I work in IT and I'd recommend not letting any child under say 13 use the internet *at all*, nevermind FB. The internet is basically an adult zone, not a child's toy.
Yes, it's educational, and I'm all for exposing kids to technology and big ideas and playgrounds where they might god forbid actually get a grazed knee.
The web is vast and cool, but the sites kids would gravitate towards would be full of assholes, idiots, predators and.. well, other stupid kids. Kids do need to be protected from each other, probably more than anything else.
I believe there's value in letting a child grow up being able to generally TRUST their environment, and interactions with others. The internet is essentially a no-trust zone. So unless a parent IS going to shoulder-surf, you'd be better off giving them the cable remote than free reign on the web.
The child has to be old enough to be able to discern, for themselves, between positive sites and social connections, and negative ones. Even a lot of adults have trouble with that.
So in my minds, the risks are to great at the moment. Not until they work out some way of being able to offer children's content as securely as a locked TV remote, where if they don't know the PIN, there's no way in hell they can get onto the pron channel, or all the brain-numbing crap out there that adults can generally view with a sense of perspective.
Quite why SPL size works this way is unclear, but Kanai speculates that it may be linked to that fact that as we mature, the brain's grey matter is pruned of neurons in order to work more efficiently.
If kids learn to harness attention properly, I assume pruning occurs in a way which makes it easier to do so in future. Conversely, with so many distracting demands on attention these days (entertainment, internet & devices), pruning may occur to make focussing much harder in future.
"Multitasking" is a great ability, and noticing the snap of a twig is a good survival skill. But over-emphasise it and we may end up with adults who can't focus enough for long-term tasks like research.
Worse, kids don't go into research because they prefer to do something more immediately gratifying. However this "conscious preference" really comes from how their brain grew up, so that focussing feels "too hard".
is the use of Light Sabres. Otherwise, it's just some random sci-fi genre game with pretty hairstyles and face paint.
While Star Trek and Dr Who retained/reclaimed their original appeal over many iterations, I find it very strange how Star Wars - at least as ubiquitous and seemingly immutable - so quickly and carelessly mutated into something completely unrecognisable and utterly unappealing to those who loved the original.
One of the great tragedies of modern film culture in my mind.
But hey, who cares if you have nothing to hide right?
It's a fuzzy line. One one hand, you don't people being judged as guilty of something by association, guilty-by-data as it were, without them actually having committed a crime.
On the other hand, you would prefer the police to catch a terrorist, based on their investigations, *before* he does anything.
I think we're busy, as a society, investigating what the overlap between the two really means, and it will probably take a long time to sort it out.
Facebook doesn't need you to post. Other people can fill in the blanks for them. You don't decide what information they release about you.
I disagree. I'm old-school, grew up with BBS, forums, and "journals" before they were called "blogs". Even on a BBS, you didn't reveal your own name, even though you could only really converse with other people on the same BBS who were in the same neighbourhood. Even in that relatively close-knit environment, nobody knew who you were unless you told them.
I was speechless when suddenly everyone started using their own *real name* on FB. That's a real paradigm shift on the net, which I rarely see discussed. Myself, I use a pseudonym on FB. Nobody knows who I really am, except for my few friends, all of whom *are* actual friends.
Nothing is stopping other people doing the same. Seeing the connections and likes of pseudonyms is still marketable data, but at least it's not your real identity out there in the public arena. That phenomenon still amazes me. I put it down to the inner exhibitionist in all of us.:)
It's about not giving some centralized entity an enormous power because they know everything about everyone. Such a huge power will be misused, sooner or later.
This is why I see it as so appalling how our own governments are proposing the notion that "if you've nothing to fear then you've nothing to hide". This is the same argument regimes like N.Korea, China, etc. use.
When a government legislates to shift a boundary as to what "something to hide" is, you don't want that to immediately imply "something to fear". Nobody should fear government, even a criminal. Ideally, a just punishment for a wrongdoing should be expected as a natural result of it. You know the rules. When the rules are clearly unfair, you should expect an avenue to pursue change.
