I've actually started much of the work with public private keys in a decentralized social network. With the exception of having it on a peer to peer network instead of a federation of websites the idea described above is exactly the same as the one I came up with for this project. With a peer to peer network, you don't have to worry about censorship (unless the whole network is censored), and you don't have to worry about the website owner selling your information.
To get around the spam problem, you can simply not accept connections from people who you haven't friended or aren't friends of friends (finding your first friend may be a problem).
Porn won't be an issue since everyone is basically hosting their own content. If you don't want to see something, you don't have to friend that person. My guess is accidentally seeing porn won't be much of a problem since most people will have friends with similar morals.
However, I haven't finished much due to lack of time. It's open source. Any help would be appreciated.
Instead of going through a website, each node in the network connects directly to each friend and all information is encrypted. Though you can create a handle, your real id is your public key. This causes some issues when finding friends, but public keys seem like the best way to go.
Not much is done right now. I wasn't planning on any kind of announcement yet. Since the topic came up and people are clearly interested in a more secure social network, I thought I would throw it out there and hopefully get some help.
4 - There are no good pick up lines. Stop trying, stop reading the speed seduction books, they do not work if you do not understand human psychology and look like a "hunk" or at least semi cute to a woman.
Actually there are good pickup lines. Try "Hi".
If you do want to learn to become better at talking to or picking up women there is plenty of information and help out there. No, you don't have to look like a "hunk" or good looking (though it helps).
I'm working on a documentary of the pickup artist community in the DC area. What these guys can do is amazing and most of them don't look like jocks or pretty boys. It's all social skill learned from the various pickup companies and from each other. Most of these guys are in IT, and started out with the same level of social skills as the average slashdotter.
Here are some interviews of the less than pretty pickup artists from my documentary:
As a DC are filmmaker, I agree with your observation of the move to Vimeo. Lately, I've seen more and more short films moving to HD as cameras are getting cheaper. Now, the filmmakers want to post in full HD rather than settling for the poor quality of Youtube.
For example, many more of the films in this year's 48 hour film project in DC were shot in HD including the one I worked on. We posted our 48 hour film, "Chasing Larry", on Vimeo, and it looks like hundreds of others are also posted there.
I've also started posting on Vimeo excerpts from a documentary I'm working on called "Pickup Artist Underground"
Note, not only can you view the streamed version of the video, there is a link in the bottom right to download it. I believe the download format is always the same format you uploaded, but I'm not certain. I've only ever uploaded videos quicktime mov encoded.
There is one caveat which may be an issue for the poster. The terms of service for Vimeo explicitly disallow commercial videos. I'm not sure what the intent is, but if you plan to sell your short at a later date, you may have a problem. If not, I would strongly suggest Vimeo.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
There is a slight advantage to my solution over yours in the way it is parsed. Your version, as you have written it, is:
Note how the text nodes between your inner element nodes do not show up if you use attributes. Though of little use in this example, if there are thousands of coordinates, when parsing my solution would save time and memory when parsing.
This is not a major difference, but I think you can see why my solution is more appropriate.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
Though I agree with you that many people don't understand the difference between marked-up text and data, your xml solution is inappropriate. A better version of the xml solution would be something like:
<gml:coordinates x="100" y="200"/>
Also, as mentioned by The_reformant, with W3C XML Schema Part 2, the coordinates actually are numbers, and not text strings.
This is just the beginning. As I've predicted on my blog, there will be Facebook rioters on the street.
After repeatedly ignoring privacy concerns, all Facebook users revolt. The revolt initially remains confined to Facebook, but will suddenly explode through the Internet, then out into the streets of every major city....
Social rioting becomes the next hot technology, and 1000's of entrepreneurs collectively raise billions of dollars to entice more people to riot. When asked how they plan to make money of the rioting, the entrepreneurs will shuffle their feet and mumble something about advertising.
