1. You cannot annotate them. No writing in the margins, no circling or underlining interesting stuff, no putting in a footnote proving the author's argument is illogical or flawed. With a book, you can scribble in it and then pass it on to a friend. This is a major irremovable flaw in any DRM system.
2. They're not efficient. By this, I mean that it's more difficult to vary your reading speed, and in particular to skim to the juicy parts.
No, it's about a shift in power. Geek skills are a critical part of the modern information society. We geeks/nerds have created a new kind of social structure, in open source, something that competes with the business enterprise and the state. People with geek/nerd talents are essential for most modern businesses, just as a vibrant business community is essential for a healthy nation-state. This power shift trickles down into societal attitudes: kids don't tinker on cars, they mod their computers. Small talk at parties is about your computer gear, instead of cars. Our pursuits are adopted more and more by the world, our films and books sell - much to the bafflement and disdain of the guardians of old bourgouis culture. (Every read a NYT review of one of the Tolkien films?)
It's not about the money, it's the power that can get the status. Just as money could buy a noble title -- and status -- for the banker Rothschild in 1816, more and more, geeks can turn their tech knowledge into money and traditional measures of status.
American public schools are designed with the factory as a model -- everyone is supposed to progress in lockstep. All children the same age are supposed to be learning the same things, and teachers are given little or no support if they try to tailor or subdivide their class to address the very real wide range of abilities and knowledge. This system works poorly for all but the mid-range students, and cannot deal well at all with children whose abilities vary widely. Furthermore, the factory approach pushes students onward whether or not they've learned foundation knowledge; this causes lifelong problems for many in mathematics, especially.
Another corrosive problem is that far too many teachers have not mastered the subjects they teach. It is difficult to correctly teach what you do not know or understand, whatever the teachers' colleges may claim. Those unfortunately ignorant instructors are incompetent, and should be removed. But do we have the mechanisms to identify them, much less remove them? No.
Here are a few anecdotes, to concretely illustrate the problems with the factory system:
I know a 10-year old who can spell and write better than most college students, read difficult texts like Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf, but is struggling with 4th grade math. How can someone like that get appropriately challenged in English and Math in the one-size-fits-all world of the American public school?
One high school student missed most of fractions in the earlier grades, as a result of illness. Although she attended one of the better public school systems in the Bay Area, the system had no mechanism for filling in the missed knowledge. For that reason, she struggled through geometry and algebra, making mistakes because of her poor understanding of basic fractions. (I taught SAT prep part time; it has given me a very jaundiced view of even the best public and private schools.) This is a very common story, unfortunately.
Some teachers pass on their own misconceptions; one teacher taught their poor students a confused muddle of the methods for adding and subtracting fractions, so that they learned to do fractional arithmetic like multiplication and vice versa. Of course, the system never caught and fixed the error, everyone had to move on, in lockstep, and muddle through somehow.
These are problems in the design of the education system, and are unlikely to be fixed by adding more money, adding accountability, or anything short of revolutionary upheaval and a lot of teacher reeducation. The private schools in the U.S. share the same design and philosophy, so privatization and/or vouchers would likewise make little difference. One exception are (some) Montessori schools, where childern learn at a pace tailored to their individual needs, at varying levels for each subject.
Finally, the education system has pretty much abandoned the teaching of logic and classical rhetoric, though they were common subjects for schoolchildren a century or more ago. Both were once considered necessary for someone to consider themselves well-educated, but as the feeble level of public debate shows (in politics and on the internet), that has not been true for many, many decades. Most people wouldn't know an ad hominem attack if it bit them on the nose, and fewer still think about tailoring their argument to their audience, or organizing it to best effect.
Some people, in despair, disgust, or religious fervor, have taken to home-schooling their children. It speaks volumes about the inadequacies of public schooling that home-schooled children generally do much better than publicly-schooled counterparts, even though many of those home-schooled students are taught an archaic mixture of basic 3Rs and anti-scientific Christianity. Some are even using history texts from the 19th century (available online)!
Although the public school as an institution has wide support (note Cal. Gov. Schwartzenegger's political problems), it needs radical reform if it's to adequately serve a post-industrial society. The factory system, perhaps appropriate for the clock-punching mid-20th century, does not train students to be the self-motivated, creative people that information age society needs.
The owners and management increase their income, by cutting the cost of manufacture. Because they already have most of the necessities covered, they invest the savings, resulting in rising asset (real-estate) prices. Rents actually fall, because fewer people are working and can afford rent. Asset prices rise, because most of the benefits of the new efficiencies have been captured by the already wealthy.
