Nah. It's the end of the Shuttle, certainly, and possibly the end of the ISS. But the US is too proud of it's space dominance to cut itself completely out of the race.
They'd ground the fleet, perhaps de-orbit the station (unless they could arrange with the Russians to run it), and get to work on whatever is going to replace the Shuttle. It wouldn't happen soon; it would start with too many bureaucrats in too many departments layering on requirements (which is part of what made the Shuttle itself such a nightmare.) It would be at least a decade.
I agree with you totally and absolutely. The RIAA and MPAA suck; let them die. Don't buy their stuff. Buy stuff from indie artists.
I just need to stick in one more item: don't download their stuff, either. Not buying it is standing up for artists outside the system. Downloading it anyway is just hypocritical.
Another thing you should have learned in business is that your business partner's problem is also your problem. The **AAs are your partners: you buy things for them. Claiming that their problems are theirs alone is self-defeating, because it leads precisely where you're suggesting: they'll stick the most restrictive DRM they can on it, and suddenly their problem becomes your problem.
So rather than just getting angry and saying, "Hey, you're trying to take away my fair use rights, I demand everything that's coming to me and screw what's fair to you," you treat them as the enemy, which encourages them to treat you as the enemy.
I think that if the Slashdot community took the attitude of trying to come up with a fair solution, the **AAs could be convinced to embrace it. You offer them a point at which they can be happy and you can be happy, and they'll go exactly where you're saying: happy customers buy more stuff.
Maybe there isn't a better solution than, as the great-grandparent post suggests, just getting people angry. It doesn't really fight DRM, of course, but it gives you a great opportunity to scream about it on Slashdot.
Pay-per-download also implies a DRM model, which I think is no more acceptable to the great-grandparent poster than any other DRM.
You could do DRM-free pay-per-download, which many Slashdot posters seem to prefer, but if it's DRM-free it'll rapdily turn into free downloads.
They were reluctant to do pay-per-download because they wanted to see the DRM on it first. Now that the model is proving successful (whether the DRM helps or hinders that is up for debate), you'll find that an awful lot of stuff is available on iTunes.
It's not fair to them in the sense that they're playing by an old set of rules. They used to price their sales under the assumption that you could not easily make copies. If your friends wanted one, they'd have to go to the store and buy it.
The rules have changed, but they haven't changed their pricing model. When you buy a CD from them, you're implicitly (but not explicitly) agreeing that for $12 you're getting the right to play it, and sell it, and transfer it to your iPod, but not to send out free copies over the Internet.
Like I said, that's all implicit, in that it used to be true because P2P didn't exist at all. They wish to continue playing by the old rules, because they thought it worked well for them and for you. Nobody particularly complained about the fact that the implicit contract forbid them from making backup copies because it simply wasn't possible to do it.
So you're welcome to claim that the absolutely-no-DRM is fair to them, in that you're just exercising rights that you always had but didn't exercise because the technology wasn't available. They're looking to change the contract to make the implicit explicit, via DRM.
I'm not saying that DRM is necessarily the right answer for that, and you read the grandparent post closely you'll see that I'm not calling for DRM but rather just for balance to see their point of view. DRM is clearly overly restrictive, but my point is not to promote DRM but rather to say why DRM was created in response to an unfair situation.
One alternative to adding DRM, for example, would be to change the price. They assumed that they could sell you a $12 CD, and if your friend wanted it (or any part of it) they'd get $12 from that friend, too. If you believe that the no-DRM model is fair to them, then they could raise prices.
That doesn't actually work. Higher prices would encourage more downloading, causing even higher prices, until eventually they decide to sell one copy for $200,000. Let the music listeners of the world get together to pitch in for it, and then throw it out in the Internet for free.
There are a number of other ways it could go. They could stop spending quite so much producing and promoting albums, for example. What one really wants is neither DRM nor no-DRM, but some brilliant new model which makes DRM unnecessary. I haven't got it.
