But personally I doubt that code is a true form of expression. When an engineer builds a device it serves a purpose, there may
be an artistic component to the work, but it's first and foremost a solution to a problem.
Artistry is not the reason for protecting speech, nor is it the criterion for which speech is to be protected!
As you note, a primary reason for the 1st amendment protection of speech is to protect dissident political opinions. Some of the men who penned that amendment themselves had been at risk of being hanged for treason, for having writen a political document -- the Declaration of Independence. It could not have been far from their minds. They did not come up with the first amendment out of a sense of the sacredness or privileged place of Art.
No, speech is not protected because it might be art; art is protected because it might be speech.
Consider the Constitution itself. No one would argue it is other than speech, yet what is it besides a program for running a government? The fact that something is "first and foremost a solution to a problem" hardly keeps it from being speech.
And just because code is language readily obeyed by computers does not mean it is not speech. What happens if we develop actual natural language parsing? Is then English to be curtailed?
The fact is we're in a terrible pickle. Freedom of speech comparatively straight forward in a world where words are just words. But what do we do in a world in which words have the power to alter reality? To simply say "it is not speech" is a cop-out. It doesn't solve the intrinsic problem -- that words just became vastly more powerful -- it just sweeps it under the rug.
As computers become better and better at obeying natural languages and computers become more and more ubiquitous, the problem just gets worse.
"Interactive" has been most commonly used to refer to content experience (that is the user's experience of the content) which is dynamically effectable by the user: e.g. video games, choose-your-own-adventure books, Eliza, etc. Heaven knows, when I say "interactive" I mean "When I do something to it, it reacts immediately and returns control to me"; that's certainly the common usage around here.
Applying it to content experience which is static, such as a normal linear book, is disingenuous. The word for books which, while static in content, are open to end user input in the initial stages of creation, is "responsive".
Furthermore, there is nothing necessarily interactive nor responsive about an e-book. It's content can be just a singularly and fixedly authored, just as static, as the old paper-and-glue kind. The medium in this case implies nothing of the message.
Finally, the use of "interactive" as a positive buzzword is a sign of datedness.
Roger Ebert in his talk at MIT on interactive movies related that by and large, audiences are profoundly unsatisfied by any situations in which they feel they didn't get the whole story, including plot branches not chosen. Experimental movies which have voting buttons to direct the plot flopped. Meanwhile the "interactive" exhibits at the local science museum have not brought it up to the attendence levels of the almost wholly non-interactive Aquarium.
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Um, dude. That was a cunning oblique referrence which couldn't possibly be misconstrued by any university.
One of the biggest copyright cases in the late 20th cen. had to do with universities providing students with photocopied books or compilation books of photocopied articles, without paying for the rights to republish. Professors were going to their university copy shops and handing them a stack of academic articles or a text book, and saying "Make a copy of this for every member of my 30 person class, and sell it to them when they come in." So in that case, instead of (or in addition to) going to a bookstore to buy a textbook, you go to, say, the campus Kinkos and buy your photocopied book from them.
There was a lawsuit. The universities lost. Universities generally don't pull that stunt any more -- while they may photocopy, they pay for the rights to do so. (If you want photocopy rights, generally one can buy them through the Copyright Clearance Center, and organization which administers rights precisely for that purpose.)
So that line about photocopying was actually an oblique threat: "We won over the wholesale photocopying issue, we can win over Napster."
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You think pursuing a technical field in college is a way to make people more politically savvy?
You're joking, right?
Look, in technical majors and at technical schools, voter registration is abysmal. Here (Cambridge, MA), the voter rolls are posted outside publically so you can see who at which address is registered; back at MIT, I discovered that of my dorm 90~ people, all of 6 of us had registered to vote locally. And two of those were the housemaster and housemistress. Clearly one can't be sure how many people were sending absentee ballots back home, but considering that MIT was losing a battle with the City of Camb. ("Hey, where did all the on-street parking go?") because no one who cared about MIT was registered to vote locally, I'm none to impressed with absentee voting.
Frankly, sheltering in the desmesne of the Ivory Tower isn't particularly likely to inspire geeks to take a political interest in the real world. The only thing that makes the likes of us interested in politics is a vested interest: when they bite us where it hurts, then we care.
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The best technologies are ones which don't mystify their users; which are reliable and robust, not cantanerous and prone to
disasterous failure from small errors; which work themselves into the fabric of everyday, mundane life so well we don't even think of
them as "technology" anymore. One should not have to engage in ritual sacrifice; to learn strange, archane words or glyphs; to
prepare extensive containment mechanisms in the eventuallity that what one raises one cannot put down; to have to perform an
extensive series of precise gestures to a level of exactitude which demands years of training, lest in erring one looses upon an
unwitting world a reign of absolute darkness and terror; or to invoke metaphysical powers... merely to use, say, a spreadsheet. Yet
for decades, that has been precisely the experience of many users of commercial software products.
Geeks are people who delight in being wizards. For us, playing with the arcane is intrinsically enjoyable. But that a technology is arcane does not make it a good technology -- it makes it a marginal technology.
The best technologies are like hammers, bridges, and automated teller machines. No matter how little the general public understands them, there is nothing mystical, occult or "magical" about them for even the least technical person.
The "magicalness" of technology is an indication of its poverty of elegance, its brittleness, its limited user interface.
A "magical" technology is anything but advanced.
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Speaking as someone who has freelanced (i.e. companies outsourced to me), one of the most critical things for any project which is going to be done "off-site" is whether it can be black-boxed.
If the people setting the parameters of the project have a sufficiently clear idea of where the boundaries of the project are, and how it fits in to the other work people are doing, then it's a candidate for outsourcing -- otherwise forget it. The project has to be sufficiently discrete that the developer doesn't have to constantly be in contact to negotiate how their work meshes with anyone else's.
So things like "an application which does the following things" are candidates for outsourcing, while "a solution to the problem we are having" or "add functionality to this thing" or "debug this system" aren't.
Note, I am not saying BlackBoxability is sufficient, merely necessary. If the project cannot be treated by your side as a Black Box, then don't let it out of your site.
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Regarding your third point: AmEx is not offering disposable numbers to just anyone (check the article). They are offering them to their customers -- i.e. people with AmEx accounts, who thus, one presumes, have met AmEx's standards of credit rating, etc. Thus this is no different than already having a credit card from AmEx, except that it can't be stolen (online). The numbers being instantly available on-line just means their customers will be more likely to go to the minimal effort of getting the more secure disposables rather than just typing their real AmEx# into ghu-knows what website.
