Your point is valid with respect to at least one participant: me. Posting online yields instant rewards. I think there may be a real danger here. I confess that in my short time on Slashdot, I've been tremendously aware of mod points (maybe even more concerned with mod points than the responses to my posts?) Yes, online I get attention. In RL I'm not published (though I've tried to become so) and online, I'm a writer with an audience. Admittedly a small audience, but an audience, and the danger lies in the ease of posting and the rewards I get (if I admit, and I do, that I write for attention) for posting. Folks respond, my ego becomes involved, and as often as not an argument ensues.
From the article:
I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.
While I don't share Michael Gorman's dismissal of Blog People's abilities (his "intellectual needs" comment is galling), I do think he's rubbed his fingers over a kernel of truth. The fact is, that blogging and online reading (ie, surfing the web) have largely edged out something else in my life: reading books. Not that I've given up the practice, but that I'm less inclined to do it than I used to be, and more inclined to lose large periods of time in front of the computer screen. (I do not say the medium is to blame; I want to avoid digital vs. paper catfights.) I suspect my behavior is related to a feedback loop of work/reward. Posting online requires relatively little work and yields relatively immediate reward. Reading online, similarly, is quick & easy compared to novels. I flatter myself that I monitor the cutting edge of news via the web--and I believe it is possible to do so, and Slashdot may even be an aid towards doing so--but in fact, I derive as much satisfaction out of a rousing debate on inane trivia (provided I win, or score points or prestige) as I do out of debating issues of real significance. The gratification of the moment doesn't care what the subject is, only that I'm reading/writing/evaluating...and getting attention.
Yes, you've struck a nerve, O Anonymous Coward.
There's a larger point too, having to do with attention span, that is implicitly raised in M. Gorman's comment. It may be that as I feed myself with digital snacks I to some degree lose interest in meatier works. It's easy to show off a little knowledge of calculus, should a discussion head that direction, and easy enough to look up on Google the innards of whatever physics question is the problem of the moment, since those are quick and work-free; it's much harder to sustain a quiet and real course of study on some difficult topic. A steady diet of snacks may gradually wear down my ability to sustain long-term learning and interacting.
I may have to curtail my participation herewith.:)
"while travelling in a bus, a car or a train. All they need to do is -- place the turbine against the wind flow."
So essentially, this is like plugging in your laptop at Barnes & Noble: the store pays the cost. The car or bus will have its air resistence increased and therefore miles per gallon of fuel decreased. Not really creating energy out of thin air here.:)
Really? Fashionable in what circles? At my workplace religion is not much spoken of, but when it is, folks generally conclude with something along the lines of "I disagree with some of the tenets of the church, but I can't understand how people can look at the world and not believe in God."
But that's my personal experience. According to statistics widely available online, a full third of the world's population is Christian, over a fifth is Islamic (add these together and already over half the world's population believes in a God). Secular/agnostic/atheist is somewhere around one sixth of the world's population. I'd say that historically, theism is unquestionably the most popular position, and even today, atheism is decidedly unfashionable.
"having a computer in his home for upwards of 10 years...."
One thing computers are is fast. Why make it sit through ten years absorbing input at human speeds when the digital content of the web is available for scanning as fast as the machine can?
I take what Geo.cc wrote, "That is not for us to determine. As the injured party, it is for Apple to determine what they need to do," to be an abstract principle about whose place it is to forgive an injury. If someone steps on my toe, onlookers may well decide that it was a minor infraction and tell me to shrug and smile, but what if it really hurt? My toe, my place to forgive.
We slashdotters are distanced third parties and I for one do not know how much monetary damage was actually done to Apple by Desicanuk. I have trouble coming up with any clear way of deciding how much money the distribution cost, especially since it sounds like the value is purely in potential. I agree there are facts at the base of any claimed damage, but this case requires lots of speculation on how to interpret and extrapolate these facts. I'm certainly not ready to agree with a knee-jerk "this didn't cost them a dime" response.
Unfortunatly, the US seems to be stuck on this idea that you have no privacy in a public place. This is a wonderful idea if your intention is to live in a surveillance society, bad if you hope to live in a free one.
I'm intrigued and confused. There are two freedoms: the freedom from being pestered by someone selling something, and the freedom to sell something. Which takes precedence?
The bit about a surveillance society loses me...how would such a society alleviate the spam problem? (Incidentally, I for one do not want to live in a surveillance society:)
I hope you're not sorting these by hand! If you maintain your email address in spite of that spam deluge, it seems to me you must be getting a significant volume of legitimate email as well. If the cost/benefit ratio were too high, surely you would trash that address and start over. I'm sure you're aware of the many tools to combat spam and are filtering pro-actively.