Unfortunately, the "hard line" approach seems to be becoming a little more prevalent in western culture.
I found this Wikipedia article rather interesting.
That's an interesting article, thanks for posting that.
It seems it's not a logical progression of one level to the other though... think of the thief who steals to feed his family. Contravening level 4 (rule of law) to accomplish level 6 (or 5 perhaps).
And then again, does anything really get past levels 1 and 2? There's an argument that we don't do anything which isn't out of self-interest. Pursuing a natural desire for leadership and a desire to "do good" is just that - pursuing your personal desires.
If we did not have any psychological bias to be good or bad, then it would come down to a purely conscious choice, and you could really say someone is "good" because they're making a choice to do good when it makes no difference to them, psychologically, either way.
But I think we just label someone "moral", "good", "law-abiding", or the opposite, just because of how they behave - which follows from their own in-built inclinations to do so. But then I'm not convinced we have free will really either, so my view of morality follows from that.:)
Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."
That's exactly not what the article said. To summarise, it says, "any server setup has its flaws, but the advantages of Amazon to startups and the democratisation of the web is enough to be thankful for." And I'd agree.
Why does every American conversation about privacy turn into what to say when a cop pulls you over? Police paranoia, government paranoia. From out here, you're sounding more and more like the countries you've traditionally been so proud not to be like.
Eventually something new will come along and it will split up the same way as it is in 'real life' every one will find their own coffee shops or dives
I know what you're saying but you can't really compare FB to MySpace, though people tend to because they're both "social networks". But FB is much more than that now. On FB you can have your business page, conduct your advertising (I just set one up for a friend who runs a book cafe) with nothing more than your existing site and that ubiquitous "Like" button. You can inform friends of movie nights, your community group of new events (though Meetup does a slightly better job it costs, FB is free). Part of FB's strategy is to firmly embed itself as an invaluable addition to any web site, blog, etc.
MySpace wasn't this ubiquitous by a long shot. It may seem so in retrospect only because its tormented ghost is evoked in every discussion about FB. But it's a completely different animal. MySpace was all about you. FB seems that way but is really all about *connections* - between you and friends, you and your tastes, you and businesses, you and products, you and web sites. And it will keep trying to make more connections, like cancerous neurons. It's focus is networks more than identity as such. As far as FB is concerned, your total network *is* your identity.
As such, it has much more value to investors than MySpace ever did, with its traditional eyeballs and stickiness metrics. FB is beyond that, it's value is in the behaviours and actions of the bodies behind those eyeballs.
It's the Red Weed of the Martian invasion. Yes, it may come crashing down at the hand of the smallest of human considerations - fickleness - but I'm not so sure. I have a feeling their vision is of much wider scope than just a web site for social networking. I may be giving Zuckerberg too much credit, but I feel sure he's not one to think inside the box model, so to speak.
In fact, I's say there is ZERO requirement for ANY web developer to EVER support IE6 at this point. Anyone who says otherwise is making excuses or lying.
Anyone who makes sweeping statements without adequate information is either making excuses or lying.
I feel this way about the non-alpha-sorted autocomplete for login form fields in Firefox. And its unhookable open/save dialogs. The fork never happened though.
Thanks for explaining, that's very interesting, I never knew they had discovered preserved skin cells. No viable DNA so far I assume.:)
I'd taken exception to all the "walking with dinosaurs" tosh of the past few years, as they seemed to go overboard with anthropomorphising the critters to the point of interpretive dance. Their courting behaviours, particular sounds they could make - seemed so arbitrary and over the top I couldn't take it seriously. Nothing like the grey, serious dinosaurs of my youth, and in (the original) Journey to the Centre of the Earth. They should be grey, dammit.:)
So it's good to know there's at least some science behind the colours, if not their specific choices. However mean if one artist renders Kosmoceratops in blue, and another in red, people will feel, even more so than with climate change, that scientists just can't agree on anything! (I kid, I kid).
