Slashdot is one of the few exceptions of a web interface that allows the sorts of things that should be resurrected on the web. It allows for contextual reply and changing of topic lines. It could stand some improvements in how it displays threads and subthreads in an conversation, and I disagree with an editorial board filter of subjects, driven by articles the editorial board thinks are important. Reddit is better in both regards. I think that you cold teach Markdown to most people especially if it gave them something they really need to target replies.
I hope that your rejoinder about Slashdot Beta UI is ironic for I think that Beta heads in the wrong direction changing the interface to be more like Social Media sites. If it is adopted I will unsubscribe from Slashdot because it will have the same flaw as most social media and web browser driven interfaces, not easily allowing for context in reply.
Someone noticed how bad Thunderbird's editor is. In the days of text your Mail User Editor (MTA) could fork your perferred editor. That was also true of USENET newsreaders. They had the feature built-in to quote the article or message you were replying to. You edited down to the material you wanted to reply to, wrote your response, and sent that. This should be the minimal capability of a web interface.
The standard should be that textareas are OK for small numbers of comments,
I think that the dissatisfaction many people voice over Facebook, Google+ and Google Groups and most web sites with blogs is due to this poor design. They fell hampered by the available functionality. It is just too hard with a textarea to do context and what people don't understand, because they don't know any better in many cases, is that their anger at what other people do, distractions people cause, is not due to a problem with people, people haven't changed, but that web site designs and interfaces are badly engineered for the kinds of ways that people communicate. Some idiot engineer on another thread posted how he thought that social science was way down the list on curriculum that should be taught to students in a web-design BA program. It is precisely because of poor human factors research and laziness and greed on the part of web designers and social media companies that we have a sorry state of communication on the Internet mostly centered on the miapplication of blogging to communication. Facebook is a disaster because of this and most of its users are too ignorant to realize that their frustrations with communication on it is due to Zuckerberg's insistence on "Simplocity" which means textarea widgets and blocks of text that are easy to mine for data for his businesss partners. So this is driven by greed. And Google is the same sort of thing. Google+ is just a self-promotion echo chamber for the same reason, greed.
Actually web-based applications come at a great price. Their history discourages communication and thinking. Back in the day of text, there were much better tools for communicating than we have in web-apps, web-sites, and in particular blogs. The textarea widget is a muzzle on good discourse, on the ability to argue and persuade. It encourages people to not address one another and to talk past each other. It should be abolished.
The tools developed for Mail User Agents and their derivative USENET newsgroup readers are much superior than the chat and blog tools that dominate web applications today.
The blog is being used by social media companies to restrict discussion. It is anti-democratic. We need to bring back the standards of the days of text, the discussion forum with its reply in context and its ability of users to change topic lines. Discussion does not take place in blogs and on most web sites because the complexity needed for discussion is not supported. This needs to defeat the Google business model.
When I buy a new PC, it usually has some Windows or other. I try to install some *NIX subsystem to get the familiar shell and commands. I had tried MKS demos, and I have always tried to install Cygwin, because it is free. I am comfortable with the degree of integration in the latter. It doesn't bother me to have to run a terninal application to get a shell or to run an X11 application from the Windows desktop to get access to X11 clinets, xterns, gnuemacs, etc. The price is right.
Generally, though, I have always tried to install Linux on the system because I regard it as much more secure than Windows anything, So I may run Windows with Cygwin just to get me a shell and some *NIX commands. I run Wine on Linux to get access to the odd Windows application I like.
But before GUIs and bitmapped graphics, you had text only. I still try to install emacs first to see if the OS will do it and second because for me it is still most powerfully useful with regular expression incremental search and for looking at binary files. I have used plenty of newer editors and vim. For Vi, even though I am not as comfortable with it as emacs in a barebones *NIX system it is always available and back in the day when I did system administration it was all that was there, and if the terminal software was also down, you might have had to know ex, or ed comands: 1,$s/foo/bar/g.
Emacs is really quite versatile because you can run analogs of things that often come as separate applications in it, including the shell, mail, and web browser. There was a time when emacs was an integrated environment designed for glass ttys. I still use 'emacs -nw' inside a terminal because I can make the terminal font large and edit with light colored characters on a dark background to acmodate poor eyesight. Even though I have the X11 client, sometimes editing in a terminal with a zoomed font is easier for me.
Of the newer editors, my favorite is Sublime Text 2, which works as a minimal editor for text editors or a very smart code editor. Emacs still forces you to turn on autofill on or to know enough elisp to add it to your.emacsrc file. Sublime Text 2 thinks that you just want to type in text and auto-fill if you say nothing else.
Minimally, I could do quite well with just a terminal emulation and a shell and a line editor, vi, nano, or some minimal Emacs clone. I have used tiny Linux distributions with not much more than this, but unfortunately font zooming is now more important to me that just minimal text-based operation. I tried to install Arch Linux by was defeated because I couldn't figure out how to configure the terminal for a larger font.
I don't know, social media and the marketing BS around tech is pretty ridiculous. So much attention and money is focused on pursuits that are shallow and meaningless, even though the underlying science and engineering is not. I have been on the warpath over the way blogging degrades conversation. That is a far cry from the technology needed to run the networking and applications needed to do it. It is that mature markets dumb everything and everyone down, the human condition reasserts itself, which is, people are selfish and stupid, that latter term is "Unaware" so that intelligent people can be stupid.
Ignorance is not bliss, especially with heavy metals in the environment. Hg was used to almegmate fluvial Gold in California and large amounts of Hg are now trapped in sediments washed down from the gold bearing deposits. Hg is not that mobile in the environment unless it gets incorporated into organic systems and the amount of Hg detected downstream has been relatively low, but the point is, as in the OP, that we do the experiment after the fact. In ignorance we do things and turn around and try to find out the damage after the fact, after the profit taking, and hope that the damage isn't too fatal. The other shoe may drop on Hg contamination in California centuries from now, however.
This is always er... muddied, by the fact that nature does some of the injection of heavy metals into the environment, herself. Hg is a common element in the Franciscan Group of the California Coast Ranges, so is Cr, so when businesses put large excesses of these elements into the environment, both Hg and Cr, they point to the natural supply in order to get wiggle room. In the case of Cr, it was the overabundance of the more oxidized Cr+6 that got some businesses into trouble, when Cr+2 or Cr+3 are the natural species of the element ion.