Actually, what you'll see is asset prices rise where the jobs disappear, and new prosperity among working people in the places the work went. It's fairly predictable: capital is relatively scarce in India and China, so its piece of the pie drops (the middle class and working people become relatively more prosperous, the income/wealth gap lessens). In the U.S., Europe, and Japan, labor is scarce (that is, lots of capital for each 'unit' of labor, compared to India/China), so its share of the pie grows. The benefits of trade go to the sectors ('factors of production' in economist-speak) which are relatively oversupplied -- labor-intensive in India and China, capital-intensive in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Information work is labor intensive -- educated labor (aka human capital), but labor nonetheless; labor and human capital are (relatively) in surplus in India and China, and scarce in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Formerly, the human capital moved (a.k.a. the brain drain), as did ordinary labor when it could, but with the Internet in place human capital no longer has to, we can trade instead.
In India and China, the new prosperity will be mainly spent on goods and services. In the U.S., etc., the capital-holders spend it on... more assets. What else are they going to spend it on? More lavish parties, larger mansions? So asset prices go up compared to other prices (housing bubble, anyone? Yah, yah, it's more complicated than that, and as much tax policy and interest rates as anything, but all the factors are pulling in the same direction for once.)
What's going on with outsourcing is really more like what happened to manufacturing and agriculture with the introduction of railroads; information-age work can now be moved around quickly and efficiently. Before the internet, communication (transportation) costs and time lag were too great to make anything but local production feasible for most information work. Note that this is not mechanization of the work, just an innovation in transportation technology. Mechanization of information work is also happening, but the picture's a bit less clear there.
It's a tremendous boon to the economy, but it may also spell the death of the professional (craftsman, to use the manufacturing term). Factory-type production really isn't efficient until the transportation problems disappear, which they just (in the last 20 years) have for information work.
Having information on computer, connected almost instantly world-wide, and searchable is fundamentally different. It is a greater innovation than the railroad, telegraph or deep-ocean sailing ships, IMO. Admittedly, Google is only adding the searchable part to that.
If you'd like to read some actually thoughtful discussion of "blogs vs. the traditional media", check out
Dan Gillmor's old blog.
Dan was the San Jose Merc's tech columnist, has a done a lot of serious thinking about where blogs are taking journalism, and it's in that blog. Two cent summary for the lazy:mainstream media, especially newspapers, are dying already; they are going to have to make radical changes. But read the blog and associated links, and you'll understand why, and probably come to agree if you don't already.
Lock-in can become a serious problem for enterprise software customers, if their vendor becomes focused on short-term bottom line results. It can be very tempting to boost short-term or medium-term numbers by milking customers who are locked in. The fall-off in revenue only happens years later when the customers, soured by having been reamed, switch to a less ruthless or more far-sighted competitor or to open source.
The people who directed the reaming, of course, have long since moved on to other employment, won by their 'stellar' results.
I don't mind viewing adverts IF I know in advance what they'll be like, or if there are any. Unfortunately, we get no notice when we click on a link, and no choice. We have to accept a pig in a poke, most of the time, and that's not much of a choice. Adblocking lets us have a choice, and freedom from ads if we want.
The problem is, ad-ridden sites usually don't tell us they're ad-ridden. We innocently follow a link, thinking we'll get a nice package of useful information, and instead we sometimes get a mess of intrusive, annoying ads, or worse. Who's violating the social contract here? Not us, I think.
On the internet, the expectation is that you'll get information when you follow a link. Advertising is not information: it's not new, important, and truthful (often not even one of the three). It is usually an uninvited burden.
If I had a choice, I'd avoid the ads, or at least make an informed choice (as I do with Slashdot). But sites with ads are like a plumber who invites his buddy the insurance salesman along on his house call. We get no warning that ads are coming along. Since we are being deceived, it is fair for us to enforce our understanding of the social contract.
Very simple question: If there was a copy of Adblock that would completely stop loading or displaying any page that contained blocked content, would you use it? Perhaps it could show a NetNanny like "Unapproved Advertising" instead, and you could go looking for an alternative source of the information you seek. This would be a completely moral and completely legitimate opposition to web advertising, and you could go through life happy that you've given the finger to every site that has a "poor business model".
