The typical medieval schlep could, weekly, visit one of the most striking works of art in European history: the medieval cathedral, which used artistry and splendor to communicate the religious ideas of the church to the (illiterate) common man.
Traditional, non-copyright-using cultures seem to have plenty of arts, crafts and music. More than we do, and with less of the stale "consumer" relationship.
Well, I was unemployed for a while, and turned down a couple opportunities to work at places I considered morally objectionable, including Bechtel.
So I have put my money where my mouth is. I then recieved and accepted an offer to work for a company whose values I respect - and at a higher salary than my last position. One thing they could recognize from my CV was my commitment to good business ethics and values.
It doesn't matter that there's 1000 qualified job candidates that would stab their mothers in the back for a job. For any give position, all that matters is that there is one (in fact, many) who would not. Who would you rather work with?
IT is a dead field. It's now just another form of skilled labor, like being a machinist or a glazier. You need to translate your skills as best you can to something more viable. It would be a lot easier, of course, if you lived in a country with decent health-care and educational benefits, to give you the time and opportunity to retrain.
Please see my follow up up-thread. For one thing, I don't have an hourly wage I would give to writers because I don't think there's only one mode of recompensation for writing or any of these arts.
Samuel Delaney makes most of his money on his academic salary - in fact, most academics write prodigously while getting only a small amount of income directly from that writing.
I do believe that there's room for some sort of legal protection about financially profiting for the uncompensated work of another. And representing someone else's work as your own is also fair game for intervention (as fraud). It's clear from all this file-sharing madness that copyright has little to do with any of that. I want to err - and err soundly - on the side of fair use.
That's one possibility. A number of public-sector endowed "national treasure"-type arts-fellowships are another possiblity.
Another is in-house composers and musicians. Film studios, for example, will want new content for movies and TV shows. They could have a salaried staff to produce and perform them.
Yet another is the academic model, or the teacher/artist model. Or a performance/composition/design bounty.
I don't think it's a matter of only one of these, either; rather, even today, a professional artist, musician, or composer is likely to build a career over a number of ways. After all, most of the best net-art comes from people who do it in their spare time, either just for kicks, as portfolio builders, or to hone their chops. I think it's appropriate to expect good art to be professionalized - I think that good art is vital for a healthy society, and that it be possible for a well-recieved artist to make a good living doing what they do. I simply don't believe that the manufacturing model is necessary for the creation of good art - and, in fact, is responsible for much of the worst of it.
It would be the end to art, wrting and music as manufacturing. As long as people still want art, copy, and music produced, they will get paid to produce it. It will be a matter of getting paid for the hours, not the goods.
They are being far better than SCO, because they are making a choice based on the facts, not on a bunch of made-up nonsense in order to justify a wacky lawsuit.
I think it is entirely reasonable to make one's judgment as an employee part of the screen for a new job. I would look seriously askance at someone so mercenary as to stay in a morally bankrupt organization, like a Monsanto or a Nike or an SCO or such. It's not as if they were conscripted. And there are thousands of job candidates out there who have more of the courage of their convictions - I'd certainly prefer to hire them.
That's not true. Correlation is very important. For one thing, it justifies looking for causation when that's possible. In many cases when you're studying human behaviour, there are limits on just what you can do to prove causation (what, give a bunch of videogames to kids and see if you can "make" them ADHD? There was a scandalous attempt to prove the role of trauma in creating stuttering that has had reverberations in the American psychology scene ever since - human test restrictions are now quite stringent.)
Trotting out the "correlation isn't causation" mantra like it proves you're some brilliant social critic is sophomoric. The most appropriate thing to study is how videogames and ADHD interact as a *system,* not as a simple cause/effect question. And by looking at the behaviour as part of a system of adaptations, you can explain it better. You need to find the correlation first.
From the perspective of a population living with no wage growth and a slack labor market, it's a recession. It's the experience of the bulk of the populace that matters in determining the cultural mood, not the economic statistics of a jobless increase in productivity.
I agree with you with the caveat that it's often in the characters themselves that we really understand the nature of the speculation. Gibson at is best gave us characters with inner conflicts that were structured by the changes in the world around them. For me, the master of this is Thomas Disch - he weds his keen insights into human social psychology with good speculative imagination.
Science fiction speculation that exists for superficial, somewhat plastic "space boy" personalities isn't meaningful to me, because it's speculation about a change that would be impossible for us humans. The fact is that technological change occurs within the context of human desires, human limitation, and human contradictions, and a science fiction that is naive about this is shallow at best, and often wrong about its predictions.