I'm not a public figure and therefore maintain a low profile. Apart from using my hotmail account for the occasional purchase or sign-up, I do not distribute it (it is on display on the occasional obscure forum). Roughly 50-60% of the email that arrives at my account is spam, which I understand is a fairly normal percentage these days. It does not significantly inconvenience me, since hotmail filters the majority of it before I even see it, and the rest I correctly identify without opening. I understand that the problem is more difficult when you expect to be contacted by large numbers of legitimate persons who you did not invite personally
Please understand that I'm not defending the spammers who clog your inbox! I'm defending the local football team's email campaign--though I'm a little less on their side now I realize they're not connected to Ottowa University in the first place--because I think their agenda is more or less legitimate. The spammers who attack my hotmail account repeatedly, with devious dodges to elude the filters (how many times do they have to hear "NOT interested" before they get it?)--those are the troublemakers. Yes, let us legislate against them, but let's be careful what we do and don't criminalize.
Famous authors notoriously receive far more fan mail than they can handle, so much that if they were to reply to it all they would no longer be able to write (Tolkien said as much in a brief response to one of his fans)--yet I defend the right of a fan to attempt to contact a favorite author. This example establishes that what may be a genuine inconvenience to the receiving party may at the same time be the result of good faith on the sender's part. The overwhelmed author generally takes measures similar to spam filters, which amount to not seeing or dealing with the unsolicited mail.
Football teams must advertize; that is a fact of the business world which does not make them illegitimate.
It's a question of what is and what is not under my power. I can close my ears to the world and hear no one, or I can open my ears to the world and hear things I did not invite. Whether or not someone contacts me is under their control, not mine.
Spam is evil. I hate receiving it and hate to be pestered for stuff I never wanted in the first place. This professor may have no interest in football and I respect the fact that he did not only not want to buy season tickets, he didn't want to have to turn down the offer TWICE. There are plenty of offers I have to turn down that I wish had never happened, most of them by email and crude or gross or annoying. I maintain my email account, however, because it is worth the price I pay in inconvenient SPAM.
~to these red-blooded football players' defense~
They are university affiliates, after all. Would the professor rather they stop by his office in person or stop him in the hallway? But seriously...the effort required to sidestep spam (click it into your junk box) is actually far slighter than the effort required to sidestep a solicitor's phone call or turn away a caller in the flesh. If a salesman is going to bug me, please let him (oh, please) send me an email instead of telephoning me at home!
There are folks in the world who do not want to be contacted at all, and they are entitled to have unlisted phone numbers (or no phone), never check email, never answer the doorbell, employ secretaries and security to interface between them and the world, perhaps wear a disguise every time they go outside. Celebrities have to resort to these measures; so do CEOs, public officials, jurors, and recluse writers like Thomas Pynchon. The rest of us, however, want a more moderate balance between privacy and availability to those who need to contact us. I suggest that the price of posting a public email address is that it will be used.
I'm all in favor of posting polite messages along with the email address like "please contact me only on business relating to ___" and robot-defeating formats like "me-AT-domain-dot-com" but legal action ought to be reserved for the flagrant abuse, not intra-mural etiquette breaches. Otherwise it's a bit like making a big, beautiful red button, showing it to a two-year-old, and saying "Don't press this or you'll be spanked!" (Sorry, any spammers out there reading this who take umbrage at the comparison to two-year-olds!:) If it's that important to me that the red button remain unpushed, I won't put it in reach of the toddler.
If the professor really wants people at the university not directly connected to his affairs not to contact him, he shouldn't give them his email address. The web is a very public place.
We (the sheep) do have opinions, which are shaped by the people we pay attention to.
I think you're saying that it's very difficult to form a truly original opinion. I notice in myself occasionally (probably far less often than it actually happens), a tendency to make a passionate statement for a position that I swallowed whole from someone else. I read a lot, and those ideas that go in my eyes tend to work their way out my mouth or fingers. And I still believe, or want to believe, that I think for myself! The truth is, that's hard to do.
I see two reasons this sheep-like tendency will not be corrected by the advent of the blog:
1. No one has time to learn about and think about every issue in sufficient detail to form an opinion; therefore everyone will be led by someone else in at least some category (or at best, led by their own previously established blanket principles for handling that sort of issue).
2. Blogs are, like word of mouth and every other medium, at the mercy of infectious memes.:) I suspect that ideas will work themselves through a network of blogs in a process similar to the life-cycle of an email humor piece that everyone forwards to their friends until the whole world has seen it six times.
So in spite of the optimism of my post above, I don't see blogs as the panacea for the world of information. But I do see them as a step forward because each one is limited in distribution, open to comments from readers, and the number of blog writers is increasing. I see blogs as analogous to hundreds of coffee-shop conversations as opposed to a single lecture from a podium (newspaper/television/radio).
And the potential is really extraordinary! I love the story of the missionary lady who blogged in the Ukraine. I don't think I appreciate yet just how cool and revolutionary this is. She wrote a historical document, a primary source, and it was available instantly worldwide. In the centuries when literacy itself was rare the occasional monk would write down his thoughts and we treasure every scrap of parchment that has survived the ages. At the time he wrote, some miniscule percentage of the population would have been sufficiently educated to read, but only a handful of persons would presumably ever lay eyes on the physical document. That situation was revolutionized by the printing press and I guess a revolution of similar proportions is represented by the internet. A blog is potentailly a primary source documenting a real person's real experiences, firsthand. Thus the information gleaned from reading such a blog is one step more direct than information gleaned from a traditional news source.
