I just had an epiphany as to what's wrong with the/. moderation system (after how many years here, I finally figured this out?)
I was going through the posts, as I got moderator status today, and I realized, jeez, there's a lot of posts here that need to be moderated down. They're not BAD, I don't want to hit this guy and cost him a karma point, and possibly get bitchslapped in metamoderation. They're just needless noise. There's too much of it. But these posts aren't necessarily bad, they're just not what someone who reads at 2 wants to have to deal with - who has the time?
I wonder if it would help if there was a way to half-moderate a post, knock it down a level without taking away the poor guy's karma. That way, moderation would do what it's supposed to, and reduce the noise for the people who read at 2, not forcing them to go to 3. Yet, also not getting people pissed off by whacking their karma.
I guess I'm just feeling kind of wishy washy today.
Not only did they get a cut of the sale of all blank recording media, a/. article from a couple of weeks ago said that Germany is trying to write a law requiring all computer manufacturers to pay a fee, because all computers are potential copyright infringement devices - it would equal out to about $80 more per machine.
1) You're probably right about the undercover bit. And the RIAA will probably do it themselves, just to get it done more efficiently than the cops will. And the RIAA will probably offer bounties to anyone who's willing to sell-out his former trading buddies.
2) I simply will not accept this abridgement of my fair use rights. People will challenge this and challenge this until somebody finally listens. In America, we have a captialist system, and as a consumer, I was raised to believe that a consumer does capitalism a great disservice by allowing themselves to be screwed over or cheated by a seller - therefore it is a consumer's MORAL DUTY to be informed, not be misled, and make sellers WORK for a living.
About a year ago, I found some songs online by a 70's rock band. Some of their songs that were on the radio, I remember, were phenominally great. You don't ever ever hear ANY of these songs played on the radio anymore, even on most "classic rock" stations. I always thought it would be great to own all of their albums. I downloaded them, but never had time to listen to them, except for a couple of the songs that I liked. I recently sat down and listened to the whole lot - and found that only the few songs that I remember were really great, the rest was kindof just filler. (sound familliar?) I mean, what if I HAD gone through all the trouble to locate these albums, likely out of priint, likely $20 a pop, likely not available at any local record store - and found out that it was mostly crap? I would have gotten screwed over, and with my dollars, I would have been supporting a system that screws over consumers, and done a grave disservice to other consumers because I was enforcing a system that encouraged uneducated consumption. exploitation. I then deleted the whole lot. Disk space is cheap, but not cheap enough to waste on crap. It basically wasn't even worth my time to burn them onto a CD for posterity.
Same thing happened with a 60's band (and lots of other music) - and I ended up tracking down and buying 4 CD's from that group.
Like it or not, free MP3 distribution IS an essential part of the music industry's distribution model. Like it or not, it's here to stay. You can't lock an idea.
a philosophy of personal responsibility is fine and dandy, but distill it down a bit more and it's nothing more than survival of the fittest, and basically anarchy.
It sounds like the libertarian party's aim is to just let the people with all the money and power do whatever they want to those who don't have money and power. (please, please, stop interfering with my right to dump nuclear waste on MY land! please, please stop making me pay taxes for a police department I don't need because I hired my own private armed security force!)
It puts way too much faith in the personal responsibility of individual humans who basically only display personal responsibility when they are compelled to by social contract.
Don't delude yourself that VHS is going anywhere anytime soon.
There are WAY too many home video libraries out there - I know guys who have thousands of tapes of shows and movies, shows they never watch - wifey asks, "what are you going to do with all of those tapes?"
"I'm going to watch them when I retire - especially if the quality of programming keeps going the direction it's been going."
Well, at least the vintage commercials will be funny. (people bought THAT?)
I don't know one single person who has a DVD player, and not a VHS player. Until DVD becomes writable, and economically writable, there's no way VHS is going away. (My wife tried to talk me into buying one of those combo DVD/VHS machines, and I convinced her 'no' because then, there is no way to circumvent macrovision. I like my Apex).
I send regular love letters to my congresscritters every six months. I gave $1000 to Congressman McCain (which he returned because he quit campaigning two weeks later).
Well, why do you think it is, then, that most Cable service agreements forbid operation of a server? Or why is it that DSL companies HATE to give out static IP addresses.
What if someone makes a news site with fake information? I've got news for you. . . The public WOULD be misled, IS misled, and has been misled for decades.
