If ever there was an emerging example of the inherit evils of Capitalism, it is Facebook and Google, and as people here suggest their main tool may be javascript. While I might be tempted to hide from javascript because of the abuse of privacy, I might be tempted to do just the opposite, make my visiablity bigger and, try to find the deeper vulnerabilities of the business model and exploit it.
Facebook experimented ever so briefly with comment quoting a couple of years ago. That is the feature we have here on Slashdot where you can quote from a comment you want to reply to. It would be easy to do anyway, but you'd have to be careful to quote so that the autofil feature of the textarea widget didn't distroy your quoting. Quoting on Facebook might be disruptive enough because it is clear that they reason they don'r allow you to upload your own text is that they wannt total control over what is in that widget; it makes their data mining easier.. One thing I have done is to do screen captures of my own writing, rendered in a browser window and made into an image with screen capture. Then I upload the image to Facebook. That is several times more expensive to hem than if they allowed you to upload your own text files. There woild have to be a new layer of technology and even greater expense to them to use OCRt on an image, already aliased by their compression, I might add, to capture your world from that, and people who "abuse" their image uploading that way could have a significant economic impact on their policies.
As I write, I realize that I can use the image upload of rendered text to literally illustrate how replying to a post from there with the features of a forum, like a USENET newsgroup, is superior for holding a discussion than a blog. This has become one of my greatest dissatisfaction with social media, Facebook, in particular, and blogs on all manner of websites. Discussions are one dimensional, they often go no where; people get terribly frusturated by the destractions that happen in normal discourse. The blog is a failure at anything that gets convoluted, any issue that generates more than a few replies, anything with sub-conversations. The far greater evil of Facebook and Google, because it has embraced the blog for data mining for marketers, is that it prevents useful discussion and debate which this nation needs very badily. Most citizens shy away from contraversary and debate, and I think that the reason is that technology interferres with it. The blog is the main culpret here and it is just as many leaders in government and business want it. Slashdot is a bit of an exception,and think of what you can do here that you can't do on most websites with a blog, and that you can't do this usefully on Facebook.
The idea I have is to find the next comment I want to quote from and reply to; quote from the comment, write my reply, and convert it to an image and post the image. I know it might be hard to get a reply to my reply, but at least I could show in the image how contextual reply should be done, like it is here, and waste some more of Facebook's bandwidth. I am sure that the next time you want to post something to Facebook, you uploaded your remarks formatted anyway you like as an image, that Facebook might have to reconsider its editorial policy. Who knows, if we so desire we can put Facebook out of business this way.
It bugs me to see the crap google gets when they are the least abusive of all big companies by just about any measure, and actually HAVE fought for the user on several occasions (China, warrantless data requests, posting takedowns to Chilling Effects / working with the EFF).
I guess why it irritates me so much is that Google really does seem to try to be the good guy, and they get crap for it because people seem to want to forget what their business model is and give them a hard time for being for-profit. Maybe we should boycott them, THAT will teach them to fight extrajudicial data requests!
You don't need to go into international abuse of the Internet to damn Google. The only thing you need to answer "Do no Evil" is to look at Google's mismanagement of its own products, and even if you restricted the discussion to what they do in the U.S.
The most glaring example is Google Docs and Google Drive, misrepresented as open cloud and content repositories, which in fact they deliberately violate standards to create a captive market environment. They are closed environments and claims that they support content such as web pages that should adhere to open standards are false.
Google has the repository of USENET legacy positings and maintains access to newsgroups while pushing blogging, evidently knowingly choosing a more restrictive medium for social interaction only because of its data mining applications and advantage to its business partners while stunting public discussion and debate with a blog format. Even response to USENET postings have more of the looks of a blog post than a newsreader post, revealing the business and political agenda to embrace forums while in fact curtailing them. They haven't the guts to support true public discussion and debate, contrast USENET newsgroups with Google+ and other blogs. IMHO blogs are intended to give the page owner exclusive power to set the agenda and the lack of forum features, as in USENET, suppresses public debate. Slashdot in a bright spot in the current situation,
Most Google products have been discontinued for a variety of fiighty business reasons, the most famous example is Google Reader, which successfully hid the administrivia of feed management in a way that Feedly and other aggergators do not. Even though it still has the defficiency of any blog it was one of the more successful products of Google, which was discontinued.
I regard Chrome and Google Earth as more successful, but I am leary of the large caches they create on systems. I resist using Google Eath because of that and go to Google Maps whenever I need the former, now.
And, to avoid killing the goose that lays the golden eggs: tenure and seniority should never be allowed to factor into the contract. Contracts should only establish minimum standards for compensation. Meritocracy should rein above the floor.
Look at the last bastion of unionism in America: the public sector. If anything, it robs the working class. The working class is paying taxes for people who have contracts where seniority and tenure are involved.ly", that surely is the sign of a simple mind!
I love arguments that use the term "Meritocracy", as though there is some fair and universal standard for that all-encompassing term? There isn't, and that is where the ruthless manager and big money gets to talk. "Meritocracy" is a Libertarian fiction invented to give the boss the last say, and he may not even be evaluating performance on the merits of the work being done. He may only be looking at the bottom line. The rights of workers need to be broader than is strictly right in your ideal world because of the small-mindedness of whomever get the power to dictate what the standard is.
The public worker is more exposed than his private counterpart and so it appears that he operates through patronage. I dare say that if private business had to disclose what public workers do, the deals would be more abusive. I would suggest that the outrageous executive compensation packages, even to obvious failures of leadership in business, would be but the tip of the iceberg,
If you want overgeneralization, you would say that business depends on the Human Condition. The Human Condition is that people are lazy and stupid. By "stupid" I mean the original meaning, as "in a stupor", that is not paying attention, unaware, not unintelligent. The are plenty of smart-but-stupid people out there, some of whom have reason to claim intelligence. But if people were both aware and made the effort to do the correct due dillgance, the economy would collapse, so that business depends on the Human Condition, on the weaknesses in people. If you wonder about marketing practice, just ask yourself if it depends on people being aware? Now, tell me how "If you do a job, do it right", really applies the the economy we live in?
MS had already engaged in some serious antitrust behavior circa 1990, before they were anywhere near the behemoth they are today.
what a load of crap, Windows may not have been the most secure system but against the horrible burden of IBM and the infancy and general lack of usability of GNU/Linux, Windows was the obvious choice and a choice made by people who were indeed free to choose. To this day some people would rather pretend they were completely helpless and at the mercy of big bad Microsoft than admit they made a poor choice.
Have you considered that the lack of viable competition might have been the result of robust set of anti-competitive practices? Also, by grossly oversimplifying things like you did, you forget that things weren't all that simple. MS was strong-arming OEMs if they dared to install competing OS's or browsers, and they ignored standards in IE while actively breaking compatibility of plugins.
I always thought that Gates was a simple thief that got away with it. He stole Basic from Gary Killdall, and MS-DOS was a ripoff of PC-DOS, and DOS-Shell was a dumbed down Bourne Shell. What really get my goat is people insisting that MS-DOS was ever better than UNIX, and especialy once X11 and a decent window manager existed, which was maybe right around the time DOS 3.1 existed.
I have had all of the Windows OS up to Vista, and ran versions of UNIX and Linux along side and there was no question at all that *NIX was superior in every way. The only reason for the popularity of Windows was market capture and the OEM agreement that shipped it with every x86 machine, a deal which should have been declared illegal under anti trust law from the get go. I don't buy the crap that conservatives have been putting out about the government being anti-business. I think they (the Congress, the cabinet agencies) are in bed with the biggest corporations in America and always have been regardless of which of the duopoly is in power. The ability of M$ to ship Windows with every PC is proof to me of that, and if the Congress, the courts, and most administrations had been enforcing anti-trust law Gate's wings would have been clipped years ago.
