Of course the irony is Disney's major successes after Mickey Mouse and crew were almost all public domain fairy tales.
And even more ironically, under today's laws, some of those would still have been under copyright by the time the movies were made. Lewis Carrol died in 1898, so his estate would hold have held the copyright until 1968 -- 17 years after Disney made the film in 1951.
Coming up with the clever algorithm to solve a problem is what is fun
Coming up with a clever algorithm is certainly one thing that many people find fun about programming. But there are lots of other ones: having the satisfaction of a well-designed and finished product is another one (just as using a lathe may be fun, but seeing the finished table is also fun). Another thing that's fun about programming is the magic of having your creation come to life.
It's this last one that's the most accessible at the beginner level. To a beginner, making two buttons, one of which turns the screen blue when pressed, and the other of which turns the screen red when pressed, will be as rewarding as casting the first cantrip would be for someone studying magic. This part of programming has never lost its appeal for me; whenever I create a new program or a new feature in an existing program, it still feels like magic.
The purpose of having something really simple, like BASIC, is to allow people to get the taste of the magic of programming -- just enough to convince them that it's worth all the time and effort of learning a real language. It's then that the other enjoyments, of designing good algorithms and so on, become available to them.
I haven't read Hitchens or Harris; but Dawkins consistently says things about Christianity that are simply not true; quotes straw-man arguments that you might hear as a kid in Sunday school, but which are not nearly as good or subtle as those used by real thinkers and philosophers; and makes arguments that are philosophically unsound and have been addressed or answered by Christian thinkers in abundance.
I read about half of Dennet's book, and found it interesting and well-written. The thing about it though, is that it's completely unfalsifiable. If you read it, think at every stage: "How would I know if this were not true?" And you find that there is actually no way to know; there is no evidence that can prove his ideas wrong. This is in fact a weakness, not a strength.
So read them, but make sure to get a balanced view. Some good books on the subject include:
C.S Lewis -- Mere Christianity. A bit dated (written shortly after WWII, so uses that war for a bunch of examples), but probably one of the clearest explanations of Christian ideas for the layperson I've ever read.
Tim Keller -- The Reason for God. Tim Keller started a church in New York City; and after every Sunday for years he would invite skeptics to ask questions. His book addresses a lot of common arguments, acknowledges the truth in the arguments, and then answers them in a really sound way.
Lee Strobel -- The Case for Christ. Strobel was an investigative journalist before he became a Christian; he presents a lot of the factual evidence for the accuracy of the Gospels. It's targeted at a lay-person, so it's a very easy read, if a bit light on the details. It should give you a good overview for the evidence, and good leads to more information if you're interested.
I'd actually also add Jane Austen to the list. Her books are funny, satirical, and insightful; the fact that she still has a cult following nearly 200 years after her death, and one big enough to make a movie aimed at her fans, should be evidence that she's worth a try. One of the things that makes them so good is that each of the books follows the general form of a romance novel of her time, but subtly deconstructs it. I'd recommend starting with Pride and Prejudice as the most accessible. Her books are easy to download from the internet, but if you can get a copy with good notes, that helps a lot.
Locks on homes prevent people you don't want from coming in
DRM prevents people from accessing the content
Maybe a better analogy would be this. There's a Best Buy, and two doors down an open-air market.
Best buy has the problem that some sketchy sellers from the open-air market shoplift stuff, walk down the street, and sell it to people at a huge discount.
So what they do is attach a big ugly thing to every piece of electronic equipment that uses the 3G network to make sure you've paid for this device. If cell phone coverage goes out, the whole device stops working.
The sketchy sellers from the open-air market do just as much shoplifting; they just remove the big ugly kludge. But now, more people buy from the shoplifters, because what they get is not only cheaper, but better too.
but smart business people know that anything you try to do that DIRECTLY benefits the shareholders short-term invariably hurts them long-term, and that you're best off focusing on production and customers (supply and demand), and letting the stock price benefit flow on naturally.
