The point is that we don't broadcast all sorts of messy EM, why should anyone else?
SETI isn't looking for random EM transmissions (which last I heard would be lost after some 50 lightyears in background radiation anyway), but for directed beacons aimed into our direction and in general simply ways of how interstellar communication might work. Why somebody would transmit them? Well, we don't know, but there isn't all that much reason to think that nobody ever would try it either. Can't know how much or how little is out there until you start looking and searching.
What would be a REAL scientific test would be to launch a large-antennae "Can you hear me now?" satellite with an ion engine aimed away from the orbital plane
That wouldn't be science, that would be a waste of money, since we already know the answer to that reasonably well.
And yes, SETI is about as scientific as Intelligent Design.
That's bullshit. SETI does not proclaim that alien live exist, it doesn't proclaim anything. SETI is simply looking for it and they aren't exactly hiding the fact that they haven't found anything. In so far its not much different from a biologist or archaeologist running through a jungle or desert looking for interesting things, he might find something or not.
Intelligent Design is vastly different, as they proclaim to already have the answer and then try to support it with fraudulent evidence, ignoring a far better theory that already explains everything they try to explain.
The whole fundament of SETI is a belief that something must be out there, with no better theoretical basis than the Drake Equation.
It's not a believe, its an assumption that there might be something out there and you can't know how false or true it is until you start looking. Also the Drake Equation isn't the theoretical basis for SETI, its not even a theory in the first place, its just a fancy why of saying "I wonder how likely intelligent live would be?". It was meant to foster discussion on a conference some decades ago, not hard science.
Well you are correct but you are not looking at it the right way. You do not have to be on Hotmail because you can use a different service. You do not have a phone you can have a mobile phone. You can even select a prepaid, pay as you go, or a contract for that mobile phone.
You are missing the point. I can chose to use Hotmail or Gmail or setup my own server because all use SMTP, it's an open standard and everybody can implement it. Hotmail users can simply send mail to Gmail users or any other email users. Same with the phone, my mobile phone can call land lines and call other countries and essentially call almost everything that is a phone. Facebook users on the other side can't send messages to Google+ users and Google+ can't do it the other way around either.
So social networks are in essence like the next email, except that everybody has to use the same provider if they want to communicate with each other. And that it is why its not really a choice, it doesn't depend on me, but on everybody I might want to communicate with. If I want to switch, everybody else has to and that is something I have no control over.
As long all sites are not force by law to make you use a real name I don't see a problem with it.
The problem is that Google+ isn't "just a site", its a social network build by one of the largest Internet cooperations around, so its much closer to a communication infrastructure like email in its importance then it is to just a random web forum (at least when it will be as successful as Google hopes).
And yes it does offer value to users. The ability to locate and be located is one.
That doesn't go away when you allow pseudonyms. The ability to use a pseudonym is something where different then disallowing real names.
After all you are not required to be on Facebook or Google+.
You are not required to a have a telephone or email either, yet not having them can make some tasks a whole lot more complicated.
However, to say that real names offer to value to users, whose goal is to connect primarily with people they know in real life, is either ignorant or defiantly stupid.
The availability of pseudonyms doesn't stop you from using a real name or connecting with friends. There is no additional value provided by forbidding pseudonyms.
What, are they going to start requiring scanned copies of government-issued ID?
Yes, they are already doing that. Some of the people who got locked by Google+ had to send in scanned ID cards to prove their identity and get their account reactivated.
You could start by finding reliable sources for the release dates of PSP firmware, which shouldn't be too hard.
Actually that's extremely hard, as the mainstream gaming press doesn't report about that stuff or only in such general terms that the information is either not very useful or outright incorrect. And all the detailed information about the topic on the Internet isn't considered a "reliable source", as its either some homebrew forum, Wiki, blog or whatever.
It's essentially a classic case where the requirement for a "reliable source" is used to push sources that are actually less reliable.
I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete.
Kind of. The core problem however isn't that it is complete in a good way, but that the current rules forbid you to extend it, which in turn brings you in conflict with the admins or regulars if you actually try.
There is plenty of more information that could and should be added to Wikipedia, but that shouldn't be part of the normal overview article, as it might be to much detail. For a video game that could be things like list of cheatcodes, walkthrough stuff, character descriptions, etc. stuff you currently find on Wikia.com. Wikipedia simply has no place for such information and the rules forbid them.