Technically you're correct, but I believe there's a significant difference in user attitudes. A home page has the flavor of the-face-I-show-the-world, almost an online resume, and all the extra care that goes along with that: are my photos flattering? Do I highlight my strengths? It's self-advertizing.
Blogs seem somehow more candid. Maybe there's an appeal to exhibitionism, or maybe few users understand exactly what's happening, but for some reason it is very easy to rattle out the most personal thoughts on the keyboard. On a few notable recent occasions users who did not trouble to guard their anonymity have paid RL consequences for blogging a little too candidly (ie, at Google).
I think blogging as a cultural phenomon is well worth some scrutiny.
the main product is something that is already available for free.
This has interesting ramifications. It's free, anyone can do it (and does) and it's spreading. The problem for the reader is sifting the interesting bits out of the sea of inanities. However, a couple of facts prevent this from being too big a problem: 1. what's of interest to me is not necessarily of interest to someone else 2. even after culling the 90%, the remainder is still a huge number. There exist enough relevant, interesting blogs to give me, the reader, choice. 3. "free" is contingent on size. A popular blog consumes bandwidth and at some point that bandwidth must be paid for. I believe that's a built-in check that will promote many small blogs over a few giant blogs. It's naturally resistant to monopolization.
The problem of too much to choose from and low quality is not really a problem but an asset(especially considering Google the Glorious to help me pick my way through): a plethora of choices is a good problem to have.
The potential of blogging itself elicits strongly divided opinions.
Denizens of the so-called blogosphere believe the practice is destined to revolutionize the way people distribute and get information, increasingly marginalizing traditional mass media outlets....
Critics, though, view all the fuss about blogs as the latest bout of Internet hyperbole, one that will eventually fade away ones readers realize they are rife with inaccuracies and mundane minutiae.
The critics are correct--reading blogs means reading a single writer's private quirks--but that works to the reader's advantage as well as disadvantage. Who wants to get all their information from a single, monopolistic, sensationalistic source? That's how I view the local television news--to be fair, they make an attempt, but to me it's obvious their bottom line is ratings. So today we have an alternative model for the dissemination of information (or rather, many models), and one of the sturdiest is the blog.
I'm reminded of analogies I've heard made between modern AI computing algorithms (ie, neural nets) and the human brain, in which there are so many tiny, self-contained fundamental units (connections, say) that a great many of them can fail without destroying the performance of the whole. Robust & degrades gracefully.
Blogs may forge that sort of network online. No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses, because the masses are not drinking from a single spring. Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.
This story, posted on the same day as the story about the thief who was caught by a web cam that uploaded its photos to an external server, brings home to me the changing nature of today's world. Electronic activity is inherently insecure and I'm beginning to think my baseline assumption ought to be this: someone is eavesdropping on everything I do.
My job allows a certain amount of free time at a PC with high-speed internet access and I make use of it. My employer certainly has the legal right and means to log every key I strike. Have I ever accessed my paypal account from work? Probably...so my employer (or my employer's IT guy) can probably purchase things on my credit card. How about my ebay account? Again, yes. Yahoo? Yes. Other accounts (like slashdot) and forums and blogs? These may all be open books to him/her/them/Big Brother. Fortunately I'm not a spy and not even particularly daring in my Googling ("office-appropriate websites" is my motto) so I expect I'm flying below the radar. But suppose someone really was interested? They could literally read my mail, and some of my personal email is...well...personal. Scarier still is the fact that I've used (I know, I oughtn't, but I'm human and it's embarassing to always be forgetting) certain short-cuts to help me remember which password belongs to which accounts and sometimes my screen name is the same from site to site. So someone could conceivably hack my yahoo account and use data learned there to access other accounts and basically domino-effect their way through my whole schizophrenic tree of online personas. Okay, I've mixed paranoia in there, but I really want to examine the worst-case scenario.
Proposed new worldview: every computer I use logs everything. Can I retain my privacy nevertheless?
For now, if I'm careful, yes. One key is staying below the radar, as it were. If I attract a lot of attention, I may become a target, but if I mind my own business, I'm not likely to be bothered. We're not yet at the point where everyone is considered a criminal. The man whose wife was suspicious wouldn't have gotten caught if he had not aroused her suspicions in the first place. (The method I recommend for avoiding arousing suspicions is to be scrupulously innocent; not a fail-safe, but a big help.)
If I pretend my employer is reading over my shoulder 100% of the time at work, I'm unlikely to type anything compromising.
If I pretend the other people in my household are reading over my shoulder at home, I'm likely to stay out of trouble too.
But where do I go if I want to be particularly clandestine, for example buy my wife a present without her knowing about it? Someplace anonymous. Anonymity is the great bastion of protection in the digital age. There are some freely available web-based email systems that do not even require a real name to register; with a working email address, one can open all sorts of online accounts. If I'm paranoid, I may open a unique account for the sole purpose of registering for a specific online activity, and never let the account mix with any other activity of mine.