As a whole strategy, sure. But there are an awful lot of things that corporations do to make shareholders happy short-term, that end up causing problems long term. A big one is trying to make quarterly earnings consistent. For some reason, shareholders like the quarterly earnings to be a nice even roll, within a few cents of the last one (or if there's a yearly cycle, within a few cents of what's expected given the cycle and how things are going). But fundamentally sales are a random variable, and sales for a given quarter may go up or down for no reason other than randomness. I can't tell you how many times our company has, in the third month of a quarter, suddenly announced a freeze on new hiring, or new spending, or travel budgeting, or whatever, but just for the month until the quarter is over, to bump up that earning value a little bit closer to what was expected. Long-term, it hurts the company to have this kind of randomness; but short-term, it's what shareholders want, so that's what they get.
After hearing this "gotos are evil" thing some years ago (and seeing them judiciously used in the Linux kernel to good effect), I actually looked up the original paper Dijkstra wrote, "Gotos considered harmful". It turns out that all of his objections are handled by languages like C. One of the big ones was that whatever language he was talking about was like early versions of BASIC: you GOTO a line number, not a label. So any given statement may be the target of a GOTO, with no indication that this was the case. This would indeed be a nightmare of maintainability.
However, C isn't like that at all -- you can't goto an arbitrary line; you can only jump to a label. So if you're reading along a C program, and you see a label, you *almost certainly* know that somewhere else in the code jumps to it. (And you definitely do know if the project uses -Wall -Werror.) So you know to go and find out where.
The difference is that credit unions are explicitly not-for-profit. Their main goal is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize member usefulness. That makes a really big difference.
The core of Capitalism is the making of profit above all else.
The core of economics is people doing valuable for things for other people -- "creating value", to use a PHB word. I've had a bit of exposure to the business world, and discovered that there are basically two kinds of businessmen: People who want to get your money by giving you something valuable (i.e, worth the money), and people who just want to make money whatever way they can, preferably with the minimal effort (i.e., generally giving you nothing really valuable, or by causing damage in the production so that the net effect on society is negative). The first kind of businessman actually makes the world a better place; the second generally makes it a worse place.
Our system generally rewards the first kind, and we do have some systems in place to limit the effect of the second kind. But we need to be always on guard against the second kind, and continually trying to put in laws which restrict the second kind while allowing the first kind to thrive.
I'm a Christian, but not a Catholic. One of my best friends is a Catholic priest, however; and just from the little that I've seen, that organization seems unusually concerned with appearances. Obviously nobody likes negative press about themselves or their organization; but it just seems to be bigger and very much institutional in the Catholic Church.
Which is a shame on so many fronts. For one, AFAICT that's the main reason that so little has been done wrt pedophile priests -- which in turn has increased the number of victims greatly. But moreover, the central teaching of Christianity is that every human has evil in their hearts, but that we can have forgiveness through Jesus. You'd think an organization with that teaching at its heart should be the most able to admit the fault of one of its members and ask forgiveness, rather than trying to pretend they're all saints on earth.
Never been anything stopping them aside from finding a patron.
But at the same time, it's now possible for authors to find an array of patrons. A good book should easily sell for $0.99; and an author with a fan base should also be able to ask for yearly donations. I'd certainly pay $100 to keep a writer I liked writing -- especially since I know that nearly all of the money is going right to them, rather than pennies on the dollar (as it is when you buy their books).
It's often a lot easier to get a raise with a competing offer in hand -- if you like the company where you work and the people, that's what I'd do first -- ask for an $8k raise.
Loyalty is a consideration
The thing is, even if your first-level manager is loyal to you, the company as a whole isn't. What happens if there's a strategic shift in 6 months and they decide to shut down your department, or completely reorganize things so you're no longer doing what you want anymore? You're now either looking for a job, or stuck with a job you don't like, as well as a lower salary, thinking about that job that you turned down and is no longer available.
