...not as nice as a globally decided and universally taught world auxiliary language would be (whether it might be English or whatever gained agreement). Would be much cooler not needing to use translation tools by actually having a shared language taught everywhere.
I neglected to mention that you can also disable the Google page from appearing--I find I can often get a good enough idea about the site I'm looking for, just by looking at the URLs and titles in the URL drop-down... (Wonder if Chrome will actually let you do that and miss out on the ads...)
Even Slashdot users don't know about CyberSearch? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7931/ or http://cybernetnews.com/cybersearch/ . This has been public at AMO since June 2008 and at their site earlier than that.... Granted, this one really ought to be built into Firefox (like Tree Style Tab) so more know about it, since it's not just a niche use.
One particularly handy tip you might miss about the add-on: type "^" and then your search term to instantly search the site already loaded in the same tab (no need to define a keyword).
Yeah because what one official says means we should condemn the whole institution.
(Since presumably no one here is condemning the U.S. government's existence, I won't hold my breath for the partisan attacks on Obama, Bush, etc. to stop in deference for the institution, and in the case of the U.S., unlike the U.N., its presidents actually are given some power.)
While science fiction can definitely foretell real developments and raise concern about them, it is sad that so many people seem to get their ideas about world government (particularly odd given the Star Trek base here) as though it is inevitably going to lead to a comic book dystopia. With proper checks and balances, a greater federation enables our expressive potential as a race as demonstrated in our successive history out of the slime.
For those blaming the U.N. for its ineffectiveness, why not blame its structure instead of its existence? If we lived at the time of the Articles of Confederation, should we blame the concept of a national government for its ineffectiveness? No doubt some states rights advocates at the time did, yet does any intelligent person now feel we would be better off without any national government (or government at all)?
I hardly see a lot of people believing in the miraculous powers of the U.N., though I do think there is a strong impetus toward people feeling that things should be done in an international rather than go-it-alone way--a sentiment which is rather suitable to a nation priding itself on democracy. Maybe there is some naivete within some in this group, but I don't think even naive people would fail to accept politicians who indicated by their words and proposals, that they did want to work within a more international umbrella, if certain core concerns were met.
It is even possible that with the right incentives and assurances to the rest of the membership that the present-day U.N. could come around to expelling the most egregious violators. Majority decisions of the General Assembly have been found to condemn rights abuses in certain countries, and not merely when it was the U.S. and Israel either, but countries like Iran.
But even if not, threats to leave the U.N. might also be politically viable (even a major windfall) if joined with a middle-road expressed desire to unite with a diversity of truly peace-loving nations and offer more real (but still federated) power to any proposed newly created collective body.
The UN will address the symptoms with food and aid, but will never address the problem of dictatorships and warlords that cause this poverty and corruption.
The U.N. doesn't have any way to deal with dictatorships and warlords, since most of them are members in good standing of the U.N. If you were to expel all the nations with disfunctional governments from the U.N., it would look a lot like NATO (plus Japan and India)...
While there is no doubt a continuing and increasing need for regional alliances between countries with a relatively high level of sustainable political development, and while it is a good point that dictatorships having membership in the U.N., no less on bodies like the Human Rights Council, is a serious issue, as with any union of countries wishing to refine its membership, there is still great unrecognized potential in picking a fight you can win: starting with denying membership to the most obvious targets, the most egregious violators, so as to avoid spooking those which may eventually come around with the right incentives.
There is a VAST difference between countries like Iran which systematically and even have a blueprint for violating rights, like how they deny their largest non-Muslim religious and non-political minority, Baha'is access to university education, bulldoze their cemeteries, imprison their leaders, instigate violence even against children, etc., and other countries which may be a bit too heavy-handed with those actively working against them, but which otherwise do not have a proactively rights-abusing agenda.
Restricting membership in the U.N. (which can be done according to Chapter 2 of the U.N. Charter) might be done simultaneously with other reforms which would give incentives to less developed countries to go along with this (and also improve the U.N. in the process), such as phasing out permanent membership in the Security Council, making the General Assembly partially proportional to population and making their resolutions binding, and extending jurisdiction of the hamstrung International Court to actually make judgments in cases where both parties have not agreed to put the case before them.
If Esperanto became popular (e.g., through nationalist sentiment unwilling to see English take over) and because of the constructed nature of the language (if nationalist sentiment against English would not do the same), it motivated more people to preserve their so-called natural languages*, a scramble to save traditional languages might not be a bad thing given the fact that with the increasing consolidation of existing languages (but not a single one), traditional languages are being lost quite rapidly, thus losing access to some of their cultural knowledge as well.
While I do not feel it would be a great loss in the long run for linguistic diversity to be lost (is anybody but a few hobbyists really lamenting we don't speak Old English anymore?), whether for cultural or religious reasons, no doubt people will be motivated to preserve their languages, and that is fine; it is wholly unrealistic to propose a universal language at this time which is not an "auxiliary one", i.e., supplementing local and/or national languages, as opposed to intending to replace them, and that's what most Esperantists (or International English) proponents are advocating. The point is that everyone in the world will have at least one common language in which they can speak, having learned it since early childhood.
