[W]e real people still have criminal law. Wouldn't want to treat corporations equally in that sense, would we!
Reminds me of a study I read about, back in the 1980s I think, of the legal punishments of corporations convicted for actions in which people died. The bottom line turned out to be that the fines imposed by the courts amounted to somewhat over $300 per death. They also didn't find any cases in which the corporation's officers were tried for anything.
There's been a bit more inflation since then, but also a few decades of "conservative" dominance in the US government. I wonder what the average punishment for corporate homicide might be today. A few quick googles didn't turn up anything very relevant, but maybe I didn't guess the right keywords.
I've been involved in a number of projects that were prototyped in a scripting language (usually perl or python) and then rewritten in C for performance, with the disappointing result that the C code ran slower. I've also seen the same with C -> assembly a few times.
The explanation is fairly straightforward. The low-level-language experts (including me a few times) may have known their language well, but they'd never looked into the perl/python/cc code to learn the algorithms used there. It turned out that the implementers of perl/python/cc have developed some rather sophisticated algorithms for some of the time-wasting operations (e.g. table lookup) that were unknown to the asm programmers.
If they'd recoded the same algorithm used in the interpreters and compilers for the higher languages, they'd probably have won the contest, because there's no doubt that there's still some wasted cpu time in the higher languages' code. But, as others have pointed out, very often the algorithm used is a better predictor of speed than the language used.
So high-level vs. low-level language is a bit of a bogus distinction. The actual speed of the code is a combination of the algorithm and the efficiency of the implementation of the language. And some languages have several implementations with different efficiencies.
What I notice is that the headline and most of the discussion here talk about the security of "IE", while the Home Office said "the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer". There seems to be little understanding that these aren't synonyms.
But does anyone here work for an organization of any sort (government, industry, academia, whatever) that requires that everyone use "the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer"?
In all the cases that I know of, when there's such standardization, it's for releases that existed shortly before the standard was established. It's now years later, and the standard is still in place (though often violated by workers who want better security or more features).
A number of people have written about organizations that are still standardized on IE6 and don't permit upgrades to IE8. Is there any data available on how widespread this might be? In my experience, such data is hard to come by, since both governments and private corporations tend to be secretive about their inner workings.
So could the Home Office be pushing for upgrades to W7+IE8? Nah; I thought not.
The committee provides plausible deniability wherein any single member can say "I didn't agree with the decision, but the committee decided...".
Welcome to the cosy sheltered world of civil service. People who work there genuinely couldn't survive in the 'real world' of private business/industry!
Oh, I dunno about that. I've worked in private industry for a few decades, doing software development, and I've heard exactly this line of reasoning repeatedly. I doubt that it has anything to do with government, industry, or whatever; it's just the natural behavior of humans in groups. It's not at all unusual for a group of humans to make a decision that's contrary to the interests of every member of the group. The processes that cause this are pretty well understood. It's the common CYA scenario, in which no individual can be blamed for the group's poor decision.
There's an old saying to the effect that, when faced with alternatives, the wise leader is the one who can avoid choosing the worst. I've read variants of this from a number of different "cultures". It may be that the best that humans working in groups are capable of is choosing the second-worst.
In this story, various replies seem to imply that the UK government hasn't even managed this much, since it appears that there are large parts of that government that have "standardized" on IE6. Again, this isn't just government; I could name (but won't out of pity for the workers) a number of US corporations that have exactly the same "standard". My wife works for a major medical corporation that has done this. She runs XP (virtualized on her home iMac;-), and its browser is IE6, because that's what her employer requires all employees to use. They also now require their IT workers to work at home about half time, so they have to have XP+IE6 on both their office and home machines. I use her machine occasionally to do web testing against IE6 because that's what a lot of my clients' customers use.
No, that wasn't it, though that's a pretty good comment that's similar.
The satirical skit I remember had a scene like this:
Host: Who wrote "Grapes of Wrath"
Contestant: John Steinbeck
BZZZZT!
Host: Wrong; the correct answer is "Hemingway".
(Contestant looks around with a puzzled expression, while the host explains that their survey showed that N% of the people asked said that Hemingway wrote Grapes of Wrath, where N was something > 50.)
I wouldn't be surprised if there were a number of other satires along this line, since many people do believe that questions of fact can be determined by asking people and accepting the most common answer as correct. So it's an obvious topic for satire.
The only way this code would make sense is if it were written in INTERCAL and you interpret step 5 as an unconditional COME FROM statement. In any other imperative language's semantics, step 5 would have undefined behaviour. In most declarative languages, the test would result in a unification failure or a type system violation and not run.
No, I don't think so. Step 5 would simply compile to nothing. This would correctly implement "Do not perform steps 2-4" at the step 5 position in the code. The code for steps 2-4 would be unaffected by this.
Step 6 would presumably be translated to a call on the exit routine, exit(0) in C or perl.
OTOH, I liked the INTERCAL translation. It was the first thing I thought of, too. But I don't think it's actually correct for this particular test. After all, doing that would constitute performing step 5 while still in step 1, and that would violate the instructions in step 1.
Your science teacher most likely knew you were right. But, if you are smart enough to figure it out, you were also smart enough to know the intent of the lesson.
This is a bit of reasoning that I've always sorta liked, in a "sick humor" sort of way. My favorite example was on one of the national tests here in the US (maybe the PSAT, but I'm not sure) back in the 1970s. It had a question with two "right" answers, one using Newton's mechanics, the other using Einstein's Relativity (whether Special or General I don't remember). But the test's scoring marked the Relativistic answer as wrong. When questioned about this, the test makers gave the same answer: A high-school student smart enough to understand Relativity should be smart enough to know not to use it.
Since then, I've asked a number of high-school teachers and admins, and every one of them has agreed with this. But it's an especially interesting case, because it's well understood that when Newton's and Einstein's equations differ, Newton's are wrong and Einstein's are right. (For now, anyway, until someone comes across an exception to Einstein's equations.;-)
So our teachers and testers are agreeing that students who know the correct answer to a question should be smart enough to know to give the wrong answer when there's reason to expect that other people would give the wrong answer.
Now, I can understand why people might think this way. But given this sort of lesson, I think it's probably a good thing that, for instance, I'm driving a car not built by an American manufacturer by workers trained to follow such guidelines, or that the hardware in the computer I'm typing this on wasn't manufactured in an American factory. They'd have been built by people who carefully avoid the use of advanced science when it conflicts with the mistaken ideas held by an authority figure like a teacher, test maker or boss.
But it is funny, in a very sad sort of way, to run across the concept in the above quote. It tells us a lot about why things are so screwed up in our world.
(There was also a spoof skit on this some time back, in which the "correct" answers in a TV contest were determined by a survey. Anyone remember what that skit was? Is it on youtube?)
"NUMBERED steps ARE meant to be done sequentially. Otherwise they wouldn't be numbered. People who don't get that are part of the problem, not part of the solution."
I don't think that's at all true. Almost every tests I've ever seen has had numbered questions. If the above were true, then if I had ever skipped over a question, I'd have violated the rule, and gotten no credit for answering later questions. This has never happened during my many years of schooling. So I'd conclude that numbering the questions never implies that they must be done sequentially. It's just a convenient label, so that you can refer to a specific question during discussions.
