it does. it affects a lot of things. simplest of that, has been the case of firefox vs ie fight. firefox started from nothing. ie had everything. billions of people were being pushed ie through windows worldwide, even to the extent of thinking that it was 'internet'. (really, even i had seen a lot of people in my locale, who thought internet was ie - imagine - when the browser didnt fire up, but their messengers were on, they would say 'internet' was down). there wasnt any laws rules and regulations to prevent what was happening.
then, hundreds of millions of geeks started talking about it, posting about it, encouraging people on the net, friends, relatives to use it, putting download links to their pages, this that. that not only increased ff usage, but also helped bring it up to consumer groups' agenda and legislators' agenda, and effected an awareness and even led to eu regulation.
and see, here we are today, with ie waning, firefox increasing, even having opened the way for other browsers like chrome.
considering the developments around chrome, chrome os, and other google moves, this long chain of events may lead to even quite unexpected results in other areas.
so yes, it can happen. depends on how much importance these internet-wise active people give to something.
connections in between people that are 'acquaintances' in internet, or in general, around the net, may be weak. but, there are billions of connections.
if, each of them changes the way they behave and the things they do a little bit, it makes a whopping difference.
it was harder to organize passive resistance for gandhi. it required use of printed media and word of mouth. now, its spontaneous.
those '15' geeks have much more activity than anyone else in the internet/web, and you can be rest assured that anything they are annoyed with will be talked by a lot of people, through communities, forums and so on. that is excluding the geeks who are actually publishing stuff, or leading communities, blogging, or doing any other thing.
they only trend that way, if the ruling strata does not be stubborn in their stance, and try to assert their will over the populace. the history is filled with cases in which the ruling elite had backed down, and gave in to the population's demands and revolutions were averted.
it took a revolution in 1774, and then another in 1789, and then a few more others in 1848s to establish the fundamentals of the modern liberties and freedoms, and all human rights we take granted now. apparently, we need a few more in order to get one step further.
there is something that someone said goes like this : "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
I think it easily applies like this too :
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to save a little Temporary property, deserve neither Liberty nor property."
they have given their country away, not to give out some percentage of their income for others. now, some others will take away their freedoms, and probably their income too, wasting it in distant wars, or censoring them.
I'm not entirely sure the 'planetary scale' objective you're referring to is as great as you might thing. Separation of powers is very important if you want to maintain freedom and curb oppression. If you can't vote with your dollar or your ballot, you ought to be able to vote with your feet.
there is no relevance in between planetary scale, and separation of powers. they are not even in the same context.
planetary scale is,for example, what a global market is. if you break down the market into smaller parts by feudalizing it, or walling them off, you will have many smaller markets. they will 'compete', but, in that 'competition' of markets as unit, instead of businesses as 'individuals', much energy will be lost, because the walls will not allow flow of goods and services easily.
the market will become smaller. producers which are able to produce in a market, will see that they are now competing in a smaller market. which will lead to everything becoming smaller, including supply and demand.
it is much more bigger in scale, in regard to information. information flows and multiplies rapidly, so any kind of walling off magnifies the negative effects, and any kind of free flow allowed, magnifies multiplication.
this, can be easily deduced by looking at the development of science throughout human history. wherever freedom was allowed, even tiny countries got ahead.
now we have it in a planetary scale. it is beyond stupid, it is utterly moronic to ever contemplate hampering the multiplication of information, especially at a time our planet and society are fighting with a lot of problems, and free information and science is needed more than ever.
not to forget, the importance of a unified web, for democratization of life, politics, and increased participation of all people in these aspects of life.
the person gave it to them. but, that doesnt transfer the ownership of that information to that site, and it doesnt allow them to decide who can use that information and for what.
this is like saying 'is one world really the best thing ? lets break it up into smaller parts'. or, saying 'is one huge global market is a good thing ? lets break it to smaller parts'.
its stupid. human civilization has been trying to achieve planetary scale on everything. it would be beyond moronic to revert back, when a state of that is reached in some technology ; namely, information exchange.
hey, while we are at it, why dont we go back to feudalism ? at least, there can be competition in between the lords.
some person's private information is NOT the resource of the site that stores it. a person's private information belongs to that person alone. there can be no other argument to that.
