Apple can do whatever they want to turn green, but some environmentalist won't be satisfied until every single human being on this planet is extinct.
Greenpeach can do whatever it wants to present actual information about a specific way they think Apple should change, but some Slashdot pundits won't be satisfied until every single debate is characterized as a debate between their own opinion and some unrelated extremist strawman.
what else is considered "disorderly conduct" under US law
Disorderly conduct is an old standby charge which cops use when they want to arrest someone who hasn't committed any identifiable crimes. The definitions vary from region to region, but they're generally loose enough that pretty much any behavior that the public disapproves of can be shoehorned into its definition.
For example, a friend of mine was recently arrested (and assaulted by cops) for "disorderly conduct". His crime was stomping on an American flag (his own) to illustrate his absolute right to free expression. In his case, and this student's as well, the charges will probably be ultimately dropped, but not before a stressful and embarrassing ordeal in the American justice system.
In addition, once this road is crossed -- impeaching for , and every time the president/vp is in office, and a different party has a majority in the senate and house, you'll see an impeachment.
Fine with me, I wish they would impeach more often, regardless of party. Even if it does consume a lot of government time, money, and public attention, the overall effect of regularly dragging our politicians through the coals for their misdeeds is priceless.
As citizens, we need public officials to fear us, and by extension, the other public officials who serve us. When politicians establish tacit agreements not to be "too hard" on each other, or even make public statements like "impeachment is off the table" (Pelosi), it creates a climate where officials don't fear repercussions for their actions.
Partisan politics is a corrupt, vicious, and deeply cynical game, but it does produce one valuable outcome: it pressures politicians keep their noses clean in order to avoid landing in the crosshairs of a partisan witch hunt. Or at least it should. But when politicians refuse to hold each other accountable, that's game over, because the way our government is structured, the public cannot directly influence the government in any significant legal ways, we have to go through our "representatives".
I know all discussions like this have a subtext of "anti-bushism" right now, but I hope that when a democratic president is elected in '08, people will continue to demand accountability and impeachment in response to the inevitable government misconduct we'll still see.
I dont have to be supremely competent.. just competent enough.
I agree in general, because I'm in the same situation, being "Administrator of Computer Stuff". But come on, folks. Being an expert in mysql is one thing, but understanding how to write a shell script or use a simple command-line utility like mysqldump is pretty basic stuff that even "master of none" types like me are comfortable with.
There is a lot of reflexive elitism and egotism among techies, but if someone doesn't have a foundation of basic "linux literacy", telling them not to meddle with important systems is often warranted. I think people who consider themselves computer-savvy can sometimes get defensive when their knowledge about a particular topic is shown to be lacking because they feel it's a reflection on their overall "geek cred". So they point out all the other technologies they're competent in as though that somehow mitigates their lack of knowledge in this one. This, too, is a kind of "macho geek attitude", in that people will refuse to admit that they're n00bs and need to spend a lot of time learning before they can use a new technology.
When I come up against something I don't know how to do well, I spend my energy trying to learn how to do it better, not vehemently asserting why I don't need to.
...and are less motivated to work on your next project
So let me get this straight: In order to preserve the "free market", the government has to introduce special incentives to motivate people to produce useful stuff?
Maybe I missed something in economics class, but I thought the whole point of a "free market" was that the market itself created the incentives, and that government distortion of those incentives leads to inefficiency...
Of course, personally I think that intervention and tampering with markets can often be a good thing (by legitimate, functioning democratic institutions, not corrupt governments), I just had to point out that your own reasoning is contradictory: Patents are a distortion of a "free market", so abolishing them can't possibly jeopardize the freedom of said market.
Ok, maybe I moved too quickly. It seems obvious to me, but I guess it's kind of a counter-intuitive idea for people used to thinking about software as a good.
So: Point one is that there are only two things that have value in a market: goods and services. Goods have value because there's a limited amount of them, therefore in order to get some goods I have to persuade someone else to part with theirs. Services have value because they require someone to spend time and effort performing them, so you have to persuade them to do so. We usually do this persuading by exchanging money, therefore a market consists of buying and selling goods and services.
Point two, the part may seem weird, is that software isn't a good. Software is information, and information is neither a good or a service.
The gathering, creation, modification, or presentation of information can be considered a service, but once the information exists "out there" in the public, it doesn't require effort from anyone to continue existing or being useful.
The media that the information comes on can be considered a good, but since the information can be easily and limitlessly copied, a disc with information on it isn't worth significantly more than a blank one, because the latter can be transformed into the former with almost 0 effort.
Well, the government decided that institutions like Microsoft should indeed be able to sell information, but in order to make it possible they had to force it into the "goods" model. The easiest way was to outlaw making copies of certain information, so that if people wanted a copy, they had to buy it from the government-approved vendor, who was allowed to make copies, and could set the price however they wanted.
That's why we say it's "artificial scarcity". Unlike with real goods and services, if it weren't for IP laws, there would be nothing preventing everyone from acquiring whatever publicly available information they wanted for free. And therefore that information would have 0 market value, because it would be infinitely available. The only thing that gives information value is the laws which prevent us from sharing it with each other, thereby creating an information scarcity.