In other words, if I'm careful, I can avoid linking myself to anything I do online. Say I use a public computer, perhaps at a library or an internet cafe, to open an anonymous free email account, and I use that email address to open a slashdot account. As long as I never access that email address again and never access the slashdot account at home or at work, I can avoid leaving a thread from it to me--even assuming every keystroke was logged on every computer I used.
That kind of covering my tracks is a pain, and not really necessary because I'm not up to villainy, but if I were paranoid, and I'm beginning to think I should be, it would offer protection.
But wait...anonymous public internet access is rapidly disappearing, even from libraries. One frequently must have a library account to use the library computer, and many libraries now use software that logs on a specific user f
Why not? He's good at what he does and has roughly 90% of the market share in every category he mentioned except searching. And even in that space, as he pointed out, Microsoft does have the credibility to challenge Google. (By the way, those who complain about George W's inability to admit a mistake will be refreshed to hear Bill Gates agree to the interviewer's assertion that "it was as stupid as hell to let Google get ahead of you on the search engine"). I think Microsoft can challenge Google not because it can make a better search engine, though I think MS has already demonstrated it can make a comparable engine, but because it can use its enormous leverage from past successes. Its OS will come ready-installed on the vast majority of PC's, and when it releases an OS with a built-in MS search, that MS search will get used. Is this not more or less how IE defeated Netscape in the browser category?
The Firefox article spends most of its space plugging its new series of collector's coins and encouraging users to be active in the Firefox community. The top 25 most active users, determined by, "the number and quality of the member's posts (as rated by the community), how many comments he's posted, whether or not he has engaged the community by rating other users' posts, and how much affiliate traffic he has generated for Firefox"--will be rewarded with a commemorative coin each. This reminds me vaguely of slashdot, except on slashdot the incentives (karma and moderator power) amount to essentially more credibility. Being active on slashdot is its own reward and bribes are not needed. Unrelated "perks" of the trinket variety seem to me to have very little to do with what makes Firefox important.
I suppose the open-source model needs to monetize something, when the product itself is free.
On the page where the story actually appears, http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/i-rob ot.html --the title is written "i, robot" and not "I, Robot." I find this change updates the flavor of the title into the modern era, the Day of Blog.
Fair enough; I think conveying necessary information to the reader is one of a writer's challenges.
The story's style did not really catch my attention one way or another until I read your post. The content did, but upon reflection, I wonder if the development of ideas I mentioned is more a product of the passage of time than Doctorow's own brilliance. Digital brain-backup is an idea that's kind of floating in the air these days, at least the air I breathe.:)
I too enjoyed Doctorow's interplay with the Three Laws. To me the story is self-conscious SF, written with and intended for an audience with a common working knowledge of Asimov (and Orwell's 1984). Not everyone has such a knowledge base, but SF fans certainly do. One obvious conclusion: Asimov has been hugely influential.
I wonder if in his comment at the end of the story, the bit about totalitarian assumptions that underpin traditional SF, Cory Doctorow intended to label Asimov as totalitarian. Really? Maybe so.... I do think of Asimov as a conservative. Immensely entertaining, of course, and full of intriguing ideas (I was thrilled by the Three Laws when I first read them, and loved the logic-puzzle flavor of the stories he built around them). But against the "totalitarian" accusation (if one was intended), I would point out Asimov's counter-establishment protagonists in The Gods Themselves.
But Doctorow has a point. Asimov came up with his positronic brains and Three Laws at a time when ideas about AI were...well, 50 years older than they are today. Asimov didn't need to address the issue of effective "cloning" (via saving a digital copy of all the data from a human, or robot, brain) and the ramifications of having multiple instances of the same person because those are such modern ideas (Kurzweil's Intelligent Machines was published in 1990). Today's science fiction writer must face these issues. The hero's wife in today's story is not just one person, she's 3422 copies of herself. Lose one to the ripping robot-spiders, you can still find and hug and love another one. Wife dead? No problem...this copy has the same memories and smells just as good and is just as pleasantly warm.
This story invites a worthwhile comparison of the progression of ideas from Asimov's hayday to today.
Accusations of plagiarism against Doctorow seem to me ludicrous; they have been defused before the fact by the audaciousness of his title. He's not trying to steal ideas and get away with it, he's calling attention to the ideas, exploring them further, arguing against them (and yes, possibly, profiting from their inherent name-recognition value), maybe even paying tribute to them. He is certainly not being underhanded.
I'm curious about the judgement that his writing is "stilted" and "ungainly". Do you mean it is awkward? Too rigid? On the contrary, to me it reads very informally and conversationally. "Capeesh" may clang in my ears, but I suspect the author is taking a stab at creating a future slang, and who's to say how a cop will or will not talk in the days of positronic brains? I don't think Doctorow's prose sparkles the way, say, Anthony Burgess's does, but it is certainly serviceable enough and not a distraction. Not every great writer was great with words.
