I've just been reading through the article, and one thing which kinda bugs me all the way through is the insistence that it's the man who should be doing all the running. Now, that doesn't square with my own experience - I wound up hunting down my particular (geek) guy, and dragging him off to my cave all by myself. He didn't actually notice the little hints I was dropping (okay, okay, small boulder-type hints) until I finally winched up my courage to squeaking point, and gave him a card saying that I thought he was attractive and sexy.
The guy doesn't have to do all the running. Sometimes, it's actually more attractive to find a guy who *isn't* out to get a girl straight off, who *doesn't* notice the hints, and the tips, and who is thoroughly surprised and stunned by the eventual (mutual) seduction.
People living in democracies, Sunstein maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might not have chosen themselves.
I actually agree with this. What I *disagree* with is the notion that line noise, trolling, flames, juvenile "I'm better than you are"-ing and other such artifacts of online communication are classifiable as ideas that I need to be exposed to. And in most cases, it is *this* sort of electronic idiocy that most moderation removes - the equivalent of children waving to Mum in the background of news coverage of a disaster.
The other advantage of moderation (even of minor sorts of moderation, like mail filters, or usenet scorefiles) is that it helps me prioritise my time. I have a limited amount of hours in the day that I can spend reading things like Slashdot, usenet, email and soforth. I can choose to read that which I value higher first, and *if I have the time*, I can read that which I value less highly. My value choices are based on my own value system, and one of the things I value highly happens to be reasoned, calm discussion. I'd rather read a well-justified, calm refutation of my arguments than a hotly emotional, incoherent post in support of me.
Agreed. Plus, I'd argue that Mr Katz is trying to make far too much soup from the one oyster.
One of the things which is worth considering about this "revolution" is that it is *only* *just* *starting*. The 'net as a consumer good has only been available for about 10 years or so in many countries - my own history on the 'net is about four years this July. That's a mere drop in the ocean of history. At present, we're still in the initial "impact" phase of the actual revolution. Expecting massive social change to take place inside of 7 generations is highly optimistic at best, insane at worst.
For a comparison, have a look at the activist movements of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular feminism and race equality. Even now, forty to fifty years later, there is still need for action on these matters - despite the gains which have been made. Racially and gender diverse workplaces are accepted now, and a person's race or gender are no longer accepted as justifications for why a person shouldn't have a particular job. But it's still tricky for a woman, or a person who isn't pale of skin to get into upper management - although this is changing, as generational change takes effect.
At the moment, people are checking out the 'net, and finding that it either is more than it was hyped to be, or (in most cases) that it's a lot less. You *can* find groups of other people who are just like you on the 'net, you *can* meet good people, and you *can* find a lot more information, but you have to be prepared to do the looking - it won't come to you pre-packaged. This is not to say that the 'net is a bad thing, just that it's different to television or film or radio, or even books.
Over the long term, the internet *will* fulfil many of the predictions made about it. But I don't expect this to happen either in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of my nieces or their children. Give it time, at least 100 years, before writing things off as a failure.
Linux may be fast-growing. But I'd wonder how many of the people out there who are using it are people like me.
I have a machine which dual-boots Redhat 6.2 (a very vanilla install) and Windows 98 (ditto). Most of the time, I use it in Windows mode. Why? Because at the moment, I can't find a workable driver for my PC's internal modem (which is supposed to actually work with Linux, according to the box - maybe they should have said which distribution they were talking about). Most of my interest in computers revolves around the web, and if I can't connect to the web, I'm not likely to use a different OS. At the moment, I can't afford a new external modem - I have other priorities for my cash.
Then there's the software issue. A lot of what I do with my computer revolves around a few games - most of which are only available on Windows. Even with the ones which are available in a form which suits Linux (angband, zangband), I often can't get them to install correctly.
Then there's the whole "documentation" issue. Most of the more useful documentation I've found has been in books that I've had to pay between seventy and eighty dollars for. Okay, I'm getting the OS "for free" - but I'm paying an equivalent amount to what I'd be paying for Gatesware, and *still* not being able to solve the problems which sent me to the documentation in the first place.
Now, I'm well aware that most of this is due to my own lack of familiarity with the OS. But at the moment, I don't have the necessary block of time available to me to be able to sit down and seriously learn this system. So it sits in its partition, barely ever used, and gradually becoming more and more out of date. Hopefully one day I'll be able to get things organised, and actually learn about it. But at present, I don't have the time, the energy, or the skills to devote to getting my machine working as a Linux box.
Thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people out there who have similar issues with Linux, and who basically have it installed, but unused.
The problem is, as we shed our responsibility, we also shed our rights.
This is worth remembering. There's a lot of people in the US (and a hell of a lot of them on slashdot) who prate on and on about their "rights", but who seem reluctant to accept any of the responsibility which those rights imply. As a result, the responsibility is shuffled off to government, to parents, to teachers, to *anyone else except the person involved*. And the rest of us worldwide get inflicted with things like spam, hate speech, trolls, and all the results of people claiming rights without responsibility. We also get the results of handing that responsibility to other people - censorware, draconian laws to deal with the unrestricted, unrestrained irresponsible speech of others (the Australian 'net censorship laws spring to mind as an example), and a general perception that curbing freedom of speech may not be such a bad thing after all...
The right of anonymous speech requires the listeners to be responsible enough to research the claims presented. I will accept that responsibility, in the event that I ever need to tell the world of an awful truth, or in the event that someone else needs to tell me an awful truth; a truth that would cost them their job, their standing in society, or even their life.
The right to free speech, however, requires the speakers to be responsible for what they're saying. This means that defamatory, inflammatory, and otherwise irresponsible speech under the safety of anonymity has to be curtailed somehow. The right to freedom of speech does not automatically mean the right to insult or assault your audience, or the right to demand that people listen to you by morphing to avoid their killfiles, or sending endless offensive email to someone who has asked you to stop. It doesn't mean the right to insist that you be treated seriously when you are doing the equivalent of throwing excrement at the walls, and it really doesn't mean that you have the right to be praised and respected for doing this. Which is something which is sometimes hard to convey to any number of people from the US.