When you finish reading everything, you finish executing instruction 1, and can safely go on and execute instruction 2.
Yeah; this is what I've always deduced from such instructions. And, in this example, after you've read all the instructions, and also done all the actions in steps 2-4, you then go on to step 5. This one tells you to not do 2-4, so you don't do them. It makes sense to not do those actions in step 5, since you've already done them in steps 2-4. Since step 5 doesn't tell you to actually do anything (just to not do something), you've finished step 5, and go on to the next step.
The only real problem with the instructions are in step 6. "Finish test" contains no information on how they expect you to do that. You can guess that they mean to leave the room, but that isn't stated, and might not have been when is expected. Do they want you to sign the test paper and hand it in to someone, as is common with tests? Maybe, but that's usually because they want to grade you on the answers you've written to questions, and there are no questions in this test that require writing anything. Maybe "Finish test" means "Sit and wait for further instructions." You can't tell.
This "test" is a good example of how easy it is to write English that's ambiguous and confusing to most readers. Especially since, as others have pointed out, there's no general convention that the "questions" on tests be done in any particular order. You wouldn't even expect computer programmers to do them in sequence, although that's how a computer would do them. It's generally acceptable to not do items on tests that you don't know how to do; it just gives you a zero for that item. Tests usually aren't graded by whether you did the items in order, just on how many of them you did correctly. Under this convention, it would be correct for someone taking this test to perform any subset of the actions in steps 2-4 (and also get credit for not doing any of 2-4 during step 5).
Actually, this test is mostly a good exercise for language lawyers.
Who else would hack one of the most successful companies in the world only to read the e-mails of Human Rights Activists in China? What possible gain could anyone else have from this information?... Someone who is trying to discredit China?... Someone trying to say that someone is trying to discredit China?
All of the above?
Politics does have a tendency to produce gang-bangs.
Public school is a system intended to create soldiers and factory workers, and guess what? Most of the factories are gone. What's left?
Actually, if you look where the factories have gone, and look into the factories, you'll find something even more devastating for our school system: The factories don't contain many people any more. They're mostly full of robots. The few humans are there to tend to the robots, which means that they have a pretty good technical education.
The days of training kids to take robot-like factory jobs are over, and the schools that teach that way are now producing graduates trained for a lifetime of unemployment. But it'll take a few more generations of school kids moving on to unemployment before the message gets out to the schools' administrations.
There are still jobs available of the "You want fries with that?" variety, of course. The rest of the jobs, where there's a shortage of workers, mostly require that you be able to think to some degree, because the jobs aren't routine. We now know how to program computers to do most routine jobs. But our schools don't know how to train students for the current job market, because they're based on methods that actively discourage independent thought and problem solving.
Stay tuned, though. This can't last forever. Maybe you'll live long enough to see the schools redesigned to better satisfy your society's needs. Of course, it'll be vicarious, and won't do you much good...
Nah; just about everywhere I've worked, 3 was the "standard". I've heard the saying "You can't see the fours for the threes." I've also been impressed by how emotional people can get over such trivia.
As someone who does a fair amount of web development, and often has to read/edit raw HTML, I've lately found it useful to set my vi(m) tab width to 2, to make the text more readable. I do have one of those little scripts that rewrites HTML (and XML) with tab indenting to show the nesting, and this helps a bit, but the nesting is often so extreme that it's all off the right edge. I prefer 3- or 4-char indenting, but that's no longer practical with the sort of HTML that I have to deal with. I'm wondering if there's another scheme that would make HTML more readable, but I haven't found one.
Also, I've recently been wondering if any of the common browsers allow setting their tab width. This includes all the things that behave like tabs and result in indentation such as we see in the slashdot discussions. Even with the smallest readable font size (12px) on this 1920x1200 screen, I've seen a lot of discussions here that become unreadable because even in a full-width window, the text is mostly just a thin column on the far right. Yeah, maybe I should stop reading the things that get into politics/religion, but they pop up everywhere. (And there's also that annoying thing that happens occasionally, that makes input boses like this one a very narrow column on the left.;-)
If I could set the tab width to 2, or maybe even 1, it would help solve the problem. I've looked around in several of the browsers I use on both my linux and Macbook machines, and I haven't found any tab-stop setting anywhere. Anyone know how to do this with your favorite browsers? Just FF or SM would be enough, though Opera and Safari would also be useful. IE is the last one I test against, so that's less important.;-)
What I was thinking was that the internet does provide a world wide (more or less) collaboration system where the people of the world have the opportunity to develop a cross platform philosophy where there is effort towards integrity of the one god or common consciousness...etc..
Well, good luck with that! History says that the opposite is more likely.
Consider that here in New England, the Unitarian Church came into existence as one of the factions in the breakup of the Puritan Church. Now, most people who hear this are baffled. How could the ultra-liberal Unitarian Church have formed from the Puritans? It's actually easy to explain.
The Puritans were anti-clerical. Part of their doctrine was that every man was supposed to read the Bible for himself. (We don't much know what women were supposed to do, other than obey their husbands.;-) The idea was that everyone who read the bible would come to the same ultra-authoritarian conclusions as the Puritan founders did. What actually happened was that everyone who read the Bible came to very different conclusions about what God was telling them. Eventually, this resulted in a total fracturing of Puritan society, as the various factions formed their own congregations based on their own beliefs.
An interesting part of this is that in much of New England, the main church in the town center is a Unitarian-Universalist church, and is usually labelled the "First Parish Church in <town>". When the parish was created, it was a Puritan church, of course, but the Unitarians were usually the richest and most powerful in the congregation, so they won the battle for control of the church. In most other cases, it was the Congregationalists who won the church, and of course they're now the second most liberal split-off from the Puritan Church.
There's a serious problem with expecting any sort of agreement on religious issues. Religion is based on "faith", i.e., acceptance of ideas without critical thinking or (more importantly) testing of their validity. This means that beliefs are based on what are essentially random decisions on what to pay attention to and how to interpret ambiguous wording. It's not possible for different people reading a large, dense text in a foreign language or a distant dialect of their own language to come to the same conclusions about the meaning of that text. When you have discussions, most people will also pick up pieces of what different authority figures say, and make their own (mis)interpretations of that as their beliefs.
So in areas of faith, reading the texts and having open discussions can't lead to any sort of general agreement. It always leads to the factionalism that we see in all religions not dominated by a very small group of authority figures (often just one person). A powerful central authority can impose faith in common beliefs; a distributed, open and free discussion never can. For that to happen requires the rejection of "faith", and instead depending on observation and reasoning. That's not religion at all; it's called science. The religious folks will never accept it (though they may accept some of the benefits it brings to society.)
Its time to properly address the issues and errors of our philosophies..... Imagine open source religion.
It's far too late for that; all the world's religions have been "open source" for centuries. It's true that as recently as 7 or 8 centuries back, the religious leaders did team up with the political leaders to introduce this new "copyright" concept, whose purpose was to limit the copying (by scribes mostly) of religious texts to a small number of carefully-controlled publishing houses. But then some interfering tech geeks developed printing presses, and pretty soon it was out of control.
