And it should be noted that 1. there's a lot of neural mass which is devoted to specific brain function, but also a good amount of it - particularly in the cortex - which doesn't have "innate" use, but forms connections with more functionally specified brain regions as needed - when young, they are committed into the service of different functions. That this relies on the plasticity of young brains is born out by the fact that it is much easier to teach a language or an instrument to a child than to an adult; 2. to be specific, this study, using fMRI, focused on musicians with perfect pitch, which admittedly is a specialized subset of musicians. I don't know whether Lars has perfect pitch or not. I don't know whether he was trained as a musician in his childhood or not. (I do have some evidence, however, that he's a bit incoherent.)
Before you dismiss this sort of thing out of hand, you may want to learn a bit more about brain mapping.
I remember reading a bit about the neurology of musicians: how, often, regions of the brain that are 'colonized' by the language and higher cognitive functions are, instead, recruited into the service of audition.
It went a long way to explaining why most interviews with musicians are borderline-incomprehensible fugues of inchoate rambling, false starts, and unformed thoughts. This is no exception. I was wincing throughout the whole article.
One of the few musicians whose interviews were always a wonder to behold and a joy to experience was Glenn Gould - who had his own, very prophetic perspectives on the relationship between music and technology.
In general, I've always gotten along swimmingly with composers, but I tend to get annoyed by musicians.
What I suspect - and I have my own purchasing habits to support this belief, as well as those of others I know - is that people don't buy fewer CD's because of Napster, nor do they buy more, but rather they buy different ones.
Like vitually everyone I know, I have a certain fuzzy budget for CD's. I buy about 3 or 4 a week. I've got a CD library of almost 2 thousand CDs, of all genres, tending to the outre. Because of mp3s, my CD collecting habits can now be much riskier. I don't need to buy CDs of commonly available bands, of top hits or such. I can buy obscurities, rarities, and things that Just Might Be Cool. Artists that aren't even available on Napster yet because they're too new or obscure or unusual.
This shift in buying freedom scares the RIAA and the corporate-pop musicians (like Metallica) as much as anything. Consumers can be less predictable when their budgets are freed to follow whims. The net effect is to flatten the pyramid: fewer sales, quite possibly, of Top 40 pap^H^H^H music, more sales of alternative and unusual musics.
It should also be noted that a political refugee to the United States gets $17,000 just for entering, in order to 'start a new life.'
If we offered this to, say, people from Jamaica, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, or any other Latin country, we would be utterly inundated with immigrants from those countries.
There is no basis for claiming that capitalism entitles me to a reward for my work and creativity, if no one in the market values it. I can spend the rest of my life making beautiful sculpture out of my earwax, and if no one wants to buy it, there's no way I'm going to be able to get a return on my work.
IP isn't about reimbursing work. Work occurs over time, and I take great pains before I engage in work to ensure that I am going to be reimbursed for it. IP is an attempt to turn the product of that work into an alienable, resaleable commodity. This does increase the reward for some producers, and decreases it for others. (I.e., if you can sell several recorded copies of, i.e., a musical performance and can use the force of law to ensure that each copy of that performance is redundently rewarded, you significantly diminish the market for new performances. This is why local musicians don't thrive in the recording-industry star system.)
Remember, in most sectors, the residual benefits of work performed are not identical with the work: i.e., people who enjoy the ongoing benefits of the work I have done at one time are not sending me royalty checks. I don't see why other industries should be special in that regard.
So the US had its expansionist period in the first 100 years of its existence, while the USSR built its buffer area within the first 35 years of its existence - after having been invaded twice (the Allied force which fought on behalf of the Whites during the Russian Civil War being the first, then Germany.)
The Monroe doctrine remains a principle of US foreign policy: witness our Latin America policies in Colombia, Central America, and Cuba. Otherwise, US foreign policy is largely dictated by our ability to have access to foreign resources and markets; thus, since the US has effectively secured the Western Hemisphere, simple brute expansionism isn't necessary, which enables you to ape a moral high-ground now.
The essential point is that Soviet expansionism was fundementally motivated by fear of invasion and attack - a fear founded in the very real history of the USSR and its relationship with the west from its very inception, not by simple megalomania.
