The INTERNET isn't private. It is PUBLIC. What you do on the internet, what sites you go to, what you look at, what you listen to, what you do, what information you send, what you receive is ALL PUBLIC.
That's news to me. I haven't a blind brass notion of what anyone else is doing online. In fact, I don't even know how I would go about finding out.
Furthermore, your "fair share" is determined on how productive in enterprising you are. The more you stimulate the economy, the more you're penalized for it.
This argument is based on the assumption that those who are payed more in our society are more hard working and productive. As any fool can tell you, in reality the exact opposite of this assumption holds. Typically the more you are paid, the less productive you are.
While there are exceptions, it is safe to say that those on the lower end of the payscale work very hard jobs for very long hours, whereas those in high paid executive positions are on a gravy train, with high salaries, bonuses, short hours, little responsibility and who actually do atrociously little work.
The truth, and it is something that many simply cannot bear to face, is that the wealth of many individuals has very little to do with their own productivity and labour, and very much to do with the productivity and labour of the many people who work for them. This notion was, and still is, denied by many, particularly whose at the top end of the pay scale, who struggle to find some rationalisation for why they, who spend most of their day idle, spewing out buzzwords, on telephone calls, making powerpoint presentations or surfing for porn, should receive an order of magnitude or more compensation for their day than the people on the factory floor who visibly sweat in order to make their living. It's a powerful juxtaposition and one which I'm sure people in top paying jobs are subconsciously uncomfortable with. Hence they rationalise. Oh do they rationalise.
Read Galbraith's book, "The Great Crash", where he analyises the 1929 stock market crash. Among other things, he argues that one of the main causes of the crash was the huge wealth disparity between the super rich and everyone else. Basically, there were a small number of people who had sucked up a sizable proportion of the money in the US, and gave nothing in return. When they stopped spending, the whole system froze up. They were essentially black holes which money flowed into, but never out of. Consumption taxes wouldn't have helped. Their money was idle and remained so.
So I don't buy this idea about the "injustice" of taxing higher earners. In my opinion, the true leaches in our society are the people in top positions who sit around doing nothing while creaming off the labour of others. they are the true parasites, and they are ultimately the ones who got us into the current crises we now find ourselves in. I'm not a communist, but I don't buy the idea that people should receive unlimited compensation simply because they had a rich parent, an expensive education and the right contacts. And make no mistake, those are the only qualifications that 90% of business managers have today.
The checkout policy is the price you pay for having specialty knowledge behind the register at minimum wage prices.
A friend of mine works at Gamestop and they have a policy of "staff loans". While he does take advantage of this to play the latest and greatest titles, taking games home to play is basically a (unpaid) part of his job. He takes home titles, assesses them, and is able to give an honest opinion to anyone who comes up to the counter. The other employees do so as well, and the end result is, as you say, a lot of specialist knowledge behind the counter.
I have often gone up to a game shop counter and asked, "What about $GAME_X?". I have variously been told a game is great or awful, fun or boring, worth it new, worth it used, etc,etc. Sometimes, two people behind the counter will get into a disagreement over a particular with one arguing that the game is fantastic, and the other disparaging it. With the wages these guys get, this is not some company stunt. It's a real live critique from people who actually play game, and I appreciate getting it.
You get clerks who play one console over the other. You get guys who play PC games. You get Guys who like/hate FPSes, RPGs, MMOs, RTSes, etc, etc, etc. When one clerk doesn't know about $GAME_X, he turns around to someone else who can usually tell you whether it's good or not. The best advice you get concerns the lesser known titles, the hidden gems that the mainstream has ignored but which turn out to be simply excellent games.
Is my new game not new because someone has played it for a day or two? Do I actually care. When I was buying my PS3, the shop had a deal going where you got two free games. They were out of Resistance Fall of Man copies, so it was looking like I was going to get stuck with something like Madden NFL or Gundam. Then I was offered a used copy of Resistance in place of a new one. The disc was spotless, the manual was uncrumpled, the case was intact. I jumped at the offer.
Software is software is software. As long as the storage medium has data integrity, I really couldn't care less who has used it before me. This is digital information. There is not going to be artifacts or slowdown in the game because someone else played it before me. The menus will not be worn or weathered, and my characters guns are not going to jam if I don't buy a pristine new copy. This is indeed, the very purpose of digital information. It can be copied an used infinitely without degradation.
People who complain about these staff loans are probably the same kind of people who will buy gold HDMI cable so that they get a "better quality" digital signal. In other words, people who have no idea how computers, or computers game actually work.
I wrote a comment yesterday about how the newspaper industry has lost most of an entire generation of readers due to the declining quality of their product. Now they are standing to lose all of that generation, and the next one coming, by making their content effectively inaccessible.