We talk about web standards being a good thing, but how much enormous impact do you think having a common form of communication would have as far as science, technology, medicine, and dare we say, opportunities for better cultural understanding/peace, elimination of some immigration/native friction, etc.? I find it rather stunning that more people have not taken up this movement, though there does seem to be a bit of work to get people to stop thinking it means eliminating native languages, that the only possibility of an international language would be Esperanto, that democratic choice could not play a role, etc..
* The second generation of Esperanto parents ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers ) appear to adopt Esperanto nearly wholesale, unlike the typical need for creolization as needed by linguistically-impoverished pidgins, thus suggesting it is already a complete "natural" language)
Esperanto does have at least ten or tens of thousands of speakers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers , and even a couple thousand native speakers. And with the internet, there are many more opportunities to have such communication.
However, I agree there is nothing wrong with learning existing languages, except that, unfortunately, our world hasn't officially standardized on just one of the existing languages either, thus requiring people needing to learn multiple lingua francas if they want to get by in more places (thus Esperanto advocates put forward Esperanto as a way of breaking an impasse in deciding which existing language to choose). As it is now, pretty much the official languages of the U.N. function as lingua francas around the world (Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, English, and Russian), and it is a waste of our resources, and a barrier to access to each other's resources to have no single common medium of communication.
My strong opinion is that the issue should be put to a vote at the global level (maybe the Inter-Parliamentary Union which might more represent peoples of the world than the U.N. at this point) so that if English is as popular as people think it is (its not as widespread as people think it is, for sure), then the majority/plurality decision can give democratic backing to it being implemented earlier on and in more places, and if English will not get enough support, then the human race needs to get started on learning whatever will get support (e.g., Esperanto).
Esperanto is a great experiment and may help such a global decision weigh the desirability/feasibility of adopting such a constructed language, though no one could/can expect everyone in the world would/will drop everything to learn any constructed language when there weren't/aren't any institutional guarantees that it would/will be implemented universally in schools around the world.
Kind of like when I tried making a space at Wiktionary for entirely newly coined terms, in the event that proposals could be made, categorized, and discussed (an actual interesting use of a wiki-based dictionary, imo), and then someone (apparently Mikhail Epstein) came up with the word "protologism" to define this concept of a just-coined neologism (which I had earlier called, far less attractively, a "nowism" or "neo-neologism"). The word then at that time was self-describing (and maybe still is given that, while it kind of gained a little life of its own, it has to date not been used all that much outside of Wikipedia).
While it is necessary to recognize human capacity for evil, it is also necessary, particularly in the prevailing climate of self-defeating cynicism, to recognize our demonstrable capacity for justice and greater federation.
Has not, in practically every region of the world, a system of laws and administrative machinery developed to support a level of organization which transcends tribes, and city-states, and even now to some degree, transcending nations? Yes, there is still tribalism in our nature, still conflicts between nations, and indeed yes, within nations, but even while the scale of our problems has correspondingly increased in our adolescent state on the planet, we have demonstrated the ability to transcend by achieving progressively higher levels of sustainable organization. This organization has not been achieved merely by homogenizing imperialism, as imperialism has also given way to greater, if inadequate, degrees of self-governance and federation, even while certain issues raise to higher levels of standardization and need for some component of centralized management, and may from time to time go too far in one direction.
We can quite simply not afford to continue ignoring our equally powerful human capacity to transcend limiting selfishness such as has delivered to us, despite continuing tension between the poles, the achievement of a good degree of decentralization along with a good degree of centralization in our societal structures, even while admitting that to date, this has mostly reached a reasonable balance only up to the national level. Despite a past history of warring tribes and states, in much of the world, we have absolutely no such fears left of cities arming themselves to take over neighboring cities, or neighboring states doing the same. We have consolidated loyalties which are far larger than the constituencies which originally formed our nations.
And despite being inadequate, that is still a remarkable achievement, and one which itself proves our capacity to be able to further extend such a loyalty and organizational capacity more fully to the international level. The real solution here indeed is to eliminate entirely the need for such a high degree of weaponry, just as we have freed our internal states or provinces from the need to possess massive amounts of arms to protect themselves from neighboring provinces. Had we not done so, if not in blood, we would be wasting our preciously limited resources on redundant and fear-inducing, non-productive goods. Of course, just as the states forming our Union (for my fellow U.S. citizens here) would not lay down their arms against one another immediately, and indeed a human rights issue (slavery) needed to be resolved before it lastingly could be, disarmament cannot and should not be achieved unilaterally while effective and justly representative unifying and security measures are not in place at the global level. But this is not a mere dream, unless we malign our own ancestors' achievements and our own selves.
If you respond that somehow this is different because we in different nations are different peoples, I would agree with you that indeed we have to promote, just as the Founding Fathers of the U.S. (such as Benjamin Franklin) did, the concept of a wider loyalty and identity within our educational systems, this time to the world level (i.e., to promote world citizenship in schools around the world) so that we do see ourselves as the same people, while simultaneously overcoming the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the current world system of governance, just as the Founding Fathers discovered they needed to overhaul the weak and ineffectual Articles of Confederation.
