When will it stop? When will we (consumers) be able to find something to do without being bomarded with advertising?
When we stop being complacent about it, is my guess. I live in a typical American town, slaughtered with ads from top to bottom; and yet just because of my habits I suffer a lot less of them than many folk do. I tell every single telemarketer to remove my name from their list, I opt out of everything, I plaster "no solicitations" signs, I return junk mail (or use their postage-paid envelopes to send them each other's ads). As a result, I have about half as much of it to deal with as say, my mom, who's too polite to be snippy with a telemarketer and too honest to put the wrong address on everything she fills out.
In my dream world, all advertising is restricted to areas where people will go looking for the goods and services in question. The YellowPages is a great idea; IMO that's all there should be. You want an ad? Put one in the appropriate online or print publication, or make a commercial to be shown on AdTV or played on CommercialRadio. People who are looking for you can then find you. But I think it's a gross violation of humanity's right to be left alone, and to choose what they think, why and when, to allow industries to bombard public and private spaces with their drivel. Most of it, as mentioned in another comment, has become so sophisticated now that it borders all-out manipulation of people's opinions and desires.
I think what needs to happen to make it stop is for the people being subjected to it to get fed up. Who says they have "the right" to advertise at us? (A flawed piece of legislation that slid through in Santa Barbara a hundred years ago, supposedly giving corporations 'free speech', of course. That's no obstacle though, since any attorney who tried could prove that by virtue of their financial resources, corporations take *more* free-speech-rights than are available to people, thus disenfranchising the individual. Nyah.)
How does it start? A mass optout movement? Carefully targetted "community improvement vandalism"? Boycotts? Lawsuits?
This is where you guys know more than me. I'll take whatever steps are presented to me, though, to stop the onslaught of mindless profitteering sludge from reaching my precious brain. Is it not a fundamental human right to think what we want, when we want??
1. "I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game."
2. "I don't even notice ads anymore, they are just automatically blocked out of my vision."
Keep a close eye on those two quotes, because they have a lot to do with each other. They are unwilling proof of the fact that ads work just fine, if not better, when you ignore them.
Let me explain...Most advertisers do try to "get your attention", because if they can get you to consciously devote your actual thinking to their brand, even for a second--say you see an "interesting" ad (another way to say "cleverly presented inaccurate drivel") and you let it bounce around your head for a moment--then there's a nice big fat chance that that brand / name / ad will come floating back to the surface as soon as a situation triggers that part of your thoughts. (To summarize: Interesting Coke ad = more mental energy/time devoted to thinking about Coke = stronger mental attraction to the idea of Coke = more likely that when you think "drink" you will think "Coke".)
But my point is that that's not all an advertisement does, psychologically. In fact, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Active-thinking energy is nice because it worms its way into your conscious thoughts--only an "interesting" advertisement will likely make you/verbally/ recommend the product, or/consciously/ think of it at the relevant time (or even at a somewhat-related not-relevant time; because you can never quite tell where brainwaves will cross). But what happens to an advertisement you don't notice--or more accurately, what happens to the BILLIONS of advertisements you don't notice? Do they just "go away"? Did they never sink in? Wrong, muchcha. Everything sinks in, and how it does so has much more to do with the medium that the ad is delivered in than the ad itself. A TV ad that you're not paying attention to dives straight to your hypothalamus, the part of the brain concerned with instinct and involuntary reaction--this is the part of your brain that TV speaks to. It has nothing to do with your conscious thoughts and it does not get filtered by your cerebrum, which is the part of your brain that distinguishes reality from fantasy. This is exactly why, when you see a scary movie on TV, you get physically scared; why porn gives ya'll erections. Ignoring an ad that's in front of your face on a television (game, movie, news program) is like having the border-guard turn his head and letting the info mainline right into your subconscious.
Now, "ignoring" a billboard or a print or a radio or a little-tag-on-your-shoe ad isn't quite as effective for the advertiser as ignoring a television ad--tv ads actually statistically work better when you ignore them. Other ads don't, but they still work, because--let me repeat--*you* may choose to ignore some things, but YOUR BRAIN DOES NOT. To assume so is synonymous with assuming that, because you don't see the handshakes your computer is doing to log in somewhere, they aren't happening or don't matter. The brain works much more like a computer than anything else, and even simple stuff like hypnosis proves conclusively that the BRAIN IGNORES NOTHING. Every single tag and sign and jingle and sex-signal that you receive from an advertiser GETS IN THERE. The fact that you see them all day, every day, without a break (unless you, like me, tend to stare at a blank wall for a moment every day and go aaaahhh) only makes it easier for you to consciously ignore them--that is, it becomes easy to choose not to pay attention to the effect they are having on you.
Sorry to ramble, but this is one of the biggest dangers I see confronting people, psychologically speaking, in this here New Era. We don't realize the science behind what these advertisers are doing, but THEY DO--they have/huge/ budgets set aside for hiring top psychologists and neurologists to study the effects of advertising for the industry. It's just not common knowledge how actually pervasive, and how mentally abusive, the constant glut of billboards, signs, songs, symbols, sponsorships and sell-outs really is.
Nice to see the Spirit of Superficiality is still alive and kicking in America, isn't it? True to form, he has a problem with the name but he can't quite spell the subject. I think this guy is every suit I know...
You know, I found it damn disappointing that I read all these comments and NOBODY had one single practical thing to say (unless I missed it) about helping this guy out. How many floppy drives do YOU have? How many old 486 parts? How many of you, like me, are sysadmins, and throw away or recycle buttloads of this stuff all the time? Shame on you! Talking about 'wow, that's a really good idea' when YOU'RE the people these kids need help from!!
Because I'm not slime, I've written to the BBC asking for more information about where and what WE (the rich US techies) could send to the Nepalese students. When I get more info I'll post it...but at least they'll be getting a shipment from *me*.
...While I agree that, if you haven't learned to operate your brain by the time you're eighteen you have problems college won't fix, I would like to plug here a college that actually TEACHES THINKING. They have no classes in computers. But they can teach you anything you need to know to _learn_ about computers...
Anyway, the place is called St. John's College. It's a private, nondenominational liberal arts school (that's right, you can ONLY get a BA from here) with two campuses, one in Annapolis, MD and one in Santa Fe, NM (I went to Santa Fe).
The program is popularly referred to as the "Great Books Program", and it's delightfully unconcerned with looking "PC". At St. John's you can spend four blissful years studying dead white guys (not exclusively, but largely), not through professors' lectures or Cliff notes, but from the actual text, in small, discussion-based classes that you'd better really know your shit to be able to pass. Not only that, but they teach corresponding subjects congruently, so the understanding you get is more that two-dimensional. For instance, every Freshman studies Attic (ancient) Greek in language, reads Plato (and all his lovely peers) in Seminar, decodes Euclidian geometry (by reading Euclid) in Math, and looks over the early Greek and Roman scientists in lab. This leads to assignments like translating some of Aristotle's Physics for lab class while debating whether he was right in view of Plato. It's not for everybody, but if you want to learn to think, not just unilaterally but across vast internal dimensions of space, time, language and culture, I recommend it wholeheartedly.
...And another thing. I HATE congresspeople. Last time I emailed one with anything but a prefab letter, I had state troopers on my ass for weeks because they thought I was dangerous or something. (I was simply vastly annoyed.) I can't *imagine* calling one.
The Slashdot forum has already proven successful for getting the grassroot's opinion out in the open. What about some spawn of it, moderated like Slashdot, on a webpage that congresspeople would be idiots not to read?
