What the poster was alluding to, I believe, was buying a thin veneer of ethics in the public's eye, behind which they can do all sorts of nasty things.
[sarcasm] And of course, this is a consequences of the much-reviled-by-Katz Corporate Age -- nobody but corporations does this, for sure! [/sarcasm]
communism is older than marx,..[snip].. Communism is a philosophy.
I am curious. How do YOU define communism? Is Campanella a communist? What about Franciscan monks or early Christians? or Buddhist monks? Is any kind of communal living communist?
At its core I think socialism and to a lesser extent communism have alot of potential and are generally very good ideas. I think that the problem has lay in the creation of powerful central states.
You have a different understanding of communism than I do, but to me a powerful and overbearing state is the main characteristic of it. Communism is basically about taking economic power away from individuals (justification: because they can abuse it) and giving it to the state. Political power shortly follows and we get all the standard problems very quickly.
Anytime the people are separated from the running of the government, the system has failed (which is why I think representative democracy is a horrid abomination and refuse to vote for representatives)
Well, how are you going to manage society? It is a very, very complicated task. You can't expect to run referendums on every little issue and even if you do (in the future electronic paradise), rule by mob rarely if ever led to good results. I am not going to argue for technocratic solutions, but somebody has to run the country understanding what's happening and what are the consequences of what they are doing. It is basically a complexity issue.
I don't really understand how one can buy ethics, but that aside what you are talking about is not ethics, but pure PR, aka image management, aka spinmeistering, aka controlling how the outside world sees you. This ancient art has been perfected by politicians and corporations, of course, have been using it quite successfully for quite a while.
What all this has to do with ethics I don't know. I don't even know what ethics are you talking about since even a couple of steps beyound "Thou shall not kill" you would find vigorous (and honest) disagreements about what's ethical and what's not...
All processor upgrades seem to give you very little performance gain compared to what you expect them to give you because the CPU is not the major performance bottleneck of the machine. The biggest offender is the hard disk drive
Such general statements are completely meaningless. Your bottleneck depends on your application, period. If you are into heavy database thrashing, then yes, you are very much concerned about the drive I/O. But if you are into serious math, or statistical modeling, or graphics rendering then pure CPU is what limits you, disk speed doesn't concern you at all.
Death camps are no part of communism itself. They are the work of a powerful and corrupt autocrat.
Well, it's somewhat a matter of definitions. If you define communism as a set of ideas that Marx penned in Das Kapital and other works, then, yes, he did not write about concentration camps (which were, as an aside, invented by the British during the Boer war). However that's not a very useful definition of communism for the sake of our discussion. For example, it's not possible for it to fail since a philosophy cannot fail.
If, on the other hand, you define communism as a social, political, and economic system that was implemented in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, etc (somewhat differently in each), then it possible to claim that it failed and I do make this claim.
Whether this real socio-political system had much in common with Marx's ideas is a subject much debated by Marxists but not of much interest to anybody else.
Can you blame the basic philosophy for the atocities commited by the people who do things in its name?
Insofar as it is possible to blame a philosophy, yes, I can.
Should we then blame Christianity itself for the actions of those who carried out the spanish inquisition?
Sure. I don't see anything earth-shattering about it.
You seem to think that communism was a good idea that was corrupted/tainted/misformed by bad people. Think why these bad people were attracted to this idea, and why people who followed (or claimed to follow) communism turned out to be deadliest dictators during the XX century. Stalin killed many more Russians and Ukrainians than Hitler Jews.
Communism as a socio-political system failed everywhere it has been tried." Under what criteria has it been considered a failure?
Any reasonable one.
Communism in the former Soviet Union has achieved, in one generation, an enormous amount, but one has to compare apples to apples.
And which generation is it? The one that was killed in Stalin's camps?
So to compare it to the US system is ridiculous
Nobody is comparing Russia to the US. Think about this: every country that used to be "communist" with the exception of Cuba and North Korea (for obvious reasons) has forcefully rejected this way either by essentially popular uprising (Russia and Eastern Europe) or oligarchy-directed evolution (China). There must be a reason for this, no?
It is true that the Communist system was replaced with one more in line with "ours" but has this changed things for the better? Take a look at unemployment rates, mortality rates, wages, and other social indicators to judge for yourself.
First, economic indicators are not the only ones meaningful to a society. Going to jail for anti-Soviet propaganda was very real.
As to such thing as unemployment rates, I'd like to point out that NOT having a job was a criminal offense in the USSR. Besides, how do you know what the crime rates, etc. were for the Soviet regime? I certainly don't believe the official statistics from that time -- do you?
Communism clearly failed -- this is one of the major lessons of the XX century. Two major countries chose communism (Russia and China -- the rest were basically occupied), both under extreme conditions -- war, civil war, etc. Both killed off significant part of their population -- the best part! -- and both made a huge economic mess. Both rejected communism in the end. And you don't call this failure?
Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery
There are two different things: your own personal moral code, and generally accepted societal norms. Personal morality varies and has always varied greatly and we are not really talking about it. Speaking of generally accepted norms, slavery was generally accepted in a lot of societies for long periods of time.
