Markus Persson stopped further progress on a Rift version of Minecraft because of Facebook's involvement. Much respect to Notch for choosing to keep his hands clean of anything FB. There's been quite a bit of bewilderment over his position. If you don't understand where he's coming from after this whole time, I'd stop trying to understand.
Notch's move restores some of my faith in common sense. Well done, Notch. I don't even play Minecraft, maybe I should take a look at it.
How comical - "Twitter, obey us! We have this court order we scribbled on a sandwich napkin! And while you're at it, shut your doors and grovel at our feet!"
What's tally ironic is that iPhones are manufactured in China. That's the kind of irony that makes my ears fall off. I think, at some point we're going to have to make these devices in the US.
Exactly. So I have to chuckle when the news reports that an irate Mark Zuckerberg calls the President to voice his displeasure over spying (http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/13/technology/security/mark-zuckerberg-nsa/) . I don't know what he's pretending to be mad about.
. . . because the NSA stated yesterday that tech companies were fully aware of snooping the who time (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/03/20/1745254/nsa-general-counsel-insists-us-companies-assisted-in-data-collection). If they're encrypting, it's either for show (porbable) or to prevent eavesdropping by anyone else but the NSA (unlikely, if this mattered to them they would have done it a long time ago.) So, yeah, this feels like it's for show so that people can continue to have confidence in Google's platforms.
I think we're at the point in the cycle, especially in Silicon Valley, where youth equates to connectedness with modern trends in technology. It may be a somewhat correct assumption, especially in my case where I find social media and chronic smart phone use to be odious. But I don't think most older programmers feel this way. As people get older and this the social media hype begins to peter out, I think companies will become realistic again. I know quite a few dotnet programmers that are over 40, and when it comes to PHP and MySQL I think companies in general are kind of indifferent about age.
"Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."
No, I think free, industry standard software will do more for these kids than putting more money into the school system. I don't think more money to the schools is going to fix the problems these students have, empowering them with relevant skills will.
Maybe she can focus on why people do these things to start with and work on technology that can prevent these occurences? Our beef is with the crime itself and the damage it do? I think Roache missed the larger point.
Can you back up anything you mentioned in your post? So, a couple of problems;
"America has 320+ million people. It's talent pool is plenty big. Limited IQ is not a problem in the U.S."
Help me understand how you came to this conclusion exactly? Tech companies all have shortages of talent and have been screaming for immigration reform. They wouldn't take that route if they could hire local people (and, no, I'm sorry but the argument that companies want to pay immigrants pennies on the dollar doesn't wash. In the long run, the wages still go up for intelligent immigrants just like wages have been going up in general in China. People only get paid less for a short while in the begining). Also, what does having 320 million people have to do with its population of intelligent individuals? Your reasoning is, "There are lots of people in a given population, so there must people lots of intelligent people in that population?" Sorry, it doesn't quite work out that way.
This kind of rationale doesn't work in, for instance, professional sports (which seems to be taken more seriously than growing a population of bright people, for some bizarre reason). If a team wants the best players, it looks everywhere in the world and pursuades them to play for their team. It doesn't say, "Let's hire from the local college, they have plenty of players so they must all be qualified." They don't say that because they're not all qualified.
There's an old saw that goes, "You can learn a lot about a people by the heroes it keeps". It's true. Our heroes are the Kardashians and Desperate Housewives. We tap away on our smart phones and follow each other on Facebook. That's who we became. Opening up immigration would be painless; everyone gets an IQ test and have to pass a background check - if you score as a genius, you get instant papers. Done deal, no more hassles. It would cost 5 dollars to administer, no lawyers needed. People who are against immigration are terrified of the competition, so they dress up the argument with nonsense.
Let's face it, everyone has a list of things in the world that they'd like to see made better with automation. Coffee Barista not getting your drink fast enough? Briggo has you covered (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/briggo_coffee_robot_should_starbucks_replace_baristas_with_machines.html) . Are troop deployments in the middle east exacting a heavy human toll on your Armed Forces? Withdraw troops and send in the drones (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/25/uk-controlling-drones-afghanistan-britain). Haven't we always done this? Didn't we replace horses and buggies with the Model T? It's standard operating procedure. Gates is totally right; at this point in our societal evolution, it's almost inevitable that people are going to be left behind because programming and tinkering is just not engaging for them (much as I wish this were not the case at all). Some folks are just not intellectually curious about technology and what it can do - it's not easy to convince everyone to become engineers or programmers and even most of the ones we have today aren't really all that great at what they do.
