Long form is way better online these days. I'm working in this field, and I'd expand on your reasons greatly:
Long form journalism doesn't sell papers -- the sports pages do. As advertising dollars erode, this kind of journalism WILL go to other venues, be it regional or highly local papers or the web.
The audience for long-form investigative journalism is almost certainly mainly well educated and mainly online.
The physical constraints of the format and the distribution mechanism of newspapers means is outdated: You can create much richer context around a story -- using multimedia, 3rd party resources, etc -- using good old hyperlinks.
Layout and design still matters -- you still have to produce online pieces. But it doesn't require a genius to do this -- certainly not the many layers of bureaucracy I hear about from reporters at the Post and the Chicago Tribune in getting their work online.
If you want a printable version (perhaps of a culmative project), provide it as a PDF.
Online resources are far easier to track, note, and share with tools like Google Reader or Zotero.
The Internet is at least as great a venue of influence as printed material these days -- big, big stories have debuted online in recent years. If part of the point of long-form journalism is to influence discourse, policy, and decision-making, then you need to go where you have leverage.
That quote -- 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print' -- is pure, unadulterated dogma, unmoored from any reality. If you're doing long form, you aren't doing it for the dailies or the alternative weeklies anymore, most likely. Some, if not all, of your professional life will be online or bump up against Internet technologies. If you need a printed product, you have options (get your audience to help; print high quality single page magazine-covers-without-the-magazine with story snippets and your URL...), you can do events, but your primary channel of distribution is very likely going to be the Internet.
People who are whining that a story whose primary audience is probably 99% online didn't make it into a format that is hemhoraging money are out of their damn minds, and probably will soon be out of business, too.
Actually.... perhaps that is partially the point. The boys and girls at Best Buy and Circuit City are starting to talk shit about Vista, and MS really can't stop them. But planting a Windows Guru at prominent stores means that MS can keep tabs on other salespeople.
A government-owned and mandated social network is something you're totally cool with then?
There is a such a thing as a commons, and public space. Public space is not exactly government-owned in many traditional theories of property -- it is owned by some definition of the "public" and is regulated on the public's behalf by the government.
Saying that you can simply refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet misses part of the point here. To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I am forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived. You could say, of course, that I should not stay in contact with those friends, but in real life it is not so easy to make such demands, especially when we are talking about communicating with relatives and dear friends, often in cases where communication is essential, such as family emergencies. Pragmatically, it just isn't always feasible to say "use the public internet and the (broken) standards for email."
The phenomena is similar to the shrinking amount of public space in the United States: A popular tourist destination in the city where I live used to be public property, and anyone could come with a sign and a cause and exercise their right to free speech -- including criticizing the government that maintained the large, open-air space. Within the past decade, the city sold the land and put the space under private management, and now one cannot go and peacefully exercise their right to free speech -- the private owner has far greater effective and legal discretion over what happens on their land. Most of us must move quite a bit through the space around them -- roads, offices, parks, hospitals, stores, and even virtual spaces -- and the ownership (common, corporate, or individual) has an effect on what we do and say, and what others can do and say to us.
There's a very simple solution: carbon tax + apply proceeds (in transparent process) to carbon sinks and to legitimate warming harm-abatement.
I think Ross McKitrick's little thought experiment is a better option -- you yourself point out some of the drawbacks of this strategy, though many of those you mention paint far too simplistic a picture of what an "environmentalist" wants. Even if you are right on this point, McKitrick's proposal takes this possibility into account more thoroughly and thoughtfully.
McKitrick says that there is an area of the atmosphere where everyone agrees temperature fluctuations are a result of human activity. Given this fact, create some tiny, baseline carbon tax. This tax would increase at a specified rate tied to the increase in temperatures in the tropical troposphere. If deniers are right, the tax should not go up much or even at all, industry will not be faced with onerous taxes, and the end-is-nigh-ers look like barking morons. If the global warming apocalypse people are right, the taxes should rise at a rate that will create a "natural" (i.e. market based) emissions cap as businesses adjust their practices to compensate for ever-rising taxes.
Too bad the article is Slashdotted. In any event, this is a great point. Creative has the problem that it isn't high-end enough to compete in the professional audio space, yet their core business is all but commodified. It's a good example of how companies are increasing being forced to join a race to the bottom, specialize in high-end/boutique-style wares sold in low quantities for high margins, or get clobbered. Companies like Creative get screwed either way -- they aren't well situated to join in the commodity arms race, and going high-end is hard because of their brand and because of the serious scaling-back it would entail.
I agree. Whatever else you say about MS, and there's lots to say, they seem to have given their security researchers a lot of freedom and because of their size and power have the resources and brainpower to tackle these problems in pretty cool ways. The sad thing, as with much of what comes out from MS, is that you see these really smart, awesome people doing great work, but when it comes to taking their own advice, you can see quite directly the way that the vast bureaucracy and Microsoft's avaricious corporate culture corrupting the good work.
