An "artistic industry"? You really think that creating content so that advertisers can target eyeballs equals artistic? This is an important point: the show is not the product, you are.
To be more specific: the show exists only to sell ads. While the show has to be just good enough to get viewers, the viewers are the commodity, not the show. The viewers are being sold to the advertisers, who pay a huge premium for shows that have higher ratings. The show could be crap, and most of the times it is; but the show isn't being made to make you happy; it's being made to make the advertisers happy (i.e., sell more of their products).
Don't you remember hearing how a certain scene was deleted because it offended the advertisers? I don't remember ever hearing about a scene being removed because it offended viewers (unless those viewers were also advertisers).
NBC canceled Friends, and with good reason as another responder showed: the actors are getting older and aren't "hip".
With Simpsons, the actors (in fact, the characters) never age.
If the show's quality declines enough, people will stop watching and it'll get canceled. If the quality declines according to you but the show isn't canceled, then your quality meter doesn't jibe with the average viewer's.
Which is not to say that either of you are wrong; just that people get upset about ridiculous things (killing 100 Iraqis for every American killed is something to get upset about, especially because we shouldn't have been there in the first fucking place).
Domo arigato. Although it's coming down at basically the same speed as the download I had started, I feel better about providing some upload bandwidth to the other suckers trying to get it.;-)
Jesus understood how God works. He shared that with his fellow men for their betterment. If others can understand how God works and how his works work, isn't it the height of enlightenment and Godliness to share that with others?
Or are you saying the quest for knowledge is ultimately futile and we should all tithe our priests unquestioningly and then die, secure in the "knowledge" that some unmeasurable part of us isn't actually dying?
Reminds me of Grampa Simpson's attempt at getting a driver's license, ending with a newspaper with his picture and the caption, "Angry Man Yells at Cloud".
A response said 4 MB/s. So once we have 3G, we should be able to have just a small amount of memory in the device itself, for taking pictures; when recording video, it streams it back to some central office (either your PC if it's on the internet and can talk fast enough, or you pay for their or someone else's servers to handle the data).
The huge benefit to this is, if you're recording something dangerous like a cop beating up a protestor and the cops then detain you and smash your device -- well, you still will have the video you just took.
Espionage uses as well.
Personally, I'd like such a device in a head-mounted form factor (perhaps embedded in my glasses?) so it's constantly recording everything I do, everywhere I go, every conversation I have. That way I'll have a complete record which I can review, and aid my memory (and also provide alibis, if necessary).
People choose to buy video games, like any other product.
Perhaps this is one reason Valve is moving to Steam-based sales: they can treat it like cable or satellite radio. Howard Stern is moving to Sirius satellite exactly because there is no regulation there.
Perhaps all games will be banned from stores, just like all entendres (let alone the double kind) are banned from the airwaves. The people will move on; we've tasted "censorship = damage and we can route around it" and we won't give that up.
Star Trek utopia kick? Sure, whatever, vitriol back at you for thinking inside the box.
Full-blown nanotech will be here in less than 20 years. It is not going to creep up on you: it'll be here all of a sudden. Once one assembler is created, it'll be less than a year that an organization takes it upon themselves to provide a "replicator" to every human on the planet. (I don't particularly like Star Trek myself, but everyone knows what a "replicator" is; it's become like kleenex or xerox.)
There goes the food problem.
How is history any possible indicator of what's going to happen as we approach and pass through the singularity? How many singularities have we gone through in recorded history? (My guess is none but feel free to surprise me.)
OSS itself features highly in Christine Peterson's talks and works; the Foresight Institute is aptly named. As we start designing nanocritters, we're going to want the ability to share them. Putting them under the GPL or similar open-source license would ensure that others can benefit from them, add to them, and share them with others.
Anyone can build an STL (scanning tunnelling microscope) for about $300. Although this moves atoms around slowly, you just need to move enough to make an "arm" to help you move more, and then the arm builds a couple more arms, exponentially, until you have a box that looks like Rincewind's sapient pearwood luggage turned inside out.
Yes, it's currently a pipe dream. So were space flight and huge explosions at one point.