The crackdown on "anyone can have their own server" has already begun. What content you can host is determined by your ISP, likely a Very Large Corporation (or soon will be bought by one).
It won't be long before most personal web pages are "this is my car this is my dog" pages. (um wait) hosted on Geocities, and the tools required to start a viable web business (ecommerce software, web design expertise, hardware, connectivity, partnerships with search engines and filter companies and huge OS vendors, etc) are so expensive, that the bar is too high for the general home user, and only Very Large Corporations will be able to do it.. Just the realities of market economics.
Well, how do they handle this on Star Trek Voyager? I mean, why don't we ever see Paris going over to the replicator, looking over his shoulder, and asking for a fattie, then sneaking down to the holo-deck and loading up the "lava lamp land" program?
I mean, everyone else seems to be replicating alcoholic beverages, even the Cap'n is a caffeine junkie (ever notice how caffeine doesn't obey the law of i before e?) - could her caffeine addiction negatively impact her performance as a captain? Put people's lives in jeopardy? Is it a banned substance? I mean, sure, maybe it's some kind of synthetic caffeine, but she sure gets bitchy before she gets her coffee, so it looks like addiction to me - so whatever 23rd century substitute they have, it's still addictive.
Then what about patented drugs? Does the federation have to beam payments to the drug companies any time a replicator makes something to help a sick crew member (who then, in the line of duty saves the company's home-planet from assimilation by the Borg? All in a day's work ma'am). Is it against the law to hack a replicator? What if the Voyager's replicators stop working after a few years because the licenses weren't updated? THEN they'd be fucked.
The ACLU has such a bad reputation of political bias (whether that's deserved or not), it won't help our case on bit. In fact, it will harm it. In America (if you haven't noticed) if the ACLU is defending it, then it's part of the international communist conspiracy. . .
I think that organizations like the EFF and ACLU are fine and dandy. Legal guns are necessary, but die mensche, the people, need to be educated. They need to know and understand these issues. Especially the people who are in law school right now, who will be prosecuting and defending and judging these cases in the future. Right now, the legal environment consists mainly of people who "came up" during the greed-infested 80's. It's only going to get worse as corporate propaganda in the educational system (yet another money-making machine), gets more and more entrenched.
It's the dental students who have to pay for the damn necessary book every 180 days, it's the animation students who don't get to view as course materials, one of the seminal works of the art (Steamboat Willie) because it's still not public domain, and luckily, it's the 70 million dorm rats who are being chased off of napster.
Since this Napster debate started, I've heard the opinions of a lot of deluded self-rightious morons who have been listening to record company propaganda saying that copying is stealing and that it's illegal. Well, that was bullshit from day one, and more effort should be put towards educating these people that we had (until recently) a legal right to copy music - until the record companies bribed the politicians and judges to take away that right. Whether it SEEMS right or wrong is a moral exercise for any individual, but what is CLEARLY wrong is telling someone that what they are doing is illegal when it's not, and then bribing politicians and judges to change the law. Once people realize that, they should understand that this issue isn't just about copying Brittney Spears songs, it's about our basic rights and our political system, control of our very lives - economic slavery. The right/wrong issues are staggering when you take that into account. A 136 Gig MP3 collection is a tempest in a teacup by comparison. That is what the lawyers and judges and politicians of tomorrow NEED to know.
The internet is the greatest information dissemination tool that humankind has ever devised. And still, we can't get the word out.
I think that the argument in favor of limiting a corporation's "free speech" that finally hit home was the fact that the shareholders had no voice in how a corporation spends it's political bribery fund.
So the law will be changed to make sure that the shareholders get to vote on corporate political donations. (instead of being forced to "vote with their feet").
The Republicans accepted that argument as long as Unions were similarly restricted by the will of their members. (which seems fine to me, why wouldn't Union members want to give money to the party that stands up for their rights?)
"BTW, we started to lose our freedoms in 1861 when Lincoln decided that states didn't have the right to secede."
I think this is probably a key point in American History that's glossed over - because that notion, is bundled with slavery, at least in the propaganda that's pushed.
Now, everyone, please, raise your hands, who's for slavery? Anyone? Buelher? Anyone?
So basically, the way the US Civil war is taugh in US History classes, is that giving the Federal Government THAT much power was a GOOD thing, and if you don't believe that, you're for slavery, and a Nazi racist skinhead trenchcoat mafia member! (erm- Godwin's law?)