Essentially Wikipedia should move the goal post a little further and provide systems to handle more detailed information on a subject matter.
The results don't look that great, don't work in a web browser,
Neither does ePub. With PDF the situation is actually a little better as Chrome will get (or already has) native PDF support and Plugins for other browsers are also rather widespread. That ePub is internally just HTML in a Zip doesn't really help when the browser doesn't have a way to deal with that.
This is one of the weird things with browsers that I never really understood: They are essentially the primary tool for consuming text these days, yet they are incredible shitty at actually handling something that is the size of a book or heck, they even fail at rendering something nicely that is just raw HTML, violating every rule of good typography with their default style (Readability and other third party hacks however help).
That said, Oblivion did have a pretty crappy console-riffic stock interface for things like inventory management.
The best part with that is of course that Oblivion on PC doesn't properly support a gamepad. So the interface was not only bad with mouse, it doesn't even work at all with the device it was designed for. I personally don't mind when a game forces me to play with a gamepad, at least then there is one way to play the game as designed, but lazy ports that aren't properly adopted to a mouse and don't allow you to use a gamepad at the same time really drive me nuts. They give be the bad of both worlds and nobody can be happy with them.
That's not exactly true. While they require almost no disk space, they do require quite a bit of RAM. Just because all the textures and models are procedurally generated doesn't make the need to store them go away. If things would be dynamically generated each frame in a geometry or pixel shader things might look different, but that is a whole lot more complicated then just procedural generation.
That's partly a myth. If Google nukes your account on Google+ it doesn't nuke the rest of your Google doings, only everything attached to the "Public Profile", i.e. Buzz, +1 and some other social junk, not Google Mail or Google Docs.
That doesn't work properly, as you can't remap the trigger to anything, as they are handled as axis not as button by DirectInput. The only way to make the wireless controller work properly with rumble and all is to attach a wired controller.
I rather like the current situation, as it allows me to play PC games even with a rather old PC. The only annoying part when playing with a low-end PC is that most games these days are CPU bound and unlike the graphic details, you almost never can do much to degrease the CPU use in a game.
I would've preferred it to cost about 2/3 the price, but what can you do?
It's half the price of a gamer mouse, so it's not exactly expensive.
And speaking about Assassins Creed, Assassins Creed 2 had a really curios bug when it comes to Xbox360 gamepads: It would work with the wired Xbox360 gamepad, but not with the wireless one. It really baffles me how such a bug could not only slip past quality control, but then also never unpatched afterwards. That is something that literately should take five minutes to fix.
Even more fun: The game had a second bug, it would always use the first controller in the chain, not the configured one, thus you could plug in both a wireless and a wired pad, it would detect the second, but then use the first. The game was thus perfectly playable with a wireless controller, but you needed a wired one to make it work.
The confusing controls however remained confusing even with a Xbox360 gamepad, as the game would still refer to hand and head symbols instead of the actual button names. Kind of no surprise that PC gaming has a hard time when developers seem to care so little about making their game work. If they won't spend the extra money on making good mouse controls, they at the very least should make the gamepad controls properly functional, but oftentimes they don't even do that.
Whatever happen to UI consistency?
on
The Next Firefox UI
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Whatever happen to UI consistency? "Back in the day" UIs used to use the same toolkits, have their menus and toolbars all in the same spot and work consistently across applications. Today all those UI elements are kind of splattered around the application and there is really no consistency where you can find something anymore. There are also things in modern UIs that I really don't get, Firefox4 for example will present you different menus depending on if you click it with a mouse or if you activate it with the keyboard. What's the point in that? Didn't we figure out that changing menus where a really bad idea back when Windows tried it many years ago? Once up-on a time the menu was full of all the stuff the application could do, now its like playing hide and seek with the functions an application might have and hiding them from the user is really not helping.
It mentioned a temperature sensor, but what would that sensor do? Would it transmit data?
Measure temperature and record it I would assume. If that stuff would get cheap enough you put stickers with it on all food and find out if there after was a lapse in the cooling chain. Reading that info out would then be done with regular RFID gear I assume, as I doubt there is enough power in the air for retransmission.
I also find the concept that this is "green" power a bit off considering just printing these things may take more power than they could give back.
The "green" part is that you might be able to use it in places where you otherwise would need to use a replaceable battery and since it last forever, that can be quite a saving.
the impact each time it happens slowly diminishes until we accept it as part of life.