Standard Oil allegedly became a "monopoly" years before antitrust regulation was law, and is often used as the textbook example of "monopoly".
oligopoly, monopoly, they all end up the same from the respect of people. it doesnt matter whether 4 oil companies dominate market, or 1. they will act in lockstep as a cartel, even without talking and seeing each other. they will fix prices autonomously. your approach is way too narrow to this matter. you are seeing it from the window of 'one single company'. its not about one single company, or one single person. its about a control existing on any given market, moreover, more than one market, and industry.
like how despite the production costs of a lot of items have decreased to cents due to outsourcing in china, the prices in western countries have generally remained the same, or with little reductions. the corporations dominating those markets think people should pay those prices. and not one single one of them starts drastically reducing their prices and outcompeting all others - only minor companies which wouldnt affect things at all.
if situation is disturbed, controllers get aggressive - just like in the case of music, media and movie cartels. they still insist everyone should pay $15 a pop to a single cd, despite all the costs relevant to production of that music cd, have plummeted down to near zero vicinity. yea, including the cost of the artist - with the contracts they are making to artists, they already pay dimes to them, and have them make their pay for themselves through concerts. with recent 'loan' schemes, artists even come up in debt to the studio when they contract, for a long time.
worldwide, 4 companies are controlling music/media market. through innumerable subsidiaries.
this example can be taken and applied to any sector. this is a problematic sector because the controlling interests are at the position of losing their hold on the market, and market dictating them the prices. and all the stampede ensues from that.
The list of "robber barons" on Wikipedia includes very few alleged "monopolists", at least according to the biographies of the ones I clicked on.
no monopolist accepts the title of monopolizer. its dangerous. moreover, more than the total control of one single industry (3 to 4 of them were fighting against other in each of those industries), what matters is, again, the control of that aspect of life.
if there are 4 entities controlling something, it means, that sector is controlled by 4 entities. period. there isnt anything more than this. those people, aside from controlling all such sectors in 3 to 4 person lots, depending on their investments, were also starting to get ahold of other fields aside from their initial investments and interests. the rate of things were going was that, things would consolidate from 10-15 people, to approx 4 people, in ALL sectors combined, because 4 of them were powerful than others in regard to most respects. this was what prompted the anti trust regulations.
if they werent there, usa would indeed end up at the ownership of 4 surnames.
what antitrust regulations have changed has been that, its now impossible to totally control a sector with just one name, one company. you get sued. however, the method of intricate web of shareholderships, partnerships, proxy corporations, holdings inside and outside a country have evolved to circumvent these. now, if one looks at a given sector, s/he would get a picture as if there are 3-4 companies dominating it (which is actually accepted as normal, somehow, despite being totally contradictory to antitrust concept), with innumerable smaller companies being active in smaller scales. but, when one digs down, s/he sees that aside from the total policy/price setting of those 4 major companies, almost all the smaller company networks are either controlled, owned, or shared in between various conglomerates and holdings which actually link t
you will have to forget before doing that, the fact that ACTA was initiated, prepared and cooked and started being pushed around in republican term in congress, senate and admn., before 2006. at 2006, it was already during international negotiations stage, first by being pushed to canadians.
First, the bill to censor internet and get ahold of any domain name, with a court order
now, the ability for a single department of u.s. government, without requiring a court order, to control private networks,
Couple these two with the draconian and stupid copyright/patent laws in usa, and you can see that it wont take a few months after this for u.n. or eu to come up with an alternative, international or european authority to govern domain names and ip numbers.
way to go, u.s., cutting the leg you are standing on. any other country would cut its own real legs (metaphorically) rather than risk losing the de facto control of internet.
even when i had too much time back when a teenager, i didnt invest in that much time to achieve any 'status' or 'title' that i couldnt do anything with.
its pointless. just acquiring a title does nothing, if it has no value in the game. ie, if it doesnt open new doors, or do new things, its just a text label that appears in a variable.
i feel the same for most 'achievement' style fish hooks in recent games. pointless.
Does shit like this: publishes non-factual, fingerpointing article about left-wing journalists,falsely accusing them of terrorism. Journalists then get arrested, detained for weeks and their careers destroyed, based on "information in the media". Author of said article turns out to be a former cop and still is a Dutch secret service employee.
its the same old same old. i dropped mass effect 2 probably at 10%, and even forgot it was on the hard drive after a few days. it was just a more polished version of the older one, but, quite dumbed down to the extent that i feld playing an interactive movie like the games back in mid 1990s. (early cd era, remember). click a few things, watch a cutscene, shoot some, watch a cutscene. actually clicking was also even out of the picture.
its the result of extreme industrial corporatism in gaming. everything is for profit, no risks taken, whatever made money before is rehashed and pushed in front of people.