A masterstroke of social engineering, I might add. Propaganda, before propaganda became fasionable.
Hey, all that time I wasted reading Robert A. Wilson books had to be good for *something*!
Why oh why doesn't SOMEBODY start a political party?
I mean, I know the libertarians have a strong online presence, but they're just whacko, and the Greens, well, they're too strongly associated with failed socialist policies of Europe (whether that's true or not, that's just how we Americans view the Greens, just a fact, not an opinion - and if that doesn't kill the Greens, Jello Biafra, though I LOVE the guy, will), and the Reform party, well, it was a nice idea until the fundy freaks usurped it.
Democrats $
Republicans $
So it looks like lobbying an existing party to get onto their platform is not a viable option.
They're more than acronyms now, they're web cliches. Had to use em. But didn't want to risk the inevitable 30 or so postings afterwards asking "what does IANACN stand for?"
I Am Not A Clueless Newbie.
Yeah, but who sired who? Did CA sire Microsoft, or did Microsoft sire CA? And why can't they just hang out in the corporate coven together like all the other vampires?
Ramjets and Scramjets were used chiefly in surface to air interceptor missiles of the 1960's and 1970's. For taking out high-altitude bombers and supersonic attack planes.
IANAAE (I Am Not An Aerospace Engineer) but IIRC (If I Recall Correctly), a huge proportion of the fuel used to put a shuttle into orbit is used in the first mile or so, getting up to the speed of sound.
This is why NASA is working on a launch system that runs on an inclined rail using electromagnets. (from a past/. article).
What if a camera maker designed a camera, with a case of transparent elements so you could see inside to the gear mechanism, to see how well it was designed and built, and how it functions (of course the negative is in an opaque container) -
then decorates the case with gold and fine polished wood accents, and shapes it so that it is both pleasing to look at and ergonomically functional.
It's a tool. To be sure. But then the tool is also a piece of art.
Ever driven a Porsche Boxter? How about a Volvo 1800s. Is it just a car? Or a work of art?
How about a screen-saver program. Is that a work of art? Or a tool?
My first "art" class in college was Art History, and the first item we studied was Venus of Villendorf, which was an earth-goddess statue.
All art is functional. Sometimes it's just functional as eye-candy. Sometime's it's just fucntional as greed satisfaction for the artist and gallery owner.
"Painting and sculpture, especially all this "avant garde" stuff that consists of nothing more than a few splashes
of paint on a canvas, don't have anything to do with the world people live in at all. "
That's so untrue.
Yes, there is a great deal of cronyism and elitism in the art world today, a lot of ass-kissing and bullshit iconism - in fact, it's been going on for centuries, and the hot new "movements" that arise are almost always based on inconoclasm.
But just because you look at a piece of art and do not understand it does not mean that it's crap. A lot of it DOES have to do with the world people live in. Sometimes, it's something that's limited to "art people" - that is, if you aren't a trained artist, you won't see what it is this artist was trying to communicate. Same is true for your standard basic Calculus text. (only - that Calculus text, it can be argued, will benefit people who don't understand it; the art wont, and that's what I'm talking about with the cronyism).
But most good art, can be viewed by most people, and something conveyed. What does a few splashes of paint on a canvas convey to you? Certainly not something worth $50,000 - that's cronyism again, but doesn't it convey the joy you had when you were 3 and first played with watercolors? or a feeling of motion, recklessness? I see where you're coming from - there's definately a lot of "modern" art that's just way overrated (I have a personal grudge against Picasso), but that kind of thing does have a definate value to society.
Believe it or not, some of the more expensive art recently is coming out of the high-tech arena. Electron micrographs, enlarged and framed - sold to rich dot-commers, or that pay-chair that was on/. last week. It matters to today's rich elite; the rich dot-commer geek.
Slashdot Mirror
I just had an epiphany as to what's wrong with the /. moderation system (after how many years here, I finally figured this out?)
I was going through the posts, as I got moderator status today, and I realized, jeez, there's a lot of posts here that need to be moderated down. They're not BAD, I don't want to hit this guy and cost him a karma point, and possibly get bitchslapped in metamoderation. They're just needless noise. There's too much of it. But these posts aren't necessarily bad, they're just not what someone who reads at 2 wants to have to deal with - who has the time?
