What worries me about this post is that it has been moderated:
Insightful=3, Interesting=4
Either moderators have a sick sense of humor today, or the problem of antisexuality & antipleasure is bigger than I thought. How is this post any different from someone (say, the Taleban) advocating putting woman in veils, to avoid "temptation" of the flesh?
This troll doesn't surprise me, it's not creative or original in any sense. But that it was moderated up for its insightful/interesting content by 7 people -- that just blows me away.
A single large weapon could indeed make Monaco or Luxembourg uninhabitable for a time, but those are the smallest of countries
I'm sorry, but you don't have a clue about the destructive power of modern nuclear weapons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton bomb. It killed 100,000 people immediately and probably about the same amount through radiation. By now we're able to build bombs with 100 megatons and more (this number practically only depends on the amount of money you are willing to spend). 1 megaton = 1000 kilotons. It doesn't take a nuclear rocket scientist to know that this stuff is capable of destroying whole countries.
Note that, of course, I don't use the word "destroy" in the sense of "blowing it up into many many tiny little pieces", but in the sense of "killing all complex life". As for the former, the Castle Bravo test literally destroyed the island in question and left nothing but a huge crater in its place..
Nuclear weapons can make areas of land inhabitable, and will dramatically affect the land for years - but the odds of a nuclear conflict that actually reduced the earth to ashes are completely improbable.
You are missing the point. I was not talking about what is probable -- a redirected asteroid hitting the Earth is not probable either. I was talking about what we can already do with current technology. And again, a single country could make 99% of the whole planet's population (of most animals as well) die from radiation by exploding a ~60 MT bomb with a coat of Cobalt in the atmosphere. The Cobalt would become radioactive Cobalt 60, and contaminate the whole planet.
And don't forget nuclear winter.
They'll just kill everyone in cities and urban areas, with developed nations the hardest hit.
They'll kill everyone in every place where people and, depending on the disease, animals come and go within the incubation time. That doesn't leave out a lot.
So in the future, using large objects from space, we may be able to, instead of killing 99% of the population, kill 100% of it, and the insects as well, in shorter time. So what? The big challenge is obviously not finding better ways to kill many people, but to prevent them from being used.
The amount of available nuclear bombs is still large enough to destroy the Earth ~10,000 times. A single H-Bomb can destroy whole countries and make them uninhabitable for years. A single bomb that spreads radioactive material through the atmosphere could kill all of us. Then there's biological and chemical weapons. A genetically engineered virus, with the right incubation time, could kill us all in a couple of weeks.
ABC-weapons are already pretty good at killing lots of people, and they are easy to get. Heck, even India & Pakistan got nukes. How about the Taleban? How about you? Get yours today!
You're right. The editorial selection of content is the main problem of Slashdot. I have experienced that many times myself, when I still thought that Slashdot was the best thing since sliced bread and submitted stories fairly often. Slashdot editors could improve the situation greatly by simply adding one of several standard reasons (and possibly a free form text in special cases) to story rejection -- at least this would avoid user frustration (and even decrease workload by reducing angry e-mail). Of course it wouldn't solve the problem that Slashdot's editors are far from perfect and their standards for selection are hardly the best.
The whole "Slashdot sucks" attitude (which contributes to the trolling problem) can probably be partially traced back to this. The cold, reasonless rejection of stories removes the humanity from the site and creates a tension between the editors and the readers. You may think that I am exaggerating. If you submit stories to/. regularly, you probably agree.
But you're wrong in suggesting that this story is a troll. In fact it's one of the more positive examples of a Slashdot story. While most stories just link to ZDNet, Yahoo, CNN, Wired etc., this one links directly to a non-corporate competitor, to a non-mainstream analysis which is actually fairly interesting. Michael should be applauded for posting this. By discouraging this story, what you promote is basically nothing but a digest from approved mainstream media. Anything that is not backed up by an authority is dangerous because it might get flamed by the masses (or even be factually incorrect).
If Slashdot develops further in that direction, I will stop reading it. There are tools to create automatic linklists to the latest stories on other sites, I don't need Slashdot for that. Slashdot should be a site that mainly links to the stuff that is interesting and which you only read about everywhere else after it has been slashdotted.
