NOTE: This response became amazingly long. I pasted it into OpenOffice.org and ran a word-count. 2,630. Better get your popcorn now, 'cause there's no intermission.
Ooo, this one's interesting. But actually, I have already thought about this. Let me go through and actually answer all those rhetorical questions you pose. (That's the danger with asking rhetorical questions - if your audience answers them in a way you didn't anticipate, they rapidly become unpersuasive.)
> When you share your ideas with others, do you own those ideas?
Nope. You can't own ideas; they're non-tangible. Perhaps you are thinking of Thomas Jefferson's Letter to Isaac Mcpherson, wherein he states "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."
> Does it matter if you wrote them down first?
Again, no.
> Does it matter where you drew inspiration for those ideas?
Depends on how you mean "matter." If you're trying to imply that drawing inspiration from older works makes the derivative work less valuable, then clearly the answer is "no."
> While you and I might agree that plagiarism is lying, theft, and wrong, would it shock you to > learn that not everyone thinks as we do?
I teach rhetoric and composition for a living. That's ALL about disagreement. Furthermore, I'm not stupid. Of course people think differently from one another; and what a dull, lifeless world it would be if we didn't!
> Is it equally shocking that after a whole freaking class period on the topic, others still do not agree?
Since we've established that I'm not shocked by the existence of disagreement, I am also not shocked by the fact that my students disagree with me about plagiarism. What I do find irritating (and puzzling!) is that when they're clearly told "X is plagiarism; don't do it; if you do you'll get punished," they apparently lack the self-interest to avoid the punishment. I think perhaps that they're still learning that (shock!) rules really do apply to them, they're not exempt.
> Do you attribute this to a lack of moral values or understanding?
If by "this" you mean "the student's disagreement," then neither. I attribute it to broad cultural forces that have de-emphasized the importance of personal responsibility, and also to their youth. Young people do stupid stuff, because they haven't learned better. IF, however, the word "this" refers to the infringing behavior, then it depends on the student. I've seen some who simply didn't understand; and others who consciously set out to subvert the system for their own personal gain.
> As more and more members of society become literate writers, and as our capacity to both capture and > share these writings increase, the total space available for new and original work decreases.
Two points. First, I find your assumption that there is a finite amount of knowledge highly dubious. There are three types of knowledge: that which we know and understand; that which we know of but do not understand; and that which we do not know at all. In the first type, we often discover that something we thought we understood we actually didn't. EG: Newton's laws of gravity turned out not to account for all observable phenomena, and so Einstein was led to re-consider the problem. The second type is often easier to see -- we know there's something going on, but don't fully understand it. EG: we know what the human genome does, but there remains a huge amount that we don't know about how exactly it works, hence the field of proteomics. The third type is the most troublesome of all. We don't know what we don't
Sure. And if a boss tells 30 of is subordinates all do to the same thing, is it unreasonable or unwanted if they collaborate?
Not at all unreasonable. But before you can work effectively in a group, you need to know how to work alone. Which is why we give them assignments in college where they have to do it themselves. Plagiarizing and collaborating on assignments that explicitly call for each student to work alone undermines their learning.
If a professor wants students to actually think and produce new (or at least constructively derivative) material, the assignment can't be the same for everyone in every class, at college after college, year after year.
1) No good teacher uses the same assignments year after year. I change mine every term, and so do most of the other teachers I know. We do so, not because the old assignments get "stale" somehow, but because students pass on their papers to newer students.
2) Assignments should always offer a decent amount of flexibility. This is partly because the writing tends to get worse when the assignment is inflexible. But it's also because reading forty or fifty essays on the same topic, most of which will be poorly written, is an exercise in masochism. Building flexibility into the assignments gives the students scope to find an approach they find interesting (or at least tolerable) and keeps the instructor from going insane during grading.
3) In a freshman level class, and indeed in most undergraduate classes, you can't expect the students to create new material. With rare, rare exceptions, it's simply beyond their current capabilities to come up with genuinely new contributions to knowledge. If they get to that point, it tends to happen towards the end of the undergrad years, or in graduate school.
4) The thinking part is the real goal. And in this respect, the only thing you need to do is craft an assignment that requires the student to grapple with ideas that they haven't thought about before.
Every single one of these pedagogical goals is completely destroyed when the student plagiarizes. If they don't do the assignment, they're not learning from it.
You seem to be talking about students working together to complete the work; I'm talking about students who turn in "essays" in which 80% of the words have been pasted without alteration from web sites. It's my job to teach my students to write. You learn to write by WRITING. If they copy and paste giant chunks of text from the Internet, then they're not writing that text. Somebody else did. And when they turn it in without citing their source, they're lying about it. When they put their name at the top of a paper that contains unattributed text from other peoples' work, they're claiming that work as theirs.
This is one of the fundamental tenets of academic life: you do your own work. If you draw on somebody else's work, you put it in quotes and you give a citation, both to acknowledge their contribution, and to allow your readers to consult the source for themselves if they'd like. If you don't, it's plagiarism. It's lying. It's theft. It's wrong. A lot of students don't seem to understand that. I tell them at the beginning what plagiarism is, why it's bad, and how to avoid it. BEFORE the first paper comes due. I devote a whole freaking class period to it. And STILL they turn in the plagiarized papers.
This is NOT a "tempest in a teapot." It's a real problem. It takes time and resources away from the other things I have to do. Dealing with one plagiarized paper can take four to seven hours, not counting the administrative stuff.
As for "evolving techniques" -- well, we academics aren't stupid. Nor, as some other posters (not parent poster) have suggested, are we lazy. We're going to continue to evolve countermeasures, catch every plagiarist we can, and punish them. And we're going to hate every minute of it, because we signed on to teach, not to police. So please - raise your kids to do their own work rather than leaching off other people.
Humph. Sure, go pick on the defenseless straw man.
Bosses rarely ask you to write a history of the Brazilian economy. But they frequently say things like this:
"Bob, the client wants to evaluate the feasability of building a bridge across the river near their Saskatoon branch. We'll need to identify potential sites within a few miles of the facility, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each site, and do a rough estimate of the costs in both time and effort. You have three months."
If you've never written an evaluative argument before, that's going to be really freaking hard. And DON'T wave the "Engineers don't need to write" flag at me - if you're going to be building a bridge, I want to know that you can convey complicated engineering problems to your bosses, who will not be engineers, clearly enough that they can make sane decisions about whether and how to do the job.
Now. I teach writing. When a student cheats by plagiarizing from the Internet, they're cheating themselves of the experience that they'll NEED in order to undertake REAL writing assignments later on. If that bridge collapses because my student wasn't able to communicate clearly to the boss (and the boss's boss) through writing, then I bear some of the responsibility for that. So yeah, when students cheat in my class it's a problem.
As for the "realism" of the assignments, my claim is this: writing is writing. Argumentation is argumentation. If you learn to write, and to argue, then you can do it about any topic from bridge-building to palaeography to proteomics and back again. So don't write plagiarists a pass if you want your bridges sturdy.
