While text messaging has been up and running for nearly a decade or so in Europe, they didn't pick it up for a long time in the U.S. because the industry as a whole didn't care for how it was implemented.
It's turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. Text messaging, which was originally created so that cell companies could update their phones over the air, all travels through third party carriers, which is why you can send a text to most anybody (at least intranationally, international tends to be a bit of a hassle in many cases, though T-Mobile seems to mostly have that beat), unlike MMS, which is mostly intracarrier protocol driven, and thus conflicts badly with other carriers.
The issue the U.S. has run into with text, besides the fact that it's relatively new (though believe me, the kids at school where cell phones are allowed love it) is that the companies have a lot of issues deciding how they're going to bill it.
You're generally more likely to find plans with unlimited internet than unlimited sms, because the general business model dictates that you're going to get your money off of per use 10 cent charges, or what have you.
But then, most of the US data models are a little strange.
About a year back, Verizon declared cell phones (at least, so far as I know, cell phones that aren't them) long distance.
So all of our Boston customers, at least, suddenly had to start dialing the area code. Caused no end of fluff.
Generally, if you pick up a GSM phone with Cingular, you will need to expect to dial the area code. Due to WLNP issues and landline conflicts (especially as the Landlines separate from Cell with VOIP/WIMAX) you're going to see more and more issues like that, since cell phones almost always are, except in cases where they are directly owned by the local landline company, competition that the landlines can't afford.
Frankly, I get the impression that Mr. Ellis doesn't care. He says what he wants to say, and writes what he wants to write. If you like him, fine, if you don't, fine, but he's not trying to save the world, he's just spouting off his own opinion.
Nobody is forcing you to listen to him, or to read his material. He's not in charge of anything, and he has no platform. Feel free to disagree, but putting this much thought into the matter says that you take both him and yourself far too seriously.
>If they can't accept that you're taking a >political stand on an issue that's important to >you, then you should probably reconsider whether >you really want this person sending you cards to >begin with.
Er, raise of hands here...how many people have Parents, relatives, etc. who they do, in fact, want to continue contact with (because they're family) but who totally disagree with their views on things?
"I'm sorry Mom, but the fact that you won't accept my geek/liberal/zoophilia agenda means that I never want to speak to you again or receive loot from you. Thanks".
Riiight.
An interesting if distracting read...
on
0wnz0red
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It reminded me quite a bit of Bruce Bethke's "Head Crash", with a bit of John Scalzi's Agent To the Stars mixed in. I didn't find the dropped haxor speak too irritating...obviously these were people who had become too professional in their coding to really be considered true hackers...the dropped language bits were actually signposts to how mainstream they were, not a pretention of understanding.
I am, perhaps unlike most of the rest of the natiion, just too damn lazy to bother scoping out the net for MP3's to download, and I don't trust most music services of that type. Too many tales of gator and the like.
As such, I only know an album from what they've got on their site, occasionally hits on Amazon, or friends.
But even more debilitating, I was layed off back in September because we made the mistake of getting our boss addicted to EQ, and the business crumbled. And I have yet to recover. *grin* Thus I don't have the money for Moby's album, or any others.
Which is all to say...we are still in a recession, depending on what part of the country you're in. The radio commercials are all still talking about how tech will be the biggest business, and affect everything, and how the workforce will increase 80 percent by 2010, blah blah blah. But it ain't happening yet, or here.
But Moby still expects us to pay the 18 + dollars to run out and buy his new compilation sight unseen. I may not be raking in the techie dollars, but I still have the techie brains to know that that's just a bad investment waiting to happen. *shrug*
Actually, there are dish washers that are that size. Many things are a great deal smaller in Europe than here...and you can find "dish-washers" that size in the back of most resturaunts, who's sole purpose is to steam the critters clean. You're just assuming that the image you get in your head provided by the word "dishwasher" is the same as the one used by the folks doing the original report.
My parents also taught me this (though they don't remember doing so now). This was bs. My tormentors continued to pick on me, and beat on me, all through grade school and part of college.
