I'd also say that the funding philosophy has changed significantly. Things like the space program and DARPANET came from a time when the government sought to fund high-risk/high-reward programs - programs that were unlikely to succeed, but would have a significant impact if they did.
Now the approach is much more conservative, we only fund things that appear to be fairly low-hanging fruit. When a small company demonstrates success, the follow-on work is usually scooped up by the large, beurocratic defense giants like Boeing or Northropp Grumman.
I see this as a good way to stop spammers. Bot farmers and hackers will not be filtered out by this system (it is too easy to be your own cut-out). Their claim that gamers would sell gold for cheaper than a business in (for example) china seemed either naive or duplicitious. People in countries with a much lower cost of living will have a market advantage that edge out the gamers in the countries where a $15/month game and computer system is an affordable luxury.
Responses seemed (no surprise) just a way to promote their service, and their responses disingenous.
However, if I were to buy gold, I'd consider their service because the prices do seem cheap, and they should successfully combat one of the three evils they claim to be against. TBH I don't believe there IS a way to stop hackers pillaging accounts, and think that the game company is the one to combat bots. So if sparter, as a seller, pledges not to spam, that is about as much as I can expect from them.
It's only a matter of time before speech recognition/synthesis technology allows near-realtime chat with language filtering/whatever built in. I'd be surprised if within 10-15 years, that 11 year old boy didnt sound like a dwarf too.
In the meantime, I think the internet continues to provide an interesting way to confront your prejudices.
While I like both authors, they arent very similar (well ok, they are both English, and prone to fantasy). The Eternals series doesn't share anything in common with the eternal champion series aside from the word "eternal".
Gaiman's been around long enough that I am not sure you can count his entire body of work as having been authored "these days".
If you haven't read Gaiman, you should check out some of his stuff- you're in for a real treat. I wish I could discover him over again...
I understand the reticence people are expressing- but, it flies in the face of my experience.
My first computer was a commodore 64. My friends had households with trs-80s, vic-20s and then (drool) apples. There were very few applications available, usually just a few simple games that we traded on disk without fear of copyright law.
And we loved it. I started with writing choose-your-own-adventure type games, then various tools to help me in my with my hobbies like D&D. Then I started messing with sprites and making my own simple video games. Eventually I was writing algorithmic music. I had other friends that did the same, and we learned together. By the time I got to college, I had taught myself C and C++- never having taken a class. Mostly learning out of documents I found on BBSes and published in cheap old pulp magazines.
That's what I am expecting OLPC to inspire. The amount of documentation, and power of those machines will be much greater than what I had to work with as a kid, and I am sure a kid aptly motivated can make do. My circumstances weren't awful- I was a middle-class kid with a pantry full of fruit juice and snacks. I think being from an economically deprived country would provide, if anything, more motivation for looking into this high-tech box of magic that had been given to you. When you can't pay the costs of education and maintenance, you can often find ways to make do by teaching and fixing yourself. If you can't afford Internet access, the mesh network provided through the OLPCs is STILL a lot cooler than what I was playing with as a kid.
I don't know anything about being a deprived kid in a third world nation, but I have had times of fairly extreme economic adversity in my life, and I do remember something that I haven't seen mentioned at all: When you don't have much, it's hard to describe the impact of a luxury item on the human spirit. We definitely should also be trying to help out with health and food infrastructures in third world countries, but giving people something unneccessary that is as diverting as a computer can be has immense value.
Where was the science in this experiment? How was "psychological maturity" defined and tested for? Is there some sort of indisputable characteristic associated with this, or did he just get a large sample size and ask them if they still liked scooby-doo?
Without that, this just seems like pseudo-science supporting a world view in which todays' generation is less responsible that the last.
The voiceover cemented the fusion of film noire and sci-fi. The removal of the voice changed the voiceover in a way many people find preferable, but I still think that one of the things that made bladerunner such a pivotal movie was that meshing of the genres. It's a different movie without them- whether that movie is better or not is a matter of preference.
I prefer the original.
My grandfather and great-grandfather both worked for West Virginia coal mines that used their geographic isolation to create pretty unthinkable work conditions- extremely dangerous mines, low wages that were promptly reclaimed at company stores that sold goods for unreasonably high costs.