The solution is very simple, and I am amazed that TFA didn't at least mention it. The solution is not to base grades on such handed-in work. Instead, base grades on performance that you can ensure is the student's own. Higher (and lower) education have a name for this: exams. Conduct an exam under carefully-controlled conditions, and no cheating is possible.
Ahh, an exam fan. Sure, exams are considerably more resistant to cheating. But they're a LOUSY way to assess learning. Let's run down the types, shall we?
True/False exams. There's no need to cheat on exams like these; if you've been to a couple of the classes and maybe glanced at a textbook, you can guess your way to a passing grade. Study up the night before, pass with flying colors, and forget it all the next day.
Multiple Choice. Basically true/false on steroids. Good for assessing simple factual knowledge; useless for assessing critical thinking skills. Plus you can cram the night before and then forget it all the next day.
Essay exams. These are better at assessing actual learning. They are, however, quite limited. In an exam period lasting two to three hours (longer is impractical - people need breaks for the bathroom and stuff!), you can't write enough to really grapple with a complicated subject. Furthermore, they're hard to grade, because people have lousy handwriting these days. I cringe to think of the hours upon hours upon HOURS I've spent struggling with unintelligible handwriting in essay exams. Funnily enough, the ones with good handwriting tend to get good grades, regardless of whether the student actually had any good thought or insight, just because they can be deciphered.
Lastly, let me ask you a question: When was the last time your boss said "Remember to bring two sharpened pencils for the exam on Tuesday."... ? That's right, NEVER! Because exams don't have jack shit to do with work.
You learn to think by thinking. You learn to write by writing. In order to write, you need to think. Therefore, if we expect the students to develop ANY kind of critical thinking skills, we have to have them write stuff. If we try to substitute exams for everything, we're going to wind up with graduates who are damned good at taking tests, but couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag.
I'm not a professor; but I am a poorly paid graduate student teaching composition at a large university. And Wikipedia is, in my experience, the most common source used by plagiarists.
See, it used to be HARD to plagiarize papers. Plagiarizing required going to the library, doing research to find a good essay that would answer the assignment, and then copying it out (or typing it up) in order to turn it in. And if you were ready to put THAT much work into it, why not just write the thing yourself? So most students did.
Then computers came along. They soon had "copy-and-paste" functionality that makes it easy to duplicate large chunks of text. And then the Internet came along, supplying a gigantic amount of pre-made chunks of text to copy-n-paste. All of a sudden, plagiarism got really easy. All you have to do is go to Google, round up four or five sources vaguely related to the assignment, and then mash a bunch of bleeding chunks from those sources into something like an essay. While the honest students labor far into the night over their tortured prose, the dis-honest student spends about an hour mashing together pre-tortured prose from the Internet, and then goes to bed.
So Wikipedia isn't the problem; it's just a common source. I had one paper (on the topic of marijuana legalization) in which approximately 40% of the 1,500 word assignment was copied from Wikipedia. Another 40% or so was copied from non-Wikipedia sources, and the remaining 20% consisted of an opening, a conclusion, and a few sentences attempting to link together the copied chunks.
Sometimes they'll find whole papers, complete, intact, and ready-to-submit. I heard one story of a student who copied a whole essay from the Internet, but failed to actually remove the copyright notice before turning it in. Oy.
Other sites, known as "paper mills" offer to write papers FOR you, at a high price. Why bother writing your own paper, when you can pay somebody $10 a page to do it for you? (Though even then, the quality will usually suck.) If they don't suck, they're damn hard to identify.
If you assign papers in college, you need to know that the Internet makes it possible to plagiarize left, right, and center. I've never had more than 3 plagiarists in a class of 25, but that small chunk means you have to constantly check for plagiarism even in the remaining students. It pretty much sucks.
Sure he can. People regularly live with multiple, contradictory definitions of important concepts.
The definition of "community" seems to be what's at stake here. One possible definition would be something like "a group of people who always think in exactly the same way as one another." If everybody always thinks the same, then there's never any conflict, and everyone is happy. Hooray, bounce bounce.
This is an unworkable definition, but there are people who sincerely believe it's attainable. (Those kind of people scare me, because all too often they wind up suppressing debate, torturing rebels, fighting religious wars, and other unpleasant things.) There are also people who know it's unattainable, but still wish it could work. The grandparent poster may well be one of these, since the claim "there's no such thing as community" is a logical consequence of holding an unworkable definition of "community." (This sort scares me, too, since they sometimes adopt the "nature red in tooth and claw" outlook - everyone everywhere is always out for themselves and no one else, so stab your neighbor before he stabs you.)
A more workable definition of "community" might be something like this: "a group of people who share a set of common values, which drive them to work toward similar goals despite occasional disagreement over methods." If we work with a definition like this, then it is indeed possible to speak of an "open source community," even in the face of disagreement. Note that nobody in this debate is proposing that we stop writing open source code. The debate that Mark Shuttleworth is commenting on seems to be over which method of writing open souce code works best. Yep. Still a community.
My biggest web devel tool is Firefox, with the Web Developer extension and the HTML Validator extension. The former does all sorts of amazingly neat things like letting me get precise info about any element within a page (using "Dispaly Element Information" under the "Information" menu, CTRL+SHIFT+F for short), showing me the HTTP response headers to any given page, add custom styles to a page, validate links, check for Section 508 accessibility compliance, resize the window for simulating lower screen resolutions, and on and on and on!
The latter does instantaneous HTML validation using Tidy and displays any errors or warnings on the "view source" page. It also gives me LINE NUMBERS in the view soucrce window, which is a blessing. The beta version (which I prefer) lets you pick between the Tidy algorithm and the W3C's SGML parser. The SGML parser version gives the same errors as the W3C's own online validator, but without any need to submit the page through an online form.
As for editing HTML, I generally use SciTE or one of its derivatives (eg Notepad2). Sadly, those aren't available under Mac OS X, so when I need to work on a Mac box I use Smultron. THAT, however, is just an editor. People get religious about their editors, so my advice is just to pick one that suits you and ignore anybody what sniggers at you.
This is quite definitely beta stuff. Maybe alpha. In particular, the "pass" system seems borked. I came across an image that was unidentifiable, and clicked "Pass." It said, "Waiting on your partner to pass." Long, dreary seconds ticked by, and then it said "Your partner wants to pass."... ???
Why yes! I'd be glad to agree with my partner's request, except that I ALREADY SENT a pass request, and now the button is greyed out.
This happened several times. The first time, we were almost done anyway, so I let the timer expire. Guess what? If time expires while in this confused "we both want to pass but the system isn't working" state, then it doesn't actually complete the sequence (ie redirect you to the "completion" page). It just sits there, leaving you no choice but to manually return to the beginning page.
