It's easy once you know what RSS is. People who come across the little orange RSS buttons that have never used an aggregator before just ignore them. It's Really Simple Syndication once you understand the way things work, but the first time blows.
With that said, I don't think this is going to help AOL much at all. Yahoo has done this already, and they've done it pretty damn well. They have external feed providers who, in addition to a normal RSS feed link, provide a link that adds their feed directly to the user's My Yahoo page. Ask Jeeves' Bloglines has a similar service. That's how easy using RSS feeds should be for most users. Click a link and you're done. No software installation, no learning about the details behind RSS. I don't think AOL can really make an impact on the stranglehold exisiting providers have in that space.
True. I would never expect a spyware company to lie their way into a trusted network.:)
The extension shows you who rated various things. If there's a bad rating, stop trusting that person. If someone you trust has a bad habit of trusting untrustworthy people, stop trusting that person.
As another person mentioned, the people you entrust while using this system don't actually have to be people you know. For instance, if you take a look at someone's del.icio.us links page and there are tons of things that interest you, you would probably trust them to inform your browsing decisions.
This system looks like a good way of implementing spyware/adware prevention and the like based on trust, but I don't think it will do so well for general browsing as you point out. There are plenty of people I would trust to help me stay away from spyware who I wouldn't want pointing me to web sites to read, mainly because I read vastly different things on the Internet from many of my friends. A system tha would work for this is something like Amazon's recommendation system. Without fail, Amazon emails me stuff that I'm actually interested in based on things I've bought from them. If something could use my web browsing history and compare it with that of others to suggest sites to read, that would be awesome. There are tons of privacy issues there, but putting those aside, I think such a system would be very effective.
One thing that might break such a system would be spammers. Spammers like to break anything that's good on the Internet with advertising, and this would be no exception. I think it would be hard to replicate a normal browsing history while inserting a few ad links, and submit those histories on a large enough scale to make those sites show up as results.
Anyway, I've gone off on a bit of a tangent. My point is that trust works well for many of the stated goals, but not so much for what I really want: all the good information on the Internet pumped straight into my brain.
I'm tired of this trendy shit in \. where at the drop of a fucking hat people start categorizing people as either a Linux Zealot or a M$ Luvers.Technology is not meant to be worshiped, it is meant to be used to accomplish a goal, and you should use whatever best fits that goal, windows, linux or a fucking ti83.
Actually, in this case he's arguably doing what representatives are supposed to do. He represents the suburbs of Houston, the residents of which benefit when there's funding for new jobs in town. Sure, it's pork, but at least it doesn't involve a feeding tube or threatening judges.
The one question I have is this: Why just students?
If you open it up to everyone, it's harder to tell if the person will get the intended benefit out of it: education. Experienced coders could participate just for the money. The program isn't supposed to be mainly about the money, it's just there to get college students' eyes on developing open source software as an option.
If you're only going to watch one, watch Jeff Waugh's presentation about "GNOME 3.0" and his ballsy 10x10 goal (10% market share by 2010). If you're looking for something to hack on, check out the presentation on PiTiVi, which is a nonlinear video editor that sounds like it has potential if the planned features that were laid out in the presentation are seen to fruition. And if you've heard about Canonical/Ubuntu's Launchpad services but never really knew they were all about, watch Mark Shuttleworth's keynote.
The point isn't just the success or failure to communicate an idea. Depending on the language chosen, outside from any 'factual content', there is also conveyed: the writer's opinion of the reader; the writer's opinion of themselves; ancillary flavour; and more besides.
I agree. The problem is that when people correct things, they're not trying to help other people out, they're trying to point out how dumb the person who made the mistake is, and how smart they are for correcting it. It's the obnoxious grammar nazis that no one likes. I don't think sloppy writing should be accepted, but I do think the "irony" example I gave is a good example of something that should be let go. Sure, people use the word when they mean "coincidental", but enough people do it to where a majority of the population won't blink an eye when that mistake is made. If it's truly ignorance that these people are trying to combat, the solution is to educate, not to berate.
Yakka foob mog. Grub pubbawup zink watoom gazork. Chumble spuzz.
Oh, or did you still want me to use the language rules that you approve of?
