The release of Windows 8 is a great day, because it means we're one step closer to the release of Windows 9, where they will hopefully fix everything that is driving away people like me (which Apple is also seeming to do, which has already started to drive me away from them, too).
This was as painful to watch as the "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell!" commercials, used to be. Maybe more painful, because I actually grew to have a bit of an affinity for Apple products from OSX on-ward. Blech.
Arbitration always benefits the corporation, who is the one giving the arbitration company the business and therefore has a symbiotic relationship with. Anyway, it doesn't matter what a EULA says. You don't lose your right to sue someone, in any form, just because they slip "don't sue me, bro!" into a contract or TOS.
I don't see why that's a problem. They intend to sell the final product for $99 and what you're pledging for on Kickstarter is a console from the first production run. So, if after the 8% Kickstarter and Amazon fees, they have $129.20 per console that they already plan on selling at $99 for a profit, then they're doing damn well. They're looking at 30% *above* what they've already determined could be a profitable price to sell at.
Remember, this money isn't to fund the entire project, which is already pretty far under way, it seems. If anything, this is all just an attempt to get a bunch of publicity and pre-orders for a product that was coming to market with or without Kickstarter. (Though we could easily argue over how this is probably a pretty shitty abuse of the spirit of Kickstarter).
That damn controller looks uncomfortable as hell. It's like they took the XBOX 360 controller and stripped out all of the contouring that makes it so comfortable and fitting for the hand. I still haven't canceled my backing pledge, but that's not so much because of my excitement over playing games on it as my excitement at having a conversation piece collector's item on my shelf ten years from now. I'll either end up with a first-run version of a super popular console or an only-run version of a total failure. Either way, it'll be worth having in my collection. Unless it's *such* a failure that it basically just turns out to be the Phantom.
It's 2012. This isn't some arcane art. You have new-hires sign a sexual harassment policy and you have all employees consume a sexual harassment policy training session every year or so (an online recorded session does just fine). This way, everyone is aware of the legal obligations, the company policy, and the responses they can expect if they violate policy. Then, you have an HR department that handles complaints and reports and acts accordingly as per law and company policy, including termination if deemed necessary.
I really can't imagine where these people are working that this is even an issue. I'm a professional in the tech industry and I can't imagine anyone I've worked with having any sort of inappropriate interactions with female colleagues (nor have I ever encountered this happening in almost two decades in the industry). Aren't we at least two or three decades past the transitional "women coming into the workplace" period? Aren't practically all the guys that would be old enough for this to even remotely be a problem for already retired?
The final solution will be the full blown commercialization of the internet. I don't mean the attempt of every mommy-blogger to weasel a nickel out of their crappy five-reader blog by plastering it with a ton of advertisements from questionable places. I mean the shifting of legislation and entry point so that the internet becomes the next television. A medium in which only a very few own all the content and disseminate it to the mass of consumers. Back to the old ways, where you and I didn't have any voice and distribution went to the highest bidder.
I mean, it has already started years ago and we can see it every time we turn around. The massive content farms that own collectives of the largest sites on the internet (I'm thinking AOL, Vox, CBS, etc). When corporations and government finally come to a solution that they're all happy with, kids won't believe us when we tell them about a time when you could make your own website, own your own server, build your own business or service, and do it all without being a multi-national conglomerate or having to get certification, licensing, and some sort of government oversight.
I'd have given a testicle for something like Khan Academy, when I was young. Instead, I got a bunch of angry overworked and under-performing teachers that just wanted me to shut up, go away, not ask questions, and *most of all* never correct them when they spread completely inaccurate information to the class. All I wanted was a way to self-educate. To a degree, I accomplished that with a lot of school-skipping, when I spent day after day at the central public library, instead. However, I was often hindered by wanting to learn things, but not knowing where to start or what path to follow. For example, I would be far ahead of where I am, today, if I had someone or something to guide me into programming a decade earlier. Back when I didn't have an internet to tell me about C and C++ and Perl. Back when the furthest I could get was "I know I want to code" and reading a book in the tiny section at the library that only really had theoretical things with pseudo-code that didn't mean anything to me at the time.
Khan (and the internet, overall) is an autodidacts wet-dream. It is what could have changed the lives of so many young people in the past who weren't stupid or lazy, but weren't getting any real meat out of their "real" education.
Yeah, I'm not so sure I'm going to trust a USB stick to work some magic when I could just use known-good utilities and practices to solve these problems. Or, better, just buy the non-tech-savvy in my life who don't have the slightest clue and just need to play casual games, surf, use email an iMac (which is what I did on Mother's Day for my mom a couple years ago). Yeah, it's a little bit of the dark-side, but I've never received a single tech call and everything works just fine.
