Given that finalthoughts seems to be a domain squatter, and postexpression seems to be down, I think what would be new is if there was a reliable way to do this.
An email from the grave falls into the same category as making the stupid joke of saying "no" at your wedding.
Ok, if it was a joke, sure, but explain to me how this is any worse than a living will?
If you have anything to say after you kicked the bucket, leave the message at a friend or at a notary's office.
This is just a more high-tech way of doing so. It'd certainly be nice to be able to go back and edit them much more easily than going down to that notary's office, proving you are who you say you are, and replacing that piece of paper.
It could very well be that you are not the first to go and then you will walk around with the idea of 'why did I not say it?'.
If I really can't say it, then yeah, that's a risk I have to take.
If you can't say it now, it isn't worth saying at all.
Let's take a really simple example: Say you hate your boss. You hate everything about the fucker. But you play nice, because you want to keep your job.
Granted, I'd probably want out, but the way the economy is now, I'd want a better offer lined up, first.
So yes, it would be kind of cool if, having died before getting that better offer, I could let him know what a prick I thought he was.
Your advice is generally useful, and there are a lot of things that people leave unsaid that really should be out in the open. But it's still not hard to think of things -- not just things to say, but bits of information to share -- that I would rather not do so while alive.
If I remember, it wasn't a bug so much as a design flaw. Only three people have to check in, if two of the three don't, it sends the messages. So all that has to happen is for two people to simultaneously be unable to reach a computer for long enough.
I was very tempted to do this, but not via a third party -- or at least, not a website-as-a-third-party.
This is mainly because if I'm dead, I have no secrets of my own to keep anymore, so I'd probably want my friends and family to have access to all my stuff -- ssh keys, gpg keys, porn, various email addresses, etc -- as a way to share more with them than I'd be willing to while I'm alive.
Plus, the whole "Do NOT send keys/passwords via email!" may carry a bit more weight when it's my final will and testament.
But of course, this is fairly sensitive stuff. Some of it, I really don't care if people have when I'm dead, but I'd rather not share while I'm alive... Some of it is still only going to be among close friends even when I am dead.
Plus, it's probably cheaper to do it myself.
On the other hand, I suppose I really can't use a dead-man's switch if it's something I rig myself. You never know when something will go wrong -- what happens if my family goes through my stuff, shuts down my server two days before the message was scheduled to fire?
If you'd asked me to name one Internet technology that was likely to stick around in its current form for a long time, it's likely that I would have said "email". Google Wave challenges that for me.
Yeah, after using Gmail, I would've certainly predicted that something would come along and challenge email. I would've guessed that email would still exist, in its current form, mostly because of inertia.
I'd probably have picked ssh. The Unix commandline isn't going away for a long time.
there's something about email, for example, that forces a sort of linearity of conversation. That is, its structure is fairly limiting, even when you put threads into the process.
I haven't really found that -- especially among technical people, where you can refer back to an archived post in a mailing list, for example.
And everything is an attachment instead of being part of the communication.
Contrast to IM, where everything is a link instead of being part of the communication.
Which reminds me: One thing that's going to absolutely suck about Google Wave is those people who insist on using animated emoticons. Seriously, it seems like half the people I talk to on MSN do this -- for example, they type brb, and it becomes a big animated BRB that turns into a stick figure and runs away. Cute the first time, but just distracting after that.
Do I really want to give these ADD-afflicted people the ability to send me fully interactive, inane little widgets?
what I hadn't considered until the past couple years was how much the particular standard we follow or file format we use also imposes the same limits. You can only put into your web page what HTML supports, and you can only put into emails what the clients will support.
Perhaps, but there is power in these limits.
For example, Google Wave imposes the limit that you can only add relatively low-bandwidth (or at least low-frequency), reversible changes -- you probably couldn't play an FPS in it. In return, you get all these cool little tools to browse through the history.
HTML imposes some limits of its own -- sure, there are ways to get around them, but when a web page behaves the way you expect, there's power there. Examples are bookmarking, back/forward, open in a new tab, and Greasemonkey scripts -- these are the kinds of things that are only possible on a common, restricted platform. People developing native apps often find themselves having to add this kind of functionality back in.
What has me excited about Google Wave is not so much this exact approach, but that people are trying to figure out how we could change the entire paradigm of our current interaction with the Internet, changing the distinctions between IM, email, and documents.
I don't think that's new. I think what's new is that they've presented something that actually could do just that.
I have to think a bit more about the actual implications, though. For example, what types of documents make sense, and what types don't? Is it possible that people would use this for collaboratively developing code? I know I like to be able to take text back to the commandline and grep through it, and use real version control like Git, but maybe I'm old-fashioned.
Ok, makes sense, except that this is exactly, precisely the opposite of what you said -- skill-matching would not be picking a server, it would be clicking on the "take me to a server with people who suck as much as me" button, right?
And the overall experience is worse I believe.
Possibly. I haven't tried it. But I certainly would rather use native Quake 3, most of the time...
My take is that Linus is being a pragmatic fellow and choosing his battles here, even if deep down he suspects that nVidia is violating the letter of the license.
My take would be that Linus doesn't particularly care about the spirit of the license, either. As an example, he really doesn't care about what Tivo did -- he doesn't mind being able to see their changes, without having the ability to compile and actually run them on his own Tivo.
The second point is also important because, even though they don't need to apply the GPL to their own code to distribute it, they do need to apply the GPL to the combined work of Linux and their driver (and, therefore, a GPL-compatible license to their own code) if they want to distribute them together.