Case in point is IE7. If you look at the IE7 development blogs, you see some good ideas from people who by and large wanted to do good by the web development community. Yet the IE7 that was delivered to consumers can be charitably described as "disappointing", and less charitably described as a "watered-down piece of shit."
The good news is that we won, and that, combined with this decision and a few others, there is starting to be some good precedent for shielding online journalism from gratuitous subpoenas -- specifically, the decision in this case (which came down while our subpoena battle was still raging, but wasn't applicable because of jurisdiction), says that a person who publishes online is a journalist insofar as their activities can be construed as journalism. This is a really sane approach that avoids the ivory-tower/guild mentality that journalists like to trot around when they start talking about shield laws and helps revive the notion of the citizen-journalist. Our case was decided similarly.
The bad news is that unless you've got serious legal support in these "new" areas of jurisprudence and your adversary has deep pockets, they can grind away for months and years pushing hopeless motions and ridiculous claims. When the City of Chicago subpoenaed us, they asked for all of the notes of the writer, Jamie Kalven, regarding all allegations of police brutality or misconduct by any officer during a four year period. The case in question--and reporting we did on the case--was about one alleged victim of police brutality and a couple of police officers.
Our legal representation argued this was, uh, overbroad. The judge agreed. But, over the next few months, the city filed several more motions with significant space devoted to contesting a point that was farcical and obvious to everyone involved. We were lucky enough to know some good attorneys. The Apple bloggers got the EFF behind them. But this is troubling on two levels. First, it's a big waste of resources all around -- federal judges have a lot more pressing issues than reading another two, or ten, or twenty pages of the same unreasoned, unsubstantiated assertions of fact.
What's more scary is that there are countless subpoenas and other legal threats every year that unfairly crush people, who, even if they win in the end, will no doubt question a dubious equivalence in our society: that winning a case and justice amount to the same thing.
Mixtapes don't exactly bring in the cash. They're distributed hypothetically for free -- "for promotional use only" -- but often for some money at underground hiphop shops and websites, by street vendors, and on Torrent sites and other websites for free. It is pretty unlikely DJ Drama is getting rich off of his mixtapes. Mixtapes serve a more socially oriented purpose than in the pure music sales market. They let MCs and DJs know about their peers, creating a social network. They help define trends and sounds. They serve as a battleground for skills and styles, where up and comers one-up each other. They let veteran producers and DJs experiment and take risks that they couldn't in a purely profit-driven big record style environment with marketing and sales chains.
Hiphop culture is just that, a culture. Even some of the most money-centric (judging by their lyrics) rappers also express deep concern about that culture as a culture, and work to sustain it. Jay-Z, a rich and powerful player in the industry, has put artists that he respects -- the Root, Talib Kweli -- in his lyrics, on his label, into wider circulation. While I'm sure he makes money off the new Roots album, it's unlikely that they bring in the kind of dough that a Young Jeezy or Chamillionaire bring in during their few months of fame.
Mixtapes rarely hurt anybody, nor do they or can they make anybody rich in any direct way in most cases. But they are an integral part of the social life of hiphop, a key way for people to share, be heard, and learn what others are doing. It may sometimes be a mild form of copyright infringement; it certainly is not the sort of "crime" that requires a SWAT team and racketeering charges.
Regular users do need system administrators, but I think that Google and others understand this far better than MS to date. What's a web app with remote server-based storage but someone else handling your backups and data integrity and security? Look at Gmail, or the Google spreadsheet, or the Google calendar, or their aquisition of Writely. These types of applications take a lot of the risks of running your own PC out of the equation. Users don't need schmancy new features in a fucking word processor, they need a simple program with basic outlining, formatting, and spellchecking and they need security and data integrity. Office, so long as it is a standalone application running on Windows, gives you more features but relatively few additional document management, backup, or security enhancements, and probably introduces more than a few attack vectors, especially since email, a technology for selling penny stocks, is tightly coupled to the other applications. It is, in a word, insane.
As web apps become more rich, and comply with standards that ubiquitous, cross-platform browsers can deal with, the specialized, OS-dependent enterprise and desktop apps that keep Windows on the desktop are going to slowly die out, leaving Windows as a really nice gaming platform, and not much else. Here's a wild idea: perhaps the losses MS takes on the Xbox platform is in part because of concerns of precisely this sort.
The Office Live offerings and brining in Ray Ozzie I think has been a move to try to get into this emerging market, but I doubt that MS's bureaucratic momentum will really accomodate the possibility in time to beat Google and the many other challengers. I think the entire Vista and Office 2007 strategies show MS trying to have it both ways -- milking their traditional cash cows at the same time they dabble in actually addressing the issues presenting the common problems with information technology in the broader society.