Since I bought my LCD TV, I used the "MotionFlow" (or whatever nickname they give it) once, then turned it off forever. MotionFlow interpolates frames, making films look too "smooth", like they were shot on video. For me, it totally ruins the feeling of watching a film.
Perhaps it's just conditioning from experience, and the next generation won't care. But I prefer my films to be slightly grainy, slightly imperfect. I prefer them to look like they were shot on film, with dedication to the medium, story and cinematography. Not preoccupation with pixels.
Same applies to games. Funny how the best games of all time never attempted to be graphically perfect.
I think Google is worried about not being able to lock people into their services. Just look at Apple's iOS, it goes hand in hand with the App Store, which is itself proving to be a minor revolution in delivering software. Apple may even (speculation here) licence iOS out to other device makers, simply to gain more share for its services. These days it seems device penetration isn't as important as service penetration. I'd say the device is secondary. The iPhone & iPad are "new and cool", but they're just delivery mechanisms for Apple services.
So I'd say Google is wanting to expand their services, and having an Android which can be customised to, say, exclude the Google App Store, or any other of their services, wouldn't be good.
So? Isn't the point of open source that other people can take it and modify it to try out ideas?
Yes but only if the end user has a *choice* of what to use. That's open and democratic. On the other hand, just look how Democracy itself turned out.:)
I just inherited a second hand 3G iPhone, jailbroke it, installed a bunch of apps and so on. And I still don't see why people rave about it so much. Same with the iPad. Sure, it's a new toy, it's futuristic, it's kind of like having a computer in your hand for the first time, and it "seems useful". But only before you've used one for a while.
My brother has an iPad and I fiddled around with it for a few days and came to the conclusion it wasn't that useful for much. He doesn't even use it much anymore.
The iPhone however serves as an iPod, camera and even a phone, so it's more practical. 99% of all those "apps" are just games. Apple is doing a good job keeping the novelty factor going (no camera flash on the 3G but the 4 has it, and compass.. what will the 5 have that the 4 doesn't, etc.) When people start to think seriously about these devices, the playing field will open up. But I don't think people are being that serious about it yet. It's still "new and cool", and Apple has a monopoly on new-and-cool right now. But it won't last.
But while they have it, Apple is doing a good job of locking people in and shoring up a superior position. But later they may licence out iOS to third party device makers, so gaining even more market share for their services like the app store. It's not the penetration of the physical device that matters in the end-game, it's penetration of services. Or so it seems these days.
That's interesting. But you'd think if were really necessary to be that big, then evolution would simply construct a better bone. The way birds have especially light, kind of honeycomb bones so they can fly more easily.
What I really want to know is how the f* do they know what colour skin dinosaurs have?! We've had the smurf-blue kosmoceratops, now this multi-coloured red thing. Is there any reasoning behind it, or just bored artists?
Now the current system is so terrible (because the incentives of the people who write the laws are very different from what average citizens want to get out of copyright law) [...] when you discuss copyright it's important to do so in these terms.
That's the only part that matters in the argument. Nobody, not even artists, have shown that artists are losing money (ie. missing out on real sales) because of file sharing.
The equivalent argument here in Australia is the hoo-ha about "boat people" (refugees invading our shores by boat). They're insignificant in number, don't do any harm to the economy or anything else, but it's a political hot potato nonetheless.
This is because the motivations of legislators are not the same as those of the people for whom they are legislating. Those days are long gone.
Isn't that a little insane? I was wondering why they built nuclear plants on the East coast in the first place, knowing that's where earthquakes and tsunamis originate.
Shouldn't they build more inland, toward the West?
Slashdot Mirror
I work in IT and I'd recommend not letting any child under say 13 use the internet *at all*, nevermind FB. The internet is basically an adult zone, not a child's toy.
Yes, it's educational, and I'm all for exposing kids to technology and big ideas and playgrounds where they might god forbid actually get a grazed knee.
