Katz has seen the free market intimidated by oppressive government.
Government agencies in the US have very little power to "oppress" movie theaters, considering (a) the way the courts interpret the First Amendment, and (b) the amount of money that Hollywood donates to political campaigns.
The theater that Katz visited is cracking down on unchaperoned teenagers for the same reason that Blockbuster refuses to carry NC-17 videos. They're not afraid of government intimidation; they're afraid of offending potential customers.
Either Katz doesn't understand libertarianism, or I don't.
According to the article, the theater is being strict about teenagers attending R-rated movies because of corporate policy, not because of government censorship. By libertarian principles, the owner of a movie theater has the right to refuse service to any potential customer for any reason, including the customer's age.
Katz has seen the free market in action. This month, the free market rewards companies that can both sell tickets to naughty movies and pander to Columbine-obsessed parents. If he doesn't like the results, then his experience seems more like an argument against libertarianism than an argument for it.
Somebody I know once did editorial work for a multimedia encyclopedia. One entry, describing a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, said that the treaty was signed by "Answer Sedate and Meantime Begin".
Sure, Weightmann has his slant, and I would love to see rebuttal essays by lobbyists for the other sides, but:
he states his vested interest up front--he's not astroturfing
he gives a reasonable summary of his opponents' views
he provides links to his opponents' Web sites
Of course, he probably knows that doing all this makes him seem reasonable and even-handed, and therefore makes his argument more convincing.
Disclaimer: While this post represents only my own views, I work for a company that sells software to cable, telephone, and Internet companies. (I suppose that means we're neutrals in this war.:-)
If you can't prioritize your spending to afford $17/mo on your kids, then you shouldn't be having kids in the first place.
Suppose a couple has enough money to support children, and they have children, and then one parent runs away, or is unemployed for a long period, or has major out-of-pocket medical expenses. A big chunk of the family income has dried up, but the kids, and the expenses associated with having them, are still there. What should the (remaining) parent do -- give the kids up for adoption?
At some point, ISPs will be able to bill Internet usage the way that phone companies bill phone usage: the amount that each user pays will be more or less proportional to the load that he or she puts on the network.
As long as networking companies are building the infrastructure for this, I hope they will also provide the analog of "800" (freephone) and "900" (premium-rate) service.
In this dream world, to get an ad-free Slashdot, we could simply go to http://slashdot.org.900; our ISPs would charge us a few milli-cents extra for each page view, and pass the surplus along to the Slashdot administration.
all news reporting has bias -- the major American media is generally liberal
One left-wing writer (I can't recall the name, but I think the person was affiliated with F.A.I.R.) suggested that the media have a centrist bias.
That is: They are happy to point out instances where our major institutions cause harm (a politician is corrupt, a corporation dumps toxic waste, a doctor sexually abuses a patient, and so on). However, these are almost always treated as crimes done by aberrant individuals, as special-case failures of the system, or as signs that the institution needs some minor adjustment. The media are extremely reluctant to suggest that any of these institutions (government, corporations, health care) causes so much harm that it needs to be reorganized in a significant way.
These laws have been around for a very very very long time under certain disaster laws enacted around 50 years ago, about the same time the gold standard was removed and welfare was created.
And before 1949, of course, our government had perfect respect for the liberty of its citizens. Just ask anybody who, in those days, was:
trying to organize a union
African-American
Japanese-American and living in California
female and aspiring to work in a primarily male profession
This was a program that played two-part music on an Apple II -- pretty impressive, considering that the only sound system built into that machine was a speaker that went "click" every time the CPU addressed a certain memory location.
#include
This program was available in 1985, if not earlier.
Re:CAP gives "Prince of Egypt" demerits for violen
on
Spoonful of Quickies
·
· Score: 1
...and by the way, the review also contains this gem:
That some points in the movie might not have been 100% accurate is not really that significant. That no one knows whether, e.g., crocodiles actually attacked the three month old baby Moses while adrift in the basket is not important; that the movie presented Yoshabel, the mother of Moses, setting her baby adrift on the river to save him from death at the hands of Seti, the Pharaoh at the time, IS important.
