To someone accustomed to California, this place still seems like paradise. To someone who has lived here for 30+ years, it seems like an overdeveloped, overcrowded, overmoneyed, shadow of its former self. A victim of its own success.
I should note that I don't actually live in Austin proper, I live in a small town half an hour away. It's a real town, not just a bedroom community to Austin, with its own downtown and its own soul. So many of my favorable impressions are drawn from life in this small town.
That said, I do really like Austin itself. I suppose it's inevitable that I'd compare it to the SFBay area where I lived for decades, though I consider that comparison no less valid than that of a longtime resident. Austin may feel big compared to its former self, but in terms of congestion and price pressure it is not even in the same category as the SFBay... and believe me that's a good thing. There's always tons of parking downtown, RIGHT downtown, whereas on my recent Bay visit I was subjected to a lunch where our driver spent ten minutes angling for a parking spot within two blocks of our destination in a somewhat off-the-beaten-path mid-peninsula city... ultimately failing and forcing us to walk three blocks. IMO Austin's music scene is better than that of the Bay, could be partly because I'm a guitar person, but music really seems to be in the soul of this town; I walk into an instrument store and the guitar section is crawling with people picking at the guitars, it's exciting. Fundamentally, Austin will never run out of expansion room, it's surrounded by empty desert in every direction; the bay area by contrast expanded as much as it could horizontally years ago, to the edges of the bay, and now has nowhere to go but up and pricier.
I definitely hear you about Austin seeming different and a shadow of its former self. Not because I share that view of Austin, but because I believe that that change of perspective occurs just about anywhere that becomes popular. The bay area went from stressful-yet-tolerable to just-plain-crazy as I lived there. Before that I grew up in old (pre-tourism) Santa Fe, and it is probably very difficult for all the tourists who now rave about it to imagine how dissimilar I consider it to it's former "soul". It happens. I think the solution is to enjoy a place while it has something to offer you, and to move on to new good times when the changes gather more steam than you like.
Let's see if the Linux community can match [B ill Gates'] generosity.
Ok. Let's see, he's giving 2% of his net worth to vaccinate kids, so to match that we'd need The Linux Community to donate 2% of THEIR, uh, revenues. What's $0 x 0.02?
From another angle: he's keeping only the first $40 billion of his wealth for himself. So to match this, we'll need each member of the linux community to likewise keep only $40 billion per person, and then selflessly donate the rest. I know that only $40B per person can be a bitter pill to swallow, but when people like Bill lead the way then it's time to show that we really believe in the ideals we talk about. If you personally feel that you need more than forty thousand mansions, then we in the linux community do not want you here.
The good: it has a reasonable tech job market, easy winters, good housing prices, one of the best live music scenes in the world, tons of open space, a vibrant university student population, and a lot of open-minded fun people.
The reasons to be cautious: summers are toasty, and Austin is a bit of an enclave. By enclave, I mean Austin is about the only place in Texas that I think would be palatable to a Californian. Everywhere else is likely to strike Cal liberals as too conservative, and as for Cal conservatives (warning: blatant speculation follows) the conservatives in Texas tend to be that way because they're uneducated, whereas Cal conservatives tend to be that way because they're wealthy.
Overall I've found it to be a workable mix for me. I should mention that my views are heavily influenced by how quickly I'm paying off debt here; debt weighed on my mind constantly before coming here.
I've had the good luck to find excellent sushi in this town. That helps very much.
My ideal town would have the intellectualism of the Boston area, the tech job market of The Valley circa 1996, the housing prices of Austin, the weather of mid-coastal California, and the terrain of Sonoma.
I can't just pick up and move somewhere and hope I'll find work. And the labor market is ovesupplied everywhere, so nobody will even look at a nonlocal resume.
I experienced the same desire to leave the Silicon Valley coupled with wondering how to do it. I sorta started wanting to leave back in '99... the bust hadn't set in, and paychecks were huge, but I was freaked out by the crash I knew was coming. Then I had a kid, and suddenly I was going deeper into debt every month. Couldn't possibly afford to have another kid there, couldn't even really afford the one I had. No chance of buying a house I wanted. We were one missed paycheck away from not knowing what the hell would happen to us, a scary prospect when working in high tech. Considered moving to the east coast near family, but didn't get a single nibble on the resume as the bust was in full bloom.