This is an American throwback, from the days when we were still dependant on English corporations to plan our cities and provide our goods. Of course, eventually we brightened up and LEFT, taking on the Big Boys with everything from muskets to cannonballs to keep their corporate-run claws off our lives. Now we're back, and even though we (the techies) virtually run the world, we're taking more and more shit from these corporations every day. Why are they in charge? Could *your* boss keep his own server running for, oh, a day? Could *your* manager code a program that counts to five? More importantly, could your CEO, the guy who makes an average of 450 TIMES MORE THAN YOU DO, even answer an email without help?
IMO, there are three options. Freelance is one, but only if you're either 1) neighborly or 2) a prima donna about it. If you're 1), you can charge twenty bucks to everybody you know to fix/code/whatever you do anything they've got. If you're 2), you have to have panache, because you have to be able to outbabble people who've sat for mind-deafening hours in leadership seminars; but surprisingly, being a prima donna freelance techie works pretty well for quite a few people I know. Another option is Unionization--I thought this was *great* idea for techies. It would put us damn near in control of the world, but hey, if these damn executives would just read some basic sci-fi they'd've known THAT was coming.
The third option is for techies to simply stop taking shit, but this has to be done on a much more intensive scale than simply telling one's boss or one's company to fuck off. For one thing, if all we do is refuse to work except under better, more sensible conditions (ie, I want the OSHA ergonomic rules back, asshole!) then all that will happen is that suddenly every major tech company will be staffed with foreigners making half what you did anyway. There have already been plenty of reports of tech companies generating FALSE reports of work shortages to convince the SEC and immigration to let them bring over more cheap work from abroad. So what the techies would need to do is get together, and not only refuse to tolerate crap like we're getting now (and it is getting ridiculous; Jon here didn't catch the half of it)--AND we need to start nailing these companies when they lie to try and cover for our behaviour. We need to tell the media what the conditions are so they can't be ignored. We need to start pointing fingers at companies that fire a couple thousand American workers and then apply for more foreign labor in three months because they're "desperately shorthanded". Or companies that demand more foreign labor, yet they turn down 80% of their American applicants (usually because we cost too much). Finally, more techies need to get out there and run companies of their own (this is already done somewhat)--but they need to do it from a TECHNICALLY FEASIBLE standpoint. I'd hate to say it, but every tech businessman I know went totally turncoat as soon as he became a "shareholder"--suddenly it was all about the bottom line again. As a dissident shareholder of a tech company myself, I'm convinced that nothing good will ever come of slavedriving. Nothing ever has, and nothing ever will. Every time a group of fatcats gets together to whip some other group into working at great profit to no-one but the fatcats, shit gets ugly. Let's make it ugly NOW, then, before our children are facing riots over it.
Encryption may not kill people (yet. I suppose you could chemically "encrypt" an Anthrax virus or something, maybe for time-release...but we won't go there, in case the Aum Shinrikyo thinks of it and somebody blames me.) but the Western Empire is sure treating it like it does. My thought is, do you want to be without secure encryption, when the only people who _are_ allowed to have it are, say, NATO? Or the NSA? I'm running right out and writing my own algorithm RIGHT NOW and I'm not telling *anybody* how it works. Um, except maybe if I wanna use it with somebody. I see a world of government-encryption-standards (mandated like content/copy controls?) where the citizen is forbidden from keeping anything secret. Yah well, fluck dat.
I just found out recently that one of the biggest culprits that causes chronic back pain is...the Chair! Not just because of the shape, but because of the back support! Freaky, huh? Apparently your lumbar and lower vertebrae do not align properly without the assistance of your lower-back and pelvic muscles...which atrophy if your back is constantly resting against something! Anyway, I and some friends have experienced blinding success with low tables (someone I know cut the legs off his desk) and nice thick mats to sit Indian-style or kneel on. I've even found sitting unassisted even helps my wrists and shoulders, tho I'm no chiropractor so I couldn't tell ya why.
There's a lot of information out there, but as a summary, I found this article very helpful (even though it comes from a commercial site).
the new york times is an avowed left-wing rag....
michael is a known greenie tree-hugger
...is it any surprise he would be trying to advance his agenda with favorable articles?
Try this on for size:
The NYT is an avowed big-business-and-corrupt-politics-friendly rag, bought and paid for by advertising dollars, not citizen voices.
So is it any surprise that this article should come out now, now that people are finally starting to freak out about the vast environmental damage done by large corporations run with nothing in mind but their precious, almighty dollar? You mention the hysteria yourself--well, suddenly we're starting to see a rash of media pieces in which the Corporations Aren't The Bad Guys Anymore. No, Really, We're Environmentally Friendly. Now Give Us That Dollar.
The tactic is to keep people from realizing that allowing businesses to get out of the people's control--like we have for the last hundred years--IS the evil, it IS the reason for things like the shitty environment, the unfair economics, even the lack of AIDS medications in poor countries. And it'll only get worse as long as we allow it to go on.
What you're seeing in this article is the scrabbling of the fatcats to make sure that people don't pin them, and their absurd "free trade is free" rhetoric, as the cause of all these awful, pressing problems. This article wasn't advancing the "tree-hugger" agenda, you twerp, though I guess we can't blame you for falling for the angle they obviously wanted you to fall for. No, this piece, and the glut of others like it you'll probably run into, was propping up the big-business agenda--or as they say in Fight Club, "polishing the brass on the Titanic." 'Cause it's all comin' down, baby.
Sara Thustra
"Insustainable" does not mean "can go on until the rich feel they're rich enough".
...I read about this system, and about five or six other known systems that "might support life" in Figments of Reality, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen's sequal to The Collapse of Chaos.
I'm no astronomer, but I know what infinity is. Of course they're out there.
Understandable, and a very good point that us millisecond naysayers would do well to remember.
However, it's never beneficial to get too caught up in your hangups, no matter how tight the web. So you may transpose letters now and again (so do I; but for me it *is* dyslexia) -- at least you, me and other situational handicappers still have our ability to PROOFREAD.
Editing-free sig:
It woudl be a shaem for us to "get in the wya of oursleves" simply by being lazy or nto paying atteniton.
Sara T.
The best way to counterbalance Big Money's inevitable, even understandable, efforts to shape the Net into an environment of its liking is through the untidy, squabbling process of democratic governance--the exact process rejected by those who place their faith in the endless ability of anonymous hackers to circumvent any controls. An important step toward creating the kind of online future we want is to abandon the persistent myth that information wants to be free.
Phuk information. People want to be free, which is why there are things like P2P and hackers. But this isn't about hackers or techies or information -- it's about the freedom of people to live and learn without kissing the ass of some jerk with money every time they log on.
This article makes a good point about the "cold, hard reality" of things like the unregulated nature of the Internet, and it looks forward to the point when the Bad Guys will inevitably try to stuff a sock in human freedom in the interest of their Dolla (inevitable, yes, but screw "understandable"; these are assholes, nothing more), but it completely ignores what happens next, or indeed, even that anything does.
Are we going to roll over and be regulated, then? Come on! Information doesn't *want* anything. Information is wanted, and every two-legged hominid on this planet knows that the Truth Will Set You Free. We are bound to seek truth, even when it kills us. It's part of the human condition, okay?? So eventually the Empire is going to use hardware rigging to try and stop us trading Information without first forking over that Dolla -- so what? Is that somehow more remarkable then when, say, all the water in an African nation is suddenly "privatized" and no-one can drink without forking over the Dolla? Is anything they might do to the 'Net somehow more impossible to circumvent than any other evil perpetrated by a small group of greedy fatcats? I think not. If humanity can rise up against things like religious persecution, slavery, and war, why would they be put down by a copy-protected hard drive??