That Torvalds duties differ by miles from that of Ballmer and Gates is a sign of genius - Linus can manage an open source development organization without the traditional management hierarchy that is managed by Ballmer/Gates and all the rest of 'em.
I believe that we will see more of this as time goes on. With the coming of nanotechnology, we won't need companies backing projects since the "workers" in the projects will not need an income, as they will be able to replicate any material goods (including steaks and Corvettes). So there will be a lot more projects, not just software, in which the "organization" is very loose and geographically spread out.
I think Torvalds is most definitely on the leading edge of a complete shift in the fundamentals of what it means to "work." I think it's really cool that we're seeing the beginning of a nanotechnological society several years before we actually have full-blown nanotech.
It's easy, it's effective, but it isn't as overly harsh as it would be to make someone a felon and put them in jail for several years.
Which is exactly why civil suits won't be the way to go. They don't want to catch you and make you pay; they want to make an example of you so that others won't want to get caught, or will decide that robbing the DVD from a store carries less penalty than downloading it.
It's all about control. And here's a crazy thought: in America, ex-felons cannot vote. So if you want to get rid of a certain mentality (like, "information should be free"), then all you have to do is felonize the sharing of information, and then catch all the sharers and nobody will vote to remove the law. Pretty tricky, that.
I just find it abhorrent that felons cannot vote. Felons shouldn't have to pay taxes, then, either--paying taxes without the right to vote is taxation without representation, which is why we dumped tea over 200 years ago.
The comparison is spot on: marijuana use was perfectly legal (in fact, it was even (gasp!) advertised!) before the law was changed.
Why was the law changed? Well, we don't let ex-felons vote, and we wanted to remove the newly-instituted black vote however we could, so we criminalized something we knew everyone did and then selectively enforced it.
Exactly. There are victimful behaviors that are not crimes, but not victimizing enough to be made into crimes. Things like, for example, hitting your kids. Or kids fighting on the playground. Or cheating on a test (against school rules, but you won't go to jail or be fined for it). Or running over a skunk/raccoon/wildebeest (not someone's pet, that is).
And then there are crimes which don't have a victim, which seems absurd; if nobody is being wronged wtf does the gubmint care what I negotiate with my fellow sovereign? But apparently they do, so I cannot legally have sex with someone for exchange of other item or service of value (excepting, of course, where there are rings involved); I cannot put whatever substance I choose to into my own body (I can't make a victim out of myself, unless I suppose I'm multiple personality disordered and one is out the get the other, which I'm not positive is not the case but right now I'm the one in control); and I can't share my toys with my friends unless I also take my toys back (no file copying, but I can play the song for them in my room/car).
With this new law, we're going to make sharing illegal. What will we teach kindergardners then? "Sharing is good, but only physical goods, and only when you can't make copies of them. Keep your toys out of the replicator, boys and girls!"
What would you have the father do, then? Buy the kid a hooker? Ask him to join mom and dad in the bedroom? ("Every sperm is saaaacred...") I'd much rather have been given some magazines when I was a kid and told "you're not going to go blind, and you need to remove the testosterone at least once a week, otherwise your body will remove it for you and we'll have to launder the sheets."
Porn may create a completely unrealistic fantasy, but then so does the Matrix and the Iraq war. And the Matrix will be possible in a couple years; whether the Iraq war will be over by then is anybody's guess.
ALWAYS a bad situation to be in, where it is nearly impossible to avoid violating a law - then the law becomes a means to randomly smack-down on people for whatever you wish to discriminate against them for.
EXACTLY. Ayn Rand had it right over 50 years ago with this passage from Atlas Shrugged:
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
~Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
I wonder whether the increasing price of gasoline will change people's behavior enough to drastically change the single-occupant vehicle.
I think that, combined with autonomous vehicles, could make for a drastic decrease in single-occupant-vehicles.
If cars drive themselves, then it wouldn't be difficult to create a taxi service with no taxi drivers. I think car ownership is going to go waaaaaaay down once this arrives. I know I'd give up having a car if I could pay $200 a month for as many rides as I wanted.