Here's a sample paragraph, picked from the middle of the piece:
The car shuddered as it wove in and out of the lanes on the Don Valley Parkway, barreling for the Gardiner Express Way, using his copper's override to make the thick, slow traffic part ahead of him. He wasn't supposed to do this, but as between a minor infraction and pissing off the man from Social Harmony, he knew which one he'd pick.
Apart from a couple of what strike me as grammatical errors (is the car or the man the subject of the first sentence?) I don't find much to complain about in the prose. Verbs like shudder, weave, barrel are colorful and bring the action to life. wasn't and pissing off are certainly colloquial and sidestep the label "stilted."
The story is legible, has credible characters with real problems, addresses relevant issues, demonstrates insight into progress made in the AI field, and has achieved the honor of slashdot attention. Furthermore, it is compelling enough that I read it to the end--which makes it a legitimate piece of fiction in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
While I don't share Michael Gorman's dismissal of Blog People's abilities (his "intellectual needs" comment is galling), I do think he's rubbed his fingers over a kernel of truth. The fact is, that blogging and online reading (ie, surfing the web) have largely edged out something else in my life: reading books. Not that I've given up the practice, but that I'm less inclined to do it than I used to be, and more inclined to lose large periods of time in front of the computer screen. (I do not say the medium is to blame; I want to avoid digital vs. paper catfights.) I suspect my behavior is related to a feedback loop of work/reward. Posting online requires relatively little work and yields relatively immediate reward. Reading online, similarly, is quick & easy compared to novels. I flatter myself that I monitor the cutting edge of news via the web--and I believe it is possible to do so, and Slashdot may even be an aid towards doing so--but in fact, I derive as much satisfaction out of a rousing debate on inane trivia (provided I win, or score points or prestige) as I do out of debating issues of real significance. The gratification of the moment doesn't care what the subject is, only that I'm reading/writing/evaluating...and getting attention.
Yes, you've struck a nerve, O Anonymous Coward.
There's a larger point too, having to do with attention span, that is implicitly raised in M. Gorman's comment. It may be that as I feed myself with digital snacks I to some degree lose interest in meatier works. It's easy to show off a little knowledge of calculus, should a discussion head that direction, and easy enough to look up on Google the innards of whatever physics question is the problem of the moment, since those are quick and work-free; it's much harder to sustain a quiet and real course of study on some difficult topic. A steady diet of snacks may gradually wear down my ability to sustain long-term learning and interacting.
I may have to curtail my participation herewith.
Ah, fair enough. I'm new enough to Slashdot I'm not yet ready to characterize the user base, so I take your word for it.
I hate that sort of namecalling, though. Idiot you obviously are not.
"while travelling in a bus, a car or a train. All they need to do is -- place the turbine against the wind flow."
:)
So essentially, this is like plugging in your laptop at Barnes & Noble: the store pays the cost. The car or bus will have its air resistence increased and therefore miles per gallon of fuel decreased. Not really creating energy out of thin air here.
"Atheism is the most fashionable belief"
t ml
Really? Fashionable in what circles? At my workplace religion is not much spoken of, but when it is, folks generally conclude with something along the lines of "I disagree with some of the tenets of the church, but I can't understand how people can look at the world and not believe in God."
But that's my personal experience. According to statistics widely available online, a full third of the world's population is Christian, over a fifth is Islamic (add these together and already over half the world's population believes in a God). Secular/agnostic/atheist is somewhere around one sixth of the world's population. I'd say that historically, theism is unquestionably the most popular position, and even today, atheism is decidedly unfashionable.
Numbers taken from: http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.h
"having a computer in his home for upwards of 10 years...."
One thing computers are is fast. Why make it sit through ten years absorbing input at human speeds when the digital content of the web is available for scanning as fast as the machine can?
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven? :)
I take what Geo.cc wrote, "That is not for us to determine. As the injured party, it is for Apple to determine what they need to do," to be an abstract principle about whose place it is to forgive an injury. If someone steps on my toe, onlookers may well decide that it was a minor infraction and tell me to shrug and smile, but what if it really hurt? My toe, my place to forgive.
We slashdotters are distanced third parties and I for one do not know how much monetary damage was actually done to Apple by Desicanuk. I have trouble coming up with any clear way of deciding how much money the distribution cost, especially since it sounds like the value is purely in potential. I agree there are facts at the base of any claimed damage, but this case requires lots of speculation on how to interpret and extrapolate these facts. I'm certainly not ready to agree with a knee-jerk "this didn't cost them a dime" response.
Let's listen to Apple's estimates.
Unfortunatly, the US seems to be stuck on this idea that you have no privacy in a public place. This is a wonderful idea if your intention is to live in a surveillance society, bad if you hope to live in a free one.
:)
I'm intrigued and confused. There are two freedoms: the freedom from being pestered by someone selling something, and the freedom to sell something. Which takes precedence?
The bit about a surveillance society loses me...how would such a society alleviate the spam problem? (Incidentally, I for one do not want to live in a surveillance society
My price? Several thousand spam e-mail a day.