That depends, the problems with always-on Internet DRM aren't just theoretical stuff that only some Free Software hippies will complain about, but very practical problems that a lot of gamer will encounter while playing the games. As while almost everybody has Internet, almost nobody has Internet that is solid enough to never ever have issues with disconnect.
The only way to fix those complains is to make the DRM solid enough to not only stop bothering the paying player, but to provide additional value to them. That is why Steam is so successful, in essence it is also online DRM, but the mildest kind of it, if your Internet is down, it will simply launch into Offline mode. So aside from the initial product activation, it doesn't need Internet. On top of that it handles all the patching automatically, provides a forum for every game for support, doesn't require a DVD in the drive, provides achievements and other stuff. In essence, this causes Steam games to work better and easier then regular DRM-free. That's why most people don't complain about it.
That's not to say that Steam is perfect, it still removes some basic freedoms you should have, you can't lend a Steam game to friend or family and you do have to have Internet to activate the game on install. But compared to all the benefits it provides, its an acceptable trade-off.
So unless the DRM actually gets good enough that people not only won't be bothered by it, but actually will welcome it, I doubt the complaining will stop anytime soon.
You are just incoherent. At first you say that you want Anonymity to protect people from harassment. Then you say. "If it is stupid and insulting, block them or filter them, but don't force everybody else to use real name."
How the hell is that incoherent? Allowing anonymous/pseudonymous posting doesn't mean everybody should be forced to read them. If somebody wants to filter them, fine, but it should be the readers choice, not Googles. I like browsing Slashdot at -1 and see everything.
In the end all that you are saying is that you don't want to be held responsible for what you say
Yes, as that is the only way to get true Freedom of Speech, everything else just results in self-censorship. If somebody wants to discuss his issues of being gay in a web forum, he should be able to do that under a pseudonym. Even if said forum is hosted on the Google+ service.
You want Google to run Google plus the way you want them too.
I want them to give me the freedom to decide how to communicate, not have them enforce nanny-state rules on me that I don't want.
Because you feel you have some right to that free service on your own terms
You seem to be pretty ignorant to the damage that monopolies/oligopolies can do.
committed suicide should have just blocked those bullies?
You can't block bullies in real life when your real name leaked. That's the whole reason why pseudonyms are great, if things get out of control, you can get a new one and start clean. You can't do that with a real name.
Your whole argument seems to be simply based on "It's free, so they can enforce whatever the fuck they want". I consider that fundamentally flawed, as it essentially hands over central infrastructure into cooperate control. So don't come complaining when 10 years down the road Google changes the rules into something you might find unacceptable, as by that point, it might not be so easy and turn back and use an alternative without isolating yourself from everybody else.
One, very limited, alternative to PayPal is Flattr. It is however only an alternative when it comes to donations, as the whole service is build around making anonymous micro-donations and not build as a payment service. Thus for donating to your favorite blog, podcast or Free Software project, it can be quite useful, for paying at your favorite retailer, not so much. Flattr also has the problem that it is not very well known outside of Germany, so while you can find it at a lot of German sites, you can hardly find it on any English ones.
It's forcing people to reveal data that they don't want to reveal, that's not only evil, that's also against the law in some European countries (exact interpretation of the law might vary and enforcing it is a whole different issue).
You do not have to be on Google+
That is quite frankly a bullshit argument. You don't have to have a phone either or electricity, but you better have both of those if you want to be a regular part of society and not some crazy loony living in a tree house. The way social networks are used these days is like an advanced form of email, essentially we are replacing an aging open standard with a closed company controlled network. The Internet is kind of rolling back from the freedom we had, to the early days of AOL and Compuserve. You can pretend it is not happening, but that doesn't stop it from happening.
Anonymity and even alter egos have their place.
Yeah, it can free them from oppression, free them to say what they actually think. If it is stupid and insulting, block them or filter them, but don't force everybody else to use real name.
Essentially, yes. The Uncanny effect is in very large part simply caused by sloppy/low-budget implementation of animation or rendering, it is not some mystical valley where you drop into if things get more realistic. A lot of the ugliness in facial motion capture for example is simply caused by inadequate capture. Unlike the body, where you have only a few limited joints to worry about, the face is full of muscle and skin movement and humans are very good at recognizing that. Thus putting a few markers on somebodies face and then slapping the data on a 3D model will lead to uncanny results, as you end up with tiny mismatches in the data (which you could fix manually by hand if you had the budget). That's why modern facial motion capture doesn't use markers, it captures lots of photographs from multiple angles with some other trickery, thus you get far more detail then you could have ever hoped for with marker based approaches and the results in turn look perfectly photo realistic.
