Natural Gas, being the generally used name for naturally occuring methane trapped in rock strata, is not particularly renewable (and is usually mixed up with smaller amounts of other gaseous alkanes). However, there are many processes, both biological and otherwise, that produce methane in decent quantities. So, yeah, methane is renewable. We're just stuck with partial homonymic terminology that confuses us.
You do realise that there is no amorphous blob called the police? You realise that the police are made up of a bunch of people, some of whom are very competent, some of whom are less so. This is why the police can do one job well, and one job badly, because there were different police in handling the issue.
'Tis true that police departments are composed of diverse sorts of individuals of varying levels of competence. However, particular departments can encourage development of certain ways of doing things, certain professional culture, through policies, hiring criteria, and subtler social pressures, such that the vast majority of the officers will behave in a predictable way given the same circumstances. The quality of that behavior depends upon those policies and what the interior culture is.
At the University I attend, there are two neighboring towns which have substatial contact with the students. They have separate police departments, and while they are all individuals as you say, I have a reasonable expectation of being treated fairly by an officer from one of those towns, and not so much from the other. Occassionally I am pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised, but not often. I suspect it has a lot to do with differences of priority, different internal cultures, and probably even different policies.
So many people on slashdot seem to have difficulty in dealing with groups of people. I guess it makes it easier to argue.
The formation of categories and identification of general delineations and trends are crucial to thought and discussion. I agree it can be done well or poorly, and some folks are better at it than others. The trick is to identify which factors of distinction are important and which are trivial. Not always easy, and easy thus to err on the side of excluding something important in the generalization.
That your other post should have been modded troll, you are still incorrect. This line of thinking does not give itself over to slipper-slope thinking, because societies, including ours, have the legal capability to decide where certain responsibilities shift from parent to child. Before that line, it is the parents' responsibility for the child's behavior. After, it is the child's. Charles Manson, for you example, was an adult when he committed his crimes, and so was legally responsible for them, and his parents really don't enter into the picture, except perhaps for psychological curiousity's sake.
No, but that isn't what this is about. It's about power generation and fuel independence for that generation; vehicles in the US use gasoline, and they need not. It could just as easily have been, say, nuclear powerplants generating electricity, and the cars being electric cars (which, if France possesses a primarily nuclear-powered energy economy, might make sense).
As Postman pointed out, laws were created to deal with advertisinbg at a time when all advertisments were expected to make factual truth-claims about their product; false advertising was when an advertiser make a false or erroneous factual claim in their advert about their product. When advertising became about image rather than facts, adverts for the most part ceased to make truth-claims at all. Thus, all those laws no longer apply.
Since many economists have pointed out recently that no economy can function efficiently when the participants have poor knowledge of the transaction and poor knowledge of the product, perhaps capitalism owes it to itself to enourage truth-claims in advertising again, and perhaps sanction or eschew ads that do not. What sort of regulatory mechabnism that might entail I dare not think about, but it might be a start.
It's the official symbol of the Democratic Party, under which Obama is running. When it's a Republiucan-centered story, Slashdot uses an elephant, which is the appropriate symbol for them.
Actually, and this is weird, but for this past fiscal year it turns out that I was wrong about classical sales going down; they went up a significant amount over the previous year. Just search on Google 'beethoven' 'sales' 'decline'...I didn't save the page URL. I guess it might be because true classical enthusiasts can't stand the standard 128 MP3 bitrate because it takes some richness and clarity out of the pieces and so they prefer CD quality sound. Also, most classical fans are slightly older and so used to using CD tech as opposed to MP3 tech. Just a thought.
This is what I get for shooting my mouth off without checking first. The rest of my comment I stand by, though.;)
Which is better than being dead on sight. That was my only point. Not that being a non-Muslim in these countries doesn't suck lots, only that being an apostate Muslim sucks much, much more, in that instant death sort of way.
And the status of Dhimmi has changed drastically over the history of Islam. During the Golden Age of Islam in Iberia, being a dhimmi was very nearly as good as being a Muslim. In Iran now, it suck a great deal. In Saudi Arabia, it sucks way, way more than even in Iran(the Wahhabists seem to be much more touchy about it than the Shi'ites).
Practically, what's the difference between there being more crap music and us being exposed to more crap music with the percentage of crap music being the same?
