> How is saying we are going to censor content on our hard drives any different than saying we are going to censor content on our switches?
Because there's generally only one party that controls the packet switches that serve households, whereas there are many different companies providing information services, even if there is some concentration there, too.
If you don't like censorship on Reddit, you can use 4chan instead, or Voat, or etc... In most of the country, you have one choice for high-speed broadband--maybe two if you live close enough for DSL to be competitive with cable modems. Replacing or adding to these competitors is EXTREMELY difficult in most places, because of the way that costs scale when putting wires on poles or in the ground. We put more restrictions on ISPs because they have control of "bottleneck" facilities.
People used to say that being gay was a mental disorder too. There's decent scientific evidence that transsexualism isn't one either. This includes documented cross-sex differences in some brain structures as well as studies looking at identical vs. fraternal twins. (the rate of concordance is WAY higher for identical twins.) Also, consider the fact that the condition has been around for thousands of years with documented history in across different cultures. (E.g., Hijra, two-spirit, etc...)
Sure, trans people probably more often have depression and anxiety, but... if your parents disowned you, your classmates mocked you, and nobody would hire you or associate with you... you'd probably have some mental health problems too. Yes, things are a bit better in most places now, but this is only a VERY recent development.
Title II isn't just something that the Obama administration decided to do arbitrarily. Consider the federal statute defining telecommunications: "The term “telecommunications” means the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received." 47 U.S.C. 153 (50). That's exactly what the Internet does. If it wasn't, TLS/IPSEC/L2tp, etc... lots of stuff wouldn't work. Other packet-switched networks were regulated as Title II telecommunications, e.g., Frame Relay. The fact that the Internet is connectionless and globally addressable doesn't change the fact that it's a telecommunications service, just like other packet-switched networks.
If "network neutrality" like rules hadn't existed with telecommunications networks since the FCC's 1970s-1980s Computer Inquiries, the Internet could have never been commercialized in the first place. You'd still be replying to this comment on a Compuserve-like service run by AT&T.
As many others have commented, more direct democracy is likely to make things worse, not better. The problem is, of course, Rational Ignorance, and the classic solution to that problem is representation. IMHO, the problem is that as the population has grown, the number of people per representative has increased dramatically over the last 200 years. Combined with some structural changes (i.e., fragmentation, competition) in the media, this means that politicians simply can't get elected without $. When money is more important than votes for being elected (because it effectively buys votes through a variety of means...) it's no surprise that politicians cater to those who fund their campaigns. None of this is particularly novel; Lessig has a great presentation on this going around, and a new book, too.
However, when you're talking about using "crowd-sourcing" solutions, IMHO the best way to do this is by using the 'net to enable what I'd call better "political proxies," and that's probably more representation. I'd be a lot more likely to go vote in a primary election if I knew... who to vote for to advance my political views, but collecting this information is a lot of work, especially if I want to avoid the influence of $-influenced information, seek out good sources of information, look at actual voting records, etc... and I want to do this for a reasonably large number of offices and candidates. OTOH, I'd be happy to trust someone I know who holds similar beliefs to do this and just vote their recommendation. And I'd be more willing to do that kind of research if I knew it mattered to more than just myself. This is the role that parties are supposed to fulfill, but the fact that there are only two of them (see: winner-take-all) makes this a rather blunt, ineffective instrument. Plus they don't help for primaries.
TL; DR, more direct democracy will make it worse, I'd rather have more effective, targeted representation instead, even if it just lets me know how to vote in primary and non-partisan elections.
Microsoft is a "natural" monopoly How so? The basis of their business is copyright - a government issued monopoly.
Copyright gives Microsoft a monopoly in Operating Systems the same way it gives Britney Spears a monopoly on music. That is to say- it doesn't. She only has a monopoly only on her own music, and if you prefer to listen to something else, there's no reason you can't do so. Microsoft's monopoly is based on much more than simple copyright law.
If you're interested in the economics behind my argument, you can check out this link. Microsoft's long run average cost (LRAC) curve for Windows is their initial development cost multiplied by the inverse of the quantity demanded. When the capital costs are very high and the marginal costs constant (near zero), you can see how this is a unique cost curve. In most industries, average cost declines only so far before going back up again This alone doesn't make them a natural monopoly, because that depends on the scale of the initial costs relevant the entire market. Beyond this, it starts to get a little more complicated because Microsoft can keep bumping up the development cost and narrowing the market, and then gets into what products can be substitutes, how good they are (as substitutes, not in themselves), whether they're doing this on purpose of if it's just a byproduct of their production (yeah, right), etc...
