For example: Do you think that the original Battlestar Galactica TV show constituted theft of the ideas in Star Wars? Did Lucas steal the plot of Kurusawa's Hidden Fortress?
The problem with your interpretation is that plot ideas, characters, and so on do not spring from a whole cloth out of the author's mind, unaided by the culture and society in which the author lives. James Joyce couldn't have written Ulysses were it not for Homer's Odyssey. How could schools of artistic expression spring up unless one artist was taking and expanding upon the ideas of others? Placing inordinate barriers on creativity ultimately thwarts economic growth as well as the vitality of a culture.
I don't have a problem with copyright. I do have a problem with the persistent belief that creative works are the same as tables or bicycles or computers. They are not. The Constitution created copyright as a spur to creativity, *not* as a means of equating the intellectual property inherent in a creative work with the real property in a plot of land. Copyright is an artificial, legal construct.
Copyright exists "To Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts" not to serve as a perpetual income machine for writers and artists.
Unless they're harboring some religious, ethnic, or national grudge, people generally don't know much about history. That's 3x as true in the US as it is in most places.
'Sadly, a great many people in the computer field have a pathetic sense (or rather ignorance) of history. They are pompous and narcissistic enough to ignore the great contributions of past geniuses...
I'm confused. Are computer folks ignorant about history, or are they knowledgeable about history and chosing to ignore it?
The language from his suit is designed for media consumption, not to sway a judge.
Here's a random clip from his statement of facts:
21. Take-Two is fraudulently and deceptively marketing this game not only because it desperately needs the cash from the sale of this controversial game, whose release has been delayed for over a year in large part because of the efforts of the undersigned petitioner, but also because controversy still swirls about the Bully game, and Take-Two is Hell-bent to defuse it.
Lawyers vary in how they make their statements of fact, but a long litany of statements like this make you sound unhinged and guilty of gross hyperbole. Maybe that's why he's been so stupendously unsuccessful in all of his anti-game lawsuits.
I also wonder at the letter he sent to Take-Two and Wal-Mart. The opening paragraph certainly sounds like a bald attempt at extortion. He's already skated on thin ice with the Florida Bar and with various judges. I wonder how much longer he'll be able to push the envelope with these vague and poorly constructed lawsuits before he gets nailed to the wall for it.
Upon reopening on June 3, 2006, its number of visitors has doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertisement revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. The advertisements now generate about 75,000 USD per month according to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD.
I guess you could call that "sticking it to the man." You could also call it profiting. Perhaps a bit less Robin Hood and a bit more ticket scalper.
While I would urge this guy to start small (and have a clear idea of what he wants to accomplish, which he seems to lack at the moment), I would also encourage him to start implementing his organizational ideas from the get-go.
I likely didn't phrase my comment very well. What I meant was only that he should start small, as you suggest. I've been in small organizations that attempted to do the very thing he brought up, and it didn't work well. However, the collective he envisions may come up with a methodology that works. More power to them if they can.
Your Dilbert quote cracked me up. I see that all the time in business, and it is an asenine world view. However, that's usually a reference to business strategy, rather than the fundamental legal and organizational structure of a company. I've seen many organizational structures, all of which incorporate some sort of heirarchy. There are many reasons for this, but I think most of them have to do not with how an organization functions in isolation, but how it interacts with the world. The capitalist system is not set up to handle collective decisionmaking very well, given that banks, investors, vendors, and customers all operate with stratified decisionmaking structures.
The best way to learn about whether something works in business is to go out and try it. I should have made that and "start small" the focus of my post.
It's an industry association. It seems their strategy is to go after their targets as aggressively as possible, in order to send out the clear message that they can and will sue regular folks like you and me. They are effectively the "bad cop" while the individual record companies play the "good cop" giving the people the Brittany Spears and Korn they so desperately need.
You can argue that filesharing is on the rise, or that the RIAA's enforcement actions have cut filesharing, depending on whose facts you use and how you slice them. But in the end the strategy of using the industry association to attack customers, while individual labels try to pretend they play no part in it, probably won't work. In a world where alternatives to label-centric distribution are nonexistent, the labels would be able to make this good cop, bad cop strategy work. But the irony here is that the tighter they squeeze, the more systems will slip through their fingers (apologies to G. Lucas). Sure, there are no "good" big labels to defect to, but there is much more incentive to escape the entire label system altogether.