Odds are if the people posting those vile things had to have their real names tied to their acts maybe they wouldn't have done it.
Nothing stops them from harassing the victim via other channels. The whole point is that you don't want to leak if somebody is gay or not by forcing them to use a real name in the first place. Once the real name is out, you have the victim pretty wide open for attack.
Really so what you want is a place where you can hide when you want to but snipe from the bushes.
It's not about sniping, its about not being sniped.
Yes Facebook has been used as evidence why ever not?
The problem is that a lot of info there might be subject to gross misinterpretation. A photo taken out of context, viewed by somebody who wasn't at the event can give you a very different picture then what really happened. It also gives a very unrealistic view of somebodies life, just because someones Facebook account is full of party picture doesn't means he parties a lot, it might simply mean that he only post party pictures. And who knows, that beer funnel, it might have been filled with alcohol-free beer.
I doubt that people just a little outside the norm will have a problem with Google+ or Facebook.
Good communication requires two parts, one party expressing things, the other party paying attention and caring about what is being expressed. I believe we have seen where the lapse is here in multiple examples now, and I direct you back to the link in the first post you replied to, which specifically talks about pseudonyms.
The only area where that first link even mention pseudonyms is:
- If you add nicknames, maiden names, etc. to the "Other names" portion of your G+ profile, those with permission to view those fields can search for you using that term. For example: some of my colleagues call me "elatable," a pseudonym I’ve used on many services, so I've added it to my list of other names.
And that says nothing about having an pseudonym only account, you still need a real name for the account, you can just have a pseudonym in addition. So if they explicitly do allow non-real name account, please quote the part.
You wouldn't need to, you would simply make your account with your most common name, then put your alternate names in the "Other names" field
That doesn't fix the problem, I still have to use my real name for my account and my real name will get exposed to all circles.
PS: I have seen a feature request to have different profile pictures (and views) for different circles, which would exactly provide what you are seeking
Yes, such a feature would be nice. However multiple accounts would still be the better alternative, as you don't want Google to know that those two accounts are connected.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that we don't broadcast all sorts of messy EM, why should anyone else?
SETI isn't looking for random EM transmissions (which last I heard would be lost after some 50 lightyears in background radiation anyway), but for directed beacons aimed into our direction and in general simply ways of how interstellar communication might work. Why somebody would transmit them? Well, we don't know, but there isn't all that much reason to think that nobody ever would try it either. Can't know how much or how little is out there until you start looking and searching.
What would be a REAL scientific test would be to launch a large-antennae "Can you hear me now?" satellite with an ion engine aimed away from the orbital plane
That wouldn't be science, that would be a waste of money, since we already know the answer to that reasonably well.
And yes, SETI is about as scientific as Intelligent Design.
That's bullshit. SETI does not proclaim that alien live exist, it doesn't proclaim anything. SETI is simply looking for it and they aren't exactly hiding the fact that they haven't found anything. In so far its not much different from a biologist or archaeologist running through a jungle or desert looking for interesting things, he might find something or not.
Intelligent Design is vastly different, as they proclaim to already have the answer and then try to support it with fraudulent evidence, ignoring a far better theory that already explains everything they try to explain.
The whole fundament of SETI is a belief that something must be out there, with no better theoretical basis than the Drake Equation.
It's not a believe, its an assumption that there might be something out there and you can't know how false or true it is until you start looking. Also the Drake Equation isn't the theoretical basis for SETI, its not even a theory in the first place, its just a fancy why of saying "I wonder how likely intelligent live would be?". It was meant to foster discussion on a conference some decades ago, not hard science.
Well you are correct but you are not looking at it the right way. You do not have to be on Hotmail because you can use a different service. You do not have a phone you can have a mobile phone. You can even select a prepaid, pay as you go, or a contract for that mobile phone.
You are missing the point. I can chose to use Hotmail or Gmail or setup my own server because all use SMTP, it's an open standard and everybody can implement it. Hotmail users can simply send mail to Gmail users or any other email users. Same with the phone, my mobile phone can call land lines and call other countries and essentially call almost everything that is a phone. Facebook users on the other side can't send messages to Google+ users and Google+ can't do it the other way around either.
