The inheritance tax as implemented in the US is fundamentally wrong, regardless of who does/doesn't pay or where the money goes. Because it taxes citizens (real human beings, not corporations) on assets for which they have already paid rather substantial taxes with an even more onerous tax. Actually, it's a rather nifty scam on the government's part to be able to tax a family over and over again on assets and possessions that remain with the family for more than 1 or 2 generations.
Double taxation is on the same plane as "taxation without representation" in terms of basic wrongness. No matter how good the supposed "benefits", the ends cannot justify the means. If Mr. Brin is so concerned about the money disappearing, let him figure out some other way to soak the Evil Rich (tm).
we need better parents who are involved in their childrens' lives and teach them that violence is the last resort of nations and the feeble minded, not a fun afternoon pastime.
we need better parents who do not put themselves in the position of having to explain to their kids the difference between the horror of the current violence in the middle east and the great entertainment value of the latest slasher/shoot-em-up-action movie.
"I am not blaiming (sic) anyone here" + "but where are the parents" = "I blame the parents". Just thought I would point that out.:-)
I don't know why I even bother when the whole article is a massive troll, anyway.
IANAL but I remember reading some recommendation that one NOT include a personal name or place name in a company or product name. The reasoning was that it is much more difficult to maintain a trademark for a name whose "ownership" cannot easily be established. The base implication was that people have basic rights to their own name and actual places have things like history and governments on their side.
So, for example, Greg's Super Smooth Shaving Cream could not force me to change my name from Greg to something else, and furthermore my name Greg would have legal identity value for me separate from Greg, Inc. And Washington Karbonated Kola could not force a certain large national capitol to change its name. Anyone more familiar with this?
find dir -type f -mtime -7 -print | cpio -pvmd zip-mount-point
Trivial. Once you've done this 2-3 times, you never forget. find+cpio rulez...
Now the interesting thing here is that the above Unix command tells not only which file to copy, but also how to arrange them on the target media. That is left out of your plain language command. Did you mean just put them all in one flat top-level directory? If so, what about name-space collisions? With natural language, context is just everything and you're always leaving little details out.
Statistically speaking, the expert user is a myth. 99% of all people do not grok computers, nor do they have the slightest interest in doing so. They understand the real world and have difficulty with many abstractions that do not have real world analogs.
Natural language interface? Hoo, Hoo! That's a good one! Most people have a difficult time mastering their own native language that they speak every day. I regularly meet people with whom I have some difficulty in simple conversation due to language barriers, people who natively speak my own language (English). And there are significant subcultures which seem to take pride in significant lack of language skills. Would a natural language interface marginalize these groups? Who gets to decide what is "natural"? If you go by any sort of official language rules for English, many US citizens will have difficulty with it.
I agree that the GUI as epitomized by the Mac is very limiting for some aspects of computer interaction. My own conjecture is that eventually there will arise an unnatural language with which we can interact with the unnatural computer world. This language will still have metaphors and control paradigms, but these will not have direct real world comparisons. They will instead be wholly appropriate for expressing and manipulating the many concepts of the digital world. And I strongly suspect that many elements of today's GUI design will still be intermixed with that interaction.
Um, no. Although parenting may have changed some, the bigger change has been the world in which we parent. Before the Internet, there was no possible way for my 3 year old daughter to ever see pr0n, period, unless some sicko assaulted her in some way.
Now, not only do I have to worry about physical safety, I also have to worry about what raw, unfiltered sewage comes into my home over the wire. (Yes, I chose those words deliberately, I don't use censorware). Now I have an aspect of parenting that did not even exist before the advent of home access to a near completely unregulated Internet filled with explicit imagery that is most definitely not appropriate for children to see.
I am not saying that the answer is censorware. I have many, many qualms about implementation of any automatic information filtering tool. But blaming today's parents is just plain wrong. I work hard at being a parent, and so does just about every other parent that I know.
Um, it's called civil disobedience, a basic responsibility of any free people. And a citizen cannot "usurp" power from a democratic government, by definition, because supposedly all government power belongs to the governed to begin with and is merely loaned to the government to promote common good, defense and stuff. So your concern might better be stated in the reverse: the government usurping a business' rights to free association and enterprise, as well as citizens' rights to freedom from unlawful search and seizure, in order to support dubious efforts to combat possibly nonexistent crime.
think of the bureaucratic, paper and postal savings that would come from issuing permits and certificates and collecting fines on the Net.
