As someone who writes quite a bit (though doesn't really make money for it) I can say I would be pretty pissed it if was perfectly legal and "OK" for anyone to take my work, stick their name on it, delete my credits, and publish it themselves.
I imagine anyone who does much creative work (writing, coding, composing, whatever) feels the same way, even if they choose to share it for free, they expect to be able to get credit for the work they have done. Taking this away WOULD drastically undermine people's incentive to share creative works with their community.
You know - its strange I never thought of this before, but it makes sense. I only have a couple of years in the industry - so I don't have the contacts I think I would need to maintain a business and live far away from what I expect would be my primary market...
I love Playa Del Carmen by the way, thought is been a couple of years since I've been there. (And I love the even more out of the way places in driving distance...)
What kind of work do you do? How do you go about lining up business? Where are your customers generally located?
I am using SpamAssassin 2.55 with a threshold set to 5 - I've yet to see a false positive. (And I'm in the unfortunate position of receiving about 100 spams per day.) I have my filter set to put spams in the trash but I review the from/subject lines before emptying them out.
I added a few lines for RBL's but not much of my spam seems to actually come from sites listed in the RBL's:
I also increased the score in my user config file for a number of the filters involving genitalia - I can't think of anyone who would send me a legit email containing any of those words, that seems to help a lot.
Finally - I found I needed to give it time. The bayesian filter needs to 'see' at least a few hundred messages in order for it to start to work effectively. Initially I saw results in the range you are seeing... But the more the bayesian filter sees, the better it gets. initially I didn't delete the spams that got through - I put them in a special folder and once a week I fed them through sa-learn. In the past 3 weeks I have had 1 spam penetrate to my actual inbox, at about 100 spams per day thats a pretty good number.
Is anyone aware of Windows root kits with similar functionality to the kits that I've seen installed on many Linux boxes? Eg. packet sniffer, trojan ssh daemon, usually some kind of DDOS device, IRC bot etc. as well as various password cracking tools (l0pht crack?).
The US - IMHO, had something else going for it as well. Truly, staggeringly visionary leadership in the form of most of the "founding fathers". It was this leadership and the soundness of the constitution they drafted that saw the US through its fledgling years of democracy. If just one of those men had been greedier, or more power hungry, the world would be a very different place.
The problem with most of the "liberated" countries is the previous leader (dictator) has generally done a pretty good job of shooting or chasing off any kind of visionary who might lead the people to build a better nation.
Re:The article focuses solely on the first-world,
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 1
OPEC doesn't work nearly as well as it did in the early days. There is a great deal of infighting between member nations. With a huge drop in demand the members would all see their pocket books hurting, they wouldn't waste a second stabbing one another in the back and pumping more oil than they agreed to. Almost all of the OPEC states (but especially Saudi) regularly exceed their OPEC quota even at present.
Sorry, does anyone else out there think we should LET kids take risks, LET kids learn from their mistakes, LET kids take actions that aren't good for them so they can see for themselves. And if a few don't make it - well, bluntly, there's plenty where they came from.
The current situation seems destined to produce adult children - people who have never experienced anything outside of the carefully sanitized artificial environment created for them. Maybe experiencing a little danger might be good for them.
Our society is obsessively compelled to believe (in large part thanks to media induced hysteria) that there are psychos and thugs around every corner. The reality is those of us in North America and Western Europe live in the SAFEST SOCIETY THERE EVER HAS BEEN.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a greater good to be had by letting our kids LIVE and LEARN (and risk) than locking them down every moment of their lives and then suddenly turning them loose when they are 18. Our society seems bound and determined to ensure children make the LEAST of the first 20 years of their life.
Re:The article focuses solely on the first-world,
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If the US economy moved from oil to another energy source ( huge hypothetical, but lets say it did) the price of oil would drop considerably. I'm sure the middle east would continue pumping, and selling, oil. But the business would not be quite as lucrative as it is.
I imagine western Europe will switch to hydrogen economies long before it happens in north america.
Plastics use a fraction of the amount of oil that goes into the automobile. America could probably supply all the necessary oil from its own pumps without needing to import oil for quite a long time if the only demand for oil was from the plastics industry.
