Opera Software is certainly the most delightful software company I've ever come across, though some game ones have been good.
I hope the Appleseed guy gets moving. He wants an open network and it would be great if he could plug into Facebook's. FB's chat interface is open anyway.
1. Users do not know the boundary conditions until someone's privacy has been abused - if they're paying attention and understand the issue.
2. At that point in time, most users will have already shared too much - and once their privacy has been breached/sold, there's no undo button.
3. Users have to spend time demanding their privacy rights which may or may not be given.
4. We don't need to research where the boundary conditions are because once you know who's likely to access what information, it's not that complicated.
The only question here is whether Facebook et al have a duty of care to their users. Morally they do, legally they generally don't and, financially, they're best of selling as much as they can get away with.
Witness the clash, and hopefully the prelude to the exodus. If Google had their act together, they could clean up. Perhaps it's a good thing they don't.
It's in the new 'manifesto', pg 11, along with scrapping ContactPoint, next gen biometric passports & almost certainly making the medical records database opt-in:
We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
The short answer is merely to ask "What would Hitler have done with one?"
Expanding on my main comment, the UK's appalling 9 year policy of retaining DNA of people arrested and not convicted has proven to have no significant effect on crime. Retention of everyone's DNA would be even less significant.
Your DNA indicates much about yourself which, in the wrong hands, would be a major invasion of privacy, including racial characteristics, psychological characteristics, sexuality, gender, familial relations, life expectancy etc. Such invasion plus costs of retention etc must be justified by crime reduction.
It seems that retaining only convicted criminals' DNA can be justified. Cross-checking DNA from those arrested/charged against crime scenes (and then deleting/destroying the former) can also be justified.
Secondly, if on-the-spot DNA testing ever becomes possible, you have a means and a pretext to be compelled to identify yourself wherever you go and whatever you do.
National databases themselves are a great threat. As stated above, if wherever you go and whatever you do can be recorded and linked to you by a single database, you can no longer guarantee the freedom of your entire country.
It becomes very easy for governments to capture and punish those who wish to hold it to account.
Your DNA reveals a lot about you and so unauthorised access to is a clear invasion of privacy, which could only be justified by any protection against crime it causes.
Furthermore, any national database which can act as a primary index for further information held on you is a genuine totalitarian threat.
The outgoing Labour Government, which has been repeatedly noted on/. for its frightening attacks on UK liberty, insisted that the retention of DNA of innocent people was necessary to stop serious crime. However, after 9 years of retaining the DNA of innocent people, this hadn't even aided in the solving of a single serious crime.
It should be noted that DNA is retained from crime scenes and that DNA of arrestees is checked against that before being destroyed. This is a world apart from the blanket retention that the outgoing Goverment pretended was necessary to solve certain cases.
Did you notice Blair's Serious Crime Bill, via which you could be punished eg forced to move hundreds of miles, by merely doing something which would inadvertently aid any potential serious crime, whether or not a crime was committed?
It was amended by Brown to make the punishment proportionate.
Unbeknownst even to most Brits, the recently deposed British Government was waging war on our freedom.
This document is a little out of date but is otherwise an excellent and terrifying source.
Some snippets for you.
The Blair govt twice passed bills which can rewrite the constitution (including that bit about holding elections):
The first one was the Civil Contingencies Act - which can declare a instant dictatorship upon a minor national emergency, uncannily familiar to Hitler's Enabling Act.
The second one was the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act. This one can amend constitutional laws without requiring any discussion in Parliament.
Are trade description laws valid for products which you pay for by selling your profile data to marketeers?
I saw this Chrome faster BS spammed everywhere. Took me a good 10 mins to find out it wasn't true.
This seems like a good summary of what the Commander-in-Chief needs to understand.
It may look like indecipherable spaghetti but we'll have something like a 3D browser representation with a page for each concept in our minds. Do we look at the internet and say "OMG that's too complicated"? 7+/-2, remember?
So the problem is primarily trying to put too much information on to one page.
It also reminds me of Ender's Game where a certain victory was achieved by denying the player the big picture... so they could focus entirely on the process.
Since 1996, Opera would show both a list of pages and one (or more) page at the same time, which is basically all tabbed browsing does. The tab metaphor, when introduced in version 4, actually limited you to seeing only 1 page at a time. I remember they gave you the option of sticking with MDI - which I did for a while.