Why is anyone still listening to Alan Greenspan? Didn't his anti-regulation, hands-off policies almost steer the American Economy off a cliff just a few years ago? For heaven's sakes, he went before the House Oversight Committee in 2008 and did a mea culpa of all things (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB122476545437862295). I'm desperate to know who honestly wants to hear him give advice on economics.
What else can be said except that he's completely right and that, frankly, I don't think we're smart enough to do it here in the US. The immigration situation here is totally rediculous, there was a time when we would actively seek out genious in the same way as a football team looks everywhere for new players. These immigrants (like Einstein) changed the world and today, for whatever baffling reason, we make the process as difficult and as confusing as possible. If you think about it, immigration by itself is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to beef up the IQ of the American gene pool.
If we can't get that right, I don't think we're going to shift our focus away from America's Got Talent long enough to institute programs to cultivate genius. It's one of the most heartbreaking issues of our time.
Fragmentation is natural, she just doesn't see it. Not everyone is on Facebook. About a billion people are, but 1 billion != 6.5 billion. And I understand that not everyone has a PC or phone, and this stops many from being on FB. But there are more than a billion PC/smartphone users in the world. And I count myself and my friends among those who aren't on FB, I wrote my own social media site and we do our busines there.
FB seems to appeal to a particular type of person with an interest in things like pop-culture and popular opinion. Most people just like a lot of noise, but not everyone. The author's opinion is just plain wrong, there's no simpler way to put it.
On Titanfall's release day, I posted a user review on Metacritic giving the game a zero, saying that I got a refund on Origin (they have a return policy for games, lucky me) and that I felt that the game was basically a super-modded Call of Duty - a sentiment that has been echoed even by more traditional gaming outlets. I also mentioned that when it comes to liking or disliking TItanfall, there are two types of players, 1) players who still enjoy Call of Duty and 2) players who don't. If you still enjoy the old CoD gaming formulas, give this game a try, otherwise pass on it. After a couple of days, the review was taken down, presumably because it was considered trolling? Not sure. I couldn't have been more honest.
Titanfall is not a great game, but opinion aside - some odd facts. Has anyone noticed that the textures on the PC version almost seem excessively low res? I find this particularly baffling. The other thing that troubles me is that Vincent Zampella aparently tweeted on October 29th that he wasn't aware that Titanfall was going to be an Xbox One exclusive until just then (http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/18380/article/titanfall-perpetually-a-microsoft-exclusive-respawn-unaware-ea-made-a-deal/). So, the only way he could have been unaware is that they were already working on a PS4 version and that the exclusivity deal announced in October quashed it. It just feels like a couple of these points kind of add up that Microsoft needed to make sure that it was exclusive and that the PC version wouldn't outshine the Xbox One version in the inevitable side-by-side comparisons. And, for its part, I must confess that I'm hard pressed to find much difference inthe Xbone-to-PC side-by-side videos.
In the end, I think the effort was wasted. There weren't many players broadcasting Titanfall on Twitch last night. And, as an avid gamer, it just feels like a lot of jockeying when versions of already-finished games are stopped with exclusivity contracts. I just can't get behind the Xbox One platform at all.
For sure it's not practical, you're totally right. My larger gripe, if you could even call it that, is that he "crowdsourced" troubleshooting to figure out the most basic of things. He could have run nslookup on the ISP DNS servers, then run the same query on any publicly available one. Takes 20 seconds. And, anyway, some common sense - is Comcast really going to go through the trouble of very blatantly preventing connections from resolving in this manner? Baffling.
Or maybe if their DNS servers are awful for whatever reason a user should just learn to fix it themselves instead of crowdfunding a dumb experiment that proves little more than their ISP's systems are either broken by accident or broken on purpose. Who knows, who cares.
Sorry, maybe you've skipped a salient point in the article, but the sites are not inaccessible. It seems plausible that there are some shannigans going on the Comcast DNS, just switch to a public DNS server for heaven's sakes. This is a really dumb post, sorry.