Yes, Politics is the setting of priorities in society, and it is also the battle of groups who want to exclude others not in their elite. Economics introduces the perception of scarcity, either there is a limited resource that needs to be fairly apportioned or that there are groups that claim to be more entitled than others to use it. The Unseen Hand like the Free Market are idealizations, ovesimplifications, of reality. They apply when there is no advantage in knowledge or no elitist advantage sought. Reality is that economics is really more like politics because people can play favorites with where they do business, they are easily biased and while one can find plenty of cases where political consideration don't matter very much in one's day to day transactions, the more Macro-economic the scope the less the hand is invidible, and the more the priorities are dictated by politics.
So the reason we are getting the finger, is that banks and financial institutions have been successful in the political arena at pushing the elitism of financially minded and wealthy minorities. This is happening the world over and it threatens our safety. Financialization and speculation are now too important in the world economy. That will come to disaster, unrest, possibly ecological calamity and mass extinction from which mankind will not escape because of the unwise leadership we have. That will surely answer economics with the end of economists and all the rest.
But, you have it wrong. The burden on you is not that you are doing something right or wrong, but that whatever you are doing can be recorded and the content used out of context to create the impression that you WERE doing something wrong. That is why people are, and should be, sensitive about privacy, the expectation that you can go out in public and not fear that someone is going to use something perfectly OK against you is sacred.
When the police record your license plate and if they turn around and acuse you of a crime, a traffic violation or worse, they still have to go before a judge and ultimately a jury and demonstrate that they had cause and submit the recording as evidence to be reviewed. The use of helmet cams has in fact backfired against cops who abuse their power, but in general people are sensitive about others collecting "data" on them in public. Even snapping a photo in a restaurant makes many people uncomfortable, not because they have something to hide, but because a photo could be used to create the impression that something has happened that really didn't. Social Media should be full of this, and that has resulted in lawsuits which innocent people have won.
The OP didn't quote the part of the Atlantic article that explained what the adaptation of the gel that forms from Horseshoe Crab blood is for. It sounds roughly analogous to what blood clotting in many animals does to protect them from infection from an open wound. It is the same sort of thing. The blood, blue because many crustacians use Cu instead of Fe in the O binding protein of their blood, protects the relatively open circulatory system of these arthropods from bacteria.
Back in the day, Cambrian day, the animals like these were trilobites that were fed upon by predators that could crack the exoskeleton with pincers and claws to eat the soft parts within. That risk along with incidental puncture of the exoskeleton would make the circulation vulnerable to pathogens, so that even if you survived an accident the breach in your armor might kill you from infection, so that explains the adaptation.
So, why are these blue bloods, using Cu instead of Fe, which makes our blood red? This is true of lobsters as well. The arthropods appeared in the Earliest Cambrian although there is evidence for them before the Cambrian Explosion. There is a beast in the Edicarian Fauna of Australia that has the same three part body plan of the trilobites and ultimately the horseshoe crab, and most of the extant isopoda, including the pill bug. These animals might have been around in the late Precambrian. Although this is well after the Fe was oxidized out of the oceans, causing the worldwide ironstone, banded iron deposits. Their blood may have evolved to use the more soluable salts of Cu. The problem is the protean that uses Cu is less effective than Hemoglobin, that uses Fe, for carrying O in the blood. The arthropods we know retained the ancestral material because they were not so active as to need the more efficient protean in their blood.
I have known about Richard Stallman for a long time and have seen some recent interviews down by Russia TV, whose interest is suspect, given that at least one interviewer did his utmost to twist what Stallman was saying.
I have always felt that Stallman's views are a little doctrinaire including the distinction between the kernel being totally free and the applications not being totally free. The way I understand it, the hook non-free tools have on users who install them is convenience, if not market share, but that is the hook any main market player has on consumers of any products. So, people are more than willing to sacrifice freedom, as in total control of their systems, to non-free convenience. It is not simply that closed standards are supported by non-free software, but that lots of content uses non-free standards and in some cases that is to the advantage of the content owner. It would be interesting to hear what Stallman thinks of efforts to enforce ownership on content.
I ascribe to the theory that ownership has to be enforced, that the reason why copyright protection is a losing battle in digital media is that it is predicated on the expense of making copies, which digital technology has made practically zero, and so the enforcement of property rights is at best a game of picking low hanging fruit, not stopping it. These are two distinct problems, content producers have reasons to pick closed standards, but in the face of any real ability to enforce ownership and against the possibility that they may see the advantage to publish in an free standard for wide desemination of samples of their work, if not all of them. "Free" is not the same as "Open". An open standard might just be a published API that uses a non-free core, for which a licensing fee had to be paid or at least the owner does not publish the source for.
So, this raises an interesting idea, to the extant that so-called open-source programs are undocumented or poorly documented are they free or not? Yes, you can get at the source and read it and if you are smart you can figure out what it does. If there are no documents, or they are poorly written, as is often the case, then if there are no useful comments in the source, is having the source really any different than if the code were not free?
Because they don't file for unemployment benefits, they would not be counted. We all have known people who work for a few months at high paying jobs, then the contract ends and they have to live off the fat of the lamb for a year or more and they can do it without needing UI, even though when you do the math, their average income may be close to poverty level.
You can blame govt. regs. and Red Tape, ( You sound like a Republican, running the canned argument.) So consider a much more damaging argument to your whole tacit idea of economics and its incentives. Let's begin with the idea that is is investment which drives what happens, not demand. Demand for goods and services and jobs to make them is supposed to motivate investors to fund those companies willing to provide these, true?, Now, suppose that there is a sickness in management and finance, which is driven by digital technology and world wide communication and investment markets, which overemphasizes financialization and short-term ROI. There is no longer a tight coupling of demand and investment because of the large amount of world capital tied up in speculation, enabled by digital technology and communications. By demand I mean for jobs and for goods and services.
