Word Mark: COKE Goods and Services: IC 025. US 022 039. G & S: footwear. FIRST USE: 19880311. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19880311 Mark Drawing Code: (1) TYPED DRAWING Serial Number: 75114281 Filing Date: May 17, 1996 Published for Opposition: January 21, 1997 Registration Number: 2052760 Registration Date: April 15, 1997 Owner (REGISTRANT): Coca-Cola Company, The CORPORATION DELAWARE One Coca-Cola Plaza Atlanta GEORGIA 30313 Type of Mark: TRADEMARK
Fortunately, someone already said what I was going to say (of course, that may no be worthy of moderation).
HR doesn't really understand the work done by people in those positions. Thus outside yardsticks, certificates and degrees, become important.
When I was doing hiring, I cannot tell you the number of lusers that paraded though my office because HR had seen that they were certified. Some of these people couldn't have installed NT without calling tech support.
Most HR droids (except in the really, really good tech companies) don't have the faintest idea what the company does. When I worked in a biomedical consulting firm, the HR person would routinely throw away Ivy League degrees in favor of ones from, shall we say, less distinguished schools because the one she chose "had more scientific words on them."
Managers don't want to get dumped on by their bosses if a new hire turns out bad.
I'd add to this: HR is afraid to get dumped on for wasting the manager's time if he/she sends a bad candidte to the managers. Certs are a CYA measure for the HR folks as well-- they can always say "well, he/she/it had the right credentials," and the manager is forced to agree (how is he going to explain that he wants someone who can think?) and go away.
I've interviewed at jobs where HR, using their standards, has told me "you really don't fit the job description", and when I went ahead and interviewed been told "you're the first person HR has sent us that fits."
Dammit, now you're taunting me-- why didn't you apply to the companies that I used to work for?
The primary purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to disclose their invention. Software authors have often resorted to schemes such as encryption, restrictive license agreements and similar strategies to prevent their competitors from being able to copy the technologies they develop. KEEPING TECHNOLOGY SECRETS IF [sic] FUNDAMENTALLY BAD FOR PROGRESS.
Report Card: Understanding of the subject: B Understanding real-world implications: F
Although it is possible to argue the first point (and to argue that the purpose of patents is to protect innnovators), I basically agree with you on the purpose of patents. However, software patents do not lead to disclosure of "technology secrets." Let's take a look at a few examples:
Read these patents. Are any innovations disclosed? I've read all three, and I didn't see any disclosure of any technology secrets. What I saw were very broad descriptions of things that already existed in the physical world, or broad descriptions of things so obvious that calling them innovations demeans the term innovation.
Alright class, repeat after me: If something exists in the physical world, and you describe it occurring over the Internet, it does not mean that it is innovation, and almost certainly does not mean that it needs the protection of a patent.
Maybe so, but I haven't seen too much evidence of it lately. And just being "bright" doesn't mean your opinions are automatically valid, and you certainly don't have any "right" to involve yourselves in the legal and political processes of our country - that's what politicians are for. Leave them to do the job they are paid for. Doing otherwise makes you an anarchist who wants to tear down the fabric of our society.
OK, I don't know what particular nation you're from, but many nations, and most of those with a respectable legal system, provide a reason to involve oneself in the political processes of the country-- the concept that power flows from the will of a nation's citizens. That, after all, is what elections are about. Wanting to be involved in the political processes of one's own country is NOT equivalent to being an anarchist, to wit:
anarchist \An"arch*ist\, n. [Cf. F. anarchiste.] An anarch; one who advocates anarchy of aims at the overthrow of civil government.
If a citizen wants to participate in the political processses of his or her nation without wanting to overthrow the civil government, then he or she is not an anarchist.
Leaving the business of politics solely to the politicians leads to the kind of cronyism and special-interest-slanted laws that can be exemplified by the US Software Patent mess.
I feel exactly the same. Paying $21B for anything is the type of bet that is only laid on a sure thing that will yield huge returns. I cannot help thinking that the value in this is as follows:
Linking the certificate services with the DNS registration that NSI has had a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on for so long. VeriSign and NSI have a long-term relationship in place, so there would be plenty of data for VeriSign to go on regarding the effectiveness of this basic relationship. Likely they want to deepen it by buying NSI and getting a bigger piece of the pie.
NSI has the largest existing customer base on the net. This is a huge market base, and, even with the inroads that alternative registrars have made, likely an enormous part of the value proposition. Last I checked (and I haven't been doing a lot of registrations lately), it's pretty much impossible to change the registrar of record. VeriSign will fight to the death to keep these switching costs in place.
I just wish that there was an alternative to VeriSign. As noted by many posts, their services sucks worse than NSI. They're going to monopolize the PKI, and that will be a shame, allowing all of the worst predcitions of Internet snooping and loss of anonimity to come true (in addition to pricing PKI out of reach of the little guy).
Hasn't the US Supreme Court defended anonymity as an important element of free speech? Without anonymity, there is always fear of retribution.
Yes, in McIntyr e v. Ohio Elections Commission, the US Supreme Court did state that anonimity is a right protected under the free speech rights as outlined in the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.
Anonymity, while it protects the speaker from retribution, does reduce the impact of the speech (in my opinion).
I'm not so sure that it is unusable. I used software RAID on Linux boxen for servers running INN for a full news feed way back under kernel 1.2, and it worked fine. Sure, I wasn't supporting a ISP-style workload (only 150 internal users), but it was fine.
So, I think that IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS, software RAID is OK, especially in linux.
IANAL, but I do think that the law is geared towards allowing your name to be your property if there is a good faith intent to use it, rather than speculating or ransoming good names.
Actually, as long as there is not a registered trademark on the domain, the law doesn't even require a good-faith effort to use it. So fordcars.com is a no-go, but computer.com is A-OK, even if you just sell it (this actually happened-- a guy had computer.com and never did anything with it until someone offered him a big truck full of money-- than he sold it).
I am a good writer, and one of the sins that I assiduously try to avoid is the overt insertion of my opinion in my writing. A second sin that I try to avoid is mentioning things that are about me and not related to my topic. However, you seem to constantly do these two things in your writing on/..
The first media call came in at 7 a.m., a producer at ABC Radio News waking me up to ask if I had any thoughts about the announcement that Time Warner and America Online had just decided to merge into a $350 billion company. The second call came from the BBC, then the Associated Press.
Here you mention yourself in a way that really has nothing to do with the point of your story (although it has everything to do with self-promotion).
Questions: Do you consider yourself a good writer? Do you think that your articles for/. are well-written? If so, why do you write so self-referentially? What is your best work?
Documenting everything is the only way to protect yourself. You can (apparently, although IANAL) defend yourself, even against a patent, if you can reliably show that you got there first. Basically, if you can document that in 1999 you did X, even if you did not file a patent, then you can defend against the patent application filed in 2000.
Oh, and make good backups, especially since there is the possibility of seizure as a legal recourse (although much later).
I agree that there is no demographic information that would help. I wish the poster were more obvious ways to see the poter's identity (maybe a way to highlight certain people's posts would be good-- like being able to assign a +1 or +2 to people's posts in your personal preferences). It all comes back to how good the individual's reputation is. I'd recommend displaying Karma, but we all have seen what happens with the Karma Whoring.
