"and is killing your freedom"
There are two positions here.
It's the creator's moral right to do what they want with it - they created it. It didn't appear out of thin air
It's the user's right to do what they want with it.
The two absolutes are untenable, which is why we have a social contract called copyright, and a social contract called the GPL. You're only seeing one side. But maybe you haven't created anything recently:)
...It's also noteworthy that TheRegister has a partnership with Tom's Hardware in the U.S., and some editors of Tom's have been noted as being overtly biased towards Intel
No shit, Sherlock!
I always thought TheRegister was really cozy with Intel too. Especially Ashlee Vance, who seems to be a real Intel fanboy.
When you closer you begin to see a pattern. World beating Intel products like the system-on-a-chip Timna were launched first at The Register with puff pieces such as Intel's Timna has dead duck look'n'feel. Recently they've done nothing but tell us how great Intel's wireless strategy is - have a look at Ronald McDonald to save WiFi and shit like this. Pure ficking PR.
They're corporate whores - keep investigating Sivar you'll nail their asses.
There are four standard robo-responses to criticisms of Wikipedia.
You can change it if you want
All information is suspect: trust nothing and no one. [Typical implementation "Traditional encyclopedias also have mistakes..." ]
There are good entries in Wikipedia [choose one to illustrate]
Do the corroboration yourself [Typical implementation: "Wikipedia provides an edit history so you can see which IP node or contributor last edited it - so use it to determine whether this entry is garbage or not..."]
I see you've opted for 2 and 3. Unfortunately this is simply anecdotal. The problem that Wikipedia is as good, or bad, as its last edit has not been addressed. You can't vote for the truth.
Why not just say, as Agent Mulder would, "I want to believe..." ?
And we know why. Wikipedia is much more of an ideological crusade than it is a serious reference work.
Its advocates desperately need to prove that amateurs can do just as good a job as experts who really know what they're talking about - or editors who can write a readable entry. 'Cos it's Emergent, dude!
I can't see Wikipedia escaping from this death-spiral because of the fundamental philosophical error - that you can vote for the truth. Even Wikipedia has an entry for this;-)
The much deeper problem is the backlash. Kid goes to Google, finds a garbage Wikipedia entry, fucks up. It would have been nice to have some real quality information on the internet, while it lasted.
If shysters like Kazaa were defending themselves in a US court the EFF would be helping them. Go see - MGM v Grokster.
What was your point again - that the EFF should only defend fragrant and sweet-smelling defendents? The law isn't a beauty contest - sometimes you have hold to your nose.
They can't shut something down unless it's a central entity.... Of course, I could be totally wrong
You are totally wrong. BitTorrent was never designed to be anonymous. BitTorrent sites were closed down quicker than the P2P networks because the individuals sharing thier files identified their IP addresses and Torrents were advertized on easy to find websites. Very easy to go after a web site.
It's weird how people see the word "decentralized" and think it's some kind of magic.
Apple keeps about 4 cents of ever 99 cents song. Recording rights holders take 62 to 65 cents, publishers 8 cents, and the credit card companies the rest. That's enough for Apple to break even, just about. Where Apple makes money is on iPods and Macs.
Apple has also said that it's prepared to take a bath on the music store to expand the business. It has repeatedly warned financial analysts not to expect iTunes to be a profit center.
At which point Cringely's case falls down around his ears, and we go back to square one.
"Evolution is to analogy as statues are to birdshit"
- biologist Steve Jones in The New York Review of Books
quoted in Andrew Brown's Darwin Wars
( homepage - Amazon.com)
Lazy hacks and lazy bloggers love bad metaphors. It sure saves thinking.
You're right, and in states that had the lowest broadband internet penetration the vote turned out handsomely for Bush. Real world social organizations trumped virtual networks.
The echo chamber did for Dean (especially when he sent in the Perfect Storm: 2000 volunteers with orange helmets with blue propellers on each one.)
