It is accepted that she never actually wrote the programs under discussion - the OP was Babbage, though she was certainly highly enthusiastic about the workings of his contraptions and their implications for the world, and studied the topics sufficiently to write insightful and interesting commentary to high degree.
Of all that is published though, only a selection is ever read by the masses.
1) Indeed you can't just do "what you want" - but when what you do is lauded and desireable, is it really that much to ask to be able to make a living from it? From a zen buddhist perspective, we could also simply do what we do and let people benefit from that without thought of reward, be that making art, tables, or farming the land. It works when everyone is as altruistic and zen-buddhisty - but it doesn't pay bills that are at a baser, more real level than idealism and philosophy.
2) I'll wager you never actually talked to an artist beyond firends who "like to draw." I'll also wager that you've never earnestly talked to someone who had an goal that was not aligned with your ideals for goals. Saying what they want to do is merely a "hobby" is rather belittling - we may as well state that anything we do before it becomes an idea of a career - planting tomatoes in the garden, knitting... installing an experimental Linux - is a hobby and should just be left as such. When a hobby becomes a career goal, you can't just brush it aside in your head. No, TV is not a hobby, and my hair is black, the point is moot. TV is however an industry that employes lots of technicians, accountants, writers, actors, cleaners, builders, journalists, etc. And in small doses is no bad thing either. If you can temper yourself, good on you.
3) Many activites came from humble roots, farming, sewing, washing, hunting, all of which were community activities that weren't "careers" or "employ" and were performed to maintain a community with no exchange of funds but the share in the fruits of labour. But hey, things changed, we operate differently. On the point of art, even if we disregard the "masters", there were also small time painters and sculptors milennia before the Internet. They still wanted to make it a living. They provide stuff we like, why shouldn't we give them something in return?
I guess in all of that, it can still be argued that things change, and the age of the paid artist may be drawing to an end. But isn't the point of our modern society to find better ways of being, to allow everyone the ability to work towards a dream - especially if its product is something we admire? (not that that is a requirement - we have scientsist spending vast amounts of cash on research that won't amount to anything useful but the sheer act of learning).
I consort with artists. I talk with them often. Small fry, who want so desperately to make a living from doing what they love. They fear for their work being lost on the net with no trace back home, and therefore no commissions, and therefore no pay.
I talk to them about Creative Commons. All you need is to submit to advertising and get page views. How many, when anyone can be an artist? Just get a part time job to tide you over. A job to afford making art, that takes so much time away from making art?. It's not as easy a sell as the more famous (and already rich) proponents would have you believe. Artists who are still starting out have to get every penny they can - not out of avarice. Out of necessity.
They're not in a big Studio. They're not funded by organisations. They don't have a paycheck. They operate independantly. Freely. Wihtout agenda. Isn't that the type of art we want to see? Isn't that the type of art we hold up as ideal? Is that not worth paying artists a living for?
I believe artists should be able to monetize the dozens of hours and materials they spend to create a work we can share at the push of a button.
The artists who are my friends: I also feed them the hot meals they still can't afford.
Describing the mechanism as a pay-wall probably does the feature a disservice - of course, one way of unlocking is pay, but it is stil possible to view free, and a more useful corollary as demonstrated in the article is that the artist can more effectively drive the user to a retailer of their merchandise (and a preferred one at that), or to their own store.
As usual, persons who specifically do not wish to pay money will not have to, but ensuring a store link for that particular content accompanies the piece in an otherwise free-distribution format
-allows sharers to share, and recipients still have a no-pay way of viewing the material
-enables artists to edge persons amenable to the idea of paying towards a store, removing the requirement of said consumers to proactively locate a retailer
-which subsequently would make the act of sharing a real free-advertising mechanism
This could work really well, so long as sharing gratis and libere is still possible, and if artists using this can provide direct access to the specific item in an international store.