Yes, faster than you could say "web content"! All the commercial and advertising sites are usually noise, and I would love to filter them out when I'm looking for real information. Yes, there are a few sites I'd actually pay for, and sometimes I'd be happy to check sites with ads, but I would like the option! (I'm not sure I'd pay for sites where most of the content is added by the readers. Just having control of that data flow is perhaps enough of a reward to the owners.)
Unfortunately, the USPTO has been patenting algorithms (ideas), and discoveries. It has also been basically ignoring the requirements of non-obviousness and usefulness; (interesting recent article in The Economist: http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm? story_id=3738910).
Many of the patents never should have been issued, and there's no incentive for the Patent Office to clean up the mess. The system is badly broken, so many of us oppose the E.U. adoption of U.S. patent laws. The E.U. should put in place a moratorium on the enforcement of U.S. patents until the U.S. cleans up its mess, at the very least. Preferably, it should avoid extending software patents at all; implementing an algorithm (which is not patentable) is often a trivial exercise (which is not supposed to be patentable).
It's the fault of faculty, because they don't advise the students better?!? And this has some direct relation to the poor performance of the U.S. in the competition?
And all U.S. universities have this problem because Stanford does?!? I don't quite see the logic here.
Here's how this argument seems to go:
1. Stanford does a poor job of counseling its undergraduate students (supported by evidence)
2. Therefore, all major U.S. universities do a poor job of counseling their undergraduate students.
3. Poor counseling means that the students are not counselled to work hard at these competitions (a reach, you didn't explicitly say this, but it's the only way I can see this argument making a little sense.)
4. Therefore, the students lose these competitions.
The logic here is pretty weak:
a) The second step is
quite a leap, and a standard logical fallacy.
b) If U.S. students are not being counselled to work hard at these competitions, isn't it is more likely because the counsellors share the general U.S. attitudes I mentioned, than poor counselling?
Finally, if your post gets modded down, it's probably because of the incredibly (for a Stanford student) poor logic shown in the post. Whose fault is that?!
...it's a legitimate contest, tests something important, and the U.S. teams were beaten.
I'm American, and love my country, but we have to face facts. U.S. society doesn't place a lot of value on academic knowledge, compared to the rest of the world. Our cultural heroes aren't scientists, academics, and thinkers -- they are entertainers and athletes. We respect practicality, and making money, not intellectual understanding.
Our society has a longstanding democratic suspicion of elites, including intellectual elites, which often shows up as a disdain for 'impractical' academics. There are several examples of this cultural disdain in the responses to this topic (taking the form of, "who cares, it has no relevance to the practical realm of real-world programming/software engineering."
You can argue about whether or not this disdain for intellectual mastery is good, but the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the theory of evolution isn't widely accepted. Perhaps our culture's disdain for and mistrust of elites has a real price, and this contest is one place it shows up? Perhaps it also encourages many of the brightest students to go into areas where they can make money -- law, medical, or business school -- rather than academia?
It was about the American colonies wanting a proverbial "seat at the table", not about English monopolies.
The Boston Tea Party was a response to the Tea Act. A quick Google gives the following, among many others:
"In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which gave the English East India Company a chance to avert bankruptcy by granting a monopoly on the importation of tea into the colonies."
u-s-history.com
" American merchants recognized this monopoly took money from their pockets, and resisted this tea monopoly. Merchants added to the revolutionary fervor. Locally the agents of the East India company were pressured to resign their posts, and ships were sent away unloaded from American coasts."
iboston.org
This doesn't sound at all like protest about representation, does it? The Revolution was fueled by many things, including representation, but the Boston Tea Party was mainly rebellion against a monopoly.
Monarchs gave monopolies to benefit their friends, and possibly to guarantee that they'd be able to recoup their costs of building manufacturing facilities. Never mind that it prevents others from doing the same, more effectively. We recognise today that this is not a good thing, in manufacturing. Why should it be a good thing for ideas?
Indeed, and they're going to eat a lot better once society cuts out the monopolists in the middle.
If we want to defeat DRM and other IP monopolies, we're going to have to invent a better way to reward creators. Once there's a clearly superior way to reward them, the IP monopolies with wither away.... ok, so they won't, they'll fight tooth and nail, bribe our legislators, spread FUD, and paint opponents as "pirates". We've got a very difficult battle until we can develop a better way to reward creators.
An idea is not "intangible goods". Everyone can have an idea at the same time, sing the same song at the same time, perform the same Shakespearean play at the same time. There is no rational reason to prevent this. Ideas and songs do not behave like chairs or clothing -- many people can use them at the same time. We do want to encourage people to craft songs, think up new ideas, and so on. But we do not need to create a new form of property out of ideas and songs to do so.
