"but make the editors write the summaries themselves so they have to read the material and hopefully drive the story quality up."
My brain is having a severe attack of Cognitive Dissonance Disorder trying to comprehend the concept "Obviously new here, with a 6-digit user number". I'm not sure if this was an attempted ad hominem argument here, if it was it would be an odd one at best especially considering your uid has 6 digits as well (albeit smaller ones) though I'm not sure how else to interpret that sentence unless it was meant to be satirical in nature (quite hard to tell considering what some people write).
Let's face it - if the editors aren't *already* clicking on the links in the article, to make sure they work and that the summary matches the article, *that* is your root cause, and that's what needs fixing. Well I think it has to do with their objectives and their perceived liability for bad information. If they're merely looking for the best submissions there's an idea that they're not as responsible for the words of the summary, after all they didn't write them, they just pointed you to them so some of the responsibility for inaccuracies falls to the poster instead of the editor. If they write them themselves then they bear sole responsibility for errors and are more careful as a result. As well when you're writing something yourself you can't just regurgitate other peoples interpretations since you can't understand them fully without reading the sources. Thus they'll be forced to read the articles to write their summaries.
Of course this would likely result is smaller overall story volume (though maybe they would save themselves time in not having to read submissions as much) and as you mentioned editors reading the links more carefully would be the ideal solution but since they don't show any signs of adapting to work in the current system maybe the system has to adapt to work with them.
Regardless it always bugs me how/. can have grossly misleading titles and summaries that stay on the front page forever. The comments often clear it up unanimously but the majority of readers will probably never read the comments and will come away with bad facts. I think there needs to be some kind of system whereby commenters can update headlines and summaries which are bad since the editors don't necessarily read the comments for every story. Big surprise. Over 12 hours since the story was posted, the comments almost unanimously condemn the story, badsummary is one of the tags, and the title and summary are still as they were. I'm seriously considering quitting/. at this point.
The fact is I simply can't read the links and/or comments for the majority of stories and the titles+summaries are getting so absurdly inaccurate that I need to consciously filter out information I glean from there since there's such a high probability of it being inaccurate. I love/. for the comments but the quality of articles is seriously going to have to change or they're going to start losing readers to people reading the blogs they care about directly via rss. Perhaps they could stop posting full submissions from readers, still credit them for the links but make the editors write the summaries themselves so they have to read the material and hopefully drive the story quality up.
Actually no, the original article contains the word "the" before the word "software". This is a transcription error on the part of the submitter (unless they went and corrected the article without changing the update time). How is leaving out "the" a transcription error? It's a 45 word exert, no one is going to type it you just copy+paste the text. If the "the" was in the original article at the time of citing there really aren't many plausible explanations other than trying to distort the meaning. Of course fact that the distortion isn't very misleading makes me believe there was no "the" in the original text.
However, even if the "the" was missing my reading of the sentence still leaves the possibility that the software they're talking about is only software under the GPL. True the meaning is more ambiguous but that doesn't mean you get to assign the wrong meaning then blame the writer for the wrong meaning.
Regardless it always bugs me how/. can have grossly misleading titles and summaries that stay on the front page forever. The comments often clear it up unanimously but the majority of readers will probably never read the comments and will come away with bad facts. I think there needs to be some kind of system whereby commenters can update headlines and summaries which are bad since the editors don't necessarily read the comments for every story. Any ideas how to do this effectively? (I think a wiki would be far too susceptible to vandalism).
If we simply extend our current societal and economic principals we'll decide they need busywork, most likely this will be involved in somehow entertaining the other two classes. A good portion will probably perform some kind of creative art, ie actors or musicians, and most of their work will consist of live shows (best way to use up manpower and show supremacy of the other two classes). However the vast majority won't be sufficiently creative enough, thus they'll be in the service industry, waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (if we still let humans drive)
And this is different from the present-day American economy how, exactly?
As I mentioned it was just an extension of our current system, so aside from a much larger lower class and the addition of robots it really isn't any different.
I've considered the same thing and have come to the belief there are two distinct scenarios that we may encounter.
Either scenario has the same basis, as robots render physical human labor obsolete we will end up with a three class society. An upper class who owns the businesses (and the robots), a middle class consisting of the intellectual lower level professions, ie programmers, scientists, engineers, essentially the people who build and service the robots, and finally a lower class of people who's jobs were taken by robots (manual laborers or even intellectual laborers who's field is better done by machine). The first two classes are probably mostly the same as they are now, where the systems differ is the question of what to do with the lower class of people.