Steve Wozniak may or may not have been saying Android or any other os would or would not dominate IOS or other OSES in any potential platform that has been and will be invented in future. This may, or may not be a news broadcast.
they wont shut down sites in third world countries.
they are going to try shutting down the.com or.org or whatever domain they can get ahold of, in usa. because, ICANN is in usa.
this will practically kill usa control of internet domain names. entire world cannot tolerate one single country asserting its will upon all domain names in the world. this will be a side effect.
when the dust settles down, and there is or are other top level corporations handing out names, then they are going to block whatever site that is outside us, to u.s. public. in short, they will outright censor whatever they want from american citizens.
quite democratic eh... also stupid, due to the above side effect. can you imagine russia, china, india, allowing usa to censor internet over icann at will ?
yeah you. the one who is reading this post. how much exactly did you pay in lobbying for your interests last year ? $100 mil ? $1 mil ? $50,000 ? $50 ? none ?
probably either none, or, something in between $50 and none. definitely not $100 mil.
those who want that, however, spent in between at least $100 mil and $1 mil. so, they are getting it.
such is the way with democracy in a capitalist country - you get what you want, as much as you pay for. if you dont have enough money to pay for what you want, you just dont get it -> its a simple rule of capitalism.
so, you have two choices :
a) If you arent rich enough to pay for it yourself, get together, and pay for it with others
b) Change the capitalist society that requires money for everything, including winning elections, justice and lawmaking
it can only discredit him and wikileaks in the minds of right wing americans. since they are so quick to believe anything that is 'against' their country, or military, as evil, and associate whatever lie or truth that is told them, with them.
in europe, this would further alienate europeans from america and americans. it will increase the tendency of blaming anything bad that happens to any people who are not pro-american, on america. this, actually may not be so incorrect either.
Slashdot Mirror
it does. it affects a lot of things. simplest of that, has been the case of firefox vs ie fight. firefox started from nothing. ie had everything. billions of people were being pushed ie through windows worldwide, even to the extent of thinking that it was 'internet'. (really, even i had seen a lot of people in my locale, who thought internet was ie - imagine - when the browser didnt fire up, but their messengers were on, they would say 'internet' was down). there wasnt any laws rules and regulations to prevent what was happening.
then, hundreds of millions of geeks started talking about it, posting about it, encouraging people on the net, friends, relatives to use it, putting download links to their pages, this that. that not only increased ff usage, but also helped bring it up to consumer groups' agenda and legislators' agenda, and effected an awareness and even led to eu regulation.
and see, here we are today, with ie waning, firefox increasing, even having opened the way for other browsers like chrome.
considering the developments around chrome, chrome os, and other google moves, this long chain of events may lead to even quite unexpected results in other areas.
so yes, it can happen. depends on how much importance these internet-wise active people give to something.
connections in between people that are 'acquaintances' in internet, or in general, around the net, may be weak. but, there are billions of connections.
if, each of them changes the way they behave and the things they do a little bit, it makes a whopping difference.
it was harder to organize passive resistance for gandhi. it required use of printed media and word of mouth. now, its spontaneous.
those '15' geeks have much more activity than anyone else in the internet/web, and you can be rest assured that anything they are annoyed with will be talked by a lot of people, through communities, forums and so on. that is excluding the geeks who are actually publishing stuff, or leading communities, blogging, or doing any other thing.
they only trend that way, if the ruling strata does not be stubborn in their stance, and try to assert their will over the populace. the history is filled with cases in which the ruling elite had backed down, and gave in to the population's demands and revolutions were averted.
with the current collaboration and communication tools (internet, mobile) revolutions dont even need to be bloody anymore.
it took a revolution in 1774, and then another in 1789, and then a few more others in 1848s to establish the fundamentals of the modern liberties and freedoms, and all human rights we take granted now. apparently, we need a few more in order to get one step further.
there is something that someone said goes like this : "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
I think it easily applies like this too :
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to save a little Temporary property, deserve neither Liberty nor property."
they have given their country away, not to give out some percentage of their income for others. now, some others will take away their freedoms, and probably their income too, wasting it in distant wars, or censoring them.
