Email is a decentralized protocol, but there are reasons why people give up their privacy and prefer web mail for convenience. What Eben Moglen described is basically making decentralized protocols for everything including social networks and such. But even when we created the perfect decentralized protocols of everything, I don't think that it will prevent data mining and protect user's privacy.
To simplify the view, just lets say we can do everything with email, let's say all the user's personal data are stored in email messages. To really protect my privacy, not only I'd have to host all my emails, but I'd have to set up my own email server as well. Not only I shouldn't use the web interface, but I also should't use the POP/IMAP/SMTP services that Gmail or Yahoo or my ISP provides. Now building my own web interface would not be so hard, as I'm hosting my own server. But making sure of my server is on most of the time and physically managing and backup my email data on my server would not be so trivial. What happen if I travel oversea and my server crashed or my home went out of electricity? What happen if disaster happened and everything in my house including the server and backup are gone?
So have these problems are exactly the reason why people choose Gmail. By hosting the server on the cloud, all the uptime, backup, and management problems are solved out of the box. Of course there might be better solution than Gmail, but I doubt if it will success commercially. Now lets say we created free software stack that performs better than Gmail and work out of the box. With the software in hand, all we need is just a place to host the server. User would then have three choices: 1. Buy a server plug and host it at home, 2. Purchase web hosting and host it as a black box in the cloud, and 3. Let Google host the same software for free but with storage and data shared with everyone. While option 2 is supposed to be the optimum choice, majority of people would still choose option 3 simply because it is FREE.
So IMHO the real challenge to make the public to adopt a decentralized architecture is to come out with a better business model. Simple hosting charges won't work when there are free alternatives, and there is no way to make black box hosting free. Average Joe will neither want to purchase troublesome sheeva plug nor would they want to pay for hosting in the cloud. Decentralized architecture will not prevent centralized hosting and data mining, what it does is allow us to switch from one provider to another easily. Whether the user choose a free provider that mine data or become their own provider, its entirely their choice.
The other problem with privacy in decentralized architecture is that you actually get less privacy when you use centralized identification. People here often complain that they don't want Facebook to know they like or comment on some random webpages. While that might be a problem, most of our information can already be found in the Internet publicly. If OpenID become the norm, my ID at Slashdot, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and whatever random forum should remain the same. This would be even true for a decentralized data architecture because you need a universal way to identify yourself. With OpenID, a simple Google search will reveal this post I'm writing in Slashdot, the comment I gave on random YouTube video, the articles I digged and liked, and whatever sites that I participated in. Actually all these information already available publicly, but what really stops Google on mining it is the lack of unified ID.
In conclusion, while a decentralized data architecture might seem good, it doesn't help much if most of our information is already available publicly. Protecting private data is only feasible unless we can find a way for providers to provide hosting services. And even if all these problems can be solved, I still don't think the privacy problems could be solve with just that.
Everything you need to learn is already available for free on the web. You just have to search harder to find them. I'd assume you want to enroll in university computer science as you are asking this in slashdot.
For pre-U education to brush up your knowledge, there's Khan Academy to teach you everything from primary school to even college.
For formal university level education, you can get many of them free directly from university. MIT Open Courseware is one of the well known examples. You can find a list of them at Open Culture. Google Code University is a less known but great site that helps you start and search on your online education journey.
There are also video lecture collection sites that contain lecture recordings from various universities, such as Academic Earth and Video Lectures.
You can download a lot of ebooks from the web. Here is an example list you can found on Delicious.
In case if you are only interested in web design, IMHO the best way to learn design and multimedia is go to a real college. But anyway, there are tons of resources for web design too. Delicious is a must have search tool for you to get started.
I'd love to provide more links that I have but I'm short of time. But as always, Google is your best friend!
This is why ChromeOS is gonna be so rocks and rule the world. HTML5 is clearly blurring the distinction between a web app and a desktop application, and you can see that it is definitely possible to do almost everything with just a browser using HTML5 and javascript.
There is this trend of replacing traditional GUI interface with web interface, even though the application itself is a desktop application. Such examples are Freenet, Transmission, Yacy, and so on. Some other applications are using web interface as well even they are not a website, such as the router administration interface, and Chrome's internal downloads and other configuration interface.
What we can see is that it is actually much more easier and portable to build desktop applications using web interface. HTML5 has become so powerful that it can be used to build almost all traditional applications that solely use the GUI APIs to build their interface. Text editor, video player, office suite, instant messaging, POS, and business suite can all be built using web interface and may have even richer interface. The only kind of applications that can't be built using HTML5 is those that build custom GUI components that use lower level display interface rather than the GUI API, such as Photoshop and other image/video/audio editing software, and games with a lot of interaction.
