Katz argues that there exists a culture that has grown up on technology. True. It's clear that the subject of this essay, and the intended reader, are both us: the people who read/lurk/post on slashdot. It's a great generalization for him to assume that we're all young, naive cyber-hippies who foolishly think we're better than people who are less inclined to technology. That's beside the point, though.
Katz argues that this technology society is hopelessly elitist. Also true. But is this a bad thing? Many, many people who post here have expressed their complete loss of trust in corporations and the government. Are we to believe that the masses of people who blindly accept the control of corporations over their lives have the ability to make good decisions about where to take our society?
Decisions are Katz's main point: he says that while we aimlessly argue over issues that don't concern most people, the corporations and governments are conspiring to control our lives, taking the true decision-making away from the individual.
The fact is, many of the issues that are argued over here directly affect most of society. Technology is changing the world today. Most of society, though, is totally disconnected from the real issues - those of privacy, personal freedom, and yes, democracy and capitalism. The masses have accepted the current state of the internet and assumes that speech will always be free. They incorrectly assume that the real power over our human society is held by the individual, not the corporation.
The public is mostly ignorant to the real threats to freedom, partly due to the "monster under the bed" fears of evil hackers and killer computer virii that steal your credit cards.
Katz is backwards in his reasoning. It is not the cyber-minority who are the problem, it is the majority, who have shown that they're willing to let the AOLs of the world run their lives.
I don't dispute that there's just a touch of narcissism here:). But elitism? Hell no. For every person who realizes the true problems that are brought about by technology, there's one less person who isn't willing to do something about changing our world.
What happens when the music industry finally convinces us that CDs aren't the best-quality reproduction of sound possible? (They are.)
They don't actually care about the quality, they care about controlling how and when YOU listen to YOUR music that YOU bought. They'll just use this as a stepping stone to cram encrypted DVD audio down our throats, and eventually they won't even release songs on physical media. Why? Because they can't be individually tagged to track down pirates.
The way they'd LOVE it, is for music to be downloadable to computers/set top boxes in their own encrypted, tagged format. If you share music online, they can download it and see who originally bought the music. They can even punish that person themselves, by disabling their entire music collection! Do you want the music industry to have this power while ripping off both consumers and artists? I thought not.
Fight the RIAA. The internet makes them obsolete, and they know it.
CR does the same thing with computers - A perfectly good Dell will lose out to an HP or something, because the HP comes with a free color printer and "$1000 worth of software". Their policy of not accepting ads or samples is good, but they do compare apples to oranges sometimes..
Actually haven't they gotten cheating under control in Quakeworld now? There was an initial flood of cheaters after the source was released but I was under the impression that there are now effective solutions to cheating. This seems like a real-world example of how cheating may be stopped..
You call me a nerd.. look who's getting so worked up about one little piece of speculation about cheating in a game? You're the reason slashdot is almost not worth visiting any more. People like you.
Who? Are you one of them? Are you secretly the author of one of my favorite games? If you're not, please shut up. If you were really "helluva" lot smarter than me you'd find better uses for your time than bitching about why my comment was moderated up.
Speak for yourself. I've been doing this stuff since Doom and I can tell you that there's a massive community of gamers who wouldn't think of cheating.
You've mentioned two of the most infamous games for cheating (Diablo 1, Quakeworld). I sincerely hope that we've learned something from these games. I believe that lesson is that we need technical solutions to cheating in online games, because suppressing cheat software is doomed to failure. It's easier to suppress drivers than a diablo cheater or a quake auto-aim bot, because anyone can sit down and make one of the latter - not anyone can write drivers for an ASUS card though.
Most (99%+) multiplayer gamers (first person shooters especially) really and truly respect the integrity of the game. If the integrity is destroyed for me, the game has lost all of its fun. I don't understand cheating, but the fact is that it can utterly ruin a game (Again, both Diablo and QW. Diablo never recovered, but the QW community seems to be making progress). The solutions to the Diablo and QW problems were both technical.
It's clear that video card drivers are bound to come out (just look at the long list of nVidia beta drivers that have been leaked). We can't count on ASUS reconsidering releasing these. I think the solution this time rests on the game designers, in the form of some kind of driver signing / certification, a la Microsoft. Don't have a certified driver? Can't play the game.