Even with the supposed ease of use issues, not every one should be restricted to a UNIX shell ( Or was DOS-Shell that much different? Not really), UNIX/Linux has been much more secure than Windows, and if you can imagine that a company allows its business partners to get into your system the moment it is powered up the first time, then what is to stop some hacker? Not much. Anyway the ease of use issues are largely non-existent and Linux runs on systems that are too small for recent Windows releases. I ran Ubuntu 12.04 on a system that was too small for Vista, that was running XP and would not run any later release of Windows. Windows will persist because of legacy, and the illegal market capture it has, not because it is worth a damn.
There are people who are so locked in that they don't want to think creatively, sure, but there are also effects of the tools people have to use to think that stunt creative thinking. Most people aren't stupid, they just lack the stimulus to think outside of convention, they need help.
But they aren't getting help from technology that could really help them to think. That may be by design, or at best an unintended side-effect of technology being applied for one use while hurting another use.
If you look at most blogs, the discussion goes no where, people write their response and if they are lucky someone will challenge this but usually the discussion ends there, it is because the blog lacks a useful mechanism for replying in context by being able to quote something and speaking to it, a feature we have on Slashdot.
The conversations here are much more lively not because the people here are that much more creative that they are on other sites, but because blogs do a couple of things that stunt creative thought, the owner of the page set the agenda, and the replies don't generate subtopics.
I think that the entrapaneurs of social media, beginning with Google know all this and they want it the way it is because their model is that they want blocks of text only so they can run regular expressions looking for marketing keywords, only. They could care less about structures in conversations that facilitate directed discussion, real creative colaborative writing, even in a debate or contentious environment. How do I know this? Google took great pains to create an archive of USENET posts for the first decade of its existence. It would be good of all of you to look at that. The revealing thing is that Google and other social media companies didn't take away any of the wisdom of that approach, in fact they went in the opposite direction, and I think consciously, and to thwart badly needed public discussion. Some of that value is here on Slashdot but even Slashdot because of to web interface has not approached yet the richness that was possible with the USENET newsreaders.
Creativity is a value, but given the complexity and the peril to democracy in our time, it becomes essential, and the web-based and social media companies have not done enough, and they haven't done the right thing to get people to think creatively at least in written discussions.
The worst offtender by far is Facebook. Now, I know that people here love to bash Facebook and its users, and that the argument we get from Mark Zuckerberg is that he wants a simple interface, but that is the problem, there ins't enough structure there to hold any kind of intelligent discussions. I can understand one saying that Facebook is not intended for discussion, and surely most of what goes on there is family and friends gooing over baby and pet pictures. I have no problem with that. The problem with Facebook is that there are many attempts of people to hold topical discussions and there are pages there that get thousands of replies, but have you ever tried to read through all that stuff? I'll bet not, and the reason is because the blog breaks down after maybe ten replies. It is not practical to reply to blogs which is why blog pages often appear to be about the egos of the page creators. It is because the technology doesn't provide useful means to facilitate creative response, which is why most blogs read like a bunch of people not communicating, talking to them selves, and the energy to respond to content is mostly with the page owner. In Newspaper blogs, there is argument, but the lack of structure makes it hard to follow and the ignoring or loss of context is a big problem. That is why off-topic and trolls are so destracting and people who become afraid because of the intimidation are denied the freedom to think.
Interesting that last phraise "Freedom to Think." that is what led to our open institutions, the ability of individuals to deliberate and not be intimidated by manipulators, to be abl
Most of the info is in the Nature article, the paper, though probably funded by the taxpayes, is securely behind the AAAS paywall. Maybe Congress, if it had any balls, would make it illegal to publish publically funded research behind a paywall, but I digress.
The message here seems to be that there were really two geologic events on the subduction zone of Japan's northern coast in March 2011. The first was an an ordinary subduction quake at modest depth in the plane of the Benioff Zone, a thrust event, but that was followed by a seconary event at shallower depth which involved as much as 50 meters of thrust that triggered the huge 30 m. tsamani. This latter event was triggered by the primary subduction quake in a regime that released stress in the plate by allowing for a large amount of slippage in a relatively weak medium, not storing tectonic strain by reacting to its release elsewhere.
The analogy with the San Andreas Fault in Central California is that there are incompetant rock allowing for a relatively large ammount of slippage, some of it aseismic, between segments of the fault that are stuck because of very strong rocks that store strain for release in large quakes. So serpentines in central California may more easily pas strain along toward places where hard rocks like grainites are storing the stress to be released all at once, to the north and south of the central segment of the fault/
The difference is that the release of strain at one place in the subduction zone caused even greater slip in an incompetant boundary seaward of the initial tectonic release. In California we ger fault creep, but it is not enough to release all the strain, nor does it happen in one great event. Nor does muddy subduction even always result in seismic activity. The Mariannas Trench is aseismic probably because the subduction zone is greased and not storing strain enough to result in quakes, and there are mud volcanoes in that area as well, serpentine mud has been found there.
The abstract for the paper called the grease in the Japan subduction zone "Plagic Clay". All that means is that the mud comes from clay minerals that settle out of the water column. They could have been terrigenous, sediments from land ultimately, that got carried as far as they can get, or meteoric. The "Grease" in California and in the Mariannas Trench is different. It is from a slippery mineral that forms from the reaction of water with minerals very rich in Fe, Mg and less Si, like Olivine. The Pelagic mud may not be slippy enough to release all the strain like the Marianas serpentine mud, but it may need a nudge to move, and then ti might move a great deal all at once. 50 m. is a lot.
I've found that most of the people who say this are crappy programmers, overly optimistic, or both.
Actually sight-singing the continuo lines from Bach's Christmas Oratorio, the orchestral score, either while listening to a recording or not is absurdly simple! Only if you brain happens to be wired for music and you have learned enough solfeggio to read the part at sight. So this is wrong, as is the assertion that anything is absurdly simple. Is remembering 40 moves at chess "absurdly simple"? It might be if your degrees are in math or CS and you have been playing chess since you were four years old. I know musicians who have been perforning since they were that age.
But brains are all different, so I could never remember many moves in a chess line while knowing people who knew all the variations of the opening, and they couldn't remember orchestral and vocal parts from music literature as easy as I could. BTW, I consider myself a bad programmer, even though I try to write code every once in a while. I don't have any illusions that it is my strength. As to if good programming can be taught, especially to adults who got it wrong, I have my doubts, just like it takes some native ability to do music, at least some pitch and tonal memory.
I stopped following links to Stack Overflow when I do a search on a problem I'm trying to solve.
Useful outcomes there are few and far between in my experience with it. Is is far worse than Ubuntu Community Support where these is at least incentive to being a problem to resolution. That is not what I see on Stack Overflow.
I love the perversity of human nature and economics as regards music and paying for music.
First, people will make and listen to music whether they pay to or not, and in fact there is an inverse relationship between quality and price. You will pay much more for what is current, new, but as with all art, new is not necessary better or enduring and much of the best art that has ever been produced either doesn't generate profit for the entertainment insustry or is already in the public domain.