I'm not entirely sure the 'planetary scale' objective you're referring to is as great as you might thing. Separation of powers is very important if you want to maintain freedom and curb oppression. If you can't vote with your dollar or your ballot, you ought to be able to vote with your feet.
there is no relevance in between planetary scale, and separation of powers. they are not even in the same context.
planetary scale is,for example, what a global market is. if you break down the market into smaller parts by feudalizing it, or walling them off, you will have many smaller markets. they will 'compete', but, in that 'competition' of markets as unit, instead of businesses as 'individuals', much energy will be lost, because the walls will not allow flow of goods and services easily.
the market will become smaller. producers which are able to produce in a market, will see that they are now competing in a smaller market. which will lead to everything becoming smaller, including supply and demand.
it is much more bigger in scale, in regard to information. information flows and multiplies rapidly, so any kind of walling off magnifies the negative effects, and any kind of free flow allowed, magnifies multiplication.
this, can be easily deduced by looking at the development of science throughout human history. wherever freedom was allowed, even tiny countries got ahead.
now we have it in a planetary scale. it is beyond stupid, it is utterly moronic to ever contemplate hampering the multiplication of information, especially at a time our planet and society are fighting with a lot of problems, and free information and science is needed more than ever.
not to forget, the importance of a unified web, for democratization of life, politics, and increased participation of all people in these aspects of life.
users, the owners of their private information, should decide what happens.
the person gave it to them. but, that doesnt transfer the ownership of that information to that site, and it doesnt allow them to decide who can use that information and for what.
'competition' ?
this is like saying 'is one world really the best thing ? lets break it up into smaller parts'. or, saying 'is one huge global market is a good thing ? lets break it to smaller parts'.
its stupid. human civilization has been trying to achieve planetary scale on everything. it would be beyond moronic to revert back, when a state of that is reached in some technology ; namely, information exchange.
hey, while we are at it, why dont we go back to feudalism ? at least, there can be competition in between the lords.
some person's private information is NOT the resource of the site that stores it. a person's private information belongs to that person alone. there can be no other argument to that.
or, they realize the futility of 'ranking' and 'comparing'.
Standard Oil allegedly became a "monopoly" years before antitrust regulation was law, and is often used as the textbook example of "monopoly".
oligopoly, monopoly, they all end up the same from the respect of people. it doesnt matter whether 4 oil companies dominate market, or 1. they will act in lockstep as a cartel, even without talking and seeing each other. they will fix prices autonomously. your approach is way too narrow to this matter. you are seeing it from the window of 'one single company'. its not about one single company, or one single person. its about a control existing on any given market, moreover, more than one market, and industry.
like how despite the production costs of a lot of items have decreased to cents due to outsourcing in china, the prices in western countries have generally remained the same, or with little reductions. the corporations dominating those markets think people should pay those prices. and not one single one of them starts drastically reducing their prices and outcompeting all others - only minor companies which wouldnt affect things at all.
if situation is disturbed, controllers get aggressive - just like in the case of music, media and movie cartels. they still insist everyone should pay $15 a pop to a single cd, despite all the costs relevant to production of that music cd, have plummeted down to near zero vicinity. yea, including the cost of the artist - with the contracts they are making to artists, they already pay dimes to them, and have them make their pay for themselves through concerts. with recent 'loan' schemes, artists even come up in debt to the studio when they contract, for a long time.
worldwide, 4 companies are controlling music/media market. through innumerable subsidiaries.
this example can be taken and applied to any sector. this is a problematic sector because the controlling interests are at the position of losing their hold on the market, and market dictating them the prices. and all the stampede ensues from that.
The list of "robber barons" on Wikipedia includes very few alleged "monopolists", at least according to the biographies of the ones I clicked on.
no monopolist accepts the title of monopolizer. its dangerous. moreover, more than the total control of one single industry (3 to 4 of them were fighting against other in each of those industries), what matters is, again, the control of that aspect of life.
if there are 4 entities controlling something, it means, that sector is controlled by 4 entities. period. there isnt anything more than this. those people, aside from controlling all such sectors in 3 to 4 person lots, depending on their investments, were also starting to get ahold of other fields aside from their initial investments and interests. the rate of things were going was that, things would consolidate from 10-15 people, to approx 4 people, in ALL sectors combined, because 4 of them were powerful than others in regard to most respects. this was what prompted the anti trust regulations.
if they werent there, usa would indeed end up at the ownership of 4 surnames.