I keep waiting for one of the major labels to break ranks and start acting intelligent, giving customers fewer restrictions and defecting from the RIAA. It seems though, that none of them has the guts to do it, so they'll all keep pushing on consumers as hard as they can. The end result of the crackdown will eventually lead to a new business model in which the labels play a small or nonexistent role. Ironic, isn't it?
I'm not saying this to be snarky. If you haven't already been involved in starting a business with three or more people, do that first. I think it will provide a lot of insight into why it is very difficult to make distributed decisionmaking work in a for profit environment. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but there are reasons why such entities have not risen to the top of the economic heap.
Since there are already about 54 zillion people using it, I'd say the public is unconcerned. Analysts like to speculate about YouTube's business model, but everyone else is already using the service. It's good of Dvorak to give YouTube his stamp of approval. Doubtless they'll see a noticeable spike in traffic from all of those people who were hesitant about using YT: "Gee, should I check out this link to a YT video of some kid singing in his underwear? Crap. I don't know. Dvorak hasn't weighed in on these guys yet. What to do, what to do?!
What does it matter if businessmen use Apple solutions or not? Why hold them up as paragons of taste and class?
I think the parent was simply referring to the fact that people use computers every day in their workplaces, but we don't see Apple ads featuring Macs in the workplace.
As for businessmen as a class of humans not worthy of any respect, your examples seem to be pulling almost exclusively from the excesses of the worst Fortune 500 size companies. Small business fuels the economy:
From a two-person software start-up to a fleet of trucks helping to build cities, the small-business sector catalyzes economic expansion by:
making up 99.7 percent of all U.S. employers, meaning that only 17,000 companies, or 0.3 percent of all employers, have 500 or more employees;
generating half the nonfarm output of the U.S. economy, and employing about half of all Americans not working for government, while adding 60 to 80 percent of net new (nongovernmental) jobs annually;
comprising 97 percent of exporters and producing 29 percent of all export value--key points when we consider that exports have accounted for about 25 percent of U.S. economic growth over the past decade and support an estimated 12 million jobs;
winning nearly 24 percent of all government contracts, ranging from ship construction to printing brochures.
I have a hard time believing that the people who run most of the businesses in the United States are worthy of such scorn. Painting all businesspeople as vile creatures is akin to saying that all athletes take steroids, all programmers crack DoD systems, and all (pick an ethnic background) are criminals.
Right now Flogging a dead Story has been modded down to -1 Troll, which seems absurd to me. He points out that the story is thin and links to a prior article which already covered this topic. Trolls make wild accusations without anything to back them up. This wasn't a troll. Wish I had moderator points.
Don't worry, we'll get to keep our slug-throwers, even centuries after we leave earth. In fact, aside from the spaceships and hovercars, it'll seem a lot like the Wild West.
You are just 70 years behind Europe. What took you so long?
Nice leap. A man in New Hampshire is *charged* with violating a wiretapping and eavesdropping law. Another man in Philly gets busted by the cops for taking a photograph, which raises a big stink and likely will backfire on the police department.
The NH case is being reviewed. The man arrested in Philly was released, and the family has requested an inquiry. Don't be surprised if the police department is forced to apologize.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how do these two cases lead to the assumption that America is in the grip of jackbooted thugs?
NASA has never been anything but an R&D branch of the US Military.
Facts?
The NASA/DoD connection is obvious, but saying that it's sole role is R&D for the military is simplistic at best. Think about the commercial satellites launched into space by NASA; the massive amounts of pure science research on the Venus, Mars, and the moon; Skylab and the ISS; exploration of the outer solar system; the Hubble space telescope; the list goes on.
Then you must have read a different, shallower book called "1984" than I did. Because, in the "1984" I have sitting here, the state didn't actually do much 'controlling' beyond setting up the basic structure whereby people wittingly or unwittingly controlled themselves.
No, I think we did read the same book. My point is the same as yours. The state clamps down because the people tell it to. Individuals buy into the fear, which collectively creates a state that feeds the fear, and so on.
Rocket bombs? (What colour is the Terror Alert level today?). Eurasia/Eastasia? (Who are you 'at war' with - Afghanistan? Iraq? Is it Iran yet? What about tomorrow - Lebanon? Venezuela?). Hate Week? (Watch much Fox News?). Prisoners being driven through the streets (seen footage from Gitmo lately?) on their way to an uncertain fate? (Military courts, anyone?). The constant state of fear? (Are you with us in the War on Terrah, or against us?). The soothing voice of the figurehead Big Brother? (When is the next State of the Union address anyway?).
