Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
Surrounding oneself with yes-men is the recipe for certain failure. Is there anyone here who hasn't worked at a place with those guys? In the end you have to start laying it on also just to avoid losing your job. A company that can't accept real feedback on the critical issues that only employees can see is dooming itself.
In a weak economy they will survive short term. But the turnover of employees and failed projects will drain the company's resources. When the market improves and astute employees can flee the sinking ship, the company will finally tank.
Copying games is not morally wrong. Copyright is a legal invention to encourage development of new material. If people are violating copyright then there is a reason. The primary question here was why are people violating copyright.
If these are business men then they should understand market forces. It is more convenient to walk into a store and buy a product than it is to find it and run hacks and risk malware. A consumer would prefer to have a product with verified product from a reputable dealer. Product typically comes with some incentive, even if it's just a nice manual. Part of the problem here is that developers are being blind to their audience.
These reasons might not apply to every developer.
#1. You are charging more than the market will bare if the piracy is significant. #1a. One of the problems here is that there is really more than one market, isn't there? Are developers creating games that will appeal to consumers that are not going to buy? If you developed a game about shooting up liquor stores instead of portfolio management I think you may find your audience doesn't have $50 to spare. #2. Your consumer base doesn't trust you. And they don't want to give their money to someone who is their enemy. Your protections schemes insinuated they were thieves after they spent 10 hours earning the money to purchase your game. Your hype wasn't honest and lying to make money isn't advertising, it's fraud. #3. There's no payoff for being legit. When the consumer opens the box there is nothing more than if they just downloaded the game. There's no color manual, no fan materials, no stickers or buttons. A bunch of people just bought an IPhone App that does nothing but tell other people how much they paid for it. Give your legit customers something to brag about?
I wonder. Does anyone have any insight as to the Real side of the deal. I'm trying to think of any advantage to Yahoo!.
Whereas Yahoo! is going to take a lot of negative publicity from a small group of people, existing media online outlets might take a serious hit due to lack of faith in the industry if Yahoo! had just said "screw 'em".
So I'm wondering if Yahoo! really did all that much on this deal or if it was well contributed to by Real who wanted to gain the customers and avoid a huge blow to the industry over lack of faith in the business model.
We know that it at least part of it could be written in a small example of Java, run on unix, performance projections were based on running on multiple systems over a network, was based on a (presumably failed) implementation written in an obscure language, and addressed a relatively simple problem.
Certainly some sort of distributed computing. I doubt P2P. Perhaps some sort of distributed file system or backup project.
Good catch. My mistake in typing out too fast without reviewing my own post.
My first reaction was that only citizens and not enemies should have rights. Then I realize the problem with that is that I am not going to be the one who decides if I'm an enemy or not. And it is not always the good guys who are calling those shots.
Amen. The constitution doesn't list these as US citizenship given rights. They are named as God given rights specifically because an overpowered government could choose when and to what extent it could abuse people. More than 200 years and thousands upon thousands of US citizens lives given to protect freedom and here we debate whether or not the US government can choose when and where to suspend the rights of it's citizens.
Unless the software tool takes your bandwidth data and reports it book to Google servers to be analyzed in comparison to thousands to millions of other reports. This sort of meta-analysis is where Google can really shine. On one side of the deal, Google gets lots of information about network traffic. On the other side, the consumers get reliable information about their own network traffic. Definitely a sweet deal for google.
If it is as simple as what you suggest it would be a great move for Google as the ISP's could unthrottle Google and Google would get superior network traffic over all of the smaller sites that don't have their own well used network-throttling-detectors.
Absolutely. You can't fix the problem of the pay being unreasonable for the work. In Michigan teachers are on a continual education basis. They must pump more and more money into their certification as well as more and more time. If they stop then they can't teach.
As inflation and tuition increases, the pay moves them below middle class status. There is a reason why the majority of teachers are Middle Age women with teenage or older children. Teachers don't make a reasonable living. The proposition remains more attractive to women who are married with a husband to support them. Their kids must be near-grown so that they have enough time to put into the job, which now entails a lot more than teaching.
I'll go so far as to say that as middle class disappears the problem with the students will increase as well. Few mom's will be staying home to care for the kids. That means that even suspending a student means the student gets a day off to play the x-box. There will be fewer consequences for behavior, less help out home with the work they are given, and fewer chances for their parents to become involved at school.
