There is a fourth solution. Google Fibre [google.com] spreads across more of America (the rest of Kansas is next on the cards), and either takes over completely, or forces the others to play catch up. Kinda like what Gmail did for email.
To play devil's advocate here, do you really think that Google Fiber won't take advantage of their presence on all those nodes to deliver YouTube performance that cannot feasibly be rivaled by anybody else? Pragmatically speaking, then, Google Fiber taking over is the same as #1 on my list, just with a different telecom who happens to also be trying to weasel their way into being a big media conglomerate. You still end up with big media and a ghetto where everybody else lives. The only difference is that Google ends up being the gatekeeper over who lives in the ghetto instead of Comcast. Is that better? Maybe, maybe not.
There are two solutions, both of which are obvious. The first, which is the solution the telecoms want to choose, is to charge content providers for providing content at reasonable speeds. This, of course, leads to a two-tier Internet, i.e. the big media conglomerates and the independent ghetto. The second is to pass laws that ban download limits for all wired service providers.
At this point, those are the only two options. Well, no, there's a third. We could build up a government-run infrastructure. But I'm not holding my breath.
Exploding a bomb in a queue kills four or five, seriously injures the same number.
Only if it is a very small bomb.
Blowing up an airliner in the air kills hundreds, splashes bent metal across the countryside, and dominates the news for days.
Only if it is a very large bomb.
See the problem with that logic? A bomb big enough to actually take down a plane—not just rip a hole in the side—planes have landed safely with large chunks of their cabin wall missing (e.g. Aloha Airlines Flight 243)—is a sizable bomb that would probably kill more than a handful of people in a dense security queue area. In fact, the number of deaths could probably be comparable if the terrorist timed it right. Besides, if you're a lone terrorist, the limiting factor is that, as a passenger, after you carry a single bomb onto a single plane, you're not getting on another plane (unless they fly your remains home for burial). However, that limitation does not apply until you step through the gate....
A simple metal detector is sufficient (or at least nearly sufficient) to mitigate the threat to actual planes posed by materials on the terrorist's person. Anything that can be remotely triggered should contain enough metal to set those off. Anything that isn't would require the terrorist to light his or her shoe on fire without getting jumped or setting off the lavatory smoke detectors first. (Okay, that last part is a nonzero risk, but assuming the devices being discussed in this article work reasonably well, that threat can be gone as quickly as you can ban matches and butane lighters and configure the machines to detect them. Remember, kids, if you smoke, you're making it harder to catch terrorists.)
The one remaining threat I can think of could be solved by not allowing anyone to carry bags into restrooms at airports or lavatories on airplanes. This would require some free, short-term lockers to be added and staff to monitor things, but it would not only improve security, but also the overall experience of being in a tiny stall with a couple of large bags.... Ironically, the TSA insisted on eliminating lockers to "improve" security.... But I digress.
Then again, sometimes, I wonder if the only reason for the passenger screening is to delay passengers long enough that their luggage can be properly inspected....
The FCC thru its regulatory capture has given us the.slowest most expensive Internet connections possible.
Citation needed. From what I've seen, the reason we have expensive Internet service is because it is being provided by corporations who do not compete and, because of high overhead of moving into an area (which has little to do with the FCC), cannot effectively compete.
There's only one way to make Internet dramatically cheaper, and it requires the government to build the infrastructure and turn it over to a nonprofit corporation instead of a for-profit corporation as they did with the phone system. The mistakes that led to our expensive Internet service began in the late 1800s.
At least in WebKit-based browsers, that only works up to a point. Beyond a certain point, you can't zoom further without editing the page CSS because the column width extends past the edge of the window.
I've been trying to order the Lightroom 4 upgrade all weekend, and their servers keep failing to accept the order at the very last step, either after accepting credit card information or after PayPal has processed the payment, depending on which payment method I choose. These may be isolated incidents, but the timing of these server failures is disconcerting, at the very least.
As I understand it, basically, yes, so long as all you start with is the shape of the font at some size and not the specific set of points that define the lines and curves. You'll also have to choose all the kerning, tracking, and leading values, though, so it isn't quite as trivial as you seem to be suggesting. That said, some tools such as Fontographer can do a halfway decent job of guessing those values....