In other words, distros that do combine them, like Ubuntu, are actually GPL violators?
If I ran an anime fanboi site, I'd be stupid to use my own hardware in the first place.
I wasn't suggesting that you actually switch to Newegg. Antique Geekmeister makes a good point, but I was taking into account the service they provide above and beyond Newegg, Tigerdirect, etc. Rather, I was wondering two things:
WTF are they doing that takes six weeks?
Why hasn't a competitor appeared with shorter response time and driven them out of business?
Seriously, if you can't answer the first question, you have to assume it's some massive inefficiency at their end -- of the kind the free market is designed to crush.
What's more, the fact that you're doing this three months ahead of time hints at a pretty massive inefficiency in your business. The reason these so-called "cloud" models work -- that is, the utility computing models -- is because most businesses really can't know that far in advance what kind of load they're going to get.
I say "hints at" because I could be entirely wrong -- and I should clarify, I'm not suggesting you all switch to EC2. I'm only trying to highlight, again, that if the rest of the world moves as slowly as you, something is very wrong.
In other words, you could provide a similar service by simply buying two servers of your own. Of course, you'd need a highly competent admin to do the actual service...
It still raises the question -- is it worth the wait? WTF is the wait actually for, and why haven't competitors appeared with shorter wait times and driven them out of business?
If Skype would adopt SIP, then the revolution would be complete.
Well, the difference is, Jabber is actually superior in many ways to the protocols used by Yahoo, MSN, and AIM.
Skype is far superior to SIP -- Skype can tunnel through firewalls, whereas SIP, last I checked, was worse than FTP, needing dozens of ports forwarded to be useful.
Conversely, imagine if you had to register for Hotmail just to send e-mail to someone else who was a Hotmail user. Would e-mail ever have become as big as it has?
It actually used to be that way, back before ISPs "got it" about the Internet.
The problem is, these days, people "solve" the IM problem by using multi-clients and multiple accounts -- for extreme laziness, they'll just use Meebo, for example. For those who want Jabber, there are ways to bridge Jabber to these other protocols -- but you still need an account.
It seems unlikely the services themselves will do much to help. I believe Yahoo and/or AIM actually opened up their protocol, but they still won't use Jabber. MSN likes the ability to censor things -- for example, certain patterns of URLs (something like download.php, but not, oddly, download.asp) -- and censorship is always easier with a closed system.
Furthermore, I imagine the business decisions are at least partly motivated by the possibility of spam (spim?) -- I think they're under the illusion that this is somehow easier to police when it's not an open protocol. (Oddly, I never get spam on gtalk...)
So, my point was, as cool as Wave is, it would be depressingly predictable for everyone except Google to ignore it, and/or develop their own competing, broken standards. OpenID is a huge success story lately, yet we still have to code special cases for broken providers.
I put cash money down on a physical server with 1T of 15k rpm spinning disks 3 days ago. If said server gets here in 6 weeks I will be happy.
Erm... Why does your supplier suck so much?
Seriously, Newegg carries this kind of stuff, and I've never seen them take more than a few days. Granted, Newegg also doesn't provide the kind of service I'm sure your supplier does, but really, six weeks? WTF are they doing for six weeks?
To be frank, the world works slower than you do, get used to it.
An appropriate response here is often: s/get used to it/do something about it/g.
some other toolkit with no ogligation to share modifications should be preferred.
Perhaps. But I don't actually see this problem a lot...
For example, if they're actually modifying the kernel, they could use whatever trick nVidia uses to get around the GPL and insert binary blobs. But most of the time, they shouldn't need to modify the kernel, or at least, any modifications they do make wouldn't be considered "secret sauce" anyway.
But in most of these cases, it's reasonable to put most of it in userland, and to link only against LGPL stuff, if that -- plenty of BSD and MIT stuff that might be useful.
And I'm making my living with GNU/Linux tools only;-)
That makes your post particularly disturbing.
Perhaps it wasn't your intent, but you've given the impression that simply using Linux will force everything to be open source, and that's simply not the case.
I've been wanting one open protocol for IM for ages, so that anyone on any network can talk easily.
It's called Jabber, and Google Talk already uses it.
The problem isn't creating that standard, open protocol. The problem is getting Yahoo, AIM, and MSN to use it -- or worse, getting the general public to abandon those networks and sign up for Gmail instead.
I'm somewhat shocked someone didn't just cut it up into a 5-10 min video on YouTube though.
What I gathered from the ten-minute abbreviated video is:
It's a document that can be edited live by many people on multiple servers. ("Live" means "character by character".) It can be extended in interesting ways. Each edit is kept by the server, and can be rolled back.
This allows it to be used for an absurd number of things -- the demo showed a photo album, a blog, a live chat, email, a bug tracker, a really nice spellchecker and translator, support for mobile devices, etc etc. (When I say "email", I mean "meant to replace email.")
It's difficult to create an elevator pitch because, while the idea itself is deceptively simple, the implications are not. For example, what's the "elevator pitch" for the Internet, or even (perhaps especially) the World Wide Web? "You can connect to a server and view any document, which can link to any other document, you can submit information back to the server, and it can be scripted."
O...k... but does this actually encompass everything the Internet has done, or why you should care? No, you'd need a seminar for that. Even e-commerce -- hell, even dynamic pages -- aren't necessarily obvious -- HTTP, for example, was clearly designed for static things, or at least manually-updated things. Certainly the idea of actually building an application with the Web browser and a Web server as a platform seems laughably implausible -- and some people still laugh, to this day.
