"mandating filters" is NOT democracy. It IS an abuse of individual rights
Mandating filter is most certanily democratic. Large numbers of democratically elected politicians voted for it. In fact a majority of politicians regularly vote for the most noxious and anti-freedom issues.
Your error is assuming that democracy=individual rights. Democracy is merely a method of choosing political leaders and has very little to do with the defense of individual rights.
All Katz wants to do is give even more power to those who want mandatory filters. In fact Katz is one of those people, he just wants them to censor and control *other* things than the Internet. Classic hypocrisy among censors. Your copy of Hustler is pornography, but my Bible is not. The government should keep its hands off of ISPs, but it should go after McDonald's.
"This is a nice sound bite but that's all it is. Censorship of ideas is bad. Regulating the markets for material things is unrelated. The only connection is that the free market for large Telecomms has resulted in a limited number of pro-corporate ideas being presented. More regulation of large corporations could result in a freer market of ideas, completely consistent goals."
Censorship *is* a form of regulating a free market.
Are you folks so hopelessly naive that you think you can give all of this power to the state to do things like go after fast food and Wal Mart without it inevitably devolving to censorship?'
This is the problem with Katz. He sits there and thinks "I want the world to be this way, and the government should have the power to make it so." Of course it is the hallmark of all censors and control freaks that they only want to go after the "really bad" stuff. It's only [pornography, McDonald's, insert subject to be demonized here] that nice people like Katz and Focus on the Family want to contol (only our evil enemies would want to control and limit people's access to that other good stuff we like).
The really annoying thing about Katz is his rank hypocrisy.
On the one hand, Katz constanly whines about corporations and advocates this very communitarian-oriented "we have to subject technology to democratic control" nonsense.
But on the other hand, the second anyone actually exerts such democratic control -- say by mandating filters for public library and school access -- he's suddenly *shocked* at this blatant abuse of individual rights.
You can't have it both ways, Jon. You can't rail against an out of control market and then turn around and complain when somebody follows through on your suggestions and attempts to get the market under control.
Well capitalism is a white European invention and it is poised to disappear as non-European nations become dominant.
China is poised to become the 21st century super power and they are communist, not capitalist. Communism is a third world philosophy, not a western one.
This made absolutely no sense. Nazi Germany was a non-capitalist world power as was Imperial Japan. Third World nations that have adopted Communism grossly underperform those that are capitalist (where would you want to live -- South Korea or North Korea?)
Yes, the first one is an urban legend, but yours is just made-up as well. The truth of the matter is that noone alive today has the definitive answer as to why the QWERTY keyboard was used. It certainly wasn't effeciency as the speed record has always been on DVORAK keyboards (that's the name of it, not the key arrangement.)
When you said I made this up, you were a liar. If you would read any decent account of the history of the typewriter, there were in fact speed competitions held and those using QWERTY layouts won. Dvorak's layout didn't come until much later.
The efficiency claim is also nonsense. Yes the fastest typing speeds in the world are achieved on Dvorak, but for the efficiency claim to be true, the average Dvorak keyboarder would have to be faster than the average QWERTY keyboarder. What few studies there are on this point typically find the differences in typing speed border on statistically insignificant.
See this story, which has a good look at the issues and was featured on Slashdot awhile ago.
I type about 130 words per minute and do a lot of keyboard. I've been very worried about carpal syndrome as I head toward my mid-30s (and have been keyboarding incessantly since I was 11 or 12).
The bottom line from what I can tell, is that there simply is no such thing as an ergonomic or safe keyboard. The bottom line is that the human hand and wrist did not evolve for keyboarding and even under the best of conditions, it is an awkward activity that will lead to carpal tunnel syndrome and similar problems for a significant number of people.
What we really need are alternative system that would reduce the total number of keys needed to be pressed to form words rather than different layouts of the alphabet (and yes there are such systems out there).
Hmmm...when intellectual property companies try to attach nonsense like "You are not licensed to read this version of Alice In Wonderland aloud," the people here go nuts.
How is saying "you can't run this program on non-free OS systems" any different than that?
Did the Long Island Kids Use an "Anonymous" E-Mail
on
Congress@Work
·
· Score: 2
The kids he's talking about did download arson instruction from the web, but I haven't heard anything about them using "anonymous" email systems. Note that even if they did, that did not keep them from getting caught.
A lot of this depends on what the contract is committing you to. As long as you're not in some sort of exclusive relationship with UGO, I'd sign the contract, get whatever I could out of UGO, and then ditch them.
