"Corporations are entirely amoral and self-interested, and Google's sole obligation is to generate profit for its shareholders"
Look, I appreciate the fact that libertarians like to approach the world with a few simple principles, I like simple principles too, I just have this thing about wanting them to be correct. As simple as possible, but no simpler, you know?
Even granting your "sole obligation", which in itself is a little dubious, the range of reasonable argument about the best way to satisfy that obligation is so huge that your "sole obligation" doesn't actually simplify very much. E.g. in the case of google they decided early on to adopt a "don't be evil" policy, which is to say they thought it would be useful to distinguish themselves from competitors with a narrower conception of their self-interest. This by itself would put ethical concerns back on the table where google is concerned, even if you had somehow successfully ruled them out where other corporations are concerned (and you haven't).
And every damn thing I just said is stunningly obvious to people who aren't doctrinaire free marketeers. Maybe you should "check your premises". Are they doing more for you or to you?
And now consider the case of the wikipedia pages that are ruled by hired guns and sock-puppets, take a look at places like the New York Times message blogs and so on... ask yourself how we can possibly build an infra-structure of the future without real ids to work with. Lancet doesn't publish medical research by anonymous contributors, why should wikipedia carry summaries of that research by effectively anonymous agents?
Not only do we need "real name policies", we need real names that are verified in some way, e.g. by a ten cent charge on a credit card.
Yes, there's also a role for anonimizing services like wikileaks and openleaks, but that really shouldn't be the default way we deal with the world.
And by the way, there's a tendency for people to post a lot of stuff while hiding behind a pseudonym, and then get an unpleasant shock when they realize that their pseudonym has been penetrated. Try asking a different question: is it irresponsible to promise people anonymity when in reality, that's not so easy to deliver?
Footnote: can we please agree that using a pseudonym is equivalent to being anonymous? Places like slashdot have really corrupted the meaning of "anonymous".
Car "accidents" go up and down with the economy. The economy has veered between "sucks" and "suckier" throughout the naughts.
Even if the death-rate has been dropping, it could be it would drop even more if it weren't for the morons-with-gadgets.
Anyway you look at it, cars are still killing over 40,000 people a year in the US. (We got into a "war on terror" when only a few thousand people were killed, where's the "war on cars"?)
"no correlation between the jerkiness and the competence of the individual"
Perhaps not (though actually I suspect there is some, and it is not a positive one), but if you managed to read more than the title of my post, you would realize I was pointing out prior occasions where Posner has made public pronouncements that are dubious at best.
Some jerks may indeed be reliable sources, but Posner is not one of them.
Hmm I think Judge Posner has a much deeper knowledge than you of what one can and cannot do in a court of law.
As long as we're judging the source (aka the judge), let me say that I've actually read one of Posner's books, and he struck me as a raging egocentric jerk. His "Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline" argues that no one should ever speak out on anything but his subject of expertise, and yet the entire book is an example of him doing just that (posner). I've also seen him engage in some sleazy, politically motivated attacks on people like Paul Krugman (krugman).
So, if conservative partisans give you the warm fuzzies, you should have a warm glow about Posner's name, if not, then this is just another "broken clock" example.
I just thought I would mention Thomas Gold's book The Deep Hot Biosphere. Gold's thesis is that "fossil fuels" aren't, and have an abiological origin, much like the hydrocarbons we can see in interstellar nebulae. An essential part of the theory is that "extremophiles" aren't all that rare, and permeate the earth down to unsuspected depths... that explains why the oil coming up out of the ground looks biological in origin (handedness): it's been messed with by the deep bacteria.
So myself, what I learned from this abstract is that the "deep hot biosphere" has apparently become an accepted fact. (Needless to say, the "abiological origin of oil" is not (yet?) on the "mainstream science" list.)
Maybe you feel so negatively about them because of how you choose to define them (idealists).
It's hard to say where he's coming from from just what he's said. He cherry-picks "idealists" excluding any cases where they might have done some good (and obviously Tim Berners-Lee has already done more with his life than anyone here is likely to equal), he somehow defines himself as a non-idealist when actually he's got an anti-ideology ideology going that's really pretty extreme, and he somehow ignores the fact that the non-idealists have been known to do some damage now and then as well....
Got it. Progress happens, but it has to "just happen", and anyone who is interested in making it happen is an egocentric bastard, and the world would be a better place if only we had your sense to trust in providence and/or the Free Market.
The web we have is the web we deserve in this best of all possible internets.
What makes TBL think that most of the people using Twitter or Facebook are interested in reasoned debate? If that's what people were interested in, Twitter would already look like that.
If technology did not influence human behavior, there would be no reason to be interested in technology.
Well, in terms of coining the phrase "World Wide Web", and actually creating http, he certainly had an impact.