So, the primitive for Google Wave is a document that can be simultaneously edited by a number of people, with scriptability and version control. The implications, I don't fully grok yet, but they look damned impressive.
the expression isn't personally handed down by God as The Official Expression Of Fear.
True, but this study didn't say that facial expressions aren't global -- that was the Slashdot summary's misinterpretation.
In fact, after watching Lie To Me, which seems to be based on some real science, I would suspect that while that expression is not necessarily going to be exactly the same, that facial expressions are, in fact, universal.
In any case, this study was entirely about the perception of expressions, not the expressions themselves.
All of these have the same flaw as the IRC-driven botnets -- they're basically relying on a single point of failure. All someone has to do is realize that command/control is going through this one point, and the entire botnet can be shut down. Hardly skynet.
What surprises me is how few botnets (if any) have used truly peer-to-peer systems, like, say, Freenet. Indeed, while Freenet itself may be too high bandwidth and too complex for this, it does have one advantage -- you can't block part of Freenet without blocking all of Freenet.
The trick would be to combine techniques -- phone home to an FTP server, maybe, or to something more plausible -- that's running on just another bot in the swarm. Commands could be sent from any compromised box, and would be signed -- thus, the botnet author could use any Internet cafe, and it'd be difficult to even trace it back to said Internet cafe -- yet the only way to take the swarm down would be to obtain the owner's private key, or deal with each compromised machine individually.
And that could be made difficult with techniques like virtualization, possibly combined with (in especially nasty cases) reflashing the BIOS. Try to tamper with the bot, and the machine self-destructs.
I'm sorry, I hope these ideas are used for good and not evil, but I'm not sure if I'm more disgusted by the existence of botnets, or by the technical incompetence of those who create and operate them.
I was going to try to keep this short, but it didn't work out that way. I hope, at least, it's interesting to read...
Since people are subject to passions and impulses, I don't have the same hope in man as I do in God.
In every detailed description I've found of a god, I see the same passions and impulses. In particular, a "jealous god" sounds very human.
I suppose, for me, it's actually more inspiring that we find ways to overcome whatever flaws we have. Perhaps it would be foolish of me to have faith in humanity, but I certainly have hope.
I think you are saying that the possibility of endless discoveries and the apparently uncapped capability of man to discover them is enough to satisfy your deepest longings.
I would say, it inspires longings that are then fulfilled when I see these discoveries happening.
Indeed, I'll admit most of my knowledge of evolution comes from my making an Internet sport out of debating Creationists, but I've also come to admire just how amazing it is -- both that it happens, and how all of these fields of human knowledge come together to support it, and how it then supports so many of the same fields.
It's the same kind of eureka moment as when I finally manage to make a program work...
I would not say that these alone satisfy every longing that I have. There are more personal things, like love.
But it stems from: There is only this material world, and what we make of it. Religion is one thing we could make of it. Freed from those constraints, what could I invent?
However, I am not convinced and do not agree that the development of our capacity to believe (or in religious experience) is an accident.
Well, define "accident".
It's true, there are complete accidents and evolutionary dead-ends. What purpose does the appendix serve?
I suspect that religion is such a thing, but it's not difficult to see what purpose it at least has served. It's a product of our ability to see patterns -- the tiger in the grass. It has a beneficial aspect of bringing us together -- though again, it's hard to say whether this comes out of religion, or religion comes out of this.
So, to me, it's not difficult to see how religion might have evolved. Nor does this immediately challenge your faith -- after all, you need eyes to see God, and a brain to think about and understand him, and these were evolved as mere means of survival.
There is certainly a need to distinguish hallucination from spiritual experience.
The problem is, I'm not sure how to do that, other than to insist that the spiritual experience be independently verified -- that is, that many people saw the same thing at the same time, perhaps that it was videotaped...
In other words, the only way I know to test such experiences is to treat them as superstition -- to be skeptical of them as I would be of the Loch Ness Monster, or of alien abductions. This does not immediately imply that such a claim is ridiculous, only that it is extraordinary -- as in, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
If God does not intervene in the world, how is it possible for me to experience him?
Good point, but I suppose I should've been more clear -- or perhaps I should've read more about Deism.
Why not simply believe in a God, one who created the universe and interacts with it, without being tied to any particular scripture?
Jesus does want to come into your life. He won't barge in without your invitation because he respects you. I think you could agree that some faith would be needed on your part to extend that invitation to Jesus.
I don't agree.
After all, if we were talking about an ordinary person, I could simply open the door to my house and let them in. Perhaps I'm assuming their existence, but that's because I can see them.
If given that God is omniscient and we are not, then there would be some questions to which we will not have an answer. You raise some of them.
And yet, we have to have some way to distinguish a true god from a false one, or a just god from an unjust one. Why would I want to worship an unjust god?
Given that, I don't buy the "God knows better than I do" argument. Maybe he does, but I can only work with the knowledge and understanding that I have, and I must make a decision. Does this god exist, or is he imaginary? If he exists, would I worship him?
The Book of Job is about a man who raises many of the same kind of questions and more. In the end, he recognizes that he is not God's peer (by a long shot) in wisdom, knowledge or understanding, but Job continued to have faith.
The Book of Job is interesting for other reasons.
Let's recap the plot, shall we? God is bragging about Job to Satan. Satan makes a bet with God that Job only worships God because God has blessed him, and that if God were to remove those blessings, Job would curse him.
