Re:Why not an official Wikipedia editing applicati
on
Why Is Wikipedia So Ugly?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Quite true, however just because a full WYSWYG editor would be a bad idea, doesn't mean you shouldn't have something beyond the primitive plain text. Things like ref's make editing the plain text pretty painful right now, as you simply can't read the text properly when every line is interrupted by three lines of ref hyperlinks and link descriptions. The proper answer should be a proper structured view of the text that makes it clear where tags start and stop, but also keeps the text human readable without looking like random markup soup.
That shouldn't be to hard to fix, it's a Wiki after all. Define a syntax, have the parser check it and spout out "syntax error" messages along the way. Leave it to the users to clean it up. This would also be a nice way to introduce new editors to Wikipedia, as fixing syntax errors is easy and unoffensive, so there is less risk of a revert war.
Nobody gives a shit about an enthralling story or character development anymore.
That's actually a good thing, as it means developer are focusing on one thing instead of trying to cram multiplayer and singleplayer into one game. I much prefer to have my singleplayer games to be free of multiplayer and vice versa.
where you got a real story that took a damn long time to finish it, 40-50 hours was considered to be short once now
That's nostalgia speaking. Game times haven't changed much at all. You can still sink 100h into Skyrim or Fallout if you want, or 30h into a Mass Effect or Deus Ex: HR, meanwhile classics like Doom, Duke Nukem or Monkey Island weren't even 10h long, see for yourself.
Yet another loaded headline and another discussion down the drain. I don't doubt that porn, games and just the Internet in general have some effect on us, but it would really help when those articles wouldn't always start with a conclusion and instead just start with presenting quantifiable data. So how much less do man actually talk to women? How much time do they spend indoors in isolation instead of outside doing sports compared to 10, 20 or 50 years ago? What influence has Internet dating on all this, does it undo the damage happening elsewhere, does it have a noticeable effect at all? How come women are always just a passive object in those discussion, they don't they play games and watch porn too?
I am sure there are plenty of changes going on, but when the headline is little more then an attack on somebodies lifestyle and a pretty old one at that (remember how rock'n roll, techno and whatever would ruin us all?), then all the responses will just boil to self defense, not some useful discussion.
As for not being keyboard-centric rather than mouse-centric, some of us consider that a feature.
Being keyboard centric isn't a problem, quite the opposite. Having a god awful GUI on the other side is a problem. A good interface should slowly teach the users about shortcuts and everything and while Emacs actually does a good job at that (if you M-x a function that has a shortcut, it tells you which), the GUI is scarring users away long before they'll ever find that out.
The problem is that Emacs was kind of state of the art some two decades ago, today on the other side it just shows it's age a little to much. It still has some interesting features that haven't been mimicked much by other application (e.g. self-documentation), but as for the GUI, you'd be hard pressed to find anything that is worse then Emacs.
The most interesting thing about Emacs isn't even just the programmability, as a lot of apps have that in one way or another, but the fact that it is self-documentation. It takes literally two clicks to go from any function or keyboard shortcut to the exact line in the source code that defines it (first jumps to the documentation, second to the definition). Nothing else in the Free Software world makes source that easy to access, most don't even try. Blender being the only exception, as that at least gives you documentation on how to access any GUI control via scripting right in the tooltip.
Yep, the only problem with Kickstarter right now seems to be that it's a little to popular. After the Doublefine Adventure success a lot of other game projects jumped on the train and a lot of them are already struggling to make it to their goal, as its simply to hard to get much publicity when there are so projects. The Sherlock Holmes adventure for example failed, even so it asked for far less money and seemed like a reasonable project. When you already have Doublefine, Larry, Wasteland, Jane Jensen and so on clogging the news most people probably didn't even notice that that project existed. Starlight Inception is also struggeling and Republic might also not make the cut. It of course helps little that some people seemed to go onto Kickstarter with a little to high expectations and ill propared. Portal 1986 Reborn seems interesting, but $900'000? Yeah, not going to happen. But none of that is "bubble bursting", is just a flattening of the curve after the initial hype, not every project can be among the first and get all the press and success.