It is a chicken-and-egg situation--we need a stronger international government to be able to consolidate our identification as world citizens, but we also need greater promotion of this concept, in order for us to get there (just as was needed in the joining of the U.S. states into a wider Union where the concept of a national identity had not yet
For some doctors here in China at least, it is the other way around.
About 10 years ago, I came to China to do English teaching, and as I suffer from chronic fatigue (worse than it sounds), I went to a Chinese doctor to see if there was anything useful I might find.
This was also central China--not some highly developed coastal city (though it was urban)--and after my translator explained my interest in some Chinese medicine for fatigue, he derisively said to the translator, "he believes in that stuff (too)?". After I made clear that my interest was because there were no scientifically proven treatments for chronic fatigue, and I was willing to try something which might help (with traditional use perhaps pointing to an effective but as yet untested treatment), he conceded in the validity of the interest.
He didn't end up prescribing anything, but Chinese hospitals and local drug stores do have significant amounts of dried herbs along with the standard "Western" medicine. But as this anecdote might support, among medical professionals at least, the priority might not necessarily be based on traditional medicine first except in the sense of avoiding stress, eating well, etc.
Even among traditional medicine advocates, taking herbs might not be supported unless the person has a weakened constitution, etc.
But I do agree it might be beneficial to find herbs, taken as many Chinese do, over a longer period of time than the equivalent but more potent drugs which really can hammer you with negative side effects (and which many Western doctors hardly advise you about at all--e.g., I was sent to different specialists for some terrible jaw pain I had and later discovered on my own it was due to a prescribed antacid I had been taking; perhaps tellingly, a Chinese doctor here independently started me with the same medicine as I got prescribed in the U.S. but with half the dosage--and it worked pretty well).
Yes, but that's why the workers don't need to be given such a large portion of the profits of a company. It'd only need to be a certain portion of the profits, say 20-25%, but still enough to make it appealing on some level...The results might also satisfy management and the share-holders as well.
In any case, it won't be enough of an incentive to deter someone with an ethic which says they can just steal from the company, dump all their work on others, back-stab to get ahead, etc., if they are able to get away with it and get their individual reward, but it certainly can give a nice feeling to the average worker who isn't necessarily tempted to be a crook, but might otherwise just come in to cash his or her check and forget about the meaning of what they are doing. It's not just about working harder, either, as it is giving reason to workers to think more purposefully and intelligently in their work.
Heck, I get pretty tickled when I get a small donation for some open source software, or when a company delivered on their promise to give bonuses for ideas they implemented.
A little carrot can go a lot farther to instilling loyalty than a lot of menacing reviews, monitoring schemes, etc. Working as a temp at one place, my boss wanted me to inform him whenever I went to the washroom--and I wasn't someone to take long bathroom breaks; even my elementary school teachers didn't time that!
Firstly, I congratulate you for your caring enough about taking on the issue.
However, I think it is worthwhile to ask (if you, like most companies, have not already considered) whether employees have enough incentive to really want to work together in your company.
If companies gave a share of the profits to every employee in the company, not only would those employees have a stake at being more polite to clients, more innovative, etc., they would also see that their own interests were tied up in the interests of the other employees. It wouldn't be us-vs-them as far as other departments, or me-vs-them, it would foster working together, and a sense of ownership in the company, especially if the company also regularly consults with and consider the employees as part owners in decision-making.
When the employees stand to gain from greater cohesion, executives aren't solely responsible for attempting rah-rah motivation that encourages them to do so. No executive would join or stick around with a company which wasn't rewarding him or her, so executives need to stop thinking they are in a special class of people who are inherently motivated for grander things like team-work and service.
Just because one hopes employees will just naturally have an ethic to work in the interests of the company--including fostering good relations with other co-workers--doesn't mean they will.
Too many companies assume that only executives are worthy of enticing with a share of the company's profits, or they make the program opt-in or dependent on the employee spending some of their own money, while some of the strongest benefits may come from there literally being collective ownership by everyone (at least as far as having a share of the profits and some decision making). Everyone has reason to work together, beyond the inherent but more elusive rewards for doing so.
While this might not be your company's issue, and while the suggestion may only seem tangentially related to your question, ensuring people are motivated for the fundamental reason most choose to be with a company (and to work at all) really needs to be taken into account before they will be more productive and more interested in collaborating and feeling at home at work.
Capitalism has it right when it recognizes people need incentives, but oddly, such incentives haven't been adequately brought to the common people who might otherwise be wooed by communism. Many executives today actually come off as rather communistic in assuming people should just work for the benefit of the "state" (corporation). They insist that workers should just be satisfied with a salary and fear of losing their job, and that this should be enough to motivate anyone. It isn't.
To reference Slashdot canonical authority, note that one of the serious moments in the film Office Space was when the main character is asked whether having a share of the profits would motivate him, and he actually admits it might.
Certain activities should be done, for example, jointly only between such regions as American states and Europe (e.g., the European Union is right not to set its standards too low in just allowing anyone to join, though I hope such like-minded unions progress across the Atlantic and Americas and into other like-minded regions).