I am fortunate that my tastes run to the Classical music genere. I read sheet music and know music history and literature, and I find that what I like is often freely available, even though recorded performances are under copyright. The Classical literature is at most about 5% of the retail market in entertainment and good because the media corporations aren't going to devote too much resource to enforce copyright on it. So getting a CD checked out of the public library and converting it to MP3 although illegal isn't going to be low hanging fruit for enforcement. There are many fine performances that are PD and one could spend a lifetime studying them and the music being played.
So, the real utility of copyright is its enforcement and the low hanging fruit is in what has mass appeal and is profitable to produce. That is not the same as what is best, although there is no accounting for taste. I just think that there are lots of us who don't really care about what is current, popular, or the economic viability of the current media or publishing corporation.
There has been much debate recently about copyright law. I think that it benefits a business that has been made obsolete by technology and I don't think that except for the greed and power of a few corporations that it benefits us much at all. Artists mostly don't benefit from it, and the flow of information, especially the paywalls of referred scientific journals, impead information availability. I would like to see a restriction of copyright to benefit only the artist and his immediate heirs, not uncreative financial institutions.
But the light travel time makes the events upcoming in our time. We see objects at different times in their history according to their distance in light years, so Capella is 45 light years away, we see it as it was that long ago tonight. Even the Sun we see is as it was 8 minutes ago. It could have exploded that long ago and we would find out only now.
Seriously, what the light is telling us is that we are about to witness the effects of two supermassive black holes merging. Physics suggests that we should see effects that test our basic understanding, such as such an event might reveal the graviton, the boson for the gravity fource, by creating ripples in spacetime. The article says that this would affect pulsars, but does spell out how/ Maybe waves in spacetime passing a pulsar would change its pulse frequency in some way predicted by models for gravatational waves, if they are caused by this event.
Of course, even the inference that the emissions are caused by merging black holes is not absolutely certain, there could be some other explanation, but you and I may not be able to get at the critical tests because the journal article may be behind a paywall and even if we were current on the science we may never be able to read the arguments for and against unless we pay for it. Usually the abstract is free, but the article itself is protected by journal copyright and if we really wanted to know the argument, which is the critical part of any science, we may not be able to get to it.
If it becomes more profitable to entirely ignore the U.S. market though, people will stop catering to the U.S. laws and regulations. This can be brought about in a multitude of ways, but one way that's already in progress is the loss of the middle class and thus the loss of total consumer spending power.
That'll be the only way things can return to sanity here; after economic intimidation from other countries.
Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ comes to mind here. It is a Business and Financial Oligarchy that takes the place of the Roman Emperors and the Army. Government is usually in reaction to surrounding economic institution changes, and its institutions follow the economic ones.
The trouble with economics as a driving force to history is that the effects are for the most part unintentional, that is, without foresight, or Mankind is terribly near-sighted, and so if the enterprise become lost in the process, it is usually not expected. So if Capitalism is as American as Apple Pie, no one who thinks like a Capitalist or a Financier, or a Banker will see their natural sort-sightedness as killing the Goose that laid the Golden Egg. But it can.
The outcome you describe has a dire risk, that economic intimidation really means something like war, and that like the Roman Empire that the decay will come from within, from alien values inside our boarders, from people who never bought our myths of who we are and what we are about.
Considering that I was able to run Knoppix 7.2 recently on an ancient PC with 256 mb of ram and some random swap on a smallish disk, I see no reason I couldn't run a desktop on a $100 mobile device. If the thing had a couple of USB ports, enough to attach a hub, I should be able to hang all my desktop peripherals off it and be good to go. All the better if I could boot off a USB hard drive and run whatever OS I have on it. I don't even see the size of a flash disk to be a problem if the networking is all there, the boot from the hub devices. I can plug my 19" monitor, keyboard and mouse. This would be fine even though I find it hard to use the tiny display that comes with these devices. I want a Rasberry PI device with more umph! So give me a 64 bit AMD compat processor in the device, a couple of gigs of ram and just enough flash for a boot loader or installed OS, say 500 gb, and I see no reason at all to worry about doing without a desktop.
It is harder to find a good company than talent! I have been retired since 2005, forced out by disability and age from a career in Silicon Valley as a developer and system admin. And it is hard to stay current and to know what to study. Right now I am enamored with Python, but not too experienced, yet.
The thing which bothers me is that I am turned off by the companies, especially the well-known ones. I live a bus ride away from Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, and not far from Google, not that either would hire an old grey beard like me, and yet I would not clamor to work to either, except to try and cause trouble. I am totally unimpressed with these and many of the other famous companies around here. Seeing the crap that these companies do makes me laugh at Capitalism and at business in general the way it is done here in the U.S. and world. I am frankly ashamed and embarassed for the people who run these and who persaude investors. OK, I get that it takes some smarts to do some of the things behind the scenes, like the Big Data backend of Facebook, and I have had words with the people at Google about the design of their products, Google Docs mostly, So I know that I wouldn't fit in because despite what I know and don't know, I would try to be disruptive because I can see basic evil in what they are doing.
I know that there are lots of smart people, all those that learned their computer science and other things, and I took my degrees in Earth Science and got int Scientific Programming by way of that, but the way business is done is wasting talent on useless and destructive things. You would be better off writing words than code, analyzing why the world can go so awry as it has under the poor leadership we get for these people.
A few weeks ago I acquired an old PC that that had Win XP on it and could not have run later Windows releases. I installed Knoppix 7.2 and Debian 7 on it. I am very pleased with the former and have given up on the latter, oh by the way, I tested Arch Linux on that system as well, but give up on it for another reason. My main desktop runs Ubuntu 12.04. I had been updating or installing Ubuntu on that system since U. 8.10. I was a Solaris system admin. and have developer experience, so I am familiar with the shell. I couldn't get through the Arch install because the font was way too small for my disabled eyes. Debian sort of worked but it was unconfigured and I couldn't find which packages I needed to get wireless working, which Knoppix gave me out of the box.
I liked Ubuntu but I don't trust Mark Shuttleworth, in particular, to preserve legacy, and not try to make it into his captive market. I will dump the distro in a heartbeat if I think he has done that. It isn't that I don't like conveinince, but the difference between Linux and Windows is that you can dig into the innards of Linux because it preserves legacy and standards in a well documented way, something Windows doesn't do well, but you can keep it simple if that is all you want, and Ubuntu in those earlier releases was reliable for that. I am worried about that now.
The "Filter Bubble" is in part the product of too much information and a very poor design for public discussion, the blog, which is intentional. Even Slash Dot has the core flaw even though it is a forum, technically. If there is a filter bubble at all, it is in part created by the need for moderation of blogs and the lack of a good mechanism to handle topic drift, sub-threads, and the way to create an interest, even compelling one, for opposing or different views.
I draw on my recall of how on the USENET It was possible to reason with people, present opposing arguments and be persuasive in an area that is at least as contentious as any mentioned in this thread. In fact I debated with Creationists from 1987 to about 1993, and changed a few minds.
The Newsgroup is a superior way to manage the topic. Slash Dot has some of the correct approach by laying out the discussion by topic, but the top down topic hierarchy of USENET is better. The problem with slash dot is that it has too much of the features of a blog and not enough structure so that readers can hone in on the threads that hold interest for them, and these are not necessarily those that they will find agreement as to ideas.
For example, one must filter the large number of posts in some useful way. One way I can suggest is that I would mark to ignore threads with a large number of posts, these are likely to be predictable, facile, and full of short posts. The other is to perfer to read long posts, indicating that some person has made an effort to write, put sentences and paragraphs in some order that is logical, and made an effort to reason. I want to read these posts. These don't exclude posts that I might not agree with, and good. I might want to be exposed to posts that have some meat on them written by people who can think in writing.