The web is vast and cool, but the sites kids would gravitate towards would be full of assholes, idiots, predators and .. well, other stupid kids. Kids do need to be protected from each other, probably more than anything else.
I believe there's value in letting a child grow up being able to generally TRUST their environment, and interactions with others. The internet is essentially a no-trust zone. So unless a parent IS going to shoulder-surf, you'd be better off giving them the cable remote than free reign on the web.
The child has to be old enough to be able to discern, for themselves, between positive sites and social connections, and negative ones. Even a lot of adults have trouble with that.
So in my minds, the risks are to great at the moment. Not until they work out some way of being able to offer children's content as securely as a locked TV remote, where if they don't know the PIN, there's no way in hell they can get onto the pron channel, or all the brain-numbing crap out there that adults can generally view with a sense of perspective.
From TFA:
Quite why SPL size works this way is unclear, but Kanai speculates that it may be linked to that fact that as we mature, the brain's grey matter is pruned of neurons in order to work more efficiently.
If kids learn to harness attention properly, I assume pruning occurs in a way which makes it easier to do so in future. Conversely, with so many distracting demands on attention these days (entertainment, internet & devices), pruning may occur to make focussing much harder in future.
"Multitasking" is a great ability, and noticing the snap of a twig is a good survival skill. But over-emphasise it and we may end up with adults who can't focus enough for long-term tasks like research.
Worse, kids don't go into research because they prefer to do something more immediately gratifying. However this "conscious preference" really comes from how their brain grew up, so that focussing feels "too hard".
is the use of Light Sabres. Otherwise, it's just some random sci-fi genre game with pretty hairstyles and face paint.
While Star Trek and Dr Who retained/reclaimed their original appeal over many iterations, I find it very strange how Star Wars - at least as ubiquitous and seemingly immutable - so quickly and carelessly mutated into something completely unrecognisable and utterly unappealing to those who loved the original.
One of the great tragedies of modern film culture in my mind.
I have my comment point cutoff set to +5, and can't see the word "trousers" anywhere.
everyone else could pretty much walk hand in hand with a leper and never catch a thing.
And often the leper doesn't actually need to be present.
But hey, who cares if you have nothing to hide right?
It's a fuzzy line. One one hand, you don't people being judged as guilty of something by association, guilty-by-data as it were, without them actually having committed a crime.
On the other hand, you would prefer the police to catch a terrorist, based on their investigations, *before* he does anything.
I think we're busy, as a society, investigating what the overlap between the two really means, and it will probably take a long time to sort it out.
Facebook doesn't need you to post. Other people can fill in the blanks for them. You don't decide what information they release about you.
I disagree. I'm old-school, grew up with BBS, forums, and "journals" before they were called "blogs". Even on a BBS, you didn't reveal your own name, even though you could only really converse with other people on the same BBS who were in the same neighbourhood. Even in that relatively close-knit environment, nobody knew who you were unless you told them.
I was speechless when suddenly everyone started using their own *real name* on FB. That's a real paradigm shift on the net, which I rarely see discussed. Myself, I use a pseudonym on FB. Nobody knows who I really am, except for my few friends, all of whom *are* actual friends.
Nothing is stopping other people doing the same. Seeing the connections and likes of pseudonyms is still marketable data, but at least it's not your real identity out there in the public arena. That phenomenon still amazes me. I put it down to the inner exhibitionist in all of us. :)
It's about not giving some centralized entity an enormous power because they know everything about everyone. Such a huge power will be misused, sooner or later.
This is why I see it as so appalling how our own governments are proposing the notion that "if you've nothing to fear then you've nothing to hide". This is the same argument regimes like N.Korea, China, etc. use.
When a government legislates to shift a boundary as to what "something to hide" is, you don't want that to immediately imply "something to fear". Nobody should fear government, even a criminal. Ideally, a just punishment for a wrongdoing should be expected as a natural result of it. You know the rules. When the rules are clearly unfair, you should expect an avenue to pursue change.
Unfortunately, the "hard line" approach seems to be becoming a little more prevalent in western culture.