If we simply extend our current societal and economic principals we'll decide they need busywork, most likely this will be involved in somehow entertaining the other two classes. A good portion will probably perform some kind of creative art, ie actors or musicians, and most of their work will consist of live shows (best way to use up manpower and show supremacy of the other two classes). However the vast majority won't be sufficiently creative enough, thus they'll be in the service industry, waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (if we still let humans drive). Note that in both cases the lower class isn't servicing only the upper class but probably the middle class as well, for instance the equivalent of a code monkey would get a couple butlers since there's such an excess of labor available. Interestingly since the benefit of work is so much less society may respond by demanding people work more since large numbers of unemployed or under stimulated people would have the potential to be extremely disruptive to the society. This does have precedent, apparently in the middle ages the idea was if you could get out of working you should, people with inherited money who chose not to work weren't looked down upon like they are today (at least by some parts of society). The idea of everyone having to work and pull their fair share was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution and the creation of the welfare state so that people wouldn't choose to remain unemployed.
This isn't a horrible scenario, it just isn't a very significant improvement over our current society. The happier alternative is that instead of keeping the lower class busy with work we keep them busy with fun. People who don't work just spend their days visiting with each other, going to various clubs, basically keeping themselves entertained with structured activities. This will probably be accomplished through some kind of welfare, the upper and middle class will still get extra money to be rewarded for their work (though most of the middle class will probably be the Open Source developer type who does it partially for fun) but living a life without employment will be a viable and somewhat respectable possibility. The fundamental difference between this system and the previous is in the first system the lower class entertained just the upper and middle classes, here they entertain themselves as well.
This second scenario may seem like a fantasy but I do believe it is a possibility. Just think of the life of an unemployed person today as opposed to a couple hundred years ago?
What will determine which path is basically how we react when we start to get large numbers of people who are able, competent, looking for any kind of work, and unable to find it. If we keep creating jobs to keep them employed and occupied than we may end up with the first scenario, if however we try to give them a viable alternative (maybe even give them fun jobs) we may get the second scenario.
Microsoft can certainly fire the employee, but they nevertheless distributed Ubuntu, which includes alot of GPL-software. This means that they are bound by the terms of the GPL. Among other things, this means that:
Microsoft has distributed GPL software in the past (Services for Unix). Just not Linux per se. That's an important detail. Any legal rights that Microsoft bestowed would be limited to the software they distributed under the GPL, if they wrote some custom app and released it under the GPL it wouldn't affect any other application, but if they did legally redistribute Ubuntu then they're now bound to the GPL for the kernel, gcc, OpenOffice, and any other app included in there.
He's better then the alternative... Lord Hillary. No, he's not. Hillary would be a fine president, as good as any other candidate who's thrown their hat in the ring. She's principled, seasoned, intelligent, and capable of working across party lines. One thing I always see whenever Hillary Clinton is mentioned is a whole bunch of people jumping up who hate her. The problem is they almost always talk like the reasons for their hatred are completely obvious and a natural reaction and as a result I still have no idea why a large part of the American public despises her.
Could someone explain why no many people hate Hillary Clinton, is it just personality or is there something else?
Very true. A quick look at climate history will show that the climate has been changing since the Earth had a climate to begin with, well before the SUV was invented and Bush was elected. It will also show that we are actually in a cool period and global warming will get us back to where we need to be! It's worse than you think. You should see the temperatures on Venus, we're in a deep freezer compared to them!!
In that graph, right near where we are, where it's really cold, right at the start of the Pleistocene, that's 1.806 million years ago. The fact is "where we need to be" is right here, this is the climate we evolved for, a global average of 22C found a few million years futher back was great for those species but we were built for ~12C.
A lot can happen in that period of time, species and ecosystems can adapt extensively given even a fraction of that period. Unfortunately we're changing a lot faster than that and a lot of life won't be able to keep up.
Only in countries where there is a strong vested interest in maintaining the status quo has the issue been politicized.
Right, and the countries that are interested in changing the status quo are NOT politicizing the issue? I get it, since they are on YOUR side, it's not political, but those with different views are politicizing the issue. You're talking about politicizing two different things.
First there's the science, ie a^2 + b^2 = c^2, this is something that shouldn't be politicized because unlike the Pythagorean theorem the average person isn't qualified to pass judgement on most science. We have to trust the scientific community to give us the right facts, afterall that's what they're there for.
The next part is the action that results from the science, ie should be build a right angled room using pythagorean theorem so we can have a contrived example? This is what can be politicized as it involves action.
As example of where this separation seems to be holding is the stem cell debate. Despite the fact that I disagree with the people fighting stem cell research they are for the most part not attacking the science itself, rather they are saying they don't want to take a course of action offered by the science.
The problem with global warming is instead of arguing about the appropriate response (ie sure the oceans will go up but we don't think it's worth the short term economic disruption), something that is justly political, they're attacking the science instead. This is what the poster meant by politicizing global warming, people claiming that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 or the value of pi is a political question, it isn't a political question, it's a scientific question, a scientific question that has been answered.