However, in other non-critical areas, such as ICANN and membership on the United Nations General Assembly itself (since the General Assembly resolutions are currently not binding), I believe the most effective policy is, at this point in time, to deny only the most egregious deniers of human rights the right to participate, while allowing most voices to be heard until such time as standards improve (The U.N. charter does not give an unequivocal right to stay in the U.N.; it can be revoked). If a country wants to block traffic to a particular domain, they can already do it, so I'm not sure that the repercussions would be so serious if oppressive regions provisionally get to deny certain domains assigned under their country's specific top-level domains. In non-critical cases where widespread participation is reasonable and beneficial even with somewhat oppressive regimes (it defuses perceptions of American exceptionalism for one), you can exercise more influence when you pick your battles wisely and engage, rather than being quixotic (and no doubt inconsistent) in throwing all problematic countries into one lump and failing to have any influence at all on human rights because the net was cast too wide.
But it is a good impulse to recognize there need to be certain standards, especially if effort is made to apply them progressively.
For those who want to work in PHP, one can already work JavaScript-style (as of PHP 5.3), or even JavaScript proper... (While I'm at it, I may as well mention our bringing PHP to JavaScript (PHP functions implemented in JS, that is), hopefully making SSJS more appealing (though still requiring host support). Help welcome!...)
While this might go against the Church of the Anti-Religion (Gathering of the Tribe: here), maybe the fact that those of you who admit partisanship in yourself or among those who use the same technologies you do, could concede that systems of morality--including those which justify themselves on supernatural inspiration and use that to enhance its effect (indisputably quite frequently for good), while admittedly broader in scope (and power) than technology fan-clubs, are not themselves inherently to blame for fanatics and fundamentalists any more than Linux or the like is inherently to blame for the type of dude who kicked me out of a chat room for the FUD blasphemy of joking to the effect that if I couldn't get help from them testing a potentially useful open source Firefox extension on Linux that Linux users might otherwise cede territory to the "Dark Side".
It shouldn't be such a marvel to people who recognize that our ubiquitous use of a brain--however much you may joke that religionists do not have any (isn't treating and taunting others as a whole a sign of fervid attachment and insecurity, btw?; most cults don't even go that far)--in filtering reality, with its propensity for emotional and/or communal attachments, will apply such a propensity, more or less universally, for good or ill, across all subjects. I am in you, and you are in me...
"Exponents of the world's various theological systems bear a heavy responsibility not only for the disrepute into which faith itself has fallen among many progressive thinkers, but for the inhibitions and distortions produced in humanity's continuing discourse on spiritual meaning. To conclude, however, that the answer lies in discouraging the investigation of spiritual reality and ignoring the deepest roots of human motivation is a self-evident delusion. The sole effect, to the degree that such censorship has been achieved in recent history, has been to deliver the shaping of humanity's future into the hands of a new orthodoxy, one which argues that truth is amoral and facts are independent of values."
(The Prosperity of Humankind)
The problem with a lot of sites dealing with spam is that they are using the same software that tries to solve everything at the top. Uniformity doesn't help.
But leaving people to their own devices to create or adapt their own forum/blogging/wiki software is not a good solution either. Uncoordinated diversity leaves a lot of people to fend for themselves.
Having unity-in-diversity (a common strength across systems and organisms), however, might well solve the problem.
If forum/blogging/wiki software creators would give sites the opportunity to make (and be able to change) their own set of question and answers for first-time-users (and not trouble them after that), I think bots would be hard-pressed to be programmed to interpret all such site-specific questions on their own. If bots could actually be programmed to intelligently answer all such human language questions, I think the bot-makers could be making a lot more dough in legitimate business...
Besides this, I'm surprised the article didn't make mention of the Affero GPL to force server-side code to be shared back.
As far as the parent comment:
What if the http server and database are free software, but the people who operate the server don't allow you to download all of their data in bulk and serve it yourself?
I for one think that might make an excellent optional addition to the GPL, as with Affero. If crowd-sourcing sites like Wikipedia didn't make their data available in bulk, they are much less appealing. Yes, one can make their own spider/scraper, but that is not exactly in the spirit of the data itself being wholly "free", assuming it is even possible with some sites to reverse engineer their complete data package. And nothing is to prevent the site from modifying their robots.txt file at any time to cause/force the Wayback Machine, etc. to stop distributing their archived copies (and taking the content offline or requiring paid access to it), thereby leaving every contributor in the lurch who expected to be able to get their content contributions back, even if those contributions were GPL.
On the other side, it would be interesting to see an optional clause compelling the exposure of the live database API (at least read-only, though maybe even a limited-but-meaningful write-access one for wikis, allowing perhaps for free but limited, registration-dependent keys), since sometimes the source of the data (by that I mean the site which is serving the data) is what is important, as it is trusted and contains the latest data which people wish to read or shape.
Actually, a site which acted to expose the write API (whether compelling others creating their own version to expose their data, data API, etc., or not), might be the only way Wikipedia could become more free--and someone setting up such a fork, if Mediawiki didn't do so itself, might be the one way people would actually switch sites. When the API is exposed, it can effectively produce a distributed wiki which addresses the issue of specific hosts being blocked (as Wikipedia has been and is in some countries) as well as opens up opportunities for alternative clients.