Like it or not, most people under 30 get their news from the internet. Some will read the occasional newspaper, or watch the TV, or listen to the radio, but the bottom line is that they are spending more time online than all three put together. They're going to look for information and news online before they look for it elsewhere.
People want one click news. Google news, while it isn't perfect, is providing them what they want. An easy way to get the latest headlines, and to search for news topics that interest them and that may not have recieved general coverage. Think about what the service is doing. It's combining the strengths of online, national and local news sources, all in one feed. As a reader of news online, I can safely say that well over 95% of the news stories I have read online were come by via the Google news service.
Newspapers, for some obscure reason, don't seem to like this. Instead they would prefer to make it harder to find their content, and ultimately harder to read it. Imagine an online business that demanded that Google and every other search engine stop indexing their content. It would be lunacy, yet that's exactly what these newspapers are doing.
There is a fundamental law to Internet business, if I may:
If you put barriers between users and your online content, your site will die.
It doesn't matter how high quality your site's content is. If people cannot get past the barriers between them and it, they will turn to your competitors, one of whom will have information they can access quickly and conveniently. Time and again it has been shown that the more open and accessible a site is, the more traffic it will accumulate. True, there may not be much quality control on the traffic (Myspace, Gamespot, etc), but if your site is advertisement based, this will not matter a fiddlers to you.
So here is Google, doing newspapers a favour, by making their online content easier to acess and read, ultimately drawing more eyeballs to the ads on their story pages. And what do they do? They spit in Googles face and demand cold hard cash for every ten word story excerpt. It's lunacy. The product of minds either deranged or deluded. These people seem unable to grasp the consequences of their actions, unlike Google, who has understood the mechanics of all this from day one.
If the The Guardian manages to get its content delisted from Google news and other feeds, then the only effect will be that I, and millions of others, will no longer click into The Guardian website. It will be almost as if their site did not exist. And because people are moving to online over print news, these newspapers will lose an entire generation of not just online readers, but readers period. They are asking to drink hemlock, nay, demanding to do so.
I don't know who is running these newspapers. But whoever they are, they clearly do not actually understand how the newspaper industry actually work anymore. They seem to be like the bankers and economists in the financial industry, who knew so little about their businesses that they, against all reason, rationality and common sense, threw all their money, reputations and futures away for nothing. There is no logic to the decisions of management at these newspapers, yet they persist in this folly.
This probably points to some underlying pathology in the way western companies in general are run. They seem to be quite happy to lose every last one of their customers as long as they retain complete control over the dregs that remain.
For better or worse, Bush -- not being a lawyer -- would've taken Sudan on their offer [of rendering Bin Laden] and the 9/11 would never have happened.
Assuming of course that Osama bin Laden actually had anything to do with the September 11th attacks.
The news outlets have really thrown themselves to the mercy of the Internet revolution, sticking by their values, and look where it got them. I am very worried about the decline of "real news" in the US.
As someone whose formative newspaper, and other news source, reading years were essentially from 2001-2006, I must completely and totally disagree with you.
I'm not sure exactly what newspaper values were in the later decades of the twentieth century. But I certainly do know what they are in the early years of the 21st. They are the values of the establishment, as newspapers in particular are a central and inextricable part of the establishment. I watched paper after paper after paper, day after day after day, tow the party line, stifle dissent, spin stories upside down, manufacture controversy, manufacture consent, treat the powerful with kid gloves, and viciously destroy those who could not defend themselves.
In 2003, literally millions of people marched against the war in Iraq while not one major newspaper went against it. Every last prominent newspaper in the western world supported that war. In the aftermath, they continued to support it. Amid the scandals and lies that followed it, they still supported it, and freely repeated the excuses for the excuses for the excuses. They were all little more than government press sectrecaries, the world over.
And it's not just the war. That was only the most grievous failing of the newspaper industry. When it came to the financial industry, to the graft, to the unjust laws, to the violations of the rule of law, I can't recall a single serious newspaper investigation into anything aside from sex scandals and knife crime. How many important stories have we seen posted on Slashdot that will never, ever see the front, or any other, page of any national or international newspaper. Newspapers are toothless, only having fangs for those who they know cannot fight back. They have not, in my memory, ever seriously attacked those in secure positions of power. Ever.
I open up a newspaper and all I see is district court case reports, astroturf, human interest stories, AP stories and sports news. Oh and opinion. Opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion. Commentary and analysis from wholly unqualified windbags, and every letter of it bought and paid for.
You ask me why the newspaper industry is failing? The Internet!? Not likely. The reason they are failing is because they have failed to provide news, the "real news" you claim they still offer. They don't. Newspapers and the entire media industry have offered an entire generation nothing but tripe, gossip and the offical government line, and in so doing they have lost that generation. Probably forever.