Elementary OS with the extra trimmings provided by ElementaryUpdate.com, and after switching out some of the standard apps for better ones (Noise for Banshee, Geary for Evolution or Thunderbird, etc...), is great for the "newcomers" to the Linux world -- especially for people of the "I just want to use a mouse" kind of people.
I'm not convinced that any GNU/Linux is for the absolute non-techie, but there are plenty of distros out there with the explicit aim of being newbie-friendly (or in marketing terms, "focused on a great user experience"). Once your user knows how to Google effectively, and knows how to search based on desktop environment instead of distro, they should be able to fly solo fairly soon.
For those who have the patience to look things up and understand the basics of their systems and are not afraid of the occasional CLI operation, the entire Debian family is at their disposition, and the RedHat line is fairly well documented too due to the sheer sizes of both its family tree and comunities. It takes just some initial explanation to newcomers as to what differs between distros from a user perspective to get someone like a developer (or just a plain curious technically-minded person) productive with just about any new distro from one of the large families.
Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
But try this little thought experiment: take some random Anyville, USA. How much have they travelled, how diverse is their population? How do populations move? How many are going to marry from the same town, as did their parents and grandparents, and how many are going to have children and grandchildren doing the same? And even if the population started out with diversity, you can lather, rinse, repeat the marriage/procreation suds and end up with a genetically similar pool of people - the town itself holds massively similar people on average.
Those of us who are more footloose and have moved around further are still statistical anomalies, insomuch as we often hail from outside of these wells of similarity. That is not to say that since we're so different, we cannot make friends with those whose families are long time residents, nor does it exclude the idea of having a multicultural community of extremely different people, DNA-wise.
But at its core, the fault of this study is basic: a textbook example of correlation-causation fallacy.
Search is the least of the internet's traffic.
Analytics and advertising are working in the back end.
YouTube is streamingmassive amounts of data.
Google's spiders are crwaling all over.
Some small to medium businesses are using Google apps to drive all their comms.
Maps are being served the woltd over
Goodness knows what else. Remember: Google is out to organize ALL information. Not just your searches.
I'd expect nothing less from a 1st world culture in general that says "do what YOU want to do," "find YOUR dream," "YOU're the most important to YOU." Reading the comments on this thread so far, it is evident that we'd rather remain blissfully ignorant and shift the burden elsewhere.
It's gruelling work to sort out the world's problems, and with no one-right-answer, fraught with the possibility of failure, as some commenters here can attest: one commenter demonstrates the core attitudinal problem - it takes effort to connect with someone from a different social background, with different concerns, priorities and fears for continued livelihood, to try and understand the problem, and formulate some answer, ANY answer, but at least to give a damn and TRY; some of us just aren't up to the task (though we can't necessarily be blamed for that much so long as we're not in denial). It's much easier to cater to the quick-wins, the plugged-in smart-phone-wielding, TV-watching, internet-addicted, money-squandering market and keep them happy. Fast money, cheap glory.
The first commenters demonstate the very sentiment under fire, that rather than recognizing that there are much more worthwhile questions to ponder than how to make the next best cheap app on the most expensive phones to date, or how to make their privileged lives even more privileged, they prefer to suggest that Nnaemeka is the whiny my-problems-aren't-solved person. Thing is, privileged netizen, YOUR problems ARE being solved.
Thankfully I too know the kind of people "O('_')O_Bush" points out, those who are toiling away, and even setting up locally successful ventures, to make communities, environments and the Environment better; though it's either an uneven distribution, in terms of attention gained vs actual work being done and achievements being made. I suspect we all know some such people. But we'd rather comment on the "celebrities" than focus on the great things happening on our own street.
We've riled as the 99% against the 1% and the sheer injustice of it all, but we forget that we're still part of the upper 20% that are still quite plumply sitting on another lowly 80%. We are the 20%, and we are unashamed.
Microsoft still insists that they want to work on their own project, but why not contribute that effort to a working group whose goal is to improve WebRCT, or even help steer the project away from the SDP dependance that they so loathe?