Within reason, I suppose, but they would probably offer a "commuter's rate" which included weekends. Perhaps similar to some cell phone plans, where they have "rollover minutes", you could have "rollover miles" so you can take a trip across the country once a year or something.
Yeah, and my stock options will always be more valuable than yours, because we work 80-100 hour weeks and get products out faster.
I don't agree with pre-emptive war that's not even formally declared, though.
Perhaps I'd have better quality-of-life if I were in your country, but I think I'd find myself itching to work when I was forced home after 1/3 of my normal week...
Google announced their own Desktop Search technology recently; the tool is fast but is limited in capabilities.
What capabilities is it limited in? It does a great job searching both my home and work machines (in fact, the "fuck" test found some documents on my work machine that I didn't know were there, and I promptly removed them both from my machine and from the locations it will search).
When I need to find an email that I sent or received, I use the Google Desktop Search Tool. It's way faster than Outlook, and can even open the found email up using Outlook! That's fantastic. The only thing I wish it could do (aha! One of the limitations) is open the folder that that email is in (or at least, tell me which folder it is). I can forward the email without knowing that, but I can't include a copy of the email in another email (as an attachment, that is) without knowing the folder it's in so I can drag-and-drop it.
From the OP:
if it doesnt include spyware, they are one step ahead of Google in that department
What spyware do you think Google includes? I haven't found any, and I use both Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. It does have issues with Netlimiter and Xfire, but I don't really need those so I uninstalled them. I can limit upload speeds in Azureus using Azureus itself now (2.2.0.0); it's nice to be able to see the graph in Netlimiter but Google's functionality makes me much more productive than looking at pretty graphs so I made my decision. And Xfire was installed with America's Army, and a) I haven't even used it (Xfire); and b) I probably won't use AA much.
Now, granted that Google is in a unique position of being able to amass and conglomerate every company's IP now, and perhaps Google HQ has their own "search users" tool which will find my "fuck" document (and yours as well), making Google likely to be bought by the NSA for inclusion in Echelon. I'm not sure how firmly my tongue is in my cheek on that one, actually...
I'm not sure how valuable that kind of info would be on most shows.
I would say very. It would tell them which commercials are good enough in fast-forward (or "only see an instant then rewind and play it" like my ReplayTV, and the TiVo can be programmed to have a 30-second skip as well but it seems to keep "turning off" the setting so we have to keep programming it...), and which commercials are ignored.
I tend to watch most of the ads for other shows, which tend to appear at the end of the commercial block. Many of those shows I watch, and I'm interested in learning what shows are new as well. The first commercial in the block is usually a movie, so I tend to watch those, again to stay informed.
It's funny, people at work will ask me, "Have you seen that commercial where" etc., and I have to say, "Sorry, I don't watch most commercials, I have a ReplayTV."
But as far as the information's value, advertisers would pay good money to know what's effective in this new medium.
Slashdot Mirror
To be more specific: the show exists only to sell ads. While the show has to be just good enough to get viewers, the viewers are the commodity, not the show. The viewers are being sold to the advertisers, who pay a huge premium for shows that have higher ratings. The show could be crap, and most of the times it is; but the show isn't being made to make you happy; it's being made to make the advertisers happy (i.e., sell more of their products).
Don't you remember hearing how a certain scene was deleted because it offended the advertisers? I don't remember ever hearing about a scene being removed because it offended viewers (unless those viewers were also advertisers).
With Simpsons, the actors (in fact, the characters) never age.
If the show's quality declines enough, people will stop watching and it'll get canceled. If the quality declines according to you but the show isn't canceled, then your quality meter doesn't jibe with the average viewer's.
Which is not to say that either of you are wrong; just that people get upset about ridiculous things (killing 100 Iraqis for every American killed is something to get upset about, especially because we shouldn't have been there in the first fucking place).
It's embarassing to live in a capitalistic society? Would you prefer that losses dictate behavior?
