Friends lists, message boards, picture commenting and bulletins could all easily be done with a free host and the right software [freshmeat.net].
Hey, I'm the main appleseed developer. If you have had any problems installing, I'd be interested to hear them. Anything I can do to make it easier to install, the better. I know there's a lot I can do since I haven't focused much on ease of installation, but if you have any ideas, let me know!
if they don't open up and embrace standards allowing greater interoperability among the different networks.
It makes perfect sense for people outside of these corporations to see that... But from within, how do you balance interoperability with the business necessity of maintaining your users? For-profit sites aren't interested in that balancing act. They'll keep their walled garden as isolated as they can.
I've been developing an open source, distributed social networking software called Appleseed, and honestly, I think the solution is going to have to come from an open source solution. As long as profit and market share are the main motivating factors of companies like Facebook, Friendster, Myspace, etc., there is absolutely no incentive to design things properly.
Appleseed, and open source in general, has the freedom to be able to do things right. Create an interoperable network of social networking "nodes" which use a standard protocol to connect and interact. It's very simple, and the rules of business that these companies have to follow is the only thing keeping that from happening from within the proprietary world.
I see it as analagous to the old days of email. Back in the day, you had Compuserve, you had AOL, and Prodigy, and other competing services that attempted to monopolize their user base by refusing interoperability. But eventually, they had no choice but to adopt standard E-Mail for their users.
Let's face it, in this day and age, there is no single, good technological answer for why a user on MySpace can't send a message or a friend request to a user on Friendster, other than "We [myspace] doesn't want them to." Which is not an answer that people will tolerate for long.
You're kind of missing the point, though. When people say they get their news from The Onion or The Daily Show or the Colbert Report, what they mean is that they're getting their anaysis from these shows.
Which doesn't mean that they get their news from the mainstream media. You can get your news from Agence France Press, from Al Jazeera, from the BBC, from the CBC, from satellite television, to internet RSS feeds, to the Hindu Times, to everything inbetween. There are plenty of places, especially thanks to the internet, that people can get reasonably objective reporting on events. The American mainstream media is horrendous when it comes to reporting the news. They'll stick with a handful of sensational stories all day, instead of serious reporting, they prefer yellow journalism and gossip. They would be comedy, if they weren't such tragedy in that they aren't joking...
On the other hand, when it comes to analysis of those events, nobody hits the nail on the head like the humor outlets: Daily Show, Onion, Colbert Report.
I'm working on a sender stores system for a distributed social networking software called Appleseed based, in theory, on Internet Mail 2000. I figured early on that since the system was distributed, which means that anybody could set up an Appleseed social networking "node", that it would suffer from the same problems as any mail system if I used the standard reciever-stores system.
I don't harbor any illusions about a sender stores system being able to eliminate spam entirely, but the reason I went with it, especially after reading this indepth critique, was that it created a system of accountability. You may not be able to stop spam, but you have much better tools for knowing exactly where the spam came from.
The disadvantage is that it becomes, ideologically anyways, incompatible with current email systems. I consider this a small price to pay to allow admins to have better control and protection over their systems.
The system I'm building is rudimentary for now, and only uses direct HTTP->HTTP connections to send notifications and retrieve messages, and won't have any of the fancy abilities that email has right now, but it's a start, and there's no reason that those features can't be added as it evolves. It's gonna be a big experiment, and I'm expecting a whole lot of unforseen issues, but this whole project is a big experiment, so I'm excited about the possibilities in general.
This is all sound advice, but ultimately, better social networking software would go a long way towards privacy on the internet. MySpace is probably the worst, with basically only two options (private or public profile), and very little granular control. Livejournal has gotten better with friends filters, but for a while there, once someone was on your friends list, they had access to basically everything. I've heard facebook, with their StalkerHelper 2.0 additions can be considered one of the worst. I might want to be able to see all the comments I've posted, but I don't want other people to be able to see them.
I've been working on a distributed open source social networking software called Appleseed for a while now, and one of the big concerns I have is to make privacy controls as powerful as possible. This isn't just to keep xxhotbro34xx from chatting up 16 year old girls, although that's a nice addition. It's also because I want control of what's available to whom. If I post a blog entry, I want to be able to restrict it's viewing to only certain portions of my friends list.