If you ask me, just owning a phone with a "spam everyone in my addressbook" button should be a crime....
:-D
But seriously, no, this is a pretty disturbing example of what happens when we let lawmakers get overzealous in their attempt to "get tough on crime". They invariably create laws with unintended and far-reaching side effects, somebody gets caught up in it accidentally, and maybe they patch the law, maybe they don't, but either way, society fails to learn the lesson and continues to come up with knee-jerk reactionary laws instead of taking the time to think through them before they or their representatives sign them into law in the first place.
That's what's so sad about this—not that this guy got screwed by the law, but that the lawmakers couldn't see the harm in passing child protection laws (or any laws, for that matter) that don't require mens rea. Strict liability laws are almost invariably bad laws.
The fact that the media were also critical of hypocrites who attacked people for doing the same thing that they themselves were doing does not negate the fact that the media were critical of Clinton and made minor celebrities out of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky, often going into detail that was downright disgusting and inappropriate for younger viewers in an almost "if it bleeds, it leads" sort of way, rather like sharks circling an injured sea lion. The fact is that the media made a big deal out of what should have been a private matter between the President and his wife. The Republicans certainly fanned the flames, but the media were quite complicit. If that's being "in the administration's pocket", I'd hate to think what a truly independent media would have done. I mean, they'd have had a hard time creating more negative press for Clinton short of airing a sex tape during prime time.
I also remember the rather unflattering media coverage of Whitewater, somewhat excessive coverage of Bill Clinton's brother, and (back in the Reagan years) extended coverage of Iran Contra. None of those stories were flattering to the sitting President at the time. And Watergate? The news media basically ran Nixon out of town on a rail. Don't give me that "It has always been this way" crap. Things have backslid pretty severely as of late. We can argue about the time scale, but the media is definitely a much less effective watchdog today than it was thirty or forty years ago.
Honestly, a big part of the blame rests on highly partisan news outlets like Fox News. By presenting such severely biased reporting as news, they have almost single-handedly undermined the credibility of news reporting. By convincing such a large number of people that their skewed reality is truth, it doesn't matter how many other news outlets give truly balanced reporting—a significant chunk of the population will continue to believe that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. or other outright fabrications.
And the end result of their skew was that the other side had to come up with a counter-skew, a.k.a. MSNBC, that skews the news firmly in the opposite direction. So now we have a big chunk of people getting their news from an outlet skewed way to the left and another getting their news from an outlet skewed way to the right, and everybody else trying to achieve balance—not by calling both sides on their lies and praising them for their truths, but by presenting both sides' lies as though they were equally valid truths. And in the end, you're left with Comedy Central being one of the most unbiased sources of news because they're the only ones who aren't afraid to editorialize and call politicians on the utter bulls**t that comes out of their mouths.
No, news coverage of politics is much, much worse than it was in the 80s and 90s. What we have now is just a pale shadow of what we used to have.
Even people doing graphics and audio manipulation mostly just use APIs written by other people who do the hardcore math for them. If I want to perform an FFT and use the resulting data set, I don't need to know how an FFT is computed; I just call a function in an FFT library. If I want to render a 3D scene, unless I'm actually writing software for use in some specialized field, chances are I'm just going to throw a spline model at OpenGL and tell it to wrap a texture around it. I don't need to know the math of bilinear interpolation to use it. I just need to know how to set the interpolation mode for the vertex in question. And so on.
I'm guessing that probably no more than one or two percent of programmers will do any significant amount of algebra or calculus or trig during their careers, and that most of the people who do either write low-level graphics or audio code, work for NASA or the aerospace industry, or work in a handful of other highly specialized fields where exacting precision is required. The vast majority of computer programmers will never need to use math above a middle school level, even though much of the software they write will do so routinely. And this is the beauty of code reuse. It means that I can do higher-order math without having to crack open a textbook and remember how all that stuff works, because somebody else already did the heavy lifting.:-)
In all seriousness, though, even working in software, I can count the number of times I've used algebra on one hand... maybe two hands if I count in unary. That said, I still think that it is good to understand higher-order math, if only because every once in a while, I do need it, and not knowing it would require a lot more work.
