I think in this environment we need both "flagship" marketed versions, and a couple of "principled" versions.
The sneaky art of marketing does include factors aimed at popularity which often means features that annoy expert users. However, projects with too small of a userbase eventually wither into perma-stasis and cease to make a difference in the broad picture.
I recall hearing a couple stories about the Debian project struggling with some administrative issues because there was "no rush".
Some kind of IceCat variant or such would satisfy the specialist users who could go on to do things like trash Awesome Bar if they wanted to in one version.
I pay real attention to comments, mods, and the rest.
But the Mod system is meant to filter out clear trolls so that the basic discussion can go on. On complex topics, even in serious discussions 10 posters end up being wrong because they missed a detail. Then they all learned something when poster #11 solves it once and for all.
The basic heuristic for upmodding is "if it looks like information, give it a chance". Across the range of stories, modders can't be experts all the time, but they want to reward quality posts.
If he's submarining, I cannot always know if one of his viciously clever posts with some piece of code does not butcher the situation.
I think even the zealous types might respect "Attribution" if it was Free_Beer and "Close to Free_Speech".
Another way to call it is the "Respect-Supercommercial" license.
I am not paying anything today - that's just pure retail that everyone is already tired of. But presuming a song like track 7's "Fight the Storm" filters its way into my core listening set *because of your generous terms*, then at some future time I am likely to contact you. It's a delayed revenue stream - "make sure the value is worth it".
You made a crucial concession "even in commercial projects". If I dream up some nifty project, I may very well include one of your songs... because I have to do all the dev. work *up front*. Then supposing I get lucky and make a few bucks... then I can flip a couple your way.
I haven't scoured your terms, but I think your intent is to allow "derivative" works with attribution of inspiration. That's important because YouTube is all about quick bursts of mashup creativity.
I'm thinkin' that this is prohibited, but I read articles, not TOS docs for services I don't use. Probably something like "You agree not to share your password" and such.
However, if someone managed to limbo their way into legality with a killer maneuver, that would be beautiful.
"TELL you what it sounds like! This customized SongReport will be sent to you - electronically - for you to use and enjoy... the way the artists intended."
Great!
Where do I sign up?
Since I don't have time to listen to listen to 4,000 songs, I'll just subcontract you as work-for-hire for media content that you just gave me the rights to *USE*.
Always call the bluff on sarcasm. There might be money to be made.
Because the other services are arguably illegal pending certain court cases. You mentioned YouTube, which is a couple stories away in today's same news batch.
This is supposedly an "iTunes" successor which lets you play songs in "cloudspace" until you decide which ones you give a damn enough to download.
If they don't bother to pay but then they call to whine, you get your money back. It gets charged to their phone bill, and they probably don't look at that either.
If they can handle themselves silently, they "stay cheap".
If they call knowing it's a charged call but they're screwed and need help, then it's an even-handed deal.... Oh well, it was a fun thought.
I'm sure a properly designed study at least tries to deal with the Placebo question. Notice the cautious conclusion "a digit or so"... meaning the effect is greater than zero, but complicated.
However, if you go beyond the "placebo" concept into active training methods, you can add a capacity to remember MANY more digits.
The medical study tried to figure out how much was a chemical enhancement alone without "training effects".
"The question you should be asking is "What person would want to be smarter given the risk of unknown side effects from long term use?""
Lots.
IQ has a crushing "Threshold" problem. Either you can perform some function in your enhanced state alone, or not at all. Thus if you ideally bank it properly, you stand to make much more money, and we all know how much fun it is to be poor in this world.
It's made worse by the entire culture (at least in the US) of valuing short term gains - if our national leaders can't be counted on to follow a wise course and Social Security might not even exist 25 years from now, why should we bother to walk leisurely on the rat wheel?
You really can't SKIP entire nights of sleep - long term, all you can do is cut them short.
However, I recommend Nancy Kress "Beggars in Spain" for an entire novel built on this premise. (Note to self - go buy another copy.)
What eventually happened is that "normal" became a ghetto that eventually withered and faded. In the novel, the "sleepless" mutation was "pure" - no drawbacks.
A much more complex scenario is the "Algernon Phenomenon", in which someone trades long term health for short term bursts. THAT question is horribly complex. (Do you stay a nice healthy janitor for 40 years, or put in 5 sharp years as a researcher before you totally burn out??)
This might be even worse in the Internet Age, because with good marketing, you can "Amplify" your good years' results, whereas society univerally looks down upon janitorial work and such.
"I guess that drugs specifically made for the mind start (at least for me) creeping deeper and deeper into questions of morality and ethics than one designed to treat any other body part."
Oh, they do, they do. Because in various forms, IQ is the Holy Grail.
