There's one difference between my scenario and yours worthy of a reply.
In the mace-spray scenario, Jane took an active action, she hit the button on the mace spray. In my scenario, Jane could have just as easily backed into Jim.
In my scenario, Jane feels threatened--she arms the device. In your scenario, Jane feels threatened--she grabs her mace, maybe even she flips the safety cover off the trigger.
At this point, no one can get harmed by Jane's mace if she doesn't pull the trigger. With the jacket, if she just accidentally backs into Jim he gets the jolt.
There's a difference there. Now, you and others have made some strong, well-reasoned arguments for the notion that this difference, as applied to this device, doesn't render this device a public hazard. I am not arguing that point.
What interests me is the passivity of the discharge mechanism. I just saw Dr. Strangelove again about a week ago. If you remember, the Soviets had a "Doomsday Device" that would automatically trigger some event that would cover the earth with dangerous radiation levels for 93 years, or something like that, if a nuclear device ever exploded on USSR territory. The ethical reasoning for the use of the device provided that there could never be an event to trigger the device that wouldn't justify it's use. The movie serves on one level to demonstrate the fallacy of such certainty.
That's what I find interesting about this device. I haven't been arguing against it, I haven't made up my mind about it, to be truthful, but I do think the passive nature of the weapon delivery (the actual shock) is worthy of close examination.
You may confusing two different lines of the discussion I have been pursuing.
Yes, clearly, if the wearer has no intention of creating an unintentional discharge it won't happen. I get it. If we could assure that all people armed had similar control of their weapons, I'm all for everyone being armed all the time.
Here's a scenario that I think merits some examination, that's all. Jane gets a jacket. Jane is in an enclosed area and feels threatened, she charges up the jacket. That's active.
Jim, not an attacker, unseen to Jane, comes into accidental contact with her because of the realities of the enclosed area, be it a subway car, elevator or whatever. Bang, jacket discharges, even though Jane did not intend it. That's passive.
Jane didn't want to shock Jim.
I don't know of another personal protection device subject to passive deployment while operating as designed.
You have to pull the trigger on a gun. This thing just gets charged up intentionally, the discharge can be entirely unintentional in some contexts.
You have to post warning signs concerning your fence as I understand the law. But, having said that, it is an interesting analogy. To take it a bit further, I don't know that I can unintentionally cause a discharge of your fence by doing something that is otherwise acceptable behavior (like unintentionally brushing against someone).
Re:Do we really want this?
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Touching a woman's breast without her consent does indeed "cause harm." This is the distinction I was seeking to make. According to cultural norms it is an act of aggresion, lightly brushing against someone as you exit the subway is not such an act.
I think anyone who grabs a woman's breast on the subway should be subject to a corrective action, and I think an 80,000 V shock is a compensatory response. But, if I unintentionally brush past said breast as I exit a crowded subway....
Intention is the key here. The device is discharged in a passive manner, as I understand it. That merits some discussion.
Yeah, I read the article. The action of charging the device is active but the discharge might be passive. You have to hold up a mace-sprayer and point it at someone for them to receive the full force of the weapon. With this thing, the discharge can be triggered by an event that both the wearer and the charge-victim would interpret as non-threatening.
I think that is a difference that merits discussion.
Do we really want this?
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I live in Manhattan. What would stop some sociopath from donning one of these jackets and getting on the subway at rush hour? I could imagine the East Village punks getting a real charge out of this (pun intended).
A taser at least resembles a weapon and give an aggressor some cue that you are wielding a weapon, this thing looks like a jacket (although it apparently doesn't sound like one). I think that's crossing a line and as such requires more thought. Maybe a warning label or something.
One cannot legally rig up a shotgun or some other dangerous device to automatically discharge upon the violation of a perimeter, how is this different? What happens to mens rea (malicious intent)? How does one assert that merely touching someone is an act for which you can cause physical harm?