At any rate, to recap: the no-DRM model isn't completely fair to them because they spend money to create and promote albums, and in the limit case they sell exactly 1 CD for $12 and everybody else downloads it. That doesn't seem fair, does it?
Let's assume (perhaps falsely) that the RIAA/MPAA aren't literally Satan's spawn. They have a good reason for wanting DRM: they spend a lot of money to make music/movies. They'd like to get paid for that, and the current environment makes it easy for people to get the full benefit of their work without paying for it.
You know all this, so I'm not going to explain any further, but the question is, did you explain this to your friend? It's easy to get people angry when you explain only one side of the story. And if you want to use him as an example you have to be extra-careful to present their side as persuasively as possible, because you're obviously coming to this with a bias.
Look, I agree that the DRM they want to use is too restrictive. But the absolutely-no-DRM environment is also not completely fair to them. So the attitude of simply getting angry at them for proposing an alternative is just wrong. The proper attitude is closer to, "Gee, neither situation is tenable, let's figure out what's genuinely fair."
I thought the actors gave lovely downplayed performances. I thought the visuals were stylish and captivating. I thought the writing was sharp and incisive and funny.
But hey, apparently there's no accounting for taste. Just skip all of the future Serenity threads.
One thing I can say is that I felt that the earliest episodes were not the strongest. You could try Shindig, which was one of the funniest episodes, but whether it would work if you weren't already into the characters, I just can't say.
These are the retailers. Even more than the studios, they care very much that people actually buy movies rather than getting illegal copies.
If you want an end to copy protection, you're not going to have the retailers on your side unless you give them a really good reason. Tell them you'll boycott, perhaps, or show them some research showing that movie downloaders buy more movies. (Send it to me, too, while you're at it.)
But don't expect them to call for what they perceive as slitting their own throats.
Sorry if I reaad too much into your post. Let me show you how I got where I went:
You said that "downloading illegally is the most convenient method of hearing the music before they decide whether or not they are going to buy it." I inferred from this that you think that the process should be made legal.
But since that makes it possible for people to download the music for free, the labels take 100% of the risk: that is, people can get the music legally for free and it would be mostly out of the goodness of their hearts to actually buy the music (plus the highly valuable jewel case and cover art.)
So I apologize if I put words in your mouth, but I at least hope this clears up why I said what I did. I may well be wrong, but I mean well.
In court, they have to talk in terms of what's legal. Just because it costs them money doesn't give them any right to put a stop to it. It being illegal does.
The goal of laws is to make things that hurt people illegal, so their motivation (making money, and avoiding losing money) drives lawmaking (making music sharing illegal). Whether the law is fair, and whether it serves the goal, is another question entirely.
That's the legal route. They also have the route of appeal to your sense of fairness, which they've also been taking. They say, "Please don't download music/movies, because it puts the people who make them out of work," in ads. They "spout" that line, too, just in a different venue: direct to the consumers/downloaders. They talk law in the courts, and fairness to you.
iTMS offers 30-second samplings, which is fully 20% of most songs. No, it's not the same as hearing the whole thing, but it seems like a pretty fair compromise to me.
Between that and the other ways you have of hearing music (radio, CDs from friends, in clubs), it seems unfair to defend illegally-downloading music, since it is VERY unfair to the music labels (since they have no way of distinguishing between "I was just trying it out" and "I decided that I'd rather not pay you for it").
I'm not saying that the compromise is completely fair to you, but it does seem that asking them to shoulder 100% of the risk is even more unfair to them.
Actually, comics are taken extremely seriously by their fans, and it's why they're often called "graphic novels" or "books" (short for "comic books", as opposed to the thicker objects we ordinarily call books.)
Calling them "comics" often doesn't cut it any more because they're no longer very comic. Some fans still use the term as a historical artifact, like the nonexistent "dial" on your cell phone.
Nerdcore rap, on the other hand, is a self-deprecating name for a self-deprecating art form.