If you are on some sort of exclusive deal, refuse the money and the contract and ditch UGO immediately for being in breach of contract.
"." Gilder promises that businesses will be forced to abscond their implicit drive to waste your time. The average 38-month wait for the installation of a phone line, and the further telemarketing interruptions. The "supreme time waster", television. The decline of lame mass-market advertising, leaving only supremely-targeted ads which actually have a chance of being beneficial to you. Collaboration enabled by the fibersphere will be "liberated from hierarchies that often waste their time and talents," creating new cottage industries which will thrive and grow. This is a future in which the sovereign individual is freed to become as much as she allows."
If this is an accurate summary, this is Gilder at his computer-utopian worst.
Then again, what do you expect from a man who writes about the glory of computers the next and then goes off on the evils of teaching about natural selection the next.
when they go to the local chain store, not only will they be forced into the latest upgrade, but also not be informed of alternatives (Linux/BSD/etc) to the package they have signed into for their great rebates to afford their new toy.
This is ludicrous. When I go the local chain, they have numerous copies of various flavors of Unix on the shelves next to the Windows OS.
Average people like me don't buy Linux not because it's not available but a) it doesn't have the application support I need and b) it's still too complex to install/maintain for a desktop OS.
I can't believe Slashdot refuses to run a lot of very newsworthy pieces, but they publish this crap.
I don't agree with the author at all, but I've seen much better essays that actually gave decent, well thought out arguments for these positions rather than the "I can't afford [insert application here], so therefore it must be overpriced" nonsense this person is offering.
This story is completely useless since it uses two equivocal and incompatible defintions of "low" (at the beginning the story implies that "low" levels of radiation cause mutations, but later it implies that levels of radiation that cause mutation is lower than previously thought, which could still be a very high level of exposure).
They don't give the damn exposure data. Why can't they just give a rough range of the exposure that the people in this study faced?
"all, the scientists provide the articles free of charge. What's the excuse the journals use?"
Since publications in peer reviewed journal is a large factor in hiring, tenure, etc. decisions, even though scientists provide articles for free, they are still compensated for doing so (though not by the journals in question).
As a libertarian myself, its this kind of nonsense ("corporations have an innocent and noble aim") that I suspect Michael was referring to as "libertarian babble." Libertarianism is not and should not be reduced to simple mindless worship of corporations. Most corporations suck and don't give a flying f--- about property rights as libertarians frame them.
It is odd that he embraces the Declaration of Independence's "pursuit of happiness" line but then seems dismissive of private property. In fact Jefferson changed this line from pursuit of property to pursuit of happiness because he thought that it was clear that the pursuit of property was simply an obvious instance of the pursuit of happiness.
It is certainly possible to criticize many of the current regimins of property -- in the U.S., for example, there is too little truly private property, with even large corporations relying on the state-sponsored expropriation of property -- but Rusty's article is not a very well thought out look at the issues relating to property rights.
"why not take it to his ISP? He could do a lot less without an ISP to help him harass this site, and going to court would waste resources which could have been saved, but oh well!"
From personal experience, a lot of the most annoying trolls do their damage from public terminals at libraries, etc. And what are you going to do if he's using say EarthLink. Are you really going to send an e-mail to EarthLink and say "somebody who uses you as an ISP but posts here using a Hotmail account is being abusive. Please make him stop"??
No actually they are very similar. This idea that there is almost a conspiracy of scientists who are so involved in the existing paradigm that they deny our wonderful new trailblazers their proper due is a common trope of almost all pseudoscience. The book being reviewed here is no different than any number of similar books you can find defending any number of pseudoscientific theories.
Cold Fusion was rejected because its proponents made dramatic claims that were unable to be replicated (and, as one person pointed out, clearly was not any form of fusion). As the NCAS report cite by the reviewer notes, millions of dollars was spent trying to replicate these experiments, and the bottom line that there's no there there.
Is this a late April Fool's Joke? Okay I know Slashdot has essentially no editorial standards and no regard for fact checking and accuracy when it posts a story, but I thought it would have some sort of minimial threshhold for stories.
What's next? How the powers that be are suppressing the existence of the Loch Ness monster?
Speech isn't an absolute
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 2
Sunstein is serious when he says speech isn't an absolute. He supported, for example, the lawsuit by cattlemen against Oprah Winfrey. See:
Slashdot Mirror
"mandating filters" is NOT democracy. It IS an abuse of individual rights
Mandating filter is most certanily democratic. Large numbers of democratically elected politicians voted for it. In fact a majority of politicians regularly vote for the most noxious and anti-freedom issues.