So, in order to settle a bet, God utterly ruins Job's life. He destroys everything Job had -- his crops, his house, his family, and eventually, his health.
All to settle a fucking bet.
And this is the all-loving creature I'm supposed to worship?
Never mind, of course, the blatant errors in God's message to Job. "Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth?" It doesn't have foundations, or corners, or any of the other things mentioned. And this is also a fairly cruel thing for God to do -- basically saying, "I'm better than you, so I get to make the rules."
Would we accept that from a person?
Think about that. Just for fun, suppose Bruce Wayne walked up to you and punched you, for no reason. Would you just accept that he knows best, because he's Batman? I mean, Batman is stronger, faster, smarter, richer, and cooler than you -- better than you in pretty much every way -- but you still wouldn't tolerate him being an ass.
I mean, it seems like an elaborate "might makes right" argument.
The difference is that God, by definition, is flawless. The problem is, how do you know he's flawless, when he seems to do such flawed things? Couldn't Bruce Wayne simply define himself to be flawless?
I don't think I'm in any kind of position second guess God.
I think it's your duty as a rational being to question everything. You absolutely should second guess God. Lot did, after all.
My lack of understanding of his way doesn't prove that he is not all good, it proves that I am not all knowing.
Again, substitute any human for God. Does that sentence still apply?
You accept that he's all good, and based on that, you assume that there must be something you don't know that justifies the evil that he does. I start from the assumption that, whether it's my own rationality or a gift from God, I do have the ability to tell right from wrong.
Second, the punishment was not merely death; it was much worse, separation from God.
I'm actually pretty happy in my separation from God. But I'm not quite sure what you're getting at -- this was the punishment that Jesus endured?
Finally, I don't want to cop-out on God's alleged control of Pharoh's heart (and likely other alleged contradictions in different sections of scripture). I tried to write out a number of explanations in a number of different ways, but all were unsatisfactory to me.... Its human literature. It was inspired by God but written by human authors
That is something I think we'll strongly agree on -- that the Bible is a flawed book, written by flawed humans.
I tried things that made me happy, but I was happy only for as long as those things lasted.
Would the same apply to your faith? That is, faith makes you happy only as long as it lasts, but it just lasts longer?
I was only sure there was a possibility of God.
I was sure of this for a long time. I called myself "optimistic agnostic", roughly translated as "I want to believe." But, being intellectually honest with myself, I couldn't simply say "I believe," rather, "It'd be really nice if God exists, but I don't know."
I eventually found a few arguments -- mostly biblical quotes, and the argument from evil -- to draw the conclusion that even if a god exists, it would be the kind of being I probably wouldn't want to worship. At the very least, if a god revealed itself to me, I would have a lot of questions for it.
Once I decided I was no longer really attached to the idea of a god existing, I was able to compare that possibility with the possibility of other things that I don't believe.
Then I read Pascal's Wager, which is not a proof. I saw it as an invitation: given the alternatives Pascal presents AND that I thought there was at least a possiblility that God exists, would I be willing to live my life as if there is God?
The problem with Pascal's Wager is, of course, that it's a false dichotomy. Other possibilities include that a god exists, but that he only rewards those who are skeptical and intellectually honest -- thus, those who believe on faith would go to hell, and those who disbelieve, or who have found really good reasons for believing, go to heaven.
I see your point -- the invitation is, would you (or I) be willing to live as though a god exists, despite not really believing, or being sure?
without belief, I was not aware of the gifts that God was pouring out upon me. One such gift is hope. This is not the hope of getting to heaven, but much bigger and broader. I find it difficult to express in words.
Hope... that things will work out for the best, that we're on a path that makes sense, that things we do are right, and have meaning...
Are any of those resonating?
I find that I do have hope. The universe, as it is -- without acknowledging or rejecting a supernatural claim, but just looking at the natural universe -- it's unimaginably beautiful. And the way in which we experience, explore, and learn about this universe is inspiring. I don't know if I can put it better than this video -- and I think you'll enjoy it, again, believer or not. I know it sends chills down my spine.
And it may give you some insight into, not why I don't believe, but why I don't need to.
Its in this experience that my uncertainty of God's existence dropped off.
Not to diminish your experience, but that was another reason I showed that video to you -- there are powerful experiences like this, I could even call them religious experiences, but they aren't necessarily tied to a god.
I would also suggest that your experience is the root of your belief, not the other way around -- that on a very basic level, the message of most religion came out of similar experiences.
And I do mean, not to diminish your experience -- I am not trying to say it's insignificant, or that you imagined it. I just have a different interpretation of it.
I will, however, say that the human brain is a funny thing, and that it can be very difficult to tell the difference between a spiritual experience and a hallucination.
When I thought of superstitions, I thought of rabbit's foot, walking under a ladder, black cat, stepping on the crack, salt over the shoulder kind of baseless rules on how to avoid bad luck for example. I can also understand how religion, without the experience of God, can
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking more along the lines of:
Tim: I sure miss my father. I wonder what he was really like?
Bill: Well, he was into sodomizing goats.
Tim: That explains so much...
(For the record, I'm not actually into sodomizing goats. It's an example.)
Of course, now that I think about it, that would probably end up playing out something like this...
I suppose the point is, rather, that I have no particular reason to hide porn once I'm dead. And if they're offended, too bad, I'm already dead.