So the billing (wrt your second point) is no different: you get it on your AmEx card bill, is all.
Think of the disposable # as an alias for your real number. In the same way people use hotmail accounts as disposable spam-filter accounts, these AmEx#s are disposable theft-filter accounts.
So to use this, you need to apply for a regular AmEx account, and then you can get the disposable #s.
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I'm an MIT drop-out (class of '93), who is now a contract programmer.
No doubt there are people who are leaving or skipping college because the money's good. Those people impress the hell out of me, because they are clearly impervious to social pressure.
The social pressures to stay in college are enormous, whether you are a middle- or upper- class kid just trying to live up to social norms, or a lower-class kid carrying the aspirations of your family on your shoulders. I assure you, the message is drummed into all of our heads from a young age that someone without a college degree is a failure, barely fit for flipping McHamburgers.
Nothing I have done, no political positions I have taken, no opinions expressed, no deeds committed (and I have racked up some doozies) have offended, threatened, and upset more friends, family and acquaintances than my dropping out of college. Nothing I have done required more courage of conviction, more steadfastness in the face of social pressure.
And frankly, I expect the reason young geeks are leaving the educational system is same or similar to my reason for leaving:
I was tried of being a child, and wanted to be a grown-up.
I was sick unto death of the prolonged adolescence which is college, even in such a sink-or-swim place as MIT. There are people who love being adolescents, and want to be one as long as they possibly can. Well, I hated it. I hated being a child from about age five on, and couldn't wait to join the world of adults. I hated being a second class citizen, I hated having no say in my fate, I hated having no effect on the Real World.
I hated the fact that whenever I expressed such sentiments, I was poo-pooed: "Oh, you don't want the world of bills and responsibilities and all that ikky adult stuff; enjoy your privileged childhood and don't worry your pretty little head about it."
I am a geek and an engineer: that means that somewhere deep in my soul is a drive to tinker, to build, to inflict my will on the systems around me, to push limits, to explore. In short, to exercise power over the material and intellectual world around me. My experience of youth was of being kept from the Real World, the world of things, the world of real concerns, the world of real systems: of being kept profoundly powerless.
I left school not for a cushy, lucrative IT job, but for the crap-shoot of secretarial temping. I did it because I couldn't stand to be apart from the real world of work, rent, bills, etc. I did it because I decided it was better to be an adult in the humblest of circumstances than an over-grown child in a gilded nursery.
I expect that many young geeks who eschew further "educational" (and those are indeed sneer quotes) institutionalization, are not lured by mere wealth -- what geek is? -- but by the opportunity to do Real Work, in the Real Adult World, which Really Matters.
Yeah, maybe running some company's corporate webservers isn't profoundly meaningful, and at the end of the day doesn't confer as sense of having bettered the world. But at least it mattered to someone what work you did, it mattered to someone whether you lived or died, it mattered whether the job got done.
And nothing in the artificial exercises of accademia will ever confer that feeling.
The money merely makes the choice to flee adolescence less financially dicey. It's not the money, it's the chance to be a grownup that is the temptation.
The choice to go to college or not is an intensely personal one -- as much so as what religion one follows -- and it sickens and offends me that people treat the issue as one of public policy.
Are these young geeks doing a bad thing by skipping, leaving or differing college? Well, who are we to second-guess them? Who are we to cluck our tongues in consternation and tell them they are screwing up their lives? Are those lives not theirs to do with what they wish?
If college is such a wonderful thing, no doubt word will get out, and those of us who don't have degrees will eventually get them. Contrary to everything you might have heard, it's quite possible to go back to school later in life -- heaven knows, the subway here is coated in advertisements for degree programs for working adults.
Frankly, I look at college and I don't see anything I want. That's all the reason in the world a person should need for not going.
Sure, there might be things I'd learn which would make me a better programmer, but I'm happy working (at a paid job) only 40hrs a week and would rather not sacrifice my composing, my writing, my music history research, my reading in medieval studies/structural anthropology/20th cen. literature/etc. to go back to school to be a better programmer. Sure, there might be classes in those topics at a college, but I hate the classroom environment and love coding professionally; I don't want to give up my career.
Sure, maybe a college degree would help me command more money....
But it's never been the money.
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Can anybody explain to me why liberals see the corporations as evil and big government as inherently good?
Sure. Corporations are as capable -- on a theoretical standpoint -- of murder and enslavement as governments. In actuality, in the past century corporations have waged war (through proxy) and circumvented the constitutional amendments prohibiting slavery (the "company town").
What makes corporations more scary than governments (to liberals) is the idea that a democracy or republic gives you or I at least some input. No corporation need answer to anyone but those who can buy stock, and few are constituted to guarantee any kinds of liberties to their employees or clients.
So while any liberal will grant that governments have -- so far -- be the greater oppressors, they see how corporations could be much, much worse, left to their own devices.
Ha. Little you know. I've been in the SCA 10+yrs, and where you thought
Making high-tech swords? I think these people need girlfriends.
I thought
Making high-tech swords? Some people will do anything to get a girlfriend.
And I'll have you know, Salon reported we're one of the few exceptive flavors of geek actually getting any (we all know what a pure wellspring of relevant and unbiased intel Salon is;).
So far all the comments have been about the technical side of things, which looks, from here, to be pretty cut-n-dried. The real issue is the human engineering one.
This project -- any volunteer project involving more than two people -- has serious People Issues. I speak from experience: I often organize hoardes of volunteers in my spare time, sometimes even to do pro work to raise money for our organization.
First, you're talking about getting users to contribute work. Since you're talking about selling these services, they'd better be pretty professional. You're talking some pretty heavy management burden here. Getting amateurs/volunteers to put out high quality work consistently can be hard, because volunteers take (all too often) the attitude "you should be grateful I did the work at all".
Second, you're going to have to convince people that it's worth while. Note that the OS movement is powered by the "scratch my itch" dynamo. Is it anyone's itch to make corporate web pages, to keep a public lab open? That strikes me as a very hard sell. You might get someone to do it once, but will they keep doing it?