Now let's look at what I actually said: "When someone says a word and everyone understands what they're saying..."
In some cases, using words incorrectly will make it harder for people to understand what you're saying, but if the usage is so common that everyone understands it, then it's proper usage.
I think this is a good time to point out how irrational some grammar nazis are, particularly the ones who always find it necessary to correct people when they "misuse" the word irony. When someone says a word and everyone understands what they're saying, guess what? That's what the word means. It's only a problem when the misuse of a word results in confusion, but if a particular incorrect use of a word is so common that everyone understands it, it's now a correct use of the word. That's the way language works.
I'll add a new point to my original post. Copyright is only of value where the product is the copy.
What copyright does is allow a creator to make the copy a product in the first place. What a creator posesses is talent. It's pretty hard to sell talent. You can either perform that talent for a charge, or because of copyright, you can sell recordings of that talent. CDs are far more profitable than tours are, and while some people use an album as an advertisement for their concerts, most of the established artists don't. The album itself is usually far more profitable than the tour if they already have the exposure they need.
The business model you suggest of allowing free distribution of copies and making money off of tours alone is possibly profitable, but it relies on the consumer not being satisfied with the product itself, and imposes restrictions on the area from which the artist can make money to where she can travel. Sure, it could still work. The whole point of copyright is to not take that chance with our culture. There are tons of ways that artists would find to make a living in a post-copyright society, but we've decided that the cost of giving up the right to freely make copies is worth the increased production of creative works.
So the obvious question, as you've asked, is, "Has copyright actually achieved this goal?" I think it has. It makes it much easier for a creator to make money off their work. They have created something, and they can make money off of the creation itself instead of trying find some other way to do so. We've been focusing on music, but how about books? You can either sell copies of the book or ask for donations. Without copyright, you're basically limited to asking for donations. This model can work, but it won't work for everyone. Having copyright allows the method for making money off of creative works to be straightforward and significantly less risky that without it. This makes the investment of time and money into a creative work more attractive, and causes more people to do so.
Giving up the unfettered right to make copies is a small price to pay for the increased production of creative works. However, I would personally like to build upon the works I enjoy myself, and copyright law doesn't allow me to do that. Some creators have chosen business models that still give me that right, and for doing so, I support them. I think taking away copyright would definitely have some benefits, but we would lose out on the creation of some new works because it won't be profitable enough. We can reign in the rights we've given away to creators without hurting the prospective profit for new creations, and we should definitely do so. Doing away with copyright altogether without having a straightforward, proven business model with comparable risk in place would hurt the production of creative works.
Copyrighted entertainment is new, and a little bit counter intuitive.
Copyrighted entertainment is as new as the means to copy the entertainment is. Copyright came right behind the printing press. It expanded after the player piano. Being able to copy creative works changes how things work.
You describe a time when people create works to entertain themselves and didn't need copyright to prod them along. Folk music and hymns were satisfying entertainment until someone who was really good at singing decided that she could go and perform in front of a crowd and people would pay her to do it. People enjoyed being entertained by professional entertainers more than by themselves. So this trend continued.
Once the means to copy this entertainment came along, that business model broke. People didn't need to go to concerts to hear music, because they could hear it in the comfort of their own homes. If anyone was allowed to copy these performances and pass them along, very few people would attend concerts and the performers wouldn't make money anymore. They would stop writing new songs.
Lawmakers all around the western world saw this problem and enacted laws to prevent this from happening. The (American) founding fathers themselves explicitly gave Congress the power to make laws that would promote the progress of science and the arts by giving their creators special rights.
So you're probably wondering why we can't just go back to the original system we had where we would all entertain ourselves. The cat's out of the bag, and imposing artificial limits on copying creative works is hard to enforce. That's true. But most people don't want to go back to the way it was before.
The quality of creative works that are made by people who can devote large chunks of time to perfecting their works is far more often than not greater than that of someone who is just trying to pass the time in between naps and meals. The reason we gave up the right to copy works as a society was to increase the quantity and quality of creative works we'd have available to us as a society. It works, for the most part.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things wrong with copyright law, such as the extremely excessive duration of copyright. But that doesn't mean we need to do away with it. Instead, the laws as they are now should be fixed, and the people who want to give others the rights that are assigned to them as creators when they make a work are free to do so by using the various licenses out there that make it easy.
