Why not download something locally that checks in for updates and new features only but runs locally? (Sometimes I require the ability to edit images in the field while only having a remote EDGE Cell Connection.)
Adobe invented AIR for this use case. There will be an AIR version that should probably do just this.
Why is it so DOG Slow?
Wasn't too bad for me. I would assume it's because their server is swamped since the headline is all over the net. Slashdotting++?
How do you turn on the decades-old proven standard Photoshop tool bars?
You don't. It's not a photoshop replacement. It's not meant to be a photoshop replacement.
Why does it require my images to be uploaded to be edited? (I do not want any of my copyrighted media to cross the line of possession demarcation.)
That's a privacy issue no doubt. But I'd assume that the server is doing a lot of the "photoshop" work. I doubt it's possible in Flex. So it needs the photos on the server to do that.
Does Adobe use retain share or gain any legal use of my uploaded images?
Maybe. They shouldn't but I wouldn't put it past them.
Am I the only one noticing this "service" appears to be only intended for amateurs in image manipulation?
Hopefully not since that's who it was designed for.
If you're a "non-rank non-amateur" it probably isn't. I don't find the GIMP particularly easy to use. I'd use this photoshop express tool to put a stack of photos up, quickly page through, crop and edit some of them and then share them with whomever I wanted to. But I'm pretty amateur in my needs. Still, that's the use case it's targetted for and I'd argue that for that particular case (upload, resize, crop, rotate, remove red eye, change saturation, publish to facebook) it's probably way easier and faster to use than the GIMP.
It only annoys me because Blizzard will implement this entire system, but ignore in game petitions by players reporting people who are obviously botting.
Scanning is fine with me but it should correspond to a policy of strict enforcement in game. Nowadays, I log in to Alterac Valley and 5 out of my 40 teammates are obviously botting. There are usually 20 of these up at a time and 10 battlegroups. That's a rough 1000 people botting at any given minute. And Blizzard does nothing to stop it because that form of botting is considered innocuous despite being against their Terms of Service.
Now, I don't really care about AV botting. But consistent and strict enforcement of rules should be step 1. The scanning should occur to stop cases where in game mechanisms for identifying and punishing botters fail. And that's just not the case.
It feels to me that they install this scanner on my machine as a cheap and effective way to identify cheating that affects their bottom line (large scale gold botting, game hacking, etc.) but not the cheating that affects my gameplay (honor botting, gold purchasing, arena team selling, exploiting, etc.) And when i look at it that way it kind of pisses me off that they use my machine to pad their wallets while ignoring the issues that actually matter to me as a player.
of course, it doesn't annoy me enough to get me to give up the addiction.
It seems to me that it must be hard to optimize because of the 5 star system.
90% of the movies I rate are either 3 or 4 stars. I already pre-filter so I don't watch movies that would get a 2 or 1 often and 5s are hard to fine. Trying to differentiate the emotions generating "meh" and "yeah" is gonna be tough. I don't know if most people rate similarly but I imagine they do.
A 10 star system would add more data points and might be better. But a simple system with multiple axis would be a lot better, I bet. Something as simple as good vs. enjoyable would do a lot to differentiate my personal preferences (action flick might be 2 stars good and 5 enjoyable for an overall 4 where a drama might be 5 stars good vs. 3 stars enjoyable for an overall 4.) The problem with that is you would probably receive less data with a more complex system.
I haven't looked at the data, but I can see why it would be hard to optimize a learning algorithm around a data set with 5 possible outcomes clustered heavily around two and an almost infinite number of discreet features on each item. It might seem like the set of features would allow for a huge diversity of solutions but I really think the limited feedback might be the problem.
Maybe someone who actually worked on this could comment.
Actually, the problem is that things that do these tasks well wouldn't strike people as being robots.
Is a dishwasher a robot? Is a programmable coffee pot a robot? Is a remote control or a TIVO a robot? Is a home automation system a robot? How about a motorized scooter? How about a sprinkler system? Centralized heat/air? Motion sensing lights?