It's sort of like invading and occupying a country just because they could be a threat in the future, we don't do tha...oh, wait.
You're right, he did say some stupid things and he totally doesn't get Open Source.
He's brilliant, though. A very bright light. He didn't let the fact that no one could imagine the possibilities of Ethernet limit the scope of it's ultimate possibilities. Indeed, as discussed in this article, datagrams are "regarded" by Ethernet as equals. This is a fundamental principle and it is important.
Maybe that kind of clarity limits his ability to appreciate the more value-laden social contract of Open Source. That's okay with me. The tent is big enough for Bon Metclfe as far as I am concerned. No matter how utterly I disagree with him on things for which we are all allowed opinions, I'm glad we all agree on how to deliver packets.
I know you're making a clever joke, but had "A" student instead of a "Gentleman's C" student been appointed President of The United States in 2001 it is quite possible that our government might be more representative of the interests of US Citizens. Certainly, I think it is quite likely that dissent and the loyal opposition would not be held in such contempt by someone who hit the books instead of the beer bong in college.
I used to wish a third political party could develop in the USA.
I base this observation on my personal experience that people who have not had widespread exposure to other people's thinking are prone to the notion that the prevailing cultural conventional wisdom is all the wisdom there is.
My suppostition that such exposure might encourage people to think for themselves has nothing to do with economic status, skin color, geography or anything else. Thinking begats thinking.
Similarly, if I were exposed to the myths and oral traditions of indigenous African peoples I might think of something that otherwise might not have occured to me. I intend no inference of relative personal or cultural merit.
Analog is subject to degradation everytime it is reproduced. Digital conversion halts the degradation at conversion. Ones are ones and zeroes are zeroes from then on.
I think there is a touch of naivete in this notion:
"Think about the power of bringing our library to little schools in the middle of Africa," Keller said. "Would it make a difference for those who now have their minds closed to the idea of democracy?"
I am not sure it would. It might turn them on to the idea of thinking for themselves, though. That could have interesting consequences. Unfortunately, just this very possiblity is threatening to those who are now profiting from their ignorance. These people are likely in a position to be gatekeepers for the dissemination of information.
But, having a robot do something which is enhanced by mindless repetition is a natural robotic application. Then having that application be something that could enable political liberation is a interesting twist of the old "robots in service to humanity" ideals. I'm not so sure that those holding the reins are going to be so interested in this--call me cynical.
What I would like to see is a similar device for converting analog recordings, in whatever form be at tape, vinyl, wax cylinders, to an open digitized format and then have those recording made available in like fashion. It might be just as interesting to turn those kids in Africa on to Mozart, or oral arguments from the Supreme Court.
I thought about that. My inclination was to just knock the guy off the segway, not to knock over the segway itself.
My plan was an elbow thrust deep into the chest, causing the rider to lose his grip on the handlebars and go careening into a woman obstructing the top of the stairs at a subway entrance while chatting mindlessly on a cell phone waiting for some guilt-ridden soul to volunteer to carry her stroller down the stairs.
For grins, I searched EBay and found out that the gent that lost this one can get another one, deliverable immediately, for $5500.
Why? That is another question. I was almost run over by one of these things on the sidewalk in Manhattan the other day. Mr. UpperWestSide Yuppie was navigating the sidewalk, including the wheelchair cut-outs at intersections with some aplomb, but I really had to suppress an urge to just knock him off the damn thing.
I can only pray that they don't figure out a way to build and market a Segway stroller. Oh my God, the thought just makes me shudder. GPS, 802.11g web nanny-cam....the horror, the horror.
Re:Forget it -This horse is long out of the barn
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: 1
I can't comply with your request without also violating the law and the user agreement for the DB service we use. I wish I could, I wish you could. We should own our own information, but we don't.