The media is a joke, they are in the admins back pocket, and they have been forever.
No, not forever. George W. Bush started that trend. Before that, the media were remarkably critical of the administration. Remember the whole Monica Lewinsky thing?
That all changed the day Bush Jr. got into office. He seriously curtailed the White House press corps, punishing people who asked tough questions by pushing them to the back row, threatening to remove media outlets entirely if they were too critical of the administration, etc. Since then, if Helen Thomas's comments are any indication, Obama has only cranked up the abuse a notch further.
It won't end until the public demands an apolitical regulatory body to oversee membership in the press corps and enforce fairness during press briefings.
No idea about the original quote, but "close to" is the only wording that even halfway makes sense. The word "near" refers exclusively to physical proximity. To be correct English, you would have to describe beer as nearly water, which would not make sense in the canoe case, because "nearly" can only mean "almost". By contrast, "close to" can refer to either physical proximity or numerical proximity (similarity).
Computationally speaking, device-level encryption is probably sufficient, assuming there aren't any serious flaws found in AES-128. The weakness, if any exists, is in the choice of passphrase, and that won't be helped by adding more encryption tied to the same passphrase....
Imagine if you picked up the local phone directory, and instead of what it has now, it listed names such as FantasyFairy337, OMGCATS88 and cutiecupcakes264. They are still real accounts, and calling the number will connect you with a living breathing person but what would your opinion of the utility of the phone directory be?
About the same as it is now. My employer's phone directory has my number, so if anybody from work needs to reach me, they can. If anybody else needs my number, they can bloody well ask me for it. Likewise, if I need to know somebody's number, I'll ask for it. Otherwise, my number is unlisted, and a lot of folks I know have unlisted numbers as well. Heck, half the folks I know don't even have a home phone, which makes phone books pretty close to completely useless.
I haven't looked up anybody's number in a phone book since I was... oh, single-digit years of age... back in the days when a cellular phone had a car battery attached and, generally speaking, a car attached as well. The notion of being able to trust everyone in town with your phone number is an anachronism from times gone by decades ago, in much the same way that being able to trust any random person to see your real name when they see you posting with your Facebook user on some random message board is an anachronism left over from the early days of the Internet, back before all the stalkers, crazies, and AOLers got on.:-D
BTW, get off my lawn.:-D
But in all seriousness, it's not that I don't trust Facebook to have my real name. It's that I don't trust the world to have my real name, and a lot of sites try to force you to use Facebook to authenticate yourself. The more sites I encounter that use Facebook for their authentication scheme, the less inclined I am to use my real name on Facebook. The more people make that call, the less practical it becomes to find people on Facebook, but then again, if you really want to know my Facebook handle, you could always ask me. In other words, no different than my phone number.
What Facebook really needs to do is to acknowledge that there's a privacy concern, and to allow people to set a fake screen name that will be seen by anyone who isn't on their friends list, or friends of friends, or whatever their privacy setting says. Oh, and to make it possible to provide that bogus information to app developers instead of your real info as well, for precisely the same reason.
I don't even mind people being able to look me up by my real name if they know it. I just want to be able to have a clear delineation between my online persona and my Facebook life or, to put it another way, plausible deniability.:-)
Unfortunately Facebook is a private company and they own the servers, so they get to dictate what data is and is not allowed.
Nobody said otherwise. What I said was any justification is almost guaranteed to be something that most people would find unacceptable. Sure, users' only real recourse is to switch services, but that can happen; just ask Myspace.
Well, I think what they're trying to quash is the flood of yahoos who have nothing but a notion... that "1% inspiration" which is also clogging up our patent system with stuff like "A car that runs on farts" without any technical development to actually make it actually exist.
That's largely a temporary problem. Over time, the folks with a reputation for getting stuff done will have projects to their name, and those who don't will work with people who do. And just providing bios of the people involved goes a long way towards weeding out people who have no prayer of making the product in question.
