I am guessing that you are a very big fan of classic Marxism. Everything's value is arbitrary. Everything's price is either what people are willing to pay or what government or other entities force the price to be. Content providers don't deserve money, per se, no more than anyone desrves money. However, if someone hired you to shovel shit or signed you to a contract to produce an album, you did the work, you deserve pay and are legally entitled to what you were contracted to do. No denying that. The company that had you shovel shit has some need for that to be done, else they wouldn't have you do it. Even if that need was that the government mandated that you work and thus they have to find something for you to do (rare but has happened). The company that contracted you to make an album markets that album, sets up a tour, etc, in order to recoup their cost to make it and hopefully turn a profit so they can find more artists and make more records and give bonueses to themselves for their mad skillz. If you're talented, the album is good, and the market primed for it, it will sell lots of copies and fill concerts. If not, you'll get axed from your contract and you go off to do something else or play in coffee shops on open mic night. Now, if content were free by its very nature, the system would be up-ended. No the artist doesn't 'desrve' pay, but at the same time, we don't 'deserve' the right to enjoy it without paying. Why should we? Because we want it? Becuase we can? That's my guess. We are lulled into thinking its free but really we pay for content in a round about way. Advertisers pay for tv stations to buy the programs and movies to show us. We buy the products of the advertisers. If people don't respond to the ads, the advertisers pull out and the show dies. Who the hell has time to make a tv show in their spare time and give it away for free. Have you ever used Bryce or Photoshop or Flash? They take time. Lot's of it to do a good project. A home sound recording is no where near as good as studio recording, not unless you invest big big bucks. Paint in your spare time? Write a novel in your spare time? Have you ever attempted these pursuits? Sure some people do it, but its hard. I've been writing a novel in my spare time for a while now. Jesus Christ, if I had to give it away for freee simply becasue it is content, no matter how much i wanted to tell this story, i wouldn't b/c the labor which you so flip[pantly call free isn't free. There are uppoprtunity costs. What I could be doing instead of that pursuit, which I intimately love to do. Time away from family, time away from leisure(and if you say leisure is unimportant or unnecessary, you are wrong and any good manager, doctor, pyschologist, or normal human being will tell you that.) Do you know any up and coming artists, musicians, writers, etc? They start b/c they love what they are doing, but I promise you that they hope to make a career out of it. Who the hell are we to tell them they can't? Corporate patronage? Do you sit through the NPR or PBS fund drives every year? They have to struggle to get every dime of corporate and persoanl patronage. It is a whimiscal fantasy to count on that.
One of my instructors is a configuration manager at the company the government has hired to perform the measurements of the US version to be tested later this year. Apparently the plane os launched from a rocket which is launched from a modified jet. The jet sreams to the edge of space and at some point should disintegrate. The study is to find out just how fast and how hard the scramjet can be pushed, measure stress and all the other good stuff to know. Sounds fun to me.
Ok, consider Renaissance art. Some of the greatest art in existence, representing unparalleled cretivity, skill, and mastery. The producers of this content were funded by wealthy patrons like the De Medicis and the Vatican, painting portaits occasionally for them, or doing the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, for instance. Without that patronage, these artists, or content providers, would not have been able to create these masterpieces in their spare time while earning a living from other means. So what if Disney is a big mean corporation - it is a big mean corporation that employs tens of thousands of people, offers progressive benefits, and produces some really great and some really crappy content. Content is very similar to any other commodity: labor added to raw material produces a good. The labor is not free. There are costs associated with that labor. Just because a song or a movie is somewhat less tangible than a brick or a monitor does not make it less real or less valuable.
Why don't content providers deserve compensation?
If they are not compensated, how can they continue to afford to make content? If Penny Arcade could not secure enough advertising, affiliates, and merchandising, do you think they could afford to produce the site and all its bandwidth costs? If They Might Be Giants didn;t get royalties for their music, could they afford the studio time to record new songs?