It will still be interesting to see how Kickstarter will develop when peoples expectations actually meet reality. Having Tim Schaefer do another adventure sounds like a really good idea on paper, but so did Lucas doing more Star Wars or Indiana Jones at some point in the past and those didn't turn out to well. And with a lot of other projects you don't even have A-level people working on them, so even when they do everything right, all they might be able to deliver is an average game that people wouldn't bother to buy if they would have known beforehand. If those disappointed people then decide to no longer donate to Kickstarter, then might be issues, we probably find out in a year.
That certainly were great if you happen to be a maleware developer.
Could we please stop spreading that bullshit. Maleware does not care about root rights, it can do all the shit it wants to do with user rights just fine. Linux does not prevent you from running software or installing it, package manager simply do that due to incompetence, not due to security (and yeah, you can mount noexec and such, popular distris do not do that by default). Also making things harder for the user does not prevent maleware, it does the opposite, it causes it, as the user loses track what is a legitimate operation and what is a harmful one.
sudo apt-get install "software". What's the MS "superior" way of sharing software?
Stop thinking in boxes. Stop comparing Linux to Windows. If you go with the mindset: "Hey Windows sucks, so Linux can suck too". Of course Linux will end up sucking. Instead think about how to actually improve it, think about how to make a superior and more flexible experience. For software sharing that would mean making modification and distribution of modifications trivial. Take the OLPC with Sugar for example:
You want to see source code for an application, you hit Fn-Space, it launches an IDE and allows you to hack away. You want to share your modifications? In the neighborhood view you can see what your friends are currently running, wanna have it? Just double click it. It will transfer the software and run it. No extra work to package it required. It so simple you can explain it to a five year old.
Of course, for a full scale Linux distribution you might want something a little more complicated, with Launchpad or Github integration or whatever. But the point is that you want something that is easy to use. You want a package format that allows the user to get source access easily and an easy way to distribute his changes. You want something that gives the user actual freedom to do what he wants to do, not something that locks up that freedom behind walls and walls of different software, package formats and other complications.
I don't think I agree, if anything I see another window for Linux adoption coming up. Both Apple and Microsoft appear ready to abandon pros. Lion is getting more difficult for pros to use effectively... and Windows 8... well just look at the start menu.
Problem is, Unity and Gnome3 do everything they can do clone Windows 8 badly and their support for pros is just as shit when it comes to things like support for multiple monitors. So while I agree that there would be a new window, it looks like Linux is missing it again. Also Windows 8 is actually not all that bad, Metro is shit, but the rest of the OS is actually quite easy to use and well organized, it's the first Windows version in a while where things make more sense then they did before (I skipped Windows 7, so a lot of the features might not be Windows 8 exclusive).
Overall the Linux desktop experience is a shitty experience, it's really as easy as that. And no, I don't mean the lack of games or commercial software, I just mean problems within the Free Software world itself. The complete lack of quality control, inconsistencies, stuff not working properly and so on. It simply looks and feels like what it is: A product cobbled together by thousands of people with little or no agreement on any consistency. It doesn't help that the Free Software world likes to hit the reset button every five years to switch to a new, yet completely incompatible and still completly unfinished desktop expierence.
Wanna improve things? Get together and define one distribution independed packaging format. And while at it, make it flexible so that it doesn't require root rights to install software, make it easy to share software with it, make it easy to get access to the source and modify it. Then start working on having apps cooperate with each other, give me flexible data import/export everywhere, so that I don't have to manually transfer my podcast subscriptions item by item when I want to switch players. Cleanup/home/ so that everything is in ~/.config/. Enhance the documentation system so that it's trivial to find out what files an application uses and where it stores your data (yeah, strace is great, it's not a replacement for documentation). And so on.
At this point I don't expet Linux to ever succeed on the desktop. It was a mess 10 years ago and it's still a mess, with very little improvements in the mean time, instead a lot of useless reinvention of the wheel.