Third, speaking as someone who does web production professionally, it's a bitch. Not the technical side -- the business side. The businesses are constantly coming back with piddling copy revisions, trying to get you to do free work ("it's just a little change"). And, BTW, my agency bills ~$50/hr for my time doing DHTML, and I am considered a jr. level DHTMLer. Boston. And I don't even do design, just implementation. Just in case you were planning on charging $20/hr.
Fourth, you're talking about drawing volunteers from the public. You don't even have any filters between you and them (such as all belong to the same club or some such). You're going to have a hell of a job making character judgements of the strangers that walk in your doors, and you're going to have to make hundreds of them, constantly. Not merely "Do I trust this person not to loose the next Morris worm from my machines?" but "Do I trust this person not to flake out in the middle of doing a customer's project?"
These are the areas in which *real* head-aches arise. Basically, you need to be -- or to have to hand -- a real "people person", or more properly a "leader of (wo)men" to bear the brunt of managing volutneers.
Is something like this possible? Sure: but it completely requires some highly charismatic person to marry their souls to this project. Someone who builds group esprit, who defuses conflicts, who has a natural air of authority, who personally exemplifies the values of the organization (e.g. brilliant hacker, hard worker, tolerant with newbie users, etc.), whom people trust and follow.
These people don't grow on trees. These people have their pick of volunteer organizations to work for, not to mention their pick of 80hr/week jobs. If you are or have such a person, then your organization is unspeakably lucky.
If you don't have such a person, and you aren't prepared to try to be that person, you are going to drink the dregs of a very bitter brew. Volunteers who manage volunteers often have the worst and the most embittering cases of disillusionment and burn-out. They rail about the stupid, lazy, and vicious nature of their fellow humans, and swear never to bother trying to help someone again. They feel taken-advantage of, rattled and hurt -- and unconfident of their own abilities.
Think about the human dimensions very seriously indeed.
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The Register story (two new usage polls)
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 3
A current story at The Register reports on two new Napster usage polls. One shows most of the people using Napster to pirate music are not college students, as widely believed. The other indicates that users are buying the CDs they sample online.
The question is not whether you own or lease your car, your video tapes, etc. The question is whether or not you own the tools of your trade and the place in which you earn a living.
We are approaching a corporo-feudalism because the vast majority of people do not own the tools with which they work or the facilities in which they needs must earn their living.
They can be deprived of the ability to make a livelihood on the whim of their feudal overlords^d^demployers, and cannot fend for themselves if no employer will take them in. It is easy for a high-tech worker in today's economy to be blasé about their ability to hop from fiefdom to fiefdom -- especially if he owns his house and a reasonable computer. But it is not so easy for everyone now, and in the next recession you'll see just how much freedom you have.
How much freedom does Jane R. Secretary have if losing her job also means losing not only the ability to feed her kids and keep a roof over their heads, but their health care? Her child care? Her public-transit-accessible apartment? Her company subsidized transit pass? Her (gasp!) internet access?
Are we to be surprized, then that when Jane R. Secretary is told to shred documents which the EPA, SEC, or NRC[*] would very much like to see to the discomfort of her employer, she doesn't ask too many questions and doesn't raise a stink?
(This is why I temp/contract/freelance. I insist on being a free tradesman, in so far as possible. It works for doctors, lawyers and plumbers; it works for me.)
[*] Yes, as it happens, a client of mine actually once asked me to falsify radiation safety records, when I was basically a glorified secretary. Might have worked, too, except for the fact the secretary in question knew a geiger counter when she saw one. ----------------------------------------------
The clever reader will have noted that I mentioned Fussell's schema had 12 classes, and I discussed the four lower classes, three middle classes and the four upper classes.
The remaining class, "class X", of people who prefer to consider themselves outside the class system. The bohemians, if you will. These people who elect to wear clothing which gives neutral, mixed, or ambiguous class signs.
Wearing such t-shirts might be indicitive of that.
However, by Fussell's paradigm, the fact that you managed to work mention of the three brands of T-shirt you value into a conversation of how you don't wear clothing with brands strongly suggests you possess that class insecurity common of people in the middle class.:)
Interesting. There is a very important thesis in the book Class by Paul Fussell which pertains here.
He presents a paradigm of American society in which there are 12 social classes, which are as much cultures as economic brackets. One of the many things he discusses is the idea of "legible clothing", that is to say, clothing with words printed on it. Displaying the brand names on your clothing is a way of asserting which social class you belong to, or wish to belong to.
In the four lower classes, "impressive" brands are largely inaccessible because of cost. However, when a member of the lower classes can afford clothing of such a brand, s/he gravitates towards clothing which flaunts its brand, in as big, bold letters and icons as it possibly can; this communicates to other members of the same class "I am more wealthy than you".
The upper four classes prefer clothing with either no brands apparent or extremely subtle branding. Wearing prominent logos is vulgar. Also, this turns the identification of the brand into a test of the viewer's class: it allows the wearer to test whether they are dealing with someone familiar enough with, say, Versace gowns as to be able to tell one when they see one.
It is the middle three classes who consume "designer" and "branded" clothing the most. They can afford it, and they are often insecure about their class status: there is nothing worse for someone in the middle classes than to be mistaken for someone in the lower classes. Wearing designer jeans, e.g., back in the 1980s, was a way for middle class school girls especially to differentiate themselves from their lower class classmates.
At any point, the reason I mention this is two-fold (beyond the obvious one that it might amuse you, gentle readers).
First, if you've ever aspired to either climb the class lader or merely become better at your Sherlock Holmes-style disguises, this provides a very nifty little heuristic. Only one part of many, but a vital part.
Second, brand watching -- wrt people's clothing -- doesn't merely tell you the penetration of corporatism into private life. It also is an at-a-glance rough measure of the class demographics in a social environment. Analysts and pundits are always saying things like "the middle class is disappearing" etc. Well, go collect your own qualitative data. See for yourself what the class distrubution is like in your area.
It would seem that an open mind, and a computer, and some amount of net-savvy to find others of the same ilk would be required to reach out like you suggest.
Er, no. The hippies, the beats, the flappers all did just fine without computers.
Subcultures -- that is what we're talking about -- have been around for a long time. Much longer than computers. Computers do indeed facilitate it by accreting minorities, but merely having a highly mobile culture (lots of cars or trains) is already a big help.
IMHO subcultures are a natural result of the fact people are different -- are born different -- in very fundamental ways. Subcultures arise from people sharing certain personality traits, often rarer traits, banding together for mutual support. Subcultures are inexorable. They may be hindered by lack of mobility or free flow of information, but even in the worst situations of information flow (say, heretics trying to find each other in 12th century France) humans manage. They're amazing that way.