Many North American Natives had no concept of property the way Europeans did, nor do a few other tribes scattered across the globe. The idea of property itself had little formulation for the bulk of humanity's time on earth. What might be more appropriate to say is the Property is essential to Western Civilizaion. Or perhaps "the idea of self-identity is essential to our concept of society." Lots of thought was given to society and the role of property in the 18th and 19th centuries. Read Voltaire, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseaue, Montesquie for some of their ideas on this concept.
I am not yet convinced one way or the other over the underlying issue involved in this case and seemingly everything else today: intellectually property. Content producers have to make some sort of compensation for their activities. Honor systems have not yet worked - witness Stephen King's experiment last year. Maybe once we start seeing micropayment system in place and more ubiquitous such schemes may pay off. I guess what I am unsure of is whether something should necessarily belong to the public domain simply because we want it. The idea that "data wants to be free" is so often promulgated by those who want to exploit resources like Napster that its credibility is diminished. One the other hand, the advances achieved by the Open Source community speak volumes about the creative capacity of the collective spirit, individuals working together to create a whole that is more than the some of the parts. I love free stuff, who doesn't, but I don't know that such a love dictates that things be free simply b/c we want them to be. Obviously what this is about is whether copyright should be extended, so it is a different beast, in some regards. However, this dicussion, the fight over Open Source (at least on MS's part its a fight), and the debate over Napster et al are all symptoms of a bigger issue. The sad thing is the gulf separating the two sides is ever widening. This struggle between conservative and liberal, if you will, is going to have far reaching consequences, beyond this issue, into medicine, space research, family planning, and beyond. Why is it that at the begining of the 21st century, the forces of yesterday are prevailing in so many ways?
I guess I should be happy with the pace of technology advances, but instead I just look at my humble little PC that wa l33t 11 months ago when I bought it...O! What brave new world that debases my system and devours my coin...
Thanks for the corrections. I had just listened to guy in my grad class give a presentation on nanotubes and had myself read an article on quantum computers. Mind you the class was on programming management and my background is political science. I probably should have kept my mouth shut by they are jusdt too interesting not to talk about...
From what I understand, the electrons in a nanotube behave like/as quantum particles, losing none energy, emitting no interference, and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement. They can bring quantum computers about sooner than may otherwise be possible. Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps. Nad make advanced hearing aids, and space elevators, and turn water into wine....well they are pretty cool at any rate
Students informing on one another and their eldersis the stuff of chilling novels and shameful history. The difficulty of the current situation is that there are appropriate times to inform, which are blurred, and there are certain levels of responsibilty missing in our system. Schools are steadily growing worse at over reacting to everything, from aspirin to normal adolescent boundary testing that is essential to our growth as independent adults. Students, in many schools, are viewed more as enemies than pupils, and certainly not partners in their own education experience. How anyone learns in these schools is a mystery to me.
And why is it the students job to snich? Parents should, but don't far too often, take active roles in their children's lives. Teachers are so overburdened in most districts and so underpaid, that they are incapable of knowing their students well enough to understand them. Policies in many places create artificial divisions between teacher and student a between the students themselves. High school is a destructive enough time in many peoples lives already. TO further alienate those already on the fringe by these over-reactionary policies is just inviting more Columbines....
To the power of the Force. Do not put too much faith in this technological terror.
It would be nice to rest on our laurels for a minute and not have something 12e500 x better than what we bought this morning. Oh well, at least I can still play Alice...
Never before has so much attention been paid by people of distinction than in the last several years. The WIPO debated 'sucks', the president is involved in a sucking scandal, congress spends $50 million investigating sucking in the Oval Office...
Verily these are the end times....
Management sets the tone. Good managers and a strong sense of culture make all the difference. At my company, a big telecommunications carrier, people in their thirties seems to be the most respected. A survey last year showed that most people here believed that to get ahead, being a thirtysomething male with a wife and kids was the surest ticket. Certainly none of the managers I've seen are younger than 30, and only the tops execs show much above 50, save for some Bell tag-alongs in supervisory positions. The web team is the lone exception - young/old, male/female seems less relevant.
