tech != learning. Fancy, expensive computers and organizers don't help most people in the lecture hall or seminar room. Lots of folks have gone into why: the imput for paper & pen(cil) is fast and flexible. You can do what works for you, and you can do it fast. Think you can take calculus notes on a laptop? Think again. In a hard class, you don't want to have to wrestle with your input device. The time you spend trying to remember how to work your fancy little widget is time you can't spend drumming Green's Theorem into your head.
Laptops get lifted, both in your room and outside of it. At big public universities they will grow legs in five minutes. Where I work and study, laptops get ripped off grad student offices in the time it takes the poor sleep-deprived bastards to get their coffee from the crap machine down the hall. You don't want to see your 17" PowerBook vanish because your roommate didn't lock the door when he went to take a piss. If you're gonna go laptop, be sure your life won't end if it vanishes on you.
You are poor. Unless mommy and daddy are spoiling you useless, you don't have tons of money to throw around on cool toys. Go cheap -- if you have to have a laptop, think $1000. If you're going desktop you can get equipped for half that, especially if you do the building yourself. If you're one of those kids whose parents are treat them like a goddamn Emperor, go nuts. Your folks can buy you whatever you want and replace it when you forget to lock your door in your hurry to leave for spring break on your personal Lear jet. For the rest of us, three magic words: second generation hardware.
My computer use has changed a lot while I've been a student. When I was a dirt poor undergrad, I had a desktop machine. As I graduate student (working both a half and a fulltime job, so the money is findable) I find that I like laptops -- I don't have a dorm room on campus to return to, and computer labs are filled with those damn yappy undergrads. I've never wanted an electronic organizer, and I've never had any luck taking notes with anything but pen and paper, whether I was studying calc or body theory. Save your cash for beer. One palm = lots of beer.
I'm with the folks that recommend desktops. They're harder to steal, more powerful for the money, and you can use them as a cornerstone for your stereo/dvd/game console of choice. If you elect to go laptop, go Apple, and for god's sake keep the damn thing with you all the time.
So, let me get this straight: you're mocking people who want to have a party celebrating a software release because they're geeks, and to do it you use a quote from Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade, for god's sake.
As a point of history, Hawaii was not U.S. soil when it was attacked. It didn't become a state until 1959. And the U.S. WAS helping England - by shipping arms and supplies as fast as we possibly could, while maintaining a thin veil of plausible deniability.
Hawaii wasn't US soil, but the the base was a US base and the folks who died were US folks. So you can dispute the point on a technicality (and you're right to do so), but that's it. Our attitude following was that we were attacked, and that's what counts.
And bully for the US shipping arms and supplies. That must have taken unbelievable courage -- much more than those lousy frogs had, since they gave up so readily in the face of a far superior power.
We had the spine to sit comfortably back home and crank out supplies, making huge loads of cash all the while. Must've been really tough on us.
Come on, does anybody really believe that selling countries supplies (and making a profit in the mean time) is really on the same tier as fending off a well-coordinated invasion?
It was just a little much at the time with WWI still fresh in American minds and the Great Depression still rolling along, to have drag our asses over to Europe and save France from Germany AGAIN.
Oh, come off it. Like the US (just as a random example) did much better. We Americans knew about the atrocities in Europe and we couldn't be bothered to help England out when they were fighting the Nazis alone. We didn't decide the war was worth fighting until we were attacked on our own soil.
The idea that the US entered the war as courageous altruists is pure bunk.
Let's also not forget DeGaulle and La Resistance. They fought against the Nazis as well as Petain's government -- their own government -- while Americans were sitting on their hands.
Whether or not an activity is legal is confusing the issue. I don't give two sticks about our current, flawed laws. Everyone knows that we don't have free speech under our laws, at least not in the US, where case law has systematically dismantled the Bill of Rights.
That done, we're really talking about whether or not certain activites should be allowed or punished. The activity in question is not hacking ('criminal' or otherwise), nor is it pedophilia. We're talking about speech, and whether someone that talks about an activity should be punished because someone else did something that we think should be punished.
Put that way, it's not so clear anymore, is it?
The "Fire in a Crowded Theater" argument was taken on
earlier in this thread. I agree with the post somewhat, but here's what I'd add:
You have the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. If nothing bad happens, there's no problem. If something bad happens, your direct action of speech can make you responsible for the result. Your speech directly and alone can be traced to the result -- you are the arm of action. There is no 3rd party. This is why 'inciting a riot' is a garbage 'crime.' If all you do is talk and other people decide to riot, their decision is not your responsibility even if your speech influenced their decision. And let me head off any talk of the folks in the theater 'deciding to panic.' That's not a loophole, it's a different thing since they aren't willfully commiting a crime or hurting anyone as is the case in the riot, NAMBLA, or criminal hacking scenarios.
"Fire in a Crowded Theater" should not be confused with someone reading a NAMBLA magazine and going on a rape'n'murder spree (that situation is more analogous to someone playing Doom and later shooting up their school than anything else, meaning that the so-called 'cause' isn't really at fault, the person who goes and hurts other people is at fault). The speech of the NAMBLA authors did not cause the rape and murder directly or alone -- there was a 3rd party nutball.
Apples and oranges, apples and oranges.
