It took me all of twenty minutes to write a brief, thoughtful letter and use the handy-dandy merge function on Nisus Writer 5.0 to create a document to be sent to my two U.S. senators and state attorney general.
This is the same issue that's going on with copyright law: large corporations with resources far beyond any individual and most sovereign nations on the planet are controlling the political dialogue. Yeah, I hate Microsoft, too, but it goes beyond that.
Don't just sit on your arse bitching to other/.ers -- spend twenty minutes and US$1.05 on postage.
Ob. Usage: the word is "copyright" not "copywrite". If you hold a copyright to something, that means you have secured the rights to copy and distribute that thing. That thing has been "copyrighted." Sounds funny, but that's the way it is.
Sure, many people had glowing visions of what the 'net would do for society and, seven years after the mass mobilization towards those visions, not all of the predictions have panned out.
Isn't this about par for the course? I mean, the net itself is an incredibly complex system, and here a lot of us were trying to predict its behavior in and effect on an even more complex system -- human society.
That we got some of it wrong -- no, that some of the things we predicted did not happen when we said they would -- should not be unnerving or surprising.
And I dispute that Napster has had a small effect. While Napster as a service may be done, nobody is just going to "forget" about the possibilities it spawned... does anyone really believe that the record companies can put the genie back in the bottle? Do millions of people not think differently about intellectual property and the power of oligopolies because of the attention Napster has received in mainstream media?
I think we have a tendancy to think of revolutions as events that can be easily summed up in a chapter in a history book. Revolutions take time, and I think we're still in the midst of one -- too close to make sweeping declarations that the revolution is over, and that it didn't matter.
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It took me all of twenty minutes to write a brief, thoughtful letter and use the handy-dandy merge function on Nisus Writer 5.0 to create a document to be sent to my two U.S. senators and state attorney general.
/.ers -- spend twenty minutes and US$1.05 on postage.
This is the same issue that's going on with copyright law: large corporations with resources far beyond any individual and most sovereign nations on the planet are controlling the political dialogue. Yeah, I hate Microsoft, too, but it goes beyond that.
Don't just sit on your arse bitching to other
Silence implies acceptance.
Ob. Usage: the word is "copyright" not "copywrite". If you hold a copyright to something, that means you have secured the rights to copy and distribute that thing. That thing has been "copyrighted." Sounds funny, but that's the way it is.
Zope is cool. Python is cool. But neither have the marketing budget of IIS and ASP.
As Tim the Enchanter once said to a group of incredulous knights... "Just look at the bones!"
Sure, many people had glowing visions of what the 'net would do for society and, seven years after the mass mobilization towards those visions, not all of the predictions have panned out.
Isn't this about par for the course? I mean, the net itself is an incredibly complex system, and here a lot of us were trying to predict its behavior in and effect on an even more complex system -- human society.
That we got some of it wrong -- no, that some of the things we predicted did not happen when we said they would -- should not be unnerving or surprising.
And I dispute that Napster has had a small effect. While Napster as a service may be done, nobody is just going to "forget" about the possibilities it spawned... does anyone really believe that the record companies can put the genie back in the bottle? Do millions of people not think differently about intellectual property and the power of oligopolies because of the attention Napster has received in mainstream media?
I think we have a tendancy to think of revolutions as events that can be easily summed up in a chapter in a history book. Revolutions take time, and I think we're still in the midst of one -- too close to make sweeping declarations that the revolution is over, and that it didn't matter.