Ok, so far we're talking about either Charles Perrow-type normal accidents here, or we're trying to build a high reliability system and failing. However, since large, catastrophic events in unusual areas (such as space travel) draw a lot of attention, public risk perception may be higher than the actual risk. I don't know. Personally, even a catastrophic 2% "normal accident" rate is too high for my taste when it comes to space travel.
Unfortunately, as everyone who works in occupational health and safety (as I do) knows, good safety practice is expensive, and requires a lot of good safety theory and research behind it, which is also expensive. NASA has a history of having funding taken away from it, and according to recent press statements, NASA has been having trouble (of one variety or other) retaining safety personnel.
The upshot is, of course, that unless anyone doing space is willing to pay the extraordinary overhead costs of space safety, people, both on the ground and in the air, are going to keep dying.
If certain labels had a way for me to listen to streaming audio of their back catalogues, I'd probably tune in once in awhile. My favourite indie label has a lot of MP3s on their site, and I'm going to buy that Causey Way CD eventually...a band I never would have heard of if I hadn't been browsing their catalogue listings and seen that MP3 and thought the title looked interesting.
However, the RIAA is not going to listen. No amount of cranks make a consensus here, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison (who also should stop cutting off his nose to spite his face).
...(IANAPL, and I'm not an expert on US patents) they may be able to get any UNIX-like system on that pesky "prior art" provision, not necessarily because it specifically violates any putative patents by reusing code. After all, as the other poster (and anyone who cares to do a little research) knows, both Linux and BSD originate from independent, non-UNIX codebases. The ideational structure, the "Unix-like-ness," however, that makes these OSes what they are, may be the problem, in fact (actually, de facto AND de jure). And that's a big problem, since it's utterly impossible (?) to get around.
A friend of mine has a grocery store card and a credit card, incidentally, in the name of his SCA persona. Scary thing is...Lord So-and-So has better credit than he does -- and more grocery store points -- and he never gets telemarketing calls... (Name changed to protect the devious, of course.) Now how does one take that lesson and apply it to tires?
In Toronto, they've also had this for a couple of years, now that 416 AC overlaps with 905 and 647, and 905 overlaps with 289. I don't know why it's such a big deal to dial 10 digits instead of 7 anyway. It's not like it takes longer or anything, and after awhile you just get used to asking people for their AC. In fact, when I moved from Toronto back to London, which just has conventional 7-digit dialling, it felt funny not to have to dial 519 in front of all my calls.
Don't tell me that New Yorkers are whinier than Torontonians! I may be crushed!
I know how you feel. I own about 2000 books, so there are a lot of times when I go into my local second-hand bookstore and don't find anything I want to read at all. The posters who suggest you branch out have a good point, and I can provide some input as to "Mainstream for Science Fiction Fans" (remember that anthology, "Science Fiction for People Who Don't Like Science Fiction"?)
Note that some of these authors are not new, but you may not have gotten around to them (or heard of them) yet:
W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and If Wishes Were Horses, which are sort of "magic realism" fantasy (no orcs, elves, or swords to be seen!).
Stephen King, (bear with me!) The Dark Tower series, which is sort of dark, parallel-world fantasy drawn from contemporary popular culture, and not really like anything else King's ever written.
Tom Holt, Only Human, Snow White and the Seven Samurai, and Ye Gods!, which is sort of similar to Douglas Adams, only with less philosophy and more social skills.
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend In A Coma, which is a complete departure from Microserfs.
Donald J. Skal, Antibodies, a very overlooked little tome on people who want to become machines.
Frank Norris, McTeague, written in 1899 and has probably one of the scariest endings ever written. Ok, so it's not SF, but it might count as horror, and it's definitely a classic book. I love this book and think it's a really great read. Norris doesn't pull any punches, so it's really gritty without any flowery phrases to be found.:)
Theme anthologies are also a great way of discovering "new" authors, as are subscribing to SF magazines. But I'm sure you knew that already.
Adviso: Keep in mind that I'm heavily into Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen King, and Cordwainer Smith (among others), and I despise Tolkien and all the other sappy fantasists who take themselves seriously, so take with the appropriately-sized grain of salt.
This argument is not new in publishing circles. In fact, everyone from publishing industry executives to Spider Robinson (in a televised interview on the Space Channel) takes a crack at it every so often, and it goes like this:
Since Sturgeon's Law applies to all forms of content creation, publishers serve the valuable function of separating the wheat from the chaff and presenting us, the buying/reading public, with only the best of what's available.
Unfortunately, there are a few flaws with this argument. First of all, who decides what's the "best"? The guy who gave the go-ahead to publish The Bridges of Madison County? Literary critics? The New York Times Review of Books? Secondly, using sales numbers as the only arbiter of "good" or "bad" in an artistic venture is a really strange way of looking at art, one which sort of presupposes that that which is marketable is (de facto and de jure) automatically "good." (See argument one.) Thirdly, it's entirely possible for famous, well-respected, and talented content creators to have their entire careers axed by one failed venture. Don't believe me? Ask Norman Spinrad, author of Bug Jack Barron, and The Iron Dream among others. It happened to him, and it's happened (according to my own research) to many other authors (I'm afraid I can't really name names here, though).