I understand kids playing pokemon (even though it's boring as hell and someone should point them toward a real RPG). What I don't understand are all the *adults* playing pokemon.
Not only a good way, but perhaps the best. Disobeying a law often results in the government responding in clearly disproportionate and unfair ways that the public can then see (especially if you garner any press), which then draws public support to something they weren't too concerned about before or may not even have been aware of, before. It is the cornerstone of civil disobedience and civil rights movements of all kinds. Kindly obeying and quietly petitioning for change will almost never accomplish what forcing government or business into over-reacting before the eyes of the public will.
Yeah, same here. There are great TV shows on over the last few years (The Shield, The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc) -- but not enough to spend $100-$200/mo on. I haven't watched live (not even over-the-air) television in about a decade and the only commercials I'm ever confronted with are the live-reads on some of the podcasts/streams that I consume -- which I'm completely okay with.
So, basically, they can do whatever the hell they want. Talking about advertising on television is like quaint and irrelevant.
This woman's statement is idiotic and absurd. Saying some people didn't understand the language of the law any better than she/they did doesn't discredit the technical knowledge of those against it. It discredits the (intentionally murky) clarify and specificity of the language of the law.
The first thing to be concerned with is that we no longer call it "shell shock". That's what people used to call it. But, gosh, that just sounds so harsh and brutal. It's far more comfortable (especially for those of us who don't experience it) to call it something like "post traumatic stress disorder". See, that way it sounds more like something you get from working hard on a project with a quickly approaching deadline that you can prescribe squeezing a stress-ball and taking long walks through a garden to address.
If we referred to it as "shell-shock", we'd have to confront just how terrible it is. Not just individually, but as a society in the way we treat those we send off to do our dirty work and in the way we treat them when we come back. But that's too much responsibility and bother. So we just give it a disconnected term and assume it's something you'll work through with a "therapist".
They should do a series of rap songs, too. That rap is hip these days and the kids really like it. Nothing reaches young people like adults dressing up like characters and rapping! This won't turn young people off out of sheer repulsion at being patronized at all!
Exactly. I am no more the creator of data about myself that my bank and medical provider has than a tree is the creator of a painting I made of it. We are the subject of our data; not its creators. And while we should have control over it, the fact is that we don't and never will. Further, the idea that we should have the right to buy and sell it is silly. The value of your PRIVACY is far more important than the $10/yr you could get in the value of your DATA.
But it's more likely that they're acting as thugs for the pharmaceutical industry and all of this "we must censor/limit/control/identify people on the internet and enact SOPA to protect people from 'counterfeit' medications" bullshit is part of that.
And, to this day, he remains an unbelievably articulate and compelling speaker on the matter of privacy and freedom on the internet. He made a couple great appearances on the TWiT network in the last couple of years that are worth watching:
I can only assume you're being sarcastic. You can't possibly have a Slashdot UID nearly as low as mine and be ignorant of John Perry Barlow, the EFF, and this letter.
As they said, the ads will appear if you don't have a subscription or any available credit with your account. This seems entirely fair, to me. You can get a free service in return for tolerating some advertising or -- if you're like me and abhor ads -- you can pay for the service. This is exactly how things should work (as opposed to things like cable television and XBOX Live where you get advertising *even if you do pay*.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blankete
The reason we interpret this as an advertisement is that Slashdot hasn't been doing videos or product reviews or video product reviews. Or maybe you have. But I haven't seen them and I've been here for fifteen years. There is no context for having established any sort of "we do slashdot videos now" and/or "we do video product reviews now". All we get is a giant spammy sounding blurb with what looks like a commercial that could have been produced directly to put on the front of the product's website.
I don't see how anyone could have not seen our skepticism and reactions coming a mile away when we were given no context for it.
I thought it was a joke, too. I had to read through the comments and make sure I wasn't missing something in the blurb or something somewhere that explained this was an early April Fools thing where Slashdot was having a go at us. I guess that, now that Taco is gone, they decided to roll out flat-out advertising. Full blown commercials and everything (even though I have the little "no ads" option selected on Slashdot's interface).
Slashdot has become less a part of my life in the last few years. Not because of other sites. Mostly because of itself. And because I don't need it much anymore. They're doing a really good job of convincing me that I don't need to be here at *all* anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
The release of Windows 8 is a great day, because it means we're one step closer to the release of Windows 9, where they will hopefully fix everything that is driving away people like me (which Apple is also seeming to do, which has already started to drive me away from them, too).