I will certainly never again relay on any mainstream media for my information, on anything. I have, for all my formative news-reading years, relied on the Internet as a source of information. Poor as it is, it has served me better than any official publication. And it has served others in the same way. Others from my generation and probably from two others.
A demographic spanning some 20 years for whom newspapers, raid and television have been, are and will always be and unreliable sources of information. This is not some problem for young "pinkos" or anarchists who will turn to the Village Magazine or Indymedia or what have you for their news. No. The problems in the contemporary media are so deep, so systemic, and so pervasive across the entire political spectrum of the industry, that the young readers who have had to put up with them will never again turn to any outlet proclaiming itself to be an official or unofficial source of news. For them, journalism is a disreputable occupation, and anyone claiming to be one will always be suspect. They turn instead to the bloggers, and nobodies, and part time commentators. People untainted by a corrupt occupation or ind
Re:Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them
on
Even Dirtier IT Jobs
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· Score: 2, Funny
Of course, if nobody cares about you or depends on you then noone will miss you.... If you got run over by the bus, a few friends, relatives and coworkers would attend the funeral, shrug and say "terrible shame" and get on with their lives. Noone would cry for you, noone would call out your name, noone would reach out for you in the dark wishing you were there.
So you're saying that I should have children in order that, upon my inevitable death, they shall be struck so great an emotional blow that they will keen and wail piteously in futile despair; all for the benefit of my own personal requiem?
.....
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Re:Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them
on
Even Dirtier IT Jobs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not pretty, but it beats being unemployed - and being responsible for a family.
A statement which further reinforces my view that having children signals the end of happy life, and the beginning of some kind of badgered and miserable existence, regurgitating the dregs of ones own aspirations into the insatiable beaks of thankless offspring.
The Firehose lets us all know just how bad the Slashdot story submission poll really is. There is a lot of tripe in there; ads, dupes, polemicals, rotten formatting, dupes, enormous submissions, just plain boring stories and more dupes.
The issue of story selection is a deep and chronic one at Slashdot. Essentially, the root of the problem is that there is no real incentive to post a good submission, and more incentive to simply post a swathe of low quality submissions instead. I and many other submitters have spent considerable time an effort on compiling and editing submissions, only to have them rejected within minutes, while dupes were chosen instead.
Now, when you submit you have to accept that your story may not be posted. But when quality submissions are getting lost amid the deluge, it's easy to see how good potential submitters can become disheartened and will simply stop submitting good stories. By contrast, the shotgun submitter who spends less time on each submission, but submits more submissions in total, will be more likely to have a story posted and will continue submitting. The end result is the current, appalling state of the firehose. Admittedly the front page has improved in recent times, but the firehose is as bad as ever.
The best way to solve this problem is to give submitters a karma system. This would allow the system to distinguish between submitters who write good stories that didn't make it, and submitters who just wrote tripe. A meta moderation system for submissions would go a long way to improving the submission box and hence the front page.
How hard can it be to monitor the temperature of a nuclear reactor? Apparently, this task is somehow beyond the competence of nuclear plant supervisors for some obscure reason. Blaming regulation is beside the point. A first year undergraduate engineering student would be able to build a reliable temperature monitor.
Well all I wanted the internet for was worms, popups, piracy, agenda-driven corruption, scams, spam, primal absurdity, porn and the base nature of humanity.
Why should I have to put up with you ordering your stupid computer book?
The article links to an ICANN memo on "Morality and Public Order Objection Considerations in New gTLDs". Essentially ICANN says you have the right to free speech online, except when you don't. From the memo
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. 2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression;[...] 3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it
special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain
restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are
necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals.
In case you missed it, here's the short version.
The right to freedom of expression...may therefore be subject to certain restrictions... For the protection of...public health or morals.
I am reminded of DeValera's 1937 Constitution of Ireland, which granted unto the Irish people the following freedoms
1 The State guarantees liberty for the exercise of the following rights, subject to public order and morality: i. The right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions. The education of public opinion being, however, a matter of such grave import to the common good, the State shall endeavour to ensure that organs of public opinion, such as the radio, the press, the cinema, while preserving their rightful liberty of expression, including criticism of Government policy, shall not be used to undermine public order or morality or the authority of the State.
The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.
DeValera's objective was a sanitized society in Ireland. One in which anything deemed inappropriate by the catholic church and conservatives was expressly illegal. He got his wish, and almost broke the country in the process. Ireland became a priest ridden backwater in which no progressive opinion or position could be uttered or advocated. When in 1950, the government tried to introduce free maternity care to combat the high infant mortality rate, the Catholic Church brought down the government.