So social networks are in essence like the next email, except that everybody has to use the same provider if they want to communicate with each other. And that it is why its not really a choice, it doesn't depend on me, but on everybody I might want to communicate with. If I want to switch, everybody else has to and that is something I have no control over.
As long all sites are not force by law to make you use a real name I don't see a problem with it.
The problem is that Google+ isn't "just a site", its a social network build by one of the largest Internet cooperations around, so its much closer to a communication infrastructure like email in its importance then it is to just a random web forum (at least when it will be as successful as Google hopes).
And yes it does offer value to users. The ability to locate and be located is one.
That doesn't go away when you allow pseudonyms. The ability to use a pseudonym is something where different then disallowing real names.
After all you are not required to be on Facebook or Google+.
You are not required to a have a telephone or email either, yet not having them can make some tasks a whole lot more complicated.
However, to say that real names offer to value to users, whose goal is to connect primarily with people they know in real life, is either ignorant or defiantly stupid.
The availability of pseudonyms doesn't stop you from using a real name or connecting with friends. There is no additional value provided by forbidding pseudonyms.
What, are they going to start requiring scanned copies of government-issued ID?
Yes, they are already doing that. Some of the people who got locked by Google+ had to send in scanned ID cards to prove their identity and get their account reactivated.
You could start by finding reliable sources for the release dates of PSP firmware, which shouldn't be too hard.
Actually that's extremely hard, as the mainstream gaming press doesn't report about that stuff or only in such general terms that the information is either not very useful or outright incorrect. And all the detailed information about the topic on the Internet isn't considered a "reliable source", as its either some homebrew forum, Wiki, blog or whatever.
It's essentially a classic case where the requirement for a "reliable source" is used to push sources that are actually less reliable.
I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete.
Kind of. The core problem however isn't that it is complete in a good way, but that the current rules forbid you to extend it, which in turn brings you in conflict with the admins or regulars if you actually try.
There is plenty of more information that could and should be added to Wikipedia, but that shouldn't be part of the normal overview article, as it might be to much detail. For a video game that could be things like list of cheatcodes, walkthrough stuff, character descriptions, etc. stuff you currently find on Wikia.com. Wikipedia simply has no place for such information and the rules forbid them.
Essentially Wikipedia should move the goal post a little further and provide systems to handle more detailed information on a subject matter.
The results don't look that great, don't work in a web browser,
Neither does ePub. With PDF the situation is actually a little better as Chrome will get (or already has) native PDF support and Plugins for other browsers are also rather widespread. That ePub is internally just HTML in a Zip doesn't really help when the browser doesn't have a way to deal with that.
This is one of the weird things with browsers that I never really understood: They are essentially the primary tool for consuming text these days, yet they are incredible shitty at actually handling something that is the size of a book or heck, they even fail at rendering something nicely that is just raw HTML, violating every rule of good typography with their default style (Readability and other third party hacks however help).
That said, Oblivion did have a pretty crappy console-riffic stock interface for things like inventory management.
The best part with that is of course that Oblivion on PC doesn't properly support a gamepad. So the interface was not only bad with mouse, it doesn't even work at all with the device it was designed for. I personally don't mind when a game forces me to play with a gamepad, at least then there is one way to play the game as designed, but lazy ports that aren't properly adopted to a mouse and don't allow you to use a gamepad at the same time really drive me nuts. They give be the bad of both worlds and nobody can be happy with them.
they occupy virtually no space
That's not exactly true. While they require almost no disk space, they do require quite a bit of RAM. Just because all the textures and models are procedurally generated doesn't make the need to store them go away. If things would be dynamically generated each frame in a geometry or pixel shader things might look different, but that is a whole lot more complicated then just procedural generation.
That's partly a myth. If Google nukes your account on Google+ it doesn't nuke the rest of your Google doings, only everything attached to the "Public Profile", i.e. Buzz, +1 and some other social junk, not Google Mail or Google Docs.
That doesn't work properly, as you can't remap the trigger to anything, as they are handled as axis not as button by DirectInput. The only way to make the wireless controller work properly with rumble and all is to attach a wired controller.
I rather like the current situation, as it allows me to play PC games even with a rather old PC. The only annoying part when playing with a low-end PC is that most games these days are CPU bound and unlike the graphic details, you almost never can do much to degrease the CPU use in a game.