See, the way the publishing biz operates, it works similarly to many areas in our society (like electoral politics, and the private sector, for two): If you've already got the "name" and you've got lots of money (or a couple of bestsellers in the hole), you're practically guaranteed to stay a success. If, on the other hand, you have to compete against the "brand names" and everybody else submitting their work 'over-the-transom', your chances of achieving even that first foot-in-the-door publication are very small. Your talent, or lack thereof, isn't usually much of a deciding factor.
So given all that, these guys making this Social Darwinism In Publishing argument really piss me off, because they're completely disconnected from publishing biz reality as we know it...either that, or they've got their lucrative contract, so they really genuinely believe that the stacked deck affords equality of opportunity. Therefore, obviously, the rather McLuhanesque (the retro-60's naivete Kling refers to?) levelling Creative Commons is a bad thing. Right.
Let me see... Now after I write my multi-million selling super blockbuster best-sellers, I can make sure that all my heirs and assigns (and maybe even my own personal immortal corporation) can keep profiting from my works forever...and ever...and ever... My Boswell will never have to work a day in his (or her) life! We're all set!
But wait... Suppose I don't write mega-super-uber blockbuster bestsellers, and my work (like 99% of all authors' work) remains steadily mid-list after I die. Judging by current trends, ever-lengthening copyrights mean only one thing: I languish in obscurity forever...and ever...and ever...and nobody gets rich...
...especially not the general public.
(We are so many, but they are so rich.)
Hmm...immortality for the priveledged few; death and obscurity for the rest. Maybe not such good news after all.
The only good thing I can think of about locating it in Belleville is that it's about equidistant from the Ottawa tech cluster (Ottawa, Kanata, Hull, etc.), Toronto and its exurbs (Toronto, Markham, Scarberia), and Montreal. Also, the overhead's probably way cheaper in Belleville than in the GTA, Ottawa, Montreal, or a similar-sized urban centre. Hmm... Sneaky ulterior motive question: Did anyone happen to notice whether the City of Belleville is providing infrastructure monies or similar other "incentives"?
Yes, I said "nineteen fifty four," and not "nineteen eighty four."
The phrase of the day is "chilling effect," brought to you by the letters H, U, A, and C.
Or isn't anyone else thinking that TIA (and friends) is a little closer to the HUAC than Orwell's book? Just alias "Commies" to "terrorists," and it works just fine.
I mean this new plot is like, well, imagine -- naah, hold on, I have to say it -- imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Joe McCarthys...
Why do folks keep misrepresenting what actually happened here?
The fact is, he did all his work on the product (which is legal in its country of origin) in Russia, where, last I heard, US laws don't apply. The fact that they were waiting to arrest him, apparently, for giving an academic lecture on a product he produced where it was legal is far more disturbing than you make it out to be.
ISTR that Skylarov isn't the first person to whom this sort of jurisdictional knucklebones has happened at the behest of some large, US-based money-wielding entity. As you may recall when the DeCSS story broke, the US wanted Jon Johansen to stand trial in the US for breaking a US law when he wasn't even in the US when he allegedly "broke" it (how can you break the law of another country when you aren't even there, I'd like to know?), but that quickly passed off around the same time as the Norwegian authorities decided to go ahead and prosecute him for related offenses, real or imagined. Also, you may recall Edward Felten's legal difficulties surrounding his paper on encryption.
All of which, in my (paranoid?) mind, adds up to the US's playing very fast and loose with international law (what else is new?) and an immense chilling effect in the technology field.
If it were provable that Elocomsoft was deliberately and knowingly (with malice aforethought) selling products to customers not legally able to buy them, that would be another matter, which I think was upheld with the verdict here. However, the very clear perception that I'm getting from the Elocomsoft case in general is that the US wants to enforce the DMCA worldwide, and will do just about anything it can to make sure that it gets what it wants. Note, please, I'm not a US citizen, and so don't have US patriotism getting in the way of my natural impulses to be skeptical and cynical of the US government's motives in any given instance, so I could be erring on the side of hostility here.
...how did they settle the jurisdictional questions? I mean, last I heard, Skylarov was working in Russia. One assumes the US government just did it by fiat, or was there more diplomacy involved than what I'm led to believe?
If the US just went ahead and did it anyway, that's kind of a scary precedent, meaning that now, no matter where you are in the world, the long arm of US law enforcement can come after you for doing something it doesn't happen to like? If that's the case, as sort of a quid pro quo, I would like some of the priveleges of US citizenship to go along with the burdens.
I bet there are a lot of old Amiga geeks out there who'd love to be browsing the internet on something that looks like an Amiga...but isn't...as opposed to some of us old Amiga geeks (you know who you are, hi, Knute!) who really do browse the internet on Amigas.
He says there's actually a good reason, even: "I don't get viruses, because nobody writes viruses for my operating system, chortle chortle chortle." Me: "So when are you going to get a real computer? I switched to PCs years ago!" Anybody got an Amiga virus on disk I could send to him by mail?;)
This showed up in my e-mail inbox today, sent from a friend. It's a little less DIY than the parent poster's solution, but it's all right too:
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 13:18:16 -0500
I declare December 2, 2004 to be "the end of spam" day.
As of December 2nd, everyone has to use a new e-mail protocol which fixes the fundamental problem of SMTP: untrusted sources.