Domo arigato. Although it's coming down at basically the same speed as the download I had started, I feel better about providing some upload bandwidth to the other suckers trying to get it. ;-)
Jesus understood how God works. He shared that with his fellow men for their betterment. If others can understand how God works and how his works work, isn't it the height of enlightenment and Godliness to share that with others?
Or are you saying the quest for knowledge is ultimately futile and we should all tithe our priests unquestioningly and then die, secure in the "knowledge" that some unmeasurable part of us isn't actually dying?
No thanks, I'll take life extension any day.
Reminds me of Grampa Simpson's attempt at getting a driver's license, ending with a newspaper with his picture and the caption, "Angry Man Yells at Cloud".
The huge benefit to this is, if you're recording something dangerous like a cop beating up a protestor and the cops then detain you and smash your device -- well, you still will have the video you just took.
Espionage uses as well.
Personally, I'd like such a device in a head-mounted form factor (perhaps embedded in my glasses?) so it's constantly recording everything I do, everywhere I go, every conversation I have. That way I'll have a complete record which I can review, and aid my memory (and also provide alibis, if necessary).
Perhaps this is one reason Valve is moving to Steam-based sales: they can treat it like cable or satellite radio. Howard Stern is moving to Sirius satellite exactly because there is no regulation there.
Perhaps all games will be banned from stores, just like all entendres (let alone the double kind) are banned from the airwaves. The people will move on; we've tasted "censorship = damage and we can route around it" and we won't give that up.
One is all that is required (to initiate a serious problem).
Full-blown nanotech will be here in less than 20 years. It is not going to creep up on you: it'll be here all of a sudden. Once one assembler is created, it'll be less than a year that an organization takes it upon themselves to provide a "replicator" to every human on the planet. (I don't particularly like Star Trek myself, but everyone knows what a "replicator" is; it's become like kleenex or xerox.)
There goes the food problem.
How is history any possible indicator of what's going to happen as we approach and pass through the singularity? How many singularities have we gone through in recorded history? (My guess is none but feel free to surprise me.)
OSS itself features highly in Christine Peterson's talks and works; the Foresight Institute is aptly named. As we start designing nanocritters, we're going to want the ability to share them. Putting them under the GPL or similar open-source license would ensure that others can benefit from them, add to them, and share them with others.
Anyone can build an STL (scanning tunnelling microscope) for about $300. Although this moves atoms around slowly, you just need to move enough to make an "arm" to help you move more, and then the arm builds a couple more arms, exponentially, until you have a box that looks like Rincewind's sapient pearwood luggage turned inside out.
Yes, it's currently a pipe dream. So were space flight and huge explosions at one point.
I believe that we will see more of this as time goes on. With the coming of nanotechnology, we won't need companies backing projects since the "workers" in the projects will not need an income, as they will be able to replicate any material goods (including steaks and Corvettes). So there will be a lot more projects, not just software, in which the "organization" is very loose and geographically spread out.
I think Torvalds is most definitely on the leading edge of a complete shift in the fundamentals of what it means to "work." I think it's really cool that we're seeing the beginning of a nanotechnological society several years before we actually have full-blown nanotech.
Which is exactly why civil suits won't be the way to go. They don't want to catch you and make you pay; they want to make an example of you so that others won't want to get caught, or will decide that robbing the DVD from a store carries less penalty than downloading it.
It's all about control. And here's a crazy thought: in America, ex-felons cannot vote. So if you want to get rid of a certain mentality (like, "information should be free"), then all you have to do is felonize the sharing of information, and then catch all the sharers and nobody will vote to remove the law. Pretty tricky, that.
I just find it abhorrent that felons cannot vote. Felons shouldn't have to pay taxes, then, either--paying taxes without the right to vote is taxation without representation, which is why we dumped tea over 200 years ago.
Why was the law changed? Well, we don't let ex-felons vote, and we wanted to remove the newly-instituted black vote however we could, so we criminalized something we knew everyone did and then selectively enforced it.
Exactly. There are victimful behaviors that are not crimes, but not victimizing enough to be made into crimes. Things like, for example, hitting your kids. Or kids fighting on the playground. Or cheating on a test (against school rules, but you won't go to jail or be fined for it). Or running over a skunk/raccoon/wildebeest (not someone's pet, that is).