You don't need a recent scientific study from a top-tier university for knowing a _lot_ of things.
Perhaps you do not, but you almost certainly need a methodology that includes empirical tests and peer review at some point. Received wisdom -- about race, about god/godess/the gods, about how to cure ailments -- must be subjected to the same tests and the best tools we have for achieving some modicum of "truth" about the world. You don't have to argue for an absolute-truth epistemology or for modern science as the end of human progress to conclude that some ways of knowing are better than others, and that all attempts at knowing must be verified and critiqued as best we can.
More importantly, we live in a world where policy directly interacts with issues intimately connected with the sciences -- if you were making policy in 18th century Boston, you're not (except in the most remote senses) making policies that deal with the Internet, or nuclear weapons, or global warming. The spectre of these things makes science far more crucial in public policy than at any other point in human history.
Okay, this is getting ludicrous. But as someone who has done some long (2000+ mile) treks and several more multi-state (~500 mile) bike trips, you get a pretty strong sense of coverage, particularly because if you're in the middle of nowhere and your phone doesn't work, this could be a Bad Thing. My Sprint service was good in Cali, non-existent throughout Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota, good in Iowa and Illinois, bad in rural Michigan but fine in the cities.
Thanks for the intelligent reply. What always got me was that there was a certain lack of subtlety in the music -- it felt to me like it drew too much attention to itself, and pushed the whole "it's the Wild West, it's a fusion of cultures!" trope too far, or at least too into the realm of being obvious and just a shade patronizing.
On the other hand, I watched the series around the same time that I found The Wire (easily the best show on TV, imho). That show doesn't use background music at all unless it is part of the fictional environment, and I felt that strategy removed a great deal of the artifice from the proceedings and makes The Wire feel more like a documentary.
Given some of Firefly's themes and attempts to be gritty and nuanced, I think something similar might have worked really well on the show. But that's definitely not Joss Whedon, and his vision is also what made Firefly excellent TV.
I officially don't understand/. -- I got frist post. Not intentionally. Just pointed out that perhaps, of the many strengths in Firefly, we might be less than inclined to count the music among them.
What makes no sense is that I got modded flamebait for this, while I say much more flame-tastic stuff about how crappy this Multiverse system looks later in this thread that's been modded insightful. Similarly, I wrote a pretty dumb reply and a pretty smart reply in a recent thread about Novell killing off Hula, and the friggin' dumb reply got bumped to +5 for a time. I was actually relieved when someone marked it overrated. I don't feel like/. used to be this insanely moderated.
Everything about the Multiverse project screams "half-assed" to me, from their bad copy to their vaporware examples to their ridiculuous, sycophantic jargon in TFA. Using a terrible screenshot was a cheap but effective way of highlighting that not only do they not have a snowball's chance in hell, they appear to be lacking in taste, class, technical skill, and attention to detail. I'd be really happy if I'm proven wrong; Firefly is one of the best sci-fi shows in my book.
I strongly doubt the MS brouhaha has much to do with this. Novell is a company in very serious trouble, and the MS agreement as well as this announcement are the fruit of the same poisoned tree.
All of the options, including Zimbra and OpenXchange, have serious problems. Hula looked really nifty and nice, if a bit monolithic. However, it always had a whiff of the vaporware about it and I think the case on that is now closed.
I'm one of the core team at FreeGeek Chicago (shameless plug! shameless plug!) and I also want to emphasize that a big part of the FG ethos is to a create and sustain a culture of problem-solving. The big secret of FreeGeek Chicago isn't that we're all walking encyclopedia's of Great Linux Knowledge To Be Dispensed From On High, it's that we all know some stuff and know how to learn other stuff as the need arises -- who to call, write, etc, how to ask, how to discriminate between BS and good advice. I believe that creating that atmosphere and modeling that culture is critical for teaching people skills that transcend operating systems or knowing the difference between RDRAM and SDRAM.
That spirit of self-sufficiency and problem-solving left the building in Redmond many years ago. You have a problem with Windows, it's rare that you reach out to an active community for help -- you either call support or hire a specialist. Sure, the Ubuntu forums and the FreeGeek mailing lists are also filled with specialists, some of whom charge for their services, but in general it's a community of specialists and you problem-solve together.
I've been helping people with their computers as a sideline in literally the poorest neighborhood in America for the past six years or so. Now I refer everybody to FreeGeek, because you come in with a computer problem, and don't just get your networking working, you get to do it yourself, and see smart people apply critical thinking to fixing it, and talk about the global and political and social questions surrounding technology production and the environment and free software. It's awesome -- that's not something I had when I was just some magician who'd come in and fix your Windows 98 box.