This is different from government issues monopolies with regulation, like cable franchises- which are government granted monopolies on top of the economics outlined above. An even better example is the post office- even though the industry is large enough to accommodate several carriers, there are still some things that only the post office can do.
But all those people who are pissed off at the government for handing Microsoft this monopoly they have, well, go be pissed off at the government.
I've just finished my undergrad major in econ* and I'd offer just one modification. Microsoft is a "natural" monopoly, in an economically similar way to the old Bell telephone system. The similarities are in combination of large initial capital costs with near-zero marginal cost, and the "network effect", where compatibility issues mean that the value of Windows as a product depends, in an important way, on the number of other people also using Windows. So you can't really blame the Government for giving them the monopoly per se, but you can definitely blame them for letting Microsoft abuse this power. Particularly the way the feds seemed to lose interest once Bush took office.
IMHO, the best way to fix the problem is to force (or strongly encourage) interoperability and standards compliance in some way, to keep them from making changes designed to break competitors' products and make everyone have the newest versions of Microsoft software to communicate with each other. That one thing could make a world of difference.
Another very interesting possibility is the GPL-ing of Java. Not because it's Java specifically, but because it's "middleware" that abstracts away the underlying hardware and OS to a large degree. The "network effect" of compatibility for applications is then tied to a free (libre) platform. Of course I realize there are technical objections to this...;)
*as if that means much, as there are probably Ph.Ds reading this, but...
Java being released under the GPL might have an even bigger impact in the long term than it appears (from these comments) many people think. It may represent the beginning of a huge leap forward for open source. The following line of reasoning seems at least somewhat plausible...
Starting with the obvious, Java will become more acceptable as a generalized platform for open source projects because there is no longer any danger of having the base platform disappear, go exclusively commercial, etc...
The greater use of Java for applications will further drive development that reduces the (system) cost of starting an additional Java application. Some of this work has already been done. Think of desktop widgets running in some sort of system-wide application server, rather than their own separate process. This drastically reduces the (marginal) cost of starting and running an additional Java program.
This will make it even more likely that Java is selected for new open source applications.
The above will be a mutually reinforcing cycle.
These applications will be able to reach a much larger audience, specifically those who run Windows or Mac OSX on their desktops. Yes, some other apps are already cross-platform (i.e., Firefox), and cross-platform compatibility may not be perfect, but cross-platform compatibility becomes the default, rather than the exception.
Just like the shift of some applications to the web, the underlying operating system again becomes less relevant. GPL'd GNU/Linux becomes a better substitute for Windows on the desktop, because the same applications will more often run on it as well.
So more people use it.
Competition and innovation flourish as Microsoft looses its unrivaled power to take over new markets/applications by leveraging the Windows monopoly. More firms will take development risks (for commercial software) without the threat of being so easily crushed by Microsoft.
Of course, the idea's not perfect, especially due to the large number of existing platform-specific applications and the fact that some applications need to be platform specific to run efficiently. Perhaps ahead of time compilation will be used/developed further? Anyway, even if this happens, it's probably going to take a very long time- maybe decades. But if the end result is that people coalesce around a freer and more open platform, and better (often open!) and cheaper (often free!) software comes about as a result, we'll all (well, except for Microsoft, of course) be better off.
WMD proliferation is a huge problem. Let's face it- nuclear weapons weapons were developed over 60 years ago, while a successful nuclear program does require substantial resources, enough information on nuclear weapons design has entered the public domain that many Slashdotters could figure out the basics in under an hour of online research. The more nations the acquire the technology, the more likely it is to be used. Not only will they fall into the hands of less and less rational governments (Read: Iran), but smaller nations, with perhaps less developed command and control systems, more opportunities for theft/loss, and perhaps most importantly, the possibility of covert delpoyment with plausible deniability. All this makes it more and more likely that nuclear weapons will be used, and you'd have to be an idiot to think that DC wouldn't be on the top of the target list for some phychotic asshole trying to start WW3.
