It's too early to tell if the events in Tunisia will produce a wave of liberation. But it does call to mind the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. This could turn out to be the Arab world's Berlin Wall, then if it spreads to non-Arab countries like Pakistan, the Muslim world's as well.
There are a number of parallels. For example, pop historians like to point to the Berlin Wall as the event that triggered the end of communism in Eastern Europe. But there were lots of false starts that go back further, at least, say, to the protest movement spearhead by Solidarity in Poland, or maybe even further back to the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, in the late 1960s. The latter was brutally suppressed by the Soviets and their allies.
Could the present events have been inspired by the earlier events in Iran after the hotly contested elections in that theocratic country? Expect any event remotely similar to the Fall of the Wall to usher in a period of instability in the Arab world, something that extremists could exploit to install psychotic regimes worse than the despots they replaced/displaced.
Who knows, maybe Obama could be this generation's Reagan when the late Republican president issued his famous challenge to his Soviet counterpart: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Semantic nazi here. You used the word "book" in two different senses in your post: (1) books as something you read whatever the medium (e.g. when Amazon "sells a huge base of books" whether "print or electronic) and (2) books as something you treasure as an artifact, whether you read it or not (e.g. coffee-table books).
As for me, I belong to the first category. People who bewail the demise of the individually bound physical book should remember that the "book" was itself a replacement for older forms of reading media, which included the scroll and the clay tablet.
I draw the line however at multimedia apps that resemble a newspaper from the Harry Potter universe. We should differentiate between the act of largely decoding symbols and that of viewing moving images. The first I would call reading, the latter pornography.
When I click on a comment, I'm brought to a page with a Gear, a Magnifying Glass, and a comment count. How do I make the comment (that I want to comment on) appear so I can see the comment in context? I suspect the goal of the redesign is toward a cleaner, more Google-y appearance. But this comes at the expense of requiring more clicks just to view a low-ranked (low-modded) comment and reply.
Now what was that famous quotation again about clean desktops and the mental states of their owners?
The People's Republic of China has lots of blogs, cell phones, and bogus brand blue jeans (I don't know about the Bruce Springsteen part). Does the PROC symbolize a win for American ideals?
Maybe you should qualify your enthusiasm for consumerist democracy. Here's a little thought experiment. Imagine a state where all your creature comforts are taken care of: from food to housing to health care to porn. Would you bother protesting you don't have the right to select the Great Leader?
The link to the SOTU site is actually embedded in the Fine Article. Here it is in its naked glory:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2011
As I'm running Gnash under Chromium, all I see ATM is a static web page with a black rectangle in the middle, topped by two tabs labeled "Enhanced" and "Standard". The view defaults to "Enhanced", but clicking on "Standard" does nothing (so I presume the tabs are really static place holders for the Flash-based interface). Below the rectangle are some information boxes, including a download button for users of a certain Flash-challenged gadget.
Only if it's part of a horde of a billion butterflies.
Those who blame Wikileaks for being irresponsible, even criminal, for their release of supposedly confidential information should look at the way social networks and other sites and Internet services facilitate activities that could lead to people getting injured or even killed. If Wikileaks deserved to be banned, then so should Facebook and Twitter, for these sites would, arguably, be doing harm by making it easier for the stain of information to spread.
Because A.C. Clarke said so;) In Songs of Distant Earth, the advanced space-faring humans (as against the native humans of the ocean planet Thalassa) haul water from the world ocean by freezing a few cubic meters of it at a time and then pulling the blocks of ice up.
The difference between hauling up ice cubes and siphoning water is the difference between using a bucket to fetch water for your small camp (a digital activity that can be measured by the number of trips to and from the camp) and diverting a river to bring water to a whole town (a continuous and thereby analog activity). Siphoning water may be more efficient in the long haul, but initially more expensive and even more daunting than building an already technically challenging beanstalk to the sky. Just think of the excess mass that would be added to the elevator complex by the pipe and the water flowing through it.
Intel's Asus Eee PC Atom platform was a direct reaction to OLPC's hype...
