* Also on the subject I do not think applying traditional tv / newspaper ecomonics to internet sites is nessecarily the best idea if this was to happen I could envision websites content being mirrored on p2p networks very fast . The content would be virtualy Identical to the original bar for example the ability to post a comment. *
but even with peer to peer mirroring of content you still have the reliability and convenience that being an aggregator of that content provides... i would rather go to slashdot where i dont have to hunt down the content i want than go searching for it. as far as copyright and everything else goes i of course support completely free peer to peer systems... i dont think that the strong development of peer to peer means the end of slashdot or of television networks... they have too much content to leverage even in new models of transmission and non pay per access schemes.
so they should be paying rates similar to print advertising in magazines and newspapers for banner ads and similar to tv for more dynamic video and animated advertising when more of the world is networked with fatter bandwith.
the only question left then is how it is presented... and thats what the ad companies get paid for.
id never pay for slashdot and i dont play everquest. the hypocracy of so many that wouldnt pay for slashdot but put so much cash into that game is a good point to bring up but that doesnt mean all of us are hypocrites. the main difference is that its much easier to spring up with a new slashdot alternative that is completely free for users and costs a minimal amount for operators than it is to develop and run a new free everquest.
im not threatening slashdot with keeping my money to myself, im promising to help develop something better if the need arises.
if slashdot became a paid subcription site, other better sites would spring up overnight. people like me who like slashdot currently would make sure of it. even the many people who wouldnt mind paying at first would eventually leave slashdot in favor of much more open much more adaptive new sites/networks that gave them more of what they want and at the moment come to slashdot for.
there are many people here that would doubt this, saying that slashdot is slashdot, and they wouldnt want to leave for anything else. id just remind them how that is what many others said about them bothering to go anywhere other than cnn or some other major media outlet when slashdot came into existence.
other than occasional well written articles, subcription reliant sites like salon and others (even when not a full subsciption site) have been a complete failure as far as that business model is concerned. while slashdot is currently talking of an opera like model of charging those who dont want banners, it is still a problem because of the overall trend that some of us have seen.
the interests of the parent company in maximizing the marketable value of the osdn, instead of maximizing the inherent value through better content and all the rest of what makes an open community like this such a good thing, are harming the "product" itself. i am not suggesting that va or anyone give up on making any money and follow a misguided and overly optimitic (think dot com bubble) economic plan... running things like slashdot and sourceforge and the rest has its costs and so does everything else that they would like to do (along with the obvious costs of basic living, etc). but how can you charge a subsciption rate of any kind or change the licensing for any part of osdn to something more restricted. are all those that contribute going to be given a share of the money?
slashdot for example isnt just a news service... what really sets it apart is its open structure, the type of news we find here, and most significantly to many the value of the comments that come from so many people that are not employees of va. are we supposed to rise up and sue just like freelance writers have done to the new york times? if you charge me for access to the site are you going to give me a consulting fee for my ideas? i dont think so, and i dont think you should, but these are some of the problems of an open source development, information, and discussion community when those that own the domains and the servers they are run on decide they arent making enough money.
what i think should be done instead is a serious focus on cost reduction. with all the technically minded people on this network it is easy to imagine the possibility for many things any one of us could not think of on our own. better cost managment and all the creativity available must have some benefit to the survivability of a very free slashdot and osdn.
also, to maximize the usefulness of all these opinions and concerns and comments and the rest we should think to develop a slashdot advocacy project/fund. it has been discussed before with little result and if it doesnt happen soon others will do something similar without the ability of slashdot to benefit from it as directly.
if all those here that care about one piece of legislation (like the dmca or sssca) or about patents or anything else want to give their feelings and comments the added teeth of a much greater impact both online and in our own world in general then what could be better than being able to contribute anything from pennies to hundreds of bucks and more (or in-kind support or whatever) to a slashdot advocacy (legal defense plus legislative/media counter-lobbying) fund with a small part of that cash going towards the maintanance and expansion of the osdn. i know damn well that if all the people here arent going to do this, someone will (hell i know i would at some point) - but no group of people are better situated at the moment to do this with as succesful a result as slashdot and osdn.