The US, in fact, has occupied Mexico City and annexed much of Mexico, from Texas to California. At one time, the US had annexed Cuba and the Philippines, and occupied Nicaragua.
I refer you to the Monroe Doctrine for a description of American policy regarding its sphere of influence.
Miguel is not just a programmer - he's leading the project and is otherwise got his hands full of lots of stuff. The person to whom I was responding to was either just a programmer or, most likely, a student planning to become one, and thus was failing to grok the different needs that anyone in any lead/management role has. (I think evolution is on the right track by emulating Outlook's functionality - modulo the virus vulnerability - that was the jist of my post!)
However, the business user's needs go beyond just 'lots of email.' If it were all about email, pine plus procmail would be groovy.
Well, it does, reasons of the obvious overintegration with the OS, and Exchange is fifty kinds of evil, but the Outlook client in its essentials is head and shoulders above the competition when it comes to a full-fledged PIM.
At home, I use pine for my personal mail. It's good for straight-forward text-messages-and-tahnk-you-very-much sort of stuff. However, my work involves lots and lots of meetings and airplane trips and projects and to-do lists and hastily-scribbled notes and organization of ideas and collaboration. I travel constantly, and need a system that helps me keep on top of things. Outlook is excellent at this.
If you are just a programmer, (or studying to be one), then Outlook is both overkill and generally a miss. Your to-do list is probably best kept on a piece of paper next to your machine, and there is no reason to integrate messaging with other aspects of your workflow. However, those of us with ties to the rest of the business world get a lot of benefit from the versatility of the Outlook client. I hate to say this, but your needs are so different from a typical business-users needs, that I don't think you could grok them.
Note that the only other MS desktop client program I really care for is Excel. I prefer Abiword to Word a hundred-fold.
In any case, I think that the Outlook client is an excellent bar to aim for.
Dictionaries do more than just document usage as if it were nothing but a historical record. The provide a basis for generic and institutional uses of language, such as media, government, business, and education. By acting as a stabilizing influence on language, they ensure that we are more likely to understand a 17th century English document than a 17th century reader would be likely to understand the Canterbury Tales, and by contributing to the fiction of a 'standard' English which can be taught, actually gives people from communities that use a non-Standard English a chance to escape the 'class marking' of their dialects.
Your definition of the identity of 'crackers' is a bit presumptious. Another way to look at it is that some hackers wished to call other hackers 'crackers' because they don't like to be associated with them. As the article notes, the use of 'cracker' by the computer-savvy community postdates the use of 'hacker' in the media to describe computer intruders. It's actually an old version of the "True Scotsman" trick, a popular trick among religious people who want to disassociate themselves from the negative actions of other religious people. ("Oh, the people who led the Inquisition weren't True Christians, becaue True Christians wouldn't lead the Inquisition.")
Outside a tiny (relatively speaking) demimonde, www.jargon.org has no real authority. Referring to it will be as effective as referring to the Book of the Subgenius.
The 3D imagery I was referring to in the Hollywood hacker stereotype is the swooping-through-the-network shots, the flashing "Access Denied" signs that spin in space, the crumbling walls that represent a bypassed security measure, etc.
Frankly, I think your term for 'hacking' as a verb is pretty general. I mean, I know what you mean (and that is the heart of the debate,) but such usages to me indicate a sort of "Me-too"-ism, sort of like sticking the word "engineer" at the end of a job title, because programming for some perverse reason enjoys a status in some communities that other forms of demanding technical work don't. "Hacking" can be as general as 'working really hard at something' or 'doing something cleverly.' I know I swore off from the philosophy of language, but I think of Wittgenstein's 'family resemblences' when talking about words and meanings: how the word game, for example, has a meaning whcih can't be bound by necessary and sufficient conditions, and includes things which merely resemble each other in some ways. If you think of 'meaning' as 'the ability for input to activate a term-node in a neural network,' then those sort of phenomenon makes more sense.
First, there are no such things as "true meanings." Meaning in language is created when reference is secured. Even among us, saying that "a hacker is in the system" quite reliably constructs a consistent meaning. (Let's leave Quine, Ayers, and Putnam out of all this for now, you language philosphers. If I hear about twin earth, I'll plotz.)
