Silly parents! Are you all up in arms and legs about your little dumpling watching pornography online, like the subjects of this recent Guardian article? Well, I can't sympathize. Worse yet, I am here to destroy all hopes that you will ever have for (a) an all-wholesome web, or (b) getting your kids to practice wholesome viewing habits.
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Our Parental Policy
See, around my house, we've always had a 100% liberal policy on what media content our kids can read, watch, listen to, and play. They have their own TVs and computers and phones and we don't put any parental controls on them at all. Instead, we offer proactive parenting: we coach and advise on the difference between reality and fantasy, the difference between listening to songs about anti-social behavior and acting it out, the importance of examining the morality and safety of a depicted action, and so on.
We're also all about the open-and-honest communication. What this means is that when they run across something unsavory, we can offer guidance on how to take it. Then they learn that no matter how cool an idea it might at first seem to stick some strange thing in some strange orifice, we're right here to mention that that's how funny stories told by hospital emergency-room staff are born. Any time our kids run across something weird and dirty, they can feel perfectly comfortable asking us about it, whereupon we can assure them that no, while some people online have a thing about dressing up as Tigger(*) for a night of fun adult romping, that doesn't mean that the average bride and groom will be expecting it on their wedding night.
(* sorry, furries, but you're used to being easy targets by now!)
Hey, by the time kids are seeking this out on their own, they're fourteen and passing puberty. They've already had sex-ed in school. They will have just four short years until they become legal adults as far as sex is concerned, and then they have to deal with the full brunt of the weird world and all of its myriad disgusting fetishes and depraved debauchery anyway. Would I rather they have their first introduction to the Wide World of Whackos as naive, sheltered, innocent lambs after they've moved out and are on their own, or would I rather they discover it at a safe distance first over the Internet where they have the advantage of my sober judgment and council? Why is this even a difficult question for anybody?
Seriously, why?
"Wise like a serpent, harmless like a dove." That's my attitude.
And before anybody takes this to mean that I let my kids cavort with child predators or send inappropriate photos to strangers, let me caution you wet thumbs that I'm only talking about consuming online media - interacting with it is an entirely different matter, and we're still gradually lifting our controls on participation until they understand how to avoid being victimized by creeps, and that their 35-year-old selves would regret imprudent photos snapped and posted of their 16-year-old selves. "For now you can look and explore, but you have much to learn before you can get out there and swim with the sharks."
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Why Any Other Parental Policy Is Doomed
It is thanks to this open-and-honest communication policy that I get to find out about things like the current "practical jokes" fad on YouTube.
Imagine a perfect world as the repressive nannies would have it: There is either no porn online, or no way for their own kids to consume it. So their apple-cheeked little munchkin skips up and asks "Mommy, can I watch practical joke videos on YouTube?" Well, of course little moppet (pinches cheek), you run right along and have fun now!
Now, what are you thinking when you hear "practical jokes"? Glue a quarter to the sidewalk, watch people struggle to pry it up, yuk yuk? Perhaps the ever-popular "kick me" sign taped to the back?
There's dozens more examples where this came from. But now, imagine your kid telling the gist of six or seven of these to you rapid-fire in a row, like my kid just did to me. Listen to your faith in humanity deflate like a sad balloon.
Now, granted, I know most of these are faked. (Did you hear that, wet thumbs in the back row? I knooooow they're faaaaaake!) But still, they suggest seriously messed-up things to do, and certainly we read about kids who get hurt in nasty ways imitating the Internet all the time, such as with the recent real panic about the swallow-a-spoonful-of-cinnamon challenge. In no uncertain terms, bleach in the shower can get into your eyes and blind you for life while burning your eyes right out of their sockets, superglue requires a trip to the hospital to remove with chemical solvents that might work, and coins shooting out of an AC unit can hit you in the face, possibly knocking a tooth out. Also, cinnamon by the scoop can choke you to death, and furthermore hurt the entire time you're dying.
This shit ain't funny. It's cruel, sick, sadistic, barbaric, and several other things to get into a huff about.
Now, how would we have known to censor this beforehand?
It's not X-rated. It's not even R-rated. You can keep your clothes on, not swear, not worship the devil, not abuse any illicit substances, not even pirate any music, and still depict something that's wrong on all kinds of levels.