Capitalism and communism are general catagories of ideologies. Many form sof both have never been tried. The failure of one or more forms of communism does not prove capitalism correct.
First, we are really talking about communism and capitalism not as ideologies, but as socio-economic-political systems. Surely, many forms have never been tried -- and generally there is a good reason for that;-)
As to proving capitalism "correct", it is not and cannot be "correct". I would argue that it is a reasonable and successful way to structure a society. It is not necessarily the best that ever could be, and most certainly not "correct" (correct implies matching some standard: what standard?)
Communism has been quite sucessfull in some places.
Communism as a socio-political system failed everywhere it has been tried. Small common-property communes are not communism. For example, Israeli kibbutzes are not communism.
Once a company is so large and has such a product base that the average person can't help but buy their product, is it really a free market?
keeping a check on the freedom and prosperity brought us by forces like technology and capitalism.
Ahem. And why would I need checks on freedom and prosperity? Last time I looked, they both were Good Things. As far as I am concerned, the more I get of both of them, the better.
we clung loosely to the notion that some institutions -- politics, journalism, academe, art and culture -- stood outside the marketplace at least somewhat beyond bottom-line calculations.
Ahem again. Katz doesn't understand the basic concept of power, as in 'political power'. Yes, politics are connected to money, but they are different as well. Money is just one of the major motivators for humans (power and sex are the other ones). Journalism is an outgrowth of politics, and art has been connected to money (and power) since the beginning.
universities provided safe havens where politics and P&L statements couldn't intrude too brazenly on critical thinking and expression.
Universities always have been more or less political. And the current plague in academia -- political correctness -- has nothing to do with money or corporations: it's a self-inflicted wound.
Making money off of technological research is certainly acceptable now.
As opposed to when? I think that Katz glosses over (or doesn't understand, which is more likely) the difference between basic and applied science. Applied science (aka technology) has always been about making practical things and practical things do involve money.
their [academic researchers] work is supposed to proceed ethically, with the public's best interests and the highest standards of science research in mind.
That's news to me. I had no clue that scientific research has to proceed with the public's best interest in mind. Who can tell what's in the public best interest? And which public? American? or all humanity?
Academic research is an honest search for a deeper understanding of reality (and some unrealities as well). It has nothing to do with public interest.
And the evolution of technology will get even less scrutiny and oversight.
You mean right now there is some oversight over evolution of technology? How interesting. And who does this, pray tell?
Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how to induce understandably apathetic Americans to vote and to simply start selling stock in the Corporate Republic itself. Looks like a sure winner.
Well, Katz, you sell stock when you expect it to go DOWN, not up. I thought you were saying that the corporations won -- in that case you want to BUY stock.
In any case, Katz doesn't understand (among other things) economics. The basic function of the marketplace is to select successful stuff and kill off losers. It does this much better than, say, governments. I see no reason why the same process wouldn't work as well for technology (keeping in mind that it is *applied* science, not basic science). I certainly see no horrors in it. Of course, basic science need external-to-markets funding because it's fruits are too uncertain and too far in the future.
I have a hard time understanding how preservation of music or software became illegal.
One of the rights of ownership is the right to destroy.
If you want to preserve something that is not yours -- tough luck. The owner gets to decide what happens to it.
I am not saying that letting old software die is a good thing, or even a reasonable thing to do. However, the copyright holders are perfectly within their rights.
I resent the Internet-as-virus analogy. It is inflammatory. And somewhat in-accurate.
Sigh. Did you even read the couple of sentences that got you so resentful? Here they are:
"We're very much looking at a biological model of an epidemic," said Esther Dyson, publisher of the technology newsletter Release 1.0. "On the Internet, a product doesn't require a central host and it doesn't require central distribution, it just spreads. It's new in business. It's been going on a long time in viruses."
I'll try to explain in simpler words. The biological model of an epidemic describes how something spreads. Its main characteristic is that once that something reached a certain point, this point becomes a source for further spreading. Obviously, this was developed by studying the spread of infectious diseases through human population. Ester Dyson pointed out that the same model is applicable to Napster-type file sharing mechanisms. This is a valid and correct (IMHO) observation. And yes, viruses did it first, although the model was AFAIK based on the spread of non-virus diseases (like plague and cholera).
No matter how hard I look I cannot see anybody here making an analogy between Internet and viruses (or virii). Perhaps you could enlighten me?
Viruses, bacteria, fungii and other parasites live off the strength of the host organism. They weaking it in order to grow, a negative net sum game since they die when the organism succumbs.
You didn't listen carefully at your high school biology lessons. Successful parasites do not kill their host, since this is counterproductive. The most successful even help their host and then it is called symbiosis. The bacteria living in your intestines are a good example of this -- without them you'd get into trouble fast.
Parasites that kill their hosts and do it quickly are at evolutionary disadvantage -- they tend to die out together with whatever part of their host population they got to.
The Internet is not a negative net sum game.