Pointing out the problems with the GPL - or worse, pointing out that the GPL doesn't even respect the 4 freedoms listed on the home page of the FSF - brings out people who blindly repeat what "everyone who really is a true believer knows."
I agree with the rest of yoru post, but here you kind of lost me. What exactly are those problems with the GPL? And how does the GPL violate the 4 freedoms?
I bag to differ, Macs are a complete clusterfuck. While there is only "one" MacOSX, they upgrade it frequently and break compatibility with essentially each version. So if you are stuck with a Mac that doesn't use the latest and greatest version, simple stuff has software installation can turn into a nightmare, especially when it comes to Open Source software (e.g. most of that stuff is tied to a specific release, requires Xcode which Apple doesn't ship for older versions and so on).
The core problem with search engines right now is that they search just for plain text not entities, so whenever a text string shows up in a webpage that matches, you get that as a result, even so that text string happens to refer to a completely different entity. Some search engines such as DuckduckGo or WolframAlpha do have some support for enties, but they are extremely limited and essentially useless for actual search. So if you type in "Saturn" into DuckduckGo, you get the info that it's a planet, a game console and a few other things, but when you then actually click the planet link DuckduckGo won't do an actual search for the entity, but still just makes a basic text search on the term and of course the first link then goes to Saturn.com, which is a car manufactuer not a planet. For more obscure things it becomes completely useless as it won't even recognize that there is an entity behind the text.
That the article refers to Siri is a bit misleading here, as the real breakthrough waiting to happen isn't having AI trying to figure out your voiced search query, but instead having AI actually do the parsing and indexing of web content.
And this is why it will probably fail, all you need is a fair group of people to work together.
One interesting aspect of such a system is that it doesn't have to be bulletproof to work, as the goal isn't to get a perfectly reliable rating of the player, but to encourage nice behaviors. So even if some people are gaming the system, as long as the rest of people actually start to behave a little bit better as somebody is now keeping track of their behavior it might work exactly as intended. On top of that Steam accounts aren't easy to sockpuppet, as people invest actual money into them (in the form of buying games), so telling a real account from an automatically created one is pretty trivial.
System seems ripe for being abused...Leisure Suit Larry's kickstarter suggests the money is needed to make the game, glossing over that the game has already been under production for at least half a year.
All they have is a single background and a bit of animation that they used to pitch the game to publishers, they don't have a game. The publishers didn't want it, so they are now pitching it to kickstarter.
I'm just talking about why there was such an uproar.
Well, I can't say why the uproar reached this magnitude, but the fact is that the ending is broken more then a few ways. It's not just that it doesn't give closure or answers all the questions, it's that it is lazy (i.e. color swap) and doesn't even make any sense on a very basic levels, it has characters showing up in places without explanation for how they got there and no time for them to have gone there. So it's not just bad, it's broken, which especially considering that the rest of the game and the rest of the series is perfectly fine is just a little weird.
Sure, you can run X on top of Wayland for now, but once people start writing Wayland only apps that's not going to be a viable way to work anymore.
Hardly anybody is writing X apps and hardly anybody will be writing Wayland apps, instead people will continue to write Gtk+, QT, HTML or SDL applications and network transparency can happen somewhere between those and Wayland.
Also network transparency in X sucks. It's far to slow, cumbersome and inflexible for todays world. It works ok in simple situations where you have dedicated X terminals with a limited set of apps, it doesn't work for situation where you might want to move a videoplayer or game from your desktop to your TV (can't move windows between displays, video streaming is far to slow).
The real name policy has been quietly lifted (or at least much relaxed) earlier this year.
It has not, the real name policy is still in place and my fake profile got just suspended this week after lasting for quite a few month. Only thing that seems to have changes is that they now offer you to edit your name easily.
Ok that might be overkill for this, but you are wrong here.