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I Would Rather My Kids Watch Porn Than Pranks
At least sex is usually a consensual act engaged in by people who enjoy it. At least in your standard sexual activity, there isn't an immediate risk of permanent debilitating injury. And at least the enjoyment-factor from most forms of sex does not come from sadistic cruelty, barbaric ignorance, and ruining someone's day and possibly life. Truly, I watch six prank videos in a row and Debbie Does Dallas starts looking as wholesome as white picket fences and apple pie by comparison. So does a Freddy Kruger flick, because at least it's clearly understood that it's a work of fiction.
The enjoyment of pranks is an act of sadism. It is all about getting amusement at the expense of another human being's dignity and safety. It is far, far crueler than half the degrading things I've seen porn stars do. The fact that these prank videos are so popular says scary things about what kind of dark undercurrent to our society we might be creating.
Furthermore, I will step forward to make the bold claim that the popularity of dangerous pranks among young people is a symptom of exactly the kind of sick society we create when we let the repressive nannies have their say. We can ban all kinds of less-dangerous ideas for teens to be exposed to, only to provoke them to invent new ideas on their own that are even worse.
And if you thought I was over-reacting to practical jokes, be aware that the next logical step is the "dare", where people voluntarily play pranks on themselves just for the attention value. Here again, you might think "but we all played truth of dare in junior high", but then you haven't been to another popular teen hangout online, Get Dare. Go ahead and browse around there - you'll find the horror stories soon enough. I'm the most liberal left-wing pinko in the world, and getdare.com makes me want to get an angry mob with torches and pitchforks together and go burn it down.
We can show people doing sick, sad, twisted things to each other all day long, and nobody raises an eyebrow. Yet we can't show two people loving each other. For that matter, we can't show a woman breastfeeding her baby.
We're a sick species.
And trying to fix it with censorship, whether individually or collectively, just makes us sicker.
There's something about late spring that seems to bring the corporate asstroturf out of the woodwork (oops, I made a "Freudian typo" there!). College graduation is coming up after all, with all those fresh new students hitting the market and becoming truly adult consumers for the first time. Gotta get ready for them. Today's front page of Slashdot brings us not one, not two, but three examples.
The first is rather telling: An unnamed company employee posts about how their company asked them to asstroturf, posing the ethical question to the hivemind. The comments are surprising in their lack of condemnation, kind of "Meh, if you want to, everyone else does." Most of them say to go ahead if they feel the social marketing hype is warranted. Almost nobody raises the ethical issue of an employee posing as a customer giving fake reviews of their company's product. Certainly nobody brings up the potential violation of FCC law.
I always get the blankest looks when I bring up that 2009 FCC ruling. You can hear the fact bounce off the skull with an audible "thud".
I'm tempted to tweet him a link to the comment. I see the hornet nest, I have a rock in my hand... no, no, put it down Pete! You're too busy now.
Finally, another whooping pile of Micro-bull posts on Slashdot about how the desktop game of Freecell was allegedly "solved" by crowdsourcing, in one of those feel-goody "see Microsoft is really open-participation-friendly after all" pieces. See, Freecell deals hands based on seed numbers, which you can type in yourself, and they had to test whether every hand could be solved fairly. They supposedly proved only one hand couldn't win. The problem is, this story is completely false. A group of players couldn't solve the hand, but that doesn't prove it by itself. Wikipedia lists the full research on the game mechanics and notes that up to 1282 games are unsolvable, depending on how high you count. It is computer simulations, not humans, who prove Freecell games unsolvable.
If you want to explore the software that was used to find all 1,282 unsolvable games of Freecell, it's Don Woods' Freecell solver...
An open-source program, of course!
Well, I've got my lawnmower, so I'm ready for spring!
Just about exactly one year ago, I received an email from a reader asking some questions about computing culture, and where Microsoft, Apple, and Linux fit into the scheme of things. He mentioned that he was fine with me posting the text of the conversation in my blog. And I meant to do that, but it got buried under the pile on my virtual desk until now.
Be advised that I love hearing from all of you, but I'm lucky if I get a chance to reply at all! And when I do, it isn't usually a four page epic epistle with footnotes and citations like this. But this one time, somebody asked just the right questions and gave me just the right impression that I had a wonderful opportunity to teach a fertile mind. Wherever he is today, I hope he went far in pursuing his dreams!
The original letter
Disclaimer: if you wish, you can answer publicly in a blog post, if you want, and quote the email in full. I have no problem with it :)
Dear Penguin Pete.