Now, if we're unlucky, nobody will bother going to those lengths, and we'll be left with dumb quickie shit like "So, I changed a so that it's also a bottle-opener"
And that's the core of the problem. There are two types of projects: projects that are trivial and projects that require a lot of work just to get to the stage of having an early prototype of a few bits of the functionality. Trivial projects aren't worth funding. Nontrivial projects usually require significant capital just to get started.
The sole exceptions I can think of are those projects where you can get an ugly (but working) prototype through software alone, and where most of the expense falls into the "make it look pretty" category—building enclosures or whatever. However, for those projects, without pictures of the prototypes, you can't tell whether the person designing it has any design sense whatsoever. If they do, they should be able to show design concepts. If they don't, then the project is already effectively complete to the maximum extent of the current creators' abilities, and injecting additional funds probably won't help unless they know a good designer, and if they do, then they should have design concepts. Either way, they should have design concepts.
Instead, now people will have to demonstrate that they possess some important skill necessary in making it work and, thus, they are uniquely deserving of financial backing. So, what kind of demos will we now see from Kickstarter? Hopefully, it will be stuff where the dude has wires and cords all over his workbench... "So, I wired this cellphone into this Arduino... and that's sending signals to the RaspberryPi, and here's this ugly HTML interface I wrote so that I can now have my cellphone detect when I wake up and it starts the car and warms it up for me without me having to do a thing. So, as you can see, it works. Now, I just need a hardware guy to make this into a gadget about the size of a pack of cigarettes and an HTML ninja to make the web interface all slick.
I would expect at least a basic proof-of-concept even if they do have a pretty design mock-up. The point is that if I don't get to see *both*, I'm not interested in your project. If you don't have enough design sense to have some idea what your finished UI will look like, then I have no faith in being able to adapt your code to support a reasonable UI without throwing it out and rewriting it. If you don't have enough design sense to know what the physical product will look like, then I also have no reason to assume that you've even begun to consider how your product will be used, which means that it could very easily be a useless product, or it could require a complete redesign from the ground up to become usable. And so on.
A rendering (or at least a very high quality design drawing) is necessary, but not sufficient. It is the hook that gets people's attention. And a rendering does a better job of that than a design drawing because it shows that you have already put a great deal of thought into one important aspect of the product. From there, you have to convince me that the project is interesting, that you've thought through other, non-design aspects of the product, that you are capable of pulling the project off, etc.
Has this friend ever sent you any revealing pictures?
Eww. No.
How much do you think this friend spends on entertainment? clothes? shoes? online services?
Don't know. Ask him/her yourself.
Please estimate the odds that this so-called friend might be a terrorist?
About the same as the general population, give or take.
If you had to describe this friend to Facebook and the DHS, which of the following descriptions would you use: creative? avant-garde? obedient? disruptive?
Leftist and litigious.
I think that's where the conversation would end abruptly.
Slashdot Mirror
Flip-up panels. If something goes wrong, you reach over, flip it up out of the way, and you have your windows back.
Nice strawman. Murder or attempted murder requires mens rea. Most people who do this are not trying to kill anyone. They're just being idiots.
Reckless endangerment, sure. Attempted murder? Good luck getting that to stick. You'd be laughed out of court.
To play devil's advocate here, do you really think that Google Fiber won't take advantage of their presence on all those nodes to deliver YouTube performance that cannot feasibly be rivaled by anybody else? Pragmatically speaking, then, Google Fiber taking over is the same as #1 on my list, just with a different telecom who happens to also be trying to weasel their way into being a big media conglomerate. You still end up with big media and a ghetto where everybody else lives. The only difference is that Google ends up being the gatekeeper over who lives in the ghetto instead of Comcast. Is that better? Maybe, maybe not.
Likewise. I moved to Sprint because of AT&T's redefinition of unlimited. That said, I doubt enough people will do this to actually effect change.
There are two solutions, both of which are obvious. The first, which is the solution the telecoms want to choose, is to charge content providers for providing content at reasonable speeds. This, of course, leads to a two-tier Internet, i.e. the big media conglomerates and the independent ghetto. The second is to pass laws that ban download limits for all wired service providers.
At this point, those are the only two options. Well, no, there's a third. We could build up a government-run infrastructure. But I'm not holding my breath.
