I agree as well. Moreso for them, actually, because back then you didn't have the internet as an alternative. So the license was more important back then.
The difference is that you are apparently welcome to wave your hand and dismiss the fact that this is government censorship. Honestly, what would your reaction be if it happened here in the USA?
More importantly, what would a Venezuelan's reaction be? Because I live in the US, of course I would be upset. My point is merely that people very often get very self-righteous about condemning the actions of other countries, while suspiciously ignoring many of the egregious encroachments on freedom that occur in their own backyard.
And please don't think I'm defending Chavez himself in any ways, but let's remember that Thatcher refused to renew the license of Thames Television. True, their license was lost for capitalist reasons (not being profitable enough), and RCTV was removed for political reasons, but many would argue that those reasons are not really all that different.
And let's be honest about this. In America in 2007, if CNN started taking an active role in the violent removal of Bush (who, while contraversial, was democratically elected), how long do you think the Bush administration would put up with that?
Chavez is authoritarian, heavy-handed and a bit megalomaniacal. But sometimes all of us need to take a good look in the mirror about the state of democracy here before we get all high and mighty about defending democracy elsewhere.
Google should allow people the option to send in an alternate photo. Give people the information on where to stand and what kinds of camera you can use, and then, if approved, pay something like $100 a photo. Maybe have an approval process first for whether the photo is inappropriate or not, and other ways to keep people from scamming the system.
That way, people can regain their privacy, and make a hundred bucks, and Google keeps their reputation, and doesn't pay much more than they would sending someone out to retake the photo.
The funniest part about this video is when he brags about how he swears at the kids and calls them names in English, and because they can't speak the language, they don't know what he's saying.
And the whole time I'm thinking, "You jackass, you think they're not doing the same goddamn thing to you in Pashtun?"
When I read the title, my first thought was of the game, Legend of Mana, where new sections of the map could be unlocked through gameplay, and positioned according to the user. I thought of how this might work in a networked world, where unlocking another user's game map requires designing a game map yourself. The game would be part quest, and part map and character design tools. An infinite map could be created as long as users were creating.
Find yourself a good storyline to explain why certain people can create landscapes, maybe add in a little bit of politics and conflict around these abilities, and throw in a good amount of professionally designed side quests to keep things fresh, and I would think you would have a huge seller on your hands.
And this is the first thing I thought of. Imagine if people sat down and really took the idea "user generated content" into really wild directions... Imagine the possibilities.
So maybe you can see why I was disappointed by what the article was actually talking about.
because there are four basic kinds of human personality with four different life goals.
"There are four kinds of business: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales...and hospitals/manufacturing...and air travel." - Michael Scott
Human is way more complex and nuanced than you're positing. Sorry your attempts at sounding academically informed have failed, but I'm going to have to ask for some sort of reference or series of studies which corroborate your assertion.
But the native population had virtually unlimited land and resources to work with. They also had a very small population as a starting point.
The urban centers that the Iroquois lived in were as large as most major European cities at the time. Population density was very high, almost 200 people per acre. Every place that has a cultural history of direct democracy is able to handle it. There have been consensus meetings of 3000 people in Mexico City's UNAM. The encuentros and assemblias popular in South America will sometimes number in the thousands.
It's hard to imagine, from a western standpoint, and especially a USian standpoint, that people can work together in large groups without a single central authority. But many examples of such exist through human history, and still exist today.
The cultural importance people people put on direct democracy and participation is what makes it possible. Even though most USians seem completely incapable of this, doesn't mean that cultures and perspectives don't change.
Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa are full of examples.
Examples of movements for grassroots democracy are very abundant in places like Latin America, where encuentros, assemblias popular, zapatismo and other movements for direct democracy flourish. And those movements are very greatly movements of the poor. The very poor.
This demand for direct democracy far exceeds anything western liberal Democracies have experience, and most importantly, have gone out of their way to crush or forcedly make obsolete. We had forms of direct democracy, for instance, in the United States, in the form of the Iriquois Confederacy, or the New England town hall meetings. The former was ruthlessly crushed, the latter slowly pushed into obscurity.
You may have this idea that democracy begins and ends with congressman and senators, but it has much, much greater potential than that.
The poor have never contributed anything to any society, and they never will.
