardly distinguishes it from the rest of Jon's writings, in which he talks extremely vaguely about matters in which he cannot possibly be an expert.
My point here? Well, I guess I have one, and it's this: While I read Mr. Katz's articles, and am frequently entertained by them and the ensuing discussion, he represents a branch of journalism that really irks me. Nowadays, the media in general has realised that there's much more profit in entertaining people than educating them.
Somewhere in the mix it was lost that it was the job of the writer to impart information. Good writing is written by someone with a background in a particular field who is able to combine a talent for writing with specific knowledge in order to make complicated things more easily learned by the average person. Jon, of course, only has a talent for writing things that are entertaining, nothing wrong with that, but when it's commonly held that a talent for writing makes a person an expert on everything, then the result is complete balls of fluff like Jon's current series on "Corporatism."
4) What makes the Internet so special, that once the same thing is done there, everything is suddenly illegal, patentable, etc., etc.?
Everything was illegal before, but was there was no commotion over it for two reasons: 1. It was still vaguely difficult to amass copyrighted material. 2. It was impossible for many reasons to track people and bust them for making a copy of "Master of Puppets" for friend.
With the internet, #1 is no longer true. It's pretty convenient to get whatever you want over the net, and it will only get easier. So the people who profit off distributing information are getting a bit antsy.
The problem is, #2 is still very much true. What can you do about it? Send the police into private residences to confiscate people's computers? Put ads on TV until everyone realises copying is wrong?
Probably the only solution that keeps the sellers of information in business is to develop closed formats that cannot be copied and put onto the internet. It's a shame, because so many of the Industry's solutions run counter to so many good things, like artistic integrity and free exchange of information.
It seems to be a fairly standard moral principle that you should help others.
Oh sure, standard among unwashed hippie mystic freaks. Anyone with even the slightest amount of love for Reason can see that the only person one should act to benefit is one's self. After all, helping one's self brings clear benefit, while gaining happiness by helping others is completely irrational.
As Ayn Rand once said: 'Helping others will only give those others an advantage with which they can destroy you.' Anyone who doesn't agree completely with Rand is no better than the vile commies she stood up to.
All good rational people know that helping others is not a virtue. How can it be a virtue if I don't enjoy doing it? If living in a stark impersonal world devoid of altruistic friendship and basic emotional interaction was good enough for Rand's fictional characters, then by gum, it's good enough for me.
That got me to thinking this morning as I bought my paper.. wouldn't it be cool to have a print version of what's going on/what had happened in the web the previous day? I would certainly plunk down a quarter to get some slashdot headlines, the register headlines, some article blurbs, security stuff, recent security holes, penny-arcade, sluggy, and friend bear on the comics page, some 20 page editorials by Jon Katz:)..
The comics page would be cool. Actually, what would be cool is if the regular newspaper comics page carried some of the great internet strips out there. Actually, no wait, then the strips would have to be shrunk down into a little four by one strip. Well, I guess things are pretty cool as they are.
Hopefully, a collection of internet comics would not include the abominable User-friendly, and would get good work like PvP or the delicious Sinfest.
Oh yeah... Mirsky was great. Back when the web was just a bunch of college kids up to no good, Mirsky was a consistent source of amusement. Sigh. The internet must be growing up if the mention of an old web side makes me wax nostalgic.
Plus, on the topic of sex and value, just why *isn't* there an.xxx TLD? Seems to me it would satisfy both the people who want to look at porn, and the people who want not to look at porn.
"The benefits of developing operating systems and applications software under the same roof will increase as new intelligent devices emerge over the next few years," [Gates] said.
This is absolutely true, so long as you read "benefits" as "benefits to Microsoft." Benefit for rest of us, on the other hand, would be much better with an operating system kernel being developed openly, and application writers competing fairly to write software for it
'The DOJ plan would effectively reduce Windows to a small core of low-level functionality that performs only the most basic operations.' -- MICROSOFT LOBBYING PAPER
Basic operations? You mean like acting as a virtual machine to run programs on, and controlling the computer's resources? It's funny because the DOJ has to tell Microsoft how to write an operating system.
Microsoft is right. The ILOVEYOU virus isn't a software issue, it's a user education issue.
Just the same way that accidental gun deaths are a user education issue. And prescription drug overdoses. And smoking-related lung cancer. And traffic accidents. All of these things could be prevented if the user just *weren't* *so* *dumb*.