Just to be contrary, I'd like to point out that at the previous turn of the century, similar issues surrounded pugilism. You know, boxing.
It took a few poet-souled writers to articulate the beauty of boxing, but then it was in vogue in the intelligencia to "appreciate" it.
I never Got what there was to appreciate about the aesthetics of boxing, until one day I saw one of the two-person kick-boxing games being played publically at a cybercafe(tm). And I Got it!
And I thought that was so cool, my getting in touch with the aesthetic of a previous century's forbidden violence obsession via this century's forbidden violence obsession.
So don't be so quick to dismiss the aesthetic value of Quake, etc. It was cool for aesthetes to disdain pugilism, too, in its day, until the Poets (complementary to Geeks) got their hands on it. When a Poet falls in love with Quake, all bets will be off.
However today, few people have the time or outdoor space to engage in these activities, and there are very few adult leagues set up on a purely recreational (ie not very competitive) level. As a replacement for these, online gaming has developed.
I am deeply skeptical that online gaming is a replacement for sports (i.e. outdoor gaming). My impression is that online gaming still appeals primarily to those people who were never terribly inclined to sports in the first place. Lumping games of purely cerebral strategy (chess) with games of physical tactics (football) strikes me as wrong. They largely appeal to different personalities.
While I am quite willing to grant that you have a great familiarity with online gamers as such, are you sure that, if you met them in real life, they would turn out to be the same sorts of people as play sports? They may talk the same, but... well, this is the internet. ----------------------------------------------
It seems to have gotten lost in this discussion (it was at the bottom of the cited article) that he was not merely disparaging his classmates and teachers out of a personal grievance: he was defending and avenging a friend of his who had been publically disparaged in the school newspaper and on several private sites.
The story says she (the friend) was the butt of some "unsavory criticism" in the school paper's "gossip column filled with tidbits about the romantic lives of Milford students." In other words, evidently his friend was the victim of public, in-print, school-sanctioned sexual harassment. Not to mention libel.
This changes nothing of the fundamental legal issues, but it does color the character of the case. This is not just some twerp flaming people because they hurt his feelings (though considering how ill he was treated, from the account of his father, I think he would not be out of line if he had). This guy was attacking the people who hurt his friend, probably committed a crime against her (libel and/or sexual harassment), and did it with complete impunity. He was was standing up for a friend.
The Leage of Women Voters was founded in 1920, to counter the assertion that if women were given the vote they were so ignorent they would only vote the ways their fathers and husbands told them to. It is a non-partisan organization dedicated to getting people involved in democracy. One big service they do is track candidate's records and statements of position.
Their unbiased reporting of this data is so respected here in MA, it's widely considered the standard. Usually before big elections the Boston Globe will run a special insert with one of their big position tables.
Frankly the problem is not getting good information on the candidates. It's the problem that the candidates suck. ----------------------------------------------
There are so many obvious reasons for this I don't know where to start.
First off, most polls used in the real.world don't count what your positions are and label on that basis: they just ask you "what party are you in?" Most Americans think there are only two parties, and "Libertarian" ain't one of 'em.
The difference with the net is, if nothing else, the Libertarians got here first, put up their "World's Smallest Political Quiz", and educated the heck out of anyone who surfed by. Net result (pun only slightly intended): more people on the net (especially more of the earlier adopters who were around at the dawn of the web) know what a Libertarian is and whether or not they is one, than in the general population.
That of course is not sufficient to explain it all, but it's a necessary component: you can't profess subscription to a philosophy you have never heard of.
Even more important, net access is still largely a privilege of "success" as construed by our culture. It is still the case the the college educated are over-represented on the net, that people employed in high-tech are over-represented on the net.
Frankly, libertarianism is more attractive to people who feel self-assured in their "success". Libertarianism stresses self-sufficiency, and thus its appeal varies directly with one faith in one's own ability to be self-sufficient.
The net is filled with people who are largely confident of their ability to make a reasonable living. They have good prospects, they're riding on the crest of a wave of economic development, are proud of their strong work ethic, and are largely (sorry) members of that long-privileged class, the upper-middle class white American males.
In the US population, on the other hand, is filled with (1) blue-color workers many (most?) of whom have been layed-off at least once in their lives (2) members of one of the many groups which have been subjected to open anti-hiring bigotry in living memory (women, blacks, etc.) (3) lived through the Great Depression. These people see their prospects as iffy (the rug could be yanked out from under them at any time), economic waves passing them by and being transitory at best, and their worth ethic, no matter how strong, as being completely irrelevant as to whether or not they can keep a job. They have far less confidence in their prospects for consistently keeping a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and clothes on their backs.
Regardless of whether or not libertarianism would benefit such people (I make no comment on that), most people in the US are not going to find a philosophy of self-sufficiency appealing.
The difference in demographics is very real, and where this is coming from.
It is further exacerbated by the fact that the libertarian demographic is also more likely to want to participate in on-line political polls. For one thing, the web is opt-in while real.life exit pols are opt-out, and minority political positions always opt-in in higher rates than the majority positions. For another, someone who is on-line 8hrs a day (e.g. someone who works in high-tech, a university student) is more likely to fritter away time on the web doing political polls than someone who only gets 1hr a day on-line because they work mopping floors. The person on-line 8hrs a day has more opportunity to respond to a poll. And the person who is on-line 8hrs a day, for the previously mentioned reasons, probably is more sympathetic to libertarianism.
Or maybe it's just that libertarians vote more than once.:)
Hear, hear. Modality easier for the beginners, and more powerful for the power-users. It's also easier to integrate with keyboard-only I/O than non-modal interfaces, which for those of us with mousebite is a serious win.
There needs to also be non-modal interfaces, but right now we've moved almost completely away from them. The pendulum should swing back.
The things for which modality is crucial is for any program which provides a user experience of "environment". When a user is "within" a program, doing something, interacting with the program, then modality is powerful. By way of contrast, when a user experiences the program as a "thing", then a non-modal interface is probably best.