This is a textbook example of classism, you can't deny that. You're robbing a whole group of people of not only their historical impact, but also robbing them of their agency. Poor people are still human beings, and despite their percieved irrationality (which rich people, taken as a group, can also be viewed as violently irrational as well), are agents in world history, effecting both positive and negative change. Just like every other economic, racial, social, and cultural group.
To say this statement is, simply put, broadly classist and patently absurd.
And of course the Arabs and Persians and Jews all get off scott-free because they control the media... Of course the gay characters are _never_ stereotypes... And the "sex workers" of the world are always portrayed in the most positive and even-handed light possible... And the "spics" and "rice burners" were perfectly valid and even-handed portrayals of racial norms as well...
Ultimately a system which is based uses open standards for interoperability, while balancing ease of use for the user, will win out over all of them.
With social networking, we're in the early days, much like when Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve all had competing services which refused to cooperate. And in the end, Email won out over all of them.
Most Mexicans aren't criminals, but why not filter out the ones that are before they come in? If I were a criminal, I would either be incarcerated or I would have a felony on my record, which restricts many of my freedoms. If a Mexican criminal comes here, we have no record of their crimes. Immigration to the US is a privilege, and if you're a criminal, we can reject you.
This idea that Mexican criminals are fleeing to the U.S. has never made sense to me. Why would anybody trying to avoid being caught come to a country that has one of the largest law enforcement apparatuses in the world? If you wanted to lay low, honestly, would you come to the U.S. or run off to someplace like Brazil or Guatemala? Or hell, just quietly hide out in the rural parts of Mexico?
If you were a felon on the run from the law, would the U.S. really be your first destination?
PHP4? That's interesting. I've been developing under PHP4, but I've also been testing it out on a friends server running php5, and haven't had any trouble. I'll look into it.
Oh, okay, I see now. Yeah, those are warnings that I haven't been able to work out yet. The quick fix is to go to code/include/classes/appleseed.php and set error_reporting to E_ERROR (around line 703).
Actually, it has not long been claimed by advertisers. Actually, if you look closely, the site expired yesterday (Jan 02, 2007). I've been trying to contact my hosting company in order to renew the domain, but I've been having problems getting in touch with them. Hopefully the site will be available again within the next day or two.
Do you see Appleseed as having any future overlap, integration with or extension of the Jabber protocol?
Absolutely. I hope to eventually have your appleseed address (which looks just like an email address) work as a Jabber address as well, for those appleseed nodes which opt to serve as jabber servers as well. Possibly even try and make the appleseed protocol more of an extension of the jabber protocol?
I also hope to have a pop-in window for jabber chat, just like Gmail uses.
This is definitely farther down the line, but I'd like to integrate with Jabber as much as possible.
With Appleseed, you can set up a node using an $8 a month shared hosting account, and handle probably around 25-50 users comfortably. Or spend some more and make a dedicated site for, say, comic book geeks or cat enthusiasts, and spend a couple hundred bucks a month for a colocated server so you can get a thousand some users. Throw some google ads up on the site, and a donation button, and you'll easily make up your hosting costs if you've got loyal, active users.
See, that's the beauty of distributing it. It's not just technical load sharing, it's social load sharing.
The fact is that these proprietary, corporate controlled walled gardens are a dead end. There is no reason why 50 million users should be on one site. In fact, it creates more problems keeping them walled in than it is to create a free system that interconnects.
I'm sorry, but as technology progresses, we'll all realize that the profit and marketshare motive has been holding progress back.
There's no reason that social networking couldn't have been distributed from the get-go. Which means that it's an inevitable evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, but it was still wrong in my mind.
I agree as well. Moreso for them, actually, because back then you didn't have the internet as an alternative. So the license was more important back then.
The difference is that you are apparently welcome to wave your hand and dismiss the fact that this is government censorship. Honestly, what would your reaction be if it happened here in the USA?
More importantly, what would a Venezuelan's reaction be? Because I live in the US, of course I would be upset. My point is merely that people very often get very self-righteous about condemning the actions of other countries, while suspiciously ignoring many of the egregious encroachments on freedom that occur in their own backyard.