Very few left-handers are hemispherically reversed in my experience (and how would you measure it?)
Rather, some of the brain functions eg speech are more likely to be represented on the non-dominant hemisphere. It's a different kind of specialisation but probably increases communication across the corpus callosum - which would improve one's ability at synchronising both hemispheres.
The bicameral mind doesn't make much sense because both Wernickes and Brocas are in the left hemisphere.
Language seems to be an evolutionary adaptation from grunts & non-vocal communication.
We talk to ourselves in our heads. You're probably talking to yourself as you're reading this. Both of these areas would be lighting up.
I haven't followed recent research esp re: fMRI and was taught much of this by a colleague so there's probably more accurate information out there.
I'm a psychotherapist. 80% of people's problems are typically 'wired' in their non-dominant hemisphere. Is it because they're much more flexible with the dominant hemisphere? Doesn't seem like it would account for the overwhelmingly one-sided distribution.
People also typically have physical problems on the non-dominant side of their body. There even seems to be a bias with injuries.
I seem to recall that some kids who had their language centres destroyed typically re-develop them on the right hemisphere. Some/all women have been shown to have smaller language centres on the right hemisphere. Seems to be true of left-handers too.
Brain plasticity is a primary quality of the brain, especially in the young, but there also seems to be a lot of specialisation encoded genetically.
Especially in men, right brains don't talk. So that's exclusively left-brain.
Driving (at least the direction & speed control) is right brain. The time it's most likely to engage your left brain is when you have to consciously think ie planning your route, adapting to unusual road conditions. Apart from that driving & talking is fairly easy for experienced drivers. Typically, drivers talk in a monotonous voice as inflection is right hemisphere.
Try adding a column of figures eg restaurant bill and having a conversation at the same time - pretty damn hard because both are left brain. So there we're only single-tasking.
I think what this research shows is that we use both sides of our brain when we're single-tasking. Some areas of the brain are very specialised but other areas can be trained to perform similar functions (for some people, the right hemisphere spelling a word would be an unnatural task). If we're doing two tasks for which different hemispheres of the brain can assigned one of the tasks, then the brain is quite adept at dividing up the workload.
Avatar was designed to be 3D from the start whereas Alice wasn't.
For some, this may be incredibly important.
Current technology is not true 3D - the actual distance of where your eyes are looking hasn't changed. All the current technology does is present a different 2D perspective to each eye.
So actually, it is your mind that is creating the 3D effect by extrapolating from those cues and ignoring others (focal distance, lack of physical movement, lack of tactile & smell cues).
Now some people's brains create a more immersive 3D effect than others'. Early cinema goers ducked to avoid oncoming trains. Remote tribes first encountering TV often have similar experiences.
All of us learn to distinguish between TV & reality (probably before our memory works around age 4) and use different brain modes for interpreting each. Books too.
Now, I'm the kind of person who likes to sit in the front row in the cinema and pretend I'm at an IMAX. So when it came to Avatar, knowing that it was my mind making the 3D effect, I hypnotised myself to make it as immersive as possible (yes, I'm a hypnotherapist)
So in the opening scene where you fly over the forest, my jaw dropped and I remember exclaiming “holy shit” out loud. Because I actually felt like I was there.
The concept of having an alternative Avatar reality is the perfect metaphor for coping with this. I felt it was more that my 'Avatar' that was a bit faulty rather than any flaws with my sensory interpretation.
However, I ran into problems about 20 mins in.
For 50 years or more, 2D filmmakers have been panning and cutting shots because they knew that their audience wasn't treating the camera as their own physical perspective. But if you're fully immersed with a 3D experience, it makes you feel like you're moving & teleporting every few seconds.
Avatar was designed to be 3D from scratch and does this much less. Still, after 20 mins I had major motion sickness. Alice in Wonderland was designed to be 2D, does a ton of cutting and panning, and would have been unwatchable for me in 3D.
In the future, I think many scenes will have to be shot twice, or perhaps with multiple, moving 2D cameras and a static 3D camera for the same shot.
NO2ID is the main campaign opposing mass surveillance. We are the fastest growing campaign in the country, are very well organised and have driven most of the bad press these Big Brother plans have received.
But we are short on people (and money). So register your support. There is no obligation and how many opportunities do you get to save your country?
There's something about being dangled from your feet with your head being flushed in a school toilet that makes them realise that... Those with power often abuse those without power.
