Oops that didn't work. Anyway, there are numerous graphics on Slashdot that don't have ALT tags. Typical Geek indignation. Is Katz writing *everything* here now?
1. Comparing the MPA and the music industry to China is nauseous. I think the MPA and RIAA are stupid and misunderstand the Internet, but comparing them to the totalitarian Chinese state is a bit of a stretch.
2. The net is very censorsable -- at least as censorable as r/l. Katz is mistaken when he thinks that in order for the net to be censored that someone has to monitor *every* chat room. Not even close. All that is needed is to monitor a significant minority of chat rooms and make several high profile examples of offenders in order to deter the sort of things China doesn't want (this is, after all, exactly the role fulfilled by other criminal prosecutions -- no crime can be punished perfectly, but by publicly punishing a broad sample of cirminals, others are deterred from committing the same crime, though again, not perfectly).
In China, for example, state censorship of the Internet works surprisingly well. I've talked to people in Chia via email who refuse to talk about certain topics because they know people have been thrown in jail for such activities.
Fear is rather easy to generate for an authoritarian state.
And I take it, then, you would have no problem if racist hackers decide to take down anti-racist sites as well.
If you start down the road of "If I think you're wrong, I can hack your site," you are a fool to think those you disagree with won't take the same tactic.
I suspect this is scientifically invalid
on
Author Unknown
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· Score: 3
What Foster claims to do seems to me little more than the sort of nonsense that psychic investigators claim to do. I'd love to see any evidence or studies validating his techniques (a double blind study on a wide variety of text fragments would be a start).
Lincoln biographer Stephen Oates almost had his career ruined by some morons at NIH who ran some Lincoln biographies through a computer and claimed Oates had plagiarized based on some similarities with a classic 1952 bio of Lincoln.
Claiming that the problem with discussion forums is white male jerks is the most absurd things Katz has ever claimed. First, since most anonymous cowards are anonymous its difficult to know their sex or race (has Katz been tracking these users behind our backs)?
My boards are very contentions and I have had no problem getting women to post in them -- in fact sometimes the women are just as likely to hurl off some idiotic flame as the men are. I've received plenty of email flames from women filled with expletives.
This article reminded me of those articles on women and computer games which goes on about creating more relationship-oriented games for women, ignoring the fact that a lot of female gamers (such as my wife for one) like to kick butt on Quake and cause mass destruction in AOE2. Not only does this article play to stereotypes about aggressive men, but also to stereotypes about passive women.
You know who Katz reminds me more and more of -- Douglas Rushkoff. He's a newbie poser trying to act like he "gets" it when he still doesn't have a clue about what's going on online.
I run a bunch of political sites and I'm accustomed to the fact that lone flamers are always going to be with us. If someone is abusive enough for a long period of time I'll block their IP but for the most part the community on an active board really deals with flamers in their own way (usually by ignoring them).
The real difficulty I've noticed is when you have two or three people flaming as a group with the clear intention of making a board unusable. I had a situation on one board recently where four or five people came on and began announcing the formation of their own group, which had nothing at all to do with the board topic, and then had post after post of their group's planned activities, a little stage internecine feud, etc. The damage was much worse than just a single angry person.
A board like Slashdot is so popular that they can afford to keep the Anonymous Coward option, but for smaller boards blocking some people and requiring non-anonymous membership are the only way to prevent such nonsense.
The Matrix was an awesome movie, but basing philosophy course around it is idiotic. Most of the philosophical ideas in "The Matrix" are just a ripoff of Plato anway (in fact "The Matrix" is really just "The Allegory of the Cave" with kick-ass CGI) -- the kiddies should read the original, and rent the Hollywood puffery on their own time.
CBS, like most news outlets, reported that NATO lied about video of a missile hitting a bridge in Kosovo -- the video had been compressed and did not accurately reflect the elapsed time (the real incident took far longer to unfold than the video).
What CBS did on New Years is *exactly* what NATO did -- they presented a set of images as if they were live, unaltered video images when in fact they were tampered and doctored with.