Wrong. A user clicks on an email message, and their email client automatically starts running an attached file? Stupid-user or not, this 'feature' is just plain unjustified. How many seconds would you have to use up to think of a way to make this program more secure? How about prompting the user: "Run attached file: ILOVEU.VBS? (Y/N)"
Writing software that makes it easy for strangers to take advantage of the use is just plain negligent. Plenty of sensible software writers know that their software is going to be used by users of a variety of skill levels, and take this into account when writing. mIRC, for example, is set by default to decline DCC sends of.exes,.vbs, etc. This is just good sense.
Which is better, to make a program secure by default, and let users turn off security if they want? Or to make it insecure by default, and blame the users for not turning on the security?
Yes, MAME is neat, and yes, it's far better to play this games emulated on your computer than on some website using one of the tools of the Devil. (shockwave)
But still, is there anyone out there who has never dreamed the impossible dream? To have the global high score on their favorite arcade game?
Yay! Another informative article by Mr. Katz! Let's go through the checklist, and see if he's delivered the goods once again:
1. Attempt to make annoying new buzzword; "Corporatism," Check!
2. Sixth-grade writing techniques; Beginning the article with a dictionary definition, Check!
3. Broad generalizations; America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries... Check!
4. Unjustified alarmist language. Everywhere in this new Republic, individualism is on the run. Check!
Bra-vo. It's good to see success has not spoiled Jon, and that he continues to give us more Katz-y goodness with every article.
and as for on-topic-ness, I'd say that I partly agree with the premise that corporations have negative effects on society that should be recognize, but I feel uncompelled to express this idea in broad terms, without specific cases to apply it to.
And honestly, do you think the kid that wrote the software was thinking "Wow! I can trade John Philip Sousa songs with my friends!" when he started it? I kind of doubt it.
And why wasn't he thinking that? Could it be that all his life MTV has been telling him what music is cool? MTV, and other media sellers who profit from selling few bands to many people. What does it benefit MTV if people like listening to a wide variety of music? Less diversity means more sales for one particular artist, allowing a select few creations to be catapulted to superstar status. Other artists are tempted to try to reach for this gold ring, to try to make their creations more like the things on MTV, because that's what great (popular) music is.
What does an artist do when they create a musical work? They sit down, take pen in hand, and try to express feelings they have inside them. Maybe people will like their art, maybe they won't. The artist just wants to express herself and make something that she thinks is beautiful that she wants to share with the world.
What does the media do when it wants to promote a musical work? It sorts through all the music produced and finds the one that appeals to the most number of people. The one that contains the lowest common denominator. Something that's guaranteed to please for a moment, and not offend anyone.
A marketplace of ideas works when everyone speaks their mind and says what they believe. In this honest discourse, ideas are traded, and people evaluate and compare them to their own views, perhaps even revising the way they think when presented with new information. The idea of profiting by adding false or contrived ideas to this mix runs contrary to the benefits of free thought and free information.
Now, I'm not as radical as I might come off here. I can accept that there will be advertising, that people will say things that they don't believe in order to make a profit. Overall I think people are smart enough to filter out bad information most of the time. I'm just wondering, why do we see it as such a good thing that MTV and the record companies are making so much money? Does their success increase the quality of the music that is made? Does it promote honest discourse? Does it advance the cause of art?
Where is porn on that list? Camon guys, that's gotta be one of the top inventions of the 20th century.
I mean, in the 19th century. It was very hard to find porn. Now, you don't even have to go outside to get porn. Making porn easily accessibly is gotta be the top invention of the 20th century.
I think you skipped over one of the entries on the list.
13. Global pornography network. (HTH)
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Re:When marketing data becomes a Biography
on
The Eroded Self
·
· Score: 2
Look at the example below and ask yourself: where would you draw the line?
John Smith resides at 123 Elm street. and he has 48% equity in his house. and is married with 2 kids. and he wears 34/32 size pants. (usually dockers from WalMart). ...
Personally I have no problem with any of the items on the list being public information, but then, I may be odd in that respect. The big deal about privacy rights, as far as I can figure out, is that they be egalitarian. Where society gets into trouble is when one person's level of privacy is greater than another's. Suppose I know this information about John Smith -- that's all very well and good, but by right, John should be able to look up what kind of pants *I* wear as well.
Of course, what people want is to have their information secret and other people's public -- it gives you a sort of power over other people. In my mind, we could alleviate some of this disparity by working towards there being *less* privacy in society. More information would be public, and even better, it would be *understood* to be public. What we have now is the understanding that information is private, but with information being collected in secret, and available to those who have the money, influence, or position to investigate them.