I don't think IBM really has really come up with the best way for the "metaverse" to be implemented. As has been mentioned before here, they are still stuck in walled garden approach to 3d worlds.
After the last time IBM's metaverse was posted on Slashdot, I realized, with my background in Java3d, I could start work on one, and did. I have a VERY rudimentary "metaverse" program written which allows a user to download a virtual world in a way very similar to how we currently download webpages. I was able to implement basic server using Ruby on Rails, and a basic client to download the virtual world. Anyone can set up a server, and anyone with the client would be able to connect to it if they knew the house name (like a domain name), and room name (like the directory). I, unfortunately, became distracted before I could implement portals between each server, but the idea was to make a portal object in which when the user's avatar ran into it, his or her browser would pick up a house and room name from the portal and connect to new server.
If anyone is interested in playing around with it (remember it's very basic), I have the code on my computer, but no place to post it. I haven't had much luck with Sourceforge lately, and don't want to post it there if I can avoid it. Any ideas are welcome.
Before they fixed it, editing the page would give you a Service Temporarily Unavailable page. It looked like some script kiddie changed the first page adding links to their home page, and whacked the wiki so no one could change it back.
Actually, "Free Thinkers" is a term used by many atheist groups, since various churches have made word "atheist" have a bad connotation. Many otherwise obvious atheists don't want to refer to themselves by that term.
I think the "Freethinkers" the slashdot article is referring to is the actual name of the group rather than some term the slashdot editors made up.
This sort of reminds me of the way the Mongols defeated the Great Wall of China.
Did they tear the wall down? No.
Did they march around one end of the wall? No.
They simply bribed a guard to open the gates.
Maybe China shouldn't be so fixated on walls.
Re:They already pay their "fair share".
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The whole "Hands off the internet" campaign tries to frame the issue as who should pay for the expansion of the internet, consumers or Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc.
Where does Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc. get their money from? That's right, consumers.
If Amazon and Ebay have to pay to reach consumers, then they will be forced to raise their prices. This, of course, means the consumers will still be paying for the expansion of the internet, only indirectly. The only problem with this is if Amazon and Ebay have to charge so much more to reach consumers, that it's cheaper for consumers to buy from brick and morter stores. Consumers may stop shoping online altogether, and Amazon and Ebay risk going out of business.
Google is only sightly more complicated. Google gets it money from advertising, so it would have to charge more for ads. Any business that want's to continue advertising through Google, will have to charge more for their goods and services, and you have the same problem as above.
The real question of who should pay for the expansion of the internet isn't between consumers and Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc, but consumers (directly) and consumers (indirectly). The answer to this question will determine whether internet innovation will continue as it has, or stop and the internet will become just another way to watch TV and Movies.
I think I've tried all of the online dating sites, and in my personal opinion, they are all worthless.
Not only does everyone lie, but you also have spammers posting fake profiles to fish e-mail addresses. Of course, those fake postings are easy to spot. If you see a profile for a super hot half naked chick (and on some sites, completely naked chick) with a description of "e-mail me at hotchick@spamrus.com", then it's most likely a fake post.
Then there are the online dating sites where you must pay to reply to any e-mail sent to you. For some reason, right before and again right after your subscription runs out, you get an e-mail from a really hot chick who likes your profile, and is just looking for a f**k buddy. If you renew your subscription and e-mail the chick, you'll never hear from her again.
If you can avoid all of the scams, you still have social problems of online dating. If you've read any "good" books on human courtship, you should know how important body language is. With online dating, you completely lose the subtle dialog of body language, to the misspellings and poor grammar of e-mail.
My suggestion would be to get out of the house, and meet people. You don't have to go to bars. In fact, I would strongly suggest not going to bars, and instead seek out group activities where you'll get a change to meet potentially single women or men.
That said if I had to recommend an online dating service, eHarmony.com would be my choice. They seem to have the least fraud, and with all the steps you must go through to make contact, you tend to only meet people serious about dating.