The article has the issue square to rights by referring to canonical sources - established dictionaries. At this point, the geek community may as well say that the word "hacker" refers to white-tufted thrush, and that the appropriate term is "pendejo," for all the good it will do. The institutions that have the general authority to determine meaning in media, government, and education - the dictionary writers (who fill the void left by the absence of the sorts of language academies that France and Spain use) - have made their claim.
Language is created by usage. Very few attempts to engineer the use of language are successful, unless there is some real-world social or political tumult associated with it. If there is a civil-rights movement for hackers, perhaps the language about it will come under greater scrutiny. (Of course, that means, that if the public ended up meaning by 'hacker' what some folks here want them to mean by 'hacker,' the dictionary writers will eventually follow suit. I don't see any mechanism for that to happen - there isn't enough motivation on the part of the public.)
On another level, I think it is misguided to completely toss out the Hollywood hacker media fantasy. Of course there aren't teen-model wunderkind hackers rollerblading around the city. Of course [cr|h]acking doesn't involve 3d imagery and heart-stopping graphics. But the mediated image of the hacker does reveal a sort of public anxiety that so much of our infrastructure is now opaque to all but those with the technological expertise to decode it. It is a testimony to our (we being high-tech cognoscenti of different stripes) status, and the general public awe that it inspires. We should, if not embrace the glamorized image, at least be somewhat pleased that we can inspire it.
I wonder at what point does a fast-and-furious upgrade schedule, like Palm seems to be engaged in ("wireless! color! new processor!") become a problem for revenue. I was going to upgrade my Palm IIIx a couple times, but have held off, wavering between getting a Handspring (has anyone used the mp3 module on those?) and waiting for Palm's Next Big Thing. I wonder - I'm not a MBA type - at what point does that sort of upgrade cycle lead to "consumer paralysis."
Almost everyone has one or more of the above things happen in their lives. Those are among the things that generate suffering in life, and most everyone experiences suffering. Not everyone becomes an alcoholic.
Alcoholics may use their pain as a pretext for drinking, but it isn't the reason they drink. They drink because they are alcoholics. Alcoholism creates a drive to drink, and drives are pre-rational. To describe alcoholism as 'stupid' is like describing the drive for sex as 'stupid.'
There is a strong genetic component to alcoholism and addiction, and a relationship with depression. Separated twin studies confirm this, as do the demographics in the distribution of alcoholism and addiction.
Those are most definitely not heavy-lifter apps. They are desktop applications, meant to open and view files. Pretty petty stuff, essentially.
3D Studio Max or Photoshop would be a real heavy-lifter workstation app, and the open source analogue to Photoshop, the GIMP, follows the exact pattern that I described - perkier, with a good bug-fix rate, but fewer features and a less intuitive interface.
I find it instructive to note how much better Mozilla is in terms of performance and 'good manners' than Navigator was.
The reason why a proprietary/mainstream version of a netbrowser is necessary is that the web is broken for many sites: too many sites rely on browser specific defects (yes!) and quirks, and too much content requires proprietary plug-ins. But if Netscape is the best that proprietary software can do, in the long run we would be utterly screwed.
The competition between closed and open apps is unfair when the closed-app producers own the file formats. Problems like the inability to view movies made with the Sorenson codec are, I predict, going to be the primary obstacle to creating a truly viable mass-market desktop version of Linux that could compete with the Windows and Mac desktops, much moreso than simple 'theme-pretty' issues will be.
The three applications on my primary Linux system which give me the most problems are, in increasing order of grief:
Netscape Navigator, with its frequent crashes and mediocre performance
Realplayer, with poor performance and memory management
Adobe Acrobat Reader, with utterly hideous, swap-colonizing, X-freezing memory gluttony.
They are also the primary closed/binary-only applications on my system, and are there largely due to the lack of viable alternatives to access closed content (I agree with those who note that it is closed file/media formats that are our biggest problem, not Microsoft.)
