"How anyone can sit here and look at the current state of affairs and not see it as a monumental clusterfuck that is HOLDING BACK the progress and innovation we were promised with HTML5 is beyond me."
If you're going to rant about taking a huge step backward, look no further than media streaming. Media streaming, where every time you want to watch the SAME video you have to download it again, wastes bandwidth, a much more precious resource than the 32GB micro-SD card you slip into your smartphone, much less the 3TB hard disk in your PC.
You're right though about "vested" interests preventing the progress of technology, from energy production to file sharing to medicine.
Well, to be fair, ATM it's Microsoft trying to convince others to adopt and adapt to its proposed standard. There's every reason to be suspicious of MS's motives, but the company has released some technologies that have gained wide deployment and yet have not resulted in a botnet of lawsuits against developers companies attempting to write their own implementations. MS might be trying to turn its FAT filesystems into a cash cow, but the RTF spec is free for anyone to use.
I haven't done much Googling, but it appears that Wikimedia's data centers are all located in the US. Is this still correct? Shouldn't Wikimedia be thinking of expanding its essential operations to other relatively "free" countries like Sweden, as a safeguard against possible natural disasters or human-induced server shutdowns?
I do understand these principles. For the record I'm against copyright and patents. But I know there are policital realities that make such a stand unfeasible.
True. So be very extra careful of your likes. Keep criticism to the generic minimum or use weasel words, like "I think X isn't being entirely truthful" rather than using the libelous "L" word. Moreover, not having an FB account could set off a much louder alarm. IIRC the social networking footprints of suspects in recent mass violence cases were surprisingly low to virtually non-existent.
The old Mega-Upload did use Flash for some functions, such as directories for multiple file downloads. I believe the architecture was up- or downgrade, take your pick, to Javascirpt just before the Big Raid.
However, what made the old Mega a popular download site was that it was perfectly possible to download using simple non-browser based tools, including the commandline hacker's download manager of choice, wget. And Mega's files where infinitely resumable, even across different IP addresses even using the non-paying downloaders. You just pointed wget to the new URL, and assuming the remote and local file's name are the same, wget resumes the partially downloaded file.
Few file hosts now allow this functionality for free users.
Okay, I'm a hypocrite. I don't have a FB account. But I think it makes far more sense to have a FB account that you fill with partly real, mostly bogus information than not having one and getting marked out as a oddball, paranoid, delusional type. The thing is, use FB the way savvy celebrities use the media. Generate just enough buzz to throw off the scent and make people believe you're a normal person, whatever that means. "Hold" fake opinions on non-controversial topics. Don't hold controvesial views on controversial topics, or pick a few pet controversies like nuclear power, gun or animal rights. And decline invites from people you don't know or haven't re-searched well. Accept invites from the operators of both political parties. This will make you less like to attract the attention of the Feds, than being RMS.
That would be the Raspberry Pi, which underCUTs them by half. Or you might wait for Dell's hopefully not vaporware $50 PC (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/01/16/2317205/meet-ophelia-dells-plan-to-reinvent-itself)
Requiring a government to "opensource" software is a nice but difficult proposition. The biggest problem I see is this: how can say a Western government justify giving stuff free to Al Qaeda or the Chinese? No, I'm not raising the Beware the Terrorists/Communists argument, simply stating the fact that opensourcing software means that EVERYBODY gets free access to the source, and that includes people outside the political entity. So effectively, you subsidize software development in other countries. Again, this is a great and altrusitic idea but one must also think of the political consequences of such a move.
I agree with you about the need to use the need for state power to be used in a "constructive" manner. However your description of Swartz alleged crime as "stealing" falls into the typical intellectual "property" trap that equates virtual "things" with real life objects. It's this comparison with real life "stealing" that appears to underlie the aggressive prosecution of the case.
A quote from the wikipedia article about Carmen Ortiz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz) best sums up this attitude:
'Ortiz was the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the Aaron Swartz case. In a 2011 press release, Ortiz wrote, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."'
See the danger? Despite all the rhetoric the Big Media companies bombard us that depict file sharers as digital thieves, nobody as far as I know has been successfully prosecuted for stealing an mp3 or mp4 of a hit song or movie. For copyright infringement, yes, but to get sent to jail for stealing an mp3, you'd have to steal the iPod it's stored in.
Right. And the the definition of "humanoid" is also a bit stretched. While I'm not expecting something out of the Uncanny Valley, a humanoid robot should at least bear some resemblance to the bug-eyed aliens from Roswell. Baxter doesn't even look like the Google Android logo but more like a vacuum cleaner with an old-style Mac boot screen for its "head".
