The problem is Shirky didn't take a few things into account:
Don't forget the problem of "50% of the people are below average" I don't mean that as any kind of insult, just an observation of reality. When you are talking about global scale projects like Wikipedia, the contributions that make it a valuable resource are the ones that come from people with expertise. That severely limits the number of people who can contribute meaningfully, a sort of self enforcing version of the adage "20% of the people do 80% of the work." That doesn't mean that everyone else can't contribute to society in a better way than watching TV but that the internet doesn't really open up a new world of possiblites. The best ways for the Average Joe to contribute have been around for quite some time: Big Brothers/Big Sisters, rebuilding the Gulf Coast, being a real part of you community, being an involved parent. These are all things that most everyone can do, but that often lose out to TV.
denatured alcohol being un-drinkable has more to do with taxes than sin.
and denatured sugar has more to do with farm subsidies and protectionism than food quality or safety. The fact that when they denature grain alcohol or in this case sugar, suddenly the price plummets, tells me that those "food grade" products are horribly over priced.
How insulting is it to the Mexican sugar farmer to tell him "If you want export sugar to the US, you have to poison it first and then only charge 1/8th the price that US farmers charge. But no you cannot immigrate to the US. Hooray for the North American Free Trade Agreement."
The irony is that TV makers brought it onto themselves by constantly lowering standards.
I don't think that's true. Compare a season of "Heroes" to a season of "A-Team" or "Night Rider". Look at the quality progression of "Star Trek" "Star Trek:the Next Generation" "Battlestar Galactica". I think television quality has migrated towards the extremes, there is some television that is very good, and some that makes Charlie the Unicorn look brilliant. I'm hoping that the rise of YouTube is going to be the end of reality TV.
PACs are bad in that they have usurped the power of our vote. But for this country to be a democracy, we must recognize that (in this modern age) advocacy is just as vital a way of communicating with our "representatives" as voting is. Unless you Senator is a regular slashdot reader, they don't know why you won't be voting for them next election, and there are far to many possible issues for them to guess which is important. A letter that may or may not make it past the office staff is not nearly as effective as someone taking your senator to lunch to discuss why thousands of constituents feel that the DMCA is a bad bad law. But if you refuse to try to gain influence for issues you feel are important through the use of PACs on the basis that they are evil, then only the willingly evil will have PACs and only the evil will have full representation in our pay-to-play democracy.
If they post the music, along with an open letter to Congress requesting the radical alteration and/or repeal of recent copyright legislation like the NET Act or the DMCA, then I would consider spending my money with them.
Open letters to Congress don't mean nearly as much as professional lobbying, I would much rather see a Metallica team up with other musicians (perhaps Radiohead and NIN) to form a "Fans are not Criminals" political action committee and have a PAC contribution option with every download.
PI: scribe a circle, precisely measure it's diameter, precisely measure it's circumference, divide circumference by diameter and you get PI. There is no sqrt of (-1) you are just imagining it. It was theorized by observing peyote.
The math exists regardless of the symbolism used to describe it.
Math is the symbolism used to describe the universe. Physical reality does not need symbols or tools or sentience to function, we however need math to describe the functions of the universe in precise detail. Math is a tool and so is an invented thing where the ideas have come from observing the world around us, just like a knife or velcro are tools that where invented based off of ideas gleaned from observations of the world around us.
Well that would really suck IF capital gains were taxed at 38%, but here in America long term capital gains are taxed at about 15%. If you are paying 38% your accountant is stealing from you.
One third of the wealth is in the highest ONE PERCENT. the middle class doesn't start anywhere near the 99% mark. The top 10% (which owns 80% of the investment wealth) doesn't start until $350k a year, and that's by 2005 numbers. High capital gains taxes don't hurt people making under $100k because so little of their income is capital gains based. While many of the wealthiest make most of their money via capital gains like warren buffet and hedge fund managers. Now if capital gains goes up 2% that would let income tax come down 1% (yes this is a rough estimation). So anyone who makes less than a third of their income off of capital gains would pay less tax, that means the middle and lower classes.
One of the problems with the historically-high capital gains tax, is that 2/3rds of the investment shares are held by middle-class folks, NOT by the very rich.
It's interesting to consider whether power beamed down from orbit even has much of a future.