Absolutely nothing. There is no difference from the end user's perspective; my issue was simply that people are asserting that overall music, as a whole, is getting worse, and that position is silly, for reasons mentioned above. The problem you bring up is I think closer to the real reason why people get frustrated with modern music. The effects of Sturgeon's Law are not such a big deal when you have reliable filters and search tools to find what you are looking for, because then for all intents and purposes you can pretend the 99% junk simply doesn't exist. But, as sheer quantity rises, without a concomitant increase in search algorithm or method efficiency, it simply becomes more difficult to find the 1% good stuff, and as you point out you get lateral exposure to more of that 99% from ambient sources, such as radio is for music.
The problem will reach, I believe, suffocating levels, not in the music industry, but rather on the Web. For now, contextual text searches are good enough to get you where you want most of the time, but given the rate at which total data available increases, finding any particular needle in that haystack is going to get prohibitively hard, such that even the best contextual text search algorithms will spit back mostly crap.
It used to be that metaphysicians were physicists with a massive inferiority complex. But now it seems that the physicists have decided to become metaphysicians. It would be as if all of a sudden all other engineering students decided they would like nothing other than to become Civil Engineers. Sound likely to you? Me either.
* The quality of music has nothing to do with lower CD sales.
I'm sorry, but this is the same brand of BS as the old saw 'things were sooooo much better in my day, and everything since is crap' in every area of every art-form/discipline/job area/whatever since time began. Music doesn't get better or worse; it changes. Due to Sturgeon's Law, 99% of it will be crap, just as 99% of music when you were growing up was crap. Since we are a more media inundated society, the sheer quantities are higher, but proportionately it is the same.
Familiarity with certain styles will make a person more tolerant of mediocre talent in particular genres or styles, but not tolerant of mediocrity in others. To a person who listens to Rock, they might enjoy John Q. Crappy's rock band but can't stand the local sucky hip-hop artist. It doesn't mean that rock music is better. The same goes for generational changes with music, only you have to deal with the additional power of nostalgia.
And, it should be noted that CD sales of Beethoven, Stravinsky, et al. are dropping just as precipitously as modern pop artists, so I would submit that even the 'appearance' of diminshing quality is not a significant causal factor.
The culprit is a simple cultural acclimation to a technology that the industry simply hasn't taken advantage of. And they will probably die for it. Are you crying? I'm not.
You are confusing apostasy, which is defined specifically as 'once being a member of a religion, but turning away from that religion' as opposed to simple 'belief in something else'. Apostasy is thought of in pretty much every religion as betrayal, since you were 'saved' but you turned your back on the truth, whereas if you are merely of a different belief, the attitude is more of pity for the 'ignorant unsaved'. In addition, in Islam, Jews and Christians get a 'not quite as benightedly stupid as everyone else' rank for believeing in the same God; they are called 'Dhimmi' or people of the Book.
The I/E element doesn't seem to be that relevant for choice of music for *private* listening. As an ENTP, I too have a wide range of musical taste, from Philip Glass to System of a Down, but I find that I am much pickier in private than public listening. For me, music playing of any sort that doesn't involve cringing and isn't too fscking loud is an effective lubricant for group social interaction, much like a movie playing in the background.
The real issue is this: DRM restricts the circumstances under which a document may be viewed and reproduced. My concern is that truly revolutionary and sometimes even merely progressive ideas proceed virally, by one person giving his social neighbors a 'copy' of the idea, and so forth. If the most effective presentation mode for that idea happens to be some medium that is under heavily restrictive and effective DRM (I know, effective DRM is so far fictional, but I think not for long) then the technology of DRM will in all probability impede effective dissemination of the idea.
And I disagree on your point, namely that corporate publishers don't publish significant amounts of revolutionary and/or progressive material. I think rather they are the only ones that have the resources to produce and publish to a wide audiences certain types of content of a certain expected quality, esp. movies and television shows. The proportional quantity of rev. content doesn't matter; what matters is the prospective audience size for what little content makes it out in the first place. Since corporations have no (or very little) ideological interest in the content, only a financial interest, they have every motivation in the world to attempt to restrict production and access to channels over which they may expect compensation.