also: i completely agree with the earlier post by linuxrunner about why banner ads dont work. it isnt because of advertising itself, its because many of us have been duped into the wrong method of measuring its effectiveness and charging for it. ad rates based on click throughs make absolutly no sense... providing the clickthrough as a benefit is good because then someone who is interesed can go to that site immediately if they want without having to type in the url and search for what was advertised... but the real value of advtising on the web is no different than advertising during the superbowl and should have a similar pay model... the current failure of it being like that is just a measure of shortsitedness and bad business sense by the same ad people that never thought much of the internet to begin with.
that depends on what samples you choose to base your scientific opinions on and how those sample networks of people will interact with each other... will the survival of the fattest in much of the american midwest really be dominant over the survival of the most self demanding that exists in new york city for example? and which populations create indiividuals that stand out more and influence others more....
the reason this article is so fucked up is because they take a limited view of the factors and the actual individuals invoved... and as anyone that knows anything about modern evolutionary theory, chaos theory, systems theory, and what its like to be an actual person and not just a part of some theory knows, you have to include every factor and fair samples in real situations or a close approximation thereof to get a good result.
like ive said before... garbage in = garbage out.
you are absolutely right. you also can include in those evolutionary pressures, like global climate change and disease, the impact we as a species have on ourselves and how much our own social change impacts our biological change... there are many people who would divide these because they see evolution, biology, and science as some seperate thing from ourselves and our lives. but it is just really stupid to not see how social change can impact the way a person lives their lives and by direct extention their environment which is exactly what most influences biological evolution... whoever thinks weve stopped changing socially, biologically, or in any other way is both blind and very unimaginative.
it is a constant process that happens both in the natural selection process of reproduction and in the chaos related impact the smallest of changes and choices and situations in our everyday lives have on ourselves, our entire lives, and on everyone else on a macro level (think systems theory). these sad excuses for evolutionary biologists just dont know where to look and are letting their own narrow social exposure create a subjective scientific result...
They already require you to show your ID to travel by air and are starting to require it to buy tickets at Amtrak. As badly run as Greyhound is i dont think they are going to be very far behind on the same kind of requirements.
Of course I'm glad that we dont have to show ID to get on local buses or trains and I'm sure everyone would "raise all hell" when or if that happened but it bothers me that I have to show ID much more often now if I want to travel from one city to another or one state to another. It doesnt make travel very appealing and it wont do much to keep me or anyone else safe either. That doesnt sound much like freedom to me.
Wouldnt it just make so much more sense to do things that actually make travel safer.
Why focus only on terrorists and Microsoft... What about the damage we do to ourselves?
I am not a part of the "civil libertarian crowd" and I dont appreciate been marginalized as such.
Some of us actually care about our own lives and our freedom to live.
All this talk about freedom isnt just some technical nitpicking about principles. Its very simple actually...
I am alive. I want to be able to live without having to submit to the whims of others no matter how good their intentions may be. I want to be free to live.
I cannot be free if i am being blown up by terrorists and i cannot be free if i have to subject myself to a range of anything from petty annoyances to much more serious concerns. I cannot be free if the measures to "protect me" from those terrorists (or from the dangers of corporations not knowing every last thing i do so they can market that info to each other) are harming me themselves.
And yes, i do think a lot of what we are talking about is harmful and not just stupid.
When a 75 year old congressman is stripsearched because underpaid untrained airport security rejects dont believe he has a metal hip, yet nothing is done to prevent real terrorists from getting onto planes with bomb in their shoes, that seems pretty damn harmful to me.
Some states/cities have laws on the books where it is illegal not to show photo ID to a police officer on demand. Not having ID can have you end up in jail. Stupid laws, but they are real.
Those laws themselves are not legal. They just havent been effectively challenged in court yet in those few cities and states.
It's a shame how few of us recognize how much of a tool and a skill law can be. We've got to train to use it just like any other skill and be ready to defend ourselves with it when the time comes.
If we knew a bit more about how to do that ahead of time we wouldnt have such stupid laws on the books.
The beauty and the shame of a participatory democratic republic like ours... you have to actually participate in order for that self-governance and freedom thing to work.