I hate tweets. I hate trolls. I dislike mobile. Building public opinion around them is bad for citizenship in a democratic state where discussions need to go to depth and have some grist. I sometime think that marketers and political establishments love mobile, tweets and blogs, because they can control the topic, just like the staff at Slash Dot can control the headlines and the fact that most of the stuff submitted is never seen unless it makes it to the headline. The fact that the topics need to to filtered in that top-down way is a sign that the technology that they are based on fails to give people a voice, and although I don't put slash dot at the top of my list of evil doers, there are plenty of other Internet companies that deserve to be for misusing the medium and not behaving in the service of lively and informative public discussion. The Filter Bubble is a product of misapplication of the technology because there isn't enough structure in blogs and fourms can have structure, but there isn't enough of it to allow for people to manage the flood of information in a useful way, for them.
I know that people on this site love to hate Facebook, but it is important to know why Facebook is not designed to really handle discussion and why that damages people who use it. The reason Facebook is a failure is that it is a blog, and the discussions on it quickly exceed the utility of a blog. What seems to anger Facebook users more is that they can't set a priority for what they see and the lack of structure upsets them at some perfectly normal human tendancies, like topic drift, but unlike a conversation between people, it is harder to wade through the things that don't excite interest, to ignore them.
While I think this post is OT, doesn't address the research finding cited above, I think that it may be beside the point, where the point may be how to inject different points of view in the lineal flow of a blog, the solution is to give the reader much more structure. I found on the USENET that it was possible to inject ideas that people might otherwise ignore if one was cleaver, not choosing obvious emotive words and phrases, and knowing how to make an argument,
There is a good case for Linux needing two different approaches, the no-frills but extremely flexible and powerful image of Arch Linux, a shell, no GUI, and lots of tools that are hard for novices to learn and use, but are close to the metal, the computer science metal, and something that is more suited for the novice and casual user. I am concerned that Shuttleworth's vision to make a main-market Linux is like any other products that appeal to "average" people, stripped of features and dumbed down. When he was talking about dropping XOrg, I was very worried that the legacy was going to go with it, and why, so he could realize his ego's dream of making a sexy Linux derivative that Grandma would wnat but not care about the depth of detail beneath.
Operating systems are quite different from other products, say the automobile. Each new technology goes from a geeky adopter mode where buyers worry about the internals, and as the product matures and the technology gets better the details become invisible to consumers. It is going to be a long time before computer operating systems become as transparent, and maybe never, so to want to take away that access to the depths of them for some kind of mass appeal, is premature. That should hopefully be the lesson of Windows, that Microsoft had to give its users access to some internals, at least to write them decent error messages and logs rather than continuing to try to hide complexity from users.
Operating systems are not mature enough that they can be handled by normal sales and marketing strategy alone, and that is why we cannot trust Mark Shutleworth's decisions. He was forced to retreat somewhat from Unity being the inclusive model for Ubuntu's GUI because even though he may be right in the long run that tablets and touch may represent a future for his product, that giving less priority to the wishes of desktop users was rash and egocentric.
If anything it is the fact that Shuttleworth seems to be of that ecocentric and arrogant stamp of many a business leader, that his leverage is his net worth, that worries me as concerns Linux, which should retain all of its legacy, its roots, and then go for broader appeal, not sacrifice its complexity to get mass appeal, then it is no different from Windows. I would much rather Microsoft have 85% of the personal computer market than sacrifice Linux's rich details for mass appeal. I think that one can get at techniques from computer science if one wants to the the shell and commands, or not. I am not saying that Linux cannot do both, it can, but I don't necessarily think that the tact chosen by Ubuntu is the right way to do it.
If you want to understand the most critical difference between political ideologies and system and get past their oversimplifications, the fly in the ointment things they gloss over, the hopeful dream with all the nastiness ignored, ask yourself if they include everybody or who they exclude.
So, if you want to exclude people, ask yourself if you can really get away with it and at what cost. Quite often political ideologists either aren't honest about this or get it wrong. Do you want to include people who are financially minded, for instance, or white, or Christian? And how to you keep the "others" out.
American History in particular is full of enclaves of people that think alike, where like-values are enforced. Such "utopian" colonies survived because it was easy to isolate them. Jim Jones moved the People's Temple to Gayana to isolate them from what he regarded as dangerous outside influences before he coerced them to drink cool-aid laced with cyanide and die. Except from the suicide, how is that much different from the Mormons in Utah?
The problem with that today, and I think it is connected with the recent spike in gun violence and mass shootings, is that there are fewer places to run and hide and that to have to stay and get along with lots of different kinds of people, like in the increasingly urban lot of most of humanity, takes an approach that is not elitist. The problem with this is that economics, the breakdown of inclusive economic and political institutions could change all that, and that change would be based on elitism and scarcity, for the notion that there isn't enough to go around turns people selfish and they begin to invent lies about how they deserve the fruits of society while others do not. For a long time I scratched my head about how a very advanced nation like Germany could have embraced Hitler and the Nazi movement in 1933. It seemed to me a mystery of how the nation that had embraced the most advanced science and philosophy could have made what in hindsight seems like such a dreadful mistake. But now I know how any advanced culture can go down that road including in the United States. It is by embracing Conservatism in the form of elitism, the motto for which is "I've got mine, screw you!" The Brown Shirts are not all that far removed from that kind of thinking which the rhetoric from some of the Tea Parties has revealed.
Now, of course, the opposite political pole also can spawn elitism, as we can document in Socialist and Communist regimes. but they become essentially Conservative. If the poor generializations that come out of American political rhetoric were to apply, North Korea and even China would be much more inclusive societies than they are. They are essentially protecting their investment and their elites just as Western countries who cater to Conservative Capitalists do.
There is no better elitism than an big lopsided income distribution, such as is emerging in the U.S. The apologists for laissez-faire economics like to downplay its unfair aspect, that having very rich people in the market drives up prices for everybody and especially those at the bottom. Look at the housing market, especially in the wealthy parts of the nation. They love to point out how opportunity is there and to be rewarded by iniative. What they fail to tell you, and probably why they are so willing to claim that, is that they got to a scarce resource first and locked out others in doing so. So the psychology of scarcity feeds on itself, it supports elitist thinking. The problem with that is that there is a Day of Rechoning in which accounts are called in and in which the disadvantaged get some payback. That is made even more likely by a high rate of change, that business models and empires become vulnerable. In human history the tide of tyranny has often been helped by outside calamity, and although I cannot predict when the next volcano will explode and plunge the earth into ashfall winter, that has happened before and it has promoted elites. We might be able to outgrow the temper tantrum of elitism by then.
You are still projecting, In fact you are projecting those sociopathic qualities on me that you revealed by your appearent indifference to the misconduct of others around you.
I was saying that such indifference does not work in a vacuum. Just like people in Nazi Germany who did what they did because they were just doing what was expected of them, so I am reminding you that indifference to injustice can come back to haunt you when the social norms change, and not because you intended it that way. So if you happen to work for a large bank or financial institution that is using speclaton to rob little people of their savings and livelyhood, it is not my power to make good on threats to you, but my kind warning to you that what you can get away with today may not be what will be tolerated tomorrow, and I have history as my guide for that.
Whether you take personal umbrage at me for what I said is of no matter. There are forces far larger than me or you that may decide. I urge you to heed those. I presume that you taking exception is due to a guilty conscience, so heed that too.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't play it in E-major or minor.
Oh, I get it, promiscuous mode!
This sounds to me like most blog posts! The message that loses the most context, and quote me on that!