Yeah, no kidding. It's depressing that you need to explain something as stunningly obvious as that on slashdot.
Yes, what Tim Berners-Lee did in inventing the http protocol was small, but it was obviously (in retrospect) the minimal amount of work needed to kick-off the whole phenomena. There are people such as Ted Nelson (who I also have a lot of respect for), who had much grander visions about what could be done with hypertext, but notably they had trouble getting their visions implemented. Sometimes keeping it simple is the right thing to do, eh?
(On the other hand, I still can't figure out what he was thinking about the whole "semantic web" business, but that's another story.)
Meanwhile, here it the nominal real world, we have a problem with complicated political and commercial decisions that require a well-informed, intelligent citizenry to navigate... presuming we don't just write off the entire notion of a "government by the people", and so on.
So on the one hand, you have whacky idealists who think that a reliable information architecture is part of the solution and on the other hand, we have you realistic fellows, with your grand vision of... what exactly? State-corporate control of the dumbed-down masses?
You're right about this being an ancient debate. I'm not so sure you're right about which side is sadder.
What's worse is that they did release something that they themselves said was essentially a watered-down, "test" application (sorry, can't remember its name).
It is possible that you're thinking of ZigZag, a perl implementation of (as I remember it) a multi-dimensional, free-form branching data structure... it was something like a 3-D spreadsheet with more than 3 dimensions, if that makes any sense to you.
This had nothing at all to do with Xanadu, except a certain style of thinking on Nelson's part.
Consider the possibility that many academics might actually care about the quality of their work, and not enjoy cavorting with amateurs, madmen and trolls, without any real recourse to solve problems.
There's supposed to be an up-side to academic rewards (both in terms of reputation and money), it's supposed to encourage good work.
There are many useful queries that have no params, e.g. "show tables". Forcing the user to prepare a query that has no params will not improve security.
SQL comments are sometimes useful with MySQL because (if I remember right) they appear in the query log.
for example, they can label their own site as a "shopping" site, or "product review" site
Yes, making the scammers run a bogus review site that links to their favored shopping site sounds like a really onerous restriction on their nefarious activities. That'll put 'em out of business for sure.
That used to be true, but I wonder if that's still true. Skimming through the email spam in my spam sewer, I noticed some time ago that it shifted from a focus on "average" people to a focus on the unusually stupid. First there was a tendency toward archaic politeness "Top of the morning to you!" to try to suck in senile retirees, then there was a shift toward dude speak "Hey Bro, Whassup?!" to try to nail idiot teenagers.
Even "normal people" wise-up eventually (sometimes before the election).
And the actual victims of spam, after all, are the idiots they can con into paying them to spam. If the customer doesn't actually make money, oh well, there's always another sucker.
I do try the other search engines every now and then, but even when searching for something rather obscure Google returns more relevant results than the others.
Seriously? I haven't noticed any limitation in the amount of ground that blekko.com or duckduck.go cover... and it really doesn't matter if there are a bajillion pages you index when two thirds of them are spam pages with content ripped from wikipedia.
Also, when I search for something really obscure, google always wants to push me in the most obvious direction, which is not typically what I want...
Making good searches simply is something one must learn, no search engine can read your mind and find exactly what you mean. Tell us more about this fabulous skill you've developed. We're all new to this internet thingie here.
One of many search engine features I can think of, but have never seen implemented, would be to treat different grammatical forms as rough synonyms. It's a little irritating to have to run a nearly identical search multiple times, once on a term like "indexes" and again on "indicies" and again on "indexing".
Yes, I switched to blekko.com as my default search engine in firefox recently:
blekko.com. It works well enough that I don't touch google very much any more. Slashtags are a really interesting feature.
Certainly duckduckgo.com is decent, but it's js features are off-putting to me (though not as bad as google's new ones-- a drop down of guesses you don't want that obscures the button you want to click... I thought google tested things before roll-out).
The central problem that any search engine needs to deal with these days is the rapidly declining quality of content on the web. When google got started, it could use the web of links as a guide to quality, but google's success choked off the behavior it relied on originally: no one bothers to link farm any more. And say what you will about the democratic nature of the blog revolution, but there's a downside to making it possible for almost anyone to publish something on the web.
I keep hoping someone is going to put over a fad for making things actually work well... "Web 3.0: now it's serious".
You might imagine valid uses for flexible documents that adapt to the environment they're read on, but if you don't realize that these documents have these flexible/adaptive features, then there is indeed some potential for nasty surprises.
There are already a lot of weird myths about pdfs (e.g. I've heard they're better for contracts than docs because "pdfs can't be edited"). This is, at the very least, pointing out yet another misconception.