There's a nice rant on this at El Reg
Nicely put. When Microsoft does it, the users are victims. When Google does it, the users are stupid.
When Microsoft uses a privacy policy that entitles it to your business plans all hell breaks loose - as it should. When Google uses the same privacy policy for Orkut, the l33t kids roll over and want to be fucked^H^H tickled again. It's amazing.
Google has performed a Mitnick-style social engineering exploit, giving people what they want to hear.
l33t kidz: "We love you, Google!" Google: "We're not evil!" l33t kidz: "We love you even more, Google!" Google: "We're not evil but we're not too bothered about security or privacy, and you allow us to use your business plans!" l33t kidz: "That's OK! It's not your fault. We love you, Google!" ... rinse and repeat.
Google might not be evil, but it's already gone far beyond anything Microsoft could have got away with. And with l33t kidz as our watchdogs, how will we ever hold them accountable?
But his pandering, suck-up rambles - which I guess only Tim O'Really could print - have another effect. Reading Graham makes me want to run a mile from Lisp. When I used EMACS, I thought Lisp was a macro language with a lot of class and potential. But if I study it some more, will I end up like Paul Graham - a New Age flake who's been staring at the sun/mandelbrots/ants too long?
I guess we've got a new Jon Katz to kick around now on Slashdot.
Here's how Howard Rheingold goes about his business of making money from Junk Science. Just fill in the blanks.
"Will the advent of [A] give rise to a new [B] which displays emergent properties of [C]?"
1) In this case let [A] = weblogs, wikis or wifi. VR's and virtual communities have been done. The important thing is that whatever it is shows "emergent" properities. Anything shows emergent properties, but it must sound appropriately "empowering" and biological.
2) Let [B] be a new economy or political organization. These can alternate as you wish.
3) Make sure [C] includes at least contemporary references to at least two from the following three: evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, game theory.
Now make those all important calls to Stewart Brand's Global Business Network and the Foresight Institute. Beg John Brockman to slip something onto edge.org. Tap Esther Dyson and ask her to bring it up at the next Santa Fe Institute board meeting. One of these will provide the backing for the seed conference.
Now call up one of the youngsters you've been grooming, like Cory Doctorow, who will get very excited about this, without raising any awkward questions. The "memes" will then spread: and anyone who doubts that the political economy hasn't changed as if by magic can be dismissed very simply: they simply Don't Get It!
With that, you should be set up for two or three years of modestly lucrative consultancy - and then it's time to do it all over again. Rinse and repeat.
Indeed so, and this is a great PR spin from the pigopolist lobby.
The point of DRM is not how generous it is, but that control has fundamentally shifted away from us. It's an attempt to codify and lock-down our de facto rights. The point being that although it may be generous tomorrow, there's no guarantee that it will be the day after that.
Once DRM is accepted the pigopolists have lots of marketing experiments they'd like to perform: one-time party CDs, anyone?
Apple or Sun may want to pay for it, but GPL developers won't. From the penalty:
... To the extent that any of this interface information might be protected by intellectual property in the European Economic Area(6), Microsoft would be entitled to reasonable remuneration.
Can you imagine Samba or Novell paying Microsoft IP? This part locks out OSS developers for good.
Perhaps you don't realize that you were arguing that it wasn't Google's responsibility: the two suggestions you made for the problems to be fixed made the user responsible, and didn't require Google to fix anything.
Which bit of the word responsibility don't you understand?
Now that you've had a chance to think, and sort of worked out that your original position is absurd, how abut following through the consequences of your other suggestions, too?
One is that every user will need to build their own link farm to re-weight an algorithm that Google shouldn't fix. Why is this good? Do you think it will happen? Do you still hold this view?
Your mistake is that the logical NOT doesn't apply here. You advocate simply absolving Google of any responsiblity for the problem - because Google is just machines running algorithms, right?