You are absolutely right. We may have all the reason in the world to want our freedom and be upset when things like this are happening but if we dont have better solutions (or any solutions) to fill that same vacuum then whatever is suggested to at least try and make us more secure will pass and become a part of our every day lives.
What we need is two big things to start with here... We need those better ways of dealing with our problems and advancing our own freedom, and we need better ways to support and discuss those ways (more support for existing projects, development of new ones, better communication between interested and skilled people, ability to connect these activities with other networks and with legislators or comanies or whatever it takes to see results).
As far as the specific concerns we are worrying about go, what we need is to be able to clearly identify what it is that is such a threat.
Obviously most of us dont have much of a problem with drivers licenses being used for driving. It becomes a problem when we are required to identify ourselves at every little point in our day to day lives for anything important we may want or need to do. The only justifiable reason for these stronger ID requirements right now is because we simply arent as safe as we'd like to be.... not when we fly or when we ride trains or when we do many things. While the way that the infrastructure for a national ID is being developed is worth some attention (being quietly passed through "under the radar" as states interconnect existing databases, and companies like Microsoft and Sun develop what is needed for their passport and project liberty one-stop id systems), what is really at issue is why we are not secure.
Personally I think some of the major problems that are driving these fears and worries about our safety are obviously air travel (which can be addresed much more effectivley with genuine improvements than with a reliance on identification at every step along the way), bioterrorism (which has a hell of a lot more to do with the quality of our hospitals, our research against biochemical agents, and of course the quality of our response to and containment of actual attacks), and most importantly of anything, adressing the root causes of why terrorism happens at all (what are the conditions throughout all of the middle east and muslim world and throughout india and pakistan and so many other places that we simply dont talk about except when it suits us).
It isnt very much like me and I think like many of the people who might be reading this to just throw up our hands and say its too big or walk away from it cause we dont know what to do right off the bat. I recognize that the problems we face and the root issues causing them are much larger than can be addressed by one person in one post summing it all up. I would hope though that there are many others who appreciate the challenge of wanting to do something about these things and of talking with each other about ways to create new ideas to fill that vacuum. If thats the case then i dont think its really that hard to do something possitive about these situations... I really doubt that the people at oracle and microsoft and in a few state govs that are considering these steps towards a more interconnected set indentification databases have any kind of monopoly on creative ability. Thats the nice thing about vacuums - you dont need to solve everything, just do better than the competition. The only question remaining is whether any of us really want to do anything or whether we will just watch as these things take place.
How would you suggest we pursue that patent reform?
Yes there are many aspects of the process that need to be looked at and changed but its not gonna happen on its own... how do you personally feel that these needs can be connected with real life results?
A little legal education and patent info briefing might help the bunch of us. Along with the rest of the world...
Relates back to what i was saying earlier.... All this is nice and good to talk about but what ya gonna do about it? Website dev maybe? Actual coordinating with anyone? *ehem* Slashdot Advocacy anyone?
Of course this and the other example of patent stupidity posted on slashdot earlier today are just the umpteenth million reason why we should be doing something more to give all these comments about our rights online and offline some kind of greater impact than they currently have.
Its been suggested before, but i still havent seen much action from anyone on the idea of a Slashdot - or slashdot related - Advocacy Project (org/fund/website). What kind of hybrid creature that might be could be born of the wonder of the slashdot threaded discussion process, but essentially the best ideas that ive heard so far would involve making the connection between comments here on slashdot and useful recipients of those suggestions, like elected officials (or those seeking election) and company executives, etc., along with drawing in donations through pay pal and other means for a fund to support legal action and education and research and such (like what the EFF and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic are doing).
Hell, at the very least it could be a form of a distribution network for those kind of funds - raising donations for projets that users mod up in importance and comment on and help coordinate - with the redistributing of those funds to the most effective and support needing of those working on projects (like the eff with the adobe/sklyarov situation).
Yeah i know theres the EFF and the ACLU and a bunch of other undersupported, overworked, undercoordinated organizations but do we seriously think that adding our support would do anything other than help.
Id personally think that a major focus should be to bring programming, web design, networking and other skills to help out EFF and all the state and local chapters of the ACLU and others by the ton...