And who
But the Internet is like a living process in that it is robust and fault-tolerant. In this way it is like viruses. And very unlike the vulnerable centralized large-corporation model that still prevails. said it is?
I don't like these analogies, but let me point out to you that Internet is fairly centralized. Destroying a dozen buildings (starting with MAE East, etc.) will severly cripple the 'net. Shut down the DNS root servers and the 'net will grind to a halt very quickly. Sure, it will recover at some point, but today's internet is a far cry from the virus model: a mob of simple, self-sufficient units that replicate very quickly and do not need to communicate.
By that argument, porn sites should be not only be accessable on publicly owned clients, but should also be hosted on publicly owned servers.
Not really. There is a real-world, as well as legal, difference between government property and public space. You can make political speeches on the street, but not necessarily inside governmental buildings.
In public space, the government cannot limit speech -- that is the gist of the First Amendment. A public library is public space and the case against library filtering on constitutional grounds actually has some feet to stand on.
You were fine up until now. I don't know anything about you, your background, what you have learned or not learned in life. And neither do you about me and my education.
Ahem. To quote from your post: "Have you ever taken an ethics class in college? Or maybe a debate or philosophy class? ". I read into it a clear implication that I didn't.
Further, at no point did I make any statements to the affect that this involved the teaching "ethics" involved any particular school of thought.
Why did you shift over to lawyerese? In any case, we were talking about teaching ethics to people before allowing them on the 'net, right? The 'net happens to be a worldwide thing, I think we can agree on that. If you want something useful to come out of this, the ethics that you are going to teach are going to be if not the same, then at least highly compatible. Thus my point that ethics can be and are different.
*Most* culture, religions, etc. teach simple codes of conduct which would apply in most societies.
On the level of "you should not kill a guy just 'cause you don't like his face", sure. On a more complicated level, not really.
Besides, you don't want everybody and his grandmother to follow the same code of ethics, would you? This would make the world a very boring place.
If, as you claim, the WWW is 'a collection of pages that can be accessed through' HTTP, then your tool analogy doesn't hold, since the pages weren't created using HTTP.
It holds somewhat, since HTTP is what made the web possible. However, I agree with you that a tool is not the best metaphor. Perhaps HTTP -> web is the same as TV sets -> TV programming?
but it general, it is more accurate to say, as the previous posterdid, that the web is the protocol. There is nothing really incorrect about that statement.
Since we ARE being picky. this is actually incorrect. If it were true, then the web at the moment HTTP was invented (or, rather, implemented) and the web now should be one and the same. Besides, there is also HTML with is quite separate from HTTP, etc.
You are confusing content with the means to communicate this content. Of course, McLuhan said that the medium is the message, but you shouldn't take it too literally.
And what about those hosts that are off-planet?
Why do you think that "world" means Earth? It could also mean "the whole universe".
*One* of the arguments regarding the supposed Digital Divide is that persons without access to the Internet will be passed up for better jobs in the new economy based upon technology and internet-related employment.
This, IMHO, is true, but no more true than the fact that people with better education or better brains will get better jobs.
It is useful to have Internet access -- at the very least it broadens your horizons and makes your world more complicated (here, a Good Thing). A kid who grew up in a big city is likely to be smarter/more active/more likely to get better jobs than a kid who grew up in the middle of nowhere just because his environment was more complex and more stimulating and challenging. Note that I said "likely" -- this is a statistical thing and not fate. The same way a kid who grew up with an Internet-connected computer freely available is likely to be smarter/etc. for exactly the same reason.
The conclusion has been that Internet will supposedly somehow propel someone without prior experience into a better career in the IT field.
This conclusion, of course, is wrong. However the world is not limited to careers in IT fields.
Whose ethics? Have you ever taken an ethics class in college? Or maybe a debate or philosophy class?
Sounds like you didn't. Is it the one where they teach you that over history people believed in a lot of VERY different things and their ethics, besides a small bunch of probably biologically-determined stuff (murder, etc.) were very different as well? If you think that what passes for the current mainstream American ethics is the pinnacle of human thought, think again. Besides, it's very very hard to justify or "prove" ethics without involving some god or gods in the process.
To give you an example, Jains have ethic that prohibits killing living things -- any living things (mosquitoes, etc. are included). Why not use this ethic?
You don't have to. Define standard catagories, such as Hate, Sex, Violence, Just-plain-being-different, whatever.
Either you'll have to make a so long list of categories that most people won't bother, or the same problems appear.
Hate? Would Qur'anic passages where Muhammad rants against Jews be included there? What about wartime propaganda documents? What about a "I-hate-all-blondes-cause-my-girlfriend-just-dumpe d-me" site?
Sex? What to a European is beach holidays pictures is sex to an American (topless women on the beach? and some are actually nekkid? horrors...) And what about naked breasts of brown people from New Guinea?
Violence? Heh. What to an American is a mild and funny thing, to a European is unacceptably depraved depiction of violence...
It's a commonly made mistake. The Internet is an evolution of various standards/protocols.
The world wide web, OTOH, is a specific protocol specifically invented by one person.