I get tired of reading Katz' lament that HIS issues are not getting the play he wants them to get. To wit:
The Web's failure to produce or maintain common discussion grounds is getting to be a serious problem with real consequences. Misinformation about genetic research, online safety - even the Y2K problems - spreads primarily because intelligent public discussion of these issues isn't possible, except in places where nobody knows much about them, like Congress or on TV talk shows.
Or, I might add, in a Jon Katz column on/.
Each of the burning topics that Katz mentions were "addressed" in a Katz column over the past few months. I read them all, and I thought that they all did a terrible job of dealing with the issues. There was robust (and sometimes heated discussion) in the discussion areas after each one.
Katz probably got some "this article sucks" e-mail after those articles because, well, they sucked. Sometimes people are just calling a rose a rose.
In response to the oft-written lament "why don't you kust turn him off on your preferences?" The answer is because I'm worried that if I don't pay attention to the FUD of the week from Katz, someone else will take him seriously, and I won't be prepared for their FUD parroting and it will be harder to debunk the FUD.
It's like Katz is/.'s own Good Times virus-- you've got to pay attention, even though the content is non-sensical.
Unfortunately, by reading and posting, I'm driving the page views for Katz's stories up too high-- so/. will never get get rid of such a popular author.
Katz has finally finished, and his basic point is not so big a deal that it needed 3 days to spell it out: some people take advantage of the relative anonymity of the Internet to make hostile, inappropriate, or sophomoric comments.
This is true. I concur that many, many people do not take proper ownership of their own words on the Internet or in any electronic communication. However, this seems to be a problem with people adjusting to the idea of electronic communication in general (how many PHBs have sent morale-crushing e-mail because they didn't get it?), not with the structure of the Internet. The worst flamers (except on/.) That I have encountered on the net have real accounts, but just some kind of problem: kookism, juvenile boredom, desire to break up conversations on topics that they have strong and conflicting views, etc.
Katz is right that those who are creating on line communities need to be concerned about this, as the effort (and $$) being expended on the creation of on line communities is too great for them to be so easily disrupted by flame wars.
However, it is impossible for total openness and total amicability to co-exist in the Internet as currently constructed (just as it is currently impossible to have a perfectly secure and easily-usable computer system). Part of this is the human condition. Much of what makes life interesting IS conflict. Conflict is the crucible in which innovation is fired, where great new ideas are refined. If some cannot handle that conflict, their experience of the world is the worse for it.
What does this mean for Katz' communities? Well it means that, like any community, there will be good and bad aspect to it. In my real community, I love having my neighbor on the left as a neighbor, and I cannot stand my neighbor on the other side. However, just because I cannot stand my neighbor on the right, do I scream at him and his wife in the street? No, because it would jeopardize my standing in the community.
This, to me is the crux of the issue. It is possible to create standing in the e-community, just as one can in the meat space community. However, it takes effort, time, civility, and respect for others. Sometimes, it can be so hard to be heard on the net that one feels the need to scream or write in a hostile manner to get one's views heard. This is generally wrong. It easily destroys one's standing in the community. I tend to ignore anything that comes from a past flamer (pick the filtering capability of your choice). But I do this in the real world as well- I don't watch shows that I don't like on television. But not listening is not inhibiting commercial or political speech.
Perhaps if it were more difficult to so easily change one's identity on the net, this wouldn't be a problem. However, this is one of the things that is valuable. The AC posts are, occasionally, great. Since they need to be moderated up for me to read them, I generally only see good ones unless I am moderating or looking for moderation problems. Perhaps some sanction might be a good idea- maybe if people were required to log in before posting as AC, and their comment could be moderated down as a troll or flamebait, there could be karma sanctions or suspension (of course, it's easy to create new accounts).
You're right. The FCC has been getting commments on this issue since the notice of proposed rulemaking was made in Jan 1999. You can see all of the comments, etc. at the FCC low-power FM web site. It doesn't look like they are hoping that individuals will get LPFM stations, only groups with community ties (which seems like a good idea anyway).
One thing that I don't know about-- at the proposed rulemaking announcement, one of the commissioners made a statement:
My second concern relates to the impact that creation of low power service may have on potential conversion to terrestrial digital radio service. I understand that there have been promising advances of late that can enable current radio operations to convert to digital transmission technology "in band on channel." Converting to digital transmission technology could improve the quality of radio service and potentially increase spectral efficiency. These are very real benefits and I would be concerned if authorizing some or all of these low power radio services would make in band on channel conversion to digital radio unworkable for existing terrestrial services.
The player that's always mentioned in this is USA Digital Radio, LLC. I didn't find any statements on their web site about the low-power FM stuff, so maybe it's not such a big deal.
Does anyone here know anything more about this technology?
You should have read it all. You would have come to the same conclusion that I did: Jon Katz' premise in this article is flawed and wrong. He does not understand how to make a valid point, so falls back on proof by assertion. This works for people with credibility-- unfortunately, Katz doesn't have much with me. His basic point- that a white, male, angry class of geeks is flaming newcomers and others who are different and driving them away is inaccurate and poorly supported (of course, that's because it's wrong, but it's easier to prove an incorrect hypotesis with fact manging and proof by assertion).
Katz asserts that the early days of the net were the breeding ground for a class of people who were inherently and overtly hostile to these non-white, non-male newcomers. Although the demographics of many of the early net users are generally white and generally male, this does not prove the point. For instance, I am both white and male and I am not hostile to people who are neither.
Katz asserts that a preexisting angry streak in the geek subculture has permeated the culture of the net, adding that he believes that is generated by the demographics of the net-- his angry young men. Again, Katz uses the proof by assertion method. As a young man I was hostile toward many things. In fact, my wife accuses me of being hostile to other drivers even today. However, somehow I was able to keep from adopting this hostility in written or spoken communication (well, there were a few instances, but beer was involved).
Katz asserts that harassment of a sexual nature is endemic in the technical workplace, and uses a complaint at Juno to back up his claim. However, he fails to note that sexual harassment claims are filed in every industry and that most of the truly notable cases are not in the technical industry. The number of women who function as CEOs and officers of technology companies stands in stark contrast to Katz' assertion that the technical workplace and cyberspace are replete with harassment.
One of the arguments that Katz returns to over and over again is that the difficulty that people have posting to or using/. is inherently a part of the hostility that is often seen on the site. Of course, it couldn't be that the site is difficult to use (it is, especially for newer web users) or that the content, generally of a more technical nature, is difficult for those not versed in both technology and open source issues to understand. These are significant barriers to participation for some. However, this is a good thing in that it helps (along with moderation) to keep the noise level down somewhat. When these people understand the content and the mechanism, they will be ready to join the discussion.
The assertion that there is some sort of "broad geek conspiracy" to keep women, non-whites, and other "undesirables" off of the net or in their own "content ghettos" is an example of the worst kind of hysteria, and deserves no place in a/. feature. While it IS appropriate to challenge the participants on/. to make/. and the web a better place, there is no reason for the type of mindless stereotyping of geeks that Katz has so proudly rejected in the past.
Katz tries to tie all of this together with some developmental psychology theory, using this to assert that the ability to "act" in a hostile manner online will lead to adults that are inherently hostile due to the fact that they never learned how to behave. Last time I checked, the same people who are online also exist in the offline world, where they shop, interact with others, go to restaurants, and engage in a variety of day-to-day activities that expose them to a different environment where they likely are less hostile than online. I also imagine that within each hostile poster's own community there is less of this hostility- I bet that they can get along.
