This was already well-researched in the HCI literature, starting with Olsen's groundbreaking paper on the DataNose around 1986, and extended significantly by Brad Meyers, et al., in their 1991 UIST paper on Nose Gesture Interfaces and Rhino-Virtual-Reality in General.
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction”... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons
I am in the exact same boat. I never really was in to TV and never had cable. I can't stand commericals. I used to just watch VHS, then DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc. Now I use netflix streaming and am discovering that maybe I did miss a few good shows over the years. Of course, I still pay ComCast a ton of money to get my high-speed net access so I am not sure if I am saving any money...
Hmm, if I remember corectly, the philosophy would be that it is too bad if you don't want someone to link to your text, that should not be your decision to make. That it is ethically wrong to limit linking or quoting. That a link or an edit is an independent creation that has its own identity and rights. I think the example he gives is that I should be able to take your book, quote the whole thing, change one word, and repost it as a new version. Then if someone read my text instead of yours, 99.995% of the royalty would go to you, and.0005 would go to me. Something like that, I forget the details.
In terms of how you implement the linking, it is just a data structure that has two range pointers - the source range and destination range. There are two parts that make it harder. First you need an address system that is extensible and can reference at an arbirtary level of detail. You could use Nelson's own tumbler addressing, although that is not super efficient, or you could create some other system. Then you need a repository to hold and find these links, so that when I am looking at a document, I can see all of the links going to or fromt that. Our friends at Google (or Bing if you prefer) already maintain these link indices so it isn't like it is an unsolved problem. Some of the toolbars available will surface this information for you today.
Can it be that there is a generation of people who love tech and read slashdot every day but don't know who Ted Nelson is? Can you even understand the phrase "free software is like free love, not free beer" if you don't know anything about history? Wow.
I've heard Ted Nelson speak and even met him on a few occasions back in the day - I think it was around 1987. Ted Nelson is not a crackpot by any means - he is the real deal. He wrote a truly fantastic book called "Computer Lib" back in 1974 or so, advocating open and free personal computing long before the Apple I was invented. His vision of "HyperText" has two parts - one is an underlying philosophy that all information should be accessible and usable for whatever people want. The second is some technological solutions and implementation ideas on how to do this.
I think Dr. Nelson has a pretty good track record on the philosophy side. For instance, he discussed that links embedded into documents are a bad idea because they get broken and can only be placed there by the owner of the document. He discusses that links should always be two-way. That links should have known ownership. That the amount of linking (and nth-order linking) can be seen as a judgement of the value of a document. These are all spot-on. In fact, you could argue that Google's entire technology is based on applying a subset of Nelson's ideas to HTML.
HyperText (and HyperMedia) philosophy also is foretells the entire debate now on digital music and digital media, and DRM in general. This is again all written about two decades before we did QuickTime at Apple.
It is too bad that he has become more of a Cassandra these days.
My favorite quote from him is from a talk he was giving on computers and education. He starts by drawing a child and then a garden of delight that represents learning. Then he says "this is the teacher", and draws a brick wall between then. Then he says "Putting computers in the classroom changed all this" and he erases the word "teacher" under the brick wall and writes "computers". So true...
We might imagine the universe is starting with a very large amount of energy compressed into singularity and then it starts expanding by inflating dimensions. You can assume that there are as many dimensions as you want, but that they are very small; not infinitely small, but small enough so that a complete circuit of the dimension is much smaller than a Planck length. The dimensions are expanding to create a place to put all that energy, so we might expect that one dimension would inflate significantly before it runs out of space - literally - and the next one would start to inflate in earnest. So to expand out and get the three big dimensions we have now, you would naturally pass through a stage where we have 1 and then 2 dimensions. If this happened, we should be able to see the tell-tale signs still imprinted in the make-up of the current universe. For instance, events that happened at very high energies (from early universe), should look today like they all happened in a line or plane instead of in 3D space. That is what the paper is about - more ways to check for this..
