...now that I don't have to take it seriously. I love the department tagline. Somehow the sight of a monkey in a fez seems utterly fitting. Any chance we could make that the new SCO icon?
The point I think you are trying to get across, if I may wipe off the ad-hominem, is whether the accusation of censorship is valid when applied to the practice of moderation, etc. on a web forum.
Censorship, as an accusation, depends upon an assumed social contract. In the case of a web site, this contract would be that the forum is a totally free marketplace of ideas. I fully recognize that a web forum does not necessarily imply that contract. The question I was asking is: what does that make the forum in question? Freedom also means the freedom to associate, and that means the freedom to be exclusive as a group. Are web forums exemplary of freedom as a group? Or are they free as is (supposed to be) the press? Does the technology behind web forums tend to encourage one type of freedom over another?
And whatever that control is, it sure as hell isn't censorship.
If the idea behind the group is to share each other's comments about the news, and the control involves governing the content of those comments, how is that not censorship?
What does this say about the social value of content distribution mechanisms that do not have a reverse economy of scale, such as freenet? If the site depends upon a given flow of visitors to fund ever increasing bandwidth and equipment costs, does free speech depend upon escaping from that system?
If I graffiti your house, and you clean it off, would you call that censorship too?
I don't know if that's the best analogy. This is a little more like if I were to bring a group together to paint posters, and having a good portion of the group decide it would be more fun to use the paper to make paper airplanes. They've taken advantage of both the resources and group that I've provided to do something completely divergent from the original purpose. I then must decide whether to go with the flow or fly into a rage and tear up all the paper airplanes.
I have several children, and we live on a cul-de-sac (sigh: yes, I know). Many other children live nearby. I see this course of events play out every day. One (leader) will decide that the group will go to their house and do X. Let's say, a tea party for example. But everyone gets there, and a subgroup forms who would rather play with the leader's hungry hungry hippo game or some shit. What follows is a question of group dynamics and power. The leader ultimately can enforce adherence to the original plan, because everyone's in her house. But she knows that doing so could result in everyone leaving in disgust. She'll either tolerate it, because she's more interested in people, or forbid it, because she's more interested in power. This is almost never a question answered by the leader's personal ethics, but by the number and influence of people who wish to "defect". The leader will tend to take what she can get.
The ultimate question here is what is your purpose in creating a web site that features a group that you've invited in to create content? Are you interested in the group, the people, the content, what? Does it all really boil down to "I will excercise as much power as a reasonably large group of people will tolerate."?
Depends on how you define secure. If a major windows site gets broken into like this, you don't hear about it. You only hear about Windows problems when a.) Microsoft decides to release a "security fix", or b.) when large corporations and state governments are brought to their knees.
The real story is (and this groks with your point, by the way), how do you trust someone trying to proselytize you with an alien philosophy of computer use when they still run wu-ftpd and don't do backups?
The Einstein quote is compelling, but when you compare it to this:
That fellow Einstein suits his convenience. Every year he retracts what he wrote the year before. Einstein - 1915 - age 36
It becomes obvious that even he had some regard for his post age 30 work. Most of the important clarifications and refinement of relativity occurred later in his life, so it appears even he was wrong about himself. Galileo's most significant contributions to science revolved around the invention of the telescope (1610 - age 46) and the resultant discovery of the Galilean moons.
I'll agree that most scientists who contribute meaningfully to science get started by age 30, but it is obvious that this is not a time limit at which those contributions cease.
Most people that make any significant contributions to their field do so before they're 30.
Ever heard of Galileo, Hawking, or Einstein?
Either you are a historian devoted exclusively to the lives of Mongol warlords, a fan of boy bands, or a Microsoft astroturfer. Which of the above I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Gosh. The letters in question are indeed there, and completely identical to the work in question. I mean, I guess we could change the filename and preserve the integrity of the work as free software, but what about the installed base using the old name?
I'm afraid they may have something there. I only hope they offer a sweet licensing deal so I can diligently steer clear of any future IP troubles. I wouldn't want anyone thinking I'm a software pirate.
Re:Makes me feel important
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Or you can sit here and feel sorry for yourself because the people who have bothered aren't speaking for you.
I believe you misunderstand me. First of all, there are groups that are speaking for me and whom I support. An objective article on the topic would have led with a discussion of the EFF rather than mentioning it as a tagline to the MoveOn.org human interest piece. MoveOn.org is significantly more obscure among techno-activists than is the EFF, and I believe this reversal of importance is an example of media bias driven by the political message of the two groups and how well they line up with the agenda of the LA Times.