Some of you may complain saying that "ok web interface is cool, but I want to use that fucking application offline and I don't want to store things on the cloud". The solution is actually pretty simple - just install the web server on your computer! With what I call "client side server", you can get the best of both world: offline application with web interface. Some applications certainly do this (Freenet etc) by starting their own server, but if we can standardize this and bring everything together, we do can build a pretty powerful desktop that is completely built on web interface.
In summary - ChromeOS + client side server = killer app.
The reason science cannot disprove religion such as Christianity is because most believers only selfishly care about what God gives to their life, instead of whether the environment/universe is created by God.
With the advance in science and technology, the God in people's mind has shrink down to a magical being inside the chaos soup that can change their life through butterfly effect. For example, 99% of praises about God is actually about how God brings good things to their life by believing in God.
Scientifically there is no way you can explain why a believer encounter an incident "arranged" by God, and that's what keeps people in continuing believing in God. However statistically we can actually see that everything is still obeying the law of statistics, i.e. there are x% of people get promoted, x% of people gain sudden increase in income, x% of people solved relationship problems with their loved one, x% of people get their live saved in a disaster, etc etc.
The statistics of every incident actually stays the same whether someone is religious or not. But religious people will always willing to try again and wait patiently because they believe that God will eventually give them what they wanted. Probability speaking, there is always a chance a person can get what he want. When a believer gets what he want, he praises it as the gift from God; When a believer doesn't get what he want, there's still a high chance he is willing to wait, and even if he starts to disbelieve, what the church lose is just one believer.
This phenomena in turns can be explained using natural selection and evolution theory. When a person disbelieve in God, he is actually considered dead from evolutionary point of view, because it is highly unlikely that he can convince other believers into disbelieve, aka there is no off spring. On the other hand when a person starts to believe in God, the network effect is exponential and the good stories will only compound increasingly, in other words it means that believers are much capable of producing "offspring" in the evolution between believer and non-believer "species" of the human population.
It is even worse that our society is actually showing a trend towards religion, and this phenomena can actually described using psychology. The stressful modern life in city means that people in current generation is facing more problems than ever. For instance, students are depressed in getting good results, adults having not enough salary, health problems, social problems, and many more. None of these problems can be solved by using science, but religion would give exactly what these people need - hope. The majority people in the society would have tendency to believe in God to give them hope that they can't get themselves - mainly money, health, fame, and love.
The lesson to learn here is that we as scientists should stop trying to disprove religion through science, because IMHO it is the wrong way. We should use smarter ways to "unconvert" religious people, albeit it is still very hard. For example, we can educate people to have confidence in getting what they want through ways other than faith, although ways such as motivation talks appear to be less effective than religious talks. We can also try to disprove religion with religion, for example showing the conflicts of Christian believes through the history of Christianity.
Nevertheless, it will still be extremely hard for people to not have faith in this society. In fact, if suddenly the whole world stops believing in God the impact would be disastrous. Many people would lose hope, demotivated, and even lose direction in their life. Although I don't like religion, I can't deny that there is no better psychological medicine to the society other than religion.
The short film is directed by Patrick Boivin, and it seems to have nothing to do with the original movie. It is amazing how a small team can make such high quality film that look almost the same as the real movie.
A marathon analogy is the best way I can think of to describe the current picture of education system in places especially like China.
Imagine a marathon race with twisted rules, where only the first 60% of participants are allowed to pass certain checkpoints located at the 200m, 500m, and 1km. Whereas the lagging participants are forfeited to take a longer and tougher route. The rational that the organizer gives in this race is "If you can't even win in the first kilometer, don't even think about winning when you reach the end of 40km!"
It is too sad to say that the checkpoints on 200m, 500m, 1km, 2km, 5km each corresponds to the checkpoints of our life at kindergarden, primary school, high school, college, and university. And the filter rate is increasingly strict as competition gets intense. Everyone rushes to win at these checkpoints, but then suddenly stop upon exhausted and walk slowly towards the end of race because there is no big shinny trophy waiting there.
Life is like a marathon. Yet too many people focuses on who gets number one at the 100th m and 1st km, instead of who are the few people who can eventually reach the 40th km before they died.
Whether you think Google's initial decision to comply with censorship in China is right or not, I think their decision now makes the initial compliance worthwhile. With it Google now has enough influence to the Chinese that the news is big enough to spread to everyone in China. (Remember it doesn't matter how much we know, more important is how much the Chinese citizen get from this news) Google also has enough market share that its retreat can greatly disrupt existing market.
Although there are certainly still a lot of ignorant PRC Chinese that pissed me off, I am very glad to see a lot of PRC Chinese that appreciate Google and disagree with the censorship in China. Many of them know about sensitive incidents like tiananmen. I believe thanks to the "negative" effect of the great censorship effort by the government, some younger Chinese become more aware of such incidents by actively comparing search results of these incidents whenever censorship related news are reported.