What we need to do about it? Now that's a political question.
You have produced yet another set of statements without proof that this has anything to do with man-made global warming. Sea-levelss have been rising for more than 10,000 years and somehow you've just noticed? Did you look at the article the poster cited? You seem to be rebutting an argument they never made.
a) living on a delta is a great way to see the sea rising relative to the land, but the sea-level has hardly changed while those deltas continue to sink. Ask the Mayor of New Orleans. If the deltas are not replenished then you get severe coastal erosion and deltaic islands sink into the water.
b) Tuvalu's problems are entirely caused not by rising sea-levels (because there isn't any) but by overpopulation and overextraction of water making the wells become brackish. The Tuvalu embassador never said the sea levels had risen. Instead he noted that the ocean was warmer, and this, he believed, was part of the reason their coral was dying (probably a factor though it may not be the primary one). More importantly he noted that warmer ocean temperatures mean more severe weather (most climatologists seem to agree with this) and severe weather can be very destructive to an island that's only 4m above sea level.
Here's what the scientists say:
"The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year." and
"The historical record (from Tuvalu) shows no visual evidence of any acceleration in sea level trends."
So the sea-level rise is just barely measureable and shows no acceleration due to global warming, man-made or otherwise. Your link was broke but the points you mentioned miss the mark on two points. First I couldn't see anywhere where the Tuvlu embassador was talking about significant rises in the sea level, most of his worry was about the severe weather from warmer oceans.
More importantly those historical stats sidestep the fact that the sea level rise that people worry about comes from land based ice caps (like the one on Greenland) sliding into the ocean. Something that hasn't really happened yet so there wouldn't be any reason for the sea levels to have already risen.
Your argument there is a bit like standing on the deck of the Titanic just before it hit the iceburg and arguing that everyone is safe as the hull is still completely intact.
Keep any form of legislation out of it. Let it self-regulate. Sounds radical and utopian, but the opposite seems even worse, ineffective and ultimately pointless. There's a problem with trying to make a system an anarchy to maintain freedom.
There's no such thing as anarchy.
Just look at any 3rd world country without a strong government, they're some of the least free places around since you're at the complete mercy of whoever happens to control your little area. That's exactly what will happen to the current infrastructure of the Internet without government control, and the local warlords are almost certainly going to be ISPs. ISPs who control the flow of bits, and if they own the wire they have a natural monopoly as well.
Now maybe someday we'll manage to build some kind of the completely decentralized P2P mesh where we don't need ISPs and we'll actually be able to make the anarchy work. But right now the physical network and what goes over those wires is controlled by someone, and if it isn't the government it's going to be big business. Now I don't really trust the government to always do the right thing, but I trust they'll do a better job and be a little more accountable to us than Microsoft, AOL, and the baby Bells who are the other option.
I am sick of people countering arguments with just words. Put up the link where you got your info or shutup. Okay China will probably become the biggest greenhouse gas emitter this year or next, International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol said in April. Ma said today this is inevitable and he can't estimate when it will happen.
... The country's[China's] greenhouse gas emissions reached 5.6 billion tons in 2004, of which 5.05 billion tons were carbon dioxide, the commission said in the report. U.S. emissions that year reached 7.12 billion tons, according to the Department of Energy.
Except that the biggest opposition party, the liberals, haven't expressed any reservations about moving towards US-style copyright legislation,
Election coming sooner rather than later.
Probably not, Harper no longer has the power to arbitrarily call an election after passing the fixed election terms law. The only way an election can happen now is at the expiry of the term or if the government is defeated in a confidence motion.
The only confidence motion I see coming up before the next budget is the conservatives environmental legislation, and while the opposition parties don't like it I think it's just strong enough that they don't want to risk the fallout from defeating it.
We already got one reprieve from DMCA style legislation when the liberals fell, I don't think we can hold it off much longer:(
Ironically, I know at least 3 different "white" people who very proudly proclaim their 1/16th, or 1/64th Native American heritage. If you travel anywhere in the American Southwest, you see all the art stores, culture, etc. is directed at Native American heritage; the cities are decorated with their ideograms, their colors, their design motifs, etc.
For a despised and oppressed people, they sure do figure prominently with regard to cultural respect. I'm not denying that there's racism and oppression. I'm just saying there's a strong cognitive dissonance going on in Western culture. Though; I'd say that power politics, and multiculturalism are two very different things. .. That is an interesting point, for the heritage I suspect that's because they can still cash in on some of the positive stereotypes but the level of native ancestory is small enough that they feel they won't be considered native.
As for the cultural respect I do think that's a very positive thing and is one way in which natives can achieve respect in the mainstream. Unfortunately it's just not feasible to have an entire people of artisans and performers.