Just another example of how intellectualy bankrupt modern news collection and broadcasting is. Saw a recent story about how pressure is building for the networks to add music in the background during news stories to heighten drama, etc. Hasn't happened yet but it certainly will.
Thank god for the Web -- while the major network news programs (and much of its print counterpart) are turning into little more than well-scripted soap operas, the web is providing the sort of fact checking and peer review that the traditional media will never give us.
This is the problem with OSHA. It imposes on businesses a level of safety that almost all of us would never choose for ourselves. I know that my house would never pass an OSHA inspection and I have no desire to bring it up to what they consider safe.
We should get rid of OSHA entirely. It's wrong and counterproductive for OSHA to inspect my house and it's wrong and counterproductive for OSHA to inspect my work place.
(This is why OSHA has had so little impact on the rates of workplace injuries -- because it focuses on such silly things. Workplace injuries have been steadily falling throughout the century due to private initiatives with almost no help from OSHA. We should get rid of OSHA).
I'm sad to say I live in the same as these morons.
The Las Vegas FBI sting? I believe what Hemos is talking about here is the fact that in 1998 two people were arrested for trying to buy anthrax in Las Vegas.
Of course what Hemos can't be bothered to check on (heard of a web search?) is that the government was forced to drop the charges because the anthrax the two gentlement were trying to purchase was non-infectious and unable to be converted into a biological weapon.
The USPS has probably the single most valuable database in the world -- the names and addresses of very close to 100 percent of all Americans. If MS had such a database, people would be PO'd.
You know, the real problem here is society's lack of understanding of coke fiends. The coke fiends at the local high school are picked on mercilessly by the jocks, the girl scouts and the geeks. And then people wonder why they go on murderous rampages.
Oh the horror of being a misunderstood cokefiend in our modern world.
The sexual partners choose today affects what the human species will look like in the next generation and no politician or congressional hearing has been held on people's selection. When are we going to explore the dark side of that? How can we allow people to just willy nilly decide on their own who to have sex with without taking into account the deep philosphical issues involved? Or do we really want to risk spinning out of control?
Human society is itself an ongoing, unpredictable experiment in technology that started with the first farmer thousands of years ago. Katz is one of its most annoyingly banal products.
(If somebody wrote this article substituting computers and geeks for genetics and biologist, Katz would write a column accusing them of being responsible for Columbine.)
I used to work for a pharmaceutical company and name companies do a very important service. For one with a drug you need to find a name that is not too similar to other drug names -- otherwise pharmacists, doctors and patients get drugs mixed up which is a bad thing. Find new names for things is not easy given the huge number of registered products.
Besides, Aptiva is a much better name than Slashdot.
If corporations are destroying the earth they've done a very poor job of it considering that life expectancy around the world continues to increase and every indicator of material well being, such as the percentage of people undernourished in the developing world, has improve dramatically over the last 30 years.
I still don't see how you can be pro-open source and anti-free trade.
Hint. If you say you're going to go to Seattle and engage in violence, which quite a few people did, then go to Seattle and engage in violence, you're going to get a reaction from police.
It's interesting to see people in the Open Source community dissing free trade (the WTO, contrary to popular belief, is not a free trade pact). So you want the government telling you who you can and not collaborate with on Open Source projects around the world?
Although obviously GW would be able to take it to court, there are provisions in the copyright laws which specifically exempt parodies. Specifically: "the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism [or] comment . . . is not an infringement . . .," For example, 2 Live Crew clearly ripped off Roy Orbison's song, "Pretty Woman," and Orbison's record company sued, but the Supreme Court found in favor of 2 Live Crew in a 1994 decision based on the fact that it was a parody.
First, on the spending issue, the U.S. is right near the top on spending per pupil in public education among Western industrialized nations -- clearly we don't get our money's worth.
