Ugh. Anyone who already owns Acme.com and is serious about protecting Acme as a trade name is going to now have to buy Acme.us and Acme.com.us, just like they have to buy Acme.info, Acme.biz, and Acme.pro. Then there will be Acme.store, Acme.brand, Acme.workplace, Acme.services, Acme.product, Acme.ICANNkickback, Acme.RegistryChristmasPartyFund, and on and on as they add more and more gtld's without any apparent bound.
Every one of these increases the yearly tax on businesses, making it more likely that only big businesses can keep up and that little businesses won't be able to. Now it's not $35/yr for a domain, but $35*6 or *8 or *10 to keep even one point of contact maintained. And it's even worse if you have a multi-word name because you need twice as much money for my-acme.com, myacme.com, my-acme.us, myacme.us, my-acme.com.us, myacme.com.us, and so on.
I don't know about anyone else, but I am fed up with new TLDs. It may be useful to those who haven't invested yet, but anyone who hasn't invested yet isn't in it for business. To those of us who have bought in, it's a constant scramble to keep up and extraordinarily painful.
ICANN seems to me an out-of-control organization with no apparent checks and balances to its exercising its capricious whims. I am quite upset about this, but have no idea who to complain to. I suspect the answer is: there is no one. If someone knows otherwise, I'd be interested.
If you want a good small world to study, I'd go to Junkyard Wars on The Learning Channel (TLC). Most games are inherently top-down, identifying the high level structure of what you'll want to do and even often the tools you'll be using and leading you to just decide what order to press the buttons to make those tools achieve that goal. If you want strategy to be used, I suggest you being in a more bottom-up, Lego-like way giving some components with purposes that are not readily apparent but that invite experimentation, improvisation, and composition.
It bugged me a lot that in Pharoah, for example, that when I worked out a way to manage a small region of a town, I couldn't encapsulate that and start to build bigger patterns from smaller ones. There were no compositional tools. And eventually the game dies of its own weight because one gets tired of dealing with things at the micro level, and the time spent dealing with that distracts from the fun of building bigger patterns.
Computer scientists know that you can't build bigger and bigger things without creating aggregations (and aggregations of aggregations, and so on) or without creating abstractions and hiding detail; game designers need to come to grips with the fact that game players need these same tools to keep a game from wearing out. The issue of a commander having to give orders and have others implement them doesn't just add "realism", it adds tractability. It keeps the game "possible".
My ratings system is, itself, intended as subtle parody of the concept of ratings systems. The real problem with ratings systems is that the choice of what to rate is itself political. Unless you're committed to exposing in the ratings the inherent political tensions among various users, you're either going to provide no information or you'll serve one side or the other. Toward that end, I offered both "gay" and "intolerance" ratings; I personally don't like intolerance, but I understand it's fashionable in some camps. I offered both "irreverance" ratings and "evangelism" ratings. I abhor evangelism, but I guess some people are the reverse.
But the list of things people find to dislike in others could be endless, and the question becomes: how much burden can one place on the individual site to acknowledge things people might choose to dislike? Does the Bill Cosby show get labeled as "racial"? The open-minded among us would wish this were never an issue, but to some it is. I'm not advocating catering to the audience that thinks that's a useful rating, but I'm highlighting the obvious presence of that audience to point out that any ratings system immediately confronts the political.
And what of "Darwinism"? Do we just counter with a "Evolutionism" rating, requiring every show on earth to recognize that it confronts this issue and takes a side? What if one or the other side wants to simply call their category "Common Sense"? Who gets to pick the label names? The "Pro-Life"/"Pro-Choice" people have this problem, that the opposite sides label the opponent tactically, as in "Anti-Choice"/"Pro-Abortion". Even in this world-wide war (not yet referred to as World War III) going on now, both "sides" are claiming it's Good against Evil, but they each disagree on who's playing which role.
I've also found the issue of graphics to affect things. People ask me all the time if I run an adult site. Of course I do. It's intended to be read by adults! It doesn't have any pictures of nude people, of course, but I resent being told that the generic word "adult" has been co-opted for something as narrow as it has come to mean.