Greg Allman's gotta chill. There's a lot to be said for rap. It's got an incredibly engaging beat and when it's done well the rhymes are clever. At it's best it's playing with language, a very nerdly thing to do.
Yeah, it's 99% crap. This is different from every other genre how?
It's not meant to be taken seriously. It's all in-jokes deliberately contrasting the white-bread image of the geek coder with the ultra-violent image of gangsta rap. The geeks have their own art form that they practice seriously; it's called "writing code". This is what they do to relax.
Wrong. There's an additional source of money: income of the companies you're buying. That can be paid out as dividends, and that's pure income. If you're playing the game correctly, the price you're willing to pay is proportional to those dividends.
If the company you were investing in were a farm, the dividends would come from the vegetables the farm sold. Those are, in effect, free: they come from the sun and the earth. All you pay for is the labor.
Or it could be a company that needs the money to write software/open a dry-cleaner/making ice cream. They make actual money from selling software/cleaning clothes/selling ice cream, and they give you a piece of that. It's real money, not pyramid-scheme money.
The actual game is a lot more complicated than that, but at its basis that's why you invest: not for the pyramid scheme of new investors, but by the fact that you give money to people who make something valuable and then give you some of the profits.
The price of the stock should be proportional to the value of those dividends. Sure, some people invest in hopes of selling on a pyramid scheme, but not everybody (and not me). Those people tend to drive up the price of the stock. You say out of companies whose stock is bid up by those speculators, and find companies whose dividends are "cheap".
But the main thing to remember is that a stock isn't a random piece of paper, like a card or a pair of dice. It's a piece of a real company, and owning stock entitles you to some of the profits of that company (as well as some control of it, which is nearly irrelevant unless you're massively rich.) That's why it's not gambling, and it's not pari-mutuel: your money ultimately comes not from the investors but from the company itself.
Why does personalized advertising bother you so much? Is it the fact that you care more about the ad, because you're irritated that you're actually interested? Or is it just that you prefer the implication that non-targeted ads imply that you're anonymous? In other words, do personalized ads bug you primarily because they remind you that you're not anonymous?
The existence of identity standards doesn't necessarily mean automatically identifying yourself everywhere you go. This is not about loss of anonymity; it's actually about improving it. There are various middle grounds between "totally anonymous" and "totally exposed" and they're trying to standardize those. And you'll presumably see ads as personalized as the level of identity you're required to expose for any particular service. If a particular service requires too much of you, don't use it.
Beyond that, personalized ads don't bother me much. If I want to read the New York Times and they feel that they're going to do better business showing an ad targeted to a 35 year old white male, feel free. Who knows, they may even be right. I'd love to reach a state where I'm grateful for ads which tell me about stuff I want to know rather than being irritated by ads that have nothing to do with me, especially when they're offensive in some way.
I'd say that anonymity is a corollary to the existing 7 rules. "User control" and "minimal disclosure" together imply that you can release zero information, if you choose.
Unless you'd like to rephrase rule 0 as "Services are required to serve everybody without identifying them, even minimally". You may well agree with that, but I'm not sure that I do. It's the same as what you said except turned around, focusing not on you but on the people whom you are asking to do work on your behalf.
That runs counter to the "minimal disclosure" rule. The converse of "discloses the least amount of identifying information" is "you must disclose some minimum amount if it's required". Some services require some form of identity management, from specifying preferences on my Slashdot page to specifying the shipping address for my Amazon order.
The real question is, what's "minimal" and how do we enforce it? Presumably enforcement happens by market forces: if you don't want to shop at Amazon because they require more information than you want to give, you go elsewhere. But online as in the real world, it's not always easy (or possible) to shop elsewhere. Sometimes the markets will flow to create alternatives; sometimes it's just not sufficiently profitable.
So I'm not worried about anonymity so much as I am about the larger problem: how do I encourage sites that I want to do business with to set their minimums to appropriate levels? You're proposing, I think, that the minimum is always zero, and I think that's oversimplified and unrealistic.