It's their resources, so it's theirs to decide WTF they want to do with it. But here's a thought. What the Web sorely lacks isn't another Wiki dump of specialized topics that can be found in other Wikipages, something a web robot can do. The Wikimedia foundation is in a good position, more than any other non-commercial group, to start its own search engine to rival the corporate offerings of Google and Microsoft. Besides Google, Bing and specialist search sites for products, pr0n, and pirate wares, the other search "engines" are mostly Google/Bing scrapers. Wikimedia has the chance to change that, with its already extensive catalog of human verified links, aka citations required.
Aside from the obvious correlation, there's smog in our Street View and Haze in our spysat, is there any way to tell if the "smokescreen" is natural or man-made? How can one tell a dust storm from smog, cloud formations, or the plumes of a gigantic volcanic eruption? I know from elementary science that clouds are pollution.
It's easy to see why US environmental conditions should be better. China is a more dense country. There are more people/polluters per square area than in the US. A more meaningful comparison would be between countries or political units with approximate population densities and levels of development, say the US vs. Europe or China vs. India.
Stuff like this makes more net-savvy FB users less and less open about sharing their lives online. FB's become the virtual equivalent of the mall, a place for the masses and not just some cozy hangout where you can gather with friends and let your hair down. Here the pressure to conform becomes great, since standing out means you have to be either the star or the oddball accosted by security: your parents or those "friends" of yours horrified by your unconventional opinion. When everybody chooses to just "like" whatever everybody likes, how useful will that information be to FB?
"*This includes fictional suicides in print, tv, or cinema"
This probably explains while somebody else has to kill the would-be zombie.
"Tellingly, in most parts of the world, *highly publicized suicides tend to cause others to kill themselves. "suicide contagion" causes "suicide clusters" and the CDC has been looking into it for a few decades."
The closest thing I've noted to a suicide epidemic are those Buddhist monks setting themselves ablaze, and that has a clear political point. Suicide as a form of protest should be viewed differently from the suicide for more personal reasons.
"There is nothing rational nor sane about taking one's own life."
Please do not generalize. I've witnessed the suffering of a terminally ill relation who more than once pleaded with me for some drug that could end it all. I find it more disgusting that you'd presume to know some other person's pain well enough conclude that surviving to the end of your natural lifespan is the end-all of human existence.
His advice is sane as long as you remember never to micromanage the guys who'll implement your vision. Knowing CPR is a good thing, but forcing it on a person with a bullet in his chest could do more harm than good. Other examples: an accomplished writer would not necessarily make a good editor if he chooses to rewrite a novel to suit his own writing style. An art critic who paints on the side might be tempted to show off his technical knowledge of a medium instead of writing a general review that the public can understand.
Knowing good design is better than knowing just a little HTML.
"You can get a voice/data plan for about $30 a month. But you're not going to want to use it with a smart phone."
And why not? I've seen "smart" people use their smartphones as a combo dumbphone/tablet, effectively turning them into small "phablets" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phablet). Basically you use the expensive data plan for the dumbphone stuff like old-fashioned text-messaging and voice calls, or for quickly checking your social stats. Then you report to the nearest wi-fi hotspot if you want to watch YouTube or stare at your FB profile. This isn't as much as a hassle as you think, if you happen to live in a big city. Incidentally the Chinaphones I've seen happen to have 5" screen, which puts them at the lower end of the phablet category.
Only porn can save VR from going the way of the flying car. Seriously VR will become less than a gimmick if it's adopted by the social networking sheeple. VR gadgets will only go mainstream if combined with a SIM-like environment like Second Life but with better than Quake 2 graphics. Think Farmville where you can get a real close look at the virtual corn you've just harvested.
The problem with most shooters is that they're too fast for everybody but so-called hardcore gamers. And I mean "fast" not just in a carpal tunnel sense but fast in terms of pacing as well, since body count is what counts the most: the aliens, zombies, terrorists fragged. Why can't 3D game designers watch an episode of say The Walking Dead, and learn the joys of not spending every other second bashing and blowing up heads?
I haven't read the graphic novel, and my only memories of the original movie is Stallone's goofy acting. The newer Dredd movie features what appears to be a gun with sophisticated targetting electronics, but Dredd can still fire at will.