Anonymously send your VPs Tom DeMarco's Peopleware...best book I've seen on how to manage information workers....
You don't have to be paranoid for them to be after you. You don't have to be a conspiracy nut for them to conspire...
i am really not a conspiracy nut; facts are facts. Just watch the history channel if you think the government always tells the truth, the reality is somewhere in between the conspiracy theorists delusions and the naive passerby's dreams.
I think that this incident is precisely a government campaign to build public support for encryption regualtion. My grad instructor worked for the 'intelligence community' during the Gulf War; he implied without saying directly that the gorvernment used the news media like a precision weapon in control what was known, by whom and when. So much disinformation went through CNN, with their blessing, that it is amazing we know any 'facts' at all. Who knows, maybe Bin laden is on the government payroll...
I think he has some really good analysis but I have to wonder about doomsayers and evangelists. Things are never as bad or never as good as either might say. We always hug the middle path. At any rate, I heard somewhere that the number of commuications that could potentially be monitored rises at a rate exponential to the ability to monitor them. Then again, my grad instructor who worked for the 'intelligence community' seems very frightened by some of the stuff he saw. He would tell save for the microchip embedded in his spinal cord....
I think that I should be worried or annoyed by this but I (we) are so used to security holes, lack of privacy online, and spam that the general level of interest I can come up with is pretty minimal. On the one hand, its pretty sad that there is so much of this stuff that we are desensitized to it; on the other hand, the Internet is still like the Wild West in a sense - its a frontier with the requisite frontier mentality. I'm sure this has been said elsewhere better than I am saying it, but I think that the dynamic of those pushing the boundaries with advances versus those who try to expolit those boundaries versus those that try and stop them creates a better future world. Those of us on the fringes may be the occasional casuality, but maybe, just maybe, its for the greater good...
I wonder if researchers will be able to one day use this type of recognition paradigm for advanced, intuitive artificial intelligence. I think that it is not too early to begin thinking about making out thinking technology not want to hurt us later on. You just know that are machines are going to want to kill us some day...
Sim-city, sim-tower, etc are good computer-based games that do not focus on beating someone, but rather developing for 'the greater good.' Lots of puzzle solving games exists on and off the computer as well. But, if you want any kind of game with a winner, you will necessarily have losers.
Why does the DOD want this information? I noticed that many of the posts advocated the selling of this information, and in general, demographic data is essential to advertising. However, the worry that is implied here is that the government might potentially use more specific data to hunt for hackers or make token arrests of warez or pr0n 'enthusiasts'. The government and industry have taken a fair amount of our privacy and anonimity(sp?) away over the past several decades, since Welfare in the 1930s IMHO. We in return for sacrificing our freedoms receive an all-powerful nanny-state that takes care for us in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way: what's good for the masses is good for everyone - except the rich. How much longer before every citizen has their DNA on file, analyzed and people forced into their 'ideal place' in society? Or in a different vein - before the state offers 'dole and circuses' to keep the mob happy. 1984 is unlikely, but we could be heading straight for Brave New World if we aren't careful.
Yeah.
There is a small industry built around repairing old transformers.
And, in Japan they apparently have started making old school type Transformers, including some of the originals just like they were way back when.
And, I have to add the C64 as one of the damn coolest toys from that era...there were so MANY games... man...those were the days
I played with those toys every day when I was a kid; my friends and siblings and I had this huge intricate storyline that spanned like three years. I attribute those days to my development as an aspiring author and webmaster for an upcoming webcomic (that's what the world needs, right? another webcomic? You bet it does).
The sad thing was that at the end of that story line, they all died in an apocalypse...I hammered many of them to death and corroded the rest in some toxic mix from my huge chemistry set...I am so kicking myself today. It's depressing to realize that one of the few happy memories (geeks get only so many) from childhood has no tangible manifestation anymore, and that due to my own hand.
I'm a lot more careful with my newer toys - pda's are toys, aren't they?
Slashdot Mirror
That thing about Marxism is out of context. I am speaking more of its disdain for cultural arts in preference to manufacturing.