There are a lot of highly rated comments about how government officials are selfish for planning for this for themselves and leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. Well, not only are they the primary targets of such an attack, but also you would much rather have the keep functioning should (God forbid) this ever happen than to evacuate, for example, me- a private citizen whom you know virtually nothing about and would be in no position to help in recovering from such a terrible disaster. Yeah, it sucks- but that doesn't make it any less true. If you're looking at the big picture, it's the more compassionate and more rational thing to do.
Another thing is that this is exactly why the invasion of Iraq was such a stupid, brain-dead, bone-headed move. Bush likes to talk about "political capital"- he blew ours (the US's) when he launched a preemptive war when there turned out to be nothing to preempt. Now Iran has built uranium enrichment facilities (the biggest hurdle to nuclear weapons development) and we're left with our credibility in tatters and looking impotent (see current situation in Iraq).
The problem is that while MAD may have worked with the Soviets, the situation with other countries is different. As yourself how sure you are that-
Their leadership is rational, and will properly consider the consequenses to their population in the event of nuclear retaliation?
They will have sufficient command and control over them to prevent theft/unauthorized use?
That a limited ABM strategy cannot be effective against a very small number of missles? (compared to the 1,000s in the theoretical Cold War exchanges)
That the existance of such technology disclosed publicly, with the possibility of more advanced (classified) capabilities, will not have an additional deterring effect?
That the development of this technology is not a necessary step towards the development of something more advanced and useful along the same lines?
Massive overkill in retaliation will be politically acceptable even with the impact to neighboring countries?
Wanting something a little better than MAD isn't crazy.
Ultimately, I'd agree that "code is design", but that this is an overly simplified view. Looking at "x = y + z" and knowing an addition operation is being performed is one thng, but what do these symbols stand for? Why is the operation being done? How does this fit into the overall function of the software? These questions start to become more difficult and time consuming for a human being to answer without an overall design as a project increases in size and complexity.
For example, I might be able to look at an init script and, sans documentation, quickly understand what's going on to the point that I can understand and modify the script. It's hard to argue that I could use the same process for contributing a patch to say, PostgreSQL. I guess I'm trying to say that the relative efficency of people using different forms of design (either code, or explicit design documentation) is analagous to algorithmic complexity for programs.
Recipricol Compensation vs. Bill and Keep
on
SBC's VoIP End Run
·
· Score: 3, Informative
When the Bells were originally forced to open their networks to competition by the '96 telcom act, they lobbied for and recieved a concession called Recipricol Compensation. When the ILECs (SBC, et. al.) and newly created CLECs interconnected with each other's networks, each party would pay the other to terminate calls on the other party's network. This was done so that CLECs could not go after the high volume, profitable, business customers without sending a significant chunk of the profits back to the ILECs in the form of Recipricol Compensation.
Then along came the internet, and all of a sudden the traffic flow to CLECs was completely reversed! Now, instead of making a lot of calls, the largest customers were *recieving* a *lot* of calls, and they were lasting longer (Recip. Comp. is billed by the minute). All of a sudden, SBC decided the old system wasn't fair and that it needed to be changed. They removed the old system from their new InterConnection Agreements (ICAs) with CLECs to the best of their regulatory abilities, and eventually mostly succeded in stopping these payments to CLECs. SBC decided the regulation was no longer fair because it was no longer in its best interest! Now, when the situation has swung the back other way with VoIP, they're trying to change the rules again. It's no surprise they'd try, but what's sad about our political and regulatory systems is that, at least in the medium term, it's probably they'll get their way.
As someone who's facinated by Economics and a big fan of fair and open markets, the current situation with the former Bells seems intolerable. The '96 act has failed to create a truely competitive market in telecommunications because it relied too hevily on the Government's ability to come up with good, fair regulations, and the ILECs good behavior in obeying them. IMHO, what needs to happen is new federal legislation forcing divestment of the ILECs last mile infrastructure and tandem (interconnection) switches from their retail sides. The new entity would retain the monopoly on the physical infrastructure, but be highly regulated- prohibited from selling directly to consumers, price controlled, and would be forced to treat all carriers equally. The retail side would have to compete on a level playing field with everyone else. This situation wouldn't be perfect, but it would be better than what we have today. Look what happened with long distance once the market became competitive! Compare rates 10-15 years ago with those of today. I remember paying $0.25/min for a long distance call of less than 100 miles, and today I can buy *unlimited* local and long distance anywhere in the country for $25/mo through Vonage- less than the local line alone from SBC.