Given that finalthoughts seems to be a domain squatter, and postexpression seems to be down, I think what would be new is if there was a reliable way to do this.
An email from the grave falls into the same category as making the stupid joke of saying "no" at your wedding.
Ok, if it was a joke, sure, but explain to me how this is any worse than a living will?
If you have anything to say after you kicked the bucket, leave the message at a friend or at a notary's office.
This is just a more high-tech way of doing so. It'd certainly be nice to be able to go back and edit them much more easily than going down to that notary's office, proving you are who you say you are, and replacing that piece of paper.
Problem is, how do we know people will still be using anything like email ten years from now?
Seems to me, this would be an expensive service to maintain.
It could very well be that you are not the first to go and then you will walk around with the idea of 'why did I not say it?'.
If I really can't say it, then yeah, that's a risk I have to take.
If you can't say it now, it isn't worth saying at all.
Let's take a really simple example: Say you hate your boss. You hate everything about the fucker. But you play nice, because you want to keep your job.
Granted, I'd probably want out, but the way the economy is now, I'd want a better offer lined up, first.
So yes, it would be kind of cool if, having died before getting that better offer, I could let him know what a prick I thought he was.
Your advice is generally useful, and there are a lot of things that people leave unsaid that really should be out in the open. But it's still not hard to think of things -- not just things to say, but bits of information to share -- that I would rather not do so while alive.
If I remember, it wasn't a bug so much as a design flaw. Only three people have to check in, if two of the three don't, it sends the messages. So all that has to happen is for two people to simultaneously be unable to reach a computer for long enough.
I was very tempted to do this, but not via a third party -- or at least, not a website-as-a-third-party.
This is mainly because if I'm dead, I have no secrets of my own to keep anymore, so I'd probably want my friends and family to have access to all my stuff -- ssh keys, gpg keys, porn, various email addresses, etc -- as a way to share more with them than I'd be willing to while I'm alive.
Plus, the whole "Do NOT send keys/passwords via email!" may carry a bit more weight when it's my final will and testament.
But of course, this is fairly sensitive stuff. Some of it, I really don't care if people have when I'm dead, but I'd rather not share while I'm alive... Some of it is still only going to be among close friends even when I am dead.
Plus, it's probably cheaper to do it myself.
On the other hand, I suppose I really can't use a dead-man's switch if it's something I rig myself. You never know when something will go wrong -- what happens if my family goes through my stuff, shuts down my server two days before the message was scheduled to fire?
If you'd asked me to name one Internet technology that was likely to stick around in its current form for a long time, it's likely that I would have said "email". Google Wave challenges that for me.
Yeah, after using Gmail, I would've certainly predicted that something would come along and challenge email. I would've guessed that email would still exist, in its current form, mostly because of inertia.
I'd probably have picked ssh. The Unix commandline isn't going away for a long time.
there's something about email, for example, that forces a sort of linearity of conversation. That is, its structure is fairly limiting, even when you put threads into the process.
I haven't really found that -- especially among technical people, where you can refer back to an archived post in a mailing list, for example.
And everything is an attachment instead of being part of the communication.
Contrast to IM, where everything is a link instead of being part of the communication.
Which reminds me: One thing that's going to absolutely suck about Google Wave is those people who insist on using animated emoticons. Seriously, it seems like half the people I talk to on MSN do this -- for example, they type brb, and it becomes a big animated BRB that turns into a stick figure and runs away. Cute the first time, but just distracting after that.
Do I really want to give these ADD-afflicted people the ability to send me fully interactive, inane little widgets?
what I hadn't considered until the past couple years was how much the particular standard we follow or file format we use also imposes the same limits. You can only put into your web page what HTML supports, and you can only put into emails what the clients will support.
Perhaps, but there is power in these limits.
For example, Google Wave imposes the limit that you can only add relatively low-bandwidth (or at least low-frequency), reversible changes -- you probably couldn't play an FPS in it. In return, you get all these cool little tools to browse through the history.
HTML imposes some limits of its own -- sure, there are ways to get around them, but when a web page behaves the way you expect, there's power there. Examples are bookmarking, back/forward, open in a new tab, and Greasemonkey scripts -- these are the kinds of things that are only possible on a common, restricted platform. People developing native apps often find themselves having to add this kind of functionality back in.
What has me excited about Google Wave is not so much this exact approach, but that people are trying to figure out how we could change the entire paradigm of our current interaction with the Internet, changing the distinctions between IM, email, and documents.
I don't think that's new. I think what's new is that they've presented something that actually could do just that.
I have to think a bit more about the actual implications, though. For example, what types of documents make sense, and what types don't? Is it possible that people would use this for collaboratively developing code? I know I like to be able to take text back to the commandline and grep through it, and use real version control like Git, but maybe I'm old-fashioned.
I mean there is no skill matching. :)
Ok, makes sense, except that this is exactly, precisely the opposite of what you said -- skill-matching would not be picking a server, it would be clicking on the "take me to a server with people who suck as much as me" button, right?
And the overall experience is worse I believe.
Possibly. I haven't tried it. But I certainly would rather use native Quake 3, most of the time...
My take is that Linus is being a pragmatic fellow and choosing his battles here, even if deep down he suspects that nVidia is violating the letter of the license.
My take would be that Linus doesn't particularly care about the spirit of the license, either. As an example, he really doesn't care about what Tivo did -- he doesn't mind being able to see their changes, without having the ability to compile and actually run them on his own Tivo.