What I coded in was Friends Circles, where you can categorize your friends into circles. One friend can be a member of multiple circles. Then, you can restrict your journal entries, photos, etc. according to your friends circles. Eventually everybody is going to be doing social networking, it'll be as common as email. And with that in mind, I want to be able to have my family on my friends list, while still being able to restrict their ability to see the photos of my new tattoo.
It's a simple idea, but it's really important, because for too long social networking functioned on the idea of Privacy Through Obscurity. People simply hoped that their personal information wouldn't be found by family members, employers, etc. But that day is long gone.
So it's important that social networking take the privacy of the individual strongly into consideration. I want to be able to have a social networking profile that I can show to anyone, while still being able to post pictures from that crazy party last week or journal entries about how I think my boss is an idiot.
And this stuff becomes even more important when you talk about teenagers getting on social networking sites. If I had kids, I would never let them get a myspace profile, but I wouldn't mind them getting an Appleseed profile after I explain how (and importantly, why) to use the privacy features to keep themselves safe.
Probably the biggest PR mistake that environmentalists ever made was that they made their activism about "The Earth", and not about our ability to survive on it.
Nature is a resilient bitch. We could hardly do the kind of damage necessary to make Earth unlivable by something.
We can, however, make life very unpleasant for mankind. And that's why we need to preserve the environment as best as possible. For us, not the environment.
You do realize that when all the European immigrants came over at the turn of last century, there was no such thing as an "illegal immigrant?" Immigration was exceedingly simple. And everybody got to stay except for the Asians (Asian Exclusion Act, anyone?).
Now, you have "illegal" immigration which ignores the 50,000 or so illegal Irish immigrants in NYC, but focuses on Latinos. What we're gearing up for is another Operation Wetback (Wiki search it).
Didn't know about any of this? Well, maybe the "debate" you've been having has been narrow and uninformed, then.
There's a few factors which have made myspace a cesspool spawning marketing and advertising demons left and right.
The first is that the system is centralized. Therefore, any spammers, spimmers, or whatever they're called on social networking sites, who decide to set up shop have only to contend with a sign up process, and maybe a captcha. Other than that, the burden is put on myspace.com itself. The spammers get a free ride.
The answer to this is to create a more decentralized social networking system. Like I've said before, I'm working on an open source project like that called Appleseed, but some of the ways I can foresee stopping spammers from setting up fake profiles and all that is to a) use a sender-stores system for messaging, so that the burden of storing and maintaining messages is put on the spammer. Want to send out a million messages? Sure. But be sure to be willing to host those messages indefinitely until their recipients decide to pick them up. Oh, and as far as accountability goes, it'll be a lot easier to find you. Also, b) By distributing social networking into specialized nodes, you now have a lot large pool of people willing to get rid of spammers. Each node will have a dedicated admin, so knocking off one or two fake profiles every so often isn't so hard. But MySpace has 50,000,000 people on one site. Sometimes it seems like they don't care about spammers, but honestly, it's probably just that they're incapable of removing all of them as fast as they're created. "Never attribute to malice" and all that...
The other important factor? Men are idiots. I see these fake profiles that scream "no fucking way I'm real", and it'll have hundreds of knucklehead friends. It seems creating a profile that says,
"Hi, I'm Emily! I'm 19 years old, bisexual, and I just moved to Detroit from Cali! I like to party, have fun, dance, and have naughty sex! Come over and see me on my webcam over here..."
is all you need to do to create the requisite blood flow displacement which makes most dudes take a few steps back on the evolutionary ladder. Just like spam, you can take a technical approach, and that can go a far way to defeating it, but as long as there are dudes out there with barbed wire bicep tattoos, backwards hats, throwing up fake gang signs in their bedroom in front of a Sublime poster willing to be duped by the simplest of scams, there's not much we can do. Possibly a well educated, self-confident, and sexually liberation female population who absolutely refused to have sex with these cro-magnons until they opened a book might help. But like a sender-stores system, some of them might get through anyways.
