Some of these "local cultural rules" may differ greatly from one part of the world to another. So good luck enforcing them on anything bigger than the web site of a small to mid-size town's local newspaper.
IMO it's fine if the Pashtun Daily Peacock wants to specifically disallow remarks about eating pork products or something. If I pop in from around the world and get schooled over my post about a chitlin that looks just like Bin Laden, so be it.
But I was thinking more along the lines of the differences between Reddit and the NY Times. On one, profanity is not banned, and on the other it is (I assume). And the head does not explode to go between these two "cultures". We even meme-ify the concept of NSFW to avoid crossing up a more permissive culture with a less permissive one because we're used to switching between commonly established sets of social-acceptability rules.
* Conversation, not isolated comments or voting scores, must be the central criterion of user interaction.
Interesting idea. I'm wondering 2 things. How does this criterion get transmitted to users? And for the sake of comment scoring, is this different in practice than the *intent* of slashdot's meta-moderation (i.e. you're supposed to support a +1 if a comment adds to the discussion, even if you don't agree with the comment).
What's needed in most news comment forums is human moderators consistently applying well-defined local cultural rules about what's acceptable. When those rules are made explicit and then enforced, they can become a self-reinforcing part of the culture. Users get educated in the process, and educate the newcomers, requiring less professional community management.
You cannot replace this kernel of human etiquette with a technological solution and expect to get better "discussions" than, say, here on Slashdot.
So first find the sites that do rules+human moderation well enough already to host the level of civility and discussion you hope for, and distill out the minimum rules and moderator involvement needed to get there. Then add the tech.
That said, considering all the power wasted by an OS like Windows and whatever other programs you may have resident in RAM for convenience's sake, and plug-ins like Flash that are ubiquitous even on netbooks, measuring the difference in a browser's power consumption is probably laughable.
Yeah, kinda laughable in the bigger scheme of things, BUT I have to hand it to Microsoft for their part in getting Adobe to fix a problem where Flash prevented Windows from autosleeping. That was huge energy waste when multiplied across probably millions of home PCs that would normally have been asleep for at least 12 hours a day.
What's more, that was part of a wider Microsoft effort that promotes efficiency across their products, including in data centers where a 10-15% efficiency win can really add up. So a begrudging kudos to MS on this -- and I hope FF kicks IE's lilly white hiney in every regard next go-round!
Newer designs along with effective regulatory oversight (like that in Japan vs. the captive b.s. we have in the USA) are held as the redemption of nuclear power's safety record. And yet Monju disproved both, when it's shiny new sodium-cooled Fast Breeder Reactor design failed *and* the regulator became involved in a cover-up.
Interested readers should note that the wikipedia article linked above has been well sanitized (nice job, nuke industry!), but there is plenty in the public record to show what a fiasco that was.
A Do-Not-Track Law is still very necessary to spell out what rights users have (over their own frickin' data) and to create a bright line that companies can be clear about staying behind or getting sued.
Of course, I trust Congress to create such a law balanced in the interests of individual citizens about as much as I trust Microsoft to implement this feature with benign intent.
Ditto. I went looking for a replacement for the crappy nav Toyota offers for the Prius and was surprised that by now there isn't an Android HU available anywhere for any car.
What I mostly want is the ability to do the things that factory headunits already do, only better because the software is customizable. (As opposed to having a general purpose computer to play solitaire on at 80mph, like so many in this thread imagine.)
For one example, the 2010 Prius nav requires an expensive XM subscription for traffic data, map updates cost $200/yr, and it does a crappier job of routing around traffic and estimating arrival time than my 2-yr old $200 Garmin handheld with lifetime free traffic data. So I want to download Garmin or TomTom and run it instead of the crappy Toyota software.
For another example, the interface for playing iPod stuff totally blows IMHO. I'd like the option to change it or download a different interface, but I'm stuck with something designed for other brains.
Once you've used a factory unit and seen how much better it could be at its own job, you'll understand why there needs to be an Android headunit platform. Car makers can only provide a one-size-fits-all, lowest-common-denominator, long-lead-to-market, non-upgradable system that is a waste of potential. Its time they turned the job over to a wider market and leveraged all the programmers they don't have on their payrolls.
I was thinking the same thing. Then again McAfee software scans every email, every http request, and file on a user's system. That software plus an appropriately opaque EULA would make a rockin' platform for targeting advertising. Just sayin'...
When my dad passed, I kept his pickup as a kind of shrine. It had his personality because of how he decorated it, the things he kept in it for work and play, and the memories of places we went in it. Eventually I passed it to another family member, and of course it will someday be gone. But for a while, it was a cool way to have an occasional visit with ol' dad.
