It does make me wonder how long it will be before some rich person or company buys a few islands, establishes a country and bans children from them (think an almost-permananent vacation spot). I would assume that there are a lot of laws designed to push agendas based on 'protecting the children'and so I bet it would be quite an interesting country that only allows childless people to come and live there, and would certainly have interesting TV!
Re-Read my post. I'll gladly take a nickel for every *person* who *suggests* that a library ban a book (or that a network not air a movie...), but I'll not get rich if I received a thousand dollars for every library or network that actually capitulates.
It's the ALA's annual Straw Man Competition. Don't fall for it.
Sounds like someone doesn't live in hickville. Or belonged to a PTA anywhere. To believe that banning books is either temporally remote or over with is naive AND incorrect. These days parents seem to just are about different stuff, like 'promoting witchcraft' (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). And sometimes, they succeed for a time (till a suit or injunction slaps them back into shape).
I'll take a citation on any of that, please.
Sure, I've heard that Harry Potter has gotten some religious groups' panties in a bunch, but I've yet to hear that any of the books were banned by any school or library. In fact, it's been just the opposite: Harry and his pals have done more to get young adults to read in the last decade -- and as such have been adopted and trumpeted by schools and libraries everywhere -- than just about any other series.
And LOTR? Come on. Who has banned it? What library has come even CLOSE to consider banning it?
The whole charade is a smoke screen to trump up fear and loathing for the Christian Right and depict librarians (destined to become the buggy-whip salesmen of the 21st century) as heroically manning the barricades of literary freedom and expression.
But your sub-titles recently, like "Web-Two-Point-Doh," have been really, really clever. Not that you need an idiot like me to tell you that, but I figure I give you eds enough (deserved) grief day-to-day it's only proper that I hand out a compliment on the (rare) occasion it is merited. And since the tags are among the few places here where you guys actually have the opportunity to inject some personality, I am gratified to see that at least one of you has one.
SULU, then Archer. Sulu was only a captain for one move and came across better.
Sulu, the fencing botanist? Yes, I was particularly impressed by the dainty way he sipped tea from the fine china set. Were I a starfleet grunt, I'm certain I would follow him into the mess hall at dinner time, cuz the guy clearly knew how to eat. Whether I'd let him lead me into deep space is another story...
Nothing you write about yourself in your blog will seem as clever, funny, and/or meaningful at age 35 as it did at age 22, and it's not because you have lost your sense of humor or appreciation for art and philosophy. And unless you plan a career as a full-time Ren Faire professional, stay away from the "Fan Fiction" completely.
There's a difference between walking by a pile of shit and having a pile of shit dropped in front of you.
I suppose. But from where I'm viewing this, this is more a matter of people having jumped into a pile of shit months ago and only now wondering why they're starting to stink.
Let's review the Rules for Living in a Networked World:
1. Don't put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't want your boss, your wife, your child, or the Attorney General's Office to read.
2. Don't put anything on a website linked to your name that you wouldn't want Anyone, Anywhere, Now or Forever, linked to you.
It's simple really: Think someday, maybe, possibly, slight chance, back-of-your-mind, you might want to run for public office? Stay away from MySpace and Facebook and their ilk like they were kryptonite.
Unlike Wikipedia... you're not anonymous, so if you are identified as a vandal, your entered data can be removed. They also limit input to 25/entreis month.
Great. So the barriers for participation in a nefarious identity-mining site are higher than for Wikipedia. Which means that scenarios like this one are playing out in the back of school buses across the land:
Punk_01: "D00d! I got a great idea! Let's scam that new teacher, I glommed his biz card, we can put his phone number and shit online!"
Punk_02: "Jigsaw? No way, d00d, I heard they're like, really, really strict. How 'bout we just edit Luxembourg some more?"
Bad, bad troll! xine is a player for MPEG videos, it is not some stupid old technology.