I'm not sure solar power from orbit is going to be that good an idea as a primary world power source, at least until global warming is already largely solved. I may well be over simplifying things, but isn't the basic problem of global warming a matter of too much energy in the biosphere? How is adding more energy to the equation going to do anything but make it worse? I know that ideally it would replace hydrocarbon fuels and greenhouse gas levels would plummet, but during the transition time where we would still have the greenhouse gases but adding additional power (heat) to the biosphere it would seem to be pushing us all too close or over a tipping point, like the release of undersea methane.
It's a matter of conditioning and mindset. I've seen people blow chunks when they catch the smell of spoiled casein paint, but because I know what it is and I have acclimated to it, I am no longer bothered by the smell. It makes sense to instinctually associate blood with violence and death (and thus be revolted) unless you have learned other associations with it. Most trauma injuries make me think of mountain biking.
The U.S. gives more money to countries in need than anyone other country in the world...
If you're going to rattle off broad claims like this you should at least cite them.
Umm, they pay about one third of the taxes, which makes sense in a flat tax kind of way because the top 1% own one third of the assets in the US. Now while that seems fair enough, until you look at the distribution of investment assets (that is assets that are actually earning money and are not necessary for the owner's day to day life) now the richest 1% hold 40% of the investment assets.
These people have a lot of nerve to ask me for money to be able to read my private papers and correspondence.
Ask?... really? I must have missed that part while I was filling out my tax returns. Maybe the language they use when "asking" for my money is just a bit obscure. It sounds to me like they are saying: "give us money or armed men will take you away to prison for a year and we will take a $25,000 penalty out of your savings." You are not being asked for permission, you are being informed of a decision made by your betters.
I'm certain that some of the cars zooming down I-80 across Chicago are involved in some illegal activity. Does that mean that every car should be stopped and searched? It's possible that in one of the houses or apartments on my block there is something illegal to some extent going on. Should the FBI have open access to all the residences then?
Just yesterday, there was the sentiment expressed that hunting pedophiles should trump privacy. At one time that post was up to +4 insightful. Slashdotters tend to be very protective of online privacy rights, far more so than the average American, I suspect that the reasoning expressed in that post would have appealed strongly to most Americans. So all that needs to happen to make this go forward to for someone to say that the FBI tap is needed to stop the pedophiles and it's a done deal. Anyone who opposes FBI internet filtering is a child rapist. Any private citizen using encryption is a baby touching terrorist.
"While he was on bail for the first charges, he then molested and killed another girl.
The investigation took YEARS for the murder, because" some dumb-ass let him out on bail, which is why the murder happened at all. The more highly-emotionally charged the example, the more important it is to carefully analyze where the flaws in system allowed for a repeat offense. Protecting someone's rights, must by definition always be right. I don't think Google would be wrong in complying with a search warrant (or the Brazilian equivalent) but I do think it would be wrong for them to open up everyones account for the purposes of data mining for pedophiles. Imagine if the data was stored in everyone's homes instead of stored with Google, search warrants naming individuals could be used to search their home PCs. Data mining would be cops going door-to-door searching everyone's PC in order to find which people are pedophiles. The heinousness of pedophilia would not excuse the violation of a nationwide door-to-door search of everyone's home computers and it does not excuse the mining of storage that was presented as and expected to be, private.
At their theoretical 100% efficiency, it's about a wash, though you'll still have to visit the pump half again as often to fill up.
It might be a wash when you just analyze the dollar cost, but when you consider the source of the fuel being purchased, it becomes a bargain again. First off, a dollar will be far more likely to eventually spent on a product that I make a living producing, if that dollar stays my country. Secondly, if our fuel source is domestically produced then the military protection of that fuel source is already taken care of at a great savings to the tax payer. And lastly, even if the biofuel burns inefficiently it is still carbon neutral.
forced to code so well that normal warranties can be offered. This would stop the massive release of perpetual betaware that has never ending security and functionality issues, and separate the truly thoughtful and "engineering first" efforts- from the good companies that would succeed
That is true, but it would also raise the price of an OS several fold and require more restrictions to be placed on application designers. Car manufacturers can require that you only use certain, high rated tires for their cars. They have to do this in order to protect themselves from the kind of liability that you are suggesting for software companies. So unless you relish the idea of never using third party software ever again, and having a very short list of "approved software" available only at prices that reflect the increase of liability insurance, than you need to get used to the idea that the user is largely responsible for the integrity of their system. Look at what high exposure to liability has done for the medical field, why introduce that to the software field?