Also, people are dumb. I got a picture of a mountain road bordered by pine trees with a large cloud on the horizon. So over the course of about twenty seconds I suggested:
- Cloud - Mountain - Road - Trees - Pine Trees - Thunderhead - Cars - Car
My partner still hadn't suggested any terms. So I suggested:
- nincompoop - light weight - My partner is an idiot
Prototype has some pretty good documentation. Also, it's pretty low-level, so it's easy to build into other stuff. Heck, Prototype is worth it just for the each() iterator method!
Dojo'sdocs are very much hit-or-miss. Some features are pretty smoothly documented. Others are like navigating a trackless wilderness with no more than the sun and stars to guide you. Also, Dojo's annoying because it requires you to add non-standard attributes to your HTML in order to identify widgets. For example:
An early development version of JavaScript was code-named "mocha." All the way through the old 4.x series of Netscape Navigator, you could access the JavaScript console by typing "mocha:" in the address bar. How I wish they had just adopted that name for the language as a whole! It would have prevented so much confusion.
This is a fairly obscure term, so most non-specialists don't know it. A "palimpsest" is a piece of parchment that has been re-used. This particular palimpsest contains stuff by Archimedes; and so it is called "the Archimedes Palimpsest." It is not "a copy of Archimedes' Palimpsest," it is THE Archimedes palimpsest.
Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.
Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.
I love it when Slashdot produces an actual conversation. ^_^ You're going on the friends list.
I suppose it is a created environment, in that everyone has to grow their own forest of ideas from scratch. I'm inclined to resist the adjective "artificial" though, since it implies that the process is unnatural in some way. If you ask me, developing ideas is a completely natural thing for a human being to do.
A problem with my metaphor is that it doesn't draw sharp distinctions between individuals and groups. Each individual has his or her own forest - his or her own set of ideas. But one advantage of the marketplace metaphor is that it involves interactions between distinct individuals. The marketplace metaphor thus recognizes that the creation and distribution of ideas is a group activity. I suppose I could extend my forest metaphor to suggest that each individual functions as the warden or manager of a particular part of the forest, but the forest itself encompasses all possible ideas. Each individual then has a particular set of ideas, and can interact with others, transplanting trees or spreading seeds. That suggests a shared responsibility for the health of the forest as a whole, with each individual tending a certain part of it, and trading seeds (ideas) with others so that the whole is healthier and new caretakers (children) can get started.
At some point, of course, the metaphor breaks down. For example, given the number of people that we interact with in a lifetime, it's hard to envision the population density of the forest of knowing (ooo, in Latin that's silva scientis - neat). But it's still fun to think about. ^_^
Perhaps it is a flawed metaphor (as all metaphors by definition are) but can you think of a better one?
Yep. In fact, your own post suggests it: trees. Forestry. Or "environmental management" if you prefer. In a forest, you find many different species of trees. They are all in competition with one another for access to sunlight, water, and nutrients. Since they are in competition, and may not be equally suited to current conditions, some types of trees are more common than others. Trees begin from seeds, or from outlying roots - in both case, they have their origin in older trees. Sometimes they cross-pollinate with other trees. They grow, from a fragile sapling (which may easily die) to a full-grown tough tree. You can perceive the outlines of a tree from a distance; but the closer you look at it, the more detailed it becomes: trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, veins within the leaf, individual cells. Trees attempt to spawn new child-trees of their own. They can persist for decades, centuries, or in some rarer cases millennia.
In the same way, there are many different ideas, in competition with one another for resources (people's minds). Some types of ideas are more common than others. Ideas begin as variants of older ideas; even if they grow in new and different ways, they have their origins in older ideas. Sometimes they combine with other ideas. They grow, from a young and poorly developed idea, to an elaborate, sturdy philosophy or theory or perspective. You can perceive the outlines of an idea from a distance, but the closer you look, the more details you can see. Ideas can persist for decades, centuries, or millennia.
Knowledge is a forest. Furthermore, it is a forest we live in. We depend on ideas. They let us figure out how to live life, and how to think. It is in our interest to see that the forest of ideas remains healthy. Healthy forests have many different kinds of trees. If there is only one kind of tree in the forest, then it is more susceptible to disease, and insects. So we should encourage many different ideas. We should encourage young ideas, and, sometimes, fell older trees to free up space for newer ones to grow.
And sometimes, when the forest has grown choked and full - sometimes we need a forest fire to sweep through and devour the weakest ideas, leaving room for new ones to grow from the nourishing ashes.
As you say, no metaphor is perfect. If a tree becomes diseased, should we root out the tree? What would be a "diseased" idea? How could we "uproot" it when we have no direct control over what others think? Would it even be a good idea to try?
Overall though, I think I prefer this environmental metaphor to the marketplace metaphor. Marketplaces are based on scarcity, and promote unequal access to resources. Forests are based on abundance, and they're hard to control. You can think as you like, of course; but as I see it, the marketplace is just another tree in the forest of knowing.
A "free market of ideas" is a bad metaphor. In a market, people bargain for commodities. When there is a limited supply of commodity X, and lots of people want it, only the people who are willing to sacrifice the most (time, energy, money, whatever) get to use commodity X. If I give you my supply of commodity X, then I don't have it any more.
Ideas are totally different. If I give you an idea - I still have the idea. In fact, now we BOTH have the idea. Even if you pay me for the idea, I still have the idea too. My knowledge of the idea doesn't vanish when I transfer it to you. Thomas Jefferson said it best: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The marketplace metaphor is therefore completely inappropriate to ideas. You can't exchange ideas in the same way you can physical goods. It just doesn't work that way.
The crooks must stay in office to keep the power they are selling.
Err. Actually, no. A senator or representative who is voted out of office can immediately turn around and become a highly-paid corporate lobbyist.
Think about it: while they're in congress, they acquire intimate knowledge of the legislative process, and at the same time they build a network of acquaintances and allies, and learn who gets things done in Congress. When they get voted out, they have fantastic credentials as a lobbyist: they know who to talk to about what, how to phrase it, and why, and they probably know a lot of the legislators personally.
What's more, once they're out of office, the public at large has no way to hold them accountable.
With apologies to Obi Wan, any congressman can say If you vote me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
... a key challenge is to get the local processes in place to effectively utilize the early warning. Unfortunately some of the most vulnerable spots are far-flung areas with lack of resources and processes to handle effective evacuations etc.
I guarantee you that the people who are working on this system are aware of this and thinking about ways to address it. Broadly, there are two things that need to be done: advance prep, and getting the warning out.
Advance prep means:
Identify local leaders in each settlement. (Depends on size - mayor? elders? local police/firemen/etc?)
Get the local leaders to identify a rendezvous point, namely the local high ground. The monitoring stations should also keep a list of designated rendezvous points for each settlement.
