Yes, Michael did an astute job of pointing out those inconsistencies. In fact, I was curious to how both opponents could make such flaws, while Sullivan's points seemed to be cogent and lucid, then I realized much of that may be in the interpretation. Michael has done a good job, then, of summarizing the flaws in the DA and MPAA arguments. Please moderate the previous reply up, so reviewers get a chance to consider Michael's strengths here...
I program in order to write
If I spoke in order to write
I would write about speaking
If I stole in order to write
I would write about stealing
But I program in order to write
And thus my thoughts must be organized
Presentable and actually do something
Though a spontaneous poet I'm not yet
If I program and program all day
And like Lewis Carroll write all night
Soon a new Alice in Wonderland tumbles forth
(That mathematically-correct fairy tale)
And the art of poetry will be enhanced
Not by math but by logic, and then
The art of programming will be noble
And the court won't wonder whether
Programming can be expressive, Hooray!
I am a writer. On the side, to make a living, I am a programmer. The reason for my choice to be a programmer is not whimsical, but deeply rooted in my needs as a writer. As a writer, I need to be able to do for-pay work which does not exhaust my soul, leaving me no depth or clarity when I sit down to write. My whole life nurtures the art of writing, and I must be careful in what I choose to do with my non-writing life, if I want my writing to reflect anything notable.
In other words, I discovered that to write well, I write what I am. Of course, what I am can be metaphorized.
For example, I may choose to fund the art of writing as a salesman. Then, when I sit down to write, I write about conquest and competition and slyly leading my clients to the purchase point. While these abilities are demanded of a salesman, and many salesmen would then read my writing even if it were metaphorized, this is not what I am seeking to write. I seek to write lucidly, with well-organized thoughts, on various ethical issues.
As such, I find that my "day job" as a programmer is perfect! The task of organizing thoughts into a clean, presentable manner, is absolutely demanded of me during the day. When I sit down at night to write, the same techniques apply. All I have to do is research my topics (also demanded of a programmer) and then write, both synthesising (programmers call it cut-n-paste), and creating entirely new objects.
Note Larry Wall for a man who infuses poetry with programming... With these thoughts, could I be anything other than just another Perl hacker?
Give me some time, and this essay would be shorter and have more content.:-)
Ummm, there is a really intriguing analysis and response to the reality/belief essay several messages later, with the subject line of "Subjectivity is Objectivity for some Objects."
Know where the metric came from originally?
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
·
· Score: 1
The inch is most likely based on something referred to as the Primitive Inch, which is also known as the Pyramid Inch. Take a look at your dollar bill. See that pyramid on the back? It's there because of Napoleon, who implemented the metric system after returning from Egypt where he studied the pyramids in extraordinary detail, but got some of the information wrong.
The metric system is based on a mistake made in measuring the distance OVER THE SURFACE of the earth instead of from the center to the north pole, later verified by satellites to be extremely close to the distance Napoleon would have found if he'd known how to measure that distance...the English foot.
If you want to see how incredibly accurate the English system is in relation to the universe, take a look at this site and read it for a while. It's only one example of many sites about the pyramids.
The metric system was flawed from inception, and is as geocentric as the Catholics during Galileo's day, while the English system is NOT arbitrary, but based on extremely accurate information about the size of the earth, sidereal time, and so forth which was known thousands and thousands of years ago.
Glad to learn about Fahrenheit being sensibly based, as well.
The metric system will fade in a few hundred years, the English system will either be revived then, or be recreated in exact proportions, because it is a more accurate expression of our place in the universe than the metric. I thank Napoleon for the canned food idea, though.
One quote from that site, by the way: "Thus the length of the Pyramid Inch is defined and it turns out to be 1.00106 British Inches, an amazingly close correspondence to our present day standard..."
I mighta remembered some of the details inaccurately, but this debate will be closed by the time I can post more accurately, so thanks for listening.
Actually, it's much more complex than "competition is bad, cooperation is good." There is a place for competition. But, remember the old story of the guy who only had one tool? Everything looked like a nail to him. Competition is only one tool of the many available. On a physical level, we ARE competing for the same finite resources, but when we get to something like software, which is an infinite resource, we don't need ta compete. We can create a whole new OS on the fly.
As for my ideas dying when I die, tell that to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Jesus Christ. All three of them woulda given you that piece of bread.
Oh on your other point, EVERY dogma, EVERY movement, no matter how secular, is a religion, just as EVERYTHING WE DO is either overcoming fascism or accepting of it.
Fascism is one of those things which is ubiquitous; if we deny that it exists, we are only fooling ourselves. Freedom is also ubiquitous, and we can either accept it or reject it, but we cannot realistically say that we have no part in it. If you do not include this struggle in everything you do, then you are in the elite who can pretend that the battle is already finished. The rest of us keep fighting to the end.
It means that statistics only give you information about the present. Accurate information about the future comes from a different source. I was talking about sustainability. The point I was making was that Microsoft survives financially because they appeal to the statistically largest portion of the population, while their practices are unsustainable in the long-term, and thus they will fade before Open Source does, because they alienate the peripheral people like Linux users, who don't WANT Microsoft products to think for them. And would rather put together their own OS than bend the knee to the masses, who are fickle and leave ya behind without remorse when something else catches their short attention span. Appealing to the masses always works, but only for a short time each.