The flames by a significant part of Slashdot users could be avoided if Slashdot editors would more actively participate in the discussion. Their usual passivity and lack of commentary (or apology in the case of an obvious mistake) only increases the tension between editors and readers.
All that being said, it is unlikely that Slashdot will change anytime soon. When was the last major change to the way Slashdot works? That's the problem -- the site has reached a state of stagnation. Changes are not implemented for fear of the technical and social problems they might cause.
Therefore it's time to move on to more developed communities and let this one die. Some of its contributions have been great, but now it has to be replaced by more open, useful and friendly solutions. That's the way of evolution.
The fact that K5 has been so easily slashdotted points out a flaw in what some have argued, namely that it doesn't matter whether collaborative media are -technically- centralized or decentralized. The problems are obvious:
Once communities scale beyond a certain size, bandwidth becomes too expensive. This problem isn't likely to go away anytime soon because collaborative media will have to use videos and images (maybe even 3D data) in the future to emotionally compete with corporate media. In other words, while bandwidth will become cheaper, more of it will be necessary. The cost problem can be at least partially solved through voluntary payments, subscription etc., but the more obvious solution is to directly spread distribution costs over the users by using decentralized networks.
Centralized discussion forums are very vulnerable to censorship and other forms of corporate control. The Scientology incident is only one example of this. K5 has not yet experirenced it, and it makes sense for Rusty to ignore this problem (or even to justify the censorship, as he has done, like many others, in the Scientology case), but that won't make it go away.
Let me point out that I am not just anticopyright because I want "free stuff". Copyright is an effective instrument of censorship, especially if it can be transferred from the original creators. But even they may desire the removal of their works from the public when pressured many years later (I could give you examples of this). One of the key problems of free, collaborative media will also be the creation of visual content. In doing this, it is often inevitable to violate someone's copyright. The erosion of fair use and strict persecution of copyright violators will have the same effects on collaborative writing that software patents have on open source software development. A decentralized network can give better protection to its users and avoid the forced removal of content with the help of copyright, either for economic or ideological reasons.
For these, and other reasons (I just realized that I'm repeating myself), it is essential that the media with which we plan to liberate ourselves are free from centralized control. Slashdot and Kuro5hin must, eventually, die and be replaced by better solutions. Of course we can learn a lot from the past (Usenet and the Internet architecture itself, for example), but we will also have to invent a lot of new cool stuff.
.. is good, but it is not excellent. The reason it is so easily discounted as a "katzish" article (which it isn't -- Rusty is, if anything, a true Anti-Katz) is that a lot of interesting facts are hidden under a rather mundane (and flawed) sociological analysis.
The facts are that corporations can manipulate the perception of reality of many people, and thereby, eventually, in some ways, reality itself. Those who don't believe this should read Toxic Sludge is Good For You and, as an intro into what you may expect, The PR Plot to Overheat the Earth. Toxic Sludge should be required reading in high school. It points out the many ways in which corporations are actively spreading disinformation and distorting our perception of reality, to maximize their profits -- often with deadly results. It easily refutes the most basic flaw in libertarian ideology, that free and informed decisions are possible in a centralized, corporate media world.
Rusty makes a valid point; namely, that the only way to fix this problem is by allowing people, instead of corporations interested only in maximizing profit (and speaking through corporate media), to inform other people -- building "communities" (a word which I merely put in quotes because of its [ab]use by others).
What is less interesting (but probably important to Rusty himself, who seems to only recently have discovered these facts) is the discussion of reality and what makes it. Unfortunately, this is the intro to the article, so many may stop reading there. Also unfortunately, the meatier parts are not backed up with sources. The truth about reality vs. perception is pretty easy to sum up:
There is an objective reality.
Our perception of reality tends to be an approximation, since reality is not a closed system, yet our information about it is limited. (The only method by which this approximation can be perfected is the scientific one, as compared to religious belief, which is basically guessing.)
Things get really messy once you start questioning the idea that there is actually an objective reality to begin with. Don't do that. If you assume that there is no objective reality, the first assumption you make is subject to this theory. That means it's both wrong and right at the same time. That means it's worthless. Constructivism and postmodernism are, therefore, bullshit. Rusty's arguments go a bit in the postmodern direction (or at least sound like it), but not too much.
All in all, I would have preferred more interesting real-life examples of mass manipulation and a neurophysiological explanation of the mechanisms of manipulation, but if I want to read that, I probably have to write it myself.