So you're saying that Indians are unable to progress mainly because we Westerners aren't providing them with decent role models? Why don't they have strong role models within their own communities? Or do they? Maybe they do, but the fact is they're exposed to a ton of our media (their own culture is essentially overwhelmed by it), even if they see some successful native within their community every show they see tells them that the white man won't accept this success. Not showing native role models on TV isn't a neutral stance, it's a negative one that's arguably racist as we're actively telling a people the only way they can succeed is as side shows.
Secondly, you're saying that we should provide them distinctly with role models of WESTERNISED Indians, thus in order to Westernise them? If all they can do, as you suggest, is mimic role models (what a horrible insult in itself - do you think they are on the level of apes with no free will or something), then isn't that destroying their culture? Honestly, every individual Indian is responsible for their own future. They are no longer really being oppressed. They are capable. End of story. It's possible to show someone being native without sticking them in a sweat lodge. There were a handful of TV shows that came up on Canadian TV (North of 60, The Res) which depicted life on reserves, they were good positive shows but I didn't use them as examples since due to the settings and the fact the characters were all native they couldn't really show the white man giving them any acceptance. Regardless the characters were all obviously and identifiably native and they barely ever had medicine men or people throat singing around a fire. The medicine man is our caricature of natives, showing a person who is identifiably native but also a successful professional isn't trying to westernize them, it's reality, or at least it should be.
As to being responsible for their own future the fact is there are a ton of variables that affect someones ability to succeed, we're screwing up most of them in ways I'm not completely sure how to fix, but one of them, the supply of good strong role models that we're overwhelmed with, we can fix.
MySpace, LiveJournal,... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.
Just because the owner is allowed to do something doesn't mean they should.
Say the mall owner kicks you out because he doesn't like your anti-war t-shirt, yes it's his right, and yes I have the right to complain about it, and I will. This is what's happening here, a bunch of people got kicked out for possibly saying something the owner didn't like, yes it was the owner's right to do so but we're sure not under any obligation to agree with the owner's actions.
Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.
I'm curious what happens when your ISP becomes uncomfortable with the message coming from the IP they assigned you? There can be a lot of variance both in what is considered public and how you can reach it.
My stepfather is Cree, and I spend much of my childhood on reserves.
The indian act was supported by chiefs to keep women off their feet and in beds making babies so they could be beaten by their husbands. Look it up, it's true. Women in first nations are fighting for equality (still) but rarely get anywhere because they are (often quite literally) beaten back down. I have to say that I have seen *NO* evidence of this, ever. Not once.
Life on reserves is difficult, and I would say that native people are the most disenfranchised in Canada (to Americans reading this: they get treated with the same respect that black people get treated in the southern states.) However, I have seen no evidence that spousal abuse happens on the scale you claim. I'd go further. I believe that Native Americans are easily the most discriminated against racial group in North America, for evidence simply look at the media. Shows, movies, they always have their representative minority characters, black, indian, arabic, asian, it's not uncommon to see a very positive portrayal of a person from one of these groups in the media. Now think about portrayals of Natives, when is the last time you've seen a native actor in a movie or television show who isn't either some kind of medicine man, unsavory charcter from a reserve, or some other caricature?
There are ONLY TWO examples I can think of in all the media I've seen.
The most familiar to./ers is probably Chakotay, unfortunately the character appeared to related more to South American indian tribes (the actor himself was American-Mexican, not an aboriginal), became a medicine man whenever his Native Americanness was brought up, and of course was on a space ship which kinda blows the rest of the relatability for native audiences (what, native kids are going to now pursue their dream of being a star ship captain?). The only other example I can think of is the police officer (Lorne Cardinal) off Corner Gas, sure he's not a complicated character by any means, it's a sitcom after all, but he's portrayed as a valuable member of the community who has a function other than jumping up to the audience and saying "Look at me! I'm native!".
My home town was next to a large reservation and as a result my high school had a lot of native students. There were some real nice smart kids among them, and I can just about guarantee that none of them went to university. Can't blame them of course, if you had never seen a single example of someone like you actually succeeding in an educated profession how hard would you pursue an education?
If people are really interested in native americans succeeding give them some damn role models! Have a doctor or lawyer show where a primary character is native, smart, and doesn't start talking about native rituals or ancient wisdom every chance they get. Heck even a native Brittney Spears or Brad Pitt to show them they can have sex appeal as natives (there's a reason that many native kids in my school started emulating black hip-hop culture).
I never suggested that such companies wouldn't be interested in doing active development, in fact any company that expects to have any serious support contracts is going to need active developers with the project.
Novell has active developers in the Linux community, yet they have still been dealt a major blow by that same community in the form of GPLv3. I'm not saying that the GPLv3 should be weakened for the benefit of Novell, but that other companies interested in becoming active in the community may not do so for fear of unintentionally drawing the ire of the community.