I know what xine is, super-genius, I use it daily. Along with a whole bunch of other Linux players and plug-ins that I would not expect Hollywood to actively support until they achieved some marketshare approaching at least that of Firefox. Because a player exists, or is even technologically superior to what "the masses" have, should by no means bind, ethically or otherwise, a company to support that player if it does not make good business sense to do so.
Until they sell me a non-drm'ed movie download I can watch with xine/mplayer on my Solaris/Sparc desktop, I'll stick to the pirate bay
I'm with you, Matey. Until the swabs make it available to me on those little wheelie discs with the colored cellophane frames and I can project it on to my Mom's laundry hanging in the backyard, I'm going the copyright infringement route as well.
Stupid studios! When will they ever learn they have to cater to ALL our home playback technologies, no matter how eccentric or whimsical? They JUST DON'T GET IT!
Assuming I had something like 500 friends I'd see a lot of information about people
Assuming you had something like 500 friends you wouldn't have an entry on Facebook. You'd be too busy maintaining real relationships, and not the HTML and PHP that passes for "relationships" in social networking sites.
Think of the cameras as hi-tech plain clothes store "detectives;" y'know, the pensioners who are paid to blend in with the patrons and report anyone suspicious. The cameras and high-density servers just do their job, only more efficiently and less expensively.
I swear, some days Slashdot just seems so... analog and anti-progress.
Make the podcasts available, or not. Charge a premium for them, or not. But the whole point of the pod is that of time-shifting: The student CANNOT attend the lecture when it is scheduled, so he downloads the podcast and "attends" when he can. Better living through science, and all that.
The professor is being charged with educating the student; if he, being assisted by a download and that omnipresent little white box, can succeed in accomplishing that education without a student even entering his classroom, more power to him, sez me. Of course, we all know the issue is one of ego. The prof wants to be hi-tech hip with his words downloadable daily, yet he still wants to see a full lecture hall hanging upon every word of wisdom as if they were dollops of moist angel food.
Now, to answer your actual question. Set up a matrix of authentication codes, columns of lecture dates by rows of students. The prof hands them out at the end of each lecture, all good for a single podcast download of the lecture they just heard (WTF? But hey, that's the academic ego, I suppose...) The code is your daily password, your SS# is your UID. Of course, if you want to give both your code AND and your SS# to your truant bud, nothing stops you except the ickiness, and the fact that the code is good for only one download of that lecture.
Here's an even crazier notion: Maybe, if he wanted to interact with content on the Internet, he'd be playing friggin' EVE Online? Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?
How does Encyclopedia Britannica do it? Or the NYT?
They FIRE people. People LOSE THEIR JOBS. If someone abuses or games or otherwise plays loose with the facts they risk MAKING LESS MONEY.
Money. You want capital 'T' Truth? Make it about the money.
The wikipedia "model" as it stands now is all reward (big ego boos, "Look Ma, I edited Luxembourg!") and very little risk (Dood1: "Yo, I just got banned from posting in wikipedia!" Dood2: "Like, D00d, you are so-o-o-- cool! That rawks, man! And screw them!"). The day a writer of a wikipedia article loses his source of income for doing a bad job is the day wikipedia begins to be credible.
You want "community"? Go to a parade or fireworks display. You want an encyclopedia of facts? Pay people.
give everyone the power to make changes, and you can guarantee they will not all be entirely scrupulous or responsible.
"Scrupulous and responsible"!?! Dood! How about "old enough to shave"? More edits to global geo-political articles in wikipedia are crafted in a week as a result of dares made in the backseats of school buses than in a decade's worth of Britannicas. Why not just take the ten most altered articles each day and have the people watching MTV's Total Request Live call in and vote for the changes in history they most want to see?
However, billions of people use knives safely every day to prepare food.
And the however-many-but-hardly-likely-to-be-in-the-billio ns people who, erm, *use* violent pornography [presumably?] safely every day are preparing... what exactly?
Hey, don't look at me; you're the guy comparing dirty pictures to cooking utensils. With free-speech advocates like you on the barricades, we're all sure to hang...