No way. The paramount priority of any government is to increase in size and power. We will end up with massive duplication of effort. What about all those millions of citizens (the majority, remember?) who do not have computer/Internet access? We can't marginalize them. So we have to keep the existing meat-space solutions intact while we add e-gov sites which will have to be funded and maintained by additional revenue (taxes).
The only likely increase in efficiency would be in the collection and analysis of information that the gov't can use to manage its citizens, all under the guise of being more "helpful". Indeed, one might argue that physical world inefficiency is a good natural brake on some gov't processes functioning too well.
I'm not saying a new e-gov approach is necessarily a completely bad thing, but don't delude yourself into thinking it will save any money or decrease the size of the beauracracy.
The vast difference in cost-of-duplication makes the two cases so non-parallel that they are nearly orthogonal.
If I walk into a dealership and drive off with a Suburban, the dealer has lost some real tangible thing that cannot be restored without a large amount of effort (manufacturing). With the thing gone, there is no possibility for making revenue without getting back the stolen item. That is not the case when I "steal" a song. The original owner still has the song.
The singer is selling access to the product, either through ticket sales or physical media. The auto dealer is selling the product itself. The two are engaged in totally different transactions. The loss that the original owner experiences is financial gain from transactions associated with the song through loss of control of access to the song.
Control of access (distribution) is currently the only way for content creators to extract revenue from the creation. We need to stop fighting for control of the distribution and figure out how to make money regardless of distribution. If we address the latter issue then the former need for control goes away.
How do we preserve the ability of content creators to gain from content associated exchanges while letting the content roam free? I have no idea:-) But that's the central issue of the conflict.
The Internet is a fundamentally useful thing, an enabling technology that facilitates rich communication among individuals, groups, businesses, government agencies and constituencies. Everyone who needs this communication medium has a vested interest in ensuring that it continues.
I vehemently deny and attack the assertion that advertising is required to keep the Internet viable. Do I have to listen to ads every time I make a phone call? Has the phone network collapsed because of the lack of revenue from paid advertising over each and every call made? Would anyone in their right mind suggest that the phone company (in collusion with advertisers) track all of my phone calls, their length and the parties whom I was calling, all so that they could build a better consumer profile to target advertising to me? No, no, no, never in a million years. Even clueless cogresscritters can understand these points. Why should the Internet be any different? The Internet has rapidly become part of the basic communications infrastructure and as such will always be paid for because it fills a basic need.
Don't be confused by all of the rhetoric spewing from "content providers" who view the Internet as a broadcast entertainment medium. The Internet is not smart television! It is much more like the phone in that communication is two-way. I very much fear that that simple fact is being drowned by the rush of big interests to use it as a much more efficient means of information control.
I personally disagree with the basic premise of this game, based on the details that Jon has provided. I disagree with it for different reasons than Jon. But Jon's articles have shown a disturbing trend of hatred and fear-mongering towards groups that have a tendency for more right-leaning viewpoints, so I felt compelled to reply just to maintain a sense of balance. I have particular issues with many points in this article:
"...the never-ending struggle between technology and the self-proclaimed forces of morality"
Aren't you also more than a little self-proclaimed? Isn't "forces of morality" rather strong labeling? Do all moralists, Christian or otherwise, fit neatly into this little box that you've invented? Isn't the relationship between technology and morality more complex than the single, over-simplified concept of "never-ending struggle"?
"The new idea seems to be that while opponents can condemn TV, movies and the Net for causing violence, violence can also be used to promote wholesomeness and spirituality. It's a confusing time to be a moral guardian."
This statement assumes that all "moral guardians", as you disaparagingly label them, will line up in support of this game and/or its authors' intentions. Your over-broad assertion also implies that opponents of violence in the media are the same set who would share the idea of promoting spiritual concepts with a violent computer game. Boy, your little labeled boxes just keep getting tighter and tighter. In fact, it is far more probable that many, if not most, "moral guardians" will disagree with the game at least as strongly as you, although for very different reasons.