Some of the first printed texts (and the topic of the first copyright trials and executions) were the major religious texts of the day. This eventually led to near-universal literacy in several parts of the world, and the leaders found it impossible to keep cheap copies of their religious texts out of the hands of people who could read the scriptures themselves. Life has been tough for the religious leaders ever since then, as the local monopolies over religious thought were lost.
Fact is, printed copies of all the world's religious texts have been widely available for going on half a millennium now. As with open-source software, it has led to both widespread forking of the religions and widespread understanding of how religions work. Or, more often, how they fail to work. (Just ask a few Catholics about their ban on priestly sex.) Nowadays, you can rapidly download most of the holy texts for free from somewhere on the Internet. And it's not hard to find online discussions of many of them. If not, you can easily start your own discussion (or religion).
Of course, most religious organizations probably haven't profited from this open publication. The story with software isn't quite as clear yet.
Since it should end up, again, more tolerable generally.
I wouldn't bet on that. To many religious people, one of the main points of having a religion is that it gives you an excuse to be intolerant of other people.
It has always seemed to me that if there is a God, He (or She or It) must be rather frustrated by this. After all, if we were created by such a being, it's pretty clear that we were designed to be highly variably in pretty much everything. So this purported God must find it rather annoying to be used to justify all the nasty stuff that His (Her/Its) followers routinely try to inflict on the world of complex and varied people.
OTOH, there are a few religious people around who are interesting to talk or listen to. Maybe the rest of us just need to learn to not answer the intolerant ones. We can just close the window and ignore them. So far, at least, there's not really much the religious intolerant types can actually do to us across the Net, except "flame" us in the sense that term's used on the Net. And the tolerant ones might be able to engage us in some interesting conversations.
Well, could bring a new definition to "flame war" when the comments section of the blog turns ugly.
We already have a term for such discussions: "religious".
(I was tempted to add a "smiley", but decided it would be inappropriate. What we need is more like an "evil grinney", but I don't know if there's an ASCII symbol for that.)
Yeah; it's interesting to read about the various steps that assorted government have made to adjust to the existence of the Internet. Eventually it'll be the universal data repository. But it's gonna take a while.
One problem in the US is that we're in the throes of a political ideology that wants to "privatize" everything. Even the Defense Dept has gone from subcontracting its physical supplies to subcontracting much of its military activity (notably in Iraq and Afghanistan) to private corporations. The handling of public notices has long been handled in the US by private publishers, for no apparent reason other than "tradition".
A few states like Alaska may switch to doing the job themselves, but in general we can expect strong pressure from the private publishing industry to block this move and pay them to continue to do it. A lot of the political crowd will agree with this, because they think the government should be strangled and everything should be done by private corporations. We read a lot of this ideology here, of course, but it's alive and well out in the general population, supported by a lot of PR from the private interests (who now have Supreme Court permission to invest as much money as they like in the campaigns;-).
It'll be interesting to see how it works out. One thing I'd think we can expect is that major newspapers are already fighting behind the scenes to preserve their traditional role as the publishers of record. I'd think that the Library of Congress would be a better agency to handle the job, but I'm just one person with no political power. And such decisions are never made on purely practical grounds; they are political power struggles. Politics tends to favor channeling money to the "right" private interests, i.e., the companies that have greased the right hands.
I would also say that there is no real journalism here either. Quoting things like 'A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers' individual sites.' without any analysis of what the underlying numbers are gives a very distorted impression
It's also highly ambiguous. My first thought on reading the summary (;-) was "Well, I click on lots of articles". But then I noticed that, with more careful reading, the summary could easily apply to me, too. After all, I don't click on all the links. I only click on a rather tiny minority of the links, because I don't have time to read them all. So for most of the articles, I do just scan the headlines. For a few, I note a source that I consider somewhat reliable (or interesting, not necessarily the same thing), and click on that link. For some stories, I click on the "all 497 news stories" link and look for sources that might write from an interesting different viewpoint. Sometimes I look at google news, think "I've already read about all those stories", and move on.
But for almost all the stories, I indeed to just scan the headlines. Just as most people have always done with newspapers. For some, I read the first paragraph or two, just as most people have always done with newspapers. There's a reason that people are taught to write a succinct "who, when, where,..." intro paragraph. Not just news people; I was taught that style back in junior high school. That way you can get the "what's happening to who where" out to most readers very quickly. If they're interested in the details, they can keep reading.
But it's been a long time since anyone has had the time to read all the news. It's no longer humanly possible, even for the fastest reader with the fasted net link. So of course we all mostly just scan the headlines. We pick out a few headlines for more details. But you can't tell from TFA's phrasing whether most of us never read past the headline. They just say "Nearly half of the users of Google News skim the headlines at the news aggregator site without clicking through..." without saying whether this is for all articles, 99% of them, 90%, or what. They probably don't know. Unless they can secretly turn on this Macbook's camera without the little red warning light coming on, they can't know where my eyes are pointed, so they can't even know how many headlines I look at. That "nearly half the users" seems to be claiming that they have indeed watched almost all Google News readers, but somehow I sorta doubt that statistic, too.
(And if they can access the little camera without me knowing, they've learned that I keep it covered with a small piece of tape.;-)
I thought that if they are being run out of business by online businesses, that publication of record should meet the same fate. Why must it be dead-tree that's publication of record?
Probably because for the next decade or so, our society will still be run by people to whom "publication" means on paper. Yes, we can (and almost certainly will) have all the information online, too. But society, especially the legal part of society, doesn't change all that fast.
Consider the phrase "publication of record". This essentially means that when something is published there, it's officially "known" to the legal system. Very often, the information has already been known to a lot of people, and may well have been published elsewhere. But it's only officially "known" when published in a publication of record. There's good reason for this. Without such official publications, someone could "publish" something in some obscure place in another state or country, and claim in court that it should have been known to everyone, because it had been published. Alternately, if you wanted something known and recognized, you could get it published in dozens of places, and still be sued for not having notified someone of your important fact. Getting your info in a "publication of record" means that nobody can sue you for hiding the facts from public knowledge. This isn't currently possible online, because anyone with access to a machine can quickly edit the text to say whatever they want it to say. Online articles can disappear in an instant, or morph into their opposite.
The legal field still pretty much doesn't "see" the online world. For many legal purposes, the Internet doesn't exist, or if it does, putting information there doesn't legally constitute "publishing" the info. (While in other cases, like music sharing, it does.;-) Until the legal system works out what the Internet is and what its rules are, society will still need its publications of record to be in the traditional form, which probably means the same hard-copy form (by the same publishers) that they've used in recent centuries.
And note that the online world still works on a month-by-month (or day-to-day) basis. The Internet can't be trusted to keep things for decades. You can't even reliably find something that was online a mere one decade ago. Or if you can, it's often in an obsolete, proprietary format that can't be interpreted correctly by currently-available software tools. There was a story a year or so back about the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) asking Microsoft for the last 10 years of their tax records, and Microsoft responding that they could no longer read the Word documents from that far back. It's possible that they were just lying, of course, but it's easy to believe that they were serious. The legal system won't tolerate a records-keeping system that has such short, unreliable memory. If it did, you'd have no assurance that the legal documents showing that you own your house are still available and say that it's your house. The computer industry has show little interest in making sure that such things are permanent and not easily editable by anyone. Until such things change, the legal system isn't likely to take us seriously, and will instead depend on the older means of keeping records.