Allowing our government to grant a monopoly on these things is, IMO, incredibly counterproductive. It reminds me most of the way some European monarchs treated manufacturing when it began to grow -- individuals were given exclusive rights to manufacture this or that product. The countries which did not follow this practice developed vibrant economies, and those that did eventually abandoned the practice in order to catch up.
In other words, copyrights and so forth are the opposite of free market capitalism, just as the monopolies granted by the old monarchies were. To refresh you memory, recall the Boston Tea Party? It was the American colonists' rebellion against the King George's imposition of one of those monarchical monopolies.
Free markets are much better for manufacturing and trading societies, and free use of ideas, songs and stories will be much more productive for our society.
The founding fathers were bitterly split between those opposed to a vigorous central government and those that thought it was necessary. This split became quite harsh after the adoption of the Constitution, and nearly came to spilling blood. One cannot truthfully say "the founders believed X" or "the founders believed Y" about the role of Federal government, when the fact is that they disagreed.
Read Joseph Ellis' excellent biography, "His Excellency: George Washington", if you want to know more (and come to understand why Washington is considered a great man, which puzzled me 'till I read "His Excellency").
The problem is, the recent expansion of copyright and other intellectual monopolies have a lot to do with technology. It's an unfortunate development that affects all of us, profoundly reducing our freedom as geeks and technophiles.
The U.S. government has been pushing this expansion of intellectual monopolies on the rest of the world. The degree to which other countries buckle under to this pressure affects us all. And it's pure politics, like it or not. We can't curl up in our little geek world and ignore politics any longer, or we'll lose our technological freedoms.
And when you start talking politics, you get some retarded commentary. It's an unavoidable annoyance, we have to just deal with it.
Never mind that more than a few American political observers (pundits) have pointed out in the last few years that the U.S. has embarked upon a clearly imperial foreign policy.
Why would the U.S. government announce that it was an empire when it's evident to even modestly astute observers? Most republics that establish an empire avoid the term, for political and self-esteem reasons; it's mainly the hindsight of historians that affix the label.
In my state (each state here in the US is different) we have a "right to work" law, which paradoxically allows employers to fire for ANY reason or none at all, with the usual exceptions for discrimination, whistle-blowing, etc.
Sure, "right-to-work" is doublespeak. Distressingly common these days, but it works so sleazeballs use it.
Free speech is an inalienable human right, not a matter of law. The American Constitution builds that right, and others, into our political life -- because that is social sphere that the Constitution regulates. Americans have the freedom to associate with organizations in the religious and commercial sphere that don't respect that right -- but that doesn't eliminate our intrinsic right to free speech in those spheres!
Most American scorn societies and organizations that infringe on that right, considering them backward and authoritarian. Consider attitudes towards Scientology (whose use of copyright to stifle dissent is notorious) or efforts by the Catholic Church to silence dissenters (mostly officials of the Church); do we consider those rightful actions?
The commercial sphere is no different. Free speech should be the norm, but instead -- probably because businesses are authoritarian organizations rather than democratic ones -- it is not. The arguments for free speech in the commercial sphere are just as strong as in the political one, and generally the same arguments. But free speech threatens authority, and so it gets suppressed.
Of course, there are things that are the commercial equivalent of 'national security' -- non-public financial information, key stategy information. There are a few reasonable restrictions on free speech. NDAs about company secrets are necessary, should be honored, and should be enforcable. But where the line gets drawn says a lot about an organization.
The whole point of the right to free speech is that criticism is protected. No one needs the right to freely speak praise! I can't say whether or not this guy was rightfully fired (having not seen the stuff that he initially posted, which might fall under the 'national security' heading).
No, the relationship is causal -- predatory pricing.
Microsoft is a classic monopolist, and shows the symptoms: significantly higher profits than other software industry businesses, over many years. If MSoft's products were in competitive sectors, its profits would be more in line with the rest of the industry, as competition would lower prices (basic Econ 101). Instead, it reaps returns far above average.
Just read a few of the other articles on that site -- these people are polemicists, not economists. And not very good ones, either; their arguments have many logical holes. Lots of vigorous arm-waving, no rigor. It's probably some Republican-funded policy paper mill, clearly not an academic think tank./ignore
I disagree. I think combat MMOs are more compelling for three reasons:
1. There is more randomness in combat, and that randomness occasionally presents an unforseen difficulty or a challenge. The variability makes it more interesting. Tradeskills, by contrast, have no variability in most MMOS. At least, no variability that presents a challenge that players can react to.