And while I agree that sitting back and thinking you're safe from the world's tyrants isn't a smart idea for anyone, much less those of us who want to earn freedom, online or elsewhere, I do think it's absurd to contrast the way the 'Net works with democracy. Oh, what, so Capitalism is Democracy now and the 'Net is full of Anarchists?? Don't be ridiculous. The Internet is the most democratic thing we've managed to do yet, as a human race, and it will remain so until some asshole manages to put it in a cage and charge admission, at which point the people will come up with something else. That's Democracy; the people finding ways to communicate and learn and be free in spite of the obstacles. There will always be obstacles, and I guess most of those obstacles will probably almost always stem from a few jerks who don't care what happens to anybody or anything, as long as they can have more than they need. Hopefully, one day they get what they deserve; in the meantime, I and I will always be looking for the hack.
Charlie was a chemist
But Charlie is no more
What Charlie thought was H2O
Was H2S04!
The judicial system has "seen the light" of this argument and basically agrees, unless you get unlucky and get a bad judge.
Did anybody else notice that this decision came from Santa Clara County, the Home Of Corporate Personhood?? This is the court system that handed every civil right we have, part and parcel, over to corporations, making it possible for them to lobby Congress, hold stock in other corporations, merge without limits and use their "right to free speech" to slaughter our world with ads and market to children.
I'm glad anonymous posting is (momentarily) safe, but somehow it feels like getting flowers from Slobodan Milosevic.
They're made for PUBLISHERS -- Didn't you read the article? They're just trying to stay alive, man.
Just fightin' off the day when somebody realizes that, if the Net is going to have an impact on literature, it will probably be related to its ability to allow AUTHORS, SMALL PUBLISHERS and LIBRARIES more options and latitude. They really don't want us to think of "publishing" as a market driven by Art--which is probably why they call it something as dry as "publishing"--because then it would seem really fucked up to have it DOMINATED by the same scuzzy handful of icky companies that pretty much dominates everything. But hey, we let it go on with music...
Of COURSE the e-book isn't doing anything for most readers; the suits sitting around in the boardrooms probably didn't think of a "human reader" more than twice as they excitedly ejaculated their e-book into existence. They were thinking about two things: "How can we keep control of all these books, when the 'Net is going to make publishing so much easier," and "How can we make more money?" End thought process. That's it.
The readers, by contrast, while some of them MIGHT be interested in the ocassional e-book (say for convenience's sake) are on the whole much more involved in issues like Quality, Artful Expression, Low Cost and NonCensoredness -- none of which are high on Random House's list of Things To Exploit For $$$.
Bow down before the one you serve, assholes. This is why small businesses (or, to go global, large networks of small businesses) are better than these 1984-ish behemoth corporations every time: A local business, run by human beings, often makes a priority out of something besides CA$H.
-ST
So help me, if these people piss me off one more time I'm getting my set of encyclopedias and hitting the photocopier!
LAWYERS write these TOSes and they don't care if it makes sense as long as it limits liability.
Closing port 80 is obviously a stupid thing to do to an entire customer base to stop a worm that only propogates on MS IIS (I use Apache -- what danger am I? But the guy on the other end of the phone had never heard of Apache...) but the guys writing the rules don't know or care about that. They probably looked in some dusty law tome and found an old maritime law that said "companies can not be liable for damage if they closed the affected ports as soon as the storm came in".
BTW, I don't know what it says after all the corporate merging going on, but my @home TOS used to say that I could lose my account for "accessing a port on another machine without prior written permission." Every time I type "www.yahoo.com" I wonder if they're going to nix me. (Especially since they tried to use that clause to kick my buddy for TCP/IP SYN scanning, which of course doesn't even *involve* accessing anything!)
"It is one of the triumphs of man that he can know a thing and still not believe it." -J. Steinbeck
No kidding -- the first time I encountered Gator, it was bundled with a piece o' freeware called "Pop-Up Stopper". SOMEBODY explain that to me.
It took me two days to realize I had Gator, because of course I wasn't getting any pop-up ads...*rotfl* I mean, seriously now!
(BTW, strangely enough I have to recommend the Pop-Up Stopper program. In spite of being laced with GatorAIDS, it has worked damn well for me. It seems to have 100% success stopping ads--hehe even if its own spawn is sending them--and you can disable it for the duration of a click by holding SHIFT or CTRL, which is nice when you want to bring something up in a new window. Just thought I'd point that out.)
What is this supposed to prove? That cockroach companies like Gator aren't even LOOKING at what kind of software they're infecting with their program?? Or that the world is becoming so saturated with people scrambling for a buck any way they can get it that all the *sensible* ideas have been taken?!
--ST
"It is one of the triumphs of man that he can know a thing and still not believe it." --John Steinbeck
I led a suffocatingly sheltered life, and I didn't see Star Wars until I was ten thanks to my $#@!in' parents. I didn't have rosy glasses. I knew it was cheesy, and I loved it anyway. The components of it may be B-grade, but they're put together so damn well that most adults will/still/ get sucked into it if they start watching it. The point of a movie, yes?
I ran out and saw Episode I in the theatres when it came out, too. Twice. I knew it was cheesy too, but again, I loved it. The story, all four (now five, I guess) parts of it, is still excellent, the dialog is well written and the characters are superbly developed (yeah, except for Jar-Jar, but didn't *your* parents roll their eyes over the inane beeping of R2-D2?).
I will go see Episode II when it comes out, even though I don't really like seeing movies in theatres anymore. I know it will be cheesy. I wish it wasn't so over-hyped, but that's more a result of *our* way of handling famous things than it is of Star Wars--Star Wars kicks ass, and it just happens to be famous because of it, so we treat it like our own media specimen-whore. It doesn't matter; I'm betting pretty hard that I'll love it anyway. It's Star Wars, man.
The question boils down to WHY aren't the People concerned with things like the DMCA? Is it really because every American, if honestly confronted with the facts, would rather be watching Survivor?
I'll agree at least half the American people are tv-addicted, morality-deprived and clouded with so many different mental and physical poisons that you might as well be talking to a toxic waste dump, like some sick 21st-century version of a Fraggle. (Remember the Trash Heap?)
But I was raised that way, too.
For these people, the television is their parent; the mall is their friend. Always has been. Unless something else--preferably a real person-- gets in there and makes a point, these people will run in circles FOREVER.
I can't say it's their fault anymore, though I used to feel that way. Even in this hideous suburb, where my close friends feel incomplete without the newest car and my cousins and siblings clamour to throw away their kids' college money on the latest fad, I consistently can make people say, "Wow, really?" Just by talking to them. A lot of these people have never HEARD the idea that the media is all owned by huge corporations. They grew up hearing their parents *chuckle* over the fact that McDonald's is bad for you; their mindspace has been so carefully cultivated, their doubts so carefully turned on themselves, that simple truths will often throw them for a total loop. Yes, it's somewhat their fault, for a lack of clear thinking (which they sure as hell aren't taught in school) and for laziness and self-centeredness that they've been bred with from day one...but all they did, when it comes right down to it, was keep drinking the poison they were nursed on.
Let's keep the heat, and the blame, on those who've taken it upon themselves to ruin our families, our minds and our planet for their own ends. Don't use people's ignorance as a reason to blame them for the problem; they didn't DO it, it was done to THEM.
And then let's stop the cycle. Make sure your own kids are violently allergic to their bullshit.
Where are the truth in advertising people when you need them? Don't know if anybody remembers, but there was a spat in the 80's when something couldn't be called "Free" unless it was absolutely, totally free. You'd never see the word again if we did that today!