As for these items, I'm not sure what you're getting at. If the state doesn't really exercise much power, then why do they matter one way or the other?
Plus, I'm not sure how well your examples match anyway. The Terror Alert is widely regarded as a joke in the US. I don't know anyone, including the wingnuts I know who swallow the whole War on Terror notion, who believes that the Terror Alert system has any relationship to real life. Eurasia/Eastasia doesn't work either. We're at war with terrorists and Islamic states that sponsor terrorism. Whether you accept the premise or not, I think the enemy is fairly well established. Venezuela has nothing to do with it and the exchanges between the US and Venezuela are not going to lead to war. Chavez gets street cred for showing the US the finger. Nothing new in that. As for Hate Week and Fox News, there are, believe it or not, a lot of people who don't watch Fox News. Even then, it's an absolutely asenine organization that has built itself around jingoism, but equating it to Hate Week is excessive. Gitmo is a travesty of justice and a black eye for America. But there is tremendous outrage over Gitmo here, and intense politics around how to make a better system for detained enemy combatants. The constant state of fear is waning, even in the most intense nitwits, the ones who for a while were afraid to go buy TV dinners at Wal-Mart for fear of being bombed into oblivion. Finally, the President's poll numbers serve as proof that while there are some staunch holdouts, most Americans wouldn't trust him enough to let him eat with a foreign dignitary, much less run the country.
You seem to be implying a linear progression of state repression of individual rights, which seems off to me. It waxed in the 1950s during McCarthyism, then waned until the end of the 1960s when COINTELPRO et al reared their ugly heads. Then it waned again in the aftermath of Executive, FBI and CIA overreach. The 1970s and 1980s did not see an increase in government intrusion. The war on drugs in the 1990s slowly moved it up, but it wasn't until the reaction to 9/11 that we saw such eggregious violations of basic freedoms.
I think there's a strong tendency when we look at American history to assume that the government has been increasingly encroaching on our freedoms with each succeeding decade, and that this is somehow a force outside our control. But the violations always pop up during wars.
The post-9/11 era was quickly characterized as a "war" than the more appropriate "hunt for pirates" I would prefer to use. It's not too late for Americans to understand that thinking of this as a "war" is a simpleminded and counterproductive way to deal with a complex situation. I would suggest that already American popular opinion is shifting, and the Bush Administration may have already reached the zenith of its Big Brother powers. What the legislature gives, it can take away.
My main point in this discussion is that fatalism doesn't help us make government respect our freedoms. Political action does. It is possible to influence government, but it takes time and effort, and it can't be accomplished with a silver bullet. I think we've grown so used to instant, technological solutions that we're impatient with human political processes, which are inherently difficult and time-consuming.
My biggest problem with Apple for the last 4 years or so (both as an observer and now as a user) has been their lack of advertising of OS X.
In the mid-90s, Apple tried for quite some time to hammer home just how much better the MacOS was compared to Windows. They put multi-page spreads in major newsweeklies, touting the virtues of the Mac, point by point.
Consumers did not care.
Advertising works when it appeals to emotion. That's why the iPod ads have been so successful. By advertising on features, Apple is playing to the "check the boxes in your feature list" mentality that rules the PC industry. Individual features aren't compelling. The overall experience, and in advertising terms, the feeling of using a Mac is the real differentiator. That's why in the most recent Mac ads, Apple has stayed away from details, focusing instead on broad, easily-understood concepts.
Sophisticated computer users can already easily look up the specs online. Mainstream users need to be pursuaded with emotion.
Ever noticed that whenever the media is reporting on an attack, they don't just say that the culprit is a group of radicals, but it's a group of Islamic radicals, even when they don't know who the group was?
I think that's a sweeping generalization. I don't watch TV news at all - haven't in years. I get my news from newspapers and weeklies, and I find that the news sources I read tend to name the organizations and define them fairly well. This comes back to apathy by citizens. If we're too lazy to get real news, we'll watch infotainment and delude ourselves into thinking we're actually getting serious news. TV news is the least factual, most emotional media source of all because it relies on images, which are of course easily manipulated through editing, scale, and selection. See the carnage on TV and you've learned nothing.