They're all automated systems that solve problems or make performing tasks easier. Many of them integrate sensors that tune them to the environment or operate on a schedule. But if they don't have two legs and arms and walk around making beep bop noises, we think they're not robots.
And most anything else we come up with that doesn't do a task exactly like a human does (which is probably inefficient or wasteful, hence why we built the automated system in the first place) is not considered a robot.
Somebody alluded to it in an earlier reply. A robotic chaffeur is a robot but a car that parks/drives itself isn't.
yeah, well, people believe what they want to and I bet Slashdot editors would love to believe this one, given that their web 2.0 competitors are all kicking their asses.
>Never, ever, ever open an attachment which you did not request. >It's that easy.
And committing a felony through the internet isn't a sufficient request to receive an attachment from the FBI?
It's nice to have hard and fast rules you think you would follow in every situation but the more authentic the person can make themselves seem and the more they can make you fear not opening it, the more likely the person will be tempted to open the attachment. And I think the FBI has the capacity to seem very authentic and make you very afraid.
I didn't say I would have opened it. But if the e-mail made a strong case for why not opening it might have resulted in me being in jail and was verified as coming from fbi.gov, I would have thought about it a lot more than a misspelled e-mail from Nigeria. I'm sorry but that's human nature and that's why people still get defrauded. You may think you're too smart/careful/informed to fall for it, but if there's a group of people I think could probably find a weakness that would cause you to break your 100% rule and open that attachment, it's the FBI.
I think a lot of the issues could be resolved by not having the vendor pay the exploit finder directly and instead allowing people to speculate on the probability of a particular exploit being found.
This has a lot of parallels to the Policy Analysis Market where the defense department tried to set up a futures market for predicting political developments in the middle east. There are some moral issues around the fact that you might be rewarding the wrong people with the system. My personal take is that information has some value when it's unknown and it may be the case that the "bad" people are the only ones with that information. It's worth rewarding them to get them to give that info up.
A predictive futures market in exploits might work well. If a contract appeared stating that a vulnerability in Java's image processing code would be found in six months and the price went through the roof, then Sun would know where to start investigating. When they found the exploit, the people who predicted it early would get paid off. It basically rewards people with insider information.
A person who discovered an exploit would then be able to buy contracts for that exploit low, push the price higher, potentially by publicizing his/her having found it and then publicize the exploit when he/she felt the price was at its peak.
Trying to shop a vulnerability around the black market would inherently cause the price to rise as well, keying off the vendor to a possible exploit.
Also, (if my theoretical economics are correct) the stable price of an exploit contract would indicate its overall probability (x product is secure or not.)
Would you NOT open an attachment from an authentic fbi.gov address? Criminal activity or not, ignoring that attachment would be a ballsy decision.
I'm not saying they sent it from fbi.gov or some other government address but they certainly could. It's pretty safe to assume that the FBI would have a lot of options normal spammers might not as far as making an e-mail attachment look like something you really ought to open.
As far as anti-virus defenses: Who's reporting the FBI spyware to Norton or McAfee and sending them the information on the program? It's certainly not the guy getting arrested and having his computer confiscated as evidence. The FBI wouldn't have to bother with court orders not to scan for FBI spyware if they never installed the spyware on the computer of someone who could identify and report it. And I think the FBI of all organizations would have the resources to develop a program that wouldn't be picked up by normal anti-spyware tools scanning for potentially malicious behavior.
I had this problem on verizon DSL way back in the day. But it turned out the windows app was just a "Click to start" app that authenticated through PPPoE. When i set up the PPPoE settings in linux manually, I had an always on internet connection that worked far better than on my PC.
I think most cable companies code their install packages for IE on Windows because that's the system most people who would call tech support and say "I can't find the internet in my computer" would have. It makes it easy for customer service to hand hold them through the steps and probably lets them automate some configuration through activeX and windows doodads without having to write a full install program.
Since the whole process isn't that hard anyway, I think they assume Linux users will just figure it out. It sucks to be unsupported, but working around being unsupported is something linux users have been doing for years. It's kind of a lousy catch-22. Linux isn't supported, so Linux users build their own software to support linux. Then companies think "we don't have to support Linux because they'll just work it out themselves."