--ST
The latest issue of Playboy ran a great article on this topic, though it was more focused on viruses specifically. Yes, being a chick, I *read* the *articles* in Playboy--and yes, there are articles.
Anyway, the article mentioned a similar (maybe part of the same?) test that simulated a three-day biowarfare attack on Colorado. Needless to say, the outcome of this attack was the same: Mass panic, lots of dead people. Funnily enough tho, in both cases, as soon as enough people started dying the PhatCats up top started wanting to bring out the soldiers and kill off the rest of us. It's like their natural reaction: "Hey! People are dropping dead everywhere!! This is terrifying!"
"Well, quick! Somebody get on the horn and get some guns out here -- we can't let the rest of 'em keep running around like that!!"
But I'll tell ya, I, at least, had underestimated the true potential ickiness of this sort of thing. Like cities--cities make it baaaad. It turns out that the more people living in an area and the more densely, the greater the chances of a (viral) outbreak being of the really nasty gooey liquified-internal-organs-oozing-out variety. It has to do with the virus' chances of long-term survival -- Think about it. Ebola would never survive long in a sparsely populated area--all its hosts would die too quickly--but it can take out a hospital in hours. Or a city in a few days.
And it seems we may not be thinking too hard about what's likely the most dangerous possibility -- THE FLU. According to the Playboy article, referencing a spokesperson for the CDC (who, as somebody pointed out above, is responsible for *preventing* but not *dealing with* situations of this nature--when it comes to dealing with them, "Quick! Get a tank!!") -- We're overdue for a massive flu outbreak, like the one in the early 1900's (1918, was it?) that took out twenty million people worldwide. That's the entire death toll of AIDS squashed into a few months. Normally some sort of flu mutation/outbreak happens every ten years or so...But it's been more than twenty since our last real epidemic.
And if THAT doesn't make you wash your hands after you pee, nothing will!
Sara "I like to make sure you sleep as badly as I do" Thustra
The third world war will be a war of information...
Situation: World is run by corporations; thanks to the Santa Clara Decision, vast amounts of B.S. and people slacking in their personal vigilance regarding such things. How do corporations maintain control? Why, they own all the mass media they can, of course. You hear, quite simply, what they want you to hear. Then, ironically, they create a "reality-based" show called Big Brother. Oh, ha ha.
Conflict: The Internet pops up, just as all those dollar-lovin' yokels have finally started to get a good squeeze on American media. Now THIS little prole sitting in Detroit is reading uncensored, International headlines every day. Ack! Thanks to the Internet, the "Battle of Seattle" was exposed; all of G7-ization was threatened...something has to be done!
Evil Empire's Solution: PR Campaign!! Slur the Internet! Do your part to make sure that no "decent" citizen would ever go there for anything! By turning the 'Net into a red-light district, the Big Media is playing a damn good trump card -- Destabilizing and discrediting the 'Net's awesome potential as a free, actually-uncensored media source. They can't stop Truth from posting a website, at least not yet, but if enough TV-addicted, barely-got-a-brainwave-left citizens buy the bullshit (and if they buy it enough to spend money for the crap that's on cable, who's to say they won't?), the Corps could actually deal a devastating blow to the Internet and the FREE speech you and I know it really stands for.
I'd say this warrants a counterattack. First these jerks had the presumption to BUY OUR sources of information and suppress what's supposed to be our gods-given right to PUBLIC DISCOURSE. Now they're pissing in our waterhole, to make sure we keep drinking their Pepsi.
Whatever it is you/.ers do, do it now and do it well and do it to the corporate media. Personally, I'd like to see CNN.com read "NEWS, BUT NEWS THAT'S ALMOST PORN."
(That's right, I just said HACK IT DOWN. This crap has gone on long enough.)
Sara Thustra
"If I only had the tiniest grain of Wisdom, I should walk in the Great Way; And my only fear would be to stray from it." --The Man Himself, Lao Tzu
The human soul is the greatest anti-piracy measure in the known world, but no major company will use it.
If your customers like you, they will never steal from you, even if they're criminal men by nature. Anybody heard of the priest who walks around East L.A., wading in and out of gang shoot-outs, but nobody will touch him?
The problem of course, is that in order to be liked, YOU FIRST have to be honest. These greedy futhermuckers can't hide in sheeps' clothing anymore; the world has become too cynical.
My prediction? The bigger and badder the fatcats get, the sharper and nastier will come the replies! The truth is, even my own sainted mother can't convince herself that these assholes don't deserve everything they get.
Hey, that's something good A.I. could do for the race...if you can't SPELL, you can't talk to the computers! Syntax would sweep Bush under the evolutionary rug, which in turn might save us all.
Moron politicians and their incisive grasp of technology aside, my main worry is the Environment: Computers seem to prefer cooled, regulated, hospital-colored environments swarming with hunched-over CTS victims. Not sure I want the whole planet to look like that...
What do scare tactics, sensationalism and science all have in common?
They all preclude individual THOUGHT.
What exactly defines "air quality"? Is it a lab report? A set of chemical parts-per-million? A media story? A soundbyte from a science convention?
No, stupid, it's the AIR. Every human being on Earth ought, as a matter of simple survival, to know what good air and bad air is. So look outside, you idiots!! I can't believe all the time people waste with their heads buried in pointlessly-biased, fluff-ridden magazines debating about a substance that's right outside their door!
Is the air in bad shape? I DARE you to come stand in Detroit, where I live, or in any major urban area (many of which are worse) and say otherwise. Take a big burning gulp of that stink and try to tell me it's "scaremongering". An "intelligent" individual is not one with a degree, or one who watches Washington or listens to the Corporate News (or even the non-corporate news). It's somebody who LOOKS AROUND THEM and GETS AN IDEA about what's going on. If people were really paying attention to the state and quality of their environment, none of this would even be an argument. We got factories, things got stinky. We got cars, things got stinkier. People/you and I know/ who are exposed to higher levels of the stink are dying from cancer and all sorts of nastiness; now why in the hell would you need Time Magazine to tell you there's an air problem? The sciences and the scare tactics and the "global warming" chutzpah are all playing on the same team: They're all designed to distract us from the obvious, simple, straightforward problems at hand.
I'll tell you what Global Warming is: IT'S A BUZZWORD. And like a million zillion other buzzwords, it's only there to make you go tingle-tingle-ooooh; Now I Know. And you don't, because you haven't actually *thought* about it for a bloody second. Sure, from a scientific perspective it does matter if the Earth's temperature is rising at an accelerated level; we all live here and we all have to deal with that. But from a PUBLIC perspective that's nothing but a smokescreen; whether or not the temperature is higher by an average degree is ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS to the public responsibility of decision-making. What matters is what you see -- Gawd, wasn't it just a few decades ago that we ridiculed the world's idiots with the taunt, "What, do you believe what you read, too?"
For pete's sake, stop being led by the nose! Go look outside! Watch the freeway traffic spill tons of black smelly cloudage into the sky, and then SLAP YOURSELF for ever wondering if there really was a problem, just because all the scientists and newspapers told you there might not be. Then turn that slap where it's needed: Slap some RESPONSIBILITY, some taxes, and some heavy regulations on the people responsible, from Ford all the way down to the idiot watering his lawn in California. Then, AND ONLY THEN, will this become a problem we can deal with.
Until then, *cough**cough*, I'll be outside, smoking a cigarette for some fresh air.
-S.T.
Slashdot Mirror
When will it stop? When will we (consumers) be able to find something to do without being bomarded with advertising?