Considering the poster's question makes me think that a virtual shrine should be do-able: a small 3-D world with representations of places and things that bring a strong sense of a person's uniqueness. For me, just that truck would do fine. It would be neat if I could share it with family and friends, and connect it with their favorite ways of remembering him.
I don't know what current virtual reality platform would be best suited for this since I don't play any of the games that use this stuff, but I'll bet there's something off-the-shelf that should do OK...
While not subject to the same organized "burying" effects, most even vaguely political stories on Slashdot are so filled with irrational and diversionary comments I'd be shocked if some of that wasn't an organized attempt to render this a hostile environment for actual throughtful discussion.
I'd love the chance to datamine the IPs of Slashdot's comments. After all, the governement already does for their own purposes.
No matter where you stand on Manning and Wikileaks, the intent of the Fourth Amendment (and the entire Revolution, really) is against the whole idea of the government snooping on its citizens without restraint.
It's one thing when the feds get a warrant to eavesdrop on a suspect like Manning, it's quite another when they wholesale eavesdrop on the entire population (or 250 million IPs in this case) and use the Manning affair to justify it after the fact.
According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant's manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users' Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies.
Wait, so a dozen large ISPs are handing private user data to Project Vigilant which in turn hands it to parts of the US gov't, and this is "legal" because the ISPs have EULAs which allow sharing with unspecified third parties???
Way to bury the lede, slashdot. Some mainstream journo needs to find out which ISPs are participating.
Unlike typical spies with foreign diplomatic cover, these alleged "illegals" cannot just be summarily expelled back to their home countries. Any act against them requires due process, the first step of which is pressing charges.
The lack of diplomatic cover also means they are not protected from any charges that may stick. Spying without diplomatic cover is a very risky game. It makes this case all the more interesting.
Unfortunately, the Russians still do not really understand american culture and so they find it difficult to penetrate deeply into any establishment domestically.
Yet the Russians ended up with moles in the CIA and FBI who were placed highly enough to accomplish shamefully *epic* damage to the US. Knock them for style points all you want, but dangling the $$ just plain worked. We got our @sses handed to us.
Books have a versatility that DRM'd E-books can't have.
Yes, though I'd rephrase that to "Books have a versatility that DRM'd e-books could have but don't."
For example, Amazon could allow you to sell your "used" DRM'ed e-book by transferring the license. Similarly, Amazon could allow you to lend a DRM'd e-book (again, by brokering the license).
I grant that even then you'd still only be able to do those things within the walled garden of that DRM scheme's ecosystem. (You could only sell an amazon kindle book to another amazon customer, which is less versatile than a book.)
But the publishers and distributors have no will to provide that versatility. Which is why I still agree with your point.
I remember backpacking around Europe 20-ish years ago. You run into many Aussies on walkabout, and some of them complained to me that this one guy was pushing their politics far to the right. By controlling the newspapers he had every politician running scared. The guy? Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch's grip on the Australian press is extraordinary. Of all the daily newspapers published in the capital cities, where most Australians live, two out of every three copies sold are Murdoch's. Three out of every four Sundays are Murdoch's. In Adelaide, he owns everything, including the printing presses.
At the time I remember thinking "Well, good luck with that!"
Fox News and the George W. Bush presidency later, I'm no longer surprised by Australia's bent towards authoritarianism.
Plus, with electricity you have more control over how much you use and consumption is more predictably related to what you do. Whereas the iPhone uses data for all kinds of things without asking you, and it's not predictable.
Ever travelled overseas w/ an iPhone? It's a *nightmare* to stay within a data budget (like if you pay for a fixed amount of roaming data). Even just receiving a voicemail that you don't listen to uses data. Basically you can either turn data roaming off completely, or play limit roulette. Because the amount of data you're using is outside of your control and it's not predictable *at all*.
Granted, if the data budget is set high enough, this should be less of a problem. But the point remains, on the iPhone, user control over metered data is not not like controlling electricity consumption in a house.
Being cynical to that degree will just render you powerless.
Consider some small-scale successes, like the California law that requires customers to be notified when their private records are breached. Not hugely burdensome, and it is actually useful (it helped me personally in one case).
Also HIPAA, while seemingly toothless and flawed, has had positive impacts in *some* areas. (Notably at hospitals which have been able to implement privacy protection through their standard training and other polices, but even my dentist's forms now ask if it's OK to leave private details on my home answering machine.)