Also, if they do continue down the loner's path, will they also be an ass, patent a whole bunch of core mechanisms, and thus greatly hinder WebRCT from becoming complete?
An interesting point that has been mentioned so far: When dealing with persons of a criminal mindset, you can be sure that even if guns were outlawed, the criminal would find a way to cause harm/obtain a gun.
Whilst this is true, it does not take into consideration persons without a previous history turning bad; and persons of an angry "nature" not quite willing to track down and deal with the black market. Even by the time they did, they might have had time to cool off...
They may resort to knives and blunt objects for melee attacks, but that kind of damage, compared to a long-range rapid-fire weapon, yields a much lower chance of high body count.
As to the argument of the "tool" not being the problem - no, it's not the initial cause I suppose, but accessibility makes it extremely easy for the mentally unstable, who proponents of this argument like to hold up, to cause the damage they do - indeed, there are Bad People out there, suffocating their children in cars, and bludgeoning their wives with baseball bats... but come on, haven't we seen enough shootings in the history of the USA (and the world) where other persons had guns but it failed to prevent a massacre, or only made it worse? I still don't see how you could repurpose a firearm to be of any use other than making more dead people. And as said before - the alternative assault methods don't easily offer the instant-high-body-count which so addles us.
How can I phrase this better... of the set of people who have the mindset and will to kill people, the body count is different when all have access to guns, as opposed to when only a highly restricted subset have access (namely, those willing to deal with the black market or other illegal route).
There are plenty of other ways to kill lots of people without purpose-designed tools (read: items designed primarily to be weapons), as any diligent chemistry and physics student can demonstrate, or even just a crafty person. Funny that the crazed killers always opt for the pre-made weapons (guns, knives, legal or illegal) whatever the country.
Slashdot Mirror
It is accepted that she never actually wrote the programs under discussion - the OP was Babbage, though she was certainly highly enthusiastic about the workings of his contraptions and their implications for the world, and studied the topics sufficiently to write insightful and interesting commentary to high degree.
Of all that is published though, only a selection is ever read by the masses.
[allow me to apologise for my wagers - they are the snide insinuations of a slightly bemused person...]
.... a fair retort. May I respond:
1) Indeed you can't just do "what you want" - but when what you do is lauded and desireable, is it really that much to ask to be able to make a living from it? From a zen buddhist perspective, we could also simply do what we do and let people benefit from that without thought of reward, be that making art, tables, or farming the land. It works when everyone is as altruistic and zen-buddhisty - but it doesn't pay bills that are at a baser, more real level than idealism and philosophy.
2) I'll wager you never actually talked to an artist beyond firends who "like to draw." I'll also wager that you've never earnestly talked to someone who had an goal that was not aligned with your ideals for goals. Saying what they want to do is merely a "hobby" is rather belittling - we may as well state that anything we do before it becomes an idea of a career - planting tomatoes in the garden, knitting... installing an experimental Linux - is a hobby and should just be left as such. When a hobby becomes a career goal, you can't just brush it aside in your head. No, TV is not a hobby, and my hair is black, the point is moot. TV is however an industry that employes lots of technicians, accountants, writers, actors, cleaners, builders, journalists, etc. And in small doses is no bad thing either. If you can temper yourself, good on you.
3) Many activites came from humble roots, farming, sewing, washing, hunting, all of which were community activities that weren't "careers" or "employ" and were performed to maintain a community with no exchange of funds but the share in the fruits of labour. But hey, things changed, we operate differently. On the point of art, even if we disregard the "masters", there were also small time painters and sculptors milennia before the Internet. They still wanted to make it a living. They provide stuff we like, why shouldn't we give them something in return?
I guess in all of that, it can still be argued that things change, and the age of the paid artist may be drawing to an end. But isn't the point of our modern society to find better ways of being, to allow everyone the ability to work towards a dream - especially if its product is something we admire? (not that that is a requirement - we have scientsist spending vast amounts of cash on research that won't amount to anything useful but the sheer act of learning).