The reason the state has more power isn't because the people have given it to them, it is because Americans are too lazy and apathetic to stop the state from taking that power.
Bush was re-elected. You can say that was apathy, or you can say it was the people talking. I say it was both. The bottom line for me is that Americans were scared enough to give power to Bush a second time, when they knew very clearly how he would use that power (or should have, if they were paying attention). A lot of people ARE scared of Islamic terrorists, and vote accordingly. People are notoriously bad at evaluating risk.
1984 was about the state controlling everything. In the current situation, the state is peering more heavily into everything we're doing because a lot of people are so afraid of Islamic terrorists that they're willing to give the state more power. This may or may not be a temporary situation, but the state obviously hasn't reached the level of control that Big Brother did in 1984.
As for corporations watching what you do, the real question is whether Microsoft checking to see if you're using a pirated version of their software is somehow going to affect your political rights, or if it is just a stupid move on their part that will only push customers away from their products. After all, you only have one state. You can choose software vendors.
As part of their marketing strategy, Microsoft has been attacking F/OSS for years, and it obviously hasn't worked. As a business, they ultimately have to be pragmatic if they want to survive. So they're adjusting their marketing accordingly. Microsoft still wants F/OSS to go away, but they now realize they can't do it with sheer FUD.
Whether they'll be able to compete on the merits is another matter entirely. As Paul Graham pointed out once, MS doesn't like hiring hackers who work on Open Source projects in their spare time. In so doing, they're probably depriving themselves of some of the best talent. While MS marketing may be changing, if the core belief system of the business folks and project managers at Microsoft remains fearful of the taint of Open Source, their dominance will continue to wane.
I mean, to learn piano, all you need is to buy a piano and then just plunk away at it until you're playing Chopin, right?
You seem to be implying that learning to play a video game well is equal in difficulty to learning to become a skilled pianist. For that matter, do you think that becoming a skilled basketball player or swimmer is no more difficult than becoming skilled at Halo 2?
I don't think all activities are equal in difficulty, particularly given that video games are created specifically to be playable. The piano wasn't created to be easy to learn. Video games are.
The caliber of Genius Bar employees seems to vary quite a bit. I've only had to use the Genius Bar twice, but both times the people working there were really on the ball and helpful. Perhaps it's because I live in the Silicon Valley area, and they have a greater pool of Macheads to choose from, or perhaps it's just dumb luck.
Of course, the problem with anecdotal evidence (positive or negative) is that it really doesn't provide any light on whether the individual experience is an outlier or a common experience.
I think sometimes, we get too caught up in treating the "Internet" as a single entity filled with information and shared by the whole world. In reality, it's just a "grid" that allows everyone's computer equipment to interconnect (or not, as they so desire).
So true. Meatspace is still important, no matter how intoxicating the virtual world has become. No physical cable, routers, servers, big buildings full of equipment = no Internet. The Internet does not exist on its own - it is wholly dependent on the physical world, where political boundaries still prevail.
Imagine policing the Net for infractions of the Laws of Cyberspace. Nations have already proven that they will go to extraordinary lengths to enforce their own laws in cyberspace. If anything, the trend is moving in the direction of a filtered Internet.
If you aren't into cheating with cloaked pages and doorway pages, the best way to get targeted traffic is to add value to visitors' experience. They come to your site, find its a good site, and spread the word. The more useful and relevant your site, the more visitors will return. In a nutshell, make a good site. Simple, really. I wouldn't be surprised to find that pagerank was a decoy set up to distract search engine marketers and let google go about its business.
I'm in full agreement that creating useful, relevant content is the cornerstone of website success. But it's not as easy as that. Pagerank is not a decoy - it is what allowed Google to take over as top dog in the search world. The core concept behind PageRank is that if a site is linked to by other sites, this must be for good reason. It is an indirect method of determining relevance. Of course it has been gamed over the years, but PageRank still matters. If it didn't, we'd all still be using AltaVista.
The trickiest part of getting noticed by engines is obtaining useful inbound links. If people can't see your site, they won't be able to evaluate it and (hopefully) link to it. It's the old marketing conundrum. How do I get the word out about this great thing I've created, when I'm just one fish in a giant ocean? Some people go the quick and dirty route, using search engine spamming techniques, which are akin to the scummy marketing tactics of snail mail advertisers (ever received a piece of mail seemingly related to your home mortgage, and found it was actually an ad from a competing lender?).