For example, compare a word processor to a cd player. The first is something you work in. Contrary to everything everyone expected based on ideas of modality being "hostile" and "unnatural", the most preferred word processor in history was Word Perfect 5 -- which was strictly modal. Meanwhile, a cd player is something you want to set up to do something (play a cd) and then have it function without you. It doesn't need a modal interface. ----------------------------------------------
Slashdot Mirror
Artistry is not the reason for protecting speech, nor is it the criterion for which speech is to be protected!
As you note, a primary reason for the 1st amendment protection of speech is to protect dissident political opinions. Some of the men who penned that amendment themselves had been at risk of being hanged for treason, for having writen a political document -- the Declaration of Independence. It could not have been far from their minds. They did not come up with the first amendment out of a sense of the sacredness or privileged place of Art.
No, speech is not protected because it might be art; art is protected because it might be speech.
Consider the Constitution itself. No one would argue it is other than speech, yet what is it besides a program for running a government? The fact that something is "first and foremost a solution to a problem" hardly keeps it from being speech.
And just because code is language readily obeyed by computers does not mean it is not speech. What happens if we develop actual natural language parsing? Is then English to be curtailed?
The fact is we're in a terrible pickle. Freedom of speech comparatively straight forward in a world where words are just words. But what do we do in a world in which words have the power to alter reality? To simply say "it is not speech" is a cop-out. It doesn't solve the intrinsic problem -- that words just became vastly more powerful -- it just sweeps it under the rug. As computers become better and better at obeying natural languages and computers become more and more ubiquitous, the problem just gets worse.
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Seriously. If you care, get a lawyer.
And then, get a good headhunter.
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Can we get a few things straight?
"Interactive" has been most commonly used to refer to content experience (that is the user's experience of the content) which is dynamically effectable by the user: e.g. video games, choose-your-own-adventure books, Eliza, etc. Heaven knows, when I say "interactive" I mean "When I do something to it, it reacts immediately and returns control to me"; that's certainly the common usage around here.
Applying it to content experience which is static, such as a normal linear book, is disingenuous. The word for books which, while static in content, are open to end user input in the initial stages of creation, is "responsive".
Furthermore, there is nothing necessarily interactive nor responsive about an e-book. It's content can be just a singularly and fixedly authored, just as static, as the old paper-and-glue kind. The medium in this case implies nothing of the message.
Finally, the use of "interactive" as a positive buzzword is a sign of datedness. Roger Ebert in his talk at MIT on interactive movies related that by and large, audiences are profoundly unsatisfied by any situations in which they feel they didn't get the whole story, including plot branches not chosen. Experimental movies which have voting buttons to direct the plot flopped. Meanwhile the "interactive" exhibits at the local science museum have not brought it up to the attendence levels of the almost wholly non-interactive Aquarium.
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Um, dude. That was a cunning oblique referrence which couldn't possibly be misconstrued by any university.
One of the biggest copyright cases in the late 20th cen. had to do with universities providing students with photocopied books or compilation books of photocopied articles, without paying for the rights to republish. Professors were going to their university copy shops and handing them a stack of academic articles or a text book, and saying "Make a copy of this for every member of my 30 person class, and sell it to them when they come in." So in that case, instead of (or in addition to) going to a bookstore to buy a textbook, you go to, say, the campus Kinkos and buy your photocopied book from them.
There was a lawsuit. The universities lost. Universities generally don't pull that stunt any more -- while they may photocopy, they pay for the rights to do so. (If you want photocopy rights, generally one can buy them through the Copyright Clearance Center, and organization which administers rights precisely for that purpose.)
So that line about photocopying was actually an oblique threat: "We won over the wholesale photocopying issue, we can win over Napster."
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You think pursuing a technical field in college is a way to make people more politically savvy?
You're joking, right?
Look, in technical majors and at technical schools, voter registration is abysmal. Here (Cambridge, MA), the voter rolls are posted outside publically so you can see who at which address is registered; back at MIT, I discovered that of my dorm 90~ people, all of 6 of us had registered to vote locally. And two of those were the housemaster and housemistress. Clearly one can't be sure how many people were sending absentee ballots back home, but considering that MIT was losing a battle with the City of Camb. ("Hey, where did all the on-street parking go?") because no one who cared about MIT was registered to vote locally, I'm none to impressed with absentee voting.
Frankly, sheltering in the desmesne of the Ivory Tower isn't particularly likely to inspire geeks to take a political interest in the real world. The only thing that makes the likes of us interested in politics is a vested interest: when they bite us where it hurts, then we care.
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No. It is meant to challenge your assumptions.
The best technologies are ones which don't mystify their users; which are reliable and robust, not cantanerous and prone to disasterous failure from small errors; which work themselves into the fabric of everyday, mundane life so well we don't even think of them as "technology" anymore. One should not have to engage in ritual sacrifice; to learn strange, archane words or glyphs; to prepare extensive containment mechanisms in the eventuallity that what one raises one cannot put down; to have to perform an extensive series of precise gestures to a level of exactitude which demands years of training, lest in erring one looses upon an unwitting world a reign of absolute darkness and terror; or to invoke metaphysical powers... merely to use, say, a spreadsheet. Yet for decades, that has been precisely the experience of many users of commercial software products.
Geeks are people who delight in being wizards. For us, playing with the arcane is intrinsically enjoyable. But that a technology is arcane does not make it a good technology -- it makes it a marginal technology.
The best technologies are like hammers, bridges, and automated teller machines. No matter how little the general public understands them, there is nothing mystical, occult or "magical" about them for even the least technical person.
The "magicalness" of technology is an indication of its poverty of elegance, its brittleness, its limited user interface.
A "magical" technology is anything but advanced.
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Speaking as someone who has freelanced (i.e. companies outsourced to me), one of the most critical things for any project which is going to be done "off-site" is whether it can be black-boxed.
If the people setting the parameters of the project have a sufficiently clear idea of where the boundaries of the project are, and how it fits in to the other work people are doing, then it's a candidate for outsourcing -- otherwise forget it. The project has to be sufficiently discrete that the developer doesn't have to constantly be in contact to negotiate how their work meshes with anyone else's.
So things like "an application which does the following things" are candidates for outsourcing, while "a solution to the problem we are having" or "add functionality to this thing" or "debug this system" aren't.
Note, I am not saying BlackBoxability is sufficient, merely necessary. If the project cannot be treated by your side as a Black Box, then don't let it out of your site.