Linux is composed of people working in a cooperative environment. If it doesn't work right but you've got a great idea, some stranger out of nowhere will arrive and fix it for you: On the condition that you become that stranger some time in the future for someone else. Great implementation of the old concept known as the Golden Rule. From the beginning of his first comment onward, Doug Miller makes it clear that he is working in a competitive environment. (I just used his own term 'competitive.')
Competition has its place, but it need not be the driving force behind software design/selling. The funny thing is that Microsoft, by being large and monolothic does not appear to be competitive to the uninformed. And on the other hand, Linux supporters seem to be fiercely competitive, preferring KDE over GNOME or SLACKWARE over DEBIAN, with virulent flame wars on these topics, while Microsoft supporters rather obediently take what comes to them without complaint.
So when Doug Miller very gently speaks, in an intelligent and articulate manner about 'competition' few people realize that the premise of 'competition' is short-sighted, and far from the fun and excitement that comes from approaching the same goals in a 'cooperative' environment. The scope of this mini-essay is too limited to talk about the fact that fascism can hide behind the guise of 'cooperation' as easily as it can hide behind the guise of 'competition,' so let me remain on the point that it should be clear that Doug Miller, and his company, is extremely competitive.
FUD (stirring up Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt against your opponent) is a way of thinking for competitive folks, who have no immovable ethical boundaries: the boundaries will move if no one objects to their implementation. We object to Microsoft, and this keeps them in line. Linux on the other hand, is built in a process of dialogue (or multilogue?). FUD fails within the Open Source community, because we all want the software to work, not just a few of us. Divide and conquer doesn't work against people who have the same goal. Microsoft is waging war with its own customers; Linux is seeking to serve, by allowing ANY customer to inform himself and transform the product, based on merit alone.
While Open Source by its cooperative nature will eventually grow out of its internal dissension, rising above FUD, FUD is always an option within competition, because competition is founded on a hierarchical structure where one person wins and another person loses. Help yourself win by helping the other guy lose? This is not like Linux!
'Cooperation' on the other hand, is an extremely high standard toward which Open Source strives. It cannot be implemented in any sustainable fashion unless there is a way to manage extremely peripheral perspectives in a way which invites people to work toward the common goal if they find that the current version of the goal is not to their liking. (Some perspectives may be so peripheral they cannot be included, but those would only be ones which are actively destructive to the goal).
'Competition' takes those same peripheral perspectives and says 'as long as we appeal to the main group, we'll always come out ahead, because there's more in the middle.' Statistically true, but statistics are STATIC. The idea is fundamentally non-creative, and ultimately unsustainable. When Microsoft starts creating products that invite, instead of compel, they'll be moving toward the standard of Open Source in a meaningful manner. Until then, they build up low karma. Period.
Why? We in the Open Source community use FUD decreasingly as we learn how to extricate ourselves from the competitive environment of which Microsoft is an authorized member. Open Source, as Jon Katz suggested on slashdot a few days ago, is a form of 'New Jerusalem' because it points to a brave new world which is NOT fascist, or monolithic, or uncreative.
Anyway, while we use FUD decreasingly, Microsoft is bound (until they release from the 'competitive' model) to use it increasingly, until it backfires on them so hard (as the DOJ already helped them foreshadow) they give it up. This is the nature of any short-sighted philosophy; it works for a while, then collapses, while the sustainable philosophy trudges onward.
Open Source is well-established, thanks to the hard work of wingnuts like Richard Stallman, who held to it firmly for years and years, until it had momentum. Now, it is for us to use its premises to quit picking on Microsoft, and let them go through the phases of bloating and collapse which will come by the nature of long-ago choices they adhere to. After they finish taking over the world, and then failing, because all systems are and always will be hackable, Open Source will still be an option.
The true end of Open Source is long, long ways away. It is an operating system which cannot even consider the notion of encryption, because the human mind and soul is liberated to the point that we don't need to hide things from each other, because we prefer the joy that comes from working together to the joy that comes from beating each other down.
Is Open Source in competition with Microsoft? Nope; that's the way Microsoft sees it. We're not in competition with 'em, we're so far ahead of them that we're reaching back to give them a hand now. That's the nature of revolutions. Built on freedom, they laugh at verbiage like Doug Miller's, which though eloquent and striving, is unable to perceive the revolution happening around them, for they are fundamentally a part of the Old World.
Microsoft are the redcoats; Linux is Subcomandante Marcos. The people win in the end, always, cuz the end ain't the end until the people win!:-)
Extending your Jerusalem metaphor here, not submitting a troll: When Jesus was walkin' the earth, he had an astounding new way of interpreting the same old information, and eventually got killed for it, partly because it was destabilizing what existed before him.
The metaphor carries well into understanding the future of Open Source. Within a few decades of his death, the movement of people who believed in Jesus's 'Open Source for the Soul' ie: a much freer way of interpreting religious rituals & traditions was swarmed with fakers and poseurs, people who were eager to call themselves popes and bishops and use the foundation of freedom to shackle their sheep.