*As an aside, I find it ironic that/.ers don't like invisible hands that Create or Intelligently Design things, but are downright chummy with other invisible hands.
Evolution and natural selection have an invisible hand that guides a process which creates order from chaos. Capitalism and the free market have an invisible hand that guides a similar process.
Intelligent design is an immediate and atomic occurrence. It's an invisible hand that pops out of the sky, puts something down and disappears. If intelligent design defined a measurable and observable process for creation and adaptation, then that invisible hand might have a lot more traction here on slashdot.
The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. Fans suck waste into the commode.
Astronaut 1: Uh oh Cosmonaut 1: What happened? Astronaut 1: The shit hit the fan
The only argument he makes for why you would practically want to do this is to add 10-25% more screen space for content. Not good enough.
Keyboard shortcuts are far better for daily use, but they're a barrier to entry. Until I learn the shortcuts, I use the buttons. Yes, forcing me to use the shortcuts would force me to learn them more quickly and increase my productivity. But it would also add ramp up time to using the application and piss me off.
There are a lot of apps I rarely use. I like the buttons. I don't want to learn those apps. I just want to get what I need done. So I click on the icons and surf through the menus with my mouse. For those applications I use a lot, the shortcuts are there.
I think the this guy only shows that:
1) We should use shortcuts more often.
2) Applications should give advanced users the ability to turn off all toolbars (most of them do and most of us don't.)
Stealing homemade sex videos and that sort of thing from customers' computers is another matter.
Watch the video from TFA. That's what he does (on a smaller scale.) He downloads personal photos including vacation photos of a girl in a bikini on the beach. He notices that as well and doesn't delete them.
He didn't LOOK at the porn but it might have been homemade. Who knows? The article makes a good point. Once the computer's broken, you can't necessarily clean it up. If your comp won't start but you happen to have sex videos and nude photos (or equally private but more mundane things) on your desktop. . . well . . .
It doesn't have to be porn. It could be important business files, personal writing, etc. If it's copyrighted material, that's one thing. If it's personal material, that's completely different. And the guy they caught definitely wasn't bothering to distinguish.
Doesn't seem like Google is setting up in Kenya as opposed to South Africa. They're simply setting up in Kenya. I think they're already in South Africa.
As far as "Why Kenya?" Kenya is an obvious choice for setting up in East Africa. Nairobi, while a bit of a crime ridden hell hole, is the central point for anything in East Africa. If you set up in Nairobi, you get Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and probably Ethiopia, malawi and northern mozambique.
Obvious reasons to set up in East Africa are the ones given in the article: improving maps and localized content. They'll hand wave at providing local content for East Africans but let's be honest: There's no money in that. It's about tourism. East Africa is a huge tourist destination and a damn difficult place to get info on. Having lived, worked and travelled there extensively, I know there's a huge market for mining information OUT of the region to supply to the world and that's all google really does anyway. They want to connect the world to the region. If they happen to connect the region to the world as a byproduct, then that's a happy secondary result.
And lastly, I'm sure they want to influence local legislation. They have serious issues in China. East Africa isn't a rapidly growing economy, but it is growing. I'm sure they'd like to be proactive about avoiding political issues in an economic region they will want to eventually focus on more heavily.
If any company did this out of the goodness of their heart, I'm sure it would be google. But every corporation is a slave to the bottom line and Google has shown that they have to be too. The business model here is providing maps and targetted ads to potential safari goers both back home and while they're in the region. Anything else that comes out of it will be a happy secondary benefit.
Is it the cause? Would he NOT have done it otherwise? I agree the game might be the catalyst. But for someone in an unstable emotional state who is considering violence, it would seem anything could be the catalyst. Had it not been the game, could it have been TV, movies, a comment by a peer, his teacher's criticism, his parents, himself? Are these things dangerous because they can trigger violence out of someone who was merely contemplating violence?
The assumption of people against violent video games seems to be that they tacitly endorse real life violent behavior by encouraging people to perform it virtually. But anyone who could allow a video game to sway him away from the moral standard of an entire society is already a psychopath. Is our best defense against psychopathic tendencies to try to remove from access all influences which might seemingly validate those tendencies? That seems pretty bleak.