I think we should close the business schools the world over and teach economics with philosophy and ethics. We should attack the scientific basis of economics, it is but a branch of politics with some math thrown in to cover up the hidden agenda. Politics is the debate over social priorities, it results in the interests of competing groups being weighted against one another. In the classic pure market it is a blind eye to social allegances that is supposed to rule. At least one's habits and associations bias that, which is why we have marketing in business, but the more large scale the consideration the more political it becomes, there are groups favored at the expense of other groups. Economics becomes politics., which is why we can talk about Political Economy. BTW I oppose the political economy of the GOP but also the rest of the duopoly and Wall Stret and the Banks, it is neoliberalism, which is a mistake.
No, it is a problem with the medium. The structure of Google Plus does not allow for any kind of exchange that doesn't stroke the ego of the person who originated the topic. Just try to say some dissenting or critical of a post on it and you will see that it has a self-censoring and self-correcting feel. That is because the design is centered on the self-promotion and the group of people who subscribe as generally glad-handers and yes-men for the promoted item. It is just a business forum and a rather closed one at that. It is not a place for anything other than business promotion, which is why it is boring to most people who have access to it. I have tried it, and have lots of pending messages, but I now ignore it and any requests to join circles, it is all spam. To me, Google Plus is why I think Google Is Evil, it does evil.
Well, there are two sides to every story, so while Google+ is like LinkedIn, a platform for shameless self-promotion, it is not a place to have a decent discussion, nor is Facebook. Google has the historical archive for high-quality, if Wild-West, discussion and debate in the form of the USENET archive from its beginning in 1985 to a point well past 2000. What is telling about Google is that even though they had that information, they abandoned the advantages of both web-mail and newsgroups for supporting focused discussion between individuals who did not create the original topic post, for what we call Social Media and blogging.
Most of the reason social media sites suck, when they do, is because of blogging, because of what blogging doesn't allow participants to do. If your only interest is promoting some service or your business, I suppose blogging is fine. It is also OK for simple exchanges that are pretty much restricted to one topic exchanges, it is probsbly OK. Facebook is OK for what it is capable ot doing, regardless of Facebook's business model and the Big Data application. It is what it can't do and how that might be shaped by the business model of Google and Facebook and other social media companies that matters because it is degrading communication and discussion, things that should be allowed by someone to take place on a national scale as if the health of our institutions depended on it.
I have said over and over here that what the Internet needs is a resurrection of that style of the USENET newsgroup in a web model. It need only be text-only groups, and possibly a new topic hierarchy, but it needs to be global like Facebook is and it needs to allow for respondants to create new topics and threads without editorial staff moderation. This is like Slashdot with the current default UI and like Reddit, but the difference is that the structure of topics needs to be far more rich, like it is on USENET.
I think that my ideas don't get much attention because the blog has dominated the Internet for about 20 years and most poeple simply do not know about that structure of newsgroup posting or even web-mail. The ability to change topics, the ability to quote in reply and respond to that in context. These features, along with topic complexity and topic hierarchy, which are closer to Wiki design, now, are simply not known to most people, and the prevayors of social media have simply shaped what people say around the limitations of blogs. The reason may be the Big Data application, spying on you, but the result is far reaching. It gives web site owners and editorial staffs too much power to shape the conversation, and it hampers discussion between the respondents. It also enables trolls and abusers.
Google has really been on my shit list lately. I live near Silicon Valley and I am not proud of what these most visible companies are doing to people's lives. It doesn't really surprise me that Google's efforts to get there first with fast fiber would leave poorer areas in the dark, literally. Market capture and control of users, and if the article is correct, elitism, is part and parcel of the result of Google's business strategy over the past few years. Not that I have any sympathy for ISPs in general who behave like utility monopolies. A solution might be to steal bandwith form wireless carriers for public and free access. I also think that low power wireless with store and forward mesh networks is a possible solution. Low power solutions would still be legal under the terms which FCC has allocated bandwidth, especially if a free speech challenge is made to ISP control of bandwidth.
The whole point is that people need to be thinking of disruptive ways to prevent single vendor control of things at many levels beginning with Microsoft's illegal domination of the desktop and but also extending to Google's violation of open standards to create captive platforms. This extends to the undoing of the Internet, particularly for its control or chock points favored by governments who spy and businesses who create monopolies. We may have to trade some convienence and speed of access to get our freedom and privacy back. The bad guys always have the seduction of laziness to lure people in. If people want their power back they will have to make the effort to understand the tools they use better. The greedy people who run businesses know that this the the control they have ove most people, their lack of understanding. Rebellion creates an incentive for more resourcefulness and the impetus to find alternatives.
Debian is a good basis for other better designed derivatives, but in its efforts to be everything for everybody it has a tricky install and configuration process with poor checking and a lack of orthagonal processes to upgrade. I can be more precise, no pun. I tried installing Debian 7 on an old legacy machine. It went fine. The machine has a wireless dongle on its USB port, but something happened in the install scripts that skipped the install of the wireless stuff, or at least it wasn't successful, no wireless, and using Synaptic had not helped me to find and install the missing packages. So, there is a lack of symmetry with the install process and the upgrade process. The metapackage information is not readily available, especially if all you have the an install which has failed connectivity with the internet.
On the same system I installed Knoppix 7.2 which went well and automatically found the wireless dongle and installed the right drivers. The only problem with the install is that I haven't found that way you disable the default login, that system. based on Debian 7, is intended to be a rescue system, and I admire Klaus Knopper and what he has done with it, very very much.
I has occurred to me that I could compare the package names from the Knoppix install with those on the Debian 7 install and see if I can spot the missing wireless packages. That seems like a lot of work, especailly when that should be a wireless metapackage to check.
Fact is, if Linux users were truly conservative, that is wanting legacy and full control, they'd go back to command-line or use Arch Linux or minimal Debian. But the real issue here is that Classic Gnome vs. Unity, just as Metro vs. Windows 7 in that world, is not just a matter of being resistant to changer. Shuttleworth had this dream of running Linux on tablets and mobile phones, a dream not really yet realized, at least it hasn't caught fire. The way he did things was to try to cram the changes down everyone's throat, including keyboard and desktop users. On the desktop, Unity and Metro don't rally make sense because they add annoying extra steps to get to an item that a global menu achieves in fewer steps.
I installed U. 12.04 and ran Unity and the largest problem came on two areas, finding a particular application by name where I forgot the name and keeping a static order of things when Dash tries, social media style, to anticipate whaat you want, and gets is wrong, which is frequent. That effort to think for you is one of the annoying features, and is going to be a bigger problem as advertisers get more and more into the interface to try to guess what you are going to do next. It is like the frustration one often geels with Google search and with most social media sites and is why the problem is likely to get worse, and is going to get a bigger backlash from power users.