Well, since we all are being picky, the WWW is not a protocol. It's a collection of pages that can be accessed through that protocol. The difference is the same as between a tool and something made with this tool. Yes, HTTP was invented in Europe and it made the web possible (but, of course, hyperlinking text was an old idea by then). However, the web as we see it now certainly wasn't "invented" or "created" by one person. The web is a humongous multifaceted extraordinarily interesting mess that was created by all the web designers, and webmasters, and, yes, even "this is me and this is my dog" lusers. And, BTW since we are talking Europe vs. USA, most of them were American.
Freedom of speech and freedom to browse the web on government-bought computers are not the same thing. At all.
I wouldn't be so sure about it. How about making a political speech in a government-built park, standing on a paid-for-by-the-government sidewalk under a government-planted tree?
It would be far better to train young people on hardware, operating systems, coding, applications and ethics before throwing them into the maelstrom of the Internet - my opinion.
And what in nine hells does the web has to do with hardware, operating systems and coding? The web is an information resource. Having a clue about computers is not necessary to access and use it. You sound like one of those people that believed that one should first be taught programming in Basic before being allowed to use a word processor (anybody remembers mid-to-late 80s?).
And ethics?! Exactly whose ethics are you going to teach?
Something like the OpenDirectory that there was a while ago, or somesuch. People could submit sights that they thought were "bad", where tehy would be added to a pending list. From there, they could be voted on.
The problem, of course, is that you presuppose that all people have the same values, that is, same ideas about what is "bad". This is not even close to true. If you are willing to block sites that somebody, or a bunch of somebodies, thought to be "bad", you might as well switch off the web.
And I am not even talking about the problems of deciding moral issues by majority vote.
"Someone who releases a harmful program through a press release has a different agenda than to help you."
And why in hell should he be interested in helping you? And what do you care about his agenda?
He is doing you a service: he is telling you that a program you have is vulnerable. It's up to you to decide what to do with this information (standard reaction: ignore), but the guy who published the exploit owes you nothing and gives you useful information.
There is an interesting issue of the balance of power in the grey/black hat community. If the exploits are published, then the real crackers (who actually discover them and write exploits) are not much more powerful than the script kiddies: they understand the tools much better and they have them earlier, but it's the same tools after all.
Now, if the exploits were not published, then script kiddies would be left high and dry (well, as soon as the net patches the holes known today -- might take around five years, I think) and the real crackers would be in a much better position. Not only would they have less competition, their ways of breaking in would be generally unknown and thus generally unpatched.
I am quite sure that Marcus Ranum is not a black-hat guy bent on eliminating competition, but the real consequences of this suggestion would be the lessening of the script kiddie power, but the increase of the "real cracker" power.
1. I have a door with a broken lock and I don't tell anybody.
2. I have a door with a broken lock and I put a sign in my front lawn reading, "I have a broken Brand X lock. Can somebody tell me where to get a new one?"
This is a seriously flawed analogy that doesn't work in more ways than one. Consider a more appropriate one:
You have a brand X lock on your door. Unknown to you some guys have found out that sticking a nail into all brand X locks unlocks the door. Now the question is, do you want to hear about it? If yes, other people also know it, but you can go and change the lock ASAP. If no, you are just hoping that the underground grapevine is not very efficient at distributing useful information (yeah, right). So?
Ask yourself why you are protesting the RIAA? For artists rights? Or because you irresponsibly want your free music? jeez.
Well, actually neither. I dislike RIAA because they want waaay too much control over my life -- specifically, where and how I listen to music. I don't like it.
I have no special feelings for Napster as a company. They did provide a valuable service: they opened the floodgates. RIAA in blind rage is trying to crucify Napster for that, but that's pure revenge -- they cannot turn back the clock. Too many people now know that Internet is where you get your music and trying to tell them otherwise is not going to work. If anything, this will force migration to lawyer-resistant Gnutella-type networks, which is a Good Thing.
There are two main reasons why Napster was so successful (besides providing free music):
(1) Napster is immediate (for broadband people, at least). If my buddy tells me about some great piece of music, I can check it out right away. This is important and a large part of Napster appeal.
(2) Napster is pick-and-choose. People's been bitching about having to buy the whole CD for a single worthwhile song for a loooong time and the recording industry did nothing -- why should they? Napster allows me to assemble collections of exactly what I want and nothing more.
If the recording industry is able to match these two advantages, it might survive. If it insists on blindly lashing out anything that threatens its dominance, it will die. It ain't gonna be pretty and the collateral damage might be significant, but die it will.
Slashdot Mirror
What the poster was alluding to, I believe, was buying a thin veneer of ethics in the public's eye, behind which they can do all sorts of nasty things.
[sarcasm] And of course, this is a consequences of the much-reviled-by-Katz Corporate Age -- nobody but corporations does this, for sure! [/sarcasm]
Kaa
communism is older than marx, ..[snip].. Communism is a philosophy.
I am curious. How do YOU define communism? Is Campanella a communist? What about Franciscan monks or early Christians? or Buddhist monks? Is any kind of communal living communist?