At least plant matter is renewable. Obviously increased consumption is bad but expecting the best solution right away is also bad. Hopefully conservation and a transition to renewable resources will increase in parallel.
One of the things that has made the mobile web continue to be mostly a failure since the late 90s is the fact that mobile web apps aren't really platform independent.
For a normal web app, you can assume a standard mouse and keyboard. The details of those are relatively unimportant. For mobile web apps, your users may have a keypad and they may not. They may have a touch screen and they may not. They may have a scroll wheel or a little directional button or arrow buttons or whatever the maker of the phone decided to add. They may have a small resolution screen or a big one.
Which means it's really really hard to make a generic mobile web app that's easy to use for every user.
I think the ability to build a custom machine compiled app for an iphone would allow developers to take advantage of all the great features, animation libraries and hardware of the iphone. But a generic mobile web app that runs on the iPhone won't have nearly the slick experience on the iPhone that it would if it was custom built for the iPhone. If a web app is designed purely for the iPhone, it will still likely be limited in its capacity to take advantage of all the features of the iPhone + it won't work well on anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it ONLY Flash 9 based?
Because it uses Flex 2.
Why not download something locally that checks in for updates and new features only but runs locally? (Sometimes I require the ability to edit images in the field while only having a remote EDGE Cell Connection.)
Adobe invented AIR for this use case. There will be an AIR version that should probably do just this.
Why is it so DOG Slow?
Wasn't too bad for me. I would assume it's because their server is swamped since the headline is all over the net. Slashdotting++?
How do you turn on the decades-old proven standard Photoshop tool bars?
You don't. It's not a photoshop replacement. It's not meant to be a photoshop replacement.
Why does it require my images to be uploaded to be edited? (I do not want any of my copyrighted media to cross the line of possession demarcation.)
That's a privacy issue no doubt. But I'd assume that the server is doing a lot of the "photoshop" work. I doubt it's possible in Flex. So it needs the photos on the server to do that.
Does Adobe use retain share or gain any legal use of my uploaded images?
Maybe. They shouldn't but I wouldn't put it past them.
Am I the only one noticing this "service" appears to be only intended for amateurs in image manipulation?
Hopefully not since that's who it was designed for.
How is this ANY better than the FREE GIMP?? http://www.gimp.org/
If you're a "non-rank non-amateur" it probably isn't. I don't find the GIMP particularly easy to use. I'd use this photoshop express tool to put a stack of photos up, quickly page through, crop and edit some of them and then share them with whomever I wanted to. But I'm pretty amateur in my needs. Still, that's the use case it's targetted for and I'd argue that for that particular case (upload, resize, crop, rotate, remove red eye, change saturation, publish to facebook) it's probably way easier and faster to use than the GIMP.
It only annoys me because Blizzard will implement this entire system, but ignore in game petitions by players reporting people who are obviously botting.
Scanning is fine with me but it should correspond to a policy of strict enforcement in game. Nowadays, I log in to Alterac Valley and 5 out of my 40 teammates are obviously botting. There are usually 20 of these up at a time and 10 battlegroups. That's a rough 1000 people botting at any given minute. And Blizzard does nothing to stop it because that form of botting is considered innocuous despite being against their Terms of Service.
Now, I don't really care about AV botting. But consistent and strict enforcement of rules should be step 1. The scanning should occur to stop cases where in game mechanisms for identifying and punishing botters fail. And that's just not the case.
It feels to me that they install this scanner on my machine as a cheap and effective way to identify cheating that affects their bottom line (large scale gold botting, game hacking, etc.) but not the cheating that affects my gameplay (honor botting, gold purchasing, arena team selling, exploiting, etc.) And when i look at it that way it kind of pisses me off that they use my machine to pad their wallets while ignoring the issues that actually matter to me as a player.
of course, it doesn't annoy me enough to get me to give up the addiction.
It seems to me that it must be hard to optimize because of the 5 star system.