It isn't impossible for closed software to be good, but it often is more work to create quality than is worth the while of the developers - they seem to throw out half-hearted ports in order to 'shut the bastards up.'
I do share RMS' idealism, and hope that we ultimately will see software as something ontologically and intrinsically free, but I'm no purist in the meantime - nonetheless, I haven't been impressed by the closed software that has been released for Linux.
It just occurred to me that this could be an act of collusion between Sony and the Japanese government, in order to provoke more excitement for Sony before it goes to export: that a few political leaders push to restrict export, which creates a considerable amount of mystique for the product. Thinking that this could be military grade in its processing power is going to make a lot of people very excited.
So after a little show 'wrangling,' the politicians who sponsored the objection back down, and the export of PS2 goes forward to everyone's excitement - the orders fly in, and everyone's happy.
Is the 'property' of EQ ever your property, or does it belong to Sony? Do you actually have any rights to it that they don't explicitly give to you? Is the 'you' that 'owns' those objects the same as the you that is playing the game? If your character dies, you may lose those objects - just what rights do you have in that case?
More questions: what is the legal status of contracts made between two characters on EQ? Are they binding between the players? Are marriages? What civil rights do you have? Can Sony arbitrarily triple or quadruple the costs of a subscription? If you didn't pay, what rights would you have to your virtual property?
Let's indulge the reverie that we may, indeed, migrate more and more of our social identities, including the economic and the creative, to 'virtual realms,' communities that are mediated in electronic networks.
Let us continue the conjecture that one has and develops property, wealth, reputation, relationships and so forth within these communities.
Now, these communities are privately owned, unambiguously. All property of Sony or AOL/Time/Warner or whoever. Does this make them the equivalents of the governments of these new 'places?'
Does a certain sort of political 'right' accrue based on the fact that you invest time and effort - perhaps years, someday perhaps the better part of a life - despite the proprietary nature of this virtual existence? Does this blur the distinction between private property and public space? How much of that is dependent on the ability to 'translate' between private realms? (ON one hand, we think of our physical world as more constrained, since it is harder to move from one country to another if one is disatisfied with the political structure than it would be to move from one virtual realm to another - however, in fact, in the real world, much of our wealth is *more* liquid - I can sell my possessions, earned by years of labor, and move to another place, but all my labor in one virtual world would be completely untransportable to another...)
That's the most interesting aspect of this sort of development to me - it challenges a lot of the basic political and economic ontology of popular wisdom.
What is 'mental health' has as much to do with the requirements for survival and adaptation within a society as with anything else.
America has become one of the most competitive societies in history, because it has more class fluidity than any society in history. You can, with a bit of effort, the right temperment, and a bit of luck, move a few notches up the social and economic ladder from your starting point (helps to be well educated, of course). This means that any psychological characteristic or temperment which doesn't fit in with the Protestant work ethic and a go-getter attitude is going to be maladaptive, and parents may well see them as defects which need to be corrected. Since artistic, playfully distracted and introspective temperments (unless coupled with a scientific bent) are not well rewarded in our society and don't offer a lot of viable career options, those temperments are increasingly pathologized.
You'll notice that there are no medications to treat workaholism and "Overachievement Disorder," even if they compromise the ability to form and maintain healthy relationships.
There is no comparison. American football fans can be wacky, but European and Latin American (real) football mania is profoundly different in style, magnitude, and significance. Loyalty to club is gang loyalty in a way that team loyalty can never approach. For one thing, real football teams don't move.
I think of teams like the Boca Juniors of Buenos Aires, or Flamingo of Rio de Janiero, or the Alianza of Lima, or Corinthians of Sao Paulo (or my family's team - Melgar of Arequipa, the only professional sports team I can think of named after a composer.) - these things are like a cult and a gang identity combined, and I am not being hyperbolic.
Hornby's book is not, it should be emphasized, about hooliganism, either. While the hooligans are an indication of how strong the football cult is, it is only a sad fraction of the whole picture.
I know Green Bay fans, and they are an enthusiastic bunch, but there's no contest. The story could not translate.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you dismiss this sort of thing out of hand, you may want to learn a bit more about brain mapping.
And yet it's true. I will refer you to the data when I am back at home, and have access to my library.
