The metaphor goes even further: HTML was modeled after HyperCard, which was designed as a programming language geeks & non-geeks alike could use at their respective ability levels -- newbies/non-geeks could quickly learn to code the equivalent of a hand-written personal website (linked text+multimedia) while experts/geeks made professional standalone applications like today's major shopping sites or (literally) Myst. While HTML can't easily be used to hand-write a "good" site anymore, it's still very possible for a regular user to rapidly learn the basics, making it still on some level be a "language" potentially common among human beings, rather than being specific to the subset that are inclined towards programming.
Er, no. Witch hunts aren't from anonymity, or there wouldn't have been any back when everyone lived in little towns where they could be instantly & easily identified by just about anyone else there.
Witch hunts often come about for the opposite reason, in fact: it places immense psychological pressure upon someone when they see others around them (particularly people they respect) targeting individuals or groups, and because the "us vs. them" attitude means that even appearing to sympathize or disagree means potentially being targeted as "one of them," the vast majority of people will go along with it. Even if there's no threat of physical harm, being socially ostracized or looked down upon by others that know them (particularly ones respected by the community) is stressful enough to impel most to cooperate, particularly if the group includes individuals that the person wishes to be respected by and/or that are higher in the social hierarchy.
In-person, people gossip and speculate about others they know with friends, co-workers, or others they're on a first-name basis with, often despite knowing that the "information"-sharing could or will cause grief for the individual down the road; if the friend/co-worker starts speaking negatively about someone else, again, the majority of people will refrain from speaking out against it for fear of either hurting their standing with the person or becoming the next target. Likewise, it's similarly highly common for kids to gossip, knowingly lie about or even bully classmates as a method of bolstering their place in the social hierarchy, and very few kids will speak out against someone their age that's engaging in that kind of behavior.
The idea that anonymity leads to anti-social behavior online was nothing more than an untested theory that the media picked up on and ran with, not a well-established psychological reality. The few studies that have been done (including examinations of forum results) indicated that requiring real names only eliminates a tiny percentage of the vicious posts or trolls. That's because the vast majority of people that troll individuals or groups feel there's absolutely nothing wrong with their behavior, very often even feeling proud of it; they'll say the same things whether they're logged in under their real name, a pseudonym, or anonymously, which is why *Facebook* has a huge problem with bullying & trolling by people using their real names. (Think about all of the times you've seen people express smug pride for being "politically incorrect" by needlessly using slurs or saying things when somebody politely says it's hurtful to them & others -- the same callousness appears on Facebook and other places where people post under their real names.)
Furthermore crazy as all hell people picked up on redit and 4chan treating them as valid sources, and propagated it as truth over the airways (Glen Beck, Alex Jones, ect). The more wrong information there is, the more conspiracy theories will spring up from the insane.
Crazy/Insane != bigots paid to be total assholes. Don't push it off on the mentally ill folks -- they/we are no more (quite possibly less) likely to be prejudiced assholes than the next person, and markedly less likely to have a high-paying job encouraging them to air their views.
If you'd have listened to the hippies, there'd been no Vietnam...
I agree with your overall message, but our government started sending soldiers over to Vietnam in the mid-50s, while the countercultural movement didn't get started until the early '60s, with the main bulk of the anti-war activity years later. Also, just to be fair, the hatred of hippies is more of a right-wing & libertarian issue rather than specific to Generations X & Y/Millenials -- there's certainly more than enough right-wing/libertarian Boomers that are just as hateful.
It seems to me that it's primarily just DRM-infected video that's a problem, or possibly the distro/browser you're using. I'm using an 8-year-old laptop with Simply Mepis 11 + Firefox & Opera, and just about any video site without DRM seems to work fine for me. ("Just about" because Opera becomes borderline unresponsive if I try to view porn videos using it.)
I haven't found a solution to the cablecard problem yet, but so far in what little free time I've had, I've been working on improving an automated bittorrent based solution I already have.
Please share whatever you've come up with in a Slashdot submission, whether it's just a combination of programs, something you wrote yourself, shell scripts, or etc. -- it'd doubtless help others even if we're not tackling the exact same situation, and I'd be surprised if you didn't get at least a few suggestions for handling whatever weak points you feel it has.
...people who are really suicidal will find *some* way to kill themselves.