You can expect the same thing to happen with the Open Source movement, although faster because we got fax machines, BBSs, and e-mails. Yes, it is pure and beautiful now, re-interpreting all previous proprietary-information-dissemination-techniques. But it will increasingly be swarmed with people using it for their own selfish ends. Human nature.
Human nature, and the fact that the United States still has a strong Christian ethos driving it: for example, the apocalyptic end-of-the-world nature of the Book of Revelations played a big role in the Y2K scare of only a coupla years ago.
These factors must be considered when you look at whether Open Source is what it says it is, and whether it will still be the same in ten years.
The funny thing is, most programmers/hackers have a Tolkien/Star Wars/and even specifically nonChristian kind of mythology driving their personal end-time worldview, but the generalizations I just made still hold. Why is this funny? Because people who are adamantly nonChristian now PRECISELY BECAUSE of the thick hypocrisies laden in this religion, don't see the parallel that in 50 years, Open Source will be laden with hypocrisies, too, and people will think of it in cynical, jaded terms.
In those days, there will be a few stalwarts who hold to it fiercely, just like there are some fundamentalists now in the Bible Belt, who ain't gonna let you tell them that Jesus ain't God.
Hope you see my point and don't respond to the trollware woven throughout. This is a conversation about Open Source and New Jerusalem, and I think it's a valid question. Well framed by John Katz.
If it's a revolution, then it is creating a new way of seeing the world. Otherwise, it's just an offshoot of what was before.
So, let's not pretend it's a revolution, eager to return to what was before, but accept that it is... and extend it into the future. Instead of analyzing its effect on all sorts of established patterns, I think a much more fruitful approach to the Internet Revolution is to see what things have been created or sustained or strengthened entirely within the realm of the Internet. I think Tiananmen Square and SubComandante Marcos are two excellent examples. I was online at the time of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and I remember the Chinese gov't shut down ALL media access to the events there. They shut down all video, all phones, even faxes. But the Internet was unknown to them (it was the late 80s), and they forgot to shut down the Internet. Students ran in from the scene, logged on to their university e-mail accounts, and sent passionate and detailed e-mails about what was happening on their streets. I remember being quite informed on the topic, then turning to the News at 5:00 and finding nothing but obscure references to something happening in China. I didn't know how to organize that information then, but now I do: that was the first time the Internet played a significant role in undermining "official" strategies. By the time the Chinese gov't got around to shutting down the Internet, which they never did, it was way too late--the truth was already out.
A few years later, I watched Subcomandante Marcos restructure the revolutionary value of the Internet over the course of dozens of e-mails which revealed a cryptic poetic genius who was extremely well-prepared for an online war, playing against politicians who kept trying to respond to him with plain old-fashioned violence. The events of the past few weeks, where 150,000 people gathered to cheer him in Mexico City, where the Mexican prez Fox sent several hundred police officers to PROTECT Marcos, instead of what they were doing eight years ago, which was sending assassins to ambush him (several ambushes failed against him, because he was simply better informed than the Feds)...
The point is, that we should not look at the Internet/Information revolution with the language of its predecessor, which I consider the paranoia revolution (which began in about 1930, and is winding down now in the face of the incredible access to information coming to us via the Internet). We should look at it within its own terms, and continue to build it out of the thin air from which it was created. Remember, no one, not a single soul, predicted where we'd be with the Internet fifteen years ago. It was just a research tool til 1994...
Well then, you ask, what is that new language? You're reading it. Look at us. We're geeks. Used to be, we'd have to make a living as circus-sideshow freaks. Now an incredible legitimacy is given to programmers, and our demand for Open Source approaches to the world. This is rich material, and I hope John Katz turns his ability to synthesize themes by careful and targeted research to realizing that the Information Revolution is one where we can only make scant reference to the pre-open-source world, and hold firmly to the vision that comes with this revolution so we can turn it over to our grandkids and know that we didn't just let Walmart and McDonalds and Pepsico coopt it from us like they so want to. Viva la Google! Viva la Amazon! Viva la Revolucion!
I used to come in to work and lie all the time.
When I got home, I was in a fit of denial.
I was only doing what everyone around me was doing. Then one day I discovered what was happening, and I sought a way out of this attitude of CYA, hiding what I was actually doing from my boss, and so forth. The solution took years, but now when I come to work, I try real hard not to lie. Stress level way down. I really enjoy my job. I think the Monday morning stress thoughts come from the fact that you know you have to go back to lying again on Monday. So quit it, willya. Sleep better.
Racism is not fun. But what's worse than racism
is people who cry "racism" when it's not the case.
Since I couldn't get to the link on the story,
I wasn't able to see if they have hard evidence,
but I wouldn't even consider it a news story
unless they did. Racism and sexism are terms
which alienate and polarize, and need to be
supported with more than hunches and rumours.
Is Tradewars a MUD? Back in the early 90s, I played Tradewars, before the Internet was graphical. My friend set up a BBS using a university phone line, and we used to play fiercely. It was my first introduction to a concept of time and space which was incredibly vast--the game was designed so that it literally took several weeks to move from one corner of the universe to another. In video-game time, that was eons. I haven't played Multi-User games since then.