Putting both idealism and cynicism aside, I think you're right that it's too late in the US to eliminate the kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, Choicepoint and Axciom do. No Congress is going to seriously harm those businesses.
That doesn't mean that we can't think in advance about what could still practically be done to improve individuals' control over their private information, and get it into Bill form.
I learned Conway's Game of Life through Gardner's SciAm columns, and programmed it for display on a Televideo 925 terminal hung off an S100 bus machine running CP/M on an 8088. I hope Martin boarded a Glider headed for some distant Pulsar...
According to the interview, Pixel Qi are still supporting OLPC, but they aren't designing just for -- or even primarily for OLPC any longer. It is neat that kids in Africa were the first market for the new display technology, but we're going to see the newer Pixel Qi stuff in commercial netbooks long before the XO-2 is out, most likely.
The newest stuff does full color in direct sun, and apparently the generation after this will cut power consumption by a bunch.
It's a massive backwards step in power consumption for one
Do we know that? The Via part implements frequency scaling, did the Geode? (I don't think so.) I'd like to see some numbers on power consumption of the XO-1 vs. XO-1.5 for similar usage patterns.
[Also, it's my understanding that hardware issues prevented OLPC from implementing the micro-sleep idea that would have something like doubled battery life. If this refresh fixes the hw issue and they implement it, that might pay off handsomely.]
- and a muddled mess of user focus.
Sorry, I just don't know what that means in rational terms.
From what you've said I suspect that you're peaved that they stuck with x86 because you think it's all about supporting Microsoft and sacrificing the efficiency they could have gotten with ARM. To whatever extent that maintaining x86 compatibility is a sacrifice (quantify, please?), it has to be weighed against what Negroponte said about sales not happening because countries were hesitant to buy something that could not at least in theory run Windows.
But for all I know, they made this choice because it's a mass-produced (i.e. inexpensive) part continuing to ride Moore's Law and that isn't EOL like Geode, and has the horsepower to run the software that frankly was never optimized well for the Geode.
Either way, it's a sideways move at worst, I don't understand this weeping and gnashing of teeth over making a product that will be more effective at helping kids learn.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO it's fine if the Pashtun Daily Peacock wants to specifically disallow remarks about eating pork products or something. If I pop in from around the world and get schooled over my post about a chitlin that looks just like Bin Laden, so be it.
But I was thinking more along the lines of the differences between Reddit and the NY Times. On one, profanity is not banned, and on the other it is (I assume). And the head does not explode to go between these two "cultures". We even meme-ify the concept of NSFW to avoid crossing up a more permissive culture with a less permissive one because we're used to switching between commonly established sets of social-acceptability rules.
Interesting idea. I'm wondering 2 things. How does this criterion get transmitted to users? And for the sake of comment scoring, is this different in practice than the *intent* of slashdot's meta-moderation (i.e. you're supposed to support a +1 if a comment adds to the discussion, even if you don't agree with the comment).
What's needed in most news comment forums is human moderators consistently applying well-defined local cultural rules about what's acceptable.
When those rules are made explicit and then enforced, they can become a self-reinforcing part of the culture. Users get educated in the process, and educate the newcomers, requiring less professional community management.
You cannot replace this kernel of human etiquette with a technological solution and expect to get better "discussions" than, say, here on Slashdot.
So first find the sites that do rules+human moderation well enough already to host the level of civility and discussion you hope for, and distill out the minimum rules and moderator involvement needed to get there. Then add the tech.
Yeah, kinda laughable in the bigger scheme of things, BUT I have to hand it to Microsoft for their part in getting Adobe to fix a problem where Flash prevented Windows from autosleeping. That was huge energy waste when multiplied across probably millions of home PCs that would normally have been asleep for at least 12 hours a day.
What's more, that was part of a wider Microsoft effort that promotes efficiency across their products, including in data centers where a 10-15% efficiency win can really add up. So a begrudging kudos to MS on this -- and I hope FF kicks IE's lilly white hiney in every regard next go-round!
There have been several cases that reflect on user-identified grocery store data.
The FBI went trawling through grocery club card data looking for possible Iranian terrorists -- based on what they supposedly eat.
A man was wrongly suspected of arson based on his club card records of having purchased fire starters, and was later exonerated.
There was another case where the supermarket itself, being sued by a customer who slipped, threatened to use his purchase records to show that he was a probable alcoholic.
I'm sure all of the affected people thought the same way you do -- "why should I care?".
But then this article is about Germany, where the citizens know exactly why they should care about dossiers on ordinary citizens.
