Get out of your basement. Discover the world. There are a lot of things out there that are pleasant to look at, to touch, to experience. Maybe this will cure you of your bitter disdain for anyone out there who doesn't spend 22 hours a day playing with command lines. You are not better in any way than someone who doesn't care about the processes running inside the household appliance that they use for internet access. The fact that they don't want to be surrounded with ugly tower cases with their covers removed and ribbon cables hanging out of them is perfectly OK. Many people would rather live in pleasant surroundings. Their highly developed aesthetic probably means they are at least as capable of applying their intelligence to everyday life as you are. Possibly more.
The "tax on e-mail" has been circulating as a hoax for a while now. Even if there are proposals under consideration, they are foolish, as the idea itself is not well thought out.
Ask yourself, what would be taxed and how would it be measured? SMTP traffic from a host? Move the host offshore - easy to do. SMTP traffic from a user? And how are you going to measure the packets going down a phone wire and differentiate them from the other types of traffic? I know - maybe they could set up some kind of enormous sniffer network at key network interchanges, sample all of the traffic, then figure out which host originated it (sometimes tricky, but not impossible), then figure out who owns that bit of traffic (what company/user - this is tricky).
A tax on e-mail would be about as easy to enforce as that French idea that all web sites should be translated before crossing to national frontier. If it happens, just move your e-mail somewhere where it is not taxed. End of problem.
The biggest problem I find in projects I have worked on is developing with reference to original requirements and design docs. Once you "parcel out" everything, people go on their merry way, and as long aws a component has the right polish (superficially appears to do what it needs to), some team members figure the work is finished. Or there's the "works right twice in a row" criterion for finishing.
Here's where the whiteboard-only approach is a BIG problem. Who is doing what? when are they considered finished? what criteria are there for completion? what dependencies have you introduced between sub-projects? If the only reference you have is the whiteboard and a few e-mails, you are making the accountability and completion part of your process potentially more difficult than it needs to be. This is a difficult bit (and often overlooked) even if you have a details project plan and lots of supporting documentation.
One reason flowcharting, etc., seems really anal to a lot of developers is because they have always been lucky. Once their streak of luck runs out, they may not be around any more to warn others. Another reason a lot of people object to rigorous design planning is because they have seen process used a a political tool in their organization. This doesn't invalidate the process, it just means that your organization has too many jerks!
I would not be surprised at all to see MS release Office 200x for Linux in some partially complete fashion, once they see a credible market for shrinkwrapped, retail-distributed Linux-desktop software. However, it is much better for everyone if Access and Powerpoint never get ported. Powerpoint is an abomination aesthetically and in terms of file size and CPU utilization, and Access is a dbms that barely works, behaving inconsistently and commonly doing things like losing records or attaching updates to the wrong record.
Hopefully by the time this release happens (it it happens), MS Office will be well along on its tumble into irrelevancy anyway.
So the outpouring of grief and concern is a result of large media outlets intensively covering an event that really is not that significant? And this is exacerbated by technology? And JFK Jr. was irrelevant to "this generation" because he didn't worship the internet? Am I getting the gist of what you're saying here?
For starters: mass media can manufacture stories and perspectives, but they can't manufacture meaning. There are two parties involved in meaning, the author and the reader. If the significance of something is lost on the reader, then it becomes insignificant. So if a large group of people did not find JFK Jr's death to be significant, there would be no shrines with flowers or declarations about a "black shroud" from that group. It is certainly possible for mass media to try to make it appear that "public opinion" or "public sentiment" leans in a particular direction, but it is not possible for mass media to implant emotions in people's psyches or to fundamentally change their views of themselves and the world, against their will.
Anyway I take it you watched and read a lot of the coverage, and it didn't brainwash you into an outpouring of grief. Are you saying that you and your friends/colleagues and vastly superior to the great unwashed out there, who are so feeble that they can be hypnotised into believing, against their will, that O.J., the Kennedys and the Super Bowl are more significant than the internet? Can you really despise the common folk that much? Is it just possible that this story continues to occupy so much media space all around the world because it is meaningful to quite a large group of people within the mass audience?
Technology does enable the mass media to circulate images more quickly and widely. But this does not seem to have changed the way in which stories unfold. In fact, the speed at which stories circulate the the public around the world is not all that faster now than it was after the first trans-oceanic cables were laid. Seriously. Now we get TV coverage potentially minutes or hours after a story breaks -- in those days a new edition of a newspaper could be on the streets within an hour or two, with major newspapers sometimes publishing several editions in a day (this is true within living memory).