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Regarding your third point: AmEx is not offering disposable numbers to just anyone (check the article). They are offering them to their customers -- i.e. people with AmEx accounts, who thus, one presumes, have met AmEx's standards of credit rating, etc. Thus this is no different than already having a credit card from AmEx, except that it can't be stolen (online). The numbers being instantly available on-line just means their customers will be more likely to go to the minimal effort of getting the more secure disposables rather than just typing their real AmEx# into ghu-knows what website.
So the billing (wrt your second point) is no different: you get it on your AmEx card bill, is all.
Think of the disposable # as an alias for your real number. In the same way people use hotmail accounts as disposable spam-filter accounts, these AmEx#s are disposable theft-filter accounts.
So to use this, you need to apply for a regular AmEx account, and then you can get the disposable #s.
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I'm an MIT drop-out (class of '93), who is now a contract programmer.
No doubt there are people who are leaving or skipping college because the money's good. Those people impress the hell out of me, because they are clearly impervious to social pressure.
The social pressures to stay in college are enormous, whether you are a middle- or upper- class kid just trying to live up to social norms, or a lower-class kid carrying the aspirations of your family on your shoulders. I assure you, the message is drummed into all of our heads from a young age that someone without a college degree is a failure, barely fit for flipping McHamburgers.
Nothing I have done, no political positions I have taken, no opinions expressed, no deeds committed (and I have racked up some doozies) have offended, threatened, and upset more friends, family and acquaintances than my dropping out of college. Nothing I have done required more courage of conviction, more steadfastness in the face of social pressure.
And frankly, I expect the reason young geeks are leaving the educational system is same or similar to my reason for leaving:
I was tried of being a child, and wanted to be a grown-up.
I was sick unto death of the prolonged adolescence which is college, even in such a sink-or-swim place as MIT. There are people who love being adolescents, and want to be one as long as they possibly can. Well, I hated it. I hated being a child from about age five on, and couldn't wait to join the world of adults. I hated being a second class citizen, I hated having no say in my fate, I hated having no effect on the Real World.
I hated the fact that whenever I expressed such sentiments, I was poo-pooed: "Oh, you don't want the world of bills and responsibilities and all that ikky adult stuff; enjoy your privileged childhood and don't worry your pretty little head about it."
I am a geek and an engineer: that means that somewhere deep in my soul is a drive to tinker, to build, to inflict my will on the systems around me, to push limits, to explore. In short, to exercise power over the material and intellectual world around me. My experience of youth was of being kept from the Real World, the world of things, the world of real concerns, the world of real systems: of being kept profoundly powerless.
I left school not for a cushy, lucrative IT job, but for the crap-shoot of secretarial temping. I did it because I couldn't stand to be apart from the real world of work, rent, bills, etc. I did it because I decided it was better to be an adult in the humblest of circumstances than an over-grown child in a gilded nursery.
I expect that many young geeks who eschew further "educational" (and those are indeed sneer quotes) institutionalization, are not lured by mere wealth -- what geek is? -- but by the opportunity to do Real Work, in the Real Adult World, which Really Matters.
Yeah, maybe running some company's corporate webservers isn't profoundly meaningful, and at the end of the day doesn't confer as sense of having bettered the world. But at least it mattered to someone what work you did, it mattered to someone whether you lived or died, it mattered whether the job got done.
And nothing in the artificial exercises of accademia will ever confer that feeling.
The money merely makes the choice to flee adolescence less financially dicey. It's not the money, it's the chance to be a grownup that is the temptation.
The choice to go to college or not is an intensely personal one -- as much so as what religion one follows -- and it sickens and offends me that people treat the issue as one of public policy.
Are these young geeks doing a bad thing by skipping, leaving or differing college? Well, who are we to second-guess them? Who are we to cluck our tongues in consternation and tell them they are screwing up their lives? Are those lives not theirs to do with what they wish?
If college is such a wonderful thing, no doubt word will get out, and those of us who don't have degrees will eventually get them. Contrary to everything you might have heard, it's quite possible to go back to school later in life -- heaven knows, the subway here is coated in advertisements for degree programs for working adults.
Frankly, I look at college and I don't see anything I want. That's all the reason in the world a person should need for not going.
Sure, there might be things I'd learn which would make me a better programmer, but I'm happy working (at a paid job) only 40hrs a week and would rather not sacrifice my composing, my writing, my music history research, my reading in medieval studies/structural anthropology/20th cen. literature/etc. to go back to school to be a better programmer. Sure, there might be classes in those topics at a college, but I hate the classroom environment and love coding professionally; I don't want to give up my career.
Sure, maybe a college degree would help me command more money....
But it's never been the money.
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Sure. Corporations are as capable -- on a theoretical standpoint -- of murder and enslavement as governments. In actuality, in the past century corporations have waged war (through proxy) and circumvented the constitutional amendments prohibiting slavery (the "company town").
What makes corporations more scary than governments (to liberals) is the idea that a democracy or republic gives you or I at least some input. No corporation need answer to anyone but those who can buy stock, and few are constituted to guarantee any kinds of liberties to their employees or clients.
So while any liberal will grant that governments have -- so far -- be the greater oppressors, they see how corporations could be much, much worse , left to their own devices.
Hope that helps!
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Ha. Little you know. I've been in the SCA 10+yrs, and where you thought
I thought And I'll have you know, Salon reported we're one of the few exceptive flavors of geek actually getting any (we all know what a pure wellspring of relevant and unbiased intel Salon isI commend metallurgy highly to you. :)
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So far all the comments have been about the technical side of things, which looks, from here, to be pretty cut-n-dried. The real issue is the human engineering one.
This project -- any volunteer project involving more than two people -- has serious People Issues. I speak from experience: I often organize hoardes of volunteers in my spare time, sometimes even to do pro work to raise money for our organization.
First, you're talking about getting users to contribute work. Since you're talking about selling these services, they'd better be pretty professional. You're talking some pretty heavy management burden here. Getting amateurs/volunteers to put out high quality work consistently can be hard, because volunteers take (all too often) the attitude "you should be grateful I did the work at all".
Second, you're going to have to convince people that it's worth while. Note that the OS movement is powered by the "scratch my itch" dynamo. Is it anyone's itch to make corporate web pages, to keep a public lab open? That strikes me as a very hard sell. You might get someone to do it once, but will they keep doing it?