If the CERN result is correct, they should have arrived in 1982.
He's missing a step here. What he should have said is, "If the CERN result is correct, and we hypothesize that all neutrinos consistently travel x% faster than light, then they should have arrived in 1982." In other words, he's mixing up "the CERN observations are correct" with a particular hypothesis which could explain them -- namely, neutrinos always traveling x% faster than light.
But there are innumerable reasonable hypotheses which could be consistent both with the CERN observations and the neutrinos detected from that supernova. For one, are we sure that there weren't any neutrinos in 1982? For example, it could be that the "faster than light" trick is probabilistic, and so some neutrinos actually did show up in 1982, while others showed up in 1987. It could also be that the "faster than light" trick is non-linear; so even if there wasn't a burst at the predicted time in 1982, it could have been some other burst in 1986, 1983, 1970, or even 500BC. It also could be the case that that there's a "tunneling" effect that happens when they're emitted. In that case, the neutrinos would show up 3 hours and a few nanoseconds early -- something I doubt we could detect.
Not saying I think the neutrinos have gone faster than light; I'm just saying that the supernova-related neutrino observations are hardly conclusive.
Then again, the work I did for my thesis never made it past "research prototype". Papers are the "coin of the realm" in academia. There's a very long way between "proof of concept that runs well enough to take measurements and publish" and "something I can sell to someone", and there are no papers in between. That leaves entrepreneurs, or departments / people who do it just out of the goodness of their hearts.
I've got a good heart I think, but nowhere near good enough to spend all day at work coding, and then come home and code some more.:-)
A cabal is a group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views and/or interests in a church, state, or other community, often by intrigue. Cabals are sometimes secret societies composed of a few designing persons.... The use of this term usually carries strong connotations of shadowy corners, back rooms and insidious influence; a cabal is more evil and selective than, say, a faction, which is simply selfish...
From TFA:
Besides, “Some tools encourage workflows that are actively detrimental, and I think CVS [Concurrent Versions System, a version control system] for example has caused a lot of projects to have the notion of a 'commit cabal,'” Torvalds continues. “I personally tend to think tar-balls and patches are actually preferable to that – if only because they make all developers 'equal,' and you don't get the kind of model where certain people have 'commit access,' and the rest are second-class citizens. Sometimes it's better that everybody is a second class citizen than that some people have an easier time at it.”
So by "commit cabal" he means a small group of privileged people have commit access to a repository. But by calling it a "cabal", he's comparing (negatively) it to some kind of secret club. This is in contrast to the way Linux was developed originally, where anyone could post a patch series to the list, and it may be taken or rejected regardless of how long you've been in the community.
It's usually worked well for me because of different requirements, a different environment, and thus a different workflow.
I think his point was that CVS encourages a "commit cabal" workflow; and it's the "commit cabal" workflow which he thinks is detrimental to an open-source project.
Perl was designed for text processing, and at that it excels. Bash was designed for starting and managing sequences of other commands, and at that it excels. Both languages are actually capable of doing the other; but in Perl, executing other programs and keeping track of them is a bit clunky and requires a lot of extra verbiage, and in Bash, doing string parsing is really clunky and requires a lot of extra verbiage.
Moral of the story: choose the right tool for the job.
did FOSS really save IBM? I was under the impression that what saved IBM was reinventing themselves as a "soloutions" company. They may use a bit of FOSS in their solutions and contribute a bit to the projects they use but I never got the impression it was critical to them.
If you look at IBM's decision to support OSS from the business perspective of Porter's Five Forces, the benefit they get from supporting open-source is obvious. They are selling solutions; but one major thing they had to buy was Microsoft. Microsoft had a stranglehold on the PC market others had it on the server markets, meaning they could charge signfiicant premiums and push people around.
So the purpose of supporting Linux was to break that stranglehold -- to reduce the bargaining power of sellers, in terms of Porter's analysis -- so that they could capture more value from the market they were in.