The organizations he's looking for aren't "nefarious secret ultra-rich" whackos but ordinary environmentalists. If he finds that the money comes from World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, or even better one of the anti-globalization action groups, he'll accuse them of being anti-corporate (and, by extension, anti-American).
There do exist groups whose primary goals are some sort of reordering of the world society along what are essentially socialist wealth-redistributive lines. These groups use global warming as an example of the evil that corporations do, and what better argument could they hope for than "Exxon-Moible is destroying every life on planet earth! We should dismantle them and take their money as punishment."
Any research funded by such an organization is going to be in question, because getting the right results furthers their political aims.
It isn't even precisely "bribery" as the grandparent post would suggest. That would imply that the scientists were completely objective but were corrupted by the influence of the money. They may well be individually intent on furthering their theory in the absence of evidence. Although reproducibility is the sine qua non of science, climate change is particularly tricky and prone to manipulation of the data. Thus taking money from an anti-globalization activist wouldn't suggest "bribery" so much as "political bias".
I need to note that I'm trying to be objective in my description here and not use inflammatory rhetoric. My own personal opinions of global warming and globalization aren't relevant; I'm just explaining what he's hoping to find and how he'll use it politically. As for my own opinion, well, I'm the guy who submitted the article.
When I submitted the summary, it included links to several other news articles on the subject. For once the Slashdot editors actually decided to edit, which in this case meant editing out the additional points of view.
You can find them with Google News, but you can infer the Chairman's view from the editorial: he feels that the research was politically motivated.
It's not entirely a gamble. Sure, you can play it that way if you want, but in gambling you KNOW you will lose: $X goes in, the house takes 10%, and.9$X comes out. You might win, you might lose, but it's a zero-sum game and in the long run it's always a net win for the house and a net loss for you.
Investing wisely in the market isn't gambling. $X goes in, a bunch of new products are invented worth $Y, and $X+$Y comes out. It's a net win.
I don't watch the ticker ever few minutes, because innovation doesn't happen in minutes. Buy a company who isn't overvalued (which is a matter of research, unlike the fall of the cards, which is guessing) and wait a few months or years.
Sure, there's silly money to be made in the nearly-random movement that day traders take advantage of, but if they win at all it's only because the stock market tends to rise over time. So they lose money on 99 transactions and win on 100 of them, even picking at random.
Fine, whatever. From the market's standpoint they're still providing liquidity, which is what's really going on. You don't ordinarily get to invest at the beginning and sell out at the end. You buy in at some point in the ride, and sell out when you want your money for some other purpose. The companies don't see that money, but the initial people invest because they know that they can get their money out at some point before the very end.
It looks like a gamble if you don't know what you're doing, but unlike a casino you can be smart. Figure out how much money they have, how much money they're likely to make, and you can make yourself a profit for free. Do it wrong or get unlucky (competitors, lawsuits, ideas that turn out badly, shifts in people's tastes) and you can still lose, but unlike the casino there's money coming out at the end of the day because the money is going into something real: companies that provide real services and products.
Yeah, there are gamblers there, too. I'm happy to take their money.
I like your thesis, but I think you're missing the part where it's not just "people", it's "the sort of people who use drugs", which are intended to be separate from "the good, honest, moral, God-fearing people who make the laws" and "the good, honest, moral, God-fearing people who elected them". Never forget the complicity of the electorate, who keep sending tough-on-drugs candidates back, and who spaz when a candidate admits to using drugs.
So it's not just a "war on people"; that's a little too Orwellian. It's a reflection of a moralistic, judgmental, and often hypocritical aspect of American society. I don't need to hypothesize a shadowy keep-the-people-down figure when all I need is the prudes and Puritans to know why we're pursuing this foolish policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. It's the end of the Shuttle, certainly, and possibly the end of the ISS. But the US is too proud of it's space dominance to cut itself completely out of the race.
