If this is true, then I'm not too worried. Inoffensive, tepid, quiet people don't voice brilliant, innovative ideas. They may not even have them. The American economy has always depended on a steady stream of craziness out of its best and brightest. But on the positive side, business could (in the distant future) be the last sanctuary for the creative kooks. Why? Bear with me here...
First, American education is not great. It's good enough to turn out middle managers. And it does an adequate job at babysitting. But anyone that is different gets smacked down. That's cultural -- all an individual can do is home-school. So there's no real opportunity or avenue to protect the freaks as a whole.
Second, politics is and has always been a forum for the lowest common denominator. Politics will tend to homogenize relentlessly until everyone is a member of the lowest common denominator. Perhaps it already has. Individualism will get no protection from government. No government has ever put itself on the line to protect the individual. This is due to the instinct for self-preservation exhibited by all organized entities, be they collections of cells or collections of collections of cells. (The rule is recursive.)
Finally, we get to business. Corporatism is pretty horrible, I agree. But I believe that there are loopholes that can be exploited. The tricky part is to guide the evolution of law and culture so that even if Old Individualism dies, New Individualism can still flourish. What is New Individualism? Frankly, I don't have a complete answer to that. Neither do you, Jon, you just want the Old Individualism back, the one that you think was given to you by God and country and our forefathers. But pining for the past is not the American way. The American Way means that you redefine Individualism so that it can flourish again. It means being faster, smarter, and able to turn on a dime, while the culture-homogenizing corporations lumber along behind you, maybe even right at your heels. Does this sound familiar at all? It should, if you've read books about small business, garage startups, and assorted clue-related manifestos. You see, The American Love Affair with business is unlikely to end soon. But we can be sure that the economy will falter if creativity is completely stifled. Where does this path lead?
Back to business. Because business has a vested interest in preserving individuality and creativity. If all businesses in a given market are the same, no business has a competitive advantage. The smart businesses churn through ideas, trying to find the one that that will keep them on the leading edge. The dumber (and often older) businesses try to squash ideas instead of pouring their resources into smart people. The market, as a result, is in a constant state of flux. As a market ages towards death, the companies eventually turn into red giants, engulfing everything around them. (Coke, Pepsi...)
Within a dying market, there is no room for individualism. The Web came out of nowhere and grew magnificently, on Internet time. Now it's dying on the same Internet time. What is my point here? My point is that if you live on the wired planet, all you can see is the red giants relentlessly expanding towards you (like AOL/Time-Warner). But just because Internet individualism is being squashed does not mean that individualism as a whole is as well. Take corporate individualism. Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, true individuals, even if we didn't always like them. Then, dead time. Then later, a fresh crop like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. Small businesses are growing at a fantastic rate right now, in more than just the technology sector. A small business of one person is still an individual. I always bring up this company, but how about Novica? This company has staked its reputation on the individual. Each of its artists is a small business, a subcontracted seller of goods and services. Novica on its own will grab 0.01% of the market for interior decorations - not a threat. A thousand Novicas, tapping a million individual artists, are a threat indeed.
What I see ultimately occurring is a rebirth and renaissance of individuality. Bruce Sterling's essay on the future, where everyone is in business, comes true. But individuality will have to make itself valuable somehow. This may make you cringe -- perhaps you think art is only art if created without respect to money. Or that an idea or opinion that is paid is absolutely tainted and invalid. We have only to look to the Italian Renaissance to see how false this is. Painters and writers and musicians had to convince their patrons to give them money (or be rich themselves). And yet real art came out of the studios of patronized arts.
In conclusion: Use the past as a guide, but don't try to resurrect it. Bend like the willow before the winds of change, little grasshopper.
The Librarian of Congress may have gotten there by dint of his ass-kissing abilities, pardon my profanity. I don't know that you can say his resume entitles him to dismiss the value of the Internet as a valid form of communication and a method of empowerment for countless millions. However, this is only my intuition, not based on any hard knowledge of how his position was attained.
It is in fact the case that tremendous effort is expended on junk in our economy. But you can't have a booming consumer economy with consumers and consumables. What I am looking forward to is the possibility of an increasingly vibrant subculture (which already exists) that says, "Let them have Pokemon"...and unashamedly lives off the humming vibrating consumption machine without being conned into taking part. People who place an economic premium on the unique and the handmade are not so different from people who place a premium on Gap or Starbucks. Many of these people exist - I'm only one of them!
I am not ashamed to say that I have avoided critical readings of Marx. And I have no intention of becoming a socialist -- I enjoy wealth, and I enjoy subverting those around me with my philosophies on responsible, thoughtful, pleasurable consumption of material goods...and the creation of more goods or services in my spare time.
I have often thought that there is a meme out there that says pain and suffering are the only means to understanding and to good literature. But, if I may point this out needlessly, pain and suffering are not limited to the poor. No one has a monopolity on heartache or the human condition, not the medieval flagellants, not the mayan indians or the native americans, not anybody. Great literature comes from the thinking people of the world, and some of the sharpest and most moving literature comes from people with no "life experience" with poverty or physical deprivation.
Yes, today's literature reeks. You are correct. But yesterday's literature also reeked. You may suppose that it didn't and point me to Tolstoy, but Tolstoy had many compatriots in literature who wrote absolutely abysmal material. Because the only literature that has survived is that which has withstood the test of time, we naturally assume that there were no bad writers prior to the twentieth century. There were, they're just hard to track down, because, basically, they reeked. I doubt Grisham will survive, at least not the way Tolstoy has.
You need not look to American writers to find outstanding literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie are two of the pillars in my library. I recently discovered Arundhati Roy as well -- quite frankly, there are writers out there now who are ever so much more talented than Jane Austen (though I do love her), but the signal to noise ratio, much like on slashdot, has kept them from the public consciousness.