The situation we have now seems to be headed back to a private entity extracting monopoly rents for a vital infrastructure, which IMHO is even worse than state control. Even with all the barriers SBC is throwing up, some CLECs are making it work- but things seem risky. CLECs need a stable, fair, regulatory environment in order to make the investments that will, in the long run, benefit all of us. SBC has managed to virtually eliminate Recip Comp, change other significant terms of interconnection, and eliminate line sharing. If the regulators continue to let the ILECs have their way, the result will be changing rules that bankrupt existing CLECs and discourage new market entrants.
I liked the movie as well. While it may have been slightly "camp", at least it had the balls to raise some philosophical questions that probably went over the head of most viewers. That doesn't mean you have to like the movie to be smart, you could have been turned off for other reasons.
I liked the movie because I saw it as unique. Never before had I seen a movie that presented such deep questions in a powerfull and simple way. I came out of the theatre in awe, almost like a "religios experience".
If other things about the movie turned people off, I guess it's their loss. If you can't appreciate at least SOMETHING about this movie, then it either went over your head or you just don't care.
Slashdot Mirror
> How is saying we are going to censor content on our hard drives any different than saying we are going to censor content on our switches?
Because there's generally only one party that controls the packet switches that serve households, whereas there are many different companies providing information services, even if there is some concentration there, too.
If you don't like censorship on Reddit, you can use 4chan instead, or Voat, or etc... In most of the country, you have one choice for high-speed broadband--maybe two if you live close enough for DSL to be competitive with cable modems. Replacing or adding to these competitors is EXTREMELY difficult in most places, because of the way that costs scale when putting wires on poles or in the ground. We put more restrictions on ISPs because they have control of "bottleneck" facilities.
People used to say that being gay was a mental disorder too. There's decent scientific evidence that transsexualism isn't one either. This includes documented cross-sex differences in some brain structures as well as studies looking at identical vs. fraternal twins. (the rate of concordance is WAY higher for identical twins.) Also, consider the fact that the condition has been around for thousands of years with documented history in across different cultures. (E.g., Hijra, two-spirit, etc...)
Sure, trans people probably more often have depression and anxiety, but... if your parents disowned you, your classmates mocked you, and nobody would hire you or associate with you... you'd probably have some mental health problems too. Yes, things are a bit better in most places now, but this is only a VERY recent development.
Title II isn't just something that the Obama administration decided to do arbitrarily. Consider the federal statute defining telecommunications: "The term “telecommunications” means the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received." 47 U.S.C. 153 (50). That's exactly what the Internet does. If it wasn't, TLS/IPSEC/L2tp, etc... lots of stuff wouldn't work. Other packet-switched networks were regulated as Title II telecommunications, e.g., Frame Relay. The fact that the Internet is connectionless and globally addressable doesn't change the fact that it's a telecommunications service, just like other packet-switched networks.
If "network neutrality" like rules hadn't existed with telecommunications networks since the FCC's 1970s-1980s Computer Inquiries, the Internet could have never been commercialized in the first place. You'd still be replying to this comment on a Compuserve-like service run by AT&T.
As many others have commented, more direct democracy is likely to make things worse, not better. The problem is, of course, Rational Ignorance, and the classic solution to that problem is representation. IMHO, the problem is that as the population has grown, the number of people per representative has increased dramatically over the last 200 years. Combined with some structural changes (i.e., fragmentation, competition) in the media, this means that politicians simply can't get elected without $. When money is more important than votes for being elected (because it effectively buys votes through a variety of means...) it's no surprise that politicians cater to those who fund their campaigns. None of this is particularly novel; Lessig has a great presentation on this going around, and a new book, too.
However, when you're talking about using "crowd-sourcing" solutions, IMHO the best way to do this is by using the 'net to enable what I'd call better "political proxies," and that's probably more representation. I'd be a lot more likely to go vote in a primary election if I knew... who to vote for to advance my political views, but collecting this information is a lot of work, especially if I want to avoid the influence of $-influenced information, seek out good sources of information, look at actual voting records, etc... and I want to do this for a reasonably large number of offices and candidates. OTOH, I'd be happy to trust someone I know who holds similar beliefs to do this and just vote their recommendation. And I'd be more willing to do that kind of research if I knew it mattered to more than just myself. This is the role that parties are supposed to fulfill, but the fact that there are only two of them (see: winner-take-all) makes this a rather blunt, ineffective instrument. Plus they don't help for primaries.