Even a mailing list doesn't fix the issue. People do get the new mail when they join the conversation on a mailing list, but they still don't get the old one. To fix that you have add a mailing list archive into the mix, and when when you do, you are essentially leaving email and your email reader behind and switch to HTML and your browser, as mail archives rarely work via SMTP and if they do, only via extremely obscure mailing list specific commands, not via something nicely integrated into your mail reader. There are of course numerous other problems with mailing lists: The whole Reply-To stuff is a mess, some mailing lists enforce it others not, thus it becomes easy to hit the wrong reply button and accidentally leaving the mailing list. Mailing list, when open to the public, also have the issue that they don't have a clear indication if a message was send by a member or by a non-member, thus if you want to make sure people actually read your reply you have to CC everything around and hope that they actually reply to the mailing list, not to you directly.
The whole problem is essentially that conversations need some persistence and email doesn't provide any of that. To bad that Google killed Wave, that might have been a nice solution to have most of the features of social networks without being a social network.
Except there is no such thing as group email. All you can do is put multiple people in the To or CC header and that works like shit when you have people joining the conversation later as now everybody in your group is communicating to a slightly different group and some people might never receive the mail they should.
The government would be able to know what books we are reading
That kind of depends how the individual shops handle it and the size of the shop. If I buy something on Amazon, all the bank knows is that I bought something on Amazon, the date, the price and an id of my order, but not the order itself. Sometimes that information might be enough to trace it back to the original product, if the price is unique (special sale on a date) or the shop is small (buying directly from an author), but often times it won't be of much use, especially with shops the size of Amazon that sell pretty much everything. Also just because the bank knows, doesn't mean it needs to tell the government.
So while traceability certainly removes some privacy, it's not like it gives traces right down to every single thing you buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite true, however just because a full WYSWYG editor would be a bad idea, doesn't mean you shouldn't have something beyond the primitive plain text. Things like ref's make editing the plain text pretty painful right now, as you simply can't read the text properly when every line is interrupted by three lines of ref hyperlinks and link descriptions. The proper answer should be a proper structured view of the text that makes it clear where tags start and stop, but also keeps the text human readable without looking like random markup soup.
That shouldn't be to hard to fix, it's a Wiki after all. Define a syntax, have the parser check it and spout out "syntax error" messages along the way. Leave it to the users to clean it up. This would also be a nice way to introduce new editors to Wikipedia, as fixing syntax errors is easy and unoffensive, so there is less risk of a revert war.
Nobody gives a shit about an enthralling story or character development anymore.
That's actually a good thing, as it means developer are focusing on one thing instead of trying to cram multiplayer and singleplayer into one game. I much prefer to have my singleplayer games to be free of multiplayer and vice versa.
where you got a real story that took a damn long time to finish it, 40-50 hours was considered to be short once now
That's nostalgia speaking. Game times haven't changed much at all. You can still sink 100h into Skyrim or Fallout if you want, or 30h into a Mass Effect or Deus Ex: HR, meanwhile classics like Doom, Duke Nukem or Monkey Island weren't even 10h long, see for yourself.
Linux versions are free, Windows is not. So buying a Windows7 license just to throw it away five minutes later would be rather ridiculous.
Yet another loaded headline and another discussion down the drain. I don't doubt that porn, games and just the Internet in general have some effect on us, but it would really help when those articles wouldn't always start with a conclusion and instead just start with presenting quantifiable data. So how much less do man actually talk to women? How much time do they spend indoors in isolation instead of outside doing sports compared to 10, 20 or 50 years ago? What influence has Internet dating on all this, does it undo the damage happening elsewhere, does it have a noticeable effect at all? How come women are always just a passive object in those discussion, they don't they play games and watch porn too?
I am sure there are plenty of changes going on, but when the headline is little more then an attack on somebodies lifestyle and a pretty old one at that (remember how rock'n roll, techno and whatever would ruin us all?), then all the responses will just boil to self defense, not some useful discussion.
As for not being keyboard-centric rather than mouse-centric, some of us consider that a feature.