You want a school that teaches more than just Reading, Writing, and Reading? That's not going to happen in a society with a shriveled middle class.
Jesus said to turn the other cheek. He said to forgive those that trespass against you. My understanding is that, at the time, a man might slap you with an open hand. It was an insult because he hit you with his palm... you couldn't handle a real blow like a real man.
In this case if you were to turn your face, he couldn't hit you with his palm. He'd have to backhand you and hit you with his knuckles. To turn the other cheek was not so much to mean that you should let someone walk over you, but to say that you should show the persecutor that you could take his best and you were his equal, not subservient.
To us that might seem like he's telling us to let our enemies hit us harder and hurt us worse. But you have to take it in the context of a nation living in oppression by a conquering empire. These people were probably not Roman citizens and as such were absolutely not considered equal.
Again with the silly curve drawing. "Smarter" isn't something you can make just by packing in enough circuits. People don't even know what "smarter" is. Probably they'll figure it out eventually. But it's already clear that "smarter" is more complicated than any technology we'll see in the next century or so. That's an easy one. We are vain. Smarter is whatever makes us different than every other living thing and computer. If a computer can out-calculate us for raw addition then smarter is us being able to put strategies together, like in chess. If we discover that animals do have "words" then smarter is that we can put them together with syntax. We will never invent machines that are smarter because we will always find a distinction to contrast it with a human. We will always find a way to say, "But it can't do this thing like we do."
This kind of smarter is not a technological question. At it's heart it is a religious/philosophical question.
The interview there made them look even more foolish. Being asked about the move to L&H causing breaches in privacy she referred to a 200 year history of keeping data safe. Were they using L&H for the last 200 years? There was no logic whatsoever.
Worse yet she seemed unaware of how a national surveillance program (Patriot Act) might affect their ability to keep their information secure with a US contractor.
What if you just have to transmit some files off site to yourself and you use Rapidshare? What if you need to work on a spreadsheet at home and you import it into your Google Docs account? It is important for a government and businesses recognize the ways that information can be compromised.
But it is significant when they are naming USA as an unsafe place for data. That limits our ability to keep up as we lose opportunities for contracts due to liability over data.
It is not a matter of a company's servers being unsecure. It is that the USA can demand those records, without search warrant, without you knowing, requiring of handing over keys to your data. That means that any security measures you verify at your contractors end are meaningless if the government decides it wants the information.
European leaders have, in the past, gone on record with concerns over the USA using communications surveillance systems to steal trade secrets and other business information. No matter what your contractor's set up is, the USA can access his server, ban him from notifying you, require handing over encryption keys, water-board information from admins, all without a warrant. Official US policies require counter-policies from countries those policies affect.
This was actually an issue the EU looked into. I remember hearing a few years back how an EU commission voiced concerns over the USA using Eschelon to spy on businesses and steal information. They claimed the USA would then award that information to USA corporations. I believe this was before much of the US would have heard of Eschelon and many who talked about it were branded conspiracy nuts. Then these leaders from the EU came out and not only outed Eschelon but exposed abuses of communications surveillance system.
Don't forget that you may be working with a company that may be required to, or will at any rate, backup their email securely and store it for a long period of time. The same might be true of any data on the network. Then you are dealing with a situation where your data must not only be secured during this stage, but where you must trust the contractor to secure your data for years. What would happen if that information was compromised after the company folds up?
Any situation where your information is held by another party could involve risks to your company. These risks could endure for years, even after the other party has closed up and no longer able to insure the data themselves, potentially leaving all liability with your company with no recourse.
Example: Contractor closes shop in 4 years. Backup tapes are abandoned with no IT on staff to take ownership. Backup tapes are looted by hooligans. Hooligans use credit information of your employees to assume their identities and rack up bills in their names. Depending on the size of your company, 100's of employees decide to file suit against their employer over the reckless loss of their data. Your company has no one to put the burden on because the contractor is now out of business.
I was thinking along those lines as well. You could lose the drives, have less power consumption, one less point of failure, easier support (centralized image that can't be changed by the user), network file storage.
Actually, aside from the support I doubt the savings in hardware would come to much, but it very well could if he has a large pool of computers.