You value the ability to share and build on top of other people's work. Other people value the quality and quantity of works that copyright makes possible. If you'd rather the shared paradigm win out, support the people who share their works. When you do that, they get the benefit that copyright was supposed to afford them, profit, and you and society as a whole get the benefit of being able to use the work with much less restrictions. Put your money where your mouth is. Head over to Magnatune and buy and album. Click the PayPal donate buttons on the sites of peoples works you enjoy. Do something to give people an incentive to create and share their works.
I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine. Collaboration in creativity leads to such wonderful dreck as sitcoms and "dramedys". Just say no.
I agree. Stories aren't things that can be put together piecemeal, and generally don't adapt well to the traditional open source paradigm. However, there are other ways that Free thinking can help this type of creative project.
There are some aspects of these projects that can be done piecemeal. Films typically have soundtracks, and most filmmakers aren't composers/singers/musicians as well. With shared work out there, filmmakers can build on top of the music that other people have put out there.
Taking video clips from a shared work can be useful as well. In many typical dramas and sitcoms, they show a little clip of the city the story is taking place in or a shot of the skyline. Most people don't have the resources to do that sort of thing, but if a video that incorporates such a clip has been shared, another creator can make there work better by leveraging off of work that has already been done.
The traditional open source methodology seems to be the focus of this article, however it seems that they have a core group working on the creative concept, though they say that others from the community will be involved as well. The collaboration of many people on the technical aspects of the film will work fabulously, but there are some things that just don't lend themselves to that way of working, and I think they realize that. I think the main benefit from shared crative works is being able to reuse bits of that content that suit new works, not the way people put them together. People have collaborated on creative works for a long time. The new development is that the product of that work will be able to be built upon by others.
I actually have a research project on this topic that I should be working on instead of reading Slashdot.
Having to go back to the server again and again and again to get tiny amounts of data doesn't sound too nice to me.
That's what you do each time you click on a link to go to a different web page within a site. With AJAX, you only get the data you need. It's not slow. Have you used Google Maps? GMail? That's what's going on behind the scenes, and it makes the experience far better.
If you've tried to read an article on Salon.com these days, they have a "day pass" system where you have to watch an ad before you can read the articles. If force users to watch an ad before they download the show, yu can use their IP address to identify their location and target ads that way. I think that style of advertisement is more effective than TV ads, because you only have one ad, and someone isn't going to go grab a snack while the ad plays. If you break the show up into two chunks, you can do that twice, etc. Of course, you'll eventually reach the point when people will try to find another source that redistributes the shows without the advertisement. A well balanced combination of global ads in the video and local ads in the web page would probably end up working out fine.
How is some farker saying that he hoped "the grenade had gone off" anything REMOTELY like a threat on the life of the president?
It doesn't, but generally, it's a pretty bad idea to wish ill on the president. Most people who say things like that don't carry out their wishes, but some do. It's not smart to put yourself in their company.
Intimidation of political speech, pure and simple.
Wishing ill on the president is not political speech. If that's how people get their thoughts across, they must be pretty inarticulate. There's a big difference between "Social security isn't in danger and shouldn't be tampered with" and "Aw, the grande didn't go off!"
If you came across a site on the Internet where people were begging for your death, you'd probably report it to police, who would then choose whether or not to investigate. The president has his own dedicated police force to do this, so you'd expect that you're more likely to be confronted for wishing ill on the president than on your boss. Joking about a grenade going off isn't exactly shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but it's pretty close. It's a reasonable restriction on free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy once you know what RSS is. People who come across the little orange RSS buttons that have never used an aggregator before just ignore them. It's Really Simple Syndication once you understand the way things work, but the first time blows.
With that said, I don't think this is going to help AOL much at all. Yahoo has done this already, and they've done it pretty damn well. They have external feed providers who, in addition to a normal RSS feed link, provide a link that adds their feed directly to the user's My Yahoo page. Ask Jeeves' Bloglines has a similar service. That's how easy using RSS feeds should be for most users. Click a link and you're done. No software installation, no learning about the details behind RSS. I don't think AOL can really make an impact on the stranglehold exisiting providers have in that space.