Just as with traditional offline marketing and advertising, there are legitimate ways to put the word out. They're slower and more labor intensive than fast buck methods, but they can help. Inbound links from well-respected sites, proper use of markup, clearly-written listings in directories, and keyword targeting can help your site gain visibility while helping searchers at the same time. Sites that ignore SEO can succeed, but most that do succeed rely on SEO to at least some degree.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the real question.
For example: Do you think that the original Battlestar Galactica TV show constituted theft of the ideas in Star Wars? Did Lucas steal the plot of Kurusawa's Hidden Fortress?
The problem with your interpretation is that plot ideas, characters, and so on do not spring from a whole cloth out of the author's mind, unaided by the culture and society in which the author lives. James Joyce couldn't have written Ulysses were it not for Homer's Odyssey. How could schools of artistic expression spring up unless one artist was taking and expanding upon the ideas of others? Placing inordinate barriers on creativity ultimately thwarts economic growth as well as the vitality of a culture.
I don't have a problem with copyright. I do have a problem with the persistent belief that creative works are the same as tables or bicycles or computers. They are not. The Constitution created copyright as a spur to creativity, *not* as a means of equating the intellectual property inherent in a creative work with the real property in a plot of land. Copyright is an artificial, legal construct.
Copyright exists "To Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts" not to serve as a perpetual income machine for writers and artists.
Unless they're harboring some religious, ethnic, or national grudge, people generally don't know much about history. That's 3x as true in the US as it is in most places.
'Sadly, a great many people in the computer field have a pathetic sense (or rather ignorance) of history. They are pompous and narcissistic enough to ignore the great contributions of past geniuses...
I'm confused. Are computer folks ignorant about history, or are they knowledgeable about history and chosing to ignore it?
The language from his suit is designed for media consumption, not to sway a judge.
Here's a random clip from his statement of facts:
Lawyers vary in how they make their statements of fact, but a long litany of statements like this make you sound unhinged and guilty of gross hyperbole. Maybe that's why he's been so stupendously unsuccessful in all of his anti-game lawsuits.
I also wonder at the letter he sent to Take-Two and Wal-Mart. The opening paragraph certainly sounds like a bald attempt at extortion. He's already skated on thin ice with the Florida Bar and with various judges. I wonder how much longer he'll be able to push the envelope with these vague and poorly constructed lawsuits before he gets nailed to the wall for it.
From Wikipedia:
Upon reopening on June 3, 2006, its number of visitors has doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertisement revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. The advertisements now generate about 75,000 USD per month according to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD.
I guess you could call that "sticking it to the man." You could also call it profiting. Perhaps a bit less Robin Hood and a bit more ticket scalper.
While I would urge this guy to start small (and have a clear idea of what he wants to accomplish, which he seems to lack at the moment), I would also encourage him to start implementing his organizational ideas from the get-go.
I likely didn't phrase my comment very well. What I meant was only that he should start small, as you suggest. I've been in small organizations that attempted to do the very thing he brought up, and it didn't work well. However, the collective he envisions may come up with a methodology that works. More power to them if they can.
Your Dilbert quote cracked me up. I see that all the time in business, and it is an asenine world view. However, that's usually a reference to business strategy, rather than the fundamental legal and organizational structure of a company. I've seen many organizational structures, all of which incorporate some sort of heirarchy. There are many reasons for this, but I think most of them have to do not with how an organization functions in isolation, but how it interacts with the world. The capitalist system is not set up to handle collective decisionmaking very well, given that banks, investors, vendors, and customers all operate with stratified decisionmaking structures.
The best way to learn about whether something works in business is to go out and try it. I should have made that and "start small" the focus of my post.
It's an industry association. It seems their strategy is to go after their targets as aggressively as possible, in order to send out the clear message that they can and will sue regular folks like you and me. They are effectively the "bad cop" while the individual record companies play the "good cop" giving the people the Brittany Spears and Korn they so desperately need.
You can argue that filesharing is on the rise, or that the RIAA's enforcement actions have cut filesharing, depending on whose facts you use and how you slice them. But in the end the strategy of using the industry association to attack customers, while individual labels try to pretend they play no part in it, probably won't work. In a world where alternatives to label-centric distribution are nonexistent, the labels would be able to make this good cop, bad cop strategy work. But the irony here is that the tighter they squeeze, the more systems will slip through their fingers (apologies to G. Lucas). Sure, there are no "good" big labels to defect to, but there is much more incentive to escape the entire label system altogether.