At its core I think socialism and to a lesser extent communism have alot of potential and are generally very good ideas. I think that the problem has lay in the creation of powerful central states.
You have a different understanding of communism than I do, but to me a powerful and overbearing state is the main characteristic of it. Communism is basically about taking economic power away from individuals (justification: because they can abuse it) and giving it to the state. Political power shortly follows and we get all the standard problems very quickly.
Anytime the people are separated from the running of the government, the system has failed (which is why I think representative democracy is a horrid abomination and refuse to vote for representatives)
Well, how are you going to manage society? It is a very, very complicated task. You can't expect to run referendums on every little issue and even if you do (in the future electronic paradise), rule by mob rarely if ever led to good results. I am not going to argue for technocratic solutions, but somebody has to run the country understanding what's happening and what are the consequences of what they are doing. It is basically a complexity issue.
Kaa
corporations can buy ethics with money
I don't really understand how one can buy ethics, but that aside what you are talking about is not ethics, but pure PR, aka image management, aka spinmeistering, aka controlling how the outside world sees you. This ancient art has been perfected by politicians and corporations, of course, have been using it quite successfully for quite a while.
What all this has to do with ethics I don't know. I don't even know what ethics are you talking about since even a couple of steps beyound "Thou shall not kill" you would find vigorous (and honest) disagreements about what's ethical and what's not...
Kaa
All processor upgrades seem to give you very little performance gain compared to what you expect them to give you because the CPU is not the major performance bottleneck of the machine. The biggest offender is the hard disk drive
Such general statements are completely meaningless. Your bottleneck depends on your application, period. If you are into heavy database thrashing, then yes, you are very much concerned about the drive I/O. But if you are into serious math, or statistical modeling, or graphics rendering then pure CPU is what limits you, disk speed doesn't concern you at all.
Kaa
Death camps are no part of communism itself. They are the work of a powerful and corrupt autocrat.
Well, it's somewhat a matter of definitions. If you define communism as a set of ideas that Marx penned in Das Kapital and other works, then, yes, he did not write about concentration camps (which were, as an aside, invented by the British during the Boer war). However that's not a very useful definition of communism for the sake of our discussion. For example, it's not possible for it to fail since a philosophy cannot fail.
If, on the other hand, you define communism as a social, political, and economic system that was implemented in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, etc (somewhat differently in each), then it possible to claim that it failed and I do make this claim.
Whether this real socio-political system had much in common with Marx's ideas is a subject much debated by Marxists but not of much interest to anybody else.
Can you blame the basic philosophy for the atocities commited by the people who do things in its name?
Insofar as it is possible to blame a philosophy, yes, I can.
Should we then blame Christianity itself for the actions of those who carried out the spanish inquisition?
Sure. I don't see anything earth-shattering about it.
You seem to think that communism was a good idea that was corrupted/tainted/misformed by bad people. Think why these bad people were attracted to this idea, and why people who followed (or claimed to follow) communism turned out to be deadliest dictators during the XX century. Stalin killed many more Russians and Ukrainians than Hitler Jews.
Kaa
Communism as a socio-political system failed everywhere it has been tried." Under what criteria has it been considered a failure?
Any reasonable one.
Communism in the former Soviet Union has achieved, in one generation, an enormous amount, but one has to compare apples to apples.
And which generation is it? The one that was killed in Stalin's camps?
So to compare it to the US system is ridiculous
Nobody is comparing Russia to the US. Think about this: every country that used to be "communist" with the exception of Cuba and North Korea (for obvious reasons) has forcefully rejected this way either by essentially popular uprising (Russia and Eastern Europe) or oligarchy-directed evolution (China). There must be a reason for this, no?
It is true that the Communist system was replaced with one more in line with "ours" but has this changed things for the better? Take a look at unemployment rates, mortality rates, wages, and other social indicators to judge for yourself.
First, economic indicators are not the only ones meaningful to a society. Going to jail for anti-Soviet propaganda was very real.
As to such thing as unemployment rates, I'd like to point out that NOT having a job was a criminal offense in the USSR. Besides, how do you know what the crime rates, etc. were for the Soviet regime? I certainly don't believe the official statistics from that time -- do you?
Communism clearly failed -- this is one of the major lessons of the XX century. Two major countries chose communism (Russia and China -- the rest were basically occupied), both under extreme conditions -- war, civil war, etc. Both killed off significant part of their population -- the best part! -- and both made a huge economic mess. Both rejected communism in the end. And you don't call this failure?
Kaa
Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery
;-)
There are two different things: your own personal moral code, and generally accepted societal norms. Personal morality varies and has always varied greatly and we are not really talking about it. Speaking of generally accepted norms, slavery was generally accepted in a lot of societies for long periods of time.
Capitalism and communism are general catagories of ideologies. Many form sof both have never been tried. The failure of one or more forms of communism does not prove capitalism correct.