That'sa myth: the vast majority that get help recover. Depression temporarily wrecks the ability to think rationally or see things in proportion; people with severe cases don't want specifically to die, they want to stop being trapped in mental agony and can't believe there's a way out. With most suicide attempts, the person survives and the shock of what happened dispels the depression long enough for support from friends/family, therapy and medication to bring it under control. If they try to commit suicide with a gun and don't completely botch it, most won't get that chance.
Some people do attempt it again in the future and sometimes fail to survive it, but there's typically an underlying reason -- they may have refused to take/continue medication, had another disorder causing depression, been in a situation beyond their (but not others') control, or been in the small minority that doesn't respond well to the currently-available drugs/therapies. In other words, they're not a good barometer for how likely intervention works in the rest of the population.
I think that stopped being true with people born in the mid-late 70s, maybe earlier. While my older "Gen X" cousins/friends are solidly into their own generation's music, everyone I know that's between 28 & 37 can name at least a few bands from the late 60s & 70s that they really enjoy. When I go to concerts with my father (4-5 times a year), it's common for a good third of the audience is under 40 years old, and a lot of our parents got into MTV (where "our" bands appeared) when it came along; "classic rock" radio/internet stations likewise play all kinds of music from the late 60s through the early 90s -- our parents' music is effectively ours as well.
Yep. The bowl of petunias thinking, "oh no, not again" is what went through my head, followed by comparing people that trust DHS to do what's best for us and the whale's, "Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast?... I wonder if it will be my friend?"
They're not legal everywhere -- in many areas, people can't even set off "safe" fireworks on the 4th of July anymore due to the cost of sending the fire department out to handle calls or minor fires, let alone anything more exciting.
Schools in many states stopped teaching things like that a few decades ago. I'm in my mid-30s, and my classes didn't study grammar beyond the basics (noun, verb, adjective, adverb identification), so we had to learn "naturally" just through reading; it worked fine for those of us that did read for fun or with our parents at home, but not so well for the others.
(AFAIK, the change was the result of a mixture of funding being cut severely to schools in my state and voters/pundits decrying grammar & spelling as wastes of time we should learn just as part of reading, not as separate full subjects.)
They could actually use it as a marking system to make it easier for ground crews to find spots and to "tag" suspected criminals, if they use a formula that starts off looking like normal bird poop, then turns a fluorescent color and can't be washed off. (Having it start out looking like poop would prevent the offenders from realizing it's not a normal bird and shooting it down before it can escape.)
All along the southern border of the US raptors are a common sight. The prototype being displayed by the sales droid in TFA indicates that this UAV is close in size to adult native species in that area. The only thing that might give it away is its flight pattern.
If it could enter or look into forests, it'd also work for detecting outdoor pot farms in California's state parks & forested regions. (I'm not joking -- up here in Mendocino & northern Sonoma counties, the heavily armed guards & traps left by Mexican drug cartels & regional gangs have made it dangerous to explore off-trail like people used to just a generation ago.)
Or a screen that can develop malleable bumps/ridges for things like keyboard emulation, eventually with force-feedback and that kind of thing. That's what I'd like to see -- the abilities of a keyboard without the breakable moving extra parts.
Font, button/key size & the amount of visible info are all affected by screen size. As people age (particularly over 30), the font size that they can *comfortably* read even with "good" vision gradually increases; enlarging the font decreases the amount of visible information and often isn't an option at all. Likewise, the size of an on-screen button/key that they can consistently tap shifts upward with age, and even with a 4" screen it starts getting crowded (at best) very quickly if you shift their size upward.
I don't have trouble seeing on my 4" phone (yet) but I *have* noticed that I get an annoying sense of being 'closed in' when trying to do things like organize my to-do list & schedule. Also, the only keyboard I like, SwiftKey takes up 70-80% of the screen, which causes real problems when an app won't let me scroll to see the last input areas.
So it actually makes perfect sense that the people you know would want larger screens -- it makes the phone more comfortable for them to use.
Titanium Backup might be able to freeze it; I haven't given Titanium a try yet, but I've seen it recommended for various CPU-eating apps/services quite a few times.
No, they go back because it alleviates serious pain from major mental illness, which the vast majority of addicts have. By "major mental illness" I don't mean just garden-variety depression or anxiety, but disorders that cause wild mood swings to enraged/suicidal/terrified out of the blue, scary hallucinations, and so forth. They also don't develop coping skills for daily life, so the problems we quickly deal with & move beyond accumulate for them until they can reach their method of coping (e.g. the substance). That's why they go back to cocaine or whatever their substance of choice is -- and also why so many of them end up on the streets.
