August 28, 2000: 2:00 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com announced Monday that they have joined forces in an initiative to sell digital books over the Internet. Amazon.com's
23 million customers can use Microsoft Reader software to download and read content from electronic books to be offered in its future e-book store, the companies announced
at a publishing tradeshow in San Francisco. "We are thrilled that Amazon.com, the No. 1 online bookseller, has selected Microsoft Reader as the software that will evolve the
reading experience for book lovers everywhere," said Dick Brass, vice president of technology development for Microsoft. In afternoon trading Monday, shares of Amazon
(AMZN: Research, Estimates) rose 1/8 to 40-1/16, and Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) shares remained flat at 70-5/8.
Would it scare anyone else if our favorite monopoly gets a stranglehold on the technology that allows you to read books???
August 28, 2000: 2:00 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com announced Monday
that they have joined forces in an initiative to sell digital books over the
Internet.
Amazon.com's 23 million customers can use Microsoft Reader software to
download and read content from electronic books to be offered in its future
e-book store, the companies announced at a publishing tradeshow in San
Francisco.
"We are thrilled that Amazon.com, the No. 1 online bookseller, has selected
Microsoft Reader as the software that will evolve the reading experience for
book lovers everywhere," said Dick Brass, vice president of technology
development for Microsoft.
In afternoon trading Monday, shares of Amazon (AMZN: Research, Estimates)
rose 1/8 to 40-1/16, and Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) shares
remained flat at 70-5/8.
Amazon sure will make alot more money if they don't actually have to ship a physical book, not to mention if you have to reorder it every time you want to reread it, and if you have to buy a different copy for everybody in your family.
And would it scare anyone else if our favorite monopoly gets a stranglehold on the technology that allows you to read books???
Jon, I've reread your post twice, and I keep getting the feeling that your post has this sort of plotline:
"Well, it looks like the plane is going down, we seem to be losing altitude rapidly, and the pilots apparently don't want to share the task of piloting with us, but somebody will figure out how to keep the plane from crashing some time in the future."
I'm not trying to imply that politicians/lobbyists are like the pilots of our societal airplane. What I am trying to say is that very often your articles give good examples of what's going wrong, and then contain absolutely no follow through except for vague prognostications about the future. Why don't you ever include any proposed plans of action for us/. readers? Given this article, you could have had links to the EFF, or to the Democracy Project, both of which are directly concerned with the issues you raise and certainly could use support from the/. community.
So Jon, instead of collecting a paycheck for merely writing more filler for the "eternal debate," as you phrase it, why not finish your articles with concrete suggested plans of action for us to consider? Maybe that way we can band together to save us all from a "crash landing."
1.lead - and lots of it, in each computer, in every monitor's glass, they'll still have lots of lead in their equipment, and I'm guessing they won't be extracting it before getting rid of their old hardware when it comes time
2.ozone - any time you run an electric motor (fan, power supply, dustbuster, whatever) some atmospheric oxygen gets zapped into ozone, an element of smog
3.VOC's - Volatile Organic Compounds, which will be emitted from their new furniture and carpet over the next few years, unless they chose to go with solid wood furniture and simply stain or oil it (which I highly doubt)
While you're at it, why don't you add a fourth reason:
4.CH4 and H2S - methane and hydrogen sulfide, produced as flatulents by all of the people who work there after consuming food of any sort.
I mean, how can any firm be "100% environmentally- friendly" if they actually hire homo sapiens who go around inefficiently converting carbon-based food sources into smelly air polution?
Sarcasm aside, I think your points are pretty specious. Your point about ozone production, although technically accurate, is also misleading because the amount produced is so neglible. One car running for one day produces more NOx's and SO2 (the main constituents of smog) than a computer produces ozone in a lifetime. As for lead in computers, it's not so bad as you suggest. The lead is certainly not volatile (in the sense where it can vaporize into the atmosphere) and there are quite a few firms now that specialize in recyling computer parts, so that the lead doesn't necessarily have to go into a landfill at the end of its lifetime. And, as for your third point, I mean, come on: they can't be environmentally friendly because they use furniture? VOCs from carpets are NOT one of the pressing environmental dangers this world faces.