90% of the movies I rate are either 3 or 4 stars. I already pre-filter so I don't watch movies that would get a 2 or 1 often and 5s are hard to fine. Trying to differentiate the emotions generating "meh" and "yeah" is gonna be tough. I don't know if most people rate similarly but I imagine they do.
A 10 star system would add more data points and might be better. But a simple system with multiple axis would be a lot better, I bet. Something as simple as good vs. enjoyable would do a lot to differentiate my personal preferences (action flick might be 2 stars good and 5 enjoyable for an overall 4 where a drama might be 5 stars good vs. 3 stars enjoyable for an overall 4.) The problem with that is you would probably receive less data with a more complex system.
I haven't looked at the data, but I can see why it would be hard to optimize a learning algorithm around a data set with 5 possible outcomes clustered heavily around two and an almost infinite number of discreet features on each item. It might seem like the set of features would allow for a huge diversity of solutions but I really think the limited feedback might be the problem.
Maybe someone who actually worked on this could comment.
Actually, the problem is that things that do these tasks well wouldn't strike people as being robots.
Is a dishwasher a robot? Is a programmable coffee pot a robot? Is a remote control or a TIVO a robot? Is a home automation system a robot? How about a motorized scooter? How about a sprinkler system? Centralized heat/air? Motion sensing lights?
They're all automated systems that solve problems or make performing tasks easier. Many of them integrate sensors that tune them to the environment or operate on a schedule. But if they don't have two legs and arms and walk around making beep bop noises, we think they're not robots.
And most anything else we come up with that doesn't do a task exactly like a human does (which is probably inefficient or wasteful, hence why we built the automated system in the first place) is not considered a robot.
Somebody alluded to it in an earlier reply. A robotic chaffeur is a robot but a car that parks/drives itself isn't.
Yes, because the American market for luxury goods is so small.
I don't think Mercedes even sells cars here, do they?
yeah, well, people believe what they want to and I bet Slashdot editors would love to believe this one, given that their web 2.0 competitors are all kicking their asses.
>Never, ever, ever open an attachment which you did not request.
>It's that easy.
And committing a felony through the internet isn't a sufficient request to receive an attachment from the FBI?
It's nice to have hard and fast rules you think you would follow in every situation but the more authentic the person can make themselves seem and the more they can make you fear not opening it, the more likely the person will be tempted to open the attachment. And I think the FBI has the capacity to seem very authentic and make you very afraid.
I didn't say I would have opened it. But if the e-mail made a strong case for why not opening it might have resulted in me being in jail and was verified as coming from fbi.gov, I would have thought about it a lot more than a misspelled e-mail from Nigeria. I'm sorry but that's human nature and that's why people still get defrauded. You may think you're too smart/careful/informed to fall for it, but if there's a group of people I think could probably find a weakness that would cause you to break your 100% rule and open that attachment, it's the FBI.
are belong to us?
Bad gameplay will never be fun but there are plenty of games which are renowned for having parts which are so terrible as to be amazingly great.
I think a lot of the issues could be resolved by not having the vendor pay the exploit finder directly and instead allowing people to speculate on the probability of a particular exploit being found.
This has a lot of parallels to the Policy Analysis Market where the defense department tried to set up a futures market for predicting political developments in the middle east. There are some moral issues around the fact that you might be rewarding the wrong people with the system. My personal take is that information has some value when it's unknown and it may be the case that the "bad" people are the only ones with that information. It's worth rewarding them to get them to give that info up.
A predictive futures market in exploits might work well. If a contract appeared stating that a vulnerability in Java's image processing code would be found in six months and the price went through the roof, then Sun would know where to start investigating. When they found the exploit, the people who predicted it early would get paid off. It basically rewards people with insider information.
A person who discovered an exploit would then be able to buy contracts for that exploit low, push the price higher, potentially by publicizing his/her having found it and then publicize the exploit when he/she felt the price was at its peak.
Trying to shop a vulnerability around the black market would inherently cause the price to rise as well, keying off the vendor to a possible exploit.
Also, (if my theoretical economics are correct) the stable price of an exploit contract would indicate its overall probability (x product is secure or not.)