BTW, the reason inflation mostly stops after 3 dimensions is that three dimensions is the lowest number of dimensions where randomly distributed items are no longer on top of each other. (e.g., a 1d or 2d random walk will always return to its origin, but in 3D you can get lost for good). You can also hypothesize that a few more dimensions also expanded a little in the process, but not by very much. This is (very) basically what string theory holds.
Many people have trouble understanding the relationship between how many dimensions you have, how much you can hold, and the energy levels involved. Here is a simple thought experiment that anyone can do with just a pen and paper or maybe a string. We will use the paper for space and the string for energy. Draw a 1" line. How long of a piece of string can it "hold"? Only an 1" of course. Now draw a 1"x1" box. How long of a piece of string can it hold? About 1.4", if you stretch it from corner to corner. Now make a 1"x1"x1" box. How long of a piece of string can it hold now?
You can actually stick the Empire State Building into a 1" n-dimensional cube, as long as n is sufficiently large (I think around 225 million should do it...:-) ).
IANAL, but I did run a Private Investigation firm. A lot of people are in jail because they didn't understand the law about this.
If you exchange anything of value under the pretense of hiring a hitman, then you are guilty of consipiracy to commit murder. For all intents and purposes, the ability or even the intent of the person you "hire" is not relevant, nor is the amount of total value of the exchange. Just like robbing a bank with a gun counts even if the gun was fake/had no bullets/etc.
Merely saying "I wish someone would kill " is a weaker version of "I will give someone $500 to kill " - solicitation. This is where you get into a slipperly slope of how much that resembles an agreement. For instance, if a 9 year says "I will give you a trillion dollars to kill ", that is not very credible. But if a mafia godfather with a track record of hiring killers and rewarding them merely says "Person is annoying me", that might be sufficient.
The real trouble comes when you exchange something of value. I was working a case once where someone was in prison for conspiracy because they asked someone to kill their girlfriend. The "hitman" asked for $1500. The guy told him he was broke. The "hitman" said "yeah, I could do it for free but I would have to leave town." So the person gave him $15 for bus fare. That was enough to show a contract. It turned out his hitman was an undercover cop. Now the guy is serving 15 years.
So in Facebook, if you said "I will be your neighbor in farmville if you kill her", and someone accepts that gift, that would be the same as you paying some stranger $10k.
...but most of the long takes in modern movies are made possible because of CGI being used to hide the shot breaks and camera transitions, fill in walls, remove crew members, and basically do all kinds of stuff that make it appear seemless. A shot that is apparently uncut by no means indicates that no CGI is used.
Not that it should bother you much - bad CGI is just like bad lighting, bad editing, bad directing, bad acting, or any other component of film. CGI doesn't kill movies - Michael Bay using CGI does.
Does anyone remember XPLORA, the Peter Gabriel interactive CD-ROM project? I am imagining something like that...
Meanwhile, MMO is all about fantasy. Who in the world wants to be Michael Jackson? How is that fun?
Now David Bowie world - that would be off the hook! Everyone starts with a gun/sex toy and you can change your name, race or gender at any time. In fact, I am amazed Bowie doesn't already have a MMORPG.
OK, since the author of the article seems to be totally ignorant of the actual issue, let me help you. This is nothing to do with "customer rights" and everything to do with stealing.
Your iPad/PlayStation/XBOX costs MORE than you are currently paying for it. Apple/Sony/Microsoft is selling it to you more cheaply because they want to make up the difference by selling you software.
So the companies have a few choices. 1) charge much more for the hardware and worry that people will not buy it. 2) undercharge for the hardware and lock people in to a closed app store. 3) sell two different versions - locked and unlocked - and let people choose which one they want.
Some open systems like PCs do #1 while some smartphones do #3. But most content-based products do model #2. When you "jailbreak" your product and use that to exit the app store ecosystem, that is basically saying "I know you want $800 for this, but I only want to pay you $400". We have a word for that. It is called "stealing". If you want to buy a toaster and it costs $20, but you only want to pay $10, you can't just tell WalMart that it is your "customer right".