In my opinion, ICANN's ultimate aim to transform the internet into a place akin to 1950's Ireland, in which only the opinions and policies of a few powerful (and conservative) groups can hold sway. If the Catholic, or Mormon, or Anglican churches, or an Islamic or Jewish organisation objects to your website, down it goes. If a foreign government complains that your site is contributing to "public unrest" in their state, down it goes. If your website is giving information on abortion in a country where that is illegal, down it goes. If your website uses "obscene language", down it goes.
Remember ICANN is responsible for more than just TLDs. They control domain names and IP addresses. What does a memo like this coming out of the ICANN office say about its commitment to a free and open internet. Not a lot in my opinion. The office has changed.
There are pornography sites, there are racist sites, there are blasphemous sites, anarchist sites, obscene, derogatory, offensive sites. And many more. Guess what? The world has not come to an end. We don't need these "guidelines" or regulations. The internet and society at large have done just fine without them. But try telling that to the people who drafted this memo.
Cyber-saftey is a euphemism. There's no "index.html" file on any webserver in the world that anyone needs immediate and sweeping protections from. This is Cyber-censorship.
Maybe one day the global warming alarmists and hoaxsters will realize that change is a *natural* thing in this universe whether caused by inanimate or animate forces. Storms come and go. Icecaps expand and shrink. Glaciers advance and recede. Species thrive and decline. Get over it.
There is a difference between climate change alarmism and acceptance of anthropomorphic climate change. Due to the shoddy nature of science reporting, and the credulous attidude of many, the two have been confused.
Anthropomorphic climate change is the idea that humans, and more specifically, human industrial output, is having a measurable and significant effect on the climate of the earth. This argument is not so far away from the argument that industry has an effect on the environment, which is obviously true. The difference here is that anthropomorphic climate change states that the effects of human industry are now on a global scale. It's important to note at this point that climate scientists have the evidence to prove these claims.
Proponents of the idea of anthropomorphic climate change usually advocate measures to halt or reduce the effect of humans on the environment. There are adverse effects to climate change, as well as some beneficial ones, but ultimately they argue that we as a society should practice good husbandry and not risk causing adverse effects for ourselves or for others. A swift change in global or regional climates is ultimately in no ones best interests, and of least interest of all to our environment.
Climate change alarmism is different. Global warming alarmists typically take the most spectacular, alarming, devastating and ultimately least likely potential outcomes of climate change and loudly proclaim their inevitability. Usually, they advocate personal efforts by individuals. (but not by industry, ho hum). It's easy to dismiss many of their claims.
But dismissing alarmism is often extrapolated out to dismissing anthropomorphic climate change as a whole. You really shouldn't do this. The effects of climate change may not be worthy of a hollywood spectacle, but they will be real and probably permanent. If a few million of hectares of scrubland are turned to desert, or forests turn to grassland, or if your summers are too wet or too hot, of if a few species become extinct, or if your children will never be able to build a snowman, then it is true that you will not have lost a lot objectively. But you will have lost something. And needlessly.
You mentioned in your post that "Species thrive and decline." This is true, but species can and have been declined or destroyed not by natural causes but by the effect of human industry. Consider whales. Fished to the point of, and in effect probably to, extinction not by any natural cause, but by the will of human societies and industry. I think it's safe to say that no one wanted this to happen, but it did anyway and we cannot ever undo this. The greater tragedy is that is need never have happened.
It's the same with climate change. A few degrees may not sound like a lot to most people, but it is a big change. The earth will pull through, but it will be a slightly different place. But Things and places will be lost to us forever. And they will be lost not because we as a society did nothing, but because we refused to stop doing things which we could easily have done without. That doesn't sound like a lot of progress to me.
I like X11. I like user accounts. I like init levels. I like the command line.
I like iptables. I like ssh. I like grub. I like lilo. I like partitions.
cd. mv. du. fsck. ps. chron. grep. dd. awk. rm. cut. exec. sed. paste. fortune. latex. convert. wget. make.
I love every program that can be run from the prompt!
I like umounting entire directories and mounting new partitions in their place. When I see my home directory on a seperate disk seamlessly becoming part of a new filesystem, my heart dances.
I like showing windows users the power of the interfaces at my command. When they saw me editing config files in vi and emacs without a mouse and fled screaming from the server room, my heart leapt.
I like it when a long and tedious task is automated with single perl program. I remember being moved upon seeing a simple quick script make thousands of complex edits again and again.
Having total control over the machine as root is unendurably exciting. Seeing multiple users being logged out and their process terminated, as my own finger falls, was spectacular.
When the filesystem was failing with multiple bad sectors, and we hotswapped it all from tape backup without a reboot, I was at my height.
I like it when things go catastrophically wrong. It is a sad thing to see a newb be fooled into running "#rm -rf/".
I like being outperformed in security and reliability by BSD servers. Having to fix bug after bug and constantly update the kernel while they run unmaintained for years is the ultimate disgrace.