'Simulates real' != 'is real' ; this is the entire illusion or 'magic', if you will, of video in a nutshell. People thought Lonelygirl15 was real because it was professionally produced to appear that way; people watched it because its production values made it watchable (and even enjoyable). Had it been a real person talking about their life, by all odds, it would not have been nearly as compelling.
Somewhere along the same lines, DRM and DRM-related issues are not a 'geek deal' because 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is not well known outside geek circles, but rather because there has been no compelling expression of those issues for the common man in the dominant mediums; if someone capable were to write, say, a comedy screenplay dealing with a world in which DRM had run rampant, with high production values, and it actually gets produced, then the issue will have a chance to penetrate the public consciousness as a whole. Much the same as the evils of slavery became more visible to Northerners after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a vehicle that expressed the ideas to them in a way to whcih they were accustomed to responding. Until the issue is expressed in such a way, it remains a fringe issue for 'issue geeks'.
DRM is a particularly bizarre example because it is an issue about how to control how we dialogue about issues!
You weren't paying attention. 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is an essay. Text. (And about a pretty esoteric subject vis a vis the general population, at that.) As such, it is no surprise that it is less well known than the audio-visual LonelyGirl15 videos, which, incidentally to undercut your 'yahoo' theory of successful media, was produced professionally.
Because the ranting yahoo isn't the issue. They don't change people's minds (on the scale we are discussing, anyway), regardless of the medium. The effectiveness of a message is also dependent in great part by its artistic quality. A message, no matter how perceptive, will not make an impact if its presentation is so ugly or boring that nobody will take the time to view it or if they do to take it seriously. Liek it or not, in an audio-visual world production values contribute or detract from the presentation of a message; good production values require access to (usually expensive) tools, such as good actors and writers, perhaps visually believable abstractions and effects, and an overall aesthetic that matches the intent of the piece.
The public's standards of production values in the age of print were easy (or at least easier) to meet than they are in the audio-visual age, and thus cost less. We don't live in that world anymore.
Fighting DRM =! Fighting against slavery, ethnic cleansing, racism, sexism, facism, totalitarinism....or any other REALLY important social battle.
I would argue that the amount to which social change of any sort is possible is directly correlated with how easy it is to distribute progressive and/or revolutionary ideas to sympathetic eyes and ears (to console them) and neutral eyes and ears (to convince them) and even to hostile eyes and ears (to force a response of some sort). Each one of the social battles you mentioned were fought first in the hearts and minds of the constituents of the relevant society (and sometimes, much later, with the blood and bullets of those same constituents) with media campaigns books, movies, etc.. e.g. Common Sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Liberator, Philadelphia, Feminine Mystique, the Killing fields, etc.
DRM is more than merely 'geek-worrisome' because corporations are invested heavily in the social status quo, explicitly or not: If the social status quo changes, that causes social unrest, and social unrest is generally very bad for business. Thus, if distribution of information is locked down into easily controlled channels, then corporations have an easy way to squeeze one viewpoint (advocating change) out of an effective medium of discourse, or promote one that champions the status-quo. Large corporations, by virtue of the system that we live in, already control most of the money needed to distribute widescale; it would be a very poor idea to also give them control of the means!
And whether english teachers particularly like it or not, the current and probably subsequent generations are going to rely heavily upon the audio-visual vocabularies of TV, movies, and videogames to make sense out of the world around them, rather than the eariler generations' reliance upon textual modes and vocabularies. These newer modes of expression, having a high technological and financial overhead, are easier to control if control is allowed. So, yeah, the stakes are quite high.
You're mixing up ancient (and long dead) political parties' titles with a form of government. Federalism is a form of government where governing duties are divvied up between two different layers of government, one national, and one more local. Maine saying 'hey, IDs are our job not the feds' is a blow for, not against, Federalism as it lives in the US Constitution (10th amendment, most specifically). The anti-federalists were, IIRC, a political movement opposing the ratification of the US Constitution (and the federation that would be created by that document); they preferred the pre-existing Confederation, which was a much looser union with few if any national gov't duties to speak of.
One might even go a little further and assert that US soldiers would be even less likely to fire on unarmed US citizens than armed ones, because there can be no legitimate or legal military order in those cases as well as little room for personal justification after-the-fact.
Notwithstanding that optimism, there was the Kent State incident, so perhaps not.