It went a long way to explaining why most interviews with musicians are borderline-incomprehensible fugues of inchoate rambling, false starts, and unformed thoughts. This is no exception. I was wincing throughout the whole article.
One of the few musicians whose interviews were always a wonder to behold and a joy to experience was Glenn Gould - who had his own, very prophetic perspectives on the relationship between music and technology.
In general, I've always gotten along swimmingly with composers, but I tend to get annoyed by musicians.
Like vitually everyone I know, I have a certain fuzzy budget for CD's. I buy about 3 or 4 a week. I've got a CD library of almost 2 thousand CDs, of all genres, tending to the outre. Because of mp3s, my CD collecting habits can now be much riskier. I don't need to buy CDs of commonly available bands, of top hits or such. I can buy obscurities, rarities, and things that Just Might Be Cool. Artists that aren't even available on Napster yet because they're too new or obscure or unusual.
This shift in buying freedom scares the RIAA and the corporate-pop musicians (like Metallica) as much as anything. Consumers can be less predictable when their budgets are freed to follow whims. The net effect is to flatten the pyramid: fewer sales, quite possibly, of Top 40 pap^H^H^H music, more sales of alternative and unusual musics.
Should we be even in the teensiest bit surprised that it got slashdotted?
If we offered this to, say, people from Jamaica, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, or any other Latin country, we would be utterly inundated with immigrants from those countries.
IP isn't about reimbursing work. Work occurs over time, and I take great pains before I engage in work to ensure that I am going to be reimbursed for it. IP is an attempt to turn the product of that work into an alienable, resaleable commodity. This does increase the reward for some producers, and decreases it for others. (I.e., if you can sell several recorded copies of, i.e., a musical performance and can use the force of law to ensure that each copy of that performance is redundently rewarded, you significantly diminish the market for new performances. This is why local musicians don't thrive in the recording-industry star system.)
Remember, in most sectors, the residual benefits of work performed are not identical with the work: i.e., people who enjoy the ongoing benefits of the work I have done at one time are not sending me royalty checks. I don't see why other industries should be special in that regard.
The Monroe doctrine remains a principle of US foreign policy: witness our Latin America policies in Colombia, Central America, and Cuba. Otherwise, US foreign policy is largely dictated by our ability to have access to foreign resources and markets; thus, since the US has effectively secured the Western Hemisphere, simple brute expansionism isn't necessary, which enables you to ape a moral high-ground now.
The essential point is that Soviet expansionism was fundementally motivated by fear of invasion and attack - a fear founded in the very real history of the USSR and its relationship with the west from its very inception, not by simple megalomania.
I refer you to the Monroe Doctrine for a description of American policy regarding its sphere of influence.
However, the business user's needs go beyond just 'lots of email.' If it were all about email, pine plus procmail would be groovy.
At home, I use pine for my personal mail. It's good for straight-forward text-messages-and-tahnk-you-very-much sort of stuff. However, my work involves lots and lots of meetings and airplane trips and projects and to-do lists and hastily-scribbled notes and organization of ideas and collaboration. I travel constantly, and need a system that helps me keep on top of things. Outlook is excellent at this.
If you are just a programmer, (or studying to be one), then Outlook is both overkill and generally a miss. Your to-do list is probably best kept on a piece of paper next to your machine, and there is no reason to integrate messaging with other aspects of your workflow. However, those of us with ties to the rest of the business world get a lot of benefit from the versatility of the Outlook client. I hate to say this, but your needs are so different from a typical business-users needs, that I don't think you could grok them.
Note that the only other MS desktop client program I really care for is Excel. I prefer Abiword to Word a hundred-fold.
In any case, I think that the Outlook client is an excellent bar to aim for.
Your definition of the identity of 'crackers' is a bit presumptious. Another way to look at it is that some hackers wished to call other hackers 'crackers' because they don't like to be associated with them. As the article notes, the use of 'cracker' by the computer-savvy community postdates the use of 'hacker' in the media to describe computer intruders. It's actually an old version of the "True Scotsman" trick, a popular trick among religious people who want to disassociate themselves from the negative actions of other religious people. ("Oh, the people who led the Inquisition weren't True Christians, becaue True Christians wouldn't lead the Inquisition.")