Those of you who want to talk about the actual solutions to the discussed problems should subscribe to p2pj, a mailing list about peer-to-peer journalism (or "collaborative media", if you prefer that) which I have created.
You know, when they open-source BeOS, thousands of happy open-source programmers will take it apart, reduce the memory footprint, make it faster, make it more compatible and less bloated. Just like they did with Mozilla.. right? Right?
Any project that requires a regularly paid staff is, of course, harder to get enough money for than a project that is done in people's spare time (like my own sites, for example). On one of my sites, a German net magazine, the "Editors" pay for the bandwidth themselves, and there is no advertising whatsoever. As I said, to take non-profit journalism to the next step, the further development of p2p networks would be desirable to save the bandwidth costs associated with many visitors.
Read infoAnarchy to stay informed on the latest spyware and tracking tools. I have submitted this story to/. last Friday (before publishing it myself), but it was rejected. Unsurprisingly,/. prefers stories that have already been verified by large sites like Salon and CNET (not exactly a good way to encourage alternative media).
I don't think that my head is up my ass or even close, since I am very familiar with that view. Anyway, as far as I remember, Rob said at the P2P Conference that Slashdot pays mostly for itself -- I don't know how much help they get from OSDN/VA. I am certain, though, that/. takes less effort to maintain than, say, Salon, and K5 is an even better example: The "only" regular staff that is required are a few coders -- the current ones even do it in their spare time. Sure, bandwidth remains a problem, but real P2P networks should solve that: Simply distribute the bandwidth cost over the peers. I also believe that voluntary donations, while not overly lucrative, might at least be enough to pay for bandwidth.
The various ideas and concepts behind collaborative media are discussed on a mailing list called peer-to-peer journalism. If you're interested, you can subscribe here. Jon has brought up the "intellectual inbreeding" argument on the list, and here's my response.
I've been hearing the argument of "intellectual inbreeding" a lot. It
seems like a strawman argument to me. You should watch some political
discussion forums. In the liberal discussion forums, the
conservatives are ignored -- in the conservative discussion forums,
the liberals are ignored. People with so different views don't really
talk to each other, even if they DO talk to each other. Even the
mistakes that are undisputable are disputed. You can rationalize
about everything, and people do it all the time.
That's how the human brain works. It's our limbic system, our emotion
center, that causes certain feelings when we think about certain
subjects. When the smoker reads about the 238348th study that shows
that smoking causes cancer, he knows: "If this is true, I'd have to
stop smoking." Then his limbic system gets into the game: "But I
don't WANT to stop smoking. Hey, cortex, think of a reason that I
shouldn't stop doing it." Result: "Oh you know, George, for every
study there's one that shows exactly the opposite. And by the way, my
father was a regular smoker and lived until age 75 without problems.
Why should I care?" Limbic system: "Great job, now I feel better.
Give me another of those Marlboros..";-)
The effect is called selective perception. People ignore the
information that contradicts their emotionally cemented worldviews.
Most people aren't even able -- you might say they're physically,
anatomically unable -- to change their views on fundamental subjects.
Selective perception is a really, really powerful mechanism.
Is all hope lost for reason, then? I don't think so, but it has
nothing to do with collaborative filtering. It's the ability to
derive pleasure not from learning something that confirms what you
know, but learning something that sounds like the truth. It's the
"gut feeling" that truth is more important than "gut feelings". With
an open mind, you will constantly seek new information to build a
logically consistent worldview - from all reasonable sources.
Unfortunately, only few people have this ability. Not because that's
some kind of elitist natural law, but because our education system
doesn't teach the scientific reasoning that's necessary to discern
science from pseudoscience and truth from falsehood. The
intellectuals are preaching postmodernism while the rest of the world
goes to hell.
Carl Sagan has written that while his parents were extremely
important for his scientific career, his school did nearly entirely
discourage him from ever going into the field of science. Only later
at university he met the interesting guys. It's quite obvious that
the education system will hardly get better, only worse. Need I say
Columbine? The American education system is a hellhole for kids that
are different, and the European one is often not really much better.