The problem is that the "pay product printed on dead trees" was losing subscribers at a steady pace before they started producing the free digital product.
What I've found curious about this whole issue is that nearly all the commentary and discussions I've heard or read about it has settled on the problems of newspapers. It's as if they think that people have bought newspapers because they want the cheap, cruddy paper, and the news printed on it is just incidental decoration.
I've even heard/read a few discussions in which participants try to point out that people want the news, not the paper, and they are usually ignored.
So far, there doesn't seem to be much awareness of this in the "newspaper" industry. They seem to view the Net as something set up by troublemakers who have some sort of grudge against the newspapers, maybe by tree-huggers who use phrases like "dead-tree edition". I suspect that most people don't really care about the cheap newsprint kind of paper, or the trees that died to produce it. They're just interested in what's happening in the world, and will use the technology that provides the news in a convenient form.
The winners in this technology change will probably be the organizations that figure out that what people really want is the news, in the most convenient form. The real winners will be the ones like google, who figure out that they have to have advertising, but readers will go to the sources whose ads are unobtrusive. Most internet news sites are rather obnoxious with their ads, similar to their print editions. If have a Google News window on my screen, and the ads aren't blocked. I don't bother blocking them (though I have AdBlock installed), because they're so easy to ignore. And yes, I have clicked on them occasionally, when I was looking for something I wanted to buy. But mostly I've clicked on the "all 1023 news articles" links for interesting stories, because it's fun to read the spin various sources put on the stories. I've also learned a lot of sites to not bother with due to their obnoxious ads.
The New York Times is one of the better news sources for the ease of visually separating articles and ads, so it probably has a good chance of surviving. Unless their management decides to go the flash-ad route, in which case millions of us will simply stop visiting them.
(I wonder if the google folks have considered using the "obnoxicity level" of sites' ads as part of their page rank. For news sources, this could be a good way to help readers.;-)
Funny, but there's a serious aspect to this. The New York Times is a major "publication of record", and that has some important social and legal implications. Such publications can and do argue that they're performing a needed public service, and thus should be supported.
With the growing disappearance of dead-tree newspapers, a lot of areas are losing their publications of record. People who didn't even work for these newspapers are starting to point out that Something Should Be Done about this. And an obvious approach is a subsidy to support such publications.
Of course, a likely result of this process is that publications of record will become effective or real subsidiaries of the government(s) supplying the support. In the US, where there's a strong private corporation culture, the most likely eventual solution is the sort of pseudo-private regulated publications like the telecom companies, many so-called private utility companies, and (to make the ob auto analogy) the many private companies created to manage major toll roads.
It might be noted that in many other countries, this position is held by organizations other than newspapers. For example, it's common for religious organizations (church, temple, mosque, whatever) to maintain public records, including the various kinds of public announcements that newpapers publish here in the US. In other countries, it's all done by a government department, or sometimes by several different departments. In those countries, the newspapers probably will die out as the Net takes over all their business at a much lower cost.
I strongly believe that beyond an initial marketing push, if a product is truly good, it can sell itself.
Well, we do have the computer field as a major counterexample. The best-selling computer system for a long time has been MS Windows, which has always been the crappiest product available. They're a prime example of an old business guideline: The best way to be a major vendor is to have the biggest advertising budget. If you have that, there's no point on paying extra money to have a good product, because it won't get you a significant increase in sales. Only a tiny part of the market understands how to judge quality, and you can safely leave those sales to the small companies that will never be large.
Of course, the telephone business has long worked on a different basis. Their business plan has always been to make deals with governmental authorities to get a local monopoly wherever possible. Then quality doesn't matter because the regulators will guarantee that you always have a profit and no competitors.
At present, there is a small amount of competition allowed in the recently-developed wireless phone market. But this is only a temporary situation. The phone companies are hard at work on mergers and acquisitions, plus "campaign contributions" to reestablish regulated local monopolies. So we can expect that fairly soon they'll be back to their normal non-competitive situation. AT&T's only real problem is management that hasn't heard about the competitive market. But this is only a temporary situation.
"We're the Phone Company. We don't care. We don't have to."
Reminds me of the scenario of someone walking down the sidewalk humming or whistling a tune, resulting in their arrest and prosecution for unauthorized public performance of a copyrighted work.
In my experience, bad ideas aren't exclusive to any particular group. Good ideas aren't either. "Us vs. Them" produces a lot of heat, but no light.
True in general. But it helps a lot if you can get a number of "eyes" looking at what you're trying to produce. This is easier to do in an "open" development setting. Most of the corporate development I've been involved in has blocked my access to actual users, ensuring that our small team would mostly build for someone with knowledge similar to ours. The first releases would inevitably baffle the customers, of course, and we'd have to move on to a redesign phase. This can easily take some time if there are organizational barriers designed to minimize the actual contact between developers and users. OTOH, in the "open" projects I've been involved in, I've always been able to talk to end users. There are still communication barriers, since we don't generally talk the same language. But problems are a lot easier to solve when you can communicate directly and get ideas from a wide variety of people.
I suppose understanding this requires giving up the idea that there's one perfect way to create new things. But many people do seem to like the One True Way approach, and condemn anyone who wants to try a variety of ideas to see what works.
Interesting, because I have a number of paperback books published in the 1950's Well, worn, but still just as readable as the day they were printed.
You must be a proverbial gentle reader.;-) Actually, I have a few paperback from the 60's that are still in "fair" shape. OTOH, I have a dictionary that is less than 10 years old that's falling apart.
How do you read 60 year old data? For the most part the hardware no longer exists to read data from 1950s - 1960s computers. If I buy an e-book today will I be able to reread it in 2070? If I buy a paper book, I will.
That's a very good point. Just yesterday, my wife was talking to someone in an org that we're helping build a web site, and she asked them if we could get ahold of some old newsletters, meeting minutes, etc. The answer was yes, but they're all on floppy disks. We looked around, and we don't have a floppy disk reader any more; our purge of old machines in the basement last Spring got rid of them. They called around to the org's board, and couldn't find anyone with a floppy reader. Maybe someone still has one, or we can get one from Amazon that might work. Then there's the problem that they're mostly in old Word Doc formats, which current releases of Word are notoriously reluctant to accept. (Also, Microsoft's recent patents on their formats may have made it a federal crime to "decrypt" them and put their contents online.;-)
If we can manage to extract the files, we can save a lot of the org's history. We'll put it online, and let archive.org and google back them up;-). There's a growing realization that the only way to preserve our history now is to keep everything on multiple live filesystems, preferably online, and migrate it to successive storage hardware memory hardware as they come available.
Hard copy has problems, too. It's easy for religious or political power groups to find and burn. If not, it's easy to get stored in a damp basement where the mildew eats it, or in an attic where the squirrels make it into a nest.
But for commercially published stuff, a dead-tree edition might be the best for long-term survival. If you can get anyone to publish and sell your stuff, which isn't true for 99% of the stuff that'll be interesting to historians centuries from now.
Slashdot Mirror
[W]e real people still have criminal law. Wouldn't want to treat corporations equally in that sense, would we!