My chance to leave came in an unexpected way. The small company I worked for was acquired by a huge company, and this huge company had a fairly liberal work-from-home policy. I inquired and was told I could work from anywhere I cared to move. Coincidentally enough, my wife's company was simultaneously acquired by a huge company, also with a superb work-from-home policy. We knew we had to take the opportunity, and burned rubber moving to a cheaper state. One with a reasonable job market, and WAY better housing prices and cost of living prices.
It's been a dream come true. The culture here is much more focused on family. We've had our second kid. We're paying off our debt at a radical clip. We live in a house so nice that we couldn't have even afforded to rent one like it in The Valley. We can now afford to have either one of us lose our jobs for over a year and we'd be fine. And the likelihood is that we'd eventually find worthy replacements for our jobs.
I feel that we got very lucky, but I do think that in our experience lies the potential seed of a way out for someone like yourself: you could seek work at one of these huge companies (IBM, Oracle, HP, etc) with a particular eye open for prospectively working from home, either right away or perhaps after some amount of time on a project. It may take some time, but the good thing about such an approach is that there's no "cliff" of risk - unlike moving somewhere and hoping you pick up a job right away.
Yeah, cuz they had a gun pointed to their head when they signed those contracts, right?
I dunno... did you have a gun at your head when you decided it was in your best interests to drive a car? To get a telephone? To wear more than bikini briefs to a job interview? It's fun and easy to try to make people out to be hypocrites by pointing out things they did that they weren't technically required to do, but not everything worthwhile is fun or easy.
Explain to me... why a clever person who comes up with a novel algorithm... shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly
I'd first say that abuses of patents are costing society far more than they are worth. The existing system is badly broken. When a government sets policy, the rule should be to maximize benefits for the governed; that is not happening. True, a few lawsuit-happy people are getting wealthy, and true, a few mega-corporations are enjoying their use of patent cross-licensing ("I won't sue you if you don't sue me") to bar the entry of competition, but the wealth produced there is concentrated in a tiny (and may I say non-deserving) segment. When economies suffer from an skewed distribution of supply and demand, very bad things have been known to happen... for everybody.
I'd also say that even if patents were functioning to the spirit of the original intent (i.e. only non-obvious patents granted, and - I'd argue in the world of software - a MUCH shorter span than 17 years) I'd still have a problem with them. I agree that it's in society's interest to stimulate innovation by rewarding those who innovate... but I disagree that possessing a patent should be like printing money. Reward should be commensurate with effort. If a person works unpaid for five years to produce Wonderful Algorithm X, I'd want the patent to grant them the ability to get ahead by five years of nominal salary plus some standard reward factor (perhaps another five years nominal salary) at which point the patent would expire and the inventor would have to compete on market merits. This gets complicated because of the need to account for how much unpaid time a person has put into an invention, though I suspect not impossible. Pointedly, my compensation formula does not include "degree of genius" that went into the effort, other than the (hypothetically well-applied) standard of "non-obvious". And most importantly, patents should not be a license to print money; there should be reward, but it should not be unmetered.
When used in this context, "intangible" doesn't mean "non-existent"... it means "hard to quantify". The difficulty of quantifying the benefit of a proposal should is not per se an argument against enacting the proposal.
For example, almost any investment in infrastructure has "intangible" benefits. When a government considers whether to build new roads to stimulate economic development of an area, it is very hard to pin down precisely what benefits will be derived in terms of commerce, consumption, quality of life, opportunity cost, etc... yet these kinds of decisions are made all the time, and for good reason: a persistent lack of infrastructural investment correlates strongly with diminished outcomes over the long term.
"By 2050, our aim is to beat the winners of football's World Cup and we are very confident that we will be able to do that," said Shu Ishiguro, who heads Robot Laboratory in Osaka. "When we have accomplished that, we will have a society in which humans and artificial intelligence are completely in harmony."
WTF?? Yeah right. I don't know why we humans fight wars when all vestiges of dis-harmony could be eliminated by one team beating the other in soccer/football.
Because portable computers wear out so quickly, I've been trying to come up with a realistic system that I could carry from place to place, comprised of parts that are cheaper than a portable. I'm willing to make the compromise of having to plug in to standard AC. Given that, the mac mini seems like a nicely sized cpu/disk combo at a price I'd be willing to pay. I can use a foldable portable keyboard, no problem. Now the part I haven't been able to figure out: what screen could I use? Small screen is perfectly fine. Sometimes I imagine using some pda screen, like a zaurus running vnc logged in over wireless, but I feel it should be possible to undercut the price/size performance of a zaurus when all I need is a screen itself. Anyone know of cheap, small screens that a person can buy a la carte?