The new media, however, give kids many new opportunities. Right now,
it's still extremely difficult for a youngster to see the difference
between what some nazi is saying on a propaganda website, or a
scientific analysis of World War II. Because the kid probably doesn't
have the value system to discern science from pseudoscience, he's
virtually lost in the information jungle.
The only solution, then, are the reputation and rating systems we
already talked about. But here, the problem hinges a lot on how the
reputations are implemented. It is absolutely essential that you have
sophisticated trust metrics. I.e. an information can be recommended
to me because a "friend of a friend of a friend" has recommended it.
How popular one identity is within the network depends on their past
history. People who are extremely suspectible to selective perception
will be only trusted by people who share their particular fetishes.
People who have an open mind, however, will be trusted by all users --
not on all subjects, but on some by each. Because they are the more
reliable source of information.
That way, people who are very good at fact-checking will inevitably
rise to the top. Kids will be able to find mentors easily, and will
learn to use the methods employed by them. These kids will grow up to
be even better information managers -- the most important ability of
the next century.
In other words, collaborative filtering is not the problem, it is the
solution. The situation we have right now is the problem, because
dangerous memes can spread in isolated parts of the network, whereas
a working trust metric combined with recommendation systems permeates
the entire network and brings the best thinkers to the top.
Sure, you can killfile them -- but the only effect will be that you
yourself are isolated. The most dogmatic groups will also use
whatever network becomes popular in the future, and they will try to
shield themselves against any and all ideas that they find dangerous.
But they will not be able to gain new members this way. They will
die. The open minded ones will prevail.
The idea of forcing people to include links they don't like is about as appealing to me as forcing schools to teach creationism.
The difference between commercial and non-commercial or semi-commercial sites will finally begin to show. While the commercial web has been primarily paid for by stockholders in the early days, this time is over. As advertising becomes more annoying and more difficult to block, the advantgage of "free speech" over "free beer" will become clear. Collaborative sites like/. and K5 need less staff to provide more content than CNET & Co. The web can't be built with lots of money & advertising -- that's just digital TV. It can only be built by the people, and for the people.
.. how some good PR and a good product can turn some of the most privacy-sensitive people in the world into gullible idiots. It's the same effect that causes smokers to argue that smoking doesn't cause cancer. TiVo explicitly states in their privacy policy that
any information that may be considered "personal," such as the recorder's serial number, is severed from anonymous data such as your recorder's diagnostics,
once it arrives at TiVo.
[...]
The insinuation that TiVo "could" correlate both sets of information is inflammatory and contradicts TiVo's actual practices.
They know what buttons you press, they now which shows you watch. They can even statistically correlate when you're in the house and when you aren't. The broader the spectrum of TV channels you can receive, the more sense it makes to correlate this information to your identity.
You just have to trust TiVo, a corporation like any other, that they won't send this data to spammers & junk mailers including your identity -- a risk which is especially big if they go bankrupt, which will probably the case one day.
You have to trust them that they don't tell your boss that you watch softporn or an unreasonable amount of children's TV ("pedophile!"). You have to trust them that they don't tell your insurance company that you watch a lot of health information, especially about heart risks. You have to trust them that they don't tell the gov't that you watch only political documentaries and are especially interested in JFK.
Go on, trust TiVo. They're you friends. (Or at least they've got a good PR department that makes you think so.) Everyone else is just a conspiracy theorist and a fanatic.
While you're at it, enable the viewer reporting information in Real Player. Install Comet Cursor. Get webHancer. Get Aureate. Get Cydoor. All these advertisers just want to improve your web experience. And if you ask, they'll certainly tell you that they store all identifying information separately from everything else and would never correlate them together. What are you waiting for? This data is completely WORTHLESS, after all, right?
Please, people.. Jeff Bezos founded BountyQuest together with O'Reilly. Now, does it really surprise anyone that BountyQuest announces they found no prior art for a patent Bezos attempts to make a lot of money with? How naive can you possibly be? Do you really believe a man like Bezos who is now suspected for insider trading has any kind of morals at all, let alone problems with the existing patent system? The whole reason this project was started is to say "Nobody did it" later. It's a clever PR stunt, nothing more, nothing less.. but an extremely dangerous one.