The Bible never explicitly names who was Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus. Since the author of the review doesn't flag the name "Seti" as one of the possibly-not-accurate points, it appears that he didn't read the Book of Exodus very closely. But he sits through R-rated movies multiple times to count the dirty words. Great moral leadership we have here....
CAP gives "Prince of Egypt" demerits for violence
on
Spoonful of Quickies
·
· Score: 1
consider what rating the Bible would get when run through his scale...
The most severe loss of points was due to violence: slavery, beatings, murder, infanticide, and babies used as food for crocodiles (in a mural). Though these things are not just based on a true story, but ARE a true story, they are still violence and can have an impact or influence on your children. Next in severity of loss of points were matters of unholy reality such as the demonic doers, calling on power from unholy gods, and belittling remarks about the power of prayer and God's sincerity.
...can be sought just as greedily as any other kind of payment.
ESR compared open-source development to the academic world. Ask any Ph.D. student about how bitterly some people in academia can quibble over their share of credit in collaborative scientific work.
Mergers and acquisitions have different accounting rules. Therefore, when a large company, er, assimilates a much smaller company, it looks better on the books for them to call this a "merger".
Disclaimer: I am not an accountant, but I am an employee of Kenan Systems, which merged with Lucent Technologies a few months ago. (The proprietor of Kenan Systems got about $1.5 billion in the deal; Lucent's market cap is over $190 billion....)
The vast majority of professional fiction writers don't make enough money off of their sales to support themselves, and if they can't maintain sales above a certain threshold, they can't get published at all. Writers with a small but reliable following might get more income through the SPP than they would through traditional print distribution channels (where the bookstore, distributor, publisher, and paper mill all take their pieces of the action). The superstars (like Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and L.Ron Hubbard:-) might make more from print sales than from the SPP--if so, they could simply continue to use print and ignore the SPP.
(Can anyone comment on the income distribution for non-fiction writers, musicians, painters, filmmakers... ?)
Groups like cDc are doing us a valuable service, for the following reasons:
For many computer-related commercial products (e.g., operating systems, cellular phones, Web server programs), if you can give the impression that your product is more secure than your competitor's product, then (all other factors being equal) you will sell more.
The people who buy these products, and the people who review them for industry magazines, can't distinguish a product with bad security from a product with good security. Even a computer-security professional may not be able to find security weaknesses right away; there may be one subtle bug that can leaves your system wide open to an intruder, but finding the bug might take weeks or months of full-time work, especially if the people evaluating the product don't have access to the source code.
It's a lot easier to boast about your product's security than it is to actually implement a secure product. This is especially true when your product has selling points other than security: a hundred programmer-hours spent improving the user interface will probably do more for your sales than a hundred programmer-hours spent looking for security holes.
Therefore, when you get wind of a security hole in one of your products, you have a powerful incentive to sit on your hands. Patching the security flaw will take programmer-hours away from adding spiffy new features to the next version of the product. And sending out an emergency patch to fix a security flaw is bad for your reputation, because by doing so, you're admitting that you overstated how secure your product was in the first place.
Public revelations of security flaws are the best way to push these companies into action, since it takes away their incentive to procrastinate.
Many people have observed that thanks to the Internet's low price and popularity, anyone with disk space and a Net connection can be a publisher.
This story points out the flip side. Anyone who publishes on the Web, or who helps someone else publish on the Web, is exposed to the same legal risks that paper-and-ink publishers have.
When the damage was done, the owner of DR DOS (Digital Research, and later Novell) had the legal right to sue Microsoft for it; Ray Noorda, the former chairman of Novell, believed that Novell had grounds to sue, but didn't try. When Caldera bought DR DOS from Novell in 1996, the deal included Novell's DR-DOS-related claims against Microsoft; Caldera filed its antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft on the same day that it purchased DR DOS.
According to the summary, the act also "[s]pecifies that the use of encryption shall not be the sole basis for establishing probable cause with respect to a criminal offense or a search warrant." Bravo!
This may well be true (I haven't a clue as to what Huntington's chorea is) but I can tell you that you can have half of sickle-cell anemia.