I would like to ask you something, which you might think is pro-Microsoft or pro-Apple or something, and it might be, but i'm really just interested in hearing what you think.
My question is this: Without the efforts of Microsoft and Apple, would computers be as easy to use as they are now? What if the development of computer operating systems and the way that computers behaved, were done by teams of volunteers, that wouldn't have had any money to conduct Human Computer Interaction tests, and refine the operating system as well as the GUI and CLI to the needs of the average man. Would we be lacking in the terms of desktop computer usage, with only the powerful geek elite using them, or would we have progressed even more, making computers easy to use, even for the average consumer?
I don't want to sound like i'm pro Big corporation, because they're inherently bad for the common folk. That said, i believe that Mircosoft's efforts in building Windows helped democratize computer usage to the level, where an average man could pick one up and start doing things with it. Same thing with Apple's original Macintosh: despite the price, it was made with the non-technical user in mind.
I've seen some anti-normal user sentiment in the Linux circles (although it's not that big, mind) but when i hear Richard Stallman speaking free software and such, i sometimes get the mental image, that he's horrified about the fact that NORMAL people WITHOUT a Ph.D are using computers to build things, consume things and just talk to other people.
What's your opinion on this?
Best Wishes
(name withheld)
Finland, The Canada of Europe.
My reply
Dear (name withheld),
Get ready for a long letter! :) I assure you, I won't rip into you here, I'll just set out the stuff you seem not to have discovered on your own yet. You sound like a bright person; I'm doing this because it's worth it to inspire a questing mind like yours by pointing you at the things you haven't been told yet.
Your question reflects the state of affairs which I rail against constantly. Specifically, there are facts that are buried by the corporate media which, had they been more openly aired, you would not have needed to ask. But there's a lot of nuanced, interconnected ideas that you have... you're not entirely wrong, and you're certainly not to blame for the parts that you have wrong - as I say, it's the fault of the media not providing you with better information! I'll break this down into parts.
(1) So basically, your first part is summed up as: "Would there be advanced computing systems without Microsoft and Apple?"
In the first place, Microsoft did not pioneer the desktop GUI. Windows didn't take over the market until 1993, when version 3.1 came out. Apple had a desktop GUI before them with the MacIntosh, going clear back to 1984, and in fact when Microsoft copied Apple to launch Windows, Apple sued in a famous litigation case for the "look and feel" of Microsoft's interface.
As you can see from that Wikipedia article, Apple also didn't pioneer the GUI interface... Xerox had it first! And likewise, Xerox sued Apple for copying them!
Now, as a side note, Apple computers contain a Unix-based core. Mac OS X "is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc."
Apple's Mac OS also makes use of the BSD code base, and there's your open source involvement already.
(1){a} So now your question is reduced to "Would there be advanced GUI systems without proprietary, corporate-controlled development, period?"
Now to trace it back to Xerox, the Xerox Alto and the Star were pioneers of GUI workstations starting in 1973.
But I'll skip a bit to avoid boring your leg off - the man you need to meet is Douglas Engelbart.
Never heard of him? All you hear about is Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, right? Douglas Engelbart!
Douglas Engelbart developed the first GUI at the Stanford Research Institute, and Xerox's systems were based on it. Douglas Engelbart is actually the pioneer of the mouse, graphics on the screen, hypertext, icons and buttons you could click on... way back in the 1960s! We're a long way from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates now, aren't we? :) Anyway, Douglas Engelbart was not in any way a corporate hack with a profit motive, but just a university researcher running off government money (from ARPA).
(2) Now, your query seems to imply that GUIs "brought the computer to the masses" and that before the Great Mouse Revolution, computers were the exclusive domain of the elite eggheads who could mutter incantations in binary or something. So, let me paraphrase this as "Would the public have been able to use computers before the desktop GUI?"
Well, what you're forgetting is that the consumer home computer revolution launched way back in the 1970s. Hobbyists already formed the Homebrew Computer Club back in 1975.
And that article tells the story better than I can:
"The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of electronic enthusiasts and technically-minded hobbyists who gathered to trade parts, circuits, and information pertaining to DIY construction of computing devices. It was started by Gordon French and Fred Moore who met at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park. They both were interested in maintaining a regular, open forum for people to get together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone."