I'm acquainted with some of the folks who brought this suit through my own work on Chicago housing issues (human rights issues in public housing, actually). They were entirely barking up the wrong tree here. First, they were trying to go after a relatively neutral forum for the bigotry. Last summer, I was trying to help a buddy (black, former gang member, paralyzed from a shooting) find an apartment, and we ran into several quite racist landlords in our Craigslist searches. Is that Craig Newmark and Co.'s fault? I never thought so. Second, the real issues are that one can form elaborate proxies that function quite well at keeping out those you don't want in your building -- combinations of background checks, credit checks, and other requirements that can quite accurately keep out minorities and others you don't want. When you then consider that in the rental market, tenants rights means once you've got somebody in, it's hard to kick them out, renters have a natural, non-bigoted reason to be very careful about who they rent to.
These are hard questions -- should people have to right to some form of housing under most circumstances? Is so, how do you balance those rights with the rights of renters and landlords? These are regulatory questions that have proven to be notoriously difficult to answer. It is clear, however, that suing Craigslist really does very little to advance thinking, discussion, and reform (if needed) of the policy questions surrounding housing.
Sure, people shouldn't be stopped due to arbitrary standards like race or gender from renting anywhere they want, but forcing a bigot to do it is not a good idea.
First, this isn't legislation, it's the finding of a federal judge in a crazy lawsuit (one that was brought by some folks I actually know who were definitely barking up the wrong tree IMO). Second, it's a far thornier situation and the answers aren't nearly as clear. I'm sympathetic to your line of thinking on some level, but there are mitigating circumstances here, the main one being that freedom of association means some different in a commercial transaction than in a personal transaction. A couple centuries of the articulated theory and social practice of capitalism have shown that in order for markets to be fair and be efficient, some level of regulatory intervention is often required. Markets aren't "natural", they're a human creations, and open to human manipulation in order to achieve certain goals at the expense of an entirely unregulated market.
Social relations and commercial relations can be then seen as somewhat separate and distinct. Here's the example: I'm looking for a deaf, hermaphroditic amputee no taller than 5'2" to be my roommate on Craigslist. Perfectly acceptable -- I'm using my freedom of association to associate with the kind of person I want to live with and to go get a cabin out in the woods. But neither proximity nor selling/renting your my cabin are association in that directly voluntary, social sense. Therefore, if my neighbor is a race I don't like, well, tough for me, I can exercise my freedom of association not to associate with my neighbor, but I can't force him or her to move. The way this plays out in the Real World in the US is that, according to the American jurisprudence of discrimination and equality, I can't discriminate on the basis of certain criteria called "protected classes" (race and gender being the two key classes) which, depending on the class, as subject to a varying level of "scrutiny" by the courts.
In any event, you (and I, so far) are proceeding on the assumption that the renter/seller in these situations is an individual. And while there are lots of individual landlords, more and more home sales and rentals in American cities are at the very least mitigated by an agent of some sort, and often the landlord itself is corporate entity, often quite large. And at that point, it gets even weirder, unless you believe that the doctrine that a corporation is just a unique form of individual, with the same rights and so forth -- do corporations have a right of association? If they do, is it even remotely similar to an individual's right of association?
In all events, I'm glad you mentioned the freedom of association, because it certainly is a less discussed and less affirmed right in American, but an important one.
Marx has to go on record as the worst thinker in history.
Ever read any Marx? Not just the Communist Manifesto but works like The Grundrisse or the Theses on Feurbach or the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean? No reasonable thinker can escape Marx. This is partly historical, but it is also a testament to the questions raised by Marx and his dazzling approaches to a wide variety of subjects in the social and political sciences.
Whatever else Marx was, he was a groundbreaking philosopher of the relationship between humans and the things humans create, brilliantly applying Hegelian dialectics to the concrete realm of human creation within a variety of different economic frameworks. For that alone, various of his ideas find their way into some of the best in contemporary thought (I'm thinking specifically of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain and the work that came out of the Frankfurt School).
Marx's political philosophy has been thoroughly discredited in social practice, and the ramifications of some of his more didactic works leave him, in some debatable way, with blood on his hands. But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, he is still one of the most important thinkers of the past 250 years, and for good reason.
Don't they just do this because they're concerned you won't make it out alive without police protection?
It depends. Sometimes, yeah, because of some presumption of danger. Sometimes, because they think I'm there to buy drugs (which is fair, that's the main reason you'll see white people in those neighborhoods). Sometimes because they want to mess with somebody. It just depends.
