Could it be that as increasing numbers of people have become convinced of the efficacy of popping pills to cure/control all manner of illnesses, that the placebo effect inevitably increased along with that familiarity? Isn't the placebo effect truly nothing more than a very specific form of self-delusion and self-fulfilling prophecy? It hardly seems shocking that, as anecdotal stories of successful pill-popping mount, people would become increasingly delusional about what they expect when they pop one, such that even when a pill is a phony it still appears to have an effect because their own body is doing the work to fulfill the prophecy.
They might want to identify highly skeptical people and test both medications and the placebo effect on them, and then compare that to the average; what they might find is that neither pills nor the placebo effect work nearly so well on skeptics as on the general population. This seems to be true for me, in any case; drugs that were expected to work had no effect, quite possibly because I wasn't nearly so convinced of it as the doctors prescribing them, nor am I inclined to blindly accept what doctors tell me.
Maybe we should stop calling it 'the placebo effect' and call it something more descriptive, if indeed it is a type of self-delusion.
Are there any current real-world examples of this dynamic? I see your point, but it seems a bit theoretical at this point. If it doesn't work out that way, the consequences of counting on it could be dire for OSS.
The dots connecting this to OSS aren't immediately apparent to me.
Borland and other companies tried something just shy of subscriptions, by using annoyingly frequent upgrades. I don't think it worked very well, because customers were smart enough to work out the cost-benefit ratio of most of the so-called upgrades and simply said no to them.
Software subscriptions, if we acquiesce to them, are akin to extortion, or the same tactics that drug pushers use. With one-time software licenses, even if a person disapproved of revisions, he was able to keep using the version for which he bought a license. Once a person is dependent upon a subscribed application, however, it's all or nothing: if revisions are not to his liking, he has only one choice, to stop using the software entirely. He can't keep using a revision he did find useful, because that revision has now been forcibly removed and no longer exists.
Software subscriptions remove choice and control from the consumer/user and transfer it to the "content" publisher. It's another form of DRM, really.
Another case of mis-framing: the question to ask is not "can the Ares program be salvaged?" but rather "should the Ares program be salvaged?" That's what the Augustine Commission is intending to decide, right? Perhaps the Commission should be sequestered like a jury, to keep it from being unduly influenced by these nervous contractors afraid they're about to be kicked from the back of the gravy train?
Do I need to repeat the rest of the explanation? We've been having this tug-of-war over software subscriptions for almost 15 years now. Call it "the cloud" or any of the other rebranding attempts from the past, but it's all had the same goal: making you pay more for the software you use.
What we should fear is no longer having any control at all over the software we use AND having to pay every month/day/hour/minute for the privilege of being able to use it.
BTW, did anyone who modded parent up happen to notice the URL and content of his shared homepage? He's hardly an impartial observer in this matter: he has a specific vested interest in promoting this "SaaS". SaaS very much a threat... to anyone not producing or selling it. The people promoting it aim to tip the economic balance even farther in their favor. Sure, supposedly we all have that goal in common, but some people are greedier than others. It's large corporations that will benefit from "SaaS", not the little guy.
Guess who actually got modded as Troll, though? Nope, not the "idiot"... it was my original comment pointing out the larger context being ignored (for the sake of TOFA). Modded as Troll not just once, but repeatedly.
If there's one thing about Slashdot that should change, it's the removal of anonymity when people moderate.
If you're under 40 and in good health you're in for a rather rude awakening, with those beliefs. You'll likely live to see the shit begin to hit the fan in a serious way. Google and other online sources should be education enough for you. I'm too disorganized to do anything more than plant the seed; you'll have to water and feed it.
I'm guessing you've never watched 'Silent Running', but given what you said you might wanna start your re-education with another old movie: 'Soylent Green'.
As long as the world is this overpopulated we'll always have enough food. Cannibals aren't bad people, they're just pragmatic.