As someone very intelligent once said: "There is no right to be heard on usenet".
This is an informational war between the people of the world and basically corporations of the world (governments playing puppet to the corporate whim). The instrument of control is the Law. The legislators and lawyers are going to find it extremely difficult to control informational flow, but we are seeing - real time! every day something new! - the fruits of their labors: horrible and unenforcable laws that basically make each and every citizen a criminal. Once everyone is a criminal, then all of their liberties are endangered, and they must skulk around, fearful of being caught.
The only difference that I can see between Winston Smith's sad little grey world and this one is that people don't seem to have the zeal to rat out their neighbors, no one is wearing a red sash. Wait, correct that, I forgot about the model for the (forget what Orwell called them) guys who turn in their neighbors: the Religious Right and Christian Conservatives here in America. Already drug laws have turned half a nation into criminals.
Now another large chunk will be criminalized - sorry, has been criminalized. Napster-users, anyone who ever burned a disk containing MS Office and gave it to a friend. Basically, an entire nation of criminals, at risk and fearful of exposure. This serves the regime well.
The reason there will not be reform is that legislators are no longer servants of the people, if they ever were. No, the people are not vested in their country. Not in England where by some strange brainwashing technique (a la 1984) they Act like the Parliament is their friend, not in America where we know the story but admit powerlessness and the inability to organize except to continue to oppress Ourselves (MADD, African_American Rights Moevments, et al), and apparently not in Australia, which probably follows a British model.
[fx:tongue firmly in cheek]
Well, actually, for Australians, it's not that much of a change. After all, we're a nation of criminals, aren't we?
[removes tongue, and sarcasm]
That said, the current Australian government has a fairly strong history of removing the freedoms of the Australian people. For a start, this is the government which declared that material which would get greater than an "M" classification (ie not considered as being viewable by people under 15 years) is not legal to place on a web page hosted in this country. It's the government which brought in some lovely laws (for the Olympics - really!) which give the prime minister the power to call out the Army in times of civil turmoil. These laws haven't been removed. It's the government which has attempted (and succeeded) in removing a single or lesbian woman's entitlement to use IVF services to conceive a child - as well as the rights of heterosexual defacto couples. The loss of the privilege to forward on email is just a drop in the bucket by comparison.
What's really frightening, from an Australian point of view, is that by changing the government of the day, there is *no* guarantee that we'll stop this gradual erosion of our civil liberties. The Labor party is right alongside the Liberal/National coalition in this matter (after all, if they weren't, we'd have heard a lot more controversy about these laws). The Democrats have stopped trying to keep the bastards honest, and have decided to try becoming bigger bastards instead. One Nation would be a bigger threat to civil liberties than any other party aside from possibly the Greens (especially the more rabid ones who think that anything "natural" is more sacred than anything human). At this rate, the Natural Law Party (yogic flying, transcendental meditation, and world peace) aren't just sounding reasonable, they're sounding like a sensible alterntive. Now *that* is scary.
Meg Thornton (who isn't looking forward to the federal election this year)
--
"There are also apparently plans to reinstate the old limits on.org domains - if you aren't a non-profit corporation, you won't be permitted to register or keep a.org domain"
Really, how long do you think it will be before they require all.com registrations to be real companies? This really isn't that far-fetched. They may require proof from you that you own the trademark you are trying to register...
Obviously, this is all trending towards the corporatization of the web... yee-haw.
I hate to say this, but as far as I know this has been the case in the.au domain all along. So damn, the rest of the world may get held to the same rules as us Aussies for a change *grin*. Maybe we'll lose some of the sillier vanity domains - or maybe separate TLDs will eventually be introduced to cover fan organisations (.fan anyone?) and personal vanity domains (.vty?). The web may become more organised. Terrible outcome, right?
Alternatively, of course, the whole shebang may well go through and kill off a lot of interesting private web pages in favour of corporate blah. We won't know until it happens, though. However, one thing to note - if this is still at proposal stage, *now* is the time to object - in writing.
A comment from the land where the 56kbps modem still rules supreme (Australia). The ISP I use has a very straightforward pricing plan - you pay a flat fee per calendar month, and you get up to 400MB total traffic in that month. If you go over that, you pay a certain amount per megabyte. This penalises people who download lots of stuff, and particularly penalises those people who regard ISP bandwidth as a limitless resource (which, in Australia, it isn't). Now, so far, I've downloaded mail for two different email accounts, read about half a dozen newsgroups (three of which are about 200 messages per day), do a bit of web-surfing (checking out about three online comics, and then rambling randomly), and also chat on IRC three nights a week without using up my quota.
Oh, and the reason we haven't got ADSL here is mainly because Tel$tra, gods bless their hearts, have decided not to roll it out - after all, they're making so much money from the phone lines, why provide us plebs with something more effective and more expensive.
On my reading of the whole article from EFA Australia, the most pervasive issue is the notion that online content should be assessed at stricter levels of censorship than offline content. Or, in other words, if I wanted to publish my personal erotic fantasy writing as an online magazine, I would be subject to stricter censorship than if I published them as a commercial magazine, or as a street 'zine. I would have to tone them down more, I would be subject to stricter fines if I didn't, and after all that, I'd still not be able to publish them without getting them classified.
Strange, really, when you consider that an online provider can place much stricter controls on who gets access to their material than an offline provider. I can certainly remember getting a quick peek at the "naughty" photos in Playboy and Penthouse as a kid. Oddly enough, I seem to have grown up to be a relatively sane and sensible adult - about my only quirk is a deep and thorough dislike of the type of thinking which regards anything sexual as "dirty" or "nasty". But try accessing an online p0rn site without having the right credit card number. Unless you really have superior skills and knowledge, you aren't likely to be able to see even a picture of a woman in full chador.