The southside looks awfully scary to outsiders, and sometimes genuinely is (when gangs are warring) but I've never been in mortal danger and rarely in anything more than very minor danger of being the victim of crime in the past seven years of working on the southside, and never have been. Based on a lot of conversations and my experiences and the experience of my friends, I think you're in more danger in a more affluent or gentrifying neighborhood, because that's where the stickup kids and other thugs go to shake folks down. I suppose that changes if you are actually there to buy drugs. But if you aren't, I think you're pretty safe. I actually have a buddy who is really eloquent about it, who tells me that since I have the privilege to travel and not be a symbol of fear for folks, I need to let people know I've walked the toughest blocks in the USA, and people there are pretty much like people everywhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Long form is way better online these days. I'm working in this field, and I'd expand on your reasons greatly:
That quote -- 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print' -- is pure, unadulterated dogma, unmoored from any reality. If you're doing long form, you aren't doing it for the dailies or the alternative weeklies anymore, most likely. Some, if not all, of your professional life will be online or bump up against Internet technologies. If you need a printed product, you have options (get your audience to help; print high quality single page magazine-covers-without-the-magazine with story snippets and your URL...), you can do events, but your primary channel of distribution is very likely going to be the Internet.
People who are whining that a story whose primary audience is probably 99% online didn't make it into a format that is hemhoraging money are out of their damn minds, and probably will soon be out of business, too.
Actually.... perhaps that is partially the point. The boys and girls at Best Buy and Circuit City are starting to talk shit about Vista, and MS really can't stop them. But planting a Windows Guru at prominent stores means that MS can keep tabs on other salespeople.
There is a such a thing as a commons, and public space. Public space is not exactly government-owned in many traditional theories of property -- it is owned by some definition of the "public" and is regulated on the public's behalf by the government.
Saying that you can simply refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet misses part of the point here. To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I am forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived. You could say, of course, that I should not stay in contact with those friends, but in real life it is not so easy to make such demands, especially when we are talking about communicating with relatives and dear friends, often in cases where communication is essential, such as family emergencies. Pragmatically, it just isn't always feasible to say "use the public internet and the (broken) standards for email."
The phenomena is similar to the shrinking amount of public space in the United States: A popular tourist destination in the city where I live used to be public property, and anyone could come with a sign and a cause and exercise their right to free speech -- including criticizing the government that maintained the large, open-air space. Within the past decade, the city sold the land and put the space under private management, and now one cannot go and peacefully exercise their right to free speech -- the private owner has far greater effective and legal discretion over what happens on their land. Most of us must move quite a bit through the space around them -- roads, offices, parks, hospitals, stores, and even virtual spaces -- and the ownership (common, corporate, or individual) has an effect on what we do and say, and what others can do and say to us.
I think Ross McKitrick's little thought experiment is a better option -- you yourself point out some of the drawbacks of this strategy, though many of those you mention paint far too simplistic a picture of what an "environmentalist" wants. Even if you are right on this point, McKitrick's proposal takes this possibility into account more thoroughly and thoughtfully.
McKitrick says that there is an area of the atmosphere where everyone agrees temperature fluctuations are a result of human activity. Given this fact, create some tiny, baseline carbon tax. This tax would increase at a specified rate tied to the increase in temperatures in the tropical troposphere. If deniers are right, the tax should not go up much or even at all, industry will not be faced with onerous taxes, and the end-is-nigh-ers look like barking morons. If the global warming apocalypse people are right, the taxes should rise at a rate that will create a "natural" (i.e. market based) emissions cap as businesses adjust their practices to compensate for ever-rising taxes.
Too bad the article is Slashdotted. In any event, this is a great point. Creative has the problem that it isn't high-end enough to compete in the professional audio space, yet their core business is all but commodified. It's a good example of how companies are increasing being forced to join a race to the bottom, specialize in high-end/boutique-style wares sold in low quantities for high margins, or get clobbered. Companies like Creative get screwed either way -- they aren't well situated to join in the commodity arms race, and going high-end is hard because of their brand and because of the serious scaling-back it would entail.
I agree. Whatever else you say about MS, and there's lots to say, they seem to have given their security researchers a lot of freedom and because of their size and power have the resources and brainpower to tackle these problems in pretty cool ways. The sad thing, as with much of what comes out from MS, is that you see these really smart, awesome people doing great work, but when it comes to taking their own advice, you can see quite directly the way that the vast bureaucracy and Microsoft's avaricious corporate culture corrupting the good work.
Case in point is IE7. If you look at the IE7 development blogs, you see some good ideas from people who by and large wanted to do good by the web development community. Yet the IE7 that was delivered to consumers can be charitably described as "disappointing", and less charitably described as a "watered-down piece of shit."
A writer I work with had a situation along these lines with a subpoena from the city of Chicago regarding alleged police brutality we reported on.