Yes, your search would return many hits, but understand that if I were doing this in the proper context, I would also know that you've interacted with my employer and what the details of that interaction were, so you have a point--it's not exactly true that I could just pick you out cold from the hits on those parameters and those bits you gave me wouldn't actually be all the data I had. From my experience, I would wager that I would probably have to weed through about 50 possibilities. Something about one of the hits would resonate with the information I have going in--probably some health information about you.
So, I am going to have to want to find you enough to spend about a week tracking down leads, which in my case, means that my employer is going to have to be willing to plunk down 4 figures for the information. But, it can be done.
You're right, the only anonimity is in numbers though, that's my point. My last name is more unique than yours.
Forget it -This horse is long out of the barn
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I work in information privacy and security in health care. The situation is already beyond repair. The only thing giving anyone in the industrialized world any semblance of privacy is sheer numbers.
I can take your last name, gender, a guess about your age within five years, a guess about what region of the US in which you live, and right here, from the very terminal from which I type this message, probably determine where you have lived for the past seven years, your neighbor's names, your family members' names, your social security number, your driver's license numbers, any public records (criminal, civil, real estate) in less time than it takes to reload slashdot on a busy saturday afternoon.
The key is that the results I get back will be fuzzy, I'll have to try to make sense of them, and not all of the hits will be accurate. But anyone with a brain can sense a "theme" running through the hits and nail your ID beyond a reasonable doubt.
Think you're off the grid? Only if you have never applied for utilities or credit of any kind, never gotten a publicly issued license, and never graduated from any school. If all that's true, why would I be looking for you anyway? You can't buy anything.
We need to collectively grow up here. It's not about limiting our invasions of privacy, we need to be licensing and bonding people who can mine it, like we license doctors, attorneys and cops.
The information really is out there, and it really is indexed, and it really is being used. That's why these Internet cookie monsters are so bold and shameless. They're not doing anything new and they know it.
I remember upgrading my 10MB MFM HD in my IBM XT to a RLL-encoded 32MB model and wondering if I would every use that much storge space the rest of my life. Honestly.
Even better, I remember when we got the extra 16k of RAM in the Heathkit I was hacking and wondering what I would ever want it to do that would require that much memory.
I have to admit that the notion that it is now techincally possible to mpeg-1 every moment of one's existence is a staggering one.
If you accept that Blogs satisfy some previously underestimated human desire for self-expression, think of what might happen if one could clip a web cam to one's collar, wear a storage device on one's waist and synch that with an online VidLog every night like a Palm Pilot?
If you're starting a business you need to focus 100% on getting customers. Everything else you can do along the way. If you don't have customers, you won't have to worry about zoning. If you do have customers, the solution to any zoning problem will suggest itself. First things first.
As a practical matter, these kinds of things only present themselves as real problems secondary to traffic and parking. If you draw attention to the fact that you're running a business from your home by being obnoxious to your neighbors by bringing a bunch of traffic to the neighborhood, then you'll have to confront the problem. But, if you're that busy, you can afford to move anyway.
Don't sweat this, concentrate on getting customers.
Gil Scott Heron's point, as I saw it, was that mass media cannot forment revolution because of it's own investment in cultural and economic stability. Once mass media invests in something as content, it assumes an economic and political inertia and possesses a certain cultural enuii.
Another way to put it is once something makes Newsweek, it is already over.
So, if one is interested in things that really can change, you have to find out about them in ways that are alternative to mass media. The WWW is precisely that instrument in our age, something that GSH could not forsee.
Of course we can't rely on the system, whether that be televison or the WWW to be good, we have to be good. But you and I have access to the WWW (this post is evidence of that, it can be seen from anywhere), but we couldn't get on Television to have this discussion (not on a channel with worldwide distribution, anyway) because we have yet to be co-opted as content.
Once one becomes content in the way that I use the term here, changing things becomes at odds with one's own self-interest.
That's why the Revolution won't be televised, but it will be modded-up.
You're on the same line of thinking as I, but I do think all social movements need a journal of some kind. Before the Internet these were on paper, but a community, which is a necessary prerequisite for a revolution, needs a place to exchange ideas.