I for one think that this article has done a great service by raising the issue. While I might not demand to only use "free" sites (client-side of server-side) myself, and while I might not always want to compel others to go that far in staying "free" by using such compulsory licenses in my own open source projects, I do believe it offers a good option to stimulate development of such fully-free sites, especially if the FSF's future server-side solutions will take into account optionally compelling the exposure of data API's and/or bulk data downloads as mentioned above.
Slashdot Mirror
So Eve was created from a ribbed?
...not as nice as a globally decided and universally taught world auxiliary language would be (whether it might be English or whatever gained agreement). Would be much cooler not needing to use translation tools by actually having a shared language taught everywhere.
for BIG BROTHER...
I neglected to mention that you can also disable the Google page from appearing--I find I can often get a good enough idea about the site I'm looking for, just by looking at the URLs and titles in the URL drop-down... (Wonder if Chrome will actually let you do that and miss out on the ads...)
Even Slashdot users don't know about CyberSearch? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7931/ or http://cybernetnews.com/cybersearch/ . This has been public at AMO since June 2008 and at their site earlier than that.... Granted, this one really ought to be built into Firefox (like Tree Style Tab) so more know about it, since it's not just a niche use.
One particularly handy tip you might miss about the add-on: type "^" and then your search term to instantly search the site already loaded in the same tab (no need to define a keyword).
Yeah because what one official says means we should condemn the whole institution.
(Since presumably no one here is condemning the U.S. government's existence, I won't hold my breath for the partisan attacks on Obama, Bush, etc. to stop in deference for the institution, and in the case of the U.S., unlike the U.N., its presidents actually are given some power.)
While science fiction can definitely foretell real developments and raise concern about them, it is sad that so many people seem to get their ideas about world government (particularly odd given the Star Trek base here) as though it is inevitably going to lead to a comic book dystopia. With proper checks and balances, a greater federation enables our expressive potential as a race as demonstrated in our successive history out of the slime.
For those blaming the U.N. for its ineffectiveness, why not blame its structure instead of its existence? If we lived at the time of the Articles of Confederation, should we blame the concept of a national government for its ineffectiveness? No doubt some states rights advocates at the time did, yet does any intelligent person now feel we would be better off without any national government (or government at all)?
I hardly see a lot of people believing in the miraculous powers of the U.N., though I do think there is a strong impetus toward people feeling that things should be done in an international rather than go-it-alone way--a sentiment which is rather suitable to a nation priding itself on democracy. Maybe there is some naivete within some in this group, but I don't think even naive people would fail to accept politicians who indicated by their words and proposals, that they did want to work within a more international umbrella, if certain core concerns were met.
It is even possible that with the right incentives and assurances to the rest of the membership that the present-day U.N. could come around to expelling the most egregious violators. Majority decisions of the General Assembly have been found to condemn rights abuses in certain countries, and not merely when it was the U.S. and Israel either, but countries like Iran.
But even if not, threats to leave the U.N. might also be politically viable (even a major windfall) if joined with a middle-road expressed desire to unite with a diversity of truly peace-loving nations and offer more real (but still federated) power to any proposed newly created collective body.
The U.N. doesn't have any way to deal with dictatorships and warlords, since most of them are members in good standing of the U.N. If you were to expel all the nations with disfunctional governments from the U.N., it would look a lot like NATO (plus Japan and India)...
While there is no doubt a continuing and increasing need for regional alliances between countries with a relatively high level of sustainable political development, and while it is a good point that dictatorships having membership in the U.N., no less on bodies like the Human Rights Council, is a serious issue, as with any union of countries wishing to refine its membership, there is still great unrecognized potential in picking a fight you can win: starting with denying membership to the most obvious targets, the most egregious violators, so as to avoid spooking those which may eventually come around with the right incentives.
There is a VAST difference between countries like Iran which systematically and even have a blueprint for violating rights, like how they deny their largest non-Muslim religious and non-political minority, Baha'is access to university education, bulldoze their cemeteries, imprison their leaders, instigate violence even against children, etc., and other countries which may be a bit too heavy-handed with those actively working against them, but which otherwise do not have a proactively rights-abusing agenda.
Restricting membership in the U.N. (which can be done according to Chapter 2 of the U.N. Charter) might be done simultaneously with other reforms which would give incentives to less developed countries to go along with this (and also improve the U.N. in the process), such as phasing out permanent membership in the Security Council, making the General Assembly partially proportional to population and making their resolutions binding, and extending jurisdiction of the hamstrung International Court to actually make judgments in cases where both parties have not agreed to put the case before them.
Delaying publication 100 years is a long way to go for getting in the last laugh...
If Esperanto became popular (e.g., through nationalist sentiment unwilling to see English take over) and because of the constructed nature of the language (if nationalist sentiment against English would not do the same), it motivated more people to preserve their so-called natural languages*, a scramble to save traditional languages might not be a bad thing given the fact that with the increasing consolidation of existing languages (but not a single one), traditional languages are being lost quite rapidly, thus losing access to some of their cultural knowledge as well.
While I do not feel it would be a great loss in the long run for linguistic diversity to be lost (is anybody but a few hobbyists really lamenting we don't speak Old English anymore?), whether for cultural or religious reasons, no doubt people will be motivated to preserve their languages, and that is fine; it is wholly unrealistic to propose a universal language at this time which is not an "auxiliary one", i.e., supplementing local and/or national languages, as opposed to intending to replace them, and that's what most Esperantists (or International English) proponents are advocating. The point is that everyone in the world will have at least one common language in which they can speak, having learned it since early childhood.