2. Combat MMO monsters have (in compelling MMOs), a wide variety. They have different abilities, stats, and AI behaviour, all of which present the players with a puzzle to solve. When the puzzles are solved, the monsters known and understood, then the game becomes more of a grind.
3. The main timesink in combat MMOs is the combat. The combat itself is fun, because it presents a series of challenges to the player. When it becomes routine, it becomes a grind.
ATITD seems more of a treadmill in large part because the main timesinks are not challenging or puzzling. That is a flaw in the design of the game, not a flaw inherent in MMOs.
I tried out ATITD, and ATITD2. There were many good aspects to both, and ATITD deserves credit for being the first MMO with tradeskills that required actual skill (charcoal making, for one).. Unfortunately, too many of them were repetitive, and other timesinks in the game were very boring (esp. travel).
These games rely on player achievement (progress) to keep players engaged and interested. It has to take time to progress, so the designers build in timesinks. Some of the timesinks, like combat, present some challenge and have a lot of variation that keep them from getting boring. Others, like travel, are interesting the first few times but become boring when the scenery becomes familiar. As the parent says, tradeskills could present some puzzle or require some skill, but don't. That makes them boring.
The main challenge MMO tradeskills present is the running of a business (figuring out how to make a profit), not the trade skill itself. A system that required actual skill to perform the tradeskill would be a lot more interesting! A really good design would make progress in the skill depend on both getting better at a particular puzzle/challenge, and solving ever more complicated puzzles/challenges (think DDR or most puzzle-type game).
I understand what you mean, but I have trouble with the idea that you should be able to get into a duel and then talk in the middle of it.
If you're fighting for your life, and have time to think of witty comebacks, you're probably about to get shot or stabbed for not concentrating.
Have you never seen a swashbuckler? Three Musketeers? One of the old Errol Flynn movies? Witty banter is a necessity for dueling! Let the sharpest tongue win!
My favorite implementation of dueling in computer games is still "Curse of Monkey Island"; you have to figure out the correct witty comeback in order to win your duels. It's one of the best (or at least most amusing) puzzles I've ever seen.
MMOs have very few of the puzzles and riddles that you find in (some) MUDs or the interactive fiction games. They have abandoned a key element of RP computer games (and PnP games) that keep people interested, amused, and engaged. It's a key reason they quickly feel like a grind.
Slashdot Mirror
1. You cannot annotate them. No writing in the margins, no circling or underlining interesting stuff, no putting in a footnote proving the author's argument is illogical or flawed. With a book, you can scribble in it and then pass it on to a friend. This is a major irremovable flaw in any DRM system.
2. They're not efficient. By this, I mean that it's more difficult to vary your reading speed, and in particular to skim to the juicy parts.
It's not about the money, it's the power that can get the status. Just as money could buy a noble title -- and status -- for the banker Rothschild in 1816, more and more, geeks can turn their tech knowledge into money and traditional measures of status.
Another corrosive problem is that far too many teachers have not mastered the subjects they teach. It is difficult to correctly teach what you do not know or understand, whatever the teachers' colleges may claim. Those unfortunately ignorant instructors are incompetent, and should be removed. But do we have the mechanisms to identify them, much less remove them? No.
Here are a few anecdotes, to concretely illustrate the problems with the factory system:
I know a 10-year old who can spell and write better than most college students, read difficult texts like Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf, but is struggling with 4th grade math. How can someone like that get appropriately challenged in English and Math in the one-size-fits-all world of the American public school?
One high school student missed most of fractions in the earlier grades, as a result of illness. Although she attended one of the better public school systems in the Bay Area, the system had no mechanism for filling in the missed knowledge. For that reason, she struggled through geometry and algebra, making mistakes because of her poor understanding of basic fractions. (I taught SAT prep part time; it has given me a very jaundiced view of even the best public and private schools.) This is a very common story, unfortunately.
Some teachers pass on their own misconceptions; one teacher taught their poor students a confused muddle of the methods for adding and subtracting fractions, so that they learned to do fractional arithmetic like multiplication and vice versa. Of course, the system never caught and fixed the error, everyone had to move on, in lockstep, and muddle through somehow.
These are problems in the design of the education system, and are unlikely to be fixed by adding more money, adding accountability, or anything short of revolutionary upheaval and a lot of teacher reeducation. The private schools in the U.S. share the same design and philosophy, so privatization and/or vouchers would likewise make little difference. One exception are (some) Montessori schools, where childern learn at a pace tailored to their individual needs, at varying levels for each subject.