For them, a labor union was fairly neccessary. The pros outweighed the cons. Their situation also beared NO resemblance to mine as a programming professional. They would both look on my station today and be very glad for me.
Many industries in the United States face a basic threat from the fact that it is simply cheaper to produce our product in a location with a lower cost of living, and that businesses that do not produce their goods at a strong value are businesses that fail.
What bothers me is that the union mentality in the original post fails to recognize this as a shared problem between the business and the employees. Unionizing when a company has set a value on goods so low that they have to mistreat their workers to get it is one thing. Unionizing to strongarm a company into an unjustifiable and disadvantageous relationship with you is another. Even if you successfully force a company to bear the full burden of the geographic disparity in cost of labor, all you have done is signed the death sentence for that company. It seems like when people talk about unionizing the IT industry, they aren't solving a problem- they are forcing the burden of a problem onto someone else's shoulders.
I think living in a region with a disproportionate cost of living will bring with it commensurate higher demands of its citizens, and that that is painful. However, the problem still isn't as severe as people make it out to be, and I have found that striving to be good at what I do, and not be a pushover in negotiations still gets me a job in the United States that my grandparents would be see as a definite uplifting of our family's fortunes.
They also changed some of the soundtrack (I noticed this at the end of 6 at least). I agree though that blacker space, more impressive lasers, and less cheezy computer consoles were a welcome addition. I just objected to the additional and modified scenes. They were uniformly bad calls IMO.
Now if only they'd release the original bladerunner on dvd... Even though I seem to be one of three people on the planet that think that the director's cut totally ruined the film noire tone of the original.
China, and well- that is where things are going. Satellites are getting cheaper and more reliable, and it is only a matter of time until affordable, (very) detailed imagery from space will soon be an acheivable goal for nations even advanced than china (although, granted, the infrastructure to best use such intelligence for military purposes is considerably further out of reach).
If we want to maintain the same degree of privacy and security that we have always enjoyed, then developing technologies to stop unwanted observation is neccessary.
This is actually heartening to me, because I think that the terrorist threat is blown out of proportion for political expediency, whereas this kind of military spending tells me that someone still has their eye on the ball. This isn't about the world today, this is about the world 10 years from today.
I'd like to live in a world where any and all military spending was unneccessary, but that isn't the one we are in. Protecting your airspace is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
There are plenty of very real moral and idealistic reasons to choose to use free software. Apple isn't going to help any section of humanity that can't significantly improve their bottom line. Supporting gpled software very well might.
To be honest, I think a lot of the public perception of windows' weaknesses and apple's strengths come more from a sense of fashion and trend than from a position of sound logic. My main beef with both of them is that they force me into an uncomfortable role as a user, and that the main objective of the organization behind their production is to increase shareholder value. One might choose apple over windows because apple is more cool. One might choose Linux over either because it was more GOOD.
I hate to paste a "me too" post, but YES. Start with K&R's The C Programming language if you are looking for a good beginning towards becoming a good programmer (as opposed to a "good-enough" programmer).
If you ever plan on writing programs that do more than throw up a simple gui and connect to a database, you WILL need to understand memory intuitively, and there is no better time to get that understanding than at the start.
I think people confuse accessibility with power. I don't think that VB is really any easier to learn than C is- it's just that the results as you learn are a lot more impressive (powerful).
Some programs are best implemented in C or assembly. Others are really fastest to do in a 4GL. I think every programmer will want both in their toolkit, but starting with C will give you much better long-term habits than starting with VB or C#.
I do not understand the rabid brand loyalty I often see given to Itunes in the face of superior products and services. I think that Ipods are clearly one of the nicer media players on the market, but Itunes is really second rate, both as a music manager (I love the way it will ERASE the contents of an Ipod with no warning when that Ipod is attached to a fresh install of Itunes), and as a music store (the DRM model is very restrictive, you can only download files once, the mp3s cost more than competitors, and there is no service in itunes to compare to the subscriptions services offered by napster and yahoo).
Given Apple's ability to succeed with such a marginal service, I think Amazon has a herculean task. I don't see them being able to compete in cool- the Amazon brand is nowhere near as sexy as the Apple brand is. Competing on cost and value has been tried before, and hasn't worked for napster or yahoo. The market really hasn't demonstrated a sensitivity to anything other than brand image and marketing budget. We're just not particularly discriminating consumers yet.