The new protocol isn't "new". It's just that on Dec 2, 2004, everyone should stop accepting SMTP connection that don't use the STARTTLS extension to SMTP as described in RFC2487.
STARTTLS has the benefit of creating Received: headers that are cryptographically signed, and therefore meaningful. Internet email is
sent like a bucket-brigade... you send your email to your ISP, which passes it on to another ISP, which passes it to another mail server, which sends it to final receiver's mail "Inbox". With STARTTLS, there is an audit path of who passed the email alone each "hop". There is still a possibility that you won't know who the original sender is, but you know the first ISP that let that message into the system. That's good enough.
After Dec 2, 2004: when you receive email that is spam, you will be able to identify which server let the spam into the Internet. That site can
be punished, by starting a DoS attack against it, or by declaring the site to be "terrorist" at which point the Bush Administration, which will have just won re-election (and being in its last term will have no need to follow any laws) will bomb the email server. They will be given 24 hours notice, 48 if it is a 3-day weekend. Bombing will not happen if the owner of the mail system can demonstrate which user sent the spam, and that they have been removed from the system. With the threat of being bombed, mail system administrators will be under extreme pressure to make sure that all email that leaves their systems is certifiably marked by the actual creator. (Thus fixing the "but who was the original sender?" issue). Then we can arrest the user that sent the spam.
I encourage all countries to make it illegal to send email that is unreplyable. Thus making it possible to use "active filtering" systems, which accept email from "known good parties" and everyone else receives an automated reply saying, "If you want to get on my 'known good' list, here's how...". With STARTTLS in use, we can track down who is permitting unreplyable email into the Internet, and bomb them.
Before Dec 2, 2004 all mail systems should begin deploying STARTTLS. It is backwards compatible with older mail systems. It doesn't require the
risky and dangerous "throw the switch day" conversions like some new computer systems. While I'm at it, Wietse Venema should be gagged and
bound to his computer until he merges in the "STARTTLS" patch to Postfix.
Before Dec 2, 2004, email client authors should add features that let users see which email they would have missed if the post-Dec 2, 2004 policies had been in place. (Simply mark the message a special color if any of the Received: lines are from non-TLS systems.) This will encourage users to apply pressure to their friends to move to
STARTTLS-enabled ISPs.
Finally, you might be asking, "How did you pick December 2nd?" The answer is quite simple. It's my birthday and I can't think of a better birthday present I could receive than the end of spam.
Can you?
Sincerely,
Tom Limoncelli
Of course, read with tongue in appropriate position, ie. in cheek.
Yes, you have it exactly right, as near as I can figure. Unfortunately, there's a problem. Economic "growth" based on exploiting natural and human resources is necessrily finite -- there's only a finite amount of natural and human resources to go around.
We as a species are already getting into trouble because of the (unintentional) consequenses of unfettered growth, such as increasing water scarcity, desertification, and pollution. These suggest there ought to be another way of looking at an economy (maybe redefine it as a "monetary ecology"?)...
After all, in most cases, you don't call unrestricted growth "good," you call it "cancer."
As we move closer to the end of the age, look for more decisions to be made based on the "common good", "world order", and "tolerance" rather than individual rights and dignity.
Precisely what do "individual rights" and "dignity" have to do with a cluster of cells that, I quote (from the official Stanford press release), "cannot on their own develop into a human"? Please. This is not reproductive cloning. This is actually about the same, in terms of "dignity" or "individual rights" as a pacemaker.
Just because it comes from human tissue doesn't make it human, or do you give your toenail clippings funerals? Ever done that experiment in science class using epithelial cells? Did you feel like a murderer after you scraped the inside of your cheek?
Anyway, I don't know where your perspective is coming from, but you ought to at least RTFA before you rant.
Pardon me, but I thought it was rather interesting how all the proposed solutions in this white paper, while innovative, neato, and rather cool, still involve my spending more money to get rid of a problem I shouldn't have in the first place.
I absolutely love how there's a whole section involving means for businesses to make money from implementing the scheme, but the part where he notes that all of us poor schmucks who actually get bombarded with spam and telemarketing calls will have to "upgrade" to newer phone sets and e-mail programs (no doubt with a cost) is just glossed over. Isn't most of the problem with spam and telemarketers that they cost us money already? How is paying more supposed to make us feel better about making them (we hope) go away?
Surely there's got to be some way of dealing with this problem without spending more money, without enriching the telco robber barons (at minimum), or at least by using money we're already going to spend anyway (coughcough where's the CRTC when you need 'em?)...
I'm reminded of possible "forced" upgrades by other entities -- regarding Microsoft software, HDTV, DVDs, CDs, and I can only stop to wonder if IBM might, were this scheme implemented, be conveniently right there with a plug-in for your phone or something... (Always look for the ulterior motive, sez I.)
From the website, which you obviously haven't read: "In his defense, Schmeiser showed his own farm-based evidence that the fields ranged from nearly zero to 68% Roundup Ready. These tests were confirmed by independent tests performed by research scientists at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, MB." That's not "98%," not even close, and an uneven distribution like that certainly could be the result of contamination or drift. And there are lots of articles out there referring to the problems with contaminated seed.