Only if it is a very small bomb.
Only if it is a very large bomb.
See the problem with that logic? A bomb big enough to actually take down a plane—not just rip a hole in the side—planes have landed safely with large chunks of their cabin wall missing (e.g. Aloha Airlines Flight 243)—is a sizable bomb that would probably kill more than a handful of people in a dense security queue area. In fact, the number of deaths could probably be comparable if the terrorist timed it right. Besides, if you're a lone terrorist, the limiting factor is that, as a passenger, after you carry a single bomb onto a single plane, you're not getting on another plane (unless they fly your remains home for burial). However, that limitation does not apply until you step through the gate....
A simple metal detector is sufficient (or at least nearly sufficient) to mitigate the threat to actual planes posed by materials on the terrorist's person. Anything that can be remotely triggered should contain enough metal to set those off. Anything that isn't would require the terrorist to light his or her shoe on fire without getting jumped or setting off the lavatory smoke detectors first. (Okay, that last part is a nonzero risk, but assuming the devices being discussed in this article work reasonably well, that threat can be gone as quickly as you can ban matches and butane lighters and configure the machines to detect them. Remember, kids, if you smoke, you're making it harder to catch terrorists.)
The one remaining threat I can think of could be solved by not allowing anyone to carry bags into restrooms at airports or lavatories on airplanes. This would require some free, short-term lockers to be added and staff to monitor things, but it would not only improve security, but also the overall experience of being in a tiny stall with a couple of large bags.... Ironically, the TSA insisted on eliminating lockers to "improve" security.... But I digress.
Then again, sometimes, I wonder if the only reason for the passenger screening is to delay passengers long enough that their luggage can be properly inspected....
For devices that lack a proper device tree, that's what a config file is for. None of that should be hard-coded into the kernel binary or the source.
Citation needed. From what I've seen, the reason we have expensive Internet service is because it is being provided by corporations who do not compete and, because of high overhead of moving into an area (which has little to do with the FCC), cannot effectively compete.
There's only one way to make Internet dramatically cheaper, and it requires the government to build the infrastructure and turn it over to a nonprofit corporation instead of a for-profit corporation as they did with the phone system. The mistakes that led to our expensive Internet service began in the late 1800s.
Insanity. You know, doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results.
At least in WebKit-based browsers, that only works up to a point. Beyond a certain point, you can't zoom further without editing the page CSS because the column width extends past the edge of the window.
I've been trying to order the Lightroom 4 upgrade all weekend, and their servers keep failing to accept the order at the very last step, either after accepting credit card information or after PayPal has processed the payment, depending on which payment method I choose. These may be isolated incidents, but the timing of these server failures is disconcerting, at the very least.
As I understand it, basically, yes, so long as all you start with is the shape of the font at some size and not the specific set of points that define the lines and curves. You'll also have to choose all the kerning, tracking, and leading values, though, so it isn't quite as trivial as you seem to be suggesting. That said, some tools such as Fontographer can do a halfway decent job of guessing those values....
The last time I saw a web page with a narrow enough column width that I could read a line at a time was... well, do you remember Netscape Mosaic?
If you ask me, just owning a phone with a "spam everyone in my addressbook" button should be a crime....
:-D
But seriously, no, this is a pretty disturbing example of what happens when we let lawmakers get overzealous in their attempt to "get tough on crime". They invariably create laws with unintended and far-reaching side effects, somebody gets caught up in it accidentally, and maybe they patch the law, maybe they don't, but either way, society fails to learn the lesson and continues to come up with knee-jerk reactionary laws instead of taking the time to think through them before they or their representatives sign them into law in the first place.
That's what's so sad about this—not that this guy got screwed by the law, but that the lawmakers couldn't see the harm in passing child protection laws (or any laws, for that matter) that don't require mens rea. Strict liability laws are almost invariably bad laws.
Multi-touch trackpad, perhaps?