I guarantee that if you are making any significant money at ALL....and you try to pull this, that the IRS will not be so tolerant of you.
I totally understand this reaction, because the government gives the appearance of being a real hardass about taxes, and we're told our whole lives that we absolutely must pay taxes no matter what, or certain doom awaits us. People tend to be stubbornly disbelieving or downright hostile to the suggestion that they have, in fact, been paying taxes voluntarily.
But I'd encourage you to do some research on your "guarantee", because you'll find that there are many people who withhold significant amounts of tax money due to their religious/moral convictions, and they do it openly, with nothing to hide. Some people go so far as to fill out their tax paperwork and send it to the IRS with a message explaining why they aren't paying some or all of what they owe.
I'm sure the IRS would love to jump on them, but it's a sticky issue for the government, because it borders on persecuting people for their religious beliefs, which is even more illegal than tax evasion.
Microsoft is actually creating something [...] that has value.
No. Microsoft did create something of value (depending on who you ask:) when they developed Vista.
But when Microsoft sells you a CD/DVD with Vista on it, they're not selling you a valuable good or service. You could easily get an identical disc for almost nothing, so the disc isn't a valuable good, and you don't get any significant support, so you're not buying a service, either.
All they're selling you is protection from the government. If you don't pay this "protection money" to Microsoft, they will use IP law to fuck your shit up. If that's not artificial scarcity, I don't know what is.
And it's probably true that Microsoft would go out of business if they spent millions on developing a new product and then the government didn't force people to collectively pay them back when it was done. But you know what? When the government forces people to pay radically inflated prices for the sake of keeping a massive corporation in business, that's what they call a "centrally planned economy". And I know how y'all feel about those red bastards:)
I have friends that will mail their returns to the IRS if they owe money. They do their taxes early, February-ish like kannibal_klown (that is an awesome user id, btw). It is their way of "sticking it to the man" by mailing the check at the very last moment possible.
I have friends that will refuse to pay their federal taxes for religious/ethical reasons, on the basis that paying the government to make war or use coercive force is wrong, and against their religious/ethical convictions.
It's called war tax resistance and it's an age-old anti-government tradition that has been surprisingly tolerated by the government in recent times.
nor is it fair to imply that I can *either* create good content *or* run ads.
Sure, plenty of people make good content and make money off ads - otherwise the internet would be nothing but a cesspool of spam and obtrusive advertisement. But I think the claim that it's a conflict of interest is pretty inarguable. Presumably, your motivation for creating and maintaining your site (which is neat btw) is to share coding information that you think is useful and interesting with like-minded individuals. This is well and good, that's what makes the internet great.
However, when ads are introduced, your site is beholden not just to your motivation, but the advertiser's. If you get rewarded on the basis of how many people hit your site (or how many click banners, or buy products through links), then there are two conflicting guiding principles in the management of your site. One principle says "make stuff that I think is good, regardless if it has mass appeal", and another says "get as many eyes as possible on this site, because eyes=$$$" When they agree, everything's fine, but when your profit motivation comes in conflict with your personal motivation, your integrity suffers, and that sucks for you and your audience.
So, what's the business model for all this great online stuff we like so much, if not ads?
Perhaps you've never heard of a gift economy, but you've probably been involved in one unknowingly. The internet began as a gift economy, everyone offering and exchanging information voluntarily at their own expense because they wanted to share it. That's what made it great, and that's the way it should stay.
Actually, being solicited by people offering you something you might want!
I think this places a lot more trust in the honesty and integrity of advertisers than they're due. When advertisers say they're monitoring people to "better target advertising", they don't just mean "we want to make sure that the ads we show you are of interest to you" - it also potentially means "we want to know all the things you value and ideas/groups you identify with so we can advertise our products as seeming to meet your every need".
What it comes down to is that advertisers want to get you to buy things that you wouldn't otherwise have bought. If this means getting you to buy things you're already interested in, cool, but if they don't have anything you're already interested in (which is often the case), their job as advertisers is to generate interest and excitement about something that you don't care about.
Having intimate knowledge of a consumer's behavior essentially tells the advertisers exactly which "buttons to push" when hawking their product - whatever it is - on that individual. It allows them to go "Ah, I see Joe Sixpack is single and looking for a partner - show him the ad that associates our product with increased sex appeal and popularity for men!" While each of us sees ourselves as too savvy to be fooled by such tricks, companies wouldn't be spending vast sums on it if it didn't influence us.
Yes, but many ads pay only when they're clicked, and it's difficult to thank a webmaster by clicking an ad that your browser has scrubbed.
That said, webmasters who want a "tip" would, in my opinion, be much better to put a little paypal donation cup than a bunch of ads. Using advertisments to make money introduces conflicts of interest that can threaten the quality and integrity of the site.
Advertisments generate money based on the volume of visitors to the page, not their enjoyment or interest in the content. If you load up a page, you see the ads, regardless of whether the story was a life-changing insightful essay or a waste of the bandwidth it took to download it. This encourages webmasters to be sensational and attention grabbing, but not necessarily anything beyond that. Donations reward webmasters for high-quality content which is appreciated and valued by the audience, regardless if it gets the most hits or makes the front page of Slashdot.