I got beyond all that becuase I become so scarred by the entire experience that I stopped caring about myself, and became resigned to life as on who suffers, and am in fact fairly paranoid as a result. I expect people to hate me, and to pick on me, because i was taught that I was in fact a lesser being and deserve such.
The fact that I'm now 25 and haven't had to face anything like that for about 4 years has not lessened the fear inside me, and I find it very difficult to connect emotionally with anybody. But hey, it's my fault for not doing something, right?
Never mind that my parents couldn't do anything, that my teachers didn't care, and that none of the bullies even remember me anymore, most likely.
Never mind that I have no self esteem. I only got beat up once or twice, it's no biggy. And hey, everybody has it happen, so it's a non-issue. Stop whining and bite the bullet.
Riiight.
I will never, ever be able to truly deal with the pain or injustice of it all. Nor will I ever really be able to trust anybody again. But it doesn't matter, does it? Because it's normal, and I need to just grow up, and drown my dreams in adulthood, and keep going until stress kills me and I serve a useful American life. yay.
It's more about a corporate attitude that quality doesn't matter (ie, turning out software with a multitude of bugs) so long as there are lots of cool new bugs and whistles to keep the user entertained until the next expansion. Actual individual programmers are of less of a mentioned threat...though one could suppose that their willingness to work in an environment which supports allowing bug infested programs to go out condemns them outright...
News at it's heart is really just an important event that somebody felt like sharing. The fact that there are institutions out there that exist soley for sharing and "creating" news doesn't alter the fact that for the most part, it's humans trying to communicate important ideas to each other.
<p>Net news is hampered more than any other news form, I think, by advertising. Where advertising is absolutely necessary on television and perhaps print, Net users are used to not having to wade through mind boggling amounts of garbage to get where they're going.
<p>But the Web, which is the basis for most current online news, has been turned almost entirely into a forum for advertising, solid spam, and this seems to me to conflict directly with most older attitudes on net travel.
<p>Add to the constant advertisement that most sites seem to pundit directly from a certian viewpoint (moreso than most newspapers, which while certainly accusable of being "conservative" Or "liberal" still tend to avoid a lot of the high minded views or pretentions of the web) and you've got yourself a selection of flavors...not necessarily news, or even communication.
<p>Sift through Katz as you choose. Or CNN.com. Or any of the other sites, salons, etc. I often think that The Onion is perhaps the best on the net, because their only real objective is to be funny, and they always succeed fairly well. Actually finding news organizations that succeed across the board in a pursuit seems rather difficult.
<p>Must they all have agendas? Politics to support? Apparently so. Would they be so naked, so pointless, without them? We may never know.
What confused me about the "ICANN is an American effort, thus why should we put our money into it" ideal is that the majority of people on the ICANN board of directors currently are FROM Europe. Thus the majority of interests represented are from there, not from here. Odd...
The Bubblegum crisis is fairly good (despite the name), and is currently out in a DVD collection of the whole thing. Chicks with battle armor fighting bio-tech monstrosities. Very sharp stuff. A lot of people also follow Tenchi, which is a semi-serious/semi-comic anime, which is fairly hard to explain unless you've seen all of the versions. If you're into print anime, check out "The Valley of the Winds", which I think has to be one of the best Anime of all time, at least in print version. Also, check out the Patlabor movies. Though I wouldn't bother with the actual series.
The main problem with this line of thinking, is that it assumes that the people giving out the award (and those bothering to be excited over things like awards, etc.) probably don't know the proper language, the difference between KDE and GNOME quantifiably, etc. They're probably fair neophytes to the situation...so as usual, while we sit back and quibble over the legalese of what just happened, the folks doing the awarding are so far from aware that it would never matter to them. Consider the source before you get your panties in a knot.