I found this Wikipedia article rather interesting.
That's an interesting article, thanks for posting that.
It seems it's not a logical progression of one level to the other though... think of the thief who steals to feed his family. Contravening level 4 (rule of law) to accomplish level 6 (or 5 perhaps).
And then again, does anything really get past levels 1 and 2? There's an argument that we don't do anything which isn't out of self-interest. Pursuing a natural desire for leadership and a desire to "do good" is just that - pursuing your personal desires.
If we did not have any psychological bias to be good or bad, then it would come down to a purely conscious choice, and you could really say someone is "good" because they're making a choice to do good when it makes no difference to them, psychologically, either way.
But I think we just label someone "moral", "good", "law-abiding", or the opposite, just because of how they behave - which follows from their own in-built inclinations to do so. But then I'm not convinced we have free will really either, so my view of morality follows from that. :)
Basicly it says "We went down, and took down lots of important stuff. That shows just how important we are and that lots of people use us. Thus, our cloud is a good thing."
That's exactly not what the article said. To summarise, it says, "any server setup has its flaws, but the advantages of Amazon to startups and the democratisation of the web is enough to be thankful for." And I'd agree.
Why does every American conversation about privacy turn into what to say when a cop pulls you over? Police paranoia, government paranoia. From out here, you're sounding more and more like the countries you've traditionally been so proud not to be like.
Eventually something new will come along and it will split up the same way as it is in 'real life' every one will find their own coffee shops or dives
I know what you're saying but you can't really compare FB to MySpace, though people tend to because they're both "social networks". But FB is much more than that now. On FB you can have your business page, conduct your advertising (I just set one up for a friend who runs a book cafe) with nothing more than your existing site and that ubiquitous "Like" button. You can inform friends of movie nights, your community group of new events (though Meetup does a slightly better job it costs, FB is free). Part of FB's strategy is to firmly embed itself as an invaluable addition to any web site, blog, etc.
MySpace wasn't this ubiquitous by a long shot. It may seem so in retrospect only because its tormented ghost is evoked in every discussion about FB. But it's a completely different animal. MySpace was all about you. FB seems that way but is really all about *connections* - between you and friends, you and your tastes, you and businesses, you and products, you and web sites. And it will keep trying to make more connections, like cancerous neurons. It's focus is networks more than identity as such. As far as FB is concerned, your total network *is* your identity.
As such, it has much more value to investors than MySpace ever did, with its traditional eyeballs and stickiness metrics. FB is beyond that, it's value is in the behaviours and actions of the bodies behind those eyeballs.
It's the Red Weed of the Martian invasion. Yes, it may come crashing down at the hand of the smallest of human considerations - fickleness - but I'm not so sure. I have a feeling their vision is of much wider scope than just a web site for social networking. I may be giving Zuckerberg too much credit, but I feel sure he's not one to think inside the box model, so to speak.
when parents set a bad example for the kids.
But dad, you wiretapped my phone, why can't I wiretap yours? What makes you better than me?
Kids. Always asking difficult questions.
In fact, I's say there is ZERO requirement for ANY web developer to EVER support IE6 at this point. Anyone who says otherwise is making excuses or lying.
Anyone who makes sweeping statements without adequate information is either making excuses or lying.
I feel this way about the non-alpha-sorted autocomplete for login form fields in Firefox. And its unhookable open/save dialogs. The fork never happened though.
Thanks for explaining, that's very interesting, I never knew they had discovered preserved skin cells. No viable DNA so far I assume. :)
I'd taken exception to all the "walking with dinosaurs" tosh of the past few years, as they seemed to go overboard with anthropomorphising the critters to the point of interpretive dance. Their courting behaviours, particular sounds they could make - seemed so arbitrary and over the top I couldn't take it seriously. Nothing like the grey, serious dinosaurs of my youth, and in (the original) Journey to the Centre of the Earth. They should be grey, dammit. :)
So it's good to know there's at least some science behind the colours, if not their specific choices. However mean if one artist renders Kosmoceratops in blue, and another in red, people will feel, even more so than with climate change, that scientists just can't agree on anything! (I kid, I kid).