I would've preferred it to cost about 2/3 the price, but what can you do?
It's half the price of a gamer mouse, so it's not exactly expensive.
And speaking about Assassins Creed, Assassins Creed 2 had a really curios bug when it comes to Xbox360 gamepads: It would work with the wired Xbox360 gamepad, but not with the wireless one. It really baffles me how such a bug could not only slip past quality control, but then also never unpatched afterwards. That is something that literately should take five minutes to fix.
Even more fun: The game had a second bug, it would always use the first controller in the chain, not the configured one, thus you could plug in both a wireless and a wired pad, it would detect the second, but then use the first. The game was thus perfectly playable with a wireless controller, but you needed a wired one to make it work.
The confusing controls however remained confusing even with a Xbox360 gamepad, as the game would still refer to hand and head symbols instead of the actual button names. Kind of no surprise that PC gaming has a hard time when developers seem to care so little about making their game work. If they won't spend the extra money on making good mouse controls, they at the very least should make the gamepad controls properly functional, but oftentimes they don't even do that.
Whatever happen to UI consistency? "Back in the day" UIs used to use the same toolkits, have their menus and toolbars all in the same spot and work consistently across applications. Today all those UI elements are kind of splattered around the application and there is really no consistency where you can find something anymore. There are also things in modern UIs that I really don't get, Firefox4 for example will present you different menus depending on if you click it with a mouse or if you activate it with the keyboard. What's the point in that? Didn't we figure out that changing menus where a really bad idea back when Windows tried it many years ago? Once up-on a time the menu was full of all the stuff the application could do, now its like playing hide and seek with the functions an application might have and hiding them from the user is really not helping.
It mentioned a temperature sensor, but what would that sensor do? Would it transmit data?
Measure temperature and record it I would assume. If that stuff would get cheap enough you put stickers with it on all food and find out if there after was a lapse in the cooling chain. Reading that info out would then be done with regular RFID gear I assume, as I doubt there is enough power in the air for retransmission.
I also find the concept that this is "green" power a bit off considering just printing these things may take more power than they could give back.
The "green" part is that you might be able to use it in places where you otherwise would need to use a replaceable battery and since it last forever, that can be quite a saving.
the impact each time it happens slowly diminishes until we accept it as part of life.
That depends, the problems with always-on Internet DRM aren't just theoretical stuff that only some Free Software hippies will complain about, but very practical problems that a lot of gamer will encounter while playing the games. As while almost everybody has Internet, almost nobody has Internet that is solid enough to never ever have issues with disconnect.
The only way to fix those complains is to make the DRM solid enough to not only stop bothering the paying player, but to provide additional value to them. That is why Steam is so successful, in essence it is also online DRM, but the mildest kind of it, if your Internet is down, it will simply launch into Offline mode. So aside from the initial product activation, it doesn't need Internet. On top of that it handles all the patching automatically, provides a forum for every game for support, doesn't require a DVD in the drive, provides achievements and other stuff. In essence, this causes Steam games to work better and easier then regular DRM-free. That's why most people don't complain about it.
That's not to say that Steam is perfect, it still removes some basic freedoms you should have, you can't lend a Steam game to friend or family and you do have to have Internet to activate the game on install. But compared to all the benefits it provides, its an acceptable trade-off.
So unless the DRM actually gets good enough that people not only won't be bothered by it, but actually will welcome it, I doubt the complaining will stop anytime soon.
You are just incoherent. At first you say that you want Anonymity to protect people from harassment. Then you say. "If it is stupid and insulting, block them or filter them, but don't force everybody else to use real name."
How the hell is that incoherent? Allowing anonymous/pseudonymous posting doesn't mean everybody should be forced to read them. If somebody wants to filter them, fine, but it should be the readers choice, not Googles. I like browsing Slashdot at -1 and see everything.
In the end all that you are saying is that you don't want to be held responsible for what you say
Yes, as that is the only way to get true Freedom of Speech, everything else just results in self-censorship. If somebody wants to discuss his issues of being gay in a web forum, he should be able to do that under a pseudonym. Even if said forum is hosted on the Google+ service.
You want Google to run Google plus the way you want them too.
I want them to give me the freedom to decide how to communicate, not have them enforce nanny-state rules on me that I don't want.
Because you feel you have some right to that free service on your own terms
You seem to be pretty ignorant to the damage that monopolies/oligopolies can do.
committed suicide should have just blocked those bullies?