I think we've actually hit another period, technologically, where we're advancing too fast for active standards on "how things should be done" to make things like searching pages/web databases/etc. an accessible, easy thing. It's probably going to take a while...it seems like every month they come out with a new way of doing things, a new "language that's going to change the world!", a new proprietery language/program for corps to use. Until that dwindles, for whatever reason, the web is going to continue to be behind in terms of searchability.
So if we don't know Perl, or any other language (yet) then we're screwed in reading it? Argh. Can anybody recommend a good basic book for those of us not from a Computer Science background (my degree is in theatre) but who are trying to get into programming, albiet slowly?
So the new tact these guys should take is, when consulted, tell people "look, you don't want caring, on top, etc., that's what everybody else does. What you want is a name that's going to make everybody see you as evil, uncaring, backstabbing, bloated bastards...becuase you know, that's gotta get you coming out the other end with names that will be totally different than everybody else', rather than the cool kind which are currently associated mainly with evil, uncaring, backstabbing, bloated corporations..."
The problem here, as pointed out before, (er, okay, problems): 1. etoy fails to be much in the way of money, which is why they yanked their site fast when fined 10k per day...they don't have it. The only 10k they had, they donated...they're just a bunch of guys doing performance art with a web page. 2. Most of the folks being sued by corps will NOT be able to afford the law support to counter Corporate attacks. And you can't insist that, say, ICANN provide lawyers for such a thing (to try to get the legal precedence, etc.) since ICANN itself is non-profit, and thus is also out of it's league in terms of fighting corp lawyer battles...
Anyway. I think that a good bit of people's fears over the future come from what has been termed, time and again, as a growing awareness of how our technological capabilities have so far outpaced our own understanding and control of ourselves.
While technology, and our ability to shape, control, destroy, etc. our world has grown drastically in the last century, our own understanding of ourselves, how to predict how people will act, how to get people to actually act responsibly (unlike various flame wars, or efforts which cause the Geek test) haven't actually advanced credibly at all.
Often the metaphor is given of a child who, rather than holding a club to beat up other children with, now holds a clock filled with hollow point bullets and an infinite supply of clips...
This is obviously something of an alarmist, anti-tech view, that all tech leads to violence and destruction. But it's also a fairly well known paradigm (sorry) that people remember the bad stuff, no matter how much good stuff outnumbers it.
However, I believe that something which counters this is the American belief of Manifest Destiny, which, though no longer stated as much as a century ago, or even 30 years ago during the "Democracy will defeat Communism, for we are cooler" days, certainly seems to give most Americans the belief that they're righter, better, and more likely to survive, no matter how brightly they glow in the dark.
I mean, the fact that we have more porno sites on the net should be an indicator, if nothing else. Those California girls, whew...
*blinks*
Most of the biggish problems in our culture are tracable not to our technology, but rather the way we deal with it. Our tendecies to lie about ourselves on the net, our proclivity for using tech weapons to vent our anger (or not), our dependencies on tech to make us brighter, happier little smurflings...our belief that science will indeed save us and make us happier, becoming the new god of the times...
Not everybody is that strong, in and of themselves, to challenge something like the FBI. The guy called the artist and his superiors, and getting no other orders, pulled out. So obviously, we're not talking about the sort of person who goes around challenging authority. Please...sometimes consider that not everybody may react like you, may think of the same things. Not everybody can be a "hero". Just running his own business, to some degree, takes balls enough. We all have limits.
Not really. There are plenty of bbs's brimming with people with attitudes like this. Not to mention IRC's, Usenets, Churches...
It took me a long time to teach myself to take a couple of deep breaths first and really imagine what was going on in the other person's mind (and whether anybody needed to hear my angst over a post) before replying.
Most people never do. They feel that they have the innate right to express ANYTHING they may feel, at any time, because somewhere, somebody got the idea that we have the right to never be offended, that life is fair, etc.
Life only becomes fair, methinks, when people don't respond to any possible upbraidance of their "rights" with anger and flames.
With people as edgy as they are these days, and people out there flying off the handle and walking into work with shotguns...you bet the FBI is going to be edgy about anything that can possibly generate a buttload of flames. All they need is for just ONE of those people to decide that flaming just isn't enough to get that point across...
