TED Community » John Frum

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• A reply on Conversation: If this were the last day of your life, how would you spend it?

  Feb 1 2013: Oh no... Glenn Gould!! I prefer Ralph Kirkpatrick or Scott Ross, myself :-)
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  A reply on Conversation: If this were the last day of your life, how would you spend it?

  Feb 1 2013: Yes, in some fields, products are forgotten faster than in others. But does that mean that short-lived things have no place in our lives? Maybe I used one of your products, who knows! And I built something that was useful to someone for some period of time. I got paid for it, and so did you. In any case, practically all products have their own lifetimes. I bet, even the Eiffel Tower would, one day, have outlived its usefulness, and it will come down.
  
  Even a cook can look at each burger he made, and say, "with this, I fill one person's stomach". So, why can't you? If no one found the work you do useful, you wouldn't have been paid for it.
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  A reply on Conversation: What is the definition of having a "Right to drive" or other "Rights" as to opposed to having a "Privilege to drive" or other "Privileges"

  Jan 22 2013: Legal rights are one aspect of rights, but not the only one. Legal rights depend on which country one is a citizen of.
  
  Legality is based on morality... in every country. What are moral rights based on? That's very debatable. I have my own ideas on what's moral, but I do not assume that everyone would share my views on that.
  
  If I were in Malaysia, Indonesia or some Arab country, I'd have no "right" to insult Allah or Mohammed. Left libertarians do not subscribe to the concept of property rights. Some countries, and the UN seem to believe in the "right" to water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_water
  
  The statement "this isn't an opinion, it's a legal fact" is empty without the context of time and place. For most of their history, blacks and women in the US did not have a "right" to vote. For quite a while, only landowners had that right.
  
  Legal rights are fickle. Moral rights are subjective.

• A comment on Conversation: If this were the last day of your life, how would you spend it?

  Jan 22 2013: Depends on why it was going to be my last day of life. If I'm not dying of some debilitating disease, I would do drugs, sex, rinse, repeat. It would be a completely hedonistic day. Anything even remotely philosophical or "spiritual" would be shunned.
  
  As for anything non-hedonistic, I suppose that's what I've been doing all my life anyway.
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  A reply on Conversation: A Tribute to Aaron Swartz - Post all academic articles for open public review, and end the traditional peer-review process

  Jan 22 2013: I'm not pessimistic about open publishing at all. That's one thing I'm very optimistic about. This is an Idea Whose Time Has Come®.
  
  These big publishers (Elsevier, Nature, Science, IEEE, Springer, Wiley) became big because publishing used to cost a lot of money, quite apart from the actual paper and print costs, there was the cost of actually running the business. With the internet, collaboration becomes a lot easier, and some academics realize that they, with a few volunteers, can actually run a journal in their spare time. If you start googling on this, there won't be an end to it.
  
  Interestingly, my own field, which shall go unnamed, has taken a completely open approach to the whole thing. Anyone can download ALL the papers published in the last 30 years or so. Not only that, when researchers write software, it is typically with an open-source license.

• A reply on Conversation: A Tribute to Aaron Swartz - Post all academic articles for open public review, and end the traditional peer-review process

  Jan 21 2013: Articles such as http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/01/ortiz_says_suicide_will_not_change_handling_cases reaffirm my cynicism.
  
  begin quote >>
  Ortiz’s spokeswoman, Christina DiIorio-Sterling, said last night the Swartz case won’t affect the office’s handling of other cases. “Absolutely not,” she said. “We thought the case was reasonably handled and we would not have done things differently.
  
  “We’re going to continue doing the work of the office and of following our mission.”
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  A comment on Conversation: A Tribute to Aaron Swartz - Post all academic articles for open public review, and end the traditional peer-review process

  Jan 20 2013: I think TED is the wrong forum for this. Most people on TED forums do not contribute to academic publications. So, the preferences of most people here is irrelevant.
  
  Having said that, many fields that I have come across already have academics who have been pushing for open access for quite a few years now, and have already achieved a good deal of success at it. See https://plus.google.com/104362980539466846301/posts/WStiQ38Hioy or http://www.nature.com/news/mathematicians-aim-to-take-publishers-out-of-publishing-1.12243 for recent examples.
  
  The peer review process for many open journals is (IMHO) moslty good enough. However, there are still some people in academia who prefer an even more open review process: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.6590v1.pdf
  
  There is already a trend towards more openness, and I don't see Aaron's death making much difference to it. However, Aaron's death has shaken the convictions of the people actually responsible for his despair - the agencies of government that made this particular kind of prosecutorial overreach possible. "Shaken the convictions"? Well... I think they are spineless worms, and do not have real convictions, other than getting their next promotion. Let me rephrase that. Aaron's death has resulted in SOME of them worrying about what kind of crap they can get away with next time.
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  A comment on Conversation: Re-defining privacy!

  Jan 20 2013: It is definitely a violation of your friends' privacy. Imagine him taking your pictures or that of your friends and creating something that shows them in bad light.
  
  Given your 3 conditions, I imagine it's fairly easy to cause you real harm.
  1. One could send emails, effectively, impersonating you. A resignation letter, a scandalous letter, etc.
  2. One could mine your data to discover information that could be used to "hack" into your bank account. Impersonating you to your bank's telephone support person becomes easier.
  ... and so on. I can think of more 'creative' uses given time.

• A reply on Conversation: Can world-changing projects be crowdfunded? (Aka, why don't people donate?)

  Jan 20 2013: As for Kickstarter, depends on what expectations you have to qualify for "really change the world".
  
  In any case, charity is not a new concept. Even historically, charities have addressed many different scales of needs, including billions of $. "Crowd-funding" is just a newfangled term for it.

• A reply on Conversation: Can world-changing projects be crowdfunded? (Aka, why don't people donate?)

  Jan 19 2013: correct.