We talk about web standards being a good thing, but how much enormous impact do you think having a common form of communication would have as far as science, technology, medicine, and dare we say, opportunities for better cultural understanding/peace, elimination of some immigration/native friction, etc.? I find it rather stunning that more people have not taken up this movement, though there does seem to be a bit of work to get people to stop thinking it means eliminating native languages, that the only possibility of an international language would be Esperanto, that democratic choice could not play a role, etc..
* The second generation of Esperanto parents ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers ) appear to adopt Esperanto nearly wholesale, unlike the typical need for creolization as needed by linguistically-impoverished pidgins, thus suggesting it is already a complete "natural" language)
Esperanto does have at least ten or tens of thousands of speakers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers , and even a couple thousand native speakers. And with the internet, there are many more opportunities to have such communication.
However, I agree there is nothing wrong with learning existing languages, except that, unfortunately, our world hasn't officially standardized on just one of the existing languages either, thus requiring people needing to learn multiple lingua francas if they want to get by in more places (thus Esperanto advocates put forward Esperanto as a way of breaking an impasse in deciding which existing language to choose). As it is now, pretty much the official languages of the U.N. function as lingua francas around the world (Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, English, and Russian), and it is a waste of our resources, and a barrier to access to each other's resources to have no single common medium of communication.
My strong opinion is that the issue should be put to a vote at the global level (maybe the Inter-Parliamentary Union which might more represent peoples of the world than the U.N. at this point) so that if English is as popular as people think it is (its not as widespread as people think it is, for sure), then the majority/plurality decision can give democratic backing to it being implemented earlier on and in more places, and if English will not get enough support, then the human race needs to get started on learning whatever will get support (e.g., Esperanto).
Esperanto is a great experiment and may help such a global decision weigh the desirability/feasibility of adopting such a constructed language, though no one could/can expect everyone in the world would/will drop everything to learn any constructed language when there weren't/aren't any institutional guarantees that it would/will be implemented universally in schools around the world.
Or a mustache...
Kind of like when I tried making a space at Wiktionary for entirely newly coined terms, in the event that proposals could be made, categorized, and discussed (an actual interesting use of a wiki-based dictionary, imo), and then someone (apparently Mikhail Epstein) came up with the word "protologism" to define this concept of a just-coined neologism (which I had earlier called, far less attractively, a "nowism" or "neo-neologism"). The word then at that time was self-describing (and maybe still is given that, while it kind of gained a little life of its own, it has to date not been used all that much outside of Wikipedia).
While it is necessary to recognize human capacity for evil, it is also necessary, particularly in the prevailing climate of self-defeating cynicism, to recognize our demonstrable capacity for justice and greater federation.
Has not, in practically every region of the world, a system of laws and administrative machinery developed to support a level of organization which transcends tribes, and city-states, and even now to some degree, transcending nations? Yes, there is still tribalism in our nature, still conflicts between nations, and indeed yes, within nations, but even while the scale of our problems has correspondingly increased in our adolescent state on the planet, we have demonstrated the ability to transcend by achieving progressively higher levels of sustainable organization. This organization has not been achieved merely by homogenizing imperialism, as imperialism has also given way to greater, if inadequate, degrees of self-governance and federation, even while certain issues raise to higher levels of standardization and need for some component of centralized management, and may from time to time go too far in one direction.
We can quite simply not afford to continue ignoring our equally powerful human capacity to transcend limiting selfishness such as has delivered to us, despite continuing tension between the poles, the achievement of a good degree of decentralization along with a good degree of centralization in our societal structures, even while admitting that to date, this has mostly reached a reasonable balance only up to the national level. Despite a past history of warring tribes and states, in much of the world, we have absolutely no such fears left of cities arming themselves to take over neighboring cities, or neighboring states doing the same. We have consolidated loyalties which are far larger than the constituencies which originally formed our nations.
And despite being inadequate, that is still a remarkable achievement, and one which itself proves our capacity to be able to further extend such a loyalty and organizational capacity more fully to the international level. The real solution here indeed is to eliminate entirely the need for such a high degree of weaponry, just as we have freed our internal states or provinces from the need to possess massive amounts of arms to protect themselves from neighboring provinces. Had we not done so, if not in blood, we would be wasting our preciously limited resources on redundant and fear-inducing, non-productive goods. Of course, just as the states forming our Union (for my fellow U.S. citizens here) would not lay down their arms against one another immediately, and indeed a human rights issue (slavery) needed to be resolved before it lastingly could be, disarmament cannot and should not be achieved unilaterally while effective and justly representative unifying and security measures are not in place at the global level. But this is not a mere dream, unless we malign our own ancestors' achievements and our own selves.
If you respond that somehow this is different because we in different nations are different peoples, I would agree with you that indeed we have to promote, just as the Founding Fathers of the U.S. (such as Benjamin Franklin) did, the concept of a wider loyalty and identity within our educational systems, this time to the world level (i.e., to promote world citizenship in schools around the world) so that we do see ourselves as the same people, while simultaneously overcoming the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the current world system of governance, just as the Founding Fathers discovered they needed to overhaul the weak and ineffectual Articles of Confederation.