Finally, the tendency of Katz to insert his own experiences as a validation of poorly-thought-out assertions is self-serving and insulting. Katz seems surprised that on one of the most pro-open source web sites on the net that the reaction to his use of Word was negative in some quarters. That Katz would be surprised by this is baffling. The use of these examples from his own experience gives a tone of self-justification and self-imposed martyrdom that makes the skin crawl as one reads it. The effect is to insult the reader, which makes me a little hostile.
``Unfortunately, the threat of computer virus and other technological attacks on personal computers make Internet voting from the home or office an unsecure and unwise practice at this time.''
Despite being non-sensical (virus attacks?), this is well-taken. CmdrTaco brings up the point that $billions are floating around on Internet transactions, but voting is not done online. Even though it seems when you go to the polling place that security is _weak_, it still requires some hard-to-defeat methods that make widespread voting fraud hard (at the voter end-- counters can cheat all they want if there's no oversight).
The problem is that voting in elections is the basis for creating the infrastructure (contract law, the courts, determining and collecting taxes, etc...) that allows Internet transactions to be conducted. This is a sensitive process and any chance to undermine it (and how fast could a beowulf cluster on a bunch of those new weather computers fraudulently vote?) has to be avoided.
Much as I would love to vote online, I just don't think that we're there yet
The article mentions a 14-day theoretical limit for forecasts. What drives this limit? I know that small-scale weather forcasting is way too complex, and they are talking about county-level forecasts.
OK, agreed, no one right answer, but maybe better said "a provably right answer." The existance of an answer which no currently known data contradicts might be a better way of characterizing the science/engineerring way.
It was a quckly-written post, so pardon the poorly-worded description of the science/humanities issue (which is likely better stated as the solvable/subjective problem).
Jon Katz has a problem with flames. In the first of three parts, he is attempting to lay the foundation for whatever he is trying to say. Here, I will attempt to consider the points brought up by Mr. Katz and give my own answers as appropriate.
I have always considered "flaming" to be an out-of-proportion response to a comment, question, or answer posted in a public forum. Mr. Katz includes personal, "private" replies with public ones. I agree that both are "flames" in the traditional sense, but I think that one is very different from another in terms of scope and impact. I wll generally consider only public flames, although private flames can also be generally considered in the same boat.
First, though, I will do what Mr. Katz refused to do-- I will define what I consider to be a flame, versus what I consider to be a response. As I mentioned above, one of the key identifiers of a flame is that it is out-of-proportion response to an original comment. A second identifier of a flame would be a personal tone to the response that implies that the original poster is deficient in some manner. The second aspect is what I would consider the real crux of the flame-- a person with no knowledge of another other than online interaction expresses a judgement on his or her good (or, more likely, bad) points as a human being. These can often be very non-specific-- for instance: "You suck," or "Please Die." However, the personal aspect to the flame is the heart of the matter for Mr. Katz (although he does not state this very well) and I would have to agree.
Mr. Katz is also onto something when he attempts to relate flaming to the creation and lifetimes of electronic or virtual communities (hereafter e-communities). These relatively new groupings are vastly different from their real-world counterparts. There are a number of reasons for this, all relevant to the issue of flaming. One is the breadth of e-communities. These communities grow into enormous groups, with participants having very different levels of participation-- lurkers "participate" in these e-communities, as do frequent posters, moderators, and others. For instance, my/. user number is 98832, which I have always assumed is a number incrementing from 0 for each new user. This would mean that/. has a huge number of users, in excess of 100,000. I don't know of many communities that have that many active participants (and/. doesn't, I know, but the point is that an e-community is huge).
E-communities are also very fluid. People join and leave constantly. People change their level of involvement constantly (lurker to participant to lurker). In a huge community where people are constantly on the move, it is very hard to judge anyone other than a select few known participants.
Finally, e-communities divorce participants from most of the details that we use to evaluate people in our meatspace communities. All we see on/. or other forums are screen names/e-mail addresses and the words that the other person has chosen to share with the community. That sharing with the rest of the e-community is the primary method of interaction in e-communities. Sometimes this sharing is anonymous, or nearly so. Anonymous sharing is good and bad-- an anonymous poster doesn't own his or her own words, and therefore is less likely to consider their online reputation as they post either well-though comments or flames. This stripping of the actual human details from postings to/. or to mailing lists creates what Mr. Katz calls "surreal distance," a phenomenon that many have remarked upon where the flamer is believed not to think of the target as a human being. I disagree with this interpretation of the phenomenon. I believe that the flamer knows, in the abstract, that there is a person on the receiving end of flames. However, the stripping of human details from the words in the post creates a caricature human in the flamer's mind-- based on the words in the post. The person may have just posted something laughably wrong or perhaps unknowingly insulting. This person has no grounding in the flamer's real world and is therefore a prime target for, well, a flame.
Mr. Katz's personal experience is that there are a significant number of flames generated when one posts to a website, and that, when flames are responded to, the original flamer almost always apologizes, replies in a more civil tone, or flees. However, this is to be expected-- the reply by the recipient adds more details to the picture of the person/poster in the flamer's mind. The natural reaction is that the tone of the interaction will become more civil. However, Mr. Katz seems to indicate that this is a surprise when it is not-- remember that reports of starving children didn't lead to action in Somalia-- TV pictures, which humanized the suffering, did so.
Mr. Katz makes a larger point about flaming-- that it discourages free speech. His argument is that public flaming or private flaming leads to fewer people joining in the conversation of the e-community. He states that the civil interactions are often not seen publicly, while the attacks generally are seen publicly. This is true in some forums, but is not necessarily the case. The unmoderated e-mail list is the most typical of this problem. A few flame-wielding posters can easily destroy the entire valuable interaction by overwhelming the civil posts. USENET is also vulnerable. Moderated forums generally can keep this from occurring by, well, moderating the submissions from participants. On mailing lists, this generally works well, but depends greatly on the moderator and is open to the charge of suppression of unpopular viewpoints (as is/.).
Flames, however, in some cases are an important protection vehicle for the community, especially when it is under attack by those who damage the cherished signal/noise ratio for the community. The reaction of flamers is usually toward those that bring the least to the discussion, thus perhaps regulating the forum by discouraging these from participating. These flames are often directed, and rightfully so in my opinion, against kooks who invade forums with wildly inaccurate claims or off-topic postings. The likes of Jim Fleming, Richard Sexton, Joe Baptista, Bob Allisat, Jeff Williams, and other net.kooks are barraged with flames when they enter a forum spewing their junk posts at unsuspecting participants. Although in the case of net.kooks it is impossible to stop them, the flames will keep others from being taken in by the inaccuracies of them and their posts.
Beyond simple kookism, flames do perhaps help to keep the signal/noise ratio high by discouraging ill-informed posts, for example from newbies in forums with highly technical content. Although the flames may seem hostile, they do establish a barrier to entry that will help keep the s/n ratio high.