Being keyboard centric isn't a problem, quite the opposite. Having a god awful GUI on the other side is a problem. A good interface should slowly teach the users about shortcuts and everything and while Emacs actually does a good job at that (if you M-x a function that has a shortcut, it tells you which), the GUI is scarring users away long before they'll ever find that out.
The problem is that Emacs was kind of state of the art some two decades ago, today on the other side it just shows it's age a little to much. It still has some interesting features that haven't been mimicked much by other application (e.g. self-documentation), but as for the GUI, you'd be hard pressed to find anything that is worse then Emacs.
The most interesting thing about Emacs isn't even just the programmability, as a lot of apps have that in one way or another, but the fact that it is self-documentation. It takes literally two clicks to go from any function or keyboard shortcut to the exact line in the source code that defines it (first jumps to the documentation, second to the definition). Nothing else in the Free Software world makes source that easy to access, most don't even try. Blender being the only exception, as that at least gives you documentation on how to access any GUI control via scripting right in the tooltip.
If people should be allowed to own guns, then countries should be allowed to own nukes. Why are we angry at Iran again?
Yep, the only problem with Kickstarter right now seems to be that it's a little to popular. After the Doublefine Adventure success a lot of other game projects jumped on the train and a lot of them are already struggling to make it to their goal, as its simply to hard to get much publicity when there are so projects. The Sherlock Holmes adventure for example failed, even so it asked for far less money and seemed like a reasonable project. When you already have Doublefine, Larry, Wasteland, Jane Jensen and so on clogging the news most people probably didn't even notice that that project existed. Starlight Inception is also struggeling and Republic might also not make the cut. It of course helps little that some people seemed to go onto Kickstarter with a little to high expectations and ill propared. Portal 1986 Reborn seems interesting, but $900'000? Yeah, not going to happen. But none of that is "bubble bursting", is just a flattening of the curve after the initial hype, not every project can be among the first and get all the press and success.
It will still be interesting to see how Kickstarter will develop when peoples expectations actually meet reality. Having Tim Schaefer do another adventure sounds like a really good idea on paper, but so did Lucas doing more Star Wars or Indiana Jones at some point in the past and those didn't turn out to well. And with a lot of other projects you don't even have A-level people working on them, so even when they do everything right, all they might be able to deliver is an average game that people wouldn't bother to buy if they would have known beforehand. If those disappointed people then decide to no longer donate to Kickstarter, then might be issues, we probably find out in a year.
That certainly were great if you happen to be a maleware developer.
Could we please stop spreading that bullshit. Maleware does not care about root rights, it can do all the shit it wants to do with user rights just fine. Linux does not prevent you from running software or installing it, package manager simply do that due to incompetence, not due to security (and yeah, you can mount noexec and such, popular distris do not do that by default). Also making things harder for the user does not prevent maleware, it does the opposite, it causes it, as the user loses track what is a legitimate operation and what is a harmful one.
Each distribution has a bug reporting/tracking system.
Yeah and they don't work very well. For example: makepasswd not generating random passwords, BGR subpixel rendering broken or
XFCE4 Volume Control issue. Tracking of bugs is all nice and good, but once they entered the tracker, very little actually happens to fix them. Even simple things like forwarding them to upstream isn't handled in any proper manner.
sudo apt-get install "software". What's the MS "superior" way of sharing software?
Stop thinking in boxes. Stop comparing Linux to Windows. If you go with the mindset: "Hey Windows sucks, so Linux can suck too". Of course Linux will end up sucking. Instead think about how to actually improve it, think about how to make a superior and more flexible experience. For software sharing that would mean making modification and distribution of modifications trivial. Take the OLPC with Sugar for example:
You want to see source code for an application, you hit Fn-Space, it launches an IDE and allows you to hack away. You want to share your modifications? In the neighborhood view you can see what your friends are currently running, wanna have it? Just double click it. It will transfer the software and run it. No extra work to package it required. It so simple you can explain it to a five year old.
Of course, for a full scale Linux distribution you might want something a little more complicated, with Launchpad or Github integration or whatever. But the point is that you want something that is easy to use. You want a package format that allows the user to get source access easily and an easy way to distribute his changes. You want something that gives the user actual freedom to do what he wants to do, not something that locks up that freedom behind walls and walls of different software, package formats and other complications.