Lastly, if we place restrictions -- any restrictions -- on free speech it is no longer free and we should have the spine to admit that. There is no such thing as 'mostly free,' since 'mostly free' is equivalent to 'free -- except when it's not' which is equivalent to 'not free.' Anybody who can't deal with the conseqences of real free speech should stop pretending they support it. They don't.
I'm spooked mightily by anyone adding links on pages that I've written. Seems to me that Smart Tags are editorial content masquerading as "additional information for the end user" or whatever the claptrap Microsoft party line is. The very presence of additional or alternate information is editorial -- if I want it there, I will goddamn put it there, thank you. And if people want more information or alternate perspectives, they can march their butts over to Google. Note to Redmond: Get. Your. Hands. Off. My. Copy.
Who made MS the editor-in-chief of the web, anyway? The great thing about this medium is that it's pluralistic, sprawling, and searchable. Alternate perspectives aren't hard to find -- they jump out if you simply bother to look.
Yes, webmasters will evidently be able to disable the Smart Tags. But once again this is MS's strategy of preying on people's laziness in order to push through their agenda, a la bundling IE with Windows (or the plethora of MS crap they're planning on including in XP). I know this is Business As Usual, but that doesn't make me feel any better about it.
Whoa, whoa, whoa... You're making some broad assumptions there that I never said.
My apologies; you're right, of course. My point should have been that, just as it's not usually responsible to play the Hitler card in conversation (since it's more a call to emotions than reason), it's usually bad to play the NAMBLA card. In these discussions it's best to look for the rational extreme of an argument rather than the emotional extreme, so I still think your argument is a straw man, but I'm likewise guilty of playing it up. Sorry about that.
I don't give a rip about "big, bad, slavering queers," I'm worried about the psycho who looks at my kids and sees fresh meat, and is armed with enough knowledge to do something. Where are my rights and my family's rights? How, in a practical sense, does this "free society" benefit me if the threats to my kids are increasing because of groups like NAMBLA?
It benifits you and your kids because it promises free speech, without the encumberence of "community standards" or any touchy-feely "let's protect the children, damn and blast the consequences" mumbo-jumbo. There are other people in the world than the children. It's an old saw: you don't regulate adult expression to make it palateable for kids.
Look, you simply can't say things like
NAMBLA was criminally responsible for what happened because they acted in an advisory role to the perpetrator, telling him explicitly how to commit the crime and get away with it
without setting a really awful precedent. By this logic, the authors of a book like
Hacking Exposed, which explicitly outlines hacking techniques, could be held criminally culpable for the actions of some 3rd party 1337 h4x0r, even though that 3rd party has their own brain with which s/he makes his or her own decisions. I realize it looks like I'm crying slippery slope, but I don't really see where you can fairly draw the line once you start blaming the people of talk for the actions of crackpots who happen to read their writings. And let's not bother talking about intent, since I doubt anyone can prove that the intent of NAMBLA is to incite folks to rape and murder. Or even pedophilia, since I doubt (though I'm not sure) that they ascribe to outside morality and definitions, and to prove intent you have to work with their system of morality and definition. If anyone has information about that, please share.
I'd rather have my kids live in a free society than a safe society, and ditto for me myself. I guess that's all it comes down to.
Sorry, but I don't want any part of the "freedom" that groups like NAMBLA represent.
So steer clear of them. That's your right. But don't think for a minute that you have the right to shut them up simply because they make you uncomfortable.
I'm not defending murder and rape here. But there is an immesurable gulf between speech, no matter how hateful or incendiary, and an action like murder. Conflating the two is a manipulative move, and one that often works since most folks can't be bothered enough to realize that nobody who isn't seriously unhinged is going to go on a rape and murder spree simply because of some article they read in a NAMBLA magazine. Even if the article has pictures.
Your argument is a straw man that plays to people's fears and prejudices rather than tackling the substance of the freedom issue (specifically, it's a scare piece which preys on the prejudice that there are tons of big, bad, slavering queers out there who just can't wait to get their hands on some supple boy flesh to rape and kill). That's dangerous stuff there, bullshit to boot (since most child molesters are hetero, proportionally), and certainly not a rigorous enough approach to so vital a discussion.
I support NAMBLA's right to publish their magazine. I even support their right to advocate pedophilia. Let's go one up: I support some nutball's right to publish a site or magazine calling for the extermination of blacks and homosexuals. That doesn't make me a pedophile, racist, or homophobe. I have support these people, so that at the end of the day I know that I can speak my mind. Freedom of speech only really exists when we feel the urge to clamp down on what someone says, and we successfully resist that urge. It's far too easy to trumpet our love for liberty when we're not offended or scared.
It's nice to see that all the shrill bleating about our poor, poor children is finally starting to lose its emotional stranglehold on censorship discourse in Michigan. Not a minute too soon, either. After all, this is a state where swearing in front of children is not only illegal -- it's
occasionally enforced.
It always struck me as strange that we Americans can justify neatly overthrowing one of our basic tenets of freedom simply by waving our hands and muttering something vauge about "protecting the children." Of all the tests of free speech, why do we fixate on one of the most pointless? Real free speech would demand that, should a neo-Nazi demagogue come along, we grit our teeth and support their right to talk. But let's ignore that thorny issue for awhile and focus on our children, who will surely be hellbound if they hear any cussin'.