I like your points. On the first I'd say that an opt-out list is a good step up (and away) from criminalization, and as you say can be effective in some communications contexts. The only concern there is my wariness (to a much lesser degree I suppose) in the same vein, that if one opts out of all telemarketers, for example, it absolutely prevents the possibility that one might receive a 'good' (i.e. useful or advertising an appropriate or beneficial product) telemarket call. One might say that that is a small price to pay for avoiding the hassle of such calls overall, and I'd probably be inclined to agree.
On the whole 'spammers are abusing a system and should be punished in concordance with that abuse' I am of two minds as well. On one hand the principles of justice seem to require that major potentially socially destabilising abuses be met with the force of law, but it is never really clear whether such a disruption qualifies. Spam itself is probably an easier case, but one might think of other systems that are abused (manipulated for purely selfish gain) which may not meet such a level. Currency speculation and arbitrage is one example that comes to mind; an arbitrageur is indeed exploiting a market inefficiency for purely personal gain, with at best questionable benefit for the overall efficiency of the resulting market, and possibly very nasty negative consequences for other people due to their activities. Still, it is thought of as generally acceptable.
On the last point, I think this has a great deal to do with personal taste and the amount of spam one is willing to put up with. If you are willing to be more charitable with one's public contacts as to the information content of their subject lines, then you must pay for this charity in terms of a less favorable signal-to-noise ratio when it comes time to try to filter them out. Personally I think it would be better overall if people took the time to actually give some descriptive information, but the medium itself so far seems to encourage very unreflective and unthoughtful, or perhaps at best simply overly speedy communication. The type of cultural etiquette standards that would have to be necessary (and fairly globally held) in order to put a real dent in spam are probably unrealistically stringent. And you are right; humans are not poerfect pattern recognition filters, and some legitimate messages would undoubtedly still be lost. I do think some minimum standards, while not helping particularly with the spam, might at least help for us to have a more mindful understanding of how e-mail changes our ways of communicating (not just in the sense of its speed). When letters took days to mail, people put more thought into what was written, so I know it's not strictly impossible for folks to do.
On occasion I have been accused of being a flaming optimist.;)
Respectfully I have to disagree just a slight bit. While I'd agree on the whole that most spam borders on harrassment rather than free speech, I would say that it is a hard line to draw about the appropriate ratio of 'pull' to 'push' (and I'd argue that all methods of communication, including most forms of what we might call 'legitimate' advertisement, have a mix of both). Which is why I agree more with your assessment, or rather, the way it was presented, than the 'shouting penis in my home' metaphor guy; I mainly object to the metaphor, not the underlying point.
However, I must admit to a certain degree of discomfort with where this leads; I know of no one (but myself) who is capable of judging my tolerance threshold for me, and criminalizing certain types of marketing wholesale is nearly guaranteed to err on the wrong side of the line. I also have real serious problems with enforcement when, with easy anonymous violation conditions such prosecution might be futile; some other discouragement approach might work better from a pragmatic sense. Some poster the other day in a different article suggested better user education, and while I scoffed at the time, maybe he/she was onto something.
While this may make me something of an 'e-mail prick' or somesuch, I tend to think that in a context like e-mail or snail mail where the sender has only the subject line or some equivalent short bit of data to explain to me why I should open it, a descriptive e-mail heading meaningful to me is the only thing that's gonna get me to open the damn mail. 're: your mail' and somesuch should be ignored just as readily as 're: penis PILLS'; there is an etiquette that develops in all communicative mediums over time to circumvent just these sorts of problems, and these types of positive flags (e.g. well-formed, descriptive, meaningful headers by legitimate email users) would help in ways that even the best spam filter and its list of negative flags would not. And of course, both approaches meet in the middle; a spam filter brings down the haystack to a human-heuristic filterable level, and then the human searches for and opens in this haystack only e-mails very likely to contain a needle, indicated by well-formed 'e-mail courteous' subject lines. A spammer in this case would have to be damn clever with his subject header generators (damn things would nearly have to pass a Turing Test) to defeat this two-pronged approach. Education and evolving standards of etiquette vis a vis legitimate use of e-mail might help reduce spam not by criminalizing it but simply by making it less effective at making money.