The fact that the media were also critical of hypocrites who attacked people for doing the same thing that they themselves were doing does not negate the fact that the media were critical of Clinton and made minor celebrities out of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky, often going into detail that was downright disgusting and inappropriate for younger viewers in an almost "if it bleeds, it leads" sort of way, rather like sharks circling an injured sea lion. The fact is that the media made a big deal out of what should have been a private matter between the President and his wife. The Republicans certainly fanned the flames, but the media were quite complicit. If that's being "in the administration's pocket", I'd hate to think what a truly independent media would have done. I mean, they'd have had a hard time creating more negative press for Clinton short of airing a sex tape during prime time.
I also remember the rather unflattering media coverage of Whitewater, somewhat excessive coverage of Bill Clinton's brother, and (back in the Reagan years) extended coverage of Iran Contra. None of those stories were flattering to the sitting President at the time. And Watergate? The news media basically ran Nixon out of town on a rail. Don't give me that "It has always been this way" crap. Things have backslid pretty severely as of late. We can argue about the time scale, but the media is definitely a much less effective watchdog today than it was thirty or forty years ago.
Honestly, a big part of the blame rests on highly partisan news outlets like Fox News. By presenting such severely biased reporting as news, they have almost single-handedly undermined the credibility of news reporting. By convincing such a large number of people that their skewed reality is truth, it doesn't matter how many other news outlets give truly balanced reporting—a significant chunk of the population will continue to believe that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. or other outright fabrications.
And the end result of their skew was that the other side had to come up with a counter-skew, a.k.a. MSNBC, that skews the news firmly in the opposite direction. So now we have a big chunk of people getting their news from an outlet skewed way to the left and another getting their news from an outlet skewed way to the right, and everybody else trying to achieve balance—not by calling both sides on their lies and praising them for their truths, but by presenting both sides' lies as though they were equally valid truths. And in the end, you're left with Comedy Central being one of the most unbiased sources of news because they're the only ones who aren't afraid to editorialize and call politicians on the utter bulls**t that comes out of their mouths.
No, news coverage of politics is much, much worse than it was in the 80s and 90s. What we have now is just a pale shadow of what we used to have.
Even people doing graphics and audio manipulation mostly just use APIs written by other people who do the hardcore math for them. If I want to perform an FFT and use the resulting data set, I don't need to know how an FFT is computed; I just call a function in an FFT library. If I want to render a 3D scene, unless I'm actually writing software for use in some specialized field, chances are I'm just going to throw a spline model at OpenGL and tell it to wrap a texture around it. I don't need to know the math of bilinear interpolation to use it. I just need to know how to set the interpolation mode for the vertex in question. And so on.
I'm guessing that probably no more than one or two percent of programmers will do any significant amount of algebra or calculus or trig during their careers, and that most of the people who do either write low-level graphics or audio code, work for NASA or the aerospace industry, or work in a handful of other highly specialized fields where exacting precision is required. The vast majority of computer programmers will never need to use math above a middle school level, even though much of the software they write will do so routinely. And this is the beauty of code reuse. It means that I can do higher-order math without having to crack open a textbook and remember how all that stuff works, because somebody else already did the heavy lifting. :-)
How beauteous mankind is!
In all seriousness, though, even working in software, I can count the number of times I've used algebra on one hand... maybe two hands if I count in unary. That said, I still think that it is good to understand higher-order math, if only because every once in a while, I do need it, and not knowing it would require a lot more work.
No, not forever. George W. Bush started that trend. Before that, the media were remarkably critical of the administration. Remember the whole Monica Lewinsky thing?
That all changed the day Bush Jr. got into office. He seriously curtailed the White House press corps, punishing people who asked tough questions by pushing them to the back row, threatening to remove media outlets entirely if they were too critical of the administration, etc. Since then, if Helen Thomas's comments are any indication, Obama has only cranked up the abuse a notch further.
It won't end until the public demands an apolitical regulatory body to oversee membership in the press corps and enforce fairness during press briefings.
No idea about the original quote, but "close to" is the only wording that even halfway makes sense. The word "near" refers exclusively to physical proximity. To be correct English, you would have to describe beer as nearly water, which would not make sense in the canoe case, because "nearly" can only mean "almost". By contrast, "close to" can refer to either physical proximity or numerical proximity (similarity).