Seems to me that there's no such thing as a conditional freedom. At the risk of sounding like I'm making a false either/or proposition, either speech is free -- whether or not we like what is said -- or it's not. Freedom is one of those places where there is no middle ground. Any restriction on freedom does it in.
That said, I think it's time that we Americans either live up to the promise we made ourselves, or we set aside our smug claims to freedom as just so much outdated, naive dreaming. I know which I prefer, even though it will mean protecting hate speech, corporate advertising (as long as we buy into the myth of corporate personhood), and yes, even forcing our children to listen to words we don't like.
Where I live (Michigan), we have statewide proficiency tests that actually are corrected by our teachers. While that's nice (the teacher-graders, not the tests themselves), it's not a solution for standardized tests, where finding the results isn't as simple as #correct/#total=%ile. There's a whole cadre of statistical manipulations the raw results go through, and we only have to look at the article to see how dangerous some of them are:
Then CTB did something that it would not do in any other state: it simply raised the comparative rankings of many Tennessee students, and lowered some others, to conform with Mr. Sanders's statistical models - even though the company could find no error to justify those changes.
My, my, my... adjusting results to jive well with a statistical model, are we? That's some quality data, there. That such manipulation is possible is a little chilling, but this article seems to suggest it is commonplace. School districts are making decisions based on test data that's been twisted and pulled like Silly Putty.
Seems to me that the real reason we have standardized tests is to cast the legitimizing shadow of external validity on some fundamentally meaningless numbers so that we can claim those numbers constitute a meaningful measure. We need something quantifiable to judge our students against, after all, and if there isn't a good yardstick available we'll use a crappy one even though we know it's crap, because we certainly need something to show the parents.
Don't get me wrong -- I strongly believe that we need to monitor our educators and drum out the bad ones. We don't tolerate bad surgeons; we shouldn't tolerate bad teachers. But articles like this make it abundantly clear that standardized tests, while appearing to offer an easy gauge of student performance, are all surface and no substance.
. . . To say nothing of the multisecond delay Windows 2000 users have to endure when bringing up the in-page right-click menu in version 5.5. I mean, you'd think an MS browser would work really well with a MS OS (peripherally, I'm sure someone knows a tweak for this and can post it with the usual "hey, moron, do this" aplomb, but such a thing really shouldn't be necessary. Besides, I'm far too lazy to try and make Windows 2000 palatable. That's too Herculean an effort).
I'll take Netscape 4.x under Linux any day, provided I've taken the time to tweak my fonts/font servers. Sure, the wigets are gross (really, really gross), but the rendering engine is good and I've never had it go down screaming.
Even so, Redhat's move to bundle Mozilla is a sign of progress. More users --> (more demand) + (more developers) --> better software, at least in my ideal little world.
I stopped reading here. I see where this is going. Trollsville USA!
Oh, that's crap. As I understand it, one way to troll is to completely go off the handle without bothering to address the substance of what you're objecting to. From that vantage, I don't see how "This argument is crap and I stopped reading" is any less trollish than unloading on RMS and his penchant for insisting that others follow his semantics. People are allowed to think that RMS's opinions are wrong. They are allowed to say so in very strong (even offensive) terms, and simply doing so doesn't make them trolls.
More to the point, if you'd read the entire article you would have hit some interesting stuff. While a good part of it is tiresome KDE vs. Ximian Gnome partisanship, there's also a perfectly reasonable call for the FSF to release information on their finances.
Point is, just screaming "troll" isn't a good enough argument against Powell's article. It fails to contest, for example, Powell's claim that
it is absolutely undeniable that the FSF has thrown its support behind a desktop controlled by two for-profit companies, one of which has an officer who sits on the FSF's board; the same
company has purchased advertising aimed at confounding those who are seeking a desktop that is truly free in every rational sense of the word; and the other company has suggested that users can assist its product in surviving but help it avoid paying its bills by donating to the Free Software Foundation, or else an officer of that company has flung down and danced upon his fiduciary responsibilities by saying, in a communication that is part of his corporate function, that people might want to send money to the FSF instead of the company.
I mean, when you look at it that way, it reeks. If the FSF wants to represent the interest of hackers and geeks in the public sphere, I think it's perfectly reasonable that us hackers and geeks call them when they're out of line (or, as is the case here, when there's enough going on to make them look like they're out of line). Just because they're not the RIAA doesn't mean they're saints. If they're not doing anything wrong, the only thing releasing information would do is completely exhonorate them.
Lastly, let's not forget that they're a Foundation, not an individual. Organizations, whether foundations or corporations, can't (or at least, shouldn't be allowed to) claim the same rights as individuals.
Before you go off on me, here's my line of thinking: if you give an organization the same rights as an individual, the organization will have greater rights in a de facto sense. They have resources (time, money, personnel, etc.) to fight when their rights are infringed that individuals simply don't have. I mean, I don't have a legal team to fight for me when I say something that pisses someone off and they take me to court, but major corporations and organizations do. They, by entension, have more real free speech than I do simply because they can defend what they say and I can't -- this holds true even though we technically have the same rights.