It's a cute picture, but it's wrong. Every search engine should be tweaking its algorithms to give the users better (or less crappy) results. Google says it is. Therefore it's introducing human judgements and values.
That's what we do when we create machines, or software, whether we're aware of it or not. You're just as responsible for the consequences of your code as a programmer at Microsoft, or a hypothetical programmer who codes a car's Cruise Control to turn left every 1,000th mile.:)
You can argue Google is doing a good job, or a bad job, but you can't argue that it can't take responsibility for its value judgements. And you can't wish objections away as 'silly'.
...To say that Google needs to do something about this is silly
The remedy you propose is like telling people to jump out of the way when the J.Random Car makes its Cruise Control Left Turn. Hey, too bad you've been run over, pal! OK, you say - it's not the car maker's fault.
... The algorithms are working as intended.
So let's fix the humans who keep getting run over by random cars? Google's algorithms change every month or two. Some aspects of the algorithm (linkmaps) that worked as intended in 1998 don't work when the Web's full of people trying to rig Google's linkmap algorithm. But they aren't going to go away by wishing them away.
One of your 'solutions' is cute too:
... or make your own links to the "right" place.
Great! I'll ask my Mom to start a link farm now. Making the Web a safer place by giving everyone a nuclear weapon is a pretty interesting idea. But in the end it's going to be won by the people with the money, time and determination to build and fire the biggest arsenals.
Meme advocates remind me of the annoying kid in the class who has one only answer to every question. That answer is to shout "Meme!" to everything, whether the answer is best explained psychologically, sociologically or by a combination of approaches.
For a really torching critique of how stupid and limiting this idea really is, see Mary Midgley's famous essay from 1979, here.
Answering the point that "A cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself... Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over."
Midgley writes -
So, apparently, if we want to study (say) dances, we should stop asking what dances do for people and should ask only what they do for themselves. We shall no longer ask to what particular human tastes and needs they appeal, how people use them, how they are related to the other satisfactions of life, what feelings they express or what needs cause people to change them, Instead, presumably, we shall ask why dances, if they wanted a host, decided to parasitize people rather then elephants or octopuses. This is not an easy question to handle for dances, but it will be still harder for scientific theories. Dawkins explicitly includes them as memes, so that the proper way to enquire about them seems to be, not to investigate their truth or any other advantage which they might have for the people using them, but to study the use they make of people.
So "mimetics" basically assumes we're Borg'd robots and all other studies of how ideas are valued, evaluated or accepted should be thrown out of the window.
No wonder people find the idea creepy.
She elaborated on this in her chapter in Alas Poor Darwin [link] where she described it as "...an entirely understandable move in view of the success of similar methods in the physical sciences... The trouble is that thought and culture are not the sorts of thing that can distinct units at all.... Information is not a third kind of stuff."
She's pretty much on the money. Meme-advocates are dazzled by patterns, but the approach is so philosophically narrow the answers don't have any context, and so no value.
Why do you run Linux, BSD or Mac OS X? Don't even bother answering, your operating system chose you...:-/
Slashdot Mirror
The two absolutes are untenable, which is why we have a social contract called copyright, and a social contract called the GPL. You're only seeing one side. But maybe you haven't created anything recently :)
Remember that Bill Gates thinks the GPL is "unfair" too - and that the GPL is based on strong copyright law.
No shit, Sherlock!
I always thought TheRegister was really cozy with Intel too. Especially Ashlee Vance, who seems to be a real Intel fanboy.
Do you remember how they always gave Intel's IA-64 processor a really easy ride - by calling it a cute name like "Itanic" and running suck-up stories like Itanic: Enron's Golden Albatross, Dell 14- IBM 0: Itanic quarterly sales revealed, Itanium sales fall $13.4bn shy of $14bn forecast, Do not feed, poke or disturb the Itanic user and even Miracle cures Berkeley man of Itanic wickedness.