For my parody, there is also the issue of subtlety. This is an article that tries to treat the issue of politics even-handedly. Does that make this a political or an apolitical article? If I mentioned Darwinism in a derisive way, does that make it anti-Darwin? What if I only did so to make a humorous or ironic point and I'm really pro-Darwin? What if I write a story that takes a pro-violence or pro-drugs position to show the dangers of violence or drugs? How do I rate that? Ratings that are mere keywords, and not "relational expressions", capture none of this subtlety. Simple keywords ("use of") is not good enough. "comparison_of(darwin,evolution)" is different than "beats(darwin,evolution)" (or vice versa). Depiction of naked bodies having sex is different in educational contexts than in erotic contexts.
Depiction of nudity can also be essential in medical contexts. Must "medical" be a "rating" in order to enable this distinction? Once you do that, is "rating" much different than "search"? What is not a rating? Perhaps the key to rating is for Google to simply add a prompt to its search box saying "Type a rating:". Then the whole Internet will be suddenly already rated.
And, finally, as a writer, I note that any ratings system that is detailed enough to really be useful can spoil storylines. If the "ratable" part is too close to the end, then rating it can spoil the ending. Consider that I have a rating for "use of Atomic Devices" in my story; now how would rating Failsafe or Dr. Strangelove with this have affected the surprise of the endings? Or rating "use of single-person self-propelled vehicles" affect your appreciation of Citi--oh, never mind.
I think self-rating is time-consuming and probably pointless in that it won't satisfy any but a few. I have concluded that community ratings are perhaps more practical, but only if the set of categories isn't fixed or there is some way for politics to express itself. I don't think Slashdot quite has the notion right because it doesn't allow multiple points of view on the same article, but I applaud their experiment in community participation and I consider it much more right than most of the other systems out there. I hope to see (and perhaps myself do) more experiments in participation. The cyber world started out to be participatory. We shouldn't let it fall back to being just like going to the movies, full of pre-packaged content fitting into neat little categories, just because we're too lazy to offer alternatives.
I moved a couple years ago to Senator Gregg's state (NH). I've so far found my representatives and senators are just as responsive to e-mail. They write back in snail mail with text that suggests they have registered my opinion. In this case, I hope my mail contributed to the change of position.
I pointed out in my email to him that strong crypto is an important defensive weapon against terrorists, and that it was misguided to merely look at the offensive uses. I also said I thought that the restrictions on crypto make it hard to build crypto into US-made products to be distributed world-wide because we have to cripple our products, making them less competitive. And finally, I pointed out that terrorists already have strong crypto and aren't going to give it up just because it's made illegal. I borrowed this catch phrase from the gun folks: When crypto is outlawed, only criminals will have crypto. Hopefully one of these arguments hit home.
This is an excellent question. That's not to say I agree with the claims it's making, but it raises a number of interesting and important issues. The short answer, I think, is that there is a difference between "how a language is used" and "what a language is good for". You're making observations about the former and trying to conclude things about the latter, but I don't find the inductive leaps you're making to be well founded.
When I look at how Java is (or should be) used, I see more similarity between Java and TeX or C than between Java and Lisp. That is, I see Java, TeX, and C as "assembly languages" and Lisp as a "higher level" language. The former set of languages are about implementing an idea (saying how to do it), while higher level language should be, I think, about expressing an idea (saying what you want done, and abstracting away from how you want it done).
Can one such language threaten the other in the marketplace? Sure. Does marketplace superiority necessarily imply technical or conceptual or moral superiority? Can you spell "Microsoft"?
I don't deny that Java has adopted some useful features of Lisp. I'm actually relieved to have entered an era where I don't have to explain the importance of garbage collection all the time. Java has finally made it clear to people that this is a useful language feature. I'm happy to see any of the good ideas of Lisp trickling down into other languages. But Java has not by any means "captured the essence of Lisp".
I doubt this query will bubble up to be among the questions I'm supposed to answer for the interview, so I'll answer it ahead of time here.