It's true that donation-based sites often don't make as much money as if they used an ad-based structure, but if you're running a site where your primary interest is not creating good content but maximizing profit through advertising, in my mind you've no more integrity than the shmucks responsible for broadcast television, so why would I want to support your site anyway?
The nature of long-term web archiving does indeed make this much more important.
That's a problem with employers who think they're being super-sleuths and uncovering "the truth" about someone by punching their name into Google, not with the students.
Anyone can put something on the internet, and it can be totally false, anonymous, and pretty much nobody can control it. Everyone knows this intellectually, but people can't seem to stop themselves from taking the things that show up on the internet too seriously.
Like any good pundit, I blame the media. Mass media has always in the past been a one-way conduit, where smart, professional people created and sent out "quality" information to the passive, receiving public. This created a very stark dichotomy in the media scene: You had media producers and media consumers.
Media producers were never believed to be infallible and god-like, but they were believed to be professional and hold themselves to standards, and so media consumers treated information they received with a certain level of credulity. It's the old "if it was on TV it has to be true" mentality, and it's very real.
Even on the internet. The old dichotomy obviously doesn't apply to the internet - the same people who consume media also produce it, and they don't do it professionally or with necessarily any standards. But, having grown up in a society which "trusts" the media, we make reflexive assumptions about media we find on the internet.
It shouldn't be shocking, or really notable at all that someone created a fake MySpace, but to many people (especially older, less tech savvy people), it's a very shocking and outraging thing, because they assume other people will place some credibility in that media source. And the sad thing is, they're right.
In maybe another 10 years or so, once people have finally gotten used to the idea of widespread participatory media, and pretty much everyone has droves of unreliable, totally fabricated information about themselves on the net, I predict we won't have to deal with all this shit.
There is not a historian around that would say that wars are not mostly about resources.
I think I've been misunderstood. I agree that wars are mostly about resources. And there are enough resources for everyone - it's not a matter of opinion or vague theory, it's a statistical fact - the world has enough industrial capacity, farmland, and labor among all humanity to take care of the basic needs of all people, plus a lot more.
War is the reason that this "idealistic" vision does not exist. Humanity doesn't spend its resources helping each other out, we spend our resources trying to jack stuff from each other and protect our own stash. This conflict leads to a net loss of resources on both sides. Again, not really debatable - that's the nature of conflict.
My point didn't have anything to do with "handouts" or whatever bullshit neo-con tip you got on there, it was simply that because of the above, if we got rid of war the net resources of humanity would jump radically, and in the long run almost everyone would benefit. But we don't do that. We continue to fight and destroy each other's lives and resources, and the reason is that people are not "grown up" enough to realize that this is not in our long-term best interest.
There are no generalizable social benefits from bestowing chimps with human rights.
Here's a thought: Allowing animals to be abused, imprisoned, and generally shat upon creates a culture of acceptance of casual, utilitarian violence. While we do draw a pretty stark line between humans and other species, it could be argued that a society which is disrespectful of the "rights" of animals is especially vulnerable to treating each other badly.
It's called "dehumanization" for a reason. One group of people characterizes another as "subhuman", thereby instantly justifying all manner of abuses towards them. Since our society already has a category for "sentient beings who suffer but are not entitled to respect or rights", it's not that much of a stretch to place a group of particularly hated humans in the same category.
However, if we foster a general understanding that even beings who everyone acknowledges are "less" than us, and more "savage" are entitled to a base level of rights, it becomes harder to justify treating other humans worse than that simply because they're perceived as being "less" or "worse" than us.
I realize that this argument doesn't make logical sense, but it's much more based on the vague illogical psychology of society at large, and I think there's some truth to it.
We have human rights because we demand them. We have the power to fight for them and we did.
It's very likely that you never fought for your rights, and even if you did, there are plenty of people around you who never did. Furthermore, it's likely that you have never even demanded every one of the rights you enjoy, at least in the forceful way you're suggesting.
And yet you and the people around you have those rights. If you live in the US, those rights are considered so basic that all you have to do is get born on US soil and you are automatically granted every one of them.
Now, it can be argued that we don't truly have any rights that we cannot secure for ourselves by force, which may have been your point - and I agree with it on a philosophical level, but in practice when we talk about rights we're talking about what governments guarantee to their people. Governments do grant rights to humans, no matter how strong or weak they are, whether they demand them or not. All it takes is being human. So the question is, why do they take a different stance with animals?
war and conflict is rarely about not being "grown up", but rather traditionally more about obtaining resources,
There are enough resources for everyone. In fact, with the level of technological sophistication we currently have, we could easily produce resources for far more people than there currently are.
The reason there is starvation and shortage is because of greed, because most people want more than they need, and some people take even more than they could reasonably want. This results in the need for constant struggle against each other to either defend or obtain the resources we need to survive - which really helps nobody.
If humanity as a whole was endowed with a greater sense of enlightened self-interest, we would all realize that "all getting along" not only guarantees a bounty of resources for everyone, it eliminates the need to worry about protecting our own resources (which is something no real person or society can enjoy, no matter how much resources they have).