(BTW, it's a pleasure arguing with you, and the few ACs that have joined the thread with intelligent comments)
I would hate to be put in the same class as the uninformed Mr. Billington. I believe strongly that there is lots of information that does not deserve to be made into a book. Popular information. Information freely available on Geocities and Tripod, and for pay from Simon & Schuster. So I am pulling for ubiquitous electronic books as a means of allowing beautiful tasteful print books to flourish. With luck the book world will soon be like dirty snow with crocuses pushing up through it despite the weight. If everyone is rich, then everyone can afford to pursue bookmaking, or open source, or composing, or fixing antique bicycles -- whatever their fancy, their hobby.
That's the argument for supply. As far as the argument for demand, there's always keeping up with the Johnsons. No longer will it be sufficient to own mass-produced luxury items. The most luxurious items will be those that are unique -- antiques, limited editions, and works of art. When Ms. Married-Very-Well-Indeed goes shopping for shower curtains, and she has a choice between a mass-produced linen shower curtain and a hand-woven shower curtain signed by the artist, which do you think she will prefer? Most certainly, the one that will get the rave reviews at the cocktail party, and the jealousy of all her friends. Books will be not so different from shower curtains. (And since people never really change, you can bet on the competitiveness in one's social circle driving increased demand for luxury goods, and a constant redefinition of luxury.)
This is my hopeful vision of the future, where underneath the subfloor are highly efficient machines and business processes keeping the economy moving and the consumers wealthy, and allowing artisans to live in the light and create what they love and sell their creations around the world.
You can't stop what's under the subfloor. If you want to go to war against consumerism and mass manufacture, you must be the one to both create and demand the unique, the beautiful, and the original.
note: you could read this whole post as an argument for open source too, if you really wanted to.
Au contraire, mon ami. I adore books. I love the smell of new and old books alike, the generous heft, the feel of crisp paper flipping by as I sink into a virtual world (yes, virtual). Books are my weakness and my most desired form of wealth.
However, I do not love the Harlequin romance. I do not love the latest business bore, or the danielle doorstop. I find Stephen King* mildly diverting, though rarely for all 600 pages.
Digitization will stop the disgusting waste of trees (which I also happen to like) on books that are truly consumables. What are the chances that you will keep the latest bestseller on your shelf and pass it down to your children? Very small, which is as it should be.
In this new world of electronic information, precious book-making time and space and labor will go towards creating the books that aren't consumer items. Rousseau's works will come out in marvelous new leather-bound limited editions, perhaps hand illustrated and hand bound, and signed by (for example) the author's nephew's brother's ex-wife. The most wonderful and enduring works will make it onto paper, and the home library will be a joy to walk through. The world is slowly changing to a place where people have enough money to afford material objects created by artisans** instead of by mass manufacture. The reason for this change is and will continue to be gains in efficiency in manufacturing consumer items, as well as the digitization of needlessly tree-based information***.
New books should have to past the test of time before we honor them with the hand of an artisan bookmaker****. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can research Victorian England by downloading scholarly texts, and then enjoy some quiet time on the porch with a beautiful copy of Little Dorrit.
Notes * The perfect candidate for throwaway e-books, so we can stop throwing away the t-books ** Novica.com *** Newspapers, most textbooks, newsletters, junk mail, romance novels, etc. -- just to name a few **** I like maps too
The site says "Powered by MacOS X Server" -- it's incredibly slow from the/. effect, but it hasn't crashed. I'm fairly impressed if that's the new Apple standard, I like the idea of a server that just keeps running slower and slower without crashing -- sounds like a *nix box to me. Wonder what web server they are running?
Your life cycle cost calculation is a step in the right direction -- it does show exactly how cost-ineffective these panels are in relation to wall power. But I'd like to take issue with a few of your points.
First, if you are comparing to wall power, then these are obviously a bad deal. Distributed energy is always a bad deal compared to existing wall power. That's because the utility has already made all the capital investments for you, and they get the best deals on long-term financing -- it's hard for an individual to do better, even with all those utility investments in nuclear.
But these are an outstanding deal if you live off-grid. They are convenient to move around, they have a cord so you can keep your laptop in the shade and the cells in the sun. Unfortunately, the level of ambient light even in the shade is too high to comfortably view a laptop screen. It takes some getting used to, especially during the middle of a sunny day.
Second, regarding solar power plants. $0.56/kWh is not "just on the edge" (edge = $0.03/kWh) and photovoltaics are the least likely technology to be used in a commercial powerplant, barring commercialization of that Australian guy's silicon wafer manufacturing improvements. Yes, it is true that efficiency and output are directly related to the amount of sunlight shining on the panels. However, they are inversely related to the temperature of the panel. The hotter they get, the worse they work.
I'm afraid you are also taking a bunch of disparate facts about the energy industry and taking them out of context here. The reason prices hit $6000/MWh several years ago was because of market speculation and a series of shady deals. It had nothing to do with the real cost of producing energy.
I am not trying to rain on anyone's parade, as I am in fact a die-hard renewables supporter -- I worked in the energy industry and I know how much we need cleaner technology. But there are many other emerging technologies which will change the industry drastically, much more so than photovoltaics. For instance, fuel cells - technology with a chance. Prototypes of fuel-cell powered laptops and cell phones exist, and will soon allow you to run your laptop 28 hours without "recharging". Not only that, but you'll probably able to carry around a couple of very small canisters of hydrogen or other fuel much more easily than toting batteries.
Treat children as children and you will get childish behavior. Treat them as adults and most of the time, you will be pleasantly rewarded. Give them the same rights, responsibilities, and protections, and we can guarantee schoolyard violence will be virtually wiped out.
However, the Pinkerton decision-makers have to realize that children live very different lives from the rest of us. In real life, legal protection is subordinate to common practice. Thus, a middle school student who is verbally or physically abused by peers is, by the laws of the schoolyard that prevail, not entitled to any protection from teachers, police, or the court system.
Now, this snippet of argument might lead one to think that I support the idea of adding the authority of a third (private, disinterested) party into the Schoolyard Corpus of Law.
But I do not. At least, I do not support Pinkerton's current version of the law. I think Pinkerton has been seduced by sunny blond girls and boys* linking hands, praying, weeping, singing songs about the violence in schools, vowing to fight intolerance and embrace all students. But the reality is this:
While the popular boys and girls may feel a grain of love and tolerance for their fellow students in the face of monstrous crimes, they fall, soon enough, into their old patterns, which range from simple exclusion by these sunny blond people to the commission of absolute atrocities against the rest of the schoolyard.