Other flames are less useful. However, sometimes we need to apply the "good sense" filter to flames that we see. For me, flames from anonymous sources fall into the "ignore completely" category. Flames with content that is low on informational measures and high on the "you suck" measures also find their way to the bit-bucket. The second kind is often anonymous, so these messages are ignored anyway. Finally, there are some flames that are worth responding to. It can be difficult to determine which are in this subset, but there are some. Usually they contain some information that (however vaguely) supports their view. These flames may be from people with real views that don't have the language tools to easily approach them. They may also be from people who think, however wrongly, that "that's my style, so I can't be bothered to change it to make my point." These folks are an unfortunate case-- they are diminishing their own right to free speech by not fully exercising it. Perhaps replying to their messages can help them understand a more useful approach to online communication.
Some topics will never be divorced from their ability to generate flames. The Mac Evangelists werer the first well-known group to flame everyone who said anything negative in any way about Apple or the Mac, and the Linux evangelists are similar in their flame-expressed ardor. In politics, tobacco, guns, and abortion in the U.S. might as well be consigned to flame-only news groups and mailing lists.
Flames are a fact of life in the e-communities that we are building on the net. I, somehow, don't see them as quite a scourge as Mr. Katz. Perhaps if you flame me I will.
So, why, pray tell, would it be the *humanities* which are then described as "small-minded crap"? Oh, and by the way, could you please tell me which is better, Picasso's Guernica or Bach's Magnificat? What's that you say? There's no single right answer? It depends on personal taste and opinion? How terribly small-minded!
Thanks for taking me out for a well-deserved trip to the woodshed. I didn't write that very well. Let me explain.
I actually was referring to a previous post that I made in the thrad when I was thinking of small-minded crap. I was specifically thinking of the politically-correct victim culture foisted upon a lot of students, especially in the humanities (I know because I am a humanities major-- American Studies with a concentration on history. We basically were doing what is called "cultural history," which draws on a braoder range of sources than traditional history) and especially women in the late 80's and early 90's.
The crap is that (the creation of the victim-culture and all of the very small-minded thinking that came out of it), and not well-researched efforts at scholarship in the humanities. Also the crap is not issues relatted to personal enjoyment of art/music/writing. There is necessarily a subjective aspect to the evaluation of art/music/writing, and the differnces in this subjective aspect are hardly crap (although some people express them in ways that make them seem so).
So I hope that makes my point a little better. Scroll up a little to my previous post about assault and harassment being in the eye pf the beholder and I hope that the post that you were replying to will make more sense, although I acknowledge that it was poorly worded.
By the way, the rich and powerful are generally equally-intolerant of dissenting voices as the "man on the street"-- they just have better tools to keep viewpoints that conflict with theirs down.
I would rather be flamed and corrected than told that I held an 'alternate by equally viable' opinion.
You're dead on in the way that you feel. I think that it's the right way to feel about mistakes/errors and having one's own errors corrected(life is far too short to be wrong about everything). And this is the problem with A LOT of the people that are being produced by the U.S. University system, especially during the late 80's/early 90's and, at that time, especially women-- they cannot relate to this way of looking at things.
Maybe it's the difference in a lot of the humanities programs versus science/engineering programs: In science/engineering, there's one right answer-- it can be tested for correctness; in the humanities there's a lot of room for intrepretation and "different but equally viable answers."
A lot of this small-minded crap came out of the hideous feminism of the late 80's an early 90's. The wide-scale creation of a victimized woman culture was the main project of most of the popular women writers of the time (Camile Paglia is a notable exception). Most of this intellectual garbage was eaten up by the political correctness police rampant in university faculties and student bodies in the U.S. in the 80's/90's. They shoved it down everyone's throat and helped create a world of victims who could be "assulted" by an e-mail message. What crap.
While I agree 100% that flaming someone is not equal to an assault (the actual threat of physical violence is [almost] never there), many people don't see it that way. I do not think that they are right, but I see it every day online and in meatspace.
There are some people who have a real problem with "feeling threatened." These people, for whatever reason, equate "feeling bad" because they said something stupid with "assault." I think that these people have taken a lesson from the "harrassment" issue in the U.S. (harrassment is in the eye of the harrassed) and applied it to "assault."
Those people that I personnally know who feel this way have generally led such sheltered lives that they are unable to see the difference between hurt feelings and physical hurt, as hurt feelings are the worst thing they've ever encountered. Nice life, but it makes them unable to really deal with issues (like the fact that they might make a dumb comment online) without an incredible internal emotional overreaction.
Flame away, I can take it.
Re:Mixing different ideas
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"...the reality of free speech and press has nothing to do with the ability to speak and everything to do with the ability to be heard."
I'm not sure that I totally agree, but I see why you might make that assertion. I'm now venturing into the land of opinion, but I believe that the current situation with regard to the ability to be heard is better thn it has ever been.
Back in 1955, how constrained was the right to be heard? The possible outlets were three(?) TV stations that relatively few had access to, radio, newspapers, and a few magazines (most of which we still see today-- Time, Life [funnily enough], The Economist, Newsweek, etc.).
No Internet. No cable TV (along with its incredible need for lots and lots of content leading to lots and lots of shows).
The power in those days was far more concentrated in the hands of a few editors/journalists than it is today. I went to school with a number of people who are in mainstream journalism right now, and through them I have met even more people in mainstream journalism (think CBS, WSJ, etc.). Practically to a man and woman, they believe that the press is less able to effectively bury a story than it was able to in the past. Why?-- the profusion of outlets for news.
From several of those folks, I have heard that it was common practice in the news rooms of 20 years ago to bury stories that were unflattering to the local politician, local entrepeneur, or other person somehow affiliated with the powers that be(TM) in the local area. This is now virtually impossible. Just in the print media, everyone has a "city paper" of some sort that is widely read and will scoop the big shots in town given the chance.
Beyond print, the Internet has freed new points of view and outlets to arise even while the big fish get bigger./., the Drudge Report, Soccer Buzz-- all of these sites are new vehicles that are outside of the traditional media, but that are monitired and have created stories in the world that was hopelessly dominated by the traditional media.
The emergence of cable and satellite TV has created the same type of new outlets for points of view previously kept from the general public. Even without the protected "local access" channels, there are more points of view being spread about on channels 4-200 than there ever were by channels 1-3.
I think that people overreact to the types of things that Katz is raving about here because even the youn'uns among us buy into the old idea that there are 3 networks and everyone watches the news on those networks and therefore those networks have total control over the mind of America. This is mostly false, and becoming moreso with time. Viewership of the networks is falling-- even the revolutionary cable stations like CNN and TBS are losing viewership. This is because of audience fragmentation, which is likely to continue into the forseeable future (which may be only 18 months-- I'm no seer). One of the reasons that the TW/AOL deal is big is that it becomes a one-stop-shop for advertisers looking to buy advertising time in many different segments of the population and across different media.
Despite your misgivings, I think that the genie is out of the bottle, and that it would be impossible for any one commercial entity to squelch free speech at all in the United States of today. There are simply too many ways for people to route around media censorship. I think that the ability to be heard is greater than it has ever been in the U.S., and I imagine that it will continue to become more robust.
The cornerstone of anti-trust law -- and the idea behind a free press -- is that the individual citizen/consumer benefits from openness, choice and diversity of expression and opinion. The impact of mergers like this is to deny choice, concentrate power and homogenize creativity and expression.
BZZZT! Wrong, but thank you for playing.