And all of this talk about companies "forcing" you to do this or that. Wake up! You DO NOT HAVE TO BUY AN IPAD. If you don't like being locked in, don't engage in criminal behavior - just buy something else that is open. Geez people.
There are a lot of different skills that count broadly as math.
There is counting. Recognizing quantities (by sight or by touch). Arithmetic (+, -, *, / ). Recognizing shapes. Finding unknowns. Mapping concrete items to abstract concepts (A A A = 3 As). Using variables. Algebra, Geometry, etc, etc. These are different skills. I am sure we have all met children who can tell you that "6+9=15" but if you asked them "if mommy gives you 6 cookies and daddy gives you 9, how my do you have?" would be stumped.
It sounds from the article that they dd not eliminate all maths, just abstract symbol manipulation, like "3+4=7".
It is pretty well established by people like Piaget that there are certain windows in childhood. During those times, the mind can easily absorb certain concepts that before or after those times they either cannot or all or can only with great dificulty or other exceptional circumstances.
The most widely accepted window is the window for early language learning, where beyond a certain age you will likely never be truly multi-lingual - you will always have a first language and zero or more secondary ones. However, there are several others. Mother-bonding happens within days of birth. Arithmetic sense (the ability to count, recognize quantities and relations) is one of those that is also quite young - 4-6 or something if I recall. There is a similar window for social behavior. There is also evidence that topology is such a window.
Ironically, despite the western obsession with early reading, there is no evidence that there is any window for reading. People who learn to read later in life - even 40's and beyond - can learn to read with little trouble and quickly become indistinguishable from early readers in terms of reading speed and comprehension. In fact, there is no evidence at all that early reading has any positive effect.
There are already schools that emphasize non-academic ways of learning. For example, in the Waldorf schools, children are not exposed to ANY academics at all - not even letter shapes or counting - until they are 7. Then the academic load builds slowly up, with more emphasis on outdoor play, spoken language and song, and craft-making than on book learning or lecturing. Despite this, most of these students have standard tests as high or higher than students from other private school that place more emphasis on academics.
My personal opinion (as someone with lots of kids in school) is that our current education system puts too much stuff in kids heads that they cannot process because it is not relevant to their daily experience. It is better for kids - especially young kids, under 10 or so - to play outside, engage in imaginative play, and to develop deep emotional connections with people around them than to learn to read or memorize multiplication tables. Academics can come later.
Bold stand? PLEASE. Google makes almost all of their money in China by selling ads on their US site to Chinese companies, not from google.cn. If they really felt China was evil, they would pull out their sales team and stop selling personal information to the "evil" Chinese. But you notice that there is no talk of that from these jokers.
Or, more accurately:
"We were cool with doing business with you, even effacing our own corporate values, because your country is a lucrative market. But after billions of dollars we still get our hat handed to us in the marketplace by the local competitor. We lost our good execs, and all of the good people we poached from other companies have abandoned ship. So now we need a way to get out without looking like the miserable failures we are. So we pretend it has something to do with human rights, even though we didn't care when there was money to be had."
Before reading the article, I had no idea that McDonalds et al. were not already growing their "meat" in a vat... Are you telling me that a Hot Dog actually contains a part of a real animal? Amazing!
Slashdot Mirror
This was already well-researched in the HCI literature, starting with Olsen's groundbreaking paper on the DataNose around 1986, and extended significantly by Brad Meyers, et al., in their 1991 UIST paper on Nose Gesture Interfaces and Rhino-Virtual-Reality in General.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=120789
- Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons
rip, kurt!
Seriously, can anyone say that with a straight face?