There's no great conspiracy - but, it is also obviously not in the oil industries best interests for the world to get "unhooked" off of oil. They have a huge investment in manufacturing, storage and other physical plant facilities, and transportation of oil. Plus - its easy money. Sure they are going to have their fingers in a couple of other pies (solar panels for example), why not? If you think that means they wouldn't very much prefer the world continued to use fossil fuels as the primary means of transportation, you're dreaming. They will take what steps they can to ensure it remains that way for as long as possible, their investors would demand nothing less.
Or better yet, why is it -possible- to pop up a window over or under the users browser without the users permission?
(Yes, I know there are a lot of browsers that now allow you to block popups - and that you can inside of IE using the google toolbar... but it seems rather poor design to have allowed this without user permission in the/first place/.)
When I accidentally repartitioned and started an ext2 format on a windows drive with a LOT of data on it I wanted to keep, I used a tool called 'Repoman' from this group: http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/
YMMV but it worked well for me - it was able to recover the old partition information, and rebuild the filesystems sufficiently well for me to stick it in as the secondary drive on another machine and recover the majority of the data. Its not a free tool but for 30 odd dollars it was money well spent.
Just out of curiousity - where the heck did you find internet access in Tofino. Or a better question - why are you on the internet if you're in Tofino.:)
Keep in mind the top500 list is built by volountary submissions to the archive. That means - there is a not insubstantial number of computers that "should" be in the top 500 (and top 5 for that matter) but aren't because of either a) the researchers who bought the system are just itching to use their very expensive machine for research and just bypass running the benchmark to get right down to business b) the agency/company using the machine desires to maintain a low profile.
Also - keep in mind that linpack favors machines with very low latency, high bandwidth interconnects. But - in some simulations / applications this is irrelevant. Some applications demand this bandwidth/latency - but others transfer relatively small, but very difficult problems among CPU's. (SETI @ HOME is a decent laymen example of this... A work unit is quite small, but requires a lot of cpu time to process.) Thus actual performance of an application like this would more closely approximate the Rpeak figure rather than the Rmax figure on those linpack tests. These kinds of applications would tend to favor the x86 clusters on the top500 list more heavily, because in raw MIPS they are quite strong.
As someone who uses linux on a laptop, running SuSE 8.2 I *DEFINITELY* have a use for this. I use my laptop in a professional capacity to do quite a lot of things, and while I can run on batteries I do generally turn it off and on at least a couple times a day. Further - because I am occasionally forced to dual boot, sometimes that can be even more often. It is a good 3-4 minutes between power on and KDE desktop. This is on an 800mhz P3 with 512 megs of RAM.
And I doubt they lost a single sale because of this. People who were going to buy it bought it, people who weren't, didn't. Yawn.
As you fail to grok - copy protection doesn't stop pirates. It takes them about 5 minutes of google'ing to find the hack, or download off a warez server. Ironically, they often have an easier time than legitimate users. (Please insert cd 'x'.)
I buy my games yet I use daemon tools anti-safedisc/securom 'haxx0r' tools all the time. Why? I like to have the whole game on my hard disk, and I hate when my CD drive hiccups on the invalid data areas on some of the copyright cd's.
Do you live on the same planet? My computer has tens of thousands of "image" files on it - most of them are jpeg, bitmaps, pcx etc. etc. etc. associated with installed software or in various caches from web browsing. Most computers are like this. Do a search on any windows computer for common image formats and you'll get back hundreds if not thousands of results. Do you know what every single one of those images are? Didn't think so.
If these things were saved to his desktop or something, thats one thing, but most likely they were stuffed away in some folder with a data-like name.
You can bet the prosecution had experts on their side who would have ripped this guys defense to pieces if it was that easy to find a hole in it. The court found this guy innocent - we should respect the courts finding and drop the witch hunt.
I've got a list of dangerous things too. How about: Fire Rocks Sharp sticks Screw drivers Cars Planes Rocks dropped from planes
etc. etc. etc.
Because something has the potential to be dangerous is not a valid argument for not researching it. If that argument was applied 10,000 years ago we'd still be getting eaten by wolves and mauled by buffalo.
If you think nuclear energy is dangerous do some research into the number of deaths related to the burning of fossil fuels, the mining of coal, the extraction and transportation of oil & gas. Its all dangerous.
