I don't believe that a free-software approach makes sense for all kinds of information. But databases might benefit from a GPL-like license. The more people contribute to a database, the more useful it is. The more useful a database is, the more people use it. The more people use a database, the more people contribute to it. Pretty basic positive feedback loop, I'd think.
Of course, there'd be a lot of logistics to work out, especially in terms of having the data be high-quality, not error-ridden. And data can't really be verified in the same way as code. But perhaps it's worth considering.
If you want to be a good complacent consumer, you have no reason to worry about a loss of privacy. It's only if you want to resist in any way that it becomes a concern.
For example: Let's say you become, for whatever reason, one of the major players in a boycott against some large corporation. In the future, where there will most likely be gobs and gobs of data freely available about everybody, it will be trivial for an unscrupulous corporation to dig up dirt about you. Maybe you use your credit card a lot at a certain motel, which could point to the possibility of an extramarital affair. Maybe you've been buying a lot of DVDs from some hardcore porn site. Companies are composed of hundreds and thousands of people, so character assassination doesn't work nearly so effectively against them, but individuals have much more to fear from this tactic.
But if you just keep your head down, work hard, and never speak out, you won't have a thing to worry about.
Francis Hwang
Re:Why is LISP superior?
on
RMS The Coder
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· Score: 1
And although I've never used Scheme in a professional environment, I can say that having to do it for one semester in undergrad forced an extremely rigorous, clean thinking on me. C allows you all kinds of hacks, which can be useful, but if you see a hack in C, 99 times out of 100, it's a result of sloppy coding, not a genuinely justifiable design decision.
Scheme takes care of that by just not letting you do any of that. And years later, when my employers were telling me my code was extremely easy to read, I'd credit part of that to the fact that I had to learn how to write clean, elegant code back in school.
... to point out, in this discussion, that a lot of these questions were already brought to the public in Gattaca. In fact, I bet if you were to take one of those man-on-the-street polls, you'd hear a lot of people expressing serious reservations about genetic research in general. Everyday folks may not know all the specifics of the Human Genome Project, but they get the gist of it.
Unfortunately, those are the people who are intimidated by scientific talk, and often feel that the scientific community doesn't want to hear what they think. (Which is too often the case.)
Long before the invention of the IMG tag, universal access was a vital part of the HTML spec -- the spec didn't actually define the presentation of content, just its semantic structuring. Presentation and syntax are supposed to be separate, and the loss of handicapped access is only one of the punishments inflicted on the public by intermingling the two. (There's a very good discussion of these issues in David Siegel's article stumping for the adoption of CSS.)
There are two questions that have to be asked here:
1. Is access to AOL an important part of public life?
This is debatable only to the extent that you focus specifically on AOL's terrible, spammy services; if you use AOL as a stand-in for internet access in general you have to answer yes. Nobody would argue today (especially not on slashdot) that access to internet resources is not significant.
2. Are there reasonable steps that AOL could be taking to make it easier for handicapped users to access their services?
This is a little touchier, because it focuses on the question of what is reasonable design. AOL will probably argue that it needs to rely on an image-heavy layout in order to stay competitive, but that's a hard thing to actually prove. (When you add images, how many users do you add because they're impressed by the flashiness, and how many users do you lose because they're annoyed with the long download time? Both numbers are hard to measure.) And yet, the extent to which blind users lose access to AOL's sites as a result are generally much easier to substantiate: I think it'd be pretty easy for a lawyer to demonstrate how AOL sites are completely unusable for the blind.
I'm all for this lawsuit. Not simply because it's another thorn in AOL's butt (though it is), or because I think we should do what we can to make life a little easier for blind people (though we should). But because I love spare, trimmed-down HTML, and I long for the day when 40-something marketing directors stop treating the Web like it was TV or a magazine. If this suit is successful, it'll get us one day closer to the day when the user, not the producer, controls the presentation -- and that will benefit everybody, blind and sighted alike.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but if you're taking legal advice from some guy bullshitting on some web site, you deserve what you get.
I'm generally of the If you can't be bothered to get your ass down to the polls, you don't deserve a say school of thought. Still, I think this is a good idea in theory.