Haven't you wondered why you only ever saw cheerleaders linking hands with other cheerleaders in these media pictures? It's because the goths, geeks, and nerds know that the above italicised paragraph is a truism that cannot be affected by any number of Anti-Violence Singalongs. Diversity in the workplace has no analog in schools.
So, what is the solution? W.A.V.E. America is not the solution, in its current form. Here is a list of my concerns about this program.
In one breath, the Pinkerton site speaks of "responsibility", and in the next, allows children to duck responsibility by calling anonymous tips in on their fellow students.
Pro: If there were a danger to the student of being injured somehow if their name was released in conjunction with an investigation into a fellow student, then anonymity protects them.
Con: The right to know and face one's accuser is critical! The accuser's right to safety does not outweigh the rights of the accused. This has been proven over and over in our system of justice. If the student who calls the W.A.V.E. line believes they are in danger, then they are entitled to protection, not anonymity. Pinkerton probably has a division that could protect them (you know, razor for free, charge for the blades and all that). Students need to call the police, not W.A.V.E., if they are in so much danger that they cannot give their name.
What happens as the result of a call? A report is sent to school administrators. The school then has the responsibility to act on all tips -- anonymous or otherwise.
Pro: At least we don't have a corporation deciding which kids are troublemakers and which kids are being unfairly reported. Theoretically, the school administrators should be informed enough to gauge the difference and act fairly.
Con: Yeah right. W.A.V.E. strengthens the status quo by putting the power right back in the hands of the people that enforce a pecking order. What will the school do if a goth calls in and reports that the quarterback has been leaving dead animals in her locker again? Same as always - nothing at all, because school administrators virtually never act against the interests of the powerful or the popular**. When the opposite occurs, and the quarterback's girlfriend calls in to say the goth is threatening to blow away the football team, all hell will break loose. Maybe Pinkerton should be given a mandate to protect the innocent, even the freaky. (Yes I know -- it would be against every mandate in this country to hand over power/justice to a company whose responsibility is to make money. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The Pinkerton officials just need to be aware that a corporation absolutely cannot maximize profits and justice at the same time.)
Resolve, Respect, and Responsibility***. You mean, as defined by Pinkerton. Or as defined by your teachers. Or as defined by your local police. You probably don't mean, as defined by yourself, after much critical thinking and reading. For example:
Responsibility in the context of W.A.V.E. probably includes upholding the law of the land without ever questioning its fitness or justice.
Resolve means that when someone makes fun of your breasts, you tell an adult, preferably someone in charge like an administrator. When the administrator does nothing, you call W.A.V.E., who sends a report to the administrator. What do you do after that? *shrug* Beats me. Besides, W.A.V.E. might not even take your call if all you have to report is a silly little bit of sexual harassment.
Respect means knowing where you stand in the school hierarchy, and not stepping out of line in your daily interactions with other students. It probably doesn't mean demanding that 17 year old felons be put in jail regardless of their athletic scholarship.
There is just so much more I could address. If there'd been more notice, I would have asked Pinkerton if I could fly out as well. For instance, the mission statement that states that they are dedicated to "tomorrow's workforce" implies exclusion on their part -- poets and beatniks be damned, we're just protecting the future cubicle occupiers because as a company it would be irresponsible of us to protect anything beyond our own interests.
Anyway...to anyone that has read this far...thanks for listening to my admittedly long opinion on this matter!!
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There was a story at CNN about the gaydar device. However, I think people had better watch out where they choose to wear it, what they program into it, and so on.
Frankly, I wouldn't want to see one of these fall into the hands of drunken/violent homophobes with baseball bats.
The research that the earlier poster was referring to was referring to much earlier civilizations than the Native American tribe your grandfather belonged to.
Technology and culture were not fixed and frozen prior to the twentieth century -- there was change, in fact drastic change, between the lives of people 150 centuries ago and the lives of people 5 centuries ago. And technology didn't always change lives for the better -- there were definite hiccups along the way.
The daily lives of ancient people depended greatly on their environments as well as on their level of technology. Life would naturally be easier in the Yucatan than in Greenland.
It's a shame the earlier poster didn't post a link to the actual research so we could rebut/support directly.
Oh yeah -- food made from acorns is gross. Yucca flour is MUCH tastier.:-)
Because that would imply that the people behind this have a political motive regarding the corporations they are targeting. What if the people behind this have only one target -- the Web? Get eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo, and you've covered 90% of the Internet for 90% of the voting public (stats are not real, just illustrative). Check out the update -- this makes a lot more sense if you just want the words "hacker" and "internet" and "e-commerce" to get on the 11 o'clock news. If you want some fresh FUD so you can pass a bill locking down the 'net, this is the way to do it.
(Mission accomplished: the news is coming on, and the top story is the evil hackers who are targeting the innocents...)
Are you trying to imply that I suck at Quake?:-) Well you would probably be right. But you are totally missing my point -- see, your post is all about competition, gamer vs the computer, gamer vs the world...like I said before, kung-fu.
Nobody will ever see this post, so I can kind of just ramble here...to me, it truly is not whether you win or lose. Shit, everyone dies, so ultimately, it's game over, you lose (though if I remember correctly, you are a religious person and would disagree with my metaphor).
If I may point this out, the idea of relaxing for an entire hour with Quake and THEN move on to other games is totally alien to me -- that's a whole lotta time devoted to competing. And among boys, that's not even close to "obsessive".
No matter what your gender, you rank a game by how much fun it really is. Fun for some is bass fishing, for others it could be barbie makeovers, or late night quake games beating the crap out of buddies, or just exploring alien worlds like Riven...
For me, all I really care about is figuring shit out. I like slurping up a problem and coming up with a solution in a real time. Women are good at that kind of stuff (so are men), but they aren't under the influence of male hormones. I think that is why you see women playing solitaire, tetris, riven, oddworld....it doesn't bother them that they aren't scoring off anyone.