It is a chicken-and-egg situation--we need a stronger international government to be able to consolidate our identification as world citizens, but we also need greater promotion of this concept, in order for us to get there (just as was needed in the joining of the U.S. states into a wider Union where the concept of a national identity had not yet
For some doctors here in China at least, it is the other way around.
About 10 years ago, I came to China to do English teaching, and as I suffer from chronic fatigue (worse than it sounds), I went to a Chinese doctor to see if there was anything useful I might find.
This was also central China--not some highly developed coastal city (though it was urban)--and after my translator explained my interest in some Chinese medicine for fatigue, he derisively said to the translator, "he believes in that stuff (too)?". After I made clear that my interest was because there were no scientifically proven treatments for chronic fatigue, and I was willing to try something which might help (with traditional use perhaps pointing to an effective but as yet untested treatment), he conceded in the validity of the interest.
He didn't end up prescribing anything, but Chinese hospitals and local drug stores do have significant amounts of dried herbs along with the standard "Western" medicine. But as this anecdote might support, among medical professionals at least, the priority might not necessarily be based on traditional medicine first except in the sense of avoiding stress, eating well, etc.
Even among traditional medicine advocates, taking herbs might not be supported unless the person has a weakened constitution, etc.
But I do agree it might be beneficial to find herbs, taken as many Chinese do, over a longer period of time than the equivalent but more potent drugs which really can hammer you with negative side effects (and which many Western doctors hardly advise you about at all--e.g., I was sent to different specialists for some terrible jaw pain I had and later discovered on my own it was due to a prescribed antacid I had been taking; perhaps tellingly, a Chinese doctor here independently started me with the same medicine as I got prescribed in the U.S. but with half the dosage--and it worked pretty well).
It's not quite Hell, but it's an impressive step in that direction...
Yes, but that's why the workers don't need to be given such a large portion of the profits of a company. It'd only need to be a certain portion of the profits, say 20-25%, but still enough to make it appealing on some level...The results might also satisfy management and the share-holders as well.
In any case, it won't be enough of an incentive to deter someone with an ethic which says they can just steal from the company, dump all their work on others, back-stab to get ahead, etc., if they are able to get away with it and get their individual reward, but it certainly can give a nice feeling to the average worker who isn't necessarily tempted to be a crook, but might otherwise just come in to cash his or her check and forget about the meaning of what they are doing. It's not just about working harder, either, as it is giving reason to workers to think more purposefully and intelligently in their work.
Heck, I get pretty tickled when I get a small donation for some open source software, or when a company delivered on their promise to give bonuses for ideas they implemented.
A little carrot can go a lot farther to instilling loyalty than a lot of menacing reviews, monitoring schemes, etc. Working as a temp at one place, my boss wanted me to inform him whenever I went to the washroom--and I wasn't someone to take long bathroom breaks; even my elementary school teachers didn't time that!
Firstly, I congratulate you for your caring enough about taking on the issue.
However, I think it is worthwhile to ask (if you, like most companies, have not already considered) whether employees have enough incentive to really want to work together in your company.
If companies gave a share of the profits to every employee in the company, not only would those employees have a stake at being more polite to clients, more innovative, etc., they would also see that their own interests were tied up in the interests of the other employees. It wouldn't be us-vs-them as far as other departments, or me-vs-them, it would foster working together, and a sense of ownership in the company, especially if the company also regularly consults with and consider the employees as part owners in decision-making.
When the employees stand to gain from greater cohesion, executives aren't solely responsible for attempting rah-rah motivation that encourages them to do so. No executive would join or stick around with a company which wasn't rewarding him or her, so executives need to stop thinking they are in a special class of people who are inherently motivated for grander things like team-work and service.
Just because one hopes employees will just naturally have an ethic to work in the interests of the company--including fostering good relations with other co-workers--doesn't mean they will.
Too many companies assume that only executives are worthy of enticing with a share of the company's profits, or they make the program opt-in or dependent on the employee spending some of their own money, while some of the strongest benefits may come from there literally being collective ownership by everyone (at least as far as having a share of the profits and some decision making). Everyone has reason to work together, beyond the inherent but more elusive rewards for doing so.
While this might not be your company's issue, and while the suggestion may only seem tangentially related to your question, ensuring people are motivated for the fundamental reason most choose to be with a company (and to work at all) really needs to be taken into account before they will be more productive and more interested in collaborating and feeling at home at work.
Capitalism has it right when it recognizes people need incentives, but oddly, such incentives haven't been adequately brought to the common people who might otherwise be wooed by communism. Many executives today actually come off as rather communistic in assuming people should just work for the benefit of the "state" (corporation). They insist that workers should just be satisfied with a salary and fear of losing their job, and that this should be enough to motivate anyone. It isn't.
To reference Slashdot canonical authority, note that one of the serious moments in the film Office Space was when the main character is asked whether having a share of the profits would motivate him, and he actually admits it might.
IT phone home...
