> a public online encyclopedia - the whole point is that it's public, so encrypting it makes no sense.
In many countries reading the wrong parts of the encyclopedia can get you arrested. "Available to all" is not the same as "your reading habits should be public". HTTPS isn't a complete solution, but it's a necessary part of maintaining online privacy.
Used iTunes? It's like that for books but less bloated. Syncs to many devices, and can scrape RSS feeds from magazines, build them into EPUBs and sync them to an ereader, like a text-based podcast. This works surprisingly well, superior in some ways to reading the same material on the Web.
How about we have an agency OTHER than the TSA provide data on how much radiation in being emitted. Not hard to do -- OSHA rep visits the airport, run the test on each machine, and out. TSA never has to do math again; the radiation output is not a security question anyway.
Libraries are pre-positioned all over our cities, and pretty soon they're not going to be full of bookshelves. Costs will go way down (think $10 e-readers), assuming the publishing industry doesn't win their fight to create kill switch licenses (see boycottharpercollins.com for details there).
This is a huge opportunity.
This is a chance to reinvent a great public space into a pillar of the new peer to peer economy: hacker space, certainly, but also coworking space, peer education space, a meetup space, a place to celebrate the commons in all its forms. Yes, they are strapped for cash. But meetups are cheap when you've got real estate already. And it's a lot easier to fund something that's full of users. So let's shove those shelves to the back, and start making stuff.
I actually disagree -- at $1 a pop, I can accept what is essentially a one-time-use license. And this is with full knowledge of all the freedom issues involved. Treat it like a rental, and suddenly it seems fair again. If I want the book on a new service/device, I pay a $1 fee. I'm ok with that.
Flat screen TVs? Self-checkout? That makes it as sophisticated as... every grocery store in Bollingbrook.
That said, I think the reinvention of libraries from a book-storage facility to a community space devoted to being a platform for self education, ad hoc business, and community organizing is awesome. That, not the inclusion of teevee, is the point worth noting here.
A few days ago, Comcast stop serving.ly addresses in Chicago for a few hours. Bit.ly told me (via thier Twitter team, who was pretty quick) that it was routing problem with Comcast. I had assumed that some root name servers were down, but at the time, they checked out fine on other ISPs.
I kind of feel like these things might be related, like tinkering with the.ly nameservers to avoid the three in Libya, but I don't know enough about this to ask the right questions. Plausable?
As as aside, while troubleshooting this, bit.ly staff kept sending me shortlinks to solutions that I couldn't load because.ly timed out. Linkrot! Funny/scary.
This is what I hope a peer to peer social network could solve.
You'd be able to choose a host for your, uh, seed so there's some risk gone. But you could also sync your stuff to an encrypted vault with a few friends, and return the favor to them. That's pretty reliable. And then you could export the archive into a format that lots of people could unpack and use, because there's the original open source manager, and perhaps a bunch of alternatives/competitors using the same protocol like you see with bitTorrent clients.
It's not just about the network of your peers and privacy. It's also owning your lifestream in a format that's still useful five years from now. From there, building out management of a home library is pretty natural, even if it's never shared across the network. I lost almost all of my early journalistic work when my Hotmail account got wiped due to inactivity. That's hard to replace. A consolidated service to both store and share information could be really powerful and universally liked. Facebook is a reasonably effective start at this... but with some inextricable baggage around privacy, ownership and portability.
Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.
Seriously, why write this story and why post the link, without a freaking photo demo?
There's no bright line between retouching photos to match a certain beauty standard and simply removing artifacts introduced by the camera or lighting (correcting color balance by auto-leveling, for instance). Which is this one? Who the hell knows.
That service would really useful if I had more than two high speed options to pick from. But I don't. And neither does most of the United States. And if I define high speed as more than 4 Mb/s, then I have one option: Comcast, which just happens to be the most hated company in America.*
Mid-level ISPs used to have to change everyone the same rates - it's was a rule. That got chucked in the early 2000s wave of deregulation, and immediately afterwards the big telecos gave the local ISPs impossibly high rates for upstream connection. They got bulk-pricing deals that were more expensive than the telecos, who also sold retail ISP service, was charging the public. And now, those ISPs are all gone. Meanwhile the big ISPs carved up the cities they wanted to serve, and that was that. Monopoly secured.
Verizon/Fios was supposed to be a solution, but guess what: no new fiber going down these days. Its not worth it to a company that has to hit quarterly revenue targets. And it never will be.
Uh, seems like 1940-2000 was a pretty good run actually, and sharply contrasting with the previous 60 years. The Great Depression wasn't our biggest, it was just our most recent.