Your own phone number is in a different class - it's stable for a long time (until you move or change cells, etc.) So that single piece of data gets lots of repetition.
The question at hand was how different people do with fresh new information *with no expectation of remembering it later*. Thus for a study, presented with 10 phone numbers your rate could be much lower. But if you're in an office and need to learn these numbers, then that motivation factor proves to make a difference in the results.
Absolutely, and this has even been in some high profile studies. Multi-tasking is at the employer's convenience. I think it's a weird form of "prisoner's delimma". It was all the vogue for about a decade for multi-T to be "the new wave of work", until the brutal evidence began mounting.
All I have been able to do is batch similar tasks, and carefully micro-manage minutes of rest in the day.
... Except it's now up to 10 digits, wih the advent of cell phones.
For landline calls, you can usually fudge the area code, but cell phones introduce weird new cell-area codes, and half the time people giving you their number forget to even tell you.
Re: dialing, you can always dial slower, giving yourself those extra seconds to keep looking at the number.
There's a psychological side to this, separate from the pharma-medical side. It's about managing people's expectations, AND their "feel-good" needs.
Starting from scratch, "sustainable" speed is always less than perfect top-power speed. So, yes at flawless form you might be able to do something in 2 hours, but corporate america forces workers to deal with weird distractions that for some of us seriously break the flow.
So, if your manager one day wanders up and asks "can you do that again in 2 hours", the answer is... NO! Because... you have to DEPEND on having your flow broken, and the related slowdown. Decide your own timing and reply with the fool-proof timeframe you know you can deliver. (Say, 3.5 hours.)
Busy managers often trick themselves into asking for things only when it is already a crisis. Gently promote trading "preliminary news" because chances are, they often hear the rumblings of things hours or even days before, but it's not clearly defined.
I have done well with a "Shell First" approach. With the prelim news, I can start emailing necessary people for their fragment of the setup, build the blank forms, etc. Then when the manager gets his hands on the key data that flips it to "live", you have already done the *boring third* of the work. With only the interesting 2/3 of it left, chances are you can NOW make a deadline of "2 hours".
Try some mini-experiments. You already have your baseline of "getting drowsy for these activities".
My hunch is you run your life on the edge of a small chronic sleep-debt, which is the subtle cumulative effects of shaving off small fractions of each night's sleep.
Pick a weekend and clear your entire schedule. Go to bed with a clock, but the alarm off. (That's so you can glance at the time during the "false-alarm wakeup that you know is too early, and refuse to get up.) Even if you feel guilty/lazy, insist on resting for at least an hour past your "regular" timing.
Then when you do finally get up, do all your morning things, and have a large heavy-protein breakfast. Then take your coffee/soda/other beverage and lounge in your favorite chair with an *exciting* book.
Wait for it... Wait for it... Ok look, you're drowsy! Okay, fine. That's why you cleared your schedule. "Call the bluff" - take the nap. It's okay to have a nap only 2 hours after you got up!
So, you get up the second time, and maybe even a third. But eventually, your body will finally grudgingly admit it's rested, and call off the nap-attacks. Then if you succeed in getting through some 60/75 pages of your book, you'll have your key data point. However, the entire first trial could be a washout. That's okay.
It will take a few weekend trials to learn/train to settle down properly. But eventually, your semi-conscious will start forming the first pathways to that signal of "getting ready to study".
Then you, sir, have never actually played the more obscure variants which have addressed this problem. The Victorians mastered the art, and created a whole spectrum from pure luck to 100% solvable.
Windows has included the now famous Klondike variant. However, if you're a skill maven, look up the Spider family of variants which were always my favorites. I think I even saw a Windows port somewhere too. (If not, it's a snap to program them.)
This is why Slashdot is great. A previous poster didn't know the difference between the two words. You explain in great form.
Now that the difference is apparent, I agree that someone misjudged the implications of "virtual meatspace"... which at its worst is like Small Town Effect. "Oh look! A dandelion!"
Once you get past the Snarking, sometimes the buzzwords actually have a point.
A Web Place requires the user to spend tangible amounts of time physically present at the place, preferably with greater than 25% attentiveness. IRC is the case study to "online in absentia".
AOL's legions of Septemberites learned their first wee steps of the web because they responded in raucous rapid-fire quantities to each other.
You posted to a Web Page at 8:23 PM. You don't feel it's necessary to hang around for 2 hours for me to post my reply at 10:30.
The problem with "web places" is that no one has quite mastered how to "hang" at web places without spending first tier time at a computer. As a few SF books have shown, web places will take off when you can visit for 17 minutes in the line at a restaurant.
Slashdot Mirror
I think in this environment we need both "flagship" marketed versions, and a couple of "principled" versions.