Finally, the education system has pretty much abandoned the teaching of logic and classical rhetoric, though they were common subjects for schoolchildren a century or more ago. Both were once considered necessary for someone to consider themselves well-educated, but as the feeble level of public debate shows (in politics and on the internet), that has not been true for many, many decades. Most people wouldn't know an ad hominem attack if it bit them on the nose, and fewer still think about tailoring their argument to their audience, or organizing it to best effect.
Some people, in despair, disgust, or religious fervor, have taken to home-schooling their children. It speaks volumes about the inadequacies of public schooling that home-schooled children generally do much better than publicly-schooled counterparts, even though many of those home-schooled students are taught an archaic mixture of basic 3Rs and anti-scientific Christianity. Some are even using history texts from the 19th century (available online)!
Although the public school as an institution has wide support (note Cal. Gov. Schwartzenegger's political problems), it needs radical reform if it's to adequately serve a post-industrial society. The factory system, perhaps appropriate for the clock-punching mid-20th century, does not train students to be the self-motivated, creative people that information age society needs.
Actually, what you'll see is asset prices rise where the jobs disappear, and new prosperity among working people in the places the work went. It's fairly predictable: capital is relatively scarce in India and China, so its piece of the pie drops (the middle class and working people become relatively more prosperous, the income/wealth gap lessens). In the U.S., Europe, and Japan, labor is scarce (that is, lots of capital for each 'unit' of labor, compared to India/China), so its share of the pie grows. The benefits of trade go to the sectors ('factors of production' in economist-speak) which are relatively oversupplied -- labor-intensive in India and China, capital-intensive in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Information work is labor intensive -- educated labor (aka human capital), but labor nonetheless; labor and human capital are (relatively) in surplus in India and China, and scarce in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Formerly, the human capital moved (a.k.a. the brain drain), as did ordinary labor when it could, but with the Internet in place human capital no longer has to, we can trade instead.
In India and China, the new prosperity will be mainly spent on goods and services. In the U.S., etc., the capital-holders spend it on... more assets. What else are they going to spend it on? More lavish parties, larger mansions? So asset prices go up compared to other prices (housing bubble, anyone? Yah, yah, it's more complicated than that, and as much tax policy and interest rates as anything, but all the factors are pulling in the same direction for once.)
What's going on with outsourcing is really more like what happened to manufacturing and agriculture with the introduction of railroads; information-age work can now be moved around quickly and efficiently. Before the internet, communication (transportation) costs and time lag were too great to make anything but local production feasible for most information work. Note that this is not mechanization of the work, just an innovation in transportation technology. Mechanization of information work is also happening, but the picture's a bit less clear there.
It's a tremendous boon to the economy, but it may also spell the death of the professional (craftsman, to use the manufacturing term). Factory-type production really isn't efficient until the transportation problems disappear, which they just (in the last 20 years) have for information work.
Having information on computer, connected almost instantly world-wide, and searchable is fundamentally different. It is a greater innovation than the railroad, telegraph or deep-ocean sailing ships, IMO. Admittedly, Google is only adding the searchable part to that.
Dan was the San Jose Merc's tech columnist, has a done a lot of serious thinking about where blogs are taking journalism, and it's in that blog. Two cent summary for the lazy:mainstream media, especially newspapers, are dying already; they are going to have to make radical changes. But read the blog and associated links, and you'll understand why, and probably come to agree if you don't already.
The people who directed the reaming, of course, have long since moved on to other employment, won by their 'stellar' results.
I don't mind viewing adverts IF I know in advance what they'll be like, or if there are any. Unfortunately, we get no notice when we click on a link, and no choice. We have to accept a pig in a poke, most of the time, and that's not much of a choice. Adblocking lets us have a choice, and freedom from ads if we want.
On the internet, the expectation is that you'll get information when you follow a link. Advertising is not information: it's not new, important, and truthful (often not even one of the three). It is usually an uninvited burden.
If I had a choice, I'd avoid the ads, or at least make an informed choice (as I do with Slashdot). But sites with ads are like a plumber who invites his buddy the insurance salesman along on his house call. We get no warning that ads are coming along. Since we are being deceived, it is fair for us to enforce our understanding of the social contract.