And just enough people, every year, do just that. Some stupid stunt that started out enlightened, but just winds up hurting somebody, and certainly damaging the rights of others.
Sophistry is not a big step toward species wide survival.
In the context of the ongoing question of how the internet/technology growth foils closeness and communication of people, how does getting programmable robot dogs fit into this? Not enough falseness on the net, so we bring it into our homes? But surely that's an overreaction, it's just another hobby, albeit like paying for all of the food your dog will eat in a decade up front... I just have to wonder how much wonder that there is present in the real, natural world, we're slowly losing contact in our growing fascatination (and growing market ability to be more so with more product lines) with the technological wonders around us... Blah.
I got to the point fairly quickly via bbs multitasking where my automatic typing was fairly quick (though often terminally dyslexic), but I've found that I tend to avoid using the arrow keys, penalty box, etc. as much as possible, much as that hampers my work, simply because it's such a PITA to bother with, distracting me from the work at hand. On the other hand, in the realm of control and alt keys that are too small and inconveniently located, I do wish there were some easier way to do curly braces and such so that I wouldn't wear out my pinky holding down the shift key while tagging, but that seems a terminal fate of the current keyboard. Help? Vi was interesting, in the few unix enabled jobs I've been in, but not being from a programming background ("you need to swim, so we're dropping you into the Unix Ocean, tell us next week if you drown.."), but the learning curve on that sort of thing, when done on one's own, seem rather steepish. But I can dream... I myself attain zen via keyboard more often when I'm in the midst of a discussion or story (being a bit of a writer) and my brain takes off and my fingers desperately attempt to keep up with my current passionate discourse. But it's appreciable just the same, you look up suddenly at the clock and the time has vanished, but the movement of temporal dislocation was more than worthwhile, you feel inside. Or at least, I do. Nice article, thanks for the thoughts.
So much of the power held by data miners is power we give them. For the sake of convenience, we choose to utilize stores, utilities, etc. which give out our information to all takers. So that we may spend less time doing "worthless" things, we will willingly charge our purchases, use our ATM/debit cards, etc. It's well acknowledged that, time consuming as it might be, if we did more of our purchasing in person, in cash, we'd be a lot less trackable. But instead, we're taken with the ease of online and mail consuming, which of course hand our information right over to the waiting miners. Interesting idea just occured to me...have you ever tried refusing to give out information to the folks at Radio Shack or Best Buy, et al., when they asked for it? What would they do? I've never seen anybody do it, I think it's assumed that you have to. But do you really? *blinks* There are so many things that we assume are beyond our control, that are just done as a matter of course...but maybe, they are actually quite within our control, and it's that assumption of lack that the sellers are depending on?
Re:I work for a large national ISP. Here's the dea
on
NSI to be RBL'ed?
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*blinks* I have yet to ever sign up to an email service, nor do I know anyone who ever has, who WANTS to receive advertisements. Usually, the longer people have been on the net,the LESS email they want to receive, especvially since many of them are actively part of various email lists which fill their boxes fast enough as it is. If I want advertisements, then I'll either hit a search engine looking for company sites on a topic, or watch TV, or, *gasp*, hit the yellow pages. It's worth the effort, not to be bothered by constant spam. Once again, some part of my brain is making the mistake of thinking that this should be, in fact, patently obvious...that our societal and utter hatred of junk mail should in some way clue people in that nobody in their right mind (ie, the common consumer) wants and enjoys spam...especially the newbies, who have a low comprehension rate about how they can stop it. This isn't a service. And at least you can, to some degree, cut down on the junk mail by making requests to the post office or the sender. No such service often exists on the net except for buggy filters, which often must be added to each and every day as the spam sender finds yet another email service to sign up with... Customers pay for service. Spam does not serve, it extorts. Thus true service protects from spam.
Slashdot Mirror
While text messaging has been up and running for nearly a decade or so in Europe, they didn't pick it up for a long time in the U.S. because the industry as a whole didn't care for how it was implemented.