I wonder if it would help if there was a way to half-moderate a post, knock it down a level without taking away the poor guy's karma. That way, moderation would do what it's supposed to, and reduce the noise for the people who read at 2, not forcing them to go to 3. Yet, also not getting people pissed off by whacking their karma.
I guess I'm just feeling kind of wishy washy today.
Not only did they get a cut of the sale of all blank recording media, a /. article from a couple of weeks ago said that Germany is trying to write a law requiring all computer manufacturers to pay a fee, because all computers are potential copyright infringement devices - it would equal out to about $80 more per machine.
Is your ass feeling sore now?
1) You're probably right about the undercover bit. And the RIAA will probably do it themselves, just to get it done more efficiently than the cops will. And the RIAA will probably offer bounties to anyone who's willing to sell-out his former trading buddies.
2) I simply will not accept this abridgement of my fair use rights. People will challenge this and challenge this until somebody finally listens. In America, we have a captialist system, and as a consumer, I was raised to believe that a consumer does capitalism a great disservice by allowing themselves to be screwed over or cheated by a seller - therefore it is a consumer's MORAL DUTY to be informed, not be misled, and make sellers WORK for a living.
About a year ago, I found some songs online by a 70's rock band. Some of their songs that were on the radio, I remember, were phenominally great. You don't ever ever hear ANY of these songs played on the radio anymore, even on most "classic rock" stations. I always thought it would be great to own all of their albums. I downloaded them, but never had time to listen to them, except for a couple of the songs that I liked. I recently sat down and listened to the whole lot - and found that only the few songs that I remember were really great, the rest was kindof just filler. (sound familliar?) I mean, what if I HAD gone through all the trouble to locate these albums, likely out of priint, likely $20 a pop, likely not available at any local record store - and found out that it was mostly crap? I would have gotten screwed over, and with my dollars, I would have been supporting a system that screws over consumers, and done a grave disservice to other consumers because I was enforcing a system that encouraged uneducated consumption. exploitation. I then deleted the whole lot. Disk space is cheap, but not cheap enough to waste on crap. It basically wasn't even worth my time to burn them onto a CD for posterity.
Same thing happened with a 60's band (and lots of other music) - and I ended up tracking down and buying 4 CD's from that group.
Like it or not, free MP3 distribution IS an essential part of the music industry's distribution model. Like it or not, it's here to stay. You can't lock an idea.
Yeah, that's right you MPAA and RIAA fucks! Go to hell!
a philosophy of personal responsibility is fine and dandy, but distill it down a bit more and it's nothing more than survival of the fittest, and basically anarchy.
It sounds like the libertarian party's aim is to just let the people with all the money and power do whatever they want to those who don't have money and power. (please, please, stop interfering with my right to dump nuclear waste on MY land! please, please stop making me pay taxes for a police department I don't need because I hired my own private armed security force!)
It puts way too much faith in the personal responsibility of individual humans who basically only display personal responsibility when they are compelled to by social contract.
Don't delude yourself that VHS is going anywhere anytime soon.
There are WAY too many home video libraries out there - I know guys who have thousands of tapes of shows and movies, shows they never watch - wifey asks, "what are you going to do with all of those tapes?"
"I'm going to watch them when I retire - especially if the quality of programming keeps going the direction it's been going."
Well, at least the vintage commercials will be funny. (people bought THAT?)
I don't know one single person who has a DVD player, and not a VHS player. Until DVD becomes writable, and economically writable, there's no way VHS is going away. (My wife tried to talk me into buying one of those combo DVD/VHS machines, and I convinced her 'no' because then, there is no way to circumvent macrovision. I like my Apex).
I send regular love letters to my congresscritters every six months. I gave $1000 to Congressman McCain (which he returned because he quit campaigning two weeks later).
Well, why do you think it is, then, that most Cable service agreements forbid operation of a server? Or why is it that DSL companies HATE to give out static IP addresses.
What if someone makes a news site with fake information? I've got news for you. . . The public WOULD be misled, IS misled, and has been misled for decades.
The crackdown on "anyone can have their own server" has already begun. What content you can host is determined by your ISP, likely a Very Large Corporation (or soon will be bought by one).
It won't be long before most personal web pages are "this is my car this is my dog" pages. (um wait) hosted on Geocities, and the tools required to start a viable web business (ecommerce software, web design expertise, hardware, connectivity, partnerships with search engines and filter companies and huge OS vendors, etc) are so expensive, that the bar is too high for the general home user, and only Very Large Corporations will be able to do it.. Just the realities of market economics.