TL; DR, more direct democracy will make it worse, I'd rather have more effective, targeted representation instead, even if it just lets me know how to vote in primary and non-partisan elections.
Copyright gives Microsoft a monopoly in Operating Systems the same way it gives Britney Spears a monopoly on music. That is to say- it doesn't. She only has a monopoly only on her own music, and if you prefer to listen to something else, there's no reason you can't do so. Microsoft's monopoly is based on much more than simple copyright law.
If you're interested in the economics behind my argument, you can check out this link. Microsoft's long run average cost (LRAC) curve for Windows is their initial development cost multiplied by the inverse of the quantity demanded. When the capital costs are very high and the marginal costs constant (near zero), you can see how this is a unique cost curve. In most industries, average cost declines only so far before going back up again This alone doesn't make them a natural monopoly, because that depends on the scale of the initial costs relevant the entire market. Beyond this, it starts to get a little more complicated because Microsoft can keep bumping up the development cost and narrowing the market, and then gets into what products can be substitutes, how good they are (as substitutes, not in themselves), whether they're doing this on purpose of if it's just a byproduct of their production (yeah, right), etc...
This is different from government issues monopolies with regulation, like cable franchises- which are government granted monopolies on top of the economics outlined above. An even better example is the post office- even though the industry is large enough to accommodate several carriers, there are still some things that only the post office can do.
I've just finished my undergrad major in econ* and I'd offer just one modification. Microsoft is a "natural" monopoly, in an economically similar way to the old Bell telephone system. The similarities are in combination of large initial capital costs with near-zero marginal cost, and the "network effect", where compatibility issues mean that the value of Windows as a product depends, in an important way, on the number of other people also using Windows. So you can't really blame the Government for giving them the monopoly per se, but you can definitely blame them for letting Microsoft abuse this power. Particularly the way the feds seemed to lose interest once Bush took office.
;)
IMHO, the best way to fix the problem is to force (or strongly encourage) interoperability and standards compliance in some way, to keep them from making changes designed to break competitors' products and make everyone have the newest versions of Microsoft software to communicate with each other. That one thing could make a world of difference.
Another very interesting possibility is the GPL-ing of Java. Not because it's Java specifically, but because it's "middleware" that abstracts away the underlying hardware and OS to a large degree. The "network effect" of compatibility for applications is then tied to a free (libre) platform. Of course I realize there are technical objections to this...
*as if that means much, as there are probably Ph.Ds reading this, but...
Java being released under the GPL might have an even bigger impact in the long term than it appears (from these comments) many people think. It may represent the beginning of a huge leap forward for open source. The following line of reasoning seems at least somewhat plausible...
Of course, the idea's not perfect, especially due to the large number of existing platform-specific applications and the fact that some applications need to be platform specific to run efficiently. Perhaps ahead of time compilation will be used/developed further? Anyway, even if this happens, it's probably going to take a very long time- maybe decades. But if the end result is that people coalesce around a freer and more open platform, and better (often open!) and cheaper (often free!) software comes about as a result, we'll all (well, except for Microsoft, of course) be better off.
ChePibe is right on the money.
WMD proliferation is a huge problem. Let's face it- nuclear weapons weapons were developed over 60 years ago, while a successful nuclear program does require substantial resources, enough information on nuclear weapons design has entered the public domain that many Slashdotters could figure out the basics in under an hour of online research. The more nations the acquire the technology, the more likely it is to be used. Not only will they fall into the hands of less and less rational governments (Read: Iran), but smaller nations, with perhaps less developed command and control systems, more opportunities for theft/loss, and perhaps most importantly, the possibility of covert delpoyment with plausible deniability. All this makes it more and more likely that nuclear weapons will be used, and you'd have to be an idiot to think that DC wouldn't be on the top of the target list for some phychotic asshole trying to start WW3.
There are a lot of highly rated comments about how government officials are selfish for planning for this for themselves and leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. Well, not only are they the primary targets of such an attack, but also you would much rather have the keep functioning should (God forbid) this ever happen than to evacuate, for example, me- a private citizen whom you know virtually nothing about and would be in no position to help in recovering from such a terrible disaster. Yeah, it sucks- but that doesn't make it any less true. If you're looking at the big picture, it's the more compassionate and more rational thing to do.