If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: One of the biggest things holding social networking back is that people still have this conception of it that is very reminiscent of a 1996 Wired Magazine article. That it's all very cool and hip and revolutionary.
Social networking isn't gonna get anywhere until people everywhere see it as a basic tool, no more, no less. You don't see kids bragging about their email address, do you? Why are teenagers acting the fool over the fact that they have a myspace?
I've been working on a distributed social networking software called Appleseed (at Sourceforge, and a test site at Appleseedproject.org. The idea is to distribute social networking across an infinite number of sites, all of which can communicate with each other flawlessly. Basically, taking the decentralized theory of the internet, and applying it to social networking software.
One of the effects I think this will have, is that a lot of people will join social networking sites who might be normally turned off by a monolothic cesspool such as MySpace. Ridiculous hipsters can have their site, and people who don't suck could have their own site, and someone who doesn't suck could still maintain a relationship with their hipster "friend" so that they can hear where the parties are without having to wear girls jeans and have a haircut that proves that the world has no sense of decency.
Yes, this means that your uncle and your mom and your cousin and even maybe your grandparents are gonna be do the whole social networking thing. Luckily, Appleseed has a lot of privacy options, so you can hide your BDSM Leninist Reading Group from your family.
One of the effects of the "uncooling" of social networking, I think, will be that people recognize that you're not hanging out at 80's night at the local club, or chilling with your friends at a private party. You're broadcasting your life to the whole damn world. Once I think people realize that, I think the absurd and abnormal social habits that social networking creates are going to quickly disappear.
who has amassed more than 120,000 'friends' that opt (for rewards) to associate themselves with his profile."
What kind of a social network has to buy it's friends?
I really kind of marvel at the way social networking has evolved on the web. Corporations have sunk their teeth into it, but the fit hasn't been very good, has it?
Part of that is that social networking needs to stop being centered around isolated websites that function as islands, seperated from each other. Instead, social networks need to function like the internet themselves: Interoperable, decentralized, and based on open standards.
Think of how much email would suck if I had to be the same server as you to send you one? Why do I have to be on Myspace.com to add someone as a friend? There is no single, technical reason why I couldn't be on Friendster.com and add a MySpace user as a friend.
What's preventing that kind of functionality is social, not technical.
As a side note, I think the best thing to happen to social networking is if it stops being "cool." If it stops being something you talk about in that hip, 1996 Wired Magazine kinda way, and starts being just something that is.
Why is it that the same people who want to embrace the wholesale slaughter of embryos to drive stem cell research - which is genetically engineering drugs - get up in arms about GE food?
OMG, won't somebody please think of the blastocysts!
Those blastocysts are gonna get thrown out whether or not they're researched. So obviously, you'd rather all those innocent, angelic "babies" to die in vain, then, wouldn't you?
Seems to me that these folks just value their dinner more than their humanity
Maybe we understand biology enough to know that they're not comparable situations?
Researching stem cells is just not the same as taking the genes from a fish and splicing them into a tomato.
Damn, could they make the Wii any more attractive to casual gamers? I've always wanted to play online games, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay for a game, and then keep paying more for the service.
$200-$250 price point, fun games, and free online play. The only way they could make it more attractive is to [insert natalie portman reference here].
But to be honest, I don't know if I can take somebody seriously who says something like 'Suppose the only music in all the world were rap or heavy metal.'
I mean, honestly, has the guy never heard of Saul Williams?
I am that timeless NGH that swings on pendulums like vines through mines of booby trapped minds that are enslaved by time. I am the life that supersedes lifetimes, I am. It was me with serpentine hair and a timeless stare that with a mortal glare turned mortal fear into stone time capsules. They still exist as the walking dead. As I do, the original suffer-head, symbol of life and matriarchy's severed head: Medusa, I am. It was me, the ecclesiastical one, that pointed out that there was nothing new under the sun. and in times of laughter and times of tears, saw that no times were real times, 'cause all times were fear. The wise seer, Solomon, I am. It was me with tattered clothes that made you scatter as you shuffled past me on the street. Yes, you shuffled past me on the street as I stood there conversing with wind blown spirits. And I fear it's your loss that you didn't stop and talk to me. I could have told you your future as I explained your present, but instead, I'm the homeless schizophrenic that you resent for being aimless. The in-tuned nameless, I am. I am that NGH. I am that NGH. I am that NGH. I am a negro. Yes, negro from necro, meaning death. I overcame it so they named me after it. And I be spitting at death from behind and putting "kick me" signs on it's back, because, I am not the son of Sha Clack Clack . I am before that. I am before. I am before before. Before death is eternity. After death is eternity. There is no death there's only eternity. And I be ridin' on the wings of eternity, like yah, yah, Sha Clack Clack.