A big problem for Wikipedia, that Brittanica addresses, is it's dynamic nature. Since the article in Nature, I'm sure all of the Wikipedia articles in question have been vandalized, fixed, vandalized again, likely fixed again, more information has been added, some information removed, and reorganized. The accuracy of the information in a Wikipedia article depends on the exact moment you view it.
Brittanica articles, on the other hand, remain the same for longer periods of time. Which means, it will remain accurate, and well organized longer, but, at the same time, errors will also exist longer than Wikipedia.
My point is, Wikipedia can claim also claim the Nature article as invalid, since the articles are constantly changing. The Nature article was doomed from the beginning.
I've mentioned the vandalizism problem on Wikipedia several times on Slashdot. My suggestion is to move to the opensource model of article development where anyone can contribute, but only people who have proven themselves can "release" articles to the public. I've finally finished a prototype which can be found at: www.lohipedia.com (Note: there are still many bugs to work out, and it's ugly). The goal is to find that optimum point of user contribution versus article control where the best article possible can be produced.
In my latest website, www.lohipedia.com, I'm using MySql. At $40k per processor, Oracle isn't even a consideration. Since I have to pay for the site out of my own pocket, $40k is most of my salary.
Now you may think, "What does Oracle care about such a small website?" Well, if I'm using mysql on my own projects, then I'm much more likely to use them at work.
<marketingDroid>Oracle is losing mindshare to MySql.</marketingDroid>
Actually, (for those who couldn't tell) it is just a joke. I'm sticking with OS X because I currently have a nice development environment for RoR set up on it, and, more importantly, it's what I have.
I've recently started playing with RoR, and though my first choice platform for any programming project is usually Linux, I went with OS X instead.
Unlike Linux-Apache-Mysql-Php/Perl/Python which has the nice acronym LAMP. Linux-Apache-Mysql-Ruby has the rather unfortunate acronym LAMR (pronouced lamer).
I'll stick with developing RoR on OS X.
If you're interested in my lates RoR project, check out: OSWiki
I've made this comment before (previous comment), so I won't repeat myself too much. Basically, they should different levels of contributers, based on trust.
Maintainer
Commiters
Submitters
Users
Last time I asked if anyone would be interested in starting a website like this, but, not surprisingly, no one was willing.
So, in DIY fashion, I've started my own project: OSWiki (The name will likely change, as a project already exists with the name OSWiki.)
The initial release is still a little lacking, but it's written entirely in Ruby on Rails. Download it and start hacking away, and if you're interested in helping out, send me a message.
Wikipedia should move toward the open source model
on
Printing Wikipedia
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I bet you're thinking "duh, they already do", but I don't think it really follows the open source model of development from my experience.
In the open source model of development you have several levels of "contributers". (I probably missed a level or two)
1. Maintainer
2. Commiters
3. Submitters
4. Users
These levels represent levels of trust, with the Maintainer the most trust worthy, and the Users being the least. Anything contributed by those with lower trust levels gets reviewed by the higher trust levels, and appropriate action is taken (either the change is accepted or rejected). If you do something to ruin that trust, you are forced down the levels by your peers.
The only problem with this scheme in wikipedia is there will be more forking and competing articles. However, this can be mitigated in a similar fashion to what wikipedia is doing now with links at the top of articles linking to competing pages.
If anyone is interested in setting up this kind of encyclopedia, or knows of one already in use out there, send me a link.
What do I have to lose? I'll get paid for the work I put into, which I can use in my next project. I may even still release it for free on the internet, and let the video IPod suckers^W users pay $1.99 for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually started much of the work with public private keys in a decentralized social network. With the exception of having it on a peer to peer network instead of a federation of websites the idea described above is exactly the same as the one I came up with for this project. With a peer to peer network, you don't have to worry about censorship (unless the whole network is censored), and you don't have to worry about the website owner selling your information.