"I've personally never been fortunate enough to get a direct communication from God, though perhaps that's because he doesn't yet use e-mail."
Stop sneering at someone else's expression of how they are inspired to create something new. Inspiration comes in many different forms. If this guy gets phone calls from God, let him. Or is religion not part of your definition of "freedom"?
"But without question, many geeks are already on the wrong path, loving stuff like "South Park" and "The Simpsons" as they do, Satan's productions all. (He was even in the last "South Park" movie.) They might actually revel in blasphemy and angel-bashing."
So Jon Katz proclaims that South Park and The Simpsons are all evil products of Satan. Furthermore, anyone who enjoys these shows has strong tendencies towards blasphemy and angel-bashing. Every last one, no choice here. If you watch these shows, you have to fit in one of Jon's neat little boxes, so let's all line up now and start Christian bashing!
"Religion and freedom have never really gotten along..."
They're getting along just fine right now, thank you. Please, how has this game in any way affected any of your personal freedom? We can have this discussion, can't we? Freedom includes this guy's right to express his views in a game. Just like you can express your views in trite little diatribes on the Hated Christian Right (tm). Same freedom, different delivery vector.
"Technology, a disseminator of so much information, a force for freedom, has always come under fire as Satan's ally."
Technology is just as likely to be a tool of oppression. It's just a tool, not a single-sided "force for freedom". How about Fat Man and Little Boy? Lots of technology and good hard science there, do you love them as much as Slashdot? This assertion that technology is "always" viewed as Satan's ally is ridiculously over-broad and demonstrably untrue. In case you were too slow to notice, these people picked high technology (a computer game) to combat evil. Doesn't that make it God's ally, not Satan's?
"They'll grab their joysticks, deploy their amassed arsenals and rush out to meet the Millenial Crusaders. Geeks have been trained for this thier whole lives; the forces of righteousness will surely be blasted to bits."
Translation: All geeks are first-person-shooter fanatics. All geeks are non-members of, and actively opposed to, the Hated Christian Right (tm). And no member of the "forces of righteousness" would actually be good at a computer game. Lots of labels, bias, assumptions and general unsubstaniated FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
The inheritance tax as implemented in the US is fundamentally wrong, regardless of who does/doesn't pay or where the money goes. Because it taxes citizens (real human beings, not corporations) on assets for which they have already paid rather substantial taxes with an even more onerous tax. Actually, it's a rather nifty scam on the government's part to be able to tax a family over and over again on assets and possessions that remain with the family for more than 1 or 2 generations.
Double taxation is on the same plane as "taxation without representation" in terms of basic wrongness. No matter how good the supposed "benefits", the ends cannot justify the means. If Mr. Brin is so concerned about the money disappearing, let him figure out some other way to soak the Evil Rich (tm).
Hmm, where to start... OK, how about
we need better parents who are involved in their childrens' lives and teach them that violence is the last resort of nations and the feeble minded, not a fun afternoon pastime.
we need better parents who do not put themselves in the position of having to explain to their kids the difference between the horror of the current violence in the middle east and the great entertainment value of the latest slasher/shoot-em-up-action movie.
"I am not blaiming (sic) anyone here" + "but where are the parents" = "I blame the parents". :-)
Just thought I would point that out.
I don't know why I even bother when the whole article is a massive troll, anyway.
IANAL but I remember reading some recommendation that one NOT include a personal name or place name in a company or product name. The reasoning was that it is much more difficult to maintain a trademark for a name whose "ownership" cannot easily be established. The base implication was that people have basic rights to their own name and actual places have things like history and governments on their side.
So, for example, Greg's Super Smooth Shaving Cream could not force me to change my name from Greg to something else, and furthermore my name Greg would have legal identity value for me separate from Greg, Inc. And Washington Karbonated Kola could not force a certain large national capitol to change its name. Anyone more familiar with this?
find dir -type f -mtime -7 -print | cpio -pvmd zip-mount-point
Trivial. Once you've done this 2-3 times, you never forget. find+cpio rulez...
Now the interesting thing here is that the above Unix command tells not only which file to copy, but also how to arrange them on the target media. That is left out of your plain language command. Did you mean just put them all in one flat top-level directory? If so, what about name-space collisions? With natural language, context is just everything and you're always leaving little details out.