I do not decry the value of the message of MoveOn.org, I simply dispute the relative significance. As such, I feel no loss of belonging or voice in not belonging to a group with its scope and influence.
Nothing like being patronised by the mainstream media to make people feel relevant.
Particularly when portrayed as anti-war, stick-it-to-the-man, leftist hippies. My phone calls, although duly placed to idiots like Bill O'Reilly and Orrin Hatch, have also melted the phone banks of people like Berman. Furthermore, and most emphatically, MoveOn.org is not the nexus of my political thought.
OK, I'll bite on this troll just because it's still at zero, and the moderators need a reason to finish it off, placing it firmly in -1 hell where it belongs.
In the days before user-paid television service, it is true that advertising was the business impetus to put up huge powerful TV transmitters and undertake the other investmentss necessary to support land-based TV broadcasting. You are correct, therefore, in pointing out that TV content from 1977 derives from the business need to advertise.
But to suggest that the meager investments in bandwidth and hardware the average spammer makes is somehow otherwise useful to the world is absurd. When one considers that most of the infrastructure costs of spam are borne by the recipient rather than the sender, the idea of spammers contributing to the public good is assinine.
This was part of a time-honored repair procedure back when I used to work on PC's. The basic troubleshooting question was: Would the drive spin up?
If not, remedies would range from the patented wrist flick where one would hold the drive outside the case while the computer booted and tried to add a little inertial boost to the spin motor during initialization to putting the drive in a freezer for an hour.
If it spun up but would not initialize, we would often replace the controller board. A buddy of mine even built a homemade "clean room" with a clear trashbag to open a hard drive and replace internal components. His efforts were successful - the drive worked long enough to back up.
And this is interesting how? Because it's a jab at commercial software? Does it somehow imply open source is better?
From TFA:
More and more, people are turning to tech-savvy friends, online message boards and paying independent computer service firms to get results.
Well, the article didn't imply it, but you raise a good point. It appears the methods of providing support in the free software community are indeed superior to commercial support.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Good post! I don't mean this to sound like a challenge, but where could I do more reading on this?
Who would have thought that Rambo's bow and arrow would have been prophetic about future weapons technology?
Nuclear hand grenades for all!
So they are trying to sell licenses on something they attest in court to be public domain. I wonder if the right hand knows what the left is doing.
...now that I don't have to take it seriously. I love the department tagline. Somehow the sight of a monkey in a fez seems utterly fitting. Any chance we could make that the new SCO icon?
The point I think you are trying to get across, if I may wipe off the ad-hominem, is whether the accusation of censorship is valid when applied to the practice of moderation, etc. on a web forum.
Censorship, as an accusation, depends upon an assumed social contract. In the case of a web site, this contract would be that the forum is a totally free marketplace of ideas. I fully recognize that a web forum does not necessarily imply that contract. The question I was asking is: what does that make the forum in question? Freedom also means the freedom to associate, and that means the freedom to be exclusive as a group. Are web forums exemplary of freedom as a group? Or are they free as is (supposed to be) the press? Does the technology behind web forums tend to encourage one type of freedom over another?
And whatever that control is, it sure as hell isn't censorship.
If the idea behind the group is to share each other's comments about the news, and the control involves governing the content of those comments, how is that not censorship?
What does this say about the social value of content distribution mechanisms that do not have a reverse economy of scale, such as freenet? If the site depends upon a given flow of visitors to fund ever increasing bandwidth and equipment costs, does free speech depend upon escaping from that system?
If I graffiti your house, and you clean it off, would you call that censorship too?
I don't know if that's the best analogy. This is a little more like if I were to bring a group together to paint posters, and having a good portion of the group decide it would be more fun to use the paper to make paper airplanes. They've taken advantage of both the resources and group that I've provided to do something completely divergent from the original purpose. I then must decide whether to go with the flow or fly into a rage and tear up all the paper airplanes.
I have several children, and we live on a cul-de-sac (sigh: yes, I know). Many other children live nearby. I see this course of events play out every day. One (leader) will decide that the group will go to their house and do X. Let's say, a tea party for example. But everyone gets there, and a subgroup forms who would rather play with the leader's hungry hungry hippo game or some shit. What follows is a question of group dynamics and power. The leader ultimately can enforce adherence to the original plan, because everyone's in her house. But she knows that doing so could result in everyone leaving in disgust. She'll either tolerate it, because she's more interested in people, or forbid it, because she's more interested in power. This is almost never a question answered by the leader's personal ethics, but by the number and influence of people who wish to "defect". The leader will tend to take what she can get.