The thing is not so much that the court chose to believe that Schmeiser was lying (see here to find out exactly what he was convicted of and what he wasn't); they believed Monsanto over him, for some cases, which is hardly an unexpected outcome. In any case, he wasn't convicted of "brownbagging," he was convicted of having Monsanto's genes on his land and not telling them about it and paying up for it. The former is explainable because he didn't know; the latter is just rank blackmail.
Anyway, what I mean by a "rhetorical paradigm" in terms of programming and programming pedagogy is to attempt to learn and use programming as a speech act, or a linguistic construction, rather than (strictly) as a mathematical or logical algorithm. I'm trying to "code-switch" (if that isn't a horrible pun) concepts in programming to their linguistic and rhetorical analogues (examples -- mind...blanking...), like "grammar," "syntax," "graphemes," "propositions," "declarations," "case," "metaphor," etc., as a means of providing an alternate viewpoint, sort of like the people who approach higher physics through philosophy, if you catch my drift.
My simplified and slightly different test case (not precisely programming, but a parallel, easier, but similar programme) was to teach myself how to use Unix-like command line syntax to perform various functions inside Linux, while treating the OS as a "language" spoken between the computer and the user. I haven't gone too far with programming itself yet, but that's mostly due to a lack of time and appropriate teaching materials.:)
If you're interested further, please e-mail me at scripsit@starmail.com, and I'll send you a list of my reading and research materials so far.
Go read his website. He didn't know it was "Monsanto's seed," he never bought seed from Monsanto (preferring to breed his own for the last half-century or so, and he certainly didn't steal anything from Monsanto. In fact, he only found out about the cross-polination when he was trying to eliminate "volunteer" canola growing where he didn't want it and used Roundup.
Experts in the subject already insist that it's virtually if not utterly impossible to find canola, corn, and soybean seed without traces of (patented) genetically-modified genes in them. Monsanto, however, is the big offender, in that it ruthlessly goes after people who wind up with "their" proprietary genes in crops. It's also totally possible to find ultra-hybridized varieties of seed containing more than one company's proprietary genes. That comes from natural cross-polination, and other forms of non-crossbreeding contamination, not theft.
All of which just blatantly shows why this Supreme Court decision is a good idea, and why Mr. Schmeiser should get Monsanto to pay through the nose for wrecking his organic hybrid canola variant with their genetically modified strain. I wonder if this court case will help?
For the last couple of years, I've been using bits and pieces of my 'copious free time' to research and develop a hypothesis of what I might call 'rhetorical computing,' that treats human-computer interactions as speech (in the technical sense) or rhetorical acts. I've mostly gotten started with the endeavour because I am trying to learn how to program from a rhetoric/logic paradigm instead of a mathematical one. So far, it's going along as well as could be expected. I'm getting exactly the results I figure I should, comparative to the amount of time I'm able to devote to it.
In the meantime, I've been looking for scholars or practitioners who are working on similar things so I can possibly work with them, or, at least cite their papers and do the required field reading. I've already written to him. We'll see what happens.
I do think there is room in the field for different kinds of approaches (all of yours too), and I'd like to at least be permitted (somehow) to follow this line of inquiry until I know it won't work, or until I know it will. That's why I see an opportunity here, and not just an(other) argument.
Ah, but I don't live in "America". Well, I live in North America, but I don't live in the United States of America, which is what I think you mean. Which also explains why I didn't know that the US encourages people to give blood by paying them. An unsurprising development, but nevertheless, something I didn't know.
In retrospect, I'm sure that neuromarketers probably find ample volunteers by paying enough money to recruit them, but as I said in my original post, you'd have to pay a lot to interest me...for two reasons. Number one is that I just hate ads, and number two is that I'd hate to think I was helping the suppurating advertising pustules. One would think that (because of the widespread dislike of ads) they would have a hard time coming up with volunteers, but I guess not.
Where do you live? You can't sell blood where I come from -- there are specifically rules against it, which is probably due to a bunch of heads rolling in the '80s when they found out a bunch of people were transfused with tainted blood -- HIV and Hep. C. At least where I come from (if not where you are) there is a perception that anybody who'd be wanting to sell blood is probably a bad risk as a donor...
Do people hate needles more than being exposed to ads for long periods of time? For me that's a tough call, and you'd think with all the comments about anti-spam this and anti-popup that around here...
What I want to know is, where are they getting the people to lie still and take a brain scan while looking at ads? Are there really people out there who like ads sufficiently to do that? Are they paying a really, really rowrbazzle lot of money?!
Are the experimental subject people crazy?! I mean, what's the angle here? I mean, what do they say to putative volunteers, "Oh, we're going to bombard you with commercials and take pictures of your thoughts while we do it, so we can make more and more irresistable ads"? I don't get it.
I mean, the research is one thing. You have to admit that, since the crawling slime are running out of venues in which to place their scrofulous offerings, they must want to make them work better (although I doubt that will lessen the saturation level!). However, where (and how) are they finding their research subjects?
This isn't precisely the kind of research they can do on rhesus monkeys or something (although with the way ads are now, you'd think they were written by planaria for rhesus monkeys, or something), but who's giving that famous "informed consent"?
Eeek! An entirely new meaning of the ad-copy phrase "Not tested on animals"!
