jkn

Star Trek's society is collectivist (as all societies are, to a degree), but is it authoritarian?

I suspect that summarizing collectivism as authoritarian is like summarizing libertarianism as selfish: they go well together, but you can also get one without the other.

I don't know Star Trek very well, but as a utopia I guess they imagine a form of collectivism that largely preserves individual freedom? Of course most of the show centers on Starfleet, an authoritarian organisation like any military, which doesn't tell much about the whole society.

So on one hand a "bad" company advances its strategic interests by contributing to a free and open technology. On the other hand, this technology can bring general benefits beyond the company's interest.

The question is: does one outweigh the other? I think in many cases, for Web technologies, the corporate interest is modest and the general benefit is enormous, so it's definitely a win-win.

As for Android, the open platform part is a huge piece of tech that many have found useful beyond the smartphone market. On smartphones the open source project has enabled several ROM communities that ended up offering versions free of any Google service. There is nothing comparable on the iOS side.

Even Android with Google services is a pretty good deal: for the most part you get to choose what you share with Google (at the price of some features).

I think comparing to Symbian is difficult, Symbian never was in the same league as Android and iOS was it? A better comparison would be with Windows Phone or iOS. Apple has invested a lot in its privacy-friendly image, and I trust they are doing a good job. But they are the outlier. Then you have Microsoft... I don't know where Windows Phone standed privacy-wise, but they sure got a lot of criticism regarding privacy violations in the desktop/laptop OS. Although it's not free.

All in all I don't think Android is a good example to support your viewpoint.

You could say the same of all Web technologies. Do you actually think it would be better to have software patents and royalties on every Web standard?

For one thing, this would be catastrophic for open source projects (and indeed commercial audio and video codecs have been a huge pain for open source developers and users). Well, you're suggesting that free codecs are bad because they profit Facebook, and you could say the same about open source software, especially those that get contributions from Facebook.

I rather think that advertisers will always pay money to advertise, and when some of that money goes to developing open and free technologies that's a good thing.

There are many free lunches. You can get a universally supported free video codec to use for your hobby project or for your company's product, without having a Facebook account. It is always possible to find hidden costs in free products, so what? You can do the same for paid-for products. The idea that a Blu-Ray player won't spy on you because the manufacturer paid some royalties is... flawed.

No but it does grow the economy. Things you buy with the borrowed money count towards the GDP.

If you have people buying and selling nothing that's going to be a small economy.

If you have the same people, with the same wealth, buying and selling stuff to each other, that grows the economy.

If you have the same people buying and selling stuff faster, they may still retain the same wealth but the economy will grow even further.

The size of the economy is about the number of transactions, and printing money or borrowing money can definitely grow the economy (IF that money gets used to accelerate economic transactions).

I'm impressed by the lengths to which the authors must go and have gone to refute the skeptics' counter-explanations. For example, they simulated the presence of a potentially observing competitor using an audio recording of a competitor that was not actually observing the raven caching its food. Indeed otherwise a skeptic might claim that the caching raven was acting as "observed" in response to the different sound, rather than (as the authors want to show) because it inferred that it can be seen when the peephole is open.

I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult.

I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving the style to "someone else". It seems that ConTeXt's philosophy is to separate style and content, but still make it easy for the user to choose the style. It's also more integrated: comprehensive core, few third-party packages, meaning less compatibility issues (but less choice too). I'll definitely try it for my next project.

Indeed...

From the article: "He definitely goes where there is government money".

In other words, he definitely goes where we wish more people would go.

This reminds me of Cloud Atlas...

There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well.

The natural order is the law of the jungle. The strong eats/exploits the weak. Would you agree that this is the most natural order? I think the whole point of civilization is that we can do better than that.

Let's define socialism as the collective control and ownership of the means of production and their profits, and capitalism as the private ownership of these things. In this case I'm not sure which is intrinsically more "fair". I care deeply about individual freedom and not having some collective telling me how I should live my life. But at the same time I care a lot about social justice and not having the rich and powerful grind the poor for personal profit.

It seems obvious that a good system would be one that strikes the right balance between these conflicting interests. It certainly isn't whatever is most "natural". Nature serves no purpose.

Also, a force we have to contend with is the development of technology. I think it has the consequence that the "right balance" is shifting more towards intervention from the state: due to increasing automation, the capital is getting an ever greater share of profits. At some point the state has to intervene to enable some redistribution of wealth.

It's too bad the vision depicted at the beginning of the article (full texts potentially available in all libraries), didn't come true. But I feel that the public did get the most important benefit from the project: the ability to search these books. I've been researching a history of science subject recently and it's amazing the amount of information I could get from Google Books and nowhere else online. And where the snippets are not enough, I have the book title and author name, so I know where to look for the information in print.