The US Supreme Court made a huge mistake when it decided that corporations have personhood. Extending that outward, I think we have every right to see the finances of a corporation or organization, and every right to want to see them when that organization claims to represent us. It's always a good idea to be a little wary of anyone who claims to speak for anyone else, even if they're the FSF, even if they're right most of the time. Just because everything they did yesterday was good doesn't mean we can assume everything they're doing today is all peaches.
Exactly. It's just like RMS's claim that Linux should be called "GNU/Linux". Whether or not he is technically correct (he is) is really beside the point. Language, at its core, is fundamentally driven by communal interaction, which means that one person (or one group in the context of a larger, pluralistic whole) simply does not have the power to dictate the meaning of words.
This isn't to say that among certain circles you can't sustain the difference between "hacker" and "cracker" or "Linux" and "GNU/Linux", but it does mean that your power to do so is really, really limited. And, hacker prejudice aside, don't the folks who break things have just as much right to choose their name as the folks who build things?
Oh, and don't sweat the kids working in factories. It may appall you (as it did me), but it's all they got until things change. Large economics require them to work; productive people want to do better for themselves and their families. These are the same kids who grow up to build Internet Cafes.
I don't get this logic. Isn't it equivalent to "don't sweat the mass murder of countless innocents. It may seem brutal to us, but it's all they got" (BTW, that isn't intended as an anti-China slur. I know next to nothing about Chinese history and am decidedly not implying that there's more government sanctioned mass murder in China than there is in, say, the US).
It seems to me that things like child labor should give us pause, even if there are practical reasons for it and practical benifits to be gained. That children would need to work hints at a failing of the modern economics that China is moving into. I mean, what the hell kind of economy requires kids to work in factories? A bad economy.
We can see the same thing in operation here in the US. We used to have all these expectations that the inexhorable March of Progress would eventually mean that we would have to work fewer hours to maintain the same standard of living. But take a look around: we're actually working more hours than we did in 1970 for effectively the same pay. Child labor in China is part of the same problem -- and one reason we should vehemently oppose the expansion of our destructive Western economics.
This is not to say there aren't positive effects of an open economy. As you point out, open economics will make it increasingly difficult for any government to control ideas and information. This isn't a free ticket, though: as corporations get more and more influence, they will eventually become information custodians in lieu of the government. Nature, abhor, vacuum -- you get the picture. Anyway, in the US we have fairly weak governmental control of our national discourse, but it's dominated by corporate interest.
SDMI and the RIAA were hoping to prevent the professor from publishing legitimate research by invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At first glance, they succeeded.
The article then goes on to explain how the RIAA, who managed to scare our crypto friends away from publishing their work, is actually its own worst
enemy, since its strongarm tactics show how little it cares for anything but its own bottom line. Evidently the hope is that, if the RIAA looks bad enough, the courts and legislatures will realize how lousy they are and how prone the DMCA is to corporate abuse, and take action against them.
Folks, we are not going to win this one simply by hoping the RIAA and DMCA will look so bad to the courts and lawmakers that they'll get thrown out. The RIAA is an association of businesses, and businesses have entire departments devoted to smokescreening tactics like this. The Salon article shows this plainly:
On Thursday, Oppenheim [the RIAA VP of business and legal affairs] released a backpedaling statement: "The Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation (SDMI) does not -- nor did it ever -- intend to bring any legal action against Professor Felten or his co-authors. We sent the letter because we felt an obligation to the watermark licensees who had voluntarily
submitted their valuable inventions to SDMI for testing... The Recording Industry Association of America, one of the founding members of SDMI, strongly believes in academic freedom and freedom of speech."
See, the RIAA doesn't even have to go to court to be effective. It just has to threaten. And, last I checked, threatening legal action is perfectly legal pretty much everywhere. The RIAA knows that the mere threat of legal action is enough to shut most everyone up. What we need are people that refuse to cave, people that will see the matter through to court or speak before our legislatures.
We need to take away the RIAA's ability to threaten. We can't do this ethically by refusing to give them access to our courts -- everyone should be given the right to sue, even frivolously, since the risk of people being denied access to our justice system is too great otherwise -- but we can do it by taking away their favorite tools (DMCA, dishonest licensing schemes, &c). Folding in the hopes that you can make the bully look bad is a losing strategy.
What do you do when all of your choices are bad? Since the government is fundamentally responsible for this kind of mess by giving away monopolies in the form of software patents shouldn't they be involved in protecting people who wind up being screwed by them?
Ideally, yes. But there are two problems, one practical and one philosophical:
The legal wrangling necessary to grant that kind of protection is enormous, and since the voice of the consumer is always quieter than the voice of the corporation, who do you think would have more sway in hashing out the particulars? Regulation laws give us legislated monopolies, and even laws that are intended to protect the consumer will eventually be perverted.
If government should do anything regarding software, it should be to get its lousy hands off. Subscription models suck. We know this. Once the suits figure it out, they'll put their money elsewhere. This won't help any company in particular -- some of them will be screwed out of software they need. But in the long term, it gives us the best shot at killing subscription licensing. Making the situation partly bearable by passing mitigating legislation will only unnaturally prolong the life span of a Very Bad Thing. Why should we expend our energy trying to make something we know has fundamental, unconscionable flaws work?