Now, if only they could find a way to use PageRank to solve the underlying problem - human overpopulation - we might finally be on the way to realistically saving all the endangered species. As it is, without solving that 800-pound-gorilla problem, all we can do is manage to keep them on life support for a few decades. Does anyone remember 'Silent Running'? We're headed for a scenario that will require us shipping a whole lot more than just trees and plants out to the orbit of Jupiter.
This doesn't make any sense... why would Symantec want to catch the bad guys, when the very existence of those bad guys is the bread and butter of the corporation? Biting the wretched hand that feeds it?
There's something else far more sinister going on here. Will Symantec make up the profit lost from having fewer bad guys from whom to "protect" people by milking the people themselves somehow? Of course it might be argued that's been done all along, but....
It's a good thing it's a damned sight slower than a road or even mountain bike, because it's a recipe for road rash. In terms of design, trying to compare it to a Segway seems like a serious non sequitur to me, more like an attempt to misframe it in order to find it a position in the market: by comparing it to the Segway, it effectively rides on the coattails of the Segway, in the same way that intelligent design advocates create false "controversy" to give their claims a phony legitimacy.
Cory is only repeating what I've been saying for years now: the "cloud" is merely the latest spin on trying to "re-educate" people to accept software subscriptions in place of one-time software licenses. There has been an ongoing effort for many years to rebrand software as "content", for much of which people have already become accustomed to paying a monthly fee. If Big Software succeeds in convincing people that software is content, then this battle is lost and we'll all wind up paying for software by the month, cloud or no cloud.
I've said it here repeatedly, blogged about it in my little backwater blog, with nary a modding-up in sight, but now Doctorow parrots the same allegation after all this time and suddenly it's news? I guess I should derive satisfaction from the fact that finally people might take notice of the unintentional conspiracy at work here.
"Would libpng have been written, if not for the LZW patent? How about all of xiph's codecs? We wouldn't have Vorbis if it weren't for the MP3 patents.
Lemme fix that for ya:
If not for the LZW patent, libpng would never have been needed to be developed. Were it not for the MP3 patents, we wouldn't have needed Vorbis.
Necessity might be the mother of all invention, but in this case it was artificial necessity. The inventions were only necessary to get around the brick walls created by the patents. Tear down the unnatural brick walls, and the innovation could have focused on incrementally improving those existing techniques instead rather than essentially reinventing the wheel just to bypass them.
No, he didn't, actually, but I sympathize that a Fascist Republican might think so. Have you considered getting your GED and going to college, or at least spending a couple years hanging out at the library? It's surprising what you can figure out yourself when you get your head out of all that party groupthink swill.
We've already taken control of our own evolution, for better or worse:
"It is hoped that the findings may lead to new ways to reduce mutations and provide insights into human evolution."
Does anyone else see the conflict of interest inherent in that statement? This is what we humans do: we change the system before we even understand it. We try to "cure" autism before we even grasp its genetic or evolutionary significance.
"We are finally obtaining good reliable estimates of genetic features that are urgently needed to understand who we are genetically."
We won't ever be able to get an accurate answer to this question: we've already been busy contaminating the evidence. We worry about seeding Mars or other planets with terrestrial microbes before we get a chance to conclusively rule out independent signs of life, but we think nothing of poisoning our own genetic well before we even understand what's down there and why.
It just might be: the news warns people to stay away from and not bother with GMail for a while, so maybe that's exactly what people are doing? Well... except for you, because you peeked!
"Or are you one of the Slashdot socialists who generally believes that profit is evil and that capitalists destroyed the Interweb?"
He might not be, but I most certainly am. The domain name system was never envisioned as the commodity that it has become. Capitalism never benefits the Common Good especially well; rather it benefits a small minority of the Commons exceptionally well to the detriment of the rest. I presume you're at least well-read enough to have heard the term "concentration of wealth" and understand the dynamic that fuels it? We've certainly seen some concentration of domain names, now haven't we?
Slashdot Mirror
Mark my words, there's some guy named Hari Seldon to blame for this....
... the exact same motivations as humans: sex and food. Then sit back and watch the fun.