I probably should have said "one-third" rather than "one-half" to cover cases like this. If I remember my bio terminology correctly, if you have two copies of the "sickle-cell anemia" allele at the appropriate locus, you have full-blown anemia and (before modern medicine) not likely to live long; if you have one copy, then you have some anemia, but also some extra resistance to malaria; if you have zero copies, you have no anemia and a normal malaria resistance. Because the people with one copy had an evolutionary advantage over the people with zero, the alleles for sickle-cell anemia did not become extinct, even though the people with two copies were SOL.
Anyways, getting back to the topic at hand, it is possible to have a partial genetic condition. Whereas nucleotides are digital units, genes are not. They are large chains of small units, and the composition and order of those units is what is important.
Yes, but the whole of each unit is greater than the sum of its parts. If I take the gene for sickle-cell anemia, and cut out two-thirds of the nucleotides, I probably won't have a gene for one-third of sickle-cell anemia.
What components of concepts are so basic that they can be borrowed only as digital units? Well, there are building block units. I'm using them to write to you. Words, letters, phonemes are so small that while they can be modified in appearence, their meaning is very difficult to alter.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here, because on the surface, it seems you're making an absurd claim.
All of the basic units you mentioned change over time (by comparison, the genetic code that maps nucleotides onto amino acids is nigh-immutable).
Words change meaning over time, and not just by acquiring idiomatic meanings, either. For example, the word "awful" used to mean "afraid".
The shapes of letters change over time; any decent dictionary should have charts or pictures that show the relationships between the old Phonecian alphabet, the Greek, and the Roman.
Phonemes change over time -- that's why different native speakers have regional accents.
If you treat words, etc., as the building-blocks of memes, what happens when someone rephrases an idea they heard in a different language? All the building-blocks have changed -- therefore, it must be a completely different meme!
If all "memetics" has to say is that we communicate using words, and learn those words from other people, then it's a trivial and unoriginal theory.
Well, if a meme was particularly good at spreading, it might also be defensive. It has already claimed a mind and would make every attempt to stop others from invading that would be able to displace it.
So why do these attempts sometimes fail? Do memes come with hit points? You're doing handwaving, not science.
It is difficult to believe that anyone would refute that ideas spread quickly, especially someone who purportedly thinks critically.
Of course, some ideas spread quickly. People knew this long before the word "meme" was coined. And of course, some ideas don't spread so quickly. I don't see how talking about "memes" gets me any closer to understanding why some ideas spread more quickly than others.
We critical thinkers tend to be a bit more receptive to new ideas, and keep our memes in good order, with defensive mechanisms disabled.
A fellow I once knew said there's a difference between keeping an open mind and letting your brains fall out.
Genes may be digital, but gene sequences, and hence traits, can be modified.
True... but if the modified trait gives its holder an evolutionary advantage, it will spread, and the rate of the spread is much faster than the rate of useful modifications. So when we analyze propagation, we can speak of genes propagating as units.
It would be interesting to compare the game of "telephone," for instance, to random mutations in genes, especially in a medium like the internet.
First we have to deal with the problem that rumor "mutations" aren't random.
The reading guide that accompanied The Social Animal included one study on rumors (it was done around WW2, when the government had a particular interest in the effect of rumor). Basically, subject A looked at a picture, and then described it to subject B, and so on. Anyway, then the experimenter compared the last person's description with the actual picture, and compared the description with the actual picture.
If my dim memory is correct, one thing they discovered was that emotionally touchy stuff was extremely likely to get mistransmitted to better fit the speaker's prejudices. For example, if the original picture had a white man with a knife and a black man in it, after descriptions of the picture passed throgh a few white subjects, there was a significant chance that someone would say there was a black man with a knife in the picture.
Another thing I remember from my intro-psych class is that over time, people forget the sources of the information that they remember. This is obviously useful for people in the marketing/propaganda biz -- your message will eventually sink in, even though the people who hear it know you're not an entirely trustworthy source.
When most people talk about memes, they are describing discrete units of knowledge
A researcher can declare with certainty that blood type, sickle-cell anemia, and Huntington's chorea are controlled by certain genes, even if he or she can't actually sequence the DNA. This is partly because genes are digital: you can't have half of Huntington's chorea, or have a blood type halfway between A and O (assuming all your cells have pretty much the same DNA).
Can the same be said for memes? Consider all the ways in which religions, legal systems, spoken languages, and computer operating systems have borrowed concepts from one another, and then modified the concepts that they borrowed. Which concepts, or components-of-concepts, are so basic that they can only be borrowed as "digital" units?
