Jeez, how lame-brained of you, especially since you appear to be using some of your thinking capacity. You're just refusing to see the bigger picture.
Time's expurgation of a single article from an online edition of a print magazine is not directly, if at all, motivated by Time's consideration of their "bottom line." To all appearances, the expurgation of the article in question is politically motivated. You argue that No "morality" or "social conscience" or "concern for human freedom" will play into it, but from anything I can see it is precisely terms such as those you reject which motivated Time's editorial staff to censor their own publication.
Some time ago, the news media beganreporting that McDonald's was to going to provide wireless access in their restauraunts. That service, according to McDonald's itself, would in some places be for pay.
McDonald's giveaway will promote its for-pay WiFi access. iTMS is the market leader of downloaded music with, according to a 5 November analyst conference call held by Apple, over 80% market share. McDonald's will be able to "give away" US $0.99 tracks to, in some cases, sell US $2.99/day WiFi access.
I wonder if some of those Happy Meal freebies will include a day's worth of free WiFi.
I carefully cracked the case open and wiped off the sticky gunk with warm water. I then opened another good floppy, replaced the disk with the cleaned and dried formerly gunky disk. I said a brief prayer to the Woz and put it in the computer. Hey presto! We immediately read all of the information and made three copies for her to have.. ..
Awwwww, c'mon. We wanna know what happened next! You know . ..
She told me how grateful she was for all my help and that she wanted to make dinner to thank me. We had an amazing dinner with stuffed peppers, raw oysters, and two bottles of Dom Perignon. When we had finished she suddenly became really shy and blushingly asked if I would help her test out the new disk on the computer in her bedroom. Just as I was demonstrating how to "insert the floppy," she moved in take a closer look and pressed her gorgeous 48DD boobs hard against my arm. Suddenly, I realized I wasn't "floppy" anymore . . .
You know we/.'ers never get laid. The least you could do is give us a good READ! (wth, it's only karma)
This was developed by Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues.
The MASER was the predecessor of the LASER. Though most don't know this, LASER is an acronym standing for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." The difference is that MASERs amplify Microwaves instead of light.
Isn't it convenient that the lead scientist on this is named just happened to be named "Mazur?" . . . Waitaminut, where'd that black helicopter come from?
(You can get a little info about MASERs and LASERs here)
Full disclosure: I have purchased seven computers in my life since 1983 and they have all been Apple machines.
In your post you (johnpaul191) seem to assume that the iBooks mentioned in mslinux's post were purchased at different times. I assumed the 9 iBooks were part of the same shipment and (possibly) manufacturing run. In either case, mslinux's chumpy iBooks could have been chumpy because of something Apple or the manufacturer did or did not do. In my experience, user breakage is overwhelmed by manufacturing defects.
Apple's manufacturers and Apple itself do occasionally design software and hardware badly. Sometimes, there are product runs or batches of a particular run that are fouled due either to manufacturing defects, design flaws, and/or plain ol' entropy.
One example of this is the translucent power cord that Apple debuted with the Pismo (Firewire G3) powerbooks. The material used in those cords degraded over time and eventually carried charge. As a result, those cords ended up generating sparks and, in some cases, small fires. To my knowledge, no one was ever hurt but thousands of customers were affected.
Apple replaced those faulty cords under AppleCare and quietly redesigned the power cord to use a different opaque material. Power cords that failed without AppleCare cost their users in the neighborhood of $60 (US). This is only one design flaw in one of Apple's hardware lines. Other Apple hardware lines have also been poorly designed and/or manufactured: early PowerBook 100s caught fire and PowerBook 5300s are notorious for disintegrating LCD mounts.
Now, I'm not saying Apple makes a crummy machine. Far from it. (I just requisitioned and receieved a 15" ALbook which, by the way, is a way sweet machine.) But like any hardware conglomerate, Apple and its manufacturers do occasionally build and ship lemons, a fact they sometimes they try to diguise. One way they do this is by fixing such machines under warranty. In other cases they will replace the machine in question in response to a user complaint. But because they never issue a recall (which would be overkill in most cases), a small percentage of users are left with hardware that's broken due to no fault of their own.