I'm quite surprise to not see any Slashdot comment mentioning this. Within moments the news were reported, large amount of visitors are attracted to Google China's headquarter to present "illegal" flowers to Google. The new term "fei1 fa3 xian4 hua1" (Slashdot can't accept my chinese character) is used and no surprising, this term has been banned by Baidu et al. There isn't much you can see from the English Google News, but with the chinese keyword, you can get much more informative results.
The game may be far from completion and may never be finished, but surely there are large amount of great code already written by 3D Realms. So why not open source the game and let us from Slashdot finish the work?
I would certainly hope that Chrome OS would bring in the market for super low cost MIPS/ARM powered smart books. As the hardware comes, it wouldn't matter if Chrome OS is good enough, but we Linux hackers would finally have chance to install a full blown Linux distribution in any of these cheap but powerful smartbooks. (Just please tell me that vendors would not be able to lock down their hardware like the case for Android. )
Xaedalus I very agree with what you said and thanks for the insight. I am interested to research further into your proposition. Can you provide me sources that support your arguments? Thanks.
No there's still more things to do, we still need to blow up the nuclear reactor and shut down the backup grid system. In five minutes, I'll tear that whole goddamn building down. Tonight is not an accident. There are no accidents. We have not come here by chance. I do not believe in chance. When I see three objectives, three captains, three ships. I do not see coincidence, I see providence. I see purpose. I believe it our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this night holds for each and every one of us, the very meaning of our lives.
Seriously, data management problem has caused me to become paranoid to create files and documents in anywhere other than my main computer. I have over a terabyte of files to share over several computers with different OS: Ubuntu, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, and Mac OS X. Currently the only effective way I have is to share the files through samba/windows file sharing over gigabit local network. Gigabit ethernet has give me decent performance and the speed is almost like local access, I can even stream HD movies over the network.
Initially I used a dedicated Windows XP machine to host the files. Because it is always painful when Windows restart or crashed after opening too many applications and my files would be temporarily unavailable. The previous release of Ubuntu had some mysterious bug that made the speed of samba sharing slow, and I wanted to host my files using cross-platform filesystem that have read/write access over different OS, and NTFS seem to be the only option.
Recently I have migrated my files to be hosted on Ubuntu using ext4. The samba bug no longer appeared in Interpid, and the performance has been satisfactory. There is still some other bug that cause frequent disconnect/reconnect over the network, but I still can bear it for now. The other draw back of hosting in Ubuntu is that I can no longer hot plug my hard drives to XP and Mac OS X.
Currently the only annoyance problem I have is on my Macbook, where I won't have access to the files local network when I'm not at home. I am especially paranoid to create any file on the laptop, fearing management overhead to backup or move around the data to appropriate network folders. I still have no good solution to manage the photos I store in the macbook and the desktop. Currently the photos are stored in separate Lightroom catalogs. Even though I do backup the photos but I cannot do any write operation on the backup copy on my desktop, as that would destroy the integrity with the original catalog on my Macbook. My previous photo management tool, Aperture, was even worse that I cannot do any backup of the catalog to the network or NTFS partition as that destroys the chmod permissions and render the whole catalog unusable.
I am currently developing a web application that can also be used as a home/local web server that can manage and synchronize specific file formats as efficient as the web server. For example, imagine a Flickr-like web app, that is installed on both your laptop and desktop and is not only able smart-synchronize all photos, but also automatically publish selected photos to Flickr, Facebook etc, and is powered by the very same program that powers these websites.
Please tell me if anyone have the same experience or have a better solution for terabyte file management.
Now everyone stop complaining about Chrome having no extension! If Chrome is really that good for everything else except has no add-ons, and if you really so sick of getting that noscript/adblock add-on, why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?
Am I missing something? The source code of Chromium is available freely under BSD right? I thought open source is all about the freedom to take any source code and modify until it suites you?
Notice how open source is supposed to work the same way as scientific research does? Both of them requires socialism economics in order to work well.
Look at scientific research for example, you pour a large amount of money into it, but you can't sell the results of your research. You can only see the impact of your research, if any, a couple of years after some companies see the commercial value of your research and decided to use it.
Look at LHC for example, is there any commercial value for investing such large amount of money for the research? No. How about research on nature and species in a certain natural ecosystem? Other than probably selling the video to few people who are interested and willing to pay, I don't see much commercial value in such research.
So then think about it, why on earth can such research still exist today? If the world is under pure capitalism, nobody is going to spend any money to support these research. Instead, you need a socialism model to support the research.
The current socialism model to support research is to gather a pool of fund from a large group of people, and distribute the resource to everyone in a centralised way. Our pool of resource may be from university, which is paid by university students or sponsored by government. Or the resource may be directly from government, which acts as a pool of fund from the taxpayers.
Hence in some way, everyone in a nation contributes a tiny fraction of money to the research institution. The results of the research would then get contributed back to the society and benefits everyone.