We've all been trolls at one time or another. The technology to extend the medium to video and sound is not futuristic. It is upon us. Check out the deep map concept.
Left the link out of the previous post. There is an introduction to the deep map concept at www.gawak.com/deepmap. What is a deep map? It's a real-time virtual reality. Thanks.
Interesting timing. After working on an essay
all morning which introduces the deep map
concept, I click on slashdot and find that John
Katz just posted an essay on a relevant topic. What is a deep map? It's a real-time virtual reality. A deep map can be deep enough to contain several virtual communities. The movie "The Matrix" gives a crisp example of a deep map (the matrix is a sinister deep map in that movie, but there can be benign ones, as well). The link to the deep map above is
absolutely brand new, only a few moments old;
at least one of its links points to a site which
was just purchased from a registrar less than
an hour ago, so it won't be online until tomorrow, but if anyone is interested in the
concept, please check it out. There is a tremenduous amount of work to be done. Thanks.
I am working on a project which is a virtual community. It's called a Deep Map, and it utilizes GPS units all over the world, synchronized with cameras and 3-d virtual image generators, creating a virtual reality which is in effect similar to the one seen in the Matrix. The project is entirely open source (before the closed source people get ahold of the idea and try to make money with it). It is kind of an "uber" virtual community, within which numerous smaller virtual communities find home, as is the case with any solid virtual community.
I first logged in to the Internet (piping in through BITnet) in 1988. Heard of the Well back then, but never got into it because I was doing other things. There were about 60 of us in a virtual community (honors colloquium at a small university in the Midwest), and we ate up lots of bandwidth exploring the Internet as it was back then. We wrote long adventure tales, authored by numerous people, we created intra-group software, to know when others were online (AIM before AOL got ahold of the idea), and so forth, with little prompting from the outside--we started from scratch, each with 500 blocks on a VAX account, and no previous experience with the Internet except for two people who'd been in the computer science program for a year or so...
Now I'm involved in recreating that incredible experience in a global sense, and wouldn't mind all the help I can get. Interested in working on a Deep Map? (the Matrix is an example of a deep map). Lemme know.
By the way, I really enjoy Katz's enthusiastic approach to diverse topics. He does a fair amount of research, driven by a preselected hypothesis, and the final result is not always what I agree with, but always enlightening. Thanks, I look forward to the next installment. jared@dctkc.com.
Hey thanks. Actually someone else was there first,
but I guess the moderator changed that. I don't
know why I got a "0" offtopic. It was entirely
on the topic of TMBG. I think he didn't like
my.sig.
On the topic of TMBG, I enjoyed this interview
immensely because John consistently cut through
the bull each time, like the Digital/Analog question. His answer revealed that he doesn't get involved in petty turf wars. He just makes music and enjoys the heck out of it. That was a theme running through most of his answers. Wish we'd asked him better questions.
Here's my.sig again, probably'll get me modded down by some athiest who prefers closed source models.
MOGLEN: Mapmaking is a very interesting subject in general, because when everybody in the country is carrying GPS equipment, one kind of mapmaking that will be absolutely possible consists of the whole structure of what we think of as free data. That is to say - people voluntarily walking around with GPS equipped cell phones donating the stream of their information to a mapping database which will be a very accurate map of everywhere all the time. Every bridge, every road, every place in the country will be repeatedly measured by people moving around with GPS equipment.
WORTHINGTON: Have you heard of any project like this today?
MOGLEN: I'm not aware of any. But you can see that it will happen, because that data stream will exist, and there will be a kind of decentralized geographic information service structure, but I don't think anybody has yet thought about what will happen. You have lots of people thinking about it from a commercial point of view - Pizza Hut guys wondering how soon they'll be able to advertise to you on your cell phone where the closest Pizza Hut is.
WORTHINGTON: It sounds like you were going in more of an open-source direction, though.
MOGLEN: That's right, and indeed, lots of open-data possibilities of all sorts exist out there that we will begin to see. But like a lot of free-software activity, this organizes as people perceive the need or the possibility. It doesn't organize ahead of that perception. We get, in our world, accustomed to the idea that what people think is neat, or needed, they'll do. As the net makes possible various kinds of collaborations that have never been possible before they'll do things, collaboratively, in new ways. Part of what I'm trying to do is understand what the political economy of a world full of that kind of content sharing is, and this is just one tiny little example of such a process.
Exactly! I'm working on a project like this, and am in way over my head... It _must_ be open source to the core. Anybody else interested in working on this kind of real-time mapmaking? It is a huge project, and I know where it needs to go, but I haven't got the skills to pull it off within ten years alone. -jared@dctkc.com, a.k.a. Water Paradox
Actually, it is part of the "most revolutionary cultural force in the world right now," but it is invisible to people who watch television. This is the first truly peaceful revolution. Count up all the people who've been killed in virtual war in the past 20 years--it's more than the population of earth several times over. This is the revolution no one knows how to see if they've been trained in other revolutions...