"Interesting, but what lesson are we to learn from someone who emails lists of passwords to herself?"
Well, if this is true, then there's not much that can be learned from her. The hackers she mentions in the article don't seem to be breaking into accounts than by any other means than guessing user passwords and voicemail PINs. That said, this isn't really an article about the glorification of technical guru gone bad, wreaking havoc on defenseless people. It's, apparently, about someone with maybe above-average tehcnical knowledge taking advantage of people who don't take enough precautions. So, it's hard to be terribly worried since most people who don't take enough precautions aren't likely to learn their lesson from an op-ed.
Also, maybe the writer is suffering from the same myopia we all suffer from time-to-time. We glorify people all the time and for even lesser things, this particular issue isn't unique. In fact, I might make the case that people actively seek out things to glorify and that this just shows up on peoples' radar. And it is very likely never to go away. So, in other words, the op-ed is a waste of energy and time.
I pay $30/month for 25 hours of talk and text with T-Mobile, but there's hardly a data plan (I think it's, like, 30mb/month). Suits me well since I don't use a smartphone. As soon as you set foot into the data plans, that's when things start getting expensive I think.
I love youtube, so that part makes me sad. But Facebook needs to be banned everywhere, period. There was a time when America's Titans of Industry were people like John D Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie - people who changed the world with things that sheltered us, improved transportation, and fed and powered the nation. Now our magnates are people who help us post selfies and sell its users as a statistic in advertising. Pathetic.
Forget that. Just send them some youtube links of a cats playing pianos and tell them everything is fine. When you have political figures not knowing that Africa's a continent, you're honestly just better off tuning out of pop culture and spending all of your free time on Stack Overflow and/.
So what? Ask people to find Croatia on a map. Forget that. Ask them to find Africa. Skip that. Ask them to find North America. For real, now we're shocked at people who can't keep up with acronyms? This is a huge shock? Is this post about making fun of people?
Or maybe just set up a fake profile that shows you in a positive light. No friends, no real information, just a dumb virtual business card to fool the foolish. I wish I were joking.
Slashdot Mirror
But what were these these "disparaging" comments exactly?
Markus Persson stopped further progress on a Rift version of Minecraft because of Facebook's involvement. Much respect to Notch for choosing to keep his hands clean of anything FB. There's been quite a bit of bewilderment over his position. If you don't understand where he's coming from after this whole time, I'd stop trying to understand.
Notch's move restores some of my faith in common sense. Well done, Notch. I don't even play Minecraft, maybe I should take a look at it.
How comical - "Twitter, obey us! We have this court order we scribbled on a sandwich napkin! And while you're at it, shut your doors and grovel at our feet!"
What's tally ironic is that iPhones are manufactured in China. That's the kind of irony that makes my ears fall off. I think, at some point we're going to have to make these devices in the US.
Exactly. So I have to chuckle when the news reports that an irate Mark Zuckerberg calls the President to voice his displeasure over spying (http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/13/technology/security/mark-zuckerberg-nsa/) . I don't know what he's pretending to be mad about.
. . . because the NSA stated yesterday that tech companies were fully aware of snooping the who time (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/03/20/1745254/nsa-general-counsel-insists-us-companies-assisted-in-data-collection). If they're encrypting, it's either for show (porbable) or to prevent eavesdropping by anyone else but the NSA (unlikely, if this mattered to them they would have done it a long time ago.) So, yeah, this feels like it's for show so that people can continue to have confidence in Google's platforms.
I think we're at the point in the cycle, especially in Silicon Valley, where youth equates to connectedness with modern trends in technology. It may be a somewhat correct assumption, especially in my case where I find social media and chronic smart phone use to be odious. But I don't think most older programmers feel this way. As people get older and this the social media hype begins to peter out, I think companies will become realistic again. I know quite a few dotnet programmers that are over 40, and when it comes to PHP and MySQL I think companies in general are kind of indifferent about age.
"Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."
No, I think free, industry standard software will do more for these kids than putting more money into the school system. I don't think more money to the schools is going to fix the problems these students have, empowering them with relevant skills will.
Maybe she can focus on why people do these things to start with and work on technology that can prevent these occurences? Our beef is with the crime itself and the damage it do? I think Roache missed the larger point.