On a related note, something I've been thinking about is the US Census. The information on those forms is public, right? Is the government going to put up a web site where you can look at other people's census forms? On the other hand, if they're not, and the information is in fact private information, then what right did the government have to ask for it?
----- Following line: Good example of Fair Use. "OOG BUILD STONEHENGE, BUT STUPID DRUIDS GET CREDIT!!" - OOG, 4/20/00
Fair use? But OOG go through, er went through all the trouble to make an original artistic work, and the druids just outright stole it, not giving OOG any money, or credit, or anything!
{insert whatever symbol you use to differentiate funny-making from actual stupidity here}
My god... is it really necessary that the compyrighted *lyrics* to songs be kept so tightly under wraps that the only way to get them is to go to some illegal Russian server? What exactly are the artists (more likely the music companies) afraid of?
That I might look up a song lyric so that I can quote it correctly to a friend?
That I might spend all my time reading through the lyrics archive instead of actually listening to the music?
That I might skim over the lyrics to an album that I don't own to see if I might enjoy the album?
That I might actually be interested in a piece of music that I own so much that I want to go read the lyrics in order to understand it better?
Krist... Obviously such nefarious actions must be stopped immediately. --
Too bad nothing else Orson Scott Card did compares favorably to Ender's Game. Hopefully the new sequel will be different...
I guess it depend on what you liked about Ender's game, but personally, I think that Card has written lots of stuff easily in the same class as Enders game. To wit:
Speaker for the Dead: The year after Ender's Game won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, so did this one. While it's very different from Ender's Game, it's no less a sci-fi classic in its own right. After Speaker, the series of books takes a bit of a downturn, but that detracts nothing from this often powerful work.
The Worthing Chronicle: This is one of my favorite books ever. It's so many of Card's most clear and imaginitive stories thrown into one novel. I don't know how to do the story justice in just one paragraph, but suffice to say I have reread this book many times and found it thoroughly moving each time.
Maps in a Mirror: This is a large volume that collects a major portion of all of Card's short fiction. He's written many, many gems over the years, and they're all in here. These stories are back from when Card was younger and starting out; his vicious imagination is plainly evident, and all of his ideas are fresh and new.
Others: If you've read a few of Card's books and liked them, then by all means go back and read some of his fine earlier novels. Seventh Son is an intriguing alternate history of colonial America. Treason is an interesting, fast-moving adventure. Wyrms is an inventive and compelling fantasy. (It's where I took the nickname 'ruin' from)
Ok, yes, Scott Card is my favorite science fiction author. However, I would say the new sequel is unlikely to be the best in the series. If you want to find the best work by any given author, go look for things they wrote before they were writing for a living, when the ideas they had were all untried and new, bubbling out, desperate to be written.
Slashdot Mirror
Company? I assume that's a simple typo. Of course, it could be a delightful double-entendre in which you're implying that we live in a country in which laws are being written by companies to their benefit, and to the detriment of the average citizen. Doesn't seem to support your argument, though, so I guess it has to be a typo.
Not many artists? Since when are people who make art for money artists?
--
believe that there are four -- oh shit! (Lars takes care of something in the background) -- I believe that there are sort of like four links in the food chain here.
Milk boiling over? Bongwater spillage? Hot girl on televison? Inquiring minds want to know...
--
Approximately three CDs per year.
Number of CDs I've bought since I started sharing MP3s:
one. (Radiohead's The Bends, best $15 I've spent in a while)
Assuming that I buy another CD by the time a year is up, (I consider this highly likely) then my CD consumption will have fallen by one. I can attribute this drop pretty directly to MP3s, so I'd say this pernicious act of file sharing by me has cost the music industry roughly fifteen bucks.
Of course, the benefit to me, in terms of being able to listen to more music, better music, and a wider variety of music, exceeds fifteen dollars by at least an order of magnitude, so I'm having a hard time crying my eyes out for the poor record executives.
as always, your mileage may vary.
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Here's a passage from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Moderate me down for unoriginality if you must, but I think that he poses the question qute elegantly. Plus, Down and Out is a great book, and you should read it if you have not already.
I think one should start by saying that a plongeur (dishwasher) is one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten to fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a plongeur; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and they think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work - but it is necessary - we must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a plongeur's work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering.
Is a plongeur's work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a plongeur. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may only be supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.