It's rather scary - just about any restriction on adult rights or priveleges these days can be excused with the note that it's either to protect the children, or that its for the benefit of the children. Makes me wonder how I managed to survive to adulthood, really it does. Obviously I'm just a statistical fluke - as is everyone else of my generation who managed to survive through our non-child-obsequious environment.
The tone of the article was such that it implied that Google should be providing this information to the public at large, simply *because* they bought it from what was Deja.com. There's the accusation that Google are doing something morally wrong by taking the archive offline - meanwhile ignoring the fact that Deja.com had already taken a large portion of the archive offline with little or no warning. Google, apparently, are online villains of the deepest dye for wanting to get some form of commercial return for the money that they paid to acquire the archive in the first place.
So let's start from first principles here: the fact that Deja had such a comprehensive archive is not remarkable. The remarkable bit is is that *nobody else has done anything similar*. Deja's value as a resource, both in the commercial sense, as well as in the historical sense, is in its rarity. Goggle, in acquiring the deja.com archives, *prevented* this resource from being lost forever. Yet they're apparently villains for not immediately doing whatever the Open-Source community wants them to. Talk about bloody-minded ingratitude.
There's an argument being made that this information is ours already, although from what I understand, this is legally problematic. However, if you don't agree with Google being able to commercially exploit *your* precious Usenet postings, the answer is straightforward: start posting with "X-No-Archive: Yes" in your headers, and write a *polite* email to Google asking them to remove all your posts from their archive.
For myself, I'm quite glad to see that Google have obtained the archive, and if they do as good a job of running it for easy access as they have with their search engine database, I'll be extremely pleased.
Just my $0.05 worth. For what it's worth, I spent some time working as part of the student-run ISP that the technical college I attended hosted. My experiences there weren't exactly wonderful.
For starters, there was the old old problem of "boys and their toys" - there were precisely *two* female personnel who were interested in the whole business, and we were both relegated to administrative roles straight off. Secondly, there was very little actual knowledge being circulated - those who knew, knew, and those who didn't, couldn't learn anything by being involved. I eventually wound up giving up in disgust after being given the job of making the whole shebang ISO-9000 compliant, and writing procedures from scratch for them, with absolutely *no* help or assistance from any of the more experienced people.
Now, I realise that this isn't likely to be the archetypical experience for people involved with a student-run IT facility. I'd make the point that a volunteer facility really *needs* at least one person in charge who can *enforce* co-operation and information circulation - because without that, people who "don't fit" in the opinions of certain members of the group will find themselves frozen out or starved out. That was something that this particular group didn't have. It's worth noting, though, that there has to be the compromise made between idealism, control, opportuity, and common sense.
Music recording companies the world over are operating under the false premise that they have a right to remain in business using the same business models for no better reason than they were in business today. Companies are a convenient vehicle employed by people to produce goods and services. As such, they have no inherent right to remain in existence if there is no longer a market for their goods and services. Smart companies like IBM adapt to change and remain in business. Music companies are feeling the squeeze now, and must eventually embrace new technology to remain in business in the future. Oil companies will face a similar shift in the future when the oil runs out.
Of course, in the meantime, I feel strongly tempted to head over to the US and start an oil lamp company - and then campaign to restrict the trade of the power utilities there on the grounds that they're putting me out of business. Or possibly start a buggy factory (as in, horse-drawn buggy) and then sue the Ford motor company. Times change. Business models have to change with them. Sadly, at the moment, the RIAA in the US, and other such institutions around the world are under the impression that with sufficient funds, they can stop tomorrow from arriving. Sadly, enough judicial and legislative types in the US appear to agree with them to make the attempt worthwhile.
In the meantime, time moves on around them, and their customers take note. I doubt I'd be able to find a buyer for oil lamps, or horse-drawn buggies. Sooner or later (probably sooner) enough musicians are going to start dealing direct with their customers over the internet, selling MP3s directly from websites, and the need for big, centralised clearinghouses for music will be much less.
I'm not sure where I'd fit in Mr Katz's definition of "first generation" and "second generation" internet users. I started using the 'net back in 1997 (yup, after the "Great September"). But I don't spend my entire time on the web, looking at the pretty pictures and animated.gifs. Instead, I tend to spend most of my time online involved with a couple of Usenet newsgroups - which I've been involved with (as a reader at least) since I first stepped onto the 'net back in '97.
In both of these newsgroups, there is a strong sense of community (admittedly, in these days of the brave new Usenet, with trolls, flamers, and Usenet Performance Artists, this is a rarity). In both of these communities, I felt welcomed and valued as a community member. In at least one of these communities, I've been doing my level best to put something back in (always the mark of a successful community - if you've got people wanting to put things back, you must be doing something right), to add to the community.
In both cases, the community which started as a single newsgroup has spread to two or more. In at least one case, there's a small IRC network (two or three channels on two servers) which serves as an adjunct to the newsgroup. Rather than the IRC setup or the multiple groups dividing the community, it instead serves to gather it closer together. In both of these communities, it's worth noting that members of the community try to get together in "Real Life' (TM) as often as possible. In each case, the initial newsgroup is the core component, but there are lots of other ways of getting to know the people involved. While there is a strong component of online socialisation, there is just as strong a component of "offline" socialisation to complement this.
One of these two communities celebrates its tenth anniversary in about a year or so - and we're trying to organise a worldwide series of meetings for members of the community. Possibly they'll be linked by phone, or IRC. Possibly not - we've got a year to plan this, so we're going to do our best.
The days of the online community are not gone. There is still the possibility for communities to be forged, out of shared interest and shared friendship.
As someone mentioned, this problem isn't so much legal as cultural. It's also very, very human. Wherever two or more people are gathered together, yea, there will be one among them who wishes to make certain that the others are thinking in the same way that they do.
That said, the growing tendency of governments and parents to want children to be shielded from *all* forms of "disagreeable" material (with a defintion of "disagreeable" which tends to be very strongly biased toward political and sexual concepts) is somewhat unrealistic. However, even more unrealistic is the notion that somehow technology is going to be the saviour. Let's face it, over the centuries, technology has focused almost exclusively on creating new ways of getting a mate, keeping a mate, or killing off competitors for a mate. None of which are things of which parents really wish their children to be aware. The most effective "censorware" available is the stuff between a parent's ears - especially when said parent is looking over the kid's shoulder as they surf.