First, we are really talking about communism and capitalism not as ideologies, but as socio-economic-political systems. Surely, many forms have never been tried -- and generally there is a good reason for that
As to proving capitalism "correct", it is not and cannot be "correct". I would argue that it is a reasonable and successful way to structure a society. It is not necessarily the best that ever could be, and most certainly not "correct" (correct implies matching some standard: what standard?)
Communism has been quite sucessfull in some places.
Communism as a socio-political system failed everywhere it has been tried. Small common-property communes are not communism. For example, Israeli kibbutzes are not communism.
Once a company is so large and has such a product base that the average person can't help but buy their product, is it really a free market?
No, and that's why there are anti-trust laws.
Kaa
keeping a check on the freedom and prosperity brought us by forces like technology and capitalism.
Ahem. And why would I need checks on freedom and prosperity? Last time I looked, they both were Good Things. As far as I am concerned, the more I get of both of them, the better.
we clung loosely to the notion that some institutions -- politics, journalism, academe, art and culture -- stood outside the marketplace at least somewhat beyond bottom-line calculations.
Ahem again. Katz doesn't understand the basic concept of power, as in 'political power'. Yes, politics are connected to money, but they are different as well. Money is just one of the major motivators for humans (power and sex are the other ones). Journalism is an outgrowth of politics, and art has been connected to money (and power) since the beginning.
universities provided safe havens where politics and P&L statements couldn't intrude too brazenly on critical thinking and expression.
Universities always have been more or less political. And the current plague in academia -- political correctness -- has nothing to do with money or corporations: it's a self-inflicted wound.
Making money off of technological research is certainly acceptable now.
As opposed to when? I think that Katz glosses over (or doesn't understand, which is more likely) the difference between basic and applied science. Applied science (aka technology) has always been about making practical things and practical things do involve money.
their [academic researchers] work is supposed to proceed ethically, with the public's best interests and the highest standards of science research in mind.
That's news to me. I had no clue that scientific research has to proceed with the public's best interest in mind. Who can tell what's in the public best interest? And which public? American? or all humanity?
Academic research is an honest search for a deeper understanding of reality (and some unrealities as well). It has nothing to do with public interest.
And the evolution of technology will get even less scrutiny and oversight.
You mean right now there is some oversight over evolution of technology? How interesting. And who does this, pray tell?
Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how to induce understandably apathetic Americans to vote and to simply start selling stock in the Corporate Republic itself. Looks like a sure winner.
Well, Katz, you sell stock when you expect it to go DOWN, not up. I thought you were saying that the corporations won -- in that case you want to BUY stock.
In any case, Katz doesn't understand (among other things) economics. The basic function of the marketplace is to select successful stuff and kill off losers. It does this much better than, say, governments. I see no reason why the same process wouldn't work as well for technology (keeping in mind that it is *applied* science, not basic science). I certainly see no horrors in it. Of course, basic science need external-to-markets funding because it's fruits are too uncertain and too far in the future.
Sorry, Katz -- FUBARed as usual.
Kaa
I have a hard time understanding how preservation of music or software became illegal.
One of the rights of ownership is the right to destroy.
If you want to preserve something that is not yours -- tough luck. The owner gets to decide what happens to it.
I am not saying that letting old software die is a good thing, or even a reasonable thing to do. However, the copyright holders are perfectly within their rights.
Kaa
I resent the Internet-as-virus analogy. It is inflammatory. And somewhat in-accurate.
Sigh. Did you even read the couple of sentences that got you so resentful? Here they are:
"We're very much looking at a biological model of an epidemic," said Esther Dyson, publisher of the technology newsletter Release 1.0. "On the Internet, a product doesn't require a central host and it doesn't require central distribution, it just spreads. It's new in business. It's been going on a long time in viruses."
I'll try to explain in simpler words. The biological model of an epidemic describes how something spreads. Its main characteristic is that once that something reached a certain point, this point becomes a source for further spreading. Obviously, this was developed by studying the spread of infectious diseases through human population. Ester Dyson pointed out that the same model is applicable to Napster-type file sharing mechanisms. This is a valid and correct (IMHO) observation. And yes, viruses did it first, although the model was AFAIK based on the spread of non-virus diseases (like plague and cholera).
No matter how hard I look I cannot see anybody here making an analogy between Internet and viruses (or virii). Perhaps you could enlighten me?
Viruses, bacteria, fungii and other parasites live off the strength of the host organism. They weaking it in order to grow, a negative net sum game since they die when the organism succumbs.
You didn't listen carefully at your high school biology lessons. Successful parasites do not kill their host, since this is counterproductive. The most successful even help their host and then it is called symbiosis. The bacteria living in your intestines are a good example of this -- without them you'd get into trouble fast.
Parasites that kill their hosts and do it quickly are at evolutionary disadvantage -- they tend to die out together with whatever part of their host population they got to.
The Internet is not a negative net sum game.
And who
But the Internet is like a living process in that it is robust and fault-tolerant. In this way it is like viruses. And very unlike the vulnerable centralized large-corporation model that still prevails. said it is?