Well, how do they handle this on Star Trek Voyager? I mean, why don't we ever see Paris going over to the replicator, looking over his shoulder, and asking for a fattie, then sneaking down to the holo-deck and loading up the "lava lamp land" program?
I mean, everyone else seems to be replicating alcoholic beverages, even the Cap'n is a caffeine junkie (ever notice how caffeine doesn't obey the law of i before e?) - could her caffeine addiction negatively impact her performance as a captain? Put people's lives in jeopardy? Is it a banned substance? I mean, sure, maybe it's some kind of synthetic caffeine, but she sure gets bitchy before she gets her coffee, so it looks like addiction to me - so whatever 23rd century substitute they have, it's still addictive.
Then what about patented drugs? Does the federation have to beam payments to the drug companies any time a replicator makes something to help a sick crew member (who then, in the line of duty saves the company's home-planet from assimilation by the Borg? All in a day's work ma'am). Is it against the law to hack a replicator? What if the Voyager's replicators stop working after a few years because the licenses weren't updated? THEN they'd be fucked.
That's all we need, the ACLU on our side.
The ACLU has such a bad reputation of political bias (whether that's deserved or not), it won't help our case on bit. In fact, it will harm it. In America (if you haven't noticed) if the ACLU is defending it, then it's part of the international communist conspiracy. . .
I think that organizations like the EFF and ACLU are fine and dandy. Legal guns are necessary, but die mensche, the people, need to be educated. They need to know and understand these issues. Especially the people who are in law school right now, who will be prosecuting and defending and judging these cases in the future. Right now, the legal environment consists mainly of people who "came up" during the greed-infested 80's. It's only going to get worse as corporate propaganda in the educational system (yet another money-making machine), gets more and more entrenched.
It's the dental students who have to pay for the damn necessary book every 180 days, it's the animation students who don't get to view as course materials, one of the seminal works of the art (Steamboat Willie) because it's still not public domain, and luckily, it's the 70 million dorm rats who are being chased off of napster.
Since this Napster debate started, I've heard the opinions of a lot of deluded self-rightious morons who have been listening to record company propaganda saying that copying is stealing and that it's illegal. Well, that was bullshit from day one, and more effort should be put towards educating these people that we had (until recently) a legal right to copy music - until the record companies bribed the politicians and judges to take away that right. Whether it SEEMS right or wrong is a moral exercise for any individual, but what is CLEARLY wrong is telling someone that what they are doing is illegal when it's not, and then bribing politicians and judges to change the law. Once people realize that, they should understand that this issue isn't just about copying Brittney Spears songs, it's about our basic rights and our political system, control of our very lives - economic slavery. The right/wrong issues are staggering when you take that into account. A 136 Gig MP3 collection is a tempest in a teacup by comparison. That is what the lawyers and judges and politicians of tomorrow NEED to know.
The internet is the greatest information dissemination tool that humankind has ever devised. And still, we can't get the word out.
I think that the argument in favor of limiting a corporation's "free speech" that finally hit home was the fact that the shareholders had no voice in how a corporation spends it's political bribery fund.
So the law will be changed to make sure that the shareholders get to vote on corporate political donations. (instead of being forced to "vote with their feet").
The Republicans accepted that argument as long as Unions were similarly restricted by the will of their members. (which seems fine to me, why wouldn't Union members want to give money to the party that stands up for their rights?)
"BTW, we started to lose our freedoms in 1861 when Lincoln decided that states didn't have the right to secede."
I think this is probably a key point in American History that's glossed over - because that notion, is bundled with slavery, at least in the propaganda that's pushed.
Now, everyone, please, raise your hands, who's for slavery? Anyone? Buelher? Anyone?
So basically, the way the US Civil war is taugh in US History classes, is that giving the Federal Government THAT much power was a GOOD thing, and if you don't believe that, you're for slavery, and a Nazi racist skinhead trenchcoat mafia member! (erm- Godwin's law?)
A masterstroke of social engineering, I might add. Propaganda, before propaganda became fasionable.
Hey, all that time I wasted reading Robert A. Wilson books had to be good for *something*!
no, 80's was greed, 90's was apathy. . .
Why oh why doesn't SOMEBODY start a political party?