The scary thing is:
Would you NOT open an attachment from an authentic fbi.gov address? Criminal activity or not, ignoring that attachment would be a ballsy decision.
I'm not saying they sent it from fbi.gov or some other government address but they certainly could. It's pretty safe to assume that the FBI would have a lot of options normal spammers might not as far as making an e-mail attachment look like something you really ought to open.
As far as anti-virus defenses: Who's reporting the FBI spyware to Norton or McAfee and sending them the information on the program? It's certainly not the guy getting arrested and having his computer confiscated as evidence. The FBI wouldn't have to bother with court orders not to scan for FBI spyware if they never installed the spyware on the computer of someone who could identify and report it. And I think the FBI of all organizations would have the resources to develop a program that wouldn't be picked up by normal anti-spyware tools scanning for potentially malicious behavior.
If only there were a method to transform an image of a book into a symbolic representation of its content . . .
Perhaps an electronic tool that allowed manual input of the alphabet. That would be the key.
It's actually so we have one less means of escape when the robots take over.
They can already walk, climb stairs, drive cars and there's the one who thinks humans taste like bacon.
I'm just hoping no one invents a robot that can climb trees or all that practice in my backyard will be for nothing.
I had this problem on verizon DSL way back in the day. But it turned out the windows app was just a "Click to start" app that authenticated through PPPoE. When i set up the PPPoE settings in linux manually, I had an always on internet connection that worked far better than on my PC.
I think most cable companies code their install packages for IE on Windows because that's the system most people who would call tech support and say "I can't find the internet in my computer" would have. It makes it easy for customer service to hand hold them through the steps and probably lets them automate some configuration through activeX and windows doodads without having to write a full install program.
Since the whole process isn't that hard anyway, I think they assume Linux users will just figure it out. It sucks to be unsupported, but working around being unsupported is something linux users have been doing for years. It's kind of a lousy catch-22. Linux isn't supported, so Linux users build their own software to support linux. Then companies think "we don't have to support Linux because they'll just work it out themselves."
*As an aside, I find it ironic that /.ers don't like invisible hands that Create or Intelligently Design things, but are downright chummy with other invisible hands.
Evolution and natural selection have an invisible hand that guides a process which creates order from chaos. Capitalism and the free market have an invisible hand that guides a similar process.
Intelligent design is an immediate and atomic occurrence. It's an invisible hand that pops out of the sky, puts something down and disappears. If intelligent design defined a measurable and observable process for creation and adaptation, then that invisible hand might have a lot more traction here on slashdot.
Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash
Mr. Postini: You have the briefcase, Page?
Brin pulls an uzi from under his jacket.
Page: Just sign the papers, Postini.
From TFA:
The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. Fans suck waste into the commode.
Astronaut 1: Uh oh
Cosmonaut 1: What happened?
Astronaut 1: The shit hit the fan
The only argument he makes for why you would practically want to do this is to add 10-25% more screen space for content. Not good enough.
Keyboard shortcuts are far better for daily use, but they're a barrier to entry. Until I learn the shortcuts, I use the buttons. Yes, forcing me to use the shortcuts would force me to learn them more quickly and increase my productivity. But it would also add ramp up time to using the application and piss me off.
There are a lot of apps I rarely use. I like the buttons. I don't want to learn those apps. I just want to get what I need done. So I click on the icons and surf through the menus with my mouse. For those applications I use a lot, the shortcuts are there.
I think the this guy only shows that:
1) We should use shortcuts more often.
2) Applications should give advanced users the ability to turn off all toolbars (most of them do and most of us don't.)
Stealing homemade sex videos and that sort of thing from customers' computers is another matter.
Watch the video from TFA. That's what he does (on a smaller scale.) He downloads personal photos including vacation photos of a girl in a bikini on the beach. He notices that as well and doesn't delete them.
He didn't LOOK at the porn but it might have been homemade. Who knows? The article makes a good point. Once the computer's broken, you can't necessarily clean it up. If your comp won't start but you happen to have sex videos and nude photos (or equally private but more mundane things) on your desktop. . . well . . .