Slashdot Mirror
Natural Gas, being the generally used name for naturally occuring methane trapped in rock strata, is not particularly renewable (and is usually mixed up with smaller amounts of other gaseous alkanes). However, there are many processes, both biological and otherwise, that produce methane in decent quantities. So, yeah, methane is renewable. We're just stuck with partial homonymic terminology that confuses us.
You do realise that there is no amorphous blob called the police? You realise that the police are made up of a bunch of people, some of whom are very competent, some of whom are less so. This is why the police can do one job well, and one job badly, because there were different police in handling the issue.
'Tis true that police departments are composed of diverse sorts of individuals of varying levels of competence. However, particular departments can encourage development of certain ways of doing things, certain professional culture, through policies, hiring criteria, and subtler social pressures, such that the vast majority of the officers will behave in a predictable way given the same circumstances. The quality of that behavior depends upon those policies and what the interior culture is.
At the University I attend, there are two neighboring towns which have substatial contact with the students. They have separate police departments, and while they are all individuals as you say, I have a reasonable expectation of being treated fairly by an officer from one of those towns, and not so much from the other. Occassionally I am pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised, but not often. I suspect it has a lot to do with differences of priority, different internal cultures, and probably even different policies.
So many people on slashdot seem to have difficulty in dealing with groups of people. I guess it makes it easier to argue.
The formation of categories and identification of general delineations and trends are crucial to thought and discussion. I agree it can be done well or poorly, and some folks are better at it than others. The trick is to identify which factors of distinction are important and which are trivial. Not always easy, and easy thus to err on the side of excluding something important in the generalization.
[...]Members might find some 'unusual' feedback on their lines, however.
Ugh, that is soooo last century. ;) 21st century surveillance is new and improved; you need not have a clue you are being watched at all!
That your other post should have been modded troll, you are still incorrect. This line of thinking does not give itself over to slipper-slope thinking, because societies, including ours, have the legal capability to decide where certain responsibilities shift from parent to child. Before that line, it is the parents' responsibility for the child's behavior. After, it is the child's. Charles Manson, for you example, was an adult when he committed his crimes, and so was legally responsible for them, and his parents really don't enter into the picture, except perhaps for psychological curiousity's sake.
No, but that isn't what this is about. It's about power generation and fuel independence for that generation; vehicles in the US use gasoline, and they need not. It could just as easily have been, say, nuclear powerplants generating electricity, and the cars being electric cars (which, if France possesses a primarily nuclear-powered energy economy, might make sense).
As Postman pointed out, laws were created to deal with advertisinbg at a time when all advertisments were expected to make factual truth-claims about their product; false advertising was when an advertiser make a false or erroneous factual claim in their advert about their product. When advertising became about image rather than facts, adverts for the most part ceased to make truth-claims at all. Thus, all those laws no longer apply.
Since many economists have pointed out recently that no economy can function efficiently when the participants have poor knowledge of the transaction and poor knowledge of the product, perhaps capitalism owes it to itself to enourage truth-claims in advertising again, and perhaps sanction or eschew ads that do not. What sort of regulatory mechabnism that might entail I dare not think about, but it might be a start.
I thought France said 'fuck it!' and went nuclear a while back. No?
It's the official symbol of the Democratic Party, under which Obama is running. When it's a Republiucan-centered story, Slashdot uses an elephant, which is the appropriate symbol for them.
Actually, and this is weird, but for this past fiscal year it turns out that I was wrong about classical sales going down; they went up a significant amount over the previous year. Just search on Google 'beethoven' 'sales' 'decline'...I didn't save the page URL. I guess it might be because true classical enthusiasts can't stand the standard 128 MP3 bitrate because it takes some richness and clarity out of the pieces and so they prefer CD quality sound. Also, most classical fans are slightly older and so used to using CD tech as opposed to MP3 tech. Just a thought.
This is what I get for shooting my mouth off without checking first. The rest of my comment I stand by, though. ;)
Which is better than being dead on sight. That was my only point. Not that being a non-Muslim in these countries doesn't suck lots, only that being an apostate Muslim sucks much, much more, in that instant death sort of way.
And the status of Dhimmi has changed drastically over the history of Islam. During the Golden Age of Islam in Iberia, being a dhimmi was very nearly as good as being a Muslim. In Iran now, it suck a great deal. In Saudi Arabia, it sucks way, way more than even in Iran(the Wahhabists seem to be much more touchy about it than the Shi'ites).