I keep waiting for one of the major labels to break ranks and start acting intelligent, giving customers fewer restrictions and defecting from the RIAA. It seems though, that none of them has the guts to do it, so they'll all keep pushing on consumers as hard as they can. The end result of the crackdown will eventually lead to a new business model in which the labels play a small or nonexistent role. Ironic, isn't it?
I'm not saying this to be snarky. If you haven't already been involved in starting a business with three or more people, do that first. I think it will provide a lot of insight into why it is very difficult to make distributed decisionmaking work in a for profit environment. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but there are reasons why such entities have not risen to the top of the economic heap.
Since there are already about 54 zillion people using it, I'd say the public is unconcerned. Analysts like to speculate about YouTube's business model, but everyone else is already using the service. It's good of Dvorak to give YouTube his stamp of approval. Doubtless they'll see a noticeable spike in traffic from all of those people who were hesitant about using YT: "Gee, should I check out this link to a YT video of some kid singing in his underwear? Crap. I don't know. Dvorak hasn't weighed in on these guys yet. What to do, what to do?!
What does it matter if businessmen use Apple solutions or not? Why hold them up as paragons of taste and class?
I think the parent was simply referring to the fact that people use computers every day in their workplaces, but we don't see Apple ads featuring Macs in the workplace.
As for businessmen as a class of humans not worthy of any respect, your examples seem to be pulling almost exclusively from the excesses of the worst Fortune 500 size companies. Small business fuels the economy:
I have a hard time believing that the people who run most of the businesses in the United States are worthy of such scorn. Painting all businesspeople as vile creatures is akin to saying that all athletes take steroids, all programmers crack DoD systems, and all (pick an ethnic background) are criminals.
Nope, no self-interest for her in getting people to believe that 40% of WoW gamers are addicted. Nosiree.
I'm not saying she's wrong, but a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.
Right now Flogging a dead Story has been modded down to -1 Troll, which seems absurd to me. He points out that the story is thin and links to a prior article which already covered this topic. Trolls make wild accusations without anything to back them up. This wasn't a troll. Wish I had moderator points.
Don't worry, we'll get to keep our slug-throwers, even centuries after we leave earth. In fact, aside from the spaceships and hovercars, it'll seem a lot like the Wild West.
You are just 70 years behind Europe. What took you so long?
Nice leap. A man in New Hampshire is *charged* with violating a wiretapping and eavesdropping law. Another man in Philly gets busted by the cops for taking a photograph, which raises a big stink and likely will backfire on the police department.
The NH case is being reviewed. The man arrested in Philly was released, and the family has requested an inquiry. Don't be surprised if the police department is forced to apologize.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how do these two cases lead to the assumption that America is in the grip of jackbooted thugs?
NASA has never been anything but an R&D branch of the US Military.
Facts?
The NASA/DoD connection is obvious, but saying that it's sole role is R&D for the military is simplistic at best. Think about the commercial satellites launched into space by NASA; the massive amounts of pure science research on the Venus, Mars, and the moon; Skylab and the ISS; exploration of the outer solar system; the Hubble space telescope; the list goes on.
Then you must have read a different, shallower book called "1984" than I did. Because, in the "1984" I have sitting here, the state didn't actually do much 'controlling' beyond setting up the basic structure whereby people wittingly or unwittingly controlled themselves.
No, I think we did read the same book. My point is the same as yours. The state clamps down because the people tell it to. Individuals buy into the fear, which collectively creates a state that feeds the fear, and so on.
Rocket bombs? (What colour is the Terror Alert level today?). Eurasia/Eastasia? (Who are you 'at war' with - Afghanistan? Iraq? Is it Iran yet? What about tomorrow - Lebanon? Venezuela?). Hate Week? (Watch much Fox News?). Prisoners being driven through the streets (seen footage from Gitmo lately?) on their way to an uncertain fate? (Military courts, anyone?). The constant state of fear? (Are you with us in the War on Terrah, or against us?). The soothing voice of the figurehead Big Brother? (When is the next State of the Union address anyway?).
As for these items, I'm not sure what you're getting at. If the state doesn't really exercise much power, then why do they matter one way or the other?