I love to make attacks on social media and efforts by business marketers to try to tell us what is in our interfaces. For that reason I say "Fuck Beta!".
I can tell that you are not very well informed. The Dinos didn't go extinct at the KT boundary. They are still with us. They are called birds and they began to be bird-like as drmeosaurids almost 100 million years before the K/T mass extinction.
I am sure that the work cited here refines constraints on the timing and duration of the extinction events, and despite any controversy over the root cause, it is the ultimate result which is probably the same. The core idea is not new; these ideas have been discussed in the reviewed literature for a long time and even made it into the trade press as long ago as a decade. The developments have been about the details and the relative importence of intertwined effects. That is the lesson for us, not that the differences between each of the five or so major extinction events in the record makes then unique, for they differ in what percentage of the groups in the record they effected, and which of the recurring effects was most important.
What they have in common is that a disruption of the flow of carbon in the earth's biosphere leads to a collapse of the food chain and that megafauna, animals larger than a cat, generally, are very much more affected than animals who are generalists, can burrow, can scavange, through a food chain collapse. Sudden massive changes in the atmosphere, especially in common greenhouse gasses can have a larger effect that if the combination of effects leads to photosynthesis collapse on land and sea and to global land and sea water warming. When carbonate compensation and methane hydrate stability are upset by ocean warming, the sudden injestion of methane and carbon dioxide can exaggerate greenhhouse effects. The sudden injection of sulfer and nitrates into the atmosphere from any of the posited causes of the ME events has collectively the same result, the disruption of the carbon cycle by acid or aerobic conditions in the sea. These destroy the food chain and the decimation of populations begins an doesn't take more than a few hundred years.
The lesson for us is that the common materials that we think are innocuous can have catastrophic effects when they get out of hand. Even the fear of the effects of all out nuclear war works through the same mechanism, the way a "nuclear Winter" is supposed to work is the way these extinction events work, Effects like putting lots of dust into the atmosphere, adding nitrates causing acid rain, and starting massive fires, are the same, Our economic activity is pushing the atmosphere into some of the milder effects that contributed to MEs including the possibility that the oceans might warm up enough so that methane hydrate is released en mass contributing greatly to global warming. Methane is about 40 times more efficient as a green house gas than CO2. So to listen to the oil and gas companies who have solved some of our near-term energy problems by frackking and developing new domestic reserves of natural gas and oil, sounds rosy, until you realize that burning fossil fuels in that way is pretty close to what happened during each one of these mass extinctions, and do you trust the average politician or business man to know when the runaway effects kick in and it is too late? I'm sorry, but I don't.
There is an alternative to the Internet. The flaw on the Internet is its several choak points or control points, one of which passes through the NSA HQ in northern Virginia. If you are worried about their ability to spy be aware that it is made easy for them and Google and Facebook and others to spy and bias information flow by the Internet.
If you are willing the accept some changes, it might be possible to restore some freedom and privacy to your on-line access. You might have to trade some speed and access for privacy, but in doing so, it would be harder for spies and spammers to get to you, and for businesses to filter what you get to see and send to others. The difference is that there are other approaches to networking that may already exist or be brought back to life than the Internet. You may have to tolerate delays to get far distant connections, but be able to transmit to local or trusted nodes much quicker than the Internet. You might be able to use line of sight transmission and store and forward technology to go off the wired network and away from the wireless carriers. The FCC has always allowed for low power use of the airways for public use, depending on the legal distinctions it may even be posible to use owned bandwidth for private networking. I am not even suggesting that foreign protocols can be put inside IP packets and transmitted, but you would still be paying some carrier for that.
Some mesh networking scheme could use public bandwidth to operate outside the Internet and carriers, or I suppose that in a revolutionary situation bandwidth could be stolen, but just thinking about ways of encrypting data that isn't noticed because its volume is low, seems attractive, so does a dynamic network topology that become much harder to keep track of.
Please use "Democratic" when you refer to that party and "democracy" when you refer to the type of government. Also note that that the U.S. is not a democracy, it is a republic which claims to be a representative democracy. Given that the megaphone has been given to the very wealthy by the current Supreme Court, it is much less of a democracy now than it has been in the past. It is in danger of destroying itself. I hope that you don't live in California because at some point in the next few years your status could be foreign.
The quality of discourse in America has gotten so poor. All we get from people are memed arguments and broadsides. One way to look through the false dichotomy of government vs. business, one which suits the sham of political discourse wanted by the Duopoly, is to realize tow things. 1) The same group of very rich people support both political parties and have for a long time. The National Committees have published their biggest donations for each national election for many years now, and the donors are the same group of people. 2) Americans are mostly naive about politics and economics and the intimate connection of the two. In particular they are naive about the role of corruption in both politics and business. They are often victims of selective attention and public relations to conceal corruption in private business while disclosure force the same abuses of power into the open when they occur in government, so they get a biased view of the problem. One way to resolve this is to look at the backgrounds of the people who lead in the country. You find that they are pretty much the same sorts of people whit lots of amition and that through their careers they migrate from roles in business and government freely, and most of them are very wealthy. So, avuse of power is a universal human trait, every one of us if we are fortunate to get the power will tend to abuse it some way. The person who uses power morally is rare or is eliminated by those who don't. So I assume that people are seeing a biased sample of behavior and since those that aspire to wealth and business success are going to se it in even a more biased way. I think that the solution is more disclosure but there needs to be much more disclosure about internal business strategy than there is now, and I don't really care if business people claim that this hurts their competitive advantage when they abuse power even more than our elected officials.
If government and business bias the flow of Information on the Internet than they do already, a case can be made that net -neutrality is already a moot issue with the
biasing of information flow in social media, which is not a government decision, then people who want more freedom of expresion will turn to alternative technology which is harder to control, mainly abandoning the Internet and looking for technology that allows for ephemeral networks that are hard to track and spy on. The spies are both government and business, and the same group of power mongers, interchangable thieves, from business or government. Take your standard politics and shove it; that does not address the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is one of the few exceptions of a web interface that allows the sorts of things that should be resurrected on the web. It allows for contextual reply and changing of topic lines. It could stand some improvements in how it displays threads and subthreads in an conversation, and I disagree with an editorial board filter of subjects, driven by articles the editorial board thinks are important. Reddit is better in both regards. I think that you cold teach Markdown to most people especially if it gave them something they really need to target replies.