It might not be your intention. But by prefixing EeePC with the possessive (Intel's), you make it sound as if Intel was the primary mover behind the introduction of the EeePC. Intel had its own take on the OLPC. This was the Classmate PC, described thus by Wikipedia as "Intel's entry into the market for low-cost personal computers for children in the developing world". The Asus EeePC was, well, Asus's attempt to cash in on what Asus saw as a trend toward smaller form factor computers (which continuing with the increasing popularity of tablet computers, CPU/GPU "fusion" chips, and mini-ITX motherboards). The EeePC originally had a Linux-based OS produced by one of the lesser known distributions, the semi-free Xandros.
Probably more interesting is the link at the end of the brief article. Clicking on the text "Read About Aircraft Designs for 2035" takes you to a more detailed article on future aircraft.
NASA's goals for a 2030-era aircraft, compared with an aircraft entering service today, are:
A 71-decibel reduction below current Federal Aviation Administration noise standards, which aim to contain objectionable noise within airport boundaries.
A greater than 75 percent reduction on the International Civil Aviation Organization's Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection Sixth Meeting, or CAEP/6, standard for nitrogen oxide emissions, which aims to improve air quality around airports.
A greater than 70 percent reduction in fuel burn performance, which could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the cost of air travel.
The ability to exploit metroplex concepts that enable optimal use of runways at multiple airports within metropolitan areas, as a means of reducing air traffic congestion and delays.
There's also an image gallery link for more concept art and some PDF-converted presentations from Boeing, GE, MIT and Northrop Grumman.
Okay, time to be pedantic. And while the good professor is at it, why not breed some Neanderthals, sabre-toothed cats, or my personal favorite, the hugest of the post-Dinotopian behemoths, the Indricotherium?
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Really, when was the last time you edited a Wikipedia article via Tor or an anonymous proxy server? So, no, the "anyone" part needs to be changed since Wikipedia discriminates against users of those services, who can only edit when their proxy is fresh enough not to be included in the list of banned IPs. Yeah, I know, there's a reason behind the anti-open-proxy policy but, still, not everybody (who wishes to maintain their anonymity) can edit Wikipedia.
Microsoft might be famous for its attempts to introduce subtle incompatibilities that diminish the functionality of competing software products. Apple is more straightforward, at least for its post-Macintosh hardware. It simply bans the offending program.
So you do a bunch of sequels to a horror movie, all they do is drain any remaining impact out of the original
I'm sure this applies to any hit movie. I mean, the first time they made Scary Movie, it was a guilty pleasure. Now it's, well, just dull. There are few exceptions. Empire Strikes Back thematically seems better than Star Wars. The revelation of the relationship between Luke and Darth Vader was good enough to be parodied by Toy Story (was it 2 or 3?). But the Star Wars prequels? Maybe the producers should take a hint.
Why not just scan it? Then you can frame the print out (hell, you can even print 10x larger), and mail the check to me. That way we both win. Google on your wall. Money in my pocket.
Agreed. The post-Mice era will either be touch screen (iPhone) or gesture-based (Kinect), if not mind control. The device appears to inherit the main short-coming of the mouse as a pointing device. It is an indirect approximation of the movement of one's finger. You move the device blindly while looking at a triangle-like thing moving at the screen, far from obvious to new users, whose real world experience would involve manipulating an object while looking directly at it. The Slider looks more like a niche product for those suffering from RSI. So, yes, it's an alternative, the device that would overthrow the reign of the mighty mouse.
While I agree with most of your points, I take exception to the blanket statement "Aggregation of personal information is the real purpose of the internet". You make it sound as if the Internet was "invented" or evolved in order to facilitate data mining. I think the aggregation of data is more of a side effect. For most people, the Internet is either a communication tool (e.g. IM or Facebook) or an infotainment medium (e.g. browsing for pr0n or the latest celebrity rumor). Advertising, rather than the collection, analysis, and sale of information (data mining), is still the evil that powers the Internet. Or how do you explain the continued prevalence of Spam, the very anti-thesis of targeted marketing?