Could it be that as increasing numbers of people have become convinced of the efficacy of popping pills to cure/control all manner of illnesses, that the placebo effect inevitably increased along with that familiarity? Isn't the placebo effect truly nothing more than a very specific form of self-delusion and self-fulfilling prophecy? It hardly seems shocking that, as anecdotal stories of successful pill-popping mount, people would become increasingly delusional about what they expect when they pop one, such that even when a pill is a phony it still appears to have an effect because their own body is doing the work to fulfill the prophecy.
They might want to identify highly skeptical people and test both medications and the placebo effect on them, and then compare that to the average; what they might find is that neither pills nor the placebo effect work nearly so well on skeptics as on the general population. This seems to be true for me, in any case; drugs that were expected to work had no effect, quite possibly because I wasn't nearly so convinced of it as the doctors prescribing them, nor am I inclined to blindly accept what doctors tell me.
Maybe we should stop calling it 'the placebo effect' and call it something more descriptive, if indeed it is a type of self-delusion.
I wasn't trying to be serious. I guess I'll be keeping my day job for a while yet....
So I guess they won't be marketing this in fundamentalist Islamic countries where the gals wear burqas?
Are there any current real-world examples of this dynamic? I see your point, but it seems a bit theoretical at this point. If it doesn't work out that way, the consequences of counting on it could be dire for OSS.
The dots connecting this to OSS aren't immediately apparent to me.
Borland and other companies tried something just shy of subscriptions, by using annoyingly frequent upgrades. I don't think it worked very well, because customers were smart enough to work out the cost-benefit ratio of most of the so-called upgrades and simply said no to them.
Software subscriptions, if we acquiesce to them, are akin to extortion, or the same tactics that drug pushers use. With one-time software licenses, even if a person disapproved of revisions, he was able to keep using the version for which he bought a license. Once a person is dependent upon a subscribed application, however, it's all or nothing: if revisions are not to his liking, he has only one choice, to stop using the software entirely. He can't keep using a revision he did find useful, because that revision has now been forcibly removed and no longer exists.
Software subscriptions remove choice and control from the consumer/user and transfer it to the "content" publisher. It's another form of DRM, really.
Another case of mis-framing: the question to ask is not "can the Ares program be salvaged?" but rather "should the Ares program be salvaged?" That's what the Augustine Commission is intending to decide, right? Perhaps the Commission should be sequestered like a jury, to keep it from being unduly influenced by these nervous contractors afraid they're about to be kicked from the back of the gravy train?
Do I need to repeat the rest of the explanation? We've been having this tug-of-war over software subscriptions for almost 15 years now. Call it "the cloud" or any of the other rebranding attempts from the past, but it's all had the same goal: making you pay more for the software you use.
What we should fear is no longer having any control at all over the software we use AND having to pay every month/day/hour/minute for the privilege of being able to use it.
BTW, did anyone who modded parent up happen to notice the URL and content of his shared homepage? He's hardly an impartial observer in this matter: he has a specific vested interest in promoting this "SaaS". SaaS very much a threat... to anyone not producing or selling it. The people promoting it aim to tip the economic balance even farther in their favor. Sure, supposedly we all have that goal in common, but some people are greedier than others. It's large corporations that will benefit from "SaaS", not the little guy.
Guess who actually got modded as Troll, though? Nope, not the "idiot"... it was my original comment pointing out the larger context being ignored (for the sake of TOFA). Modded as Troll not just once, but repeatedly.
If there's one thing about Slashdot that should change, it's the removal of anonymity when people moderate.
If you're under 40 and in good health you're in for a rather rude awakening, with those beliefs. You'll likely live to see the shit begin to hit the fan in a serious way. Google and other online sources should be education enough for you. I'm too disorganized to do anything more than plant the seed; you'll have to water and feed it.
I'm guessing you've never watched 'Silent Running', but given what you said you might wanna start your re-education with another old movie: 'Soylent Green'.