The GPL imposes restrictions that add requirements to use cases.
GPL does not restrict use, it allows redistribution only under certain conditions, very different thing.
permissive licenses such as MIT and Apache meet the criteria better than the GPL ever did.
Except that the FSF clearly lists "Access to the source code is a precondition for this." in freedom 3, permissive licenses fail at that.
I don't think I agree, if anything I see another window for Linux adoption coming up. Both Apple and Microsoft appear ready to abandon pros. Lion is getting more difficult for pros to use effectively... and Windows 8... well just look at the start menu.
Problem is, Unity and Gnome3 do everything they can do clone Windows 8 badly and their support for pros is just as shit when it comes to things like support for multiple monitors. So while I agree that there would be a new window, it looks like Linux is missing it again. Also Windows 8 is actually not all that bad, Metro is shit, but the rest of the OS is actually quite easy to use and well organized, it's the first Windows version in a while where things make more sense then they did before (I skipped Windows 7, so a lot of the features might not be Windows 8 exclusive).
Overall the Linux desktop experience is a shitty experience, it's really as easy as that. And no, I don't mean the lack of games or commercial software, I just mean problems within the Free Software world itself. The complete lack of quality control, inconsistencies, stuff not working properly and so on. It simply looks and feels like what it is: A product cobbled together by thousands of people with little or no agreement on any consistency. It doesn't help that the Free Software world likes to hit the reset button every five years to switch to a new, yet completely incompatible and still completly unfinished desktop expierence.
Wanna improve things? Get together and define one distribution independed packaging format. And while at it, make it flexible so that it doesn't require root rights to install software, make it easy to share software with it, make it easy to get access to the source and modify it. Then start working on having apps cooperate with each other, give me flexible data import/export everywhere, so that I don't have to manually transfer my podcast subscriptions item by item when I want to switch players. Cleanup /home/ so that everything is in ~/.config/. Enhance the documentation system so that it's trivial to find out what files an application uses and where it stores your data (yeah, strace is great, it's not a replacement for documentation). And so on.
At this point I don't expet Linux to ever succeed on the desktop. It was a mess 10 years ago and it's still a mess, with very little improvements in the mean time, instead a lot of useless reinvention of the wheel.
Pointing out the problems with the GPL - or worse, pointing out that the GPL doesn't even respect the 4 freedoms listed on the home page of the FSF - brings out people who blindly repeat what "everyone who really is a true believer knows."
I agree with the rest of yoru post, but here you kind of lost me. What exactly are those problems with the GPL? And how does the GPL violate the 4 freedoms?
Even simpler with Macs.
I bag to differ, Macs are a complete clusterfuck. While there is only "one" MacOSX, they upgrade it frequently and break compatibility with essentially each version. So if you are stuck with a Mac that doesn't use the latest and greatest version, simple stuff has software installation can turn into a nightmare, especially when it comes to Open Source software (e.g. most of that stuff is tied to a specific release, requires Xcode which Apple doesn't ship for older versions and so on).
The core problem with search engines right now is that they search just for plain text not entities, so whenever a text string shows up in a webpage that matches, you get that as a result, even so that text string happens to refer to a completely different entity. Some search engines such as DuckduckGo or WolframAlpha do have some support for enties, but they are extremely limited and essentially useless for actual search. So if you type in "Saturn" into DuckduckGo, you get the info that it's a planet, a game console and a few other things, but when you then actually click the planet link DuckduckGo won't do an actual search for the entity, but still just makes a basic text search on the term and of course the first link then goes to Saturn.com, which is a car manufactuer not a planet. For more obscure things it becomes completely useless as it won't even recognize that there is an entity behind the text.
That the article refers to Siri is a bit misleading here, as the real breakthrough waiting to happen isn't having AI trying to figure out your voiced search query, but instead having AI actually do the parsing and indexing of web content.