If I had gone and said the north american power grid should be replaced at the wake of the outages [ . . . ], I would have been accused of countless acts of civil disobediance.
My first question is what is wrong with Slashdot? I mean someone saw fit to give the parent coward "Insightful" for what she or he wrote? Someone wind the clock back before 2000 when Slashdot wasn't frequented by Microsoft apologists.
Regarding your comparison of the power grid to the Internet, network events such as MSBlaster and Sobig.F highlight the fragility of an information network built of insecure nodes. At present, the overwelming majority of the nodes of the Internet are powered by Microsoft software. For better or for worse, "press releases and open letters right at the wake [sic] of major worms" draw attention to the real effects of maintaining so insecure an information network. MSBlaster and Sobig.F are not theories but facts and so prove the unreliability of an Internet composed mainly of Microsoft-powered nodes. The timely discussion of network events such as MSBlaster, Mimda, Code Red, Sobig.X, etc. in the press should, in my opinion, be an obligation of network adminstrators.
Given your post, you'd probably have us ignore the problem in the hopes that the next worm/virus/trojan does not damage our shared information network even more spectacularly. Thanks, but I would rather disseminate information and share data about such network events rather than stop my eyes, ears, and mouth with sand.
Now would he have jumped out at 30km height, he would have broken the sound barrier and then, slowed down to 220kph.
Mach I at 30 km (18.6 miles) is about 675 mph. He was travelling, at his fastest, at 360 kmh (200 mph), nowhere near the sound barrier at any altitude. The sound barrier increases and decreases even as altitude increases, but it never goes lower than about 660 mph. Here's a chart of Mach 1 at different altitudes.
(On an entirely different note, has anyone besides me noticed that the quality of Slashdot moderation has degraded over the last year or so? I haven't been "assigned" mod points since the great move West, but I know I used to do a better job than what passes for moderation these days. The mod system needs something way much more effective than the current M2 system which does absolutely nothing. I mean, we're talking about something fundamental as the speed of sound.)
Human is someone who looks and talks like me and has enough of my genes that we can (if we were of the right ages and genders) fuck like bunnies and make more humans.
Does this mean infertile humans are not human? Whatever you think, your reduction of "human" to reproductive capacity is not a technical definition of human. Arguing that humans are beings who descend from humans is no more enlightening and just as circular as saying horses are animals descended from horses (and don't even get started about donkeys and mules). Philosophers debate what it means to be human because identifying essential and/or shared characteristics of human beings reveal ways in which we are and aren't connected to living and non-living beings with whom we share the world. Identifying such characteristics (if such can ever be done) also has profound consequences for our moral, spiritual, ethical, and social obligations to other humans (and non-humans).
Besides, "fuck[ing] like bunnies" would make you a rodent, wouldn't it?
Are people with artificial limbs currently hated and shunned?
You answer your own question in the negative, but the whole reason of (for example) Americans with Disabilities Act is to ensure that people who are handicapped to the point of needing prosthetics (e. g. wheelchairs) are not discrimated against, intentionally or not. People with prostheses are shunned, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. While the transhumanist movement is concerned the rights of beings who include but are not limited to humans with prosthetic enhancements, their point is to codify the rights of such beings before a crisis (e. g. civil war) occurs.
You're right that stem cell research has many potential benefits, but what has that go to do with drafting a bill of transhuman rights? It's not like rights to self-determination and laws regulating stem-cell research are mutually exclusive or in an obvious zero-sum competition for resources.
Remember, it doesn't have to be as good as iTunes, it just has to be good enough for the masses of Windows users to accept it.
Good point.
Even so, Apple will probably execute the Windows version of iTMS with style and grace. When the iTMS for Windows debuts, it very likely will surpass the level of usability that Windows users have grown accustomed to. Given Apple's industry-envied history of producing quality software and hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's Windows version of iTunes outperforms all current players in the category.
One can only hope that more users will experience firsthand the difference between Apple(-based) and Microsoft(-based) companies. Both types of company aim to make money, but they have different approaches to that goal. Apple (idealisitic) wants to make the best widget out there, bar none. Microsoft (monopolistic) wants to be the only widget out there, barring all others.