So right there, we have home-based hobbyists, "open forum", "making computers more accessible to everyone", and so on. The gist of my argument is that it's the "home hackers" who did all the research and groundwork - even the founders of Apple were members of this club and back then, their interest was in computer advocacy, not profit. The very kernel of computers-for-the-common-folk was born on the backs of the earliest form of open-source geeks, before the term "open source" was even coined. Corporations merely came along after the fact and monetized and commercialized what was freely traded before.
Furthermore, there's the earliest home computer market. The Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 was in every mall in America, a floor display at the front of the store, launching in 1977 at a price of $600 - well within reach of the middle-class family. And there's the Commodore series, starting with the VIC-20 in 1980, at around $300 - this was my first computer, I was about 13 years old. Our family was dirt-poor, and we could still afford it. Furthermore, it was taught in school! There was also the Apple Lisa, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and the IBM PCjr, all launched in the mid-1980s.
And that's nothing compared to the TV commercials, with William Shatner, Bill Cosby, and a Charlie-Chaplin impersonator right there next to the breakfast cereal ads during the Saturday morning cartoons. What I'm saying here is: people bought them, used them, loved them, and geeked out on them.
And now for the shocker: NONE of the computers available for the home in the early 1980s had a mouse. And NONE of them had a graphical desktop. NONE of them had anything but a command line where you typed commands, and ALL of them ran Basic, the original programming language for non-technical home people. And where did Basic come from? Can you guess?
All the way back in the Homebrew Computer Club, of which both Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak were members - and there was already an open-source version of this Basic programming language being passed around. Here's a great personal memoir from a former member.
Kids played text-based adventure games, where you controlled your adventurer with commands. You can see an early example of this at the beginning of the Tom Hanks movie Big (1988). And then there's Creative Computing magazine, published 1974 to 1985...
"The magazine regularly included BASIC source code for utility programs and games, which users could manually enter into their home computers."
Wait, this is a mind-blower... do I mean that "open source code" was being freely published and shared by home consumers way back in the 1970s/1980s? In a magazine that was sold in every store? Why yes, indeed, I do!
Now going back to the late-1960s/early-1970s, there was really no middle-class home computing. Because at that point, the concept of a desktop was still a fuzzy dream - you had to get time-share on a mainframe system and the only way to do that was be a university student. Computers cost thousands of dollars and even the best ones came as an assembly kit. You had to be an electrician just to put them together. But even there, it was hobbyists, not entrepreneurs, who were pushing the computer out to the people. Back then, the idea that software could be patented, copyrighted, sold, and monetized was silly.
Whew! Pant, pant. My fingers tire. Time for the next point:
(3) OK, Richard Stallman, "geek elitism", "user friendly", and so on.
Hooooo boy. Here's the deal. Could you do me a favor and forget this headful of pre-conceived notions for a minute? Clear your mind. Take a deep breath. Now imagine the following universe:
Everything I've told you here is taught to every child in every school in every nation in the world, starting about grade 3.
All schools have "programming" as a mandatory subject, as well as being integrated with both math and science.
People grow up thinking that programming is something that NORMAL PEOPLE DO. It isn't any harder than basic math, after all. I'd say writing your first "Hello World" program is no more difficult than solving your first long division problem.
Words like "geek", "hacker", "nerd" don't exist any more. Nobody calls you a nerd for knowing how to cook an omelet or change a flat tire on a car, do they? Everybody eats and everybody drives, so cooking and car repair isn't anything out of the ordinary to do, is it? Well, everybody computes in the 21st century - why is programming seen as something that only this stereotypical egghead autistic punk-rock anti-social "nerd" or "hacker" person can do? Because as you can see from this history, this attitude wasn't the case.
"user friendly" is no longer a common idea. Instead, users are made "computer friendly"! We have to do it this way because we humans can change and adapt while computers are stuck being electric current running through logic gates, no matter how much gloss we try to paint over them.
That point there in (4) is the whole impetus for why I've been preaching on my little soap-box for five years on my blog. It's not "programming and computers for elite geeks and everybody else- hands off!" Instead, it's "everybody should learn computing and programming so that NO ONE is elite, and there will be no more geeks, just regular, ordinary people who have adopted to a world with computers in it."
But money wants it different. There's money to be made from keeping people ignorant and exploiting them for that ignorance, and that money funds a lot of misinformation, and so we have the age of corporate robber-barons who control the data and information and do the equivalent of patenting the alphabet and charging everybody ten dollars to read or write. And all you hear in the corporate-funded media is "Oh, hackers, they're evil! Don't be a hacker! People who know how to program are pathetic, anti-social geeks! Don't be one of them! (unless you pay $gazillion dollars to get a degree through our school and come work for us - then you can be one of the elite.)"