You make a series of pretty huge assumptions here, many of which are unlikely.
1) you assume that the 50 gateway points will be managed properly.
2) you assume that access to those gateway points will be managed effectively.
3) you assume that the underlying network design is intelligently put together.
I think the assumption is more along the lines of: 50 gateway points are more likely to be managed properly than 4000 points. Those 50 points will have a great deal of attention and resources allocated to them, about 80 times the amount per point of the previous 4000 points. When the government really cares about a project (read military) they can be very intelligent, just look at the stealth bomber. They are only haphazard when it is a project that exists only to please the public (read medi-care, or social security)
the complexity of the security industry is forcing it away from end-users and into the hands of companies who can bundle it with the products that need it.
Great, once again the tools I need to protect myself are being taken away given to "the professionals". So if all the security tools go to the ISPs and other infrastructure how do I protect myself from ISP spyware?
Because then he can't tell that his bags have been searched. The very idea of the TSA lock is laughable, it's the TSA baggage handlers that we need to protect our luggage from. They have the same trustworthiness as the police. Most of them do their jobs well enough. There are a few who abuse their positions in big or small ways and the rest look the other way because they "have to watch out for their own" or they don't want to "snitch".
if something is missing from your bag file a claim before you leave the airport. NWA actually requires you to file the claim at the airport
So when I'm in a NorthWest terminal I should expect to find an area with tables where I can open up my luggage to do an inventory there in the airport, right?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is Shirky didn't take a few things into account:
Don't forget the problem of "50% of the people are below average" I don't mean that as any kind of insult, just an observation of reality. When you are talking about global scale projects like Wikipedia, the contributions that make it a valuable resource are the ones that come from people with expertise. That severely limits the number of people who can contribute meaningfully, a sort of self enforcing version of the adage "20% of the people do 80% of the work." That doesn't mean that everyone else can't contribute to society in a better way than watching TV but that the internet doesn't really open up a new world of possiblites. The best ways for the Average Joe to contribute have been around for quite some time: Big Brothers/Big Sisters, rebuilding the Gulf Coast, being a real part of you community, being an involved parent. These are all things that most everyone can do, but that often lose out to TV.
denatured alcohol being un-drinkable has more to do with taxes than sin.
and denatured sugar has more to do with farm subsidies and protectionism than food quality or safety. The fact that when they denature grain alcohol or in this case sugar, suddenly the price plummets, tells me that those "food grade" products are horribly over priced.
How insulting is it to the Mexican sugar farmer to tell him "If you want export sugar to the US, you have to poison it first and then only charge 1/8th the price that US farmers charge. But no you cannot immigrate to the US. Hooray for the North American Free Trade Agreement."
The irony is that TV makers brought it onto themselves by constantly lowering standards.
I don't think that's true. Compare a season of "Heroes" to a season of "A-Team" or "Night Rider". Look at the quality progression of "Star Trek" "Star Trek:the Next Generation" "Battlestar Galactica". I think television quality has migrated towards the extremes, there is some television that is very good, and some that makes Charlie the Unicorn look brilliant. I'm hoping that the rise of YouTube is going to be the end of reality TV.
PACs are bad in that they have usurped the power of our vote. But for this country to be a democracy, we must recognize that (in this modern age) advocacy is just as vital a way of communicating with our "representatives" as voting is. Unless you Senator is a regular slashdot reader, they don't know why you won't be voting for them next election, and there are far to many possible issues for them to guess which is important. A letter that may or may not make it past the office staff is not nearly as effective as someone taking your senator to lunch to discuss why thousands of constituents feel that the DMCA is a bad bad law. But if you refuse to try to gain influence for issues you feel are important through the use of PACs on the basis that they are evil, then only the willingly evil will have PACs and only the evil will have full representation in our pay-to-play democracy.
If they post the music, along with an open letter to Congress requesting the radical alteration and/or repeal of recent copyright legislation like the NET Act or the DMCA, then I would consider spending my money with them.