So religion played more than a small role in the motivations.
That's absolutely true. But it's not taking into account that religions really are different. It's pretty hard to imagine a Buddhist group doing something like this, for example. But saying "Fuck Islam" would have been pretty politically incorrect, not to mention potentially dangerous...
Car accident statistics dont get worse if you ignore them.
You have it exactly backwards. The only reason people do terrorism is to get attention.
Look, the whole point of terrorism is to be an effectiveness multiplier. The purpose of flying the planes into the twin towers wasn't to kill people. It was to get the US to spend billions of dollars on counter-terrorism measures.
You'll occasionally see in sports games, people who strip naked and run onto the field. When that happens, the TV broadcasters point the cameras away. Why? Because they know that the cameras is what the guy wanted. By putting him on TV, they're giving him exactly what he wants, and encouraging more people to do the same. By talking about the game and ignoring him, they're sending a message: Your little stunt will be largely ignored.
If the media did that with terrorism, then terrorism would not exist: there would be no point. But the fact is that terrorism is very good for the media. It has people glued to their television sets. The media are an integral part of a terrorist attack; it wouldn't function properly without it.
Now, I'm not saying we should just ignore terrorism. We need to find out the root causes and see what we can do about it. But one of the biggest things we could do is just not make a big deal out of it.
OK, caught me out; I haven't read Marx, I've only looked at what those who follow him did.
So, did he mention anything like what I said -- about the importance of both diversity and feedback? If not, I think he missed some pretty big things in his analysis.
Capitalism certainly has lots of problems. But I think Marx looked at the wrong things. He should have asked, what has made capitalism work as well as it has so far?
There are two things that I think make capitalism work as well as it has.
Diversity Lots of people just try different things. Some of them work great, some of them work OK, some of them don't work at all.
Feedback In capitalism, money is power; not (generally) the power to make you do something you don't want to do, but the power to get you to do something that you're willing to be paid to do. People who invest their "power" in ventures which create real value for people generally get more money back -- and thus more "power" to invest in the future. People who make foolish decisions with their "power" often end up with less power.
Now it's clear that Capitalism doesn't always work this way; there are lots of times when there's a lack of diversity or feedback for some reason; people are rewarded for destroying value, or not rewarded for the value they create.
But in communism, as it has thus far been practiced, neither of these things are ever true. The State makes has a committee and makes one decision, and that policy is implemented nation-wide. Moreover, often it's taken as gospel truth, and it's heresy to even question it. Furthermore, when officials make decisions, there is almost guaranteed never to be the same degree of feedback, either good or bad.
So Marx saw what didn't work well, and tried to change it; but he didn't see what *did* work well, and try to keep it. On the contrary, he took away what worked well.
Except that's not what happened. One of the members of the board of censors is actually a free speech advocate. He started posting things on his blog which he thought had been wrongly censored. So it's no surprise that republishing of material which was already censored would be flagged up as something to be censored.
The argument the EFF is making is that the censorship itself needs to be open; the blog lets the public know what kinds of things are actually being censored, and they are thus urging the committee to leave it up.
We had this too, and what I never understood was my computer-geek friends who slacked off in that class and never learned to touch type. Come on guys, you want to do this for a living. You have to sit in this class for an hour every day anyway, you might as well... sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
And even more ironically, under today's laws, some of those would still have been under copyright by the time the movies were made. Lewis Carrol died in 1898, so his estate would hold have held the copyright until 1968 -- 17 years after Disney made the film in 1951.
Coming up with a clever algorithm is certainly one thing that many people find fun about programming. But there are lots of other ones: having the satisfaction of a well-designed and finished product is another one (just as using a lathe may be fun, but seeing the finished table is also fun). Another thing that's fun about programming is the magic of having your creation come to life.