When we stop being complacent about it, is my guess. I live in a typical American town, slaughtered with ads from top to bottom; and yet just because of my habits I suffer a lot less of them than many folk do. I tell every single telemarketer to remove my name from their list, I opt out of everything, I plaster "no solicitations" signs, I return junk mail (or use their postage-paid envelopes to send them each other's ads). As a result, I have about half as much of it to deal with as say, my mom, who's too polite to be snippy with a telemarketer and too honest to put the wrong address on everything she fills out.
In my dream world, all advertising is restricted to areas where people will go looking for the goods and services in question. The YellowPages is a great idea; IMO that's all there should be. You want an ad? Put one in the appropriate online or print publication, or make a commercial to be shown on AdTV or played on CommercialRadio. People who are looking for you can then find you. But I think it's a gross violation of humanity's right to be left alone, and to choose what they think, why and when, to allow industries to bombard public and private spaces with their drivel. Most of it, as mentioned in another comment, has become so sophisticated now that it borders all-out manipulation of people's opinions and desires.
I think what needs to happen to make it stop is for the people being subjected to it to get fed up. Who says they have "the right" to advertise at us? (A flawed piece of legislation that slid through in Santa Barbara a hundred years ago, supposedly giving corporations 'free speech', of course. That's no obstacle though, since any attorney who tried could prove that by virtue of their financial resources, corporations take *more* free-speech-rights than are available to people, thus disenfranchising the individual. Nyah.)
How does it start? A mass optout movement? Carefully targetted "community improvement vandalism"? Boycotts? Lawsuits?
This is where you guys know more than me. I'll take whatever steps are presented to me, though, to stop the onslaught of mindless profitteering sludge from reaching my precious brain. Is it not a fundamental human right to think what we want, when we want??
--Sara Thustra
The Obstacle Is The Path.
1. "I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game."
/verbally/ recommend the product, or /consciously/ think of it at the relevant time (or even at a somewhat-related not-relevant time; because you can never quite tell where brainwaves will cross). But what happens to an advertisement you don't notice--or more accurately, what happens to the BILLIONS of advertisements you don't notice? Do they just "go away"? Did they never sink in? Wrong, muchcha. Everything sinks in, and how it does so has much more to do with the medium that the ad is delivered in than the ad itself. A TV ad that you're not paying attention to dives straight to your hypothalamus, the part of the brain concerned with instinct and involuntary reaction--this is the part of your brain that TV speaks to. It has nothing to do with your conscious thoughts and it does not get filtered by your cerebrum, which is the part of your brain that distinguishes reality from fantasy. This is exactly why, when you see a scary movie on TV, you get physically scared; why porn gives ya'll erections. Ignoring an ad that's in front of your face on a television (game, movie, news program) is like having the border-guard turn his head and letting the info mainline right into your subconscious.
/huge/ budgets set aside for hiring top psychologists and neurologists to study the effects of advertising for the industry. It's just not common knowledge how actually pervasive, and how mentally abusive, the constant glut of billboards, signs, songs, symbols, sponsorships and sell-outs really is.
2. "I don't even notice ads anymore, they are just automatically blocked out of my vision."
Keep a close eye on those two quotes, because they have a lot to do with each other. They are unwilling proof of the fact that ads work just fine, if not better, when you ignore them.
Let me explain...Most advertisers do try to "get your attention", because if they can get you to consciously devote your actual thinking to their brand, even for a second--say you see an "interesting" ad (another way to say "cleverly presented inaccurate drivel") and you let it bounce around your head for a moment--then there's a nice big fat chance that that brand / name / ad will come floating back to the surface as soon as a situation triggers that part of your thoughts. (To summarize: Interesting Coke ad = more mental energy/time devoted to thinking about Coke = stronger mental attraction to the idea of Coke = more likely that when you think "drink" you will think "Coke".)
But my point is that that's not all an advertisement does, psychologically. In fact, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Active-thinking energy is nice because it worms its way into your conscious thoughts--only an "interesting" advertisement will likely make you
Now, "ignoring" a billboard or a print or a radio or a little-tag-on-your-shoe ad isn't quite as effective for the advertiser as ignoring a television ad--tv ads actually statistically work better when you ignore them. Other ads don't, but they still work, because--let me repeat--*you* may choose to ignore some things, but YOUR BRAIN DOES NOT. To assume so is synonymous with assuming that, because you don't see the handshakes your computer is doing to log in somewhere, they aren't happening or don't matter. The brain works much more like a computer than anything else, and even simple stuff like hypnosis proves conclusively that the BRAIN IGNORES NOTHING. Every single tag and sign and jingle and sex-signal that you receive from an advertiser GETS IN THERE. The fact that you see them all day, every day, without a break (unless you, like me, tend to stare at a blank wall for a moment every day and go aaaahhh) only makes it easier for you to consciously ignore them--that is, it becomes easy to choose not to pay attention to the effect they are having on you.
Sorry to ramble, but this is one of the biggest dangers I see confronting people, psychologically speaking, in this here New Era. We don't realize the science behind what these advertisers are doing, but THEY DO--they have
Please, Slashdot. Help make it common knowlege!
Nice to see the Spirit of Superficiality is still alive and kicking in America, isn't it? True to form, he has a problem with the name but he can't quite spell the subject. I think this guy is every suit I know...
Sara T.
You know, I found it damn disappointing that I read all these comments and NOBODY had one single practical thing to say (unless I missed it) about helping this guy out. How many floppy drives do YOU have? How many old 486 parts? How many of you, like me, are sysadmins, and throw away or recycle buttloads of this stuff all the time? Shame on you! Talking about 'wow, that's a really good idea' when YOU'RE the people these kids need help from!!
Because I'm not slime, I've written to the BBC asking for more information about where and what WE (the rich US techies) could send to the Nepalese students. When I get more info I'll post it...but at least they'll be getting a shipment from *me*.
Hmph.
ST
...While I agree that, if you haven't learned to operate your brain by the time you're eighteen you have problems college won't fix, I would like to plug here a college that actually TEACHES THINKING. They have no classes in computers. But they can teach you anything you need to know to _learn_ about computers...
Anyway, the place is called St. John's College. It's a private, nondenominational liberal arts school (that's right, you can ONLY get a BA from here) with two campuses, one in Annapolis, MD and one in Santa Fe, NM (I went to Santa Fe).
The program is popularly referred to as the "Great Books Program", and it's delightfully unconcerned with looking "PC". At St. John's you can spend four blissful years studying dead white guys (not exclusively, but largely), not through professors' lectures or Cliff notes, but from the actual text, in small, discussion-based classes that you'd better really know your shit to be able to pass. Not only that, but they teach corresponding subjects congruently, so the understanding you get is more that two-dimensional. For instance, every Freshman studies Attic (ancient) Greek in language, reads Plato (and all his lovely peers) in Seminar, decodes Euclidian geometry (by reading Euclid) in Math, and looks over the early Greek and Roman scientists in lab. This leads to assignments like translating some of Aristotle's Physics for lab class while debating whether he was right in view of Plato. It's not for everybody, but if you want to learn to think, not just unilaterally but across vast internal dimensions of space, time, language and culture, I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Peace and books,
S.T.
...And another thing. I HATE congresspeople. Last time I emailed one with anything but a prefab letter, I had state troopers on my ass for weeks because they thought I was dangerous or something. (I was simply vastly annoyed.) I can't *imagine* calling one.
The Slashdot forum has already proven successful for getting the grassroot's opinion out in the open. What about some spawn of it, moderated like Slashdot, on a webpage that congresspeople would be idiots not to read?