Put a cache of emergency supplies at the rendezvous point, eg water, first-aid supplies, blankets. These can either be supplied locally or through aid organizations. Obviously this will have to be secured somehow - unsecured caches might get stolen. Preferably, entrust this to somebody who lives at the rendezvous point (or close to it) and make sure it's more profitable for them to keep the cache intact than sell it themselves. It'd be a good idea to check the cache periodically (refresh the water, replace old medical supplies, etc).
Announce the rendezvous point in advance - tell people where to go BEFORE it's a crisis. The local leaders should be involved in figuring out the best way to do this for their area - could range from walking around knocking on doors to a mail campaign, posters, requiring teachers to tell their students, whatever works locally. This should be repeated periodically. Actual drills may or may not be feasible, depending on the location.
Make sure each area has some way of getting the warning and passing it on. See next section.
One problem with this is that there may not BE a local spot suitable for a rendezvous. If you live on an atoll where the highest land is 2 meters above sea level, there's no high ground. In this case, it might be necessary to build something. Perhaps Engineers without Borders can build a bunker. Or maybe a completely alternate plan will have to be developed. It'll depend on the exact local circumstances.
When the tsunami is detected, it'll be a matter of issuing warnings to as many people as possible as fast as possible, with specific recommendations. For maximum effect, they'll need to use every channel of communication possible.
Radio. Radios are cheap, and radio stations can reach large areas fast, especially AM stations with high-powered transmitters. Shortwave has even better range, but comparatively few people listen to it or have a shortwave-capable radio. So the monitoring centers should maintain a list of radio stations that broadcast in coastal areas, with current contact information, so that they can contact them directly. One phone call to a radio station can reach thousands or even millions of listeners. In remote areas, it'd be a good idea to distribute radios, or possibly sell them cheap. Emergency models with built-in solar panels and hand cranks would be good for undeveloped regions.
Television. Any television stations in the affected areas can be just as powerful at getting warnings out as the radio, so they should be notified immediately as well.
Government. This particularly applies to heavily populated areas - the local authorities can get the word out and hopefully also help people get going.
Web pages. Passing the word to popular web pages for the local area (eg newspapers, etc) is another way. This is probably less effective than any of the previous methods since it depends on people looking at it at the right time. But if it gets the warning to even a few more people, it's probably worth it.
Lastly, there needs to be a message with specific recommendations. Namely:
"The Right of the People to Fair Use of works of intellect shall not be abridged."
?
Errr... how about what? The quote you've given there doesn't appear to actually be from anything. The language looks vaguely constitutional; but nothing like this quote appears in the Constitution. And a Google search for "Right of the People to Fair Use" turned up nothing. So... what's the question you're asking, again?
... since so very many Slashdotters don't actually read the linked articles, this may be a futile gesture. But, be that as it may, here's a link to the actual study (PDF format), as published in the Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
You can't ban ideas. It's pointless. As an example, passing a law stating "The idea of open source software is hereby banned" would NOT cause people to suddenly forget the concept of open source. Legislating thought just doesn't work.
As for their persistence in seeking broadcast flag legislation, it's not at all surprising. Suppose you're in a group of businessmen. The group's goal is to make its members more wealthy. One way to do that is to increase the output of the entire society that you live in - basically, make the pie bigger so that everyone (including your group) gets a bigger slice. But that's really, really hard to do, and the group's efforts would probably cost more in time, money, and energy than they would get back as a result.
The other way to achieve the goal is to try to re-divide the existing wealth so that your group gains more. The pie doesn't get any bigger; but your group gets a bigger slice. This is much easier, and your group gets 100% of the benefits, so it makes more sense to direct the efforts of the group in that direction. Of course, the fact that YOUR group gets MORE of the pie, means every OTHER group gets LESS. But you don't care about those others. They're not in your group. Let them fend for themselves.
The broadcast flag legislation is a perfect example of this kind of group logic at work. A small group (5 major music companies, a correspondingly small number of movie studios) seek legislation that gives them higher income and protection from a perceived threat to their business. The fact that everybody else in the society has to face the consequences of that legislation is fine with them. From their point of view, that's not a bug - it's a feature.
For more details, I refer you to "The Rise and Decline of Nations" by the late economist Mancur Olson.
The interface was also the subject of intense reflection all through the project. My first intention was not to turn it into a remote control as often happens in adventure games, nor an exercise in skill but rather a tool for immersing the player physically in the world. [...] After a few minutes' play most players have completely forgotten the existence of the interface because it is simple and intrudes minimally on the screen, allowing them to concentrate solely on the story and the characters.
Such was NOT the case with yours truly. I never, EVER forgot the interface, even for a second.
I believe that they did put a great deal of time and effort into the interface. And I'm sure it worked beautifully... on Playstation.
But I played Indigio Prophecy on a PC, using a keyboard and mouse - and the interface was easily the worst aspect of the entire game. It took me forty-five minutes to complete the initial interface tutorial. I had to go online to get a tutorial explaining the tutorial, for heaven's sake.
The interface functioned thus: when the character needed to undertake an action of some sort, two circles would appear on the screen. Each circle consisted of four colored areas: red, green, blue, and yellow. The colors on these two circles would light up in sequence, and my task as the player was to match that sequence, rather like the electronic game Simon from the eighties.
When these circles first appeared on the screen, I had absolutely no idea whatsoever what to do or how to do it. If I had been using a Playstation controller, I could quite easily have figured out that the four colors on the circles matched the four colored buttons on each side of the controller. But since I was playing with a keyboard, there were no contextual clues like that.
That problem was severe enough. But once I had figured it out and moved on, I soon discovered another and equally serious problem. Navigation is partially controlled with the mouse; but you need both hands on the keyboard when you're completing a "Simon" sequence. And there's little or no warning as to when you'll need to move one hand from the mouse to the keyboard. As a result, I usually screwed up the first seconds of each sequence the first time I encountered it, and had to play the whole freaking scene again. Some complex situations involved both navigation and "Simon" sequences. Example: In one scene you must control the character's rate of breathing by tapping two colors alternately, while simultaneously navigating through narrow shelves. In this case, I eventually resorted to remapping the controls to make that specific scene easier, and then changed them back afterwards.
This is bad.
I'm not buying the sequel. If I hadn't received Indigo Prophecy as a gift from a person who expected me to play through and report back, I would have returned it by the end of the first day.
The story was good. The characters were interesting. David Cage is clearly an excellent game designer, with some interesting ideas, and a keen grasp of the challenges involved in programming games for a console-style box. But if he can't think outside that box, he shouldn't be releasing his games for use on other systems.
The culture is effected by the media and the content in it. A great example of this is the fact that the media was able to turn the word 'liberal' into a profanity. Language is perception, and the media controls the perception of most of the people.
The media is certainly a strong influence people's perceptions in any given situation.[1] But influence is not the same as control. If the media could control your perceptions, you would buy absolutely everything that they told you to without question or thought. I doubt you do that. I know I don't. All the media can do is attempt to persuade us. They're good at it, but not so good that resistance is futile. Is it hard to persuade large numbers of people of something? Sure. Is Lessig fighting an uphill battle against entrenched interests? Yep. Does that mean he's certain to fail? No. I refer you to the case of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrought major changes in a vast array of deeply entrenched cultural forces through little more than the power of words.