Apple takes a 30% cut of charitable donations made through an app. Disaster relief, feed the hungry, all of it. Everybody pays. In an era where credit card processors are getting hit by regulators (correctly!) for charging 2-4% transaction fees, Apple says it's 30% or nothing.
You'd think the phones were free.
I welcome the mass exodus of developers from iOS to alternative platforms, and then I welcome the later transition to HTML5 instead of "apps" to deliver what should have been web pages anyway.
Thanks for speaking on behalf of "people in some parts of the world". Reality check: clean water, healthy food, safety from oppressive governments and war are all access to information problems.
Here's the plan: Make a splash with an audacious goal that highlights a massive, underserved market. Gather celebrity sign ons and generally woot-woot around the mediaverse for a while. Encounter inevitable delays. Watch market players notice your efforts, do the math (uh, 5 billion potential customers? wait, really?) and move in ahead of you.
I credit One Laptop Per Child not with distributing several hundred thousand laptops, which is a moderately nice thing to do, but kicking industry in the ass to invent the netbook, which was huge in increasing access to hardware. Remember when a 3lbs computer could not be had for less than $2000? That was, like, 2008.
Remember when you couldn't get Internet sat uplink for less than $500 a month? Oh yeah, that's right now.
> government-sponsored filtering system. We certainly don't want THAT in this country. There too much traffic for that, anyway.
We're already there. Exactly how many options do you have to buy broadband service? I have two, and both are companies that will gladly toss any single user under the bus to avoid tangling with a bunch of (usually corporate, sometimes government) lawyers.
"Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too. "I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. "
Most everyone I can think of in the open-data, e-governance community agrees with you. Passionately. Take a look at this set of policy recommendations:
Slashdot Mirror
> a public online encyclopedia - the whole point is that it's public, so encrypting it makes no sense.
In many countries reading the wrong parts of the encyclopedia can get you arrested. "Available to all" is not the same as "your reading habits should be public". HTTPS isn't a complete solution, but it's a necessary part of maintaining online privacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
> Be warned, the UI is really ugly with strange icons (Hearts and stuff) and non-standard interface.
Well, I did say it was FLOSS, didn't I?
Honestly, it's no worse than Windows Media Center, which I can't even figure out. Why does everything have to have an album cover? Why?
Used iTunes? It's like that for books but less bloated. Syncs to many devices, and can scrape RSS feeds from magazines, build them into EPUBs and sync them to an ereader, like a text-based podcast. This works surprisingly well, superior in some ways to reading the same material on the Web.
And it's FLOSS.
http://calibre-ebook.com/about
Google Docs, calendar, and several other products. Can't IMAP a Google Doc.
Given the rash of medical radiation devices that have been gorking people because they were working incorrectly, I do worry about this.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/health/06radiation.html?src=mv
How about we have an agency OTHER than the TSA provide data on how much radiation in being emitted. Not hard to do -- OSHA rep visits the airport, run the test on each machine, and out. TSA never has to do math again; the radiation output is not a security question anyway.
And you avoid situations like this one, where testing gets somehow... skipped.
Source: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/02/umdnj_didnt_test_medical_x-ray.html
Libraries are pre-positioned all over our cities, and pretty soon they're not going to be full of bookshelves. Costs will go way down (think $10 e-readers), assuming the publishing industry doesn't win their fight to create kill switch licenses (see boycottharpercollins.com for details there).
This is a huge opportunity.
This is a chance to reinvent a great public space into a pillar of the new peer to peer economy: hacker space, certainly, but also coworking space, peer education space, a meetup space, a place to celebrate the commons in all its forms. Yes, they are strapped for cash. But meetups are cheap when you've got real estate already. And it's a lot easier to fund something that's full of users. So let's shove those shelves to the back, and start making stuff.
Oh, thanks. Missed that entirely.
I actually disagree -- at $1 a pop, I can accept what is essentially a one-time-use license. And this is with full knowledge of all the freedom issues involved. Treat it like a rental, and suddenly it seems fair again. If I want the book on a new service/device, I pay a $1 fee. I'm ok with that.
Flat screen TVs? Self-checkout? That makes it as sophisticated as... every grocery store in Bollingbrook.
That said, I think the reinvention of libraries from a book-storage facility to a community space devoted to being a platform for self education, ad hoc business, and community organizing is awesome. That, not the inclusion of teevee, is the point worth noting here.
> less than 7% of Libya's population has Internet access
That's the point, yo. When an area is information-poor, the value of each packet goes up, not down.
A few days ago, Comcast stop serving .ly addresses in Chicago for a few hours. Bit.ly told me (via thier Twitter team, who was pretty quick) that it was routing problem with Comcast. I had assumed that some root name servers were down, but at the time, they checked out fine on other ISPs.