The idea behind a free press-- important enough to enshrine in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States-- is that liberty is best defeinded by a free press to report on the deeds of government and citizens alike. Free press is inextricably linked to free speech, the right of citizens to express their views without undue interference FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
The idea behing anti-trust law, which didn't come along until 1890 (although a strong argument can be made that there was no need for anti-trust and anti-monopoly law before the mid-1800's, as there was no big business) was that a large enough firm could harm consumers through restraint of trade, monopoly pricing, etc. I don't believe (although I don't have time to check right now) that free speech or free press are mentioned anywhere in the Sherman anti-trust act or related acts.
In fact, I cannot see any threat to either of the rights of free speech or free press in the combination of these firms. Certainly, the combined entity will be large. However, last time I checked, there ARE other outlets for news available to people. And, unless TimeWarnerAOL decide to send their own troops into the streets (which I think there would be opposition to, aside from the fact thai I don't think either firm has an armored division), I don't see the apocalyptic threat that Katz sees. Is the new entity AOL/Time-Warner/Department of Justice? No.
Jon often forgets, among many things (although he of all people should be thankful for this) that the right to a free press is not the implicit right of citizens to quality journalism. In fact, bad reporting is also protected. Thus, the dreck the Time and its ilk produce is just as protected as the dreck the Jon Katz constantly posts.
One more thing:
The juxtaposition of the two announcements was almost Biblical in its symbolism and significance:
Slashdot Mirror
Word Mark: COKE
Goods and Services: IC 025. US 022 039. G & S: footwear.
FIRST USE: 19880311.
FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19880311
Mark Drawing Code: (1) TYPED DRAWING
Serial Number: 75114281
Filing Date: May 17, 1996
Published for Opposition: January 21, 1997
Registration Number: 2052760
Registration Date: April 15, 1997
Owner (REGISTRANT): Coca-Cola Company, The CORPORATION DELAWARE One Coca-Cola
Plaza Atlanta GEORGIA 30313
Type of Mark: TRADEMARK
Fortunately, someone already said what I was going to say (of course, that may no be worthy of moderation).
HR doesn't really understand the work done by people in those positions. Thus outside yardsticks, certificates and degrees, become important.
When I was doing hiring, I cannot tell you the number of lusers that paraded though my office because HR had seen that they were certified. Some of these people couldn't have installed NT without calling tech support.
Most HR droids (except in the really, really good tech companies) don't have the faintest idea what the company does. When I worked in a biomedical consulting firm, the HR person would routinely throw away Ivy League degrees in favor of ones from, shall we say, less distinguished schools because the one she chose "had more scientific words on them."
Managers don't want to get dumped on by their bosses if a new hire turns out bad.
I'd add to this: HR is afraid to get dumped on for wasting the manager's time if he/she sends a bad candidte to the managers. Certs are a CYA measure for the HR folks as well-- they can always say "well, he/she/it had the right credentials," and the manager is forced to agree (how is he going to explain that he wants someone who can think?) and go away.
I've interviewed at jobs where HR, using their standards, has told me "you really don't fit the job description", and when I went ahead and interviewed been told "you're the first person HR has sent us that fits."
Dammit, now you're taunting me-- why didn't you apply to the companies that I used to work for?
The primary purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to disclose their invention. Software authors have often resorted to schemes such as encryption, restrictive license agreements and similar strategies to prevent their competitors from being able to copy the technologies they develop. KEEPING TECHNOLOGY SECRETS IF [sic] FUNDAMENTALLY BAD FOR PROGRESS.
Report Card:
Understanding of the subject: B
Understanding real-world implications: F
Although it is possible to argue the first point (and to argue that the purpose of patents is to protect innnovators), I basically agree with you on the purpose of patents. However, software patents do not lead to disclosure of "technology secrets." Let's take a look at a few examples:
The Amazon.com one-click patent
The Amazon.com affiliate program patent
The Priceline business-method patent
Read these patents. Are any innovations disclosed? I've read all three, and I didn't see any disclosure of any technology secrets. What I saw were very broad descriptions of things that already existed in the physical world, or broad descriptions of things so obvious that calling them innovations demeans the term innovation.
Alright class, repeat after me: If something exists in the physical world, and you describe it occurring over the Internet, it does not mean that it is innovation, and almost certainly does not mean that it needs the protection of a patent.
Maybe so, but I haven't seen too much evidence of it lately. And just being "bright" doesn't mean your opinions are automatically valid, and you certainly don't have any "right" to involve yourselves in the legal and political processes of our country - that's what politicians are for. Leave them to do the job they are paid for. Doing otherwise makes you an anarchist who wants to tear down the fabric of our society.
OK, I don't know what particular nation you're from, but many nations, and most of those with a respectable legal system, provide a reason to involve oneself in the political processes of the country-- the concept that power flows from the will of a nation's citizens. That, after all, is what elections are about. Wanting to be involved in the political processes of one's own country is NOT equivalent to being an anarchist, to wit:
anarchist \An"arch*ist\, n. [Cf. F. anarchiste.] An anarch; one who advocates anarchy of aims at the overthrow of civil government.
If a citizen wants to participate in the political processses of his or her nation without wanting to overthrow the civil government, then he or she is not an anarchist.
Leaving the business of politics solely to the politicians leads to the kind of cronyism and special-interest-slanted laws that can be exemplified by the US Software Patent mess.
PS-- WTF is the SCP forum?
21 billion seems a bit much
I feel exactly the same. Paying $21B for anything is the type of bet that is only laid on a sure thing that will yield huge returns. I cannot help thinking that the value in this is as follows:
Linking the certificate services with the DNS registration that NSI has had a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on for so long. VeriSign and NSI have a long-term relationship in place, so there would be plenty of data for VeriSign to go on regarding the effectiveness of this basic relationship. Likely they want to deepen it by buying NSI and getting a bigger piece of the pie.
NSI has the largest existing customer base on the net. This is a huge market base, and, even with the inroads that alternative registrars have made, likely an enormous part of the value proposition. Last I checked (and I haven't been doing a lot of registrations lately), it's pretty much impossible to change the registrar of record. VeriSign will fight to the death to keep these switching costs in place.
I just wish that there was an alternative to VeriSign. As noted by many posts, their services sucks worse than NSI. They're going to monopolize the PKI, and that will be a shame, allowing all of the worst predcitions of Internet snooping and loss of anonimity to come true (in addition to pricing PKI out of reach of the little guy).
Hasn't the US Supreme Court defended anonymity as an important element of free speech? Without anonymity, there is always fear of retribution.
Yes, in McIntyr e v. Ohio Elections Commission, the US Supreme Court did state that anonimity is a right protected under the free speech rights as outlined in the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.
Anonymity, while it protects the speaker from retribution, does reduce the impact of the speech (in my opinion).
I'm not so sure that it is unusable. I used software RAID on Linux boxen for servers running INN for a full news feed way back under kernel 1.2, and it worked fine. Sure, I wasn't supporting a ISP-style workload (only 150 internal users), but it was fine.
So, I think that IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS, software RAID is OK, especially in linux.
Allan
Actually, as long as there is not a registered trademark on the domain, the law doesn't even require a good-faith effort to use it. So fordcars.com is a no-go, but computer.com is A-OK, even if you just sell it (this actually happened-- a guy had computer.com and never did anything with it until someone offered him a big truck full of money-- than he sold it).
Oh yeah, IANAL either.