The sneaky art of marketing does include factors aimed at popularity which often means features that annoy expert users. However, projects with too small of a userbase eventually wither into perma-stasis and cease to make a difference in the broad picture.
I recall hearing a couple stories about the Debian project struggling with some administrative issues because there was "no rush".
Some kind of IceCat variant or such would satisfy the specialist users who could go on to do things like trash Awesome Bar if they wanted to in one version.
I pay real attention to comments, mods, and the rest.
But the Mod system is meant to filter out clear trolls so that the basic discussion can go on. On complex topics, even in serious discussions 10 posters end up being wrong because they missed a detail. Then they all learned something when poster #11 solves it once and for all.
The basic heuristic for upmodding is "if it looks like information, give it a chance". Across the range of stories, modders can't be experts all the time, but they want to reward quality posts.
If he's submarining, I cannot always know if one of his viciously clever posts with some piece of code does not butcher the situation.
I think even the zealous types might respect "Attribution" if it was Free_Beer and "Close to Free_Speech".
Another way to call it is the "Respect-Supercommercial" license.
I am not paying anything today - that's just pure retail that everyone is already tired of. But presuming a song like track 7's "Fight the Storm" filters its way into my core listening set *because of your generous terms*, then at some future time I am likely to contact you. It's a delayed revenue stream - "make sure the value is worth it".
You made a crucial concession "even in commercial projects". If I dream up some nifty project, I may very well include one of your songs... because I have to do all the dev. work *up front*. Then supposing I get lucky and make a few bucks... then I can flip a couple your way.
I haven't scoured your terms, but I think your intent is to allow "derivative" works with attribution of inspiration. That's important because YouTube is all about quick bursts of mashup creativity.
I'm thinkin' that this is prohibited, but I read articles, not TOS docs for services I don't use. Probably something like "You agree not to share your password" and such.
However, if someone managed to limbo their way into legality with a killer maneuver, that would be beautiful.
OMGawd, that's brilliant!
Take something like this one from a couple days ago:
"News: $4 Million In Fines For Linking To Infringing Files"
Leading Question:
"How do users determine if a site is legal?"
*Crickets!*
"TELL you what it sounds like! This customized SongReport will be sent to you - electronically - for you to use and enjoy... the way the artists intended."
Great!
Where do I sign up?
Since I don't have time to listen to listen to 4,000 songs, I'll just subcontract you as work-for-hire for media content that you just gave me the rights to *USE*.
Always call the bluff on sarcasm. There might be money to be made.
Because the other services are arguably illegal pending certain court cases. You mentioned YouTube, which is a couple stories away in today's same news batch.
This is supposedly an "iTunes" successor which lets you play songs in "cloudspace" until you decide which ones you give a damn enough to download.
7 ounces (avoirdupois) of fertizilizer for your plants as a base for 1 ounce (troy) of solid gold paint is a great buy.
Turned inside out, it's a foolproof smuggling mechanism.
Ohh, you meant "fools-gold painted". Sorry.
Got it!
Make the support # 1-900!
If they don't bother to pay but then they call to whine, you get your money back. It gets charged to their phone bill, and they probably don't look at that either.
If they can handle themselves silently, they "stay cheap".
If they call knowing it's a charged call but they're screwed and need help, then it's an even-handed deal.
I'm sure a properly designed study at least tries to deal with the Placebo question. Notice the cautious conclusion "a digit or so"... meaning the effect is greater than zero, but complicated.
However, if you go beyond the "placebo" concept into active training methods, you can add a capacity to remember MANY more digits.
The medical study tried to figure out how much was a chemical enhancement alone without "training effects".
"The question you should be asking is "What person would want to be smarter given the risk of unknown side effects from long term use?""
Lots.
IQ has a crushing "Threshold" problem. Either you can perform some function in your enhanced state alone, or not at all. Thus if you ideally bank it properly, you stand to make much more money, and we all know how much fun it is to be poor in this world.
It's made worse by the entire culture (at least in the US) of valuing short term gains - if our national leaders can't be counted on to follow a wise course and Social Security might not even exist 25 years from now, why should we bother to walk leisurely on the rat wheel?
You really can't SKIP entire nights of sleep - long term, all you can do is cut them short.
However, I recommend Nancy Kress "Beggars in Spain" for an entire novel built on this premise. (Note to self - go buy another copy.)
What eventually happened is that "normal" became a ghetto that eventually withered and faded. In the novel, the "sleepless" mutation was "pure" - no drawbacks.
A much more complex scenario is the "Algernon Phenomenon", in which someone trades long term health for short term bursts. THAT question is horribly complex. (Do you stay a nice healthy janitor for 40 years, or put in 5 sharp years as a researcher before you totally burn out??)