I am guessing that you are a very big fan of classic Marxism. Everything's value is arbitrary. Everything's price is either what people are willing to pay or what government or other entities force the price to be. Content providers don't deserve money, per se, no more than anyone desrves money. However, if someone hired you to shovel shit or signed you to a contract to produce an album, you did the work, you deserve pay and are legally entitled to what you were contracted to do. No denying that. The company that had you shovel shit has some need for that to be done, else they wouldn't have you do it. Even if that need was that the government mandated that you work and thus they have to find something for you to do (rare but has happened). The company that contracted you to make an album markets that album, sets up a tour, etc, in order to recoup their cost to make it and hopefully turn a profit so they can find more artists and make more records and give bonueses to themselves for their mad skillz. If you're talented, the album is good, and the market primed for it, it will sell lots of copies and fill concerts. If not, you'll get axed from your contract and you go off to do something else or play in coffee shops on open mic night. Now, if content were free by its very nature, the system would be up-ended. No the artist doesn't 'desrve' pay, but at the same time, we don't 'deserve' the right to enjoy it without paying. Why should we? Because we want it? Becuase we can? That's my guess. We are lulled into thinking its free but really we pay for content in a round about way. Advertisers pay for tv stations to buy the programs and movies to show us. We buy the products of the advertisers. If people don't respond to the ads, the advertisers pull out and the show dies. Who the hell has time to make a tv show in their spare time and give it away for free. Have you ever used Bryce or Photoshop or Flash? They take time. Lot's of it to do a good project. A home sound recording is no where near as good as studio recording, not unless you invest big big bucks. Paint in your spare time? Write a novel in your spare time? Have you ever attempted these pursuits? Sure some people do it, but its hard. I've been writing a novel in my spare time for a while now. Jesus Christ, if I had to give it away for freee simply becasue it is content, no matter how much i wanted to tell this story, i wouldn't b/c the labor which you so flip[pantly call free isn't free. There are uppoprtunity costs. What I could be doing instead of that pursuit, which I intimately love to do. Time away from family, time away from leisure(and if you say leisure is unimportant or unnecessary, you are wrong and any good manager, doctor, pyschologist, or normal human being will tell you that.) Do you know any up and coming artists, musicians, writers, etc? They start b/c they love what they are doing, but I promise you that they hope to make a career out of it. Who the hell are we to tell them they can't? Corporate patronage? Do you sit through the NPR or PBS fund drives every year? They have to struggle to get every dime of corporate and persoanl patronage. It is a whimiscal fantasy to count on that.
One of my instructors is a configuration manager at the company the government has hired to perform the measurements of the US version to be tested later this year. Apparently the plane os launched from a rocket which is launched from a modified jet. The jet sreams to the edge of space and at some point should disintegrate. The study is to find out just how fast and how hard the scramjet can be pushed, measure stress and all the other good stuff to know. Sounds fun to me.
Ok, consider Renaissance art. Some of the greatest art in existence, representing unparalleled cretivity, skill, and mastery. The producers of this content were funded by wealthy patrons like the De Medicis and the Vatican, painting portaits occasionally for them, or doing the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, for instance. Without that patronage, these artists, or content providers, would not have been able to create these masterpieces in their spare time while earning a living from other means. So what if Disney is a big mean corporation - it is a big mean corporation that employs tens of thousands of people, offers progressive benefits, and produces some really great and some really crappy content. Content is very similar to any other commodity: labor added to raw material produces a good. The labor is not free. There are costs associated with that labor. Just because a song or a movie is somewhat less tangible than a brick or a monitor does not make it less real or less valuable. Why don't content providers deserve compensation?
If they are not compensated, how can they continue to afford to make content? If Penny Arcade could not secure enough advertising, affiliates, and merchandising, do you think they could afford to produce the site and all its bandwidth costs? If They Might Be Giants didn;t get royalties for their music, could they afford the studio time to record new songs?