Many of the patents never should have been issued, and there's no incentive for the Patent Office to clean up the mess. The system is badly broken, so many of us oppose the E.U. adoption of U.S. patent laws. The E.U. should put in place a moratorium on the enforcement of U.S. patents until the U.S. cleans up its mess, at the very least. Preferably, it should avoid extending software patents at all; implementing an algorithm (which is not patentable) is often a trivial exercise (which is not supposed to be patentable).
And all U.S. universities have this problem because Stanford does?!? I don't quite see the logic here.
Here's how this argument seems to go:
1. Stanford does a poor job of counseling its undergraduate students (supported by evidence)
2. Therefore, all major U.S. universities do a poor job of counseling their undergraduate students.
3. Poor counseling means that the students are not counselled to work hard at these competitions (a reach, you didn't explicitly say this, but it's the only way I can see this argument making a little sense.)
4. Therefore, the students lose these competitions.
The logic here is pretty weak:
a) The second step is quite a leap, and a standard logical fallacy.
b) If U.S. students are not being counselled to work hard at these competitions, isn't it is more likely because the counsellors share the general U.S. attitudes I mentioned, than poor counselling?
Finally, if your post gets modded down, it's probably because of the incredibly (for a Stanford student) poor logic shown in the post. Whose fault is that?!
I'm American, and love my country, but we have to face facts. U.S. society doesn't place a lot of value on academic knowledge, compared to the rest of the world. Our cultural heroes aren't scientists, academics, and thinkers -- they are entertainers and athletes. We respect practicality, and making money, not intellectual understanding. Our society has a longstanding democratic suspicion of elites, including intellectual elites, which often shows up as a disdain for 'impractical' academics. There are several examples of this cultural disdain in the responses to this topic (taking the form of, "who cares, it has no relevance to the practical realm of real-world programming/software engineering."
You can argue about whether or not this disdain for intellectual mastery is good, but the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the theory of evolution isn't widely accepted. Perhaps our culture's disdain for and mistrust of elites has a real price, and this contest is one place it shows up? Perhaps it also encourages many of the brightest students to go into areas where they can make money -- law, medical, or business school -- rather than academia?
The Boston Tea Party was a response to the Tea Act. A quick Google gives the following, among many others:
"In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which gave the English East India Company a chance to avert bankruptcy by granting a monopoly on the importation of tea into the colonies." u-s-history.com
" American merchants recognized this monopoly took money from their pockets, and resisted this tea monopoly. Merchants added to the revolutionary fervor. Locally the agents of the East India company were pressured to resign their posts, and ships were sent away unloaded from American coasts." iboston.org
This doesn't sound at all like protest about representation, does it? The Revolution was fueled by many things, including representation, but the Boston Tea Party was mainly rebellion against a monopoly.
Monarchs gave monopolies to benefit their friends, and possibly to guarantee that they'd be able to recoup their costs of building manufacturing facilities. Never mind that it prevents others from doing the same, more effectively. We recognise today that this is not a good thing, in manufacturing. Why should it be a good thing for ideas?
If we want to defeat DRM and other IP monopolies, we're going to have to invent a better way to reward creators. Once there's a clearly superior way to reward them, the IP monopolies with wither away.... ok, so they won't, they'll fight tooth and nail, bribe our legislators, spread FUD, and paint opponents as "pirates". We've got a very difficult battle until we can develop a better way to reward creators.
Allowing our government to grant a monopoly on these things is, IMO, incredibly counterproductive. It reminds me most of the way some European monarchs treated manufacturing when it began to grow -- individuals were given exclusive rights to manufacture this or that product. The countries which did not follow this practice developed vibrant economies, and those that did eventually abandoned the practice in order to catch up.
In other words, copyrights and so forth are the opposite of free market capitalism, just as the monopolies granted by the old monarchies were. To refresh you memory, recall the Boston Tea Party? It was the American colonists' rebellion against the King George's imposition of one of those monarchical monopolies.
Free markets are much better for manufacturing and trading societies, and free use of ideas, songs and stories will be much more productive for our society.
The founding fathers were bitterly split between those opposed to a vigorous central government and those that thought it was necessary. This split became quite harsh after the adoption of the Constitution, and nearly came to spilling blood. One cannot truthfully say "the founders believed X" or "the founders believed Y" about the role of Federal government, when the fact is that they disagreed. Read Joseph Ellis' excellent biography, "His Excellency: George Washington", if you want to know more (and come to understand why Washington is considered a great man, which puzzled me 'till I read "His Excellency").