2001-03-05 14:22:14 Decentralized Networks Picking Up Speed (articles,internet) (rejected)
2001-03-02 03:11:47 Usenet, The Next Generation? (articles,internet) (rejected)
2001-01-12 01:21:38 Anonymous publishing: Does anyone need it? (articles,Privacy) (rejected)
Sorry, but I don't get the impression you really want to report about the alternatives. Having once story after the next rejected without any reason is not exactly encouraging. You see, many of these projects were slashdotted once when they started -- but forgotten about later, when they became usable. It's useful to remind people again when projects become usable.
Maybe that's how they work for you.. personally, I loved Star Trek TNG as a kid -- there were many thought-provoking episodes (The Inner Light, Deja Vu, the parallel universe episode) and great characters (except for Lwhatshername Troi, Weasley Crusher & Worf's retarded son, of course). TNG was where the Borg were introduced -- then they screwed up the whole "collective" concept by adding a queen.
Well, I kept watching DS9 for a while after TNG had ended. I watched it regularly until "Way of the Warrior", which was when they had turned it into a "Wild West Soap Opera in Space" with religious overtones. It almost seemed to me like they had examined their "core demographic" and wanted something with more action, less plot & some "spiritual" elements. And then, for the even younger kids, they created Voyager, which was just plain ridiculous. Every single episode of Voyager I watched sucked.
Completely illogical plots, dumb basic setting ("We want to get home.. we want to get home.. will we ever make it? Oh, the pain, the sorrow.."), extremely stupid characters:
Holo-Doc - sure, he's funny, but they created more reality problems with that than any amount of echnobabble could ever resolve
Tuvok - the guy doesn't act emotionless, he acts aggressively, military-style. I will never be able to rid my memories of this fake of a so-called Vulcan.
Janeway - I'm trying to act like a liberal progressive male here, but the woman just acts like a bitch most of the time. "Do this, do that, that's an order!" Given the fact that they can't escape her, I wonder why none of the crew members has a) committed suicide in the transporter room, b) gone "Columbine" on her.
Neelix - ARGH! Most annoying Star Trek character, EVER! Perhaps I should get this ST-VOY 3D game, maybe this would give me an opportunity to kill him.. and again.. and again..
Tom Paris, Harry Kim, B`Elanna - Are these really characters? They're about as expressive as O'Brien.. when he was still on the Enterprise!
Seven of Nine - How did she get there? I can see it: "Oh cool, let's have a Borg chick! We can have flashbacks and funny implants! It worked with Picard, didn't it? Now Voyager gets its own emotionless super-intelligent crewmember, what a new idea! Plus we'll give her a sexy suit, because we received so many complaints that Kes' tits were too small." 'nuff said.
So after I watched about the first 10 episodes, I sampled the series every 20 episodes or so, with the aforementioned results. TNG was a mature series, DS9 was for ages 15-19, Voyager is for 7-14. So unless they want to combine this new series with the Teletubbies, I don't see many options to get much worse, it'll probably be similar to DS9, without the religious crap.
That's not the point. The point is that if a court mandates Napster to police their content (which the Appeals Court has effectively done), when this is impossible without inhibiting others' rights of free speech, the court has inhibited free speech. Whether this is a First Amendment violation (Congress shall make no law..) is another question.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful=3, Interesting=4
Either moderators have a sick sense of humor today, or the problem of antisexuality & antipleasure is bigger than I thought. How is this post any different from someone (say, the Taleban) advocating putting woman in veils, to avoid "temptation" of the flesh?
This troll doesn't surprise me, it's not creative or original in any sense. But that it was moderated up for its insightful/interesting content by 7 people -- that just blows me away.
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I'm sorry, but you don't have a clue about the destructive power of modern nuclear weapons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton bomb. It killed 100,000 people immediately and probably about the same amount through radiation. By now we're able to build bombs with 100 megatons and more (this number practically only depends on the amount of money you are willing to spend). 1 megaton = 1000 kilotons. It doesn't take a nuclear rocket scientist to know that this stuff is capable of destroying whole countries.
Note that, of course, I don't use the word "destroy" in the sense of "blowing it up into many many tiny little pieces", but in the sense of "killing all complex life". As for the former, the Castle Bravo test literally destroyed the island in question and left nothing but a huge crater in its place..