(George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p103/104)
--
More prosperous does not equal better. I am a proponent of capitalism, and all the benefits it brings, but there are much better values out there than making money.
Sure, there will still be *some* art if no one's paying for it, but NOT in the quantity that we have today. This is not difficult:
Oh boy! Quantity! That's exactly what I want to see when I want some art. Nothing better than crap, as long as there's lots of it.
Those who steal from musicians are not only robbing the producers of music; if a culture of larceny builds around that theft, eventually there will be nearly zero producers of music. It's unavoidable. Very few people are willing to give away the fruits of their labor. This is part of why communism is such an abominable lie.
That's a nice set of strawmen. Let's see...
a) It's not theft, it's copying-without-permission.
b) You are saying that people should act against their own best interest in order to support the interests of the group. And then you go and diss Communism.
c) People often give away their labor for free. Probably the degree to which they do varies from culture to culture. If you think it's best that people never labor for free, fine, but defend the inevitable consequences.
There's no reasonable solution to this mess. Bitching about 'theivery' is not going to change the fact that infomation is a non-excludable good. I hope sometime soon reason will prevail, and there will be sensible laws governing intellectual property drafted.
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So what you're saying, is that if art were not bought, then people would stop producing it. Or, to be more accurate. Art would not be produced by people who wanted to sell it, and would only be made by people who were making it for the fun of it.
Imagine the hell we'd live in, if the only art we were able to see was someone's expression of emotion. How would we survive, so far from the comforting world where art is something you pick up at the store to decorate your home?
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What does it mean: "Document contains no data?"
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I think it would be neat, not because we really need a computer program to moderate for us, but just as a challenging problem to write an AI for.
Probably genetic algorithms would be a good way of going about it. The AI could train by comparing itself to human moderators, there's certainly enough data out there for it. The big problem, the one that makes it near impossible to do though, is having sensible criteria for how the program will evaluate a block of text as being 'insightful' or 'funny.' If you can do this, then you have made a huge breakthrough in the field of AI.
In fact, a computer that has true artificial intelligence will 'do better than it's programmed,' as it will be able to learn as it goes, provided it gets feedback on the success or failure of its options. Also, who's to say that we wouldn't have multiple AIs each with a different set of values, combining to do moderation just like us humans?
When you look at a fresh page of comments, which do you think more often: "These comments were definitely moderated by humans." or "What were these moderators smoking?"
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One particular sentence caught my eye:
But individualism, which has increasingly retreated to and thrived on the Internet, doesn't really have a coherent ideology, almost by definition.
Just what is this? Is it saying anything? It says that individualism has 'retreated to the Internet.' I assume this means that Jon has constructed some sort of device for measuring where individualism is, and has monitored individualism scurrying its furry little legs onto the net. Actually, since Jon never gives a clear picture as to what he means by individualism, and ascribes to it many contradicting qualites, it's hard to imagine he could build such a device.
(Example of contradiction: While individualism might commonly mean 'the philosophy of acting as an individual,' Jon goes on and on about how "Individual wants this," and "Individualism values that," as if it were a collectivist movement.)
Of course, in the exact same sentence, Jon goes on to recognize that 'Individualism doesn't really have a coherent ideology.' So, what exactly has been imparted by this one sentence paragraph? Nothing, in my humble opinion. Of course, this hardly distinguishes it from the rest of Jon's writings, in which he talks extremely vaguely about matters in which he cannot possibly be an expert.
My point here? Well, I guess I have one, and it's this: While I read Mr. Katz's articles, and am frequently entertained by them and the ensuing discussion, he represents a branch of journalism that really irks me. Nowadays, the media in general has realised that there's much more profit in entertaining people than educating them.
Somewhere in the mix it was lost that it was the job of the writer to impart information. Good writing is written by someone with a background in a particular field who is able to combine a talent for writing with specific knowledge in order to make complicated things more easily learned by the average person. Jon, of course, only has a talent for writing things that are entertaining, nothing wrong with that, but when it's commonly held that a talent for writing makes a person an expert on everything, then the result is complete balls of fluff like Jon's current series on "Corporatism."
--
(Defender, of course, being the one arcade game with the easy to use six-button controls and a maddeningly steep learning curve)
(ymmv)
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Everything was illegal before, but was there was no commotion over it for two reasons: .