The Bush Administration wouldn't get away with shutting down CNN. The best they could do is stop cooperating and making life hard for CNN
If it were, say, NBC, the FCC could easily revoke it's license.
but not shut it down because we here in America still love our freedom.
This may be still true, but each year it seems less so.
"Communism is man's exploitation of man. Capitalism is just the opposite."
And please don't think I'm defending Chavez himself in any ways, but let's remember that Thatcher refused to renew the license of Thames Television. True, their license was lost for capitalist reasons (not being profitable enough), and RCTV was removed for political reasons, but many would argue that those reasons are not really all that different.
And let's be honest about this. In America in 2007, if CNN started taking an active role in the violent removal of Bush (who, while contraversial, was democratically elected), how long do you think the Bush administration would put up with that?
Chavez is authoritarian, heavy-handed and a bit megalomaniacal. But sometimes all of us need to take a good look in the mirror about the state of democracy here before we get all high and mighty about defending democracy elsewhere.
Google should allow people the option to send in an alternate photo. Give people the information on where to stand and what kinds of camera you can use, and then, if approved, pay something like $100 a photo. Maybe have an approval process first for whether the photo is inappropriate or not, and other ways to keep people from scamming the system.
That way, people can regain their privacy, and make a hundred bucks, and Google keeps their reputation, and doesn't pay much more than they would sending someone out to retake the photo.
The funniest part about this video is when he brags about how he swears at the kids and calls them names in English, and because they can't speak the language, they don't know what he's saying.
And the whole time I'm thinking, "You jackass, you think they're not doing the same goddamn thing to you in Pashtun?"
When I read the title, my first thought was of the game, Legend of Mana, where new sections of the map could be unlocked through gameplay, and positioned according to the user. I thought of how this might work in a networked world, where unlocking another user's game map requires designing a game map yourself. The game would be part quest, and part map and character design tools. An infinite map could be created as long as users were creating.
Find yourself a good storyline to explain why certain people can create landscapes, maybe add in a little bit of politics and conflict around these abilities, and throw in a good amount of professionally designed side quests to keep things fresh, and I would think you would have a huge seller on your hands.
And this is the first thing I thought of. Imagine if people sat down and really took the idea "user generated content" into really wild directions... Imagine the possibilities.
So maybe you can see why I was disappointed by what the article was actually talking about.
because there are four basic kinds of human personality with four different life goals.
"There are four kinds of business: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales...and hospitals/manufacturing...and air travel." - Michael Scott
Human is way more complex and nuanced than you're positing. Sorry your attempts at sounding academically informed have failed, but I'm going to have to ask for some sort of reference or series of studies which corroborate your assertion.
But the native population had virtually unlimited land and resources to work with. They also had a very small population as a starting point.
The urban centers that the Iroquois lived in were as large as most major European cities at the time. Population density was very high, almost 200 people per acre. Every place that has a cultural history of direct democracy is able to handle it. There have been consensus meetings of 3000 people in Mexico City's UNAM. The encuentros and assemblias popular in South America will sometimes number in the thousands.
It's hard to imagine, from a western standpoint, and especially a USian standpoint, that people can work together in large groups without a single central authority. But many examples of such exist through human history, and still exist today.
The cultural importance people people put on direct democracy and participation is what makes it possible. Even though most USians seem completely incapable of this, doesn't mean that cultures and perspectives don't change.
One can assume that all parties will deal rationally with each other, but that would fly in the face of thousands of years of human history.
Actually, no, thousands of years of human history fly in the face of your supposition that people aren't capable of that.
For instance, the Iroquois Confederation
Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa are full of examples.
Examples of movements for grassroots democracy are very abundant in places like Latin America, where encuentros, assemblias popular, zapatismo and other movements for direct democracy flourish. And those movements are very greatly movements of the poor. The very poor.
This demand for direct democracy far exceeds anything western liberal Democracies have experience, and most importantly, have gone out of their way to crush or forcedly make obsolete. We had forms of direct democracy, for instance, in the United States, in the form of the Iriquois Confederacy, or the New England town hall meetings. The former was ruthlessly crushed, the latter slowly pushed into obscurity.
You may have this idea that democracy begins and ends with congressman and senators, but it has much, much greater potential than that.
P.S., fascism in the first world was almost uniformly a movement of the middle class and the elite.