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so far we're talking about either Charles Perrow-type normal accidents here, or we're trying to build a high reliability system and failing. However, since large, catastrophic events in unusual areas (such as space travel) draw a lot of attention, public risk perception may be higher than the actual risk. I don't know. Personally, even a catastrophic 2% "normal accident" rate is too high for my taste when it comes to space travel.
Unfortunately, as everyone who works in occupational health and safety (as I do) knows, good safety practice is expensive, and requires a lot of good safety theory and research behind it, which is also expensive. NASA has a history of having funding taken away from it, and according to recent press statements, NASA has been having trouble (of one variety or other) retaining safety personnel.
The upshot is, of course, that unless anyone doing space is willing to pay the extraordinary overhead costs of space safety, people, both on the ground and in the air, are going to keep dying.
If certain labels had a way for me to listen to streaming audio of their back catalogues, I'd probably tune in once in awhile. My favourite indie label has a lot of MP3s on their site, and I'm going to buy that Causey Way CD eventually...a band I never would have heard of if I hadn't been browsing their catalogue listings and seen that MP3 and thought the title looked interesting.
However, the RIAA is not going to listen. No amount of cranks make a consensus here, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison (who also should stop cutting off his nose to spite his face).
...(IANAPL, and I'm not an expert on US patents) they may be able to get any UNIX-like system on that pesky "prior art" provision, not necessarily because it specifically violates any putative patents by reusing code. After all, as the other poster (and anyone who cares to do a little research) knows, both Linux and BSD originate from independent, non-UNIX codebases. The ideational structure, the "Unix-like-ness," however, that makes these OSes what they are, may be the problem, in fact (actually, de facto AND de jure). And that's a big problem, since it's utterly impossible (?) to get around.
A friend of mine has a grocery store card and a credit card, incidentally, in the name of his SCA persona. Scary thing is...Lord So-and-So has better credit than he does -- and more grocery store points -- and he never gets telemarketing calls... (Name changed to protect the devious, of course.) Now how does one take that lesson and apply it to tires?
In Toronto, they've also had this for a couple of years, now that 416 AC overlaps with 905 and 647, and 905 overlaps with 289. I don't know why it's such a big deal to dial 10 digits instead of 7 anyway. It's not like it takes longer or anything, and after awhile you just get used to asking people for their AC. In fact, when I moved from Toronto back to London, which just has conventional 7-digit dialling, it felt funny not to have to dial 519 in front of all my calls.
Don't tell me that New Yorkers are whinier than Torontonians! I may be crushed!
I know how you feel. I own about 2000 books, so there are a lot of times when I go into my local second-hand bookstore and don't find anything I want to read at all. The posters who suggest you branch out have a good point, and I can provide some input as to "Mainstream for Science Fiction Fans" (remember that anthology, "Science Fiction for People Who Don't Like Science Fiction"?)
:)
Note that some of these authors are not new, but you may not have gotten around to them (or heard of them) yet:
W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and If Wishes Were Horses, which are sort of "magic realism" fantasy (no orcs, elves, or swords to be seen!).
Stephen King, (bear with me!) The Dark Tower series, which is sort of dark, parallel-world fantasy drawn from contemporary popular culture, and not really like anything else King's ever written.
Tom Holt, Only Human, Snow White and the Seven Samurai, and Ye Gods!, which is sort of similar to Douglas Adams, only with less philosophy and more social skills.
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend In A Coma, which is a complete departure from Microserfs.
Donald J. Skal, Antibodies, a very overlooked little tome on people who want to become machines.
Frank Norris, McTeague, written in 1899 and has probably one of the scariest endings ever written. Ok, so it's not SF, but it might count as horror, and it's definitely a classic book. I love this book and think it's a really great read. Norris doesn't pull any punches, so it's really gritty without any flowery phrases to be found.
Theme anthologies are also a great way of discovering "new" authors, as are subscribing to SF magazines. But I'm sure you knew that already.
Adviso: Keep in mind that I'm heavily into Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen King, and Cordwainer Smith (among others), and I despise Tolkien and all the other sappy fantasists who take themselves seriously, so take with the appropriately-sized grain of salt.
This argument is not new in publishing circles. In fact, everyone from publishing industry executives to Spider Robinson (in a televised interview on the Space Channel) takes a crack at it every so often, and it goes like this:
Since Sturgeon's Law applies to all forms of content creation, publishers serve the valuable function of separating the wheat from the chaff and presenting us, the buying/reading public, with only the best of what's available.
Unfortunately, there are a few flaws with this argument. First of all, who decides what's the "best"? The guy who gave the go-ahead to publish The Bridges of Madison County? Literary critics? The New York Times Review of Books? Secondly, using sales numbers as the only arbiter of "good" or "bad" in an artistic venture is a really strange way of looking at art, one which sort of presupposes that that which is marketable is (de facto and de jure) automatically "good." (See argument one.) Thirdly, it's entirely possible for famous, well-respected, and talented content creators to have their entire careers axed by one failed venture. Don't believe me? Ask Norman Spinrad, author of Bug Jack Barron, and The Iron Dream among others. It happened to him, and it's happened (according to my own research) to many other authors (I'm afraid I can't really name names here, though).
See, the way the publishing biz operates, it works similarly to many areas in our society (like electoral politics, and the private sector, for two): If you've already got the "name" and you've got lots of money (or a couple of bestsellers in the hole), you're practically guaranteed to stay a success. If, on the other hand, you have to compete against the "brand names" and everybody else submitting their work 'over-the-transom', your chances of achieving even that first foot-in-the-door publication are very small. Your talent, or lack thereof, isn't usually much of a deciding factor.