The second point is also important because, even though they don't need to apply the GPL to their own code to distribute it, they do need to apply the GPL to the combined work of Linux and their driver (and, therefore, a GPL-compatible license to their own code) if they want to distribute them together.
In other words, distros that do combine them, like Ubuntu, are actually GPL violators?
That's actually pretty hilarious.
If I ran an anime fanboi site, I'd be stupid to use my own hardware in the first place.
I wasn't suggesting that you actually switch to Newegg. Antique Geekmeister makes a good point, but I was taking into account the service they provide above and beyond Newegg, Tigerdirect, etc. Rather, I was wondering two things:
Seriously, if you can't answer the first question, you have to assume it's some massive inefficiency at their end -- of the kind the free market is designed to crush.
What's more, the fact that you're doing this three months ahead of time hints at a pretty massive inefficiency in your business. The reason these so-called "cloud" models work -- that is, the utility computing models -- is because most businesses really can't know that far in advance what kind of load they're going to get.
I say "hints at" because I could be entirely wrong -- and I should clarify, I'm not suggesting you all switch to EC2. I'm only trying to highlight, again, that if the rest of the world moves as slowly as you, something is very wrong.
In other words, you could provide a similar service by simply buying two servers of your own. Of course, you'd need a highly competent admin to do the actual service...
It still raises the question -- is it worth the wait? WTF is the wait actually for, and why haven't competitors appeared with shorter wait times and driven them out of business?
If Skype would adopt SIP, then the revolution would be complete.
Well, the difference is, Jabber is actually superior in many ways to the protocols used by Yahoo, MSN, and AIM.
Skype is far superior to SIP -- Skype can tunnel through firewalls, whereas SIP, last I checked, was worse than FTP, needing dozens of ports forwarded to be useful.
Conversely, imagine if you had to register for Hotmail just to send e-mail to someone else who was a Hotmail user. Would e-mail ever have become as big as it has?
It actually used to be that way, back before ISPs "got it" about the Internet.
The problem is, these days, people "solve" the IM problem by using multi-clients and multiple accounts -- for extreme laziness, they'll just use Meebo, for example. For those who want Jabber, there are ways to bridge Jabber to these other protocols -- but you still need an account.
It seems unlikely the services themselves will do much to help. I believe Yahoo and/or AIM actually opened up their protocol, but they still won't use Jabber. MSN likes the ability to censor things -- for example, certain patterns of URLs (something like download.php, but not, oddly, download.asp) -- and censorship is always easier with a closed system.
Furthermore, I imagine the business decisions are at least partly motivated by the possibility of spam (spim?) -- I think they're under the illusion that this is somehow easier to police when it's not an open protocol. (Oddly, I never get spam on gtalk...)
So, my point was, as cool as Wave is, it would be depressingly predictable for everyone except Google to ignore it, and/or develop their own competing, broken standards. OpenID is a huge success story lately, yet we still have to code special cases for broken providers.
I put cash money down on a physical server with 1T of 15k rpm spinning disks 3 days ago. If said server gets here in 6 weeks I will be happy.
Erm... Why does your supplier suck so much?
Seriously, Newegg carries this kind of stuff, and I've never seen them take more than a few days. Granted, Newegg also doesn't provide the kind of service I'm sure your supplier does, but really, six weeks? WTF are they doing for six weeks?
To be frank, the world works slower than you do, get used to it.
An appropriate response here is often: s/get used to it/do something about it/g.
some other toolkit with no ogligation to share modifications should be preferred.
Perhaps. But I don't actually see this problem a lot...
For example, if they're actually modifying the kernel, they could use whatever trick nVidia uses to get around the GPL and insert binary blobs. But most of the time, they shouldn't need to modify the kernel, or at least, any modifications they do make wouldn't be considered "secret sauce" anyway.
But in most of these cases, it's reasonable to put most of it in userland, and to link only against LGPL stuff, if that -- plenty of BSD and MIT stuff that might be useful.
And I'm making my living with GNU/Linux tools only ;-)
That makes your post particularly disturbing.
Perhaps it wasn't your intent, but you've given the impression that simply using Linux will force everything to be open source, and that's simply not the case.
I've been wanting one open protocol for IM for ages, so that anyone on any network can talk easily.
It's called Jabber, and Google Talk already uses it.
The problem isn't creating that standard, open protocol. The problem is getting Yahoo, AIM, and MSN to use it -- or worse, getting the general public to abandon those networks and sign up for Gmail instead.
I'm somewhat shocked someone didn't just cut it up into a 5-10 min video on YouTube though.
Someone did.
Difficult to do.
What I gathered from the ten-minute abbreviated video is:
It's a document that can be edited live by many people on multiple servers. ("Live" means "character by character".) It can be extended in interesting ways. Each edit is kept by the server, and can be rolled back.
This allows it to be used for an absurd number of things -- the demo showed a photo album, a blog, a live chat, email, a bug tracker, a really nice spellchecker and translator, support for mobile devices, etc etc. (When I say "email", I mean "meant to replace email.")
It's difficult to create an elevator pitch because, while the idea itself is deceptively simple, the implications are not. For example, what's the "elevator pitch" for the Internet, or even (perhaps especially) the World Wide Web? "You can connect to a server and view any document, which can link to any other document, you can submit information back to the server, and it can be scripted."
O...k... but does this actually encompass everything the Internet has done, or why you should care? No, you'd need a seminar for that. Even e-commerce -- hell, even dynamic pages -- aren't necessarily obvious -- HTTP, for example, was clearly designed for static things, or at least manually-updated things. Certainly the idea of actually building an application with the Web browser and a Web server as a platform seems laughably implausible -- and some people still laugh, to this day.