You got friended for that one. ;)
Practically, what's the difference between there being more crap music and us being exposed to more crap music with the percentage of crap music being the same?
Absolutely nothing. There is no difference from the end user's perspective; my issue was simply that people are asserting that overall music, as a whole, is getting worse, and that position is silly, for reasons mentioned above. The problem you bring up is I think closer to the real reason why people get frustrated with modern music. The effects of Sturgeon's Law are not such a big deal when you have reliable filters and search tools to find what you are looking for, because then for all intents and purposes you can pretend the 99% junk simply doesn't exist. But, as sheer quantity rises, without a concomitant increase in search algorithm or method efficiency, it simply becomes more difficult to find the 1% good stuff, and as you point out you get lateral exposure to more of that 99% from ambient sources, such as radio is for music.
The problem will reach, I believe, suffocating levels, not in the music industry, but rather on the Web. For now, contextual text searches are good enough to get you where you want most of the time, but given the rate at which total data available increases, finding any particular needle in that haystack is going to get prohibitively hard, such that even the best contextual text search algorithms will spit back mostly crap.
It used to be that metaphysicians were physicists with a massive inferiority complex. But now it seems that the physicists have decided to become metaphysicians. It would be as if all of a sudden all other engineering students decided they would like nothing other than to become Civil Engineers. Sound likely to you? Me either.
* The quality of music has nothing to do with lower CD sales.
I'm sorry, but this is the same brand of BS as the old saw 'things were sooooo much better in my day, and everything since is crap' in every area of every art-form/discipline/job area/whatever since time began. Music doesn't get better or worse; it changes. Due to Sturgeon's Law, 99% of it will be crap, just as 99% of music when you were growing up was crap. Since we are a more media inundated society, the sheer quantities are higher, but proportionately it is the same.
Familiarity with certain styles will make a person more tolerant of mediocre talent in particular genres or styles, but not tolerant of mediocrity in others. To a person who listens to Rock, they might enjoy John Q. Crappy's rock band but can't stand the local sucky hip-hop artist. It doesn't mean that rock music is better. The same goes for generational changes with music, only you have to deal with the additional power of nostalgia.
And, it should be noted that CD sales of Beethoven, Stravinsky, et al. are dropping just as precipitously as modern pop artists, so I would submit that even the 'appearance' of diminshing quality is not a significant causal factor.
The culprit is a simple cultural acclimation to a technology that the industry simply hasn't taken advantage of. And they will probably die for it. Are you crying? I'm not.
You are confusing apostasy, which is defined specifically as 'once being a member of a religion, but turning away from that religion' as opposed to simple 'belief in something else'. Apostasy is thought of in pretty much every religion as betrayal, since you were 'saved' but you turned your back on the truth, whereas if you are merely of a different belief, the attitude is more of pity for the 'ignorant unsaved'. In addition, in Islam, Jews and Christians get a 'not quite as benightedly stupid as everyone else' rank for believeing in the same God; they are called 'Dhimmi' or people of the Book.
The I/E element doesn't seem to be that relevant for choice of music for *private* listening. As an ENTP, I too have a wide range of musical taste, from Philip Glass to System of a Down, but I find that I am much pickier in private than public listening. For me, music playing of any sort that doesn't involve cringing and isn't too fscking loud is an effective lubricant for group social interaction, much like a movie playing in the background.
The real issue is this: DRM restricts the circumstances under which a document may be viewed and reproduced. My concern is that truly revolutionary and sometimes even merely progressive ideas proceed virally, by one person giving his social neighbors a 'copy' of the idea, and so forth. If the most effective presentation mode for that idea happens to be some medium that is under heavily restrictive and effective DRM (I know, effective DRM is so far fictional, but I think not for long) then the technology of DRM will in all probability impede effective dissemination of the idea.
And I disagree on your point, namely that corporate publishers don't publish significant amounts of revolutionary and/or progressive material. I think rather they are the only ones that have the resources to produce and publish to a wide audiences certain types of content of a certain expected quality, esp. movies and television shows. The proportional quantity of rev. content doesn't matter; what matters is the prospective audience size for what little content makes it out in the first place. Since corporations have no (or very little) ideological interest in the content, only a financial interest, they have every motivation in the world to attempt to restrict production and access to channels over which they may expect compensation.