Third, speaking as someone who does web production professionally, it's a bitch. Not the technical side -- the business side. The businesses are constantly coming back with piddling copy revisions, trying to get you to do free work ("it's just a little change"). And, BTW, my agency bills ~$50/hr for my time doing DHTML, and I am considered a jr. level DHTMLer. Boston. And I don't even do design, just implementation. Just in case you were planning on charging $20/hr.
Fourth, you're talking about drawing volunteers from the public. You don't even have any filters between you and them (such as all belong to the same club or some such). You're going to have a hell of a job making character judgements of the strangers that walk in your doors, and you're going to have to make hundreds of them, constantly. Not merely "Do I trust this person not to loose the next Morris worm from my machines?" but "Do I trust this person not to flake out in the middle of doing a customer's project?"
These are the areas in which *real* head-aches arise. Basically, you need to be -- or to have to hand -- a real "people person", or more properly a "leader of (wo)men" to bear the brunt of managing volutneers.
Is something like this possible? Sure: but it completely requires some highly charismatic person to marry their souls to this project. Someone who builds group esprit, who defuses conflicts, who has a natural air of authority, who personally exemplifies the values of the organization (e.g. brilliant hacker, hard worker, tolerant with newbie users, etc.), whom people trust and follow.
These people don't grow on trees. These people have their pick of volunteer organizations to work for, not to mention their pick of 80hr/week jobs. If you are or have such a person, then your organization is unspeakably lucky.
If you don't have such a person, and you aren't prepared to try to be that person, you are going to drink the dregs of a very bitter brew. Volunteers who manage volunteers often have the worst and the most embittering cases of disillusionment and burn-out. They rail about the stupid, lazy, and vicious nature of their fellow humans, and swear never to bother trying to help someone again. They feel taken-advantage of, rattled and hurt -- and unconfident of their own abilities.
Think about the human dimensions very seriously indeed.
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A current story at The Register reports on two new Napster usage polls. One shows most of the people using Napster to pirate music are not college students, as widely believed. The other indicates that users are buying the CDs they sample online.
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The question is not whether you own or lease your car, your video tapes, etc. The question is whether or not you own the tools of your trade and the place in which you earn a living.
We are approaching a corporo-feudalism because the vast majority of people do not own the tools with which they work or the facilities in which they needs must earn their living.
They can be deprived of the ability to make a livelihood on the whim of their feudal overlords^d^demployers, and cannot fend for themselves if no employer will take them in. It is easy for a high-tech worker in today's economy to be blasé about their ability to hop from fiefdom to fiefdom -- especially if he owns his house and a reasonable computer. But it is not so easy for everyone now, and in the next recession you'll see just how much freedom you have.
How much freedom does Jane R. Secretary have if losing her job also means losing not only the ability to feed her kids and keep a roof over their heads, but their health care? Her child care? Her public-transit-accessible apartment? Her company subsidized transit pass? Her (gasp!) internet access?
Are we to be surprized, then that when Jane R. Secretary is told to shred documents which the EPA, SEC, or NRC[*] would very much like to see to the discomfort of her employer, she doesn't ask too many questions and doesn't raise a stink?
(This is why I temp/contract/freelance. I insist on being a free tradesman, in so far as possible. It works for doctors, lawyers and plumbers; it works for me.)
[*] Yes, as it happens, a client of mine actually once asked me to falsify radiation safety records, when I was basically a glorified secretary. Might have worked, too, except for the fact the secretary in question knew a geiger counter when she saw one.
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Indeed there is.
The clever reader will have noted that I mentioned Fussell's schema had 12 classes, and I discussed the four lower classes, three middle classes and the four upper classes.
The remaining class, "class X", of people who prefer to consider themselves outside the class system. The bohemians, if you will. These people who elect to wear clothing which gives neutral, mixed, or ambiguous class signs.
Wearing such t-shirts might be indicitive of that.
However, by Fussell's paradigm, the fact that you managed to work mention of the three brands of T-shirt you value into a conversation of how you don't wear clothing with brands strongly suggests you possess that class insecurity common of people in the middle class. :)
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Many of which are sewn on. Learn to use a stitch-ripper.
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Interesting. There is a very important thesis in the book Class by Paul Fussell which pertains here.
He presents a paradigm of American society in which there are 12 social classes, which are as much cultures as economic brackets. One of the many things he discusses is the idea of "legible clothing", that is to say, clothing with words printed on it. Displaying the brand names on your clothing is a way of asserting which social class you belong to, or wish to belong to.
In the four lower classes, "impressive" brands are largely inaccessible because of cost. However, when a member of the lower classes can afford clothing of such a brand, s/he gravitates towards clothing which flaunts its brand, in as big, bold letters and icons as it possibly can; this communicates to other members of the same class "I am more wealthy than you".
The upper four classes prefer clothing with either no brands apparent or extremely subtle branding. Wearing prominent logos is vulgar. Also, this turns the identification of the brand into a test of the viewer's class: it allows the wearer to test whether they are dealing with someone familiar enough with, say, Versace gowns as to be able to tell one when they see one.
It is the middle three classes who consume "designer" and "branded" clothing the most. They can afford it, and they are often insecure about their class status: there is nothing worse for someone in the middle classes than to be mistaken for someone in the lower classes. Wearing designer jeans, e.g., back in the 1980s, was a way for middle class school girls especially to differentiate themselves from their lower class classmates.
For an absolutely fascinating (IMHO) look at this, check out this Salon article "Consumed by Consumption".
At any point, the reason I mention this is two-fold (beyond the obvious one that it might amuse you, gentle readers).
First, if you've ever aspired to either climb the class lader or merely become better at your Sherlock Holmes-style disguises, this provides a very nifty little heuristic. Only one part of many, but a vital part.
Second, brand watching -- wrt people's clothing -- doesn't merely tell you the penetration of corporatism into private life. It also is an at-a-glance rough measure of the class demographics in a social environment. Analysts and pundits are always saying things like "the middle class is disappearing" etc. Well, go collect your own qualitative data. See for yourself what the class distrubution is like in your area.
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The MA RMV! Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt to avoid triggering PTS flashbacks.
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Er, no. The hippies, the beats, the flappers all did just fine without computers.
Subcultures -- that is what we're talking about -- have been around for a long time. Much longer than computers. Computers do indeed facilitate it by accreting minorities, but merely having a highly mobile culture (lots of cars or trains) is already a big help.