I consort with artists. I talk with them often. Small fry, who want so desperately to make a living from doing what they love. They fear for their work being lost on the net with no trace back home, and therefore no commissions, and therefore no pay.
I talk to them about Creative Commons. All you need is to submit to advertising and get page views. How many, when anyone can be an artist? Just get a part time job to tide you over. A job to afford making art, that takes so much time away from making art?. It's not as easy a sell as the more famous (and already rich) proponents would have you believe. Artists who are still starting out have to get every penny they can - not out of avarice. Out of necessity.
They're not in a big Studio. They're not funded by organisations. They don't have a paycheck. They operate independantly. Freely. Wihtout agenda. Isn't that the type of art we want to see? Isn't that the type of art we hold up as ideal? Is that not worth paying artists a living for?
I believe artists should be able to monetize the dozens of hours and materials they spend to create a work we can share at the push of a button.
The artists who are my friends: I also feed them the hot meals they still can't afford.
Describing the mechanism as a pay-wall probably does the feature a disservice - of course, one way of unlocking is pay, but it is stil possible to view free, and a more useful corollary as demonstrated in the article is that the artist can more effectively drive the user to a retailer of their merchandise (and a preferred one at that), or to their own store.
As usual, persons who specifically do not wish to pay money will not have to, but ensuring a store link for that particular content accompanies the piece in an otherwise free-distribution format
This could work really well, so long as sharing gratis and libere is still possible, and if artists using this can provide direct access to the specific item in an international store.
Elementary OS with the extra trimmings provided by ElementaryUpdate.com, and after switching out some of the standard apps for better ones (Noise for Banshee, Geary for Evolution or Thunderbird, etc...), is great for the "newcomers" to the Linux world -- especially for people of the "I just want to use a mouse" kind of people.
I'm not convinced that any GNU/Linux is for the absolute non-techie, but there are plenty of distros out there with the explicit aim of being newbie-friendly (or in marketing terms, "focused on a great user experience"). Once your user knows how to Google effectively, and knows how to search based on desktop environment instead of distro, they should be able to fly solo fairly soon.
For those who have the patience to look things up and understand the basics of their systems and are not afraid of the occasional CLI operation, the entire Debian family is at their disposition, and the RedHat line is fairly well documented too due to the sheer sizes of both its family tree and comunities. It takes just some initial explanation to newcomers as to what differs between distros from a user perspective to get someone like a developer (or just a plain curious technically-minded person) productive with just about any new distro from one of the large families.
This study fails on two counts: Americans are statistical outliers; the conclusion is fallacious due to poor understanding of causality.
For those for whom this is TL;DR -- Americans are the worst possible population to base any form of human study on (let alone a flawed study) - ref Solomon Asch's conclusion. The short summary @ neuroecology ; the longer discussion @ pacific standard.
But try this little thought experiment: take some random Anyville, USA. How much have they travelled, how diverse is their population? How do populations move? How many are going to marry from the same town, as did their parents and grandparents, and how many are going to have children and grandchildren doing the same? And even if the population started out with diversity, you can lather, rinse, repeat the marriage/procreation suds and end up with a genetically similar pool of people - the town itself holds massively similar people on average.
Those of us who are more footloose and have moved around further are still statistical anomalies, insomuch as we often hail from outside of these wells of similarity. That is not to say that since we're so different, we cannot make friends with those whose families are long time residents, nor does it exclude the idea of having a multicultural community of extremely different people, DNA-wise.
But at its core, the fault of this study is basic: a textbook example of correlation-causation fallacy.
// sent from an android device. apologies for typos and akward typing
Search is the least of the internet's traffic. Analytics and advertising are working in the back end. YouTube is streamingmassive amounts of data. Google's spiders are crwaling all over. Some small to medium businesses are using Google apps to drive all their comms. Maps are being served the woltd over Goodness knows what else. Remember: Google is out to organize ALL information. Not just your searches.