True. I would never expect a spyware company to lie their way into a trusted network. :)
The extension shows you who rated various things. If there's a bad rating, stop trusting that person. If someone you trust has a bad habit of trusting untrustworthy people, stop trusting that person.
As another person mentioned, the people you entrust while using this system don't actually have to be people you know. For instance, if you take a look at someone's del.icio.us links page and there are tons of things that interest you, you would probably trust them to inform your browsing decisions.
This system looks like a good way of implementing spyware/adware prevention and the like based on trust, but I don't think it will do so well for general browsing as you point out. There are plenty of people I would trust to help me stay away from spyware who I wouldn't want pointing me to web sites to read, mainly because I read vastly different things on the Internet from many of my friends. A system tha would work for this is something like Amazon's recommendation system. Without fail, Amazon emails me stuff that I'm actually interested in based on things I've bought from them. If something could use my web browsing history and compare it with that of others to suggest sites to read, that would be awesome. There are tons of privacy issues there, but putting those aside, I think such a system would be very effective.
One thing that might break such a system would be spammers. Spammers like to break anything that's good on the Internet with advertising, and this would be no exception. I think it would be hard to replicate a normal browsing history while inserting a few ad links, and submit those histories on a large enough scale to make those sites show up as results.
Anyway, I've gone off on a bit of a tangent. My point is that trust works well for many of the stated goals, but not so much for what I really want: all the good information on the Internet pumped straight into my brain.
Google is a business. They expand services when it makes economic sense.
Check out the Paticipatory Culture Foundation's projects.
I'm tired of this trendy shit in \. where at the drop of a fucking hat people start categorizing people as either a Linux Zealot or a M$ Luvers.Technology is not meant to be worshiped, it is meant to be used to accomplish a goal, and you should use whatever best fits that goal, windows, linux or a fucking ti83.
Backslashdot? BACKSLASHDOT?! You... you... M$ LUVER!!!
Now excuse me while I port Linux to my TI83.
Actually, in this case he's arguably doing what representatives are supposed to do. He represents the suburbs of Houston, the residents of which benefit when there's funding for new jobs in town. Sure, it's pork, but at least it doesn't involve a feeding tube or threatening judges.
This article made me throw up a little in my mouth.
Uh oh.
U.S. Patent #6102592: Emesis inducement via news bearing particularly shocking and/or appalling properties.
The one question I have is this: Why just students?
If you open it up to everyone, it's harder to tell if the person will get the intended benefit out of it: education. Experienced coders could participate just for the money. The program isn't supposed to be mainly about the money, it's just there to get college students' eyes on developing open source software as an option.
I think the word you're looking for is "verbify".
My representative is Tom DeLay. Even with all the recent ethics violations and whatnot, he'll still probably get reelected.
Sometimes giving up hope is completely warranted.
If you're only going to watch one, watch Jeff Waugh's presentation about "GNOME 3.0" and his ballsy 10x10 goal (10% market share by 2010). If you're looking for something to hack on, check out the presentation on PiTiVi, which is a nonlinear video editor that sounds like it has potential if the planned features that were laid out in the presentation are seen to fruition. And if you've heard about Canonical/Ubuntu's Launchpad services but never really knew they were all about, watch Mark Shuttleworth's keynote.
Lunch was fairly straight forward but the dessert was a peculiar electric green sweet foam.
Falling space junk and electric green food don't sound like that great of a combination.
Especially if it's during an air raid in 1941.
Are you my mummy?
The point isn't just the success or failure to communicate an idea. Depending on the language chosen, outside from any 'factual content', there is also conveyed: the writer's opinion of the reader; the writer's opinion of themselves; ancillary flavour; and more besides.
I agree. The problem is that when people correct things, they're not trying to help other people out, they're trying to point out how dumb the person who made the mistake is, and how smart they are for correcting it. It's the obnoxious grammar nazis that no one likes. I don't think sloppy writing should be accepted, but I do think the "irony" example I gave is a good example of something that should be let go. Sure, people use the word when they mean "coincidental", but enough people do it to where a majority of the population won't blink an eye when that mistake is made. If it's truly ignorance that these people are trying to combat, the solution is to educate, not to berate.