But this not-so-smart gun proposal reminds me of a current anime called Psycho-Pass where the cops are issued with a literally smooth-talking AI gun called a Dominator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass#Terminology):
"A high-tech weapon used by the police's inspectors and enforcers, which can only be used by the person it is registered to. When aimed at someone, it will read that person's crime coefficient and alter itself accordingly. By default, it is inactive to avoid firing upon innocent people. When aimed at someone with a high crime coefficient, the Dominator will switch to 'Paralyzer' mode, which fires non-lethal blasts that paralyzes its target for capture. If a target is determined to have a dangerously high crime coefficient, the Dominator will switch to 'Lethal Eliminator' mode which, as its name suggests, fires deadly shots that obliterates its target upon impact."
There's a plot twist in the series where one cop is confronted by a kidnapper with an angelic mental state. Her gun refuses to fire. The problem with the CNN opinion piece is the same. Life-saving technology that requires high technology to function is looking for grief. How exactly are you going to determine what is a child, based on visual cues alone, when the most advanced facial recognnition technology of today can be fooled by make-up? Might as well attach some sort of low-tech biological intelligence to the lethal weapon, aka a trained cop.
Maybe the forum members got disgusted by his posts, and so reported him to the Feds. Seriously, I didn't know till I checked my edictionary that "troll" had the pre-Internet non-mythical meaning of "circulate, move around".
"Why launch at CES if you're big enough to get all the attention you want on your own without sharing the spotlight?"
Not saying this is the case at CES, but I see some good reasons for a superstar to share the spotlight with other stars. Winning in the Olympics, where there are more star athletes, gives you more prestige than winning at a sports event where your competitors aren't quite world class. So I say it depends. If you have a mediocre product, launching at the same tech show as Apple would be the kiss of death. But if you're Apple and you know you have a great product or at least one that "looks" great to the industry press, then it wouldn't hurt to be the supernova that outshines a galaxy of so-so gadgets.
Yes, a truly dizzying fact that in space ithings have this uncanny tendency to spin. So you might have a satellite spining around its axis, then the satellite spinning around host planet, the planet spinning around a star, the star around the galactic core or a local cluster of stars, and the galaxy itelf spinning around a bigger galaxy or local cluster of galaxies, and so forth. I remember one "scientist" postulate that the only thing that doesn't spin is the universe itself because nobody has found any evidence to indicate a "universal" spin.
Slashdot Mirror
"How anyone can sit here and look at the current state of affairs and not see it as a monumental clusterfuck that is HOLDING BACK the progress and innovation we were promised with HTML5 is beyond me."
If you're going to rant about taking a huge step backward, look no further than media streaming. Media streaming, where every time you want to watch the SAME video you have to download it again, wastes bandwidth, a much more precious resource than the 32GB micro-SD card you slip into your smartphone, much less the 3TB hard disk in your PC.
You're right though about "vested" interests preventing the progress of technology, from energy production to file sharing to medicine.
Well, to be fair, ATM it's Microsoft trying to convince others to adopt and adapt to its proposed standard. There's every reason to be suspicious of MS's motives, but the company has released some technologies that have gained wide deployment and yet have not resulted in a botnet of lawsuits against developers companies attempting to write their own implementations. MS might be trying to turn its FAT filesystems into a cash cow, but the RTF spec is free for anyone to use.
I haven't done much Googling, but it appears that Wikimedia's data centers are all located in the US. Is this still correct? Shouldn't Wikimedia be thinking of expanding its essential operations to other relatively "free" countries like Sweden, as a safeguard against possible natural disasters or human-induced server shutdowns?
I do understand these principles. For the record I'm against copyright and patents. But I know there are policital realities that make such a stand unfeasible.
True. So be very extra careful of your likes. Keep criticism to the generic minimum or use weasel words, like "I think X isn't being entirely truthful" rather than using the libelous "L" word. Moreover, not having an FB account could set off a much louder alarm. IIRC the social networking footprints of suspects in recent mass violence cases were surprisingly low to virtually non-existent.
The old Mega-Upload did use Flash for some functions, such as directories for multiple file downloads. I believe the architecture was up- or downgrade, take your pick, to Javascirpt just before the Big Raid.
However, what made the old Mega a popular download site was that it was perfectly possible to download using simple non-browser based tools, including the commandline hacker's download manager of choice, wget. And Mega's files where infinitely resumable, even across different IP addresses even using the non-paying downloaders. You just pointed wget to the new URL, and assuming the remote and local file's name are the same, wget resumes the partially downloaded file.
Few file hosts now allow this functionality for free users.