I don't like these analogies, but let me point out to you that Internet is fairly centralized. Destroying a dozen buildings (starting with MAE East, etc.) will severly cripple the 'net. Shut down the DNS root servers and the 'net will grind to a halt very quickly. Sure, it will recover at some point, but today's internet is a far cry from the virus model: a mob of simple, self-sufficient units that replicate very quickly and do not need to communicate.
Kaa
By that argument, porn sites should be not only be accessable on publicly owned clients, but should also be hosted on publicly owned servers.
Not really. There is a real-world, as well as legal, difference between government property and public space. You can make political speeches on the street, but not necessarily inside governmental buildings.
In public space, the government cannot limit speech -- that is the gist of the First Amendment. A public library is public space and the case against library filtering on constitutional grounds actually has some feet to stand on.
IANAL, but I play one on Slashdot.
Kaa
You were fine up until now. I don't know anything about you, your background, what you have learned or not learned in life. And neither do you about me and my education.
Ahem. To quote from your post: "Have you ever taken an ethics class in college? Or maybe a debate or philosophy class? ". I read into it a clear implication that I didn't.
Further, at no point did I make any statements to the affect that this involved the teaching "ethics" involved any particular school of thought.
Why did you shift over to lawyerese? In any case, we were talking about teaching ethics to people before allowing them on the 'net, right? The 'net happens to be a worldwide thing, I think we can agree on that. If you want something useful to come out of this, the ethics that you are going to teach are going to be if not the same, then at least highly compatible. Thus my point that ethics can be and are different.
*Most* culture, religions, etc. teach simple codes of conduct which would apply in most societies.
On the level of "you should not kill a guy just 'cause you don't like his face", sure. On a more complicated level, not really.
Besides, you don't want everybody and his grandmother to follow the same code of ethics, would you? This would make the world a very boring place.
Kaa
[really really picky]
Ah! A man after my heart.
If, as you claim, the WWW is 'a collection of pages that can be accessed through' HTTP, then your tool analogy doesn't hold, since the pages weren't created using HTTP.
It holds somewhat, since HTTP is what made the web possible. However, I agree with you that a tool is not the best metaphor. Perhaps HTTP -> web is the same as TV sets -> TV programming?
but it general, it is more accurate to say, as the previous posterdid, that the web is the protocol. There is nothing really incorrect about that statement.
Since we ARE being picky. this is actually incorrect. If it were true, then the web at the moment HTTP was invented (or, rather, implemented) and the web now should be one and the same. Besides, there is also HTML with is quite separate from HTTP, etc.
You are confusing content with the means to communicate this content. Of course, McLuhan said that the medium is the message, but you shouldn't take it too literally.
And what about those hosts that are off-planet?
Why do you think that "world" means Earth? It could also mean "the whole universe".
Kaa
*One* of the arguments regarding the supposed Digital Divide is that persons without access to the Internet will be passed up for better jobs in the new economy based upon technology and internet-related employment.
This, IMHO, is true, but no more true than the fact that people with better education or better brains will get better jobs.
It is useful to have Internet access -- at the very least it broadens your horizons and makes your world more complicated (here, a Good Thing). A kid who grew up in a big city is likely to be smarter/more active/more likely to get better jobs than a kid who grew up in the middle of nowhere just because his environment was more complex and more stimulating and challenging. Note that I said "likely" -- this is a statistical thing and not fate. The same way a kid who grew up with an Internet-connected computer freely available is likely to be smarter/etc. for exactly the same reason.
The conclusion has been that Internet will supposedly somehow propel someone without prior experience into a better career in the IT field.
This conclusion, of course, is wrong. However the world is not limited to careers in IT fields.
Whose ethics? Have you ever taken an ethics class in college? Or maybe a debate or philosophy class?
Sounds like you didn't. Is it the one where they teach you that over history people believed in a lot of VERY different things and their ethics, besides a small bunch of probably biologically-determined stuff (murder, etc.) were very different as well? If you think that what passes for the current mainstream American ethics is the pinnacle of human thought, think again. Besides, it's very very hard to justify or "prove" ethics without involving some god or gods in the process.
To give you an example, Jains have ethic that prohibits killing living things -- any living things (mosquitoes, etc. are included). Why not use this ethic?
Kaa
You don't have to. Define standard catagories, such as Hate, Sex, Violence, Just-plain-being-different, whatever.
e d-me" site?
Either you'll have to make a so long list of categories that most people won't bother, or the same problems appear.
Hate? Would Qur'anic passages where Muhammad rants against Jews be included there? What about wartime propaganda documents? What about a "I-hate-all-blondes-cause-my-girlfriend-just-dump
Sex? What to a European is beach holidays pictures is sex to an American (topless women on the beach? and some are actually nekkid? horrors...) And what about naked breasts of brown people from New Guinea?
Violence? Heh. What to an American is a mild and funny thing, to a European is unacceptably depraved depiction of violence...
Kaa
It's a commonly made mistake. The Internet is an evolution of various standards/protocols.
The world wide web, OTOH, is a specific protocol specifically invented by one person.