Whatever it is that Lessig is selling, John and Jane Sixpack ain't gonna be buying.
That's going to depend largely on the age of John and Jane. I've been using bits and pieces of Lessig's book Free Culture in the basic composition course I teach at a large, fairly conservative university in the southern U.S. I've provided my students with arguments from lots of viewpoints - Lessig's one, but also Jack Valenti's testimony before the Judiciary committee in 1995, Alan Menken from the same occasion, Thomas Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPherson, and others. I've had students who believed passionately that copyright should be left just as it is, or extended even further; but those tend to be the exception. The majority of them favor copyright reform a la Lessig. Older people (notably my mother) tend to think the current copyright regime is just fine as it is.
Shit, CNN/Foxnews will make sure they don't even see it!
Oh, and nobody ever gets any news or information from anywhere but CNN or Fox. I had forgotten. Thanks for reminding me.
Television is no longer the only, or even the main source of information in people's lives. Lots of people get their news from the Internet. (Especially younger people.) And some of us, quaint thought it may seem, still read books and newspapers. Imagine that.
My point? The media is neither omniscinet nor omnipotent. The media is powerful, yes, but it's not invincible. It can be challenged; it can be beaten. Don't throw in the towel before you've even begun exercising.
[1] Just today I came across a reference to a study from the early nineties showing that people who watch a lot of TV tend to have a much more negative view of the economy than people who don't - even when you're considering people who actually make the same amount of money. See Hart and Daughton, "Modern Rhetorical Criticism," in the chapter on analyzing media.
Slashdot Mirror
NOTE: This response became amazingly long. I pasted it into OpenOffice.org and ran a word-count. 2,630. Better get your popcorn now, 'cause there's no intermission.
Ooo, this one's interesting. But actually, I have already thought about this. Let me go through and actually answer all those rhetorical questions you pose. (That's the danger with asking rhetorical questions - if your audience answers them in a way you didn't anticipate, they rapidly become unpersuasive.)
> When you share your ideas with others, do you own those ideas?
Nope. You can't own ideas; they're non-tangible. Perhaps you are thinking of Thomas Jefferson's Letter to Isaac Mcpherson, wherein he states "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."
> Does it matter if you wrote them down first?
Again, no.
> Does it matter where you drew inspiration for those ideas?
Depends on how you mean "matter." If you're trying to imply that drawing inspiration from older works makes the derivative work less valuable, then clearly the answer is "no."
> While you and I might agree that plagiarism is lying, theft, and wrong, would it shock you to
> learn that not everyone thinks as we do?
I teach rhetoric and composition for a living. That's ALL about disagreement. Furthermore, I'm not stupid. Of course people think differently from one another; and what a dull, lifeless world it would be if we didn't!
> Is it equally shocking that after a whole freaking class period on the topic, others still do not agree?
Since we've established that I'm not shocked by the existence of disagreement, I am also not shocked by the fact that my students disagree with me about plagiarism. What I do find irritating (and puzzling!) is that when they're clearly told "X is plagiarism; don't do it; if you do you'll get punished," they apparently lack the self-interest to avoid the punishment. I think perhaps that they're still learning that (shock!) rules really do apply to them, they're not exempt.
> Do you attribute this to a lack of moral values or understanding?
If by "this" you mean "the student's disagreement," then neither. I attribute it to broad cultural forces that have de-emphasized the importance of personal responsibility, and also to their youth. Young people do stupid stuff, because they haven't learned better. IF, however, the word "this" refers to the infringing behavior, then it depends on the student. I've seen some who simply didn't understand; and others who consciously set out to subvert the system for their own personal gain.
> As more and more members of society become literate writers, and as our capacity to both capture and
> share these writings increase, the total space available for new and original work decreases.
Two points. First, I find your assumption that there is a finite amount of knowledge highly dubious. There are three types of knowledge: that which we know and understand; that which we know of but do not understand; and that which we do not know at all. In the first type, we often discover that something we thought we understood we actually didn't. EG: Newton's laws of gravity turned out not to account for all observable phenomena, and so Einstein was led to re-consider the problem. The second type is often easier to see -- we know there's something going on, but don't fully understand it. EG: we know what the human genome does, but there remains a huge amount that we don't know about how exactly it works, hence the field of proteomics. The third type is the most troublesome of all. We don't know what we don't
Not at all unreasonable. But before you can work effectively in a group, you need to know how to work alone. Which is why we give them assignments in college where they have to do it themselves. Plagiarizing and collaborating on assignments that explicitly call for each student to work alone undermines their learning.
1) No good teacher uses the same assignments year after year. I change mine every term, and so do most of the other teachers I know. We do so, not because the old assignments get "stale" somehow, but because students pass on their papers to newer students.
2) Assignments should always offer a decent amount of flexibility. This is partly because the writing tends to get worse when the assignment is inflexible. But it's also because reading forty or fifty essays on the same topic, most of which will be poorly written, is an exercise in masochism. Building flexibility into the assignments gives the students scope to find an approach they find interesting (or at least tolerable) and keeps the instructor from going insane during grading.
3) In a freshman level class, and indeed in most undergraduate classes, you can't expect the students to create new material. With rare, rare exceptions, it's simply beyond their current capabilities to come up with genuinely new contributions to knowledge. If they get to that point, it tends to happen towards the end of the undergrad years, or in graduate school.
4) The thinking part is the real goal. And in this respect, the only thing you need to do is craft an assignment that requires the student to grapple with ideas that they haven't thought about before.
Every single one of these pedagogical goals is completely destroyed when the student plagiarizes. If they don't do the assignment, they're not learning from it.
You seem to be talking about students working together to complete the work; I'm talking about students who turn in "essays" in which 80% of the words have been pasted without alteration from web sites. It's my job to teach my students to write. You learn to write by WRITING. If they copy and paste giant chunks of text from the Internet, then they're not writing that text. Somebody else did. And when they turn it in without citing their source, they're lying about it. When they put their name at the top of a paper that contains unattributed text from other peoples' work, they're claiming that work as theirs.
This is one of the fundamental tenets of academic life: you do your own work. If you draw on somebody else's work, you put it in quotes and you give a citation, both to acknowledge their contribution, and to allow your readers to consult the source for themselves if they'd like. If you don't, it's plagiarism. It's lying. It's theft. It's wrong. A lot of students don't seem to understand that. I tell them at the beginning what plagiarism is, why it's bad, and how to avoid it. BEFORE the first paper comes due. I devote a whole freaking class period to it. And STILL they turn in the plagiarized papers.
This is NOT a "tempest in a teapot." It's a real problem. It takes time and resources away from the other things I have to do. Dealing with one plagiarized paper can take four to seven hours, not counting the administrative stuff.