So given all that, these guys making this Social Darwinism In Publishing argument really piss me off, because they're completely disconnected from publishing biz reality as we know it...either that, or they've got their lucrative contract, so they really genuinely believe that the stacked deck affords equality of opportunity. Therefore, obviously, the rather McLuhanesque (the retro-60's naivete Kling refers to?) levelling Creative Commons is a bad thing. Right.
Let me see... Now after I write my multi-million selling super blockbuster best-sellers, I can make sure that all my heirs and assigns (and maybe even my own personal immortal corporation) can keep profiting from my works forever...and ever...and ever... My Boswell will never have to work a day in his (or her) life! We're all set!
...especially not the general public.
But wait... Suppose I don't write mega-super-uber blockbuster bestsellers, and my work (like 99% of all authors' work) remains steadily mid-list after I die. Judging by current trends, ever-lengthening copyrights mean only one thing: I languish in obscurity forever...and ever...and ever...and nobody gets rich...
(We are so many, but they are so rich.)
Hmm...immortality for the priveledged few; death and obscurity for the rest. Maybe not such good news after all.
The only good thing I can think of about locating it in Belleville is that it's about equidistant from the Ottawa tech cluster (Ottawa, Kanata, Hull, etc.), Toronto and its exurbs (Toronto, Markham, Scarberia), and Montreal. Also, the overhead's probably way cheaper in Belleville than in the GTA, Ottawa, Montreal, or a similar-sized urban centre. Hmm... Sneaky ulterior motive question: Did anyone happen to notice whether the City of Belleville is providing infrastructure monies or similar other "incentives"?
Yes, I said "nineteen fifty four," and not "nineteen eighty four."
...and you've got it about right.
The phrase of the day is "chilling effect," brought to you by the letters H, U, A, and C.
Or isn't anyone else thinking that TIA (and friends) is a little closer to the HUAC than Orwell's book? Just alias "Commies" to "terrorists," and it works just fine.
I mean this new plot is like, well, imagine -- naah, hold on, I have to say it -- imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Joe McCarthys...
Why do folks keep misrepresenting what actually happened here?
The fact is, he did all his work on the product (which is legal in its country of origin) in Russia, where, last I heard, US laws don't apply. The fact that they were waiting to arrest him, apparently, for giving an academic lecture on a product he produced where it was legal is far more disturbing than you make it out to be.
ISTR that Skylarov isn't the first person to whom this sort of jurisdictional knucklebones has happened at the behest of some large, US-based money-wielding entity. As you may recall when the DeCSS story broke, the US wanted Jon Johansen to stand trial in the US for breaking a US law when he wasn't even in the US when he allegedly "broke" it (how can you break the law of another country when you aren't even there, I'd like to know?), but that quickly passed off around the same time as the Norwegian authorities decided to go ahead and prosecute him for related offenses, real or imagined. Also, you may recall Edward Felten's legal difficulties surrounding his paper on encryption.
All of which, in my (paranoid?) mind, adds up to the US's playing very fast and loose with international law (what else is new?) and an immense chilling effect in the technology field.
If it were provable that Elocomsoft was deliberately and knowingly (with malice aforethought) selling products to customers not legally able to buy them, that would be another matter, which I think was upheld with the verdict here. However, the very clear perception that I'm getting from the Elocomsoft case in general is that the US wants to enforce the DMCA worldwide, and will do just about anything it can to make sure that it gets what it wants. Note, please, I'm not a US citizen, and so don't have US patriotism getting in the way of my natural impulses to be skeptical and cynical of the US government's motives in any given instance, so I could be erring on the side of hostility here.
...how did they settle the jurisdictional questions? I mean, last I heard, Skylarov was working in Russia. One assumes the US government just did it by fiat, or was there more diplomacy involved than what I'm led to believe?
If the US just went ahead and did it anyway, that's kind of a scary precedent, meaning that now, no matter where you are in the world, the long arm of US law enforcement can come after you for doing something it doesn't happen to like? If that's the case, as sort of a quid pro quo, I would like some of the priveleges of US citizenship to go along with the burdens.
I bet there are a lot of old Amiga geeks out there who'd love to be browsing the internet on something that looks like an Amiga...but isn't...as opposed to some of us old Amiga geeks (you know who you are, hi, Knute!) who really do browse the internet on Amigas.
;)
He says there's actually a good reason, even: "I don't get viruses, because nobody writes viruses for my operating system, chortle chortle chortle." Me: "So when are you going to get a real computer? I switched to PCs years ago!" Anybody got an Amiga virus on disk I could send to him by mail?
This showed up in my e-mail inbox today, sent from a friend. It's a little less DIY than the parent poster's solution, but it's all right too:
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 13:18:16 -0500
I declare December 2, 2004 to be "the end of spam" day.
As of December 2nd, everyone has to use a new e-mail protocol which fixes the fundamental problem of SMTP: untrusted sources.
The new protocol isn't "new". It's just that on Dec 2, 2004, everyone should stop accepting SMTP connection that don't use the STARTTLS extension to SMTP as described in RFC2487.