Many of the threads on this story - I suspect, will follow one of a few different aspects of this case. Whether this fellow "Deserved" what happened because what he was doing was allowing the illegal copying of copyprotected works. Whether or not "tool" providers should be prosecuted rather than those actually circumventing copy protections and breaking copyright law, and general challenges to the legitimacy of the DMCA.
I'd like to bring up another thread - the appropriate use of prisons in our society. It has come to pass that the answer to all criminal activities is "send them to prison". Does this make sense for non-violent crimes such as this? This guy didn't rob a liquor store, he didn't point a gun, knife or other weapon at anyone. He didn't threaten anyone. What, exactly, is the point of sending someone like this to jail?
I'm not going to argue whether he deserves punishment or not - I'm sure that will be handled in a lot of other threads. But if we are going to punish these kinds of crimes - what punishment should be used? Having a prison population is a huge burden on society, and its reformative powers are pretty dubious at best. Are we not better off assigning community service hours or similar types of punishments for these kinds of crimes?
Hrm... not to rain on your paranoia parade, but there's more oil in Canada than there is in the middle east. Much of that is at present unexploited, but the US does import more oil from Canada at present than it does from Saudi Arabia.
The US gets less than 20% of its oil from the middle east. If its "all about oil" as you seem to claim, the US should be using political leverage to increase pump & oilsands production in Canada, not getting their people killed overseas. Not to mention dealing with the situation in Venezuela.
I think there is a bit more to it than you have identified...
A little extra-curricular work if you are interested in the subject.
How many people die every year as a result of coal mining, and respiratory related illnesses due to our use of coal as a source of energy?
How many people die every year in oil extraction & refining? How many from petroleum based airborn pollutants released when petroleum products are burned in generating stations? (In fact, to make it easier, just look at Nigeria. One country alone is more than sufficient to make my point.)
Now I'll do this bit for you.:) Not a single worker or member of the public has been killed by a commercial nuclear power plant in any country using nuclear power with the exception of Chernobyl and more recently Japan (2 deaths). There are currently 103 nuclear plants in the US providing some 20% of US power. France has 56 nuclear plants generating some 76% of their electricity. Yet there have been no fatal accidents in these countries. Compare this with the hundreds+ dead every year in oil and gas explosions in developing countries, dozens of miners killed every year even in North America where safety standards are very high... not even looking at the closer to hundreds or thousands of coal miners that die in poorer countries like the Ukraine.
If this is not enough to persuade you, consider this. Oil funds terrorism. It is that simple. It was oil money that allowed Sep. 11 to take place. If you are going to follow the full cycle "toll" of using fossil fuels, you had better tally in another 3000 dead for the year 2001, and who knows how many in the future. Bush's claims that drugs fund terrorism is a red herring - the Taliban had banned and actively executed those who cultivated opium poppies. It was the Northern Alliance that was exporting heroin as a means of funding their civil war. (Hint: they are our ALLIES).
"Nuclear" has become a bogeyman, when you look at the facts, it is the safest alternative.
Hm, and I thought the headline read 'Did life originate in underwear'. I was about to say - I wouldn't rule out the possibility in some of the hockey arena locker rooms I've been in...
To me, the natural progression for a publisher in an arena where selling dead-tree print has ended is in picking the diamonds from the rough as it were. There are almost as many would-be writers as readers out there, and most of them are awful. Lots of books that get published are awful, and a lot more meritless manuscripts are thrown out every year (along with some good manuscripts that never get published).
Still, there remains the task of: 1) Identifying good writing. 2) Promoting the authors who produce good work. 3) Promoting specific titles from authors who produce good work. 4) Editing! Even good authors spend a lot of time going back and forth with their editors. 5) Story art etc.
So there is always going to be work for the publishing houses. What remains to be seen is how digital distribution will be managed without bankrupting the existing companies. And if they are bankrupted, what will evolve to fill these roles?
Its possible someone will develop a site like epinions or slashdot except for writing, with a moderation / meta moderation system and so on. But I think the same issues that take place on slashdot will evolve - most 'moderators' will spend most of their time only reading stories/books that have already been modded up and there will be a huge collection of mostly unsorted stories/books. Most of which will be garbage but in which plenty of gems will be overlooked.
Slashdot Mirror
For your amusement there is a postmodern essay generator based on a Chomsky grammar tree available here:
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
As someone who writes quite a bit (though doesn't really make money for it) I can say I would be pretty pissed it if was perfectly legal and "OK" for anyone to take my work, stick their name on it, delete my credits, and publish it themselves.