Slashdot Mirror
"Corporations are entirely amoral and self-interested, and Google's sole obligation is to generate profit for its shareholders"
Look, I appreciate the fact that libertarians like to approach the world with a few simple principles, I like simple principles too, I just have this thing about wanting them to be correct. As simple as possible, but no simpler, you know?
Even granting your "sole obligation", which in itself is a little dubious, the range of reasonable argument about the best way to satisfy that obligation is so huge that your "sole obligation" doesn't actually simplify very much. E.g. in the case of google they decided early on to adopt a "don't be evil" policy, which is to say they thought it would be useful to distinguish themselves from competitors with a narrower conception of their self-interest. This by itself would put ethical concerns back on the table where google is concerned, even if you had somehow successfully ruled them out where other corporations are concerned (and you haven't).
And every damn thing I just said is stunningly obvious to people who aren't doctrinaire free marketeers. Maybe you should "check your premises". Are they doing more for you or to you?
And now consider the case of the wikipedia pages that are ruled by hired guns and sock-puppets, take a look at places like the New York Times message blogs and so on... ask yourself how we can possibly build an infra-structure of the future without real ids to work with. Lancet doesn't publish medical research by anonymous contributors, why should wikipedia carry summaries of that research by effectively anonymous agents?
Not only do we need "real name policies", we need real names that are verified in some way, e.g. by a ten cent charge on a credit card.
Yes, there's also a role for anonimizing services like wikileaks and openleaks, but that really shouldn't be the default way we deal with the world.
And by the way, there's a tendency for people to post a lot of stuff while hiding behind a pseudonym, and then get an unpleasant shock when they realize that their pseudonym has been penetrated. Try asking a different question: is it irresponsible to promise people anonymity when in reality, that's not so easy to deliver?
Footnote: can we please agree that using a pseudonym is equivalent to being anonymous? Places like slashdot have really corrupted the meaning of "anonymous".
No, you spare us. Put down the fucking box while you're driving. The ego you save may be your own.
Thank you.
I look forward to the next Harry Potter-Star Trek-Spiderman cross-over.
Car "accidents" go up and down with the economy. The economy has veered between "sucks" and "suckier" throughout the naughts.
Even if the death-rate has been dropping, it could be it would drop even more if it weren't for the morons-with-gadgets. Anyway you look at it, cars are still killing over 40,000 people a year in the US. (We got into a "war on terror" when only a few thousand people were killed, where's the "war on cars"?)
"no correlation between the jerkiness and the competence of the individual" Perhaps not (though actually I suspect there is some, and it is not a positive one), but if you managed to read more than the title of my post, you would realize I was pointing out prior occasions where Posner has made public pronouncements that are dubious at best.
Some jerks may indeed be reliable sources, but Posner is not one of them.
As long as we're judging the source (aka the judge), let me say that I've actually read one of Posner's books, and he struck me as a raging egocentric jerk. His "Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline" argues that no one should ever speak out on anything but his subject of expertise, and yet the entire book is an example of him doing just that (posner). I've also seen him engage in some sleazy, politically motivated attacks on people like Paul Krugman (krugman).
So, if conservative partisans give you the warm fuzzies, you should have a warm glow about Posner's name, if not, then this is just another "broken clock" example.
I just thought I would mention Thomas Gold's book The Deep Hot Biosphere. Gold's thesis is that "fossil fuels" aren't, and have an abiological origin, much like the hydrocarbons we can see in interstellar nebulae. An essential part of the theory is that "extremophiles" aren't all that rare, and permeate the earth down to unsuspected depths... that explains why the oil coming up out of the ground looks biological in origin (handedness): it's been messed with by the deep bacteria.
So myself, what I learned from this abstract is that the "deep hot biosphere" has apparently become an accepted fact. (Needless to say, the "abiological origin of oil" is not (yet?) on the "mainstream science" list.)
It's hard to say where he's coming from from just what he's said. He cherry-picks "idealists" excluding any cases where they might have done some good (and obviously Tim Berners-Lee has already done more with his life than anyone here is likely to equal), he somehow defines himself as a non-idealist when actually he's got an anti-ideology ideology going that's really pretty extreme, and he somehow ignores the fact that the non-idealists have been known to do some damage now and then as well....
Got it. Progress happens, but it has to "just happen", and anyone who is interested in making it happen is an egocentric bastard, and the world would be a better place if only we had your sense to trust in providence and/or the Free Market.
The web we have is the web we deserve in this best of all possible internets.
Moderators: this is not flamebait. It's a pretty obvious comment: google is playing "me-too" with openstreetmap.org.
If technology did not influence human behavior, there would be no reason to be interested in technology.
Well, in terms of coining the phrase "World Wide Web", and actually creating http, he certainly had an impact. Yeah, no kidding. It's depressing that you need to explain something as stunningly obvious as that on slashdot.