STARTTLS has the benefit of creating Received: headers that are cryptographically signed, and therefore meaningful. Internet email is sent like a bucket-brigade... you send your email to your ISP, which passes it on to another ISP, which passes it to another mail server, which sends it to final receiver's mail "Inbox". With STARTTLS, there is an audit path of who passed the email alone each "hop". There is still a possibility that you won't know who the original sender is, but you know the first ISP that let that message into the system. That's good enough.
After Dec 2, 2004: when you receive email that is spam, you will be able to identify which server let the spam into the Internet. That site can be punished, by starting a DoS attack against it, or by declaring the site to be "terrorist" at which point the Bush Administration, which will have just won re-election (and being in its last term will have no need to follow any laws) will bomb the email server. They will be given 24 hours notice, 48 if it is a 3-day weekend. Bombing will not happen if the owner of the mail system can demonstrate which user sent the spam, and that they have been removed from the system. With the threat of being bombed, mail system administrators will be under extreme pressure to make sure that all email that leaves their systems is certifiably marked by the actual creator. (Thus fixing the "but who was the original sender?" issue). Then we can arrest the user that sent the spam.
I encourage all countries to make it illegal to send email that is unreplyable. Thus making it possible to use "active filtering" systems, which accept email from "known good parties" and everyone else receives an automated reply saying, "If you want to get on my 'known good' list, here's how...". With STARTTLS in use, we can track down who is permitting unreplyable email into the Internet, and bomb them.
Before Dec 2, 2004 all mail systems should begin deploying STARTTLS. It is backwards compatible with older mail systems. It doesn't require the risky and dangerous "throw the switch day" conversions like some new computer systems. While I'm at it, Wietse Venema should be gagged and bound to his computer until he merges in the "STARTTLS" patch to Postfix.
Before Dec 2, 2004, email client authors should add features that let users see which email they would have missed if the post-Dec 2, 2004 policies had been in place. (Simply mark the message a special color if any of the Received: lines are from non-TLS systems.) This will encourage users to apply pressure to their friends to move to STARTTLS-enabled ISPs.
Finally, you might be asking, "How did you pick December 2nd?" The answer is quite simple. It's my birthday and I can't think of a better birthday present I could receive than the end of spam.
Can you?
Sincerely,
Tom Limoncelli
Of course, read with tongue in appropriate position, ie. in cheek.
Yes, you have it exactly right, as near as I can figure. Unfortunately, there's a problem. Economic "growth" based on exploiting natural and human resources is necessrily finite -- there's only a finite amount of natural and human resources to go around.
We as a species are already getting into trouble because of the (unintentional) consequenses of unfettered growth, such as increasing water scarcity, desertification, and pollution. These suggest there ought to be another way of looking at an economy (maybe redefine it as a "monetary ecology"?)...
After all, in most cases, you don't call unrestricted growth "good," you call it "cancer."
As we move closer to the end of the age, look for more decisions to be made based on the "common good", "world order", and "tolerance" rather than individual rights and dignity.
Precisely what do "individual rights" and "dignity" have to do with a cluster of cells that, I quote (from the official Stanford press release), "cannot on their own develop into a human"? Please. This is not reproductive cloning. This is actually about the same, in terms of "dignity" or "individual rights" as a pacemaker.
Just because it comes from human tissue doesn't make it human, or do you give your toenail clippings funerals? Ever done that experiment in science class using epithelial cells? Did you feel like a murderer after you scraped the inside of your cheek?
Anyway, I don't know where your perspective is coming from, but you ought to at least RTFA before you rant.
Pardon me, but I thought it was rather interesting how all the proposed solutions in this white paper, while innovative, neato, and rather cool, still involve my spending more money to get rid of a problem I shouldn't have in the first place.
I absolutely love how there's a whole section involving means for businesses to make money from implementing the scheme, but the part where he notes that all of us poor schmucks who actually get bombarded with spam and telemarketing calls will have to "upgrade" to newer phone sets and e-mail programs (no doubt with a cost) is just glossed over. Isn't most of the problem with spam and telemarketers that they cost us money already? How is paying more supposed to make us feel better about making them (we hope) go away?
Surely there's got to be some way of dealing with this problem without spending more money, without enriching the telco robber barons (at minimum), or at least by using money we're already going to spend anyway (coughcough where's the CRTC when you need 'em?)...
I'm reminded of possible "forced" upgrades by other entities -- regarding Microsoft software, HDTV, DVDs, CDs, and I can only stop to wonder if IBM might, were this scheme implemented, be conveniently right there with a plug-in for your phone or something... (Always look for the ulterior motive, sez I.)
From the website, which you obviously haven't read: "In his defense, Schmeiser showed his own farm-based evidence that the fields ranged from nearly zero to 68% Roundup Ready. These tests were confirmed by independent tests performed by research scientists at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, MB." That's not "98%," not even close, and an uneven distribution like that certainly could be the result of contamination or drift. And there are lots of articles out there referring to the problems with contaminated seed.
The thing is not so much that the court chose to believe that Schmeiser was lying (see here to find out exactly what he was convicted of and what he wasn't); they believed Monsanto over him, for some cases, which is hardly an unexpected outcome. In any case, he wasn't convicted of "brownbagging," he was convicted of having Monsanto's genes on his land and not telling them about it and paying up for it. The former is explainable because he didn't know; the latter is just rank blackmail.