Many North American Natives had no concept of property the way Europeans did, nor do a few other tribes scattered across the globe. The idea of property itself had little formulation for the bulk of humanity's time on earth. What might be more appropriate to say is the Property is essential to Western Civilizaion. Or perhaps "the idea of self-identity is essential to our concept of society." Lots of thought was given to society and the role of property in the 18th and 19th centuries. Read Voltaire, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseaue, Montesquie for some of their ideas on this concept.
I am not yet convinced one way or the other over the underlying issue involved in this case and seemingly everything else today: intellectually property. Content producers have to make some sort of compensation for their activities. Honor systems have not yet worked - witness Stephen King's experiment last year. Maybe once we start seeing micropayment system in place and more ubiquitous such schemes may pay off. I guess what I am unsure of is whether something should necessarily belong to the public domain simply because we want it. The idea that "data wants to be free" is so often promulgated by those who want to exploit resources like Napster that its credibility is diminished. One the other hand, the advances achieved by the Open Source community speak volumes about the creative capacity of the collective spirit, individuals working together to create a whole that is more than the some of the parts. I love free stuff, who doesn't, but I don't know that such a love dictates that things be free simply b/c we want them to be. Obviously what this is about is whether copyright should be extended, so it is a different beast, in some regards. However, this dicussion, the fight over Open Source (at least on MS's part its a fight), and the debate over Napster et al are all symptoms of a bigger issue. The sad thing is the gulf separating the two sides is ever widening. This struggle between conservative and liberal, if you will, is going to have far reaching consequences, beyond this issue, into medicine, space research, family planning, and beyond. Why is it that at the begining of the 21st century, the forces of yesterday are prevailing in so many ways?
I guess I should be happy with the pace of technology advances, but instead I just look at my humble little PC that wa l33t 11 months ago when I bought it...O! What brave new world that debases my system and devours my coin...
This is another step on the road to custome crafting organs for people or creating new, powerful medicine. Such amazing times...
Thanks for the corrections. I had just listened to guy in my grad class give a presentation on nanotubes and had myself read an article on quantum computers. Mind you the class was on programming management and my background is political science. I probably should have kept my mouth shut by they are jusdt too interesting not to talk about...
From what I understand, the electrons in a nanotube behave like/as quantum particles, losing none energy, emitting no interference, and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement. They can bring quantum computers about sooner than may otherwise be possible. Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps. Nad make advanced hearing aids, and space elevators, and turn water into wine....well they are pretty cool at any rate
Students informing on one another and their eldersis the stuff of chilling novels and shameful history. The difficulty of the current situation is that there are appropriate times to inform, which are blurred, and there are certain levels of responsibilty missing in our system. Schools are steadily growing worse at over reacting to everything, from aspirin to normal adolescent boundary testing that is essential to our growth as independent adults. Students, in many schools, are viewed more as enemies than pupils, and certainly not partners in their own education experience. How anyone learns in these schools is a mystery to me. And why is it the students job to snich? Parents should, but don't far too often, take active roles in their children's lives. Teachers are so overburdened in most districts and so underpaid, that they are incapable of knowing their students well enough to understand them. Policies in many places create artificial divisions between teacher and student a between the students themselves. High school is a destructive enough time in many peoples lives already. TO further alienate those already on the fringe by these over-reactionary policies is just inviting more Columbines....
To the power of the Force. Do not put too much faith in this technological terror. It would be nice to rest on our laurels for a minute and not have something 12e500 x better than what we bought this morning. Oh well, at least I can still play Alice...
Never before has so much attention been paid by people of distinction than in the last several years. The WIPO debated 'sucks', the president is involved in a sucking scandal, congress spends $50 million investigating sucking in the Oval Office... Verily these are the end times....
Management sets the tone. Good managers and a strong sense of culture make all the difference. At my company, a big telecommunications carrier, people in their thirties seems to be the most respected. A survey last year showed that most people here believed that to get ahead, being a thirtysomething male with a wife and kids was the surest ticket. Certainly none of the managers I've seen are younger than 30, and only the tops execs show much above 50, save for some Bell tag-alongs in supervisory positions. The web team is the lone exception - young/old, male/female seems less relevant. Anonymously send your VPs Tom DeMarco's Peopleware...best book I've seen on how to manage information workers....