Does it all make sense now? :)
Addendum: How did it come to this? Well, it's really quite simple (even I forget this sometimes and need to be reminded). The integrated circuit was only invented in 1959. The human race simply hasn't had enough time to get used to the idea of computers yet. If you look back over history, there were similar adjustment periods for the advent of the airplane, the automobile, the steam engine, the telephone, the printing press, electricity, the sea-going cargo craft, and even back to aquaducts and paved roads. You can see that monopolies have grown up alongside each advance in society, going right back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle who criticized the olive-press industry at the time for being a monopoly. Similar monopolies were attached to the production and export of major traded goods like salt, oil, steel, and diamonds. Each time, they eventually get overthrown.
Thank you for listening, and good luck in your continued learning,
"Penguin" Pete Trbovich
In recent years, the line between new media and old media has drawn itself more sharply into the standard of evaluating literacy. We are now meeting our first generation of people whom are very literate, very intellectual, and very well-read - but whom just don't happen to read books.
Ebooks, perhaps. Piles and piles of websites, for sure. But paper dead-tree books? No.
Now, I'm a book-lover in no small terms. Got shelves of 'em, couldn't imagine a world without books. And yet I can't really fault people of the younger generation for thinking that there's no advantage that books have over electronic text. I was tempted to think this myself for a long time. Upon first encounter, the Internet to me seemed to be nothing but the world's biggest, greatest library.
Recently I've seen an attitude cropping up that people like me who cling to books are old-fashioned, dowdy, dinosaurs belonging to a bygone age. And furthermore, I see people disparaging fiction books in particular. I can see the point, to a degree. I, too, went through a phase like that. And then I gained some more insight and experience - and I started collecting books again. And reading fiction again.
There's the plain old practical considerations: Books never run out of batteries, never crash, never take time to load, are more portable, are easier on the eyes, and so on. Books are permanent, barring a fire, but websites die off all the time, rendering your electronic bookmark a dead link.
But I'm not even talking about that. That's a much more prominent reason why books are here to stay.
As the years have worn on, I've discovered that the Internet is largely auto-cannibalistic. It eats its own tail. The same information goes around and around, more of it getting out than getting in. Furthermore, the same old lies keep circulating as long as the truth. When you look something up on Wikipedia, most of it references a web page, which references another web page, and so on and so forth until you get back to some GeoCities page posted in 1995 where the original fact was written... by some 8th-grader who may or may not have carefully read the book he pulled the original fact from.
My work of freelance writing for websites requires me to do piles of research. Two of the sites I write for, Lyric Interpretations and Songfacts, are about music; and believe me, rock 'n' roll history is one daunting challenge to research accurately. Obscure bands are nil on the Internet. Oldies' bands, going back beyond the '60s, nil. Anything newer than the turn of the century is also surprisingly nil, except for a handful of pop stars lucky enough to be born under the sign of Disney or Nickelodeon.
In music writing, I'm constantly hunting for the elusive answers to questions like "Yes, Lou Reed sang about heroin a lot, but is there documented evidence that he actually did any?" and "Did the person who wrote 'Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry' disappear into the Twilight Zone or what?" and "What the hell are Ronny James Dio's lyrics to 'Children Of The Sea' supposed to be about, anyway?" I've often wished I could just take a Ouija board and summon the ghost of a long-dead rock star and ask them directly. You see, the Internet collectively doesn't give a damn about a verifiable fact, only what makes a good story. Google something about music artists, and you'll be slammed with walls of opinion, speculation, urban legends, rants, trolls, myths, and fluff. Here's your pitchfork - dig right in!
Or I can turn to a book, with a good index in the back, and have the answer in two minutes. As long as it's the right book. Finding the right book to be worth keeping, ah, that's the challenge. But more and more, I'm seeing that as vast and comprehensive as the Internet is, it will never match the completeness of all the printed books in the world. Even if it did, even Google couldn't index it efficiently enough. And they're the best at what they do!
For instance, I have a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. I confess, I've never read it straight through and never will. I have it for reference; Shakespeare is so influential that whenever some movie, song, or video game refers to his work, I need it so I can flip to that play or sonnet and have it straight out. It's earned back the $8.50 I paid for it at a used book store. Ditto the King James Bible, which is the most outrageously misquoted work in history, hands down.