I hope you're not sorting these by hand! If you maintain your email address in spite of that spam deluge, it seems to me you must be getting a significant volume of legitimate email as well. If the cost/benefit ratio were too high, surely you would trash that address and start over. I'm sure you're aware of the many tools to combat spam and are filtering pro-actively.
I'm not a public figure and therefore maintain a low profile. Apart from using my hotmail account for the occasional purchase or sign-up, I do not distribute it (it is on display on the occasional obscure forum). Roughly 50-60% of the email that arrives at my account is spam, which I understand is a fairly normal percentage these days. It does not significantly inconvenience me, since hotmail filters the majority of it before I even see it, and the rest I correctly identify without opening. I understand that the problem is more difficult when you expect to be contacted by large numbers of legitimate persons who you did not invite personally
Please understand that I'm not defending the spammers who clog your inbox! I'm defending the local football team's email campaign--though I'm a little less on their side now I realize they're not connected to Ottowa University in the first place--because I think their agenda is more or less legitimate. The spammers who attack my hotmail account repeatedly, with devious dodges to elude the filters (how many times do they have to hear "NOT interested" before they get it?)--those are the troublemakers. Yes, let us legislate against them, but let's be careful what we do and don't criminalize.
Famous authors notoriously receive far more fan mail than they can handle, so much that if they were to reply to it all they would no longer be able to write (Tolkien said as much in a brief response to one of his fans)--yet I defend the right of a fan to attempt to contact a favorite author. This example establishes that what may be a genuine inconvenience to the receiving party may at the same time be the result of good faith on the sender's part. The overwhelmed author generally takes measures similar to spam filters, which amount to not seeing or dealing with the unsolicited mail.
Football teams must advertize; that is a fact of the business world which does not make them illegitimate.
It's a question of what is and what is not under my power. I can close my ears to the world and hear no one, or I can open my ears to the world and hear things I did not invite. Whether or not someone contacts me is under their control, not mine.
Ah, you're right, my mistake. That changes the flavor of the solicitation a bit.
~on the good professor's side~
:) If it's that important to me that the red button remain unpushed, I won't put it in reach of the toddler.
Spam is evil. I hate receiving it and hate to be pestered for stuff I never wanted in the first place. This professor may have no interest in football and I respect the fact that he did not only not want to buy season tickets, he didn't want to have to turn down the offer TWICE. There are plenty of offers I have to turn down that I wish had never happened, most of them by email and crude or gross or annoying. I maintain my email account, however, because it is worth the price I pay in inconvenient SPAM.
~to these red-blooded football players' defense~
They are university affiliates, after all. Would the professor rather they stop by his office in person or stop him in the hallway? But seriously...the effort required to sidestep spam (click it into your junk box) is actually far slighter than the effort required to sidestep a solicitor's phone call or turn away a caller in the flesh. If a salesman is going to bug me, please let him (oh, please) send me an email instead of telephoning me at home!
There are folks in the world who do not want to be contacted at all, and they are entitled to have unlisted phone numbers (or no phone), never check email, never answer the doorbell, employ secretaries and security to interface between them and the world, perhaps wear a disguise every time they go outside. Celebrities have to resort to these measures; so do CEOs, public officials, jurors, and recluse writers like Thomas Pynchon. The rest of us, however, want a more moderate balance between privacy and availability to those who need to contact us. I suggest that the price of posting a public email address is that it will be used.
I'm all in favor of posting polite messages along with the email address like "please contact me only on business relating to ___" and robot-defeating formats like "me-AT-domain-dot-com" but legal action ought to be reserved for the flagrant abuse, not intra-mural etiquette breaches. Otherwise it's a bit like making a big, beautiful red button, showing it to a two-year-old, and saying "Don't press this or you'll be spanked!" (Sorry, any spammers out there reading this who take umbrage at the comparison to two-year-olds!
If the professor really wants people at the university not directly connected to his affairs not to contact him, he shouldn't give them his email address. The web is a very public place.
I think you're saying that it's very difficult to form a truly original opinion. I notice in myself occasionally (probably far less often than it actually happens), a tendency to make a passionate statement for a position that I swallowed whole from someone else. I read a lot, and those ideas that go in my eyes tend to work their way out my mouth or fingers. And I still believe, or want to believe, that I think for myself! The truth is, that's hard to do.
I see two reasons this sheep-like tendency will not be corrected by the advent of the blog:
So in spite of the optimism of my post above, I don't see blogs as the panacea for the world of information. But I do see them as a step forward because each one is limited in distribution, open to comments from readers, and the number of blog writers is increasing. I see blogs as analogous to hundreds of coffee-shop conversations as opposed to a single lecture from a podium (newspaper/television/radio).
And the potential is really extraordinary! I love the story of the missionary lady who blogged in the Ukraine. I don't think I appreciate yet just how cool and revolutionary this is. She wrote a historical document, a primary source, and it was available instantly worldwide. In the centuries when literacy itself was rare the occasional monk would write down his thoughts and we treasure every scrap of parchment that has survived the ages. At the time he wrote, some miniscule percentage of the population would have been sufficiently educated to read, but only a handful of persons would presumably ever lay eyes on the physical document. That situation was revolutionized by the printing press and I guess a revolution of similar proportions is represented by the internet. A blog is potentailly a primary source documenting a real person's real experiences, firsthand. Thus the information gleaned from reading such a blog is one step more direct than information gleaned from a traditional news source.