I wish I had the time to experiment with automatic episode-writing for Another Way Out (AWO) using Lisp. I think it would be both well within the limits of technology and a lot of fun. Right now the only Lisp involved happens when I edit the stories in emacs (which is implemented in a lisp dialect). The stories are written the hard way, but at least they keep my writing skills honed, which sometimes helps out in work on the sci-fi novel I'm writing in background. (Drop me a line if you want notification if/when that comes available. But don't hold your breath--it won't be in time for Christmas.)
Regarding technology and writing, though, it continues to amaze me how sophisticated the editing tools are for programming and how weak they are for fiction writing. I consider the two to be virtually the same kind of activity, and it's been on my list sometime to write some better tools for supporting my writing. But there are always so many things to be doing...
Back on AWO for a moment, though, I use all kinds of mechanisms for coming up with plots and there's one that went over the heads of most of my readers but the nerds of this forum might get a kick out of. Each of my parodies comes with a "moral of the story" page (i.e., "editor's notes"), and you might find the moral for Episode 47 to be of special interest if you're the sort to care about mechanical story understanding/generation issues. I borrowed some tricks I'd learned from Pat Winston at the MIT AI Lab years before. The technique was almost like programming. The story came out more fun to read about than to read, frankly, but was a lot of fun to make.
And, for extra credit, those of you who are soap fans (no, you don't have to embarrass yourself by self-identifying) might also enjoy my Theory of RelativeTV, which explains some otherwise perplexing effects of time/space that occur in soaps.
A related issue is whether such cards are best as national. However secure it may be, if it is forged or broken into and there is only one such thing to forge or break into, that's it, you're in totally.
Sure, digital techniques might improve any given security check but sacrificing many such checks (one for American Express, a different one for Visa, a different one for your frequent flier card, a different one for your driver's license, and so on) for one centralized check will not improve security. At least with 37 different ID cards, there are 37 chances for the terrorist to make an error, and even 37 chances for him to be caught sweating and looking shifty or worried. Making a national ID is likely to lead to people phasing out other checks (just as ubiquitous use of the social security number has begun to do), and that can only be bad...
I haven't actually sold a domain name, but someone made me an offer on one of mine, so I looked into it a little. Here's what I (think I) know:
If you're really worried about getting too low a price, you can put the domain up for sale on eBay. That will at least cause the person bidding to not try to lowball you if the name is quite good, but you might risk that people shopping for domain names are not looking there.
On the other hand, you can put the domain up on afternic.com, which is sort of like an eBay for domain names. It even has a specific "appraisal" service that is intended to help you ask for a reasonable price from the outset. The good thing about this site seems to be that it's inhabited by people wanting to buy/sell domain names. The bad thing is that you immediately have the sense when you go there that there are LOTS of other domain names that are just as good, and so your domain name seems "less special", probably driving down the price, since many reasonable alternatives are too close at hand.
(By the way, afternic also has the advantage of having some facilities for managing the mechanics of the sale, which makes it less likely you'll botch that part. Some domain registrars have this, too. If you don't use such a facility, it's worth at least reading the instructions to make sure you understand the process.)
Just browsing either eBay or afternic.com you can get a good sense for pricing, though, that may help you, even if you don't use the forum to do the sale. (Don't direct your purchaser to do likewise, since the same knowledge might drive down the price.)
Another way of assessing the price is to ask yourself, "what would I have to pay if I were to replace my domain with one I liked just as well?" I was offered a certain sum for one of my domains, for example, but I concluded that I'd have to pay at least that sum for a replacement name I liked equally well. So I counter-proposed an amount three times the sum, an arbitrary amount that would have cleared my credit card debt. Kind of random, but I figured even if I regretted the sale I'd appreciate being out of debt... They turned me down, which suited me fine.