They'd ground the fleet, perhaps de-orbit the station (unless they could arrange with the Russians to run it), and get to work on whatever is going to replace the Shuttle. It wouldn't happen soon; it would start with too many bureaucrats in too many departments layering on requirements (which is part of what made the Shuttle itself such a nightmare.) It would be at least a decade.
I agree with you totally and absolutely. The RIAA and MPAA suck; let them die. Don't buy their stuff. Buy stuff from indie artists.
I just need to stick in one more item: don't download their stuff, either. Not buying it is standing up for artists outside the system. Downloading it anyway is just hypocritical.
Absolutely! Because nothing helps a scientific career along like a lot of media attention on a theory you're not ready to commit to.
Another thing you should have learned in business is that your business partner's problem is also your problem. The **AAs are your partners: you buy things for them. Claiming that their problems are theirs alone is self-defeating, because it leads precisely where you're suggesting: they'll stick the most restrictive DRM they can on it, and suddenly their problem becomes your problem.
So rather than just getting angry and saying, "Hey, you're trying to take away my fair use rights, I demand everything that's coming to me and screw what's fair to you," you treat them as the enemy, which encourages them to treat you as the enemy.
I think that if the Slashdot community took the attitude of trying to come up with a fair solution, the **AAs could be convinced to embrace it. You offer them a point at which they can be happy and you can be happy, and they'll go exactly where you're saying: happy customers buy more stuff.
Maybe there isn't a better solution than, as the great-grandparent post suggests, just getting people angry. It doesn't really fight DRM, of course, but it gives you a great opportunity to scream about it on Slashdot.
Pay-per-download also implies a DRM model, which I think is no more acceptable to the great-grandparent poster than any other DRM.
You could do DRM-free pay-per-download, which many Slashdot posters seem to prefer, but if it's DRM-free it'll rapdily turn into free downloads.
They were reluctant to do pay-per-download because they wanted to see the DRM on it first. Now that the model is proving successful (whether the DRM helps or hinders that is up for debate), you'll find that an awful lot of stuff is available on iTunes.
It's not fair to them in the sense that they're playing by an old set of rules. They used to price their sales under the assumption that you could not easily make copies. If your friends wanted one, they'd have to go to the store and buy it.
The rules have changed, but they haven't changed their pricing model. When you buy a CD from them, you're implicitly (but not explicitly) agreeing that for $12 you're getting the right to play it, and sell it, and transfer it to your iPod, but not to send out free copies over the Internet.
Like I said, that's all implicit, in that it used to be true because P2P didn't exist at all. They wish to continue playing by the old rules, because they thought it worked well for them and for you. Nobody particularly complained about the fact that the implicit contract forbid them from making backup copies because it simply wasn't possible to do it.
So you're welcome to claim that the absolutely-no-DRM is fair to them, in that you're just exercising rights that you always had but didn't exercise because the technology wasn't available. They're looking to change the contract to make the implicit explicit, via DRM.
I'm not saying that DRM is necessarily the right answer for that, and you read the grandparent post closely you'll see that I'm not calling for DRM but rather just for balance to see their point of view. DRM is clearly overly restrictive, but my point is not to promote DRM but rather to say why DRM was created in response to an unfair situation.
One alternative to adding DRM, for example, would be to change the price. They assumed that they could sell you a $12 CD, and if your friend wanted it (or any part of it) they'd get $12 from that friend, too. If you believe that the no-DRM model is fair to them, then they could raise prices.
That doesn't actually work. Higher prices would encourage more downloading, causing even higher prices, until eventually they decide to sell one copy for $200,000. Let the music listeners of the world get together to pitch in for it, and then throw it out in the Internet for free.
There are a number of other ways it could go. They could stop spending quite so much producing and promoting albums, for example. What one really wants is neither DRM nor no-DRM, but some brilliant new model which makes DRM unnecessary. I haven't got it.