Furthermore: there's a branch of psychology called "social psychology", which, as you might expect, studies how social forces people's behavior and thinking. (A classic social-psychology study is the Milgram experiment, where subjects believed they were "teachers" giving fatal electric shocks to "students" in an "educational experiment".) What can "memetics" explain that current theories of social psychology, or our common-sense knowledge of how people act, can't explain? How many fans of "memetics" have even read The Social Animal, the classic (and very readable) basic textbook of social psychology?
It's almost impossible to pay attention either to media or the Web and not believe in memes and memetics
Critical thinking is almost impossible? Maybe for some people....
A 10 year old with an IQ of 150 has a 'mental age' of 15.
IQ tests stopped using the "mental age" model at least twenty years ago.
A ten-year-old who scores 100 on an IQ test has, by the current definition, a "raw score" equal to the mean raw score that other ten-year-olds get on the test. Scoring 115 or 116 (depending on which version of the test you take) means your raw score is one standard deviation above the mean, 130 or 132 means two standard deviations, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
The theater that Katz visited is cracking down on unchaperoned teenagers for the same reason that Blockbuster refuses to carry NC-17 videos. They're not afraid of government intimidation; they're afraid of offending potential customers.
According to the article, the theater is being strict about teenagers attending R-rated movies because of corporate policy, not because of government censorship. By libertarian principles, the owner of a movie theater has the right to refuse service to any potential customer for any reason, including the customer's age.
Katz has seen the free market in action. This month, the free market rewards companies that can both sell tickets to naughty movies and pander to Columbine-obsessed parents. If he doesn't like the results, then his experience seems more like an argument against libertarianism than an argument for it.
Somebody I know once did editorial work for a multimedia encyclopedia. One entry, describing a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, said that the treaty was signed by "Answer Sedate and Meantime Begin".
- he states his vested interest up front--he's not astroturfing
- he gives a reasonable summary of his opponents' views
- he provides links to his opponents' Web sites
Of course, he probably knows that doing all this makes him seem reasonable and even-handed, and therefore makes his argument more convincing.Disclaimer: While this post represents only my own views, I work for a company that sells software to cable, telephone, and Internet companies. (I suppose that means we're neutrals in this war. :-)
As long as networking companies are building the infrastructure for this, I hope they will also provide the analog of "800" (freephone) and "900" (premium-rate) service.
In this dream world, to get an ad-free Slashdot, we could simply go to http://slashdot.org.900; our ISPs would charge us a few milli-cents extra for each page view, and pass the surplus along to the Slashdot administration.
That is: They are happy to point out instances where our major institutions cause harm (a politician is corrupt, a corporation dumps toxic waste, a doctor sexually abuses a patient, and so on). However, these are almost always treated as crimes done by aberrant individuals, as special-case failures of the system, or as signs that the institution needs some minor adjustment. The media are extremely reluctant to suggest that any of these institutions (government, corporations, health care) causes so much harm that it needs to be reorganized in a significant way.
#include "rant_about_how_kids_today_have_it_easy.h"
#include
This program was available in 1985, if not earlier.
ESR compared open-source development to the academic world. Ask any Ph.D. student about how bitterly some people in academia can quibble over their share of credit in collaborative scientific work.
Disclaimer: I am not an accountant, but I am an employee of Kenan Systems, which merged with Lucent Technologies a few months ago. (The proprietor of Kenan Systems got about $1.5 billion in the deal; Lucent's market cap is over $190 billion....)
(Can anyone comment on the income distribution for non-fiction writers, musicians, painters, filmmakers ... ?)
- For many computer-related commercial products (e.g., operating systems, cellular phones, Web server programs), if you can give the impression that your product is more secure than your competitor's product, then (all other factors being equal) you will sell more.
- The people who buy these products, and the people who review them for industry magazines, can't distinguish a product with bad security from a product with good security. Even a computer-security professional may not be able to find security weaknesses right away; there may be one subtle bug that can leaves your system wide open to an intruder, but finding the bug might take weeks or months of full-time work, especially if the people evaluating the product don't have access to the source code.