Let's start a petition: all exe files should be removed from the internet right now, because they are a big security hole.
Not entirely a bad idea, if not practicable. There should be a bit more security if applications are installed not via visiting different sites each peddling its own software but via central "app stores". While independent developers might find the setup undemocratic in that they can't "sell" their applications directly to users, the "app store" model predates the Apple marketing term by at least a decade (late 1990s), finding its roots in the package management systems developed for Unix and GNU/Linux.
It also reminds me of the AOL days (during the time, I was an engineer at Netscape) in that "everyone" was amazed by it as a consumer or an investor, but everyone I knew saw it as an obsolete toy for people that hadn't yet grown out of it.
While I don't care that much about Facebook, I see one big difference between between AOL and Facebook. AOL as a service provider was largely a US phenomenon, with the possible exception of a few international branches limited to English-speaking territories. I myself haven't had the chance to sign up for an AOL service account. Although I did manage to eventual get an @aol.com webmail account, I believe this isn't the type of service that earned for AOL its status as a network giant. AOL became a humongous US company, but largely (pun unintended) a midget elsewhere. Compare this to Facebook. Among those with some form of Internet connection, who hasn't heard of Facebook? Among the people I know, I'm the only one without a Facebook account. So unless Zuckerberg makes some really bad moves or Facebook suffers from a day-long outage that results in the deletion of everybody's favorite baby and w3dding photos, Facebook is here to stay.
The main problem with the OLPC, the one thing that made the project open to subversion by companies like Intel and Microsoft, is its centralized model of development. You get the laptops or tablets from one source, say, the central government of the country that buys into the idea or some buy-one/donate-the-other scheme. I understand that it's supposed to be more of an educational than a computing project. But this set-up generates dependency. What happens when the machines are damaged? More importantly, what happens to the next batch of children without laptops? Since the machines are manufactured in the usual Asian places (hint: two countries claiming the same name), this will likely result in a foreign exchange outflow from a country that can least afford it, as certain essential non-technological items (e.g. food and basic medicine) may need to take priority.
What the OLPC should have set out to develop is a RepRap-like infrastructure that will allow the adults (or even older children) of the community that takes part in the project to manufacture the laptops by themselves from cheap, readily available components. If this isn't 100% possible, then give them at least enough transfer of technology to allow them to build the least technological parts, like the case or the keyboard. Think of a laptop case made out of recycled plastic or hard laminated cardboard. Then again, how far off is the day when we can run a desktop OS on an Arduino board?
Don't just give them fish. Teach them how to fish.
Computers made using such technology might appear crude at first, but not much cruder than the devices that ushered in the PC revolution.
As a result, students may leave an introductory biology course with the ability to recite the reactions in the Calvin cycle but still believing that plants obtain most of their mass from the soil rather than from the atmosphere [...]
I've known this since (at least) high school as it had been a childhood hobby of mine to sink seeds into jars of water after I read about the wonderful concept known as "hydroponics". So, yes, I've used "informal" reasoning to come to the conclusion that plants get much of their mass from the atmosphere. This worked in my case because I happened to have done informal "experiments" on the subject.
While I doubt whether one can experience high science concepts like quantum mechanics or Einstein's theories of relativity, cultivating a DIY, or should I say, TIY (try-it-yourself) attitude may help students understand better the principles behind scientific discoveries. Simply reading about the nuts and bolts won't do. Get out the screw driver. A good course would force the student to do experiments, perhaps not to make research-quality discoveries but merely to demonstrate to themselves why something is so. In an age where knowledge is a Google search or a Wikipedia article away, there's no still substitute for hands-on work.
Since IBM has retooled itself from a hardware/software company into an IT services company, I see a future where the nth-generation of their Jeopardy program mans the help desk, fielding technical questions and whatnot from IBM's very much "human" customers. If they could perfect this, then it could spell trouble to the millions of call center workers in India, the Philippines, or the emerging outsourcing powers in Africa.