I think that's a good, simple definition, but it doesn't really color postmodernism as anything other than a reaction against the Enlightenment and the constellation of philosophies surrounding it, from positivism to teleological dialecticism (woo! jargon!).
Mind you, I'm not saying your definition is wrong by any means. I just think that defining a movement by opposition, in this case by opposition to the Modernists, tends to keep that movement from any kind of sufficiency.
For contrast, we can look at Descartes. His "I think, therefore I am" argument is indeed quaint, but he did have the effect of carving out a niche from science outside the domain of the Church. His arguments were essentially positive (reason can do x, etc.) rather than reactionary/negative (the Church cannot do x), and that gives him a kind of self-sufficency that postmodernism lacks.
Of course, anyone with their stripes in deconstruction could rip this argument apart in two seconds. But that's not the point. Deconstructive arguments really are reductive and negative -- it's hard to build something when your only tool is dynamite. Really all that deconstruction does is exploit a flaw in the traditional western metaphysics of this-vs-that. I'm harping on deconstruction because most postmodern arguments use it, and after the dust clears I can't help but think that there are better, harder things we could be doing with our time.
I have this voice in the back of my head from middle school: put your thesis in positive terms, kiddies. Come to think of it, that's probably the only useful thing I picked up in middle school.
I've found that 'postmodernism' is a very convenient term to toss around, especially for us English geeks who get their jollies out of lit. theory. But whenever I actually try to sit down and define it (or, for that matter, try to press one of my professors into offering a solid definition), things start falling apart really quick.
I'd be very interested in hearing a complete, consistent definition. That would be worth money.
More to the point, though, I'm willing to bet that we don't really need a complete, consistent definition. We can probably get by with just chalking up incompleteness as the nature of the beast. How postmodern of us.
These are the folks who gave us such fun ideas as totalizing deconstruction (all binary systems like 'light-dark' are suspect) and 'the supplement' (everything, no matter how exhaustive, is incomplete. Just think about a dictionary), so we shouldn't expect too much in terms of completeness.
Cynicism aside, I'm willing to buy the idea that 'postmodernism' is just a catch-all term for a bunch of divergent ideas that just happen to be unified by a historical moment. That they distrust so-called Old Theory isn't surprising; every theoretical movement rebells against its predecessor. In that light, it makes sense that we can't come up with a definition. We're still in the trees, so there's no hope of seeing the forest.
[For the masochistic/curious, there's lots of information on many keystone postmodern ideas in Jacques Derrida's 'De la grammatologie.' Fair warning: the English translation is awful]
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My computer use has changed a lot while I've been a student. When I was a dirt poor undergrad, I had a desktop machine. As I graduate student (working both a half and a fulltime job, so the money is findable) I find that I like laptops -- I don't have a dorm room on campus to return to, and computer labs are filled with those damn yappy undergrads. I've never wanted an electronic organizer, and I've never had any luck taking notes with anything but pen and paper, whether I was studying calc or body theory. Save your cash for beer. One palm = lots of beer.
I'm with the folks that recommend desktops. They're harder to steal, more powerful for the money, and you can use them as a cornerstone for your stereo/dvd/game console of choice. If you elect to go laptop, go Apple, and for god's sake keep the damn thing with you all the time.
Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, this is Pot.
Hawaii wasn't US soil, but the the base was a US base and the folks who died were US folks. So you can dispute the point on a technicality (and you're right to do so), but that's it. Our attitude following was that we were attacked, and that's what counts.
And bully for the US shipping arms and supplies. That must have taken unbelievable courage -- much more than those lousy frogs had, since they gave up so readily in the face of a far superior power. We had the spine to sit comfortably back home and crank out supplies, making huge loads of cash all the while. Must've been really tough on us.
Come on, does anybody really believe that selling countries supplies (and making a profit in the mean time) is really on the same tier as fending off a well-coordinated invasion?
It was just a little much at the time with WWI still fresh in American minds and the Great Depression still rolling along, to have drag our asses over to Europe and save France from Germany AGAIN.
Amen! What did France ever do for us?
(cough Revolutionary War cough cough)
The idea that the US entered the war as courageous altruists is pure bunk.
Let's also not forget DeGaulle and La Resistance. They fought against the Nazis as well as Petain's government -- their own government -- while Americans were sitting on their hands.
That done, we're really talking about whether or not certain activites should be allowed or punished. The activity in question is not hacking ('criminal' or otherwise), nor is it pedophilia. We're talking about speech, and whether someone that talks about an activity should be punished because someone else did something that we think should be punished.
Put that way, it's not so clear anymore, is it?
The "Fire in a Crowded Theater" argument was taken on earlier in this thread. I agree with the post somewhat, but here's what I'd add:
You have the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. If nothing bad happens, there's no problem. If something bad happens, your direct action of speech can make you responsible for the result. Your speech directly and alone can be traced to the result -- you are the arm of action. There is no 3rd party. This is why 'inciting a riot' is a garbage 'crime.' If all you do is talk and other people decide to riot, their decision is not your responsibility even if your speech influenced their decision. And let me head off any talk of the folks in the theater 'deciding to panic.' That's not a loophole, it's a different thing since they aren't willfully commiting a crime or hurting anyone as is the case in the riot, NAMBLA, or criminal hacking scenarios.