IMHO subcultures are a natural result of the fact people are different -- are born different -- in very fundamental ways. Subcultures arise from people sharing certain personality traits, often rarer traits, banding together for mutual support. Subcultures are inexorable. They may be hindered by lack of mobility or free flow of information, but even in the worst situations of information flow (say, heretics trying to find each other in 12th century France) humans manage. They're amazing that way.
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Just to be contrary, I'd like to point out that at the previous turn of the century, similar issues surrounded pugilism. You know, boxing.
It took a few poet-souled writers to articulate the beauty of boxing, but then it was in vogue in the intelligencia to "appreciate" it.
I never Got what there was to appreciate about the aesthetics of boxing, until one day I saw one of the two-person kick-boxing games being played publically at a cybercafe(tm). And I Got it!
And I thought that was so cool, my getting in touch with the aesthetic of a previous century's forbidden violence obsession via this century's forbidden violence obsession.
So don't be so quick to dismiss the aesthetic value of Quake, etc. It was cool for aesthetes to disdain pugilism, too, in its day, until the Poets (complementary to Geeks) got their hands on it. When a Poet falls in love with Quake, all bets will be off.
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I am deeply skeptical that online gaming is a replacement for sports (i.e. outdoor gaming). My impression is that online gaming still appeals primarily to those people who were never terribly inclined to sports in the first place. Lumping games of purely cerebral strategy (chess) with games of physical tactics (football) strikes me as wrong. They largely appeal to different personalities.
While I am quite willing to grant that you have a great familiarity with online gamers as such, are you sure that, if you met them in real life, they would turn out to be the same sorts of people as play sports? They may talk the same, but... well, this is the internet.
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It seems to have gotten lost in this discussion (it was at the bottom of the cited article) that he was not merely disparaging his classmates and teachers out of a personal grievance: he was defending and avenging a friend of his who had been publically disparaged in the school newspaper and on several private sites.
The story says she (the friend) was the butt of some "unsavory criticism" in the school paper's "gossip column filled with tidbits about the romantic lives of Milford students." In other words, evidently his friend was the victim of public, in-print, school-sanctioned sexual harassment. Not to mention libel.
This changes nothing of the fundamental legal issues, but it does color the character of the case. This is not just some twerp flaming people because they hurt his feelings (though considering how ill he was treated, from the account of his father, I think he would not be out of line if he had). This guy was attacking the people who hurt his friend, probably committed a crime against her (libel and/or sexual harassment), and did it with complete impunity. He was was standing up for a friend.
Bless his heart.
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The Leage of Women Voters was founded in 1920, to counter the assertion that if women were given the vote they were so ignorent they would only vote the ways their fathers and husbands told them to. It is a non-partisan organization dedicated to getting people involved in democracy. One big service they do is track candidate's records and statements of position.
Their unbiased reporting of this data is so respected here in MA, it's widely considered the standard. Usually before big elections the Boston Globe will run a special insert with one of their big position tables.
Frankly the problem is not getting good information on the candidates. It's the problem that the candidates suck.
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There are so many obvious reasons for this I don't know where to start.
First off, most polls used in the real.world don't count what your positions are and label on that basis: they just ask you "what party are you in?" Most Americans think there are only two parties, and "Libertarian" ain't one of 'em.
The difference with the net is, if nothing else, the Libertarians got here first, put up their "World's Smallest Political Quiz", and educated the heck out of anyone who surfed by. Net result (pun only slightly intended): more people on the net (especially more of the earlier adopters who were around at the dawn of the web) know what a Libertarian is and whether or not they is one, than in the general population.
That of course is not sufficient to explain it all, but it's a necessary component: you can't profess subscription to a philosophy you have never heard of.
Even more important, net access is still largely a privilege of "success" as construed by our culture. It is still the case the the college educated are over-represented on the net, that people employed in high-tech are over-represented on the net.
Frankly, libertarianism is more attractive to people who feel self-assured in their "success". Libertarianism stresses self-sufficiency, and thus its appeal varies directly with one faith in one's own ability to be self-sufficient.
The net is filled with people who are largely confident of their ability to make a reasonable living. They have good prospects, they're riding on the crest of a wave of economic development, are proud of their strong work ethic, and are largely (sorry) members of that long-privileged class, the upper-middle class white American males.
In the US population, on the other hand, is filled with (1) blue-color workers many (most?) of whom have been layed-off at least once in their lives (2) members of one of the many groups which have been subjected to open anti-hiring bigotry in living memory (women, blacks, etc.) (3) lived through the Great Depression. These people see their prospects as iffy (the rug could be yanked out from under them at any time), economic waves passing them by and being transitory at best, and their worth ethic, no matter how strong, as being completely irrelevant as to whether or not they can keep a job. They have far less confidence in their prospects for consistently keeping a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and clothes on their backs.
Regardless of whether or not libertarianism would benefit such people (I make no comment on that), most people in the US are not going to find a philosophy of self-sufficiency appealing.
The difference in demographics is very real, and where this is coming from.
It is further exacerbated by the fact that the libertarian demographic is also more likely to want to participate in on-line political polls. For one thing, the web is opt-in while real.life exit pols are opt-out, and minority political positions always opt-in in higher rates than the majority positions. For another, someone who is on-line 8hrs a day (e.g. someone who works in high-tech, a university student) is more likely to fritter away time on the web doing political polls than someone who only gets 1hr a day on-line because they work mopping floors. The person on-line 8hrs a day has more opportunity to respond to a poll. And the person who is on-line 8hrs a day, for the previously mentioned reasons, probably is more sympathetic to libertarianism.
Or maybe it's just that libertarians vote more than once. :)
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Hear, hear. Modality easier for the beginners, and more powerful for the power-users. It's also easier to integrate with keyboard-only I/O than non-modal interfaces, which for those of us with mousebite is a serious win.
There needs to also be non-modal interfaces, but right now we've moved almost completely away from them. The pendulum should swing back.
The things for which modality is crucial is for any program which provides a user experience of "environment". When a user is "within" a program, doing something, interacting with the program, then modality is powerful. By way of contrast, when a user experiences the program as a "thing", then a non-modal interface is probably best.
For example, compare a word processor to a cd player. The first is something you work in. Contrary to everything everyone expected based on ideas of modality being "hostile" and "unnatural", the most preferred word processor in history was Word Perfect 5 -- which was strictly modal. Meanwhile, a cd player is something you want to set up to do something (play a cd) and then have it function without you. It doesn't need a modal interface.
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