Few Windows-based companies "get it right." Instead, they get it "good enough", which is basically Clock_Nova's point.
Now, I'm not claiming Apple is a perfect company. They've shafted plenty of users, including me. But I am saying that because Apple has an idealistic approach to the market, they often pioneer and advance the state of information technology. Because Microsoft takes a monopolistic approach, they largely clone information technologies, often producing a usable but dramatically inferior product. Occasionally, the monopolistic approach demands that pioneering technology be destroyed, but now I'm getting a little off-topic . . . My main point is that Apple's Windows iTMS will probably be better than "good enough." I'm betting it will rock.
(To be fair, Windows-based companies, Microsoft to name one, occasionally produces high-quality product. For example, the Microsoft Office suite for Mac OS X comes to mind.)
I've seen this argument three times now: "Just because I own a share of Corporation X doesn't mean that I have rights to copy its corporately owned IP." Granted. This is absolutely true.
But Cringley's Snapster is a compnay that is set up so that owners become part of the corporation, and one of those rights of the corporation is to space shift its corporately owned media. Snapster would be set up so that this was the raison d'etre of the corporation. As part of the corporation I would exercise my corporate ability to space shift the corporately owned CDs.
Furthermore, the ownership of a CD and the ability to space shift is very different than the terms of an EULA on, for example, MS Windows. Without such an EULA, Sony, BMG, Time-Warner, etc. might be out of luck. There is no explicit restriction to how many machines may play a space-shifted back up.
Still, Snapster might not fly, but only a court can test that. These arguments about how "Snapster would be just like Microsoft/Mp3.com/etc." have not considered the terms of incorporation Cringely proposes.
Hm. You might be right about the quote. I was thinking of _Matrix Reloaded_, not the original, the part just before Burly Brawl. Wish I had a link. In any case, your assertion that my mistake (such as it may be) has something to do with my mouth is juvenile.
There has been some confusion on my part and the part of others. Akamai may have updated its image before I got to it (what I get for trusting write-ups).
Apparently, some enterprising young soul traced down the Akamai image and as of 20 June 2003, 9:00 am EST, that image is still up. Basically, this means the image is real enough to have Akamai's machines serve it up. (Akamai provides content delivery services to Apple)
And in case someone at Apple and Akamai wake up enough to pull the Akamai content, here's my mirror. Think of it as education free use.
(Dear, Mr. Jobs. Please don't sic your lawyers on me. You'll find I'm very amenable were I to receive "assistance" with my imminent alBook purchase.);-)
Late to the game and all that . . . but you're missing the obvious. If IBM and SCO lawyers were talking 24/7, SCO would have tanked the possibility of any deal by revoking IBM's license. How do you think Big Blue's going to respond to that shot across the bow?
No meeting of the minds here, folks. The legal battlelines have been drawn. The generals have dropped the hotline.
Of course if the USPS were losing the movies one could expect losses in both directions. I asked a one-time ex-deputy Director of the FBI about such shenanigans (ooh, my mighty network) and he said that US Postal inspectors would LOVE to hear about such "losses" and to investigate such a matter.
Being a good and right consumer, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle and settled with cancelling my subscription. I was paranoid/concerned that Netflix was purposely "losing" (read "not processing") my returned DVDs in order to slow up my queue. I had been renting about 12-15 movies a month. Once my returned DVDs began getting "lost," my rental rate went down to 4-5 DVDs per month because I had to wait about a week before I could really report them as "lost".
Maybe one day I'll sign up again and ask the Feds to investigate the mysterious disappearance of DVDs in the US Mail.
Your analysis abridges too much of the historical detail that would give your three-centuries long meta-history a chance to grow real teeth. But there are definitely more than a few nubs of truth here and there. Impressive, especially considering this also comes nearly twenty years after Lyotard's disaffected diagnosis of The Postmodern Condition. More than anything, historians and politicians need a critical meta-history, but none have been coming in large part due to the wasteland of consumer entertainment culture which inhibits the growth of socially responsible politics.