Sounds like a Boomer talking. Sense of scale? To make your claim, you missed the point that Boomers are stuck in the neanderthal age, where people have to actually kill other people. Baugh! Boomers dwell on messy bloody revolutions, and x-gen-ers prefer quiet revolutions of the mind, which don't kill people. It's perfectly appropriate that video games replaced war of the boomers. You ol' fart, go back and have your assassinations and bloody revolutions. We prefer to go further, and work with video games as the beginning of a new kind of violence; virtual violence. Video Games are part of the biggest revolution in 10,000 years, and you ask us to keep a sense of scale? Well, we thank you for your 60s work, but prefer you to get out of our way now, as we will get out of the way of the skaters and punks climbing all over our peaceful revolution with yet aNOTHer extension of reality.
I got to this topic late, but it's a relevant one for a project I'm working on. The project eventually includes images from Terraserver, other real-time sources, and environment rendering software to create 3-D images which duplicate our everyday life -- in real-time. Instead of flying over a terrain someone created months ago, you fly over terrain which is only a few minutes old--or even real-time, as our ability to render and catalog huge databases of imagery gets faster. It's like a cross between The Matrix and a video game. This type of technology, if applied with care, can help modulate the panic which older folks may have about video games. Of course, applied without care, can help accentuate it. Remember the holodeck in Star Trek? We're within twelve years of that, roughly. Remember where the Internet was in 1988? -Water Paradox
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Michael did an astute job of pointing out those inconsistencies. In fact, I was curious to how both opponents could make such flaws, while Sullivan's points seemed to be cogent and lucid, then I realized much of that may be in the interpretation. Michael has done a good job, then, of summarizing the flaws in the DA and MPAA arguments. Please moderate the previous reply up, so reviewers get a chance to consider Michael's strengths here...
If I spoke in order to write
I would write about speaking
If I stole in order to write
I would write about stealing
But I program in order to write
And thus my thoughts must be organized
Presentable and actually do something
Though a spontaneous poet I'm not yet
If I program and program all day
And like Lewis Carroll write all night
Soon a new Alice in Wonderland tumbles forth
(That mathematically-correct fairy tale)
And the art of poetry will be enhanced
Not by math but by logic, and then
The art of programming will be noble
And the court won't wonder whether
Programming can be expressive, Hooray!
I am a writer. On the side, to make a living, I am a programmer. The reason for my choice to be a programmer is not whimsical, but deeply rooted in my needs as a writer. As a writer, I need to be able to do for-pay work which does not exhaust my soul, leaving me no depth or clarity when I sit down to write. My whole life nurtures the art of writing, and I must be careful in what I choose to do with my non-writing life, if I want my writing to reflect anything notable.
In other words, I discovered that to write well, I write what I am. Of course, what I am can be metaphorized.
For example, I may choose to fund the art of writing as a salesman. Then, when I sit down to write, I write about conquest and competition and slyly leading my clients to the purchase point. While these abilities are demanded of a salesman, and many salesmen would then read my writing even if it were metaphorized, this is not what I am seeking to write. I seek to write lucidly, with well-organized thoughts, on various ethical issues.
As such, I find that my "day job" as a programmer is perfect! The task of organizing thoughts into a clean, presentable manner, is absolutely demanded of me during the day. When I sit down at night to write, the same techniques apply. All I have to do is research my topics (also demanded of a programmer) and then write, both synthesising (programmers call it cut-n-paste), and creating entirely new objects.
Note Larry Wall for a man who infuses poetry with programming... With these thoughts, could I be anything other than just another Perl hacker?
Give me some time, and this essay would be shorter and have more content. :-)
Not fair. Google can archive slashdot, but not even slashdot can slashdot Google. Google not slashdotted.
Ummm, there is a really intriguing analysis and response to the reality/belief essay several messages later, with the subject line of "Subjectivity is Objectivity for some Objects."
The metric system is based on a mistake made in measuring the distance OVER THE SURFACE of the earth instead of from the center to the north pole, later verified by satellites to be extremely close to the distance Napoleon would have found if he'd known how to measure that distance...the English foot.
If you want to see how incredibly accurate the English system is in relation to the universe, take a look at this site and read it for a while. It's only one example of many sites about the pyramids.
The metric system was flawed from inception, and is as geocentric as the Catholics during Galileo's day, while the English system is NOT arbitrary, but based on extremely accurate information about the size of the earth, sidereal time, and so forth which was known thousands and thousands of years ago.
Glad to learn about Fahrenheit being sensibly based, as well.
The metric system will fade in a few hundred years, the English system will either be revived then, or be recreated in exact proportions, because it is a more accurate expression of our place in the universe than the metric. I thank Napoleon for the canned food idea, though.
One quote from that site, by the way: "Thus the length of the Pyramid Inch is defined and it turns out to be 1.00106 British Inches, an amazingly close correspondence to our present day standard..."
I mighta remembered some of the details inaccurately, but this debate will be closed by the time I can post more accurately, so thanks for listening.
Psaw on you metric-lubbers.
As for my ideas dying when I die, tell that to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Jesus Christ. All three of them woulda given you that piece of bread.
Fascism is one of those things which is ubiquitous; if we deny that it exists, we are only fooling ourselves. Freedom is also ubiquitous, and we can either accept it or reject it, but we cannot realistically say that we have no part in it. If you do not include this struggle in everything you do, then you are in the elite who can pretend that the battle is already finished. The rest of us keep fighting to the end.