In fact, tax is a kind of socialism that solves problem of requiring tiny fraction of resource from huge amount of people. A country with 100% socialism is just meaning a country with 100% tax.
So compare this with open source, what's the different? If you divide the cost of development with the number of people who benefit, everyone is supposed to pay a very small amount of money.
The current difficulties of open source is that there is actually no way to collect this small amount of money from everyone, and thus open source projects usually require small number of people to donate for most of the cost, while all other people becomes freeriders.
I believe that in order for open source projects to grow in a healthy way, a socialism model for open source has to be established, and we have to have a pool of fund to support the projects. And currently, the only kind of pool of fund I can think of is from the government.
I can expect that once this eeeKeyboard comes out, it will bring one step closer to the touch screen interface for desktop computer.
With this small touch screen added to keyboard, an application may have another dimension of interface available to interact with user. By referring to iPhone, we can see that the potential is unlimited.
In the most basic form, the screen can default to be a numpad for normal usage. It may also become a touchpad when no mouse is available.
We can see this as a keyboard+iPhone to control the computer. I don't know if there is iPhone apps to act as interface to other computer, but eeeKeyboard is exactly a keyboard + iphone screen with this apps.
I have recently drafted a new open source license just to solve this problem. I feel that the most important problem of open source software is that the company may not sell just the binary of the software because somebody else will gonna clone it and distribute a free version. RHEL vs CentOS is a very good example.
What I suggest is to create a new open source license that prevent cloning of a project with exactly the same code. By forbidding this, the company would be able to have exclusive right to distribute the compiled binary and thus have the power to charge for the download and usage of the binary.
I think that the business model for selling proprietary software is very simple and efficient model, and the only problem is the closed source nature of proprietary software. If we can make use of best of both world, wouldn't it be great?
I temporary calling this license Proprietary Open Source License (POS) and a complementary library license for it, called Common Open source Library (COL). (bad naming, gonna find better ones.) And below is some details for these two licenses. I hope that anyone can give me some feedback about this license, tell me whether it would works and whether there is any possible flaws that violates the open source philosophy. This is just a very rough draft and your opinion is very valuable for me. Thank you!
General Rules of Proprietary Open Source License (POS): 1. The licensor must release all source code of the binary under this license or licenses that are no more restrictive than this license (e.g. COL, LGPL, BSD). 2. The licensor has exclusive right to distribute the original binary. 3. The licensee has unlimited right to distribute the original source code but not original binary. 4. Redistribution of binary must have the source code modified to have no more than 80% similarity than original source code at any time. 5. Redistribution of all modified binary and source code from this license must be relicensed under COL, and not this license, unless explicitly permitted by the licensor. 6. The licensor reserves the right to patch from the modified source code, provided the patched original source code has no more than 80% similarity of the modified source code. 7. The 80% similarity is calculated by iterating every source code files that are released under this license, and compare the differences in program code ignoring comment. 8. In case of similarity of source code is in grey zone, with rough calculation of around 75%~85% similarity, the licensor reserves the right to request the licensee to make further modification to the modified source code. 9. Embedding the original program into other software, whether open source or closed source, requires exclusive permission from the licensor to release the code in other licenses. 10. The licensor may not control which 80% of code a licensee may or may not copy. 11. Same as GPLv3, the license implicitly grant patent licenses from the licensor to the licensee.
Common Open Source Library (COL): 1. Software written under POS cannot use GPL libraries because it violates the terms. 2. A new library license has to be made to let different POS licensors share a common library. 3. COL Licensees are required to release all linked source code under GPL or POS or COL; hence it is more restrictive than LGPL and BSD. 4. COL allows the library to be used in both POS and GPL software. 5. Source code under COL is not counted under the 80% similarity requirement of POS. 6. This would make a healthier environment to open source. Because POSS (Proprietary Open Source Software) vendors not only would have the incentive to improve the library, but also monetary support to do so. 7. The compatibility for use in both POS and GPL means GPL software can benefit from the improvement of the library.
Benefits of Proprietary Open Source: 1. Provides monetary incentive to produce high quality software. 2. Gives ex
Its easy: Get both if you really like it very much.
Use the electronic version when you are reading it. Keep the hard copy as a limited edition collection, and as support for the author that you like it very much. This is what fans do, they buy the things because they love it, not because they need it.
My friend paid a very high price to buy the 1934 first edition of Security Analysis, even though he read through several chapters in pirated electronic version and there are latest edition available. He bought it because he love the book so much and is so impressed by Benjamin Graham's insight. This what true value of those out of print books in Amazon are.
Slashdot Mirror
Create some bugs in the unit test and hunt them down!
Email is a decentralized protocol, but there are reasons why people give up their privacy and prefer web mail for convenience. What Eben Moglen described is basically making decentralized protocols for everything including social networks and such. But even when we created the perfect decentralized protocols of everything, I don't think that it will prevent data mining and protect user's privacy.