I thought they were monitoring, and could search, all communications on Earth?
I'd expect nothing less from a 1st world culture in general that says "do what YOU want to do," "find YOUR dream," "YOU're the most important to YOU." Reading the comments on this thread so far, it is evident that we'd rather remain blissfully ignorant and shift the burden elsewhere.
It's gruelling work to sort out the world's problems, and with no one-right-answer, fraught with the possibility of failure, as some commenters here can attest: one commenter demonstrates the core attitudinal problem - it takes effort to connect with someone from a different social background, with different concerns, priorities and fears for continued livelihood, to try and understand the problem, and formulate some answer, ANY answer, but at least to give a damn and TRY; some of us just aren't up to the task (though we can't necessarily be blamed for that much so long as we're not in denial). It's much easier to cater to the quick-wins, the plugged-in smart-phone-wielding, TV-watching, internet-addicted, money-squandering market and keep them happy. Fast money, cheap glory.
The first commenters demonstate the very sentiment under fire, that rather than recognizing that there are much more worthwhile questions to ponder than how to make the next best cheap app on the most expensive phones to date, or how to make their privileged lives even more privileged, they prefer to suggest that Nnaemeka is the whiny my-problems-aren't-solved person. Thing is, privileged netizen, YOUR problems ARE being solved.
Thankfully I too know the kind of people "O('_')O_Bush" points out, those who are toiling away, and even setting up locally successful ventures, to make communities, environments and the Environment better; though it's either an uneven distribution, in terms of attention gained vs actual work being done and achievements being made. I suspect we all know some such people. But we'd rather comment on the "celebrities" than focus on the great things happening on our own street.
We've riled as the 99% against the 1% and the sheer injustice of it all, but we forget that we're still part of the upper 20% that are still quite plumply sitting on another lowly 80%. We are the 20%, and we are unashamed.
Microsoft still insists that they want to work on their own project, but why not contribute that effort to a working group whose goal is to improve WebRCT, or even help steer the project away from the SDP dependance that they so loathe?
Also, if they do continue down the loner's path, will they also be an ass, patent a whole bunch of core mechanisms, and thus greatly hinder WebRCT from becoming complete?
An interesting point that has been mentioned so far: When dealing with persons of a criminal mindset, you can be sure that even if guns were outlawed, the criminal would find a way to cause harm/obtain a gun.
Whilst this is true, it does not take into consideration persons without a previous history turning bad; and persons of an angry "nature" not quite willing to track down and deal with the black market. Even by the time they did, they might have had time to cool off...
They may resort to knives and blunt objects for melee attacks, but that kind of damage, compared to a long-range rapid-fire weapon, yields a much lower chance of high body count.
As to the argument of the "tool" not being the problem - no, it's not the initial cause I suppose, but accessibility makes it extremely easy for the mentally unstable, who proponents of this argument like to hold up, to cause the damage they do - indeed, there are Bad People out there, suffocating their children in cars, and bludgeoning their wives with baseball bats... but come on, haven't we seen enough shootings in the history of the USA (and the world) where other persons had guns but it failed to prevent a massacre, or only made it worse? I still don't see how you could repurpose a firearm to be of any use other than making more dead people. And as said before - the alternative assault methods don't easily offer the instant-high-body-count which so addles us.
How can I phrase this better... of the set of people who have the mindset and will to kill people, the body count is different when all have access to guns, as opposed to when only a highly restricted subset have access (namely, those willing to deal with the black market or other illegal route).
There are plenty of other ways to kill lots of people without purpose-designed tools (read: items designed primarily to be weapons), as any diligent chemistry and physics student can demonstrate, or even just a crafty person. Funny that the crazed killers always opt for the pre-made weapons (guns, knives, legal or illegal) whatever the country.