So that's some of what you're missing out on if you rely on the Internet exclusively for your non-fiction reading.
Here's the things that you're missing out on if you also don't read fiction:
Fiction can illuminate truths that fact cannot. You can study a dry old textbook and learn about Alaska... but also you can read James A. Michener's novel Alaska and gain a much deeper understanding of the driving forces in the area (along with reading for two chapters about one damn fish). Orwell's 1984, I could argue, teaches enough about politics to fill ten university political science courses. Larry Niven's Known Space series will dazzle you with the possible universe we could find out there when we do colonize space. And what history course could express the anxiety humans felt about technology at the dawn of the industrial age better than Mary Shelly's Frankenstein? Come to that, even religions use fiction to teach a point. Buddha had his koans, Jesus had his parables, Rabbis have their apocrypha. Agree or disagree with the teachings themselves, the fact remains that a fictional tale can wrap up a lesson in a way that reality, in all its messy complexity, cannot.
And that, kids, is why you still gotta read. Back to work, now!
So, I should explain that I unfortunately speak from experience. Once I had a Mechanical Turk account, and now I do not. Poof! Gone.
Next, you're probably wondering, "Pete! Big-shot online freelancer with all these clients you keep posting work about on your Twitter feed - what are you monkeying around with a microwork site for?"
Well, kinda "just for fun", the same reason many others cite. Because I'm a book junkie, and so I set up a little game for myself: I would only use the balance from a Mechanical Turk account to purchase used books from Amazon. This keeps me from spending larger amounts of free cash on books (I'm not kidding about the 'junkie' part!) and also gave me a little motivation to use my free time to pick at little productive tasks when I'm too worked-out to pay attention to serious work, but not quite lazy enough to go build yet another castle in Minecraft.
Mechanical Turk "hits" are all simple things like moderating image uploads or answering a question for a nickel or some such. Likewise, used books on Amazon can go for as little as a penny (plus shipping, of course) so the two were a good match for each other. I used the books to research more about stuff I'm paid to write and blog about (in my main work, not Turk) and also I referred clients who had small breadcrumb-sized jobs to Turk because sometimes that's just an easier way to manage it. It was a handy little tool on my freelancer's workbench, like that one screwdriver that's just the right size.
That is, until the beginning of this month, when I was simply greeted by this page when I logged in:
That's it, no warnings, no emails, no explanation, nada. May I point out, I used my "professional" name for the account; it was part of my online presence. I've had the account for years, never had a problem. I had an excellent record and high ratings, even got some customers asking for me by name. I am familiar with the terms of service and there's no possibility that I violated them.
And now I've sent them four emails asking for a resolution to this matter - and have heard nothing back!
Now, this isn't about the few dollars still in the account (still accessible from my account proper at Amazon.com, which is not suspended). But for one thing, this is damaging to my online reputation, to imply that I do something worth suspending me over. But most of all...
...it's just plain rude. I don't recall that I have ever been treated as rudely by a major corporation before. Even the unruliest company has the good graces to shoot you a letter explaining why your account went flatline, no matter how bogus that reason may be.
I also known several other people that this has happened to. But not knowing how they manage their accounts, I suspected perhaps that they did something wrong. But now that it's happened to me, I know that this can happen for no reason. Googling around, I have also found many other users of Mechanical Turn who share the same story.
Bottom line, I think those of us who have been mistreated so need to make more noise about this. I am willing to assume good faith - a bug in the system, a glitch in the works, not enough staff to oversee the algorithms, or some such. Amazon, while not walking on water, has demonstrated in the past that they at least want to try to do the right thing. I was even eyeing the Kindle for an option in ebook publishing, when I plan to take the plunge of publishing my webcomic or other works, but now I'm more hesitant. My trust has been chipped.
Anybody else out there have a similar story? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, or post about it on other sites. We can get to the bottom of this together!
The day to mark on the calendar is: May 19th, and thereafter it will be every third Saturday in May every year.
The event: Culture Freedom Day Here's a website all about Culture Freedom Day.
So, what's the difference between this and Software Freedom Day (traditionally held the third Saturday in September, sometimes colliding with "Talk Like A Native Of West Country England Day")?