Projects need IT support. Slashdot is the feeding trough the tech junkie world comes to for news and such. What better fit could there be... and how hard could it possibly be for a few dozen or more people to start passing emails between each other, maybe start up mailing lists, email and bring in big name types like Lawrence Lessig and Pamela Samuelson and all the others that anyone on/. can probably rattle off of their evolution 1.0 address books in their sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
but even with peer to peer mirroring of content you still have the reliability and convenience that being an aggregator of that content provides... i would rather go to slashdot where i dont have to hunt down the content i want than go searching for it. as far as copyright and everything else goes i of course support completely free peer to peer systems ... i dont think that the strong development of peer to peer means the end of slashdot or of television networks... they have too much content to leverage even in new models of transmission and non pay per access schemes.
so they should be paying rates similar to print advertising in magazines and newspapers for banner ads and similar to tv for more dynamic video and animated advertising when more of the world is networked with fatter bandwith.
the only question left then is how it is presented... and thats what the ad companies get paid for.
id never pay for slashdot and i dont play everquest. the hypocracy of so many that wouldnt pay for slashdot but put so much cash into that game is a good point to bring up but that doesnt mean all of us are hypocrites. the main difference is that its much easier to spring up with a new slashdot alternative that is completely free for users and costs a minimal amount for operators than it is to develop and run a new free everquest. im not threatening slashdot with keeping my money to myself, im promising to help develop something better if the need arises.
if slashdot became a paid subcription site, other better sites would spring up overnight. people like me who like slashdot currently would make sure of it. even the many people who wouldnt mind paying at first would eventually leave slashdot in favor of much more open much more adaptive new sites/networks that gave them more of what they want and at the moment come to slashdot for.
there are many people here that would doubt this, saying that slashdot is slashdot, and they wouldnt want to leave for anything else. id just remind them how that is what many others said about them bothering to go anywhere other than cnn or some other major media outlet when slashdot came into existence.
other than occasional well written articles, subcription reliant sites like salon and others (even when not a full subsciption site) have been a complete failure as far as that business model is concerned. while slashdot is currently talking of an opera like model of charging those who dont want banners, it is still a problem because of the overall trend that some of us have seen.
the interests of the parent company in maximizing the marketable value of the osdn, instead of maximizing the inherent value through better content and all the rest of what makes an open community like this such a good thing, are harming the "product" itself. i am not suggesting that va or anyone give up on making any money and follow a misguided and overly optimitic (think dot com bubble) economic plan... running things like slashdot and sourceforge and the rest has its costs and so does everything else that they would like to do (along with the obvious costs of basic living, etc). but how can you charge a subsciption rate of any kind or change the licensing for any part of osdn to something more restricted. are all those that contribute going to be given a share of the money?
slashdot for example isnt just a news service... what really sets it apart is its open structure, the type of news we find here, and most significantly to many the value of the comments that come from so many people that are not employees of va. are we supposed to rise up and sue just like freelance writers have done to the new york times? if you charge me for access to the site are you going to give me a consulting fee for my ideas? i dont think so, and i dont think you should, but these are some of the problems of an open source development, information, and discussion community when those that own the domains and the servers they are run on decide they arent making enough money.
what i think should be done instead is a serious focus on cost reduction. with all the technically minded people on this network it is easy to imagine the possibility for many things any one of us could not think of on our own. better cost managment and all the creativity available must have some benefit to the survivability of a very free slashdot and osdn.
also, to maximize the usefulness of all these opinions and concerns and comments and the rest we should think to develop a slashdot advocacy project/fund. it has been discussed before with little result and if it doesnt happen soon others will do something similar without the ability of slashdot to benefit from it as directly.
if all those here that care about one piece of legislation (like the dmca or sssca) or about patents or anything else want to give their feelings and comments the added teeth of a much greater impact both online and in our own world in general then what could be better than being able to contribute anything from pennies to hundreds of bucks and more (or in-kind support or whatever) to a slashdot advocacy (legal defense plus legislative/media counter-lobbying) fund with a small part of that cash going towards the maintanance and expansion of the osdn. i know damn well that if all the people here arent going to do this, someone will (hell i know i would at some point) - but no group of people are better situated at the moment to do this with as succesful a result as slashdot and osdn.