Plus, I'm not sure how well your examples match anyway. The Terror Alert is widely regarded as a joke in the US. I don't know anyone, including the wingnuts I know who swallow the whole War on Terror notion, who believes that the Terror Alert system has any relationship to real life. Eurasia/Eastasia doesn't work either. We're at war with terrorists and Islamic states that sponsor terrorism. Whether you accept the premise or not, I think the enemy is fairly well established. Venezuela has nothing to do with it and the exchanges between the US and Venezuela are not going to lead to war. Chavez gets street cred for showing the US the finger. Nothing new in that. As for Hate Week and Fox News, there are, believe it or not, a lot of people who don't watch Fox News. Even then, it's an absolutely asenine organization that has built itself around jingoism, but equating it to Hate Week is excessive. Gitmo is a travesty of justice and a black eye for America. But there is tremendous outrage over Gitmo here, and intense politics around how to make a better system for detained enemy combatants. The constant state of fear is waning, even in the most intense nitwits, the ones who for a while were afraid to go buy TV dinners at Wal-Mart for fear of being bombed into oblivion. Finally, the President's poll numbers serve as proof that while there are some staunch holdouts, most Americans wouldn't trust him enough to let him eat with a foreign dignitary, much less run the country.
You seem to be implying a linear progression of state repression of individual rights, which seems off to me. It waxed in the 1950s during McCarthyism, then waned until the end of the 1960s when COINTELPRO et al reared their ugly heads. Then it waned again in the aftermath of Executive, FBI and CIA overreach. The 1970s and 1980s did not see an increase in government intrusion. The war on drugs in the 1990s slowly moved it up, but it wasn't until the reaction to 9/11 that we saw such eggregious violations of basic freedoms.
I think there's a strong tendency when we look at American history to assume that the government has been increasingly encroaching on our freedoms with each succeeding decade, and that this is somehow a force outside our control. But the violations always pop up during wars.
The post-9/11 era was quickly characterized as a "war" than the more appropriate "hunt for pirates" I would prefer to use. It's not too late for Americans to understand that thinking of this as a "war" is a simpleminded and counterproductive way to deal with a complex situation. I would suggest that already American popular opinion is shifting, and the Bush Administration may have already reached the zenith of its Big Brother powers. What the legislature gives, it can take away.
My main point in this discussion is that fatalism doesn't help us make government respect our freedoms. Political action does. It is possible to influence government, but it takes time and effort, and it can't be accomplished with a silver bullet. I think we've grown so used to instant, technological solutions that we're impatient with human political processes, which are inherently difficult and time-consuming.
My biggest problem with Apple for the last 4 years or so (both as an observer and now as a user) has been their lack of advertising of OS X.
In the mid-90s, Apple tried for quite some time to hammer home just how much better the MacOS was compared to Windows. They put multi-page spreads in major newsweeklies, touting the virtues of the Mac, point by point.
Consumers did not care.
Advertising works when it appeals to emotion. That's why the iPod ads have been so successful. By advertising on features, Apple is playing to the "check the boxes in your feature list" mentality that rules the PC industry. Individual features aren't compelling. The overall experience, and in advertising terms, the feeling of using a Mac is the real differentiator. That's why in the most recent Mac ads, Apple has stayed away from details, focusing instead on broad, easily-understood concepts.
Sophisticated computer users can already easily look up the specs online. Mainstream users need to be pursuaded with emotion.
Ever noticed that whenever the media is reporting on an attack, they don't just say that the culprit is a group of radicals, but it's a group of Islamic radicals, even when they don't know who the group was?
I think that's a sweeping generalization. I don't watch TV news at all - haven't in years. I get my news from newspapers and weeklies, and I find that the news sources I read tend to name the organizations and define them fairly well. This comes back to apathy by citizens. If we're too lazy to get real news, we'll watch infotainment and delude ourselves into thinking we're actually getting serious news. TV news is the least factual, most emotional media source of all because it relies on images, which are of course easily manipulated through editing, scale, and selection. See the carnage on TV and you've learned nothing.
The reason the state has more power isn't because the people have given it to them, it is because Americans are too lazy and apathetic to stop the state from taking that power.
Bush was re-elected. You can say that was apathy, or you can say it was the people talking. I say it was both. The bottom line for me is that Americans were scared enough to give power to Bush a second time, when they knew very clearly how he would use that power (or should have, if they were paying attention). A lot of people ARE scared of Islamic terrorists, and vote accordingly. People are notoriously bad at evaluating risk.