To simplify the view, just lets say we can do everything with email, let's say all the user's personal data are stored in email messages. To really protect my privacy, not only I'd have to host all my emails, but I'd have to set up my own email server as well. Not only I shouldn't use the web interface, but I also should't use the POP/IMAP/SMTP services that Gmail or Yahoo or my ISP provides. Now building my own web interface would not be so hard, as I'm hosting my own server. But making sure of my server is on most of the time and physically managing and backup my email data on my server would not be so trivial. What happen if I travel oversea and my server crashed or my home went out of electricity? What happen if disaster happened and everything in my house including the server and backup are gone?
So have these problems are exactly the reason why people choose Gmail. By hosting the server on the cloud, all the uptime, backup, and management problems are solved out of the box. Of course there might be better solution than Gmail, but I doubt if it will success commercially. Now lets say we created free software stack that performs better than Gmail and work out of the box. With the software in hand, all we need is just a place to host the server. User would then have three choices: 1. Buy a server plug and host it at home, 2. Purchase web hosting and host it as a black box in the cloud, and 3. Let Google host the same software for free but with storage and data shared with everyone. While option 2 is supposed to be the optimum choice, majority of people would still choose option 3 simply because it is FREE.
So IMHO the real challenge to make the public to adopt a decentralized architecture is to come out with a better business model. Simple hosting charges won't work when there are free alternatives, and there is no way to make black box hosting free. Average Joe will neither want to purchase troublesome sheeva plug nor would they want to pay for hosting in the cloud. Decentralized architecture will not prevent centralized hosting and data mining, what it does is allow us to switch from one provider to another easily. Whether the user choose a free provider that mine data or become their own provider, its entirely their choice.
The other problem with privacy in decentralized architecture is that you actually get less privacy when you use centralized identification. People here often complain that they don't want Facebook to know they like or comment on some random webpages. While that might be a problem, most of our information can already be found in the Internet publicly. If OpenID become the norm, my ID at Slashdot, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and whatever random forum should remain the same. This would be even true for a decentralized data architecture because you need a universal way to identify yourself. With OpenID, a simple Google search will reveal this post I'm writing in Slashdot, the comment I gave on random YouTube video, the articles I digged and liked, and whatever sites that I participated in. Actually all these information already available publicly, but what really stops Google on mining it is the lack of unified ID.
In conclusion, while a decentralized data architecture might seem good, it doesn't help much if most of our information is already available publicly. Protecting private data is only feasible unless we can find a way for providers to provide hosting services. And even if all these problems can be solved, I still don't think the privacy problems could be solve with just that.
TechCrunch actually gave a very detailed explanation on how 3D display technology works. Everyone who wants to know more should read about this.
For pre-U education to brush up your knowledge, there's Khan Academy to teach you everything from primary school to even college.
For formal university level education, you can get many of them free directly from university. MIT Open Courseware is one of the well known examples. You can find a list of them at Open Culture. Google Code University is a less known but great site that helps you start and search on your online education journey.
There are also video lecture collection sites that contain lecture recordings from various universities, such as Academic Earth and Video Lectures.
You may also interested in less formal technology videos such as BestTechVideos and Google Tech Talks.
You can download a lot of ebooks from the web. Here is an example list you can found on Delicious.
In case if you are only interested in web design, IMHO the best way to learn design and multimedia is go to a real college. But anyway, there are tons of resources for web design too. Delicious is a must have search tool for you to get started.
I'd love to provide more links that I have but I'm short of time. But as always, Google is your best friend!
This is why ChromeOS is gonna be so rocks and rule the world. HTML5 is clearly blurring the distinction between a web app and a desktop application, and you can see that it is definitely possible to do almost everything with just a browser using HTML5 and javascript.
There is this trend of replacing traditional GUI interface with web interface, even though the application itself is a desktop application. Such examples are Freenet, Transmission, Yacy, and so on. Some other applications are using web interface as well even they are not a website, such as the router administration interface, and Chrome's internal downloads and other configuration interface.
What we can see is that it is actually much more easier and portable to build desktop applications using web interface. HTML5 has become so powerful that it can be used to build almost all traditional applications that solely use the GUI APIs to build their interface. Text editor, video player, office suite, instant messaging, POS, and business suite can all be built using web interface and may have even richer interface. The only kind of applications that can't be built using HTML5 is those that build custom GUI components that use lower level display interface rather than the GUI API, such as Photoshop and other image/video/audio editing software, and games with a lot of interaction.
Some of you may complain saying that "ok web interface is cool, but I want to use that fucking application offline and I don't want to store things on the cloud". The solution is actually pretty simple - just install the web server on your computer! With what I call "client side server", you can get the best of both world: offline application with web interface. Some applications certainly do this (Freenet etc) by starting their own server, but if we can standardize this and bring everything together, we do can build a pretty powerful desktop that is completely built on web interface.