Hell, even Tupac wrote books of poetry, and with artists out there like Mos Def, Talib Qweli, Outkast, etc., it's hard to understand how somebody could use rap music collectively as an example of "low art".
But then again, given his examples of high art being the kind of things that wealthy white people put on tuxes to clap softly to, I'm not sure I'm particularly interested in what he has in mind.
How do people from the Netherlands feel about the advertisement? I'm more interested in their opinion than politically correct America. What was the reaction in the Netherlands?
White people from the Netherlands or Black people from the Netherlands?
The fact of the matter is that we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether these ads were "racist" or not.
But the fact that they were racially problematic is pretty much indisputable. As the above comment said, why would they use a black person and a white person? Why would they be fighting? Are they really so naive as to not recognize that, given the history of racism, colonialism, genocide, fascism, etc. that have preceded our current worldwide race relations, that presenting an ad which simulates violence between a black person and a white person might, I don't know, be kind of a bad idea?
In a world without history, this ad would be meaningless. But we live in the real world, that has a bloody history of slavery, apartheid, jim crow, fascism, and colonialism.
And as such, this ad is incredibly problematic. Anybody who doesn't recognize at least that is ignoring history itself.
Oh, yeah, they didn't care about any of that.
on
The Man Behind MySpace
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship...or, y'know, testing their code or any kind of quality assurance.
I continue to be amazed at the amount that Myspace.com breaks. Messaging will sometimes go down for weeks at a time. The "chat" feature has never really worked. Pages just randomly come up with errors. And not to mention the spam and the security errors. $586 million dollars, and they can't build a decent site?
I guess that's what they get for creating a massive website using Coldfusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Friends lists, message boards, picture commenting and bulletins could all easily be done with a free host and the right software [freshmeat.net].
Hey, I'm the main appleseed developer. If you have had any problems installing, I'd be interested to hear them. Anything I can do to make it easier to install, the better. I know there's a lot I can do since I haven't focused much on ease of installation, but if you have any ideas, let me know!
if they don't open up and embrace standards allowing greater interoperability among the different networks.
It makes perfect sense for people outside of these corporations to see that... But from within, how do you balance interoperability with the business necessity of maintaining your users? For-profit sites aren't interested in that balancing act. They'll keep their walled garden as isolated as they can.
I've been developing an open source, distributed social networking software called Appleseed, and honestly, I think the solution is going to have to come from an open source solution. As long as profit and market share are the main motivating factors of companies like Facebook, Friendster, Myspace, etc., there is absolutely no incentive to design things properly.
Appleseed, and open source in general, has the freedom to be able to do things right. Create an interoperable network of social networking "nodes" which use a standard protocol to connect and interact. It's very simple, and the rules of business that these companies have to follow is the only thing keeping that from happening from within the proprietary world.
I see it as analagous to the old days of email. Back in the day, you had Compuserve, you had AOL, and Prodigy, and other competing services that attempted to monopolize their user base by refusing interoperability. But eventually, they had no choice but to adopt standard E-Mail for their users.
Let's face it, in this day and age, there is no single, good technological answer for why a user on MySpace can't send a message or a friend request to a user on Friendster, other than "We [myspace] doesn't want them to." Which is not an answer that people will tolerate for long.
This is an itch, and open source (namely, Appleseed, since it seems like the solution which is the farthest along) is the only way to scratch it.
You're kind of missing the point, though. When people say they get their news from The Onion or The Daily Show or the Colbert Report, what they mean is that they're getting their anaysis from these shows.