However, saying to people "look, it's *your* responsibility as a parent to look after your kid" is thoroughly politically incorrect these days, so it's better for politicians to just pass laws to shut up the parents, and the "moral majority" types. It's worth noting that most of these laws probably won't actually be *enforced* very strictly - they're just for show. The government has been asked to "do something about the problem of p0rn on the internet". This is something, they are doing it.
My own reaction to this would be to wait for a year, and see what happens. One of the biggest flaw in western-style democracy is that laws are more and more being promised as electoral bandaids, rather than as serious efforts to solve problems. These laws are much the same - they appear to be designed to be pointed at when the Senator/Representative in question is standing for re-election, rather than as serious efforts at limiting access to "non-child-suitable" material. The trick is to prevent anyone from getting bored enough to put time and money into enforcement of them - so keep saying to your local Senators and Representatives that you want more police action on things like murder, speeding, etc. (evil grin)
I have to admit, the thing which startled me (an Australian) about the current US election was discovering that every state and every county organises the election process separately. This completely shocked me, as I had no idea that things were that backward and awkward in a country which prides itself on being up-to-date and technologically aware.
In Australia, there is *one* federally funded organisation (the Australian Electoral Commission) which handles *everything* election related, from voter registration and electoral district boundaries to organising, conducting and counting an electoral ballot. They do this for federal elections, state elections, and even for local council elections. This one organisation standardises ballot design and educates voters on how to fill out their ballot (with advertising on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines, and on the internet, as well as a brochure about how to fill in the ballot being delivered to every house). They deal with the mechanics of the way that an election is conducted, and it is a full-time government department (which recruits a lot of temporary staff during election years on ballot night) rather than being a temporary gathering of a few volunteers. They have well-publicised rules as to what is and isn't a valid ballot.
Just this *one* small organisation prevents the Australian electoral system from having events like those in Florida. We still have close elections (our current PM has been elected on less than 50% of the popular vote, but on a majority of seats), but we don't have anywhere *near* the amount of legal wrangles over them.
The concept of patron is ancient. There was a time (awhile ago) when artists and scientists were supported by rich patrons so that they could focus on their creative work.
The modern world would be much different if it were not for the discoveries and art of these men. (if someone could reply to this message with some names of these artists and scientists, it would be much appreciated. I cannot remember any at the moment...)
Okay, the most famous patronees are probably Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo (check the local art gallery for some others). Sir Francis Bacon supported himself (born to an aristocratic family, so he could afford to get interested in things such as alchemy and physics). Sir Joseph Banks (who financed Cook's expedition to the south Pacific to watch the transit of Venus) was another wealthy man who was interested in the sciences.
Generally, an interest in the arts and the sciences has been the purview of the rich and wealthy throughout the centuries. The greatest and most famous of the patrons was probably Lorenzo de Medici, who financed whole academies of alchemists and scientists back at the beginning of the Renaissance.
These are just the ones I can remember off-hand. I'm sure there's lots more to be found through perusal of the history books.
Local phone companies don't charge metered rates for phone access,
Well, that rather depends on where you are. In countries outside the US, this is pretty much par for the course. Certainly in Australia, we pay a certain amount for the service of having the phone available (about $12 per month) and then we're charged for each individual call we make. Further, for calls outside our local call area, we have metered charges (and this can mean you're paying for a metered call within the same capital city) which are metered by the minute.
On top of this, there are a lot of ISPs over here which charge either by the hour ($X gets you Y hours per month) or by the megabyte ($X gets you Y megabytes per month) for internet access. Yes, it gets expensive if you're a heavy user (or even a moderate one - I once went over my 100MB limit through a combination of newsgroups, IRC and a little bit of web browsing).
The world is a very big place, and there's a lot of it which isn't in the USA.
I wonder what it feels like to work your butt off 10 hours a day and still get dozens of emails a day, every day telling you what a dick you are?
I wouldn't take a job like that. And, as far as I know, there's nothing preventing Rob, Jeff, Michael, and co. from saying, "screw this abuse"
and dumping Slashdot tomorrow. What do you want from these guys?
Just chiming to say "Mee toooo!" and similar AOLisms to this one. I think that a lot of people forget just how much *voluntary* work goes into providing a lot of services which we, as communities, take very much for granted. Well, here be the gen: if *you* don't like it, either don't use it, or build your own that you *do* like. If you must complain, try using some politeness and elementary good manners. If you want to know why something isn't happening the way you think it should, ask why, but don't *demand* the answer.
Now, I'll be honest - I don't read slashdot very often. I just don't have the time, and living at the far end of a fairly slow 'net connection in Australia, web-based stuff gets to be slow and unrewarding after a while. However, I'm not going to try and get the creators and maintainers of slashdot to try and make the site over to suit *my* needs and preferences. I'll just live with the fact that I can't use the site as often as I'd like, and set my comments reading threshold rather high so that it doesn't take all week to download a page.
Remember, folks, the internet *isn't* like television. *You* have the power to do something about things, and if you don't like something, *you* can go out and create your own alternative.
From what I'm seeing through the comments about the H1B visas, there's just been an increase in the global trend toward *closing* borders, rather than opening them. These days, dictators hardly have to say "you may not leave" to their citizens - indeed, they can afford to throw their gates wide open, since very few of the "liberal democracies" will accept them in.
All around the world, it's becoming harder and harder to be recognised as a refugee. All around the world, it's becoming harder and harder to move from one country to another - often there's professional criteria to meet, sometimes there's a wealth criterion (Australia, for example, will accept immigrants - provided they pay). So much for global mobility...