That's the key thing. Pick a price that makes you happy either selling or not selling.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. Anyone who already owns Acme.com and is serious about protecting Acme as a trade name is going to now have to buy Acme.us and Acme.com.us, just like they have to buy Acme.info, Acme.biz, and Acme.pro. Then there will be Acme.store, Acme.brand, Acme.workplace, Acme.services, Acme.product, Acme.ICANNkickback, Acme.RegistryChristmasPartyFund, and on and on as they add more and more gtld's without any apparent bound.
Every one of these increases the yearly tax on businesses, making it more likely that only big businesses can keep up and that little businesses won't be able to. Now it's not $35/yr for a domain, but $35*6 or *8 or *10 to keep even one point of contact maintained. And it's even worse if you have a multi-word name because you need twice as much money for my-acme.com, myacme.com, my-acme.us, myacme.us, my-acme.com.us, myacme.com.us, and so on.
I don't know about anyone else, but I am fed up with new TLDs. It may be useful to those who haven't invested yet, but anyone who hasn't invested yet isn't in it for business. To those of us who have bought in, it's a constant scramble to keep up and extraordinarily painful.
ICANN seems to me an out-of-control organization with no apparent checks and balances to its exercising its capricious whims. I am quite upset about this, but have no idea who to complain to. I suspect the answer is: there is no one. If someone knows otherwise, I'd be interested.
If you want a good small world to study, I'd go to Junkyard Wars on The Learning Channel (TLC). Most games are inherently top-down, identifying the high level structure of what you'll want to do and even often the tools you'll be using and leading you to just decide what order to press the buttons to make those tools achieve that goal. If you want strategy to be used, I suggest you being in a more bottom-up, Lego-like way giving some components with purposes that are not readily apparent but that invite experimentation, improvisation, and composition.
It bugged me a lot that in Pharoah, for example, that when I worked out a way to manage a small region of a town, I couldn't encapsulate that and start to build bigger patterns from smaller ones. There were no compositional tools. And eventually the game dies of its own weight because one gets tired of dealing with things at the micro level, and the time spent dealing with that distracts from the fun of building bigger patterns.
Computer scientists know that you can't build bigger and bigger things without creating aggregations (and aggregations of aggregations, and so on) or without creating abstractions and hiding detail; game designers need to come to grips with the fact that game players need these same tools to keep a game from wearing out. The issue of a commander having to give orders and have others implement them doesn't just add "realism", it adds tractability. It keeps the game "possible".
I experimented with self-rating at my parody site of The Young and the Restless (daytime soaps). I made a self-rating system and, for a while, maintained ratings for each episode. (The stories themselves will be of no interest to anyone here who doesn't watch Y&R regularly, but the ratings system should be generally intelligible out of context.)
My ratings system is, itself, intended as subtle parody of the concept of ratings systems. The real problem with ratings systems is that the choice of what to rate is itself political. Unless you're committed to exposing in the ratings the inherent political tensions among various users, you're either going to provide no information or you'll serve one side or the other. Toward that end, I offered both "gay" and "intolerance" ratings; I personally don't like intolerance, but I understand it's fashionable in some camps. I offered both "irreverance" ratings and "evangelism" ratings. I abhor evangelism, but I guess some people are the reverse.
But the list of things people find to dislike in others could be endless, and the question becomes: how much burden can one place on the individual site to acknowledge things people might choose to dislike? Does the Bill Cosby show get labeled as "racial"? The open-minded among us would wish this were never an issue, but to some it is. I'm not advocating catering to the audience that thinks that's a useful rating, but I'm highlighting the obvious presence of that audience to point out that any ratings system immediately confronts the political.
And what of "Darwinism"? Do we just counter with a "Evolutionism" rating, requiring every show on earth to recognize that it confronts this issue and takes a side? What if one or the other side wants to simply call their category "Common Sense"? Who gets to pick the label names? The "Pro-Life"/"Pro-Choice" people have this problem, that the opposite sides label the opponent tactically, as in "Anti-Choice"/"Pro-Abortion". Even in this world-wide war (not yet referred to as World War III) going on now, both "sides" are claiming it's Good against Evil, but they each disagree on who's playing which role.