Another thing is that this is exactly why the invasion of Iraq was such a stupid, brain-dead, bone-headed move. Bush likes to talk about "political capital"- he blew ours (the US's) when he launched a preemptive war when there turned out to be nothing to preempt. Now Iran has built uranium enrichment facilities (the biggest hurdle to nuclear weapons development) and we're left with our credibility in tatters and looking impotent (see current situation in Iraq).
Wanting something a little better than MAD isn't crazy.
Ultimately, I'd agree that "code is design", but that this is an overly simplified view. Looking at "x = y + z" and knowing an addition operation is being performed is one thng, but what do these symbols stand for? Why is the operation being done? How does this fit into the overall function of the software? These questions start to become more difficult and time consuming for a human being to answer without an overall design as a project increases in size and complexity.
For example, I might be able to look at an init script and, sans documentation, quickly understand what's going on to the point that I can understand and modify the script. It's hard to argue that I could use the same process for contributing a patch to say, PostgreSQL. I guess I'm trying to say that the relative efficency of people using different forms of design (either code, or explicit design documentation) is analagous to algorithmic complexity for programs.
When the Bells were originally forced to open their networks to competition by the '96 telcom act, they lobbied for and recieved a concession called Recipricol Compensation. When the ILECs (SBC, et. al.) and newly created CLECs interconnected with each other's networks, each party would pay the other to terminate calls on the other party's network. This was done so that CLECs could not go after the high volume, profitable, business customers without sending a significant chunk of the profits back to the ILECs in the form of Recipricol Compensation.
Then along came the internet, and all of a sudden the traffic flow to CLECs was completely reversed! Now, instead of making a lot of calls, the largest customers were *recieving* a *lot* of calls, and they were lasting longer (Recip. Comp. is billed by the minute). All of a sudden, SBC decided the old system wasn't fair and that it needed to be changed. They removed the old system from their new InterConnection Agreements (ICAs) with CLECs to the best of their regulatory abilities, and eventually mostly succeded in stopping these payments to CLECs. SBC decided the regulation was no longer fair because it was no longer in its best interest! Now, when the situation has swung the back other way with VoIP, they're trying to change the rules again. It's no surprise they'd try, but what's sad about our political and regulatory systems is that, at least in the medium term, it's probably they'll get their way.
As someone who's facinated by Economics and a big fan of fair and open markets, the current situation with the former Bells seems intolerable. The '96 act has failed to create a truely competitive market in telecommunications because it relied too hevily on the Government's ability to come up with good, fair regulations, and the ILECs good behavior in obeying them. IMHO, what needs to happen is new federal legislation forcing divestment of the ILECs last mile infrastructure and tandem (interconnection) switches from their retail sides. The new entity would retain the monopoly on the physical infrastructure, but be highly regulated- prohibited from selling directly to consumers, price controlled, and would be forced to treat all carriers equally. The retail side would have to compete on a level playing field with everyone else. This situation wouldn't be perfect, but it would be better than what we have today. Look what happened with long distance once the market became competitive! Compare rates 10-15 years ago with those of today. I remember paying $0.25/min for a long distance call of less than 100 miles, and today I can buy *unlimited* local and long distance anywhere in the country for $25/mo through Vonage- less than the local line alone from SBC.
The situation we have now seems to be headed back to a private entity extracting monopoly rents for a vital infrastructure, which IMHO is even worse than state control. Even with all the barriers SBC is throwing up, some CLECs are making it work- but things seem risky. CLECs need a stable, fair, regulatory environment in order to make the investments that will, in the long run, benefit all of us. SBC has managed to virtually eliminate Recip Comp, change other significant terms of interconnection, and eliminate line sharing. If the regulators continue to let the ILECs have their way, the result will be changing rules that bankrupt existing CLECs and discourage new market entrants.
I liked the movie as well. While it may have been slightly "camp", at least it had the balls to raise some philosophical questions that probably went over the head of most viewers. That doesn't mean you have to like the movie to be smart, you could have been turned off for other reasons.
I liked the movie because I saw it as unique. Never before had I seen a movie that presented such deep questions in a powerfull and simple way. I came out of the theatre in awe, almost like a "religios experience".
If other things about the movie turned people off, I guess it's their loss. If you can't appreciate at least SOMETHING about this movie, then it either went over your head or you just don't care.