Wednesday

02011-01-12 | Uncategorized | 5 comments

from the Upaya Newsletter:

If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance for you to contribute to making a better world. That’s your choice.
– Noam Chomsky

A Twain Scholar Reacts to the New, Censored Version ‘Huckleberry Finn’ (WSJ)

How to look younger without plastic surgery

Here is another quote (thanks SM):

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re gonna get selfish, ignorant leaders. So maybe it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here. Like… the public.
— George Carlin

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Ariel Emanuel, “A Conversation with Ariel Emanuel” (YouTube)

The first comment starts with Piracy will NEVER be stopped.. We stopped smallpox, but we can’t stop piracy?

5 Comments

  1. dave

    It all comes down to development, no? How can we get people to develop or enlarge their circle of empathy?

    Reply
  2. Matt Callahan

    Carlin rarely disappoints

    Reply
  3. Carol Anderson

    I am hopefully waiting for television to have something more fulfilling to reach the adult mind. I keep getting more all the time and then I realize they’re giving the majority of people what they want and understand. Well, there’s a handful of the hundreds that may give a person something worthwhile and aren’t just time wasters.

    Reply
  4. Adam Solomon

    Smallpox is a disease, a tangible, palpable virus you can kill with a vaccine. What’s behind piracy is something in human nature, and that’s much more difficult to stop. No amount of legislation and enforcement will do it: people have always found ways around that and will continue to. Education? Possibly, but I don’t see it stamping out the pretty widespread desire for free content, only curtailing it (and probably mildly, at that).

    As long as there’s a way to copy, there will be people who are able to do it and people who want the services. I’m not sure how we can stop that, any more than we could have stopped people recording songs off the radio onto their cassette players, without our laws becoming so draconian that the negative consequences vastly outweigh the positive.

    Whatever the solution is, I’d think it would have to be something that recognizes piracy will always be there, and seeks to minimize that damage by fundamentally changing the market structure. Strategies aiming to stamp it out entirely will more likely than not be extremely heavy-handed and largely ineffective (see the Jammie Thomas case). What the right solution looks like, I’m not sure.

    Reply
  5. Adam Solomon

    And of course – nothing better than Carlin, may he rest in peace.

    Reply

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