We're in a recession. During recessionary periods, nostalgic fantasy dominates the cultural landscape. It was true in the 70's, it was true in the early 90's, and it's true now. During boom cycles, "the future is now" optimism (or "the world is changing too fast" pessimism) has a lot more energy.
Also, the sense of public investment in the future is weaker. The age of space travel as a public-sector funded universal aspiration has been eclipsed by the corporate "if it ain't profitable within 3 years, it's not worth doing" attitude of the present day. There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes, most of us won't be able to afford it.
There are a lot of parts of real life that one "shelters" children from: rape, violence, the fact that most of one's life is a grinding, dreary march to death during which we seek to eke out tiny moments of joy before the relentless machinery of despair wipes us out, taxes, Duke Nukem Forever, the fact that so-called heroes are usually as flawed and corrupt as everyone else, and the fact that they probably came into this world not in a joyous, wonderous, giving event, but from a horny set of parents who probably were not thinking about junior at the time and, nine months later, amidst blood and screaming.
Sheltering is pretty much what it's all about.
Videogames aren't the real world, and it's appropriate to treat them as pedagogical - they can teach as much as they entertain. Responsible parents will react accordingly. Sometimes, the message that they are not supposed to play with this until they've achieved a certain maturity and moral distance is as much part of the message as any that's in the game itself.
Not that I think there's anything wrong with a measured amount of play-violence, either. That's a normal part of childhood, and I don't want to think you can nerf-ify a kid's entire life. Here's a good discussion about it - I think Gerard Jones is right-on in his perspective, but interestingly enough he doesn't let his kid play GTA3.
Do you have children? Would you let your kids watch porn? After all, they'll just want to watch it more...
Even better than Lone Wolf and Cub is Osamu Tezuka's "Adolf." All of Tezuka's stuff is worth looking at - a lot of it looks really youngish at first, but then turns out to be anything but.
Also recommended from the deep-end of the pool: American Splendor (check out the new movie that just came out.)
Well, it's not a matter of blaming it on Republicans, but on a group of very far-right types who not only are trying to hijack the Republican party, but are trying to silence people (like Bev Harris) who report on this.
Reason Magazine, by no means a liberal nor hysterical magazine, seems to have no compunctions about identifying this as a problem with roots in the right.
It's worse than you think. Election Systems and Software, the company that builds, owns and largely runs many of the voting machines used in the US (and 80% of those used in Nebraska) was at one time headed and is still partially owned by Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator from Nebraska - who, surprisingly, won unprecedented victories in his state against an incumbent Democrat governor, winning by the largest landslide ever and taking the majority among demographics that had never voted Republican in the past.Hagel had avoided reporting his ownership, and then the whole trail started to come out into the open. It also turns out that Election Systems and Software was heavily funded by the conservative Christian fundamentalist Ahmanson family.
The point is that they are comparing IBM workers to the population at large. That's statistically significant. Proof? No, but evidence that something is amiss.
Considering the large number of IBM employees in a variety of locations, that statistic is far from meaningless. If it were one little shop in the middle of nowhere, that would be one thing. But we are talking about thousands of people in dozens of sites.
By the RIAA's logic, by purchasing the CD's, they purchased the right for personal playback of that song.
After all, if the CD is stolen, are you then required to delete all copies you have of it?
The entire fiction of song-as-property is ludicrous, and it's situations like this that really bring it to the breaking point. The fact that hundreds of thousands - even millions - of otherwise quite scrupulous people in the US alone simply do not abide by these fictions is indication enough that they are preposterous. Music production should be treated as a service, not as a kind of manufacturing. Musicians need to get paid for the time they put into it, not on a piecework basis.
I think the idea is a negative income tax for the lowest bracket, not a one-time burst of money. It's an idea that has some fans among some conservatives, too.
The idea is that if large segments of the economy are completely automated, the smart thing to do is to make everybody part-owners of them.
After all, the entire state of Alaska has something comparable for its oil-wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
The typical medieval schlep could, weekly, visit one of the most striking works of art in European history: the medieval cathedral, which used artistry and splendor to communicate the religious ideas of the church to the (illiterate) common man.
Traditional, non-copyright-using cultures seem to have plenty of arts, crafts and music. More than we do, and with less of the stale "consumer" relationship.