Slashdot Mirror
I've just been reading through the article, and one thing which kinda bugs me all the way through is the insistence that it's the man who should be doing all the running. Now, that doesn't square with my own experience - I wound up hunting down my particular (geek) guy, and dragging him off to my cave all by myself. He didn't actually notice the little hints I was dropping (okay, okay, small boulder-type hints) until I finally winched up my courage to squeaking point, and gave him a card saying that I thought he was attractive and sexy.
The guy doesn't have to do all the running. Sometimes, it's actually more attractive to find a guy who *isn't* out to get a girl straight off, who *doesn't* notice the hints, and the tips, and who is thoroughly surprised and stunned by the eventual (mutual) seduction.
Possibly I'm weird, though.
People living in democracies, Sunstein maintains, should be exposed to ideas they might not have chosen themselves.
I actually agree with this. What I *disagree* with is the notion that line noise, trolling, flames, juvenile "I'm better than you are"-ing and other such artifacts of online communication are classifiable as ideas that I need to be exposed to. And in most cases, it is *this* sort of electronic idiocy that most moderation removes - the equivalent of children waving to Mum in the background of news coverage of a disaster.
The other advantage of moderation (even of minor sorts of moderation, like mail filters, or usenet scorefiles) is that it helps me prioritise my time. I have a limited amount of hours in the day that I can spend reading things like Slashdot, usenet, email and soforth. I can choose to read that which I value higher first, and *if I have the time*, I can read that which I value less highly. My value choices are based on my own value system, and one of the things I value highly happens to be reasoned, calm discussion. I'd rather read a well-justified, calm refutation of my arguments than a hotly emotional, incoherent post in support of me.
Possibly I'm strange.
Meg Thornton
--
Agreed. Plus, I'd argue that Mr Katz is trying to make far too much soup from the one oyster.
One of the things which is worth considering about this "revolution" is that it is *only* *just* *starting*. The 'net as a consumer good has only been available for about 10 years or so in many countries - my own history on the 'net is about four years this July. That's a mere drop in the ocean of history. At present, we're still in the initial "impact" phase of the actual revolution. Expecting massive social change to take place inside of 7 generations is highly optimistic at best, insane at worst.
For a comparison, have a look at the activist movements of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular feminism and race equality. Even now, forty to fifty years later, there is still need for action on these matters - despite the gains which have been made. Racially and gender diverse workplaces are accepted now, and a person's race or gender are no longer accepted as justifications for why a person shouldn't have a particular job. But it's still tricky for a woman, or a person who isn't pale of skin to get into upper management - although this is changing, as generational change takes effect.
At the moment, people are checking out the 'net, and finding that it either is more than it was hyped to be, or (in most cases) that it's a lot less. You *can* find groups of other people who are just like you on the 'net, you *can* meet good people, and you *can* find a lot more information, but you have to be prepared to do the looking - it won't come to you pre-packaged. This is not to say that the 'net is a bad thing, just that it's different to television or film or radio, or even books.
Over the long term, the internet *will* fulfil many of the predictions made about it. But I don't expect this to happen either in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of my nieces or their children. Give it time, at least 100 years, before writing things off as a failure.
Meg Thornton
--
Linux may be fast-growing. But I'd wonder how many of the people out there who are using it are people like me.
I have a machine which dual-boots Redhat 6.2 (a very vanilla install) and Windows 98 (ditto). Most of the time, I use it in Windows mode. Why? Because at the moment, I can't find a workable driver for my PC's internal modem (which is supposed to actually work with Linux, according to the box - maybe they should have said which distribution they were talking about). Most of my interest in computers revolves around the web, and if I can't connect to the web, I'm not likely to use a different OS. At the moment, I can't afford a new external modem - I have other priorities for my cash.
Then there's the software issue. A lot of what I do with my computer revolves around a few games - most of which are only available on Windows. Even with the ones which are available in a form which suits Linux (angband, zangband), I often can't get them to install correctly.
Then there's the whole "documentation" issue. Most of the more useful documentation I've found has been in books that I've had to pay between seventy and eighty dollars for. Okay, I'm getting the OS "for free" - but I'm paying an equivalent amount to what I'd be paying for Gatesware, and *still* not being able to solve the problems which sent me to the documentation in the first place.
Now, I'm well aware that most of this is due to my own lack of familiarity with the OS. But at the moment, I don't have the necessary block of time available to me to be able to sit down and seriously learn this system. So it sits in its partition, barely ever used, and gradually becoming more and more out of date. Hopefully one day I'll be able to get things organised, and actually learn about it. But at present, I don't have the time, the energy, or the skills to devote to getting my machine working as a Linux box.
Thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people out there who have similar issues with Linux, and who basically have it installed, but unused.
Meg Thornton
--
The problem is, as we shed our responsibility, we also shed our rights.
This is worth remembering. There's a lot of people in the US (and a hell of a lot of them on slashdot) who prate on and on about their "rights", but who seem reluctant to accept any of the responsibility which those rights imply. As a result, the responsibility is shuffled off to government, to parents, to teachers, to *anyone else except the person involved*. And the rest of us worldwide get inflicted with things like spam, hate speech, trolls, and all the results of people claiming rights without responsibility. We also get the results of handing that responsibility to other people - censorware, draconian laws to deal with the unrestricted, unrestrained irresponsible speech of others (the Australian 'net censorship laws spring to mind as an example), and a general perception that curbing freedom of speech may not be such a bad thing after all...
The right of anonymous speech requires the listeners to be responsible enough to research the claims presented. I will accept that responsibility, in the event that I ever need to tell the world of an awful truth, or in the event that someone else needs to tell me an awful truth; a truth that would cost them their job, their standing in society, or even their life.
The right to free speech, however, requires the speakers to be responsible for what they're saying. This means that defamatory, inflammatory, and otherwise irresponsible speech under the safety of anonymity has to be curtailed somehow. The right to freedom of speech does not automatically mean the right to insult or assault your audience, or the right to demand that people listen to you by morphing to avoid their killfiles, or sending endless offensive email to someone who has asked you to stop. It doesn't mean the right to insist that you be treated seriously when you are doing the equivalent of throwing excrement at the walls, and it really doesn't mean that you have the right to be praised and respected for doing this. Which is something which is sometimes hard to convey to any number of people from the US.