Slashdot Mirror
It's too early to tell if the events in Tunisia will produce a wave of liberation. But it does call to mind the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. This could turn out to be the Arab world's Berlin Wall, then if it spreads to non-Arab countries like Pakistan, the Muslim world's as well.
There are a number of parallels. For example, pop historians like to point to the Berlin Wall as the event that triggered the end of communism in Eastern Europe. But there were lots of false starts that go back further, at least, say, to the protest movement spearhead by Solidarity in Poland, or maybe even further back to the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, in the late 1960s. The latter was brutally suppressed by the Soviets and their allies.
Could the present events have been inspired by the earlier events in Iran after the hotly contested elections in that theocratic country? Expect any event remotely similar to the Fall of the Wall to usher in a period of instability in the Arab world, something that extremists could exploit to install psychotic regimes worse than the despots they replaced/displaced.
Who knows, maybe Obama could be this generation's Reagan when the late Republican president issued his famous challenge to his Soviet counterpart: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Semantic nazi here. You used the word "book" in two different senses in your post: (1) books as something you read whatever the medium (e.g. when Amazon "sells a huge base of books" whether "print or electronic) and (2) books as something you treasure as an artifact, whether you read it or not (e.g. coffee-table books).
As for me, I belong to the first category. People who bewail the demise of the individually bound physical book should remember that the "book" was itself a replacement for older forms of reading media, which included the scroll and the clay tablet.
I draw the line however at multimedia apps that resemble a newspaper from the Harry Potter universe. We should differentiate between the act of largely decoding symbols and that of viewing moving images. The first I would call reading, the latter pornography.
Star Trek?
When I click on a comment, I'm brought to a page with a Gear, a Magnifying Glass, and a comment count. How do I make the comment (that I want to comment on) appear so I can see the comment in context? I suspect the goal of the redesign is toward a cleaner, more Google-y appearance. But this comes at the expense of requiring more clicks just to view a low-ranked (low-modded) comment and reply.
Now what was that famous quotation again about clean desktops and the mental states of their owners?
The People's Republic of China has lots of blogs, cell phones, and bogus brand blue jeans (I don't know about the Bruce Springsteen part). Does the PROC symbolize a win for American ideals?
Maybe you should qualify your enthusiasm for consumerist democracy. Here's a little thought experiment. Imagine a state where all your creature comforts are taken care of: from food to housing to health care to porn. Would you bother protesting you don't have the right to select the Great Leader?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2011
As I'm running Gnash under Chromium, all I see ATM is a static web page with a black rectangle in the middle, topped by two tabs labeled "Enhanced" and "Standard". The view defaults to "Enhanced", but clicking on "Standard" does nothing (so I presume the tabs are really static place holders for the Flash-based interface). Below the rectangle are some information boxes, including a download button for users of a certain Flash-challenged gadget.
Only if it's part of a horde of a billion butterflies.
Those who blame Wikileaks for being irresponsible, even criminal, for their release of supposedly confidential information should look at the way social networks and other sites and Internet services facilitate activities that could lead to people getting injured or even killed. If Wikileaks deserved to be banned, then so should Facebook and Twitter, for these sites would, arguably, be doing harm by making it easier for the stain of information to spread.
Because A.C. Clarke said so;) In Songs of Distant Earth, the advanced space-faring humans (as against the native humans of the ocean planet Thalassa) haul water from the world ocean by freezing a few cubic meters of it at a time and then pulling the blocks of ice up.
The difference between hauling up ice cubes and siphoning water is the difference between using a bucket to fetch water for your small camp (a digital activity that can be measured by the number of trips to and from the camp) and diverting a river to bring water to a whole town (a continuous and thereby analog activity). Siphoning water may be more efficient in the long haul, but initially more expensive and even more daunting than building an already technically challenging beanstalk to the sky. Just think of the excess mass that would be added to the elevator complex by the pipe and the water flowing through it.
Easily fixed. Build a space elevator. No, wait. That would make it dirt cheap to haul water from the Earth's oceans onto geostationary orbit.