Do you REALLY play a game a few dozen more times once you've finished it? Why? Once you've figured it out, why would you play it again? Maybe you are trying to get your money's worth...but I can't even understand that. Once I know all the secrets, that's it. Shelf time.
Dammit -- now I've blown the secret women's code regarding men -- the real reason why we love 'em and leave 'em.:-)
I think many women (especially younger ones) are avid action gamers, but not to the exclusion of other games, and not for the purpose of proving their kung-fu.
If there is any one game characteristic that unifies women gamers, I would say it would have to be problem solving. Games like Myst and Riven, the Oddworld series, and many good action games (the Marathon series comes to mind) feature excellent gameplay that challenges the mind first and foremost; itchy trigger fingers are a secondary skill.
I have high standards for my games. I like screaming graphics just as much as any other geek, but I am easily bored by repetitive shooting sprees.
flamebait, offtopic alert: Quake? To me it's a yawner -- if I want network play, I'd rather exercise my napoleonic tendencies in Myth II; learning to flank works the mind a little harder.
Back to the subject: I'm not trying to imply that teenage boys are poor at problem-solving, or even uninterested. They just have different standards for what qualifies as an un-fscking-believable game.
Please remember, though, that the ads that are the subject of this story target people who buy magazines and NOT people who buy games. Big difference.
I'm not going to go out and buy any game magazines for the same reason I don't buy auto magazines: the signal-to-pr0n ratio is pathetic. I'd rather read womengamers.com for gaming information...and for you boys out there, check it out -- it's not like the reviews are filled with thinly veiled references to vaginas or anything. (Can I even say that on Slashdot?)
I'd like to know if any males find women gamer sites to be particularly hostile to men.
I see more than one problem here. Notwithstanding any moral implications, there are a ton of legal questions.
Scenario A: Networks airbrushing over each other's billboards, buildings, etc. with different sponsors
This will solve itself, because the networks are on a level playing field -- they will most likely come to an out of court agreement, unless they are all as ill-mannered and belligerent as the CBS president.
Scenario B: Networks inserting advertising onto the billboards/signs of smaller businesses.
I almost HOPE they do this. After all, they could argue that the local businesses are getting free advertising merely by being shown in the background of a TV show, and thus the network is merely reclaiming ad space previously given away for free. I'm pretty sure this would backfire though, so I'm not too worried.
The networks inserting advertising onto anything and everything that moves. And stuff that doesn't.
This is the real problem. Most advertising is obviously advertising, but there is a subset that masquerades as truth. Fake websites, fake movie advertisements, some infomercials, and so on. Most of that stuff is easier to pick out because it falls into an advertising "context" -- a 30 second spot, or whatever. But what if ad agencies realize that there is an opportunity to truly blur the line between advertising and reality? Insert an ad masquerading as truth into a show professing to report the truth? How much would that be worth? I know that fake websites are harder to distinguish from fake movie trailers simply because there are no contextual clues ("Rated 'Y' for Yummy").
My question: With basic research budgets in disarray, do you see any opportunity for amateur scientists to pursue distributed research projects?
I believe that amateur astronomers have done a great deal to assist the "professionals", due to the ease of distributing a great amount of work among many volunteers, but I am not aware of the same phenomenon occuring in any other field.
It has been suggested that the only experimental physics left to do is that which requires billions of dollars and/or 50 acre+ installations. I do not know whether to believe this view -- perhaps with a bit of creativity, experiments could be designed such that they could be farmed out to an array of amateur scientists willing to commit time and money towards the effort (similar to how open source software is pursued now). I have heard of a few such possibilities, eg amateur neutrino detectors, but none that I know of that are endorsed or initiated by institutional science.
To restate my question, is such an approach possible, and/or desirable?
Of course there are female Slashdot readers. If any of them are like me, they are thinking that this subject is purely sociopolitical, not technical, and therefore gets a 'Whatever' on the scale of Dull to Ubernerdly. But what the hell, unlike the vast majority of these posters, I did peruse the newsletter...let me address a few choice quotes that made me scoff.
Invisibility: Some games contain no women characters at all--many sports simulations are typical of this absence. Girls and women aren't included in such games as the NHL Hockey or NFL Football.
Fancy that. Those male coders out there are writing games meant to be as realistic as possible and they're not putting female hockey players in an NHL game? Those bastards!!!
Tomb Raider 's Lara Croft (with 36-24-36 measurements) promotes an image of femininity nearly unattainable by most girls.
How many fat-ass geek boys with cheeto dust on their scraggly beards get to star in videogames? The male body as portrayed in videogames is unattainable as well. Not even with steroids could a guy end up looking like good ol Duke. Sure, we all "know" that duke and lara aren't real, aren't meant to be real, but if we are going to throw up our hands about body image, let's not forget boys -- there have been plenty of studies showing that boys and girls are pretty much equally subject to body dysmorphia. Since the standards are different, the effects are different -- bulimia vs steroid use.
I will go out on a limb and say that this particular article, though, is not as bad as these two quotes represent. However, it has a tendency to fail to call on real data, instead using dubious logic and/or anecdote-style "proof".
Some of the articles are more interesting -- actual research documenting female behavior online, or good ideas about the real problem (fewer women going into science and engineering).
If you are a man reading this and you are particularly clever, you will have noticed that I have a gender-neutral login. Whatever you think is the reason for this, you'll probably be wrong.
Here's a theory for you -- our good buddy and cybergod Steve Wozniak left coding to give something back by teaching. Do you think maybe that there is a form of reverse sexism that discourages boys from going into such non-macho fields as education? I've seen quite a few posts on slashdot from tech support guys who say that they feel quite rewarded when they educate a customer about this or that...perhaps their true calling was teaching, but they were discouraged. Maybe this is the reason that there is a bias -- it's not that there are no women in tech, it's that there are no men in other women-dominated fields. Polarization from multiple forms of sexism.
you can't necessarily reverse the greenhouse effect with microbes that bind carbon. what happens when they die and decay to their constituent parts? you'd have to put 'em in ziplock bags and throw them in a gigantic landfill. we're talking thousands, even millions of tons of carbon.
you COULD create a more efficient cycle though, much like powering cars that burn plant-created alcohols that bind carbon while they grow and release it through combustion.