Which doesn't mean that they get their news from the mainstream media. You can get your news from Agence France Press, from Al Jazeera, from the BBC, from the CBC, from satellite television, to internet RSS feeds, to the Hindu Times, to everything inbetween. There are plenty of places, especially thanks to the internet, that people can get reasonably objective reporting on events. The American mainstream media is horrendous when it comes to reporting the news. They'll stick with a handful of sensational stories all day, instead of serious reporting, they prefer yellow journalism and gossip. They would be comedy, if they weren't such tragedy in that they aren't joking...
On the other hand, when it comes to analysis of those events, nobody hits the nail on the head like the humor outlets: Daily Show, Onion, Colbert Report.
I'm working on a sender stores system for a distributed social networking software called Appleseed based, in theory, on Internet Mail 2000. I figured early on that since the system was distributed, which means that anybody could set up an Appleseed social networking "node", that it would suffer from the same problems as any mail system if I used the standard reciever-stores system.
I don't harbor any illusions about a sender stores system being able to eliminate spam entirely, but the reason I went with it, especially after reading this indepth critique, was that it created a system of accountability. You may not be able to stop spam, but you have much better tools for knowing exactly where the spam came from.
The disadvantage is that it becomes, ideologically anyways, incompatible with current email systems. I consider this a small price to pay to allow admins to have better control and protection over their systems.
The system I'm building is rudimentary for now, and only uses direct HTTP->HTTP connections to send notifications and retrieve messages, and won't have any of the fancy abilities that email has right now, but it's a start, and there's no reason that those features can't be added as it evolves. It's gonna be a big experiment, and I'm expecting a whole lot of unforseen issues, but this whole project is a big experiment, so I'm excited about the possibilities in general.
None of which explains the fact that countries without the death penalty are incredibly less violent than the U.S.
This is all sound advice, but ultimately, better social networking software would go a long way towards privacy on the internet. MySpace is probably the worst, with basically only two options (private or public profile), and very little granular control. Livejournal has gotten better with friends filters, but for a while there, once someone was on your friends list, they had access to basically everything. I've heard facebook, with their StalkerHelper 2.0 additions can be considered one of the worst. I might want to be able to see all the comments I've posted, but I don't want other people to be able to see them.
I've been working on a distributed open source social networking software called Appleseed for a while now, and one of the big concerns I have is to make privacy controls as powerful as possible. This isn't just to keep xxhotbro34xx from chatting up 16 year old girls, although that's a nice addition. It's also because I want control of what's available to whom. If I post a blog entry, I want to be able to restrict it's viewing to only certain portions of my friends list.
What I coded in was Friends Circles, where you can categorize your friends into circles. One friend can be a member of multiple circles. Then, you can restrict your journal entries, photos, etc. according to your friends circles. Eventually everybody is going to be doing social networking, it'll be as common as email. And with that in mind, I want to be able to have my family on my friends list, while still being able to restrict their ability to see the photos of my new tattoo.
It's a simple idea, but it's really important, because for too long social networking functioned on the idea of Privacy Through Obscurity. People simply hoped that their personal information wouldn't be found by family members, employers, etc. But that day is long gone.
So it's important that social networking take the privacy of the individual strongly into consideration. I want to be able to have a social networking profile that I can show to anyone, while still being able to post pictures from that crazy party last week or journal entries about how I think my boss is an idiot.
And this stuff becomes even more important when you talk about teenagers getting on social networking sites. If I had kids, I would never let them get a myspace profile, but I wouldn't mind them getting an Appleseed profile after I explain how (and importantly, why) to use the privacy features to keep themselves safe.
Probably the biggest PR mistake that environmentalists ever made was that they made their activism about "The Earth", and not about our ability to survive on it.
Nature is a resilient bitch. We could hardly do the kind of damage necessary to make Earth unlivable by something.
We can, however, make life very unpleasant for mankind. And that's why we need to preserve the environment as best as possible. For us, not the environment.
Yeah, because nobody got turned down back then.
You do realize that when all the European immigrants came over at the turn of last century, there was no such thing as an "illegal immigrant?" Immigration was exceedingly simple. And everybody got to stay except for the Asians (Asian Exclusion Act, anyone?).
