Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.
Soon a growing portion will be "This page was bookmarked on my dad's computer; what does 'laid' mean?!"
..think about, what hundreds of thousands of years of evolution optimized you for. Can’t get any better.
That's were genetic engineering comes in. Bye bye evolution, hello Human 2.3 BETA.
There's a conventional statistic among publishers, to the effect that every book sold is read by four people. This is usually mentioned in a context that makes it clear that there's a problem.
Thinking back on my own experiences growing up me and my friends bought a lot of books. Usually one of us would buy a book, if it was any good we'd recommend it our friends and they'd take turns reading it. With only very few exceptions (like special hardcover collectors versions) books purchased by one ended up belonging to the group (I have even re-bought several bought later because my original copy was read to devastation or ended up in one of the others bookcase's). One of the benefits of this system was that we, as a group, could read a large number of books far surpassing the purchasing power of any one single individual. If I had to purchase all the books I was going to read myself, the amount of authors I would gain familiarity with would be diminished by several factors.
I'm going to pay. I read the NYTimes online everyday; a habit I started more than 10 years ago. The sites/shows you have listed are really just aggregators. Someone needs to be there, hit the pavement and get the story. This article [nytimes.com] is a great example of good reporting. I think it is worth value. If I have to pay a few cents for it... so be it.
The question is how many of the employees and journalists paid by the NYT are actually out there, hitting the pavement and getting the story. And how many are basically just dead weight writing bullcrap to fill space.
Instead, I think NYT has a terrible business mechanism that is trapped too much 30 years ago to capitalize on emerging media.
Probably many newspapers have a lot of people, material and space that they pay for that this digital age simply won't be able to cover the cost of. The revenue generated online simply won't cover them running a big news machine the way they are used to, so they try to hold on to an outdated model out of nostalgia and a stubborn belief that it's not them its the internet and all those damn kids.
As much as we don't like paying for content, someone has to pay for for the journalist to do their job.
I will argue that a lot of those so called "journalists" are not doing much reporting beyond writing what thoughts occur inside their heads about various issues. And that type of reporting I can get from John down on the corner writing in his blog. As many others have said in their replies on this thread; there is a lot of dead weight in this industry. A relatively small number of journalists are going around seeing, hearing, asking, and fact checking; most seem to be permanently stuck inside their offices whining about the unfairness of "teh internets".
Quite frankly I expect a large number of those that consider themselves journalists to be out of job ten-twenty years down the line. With internet blogs covering most of the opinion piece market, and only a small number of very active people being able to live off being what one could call a full-time journalist. Already a lot of pieces on various sites are written by people who have other jobs (mostly well-knowns from various industries; especially the entertainment industry, and a range of authors).
How much will this content cost? I have no idea, but someone will pay for it.
What the next decades will uncover is exactly what type of content people will pay for and how much they will pay. Maybe my speculation is way off, maybe not; time will tell. One thing is for certain what we get in the end won't look much like what we got right now. And a lot of people will fall by the wayside as the industry changes.
Very few media sources I've found actually provide a significantly better service than many other sources, so it simply doesn't make sense for me as a consumer to pay for product I can get for free.
Since the majority of what these sites offer are opinion pieces I have to agree with you. For me to pay to read such material it would have to have a constant and significant quality, and if I could find that from a particular writer I wouldn't mind paying that person directly to read only their material (on a blog or personal site or whatever). One could argue for paying for news but if I was going to subscribe to a site delivering news it would have to be purely that; new events of significance (and not what so and so celebrity did over the weekend), reported matter of factly and as objectively as possible.
The product these sites are trying to sell us is quite frankly, in my opinion, of little value (taken as a whole) with only a few articles of interest now and again. Maybe they'll be able to carve out their niche over time, but I seriously doubt anything near "20 million unique readers" will bother paying for this type of thing.
This is also impractical, because you can't expect every single citizen to apply for permission just to post videos of their cat onto youtube.
Indeed. One thing that could kill such a policy quickly is the huge number of people applying for permission for all sorts of material would swamp the institution. But seriously the oppressiveness of such a policy seems excessive; even for Italy. And to make this have any sort of effect at all they would have to block all access to foreign sites since they would continue to upload more or less whatever they would wish.
Once, when I was a student, I tried to get a copy of the school's policy manual. I was politely but firmly told to sit down and shut up. To be honest, I don't believe that such things even exist, or if they are they are so broadly defined as to be useless for informing behaviour.
Policies must always be worded in such a convoluted way as to remain open to any interpretation most serving the administration at any given time. Asking for the policy documentation is in itself a breach of policy and highly suspicious and subversive behaviour. Any questioning of authority is a sign of anti-social and destructive behaviour.
The end result is that school officials with a high self interest will put their self interest in front of everyone else (the authorities who are wasting their time, the students out of class, the student directly involved, the parents who have to come pick up all the students early, etc), since they are more worried about the ramifications to themselves than the trouble they may cause for others.
That's why I have always been in favour of school consisting of a transport vehicle going around picking up each kid individually and placing each into their own stasispod. Then said stasispod is driven to a building were they will be stacked up for 10 hours and all interaction will be committed virtually with the kids never leaving their respective pods. If any student violates policy or acts in a threatening manner the pod can be disconnected from the hub and driven directly to the nearest correctional facility. Safety first!
Don't do anything to attract attention to yourself ever.
Anyone actively trying not to attract attention must be a terrorist!
Or maybe the kid was trying to impress his friends by acting like the thing was a bomb. While I'm sure the school/police/fire dept overreacted, kids do strange stuff and often don't realize the consequences of their actions.
All that is mentioned in the article is:
Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.
The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.
Both the student and his parents were "very cooperative" with authorities, Luque said. He said fire officials also went to the student's home and checked the garage to make sure items there were neither harmful nor explosive.
The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.
Now I can't say what policies he might have violated; though from what little is said in the article one is left with the impression that the vice principal in question overacted (or erred on the side of caution). I can understand that after going through such an event that the kid in question might need a bit of counselling to deal with the fact that he got hanged out in-front of the whole school as a possible terrorist. So I hope that is what they are talking about, and not that he "needs counselling" because he inadvertently scared a frightened adult administrator.
It is in no way a violation of freedom of speech to put information out there to clarify a certain point of view but it's the essence of freedom of speech.
From TFA:
In a lengthy academic paper, President Obama's regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, argued the U.S. government should ban "conspiracy theorizing."
Among the beliefs Sunstein would ban is advocating that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.
"We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories."
Banning people from "conspiracy theorizing" sounds a heck of a lot more serious than "put information out there to clarify", it sounds like they consider banning "conspiracy theorizing." Which is a ludicrous policy. Almost any definition of "conspiracy theory" would mandate them to take action against almost all criticism of the government, the state or any of its institutions or representatives. Will it be illegal to levy claims of criminal activities against an elected representatives since it will be a "conspiracy theory"? I can imagine a fairly wide range of ways such a policy could be mis-used; if you even consider the original use legitimate.
Banning people from saying that the government is corrupt, or committing acts they disagree with, is a great injustice. It can only lead to a greater credence to their claims, and with policies such as argued for by Sunstein one starts to feel an increasing drag towards becoming one of these radical voices critical of what the government wants people to accept as justified.
What good is a ticket to the good life, if you can't find the entrance?
