"Comparing a mature technology with one still in early adoption phase, and concluding that the latter has no chance, is to mistake the acorn for the oak."
In fact it is you who is perhaps guilty of 'mistaking the acorn for the oak'. It's clear from context that you meant to end your sentence differently, perhaps with "...is to forget that the mightiest oak was once an acorn." (admittedly a little flowery, but bear with me.)
But your malapropism, as it turns out, may be quite illuminating. It just so happens that only about 1 in 10,000 acorns ever grows into an Oak, mighty or otherwise [1]. To see in every nascent technology the seeds of greatness is to ignore the full-to-overflowing dustbin of history to which so many promising ideas are sadly consigned.
Don't get me wrong--I remain hopeful that VOIP can help smash the telco monopolies, but as others here have noted, the powers that be aren't taking any of this lying down. The restrictions on 'servers' in many TOS's are only the first line of defense that will need to be breached before we see real success. As has been noted by others here, one of the key difference between the dawn of fax and that of VOIP is that the phone companies were more than happy to have their customers sign up for extra fax lines and use their new gadgets to make long-distance calls. And there wasn't much FedEx could do about it. Contrast with the current situation, where broadband ISPs in many markets *are* the telcos who stand to suffer, and you see how you have opened yourself up to charges of observation bias.
You are not alone in your eternal hope, of course. A quick Google of 'poem mighty-oak acorn' should convince you of that.
Well, so what? Does that make her insights and research into the history of the case any less valid? I'd argue no.
Our own experiences will always predispose us to be interested in certain topics, to look a little longer than we might otherwise. Would I dig sailing as much if I grew up on the prairies? Did doing logic problems as a kid with my math teacher dad set me up to dig on programming? Probably. Is that any reason to discount my interest or pursuits in those fields? I don't think so.
When it comes to doing good history, I happen to think that being up-front about some of the reasons for your interest in a story lets your audience better appreciate your analysis. (Of course, it also opens you up to charges of 'axe-grinding', but as a reader/viewer, I'd rather have that information going in.) I've never read any history that wasn't made a lot clearer and more useful by finding out more about its writer.
'Coming clean' about your possible influences/conflicts of interest is a good thing in many realms, history-writing included. Note that I'm not saying that Gilbert's film *won't* be a strongly-biased, historically inaccurate, propaganda piece, but rather that I see her honesty about her own 'angle' as a good thing.
Where I think dr_labrat jumped the rails into questionability when he or she made just such an assumption: that Gilbert's being of the same race as the subject of her documentary was grounds for dismissing whatever she had to say on the matter as axe-grinding. That should wait until you've seen/heard what she has to say, and, as I said in my last message, the interview with the filmmaker does little to support such an assumption.
I don't know, I think the filmmaker's being forthright about her motivations and interest is admirable, and I do agree that it sounds pretty bad to dismiss the work of a filmmaker who says that her thinking about racism in America informs a historical documentary she's working on as "one of *those* documentaries," as you did.
I'll grant you that the analogy between use of tissue samples and slavery is a bit strained, but if you'd read the f'n article, you'd have seen that this particular filmmaker is coming at this from a lot of interesting angles, and is just as open about the relevance of her personal experiences to them. For example, she talks about the parallel questions of consent vs. furthering the public interest that arise in the making of documentaries, and also discusses her interest in exploring the 'mythic' side of the immortal cell line story.
Racism exists (even in Science!!) and by blowing off any discussion of its role in historical developments as 'axe-grinding' you open yourself up to the kind of accusation/questioning you've seen here. I don't think this sort of response is P.C. gone out of control, if I may pre-emptively respond to what I suspect your response to this post might be, but rather a reminder to keep the squelch turned up a little higher up on your own personal bullshit detector, lest you become (or appear) truly insensitive to the important and real concerns and insights of others.
Furthermore, as a trained 'historian of science' (I won't tell you which college in Boston it's from), I find your sanctification of the "science documentary" amusing. It's a seedy, complicated world, and while I enjoy the cut-and-dried 19th-century rivalry-driven PBS train-bridge-construction documentary genre as much as the next guy, I certainly also appreciate a historian who's not afraid to dig a little deeper.
The serious problem of undesirable links being added to unwitting users' pages could be avoided by:
1) making the system opt-in,
2) making them visually distinct from regular hyperlinks in some way, and
3) providing the option to (un)subscribe to 'libraries' of rule-URL pairs assembled by whomever.
Come to think of it, this is nearly exactly what www.flyswat.com does. They have a IE for Win plugin available that adds links (that manifest as a weird puky green underline) to any page, and that can be easily turned on and off. I used it for a few days once, and found the easy links to bios and dictionary definitions genuinely useful. They also have "Booster Packs" available (http://www.flyswat.com/bp.html) in a number of fields. Of course, these packs are crying out for an open format for these packs would be no end of fun, and could provide neat opportunities for 'pre-annotating' all kinds of pages.
Imagine links from major brand names/ticker symbols to Corpwatch instead of MSN, or from Book Titles/ISBNs to ISBN.nu...
Somewhat unrelated: I heard that MSFT had a patent on typing a verb into the address bar of a browser. I.e. locking up the address bar as CLI. Pure hearsay.