Ok... How much do you know about rhetoric?
:)
Anyway, what I mean by a "rhetorical paradigm" in terms of programming and programming pedagogy is to attempt to learn and use programming as a speech act, or a linguistic construction, rather than (strictly) as a mathematical or logical algorithm. I'm trying to "code-switch" (if that isn't a horrible pun) concepts in programming to their linguistic and rhetorical analogues (examples -- mind...blanking...), like "grammar," "syntax," "graphemes," "propositions," "declarations," "case," "metaphor," etc., as a means of providing an alternate viewpoint, sort of like the people who approach higher physics through philosophy, if you catch my drift.
My simplified and slightly different test case (not precisely programming, but a parallel, easier, but similar programme) was to teach myself how to use Unix-like command line syntax to perform various functions inside Linux, while treating the OS as a "language" spoken between the computer and the user. I haven't gone too far with programming itself yet, but that's mostly due to a lack of time and appropriate teaching materials.
If you're interested further, please e-mail me at scripsit@starmail.com, and I'll send you a list of my reading and research materials so far.
Go read his website. He didn't know it was "Monsanto's seed," he never bought seed from Monsanto (preferring to breed his own for the last half-century or so, and he certainly didn't steal anything from Monsanto. In fact, he only found out about the cross-polination when he was trying to eliminate "volunteer" canola growing where he didn't want it and used Roundup.
Experts in the subject already insist that it's virtually if not utterly impossible to find canola, corn, and soybean seed without traces of (patented) genetically-modified genes in them. Monsanto, however, is the big offender, in that it ruthlessly goes after people who wind up with "their" proprietary genes in crops. It's also totally possible to find ultra-hybridized varieties of seed containing more than one company's proprietary genes. That comes from natural cross-polination, and other forms of non-crossbreeding contamination, not theft.
All of which just blatantly shows why this Supreme Court decision is a good idea, and why Mr. Schmeiser should get Monsanto to pay through the nose for wrecking his organic hybrid canola variant with their genetically modified strain. I wonder if this court case will help?
For the last couple of years, I've been using bits and pieces of my 'copious free time' to research and develop a hypothesis of what I might call 'rhetorical computing,' that treats human-computer interactions as speech (in the technical sense) or rhetorical acts. I've mostly gotten started with the endeavour because I am trying to learn how to program from a rhetoric/logic paradigm instead of a mathematical one. So far, it's going along as well as could be expected. I'm getting exactly the results I figure I should, comparative to the amount of time I'm able to devote to it.
In the meantime, I've been looking for scholars or practitioners who are working on similar things so I can possibly work with them, or, at least cite their papers and do the required field reading. I've already written to him. We'll see what happens.
I do think there is room in the field for different kinds of approaches (all of yours too), and I'd like to at least be permitted (somehow) to follow this line of inquiry until I know it won't work, or until I know it will. That's why I see an opportunity here, and not just an(other) argument.
Ah, but I don't live in "America". Well, I live in North America, but I don't live in the United States of America, which is what I think you mean. Which also explains why I didn't know that the US encourages people to give blood by paying them. An unsurprising development, but nevertheless, something I didn't know.
In retrospect, I'm sure that neuromarketers probably find ample volunteers by paying enough money to recruit them, but as I said in my original post, you'd have to pay a lot to interest me...for two reasons. Number one is that I just hate ads, and number two is that I'd hate to think I was helping the suppurating advertising pustules. One would think that (because of the widespread dislike of ads) they would have a hard time coming up with volunteers, but I guess not.
We get blood for transfusions from unpaid donors. In fact, if I remember correctly, there are actually laws against selling blood (or buying it) here.
Would people in the US really not give blood if they weren't paid for it? That's kind of scary.
Where do you live? You can't sell blood where I come from -- there are specifically rules against it, which is probably due to a bunch of heads rolling in the '80s when they found out a bunch of people were transfused with tainted blood -- HIV and Hep. C. At least where I come from (if not where you are) there is a perception that anybody who'd be wanting to sell blood is probably a bad risk as a donor...
Do people hate needles more than being exposed to ads for long periods of time? For me that's a tough call, and you'd think with all the comments about anti-spam this and anti-popup that around here...
What I want to know is, where are they getting the people to lie still and take a brain scan while looking at ads? Are there really people out there who like ads sufficiently to do that? Are they paying a really, really rowrbazzle lot of money?!
Are the experimental subject people crazy?! I mean, what's the angle here? I mean, what do they say to putative volunteers, "Oh, we're going to bombard you with commercials and take pictures of your thoughts while we do it, so we can make more and more irresistable ads"? I don't get it.
I mean, the research is one thing. You have to admit that, since the crawling slime are running out of venues in which to place their scrofulous offerings, they must want to make them work better (although I doubt that will lessen the saturation level!). However, where (and how) are they finding their research subjects?
This isn't precisely the kind of research they can do on rhesus monkeys or something (although with the way ads are now, you'd think they were written by planaria for rhesus monkeys, or something), but who's giving that famous "informed consent"?
Eeek! An entirely new meaning of the ad-copy phrase "Not tested on animals"!
--shudder-- Ok, I'm scaring myself. I'd better stop now.