Gentlemen...I desire a distro that is like hell.
Gentlemen, my companions in Slashdot, who follow the penguin...Gentlemen, what do you desire?
Do you desire a distro as well? Do you desire a distro with no mercy!?
Do you desire a setup of boxen that stretches the limits of solder, fans, power supply, and heat sinks to the limit!? One that will overclock all the CPUs on this planet?!?...
Slashdot Mirror
And when (not if) this clock breaks down, what will that encourage us to do?
That's news to me. I haven't a blind brass notion of what anyone else is doing online. In fact, I don't even know how I would go about finding out.
Doesn't sound very public to me.
If your game is really good, then won't it sell more copies, making you more money?
Is there some hidden cost in producing more copies of a binary file?
Coal contains trace amounts of uranium, typically at around 3ppm.
However ordinary soil contains trace amounts at concentrations ranging from between 1-5ppm.
This argument is based on the assumption that those who are payed more in our society are more hard working and productive. As any fool can tell you, in reality the exact opposite of this assumption holds. Typically the more you are paid, the less productive you are.
While there are exceptions, it is safe to say that those on the lower end of the payscale work very hard jobs for very long hours, whereas those in high paid executive positions are on a gravy train, with high salaries, bonuses, short hours, little responsibility and who actually do atrociously little work.
The truth, and it is something that many simply cannot bear to face, is that the wealth of many individuals has very little to do with their own productivity and labour, and very much to do with the productivity and labour of the many people who work for them. This notion was, and still is, denied by many, particularly whose at the top end of the pay scale, who struggle to find some rationalisation for why they, who spend most of their day idle, spewing out buzzwords, on telephone calls, making powerpoint presentations or surfing for porn, should receive an order of magnitude or more compensation for their day than the people on the factory floor who visibly sweat in order to make their living. It's a powerful juxtaposition and one which I'm sure people in top paying jobs are subconsciously uncomfortable with. Hence they rationalise. Oh do they rationalise.
Read Galbraith's book, "The Great Crash", where he analyises the 1929 stock market crash. Among other things, he argues that one of the main causes of the crash was the huge wealth disparity between the super rich and everyone else. Basically, there were a small number of people who had sucked up a sizable proportion of the money in the US, and gave nothing in return. When they stopped spending, the whole system froze up. They were essentially black holes which money flowed into, but never out of. Consumption taxes wouldn't have helped. Their money was idle and remained so.
So I don't buy this idea about the "injustice" of taxing higher earners. In my opinion, the true leaches in our society are the people in top positions who sit around doing nothing while creaming off the labour of others. they are the true parasites, and they are ultimately the ones who got us into the current crises we now find ourselves in. I'm not a communist, but I don't buy the idea that people should receive unlimited compensation simply because they had a rich parent, an expensive education and the right contacts. And make no mistake, those are the only qualifications that 90% of business managers have today.
Personally, I've never been able to get any virtualisation software to work. Can you give me a How-to on setting one up?
A friend of mine works at Gamestop and they have a policy of "staff loans". While he does take advantage of this to play the latest and greatest titles, taking games home to play is basically a (unpaid) part of his job. He takes home titles, assesses them, and is able to give an honest opinion to anyone who comes up to the counter. The other employees do so as well, and the end result is, as you say, a lot of specialist knowledge behind the counter.
I have often gone up to a game shop counter and asked, "What about $GAME_X?". I have variously been told a game is great or awful, fun or boring, worth it new, worth it used, etc ,etc. Sometimes, two people behind the counter will get into a disagreement over a particular with one arguing that the game is fantastic, and the other disparaging it. With the wages these guys get, this is not some company stunt. It's a real live critique from people who actually play game, and I appreciate getting it.
You get clerks who play one console over the other. You get guys who play PC games. You get Guys who like/hate FPSes, RPGs, MMOs, RTSes, etc, etc, etc. When one clerk doesn't know about $GAME_X, he turns around to someone else who can usually tell you whether it's good or not. The best advice you get concerns the lesser known titles, the hidden gems that the mainstream has ignored but which turn out to be simply excellent games.
Is my new game not new because someone has played it for a day or two? Do I actually care. When I was buying my PS3, the shop had a deal going where you got two free games. They were out of Resistance Fall of Man copies, so it was looking like I was going to get stuck with something like Madden NFL or Gundam. Then I was offered a used copy of Resistance in place of a new one. The disc was spotless, the manual was uncrumpled, the case was intact. I jumped at the offer.
Software is software is software. As long as the storage medium has data integrity, I really couldn't care less who has used it before me. This is digital information. There is not going to be artifacts or slowdown in the game because someone else played it before me. The menus will not be worn or weathered, and my characters guns are not going to jam if I don't buy a pristine new copy. This is indeed, the very purpose of digital information. It can be copied an used infinitely without degradation.