As for "evolving techniques" -- well, we academics aren't stupid. Nor, as some other posters (not parent poster) have suggested, are we lazy. We're going to continue to evolve countermeasures, catch every plagiarist we can, and punish them. And we're going to hate every minute of it, because we signed on to teach, not to police. So please - raise your kids to do their own work rather than leaching off other people.
Humph. Sure, go pick on the defenseless straw man.
Bosses rarely ask you to write a history of the Brazilian economy. But they frequently say things like this:
"Bob, the client wants to evaluate the feasability of building a bridge across the river near their Saskatoon branch. We'll need to identify potential sites within a few miles of the facility, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each site, and do a rough estimate of the costs in both time and effort. You have three months."
If you've never written an evaluative argument before, that's going to be really freaking hard. And DON'T wave the "Engineers don't need to write" flag at me - if you're going to be building a bridge, I want to know that you can convey complicated engineering problems to your bosses, who will not be engineers, clearly enough that they can make sane decisions about whether and how to do the job.
Now. I teach writing. When a student cheats by plagiarizing from the Internet, they're cheating themselves of the experience that they'll NEED in order to undertake REAL writing assignments later on. If that bridge collapses because my student wasn't able to communicate clearly to the boss (and the boss's boss) through writing, then I bear some of the responsibility for that. So yeah, when students cheat in my class it's a problem.
As for the "realism" of the assignments, my claim is this: writing is writing. Argumentation is argumentation. If you learn to write, and to argue, then you can do it about any topic from bridge-building to palaeography to proteomics and back again. So don't write plagiarists a pass if you want your bridges sturdy.
Ahh, an exam fan. Sure, exams are considerably more resistant to cheating. But they're a LOUSY way to assess learning. Let's run down the types, shall we?
True/False exams. There's no need to cheat on exams like these; if you've been to a couple of the classes and maybe glanced at a textbook, you can guess your way to a passing grade. Study up the night before, pass with flying colors, and forget it all the next day.
Multiple Choice. Basically true/false on steroids. Good for assessing simple factual knowledge; useless for assessing critical thinking skills. Plus you can cram the night before and then forget it all the next day.
Essay exams. These are better at assessing actual learning. They are, however, quite limited. In an exam period lasting two to three hours (longer is impractical - people need breaks for the bathroom and stuff!), you can't write enough to really grapple with a complicated subject. Furthermore, they're hard to grade, because people have lousy handwriting these days. I cringe to think of the hours upon hours upon HOURS I've spent struggling with unintelligible handwriting in essay exams. Funnily enough, the ones with good handwriting tend to get good grades, regardless of whether the student actually had any good thought or insight, just because they can be deciphered.
Lastly, let me ask you a question: When was the last time your boss said "Remember to bring two sharpened pencils for the exam on Tuesday."
You learn to think by thinking. You learn to write by writing. In order to write, you need to think. Therefore, if we expect the students to develop ANY kind of critical thinking skills, we have to have them write stuff. If we try to substitute exams for everything, we're going to wind up with graduates who are damned good at taking tests, but couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag.
I'm not a professor; but I am a poorly paid graduate student teaching composition at a large university. And Wikipedia is, in my experience, the most common source used by plagiarists.
See, it used to be HARD to plagiarize papers. Plagiarizing required going to the library, doing research to find a good essay that would answer the assignment, and then copying it out (or typing it up) in order to turn it in. And if you were ready to put THAT much work into it, why not just write the thing yourself? So most students did.
Then computers came along. They soon had "copy-and-paste" functionality that makes it easy to duplicate large chunks of text. And then the Internet came along, supplying a gigantic amount of pre-made chunks of text to copy-n-paste. All of a sudden, plagiarism got really easy. All you have to do is go to Google, round up four or five sources vaguely related to the assignment, and then mash a bunch of bleeding chunks from those sources into something like an essay. While the honest students labor far into the night over their tortured prose, the dis-honest student spends about an hour mashing together pre-tortured prose from the Internet, and then goes to bed.
So Wikipedia isn't the problem; it's just a common source. I had one paper (on the topic of marijuana legalization) in which approximately 40% of the 1,500 word assignment was copied from Wikipedia. Another 40% or so was copied from non-Wikipedia sources, and the remaining 20% consisted of an opening, a conclusion, and a few sentences attempting to link together the copied chunks.
Sometimes they'll find whole papers, complete, intact, and ready-to-submit. I heard one story of a student who copied a whole essay from the Internet, but failed to actually remove the copyright notice before turning it in. Oy.
Other sites, known as "paper mills" offer to write papers FOR you, at a high price. Why bother writing your own paper, when you can pay somebody $10 a page to do it for you? (Though even then, the quality will usually suck.) If they don't suck, they're damn hard to identify.
If you assign papers in college, you need to know that the Internet makes it possible to plagiarize left, right, and center. I've never had more than 3 plagiarists in a class of 25, but that small chunk means you have to constantly check for plagiarism even in the remaining students. It pretty much sucks.
Well, that should give him PLENTY of time. Heck, I could do it in a few minutes!
The definition of "community" seems to be what's at stake here. One possible definition would be something like "a group of people who always think in exactly the same way as one another." If everybody always thinks the same, then there's never any conflict, and everyone is happy. Hooray, bounce bounce.
This is an unworkable definition, but there are people who sincerely believe it's attainable. (Those kind of people scare me, because all too often they wind up suppressing debate, torturing rebels, fighting religious wars, and other unpleasant things.) There are also people who know it's unattainable, but still wish it could work. The grandparent poster may well be one of these, since the claim "there's no such thing as community" is a logical consequence of holding an unworkable definition of "community." (This sort scares me, too, since they sometimes adopt the "nature red in tooth and claw" outlook - everyone everywhere is always out for themselves and no one else, so stab your neighbor before he stabs you.)
A more workable definition of "community" might be something like this: "a group of people who share a set of common values, which drive them to work toward similar goals despite occasional disagreement over methods." If we work with a definition like this, then it is indeed possible to speak of an "open source community," even in the face of disagreement. Note that nobody in this debate is proposing that we stop writing open source code. The debate that Mark Shuttleworth is commenting on seems to be over which method of writing open souce code works best. Yep. Still a community.
My biggest web devel tool is Firefox, with the Web Developer extension and the HTML Validator extension. The former does all sorts of amazingly neat things like letting me get precise info about any element within a page (using "Dispaly Element Information" under the "Information" menu, CTRL+SHIFT+F for short), showing me the HTTP response headers to any given page, add custom styles to a page, validate links, check for Section 508 accessibility compliance, resize the window for simulating lower screen resolutions, and on and on and on!
The latter does instantaneous HTML validation using Tidy and displays any errors or warnings on the "view source" page. It also gives me LINE NUMBERS in the view soucrce window, which is a blessing. The beta version (which I prefer) lets you pick between the Tidy algorithm and the W3C's SGML parser. The SGML parser version gives the same errors as the W3C's own online validator, but without any need to submit the page through an online form.