When you closer you begin to see a pattern. World beating Intel products like the system-on-a-chip Timna were launched first at The Register with puff pieces such as Intel's Timna has dead duck look'n'feel. Recently they've done nothing but tell us how great Intel's wireless strategy is - have a look at Ronald McDonald to save WiFi and shit like this. Pure ficking PR.
They're corporate whores - keep investigating Sivar you'll nail their asses.
Both of those I define as progress. YMMV.
I see you've opted for 2 and 3. Unfortunately this is simply anecdotal. The problem that Wikipedia is as good, or bad, as its last edit has not been addressed. You can't vote for the truth.
Why not just say, as Agent Mulder would, "I want to believe..." ?
Its advocates desperately need to prove that amateurs can do just as good a job as experts who really know what they're talking about - or editors who can write a readable entry. 'Cos it's Emergent, dude!
As the co-founder of the project wrote, Wikipedia needs to embrace real experts.
I can't see Wikipedia escaping from this death-spiral because of the fundamental philosophical error - that you can vote for the truth. Even Wikipedia has an entry for this ;-)
The much deeper problem is the backlash. Kid goes to Google, finds a garbage Wikipedia entry, fucks up. It would have been nice to have some real quality information on the internet, while it lasted.
What was your point again - that the EFF should only defend fragrant and sweet-smelling defendents? The law isn't a beauty contest - sometimes you have hold to your nose.
But this couldn't be a blog, because it contains news I hadn't read someplace else. It would be disqualified from the blog-o-sphere.
You are totally wrong. BitTorrent was never designed to be anonymous. BitTorrent sites were closed down quicker than the P2P networks because the individuals sharing thier files identified their IP addresses and Torrents were advertized on easy to find websites. Very easy to go after a web site.
It's weird how people see the word "decentralized" and think it's some kind of magic.
Apple's emotional health still doesn't equate to a trade secret.
Can you prove it is?
Apple has also said that it's prepared to take a bath on the music store to expand the business. It has repeatedly warned financial analysts not to expect iTunes to be a profit center.
At which point Cringely's case falls down around his ears, and we go back to square one.
Lazy hacks and lazy bloggers love bad metaphors. It sure saves thinking.
The echo chamber did for Dean (especially when he sent in the Perfect Storm: 2000 volunteers with orange helmets with blue propellers on each one.) There's a nice rant on this at El Reg
Even if Jesus set up a blogging cafe in the center of Rockport, Texas and extolled the virtues of a woman's right to choose while snapping pictures of gay weddings with his Nokia, it would have made no difference to this election. All of the bloggers would have told themselves about the miracle, while Bobby and Bobby Sue went right along with their business ... George W. Bush kicked your blogging ass.
When Microsoft uses a privacy policy that entitles it to your business plans all hell breaks loose - as it should. When Google uses the same privacy policy for Orkut, the l33t kids roll over and want to be fucked^H^H tickled again. It's amazing.
Google has performed a Mitnick-style social engineering exploit, giving people what they want to hear.
l33t kidz: "We love you, Google!"
... rinse and repeat.
Google: "We're not evil!"
l33t kidz: "We love you even more, Google!"
Google: "We're not evil but we're not too bothered about security or privacy, and you allow us to use your business plans!"
l33t kidz: "That's OK! It's not your fault. We love you, Google!"
Google might not be evil, but it's already gone far beyond anything Microsoft could have got away with. And with l33t kidz as our watchdogs, how will we ever hold them accountable?
And you might just have saved someone reading 800 pages of self-serving crap: Godel. Escher and Me, Me, Me...
But his pandering, suck-up rambles - which I guess only Tim O'Really could print - have another effect. Reading Graham makes me want to run a mile from Lisp. When I used EMACS, I thought Lisp was a macro language with a lot of class and potential. But if I study it some more, will I end up like Paul Graham - a New Age flake who's been staring at the sun/mandelbrots/ants too long?
I guess we've got a new Jon Katz to kick around now on Slashdot.