Well, see, the world of free (as in freedom) artists doesn't always fit well into the world of free (as in freedom) software. There are many Free Culture advocates who don't necessarily fit under the Libre Software tent, but there's been a lot of Free Culture members showing up on Software Freedom Day. So now they get their own separate day.
Nobody will boo you if you attend both, though.
I'll quote this little press release that showed up in the hopper:
"What we have envisioned is a day where all the Free Culture artists
around the world could walk in the street and play, act or showcase
their work and explain to people what Free Culture is and why they have
chosen to contribute to the movement. Of course there could also be some
amount of discussions and debates, but we should definitely stay away
from long presentations and make it a real festival where the general
public would come and simply enjoy the show while learning about those
artists."
This sounds like more fun than a box of kittens, and I'd love to see this take off. So I'm doing my little duty by passing it along.
Most interesting would be the inclusion of "outsider" art, folk art, indie music, performance artists, and all those other fringe avant-garde makers and shakers. If this becomes their chief venue - think of an open-air round-the-world Burning Man without the hassle - wouldn't that be cool?
It's been about three and a half years of churning out my own humble little webcomic. During that time, I've noticed that "webcomics which focus on Linux / FOSS / computer-geekery" is one heck of a tiny niche! So I thought I'd throw out a list for those others in my narrow slot.
You all probably already know about the big famous examples like XKCD, User-Friendly, and (though it barely squeaks into the "geekery" category) The Oatmeal. But I dug a little deeper to find some underrated webcomics that definitely deserve to be better-known:
Note: Webcomics have the shelf life of a dandelion in a hailstorm, so it's normal to find most of them discontinued. Don't moan; at least there's archives. Maybe with encouragement, some of them will start up again.
A very cynical webcomic about a software engineer in the corporate world. Has a distinctive style for caricature art that makes the characters adorable to look at, with broad humor that would appeal to a much wider audience.
A full-fleshed-out comic about the computing industry, with lots of office humor and general geeks milling about. Been going strong for ten years now. Lots of depth and character development.
There's actually four webcomics here, "Help Desk", "Kernel Panic", "Old Skool Webcomic", and "PC Town". All four of them are surreal universes with humor as delightfully dry as chardonnay. "Help Desk" and "Kernel Panic" are more computer-geek oriented, "Old Skool" is almost its own little joke (at 8 episodes total), and "PC Town" appears to be a noir geek webcomic. Now tell me that isn't blazing new territory.
A very creative webcomic about the technology industry (popular theme, no?) Chock full of interesting little flights of fancy and satire of office culture. Also, the 'about' page lists several more comics done by the same author... but I was too distracted by the awesome little animated cartoon clip below the webcomic, called "Arctic Circle". Yes, I've been tossing around the idea of branching into animation too...
You've probably heard of this one, since it's hosted at Free Software Magazine's site. It's definitely a gag-a-day type strip with jokes strictly from the pro-GNU point of view. Plus adorable fluffy animal characters.
Ran from 2001 to 2004, like the Velvet Underground of Linux-geek-centric webcomics - Before its time! Has great newspaper-style art. And one of the characters is a robot built from a recycled Vic-20! How old skool is that?
Done by my old peer, Eric's Binary World. It's a geek-humor themed strip which is remarkable for being drawn in Blender! This gives it a unique look; as the strip's evolved over time, it resembles a a bit the 3D animation of the Weird Al Yankovic UHF ilk. Also changed from gag-a-day to continuing story arcs.
Add yours here!
In the comment section below, if anybody has heard of a substantial Linux / programming / tech webcomic that I haven't found yet, don't be shy! Tell us about it and I'll update the list. See, I'm reserving this much space for adding more:
Hogwash. Encyclopedias simply wrote themselves out of style, that's all. The whole Internet, even in 1995, was better than any encyclopedia ever written already.
The best print encyclopedia I have ever used suffered from numerous flaws:
Outdated by the time the ink's dry. Especially science articles when new research overturns old results, and geography articles when some pokey Scrabble-winner country has a military coup and redraws its borders.
Incomplete entries. The fattest set I've ever owned never had enough entries to satisfy every query.
Skimpy entries. What entries were there might be only a couple of paragraphs when I needed a whole essay.
Biased... Yes, worse than the Internet!