Where does the money go? A good example of just how corrupt large school districts in America are can be found at:
It profiles wasteful spending of almost unbelievable proportions in Detroit. The school district spent, for example, almost $500K on a piece of land that was only appraised at $80K. The school system paid $350K for a computerized system that was never actually implemented. All the contracts go to friends of the people on the school board.
And, of course, students in Detroit's public school system are among the worst in the state as measured by the state assessment tests.
The answer is competition. We have a charter school experiment here in Michigan and their school construction costs are far lower because they're private companies who can't afford to put up with such cronyism and other nonsense.
A warning does *not* absolve a manufacturer of liability.
One of the big three automakers recently lost a lawsuit where a man was killed after stopping his car on the top of a steep hill without using the parking brake, leaving the engine on and then standing behind the automobile. The pickup truck rolled over him and killed him.
Lawyers for the automobile company noted that a) the owners manual clearly says (and it is widely held common sense) never to park a car on a hill without engaging the parking brake and b) it is impossible to design a gear system, under current regulatory requirements, that doesn't have a small but substantial risk of shifting gears accidentally in that situation.
But the company lost anyway. A warning doesn't mean jack in court if a jury decides that your company was negligent.
Using the Diamond MP3 case, warning users not to use the software to pirate music doesn't mean anything if a jury decides that Diamond clearly knew the major purpose of the Rio would be to pirate music (if I were the RIAA, btw, instead of trying to prevent MP3 boxes from coming to market I'd simply sue their manufacturers in civil court for damages).
Disclaimers are important but do not protect a company from liability.
In the McDonald's example, the jury found McDonald's liable not because of the wording of the disclaimer but because the jury felt the coffee was to hot regardless of any disclaimer (a disclaimer does not protect against an "unreasonably" dangerous product).
Slashdot Mirror
Oops that didn't work. Anyway, there are numerous graphics on Slashdot that don't have ALT tags. Typical Geek indignation. Is Katz writing *everything* here now?
From the top of the Post Comment page on Slashdto:
Hmm...where's the ALT tag? I hate corporate idiots who don't include ALT tags.
1. Comparing the MPA and the music industry to China is nauseous. I think the MPA and RIAA are stupid and misunderstand the Internet, but comparing them to the totalitarian Chinese state is a bit of a stretch.
2. The net is very censorsable -- at least as censorable as r/l. Katz is mistaken when he thinks that in order for the net to be censored that someone has to monitor *every* chat room. Not even close. All that is needed is to monitor a significant minority of chat rooms and make several high profile examples of offenders in order to deter the sort of things China doesn't want (this is, after all, exactly the role fulfilled by other criminal prosecutions -- no crime can be punished perfectly, but by publicly punishing a broad sample of cirminals, others are deterred from committing the same crime, though again, not perfectly).
In China, for example, state censorship of the Internet works surprisingly well. I've talked to people in Chia via email who refuse to talk about certain topics because they know people have been thrown in jail for such activities.
Fear is rather easy to generate for an authoritarian state.
And I take it, then, you would have no problem if racist hackers decide to take down anti-racist sites as well.
If you start down the road of "If I think you're wrong, I can hack your site," you are a fool to think those you disagree with won't take the same tactic.
What Foster claims to do seems to me little more than the sort of nonsense that psychic investigators claim to do. I'd love to see any evidence or studies validating his techniques (a double blind study on a wide variety of text fragments would be a start).
Lincoln biographer Stephen Oates almost had his career ruined by some morons at NIH who ran some Lincoln biographies through a computer and claimed Oates had plagiarized based on some similarities with a classic 1952 bio of Lincoln.
All of that for a lame suggestion to have a "free fire zone." Wow! What a revelation! I never would have that of that.
Moderating posts? Whew, no wonder Katz makes the big money. No webmaster would have ever thought of that.
Claiming that the problem with discussion forums is white male jerks is the most absurd things Katz has ever claimed. First, since most anonymous cowards are anonymous its difficult to know their sex or race (has Katz been tracking these users behind our backs)?