Many computer related specialties are the blue collar jobs of the future. Support jobs are very nearly there, only because anyone can go get an associate's degree at a local college and learn how to reinstall and reboot -- without a huge investment in education but with a pretty good payoff in the job world. Obviously some people are better at support jobs than others, but that's not really unique to geeks -- there are also auto mechanics who are so good that we wonder if they were cars in their previous life.
The ubiquitous blue-collar programmer is a little further off, due to the currently-unique skill set required.
"It's a great, fun feature. Almost anyone who visits the area will automatically identify with a purchase circle. It's a fun, interactive feature... people will often find things they'll read, watch, and listen to,"
The newspeak isn't even mildly believable -- how many times can one emphasize the word fun about a privacy issue hot-button and not look like a complete fool? This quote is the only reason given in the Wired article for Amazon choosing to do this. It's not "fun", except where you define "fun" to include looking into the President's trousers (*shudder*) or viewing the World's Greatest Plane Crashes.
Usually it's not good to underestimate the potential stupidity of corporate decisions, but I think in this case, it's not stupidity. Amazon must know that people are becoming increasingly concerned about privacy. I think this is at least partially a PR stunt.
Why?
1. On the Internet, everyone's a voyeur*. Hits++... 2. Data mining companies will be on this like maggots...hits++, analyst reports++ 3. Some companies will be pissed off. But not many will go to all the trouble of completely shutting down a corporate relationship with Amazon and opening another with BN. And individuals, well they have nothing to worry about. I mean, Amazon's only targeting companies with 6+ employees, right?...so no great negative effect
Net effect, lots of attention and eyeballs in the short term. In the long term, people's attention spans...what was I saying?
*well, not me, and not you, but everyone else is, right?
This is so unbelievably dull and useless. I don't read/. everyday, so I may have missed out on how the interview candidates are chosen. Do/.ers vote on these people?
There are plenty of assholes from whom I can learn what not to do, who not to be, and how not to live my life -- I think most of us know assholes from whom they can personally take away these lessons.
If the reason for interviewing this guy is because he got on MTV, or because he used technology to get a girl, or because he had a mildly interesting childhood, I'm just so disappointed. Why not interview me? I had a weird childhood (who didn't?)! I have slackware (but I don't KNOW slackware)! I could break into a computer (after reading the directions, of course)! But I'm not stupid enough to call myself a hacker -- I'm not even a script kiddie.
So maybe instead of holy war polls, there could be polls listing possibilities for the next interviewee. I am absolutely sure that there are tons of great hackers, project leaders, and other cool people from whom we could actually learn something. I don't know who these people are, but I bet the/. community knows enough names and backgrounds to have a much more interesting field of candidates for the next interview.
Personally, I would like to see some interviews with more hackers who've gone corporate -- or those who've made the choice not to.
So how 'bout it folks? Names and backgrounds of interview candidates?
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First, American education is not great. It's good enough to turn out middle managers. And it does an adequate job at babysitting. But anyone that is different gets smacked down. That's cultural -- all an individual can do is home-school. So there's no real opportunity or avenue to protect the freaks as a whole.
Second, politics is and has always been a forum for the lowest common denominator. Politics will tend to homogenize relentlessly until everyone is a member of the lowest common denominator. Perhaps it already has. Individualism will get no protection from government. No government has ever put itself on the line to protect the individual. This is due to the instinct for self-preservation exhibited by all organized entities, be they collections of cells or collections of collections of cells. (The rule is recursive.)
Finally, we get to business. Corporatism is pretty horrible, I agree. But I believe that there are loopholes that can be exploited. The tricky part is to guide the evolution of law and culture so that even if Old Individualism dies, New Individualism can still flourish. What is New Individualism? Frankly, I don't have a complete answer to that. Neither do you, Jon, you just want the Old Individualism back, the one that you think was given to you by God and country and our forefathers. But pining for the past is not the American way. The American Way means that you redefine Individualism so that it can flourish again. It means being faster, smarter, and able to turn on a dime, while the culture-homogenizing corporations lumber along behind you, maybe even right at your heels. Does this sound familiar at all? It should, if you've read books about small business, garage startups, and assorted clue-related manifestos. You see, The American Love Affair with business is unlikely to end soon. But we can be sure that the economy will falter if creativity is completely stifled. Where does this path lead?
Back to business. Because business has a vested interest in preserving individuality and creativity. If all businesses in a given market are the same, no business has a competitive advantage. The smart businesses churn through ideas, trying to find the one that that will keep them on the leading edge. The dumber (and often older) businesses try to squash ideas instead of pouring their resources into smart people. The market, as a result, is in a constant state of flux. As a market ages towards death, the companies eventually turn into red giants, engulfing everything around them. (Coke, Pepsi...)
Within a dying market, there is no room for individualism. The Web came out of nowhere and grew magnificently, on Internet time. Now it's dying on the same Internet time. What is my point here? My point is that if you live on the wired planet, all you can see is the red giants relentlessly expanding towards you (like AOL/Time-Warner). But just because Internet individualism is being squashed does not mean that individualism as a whole is as well. Take corporate individualism. Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, true individuals, even if we didn't always like them. Then, dead time. Then later, a fresh crop like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. Small businesses are growing at a fantastic rate right now, in more than just the technology sector. A small business of one person is still an individual. I always bring up this company, but how about Novica? This company has staked its reputation on the individual. Each of its artists is a small business, a subcontracted seller of goods and services. Novica on its own will grab 0.01% of the market for interior decorations - not a threat. A thousand Novicas, tapping a million individual artists, are a threat indeed.
What I see ultimately occurring is a rebirth and renaissance of individuality. Bruce Sterling's essay on the future, where everyone is in business, comes true. But individuality will have to make itself valuable somehow. This may make you cringe -- perhaps you think art is only art if created without respect to money. Or that an idea or opinion that is paid is absolutely tainted and invalid. We have only to look to the Italian Renaissance to see how false this is. Painters and writers and musicians had to convince their patrons to give them money (or be rich themselves). And yet real art came out of the studios of patronized arts.