also: i completely agree with the earlier post by linuxrunner about why banner ads dont work. it isnt because of advertising itself, its because many of us have been duped into the wrong method of measuring its effectiveness and charging for it. ad rates based on click throughs make absolutly no sense... providing the clickthrough as a benefit is good because then someone who is interesed can go to that site immediately if they want without having to type in the url and search for what was advertised... but the real value of advtising on the web is no different than advertising during the superbowl and should have a similar pay model... the current failure of it being like that is just a measure of shortsitedness and bad business sense by the same ad people that never thought much of the internet to begin with.
that depends on what samples you choose to base your scientific opinions on and how those sample networks of people will interact with each other... will the survival of the fattest in much of the american midwest really be dominant over the survival of the most self demanding that exists in new york city for example? and which populations create indiividuals that stand out more and influence others more.... the reason this article is so fucked up is because they take a limited view of the factors and the actual individuals invoved... and as anyone that knows anything about modern evolutionary theory, chaos theory, systems theory, and what its like to be an actual person and not just a part of some theory knows, you have to include every factor and fair samples in real situations or a close approximation thereof to get a good result. like ive said before... garbage in = garbage out.
you are absolutely right. you also can include in those evolutionary pressures, like global climate change and disease, the impact we as a species have on ourselves and how much our own social change impacts our biological change... there are many people who would divide these because they see evolution, biology, and science as some seperate thing from ourselves and our lives. but it is just really stupid to not see how social change can impact the way a person lives their lives and by direct extention their environment which is exactly what most influences biological evolution... whoever thinks weve stopped changing socially, biologically, or in any other way is both blind and very unimaginative.
it is a constant process that happens both in the natural selection process of reproduction and in the chaos related impact the smallest of changes and choices and situations in our everyday lives have on ourselves, our entire lives, and on everyone else on a macro level (think systems theory). these sad excuses for evolutionary biologists just dont know where to look and are letting their own narrow social exposure create a subjective scientific result...
as usual, garbage in = garbage out.
They already require you to show your ID to travel by air and are starting to require it to buy tickets at Amtrak. As badly run as Greyhound is i dont think they are going to be very far behind on the same kind of requirements.
Of course I'm glad that we dont have to show ID to get on local buses or trains and I'm sure everyone would "raise all hell" when or if that happened but it bothers me that I have to show ID much more often now if I want to travel from one city to another or one state to another. It doesnt make travel very appealing and it wont do much to keep me or anyone else safe either. That doesnt sound much like freedom to me.
Wouldnt it just make so much more sense to do things that actually make travel safer.
Why focus only on terrorists and Microsoft... What about the damage we do to ourselves?
I am not a part of the "civil libertarian crowd" and I dont appreciate been marginalized as such.
Some of us actually care about our own lives and our freedom to live.
All this talk about freedom isnt just some technical nitpicking about principles. Its very simple actually...
I am alive. I want to be able to live without having to submit to the whims of others no matter how good their intentions may be. I want to be free to live.
I cannot be free if i am being blown up by terrorists and i cannot be free if i have to subject myself to a range of anything from petty annoyances to much more serious concerns. I cannot be free if the measures to "protect me" from those terrorists (or from the dangers of corporations not knowing every last thing i do so they can market that info to each other) are harming me themselves.
And yes, i do think a lot of what we are talking about is harmful and not just stupid.
When a 75 year old congressman is stripsearched because underpaid untrained airport security rejects dont believe he has a metal hip, yet nothing is done to prevent real terrorists from getting onto planes with bomb in their shoes, that seems pretty damn harmful to me.
Those laws themselves are not legal. They just havent been effectively challenged in court yet in those few cities and states.
It's a shame how few of us recognize how much of a tool and a skill law can be. We've got to train to use it just like any other skill and be ready to defend ourselves with it when the time comes.
If we knew a bit more about how to do that ahead of time we wouldnt have such stupid laws on the books.
The beauty and the shame of a participatory democratic republic like ours... you have to actually participate in order for that self-governance and freedom thing to work.
What we need is two big things to start with here... We need those better ways of dealing with our problems and advancing our own freedom, and we need better ways to support and discuss those ways (more support for existing projects, development of new ones, better communication between interested and skilled people, ability to connect these activities with other networks and with legislators or comanies or whatever it takes to see results).