Intel's Asus Eee PC Atom platform was a direct reaction to OLPC's hype...
It might not be your intention. But by prefixing EeePC with the possessive (Intel's), you make it sound as if Intel was the primary mover behind the introduction of the EeePC. Intel had its own take on the OLPC. This was the Classmate PC, described thus by Wikipedia as "Intel's entry into the market for low-cost personal computers for children in the developing world". The Asus EeePC was, well, Asus's attempt to cash in on what Asus saw as a trend toward smaller form factor computers (which continuing with the increasing popularity of tablet computers, CPU/GPU "fusion" chips, and mini-ITX motherboards). The EeePC originally had a Linux-based OS produced by one of the lesser known distributions, the semi-free Xandros.
NASA's goals for a 2030-era aircraft, compared with an aircraft entering service today, are:
A 71-decibel reduction below current Federal Aviation Administration noise standards, which aim to contain objectionable noise within airport boundaries.
A greater than 75 percent reduction on the International Civil Aviation Organization's Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection Sixth Meeting, or CAEP/6, standard for nitrogen oxide emissions, which aims to improve air quality around airports.
A greater than 70 percent reduction in fuel burn performance, which could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the cost of air travel. The ability to exploit metroplex concepts that enable optimal use of runways at multiple airports within metropolitan areas, as a means of reducing air traffic congestion and delays.
There's also an image gallery link for more concept art and some PDF-converted presentations from Boeing, GE, MIT and Northrop Grumman.
Okay, time to be pedantic. And while the good professor is at it, why not breed some Neanderthals, sabre-toothed cats, or my personal favorite, the hugest of the post-Dinotopian behemoths, the Indricotherium?
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Really, when was the last time you edited a Wikipedia article via Tor or an anonymous proxy server? So, no, the "anyone" part needs to be changed since Wikipedia discriminates against users of those services, who can only edit when their proxy is fresh enough not to be included in the list of banned IPs. Yeah, I know, there's a reason behind the anti-open-proxy policy but, still, not everybody (who wishes to maintain their anonymity) can edit Wikipedia.
Microsoft might be famous for its attempts to introduce subtle incompatibilities that diminish the functionality of competing software products. Apple is more straightforward, at least for its post-Macintosh hardware. It simply bans the offending program.
Well, does this mean they're building up a new Ripley (the character played by Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise)?
So you do a bunch of sequels to a horror movie, all they do is drain any remaining impact out of the original
I'm sure this applies to any hit movie. I mean, the first time they made Scary Movie, it was a guilty pleasure. Now it's, well, just dull. There are few exceptions. Empire Strikes Back thematically seems better than Star Wars. The revelation of the relationship between Luke and Darth Vader was good enough to be parodied by Toy Story (was it 2 or 3?). But the Star Wars prequels? Maybe the producers should take a hint.
Why not just scan it? Then you can frame the print out (hell, you can even print 10x larger), and mail the check to me. That way we both win. Google on your wall. Money in my pocket.
Agreed. The post-Mice era will either be touch screen (iPhone) or gesture-based (Kinect), if not mind control. The device appears to inherit the main short-coming of the mouse as a pointing device. It is an indirect approximation of the movement of one's finger. You move the device blindly while looking at a triangle-like thing moving at the screen, far from obvious to new users, whose real world experience would involve manipulating an object while looking directly at it. The Slider looks more like a niche product for those suffering from RSI. So, yes, it's an alternative, the device that would overthrow the reign of the mighty mouse.
While I agree with most of your points, I take exception to the blanket statement "Aggregation of personal information is the real purpose of the internet". You make it sound as if the Internet was "invented" or evolved in order to facilitate data mining. I think the aggregation of data is more of a side effect. For most people, the Internet is either a communication tool (e.g. IM or Facebook) or an infotainment medium (e.g. browsing for pr0n or the latest celebrity rumor). Advertising, rather than the collection, analysis, and sale of information (data mining), is still the evil that powers the Internet. Or how do you explain the continued prevalence of Spam, the very anti-thesis of targeted marketing?