This was as painful to watch as the "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell!" commercials, used to be. Maybe more painful, because I actually grew to have a bit of an affinity for Apple products from OSX on-ward. Blech.
Arbitration always benefits the corporation, who is the one giving the arbitration company the business and therefore has a symbiotic relationship with. Anyway, it doesn't matter what a EULA says. You don't lose your right to sue someone, in any form, just because they slip "don't sue me, bro!" into a contract or TOS.
I don't see why that's a problem. They intend to sell the final product for $99 and what you're pledging for on Kickstarter is a console from the first production run. So, if after the 8% Kickstarter and Amazon fees, they have $129.20 per console that they already plan on selling at $99 for a profit, then they're doing damn well. They're looking at 30% *above* what they've already determined could be a profitable price to sell at.
Remember, this money isn't to fund the entire project, which is already pretty far under way, it seems. If anything, this is all just an attempt to get a bunch of publicity and pre-orders for a product that was coming to market with or without Kickstarter. (Though we could easily argue over how this is probably a pretty shitty abuse of the spirit of Kickstarter).
Reddit influence.
That damn controller looks uncomfortable as hell. It's like they took the XBOX 360 controller and stripped out all of the contouring that makes it so comfortable and fitting for the hand. I still haven't canceled my backing pledge, but that's not so much because of my excitement over playing games on it as my excitement at having a conversation piece collector's item on my shelf ten years from now. I'll either end up with a first-run version of a super popular console or an only-run version of a total failure. Either way, it'll be worth having in my collection. Unless it's *such* a failure that it basically just turns out to be the Phantom.
It's 2012. This isn't some arcane art. You have new-hires sign a sexual harassment policy and you have all employees consume a sexual harassment policy training session every year or so (an online recorded session does just fine). This way, everyone is aware of the legal obligations, the company policy, and the responses they can expect if they violate policy. Then, you have an HR department that handles complaints and reports and acts accordingly as per law and company policy, including termination if deemed necessary.
I really can't imagine where these people are working that this is even an issue. I'm a professional in the tech industry and I can't imagine anyone I've worked with having any sort of inappropriate interactions with female colleagues (nor have I ever encountered this happening in almost two decades in the industry). Aren't we at least two or three decades past the transitional "women coming into the workplace" period? Aren't practically all the guys that would be old enough for this to even remotely be a problem for already retired?
The final solution will be the full blown commercialization of the internet. I don't mean the attempt of every mommy-blogger to weasel a nickel out of their crappy five-reader blog by plastering it with a ton of advertisements from questionable places. I mean the shifting of legislation and entry point so that the internet becomes the next television. A medium in which only a very few own all the content and disseminate it to the mass of consumers. Back to the old ways, where you and I didn't have any voice and distribution went to the highest bidder.
I mean, it has already started years ago and we can see it every time we turn around. The massive content farms that own collectives of the largest sites on the internet (I'm thinking AOL, Vox, CBS, etc). When corporations and government finally come to a solution that they're all happy with, kids won't believe us when we tell them about a time when you could make your own website, own your own server, build your own business or service, and do it all without being a multi-national conglomerate or having to get certification, licensing, and some sort of government oversight.
I'd have given a testicle for something like Khan Academy, when I was young. Instead, I got a bunch of angry overworked and under-performing teachers that just wanted me to shut up, go away, not ask questions, and *most of all* never correct them when they spread completely inaccurate information to the class. All I wanted was a way to self-educate. To a degree, I accomplished that with a lot of school-skipping, when I spent day after day at the central public library, instead. However, I was often hindered by wanting to learn things, but not knowing where to start or what path to follow. For example, I would be far ahead of where I am, today, if I had someone or something to guide me into programming a decade earlier. Back when I didn't have an internet to tell me about C and C++ and Perl. Back when the furthest I could get was "I know I want to code" and reading a book in the tiny section at the library that only really had theoretical things with pseudo-code that didn't mean anything to me at the time.
Khan (and the internet, overall) is an autodidacts wet-dream. It is what could have changed the lives of so many young people in the past who weren't stupid or lazy, but weren't getting any real meat out of their "real" education.
Yeah, I'm not so sure I'm going to trust a USB stick to work some magic when I could just use known-good utilities and practices to solve these problems. Or, better, just buy the non-tech-savvy in my life who don't have the slightest clue and just need to play casual games, surf, use email an iMac (which is what I did on Mother's Day for my mom a couple years ago). Yeah, it's a little bit of the dark-side, but I've never received a single tech call and everything works just fine.