I have been playing Urban Terror the Q3 mod since my son was inside my wife's belly 7 years ago. I love that it's still going strong with updates, new maps, and new players. Now it has a version of the open source'd Q3 code so it's free to play.
You'll get dozens if different answers here because everyone has a different situation. I work somewhere now where it's cool if I have to leave early because my kid is sick. So it's also cool with me if an hour or two after work they call me because they have some problem they need help with.
I used to work a part time 20 hour job where they wanted 40 hours of work and on call. That was not OK because if they wanted 40 hours they needed to pay me for it. So I wasn't available when they called.
Comes down to if your bosses are trustworthy for how they use your time and if you can afford to walk away if they are not.
Movie Maker is on all of the XP computers which most of the kids will have. Train them in what they have or what they can get for free or cheap.
There's plenty of talk of teaching industry standards or teaching concepts. But, if you don't teach them what they have at home then they wont be using it. Because let's face it, they don't have enough access at school to become pros anyway. But if you encourage them to use something at home... well, kids have a lot more free time than we do. If they love it they will play with it and learn on their own.
I think someone convinced us that things that are bad for us or not in line with the 'norm' are somehow evil... wrong morally. First we start hiding what sex is from our kids when 100 years ago they could look out on the farm and see it happen. Now we deny simply smoking as though Cookie Monster was sexually molesting a 3 year old retarded parapalegic with a dead gay kitten. People smoke, it's not necessarily good for them but it doesn't make them into a bank robber or a rapist any more than a bad habit of overeating too many cookies does.
Agreed. We all lose because when we can't freely use works that existed from before we were born, there's no incentive for anyone to create anything new or better.
The show is dated. It was great at the time. I loved it. 25 years ago they only made shows about cars (Dukes of Hazzard and A-Team) and about computers with lifelike AI, normally brought to life by a power surge or spilling coke in a computer (Automan and Electric Dreams) or sometimes unlikely crime-stopping heros (miami vice or Greatest American Hero or again A-TEAM). Knight Rider was the ultimate 80's show because it took all 3 of these things and turned them into one show. But, 25 years later a show like any of these things just doesn't work so well. We are more jaded and this would just seem silly. I'd still love a reunion show, but I don't think the premise works any more.
We've moved past an age where computers were mysterious, dangerous, and somehow held the key to the salvation or the damnation of the human race. Now we accept them as what they are, another tool that people use or misuse. They are not mysterious and no one imagines that they are going to start talking to you. They'd have to do some serious revamping to make me suspend belief enough to get into this show or to not hate it for making my precious childhood memories seem ridiculous.
And most of those tech shows have very small costs compared to HBO. So while 30,000 other viewers in my area might not want to watch Grass Growing Channel, it will still be affordable. Prices might go up, but I also wont be paying for the golfing channel, the gardening channel, the doggy channel, etc. So I'll pay more and get what I want.
Of course, the best advantage is that networks will have to work on quality program if viewers have more choices about what channels to even pick up.
Reasonable? A Hard-Ban is reasonable. Tell me what public service telemarketers are serving?
I pay money for my land line. Telemarketers use it without my permission to make a profit. The result is that I never know when I pick up the phone if it is really a call for me or just some jerk trying to scam me out of a buck. When they pay me for my landline and my time then that is "reasonable" that they can call me. Just like Network TV being supported by advertising> I don't pay for network TV. I know that ad supported revenue gets me my shows.
Someone might say that the phone spammers are also paying into the phone system and that makes it cheaper for all. NO WAY! They put a ton of use on the telecom grid compared to my little ol' landline. Then the phone companies extort money from customers by telling them they wont stop harrassing calls unless you pay them MORE. They wont stop harrassing phones to their customers that they are being paid to place to their customers unless you are ready to hand over more cash.
Really, this is embarrassing that we got laws that make email spam illegal faster but never anything to stop telemarketers. And don't even start about the DNC list being a deterrent. I haven't had a telemarketing call in about 4 years that wasn't outright fraudulent. These are scumbag people working for scumbag companies and they break many laws to begin with. Breaking a DNC law isn't going to deter them when they know it wont be enforced.
It's sad. When I was a kid I read all those postmodernist cyberpunk novels where the criminal was the hero and the government and (non)respectable businesses were the bad guys. I thought that sounded pretty cool, pretty scary, and I thought it would happen one day.