Reminds me of a study I read about, back in the 1980s I think, of the legal punishments of corporations convicted for actions in which people died. The bottom line turned out to be that the fines imposed by the courts amounted to somewhat over $300 per death. They also didn't find any cases in which the corporation's officers were tried for anything.
There's been a bit more inflation since then, but also a few decades of "conservative" dominance in the US government. I wonder what the average punishment for corporate homicide might be today. A few quick googles didn't turn up anything very relevant, but maybe I didn't guess the right keywords.
I've been involved in a number of projects that were prototyped in a scripting language (usually perl or python) and then rewritten in C for performance, with the disappointing result that the C code ran slower. I've also seen the same with C -> assembly a few times.
The explanation is fairly straightforward. The low-level-language experts (including me a few times) may have known their language well, but they'd never looked into the perl/python/cc code to learn the algorithms used there. It turned out that the implementers of perl/python/cc have developed some rather sophisticated algorithms for some of the time-wasting operations (e.g. table lookup) that were unknown to the asm programmers.
If they'd recoded the same algorithm used in the interpreters and compilers for the higher languages, they'd probably have won the contest, because there's no doubt that there's still some wasted cpu time in the higher languages' code. But, as others have pointed out, very often the algorithm used is a better predictor of speed than the language used.
So high-level vs. low-level language is a bit of a bogus distinction. The actual speed of the code is a combination of the algorithm and the efficiency of the implementation of the language. And some languages have several implementations with different efficiencies.
What I notice is that the headline and most of the discussion here talk about the security of "IE", while the Home Office said "the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer". There seems to be little understanding that these aren't synonyms.
But does anyone here work for an organization of any sort (government, industry, academia, whatever) that requires that everyone use "the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer"?
In all the cases that I know of, when there's such standardization, it's for releases that existed shortly before the standard was established. It's now years later, and the standard is still in place (though often violated by workers who want better security or more features).
A number of people have written about organizations that are still standardized on IE6 and don't permit upgrades to IE8. Is there any data available on how widespread this might be? In my experience, such data is hard to come by, since both governments and private corporations tend to be secretive about their inner workings.
So could the Home Office be pushing for upgrades to W7+IE8? Nah; I thought not.
The committee provides plausible deniability wherein any single member can say "I didn't agree with the decision, but the committee decided...".
Welcome to the cosy sheltered world of civil service. People who work there genuinely couldn't survive in the 'real world' of private business/industry!
Oh, I dunno about that. I've worked in private industry for a few decades, doing software development, and I've heard exactly this line of reasoning repeatedly. I doubt that it has anything to do with government, industry, or whatever; it's just the natural behavior of humans in groups. It's not at all unusual for a group of humans to make a decision that's contrary to the interests of every member of the group. The processes that cause this are pretty well understood. It's the common CYA scenario, in which no individual can be blamed for the group's poor decision.
There's an old saying to the effect that, when faced with alternatives, the wise leader is the one who can avoid choosing the worst. I've read variants of this from a number of different "cultures". It may be that the best that humans working in groups are capable of is choosing the second-worst.
In this story, various replies seem to imply that the UK government hasn't even managed this much, since it appears that there are large parts of that government that have "standardized" on IE6. Again, this isn't just government; I could name (but won't out of pity for the workers) a number of US corporations that have exactly the same "standard". My wife works for a major medical corporation that has done this. She runs XP (virtualized on her home iMac ;-), and its browser is IE6, because that's what her employer requires all employees to use. They also now require their IT workers to work at home about half time, so they have to have XP+IE6 on both their office and home machines. I use her machine occasionally to do web testing against IE6 because that's what a lot of my clients' customers use.
Yes, things really are that bad.
No, that wasn't it, though that's a pretty good comment that's similar.
The satirical skit I remember had a scene like this:
Host: Who wrote "Grapes of Wrath"
Contestant: John Steinbeck
BZZZZT!
Host: Wrong; the correct answer is "Hemingway".
(Contestant looks around with a puzzled expression, while the host explains that their survey showed that N% of the people asked said that Hemingway wrote Grapes of Wrath, where N was something > 50.)
I wouldn't be surprised if there were a number of other satires along this line, since many people do believe that questions of fact can be determined by asking people and accepting the most common answer as correct. So it's an obvious topic for satire.
The only way this code would make sense is if it were written in INTERCAL and you interpret step 5 as an unconditional COME FROM statement. In any other imperative language's semantics, step 5 would have undefined behaviour. In most declarative languages, the test would result in a unification failure or a type system violation and not run.
No, I don't think so. Step 5 would simply compile to nothing. This would correctly implement "Do not perform steps 2-4" at the step 5 position in the code. The code for steps 2-4 would be unaffected by this.
Step 6 would presumably be translated to a call on the exit routine, exit(0) in C or perl.
OTOH, I liked the INTERCAL translation. It was the first thing I thought of, too. But I don't think it's actually correct for this particular test. After all, doing that would constitute performing step 5 while still in step 1, and that would violate the instructions in step 1.
Isn't language lawyerism fun?
Your science teacher most likely knew you were right. But, if you are smart enough to figure it out, you were also smart enough to know the intent of the lesson.
This is a bit of reasoning that I've always sorta liked, in a "sick humor" sort of way. My favorite example was on one of the national tests here in the US (maybe the PSAT, but I'm not sure) back in the 1970s. It had a question with two "right" answers, one using Newton's mechanics, the other using Einstein's Relativity (whether Special or General I don't remember). But the test's scoring marked the Relativistic answer as wrong. When questioned about this, the test makers gave the same answer: A high-school student smart enough to understand Relativity should be smart enough to know not to use it.
Since then, I've asked a number of high-school teachers and admins, and every one of them has agreed with this. But it's an especially interesting case, because it's well understood that when Newton's and Einstein's equations differ, Newton's are wrong and Einstein's are right. (For now, anyway, until someone comes across an exception to Einstein's equations. ;-)
So our teachers and testers are agreeing that students who know the correct answer to a question should be smart enough to know to give the wrong answer when there's reason to expect that other people would give the wrong answer.
Now, I can understand why people might think this way. But given this sort of lesson, I think it's probably a good thing that, for instance, I'm driving a car not built by an American manufacturer by workers trained to follow such guidelines, or that the hardware in the computer I'm typing this on wasn't manufactured in an American factory. They'd have been built by people who carefully avoid the use of advanced science when it conflicts with the mistaken ideas held by an authority figure like a teacher, test maker or boss.
But it is funny, in a very sad sort of way, to run across the concept in the above quote. It tells us a lot about why things are so screwed up in our world.
(There was also a spoof skit on this some time back, in which the "correct" answers in a TV contest were determined by a survey. Anyone remember what that skit was? Is it on youtube?)
"NUMBERED steps ARE meant to be done sequentially. Otherwise they wouldn't be numbered. People who don't get that are part of the problem, not part of the solution."
I don't think that's at all true. Almost every tests I've ever seen has had numbered questions. If the above were true, then if I had ever skipped over a question, I'd have violated the rule, and gotten no credit for answering later questions. This has never happened during my many years of schooling. So I'd conclude that numbering the questions never implies that they must be done sequentially. It's just a convenient label, so that you can refer to a specific question during discussions.