Certain activities should be done, for example, jointly only between such regions as American states and Europe (e.g., the European Union is right not to set its standards too low in just allowing anyone to join, though I hope such like-minded unions progress across the Atlantic and Americas and into other like-minded regions).
However, in other non-critical areas, such as ICANN and membership on the United Nations General Assembly itself (since the General Assembly resolutions are currently not binding), I believe the most effective policy is, at this point in time, to deny only the most egregious deniers of human rights the right to participate, while allowing most voices to be heard until such time as standards improve (The U.N. charter does not give an unequivocal right to stay in the U.N.; it can be revoked). If a country wants to block traffic to a particular domain, they can already do it, so I'm not sure that the repercussions would be so serious if oppressive regions provisionally get to deny certain domains assigned under their country's specific top-level domains. In non-critical cases where widespread participation is reasonable and beneficial even with somewhat oppressive regimes (it defuses perceptions of American exceptionalism for one), you can exercise more influence when you pick your battles wisely and engage, rather than being quixotic (and no doubt inconsistent) in throwing all problematic countries into one lump and failing to have any influence at all on human rights because the net was cast too wide.
But it is a good impulse to recognize there need to be certain standards, especially if effort is made to apply them progressively.
For those who want to work in PHP, one can already work JavaScript-style (as of PHP 5.3), or even JavaScript proper... (While I'm at it, I may as well mention our bringing PHP to JavaScript (PHP functions implemented in JS, that is), hopefully making SSJS more appealing (though still requiring host support). Help welcome!...)
While this might go against the Church of the Anti-Religion (Gathering of the Tribe: here), maybe the fact that those of you who admit partisanship in yourself or among those who use the same technologies you do, could concede that systems of morality--including those which justify themselves on supernatural inspiration and use that to enhance its effect (indisputably quite frequently for good), while admittedly broader in scope (and power) than technology fan-clubs, are not themselves inherently to blame for fanatics and fundamentalists any more than Linux or the like is inherently to blame for the type of dude who kicked me out of a chat room for the FUD blasphemy of joking to the effect that if I couldn't get help from them testing a potentially useful open source Firefox extension on Linux that Linux users might otherwise cede territory to the "Dark Side".
It shouldn't be such a marvel to people who recognize that our ubiquitous use of a brain--however much you may joke that religionists do not have any (isn't treating and taunting others as a whole a sign of fervid attachment and insecurity, btw?; most cults don't even go that far)--in filtering reality, with its propensity for emotional and/or communal attachments, will apply such a propensity, more or less universally, for good or ill, across all subjects. I am in you, and you are in me...
The problem with a lot of sites dealing with spam is that they are using the same software that tries to solve everything at the top. Uniformity doesn't help.
But leaving people to their own devices to create or adapt their own forum/blogging/wiki software is not a good solution either. Uncoordinated diversity leaves a lot of people to fend for themselves.
Having unity-in-diversity (a common strength across systems and organisms), however, might well solve the problem.
If forum/blogging/wiki software creators would give sites the opportunity to make (and be able to change) their own set of question and answers for first-time-users (and not trouble them after that), I think bots would be hard-pressed to be programmed to interpret all such site-specific questions on their own. If bots could actually be programmed to intelligently answer all such human language questions, I think the bot-makers could be making a lot more dough in legitimate business...
Besides this, I'm surprised the article didn't make mention of the Affero GPL to force server-side code to be shared back.
As far as the parent comment:
I for one think that might make an excellent optional addition to the GPL, as with Affero. If crowd-sourcing sites like Wikipedia didn't make their data available in bulk, they are much less appealing. Yes, one can make their own spider/scraper, but that is not exactly in the spirit of the data itself being wholly "free", assuming it is even possible with some sites to reverse engineer their complete data package. And nothing is to prevent the site from modifying their robots.txt file at any time to cause/force the Wayback Machine, etc. to stop distributing their archived copies (and taking the content offline or requiring paid access to it), thereby leaving every contributor in the lurch who expected to be able to get their content contributions back, even if those contributions were GPL.
On the other side, it would be interesting to see an optional clause compelling the exposure of the live database API (at least read-only, though maybe even a limited-but-meaningful write-access one for wikis, allowing perhaps for free but limited, registration-dependent keys), since sometimes the source of the data (by that I mean the site which is serving the data) is what is important, as it is trusted and contains the latest data which people wish to read or shape.
Actually, a site which acted to expose the write API (whether compelling others creating their own version to expose their data, data API, etc., or not), might be the only way Wikipedia could become more free--and someone setting up such a fork, if Mediawiki didn't do so itself, might be the one way people would actually switch sites. When the API is exposed, it can effectively produce a distributed wiki which addresses the issue of specific hosts being blocked (as Wikipedia has been and is in some countries) as well as opens up opportunities for alternative clients.
I for one think that this article has done a great service by raising the issue. While I might not demand to only use "free" sites (client-side of server-side) myself, and while I might not always want to compel others to go that far in staying "free" by using such compulsory licenses in my own open source projects, I do believe it offers a good option to stimulate development of such fully-free sites, especially if the FSF's future server-side solutions will take into account optionally compelling the exposure of data API's and/or bulk data downloads as mentioned above.
he was right-on Lamarck...