In conclusion: Use the past as a guide, but don't try to resurrect it. Bend like the willow before the winds of change, little grasshopper.
Best,
Amanda
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It is in fact the case that tremendous effort is expended on junk in our economy. But you can't have a booming consumer economy with consumers and consumables. What I am looking forward to is the possibility of an increasingly vibrant subculture (which already exists) that says, "Let them have Pokemon"...and unashamedly lives off the humming vibrating consumption machine without being conned into taking part. People who place an economic premium on the unique and the handmade are not so different from people who place a premium on Gap or Starbucks. Many of these people exist - I'm only one of them!
I am not ashamed to say that I have avoided critical readings of Marx. And I have no intention of becoming a socialist -- I enjoy wealth, and I enjoy subverting those around me with my philosophies on responsible, thoughtful, pleasurable consumption of material goods...and the creation of more goods or services in my spare time.
I have often thought that there is a meme out there that says pain and suffering are the only means to understanding and to good literature. But, if I may point this out needlessly, pain and suffering are not limited to the poor. No one has a monopolity on heartache or the human condition, not the medieval flagellants, not the mayan indians or the native americans, not anybody. Great literature comes from the thinking people of the world, and some of the sharpest and most moving literature comes from people with no "life experience" with poverty or physical deprivation.
Yes, today's literature reeks. You are correct. But yesterday's literature also reeked. You may suppose that it didn't and point me to Tolstoy, but Tolstoy had many compatriots in literature who wrote absolutely abysmal material. Because the only literature that has survived is that which has withstood the test of time, we naturally assume that there were no bad writers prior to the twentieth century. There were, they're just hard to track down, because, basically, they reeked. I doubt Grisham will survive, at least not the way Tolstoy has.
You need not look to American writers to find outstanding literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie are two of the pillars in my library. I recently discovered Arundhati Roy as well -- quite frankly, there are writers out there now who are ever so much more talented than Jane Austen (though I do love her), but the signal to noise ratio, much like on slashdot, has kept them from the public consciousness.
(BTW, it's a pleasure arguing with you, and the few ACs that have joined the thread with intelligent comments)
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That's the argument for supply. As far as the argument for demand, there's always keeping up with the Johnsons. No longer will it be sufficient to own mass-produced luxury items. The most luxurious items will be those that are unique -- antiques, limited editions, and works of art. When Ms. Married-Very-Well-Indeed goes shopping for shower curtains, and she has a choice between a mass-produced linen shower curtain and a hand-woven shower curtain signed by the artist, which do you think she will prefer? Most certainly, the one that will get the rave reviews at the cocktail party, and the jealousy of all her friends. Books will be not so different from shower curtains. (And since people never really change, you can bet on the competitiveness in one's social circle driving increased demand for luxury goods, and a constant redefinition of luxury.)
This is my hopeful vision of the future, where underneath the subfloor are highly efficient machines and business processes keeping the economy moving and the consumers wealthy, and allowing artisans to live in the light and create what they love and sell their creations around the world.
You can't stop what's under the subfloor. If you want to go to war against consumerism and mass manufacture, you must be the one to both create and demand the unique, the beautiful, and the original.
note: you could read this whole post as an argument for open source too, if you really wanted to.
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However, I do not love the Harlequin romance. I do not love the latest business bore, or the danielle doorstop. I find Stephen King* mildly diverting, though rarely for all 600 pages.
Digitization will stop the disgusting waste of trees (which I also happen to like) on books that are truly consumables. What are the chances that you will keep the latest bestseller on your shelf and pass it down to your children? Very small, which is as it should be.
In this new world of electronic information, precious book-making time and space and labor will go towards creating the books that aren't consumer items. Rousseau's works will come out in marvelous new leather-bound limited editions, perhaps hand illustrated and hand bound, and signed by (for example) the author's nephew's brother's ex-wife. The most wonderful and enduring works will make it onto paper, and the home library will be a joy to walk through. The world is slowly changing to a place where people have enough money to afford material objects created by artisans** instead of by mass manufacture. The reason for this change is and will continue to be gains in efficiency in manufacturing consumer items, as well as the digitization of needlessly tree-based information***.
New books should have to past the test of time before we honor them with the hand of an artisan bookmaker****. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can research Victorian England by downloading scholarly texts, and then enjoy some quiet time on the porch with a beautiful copy of Little Dorrit.
Notes
* The perfect candidate for throwaway e-books, so we can stop throwing away the t-books
** Novica.com
*** Newspapers, most textbooks, newsletters, junk mail, romance novels, etc. -- just to name a few
**** I like maps too
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First, if you are comparing to wall power, then these are obviously a bad deal. Distributed energy is always a bad deal compared to existing wall power. That's because the utility has already made all the capital investments for you, and they get the best deals on long-term financing -- it's hard for an individual to do better, even with all those utility investments in nuclear.
But these are an outstanding deal if you live off-grid. They are convenient to move around, they have a cord so you can keep your laptop in the shade and the cells in the sun. Unfortunately, the level of ambient light even in the shade is too high to comfortably view a laptop screen. It takes some getting used to, especially during the middle of a sunny day.
Second, regarding solar power plants. $0.56/kWh is not "just on the edge" (edge = $0.03/kWh) and photovoltaics are the least likely technology to be used in a commercial powerplant, barring commercialization of that Australian guy's silicon wafer manufacturing improvements. Yes, it is true that efficiency and output are directly related to the amount of sunlight shining on the panels. However, they are inversely related to the temperature of the panel. The hotter they get, the worse they work.
I'm afraid you are also taking a bunch of disparate facts about the energy industry and taking them out of context here. The reason prices hit $6000/MWh several years ago was because of market speculation and a series of shady deals. It had nothing to do with the real cost of producing energy.