The poor have never contributed anything to any society, and they never will.
This is a textbook example of classism, you can't deny that. You're robbing a whole group of people of not only their historical impact, but also robbing them of their agency. Poor people are still human beings, and despite their percieved irrationality (which rich people, taken as a group, can also be viewed as violently irrational as well), are agents in world history, effecting both positive and negative change. Just like every other economic, racial, social, and cultural group.
To say this statement is, simply put, broadly classist and patently absurd.
Sweden
You make the mistake of thinking that there is only political democracy, but ignore the push for economic democracy.
Other than that, your classism is blinding.
A decentralized social network would be nifty, but OpenID definitely isn't one.
I'm working on it... and the plan is to use OpenID for authentication.
And of course the Arabs and Persians and Jews all get off scott-free because they control the media... Of course the gay characters are _never_ stereotypes... And the "sex workers" of the world are always portrayed in the most positive and even-handed light possible... And the "spics" and "rice burners" were perfectly valid and even-handed portrayals of racial norms as well...
You're right, two wrongs do make a right!
Amazing!
Ultimately a system which is based uses open standards for interoperability, while balancing ease of use for the user, will win out over all of them.
With social networking, we're in the early days, much like when Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve all had competing services which refused to cooperate. And in the end, Email won out over all of them.
Most Mexicans aren't criminals, but why not filter out the ones that are before they come in? If I were a criminal, I would either be incarcerated or I would have a felony on my record, which restricts many of my freedoms. If a Mexican criminal comes here, we have no record of their crimes. Immigration to the US is a privilege, and if you're a criminal, we can reject you.
This idea that Mexican criminals are fleeing to the U.S. has never made sense to me. Why would anybody trying to avoid being caught come to a country that has one of the largest law enforcement apparatuses in the world? If you wanted to lay low, honestly, would you come to the U.S. or run off to someplace like Brazil or Guatemala? Or hell, just quietly hide out in the rural parts of Mexico?
If you were a felon on the run from the law, would the U.S. really be your first destination?
PHP4? That's interesting. I've been developing under PHP4, but I've also been testing it out on a friends server running php5, and haven't had any trouble. I'll look into it.
Oh, okay, I see now. Yeah, those are warnings that I haven't been able to work out yet. The quick fix is to go to code/include/classes/appleseed.php and set error_reporting to E_ERROR (around line 703).
That's an error that I just haven't been able to track down, and it seems to be a problem with Sourceforge's hosting.
Actually, it has not long been claimed by advertisers. Actually, if you look closely, the site expired yesterday (Jan 02, 2007). I've been trying to contact my hosting company in order to renew the domain, but I've been having problems getting in touch with them. Hopefully the site will be available again within the next day or two.
Do you see Appleseed as having any future overlap, integration with or extension of the Jabber protocol?
Absolutely. I hope to eventually have your appleseed address (which looks just like an email address) work as a Jabber address as well, for those appleseed nodes which opt to serve as jabber servers as well. Possibly even try and make the appleseed protocol more of an extension of the jabber protocol?
I also hope to have a pop-in window for jabber chat, just like Gmail uses.
This is definitely farther down the line, but I'd like to integrate with Jabber as much as possible.
*The profit and marketshare you just poo-pooed.
With Appleseed, you can set up a node using an $8 a month shared hosting account, and handle probably around 25-50 users comfortably. Or spend some more and make a dedicated site for, say, comic book geeks or cat enthusiasts, and spend a couple hundred bucks a month for a colocated server so you can get a thousand some users. Throw some google ads up on the site, and a donation button, and you'll easily make up your hosting costs if you've got loyal, active users.
See, that's the beauty of distributing it. It's not just technical load sharing, it's social load sharing.
The fact is that these proprietary, corporate controlled walled gardens are a dead end. There is no reason why 50 million users should be on one site. In fact, it creates more problems keeping them walled in than it is to create a free system that interconnects.
I'm sorry, but as technology progresses, we'll all realize that the profit and marketshare motive has been holding progress back.
There's no reason that social networking couldn't have been distributed from the get-go. Which means that it's an inevitable evolution.
Social networks should soon start seeing interoperability like email.
I've been working on an open source software that uses a distributed protocol. It's called Appleseed