When you finish reading everything, you finish executing instruction 1, and can safely go on and execute instruction 2.
Yeah; this is what I've always deduced from such instructions. And, in this example, after you've read all the instructions, and also done all the actions in steps 2-4, you then go on to step 5. This one tells you to not do 2-4, so you don't do them. It makes sense to not do those actions in step 5, since you've already done them in steps 2-4. Since step 5 doesn't tell you to actually do anything (just to not do something), you've finished step 5, and go on to the next step.
The only real problem with the instructions are in step 6. "Finish test" contains no information on how they expect you to do that. You can guess that they mean to leave the room, but that isn't stated, and might not have been when is expected. Do they want you to sign the test paper and hand it in to someone, as is common with tests? Maybe, but that's usually because they want to grade you on the answers you've written to questions, and there are no questions in this test that require writing anything. Maybe "Finish test" means "Sit and wait for further instructions." You can't tell.
This "test" is a good example of how easy it is to write English that's ambiguous and confusing to most readers. Especially since, as others have pointed out, there's no general convention that the "questions" on tests be done in any particular order. You wouldn't even expect computer programmers to do them in sequence, although that's how a computer would do them. It's generally acceptable to not do items on tests that you don't know how to do; it just gives you a zero for that item. Tests usually aren't graded by whether you did the items in order, just on how many of them you did correctly. Under this convention, it would be correct for someone taking this test to perform any subset of the actions in steps 2-4 (and also get credit for not doing any of 2-4 during step 5).
Actually, this test is mostly a good exercise for language lawyers.
Who else would hack one of the most successful companies in the world only to read the e-mails of Human Rights Activists in China? What possible gain could anyone else have from this information? ... ...
Someone who is trying to discredit China?
Someone trying to say that someone is trying to discredit China?
All of the above?
Politics does have a tendency to produce gang-bangs.
Public school is a system intended to create soldiers and factory workers, and guess what? Most of the factories are gone. What's left?
Actually, if you look where the factories have gone, and look into the factories, you'll find something even more devastating for our school system: The factories don't contain many people any more. They're mostly full of robots. The few humans are there to tend to the robots, which means that they have a pretty good technical education.
The days of training kids to take robot-like factory jobs are over, and the schools that teach that way are now producing graduates trained for a lifetime of unemployment. But it'll take a few more generations of school kids moving on to unemployment before the message gets out to the schools' administrations.
There are still jobs available of the "You want fries with that?" variety, of course. The rest of the jobs, where there's a shortage of workers, mostly require that you be able to think to some degree, because the jobs aren't routine. We now know how to program computers to do most routine jobs. But our schools don't know how to train students for the current job market, because they're based on methods that actively discourage independent thought and problem solving.
Stay tuned, though. This can't last forever. Maybe you'll live long enough to see the schools redesigned to better satisfy your society's needs. Of course, it'll be vicarious, and won't do you much good ...
4 spaces or death.
Nah; just about everywhere I've worked, 3 was the "standard". I've heard the saying "You can't see the fours for the threes." I've also been impressed by how emotional people can get over such trivia.
As someone who does a fair amount of web development, and often has to read/edit raw HTML, I've lately found it useful to set my vi(m) tab width to 2, to make the text more readable. I do have one of those little scripts that rewrites HTML (and XML) with tab indenting to show the nesting, and this helps a bit, but the nesting is often so extreme that it's all off the right edge. I prefer 3- or 4-char indenting, but that's no longer practical with the sort of HTML that I have to deal with. I'm wondering if there's another scheme that would make HTML more readable, but I haven't found one.
Also, I've recently been wondering if any of the common browsers allow setting their tab width. This includes all the things that behave like tabs and result in indentation such as we see in the slashdot discussions. Even with the smallest readable font size (12px) on this 1920x1200 screen, I've seen a lot of discussions here that become unreadable because even in a full-width window, the text is mostly just a thin column on the far right. Yeah, maybe I should stop reading the things that get into politics/religion, but they pop up everywhere. (And there's also that annoying thing that happens occasionally, that makes input boses like this one a very narrow column on the left. ;-)
If I could set the tab width to 2, or maybe even 1, it would help solve the problem. I've looked around in several of the browsers I use on both my linux and Macbook machines, and I haven't found any tab-stop setting anywhere. Anyone know how to do this with your favorite browsers? Just FF or SM would be enough, though Opera and Safari would also be useful. IE is the last one I test against, so that's less important. ;-)
What I was thinking was that the internet does provide a world wide (more or less) collaboration system where the people of the world have the opportunity to develop a cross platform philosophy where there is effort towards integrity of the one god or common consciousness ...etc..
Well, good luck with that! History says that the opposite is more likely.
Consider that here in New England, the Unitarian Church came into existence as one of the factions in the breakup of the Puritan Church. Now, most people who hear this are baffled. How could the ultra-liberal Unitarian Church have formed from the Puritans? It's actually easy to explain.
The Puritans were anti-clerical. Part of their doctrine was that every man was supposed to read the Bible for himself. (We don't much know what women were supposed to do, other than obey their husbands. ;-) The idea was that everyone who read the bible would come to the same ultra-authoritarian conclusions as the Puritan founders did. What actually happened was that everyone who read the Bible came to very different conclusions about what God was telling them. Eventually, this resulted in a total fracturing of Puritan society, as the various factions formed their own congregations based on their own beliefs.
An interesting part of this is that in much of New England, the main church in the town center is a Unitarian-Universalist church, and is usually labelled the "First Parish Church in <town>". When the parish was created, it was a Puritan church, of course, but the Unitarians were usually the richest and most powerful in the congregation, so they won the battle for control of the church. In most other cases, it was the Congregationalists who won the church, and of course they're now the second most liberal split-off from the Puritan Church.
There's a serious problem with expecting any sort of agreement on religious issues. Religion is based on "faith", i.e., acceptance of ideas without critical thinking or (more importantly) testing of their validity. This means that beliefs are based on what are essentially random decisions on what to pay attention to and how to interpret ambiguous wording. It's not possible for different people reading a large, dense text in a foreign language or a distant dialect of their own language to come to the same conclusions about the meaning of that text. When you have discussions, most people will also pick up pieces of what different authority figures say, and make their own (mis)interpretations of that as their beliefs.
So in areas of faith, reading the texts and having open discussions can't lead to any sort of general agreement. It always leads to the factionalism that we see in all religions not dominated by a very small group of authority figures (often just one person). A powerful central authority can impose faith in common beliefs; a distributed, open and free discussion never can. For that to happen requires the rejection of "faith", and instead depending on observation and reasoning. That's not religion at all; it's called science. The religious folks will never accept it (though they may accept some of the benefits it brings to society.)
Its time to properly address the issues and errors of our philosophies..... Imagine open source religion.
It's far too late for that; all the world's religions have been "open source" for centuries. It's true that as recently as 7 or 8 centuries back, the religious leaders did team up with the political leaders to introduce this new "copyright" concept, whose purpose was to limit the copying (by scribes mostly) of religious texts to a small number of carefully-controlled publishing houses. But then some interfering tech geeks developed printing presses, and pretty soon it was out of control.