I mentioned Apache and Perl scripts because these are freely available and more likely to be used by the disenfranchised than AOL.
Now I can't find the reference to "geek" at all that I thought I saw in the text, so along with "intelligent" not being an rdewald keyword, maybe "informed" won't be either.
We agree, my comment was to the rhetoric, not the semantics. Using a word like "web surfers" instead of "geeks" would have been more poetic and resonant for me, that's all.
The word revolution in this context refers to the overthrow of a government, or form of government, or social system by those governed, usually by forceful means, with another government or social system taking its place.
In recent history, this has happened because of, or has been attempted by, people seeking a democracy is the new form of government. Maybe this is why a revolution in this sense will not happen in a democracy. It's not that it is impossible, it's that it has already happened.
The word can also mean a radical change of any kind. This is sometimes necessary in any social system. Democracy allows for a non-violent method to achieve this kind of revolution every election. While the change from Carter to Reagan in 1981 was not a revolution in the former sense of the word, it was in the latter sense. So, the answer depends in some measure on just what one means by revolution.
The one thing that seemed off about the langauge in the homage to GSH's insightful song about the ultimate irreverence of mass media was the attempt to address "geeks" via a reference to AOL keywords.
I don't know any geeks that use AOL.
Besides, the revolution, if there is one, will probably have a web site, but it will run on Apache and Perl Scripts. There won't be an AOL keyword....
The web isn't mass media, it just has mass distribution.
You seem to suggest that the specifics of the software used in the experiments themselves is too varied and engineered to respond to object management within the native environment.
Ok, you take the management piece into a meta-environment like web e-commerce. Each iteration produces a transaction, essentially a line in a table containing the common meta-elements and then you perform your management via linked queries on this data set ala Napster.
If all of your data engines are connected (Intranet), the only thing that needs to be centralized is the knowledge of what is where.
So, you build on the code from one of the open-source e-commerce engines and combine that with the code elements from one of the open peer-to-peer management Napster colnes.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one difference between my scenario and yours worthy of a reply.
In the mace-spray scenario, Jane took an active action, she hit the button on the mace spray. In my scenario, Jane could have just as easily backed into Jim.
In my scenario, Jane feels threatened--she arms the device. In your scenario, Jane feels threatened--she grabs her mace, maybe even she flips the safety cover off the trigger.
At this point, no one can get harmed by Jane's mace if she doesn't pull the trigger. With the jacket, if she just accidentally backs into Jim he gets the jolt.
There's a difference there. Now, you and others have made some strong, well-reasoned arguments for the notion that this difference, as applied to this device, doesn't render this device a public hazard. I am not arguing that point.
What interests me is the passivity of the discharge mechanism. I just saw Dr. Strangelove again about a week ago. If you remember, the Soviets had a "Doomsday Device" that would automatically trigger some event that would cover the earth with dangerous radiation levels for 93 years, or something like that, if a nuclear device ever exploded on USSR territory. The ethical reasoning for the use of the device provided that there could never be an event to trigger the device that wouldn't justify it's use. The movie serves on one level to demonstrate the fallacy of such certainty.
That's what I find interesting about this device. I haven't been arguing against it, I haven't made up my mind about it, to be truthful, but I do think the passive nature of the weapon delivery (the actual shock) is worthy of close examination.
Thanks for the discussion.
You may confusing two different lines of the discussion I have been pursuing.
Yes, clearly, if the wearer has no intention of creating an unintentional discharge it won't happen. I get it. If we could assure that all people armed had similar control of their weapons, I'm all for everyone being armed all the time.
Here's a scenario that I think merits some examination, that's all. Jane gets a jacket. Jane is in an enclosed area and feels threatened, she charges up the jacket. That's active.
Jim, not an attacker, unseen to Jane, comes into accidental contact with her because of the realities of the enclosed area, be it a subway car, elevator or whatever. Bang, jacket discharges, even though Jane did not intend it. That's passive.