1984 was about the state controlling everything. In the current situation, the state is peering more heavily into everything we're doing because a lot of people are so afraid of Islamic terrorists that they're willing to give the state more power. This may or may not be a temporary situation, but the state obviously hasn't reached the level of control that Big Brother did in 1984.
As for corporations watching what you do, the real question is whether Microsoft checking to see if you're using a pirated version of their software is somehow going to affect your political rights, or if it is just a stupid move on their part that will only push customers away from their products. After all, you only have one state. You can choose software vendors.
As part of their marketing strategy, Microsoft has been attacking F/OSS for years, and it obviously hasn't worked. As a business, they ultimately have to be pragmatic if they want to survive. So they're adjusting their marketing accordingly. Microsoft still wants F/OSS to go away, but they now realize they can't do it with sheer FUD.
Whether they'll be able to compete on the merits is another matter entirely. As Paul Graham pointed out once, MS doesn't like hiring hackers who work on Open Source projects in their spare time. In so doing, they're probably depriving themselves of some of the best talent. While MS marketing may be changing, if the core belief system of the business folks and project managers at Microsoft remains fearful of the taint of Open Source, their dominance will continue to wane.
I mean, to learn piano, all you need is to buy a piano and then just plunk away at it until you're playing Chopin, right?
You seem to be implying that learning to play a video game well is equal in difficulty to learning to become a skilled pianist. For that matter, do you think that becoming a skilled basketball player or swimmer is no more difficult than becoming skilled at Halo 2?
I don't think all activities are equal in difficulty, particularly given that video games are created specifically to be playable. The piano wasn't created to be easy to learn. Video games are.
I was royally pissed. "Genius bar" my ass.
The caliber of Genius Bar employees seems to vary quite a bit. I've only had to use the Genius Bar twice, but both times the people working there were really on the ball and helpful. Perhaps it's because I live in the Silicon Valley area, and they have a greater pool of Macheads to choose from, or perhaps it's just dumb luck.
Of course, the problem with anecdotal evidence (positive or negative) is that it really doesn't provide any light on whether the individual experience is an outlier or a common experience.
I think sometimes, we get too caught up in treating the "Internet" as a single entity filled with information and shared by the whole world. In reality, it's just a "grid" that allows everyone's computer equipment to interconnect (or not, as they so desire).
So true. Meatspace is still important, no matter how intoxicating the virtual world has become. No physical cable, routers, servers, big buildings full of equipment = no Internet. The Internet does not exist on its own - it is wholly dependent on the physical world, where political boundaries still prevail.
Imagine policing the Net for infractions of the Laws of Cyberspace. Nations have already proven that they will go to extraordinary lengths to enforce their own laws in cyberspace. If anything, the trend is moving in the direction of a filtered Internet.
If you aren't into cheating with cloaked pages and doorway pages, the best way to get targeted traffic is to add value to visitors' experience. They come to your site, find its a good site, and spread the word. The more useful and relevant your site, the more visitors will return. In a nutshell, make a good site. Simple, really. I wouldn't be surprised to find that pagerank was a decoy set up to distract search engine marketers and let google go about its business.
I'm in full agreement that creating useful, relevant content is the cornerstone of website success. But it's not as easy as that. Pagerank is not a decoy - it is what allowed Google to take over as top dog in the search world. The core concept behind PageRank is that if a site is linked to by other sites, this must be for good reason. It is an indirect method of determining relevance. Of course it has been gamed over the years, but PageRank still matters. If it didn't, we'd all still be using AltaVista.
The trickiest part of getting noticed by engines is obtaining useful inbound links. If people can't see your site, they won't be able to evaluate it and (hopefully) link to it. It's the old marketing conundrum. How do I get the word out about this great thing I've created, when I'm just one fish in a giant ocean? Some people go the quick and dirty route, using search engine spamming techniques, which are akin to the scummy marketing tactics of snail mail advertisers (ever received a piece of mail seemingly related to your home mortgage, and found it was actually an ad from a competing lender?).
Just as with traditional offline marketing and advertising, there are legitimate ways to put the word out. They're slower and more labor intensive than fast buck methods, but they can help. Inbound links from well-respected sites, proper use of markup, clearly-written listings in directories, and keyword targeting can help your site gain visibility while helping searchers at the same time. Sites that ignore SEO can succeed, but most that do succeed rely on SEO to at least some degree.