So, the primitive for Google Wave is a document that can be simultaneously edited by a number of people, with scriptability and version control. The implications, I don't fully grok yet, but they look damned impressive.
Or use nspluginwrapper, which we've been using to run Flash for years now.
it's not as easy finding a game as picking a server and clicking on it.
Erm, what?
That's pretty much how all online FPSes have done this. You bring up a list of servers, click one that looks interesting, and join it.
It's difficult to see how putting it in a web browser would help.
the expression isn't personally handed down by God as The Official Expression Of Fear.
True, but this study didn't say that facial expressions aren't global -- that was the Slashdot summary's misinterpretation.
In fact, after watching Lie To Me, which seems to be based on some real science, I would suspect that while that expression is not necessarily going to be exactly the same, that facial expressions are, in fact, universal.
In any case, this study was entirely about the perception of expressions, not the expressions themselves.
All of these have the same flaw as the IRC-driven botnets -- they're basically relying on a single point of failure. All someone has to do is realize that command/control is going through this one point, and the entire botnet can be shut down. Hardly skynet.
What surprises me is how few botnets (if any) have used truly peer-to-peer systems, like, say, Freenet. Indeed, while Freenet itself may be too high bandwidth and too complex for this, it does have one advantage -- you can't block part of Freenet without blocking all of Freenet.
The trick would be to combine techniques -- phone home to an FTP server, maybe, or to something more plausible -- that's running on just another bot in the swarm. Commands could be sent from any compromised box, and would be signed -- thus, the botnet author could use any Internet cafe, and it'd be difficult to even trace it back to said Internet cafe -- yet the only way to take the swarm down would be to obtain the owner's private key, or deal with each compromised machine individually.
And that could be made difficult with techniques like virtualization, possibly combined with (in especially nasty cases) reflashing the BIOS. Try to tamper with the bot, and the machine self-destructs.
I'm sorry, I hope these ideas are used for good and not evil, but I'm not sure if I'm more disgusted by the existence of botnets, or by the technical incompetence of those who create and operate them.
I was going to try to keep this short, but it didn't work out that way. I hope, at least, it's interesting to read...
Since people are subject to passions and impulses, I don't have the same hope in man as I do in God.
In every detailed description I've found of a god, I see the same passions and impulses. In particular, a "jealous god" sounds very human.
I suppose, for me, it's actually more inspiring that we find ways to overcome whatever flaws we have. Perhaps it would be foolish of me to have faith in humanity, but I certainly have hope.
I think you are saying that the possibility of endless discoveries and the apparently uncapped capability of man to discover them is enough to satisfy your deepest longings.
I would say, it inspires longings that are then fulfilled when I see these discoveries happening.
Indeed, I'll admit most of my knowledge of evolution comes from my making an Internet sport out of debating Creationists, but I've also come to admire just how amazing it is -- both that it happens, and how all of these fields of human knowledge come together to support it, and how it then supports so many of the same fields.
It's the same kind of eureka moment as when I finally manage to make a program work...
I would not say that these alone satisfy every longing that I have. There are more personal things, like love.
But it stems from: There is only this material world, and what we make of it. Religion is one thing we could make of it. Freed from those constraints, what could I invent?
However, I am not convinced and do not agree that the development of our capacity to believe (or in religious experience) is an accident.
Well, define "accident".
It's true, there are complete accidents and evolutionary dead-ends. What purpose does the appendix serve?
I suspect that religion is such a thing, but it's not difficult to see what purpose it at least has served. It's a product of our ability to see patterns -- the tiger in the grass. It has a beneficial aspect of bringing us together -- though again, it's hard to say whether this comes out of religion, or religion comes out of this.
So, to me, it's not difficult to see how religion might have evolved. Nor does this immediately challenge your faith -- after all, you need eyes to see God, and a brain to think about and understand him, and these were evolved as mere means of survival.
There is certainly a need to distinguish hallucination from spiritual experience.
The problem is, I'm not sure how to do that, other than to insist that the spiritual experience be independently verified -- that is, that many people saw the same thing at the same time, perhaps that it was videotaped...
In other words, the only way I know to test such experiences is to treat them as superstition -- to be skeptical of them as I would be of the Loch Ness Monster, or of alien abductions. This does not immediately imply that such a claim is ridiculous, only that it is extraordinary -- as in, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
If God does not intervene in the world, how is it possible for me to experience him?
Good point, but I suppose I should've been more clear -- or perhaps I should've read more about Deism.
Why not simply believe in a God, one who created the universe and interacts with it, without being tied to any particular scripture?
Jesus does want to come into your life. He won't barge in without your invitation because he respects you. I think you could agree that some faith would be needed on your part to extend that invitation to Jesus.
I don't agree.
After all, if we were talking about an ordinary person, I could simply open the door to my house and let them in. Perhaps I'm assuming their existence, but that's because I can see them.
So, for example, if Jes
If given that God is omniscient and we are not, then there would be some questions to which we will not have an answer. You raise some of them.
And yet, we have to have some way to distinguish a true god from a false one, or a just god from an unjust one. Why would I want to worship an unjust god?
Given that, I don't buy the "God knows better than I do" argument. Maybe he does, but I can only work with the knowledge and understanding that I have, and I must make a decision. Does this god exist, or is he imaginary? If he exists, would I worship him?