I hope that your rejoinder about Slashdot Beta UI is ironic for I think that Beta heads in the wrong direction changing the interface to be more like Social Media sites. If it is adopted I will unsubscribe from Slashdot because it will have the same flaw as most social media and web browser driven interfaces, not easily allowing for context in reply.
Someone noticed how bad Thunderbird's editor is. In the days of text your Mail User Editor (MTA) could fork your perferred editor. That was also true of USENET newsreaders. They had the feature built-in to quote the article or message you were replying to. You edited down to the material you wanted to reply to, wrote your response, and sent that. This should be the minimal capability of a web interface.
The standard should be that textareas are OK for small numbers of comments, I think that the dissatisfaction many people voice over Facebook, Google+ and Google Groups and most web sites with blogs is due to this poor design. They fell hampered by the available functionality. It is just too hard with a textarea to do context and what people don't understand, because they don't know any better in many cases, is that their anger at what other people do, distractions people cause, is not due to a problem with people, people haven't changed, but that web site designs and interfaces are badly engineered for the kinds of ways that people communicate. Some idiot engineer on another thread posted how he thought that social science was way down the list on curriculum that should be taught to students in a web-design BA program. It is precisely because of poor human factors research and laziness and greed on the part of web designers and social media companies that we have a sorry state of communication on the Internet mostly centered on the miapplication of blogging to communication. Facebook is a disaster because of this and most of its users are too ignorant to realize that their frustrations with communication on it is due to Zuckerberg's insistence on "Simplocity" which means textarea widgets and blocks of text that are easy to mine for data for his businesss partners. So this is driven by greed. And Google is the same sort of thing. Google+ is just a self-promotion echo chamber for the same reason, greed.
Actually web-based applications come at a great price. Their history discourages communication and thinking. Back in the day of text, there were much better tools for communicating than we have in web-apps, web-sites, and in particular blogs. The textarea widget is a muzzle on good discourse, on the ability to argue and persuade. It encourages people to not address one another and to talk past each other. It should be abolished.
The tools developed for Mail User Agents and their derivative USENET newsgroup readers are much superior than the chat and blog tools that dominate web applications today.
The blog is being used by social media companies to restrict discussion. It is anti-democratic. We need to bring back the standards of the days of text, the discussion forum with its reply in context and its ability of users to change topic lines. Discussion does not take place in blogs and on most web sites because the complexity needed for discussion is not supported. This needs to defeat the Google business model.
Doesn't it, or elisp, garbage collect?
When I buy a new PC, it usually has some Windows or other. I try to install some *NIX subsystem to get the familiar shell and commands. I had tried MKS demos, and I have always tried to install Cygwin, because it is free. I am comfortable with the degree of integration in the latter. It doesn't bother me to have to run a terninal application to get a shell or to run an X11 application from the Windows desktop to get access to X11 clinets, xterns, gnuemacs, etc. The price is right.
Generally, though, I have always tried to install Linux on the system because I regard it as much more secure than Windows anything, So I may run Windows with Cygwin just to get me a shell and some *NIX commands. I run Wine on Linux to get access to the odd Windows application I like.
But before GUIs and bitmapped graphics, you had text only. I still try to install emacs first to see if the OS will do it and second because for me it is still most powerfully useful with regular expression incremental search and for looking at binary files. I have used plenty of newer editors and vim. For Vi, even though I am not as comfortable with it as emacs in a barebones *NIX system it is always available and back in the day when I did system administration it was all that was there, and if the terminal software was also down, you might have had to know ex, or ed comands: 1,$s/foo/bar/g.
Emacs is really quite versatile because you can run analogs of things that often come as separate applications in it, including the shell, mail, and web browser. There was a time when emacs was an integrated environment designed for glass ttys. I still use 'emacs -nw' inside a terminal because I can make the terminal font large and edit with light colored characters on a dark background to acmodate poor eyesight. Even though I have the X11 client, sometimes editing in a terminal with a zoomed font is easier for me.
Of the newer editors, my favorite is Sublime Text 2, which works as a minimal editor for text editors or a very smart code editor. Emacs still forces you to turn on autofill on or to know enough elisp to add it to your .emacsrc file. Sublime Text 2 thinks that you just want to type in text and auto-fill if you say nothing else.
Minimally, I could do quite well with just a terminal emulation and a shell and a line editor, vi, nano, or some minimal Emacs clone. I have used tiny Linux distributions with not much more than this, but unfortunately font zooming is now more important to me that just minimal text-based operation. I tried to install Arch Linux by was defeated because I couldn't figure out how to configure the terminal for a larger font.
I don't know, social media and the marketing BS around tech is pretty ridiculous. So much attention and money is focused on pursuits that are shallow and meaningless, even though the underlying science and engineering is not. I have been on the warpath over the way blogging degrades conversation. That is a far cry from the technology needed to run the networking and applications needed to do it. It is that mature markets dumb everything and everyone down, the human condition reasserts itself, which is, people are selfish and stupid, that latter term is "Unaware" so that intelligent people can be stupid.
Ignorance is not bliss, especially with heavy metals in the environment. Hg was used to almegmate fluvial Gold in California and large amounts of Hg are now trapped in sediments washed down from the gold bearing deposits. Hg is not that mobile in the environment unless it gets incorporated into organic systems and the amount of Hg detected downstream has been relatively low, but the point is, as in the OP, that we do the experiment after the fact. In ignorance we do things and turn around and try to find out the damage after the fact, after the profit taking, and hope that the damage isn't too fatal. The other shoe may drop on Hg contamination in California centuries from now, however.
This is always er... muddied, by the fact that nature does some of the injection of heavy metals into the environment, herself. Hg is a common element in the Franciscan Group of the California Coast Ranges, so is Cr, so when businesses put large excesses of these elements into the environment, both Hg and Cr, they point to the natural supply in order to get wiggle room. In the case of Cr, it was the overabundance of the more oxidized Cr+6 that got some businesses into trouble, when Cr+2 or Cr+3 are the natural species of the element ion.