Technically you're correct, but I believe there's a significant difference in user attitudes. A home page has the flavor of the-face-I-show-the-world, almost an online resume, and all the extra care that goes along with that: are my photos flattering? Do I highlight my strengths? It's self-advertizing.
Blogs seem somehow more candid. Maybe there's an appeal to exhibitionism, or maybe few users understand exactly what's happening, but for some reason it is very easy to rattle out the most personal thoughts on the keyboard. On a few notable recent occasions users who did not trouble to guard their anonymity have paid RL consequences for blogging a little too candidly (ie, at Google).
I think blogging as a cultural phenomon is well worth some scrutiny.
the main product is something that is already available for free.
This has interesting ramifications. It's free, anyone can do it (and does) and it's spreading. The problem for the reader is sifting the interesting bits out of the sea of inanities. However, a couple of facts prevent this from being too big a problem:
1. what's of interest to me is not necessarily of interest to someone else
2. even after culling the 90%, the remainder is still a huge number. There exist enough relevant, interesting blogs to give me, the reader, choice.
3. "free" is contingent on size. A popular blog consumes bandwidth and at some point that bandwidth must be paid for. I believe that's a built-in check that will promote many small blogs over a few giant blogs. It's naturally resistant to monopolization.
The problem of too much to choose from and low quality is not really a problem but an asset(especially considering Google the Glorious to help me pick my way through): a plethora of choices is a good problem to have.
The critics are correct--reading blogs means reading a single writer's private quirks--but that works to the reader's advantage as well as disadvantage. Who wants to get all their information from a single, monopolistic, sensationalistic source? That's how I view the local television news--to be fair, they make an attempt, but to me it's obvious their bottom line is ratings. So today we have an alternative model for the dissemination of information (or rather, many models), and one of the sturdiest is the blog.
I'm reminded of analogies I've heard made between modern AI computing algorithms (ie, neural nets) and the human brain, in which there are so many tiny, self-contained fundamental units (connections, say) that a great many of them can fail without destroying the performance of the whole. Robust & degrades gracefully.
Blogs may forge that sort of network online. No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses, because the masses are not drinking from a single spring. Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.
I like the direction this is going....
This story, posted on the same day as the story about the thief who was caught by a web cam that uploaded its photos to an external server, brings home to me the changing nature of today's world. Electronic activity is inherently insecure and I'm beginning to think my baseline assumption ought to be this: someone is eavesdropping on everything I do.
My job allows a certain amount of free time at a PC with high-speed internet access and I make use of it. My employer certainly has the legal right and means to log every key I strike. Have I ever accessed my paypal account from work? Probably...so my employer (or my employer's IT guy) can probably purchase things on my credit card. How about my ebay account? Again, yes. Yahoo? Yes. Other accounts (like slashdot) and forums and blogs? These may all be open books to him/her/them/Big Brother. Fortunately I'm not a spy and not even particularly daring in my Googling ("office-appropriate websites" is my motto) so I expect I'm flying below the radar. But suppose someone really was interested? They could literally read my mail, and some of my personal email is...well...personal. Scarier still is the fact that I've used (I know, I oughtn't, but I'm human and it's embarassing to always be forgetting) certain short-cuts to help me remember which password belongs to which accounts and sometimes my screen name is the same from site to site. So someone could conceivably hack my yahoo account and use data learned there to access other accounts and basically domino-effect their way through my whole schizophrenic tree of online personas. Okay, I've mixed paranoia in there, but I really want to examine the worst-case scenario.
Proposed new worldview: every computer I use logs everything. Can I retain my privacy nevertheless?
For now, if I'm careful, yes. One key is staying below the radar, as it were. If I attract a lot of attention, I may become a target, but if I mind my own business, I'm not likely to be bothered. We're not yet at the point where everyone is considered a criminal. The man whose wife was suspicious wouldn't have gotten caught if he had not aroused her suspicions in the first place. (The method I recommend for avoiding arousing suspicions is to be scrupulously innocent; not a fail-safe, but a big help.)
If I pretend my employer is reading over my shoulder 100% of the time at work, I'm unlikely to type anything compromising.
If I pretend the other people in my household are reading over my shoulder at home, I'm likely to stay out of trouble too.
But where do I go if I want to be particularly clandestine, for example buy my wife a present without her knowing about it? Someplace anonymous. Anonymity is the great bastion of protection in the digital age. There are some freely available web-based email systems that do not even require a real name to register; with a working email address, one can open all sorts of online accounts. If I'm paranoid, I may open a unique account for the sole purpose of registering for a specific online activity, and never let the account mix with any other activity of mine.