Now, you have "illegal" immigration which ignores the 50,000 or so illegal Irish immigrants in NYC, but focuses on Latinos. What we're gearing up for is another Operation Wetback (Wiki search it).
Didn't know about any of this? Well, maybe the "debate" you've been having has been narrow and uninformed, then.
Pro-Abortion activists? Please.
I see more women with children at pro-choice marches than I do at pro-life marches.
There's a few factors which have made myspace a cesspool spawning marketing and advertising demons left and right.
The first is that the system is centralized. Therefore, any spammers, spimmers, or whatever they're called on social networking sites, who decide to set up shop have only to contend with a sign up process, and maybe a captcha. Other than that, the burden is put on myspace.com itself. The spammers get a free ride.
The answer to this is to create a more decentralized social networking system. Like I've said before, I'm working on an open source project like that called Appleseed, but some of the ways I can foresee stopping spammers from setting up fake profiles and all that is to a) use a sender-stores system for messaging, so that the burden of storing and maintaining messages is put on the spammer. Want to send out a million messages? Sure. But be sure to be willing to host those messages indefinitely until their recipients decide to pick them up. Oh, and as far as accountability goes, it'll be a lot easier to find you. Also, b) By distributing social networking into specialized nodes, you now have a lot large pool of people willing to get rid of spammers. Each node will have a dedicated admin, so knocking off one or two fake profiles every so often isn't so hard. But MySpace has 50,000,000 people on one site. Sometimes it seems like they don't care about spammers, but honestly, it's probably just that they're incapable of removing all of them as fast as they're created. "Never attribute to malice" and all that...
The other important factor? Men are idiots. I see these fake profiles that scream "no fucking way I'm real", and it'll have hundreds of knucklehead friends. It seems creating a profile that says,
"Hi, I'm Emily! I'm 19 years old, bisexual, and I just moved to Detroit from Cali! I like to party, have fun, dance, and have naughty sex! Come over and see me on my webcam over here..."
is all you need to do to create the requisite blood flow displacement which makes most dudes take a few steps back on the evolutionary ladder. Just like spam, you can take a technical approach, and that can go a far way to defeating it, but as long as there are dudes out there with barbed wire bicep tattoos, backwards hats, throwing up fake gang signs in their bedroom in front of a Sublime poster willing to be duped by the simplest of scams, there's not much we can do. Possibly a well educated, self-confident, and sexually liberation female population who absolutely refused to have sex with these cro-magnons until they opened a book might help. But like a sender-stores system, some of them might get through anyways.
If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: One of the biggest things holding social networking back is that people still have this conception of it that is very reminiscent of a 1996 Wired Magazine article. That it's all very cool and hip and revolutionary.
Social networking isn't gonna get anywhere until people everywhere see it as a basic tool, no more, no less. You don't see kids bragging about their email address, do you? Why are teenagers acting the fool over the fact that they have a myspace?
I've been working on a distributed social networking software called Appleseed (at Sourceforge, and a test site at Appleseedproject.org. The idea is to distribute social networking across an infinite number of sites, all of which can communicate with each other flawlessly. Basically, taking the decentralized theory of the internet, and applying it to social networking software.
One of the effects I think this will have, is that a lot of people will join social networking sites who might be normally turned off by a monolothic cesspool such as MySpace. Ridiculous hipsters can have their site, and people who don't suck could have their own site, and someone who doesn't suck could still maintain a relationship with their hipster "friend" so that they can hear where the parties are without having to wear girls jeans and have a haircut that proves that the world has no sense of decency.
Yes, this means that your uncle and your mom and your cousin and even maybe your grandparents are gonna be do the whole social networking thing. Luckily, Appleseed has a lot of privacy options, so you can hide your BDSM Leninist Reading Group from your family.
One of the effects of the "uncooling" of social networking, I think, will be that people recognize that you're not hanging out at 80's night at the local club, or chilling with your friends at a private party. You're broadcasting your life to the whole damn world. Once I think people realize that, I think the absurd and abnormal social habits that social networking creates are going to quickly disappear.