I have a friend who lives in a Texas neighborhood in Bush country. He can see several wireless networks from his house alone, so there's a fairly high usage ratio there. He said that the few pro-Kerry signs that people put out before the elections were usually stolen within 24 hours... but then somone put up a wireless network called "GeorgeBushSucksDonkeyDick". People have sorta scratched their heads and tried to figure out who has put it up, but nobody there is technical enough to propose any methodical detection approaches (political Darwinism, anyone?).
The network continues to be up, well exceeding the average 24-hour lifespan of the yard signs.
There's an easy-to-use wrapper for bit torrent available here. It allows grandma to simply click once on a link and download the torrent... even if she didn't have bit torrent installed.
While it might be a short leap for the same people to start calling for the criminalization of copyright infringement in the US, that's not what we're talking about here.
But I gotta say, I sure am tired of being reasonable when corporations are consistently not providing the same courtesy in my favor. The reason so many people are ready to believe it's in this country is because it's a frighteningly short hop away from where we actually are in our corporate-owned hell. If misinterpreting this article foments some pushback against the status quo here, I think I can live with that.
A 3 strike misdemeanor resulting in life? I don't remember ever hearing of disturbing the peace being a felony ANYWHERE in the US nor do I think any state has a three strikes misdemeanor law and definitely not one that results in life in prison.
Without disagreeing on your (implied) assertion that it's false: given that meanwhile we're talking about the possibility of people going away for long times for "IP" infractions, I sure wouldn't be surprised by people going to jail for, well, just about anything, cussing included.
It's good news for Apple as far as PR is concerned.
I disagree. I acknowledge that Apple is operating within the law and that the guy who shared the release was not. But this incident nevertheless serves to increase my distaste with for-profit information scarcity. I worked at Apple for many years in the early nineties and absolutely loved it, but for me the shine of the company has been gone for a while. Life with Apple was beautiful while they were changing the world. Now "changing the world" has given way to the same old money-grubbing penny-pinching corporate game played by everyone else. But I still feel good about linux... and the option of linux, coupled with articles like this one, are why I haven't paid for a mac in five years.
In the Kuro5hin article, Sanger makes the point that Wikipedia is deemed unreliable, and says that this is because there is too much tolerance of trolls and too little esteem for expertise. Slashdot and its [meta]moderator system constitute a distributed way of dealing with such problems, and thus makes for an interesting comparison. Slashdot would seem to have a different - and maybe easier - mission, since slashdot posts are largely opinions and are measured by a different standard (palatability, constructiveness) than encyclopedia entries (factuality). But even though many people acknowledge that there are true statements ("there was a French revolution") and false statements ("water is made of ammonia and iodine"), a lack of time and personal expertise prevents most people from being able to verify facts for themselves.
And so facts, like opinions, largely become either trusted or untrusted, rather than verified. Wikipedia should implement a ratings system somewhat like that of slashdot, with these features:
Everyone can rate any entry at any time, rather than by dint of being granted mod points
More than one entry can exist for a given topic in Wikipedia, potentially conflicting directly with other entries on the same subject
In addition to being able to rate entries, everyone can rate everyone else in terms of how much a given person trusts another person
The above leads to a situation where each person viewing wikipedia can mark various entries as trusted or not, and various people as trustworthy or not, and get a filtered view of wikipedia (or at least a per-entry score) individually tailored to the trust instincts of the individual viewer.
For an example of a trust metric, check out Advogato.
I do not mean to say that there is no such thing as objective truth or reality, there indeed is such a thing. But geographical distance, time passed, lack of measuring equipment, and other factors mean that in a very practical and real sense, "knowing" truth in many cases is reduced to a matter of trust and intuition. There is such a thing as expertise, but qualifying expertise is, in the end, a matter of trust.
Debating this point is worthwhile, because it can be difficult to grasp and should not be accepted lightly. But neither should we go around in circles never acknowledging this point or moving past it. In the end, filtering reality through a sytem of trust, tailored to the individual, is something that should be reflected in entities such as wikipedia.
The author comments that tsunami warnings may not help much, as people often flock to the coastline to see the giant waves.
Define 'help'. Reducing the total bodycount? Maybe the net effect of warnings would not budge this statistic. Increasing the Darwinian fairness by letting smart people out of harm's way while letting people with smaller frontal lobes take their place by jockeying for a front seat? I call that helpful.