'Simulates real' != 'is real' ; this is the entire illusion or 'magic', if you will, of video in a nutshell. People thought Lonelygirl15 was real because it was professionally produced to appear that way; people watched it because its production values made it watchable (and even enjoyable). Had it been a real person talking about their life, by all odds, it would not have been nearly as compelling.
Somewhere along the same lines, DRM and DRM-related issues are not a 'geek deal' because 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is not well known outside geek circles, but rather because there has been no compelling expression of those issues for the common man in the dominant mediums; if someone capable were to write, say, a comedy screenplay dealing with a world in which DRM had run rampant, with high production values, and it actually gets produced, then the issue will have a chance to penetrate the public consciousness as a whole. Much the same as the evils of slavery became more visible to Northerners after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a vehicle that expressed the ideas to them in a way to whcih they were accustomed to responding. Until the issue is expressed in such a way, it remains a fringe issue for 'issue geeks'.
DRM is a particularly bizarre example because it is an issue about how to control how we dialogue about issues!
You weren't paying attention. 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is an essay. Text. (And about a pretty esoteric subject vis a vis the general population, at that.) As such, it is no surprise that it is less well known than the audio-visual LonelyGirl15 videos, which, incidentally to undercut your 'yahoo' theory of successful media, was produced professionally.
Poor example on both sides. Try again.
Because the ranting yahoo isn't the issue. They don't change people's minds (on the scale we are discussing, anyway), regardless of the medium. The effectiveness of a message is also dependent in great part by its artistic quality. A message, no matter how perceptive, will not make an impact if its presentation is so ugly or boring that nobody will take the time to view it or if they do to take it seriously. Liek it or not, in an audio-visual world production values contribute or detract from the presentation of a message; good production values require access to (usually expensive) tools, such as good actors and writers, perhaps visually believable abstractions and effects, and an overall aesthetic that matches the intent of the piece.
The public's standards of production values in the age of print were easy (or at least easier) to meet than they are in the audio-visual age, and thus cost less. We don't live in that world anymore.
Fighting DRM =! Fighting against slavery, ethnic cleansing, racism, sexism, facism, totalitarinism....or any other REALLY important social battle.
I would argue that the amount to which social change of any sort is possible is directly correlated with how easy it is to distribute progressive and/or revolutionary ideas to sympathetic eyes and ears (to console them) and neutral eyes and ears (to convince them) and even to hostile eyes and ears (to force a response of some sort). Each one of the social battles you mentioned were fought first in the hearts and minds of the constituents of the relevant society (and sometimes, much later, with the blood and bullets of those same constituents) with media campaigns books, movies, etc.. e.g. Common Sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Liberator, Philadelphia, Feminine Mystique, the Killing fields, etc.
DRM is more than merely 'geek-worrisome' because corporations are invested heavily in the social status quo, explicitly or not: If the social status quo changes, that causes social unrest, and social unrest is generally very bad for business. Thus, if distribution of information is locked down into easily controlled channels, then corporations have an easy way to squeeze one viewpoint (advocating change) out of an effective medium of discourse, or promote one that champions the status-quo. Large corporations, by virtue of the system that we live in, already control most of the money needed to distribute widescale; it would be a very poor idea to also give them control of the means!
And whether english teachers particularly like it or not, the current and probably subsequent generations are going to rely heavily upon the audio-visual vocabularies of TV, movies, and videogames to make sense out of the world around them, rather than the eariler generations' reliance upon textual modes and vocabularies. These newer modes of expression, having a high technological and financial overhead, are easier to control if control is allowed. So, yeah, the stakes are quite high.
You're mixing up ancient (and long dead) political parties' titles with a form of government. Federalism is a form of government where governing duties are divvied up between two different layers of government, one national, and one more local. Maine saying 'hey, IDs are our job not the feds' is a blow for, not against, Federalism as it lives in the US Constitution (10th amendment, most specifically). The anti-federalists were, IIRC, a political movement opposing the ratification of the US Constitution (and the federation that would be created by that document); they preferred the pre-existing Confederation, which was a much looser union with few if any national gov't duties to speak of.
One might even go a little further and assert that US soldiers would be even less likely to fire on unarmed US citizens than armed ones, because there can be no legitimate or legal military order in those cases as well as little room for personal justification after-the-fact.