People who complain about these staff loans are probably the same kind of people who will buy gold HDMI cable so that they get a "better quality" digital signal. In other words, people who have no idea how computers, or computers game actually work.
Yes! We are Anonymous, we are legion, we do not...
A better explanation would be that they have legal records of Obama huffing kittens or some such thing. Because that would be a surprise to everyone.
I wrote a comment yesterday about how the newspaper industry has lost most of an entire generation of readers due to the declining quality of their product. Now they are standing to lose all of that generation, and the next one coming, by making their content effectively inaccessible.
Like it or not, most people under 30 get their news from the internet. Some will read the occasional newspaper, or watch the TV, or listen to the radio, but the bottom line is that they are spending more time online than all three put together. They're going to look for information and news online before they look for it elsewhere.
People want one click news. Google news, while it isn't perfect, is providing them what they want. An easy way to get the latest headlines, and to search for news topics that interest them and that may not have recieved general coverage. Think about what the service is doing. It's combining the strengths of online, national and local news sources, all in one feed. As a reader of news online, I can safely say that well over 95% of the news stories I have read online were come by via the Google news service.
Newspapers, for some obscure reason, don't seem to like this. Instead they would prefer to make it harder to find their content, and ultimately harder to read it. Imagine an online business that demanded that Google and every other search engine stop indexing their content. It would be lunacy, yet that's exactly what these newspapers are doing.
There is a fundamental law to Internet business, if I may:
It doesn't matter how high quality your site's content is. If people cannot get past the barriers between them and it, they will turn to your competitors, one of whom will have information they can access quickly and conveniently. Time and again it has been shown that the more open and accessible a site is, the more traffic it will accumulate. True, there may not be much quality control on the traffic (Myspace, Gamespot, etc), but if your site is advertisement based, this will not matter a fiddlers to you.
So here is Google, doing newspapers a favour, by making their online content easier to acess and read, ultimately drawing more eyeballs to the ads on their story pages. And what do they do? They spit in Googles face and demand cold hard cash for every ten word story excerpt. It's lunacy. The product of minds either deranged or deluded. These people seem unable to grasp the consequences of their actions, unlike Google, who has understood the mechanics of all this from day one.
If the The Guardian manages to get its content delisted from Google news and other feeds, then the only effect will be that I, and millions of others, will no longer click into The Guardian website. It will be almost as if their site did not exist. And because people are moving to online over print news, these newspapers will lose an entire generation of not just online readers, but readers period. They are asking to drink hemlock, nay, demanding to do so.
I don't know who is running these newspapers. But whoever they are, they clearly do not actually understand how the newspaper industry actually work anymore. They seem to be like the bankers and economists in the financial industry, who knew so little about their businesses that they, against all reason, rationality and common sense, threw all their money, reputations and futures away for nothing. There is no logic to the decisions of management at these newspapers, yet they persist in this folly.
This probably points to some underlying pathology in the way western companies in general are run. They seem to be quite happy to lose every last one of their customers as long as they retain complete control over the dregs that remain.
Assuming of course that Osama bin Laden actually had anything to do with the September 11th attacks.
Maybe. But that doesn't mean it was not obvious.
Sit down my son. ....
As someone whose formative newspaper, and other news source, reading years were essentially from 2001-2006, I must completely and totally disagree with you.
I'm not sure exactly what newspaper values were in the later decades of the twentieth century. But I certainly do know what they are in the early years of the 21st. They are the values of the establishment, as newspapers in particular are a central and inextricable part of the establishment. I watched paper after paper after paper, day after day after day, tow the party line, stifle dissent, spin stories upside down, manufacture controversy, manufacture consent, treat the powerful with kid gloves, and viciously destroy those who could not defend themselves.
In 2003, literally millions of people marched against the war in Iraq while not one major newspaper went against it. Every last prominent newspaper in the western world supported that war. In the aftermath, they continued to support it. Amid the scandals and lies that followed it, they still supported it, and freely repeated the excuses for the excuses for the excuses. They were all little more than government press sectrecaries, the world over.
And it's not just the war. That was only the most grievous failing of the newspaper industry. When it came to the financial industry, to the graft, to the unjust laws, to the violations of the rule of law, I can't recall a single serious newspaper investigation into anything aside from sex scandals and knife crime. How many important stories have we seen posted on Slashdot that will never, ever see the front, or any other, page of any national or international newspaper. Newspapers are toothless, only having fangs for those who they know cannot fight back. They have not, in my memory, ever seriously attacked those in secure positions of power. Ever.
I open up a newspaper and all I see is district court case reports, astroturf, human interest stories, AP stories and sports news. Oh and opinion. Opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion. Commentary and analysis from wholly unqualified windbags, and every letter of it bought and paid for.