Some of the first printed texts (and the topic of the first copyright trials and executions) were the major religious texts of the day. This eventually led to near-universal literacy in several parts of the world, and the leaders found it impossible to keep cheap copies of their religious texts out of the hands of people who could read the scriptures themselves. Life has been tough for the religious leaders ever since then, as the local monopolies over religious thought were lost.
Fact is, printed copies of all the world's religious texts have been widely available for going on half a millennium now. As with open-source software, it has led to both widespread forking of the religions and widespread understanding of how religions work. Or, more often, how they fail to work. (Just ask a few Catholics about their ban on priestly sex.) Nowadays, you can rapidly download most of the holy texts for free from somewhere on the Internet. And it's not hard to find online discussions of many of them. If not, you can easily start your own discussion (or religion).
Of course, most religious organizations probably haven't profited from this open publication. The story with software isn't quite as clear yet.
Since it should end up, again, more tolerable generally.
I wouldn't bet on that. To many religious people, one of the main points of having a religion is that it gives you an excuse to be intolerant of other people.
It has always seemed to me that if there is a God, He (or She or It) must be rather frustrated by this. After all, if we were created by such a being, it's pretty clear that we were designed to be highly variably in pretty much everything. So this purported God must find it rather annoying to be used to justify all the nasty stuff that His (Her/Its) followers routinely try to inflict on the world of complex and varied people.
OTOH, there are a few religious people around who are interesting to talk or listen to. Maybe the rest of us just need to learn to not answer the intolerant ones. We can just close the window and ignore them. So far, at least, there's not really much the religious intolerant types can actually do to us across the Net, except "flame" us in the sense that term's used on the Net. And the tolerant ones might be able to engage us in some interesting conversations.
Well, could bring a new definition to "flame war" when the comments section of the blog turns ugly.
We already have a term for such discussions: "religious".
(I was tempted to add a "smiley", but decided it would be inappropriate. What we need is more like an "evil grinney", but I don't know if there's an ASCII symbol for that.)
Yeah; it's interesting to read about the various steps that assorted government have made to adjust to the existence of the Internet. Eventually it'll be the universal data repository. But it's gonna take a while.
One problem in the US is that we're in the throes of a political ideology that wants to "privatize" everything. Even the Defense Dept has gone from subcontracting its physical supplies to subcontracting much of its military activity (notably in Iraq and Afghanistan) to private corporations. The handling of public notices has long been handled in the US by private publishers, for no apparent reason other than "tradition".
A few states like Alaska may switch to doing the job themselves, but in general we can expect strong pressure from the private publishing industry to block this move and pay them to continue to do it. A lot of the political crowd will agree with this, because they think the government should be strangled and everything should be done by private corporations. We read a lot of this ideology here, of course, but it's alive and well out in the general population, supported by a lot of PR from the private interests (who now have Supreme Court permission to invest as much money as they like in the campaigns ;-).
It'll be interesting to see how it works out. One thing I'd think we can expect is that major newspapers are already fighting behind the scenes to preserve their traditional role as the publishers of record. I'd think that the Library of Congress would be a better agency to handle the job, but I'm just one person with no political power. And such decisions are never made on purely practical grounds; they are political power struggles. Politics tends to favor channeling money to the "right" private interests, i.e., the companies that have greased the right hands.
It'll be interesting ...
I would also say that there is no real journalism here either. Quoting things like 'A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers' individual sites.' without any analysis of what the underlying numbers are gives a very distorted impression
It's also highly ambiguous. My first thought on reading the summary (;-) was "Well, I click on lots of articles". But then I noticed that, with more careful reading, the summary could easily apply to me, too. After all, I don't click on all the links. I only click on a rather tiny minority of the links, because I don't have time to read them all. So for most of the articles, I do just scan the headlines. For a few, I note a source that I consider somewhat reliable (or interesting, not necessarily the same thing), and click on that link. For some stories, I click on the "all 497 news stories" link and look for sources that might write from an interesting different viewpoint. Sometimes I look at google news, think "I've already read about all those stories", and move on.
But for almost all the stories, I indeed to just scan the headlines. Just as most people have always done with newspapers. For some, I read the first paragraph or two, just as most people have always done with newspapers. There's a reason that people are taught to write a succinct "who, when, where, ..." intro paragraph. Not just news people; I was taught that style back in junior high school. That way you can get the "what's happening to who where" out to most readers very quickly. If they're interested in the details, they can keep reading.
But it's been a long time since anyone has had the time to read all the news. It's no longer humanly possible, even for the fastest reader with the fasted net link. So of course we all mostly just scan the headlines. We pick out a few headlines for more details. But you can't tell from TFA's phrasing whether most of us never read past the headline. They just say "Nearly half of the users of Google News skim the headlines at the news aggregator site without clicking through ..." without saying whether this is for all articles, 99% of them, 90%, or what. They probably don't know. Unless they can secretly turn on this Macbook's camera without the little red warning light coming on, they can't know where my eyes are pointed, so they can't even know how many headlines I look at. That "nearly half the users" seems to be claiming that they have indeed watched almost all Google News readers, but somehow I sorta doubt that statistic, too.
(And if they can access the little camera without me knowing, they've learned that I keep it covered with a small piece of tape. ;-)
I thought that if they are being run out of business by online businesses, that publication of record should meet the same fate. Why must it be dead-tree that's publication of record?
Probably because for the next decade or so, our society will still be run by people to whom "publication" means on paper. Yes, we can (and almost certainly will) have all the information online, too. But society, especially the legal part of society, doesn't change all that fast.
Consider the phrase "publication of record". This essentially means that when something is published there, it's officially "known" to the legal system. Very often, the information has already been known to a lot of people, and may well have been published elsewhere. But it's only officially "known" when published in a publication of record. There's good reason for this. Without such official publications, someone could "publish" something in some obscure place in another state or country, and claim in court that it should have been known to everyone, because it had been published. Alternately, if you wanted something known and recognized, you could get it published in dozens of places, and still be sued for not having notified someone of your important fact. Getting your info in a "publication of record" means that nobody can sue you for hiding the facts from public knowledge. This isn't currently possible online, because anyone with access to a machine can quickly edit the text to say whatever they want it to say. Online articles can disappear in an instant, or morph into their opposite.
The legal field still pretty much doesn't "see" the online world. For many legal purposes, the Internet doesn't exist, or if it does, putting information there doesn't legally constitute "publishing" the info. (While in other cases, like music sharing, it does. ;-) Until the legal system works out what the Internet is and what its rules are, society will still need its publications of record to be in the traditional form, which probably means the same hard-copy form (by the same publishers) that they've used in recent centuries.
And note that the online world still works on a month-by-month (or day-to-day) basis. The Internet can't be trusted to keep things for decades. You can't even reliably find something that was online a mere one decade ago. Or if you can, it's often in an obsolete, proprietary format that can't be interpreted correctly by currently-available software tools. There was a story a year or so back about the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) asking Microsoft for the last 10 years of their tax records, and Microsoft responding that they could no longer read the Word documents from that far back. It's possible that they were just lying, of course, but it's easy to believe that they were serious. The legal system won't tolerate a records-keeping system that has such short, unreliable memory. If it did, you'd have no assurance that the legal documents showing that you own your house are still available and say that it's your house. The computer industry has show little interest in making sure that such things are permanent and not easily editable by anyone. Until such things change, the legal system isn't likely to take us seriously, and will instead depend on the older means of keeping records.