I am in the exact same boat. I never really was in to TV and never had cable. I can't stand commericals. I used to just watch VHS, then DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc. Now I use netflix streaming and am discovering that maybe I did miss a few good shows over the years. Of course, I still pay ComCast a ton of money to get my high-speed net access so I am not sure if I am saving any money...
Hmm, if I remember corectly, the philosophy would be that it is too bad if you don't want someone to link to your text, that should not be your decision to make. That it is ethically wrong to limit linking or quoting. That a link or an edit is an independent creation that has its own identity and rights. I think the example he gives is that I should be able to take your book, quote the whole thing, change one word, and repost it as a new version. Then if someone read my text instead of yours, 99.995% of the royalty would go to you, and .0005 would go to me. Something like that, I forget the details.
In terms of how you implement the linking, it is just a data structure that has two range pointers - the source range and destination range. There are two parts that make it harder. First you need an address system that is extensible and can reference at an arbirtary level of detail. You could use Nelson's own tumbler addressing, although that is not super efficient, or you could create some other system. Then you need a repository to hold and find these links, so that when I am looking at a document, I can see all of the links going to or fromt that. Our friends at Google (or Bing if you prefer) already maintain these link indices so it isn't like it is an unsolved problem. Some of the toolbars available will surface this information for you today.
Can it be that there is a generation of people who love tech and read slashdot every day but don't know who Ted Nelson is? Can you even understand the phrase "free software is like free love, not free beer" if you don't know anything about history? Wow.
I've heard Ted Nelson speak and even met him on a few occasions back in the day - I think it was around 1987. Ted Nelson is not a crackpot by any means - he is the real deal. He wrote a truly fantastic book called "Computer Lib" back in 1974 or so, advocating open and free personal computing long before the Apple I was invented. His vision of "HyperText" has two parts - one is an underlying philosophy that all information should be accessible and usable for whatever people want. The second is some technological solutions and implementation ideas on how to do this.
I think Dr. Nelson has a pretty good track record on the philosophy side. For instance, he discussed that links embedded into documents are a bad idea because they get broken and can only be placed there by the owner of the document. He discusses that links should always be two-way. That links should have known ownership. That the amount of linking (and nth-order linking) can be seen as a judgement of the value of a document. These are all spot-on. In fact, you could argue that Google's entire technology is based on applying a subset of Nelson's ideas to HTML.
HyperText (and HyperMedia) philosophy also is foretells the entire debate now on digital music and digital media, and DRM in general. This is again all written about two decades before we did QuickTime at Apple.
It is too bad that he has become more of a Cassandra these days.
My favorite quote from him is from a talk he was giving on computers and education. He starts by drawing a child and then a garden of delight that represents learning. Then he says "this is the teacher", and draws a brick wall between then. Then he says "Putting computers in the classroom changed all this" and he erases the word "teacher" under the brick wall and writes "computers". So true...
In somewhat plain English:
:-) ).
We might imagine the universe is starting with a very large amount of energy compressed into singularity and then it starts expanding by inflating dimensions. You can assume that there are as many dimensions as you want, but that they are very small; not infinitely small, but small enough so that a complete circuit of the dimension is much smaller than a Planck length. The dimensions are expanding to create a place to put all that energy, so we might expect that one dimension would inflate significantly before it runs out of space - literally - and the next one would start to inflate in earnest. So to expand out and get the three big dimensions we have now, you would naturally pass through a stage where we have 1 and then 2 dimensions. If this happened, we should be able to see the tell-tale signs still imprinted in the make-up of the current universe. For instance, events that happened at very high energies (from early universe), should look today like they all happened in a line or plane instead of in 3D space. That is what the paper is about - more ways to check for this..
BTW, the reason inflation mostly stops after 3 dimensions is that three dimensions is the lowest number of dimensions where randomly distributed items are no longer on top of each other. (e.g., a 1d or 2d random walk will always return to its origin, but in 3D you can get lost for good). You can also hypothesize that a few more dimensions also expanded a little in the process, but not by very much. This is (very) basically what string theory holds.