I've also found the issue of graphics to affect things. People ask me all the time if I run an adult site. Of course I do. It's intended to be read by adults! It doesn't have any pictures of nude people, of course, but I resent being told that the generic word "adult" has been co-opted for something as narrow as it has come to mean.
For my parody, there is also the issue of subtlety. This is an article that tries to treat the issue of politics even-handedly. Does that make this a political or an apolitical article? If I mentioned Darwinism in a derisive way, does that make it anti-Darwin? What if I only did so to make a humorous or ironic point and I'm really pro-Darwin? What if I write a story that takes a pro-violence or pro-drugs position to show the dangers of violence or drugs? How do I rate that? Ratings that are mere keywords, and not "relational expressions", capture none of this subtlety. Simple keywords ("use of") is not good enough. "comparison_of(darwin,evolution)" is different than "beats(darwin,evolution)" (or vice versa). Depiction of naked bodies having sex is different in educational contexts than in erotic contexts.
Depiction of nudity can also be essential in medical contexts. Must "medical" be a "rating" in order to enable this distinction? Once you do that, is "rating" much different than "search"? What is not a rating? Perhaps the key to rating is for Google to simply add a prompt to its search box saying "Type a rating:". Then the whole Internet will be suddenly already rated.
And, finally, as a writer, I note that any ratings system that is detailed enough to really be useful can spoil storylines. If the "ratable" part is too close to the end, then rating it can spoil the ending. Consider that I have a rating for "use of Atomic Devices" in my story; now how would rating Failsafe or Dr. Strangelove with this have affected the surprise of the endings? Or rating "use of single-person self-propelled vehicles" affect your appreciation of Citi--oh, never mind.
I think self-rating is time-consuming and probably pointless in that it won't satisfy any but a few. I have concluded that community ratings are perhaps more practical, but only if the set of categories isn't fixed or there is some way for politics to express itself. I don't think Slashdot quite has the notion right because it doesn't allow multiple points of view on the same article, but I applaud their experiment in community participation and I consider it much more right than most of the other systems out there. I hope to see (and perhaps myself do) more experiments in participation. The cyber world started out to be participatory. We shouldn't let it fall back to being just like going to the movies, full of pre-packaged content fitting into neat little categories, just because we're too lazy to offer alternatives.
I moved a couple years ago to Senator Gregg's state (NH). I've so far found my representatives and senators are just as responsive to e-mail. They write back in snail mail with text that suggests they have registered my opinion. In this case, I hope my mail contributed to the change of position.
I pointed out in my email to him that strong crypto is an important defensive weapon against terrorists, and that it was misguided to merely look at the offensive uses. I also said I thought that the restrictions on crypto make it hard to build crypto into US-made products to be distributed world-wide because we have to cripple our products, making them less competitive. And finally, I pointed out that terrorists already have strong crypto and aren't going to give it up just because it's made illegal. I borrowed this catch phrase from the gun folks: When crypto is outlawed, only criminals will have crypto. Hopefully one of these arguments hit home.
This is an excellent question. That's not to say I agree with the claims it's making, but it raises a number of interesting and important issues. The short answer, I think, is that there is a difference between "how a language is used" and "what a language is good for". You're making observations about the former and trying to conclude things about the latter, but I don't find the inductive leaps you're making to be well founded.
When I look at how Java is (or should be) used, I see more similarity between Java and TeX or C than between Java and Lisp. That is, I see Java, TeX, and C as "assembly languages" and Lisp as a "higher level" language. The former set of languages are about implementing an idea (saying how to do it), while higher level language should be, I think, about expressing an idea (saying what you want done, and abstracting away from how you want it done).
Can one such language threaten the other in the marketplace? Sure. Does marketplace superiority necessarily imply technical or conceptual or moral superiority? Can you spell "Microsoft"?
I don't deny that Java has adopted some useful features of Lisp. I'm actually relieved to have entered an era where I don't have to explain the importance of garbage collection all the time. Java has finally made it clear to people that this is a useful language feature. I'm happy to see any of the good ideas of Lisp trickling down into other languages. But Java has not by any means "captured the essence of Lisp".