In summary - ChromeOS + client side server = killer app.
The reason science cannot disprove religion such as Christianity is because most believers only selfishly care about what God gives to their life, instead of whether the environment/universe is created by God.
With the advance in science and technology, the God in people's mind has shrink down to a magical being inside the chaos soup that can change their life through butterfly effect. For example, 99% of praises about God is actually about how God brings good things to their life by believing in God.
Scientifically there is no way you can explain why a believer encounter an incident "arranged" by God, and that's what keeps people in continuing believing in God. However statistically we can actually see that everything is still obeying the law of statistics, i.e. there are x% of people get promoted, x% of people gain sudden increase in income, x% of people solved relationship problems with their loved one, x% of people get their live saved in a disaster, etc etc.
The statistics of every incident actually stays the same whether someone is religious or not. But religious people will always willing to try again and wait patiently because they believe that God will eventually give them what they wanted. Probability speaking, there is always a chance a person can get what he want. When a believer gets what he want, he praises it as the gift from God; When a believer doesn't get what he want, there's still a high chance he is willing to wait, and even if he starts to disbelieve, what the church lose is just one believer.
This phenomena in turns can be explained using natural selection and evolution theory. When a person disbelieve in God, he is actually considered dead from evolutionary point of view, because it is highly unlikely that he can convince other believers into disbelieve, aka there is no off spring. On the other hand when a person starts to believe in God, the network effect is exponential and the good stories will only compound increasingly, in other words it means that believers are much capable of producing "offspring" in the evolution between believer and non-believer "species" of the human population.
It is even worse that our society is actually showing a trend towards religion, and this phenomena can actually described using psychology. The stressful modern life in city means that people in current generation is facing more problems than ever. For instance, students are depressed in getting good results, adults having not enough salary, health problems, social problems, and many more. None of these problems can be solved by using science, but religion would give exactly what these people need - hope. The majority people in the society would have tendency to believe in God to give them hope that they can't get themselves - mainly money, health, fame, and love.
The lesson to learn here is that we as scientists should stop trying to disprove religion through science, because IMHO it is the wrong way. We should use smarter ways to "unconvert" religious people, albeit it is still very hard. For example, we can educate people to have confidence in getting what they want through ways other than faith, although ways such as motivation talks appear to be less effective than religious talks. We can also try to disprove religion with religion, for example showing the conflicts of Christian believes through the history of Christianity.
Nevertheless, it will still be extremely hard for people to not have faith in this society. In fact, if suddenly the whole world stops believing in God the impact would be disastrous. Many people would lose hope, demotivated, and even lose direction in their life. Although I don't like religion, I can't deny that there is no better psychological medicine to the society other than religion.
The short film is directed by Patrick Boivin, and it seems to have nothing to do with the original movie. It is amazing how a small team can make such high quality film that look almost the same as the real movie.
A marathon analogy is the best way I can think of to describe the current picture of education system in places especially like China.
Imagine a marathon race with twisted rules, where only the first 60% of participants are allowed to pass certain checkpoints located at the 200m, 500m, and 1km. Whereas the lagging participants are forfeited to take a longer and tougher route. The rational that the organizer gives in this race is "If you can't even win in the first kilometer, don't even think about winning when you reach the end of 40km!"
It is too sad to say that the checkpoints on 200m, 500m, 1km, 2km, 5km each corresponds to the checkpoints of our life at kindergarden, primary school, high school, college, and university. And the filter rate is increasingly strict as competition gets intense. Everyone rushes to win at these checkpoints, but then suddenly stop upon exhausted and walk slowly towards the end of race because there is no big shinny trophy waiting there.
Life is like a marathon. Yet too many people focuses on who gets number one at the 100th m and 1st km, instead of who are the few people who can eventually reach the 40th km before they died.
lol +1 Funny. XD
Whether you think Google's initial decision to comply with censorship in China is right or not, I think their decision now makes the initial compliance worthwhile. With it Google now has enough influence to the Chinese that the news is big enough to spread to everyone in China. (Remember it doesn't matter how much we know, more important is how much the Chinese citizen get from this news) Google also has enough market share that its retreat can greatly disrupt existing market.
Although there are certainly still a lot of ignorant PRC Chinese that pissed me off, I am very glad to see a lot of PRC Chinese that appreciate Google and disagree with the censorship in China. Many of them know about sensitive incidents like tiananmen. I believe thanks to the "negative" effect of the great censorship effort by the government, some younger Chinese become more aware of such incidents by actively comparing search results of these incidents whenever censorship related news are reported.