The 3D imagery I was referring to in the Hollywood hacker stereotype is the swooping-through-the-network shots, the flashing "Access Denied" signs that spin in space, the crumbling walls that represent a bypassed security measure, etc.
Frankly, I think your term for 'hacking' as a verb is pretty general. I mean, I know what you mean (and that is the heart of the debate,) but such usages to me indicate a sort of "Me-too"-ism, sort of like sticking the word "engineer" at the end of a job title, because programming for some perverse reason enjoys a status in some communities that other forms of demanding technical work don't. "Hacking" can be as general as 'working really hard at something' or 'doing something cleverly.' I know I swore off from the philosophy of language, but I think of Wittgenstein's 'family resemblences' when talking about words and meanings: how the word game, for example, has a meaning whcih can't be bound by necessary and sufficient conditions, and includes things which merely resemble each other in some ways. If you think of 'meaning' as 'the ability for input to activate a term-node in a neural network,' then those sort of phenomenon makes more sense.
First, there are no such things as "true meanings." Meaning in language is created when reference is secured. Even among us, saying that "a hacker is in the system" quite reliably constructs a consistent meaning. (Let's leave Quine, Ayers, and Putnam out of all this for now, you language philosphers. If I hear about twin earth, I'll plotz.)
The article has the issue square to rights by referring to canonical sources - established dictionaries. At this point, the geek community may as well say that the word "hacker" refers to white-tufted thrush, and that the appropriate term is "pendejo," for all the good it will do. The institutions that have the general authority to determine meaning in media, government, and education - the dictionary writers (who fill the void left by the absence of the sorts of language academies that France and Spain use) - have made their claim.
Language is created by usage. Very few attempts to engineer the use of language are successful, unless there is some real-world social or political tumult associated with it. If there is a civil-rights movement for hackers, perhaps the language about it will come under greater scrutiny. (Of course, that means, that if the public ended up meaning by 'hacker' what some folks here want them to mean by 'hacker,' the dictionary writers will eventually follow suit. I don't see any mechanism for that to happen - there isn't enough motivation on the part of the public.)
On another level, I think it is misguided to completely toss out the Hollywood hacker media fantasy. Of course there aren't teen-model wunderkind hackers rollerblading around the city. Of course [cr|h]acking doesn't involve 3d imagery and heart-stopping graphics. But the mediated image of the hacker does reveal a sort of public anxiety that so much of our infrastructure is now opaque to all but those with the technological expertise to decode it. It is a testimony to our (we being high-tech cognoscenti of different stripes) status, and the general public awe that it inspires. We should, if not embrace the glamorized image, at least be somewhat pleased that we can inspire it.
Unless it is gasoline, in which case everyone will cry for the government to do something, including meddle in foriegn affairs.
I wonder at what point does a fast-and-furious upgrade schedule, like Palm seems to be engaged in ("wireless! color! new processor!") become a problem for revenue. I was going to upgrade my Palm IIIx a couple times, but have held off, wavering between getting a Handspring (has anyone used the mp3 module on those?) and waiting for Palm's Next Big Thing. I wonder - I'm not a MBA type - at what point does that sort of upgrade cycle lead to "consumer paralysis."
Alcoholics may use their pain as a pretext for drinking, but it isn't the reason they drink. They drink because they are alcoholics. Alcoholism creates a drive to drink, and drives are pre-rational. To describe alcoholism as 'stupid' is like describing the drive for sex as 'stupid.'
There is a strong genetic component to alcoholism and addiction, and a relationship with depression. Separated twin studies confirm this, as do the demographics in the distribution of alcoholism and addiction.
You don't understand alcoholism. It's sub-rational. It doesn't work at the level of 'reasons.'
3D Studio Max or Photoshop would be a real heavy-lifter workstation app, and the open source analogue to Photoshop, the GIMP, follows the exact pattern that I described - perkier, with a good bug-fix rate, but fewer features and a less intuitive interface.
I find it instructive to note how much better Mozilla is in terms of performance and 'good manners' than Navigator was.