They have value, but it's as secondary devices when someone's away from their computer... For example, while I need a real computer with a keyboard and full-blown word processor to get serious writing done, I don't really need one when I just want to read a book before bed or order a prescription I need refilled -- my e-reader (effectively an e-ink tablet) is sufficient, so using it *for that* is far more reasonable than either toting my laptop everywhere or running back downstairs to where it 'lives' most of the time.
Specialization can be a good thing, and comparing related devices that have distinctly different purposes misses the point. By your logic, home computers in the 70s-90s were useless pieces of shit because they shared elements with mainframes without having similar powers -- which obviously ignores that they still did a great job at meeting the modest needs of average people interested in perhaps playing games or entering the household VHS tapes in a database.
I favor the old theory that spending a large sum on a device causes a lot of people to become defensive about its merits; agreeing that it has really serious faults would mean admitting to themselves that they were fooled into paying several times what the item is worth.
Users are NOT familiar with the Windows UI. The UI changes every damn release, in substantial ways, requiring retraining or lots of trial and error.
Win 95 and 8 are the only ones where it really changed, actually; the last version I used before installing Linux was XP, yet I had no trouble working with my mother's Windows 7 PC on a consumer level when introduced to it a year or two ago. It's also important to note that there was little-to-no "trial and error" for most users in the transition to Windows 95 -- MS pretty clearly designed the ad campaign in the months leading up to 95's release (including the choice of theme song) so it would double as user education, and seemed to focus on UI changes that would make the OS easier to handle for regular users.
HyperCard let just about anyone create a full-blown standalone application/game with it, even ones used to run large business inventory systems -- to do the same with HTML, it would require advanced web programming, database, and server skills, which are out of most people's reach, and would still be unable to be used if the device was offline.
Actually, Apple borrowed the concept from PalmOS, changed some minor things, and loaded it on larger-format screens -- they didn't innovate or design the UI type any more than Google did. (While they didn't mimic the Newton, I wouldn't be surprised if Palm did borrow many of the UI concepts from an earlier company that's just not coming to mind.)
Slashdot Mirror
The metaphor goes even further: HTML was modeled after HyperCard, which was designed as a programming language geeks & non-geeks alike could use at their respective ability levels -- newbies/non-geeks could quickly learn to code the equivalent of a hand-written personal website (linked text+multimedia) while experts/geeks made professional standalone applications like today's major shopping sites or (literally) Myst. While HTML can't easily be used to hand-write a "good" site anymore, it's still very possible for a regular user to rapidly learn the basics, making it still on some level be a "language" potentially common among human beings, rather than being specific to the subset that are inclined towards programming.
Er, no. Witch hunts aren't from anonymity, or there wouldn't have been any back when everyone lived in little towns where they could be instantly & easily identified by just about anyone else there.
Witch hunts often come about for the opposite reason, in fact: it places immense psychological pressure upon someone when they see others around them (particularly people they respect) targeting individuals or groups, and because the "us vs. them" attitude means that even appearing to sympathize or disagree means potentially being targeted as "one of them," the vast majority of people will go along with it. Even if there's no threat of physical harm, being socially ostracized or looked down upon by others that know them (particularly ones respected by the community) is stressful enough to impel most to cooperate, particularly if the group includes individuals that the person wishes to be respected by and/or that are higher in the social hierarchy.
In-person, people gossip and speculate about others they know with friends, co-workers, or others they're on a first-name basis with, often despite knowing that the "information"-sharing could or will cause grief for the individual down the road; if the friend/co-worker starts speaking negatively about someone else, again, the majority of people will refrain from speaking out against it for fear of either hurting their standing with the person or becoming the next target. Likewise, it's similarly highly common for kids to gossip, knowingly lie about or even bully classmates as a method of bolstering their place in the social hierarchy, and very few kids will speak out against someone their age that's engaging in that kind of behavior.
The idea that anonymity leads to anti-social behavior online was nothing more than an untested theory that the media picked up on and ran with, not a well-established psychological reality. The few studies that have been done (including examinations of forum results) indicated that requiring real names only eliminates a tiny percentage of the vicious posts or trolls. That's because the vast majority of people that troll individuals or groups feel there's absolutely nothing wrong with their behavior, very often even feeling proud of it; they'll say the same things whether they're logged in under their real name, a pseudonym, or anonymously, which is why *Facebook* has a huge problem with bullying & trolling by people using their real names. (Think about all of the times you've seen people express smug pride for being "politically incorrect" by needlessly using slurs or saying things when somebody politely says it's hurtful to them & others -- the same callousness appears on Facebook and other places where people post under their real names.)