All in all, I think you are unnessarily pessimistic about solarhost, to the point where you seem to be saying, "Don't bother with any environmentally friendly firms, they can't be 100% correct, so let's stick with those coal burning power plants we use now!" The fact that you apply misleading scientific nomenclature to your argument makes you at worst a troll, and at best a misguided mouthpiece for the energy industry status quo.
So if you're looking to solve the global warming problem, the expense problem, or any problem, by eliminating the dominant energy source, remember the second law of thermodynamics: "Any change in a closed system will tend to make the system more entropic." (more random) Basically any method of generating energy will negatively affect the world in some way (except solar, which negatively affects the sun, slowly).
You seem to have forgotten the definition of a "closed system," which in thermodynamics is simply a system that is impermeable to mass flux (i.e. no mass can go in or out). An "isolated system" is one which is both closed and adiabatic (no heat transfer either). Although you correctly grasped the concept that 'entropy goes up,' you failed to remember that there are conditions attached to this statement. Specifically, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy change of an isolated system in any process must be equal to or greater than zero.
The entire universe can be considered an isolated system, so it would be a correct to say that the entropy of the universe must always increase. However, what makes you think that any part of Earth, or the solar system, or even the Milky Way galaxy is isolated? Does no mass or heat ever cross the border between the U.S. and Canada? Does heat in the form of solar radiation not leave our solar system? When liquid water turns into snowflakes, the "randomness" has certainly not increased; the reason is that the atmosphere is not an isolated system.
I find it annoying when people blithely invoke the rules of thermodynamics to prove whatever they feel like. There are some Christians who claim that the Second Law PROVES the existence of a supreme deity, because how could anything non-random arise when the 2nd Law states that all changes must lead to increased randomness? (The answer: earth isn't an isolated system.)
Here we have a person supporting the Oil Oligarchy by saying that the 2nd Law PROVES that any form of energy production will somehow 'negatively affect the world,' implying that we might as well stick with gasoline. There might be a lot of reasons to use gasoline -- technological limitations, established infrastructure, consumer convenience and corporate greed, etc -- but the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is certainly not one of them.
In light of this article, I think it's a pertinent time to repeat the meme:
No copyright has expired in this country since the end of World War 2.
When the copyrights expire sometime around 2008, Congress will most likely vote to re-extend them again. Unlike what the Founders intended, entire generations can be born and die without seeing a copyright expire. A whole generation with no access to a "common pool of knowledge," but plenty of opportunity to be harassed by corporatist police state goons (e.g. 15 year-olds in Scandinavia).
I don't have any specific reasons I can point to currently, but the whole point of a "no-confidence vote" is to allow for future contigencies. Suppose that the management of Slashdot became embroiled in huge conflict-of-interest charges, with accusations flying all over about serious editorial slants or whatever. It's true that somebody else could start up a new/. with Slashcode, but there are alot of 'barriers to entry,' both physical (servers, staff) and pyschological (no name recognition, no posts, no community). If you could preserve the Slashdot community by simply voting out the bad apples in the management, that would be a good thing.
Moreover, how many managers of web based communities out there would be willing to face the ultimate in responsibility? It would give/. a hell of a lot of geek cachet if the management were willing to be voted out in the case that they lost the confidence of their community.
Having said all that, I recognize that there are a lot of practical reasons why this plan would be difficult to implement for the "management" of/. as a whole. However, I think something like this would work excellently for the people who post stories/editorials/reviews.
Suppose that Person X (e.g. CmdrTaco, JonKatz, timothy, whoever) did something scandalous. Suppose that the people with moderation privileges on/. (i.e. regular users) could then initiate a no-confidence vote on Person X. For the next few days, all moderators who log in would be presented with a little vote screen, asking if they have lost confidence in X because of said scandal, and whether he should be banned from submitting stories. Make the number pretty high, like 95%, so that people can't gang up on JonKatz or whoever.
It's true that people can simply decide not to see Person X's posts in their preferences, but I think a system like this would be even better for 2 reasons: First, even if Person X did something scandalous, not everybody would lock him out, so X would still have ability to influence a large portion of the community with his stories. Second, and most importantly, a vote of no-condifence system would encourage neutral, impartial, and honest behavior on the part of the editorial staff. Think about it, how many editors can get voted out of their job if they do horribly slanted work?
Slashdot is in the unique position of giving individuals editorial power, and I think that power should be extended as far as possible, not as far as it is convenient for Andover.net.