At the very least, I sincerely hope so.
who has amassed more than 120,000 'friends' that opt (for rewards) to associate themselves with his profile."
What kind of a social network has to buy it's friends?
I really kind of marvel at the way social networking has evolved on the web. Corporations have sunk their teeth into it, but the fit hasn't been very good, has it?
Part of that is that social networking needs to stop being centered around isolated websites that function as islands, seperated from each other. Instead, social networks need to function like the internet themselves: Interoperable, decentralized, and based on open standards.
Think of how much email would suck if I had to be the same server as you to send you one? Why do I have to be on Myspace.com to add someone as a friend? There is no single, technical reason why I couldn't be on Friendster.com and add a MySpace user as a friend.
What's preventing that kind of functionality is social, not technical.
As a side note, I think the best thing to happen to social networking is if it stops being "cool." If it stops being something you talk about in that hip, 1996 Wired Magazine kinda way, and starts being just something that is.
Wow, your whole post does nothing to disprove my argument.
Awesome.
Why is it that the same people who want to embrace the wholesale slaughter of embryos to drive stem cell research - which is genetically engineering drugs - get up in arms about GE food?
OMG, won't somebody please think of the blastocysts!
Those blastocysts are gonna get thrown out whether or not they're researched. So obviously, you'd rather all those innocent, angelic "babies" to die in vain, then, wouldn't you?
Seems to me that these folks just value their dinner more than their humanity
Maybe we understand biology enough to know that they're not comparable situations?
Researching stem cells is just not the same as taking the genes from a fish and splicing them into a tomato.
I've actually been working on just that. An open source social networking project that's distributed, called Appleseed.
We have two test sites, and we're just starting to get into the distributed part (single sign-ons, cross-site communication, P2P searches, etc).
As others have mentioned before:
Craig Murray
Damn, could they make the Wii any more attractive to casual gamers? I've always wanted to play online games, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay for a game, and then keep paying more for the service.
$200-$250 price point, fun games, and free online play. The only way they could make it more attractive is to [insert natalie portman reference here].
But to be honest, I don't know if I can take somebody seriously who says something like 'Suppose the only music in all the world were rap or heavy metal.'
I mean, honestly, has the guy never heard of Saul Williams?
Hell, even Tupac wrote books of poetry, and with artists out there like Mos Def, Talib Qweli, Outkast, etc., it's hard to understand how somebody could use rap music collectively as an example of "low art".
But then again, given his examples of high art being the kind of things that wealthy white people put on tuxes to clap softly to, I'm not sure I'm particularly interested in what he has in mind.
There's a reason it's not swept under the rug until car crashes are dealt with. Think about it.
Because it serves a much greater political purpose for the people in power than car crashes ever could?
Thank you for brilliantly illustrating why programs like this are sorely needed.
How do people from the Netherlands feel about the advertisement? I'm more interested in their opinion than politically correct America. What was the reaction in the Netherlands?
White people from the Netherlands or Black people from the Netherlands?
The fact of the matter is that we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether these ads were "racist" or not.
But the fact that they were racially problematic is pretty much indisputable. As the above comment said, why would they use a black person and a white person? Why would they be fighting? Are they really so naive as to not recognize that, given the history of racism, colonialism, genocide, fascism, etc. that have preceded our current worldwide race relations, that presenting an ad which simulates violence between a black person and a white person might, I don't know, be kind of a bad idea?
Why would anybody have .EXE files on their webservers? .EXE's don't run on Unix.
In a world without history, this ad would be meaningless. But we live in the real world, that has a bloody history of slavery, apartheid, jim crow, fascism, and colonialism.
And as such, this ad is incredibly problematic. Anybody who doesn't recognize at least that is ignoring history itself.
Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship ...or, y'know, testing their code or any kind of quality assurance.
I continue to be amazed at the amount that Myspace.com breaks. Messaging will sometimes go down for weeks at a time. The "chat" feature has never really worked. Pages just randomly come up with errors. And not to mention the spam and the security errors. $586 million dollars, and they can't build a decent site?
I guess that's what they get for creating a massive website using Coldfusion.