I imagine anyone who does much creative work (writing, coding, composing, whatever) feels the same way, even if they choose to share it for free, they expect to be able to get credit for the work they have done. Taking this away WOULD drastically undermine people's incentive to share creative works with their community.
You know - its strange I never thought of this before, but it makes sense. I only have a couple of years in the industry - so I don't have the contacts I think I would need to maintain a business and live far away from what I expect would be my primary market...
I love Playa Del Carmen by the way, thought is been a couple of years since I've been there. (And I love the even more out of the way places in driving distance...)
What kind of work do you do? How do you go about lining up business? Where are your customers generally located?
I am using SpamAssassin 2.55 with a threshold set to 5 - I've yet to see a false positive. (And I'm in the unfortunate position of receiving about 100 spams per day.) I have my filter set to put spams in the trash but I review the from/subject lines before emptying them out.
:)
I added a few lines for RBL's but not much of my spam seems to actually come from sites listed in the RBL's:
score RCVD_IN_RBL 3
score RCVD_IN_RSS 3
score RCVD_IN_DUL 3
score RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET 3
I also increased the score in my user config file for a number of the filters involving genitalia - I can't think of anyone who would send me a legit email containing any of those words, that seems to help a lot.
Finally - I found I needed to give it time. The bayesian filter needs to 'see' at least a few hundred messages in order for it to start to work effectively. Initially I saw results in the range you are seeing... But the more the bayesian filter sees, the better it gets. initially I didn't delete the spams that got through - I put them in a special folder and once a week I fed them through sa-learn. In the past 3 weeks I have had 1 spam penetrate to my actual inbox, at about 100 spams per day thats a pretty good number.
Reclaim your inbox!
Is anyone aware of Windows root kits with similar functionality to the kits that I've seen installed on many Linux boxes? Eg. packet sniffer, trojan ssh daemon, usually some kind of DDOS device, IRC bot etc. as well as various password cracking tools (l0pht crack?).
Do these exist?
The US - IMHO, had something else going for it as well. Truly, staggeringly visionary leadership in the form of most of the "founding fathers". It was this leadership and the soundness of the constitution they drafted that saw the US through its fledgling years of democracy. If just one of those men had been greedier, or more power hungry, the world would be a very different place.
The problem with most of the "liberated" countries is the previous leader (dictator) has generally done a pretty good job of shooting or chasing off any kind of visionary who might lead the people to build a better nation.
OPEC doesn't work nearly as well as it did in the early days. There is a great deal of infighting between member nations. With a huge drop in demand the members would all see their pocket books hurting, they wouldn't waste a second stabbing one another in the back and pumping more oil than they agreed to. Almost all of the OPEC states (but especially Saudi) regularly exceed their OPEC quota even at present.
Sorry, does anyone else out there think we should LET kids take risks, LET kids learn from their mistakes, LET kids take actions that aren't good for them so they can see for themselves. And if a few don't make it - well, bluntly, there's plenty where they came from.
The current situation seems destined to produce adult children - people who have never experienced anything outside of the carefully sanitized artificial environment created for them. Maybe experiencing a little danger might be good for them.
Our society is obsessively compelled to believe (in large part thanks to media induced hysteria) that there are psychos and thugs around every corner. The reality is those of us in North America and Western Europe live in the SAFEST SOCIETY THERE EVER HAS BEEN.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a greater good to be had by letting our kids LIVE and LEARN (and risk) than locking them down every moment of their lives and then suddenly turning them loose when they are 18. Our society seems bound and determined to ensure children make the LEAST of the first 20 years of their life.
If the US economy moved from oil to another energy source ( huge hypothetical, but lets say it did) the price of oil would drop considerably. I'm sure the middle east would continue pumping, and selling, oil. But the business would not be quite as lucrative as it is.
I imagine western Europe will switch to hydrogen economies long before it happens in north america.
Plastics use a fraction of the amount of oil that goes into the automobile. America could probably supply all the necessary oil from its own pumps without needing to import oil for quite a long time if the only demand for oil was from the plastics industry.