We have also organized ourselves legally in such a way that we will allow registrants on our site (after it has critical mass) to remove the management in a vote of no-confidence. We don't expect this to be a regular event, but it's a safeguard that provides a last resort of accountability.
That's a very interesting idea. Has anybody presented it to Andover.net?
(No offense to Malda and crew, I think they do a great job. But it's still an interesting idea.)
There is a big difference between what Napster is doing and what The Offspring is doing. The Offspring are making money directly off of Napster's trademark, which is specifically illegal. (Sort of like if Microsoft started selling Slashdot.org merchandise from their website.) But Napster only provides a file sharing service; they don't make money directly from the Offspring's trademarks, or any other band. The legality of this is being sorted out in court, but providing a service that allows individiuals to share files definitely has not been decreed to be illegal yet. Selling merchandise with somebody else's tradmarks definitely is illegal.
All he needs is a webpage with an official list of all his songs. If a big surge of people suddenly think that Wierd Al wrote some song called "Girls Just Wanna Felch" or something similar, anybody who's savvy will point out that Wierd Al didn't sing it because it's not on his list. Only morons and script kiddies would be fooled...
A system very similar to what you advocate has been described in some detail in Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game. In that book, Card describes online bulletin boards where people "share information, organize and build consensus around issues," to quote your essay. A central part of this book is that two genius pre-teens write intelligent posts and counterposts in a way that manipulates public opion on crucial political issues, for their own advancement.
So, my question is this: If someday the majority of people formulate their political opinions based on what they read in forums similar to Slashdot, will it be possible for individuals or organizations to manipulate the "public discourse" in such a way that advances their own agendas? If so, what type of steps would you advocate to reduce this type of "political trolling"?
"Apparently Windows95 still had a lot of old 16-bit code in it, whereas Unix (as well as Windows NT) used a flat memory model with pure 32-bit code. Supporting 16-bit code was something that Transmeta had decided to offload into software... The redesign process added about a year to Transmeta's development time."
Transmeta would have been done a year ago, except that Win95 was apparently designed so badly that it took them a whole year to get their technology down to that level. Yet another example of Mr. Gates thwarting the competition!
"So am I warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose"
Here we are in the year 2000, and corporate CEOs feel nothing unusual about comparing themselves to Roman Emperors. I find this abominable. But in a certain sense, this guy is absolutely correct. Corporations can buy politicians with ease, can have 16-year-olds arrested in Scandinavia, and ensure that the mainstream press focuses on sports and Britney Spears rather than on our eroding individual rights. Our society is evolving into a corporatist police state at a rapidly increasing pace, where CEOs ARE the new Caesars. I'm only surprised that this guy from Seagrams actually had the temerity to explicity refer to himself as such.
I, for one, much prefer participating in the barbarian "culture of the Internet" than kowtowing to wannabe Caesars.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon to use Microsoft Reader software to sell electronic books
Would it scare anyone else if our favorite monopoly gets a stranglehold on the technology that allows you to read books???
Amazon to use Microsoft Reader software to sell electronic books
Amazon sure will make alot more money if they don't actually have to ship a physical book, not to mention if you have to reorder it every time you want to reread it, and if you have to buy a different copy for everybody in your family.
And would it scare anyone else if our favorite monopoly gets a stranglehold on the technology that allows you to read books???
Jon, I've reread your post twice, and I keep getting the feeling that your post has this sort of plotline:
/. readers? Given this article, you could have had links to the EFF, or to the Democracy Project, both of which are directly concerned with the issues you raise and certainly could use support from the /. community.
"Well, it looks like the plane is going down, we seem to be losing altitude rapidly, and the pilots apparently don't want to share the task of piloting with us, but somebody will figure out how to keep the plane from crashing some time in the future."
I'm not trying to imply that politicians/lobbyists are like the pilots of our societal airplane. What I am trying to say is that very often your articles give good examples of what's going wrong, and then contain absolutely no follow through except for vague prognostications about the future. Why don't you ever include any proposed plans of action for us
So Jon, instead of collecting a paycheck for merely writing more filler for the "eternal debate," as you phrase it, why not finish your articles with concrete suggested plans of action for us to consider? Maybe that way we can band together to save us all from a "crash landing."