The ultimate question here is what is your purpose in creating a web site that features a group that you've invited in to create content? Are you interested in the group, the people, the content, what? Does it all really boil down to "I will excercise as much power as a reasonably large group of people will tolerate."?
Depends on how you define secure. If a major windows site gets broken into like this, you don't hear about it. You only hear about Windows problems when a.) Microsoft decides to release a "security fix", or b.) when large corporations and state governments are brought to their knees.
The real story is (and this groks with your point, by the way), how do you trust someone trying to proselytize you with an alien philosophy of computer use when they still run wu-ftpd and don't do backups?
The Einstein quote is compelling, but when you compare it to this:
It becomes obvious that even he had some regard for his post age 30 work. Most of the important clarifications and refinement of relativity occurred later in his life, so it appears even he was wrong about himself. Galileo's most significant contributions to science revolved around the invention of the telescope (1610 - age 46) and the resultant discovery of the Galilean moons.
I'll agree that most scientists who contribute meaningfully to science get started by age 30, but it is obvious that this is not a time limit at which those contributions cease.
Most people that make any significant contributions to their field do so before they're 30.
Ever heard of Galileo, Hawking, or Einstein?
Either you are a historian devoted exclusively to the lives of Mongol warlords, a fan of boy bands, or a Microsoft astroturfer. Which of the above I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
More and more people will become highly (and i mean highly) trained specialists in whatever they do.
Wouldn't the resultant increase in the rates the 200 year old plumbers charge pretty much absorb all the economic benefits?
INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip
Gosh. The letters in question are indeed there, and completely identical to the work in question. I mean, I guess we could change the filename and preserve the integrity of the work as free software, but what about the installed base using the old name?
I'm afraid they may have something there. I only hope they offer a sweet licensing deal so I can diligently steer clear of any future IP troubles. I wouldn't want anyone thinking I'm a software pirate.
Or you can sit here and feel sorry for yourself because the people who have bothered aren't speaking for you.
I believe you misunderstand me. First of all, there are groups that are speaking for me and whom I support. An objective article on the topic would have led with a discussion of the EFF rather than mentioning it as a tagline to the MoveOn.org human interest piece. MoveOn.org is significantly more obscure among techno-activists than is the EFF, and I believe this reversal of importance is an example of media bias driven by the political message of the two groups and how well they line up with the agenda of the LA Times.
I do not decry the value of the message of MoveOn.org, I simply dispute the relative significance. As such, I feel no loss of belonging or voice in not belonging to a group with its scope and influence.
Nothing like being patronised by the mainstream media to make people feel relevant.
Particularly when portrayed as anti-war, stick-it-to-the-man, leftist hippies. My phone calls, although duly placed to idiots like Bill O'Reilly and Orrin Hatch, have also melted the phone banks of people like Berman. Furthermore, and most emphatically, MoveOn.org is not the nexus of my political thought.
OK, I'll bite on this troll just because it's still at zero, and the moderators need a reason to finish it off, placing it firmly in -1 hell where it belongs.
In the days before user-paid television service, it is true that advertising was the business impetus to put up huge powerful TV transmitters and undertake the other investmentss necessary to support land-based TV broadcasting. You are correct, therefore, in pointing out that TV content from 1977 derives from the business need to advertise.
But to suggest that the meager investments in bandwidth and hardware the average spammer makes is somehow otherwise useful to the world is absurd. When one considers that most of the infrastructure costs of spam are borne by the recipient rather than the sender, the idea of spammers contributing to the public good is assinine.
This was part of a time-honored repair procedure back when I used to work on PC's. The basic troubleshooting question was: Would the drive spin up?
If not, remedies would range from the patented wrist flick where one would hold the drive outside the case while the computer booted and tried to add a little inertial boost to the spin motor during initialization to putting the drive in a freezer for an hour.
If it spun up but would not initialize, we would often replace the controller board. A buddy of mine even built a homemade "clean room" with a clear trashbag to open a hard drive and replace internal components. His efforts were successful - the drive worked long enough to back up.
And this is interesting how? Because it's a jab at commercial software? Does it somehow imply open source is better?
From TFA:
More and more, people are turning to tech-savvy friends, online message boards and paying independent computer service firms to get results.
Well, the article didn't imply it, but you raise a good point. It appears the methods of providing support in the free software community are indeed superior to commercial support.
Why is it K5 gets the credit for posting the link to SCO's linux source?
For the sheer entertainment value of slashdotting K5.
On a ranking of groups not to piss off...
Wow. If the Columbian Cartel tools around in Blue SUVs and shoots at you with uzis, I wonder what the IBM gang car is?