As for editing HTML, I generally use SciTE or one of its derivatives (eg Notepad2). Sadly, those aren't available under Mac OS X, so when I need to work on a Mac box I use Smultron. THAT, however, is just an editor. People get religious about their editors, so my advice is just to pick one that suits you and ignore anybody what sniggers at you.
This is quite definitely beta stuff. Maybe alpha. In particular, the "pass" system seems borked. I came across an image that was unidentifiable, and clicked "Pass." It said, "Waiting on your partner to pass." Long, dreary seconds ticked by, and then it said "Your partner wants to pass." ... ???
Why yes! I'd be glad to agree with my partner's request, except that I ALREADY SENT a pass request, and now the button is greyed out.
This happened several times. The first time, we were almost done anyway, so I let the timer expire. Guess what? If time expires while in this confused "we both want to pass but the system isn't working" state, then it doesn't actually complete the sequence (ie redirect you to the "completion" page). It just sits there, leaving you no choice but to manually return to the beginning page.
Also, people are dumb. I got a picture of a mountain road bordered by pine trees with a large cloud on the horizon. So over the course of about twenty seconds I suggested:
- Cloud
- Mountain
- Road
- Trees
- Pine Trees
- Thunderhead
- Cars
- Car
My partner still hadn't suggested any terms. So I suggested:
- nincompoop
- light weight
- My partner is an idiot
None of those matched, thankfully.
Hey, maybe the scientists can use this to their advantage. Something like this:
PETA spokesman: You're abusing animals in your lab, you fiend.
Scientist: But they're happy!
PETA spokesman: How can they be happy with you jabbing them with needles every half hour? Among OTHER things.
Scientist: Easy - they're permanently cheerful, no matter what we do to 'em. We engineered 'em that way.
PETA spokesman: >.
Dojo's docs are very much hit-or-miss. Some features are pretty smoothly documented. Others are like navigating a trackless wilderness with no more than the sun and stars to guide you. Also, Dojo's annoying because it requires you to add non-standard attributes to your HTML in order to identify widgets. For example:dojoType? widgetId? Those ain't gonna pass no validator THIS little programmer knows of.
An early development version of JavaScript was code-named "mocha." All the way through the old 4.x series of Netscape Navigator, you could access the JavaScript console by typing "mocha:" in the address bar. How I wish they had just adopted that name for the language as a whole! It would have prevented so much confusion.
This is a fairly obscure term, so most non-specialists don't know it. A "palimpsest" is a piece of parchment that has been re-used. This particular palimpsest contains stuff by Archimedes; and so it is called "the Archimedes Palimpsest." It is not "a copy of Archimedes' Palimpsest," it is THE Archimedes palimpsest.
Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.
Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.
Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.
I love it when Slashdot produces an actual conversation. ^_^ You're going on the friends list.
I suppose it is a created environment, in that everyone has to grow their own forest of ideas from scratch. I'm inclined to resist the adjective "artificial" though, since it implies that the process is unnatural in some way. If you ask me, developing ideas is a completely natural thing for a human being to do.
A problem with my metaphor is that it doesn't draw sharp distinctions between individuals and groups. Each individual has his or her own forest - his or her own set of ideas. But one advantage of the marketplace metaphor is that it involves interactions between distinct individuals. The marketplace metaphor thus recognizes that the creation and distribution of ideas is a group activity. I suppose I could extend my forest metaphor to suggest that each individual functions as the warden or manager of a particular part of the forest, but the forest itself encompasses all possible ideas. Each individual then has a particular set of ideas, and can interact with others, transplanting trees or spreading seeds. That suggests a shared responsibility for the health of the forest as a whole, with each individual tending a certain part of it, and trading seeds (ideas) with others so that the whole is healthier and new caretakers (children) can get started.
At some point, of course, the metaphor breaks down. For example, given the number of people that we interact with in a lifetime, it's hard to envision the population density of the forest of knowing (ooo, in Latin that's silva scientis - neat). But it's still fun to think about. ^_^
Yep. In fact, your own post suggests it: trees. Forestry. Or "environmental management" if you prefer. In a forest, you find many different species of trees. They are all in competition with one another for access to sunlight, water, and nutrients. Since they are in competition, and may not be equally suited to current conditions, some types of trees are more common than others. Trees begin from seeds, or from outlying roots - in both case, they have their origin in older trees. Sometimes they cross-pollinate with other trees. They grow, from a fragile sapling (which may easily die) to a full-grown tough tree. You can perceive the outlines of a tree from a distance; but the closer you look at it, the more detailed it becomes: trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, veins within the leaf, individual cells. Trees attempt to spawn new child-trees of their own. They can persist for decades, centuries, or in some rarer cases millennia.
In the same way, there are many different ideas, in competition with one another for resources (people's minds). Some types of ideas are more common than others. Ideas begin as variants of older ideas; even if they grow in new and different ways, they have their origins in older ideas. Sometimes they combine with other ideas. They grow, from a young and poorly developed idea, to an elaborate, sturdy philosophy or theory or perspective. You can perceive the outlines of an idea from a distance, but the closer you look, the more details you can see. Ideas can persist for decades, centuries, or millennia.
Knowledge is a forest. Furthermore, it is a forest we live in. We depend on ideas. They let us figure out how to live life, and how to think. It is in our interest to see that the forest of ideas remains healthy. Healthy forests have many different kinds of trees. If there is only one kind of tree in the forest, then it is more susceptible to disease, and insects. So we should encourage many different ideas. We should encourage young ideas, and, sometimes, fell older trees to free up space for newer ones to grow.
And sometimes, when the forest has grown choked and full - sometimes we need a forest fire to sweep through and devour the weakest ideas, leaving room for new ones to grow from the nourishing ashes.
As you say, no metaphor is perfect. If a tree becomes diseased, should we root out the tree? What would be a "diseased" idea? How could we "uproot" it when we have no direct control over what others think? Would it even be a good idea to try?
Overall though, I think I prefer this environmental metaphor to the marketplace metaphor. Marketplaces are based on scarcity, and promote unequal access to resources. Forests are based on abundance, and they're hard to control. You can think as you like, of course; but as I see it, the marketplace is just another tree in the forest of knowing.
A "free market of ideas" is a bad metaphor. In a market, people bargain for commodities. When there is a limited supply of commodity X, and lots of people want it, only the people who are willing to sacrifice the most (time, energy, money, whatever) get to use commodity X. If I give you my supply of commodity X, then I don't have it any more.
Ideas are totally different. If I give you an idea - I still have the idea. In fact, now we BOTH have the idea. Even if you pay me for the idea, I still have the idea too. My knowledge of the idea doesn't vanish when I transfer it to you. Thomas Jefferson said it best: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The marketplace metaphor is therefore completely inappropriate to ideas. You can't exchange ideas in the same way you can physical goods. It just doesn't work that way.