As long as the world is this overpopulated we'll always have enough food. Cannibals aren't bad people, they're just pragmatic.
Now, if only they could find a way to use PageRank to solve the underlying problem - human overpopulation - we might finally be on the way to realistically saving all the endangered species. As it is, without solving that 800-pound-gorilla problem, all we can do is manage to keep them on life support for a few decades. Does anyone remember 'Silent Running'? We're headed for a scenario that will require us shipping a whole lot more than just trees and plants out to the orbit of Jupiter.
This doesn't make any sense... why would Symantec want to catch the bad guys, when the very existence of those bad guys is the bread and butter of the corporation? Biting the wretched hand that feeds it?
There's something else far more sinister going on here. Will Symantec make up the profit lost from having fewer bad guys from whom to "protect" people by milking the people themselves somehow? Of course it might be argued that's been done all along, but....
It's a good thing it's a damned sight slower than a road or even mountain bike, because it's a recipe for road rash. In terms of design, trying to compare it to a Segway seems like a serious non sequitur to me, more like an attempt to misframe it in order to find it a position in the market: by comparing it to the Segway, it effectively rides on the coattails of the Segway, in the same way that intelligent design advocates create false "controversy" to give their claims a phony legitimacy.
This isn't so much news as it is marketing.
Cory is only repeating what I've been saying for years now: the "cloud" is merely the latest spin on trying to "re-educate" people to accept software subscriptions in place of one-time software licenses. There has been an ongoing effort for many years to rebrand software as "content", for much of which people have already become accustomed to paying a monthly fee. If Big Software succeeds in convincing people that software is content, then this battle is lost and we'll all wind up paying for software by the month, cloud or no cloud.
I've said it here repeatedly, blogged about it in my little backwater blog, with nary a modding-up in sight, but now Doctorow parrots the same allegation after all this time and suddenly it's news? I guess I should derive satisfaction from the fact that finally people might take notice of the unintentional conspiracy at work here.
Nancy Wilson still makes me stupid, then!
So if you use a Kindle to surf to Amazon.com and then click on something, what exactly gets kidnapped... the Kindle, you, or Amazon?
Lemme fix that for ya:
If not for the LZW patent, libpng would never have been needed to be developed. Were it not for the MP3 patents, we wouldn't have needed Vorbis.
Necessity might be the mother of all invention, but in this case it was artificial necessity. The inventions were only necessary to get around the brick walls created by the patents. Tear down the unnatural brick walls, and the innovation could have focused on incrementally improving those existing techniques instead rather than essentially reinventing the wheel just to bypass them.
No, he didn't, actually, but I sympathize that a Fascist Republican might think so. Have you considered getting your GED and going to college, or at least spending a couple years hanging out at the library? It's surprising what you can figure out yourself when you get your head out of all that party groupthink swill.
... to a size I can strap onto my sharks, since I haven't yet figured out how to grow them to the size of C-130s.
We've already taken control of our own evolution, for better or worse:
Does anyone else see the conflict of interest inherent in that statement? This is what we humans do: we change the system before we even understand it. We try to "cure" autism before we even grasp its genetic or evolutionary significance.
We won't ever be able to get an accurate answer to this question: we've already been busy contaminating the evidence. We worry about seeding Mars or other planets with terrestrial microbes before we get a chance to conclusively rule out independent signs of life, but we think nothing of poisoning our own genetic well before we even understand what's down there and why.
I think the strains of HPV have that one beat hands down... they're the cause of ubiquitous warts, among many other persistent annoying things!
It just might be: the news warns people to stay away from and not bother with GMail for a while, so maybe that's exactly what people are doing? Well... except for you, because you peeked!
He might not be, but I most certainly am. The domain name system was never envisioned as the commodity that it has become. Capitalism never benefits the Common Good especially well; rather it benefits a small minority of the Commons exceptionally well to the detriment of the rest. I presume you're at least well-read enough to have heard the term "concentration of wealth" and understand the dynamic that fuels it? We've certainly seen some concentration of domain names, now haven't we?