There's no great conspiracy - but, it is also obviously not in the oil industries best interests for the world to get "unhooked" off of oil. They have a huge investment in manufacturing, storage and other physical plant facilities, and transportation of oil. Plus - its easy money. Sure they are going to have their fingers in a couple of other pies (solar panels for example), why not? If you think that means they wouldn't very much prefer the world continued to use fossil fuels as the primary means of transportation, you're dreaming. They will take what steps they can to ensure it remains that way for as long as possible, their investors would demand nothing less.
No conspiracy. Just business.
Or better yet, why is it -possible- to pop up a window over or under the users browser without the users permission?
/first place/.)
(Yes, I know there are a lot of browsers that now allow you to block popups - and that you can inside of IE using the google toolbar... but it seems rather poor design to have allowed this without user permission in the
I'd just like to know who BOUGHT those shares. ;-)
When I accidentally repartitioned and started an ext2 format on a windows drive with a LOT of data on it I wanted to keep, I used a tool called 'Repoman' from this group:
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/
YMMV but it worked well for me - it was able to recover the old partition information, and rebuild the filesystems sufficiently well for me to stick it in as the secondary drive on another machine and recover the majority of the data. Its not a free tool but for 30 odd dollars it was money well spent.
Just out of curiousity - where the heck did you find internet access in Tofino. Or a better question - why are you on the internet if you're in Tofino. :)
Keep in mind the top500 list is built by volountary submissions to the archive. That means - there is a not insubstantial number of computers that "should" be in the top 500 (and top 5 for that matter) but aren't because of either a) the researchers who bought the system are just itching to use their very expensive machine for research and just bypass running the benchmark to get right down to business b) the agency/company using the machine desires to maintain a low profile.
Also - keep in mind that linpack favors machines with very low latency, high bandwidth interconnects. But - in some simulations / applications this is irrelevant. Some applications demand this bandwidth/latency - but others transfer relatively small, but very difficult problems among CPU's. (SETI @ HOME is a decent laymen example of this... A work unit is quite small, but requires a lot of cpu time to process.) Thus actual performance of an application like this would more closely approximate the Rpeak figure rather than the Rmax figure on those linpack tests. These kinds of applications would tend to favor the x86 clusters on the top500 list more heavily, because in raw MIPS they are quite strong.
As someone who uses linux on a laptop, running SuSE 8.2 I *DEFINITELY* have a use for this. I use my laptop in a professional capacity to do quite a lot of things, and while I can run on batteries I do generally turn it off and on at least a couple times a day. Further - because I am occasionally forced to dual boot, sometimes that can be even more often. It is a good 3-4 minutes between power on and KDE desktop. This is on an 800mhz P3 with 512 megs of RAM.
Do I want a faster boot?
You bet your ass I do.
And I doubt they lost a single sale because of this. People who were going to buy it bought it, people who weren't, didn't. Yawn.
As you fail to grok - copy protection doesn't stop pirates. It takes them about 5 minutes of google'ing to find the hack, or download off a warez server. Ironically, they often have an easier time than legitimate users. (Please insert cd 'x'.)
I buy my games yet I use daemon tools anti-safedisc/securom 'haxx0r' tools all the time. Why? I like to have the whole game on my hard disk, and I hate when my CD drive hiccups on the invalid data areas on some of the copyright cd's.
Do you live on the same planet? My computer has tens of thousands of "image" files on it - most of them are jpeg, bitmaps, pcx etc. etc. etc. associated with installed software or in various caches from web browsing. Most computers are like this. Do a search on any windows computer for common image formats and you'll get back hundreds if not thousands of results. Do you know what every single one of those images are? Didn't think so.
If these things were saved to his desktop or something, thats one thing, but most likely they were stuffed away in some folder with a data-like name.
You can bet the prosecution had experts on their side who would have ripped this guys defense to pieces if it was that easy to find a hole in it. The court found this guy innocent - we should respect the courts finding and drop the witch hunt.
This is insightful?
I've got a list of dangerous things too. How about:
Fire
Rocks
Sharp sticks
Screw drivers
Cars
Planes
Rocks dropped from planes
etc.
etc.
etc.
Because something has the potential to be dangerous is not a valid argument for not researching it. If that argument was applied 10,000 years ago we'd still be getting eaten by wolves and mauled by buffalo.
If you think nuclear energy is dangerous do some research into the number of deaths related to the burning of fossil fuels, the mining of coal, the extraction and transportation of oil & gas. Its all dangerous.