Statistically speaking, the expert user is a myth. 99% of all people do not grok computers, nor do they have the slightest interest in doing so. They understand the real world and have difficulty with many abstractions that do not have real world analogs.
Natural language interface? Hoo, Hoo! That's a good one! Most people have a difficult time mastering their own native language that they speak every day. I regularly meet people with whom I have some difficulty in simple conversation due to language barriers, people who natively speak my own language (English). And there are significant subcultures which seem to take pride in significant lack of language skills. Would a natural language interface marginalize these groups? Who gets to decide what is "natural"? If you go by any sort of official language rules for English, many US citizens will have difficulty with it.
I agree that the GUI as epitomized by the Mac is very limiting for some aspects of computer interaction. My own conjecture is that eventually there will arise an unnatural language with which we can interact with the unnatural computer world. This language will still have metaphors and control paradigms, but these will not have direct real world comparisons. They will instead be wholly appropriate for expressing and manipulating the many concepts of the digital world. And I strongly suspect that many elements of today's GUI design will still be intermixed with that interaction.
Um, no. Although parenting may have changed some, the bigger change has been the world in which we parent. Before the Internet, there was no possible way for my 3 year old daughter to ever see pr0n, period, unless some sicko assaulted her in some way.
Now, not only do I have to worry about physical safety, I also have to worry about what raw, unfiltered sewage comes into my home over the wire. (Yes, I chose those words deliberately, I don't use censorware). Now I have an aspect of parenting that did not even exist before the advent of home access to a near completely unregulated Internet filled with explicit imagery that is most definitely not appropriate for children to see.
I am not saying that the answer is censorware. I have many, many qualms about implementation of any automatic information filtering tool. But blaming today's parents is just plain wrong. I work hard at being a parent, and so does just about every other parent that I know.
Um, it's called civil disobedience, a basic responsibility of any free people. And a citizen cannot "usurp" power from a democratic government, by definition, because supposedly all government power belongs to the governed to begin with and is merely loaned to the government to promote common good, defense and stuff. So your concern might better be stated in the reverse: the government usurping a business' rights to free association and enterprise, as well as citizens' rights to freedom from unlawful search and seizure, in order to support dubious efforts to combat possibly nonexistent crime.
No way. The paramount priority of any government is to increase in size and power. We will end up with massive duplication of effort. What about all those millions of citizens (the majority, remember?) who do not have computer/Internet access? We can't marginalize them. So we have to keep the existing meat-space solutions intact while we add e-gov sites which will have to be funded and maintained by additional revenue (taxes).
The only likely increase in efficiency would be in the collection and analysis of information that the gov't can use to manage its citizens, all under the guise of being more "helpful". Indeed, one might argue that physical world inefficiency is a good natural brake on some gov't processes functioning too well.
I'm not saying a new e-gov approach is necessarily a completely bad thing, but don't delude yourself into thinking it will save any money or decrease the size of the beauracracy.
The vast difference in cost-of-duplication makes the two cases so non-parallel that they are nearly orthogonal.
If I walk into a dealership and drive off with a Suburban, the dealer has lost some real tangible thing that cannot be restored without a large amount of effort (manufacturing). With the thing gone, there is no possibility for making revenue without getting back the stolen item. That is not the case when I "steal" a song. The original owner still has the song.
The singer is selling access to the product, either through ticket sales or physical media. The auto dealer is selling the product itself. The two are engaged in totally different transactions. The loss that the original owner experiences is financial gain from transactions associated with the song through loss of control of access to the song.
Control of access (distribution) is currently the only way for content creators to extract revenue from the creation. We need to stop fighting for control of the distribution and figure out how to make money regardless of distribution. If we address the latter issue then the former need for control goes away.
How do we preserve the ability of content creators to gain from content associated exchanges while letting the content roam free? I have no idea :-) But that's the central issue of the conflict.
Wrong.
The Internet is a fundamentally useful thing, an enabling technology that facilitates rich communication among individuals, groups, businesses, government agencies and constituencies. Everyone who needs this communication medium has a vested interest in ensuring that it continues.