The good news is that we won, and that, combined with this decision and a few others, there is starting to be some good precedent for shielding online journalism from gratuitous subpoenas -- specifically, the decision in this case (which came down while our subpoena battle was still raging, but wasn't applicable because of jurisdiction), says that a person who publishes online is a journalist insofar as their activities can be construed as journalism. This is a really sane approach that avoids the ivory-tower/guild mentality that journalists like to trot around when they start talking about shield laws and helps revive the notion of the citizen-journalist. Our case was decided similarly.
The bad news is that unless you've got serious legal support in these "new" areas of jurisprudence and your adversary has deep pockets, they can grind away for months and years pushing hopeless motions and ridiculous claims. When the City of Chicago subpoenaed us, they asked for all of the notes of the writer, Jamie Kalven, regarding all allegations of police brutality or misconduct by any officer during a four year period. The case in question--and reporting we did on the case--was about one alleged victim of police brutality and a couple of police officers.
Our legal representation argued this was, uh, overbroad. The judge agreed. But, over the next few months, the city filed several more motions with significant space devoted to contesting a point that was farcical and obvious to everyone involved. We were lucky enough to know some good attorneys. The Apple bloggers got the EFF behind them. But this is troubling on two levels. First, it's a big waste of resources all around -- federal judges have a lot more pressing issues than reading another two, or ten, or twenty pages of the same unreasoned, unsubstantiated assertions of fact.
What's more scary is that there are countless subpoenas and other legal threats every year that unfairly crush people, who, even if they win in the end, will no doubt question a dubious equivalence in our society: that winning a case and justice amount to the same thing.
Mixtapes don't exactly bring in the cash. They're distributed hypothetically for free -- "for promotional use only" -- but often for some money at underground hiphop shops and websites, by street vendors, and on Torrent sites and other websites for free. It is pretty unlikely DJ Drama is getting rich off of his mixtapes. Mixtapes serve a more socially oriented purpose than in the pure music sales market. They let MCs and DJs know about their peers, creating a social network. They help define trends and sounds. They serve as a battleground for skills and styles, where up and comers one-up each other. They let veteran producers and DJs experiment and take risks that they couldn't in a purely profit-driven big record style environment with marketing and sales chains.
Hiphop culture is just that, a culture. Even some of the most money-centric (judging by their lyrics) rappers also express deep concern about that culture as a culture, and work to sustain it. Jay-Z, a rich and powerful player in the industry, has put artists that he respects -- the Root, Talib Kweli -- in his lyrics, on his label, into wider circulation. While I'm sure he makes money off the new Roots album, it's unlikely that they bring in the kind of dough that a Young Jeezy or Chamillionaire bring in during their few months of fame.
Mixtapes rarely hurt anybody, nor do they or can they make anybody rich in any direct way in most cases. But they are an integral part of the social life of hiphop, a key way for people to share, be heard, and learn what others are doing. It may sometimes be a mild form of copyright infringement; it certainly is not the sort of "crime" that requires a SWAT team and racketeering charges.
Mod parent +6 insightful. This has to be the most succint and true statement of the lack of accountability in software development I've ever seen.
Regular users do need system administrators, but I think that Google and others understand this far better than MS to date. What's a web app with remote server-based storage but someone else handling your backups and data integrity and security? Look at Gmail, or the Google spreadsheet, or the Google calendar, or their aquisition of Writely. These types of applications take a lot of the risks of running your own PC out of the equation. Users don't need schmancy new features in a fucking word processor, they need a simple program with basic outlining, formatting, and spellchecking and they need security and data integrity. Office, so long as it is a standalone application running on Windows, gives you more features but relatively few additional document management, backup, or security enhancements, and probably introduces more than a few attack vectors, especially since email, a technology for selling penny stocks, is tightly coupled to the other applications. It is, in a word, insane.
As web apps become more rich, and comply with standards that ubiquitous, cross-platform browsers can deal with, the specialized, OS-dependent enterprise and desktop apps that keep Windows on the desktop are going to slowly die out, leaving Windows as a really nice gaming platform, and not much else. Here's a wild idea: perhaps the losses MS takes on the Xbox platform is in part because of concerns of precisely this sort.
The Office Live offerings and brining in Ray Ozzie I think has been a move to try to get into this emerging market, but I doubt that MS's bureaucratic momentum will really accomodate the possibility in time to beat Google and the many other challengers. I think the entire Vista and Office 2007 strategies show MS trying to have it both ways -- milking their traditional cash cows at the same time they dabble in actually addressing the issues presenting the common problems with information technology in the broader society.
Perhaps you do not, but you almost certainly need a methodology that includes empirical tests and peer review at some point. Received wisdom -- about race, about god/godess/the gods, about how to cure ailments -- must be subjected to the same tests and the best tools we have for achieving some modicum of "truth" about the world. You don't have to argue for an absolute-truth epistemology or for modern science as the end of human progress to conclude that some ways of knowing are better than others, and that all attempts at knowing must be verified and critiqued as best we can.