Yes, Politics is the setting of priorities in society, and it is also the battle of groups who want to exclude others not in their elite. Economics introduces the perception of scarcity, either there is a limited resource that needs to be fairly apportioned or that there are groups that claim to be more entitled than others to use it. The Unseen Hand like the Free Market are idealizations, ovesimplifications, of reality. They apply when there is no advantage in knowledge or no elitist advantage sought. Reality is that economics is really more like politics because people can play favorites with where they do business, they are easily biased and while one can find plenty of cases where political consideration don't matter very much in one's day to day transactions, the more Macro-economic the scope the less the hand is invidible, and the more the priorities are dictated by politics.
So the reason we are getting the finger, is that banks and financial institutions have been successful in the political arena at pushing the elitism of financially minded and wealthy minorities. This is happening the world over and it threatens our safety. Financialization and speculation are now too important in the world economy. That will come to disaster, unrest, possibly ecological calamity and mass extinction from which mankind will not escape because of the unwise leadership we have. That will surely answer economics with the end of economists and all the rest.
Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, then the Nixon and Reagan Administrations.
OK, walk into a bar with a camera and start snapping photos. You might get some push back. I dare you.
But, you have it wrong. The burden on you is not that you are doing something right or wrong, but that whatever you are doing can be recorded and the content used out of context to create the impression that you WERE doing something wrong. That is why people are, and should be, sensitive about privacy, the expectation that you can go out in public and not fear that someone is going to use something perfectly OK against you is sacred.
When the police record your license plate and if they turn around and acuse you of a crime, a traffic violation or worse, they still have to go before a judge and ultimately a jury and demonstrate that they had cause and submit the recording as evidence to be reviewed. The use of helmet cams has in fact backfired against cops who abuse their power, but in general people are sensitive about others collecting "data" on them in public. Even snapping a photo in a restaurant makes many people uncomfortable, not because they have something to hide, but because a photo could be used to create the impression that something has happened that really didn't. Social Media should be full of this, and that has resulted in lawsuits which innocent people have won.
The OP didn't quote the part of the Atlantic article that explained what the adaptation of the gel that forms from Horseshoe Crab blood is for. It sounds roughly analogous to what blood clotting in many animals does to protect them from infection from an open wound. It is the same sort of thing. The blood, blue because many crustacians use Cu instead of Fe in the O binding protein of their blood, protects the relatively open circulatory system of these arthropods from bacteria.
Back in the day, Cambrian day, the animals like these were trilobites that were fed upon by predators that could crack the exoskeleton with pincers and claws to eat the soft parts within. That risk along with incidental puncture of the exoskeleton would make the circulation vulnerable to pathogens, so that even if you survived an accident the breach in your armor might kill you from infection, so that explains the adaptation.
So, why are these blue bloods, using Cu instead of Fe, which makes our blood red? This is true of lobsters as well. The arthropods appeared in the Earliest Cambrian although there is evidence for them before the Cambrian Explosion. There is a beast in the Edicarian Fauna of Australia that has the same three part body plan of the trilobites and ultimately the horseshoe crab, and most of the extant isopoda, including the pill bug. These animals might have been around in the late Precambrian. Although this is well after the Fe was oxidized out of the oceans, causing the worldwide ironstone, banded iron deposits. Their blood may have evolved to use the more soluable salts of Cu. The problem is the protean that uses Cu is less effective than Hemoglobin, that uses Fe, for carrying O in the blood. The arthropods we know retained the ancestral material because they were not so active as to need the more efficient protean in their blood.
I have known about Richard Stallman for a long time and have seen some recent interviews down by Russia TV, whose interest is suspect, given that at least one interviewer did his utmost to twist what Stallman was saying.
I have always felt that Stallman's views are a little doctrinaire including the distinction between the kernel being totally free and the applications not being totally free. The way I understand it, the hook non-free tools have on users who install them is convenience, if not market share, but that is the hook any main market player has on consumers of any products. So, people are more than willing to sacrifice freedom, as in total control of their systems, to non-free convenience. It is not simply that closed standards are supported by non-free software, but that lots of content uses non-free standards and in some cases that is to the advantage of the content owner. It would be interesting to hear what Stallman thinks of efforts to enforce ownership on content.
I ascribe to the theory that ownership has to be enforced, that the reason why copyright protection is a losing battle in digital media is that it is predicated on the expense of making copies, which digital technology has made practically zero, and so the enforcement of property rights is at best a game of picking low hanging fruit, not stopping it. These are two distinct problems, content producers have reasons to pick closed standards, but in the face of any real ability to enforce ownership and against the possibility that they may see the advantage to publish in an free standard for wide desemination of samples of their work, if not all of them. "Free" is not the same as "Open". An open standard might just be a published API that uses a non-free core, for which a licensing fee had to be paid or at least the owner does not publish the source for.
So, this raises an interesting idea, to the extant that so-called open-source programs are undocumented or poorly documented are they free or not? Yes, you can get at the source and read it and if you are smart you can figure out what it does. If there are no documents, or they are poorly written, as is often the case, then if there are no useful comments in the source, is having the source really any different than if the code were not free?
Because they don't file for unemployment benefits, they would not be counted. We all have known people who work for a few months at high paying jobs, then the contract ends and they have to live off the fat of the lamb for a year or more and they can do it without needing UI, even though when you do the math, their average income may be close to poverty level.
You can blame govt. regs. and Red Tape, ( You sound like a Republican, running the canned argument.) So consider a much more damaging argument to your whole tacit idea of economics and its incentives. Let's begin with the idea that is is investment which drives what happens, not demand. Demand for goods and services and jobs to make them is supposed to motivate investors to fund those companies willing to provide these, true?, Now, suppose that there is a sickness in management and finance, which is driven by digital technology and world wide communication and investment markets, which overemphasizes financialization and short-term ROI. There is no longer a tight coupling of demand and investment because of the large amount of world capital tied up in speculation, enabled by digital technology and communications. By demand I mean for jobs and for goods and services.