And this is why it will probably fail, all you need is a fair group of people to work together.
One interesting aspect of such a system is that it doesn't have to be bulletproof to work, as the goal isn't to get a perfectly reliable rating of the player, but to encourage nice behaviors. So even if some people are gaming the system, as long as the rest of people actually start to behave a little bit better as somebody is now keeping track of their behavior it might work exactly as intended. On top of that Steam accounts aren't easy to sockpuppet, as people invest actual money into them (in the form of buying games), so telling a real account from an automatically created one is pretty trivial.
System seems ripe for being abused...Leisure Suit Larry's kickstarter suggests the money is needed to make the game, glossing over that the game has already been under production for at least half a year.
All they have is a single background and a bit of animation that they used to pitch the game to publishers, they don't have a game. The publishers didn't want it, so they are now pitching it to kickstarter.
I'm just talking about why there was such an uproar.
Well, I can't say why the uproar reached this magnitude, but the fact is that the ending is broken more then a few ways. It's not just that it doesn't give closure or answers all the questions, it's that it is lazy (i.e. color swap) and doesn't even make any sense on a very basic levels, it has characters showing up in places without explanation for how they got there and no time for them to have gone there. So it's not just bad, it's broken, which especially considering that the rest of the game and the rest of the series is perfectly fine is just a little weird.
Sure, you can run X on top of Wayland for now, but once people start writing Wayland only apps that's not going to be a viable way to work anymore.
Hardly anybody is writing X apps and hardly anybody will be writing Wayland apps, instead people will continue to write Gtk+, QT, HTML or SDL applications and network transparency can happen somewhere between those and Wayland.
Also network transparency in X sucks. It's far to slow, cumbersome and inflexible for todays world. It works ok in simple situations where you have dedicated X terminals with a limited set of apps, it doesn't work for situation where you might want to move a videoplayer or game from your desktop to your TV (can't move windows between displays, video streaming is far to slow).
The real name policy has been quietly lifted (or at least much relaxed) earlier this year.
It has not, the real name policy is still in place and my fake profile got just suspended this week after lasting for quite a few month. Only thing that seems to have changes is that they now offer you to edit your name easily.
Ok that might be overkill for this, but you are wrong here.
Even a mailing list doesn't fix the issue. People do get the new mail when they join the conversation on a mailing list, but they still don't get the old one. To fix that you have add a mailing list archive into the mix, and when when you do, you are essentially leaving email and your email reader behind and switch to HTML and your browser, as mail archives rarely work via SMTP and if they do, only via extremely obscure mailing list specific commands, not via something nicely integrated into your mail reader. There are of course numerous other problems with mailing lists: The whole Reply-To stuff is a mess, some mailing lists enforce it others not, thus it becomes easy to hit the wrong reply button and accidentally leaving the mailing list. Mailing list, when open to the public, also have the issue that they don't have a clear indication if a message was send by a member or by a non-member, thus if you want to make sure people actually read your reply you have to CC everything around and hope that they actually reply to the mailing list, not to you directly.
The whole problem is essentially that conversations need some persistence and email doesn't provide any of that. To bad that Google killed Wave, that might have been a nice solution to have most of the features of social networks without being a social network.
A group email does the same thing.
Except there is no such thing as group email. All you can do is put multiple people in the To or CC header and that works like shit when you have people joining the conversation later as now everybody in your group is communicating to a slightly different group and some people might never receive the mail they should.
The government would be able to know what books we are reading
That kind of depends how the individual shops handle it and the size of the shop. If I buy something on Amazon, all the bank knows is that I bought something on Amazon, the date, the price and an id of my order, but not the order itself. Sometimes that information might be enough to trace it back to the original product, if the price is unique (special sale on a date) or the shop is small (buying directly from an author), but often times it won't be of much use, especially with shops the size of Amazon that sell pretty much everything. Also just because the bank knows, doesn't mean it needs to tell the government.
So while traceability certainly removes some privacy, it's not like it gives traces right down to every single thing you buy.