I don't know a lot about 3D, at all (I hope Carmack replies to this story). You'll see that the worst cheat in this driver is the "see through walls" and "wireframe" modes. If it's not too much of a performance hit, games may have to stop sending information to the video card about polygons that are not visible. I think this would probably kill performance though, as determining which objects block the view of which other objects is a primary function of hardware 3D.
I hope we can learn from our previous battles with cheating. Though I don't think this will do much in the long run, I hope that game companies show that they are not pleased with the decision of ASUS.
I love the euphemisms that spammers use to further their lies. What we call using confirmation emails, they call "double opt-in", as if there were any acceptable "single opt-in" solution. With their "single opt-in", though, they are free to use their dirty lists as they please because if you complain to them they can just say "oh, sorry, someone else must have signed you up!" or, "You dummy, you must have signed up at one of our 'affiliates' and asked to be put on their mailing list". If you had to confirm all the lists you were on, they know that their dirty practices for putting you on lists would never work.
I agree with you. Spam demands legal, and not technical solutions. I support the RBL, but judging by the number of people who are firmly against it or who have been damaged by it, it's clear that the RBL is not the answer. While it greatly reduces spam sent to sites that subscribe to it, it can also be infuriating to be a customer of a company that is on the RBL and is unwilling to fix its open relays. I used to use an @iname.com email address and I couldn't send to many sites because the mail server was listed on the RBL.
In the RBL's defense, though, they won't add a site until they have made a VERY thorough effort to contact the people responsible for the open relay. This means that your server won't be added unless you are either unresponsive, or dumb.
The real solution, of course, should be strict spam laws. The penalty for spam shouldn't be on the end user, it should be against the spammer.
I have to say, if META http-equiv is really such a bad thing to do then why do so many HTML guides teach you how to do it? Yes it's a kludge but a lot of web developers simply don't have full access to the machine they're developing on - using proper redirection isn't an option for people who don't have access to the Apache config file or whatever IIS uses.
It's how the computer is used! Sure, you could sit a bunch of kids in front of some pretty crappy "edu-tainment" software, or let them run willy nilly all over the internet. But that's the extreme low end of the spectrum.
There are many great ways that technology can supplement the K-12 curriculum.
Ever hear of a WebQuest? It's a good way for teachers to use the vast amount of information available on the Internet, while still keeping things structured and not wasting time on having the students find information themselves.
I remember my class producing some sort of newsletter when I was in 6th grade, using Quark on Apple IIe's. How is this bad? I enjoyed learning about desktop publishing. I'm sure some of my less technical classmates gained useful computer skills. Since the whole thing was connected to the subject we were studying at the time, it was relevant to the curriculum.
"Theodore Roszak, a history professor (where? Podunk Community College?) and author of The Cult of Information," says "The idea that they should be swimming in a sea of information is idiotic." what? huh? Let me get this straight. This guy teaches history (which is basically memorizing facts) but he doesn't want kids exposed to information?
There are plenty of good educational websites that aren't just a "sea of information." Many companies base their reputation on providing high quality educational content. Never mind that this was a pretty poor article. Was it news, or opinion? It's not labeled. Note to journalists: You can't start off by stating facts like "A growing number of experts are recommending that young children not be allowed on computers for any reason at all" and descend into diatribe such as:
But teachers and administrators, education's front-line, are seemingly smitten by the new technology. This is unfortunate, because as has been the case with every other fad embraced by public education over the last 40 years, research into computer education and its effect on child development or the learning process is, at best, lacking. Worse, much of the existing research raises lots of red flags.
Since I'm happily on my cable modem, the most interesting thing in this story to me is the URL: www.itu.int. What kind of new TLD is this? Who registers it? I tried to do a whois on it and network solutions told me it was an invalid TLD..
I want to register www.sex.int and sell it for millions of dollars!
Law journals are unique because unlike other journals, there is no peer review process. Anything that looks academic has a chance of getting published, regardless of whether it is based in fact or not. This happened in 1994 I believe, when the infamous "cyberporn" study was printed in the Georgetown law journal. The study, which suggested that most of the traffic on the Internet was weird fetish porn, was irresponsibly written and had no basis in science.
I guess the publishers of this "Internet Law Journal" have every right to call it a journal, but if it continues to read like a newsletter I don't think it will be very respected. One article I clicked on (about the patent problem) actually turned out to just be a bunch of links to other law sites.