Computationally speaking, device-level encryption is probably sufficient, assuming there aren't any serious flaws found in AES-128. The weakness, if any exists, is in the choice of passphrase, and that won't be helped by adding more encryption tied to the same passphrase....
About the same as it is now. My employer's phone directory has my number, so if anybody from work needs to reach me, they can. If anybody else needs my number, they can bloody well ask me for it. Likewise, if I need to know somebody's number, I'll ask for it. Otherwise, my number is unlisted, and a lot of folks I know have unlisted numbers as well. Heck, half the folks I know don't even have a home phone, which makes phone books pretty close to completely useless.
I haven't looked up anybody's number in a phone book since I was... oh, single-digit years of age... back in the days when a cellular phone had a car battery attached and, generally speaking, a car attached as well. The notion of being able to trust everyone in town with your phone number is an anachronism from times gone by decades ago, in much the same way that being able to trust any random person to see your real name when they see you posting with your Facebook user on some random message board is an anachronism left over from the early days of the Internet, back before all the stalkers, crazies, and AOLers got on. :-D
BTW, get off my lawn. :-D
But in all seriousness, it's not that I don't trust Facebook to have my real name. It's that I don't trust the world to have my real name, and a lot of sites try to force you to use Facebook to authenticate yourself. The more sites I encounter that use Facebook for their authentication scheme, the less inclined I am to use my real name on Facebook. The more people make that call, the less practical it becomes to find people on Facebook, but then again, if you really want to know my Facebook handle, you could always ask me. In other words, no different than my phone number.
What Facebook really needs to do is to acknowledge that there's a privacy concern, and to allow people to set a fake screen name that will be seen by anyone who isn't on their friends list, or friends of friends, or whatever their privacy setting says. Oh, and to make it possible to provide that bogus information to app developers instead of your real info as well, for precisely the same reason.
I don't even mind people being able to look me up by my real name if they know it. I just want to be able to have a clear delineation between my online persona and my Facebook life or, to put it another way, plausible deniability. :-)
Nobody said otherwise. What I said was any justification is almost guaranteed to be something that most people would find unacceptable. Sure, users' only real recourse is to switch services, but that can happen; just ask Myspace.
That's largely a temporary problem. Over time, the folks with a reputation for getting stuff done will have projects to their name, and those who don't will work with people who do. And just providing bios of the people involved goes a long way towards weeding out people who have no prayer of making the product in question.
And that's the core of the problem. There are two types of projects: projects that are trivial and projects that require a lot of work just to get to the stage of having an early prototype of a few bits of the functionality. Trivial projects aren't worth funding. Nontrivial projects usually require significant capital just to get started.
The sole exceptions I can think of are those projects where you can get an ugly (but working) prototype through software alone, and where most of the expense falls into the "make it look pretty" category—building enclosures or whatever. However, for those projects, without pictures of the prototypes, you can't tell whether the person designing it has any design sense whatsoever. If they do, they should be able to show design concepts. If they don't, then the project is already effectively complete to the maximum extent of the current creators' abilities, and injecting additional funds probably won't help unless they know a good designer, and if they do, then they should have design concepts. Either way, they should have design concepts.
I would expect at least a basic proof-of-concept even if they do have a pretty design mock-up. The point is that if I don't get to see *both*, I'm not interested in your project. If you don't have enough design sense to have some idea what your finished UI will look like, then I have no faith in being able to adapt your code to support a reasonable UI without throwing it out and rewriting it. If you don't have enough design sense to know what the physical product will look like, then I also have no reason to assume that you've even begun to consider how your product will be used, which means that it could very easily be a useless product, or it could require a complete redesign from the ground up to become usable. And so on.
A rendering (or at least a very high quality design drawing) is necessary, but not sufficient. It is the hook that gets people's attention. And a rendering does a better job of that than a design drawing because it shows that you have already put a great deal of thought into one important aspect of the product. From there, you have to convince me that the project is interesting, that you've thought through other, non-design aspects of the product, that you are capable of pulling the project off, etc.
Then again, right now, I'm funding too
No
No
Eww. No.
Don't know. Ask him/her yourself.
About the same as the general population, give or take.
Leftist and litigious.
I think that's where the conversation would end abruptly.