The Book of Job is about a man who raises many of the same kind of questions and more. In the end, he recognizes that he is not God's peer (by a long shot) in wisdom, knowledge or understanding, but Job continued to have faith.
The Book of Job is interesting for other reasons.
Let's recap the plot, shall we? God is bragging about Job to Satan. Satan makes a bet with God that Job only worships God because God has blessed him, and that if God were to remove those blessings, Job would curse him.
So, in order to settle a bet, God utterly ruins Job's life. He destroys everything Job had -- his crops, his house, his family, and eventually, his health.
All to settle a fucking bet.
And this is the all-loving creature I'm supposed to worship?
Never mind, of course, the blatant errors in God's message to Job. "Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth?" It doesn't have foundations, or corners, or any of the other things mentioned. And this is also a fairly cruel thing for God to do -- basically saying, "I'm better than you, so I get to make the rules."
Would we accept that from a person?
Think about that. Just for fun, suppose Bruce Wayne walked up to you and punched you, for no reason. Would you just accept that he knows best, because he's Batman? I mean, Batman is stronger, faster, smarter, richer, and cooler than you -- better than you in pretty much every way -- but you still wouldn't tolerate him being an ass.
I mean, it seems like an elaborate "might makes right" argument.
The difference is that God, by definition, is flawless. The problem is, how do you know he's flawless, when he seems to do such flawed things? Couldn't Bruce Wayne simply define himself to be flawless?
I don't think I'm in any kind of position second guess God.
I think it's your duty as a rational being to question everything. You absolutely should second guess God. Lot did, after all.
On the other hand, there's always the possibility that God will kill me for complaining.
My lack of understanding of his way doesn't prove that he is not all good, it proves that I am not all knowing.
Again, substitute any human for God. Does that sentence still apply?
You accept that he's all good, and based on that, you assume that there must be something you don't know that justifies the evil that he does. I start from the assumption that, whether it's my own rationality or a gift from God, I do have the ability to tell right from wrong.
Second, the punishment was not merely death; it was much worse, separation from God.
I'm actually pretty happy in my separation from God. But I'm not quite sure what you're getting at -- this was the punishment that Jesus endured?
Finally, I don't want to cop-out on God's alleged control of Pharoh's heart (and likely other alleged contradictions in different sections of scripture). I tried to write out a number of explanations in a number of different ways, but all were unsatisfactory to me.... Its human literature. It was inspired by God but written by human authors
That is something I think we'll strongly agree on -- that the Bible is a flawed book, written by flawed humans.
Alright, I'll try to be gentle, here...
I tried things that made me happy, but I was happy only for as long as those things lasted.
Would the same apply to your faith? That is, faith makes you happy only as long as it lasts, but it just lasts longer?
I was only sure there was a possibility of God.
I was sure of this for a long time. I called myself "optimistic agnostic", roughly translated as "I want to believe." But, being intellectually honest with myself, I couldn't simply say "I believe," rather, "It'd be really nice if God exists, but I don't know."
I eventually found a few arguments -- mostly biblical quotes, and the argument from evil -- to draw the conclusion that even if a god exists, it would be the kind of being I probably wouldn't want to worship. At the very least, if a god revealed itself to me, I would have a lot of questions for it.
Once I decided I was no longer really attached to the idea of a god existing, I was able to compare that possibility with the possibility of other things that I don't believe.
Then I read Pascal's Wager, which is not a proof. I saw it as an invitation: given the alternatives Pascal presents AND that I thought there was at least a possiblility that God exists, would I be willing to live my life as if there is God?
The problem with Pascal's Wager is, of course, that it's a false dichotomy. Other possibilities include that a god exists, but that he only rewards those who are skeptical and intellectually honest -- thus, those who believe on faith would go to hell, and those who disbelieve, or who have found really good reasons for believing, go to heaven.
I see your point -- the invitation is, would you (or I) be willing to live as though a god exists, despite not really believing, or being sure?
without belief, I was not aware of the gifts that God was pouring out upon me. One such gift is hope. This is not the hope of getting to heaven, but much bigger and broader. I find it difficult to express in words.
Hope... that things will work out for the best, that we're on a path that makes sense, that things we do are right, and have meaning...
Are any of those resonating?
I find that I do have hope. The universe, as it is -- without acknowledging or rejecting a supernatural claim, but just looking at the natural universe -- it's unimaginably beautiful. And the way in which we experience, explore, and learn about this universe is inspiring. I don't know if I can put it better than this video -- and I think you'll enjoy it, again, believer or not. I know it sends chills down my spine.
And it may give you some insight into, not why I don't believe, but why I don't need to.
Its in this experience that my uncertainty of God's existence dropped off.
Not to diminish your experience, but that was another reason I showed that video to you -- there are powerful experiences like this, I could even call them religious experiences, but they aren't necessarily tied to a god.
I would also suggest that your experience is the root of your belief, not the other way around -- that on a very basic level, the message of most religion came out of similar experiences.
And I do mean, not to diminish your experience -- I am not trying to say it's insignificant, or that you imagined it. I just have a different interpretation of it.
I will, however, say that the human brain is a funny thing, and that it can be very difficult to tell the difference between a spiritual experience and a hallucination.
When I thought of superstitions, I thought of rabbit's foot, walking under a ladder, black cat, stepping on the crack, salt over the shoulder kind of baseless rules on how to avoid bad luck for example. I can also understand how religion, without the experience of God, can