It appears that due to weather and other problems that flights began to be cancelled on Thursday and the backlog choked the system. 1,100 flights have been cancelled so far, including all flights through 12/26. Does anyone know what platform their system was based on? What kind of system just totally crashes?
Sounds like Diebold may have been contracted for the job.
That does sound great, and I'll be setting up an account shortly... thanks for the info! A question: wouldn't it be easy for the businesses to program their systems to always change the N (the middle number) to something much higher? Does SpamGourmet allow one to specify a meta-max to prevent such things, or allow one to axe an address spuriously inflated (or even one created blind)?
So since George W. Bush was the number one public figure search, and John Kerry was third, behind Janet Jackson, can we assume that if Janet Jackson had run for president, she would have had a better chance of winning than John Kerry?
Either that, or that John Kerry would have had a better chance of winning if he'd exposed a nipple on national television.
I'm a big fan of Linus, but I quibble with this statement of his:
To invent something totally new and different just because you want to do something new and different is in my opinion, the height of stupidity and hubris.
There is doubtless some context in which this statement makes perfect sense, but at least in this article it comes not long after he quotes Newton's timeless "shoulders of giants" theme and hence I take his statement above as potentially intended to be similarly non-reliant on context. If so, I guess I'll say it's sad that Linus' engineering talent obstructs his appreciation of what leads to beautiful and interesting art, and for that matter science. Linus is doing wonderfully on the applied side of things, but his position amounts to a criticism of innovation; he's fine with efficiency and correctness, but reasons for innovation would seem to escape him.
It's hard to see how categories like "TV Shows" (to pick a category from the top of the list) are intended to be used other than for copyright infringing purposes.
This is a good point. I agree that the "TV shows" category does deserve to be examined with regard to how the suprnova admins intend the site to be used.
To play admin's advocate for a moment, here's a line of thought I think also deserves consideration. Suppose I start a website with the mission of helping people overcome data distribution problems... essentially a copyright-agnostic mission. I then notice that the kind of material that people post falls into various categories e.g. "movies", and "applications". So I write scripts that present these categories to site visitors so that they don't have to sort through movies if they're looking for applications. Am I *obligated* to try to cull out copyrighted material? If so, then the defense of suprnova can go no further. But if the answer is not so obvious that one must look further for supporting evidence of intent (which is essentially the premise of our discussion at this point in the thread) then the next question is: am I obligated to avoid creating categories that have higher correlations with copyright (e.g. "TV shows") than those that do not (e.g. "14th century literature")? Even if such categories help visitors sort through material? What if I use copyright itself as the categorizer, and do a best-effort attempt to sort things into two categories: "probably copyrighted material" and "probably not copyrighted material"... it may even be my intent with such categories to help copyright-abiding downloaders avoid infringement.
I'm not necessarily saying this is the mindset of the suprnova admins. What I'm saying is that there is a difference between "intent to promote copyright infringement" and "choosing not to censure, even when material is copyrighted"... and that in the latter case, some copyright-correlated categories do have functional value.
It would be pretty difficult for the [suprnova] administrators to claim [they don't know about the infringing uses of their site], or to say "we can't control what our users do".
Agreed. I point out that the above statement is different from saying that the suprnova admins intended (or intend) the service to be used specifically for distributing copyrighted materials. Unless they have made a statement clarifying their intent, we don't know. Suppose someone puts up a site with the (truly intended) mission statement that they want to "facilitate the exchange of information, helping people get around the hurdles previously posed by bandwidth constraints and advertising costs"... it is still possible for such a site to consist primarily of copyright-infringing posts by its users. It is dangerous to equate "not preventing copyright infringement" with "intent to support copyright infringement"... confusing the two would be akin to confusing "not in favor of the patriot act" with "not against terrorism".
Slashdot Mirror
I should note that I don't actually live in Austin proper, I live in a small town half an hour away. It's a real town, not just a bedroom community to Austin, with its own downtown and its own soul. So many of my favorable impressions are drawn from life in this small town.