This might be even worse in the Internet Age, because with good marketing, you can "Amplify" your good years' results, whereas society univerally looks down upon janitorial work and such.
"I guess that drugs specifically made for the mind start (at least for me) creeping deeper and deeper into questions of morality and ethics than one designed to treat any other body part."
Oh, they do, they do. Because in various forms, IQ is the Holy Grail.
This is THE question of the 21st century.
That's hysterical.
Is this the Lifelock guy's data?
Your own phone number is in a different class - it's stable for a long time (until you move or change cells, etc.)
So that single piece of data gets lots of repetition.
The question at hand was how different people do with fresh new information *with no expectation of remembering it later*. Thus for a study, presented with 10 phone numbers your rate could be much lower. But if you're in an office and need to learn these numbers, then that motivation factor proves to make a difference in the results.
Absolutely, and this has even been in some high profile studies. Multi-tasking is at the employer's convenience. I think it's a weird form of "prisoner's delimma". It was all the vogue for about a decade for multi-T to be "the new wave of work", until the brutal evidence began mounting.
All I have been able to do is batch similar tasks, and carefully micro-manage minutes of rest in the day.
For landline calls, you can usually fudge the area code, but cell phones introduce weird new cell-area codes, and half the time people giving you their number forget to even tell you.
Re: dialing, you can always dial slower, giving yourself those extra seconds to keep looking at the number.
There's a psychological side to this, separate from the pharma-medical side. It's about managing people's expectations, AND their "feel-good" needs.
Starting from scratch, "sustainable" speed is always less than perfect top-power speed. So, yes at flawless form you might be able to do something in 2 hours, but corporate america forces workers to deal with weird distractions that for some of us seriously break the flow.
So, if your manager one day wanders up and asks "can you do that again in 2 hours", the answer is
Busy managers often trick themselves into asking for things only when it is already a crisis. Gently promote trading "preliminary news" because chances are, they often hear the rumblings of things hours or even days before, but it's not clearly defined.
I have done well with a "Shell First" approach. With the prelim news, I can start emailing necessary people for their fragment of the setup, build the blank forms, etc. Then when the manager gets his hands on the key data that flips it to "live", you have already done the *boring third* of the work. With only the interesting 2/3 of it left, chances are you can NOW make a deadline of "2 hours".
Try some mini-experiments. You already have your baseline of "getting drowsy for these activities".
My hunch is you run your life on the edge of a small chronic sleep-debt, which is the subtle cumulative effects of shaving off small fractions of each night's sleep.
Pick a weekend and clear your entire schedule. Go to bed with a clock, but the alarm off. (That's so you can glance at the time during the "false-alarm wakeup that you know is too early, and refuse to get up.) Even if you feel guilty/lazy, insist on resting for at least an hour past your "regular" timing.
Then when you do finally get up, do all your morning things, and have a large heavy-protein breakfast. Then take your coffee/soda/other beverage and lounge in your favorite chair with an *exciting* book.
Wait for it
So, you get up the second time, and maybe even a third. But eventually, your body will finally grudgingly admit it's rested, and call off the nap-attacks. Then if you succeed in getting through some 60/75 pages of your book, you'll have your key data point. However, the entire first trial could be a washout. That's okay.
It will take a few weekend trials to learn/train to settle down properly. But eventually, your semi-conscious will start forming the first pathways to that signal of "getting ready to study".
So you work for Yahoo and Steve Ballmer made an offer?
Then you, sir, have never actually played the more obscure variants which have addressed this problem. The Victorians mastered the art, and created a whole spectrum from pure luck to 100% solvable.
Windows has included the now famous Klondike variant. However, if you're a skill maven, look up the Spider family of variants which were always my favorites. I think I even saw a Windows port somewhere too. (If not, it's a snap to program them.)
This is why Slashdot is great. A previous poster didn't know the difference between the two words. You explain in great form.
Now that the difference is apparent, I agree that someone misjudged the implications of "virtual meatspace"... which at its worst is like Small Town Effect. "Oh look! A dandelion!"
Once you get past the Snarking, sometimes the buzzwords actually have a point.
A Web Place requires the user to spend tangible amounts of time physically present at the place, preferably with greater than 25% attentiveness. IRC is the case study to "online in absentia".
AOL's legions of Septemberites learned their first wee steps of the web because they responded in raucous rapid-fire quantities to each other.
Sure.
You posted to a Web Page at 8:23 PM. You don't feel it's necessary to hang around for 2 hours for me to post my reply at 10:30.
The problem with "web places" is that no one has quite mastered how to "hang" at web places without spending first tier time at a computer. As a few SF books have shown, web places will take off when you can visit for 17 minutes in the line at a restaurant.
A fun way to look at businesses is "every action someone can do has a market... the only question is whether the market pays enough".