"Fire in a Crowded Theater" should not be confused with someone reading a NAMBLA magazine and going on a rape'n'murder spree (that situation is more analogous to someone playing Doom and later shooting up their school than anything else, meaning that the so-called 'cause' isn't really at fault, the person who goes and hurts other people is at fault). The speech of the NAMBLA authors did not cause the rape and murder directly or alone -- there was a 3rd party nutball.
Apples and oranges, apples and oranges.
Lastly, if we place restrictions -- any restrictions -- on free speech it is no longer free and we should have the spine to admit that. There is no such thing as 'mostly free,' since 'mostly free' is equivalent to 'free -- except when it's not' which is equivalent to 'not free.' Anybody who can't deal with the conseqences of real free speech should stop pretending they support it. They don't.
Who made MS the editor-in-chief of the web, anyway? The great thing about this medium is that it's pluralistic, sprawling, and searchable. Alternate perspectives aren't hard to find -- they jump out if you simply bother to look.
Yes, webmasters will evidently be able to disable the Smart Tags. But once again this is MS's strategy of preying on people's laziness in order to push through their agenda, a la bundling IE with Windows (or the plethora of MS crap they're planning on including in XP). I know this is Business As Usual, but that doesn't make me feel any better about it.
My apologies; you're right, of course. My point should have been that, just as it's not usually responsible to play the Hitler card in conversation (since it's more a call to emotions than reason), it's usually bad to play the NAMBLA card. In these discussions it's best to look for the rational extreme of an argument rather than the emotional extreme, so I still think your argument is a straw man, but I'm likewise guilty of playing it up. Sorry about that.
I don't give a rip about "big, bad, slavering queers," I'm worried about the psycho who looks at my kids and sees fresh meat, and is armed with enough knowledge to do something. Where are my rights and my family's rights? How, in a practical sense, does this "free society" benefit me if the threats to my kids are increasing because of groups like NAMBLA?
It benifits you and your kids because it promises free speech, without the encumberence of "community standards" or any touchy-feely "let's protect the children, damn and blast the consequences" mumbo-jumbo. There are other people in the world than the children. It's an old saw: you don't regulate adult expression to make it palateable for kids.
Look, you simply can't say things like
NAMBLA was criminally responsible for what happened because they acted in an advisory role to the perpetrator, telling him explicitly how to commit the crime and get away with it
without setting a really awful precedent. By this logic, the authors of a book like Hacking Exposed, which explicitly outlines hacking techniques, could be held criminally culpable for the actions of some 3rd party 1337 h4x0r, even though that 3rd party has their own brain with which s/he makes his or her own decisions. I realize it looks like I'm crying slippery slope, but I don't really see where you can fairly draw the line once you start blaming the people of talk for the actions of crackpots who happen to read their writings. And let's not bother talking about intent, since I doubt anyone can prove that the intent of NAMBLA is to incite folks to rape and murder. Or even pedophilia, since I doubt (though I'm not sure) that they ascribe to outside morality and definitions, and to prove intent you have to work with their system of morality and definition. If anyone has information about that, please share.
I'd rather have my kids live in a free society than a safe society, and ditto for me myself. I guess that's all it comes down to.
So steer clear of them. That's your right. But don't think for a minute that you have the right to shut them up simply because they make you uncomfortable.
I'm not defending murder and rape here. But there is an immesurable gulf between speech, no matter how hateful or incendiary, and an action like murder. Conflating the two is a manipulative move, and one that often works since most folks can't be bothered enough to realize that nobody who isn't seriously unhinged is going to go on a rape and murder spree simply because of some article they read in a NAMBLA magazine. Even if the article has pictures.
Your argument is a straw man that plays to people's fears and prejudices rather than tackling the substance of the freedom issue (specifically, it's a scare piece which preys on the prejudice that there are tons of big, bad, slavering queers out there who just can't wait to get their hands on some supple boy flesh to rape and kill). That's dangerous stuff there, bullshit to boot (since most child molesters are hetero, proportionally), and certainly not a rigorous enough approach to so vital a discussion.
I support NAMBLA's right to publish their magazine. I even support their right to advocate pedophilia. Let's go one up: I support some nutball's right to publish a site or magazine calling for the extermination of blacks and homosexuals. That doesn't make me a pedophile, racist, or homophobe. I have support these people, so that at the end of the day I know that I can speak my mind. Freedom of speech only really exists when we feel the urge to clamp down on what someone says, and we successfully resist that urge. It's far too easy to trumpet our love for liberty when we're not offended or scared.
It always struck me as strange that we Americans can justify neatly overthrowing one of our basic tenets of freedom simply by waving our hands and muttering something vauge about "protecting the children." Of all the tests of free speech, why do we fixate on one of the most pointless? Real free speech would demand that, should a neo-Nazi demagogue come along, we grit our teeth and support their right to talk. But let's ignore that thorny issue for awhile and focus on our children, who will surely be hellbound if they hear any cussin'.
Seems to me that there's no such thing as a conditional freedom. At the risk of sounding like I'm making a false either/or proposition, either speech is free -- whether or not we like what is said -- or it's not. Freedom is one of those places where there is no middle ground. Any restriction on freedom does it in.