I'm curious as to whether or not having a real-time correction brings any real improvement in vision correction. Are cornea aberrations a realtime problem? If not, is a pixelated lens superior to an high-precision lens of some stable material?
I know that the advantage Othonix glasses offer is that they use adaptive optics (a laser and wavefront sensor) to identify a prescription for your vision that is much more accurate than the techniques currently in use at most optometrists. This allows more precise measurement of low-order aberrations, and begins to address the higher-order zernike modes (up to the 11th I think). Opthonix also has some technology for taking said prescription and grinding a lens- but all you are talking about here is a pair of glasses that have a MUCH more precise prescription than was possible before.
It's good to hear about these developments, because correcting the wavefront of the light entering your eye is guaranteed to avoid introducing any error to your cornea, whereas a lot of forms of eye surgery introduce deformity to your vision that might in the long run be harder to correct.
I'm sick of verizon freeloading off of all that free content that they can resell through their ISP services. If there weren't an internet to connect to, all those pipes they own (and lease out for profit) would be dark fiber. Google is paying for more than "cheap servers", they are leasing the bandwidth that they are accused here of freeloading, and WE are also paying for that bandwidth, so that we can access google. Verizon just wants to be able to tax google more for their success.
Changing the nature of the internet (one of our most vibrant marketplaces) is not something we should do lightly. Verizon is a public utility provider to the internet, selling bandwidth in much the same way that our power company sells us electricity. They may be "spending a fortune" laying pipes, but that is their cost of doing business- and they pass it on to their customers for a fair profit. "Preferred Access" is just another word for artificial scarcity. Verizon is just trying to find a metaphor through which they can justify asking for free money. The consumers don't benefit from this, and it is harmful to an important marketplace.
good background reading for the implications of letting the internet be defined as packets and pipes rather than a global (market) place. Good reading for any slashdotter actually.
This is killing me. A few months ago, someone wrote an extremely eloquent article (that was slashdotted) discussing this issue, and the way telco's were attempting to steer what metaphor was used for bandwidth so that it would seem most logical to charge premiums on the data that passed around the internet. Now, for the lift of me, I can't construct a search that turns it up.
The article predicted exactly this, and I wish I could find it =/
I personally wouldn't want to erase my memories of living through a school shooting, although they are pretty awful. Your rape analogy is a false choice between forgetting a traumatic event, and wishing a traumatic event on someone. I wouldn't dream of making that decision for someone else, but my life is mine to remember, the good and the bad.
My concern is that by endorsing a memory erasure drug, we implicitly reduce the degree of criminality associated with inflicting trauma on one another. I'm concerned that people might start raping people more often, knowing that whatever harm they inflict can be magically erased the next day. Worse, I really that the effects of the drug are as simple as a one-memory wipe. I'd worry that using this drug would be a trauma in its' own right, and that potential criminals out there would hold themselves less accountable for their actions, telling themselves that whatever they were about to do would be forgotten anyway
"Don't put indiscreet information in metadata fields" sounds like a glib response, but I don't think it is. With new technologies, new behaviors often need to be learned.
Because nobody ever gets anything right on the first try, I think we're in for a few years of embarassing stories about people that said too much with the metadata they forgot to strip before passing a file on, but eventually those stories will go away because:
1) UIs will improve so that metadata is considered at every point in which a file is transferred 2) There will probably be some concept of public and private metadata. 3) An understanding of what metadata is will pervade the user community.
Personally, I think metadata tags that would get you in trouble are symptomatic of larger issues that are likely to catch up with you anyway. What successful businessman would EVER even think to use a tag like "bad clients"? Metadata just provides another channel through which bad habits and sloppy thinking can catch up to you.
Metadata makes a lot of sense- and represents a much better way to go about organizing data. I think it's here to stay for a while, and the gartner interview unfairly singles out microsoft for an implementation issue shared by everyone I know that uses file-based metadata at the moment.
Another way might be to come up with a better system- one of the issues that makes all this vulnerability so scary is that we have invested way too much value in bits of information like the social security number.