If ever there was an emerging example of the inherit evils of Capitalism, it is Facebook and Google, and as people here suggest their main tool may be javascript. While I might be tempted to hide from javascript because of the abuse of privacy, I might be tempted to do just the opposite, make my visiablity bigger and, try to find the deeper vulnerabilities of the business model and exploit it.
Facebook experimented ever so briefly with comment quoting a couple of years ago. That is the feature we have here on Slashdot where you can quote from a comment you want to reply to. It would be easy to do anyway, but you'd have to be careful to quote so that the autofil feature of the textarea widget didn't distroy your quoting. Quoting on Facebook might be disruptive enough because it is clear that they reason they don'r allow you to upload your own text is that they wannt total control over what is in that widget; it makes their data mining easier.. One thing I have done is to do screen captures of my own writing, rendered in a browser window and made into an image with screen capture. Then I upload the image to Facebook. That is several times more expensive to hem than if they allowed you to upload your own text files. There woild have to be a new layer of technology and even greater expense to them to use OCRt on an image, already aliased by their compression, I might add, to capture your world from that, and people who "abuse" their image uploading that way could have a significant economic impact on their policies.
As I write, I realize that I can use the image upload of rendered text to literally illustrate how replying to a post from there with the features of a forum, like a USENET newsgroup, is superior for holding a discussion than a blog. This has become one of my greatest dissatisfaction with social media, Facebook, in particular, and blogs on all manner of websites. Discussions are one dimensional, they often go no where; people get terribly frusturated by the destractions that happen in normal discourse. The blog is a failure at anything that gets convoluted, any issue that generates more than a few replies, anything with sub-conversations. The far greater evil of Facebook and Google, because it has embraced the blog for data mining for marketers, is that it prevents useful discussion and debate which this nation needs very badily. Most citizens shy away from contraversary and debate, and I think that the reason is that technology interferres with it. The blog is the main culpret here and it is just as many leaders in government and business want it. Slashdot is a bit of an exception,and think of what you can do here that you can't do on most websites with a blog, and that you can't do this usefully on Facebook.
The idea I have is to find the next comment I want to quote from and reply to; quote from the comment, write my reply, and convert it to an image and post the image. I know it might be hard to get a reply to my reply, but at least I could show in the image how contextual reply should be done, like it is here, and waste some more of Facebook's bandwidth. I am sure that the next time you want to post something to Facebook, you uploaded your remarks formatted anyway you like as an image, that Facebook might have to reconsider its editorial policy. Who knows, if we so desire we can put Facebook out of business this way.
On an email from a gardener friend whose last name with Turner, Google came up with an ad for a compost turner!
It bugs me to see the crap google gets when they are the least abusive of all big companies by just about any measure, and actually HAVE fought for the user on several occasions (China, warrantless data requests, posting takedowns to Chilling Effects / working with the EFF).
I mean I guess you can cross your fingers and hope that companies like Yahoo and MS dont do things like spill the beans on Chinese dissident bloggers or work with the Chinese gov't to create a bugged version of Skype for China, but I wouldnt hold your breath.
I guess why it irritates me so much is that Google really does seem to try to be the good guy, and they get crap for it because people seem to want to forget what their business model is and give them a hard time for being for-profit. Maybe we should boycott them, THAT will teach them to fight extrajudicial data requests!
You don't need to go into international abuse of the Internet to damn Google. The only thing you need to answer "Do no Evil" is to look at Google's mismanagement of its own products, and even if you restricted the discussion to what they do in the U.S.
The most glaring example is Google Docs and Google Drive, misrepresented as open cloud and content repositories, which in fact they deliberately violate standards to create a captive market environment. They are closed environments and claims that they support content such as web pages that should adhere to open standards are false.
Google has the repository of USENET legacy positings and maintains access to newsgroups while pushing blogging, evidently knowingly choosing a more restrictive medium for social interaction only because of its data mining applications and advantage to its business partners while stunting public discussion and debate with a blog format. Even response to USENET postings have more of the looks of a blog post than a newsreader post, revealing the business and political agenda to embrace forums while in fact curtailing them. They haven't the guts to support true public discussion and debate, contrast USENET newsgroups with Google+ and other blogs. IMHO blogs are intended to give the page owner exclusive power to set the agenda and the lack of forum features, as in USENET, suppresses public debate. Slashdot in a bright spot in the current situation,
Most Google products have been discontinued for a variety of fiighty business reasons, the most famous example is Google Reader, which successfully hid the administrivia of feed management in a way that Feedly and other aggergators do not. Even though it still has the defficiency of any blog it was one of the more successful products of Google, which was discontinued.
I regard Chrome and Google Earth as more successful, but I am leary of the large caches they create on systems. I resist using Google Eath because of that and go to Google Maps whenever I need the former, now.
And, to avoid killing the goose that lays the golden eggs: tenure and seniority should never be allowed to factor into the contract. Contracts should only establish minimum standards for compensation. Meritocracy should rein above the floor.
Look at the last bastion of unionism in America: the public sector. If anything, it robs the working class. The working class is paying taxes for people who have contracts where seniority and tenure are involved.ly", that surely is the sign of a simple mind!
I love arguments that use the term "Meritocracy", as though there is some fair and universal standard for that all-encompassing term? There isn't, and that is where the ruthless manager and big money gets to talk. "Meritocracy" is a Libertarian fiction invented to give the boss the last say, and he may not even be evaluating performance on the merits of the work being done. He may only be looking at the bottom line. The rights of workers need to be broader than is strictly right in your ideal world because of the small-mindedness of whomever get the power to dictate what the standard is.
The public worker is more exposed than his private counterpart and so it appears that he operates through patronage. I dare say that if private business had to disclose what public workers do, the deals would be more abusive. I would suggest that the outrageous executive compensation packages, even to obvious failures of leadership in business, would be but the tip of the iceberg,
If you want overgeneralization, you would say that business depends on the Human Condition. The Human Condition is that people are lazy and stupid. By "stupid" I mean the original meaning, as "in a stupor", that is not paying attention, unaware, not unintelligent. The are plenty of smart-but-stupid people out there, some of whom have reason to claim intelligence. But if people were both aware and made the effort to do the correct due dillgance, the economy would collapse, so that business depends on the Human Condition, on the weaknesses in people. If you wonder about marketing practice, just ask yourself if it depends on people being aware? Now, tell me how "If you do a job, do it right", really applies the the economy we live in?
MS had already engaged in some serious antitrust behavior circa 1990, before they were anywhere near the behemoth they are today.
Have you considered that the lack of viable competition might have been the result of robust set of anti-competitive practices? Also, by grossly oversimplifying things like you did, you forget that things weren't all that simple. MS was strong-arming OEMs if they dared to install competing OS's or browsers, and they ignored standards in IE while actively breaking compatibility of plugins.
I always thought that Gates was a simple thief that got away with it. He stole Basic from Gary Killdall, and MS-DOS was a ripoff of PC-DOS, and DOS-Shell was a dumbed down Bourne Shell. What really get my goat is people insisting that MS-DOS was ever better than UNIX, and especialy once X11 and a decent window manager existed, which was maybe right around the time DOS 3.1 existed.
I have had all of the Windows OS up to Vista, and ran versions of UNIX and Linux along side and there was no question at all that *NIX was superior in every way. The only reason for the popularity of Windows was market capture and the OEM agreement that shipped it with every x86 machine, a deal which should have been declared illegal under anti trust law from the get go. I don't buy the crap that conservatives have been putting out about the government being anti-business. I think they (the Congress, the cabinet agencies) are in bed with the biggest corporations in America and always have been regardless of which of the duopoly is in power. The ability of M$ to ship Windows with every PC is proof to me of that, and if the Congress, the courts, and most administrations had been enforcing anti-trust law Gate's wings would have been clipped years ago.