It means that statistics only give you information about the present. Accurate information about the future comes from a different source. I was talking about sustainability. The point I was making was that Microsoft survives financially because they appeal to the statistically largest portion of the population, while their practices are unsustainable in the long-term, and thus they will fade before Open Source does, because they alienate the peripheral people like Linux users, who don't WANT Microsoft products to think for them. And would rather put together their own OS than bend the knee to the masses, who are fickle and leave ya behind without remorse when something else catches their short attention span. Appealing to the masses always works, but only for a short time each.
Competition has its place, but it need not be the driving force behind software design/selling. The funny thing is that Microsoft, by being large and monolothic does not appear to be competitive to the uninformed. And on the other hand, Linux supporters seem to be fiercely competitive, preferring KDE over GNOME or SLACKWARE over DEBIAN, with virulent flame wars on these topics, while Microsoft supporters rather obediently take what comes to them without complaint.
So when Doug Miller very gently speaks, in an intelligent and articulate manner about 'competition' few people realize that the premise of 'competition' is short-sighted, and far from the fun and excitement that comes from approaching the same goals in a 'cooperative' environment. The scope of this mini-essay is too limited to talk about the fact that fascism can hide behind the guise of 'cooperation' as easily as it can hide behind the guise of 'competition,' so let me remain on the point that it should be clear that Doug Miller, and his company, is extremely competitive.
FUD (stirring up Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt against your opponent) is a way of thinking for competitive folks, who have no immovable ethical boundaries: the boundaries will move if no one objects to their implementation. We object to Microsoft, and this keeps them in line. Linux on the other hand, is built in a process of dialogue (or multilogue?). FUD fails within the Open Source community, because we all want the software to work, not just a few of us. Divide and conquer doesn't work against people who have the same goal. Microsoft is waging war with its own customers; Linux is seeking to serve, by allowing ANY customer to inform himself and transform the product, based on merit alone.
While Open Source by its cooperative nature will eventually grow out of its internal dissension, rising above FUD, FUD is always an option within competition, because competition is founded on a hierarchical structure where one person wins and another person loses. Help yourself win by helping the other guy lose? This is not like Linux!
'Cooperation' on the other hand, is an extremely high standard toward which Open Source strives. It cannot be implemented in any sustainable fashion unless there is a way to manage extremely peripheral perspectives in a way which invites people to work toward the common goal if they find that the current version of the goal is not to their liking. (Some perspectives may be so peripheral they cannot be included, but those would only be ones which are actively destructive to the goal).
'Competition' takes those same peripheral perspectives and says 'as long as we appeal to the main group, we'll always come out ahead, because there's more in the middle.' Statistically true, but statistics are STATIC. The idea is fundamentally non-creative, and ultimately unsustainable. When Microsoft starts creating products that invite, instead of compel, they'll be moving toward the standard of Open Source in a meaningful manner. Until then, they build up low karma. Period.
Why? We in the Open Source community use FUD decreasingly as we learn how to extricate ourselves from the competitive environment of which Microsoft is an authorized member. Open Source, as Jon Katz suggested on slashdot a few days ago, is a form of 'New Jerusalem' because it points to a brave new world which is NOT fascist, or monolithic, or uncreative.
Anyway, while we use FUD decreasingly, Microsoft is bound (until they release from the 'competitive' model) to use it increasingly, until it backfires on them so hard (as the DOJ already helped them foreshadow) they give it up. This is the nature of any short-sighted philosophy; it works for a while, then collapses, while the sustainable philosophy trudges onward.
Open Source is well-established, thanks to the hard work of wingnuts like Richard Stallman, who held to it firmly for years and years, until it had momentum. Now, it is for us to use its premises to quit picking on Microsoft, and let them go through the phases of bloating and collapse which will come by the nature of long-ago choices they adhere to. After they finish taking over the world, and then failing, because all systems are and always will be hackable, Open Source will still be an option.
The true end of Open Source is long, long ways away. It is an operating system which cannot even consider the notion of encryption, because the human mind and soul is liberated to the point that we don't need to hide things from each other, because we prefer the joy that comes from working together to the joy that comes from beating each other down.
Is Open Source in competition with Microsoft? Nope; that's the way Microsoft sees it. We're not in competition with 'em, we're so far ahead of them that we're reaching back to give them a hand now. That's the nature of revolutions. Built on freedom, they laugh at verbiage like Doug Miller's, which though eloquent and striving, is unable to perceive the revolution happening around them, for they are fundamentally a part of the Old World.
Microsoft are the redcoats; Linux is Subcomandante Marcos. The people win in the end, always, cuz the end ain't the end until the people win! :-)
Thanks for listening.
The metaphor carries well into understanding the future of Open Source. Within a few decades of his death, the movement of people who believed in Jesus's 'Open Source for the Soul' ie: a much freer way of interpreting religious rituals & traditions was swarmed with fakers and poseurs, people who were eager to call themselves popes and bishops and use the foundation of freedom to shackle their sheep.