I am not trying to rain on anyone's parade, as I am in fact a die-hard renewables supporter -- I worked in the energy industry and I know how much we need cleaner technology. But there are many other emerging technologies which will change the industry drastically, much more so than photovoltaics. For instance, fuel cells - technology with a chance. Prototypes of fuel-cell powered laptops and cell phones exist, and will soon allow you to run your laptop 28 hours without "recharging". Not only that, but you'll probably able to carry around a couple of very small canisters of hydrogen or other fuel much more easily than toting batteries.
Now that is mobile computing.
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However, the Pinkerton decision-makers have to realize that children live very different lives from the rest of us. In real life, legal protection is subordinate to common practice. Thus, a middle school student who is verbally or physically abused by peers is, by the laws of the schoolyard that prevail, not entitled to any protection from teachers, police, or the court system.
Now, this snippet of argument might lead one to think that I support the idea of adding the authority of a third (private, disinterested) party into the Schoolyard Corpus of Law.
But I do not. At least, I do not support Pinkerton's current version of the law. I think Pinkerton has been seduced by sunny blond girls and boys* linking hands, praying, weeping, singing songs about the violence in schools, vowing to fight intolerance and embrace all students. But the reality is this:
While the popular boys and girls may feel a grain of love and tolerance for their fellow students in the face of monstrous crimes, they fall, soon enough, into their old patterns, which range from simple exclusion by these sunny blond people to the commission of absolute atrocities against the rest of the schoolyard.
Haven't you wondered why you only ever saw cheerleaders linking hands with other cheerleaders in these media pictures? It's because the goths, geeks, and nerds know that the above italicised paragraph is a truism that cannot be affected by any number of Anti-Violence Singalongs. Diversity in the workplace has no analog in schools.
So, what is the solution? W.A.V.E. America is not the solution, in its current form. Here is a list of my concerns about this program.
There is just so much more I could address. If there'd been more notice, I would have asked Pinkerton if I could fly out as well. For instance, the mission statement that states that they are dedicated to "tomorrow's workforce" implies exclusion on their part -- poets and beatniks be damned, we're just protecting the future cubicle occupiers because as a company it would be irresponsible of us to protect anything beyond our own interests.
Anyway...to anyone that has read this far...thanks for listening to my admittedly long opinion on this matter!!
-- Amanda
*I bear no responsibility for the Aryan resemblance to Hitler youth. Associating violent jock gangs with Hitler youth might be valid, but it's still cheap and self-serving.
** Dissecting Columbine's Cult of the Athlete
***From the Pinkerton site
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There was a story at CNN about the gaydar device. However, I think people had better watch out where they choose to wear it, what they program into it, and so on.
Frankly, I wouldn't want to see one of these fall into the hands of drunken/violent homophobes with baseball bats.
*sigh*
The research that the earlier poster was referring to was referring to much earlier civilizations than the Native American tribe your grandfather belonged to.
Technology and culture were not fixed and frozen prior to the twentieth century -- there was change, in fact drastic change, between the lives of people 150 centuries ago and the lives of people 5 centuries ago. And technology didn't always change lives for the better -- there were definite hiccups along the way.
The daily lives of ancient people depended greatly on their environments as well as on their level of technology. Life would naturally be easier in the Yucatan than in Greenland.
It's a shame the earlier poster didn't post a link to the actual research so we could rebut/support directly.
Oh yeah -- food made from acorns is gross. Yucca flour is MUCH tastier. :-)
(Mission accomplished: the news is coming on, and the top story is the evil hackers who are targeting the innocents...)
Nobody will ever see this post, so I can kind of just ramble here...to me, it truly is not whether you win or lose. Shit, everyone dies, so ultimately, it's game over, you lose (though if I remember correctly, you are a religious person and would disagree with my metaphor).
If I may point this out, the idea of relaxing for an entire hour with Quake and THEN move on to other games is totally alien to me -- that's a whole lotta time devoted to competing. And among boys, that's not even close to "obsessive".
No matter what your gender, you rank a game by how much fun it really is. Fun for some is bass fishing, for others it could be barbie makeovers, or late night quake games beating the crap out of buddies, or just exploring alien worlds like Riven...
For me, all I really care about is figuring shit out. I like slurping up a problem and coming up with a solution in a real time. Women are good at that kind of stuff (so are men), but they aren't under the influence of male hormones. I think that is why you see women playing solitaire, tetris, riven, oddworld....it doesn't bother them that they aren't scoring off anyone.
Do you REALLY play a game a few dozen more times once you've finished it? Why? Once you've figured it out, why would you play it again? Maybe you are trying to get your money's worth...but I can't even understand that. Once I know all the secrets, that's it. Shelf time.
Dammit -- now I've blown the secret women's code regarding men -- the real reason why we love 'em and leave 'em. :-)
If there is any one game characteristic that unifies women gamers, I would say it would have to be problem solving. Games like Myst and Riven, the Oddworld series, and many good action games (the Marathon series comes to mind) feature excellent gameplay that challenges the mind first and foremost; itchy trigger fingers are a secondary skill.
I have high standards for my games. I like screaming graphics just as much as any other geek, but I am easily bored by repetitive shooting sprees.
flamebait, offtopic alert: Quake? To me it's a yawner -- if I want network play, I'd rather exercise my napoleonic tendencies in Myth II; learning to flank works the mind a little harder.
Back to the subject: I'm not trying to imply that teenage boys are poor at problem-solving, or even uninterested. They just have different standards for what qualifies as an un-fscking-believable game.
Please remember, though, that the ads that are the subject of this story target people who buy magazines and NOT people who buy games. Big difference.
I'm not going to go out and buy any game magazines for the same reason I don't buy auto magazines: the signal-to-pr0n ratio is pathetic. I'd rather read womengamers.com for gaming information...and for you boys out there, check it out -- it's not like the reviews are filled with thinly veiled references to vaginas or anything. (Can I even say that on Slashdot?)
I'd like to know if any males find women gamer sites to be particularly hostile to men.
Scenario A: Networks airbrushing over each other's billboards, buildings, etc. with different sponsors
This will solve itself, because the networks are on a level playing field -- they will most likely come to an out of court agreement, unless they are all as ill-mannered and belligerent as the CBS president.
Scenario B: Networks inserting advertising onto the billboards/signs of smaller businesses.