You ask me why the newspaper industry is failing? The Internet!? Not likely. The reason they are failing is because they have failed to provide news, the "real news" you claim they still offer. They don't. Newspapers and the entire media industry have offered an entire generation nothing but tripe, gossip and the offical government line, and in so doing they have lost that generation. Probably forever.
I will certainly never again relay on any mainstream media for my information, on anything. I have, for all my formative news-reading years, relied on the Internet as a source of information. Poor as it is, it has served me better than any official publication. And it has served others in the same way. Others from my generation and probably from two others.
A demographic spanning some 20 years for whom newspapers, raid and television have been, are and will always be and unreliable sources of information. This is not some problem for young "pinkos" or anarchists who will turn to the Village Magazine or Indymedia or what have you for their news. No. The problems in the contemporary media are so deep, so systemic, and so pervasive across the entire political spectrum of the industry, that the young readers who have had to put up with them will never again turn to any outlet proclaiming itself to be an official or unofficial source of news. For them, journalism is a disreputable occupation, and anyone claiming to be one will always be suspect. They turn instead to the bloggers, and nobodies, and part time commentators. People untainted by a corrupt occupation or ind
So you're saying that I should have children in order that, upon my inevitable death, they shall be struck so great an emotional blow that they will keen and wail piteously in futile despair; all for the benefit of my own personal requiem?
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
! C...cuh....coah....COMMUNIST!!!
A statement which further reinforces my view that having children signals the end of happy life, and the beginning of some kind of badgered and miserable existence, regurgitating the dregs of ones own aspirations into the insatiable beaks of thankless offspring.
And to think. People bring this on themselves.
The Firehose lets us all know just how bad the Slashdot story submission poll really is. There is a lot of tripe in there; ads, dupes, polemicals, rotten formatting, dupes, enormous submissions, just plain boring stories and more dupes.
The issue of story selection is a deep and chronic one at Slashdot. Essentially, the root of the problem is that there is no real incentive to post a good submission, and more incentive to simply post a swathe of low quality submissions instead. I and many other submitters have spent considerable time an effort on compiling and editing submissions, only to have them rejected within minutes, while dupes were chosen instead.
Now, when you submit you have to accept that your story may not be posted. But when quality submissions are getting lost amid the deluge, it's easy to see how good potential submitters can become disheartened and will simply stop submitting good stories. By contrast, the shotgun submitter who spends less time on each submission, but submits more submissions in total, will be more likely to have a story posted and will continue submitting. The end result is the current, appalling state of the firehose. Admittedly the front page has improved in recent times, but the firehose is as bad as ever.
The best way to solve this problem is to give submitters a karma system. This would allow the system to distinguish between submitters who write good stories that didn't make it, and submitters who just wrote tripe. A meta moderation system for submissions would go a long way to improving the submission box and hence the front page.
"Computers! Error! Component Failure! Congress! Unpredicatble! etc, etc, etc. Excuses, excuses.
How hard can it be to monitor the temperature of a nuclear reactor? Apparently, this task is somehow beyond the competence of nuclear plant supervisors for some obscure reason. Blaming regulation is beside the point. A first year undergraduate engineering student would be able to build a reliable temperature monitor.
Well all I wanted the internet for was worms, popups, piracy, agenda-driven corruption, scams, spam, primal absurdity, porn and the base nature of humanity.
Why should I have to put up with you ordering your stupid computer book?
The article links to an ICANN memo on "Morality and Public Order Objection Considerations in New gTLDs". Essentially ICANN says you have the right to free speech online, except when you don't. From the memo
In case you missed it, here's the short version.
I am reminded of DeValera's 1937 Constitution of Ireland, which granted unto the Irish people the following freedoms
DeValera's objective was a sanitized society in Ireland. One in which anything deemed inappropriate by the catholic church and conservatives was expressly illegal. He got his wish, and almost broke the country in the process. Ireland became a priest ridden backwater in which no progressive opinion or position could be uttered or advocated. When in 1950, the government tried to introduce free maternity care to combat the high infant mortality rate, the Catholic Church brought down the government.
In my opinion, ICANN's ultimate aim to transform the internet into a place akin to 1950's Ireland, in which only the opinions and policies of a few powerful (and conservative) groups can hold sway. If the Catholic, or Mormon, or Anglican churches, or an Islamic or Jewish organisation objects to your website, down it goes. If a foreign government complains that your site is contributing to "public unrest" in their state, down it goes. If your website is giving information on abortion in a country where that is illegal, down it goes. If your website uses "obscene language", down it goes.
Remember ICANN is responsible for more than just TLDs. They control domain names and IP addresses. What does a memo like this coming out of the ICANN office say about its commitment to a free and open internet. Not a lot in my opinion. The office has changed.