Newer designs along with effective regulatory oversight (like that in Japan vs. the captive b.s. we have in the USA) are held as the redemption of nuclear power's safety record. And yet Monju disproved both, when it's shiny new sodium-cooled Fast Breeder Reactor design failed *and* the regulator became involved in a cover-up.
Interested readers should note that the wikipedia article linked above has been well sanitized (nice job, nuke industry!), but there is plenty in the public record to show what a fiasco that was.
A Do-Not-Track Law is still very necessary to spell out what rights users have (over their own frickin' data) and to create a bright line that companies can be clear about staying behind or getting sued.
Of course, I trust Congress to create such a law balanced in the interests of individual citizens about as much as I trust Microsoft to implement this feature with benign intent.
Ditto. I went looking for a replacement for the crappy nav Toyota offers for the Prius and was surprised that by now there isn't an Android HU available anywhere for any car.
What I mostly want is the ability to do the things that factory headunits already do, only better because the software is customizable. (As opposed to having a general purpose computer to play solitaire on at 80mph, like so many in this thread imagine.)
For one example, the 2010 Prius nav requires an expensive XM subscription for traffic data, map updates cost $200/yr, and it does a crappier job of routing around traffic and estimating arrival time than my 2-yr old $200 Garmin handheld with lifetime free traffic data. So I want to download Garmin or TomTom and run it instead of the crappy Toyota software.
For another example, the interface for playing iPod stuff totally blows IMHO. I'd like the option to change it or download a different interface, but I'm stuck with something designed for other brains.
Once you've used a factory unit and seen how much better it could be at its own job, you'll understand why there needs to be an Android headunit platform. Car makers can only provide a one-size-fits-all, lowest-common-denominator, long-lead-to-market, non-upgradable system that is a waste of potential. Its time they turned the job over to a wider market and leveraged all the programmers they don't have on their payrolls.
I was thinking the same thing. Then again McAfee software scans every email, every http request, and file on a user's system. That software plus an appropriately opaque EULA would make a rockin' platform for targeting advertising. Just sayin'...
When my dad passed, I kept his pickup as a kind of shrine. It had his personality because of how he decorated it, the things he kept in it for work and play, and the memories of places we went in it. Eventually I passed it to another family member, and of course it will someday be gone. But for a while, it was a cool way to have an occasional visit with ol' dad.
Considering the poster's question makes me think that a virtual shrine should be do-able: a small 3-D world with representations of places and things that bring a strong sense of a person's uniqueness. For me, just that truck would do fine. It would be neat if I could share it with family and friends, and connect it with their favorite ways of remembering him.
I don't know what current virtual reality platform would be best suited for this since I don't play any of the games that use this stuff, but I'll bet there's something off-the-shelf that should do OK...
While not subject to the same organized "burying" effects, most even vaguely political stories on Slashdot are so filled with irrational and diversionary comments I'd be shocked if some of that wasn't an organized attempt to render this a hostile environment for actual throughtful discussion.
I'd love the chance to datamine the IPs of Slashdot's comments. After all, the governement already does for their own purposes.
No matter where you stand on Manning and Wikileaks, the intent of the Fourth Amendment (and the entire Revolution, really) is against the whole idea of the government snooping on its citizens without restraint.
It's one thing when the feds get a warrant to eavesdrop on a suspect like Manning, it's quite another when they wholesale eavesdrop on the entire population (or 250 million IPs in this case) and use the Manning affair to justify it after the fact.
Wait, so a dozen large ISPs are handing private user data to Project Vigilant which in turn hands it to parts of the US gov't, and this is "legal" because the ISPs have EULAs which allow sharing with unspecified third parties???
Way to bury the lede, slashdot. Some mainstream journo needs to find out which ISPs are participating.
If you have to ask (or take the time to read a Windows vs. Ubuntu sheet) then you probably should be running Windows.
I'm still happy that Dell offers Ubuntu on a few configurations that I know will be tested and supported.
Unlike typical spies with foreign diplomatic cover, these alleged "illegals" cannot just be summarily expelled back to their home countries. Any act against them requires due process, the first step of which is pressing charges.
The lack of diplomatic cover also means they are not protected from any charges that may stick. Spying without diplomatic cover is a very risky game. It makes this case all the more interesting.
From your OP:
Yet the Russians ended up with moles in the CIA and FBI who were placed highly enough to accomplish shamefully *epic* damage to the US. Knock them for style points all you want, but dangling the $$ just plain worked. We got our @sses handed to us.
Yeah, the Ruskis are laughable at penetrating US institutions!