That said, I do really like Austin itself. I suppose it's inevitable that I'd compare it to the SFBay area where I lived for decades, though I consider that comparison no less valid than that of a longtime resident. Austin may feel big compared to its former self, but in terms of congestion and price pressure it is not even in the same category as the SFBay... and believe me that's a good thing. There's always tons of parking downtown, RIGHT downtown, whereas on my recent Bay visit I was subjected to a lunch where our driver spent ten minutes angling for a parking spot within two blocks of our destination in a somewhat off-the-beaten-path mid-peninsula city... ultimately failing and forcing us to walk three blocks. IMO Austin's music scene is better than that of the Bay, could be partly because I'm a guitar person, but music really seems to be in the soul of this town; I walk into an instrument store and the guitar section is crawling with people picking at the guitars, it's exciting. Fundamentally, Austin will never run out of expansion room, it's surrounded by empty desert in every direction; the bay area by contrast expanded as much as it could horizontally years ago, to the edges of the bay, and now has nowhere to go but up and pricier.
I definitely hear you about Austin seeming different and a shadow of its former self. Not because I share that view of Austin, but because I believe that that change of perspective occurs just about anywhere that becomes popular. The bay area went from stressful-yet-tolerable to just-plain-crazy as I lived there. Before that I grew up in old (pre-tourism) Santa Fe, and it is probably very difficult for all the tourists who now rave about it to imagine how dissimilar I consider it to it's former "soul". It happens. I think the solution is to enjoy a place while it has something to offer you, and to move on to new good times when the changes gather more steam than you like.
Ok. Let's see, he's giving 2% of his net worth to vaccinate kids, so to match that we'd need The Linux Community to donate 2% of THEIR, uh, revenues. What's $0 x 0.02?
From another angle: he's keeping only the first $40 billion of his wealth for himself. So to match this, we'll need each member of the linux community to likewise keep only $40 billion per person, and then selflessly donate the rest. I know that only $40B per person can be a bitter pill to swallow, but when people like Bill lead the way then it's time to show that we really believe in the ideals we talk about. If you personally feel that you need more than forty thousand mansions, then we in the linux community do not want you here.
I chose Austin.
The good: it has a reasonable tech job market, easy winters, good housing prices, one of the best live music scenes in the world, tons of open space, a vibrant university student population, and a lot of open-minded fun people.
The reasons to be cautious: summers are toasty, and Austin is a bit of an enclave. By enclave, I mean Austin is about the only place in Texas that I think would be palatable to a Californian. Everywhere else is likely to strike Cal liberals as too conservative, and as for Cal conservatives (warning: blatant speculation follows) the conservatives in Texas tend to be that way because they're uneducated, whereas Cal conservatives tend to be that way because they're wealthy.
Overall I've found it to be a workable mix for me. I should mention that my views are heavily influenced by how quickly I'm paying off debt here; debt weighed on my mind constantly before coming here.
I've had the good luck to find excellent sushi in this town. That helps very much.
My ideal town would have the intellectualism of the Boston area, the tech job market of The Valley circa 1996, the housing prices of Austin, the weather of mid-coastal California, and the terrain of Sonoma.
I experienced the same desire to leave the Silicon Valley coupled with wondering how to do it. I sorta started wanting to leave back in '99... the bust hadn't set in, and paychecks were huge, but I was freaked out by the crash I knew was coming. Then I had a kid, and suddenly I was going deeper into debt every month. Couldn't possibly afford to have another kid there, couldn't even really afford the one I had. No chance of buying a house I wanted. We were one missed paycheck away from not knowing what the hell would happen to us, a scary prospect when working in high tech. Considered moving to the east coast near family, but didn't get a single nibble on the resume as the bust was in full bloom.
My chance to leave came in an unexpected way. The small company I worked for was acquired by a huge company, and this huge company had a fairly liberal work-from-home policy. I inquired and was told I could work from anywhere I cared to move. Coincidentally enough, my wife's company was simultaneously acquired by a huge company, also with a superb work-from-home policy. We knew we had to take the opportunity, and burned rubber moving to a cheaper state. One with a reasonable job market, and WAY better housing prices and cost of living prices.
It's been a dream come true. The culture here is much more focused on family. We've had our second kid. We're paying off our debt at a radical clip. We live in a house so nice that we couldn't have even afforded to rent one like it in The Valley. We can now afford to have either one of us lose our jobs for over a year and we'd be fine. And the likelihood is that we'd eventually find worthy replacements for our jobs.
I feel that we got very lucky, but I do think that in our experience lies the potential seed of a way out for someone like yourself: you could seek work at one of these huge companies (IBM, Oracle, HP, etc) with a particular eye open for prospectively working from home, either right away or perhaps after some amount of time on a project. It may take some time, but the good thing about such an approach is that there's no "cliff" of risk - unlike moving somewhere and hoping you pick up a job right away.