ST
This is an American throwback, from the days when we were still dependant on English corporations to plan our cities and provide our goods. Of course, eventually we brightened up and LEFT, taking on the Big Boys with everything from muskets to cannonballs to keep their corporate-run claws off our lives. Now we're back, and even though we (the techies) virtually run the world, we're taking more and more shit from these corporations every day. Why are they in charge? Could *your* boss keep his own server running for, oh, a day? Could *your* manager code a program that counts to five? More importantly, could your CEO, the guy who makes an average of 450 TIMES MORE THAN YOU DO, even answer an email without help?
IMO, there are three options. Freelance is one, but only if you're either 1) neighborly or 2) a prima donna about it. If you're 1), you can charge twenty bucks to everybody you know to fix/code/whatever you do anything they've got. If you're 2), you have to have panache, because you have to be able to outbabble people who've sat for mind-deafening hours in leadership seminars; but surprisingly, being a prima donna freelance techie works pretty well for quite a few people I know. Another option is Unionization--I thought this was *great* idea for techies. It would put us damn near in control of the world, but hey, if these damn executives would just read some basic sci-fi they'd've known THAT was coming.
The third option is for techies to simply stop taking shit, but this has to be done on a much more intensive scale than simply telling one's boss or one's company to fuck off. For one thing, if all we do is refuse to work except under better, more sensible conditions (ie, I want the OSHA ergonomic rules back, asshole!) then all that will happen is that suddenly every major tech company will be staffed with foreigners making half what you did anyway. There have already been plenty of reports of tech companies generating FALSE reports of work shortages to convince the SEC and immigration to let them bring over more cheap work from abroad. So what the techies would need to do is get together, and not only refuse to tolerate crap like we're getting now (and it is getting ridiculous; Jon here didn't catch the half of it)--AND we need to start nailing these companies when they lie to try and cover for our behaviour. We need to tell the media what the conditions are so they can't be ignored. We need to start pointing fingers at companies that fire a couple thousand American workers and then apply for more foreign labor in three months because they're "desperately shorthanded". Or companies that demand more foreign labor, yet they turn down 80% of their American applicants (usually because we cost too much). Finally, more techies need to get out there and run companies of their own (this is already done somewhat)--but they need to do it from a TECHNICALLY FEASIBLE standpoint. I'd hate to say it, but every tech businessman I know went totally turncoat as soon as he became a "shareholder"--suddenly it was all about the bottom line again. As a dissident shareholder of a tech company myself, I'm convinced that nothing good will ever come of slavedriving. Nothing ever has, and nothing ever will. Every time a group of fatcats gets together to whip some other group into working at great profit to no-one but the fatcats, shit gets ugly. Let's make it ugly NOW, then, before our children are facing riots over it.
ST
Encryption may not kill people (yet. I suppose you could chemically "encrypt" an Anthrax virus or something, maybe for time-release...but we won't go there, in case the Aum Shinrikyo thinks of it and somebody blames me.) but the Western Empire is sure treating it like it does. My thought is, do you want to be without secure encryption, when the only people who _are_ allowed to have it are, say, NATO? Or the NSA? I'm running right out and writing my own algorithm RIGHT NOW and I'm not telling *anybody* how it works. Um, except maybe if I wanna use it with somebody. I see a world of government-encryption-standards (mandated like content/copy controls?) where the citizen is forbidden from keeping anything secret. Yah well, fluck dat.
ST
Here, sonny, whisper that in Uncle Sammy's ear...
I just found out recently that one of the biggest culprits that causes chronic back pain is...the Chair! Not just because of the shape, but because of the back support! Freaky, huh? Apparently your lumbar and lower vertebrae do not align properly without the assistance of your lower-back and pelvic muscles...which atrophy if your back is constantly resting against something! Anyway, I and some friends have experienced blinding success with low tables (someone I know cut the legs off his desk) and nice thick mats to sit Indian-style or kneel on. I've even found sitting unassisted even helps my wrists and shoulders, tho I'm no chiropractor so I couldn't tell ya why.
There's a lot of information out there, but as a summary, I found this article very helpful (even though it comes from a commercial site).
Viva la butt muscles!
Sara Thustra
the new york times is an avowed left-wing rag....
michael is a known greenie tree-hugger
...is it any surprise he would be trying to advance his agenda with favorable articles?
Try this on for size:
The NYT is an avowed big-business-and-corrupt-politics-friendly rag, bought and paid for by advertising dollars, not citizen voices.
So is it any surprise that this article should come out now, now that people are finally starting to freak out about the vast environmental damage done by large corporations run with nothing in mind but their precious, almighty dollar? You mention the hysteria yourself--well, suddenly we're starting to see a rash of media pieces in which the Corporations Aren't The Bad Guys Anymore. No, Really, We're Environmentally Friendly. Now Give Us That Dollar.
The tactic is to keep people from realizing that allowing businesses to get out of the people's control--like we have for the last hundred years--IS the evil, it IS the reason for things like the shitty environment, the unfair economics, even the lack of AIDS medications in poor countries. And it'll only get worse as long as we allow it to go on.
What you're seeing in this article is the scrabbling of the fatcats to make sure that people don't pin them, and their absurd "free trade is free" rhetoric, as the cause of all these awful, pressing problems. This article wasn't advancing the "tree-hugger" agenda, you twerp, though I guess we can't blame you for falling for the angle they obviously wanted you to fall for. No, this piece, and the glut of others like it you'll probably run into, was propping up the big-business agenda--or as they say in Fight Club, "polishing the brass on the Titanic." 'Cause it's all comin' down, baby.
Sara Thustra
"Insustainable" does not mean "can go on until the rich feel they're rich enough".
...I read about this system, and about five or six other known systems that "might support life" in Figments of Reality, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen's sequal to The Collapse of Chaos.
I'm no astronomer, but I know what infinity is. Of course they're out there.
Understandable, and a very good point that us millisecond naysayers would do well to remember.
However, it's never beneficial to get too caught up in your hangups, no matter how tight the web. So you may transpose letters now and again (so do I; but for me it *is* dyslexia) -- at least you, me and other situational handicappers still have our ability to PROOFREAD.
Editing-free sig:
It woudl be a shaem for us to "get in the wya of oursleves" simply by being lazy or nto paying atteniton. Sara T.
The best way to counterbalance Big Money's inevitable, even understandable, efforts to shape the Net into an environment of its liking is through the untidy, squabbling process of democratic governance--the exact process rejected by those who place their faith in the endless ability of anonymous hackers to circumvent any controls. An important step toward creating the kind of online future we want is to abandon the persistent myth that information wants to be free.
Phuk information. People want to be free, which is why there are things like P2P and hackers. But this isn't about hackers or techies or information -- it's about the freedom of people to live and learn without kissing the ass of some jerk with money every time they log on.
This article makes a good point about the "cold, hard reality" of things like the unregulated nature of the Internet, and it looks forward to the point when the Bad Guys will inevitably try to stuff a sock in human freedom in the interest of their Dolla (inevitable, yes, but screw "understandable"; these are assholes, nothing more), but it completely ignores what happens next, or indeed, even that anything does.
Are we going to roll over and be regulated, then? Come on! Information doesn't *want* anything. Information is wanted, and every two-legged hominid on this planet knows that the Truth Will Set You Free. We are bound to seek truth, even when it kills us. It's part of the human condition, okay?? So eventually the Empire is going to use hardware rigging to try and stop us trading Information without first forking over that Dolla -- so what? Is that somehow more remarkable then when, say, all the water in an African nation is suddenly "privatized" and no-one can drink without forking over the Dolla? Is anything they might do to the 'Net somehow more impossible to circumvent than any other evil perpetrated by a small group of greedy fatcats? I think not. If humanity can rise up against things like religious persecution, slavery, and war, why would they be put down by a copy-protected hard drive??