I'm quite surprise to not see any Slashdot comment mentioning this. Within moments the news were reported, large amount of visitors are attracted to Google China's headquarter to present "illegal" flowers to Google. The new term "fei1 fa3 xian4 hua1" (Slashdot can't accept my chinese character) is used and no surprising, this term has been banned by Baidu et al. There isn't much you can see from the English Google News, but with the chinese keyword, you can get much more informative results.
(disclaimer: I'm a Chinese but not from PRC)
We've already got program that automatically generates research paper for you, called SCIgen
The game may be far from completion and may never be finished, but surely there are large amount of great code already written by 3D Realms. So why not open source the game and let us from Slashdot finish the work?
I would certainly hope that Chrome OS would bring in the market for super low cost MIPS/ARM powered smart books. As the hardware comes, it wouldn't matter if Chrome OS is good enough, but we Linux hackers would finally have chance to install a full blown Linux distribution in any of these cheap but powerful smartbooks. (Just please tell me that vendors would not be able to lock down their hardware like the case for Android. )
Thanks! :)
Xaedalus I very agree with what you said and thanks for the insight. I am interested to research further into your proposition. Can you provide me sources that support your arguments? Thanks.
No there's still more things to do, we still need to blow up the nuclear reactor and shut down the backup grid system. In five minutes, I'll tear that whole goddamn building down. Tonight is not an accident. There are no accidents. We have not come here by chance. I do not believe in chance. When I see three objectives, three captains, three ships. I do not see coincidence, I see providence. I see purpose. I believe it our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this night holds for each and every one of us, the very meaning of our lives.
Seriously, data management problem has caused me to become paranoid to create files and documents in anywhere other than my main computer. I have over a terabyte of files to share over several computers with different OS: Ubuntu, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, and Mac OS X. Currently the only effective way I have is to share the files through samba/windows file sharing over gigabit local network. Gigabit ethernet has give me decent performance and the speed is almost like local access, I can even stream HD movies over the network.
Initially I used a dedicated Windows XP machine to host the files. Because it is always painful when Windows restart or crashed after opening too many applications and my files would be temporarily unavailable. The previous release of Ubuntu had some mysterious bug that made the speed of samba sharing slow, and I wanted to host my files using cross-platform filesystem that have read/write access over different OS, and NTFS seem to be the only option.
Recently I have migrated my files to be hosted on Ubuntu using ext4. The samba bug no longer appeared in Interpid, and the performance has been satisfactory. There is still some other bug that cause frequent disconnect/reconnect over the network, but I still can bear it for now. The other draw back of hosting in Ubuntu is that I can no longer hot plug my hard drives to XP and Mac OS X.
Currently the only annoyance problem I have is on my Macbook, where I won't have access to the files local network when I'm not at home. I am especially paranoid to create any file on the laptop, fearing management overhead to backup or move around the data to appropriate network folders. I still have no good solution to manage the photos I store in the macbook and the desktop. Currently the photos are stored in separate Lightroom catalogs. Even though I do backup the photos but I cannot do any write operation on the backup copy on my desktop, as that would destroy the integrity with the original catalog on my Macbook. My previous photo management tool, Aperture, was even worse that I cannot do any backup of the catalog to the network or NTFS partition as that destroys the chmod permissions and render the whole catalog unusable.
I am currently developing a web application that can also be used as a home/local web server that can manage and synchronize specific file formats as efficient as the web server. For example, imagine a Flickr-like web app, that is installed on both your laptop and desktop and is not only able smart-synchronize all photos, but also automatically publish selected photos to Flickr, Facebook etc, and is powered by the very same program that powers these websites.
Please tell me if anyone have the same experience or have a better solution for terabyte file management.
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Because not everyone in Slashdot is a programmer?
Now fixed that for ya.
Now everyone stop complaining about Chrome having no extension! If Chrome is really that good for everything else except has no add-ons, and if you really so sick of getting that noscript/adblock add-on, why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?
Am I missing something? The source code of Chromium is available freely under BSD right? I thought open source is all about the freedom to take any source code and modify until it suites you?
Perhaps one more slot to insert an 2.5" hard drive would make that a perfect home server.
I don't need fast processor, but I need large hard disk space to share media files between my computers.
Notice how open source is supposed to work the same way as scientific research does? Both of them requires socialism economics in order to work well.
Look at scientific research for example, you pour a large amount of money into it, but you can't sell the results of your research. You can only see the impact of your research, if any, a couple of years after some companies see the commercial value of your research and decided to use it.
Look at LHC for example, is there any commercial value for investing such large amount of money for the research? No. How about research on nature and species in a certain natural ecosystem? Other than probably selling the video to few people who are interested and willing to pay, I don't see much commercial value in such research.
So then think about it, why on earth can such research still exist today? If the world is under pure capitalism, nobody is going to spend any money to support these research. Instead, you need a socialism model to support the research.