I think that GPLv3 is doing the right thing in disallowing the kind of deal that Microsoft and Novell concocted but I do have one concern.
The community has just demonstrated that it's willing to deal a major financial blow to a company who the community feels violants some of their core beliefs. Could this precedent deter future companies from entering the Open Source distribution business as they now fear a misstep could lead to a massive, and damaging, community backlash?
Note, I don't think this is a rational fear except for really big players like, Novell, Red Hat, and IBM, whos misdeed could be big enough to motivate a license change but I can see a lot of businesses being tentative about dealing with such an organized and motivated community.
Cards have a much longer history of potentially harmful consequences than MMO's. I fail to see any meaningful difference, since both still enable a (potentially) addictive activity. Again I think it has to do with the party who's most active in enabling the addiction (other than the addicted party themselves).
Should card companies have to take actions wrt to gambling addictions? I'd say no.
Should a casino have some responsibility in helping problem gamblers who use their services? I'd say yes.
Not really, I think it's possible to make a reasonable judgement about things like this. A card maker isn't responsible for games that have negative effects on users, Microsoft isn't responsible if someone uses its flight simulator to practice crashing planes into buildings. However I think game makers should exercise some caution if they realize their product likely will have negative concequences such as addition with MMORGs or gratuitous violence with GTA (though there would certainly have to be some serious scientific research before there can be any talk of laws).
I'm of the view that if you want no one to distort, tarnish, or otherwise transform your works you simply shouldn't release them. You can't hand someone an idea then give them a set of rules on how to think about it.
Yes the creator has certain rights but Tolkien wasn't the only creator, even ignoring the fact that he, like any artist, took inspiration from the culture around him, the fans of his works are creators as well. When you read Tolkien your imagination expands those works far beyond the page, should you be constrained in what you can do with those imaginings because of their source?
If Tolkien didn't want us to make a movie or a video game that's too bad, but we the fan base have put in enough creative energy and emotional involvement that we have the right to transform the work in any way we like.
It's a messed up society we live in when we're asking game developers to not make their games too addictive.
If a game is extremely addictive, it basically means normal, healthy people will enjoy it a lot. The few mentally unstable who get too addicted... well... they can be sacrifised for the benefit of the greater good.
Certainly, game developers should not have any obligation whatsoever to make their games LESS addictive. That just sounds insane. If you make a product shouldn't you be somewhat responsible for the harmful effects of that product? I'm not saying it's the current case with MMORGS, I've never even played one so I can't really comment intelligently on it. But in the hypothetical scenario that a game maker found some way to make a game addictive enough so that significant portions of the population were adversely affected by it then shouldn't that game maker have some responsibility (at least a moral one) to try to reduce the addictive nature of it?
Note that addictiveness isn't necessarily synonymous with enjoyment.
I don't know what his actual beliefs are but Obama was the first one to support placing the debate footage under Creative Commons. It also looks like Lessig is friends with the guy, it doesn't necessarily mean they share copyright views but it hopefully means he would actually hear our side of the copyright debate rather than just Disneys.
That might have been true in the past. In the age of the Internet, cracks can almost instantly become widespread. I don't know the precise wording of the law but I'm guessing that while it's legal to break already ineffective protection the person who made it ineffective in the first place can still be prosecuted.
In other words you can beat a dead horse, just don't beat the horse to death.
Slashdot Mirror
My brain is having a severe attack of Cognitive Dissonance Disorder trying to comprehend the concept "Obviously new here, with a 6-digit user number". I'm not sure if this was an attempted ad hominem argument here, if it was it would be an odd one at best especially considering your uid has 6 digits as well (albeit smaller ones) though I'm not sure how else to interpret that sentence unless it was meant to be satirical in nature (quite hard to tell considering what some people write). Let's face it - if the editors aren't *already* clicking on the links in the article, to make sure they work and that the summary matches the article, *that* is your root cause, and that's what needs fixing. Well I think it has to do with their objectives and their perceived liability for bad information. If they're merely looking for the best submissions there's an idea that they're not as responsible for the words of the summary, after all they didn't write them, they just pointed you to them so some of the responsibility for inaccuracies falls to the poster instead of the editor. If they write them themselves then they bear sole responsibility for errors and are more careful as a result. As well when you're writing something yourself you can't just regurgitate other peoples interpretations since you can't understand them fully without reading the sources. Thus they'll be forced to read the articles to write their summaries.
Of course this would likely result is smaller overall story volume (though maybe they would save themselves time in not having to read submissions as much) and as you mentioned editors reading the links more carefully would be the ideal solution but since they don't show any signs of adapting to work in the current system maybe the system has to adapt to work with them.