Jane didn't want to shock Jim.
I don't know of another personal protection device subject to passive deployment while operating as designed.
You have to pull the trigger on a gun. This thing just gets charged up intentionally, the discharge can be entirely unintentional in some contexts.
You have to post warning signs concerning your fence as I understand the law. But, having said that, it is an interesting analogy. To take it a bit further, I don't know that I can unintentionally cause a discharge of your fence by doing something that is otherwise acceptable behavior (like unintentionally brushing against someone).
Touching a woman's breast without her consent does indeed "cause harm." This is the distinction I was seeking to make. According to cultural norms it is an act of aggresion, lightly brushing against someone as you exit the subway is not such an act.
I think anyone who grabs a woman's breast on the subway should be subject to a corrective action, and I think an 80,000 V shock is a compensatory response. But, if I unintentionally brush past said breast as I exit a crowded subway....
Intention is the key here. The device is discharged in a passive manner, as I understand it. That merits some discussion.
Yeah, I read the article. The action of charging the device is active but the discharge might be passive. You have to hold up a mace-sprayer and point it at someone for them to receive the full force of the weapon. With this thing, the discharge can be triggered by an event that both the wearer and the charge-victim would interpret as non-threatening.
I think that is a difference that merits discussion.
I live in Manhattan. What would stop some sociopath from donning one of these jackets and getting on the subway at rush hour? I could imagine the East Village punks getting a real charge out of this (pun intended).
A taser at least resembles a weapon and give an aggressor some cue that you are wielding a weapon, this thing looks like a jacket (although it apparently doesn't sound like one). I think that's crossing a line and as such requires more thought. Maybe a warning label or something.
One cannot legally rig up a shotgun or some other dangerous device to automatically discharge upon the violation of a perimeter, how is this different? What happens to mens rea (malicious intent)? How does one assert that merely touching someone is an act for which you can cause physical harm?
It's sort of like invading and occupying a country just because they could be a threat in the future, we don't do tha...oh, wait.
You're right, he did say some stupid things and he totally doesn't get Open Source.
He's brilliant, though. A very bright light. He didn't let the fact that no one could imagine the possibilities of Ethernet limit the scope of it's ultimate possibilities. Indeed, as discussed in this article, datagrams are "regarded" by Ethernet as equals. This is a fundamental principle and it is important.
Maybe that kind of clarity limits his ability to appreciate the more value-laden social contract of Open Source. That's okay with me. The tent is big enough for Bon Metclfe as far as I am concerned. No matter how utterly I disagree with him on things for which we are all allowed opinions, I'm glad we all agree on how to deliver packets.
I know you're making a clever joke, but had "A" student instead of a "Gentleman's C" student been appointed President of The United States in 2001 it is quite possible that our government might be more representative of the interests of US Citizens. Certainly, I think it is quite likely that dissent and the loyal opposition would not be held in such contempt by someone who hit the books instead of the beer bong in college.
I used to wish a third political party could develop in the USA.
Now I'd just like to see a second.
I base this observation on my personal experience that people who have not had widespread exposure to other people's thinking are prone to the notion that the prevailing cultural conventional wisdom is all the wisdom there is.
My suppostition that such exposure might encourage people to think for themselves has nothing to do with economic status, skin color, geography or anything else. Thinking begats thinking.
Similarly, if I were exposed to the myths and oral traditions of indigenous African peoples I might think of something that otherwise might not have occured to me. I intend no inference of relative personal or cultural merit.
Analog is subject to degradation everytime it is reproduced. Digital conversion halts the degradation at conversion. Ones are ones and zeroes are zeroes from then on.
I am not sure it would. It might turn them on to the idea of thinking for themselves, though. That could have interesting consequences. Unfortunately, just this very possiblity is threatening to those who are now profiting from their ignorance. These people are likely in a position to be gatekeepers for the dissemination of information.