At any rate, to recap: the no-DRM model isn't completely fair to them because they spend money to create and promote albums, and in the limit case they sell exactly 1 CD for $12 and everybody else downloads it. That doesn't seem fair, does it?
How did you explain their side of the argument?
Let's assume (perhaps falsely) that the RIAA/MPAA aren't literally Satan's spawn. They have a good reason for wanting DRM: they spend a lot of money to make music/movies. They'd like to get paid for that, and the current environment makes it easy for people to get the full benefit of their work without paying for it.
You know all this, so I'm not going to explain any further, but the question is, did you explain this to your friend? It's easy to get people angry when you explain only one side of the story. And if you want to use him as an example you have to be extra-careful to present their side as persuasively as possible, because you're obviously coming to this with a bias.
Look, I agree that the DRM they want to use is too restrictive. But the absolutely-no-DRM environment is also not completely fair to them. So the attitude of simply getting angry at them for proposing an alternative is just wrong. The proper attitude is closer to, "Gee, neither situation is tenable, let's figure out what's genuinely fair."
I thought the actors gave lovely downplayed performances. I thought the visuals were stylish and captivating. I thought the writing was sharp and incisive and funny.
But hey, apparently there's no accounting for taste. Just skip all of the future Serenity threads.
One thing I can say is that I felt that the earliest episodes were not the strongest. You could try Shindig, which was one of the funniest episodes, but whether it would work if you weren't already into the characters, I just can't say.
These are the retailers. Even more than the studios, they care very much that people actually buy movies rather than getting illegal copies.
If you want an end to copy protection, you're not going to have the retailers on your side unless you give them a really good reason. Tell them you'll boycott, perhaps, or show them some research showing that movie downloaders buy more movies. (Send it to me, too, while you're at it.)
But don't expect them to call for what they perceive as slitting their own throats.
Next question.
Sorry if I reaad too much into your post. Let me show you how I got where I went:
You said that "downloading illegally is the most convenient method of hearing the music before they decide whether or not they are going to buy it." I inferred from this that you think that the process should be made legal.
But since that makes it possible for people to download the music for free, the labels take 100% of the risk: that is, people can get the music legally for free and it would be mostly out of the goodness of their hearts to actually buy the music (plus the highly valuable jewel case and cover art.)
So I apologize if I put words in your mouth, but I at least hope this clears up why I said what I did. I may well be wrong, but I mean well.
In court, they have to talk in terms of what's legal. Just because it costs them money doesn't give them any right to put a stop to it. It being illegal does.
The goal of laws is to make things that hurt people illegal, so their motivation (making money, and avoiding losing money) drives lawmaking (making music sharing illegal). Whether the law is fair, and whether it serves the goal, is another question entirely.
That's the legal route. They also have the route of appeal to your sense of fairness, which they've also been taking. They say, "Please don't download music/movies, because it puts the people who make them out of work," in ads. They "spout" that line, too, just in a different venue: direct to the consumers/downloaders. They talk law in the courts, and fairness to you.
iTMS offers 30-second samplings, which is fully 20% of most songs. No, it's not the same as hearing the whole thing, but it seems like a pretty fair compromise to me.
Between that and the other ways you have of hearing music (radio, CDs from friends, in clubs), it seems unfair to defend illegally-downloading music, since it is VERY unfair to the music labels (since they have no way of distinguishing between "I was just trying it out" and "I decided that I'd rather not pay you for it").
I'm not saying that the compromise is completely fair to you, but it does seem that asking them to shoulder 100% of the risk is even more unfair to them.
Actually, comics are taken extremely seriously by their fans, and it's why they're often called "graphic novels" or "books" (short for "comic books", as opposed to the thicker objects we ordinarily call books.)
Calling them "comics" often doesn't cut it any more because they're no longer very comic. Some fans still use the term as a historical artifact, like the nonexistent "dial" on your cell phone.
Nerdcore rap, on the other hand, is a self-deprecating name for a self-deprecating art form.