what antitrust regulations have changed has been that, its now impossible to totally control a sector with just one name, one company. you get sued. however, the method of intricate web of shareholderships, partnerships, proxy corporations, holdings inside and outside a country have evolved to circumvent these. now, if one looks at a given sector, s/he would get a picture as if there are 3-4 companies dominating it (which is actually accepted as normal, somehow, despite being totally contradictory to antitrust concept), with innumerable smaller companies being active in smaller scales. but, when one digs down, s/he sees that aside from the total policy/price setting of those 4 major companies, almost all the smaller company networks are either controlled, owned, or shared in between various conglomerates and holdings which actually link t
you will have to forget before doing that, the fact that ACTA was initiated, prepared and cooked and started being pushed around in republican term in congress, senate and admn., before 2006. at 2006, it was already during international negotiations stage, first by being pushed to canadians.
First, the bill to censor internet and get ahold of any domain name, with a court order
now, the ability for a single department of u.s. government, without requiring a court order, to control private networks,
Couple these two with the draconian and stupid copyright/patent laws in usa, and you can see that it wont take a few months after this for u.n. or eu to come up with an alternative, international or european authority to govern domain names and ip numbers.
way to go, u.s., cutting the leg you are standing on. any other country would cut its own real legs (metaphorically) rather than risk losing the de facto control of internet.
maybe it was high time.
even when i had too much time back when a teenager, i didnt invest in that much time to achieve any 'status' or 'title' that i couldnt do anything with.
its pointless. just acquiring a title does nothing, if it has no value in the game. ie, if it doesnt open new doors, or do new things, its just a text label that appears in a variable.
i feel the same for most 'achievement' style fish hooks in recent games. pointless.
Does shit like this: publishes non-factual, fingerpointing article about left-wing journalists,falsely accusing them of terrorism. Journalists then get arrested, detained for weeks and their careers destroyed, based on "information in the media". Author of said article turns out to be a former cop and still is a Dutch secret service employee.
in this time and age ?
its the same old same old. i dropped mass effect 2 probably at 10%, and even forgot it was on the hard drive after a few days. it was just a more polished version of the older one, but, quite dumbed down to the extent that i feld playing an interactive movie like the games back in mid 1990s. (early cd era, remember). click a few things, watch a cutscene, shoot some, watch a cutscene. actually clicking was also even out of the picture.
its the result of extreme industrial corporatism in gaming. everything is for profit, no risks taken, whatever made money before is rehashed and pushed in front of people.
and people just drop them.
Steve Wozniak may or may not have been saying Android or any other os would or would not dominate IOS or other OSES in any potential platform that has been and will be invented in future. This may, or may not be a news broadcast.
they wont shut down sites in third world countries.
.com or .org or whatever domain they can get ahold of, in usa. because, ICANN is in usa.
... also stupid, due to the above side effect. can you imagine russia, china, india, allowing usa to censor internet over icann at will ?
they are going to try shutting down the
this will practically kill usa control of internet domain names. entire world cannot tolerate one single country asserting its will upon all domain names in the world. this will be a side effect.
when the dust settles down, and there is or are other top level corporations handing out names, then they are going to block whatever site that is outside us, to u.s. public. in short, they will outright censor whatever they want from american citizens.
quite democratic eh
yeah you. the one who is reading this post. how much exactly did you pay in lobbying for your interests last year ? $100 mil ? $1 mil ? $50,000 ? $50 ? none ?
probably either none, or, something in between $50 and none. definitely not $100 mil.
those who want that, however, spent in between at least $100 mil and $1 mil. so, they are getting it.
such is the way with democracy in a capitalist country - you get what you want, as much as you pay for. if you dont have enough money to pay for what you want, you just dont get it -> its a simple rule of capitalism.
so, you have two choices :
a) If you arent rich enough to pay for it yourself, get together, and pay for it with others
b) Change the capitalist society that requires money for everything, including winning elections, justice and lawmaking
so people can see it. its important. you can mod this post down to hell if you want.
because they have concentrated on embarrassing u.s. government, the foremost trouble instigator on the face of the planet, it is a problem ?
lets see how a lot of those troubles in third world countries have started, and who started it :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
oh my. it turned out to be united states.
it can only discredit him and wikileaks in the minds of right wing americans. since they are so quick to believe anything that is 'against' their country, or military, as evil, and associate whatever lie or truth that is told them, with them.
in europe, this would further alienate europeans from america and americans. it will increase the tendency of blaming anything bad that happens to any people who are not pro-american, on america. this, actually may not be so incorrect either.