However, television is not solely to blame. The political disorganization of the masses (whom you refer to as "the rabble") is the product of powerful cultural fantasy-machines and these machines include music, art (high and low), philosophy, religion, etc. What makes these machines so distracting is the belief that postmodernity cannot be examined (let alone reconfigured) because global capitalism has completely and permanently obscured the relations of production (the relationship between the owners and the workers | the elite and the rabble). In other words, our media are in the main useless for the political organization of the masses (or at least, not as effective as the deep entanglement of global corporatism) because many of us have come to believe that there is nothing more desirable than satisfying our consumerist appetites: everything takes a second seat to buying power including love, spirituality, and compassion.
Socially concerned meta-histories, such as the one you propose, are more important than ever. However, because you post anoymously, there is no way for scholars such as myself to attribute your work or refer others to you. Even so, I am notifying a few colleagues about what you've posted here.
Then again, you could be someone from the corporatist side trolling for black list candidates, in which case, sign me up! In the case that you are not, I'd very much like to consider other work you've done regarding these issues.
The difference between CNN linking to a site and/. linking to a site is that there is no such thing as the "CNN Effect" while the "Slashdot Effect" is such a well-known phenomenon it has been written up by a university physicist.
We're not talking an occasional spike in traffic: everytime/. links to an article, that site is hit and hit hard. With the current linking policy (i.e. none),/. inadvertently becomes a DoS portal with us slashdrones the zombified clients.
/. should have taken care of this a long time ago.
This is not meant as a bait, but what about Open Source Software? That's free and people are still paying buttloads for propietary OSes.
The translation I'm thinking is that if the pay download services were easier to use than current P2P technologies (e.g. easy searches with high success rates; complete, relatively high-quality files), people might choose to pay for their digital music than search high-and-low for mp3s with tweak in their mojo.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez, how lame-brained of you, especially since you appear to be using some of your thinking capacity. You're just refusing to see the bigger picture.
Time's expurgation of a single article from an online edition of a print magazine is not directly, if at all, motivated by Time's consideration of their "bottom line." To all appearances, the expurgation of the article in question is politically motivated. You argue that No "morality" or "social conscience" or "concern for human freedom" will play into it, but from anything I can see it is precisely terms such as those you reject which motivated Time's editorial staff to censor their own publication.
Some time ago, the news media began reporting that McDonald's was to going to provide wireless access in their restauraunts. That service, according to McDonald's itself, would in some places be for pay.
McDonald's giveaway will promote its for-pay WiFi access. iTMS is the market leader of downloaded music with, according to a 5 November analyst conference call held by Apple, over 80% market share. McDonald's will be able to "give away" US $0.99 tracks to, in some cases, sell US $2.99/day WiFi access.
I wonder if some of those Happy Meal freebies will include a day's worth of free WiFi.
I carefully cracked the case open and wiped off the sticky gunk with warm water. I then opened another good floppy, replaced the disk with the cleaned and dried formerly gunky disk. I said a brief prayer to the Woz and put it in the computer. Hey presto! We immediately read all of the information and made three copies for her to have.. . .
Awwwww, c'mon. We wanna know what happened next! You know . . .
You know we /.'ers never get laid. The least you could do is give us a good READ! (wth, it's only karma)
This was developed by Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues.
The MASER was the predecessor of the LASER. Though most don't know this, LASER is an acronym standing for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." The difference is that MASERs amplify Microwaves instead of light.
Isn't it convenient that the lead scientist on this is named just happened to be named "Mazur?" . . . Waitaminut, where'd that black helicopter come from?
(You can get a little info about MASERs and LASERs here)
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Full disclosure: I have purchased seven computers in my life since 1983 and they have all been Apple machines.
In your post you (johnpaul191) seem to assume that the iBooks mentioned in mslinux's post were purchased at different times. I assumed the 9 iBooks were part of the same shipment and (possibly) manufacturing run. In either case, mslinux's chumpy iBooks could have been chumpy because of something Apple or the manufacturer did or did not do. In my experience, user breakage is overwhelmed by manufacturing defects.
Apple's manufacturers and Apple itself do occasionally design software and hardware badly. Sometimes, there are product runs or batches of a particular run that are fouled due either to manufacturing defects, design flaws, and/or plain ol' entropy.