Furthermore crazy as all hell people picked up on redit and 4chan treating them as valid sources, and propagated it as truth over the airways (Glen Beck, Alex Jones, ect). The more wrong information there is, the more conspiracy theories will spring up from the insane.
Crazy/Insane != bigots paid to be total assholes. Don't push it off on the mentally ill folks -- they/we are no more (quite possibly less) likely to be prejudiced assholes than the next person, and markedly less likely to have a high-paying job encouraging them to air their views.
If you'd have listened to the hippies, there'd been no Vietnam ...
I agree with your overall message, but our government started sending soldiers over to Vietnam in the mid-50s, while the countercultural movement didn't get started until the early '60s, with the main bulk of the anti-war activity years later. Also, just to be fair, the hatred of hippies is more of a right-wing & libertarian issue rather than specific to Generations X & Y/Millenials -- there's certainly more than enough right-wing/libertarian Boomers that are just as hateful.
It seems to me that it's primarily just DRM-infected video that's a problem, or possibly the distro/browser you're using. I'm using an 8-year-old laptop with Simply Mepis 11 + Firefox & Opera, and just about any video site without DRM seems to work fine for me. ("Just about" because Opera becomes borderline unresponsive if I try to view porn videos using it.)
I haven't found a solution to the cablecard problem yet, but so far in what little free time I've had, I've been working on improving an automated bittorrent based solution I already have.
Please share whatever you've come up with in a Slashdot submission, whether it's just a combination of programs, something you wrote yourself, shell scripts, or etc. -- it'd doubtless help others even if we're not tackling the exact same situation, and I'd be surprised if you didn't get at least a few suggestions for handling whatever weak points you feel it has.
...people who are really suicidal will find *some* way to kill themselves.
That's a myth: the vast majority that get help recover. Depression temporarily wrecks the ability to think rationally or see things in proportion; people with severe cases don't want specifically to die, they want to stop being trapped in mental agony and can't believe there's a way out. With most suicide attempts, the person survives and the shock of what happened dispels the depression long enough for support from friends/family, therapy and medication to bring it under control. If they try to commit suicide with a gun and don't completely botch it, most won't get that chance.
Some people do attempt it again in the future and sometimes fail to survive it, but there's typically an underlying reason -- they may have refused to take/continue medication, had another disorder causing depression, been in a situation beyond their (but not others') control, or been in the small minority that doesn't respond well to the currently-available drugs/therapies. In other words, they're not a good barometer for how likely intervention works in the rest of the population.
I think that stopped being true with people born in the mid-late 70s, maybe earlier. While my older "Gen X" cousins/friends are solidly into their own generation's music, everyone I know that's between 28 & 37 can name at least a few bands from the late 60s & 70s that they really enjoy. When I go to concerts with my father (4-5 times a year), it's common for a good third of the audience is under 40 years old, and a lot of our parents got into MTV (where "our" bands appeared) when it came along; "classic rock" radio/internet stations likewise play all kinds of music from the late 60s through the early 90s -- our parents' music is effectively ours as well.
Yep. The bowl of petunias thinking, "oh no, not again" is what went through my head, followed by comparing people that trust DHS to do what's best for us and the whale's, "Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? ... I wonder if it will be my friend?"
They're not legal everywhere -- in many areas, people can't even set off "safe" fireworks on the 4th of July anymore due to the cost of sending the fire department out to handle calls or minor fires, let alone anything more exciting.
Schools in many states stopped teaching things like that a few decades ago. I'm in my mid-30s, and my classes didn't study grammar beyond the basics (noun, verb, adjective, adverb identification), so we had to learn "naturally" just through reading; it worked fine for those of us that did read for fun or with our parents at home, but not so well for the others.
(AFAIK, the change was the result of a mixture of funding being cut severely to schools in my state and voters/pundits decrying grammar & spelling as wastes of time we should learn just as part of reading, not as separate full subjects.)
...for that touch of authenticity
They could actually use it as a marking system to make it easier for ground crews to find spots and to "tag" suspected criminals, if they use a formula that starts off looking like normal bird poop, then turns a fluorescent color and can't be washed off. (Having it start out looking like poop would prevent the offenders from realizing it's not a normal bird and shooting it down before it can escape.)
All along the southern border of the US raptors are a common sight. The prototype being displayed by the sales droid in TFA indicates that this UAV is close in size to adult native species in that area. The only thing that might give it away is its flight pattern.