1. It was still vaguely difficult to amass copyrighted material
2. It was impossible for many reasons to track people and bust them for making a copy of "Master of Puppets" for friend.
With the internet, #1 is no longer true. It's pretty convenient to get whatever you want over the net, and it will only get easier. So the people who profit off distributing information are getting a bit antsy.
The problem is, #2 is still very much true. What can you do about it? Send the police into private residences to confiscate people's computers? Put ads on TV until everyone realises copying is wrong?
Probably the only solution that keeps the sellers of information in business is to develop closed formats that cannot be copied and put onto the internet. It's a shame, because so many of the Industry's solutions run counter to so many good things, like artistic integrity and free exchange of information.
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Oh sure, standard among unwashed hippie mystic freaks. Anyone with even the slightest amount of love for Reason can see that the only person one should act to benefit is one's self. After all, helping one's self brings clear benefit, while gaining happiness by helping others is completely irrational.
As Ayn Rand once said: 'Helping others will only give those others an advantage with which they can destroy you.' Anyone who doesn't agree completely with Rand is no better than the vile commies she stood up to.
All good rational people know that helping others is not a virtue. How can it be a virtue if I don't enjoy doing it? If living in a stark impersonal world devoid of altruistic friendship and basic emotional interaction was good enough for Rand's fictional characters, then by gum, it's good enough for me.
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The comics page would be cool. Actually, what would be cool is if the regular newspaper comics page carried some of the great internet strips out there. Actually, no wait, then the strips would have to be shrunk down into a little four by one strip. Well, I guess things are pretty cool as they are.
Hopefully, a collection of internet comics would not include the abominable User-friendly, and would get good work like PvP or the delicious Sinfest.
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Plus, on the topic of sex and value, just why *isn't* there an .xxx TLD? Seems to me it would satisfy both the people who want to look at porn, and the people who want not to look at porn.
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This is absolutely true, so long as you read "benefits" as "benefits to Microsoft." Benefit for rest of us, on the other hand, would be much better with an operating system kernel being developed openly, and application writers competing fairly to write software for it
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'The DOJ plan would effectively reduce Windows to a small core of low-level functionality that performs only the most basic operations.'
-- MICROSOFT LOBBYING PAPER
Basic operations? You mean like acting as a virtual machine to run programs on, and controlling the computer's resources? It's funny because the DOJ has to tell Microsoft how to write an operating system.
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Just the same way that accidental gun deaths are a user education issue. And prescription drug overdoses. And smoking-related lung cancer. And traffic accidents. All of these things could be prevented if the user just *weren't* *so* *dumb*.
Wrong. A user clicks on an email message, and their email client automatically starts running an attached file? Stupid-user or not, this 'feature' is just plain unjustified. How many seconds would you have to use up to think of a way to make this program more secure? How about prompting the user: "Run attached file: ILOVEU.VBS? (Y/N)"
Writing software that makes it easy for strangers to take advantage of the use is just plain negligent. Plenty of sensible software writers know that their software is going to be used by users of a variety of skill levels, and take this into account when writing. mIRC, for example, is set by default to decline DCC sends of .exes, .vbs, etc. This is just good sense.
Which is better, to make a program secure by default, and let users turn off security if they want? Or to make it insecure by default, and blame the users for not turning on the security?
hm.
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But still, is there anyone out there who has never dreamed the impossible dream? To have the global high score on their favorite arcade game?
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1. Attempt to make annoying new buzzword; "Corporatism," Check!
2. Sixth-grade writing techniques; Beginning the article with a dictionary definition, Check!
3. Broad generalizations; America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries... Check!
4. Unjustified alarmist language. Everywhere in this new Republic, individualism is on the run. Check!
Bra-vo. It's good to see success has not spoiled Jon, and that he continues to give us more Katz-y goodness with every article.
and as for on-topic-ness, I'd say that I partly agree with the premise that corporations have negative effects on society that should be recognize, but I feel uncompelled to express this idea in broad terms, without specific cases to apply it to.
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And why wasn't he thinking that? Could it be that all his life MTV has been telling him what music is cool? MTV, and other media sellers who profit from selling few bands to many people. What does it benefit MTV if people like listening to a wide variety of music? Less diversity means more sales for one particular artist, allowing a select few creations to be catapulted to superstar status. Other artists are tempted to try to reach for this gold ring, to try to make their creations more like the things on MTV, because that's what great (popular) music is.
What does an artist do when they create a musical work? They sit down, take pen in hand, and try to express feelings they have inside them. Maybe people will like their art, maybe they won't. The artist just wants to express herself and make something that she thinks is beautiful that she wants to share with the world.