Best of luck.
I dunno... did you have a gun at your head when you decided it was in your best interests to drive a car? To get a telephone? To wear more than bikini briefs to a job interview? It's fun and easy to try to make people out to be hypocrites by pointing out things they did that they weren't technically required to do, but not everything worthwhile is fun or easy.
I'd first say that abuses of patents are costing society far more than they are worth. The existing system is badly broken. When a government sets policy, the rule should be to maximize benefits for the governed; that is not happening. True, a few lawsuit-happy people are getting wealthy, and true, a few mega-corporations are enjoying their use of patent cross-licensing ("I won't sue you if you don't sue me") to bar the entry of competition, but the wealth produced there is concentrated in a tiny (and may I say non-deserving) segment. When economies suffer from an skewed distribution of supply and demand, very bad things have been known to happen... for everybody.
I'd also say that even if patents were functioning to the spirit of the original intent (i.e. only non-obvious patents granted, and - I'd argue in the world of software - a MUCH shorter span than 17 years) I'd still have a problem with them. I agree that it's in society's interest to stimulate innovation by rewarding those who innovate... but I disagree that possessing a patent should be like printing money. Reward should be commensurate with effort. If a person works unpaid for five years to produce Wonderful Algorithm X, I'd want the patent to grant them the ability to get ahead by five years of nominal salary plus some standard reward factor (perhaps another five years nominal salary) at which point the patent would expire and the inventor would have to compete on market merits. This gets complicated because of the need to account for how much unpaid time a person has put into an invention, though I suspect not impossible. Pointedly, my compensation formula does not include "degree of genius" that went into the effort, other than the (hypothetically well-applied) standard of "non-obvious". And most importantly, patents should not be a license to print money; there should be reward, but it should not be unmetered.
When used in this context, "intangible" doesn't mean "non-existent"... it means "hard to quantify". The difficulty of quantifying the benefit of a proposal should is not per se an argument against enacting the proposal.
For example, almost any investment in infrastructure has "intangible" benefits. When a government considers whether to build new roads to stimulate economic development of an area, it is very hard to pin down precisely what benefits will be derived in terms of commerce, consumption, quality of life, opportunity cost, etc... yet these kinds of decisions are made all the time, and for good reason: a persistent lack of infrastructural investment correlates strongly with diminished outcomes over the long term.
WTF?? Yeah right. I don't know why we humans fight wars when all vestiges of dis-harmony could be eliminated by one team beating the other in soccer/football.
Because portable computers wear out so quickly, I've been trying to come up with a realistic system that I could carry from place to place, comprised of parts that are cheaper than a portable. I'm willing to make the compromise of having to plug in to standard AC. Given that, the mac mini seems like a nicely sized cpu/disk combo at a price I'd be willing to pay. I can use a foldable portable keyboard, no problem. Now the part I haven't been able to figure out: what screen could I use? Small screen is perfectly fine. Sometimes I imagine using some pda screen, like a zaurus running vnc logged in over wireless, but I feel it should be possible to undercut the price/size performance of a zaurus when all I need is a screen itself. Anyone know of cheap, small screens that a person can buy a la carte?
The network continues to be up, well exceeding the average 24-hour lifespan of the yard signs.
There's an easy-to-use wrapper for bit torrent available here. It allows grandma to simply click once on a link and download the torrent... even if she didn't have bit torrent installed.
But I gotta say, I sure am tired of being reasonable when corporations are consistently not providing the same courtesy in my favor. The reason so many people are ready to believe it's in this country is because it's a frighteningly short hop away from where we actually are in our corporate-owned hell. If misinterpreting this article foments some pushback against the status quo here, I think I can live with that.
If only. No, that'll get you declared an 'enemy combatant', shipped off to where ever without trial, and tortured til you die of old age.
Without disagreeing on your (implied) assertion that it's false: given that meanwhile we're talking about the possibility of people going away for long times for "IP" infractions, I sure wouldn't be surprised by people going to jail for, well, just about anything, cussing included.
I disagree. I acknowledge that Apple is operating within the law and that the guy who shared the release was not. But this incident nevertheless serves to increase my distaste with for-profit information scarcity. I worked at Apple for many years in the early nineties and absolutely loved it, but for me the shine of the company has been gone for a while. Life with Apple was beautiful while they were changing the world. Now "changing the world" has given way to the same old money-grubbing penny-pinching corporate game played by everyone else. But I still feel good about linux... and the option of linux, coupled with articles like this one, are why I haven't paid for a mac in five years.