Notwithstanding that optimism, there was the Kent State incident, so perhaps not.
I like your points. On the first I'd say that an opt-out list is a good step up (and away) from criminalization, and as you say can be effective in some communications contexts. The only concern there is my wariness (to a much lesser degree I suppose) in the same vein, that if one opts out of all telemarketers, for example, it absolutely prevents the possibility that one might receive a 'good' (i.e. useful or advertising an appropriate or beneficial product) telemarket call. One might say that that is a small price to pay for avoiding the hassle of such calls overall, and I'd probably be inclined to agree.
On the whole 'spammers are abusing a system and should be punished in concordance with that abuse' I am of two minds as well. On one hand the principles of justice seem to require that major potentially socially destabilising abuses be met with the force of law, but it is never really clear whether such a disruption qualifies. Spam itself is probably an easier case, but one might think of other systems that are abused (manipulated for purely selfish gain) which may not meet such a level. Currency speculation and arbitrage is one example that comes to mind; an arbitrageur is indeed exploiting a market inefficiency for purely personal gain, with at best questionable benefit for the overall efficiency of the resulting market, and possibly very nasty negative consequences for other people due to their activities. Still, it is thought of as generally acceptable.
On the last point, I think this has a great deal to do with personal taste and the amount of spam one is willing to put up with. If you are willing to be more charitable with one's public contacts as to the information content of their subject lines, then you must pay for this charity in terms of a less favorable signal-to-noise ratio when it comes time to try to filter them out. Personally I think it would be better overall if people took the time to actually give some descriptive information, but the medium itself so far seems to encourage very unreflective and unthoughtful, or perhaps at best simply overly speedy communication. The type of cultural etiquette standards that would have to be necessary (and fairly globally held) in order to put a real dent in spam are probably unrealistically stringent. And you are right; humans are not poerfect pattern recognition filters, and some legitimate messages would undoubtedly still be lost. I do think some minimum standards, while not helping particularly with the spam, might at least help for us to have a more mindful understanding of how e-mail changes our ways of communicating (not just in the sense of its speed). When letters took days to mail, people put more thought into what was written, so I know it's not strictly impossible for folks to do.
On occasion I have been accused of being a flaming optimist. ;)
Respectfully I have to disagree just a slight bit. While I'd agree on the whole that most spam borders on harrassment rather than free speech, I would say that it is a hard line to draw about the appropriate ratio of 'pull' to 'push' (and I'd argue that all methods of communication, including most forms of what we might call 'legitimate' advertisement, have a mix of both). Which is why I agree more with your assessment, or rather, the way it was presented, than the 'shouting penis in my home' metaphor guy; I mainly object to the metaphor, not the underlying point.
However, I must admit to a certain degree of discomfort with where this leads; I know of no one (but myself) who is capable of judging my tolerance threshold for me, and criminalizing certain types of marketing wholesale is nearly guaranteed to err on the wrong side of the line. I also have real serious problems with enforcement when, with easy anonymous violation conditions such prosecution might be futile; some other discouragement approach might work better from a pragmatic sense. Some poster the other day in a different article suggested better user education, and while I scoffed at the time, maybe he/she was onto something.
While this may make me something of an 'e-mail prick' or somesuch, I tend to think that in a context like e-mail or snail mail where the sender has only the subject line or some equivalent short bit of data to explain to me why I should open it, a descriptive e-mail heading meaningful to me is the only thing that's gonna get me to open the damn mail. 're: your mail' and somesuch should be ignored just as readily as 're: penis PILLS'; there is an etiquette that develops in all communicative mediums over time to circumvent just these sorts of problems, and these types of positive flags (e.g. well-formed, descriptive, meaningful headers by legitimate email users) would help in ways that even the best spam filter and its list of negative flags would not. And of course, both approaches meet in the middle; a spam filter brings down the haystack to a human-heuristic filterable level, and then the human searches for and opens in this haystack only e-mails very likely to contain a needle, indicated by well-formed 'e-mail courteous' subject lines. A spammer in this case would have to be damn clever with his subject header generators (damn things would nearly have to pass a Turing Test) to defeat this two-pronged approach. Education and evolving standards of etiquette vis a vis legitimate use of e-mail might help reduce spam not by criminalizing it but simply by making it less effective at making money.