So the way society acts now is sort of like a little kid, or a teenager who doesn't act in their own self-interest - individuals actively do things which are self-destructive because we lack the capacity to realize that they are against our own interests.
In short, we aren't grown up enough. Of course, it's unlikely that we'll ever have a utopia of enlightened self-interest, but there has been some degree of progress throughout history, so I guess there's hope.
lol. I'd say that line was a blatant troll if it wasn't preceded by a reasoned point. Cows evolved to avoid death and reproduce, just like pretty much every other organism. And furthermore, what does evolution have to do with it in the first place? Humans didn't "evolve" to use supermarkets, but what does that have to do with whether we should or not?
There's also the valid concern for the rights of disabled people, who have been put (willingly or not) at the forefront of the US e-voting drive. The problem now is that people who are blind, physically impaired, or otherwise unable to carry out the act of filling out a ballot independently are forced to bring an assistant into the voting booth with them, who guides them through filling out the ballot and possibly does it for them.
People in the US have a pretty strong, well defined right to cast their vote in private, with nobody being able to find out who they actually voted for. It seems trivial, but it's an important part of the democratic process - the right to vote privately protects people from persecution and intimidation based on who they support, and the requirement to vote privately renders the practice of paying people for their votes almost impossible.
So it does suck that disabled people are being effectively disenfranchised when it comes to voting rights when a computerized ballot could help. Personally, I can see the benefit of having 1 or 2 computerized voting machines at each polling place, which allow audio (using headphones) and video output, as well as voice, touchscreen, and some other type of tactile input (i don't know what's easiest for people with certain disabilities). The machine can print a hard-copy ballot, printed in large text and braille, which the person can confirm. They then have it delivered to the ballot box like any other ballot.
This method would address all the concerns of the disabled lobby, while still preserving a reliable, verifiable paper trail. True, it would require some way of reading braille while counting the ballots (perhaps the braille could consist of machine-readable holes punched in the ballot?), but that doesn't seem insurmountable, especially since it'd be a very small percentage of ballot which actually came in this way.
A system like this is not what the e-voting proponents are looking for, though. Nobody can get a clear answer about what's so incredibly important about voting on computers that necessitates billions of dollars to be spent, but we can be sure that they feel it's more important than verifiable and reliable elections, because the considerations for these issues has been token at best.
One of linux's greatest weaknesses is the amount of duplication that happens.
I dunno if I'd go so far as to say that it's a weakness. That's like saying Microsoft's greatest strength is how their entire development process is centrally planned - there's two sides to that coin.
There are definitely times when it's good to have multiple tools to do the same thing - if one app or codebase is incompatible or inappropriate for whatever reason, it's nice to have another option. Additionally (though open source mitigates this somewhat), if everyone who develops on say, 3D desktops, is part of the same project, there's the potential for that project to make development choices that people are unhappy with. When there are multiple projects available, there are alternatives to turn to, but with just one project, one's only alternative is to learn X language and pull together a team of developers yourself (not much of an alternative).
That said, it's great when projects pool their resources and cooperate to build something better than they could have separately, and it should be encouraged - somehow I don't think the threat of a centralized Open Source Linux Cabal is big enough to worry about:)
You're free to question our approvers' credentials yourself.
Exactly. I'm not trying to claim that Citizendium is trying to dupe anyone or conceal their sources - I'm sure it's very open and that's admirable. I'm just saying that an article in Citizendium takes a significant amount of "checking up on" before a reader can really be confident that the information is credible. Which is also the case for projects which are less restrictive about contributions, and is likely an unsolvable problem for all non-elitist information sources like Citizendium and Wikipedia.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems like Citizendium is in many ways a reponse to the fact that you can't just look at a Wikipedia article and know that it's reliable the way you could in a journal or something. But since you can't just look at a Citizendium article and know that it's reliable (you have to either do the legwork of checking out the "authorities", or trust an institution of unknown integrity to have done it well for you), the only significant difference it has from Wikipedia is a more restrictive contribution policy.
Sure, but the Wikipedia community checks into their editors too (in the form of keeping an eye on their contributions), they just to it to a lesser degree. With the citizendium model, there is a centralized point of authority - since Citizendium checks out all the endorsers, Citizendium is essentially the meta-endorser of every endorsement.
The question is: who is Citizendium, and how well does it check its sources? Why should we default to trusting this single point? Most monolithic authorities that are considered reliable have gained this reputation by being extremely elitist - only accepting contributions from certain high-level scientists or well respected journalists, and then conducting significant review before releasing the information. This method doesn't work for community-based volunteer projects.
Basically, I think that although Wikipedia has many faults, they are due to policies that are absolutely necessary for a community encyclopedia to work at all. I think Citizendium is trying to find a middle ground between the hierarchical, authoritative information structure of old media and the decentralized, extremely participatory, inherently unauthoritative nature of most internet media - and there unfortunately isn't really a middle ground there to claim.
Nevertheless, I wish the project luck - it'll be interesting to see what actually happens with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple can do whatever they want to turn green, but some environmentalist won't be satisfied until every single human being on this planet is extinct.
Greenpeach can do whatever it wants to present actual information about a specific way they think Apple should change, but some Slashdot pundits won't be satisfied until every single debate is characterized as a debate between their own opinion and some unrelated extremist strawman.