As far as the specific concerns we are worrying about go, what we need is to be able to clearly identify what it is that is such a threat.
Obviously most of us dont have much of a problem with drivers licenses being used for driving. It becomes a problem when we are required to identify ourselves at every little point in our day to day lives for anything important we may want or need to do. The only justifiable reason for these stronger ID requirements right now is because we simply arent as safe as we'd like to be .... not when we fly or when we ride trains or when we do many things. While the way that the infrastructure for a national ID is being developed is worth some attention (being quietly passed through "under the radar" as states interconnect existing databases, and companies like Microsoft and Sun develop what is needed for their passport and project liberty one-stop id systems), what is really at issue is why we are not secure.
Personally I think some of the major problems that are driving these fears and worries about our safety are obviously air travel (which can be addresed much more effectivley with genuine improvements than with a reliance on identification at every step along the way), bioterrorism (which has a hell of a lot more to do with the quality of our hospitals, our research against biochemical agents, and of course the quality of our response to and containment of actual attacks), and most importantly of anything, adressing the root causes of why terrorism happens at all (what are the conditions throughout all of the middle east and muslim world and throughout india and pakistan and so many other places that we simply dont talk about except when it suits us).
It isnt very much like me and I think like many of the people who might be reading this to just throw up our hands and say its too big or walk away from it cause we dont know what to do right off the bat. I recognize that the problems we face and the root issues causing them are much larger than can be addressed by one person in one post summing it all up. I would hope though that there are many others who appreciate the challenge of wanting to do something about these things and of talking with each other about ways to create new ideas to fill that vacuum. If thats the case then i dont think its really that hard to do something possitive about these situations ... I really doubt that the people at oracle and microsoft and in a few state govs that are considering these steps towards a more interconnected set indentification databases have any kind of monopoly on creative ability. Thats the nice thing about vacuums - you dont need to solve everything, just do better than the competition. The only question remaining is whether any of us really want to do anything or whether we will just watch as these things take place.
How would you suggest we pursue that patent reform? Yes there are many aspects of the process that need to be looked at and changed but its not gonna happen on its own... how do you personally feel that these needs can be connected with real life results?
A little legal education and patent info briefing might help the bunch of us. Along with the rest of the world... Relates back to what i was saying earlier.... All this is nice and good to talk about but what ya gonna do about it? Website dev maybe? Actual coordinating with anyone? *ehem* Slashdot Advocacy anyone?
Of course this and the other example of patent stupidity posted on slashdot earlier today are just the umpteenth million reason why we should be doing something more to give all these comments about our rights online and offline some kind of greater impact than they currently have.
/. can probably rattle off of their evolution 1.0 address books in their sleep.
Its been suggested before, but i still havent seen much action from anyone on the idea of a Slashdot - or slashdot related - Advocacy Project (org/fund/website). What kind of hybrid creature that might be could be born of the wonder of the slashdot threaded discussion process, but essentially the best ideas that ive heard so far would involve making the connection between comments here on slashdot and useful recipients of those suggestions, like elected officials (or those seeking election) and company executives, etc., along with drawing in donations through pay pal and other means for a fund to support legal action and education and research and such (like what the EFF and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic are doing).
Hell, at the very least it could be a form of a distribution network for those kind of funds - raising donations for projets that users mod up in importance and comment on and help coordinate - with the redistributing of those funds to the most effective and support needing of those working on projects (like the eff with the adobe/sklyarov situation).
Yeah i know theres the EFF and the ACLU and a bunch of other undersupported, overworked, undercoordinated organizations but do we seriously think that adding our support would do anything other than help.
Id personally think that a major focus should be to bring programming, web design, networking and other skills to help out EFF and all the state and local chapters of the ACLU and others by the ton...
Projects need IT support. Slashdot is the feeding trough the tech junkie world comes to for news and such. What better fit could there be... and how hard could it possibly be for a few dozen or more people to start passing emails between each other, maybe start up mailing lists, email and bring in big name types like Lawrence Lessig and Pamela Samuelson and all the others that anyone on