It's turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. Text messaging, which was originally created so that cell companies could update their phones over the air, all travels through third party carriers, which is why you can send a text to most anybody (at least intranationally, international tends to be a bit of a hassle in many cases, though T-Mobile seems to mostly have that beat), unlike MMS, which is mostly intracarrier protocol driven, and thus conflicts badly with other carriers.
The issue the U.S. has run into with text, besides the fact that it's relatively new (though believe me, the kids at school where cell phones are allowed love it) is that the companies have a lot of issues deciding how they're going to bill it.
You're generally more likely to find plans with unlimited internet than unlimited sms, because the general business model dictates that you're going to get your money off of per use 10 cent charges, or what have you.
But then, most of the US data models are a little strange.
About a year back, Verizon declared cell phones (at least, so far as I know, cell phones that aren't them) long distance.
So all of our Boston customers, at least, suddenly had to start dialing the area code. Caused no end of fluff.
Generally, if you pick up a GSM phone with Cingular, you will need to expect to dial the area code. Due to WLNP issues and landline conflicts (especially as the Landlines separate from Cell with VOIP/WIMAX) you're going to see more and more issues like that, since cell phones almost always are, except in cases where they are directly owned by the local landline company, competition that the landlines can't afford.
Um...
Frankly, I get the impression that Mr. Ellis doesn't care. He says what he wants to say, and writes what he wants to write. If you like him, fine, if you don't, fine, but he's not trying to save the world, he's just spouting off his own opinion.
Nobody is forcing you to listen to him, or to read his material. He's not in charge of anything, and he has no platform. Feel free to disagree, but putting this much thought into the matter says that you take both him and yourself far too seriously.
>If they can't accept that you're taking a >political stand on an issue that's important to >you, then you should probably reconsider whether >you really want this person sending you cards to >begin with.
Er, raise of hands here...how many people have Parents, relatives, etc. who they do, in fact, want to continue contact with (because they're family) but who totally disagree with their views on things?
"I'm sorry Mom, but the fact that you won't accept my geek/liberal/zoophilia agenda means that I never want to speak to you again or receive loot from you. Thanks".
Riiight.
It reminded me quite a bit of Bruce Bethke's "Head Crash", with a bit of John Scalzi's Agent To the Stars mixed in. I didn't find the dropped haxor speak too irritating...obviously these were people who had become too professional in their coding to really be considered true hackers...the dropped language bits were actually signposts to how mainstream they were, not a pretention of understanding.
I am, perhaps unlike most of the rest of the natiion, just too damn lazy to bother scoping out the net for MP3's to download, and I don't trust most music services of that type. Too many tales of gator and the like.
As such, I only know an album from what they've got on their site, occasionally hits on Amazon, or friends.
But even more debilitating, I was layed off back in September because we made the mistake of getting our boss addicted to EQ, and the business crumbled. And I have yet to recover. *grin* Thus I don't have the money for Moby's album, or any others.
Which is all to say...we are still in a recession, depending on what part of the country you're in. The radio commercials are all still talking about how tech will be the biggest business, and affect everything, and how the workforce will increase 80 percent by 2010, blah blah blah. But it ain't happening yet, or here.
But Moby still expects us to pay the 18 + dollars to run out and buy his new compilation sight unseen. I may not be raking in the techie dollars, but I still have the techie brains to know that that's just a bad investment waiting to happen. *shrug*
Actually, there are dish washers that are that size. Many things are a great deal smaller in Europe than here...and you can find "dish-washers" that size in the back of most resturaunts, who's sole purpose is to steam the critters clean. You're just assuming that the image you get in your head provided by the word "dishwasher" is the same as the one used by the folks doing the original report.
My parents also taught me this (though they don't remember doing so now). This was bs. My tormentors continued to pick on me, and beat on me, all through grade school and part of college.