But, having a robot do something which is enhanced by mindless repetition is a natural robotic application. Then having that application be something that could enable political liberation is a interesting twist of the old "robots in service to humanity" ideals. I'm not so sure that those holding the reins are going to be so interested in this--call me cynical.
What I would like to see is a similar device for converting analog recordings, in whatever form be at tape, vinyl, wax cylinders, to an open digitized format and then have those recording made available in like fashion. It might be just as interesting to turn those kids in Africa on to Mozart, or oral arguments from the Supreme Court.
I thought about that. My inclination was to just knock the guy off the segway, not to knock over the segway itself.
My plan was an elbow thrust deep into the chest, causing the rider to lose his grip on the handlebars and go careening into a woman obstructing the top of the stairs at a subway entrance while chatting mindlessly on a cell phone waiting for some guilt-ridden soul to volunteer to carry her stroller down the stairs.
For grins, I searched EBay and found out that the gent that lost this one can get another one, deliverable immediately, for $5500.
Why? That is another question. I was almost run over by one of these things on the sidewalk in Manhattan the other day. Mr. UpperWestSide Yuppie was navigating the sidewalk, including the wheelchair cut-outs at intersections with some aplomb, but I really had to suppress an urge to just knock him off the damn thing.
I can only pray that they don't figure out a way to build and market a Segway stroller. Oh my God, the thought just makes me shudder. GPS, 802.11g web nanny-cam....the horror, the horror.
Yes, accessible to authenticated users via htpps.
I can't comply with your request without also violating the law and the user agreement for the DB service we use. I wish I could, I wish you could. We should own our own information, but we don't.
Yes, your search would return many hits, but understand that if I were doing this in the proper context, I would also know that you've interacted with my employer and what the details of that interaction were, so you have a point--it's not exactly true that I could just pick you out cold from the hits on those parameters and those bits you gave me wouldn't actually be all the data I had. From my experience, I would wager that I would probably have to weed through about 50 possibilities. Something about one of the hits would resonate with the information I have going in--probably some health information about you.
So, I am going to have to want to find you enough to spend about a week tracking down leads, which in my case, means that my employer is going to have to be willing to plunk down 4 figures for the information. But, it can be done.
You're right, the only anonimity is in numbers though, that's my point. My last name is more unique than yours.
I work in information privacy and security in health care. The situation is already beyond repair. The only thing giving anyone in the industrialized world any semblance of privacy is sheer numbers.
I can take your last name, gender, a guess about your age within five years, a guess about what region of the US in which you live, and right here, from the very terminal from which I type this message, probably determine where you have lived for the past seven years, your neighbor's names, your family members' names, your social security number, your driver's license numbers, any public records (criminal, civil, real estate) in less time than it takes to reload slashdot on a busy saturday afternoon.
The key is that the results I get back will be fuzzy, I'll have to try to make sense of them, and not all of the hits will be accurate. But anyone with a brain can sense a "theme" running through the hits and nail your ID beyond a reasonable doubt.
Think you're off the grid? Only if you have never applied for utilities or credit of any kind, never gotten a publicly issued license, and never graduated from any school. If all that's true, why would I be looking for you anyway? You can't buy anything.
We need to collectively grow up here. It's not about limiting our invasions of privacy, we need to be licensing and bonding people who can mine it, like we license doctors, attorneys and cops.
The information really is out there, and it really is indexed, and it really is being used. That's why these Internet cookie monsters are so bold and shameless. They're not doing anything new and they know it.
I remember upgrading my 10MB MFM HD in my IBM XT to a RLL-encoded 32MB model and wondering if I would every use that much storge space the rest of my life. Honestly.
Even better, I remember when we got the extra 16k of RAM in the Heathkit I was hacking and wondering what I would ever want it to do that would require that much memory.
I'm old (42).
I have to admit that the notion that it is now techincally possible to mpeg-1 every moment of one's existence is a staggering one.