I vehemently deny and attack the assertion that advertising is required to keep the Internet viable. Do I have to listen to ads every time I make a phone call? Has the phone network collapsed because of the lack of revenue from paid advertising over each and every call made? Would anyone in their right mind suggest that the phone company (in collusion with advertisers) track all of my phone calls, their length and the parties whom I was calling, all so that they could build a better consumer profile to target advertising to me? No, no, no, never in a million years. Even clueless cogresscritters can understand these points. Why should the Internet be any different? The Internet has rapidly become part of the basic communications infrastructure and as such will always be paid for because it fills a basic need.
Don't be confused by all of the rhetoric spewing from "content providers" who view the Internet as a broadcast entertainment medium. The Internet is not smart television! It is much more like the phone in that communication is two-way. I very much fear that that simple fact is being drowned by the rush of big interests to use it as a much more efficient means of information control.
I personally disagree with the basic premise of this game, based on the details that Jon has provided. I disagree with it for different reasons than Jon. But Jon's articles have shown a disturbing trend of hatred and fear-mongering towards groups that have a tendency for more right-leaning viewpoints, so I felt compelled to reply just to maintain a sense of balance. I have particular issues with many points in this article:
"...the never-ending struggle between technology and the self-proclaimed forces of morality"
Aren't you also more than a little self-proclaimed? Isn't "forces of morality" rather strong labeling? Do all moralists, Christian or otherwise, fit neatly into this little box that you've invented? Isn't the relationship between technology and morality more complex than the single, over-simplified concept of "never-ending struggle"?
"The new idea seems to be that while opponents can condemn TV, movies and the Net for causing violence, violence can also be used to promote wholesomeness and spirituality. It's a confusing time to be a moral guardian."
This statement assumes that all "moral guardians", as you disaparagingly label them, will line up in support of this game and/or its authors' intentions. Your over-broad assertion also implies that opponents of violence in the media are the same set who would share the idea of promoting spiritual concepts with a violent computer game. Boy, your little labeled boxes just keep getting tighter and tighter. In fact, it is far more probable that many, if not most, "moral guardians" will disagree with the game at least as strongly as you, although for very different reasons.
"I've personally never been fortunate enough to get a direct communication from God, though perhaps that's because he doesn't yet use e-mail."
Stop sneering at someone else's expression of how they are inspired to create something new. Inspiration comes in many different forms. If this guy gets phone calls from God, let him. Or is religion not part of your definition of "freedom"?
"But without question, many geeks are already on the wrong path, loving stuff like "South Park" and "The Simpsons" as they do, Satan's productions all. (He was even in the last "South Park" movie.) They might actually revel in blasphemy and angel-bashing."
So Jon Katz proclaims that South Park and The Simpsons are all evil products of Satan. Furthermore, anyone who enjoys these shows has strong tendencies towards blasphemy and angel-bashing. Every last one, no choice here. If you watch these shows, you have to fit in one of Jon's neat little boxes, so let's all line up now and start Christian bashing!
"Religion and freedom have never really gotten along..."
They're getting along just fine right now, thank you. Please, how has this game in any way affected any of your personal freedom? We can have this discussion, can't we? Freedom includes this guy's right to express his views in a game. Just like you can express your views in trite little diatribes on the Hated Christian Right (tm). Same freedom, different delivery vector.
"Technology, a disseminator of so much information, a force for freedom, has always come under fire as Satan's ally."
Technology is just as likely to be a tool of oppression. It's just a tool, not a single-sided "force for freedom". How about Fat Man and Little Boy? Lots of technology and good hard science there, do you love them as much as Slashdot? This assertion that technology is "always" viewed as Satan's ally is ridiculously over-broad and demonstrably untrue. In case you were too slow to notice, these people picked high technology (a computer game) to combat evil. Doesn't that make it God's ally, not Satan's?
"They'll grab their joysticks, deploy their amassed arsenals and rush out to meet the Millenial Crusaders. Geeks have been trained for this thier whole lives; the forces of righteousness will surely be blasted to bits."
Translation: All geeks are first-person-shooter fanatics. All geeks are non-members of, and actively opposed to, the Hated Christian Right (tm). And no member of the "forces of righteousness" would actually be good at a computer game. Lots of labels, bias, assumptions and general unsubstaniated FUD.