You can't block bullies in real life when your real name leaked. That's the whole reason why pseudonyms are great, if things get out of control, you can get a new one and start clean. You can't do that with a real name.
Your whole argument seems to be simply based on "It's free, so they can enforce whatever the fuck they want". I consider that fundamentally flawed, as it essentially hands over central infrastructure into cooperate control. So don't come complaining when 10 years down the road Google changes the rules into something you might find unacceptable, as by that point, it might not be so easy and turn back and use an alternative without isolating yourself from everybody else.
One, very limited, alternative to PayPal is Flattr. It is however only an alternative when it comes to donations, as the whole service is build around making anonymous micro-donations and not build as a payment service. Thus for donating to your favorite blog, podcast or Free Software project, it can be quite useful, for paying at your favorite retailer, not so much. Flattr also has the problem that it is not very well known outside of Germany, so while you can find it at a lot of German sites, you can hardly find it on any English ones.
It is not evil it is a choice.
It's forcing people to reveal data that they don't want to reveal, that's not only evil, that's also against the law in some European countries (exact interpretation of the law might vary and enforcing it is a whole different issue).
You do not have to be on Google+
That is quite frankly a bullshit argument. You don't have to have a phone either or electricity, but you better have both of those if you want to be a regular part of society and not some crazy loony living in a tree house. The way social networks are used these days is like an advanced form of email, essentially we are replacing an aging open standard with a closed company controlled network. The Internet is kind of rolling back from the freedom we had, to the early days of AOL and Compuserve. You can pretend it is not happening, but that doesn't stop it from happening.
Anonymity and even alter egos have their place.
Yeah, it can free them from oppression, free them to say what they actually think. If it is stupid and insulting, block them or filter them, but don't force everybody else to use real name.
Essentially, yes. The Uncanny effect is in very large part simply caused by sloppy/low-budget implementation of animation or rendering, it is not some mystical valley where you drop into if things get more realistic. A lot of the ugliness in facial motion capture for example is simply caused by inadequate capture. Unlike the body, where you have only a few limited joints to worry about, the face is full of muscle and skin movement and humans are very good at recognizing that. Thus putting a few markers on somebodies face and then slapping the data on a 3D model will lead to uncanny results, as you end up with tiny mismatches in the data (which you could fix manually by hand if you had the budget). That's why modern facial motion capture doesn't use markers, it captures lots of photographs from multiple angles with some other trickery, thus you get far more detail then you could have ever hoped for with marker based approaches and the results in turn look perfectly photo realistic.
Odds are if the people posting those vile things had to have their real names tied to their acts maybe they wouldn't have done it.
Nothing stops them from harassing the victim via other channels. The whole point is that you don't want to leak if somebody is gay or not by forcing them to use a real name in the first place. Once the real name is out, you have the victim pretty wide open for attack.
Really so what you want is a place where you can hide when you want to but snipe from the bushes.
It's not about sniping, its about not being sniped.
Yes Facebook has been used as evidence why ever not?
The problem is that a lot of info there might be subject to gross misinterpretation. A photo taken out of context, viewed by somebody who wasn't at the event can give you a very different picture then what really happened. It also gives a very unrealistic view of somebodies life, just because someones Facebook account is full of party picture doesn't means he parties a lot, it might simply mean that he only post party pictures. And who knows, that beer funnel, it might have been filled with alcohol-free beer.
I doubt that people just a little outside the norm will have a problem with Google+ or Facebook.
Some people might disagree.
Good communication requires two parts, one party expressing things, the other party paying attention and caring about what is being expressed. I believe we have seen where the lapse is here in multiple examples now, and I direct you back to the link in the first post you replied to, which specifically talks about pseudonyms.
The only area where that first link even mention pseudonyms is:
And that says nothing about having an pseudonym only account, you still need a real name for the account, you can just have a pseudonym in addition. So if they explicitly do allow non-real name account, please quote the part.
You wouldn't need to, you would simply make your account with your most common name, then put your alternate names in the "Other names" field
That doesn't fix the problem, I still have to use my real name for my account and my real name will get exposed to all circles.
PS: I have seen a feature request to have different profile pictures (and views) for different circles, which would exactly provide what you are seeking
Yes, such a feature would be nice. However multiple accounts would still be the better alternative, as you don't want Google to know that those two accounts are connected.