- It's a lot easier to boast about your product's security than it is to actually implement a secure product. This is especially true when your product has selling points other than security: a hundred programmer-hours spent improving the user interface will probably do more for your sales than a hundred programmer-hours spent looking for security holes.
Therefore, when you get wind of a security hole in one of your products, you have a powerful incentive to sit on your hands. Patching the security flaw will take programmer-hours away from adding spiffy new features to the next version of the product. And sending out an emergency patch to fix a security flaw is bad for your reputation, because by doing so, you're admitting that you overstated how secure your product was in the first place.Public revelations of security flaws are the best way to push these companies into action, since it takes away their incentive to procrastinate.
Recommended reading: "Why Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks", by Bruce Schneier, and "Trends in 'Press Release' Security Advisories", by someone at l0pht.
This story points out the flip side. Anyone who publishes on the Web, or who helps someone else publish on the Web, is exposed to the same legal risks that paper-and-ink publishers have.
See paragraph 420 in Caldera's "Consolidated Statement of Facts...", one of the company's legal filings.
According to the summary, the act also "[s]pecifies that the use of encryption shall not be the sole basis for establishing probable cause with respect to a criminal offense or a search warrant." Bravo!
That's capitalism, American-style: socialized losses, privatized profits...
- All of the basic units you mentioned change over time (by comparison, the genetic code that maps nucleotides onto amino acids is nigh-immutable).
- Words change meaning over time, and not just by acquiring idiomatic meanings, either. For example, the word "awful" used to mean "afraid".
- The shapes of letters change over time; any decent dictionary should have charts or pictures that show the relationships between the old Phonecian alphabet, the Greek, and the Roman.
- Phonemes change over time -- that's why different native speakers have regional accents.
- If you treat words, etc., as the building-blocks of memes, what happens when someone rephrases an idea they heard in a different language? All the building-blocks have changed -- therefore, it must be a completely different meme!
- If all "memetics" has to say is that we communicate using words, and learn those words from other people, then it's a trivial and unoriginal theory.
So why do these attempts sometimes fail? Do memes come with hit points? You're doing handwaving, not science. Of course, some ideas spread quickly. People knew this long before the word "meme" was coined. And of course, some ideas don't spread so quickly. I don't see how talking about "memes" gets me any closer to understanding why some ideas spread more quickly than others. A fellow I once knew said there's a difference between keeping an open mind and letting your brains fall out.The reading guide that accompanied The Social Animal included one study on rumors (it was done around WW2, when the government had a particular interest in the effect of rumor). Basically, subject A looked at a picture, and then described it to subject B, and so on. Anyway, then the experimenter compared the last person's description with the actual picture, and compared the description with the actual picture.
If my dim memory is correct, one thing they discovered was that emotionally touchy stuff was extremely likely to get mistransmitted to better fit the speaker's prejudices. For example, if the original picture had a white man with a knife and a black man in it, after descriptions of the picture passed throgh a few white subjects, there was a significant chance that someone would say there was a black man with a knife in the picture.
Another thing I remember from my intro-psych class is that over time, people forget the sources of the information that they remember. This is obviously useful for people in the marketing/propaganda biz -- your message will eventually sink in, even though the people who hear it know you're not an entirely trustworthy source.
Can the same be said for memes? Consider all the ways in which religions, legal systems, spoken languages, and computer operating systems have borrowed concepts from one another, and then modified the concepts that they borrowed. Which concepts, or components-of-concepts, are so basic that they can only be borrowed as "digital" units?
Furthermore: there's a branch of psychology called "social psychology", which, as you might expect, studies how social forces people's behavior and thinking. (A classic social-psychology study is the Milgram experiment, where subjects believed they were "teachers" giving fatal electric shocks to "students" in an "educational experiment".) What can "memetics" explain that current theories of social psychology, or our common-sense knowledge of how people act, can't explain? How many fans of "memetics" have even read The Social Animal, the classic (and very readable) basic textbook of social psychology?
Critical thinking is almost impossible? Maybe for some people....A ten-year-old who scores 100 on an IQ test has, by the current definition, a "raw score" equal to the mean raw score that other ten-year-olds get on the test. Scoring 115 or 116 (depending on which version of the test you take) means your raw score is one standard deviation above the mean, 130 or 132 means two standard deviations, and so on.