Okay, I'm a hypocrite. I don't have a FB account. But I think it makes far more sense to have a FB account that you fill with partly real, mostly bogus information than not having one and getting marked out as a oddball, paranoid, delusional type. The thing is, use FB the way savvy celebrities use the media. Generate just enough buzz to throw off the scent and make people believe you're a normal person, whatever that means. "Hold" fake opinions on non-controversial topics. Don't hold controvesial views on controversial topics, or pick a few pet controversies like nuclear power, gun or animal rights. And decline invites from people you don't know or haven't re-searched well. Accept invites from the operators of both political parties. This will make you less like to attract the attention of the Feds, than being RMS.
That would be the Raspberry Pi, which underCUTs them by half. Or you might wait for Dell's hopefully not vaporware $50 PC (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/01/16/2317205/meet-ophelia-dells-plan-to-reinvent-itself)
Requiring a government to "opensource" software is a nice but difficult proposition. The biggest problem I see is this: how can say a Western government justify giving stuff free to Al Qaeda or the Chinese? No, I'm not raising the Beware the Terrorists/Communists argument, simply stating the fact that opensourcing software means that EVERYBODY gets free access to the source, and that includes people outside the political entity. So effectively, you subsidize software development in other countries. Again, this is a great and altrusitic idea but one must also think of the political consequences of such a move.
I agree with you about the need to use the need for state power to be used in a "constructive" manner. However your description of Swartz alleged crime as "stealing" falls into the typical intellectual "property" trap that equates virtual "things" with real life objects. It's this comparison with real life "stealing" that appears to underlie the aggressive prosecution of the case.
A quote from the wikipedia article about Carmen Ortiz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz) best sums up this attitude:
'Ortiz was the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the Aaron Swartz case. In a 2011 press release, Ortiz wrote, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."'
See the danger? Despite all the rhetoric the Big Media companies bombard us that depict file sharers as digital thieves, nobody as far as I know has been successfully prosecuted for stealing an mp3 or mp4 of a hit song or movie. For copyright infringement, yes, but to get sent to jail for stealing an mp3, you'd have to steal the iPod it's stored in.
Right. And the the definition of "humanoid" is also a bit stretched. While I'm not expecting something out of the Uncanny Valley, a humanoid robot should at least bear some resemblance to the bug-eyed aliens from Roswell. Baxter doesn't even look like the Google Android logo but more like a vacuum cleaner with an old-style Mac boot screen for its "head".
It's their resources, so it's theirs to decide WTF they want to do with it. But here's a thought. What the Web sorely lacks isn't another Wiki dump of specialized topics that can be found in other Wikipages, something a web robot can do. The Wikimedia foundation is in a good position, more than any other non-commercial group, to start its own search engine to rival the corporate offerings of Google and Microsoft. Besides Google, Bing and specialist search sites for products, pr0n, and pirate wares, the other search "engines" are mostly Google/Bing scrapers. Wikimedia has the chance to change that, with its already extensive catalog of human verified links, aka citations required.
Aside from the obvious correlation, there's smog in our Street View and Haze in our spysat, is there any way to tell if the "smokescreen" is natural or man-made? How can one tell a dust storm from smog, cloud formations, or the plumes of a gigantic volcanic eruption? I know from elementary science that clouds are pollution.
It's easy to see why US environmental conditions should be better. China is a more dense country. There are more people/polluters per square area than in the US. A more meaningful comparison would be between countries or political units with approximate population densities and levels of development, say the US vs. Europe or China vs. India.
"parents learn about your kids life online"
Stuff like this makes more net-savvy FB users less and less open about sharing their lives online. FB's become the virtual equivalent of the mall, a place for the masses and not just some cozy hangout where you can gather with friends and let your hair down. Here the pressure to conform becomes great, since standing out means you have to be either the star or the oddball accosted by security: your parents or those "friends" of yours horrified by your unconventional opinion. When everybody chooses to just "like" whatever everybody likes, how useful will that information be to FB?
"*This includes fictional suicides in print, tv, or cinema" This probably explains while somebody else has to kill the would-be zombie. "Tellingly, in most parts of the world, *highly publicized suicides tend to cause others to kill themselves. "suicide contagion" causes "suicide clusters" and the CDC has been looking into it for a few decades." The closest thing I've noted to a suicide epidemic are those Buddhist monks setting themselves ablaze, and that has a clear political point. Suicide as a form of protest should be viewed differently from the suicide for more personal reasons.
"It's like when a police officer tells a drunk person to move their car, then when they do they arrest them for a DUI"
Just get out and push the car.
"There is nothing rational nor sane about taking one's own life."