Your error is assuming that democracy=individual rights. Democracy is merely a method of choosing political leaders and has very little to do with the defense of individual rights.
All Katz wants to do is give even more power to those who want mandatory filters. In fact Katz is one of those people, he just wants them to censor and control *other* things than the Internet. Classic hypocrisy among censors. Your copy of Hustler is pornography, but my Bible is not. The government should keep its hands off of ISPs, but it should go after McDonald's.
Complete hypocrisy.
"This is a nice sound bite but that's all it is. Censorship of ideas is bad. Regulating the markets for material things is unrelated. The only connection is that the free market for large Telecomms has resulted in a limited number of pro-corporate ideas being presented. More regulation of large corporations could result in a freer market of ideas, completely consistent goals."
Censorship *is* a form of regulating a free market.
Are you folks so hopelessly naive that you think you can give all of this power to the state to do things like go after fast food and Wal Mart without it inevitably devolving to censorship?'
This is the problem with Katz. He sits there and thinks "I want the world to be this way, and the government should have the power to make it so." Of course it is the hallmark of all censors and control freaks that they only want to go after the "really bad" stuff. It's only [pornography, McDonald's, insert subject to be demonized here] that nice people like Katz and Focus on the Family want to contol (only our evil enemies would want to control and limit people's access to that other good stuff we like).
But there has to be a balance between the prosperity of the market and the morality of the market...
Sure, but all sorts of folks are trying to bring morality to the Internet, and usually Katz writes stuff ripping on them.
The really annoying thing about Katz is his rank hypocrisy.
On the one hand, Katz constanly whines about corporations and advocates this very communitarian-oriented "we have to subject technology to democratic control" nonsense.
But on the other hand, the second anyone actually exerts such democratic control -- say by mandating filters for public library and school access -- he's suddenly *shocked* at this blatant abuse of individual rights.
You can't have it both ways, Jon. You can't rail against an out of control market and then turn around and complain when somebody follows through on your suggestions and attempts to get the market under control.
China is poised to become the 21st century super power and they are communist, not capitalist. Communism is a third world philosophy, not a western one.
This made absolutely no sense. Nazi Germany was a non-capitalist world power as was Imperial Japan. Third World nations that have adopted Communism grossly underperform those that are capitalist (where would you want to live -- South Korea or North Korea?)
Yes, there is a McDonald's in Yugoslavia, so this is no longer true.
Yes, the first one is an urban legend, but yours is just made-up as well. The truth of the matter is that noone alive today has the definitive answer as to why the QWERTY keyboard was used. It certainly wasn't effeciency as the speed record has always been on DVORAK keyboards (that's the name of it, not the key arrangement.)
When you said I made this up, you were a liar. If you would read any decent account of the history of the typewriter, there were in fact speed competitions held and those using QWERTY layouts won. Dvorak's layout didn't come until much later.
The efficiency claim is also nonsense. Yes the fastest typing speeds in the world are achieved on Dvorak, but for the efficiency claim to be true, the average Dvorak keyboarder would have to be faster than the average QWERTY keyboarder. What few studies there are on this point typically find the differences in typing speed border on statistically insignificant.
See this story, which has a good look at the issues and was featured on Slashdot awhile ago.
I type about 130 words per minute and do a lot of keyboard. I've been very worried about carpal syndrome as I head toward my mid-30s (and have been keyboarding incessantly since I was 11 or 12).
The bottom line from what I can tell, is that there simply is no such thing as an ergonomic or safe keyboard. The bottom line is that the human hand and wrist did not evolve for keyboarding and even under the best of conditions, it is an awkward activity that will lead to carpal tunnel syndrome and similar problems for a significant number of people.
What we really need are alternative system that would reduce the total number of keys needed to be pressed to form words rather than different layouts of the alphabet (and yes there are such systems out there).
This is an urban legend. QWERTY was chosen, in fact, because typewriters using it were faster than competing schemes.
Hmmm...when intellectual property companies try to attach nonsense like "You are not licensed to read this version of Alice In Wonderland aloud," the people here go nuts.
How is saying "you can't run this program on non-free OS systems" any different than that?
The kids he's talking about did download arson instruction from the web, but I haven't heard anything about them using "anonymous" email systems. Note that even if they did, that did not keep them from getting caught.
A lot of this depends on what the contract is committing you to. As long as you're not in some sort of exclusive relationship with UGO, I'd sign the contract, get whatever I could out of UGO, and then ditch them.
If you are on some sort of exclusive deal, refuse the money and the contract and ditch UGO immediately for being in breach of contract.