I got beyond all that becuase I become so scarred by the entire experience that I stopped caring about myself, and became resigned to life as on who suffers, and am in fact fairly paranoid as a result. I expect people to hate me, and to pick on me, because i was taught that I was in fact a lesser being and deserve such.
The fact that I'm now 25 and haven't had to face anything like that for about 4 years has not lessened the fear inside me, and I find it very difficult to connect emotionally with anybody. But hey, it's my fault for not doing something, right?
Never mind that my parents couldn't do anything, that my teachers didn't care, and that none of the bullies even remember me anymore, most likely.
Never mind that I have no self esteem. I only got beat up once or twice, it's no biggy. And hey, everybody has it happen, so it's a non-issue. Stop whining and bite the bullet.
Riiight.
I will never, ever be able to truly deal with the pain or injustice of it all. Nor will I ever really be able to trust anybody again. But it doesn't matter, does it? Because it's normal, and I need to just grow up, and drown my dreams in adulthood, and keep going until stress kills me and I serve a useful American life. yay.
Todd
It's more about a corporate attitude that quality doesn't matter (ie, turning out software with a multitude of bugs) so long as there are lots of cool new bugs and whistles to keep the user entertained until the next expansion. Actual individual programmers are of less of a mentioned threat...though one could suppose that their willingness to work in an environment which supports allowing bug infested programs to go out condemns them outright...
News at it's heart is really just an important event that somebody felt like sharing. The fact that there are institutions out there that exist soley for sharing and "creating" news doesn't alter the fact that for the most part, it's humans trying to communicate important ideas to each other.
<p>Net news is hampered more than any other news form, I think, by advertising. Where advertising is absolutely necessary on television and perhaps print, Net users are used to not having to wade through mind boggling amounts of garbage to get where they're going.
<p>But the Web, which is the basis for most current online news, has been turned almost entirely into a forum for advertising, solid spam, and this seems to me to conflict directly with most older attitudes on net travel.
<p>Add to the constant advertisement that most sites seem to pundit directly from a certian viewpoint (moreso than most newspapers, which while certainly accusable of being "conservative" Or "liberal" still tend to avoid a lot of the high minded views or pretentions of the web) and you've got yourself a selection of flavors...not necessarily news, or even communication.
<p>Sift through Katz as you choose. Or CNN.com. Or any of the other sites, salons, etc. I often think that The Onion is perhaps the best on the net, because their only real objective is to be funny, and they always succeed fairly well. Actually finding news organizations that succeed across the board in a pursuit seems rather difficult.
<p>Must they all have agendas? Politics to support? Apparently so. Would they be so naked, so pointless, without them? We may never know.
What confused me about the "ICANN is an American effort, thus why should we put our money into it" ideal is that the majority of people on the ICANN board of directors currently are FROM Europe. Thus the majority of interests represented are from there, not from here. Odd...
Todd
The Bubblegum crisis is fairly good (despite the name), and is currently out in a DVD collection of the whole thing. Chicks with battle armor fighting bio-tech monstrosities. Very sharp stuff.
A lot of people also follow Tenchi, which is a semi-serious/semi-comic anime, which is fairly hard to explain unless you've seen all of the versions.
If you're into print anime, check out "The Valley of the Winds", which I think has to be one of the best Anime of all time, at least in print version.
Also, check out the Patlabor movies. Though I wouldn't bother with the actual series.
The main problem with this line of thinking, is that it assumes that the people giving out the award (and those bothering to be excited over things like awards, etc.) probably don't know the proper language, the difference between KDE and GNOME quantifiably, etc. They're probably fair neophytes to the situation...so as usual, while we sit back and quibble over the legalese of what just happened, the folks doing the awarding are so far from aware that it would never matter to them. Consider the source before you get your panties in a knot.
I think we've actually hit another period, technologically, where we're advancing too fast for active standards on "how things should be done" to make things like searching pages/web databases/etc. an accessible, easy thing. It's probably going to take a while...it seems like every month they come out with a new way of doing things, a new "language that's going to change the world!", a new proprietery language/program for corps to use. Until that dwindles, for whatever reason, the web is going to continue to be behind in terms of searchability.