Can you back up anything you mentioned in your post? So, a couple of problems;
"America has 320+ million people. It's talent pool is plenty big. Limited IQ is not a problem in the U.S."
Help me understand how you came to this conclusion exactly? Tech companies all have shortages of talent and have been screaming for immigration reform. They wouldn't take that route if they could hire local people (and, no, I'm sorry but the argument that companies want to pay immigrants pennies on the dollar doesn't wash. In the long run, the wages still go up for intelligent immigrants just like wages have been going up in general in China. People only get paid less for a short while in the begining). Also, what does having 320 million people have to do with its population of intelligent individuals? Your reasoning is, "There are lots of people in a given population, so there must people lots of intelligent people in that population?" Sorry, it doesn't quite work out that way.
This kind of rationale doesn't work in, for instance, professional sports (which seems to be taken more seriously than growing a population of bright people, for some bizarre reason). If a team wants the best players, it looks everywhere in the world and pursuades them to play for their team. It doesn't say, "Let's hire from the local college, they have plenty of players so they must all be qualified." They don't say that because they're not all qualified.
There's an old saw that goes, "You can learn a lot about a people by the heroes it keeps". It's true. Our heroes are the Kardashians and Desperate Housewives. We tap away on our smart phones and follow each other on Facebook. That's who we became. Opening up immigration would be painless; everyone gets an IQ test and have to pass a background check - if you score as a genius, you get instant papers. Done deal, no more hassles. It would cost 5 dollars to administer, no lawyers needed. People who are against immigration are terrified of the competition, so they dress up the argument with nonsense.
Let's face it, everyone has a list of things in the world that they'd like to see made better with automation. Coffee Barista not getting your drink fast enough? Briggo has you covered (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/briggo_coffee_robot_should_starbucks_replace_baristas_with_machines.html) . Are troop deployments in the middle east exacting a heavy human toll on your Armed Forces? Withdraw troops and send in the drones (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/25/uk-controlling-drones-afghanistan-britain). Haven't we always done this? Didn't we replace horses and buggies with the Model T? It's standard operating procedure. Gates is totally right; at this point in our societal evolution, it's almost inevitable that people are going to be left behind because programming and tinkering is just not engaging for them (much as I wish this were not the case at all). Some folks are just not intellectually curious about technology and what it can do - it's not easy to convince everyone to become engineers or programmers and even most of the ones we have today aren't really all that great at what they do.
Why is anyone still listening to Alan Greenspan? Didn't his anti-regulation, hands-off policies almost steer the American Economy off a cliff just a few years ago? For heaven's sakes, he went before the House Oversight Committee in 2008 and did a mea culpa of all things (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB122476545437862295). I'm desperate to know who honestly wants to hear him give advice on economics.
What else can be said except that he's completely right and that, frankly, I don't think we're smart enough to do it here in the US. The immigration situation here is totally rediculous, there was a time when we would actively seek out genious in the same way as a football team looks everywhere for new players. These immigrants (like Einstein) changed the world and today, for whatever baffling reason, we make the process as difficult and as confusing as possible. If you think about it, immigration by itself is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to beef up the IQ of the American gene pool.
If we can't get that right, I don't think we're going to shift our focus away from America's Got Talent long enough to institute programs to cultivate genius. It's one of the most heartbreaking issues of our time.
Fragmentation is natural, she just doesn't see it. Not everyone is on Facebook. About a billion people are, but 1 billion != 6.5 billion. And I understand that not everyone has a PC or phone, and this stops many from being on FB. But there are more than a billion PC/smartphone users in the world. And I count myself and my friends among those who aren't on FB, I wrote my own social media site and we do our busines there.
FB seems to appeal to a particular type of person with an interest in things like pop-culture and popular opinion. Most people just like a lot of noise, but not everyone. The author's opinion is just plain wrong, there's no simpler way to put it.
On Titanfall's release day, I posted a user review on Metacritic giving the game a zero, saying that I got a refund on Origin (they have a return policy for games, lucky me) and that I felt that the game was basically a super-modded Call of Duty - a sentiment that has been echoed even by more traditional gaming outlets. I also mentioned that when it comes to liking or disliking TItanfall, there are two types of players, 1) players who still enjoy Call of Duty and 2) players who don't. If you still enjoy the old CoD gaming formulas, give this game a try, otherwise pass on it. After a couple of days, the review was taken down, presumably because it was considered trolling? Not sure. I couldn't have been more honest.