Many people have trouble understanding the relationship between how many dimensions you have, how much you can hold, and the energy levels involved. Here is a simple thought experiment that anyone can do with just a pen and paper or maybe a string. We will use the paper for space and the string for energy. Draw a 1" line. How long of a piece of string can it "hold"? Only an 1" of course. Now draw a 1"x1" box. How long of a piece of string can it hold? About 1.4", if you stretch it from corner to corner. Now make a 1"x1"x1" box. How long of a piece of string can it hold now?
You can actually stick the Empire State Building into a 1" n-dimensional cube, as long as n is sufficiently large (I think around 225 million should do it...
In the next patch, they will just slow down all competing web browsers!
I guess ICAAN is helping put the STD in the sTLD!
/ducks
IANAL, but I did run a Private Investigation firm. A lot of people are in jail because they didn't understand the law about this.
If you exchange anything of value under the pretense of hiring a hitman, then you are guilty of consipiracy to commit murder. For all intents and purposes, the ability or even the intent of the person you "hire" is not relevant, nor is the amount of total value of the exchange. Just like robbing a bank with a gun counts even if the gun was fake/had no bullets/etc.
Merely saying "I wish someone would kill " is a weaker version of "I will give someone $500 to kill " - solicitation. This is where you get into a slipperly slope of how much that resembles an agreement. For instance, if a 9 year says "I will give you a trillion dollars to kill ", that is not very credible. But if a mafia godfather with a track record of hiring killers and rewarding them merely says "Person is annoying me", that might be sufficient.
The real trouble comes when you exchange something of value. I was working a case once where someone was in prison for conspiracy because they asked someone to kill their girlfriend. The "hitman" asked for $1500. The guy told him he was broke. The "hitman" said "yeah, I could do it for free but I would have to leave town." So the person gave him $15 for bus fare. That was enough to show a contract. It turned out his hitman was an undercover cop. Now the guy is serving 15 years.
So in Facebook, if you said "I will be your neighbor in farmville if you kill her", and someone accepts that gift, that would be the same as you paying some stranger $10k.
"la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!"
Or, as Keyser Söze would put it: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist."
It is classic misdirection- act vaugely bumbling and inept in insignificant matters to distract people from putting serious scrutiny on you.
Call me when they figure out insect bacon. Then we might have a deal...
I just hope that more hot young females are inspired by the fine example of Christmas Jones to become nuclear physicists.
...but most of the long takes in modern movies are made possible because of CGI being used to hide the shot breaks and camera transitions, fill in walls, remove crew members, and basically do all kinds of stuff that make it appear seemless. A shot that is apparently uncut by no means indicates that no CGI is used. Not that it should bother you much - bad CGI is just like bad lighting, bad editing, bad directing, bad acting, or any other component of film. CGI doesn't kill movies - Michael Bay using CGI does.
Someone call Mazlan Othman asap!
Does anyone remember XPLORA, the Peter Gabriel interactive CD-ROM project? I am imagining something like that...
Meanwhile, MMO is all about fantasy. Who in the world wants to be Michael Jackson? How is that fun?
Now David Bowie world - that would be off the hook! Everyone starts with a gun/sex toy and you can change your name, race or gender at any time. In fact, I am amazed Bowie doesn't already have a MMORPG.
I for one can't wait for the first batch of experimenters to be laid low by their Cyanobacteria infected meals. Open sores, indeed!
OK, since the author of the article seems to be totally ignorant of the actual issue, let me help you. This is nothing to do with "customer rights" and everything to do with stealing.
Your iPad/PlayStation/XBOX costs MORE than you are currently paying for it. Apple/Sony/Microsoft is selling it to you more cheaply because they want to make up the difference by selling you software.
So the companies have a few choices. 1) charge much more for the hardware and worry that people will not buy it. 2) undercharge for the hardware and lock people in to a closed app store. 3) sell two different versions - locked and unlocked - and let people choose which one they want.