My boards are very contentions and I have had no problem getting women to post in them -- in fact sometimes the women are just as likely to hurl off some idiotic flame as the men are. I've received plenty of email flames from women filled with expletives.
This article reminded me of those articles on women and computer games which goes on about creating more relationship-oriented games for women, ignoring the fact that a lot of female gamers (such as my wife for one) like to kick butt on Quake and cause mass destruction in AOE2. Not only does this article play to stereotypes about aggressive men, but also to stereotypes about passive women.
You know who Katz reminds me more and more of -- Douglas Rushkoff. He's a newbie poser trying to act like he "gets" it when he still doesn't have a clue about what's going on online.
I run a bunch of political sites and I'm accustomed to the fact that lone flamers are always going to be with us. If someone is abusive enough for a long period of time I'll block their IP but for the most part the community on an active board really deals with flamers in their own way (usually by ignoring them).
The real difficulty I've noticed is when you have two or three people flaming as a group with the clear intention of making a board unusable. I had a situation on one board recently where four or five people came on and began announcing the formation of their own group, which had nothing at all to do with the board topic, and then had post after post of their group's planned activities, a little stage internecine feud, etc. The damage was much worse than just a single angry person.
A board like Slashdot is so popular that they can afford to keep the Anonymous Coward option, but for smaller boards blocking some people and requiring non-anonymous membership are the only way to prevent such nonsense.
The Matrix was an awesome movie, but basing philosophy course around it is idiotic. Most of the philosophical ideas in "The Matrix" are just a ripoff of Plato anway (in fact "The Matrix" is really just "The Allegory of the Cave" with kick-ass CGI) -- the kiddies should read the original, and rent the Hollywood puffery on their own time.
CBS, like most news outlets, reported that NATO lied about video of a missile hitting a bridge in Kosovo -- the video had been compressed and did not accurately reflect the elapsed time (the real incident took far longer to unfold than the video).
What CBS did on New Years is *exactly* what NATO did -- they presented a set of images as if they were live, unaltered video images when in fact they were tampered and doctored with.
Just another example of how intellectualy bankrupt modern news collection and broadcasting is. Saw a recent story about how pressure is building for the networks to add music in the background during news stories to heighten drama, etc. Hasn't happened yet but it certainly will.
Thank god for the Web -- while the major network news programs (and much of its print counterpart) are turning into little more than well-scripted soap operas, the web is providing the sort of fact checking and peer review that the traditional media will never give us.
This is the problem with OSHA. It imposes on businesses a level of safety that almost all of us would never choose for ourselves. I know that my house would never pass an OSHA inspection and I have no desire to bring it up to what they consider safe.
We should get rid of OSHA entirely. It's wrong and counterproductive for OSHA to inspect my house and it's wrong and counterproductive for OSHA to inspect my work place.
(This is why OSHA has had so little impact on the rates of workplace injuries -- because it focuses on such silly things. Workplace injuries have been steadily falling throughout the century due to private initiatives with almost no help from OSHA. We should get rid of OSHA).
I'm sad to say I live in the same as these morons.
The Las Vegas FBI sting? I believe what Hemos is talking about here is the fact that in 1998 two people were arrested for trying to buy anthrax in Las Vegas.
Of course what Hemos can't be bothered to check on (heard of a web search?) is that the government was forced to drop the charges because the anthrax the two gentlement were trying to purchase was non-infectious and unable to be converted into a biological weapon.
More FUD from the masters of it at Slashdot.
The USPS has probably the single most valuable database in the world -- the names and addresses of very close to 100 percent of all Americans. If MS had such a database, people would be PO'd.
You know, the real problem here is society's lack of understanding of coke fiends. The coke fiends at the local high school are picked on mercilessly by the jocks, the girl scouts and the geeks. And then people wonder why they go on murderous rampages.
Oh the horror of being a misunderstood cokefiend in our modern world.
What I said.
The sexual partners choose today affects what the human species will look like in the next generation and no politician or congressional hearing has been held on people's selection. When are we going to explore the dark side of that? How can we allow people to just willy nilly decide on their own who to have sex with without taking into account the deep philosphical issues involved? Or do we really want to risk spinning out of control?