There are pornography sites, there are racist sites, there are blasphemous sites, anarchist sites, obscene, derogatory, offensive sites. And many more. Guess what? The world has not come to an end. We don't need these "guidelines" or regulations. The internet and society at large have done just fine without them. But try telling that to the people who drafted this memo.
Cyber-saftey is a euphemism. There's no "index.html" file on any webserver in the world that anyone needs immediate and sweeping protections from. This is Cyber-censorship.
Ahh! So it was a North American problem!
What the hell is shrinkage and what does it have to do with being cold? Is this another one of those North American things?
There is a difference between climate change alarmism and acceptance of anthropomorphic climate change. Due to the shoddy nature of science reporting, and the credulous attidude of many, the two have been confused.
Anthropomorphic climate change is the idea that humans, and more specifically, human industrial output, is having a measurable and significant effect on the climate of the earth. This argument is not so far away from the argument that industry has an effect on the environment, which is obviously true. The difference here is that anthropomorphic climate change states that the effects of human industry are now on a global scale. It's important to note at this point that climate scientists have the evidence to prove these claims.
Proponents of the idea of anthropomorphic climate change usually advocate measures to halt or reduce the effect of humans on the environment. There are adverse effects to climate change, as well as some beneficial ones, but ultimately they argue that we as a society should practice good husbandry and not risk causing adverse effects for ourselves or for others. A swift change in global or regional climates is ultimately in no ones best interests, and of least interest of all to our environment.
Climate change alarmism is different. Global warming alarmists typically take the most spectacular, alarming, devastating and ultimately least likely potential outcomes of climate change and loudly proclaim their inevitability. Usually, they advocate personal efforts by individuals. (but not by industry, ho hum). It's easy to dismiss many of their claims.
But dismissing alarmism is often extrapolated out to dismissing anthropomorphic climate change as a whole. You really shouldn't do this. The effects of climate change may not be worthy of a hollywood spectacle, but they will be real and probably permanent. If a few million of hectares of scrubland are turned to desert, or forests turn to grassland, or if your summers are too wet or too hot, of if a few species become extinct, or if your children will never be able to build a snowman, then it is true that you will not have lost a lot objectively. But you will have lost something. And needlessly.
You mentioned in your post that "Species thrive and decline." This is true, but species can and have been declined or destroyed not by natural causes but by the effect of human industry. Consider whales. Fished to the point of, and in effect probably to, extinction not by any natural cause, but by the will of human societies and industry. I think it's safe to say that no one wanted this to happen, but it did anyway and we cannot ever undo this. The greater tragedy is that is need never have happened.
It's the same with climate change. A few degrees may not sound like a lot to most people, but it is a big change. The earth will pull through, but it will be a slightly different place. But Things and places will be lost to us forever. And they will be lost not because we as a society did nothing, but because we refused to stop doing things which we could easily have done without. That doesn't sound like a lot of progress to me.
Gentlemen, I like Linux.
Gentlemen, I like Linux.
Gentlemen, I love Linux!
I like X11. I like user accounts. I like init levels. I like the command line.
I like iptables. I like ssh. I like grub. I like lilo. I like partitions.
cd. mv. du. fsck. ps. chron. grep. dd. awk. rm. cut. exec. sed. paste. fortune. latex. convert. wget. make.
I love every program that can be run from the prompt!
I like umounting entire directories and mounting new partitions in their place. When I see my home directory on a seperate disk seamlessly becoming part of a new filesystem, my heart dances.
I like showing windows users the power of the interfaces at my command. When they saw me editing config files in vi and emacs without a mouse and fled screaming from the server room, my heart leapt.
I like it when a long and tedious task is automated with single perl program. I remember being moved upon seeing a simple quick script make thousands of complex edits again and again.
Having total control over the machine as root is unendurably exciting. Seeing multiple users being logged out and their process terminated, as my own finger falls, was spectacular.
When the filesystem was failing with multiple bad sectors, and we hotswapped it all from tape backup without a reboot, I was at my height.
I like it when things go catastrophically wrong. It is a sad thing to see a newb be fooled into running "#rm -rf /".
I like being outperformed in security and reliability by BSD servers. Having to fix bug after bug and constantly update the kernel while they run unmaintained for years is the ultimate disgrace.
Gentlemen...I desire a distro that is like hell.
Gentlemen, my companions in Slashdot, who follow the penguin...Gentlemen, what do you desire?
Do you desire a distro as well? Do you desire a distro with no mercy!?
Do you desire a setup of boxen that stretches the limits of solder, fans, power supply, and heat sinks to the limit!? One that will overclock all the CPUs on this planet?!? ...
Very well...then we shall have LINUX!!