How hard would it be to issue citizens a private key to go along with that public one? I've seen some insecure databases- especially back when every bad IIS web designer seemed to store their password in the global.asa- it isn't the risk of compromise on that one service that "scares the holey moley" out of me- it's that once a criminal compromises my privacy, the scope seems to be global and to some degree permanent. Does any country issue better primary keys to their citizens than the US social security number?
...or people that view computers as fashion accessories. Truly different people should be able to look past the marketing and realize that brand loyalty != innovative, self-directed thought. As a matter of fact, I just can't say that defining oneself by the products they buy strikes me as particularly progressive on any level.
The new macs seem to be good computers, but I still don't see how they are the most logical choice for artists. Unless you are extremely lucky, most artists tend to have greater cash-flow issues than most, and apples tend towards the pricier end of the spectrum. I know when I left college and was making a go of sound design, I found myself engaged in a lot of accountant-like thinking as I tried to pay rent, afford dry pasta, and keep a build/maintain a professional grade studio.
Until art starts paying more than it currently does, it seems to me that artists should be very supportive of a vibrant OSS community.
I can see your point, but I think the product resulting from opt-ins would be dramatically inferior to opt-outs. I'm afraid that we'd end up with the text equivalent of Itunes (which is completely unsatisfactory if you like 20th century music, old jazz, classical or world music).
I agree that opt-in would be more comfortable to authors, but I think the social benefit from opt-out justifies that route. Especially in light of the proposed model which limits its' utility to being a research tool.
1) For publishers, this could eventually really change things if google print ever endorsed one particular publisher for one-offs of out of print material.
2) For Authors, google print could become large enough that it would essentially be its own marketing channel. As it would be owned by google, authors would then have to accept whatever monopolistic terms google dictated to fulfill what might be perceived as a business necessity.
I think that google print is the coolest thing since sliced bread, but I can understand a little bit why the other side might be concerned. My personal view is that the social value of google print is worth the potential cost to authors and publishers- but then again I don't put food on the table by writing or publishing books.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also say that the funding philosophy has changed significantly. Things like the space program and DARPANET came from a time when the government sought to fund high-risk/high-reward programs - programs that were unlikely to succeed, but would have a significant impact if they did. Now the approach is much more conservative, we only fund things that appear to be fairly low-hanging fruit. When a small company demonstrates success, the follow-on work is usually scooped up by the large, beurocratic defense giants like Boeing or Northropp Grumman.
Neutral net COULD need AS MUCH AS twice the bandwidth. Let's not spread worst-case scenario memes just because it looks good as a headline.
I see this as a good way to stop spammers. Bot farmers and hackers will not be filtered out by this system (it is too easy to be your own cut-out). Their claim that gamers would sell gold for cheaper than a business in (for example) china seemed either naive or duplicitious. People in countries with a much lower cost of living will have a market advantage that edge out the gamers in the countries where a $15/month game and computer system is an affordable luxury. Responses seemed (no surprise) just a way to promote their service, and their responses disingenous. However, if I were to buy gold, I'd consider their service because the prices do seem cheap, and they should successfully combat one of the three evils they claim to be against. TBH I don't believe there IS a way to stop hackers pillaging accounts, and think that the game company is the one to combat bots. So if sparter, as a seller, pledges not to spam, that is about as much as I can expect from them.
It's only a matter of time before speech recognition/synthesis technology allows near-realtime chat with language filtering/whatever built in. I'd be surprised if within 10-15 years, that 11 year old boy didnt sound like a dwarf too. In the meantime, I think the internet continues to provide an interesting way to confront your prejudices.
While I like both authors, they arent very similar (well ok, they are both English, and prone to fantasy). The Eternals series doesn't share anything in common with the eternal champion series aside from the word "eternal".
Gaiman's been around long enough that I am not sure you can count his entire body of work as having been authored "these days".
If you haven't read Gaiman, you should check out some of his stuff- you're in for a real treat. I wish I could discover him over again...
I understand the reticence people are expressing- but, it flies in the face of my experience.
My first computer was a commodore 64. My friends had households with trs-80s, vic-20s and then (drool) apples. There were very few applications available, usually just a few simple games that we traded on disk without fear of copyright law.