One example of this is the translucent power cord that Apple debuted with the Pismo (Firewire G3) powerbooks. The material used in those cords degraded over time and eventually carried charge. As a result, those cords ended up generating sparks and, in some cases, small fires. To my knowledge, no one was ever hurt but thousands of customers were affected.
Apple replaced those faulty cords under AppleCare and quietly redesigned the power cord to use a different opaque material. Power cords that failed without AppleCare cost their users in the neighborhood of $60 (US). This is only one design flaw in one of Apple's hardware lines. Other Apple hardware lines have also been poorly designed and/or manufactured: early PowerBook 100s caught fire and PowerBook 5300s are notorious for disintegrating LCD mounts.
Now, I'm not saying Apple makes a crummy machine. Far from it. (I just requisitioned and receieved a 15" ALbook which, by the way, is a way sweet machine.) But like any hardware conglomerate, Apple and its manufacturers do occasionally build and ship lemons, a fact they sometimes they try to diguise. One way they do this is by fixing such machines under warranty. In other cases they will replace the machine in question in response to a user complaint. But because they never issue a recall (which would be overkill in most cases), a small percentage of users are left with hardware that's broken due to no fault of their own.
If I had gone and said the north american power grid should be replaced at the wake of the outages [ . . . ], I would have been accused of countless acts of civil disobediance.
My first question is what is wrong with Slashdot? I mean someone saw fit to give the parent coward "Insightful" for what she or he wrote? Someone wind the clock back before 2000 when Slashdot wasn't frequented by Microsoft apologists.
I'm not sure what makes you think your exercising your 1st Amendment right to speak freely (assuming you're a US citizen) would be branded civil disobedince, but in case you're really worried (and not just ranting) know you're in good comapny: first, the outage of August 2003 has produced a US-Canadain task force to investigate problems with the aging power grid. In fact, the power grid is so important that it is the subject of dozens of assessments conducted by North American Electric Reliabilty Council. Let's just say that NERC is not sanguine about the reliability of the North-American power grid. The problem is so widespread that even US lawmakers anticipate a massive political dispute.
Regarding your comparison of the power grid to the Internet, network events such as MSBlaster and Sobig.F highlight the fragility of an information network built of insecure nodes. At present, the overwelming majority of the nodes of the Internet are powered by Microsoft software. For better or for worse, "press releases and open letters right at the wake [sic] of major worms" draw attention to the real effects of maintaining so insecure an information network. MSBlaster and Sobig.F are not theories but facts and so prove the unreliability of an Internet composed mainly of Microsoft-powered nodes. The timely discussion of network events such as MSBlaster, Mimda, Code Red, Sobig.X, etc. in the press should, in my opinion, be an obligation of network adminstrators.
Given your post, you'd probably have us ignore the problem in the hopes that the next worm/virus/trojan does not damage our shared information network even more spectacularly. Thanks, but I would rather disseminate information and share data about such network events rather than stop my eyes, ears, and mouth with sand.
Now would he have jumped out at 30km height, he would have broken the sound barrier and then, slowed down to 220kph.
Mach I at 30 km (18.6 miles) is about 675 mph. He was travelling, at his fastest, at 360 kmh (200 mph), nowhere near the sound barrier at any altitude. The sound barrier increases and decreases even as altitude increases, but it never goes lower than about 660 mph. Here's a chart of Mach 1 at different altitudes.
(On an entirely different note, has anyone besides me noticed that the quality of Slashdot moderation has degraded over the last year or so? I haven't been "assigned" mod points since the great move West, but I know I used to do a better job than what passes for moderation these days. The mod system needs something way much more effective than the current M2 system which does absolutely nothing. I mean, we're talking about something fundamental as the speed of sound.)
Human is someone who looks and talks like me and has enough of my genes that we can (if we were of the right ages and genders) fuck like bunnies and make more humans.