"." Gilder promises that businesses will be forced to abscond their implicit drive to waste your time. The average 38-month wait for the installation of a phone line, and the further telemarketing interruptions. The "supreme time waster", television. The decline of lame mass-market advertising, leaving only supremely-targeted ads which actually have a chance of being beneficial to you. Collaboration enabled by the fibersphere will be "liberated from hierarchies that often waste their time and talents," creating new cottage industries which will thrive and grow. This is a future in which the sovereign individual is freed to become as much as she allows."
If this is an accurate summary, this is Gilder at his computer-utopian worst.
Then again, what do you expect from a man who writes about the glory of computers the next and then goes off on the evils of teaching about natural selection the next.
when they go to the local chain store, not only will they be forced into the latest upgrade, but also not be informed of alternatives (Linux/BSD/etc) to the package they have signed into for their great rebates to afford their new toy.
This is ludicrous. When I go the local chain, they have numerous copies of various flavors of Unix on the shelves next to the Windows OS.
Average people like me don't buy Linux not because it's not available but a) it doesn't have the application support I need and b) it's still too complex to install/maintain for a desktop OS.
I can't believe Slashdot refuses to run a lot of very newsworthy pieces, but they publish this crap.
I don't agree with the author at all, but I've seen much better essays that actually gave decent, well thought out arguments for these positions rather than the "I can't afford [insert application here], so therefore it must be overpriced" nonsense this person is offering.
This story is completely useless since it uses two equivocal and incompatible defintions of "low" (at the beginning the story implies that "low" levels of radiation cause mutations, but later it implies that levels of radiation that cause mutation is lower than previously thought, which could still be a very high level of exposure).
They don't give the damn exposure data. Why can't they just give a rough range of the exposure that the people in this study faced?
This is, after all, from the same people who successfully predicted the now skyrocketing price of RAM!!! ;)
"In other words, the computer industry is suppose to be an industry intended to assist other industries."
What is this "the computer industry is suppose [sic]" crap? The only thing the computer industry is supposed to do is make money.
As for the productivity issues, the bottom line is that measuring productivity is more voodoo than economics.
"all, the scientists provide the articles free of charge. What's the excuse the journals use?"
Since publications in peer reviewed journal is a large factor in hiring, tenure, etc. decisions, even though scientists provide articles for free, they are still compensated for doing so (though not by the journals in question).
As a libertarian myself, its this kind of nonsense ("corporations have an innocent and noble aim") that I suspect Michael was referring to as "libertarian babble." Libertarianism is not and should not be reduced to simple mindless worship of corporations. Most corporations suck and don't give a flying f--- about property rights as libertarians frame them.
It is odd that he embraces the Declaration of Independence's "pursuit of happiness" line but then seems dismissive of private property. In fact Jefferson changed this line from pursuit of property to pursuit of happiness because he thought that it was clear that the pursuit of property was simply an obvious instance of the pursuit of happiness.
It is certainly possible to criticize many of the current regimins of property -- in the U.S., for example, there is too little truly private property, with even large corporations relying on the state-sponsored expropriation of property -- but Rusty's article is not a very well thought out look at the issues relating to property rights.
"why not take it to his ISP? He could do a lot less without an ISP to help him harass this site, and going to court would waste resources which could have been saved, but oh well!"
From personal experience, a lot of the most annoying trolls do their damage from public terminals at libraries, etc. And what are you going to do if he's using say EarthLink. Are you really going to send an e-mail to EarthLink and say "somebody who uses you as an ISP but posts here using a Hotmail account is being abusive. Please make him stop"??
No actually they are very similar. This idea that there is almost a conspiracy of scientists who are so involved in the existing paradigm that they deny our wonderful new trailblazers their proper due is a common trope of almost all pseudoscience. The book being reviewed here is no different than any number of similar books you can find defending any number of pseudoscientific theories.
Cold Fusion was rejected because its proponents made dramatic claims that were unable to be replicated (and, as one person pointed out, clearly was not any form of fusion). As the NCAS report cite by the reviewer notes, millions of dollars was spent trying to replicate these experiments, and the bottom line that there's no there there.
Is this a late April Fool's Joke? Okay I know Slashdot has essentially no editorial standards and no regard for fact checking and accuracy when it posts a story, but I thought it would have some sort of minimial threshhold for stories.
What's next? How the powers that be are suppressing the existence of the Loch Ness monster?
Sunstein is serious when he says speech isn't an absolute. He supported, for example, the lawsuit by cattlemen against Oprah Winfrey. See:
http://home.uchicago.edu/~csunstei/beef.html