You can expect the same thing to happen with the Open Source movement, although faster because we got fax machines, BBSs, and e-mails. Yes, it is pure and beautiful now, re-interpreting all previous proprietary-information-dissemination-techniques. But it will increasingly be swarmed with people using it for their own selfish ends. Human nature.
Human nature, and the fact that the United States still has a strong Christian ethos driving it: for example, the apocalyptic end-of-the-world nature of the Book of Revelations played a big role in the Y2K scare of only a coupla years ago.
These factors must be considered when you look at whether Open Source is what it says it is, and whether it will still be the same in ten years.
The funny thing is, most programmers/hackers have a Tolkien/Star Wars/and even specifically nonChristian kind of mythology driving their personal end-time worldview, but the generalizations I just made still hold. Why is this funny? Because people who are adamantly nonChristian now PRECISELY BECAUSE of the thick hypocrisies laden in this religion, don't see the parallel that in 50 years, Open Source will be laden with hypocrisies, too, and people will think of it in cynical, jaded terms.
In those days, there will be a few stalwarts who hold to it fiercely, just like there are some fundamentalists now in the Bible Belt, who ain't gonna let you tell them that Jesus ain't God.
Hope you see my point and don't respond to the trollware woven throughout. This is a conversation about Open Source and New Jerusalem, and I think it's a valid question. Well framed by John Katz.
So, let's not pretend it's a revolution, eager to return to what was before, but accept that it is... and extend it into the future. Instead of analyzing its effect on all sorts of established patterns, I think a much more fruitful approach to the Internet Revolution is to see what things have been created or sustained or strengthened entirely within the realm of the Internet. I think Tiananmen Square and SubComandante Marcos are two excellent examples. I was online at the time of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and I remember the Chinese gov't shut down ALL media access to the events there. They shut down all video, all phones, even faxes. But the Internet was unknown to them (it was the late 80s), and they forgot to shut down the Internet. Students ran in from the scene, logged on to their university e-mail accounts, and sent passionate and detailed e-mails about what was happening on their streets. I remember being quite informed on the topic, then turning to the News at 5:00 and finding nothing but obscure references to something happening in China. I didn't know how to organize that information then, but now I do: that was the first time the Internet played a significant role in undermining "official" strategies. By the time the Chinese gov't got around to shutting down the Internet, which they never did, it was way too late--the truth was already out.
A few years later, I watched Subcomandante Marcos restructure the revolutionary value of the Internet over the course of dozens of e-mails which revealed a cryptic poetic genius who was extremely well-prepared for an online war, playing against politicians who kept trying to respond to him with plain old-fashioned violence. The events of the past few weeks, where 150,000 people gathered to cheer him in Mexico City, where the Mexican prez Fox sent several hundred police officers to PROTECT Marcos, instead of what they were doing eight years ago, which was sending assassins to ambush him (several ambushes failed against him, because he was simply better informed than the Feds)...
The point is, that we should not look at the Internet/Information revolution with the language of its predecessor, which I consider the paranoia revolution (which began in about 1930, and is winding down now in the face of the incredible access to information coming to us via the Internet). We should look at it within its own terms, and continue to build it out of the thin air from which it was created. Remember, no one, not a single soul, predicted where we'd be with the Internet fifteen years ago. It was just a research tool til 1994...
Well then, you ask, what is that new language? You're reading it. Look at us. We're geeks. Used to be, we'd have to make a living as circus-sideshow freaks. Now an incredible legitimacy is given to programmers, and our demand for Open Source approaches to the world. This is rich material, and I hope John Katz turns his ability to synthesize themes by careful and targeted research to realizing that the Information Revolution is one where we can only make scant reference to the pre-open-source world, and hold firmly to the vision that comes with this revolution so we can turn it over to our grandkids and know that we didn't just let Walmart and McDonalds and Pepsico coopt it from us like they so want to. Viva la Google! Viva la Amazon! Viva la Revolucion!
I used to come in to work and lie all the time. When I got home, I was in a fit of denial. I was only doing what everyone around me was doing. Then one day I discovered what was happening, and I sought a way out of this attitude of CYA, hiding what I was actually doing from my boss, and so forth. The solution took years, but now when I come to work, I try real hard not to lie. Stress level way down. I really enjoy my job. I think the Monday morning stress thoughts come from the fact that you know you have to go back to lying again on Monday. So quit it, willya. Sleep better.
Racism is not fun. But what's worse than racism is people who cry "racism" when it's not the case. Since I couldn't get to the link on the story, I wasn't able to see if they have hard evidence, but I wouldn't even consider it a news story unless they did. Racism and sexism are terms which alienate and polarize, and need to be supported with more than hunches and rumours.
Is Tradewars a MUD? Back in the early 90s, I played Tradewars, before the Internet was graphical. My friend set up a BBS using a university phone line, and we used to play fiercely. It was my first introduction to a concept of time and space which was incredibly vast--the game was designed so that it literally took several weeks to move from one corner of the universe to another. In video-game time, that was eons. I haven't played Multi-User games since then.
We've all been trolls at one time or another. The technology to extend the medium to video and sound is not futuristic. It is upon us. Check out the deep map concept.
Hey, sounds like you're talking about the deep map! www.gawak.com/deepmap
What I really hate is people who use parentheses.