To get around the spam problem, you can simply not accept connections from people who you haven't friended or aren't friends of friends (finding your first friend may be a problem).
Porn won't be an issue since everyone is basically hosting their own content. If you don't want to see something, you don't have to friend that person. My guess is accidentally seeing porn won't be much of a problem since most people will have friends with similar morals.
Everything is open sourced. It's only me working on it so the progress is slow. Here's the github link: https://github.com/macourtney/masques
I've been working on a decentralized social network for a while: https://github.com/macourtney/masques
While I'm making progress, I could use some help.
I had the idea of creating a P2P social network a while ago, and actually started writing code: https://github.com/macourtney/masques
However, I haven't finished much due to lack of time. It's open source. Any help would be appreciated.
Instead of going through a website, each node in the network connects directly to each friend and all information is encrypted. Though you can create a handle, your real id is your public key. This causes some issues when finding friends, but public keys seem like the best way to go.
Not much is done right now. I wasn't planning on any kind of announcement yet. Since the topic came up and people are clearly interested in a more secure social network, I thought I would throw it out there and hopefully get some help.
4 - There are no good pick up lines. Stop trying, stop reading the speed seduction books, they do not work if you do not understand human psychology and look like a "hunk" or at least semi cute to a woman.
Actually there are good pickup lines. Try "Hi".
If you do want to learn to become better at talking to or picking up women there is plenty of information and help out there. No, you don't have to look like a "hunk" or good looking (though it helps).
I'm working on a documentary of the pickup artist community in the DC area. What these guys can do is amazing and most of them don't look like jocks or pretty boys. It's all social skill learned from the various pickup companies and from each other. Most of these guys are in IT, and started out with the same level of social skills as the average slashdotter.
Here are some interviews of the less than pretty pickup artists from my documentary:
Knack
Cuisine
Allen
Want to learn more? Here are some links to reputable pickup artist and dating coach companies:
Venusian Arts
Ask Romeo
Mehow's Get the Girl
Style Life
Love Systems
If you can't find something that works for you from that list, nothing can help you except possibly therapy.
P.S. Yeah, Speed Seduction pretty much worthless.
As a DC are filmmaker, I agree with your observation of the move to Vimeo. Lately, I've seen more and more short films moving to HD as cameras are getting cheaper. Now, the filmmakers want to post in full HD rather than settling for the poor quality of Youtube.
For example, many more of the films in this year's 48 hour film project in DC were shot in HD including the one I worked on. We posted our 48 hour film, "Chasing Larry", on Vimeo, and it looks like hundreds of others are also posted there.
I've also started posting on Vimeo excerpts from a documentary I'm working on called "Pickup Artist Underground"
Note, not only can you view the streamed version of the video, there is a link in the bottom right to download it. I believe the download format is always the same format you uploaded, but I'm not certain. I've only ever uploaded videos quicktime mov encoded.
There is one caveat which may be an issue for the poster. The terms of service for Vimeo explicitly disallow commercial videos. I'm not sure what the intent is, but if you plan to sell your short at a later date, you may have a problem. If not, I would strongly suggest Vimeo.
There is a slight advantage to my solution over yours in the way it is parsed. Your version, as you have written it, is:
elementNode name=gml:coordinates
\-> textNode, text="\n " *
\-> elementNode name=gml:coordinateX
\-> textNode text="100"
\-> textNode, text="\n " *
\-> elementNode name=gml:coordinateY
\-> textNode, text="200"
\-> textNode, text="\n" *
To write mine in the same format:
elementNode name=gml:coordinates
\-> attributeNode name=gml:coordinateX
\-> textNode text="100"
\-> attributeNode name=gml:coordinateY
\-> textNode, text="200"
Note how the text nodes between your inner element nodes do not show up if you use attributes. Though of little use in this example, if there are thousands of coordinates, when parsing my solution would save time and memory when parsing.