And we loved it. I started with writing choose-your-own-adventure type games, then various tools to help me in my with my hobbies like D&D. Then I started messing with sprites and making my own simple video games. Eventually I was writing algorithmic music. I had other friends that did the same, and we learned together. By the time I got to college, I had taught myself C and C++- never having taken a class. Mostly learning out of documents I found on BBSes and published in cheap old pulp magazines.
That's what I am expecting OLPC to inspire. The amount of documentation, and power of those machines will be much greater than what I had to work with as a kid, and I am sure a kid aptly motivated can make do. My circumstances weren't awful- I was a middle-class kid with a pantry full of fruit juice and snacks. I think being from an economically deprived country would provide, if anything, more motivation for looking into this high-tech box of magic that had been given to you. When you can't pay the costs of education and maintenance, you can often find ways to make do by teaching and fixing yourself. If you can't afford Internet access, the mesh network provided through the OLPCs is STILL a lot cooler than what I was playing with as a kid.
I don't know anything about being a deprived kid in a third world nation, but I have had times of fairly extreme economic adversity in my life, and I do remember something that I haven't seen mentioned at all: When you don't have much, it's hard to describe the impact of a luxury item on the human spirit. We definitely should also be trying to help out with health and food infrastructures in third world countries, but giving people something unneccessary that is as diverting as a computer can be has immense value.
Where was the science in this experiment? How was "psychological maturity" defined and tested for? Is there some sort of indisputable characteristic associated with this, or did he just get a large sample size and ask them if they still liked scooby-doo? Without that, this just seems like pseudo-science supporting a world view in which todays' generation is less responsible that the last.
The voiceover cemented the fusion of film noire and sci-fi. The removal of the voice changed the voiceover in a way many people find preferable, but I still think that one of the things that made bladerunner such a pivotal movie was that meshing of the genres. It's a different movie without them- whether that movie is better or not is a matter of preference. I prefer the original.
My grandfather and great-grandfather both worked for West Virginia coal mines that used their geographic isolation to create pretty unthinkable work conditions- extremely dangerous mines, low wages that were promptly reclaimed at company stores that sold goods for unreasonably high costs.
For them, a labor union was fairly neccessary. The pros outweighed the cons. Their situation also beared NO resemblance to mine as a programming professional. They would both look on my station today and be very glad for me.
Many industries in the United States face a basic threat from the fact that it is simply cheaper to produce our product in a location with a lower cost of living, and that businesses that do not produce their goods at a strong value are businesses that fail.
What bothers me is that the union mentality in the original post fails to recognize this as a shared problem between the business and the employees. Unionizing when a company has set a value on goods so low that they have to mistreat their workers to get it is one thing. Unionizing to strongarm a company into an unjustifiable and disadvantageous relationship with you is another. Even if you successfully force a company to bear the full burden of the geographic disparity in cost of labor, all you have done is signed the death sentence for that company. It seems like when people talk about unionizing the IT industry, they aren't solving a problem- they are forcing the burden of a problem onto someone else's shoulders.
I think living in a region with a disproportionate cost of living will bring with it commensurate higher demands of its citizens, and that that is painful. However, the problem still isn't as severe as people make it out to be, and I have found that striving to be good at what I do, and not be a pushover in negotiations still gets me a job in the United States that my grandparents would be see as a definite uplifting of our family's fortunes.
They also changed some of the soundtrack (I noticed this at the end of 6 at least). I agree though that blacker space, more impressive lasers, and less cheezy computer consoles were a welcome addition. I just objected to the additional and modified scenes. They were uniformly bad calls IMO. Now if only they'd release the original bladerunner on dvd... Even though I seem to be one of three people on the planet that think that the director's cut totally ruined the film noire tone of the original.
China, and well- that is where things are going. Satellites are getting cheaper and more reliable, and it is only a matter of time until affordable, (very) detailed imagery from space will soon be an acheivable goal for nations even advanced than china (although, granted, the infrastructure to best use such intelligence for military purposes is considerably further out of reach). If we want to maintain the same degree of privacy and security that we have always enjoyed, then developing technologies to stop unwanted observation is neccessary. This is actually heartening to me, because I think that the terrorist threat is blown out of proportion for political expediency, whereas this kind of military spending tells me that someone still has their eye on the ball. This isn't about the world today, this is about the world 10 years from today. I'd like to live in a world where any and all military spending was unneccessary, but that isn't the one we are in. Protecting your airspace is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I hate to post "me too", but no kidding. I wouldn't expect slashdot to conflate the two terms. News for nerds card suspended.