I am a good writer, and one of the sins that I assiduously try to avoid is the overt insertion of my opinion in my writing. A second sin that I try to avoid is mentioning things that are about me and not related to my topic. However, you seem to constantly do these two things in your writing on /..
Two examples:
From Planet Gattaca :
What's so bizarre about "Gattaca" is that it's not really even science fiction, but an early documentary of the 21st Century.
This seems to be an example of unsupportable and clearly personal opinion.
From AOL Nation :
The first media call came in at 7 a.m., a producer at ABC Radio News waking me up to ask if I had any thoughts about the announcement that Time Warner and America Online had just decided to merge into a $350 billion company. The second call came from the BBC, then the Associated Press.
Here you mention yourself in a way that really has nothing to do with the point of your story (although it has everything to do with self-promotion).
Questions: Do you consider yourself a good writer? Do you think that your articles for /. are well-written? If so, why do you write so self-referentially? What is your best work?
Documenting everything is the only way to protect yourself. You can (apparently, although IANAL) defend yourself, even against a patent, if you can reliably show that you got there first. Basically, if you can document that in 1999 you did X, even if you did not file a patent, then you can defend against the patent application filed in 2000.
Oh, and make good backups, especially since there is the possibility of seizure as a legal recourse (although much later).
The Web's failure to produce or maintain common discussion grounds is getting to be a serious problem with real consequences. Misinformation about genetic research, online safety - even the Y2K problems - spreads primarily because intelligent public discussion of these issues isn't possible, except in places where nobody knows much about them, like Congress or on TV talk shows.
Or, I might add, in a Jon Katz column on /.
Each of the burning topics that Katz mentions were "addressed" in a Katz column over the past few months. I read them all, and I thought that they all did a terrible job of dealing with the issues. There was robust (and sometimes heated discussion) in the discussion areas after each one.
Katz probably got some "this article sucks" e-mail after those articles because, well, they sucked. Sometimes people are just calling a rose a rose.
In response to the oft-written lament "why don't you kust turn him off on your preferences?" The answer is because I'm worried that if I don't pay attention to the FUD of the week from Katz, someone else will take him seriously, and I won't be prepared for their FUD parroting and it will be harder to debunk the FUD.
It's like Katz is /.'s own Good Times virus-- you've got to pay attention, even though the content is non-sensical.
Unfortunately, by reading and posting, I'm driving the page views for Katz's stories up too high-- so /. will never get get rid of such a popular author.
This is true. I concur that many, many people do not take proper ownership of their own words on the Internet or in any electronic communication. However, this seems to be a problem with people adjusting to the idea of electronic communication in general (how many PHBs have sent morale-crushing e-mail because they didn't get it?), not with the structure of the Internet. The worst flamers (except on /.) That I have encountered on the net have real accounts, but just some kind of problem: kookism, juvenile boredom, desire to break up conversations on topics that they have strong and conflicting views, etc.
Katz is right that those who are creating on line communities need to be concerned about this, as the effort (and $$) being expended on the creation of on line communities is too great for them to be so easily disrupted by flame wars.
However, it is impossible for total openness and total amicability to co-exist in the Internet as currently constructed (just as it is currently impossible to have a perfectly secure and easily-usable computer system). Part of this is the human condition. Much of what makes life interesting IS conflict. Conflict is the crucible in which innovation is fired, where great new ideas are refined. If some cannot handle that conflict, their experience of the world is the worse for it.
What does this mean for Katz' communities? Well it means that, like any community, there will be good and bad aspect to it. In my real community, I love having my neighbor on the left as a neighbor, and I cannot stand my neighbor on the other side. However, just because I cannot stand my neighbor on the right, do I scream at him and his wife in the street? No, because it would jeopardize my standing in the community.
This, to me is the crux of the issue. It is possible to create standing in the e-community, just as one can in the meat space community. However, it takes effort, time, civility, and respect for others. Sometimes, it can be so hard to be heard on the net that one feels the need to scream or write in a hostile manner to get one's views heard. This is generally wrong. It easily destroys one's standing in the community. I tend to ignore anything that comes from a past flamer (pick the filtering capability of your choice). But I do this in the real world as well- I don't watch shows that I don't like on television. But not listening is not inhibiting commercial or political speech.
Perhaps if it were more difficult to so easily change one's identity on the net, this wouldn't be a problem. However, this is one of the things that is valuable. The AC posts are, occasionally, great. Since they need to be moderated up for me to read them, I generally only see good ones unless I am moderating or looking for moderation problems. Perhaps some sanction might be a good idea- maybe if people were required to log in before posting as AC, and their comment could be moderated down as a troll or flamebait, there could be karma sanctions or suspension (of course, it's easy to create new accounts).
I think that we may just have to live with it.
One thing that I don't know about-- at the proposed rulemaking announcement, one of the commissioners made a statement:
My second concern relates to the impact that creation of low power service may have on potential conversion to terrestrial digital radio service. I understand that there have been promising advances of late that can enable current radio operations to convert to digital transmission technology "in band on channel." Converting to digital transmission technology could improve the quality of radio service and potentially increase spectral efficiency. These are very real benefits and I would be concerned if authorizing some or all of these low power radio services would make in band on channel conversion to digital radio unworkable for existing terrestrial services.
The player that's always mentioned in this is USA Digital Radio, LLC. I didn't find any statements on their web site about the low-power FM stuff, so maybe it's not such a big deal.
Does anyone here know anything more about this technology?
Katz asserts that the early days of the net were the breeding ground for a class of people who were inherently and overtly hostile to these non-white, non-male newcomers. Although the demographics of many of the early net users are generally white and generally male, this does not prove the point. For instance, I am both white and male and I am not hostile to people who are neither.
Katz asserts that a preexisting angry streak in the geek subculture has permeated the culture of the net, adding that he believes that is generated by the demographics of the net-- his angry young men. Again, Katz uses the proof by assertion method. As a young man I was hostile toward many things. In fact, my wife accuses me of being hostile to other drivers even today. However, somehow I was able to keep from adopting this hostility in written or spoken communication (well, there were a few instances, but beer was involved).
Katz asserts that harassment of a sexual nature is endemic in the technical workplace, and uses a complaint at Juno to back up his claim. However, he fails to note that sexual harassment claims are filed in every industry and that most of the truly notable cases are not in the technical industry. The number of women who function as CEOs and officers of technology companies stands in stark contrast to Katz' assertion that the technical workplace and cyberspace are replete with harassment.
One of the arguments that Katz returns to over and over again is that the difficulty that people have posting to or using /. is inherently a part of the hostility that is often seen on the site. Of course, it couldn't be that the site is difficult to use (it is, especially for newer web users) or that the content, generally of a more technical nature, is difficult for those not versed in both technology and open source issues to understand. These are significant barriers to participation for some. However, this is a good thing in that it helps (along with moderation) to keep the noise level down somewhat. When these people understand the content and the mechanism, they will be ready to join the discussion.
The assertion that there is some sort of "broad geek conspiracy" to keep women, non-whites, and other "undesirables" off of the net or in their own "content ghettos" is an example of the worst kind of hysteria, and deserves no place in a /. feature. While it IS appropriate to challenge the participants on /. to make /. and the web a better place, there is no reason for the type of mindless stereotyping of geeks that Katz has so proudly rejected in the past.