Yakka foob mog. Grub pubbawup zink watoom gazork. Chumble spuzz.
Oh, or did you still want me to use the language rules that you approve of?
Now let's look at what I actually said: "When someone says a word and everyone understands what they're saying..."
In some cases, using words incorrectly will make it harder for people to understand what you're saying, but if the usage is so common that everyone understands it, then it's proper usage.
I think this is a good time to point out how irrational some grammar nazis are, particularly the ones who always find it necessary to correct people when they "misuse" the word irony. When someone says a word and everyone understands what they're saying, guess what? That's what the word means. It's only a problem when the misuse of a word results in confusion, but if a particular incorrect use of a word is so common that everyone understands it, it's now a correct use of the word. That's the way language works.
I'll add a new point to my original post. Copyright is only of value where the product is the copy.
What copyright does is allow a creator to make the copy a product in the first place. What a creator posesses is talent. It's pretty hard to sell talent. You can either perform that talent for a charge, or because of copyright, you can sell recordings of that talent. CDs are far more profitable than tours are, and while some people use an album as an advertisement for their concerts, most of the established artists don't. The album itself is usually far more profitable than the tour if they already have the exposure they need.
The business model you suggest of allowing free distribution of copies and making money off of tours alone is possibly profitable, but it relies on the consumer not being satisfied with the product itself, and imposes restrictions on the area from which the artist can make money to where she can travel. Sure, it could still work. The whole point of copyright is to not take that chance with our culture. There are tons of ways that artists would find to make a living in a post-copyright society, but we've decided that the cost of giving up the right to freely make copies is worth the increased production of creative works.
So the obvious question, as you've asked, is, "Has copyright actually achieved this goal?" I think it has. It makes it much easier for a creator to make money off their work. They have created something, and they can make money off of the creation itself instead of trying find some other way to do so. We've been focusing on music, but how about books? You can either sell copies of the book or ask for donations. Without copyright, you're basically limited to asking for donations. This model can work, but it won't work for everyone. Having copyright allows the method for making money off of creative works to be straightforward and significantly less risky that without it. This makes the investment of time and money into a creative work more attractive, and causes more people to do so.
Giving up the unfettered right to make copies is a small price to pay for the increased production of creative works. However, I would personally like to build upon the works I enjoy myself, and copyright law doesn't allow me to do that. Some creators have chosen business models that still give me that right, and for doing so, I support them. I think taking away copyright would definitely have some benefits, but we would lose out on the creation of some new works because it won't be profitable enough. We can reign in the rights we've given away to creators without hurting the prospective profit for new creations, and we should definitely do so. Doing away with copyright altogether without having a straightforward, proven business model with comparable risk in place would hurt the production of creative works.
Copyrighted entertainment is new, and a little bit counter intuitive.
Copyrighted entertainment is as new as the means to copy the entertainment is. Copyright came right behind the printing press. It expanded after the player piano. Being able to copy creative works changes how things work.
You describe a time when people create works to entertain themselves and didn't need copyright to prod them along. Folk music and hymns were satisfying entertainment until someone who was really good at singing decided that she could go and perform in front of a crowd and people would pay her to do it. People enjoyed being entertained by professional entertainers more than by themselves. So this trend continued.
Once the means to copy this entertainment came along, that business model broke. People didn't need to go to concerts to hear music, because they could hear it in the comfort of their own homes. If anyone was allowed to copy these performances and pass them along, very few people would attend concerts and the performers wouldn't make money anymore. They would stop writing new songs.
Lawmakers all around the western world saw this problem and enacted laws to prevent this from happening. The (American) founding fathers themselves explicitly gave Congress the power to make laws that would promote the progress of science and the arts by giving their creators special rights.
So you're probably wondering why we can't just go back to the original system we had where we would all entertain ourselves. The cat's out of the bag, and imposing artificial limits on copying creative works is hard to enforce. That's true. But most people don't want to go back to the way it was before.