Left the link out of the previous post. There is an introduction to the deep map concept at www.gawak.com/deepmap. What is a deep map? It's a real-time virtual reality. Thanks.
Interesting timing. After working on an essay all morning which introduces the deep map concept, I click on slashdot and find that John Katz just posted an essay on a relevant topic. What is a deep map? It's a real-time virtual reality. A deep map can be deep enough to contain several virtual communities. The movie "The Matrix" gives a crisp example of a deep map (the matrix is a sinister deep map in that movie, but there can be benign ones, as well). The link to the deep map above is absolutely brand new, only a few moments old; at least one of its links points to a site which was just purchased from a registrar less than an hour ago, so it won't be online until tomorrow, but if anyone is interested in the concept, please check it out. There is a tremenduous amount of work to be done. Thanks.
I first logged in to the Internet (piping in through BITnet) in 1988. Heard of the Well back then, but never got into it because I was doing other things. There were about 60 of us in a virtual community (honors colloquium at a small university in the Midwest), and we ate up lots of bandwidth exploring the Internet as it was back then. We wrote long adventure tales, authored by numerous people, we created intra-group software, to know when others were online (AIM before AOL got ahold of the idea), and so forth, with little prompting from the outside--we started from scratch, each with 500 blocks on a VAX account, and no previous experience with the Internet except for two people who'd been in the computer science program for a year or so...
Now I'm involved in recreating that incredible experience in a global sense, and wouldn't mind all the help I can get. Interested in working on a Deep Map? (the Matrix is an example of a deep map). Lemme know.
By the way, I really enjoy Katz's enthusiastic approach to diverse topics. He does a fair amount of research, driven by a preselected hypothesis, and the final result is not always what I agree with, but always enlightening. Thanks, I look forward to the next installment. jared@dctkc.com.
On the topic of TMBG, I enjoyed this interview immensely because John consistently cut through the bull each time, like the Digital/Analog question. His answer revealed that he doesn't get involved in petty turf wars. He just makes music and enjoys the heck out of it. That was a theme running through most of his answers. Wish we'd asked him better questions.
Here's my .sig again, probably'll get me modded down by some athiest who prefers closed source models.
WORTHINGTON: Have you heard of any project like this today?
MOGLEN: I'm not aware of any. But you can see that it will happen, because that data stream will exist, and there will be a kind of decentralized geographic information service structure, but I don't think anybody has yet thought about what will happen. You have lots of people thinking about it from a commercial point of view - Pizza Hut guys wondering how soon they'll be able to advertise to you on your cell phone where the closest Pizza Hut is.
WORTHINGTON: It sounds like you were going in more of an open-source direction, though. MOGLEN: That's right, and indeed, lots of open-data possibilities of all sorts exist out there that we will begin to see. But like a lot of free-software activity, this organizes as people perceive the need or the possibility. It doesn't organize ahead of that perception. We get, in our world, accustomed to the idea that what people think is neat, or needed, they'll do. As the net makes possible various kinds of collaborations that have never been possible before they'll do things, collaboratively, in new ways. Part of what I'm trying to do is understand what the political economy of a world full of that kind of content sharing is, and this is just one tiny little example of such a process.
Exactly! I'm working on a project like this, and am in way over my head... It _must_ be open source to the core. Anybody else interested in working on this kind of real-time mapmaking? It is a huge project, and I know where it needs to go, but I haven't got the skills to pull it off within ten years alone. -jared@dctkc.com, a.k.a. Water Paradox
Actually, it is part of the "most revolutionary cultural force in the world right now," but it is invisible to people who watch television. This is the first truly peaceful revolution. Count up all the people who've been killed in virtual war in the past 20 years--it's more than the population of earth several times over. This is the revolution no one knows how to see if they've been trained in other revolutions...
Sounds like a Boomer talking. Sense of scale? To make your claim, you missed the point that Boomers are stuck in the neanderthal age, where people have to actually kill other people. Baugh! Boomers dwell on messy bloody revolutions, and x-gen-ers prefer quiet revolutions of the mind, which don't kill people. It's perfectly appropriate that video games replaced war of the boomers. You ol' fart, go back and have your assassinations and bloody revolutions. We prefer to go further, and work with video games as the beginning of a new kind of violence; virtual violence. Video Games are part of the biggest revolution in 10,000 years, and you ask us to keep a sense of scale? Well, we thank you for your 60s work, but prefer you to get out of our way now, as we will get out of the way of the skaters and punks climbing all over our peaceful revolution with yet aNOTHer extension of reality.
I got to this topic late, but it's a relevant one for a project I'm working on. The project eventually includes images from Terraserver, other real-time sources, and environment rendering software to create 3-D images which duplicate our everyday life -- in real-time. Instead of flying over a terrain someone created months ago, you fly over terrain which is only a few minutes old--or even real-time, as our ability to render and catalog huge databases of imagery gets faster. It's like a cross between The Matrix and a video game. This type of technology, if applied with care, can help modulate the panic which older folks may have about video games. Of course, applied without care, can help accentuate it. Remember the holodeck in Star Trek? We're within twelve years of that, roughly. Remember where the Internet was in 1988? -Water Paradox