Please do not generalize. I've witnessed the suffering of a terminally ill relation who more than once pleaded with me for some drug that could end it all. I find it more disgusting that you'd presume to know some other person's pain well enough conclude that surviving to the end of your natural lifespan is the end-all of human existence.
His advice is sane as long as you remember never to micromanage the guys who'll implement your vision. Knowing CPR is a good thing, but forcing it on a person with a bullet in his chest could do more harm than good. Other examples: an accomplished writer would not necessarily make a good editor if he chooses to rewrite a novel to suit his own writing style. An art critic who paints on the side might be tempted to show off his technical knowledge of a medium instead of writing a general review that the public can understand.
Knowing good design is better than knowing just a little HTML.
"You can get a voice/data plan for about $30 a month. But you're not going to want to use it with a smart phone."
And why not? I've seen "smart" people use their smartphones as a combo dumbphone/tablet, effectively turning them into small "phablets" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phablet). Basically you use the expensive data plan for the dumbphone stuff like old-fashioned text-messaging and voice calls, or for quickly checking your social stats. Then you report to the nearest wi-fi hotspot if you want to watch YouTube or stare at your FB profile. This isn't as much as a hassle as you think, if you happen to live in a big city. Incidentally the Chinaphones I've seen happen to have 5" screen, which puts them at the lower end of the phablet category.
Only porn can save VR from going the way of the flying car. Seriously VR will become less than a gimmick if it's adopted by the social networking sheeple. VR gadgets will only go mainstream if combined with a SIM-like environment like Second Life but with better than Quake 2 graphics. Think Farmville where you can get a real close look at the virtual corn you've just harvested.
The problem with most shooters is that they're too fast for everybody but so-called hardcore gamers. And I mean "fast" not just in a carpal tunnel sense but fast in terms of pacing as well, since body count is what counts the most: the aliens, zombies, terrorists fragged. Why can't 3D game designers watch an episode of say The Walking Dead, and learn the joys of not spending every other second bashing and blowing up heads?
I haven't read the graphic novel, and my only memories of the original movie is Stallone's goofy acting. The newer Dredd movie features what appears to be a gun with sophisticated targetting electronics, but Dredd can still fire at will.
But this not-so-smart gun proposal reminds me of a current anime called Psycho-Pass where the cops are issued with a literally smooth-talking AI gun called a Dominator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass#Terminology):
"A high-tech weapon used by the police's inspectors and enforcers, which can only be used by the person it is registered to. When aimed at someone, it will read that person's crime coefficient and alter itself accordingly. By default, it is inactive to avoid firing upon innocent people. When aimed at someone with a high crime coefficient, the Dominator will switch to 'Paralyzer' mode, which fires non-lethal blasts that paralyzes its target for capture. If a target is determined to have a dangerously high crime coefficient, the Dominator will switch to 'Lethal Eliminator' mode which, as its name suggests, fires deadly shots that obliterates its target upon impact."
There's a plot twist in the series where one cop is confronted by a kidnapper with an angelic mental state. Her gun refuses to fire. The problem with the CNN opinion piece is the same. Life-saving technology that requires high technology to function is looking for grief. How exactly are you going to determine what is a child, based on visual cues alone, when the most advanced facial recognnition technology of today can be fooled by make-up? Might as well attach some sort of low-tech biological intelligence to the lethal weapon, aka a trained cop.
"Li trolled black market Internet forums"
Maybe the forum members got disgusted by his posts, and so reported him to the Feds. Seriously, I didn't know till I checked my edictionary that "troll" had the pre-Internet non-mythical meaning of "circulate, move around".
"Why launch at CES if you're big enough to get all the attention you want on your own without sharing the spotlight?"
Not saying this is the case at CES, but I see some good reasons for a superstar to share the spotlight with other stars. Winning in the Olympics, where there are more star athletes, gives you more prestige than winning at a sports event where your competitors aren't quite world class. So I say it depends. If you have a mediocre product, launching at the same tech show as Apple would be the kiss of death. But if you're Apple and you know you have a great product or at least one that "looks" great to the industry press, then it wouldn't hurt to be the supernova that outshines a galaxy of so-so gadgets.
Yes, a truly dizzying fact that in space ithings have this uncanny tendency to spin. So you might have a satellite spining around its axis, then the satellite spinning around host planet, the planet spinning around a star, the star around the galactic core or a local cluster of stars, and the galaxy itelf spinning around a bigger galaxy or local cluster of galaxies, and so forth. I remember one "scientist" postulate that the only thing that doesn't spin is the universe itself because nobody has found any evidence to indicate a "universal" spin.