The U.S. government has been pushing this expansion of intellectual monopolies on the rest of the world. The degree to which other countries buckle under to this pressure affects us all. And it's pure politics, like it or not. We can't curl up in our little geek world and ignore politics any longer, or we'll lose our technological freedoms.
And when you start talking politics, you get some retarded commentary. It's an unavoidable annoyance, we have to just deal with it.
Why would the U.S. government announce that it was an empire when it's evident to even modestly astute observers? Most republics that establish an empire avoid the term, for political and self-esteem reasons; it's mainly the hindsight of historians that affix the label.
Most American scorn societies and organizations that infringe on that right, considering them backward and authoritarian. Consider attitudes towards Scientology (whose use of copyright to stifle dissent is notorious) or efforts by the Catholic Church to silence dissenters (mostly officials of the Church); do we consider those rightful actions?
The commercial sphere is no different. Free speech should be the norm, but instead -- probably because businesses are authoritarian organizations rather than democratic ones -- it is not. The arguments for free speech in the commercial sphere are just as strong as in the political one, and generally the same arguments. But free speech threatens authority, and so it gets suppressed.
Of course, there are things that are the commercial equivalent of 'national security' -- non-public financial information, key stategy information. There are a few reasonable restrictions on free speech. NDAs about company secrets are necessary, should be honored, and should be enforcable. But where the line gets drawn says a lot about an organization.
The whole point of the right to free speech is that criticism is protected. No one needs the right to freely speak praise! I can't say whether or not this guy was rightfully fired (having not seen the stuff that he initially posted, which might fall under the 'national security' heading).
So, is it Minas Tirith, or Isengard?
Microsoft is a classic monopolist, and shows the symptoms: significantly higher profits than other software industry businesses, over many years. If MSoft's products were in competitive sectors, its profits would be more in line with the rest of the industry, as competition would lower prices (basic Econ 101). Instead, it reaps returns far above average.
Just read a few of the other articles on that site -- these people are polemicists, not economists. And not very good ones, either; their arguments have many logical holes. Lots of vigorous arm-waving, no rigor. It's probably some Republican-funded policy paper mill, clearly not an academic think tank. /ignore
1. There is more randomness in combat, and that randomness occasionally presents an unforseen difficulty or a challenge. The variability makes it more interesting. Tradeskills, by contrast, have no variability in most MMOS. At least, no variability that presents a challenge that players can react to.
2. Combat MMO monsters have (in compelling MMOs), a wide variety. They have different abilities, stats, and AI behaviour, all of which present the players with a puzzle to solve. When the puzzles are solved, the monsters known and understood, then the game becomes more of a grind.
3. The main timesink in combat MMOs is the combat. The combat itself is fun, because it presents a series of challenges to the player. When it becomes routine, it becomes a grind.
ATITD seems more of a treadmill in large part because the main timesinks are not challenging or puzzling. That is a flaw in the design of the game, not a flaw inherent in MMOs.
I tried out ATITD, and ATITD2. There were many good aspects to both, and ATITD deserves credit for being the first MMO with tradeskills that required actual skill (charcoal making, for one).. Unfortunately, too many of them were repetitive, and other timesinks in the game were very boring (esp. travel).
These games rely on player achievement (progress) to keep players engaged and interested. It has to take time to progress, so the designers build in timesinks. Some of the timesinks, like combat, present some challenge and have a lot of variation that keep them from getting boring. Others, like travel, are interesting the first few times but become boring when the scenery becomes familiar. As the parent says, tradeskills could present some puzzle or require some skill, but don't. That makes them boring.
The main challenge MMO tradeskills present is the running of a business (figuring out how to make a profit), not the trade skill itself. A system that required actual skill to perform the tradeskill would be a lot more interesting! A really good design would make progress in the skill depend on both getting better at a particular puzzle/challenge, and solving ever more complicated puzzles/challenges (think DDR or most puzzle-type game).
Have you never seen a swashbuckler? Three Musketeers? One of the old Errol Flynn movies? Witty banter is a necessity for dueling! Let the sharpest tongue win!
My favorite implementation of dueling in computer games is still "Curse of Monkey Island"; you have to figure out the correct witty comeback in order to win your duels. It's one of the best (or at least most amusing) puzzles I've ever seen.
MMOs have very few of the puzzles and riddles that you find in (some) MUDs or the interactive fiction games. They have abandoned a key element of RP computer games (and PnP games) that keep people interested, amused, and engaged. It's a key reason they quickly feel like a grind.
.