The fact is I simply can't read the links and/or comments for the majority of stories and the titles+summaries are getting so absurdly inaccurate that I need to consciously filter out information I glean from there since there's such a high probability of it being inaccurate. I love
However, even if the "the" was missing my reading of the sentence still leaves the possibility that the software they're talking about is only software under the GPL. True the meaning is more ambiguous but that doesn't mean you get to assign the wrong meaning then blame the writer for the wrong meaning.
Regardless it always bugs me how
And this is different from the present-day American economy how, exactly?
As I mentioned it was just an extension of our current system, so aside from a much larger lower class and the addition of robots it really isn't any different.I've considered the same thing and have come to the belief there are two distinct scenarios that we may encounter.
Either scenario has the same basis, as robots render physical human labor obsolete we will end up with a three class society. An upper class who owns the businesses (and the robots), a middle class consisting of the intellectual lower level professions, ie programmers, scientists, engineers, essentially the people who build and service the robots, and finally a lower class of people who's jobs were taken by robots (manual laborers or even intellectual laborers who's field is better done by machine). The first two classes are probably mostly the same as they are now, where the systems differ is the question of what to do with the lower class of people.
If we simply extend our current societal and economic principals we'll decide they need busywork, most likely this will be involved in somehow entertaining the other two classes. A good portion will probably perform some kind of creative art, ie actors or musicians, and most of their work will consist of live shows (best way to use up manpower and show supremacy of the other two classes). However the vast majority won't be sufficiently creative enough, thus they'll be in the service industry, waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (if we still let humans drive). Note that in both cases the lower class isn't servicing only the upper class but probably the middle class as well, for instance the equivalent of a code monkey would get a couple butlers since there's such an excess of labor available. Interestingly since the benefit of work is so much less society may respond by demanding people work more since large numbers of unemployed or under stimulated people would have the potential to be extremely disruptive to the society. This does have precedent, apparently in the middle ages the idea was if you could get out of working you should, people with inherited money who chose not to work weren't looked down upon like they are today (at least by some parts of society). The idea of everyone having to work and pull their fair share was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution and the creation of the welfare state so that people wouldn't choose to remain unemployed.
This isn't a horrible scenario, it just isn't a very significant improvement over our current society. The happier alternative is that instead of keeping the lower class busy with work we keep them busy with fun. People who don't work just spend their days visiting with each other, going to various clubs, basically keeping themselves entertained with structured activities. This will probably be accomplished through some kind of welfare, the upper and middle class will still get extra money to be rewarded for their work (though most of the middle class will probably be the Open Source developer type who does it partially for fun) but living a life without employment will be a viable and somewhat respectable possibility. The fundamental difference between this system and the previous is in the first system the lower class entertained just the upper and middle classes, here they entertain themselves as well.
This second scenario may seem like a fantasy but I do believe it is a possibility. Just think of the life of an unemployed person today as opposed to a couple hundred years ago?
What will determine which path is basically how we react when we start to get large numbers of people who are able, competent, looking for any kind of work, and unable to find it. If we keep creating jobs to keep them employed and occupied than we may end up with the first scenario, if however we try to give them a viable alternative (maybe even give them fun jobs) we may get the second scenario.
Microsoft has distributed GPL software in the past (Services for Unix). Just not Linux per se. That's an important detail. Any legal rights that Microsoft bestowed would be limited to the software they distributed under the GPL, if they wrote some custom app and released it under the GPL it wouldn't affect any other application, but if they did legally redistribute Ubuntu then they're now bound to the GPL for the kernel, gcc, OpenOffice, and any other app included in there.
Could someone explain why no many people hate Hillary Clinton, is it just personality or is there something else?
Very true. A quick look at climate history will show that the climate has been changing since the Earth had a climate to begin with, well before the SUV was invented and Bush was elected. It will also show that we are actually in a cool period and global warming will get us back to where we need to be! It's worse than you think. You should see the temperatures on Venus, we're in a deep freezer compared to them!!
In that graph, right near where we are, where it's really cold, right at the start of the Pleistocene, that's 1.806 million years ago. The fact is "where we need to be" is right here, this is the climate we evolved for, a global average of 22C found a few million years futher back was great for those species but we were built for ~12C.
A lot can happen in that period of time, species and ecosystems can adapt extensively given even a fraction of that period. Unfortunately we're changing a lot faster than that and a lot of life won't be able to keep up. Only in countries where there is a strong vested interest in maintaining the status quo has the issue been politicized.
Right, and the countries that are interested in changing the status quo are NOT politicizing the issue? I get it, since they are on YOUR side, it's not political, but those with different views are politicizing the issue. You're talking about politicizing two different things.
First there's the science, ie a^2 + b^2 = c^2, this is something that shouldn't be politicized because unlike the Pythagorean theorem the average person isn't qualified to pass judgement on most science. We have to trust the scientific community to give us the right facts, afterall that's what they're there for.