Would a werewolf cluster work in the interim?
No way! The last thing we need is an American werewolf cluster in Paris.
what else is considered "disorderly conduct" under US law
Disorderly conduct is an old standby charge which cops use when they want to arrest someone who hasn't committed any identifiable crimes. The definitions vary from region to region, but they're generally loose enough that pretty much any behavior that the public disapproves of can be shoehorned into its definition.
For example, a friend of mine was recently arrested (and assaulted by cops) for "disorderly conduct". His crime was stomping on an American flag (his own) to illustrate his absolute right to free expression. In his case, and this student's as well, the charges will probably be ultimately dropped, but not before a stressful and embarrassing ordeal in the American justice system.
In addition, once this road is crossed -- impeaching for , and every time the president/vp is in office, and a different party has a majority in the senate and house, you'll see an impeachment.
Fine with me, I wish they would impeach more often, regardless of party. Even if it does consume a lot of government time, money, and public attention, the overall effect of regularly dragging our politicians through the coals for their misdeeds is priceless.
As citizens, we need public officials to fear us, and by extension, the other public officials who serve us. When politicians establish tacit agreements not to be "too hard" on each other, or even make public statements like "impeachment is off the table" (Pelosi), it creates a climate where officials don't fear repercussions for their actions.
Partisan politics is a corrupt, vicious, and deeply cynical game, but it does produce one valuable outcome: it pressures politicians keep their noses clean in order to avoid landing in the crosshairs of a partisan witch hunt. Or at least it should. But when politicians refuse to hold each other accountable, that's game over, because the way our government is structured, the public cannot directly influence the government in any significant legal ways, we have to go through our "representatives".
I know all discussions like this have a subtext of "anti-bushism" right now, but I hope that when a democratic president is elected in '08, people will continue to demand accountability and impeachment in response to the inevitable government misconduct we'll still see.
I dont have to be supremely competent.. just competent enough.
I agree in general, because I'm in the same situation, being "Administrator of Computer Stuff". But come on, folks. Being an expert in mysql is one thing, but understanding how to write a shell script or use a simple command-line utility like mysqldump is pretty basic stuff that even "master of none" types like me are comfortable with.
There is a lot of reflexive elitism and egotism among techies, but if someone doesn't have a foundation of basic "linux literacy", telling them not to meddle with important systems is often warranted. I think people who consider themselves computer-savvy can sometimes get defensive when their knowledge about a particular topic is shown to be lacking because they feel it's a reflection on their overall "geek cred". So they point out all the other technologies they're competent in as though that somehow mitigates their lack of knowledge in this one. This, too, is a kind of "macho geek attitude", in that people will refuse to admit that they're n00bs and need to spend a lot of time learning before they can use a new technology.
When I come up against something I don't know how to do well, I spend my energy trying to learn how to do it better, not vehemently asserting why I don't need to.
...and are less motivated to work on your next project
So let me get this straight: In order to preserve the "free market", the government has to introduce special incentives to motivate people to produce useful stuff?
Maybe I missed something in economics class, but I thought the whole point of a "free market" was that the market itself created the incentives, and that government distortion of those incentives leads to inefficiency...
Of course, personally I think that intervention and tampering with markets can often be a good thing (by legitimate, functioning democratic institutions, not corrupt governments), I just had to point out that your own reasoning is contradictory: Patents are a distortion of a "free market", so abolishing them can't possibly jeopardize the freedom of said market.
that screed made no sense anywhere
Ok, maybe I moved too quickly. It seems obvious to me, but I guess it's kind of a counter-intuitive idea for people used to thinking about software as a good.
So: Point one is that there are only two things that have value in a market: goods and services. Goods have value because there's a limited amount of them, therefore in order to get some goods I have to persuade someone else to part with theirs. Services have value because they require someone to spend time and effort performing them, so you have to persuade them to do so. We usually do this persuading by exchanging money, therefore a market consists of buying and selling goods and services.
Point two, the part may seem weird, is that software isn't a good. Software is information, and information is neither a good or a service.
The gathering, creation, modification, or presentation of information can be considered a service, but once the information exists "out there" in the public, it doesn't require effort from anyone to continue existing or being useful.
The media that the information comes on can be considered a good, but since the information can be easily and limitlessly copied, a disc with information on it isn't worth significantly more than a blank one, because the latter can be transformed into the former with almost 0 effort.
Well, the government decided that institutions like Microsoft should indeed be able to sell information, but in order to make it possible they had to force it into the "goods" model. The easiest way was to outlaw making copies of certain information, so that if people wanted a copy, they had to buy it from the government-approved vendor, who was allowed to make copies, and could set the price however they wanted.
That's why we say it's "artificial scarcity". Unlike with real goods and services, if it weren't for IP laws, there would be nothing preventing everyone from acquiring whatever publicly available information they wanted for free. And therefore that information would have 0 market value, because it would be infinitely available. The only thing that gives information value is the laws which prevent us from sharing it with each other, thereby creating an information scarcity.
Hope that was more clear. Any questions?