Slashdot Mirror
"Comparing a mature technology with one still in early adoption phase, and concluding that the latter has no chance, is to mistake the acorn for the oak."
l
In fact it is you who is perhaps guilty of 'mistaking the acorn for the oak'. It's clear from context that you meant to end your sentence differently, perhaps with "...is to forget that the mightiest oak was once an acorn." (admittedly a little flowery, but bear with me.)
But your malapropism, as it turns out, may be quite illuminating. It just so happens that only about 1 in 10,000 acorns ever grows into an Oak, mighty or otherwise [1]. To see in every nascent technology the seeds of greatness is to ignore the full-to-overflowing dustbin of history to which so many promising ideas are sadly consigned.
Don't get me wrong--I remain hopeful that VOIP can help smash the telco monopolies, but as others here have noted, the powers that be aren't taking any of this lying down. The restrictions on 'servers' in many TOS's are only the first line of defense that will need to be breached before we see real success. As has been noted by others here, one of the key difference between the dawn of fax and that of VOIP is that the phone companies were more than happy to have their customers sign up for extra fax lines and use their new gadgets to make long-distance calls. And there wasn't much FedEx could do about it. Contrast with the current situation, where broadband ISPs in many markets *are* the telcos who stand to suffer, and you see how you have opened yourself up to charges of observation bias.
You are not alone in your eternal hope, of course. A quick Google of 'poem mighty-oak acorn' should convince you of that.
[1] http://www.leo.lehigh.edu/projects/sam/trivia.htm
Well, so what? Does that make her insights and research into the history of the case any less valid? I'd argue no.
Our own experiences will always predispose us to be interested in certain topics, to look a little longer than we might otherwise. Would I dig sailing as much if I grew up on the prairies? Did doing logic problems as a kid with my math teacher dad set me up to dig on programming? Probably. Is that any reason to discount my interest or pursuits in those fields? I don't think so.
When it comes to doing good history, I happen to think that being up-front about some of the reasons for your interest in a story lets your audience better appreciate your analysis. (Of course, it also opens you up to charges of 'axe-grinding', but as a reader/viewer, I'd rather have that information going in.) I've never read any history that wasn't made a lot clearer and more useful by finding out more about its writer.
'Coming clean' about your possible influences/conflicts of interest is a good thing in many realms, history-writing included. Note that I'm not saying that Gilbert's film *won't* be a strongly-biased, historically inaccurate, propaganda piece, but rather that I see her honesty about her own 'angle' as a good thing.
Where I think dr_labrat jumped the rails into questionability when he or she made just such an assumption: that Gilbert's being of the same race as the subject of her documentary was grounds for dismissing whatever she had to say on the matter as axe-grinding. That should wait until you've seen/heard what she has to say, and, as I said in my last message, the interview with the filmmaker does little to support such an assumption.
I don't know, I think the filmmaker's being forthright about her motivations and interest is admirable, and I do agree that it sounds pretty bad to dismiss the work of a filmmaker who says that her thinking about racism in America informs a historical documentary she's working on as "one of *those* documentaries," as you did.
I'll grant you that the analogy between use of tissue samples and slavery is a bit strained, but if you'd read the f'n article, you'd have seen that this particular filmmaker is coming at this from a lot of interesting angles, and is just as open about the relevance of her personal experiences to them. For example, she talks about the parallel questions of consent vs. furthering the public interest that arise in the making of documentaries, and also discusses her interest in exploring the 'mythic' side of the immortal cell line story.
Racism exists (even in Science!!) and by blowing off any discussion of its role in historical developments as 'axe-grinding' you open yourself up to the kind of accusation/questioning you've seen here. I don't think this sort of response is P.C. gone out of control, if I may pre-emptively respond to what I suspect your response to this post might be, but rather a reminder to keep the squelch turned up a little higher up on your own personal bullshit detector, lest you become (or appear) truly insensitive to the important and real concerns and insights of others.
Furthermore, as a trained 'historian of science' (I won't tell you which college in Boston it's from), I find your sanctification of the "science documentary" amusing. It's a seedy, complicated world, and while I enjoy the cut-and-dried 19th-century rivalry-driven PBS train-bridge-construction documentary genre as much as the next guy, I certainly also appreciate a historian who's not afraid to dig a little deeper.
I guess I shouldn't have created that file-c-con-con@hotmail account...
The serious problem of undesirable links being added to unwitting users' pages could be avoided by:
...
1) making the system opt-in,
2) making them visually distinct from regular hyperlinks in some way, and
3) providing the option to (un)subscribe to 'libraries' of rule-URL pairs assembled by whomever.
Come to think of it, this is nearly exactly what www.flyswat.com does. They have a IE for Win plugin available that adds links (that manifest as a weird puky green underline) to any page, and that can be easily turned on and off. I used it for a few days once, and found the easy links to bios and dictionary definitions genuinely useful. They also have "Booster Packs" available (http://www.flyswat.com/bp.html) in a number of fields. Of course, these packs are crying out for an open format for these packs would be no end of fun, and could provide neat opportunities for 'pre-annotating' all kinds of pages.
Imagine links from major brand names/ticker symbols to Corpwatch instead of MSN, or from Book Titles/ISBNs to ISBN.nu
Somewhat unrelated: I heard that MSFT had a patent on typing a verb into the address bar of a browser. I.e. locking up the address bar as CLI. Pure hearsay.