To expand on that last point: I am very sorry that one encyclopedia set I had got destroyed before I got a chance to scan in some pages and post it on the Internet. It was the 1942 print of the World Book Encyclopedia, and it was hilarious. I'd picked it up at a yard sale for $5 for the history value. Propaganda so thick you could float a battleship in it. The whole thing sounded like it was written by General Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. Right-wing, nationalist, pro-Christian, pro-right-wing, pro-conservative, and more. I understand that it was WWII and the Cold War was right around the corner, but even taking that into consideration, it was the most xenophobic reading I'd ever read.
Oh, the fun I could be having with scanned pages of that thing! You'll have to take my word for it, unless someone else has that same print out there...
This is the kind of thing that makes me snicker when I hear people (such as teachers at my kids' school. Today.) say you shouldn't use Wikipedia because "just anybody can write it". What do these people think book publishing is like? Do they think there's a white-robed archangel with a flaming sword standing guard at the entrance to the holy tabernacle where the august pages are composed by muses and cherubs? I got news for these people - anyone can write a book, or a magazine, or a newspaper, too.
Or blog, or Wikipedia article. Never put blind trust in anything you read anywhere, in any media form, not even from me. Lies and misinformation rain from the sky, but you have to encircle the globe in a bloody quest for a crumb of truth.
Here you sit, using electricity to read this article, which I also used electricity to publish. We're using computers to do this. It still sounds futuristic, and yet what do we use to keep this electronic infrastructure running? The same technology invented by prehistoric cavemen: setting things on fire.
First we burned wood. That made a campfire and gave us a way to cook food, but soon we wondered what else we could do. Eventually we started burning coal, oil, and gas. That gave us light, and eventually, steam power. And then... no, wait, there isn't any "and then". We're still stuck there today. From the internal combustion engine that powers our cars by burning gas to the electricity that comes from burning coal, we still don't rely on any means of generating electricity besides:
Find flammable thing.
Set it on fire.
We're coming up on a century since Enrico Fermi demonstrated the concept of nuclear reaction to the world, and yet here in Iowa the concept of nuclear power makes people jittery. Jittery enough that they'll dress up like zombies and march on the capitol to protest the very idea that power utilities should even consider nuclear options.
I'm not making this up: Zombies.
The protesters mainly emphasize that nuclear alternatives will make our costs go up, but still pay lip service to the typical boogys of health and safety, as if nuclear radiation were this dark witchcraft that will turn demons loose. I know people are beyond hope on that angle, but let's address the cost point:
Iowa currently gets about 75% of its power from setting things on fire - 73% coal and 2% natural gas. Iowa thankfully has vast coal mines... wait a minute, no we don't! We have to haul all that coal in from out of state. For the year of 2008 alone, those coal imports cost $500 million. That has to be delivered by rail from Wyoming. So we have to set more things on fire to power a train to bring coal to Iowa so we can set it on fire.
What is the cost of all this in terms of pollution? Who could begin to guess? We're still trying to establish that global warming is a fact. Somehow, the connection between setting things on fire and producing heat and pollution is still news to some people, even though cavemen knew it well.
And by the way, if you're worried about radiation, guess what? Coal ash is MORE radioactive than nuclear waste! And unlike nuclear waste, which is relatively easy to contain and ship away, when you set coal on fire, it makes smoke, which flies up in the air and gets into everything. You breathe it, you swim in it, you eat it, you have no choice. Need I harp on the fact, I've worked at a coal plant myself and got quite acquainted with "fly ash", the finer ash produced from burning coal. We got decked out in "bunny suit" hazmat gear and face-mask respirators, and after getting off at end of day and scrubbing down, we'd still drive home picking fly ash out of our ears. It's finer than talcum powder; one grain of it in your eyes will blind you for life because the ash grains are shaped like cockleburrs. Yes, precipitators attempt to catch most of it on the way to the smokestack, but even the most conscientious coal-burning plant in the world cannot set something on fire without producing some smoke and ash; it's just a matter of keeping the pollution under EPA standards of acceptable pollution. And when you do catch the fly ash before it gets into the air, what do you do with it then? Well, some of it gets recycled as cinderblocks and cement - the rest goes into a landfill.
Oh, and coal ash is radioactive too.
Nuclear power would bring more science jobs into the state. It would be cheaper in the long run, more than worth the moderate temporary cost of building the plants. It would allow Iowa to continue to lead the way as being one of the more progressive states in the Midwest. And...
(if this is your first time hearing me say something shocking and controversial, welcome to penguinpetes.com!)
...it would actually be cleaner, overall, than setting things on fire!