As someone very intelligent once said: "There is no right to be heard on usenet".
Meg Thornton.
--
This is an informational war between the people of the world and basically corporations of the world (governments playing puppet to the corporate whim). The instrument of control is the Law. The legislators and lawyers are going to find it extremely difficult to control informational flow, but we are seeing - real time! every day something new! - the fruits of their labors: horrible and unenforcable laws that basically make each and every citizen a criminal. Once everyone is a criminal, then all of their liberties are endangered, and they must skulk around, fearful of being caught.
The only difference that I can see between Winston Smith's sad little grey world and this one is that people don't seem to have the zeal to rat out their neighbors, no one is wearing a red sash. Wait, correct that, I forgot about the model for the (forget what Orwell called them) guys who turn in their neighbors: the Religious Right and Christian Conservatives here in America. Already drug laws have turned half a nation into criminals.
Now another large chunk will be criminalized - sorry, has been criminalized. Napster-users, anyone who ever burned a disk containing MS Office and gave it to a friend. Basically, an entire nation of criminals, at risk and fearful of exposure. This serves the regime well.
The reason there will not be reform is that legislators are no longer servants of the people, if they ever were. No, the people are not vested in their country. Not in England where by some strange brainwashing technique (a la 1984) they Act like the Parliament is their friend, not in America where we know the story but admit powerlessness and the inability to organize except to continue to oppress Ourselves (MADD, African_American Rights Moevments, et al), and apparently not in Australia, which probably follows a British model.
[fx:tongue firmly in cheek]
Well, actually, for Australians, it's not that much of a change. After all, we're a nation of criminals, aren't we?
[removes tongue, and sarcasm]
That said, the current Australian government has a fairly strong history of removing the freedoms of the Australian people. For a start, this is the government which declared that material which would get greater than an "M" classification (ie not considered as being viewable by people under 15 years) is not legal to place on a web page hosted in this country. It's the government which brought in some lovely laws (for the Olympics - really!) which give the prime minister the power to call out the Army in times of civil turmoil. These laws haven't been removed. It's the government which has attempted (and succeeded) in removing a single or lesbian woman's entitlement to use IVF services to conceive a child - as well as the rights of heterosexual defacto couples. The loss of the privilege to forward on email is just a drop in the bucket by comparison.
What's really frightening, from an Australian point of view, is that by changing the government of the day, there is *no* guarantee that we'll stop this gradual erosion of our civil liberties. The Labor party is right alongside the Liberal/National coalition in this matter (after all, if they weren't, we'd have heard a lot more controversy about these laws). The Democrats have stopped trying to keep the bastards honest, and have decided to try becoming bigger bastards instead. One Nation would be a bigger threat to civil liberties than any other party aside from possibly the Greens (especially the more rabid ones who think that anything "natural" is more sacred than anything human). At this rate, the Natural Law Party (yogic flying, transcendental meditation, and world peace) aren't just sounding reasonable, they're sounding like a sensible alterntive. Now *that* is scary.
Meg Thornton (who isn't looking forward to the federal election this year)
--
"There are also apparently plans to reinstate the old limits on .org domains - if you aren't a non-profit corporation, you won't be permitted to register or keep a .org domain"
.com registrations to be real companies? This really isn't that far-fetched. They may require proof from you that you own the trademark you are trying to register...
.au domain all along. So damn, the rest of the world may get held to the same rules as us Aussies for a change *grin*. Maybe we'll lose some of the sillier vanity domains - or maybe separate TLDs will eventually be introduced to cover fan organisations (.fan anyone?) and personal vanity domains (.vty?). The web may become more organised. Terrible outcome, right?
Really, how long do you think it will be before they require all
Obviously, this is all trending towards the corporatization of the web... yee-haw.
I hate to say this, but as far as I know this has been the case in the
Alternatively, of course, the whole shebang may well go through and kill off a lot of interesting private web pages in favour of corporate blah. We won't know until it happens, though. However, one thing to note - if this is still at proposal stage, *now* is the time to object - in writing.
Meg Thornton.
A comment from the land where the 56kbps modem still rules supreme (Australia). The ISP I use has a very straightforward pricing plan - you pay a flat fee per calendar month, and you get up to 400MB total traffic in that month. If you go over that, you pay a certain amount per megabyte. This penalises people who download lots of stuff, and particularly penalises those people who regard ISP bandwidth as a limitless resource (which, in Australia, it isn't). Now, so far, I've downloaded mail for two different email accounts, read about half a dozen newsgroups (three of which are about 200 messages per day), do a bit of web-surfing (checking out about three online comics, and then rambling randomly), and also chat on IRC three nights a week without using up my quota.
Oh, and the reason we haven't got ADSL here is mainly because Tel$tra, gods bless their hearts, have decided not to roll it out - after all, they're making so much money from the phone lines, why provide us plebs with something more effective and more expensive.
Meg Thornton.
On my reading of the whole article from EFA Australia, the most pervasive issue is the notion that online content should be assessed at stricter levels of censorship than offline content. Or, in other words, if I wanted to publish my personal erotic fantasy writing as an online magazine, I would be subject to stricter censorship than if I published them as a commercial magazine, or as a street 'zine. I would have to tone them down more, I would be subject to stricter fines if I didn't, and after all that, I'd still not be able to publish them without getting them classified.
Strange, really, when you consider that an online provider can place much stricter controls on who gets access to their material than an offline provider. I can certainly remember getting a quick peek at the "naughty" photos in Playboy and Penthouse as a kid. Oddly enough, I seem to have grown up to be a relatively sane and sensible adult - about my only quirk is a deep and thorough dislike of the type of thinking which regards anything sexual as "dirty" or "nasty". But try accessing an online p0rn site without having the right credit card number. Unless you really have superior skills and knowledge, you aren't likely to be able to see even a picture of a woman in full chador.