More importantly, we live in a world where policy directly interacts with issues intimately connected with the sciences -- if you were making policy in 18th century Boston, you're not (except in the most remote senses) making policies that deal with the Internet, or nuclear weapons, or global warming. The spectre of these things makes science far more crucial in public policy than at any other point in human history.
Okay, this is getting ludicrous. But as someone who has done some long (2000+ mile) treks and several more multi-state (~500 mile) bike trips, you get a pretty strong sense of coverage, particularly because if you're in the middle of nowhere and your phone doesn't work, this could be a Bad Thing. My Sprint service was good in Cali, non-existent throughout Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota, good in Iowa and Illinois, bad in rural Michigan but fine in the cities.
Thanks for the intelligent reply. What always got me was that there was a certain lack of subtlety in the music -- it felt to me like it drew too much attention to itself, and pushed the whole "it's the Wild West, it's a fusion of cultures!" trope too far, or at least too into the realm of being obvious and just a shade patronizing. On the other hand, I watched the series around the same time that I found The Wire (easily the best show on TV, imho). That show doesn't use background music at all unless it is part of the fictional environment, and I felt that strategy removed a great deal of the artifice from the proceedings and makes The Wire feel more like a documentary. Given some of Firefly's themes and attempts to be gritty and nuanced, I think something similar might have worked really well on the show. But that's definitely not Joss Whedon, and his vision is also what made Firefly excellent TV.
I officially don't understand /. -- I got frist post. Not intentionally. Just pointed out that perhaps, of the many strengths in Firefly, we might be less than inclined to count the music among them.
/. used to be this insanely moderated.
What makes no sense is that I got modded flamebait for this, while I say much more flame-tastic stuff about how crappy this Multiverse system looks later in this thread that's been modded insightful. Similarly, I wrote a pretty dumb reply and a pretty smart reply in a recent thread about Novell killing off Hula, and the friggin' dumb reply got bumped to +5 for a time. I was actually relieved when someone marked it overrated. I don't feel like
Everything about the Multiverse project screams "half-assed" to me, from their bad copy to their vaporware examples to their ridiculuous, sycophantic jargon in TFA. Using a terrible screenshot was a cheap but effective way of highlighting that not only do they not have a snowball's chance in hell, they appear to be lacking in taste, class, technical skill, and attention to detail. I'd be really happy if I'm proven wrong; Firefly is one of the best sci-fi shows in my book.
That, and judging by the screenshots and terrible marketspeak on the site, the platform it will be built on looks pretty crappy.
It has all the makings of a debacle, which is too bad, because Firefly was a superb show.
Will the music be unrelentingly corny?
I strongly doubt the MS brouhaha has much to do with this. Novell is a company in very serious trouble, and the MS agreement as well as this announcement are the fruit of the same poisoned tree.
All of the options, including Zimbra and OpenXchange, have serious problems. Hula looked really nifty and nice, if a bit monolithic. However, it always had a whiff of the vaporware about it and I think the case on that is now closed.
I'm one of the core team at FreeGeek Chicago (shameless plug! shameless plug!) and I also want to emphasize that a big part of the FG ethos is to a create and sustain a culture of problem-solving. The big secret of FreeGeek Chicago isn't that we're all walking encyclopedia's of Great Linux Knowledge To Be Dispensed From On High, it's that we all know some stuff and know how to learn other stuff as the need arises -- who to call, write, etc, how to ask, how to discriminate between BS and good advice. I believe that creating that atmosphere and modeling that culture is critical for teaching people skills that transcend operating systems or knowing the difference between RDRAM and SDRAM. That spirit of self-sufficiency and problem-solving left the building in Redmond many years ago. You have a problem with Windows, it's rare that you reach out to an active community for help -- you either call support or hire a specialist. Sure, the Ubuntu forums and the FreeGeek mailing lists are also filled with specialists, some of whom charge for their services, but in general it's a community of specialists and you problem-solve together. I've been helping people with their computers as a sideline in literally the poorest neighborhood in America for the past six years or so. Now I refer everybody to FreeGeek, because you come in with a computer problem, and don't just get your networking working, you get to do it yourself, and see smart people apply critical thinking to fixing it, and talk about the global and political and social questions surrounding technology production and the environment and free software. It's awesome -- that's not something I had when I was just some magician who'd come in and fix your Windows 98 box.