I would, however, be extremely wary of its implementation, particularly because of the disparity in internet access. Adding an internet vote right now would probably drastically skew voting results towards those who currently have internet access.
Of course, if we wanted to decide that internet access should be universal, we could undertake some huge project to give everybody computers with modems, a la the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing electricity to rural communities during the FDR administration. Though, with the political mood of the country these days, that probably sounds too socialistic to get any popular support.
Of course, Islamic religious law is by no means consolidated into one central church -- it's splintered, just like any major religion is. You'd have to round up a lot of influential clerics to have any effect.
Or, of course, we could just lobby governments to reject this kind of stuff -- not out of any religious principle, but just because we believe it's wrong. That's what government's supposed to be for, after all.
It's worth noting that this is hardly the first time this has happened. When companies realized it might be useful to have 1-800 numbers which spell out easy-to-remember seven-letter phrases, there were a number of entrepreneurs who bought certain 1-800 numbers and sold them off to the highest bidder. As far as I know, there were no lawsuits ever about this.
Not exactly the same case, but an interesting thing to compare cybersquatting to.
Not sure how much of Roblimo's post is serious, but I felt like weighing in. Regardless of whether you're going to end up with a geek girlfriend or a less tech-obsessed girlfriend, having a decent romantic relationship -- a good relationship with anyone, really, whether a friend or a relative or a lover -- really only hinges on a couple of fundamentals:
Be yourself, and allow the other person to do the same.
Get to know the person as that person, not as who you would like that person to be -- even if getting to know that person may lead you to the conclusion that you aren't compatible.
The really good relationships don't need to be forced -- they just happen. You should not hang with anyone because you're really hung up on the idea of having a girlfriend, losing your virginity, being in love, or getting married, and want to progress down some pre-set, pre-conceived path of a relationship. You should hang out with them because you have a fun time hanging out with them, in that moment.
Learn to be happy alone. It's a difficult thing to learn, but if you can, you'll be even happier when you do find a good relationship, and you won't be stuck with bad relationships in the meantime.
They might sound a little cliched, but I sincerely believe that any little rules that can't be derived from those are either superfluous or just plain wrong.
As I sent to the author: There is no force of law involved in the Linux community, so comparing it to any kind of a nation-state is completely off. A much better analogy would be: The Linux community is a big, raucous party, and Linus Torvalds is the most popular person there. He can stand on a table and suggest we do fun things, and the community will probably listen, because it likes his judgement. But if he starts getting belligerent or wierd, the community can just ignore him. And if he tries to shut down the party, the community can move somewhere else and keep the party going.
One of the problems is that computers just don't have the visual sex appeal that movies demand. Anything exciting that happens on a computer is probably not visually apparent -- code breakthroughs appear in tiny lines here and there, not in big blinking letters that say "Downloading..." in 64-point-type.
Although the complexity of computers makes this worse, this problem is not exclusive to the field: Film is a primarily visual medium, and is generally bad at depicting anything that isn't mostly visual. Witness how various films have to grossly simplify politics (in part because the interesting stuff about politics can't be visually represented) or music.
This is a problem that seeps into journalism, too. I know, from my experience, that when I wrote an article about the Midwest hacker conference RootFest, I worried about what the photographer would come up with as an image. Beyond the demands of anonymity from various participants, what is there to depict? I had a really fun time at RootFest (though 90% of the talk went over my head), but I didn't see a single mediagenic image the whole time I was there.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, there'd be a lot of logistics to work out, especially in terms of having the data be high-quality, not error-ridden. And data can't really be verified in the same way as code. But perhaps it's worth considering.
Francis Hwang
For example: Let's say you become, for whatever reason, one of the major players in a boycott against some large corporation. In the future, where there will most likely be gobs and gobs of data freely available about everybody, it will be trivial for an unscrupulous corporation to dig up dirt about you. Maybe you use your credit card a lot at a certain motel, which could point to the possibility of an extramarital affair. Maybe you've been buying a lot of DVDs from some hardcore porn site. Companies are composed of hundreds and thousands of people, so character assassination doesn't work nearly so effectively against them, but individuals have much more to fear from this tactic.
But if you just keep your head down, work hard, and never speak out, you won't have a thing to worry about.