I almost HOPE they do this. After all, they could argue that the local businesses are getting free advertising merely by being shown in the background of a TV show, and thus the network is merely reclaiming ad space previously given away for free. I'm pretty sure this would backfire though, so I'm not too worried.
The networks inserting advertising onto anything and everything that moves. And stuff that doesn't.
This is the real problem. Most advertising is obviously advertising, but there is a subset that masquerades as truth. Fake websites, fake movie advertisements, some infomercials, and so on. Most of that stuff is easier to pick out because it falls into an advertising "context" -- a 30 second spot, or whatever. But what if ad agencies realize that there is an opportunity to truly blur the line between advertising and reality? Insert an ad masquerading as truth into a show professing to report the truth? How much would that be worth? I know that fake websites are harder to distinguish from fake movie trailers simply because there are no contextual clues ("Rated 'Y' for Yummy").
Just food for thought.
I'm sure that if I were never under any time pressure, I wouldn't have to use it, but no other single module comes close.
(Also, I think this award is for best Perl module, not best CPAN perl module, so strict.pm qualifies.)
My question: With basic research budgets in disarray, do you see any opportunity for amateur scientists to pursue distributed research projects?
I believe that amateur astronomers have done a great deal to assist the "professionals", due to the ease of distributing a great amount of work among many volunteers, but I am not aware of the same phenomenon occuring in any other field.
It has been suggested that the only experimental physics left to do is that which requires billions of dollars and/or 50 acre+ installations. I do not know whether to believe this view -- perhaps with a bit of creativity, experiments could be designed such that they could be farmed out to an array of amateur scientists willing to commit time and money towards the effort (similar to how open source software is pursued now). I have heard of a few such possibilities, eg amateur neutrino detectors, but none that I know of that are endorsed or initiated by institutional science.
To restate my question, is such an approach possible, and/or desirable?
Thank you for your time.
Forte Bravo
Invisibility: Some games contain no women characters at all--many sports simulations are typical of this absence. Girls and women aren't included in such games as the NHL Hockey or NFL Football.
Fancy that. Those male coders out there are writing games meant to be as realistic as possible and they're not putting female hockey players in an NHL game? Those bastards!!!
Tomb Raider 's Lara Croft (with 36-24-36 measurements) promotes an image of femininity nearly unattainable by most girls.
How many fat-ass geek boys with cheeto dust on their scraggly beards get to star in videogames? The male body as portrayed in videogames is unattainable as well. Not even with steroids could a guy end up looking like good ol Duke.
Sure, we all "know" that duke and lara aren't real, aren't meant to be real, but if we are going to throw up our hands about body image, let's not forget boys -- there have been plenty of studies showing that boys and girls are pretty much equally subject to body dysmorphia. Since the standards are different, the effects are different -- bulimia vs steroid use.
I will go out on a limb and say that this particular article, though, is not as bad as these two quotes represent. However, it has a tendency to fail to call on real data, instead using dubious logic and/or anecdote-style "proof".
Some of the articles are more interesting -- actual research documenting female behavior online, or good ideas about the real problem (fewer women going into science and engineering).
If you are a man reading this and you are particularly clever, you will have noticed that I have a gender-neutral login. Whatever you think is the reason for this, you'll probably be wrong.
Here's a theory for you -- our good buddy and cybergod Steve Wozniak left coding to give something back by teaching. Do you think maybe that there is a form of reverse sexism that discourages boys from going into such non-macho fields as education? I've seen quite a few posts on slashdot from tech support guys who say that they feel quite rewarded when they educate a customer about this or that...perhaps their true calling was teaching, but they were discouraged. Maybe this is the reason that there is a bias -- it's not that there are no women in tech, it's that there are no men in other women-dominated fields. Polarization from multiple forms of sexism.
Amanda G.
There is no sig
you COULD create a more efficient cycle though, much like powering cars that burn plant-created alcohols that bind carbon while they grow and release it through combustion.
The ubiquitous blue-collar programmer is a little further off, due to the currently-unique skill set required.
But it could happen.
Hedy Lamarr (sp?).
The newspeak isn't even mildly believable -- how many times can one emphasize the word fun about a privacy issue hot-button and not look like a complete fool? This quote is the only reason given in the Wired article for Amazon choosing to do this. It's not "fun", except where you define "fun" to include looking into the President's trousers (*shudder*) or viewing the World's Greatest Plane Crashes.
Usually it's not good to underestimate the potential stupidity of corporate decisions, but I think in this case, it's not stupidity. Amazon must know that people are becoming increasingly concerned about privacy. I think this is at least partially a PR stunt.
Why?
1. On the Internet, everyone's a voyeur*. Hits++...
2. Data mining companies will be on this like maggots...hits++, analyst reports++
3. Some companies will be pissed off. But not many will go to all the trouble of completely shutting down a corporate relationship with Amazon and opening another with BN. And individuals, well they have nothing to worry about. I mean, Amazon's only targeting companies with 6+ employees, right?...so no great negative effect
Net effect, lots of attention and eyeballs in the short term. In the long term, people's attention spans...what was I saying?
*well, not me, and not you, but everyone else is, right?
There are plenty of assholes from whom I can learn what not to do, who not to be, and how not to live my life -- I think most of us know assholes from whom they can personally take away these lessons.
If the reason for interviewing this guy is because he got on MTV, or because he used technology to get a girl, or because he had a mildly interesting childhood, I'm just so disappointed. Why not interview me? I had a weird childhood (who didn't?)! I have slackware (but I don't KNOW slackware)! I could break into a computer (after reading the directions, of course)! But I'm not stupid enough to call myself a hacker -- I'm not even a script kiddie.
So maybe instead of holy war polls, there could be polls listing possibilities for the next interviewee. I am absolutely sure that there are tons of great hackers, project leaders, and other cool people from whom we could actually learn something. I don't know who these people are, but I bet the /. community knows enough names and backgrounds to have a much more interesting field of candidates for the next interview.
Personally, I would like to see some interviews with more hackers who've gone corporate -- or those who've made the choice not to.
So how 'bout it folks? Names and backgrounds of interview candidates?