Greg Allman's gotta chill. There's a lot to be said for rap. It's got an incredibly engaging beat and when it's done well the rhymes are clever. At it's best it's playing with language, a very nerdly thing to do.
Yeah, it's 99% crap. This is different from every other genre how?
It's not meant to be taken seriously. It's all in-jokes deliberately contrasting the white-bread image of the geek coder with the ultra-violent image of gangsta rap. The geeks have their own art form that they practice seriously; it's called "writing code". This is what they do to relax.
Wrong. There's an additional source of money: income of the companies you're buying. That can be paid out as dividends, and that's pure income. If you're playing the game correctly, the price you're willing to pay is proportional to those dividends.
If the company you were investing in were a farm, the dividends would come from the vegetables the farm sold. Those are, in effect, free: they come from the sun and the earth. All you pay for is the labor.
Or it could be a company that needs the money to write software/open a dry-cleaner/making ice cream. They make actual money from selling software/cleaning clothes/selling ice cream, and they give you a piece of that. It's real money, not pyramid-scheme money.
The actual game is a lot more complicated than that, but at its basis that's why you invest: not for the pyramid scheme of new investors, but by the fact that you give money to people who make something valuable and then give you some of the profits.
The price of the stock should be proportional to the value of those dividends. Sure, some people invest in hopes of selling on a pyramid scheme, but not everybody (and not me). Those people tend to drive up the price of the stock. You say out of companies whose stock is bid up by those speculators, and find companies whose dividends are "cheap".
But the main thing to remember is that a stock isn't a random piece of paper, like a card or a pair of dice. It's a piece of a real company, and owning stock entitles you to some of the profits of that company (as well as some control of it, which is nearly irrelevant unless you're massively rich.) That's why it's not gambling, and it's not pari-mutuel: your money ultimately comes not from the investors but from the company itself.
Are you kidding? Start minting mills!
Why does personalized advertising bother you so much? Is it the fact that you care more about the ad, because you're irritated that you're actually interested? Or is it just that you prefer the implication that non-targeted ads imply that you're anonymous? In other words, do personalized ads bug you primarily because they remind you that you're not anonymous?
The existence of identity standards doesn't necessarily mean automatically identifying yourself everywhere you go. This is not about loss of anonymity; it's actually about improving it. There are various middle grounds between "totally anonymous" and "totally exposed" and they're trying to standardize those. And you'll presumably see ads as personalized as the level of identity you're required to expose for any particular service. If a particular service requires too much of you, don't use it.
Beyond that, personalized ads don't bother me much. If I want to read the New York Times and they feel that they're going to do better business showing an ad targeted to a 35 year old white male, feel free. Who knows, they may even be right. I'd love to reach a state where I'm grateful for ads which tell me about stuff I want to know rather than being irritated by ads that have nothing to do with me, especially when they're offensive in some way.
I'd say that anonymity is a corollary to the existing 7 rules. "User control" and "minimal disclosure" together imply that you can release zero information, if you choose.
Unless you'd like to rephrase rule 0 as "Services are required to serve everybody without identifying them, even minimally". You may well agree with that, but I'm not sure that I do. It's the same as what you said except turned around, focusing not on you but on the people whom you are asking to do work on your behalf.
That runs counter to the "minimal disclosure" rule. The converse of "discloses the least amount of identifying information" is "you must disclose some minimum amount if it's required". Some services require some form of identity management, from specifying preferences on my Slashdot page to specifying the shipping address for my Amazon order.
The real question is, what's "minimal" and how do we enforce it? Presumably enforcement happens by market forces: if you don't want to shop at Amazon because they require more information than you want to give, you go elsewhere. But online as in the real world, it's not always easy (or possible) to shop elsewhere. Sometimes the markets will flow to create alternatives; sometimes it's just not sufficiently profitable.