I understand kids playing pokemon (even though it's boring as hell and someone should point them toward a real RPG). What I don't understand are all the *adults* playing pokemon.
Not only a good way, but perhaps the best. Disobeying a law often results in the government responding in clearly disproportionate and unfair ways that the public can then see (especially if you garner any press), which then draws public support to something they weren't too concerned about before or may not even have been aware of, before. It is the cornerstone of civil disobedience and civil rights movements of all kinds. Kindly obeying and quietly petitioning for change will almost never accomplish what forcing government or business into over-reacting before the eyes of the public will.
Yeah, same here. There are great TV shows on over the last few years (The Shield, The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc) -- but not enough to spend $100-$200/mo on. I haven't watched live (not even over-the-air) television in about a decade and the only commercials I'm ever confronted with are the live-reads on some of the podcasts/streams that I consume -- which I'm completely okay with.
So, basically, they can do whatever the hell they want. Talking about advertising on television is like quaint and irrelevant.
This woman's statement is idiotic and absurd. Saying some people didn't understand the language of the law any better than she/they did doesn't discredit the technical knowledge of those against it. It discredits the (intentionally murky) clarify and specificity of the language of the law.
The first thing to be concerned with is that we no longer call it "shell shock". That's what people used to call it. But, gosh, that just sounds so harsh and brutal. It's far more comfortable (especially for those of us who don't experience it) to call it something like "post traumatic stress disorder". See, that way it sounds more like something you get from working hard on a project with a quickly approaching deadline that you can prescribe squeezing a stress-ball and taking long walks through a garden to address.
If we referred to it as "shell-shock", we'd have to confront just how terrible it is. Not just individually, but as a society in the way we treat those we send off to do our dirty work and in the way we treat them when we come back. But that's too much responsibility and bother. So we just give it a disconnected term and assume it's something you'll work through with a "therapist".
They should do a series of rap songs, too. That rap is hip these days and the kids really like it. Nothing reaches young people like adults dressing up like characters and rapping! This won't turn young people off out of sheer repulsion at being patronized at all!
Exactly. I am no more the creator of data about myself that my bank and medical provider has than a tree is the creator of a painting I made of it. We are the subject of our data; not its creators. And while we should have control over it, the fact is that we don't and never will. Further, the idea that we should have the right to buy and sell it is silly. The value of your PRIVACY is far more important than the $10/yr you could get in the value of your DATA.
But it's more likely that they're acting as thugs for the pharmaceutical industry and all of this "we must censor/limit/control/identify people on the internet and enact SOPA to protect people from 'counterfeit' medications" bullshit is part of that.
And, to this day, he remains an unbelievably articulate and compelling speaker on the matter of privacy and freedom on the internet. He made a couple great appearances on the TWiT network in the last couple of years that are worth watching:
http://twit.tv/specials43
http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/24
I've been online since phone phreaking and running BBSes in the late 80s and Barlow is a giant.
I can only assume you're being sarcastic. You can't possibly have a Slashdot UID nearly as low as mine and be ignorant of John Perry Barlow, the EFF, and this letter.
As they said, the ads will appear if you don't have a subscription or any available credit with your account. This seems entirely fair, to me. You can get a free service in return for tolerating some advertising or -- if you're like me and abhor ads -- you can pay for the service. This is exactly how things should work (as opposed to things like cable television and XBOX Live where you get advertising *even if you do pay*.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blankete
The reason we interpret this as an advertisement is that Slashdot hasn't been doing videos or product reviews or video product reviews. Or maybe you have. But I haven't seen them and I've been here for fifteen years. There is no context for having established any sort of "we do slashdot videos now" and/or "we do video product reviews now". All we get is a giant spammy sounding blurb with what looks like a commercial that could have been produced directly to put on the front of the product's website.
I don't see how anyone could have not seen our skepticism and reactions coming a mile away when we were given no context for it.
I thought it was a joke, too. I had to read through the comments and make sure I wasn't missing something in the blurb or something somewhere that explained this was an early April Fools thing where Slashdot was having a go at us. I guess that, now that Taco is gone, they decided to roll out flat-out advertising. Full blown commercials and everything (even though I have the little "no ads" option selected on Slashdot's interface).
Slashdot has become less a part of my life in the last few years. Not because of other sites. Mostly because of itself. And because I don't need it much anymore. They're doing a really good job of convincing me that I don't need to be here at *all* anymore.
The question everyone is probably asking themselves is "what countries is this censored in?".