I guarantee that if you are making any significant money at ALL....and you try to pull this, that the IRS will not be so tolerant of you.
I totally understand this reaction, because the government gives the appearance of being a real hardass about taxes, and we're told our whole lives that we absolutely must pay taxes no matter what, or certain doom awaits us. People tend to be stubbornly disbelieving or downright hostile to the suggestion that they have, in fact, been paying taxes voluntarily.
But I'd encourage you to do some research on your "guarantee", because you'll find that there are many people who withhold significant amounts of tax money due to their religious/moral convictions, and they do it openly, with nothing to hide. Some people go so far as to fill out their tax paperwork and send it to the IRS with a message explaining why they aren't paying some or all of what they owe.
I'm sure the IRS would love to jump on them, but it's a sticky issue for the government, because it borders on persecuting people for their religious beliefs, which is even more illegal than tax evasion.
Microsoft is actually creating something [...] that has value.
:) when they developed Vista.
:)
No. Microsoft did create something of value (depending on who you ask
But when Microsoft sells you a CD/DVD with Vista on it, they're not selling you a valuable good or service. You could easily get an identical disc for almost nothing, so the disc isn't a valuable good, and you don't get any significant support, so you're not buying a service, either.
All they're selling you is protection from the government. If you don't pay this "protection money" to Microsoft, they will use IP law to fuck your shit up. If that's not artificial scarcity, I don't know what is.
And it's probably true that Microsoft would go out of business if they spent millions on developing a new product and then the government didn't force people to collectively pay them back when it was done. But you know what? When the government forces people to pay radically inflated prices for the sake of keeping a massive corporation in business, that's what they call a "centrally planned economy". And I know how y'all feel about those red bastards
it's illegal to tape a telephone conversation without both parties' consent.
Wrong. It depends on the state you're in, and most states do not require the consent of both parties. http://www.rcfp.org/taping/
I have friends that will mail their returns to the IRS if they owe money. They do their taxes early, February-ish like kannibal_klown (that is an awesome user id, btw). It is their way of "sticking it to the man" by mailing the check at the very last moment possible.
:)
I have friends that will refuse to pay their federal taxes for religious/ethical reasons, on the basis that paying the government to make war or use coercive force is wrong, and against their religious/ethical convictions.
It's called war tax resistance and it's an age-old anti-government tradition that has been surprisingly tolerated by the government in recent times.
That's their way of "sticking it to the man"
nor is it fair to imply that I can *either* create good content *or* run ads.
Sure, plenty of people make good content and make money off ads - otherwise the internet would be nothing but a cesspool of spam and obtrusive advertisement. But I think the claim that it's a conflict of interest is pretty inarguable. Presumably, your motivation for creating and maintaining your site (which is neat btw) is to share coding information that you think is useful and interesting with like-minded individuals. This is well and good, that's what makes the internet great.
However, when ads are introduced, your site is beholden not just to your motivation, but the advertiser's. If you get rewarded on the basis of how many people hit your site (or how many click banners, or buy products through links), then there are two conflicting guiding principles in the management of your site. One principle says "make stuff that I think is good, regardless if it has mass appeal", and another says "get as many eyes as possible on this site, because eyes=$$$" When they agree, everything's fine, but when your profit motivation comes in conflict with your personal motivation, your integrity suffers, and that sucks for you and your audience.
So, what's the business model for all this great online stuff we like so much, if not ads?
Perhaps you've never heard of a gift economy, but you've probably been involved in one unknowingly. The internet began as a gift economy, everyone offering and exchanging information voluntarily at their own expense because they wanted to share it. That's what made it great, and that's the way it should stay.
Actually, being solicited by people offering you something you might want!
I think this places a lot more trust in the honesty and integrity of advertisers than they're due. When advertisers say they're monitoring people to "better target advertising", they don't just mean "we want to make sure that the ads we show you are of interest to you" - it also potentially means "we want to know all the things you value and ideas/groups you identify with so we can advertise our products as seeming to meet your every need".
What it comes down to is that advertisers want to get you to buy things that you wouldn't otherwise have bought. If this means getting you to buy things you're already interested in, cool, but if they don't have anything you're already interested in (which is often the case), their job as advertisers is to generate interest and excitement about something that you don't care about.
Having intimate knowledge of a consumer's behavior essentially tells the advertisers exactly which "buttons to push" when hawking their product - whatever it is - on that individual. It allows them to go "Ah, I see Joe Sixpack is single and looking for a partner - show him the ad that associates our product with increased sex appeal and popularity for men!" While each of us sees ourselves as too savvy to be fooled by such tricks, companies wouldn't be spending vast sums on it if it didn't influence us.
Yes, but many ads pay only when they're clicked, and it's difficult to thank a webmaster by clicking an ad that your browser has scrubbed.
That said, webmasters who want a "tip" would, in my opinion, be much better to put a little paypal donation cup than a bunch of ads. Using advertisments to make money introduces conflicts of interest that can threaten the quality and integrity of the site.
Advertisments generate money based on the volume of visitors to the page, not their enjoyment or interest in the content. If you load up a page, you see the ads, regardless of whether the story was a life-changing insightful essay or a waste of the bandwidth it took to download it. This encourages webmasters to be sensational and attention grabbing, but not necessarily anything beyond that. Donations reward webmasters for high-quality content which is appreciated and valued by the audience, regardless if it gets the most hits or makes the front page of Slashdot.