I mean, I know the libertarians have a strong online presence, but they're just whacko, and the Greens, well, they're too strongly associated with failed socialist policies of Europe (whether that's true or not, that's just how we Americans view the Greens, just a fact, not an opinion - and if that doesn't kill the Greens, Jello Biafra, though I LOVE the guy, will), and the Reform party, well, it was a nice idea until the fundy freaks usurped it.
Democrats $
Republicans $
So it looks like lobbying an existing party to get onto their platform is not a viable option.
They're more than acronyms now, they're web cliches. Had to use em. But didn't want to risk the inevitable 30 or so postings afterwards asking "what does IANACN stand for?"
I Am Not A Clueless Newbie.
Yeah, but who sired who? Did CA sire Microsoft, or did Microsoft sire CA? And why can't they just hang out in the corporate coven together like all the other vampires?
Ramjets and Scramjets were used chiefly in surface to air interceptor missiles of the 1960's and 1970's. For taking out high-altitude bombers and supersonic attack planes.
IANAAE (I Am Not An Aerospace Engineer) but IIRC (If I Recall Correctly), a huge proportion of the fuel used to put a shuttle into orbit is used in the first mile or so, getting up to the speed of sound.
/. article).
This is why NASA is working on a launch system that runs on an inclined rail using electromagnets. (from a past
It may be that the whole Napster phenomenon is our "Boston Tea Party".
Unfortunately, the some of the partygoers were too stupid to bug out, and have been caught.
jeez, I work for Veritas (reliably, boringly, predictably profitable for umpteen billion quarters in a row now) - and that looks like OUR stock chart.
Face it, stock watching is an excercise in lemming-herding.
I'm thinking of organizing a union where I work.
Bagel-day is getting intolerable - they always order TONS of these crappy sesame seed and rasin bagels, but the plain ones run out so quickly!
On the subject of very analytical color theory guys, who were also emotional and passionate, one particular painter stands out. Van Gogh.
There's the story of his life (-1 ear, suicide, etc.) then there are his paintings, you can tell he learned a lot from Seurat - though they never met.
What if a camera maker designed a camera, with a case of transparent elements so you could see inside to the gear mechanism, to see how well it was designed and built, and how it functions (of course the negative is in an opaque container) -
then decorates the case with gold and fine polished wood accents, and shapes it so that it is both pleasing to look at and ergonomically functional.
It's a tool. To be sure. But then the tool is also a piece of art.
Ever driven a Porsche Boxter? How about a Volvo 1800s. Is it just a car? Or a work of art?
How about a screen-saver program. Is that a work of art? Or a tool?
I'd have to tell him he's wrong.
My first "art" class in college was Art History, and the first item we studied was Venus of Villendorf, which was an earth-goddess statue.
All art is functional. Sometimes it's just functional as eye-candy. Sometime's it's just fucntional as greed satisfaction for the artist and gallery owner.
"Painting and sculpture, especially all this "avant garde" stuff that consists of nothing more than a few splashes
/. last week. It matters to today's rich elite; the rich dot-commer geek.
of paint on a canvas, don't have anything to do with the world people live in at all. "
That's so untrue.
Yes, there is a great deal of cronyism and elitism in the art world today, a lot of ass-kissing and bullshit iconism - in fact, it's been going on for centuries, and the hot new "movements" that arise are almost always based on inconoclasm.
But just because you look at a piece of art and do not understand it does not mean that it's crap. A lot of it DOES have to do with the world people live in. Sometimes, it's something that's limited to "art people" - that is, if you aren't a trained artist, you won't see what it is this artist was trying to communicate. Same is true for your standard basic Calculus text. (only - that Calculus text, it can be argued, will benefit people who don't understand it; the art wont, and that's what I'm talking about with the cronyism).
But most good art, can be viewed by most people, and something conveyed. What does a few splashes of paint on a canvas convey to you? Certainly not something worth $50,000 - that's cronyism again, but doesn't it convey the joy you had when you were 3 and first played with watercolors? or a feeling of motion, recklessness? I see where you're coming from - there's definately a lot of "modern" art that's just way overrated (I have a personal grudge against Picasso), but that kind of thing does have a definate value to society.
Believe it or not, some of the more expensive art recently is coming out of the high-tech arena. Electron micrographs, enlarged and framed - sold to rich dot-commers, or that pay-chair that was on