When the "blog-O-sphere" gets it wrong, will there be any mainstream media left that's not already been cyber-whipped and pixel-chastised enough who might call them on it?
The Guillotine has gone out of fashion, and been replaced by The Drudge Report. That still places civilization ahead.
I'd have no problem seeing the ad-based web dissapear. The stuff that remains would be made by people who actually give a damn about what they're doing, people who are willing to suffer a little bit and actually give up something to make a website they want to create.
D00d, I just read the first page of your blog. If that's the kind of content you're talking about, y'know, from those people who give a damn and are suffering, then I'll take friggin' Uncle Miltie and the Texaco Star Theatre. Or Hallmark card poetry, even. Reality TV. FM radio. Anything...
What about donations? What about rich people running sites? Ads aren't the only game in town. Look at wikipedia. Look at the BBC even (taxpayer funded).
Man-o-Man, you dance better than Fred Astaire!
And such sterling examples! A Hive-Mind Encyclo-Sandbox in which the most obsessively compulsive disordered player wins, and a Govrnment-sponsored "news" site. If that's what my donations buy me on the web, thanks, but I, um, gave at the office...
For every Wikipedia getting by on donations (and remember, their servers and bandwidth costs are covered by corporate donations, not yours and mine), there's a bajillion sites which simply would not exist were it not for the ad model. You simply cannot create and move rich content without spending far more than the average consumer is willing to pay out-of-pocket.
Which brings us back to your Web-as-Exclusive-Country-Club model.
D00d, you didn't answer my question; here it is again, ad-free for your enjoyment: Should the content on the World Wide Web, and, by extension, entertainment in general, be available only to those who can pay 'extra?'
Slashdot Mirror
It does make me wonder how long it will be before some rich person or company buys a few islands, establishes a country and bans children from them (think an almost-permananent vacation spot). I would assume that there are a lot of laws designed to push agendas based on 'protecting the children'and so I bet it would be quite an interesting country that only allows childless people to come and live there, and would certainly have interesting TV!
I've been there.
I don't remember if the TV was especially interesting but the clothing shops were Fabulous!!
Re-Read my post. I'll gladly take a nickel for every *person* who *suggests* that a library ban a book (or that a network not air a movie...), but I'll not get rich if I received a thousand dollars for every library or network that actually capitulates.
It's the ALA's annual Straw Man Competition. Don't fall for it.
Sounds like someone doesn't live in hickville. Or belonged to a PTA anywhere. To believe that banning books is either temporally remote or over with is naive AND incorrect. These days parents seem to just are about different stuff, like 'promoting witchcraft' (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). And sometimes, they succeed for a time (till a suit or injunction slaps them back into shape).
I'll take a citation on any of that, please.
Sure, I've heard that Harry Potter has gotten some religious groups' panties in a bunch, but I've yet to hear that any of the books were banned by any school or library. In fact, it's been just the opposite: Harry and his pals have done more to get young adults to read in the last decade -- and as such have been adopted and trumpeted by schools and libraries everywhere -- than just about any other series.
And LOTR? Come on. Who has banned it? What library has come even CLOSE to consider banning it?
The whole charade is a smoke screen to trump up fear and loathing for the Christian Right and depict librarians (destined to become the buggy-whip salesmen of the 21st century) as heroically manning the barricades of literary freedom and expression.
But your sub-titles recently, like "Web-Two-Point-Doh," have been really, really clever. Not that you need an idiot like me to tell you that, but I figure I give you eds enough (deserved) grief day-to-day it's only proper that I hand out a compliment on the (rare) occasion it is merited. And since the tags are among the few places here where you guys actually have the opportunity to inject some personality, I am gratified to see that at least one of you has one.
Good on ya, bud.
Pick a Study. Any Study. G'head, g'head, pick two, we'll make more...
SULU, then Archer. Sulu was only a captain for one move and came across better.
Sulu, the fencing botanist? Yes, I was particularly impressed by the dainty way he sipped tea from the fine china set. Were I a starfleet grunt, I'm certain I would follow him into the mess hall at dinner time, cuz the guy clearly knew how to eat. Whether I'd let him lead me into deep space is another story...