It's this last one that's the most accessible at the beginner level. To a beginner, making two buttons, one of which turns the screen blue when pressed, and the other of which turns the screen red when pressed, will be as rewarding as casting the first cantrip would be for someone studying magic. This part of programming has never lost its appeal for me; whenever I create a new program or a new feature in an existing program, it still feels like magic.
The purpose of having something really simple, like BASIC, is to allow people to get the taste of the magic of programming -- just enough to convince them that it's worth all the time and effort of learning a real language. It's then that the other enjoyments, of designing good algorithms and so on, become available to them.
I haven't read Hitchens or Harris; but Dawkins consistently says things about Christianity that are simply not true; quotes straw-man arguments that you might hear as a kid in Sunday school, but which are not nearly as good or subtle as those used by real thinkers and philosophers; and makes arguments that are philosophically unsound and have been addressed or answered by Christian thinkers in abundance.
I read about half of Dennet's book, and found it interesting and well-written. The thing about it though, is that it's completely unfalsifiable. If you read it, think at every stage: "How would I know if this were not true?" And you find that there is actually no way to know; there is no evidence that can prove his ideas wrong. This is in fact a weakness, not a strength.
So read them, but make sure to get a balanced view. Some good books on the subject include:
I'd actually also add Jane Austen to the list. Her books are funny, satirical, and insightful; the fact that she still has a cult following nearly 200 years after her death, and one big enough to make a movie aimed at her fans, should be evidence that she's worth a try. One of the things that makes them so good is that each of the books follows the general form of a romance novel of her time, but subtly deconstructs it. I'd recommend starting with Pride and Prejudice as the most accessible. Her books are easy to download from the internet, but if you can get a copy with good notes, that helps a lot.
Maybe a better analogy would be this. There's a Best Buy, and two doors down an open-air market.
Best buy has the problem that some sketchy sellers from the open-air market shoplift stuff, walk down the street, and sell it to people at a huge discount.
So what they do is attach a big ugly thing to every piece of electronic equipment that uses the 3G network to make sure you've paid for this device. If cell phone coverage goes out, the whole device stops working.
The sketchy sellers from the open-air market do just as much shoplifting; they just remove the big ugly kludge. But now, more people buy from the shoplifters, because what they get is not only cheaper, but better too.
As a whole strategy, sure. But there are an awful lot of things that corporations do to make shareholders happy short-term, that end up causing problems long term. A big one is trying to make quarterly earnings consistent. For some reason, shareholders like the quarterly earnings to be a nice even roll, within a few cents of the last one (or if there's a yearly cycle, within a few cents of what's expected given the cycle and how things are going). But fundamentally sales are a random variable, and sales for a given quarter may go up or down for no reason other than randomness. I can't tell you how many times our company has, in the third month of a quarter, suddenly announced a freeze on new hiring, or new spending, or travel budgeting, or whatever, but just for the month until the quarter is over, to bump up that earning value a little bit closer to what was expected. Long-term, it hurts the company to have this kind of randomness; but short-term, it's what shareholders want, so that's what they get.
After hearing this "gotos are evil" thing some years ago (and seeing them judiciously used in the Linux kernel to good effect), I actually looked up the original paper Dijkstra wrote, "Gotos considered harmful". It turns out that all of his objections are handled by languages like C. One of the big ones was that whatever language he was talking about was like early versions of BASIC: you GOTO a line number, not a label. So any given statement may be the target of a GOTO, with no indication that this was the case. This would indeed be a nightmare of maintainability.
However, C isn't like that at all -- you can't goto an arbitrary line; you can only jump to a label. So if you're reading along a C program, and you see a label, you *almost certainly* know that somewhere else in the code jumps to it. (And you definitely do know if the project uses -Wall -Werror.) So you know to go and find out where.
The difference is that credit unions are explicitly not-for-profit. Their main goal is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize member usefulness. That makes a really big difference.