Katz tries to tie all of this together with some developmental psychology theory, using this to assert that the ability to "act" in a hostile manner online will lead to adults that are inherently hostile due to the fact that they never learned how to behave. Last time I checked, the same people who are online also exist in the offline world, where they shop, interact with others, go to restaurants, and engage in a variety of day-to-day activities that expose them to a different environment where they likely are less hostile than online. I also imagine that within each hostile poster's own community there is less of this hostility- I bet that they can get along.
Finally, the tendency of Katz to insert his own experiences as a validation of poorly-thought-out assertions is self-serving and insulting. Katz seems surprised that on one of the most pro-open source web sites on the net that the reaction to his use of Word was negative in some quarters. That Katz would be surprised by this is baffling. The use of these examples from his own experience gives a tone of self-justification and self-imposed martyrdom that makes the skin crawl as one reads it. The effect is to insult the reader, which makes me a little hostile.
Despite being non-sensical (virus attacks?), this is well-taken. CmdrTaco brings up the point that $billions are floating around on Internet transactions, but voting is not done online. Even though it seems when you go to the polling place that security is _weak_, it still requires some hard-to-defeat methods that make widespread voting fraud hard (at the voter end-- counters can cheat all they want if there's no oversight).
The problem is that voting in elections is the basis for creating the infrastructure (contract law, the courts, determining and collecting taxes, etc...) that allows Internet transactions to be conducted. This is a sensitive process and any chance to undermine it (and how fast could a beowulf cluster on a bunch of those new weather computers fraudulently vote?) has to be avoided.
Much as I would love to vote online, I just don't think that we're there yet
Anyone have any experience with weather modeling?
It was a quckly-written post, so pardon the poorly-worded description of the science/humanities issue (which is likely better stated as the solvable/subjective problem).
I have always considered "flaming" to be an out-of-proportion response to a comment, question, or answer posted in a public forum. Mr. Katz includes personal, "private" replies with public ones. I agree that both are "flames" in the traditional sense, but I think that one is very different from another in terms of scope and impact. I wll generally consider only public flames, although private flames can also be generally considered in the same boat.
First, though, I will do what Mr. Katz refused to do-- I will define what I consider to be a flame, versus what I consider to be a response. As I mentioned above, one of the key identifiers of a flame is that it is out-of-proportion response to an original comment. A second identifier of a flame would be a personal tone to the response that implies that the original poster is deficient in some manner. The second aspect is what I would consider the real crux of the flame-- a person with no knowledge of another other than online interaction expresses a judgement on his or her good (or, more likely, bad) points as a human being. These can often be very non-specific-- for instance: "You suck," or "Please Die." However, the personal aspect to the flame is the heart of the matter for Mr. Katz (although he does not state this very well) and I would have to agree.
Mr. Katz is also onto something when he attempts to relate flaming to the creation and lifetimes of electronic or virtual communities (hereafter e-communities). These relatively new groupings are vastly different from their real-world counterparts. There are a number of reasons for this, all relevant to the issue of flaming. One is the breadth of e-communities. These communities grow into enormous groups, with participants having very different levels of participation-- lurkers "participate" in these e-communities, as do frequent posters, moderators, and others. For instance, my /. user number is 98832, which I have always assumed is a number incrementing from 0 for each new user. This would mean that /. has a huge number of users, in excess of 100,000. I don't know of many communities that have that many active participants (and /. doesn't, I know, but the point is that an e-community is huge).
E-communities are also very fluid. People join and leave constantly. People change their level of involvement constantly (lurker to participant to lurker). In a huge community where people are constantly on the move, it is very hard to judge anyone other than a select few known participants.
Finally, e-communities divorce participants from most of the details that we use to evaluate people in our meatspace communities. All we see on /. or other forums are screen names/e-mail addresses and the words that the other person has chosen to share with the community. That sharing with the rest of the e-community is the primary method of interaction in e-communities. Sometimes this sharing is anonymous, or nearly so. Anonymous sharing is good and bad-- an anonymous poster doesn't own his or her own words, and therefore is less likely to consider their online reputation as they post either well-though comments or flames. This stripping of the actual human details from postings to /. or to mailing lists creates what Mr. Katz calls "surreal distance," a phenomenon that many have remarked upon where the flamer is believed not to think of the target as a human being. I disagree with this interpretation of the phenomenon. I believe that the flamer knows, in the abstract, that there is a person on the receiving end of flames. However, the stripping of human details from the words in the post creates a caricature human in the flamer's mind-- based on the words in the post. The person may have just posted something laughably wrong or perhaps unknowingly insulting. This person has no grounding in the flamer's real world and is therefore a prime target for, well, a flame.
Mr. Katz's personal experience is that there are a significant number of flames generated when one posts to a website, and that, when flames are responded to, the original flamer almost always apologizes, replies in a more civil tone, or flees. However, this is to be expected-- the reply by the recipient adds more details to the picture of the person/poster in the flamer's mind. The natural reaction is that the tone of the interaction will become more civil. However, Mr. Katz seems to indicate that this is a surprise when it is not-- remember that reports of starving children didn't lead to action in Somalia-- TV pictures, which humanized the suffering, did so.
Mr. Katz makes a larger point about flaming-- that it discourages free speech. His argument is that public flaming or private flaming leads to fewer people joining in the conversation of the e-community. He states that the civil interactions are often not seen publicly, while the attacks generally are seen publicly. This is true in some forums, but is not necessarily the case. The unmoderated e-mail list is the most typical of this problem. A few flame-wielding posters can easily destroy the entire valuable interaction by overwhelming the civil posts. USENET is also vulnerable. Moderated forums generally can keep this from occurring by, well, moderating the submissions from participants. On mailing lists, this generally works well, but depends greatly on the moderator and is open to the charge of suppression of unpopular viewpoints (as is /.).
Flames, however, in some cases are an important protection vehicle for the community, especially when it is under attack by those who damage the cherished signal/noise ratio for the community. The reaction of flamers is usually toward those that bring the least to the discussion, thus perhaps regulating the forum by discouraging these from participating. These flames are often directed, and rightfully so in my opinion, against kooks who invade forums with wildly inaccurate claims or off-topic postings. The likes of Jim Fleming, Richard Sexton, Joe Baptista, Bob Allisat, Jeff Williams, and other net.kooks are barraged with flames when they enter a forum spewing their junk posts at unsuspecting participants. Although in the case of net.kooks it is impossible to stop them, the flames will keep others from being taken in by the inaccuracies of them and their posts.
Beyond simple kookism, flames do perhaps help to keep the signal/noise ratio high by discouraging ill-informed posts, for example from newbies in forums with highly technical content. Although the flames may seem hostile, they do establish a barrier to entry that will help keep the s/n ratio high.
Other flames are less useful. However, sometimes we need to apply the "good sense" filter to flames that we see. For me, flames from anonymous sources fall into the "ignore completely" category. Flames with content that is low on informational measures and high on the "you suck" measures also find their way to the bit-bucket. The second kind is often anonymous, so these messages are ignored anyway. Finally, there are some flames that are worth responding to. It can be difficult to determine which are in this subset, but there are some. Usually they contain some information that (however vaguely) supports their view. These flames may be from people with real views that don't have the language tools to easily approach them. They may also be from people who think, however wrongly, that "that's my style, so I can't be bothered to change it to make my point." These folks are an unfortunate case-- they are diminishing their own right to free speech by not fully exercising it. Perhaps replying to their messages can help them understand a more useful approach to online communication.