Your rhetoric about the internet being the grandest accomplishment of some or another generation is something which you really should find embarrassing upon reflection. For starters, the internet is not the achievement of any particular "generation", it is the achievement of many people born at different times. And is it so significant that not devoting your efforts to it makes you a quaint anachronism? If a public figure in the 1880's didn't devote a large share of their life to the development of railroads, would you declare that they were out of step with their generation?
This is my question as well. I have seen this statistic before (briefly did intranet work for a market research company that was doing a fair amount of research on internet users), but it was never expressed in the context of "before" and "after". That is, they had stats showing that net users watched less TV than genpop (general population), but they couldn't demonstrate that they were watching less TV after starting to use the net.
It could be that there is a skew resulting from income and education level among net users. Busy professionals who do not have time to watch Seinfeld reruns possibly find it more convenient to get information from the net. It could also be that there are TV people and there are net people, regardless of education or income.
Personally, I am glued to net, print and TV about equally during my waking hours.
Thanks for clarifying so much of your original message. My turn now:
1. I would agree with you partially here, that social class stratification seems more profound and lasting than ethnic stratification.
2. Don't blame you for being confused as to why I brought this up, as the thread is about USA. Not meant to be a reply to anything you wrote, just a reminder to the thread participants that there is a wide world out there. Your assumption that deprivation ultimately comes to a head in violent upheavals is debatable.
3. The Academie Francaise is indeed an interesting case. However most nations have restrictions on "cultural products", and what language is to be used on commercially printed materials (France is a bit more adamant about it, after all they figure they invented western civilization and won't accept cheap foreign imitations). However ridiculous Academie-Francaise-type efforts appear, there is a reasonably clear difference between promotion/protection of cultural industries and politically/socially/religiously motivated censorship. In fact several countries with regulatory structures for the restriction of cultural imports have more freedom in terms of what can be published, what sort of political opinions can be expressed, and so on. In fact some state-run broadcasters provide a greater range of opinions than that found in the American media (although that certainly is not difficult).
4. Really, this is a bit overwrought!
Handling the delivery of "universal" net access at a more local level of government sounds good. However these lower levels of government have less ability to raise and allocate resources. Also this would determine the preservation of regional disparities -- like the "poverty-stricken south".
1. Are the economic divisions between races and classes in the USA really a "self-correcting problem"? If so, how long does the correction take to happen? I think a lot of people have been waiting quite a while...
2. What about the world outside North America? Access to "un-metered" telecommunications, or any telecommunications at all for that matter, is not universal.
3. State development of telecommunications has a mixed record. Don't confuse state control and state enterprises. It is possible for government utility, communications, transportation and other enterprises in various part of the world to run at "arms-length" from the government. You bet, China is a bad case. France, on the other hand, had a text-based computer network in telephone subscribers' homes in the 1980s, because of government-run telecommunications, with surprising little regulation of content (less in some respects that what freely-elected American politicians keep trying to legislate).
4. "men with guns will come and take your shit if you don't pay taxes -- try it sometime" Stop playing with guns so much, stop building so many prisons, stop giving tax breaks to businesses that generate no benefits to the larger community, start making the environmental consequences of industry the responsibility of the polluter, maybe your taxes would be lower. These are potentially huge expense items. Studying ways of making net access more universal is potentially quite a small expense item. Letting the state manage or provide better access, though, is probably a bad idea, not because of expense but because no level of government in the US seems to have the ability to distribute anything efficiently... except for fat government contracts to suppliers...
Re:How about getting rid of their Marcos-cronyism
on
UN Proposes Email Tax
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· Score: 1
Was this a reply to my post? If so, I don't see the relation.
I would certainly agree that World Bank/IMF initiatives have been a vast failure. They have undoubtedly benefited someone - I would guess primarily two groups: the western (usually US) contractors who supply goods and services to the megaprojects; and the local bigwigs who funnels the money. So, stop griping about US money being spent on third world megaprojects - it's mostly flowing back to the US anyway...
Hmph! Offshore business != economic development
on
UN Proposes Email Tax
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· Score: 1
The economic spin-off benefits from "offshore" businesses in the Caribbean and elsewhere are few for the people in that country. Offshore business relocation generally wouldn't happen if there were taxes to generate economic development or improve infrastructure. High-paid, skilled employees of internet gaming companies come from whatever country spawned the company in the first place, and you can bet that they are not investing in local education or local development (hiring servants, and guards for gated compounds, is a poor-quality spin-off and does not represent a sustainable industry).
Creating new bandwidth to support a sports pool or casino enterprise does not translate to high bandwidth internet access for ordinary citizens of "offshore" countries, any more than the growing number of phone sex chat companies in the Caribbean is going to mean everyone there gets voice mail, or even telephone service.