What does the media do when it wants to promote a musical work? It sorts through all the music produced and finds the one that appeals to the most number of people. The one that contains the lowest common denominator. Something that's guaranteed to please for a moment, and not offend anyone.
A marketplace of ideas works when everyone speaks their mind and says what they believe. In this honest discourse, ideas are traded, and people evaluate and compare them to their own views, perhaps even revising the way they think when presented with new information. The idea of profiting by adding false or contrived ideas to this mix runs contrary to the benefits of free thought and free information.
Now, I'm not as radical as I might come off here. I can accept that there will be advertising, that people will say things that they don't believe in order to make a profit. Overall I think people are smart enough to filter out bad information most of the time. I'm just wondering, why do we see it as such a good thing that MTV and the record companies are making so much money? Does their success increase the quality of the music that is made? Does it promote honest discourse? Does it advance the cause of art?
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I mean, in the 19th century. It was very hard to find porn. Now, you don't even have to go outside to get porn. Making porn easily accessibly is gotta be the top invention of the 20th century.
I think you skipped over one of the entries on the list.
13. Global pornography network.
(HTH)
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John Smith resides at 123 Elm street.
...
and he has 48% equity in his house.
and is married with 2 kids.
and he wears 34/32 size pants.
(usually dockers from WalMart).
Personally I have no problem with any of the items on the list being public information, but then, I may be odd in that respect. The big deal about privacy rights, as far as I can figure out, is that they be egalitarian. Where society gets into trouble is when one person's level of privacy is greater than another's. Suppose I know this information about John Smith -- that's all very well and good, but by right, John should be able to look up what kind of pants *I* wear as well.
Of course, what people want is to have their information secret and other people's public -- it gives you a sort of power over other people. In my mind, we could alleviate some of this disparity by working towards there being *less* privacy in society. More information would be public, and even better, it would be *understood* to be public. What we have now is the understanding that information is private, but with information being collected in secret, and available to those who have the money, influence, or position to investigate them.
On a related note, something I've been thinking about is the US Census. The information on those forms is public, right? Is the government going to put up a web site where you can look at other people's census forms? On the other hand, if they're not, and the information is in fact private information, then what right did the government have to ask for it?
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Following line: Good example of Fair Use. "OOG BUILD STONEHENGE, BUT STUPID DRUIDS GET CREDIT!!" - OOG, 4/20/00
Fair use? But OOG go through, er went through all the trouble to make an original artistic work, and the druids just outright stole it, not giving OOG any money, or credit, or anything!
{insert whatever symbol you use to differentiate funny-making from actual stupidity here}
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That I might look up a song lyric so that I can quote it correctly to a friend?
That I might spend all my time reading through the lyrics archive instead of actually listening to the music?
That I might skim over the lyrics to an album that I don't own to see if I might enjoy the album?
That I might actually be interested in a piece of music that I own so much that I want to go read the lyrics in order to understand it better?
Krist... Obviously such nefarious actions must be stopped immediately.
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I guess it depend on what you liked about Ender's game, but personally, I think that Card has written lots of stuff easily in the same class as Enders game. To wit:
Speaker for the Dead: The year after Ender's Game won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, so did this one. While it's very different from Ender's Game, it's no less a sci-fi classic in its own right. After Speaker, the series of books takes a bit of a downturn, but that detracts nothing from this often powerful work.
The Worthing Chronicle: This is one of my favorite books ever. It's so many of Card's most clear and imaginitive stories thrown into one novel. I don't know how to do the story justice in just one paragraph, but suffice to say I have reread this book many times and found it thoroughly moving each time.
Maps in a Mirror: This is a large volume that collects a major portion of all of Card's short fiction. He's written many, many gems over the years, and they're all in here. These stories are back from when Card was younger and starting out; his vicious imagination is plainly evident, and all of his ideas are fresh and new.
Others: If you've read a few of Card's books and liked them, then by all means go back and read some of his fine earlier novels. Seventh Son is an intriguing alternate history of colonial America. Treason is an interesting, fast-moving adventure. Wyrms is an inventive and compelling fantasy. (It's where I took the nickname 'ruin' from)
Ok, yes, Scott Card is my favorite science fiction author. However, I would say the new sequel is unlikely to be the best in the series. If you want to find the best work by any given author, go look for things they wrote before they were writing for a living, when the ideas they had were all untried and new, bubbling out, desperate to be written.
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