And while I agree that sitting back and thinking you're safe from the world's tyrants isn't a smart idea for anyone, much less those of us who want to earn freedom, online or elsewhere, I do think it's absurd to contrast the way the 'Net works with democracy. Oh, what, so Capitalism is Democracy now and the 'Net is full of Anarchists?? Don't be ridiculous. The Internet is the most democratic thing we've managed to do yet, as a human race, and it will remain so until some asshole manages to put it in a cage and charge admission, at which point the people will come up with something else. That's Democracy; the people finding ways to communicate and learn and be free in spite of the obstacles. There will always be obstacles, and I guess most of those obstacles will probably almost always stem from a few jerks who don't care what happens to anybody or anything, as long as they can have more than they need. Hopefully, one day they get what they deserve; in the meantime, I and I will always be looking for the hack.
Charlie was a chemist
But Charlie is no more
What Charlie thought was H2O
Was H2S04!
The judicial system has "seen the light" of this argument and basically agrees, unless you get unlucky and get a bad judge.
Did anybody else notice that this decision came from Santa Clara County, the Home Of Corporate Personhood?? This is the court system that handed every civil right we have, part and parcel, over to corporations, making it possible for them to lobby Congress, hold stock in other corporations, merge without limits and use their "right to free speech" to slaughter our world with ads and market to children.
I'm glad anonymous posting is (momentarily) safe, but somehow it feels like getting flowers from Slobodan Milosevic.
They're made for PUBLISHERS -- Didn't you read the article? They're just trying to stay alive, man.
Just fightin' off the day when somebody realizes that, if the Net is going to have an impact on literature, it will probably be related to its ability to allow AUTHORS, SMALL PUBLISHERS and LIBRARIES more options and latitude. They really don't want us to think of "publishing" as a market driven by Art--which is probably why they call it something as dry as "publishing"--because then it would seem really fucked up to have it DOMINATED by the same scuzzy handful of icky companies that pretty much dominates everything. But hey, we let it go on with music...
Of COURSE the e-book isn't doing anything for most readers; the suits sitting around in the boardrooms probably didn't think of a "human reader" more than twice as they excitedly ejaculated their e-book into existence. They were thinking about two things: "How can we keep control of all these books, when the 'Net is going to make publishing so much easier," and "How can we make more money?" End thought process. That's it.
The readers, by contrast, while some of them MIGHT be interested in the ocassional e-book (say for convenience's sake) are on the whole much more involved in issues like Quality, Artful Expression, Low Cost and NonCensoredness -- none of which are high on Random House's list of Things To Exploit For $$$.
Bow down before the one you serve, assholes. This is why small businesses (or, to go global, large networks of small businesses) are better than these 1984-ish behemoth corporations every time: A local business, run by human beings, often makes a priority out of something besides CA$H.
-ST
So help me, if these people piss me off one more time I'm getting my set of encyclopedias and hitting the photocopier!
...not a computer-literate individual.
LAWYERS write these TOSes and they don't care if it makes sense as long as it limits liability.
Closing port 80 is obviously a stupid thing to do to an entire customer base to stop a worm that only propogates on MS IIS (I use Apache -- what danger am I? But the guy on the other end of the phone had never heard of Apache...) but the guys writing the rules don't know or care about that. They probably looked in some dusty law tome and found an old maritime law that said "companies can not be liable for damage if they closed the affected ports as soon as the storm came in".
BTW, I don't know what it says after all the corporate merging going on, but my @home TOS used to say that I could lose my account for "accessing a port on another machine without prior written permission." Every time I type "www.yahoo.com" I wonder if they're going to nix me. (Especially since they tried to use that clause to kick my buddy for TCP/IP SYN scanning, which of course doesn't even *involve* accessing anything!)
"It is one of the triumphs of man that he can know a thing and still not believe it." -J. Steinbeck
No kidding -- the first time I encountered Gator, it was bundled with a piece o' freeware called "Pop-Up Stopper". SOMEBODY explain that to me.
It took me two days to realize I had Gator, because of course I wasn't getting any pop-up ads...*rotfl* I mean, seriously now!
(BTW, strangely enough I have to recommend the Pop-Up Stopper program. In spite of being laced with GatorAIDS, it has worked damn well for me. It seems to have 100% success stopping ads--hehe even if its own spawn is sending them--and you can disable it for the duration of a click by holding SHIFT or CTRL, which is nice when you want to bring something up in a new window. Just thought I'd point that out.)
What is this supposed to prove? That cockroach companies like Gator aren't even LOOKING at what kind of software they're infecting with their program?? Or that the world is becoming so saturated with people scrambling for a buck any way they can get it that all the *sensible* ideas have been taken?!
--ST
"It is one of the triumphs of man that he can know a thing and still not believe it." --John Steinbeck
I led a suffocatingly sheltered life, and I didn't see Star Wars until I was ten thanks to my $#@!in' parents. I didn't have rosy glasses. I knew it was cheesy, and I loved it anyway. The components of it may be B-grade, but they're put together so damn well that most adults will
I ran out and saw Episode I in the theatres when it came out, too. Twice. I knew it was cheesy too, but again, I loved it. The story, all four (now five, I guess) parts of it, is still excellent, the dialog is well written and the characters are superbly developed (yeah, except for Jar-Jar, but didn't *your* parents roll their eyes over the inane beeping of R2-D2?).
I will go see Episode II when it comes out, even though I don't really like seeing movies in theatres anymore. I know it will be cheesy. I wish it wasn't so over-hyped, but that's more a result of *our* way of handling famous things than it is of Star Wars--Star Wars kicks ass, and it just happens to be famous because of it, so we treat it like our own media specimen-whore. It doesn't matter; I'm betting pretty hard that I'll love it anyway. It's Star Wars, man.
ST
You make a point, but not a complete one.
The question boils down to WHY aren't the People concerned with things like the DMCA? Is it really because every American, if honestly confronted with the facts, would rather be watching Survivor?
I'll agree at least half the American people are tv-addicted, morality-deprived and clouded with so many different mental and physical poisons that you might as well be talking to a toxic waste dump, like some sick 21st-century version of a Fraggle. (Remember the Trash Heap?)
But I was raised that way, too.
For these people, the television is their parent; the mall is their friend. Always has been. Unless something else--preferably a real person-- gets in there and makes a point, these people will run in circles FOREVER.
I can't say it's their fault anymore, though I used to feel that way. Even in this hideous suburb, where my close friends feel incomplete without the newest car and my cousins and siblings clamour to throw away their kids' college money on the latest fad, I consistently can make people say, "Wow, really?" Just by talking to them. A lot of these people have never HEARD the idea that the media is all owned by huge corporations. They grew up hearing their parents *chuckle* over the fact that McDonald's is bad for you; their mindspace has been so carefully cultivated, their doubts so carefully turned on themselves, that simple truths will often throw them for a total loop. Yes, it's somewhat their fault, for a lack of clear thinking (which they sure as hell aren't taught in school) and for laziness and self-centeredness that they've been bred with from day one...but all they did, when it comes right down to it, was keep drinking the poison they were nursed on.
Let's keep the heat, and the blame, on those who've taken it upon themselves to ruin our families, our minds and our planet for their own ends. Don't use people's ignorance as a reason to blame them for the problem; they didn't DO it, it was done to THEM.
And then let's stop the cycle. Make sure your own kids are violently allergic to their bullshit.