That said, I think it's time that we Americans either live up to the promise we made ourselves, or we set aside our smug claims to freedom as just so much outdated, naive dreaming. I know which I prefer, even though it will mean protecting hate speech, corporate advertising (as long as we buy into the myth of corporate personhood), and yes, even forcing our children to listen to words we don't like.
Then CTB did something that it would not do in any other state: it simply raised the comparative rankings of many Tennessee students, and lowered some others, to conform with Mr. Sanders's statistical models - even though the company could find no error to justify those changes.
My, my, my... adjusting results to jive well with a statistical model, are we? That's some quality data, there. That such manipulation is possible is a little chilling, but this article seems to suggest it is commonplace. School districts are making decisions based on test data that's been twisted and pulled like Silly Putty.
Seems to me that the real reason we have standardized tests is to cast the legitimizing shadow of external validity on some fundamentally meaningless numbers so that we can claim those numbers constitute a meaningful measure. We need something quantifiable to judge our students against, after all, and if there isn't a good yardstick available we'll use a crappy one even though we know it's crap, because we certainly need something to show the parents.
Don't get me wrong -- I strongly believe that we need to monitor our educators and drum out the bad ones. We don't tolerate bad surgeons; we shouldn't tolerate bad teachers. But articles like this make it abundantly clear that standardized tests, while appearing to offer an easy gauge of student performance, are all surface and no substance.
I'll take Netscape 4.x under Linux any day, provided I've taken the time to tweak my fonts/font servers. Sure, the wigets are gross (really, really gross), but the rendering engine is good and I've never had it go down screaming.
Even so, Redhat's move to bundle Mozilla is a sign of progress. More users --> (more demand) + (more developers) --> better software, at least in my ideal little world.
Oh, that's crap. As I understand it, one way to troll is to completely go off the handle without bothering to address the substance of what you're objecting to. From that vantage, I don't see how "This argument is crap and I stopped reading" is any less trollish than unloading on RMS and his penchant for insisting that others follow his semantics. People are allowed to think that RMS's opinions are wrong. They are allowed to say so in very strong (even offensive) terms, and simply doing so doesn't make them trolls.
More to the point, if you'd read the entire article you would have hit some interesting stuff. While a good part of it is tiresome KDE vs. Ximian Gnome partisanship, there's also a perfectly reasonable call for the FSF to release information on their finances.
Point is, just screaming "troll" isn't a good enough argument against Powell's article. It fails to contest, for example, Powell's claim that
it is absolutely undeniable that the FSF has thrown its support behind a desktop controlled by two for-profit companies, one of which has an officer who sits on the FSF's board; the same company has purchased advertising aimed at confounding those who are seeking a desktop that is truly free in every rational sense of the word; and the other company has suggested that users can assist its product in surviving but help it avoid paying its bills by donating to the Free Software Foundation, or else an officer of that company has flung down and danced upon his fiduciary responsibilities by saying, in a communication that is part of his corporate function, that people might want to send money to the FSF instead of the company.
I mean, when you look at it that way, it reeks. If the FSF wants to represent the interest of hackers and geeks in the public sphere, I think it's perfectly reasonable that us hackers and geeks call them when they're out of line (or, as is the case here, when there's enough going on to make them look like they're out of line). Just because they're not the RIAA doesn't mean they're saints. If they're not doing anything wrong, the only thing releasing information would do is completely exhonorate them.
Lastly, let's not forget that they're a Foundation, not an individual. Organizations, whether foundations or corporations, can't (or at least, shouldn't be allowed to) claim the same rights as individuals.
Before you go off on me, here's my line of thinking: if you give an organization the same rights as an individual, the organization will have greater rights in a de facto sense. They have resources (time, money, personnel, etc.) to fight when their rights are infringed that individuals simply don't have. I mean, I don't have a legal team to fight for me when I say something that pisses someone off and they take me to court, but major corporations and organizations do. They, by entension, have more real free speech than I do simply because they can defend what they say and I can't -- this holds true even though we technically have the same rights.
The US Supreme Court made a huge mistake when it decided that corporations have personhood. Extending that outward, I think we have every right to see the finances of a corporation or organization, and every right to want to see them when that organization claims to represent us. It's always a good idea to be a little wary of anyone who claims to speak for anyone else, even if they're the FSF, even if they're right most of the time. Just because everything they did yesterday was good doesn't mean we can assume everything they're doing today is all peaches.
This isn't to say that among certain circles you can't sustain the difference between "hacker" and "cracker" or "Linux" and "GNU/Linux", but it does mean that your power to do so is really, really limited. And, hacker prejudice aside, don't the folks who break things have just as much right to choose their name as the folks who build things?
I don't get this logic. Isn't it equivalent to "don't sweat the mass murder of countless innocents. It may seem brutal to us, but it's all they got" (BTW, that isn't intended as an anti-China slur. I know next to nothing about Chinese history and am decidedly not implying that there's more government sanctioned mass murder in China than there is in, say, the US).
It seems to me that things like child labor should give us pause, even if there are practical reasons for it and practical benifits to be gained. That children would need to work hints at a failing of the modern economics that China is moving into. I mean, what the hell kind of economy requires kids to work in factories? A bad economy.