Err. Actually, no. A senator or representative who is voted out of office can immediately turn around and become a highly-paid corporate lobbyist.
Think about it: while they're in congress, they acquire intimate knowledge of the legislative process, and at the same time they build a network of acquaintances and allies, and learn who gets things done in Congress. When they get voted out, they have fantastic credentials as a lobbyist: they know who to talk to about what, how to phrase it, and why, and they probably know a lot of the legislators personally.
What's more, once they're out of office, the public at large has no way to hold them accountable.
With apologies to Obi Wan, any congressman can say If you vote me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I guarantee you that the people who are working on this system are aware of this and thinking about ways to address it. Broadly, there are two things that need to be done: advance prep, and getting the warning out.
Advance prep means:
One problem with this is that there may not BE a local spot suitable for a rendezvous. If you live on an atoll where the highest land is 2 meters above sea level, there's no high ground. In this case, it might be necessary to build something. Perhaps Engineers without Borders can build a bunker. Or maybe a completely alternate plan will have to be developed. It'll depend on the exact local circumstances.
When the tsunami is detected, it'll be a matter of issuing warnings to as many people as possible as fast as possible, with specific recommendations. For maximum effect, they'll need to use every channel of communication possible.
Lastly, there needs to be a message with specific recommendations. Namely:
Errr
... since so very many Slashdotters don't actually read the linked articles, this may be a futile gesture. But, be that as it may, here's a link to the actual study (PDF format), as published in the Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
You can't ban ideas. It's pointless. As an example, passing a law stating "The idea of open source software is hereby banned" would NOT cause people to suddenly forget the concept of open source. Legislating thought just doesn't work.
As for their persistence in seeking broadcast flag legislation, it's not at all surprising. Suppose you're in a group of businessmen. The group's goal is to make its members more wealthy. One way to do that is to increase the output of the entire society that you live in - basically, make the pie bigger so that everyone (including your group) gets a bigger slice. But that's really, really hard to do, and the group's efforts would probably cost more in time, money, and energy than they would get back as a result.
The other way to achieve the goal is to try to re-divide the existing wealth so that your group gains more. The pie doesn't get any bigger; but your group gets a bigger slice. This is much easier, and your group gets 100% of the benefits, so it makes more sense to direct the efforts of the group in that direction. Of course, the fact that YOUR group gets MORE of the pie, means every OTHER group gets LESS. But you don't care about those others. They're not in your group. Let them fend for themselves.
The broadcast flag legislation is a perfect example of this kind of group logic at work. A small group (5 major music companies, a correspondingly small number of movie studios) seek legislation that gives them higher income and protection from a perceived threat to their business. The fact that everybody else in the society has to face the consequences of that legislation is fine with them. From their point of view, that's not a bug - it's a feature.
For more details, I refer you to "The Rise and Decline of Nations" by the late economist Mancur Olson.
David Cage writes:
Such was NOT the case with yours truly. I never, EVER forgot the interface, even for a second.
I believe that they did put a great deal of time and effort into the interface. And I'm sure it worked beautifully ... on Playstation.
But I played Indigio Prophecy on a PC, using a keyboard and mouse - and the interface was easily the worst aspect of the entire game. It took me forty-five minutes to complete the initial interface tutorial. I had to go online to get a tutorial explaining the tutorial, for heaven's sake.
The interface functioned thus: when the character needed to undertake an action of some sort, two circles would appear on the screen. Each circle consisted of four colored areas: red, green, blue, and yellow. The colors on these two circles would light up in sequence, and my task as the player was to match that sequence, rather like the electronic game Simon from the eighties.
When these circles first appeared on the screen, I had absolutely no idea whatsoever what to do or how to do it. If I had been using a Playstation controller, I could quite easily have figured out that the four colors on the circles matched the four colored buttons on each side of the controller. But since I was playing with a keyboard, there were no contextual clues like that.
That problem was severe enough. But once I had figured it out and moved on, I soon discovered another and equally serious problem. Navigation is partially controlled with the mouse; but you need both hands on the keyboard when you're completing a "Simon" sequence. And there's little or no warning as to when you'll need to move one hand from the mouse to the keyboard. As a result, I usually screwed up the first seconds of each sequence the first time I encountered it, and had to play the whole freaking scene again. Some complex situations involved both navigation and "Simon" sequences. Example: In one scene you must control the character's rate of breathing by tapping two colors alternately, while simultaneously navigating through narrow shelves. In this case, I eventually resorted to remapping the controls to make that specific scene easier, and then changed them back afterwards.
This is bad.
I'm not buying the sequel. If I hadn't received Indigo Prophecy as a gift from a person who expected me to play through and report back, I would have returned it by the end of the first day.
The story was good. The characters were interesting. David Cage is clearly an excellent game designer, with some interesting ideas, and a keen grasp of the challenges involved in programming games for a console-style box. But if he can't think outside that box, he shouldn't be releasing his games for use on other systems.
The media is certainly a strong influence people's perceptions in any given situation.[1] But influence is not the same as control. If the media could control your perceptions, you would buy absolutely everything that they told you to without question or thought. I doubt you do that. I know I don't. All the media can do is attempt to persuade us. They're good at it, but not so good that resistance is futile. Is it hard to persuade large numbers of people of something? Sure. Is Lessig fighting an uphill battle against entrenched interests? Yep. Does that mean he's certain to fail? No. I refer you to the case of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrought major changes in a vast array of deeply entrenched cultural forces through little more than the power of words.
That's going to depend largely on the age of John and Jane. I've been using bits and pieces of Lessig's book Free Culture in the basic composition course I teach at a large, fairly conservative university in the southern U.S. I've provided my students with arguments from lots of viewpoints - Lessig's one, but also Jack Valenti's testimony before the Judiciary committee in 1995, Alan Menken from the same occasion, Thomas Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPherson, and others. I've had students who believed passionately that copyright should be left just as it is, or extended even further; but those tend to be the exception. The majority of them favor copyright reform a la Lessig. Older people (notably my mother) tend to think the current copyright regime is just fine as it is.
Oh, and nobody ever gets any news or information from anywhere but CNN or Fox. I had forgotten. Thanks for reminding me.
Television is no longer the only, or even the main source of information in people's lives. Lots of people get their news from the Internet. (Especially younger people.) And some of us, quaint thought it may seem, still read books and newspapers. Imagine that.
My point? The media is neither omniscinet nor omnipotent. The media is powerful, yes, but it's not invincible. It can be challenged; it can be beaten. Don't throw in the towel before you've even begun exercising.
[1] Just today I came across a reference to a study from the early nineties showing that people who watch a lot of TV tend to have a much more negative view of the economy than people who don't - even when you're considering people who actually make the same amount of money. See Hart and Daughton, "Modern Rhetorical Criticism," in the chapter on analyzing media.
Say it ain't so!