It's true that donation-based sites often don't make as much money as if they used an ad-based structure, but if you're running a site where your primary interest is not creating good content but maximizing profit through advertising, in my mind you've no more integrity than the shmucks responsible for broadcast television, so why would I want to support your site anyway?
The nature of long-term web archiving does indeed make this much more important.
That's a problem with employers who think they're being super-sleuths and uncovering "the truth" about someone by punching their name into Google, not with the students.
Anyone can put something on the internet, and it can be totally false, anonymous, and pretty much nobody can control it. Everyone knows this intellectually, but people can't seem to stop themselves from taking the things that show up on the internet too seriously.
Like any good pundit, I blame the media. Mass media has always in the past been a one-way conduit, where smart, professional people created and sent out "quality" information to the passive, receiving public. This created a very stark dichotomy in the media scene: You had media producers and media consumers.
Media producers were never believed to be infallible and god-like, but they were believed to be professional and hold themselves to standards, and so media consumers treated information they received with a certain level of credulity. It's the old "if it was on TV it has to be true" mentality, and it's very real.
Even on the internet. The old dichotomy obviously doesn't apply to the internet - the same people who consume media also produce it, and they don't do it professionally or with necessarily any standards. But, having grown up in a society which "trusts" the media, we make reflexive assumptions about media we find on the internet.
It shouldn't be shocking, or really notable at all that someone created a fake MySpace, but to many people (especially older, less tech savvy people), it's a very shocking and outraging thing, because they assume other people will place some credibility in that media source. And the sad thing is, they're right.
In maybe another 10 years or so, once people have finally gotten used to the idea of widespread participatory media, and pretty much everyone has droves of unreliable, totally fabricated information about themselves on the net, I predict we won't have to deal with all this shit.
There is not a historian around that would say that wars are not mostly about resources.
I think I've been misunderstood. I agree that wars are mostly about resources. And there are enough resources for everyone - it's not a matter of opinion or vague theory, it's a statistical fact - the world has enough industrial capacity, farmland, and labor among all humanity to take care of the basic needs of all people, plus a lot more.
War is the reason that this "idealistic" vision does not exist. Humanity doesn't spend its resources helping each other out, we spend our resources trying to jack stuff from each other and protect our own stash. This conflict leads to a net loss of resources on both sides. Again, not really debatable - that's the nature of conflict.
My point didn't have anything to do with "handouts" or whatever bullshit neo-con tip you got on there, it was simply that because of the above, if we got rid of war the net resources of humanity would jump radically, and in the long run almost everyone would benefit. But we don't do that. We continue to fight and destroy each other's lives and resources, and the reason is that people are not "grown up" enough to realize that this is not in our long-term best interest.
There are no generalizable social benefits from bestowing chimps with human rights.
Here's a thought: Allowing animals to be abused, imprisoned, and generally shat upon creates a culture of acceptance of casual, utilitarian violence. While we do draw a pretty stark line between humans and other species, it could be argued that a society which is disrespectful of the "rights" of animals is especially vulnerable to treating each other badly.
It's called "dehumanization" for a reason. One group of people characterizes another as "subhuman", thereby instantly justifying all manner of abuses towards them. Since our society already has a category for "sentient beings who suffer but are not entitled to respect or rights", it's not that much of a stretch to place a group of particularly hated humans in the same category.
However, if we foster a general understanding that even beings who everyone acknowledges are "less" than us, and more "savage" are entitled to a base level of rights, it becomes harder to justify treating other humans worse than that simply because they're perceived as being "less" or "worse" than us.
I realize that this argument doesn't make logical sense, but it's much more based on the vague illogical psychology of society at large, and I think there's some truth to it.
We have human rights because we demand them. We have the power to fight for them and we did.
It's very likely that you never fought for your rights, and even if you did, there are plenty of people around you who never did. Furthermore, it's likely that you have never even demanded every one of the rights you enjoy, at least in the forceful way you're suggesting.
And yet you and the people around you have those rights. If you live in the US, those rights are considered so basic that all you have to do is get born on US soil and you are automatically granted every one of them.
Now, it can be argued that we don't truly have any rights that we cannot secure for ourselves by force, which may have been your point - and I agree with it on a philosophical level, but in practice when we talk about rights we're talking about what governments guarantee to their people. Governments do grant rights to humans, no matter how strong or weak they are, whether they demand them or not. All it takes is being human. So the question is, why do they take a different stance with animals?
war and conflict is rarely about not being "grown up", but rather traditionally more about obtaining resources,
There are enough resources for everyone. In fact, with the level of technological sophistication we currently have, we could easily produce resources for far more people than there currently are.
The reason there is starvation and shortage is because of greed, because most people want more than they need, and some people take even more than they could reasonably want. This results in the need for constant struggle against each other to either defend or obtain the resources we need to survive - which really helps nobody.
If humanity as a whole was endowed with a greater sense of enlightened self-interest, we would all realize that "all getting along" not only guarantees a bounty of resources for everyone, it eliminates the need to worry about protecting our own resources (which is something no real person or society can enjoy, no matter how much resources they have).