Signed, Your BFFs,
Aldrich Ames and
Robert Hanssen.
Yes, though I'd rephrase that to "Books have a versatility that DRM'd e-books could have but don't."
For example, Amazon could allow you to sell your "used" DRM'ed e-book by transferring the license. Similarly, Amazon could allow you to lend a DRM'd e-book (again, by brokering the license).
I grant that even then you'd still only be able to do those things within the walled garden of that DRM scheme's ecosystem. (You could only sell an amazon kindle book to another amazon customer, which is less versatile than a book.)
But the publishers and distributors have no will to provide that versatility. Which is why I still agree with your point.
I remember backpacking around Europe 20-ish years ago. You run into many Aussies on walkabout, and some of them complained to me that this one guy was pushing their politics far to the right. By controlling the newspapers he had every politician running scared. The guy? Rupert Murdoch.
At the time I remember thinking "Well, good luck with that!"
Fox News and the George W. Bush presidency later, I'm no longer surprised by Australia's bent towards authoritarianism.
Plus, with electricity you have more control over how much you use and consumption is more predictably related to what you do. Whereas the iPhone uses data for all kinds of things without asking you, and it's not predictable.
Ever travelled overseas w/ an iPhone? It's a *nightmare* to stay within a data budget (like if you pay for a fixed amount of roaming data). Even just receiving a voicemail that you don't listen to uses data. Basically you can either turn data roaming off completely, or play limit roulette. Because the amount of data you're using is outside of your control and it's not predictable *at all*.
Granted, if the data budget is set high enough, this should be less of a problem. But the point remains, on the iPhone, user control over metered data is not not like controlling electricity consumption in a house.
Being cynical to that degree will just render you powerless.
Consider some small-scale successes, like the California law that requires customers to be notified when their private records are breached. Not hugely burdensome, and it is actually useful (it helped me personally in one case).
Also HIPAA, while seemingly toothless and flawed, has had positive impacts in *some* areas. (Notably at hospitals which have been able to implement privacy protection through their standard training and other polices, but even my dentist's forms now ask if it's OK to leave private details on my home answering machine.)
Putting both idealism and cynicism aside, I think you're right that it's too late in the US to eliminate the kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, Choicepoint and Axciom do. No Congress is going to seriously harm those businesses.
That doesn't mean that we can't think in advance about what could still practically be done to improve individuals' control over their private information, and get it into Bill form.
In the spirit of letting no crisis go unused, we should have a new privacy law crafted and ready to pass when the next Data Valdez strikes.
The Patriot Act was mostly a pre-existing fairlyland wishlist for law enforcement that was sitting on the shelf when 9/11 struck.
I don't know if pro-privacy advocates are that organized, but EFF and others should have legal language already formed into a bill, IMHO.
I learned Conway's Game of Life through Gardner's SciAm columns, and programmed it for display on a Televideo 925 terminal hung off an S100 bus machine running CP/M on an 8088. I hope Martin boarded a Glider headed for some distant Pulsar...
According to the interview, Pixel Qi are still supporting OLPC, but they aren't designing just for -- or even primarily for OLPC any longer. It is neat that kids in Africa were the first market for the new display technology, but we're going to see the newer Pixel Qi stuff in commercial netbooks long before the XO-2 is out, most likely.
The newest stuff does full color in direct sun, and apparently the generation after this will cut power consumption by a bunch.
Do we know that? The Via part implements frequency scaling, did the Geode? (I don't think so.) I'd like to see some numbers on power consumption of the XO-1 vs. XO-1.5 for similar usage patterns.
[Also, it's my understanding that hardware issues prevented OLPC from implementing the micro-sleep idea that would have something like doubled battery life. If this refresh fixes the hw issue and they implement it, that might pay off handsomely.]
Sorry, I just don't know what that means in rational terms.
From what you've said I suspect that you're peaved that they stuck with x86 because you think it's all about supporting Microsoft and sacrificing the efficiency they could have gotten with ARM. To whatever extent that maintaining x86 compatibility is a sacrifice (quantify, please?), it has to be weighed against what Negroponte said about sales not happening because countries were hesitant to buy something that could not at least in theory run Windows.
But for all I know, they made this choice because it's a mass-produced (i.e. inexpensive) part continuing to ride Moore's Law and that isn't EOL like Geode, and has the horsepower to run the software that frankly was never optimized well for the Geode.
Either way, it's a sideways move at worst, I don't understand this weeping and gnashing of teeth over making a product that will be more effective at helping kids learn.