Does this mean infertile humans are not human? Whatever you think, your reduction of "human" to reproductive capacity is not a technical definition of human. Arguing that humans are beings who descend from humans is no more enlightening and just as circular as saying horses are animals descended from horses (and don't even get started about donkeys and mules). Philosophers debate what it means to be human because identifying essential and/or shared characteristics of human beings reveal ways in which we are and aren't connected to living and non-living beings with whom we share the world. Identifying such characteristics (if such can ever be done) also has profound consequences for our moral, spiritual, ethical, and social obligations to other humans (and non-humans).
Besides, "fuck[ing] like bunnies" would make you a rodent, wouldn't it?
Are people with artificial limbs currently hated and shunned?
You answer your own question in the negative, but the whole reason of (for example) Americans with Disabilities Act is to ensure that people who are handicapped to the point of needing prosthetics (e. g. wheelchairs) are not discrimated against, intentionally or not. People with prostheses are shunned, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. While the transhumanist movement is concerned the rights of beings who include but are not limited to humans with prosthetic enhancements, their point is to codify the rights of such beings before a crisis (e. g. civil war) occurs.
You're right that stem cell research has many potential benefits, but what has that go to do with drafting a bill of transhuman rights? It's not like rights to self-determination and laws regulating stem-cell research are mutually exclusive or in an obvious zero-sum competition for resources.
Remember, it doesn't have to be as good as iTunes, it just has to be good enough for the masses of Windows users to accept it.
Good point.
Even so, Apple will probably execute the Windows version of iTMS with style and grace. When the iTMS for Windows debuts, it very likely will surpass the level of usability that Windows users have grown accustomed to. Given Apple's industry-envied history of producing quality software and hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's Windows version of iTunes outperforms all current players in the category.
One can only hope that more users will experience firsthand the difference between Apple(-based) and Microsoft(-based) companies. Both types of company aim to make money, but they have different approaches to that goal. Apple (idealisitic) wants to make the best widget out there, bar none. Microsoft (monopolistic) wants to be the only widget out there, barring all others.
Few Windows-based companies "get it right." Instead, they get it "good enough", which is basically Clock_Nova's point.
Now, I'm not claiming Apple is a perfect company. They've shafted plenty of users, including me. But I am saying that because Apple has an idealistic approach to the market, they often pioneer and advance the state of information technology. Because Microsoft takes a monopolistic approach, they largely clone information technologies, often producing a usable but dramatically inferior product. Occasionally, the monopolistic approach demands that pioneering technology be destroyed, but now I'm getting a little off-topic . . . My main point is that Apple's Windows iTMS will probably be better than "good enough." I'm betting it will rock.
(To be fair, Windows-based companies, Microsoft to name one, occasionally produces high-quality product. For example, the Microsoft Office suite for Mac OS X comes to mind.)
I've seen this argument three times now: "Just because I own a share of Corporation X doesn't mean that I have rights to copy its corporately owned IP." Granted. This is absolutely true.
But Cringley's Snapster is a compnay that is set up so that owners become part of the corporation, and one of those rights of the corporation is to space shift its corporately owned media. Snapster would be set up so that this was the raison d'etre of the corporation. As part of the corporation I would exercise my corporate ability to space shift the corporately owned CDs.
Furthermore, the ownership of a CD and the ability to space shift is very different than the terms of an EULA on, for example, MS Windows. Without such an EULA, Sony, BMG, Time-Warner, etc. might be out of luck. There is no explicit restriction to how many machines may play a space-shifted back up.
Still, Snapster might not fly, but only a court can test that. These arguments about how "Snapster would be just like Microsoft/Mp3.com/etc." have not considered the terms of incorporation Cringely proposes.
Hm. You might be right about the quote. I was thinking of _Matrix Reloaded_, not the original, the part just before Burly Brawl. Wish I had a link. In any case, your assertion that my mistake (such as it may be) has something to do with my mouth is juvenile.
Here are the two images side-by-side, Akamai's and Thinksecret's.
The images have quite different "feels". I'll leave speculation about the provenance of Thinksecret's image to the experts.
You made the same mistake I did. Look more closely, those are G4 processors, not G5. This is a graphic of Apple's current offering.
"I hate giving bad news to good people."
Got carried away and didn't look closely at the images. Sorry folks.