"Will the advent of [A] give rise to a new [B] which displays emergent properties of [C]?"
Now make those all important calls to Stewart Brand's Global Business Network and the Foresight Institute. Beg John Brockman to slip something onto edge.org. Tap Esther Dyson and ask her to bring it up at the next Santa Fe Institute board meeting. One of these will provide the backing for the seed conference.
Now call up one of the youngsters you've been grooming, like Cory Doctorow, who will get very excited about this, without raising any awkward questions. The "memes" will then spread: and anyone who doubts that the political economy hasn't changed as if by magic can be dismissed very simply: they simply Don't Get It!
With that, you should be set up for two or three years of modestly lucrative consultancy - and then it's time to do it all over again. Rinse and repeat.
The point of DRM is not how generous it is, but that control has fundamentally shifted away from us. It's an attempt to codify and lock-down our de facto rights. The point being that although it may be generous tomorrow, there's no guarantee that it will be the day after that.
Once DRM is accepted the pigopolists have lots of marketing experiments they'd like to perform: one-time party CDs, anyone?
"... Jobs is quoted as saying the his PHds said you can't make a DRM that stops piracy completely.
Which is presumably why Apple employs Phds to 1) devise new forms of DRM
and 2) head the Copy Protection Technology Working Group with Sony and Warner Brothers.
They look as snug as three bugs in a rug.
Can you imagine Samba or Novell paying Microsoft IP? This part locks out OSS developers for good.
Which bit of the word responsibility don't you understand?
Now that you've had a chance to think, and sort of worked out that your original position is absurd, how abut following through the consequences of your other suggestions, too?
One is that every user will need to build their own link farm to re-weight an algorithm that Google shouldn't fix. Why is this good? Do you think it will happen? Do you still hold this view?
It's a cute picture, but it's wrong. Every search engine should be tweaking its algorithms to give the users better (or less crappy) results. Google says it is. Therefore it's introducing human judgements and values.
That's what we do when we create machines, or software, whether we're aware of it or not. You're just as responsible for the consequences of your code as a programmer at Microsoft, or a hypothetical programmer who codes a car's Cruise Control to turn left every 1,000th mile. :)
You can argue Google is doing a good job, or a bad job, but you can't argue that it can't take responsibility for its value judgements. And you can't wish objections away as 'silly'.
The remedy you propose is like telling people to jump out of the way when the J.Random Car makes its Cruise Control Left Turn. Hey, too bad you've been run over, pal! OK, you say - it's not the car maker's fault.
So let's fix the humans who keep getting run over by random cars? Google's algorithms change every month or two. Some aspects of the algorithm (linkmaps) that worked as intended in 1998 don't work when the Web's full of people trying to rig Google's linkmap algorithm. But they aren't going to go away by wishing them away.
One of your 'solutions' is cute too:
Great! I'll ask my Mom to start a link farm now. Making the Web a safer place by giving everyone a nuclear weapon is a pretty interesting idea. But in the end it's going to be won by the people with the money, time and determination to build and fire the biggest arsenals.
For a really torching critique of how stupid and limiting this idea really is, see Mary Midgley's famous essay from 1979, here.
Answering the point that "A cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself... Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over."
Midgley writes -
So "mimetics" basically assumes we're Borg'd robots and all other studies of how ideas are valued, evaluated or accepted should be thrown out of the window.No wonder people find the idea creepy.
She elaborated on this in her chapter in Alas Poor Darwin [link] where she described it as "...an entirely understandable move in view of the success of similar methods in the physical sciences... The trouble is that thought and culture are not the sorts of thing that can distinct units at all.... Information is not a third kind of stuff."
She's pretty much on the money. Meme-advocates are dazzled by patterns, but the approach is so philosophically narrow the answers don't have any context, and so no value. Why do you run Linux, BSD or Mac OS X? Don't even bother answering, your operating system chose you... :-/