ST
Where are the truth in advertising people when you need them? Don't know if anybody remembers, but there was a spat in the 80's when something couldn't be called "Free" unless it was absolutely, totally free. You'd never see the word again if we did that today! --ST
The latest issue of Playboy ran a great article on this topic, though it was more focused on viruses specifically. Yes, being a chick, I *read* the *articles* in Playboy--and yes, there are articles.
Anyway, the article mentioned a similar (maybe part of the same?) test that simulated a three-day biowarfare attack on Colorado. Needless to say, the outcome of this attack was the same: Mass panic, lots of dead people. Funnily enough tho, in both cases, as soon as enough people started dying the PhatCats up top started wanting to bring out the soldiers and kill off the rest of us. It's like their natural reaction: "Hey! People are dropping dead everywhere!! This is terrifying!"
"Well, quick! Somebody get on the horn and get some guns out here -- we can't let the rest of 'em keep running around like that!!"
But I'll tell ya, I, at least, had underestimated the true potential ickiness of this sort of thing. Like cities--cities make it baaaad. It turns out that the more people living in an area and the more densely, the greater the chances of a (viral) outbreak being of the really nasty gooey liquified-internal-organs-oozing-out variety. It has to do with the virus' chances of long-term survival -- Think about it. Ebola would never survive long in a sparsely populated area--all its hosts would die too quickly--but it can take out a hospital in hours. Or a city in a few days.
And it seems we may not be thinking too hard about what's likely the most dangerous possibility -- THE FLU. According to the Playboy article, referencing a spokesperson for the CDC (who, as somebody pointed out above, is responsible for *preventing* but not *dealing with* situations of this nature--when it comes to dealing with them, "Quick! Get a tank!!") -- We're overdue for a massive flu outbreak, like the one in the early 1900's (1918, was it?) that took out twenty million people worldwide. That's the entire death toll of AIDS squashed into a few months. Normally some sort of flu mutation/outbreak happens every ten years or so...But it's been more than twenty since our last real epidemic.
And if THAT doesn't make you wash your hands after you pee, nothing will!
Sara "I like to make sure you sleep as badly as I do" Thustra
The third world war will be a war of information...
/.ers do, do it now and do it well and do it to the corporate media. Personally, I'd like to see CNN.com read "NEWS, BUT NEWS THAT'S ALMOST PORN."
Situation: World is run by corporations; thanks to the Santa Clara Decision, vast amounts of B.S. and people slacking in their personal vigilance regarding such things. How do corporations maintain control? Why, they own all the mass media they can, of course. You hear, quite simply, what they want you to hear. Then, ironically, they create a "reality-based" show called Big Brother. Oh, ha ha.
Conflict: The Internet pops up, just as all those dollar-lovin' yokels have finally started to get a good squeeze on American media. Now THIS little prole sitting in Detroit is reading uncensored, International headlines every day. Ack! Thanks to the Internet, the "Battle of Seattle" was exposed; all of G7-ization was threatened...something has to be done!
Evil Empire's Solution: PR Campaign!! Slur the Internet! Do your part to make sure that no "decent" citizen would ever go there for anything! By turning the 'Net into a red-light district, the Big Media is playing a damn good trump card -- Destabilizing and discrediting the 'Net's awesome potential as a free, actually-uncensored media source. They can't stop Truth from posting a website, at least not yet, but if enough TV-addicted, barely-got-a-brainwave-left citizens buy the bullshit (and if they buy it enough to spend money for the crap that's on cable, who's to say they won't?), the Corps could actually deal a devastating blow to the Internet and the FREE speech you and I know it really stands for.
I'd say this warrants a counterattack. First these jerks had the presumption to BUY OUR sources of information and suppress what's supposed to be our gods-given right to PUBLIC DISCOURSE. Now they're pissing in our waterhole, to make sure we keep drinking their Pepsi.
Whatever it is you
(That's right, I just said HACK IT DOWN. This crap has gone on long enough.)
Sara Thustra
"If I only had the tiniest grain of Wisdom, I should walk in the Great Way; And my only fear would be to stray from it." --The Man Himself, Lao Tzu
The human soul is the greatest anti-piracy measure in the known world, but no major company will use it.
If your customers like you, they will never steal from you, even if they're criminal men by nature. Anybody heard of the priest who walks around East L.A., wading in and out of gang shoot-outs, but nobody will touch him?
The problem of course, is that in order to be liked, YOU FIRST have to be honest. These greedy futhermuckers can't hide in sheeps' clothing anymore; the world has become too cynical.
My prediction? The bigger and badder the fatcats get, the sharper and nastier will come the replies! The truth is, even my own sainted mother can't convince herself that these assholes don't deserve everything they get.
--S.T.
Karmic Ocean -- Beware Sharks
Hey, that's something good A.I. could do for the race...if you can't SPELL, you can't talk to the computers! Syntax would sweep Bush under the evolutionary rug, which in turn might save us all.
Moron politicians and their incisive grasp of technology aside, my main worry is the Environment: Computers seem to prefer cooled, regulated, hospital-colored environments swarming with hunched-over CTS victims. Not sure I want the whole planet to look like that...
-S.T.
They all preclude individual THOUGHT.
What exactly defines "air quality"? Is it a lab report? A set of chemical parts-per-million? A media story? A soundbyte from a science convention?
/you and I know/ who are exposed to higher levels of the stink are dying from cancer and all sorts of nastiness; now why in the hell would you need Time Magazine to tell you there's an air problem? The sciences and the scare tactics and the "global warming" chutzpah are all playing on the same team: They're all designed to distract us from the obvious, simple, straightforward problems at hand.
No, stupid, it's the AIR. Every human being on Earth ought, as a matter of simple survival, to know what good air and bad air is. So look outside, you idiots!! I can't believe all the time people waste with their heads buried in pointlessly-biased, fluff-ridden magazines debating about a substance that's right outside their door!
Is the air in bad shape? I DARE you to come stand in Detroit, where I live, or in any major urban area (many of which are worse) and say otherwise. Take a big burning gulp of that stink and try to tell me it's "scaremongering". An "intelligent" individual is not one with a degree, or one who watches Washington or listens to the Corporate News (or even the non-corporate news). It's somebody who LOOKS AROUND THEM and GETS AN IDEA about what's going on. If people were really paying attention to the state and quality of their environment, none of this would even be an argument. We got factories, things got stinky. We got cars, things got stinkier. People
I'll tell you what Global Warming is: IT'S A BUZZWORD. And like a million zillion other buzzwords, it's only there to make you go tingle-tingle-ooooh; Now I Know. And you don't, because you haven't actually *thought* about it for a bloody second. Sure, from a scientific perspective it does matter if the Earth's temperature is rising at an accelerated level; we all live here and we all have to deal with that. But from a PUBLIC perspective that's nothing but a smokescreen; whether or not the temperature is higher by an average degree is ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS to the public responsibility of decision-making. What matters is what you see -- Gawd, wasn't it just a few decades ago that we ridiculed the world's idiots with the taunt, "What, do you believe what you read, too?"
For pete's sake, stop being led by the nose! Go look outside! Watch the freeway traffic spill tons of black smelly cloudage into the sky, and then SLAP YOURSELF for ever wondering if there really was a problem, just because all the scientists and newspapers told you there might not be. Then turn that slap where it's needed: Slap some RESPONSIBILITY, some taxes, and some heavy regulations on the people responsible, from Ford all the way down to the idiot watering his lawn in California. Then, AND ONLY THEN, will this become a problem we can deal with.
Until then, *cough**cough*, I'll be outside, smoking a cigarette for some fresh air. -S.T.