I'm acquainted with some of the folks who brought this suit through my own work on Chicago housing issues (human rights issues in public housing, actually). They were entirely barking up the wrong tree here. First, they were trying to go after a relatively neutral forum for the bigotry. Last summer, I was trying to help a buddy (black, former gang member, paralyzed from a shooting) find an apartment, and we ran into several quite racist landlords in our Craigslist searches. Is that Craig Newmark and Co.'s fault? I never thought so. Second, the real issues are that one can form elaborate proxies that function quite well at keeping out those you don't want in your building -- combinations of background checks, credit checks, and other requirements that can quite accurately keep out minorities and others you don't want. When you then consider that in the rental market, tenants rights means once you've got somebody in, it's hard to kick them out, renters have a natural, non-bigoted reason to be very careful about who they rent to. These are hard questions -- should people have to right to some form of housing under most circumstances? Is so, how do you balance those rights with the rights of renters and landlords? These are regulatory questions that have proven to be notoriously difficult to answer. It is clear, however, that suing Craigslist really does very little to advance thinking, discussion, and reform (if needed) of the policy questions surrounding housing.
First, this isn't legislation, it's the finding of a federal judge in a crazy lawsuit (one that was brought by some folks I actually know who were definitely barking up the wrong tree IMO). Second, it's a far thornier situation and the answers aren't nearly as clear. I'm sympathetic to your line of thinking on some level, but there are mitigating circumstances here, the main one being that freedom of association means some different in a commercial transaction than in a personal transaction. A couple centuries of the articulated theory and social practice of capitalism have shown that in order for markets to be fair and be efficient, some level of regulatory intervention is often required. Markets aren't "natural", they're a human creations, and open to human manipulation in order to achieve certain goals at the expense of an entirely unregulated market.
Social relations and commercial relations can be then seen as somewhat separate and distinct. Here's the example: I'm looking for a deaf, hermaphroditic amputee no taller than 5'2" to be my roommate on Craigslist. Perfectly acceptable -- I'm using my freedom of association to associate with the kind of person I want to live with and to go get a cabin out in the woods. But neither proximity nor selling/renting your my cabin are association in that directly voluntary, social sense. Therefore, if my neighbor is a race I don't like, well, tough for me, I can exercise my freedom of association not to associate with my neighbor, but I can't force him or her to move. The way this plays out in the Real World in the US is that, according to the American jurisprudence of discrimination and equality, I can't discriminate on the basis of certain criteria called "protected classes" (race and gender being the two key classes) which, depending on the class, as subject to a varying level of "scrutiny" by the courts.
In any event, you (and I, so far) are proceeding on the assumption that the renter/seller in these situations is an individual. And while there are lots of individual landlords, more and more home sales and rentals in American cities are at the very least mitigated by an agent of some sort, and often the landlord itself is corporate entity, often quite large. And at that point, it gets even weirder, unless you believe that the doctrine that a corporation is just a unique form of individual, with the same rights and so forth -- do corporations have a right of association? If they do, is it even remotely similar to an individual's right of association?
In all events, I'm glad you mentioned the freedom of association, because it certainly is a less discussed and less affirmed right in American, but an important one.
Ever read any Marx? Not just the Communist Manifesto but works like The Grundrisse or the Theses on Feurbach or the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean? No reasonable thinker can escape Marx. This is partly historical, but it is also a testament to the questions raised by Marx and his dazzling approaches to a wide variety of subjects in the social and political sciences.
Whatever else Marx was, he was a groundbreaking philosopher of the relationship between humans and the things humans create, brilliantly applying Hegelian dialectics to the concrete realm of human creation within a variety of different economic frameworks. For that alone, various of his ideas find their way into some of the best in contemporary thought (I'm thinking specifically of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain and the work that came out of the Frankfurt School).
Marx's political philosophy has been thoroughly discredited in social practice, and the ramifications of some of his more didactic works leave him, in some debatable way, with blood on his hands. But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, he is still one of the most important thinkers of the past 250 years, and for good reason.
It depends. Sometimes, yeah, because of some presumption of danger. Sometimes, because they think I'm there to buy drugs (which is fair, that's the main reason you'll see white people in those neighborhoods). Sometimes because they want to mess with somebody. It just depends.
The southside looks awfully scary to outsiders, and sometimes genuinely is (when gangs are warring) but I've never been in mortal danger and rarely in anything more than very minor danger of being the victim of crime in the past seven years of working on the southside, and never have been. Based on a lot of conversations and my experiences and the experience of my friends, I think you're in more danger in a more affluent or gentrifying neighborhood, because that's where the stickup kids and other thugs go to shake folks down. I suppose that changes if you are actually there to buy drugs. But if you aren't, I think you're pretty safe. I actually have a buddy who is really eloquent about it, who tells me that since I have the privilege to travel and not be a symbol of fear for folks, I need to let people know I've walked the toughest blocks in the USA, and people there are pretty much like people everywhere else.