Salter is the MP who recently replied to a concerned correspondent with the words: We won the election. Now we implement the manifesto. Got a problem with that?
In Britain, your ISP could be forced to have mass surveillance equipment fitted that sends any and all data to the Govt. Your ISP would be prosecuted for telling anyone. They can also jail you for not telling them your encryption passphrases (or if you can't remember them).
Compare if one's academic credibility is next to your post yet experts with real world experience have nothing to distinguish themselves from trolls etc then newcomers will tend to favour the academics. This bias could even get amplified if the newcomers have a say in how the site works.
OTOH, if academic credibility is merely a checkable fact from one's profile page then it's merely a useful way to help verify what someone is saying.
Retrospective studies are bordering on meaningless.
1. Nobody measured vitamin D intake. Instead people were asked to report on vit D related activites when they were teenagers ie up to 44 years ago. How much time did you spend outdoors when you were a teenager? Are you sure?
2. Very little effect was found at 20+. None at 45+.
3. We are then asked to believe that the cancers were caused at 10-19 but didn't get diagnosed for up to another 40 odd years.
4. Outdoor activity, milk drinking & cod liver oil consumption are all linked with upper-middle class and/or active parenting. Outdoor activity implies friends & family. Was milk ever provided in schools in Canada?
I'm playing devil's advocate to some degree but it looks like childhood stress/trauma and other factors could account for a lot of that 60%.
The irony of it all is that UK citizens think they are protecting democracy and individual rights by their contrarian stance vis-a-vis the rest of Europe, yet they are doing the opposite.
Since the EU offers nothing to hold back the Blair govt, I don't think this statement is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree with all of this.
Opera Software is certainly the most delightful software company I've ever come across, though some game ones have been good.
I hope the Appleseed guy gets moving. He wants an open network and it would be great if he could plug into Facebook's. FB's chat interface is open anyway.
So here it is:
1. Users do not know the boundary conditions until someone's privacy has been abused - if they're paying attention and understand the issue.
2. At that point in time, most users will have already shared too much - and once their privacy has been breached/sold, there's no undo button.
3. Users have to spend time demanding their privacy rights which may or may not be given.
4. We don't need to research where the boundary conditions are because once you know who's likely to access what information, it's not that complicated.
The only question here is whether Facebook et al have a duty of care to their users. Morally they do, legally they generally don't and, financially, they're best of selling as much as they can get away with.
Witness the clash, and hopefully the prelude to the exodus. If Google had their act together, they could clean up. Perhaps it's a good thing they don't.
It's in the new 'manifesto', pg 11, along with scrapping ContactPoint, next gen biometric passports & almost certainly making the medical records database opt-in:
We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
The short answer is merely to ask "What would Hitler have done with one?"
Expanding on my main comment, the UK's appalling 9 year policy of retaining DNA of people arrested and not convicted has proven to have no significant effect on crime. Retention of everyone's DNA would be even less significant.
Your DNA indicates much about yourself which, in the wrong hands, would be a major invasion of privacy, including racial characteristics, psychological characteristics, sexuality, gender, familial relations, life expectancy etc. Such invasion plus costs of retention etc must be justified by crime reduction.
It seems that retaining only convicted criminals' DNA can be justified. Cross-checking DNA from those arrested/charged against crime scenes (and then deleting/destroying the former) can also be justified.
Secondly, if on-the-spot DNA testing ever becomes possible, you have a means and a pretext to be compelled to identify yourself wherever you go and whatever you do.
National databases themselves are a great threat. As stated above, if wherever you go and whatever you do can be recorded and linked to you by a single database, you can no longer guarantee the freedom of your entire country.
It becomes very easy for governments to capture and punish those who wish to hold it to account.
Your DNA reveals a lot about you and so unauthorised access to is a clear invasion of privacy, which could only be justified by any protection against crime it causes.
Furthermore, any national database which can act as a primary index for further information held on you is a genuine totalitarian threat.
The outgoing Labour Government, which has been repeatedly noted on /. for its frightening attacks on UK liberty, insisted that the retention of DNA of innocent people was necessary to stop serious crime. However, after 9 years of retaining the DNA of innocent people, this hadn't even aided in the solving of a single serious crime.
The new coalition Government is committed to only retaining DNA of convicted criminals and temporary retention for those charged with violent and sexual offences, a model already applied in Scotland.