Even with the supposed ease of use issues, not every one should be restricted to a UNIX shell ( Or was DOS-Shell that much different? Not really), UNIX/Linux has been much more secure than Windows, and if you can imagine that a company allows its business partners to get into your system the moment it is powered up the first time, then what is to stop some hacker? Not much. Anyway the ease of use issues are largely non-existent and Linux runs on systems that are too small for recent Windows releases. I ran Ubuntu 12.04 on a system that was too small for Vista, that was running XP and would not run any later release of Windows. Windows will persist because of legacy, and the illegal market capture it has, not because it is worth a damn.
I mean the blog.
There are people who are so locked in that they don't want to think creatively, sure, but there are also effects of the tools people have to use to think that stunt creative thinking. Most people aren't stupid, they just lack the stimulus to think outside of convention, they need help.
But they aren't getting help from technology that could really help them to think. That may be by design, or at best an unintended side-effect of technology being applied for one use while hurting another use.
If you look at most blogs, the discussion goes no where, people write their response and if they are lucky someone will challenge this but usually the discussion ends there, it is because the blog lacks a useful mechanism for replying in context by being able to quote something and speaking to it, a feature we have on Slashdot.
The conversations here are much more lively not because the people here are that much more creative that they are on other sites, but because blogs do a couple of things that stunt creative thought, the owner of the page set the agenda, and the replies don't generate subtopics.
I think that the entrapaneurs of social media, beginning with Google know all this and they want it the way it is because their model is that they want blocks of text only so they can run regular expressions looking for marketing keywords, only. They could care less about structures in conversations that facilitate directed discussion, real creative colaborative writing, even in a debate or contentious environment. How do I know this? Google took great pains to create an archive of USENET posts for the first decade of its existence. It would be good of all of you to look at that. The revealing thing is that Google and other social media companies didn't take away any of the wisdom of that approach, in fact they went in the opposite direction, and I think consciously, and to thwart badly needed public discussion. Some of that value is here on Slashdot but even Slashdot because of to web interface has not approached yet the richness that was possible with the USENET newsreaders.
Creativity is a value, but given the complexity and the peril to democracy in our time, it becomes essential, and the web-based and social media companies have not done enough, and they haven't done the right thing to get people to think creatively at least in written discussions.
The worst offtender by far is Facebook. Now, I know that people here love to bash Facebook and its users, and that the argument we get from Mark Zuckerberg is that he wants a simple interface, but that is the problem, there ins't enough structure there to hold any kind of intelligent discussions. I can understand one saying that Facebook is not intended for discussion, and surely most of what goes on there is family and friends gooing over baby and pet pictures. I have no problem with that. The problem with Facebook is that there are many attempts of people to hold topical discussions and there are pages there that get thousands of replies, but have you ever tried to read through all that stuff? I'll bet not, and the reason is because the blog breaks down after maybe ten replies. It is not practical to reply to blogs which is why blog pages often appear to be about the egos of the page creators. It is because the technology doesn't provide useful means to facilitate creative response, which is why most blogs read like a bunch of people not communicating, talking to them selves, and the energy to respond to content is mostly with the page owner. In Newspaper blogs, there is argument, but the lack of structure makes it hard to follow and the ignoring or loss of context is a big problem. That is why off-topic and trolls are so destracting and people who become afraid because of the intimidation are denied the freedom to think.
Interesting that last phraise "Freedom to Think." that is what led to our open institutions, the ability of individuals to deliberate and not be intimidated by manipulators, to be abl
But does it come with Windows installed?
Most of the info is in the Nature article, the paper, though probably funded by the taxpayes, is securely behind the AAAS paywall. Maybe Congress, if it had any balls, would make it illegal to publish publically funded research behind a paywall, but I digress.
The message here seems to be that there were really two geologic events on the subduction zone of Japan's northern coast in March 2011. The first was an an ordinary subduction quake at modest depth in the plane of the Benioff Zone, a thrust event, but that was followed by a seconary event at shallower depth which involved as much as 50 meters of thrust that triggered the huge 30 m. tsamani. This latter event was triggered by the primary subduction quake in a regime that released stress in the plate by allowing for a large amount of slippage in a relatively weak medium, not storing tectonic strain by reacting to its release elsewhere.
The analogy with the San Andreas Fault in Central California is that there are incompetant rock allowing for a relatively large ammount of slippage, some of it aseismic, between segments of the fault that are stuck because of very strong rocks that store strain for release in large quakes. So serpentines in central California may more easily pas strain along toward places where hard rocks like grainites are storing the stress to be released all at once, to the north and south of the central segment of the fault/
The difference is that the release of strain at one place in the subduction zone caused even greater slip in an incompetant boundary seaward of the initial tectonic release. In California we ger fault creep, but it is not enough to release all the strain, nor does it happen in one great event. Nor does muddy subduction even always result in seismic activity. The Mariannas Trench is aseismic probably because the subduction zone is greased and not storing strain enough to result in quakes, and there are mud volcanoes in that area as well, serpentine mud has been found there.
The abstract for the paper called the grease in the Japan subduction zone "Plagic Clay". All that means is that the mud comes from clay minerals that settle out of the water column. They could have been terrigenous, sediments from land ultimately, that got carried as far as they can get, or meteoric. The "Grease" in California and in the Mariannas Trench is different. It is from a slippery mineral that forms from the reaction of water with minerals very rich in Fe, Mg and less Si, like Olivine. The Pelagic mud may not be slippy enough to release all the strain like the Marianas serpentine mud, but it may need a nudge to move, and then ti might move a great deal all at once. 50 m. is a lot.
Programming is absurdly simple.
I've found that most of the people who say this are crappy programmers, overly optimistic, or both.
Actually sight-singing the continuo lines from Bach's Christmas Oratorio, the orchestral score, either while listening to a recording or not is absurdly simple! Only if you brain happens to be wired for music and you have learned enough solfeggio to read the part at sight. So this is wrong, as is the assertion that anything is absurdly simple. Is remembering 40 moves at chess "absurdly simple"? It might be if your degrees are in math or CS and you have been playing chess since you were four years old. I know musicians who have been perforning since they were that age.
But brains are all different, so I could never remember many moves in a chess line while knowing people who knew all the variations of the opening, and they couldn't remember orchestral and vocal parts from music literature as easy as I could. BTW, I consider myself a bad programmer, even though I try to write code every once in a while. I don't have any illusions that it is my strength. As to if good programming can be taught, especially to adults who got it wrong, I have my doubts, just like it takes some native ability to do music, at least some pitch and tonal memory.
I stopped following links to Stack Overflow when I do a search on a problem I'm trying to solve.
Useful outcomes there are few and far between in my experience with it. Is is far worse than Ubuntu Community Support where these is at least incentive to being a problem to resolution. That is not what I see on Stack Overflow.
I love the perversity of human nature and economics as regards music and paying for music.
First, people will make and listen to music whether they pay to or not, and in fact there is an inverse relationship between quality and price. You will pay much more for what is current, new, but as with all art, new is not necessary better or enduring and much of the best art that has ever been produced either doesn't generate profit for the entertainment insustry or is already in the public domain.