I have to say, I don't agree with you at all.. I'd really like to read an actual study that found that 'nerds' children were actually fathered by other men.. doesn't this beg the question, "why are there still so many nerds around?" If the trait of (and this is a blatant stereotype) a smart, well-paid, unattractive and socially inept man was so undesirable, why on earth would there be so many of this kind of people?
The obvious answer is that there is a significantly lower incidence of 4th of July fireworks injuries in this population.. but seriously, where have you read that IQ is decreasing?
When have we proven that we know better than nature? Many smart people believe the human race is heading irreversibly towards extinction, in the near future. Also, think of the extinctions and ecological problems that have been caused by humans transporting plants and animals to foreign parts of the world..
I think you're taking a very dangerous view.. It's irresponsible to think that humans are in a position to determine which traits should be exaggerated and which should be suppressed. Life has been, and always will be about, the continuation of species. Think about what would happen if we engineered a human race without fear, or one that didn't feel pain? Obviously we have these traits for a reason, though an excess of either one can ruin your life.
I don't know if we're wrong for encouraging certain traits in animals. Breeding guard dogs really isn't the issue, I think, because a lot of their skills come from training rather than genetics. I don't want to get into that old debate, though.. so I'll just restate my point. I'm not saying we should stop this kind of genetic engineering (just think of the possibilities.. organ farms.. mindless grunt slaves.. three eyed fish:) I just think we should be careful not to fall into the old trap and think humans know what's best for the world.
Reading this makes me think of what we've learned from evolution. If having this gene were better for the mice in the long run, wouldn't they already have evolved it? It's like, survival of the fittest, man.. I think nature has proven to us that in matters like this, it knows better than us. I really don't think any human can foresee the consequences of flipping around genes like this.
And what would the consequences be if we were to take this discovery and apply it to humans? Why couldn't something like the movie Lawnmower Man happen (of course on a smaller scale)? We need to think long and hard before putting these types of discoveries to use.. we need to ask ourselves why these changes haven't evolved by themselves, in the same way they've been doing for millions of years.
I looked on their web site to find out what this thing was.. why would anyone run this program? It puts an ad bar on your browser, it adds some crappy bookmarks to your browser.. it puts links on your e-mails.. it changes your home page to their page.. it pops up a new window every time you open a new URL!
Not only that, they basically threaten that if you try to remove the software, it will put itself back when you reboot..
Why on earth would you use this? I can't see any redeeming features.. I even went to their homepage and tried running a search. Half the links don't work, and the other half take you to random searches about casinos and stuff..
I don't understand.. doesn't a patent fully disclose the inner workings of an invention? I believe this is so that the patent examiners can make sure that your invention works differently than other inventions that do the same thing. It's also the reason that patents pending are kept secret.
Aren't trade secrets the only things protected from reverse engineering? It seems pretty pointless to reverse engineer something that's patented, because the full text of the patent is already available to anyone.
So, does this mean that players who are travelling very fast will perceive time as moving slower than players who are at rest? Of course this isn't possible.. to address this situation, the manufacturers are including mind-altering drugs which will affect players' perceptions of time.
You are right, this is not the way to go about it. I liked the article until the point where he said what should be done about spam.
In addition to your points, I don't see why the author wants to restrict pornography spam first.. all spam is a form of harassment, so all of it should be made illegal. This solution also doesn't allow an entire ISP to opt out. ISPs are the ones who pay for the bandwidth used to transmit spam, which results in increased prices for consumers. Any proposal for spam legislation should include a provision for entire domains to opt out of spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Katz argues that there exists a culture that has grown up on technology. True. It's clear that the subject of this essay, and the intended reader, are both us: the people who read/lurk/post on slashdot. It's a great generalization for him to assume that we're all young, naive cyber-hippies who foolishly think we're better than people who are less inclined to technology. That's beside the point, though.
Katz argues that this technology society is hopelessly elitist. Also true. But is this a bad thing? Many, many people who post here have expressed their complete loss of trust in corporations and the government. Are we to believe that the masses of people who blindly accept the control of corporations over their lives have the ability to make good decisions about where to take our society?
Decisions are Katz's main point: he says that while we aimlessly argue over issues that don't concern most people, the corporations and governments are conspiring to control our lives, taking the true decision-making away from the individual.