In other words, if I'm careful, I can avoid linking myself to anything I do online. Say I use a public computer, perhaps at a library or an internet cafe, to open an anonymous free email account, and I use that email address to open a slashdot account. As long as I never access that email address again and never access the slashdot account at home or at work, I can avoid leaving a thread from it to me--even assuming every keystroke was logged on every computer I used.
That kind of covering my tracks is a pain, and not really necessary because I'm not up to villainy, but if I were paranoid, and I'm beginning to think I should be, it would offer protection.
But wait...anonymous public internet access is rapidly disappearing, even from libraries. One frequently must have a library account to use the library computer, and many libraries now use software that logs on a specific user f
Well, yes.
Why not? He's good at what he does and has roughly 90% of the market share in every category he mentioned except searching. And even in that space, as he pointed out, Microsoft does have the credibility to challenge Google. (By the way, those who complain about George W's inability to admit a mistake will be refreshed to hear Bill Gates agree to the interviewer's assertion that "it was as stupid as hell to let Google get ahead of you on the search engine"). I think Microsoft can challenge Google not because it can make a better search engine, though I think MS has already demonstrated it can make a comparable engine, but because it can use its enormous leverage from past successes. Its OS will come ready-installed on the vast majority of PC's, and when it releases an OS with a built-in MS search, that MS search will get used. Is this not more or less how IE defeated Netscape in the browser category?
The Firefox article spends most of its space plugging its new series of collector's coins and encouraging users to be active in the Firefox community. The top 25 most active users, determined by, "the number and quality of the member's posts (as rated by the community), how many comments he's posted, whether or not he has engaged the community by rating other users' posts, and how much affiliate traffic he has generated for Firefox"--will be rewarded with a commemorative coin each. This reminds me vaguely of slashdot, except on slashdot the incentives (karma and moderator power) amount to essentially more credibility. Being active on slashdot is its own reward and bribes are not needed. Unrelated "perks" of the trinket variety seem to me to have very little to do with what makes Firefox important.
I suppose the open-source model needs to monetize something, when the product itself is free.
On the page where the story actually appears, http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/i-rob ot.html --the title is written "i, robot" and not "I, Robot." I find this change updates the flavor of the title into the modern era, the Day of Blog.
Fair enough; I think conveying necessary information to the reader is one of a writer's challenges. The story's style did not really catch my attention one way or another until I read your post. The content did, but upon reflection, I wonder if the development of ideas I mentioned is more a product of the passage of time than Doctorow's own brilliance. Digital brain-backup is an idea that's kind of floating in the air these days, at least the air I breathe. :)
I wonder if in his comment at the end of the story, the bit about totalitarian assumptions that underpin traditional SF, Cory Doctorow intended to label Asimov as totalitarian. Really? Maybe so.... I do think of Asimov as a conservative. Immensely entertaining, of course, and full of intriguing ideas (I was thrilled by the Three Laws when I first read them, and loved the logic-puzzle flavor of the stories he built around them). But against the "totalitarian" accusation (if one was intended), I would point out Asimov's counter-establishment protagonists in The Gods Themselves.
But Doctorow has a point. Asimov came up with his positronic brains and Three Laws at a time when ideas about AI were...well, 50 years older than they are today. Asimov didn't need to address the issue of effective "cloning" (via saving a digital copy of all the data from a human, or robot, brain) and the ramifications of having multiple instances of the same person because those are such modern ideas (Kurzweil's Intelligent Machines was published in 1990). Today's science fiction writer must face these issues. The hero's wife in today's story is not just one person, she's 3422 copies of herself. Lose one to the ripping robot-spiders, you can still find and hug and love another one. Wife dead? No problem...this copy has the same memories and smells just as good and is just as pleasantly warm.
This story invites a worthwhile comparison of the progression of ideas from Asimov's hayday to today.
Accusations of plagiarism against Doctorow seem to me ludicrous; they have been defused before the fact by the audaciousness of his title. He's not trying to steal ideas and get away with it, he's calling attention to the ideas, exploring them further, arguing against them (and yes, possibly, profiting from their inherent name-recognition value), maybe even paying tribute to them. He is certainly not being underhanded.
I'm curious about the judgement that his writing is "stilted" and "ungainly". Do you mean it is awkward? Too rigid? On the contrary, to me it reads very informally and conversationally. "Capeesh" may clang in my ears, but I suspect the author is taking a stab at creating a future slang, and who's to say how a cop will or will not talk in the days of positronic brains? I don't think Doctorow's prose sparkles the way, say, Anthony Burgess's does, but it is certainly serviceable enough and not a distraction. Not every great writer was great with words.
Here's a sample paragraph, picked from the middle of the piece:
Apart from a couple of what strike me as grammatical errors (is the car or the man the subject of the first sentence?) I don't find much to complain about in the prose. Verbs like shudder, weave, barrel are colorful and bring the action to life. wasn't and pissing off are certainly colloquial and sidestep the label "stilted."
The story is legible, has credible characters with real problems, addresses relevant issues, demonstrates insight into progress made in the AI field, and has achieved the honor of slashdot attention. Furthermore, it is compelling enough that I read it to the end--which makes it a legitimate piece of fiction in my book.