Human society is itself an ongoing, unpredictable experiment in technology that started with the first farmer thousands of years ago. Katz is one of its most annoyingly banal products.
(If somebody wrote this article substituting computers and geeks for genetics and biologist, Katz would write a column accusing them of being responsible for Columbine.)
I used to work for a pharmaceutical company and name companies do a very important service. For one with a drug you need to find a name that is not too similar to other drug names -- otherwise pharmacists, doctors and patients get drugs mixed up which is a bad thing. Find new names for things is not easy given the huge number of registered products.
Besides, Aptiva is a much better name than Slashdot.
If corporations are destroying the earth they've done a very poor job of it considering that life expectancy around the world continues to increase and every indicator of material well being, such as the percentage of people undernourished in the developing world, has improve dramatically over the last 30 years.
I still don't see how you can be pro-open source and anti-free trade.
Hint. If you say you're going to go to Seattle and engage in violence, which quite a few people did, then go to Seattle and engage in violence, you're going to get a reaction from police.
It's interesting to see people in the Open Source community dissing free trade (the WTO, contrary to popular belief, is not a free trade pact). So you want the government telling you who you can and not collaborate with on Open Source projects around the world?
Ah, freedom.
"The idea is pretty revolutionary I guess, but I've considered the Internet the battle ground for freedom for a long time already."
We're going to fight for freedom on the Internet by shutting down web sites we disagree with? I thought we had the FBI to do that for us.
Although obviously GW would be able to take it to court, there are provisions in the copyright laws which specifically exempt parodies. Specifically: "the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism [or] comment . . . is not an infringement . . . ," For example, 2 Live Crew clearly ripped off Roy Orbison's song, "Pretty Woman," and Orbison's record company sued, but the Supreme Court found in favor of 2 Live Crew in a 1994 decision based on the fact that it was a parody.
What we need are Open Source schools!
First, on the spending issue, the U.S. is right near the top on spending per pupil in public education among Western industrialized nations -- clearly we don't get our money's worth.
o lbonds/
Where does the money go? A good example of just how corrupt large school districts in America are can be found at:
http://www.detnews.com/specialreports/1999/scho
It profiles wasteful spending of almost unbelievable proportions in Detroit. The school district spent, for example, almost $500K on a piece of land that was only appraised at $80K. The school system paid $350K for a computerized system that was never actually implemented. All the contracts go to friends of the people on the school board.
And, of course, students in Detroit's public school system are among the worst in the state as measured by the state assessment tests.
The answer is competition. We have a charter school experiment here in Michigan and their school construction costs are far lower because they're private companies who can't afford to put up with such cronyism and other nonsense.
A warning does *not* absolve a manufacturer of liability.
One of the big three automakers recently lost a lawsuit where a man was killed after stopping his car on the top of a steep hill without using the parking brake, leaving the engine on and then standing behind the automobile. The pickup truck rolled over him and killed him.
Lawyers for the automobile company noted that a) the owners manual clearly says (and it is widely held common sense) never to park a car on a hill without engaging the parking brake and b) it is impossible to design a gear system, under current regulatory requirements, that doesn't have a small but substantial risk of shifting gears accidentally in that situation.
But the company lost anyway. A warning doesn't mean jack in court if a jury decides that your company was negligent.
Using the Diamond MP3 case, warning users not to use the software to pirate music doesn't mean anything if a jury decides that Diamond clearly knew the major purpose of the Rio would be to pirate music (if I were the RIAA, btw, instead of trying to prevent MP3 boxes from coming to market I'd simply sue their manufacturers in civil court for damages).
Disclaimers are important but do not protect a company from liability.
In the McDonald's example, the jury found McDonald's liable not because of the wording of the disclaimer but because the jury felt the coffee was to hot regardless of any disclaimer (a disclaimer does not protect against an "unreasonably" dangerous product).