I didn't really believe it would happen to this extent by the time I was 33. The government launching wide spread secret surveillance on US citizens, reading their emails, xray machines to see them naked at airports, mega-corporations that are given free reign by the FTC going on to hack citizens computers as well as competitors. And now, an evil corporations secret documents shared over computer networks allowing the underdog to fight back? William Gibson should have written this book.
Slashdot Mirror
Surrounding oneself with yes-men is the recipe for certain failure. Is there anyone here who hasn't worked at a place with those guys? In the end you have to start laying it on also just to avoid losing your job. A company that can't accept real feedback on the critical issues that only employees can see is dooming itself.
In a weak economy they will survive short term. But the turnover of employees and failed projects will drain the company's resources. When the market improves and astute employees can flee the sinking ship, the company will finally tank.
Copying games is not morally wrong. Copyright is a legal invention to encourage development of new material. If people are violating copyright then there is a reason. The primary question here was why are people violating copyright.
If these are business men then they should understand market forces. It is more convenient to walk into a store and buy a product than it is to find it and run hacks and risk malware. A consumer would prefer to have a product with verified product from a reputable dealer. Product typically comes with some incentive, even if it's just a nice manual. Part of the problem here is that developers are being blind to their audience.
These reasons might not apply to every developer.
#1. You are charging more than the market will bare if the piracy is significant.
#1a. One of the problems here is that there is really more than one market, isn't there? Are developers creating games that will appeal to consumers that are not going to buy? If you developed a game about shooting up liquor stores instead of portfolio management I think you may find your audience doesn't have $50 to spare.
#2. Your consumer base doesn't trust you. And they don't want to give their money to someone who is their enemy. Your protections schemes insinuated they were thieves after they spent 10 hours earning the money to purchase your game. Your hype wasn't honest and lying to make money isn't advertising, it's fraud.
#3. There's no payoff for being legit. When the consumer opens the box there is nothing more than if they just downloaded the game. There's no color manual, no fan materials, no stickers or buttons. A bunch of people just bought an IPhone App that does nothing but tell other people how much they paid for it. Give your legit customers something to brag about?
I wonder. Does anyone have any insight as to the Real side of the deal. I'm trying to think of any advantage to Yahoo!.
Whereas Yahoo! is going to take a lot of negative publicity from a small group of people, existing media online outlets might take a serious hit due to lack of faith in the industry if Yahoo! had just said "screw 'em".
So I'm wondering if Yahoo! really did all that much on this deal or if it was well contributed to by Real who wanted to gain the customers and avoid a huge blow to the industry over lack of faith in the business model.
We know that it at least part of it could be written in a small example of Java, run on unix, performance projections were based on running on multiple systems over a network, was based on a (presumably failed) implementation written in an obscure language, and addressed a relatively simple problem.
Certainly some sort of distributed computing. I doubt P2P. Perhaps some sort of distributed file system or backup project.
Good catch. My mistake in typing out too fast without reviewing my own post.
My first reaction was that only citizens and not enemies should have rights. Then I realize the problem with that is that I am not going to be the one who decides if I'm an enemy or not. And it is not always the good guys who are calling those shots.
Amen. The constitution doesn't list these as US citizenship given rights. They are named as God given rights specifically because an overpowered government could choose when and to what extent it could abuse people. More than 200 years and thousands upon thousands of US citizens lives given to protect freedom and here we debate whether or not the US government can choose when and where to suspend the rights of it's citizens.
Unless the software tool takes your bandwidth data and reports it book to Google servers to be analyzed in comparison to thousands to millions of other reports. This sort of meta-analysis is where Google can really shine. On one side of the deal, Google gets lots of information about network traffic. On the other side, the consumers get reliable information about their own network traffic. Definitely a sweet deal for google.
If it is as simple as what you suggest it would be a great move for Google as the ISP's could unthrottle Google and Google would get superior network traffic over all of the smaller sites that don't have their own well used network-throttling-detectors.
Absolutely. You can't fix the problem of the pay being unreasonable for the work. In Michigan teachers are on a continual education basis. They must pump more and more money into their certification as well as more and more time. If they stop then they can't teach.
As inflation and tuition increases, the pay moves them below middle class status. There is a reason why the majority of teachers are Middle Age women with teenage or older children. Teachers don't make a reasonable living. The proposition remains more attractive to women who are married with a husband to support them. Their kids must be near-grown so that they have enough time to put into the job, which now entails a lot more than teaching.