I doubt this query will bubble up to be among the questions I'm supposed to answer for the interview, so I'll answer it ahead of time here.
I wish I had the time to experiment with automatic episode-writing for Another Way Out (AWO) using Lisp. I think it would be both well within the limits of technology and a lot of fun. Right now the only Lisp involved happens when I edit the stories in emacs (which is implemented in a lisp dialect). The stories are written the hard way, but at least they keep my writing skills honed, which sometimes helps out in work on the sci-fi novel I'm writing in background. (Drop me a line if you want notification if/when that comes available. But don't hold your breath--it won't be in time for Christmas.)
Regarding technology and writing, though, it continues to amaze me how sophisticated the editing tools are for programming and how weak they are for fiction writing. I consider the two to be virtually the same kind of activity, and it's been on my list sometime to write some better tools for supporting my writing. But there are always so many things to be doing...
Back on AWO for a moment, though, I use all kinds of mechanisms for coming up with plots and there's one that went over the heads of most of my readers but the nerds of this forum might get a kick out of. Each of my parodies comes with a "moral of the story" page (i.e., "editor's notes"), and you might find the moral for Episode 47 to be of special interest if you're the sort to care about mechanical story understanding/generation issues. I borrowed some tricks I'd learned from Pat Winston at the MIT AI Lab years before. The technique was almost like programming. The story came out more fun to read about than to read, frankly, but was a lot of fun to make.
And, for extra credit, those of you who are soap fans (no, you don't have to embarrass yourself by self-identifying) might also enjoy my Theory of RelativeTV, which explains some otherwise perplexing effects of time/space that occur in soaps.
A related issue is whether such cards are best as national. However secure it may be, if it is forged or broken into and there is only one such thing to forge or break into, that's it, you're in totally.
Sure, digital techniques might improve any given security check but sacrificing many such checks (one for American Express, a different one for Visa, a different one for your frequent flier card, a different one for your driver's license, and so on) for one centralized check will not improve security. At least with 37 different ID cards, there are 37 chances for the terrorist to make an error, and even 37 chances for him to be caught sweating and looking shifty or worried. Making a national ID is likely to lead to people phasing out other checks (just as ubiquitous use of the social security number has begun to do), and that can only be bad...
I haven't actually sold a domain name, but someone made me an offer on one of mine, so I looked into it a little. Here's what I (think I) know:
If you're really worried about getting too low a price, you can put the domain up for sale on eBay. That will at least cause the person bidding to not try to lowball you if the name is quite good, but you might risk that people shopping for domain names are not looking there.
On the other hand, you can put the domain up on afternic.com, which is sort of like an eBay for domain names. It even has a specific "appraisal" service that is intended to help you ask for a reasonable price from the outset. The good thing about this site seems to be that it's inhabited by people wanting to buy/sell domain names. The bad thing is that you immediately have the sense when you go there that there are LOTS of other domain names that are just as good, and so your domain name seems "less special", probably driving down the price, since many reasonable alternatives are too close at hand.
(By the way, afternic also has the advantage of having some facilities for managing the mechanics of the sale, which makes it less likely you'll botch that part. Some domain registrars have this, too. If you don't use such a facility, it's worth at least reading the instructions to make sure you understand the process.)
Just browsing either eBay or afternic.com you can get a good sense for pricing, though, that may help you, even if you don't use the forum to do the sale. (Don't direct your purchaser to do likewise, since the same knowledge might drive down the price.)
Another way of assessing the price is to ask yourself, "what would I have to pay if I were to replace my domain with one I liked just as well?" I was offered a certain sum for one of my domains, for example, but I concluded that I'd have to pay at least that sum for a replacement name I liked equally well. So I counter-proposed an amount three times the sum, an arbitrary amount that would have cleared my credit card debt. Kind of random, but I figured even if I regretted the sale I'd appreciate being out of debt... They turned me down, which suited me fine.
That's the key thing. Pick a price that makes you happy either selling or not selling.