We can see the same thing in operation here in the US. We used to have all these expectations that the inexhorable March of Progress would eventually mean that we would have to work fewer hours to maintain the same standard of living. But take a look around: we're actually working more hours than we did in 1970 for effectively the same pay. Child labor in China is part of the same problem -- and one reason we should vehemently oppose the expansion of our destructive Western economics.
This is not to say there aren't positive effects of an open economy. As you point out, open economics will make it increasingly difficult for any government to control ideas and information. This isn't a free ticket, though: as corporations get more and more influence, they will eventually become information custodians in lieu of the government. Nature, abhor, vacuum -- you get the picture. Anyway, in the US we have fairly weak governmental control of our national discourse, but it's dominated by corporate interest.
SDMI and the RIAA were hoping to prevent the professor from publishing legitimate research by invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At first glance, they succeeded.
The article then goes on to explain how the RIAA, who managed to scare our crypto friends away from publishing their work, is actually its own worst enemy, since its strongarm tactics show how little it cares for anything but its own bottom line. Evidently the hope is that, if the RIAA looks bad enough, the courts and legislatures will realize how lousy they are and how prone the DMCA is to corporate abuse, and take action against them.
Folks, we are not going to win this one simply by hoping the RIAA and DMCA will look so bad to the courts and lawmakers that they'll get thrown out. The RIAA is an association of businesses, and businesses have entire departments devoted to smokescreening tactics like this. The Salon article shows this plainly:
On Thursday, Oppenheim [the RIAA VP of business and legal affairs] released a backpedaling statement: "The Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation (SDMI) does not -- nor did it ever -- intend to bring any legal action against Professor Felten or his co-authors. We sent the letter because we felt an obligation to the watermark licensees who had voluntarily submitted their valuable inventions to SDMI for testing ... The Recording Industry Association of America, one of the founding members of SDMI, strongly believes in academic freedom and freedom of speech."
See, the RIAA doesn't even have to go to court to be effective. It just has to threaten. And, last I checked, threatening legal action is perfectly legal pretty much everywhere. The RIAA knows that the mere threat of legal action is enough to shut most everyone up. What we need are people that refuse to cave, people that will see the matter through to court or speak before our legislatures.
We need to take away the RIAA's ability to threaten. We can't do this ethically by refusing to give them access to our courts -- everyone should be given the right to sue, even frivolously, since the risk of people being denied access to our justice system is too great otherwise -- but we can do it by taking away their favorite tools (DMCA, dishonest licensing schemes, &c). Folding in the hopes that you can make the bully look bad is a losing strategy.
Ideally, yes. But there are two problems, one practical and one philosophical:
I think that's a good, simple definition, but it doesn't really color postmodernism as anything other than a reaction against the Enlightenment and the constellation of philosophies surrounding it, from positivism to teleological dialecticism (woo! jargon!).
Mind you, I'm not saying your definition is wrong by any means. I just think that defining a movement by opposition, in this case by opposition to the Modernists, tends to keep that movement from any kind of sufficiency.
For contrast, we can look at Descartes. His "I think, therefore I am" argument is indeed quaint, but he did have the effect of carving out a niche from science outside the domain of the Church. His arguments were essentially positive (reason can do x, etc.) rather than reactionary/negative (the Church cannot do x), and that gives him a kind of self-sufficency that postmodernism lacks.
Of course, anyone with their stripes in deconstruction could rip this argument apart in two seconds. But that's not the point. Deconstructive arguments really are reductive and negative -- it's hard to build something when your only tool is dynamite. Really all that deconstruction does is exploit a flaw in the traditional western metaphysics of this-vs-that. I'm harping on deconstruction because most postmodern arguments use it, and after the dust clears I can't help but think that there are better, harder things we could be doing with our time.
I have this voice in the back of my head from middle school: put your thesis in positive terms, kiddies. Come to think of it, that's probably the only useful thing I picked up in middle school.
I've found that 'postmodernism' is a very convenient term to toss around, especially for us English geeks who get their jollies out of lit. theory. But whenever I actually try to sit down and define it (or, for that matter, try to press one of my professors into offering a solid definition), things start falling apart really quick.
I'd be very interested in hearing a complete, consistent definition. That would be worth money.
More to the point, though, I'm willing to bet that we don't really need a complete, consistent definition. We can probably get by with just chalking up incompleteness as the nature of the beast. How postmodern of us.
These are the folks who gave us such fun ideas as totalizing deconstruction (all binary systems like 'light-dark' are suspect) and 'the supplement' (everything, no matter how exhaustive, is incomplete. Just think about a dictionary), so we shouldn't expect too much in terms of completeness.
Cynicism aside, I'm willing to buy the idea that 'postmodernism' is just a catch-all term for a bunch of divergent ideas that just happen to be unified by a historical moment. That they distrust so-called Old Theory isn't surprising; every theoretical movement rebells against its predecessor. In that light, it makes sense that we can't come up with a definition. We're still in the trees, so there's no hope of seeing the forest.
[For the masochistic/curious, there's lots of information on many keystone postmodern ideas in Jacques Derrida's 'De la grammatologie.' Fair warning: the English translation is awful]