And then there are crimes which don't have a victim, which seems absurd; if nobody is being wronged wtf does the gubmint care what I negotiate with my fellow sovereign? But apparently they do, so I cannot legally have sex with someone for exchange of other item or service of value (excepting, of course, where there are rings involved); I cannot put whatever substance I choose to into my own body (I can't make a victim out of myself, unless I suppose I'm multiple personality disordered and one is out the get the other, which I'm not positive is not the case but right now I'm the one in control); and I can't share my toys with my friends unless I also take my toys back (no file copying, but I can play the song for them in my room/car).
With this new law, we're going to make sharing illegal. What will we teach kindergardners then? "Sharing is good, but only physical goods, and only when you can't make copies of them. Keep your toys out of the replicator, boys and girls!"
War on Zebras!
Porn may create a completely unrealistic fantasy, but then so does the Matrix and the Iraq war. And the Matrix will be possible in a couple years; whether the Iraq war will be over by then is anybody's guess.
"Protecting" children from the world will make them less able to deal with it.
EXACTLY. Ayn Rand had it right over 50 years ago with this passage from Atlas Shrugged:
I think that, combined with autonomous vehicles, could make for a drastic decrease in single-occupant-vehicles.
If cars drive themselves, then it wouldn't be difficult to create a taxi service with no taxi drivers. I think car ownership is going to go waaaaaaay down once this arrives. I know I'd give up having a car if I could pay $200 a month for as many rides as I wanted.
Within reason, I suppose, but they would probably offer a "commuter's rate" which included weekends. Perhaps similar to some cell phone plans, where they have "rollover minutes", you could have "rollover miles" so you can take a trip across the country once a year or something.
Yeah, they could call it ... C TX ...
Then get sued by monitor makers...
I did realize it, I was making a funny. (Not that the mods noticed...) Cheers! ;-)
I don't agree with pre-emptive war that's not even formally declared, though.
Perhaps I'd have better quality-of-life if I were in your country, but I think I'd find myself itching to work when I was forced home after 1/3 of my normal week...
When I need to find an email that I sent or received, I use the Google Desktop Search Tool. It's way faster than Outlook, and can even open the found email up using Outlook! That's fantastic. The only thing I wish it could do (aha! One of the limitations) is open the folder that that email is in (or at least, tell me which folder it is). I can forward the email without knowing that, but I can't include a copy of the email in another email (as an attachment, that is) without knowing the folder it's in so I can drag-and-drop it.
From the OP:
What spyware do you think Google includes? I haven't found any, and I use both Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. It does have issues with Netlimiter and Xfire, but I don't really need those so I uninstalled them. I can limit upload speeds in Azureus using Azureus itself now (2.2.0.0); it's nice to be able to see the graph in Netlimiter but Google's functionality makes me much more productive than looking at pretty graphs so I made my decision. And Xfire was installed with America's Army, and a) I haven't even used it (Xfire); and b) I probably won't use AA much.Now, granted that Google is in a unique position of being able to amass and conglomerate every company's IP now, and perhaps Google HQ has their own "search users" tool which will find my "fuck" document (and yours as well), making Google likely to be bought by the NSA for inclusion in Echelon. I'm not sure how firmly my tongue is in my cheek on that one, actually...
You forgot the line of "--" before your Note...
I would say very . It would tell them which commercials are good enough in fast-forward (or "only see an instant then rewind and play it" like my ReplayTV, and the TiVo can be programmed to have a 30-second skip as well but it seems to keep "turning off" the setting so we have to keep programming it...), and which commercials are ignored.
I tend to watch most of the ads for other shows, which tend to appear at the end of the commercial block. Many of those shows I watch, and I'm interested in learning what shows are new as well. The first commercial in the block is usually a movie, so I tend to watch those, again to stay informed.
It's funny, people at work will ask me, "Have you seen that commercial where" etc., and I have to say, "Sorry, I don't watch most commercials, I have a ReplayTV."
But as far as the information's value, advertisers would pay good money to know what's effective in this new medium.