This is not a major difference, but I think you can see why my solution is more appropriate.
I don't think IBM really has really come up with the best way for the "metaverse" to be implemented. As has been mentioned before here, they are still stuck in walled garden approach to 3d worlds.
After the last time IBM's metaverse was posted on Slashdot, I realized, with my background in Java3d, I could start work on one, and did. I have a VERY rudimentary "metaverse" program written which allows a user to download a virtual world in a way very similar to how we currently download webpages. I was able to implement basic server using Ruby on Rails, and a basic client to download the virtual world. Anyone can set up a server, and anyone with the client would be able to connect to it if they knew the house name (like a domain name), and room name (like the directory). I, unfortunately, became distracted before I could implement portals between each server, but the idea was to make a portal object in which when the user's avatar ran into it, his or her browser would pick up a house and room name from the portal and connect to new server.
If anyone is interested in playing around with it (remember it's very basic), I have the code on my computer, but no place to post it. I haven't had much luck with Sourceforge lately, and don't want to post it there if I can avoid it. Any ideas are welcome.
I had this idea about a year ago, and though it doesn't yet get much traffic, I already have it up and running:
http://www.lohipedia.com/
Be gentle. I'm a noob at web development.
It is fixed now.
Before they fixed it, editing the page would give you a Service Temporarily Unavailable page. It looked like some script kiddie changed the first page adding links to their home page, and whacked the wiki so no one could change it back.
I wonder if this is related to their hacked wiki page?
Ruby on Rails Wiki
Anyone have information on this?
Actually, "Free Thinkers" is a term used by many atheist groups, since various churches have made word "atheist" have a bad connotation. Many otherwise obvious atheists don't want to refer to themselves by that term.
I think the "Freethinkers" the slashdot article is referring to is the actual name of the group rather than some term the slashdot editors made up.
This sort of reminds me of the way the Mongols defeated the Great Wall of China.
Did they tear the wall down? No.
Did they march around one end of the wall? No.
They simply bribed a guard to open the gates.
Maybe China shouldn't be so fixated on walls.
The whole "Hands off the internet" campaign tries to frame the issue as who should pay for the expansion of the internet, consumers or Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc.
Where does Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc. get their money from? That's right, consumers.
If Amazon and Ebay have to pay to reach consumers, then they will be forced to raise their prices. This, of course, means the consumers will still be paying for the expansion of the internet, only indirectly. The only problem with this is if Amazon and Ebay have to charge so much more to reach consumers, that it's cheaper for consumers to buy from brick and morter stores. Consumers may stop shoping online altogether, and Amazon and Ebay risk going out of business.
Google is only sightly more complicated. Google gets it money from advertising, so it would have to charge more for ads. Any business that want's to continue advertising through Google, will have to charge more for their goods and services, and you have the same problem as above.
The real question of who should pay for the expansion of the internet isn't between consumers and Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc, but consumers (directly) and consumers (indirectly). The answer to this question will determine whether internet innovation will continue as it has, or stop and the internet will become just another way to watch TV and Movies.
I think I've tried all of the online dating sites, and in my personal opinion, they are all worthless.
Not only does everyone lie, but you also have spammers posting fake profiles to fish e-mail addresses. Of course, those fake postings are easy to spot. If you see a profile for a super hot half naked chick (and on some sites, completely naked chick) with a description of "e-mail me at hotchick@spamrus.com", then it's most likely a fake post.
Then there are the online dating sites where you must pay to reply to any e-mail sent to you. For some reason, right before and again right after your subscription runs out, you get an e-mail from a really hot chick who likes your profile, and is just looking for a f**k buddy. If you renew your subscription and e-mail the chick, you'll never hear from her again.
If you can avoid all of the scams, you still have social problems of online dating. If you've read any "good" books on human courtship, you should know how important body language is. With online dating, you completely lose the subtle dialog of body language, to the misspellings and poor grammar of e-mail.