So I'm not worried about anonymity so much as I am about the larger problem: how do I encourage sites that I want to do business with to set their minimums to appropriate levels? You're proposing, I think, that the minimum is always zero, and I think that's oversimplified and unrealistic.
The organizations he's looking for aren't "nefarious secret ultra-rich" whackos but ordinary environmentalists. If he finds that the money comes from World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, or even better one of the anti-globalization action groups, he'll accuse them of being anti-corporate (and, by extension, anti-American).
There do exist groups whose primary goals are some sort of reordering of the world society along what are essentially socialist wealth-redistributive lines. These groups use global warming as an example of the evil that corporations do, and what better argument could they hope for than "Exxon-Moible is destroying every life on planet earth! We should dismantle them and take their money as punishment."
Any research funded by such an organization is going to be in question, because getting the right results furthers their political aims.
It isn't even precisely "bribery" as the grandparent post would suggest. That would imply that the scientists were completely objective but were corrupted by the influence of the money. They may well be individually intent on furthering their theory in the absence of evidence. Although reproducibility is the sine qua non of science, climate change is particularly tricky and prone to manipulation of the data. Thus taking money from an anti-globalization activist wouldn't suggest "bribery" so much as "political bias".
I need to note that I'm trying to be objective in my description here and not use inflammatory rhetoric. My own personal opinions of global warming and globalization aren't relevant; I'm just explaining what he's hoping to find and how he'll use it politically. As for my own opinion, well, I'm the guy who submitted the article.
When I submitted the summary, it included links to several other news articles on the subject. For once the Slashdot editors actually decided to edit, which in this case meant editing out the additional points of view.
You can find them with Google News, but you can infer the Chairman's view from the editorial: he feels that the research was politically motivated.
It's not entirely a gamble. Sure, you can play it that way if you want, but in gambling you KNOW you will lose: $X goes in, the house takes 10%, and .9$X comes out. You might win, you might lose, but it's a zero-sum game and in the long run it's always a net win for the house and a net loss for you.
Investing wisely in the market isn't gambling. $X goes in, a bunch of new products are invented worth $Y, and $X+$Y comes out. It's a net win.
I don't watch the ticker ever few minutes, because innovation doesn't happen in minutes. Buy a company who isn't overvalued (which is a matter of research, unlike the fall of the cards, which is guessing) and wait a few months or years.
Sure, there's silly money to be made in the nearly-random movement that day traders take advantage of, but if they win at all it's only because the stock market tends to rise over time. So they lose money on 99 transactions and win on 100 of them, even picking at random.
Fine, whatever. From the market's standpoint they're still providing liquidity, which is what's really going on. You don't ordinarily get to invest at the beginning and sell out at the end. You buy in at some point in the ride, and sell out when you want your money for some other purpose. The companies don't see that money, but the initial people invest because they know that they can get their money out at some point before the very end.
It looks like a gamble if you don't know what you're doing, but unlike a casino you can be smart. Figure out how much money they have, how much money they're likely to make, and you can make yourself a profit for free. Do it wrong or get unlucky (competitors, lawsuits, ideas that turn out badly, shifts in people's tastes) and you can still lose, but unlike the casino there's money coming out at the end of the day because the money is going into something real: companies that provide real services and products.
Yeah, there are gamblers there, too. I'm happy to take their money.
I like your thesis, but I think you're missing the part where it's not just "people", it's "the sort of people who use drugs", which are intended to be separate from "the good, honest, moral, God-fearing people who make the laws" and "the good, honest, moral, God-fearing people who elected them". Never forget the complicity of the electorate, who keep sending tough-on-drugs candidates back, and who spaz when a candidate admits to using drugs.
So it's not just a "war on people"; that's a little too Orwellian. It's a reflection of a moralistic, judgmental, and often hypocritical aspect of American society. I don't need to hypothesize a shadowy keep-the-people-down figure when all I need is the prudes and Puritans to know why we're pursuing this foolish policy.
You should definitely publish your results in J. Anecdotal Evidence.