It should be noted that DNA is retained from crime scenes and that DNA of arrestees is checked against that before being destroyed. This is a world apart from the blanket retention that the outgoing Goverment pretended was necessary to solve certain cases.
1. It's perfect target market.
2. Word spreads like wildfire.
3. Every time £uckerberg screws us over, someone will tell them how great Diaspora is.
Hey ABG, LTNS.
Did you notice Blair's Serious Crime Bill, via which you could be punished eg forced to move hundreds of miles, by merely doing something which would inadvertently aid any potential serious crime, whether or not a crime was committed?
It was amended by Brown to make the punishment proportionate.
Blair actually out-1984'd Orwell.
Unbeknownst even to most Brits, the recently deposed British Government was waging war on our freedom.
This document is a little out of date but is otherwise an excellent and terrifying source.
Some snippets for you.
The Blair govt twice passed bills which can rewrite the constitution (including that bit about holding elections):
The first one was the Civil Contingencies Act - which can declare a instant dictatorship upon a minor national emergency, uncannily familiar to Hitler's Enabling Act.
The second one was the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act. This one can amend constitutional laws without requiring any discussion in Parliament.
Are trade description laws valid for products which you pay for by selling your profile data to marketeers? I saw this Chrome faster BS spammed everywhere. Took me a good 10 mins to find out it wasn't true.
Yeah because humans are rubbish at that...
This seems like a good summary of what the Commander-in-Chief needs to understand.
It may look like indecipherable spaghetti but we'll have something like a 3D browser representation with a page for each concept in our minds. Do we look at the internet and say "OMG that's too complicated"? 7+/-2, remember?
So the problem is primarily trying to put too much information on to one page.
It also reminds me of Ender's Game where a certain victory was achieved by denying the player the big picture... so they could focus entirely on the process.
Since 1996, Opera would show both a list of pages and one (or more) page at the same time, which is basically all tabbed browsing does. The tab metaphor, when introduced in version 4, actually limited you to seeing only 1 page at a time. I remember they gave you the option of sticking with MDI - which I did for a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_browser
I'm a psychotherapeutic expert but not a brain expert and much of this knowledge is being updated with fMRI scanning.
As I said, we tend to use both sides of the brain all the time.
There's also a question of defining "logic". Spatial logic would be processed more in the right hemisphere I suspect
Very few left-handers are hemispherically reversed in my experience (and how would you measure it?)
Rather, some of the brain functions eg speech are more likely to be represented on the non-dominant hemisphere. It's a different kind of specialisation but probably increases communication across the corpus callosum - which would improve one's ability at synchronising both hemispheres.
The bicameral mind doesn't make much sense because both Wernickes and Brocas are in the left hemisphere.
Language seems to be an evolutionary adaptation from grunts & non-vocal communication.
We talk to ourselves in our heads. You're probably talking to yourself as you're reading this. Both of these areas would be lighting up.
I haven't followed recent research esp re: fMRI and was taught much of this by a colleague so there's probably more accurate information out there.
I'm a psychotherapist. 80% of people's problems are typically 'wired' in their non-dominant hemisphere. Is it because they're much more flexible with the dominant hemisphere? Doesn't seem like it would account for the overwhelmingly one-sided distribution.
People also typically have physical problems on the non-dominant side of their body. There even seems to be a bias with injuries.
I seem to recall that some kids who had their language centres destroyed typically re-develop them on the right hemisphere. Some/all women have been shown to have smaller language centres on the right hemisphere. Seems to be true of left-handers too.
Brain plasticity is a primary quality of the brain, especially in the young, but there also seems to be a lot of specialisation encoded genetically.
OMG, same here and I just called you an ambul
Especially in men, right brains don't talk. So that's exclusively left-brain.
Driving (at least the direction & speed control) is right brain. The time it's most likely to engage your left brain is when you have to consciously think ie planning your route, adapting to unusual road conditions. Apart from that driving & talking is fairly easy for experienced drivers. Typically, drivers talk in a monotonous voice as inflection is right hemisphere.
Try adding a column of figures eg restaurant bill and having a conversation at the same time - pretty damn hard because both are left brain. So there we're only single-tasking.
I think what this research shows is that we use both sides of our brain when we're single-tasking. Some areas of the brain are very specialised but other areas can be trained to perform similar functions (for some people, the right hemisphere spelling a word would be an unnatural task). If we're doing two tasks for which different hemispheres of the brain can assigned one of the tasks, then the brain is quite adept at dividing up the workload.