Well, since we all are being picky, the WWW is not a protocol. It's a collection of pages that can be accessed through that protocol. The difference is the same as between a tool and something made with this tool. Yes, HTTP was invented in Europe and it made the web possible (but, of course, hyperlinking text was an old idea by then). However, the web as we see it now certainly wasn't "invented" or "created" by one person. The web is a humongous multifaceted extraordinarily interesting mess that was created by all the web designers, and webmasters, and, yes, even "this is me and this is my dog" lusers. And, BTW since we are talking Europe vs. USA, most of them were American.
Kaa
Freedom of speech and freedom to browse the web on government-bought computers are not the same thing. At all.
I wouldn't be so sure about it. How about making a political speech in a government-built park, standing on a paid-for-by-the-government sidewalk under a government-planted tree?
Kaa
It would be far better to train young people on hardware, operating systems, coding, applications and ethics before throwing them into the maelstrom of the Internet - my opinion.
And what in nine hells does the web has to do with hardware, operating systems and coding? The web is an information resource. Having a clue about computers is not necessary to access and use it. You sound like one of those people that believed that one should first be taught programming in Basic before being allowed to use a word processor (anybody remembers mid-to-late 80s?).
And ethics?! Exactly whose ethics are you going to teach?
Kaa
Something like the OpenDirectory that there was a while ago, or somesuch. People could submit sights that they thought were "bad", where tehy would be added to a pending list. From there, they could be voted on.
The problem, of course, is that you presuppose that all people have the same values, that is, same ideas about what is "bad". This is not even close to true. If you are willing to block sites that somebody, or a bunch of somebodies, thought to be "bad", you might as well switch off the web.
And I am not even talking about the problems of deciding moral issues by majority vote.
Kaa
First, Mozilla is not dead. Mozilla cannot die. As long as someone has a copy of the source code, Mozilla is, at worst, "mostly dead"
I'd like to remind you that there is also the state of being undead and it ain't pretty.
An undead 'zilla lurching through the landscape...
Kaa
"Someone who releases a harmful program through a press release has a different agenda than to help you."
And why in hell should he be interested in helping you? And what do you care about his agenda?
He is doing you a service: he is telling you that a program you have is vulnerable. It's up to you to decide what to do with this information (standard reaction: ignore), but the guy who published the exploit owes you nothing and gives you useful information.
Kaa
There is an interesting issue of the balance of power in the grey/black hat community. If the exploits are published, then the real crackers (who actually discover them and write exploits) are not much more powerful than the script kiddies: they understand the tools much better and they have them earlier, but it's the same tools after all.
Now, if the exploits were not published, then script kiddies would be left high and dry (well, as soon as the net patches the holes known today -- might take around five years, I think) and the real crackers would be in a much better position. Not only would they have less competition, their ways of breaking in would be generally unknown and thus generally unpatched.
I am quite sure that Marcus Ranum is not a black-hat guy bent on eliminating competition, but the real consequences of this suggestion would be the lessening of the script kiddie power, but the increase of the "real cracker" power.
Kaa
I have a quick quiz for all of you.
How is my house more likely to get broken into:
1. I have a door with a broken lock and I don't tell anybody.
2. I have a door with a broken lock and I put a sign in my front lawn reading, "I have a broken Brand X lock. Can somebody tell me where to get a new one?"
This is a seriously flawed analogy that doesn't work in more ways than one. Consider a more appropriate one:
You have a brand X lock on your door. Unknown to you some guys have found out that sticking a nail into all brand X locks unlocks the door. Now the question is, do you want to hear about it? If yes, other people also know it, but you can go and change the lock ASAP. If no, you are just hoping that the underground grapevine is not very efficient at distributing useful information (yeah, right). So?
Kaa
Ask yourself why you are protesting the RIAA? For artists rights? Or because you irresponsibly want your free music? jeez.
Well, actually neither. I dislike RIAA because they want waaay too much control over my life -- specifically, where and how I listen to music. I don't like it.
I have no special feelings for Napster as a company. They did provide a valuable service: they opened the floodgates. RIAA in blind rage is trying to crucify Napster for that, but that's pure revenge -- they cannot turn back the clock. Too many people now know that Internet is where you get your music and trying to tell them otherwise is not going to work. If anything, this will force migration to lawyer-resistant Gnutella-type networks, which is a Good Thing.
There are two main reasons why Napster was so successful (besides providing free music):
(1) Napster is immediate (for broadband people, at least). If my buddy tells me about some great piece of music, I can check it out right away. This is important and a large part of Napster appeal.
(2) Napster is pick-and-choose. People's been bitching about having to buy the whole CD for a single worthwhile song for a loooong time and the recording industry did nothing -- why should they? Napster allows me to assemble collections of exactly what I want and nothing more.
If the recording industry is able to match these two advantages, it might survive. If it insists on blindly lashing out anything that threatens its dominance, it will die. It ain't gonna be pretty and the collateral damage might be significant, but die it will.
Kaa
King's mechanism for sales is based on the Street Performer Protocol,
So can we call it the Protocol of Kings?
Kaa