And so facts, like opinions, largely become either trusted or untrusted, rather than verified. Wikipedia should implement a ratings system somewhat like that of slashdot, with these features:
- Everyone can rate any entry at any time, rather than by dint of being granted mod points
- More than one entry can exist for a given topic in Wikipedia, potentially conflicting directly with other entries on the same subject
- In addition to being able to rate entries, everyone can rate everyone else in terms of how much a given person trusts another person
The above leads to a situation where each person viewing wikipedia can mark various entries as trusted or not, and various people as trustworthy or not, and get a filtered view of wikipedia (or at least a per-entry score) individually tailored to the trust instincts of the individual viewer.For an example of a trust metric, check out Advogato.
I do not mean to say that there is no such thing as objective truth or reality, there indeed is such a thing. But geographical distance, time passed, lack of measuring equipment, and other factors mean that in a very practical and real sense, "knowing" truth in many cases is reduced to a matter of trust and intuition. There is such a thing as expertise, but qualifying expertise is, in the end, a matter of trust.
Debating this point is worthwhile, because it can be difficult to grasp and should not be accepted lightly. But neither should we go around in circles never acknowledging this point or moving past it. In the end, filtering reality through a sytem of trust, tailored to the individual, is something that should be reflected in entities such as wikipedia.
Define 'help'. Reducing the total bodycount? Maybe the net effect of warnings would not budge this statistic. Increasing the Darwinian fairness by letting smart people out of harm's way while letting people with smaller frontal lobes take their place by jockeying for a front seat? I call that helpful.
Sounds like Diebold may have been contracted for the job.
That does sound great, and I'll be setting up an account shortly... thanks for the info! A question: wouldn't it be easy for the businesses to program their systems to always change the N (the middle number) to something much higher? Does SpamGourmet allow one to specify a meta-max to prevent such things, or allow one to axe an address spuriously inflated (or even one created blind)?
As your address, just give them another Spam Gourmet address. :)
Seriously though, I agree with you that caution is warranted. To that end, I'd use a free account (e.g. from yahoo) solely for this purpose.
... welcome our new solar-panel cleaning overlords.
Either that, or that John Kerry would have had a better chance of winning if he'd exposed a nipple on national television.
This is a good point. I agree that the "TV shows" category does deserve to be examined with regard to how the suprnova admins intend the site to be used.
To play admin's advocate for a moment, here's a line of thought I think also deserves consideration. Suppose I start a website with the mission of helping people overcome data distribution problems... essentially a copyright-agnostic mission. I then notice that the kind of material that people post falls into various categories e.g. "movies", and "applications". So I write scripts that present these categories to site visitors so that they don't have to sort through movies if they're looking for applications. Am I *obligated* to try to cull out copyrighted material? If so, then the defense of suprnova can go no further. But if the answer is not so obvious that one must look further for supporting evidence of intent (which is essentially the premise of our discussion at this point in the thread) then the next question is: am I obligated to avoid creating categories that have higher correlations with copyright (e.g. "TV shows") than those that do not (e.g. "14th century literature")? Even if such categories help visitors sort through material? What if I use copyright itself as the categorizer, and do a best-effort attempt to sort things into two categories: "probably copyrighted material" and "probably not copyrighted material"... it may even be my intent with such categories to help copyright-abiding downloaders avoid infringement.
I'm not necessarily saying this is the mindset of the suprnova admins. What I'm saying is that there is a difference between "intent to promote copyright infringement" and "choosing not to censure, even when material is copyrighted"... and that in the latter case, some copyright-correlated categories do have functional value.
Agreed. I point out that the above statement is different from saying that the suprnova admins intended (or intend) the service to be used specifically for distributing copyrighted materials. Unless they have made a statement clarifying their intent, we don't know. Suppose someone puts up a site with the (truly intended) mission statement that they want to "facilitate the exchange of information, helping people get around the hurdles previously posed by bandwidth constraints and advertising costs"... it is still possible for such a site to consist primarily of copyright-infringing posts by its users. It is dangerous to equate "not preventing copyright infringement" with "intent to support copyright infringement"... confusing the two would be akin to confusing "not in favor of the patriot act" with "not against terrorism".