Not that there's anything wrong with, I hasten to add.
kk, done now.
Nothing you write about yourself in your blog will seem as clever, funny, and/or meaningful at age 35 as it did at age 22, and it's not because you have lost your sense of humor or appreciation for art and philosophy. And unless you plan a career as a full-time Ren Faire professional, stay away from the "Fan Fiction" completely.
Happy to Help.
There's a difference between walking by a pile of shit and having a pile of shit dropped in front of you.
I suppose. But from where I'm viewing this, this is more a matter of people having jumped into a pile of shit months ago and only now wondering why they're starting to stink.
Let's review the Rules for Living in a Networked World:
1. Don't put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't want your boss, your wife, your child, or the Attorney General's Office to read.
2. Don't put anything on a website linked to your name that you wouldn't want Anyone, Anywhere, Now or Forever, linked to you.
It's simple really: Think someday, maybe, possibly, slight chance, back-of-your-mind, you might want to run for public office? Stay away from MySpace and Facebook and their ilk like they were kryptonite.
Unlike Wikipedia... you're not anonymous, so if you are identified as a vandal, your entered data can be removed. They also limit input to 25/entreis month.
Great. So the barriers for participation in a nefarious identity-mining site are higher than for Wikipedia. Which means that scenarios like this one are playing out in the back of school buses across the land:
Punk_01: "D00d! I got a great idea! Let's scam that new teacher, I glommed his biz card, we can put his phone number and shit online!"
Punk_02: "Jigsaw? No way, d00d, I heard they're like, really, really strict. How 'bout we just edit Luxembourg some more?"
Punk_01: "Sweet!"
Bad, bad troll! xine is a player for MPEG videos, it is not some stupid old technology.
I know what xine is, super-genius, I use it daily. Along with a whole bunch of other Linux players and plug-ins that I would not expect Hollywood to actively support until they achieved some marketshare approaching at least that of Firefox. Because a player exists, or is even technologically superior to what "the masses" have, should by no means bind, ethically or otherwise, a company to support that player if it does not make good business sense to do so.
Until they sell me a non-drm'ed movie download I can watch with xine/mplayer on my Solaris/Sparc desktop, I'll stick to the pirate bay
I'm with you, Matey. Until the swabs make it available to me on those little wheelie discs with the colored cellophane frames and I can project it on to my Mom's laundry hanging in the backyard, I'm going the copyright infringement route as well.
Stupid studios! When will they ever learn they have to cater to ALL our home playback technologies, no matter how eccentric or whimsical? They JUST DON'T GET IT!
Assuming I had something like 500 friends I'd see a lot of information about people
Assuming you had something like 500 friends you wouldn't have an entry on Facebook. You'd be too busy maintaining real relationships, and not the HTML and PHP that passes for "relationships" in social networking sites.
Think of the cameras as hi-tech plain clothes store "detectives;" y'know, the pensioners who are paid to blend in with the patrons and report anyone suspicious. The cameras and high-density servers just do their job, only more efficiently and less expensively.
I swear, some days Slashdot just seems so... analog and anti-progress.
I really think that unless we do something immediately, the habitability of at least half the landmass on Earth will be be jeapordy.
Jee-zus!!! Do I have time for a sandwich?
Maybe not... it's seems the air over your landmass is pretty thin already...
Show the world that Big Brother, Fascism and Censorship know no Left/Right wing ideology!
Make the podcasts available, or not. Charge a premium for them, or not. But the whole point of the pod is that of time-shifting: The student CANNOT attend the lecture when it is scheduled, so he downloads the podcast and "attends" when he can. Better living through science, and all that.
The professor is being charged with educating the student; if he, being assisted by a download and that omnipresent little white box, can succeed in accomplishing that education without a student even entering his classroom, more power to him, sez me. Of course, we all know the issue is one of ego. The prof wants to be hi-tech hip with his words downloadable daily, yet he still wants to see a full lecture hall hanging upon every word of wisdom as if they were dollops of moist angel food.