Some topics will never be divorced from their ability to generate flames. The Mac Evangelists werer the first well-known group to flame everyone who said anything negative in any way about Apple or the Mac, and the Linux evangelists are similar in their flame-expressed ardor. In politics, tobacco, guns, and abortion in the U.S. might as well be consigned to flame-only news groups and mailing lists.
Flames are a fact of life in the e-communities that we are building on the net. I, somehow, don't see them as quite a scourge as Mr. Katz. Perhaps if you flame me I will.
Allan
Thanks for taking me out for a well-deserved trip to the woodshed. I didn't write that very well. Let me explain.
I actually was referring to a previous post that I made in the thrad when I was thinking of small-minded crap. I was specifically thinking of the politically-correct victim culture foisted upon a lot of students, especially in the humanities (I know because I am a humanities major-- American Studies with a concentration on history. We basically were doing what is called "cultural history," which draws on a braoder range of sources than traditional history) and especially women in the late 80's and early 90's.
The crap is that (the creation of the victim-culture and all of the very small-minded thinking that came out of it), and not well-researched efforts at scholarship in the humanities. Also the crap is not issues relatted to personal enjoyment of art/music/writing. There is necessarily a subjective aspect to the evaluation of art/music/writing, and the differnces in this subjective aspect are hardly crap (although some people express them in ways that make them seem so).
So I hope that makes my point a little better. Scroll up a little to my previous post about assault and harassment being in the eye pf the beholder and I hope that the post that you were replying to will make more sense, although I acknowledge that it was poorly worded.
By the way, the rich and powerful are generally equally-intolerant of dissenting voices as the "man on the street"-- they just have better tools to keep viewpoints that conflict with theirs down.
You're dead on in the way that you feel. I think that it's the right way to feel about mistakes/errors and having one's own errors corrected(life is far too short to be wrong about everything). And this is the problem with A LOT of the people that are being produced by the U.S. University system, especially during the late 80's/early 90's and, at that time, especially women-- they cannot relate to this way of looking at things.
Maybe it's the difference in a lot of the humanities programs versus science/engineering programs: In science/engineering, there's one right answer-- it can be tested for correctness; in the humanities there's a lot of room for intrepretation and "different but equally viable answers."
A lot of this small-minded crap came out of the hideous feminism of the late 80's an early 90's. The wide-scale creation of a victimized woman culture was the main project of most of the popular women writers of the time (Camile Paglia is a notable exception). Most of this intellectual garbage was eaten up by the political correctness police rampant in university faculties and student bodies in the U.S. in the 80's/90's. They shoved it down everyone's throat and helped create a world of victims who could be "assulted" by an e-mail message. What crap.
There are some people who have a real problem with "feeling threatened." These people, for whatever reason, equate "feeling bad" because they said something stupid with "assault." I think that these people have taken a lesson from the "harrassment" issue in the U.S. (harrassment is in the eye of the harrassed) and applied it to "assault."
Those people that I personnally know who feel this way have generally led such sheltered lives that they are unable to see the difference between hurt feelings and physical hurt, as hurt feelings are the worst thing they've ever encountered. Nice life, but it makes them unable to really deal with issues (like the fact that they might make a dumb comment online) without an incredible internal emotional overreaction.
Flame away, I can take it.
I'm not sure that I totally agree, but I see why you might make that assertion. I'm now venturing into the land of opinion, but I believe that the current situation with regard to the ability to be heard is better thn it has ever been.
Back in 1955, how constrained was the right to be heard? The possible outlets were three(?) TV stations that relatively few had access to, radio, newspapers, and a few magazines (most of which we still see today-- Time, Life [funnily enough], The Economist, Newsweek, etc.).
No Internet. No cable TV (along with its incredible need for lots and lots of content leading to lots and lots of shows).
The power in those days was far more concentrated in the hands of a few editors/journalists than it is today. I went to school with a number of people who are in mainstream journalism right now, and through them I have met even more people in mainstream journalism (think CBS, WSJ, etc.). Practically to a man and woman, they believe that the press is less able to effectively bury a story than it was able to in the past. Why?-- the profusion of outlets for news.
From several of those folks, I have heard that it was common practice in the news rooms of 20 years ago to bury stories that were unflattering to the local politician, local entrepeneur, or other person somehow affiliated with the powers that be(TM) in the local area. This is now virtually impossible. Just in the print media, everyone has a "city paper" of some sort that is widely read and will scoop the big shots in town given the chance.
Beyond print, the Internet has freed new points of view and outlets to arise even while the big fish get bigger. /., the Drudge Report, Soccer Buzz-- all of these sites are new vehicles that are outside of the traditional media, but that are monitired and have created stories in the world that was hopelessly dominated by the traditional media.
The emergence of cable and satellite TV has created the same type of new outlets for points of view previously kept from the general public. Even without the protected "local access" channels, there are more points of view being spread about on channels 4-200 than there ever were by channels 1-3.
I think that people overreact to the types of things that Katz is raving about here because even the youn'uns among us buy into the old idea that there are 3 networks and everyone watches the news on those networks and therefore those networks have total control over the mind of America. This is mostly false, and becoming moreso with time. Viewership of the networks is falling-- even the revolutionary cable stations like CNN and TBS are losing viewership. This is because of audience fragmentation, which is likely to continue into the forseeable future (which may be only 18 months-- I'm no seer). One of the reasons that the TW/AOL deal is big is that it becomes a one-stop-shop for advertisers looking to buy advertising time in many different segments of the population and across different media.
Despite your misgivings, I think that the genie is out of the bottle, and that it would be impossible for any one commercial entity to squelch free speech at all in the United States of today. There are simply too many ways for people to route around media censorship. I think that the ability to be heard is greater than it has ever been in the U.S., and I imagine that it will continue to become more robust.
BZZZT! Wrong, but thank you for playing.
The idea behind a free press-- important enough to enshrine in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States-- is that liberty is best defeinded by a free press to report on the deeds of government and citizens alike. Free press is inextricably linked to free speech, the right of citizens to express their views without undue interference FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
The idea behing anti-trust law, which didn't come along until 1890 (although a strong argument can be made that there was no need for anti-trust and anti-monopoly law before the mid-1800's, as there was no big business) was that a large enough firm could harm consumers through restraint of trade, monopoly pricing, etc. I don't believe (although I don't have time to check right now) that free speech or free press are mentioned anywhere in the Sherman anti-trust act or related acts.
In fact, I cannot see any threat to either of the rights of free speech or free press in the combination of these firms. Certainly, the combined entity will be large. However, last time I checked, there ARE other outlets for news available to people. And, unless TimeWarnerAOL decide to send their own troops into the streets (which I think there would be opposition to, aside from the fact thai I don't think either firm has an armored division), I don't see the apocalyptic threat that Katz sees. Is the new entity AOL/Time-Warner/Department of Justice? No.
Jon often forgets, among many things (although he of all people should be thankful for this) that the right to a free press is not the implicit right of citizens to quality journalism. In fact, bad reporting is also protected. Thus, the dreck the Time and its ilk produce is just as protected as the dreck the Jon Katz constantly posts.
One more thing:
The juxtaposition of the two announcements was almost Biblical in its symbolism and significance:
Huh?
And most important of all...
MARKETING