The problem is that the "pay product printed on dead trees" was losing subscribers at a steady pace before they started producing the free digital product.
What I've found curious about this whole issue is that nearly all the commentary and discussions I've heard or read about it has settled on the problems of newspapers. It's as if they think that people have bought newspapers because they want the cheap, cruddy paper, and the news printed on it is just incidental decoration.
I've even heard/read a few discussions in which participants try to point out that people want the news, not the paper, and they are usually ignored.
So far, there doesn't seem to be much awareness of this in the "newspaper" industry. They seem to view the Net as something set up by troublemakers who have some sort of grudge against the newspapers, maybe by tree-huggers who use phrases like "dead-tree edition". I suspect that most people don't really care about the cheap newsprint kind of paper, or the trees that died to produce it. They're just interested in what's happening in the world, and will use the technology that provides the news in a convenient form.
The winners in this technology change will probably be the organizations that figure out that what people really want is the news, in the most convenient form. The real winners will be the ones like google, who figure out that they have to have advertising, but readers will go to the sources whose ads are unobtrusive. Most internet news sites are rather obnoxious with their ads, similar to their print editions. If have a Google News window on my screen, and the ads aren't blocked. I don't bother blocking them (though I have AdBlock installed), because they're so easy to ignore. And yes, I have clicked on them occasionally, when I was looking for something I wanted to buy. But mostly I've clicked on the "all 1023 news articles" links for interesting stories, because it's fun to read the spin various sources put on the stories. I've also learned a lot of sites to not bother with due to their obnoxious ads.
The New York Times is one of the better news sources for the ease of visually separating articles and ads, so it probably has a good chance of surviving. Unless their management decides to go the flash-ad route, in which case millions of us will simply stop visiting them.
(I wonder if the google folks have considered using the "obnoxicity level" of sites' ads as part of their page rank. For news sources, this could be a good way to help readers. ;-)
But they're too big to fail! ...
Funny, but there's a serious aspect to this. The New York Times is a major "publication of record", and that has some important social and legal implications. Such publications can and do argue that they're performing a needed public service, and thus should be supported.
With the growing disappearance of dead-tree newspapers, a lot of areas are losing their publications of record. People who didn't even work for these newspapers are starting to point out that Something Should Be Done about this. And an obvious approach is a subsidy to support such publications.
Of course, a likely result of this process is that publications of record will become effective or real subsidiaries of the government(s) supplying the support. In the US, where there's a strong private corporation culture, the most likely eventual solution is the sort of pseudo-private regulated publications like the telecom companies, many so-called private utility companies, and (to make the ob auto analogy) the many private companies created to manage major toll roads.
It might be noted that in many other countries, this position is held by organizations other than newspapers. For example, it's common for religious organizations (church, temple, mosque, whatever) to maintain public records, including the various kinds of public announcements that newpapers publish here in the US. In other countries, it's all done by a government department, or sometimes by several different departments. In those countries, the newspapers probably will die out as the Net takes over all their business at a much lower cost.
I strongly believe that beyond an initial marketing push, if a product is truly good, it can sell itself.
Well, we do have the computer field as a major counterexample. The best-selling computer system for a long time has been MS Windows, which has always been the crappiest product available. They're a prime example of an old business guideline: The best way to be a major vendor is to have the biggest advertising budget. If you have that, there's no point on paying extra money to have a good product, because it won't get you a significant increase in sales. Only a tiny part of the market understands how to judge quality, and you can safely leave those sales to the small companies that will never be large.
Of course, the telephone business has long worked on a different basis. Their business plan has always been to make deals with governmental authorities to get a local monopoly wherever possible. Then quality doesn't matter because the regulators will guarantee that you always have a profit and no competitors.
At present, there is a small amount of competition allowed in the recently-developed wireless phone market. But this is only a temporary situation. The phone companies are hard at work on mergers and acquisitions, plus "campaign contributions" to reestablish regulated local monopolies. So we can expect that fairly soon they'll be back to their normal non-competitive situation. AT&T's only real problem is management that hasn't heard about the competitive market. But this is only a temporary situation.
"We're the Phone Company. We don't care. We don't have to."
Reminds me of the scenario of someone walking down the sidewalk humming or whistling a tune, resulting in their arrest and prosecution for unauthorized public performance of a copyrighted work.
It's only a matter of time ...
In my experience, bad ideas aren't exclusive to any particular group. Good ideas aren't either. "Us vs. Them" produces a lot of heat, but no light.
True in general. But it helps a lot if you can get a number of "eyes" looking at what you're trying to produce. This is easier to do in an "open" development setting. Most of the corporate development I've been involved in has blocked my access to actual users, ensuring that our small team would mostly build for someone with knowledge similar to ours. The first releases would inevitably baffle the customers, of course, and we'd have to move on to a redesign phase. This can easily take some time if there are organizational barriers designed to minimize the actual contact between developers and users. OTOH, in the "open" projects I've been involved in, I've always been able to talk to end users. There are still communication barriers, since we don't generally talk the same language. But problems are a lot easier to solve when you can communicate directly and get ideas from a wide variety of people.
I suppose understanding this requires giving up the idea that there's one perfect way to create new things. But many people do seem to like the One True Way approach, and condemn anyone who wants to try a variety of ideas to see what works.
Interesting, because I have a number of paperback books published in the 1950's Well, worn, but still just as readable as the day they were printed.
You must be a proverbial gentle reader. ;-) Actually, I have a few paperback from the 60's that are still in "fair" shape. OTOH, I have a dictionary that is less than 10 years old that's falling apart.
How do you read 60 year old data? For the most part the hardware no longer exists to read data from 1950s - 1960s computers. If I buy an e-book today will I be able to reread it in 2070? If I buy a paper book, I will.
That's a very good point. Just yesterday, my wife was talking to someone in an org that we're helping build a web site, and she asked them if we could get ahold of some old newsletters, meeting minutes, etc. The answer was yes, but they're all on floppy disks. We looked around, and we don't have a floppy disk reader any more; our purge of old machines in the basement last Spring got rid of them. They called around to the org's board, and couldn't find anyone with a floppy reader. Maybe someone still has one, or we can get one from Amazon that might work. Then there's the problem that they're mostly in old Word Doc formats, which current releases of Word are notoriously reluctant to accept. (Also, Microsoft's recent patents on their formats may have made it a federal crime to "decrypt" them and put their contents online. ;-)
If we can manage to extract the files, we can save a lot of the org's history. We'll put it online, and let archive.org and google back them up ;-). There's a growing realization that the only way to preserve our history now is to keep everything on multiple live filesystems, preferably online, and migrate it to successive storage hardware memory hardware as they come available.
Hard copy has problems, too. It's easy for religious or political power groups to find and burn. If not, it's easy to get stored in a damp basement where the mildew eats it, or in an attic where the squirrels make it into a nest.
But for commercially published stuff, a dead-tree edition might be the best for long-term survival. If you can get anyone to publish and sell your stuff, which isn't true for 99% of the stuff that'll be interesting to historians centuries from now.