Let's start a petition: all exe files should be removed from the internet right now, because they are a big security hole.
Not entirely a bad idea, if not practicable. There should be a bit more security if applications are installed not via visiting different sites each peddling its own software but via central "app stores". While independent developers might find the setup undemocratic in that they can't "sell" their applications directly to users, the "app store" model predates the Apple marketing term by at least a decade (late 1990s), finding its roots in the package management systems developed for Unix and GNU/Linux.
It also reminds me of the AOL days (during the time, I was an engineer at Netscape) in that "everyone" was amazed by it as a consumer or an investor, but everyone I knew saw it as an obsolete toy for people that hadn't yet grown out of it.
While I don't care that much about Facebook, I see one big difference between between AOL and Facebook. AOL as a service provider was largely a US phenomenon, with the possible exception of a few international branches limited to English-speaking territories. I myself haven't had the chance to sign up for an AOL service account. Although I did manage to eventual get an @aol.com webmail account, I believe this isn't the type of service that earned for AOL its status as a network giant. AOL became a humongous US company, but largely (pun unintended) a midget elsewhere. Compare this to Facebook. Among those with some form of Internet connection, who hasn't heard of Facebook? Among the people I know, I'm the only one without a Facebook account. So unless Zuckerberg makes some really bad moves or Facebook suffers from a day-long outage that results in the deletion of everybody's favorite baby and w3dding photos, Facebook is here to stay.
The main problem with the OLPC, the one thing that made the project open to subversion by companies like Intel and Microsoft, is its centralized model of development. You get the laptops or tablets from one source, say, the central government of the country that buys into the idea or some buy-one/donate-the-other scheme. I understand that it's supposed to be more of an educational than a computing project. But this set-up generates dependency. What happens when the machines are damaged? More importantly, what happens to the next batch of children without laptops? Since the machines are manufactured in the usual Asian places (hint: two countries claiming the same name), this will likely result in a foreign exchange outflow from a country that can least afford it, as certain essential non-technological items (e.g. food and basic medicine) may need to take priority.
What the OLPC should have set out to develop is a RepRap-like infrastructure that will allow the adults (or even older children) of the community that takes part in the project to manufacture the laptops by themselves from cheap, readily available components. If this isn't 100% possible, then give them at least enough transfer of technology to allow them to build the least technological parts, like the case or the keyboard. Think of a laptop case made out of recycled plastic or hard laminated cardboard. Then again, how far off is the day when we can run a desktop OS on an Arduino board?
Don't just give them fish. Teach them how to fish.
Computers made using such technology might appear crude at first, but not much cruder than the devices that ushered in the PC revolution.
Much can happen in the next five years that puts Facebook where Livejournal is now, relatively speaking.
You mean in Russia?
As a result, students may leave an introductory biology course with the ability to recite the reactions in the Calvin cycle but still believing that plants obtain most of their mass from the soil rather than from the atmosphere [...]
I've known this since (at least) high school as it had been a childhood hobby of mine to sink seeds into jars of water after I read about the wonderful concept known as "hydroponics". So, yes, I've used "informal" reasoning to come to the conclusion that plants get much of their mass from the atmosphere. This worked in my case because I happened to have done informal "experiments" on the subject.
While I doubt whether one can experience high science concepts like quantum mechanics or Einstein's theories of relativity, cultivating a DIY, or should I say, TIY (try-it-yourself) attitude may help students understand better the principles behind scientific discoveries. Simply reading about the nuts and bolts won't do. Get out the screw driver. A good course would force the student to do experiments, perhaps not to make research-quality discoveries but merely to demonstrate to themselves why something is so. In an age where knowledge is a Google search or a Wikipedia article away, there's no still substitute for hands-on work.
Since IBM has retooled itself from a hardware/software company into an IT services company, I see a future where the nth-generation of their Jeopardy program mans the help desk, fielding technical questions and whatnot from IBM's very much "human" customers. If they could perfect this, then it could spell trouble to the millions of call center workers in India, the Philippines, or the emerging outsourcing powers in Africa.