If you accept that Blogs satisfy some previously underestimated human desire for self-expression, think of what might happen if one could clip a web cam to one's collar, wear a storage device on one's waist and synch that with an online VidLog every night like a Palm Pilot?
I am going out back to sit among the dandelions.
If you're starting a business you need to focus 100% on getting customers. Everything else you can do along the way. If you don't have customers, you won't have to worry about zoning. If you do have customers, the solution to any zoning problem will suggest itself. First things first.
As a practical matter, these kinds of things only present themselves as real problems secondary to traffic and parking. If you draw attention to the fact that you're running a business from your home by being obnoxious to your neighbors by bringing a bunch of traffic to the neighborhood, then you'll have to confront the problem. But, if you're that busy, you can afford to move anyway.
Don't sweat this, concentrate on getting customers.
Gil Scott Heron's point, as I saw it, was that mass media cannot forment revolution because of it's own investment in cultural and economic stability. Once mass media invests in something as content , it assumes an economic and political inertia and possesses a certain cultural enuii.
.
Another way to put it is once something makes Newsweek, it is already over.
So, if one is interested in things that really can change, you have to find out about them in ways that are alternative to mass media. The WWW is precisely that instrument in our age, something that GSH could not forsee.
Of course we can't rely on the system, whether that be televison or the WWW to be good, we have to be good. But you and I have access to the WWW (this post is evidence of that, it can be seen from anywhere), but we couldn't get on Television to have this discussion (not on a channel with worldwide distribution, anyway) because we have yet to be co-opted as content
Once one becomes content in the way that I use the term here, changing things becomes at odds with one's own self-interest.
That's why the Revolution won't be televised, but it will be modded-up.
You're on the same line of thinking as I, but I do think all social movements need a journal of some kind. Before the Internet these were on paper, but a community, which is a necessary prerequisite for a revolution, needs a place to exchange ideas.
I mentioned Apache and Perl scripts because these are freely available and more likely to be used by the disenfranchised than AOL.
Now I can't find the reference to "geek" at all that I thought I saw in the text, so along with "intelligent" not being an rdewald keyword, maybe "informed" won't be either.
We agree, my comment was to the rhetoric, not the semantics. Using a word like "web surfers" instead of "geeks" would have been more poetic and resonant for me, that's all.
I get it.
The word revolution in this context refers to the overthrow of a government, or form of government, or social system by those governed, usually by forceful means, with another government or social system taking its place.
In recent history, this has happened because of, or has been attempted by, people seeking a democracy is the new form of government. Maybe this is why a revolution in this sense will not happen in a democracy. It's not that it is impossible, it's that it has already happened.
The word can also mean a radical change of any kind. This is sometimes necessary in any social system. Democracy allows for a non-violent method to achieve this kind of revolution every election. While the change from Carter to Reagan in 1981 was not a revolution in the former sense of the word, it was in the latter sense. So, the answer depends in some measure on just what one means by revolution.
The one thing that seemed off about the langauge in the homage to GSH's insightful song about the ultimate irreverence of mass media was the attempt to address "geeks" via a reference to AOL keywords.
I don't know any geeks that use AOL.
Besides, the revolution, if there is one, will probably have a web site, but it will run on Apache and Perl Scripts. There won't be an AOL keyword....
The web isn't mass media, it just has mass distribution.
You seem to suggest that the specifics of the software used in the experiments themselves is too varied and engineered to respond to object management within the native environment.
Ok, you take the management piece into a meta-environment like web e-commerce. Each iteration produces a transaction, essentially a line in a table containing the common meta-elements and then you perform your management via linked queries on this data set ala Napster.
If all of your data engines are connected (Intranet), the only thing that needs to be centralized is the knowledge of what is where.
So, you build on the code from one of the open-source e-commerce engines and combine that with the code elements from one of the open peer-to-peer management Napster colnes.
Since the code is OPEN, you can do this.