Since I bought my LCD TV, I used the "MotionFlow" (or whatever nickname they give it) once, then turned it off forever. MotionFlow interpolates frames, making films look too "smooth", like they were shot on video. For me, it totally ruins the feeling of watching a film.
Perhaps it's just conditioning from experience, and the next generation won't care. But I prefer my films to be slightly grainy, slightly imperfect. I prefer them to look like they were shot on film, with dedication to the medium, story and cinematography. Not preoccupation with pixels.
Same applies to games. Funny how the best games of all time never attempted to be graphically perfect.
I think Google is worried about not being able to lock people into their services. Just look at Apple's iOS, it goes hand in hand with the App Store, which is itself proving to be a minor revolution in delivering software. Apple may even (speculation here) licence iOS out to other device makers, simply to gain more share for its services. These days it seems device penetration isn't as important as service penetration. I'd say the device is secondary. The iPhone & iPad are "new and cool", but they're just delivery mechanisms for Apple services.
So I'd say Google is wanting to expand their services, and having an Android which can be customised to, say, exclude the Google App Store, or any other of their services, wouldn't be good.
This is a services war, methinks.
So? Isn't the point of open source that other people can take it and modify it to try out ideas?
Yes but only if the end user has a *choice* of what to use. That's open and democratic. On the other hand, just look how Democracy itself turned out. :)
I just inherited a second hand 3G iPhone, jailbroke it, installed a bunch of apps and so on. And I still don't see why people rave about it so much. Same with the iPad. Sure, it's a new toy, it's futuristic, it's kind of like having a computer in your hand for the first time, and it "seems useful". But only before you've used one for a while.
My brother has an iPad and I fiddled around with it for a few days and came to the conclusion it wasn't that useful for much. He doesn't even use it much anymore.
The iPhone however serves as an iPod, camera and even a phone, so it's more practical. 99% of all those "apps" are just games. Apple is doing a good job keeping the novelty factor going (no camera flash on the 3G but the 4 has it, and compass.. what will the 5 have that the 4 doesn't, etc.) When people start to think seriously about these devices, the playing field will open up. But I don't think people are being that serious about it yet. It's still "new and cool", and Apple has a monopoly on new-and-cool right now. But it won't last.
But while they have it, Apple is doing a good job of locking people in and shoring up a superior position. But later they may licence out iOS to third party device makers, so gaining even more market share for their services like the app store. It's not the penetration of the physical device that matters in the end-game, it's penetration of services. Or so it seems these days.
That's interesting. But you'd think if were really necessary to be that big, then evolution would simply construct a better bone. The way birds have especially light, kind of honeycomb bones so they can fly more easily.
What I really want to know is how the f* do they know what colour skin dinosaurs have?! We've had the smurf-blue kosmoceratops, now this multi-coloured red thing. Is there any reasoning behind it, or just bored artists?
Now the current system is so terrible (because the incentives of the people who write the laws are very different from what average citizens want to get out of copyright law) [...] when you discuss copyright it's important to do so in these terms.
That's the only part that matters in the argument. Nobody, not even artists, have shown that artists are losing money (ie. missing out on real sales) because of file sharing.
The equivalent argument here in Australia is the hoo-ha about "boat people" (refugees invading our shores by boat). They're insignificant in number, don't do any harm to the economy or anything else, but it's a political hot potato nonetheless.
This is because the motivations of legislators are not the same as those of the people for whom they are legislating. Those days are long gone.
But that would. Leave. No room. For talk like. Christopher Walken Day.
build a nice new ABWR on top of the old site
Isn't that a little insane? I was wondering why they built nuclear plants on the East coast in the first place, knowing that's where earthquakes and tsunamis originate.
Shouldn't they build more inland, toward the West?
Isn't an anti-trust probe what they accused Julian Assange of?