I take the view that the more people, and more diversity, on the net, the greater the benefit for everyone. The best means for ensuring this happens is to promote, and provide resources (including money) for projects which extend telecommunications services to all of those people who have no access to such services now. Get the switches and lines in, then start carrying IP on them.
Whether funding for this comes from tariffs on internet traffic or somewhere else is an interesting question. Many posts here have pointed out the impossibility or at least extreme difficulty or imposing, monitoring and enforcing tariffs internationally on the internet. I'm not a tax specialist or an economist (neither are >99% of the people who have posted here - it shows too), but my feeling is that any tariff would have to be imposed at a national level, by an international agreement. The only institutions I can think of at a national level that might be able to generate tariff revenue are national domain registrars.
Another alternative is for an international internet development agency to spring up and to promote grassroots-level programs such as the already existing Grameen Bank telecom and internet community programs in Bangladesh. http://www.grameen-info.org/grameen/gtelecom/ (couldn't find a link for the internet acces project, it may still be in the planning stages)
Same thing occurred to me - North American broadcast television stops for commercials every few minutes, but there are places in the world where all of the ads are held until a program break. Generally this means that the advertisers must compensate by making the advertising highly entertaining or artful. Take a look at the Cannes Advertising festival some time, or old Clio Awards reels - European advertisements are more likely to have higher production values, edgy or daring aesthetics. Not that this is a universally good thing, adds are still used to push products of dubious value and make unsubstantiated claims (although a Hungarian gov't commission once disallowed a coffee ad that claimed "better taste", saying that this was a subjective judgement which could not be proven), and project the social and political ideals of the advertisers. It does make them more entertaining and easier to look at.
Note that I said "more likely" - there is still a certain amount of crapola. The problem of interminable repetition, by far the worst feature of TV ads, still exists, but is mitigated somewhat by the fact that there are less advertising breaks in general.
With deregulation challenging state-sponsored broadcasters in many countries, it will be interesting to see if French and Italian TV get flooded with Krazy Discount Appliance Warehouse purveyors. Will Austrian morning time slots be flooded with loser commercials for pawnshops, personal injury lawyers and correspondence schools? Will Norwegians spend dark evenings contemplating chat lines and psychic networks?
Slashdot Mirror
Anthony DiMarco - what an interesting name for a 34-year-old black woman.
--
Get out of your basement. Discover the world. There are a lot of things out there that are pleasant to look at, to touch, to experience. Maybe this will cure you of your bitter disdain for anyone out there who doesn't spend 22 hours a day playing with command lines. You are not better in any way than someone who doesn't care about the processes running inside the household appliance that they use for internet access. The fact that they don't want to be surrounded with ugly tower cases with their covers removed and ribbon cables hanging out of them is perfectly OK. Many people would rather live in pleasant surroundings. Their highly developed aesthetic probably means they are at least as capable of applying their intelligence to everyday life as you are. Possibly more.
The "tax on e-mail" has been circulating as a hoax for a while now. Even if there are proposals under consideration, they are foolish, as the idea itself is not well thought out.
Ask yourself, what would be taxed and how would it be measured? SMTP traffic from a host? Move the host offshore - easy to do. SMTP traffic from a user? And how are you going to measure the packets going down a phone wire and differentiate them from the other types of traffic? I know - maybe they could set up some kind of enormous sniffer network at key network interchanges, sample all of the traffic, then figure out which host originated it (sometimes tricky, but not impossible), then figure out who owns that bit of traffic (what company/user - this is tricky).
A tax on e-mail would be about as easy to enforce as that French idea that all web sites should be translated before crossing to national frontier. If it happens, just move your e-mail somewhere where it is not taxed. End of problem.
The biggest problem I find in projects I have worked on is developing with reference to original requirements and design docs. Once you "parcel out" everything, people go on their merry way, and as long aws a component has the right polish (superficially appears to do what it needs to), some team members figure the work is finished. Or there's the "works right twice in a row" criterion for finishing.
Here's where the whiteboard-only approach is a BIG problem. Who is doing what? when are they considered finished? what criteria are there for completion? what dependencies have you introduced between sub-projects? If the only reference you have is the whiteboard and a few e-mails, you are making the accountability and completion part of your process potentially more difficult than it needs to be. This is a difficult bit (and often overlooked) even if you have a details project plan and lots of supporting documentation.
One reason flowcharting, etc., seems really anal to a lot of developers is because they have always been lucky. Once their streak of luck runs out, they may not be around any more to warn others. Another reason a lot of people object to rigorous design planning is because they have seen process used a a political tool in their organization. This doesn't invalidate the process, it just means that your organization has too many jerks!