I'll go so far as to say that as middle class disappears the problem with the students will increase as well. Few mom's will be staying home to care for the kids. That means that even suspending a student means the student gets a day off to play the x-box. There will be fewer consequences for behavior, less help out home with the work they are given, and fewer chances for their parents to become involved at school.
You want a school that teaches more than just Reading, Writing, and Reading? That's not going to happen in a society with a shriveled middle class.
In this case if you were to turn your face, he couldn't hit you with his palm. He'd have to backhand you and hit you with his knuckles. To turn the other cheek was not so much to mean that you should let someone walk over you, but to say that you should show the persecutor that you could take his best and you were his equal, not subservient.
To us that might seem like he's telling us to let our enemies hit us harder and hurt us worse. But you have to take it in the context of a nation living in oppression by a conquering empire. These people were probably not Roman citizens and as such were absolutely not considered equal.
This kind of smarter is not a technological question. At it's heart it is a religious/philosophical question.
The interview there made them look even more foolish. Being asked about the move to L&H causing breaches in privacy she referred to a 200 year history of keeping data safe. Were they using L&H for the last 200 years? There was no logic whatsoever.
Worse yet she seemed unaware of how a national surveillance program (Patriot Act) might affect their ability to keep their information secure with a US contractor.
What if you just have to transmit some files off site to yourself and you use Rapidshare? What if you need to work on a spreadsheet at home and you import it into your Google Docs account? It is important for a government and businesses recognize the ways that information can be compromised.
But it is significant when they are naming USA as an unsafe place for data. That limits our ability to keep up as we lose opportunities for contracts due to liability over data.
It is not a matter of a company's servers being unsecure. It is that the USA can demand those records, without search warrant, without you knowing, requiring of handing over keys to your data. That means that any security measures you verify at your contractors end are meaningless if the government decides it wants the information.
European leaders have, in the past, gone on record with concerns over the USA using communications surveillance systems to steal trade secrets and other business information. No matter what your contractor's set up is, the USA can access his server, ban him from notifying you, require handing over encryption keys, water-board information from admins, all without a warrant. Official US policies require counter-policies from countries those policies affect.
This was actually an issue the EU looked into. I remember hearing a few years back how an EU commission voiced concerns over the USA using Eschelon to spy on businesses and steal information. They claimed the USA would then award that information to USA corporations. I believe this was before much of the US would have heard of Eschelon and many who talked about it were branded conspiracy nuts. Then these leaders from the EU came out and not only outed Eschelon but exposed abuses of communications surveillance system.
Don't forget that you may be working with a company that may be required to, or will at any rate, backup their email securely and store it for a long period of time. The same might be true of any data on the network. Then you are dealing with a situation where your data must not only be secured during this stage, but where you must trust the contractor to secure your data for years. What would happen if that information was compromised after the company folds up?
Any situation where your information is held by another party could involve risks to your company. These risks could endure for years, even after the other party has closed up and no longer able to insure the data themselves, potentially leaving all liability with your company with no recourse.
Example: Contractor closes shop in 4 years. Backup tapes are abandoned with no IT on staff to take ownership. Backup tapes are looted by hooligans. Hooligans use credit information of your employees to assume their identities and rack up bills in their names. Depending on the size of your company, 100's of employees decide to file suit against their employer over the reckless loss of their data. Your company has no one to put the burden on because the contractor is now out of business.
I was thinking along those lines as well. You could lose the drives, have less power consumption, one less point of failure, easier support (centralized image that can't be changed by the user), network file storage.
Actually, aside from the support I doubt the savings in hardware would come to much, but it very well could if he has a large pool of computers.
I have been playing Urban Terror the Q3 mod since my son was inside my wife's belly 7 years ago. I love that it's still going strong with updates, new maps, and new players. Now it has a version of the open source'd Q3 code so it's free to play.
You'll get dozens if different answers here because everyone has a different situation. I work somewhere now where it's cool if I have to leave early because my kid is sick. So it's also cool with me if an hour or two after work they call me because they have some problem they need help with.
I used to work a part time 20 hour job where they wanted 40 hours of work and on call. That was not OK because if they wanted 40 hours they needed to pay me for it. So I wasn't available when they called.