Titanfall is not a great game, but opinion aside - some odd facts. Has anyone noticed that the textures on the PC version almost seem excessively low res? I find this particularly baffling. The other thing that troubles me is that Vincent Zampella aparently tweeted on October 29th that he wasn't aware that Titanfall was going to be an Xbox One exclusive until just then (http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/18380/article/titanfall-perpetually-a-microsoft-exclusive-respawn-unaware-ea-made-a-deal/). So, the only way he could have been unaware is that they were already working on a PS4 version and that the exclusivity deal announced in October quashed it. It just feels like a couple of these points kind of add up that Microsoft needed to make sure that it was exclusive and that the PC version wouldn't outshine the Xbox One version in the inevitable side-by-side comparisons. And, for its part, I must confess that I'm hard pressed to find much difference inthe Xbone-to-PC side-by-side videos.
In the end, I think the effort was wasted. There weren't many players broadcasting Titanfall on Twitch last night. And, as an avid gamer, it just feels like a lot of jockeying when versions of already-finished games are stopped with exclusivity contracts. I just can't get behind the Xbox One platform at all.
For sure it's not practical, you're totally right. My larger gripe, if you could even call it that, is that he "crowdsourced" troubleshooting to figure out the most basic of things. He could have run nslookup on the ISP DNS servers, then run the same query on any publicly available one. Takes 20 seconds. And, anyway, some common sense - is Comcast really going to go through the trouble of very blatantly preventing connections from resolving in this manner? Baffling.
Or maybe if their DNS servers are awful for whatever reason a user should just learn to fix it themselves instead of crowdfunding a dumb experiment that proves little more than their ISP's systems are either broken by accident or broken on purpose. Who knows, who cares.
Sorry, maybe you've skipped a salient point in the article, but the sites are not inaccessible. It seems plausible that there are some shannigans going on the Comcast DNS, just switch to a public DNS server for heaven's sakes. This is a really dumb post, sorry.
"Interesting, but what lesson are we to learn from someone who emails lists of passwords to herself?"
Well, if this is true, then there's not much that can be learned from her. The hackers she mentions in the article don't seem to be breaking into accounts than by any other means than guessing user passwords and voicemail PINs. That said, this isn't really an article about the glorification of technical guru gone bad, wreaking havoc on defenseless people. It's, apparently, about someone with maybe above-average tehcnical knowledge taking advantage of people who don't take enough precautions. So, it's hard to be terribly worried since most people who don't take enough precautions aren't likely to learn their lesson from an op-ed.
Also, maybe the writer is suffering from the same myopia we all suffer from time-to-time. We glorify people all the time and for even lesser things, this particular issue isn't unique. In fact, I might make the case that people actively seek out things to glorify and that this just shows up on peoples' radar. And it is very likely never to go away. So, in other words, the op-ed is a waste of energy and time.
I pay $30/month for 25 hours of talk and text with T-Mobile, but there's hardly a data plan (I think it's, like, 30mb/month). Suits me well since I don't use a smartphone. As soon as you set foot into the data plans, that's when things start getting expensive I think.
I love youtube, so that part makes me sad. But Facebook needs to be banned everywhere, period. There was a time when America's Titans of Industry were people like John D Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie - people who changed the world with things that sheltered us, improved transportation, and fed and powered the nation. Now our magnates are people who help us post selfies and sell its users as a statistic in advertising. Pathetic.
Forget that. Just send them some youtube links of a cats playing pianos and tell them everything is fine. When you have political figures not knowing that Africa's a continent, you're honestly just better off tuning out of pop culture and spending all of your free time on Stack Overflow and /.
So what? Ask people to find Croatia on a map. Forget that. Ask them to find Africa. Skip that. Ask them to find North America. For real, now we're shocked at people who can't keep up with acronyms? This is a huge shock? Is this post about making fun of people?
Isn't it Guilty Until Proven Innocent in the UK? Or is it France?
Is this, like, "You need a thief to catch a thief"?
This is messed up.
Or maybe just set up a fake profile that shows you in a positive light. No friends, no real information, just a dumb virtual business card to fool the foolish. I wish I were joking.