The quality of creative works that are made by people who can devote large chunks of time to perfecting their works is far more often than not greater than that of someone who is just trying to pass the time in between naps and meals. The reason we gave up the right to copy works as a society was to increase the quantity and quality of creative works we'd have available to us as a society. It works, for the most part.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things wrong with copyright law, such as the extremely excessive duration of copyright. But that doesn't mean we need to do away with it. Instead, the laws as they are now should be fixed, and the people who want to give others the rights that are assigned to them as creators when they make a work are free to do so by using the various licenses out there that make it easy.
You value the ability to share and build on top of other people's work. Other people value the quality and quantity of works that copyright makes possible. If you'd rather the shared paradigm win out, support the people who share their works. When you do that, they get the benefit that copyright was supposed to afford them, profit, and you and society as a whole get the benefit of being able to use the work with much less restrictions. Put your money where your mouth is. Head over to Magnatune and buy and album. Click the PayPal donate buttons on the sites of peoples works you enjoy. Do something to give people an incentive to create and share their works.
I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine. Collaboration in creativity leads to such wonderful dreck as sitcoms and "dramedys". Just say no.
I agree. Stories aren't things that can be put together piecemeal, and generally don't adapt well to the traditional open source paradigm. However, there are other ways that Free thinking can help this type of creative project.
There are some aspects of these projects that can be done piecemeal. Films typically have soundtracks, and most filmmakers aren't composers/singers/musicians as well. With shared work out there, filmmakers can build on top of the music that other people have put out there.
Taking video clips from a shared work can be useful as well. In many typical dramas and sitcoms, they show a little clip of the city the story is taking place in or a shot of the skyline. Most people don't have the resources to do that sort of thing, but if a video that incorporates such a clip has been shared, another creator can make there work better by leveraging off of work that has already been done.
The traditional open source methodology seems to be the focus of this article, however it seems that they have a core group working on the creative concept, though they say that others from the community will be involved as well. The collaboration of many people on the technical aspects of the film will work fabulously, but there are some things that just don't lend themselves to that way of working, and I think they realize that. I think the main benefit from shared crative works is being able to reuse bits of that content that suit new works, not the way people put them together. People have collaborated on creative works for a long time. The new development is that the product of that work will be able to be built upon by others.
I actually have a research project on this topic that I should be working on instead of reading Slashdot.
Having to go back to the server again and again and again to get tiny amounts of data doesn't sound too nice to me.
That's what you do each time you click on a link to go to a different web page within a site. With AJAX, you only get the data you need. It's not slow. Have you used Google Maps? GMail? That's what's going on behind the scenes, and it makes the experience far better.
Given that, how long could it be before google has a specialized .torrent search?
Like this?
Not only that, they attribute a quote to InformationWeek that doesn't appear anywhere in the article. Nice.
If you've tried to read an article on Salon.com these days, they have a "day pass" system where you have to watch an ad before you can read the articles. If force users to watch an ad before they download the show, yu can use their IP address to identify their location and target ads that way. I think that style of advertisement is more effective than TV ads, because you only have one ad, and someone isn't going to go grab a snack while the ad plays. If you break the show up into two chunks, you can do that twice, etc. Of course, you'll eventually reach the point when people will try to find another source that redistributes the shows without the advertisement. A well balanced combination of global ads in the video and local ads in the web page would probably end up working out fine.
I'm fairly sure that the tweaks he's talking about are just the general process for enabling suspend on Ubuntu, as it's not enabled by default.
How is some farker saying that he hoped "the grenade had gone off" anything REMOTELY like a threat on the life of the president?
It doesn't, but generally, it's a pretty bad idea to wish ill on the president. Most people who say things like that don't carry out their wishes, but some do. It's not smart to put yourself in their company.
Intimidation of political speech, pure and simple.
Wishing ill on the president is not political speech. If that's how people get their thoughts across, they must be pretty inarticulate. There's a big difference between "Social security isn't in danger and shouldn't be tampered with" and "Aw, the grande didn't go off!"
If you came across a site on the Internet where people were begging for your death, you'd probably report it to police, who would then choose whether or not to investigate. The president has his own dedicated police force to do this, so you'd expect that you're more likely to be confronted for wishing ill on the president than on your boss. Joking about a grenade going off isn't exactly shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but it's pretty close. It's a reasonable restriction on free speech.