Yes, what Tim Berners-Lee did in inventing the http protocol was small, but it was obviously (in retrospect) the minimal amount of work needed to kick-off the whole phenomena. There are people such as Ted Nelson (who I also have a lot of respect for), who had much grander visions about what could be done with hypertext, but notably they had trouble getting their visions implemented. Sometimes keeping it simple is the right thing to do, eh?
(On the other hand, I still can't figure out what he was thinking about the whole "semantic web" business, but that's another story.)
(My review of "Weaving the Web": WWW).
Meanwhile, here it the nominal real world, we have a problem with complicated political and commercial decisions that require a well-informed, intelligent citizenry to navigate... presuming we don't just write off the entire notion of a "government by the people", and so on.
So on the one hand, you have whacky idealists who think that a reliable information architecture is part of the solution and on the other hand, we have you realistic fellows, with your grand vision of... what exactly? State-corporate control of the dumbed-down masses?
You're right about this being an ancient debate. I'm not so sure you're right about which side is sadder.
It is possible that you're thinking of ZigZag, a perl implementation of (as I remember it) a multi-dimensional, free-form branching data structure... it was something like a 3-D spreadsheet with more than 3 dimensions, if that makes any sense to you.
This had nothing at all to do with Xanadu, except a certain style of thinking on Nelson's part.
Consider the possibility that many academics might actually care about the quality of their work, and not enjoy cavorting with amateurs, madmen and trolls, without any real recourse to solve problems.
There's supposed to be an up-side to academic rewards (both in terms of reputation and money), it's supposed to encourage good work.
There is no way to not allow it. Think about this for a minute.
In a sane world astroturfing (and half of the things people call "marketing") would simply be regarded as fraud.
There are many useful queries that have no params, e.g. "show tables". Forcing the user to prepare a query that has no params will not improve security.
SQL comments are sometimes useful with MySQL because (if I remember right) they appear in the query log.
Nope: the problem is a public that values bright shiny toys over a robust information architecture, and doesn't know enough to say no to these things.
We, on the other hand, should know better, and should be telling people that they're being short-sighted.
for example, they can label their own site as a "shopping" site, or "product review" site Yes, making the scammers run a bogus review site that links to their favored shopping site sounds like a really onerous restriction on their nefarious activities. That'll put 'em out of business for sure.
Normal people are the target of spammers.
That used to be true, but I wonder if that's still true. Skimming through the email spam in my spam sewer, I noticed some time ago that it shifted from a focus on "average" people to a focus on the unusually stupid. First there was a tendency toward archaic politeness "Top of the morning to you!" to try to suck in senile retirees, then there was a shift toward dude speak "Hey Bro, Whassup?!" to try to nail idiot teenagers.
Even "normal people" wise-up eventually (sometimes before the election).
And the actual victims of spam, after all, are the idiots they can con into paying them to spam. If the customer doesn't actually make money, oh well, there's always another sucker.
I do try the other search engines every now and then, but even when searching for something rather obscure Google returns more relevant results than the others. Seriously? I haven't noticed any limitation in the amount of ground that blekko.com or duckduck.go cover... and it really doesn't matter if there are a bajillion pages you index when two thirds of them are spam pages with content ripped from wikipedia.
Also, when I search for something really obscure, google always wants to push me in the most obvious direction, which is not typically what I want...
Making good searches simply is something one must learn, no search engine can read your mind and find exactly what you mean. Tell us more about this fabulous skill you've developed. We're all new to this internet thingie here.
One of many search engine features I can think of, but have never seen implemented, would be to treat different grammatical forms as rough synonyms. It's a little irritating to have to run a nearly identical search multiple times, once on a term like "indexes" and again on "indicies" and again on "indexing".
Yes, I switched to blekko.com as my default search engine in firefox recently: blekko.com. It works well enough that I don't touch google very much any more. Slashtags are a really interesting feature.
Certainly duckduckgo.com is decent, but it's js features are off-putting to me (though not as bad as google's new ones-- a drop down of guesses you don't want that obscures the button you want to click... I thought google tested things before roll-out).
The central problem that any search engine needs to deal with these days is the rapidly declining quality of content on the web. When google got started, it could use the web of links as a guide to quality, but google's success choked off the behavior it relied on originally: no one bothers to link farm any more. And say what you will about the democratic nature of the blog revolution, but there's a downside to making it possible for almost anyone to publish something on the web.
I keep hoping someone is going to put over a fad for making things actually work well... "Web 3.0: now it's serious".
You might imagine valid uses for flexible documents that adapt to the environment they're read on, but if you don't realize that these documents have these flexible/adaptive features, then there is indeed some potential for nasty surprises.
There are already a lot of weird myths about pdfs (e.g. I've heard they're better for contracts than docs because "pdfs can't be edited"). This is, at the very least, pointing out yet another misconception.