Now, to answer your actual question. Set up a matrix of authentication codes, columns of lecture dates by rows of students. The prof hands them out at the end of each lecture, all good for a single podcast download of the lecture they just heard (WTF? But hey, that's the academic ego, I suppose...) The code is your daily password, your SS# is your UID. Of course, if you want to give both your code AND and your SS# to your truant bud, nothing stops you except the ickiness, and the fact that the code is good for only one download of that lecture.
Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?
Here's an even crazier notion: Maybe, if he wanted to interact with content on the Internet, he'd be playing friggin' EVE Online? Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?
How does Encyclopedia Britannica do it? Or the NYT?
They FIRE people. People LOSE THEIR JOBS. If someone abuses or games or otherwise plays loose with the facts they risk MAKING LESS MONEY.
Money. You want capital 'T' Truth? Make it about the money.
The wikipedia "model" as it stands now is all reward (big ego boos, "Look Ma, I edited Luxembourg!") and very little risk (Dood1: "Yo, I just got banned from posting in wikipedia!" Dood2: "Like, D00d, you are so-o-o-- cool! That rawks, man! And screw them!"). The day a writer of a wikipedia article loses his source of income for doing a bad job is the day wikipedia begins to be credible.
You want "community"? Go to a parade or fireworks display. You want an encyclopedia of facts? Pay people.
give everyone the power to make changes, and you can guarantee they will not all be entirely scrupulous or responsible.
"Scrupulous and responsible"!?! Dood! How about "old enough to shave"? More edits to global geo-political articles in wikipedia are crafted in a week as a result of dares made in the backseats of school buses than in a decade's worth of Britannicas. Why not just take the ten most altered articles each day and have the people watching MTV's Total Request Live call in and vote for the changes in history they most want to see?
However, billions of people use knives safely every day to prepare food.
o ns people who, erm, *use* violent pornography [presumably?] safely every day are preparing... what exactly?
And the however-many-but-hardly-likely-to-be-in-the-billi
Hey, don't look at me; you're the guy comparing dirty pictures to cooking utensils. With free-speech advocates like you on the barricades, we're all sure to hang...
When the "blog-O-sphere" gets it wrong, will there be any mainstream media left that's not already been cyber-whipped and pixel-chastised enough who might call them on it?
The Guillotine has gone out of fashion, and been replaced by The Drudge Report. That still places civilization ahead.
I think...
I'd have no problem seeing the ad-based web dissapear. The stuff that remains would be made by people who actually give a damn about what they're doing, people who are willing to suffer a little bit and actually give up something to make a website they want to create.
D00d, I just read the first page of your blog. If that's the kind of content you're talking about, y'know, from those people who give a damn and are suffering, then I'll take friggin' Uncle Miltie and the Texaco Star Theatre. Or Hallmark card poetry, even. Reality TV. FM radio. Anything...
jee-zus!
What about donations? What about rich people running sites? Ads aren't the only game in town. Look at wikipedia. Look at the BBC even (taxpayer funded).
Man-o-Man, you dance better than Fred Astaire!
And such sterling examples! A Hive-Mind Encyclo-Sandbox in which the most obsessively compulsive disordered player wins, and a Govrnment-sponsored "news" site. If that's what my donations buy me on the web, thanks, but I, um, gave at the office...
For every Wikipedia getting by on donations (and remember, their servers and bandwidth costs are covered by corporate donations, not yours and mine), there's a bajillion sites which simply would not exist were it not for the ad model. You simply cannot create and move rich content without spending far more than the average consumer is willing to pay out-of-pocket.
Which brings us back to your Web-as-Exclusive-Country-Club model.
Good luck with that, Thurston...
D00d, you didn't answer my question; here it is again, ad-free for your enjoyment: Should the content on the World Wide Web, and, by extension, entertainment in general, be available only to those who can pay 'extra?'