It's rather scary - just about any restriction on adult rights or priveleges these days can be excused with the note that it's either to protect the children, or that its for the benefit of the children. Makes me wonder how I managed to survive to adulthood, really it does. Obviously I'm just a statistical fluke - as is everyone else of my generation who managed to survive through our non-child-obsequious environment.
Meg Thornton.
The tone of the article was such that it implied that Google should be providing this information to the public at large, simply *because* they bought it from what was Deja.com. There's the accusation that Google are doing something morally wrong by taking the archive offline - meanwhile ignoring the fact that Deja.com had already taken a large portion of the archive offline with little or no warning. Google, apparently, are online villains of the deepest dye for wanting to get some form of commercial return for the money that they paid to acquire the archive in the first place.
So let's start from first principles here: the fact that Deja had such a comprehensive archive is not remarkable. The remarkable bit is is that *nobody else has done anything similar*. Deja's value as a resource, both in the commercial sense, as well as in the historical sense, is in its rarity. Goggle, in acquiring the deja.com archives, *prevented* this resource from being lost forever. Yet they're apparently villains for not immediately doing whatever the Open-Source community wants them to. Talk about bloody-minded ingratitude.
There's an argument being made that this information is ours already, although from what I understand, this is legally problematic. However, if you don't agree with Google being able to commercially exploit *your* precious Usenet postings, the answer is straightforward: start posting with "X-No-Archive: Yes" in your headers, and write a *polite* email to Google asking them to remove all your posts from their archive.
For myself, I'm quite glad to see that Google have obtained the archive, and if they do as good a job of running it for easy access as they have with their search engine database, I'll be extremely pleased.
Meg Thornton.
Just my $0.05 worth. For what it's worth, I spent some time working as part of the student-run ISP that the technical college I attended hosted. My experiences there weren't exactly wonderful.
For starters, there was the old old problem of "boys and their toys" - there were precisely *two* female personnel who were interested in the whole business, and we were both relegated to administrative roles straight off. Secondly, there was very little actual knowledge being circulated - those who knew, knew, and those who didn't, couldn't learn anything by being involved. I eventually wound up giving up in disgust after being given the job of making the whole shebang ISO-9000 compliant, and writing procedures from scratch for them, with absolutely *no* help or assistance from any of the more experienced people.
Now, I realise that this isn't likely to be the archetypical experience for people involved with a student-run IT facility. I'd make the point that a volunteer facility really *needs* at least one person in charge who can *enforce* co-operation and information circulation - because without that, people who "don't fit" in the opinions of certain members of the group will find themselves frozen out or starved out. That was something that this particular group didn't have. It's worth noting, though, that there has to be the compromise made between idealism, control, opportuity, and common sense.
Meg Thornton
Music recording companies the world over are operating under the false premise that they have a right to remain in business using the same business models for no better reason than they were in business today. Companies are a convenient vehicle employed by people to produce goods and services. As such, they have no inherent right to remain in existence if there is no longer a market for their goods and services. Smart companies like IBM adapt to change and remain in business. Music companies are feeling the squeeze now, and must eventually embrace new technology to remain in business in the future. Oil companies will face a similar shift in the future when the oil runs out.
Of course, in the meantime, I feel strongly tempted to head over to the US and start an oil lamp company - and then campaign to restrict the trade of the power utilities there on the grounds that they're putting me out of business. Or possibly start a buggy factory (as in, horse-drawn buggy) and then sue the Ford motor company. Times change. Business models have to change with them. Sadly, at the moment, the RIAA in the US, and other such institutions around the world are under the impression that with sufficient funds, they can stop tomorrow from arriving. Sadly, enough judicial and legislative types in the US appear to agree with them to make the attempt worthwhile.
In the meantime, time moves on around them, and their customers take note. I doubt I'd be able to find a buyer for oil lamps, or horse-drawn buggies. Sooner or later (probably sooner) enough musicians are going to start dealing direct with their customers over the internet, selling MP3s directly from websites, and the need for big, centralised clearinghouses for music will be much less.
I'm not sure where I'd fit in Mr Katz's definition of "first generation" and "second generation" internet users. I started using the 'net back in 1997 (yup, after the "Great September"). But I don't spend my entire time on the web, looking at the pretty pictures and animated .gifs. Instead, I tend to spend most of my time online involved with a couple of Usenet newsgroups - which I've been involved with (as a reader at least) since I first stepped onto the 'net back in '97.
In both of these newsgroups, there is a strong sense of community (admittedly, in these days of the brave new Usenet, with trolls, flamers, and Usenet Performance Artists, this is a rarity). In both of these communities, I felt welcomed and valued as a community member. In at least one of these communities, I've been doing my level best to put something back in (always the mark of a successful community - if you've got people wanting to put things back, you must be doing something right), to add to the community.
In both cases, the community which started as a single newsgroup has spread to two or more. In at least one case, there's a small IRC network (two or three channels on two servers) which serves as an adjunct to the newsgroup. Rather than the IRC setup or the multiple groups dividing the community, it instead serves to gather it closer together. In both of these communities, it's worth noting that members of the community try to get together in "Real Life' (TM) as often as possible. In each case, the initial newsgroup is the core component, but there are lots of other ways of getting to know the people involved. While there is a strong component of online socialisation, there is just as strong a component of "offline" socialisation to complement this.
One of these two communities celebrates its tenth anniversary in about a year or so - and we're trying to organise a worldwide series of meetings for members of the community. Possibly they'll be linked by phone, or IRC. Possibly not - we've got a year to plan this, so we're going to do our best.
The days of the online community are not gone. There is still the possibility for communities to be forged, out of shared interest and shared friendship.
Meg Thornton.
As someone mentioned, this problem isn't so much legal as cultural. It's also very, very human. Wherever two or more people are gathered together, yea, there will be one among them who wishes to make certain that the others are thinking in the same way that they do.