Open letters to Congress don't mean nearly as much as professional lobbying, I would much rather see a Metallica team up with other musicians (perhaps Radiohead and NIN) to form a "Fans are not Criminals" political action committee and have a PAC contribution option with every download.
PI: scribe a circle, precisely measure it's diameter, precisely measure it's circumference, divide circumference by diameter and you get PI.
There is no sqrt of (-1) you are just imagining it. It was theorized by observing peyote.
The math exists regardless of the symbolism used to describe it.
Math is the symbolism used to describe the universe. Physical reality does not need symbols or tools or sentience to function, we however need math to describe the functions of the universe in precise detail. Math is a tool and so is an invented thing where the ideas have come from observing the world around us, just like a knife or velcro are tools that where invented based off of ideas gleaned from observations of the world around us.
Well that would really suck IF capital gains were taxed at 38%, but here in America long term capital gains are taxed at about 15%. If you are paying 38% your accountant is stealing from you.
One third of the wealth is in the highest ONE PERCENT. the middle class doesn't start anywhere near the 99% mark. The top 10% (which owns 80% of the investment wealth) doesn't start until $350k a year, and that's by 2005 numbers. High capital gains taxes don't hurt people making under $100k because so little of their income is capital gains based. While many of the wealthiest make most of their money via capital gains like warren buffet and hedge fund managers. Now if capital gains goes up 2% that would let income tax come down 1% (yes this is a rough estimation). So anyone who makes less than a third of their income off of capital gains would pay less tax, that means the middle and lower classes.
Top Hat sales have plummeted since their heyday in the 1900's.
One of the problems with the historically-high capital gains tax, is that 2/3rds of the investment shares are held by middle-class folks, NOT by the very rich.
Could you post a link to that statistic, because from what I've read the wealthiest five percent of Americans hold 59% of the wealth. and roughly 68% of investment wealth. Expand that to the top ten percent and those numbers become 71%(net worth) and 80%(investment) of the wealth respectively.
It's interesting to consider whether power beamed down from orbit even has much of a future.
I'm not sure solar power from orbit is going to be that good an idea as a primary world power source, at least until global warming is already largely solved. I may well be over simplifying things, but isn't the basic problem of global warming a matter of too much energy in the biosphere? How is adding more energy to the equation going to do anything but make it worse? I know that ideally it would replace hydrocarbon fuels and greenhouse gas levels would plummet, but during the transition time where we would still have the greenhouse gases but adding additional power (heat) to the biosphere it would seem to be pushing us all too close or over a tipping point, like the release of undersea methane.
It's a matter of conditioning and mindset. I've seen people blow chunks when they catch the smell of spoiled casein paint, but because I know what it is and I have acclimated to it, I am no longer bothered by the smell. It makes sense to instinctually associate blood with violence and death (and thus be revolted) unless you have learned other associations with it. Most trauma injuries make me think of mountain biking.
The U.S. gives more money to countries in need than anyone other country in the world...
If you're going to rattle off broad claims like this you should at least cite them.
The US give by far the most in dollars, but fairly low in terms of GNP. But that is only counting UN Official Development Assistance contributions. I couldn't find numbers for private donations or other non-military aid. Although the Gates Foundation wrote just over $2 billion in grants in 2007, which would put their giving on a level just between Denmark and Australia.
The top 1% pay most of the taxes.
Umm, they pay about one third of the taxes, which makes sense in a flat tax kind of way because the top 1% own one third of the assets in the US. Now while that seems fair enough, until you look at the distribution of investment assets (that is assets that are actually earning money and are not necessary for the owner's day to day life) now the richest 1% hold 40% of the investment assets.
Robert Reich has some words on this as well.
These people have a lot of nerve to ask me for money to be able to read my private papers and correspondence.
Ask?... really? I must have missed that part while I was filling out my tax returns. Maybe the language they use when "asking" for my money is just a bit obscure. It sounds to me like they are saying: "give us money or armed men will take you away to prison for a year and we will take a $25,000 penalty out of your savings."
You are not being asked for permission, you are being informed of a decision made by your betters.
I'm certain that some of the cars zooming down I-80 across Chicago are involved in some illegal activity. Does that mean that every car should be stopped and searched? It's possible that in one of the houses or apartments on my block there is something illegal to some extent going on. Should the FBI have open access to all the residences then?