I am fortunate that my tastes run to the Classical music genere. I read sheet music and know music history and literature, and I find that what I like is often freely available, even though recorded performances are under copyright. The Classical literature is at most about 5% of the retail market in entertainment and good because the media corporations aren't going to devote too much resource to enforce copyright on it. So getting a CD checked out of the public library and converting it to MP3 although illegal isn't going to be low hanging fruit for enforcement. There are many fine performances that are PD and one could spend a lifetime studying them and the music being played.
So, the real utility of copyright is its enforcement and the low hanging fruit is in what has mass appeal and is profitable to produce. That is not the same as what is best, although there is no accounting for taste. I just think that there are lots of us who don't really care about what is current, popular, or the economic viability of the current media or publishing corporation. There has been much debate recently about copyright law. I think that it benefits a business that has been made obsolete by technology and I don't think that except for the greed and power of a few corporations that it benefits us much at all. Artists mostly don't benefit from it, and the flow of information, especially the paywalls of referred scientific journals, impead information availability. I would like to see a restriction of copyright to benefit only the artist and his immediate heirs, not uncreative financial institutions.
Only the abstract is available, the article hasn't yet been published. According to the link.
But the light travel time makes the events upcoming in our time. We see objects at different times in their history according to their distance in light years, so Capella is 45 light years away, we see it as it was that long ago tonight. Even the Sun we see is as it was 8 minutes ago. It could have exploded that long ago and we would find out only now.
Seriously, what the light is telling us is that we are about to witness the effects of two supermassive black holes merging. Physics suggests that we should see effects that test our basic understanding, such as such an event might reveal the graviton, the boson for the gravity fource, by creating ripples in spacetime. The article says that this would affect pulsars, but does spell out how/ Maybe waves in spacetime passing a pulsar would change its pulse frequency in some way predicted by models for gravatational waves, if they are caused by this event.
Of course, even the inference that the emissions are caused by merging black holes is not absolutely certain, there could be some other explanation, but you and I may not be able to get at the critical tests because the journal article may be behind a paywall and even if we were current on the science we may never be able to read the arguments for and against unless we pay for it. Usually the abstract is free, but the article itself is protected by journal copyright and if we really wanted to know the argument, which is the critical part of any science, we may not be able to get to it.
If it becomes more profitable to entirely ignore the U.S. market though, people will stop catering to the U.S. laws and regulations. This can be brought about in a multitude of ways, but one way that's already in progress is the loss of the middle class and thus the loss of total consumer spending power.
That'll be the only way things can return to sanity here; after economic intimidation from other countries.
Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ comes to mind here. It is a Business and Financial Oligarchy that takes the place of the Roman Emperors and the Army. Government is usually in reaction to surrounding economic institution changes, and its institutions follow the economic ones.
The trouble with economics as a driving force to history is that the effects are for the most part unintentional, that is, without foresight, or Mankind is terribly near-sighted, and so if the enterprise become lost in the process, it is usually not expected. So if Capitalism is as American as Apple Pie, no one who thinks like a Capitalist or a Financier, or a Banker will see their natural sort-sightedness as killing the Goose that laid the Golden Egg. But it can.
The outcome you describe has a dire risk, that economic intimidation really means something like war, and that like the Roman Empire that the decay will come from within, from alien values inside our boarders, from people who never bought our myths of who we are and what we are about.
Considering that I was able to run Knoppix 7.2 recently on an ancient PC with 256 mb of ram and some random swap on a smallish disk, I see no reason I couldn't run a desktop on a $100 mobile device. If the thing had a couple of USB ports, enough to attach a hub, I should be able to hang all my desktop peripherals off it and be good to go. All the better if I could boot off a USB hard drive and run whatever OS I have on it. I don't even see the size of a flash disk to be a problem if the networking is all there, the boot from the hub devices. I can plug my 19" monitor, keyboard and mouse. This would be fine even though I find it hard to use the tiny display that comes with these devices. I want a Rasberry PI device with more umph! So give me a 64 bit AMD compat processor in the device, a couple of gigs of ram and just enough flash for a boot loader or installed OS, say 500 gb, and I see no reason at all to worry about doing without a desktop.
It is harder to find a good company than talent! I have been retired since 2005, forced out by disability and age from a career in Silicon Valley as a developer and system admin. And it is hard to stay current and to know what to study. Right now I am enamored with Python, but not too experienced, yet.
The thing which bothers me is that I am turned off by the companies, especially the well-known ones. I live a bus ride away from Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, and not far from Google, not that either would hire an old grey beard like me, and yet I would not clamor to work to either, except to try and cause trouble. I am totally unimpressed with these and many of the other famous companies around here. Seeing the crap that these companies do makes me laugh at Capitalism and at business in general the way it is done here in the U.S. and world. I am frankly ashamed and embarassed for the people who run these and who persaude investors. OK, I get that it takes some smarts to do some of the things behind the scenes, like the Big Data backend of Facebook, and I have had words with the people at Google about the design of their products, Google Docs mostly, So I know that I wouldn't fit in because despite what I know and don't know, I would try to be disruptive because I can see basic evil in what they are doing.
I know that there are lots of smart people, all those that learned their computer science and other things, and I took my degrees in Earth Science and got int Scientific Programming by way of that, but the way business is done is wasting talent on useless and destructive things. You would be better off writing words than code, analyzing why the world can go so awry as it has under the poor leadership we get for these people.
A few weeks ago I acquired an old PC that that had Win XP on it and could not have run later Windows releases. I installed Knoppix 7.2 and Debian 7 on it. I am very pleased with the former and have given up on the latter, oh by the way, I tested Arch Linux on that system as well, but give up on it for another reason. My main desktop runs Ubuntu 12.04. I had been updating or installing Ubuntu on that system since U. 8.10. I was a Solaris system admin. and have developer experience, so I am familiar with the shell. I couldn't get through the Arch install because the font was way too small for my disabled eyes. Debian sort of worked but it was unconfigured and I couldn't find which packages I needed to get wireless working, which Knoppix gave me out of the box.
I liked Ubuntu but I don't trust Mark Shuttleworth, in particular, to preserve legacy, and not try to make it into his captive market. I will dump the distro in a heartbeat if I think he has done that. It isn't that I don't like conveinince, but the difference between Linux and Windows is that you can dig into the innards of Linux because it preserves legacy and standards in a well documented way, something Windows doesn't do well, but you can keep it simple if that is all you want, and Ubuntu in those earlier releases was reliable for that. I am worried about that now.
The "Filter Bubble" is in part the product of too much information and a very poor design for public discussion, the blog, which is intentional. Even Slash Dot has the core flaw even though it is a forum, technically. If there is a filter bubble at all, it is in part created by the need for moderation of blogs and the lack of a good mechanism to handle topic drift, sub-threads, and the way to create an interest, even compelling one, for opposing or different views.
I draw on my recall of how on the USENET It was possible to reason with people, present opposing arguments and be persuasive in an area that is at least as contentious as any mentioned in this thread. In fact I debated with Creationists from 1987 to about 1993, and changed a few minds.
The Newsgroup is a superior way to manage the topic. Slash Dot has some of the correct approach by laying out the discussion by topic, but the top down topic hierarchy of USENET is better. The problem with slash dot is that it has too much of the features of a blog and not enough structure so that readers can hone in on the threads that hold interest for them, and these are not necessarily those that they will find agreement as to ideas.
For example, one must filter the large number of posts in some useful way. One way I can suggest is that I would mark to ignore threads with a large number of posts, these are likely to be predictable, facile, and full of short posts. The other is to perfer to read long posts, indicating that some person has made an effort to write, put sentences and paragraphs in some order that is logical, and made an effort to reason. I want to read these posts. These don't exclude posts that I might not agree with, and good. I might want to be exposed to posts that have some meat on them written by people who can think in writing.