So the way society acts now is sort of like a little kid, or a teenager who doesn't act in their own self-interest - individuals actively do things which are self-destructive because we lack the capacity to realize that they are against our own interests.
In short, we aren't grown up enough. Of course, it's unlikely that we'll ever have a utopia of enlightened self-interest, but there has been some degree of progress throughout history, so I guess there's hope.
Cows evolved to die. They're prey...
lol. I'd say that line was a blatant troll if it wasn't preceded by a reasoned point. Cows evolved to avoid death and reproduce, just like pretty much every other organism. And furthermore, what does evolution have to do with it in the first place? Humans didn't "evolve" to use supermarkets, but what does that have to do with whether we should or not?
There's also the valid concern for the rights of disabled people, who have been put (willingly or not) at the forefront of the US e-voting drive. The problem now is that people who are blind, physically impaired, or otherwise unable to carry out the act of filling out a ballot independently are forced to bring an assistant into the voting booth with them, who guides them through filling out the ballot and possibly does it for them.
People in the US have a pretty strong, well defined right to cast their vote in private, with nobody being able to find out who they actually voted for. It seems trivial, but it's an important part of the democratic process - the right to vote privately protects people from persecution and intimidation based on who they support, and the requirement to vote privately renders the practice of paying people for their votes almost impossible.
So it does suck that disabled people are being effectively disenfranchised when it comes to voting rights when a computerized ballot could help. Personally, I can see the benefit of having 1 or 2 computerized voting machines at each polling place, which allow audio (using headphones) and video output, as well as voice, touchscreen, and some other type of tactile input (i don't know what's easiest for people with certain disabilities). The machine can print a hard-copy ballot, printed in large text and braille, which the person can confirm. They then have it delivered to the ballot box like any other ballot.
This method would address all the concerns of the disabled lobby, while still preserving a reliable, verifiable paper trail. True, it would require some way of reading braille while counting the ballots (perhaps the braille could consist of machine-readable holes punched in the ballot?), but that doesn't seem insurmountable, especially since it'd be a very small percentage of ballot which actually came in this way.
A system like this is not what the e-voting proponents are looking for, though. Nobody can get a clear answer about what's so incredibly important about voting on computers that necessitates billions of dollars to be spent, but we can be sure that they feel it's more important than verifiable and reliable elections, because the considerations for these issues has been token at best.
One of linux's greatest weaknesses is the amount of duplication that happens.
:)
I dunno if I'd go so far as to say that it's a weakness. That's like saying Microsoft's greatest strength is how their entire development process is centrally planned - there's two sides to that coin.
There are definitely times when it's good to have multiple tools to do the same thing - if one app or codebase is incompatible or inappropriate for whatever reason, it's nice to have another option. Additionally (though open source mitigates this somewhat), if everyone who develops on say, 3D desktops, is part of the same project, there's the potential for that project to make development choices that people are unhappy with. When there are multiple projects available, there are alternatives to turn to, but with just one project, one's only alternative is to learn X language and pull together a team of developers yourself (not much of an alternative).
That said, it's great when projects pool their resources and cooperate to build something better than they could have separately, and it should be encouraged - somehow I don't think the threat of a centralized Open Source Linux Cabal is big enough to worry about
You're free to question our approvers' credentials yourself.
Exactly. I'm not trying to claim that Citizendium is trying to dupe anyone or conceal their sources - I'm sure it's very open and that's admirable. I'm just saying that an article in Citizendium takes a significant amount of "checking up on" before a reader can really be confident that the information is credible. Which is also the case for projects which are less restrictive about contributions, and is likely an unsolvable problem for all non-elitist information sources like Citizendium and Wikipedia.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems like Citizendium is in many ways a reponse to the fact that you can't just look at a Wikipedia article and know that it's reliable the way you could in a journal or something. But since you can't just look at a Citizendium article and know that it's reliable (you have to either do the legwork of checking out the "authorities", or trust an institution of unknown integrity to have done it well for you), the only significant difference it has from Wikipedia is a more restrictive contribution policy.
We check into our editors
Sure, but the Wikipedia community checks into their editors too (in the form of keeping an eye on their contributions), they just to it to a lesser degree. With the citizendium model, there is a centralized point of authority - since Citizendium checks out all the endorsers, Citizendium is essentially the meta-endorser of every endorsement.
The question is: who is Citizendium, and how well does it check its sources? Why should we default to trusting this single point? Most monolithic authorities that are considered reliable have gained this reputation by being extremely elitist - only accepting contributions from certain high-level scientists or well respected journalists, and then conducting significant review before releasing the information. This method doesn't work for community-based volunteer projects.
Basically, I think that although Wikipedia has many faults, they are due to policies that are absolutely necessary for a community encyclopedia to work at all. I think Citizendium is trying to find a middle ground between the hierarchical, authoritative information structure of old media and the decentralized, extremely participatory, inherently unauthoritative nature of most internet media - and there unfortunately isn't really a middle ground there to claim.
Nevertheless, I wish the project luck - it'll be interesting to see what actually happens with it.