Source
Automatically imported from: http://commons.somewhere.com:80/rre/1997/fragments.html
Content
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.
fragments
``` Some fragmentary notes.
Information on the current strikes in Korea can be found at: http://kpd.sing-kr.org/strike/index-e.html These strikes are much more important than you would know from the generally brief and hostile treatment they have received in the US media. Having finally achieved the surface forms of democracy, Korean society is breaking free of some longstanding authoritarian patterns. People started organizing for democracy on a large scale after the massacres of the 1980s, and now they are doing something about it. Good for them.
Check out the Wall Street Journal editorial page column by Holman Jenkins on New Year's Eve defending Microsoft. These regular editorial columnists at the Wall Street Journal crack me up. This guy also recently ran a column defending Texaco after the uproar about the tape-recorded conversations in which executives made nasty jokes and allegedly conspired to destroy evidence. His method was to listen to the tape and write an article about all the parts of the tape in which they didn't make nasty jokes or conspire to destroy evidence. Anyway, the argument about Microsoft is that the economic idea of path-dependency is an academic abstraction that rests on slim-to-no empirical basis. This is really funny. Path-dependency is an absolutely pervasive phenomenon. Many technical standards are path-dependent, as are industries with important network effects. (See, for example, the marvelous books on this and related topics by the economist Nathan Rosenberg.) So are really basic things like land use; San Diego is organized completely differently from Boston, in large part because of differences in transportation technology when the buildings were built and the roads laid down. I used to wonder about the purpose of newspaper columns that made no sense. One possibility is that standards simply tend to be lower when people are preaching to the converted; this is surely true on the other end of the political spectrum. Another possibility is that bad arguments serve a purpose if most people don't know what's wrong with them.
I recommend reading every word of the February 1997 issue of Internet World. Among other things, it makes clear just how starkly the computer industry has boiled down to a war between open standards alliances and Microsoft, and in particular just how purely destructive a force Microsoft has become.
http://www2.ncsu.edu/eos/info/computer_ethics/www/spamming/index.html is a resource on spam issues. I haven't studied it closely.
Cnet has a basic discussion of how to set up your own mailing list at http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Howto/Mailing
Philip Greenspum's "Spam" program helps people set up their own mailing lists as well. Despite the name, its purpose is legitimate, not for spam. Philip's a kidder. The URL is http://www.greenspun.com/spam/index.tcl
A collection of privacy links: http://www.teleport.com/~jstar/govt.html
Boardwatch has a good introduction to the Internet and its history at http://www.boardwatch.com/isp/archit.htm
In response to my call for reading lists...
The syllabus for Prabhakar Ragde's course on social implications can be found at http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492
From H.L. Fuller: "I have tons of links to web-accessible papers and sites associated with things like audience/economics of the internet, computer mediate communications, technology implementations & education/change/reform, and many other items of related interest. Two pages in particular have copious listings --
Perspectives on the Medium: http://hugse1.harvard.edu/~fullerhe/perpec.htm
Internet & Telecomm Basics+ : http://hugse1.harvard.edu/~fullerhe/basics.htm
My site changes fairly often. This is sort the on-line portion of my growing library of materials related to my dissertation work."
Michael Froomkin's "Law and the Internet" course can be found at http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/seminar/index.html
After my cri de coeur about Dilbert, several people pointed me at a Tom Tomorrow cartoon arguing that Dilbert is really just a non-threatening way to let employees blow off steam. A URL for the Tom Tomorrow strip is: http://www.salon1999.com/comics/comics1961209.html Although I usually like Tom Tomorrow, I disagree with his argument in this case. Lots of people have used Dilbert cartoons as a means of resistance to pointy-haired managers (e.g., by posting strips that precisely describe the local managers' failings). More generally, Dilbert puts names on various modes of managerial nonsense that people might otherwise have to suffer all by themselves. I think that this is a good thing. What so disturbs me about the Dilbert "empowerment kit" is that it turns the techniques of exaggeration and caricature on their heads: instead of being tools for naming bad practices, they are used to legitimate those practices by the simple argument that the real practices don't literally correspond to the exaggerations and caricatures. I believe that work can be organized with integrity, but this "empowerment kit" is not the way to do it. In any case, I received dozens of messages about my problem with Dilbert, far more than I can reply to. Thanks, though, to everyone who wrote.
I've also given up trying to reply to everyone's mail about the Oakland school board. I do think that their original resolution on language difference was pretty darn foolish, and that its murkiness probably reflects an attempt to split the difference between some pretty divergent views in that world, some of which I would disagree with. The point is that AAE really is a dialect. I've been seeing an awful lot of parodies of AAE and the -onics construct lately, both on the net and in newspapers, and to be honest they're bringing back some really ugly memories of growing up in a segregated town in rural Maryland, where making fun of black English was not just an innocent pastime.
That's it for now.
Phil ```
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.