I think we should close the business schools the world over and teach economics with philosophy and ethics. We should attack the scientific basis of economics, it is but a branch of politics with some math thrown in to cover up the hidden agenda. Politics is the debate over social priorities, it results in the interests of competing groups being weighted against one another. In the classic pure market it is a blind eye to social allegances that is supposed to rule. At least one's habits and associations bias that, which is why we have marketing in business, but the more large scale the consideration the more political it becomes, there are groups favored at the expense of other groups. Economics becomes politics., which is why we can talk about Political Economy. BTW I oppose the political economy of the GOP but also the rest of the duopoly and Wall Stret and the Banks, it is neoliberalism, which is a mistake.
No, it is a problem with the medium. The structure of Google Plus does not allow for any kind of exchange that doesn't stroke the ego of the person who originated the topic. Just try to say some dissenting or critical of a post on it and you will see that it has a self-censoring and self-correcting feel. That is because the design is centered on the self-promotion and the group of people who subscribe as generally glad-handers and yes-men for the promoted item. It is just a business forum and a rather closed one at that. It is not a place for anything other than business promotion, which is why it is boring to most people who have access to it. I have tried it, and have lots of pending messages, but I now ignore it and any requests to join circles, it is all spam. To me, Google Plus is why I think Google Is Evil, it does evil.
Well, there are two sides to every story, so while Google+ is like LinkedIn, a platform for shameless self-promotion, it is not a place to have a decent discussion, nor is Facebook. Google has the historical archive for high-quality, if Wild-West, discussion and debate in the form of the USENET archive from its beginning in 1985 to a point well past 2000. What is telling about Google is that even though they had that information, they abandoned the advantages of both web-mail and newsgroups for supporting focused discussion between individuals who did not create the original topic post, for what we call Social Media and blogging.
Most of the reason social media sites suck, when they do, is because of blogging, because of what blogging doesn't allow participants to do. If your only interest is promoting some service or your business, I suppose blogging is fine. It is also OK for simple exchanges that are pretty much restricted to one topic exchanges, it is probsbly OK. Facebook is OK for what it is capable ot doing, regardless of Facebook's business model and the Big Data application. It is what it can't do and how that might be shaped by the business model of Google and Facebook and other social media companies that matters because it is degrading communication and discussion, things that should be allowed by someone to take place on a national scale as if the health of our institutions depended on it.
I have said over and over here that what the Internet needs is a resurrection of that style of the USENET newsgroup in a web model. It need only be text-only groups, and possibly a new topic hierarchy, but it needs to be global like Facebook is and it needs to allow for respondants to create new topics and threads without editorial staff moderation. This is like Slashdot with the current default UI and like Reddit, but the difference is that the structure of topics needs to be far more rich, like it is on USENET.
I think that my ideas don't get much attention because the blog has dominated the Internet for about 20 years and most poeple simply do not know about that structure of newsgroup posting or even web-mail. The ability to change topics, the ability to quote in reply and respond to that in context. These features, along with topic complexity and topic hierarchy, which are closer to Wiki design, now, are simply not known to most people, and the prevayors of social media have simply shaped what people say around the limitations of blogs. The reason may be the Big Data application, spying on you, but the result is far reaching. It gives web site owners and editorial staffs too much power to shape the conversation, and it hampers discussion between the respondents. It also enables trolls and abusers.
Google has really been on my shit list lately. I live near Silicon Valley and I am not proud of what these most visible companies are doing to people's lives. It doesn't really surprise me that Google's efforts to get there first with fast fiber would leave poorer areas in the dark, literally. Market capture and control of users, and if the article is correct, elitism, is part and parcel of the result of Google's business strategy over the past few years. Not that I have any sympathy for ISPs in general who behave like utility monopolies. A solution might be to steal bandwith form wireless carriers for public and free access. I also think that low power wireless with store and forward mesh networks is a possible solution. Low power solutions would still be legal under the terms which FCC has allocated bandwidth, especially if a free speech challenge is made to ISP control of bandwidth.
The whole point is that people need to be thinking of disruptive ways to prevent single vendor control of things at many levels beginning with Microsoft's illegal domination of the desktop and but also extending to Google's violation of open standards to create captive platforms. This extends to the undoing of the Internet, particularly for its control or chock points favored by governments who spy and businesses who create monopolies. We may have to trade some convienence and speed of access to get our freedom and privacy back. The bad guys always have the seduction of laziness to lure people in. If people want their power back they will have to make the effort to understand the tools they use better. The greedy people who run businesses know that this the the control they have ove most people, their lack of understanding. Rebellion creates an incentive for more resourcefulness and the impetus to find alternatives.
Debian is a good basis for other better designed derivatives, but in its efforts to be everything for everybody it has a tricky install and configuration process with poor checking and a lack of orthagonal processes to upgrade. I can be more precise, no pun. I tried installing Debian 7 on an old legacy machine. It went fine. The machine has a wireless dongle on its USB port, but something happened in the install scripts that skipped the install of the wireless stuff, or at least it wasn't successful, no wireless, and using Synaptic had not helped me to find and install the missing packages. So, there is a lack of symmetry with the install process and the upgrade process. The metapackage information is not readily available, especially if all you have the an install which has failed connectivity with the internet.
On the same system I installed Knoppix 7.2 which went well and automatically found the wireless dongle and installed the right drivers. The only problem with the install is that I haven't found that way you disable the default login, that system. based on Debian 7, is intended to be a rescue system, and I admire Klaus Knopper and what he has done with it, very very much.
I has occurred to me that I could compare the package names from the Knoppix install with those on the Debian 7 install and see if I can spot the missing wireless packages. That seems like a lot of work, especailly when that should be a wireless metapackage to check.
Fact is, if Linux users were truly conservative, that is wanting legacy and full control, they'd go back to command-line or use Arch Linux or minimal Debian. But the real issue here is that Classic Gnome vs. Unity, just as Metro vs. Windows 7 in that world, is not just a matter of being resistant to changer. Shuttleworth had this dream of running Linux on tablets and mobile phones, a dream not really yet realized, at least it hasn't caught fire. The way he did things was to try to cram the changes down everyone's throat, including keyboard and desktop users. On the desktop, Unity and Metro don't rally make sense because they add annoying extra steps to get to an item that a global menu achieves in fewer steps.