Parallel is so 90's. Everyone knows the future is in SERIAL universes.
Many of the threads on this story - I suspect, will follow one of a few different aspects of this case. Whether this fellow "Deserved" what happened because what he was doing was allowing the illegal copying of copyprotected works. Whether or not "tool" providers should be prosecuted rather than those actually circumventing copy protections and breaking copyright law, and general challenges to the legitimacy of the DMCA.
I'd like to bring up another thread - the appropriate use of prisons in our society. It has come to pass that the answer to all criminal activities is "send them to prison". Does this make sense for non-violent crimes such as this? This guy didn't rob a liquor store, he didn't point a gun, knife or other weapon at anyone. He didn't threaten anyone. What, exactly, is the point of sending someone like this to jail?
I'm not going to argue whether he deserves punishment or not - I'm sure that will be handled in a lot of other threads. But if we are going to punish these kinds of crimes - what punishment should be used? Having a prison population is a huge burden on society, and its reformative powers are pretty dubious at best. Are we not better off assigning community service hours or similar types of punishments for these kinds of crimes?
Thoughts?
Obasan
Hrm... not to rain on your paranoia parade, but there's more oil in Canada than there is in the middle east. Much of that is at present unexploited, but the US does import more oil from Canada at present than it does from Saudi Arabia.
The US gets less than 20% of its oil from the middle east. If its "all about oil" as you seem to claim, the US should be using political leverage to increase pump & oilsands production in Canada, not getting their people killed overseas. Not to mention dealing with the situation in Venezuela.
I think there is a bit more to it than you have identified...
A little extra-curricular work if you are interested in the subject.
:) Not a single worker or member of the public has been killed by a commercial nuclear power plant in any country using nuclear power with the exception of Chernobyl and more recently Japan (2 deaths). There are currently 103 nuclear plants in the US providing some 20% of US power. France has 56 nuclear plants generating some 76% of their electricity. Yet there have been no fatal accidents in these countries. Compare this with the hundreds+ dead every year in oil and gas explosions in developing countries, dozens of miners killed every year even in North America where safety standards are very high... not even looking at the closer to hundreds or thousands of coal miners that die in poorer countries like the Ukraine.
How many people die every year as a result of coal mining, and respiratory related illnesses due to our use of coal as a source of energy?
How many people die every year in oil extraction & refining? How many from petroleum based airborn pollutants released when petroleum products are burned in generating stations? (In fact, to make it easier, just look at Nigeria. One country alone is more than sufficient to make my point.)
Now I'll do this bit for you.
If this is not enough to persuade you, consider this. Oil funds terrorism. It is that simple. It was oil money that allowed Sep. 11 to take place. If you are going to follow the full cycle "toll" of using fossil fuels, you had better tally in another 3000 dead for the year 2001, and who knows how many in the future. Bush's claims that drugs fund terrorism is a red herring - the Taliban had banned and actively executed those who cultivated opium poppies. It was the Northern Alliance that was exporting heroin as a means of funding their civil war. (Hint: they are our ALLIES).
"Nuclear" has become a bogeyman, when you look at the facts, it is the safest alternative.
Hm, and I thought the headline read 'Did life originate in underwear'. I was about to say - I wouldn't rule out the possibility in some of the hockey arena locker rooms I've been in...
To me, the natural progression for a publisher in an arena where selling dead-tree print has ended is in picking the diamonds from the rough as it were. There are almost as many would-be writers as readers out there, and most of them are awful. Lots of books that get published are awful, and a lot more meritless manuscripts are thrown out every year (along with some good manuscripts that never get published).
Still, there remains the task of:
1) Identifying good writing.
2) Promoting the authors who produce good work.
3) Promoting specific titles from authors who produce good work.
4) Editing! Even good authors spend a lot of time going back and forth with their editors.
5) Story art etc.
So there is always going to be work for the publishing houses. What remains to be seen is how digital distribution will be managed without bankrupting the existing companies. And if they are bankrupted, what will evolve to fill these roles?
Its possible someone will develop a site like epinions or slashdot except for writing, with a moderation / meta moderation system and so on. But I think the same issues that take place on slashdot will evolve - most 'moderators' will spend most of their time only reading stories/books that have already been modded up and there will be a huge collection of mostly unsorted stories/books. Most of which will be garbage but in which plenty of gems will be overlooked.