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You are missing the point. I was not talking about what is probable -- a redirected asteroid hitting the Earth is not probable either. I was talking about what we can already do with current technology. And again, a single country could make 99% of the whole planet's population (of most animals as well) die from radiation by exploding a ~60 MT bomb with a coat of Cobalt in the atmosphere. The Cobalt would become radioactive Cobalt 60, and contaminate the whole planet.
And don't forget nuclear winter.
They'll just kill everyone in cities and urban areas, with developed nations the hardest hit.
They'll kill everyone in every place where people and, depending on the disease, animals come and go within the incubation time. That doesn't leave out a lot.
So in the future, using large objects from space, we may be able to, instead of killing 99% of the population, kill 100% of it, and the insects as well, in shorter time. So what? The big challenge is obviously not finding better ways to kill many people, but to prevent them from being used.
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ABC-weapons are already pretty good at killing lots of people, and they are easy to get. Heck, even India & Pakistan got nukes. How about the Taleban? How about you? Get yours today!
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The whole "Slashdot sucks" attitude (which contributes to the trolling problem) can probably be partially traced back to this. The cold, reasonless rejection of stories removes the humanity from the site and creates a tension between the editors and the readers. You may think that I am exaggerating. If you submit stories to /. regularly, you probably agree.
But you're wrong in suggesting that this story is a troll. In fact it's one of the more positive examples of a Slashdot story. While most stories just link to ZDNet, Yahoo, CNN, Wired etc., this one links directly to a non-corporate competitor, to a non-mainstream analysis which is actually fairly interesting. Michael should be applauded for posting this. By discouraging this story, what you promote is basically nothing but a digest from approved mainstream media. Anything that is not backed up by an authority is dangerous because it might get flamed by the masses (or even be factually incorrect).
If Slashdot develops further in that direction, I will stop reading it. There are tools to create automatic linklists to the latest stories on other sites, I don't need Slashdot for that. Slashdot should be a site that mainly links to the stuff that is interesting and which you only read about everywhere else after it has been slashdotted.
The flames by a significant part of Slashdot users could be avoided if Slashdot editors would more actively participate in the discussion. Their usual passivity and lack of commentary (or apology in the case of an obvious mistake) only increases the tension between editors and readers.
All that being said, it is unlikely that Slashdot will change anytime soon. When was the last major change to the way Slashdot works? That's the problem -- the site has reached a state of stagnation. Changes are not implemented for fear of the technical and social problems they might cause.
Therefore it's time to move on to more developed communities and let this one die. Some of its contributions have been great, but now it has to be replaced by more open, useful and friendly solutions. That's the way of evolution.
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- Once communities scale beyond a certain size, bandwidth becomes too expensive. This problem isn't likely to go away anytime soon because collaborative media will have to use videos and images (maybe even 3D data) in the future to emotionally compete with corporate media. In other words, while bandwidth will become cheaper, more of it will be necessary. The cost problem can be at least partially solved through voluntary payments, subscription etc., but the more obvious solution is to directly spread distribution costs over the users by using decentralized networks.
- Centralized discussion forums are very vulnerable to censorship and other forms of corporate control. The Scientology incident is only one example of this. K5 has not yet experirenced it, and it makes sense for Rusty to ignore this problem (or even to justify the censorship, as he has done, like many others, in the Scientology case), but that won't make it go away.
- Let me point out that I am not just anticopyright because I want "free stuff". Copyright is an effective instrument of censorship, especially if it can be transferred from the original creators. But even they may desire the removal of their works from the public when pressured many years later (I could give you examples of this). One of the key problems of free, collaborative media will also be the creation of visual content. In doing this, it is often inevitable to violate someone's copyright. The erosion of fair use and strict persecution of copyright violators will have the same effects on collaborative writing that software patents have on open source software development. A decentralized network can give better protection to its users and avoid the forced removal of content with the help of copyright, either for economic or ideological reasons.
For these, and other reasons (I just realized that I'm repeating myself), it is essential that the media with which we plan to liberate ourselves are free from centralized control. Slashdot and Kuro5hin must, eventually, die and be replaced by better solutions. Of course we can learn a lot from the past (Usenet and the Internet architecture itself, for example), but we will also have to invent a lot of new cool stuff.--
The facts are that corporations can manipulate the perception of reality of many people, and thereby, eventually, in some ways, reality itself. Those who don't believe this should read Toxic Sludge is Good For You and, as an intro into what you may expect, The PR Plot to Overheat the Earth. Toxic Sludge should be required reading in high school. It points out the many ways in which corporations are actively spreading disinformation and distorting our perception of reality, to maximize their profits -- often with deadly results. It easily refutes the most basic flaw in libertarian ideology, that free and informed decisions are possible in a centralized, corporate media world.