If it could enter or look into forests, it'd also work for detecting outdoor pot farms in California's state parks & forested regions. (I'm not joking -- up here in Mendocino & northern Sonoma counties, the heavily armed guards & traps left by Mexican drug cartels & regional gangs have made it dangerous to explore off-trail like people used to just a generation ago.)
Or a screen that can develop malleable bumps/ridges for things like keyboard emulation, eventually with force-feedback and that kind of thing. That's what I'd like to see -- the abilities of a keyboard without the breakable moving extra parts.
Font, button/key size & the amount of visible info are all affected by screen size. As people age (particularly over 30), the font size that they can *comfortably* read even with "good" vision gradually increases; enlarging the font decreases the amount of visible information and often isn't an option at all. Likewise, the size of an on-screen button/key that they can consistently tap shifts upward with age, and even with a 4" screen it starts getting crowded (at best) very quickly if you shift their size upward.
I don't have trouble seeing on my 4" phone (yet) but I *have* noticed that I get an annoying sense of being 'closed in' when trying to do things like organize my to-do list & schedule. Also, the only keyboard I like, SwiftKey takes up 70-80% of the screen, which causes real problems when an app won't let me scroll to see the last input areas.
So it actually makes perfect sense that the people you know would want larger screens -- it makes the phone more comfortable for them to use.
Titanium Backup might be able to freeze it; I haven't given Titanium a try yet, but I've seen it recommended for various CPU-eating apps/services quite a few times.
No, they go back because it alleviates serious pain from major mental illness, which the vast majority of addicts have. By "major mental illness" I don't mean just garden-variety depression or anxiety, but disorders that cause wild mood swings to enraged/suicidal/terrified out of the blue, scary hallucinations, and so forth. They also don't develop coping skills for daily life, so the problems we quickly deal with & move beyond accumulate for them until they can reach their method of coping (e.g. the substance). That's why they go back to cocaine or whatever their substance of choice is -- and also why so many of them end up on the streets.
They have value, but it's as secondary devices when someone's away from their computer... For example, while I need a real computer with a keyboard and full-blown word processor to get serious writing done, I don't really need one when I just want to read a book before bed or order a prescription I need refilled -- my e-reader (effectively an e-ink tablet) is sufficient, so using it *for that* is far more reasonable than either toting my laptop everywhere or running back downstairs to where it 'lives' most of the time.
Specialization can be a good thing, and comparing related devices that have distinctly different purposes misses the point. By your logic, home computers in the 70s-90s were useless pieces of shit because they shared elements with mainframes without having similar powers -- which obviously ignores that they still did a great job at meeting the modest needs of average people interested in perhaps playing games or entering the household VHS tapes in a database.
Don't most tablets support a real mouse & keyboard via Bluetooth/USB?
I favor the old theory that spending a large sum on a device causes a lot of people to become defensive about its merits; agreeing that it has really serious faults would mean admitting to themselves that they were fooled into paying several times what the item is worth.
When you mentioned "the bad", you forgot to include the apparent inability to format Slashdot posts.
Or that RT disables mandatory previews, for that matter.
Users are NOT familiar with the Windows UI. The UI changes every damn release, in substantial ways, requiring retraining or lots of trial and error.
Win 95 and 8 are the only ones where it really changed, actually; the last version I used before installing Linux was XP, yet I had no trouble working with my mother's Windows 7 PC on a consumer level when introduced to it a year or two ago. It's also important to note that there was little-to-no "trial and error" for most users in the transition to Windows 95 -- MS pretty clearly designed the ad campaign in the months leading up to 95's release (including the choice of theme song) so it would double as user education, and seemed to focus on UI changes that would make the OS easier to handle for regular users.
HyperCard let just about anyone create a full-blown standalone application/game with it, even ones used to run large business inventory systems -- to do the same with HTML, it would require advanced web programming, database, and server skills, which are out of most people's reach, and would still be unable to be used if the device was offline.
Actually, Apple borrowed the concept from PalmOS, changed some minor things, and loaded it on larger-format screens -- they didn't innovate or design the UI type any more than Google did. (While they didn't mimic the Newton, I wouldn't be surprised if Palm did borrow many of the UI concepts from an earlier company that's just not coming to mind.)
Firefox devs have contracted a severe case of "me-too-itis" from Chrome.
Hopefully someone will find a cure soon; "me-too-itis" can be fatal when not properly treated.