You don't have to be paranoid for them to be after you. You don't have to be a conspiracy nut for them to conspire... i am really not a conspiracy nut; facts are facts. Just watch the history channel if you think the government always tells the truth, the reality is somewhere in between the conspiracy theorists delusions and the naive passerby's dreams.
I think that this incident is precisely a government campaign to build public support for encryption regualtion. My grad instructor worked for the 'intelligence community' during the Gulf War; he implied without saying directly that the gorvernment used the news media like a precision weapon in control what was known, by whom and when. So much disinformation went through CNN, with their blessing, that it is amazing we know any 'facts' at all. Who knows, maybe Bin laden is on the government payroll...
I think he has some really good analysis but I have to wonder about doomsayers and evangelists. Things are never as bad or never as good as either might say. We always hug the middle path. At any rate, I heard somewhere that the number of commuications that could potentially be monitored rises at a rate exponential to the ability to monitor them. Then again, my grad instructor who worked for the 'intelligence community' seems very frightened by some of the stuff he saw. He would tell save for the microchip embedded in his spinal cord....
I think that I should be worried or annoyed by this but I (we) are so used to security holes, lack of privacy online, and spam that the general level of interest I can come up with is pretty minimal. On the one hand, its pretty sad that there is so much of this stuff that we are desensitized to it; on the other hand, the Internet is still like the Wild West in a sense - its a frontier with the requisite frontier mentality. I'm sure this has been said elsewhere better than I am saying it, but I think that the dynamic of those pushing the boundaries with advances versus those who try to expolit those boundaries versus those that try and stop them creates a better future world. Those of us on the fringes may be the occasional casuality, but maybe, just maybe, its for the greater good...
Ummm...false projection is exactly what they are talking about...muscle preparing to react just as that which they are observing.
I wonder if researchers will be able to one day use this type of recognition paradigm for advanced, intuitive artificial intelligence. I think that it is not too early to begin thinking about making out thinking technology not want to hurt us later on. You just know that are machines are going to want to kill us some day...
Sim-city, sim-tower, etc are good computer-based games that do not focus on beating someone, but rather developing for 'the greater good.' Lots of puzzle solving games exists on and off the computer as well. But, if you want any kind of game with a winner, you will necessarily have losers.
Why does the DOD want this information? I noticed that many of the posts advocated the selling of this information, and in general, demographic data is essential to advertising. However, the worry that is implied here is that the government might potentially use more specific data to hunt for hackers or make token arrests of warez or pr0n 'enthusiasts'. The government and industry have taken a fair amount of our privacy and anonimity(sp?) away over the past several decades, since Welfare in the 1930s IMHO. We in return for sacrificing our freedoms receive an all-powerful nanny-state that takes care for us in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way: what's good for the masses is good for everyone - except the rich. How much longer before every citizen has their DNA on file, analyzed and people forced into their 'ideal place' in society? Or in a different vein - before the state offers 'dole and circuses' to keep the mob happy. 1984 is unlikely, but we could be heading straight for Brave New World if we aren't careful. Yeah.
There is a small industry built around repairing old transformers. And, in Japan they apparently have started making old school type Transformers, including some of the originals just like they were way back when. And, I have to add the C64 as one of the damn coolest toys from that era...there were so MANY games... man...those were the days
I played with those toys every day when I was a kid; my friends and siblings and I had this huge intricate storyline that spanned like three years. I attribute those days to my development as an aspiring author and webmaster for an upcoming webcomic (that's what the world needs, right? another webcomic? You bet it does). The sad thing was that at the end of that story line, they all died in an apocalypse...I hammered many of them to death and corroded the rest in some toxic mix from my huge chemistry set...I am so kicking myself today. It's depressing to realize that one of the few happy memories (geeks get only so many) from childhood has no tangible manifestation anymore, and that due to my own hand. I'm a lot more careful with my newer toys - pda's are toys, aren't they?