That said, the growing tendency of governments and parents to want children to be shielded from *all* forms of "disagreeable" material (with a defintion of "disagreeable" which tends to be very strongly biased toward political and sexual concepts) is somewhat unrealistic. However, even more unrealistic is the notion that somehow technology is going to be the saviour. Let's face it, over the centuries, technology has focused almost exclusively on creating new ways of getting a mate, keeping a mate, or killing off competitors for a mate. None of which are things of which parents really wish their children to be aware. The most effective "censorware" available is the stuff between a parent's ears - especially when said parent is looking over the kid's shoulder as they surf.
However, saying to people "look, it's *your* responsibility as a parent to look after your kid" is thoroughly politically incorrect these days, so it's better for politicians to just pass laws to shut up the parents, and the "moral majority" types. It's worth noting that most of these laws probably won't actually be *enforced* very strictly - they're just for show. The government has been asked to "do something about the problem of p0rn on the internet". This is something, they are doing it.
My own reaction to this would be to wait for a year, and see what happens. One of the biggest flaw in western-style democracy is that laws are more and more being promised as electoral bandaids, rather than as serious efforts to solve problems. These laws are much the same - they appear to be designed to be pointed at when the Senator/Representative in question is standing for re-election, rather than as serious efforts at limiting access to "non-child-suitable" material. The trick is to prevent anyone from getting bored enough to put time and money into enforcement of them - so keep saying to your local Senators and Representatives that you want more police action on things like murder, speeding, etc. (evil grin)
Meg Thornton.
I have to admit, the thing which startled me (an Australian) about the current US election was discovering that every state and every county organises the election process separately. This completely shocked me, as I had no idea that things were that backward and awkward in a country which prides itself on being up-to-date and technologically aware.
In Australia, there is *one* federally funded organisation (the Australian Electoral Commission) which handles *everything* election related, from voter registration and electoral district boundaries to organising, conducting and counting an electoral ballot. They do this for federal elections, state elections, and even for local council elections. This one organisation standardises ballot design and educates voters on how to fill out their ballot (with advertising on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines, and on the internet, as well as a brochure about how to fill in the ballot being delivered to every house). They deal with the mechanics of the way that an election is conducted, and it is a full-time government department (which recruits a lot of temporary staff during election years on ballot night) rather than being a temporary gathering of a few volunteers. They have well-publicised rules as to what is and isn't a valid ballot.
Just this *one* small organisation prevents the Australian electoral system from having events like those in Florida. We still have close elections (our current PM has been elected on less than 50% of the popular vote, but on a majority of seats), but we don't have anywhere *near* the amount of legal wrangles over them.
The concept of patron is ancient. There was a time (awhile ago) when artists and scientists were supported by rich patrons so that they could focus on their creative work.
The modern world would be much different if it were not for the discoveries and art of these men. (if someone could reply to this message with some names of these artists and scientists, it would be much appreciated. I cannot remember any at the moment...)
Okay, the most famous patronees are probably Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo (check the local art gallery for some others). Sir Francis Bacon supported himself (born to an aristocratic family, so he could afford to get interested in things such as alchemy and physics). Sir Joseph Banks (who financed Cook's expedition to the south Pacific to watch the transit of Venus) was another wealthy man who was interested in the sciences.
Generally, an interest in the arts and the sciences has been the purview of the rich and wealthy throughout the centuries. The greatest and most famous of the patrons was probably Lorenzo de Medici, who financed whole academies of alchemists and scientists back at the beginning of the Renaissance.
These are just the ones I can remember off-hand. I'm sure there's lots more to be found through perusal of the history books.
Meg Thornton.
Local phone companies don't charge metered rates for phone access,
Well, that rather depends on where you are. In countries outside the US, this is pretty much par for the course. Certainly in Australia, we pay a certain amount for the service of having the phone available (about $12 per month) and then we're charged for each individual call we make. Further, for calls outside our local call area, we have metered charges (and this can mean you're paying for a metered call within the same capital city) which are metered by the minute.
On top of this, there are a lot of ISPs over here which charge either by the hour ($X gets you Y hours per month) or by the megabyte ($X gets you Y megabytes per month) for internet access. Yes, it gets expensive if you're a heavy user (or even a moderate one - I once went over my 100MB limit through a combination of newsgroups, IRC and a little bit of web browsing).
The world is a very big place, and there's a lot of it which isn't in the USA.
Meg Thornton.
I wonder what it feels like to work your butt off 10 hours a day and still get dozens of emails a day, every day telling you what a dick you are?
I wouldn't take a job like that. And, as far as I know, there's nothing preventing Rob, Jeff, Michael, and co. from saying, "screw this abuse"
and dumping Slashdot tomorrow. What do you want from these guys?
Just chiming to say "Mee toooo!" and similar AOLisms to this one. I think that a lot of people forget just how much *voluntary* work goes into providing a lot of services which we, as communities, take very much for granted. Well, here be the gen: if *you* don't like it, either don't use it, or build your own that you *do* like. If you must complain, try using some politeness and elementary good manners. If you want to know why something isn't happening the way you think it should, ask why, but don't *demand* the answer.
Now, I'll be honest - I don't read slashdot very often. I just don't have the time, and living at the far end of a fairly slow 'net connection in Australia, web-based stuff gets to be slow and unrewarding after a while. However, I'm not going to try and get the creators and maintainers of slashdot to try and make the site over to suit *my* needs and preferences. I'll just live with the fact that I can't use the site as often as I'd like, and set my comments reading threshold rather high so that it doesn't take all week to download a page.
Remember, folks, the internet *isn't* like television. *You* have the power to do something about things, and if you don't like something, *you* can go out and create your own alternative.
From what I'm seeing through the comments about the H1B visas, there's just been an increase in the global trend toward *closing* borders, rather than opening them. These days, dictators hardly have to say "you may not leave" to their citizens - indeed, they can afford to throw their gates wide open, since very few of the "liberal democracies" will accept them in.
All around the world, it's becoming harder and harder to be recognised as a refugee. All around the world, it's becoming harder and harder to move from one country to another - often there's professional criteria to meet, sometimes there's a wealth criterion (Australia, for example, will accept immigrants - provided they pay). So much for global mobility...