The current socialism model to support research is to gather a pool of fund from a large group of people, and distribute the resource to everyone in a centralised way. Our pool of resource may be from university, which is paid by university students or sponsored by government. Or the resource may be directly from government, which acts as a pool of fund from the taxpayers.
Hence in some way, everyone in a nation contributes a tiny fraction of money to the research institution. The results of the research would then get contributed back to the society and benefits everyone.
In fact, tax is a kind of socialism that solves problem of requiring tiny fraction of resource from huge amount of people. A country with 100% socialism is just meaning a country with 100% tax.
So compare this with open source, what's the different? If you divide the cost of development with the number of people who benefit, everyone is supposed to pay a very small amount of money.
The current difficulties of open source is that there is actually no way to collect this small amount of money from everyone, and thus open source projects usually require small number of people to donate for most of the cost, while all other people becomes freeriders.
I believe that in order for open source projects to grow in a healthy way, a socialism model for open source has to be established, and we have to have a pool of fund to support the projects. And currently, the only kind of pool of fund I can think of is from the government.
I can expect that once this eeeKeyboard comes out, it will bring one step closer to the touch screen interface for desktop computer.
With this small touch screen added to keyboard, an application may have another dimension of interface available to interact with user. By referring to iPhone, we can see that the potential is unlimited.
In the most basic form, the screen can default to be a numpad for normal usage. It may also become a touchpad when no mouse is available.
We can see this as a keyboard+iPhone to control the computer. I don't know if there is iPhone apps to act as interface to other computer, but eeeKeyboard is exactly a keyboard + iphone screen with this apps.
I have recently drafted a new open source license just to solve this problem. I feel that the most important problem of open source software is that the company may not sell just the binary of the software because somebody else will gonna clone it and distribute a free version. RHEL vs CentOS is a very good example.
What I suggest is to create a new open source license that prevent cloning of a project with exactly the same code. By forbidding this, the company would be able to have exclusive right to distribute the compiled binary and thus have the power to charge for the download and usage of the binary.
I think that the business model for selling proprietary software is very simple and efficient model, and the only problem is the closed source nature of proprietary software. If we can make use of best of both world, wouldn't it be great?
I temporary calling this license Proprietary Open Source License (POS) and a complementary library license for it, called Common Open source Library (COL). (bad naming, gonna find better ones.) And below is some details for these two licenses. I hope that anyone can give me some feedback about this license, tell me whether it would works and whether there is any possible flaws that violates the open source philosophy. This is just a very rough draft and your opinion is very valuable for me. Thank you!
General Rules of Proprietary Open Source License (POS):
1. The licensor must release all source code of the binary under this license or licenses that are no more restrictive than this license (e.g. COL, LGPL, BSD).
2. The licensor has exclusive right to distribute the original binary.
3. The licensee has unlimited right to distribute the original source code but not original binary.
4. Redistribution of binary must have the source code modified to have no more than 80% similarity than original source code at any time.
5. Redistribution of all modified binary and source code from this license must be relicensed under COL, and not this license, unless explicitly permitted by the licensor.
6. The licensor reserves the right to patch from the modified source code, provided the patched original source code has no more than 80% similarity of the modified source code.
7. The 80% similarity is calculated by iterating every source code files that are released under this license, and compare the differences in program code ignoring comment.
8. In case of similarity of source code is in grey zone, with rough calculation of around 75%~85% similarity, the licensor reserves the right to request the licensee to make further modification to the modified source code.
9. Embedding the original program into other software, whether open source or closed source, requires exclusive permission from the licensor to release the code in other licenses.
10. The licensor may not control which 80% of code a licensee may or may not copy.
11. Same as GPLv3, the license implicitly grant patent licenses from the licensor to the licensee.
Common Open Source Library (COL):
1. Software written under POS cannot use GPL libraries because it violates the terms.
2. A new library license has to be made to let different POS licensors share a common library.
3. COL Licensees are required to release all linked source code under GPL or POS or COL; hence it is more restrictive than LGPL and BSD.
4. COL allows the library to be used in both POS and GPL software.
5. Source code under COL is not counted under the 80% similarity requirement of POS.
6. This would make a healthier environment to open source. Because POSS (Proprietary Open Source Software) vendors not only would have the incentive to improve the library, but also monetary support to do so.
7. The compatibility for use in both POS and GPL means GPL software can benefit from the improvement of the library.
Benefits of Proprietary Open Source:
1. Provides monetary incentive to produce high quality software.
2. Gives ex
Its easy: Get both if you really like it very much.
Use the electronic version when you are reading it. Keep the hard copy as a limited edition collection, and as support for the author that you like it very much. This is what fans do, they buy the things because they love it, not because they need it.
My friend paid a very high price to buy the 1934 first edition of Security Analysis, even though he read through several chapters in pirated electronic version and there are latest edition available. He bought it because he love the book so much and is so impressed by Benjamin Graham's insight. This what true value of those out of print books in Amazon are.