I kind of feel like these things might be related, like tinkering with the .ly nameservers to avoid the three in Libya, but I don't know enough about this to ask the right questions. Plausable?
As as aside, while troubleshooting this, bit.ly staff kept sending me shortlinks to solutions that I couldn't load because .ly timed out. Linkrot! Funny/scary.
> that you're asking that question at all is just fail
In user-land it is. So, uh, maybe we should be asking the question?
This is what I hope a peer to peer social network could solve.
You'd be able to choose a host for your, uh, seed so there's some risk gone. But you could also sync your stuff to an encrypted vault with a few friends, and return the favor to them. That's pretty reliable. And then you could export the archive into a format that lots of people could unpack and use, because there's the original open source manager, and perhaps a bunch of alternatives/competitors using the same protocol like you see with bitTorrent clients.
It's not just about the network of your peers and privacy. It's also owning your lifestream in a format that's still useful five years from now. From there, building out management of a home library is pretty natural, even if it's never shared across the network. I lost almost all of my early journalistic work when my Hotmail account got wiped due to inactivity. That's hard to replace. A consolidated service to both store and share information could be really powerful and universally liked. Facebook is a reasonably effective start at this... but with some inextricable baggage around privacy, ownership and portability.
Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.
Seriously, why write this story and why post the link, without a freaking photo demo?
There's no bright line between retouching photos to match a certain beauty standard and simply removing artifacts introduced by the camera or lighting (correcting color balance by auto-leveling, for instance). Which is this one? Who the hell knows.
> They are of a sort that grows/breeds on its own.
I read this as "they are of a sort that grows beards on its own." Which is also true.
That service would really useful if I had more than two high speed options to pick from. But I don't. And neither does most of the United States. And if I define high speed as more than 4 Mb/s, then I have one option: Comcast, which just happens to be the most hated company in America.*
Mid-level ISPs used to have to change everyone the same rates - it's was a rule. That got chucked in the early 2000s wave of deregulation, and immediately afterwards the big telecos gave the local ISPs impossibly high rates for upstream connection. They got bulk-pricing deals that were more expensive than the telecos, who also sold retail ISP service, was charging the public. And now, those ISPs are all gone. Meanwhile the big ISPs carved up the cities they wanted to serve, and that was that. Monopoly secured.
Verizon/Fios was supposed to be a solution, but guess what: no new fiber going down these days. Its not worth it to a company that has to hit quarterly revenue targets. And it never will be.
*According to polling of customers.
Uh, seems like 1940-2000 was a pretty good run actually, and sharply contrasting with the previous 60 years. The Great Depression wasn't our biggest, it was just our most recent.
You are being to cynical about it. The press is made of people and they aren't the monsters you describe.
Apple takes a 30% cut of charitable donations made through an app. Disaster relief, feed the hungry, all of it. Everybody pays. In an era where credit card processors are getting hit by regulators (correctly!) for charging 2-4% transaction fees, Apple says it's 30% or nothing.
You'd think the phones were free.
I welcome the mass exodus of developers from iOS to alternative platforms, and then I welcome the later transition to HTML5 instead of "apps" to deliver what should have been web pages anyway.
Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/technology/09charity.html?_r=1
Thanks for speaking on behalf of "people in some parts of the world". Reality check: clean water, healthy food, safety from oppressive governments and war are all access to information problems.
Here's the plan: Make a splash with an audacious goal that highlights a massive, underserved market. Gather celebrity sign ons and generally woot-woot around the mediaverse for a while. Encounter inevitable delays. Watch market players notice your efforts, do the math (uh, 5 billion potential customers? wait, really?) and move in ahead of you.
I credit One Laptop Per Child not with distributing several hundred thousand laptops, which is a moderately nice thing to do, but kicking industry in the ass to invent the netbook, which was huge in increasing access to hardware. Remember when a 3lbs computer could not be had for less than $2000? That was, like, 2008.
Remember when you couldn't get Internet sat uplink for less than $500 a month? Oh yeah, that's right now.
> government-sponsored filtering system. We certainly don't want THAT in this country. There too much traffic for that, anyway.
We're already there. Exactly how many options do you have to buy broadband service? I have two, and both are companies that will gladly toss any single user under the bus to avoid tangling with a bunch of (usually corporate, sometimes government) lawyers.
"Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too. "I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. "
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801434.html
Nothing definitive in the story, but reasonably well reported eyewitness accounts.
Most everyone I can think of in the open-data, e-governance community agrees with you. Passionately. Take a look at this set of policy recommendations:
http://opengovernmentinitiative.org/
This.