Well, I was unemployed for a while, and turned down a couple opportunities to work at places I considered morally objectionable, including Bechtel.
So I have put my money where my mouth is. I then recieved and accepted an offer to work for a company whose values I respect - and at a higher salary than my last position. One thing they could recognize from my CV was my commitment to good business ethics and values.
It doesn't matter that there's 1000 qualified job candidates that would stab their mothers in the back for a job. For any give position, all that matters is that there is one (in fact, many) who would not. Who would you rather work with?
IT is a dead field. It's now just another form of skilled labor, like being a machinist or a glazier. You need to translate your skills as best you can to something more viable. It would be a lot easier, of course, if you lived in a country with decent health-care and educational benefits, to give you the time and opportunity to retrain.
Please see my follow up up-thread. For one thing, I don't have an hourly wage I would give to writers because I don't think there's only one mode of recompensation for writing or any of these arts.
Samuel Delaney makes most of his money on his academic salary - in fact, most academics write prodigously while getting only a small amount of income directly from that writing.
I do believe that there's room for some sort of legal protection about financially profiting for the uncompensated work of another. And representing someone else's work as your own is also fair game for intervention (as fraud). It's clear from all this file-sharing madness that copyright has little to do with any of that. I want to err - and err soundly - on the side of fair use.
That's one possibility. A number of public-sector endowed "national treasure"-type arts-fellowships are another possiblity.
Another is in-house composers and musicians. Film studios, for example, will want new content for movies and TV shows. They could have a salaried staff to produce and perform them.
Yet another is the academic model, or the teacher/artist model. Or a performance/composition/design bounty.
I don't think it's a matter of only one of these, either; rather, even today, a professional artist, musician, or composer is likely to build a career over a number of ways. After all, most of the best net-art comes from people who do it in their spare time, either just for kicks, as portfolio builders, or to hone their chops. I think it's appropriate to expect good art to be professionalized - I think that good art is vital for a healthy society, and that it be possible for a well-recieved artist to make a good living doing what they do. I simply don't believe that the manufacturing model is necessary for the creation of good art - and, in fact, is responsible for much of the worst of it.
It would be the end to art, wrting and music as manufacturing. As long as people still want art, copy, and music produced, they will get paid to produce it. It will be a matter of getting paid for the hours, not the goods.
They are being far better than SCO, because they are making a choice based on the facts, not on a bunch of made-up nonsense in order to justify a wacky lawsuit.
I think it is entirely reasonable to make one's judgment as an employee part of the screen for a new job. I would look seriously askance at someone so mercenary as to stay in a morally bankrupt organization, like a Monsanto or a Nike or an SCO or such. It's not as if they were conscripted. And there are thousands of job candidates out there who have more of the courage of their convictions - I'd certainly prefer to hire them.
That's not true. Correlation is very important. For one thing, it justifies looking for causation when that's possible. In many cases when you're studying human behaviour, there are limits on just what you can do to prove causation (what, give a bunch of videogames to kids and see if you can "make" them ADHD? There was a scandalous attempt to prove the role of trauma in creating stuttering that has had reverberations in the American psychology scene ever since - human test restrictions are now quite stringent.)
Trotting out the "correlation isn't causation" mantra like it proves you're some brilliant social critic is sophomoric. The most appropriate thing to study is how videogames and ADHD interact as a *system,* not as a simple cause/effect question. And by looking at the behaviour as part of a system of adaptations, you can explain it better. You need to find the correlation first.
From the perspective of a population living with no wage growth and a slack labor market, it's a recession. It's the experience of the bulk of the populace that matters in determining the cultural mood, not the economic statistics of a jobless increase in productivity.
I agree with you with the caveat that it's often in the characters themselves that we really understand the nature of the speculation. Gibson at is best gave us characters with inner conflicts that were structured by the changes in the world around them. For me, the master of this is Thomas Disch - he weds his keen insights into human social psychology with good speculative imagination.
Science fiction speculation that exists for superficial, somewhat plastic "space boy" personalities isn't meaningful to me, because it's speculation about a change that would be impossible for us humans. The fact is that technological change occurs within the context of human desires, human limitation, and human contradictions, and a science fiction that is naive about this is shallow at best, and often wrong about its predictions.
Part of it is about economic cycles.
We're in a recession. During recessionary periods, nostalgic fantasy dominates the cultural landscape. It was true in the 70's, it was true in the early 90's, and it's true now. During boom cycles, "the future is now" optimism (or "the world is changing too fast" pessimism) has a lot more energy.