I would not be surprised at all to see MS release Office 200x for Linux in some partially complete fashion, once they see a credible market for shrinkwrapped, retail-distributed Linux-desktop software. However, it is much better for everyone if Access and Powerpoint never get ported. Powerpoint is an abomination aesthetically and in terms of file size and CPU utilization, and Access is a dbms that barely works, behaving inconsistently and commonly doing things like losing records or attaching updates to the wrong record.
Hopefully by the time this release happens (it it happens), MS Office will be well along on its tumble into irrelevancy anyway.
So the outpouring of grief and concern is a result of large media outlets intensively covering an event that really is not that significant? And this is exacerbated by technology? And JFK Jr. was irrelevant to "this generation" because he didn't worship the internet? Am I getting the gist of what you're saying here?
For starters: mass media can manufacture stories and perspectives, but they can't manufacture meaning. There are two parties involved in meaning, the author and the reader. If the significance of something is lost on the reader, then it becomes insignificant. So if a large group of people did not find JFK Jr's death to be significant, there would be no shrines with flowers or declarations about a "black shroud" from that group. It is certainly possible for mass media to try to make it appear that "public opinion" or "public sentiment" leans in a particular direction, but it is not possible for mass media to implant emotions in people's psyches or to fundamentally change their views of themselves and the world, against their will.
Anyway I take it you watched and read a lot of the coverage, and it didn't brainwash you into an outpouring of grief. Are you saying that you and your friends/colleagues and vastly superior to the great unwashed out there, who are so feeble that they can be hypnotised into believing, against their will, that O.J., the Kennedys and the Super Bowl are more significant than the internet? Can you really despise the common folk that much? Is it just possible that this story continues to occupy so much media space all around the world because it is meaningful to quite a large group of people within the mass audience?
Technology does enable the mass media to circulate images more quickly and widely. But this does not seem to have changed the way in which stories unfold. In fact, the speed at which stories circulate the the public around the world is not all that faster now than it was after the first trans-oceanic cables were laid. Seriously. Now we get TV coverage potentially minutes or hours after a story breaks -- in those days a new edition of a newspaper could be on the streets within an hour or two, with major newspapers sometimes publishing several editions in a day (this is true within living memory).
Your rhetoric about the internet being the grandest accomplishment of some or another generation is something which you really should find embarrassing upon reflection. For starters, the internet is not the achievement of any particular "generation", it is the achievement of many people born at different times. And is it so significant that not devoting your efforts to it makes you a quaint anachronism? If a public figure in the 1880's didn't devote a large share of their life to the development of railroads, would you declare that they were out of step with their generation?
from carrying around a sissy girl's purse
This is my question as well. I have seen this statistic before (briefly did intranet work for a market research company that was doing a fair amount of research on internet users), but it was never expressed in the context of "before" and "after". That is, they had stats showing that net users watched less TV than genpop (general population), but they couldn't demonstrate that they were watching less TV after starting to use the net.
It could be that there is a skew resulting from income and education level among net users. Busy professionals who do not have time to watch Seinfeld reruns possibly find it more convenient to get information from the net. It could also be that there are TV people and there are net people, regardless of education or income.
Personally, I am glued to net, print and TV about equally during my waking hours.
6. You mean like in The Grapes of Wrath?
Thanks for clarifying so much of your original message. My turn now:
1. I would agree with you partially here, that social class stratification seems more profound and lasting than ethnic stratification.
2. Don't blame you for being confused as to why I brought this up, as the thread is about USA. Not meant to be a reply to anything you wrote, just a reminder to the thread participants that there is a wide world out there. Your assumption that deprivation ultimately comes to a head in violent upheavals is debatable.
3. The Academie Francaise is indeed an interesting case. However most nations have restrictions on "cultural products", and what language is to be used on commercially printed materials (France is a bit more adamant about it, after all they figure they invented western civilization and won't accept cheap foreign imitations). However ridiculous Academie-Francaise-type efforts appear, there is a reasonably clear difference between promotion/protection of cultural industries and politically/socially/religiously motivated censorship. In fact several countries with regulatory structures for the restriction of cultural imports have more freedom in terms of what can be published, what sort of political opinions can be expressed, and so on. In fact some state-run broadcasters provide a greater range of opinions than that found in the American media (although that certainly is not difficult).
4. Really, this is a bit overwrought!
Handling the delivery of "universal" net access at a more local level of government sounds good. However these lower levels of government have less ability to raise and allocate resources. Also this would determine the preservation of regional disparities -- like the "poverty-stricken south".