Rusty makes a valid point; namely, that the only way to fix this problem is by allowing people, instead of corporations interested only in maximizing profit (and speaking through corporate media), to inform other people -- building "communities" (a word which I merely put in quotes because of its [ab]use by others).
What is less interesting (but probably important to Rusty himself, who seems to only recently have discovered these facts) is the discussion of reality and what makes it. Unfortunately, this is the intro to the article, so many may stop reading there. Also unfortunately, the meatier parts are not backed up with sources. The truth about reality vs. perception is pretty easy to sum up:
Things get really messy once you start questioning the idea that there is actually an objective reality to begin with. Don't do that. If you assume that there is no objective reality, the first assumption you make is subject to this theory. That means it's both wrong and right at the same time. That means it's worthless. Constructivism and postmodernism are, therefore, bullshit. Rusty's arguments go a bit in the postmodern direction (or at least sound like it), but not too much.
All in all, I would have preferred more interesting real-life examples of mass manipulation and a neurophysiological explanation of the mechanisms of manipulation, but if I want to read that, I probably have to write it myself. Those of you who want to talk about the actual solutions to the discussed problems should subscribe to p2pj, a mailing list about peer-to-peer journalism (or "collaborative media", if you prefer that) which I have created.
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It is here, if you are interested. And yes, Jon is wrong, again :-)
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You get the idea.
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The idea of forcing people to include links they don't like is about as appealing to me as forcing schools to teach creationism.
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They know what buttons you press, they now which shows you watch. They can even statistically correlate when you're in the house and when you aren't. The broader the spectrum of TV channels you can receive, the more sense it makes to correlate this information to your identity.
You just have to trust TiVo, a corporation like any other, that they won't send this data to spammers & junk mailers including your identity -- a risk which is especially big if they go bankrupt, which will probably the case one day.
You have to trust them that they don't tell your boss that you watch softporn or an unreasonable amount of children's TV ("pedophile!"). You have to trust them that they don't tell your insurance company that you watch a lot of health information, especially about heart risks. You have to trust them that they don't tell the gov't that you watch only political documentaries and are especially interested in JFK.
Go on, trust TiVo. They're you friends. (Or at least they've got a good PR department that makes you think so.) Everyone else is just a conspiracy theorist and a fanatic.
While you're at it, enable the viewer reporting information in Real Player. Install Comet Cursor. Get webHancer. Get Aureate. Get Cydoor. All these advertisers just want to improve your web experience. And if you ask, they'll certainly tell you that they store all identifying information separately from everything else and would never correlate them together. What are you waiting for? This data is completely WORTHLESS, after all, right?
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2001-03-02 03:11:47 Usenet, The Next Generation? (articles,internet) (rejected)
2001-01-12 01:21:38 Anonymous publishing: Does anyone need it? (articles,Privacy) (rejected)
Sorry, but I don't get the impression you really want to report about the alternatives. Having once story after the next rejected without any reason is not exactly encouraging. You see, many of these projects were slashdotted once when they started -- but forgotten about later, when they became usable. It's useful to remind people again when projects become usable.
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Well, I kept watching DS9 for a while after TNG had ended. I watched it regularly until "Way of the Warrior", which was when they had turned it into a "Wild West Soap Opera in Space" with religious overtones. It almost seemed to me like they had examined their "core demographic" and wanted something with more action, less plot & some "spiritual" elements. And then, for the even younger kids, they created Voyager, which was just plain ridiculous. Every single episode of Voyager I watched sucked.
Completely illogical plots, dumb basic setting ("We want to get home .. we want to get home .. will we ever make it? Oh, the pain, the sorrow .."), extremely stupid characters:
So after I watched about the first 10 episodes, I sampled the series every 20 episodes or so, with the aforementioned results. TNG was a mature series, DS9 was for ages 15-19, Voyager is for 7-14. So unless they want to combine this new series with the Teletubbies, I don't see many options to get much worse, it'll probably be similar to DS9, without the religious crap.
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