Avatar was designed to be 3D from the start whereas Alice wasn't.
For some, this may be incredibly important.
Current technology is not true 3D - the actual distance of where your eyes are looking hasn't changed. All the current technology does is present a different 2D perspective to each eye.
So actually, it is your mind that is creating the 3D effect by extrapolating from those cues and ignoring others (focal distance, lack of physical movement, lack of tactile & smell cues).
Now some people's brains create a more immersive 3D effect than others'. Early cinema goers ducked to avoid oncoming trains. Remote tribes first encountering TV often have similar experiences.
All of us learn to distinguish between TV & reality (probably before our memory works around age 4) and use different brain modes for interpreting each. Books too.
Now, I'm the kind of person who likes to sit in the front row in the cinema and pretend I'm at an IMAX. So when it came to Avatar, knowing that it was my mind making the 3D effect, I hypnotised myself to make it as immersive as possible (yes, I'm a hypnotherapist)
So in the opening scene where you fly over the forest, my jaw dropped and I remember exclaiming “holy shit” out loud. Because I actually felt like I was there.
The concept of having an alternative Avatar reality is the perfect metaphor for coping with this. I felt it was more that my 'Avatar' that was a bit faulty rather than any flaws with my sensory interpretation.
However, I ran into problems about 20 mins in.
For 50 years or more, 2D filmmakers have been panning and cutting shots because they knew that their audience wasn't treating the camera as their own physical perspective. But if you're fully immersed with a 3D experience, it makes you feel like you're moving & teleporting every few seconds.
Avatar was designed to be 3D from scratch and does this much less. Still, after 20 mins I had major motion sickness. Alice in Wonderland was designed to be 2D, does a ton of cutting and panning, and would have been unwatchable for me in 3D.
In the future, I think many scenes will have to be shot twice, or perhaps with multiple, moving 2D cameras and a static 3D camera for the same shot.
NO2ID is the main campaign opposing mass surveillance. We are the fastest growing campaign in the country, are very well organised and have driven most of the bad press these Big Brother plans have received.
But we are short on people (and money). So register your support. There is no obligation and how many opportunities do you get to save your country?
There's something about being dangled from your feet with your head being flushed in a school toilet that makes them realise that...
Those with power often abuse those without power.
Salter is the MP who recently replied to a concerned correspondent with the words: We won the election. Now we implement the manifesto. Got a problem with that?
http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?t=2994
Blame Blair and Bush. The Neo-cons lobbied strongly for EU data retention even tho the US would never have it:
http://www.policylaundering.org/issues/comm/
In Britain, your ISP could be forced to have mass surveillance equipment fitted that sends any and all data to the Govt. Your ISP would be prosecuted for telling anyone.
They can also jail you for not telling them your encryption passphrases (or if you can't remember them).
http://www.magnacartaplus.org/bills/rip/index.htm
Just one of the many terrifying laws NuLabour have passed:
http://www.waronfreedom.net/
Agree, it's a matter of emphasis.
Compare if one's academic credibility is next to your post yet experts with real world experience have nothing to distinguish themselves from trolls etc then newcomers will tend to favour the academics. This bias could even get amplified if the newcomers have a say in how the site works.
OTOH, if academic credibility is merely a checkable fact from one's profile page then it's merely a useful way to help verify what someone is saying.
Retrospective studies are bordering on meaningless.
1. Nobody measured vitamin D intake. Instead people were asked to report on vit D related activites when they were teenagers ie up to 44 years ago. How much time did you spend outdoors when you were a teenager? Are you sure?
2. Very little effect was found at 20+. None at 45+.
3. We are then asked to believe that the cancers were caused at 10-19 but didn't get diagnosed for up to another 40 odd years.
4. Outdoor activity, milk drinking & cod liver oil consumption are all linked with upper-middle class and/or active parenting.
Outdoor activity implies friends & family. Was milk ever provided in schools in Canada?
I'm playing devil's advocate to some degree but it looks like childhood stress/trauma and other factors could account for a lot of that 60%.
The irony of it all is that UK citizens think they are protecting democracy and individual rights by their contrarian stance vis-a-vis the rest of Europe, yet they are doing the opposite.
Since the EU offers nothing to hold back the Blair govt, I don't think this statement is accurate.