The core of economics is people doing valuable for things for other people -- "creating value", to use a PHB word. I've had a bit of exposure to the business world, and discovered that there are basically two kinds of businessmen: People who want to get your money by giving you something valuable (i.e, worth the money), and people who just want to make money whatever way they can, preferably with the minimal effort (i.e., generally giving you nothing really valuable, or by causing damage in the production so that the net effect on society is negative). The first kind of businessman actually makes the world a better place; the second generally makes it a worse place.
Our system generally rewards the first kind, and we do have some systems in place to limit the effect of the second kind. But we need to be always on guard against the second kind, and continually trying to put in laws which restrict the second kind while allowing the first kind to thrive.
I'm a Christian, but not a Catholic. One of my best friends is a Catholic priest, however; and just from the little that I've seen, that organization seems unusually concerned with appearances. Obviously nobody likes negative press about themselves or their organization; but it just seems to be bigger and very much institutional in the Catholic Church.
Which is a shame on so many fronts. For one, AFAICT that's the main reason that so little has been done wrt pedophile priests -- which in turn has increased the number of victims greatly. But moreover, the central teaching of Christianity is that every human has evil in their hearts, but that we can have forgiveness through Jesus. You'd think an organization with that teaching at its heart should be the most able to admit the fault of one of its members and ask forgiveness, rather than trying to pretend they're all saints on earth.
But at the same time, it's now possible for authors to find an array of patrons. A good book should easily sell for $0.99; and an author with a fan base should also be able to ask for yearly donations. I'd certainly pay $100 to keep a writer I liked writing -- especially since I know that nearly all of the money is going right to them, rather than pennies on the dollar (as it is when you buy their books).
It's often a lot easier to get a raise with a competing offer in hand -- if you like the company where you work and the people, that's what I'd do first -- ask for an $8k raise.
The thing is, even if your first-level manager is loyal to you, the company as a whole isn't. What happens if there's a strategic shift in 6 months and they decide to shut down your department, or completely reorganize things so you're no longer doing what you want anymore? You're now either looking for a job, or stuck with a job you don't like, as well as a lower salary, thinking about that job that you turned down and is no longer available.
He's missing a step here. What he should have said is, "If the CERN result is correct, and we hypothesize that all neutrinos consistently travel x% faster than light, then they should have arrived in 1982." In other words, he's mixing up "the CERN observations are correct" with a particular hypothesis which could explain them -- namely, neutrinos always traveling x% faster than light.
But there are innumerable reasonable hypotheses which could be consistent both with the CERN observations and the neutrinos detected from that supernova. For one, are we sure that there weren't any neutrinos in 1982? For example, it could be that the "faster than light" trick is probabilistic, and so some neutrinos actually did show up in 1982, while others showed up in 1987. It could also be that the "faster than light" trick is non-linear; so even if there wasn't a burst at the predicted time in 1982, it could have been some other burst in 1986, 1983, 1970, or even 500BC. It also could be the case that that there's a "tunneling" effect that happens when they're emitted. In that case, the neutrinos would show up 3 hours and a few nanoseconds early -- something I doubt we could detect.
Not saying I think the neutrinos have gone faster than light; I'm just saying that the supernova-related neutrino observations are hardly conclusive.
How is this "without evidence of tampering", when they have an actual circuit board ("alien electronic") inserted into the machine?
Also, to hide the fact that they're changing votes, they blank out the screen. How likely is it that *no one* notices this?
More examples:
Coverity
VMWare
Xen
Then again, the work I did for my thesis never made it past "research prototype". Papers are the "coin of the realm" in academia. There's a very long way between "proof of concept that runs well enough to take measurements and publish" and "something I can sell to someone", and there are no papers in between. That leaves entrepreneurs, or departments / people who do it just out of the goodness of their hearts.
I've got a good heart I think, but nowhere near good enough to spend all day at work coding, and then come home and code some more. :-)
From TFA:
So by "commit cabal" he means a small group of privileged people have commit access to a repository. But by calling it a "cabal", he's comparing (negatively) it to some kind of secret club. This is in contrast to the way Linux was developed originally, where anyone could post a patch series to the list, and it may be taken or rejected regardless of how long you've been in the community.