I hate tweets. I hate trolls. I dislike mobile. Building public opinion around them is bad for citizenship in a democratic state where discussions need to go to depth and have some grist. I sometime think that marketers and political establishments love mobile, tweets and blogs, because they can control the topic, just like the staff at Slash Dot can control the headlines and the fact that most of the stuff submitted is never seen unless it makes it to the headline. The fact that the topics need to to filtered in that top-down way is a sign that the technology that they are based on fails to give people a voice, and although I don't put slash dot at the top of my list of evil doers, there are plenty of other Internet companies that deserve to be for misusing the medium and not behaving in the service of lively and informative public discussion. The Filter Bubble is a product of misapplication of the technology because there isn't enough structure in blogs and fourms can have structure, but there isn't enough of it to allow for people to manage the flood of information in a useful way, for them.
I know that people on this site love to hate Facebook, but it is important to know why Facebook is not designed to really handle discussion and why that damages people who use it. The reason Facebook is a failure is that it is a blog, and the discussions on it quickly exceed the utility of a blog. What seems to anger Facebook users more is that they can't set a priority for what they see and the lack of structure upsets them at some perfectly normal human tendancies, like topic drift, but unlike a conversation between people, it is harder to wade through the things that don't excite interest, to ignore them.
While I think this post is OT, doesn't address the research finding cited above, I think that it may be beside the point, where the point may be how to inject different points of view in the lineal flow of a blog, the solution is to give the reader much more structure. I found on the USENET that it was possible to inject ideas that people might otherwise ignore if one was cleaver, not choosing obvious emotive words and phrases, and knowing how to make an argument,
I am tempted
There is a good case for Linux needing two different approaches, the no-frills but extremely flexible and powerful image of Arch Linux, a shell, no GUI, and lots of tools that are hard for novices to learn and use, but are close to the metal, the computer science metal, and something that is more suited for the novice and casual user. I am concerned that Shuttleworth's vision to make a main-market Linux is like any other products that appeal to "average" people, stripped of features and dumbed down. When he was talking about dropping XOrg, I was very worried that the legacy was going to go with it, and why, so he could realize his ego's dream of making a sexy Linux derivative that Grandma would wnat but not care about the depth of detail beneath.
Operating systems are quite different from other products, say the automobile. Each new technology goes from a geeky adopter mode where buyers worry about the internals, and as the product matures and the technology gets better the details become invisible to consumers. It is going to be a long time before computer operating systems become as transparent, and maybe never, so to want to take away that access to the depths of them for some kind of mass appeal, is premature. That should hopefully be the lesson of Windows, that Microsoft had to give its users access to some internals, at least to write them decent error messages and logs rather than continuing to try to hide complexity from users.
Operating systems are not mature enough that they can be handled by normal sales and marketing strategy alone, and that is why we cannot trust Mark Shutleworth's decisions. He was forced to retreat somewhat from Unity being the inclusive model for Ubuntu's GUI because even though he may be right in the long run that tablets and touch may represent a future for his product, that giving less priority to the wishes of desktop users was rash and egocentric.
If anything it is the fact that Shuttleworth seems to be of that ecocentric and arrogant stamp of many a business leader, that his leverage is his net worth, that worries me as concerns Linux, which should retain all of its legacy, its roots, and then go for broader appeal, not sacrifice its complexity to get mass appeal, then it is no different from Windows. I would much rather Microsoft have 85% of the personal computer market than sacrifice Linux's rich details for mass appeal. I think that one can get at techniques from computer science if one wants to the the shell and commands, or not. I am not saying that Linux cannot do both, it can, but I don't necessarily think that the tact chosen by Ubuntu is the right way to do it.
If you want to understand the most critical difference between political ideologies and system and get past their oversimplifications, the fly in the ointment things they gloss over, the hopeful dream with all the nastiness ignored, ask yourself if they include everybody or who they exclude.
So, if you want to exclude people, ask yourself if you can really get away with it and at what cost. Quite often political ideologists either aren't honest about this or get it wrong. Do you want to include people who are financially minded, for instance, or white, or Christian? And how to you keep the "others" out.
American History in particular is full of enclaves of people that think alike, where like-values are enforced. Such "utopian" colonies survived because it was easy to isolate them. Jim Jones moved the People's Temple to Gayana to isolate them from what he regarded as dangerous outside influences before he coerced them to drink cool-aid laced with cyanide and die. Except from the suicide, how is that much different from the Mormons in Utah?
The problem with that today, and I think it is connected with the recent spike in gun violence and mass shootings, is that there are fewer places to run and hide and that to have to stay and get along with lots of different kinds of people, like in the increasingly urban lot of most of humanity, takes an approach that is not elitist. The problem with this is that economics, the breakdown of inclusive economic and political institutions could change all that, and that change would be based on elitism and scarcity, for the notion that there isn't enough to go around turns people selfish and they begin to invent lies about how they deserve the fruits of society while others do not. For a long time I scratched my head about how a very advanced nation like Germany could have embraced Hitler and the Nazi movement in 1933. It seemed to me a mystery of how the nation that had embraced the most advanced science and philosophy could have made what in hindsight seems like such a dreadful mistake. But now I know how any advanced culture can go down that road including in the United States. It is by embracing Conservatism in the form of elitism, the motto for which is "I've got mine, screw you!" The Brown Shirts are not all that far removed from that kind of thinking which the rhetoric from some of the Tea Parties has revealed.
Now, of course, the opposite political pole also can spawn elitism, as we can document in Socialist and Communist regimes. but they become essentially Conservative. If the poor generializations that come out of American political rhetoric were to apply, North Korea and even China would be much more inclusive societies than they are. They are essentially protecting their investment and their elites just as Western countries who cater to Conservative Capitalists do.
There is no better elitism than an big lopsided income distribution, such as is emerging in the U.S. The apologists for laissez-faire economics like to downplay its unfair aspect, that having very rich people in the market drives up prices for everybody and especially those at the bottom. Look at the housing market, especially in the wealthy parts of the nation. They love to point out how opportunity is there and to be rewarded by iniative. What they fail to tell you, and probably why they are so willing to claim that, is that they got to a scarce resource first and locked out others in doing so. So the psychology of scarcity feeds on itself, it supports elitist thinking. The problem with that is that there is a Day of Rechoning in which accounts are called in and in which the disadvantaged get some payback. That is made even more likely by a high rate of change, that business models and empires become vulnerable. In human history the tide of tyranny has often been helped by outside calamity, and although I cannot predict when the next volcano will explode and plunge the earth into ashfall winter, that has happened before and it has promoted elites. We might be able to outgrow the temper tantrum of elitism by then.
Ha, Ha, Ha, you are wrong, again.
You are still projecting, In fact you are projecting those sociopathic qualities on me that you revealed by your appearent indifference to the misconduct of others around you.
I was saying that such indifference does not work in a vacuum. Just like people in Nazi Germany who did what they did because they were just doing what was expected of them, so I am reminding you that indifference to injustice can come back to haunt you when the social norms change, and not because you intended it that way. So if you happen to work for a large bank or financial institution that is using speclaton to rob little people of their savings and livelyhood, it is not my power to make good on threats to you, but my kind warning to you that what you can get away with today may not be what will be tolerated tomorrow, and I have history as my guide for that.
Whether you take personal umbrage at me for what I said is of no matter. There are forces far larger than me or you that may decide. I urge you to heed those. I presume that you taking exception is due to a guilty conscience, so heed that too.