The fact is, many of the issues that are argued over here directly affect most of society. Technology is changing the world today. Most of society, though, is totally disconnected from the real issues - those of privacy, personal freedom, and yes, democracy and capitalism. The masses have accepted the current state of the internet and assumes that speech will always be free. They incorrectly assume that the real power over our human society is held by the individual, not the corporation.
The public is mostly ignorant to the real threats to freedom, partly due to the "monster under the bed" fears of evil hackers and killer computer virii that steal your credit cards.
Katz is backwards in his reasoning. It is not the cyber-minority who are the problem, it is the majority, who have shown that they're willing to let the AOLs of the world run their lives.
I don't dispute that there's just a touch of narcissism here :). But elitism? Hell no. For every person who realizes the true problems that are brought about by technology, there's one less person who isn't willing to do something about changing our world.
--
They don't actually care about the quality, they care about controlling how and when YOU listen to YOUR music that YOU bought. They'll just use this as a stepping stone to cram encrypted DVD audio down our throats, and eventually they won't even release songs on physical media. Why? Because they can't be individually tagged to track down pirates.
The way they'd LOVE it, is for music to be downloadable to computers/set top boxes in their own encrypted, tagged format. If you share music online, they can download it and see who originally bought the music. They can even punish that person themselves, by disabling their entire music collection! Do you want the music industry to have this power while ripping off both consumers and artists? I thought not.
Fight the RIAA. The internet makes them obsolete, and they know it.
--
Actually, that's more or less the argument Napster is going to use. Their lawyer was involved with the Justice department case against MS.
--
CR does the same thing with computers - A perfectly good Dell will lose out to an HP or something, because the HP comes with a free color printer and "$1000 worth of software". Their policy of not accepting ads or samples is good, but they do compare apples to oranges sometimes..
--
Actually haven't they gotten cheating under control in Quakeworld now? There was an initial flood of cheaters after the source was released but I was under the impression that there are now effective solutions to cheating. This seems like a real-world example of how cheating may be stopped..
--
You call me a nerd.. look who's getting so worked up about one little piece of speculation about cheating in a game? You're the reason slashdot is almost not worth visiting any more. People like you.
--
Who? Are you one of them? Are you secretly the author of one of my favorite games? If you're not, please shut up. If you were really "helluva" lot smarter than me you'd find better uses for your time than bitching about why my comment was moderated up.
--
Speak for yourself. I've been doing this stuff since Doom and I can tell you that there's a massive community of gamers who wouldn't think of cheating.
--
Most (99%+) multiplayer gamers (first person shooters especially) really and truly respect the integrity of the game. If the integrity is destroyed for me, the game has lost all of its fun. I don't understand cheating, but the fact is that it can utterly ruin a game (Again, both Diablo and QW. Diablo never recovered, but the QW community seems to be making progress). The solutions to the Diablo and QW problems were both technical.
It's clear that video card drivers are bound to come out (just look at the long list of nVidia beta drivers that have been leaked). We can't count on ASUS reconsidering releasing these. I think the solution this time rests on the game designers, in the form of some kind of driver signing / certification, a la Microsoft. Don't have a certified driver? Can't play the game.
I don't know a lot about 3D, at all (I hope Carmack replies to this story). You'll see that the worst cheat in this driver is the "see through walls" and "wireframe" modes. If it's not too much of a performance hit, games may have to stop sending information to the video card about polygons that are not visible. I think this would probably kill performance though, as determining which objects block the view of which other objects is a primary function of hardware 3D.
I hope we can learn from our previous battles with cheating. Though I don't think this will do much in the long run, I hope that game companies show that they are not pleased with the decision of ASUS.
--
I love the euphemisms that spammers use to further their lies. What we call using confirmation emails, they call "double opt-in", as if there were any acceptable "single opt-in" solution. With their "single opt-in", though, they are free to use their dirty lists as they please because if you complain to them they can just say "oh, sorry, someone else must have signed you up!" or, "You dummy, you must have signed up at one of our 'affiliates' and asked to be put on their mailing list". If you had to confirm all the lists you were on, they know that their dirty practices for putting you on lists would never work.
--
In the RBL's defense, though, they won't add a site until they have made a VERY thorough effort to contact the people responsible for the open relay. This means that your server won't be added unless you are either unresponsive, or dumb.
The real solution, of course, should be strict spam laws. The penalty for spam shouldn't be on the end user, it should be against the spammer.