Also, the sense of public investment in the future is weaker. The age of space travel as a public-sector funded universal aspiration has been eclipsed by the corporate "if it ain't profitable within 3 years, it's not worth doing" attitude of the present day. There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes, most of us won't be able to afford it.
There are a lot of parts of real life that one "shelters" children from: rape, violence, the fact that most of one's life is a grinding, dreary march to death during which we seek to eke out tiny moments of joy before the relentless machinery of despair wipes us out, taxes, Duke Nukem Forever, the fact that so-called heroes are usually as flawed and corrupt as everyone else, and the fact that they probably came into this world not in a joyous, wonderous, giving event, but from a horny set of parents who probably were not thinking about junior at the time and, nine months later, amidst blood and screaming.
Sheltering is pretty much what it's all about.
Videogames aren't the real world, and it's appropriate to treat them as pedagogical - they can teach as much as they entertain. Responsible parents will react accordingly. Sometimes, the message that they are not supposed to play with this until they've achieved a certain maturity and moral distance is as much part of the message as any that's in the game itself.
Not that I think there's anything wrong with a measured amount of play-violence, either. That's a normal part of childhood, and I don't want to think you can nerf-ify a kid's entire life. Here's a good discussion about it - I think Gerard Jones is right-on in his perspective, but interestingly enough he doesn't let his kid play GTA3.
Do you have children? Would you let your kids watch porn? After all, they'll just want to watch it more...
Even better than Lone Wolf and Cub is Osamu Tezuka's "Adolf." All of Tezuka's stuff is worth looking at - a lot of it looks really youngish at first, but then turns out to be anything but.
Also recommended from the deep-end of the pool: American Splendor (check out the new movie that just came out.)
An English major waiting on tables is making more money than an unemployed CS grad sitting at home posting on Slashdot.
Alright, that's a fair analogy.
Of course, you get to go right past airport security without stopping, too, because you know you're not a terrorist. Right?
Well, it's not a matter of blaming it on Republicans, but on a group of very far-right types who not only are trying to hijack the Republican party, but are trying to silence people (like Bev Harris) who report on this.
Reason Magazine, by no means a liberal nor hysterical magazine, seems to have no compunctions about identifying this as a problem with roots in the right.
It's worse than you think. Election Systems and Software, the company that builds, owns and largely runs many of the voting machines used in the US (and 80% of those used in Nebraska) was at one time headed and is still partially owned by Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator from Nebraska - who, surprisingly, won unprecedented victories in his state against an incumbent Democrat governor, winning by the largest landslide ever and taking the majority among demographics that had never voted Republican in the past.Hagel had avoided reporting his ownership, and then the whole trail started to come out into the open. It also turns out that Election Systems and Software was heavily funded by the conservative Christian fundamentalist Ahmanson family.
The point is that they are comparing IBM workers to the population at large. That's statistically significant. Proof? No, but evidence that something is amiss.
Considering the large number of IBM employees in a variety of locations, that statistic is far from meaningless. If it were one little shop in the middle of nowhere, that would be one thing. But we are talking about thousands of people in dozens of sites.
Ah, spoken like someone who has never recieved, nor known anyone who has recieved, an NEA or NEH grant.
They are pittances, those grants. Almost negligable.
Crappee and Goode, Attys-at-Law. Specializing in copyright and intellectual property law.
By the RIAA's logic, by purchasing the CD's, they purchased the right for personal playback of that song.
After all, if the CD is stolen, are you then required to delete all copies you have of it?
The entire fiction of song-as-property is ludicrous, and it's situations like this that really bring it to the breaking point. The fact that hundreds of thousands - even millions - of otherwise quite scrupulous people in the US alone simply do not abide by these fictions is indication enough that they are preposterous. Music production should be treated as a service, not as a kind of manufacturing. Musicians need to get paid for the time they put into it, not on a piecework basis.
40% of a user base that grew enormous based on the free product?
That's a win. A big win. I would have guessed 10%.
40% of 100,000 people is a lot more than 100% of 50 people.
What do you think Russia was like before 1917? Answer: a lot farther away from the first world than it is now.
I think the idea is a negative income tax for the lowest bracket, not a one-time burst of money. It's an idea that has some fans among some conservatives, too.
The idea is that if large segments of the economy are completely automated, the smart thing to do is to make everybody part-owners of them.
After all, the entire state of Alaska has something comparable for its oil-wealth.