2.ozone - any time you run an electric motor (fan, power supply, dustbuster, whatever) some atmospheric oxygen gets zapped into ozone, an element of smog
3.VOC's - Volatile Organic Compounds, which will be emitted from their new furniture and carpet over the next few years, unless they chose to go with solid wood furniture and simply stain or oil it (which I highly doubt)
While you're at it, why don't you add a fourth reason:
I mean, how can any firm be "100% environmentally- friendly" if they actually hire homo sapiens who go around inefficiently converting carbon-based food sources into smelly air polution?
Sarcasm aside, I think your points are pretty specious. Your point about ozone production, although technically accurate, is also misleading because the amount produced is so neglible. One car running for one day produces more NOx's and SO2 (the main constituents of smog) than a computer produces ozone in a lifetime. As for lead in computers, it's not so bad as you suggest. The lead is certainly not volatile (in the sense where it can vaporize into the atmosphere) and there are quite a few firms now that specialize in recyling computer parts, so that the lead doesn't necessarily have to go into a landfill at the end of its lifetime. And, as for your third point, I mean, come on: they can't be environmentally friendly because they use furniture? VOCs from carpets are NOT one of the pressing environmental dangers this world faces.
All in all, I think you are unnessarily pessimistic about solarhost, to the point where you seem to be saying, "Don't bother with any environmentally friendly firms, they can't be 100% correct, so let's stick with those coal burning power plants we use now!" The fact that you apply misleading scientific nomenclature to your argument makes you at worst a troll, and at best a misguided mouthpiece for the energy industry status quo.
So if you're looking to solve the global warming problem, the expense problem, or any problem, by eliminating the dominant energy source, remember the second law of thermodynamics: "Any change in a closed system will tend to make the system more entropic." (more random) Basically any method of generating energy will negatively affect the world in some way (except solar, which negatively affects the sun, slowly).
You seem to have forgotten the definition of a "closed system," which in thermodynamics is simply a system that is impermeable to mass flux (i.e. no mass can go in or out). An "isolated system" is one which is both closed and adiabatic (no heat transfer either). Although you correctly grasped the concept that 'entropy goes up,' you failed to remember that there are conditions attached to this statement. Specifically, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy change of an isolated system in any process must be equal to or greater than zero.
The entire universe can be considered an isolated system, so it would be a correct to say that the entropy of the universe must always increase. However, what makes you think that any part of Earth, or the solar system, or even the Milky Way galaxy is isolated? Does no mass or heat ever cross the border between the U.S. and Canada? Does heat in the form of solar radiation not leave our solar system? When liquid water turns into snowflakes, the "randomness" has certainly not increased; the reason is that the atmosphere is not an isolated system.
I find it annoying when people blithely invoke the rules of thermodynamics to prove whatever they feel like. There are some Christians who claim that the Second Law PROVES the existence of a supreme deity, because how could anything non-random arise when the 2nd Law states that all changes must lead to increased randomness? (The answer: earth isn't an isolated system.)
Here we have a person supporting the Oil Oligarchy by saying that the 2nd Law PROVES that any form of energy production will somehow 'negatively affect the world,' implying that we might as well stick with gasoline. There might be a lot of reasons to use gasoline -- technological limitations, established infrastructure, consumer convenience and corporate greed, etc -- but the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is certainly not one of them.
In light of this article, I think it's a pertinent time to repeat the meme:
No copyright has expired in this country since the end of World War 2.
When the copyrights expire sometime around 2008, Congress will most likely vote to re-extend them again. Unlike what the Founders intended, entire generations can be born and die without seeing a copyright expire. A whole generation with no access to a "common pool of knowledge," but plenty of opportunity to be harassed by corporatist police state goons (e.g. 15 year-olds in Scandinavia).
Um.... why? Convince me.
/. with Slashcode, but there are alot of 'barriers to entry,' both physical (servers, staff) and pyschological (no name recognition, no posts, no community). If you could preserve the Slashdot community by simply voting out the bad apples in the management, that would be a good thing.
/. a hell of a lot of geek cachet if the management were willing to be voted out in the case that they lost the confidence of their community.
/. as a whole. However, I think something like this would work excellently for the people who post stories/editorials/reviews.