Comes down to if your bosses are trustworthy for how they use your time and if you can afford to walk away if they are not.
Movie Maker is on all of the XP computers which most of the kids will have. Train them in what they have or what they can get for free or cheap.
There's plenty of talk of teaching industry standards or teaching concepts. But, if you don't teach them what they have at home then they wont be using it. Because let's face it, they don't have enough access at school to become pros anyway. But if you encourage them to use something at home... well, kids have a lot more free time than we do. If they love it they will play with it and learn on their own.
I think someone convinced us that things that are bad for us or not in line with the 'norm' are somehow evil ... wrong morally. First we start hiding what sex is from our kids when 100 years ago they could look out on the farm and see it happen. Now we deny simply smoking as though Cookie Monster was sexually molesting a 3 year old retarded parapalegic with a dead gay kitten. People smoke, it's not necessarily good for them but it doesn't make them into a bank robber or a rapist any more than a bad habit of overeating too many cookies does.
Who needs to watch it? We're living it! Except for the cool computer head that helps solve crimes.
Too true though. Cyberpunk is still relevant. Mostly because it is now a reality.
Agreed. We all lose because when we can't freely use works that existed from before we were born, there's no incentive for anyone to create anything new or better.
The show is dated. It was great at the time. I loved it. 25 years ago they only made shows about cars (Dukes of Hazzard and A-Team) and about computers with lifelike AI, normally brought to life by a power surge or spilling coke in a computer (Automan and Electric Dreams) or sometimes unlikely crime-stopping heros (miami vice or Greatest American Hero or again A-TEAM). Knight Rider was the ultimate 80's show because it took all 3 of these things and turned them into one show. But, 25 years later a show like any of these things just doesn't work so well. We are more jaded and this would just seem silly. I'd still love a reunion show, but I don't think the premise works any more.
We've moved past an age where computers were mysterious, dangerous, and somehow held the key to the salvation or the damnation of the human race. Now we accept them as what they are, another tool that people use or misuse. They are not mysterious and no one imagines that they are going to start talking to you. They'd have to do some serious revamping to make me suspend belief enough to get into this show or to not hate it for making my precious childhood memories seem ridiculous.
And most of those tech shows have very small costs compared to HBO. So while 30,000 other viewers in my area might not want to watch Grass Growing Channel, it will still be affordable. Prices might go up, but I also wont be paying for the golfing channel, the gardening channel, the doggy channel, etc. So I'll pay more and get what I want.
Of course, the best advantage is that networks will have to work on quality program if viewers have more choices about what channels to even pick up.
Reasonable?
A Hard-Ban is reasonable. Tell me what public service telemarketers are serving?
I pay money for my land line. Telemarketers use it without my permission to make a profit. The result is that I never know when I pick up the phone if it is really a call for me or just some jerk trying to scam me out of a buck. When they pay me for my landline and my time then that is "reasonable" that they can call me. Just like Network TV being supported by advertising> I don't pay for network TV. I know that ad supported revenue gets me my shows.
Someone might say that the phone spammers are also paying into the phone system and that makes it cheaper for all. NO WAY! They put a ton of use on the telecom grid compared to my little ol' landline. Then the phone companies extort money from customers by telling them they wont stop harrassing calls unless you pay them MORE. They wont stop harrassing phones to their customers that they are being paid to place to their customers unless you are ready to hand over more cash.
Really, this is embarrassing that we got laws that make email spam illegal faster but never anything to stop telemarketers. And don't even start about the DNC list being a deterrent. I haven't had a telemarketing call in about 4 years that wasn't outright fraudulent. These are scumbag people working for scumbag companies and they break many laws to begin with. Breaking a DNC law isn't going to deter them when they know it wont be enforced.
It's sad. When I was a kid I read all those postmodernist cyberpunk novels where the criminal was the hero and the government and (non)respectable businesses were the bad guys. I thought that sounded pretty cool, pretty scary, and I thought it would happen one day.
I didn't really believe it would happen to this extent by the time I was 33. The government launching wide spread secret surveillance on US citizens, reading their emails, xray machines to see them naked at airports, mega-corporations that are given free reign by the FTC going on to hack citizens computers as well as competitors. And now, an evil corporations secret documents shared over computer networks allowing the underdog to fight back? William Gibson should have written this book.