The reason why a proprietary/mainstream version of a netbrowser is necessary is that the web is broken for many sites: too many sites rely on browser specific defects (yes!) and quirks, and too much content requires proprietary plug-ins. But if Netscape is the best that proprietary software can do, in the long run we would be utterly screwed.
The competition between closed and open apps is unfair when the closed-app producers own the file formats. Problems like the inability to view movies made with the Sorenson codec are, I predict, going to be the primary obstacle to creating a truly viable mass-market desktop version of Linux that could compete with the Windows and Mac desktops, much moreso than simple 'theme-pretty' issues will be.
They are also the primary closed/binary-only applications on my system, and are there largely due to the lack of viable alternatives to access closed content (I agree with those who note that it is closed file/media formats that are our biggest problem, not Microsoft.)
It isn't impossible for closed software to be good, but it often is more work to create quality than is worth the while of the developers - they seem to throw out half-hearted ports in order to 'shut the bastards up.'
I do share RMS' idealism, and hope that we ultimately will see software as something ontologically and intrinsically free, but I'm no purist in the meantime - nonetheless, I haven't been impressed by the closed software that has been released for Linux.
So after a little show 'wrangling,' the politicians who sponsored the objection back down, and the export of PS2 goes forward to everyone's excitement - the orders fly in, and everyone's happy.
Just a little healthy paranoia.
Is the 'property' of EQ ever your property, or does it belong to Sony? Do you actually have any rights to it that they don't explicitly give to you? Is the 'you' that 'owns' those objects the same as the you that is playing the game? If your character dies, you may lose those objects - just what rights do you have in that case?
More questions: what is the legal status of contracts made between two characters on EQ? Are they binding between the players? Are marriages? What civil rights do you have? Can Sony arbitrarily triple or quadruple the costs of a subscription? If you didn't pay, what rights would you have to your virtual property?
Let us continue the conjecture that one has and develops property, wealth, reputation, relationships and so forth within these communities.
Now, these communities are privately owned, unambiguously. All property of Sony or AOL/Time/Warner or whoever. Does this make them the equivalents of the governments of these new 'places?'
Does a certain sort of political 'right' accrue based on the fact that you invest time and effort - perhaps years, someday perhaps the better part of a life - despite the proprietary nature of this virtual existence? Does this blur the distinction between private property and public space? How much of that is dependent on the ability to 'translate' between private realms? (ON one hand, we think of our physical world as more constrained, since it is harder to move from one country to another if one is disatisfied with the political structure than it would be to move from one virtual realm to another - however, in fact, in the real world, much of our wealth is *more* liquid - I can sell my possessions, earned by years of labor, and move to another place, but all my labor in one virtual world would be completely untransportable to another...)
That's the most interesting aspect of this sort of development to me - it challenges a lot of the basic political and economic ontology of popular wisdom.
America has become one of the most competitive societies in history, because it has more class fluidity than any society in history. You can, with a bit of effort, the right temperment, and a bit of luck, move a few notches up the social and economic ladder from your starting point (helps to be well educated, of course). This means that any psychological characteristic or temperment which doesn't fit in with the Protestant work ethic and a go-getter attitude is going to be maladaptive, and parents may well see them as defects which need to be corrected. Since artistic, playfully distracted and introspective temperments (unless coupled with a scientific bent) are not well rewarded in our society and don't offer a lot of viable career options, those temperments are increasingly pathologized.
You'll notice that there are no medications to treat workaholism and "Overachievement Disorder," even if they compromise the ability to form and maintain healthy relationships.
I think of teams like the Boca Juniors of Buenos Aires, or Flamingo of Rio de Janiero, or the Alianza of Lima, or Corinthians of Sao Paulo (or my family's team - Melgar of Arequipa, the only professional sports team I can think of named after a composer.) - these things are like a cult and a gang identity combined, and I am not being hyperbolic.
Hornby's book is not, it should be emphasized, about hooliganism, either. While the hooligans are an indication of how strong the football cult is, it is only a sad fraction of the whole picture.
I know Green Bay fans, and they are an enthusiastic bunch, but there's no contest. The story could not translate.