Agreed. Could somebody work up a link of it converted to html so that those of us who don't have acrobat could take a look at it? Puh-lease?
Todd
So if we don't know Perl, or any other language (yet) then we're screwed in reading it?
Argh. Can anybody recommend a good basic book for those of us not from a Computer Science background (my degree is in theatre) but who are trying to get into programming, albiet slowly?
So the new tact these guys should take is, when consulted, tell people "look, you don't want caring, on top, etc., that's what everybody else does. What you want is a name that's going to make everybody see you as evil, uncaring, backstabbing, bloated bastards...becuase you know, that's gotta get you coming out the other end with names that will be totally different than everybody else', rather than the cool kind which are currently associated mainly with evil, uncaring, backstabbing, bloated corporations..."
The problem here, as pointed out before, (er, okay, problems):
1. etoy fails to be much in the way of money, which is why they yanked their site fast when fined 10k per day...they don't have it. The only 10k they had, they donated...they're just a bunch of guys doing performance art with a web page.
2. Most of the folks being sued by corps will NOT be able to afford the law support to counter Corporate attacks. And you can't insist that, say, ICANN provide lawyers for such a thing (to try to get the legal precedence, etc.) since ICANN itself is non-profit, and thus is also out of it's league in terms of fighting corp lawyer battles...
Ick, I hate thinking up Titles.
Anyway. I think that a good bit of people's fears over the future come from what has been termed, time and again, as a growing awareness of how our technological capabilities have so far outpaced our own understanding and control of ourselves.
While technology, and our ability to shape, control, destroy, etc. our world has grown drastically in the last century, our own understanding of ourselves, how to predict how people will act, how to get people to actually act responsibly (unlike various flame wars, or efforts which cause the Geek test) haven't actually advanced credibly at all.
Often the metaphor is given of a child who, rather than holding a club to beat up other children with, now holds a clock filled with hollow point bullets and an infinite supply of clips...
This is obviously something of an alarmist, anti-tech view, that all tech leads to violence and destruction. But it's also a fairly well known paradigm (sorry) that people remember the bad stuff, no matter how much good stuff outnumbers it.
However, I believe that something which counters this is the American belief of Manifest Destiny, which, though no longer stated as much as a century ago, or even 30 years ago during the "Democracy will defeat Communism, for we are cooler" days, certainly seems to give most Americans the belief that they're righter, better, and more likely to survive, no matter how brightly they glow in the dark.
I mean, the fact that we have more porno sites on the net should be an indicator, if nothing else. Those California girls, whew...
*blinks*
Most of the biggish problems in our culture are tracable not to our technology, but rather the way we deal with it. Our tendecies to lie about ourselves on the net, our proclivity for using tech weapons to vent our anger (or not), our dependencies on tech to make us brighter, happier little smurflings...our belief that science will indeed save us and make us happier, becoming the new god of the times...
But then, all of this has been said before.
Not everybody is that strong, in and of themselves, to challenge something like the FBI. The guy called the artist and his superiors, and getting no other orders, pulled out.
So obviously, we're not talking about the sort of person who goes around challenging authority.
Please...sometimes consider that not everybody may react like you, may think of the same things. Not everybody can be a "hero". Just running his own business, to some degree, takes balls enough.
We all have limits.
Not really. There are plenty of bbs's brimming with people with attitudes like this. Not to mention IRC's, Usenets, Churches...
It took me a long time to teach myself to take a couple of deep breaths first and really imagine what was going on in the other person's mind (and whether anybody needed to hear my angst over a post) before replying.
Most people never do. They feel that they have the innate right to express ANYTHING they may feel, at any time, because somewhere, somebody got the idea that we have the right to never be offended, that life is fair, etc.
Life only becomes fair, methinks, when people don't respond to any possible upbraidance of their "rights" with anger and flames.