1. Are the economic divisions between races and classes in the USA really a "self-correcting problem"? If so, how long does the correction take to happen? I think a lot of people have been waiting quite a while ...
... except for fat government contracts to suppliers ...
2. What about the world outside North America? Access to "un-metered" telecommunications, or any telecommunications at all for that matter, is not universal.
3. State development of telecommunications has a mixed record. Don't confuse state control and state enterprises. It is possible for government utility, communications, transportation and other enterprises in various part of the world to run at "arms-length" from the government. You bet, China is a bad case. France, on the other hand, had a text-based computer network in telephone subscribers' homes in the 1980s, because of government-run telecommunications, with surprising little regulation of content (less in some respects that what freely-elected American politicians keep trying to legislate).
4. "men with guns will come and take your shit if you don't pay taxes -- try it sometime" Stop playing with guns so much, stop building so many prisons, stop giving tax breaks to businesses that generate no benefits to the larger community, start making the environmental consequences of industry the responsibility of the polluter, maybe your taxes would be lower. These are potentially huge expense items. Studying ways of making net access more universal is potentially quite a small expense item. Letting the state manage or provide better access, though, is probably a bad idea, not because of expense but because no level of government in the US seems to have the ability to distribute anything efficiently
Was this a reply to my post? If so, I don't see the relation.
...
I would certainly agree that World Bank/IMF initiatives have been a vast failure. They have undoubtedly benefited someone - I would guess primarily two groups: the western (usually US) contractors who supply goods and services to the megaprojects; and the local bigwigs who funnels the money. So, stop griping about US money being spent on third world megaprojects - it's mostly flowing back to the US anyway
The economic spin-off benefits from "offshore" businesses in the Caribbean and elsewhere are few for the people in that country. Offshore business relocation generally wouldn't happen if there were taxes to generate economic development or improve infrastructure. High-paid, skilled employees of internet gaming companies come from whatever country spawned the company in the first place, and you can bet that they are not investing in local education or local development (hiring servants, and guards for gated compounds, is a poor-quality spin-off and does not represent a sustainable industry).
Creating new bandwidth to support a sports pool or casino enterprise does not translate to high bandwidth internet access for ordinary citizens of "offshore" countries, any more than the growing number of phone sex chat companies in the Caribbean is going to mean everyone there gets voice mail, or even telephone service.
I take the view that the more people, and more diversity, on the net, the greater the benefit for everyone. The best means for ensuring this happens is to promote, and provide resources (including money) for projects which extend telecommunications services to all of those people who have no access to such services now. Get the switches and lines in, then start carrying IP on them.
Whether funding for this comes from tariffs on internet traffic or somewhere else is an interesting question. Many posts here have pointed out the impossibility or at least extreme difficulty or imposing, monitoring and enforcing tariffs internationally on the internet. I'm not a tax specialist or an economist (neither are >99% of the people who have posted here - it shows too), but my feeling is that any tariff would have to be imposed at a national level, by an international agreement. The only institutions I can think of at a national level that might be able to generate tariff revenue are national domain registrars.
Another alternative is for an international internet development agency to spring up and to promote grassroots-level programs such as the already existing Grameen Bank telecom and internet community programs in Bangladesh.
http://www.grameen-info.org/grameen/gtelecom/
(couldn't find a link for the internet acces project, it may still be in the planning stages)
Same thing occurred to me - North American broadcast television stops for commercials every few minutes, but there are places in the world where all of the ads are held until a program break. Generally this means that the advertisers must compensate by making the advertising highly entertaining or artful. Take a look at the Cannes Advertising festival some time, or old Clio Awards reels - European advertisements are more likely to have higher production values, edgy or daring aesthetics. Not that this is a universally good thing, adds are still used to push products of dubious value and make unsubstantiated claims (although a Hungarian gov't commission once disallowed a coffee ad that claimed "better taste", saying that this was a subjective judgement which could not be proven), and project the social and political ideals of the advertisers. It does make them more entertaining and easier to look at.
Note that I said "more likely" - there is still a certain amount of crapola. The problem of interminable repetition, by far the worst feature of TV ads, still exists, but is mitigated somewhat by the fact that there are less advertising breaks in general.
With deregulation challenging state-sponsored broadcasters in many countries, it will be interesting to see if French and Italian TV get flooded with Krazy Discount Appliance Warehouse purveyors. Will Austrian morning time slots be flooded with loser commercials for pawnshops, personal injury lawyers and correspondence schools? Will Norwegians spend dark evenings contemplating chat lines and psychic networks?