:-(
Apparently, some enterprising young soul traced down the Akamai image and as of 20 June 2003, 9:00 am EST, that image is still up. Basically, this means the image is real enough to have Akamai's machines serve it up. (Akamai provides content delivery services to Apple)
And in case someone at Apple and Akamai wake up enough to pull the Akamai content, here's my mirror. Think of it as education free use.
(Dear, Mr. Jobs. Please don't sic your lawyers on me. You'll find I'm very amenable were I to receive "assistance" with my imminent alBook purchase.) ;-)
Late to the game and all that . . . but you're missing the obvious. If IBM and SCO lawyers were talking 24/7, SCO would have tanked the possibility of any deal by revoking IBM's license. How do you think Big Blue's going to respond to that shot across the bow?
No meeting of the minds here, folks. The legal battlelines have been drawn. The generals have dropped the hotline.
Of course if the USPS were losing the movies one could expect losses in both directions. I asked a one-time ex-deputy Director of the FBI about such shenanigans (ooh, my mighty network) and he said that US Postal inspectors would LOVE to hear about such "losses" and to investigate such a matter.
Being a good and right consumer, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle and settled with cancelling my subscription. I was paranoid/concerned that Netflix was purposely "losing" (read "not processing") my returned DVDs in order to slow up my queue. I had been renting about 12-15 movies a month. Once my returned DVDs began getting "lost," my rental rate went down to 4-5 DVDs per month because I had to wait about a week before I could really report them as "lost".
Maybe one day I'll sign up again and ask the Feds to investigate the mysterious disappearance of DVDs in the US Mail.
Netflix? Nutflicks (ouch!) is more like it.
Oh, dear. Looks like I'll have to mirror the original.
heh.
You forgot the best one!, definitely not your average teenage chick celebrity.
::fumbles OS X in a frenzied rush to BSD::
Your analysis abridges too much of the historical detail that would give your three-centuries long meta-history a chance to grow real teeth. But there are definitely more than a few nubs of truth here and there. Impressive, especially considering this also comes nearly twenty years after Lyotard's disaffected diagnosis of The Postmodern Condition. More than anything, historians and politicians need a critical meta-history, but none have been coming in large part due to the wasteland of consumer entertainment culture which inhibits the growth of socially responsible politics.
However, television is not solely to blame. The political disorganization of the masses (whom you refer to as "the rabble") is the product of powerful cultural fantasy-machines and these machines include music, art (high and low), philosophy, religion, etc. What makes these machines so distracting is the belief that postmodernity cannot be examined (let alone reconfigured) because global capitalism has completely and permanently obscured the relations of production (the relationship between the owners and the workers | the elite and the rabble). In other words, our media are in the main useless for the political organization of the masses (or at least, not as effective as the deep entanglement of global corporatism) because many of us have come to believe that there is nothing more desirable than satisfying our consumerist appetites: everything takes a second seat to buying power including love, spirituality, and compassion.
Socially concerned meta-histories, such as the one you propose, are more important than ever. However, because you post anoymously, there is no way for scholars such as myself to attribute your work or refer others to you. Even so, I am notifying a few colleagues about what you've posted here.
Then again, you could be someone from the corporatist side trolling for black list candidates, in which case, sign me up! In the case that you are not, I'd very much like to consider other work you've done regarding these issues.
Respectfully,
mistersquid
The difference between CNN linking to a site and /. linking to a site is that there is no such thing as the "CNN Effect" while the "Slashdot Effect" is such a well-known phenomenon it has been written up by a university physicist.
We're not talking an occasional spike in traffic: everytime /. links to an article, that site is hit and hit hard. With the current linking policy (i.e. none), /. inadvertently becomes a DoS portal with us slashdrones the zombified clients.
/. should have taken care of this a long time ago.
This is not meant as a bait, but what about Open Source Software? That's free and people are still paying buttloads for propietary OSes.
The translation I'm thinking is that if the pay download services were easier to use than current P2P technologies (e.g. easy searches with high success rates; complete, relatively high-quality files), people might choose to pay for their digital music than search high-and-low for mp3s with tweak in their mojo.
Maybe?