It doesn't have to be porn. It could be important business files, personal writing, etc. If it's copyrighted material, that's one thing. If it's personal material, that's completely different. And the guy they caught definitely wasn't bothering to distinguish.
http://www.lifegem.com/
Turn yourself into a diamond. Seems rather trendy.
I don't think CIA operatives are reading slashdot to find out whether it's ok to attempt to assassinate a head of state.
http://www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/med ia/google-150806.htm
Doesn't seem like Google is setting up in Kenya as opposed to South Africa. They're simply setting up in Kenya. I think they're already in South Africa.
As far as "Why Kenya?" Kenya is an obvious choice for setting up in East Africa. Nairobi, while a bit of a crime ridden hell hole, is the central point for anything in East Africa. If you set up in Nairobi, you get Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and probably Ethiopia, malawi and northern mozambique.
Obvious reasons to set up in East Africa are the ones given in the article: improving maps and localized content. They'll hand wave at providing local content for East Africans but let's be honest: There's no money in that. It's about tourism. East Africa is a huge tourist destination and a damn difficult place to get info on. Having lived, worked and travelled there extensively, I know there's a huge market for mining information OUT of the region to supply to the world and that's all google really does anyway. They want to connect the world to the region. If they happen to connect the region to the world as a byproduct, then that's a happy secondary result.
And lastly, I'm sure they want to influence local legislation. They have serious issues in China. East Africa isn't a rapidly growing economy, but it is growing. I'm sure they'd like to be proactive about avoiding political issues in an economic region they will want to eventually focus on more heavily.
If any company did this out of the goodness of their heart, I'm sure it would be google. But every corporation is a slave to the bottom line and Google has shown that they have to be too. The business model here is providing maps and targetted ads to potential safari goers both back home and while they're in the region. Anything else that comes out of it will be a happy secondary benefit.
Even if this were true:
Is it the cause? Would he NOT have done it otherwise? I agree the game might be the catalyst. But for someone in an unstable emotional state who is considering violence, it would seem anything could be the catalyst. Had it not been the game, could it have been TV, movies, a comment by a peer, his teacher's criticism, his parents, himself? Are these things dangerous because they can trigger violence out of someone who was merely contemplating violence?
The assumption of people against violent video games seems to be that they tacitly endorse real life violent behavior by encouraging people to perform it virtually. But anyone who could allow a video game to sway him away from the moral standard of an entire society is already a psychopath. Is our best defense against psychopathic tendencies to try to remove from access all influences which might seemingly validate those tendencies? That seems pretty bleak.
Decomposed dinosaur bones is better?
At least plant matter is renewable. Obviously increased consumption is bad but expecting the best solution right away is also bad. Hopefully conservation and a transition to renewable resources will increase in parallel.
One of the things that has made the mobile web continue to be mostly a failure since the late 90s is the fact that mobile web apps aren't really platform independent.
For a normal web app, you can assume a standard mouse and keyboard. The details of those are relatively unimportant. For mobile web apps, your users may have a keypad and they may not. They may have a touch screen and they may not. They may have a scroll wheel or a little directional button or arrow buttons or whatever the maker of the phone decided to add. They may have a small resolution screen or a big one.
Which means it's really really hard to make a generic mobile web app that's easy to use for every user.
I think the ability to build a custom machine compiled app for an iphone would allow developers to take advantage of all the great features, animation libraries and hardware of the iphone. But a generic mobile web app that runs on the iPhone won't have nearly the slick experience on the iPhone that it would if it was custom built for the iPhone. If a web app is designed purely for the iPhone, it will still likely be limited in its capacity to take advantage of all the features of the iPhone + it won't work well on anything else.
If this guy ever invents this, the first thing he's gonna get when he powers up his Megatronic Time Messenger 5000 is a galactic amount of time spam.
"hi my name ghhkhk. i live zarkhon 3 future year 2045. u my good friend. put 1 dollar bank account 102023030 u be very happy now i give u half."
Imagine if every spammer who ever lived had the entire future to send spam to the second you first opened your inbox.
I'd work on the spam filter first. The time travel stuff should be trivial.