With people as edgy as they are these days, and people out there flying off the handle and walking into work with shotguns...you bet the FBI is going to be edgy about anything that can possibly generate a buttload of flames. All they need is for just ONE of those people to decide that flaming just isn't enough to get that point across...
And just enough people, every year, do just that. Some stupid stunt that started out enlightened, but just winds up hurting somebody, and certainly damaging the rights of others.
Sophistry is not a big step toward species wide survival.
In the context of the ongoing question of how the internet/technology growth foils closeness and communication of people, how does getting programmable robot dogs fit into this? Not enough falseness on the net, so we bring it into our homes?
But surely that's an overreaction, it's just another hobby, albeit like paying for all of the food your dog will eat in a decade up front...
I just have to wonder how much wonder that there is present in the real, natural world, we're slowly losing contact in our growing fascatination (and growing market ability to be more so with more product lines) with the technological wonders around us...
Blah.
I got to the point fairly quickly via bbs multitasking where my automatic typing was fairly quick (though often terminally dyslexic), but I've found that I tend to avoid using the arrow keys, penalty box, etc. as much as possible, much as that hampers my work, simply because it's such a PITA to bother with, distracting me from the work at hand.
On the other hand, in the realm of control and alt keys that are too small and inconveniently located, I do wish there were some easier way to do curly braces and such so that I wouldn't wear out my pinky holding down the shift key while tagging, but that seems a terminal fate of the current keyboard. Help?
Vi was interesting, in the few unix enabled jobs I've been in, but not being from a programming background ("you need to swim, so we're dropping you into the Unix Ocean, tell us next week if you drown.."), but the learning curve on that sort of thing, when done on one's own, seem rather steepish. But I can dream...
I myself attain zen via keyboard more often when I'm in the midst of a discussion or story (being a bit of a writer) and my brain takes off and my fingers desperately attempt to keep up with my current passionate discourse. But it's appreciable just the same, you look up suddenly at the clock and the time has vanished, but the movement of temporal dislocation was more than worthwhile, you feel inside. Or at least, I do.
Nice article, thanks for the thoughts.
Todd
So much of the power held by data miners is power we give them.
For the sake of convenience, we choose to utilize stores, utilities, etc. which give out our information to all takers.
So that we may spend less time doing "worthless" things, we will willingly charge our purchases, use our ATM/debit cards, etc.
It's well acknowledged that, time consuming as it might be, if we did more of our purchasing in person, in cash, we'd be a lot less trackable.
But instead, we're taken with the ease of online and mail consuming, which of course hand our information right over to the waiting miners.
Interesting idea just occured to me...have you ever tried refusing to give out information to the folks at Radio Shack or Best Buy, et al., when they asked for it? What would they do? I've never seen anybody do it, I think it's assumed that you have to. But do you really? *blinks* There are so many things that we assume are beyond our control, that are just done as a matter of course...but maybe, they are actually quite within our control, and it's that assumption of lack that the sellers are depending on?
*blinks*
I have yet to ever sign up to an email service, nor do I know anyone who ever has, who WANTS to receive advertisements.
Usually, the longer people have been on the net,the LESS email they want to receive, especvially since many of them are actively part of various email lists which fill their boxes fast enough as it is.
If I want advertisements, then I'll either hit a search engine looking for company sites on a topic, or watch TV, or, *gasp*, hit the yellow pages. It's worth the effort, not to be bothered by constant spam.
Once again, some part of my brain is making the mistake of thinking that this should be, in fact, patently obvious...that our societal and utter hatred of junk mail should in some way clue people in that nobody in their right mind (ie, the common consumer) wants and enjoys spam...especially the newbies, who have a low comprehension rate about how they can stop it. This isn't a service. And at least you can, to some degree, cut down on the junk mail by making requests to the post office or the sender. No such service often exists on the net except for buggy filters, which often must be added to each and every day as the spam sender finds yet another email service to sign up with...
Customers pay for service. Spam does not serve, it extorts. Thus true service protects from spam.
Todd Erickson