The next part is the action that results from the science, ie should be build a right angled room using pythagorean theorem so we can have a contrived example? This is what can be politicized as it involves action.
As example of where this separation seems to be holding is the stem cell debate. Despite the fact that I disagree with the people fighting stem cell research they are for the most part not attacking the science itself, rather they are saying they don't want to take a course of action offered by the science.
The problem with global warming is instead of arguing about the appropriate response (ie sure the oceans will go up but we don't think it's worth the short term economic disruption), something that is justly political, they're attacking the science instead. This is what the poster meant by politicizing global warming, people claiming that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 or the value of pi is a political question, it isn't a political question, it's a scientific question, a scientific question that has been answered.
What we need to do about it? Now that's a political question.
b) Tuvalu's problems are entirely caused not by rising sea-levels (because there isn't any) but by overpopulation and overextraction of water making the wells become brackish. The Tuvalu embassador never said the sea levels had risen. Instead he noted that the ocean was warmer, and this, he believed, was part of the reason their coral was dying (probably a factor though it may not be the primary one). More importantly he noted that warmer ocean temperatures mean more severe weather (most climatologists seem to agree with this) and severe weather can be very destructive to an island that's only 4m above sea level. Here's what the scientists say:
"The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year." and
"The historical record (from Tuvalu) shows no visual evidence of any acceleration in sea level trends."
So the sea-level rise is just barely measureable and shows no acceleration due to global warming, man-made or otherwise. Your link was broke but the points you mentioned miss the mark on two points. First I couldn't see anywhere where the Tuvlu embassador was talking about significant rises in the sea level, most of his worry was about the severe weather from warmer oceans.
More importantly those historical stats sidestep the fact that the sea level rise that people worry about comes from land based ice caps (like the one on Greenland) sliding into the ocean. Something that hasn't really happened yet so there wouldn't be any reason for the sea levels to have already risen.
Your argument there is a bit like standing on the deck of the Titanic just before it hit the iceburg and arguing that everyone is safe as the hull is still completely intact.
There's no such thing as anarchy.
Just look at any 3rd world country without a strong government, they're some of the least free places around since you're at the complete mercy of whoever happens to control your little area. That's exactly what will happen to the current infrastructure of the Internet without government control, and the local warlords are almost certainly going to be ISPs. ISPs who control the flow of bits, and if they own the wire they have a natural monopoly as well.
Now maybe someday we'll manage to build some kind of the completely decentralized P2P mesh where we don't need ISPs and we'll actually be able to make the anarchy work. But right now the physical network and what goes over those wires is controlled by someone, and if it isn't the government it's going to be big business. Now I don't really trust the government to always do the right thing, but I trust they'll do a better job and be a little more accountable to us than Microsoft, AOL, and the baby Bells who are the other option.
China will probably become the biggest greenhouse gas emitter this year or next, International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol said in April. Ma said today this is inevitable and he can't estimate when it will happen.
The country's[China's] greenhouse gas emissions reached 5.6 billion tons in 2004, of which 5.05 billion tons were carbon dioxide, the commission said in the report. U.S. emissions that year reached 7.12 billion tons, according to the Department of Energy.
Minority government.
Except that the biggest opposition party, the liberals, haven't expressed any reservations about moving towards US-style copyright legislation,
Probably not, Harper no longer has the power to arbitrarily call an election after passing the fixed election terms law. The only way an election can happen now is at the expiry of the term or if the government is defeated in a confidence motion.Election coming sooner rather than later.
The only confidence motion I see coming up before the next budget is the conservatives environmental legislation, and while the opposition parties don't like it I think it's just strong enough that they don't want to risk the fallout from defeating it.
We already got one reprieve from DMCA style legislation when the liberals fell, I don't think we can hold it off much longer
For a despised and oppressed people, they sure do figure prominently with regard to cultural respect. I'm not denying that there's racism and oppression. I'm just saying there's a strong cognitive dissonance going on in Western culture. Though; I'd say that power politics, and multiculturalism are two very different things. .
As for the cultural respect I do think that's a very positive thing and is one way in which natives can achieve respect in the mainstream. Unfortunately it's just not feasible to have an entire people of artisans and performers.
As to being responsible for their own future the fact is there are a ton of variables that affect someones ability to succeed, we're screwing up most of them in ways I'm not completely sure how to fix, but one of them, the supply of good strong role models that we're overwhelmed with, we can fix.
MySpace, LiveJournal, ... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.
Just because the owner is allowed to do something doesn't mean they should.Say the mall owner kicks you out because he doesn't like your anti-war t-shirt, yes it's his right, and yes I have the right to complain about it, and I will. This is what's happening here, a bunch of people got kicked out for possibly saying something the owner didn't like, yes it was the owner's right to do so but we're sure not under any obligation to agree with the owner's actions.
Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.
I'm curious what happens when your ISP becomes uncomfortable with the message coming from the IP they assigned you? There can be a lot of variance both in what is considered public and how you can reach it.Life on reserves is difficult, and I would say that native people are the most disenfranchised in Canada (to Americans reading this: they get treated with the same respect that black people get treated in the southern states.) However, I have seen no evidence that spousal abuse happens on the scale you claim. I'd go further. I believe that Native Americans are easily the most discriminated against racial group in North America, for evidence simply look at the media. Shows, movies, they always have their representative minority characters, black, indian, arabic, asian, it's not uncommon to see a very positive portrayal of a person from one of these groups in the media. Now think about portrayals of Natives, when is the last time you've seen a native actor in a movie or television show who isn't either some kind of medicine man, unsavory charcter from a reserve, or some other caricature?
There are ONLY TWO examples I can think of in all the media I've seen.
The most familiar to
My home town was next to a large reservation and as a result my high school had a lot of native students. There were some real nice smart kids among them, and I can just about guarantee that none of them went to university. Can't blame them of course, if you had never seen a single example of someone like you actually succeeding in an educated profession how hard would you pursue an education?
If people are really interested in native americans succeeding give them some damn role models! Have a doctor or lawyer show where a primary character is native, smart, and doesn't start talking about native rituals or ancient wisdom every chance they get. Heck even a native Brittney Spears or Brad Pitt to show them they can have sex appeal as natives (there's a reason that many native kids in my school started emulating black hip-hop culture).
I never suggested that such companies wouldn't be interested in doing active development, in fact any company that expects to have any serious support contracts is going to need active developers with the project.
Novell has active developers in the Linux community, yet they have still been dealt a major blow by that same community in the form of GPLv3. I'm not saying that the GPLv3 should be weakened for the benefit of Novell, but that other companies interested in becoming active in the community may not do so for fear of unintentionally drawing the ire of the community.
I think that GPLv3 is doing the right thing in disallowing the kind of deal that Microsoft and Novell concocted but I do have one concern.
The community has just demonstrated that it's willing to deal a major financial blow to a company who the community feels violants some of their core beliefs. Could this precedent deter future companies from entering the Open Source distribution business as they now fear a misstep could lead to a massive, and damaging, community backlash?
Note, I don't think this is a rational fear except for really big players like, Novell, Red Hat, and IBM, whos misdeed could be big enough to motivate a license change but I can see a lot of businesses being tentative about dealing with such an organized and motivated community.
Should card companies have to take actions wrt to gambling addictions? I'd say no.
Should a casino have some responsibility in helping problem gamblers who use their services? I'd say yes.
Not really, I think it's possible to make a reasonable judgement about things like this. A card maker isn't responsible for games that have negative effects on users, Microsoft isn't responsible if someone uses its flight simulator to practice crashing planes into buildings. However I think game makers should exercise some caution if they realize their product likely will have negative concequences such as addition with MMORGs or gratuitous violence with GTA (though there would certainly have to be some serious scientific research before there can be any talk of laws).
(and you still don't get any women).
Well too bad for Tolkien then.
I'm of the view that if you want no one to distort, tarnish, or otherwise transform your works you simply shouldn't release them. You can't hand someone an idea then give them a set of rules on how to think about it.
Yes the creator has certain rights but Tolkien wasn't the only creator, even ignoring the fact that he, like any artist, took inspiration from the culture around him, the fans of his works are creators as well. When you read Tolkien your imagination expands those works far beyond the page, should you be constrained in what you can do with those imaginings because of their source?
If Tolkien didn't want us to make a movie or a video game that's too bad, but we the fan base have put in enough creative energy and emotional involvement that we have the right to transform the work in any way we like.
If a game is extremely addictive, it basically means normal, healthy people will enjoy it a lot. The few mentally unstable who get too addicted... well... they can be sacrifised for the benefit of the greater good.
Certainly, game developers should not have any obligation whatsoever to make their games LESS addictive. That just sounds insane. If you make a product shouldn't you be somewhat responsible for the harmful effects of that product? I'm not saying it's the current case with MMORGS, I've never even played one so I can't really comment intelligently on it. But in the hypothetical scenario that a game maker found some way to make a game addictive enough so that significant portions of the population were adversely affected by it then shouldn't that game maker have some responsibility (at least a moral one) to try to reduce the addictive nature of it?
Note that addictiveness isn't necessarily synonymous with enjoyment.
I don't know what his actual beliefs are but Obama was the first one to support placing the debate footage under Creative Commons. It also looks like Lessig is friends with the guy, it doesn't necessarily mean they share copyright views but it hopefully means he would actually hear our side of the copyright debate rather than just Disneys.
In other words you can beat a dead horse, just don't beat the horse to death.