--
I have to say, if META http-equiv is really such a bad thing to do then why do so many HTML guides teach you how to do it? Yes it's a kludge but a lot of web developers simply don't have full access to the machine they're developing on - using proper redirection isn't an option for people who don't have access to the Apache config file or whatever IIS uses.
--
There are many great ways that technology can supplement the K-12 curriculum.
Ever hear of a WebQuest? It's a good way for teachers to use the vast amount of information available on the Internet, while still keeping things structured and not wasting time on having the students find information themselves.
I remember my class producing some sort of newsletter when I was in 6th grade, using Quark on Apple IIe's. How is this bad? I enjoyed learning about desktop publishing. I'm sure some of my less technical classmates gained useful computer skills. Since the whole thing was connected to the subject we were studying at the time, it was relevant to the curriculum.
"Theodore Roszak, a history professor (where? Podunk Community College?) and author of The Cult of Information," says "The idea that they should be swimming in a sea of information is idiotic." what? huh? Let me get this straight. This guy teaches history (which is basically memorizing facts) but he doesn't want kids exposed to information?
There are plenty of good educational websites that aren't just a "sea of information." Many companies base their reputation on providing high quality educational content. Never mind that this was a pretty poor article. Was it news, or opinion? It's not labeled. Note to journalists: You can't start off by stating facts like "A growing number of experts are recommending that young children not be allowed on computers for any reason at all" and descend into diatribe such as:
--
I want to register www.sex.int and sell it for millions of dollars!
--
I guess the publishers of this "Internet Law Journal" have every right to call it a journal, but if it continues to read like a newsletter I don't think it will be very respected. One article I clicked on (about the patent problem) actually turned out to just be a bunch of links to other law sites.
--
The obvious answer is that there is a significantly lower incidence of 4th of July fireworks injuries in this population.. but seriously, where have you read that IQ is decreasing?
--
I think you're taking a very dangerous view.. It's irresponsible to think that humans are in a position to determine which traits should be exaggerated and which should be suppressed. Life has been, and always will be about, the continuation of species. Think about what would happen if we engineered a human race without fear, or one that didn't feel pain? Obviously we have these traits for a reason, though an excess of either one can ruin your life.
I don't know if we're wrong for encouraging certain traits in animals. Breeding guard dogs really isn't the issue, I think, because a lot of their skills come from training rather than genetics. I don't want to get into that old debate, though.. so I'll just restate my point. I'm not saying we should stop this kind of genetic engineering (just think of the possibilities.. organ farms.. mindless grunt slaves.. three eyed fish :) I just think we should be careful not to fall into the old trap and think humans know what's best for the world.
--
And what would the consequences be if we were to take this discovery and apply it to humans? Why couldn't something like the movie Lawnmower Man happen (of course on a smaller scale)? We need to think long and hard before putting these types of discoveries to use.. we need to ask ourselves why these changes haven't evolved by themselves, in the same way they've been doing for millions of years.
--
Seriously, though, Cyber Promotions has been dead for years. Sanford says he's anti-spam now, but his actions don't reflect this.
Not only that, they basically threaten that if you try to remove the software, it will put itself back when you reboot..
Why on earth would you use this? I can't see any redeeming features.. I even went to their homepage and tried running a search. Half the links don't work, and the other half take you to random searches about casinos and stuff..
I don't understand.. doesn't a patent fully disclose the inner workings of an invention? I believe this is so that the patent examiners can make sure that your invention works differently than other inventions that do the same thing. It's also the reason that patents pending are kept secret.
Aren't trade secrets the only things protected from reverse engineering? It seems pretty pointless to reverse engineer something that's patented, because the full text of the patent is already available to anyone.
Faster chips typically mean more powerful processors
Thanks, Cnet! I always wondered what a faster chip was good for. Coming soon to an informative Cnet article near you:
I could go on.. but I'll stop here and just say, thanks Cnet!
So, does this mean that players who are travelling very fast will perceive time as moving slower than players who are at rest? Of course this isn't possible.. to address this situation, the manufacturers are including mind-altering drugs which will affect players' perceptions of time.
In addition to your points, I don't see why the author wants to restrict pornography spam first.. all spam is a form of harassment, so all of it should be made illegal. This solution also doesn't allow an entire ISP to opt out. ISPs are the ones who pay for the bandwidth used to transmit spam, which results in increased prices for consumers. Any proposal for spam legislation should include a provision for entire domains to opt out of spam.