I installed U. 12.04 and ran Unity and the largest problem came on two areas, finding a particular application by name where I forgot the name and keeping a static order of things when Dash tries, social media style, to anticipate whaat you want, and gets is wrong, which is frequent. That effort to think for you is one of the annoying features, and is going to be a bigger problem as advertisers get more and more into the interface to try to guess what you are going to do next. It is like the frustration one often geels with Google search and with most social media sites and is why the problem is likely to get worse, and is going to get a bigger backlash from power users.
I love to make attacks on social media and efforts by business marketers to try to tell us what is in our interfaces. For that reason I say "Fuck Beta!".
I can tell that you are not very well informed. The Dinos didn't go extinct at the KT boundary. They are still with us. They are called birds and they began to be bird-like as drmeosaurids almost 100 million years before the K/T mass extinction.
I am sure that the work cited here refines constraints on the timing and duration of the extinction events, and despite any controversy over the root cause, it is the ultimate result which is probably the same. The core idea is not new; these ideas have been discussed in the reviewed literature for a long time and even made it into the trade press as long ago as a decade. The developments have been about the details and the relative importence of intertwined effects. That is the lesson for us, not that the differences between each of the five or so major extinction events in the record makes then unique, for they differ in what percentage of the groups in the record they effected, and which of the recurring effects was most important.
What they have in common is that a disruption of the flow of carbon in the earth's biosphere leads to a collapse of the food chain and that megafauna, animals larger than a cat, generally, are very much more affected than animals who are generalists, can burrow, can scavange, through a food chain collapse. Sudden massive changes in the atmosphere, especially in common greenhouse gasses can have a larger effect that if the combination of effects leads to photosynthesis collapse on land and sea and to global land and sea water warming. When carbonate compensation and methane hydrate stability are upset by ocean warming, the sudden injestion of methane and carbon dioxide can exaggerate greenhhouse effects. The sudden injection of sulfer and nitrates into the atmosphere from any of the posited causes of the ME events has collectively the same result, the disruption of the carbon cycle by acid or aerobic conditions in the sea. These destroy the food chain and the decimation of populations begins an doesn't take more than a few hundred years.
The lesson for us is that the common materials that we think are innocuous can have catastrophic effects when they get out of hand. Even the fear of the effects of all out nuclear war works through the same mechanism, the way a "nuclear Winter" is supposed to work is the way these extinction events work, Effects like putting lots of dust into the atmosphere, adding nitrates causing acid rain, and starting massive fires, are the same, Our economic activity is pushing the atmosphere into some of the milder effects that contributed to MEs including the possibility that the oceans might warm up enough so that methane hydrate is released en mass contributing greatly to global warming. Methane is about 40 times more efficient as a green house gas than CO2. So to listen to the oil and gas companies who have solved some of our near-term energy problems by frackking and developing new domestic reserves of natural gas and oil, sounds rosy, until you realize that burning fossil fuels in that way is pretty close to what happened during each one of these mass extinctions, and do you trust the average politician or business man to know when the runaway effects kick in and it is too late? I'm sorry, but I don't.
There is an alternative to the Internet. The flaw on the Internet is its several choak points or control points, one of which passes through the NSA HQ in northern Virginia. If you are worried about their ability to spy be aware that it is made easy for them and Google and Facebook and others to spy and bias information flow by the Internet.
If you are willing the accept some changes, it might be possible to restore some freedom and privacy to your on-line access. You might have to trade some speed and access for privacy, but in doing so, it would be harder for spies and spammers to get to you, and for businesses to filter what you get to see and send to others. The difference is that there are other approaches to networking that may already exist or be brought back to life than the Internet. You may have to tolerate delays to get far distant connections, but be able to transmit to local or trusted nodes much quicker than the Internet. You might be able to use line of sight transmission and store and forward technology to go off the wired network and away from the wireless carriers. The FCC has always allowed for low power use of the airways for public use, depending on the legal distinctions it may even be posible to use owned bandwidth for private networking. I am not even suggesting that foreign protocols can be put inside IP packets and transmitted, but you would still be paying some carrier for that.
Some mesh networking scheme could use public bandwidth to operate outside the Internet and carriers, or I suppose that in a revolutionary situation bandwidth could be stolen, but just thinking about ways of encrypting data that isn't noticed because its volume is low, seems attractive, so does a dynamic network topology that become much harder to keep track of.
Please use "Democratic" when you refer to that party and "democracy" when you refer to the type of government. Also note that that the U.S. is not a democracy, it is a republic which claims to be a representative democracy. Given that the megaphone has been given to the very wealthy by the current Supreme Court, it is much less of a democracy now than it has been in the past. It is in danger of destroying itself. I hope that you don't live in California because at some point in the next few years your status could be foreign.
The quality of discourse in America has gotten so poor. All we get from people are memed arguments and broadsides. One way to look through the false dichotomy of government vs. business, one which suits the sham of political discourse wanted by the Duopoly, is to realize tow things. 1) The same group of very rich people support both political parties and have for a long time. The National Committees have published their biggest donations for each national election for many years now, and the donors are the same group of people. 2) Americans are mostly naive about politics and economics and the intimate connection of the two. In particular they are naive about the role of corruption in both politics and business. They are often victims of selective attention and public relations to conceal corruption in private business while disclosure force the same abuses of power into the open when they occur in government, so they get a biased view of the problem. One way to resolve this is to look at the backgrounds of the people who lead in the country. You find that they are pretty much the same sorts of people whit lots of amition and that through their careers they migrate from roles in business and government freely, and most of them are very wealthy. So, avuse of power is a universal human trait, every one of us if we are fortunate to get the power will tend to abuse it some way. The person who uses power morally is rare or is eliminated by those who don't. So I assume that people are seeing a biased sample of behavior and since those that aspire to wealth and business success are going to se it in even a more biased way. I think that the solution is more disclosure but there needs to be much more disclosure about internal business strategy than there is now, and I don't really care if business people claim that this hurts their competitive advantage when they abuse power even more than our elected officials.
If government and business bias the flow of Information on the Internet than they do already, a case can be made that net -neutrality is already a moot issue with the biasing of information flow in social media, which is not a government decision, then people who want more freedom of expresion will turn to alternative technology which is harder to control, mainly abandoning the Internet and looking for technology that allows for ephemeral networks that are hard to track and spy on. The spies are both government and business, and the same group of power mongers, interchangable thieves, from business or government. Take your standard politics and shove it; that does not address the problem.