Some open systems like PCs do #1 while some smartphones do #3. But most content-based products do model #2. When you "jailbreak" your product and use that to exit the app store ecosystem, that is basically saying "I know you want $800 for this, but I only want to pay you $400". We have a word for that. It is called "stealing". If you want to buy a toaster and it costs $20, but you only want to pay $10, you can't just tell WalMart that it is your "customer right".
And all of this talk about companies "forcing" you to do this or that. Wake up! You DO NOT HAVE TO BUY AN IPAD. If you don't like being locked in, don't engage in criminal behavior - just buy something else that is open. Geez people.
- davevr
There is counting. Recognizing quantities (by sight or by touch). Arithmetic (+, -, *, / ). Recognizing shapes. Finding unknowns. Mapping concrete items to abstract concepts (A A A = 3 As). Using variables. Algebra, Geometry, etc, etc. These are different skills. I am sure we have all met children who can tell you that "6+9=15" but if you asked them "if mommy gives you 6 cookies and daddy gives you 9, how my do you have?" would be stumped.
It sounds from the article that they dd not eliminate all maths, just abstract symbol manipulation, like "3+4=7".
It is pretty well established by people like Piaget that there are certain windows in childhood. During those times, the mind can easily absorb certain concepts that before or after those times they either cannot or all or can only with great dificulty or other exceptional circumstances.
The most widely accepted window is the window for early language learning, where beyond a certain age you will likely never be truly multi-lingual - you will always have a first language and zero or more secondary ones. However, there are several others. Mother-bonding happens within days of birth. Arithmetic sense (the ability to count, recognize quantities and relations) is one of those that is also quite young - 4-6 or something if I recall. There is a similar window for social behavior. There is also evidence that topology is such a window.
Ironically, despite the western obsession with early reading, there is no evidence that there is any window for reading. People who learn to read later in life - even 40's and beyond - can learn to read with little trouble and quickly become indistinguishable from early readers in terms of reading speed and comprehension. In fact, there is no evidence at all that early reading has any positive effect.
There are already schools that emphasize non-academic ways of learning. For example, in the Waldorf schools, children are not exposed to ANY academics at all - not even letter shapes or counting - until they are 7. Then the academic load builds slowly up, with more emphasis on outdoor play, spoken language and song, and craft-making than on book learning or lecturing. Despite this, most of these students have standard tests as high or higher than students from other private school that place more emphasis on academics.
My personal opinion (as someone with lots of kids in school) is that our current education system puts too much stuff in kids heads that they cannot process because it is not relevant to their daily experience. It is better for kids - especially young kids, under 10 or so - to play outside, engage in imaginative play, and to develop deep emotional connections with people around them than to learn to read or memorize multiplication tables. Academics can come later.
Consumers are most interested in freedom from buggy, hard-to-install, hard-to-configure, don't-play-my-youtubes, unsupported-by-my-PC-maker codecs.
Bold stand? PLEASE. Google makes almost all of their money in China by selling ads on their US site to Chinese companies, not from google.cn. If they really felt China was evil, they would pull out their sales team and stop selling personal information to the "evil" Chinese. But you notice that there is no talk of that from these jokers.
Why didn't they just call it the iPhone DX?
Or, more accurately: "We were cool with doing business with you, even effacing our own corporate values, because your country is a lucrative market. But after billions of dollars we still get our hat handed to us in the marketplace by the local competitor. We lost our good execs, and all of the good people we poached from other companies have abandoned ship. So now we need a way to get out without looking like the miserable failures we are. So we pretend it has something to do with human rights, even though we didn't care when there was money to be had."
Before reading the article, I had no idea that McDonalds et al. were not already growing their "meat" in a vat... Are you telling me that a Hot Dog actually contains a part of a real animal? Amazing!
Personally I can't wait for these to show up in Japanese Porn. There is probably already a wasei-eigo term for exo-skeleton-assisted rape.