Quoted from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
There are plenty of very real moral and idealistic reasons to choose to use free software. Apple isn't going to help any section of humanity that can't significantly improve their bottom line. Supporting gpled software very well might.
To be honest, I think a lot of the public perception of windows' weaknesses and apple's strengths come more from a sense of fashion and trend than from a position of sound logic. My main beef with both of them is that they force me into an uncomfortable role as a user, and that the main objective of the organization behind their production is to increase shareholder value. One might choose apple over windows because apple is more cool. One might choose Linux over either because it was more GOOD.
I hate to paste a "me too" post, but YES. Start with K&R's The C Programming language if you are looking for a good beginning towards becoming a good programmer (as opposed to a "good-enough" programmer).
If you ever plan on writing programs that do more than throw up a simple gui and connect to a database, you WILL need to understand memory intuitively, and there is no better time to get that understanding than at the start.
I think people confuse accessibility with power. I don't think that VB is really any easier to learn than C is- it's just that the results as you learn are a lot more impressive (powerful).
Some programs are best implemented in C or assembly. Others are really fastest to do in a 4GL. I think every programmer will want both in their toolkit, but starting with C will give you much better long-term habits than starting with VB or C#.
I do not understand the rabid brand loyalty I often see given to Itunes in the face of superior products and services. I think that Ipods are clearly one of the nicer media players on the market, but Itunes is really second rate, both as a music manager (I love the way it will ERASE the contents of an Ipod with no warning when that Ipod is attached to a fresh install of Itunes), and as a music store (the DRM model is very restrictive, you can only download files once, the mp3s cost more than competitors, and there is no service in itunes to compare to the subscriptions services offered by napster and yahoo). Given Apple's ability to succeed with such a marginal service, I think Amazon has a herculean task. I don't see them being able to compete in cool- the Amazon brand is nowhere near as sexy as the Apple brand is. Competing on cost and value has been tried before, and hasn't worked for napster or yahoo. The market really hasn't demonstrated a sensitivity to anything other than brand image and marketing budget. We're just not particularly discriminating consumers yet.
I'm curious as to whether or not having a real-time correction brings any real improvement in vision correction. Are cornea aberrations a realtime problem? If not, is a pixelated lens superior to an high-precision lens of some stable material?
I know that the advantage Othonix glasses offer is that they use adaptive optics (a laser and wavefront sensor) to identify a prescription for your vision that is much more accurate than the techniques currently in use at most optometrists. This allows more precise measurement of low-order aberrations, and begins to address the higher-order zernike modes (up to the 11th I think). Opthonix also has some technology for taking said prescription and grinding a lens- but all you are talking about here is a pair of glasses that have a MUCH more precise prescription than was possible before.
It's good to hear about these developments, because correcting the wavefront of the light entering your eye is guaranteed to avoid introducing any error to your cornea, whereas a lot of forms of eye surgery introduce deformity to your vision that might in the long run be harder to correct.
I'm sick of verizon freeloading off of all that free content that they can resell through their ISP services. If there weren't an internet to connect to, all those pipes they own (and lease out for profit) would be dark fiber. Google is paying for more than "cheap servers", they are leasing the bandwidth that they are accused here of freeloading, and WE are also paying for that bandwidth, so that we can access google. Verizon just wants to be able to tax google more for their success.
Changing the nature of the internet (one of our most vibrant marketplaces) is not something we should do lightly. Verizon is a public utility provider to the internet, selling bandwidth in much the same way that our power company sells us electricity. They may be "spending a fortune" laying pipes, but that is their cost of doing business- and they pass it on to their customers for a fair profit. "Preferred Access" is just another word for artificial scarcity. Verizon is just trying to find a metaphor through which they can justify asking for free money. The consumers don't benefit from this, and it is harmful to an important marketplace.
found it:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/comment/reply/8673
good background reading for the implications of letting the internet be defined as packets and pipes rather than a global (market) place. Good reading for any slashdotter actually.