/. (i.e. regular users) could then initiate a no-confidence vote on Person X. For the next few days, all moderators who log in would be presented with a little vote screen, asking if they have lost confidence in X because of said scandal, and whether he should be banned from submitting stories. Make the number pretty high, like 95%, so that people can't gang up on JonKatz or whoever.
I don't have any specific reasons I can point to currently, but the whole point of a "no-confidence vote" is to allow for future contigencies. Suppose that the management of Slashdot became embroiled in huge conflict-of-interest charges, with accusations flying all over about serious editorial slants or whatever. It's true that somebody else could start up a new
Moreover, how many managers of web based communities out there would be willing to face the ultimate in responsibility? It would give
Having said all that, I recognize that there are a lot of practical reasons why this plan would be difficult to implement for the "management" of
Suppose that Person X (e.g. CmdrTaco, JonKatz, timothy, whoever) did something scandalous. Suppose that the people with moderation privileges on
It's true that people can simply decide not to see Person X's posts in their preferences, but I think a system like this would be even better for 2 reasons: First, even if Person X did something scandalous, not everybody would lock him out, so X would still have ability to influence a large portion of the community with his stories. Second, and most importantly, a vote of no-condifence system would encourage neutral, impartial, and honest behavior on the part of the editorial staff. Think about it, how many editors can get voted out of their job if they do horribly slanted work?
Slashdot is in the unique position of giving individuals editorial power, and I think that power should be extended as far as possible, not as far as it is convenient for Andover.net.
We have also organized ourselves legally in such a way that we will allow registrants on our site (after it has critical mass) to remove the management in a vote of no-confidence. We don't expect this to be a regular event, but it's a safeguard that provides a last resort of accountability.
That's a very interesting idea. Has anybody presented it to Andover.net?
(No offense to Malda and crew, I think they do a great job. But it's still an interesting idea.)
There is a big difference between what Napster is doing and what The Offspring is doing. The Offspring are making money directly off of Napster's trademark, which is specifically illegal. (Sort of like if Microsoft started selling Slashdot.org merchandise from their website.) But Napster only provides a file sharing service; they don't make money directly from the Offspring's trademarks, or any other band. The legality of this is being sorted out in court, but providing a service that allows individiuals to share files definitely has not been decreed to be illegal yet. Selling merchandise with somebody else's tradmarks definitely is illegal.
All he needs is a webpage with an official list of all his songs. If a big surge of people suddenly think that Wierd Al wrote some song called "Girls Just Wanna Felch" or something similar, anybody who's savvy will point out that Wierd Al didn't sing it because it's not on his list. Only morons and script kiddies would be fooled...
A system very similar to what you advocate has been described in some detail in Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game. In that book, Card describes online bulletin boards where people "share information, organize and build consensus around issues," to quote your essay. A central part of this book is that two genius pre-teens write intelligent posts and counterposts in a way that manipulates public opion on crucial political issues, for their own advancement.
So, my question is this: If someday the majority of people formulate their political opinions based on what they read in forums similar to Slashdot, will it be possible for individuals or organizations to manipulate the "public discourse" in such a way that advances their own agendas? If so, what type of steps would you advocate to reduce this type of "political trolling"?
"Apparently Windows95 still had a lot of old 16-bit code in it, whereas Unix (as well as Windows NT) used a flat memory model with pure 32-bit code. Supporting 16-bit code was something that Transmeta had decided to offload into software... The redesign process added about a year to Transmeta's development time."
Transmeta would have been done a year ago, except that Win95 was apparently designed so badly that it took them a whole year to get their technology down to that level. Yet another example of Mr. Gates thwarting the competition!
"So am I warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose"
Here we are in the year 2000, and corporate CEOs feel nothing unusual about comparing themselves to Roman Emperors. I find this abominable. But in a certain sense, this guy is absolutely correct. Corporations can buy politicians with ease, can have 16-year-olds arrested in Scandinavia, and ensure that the mainstream press focuses on sports and Britney Spears rather than on our eroding individual rights. Our society is evolving into a corporatist police state at a rapidly increasing pace, where CEOs ARE the new Caesars. I'm only surprised that this guy from Seagrams actually had the temerity to explicity refer to himself as such.
I, for one, much prefer participating in the barbarian "culture of the Internet" than kowtowing to wannabe Caesars.