My suggestion would be to get out of the house, and meet people. You don't have to go to bars. In fact, I would strongly suggest not going to bars, and instead seek out group activities where you'll get a change to meet potentially single women or men.
That said if I had to recommend an online dating service, eHarmony.com would be my choice. They seem to have the least fraud, and with all the steps you must go through to make contact, you tend to only meet people serious about dating.
I don't think privacy is much of a concern to people like this:
http://livedigital.com/content/321254/
A big problem for Wikipedia, that Brittanica addresses, is it's dynamic nature. Since the article in Nature, I'm sure all of the Wikipedia articles in question have been vandalized, fixed, vandalized again, likely fixed again, more information has been added, some information removed, and reorganized. The accuracy of the information in a Wikipedia article depends on the exact moment you view it.
Brittanica articles, on the other hand, remain the same for longer periods of time. Which means, it will remain accurate, and well organized longer, but, at the same time, errors will also exist longer than Wikipedia.
My point is, Wikipedia can claim also claim the Nature article as invalid, since the articles are constantly changing. The Nature article was doomed from the beginning.
I've mentioned the vandalizism problem on Wikipedia several times on Slashdot. My suggestion is to move to the opensource model of article development where anyone can contribute, but only people who have proven themselves can "release" articles to the public. I've finally finished a prototype which can be found at: www.lohipedia.com (Note: there are still many bugs to work out, and it's ugly). The goal is to find that optimum point of user contribution versus article control where the best article possible can be produced.
Now you may think, "What does Oracle care about such a small website?" Well, if I'm using mysql on my own projects, then I'm much more likely to use them at work.
Actually, (for those who couldn't tell) it is just a joke. I'm sticking with OS X because I currently have a nice development environment for RoR set up on it, and, more importantly, it's what I have.
Besides, isn't OSXAMRoR a much nicer acronym?
I've recently started playing with RoR, and though my first choice platform for any programming project is usually Linux, I went with OS X instead.
Unlike Linux-Apache-Mysql-Php/Perl/Python which has the nice acronym LAMP. Linux-Apache-Mysql-Ruby has the rather unfortunate acronym LAMR (pronouced lamer).
I'll stick with developing RoR on OS X.
If you're interested in my lates RoR project, check out: OSWiki
Last time I asked if anyone would be interested in starting a website like this, but, not surprisingly, no one was willing.
So, in DIY fashion, I've started my own project: OSWiki (The name will likely change, as a project already exists with the name OSWiki.)
The initial release is still a little lacking, but it's written entirely in Ruby on Rails. Download it and start hacking away, and if you're interested in helping out, send me a message.
History of My Life (Volumes I & II)
U.S.S.
Body Language Secrets: A Guide During Courtship & Dating
The System: How to Get Laid Today!
Everything else can be looked up on the internet.
I bet you're thinking "duh, they already do", but I don't think it really follows the open source model of development from my experience.
In the open source model of development you have several levels of "contributers". (I probably missed a level or two)
1. Maintainer
2. Commiters
3. Submitters
4. Users
These levels represent levels of trust, with the Maintainer the most trust worthy, and the Users being the least. Anything contributed by those with lower trust levels gets reviewed by the higher trust levels, and appropriate action is taken (either the change is accepted or rejected). If you do something to ruin that trust, you are forced down the levels by your peers.
The only problem with this scheme in wikipedia is there will be more forking and competing articles. However, this can be mitigated in a similar fashion to what wikipedia is doing now with links at the top of articles linking to competing pages.
If anyone is interested in setting up this kind of encyclopedia, or knows of one already in use out there, send me a link.
What do I have to lose? I'll get paid for the work I put into, which I can use in my next project. I may even still release it for free on the internet, and let the video IPod suckers^W users pay $1.99 for it.
Anyways, the website for my short is http://genesoldiers.webforte.com/
We're currently in post production and looking at releasing in December or January.