This is killing me. A few months ago, someone wrote an extremely eloquent article (that was slashdotted) discussing this issue, and the way telco's were attempting to steer what metaphor was used for bandwidth so that it would seem most logical to charge premiums on the data that passed around the internet. Now, for the lift of me, I can't construct a search that turns it up.
The article predicted exactly this, and I wish I could find it =/
I personally wouldn't want to erase my memories of living through a school shooting, although they are pretty awful. Your rape analogy is a false choice between forgetting a traumatic event, and wishing a traumatic event on someone. I wouldn't dream of making that decision for someone else, but my life is mine to remember, the good and the bad.
My concern is that by endorsing a memory erasure drug, we implicitly reduce the degree of criminality associated with inflicting trauma on one another. I'm concerned that people might start raping people more often, knowing that whatever harm they inflict can be magically erased the next day. Worse, I really that the effects of the drug are as simple as a one-memory wipe. I'd worry that using this drug would be a trauma in its' own right, and that potential criminals out there would hold themselves less accountable for their actions, telling themselves that whatever they were about to do would be forgotten anyway
"Don't put indiscreet information in metadata fields" sounds like a glib response, but I don't think it is. With new technologies, new behaviors often need to be learned.
Because nobody ever gets anything right on the first try, I think we're in for a few years of embarassing stories about people that said too much with the metadata they forgot to strip before passing a file on, but eventually those stories will go away because:
1) UIs will improve so that metadata is considered at every point in which a file is transferred
2) There will probably be some concept of public and private metadata.
3) An understanding of what metadata is will pervade the user community.
Personally, I think metadata tags that would get you in trouble are symptomatic of larger issues that are likely to catch up with you anyway. What successful businessman would EVER even think to use a tag like "bad clients"? Metadata just provides another channel through which bad habits and sloppy thinking can catch up to you.
Metadata makes a lot of sense- and represents a much better way to go about organizing data. I think it's here to stay for a while, and the gartner interview unfairly singles out microsoft for an implementation issue shared by everyone I know that uses file-based metadata at the moment.
Another way might be to come up with a better system- one of the issues that makes all this vulnerability so scary is that we have invested way too much value in bits of information like the social security number. How hard would it be to issue citizens a private key to go along with that public one? I've seen some insecure databases- especially back when every bad IIS web designer seemed to store their password in the global.asa- it isn't the risk of compromise on that one service that "scares the holey moley" out of me- it's that once a criminal compromises my privacy, the scope seems to be global and to some degree permanent. Does any country issue better primary keys to their citizens than the US social security number?
...or people that view computers as fashion accessories. Truly different people should be able to look past the marketing and realize that brand loyalty != innovative, self-directed thought. As a matter of fact, I just can't say that defining oneself by the products they buy strikes me as particularly progressive on any level. The new macs seem to be good computers, but I still don't see how they are the most logical choice for artists. Unless you are extremely lucky, most artists tend to have greater cash-flow issues than most, and apples tend towards the pricier end of the spectrum. I know when I left college and was making a go of sound design, I found myself engaged in a lot of accountant-like thinking as I tried to pay rent, afford dry pasta, and keep a build/maintain a professional grade studio. Until art starts paying more than it currently does, it seems to me that artists should be very supportive of a vibrant OSS community.
I can see your point, but I think the product resulting from opt-ins would be dramatically inferior to opt-outs. I'm afraid that we'd end up with the text equivalent of Itunes (which is completely unsatisfactory if you like 20th century music, old jazz, classical or world music). I agree that opt-in would be more comfortable to authors, but I think the social benefit from opt-out justifies that route. Especially in light of the proposed model which limits its' utility to being a research tool.
1) For publishers, this could eventually really change things if google print ever endorsed one particular publisher for one-offs of out of print material. 2) For Authors, google print could become large enough that it would essentially be its own marketing channel. As it would be owned by google, authors would then have to accept whatever monopolistic terms google dictated to fulfill what might be perceived as a business necessity. I think that google print is the coolest thing since sliced bread, but I can understand a little bit why the other side might be concerned. My personal view is that the social value of google print is worth the potential cost to authors and publishers- but then again I don't put food on the table by writing or publishing books.