Just yesterday, there was the sentiment expressed that hunting pedophiles should trump privacy. At one time that post was up to +4 insightful. Slashdotters tend to be very protective of online privacy rights, far more so than the average American, I suspect that the reasoning expressed in that post would have appealed strongly to most Americans. So all that needs to happen to make this go forward to for someone to say that the FBI tap is needed to stop the pedophiles and it's a done deal. Anyone who opposes FBI internet filtering is a child rapist. Any private citizen using encryption is a baby touching terrorist.
"While he was on bail for the first charges, he then molested and killed another girl. The investigation took YEARS for the murder, because" some dumb-ass let him out on bail, which is why the murder happened at all. The more highly-emotionally charged the example, the more important it is to carefully analyze where the flaws in system allowed for a repeat offense. Protecting someone's rights, must by definition always be right.
I don't think Google would be wrong in complying with a search warrant (or the Brazilian equivalent) but I do think it would be wrong for them to open up everyones account for the purposes of data mining for pedophiles. Imagine if the data was stored in everyone's homes instead of stored with Google, search warrants naming individuals could be used to search their home PCs. Data mining would be cops going door-to-door searching everyone's PC in order to find which people are pedophiles. The heinousness of pedophilia would not excuse the violation of a nationwide door-to-door search of everyone's home computers and it does not excuse the mining of storage that was presented as and expected to be, private.
In order to make a child porno film, you have to sexually abuse a child.
Au Contraire.Abuse is not always present. I agree that the act of abusing a child should be severely punished, but I don't think that what counts in court as child pornography == child abuse.
At their theoretical 100% efficiency, it's about a wash, though you'll still have to visit the pump half again as often to fill up.
It might be a wash when you just analyze the dollar cost, but when you consider the source of the fuel being purchased, it becomes a bargain again. First off, a dollar will be far more likely to eventually spent on a product that I make a living producing, if that dollar stays my country. Secondly, if our fuel source is domestically produced then the military protection of that fuel source is already taken care of at a great savings to the tax payer. And lastly, even if the biofuel burns inefficiently it is still carbon neutral.
forced to code so well that normal warranties can be offered. This would stop the massive release of perpetual betaware that has never ending security and functionality issues, and separate the truly thoughtful and "engineering first" efforts- from the good companies that would succeed
That is true, but it would also raise the price of an OS several fold and require more restrictions to be placed on application designers. Car manufacturers can require that you only use certain, high rated tires for their cars. They have to do this in order to protect themselves from the kind of liability that you are suggesting for software companies. So unless you relish the idea of never using third party software ever again, and having a very short list of "approved software" available only at prices that reflect the increase of liability insurance, than you need to get used to the idea that the user is largely responsible for the integrity of their system. Look at what high exposure to liability has done for the medical field, why introduce that to the software field?
You make a series of pretty huge assumptions here, many of which are unlikely. 1) you assume that the 50 gateway points will be managed properly. 2) you assume that access to those gateway points will be managed effectively. 3) you assume that the underlying network design is intelligently put together.
I think the assumption is more along the lines of:
50 gateway points are more likely to be managed properly than 4000 points.
Those 50 points will have a great deal of attention and resources allocated to them, about 80 times the amount per point of the previous 4000 points.
When the government really cares about a project (read military) they can be very intelligent, just look at the stealth bomber. They are only haphazard when it is a project that exists only to please the public (read medi-care, or social security)
the complexity of the security industry is forcing it away from end-users and into the hands of companies who can bundle it with the products that need it.
Great, once again the tools I need to protect myself are being taken away given to "the professionals". So if all the security tools go to the ISPs and other infrastructure how do I protect myself from ISP spyware?
Why not use a TSA lock?
Because then he can't tell that his bags have been searched. The very idea of the TSA lock is laughable, it's the TSA baggage handlers that we need to protect our luggage from. They have the same trustworthiness as the police. Most of them do their jobs well enough. There are a few who abuse their positions in big or small ways and the rest look the other way because they "have to watch out for their own" or they don't want to "snitch".
if something is missing from your bag file a claim before you leave the airport. NWA actually requires you to file the claim at the airport
So when I'm in a NorthWest terminal I should expect to find an area with tables where I can open up my luggage to do an inventory there in the airport, right?