I think his point was that CVS encourages a "commit cabal" workflow; and it's the "commit cabal" workflow which he thinks is detrimental to an open-source project.
Perl was designed for text processing, and at that it excels. Bash was designed for starting and managing sequences of other commands, and at that it excels. Both languages are actually capable of doing the other; but in Perl, executing other programs and keeping track of them is a bit clunky and requires a lot of extra verbiage, and in Bash, doing string parsing is really clunky and requires a lot of extra verbiage.
Moral of the story: choose the right tool for the job.
If you look at IBM's decision to support OSS from the business perspective of Porter's Five Forces, the benefit they get from supporting open-source is obvious. They are selling solutions; but one major thing they had to buy was Microsoft. Microsoft had a stranglehold on the PC market others had it on the server markets, meaning they could charge signfiicant premiums and push people around.
So the purpose of supporting Linux was to break that stranglehold -- to reduce the bargaining power of sellers, in terms of Porter's analysis -- so that they could capture more value from the market they were in.
That's absolutely true. But it's not taking into account that religions really are different. It's pretty hard to imagine a Buddhist group doing something like this, for example. But saying "Fuck Islam" would have been pretty politically incorrect, not to mention potentially dangerous...
You have it exactly backwards. The only reason people do terrorism is to get attention.
Look, the whole point of terrorism is to be an effectiveness multiplier. The purpose of flying the planes into the twin towers wasn't to kill people. It was to get the US to spend billions of dollars on counter-terrorism measures.
You'll occasionally see in sports games, people who strip naked and run onto the field. When that happens, the TV broadcasters point the cameras away. Why? Because they know that the cameras is what the guy wanted. By putting him on TV, they're giving him exactly what he wants, and encouraging more people to do the same. By talking about the game and ignoring him, they're sending a message: Your little stunt will be largely ignored.
If the media did that with terrorism, then terrorism would not exist: there would be no point. But the fact is that terrorism is very good for the media. It has people glued to their television sets. The media are an integral part of a terrorist attack; it wouldn't function properly without it.
Now, I'm not saying we should just ignore terrorism. We need to find out the root causes and see what we can do about it. But one of the biggest things we could do is just not make a big deal out of it.
OK, caught me out; I haven't read Marx, I've only looked at what those who follow him did.
So, did he mention anything like what I said -- about the importance of both diversity and feedback? If not, I think he missed some pretty big things in his analysis.
Capitalism certainly has lots of problems. But I think Marx looked at the wrong things. He should have asked, what has made capitalism work as well as it has so far?
There are two things that I think make capitalism work as well as it has.
Now it's clear that Capitalism doesn't always work this way; there are lots of times when there's a lack of diversity or feedback for some reason; people are rewarded for destroying value, or not rewarded for the value they create.
But in communism, as it has thus far been practiced, neither of these things are ever true. The State makes has a committee and makes one decision, and that policy is implemented nation-wide. Moreover, often it's taken as gospel truth, and it's heresy to even question it. Furthermore, when officials make decisions, there is almost guaranteed never to be the same degree of feedback, either good or bad.
So Marx saw what didn't work well, and tried to change it; but he didn't see what *did* work well, and try to keep it. On the contrary, he took away what worked well.
Except that's not what happened. One of the members of the board of censors is actually a free speech advocate. He started posting things on his blog which he thought had been wrongly censored. So it's no surprise that republishing of material which was already censored would be flagged up as something to be censored.
The argument the EFF is making is that the censorship itself needs to be open; the blog lets the public know what kinds of things are actually being censored, and they are thus urging the committee to leave it up.
We had this too, and what I never understood was my computer-geek friends who slacked off in that class and never learned to touch type. Come on guys, you want to do this for a living. You have to sit in this class for an hour every day anyway, you might as well... sigh.