Francis Hwang
Scheme takes care of that by just not letting you do any of that. And years later, when my employers were telling me my code was extremely easy to read, I'd credit part of that to the fact that I had to learn how to write clean, elegant code back in school.
Francis Hwang
Unfortunately, those are the people who are intimidated by scientific talk, and often feel that the scientific community doesn't want to hear what they think. (Which is too often the case.)
Francis Hwang
Long before the invention of the IMG tag, universal access was a vital part of the HTML spec -- the spec didn't actually define the presentation of content, just its semantic structuring. Presentation and syntax are supposed to be separate, and the loss of handicapped access is only one of the punishments inflicted on the public by intermingling the two. (There's a very good discussion of these issues in David Siegel's article stumping for the adoption of CSS.)
There are two questions that have to be asked here:
1. Is access to AOL an important part of public life?
This is debatable only to the extent that you focus specifically on AOL's terrible, spammy services; if you use AOL as a stand-in for internet access in general you have to answer yes. Nobody would argue today (especially not on slashdot) that access to internet resources is not significant.
2. Are there reasonable steps that AOL could be taking to make it easier for handicapped users to access their services?
This is a little touchier, because it focuses on the question of what is reasonable design. AOL will probably argue that it needs to rely on an image-heavy layout in order to stay competitive, but that's a hard thing to actually prove. (When you add images, how many users do you add because they're impressed by the flashiness, and how many users do you lose because they're annoyed with the long download time? Both numbers are hard to measure.) And yet, the extent to which blind users lose access to AOL's sites as a result are generally much easier to substantiate: I think it'd be pretty easy for a lawyer to demonstrate how AOL sites are completely unusable for the blind.
I'm all for this lawsuit. Not simply because it's another thorn in AOL's butt (though it is), or because I think we should do what we can to make life a little easier for blind people (though we should). But because I love spare, trimmed-down HTML, and I long for the day when 40-something marketing directors stop treating the Web like it was TV or a magazine. If this suit is successful, it'll get us one day closer to the day when the user, not the producer, controls the presentation -- and that will benefit everybody, blind and sighted alike.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but if you're taking legal advice from some guy bullshitting on some web site, you deserve what you get.
Francis Hwang
I'm generally of the If you can't be bothered to get your ass down to the polls, you don't deserve a say school of thought. Still, I think this is a good idea in theory.
I would, however, be extremely wary of its implementation, particularly because of the disparity in internet access. Adding an internet vote right now would probably drastically skew voting results towards those who currently have internet access.
Of course, if we wanted to decide that internet access should be universal, we could undertake some huge project to give everybody computers with modems, a la the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing electricity to rural communities during the FDR administration. Though, with the political mood of the country these days, that probably sounds too socialistic to get any popular support.
Francis Hwang
Of course, Islamic religious law is by no means consolidated into one central church -- it's splintered, just like any major religion is. You'd have to round up a lot of influential clerics to have any effect.
Or, of course, we could just lobby governments to reject this kind of stuff -- not out of any religious principle, but just because we believe it's wrong. That's what government's supposed to be for, after all.
Francis Hwang
Not exactly the same case, but an interesting thing to compare cybersquatting to.
Francis Hwang
Not sure how much of Roblimo's post is serious, but I felt like weighing in. Regardless of whether you're going to end up with a geek girlfriend or a less tech-obsessed girlfriend, having a decent romantic relationship -- a good relationship with anyone, really, whether a friend or a relative or a lover -- really only hinges on a couple of fundamentals:
They might sound a little cliched, but I sincerely believe that any little rules that can't be derived from those are either superfluous or just plain wrong.
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
Although the complexity of computers makes this worse, this problem is not exclusive to the field: Film is a primarily visual medium, and is generally bad at depicting anything that isn't mostly visual. Witness how various films have to grossly simplify politics (in part because the interesting stuff about politics can't be visually represented) or music.
This is a problem that seeps into journalism, too. I know, from my experience, that when I wrote an article about the Midwest hacker conference RootFest, I worried about what the photographer would come up with as an image. Beyond the demands of anonymity from various participants, what is there to depict? I had a really fun time at RootFest (though 90% of the talk went over my head), but I didn't see a single mediagenic image the whole time I was there.
Francis Hwang