I just don't understand why Kickstarter would hold the project manager accountable for comments posted by backers, but not give the manager the ability to do anything about those comments.
Kickstarter's original complaint was that she was feeding the trolls, not that the trolls were showing up. As far as I can see, Kickstarter wanted rid of her because she was stirring up trouble, or because they were worried about the complaints coming in about a previous project. The last thing they want to do is put something in writing that is legally actionable, so they just default to the Ts & Cs in a vague way. As a course of action, it's time-tested and legally sound.
It's not that rare. One of the implications of Dunbar's number is the idea that we might not be mentally capable of accepting the sheer number of human beings in the world. If there's only 150 "people" in your mental model of the world, and it's only people that can mod down Slashdot comments, then it's not that big a step to anthropomorphise downvotes into a single "enemy"...
And you're anonymous. Which looks more stalkerish to you...?
To be honest, this has all the hallmarks of an internaut with an inflated ego who winds people up and takes their reactions as proof of a great big conspiracy of hate. I've seen a fair few people who fall into that pattern. In fact, I once had someone stalk me across newsgroups and forums in order to accuse me of stalking him.
1: If he's so good and untraceable that the police can't track him down, how can anyone know he's been sending stuff to hundreds of victims? Each case will be untraceably separate.
2: Stalkers are not indiscriminate. Genuine stalkers get fixated on a particular individual. Hundreds of victims isn't "stalking" it's just being a serial ar$€hole.
Talking back to a genuine, real-life stalker is a very bad idea. Stalkers are generally certifiably mentally ill. They have a delusion that involves the victim. Any contact, any attention, feeds that delusion. That's one of the reasons you show never engage directly with a stalker.
"Indie" is short for "independent". Not to be confused with "newbie". An indie is an indie because they don't answer to a corporate hierarchy. If Bill Gates decided to start programming iPad games under the name "Gatekeeper Games", even he would be an "indie", despite being insanely rich.
Hmmm... prizes have been in for a bit of criticism as effectively slave labour. Get 100 teams coding a solution to your program/drafting an advertising campaign/designing your new corporate headquarters, and then pay one of them what would have been a living wage for 4 or 5 of them -- even 10, maybe-- and what looks like a major bonus to each and every one of them. In the end, the backer gets a better end product than it would have got if it had hired ten teams to start off with, and 99 teams go hungry.
The issue here is that windows is blatantly in your face on 99% of laptop and desktop computers...
Linux may be running on thousands of other devices, but people don't even know it's there.
That may be the issue that you want to raise, but that is not the issue here, in this discussion. We were talking about the presence/absence of a gift economy, and Lumpy pointed out that the world more or less runs on software that was written pro bono by a bunch of altruistic devs. The lack of visibility of the OS, and the resulting lack of public awareness of the importance of the OS, is totally irrelevant.
Yes, but there is such a thing as an honest misjudgement, and people with genuine intentions underestimate challenges all the time. All financial backers, whether traditional investors or crowdfunders, have to accept that not all projects come through. So again: if a project's founders could afford to take the risk, they would not go to Kickstarter.
So while it would freeze out the fraudsters, it would also freeze out anyone with any R&D left, and would reduce Kickstarter's job to funding initial machining/manufacture and distribution set up for completed and tested prototype items.
Yes. Linux changes. Kjella never said it didn't. Kjella advocated learning skills, not specific packages. Kjella didn't even mention Linux once. The point is that the platform doesn't matter -- the skills do. You do not need a specific platform to learn the general skill.
Also, I'll commit murder if I ever meet the designers of some of the educational software platforms out there. The software aspect is absolutely lacking at the moment when it comes to educational stuff. If the software doesn't exist, then good luck at getting it down to a reasonable price. I'm still stunned that Moodle currently gets promoted as the best solution.
++Agree.
I've been teaching English as a foreign language, and I kept looking for technology to build useful exercises for my classes. The facilities in Moodle etc are abysmal. Rather than freeing the teacher, they box us in to a small selection of very limited exercise types. As a trade-off, you'd want some sort of flexibility, some sort of adaptability... but it's not there, or if it is, it's well hidden. Even the simple stuff is hard to put together, so you end up writing pretty uninspired exercises that are less effective than you originally had on paper. In the end, I sat down in front of Notepad++ and within two days of work I'd knocked up a webpage that did most of what I wanted.
I'll never regret that computer science degree -- computers aren't worth the money if you can't get them to do what you want.
Microsoft'll still be there as it's been 4 decades: Ur point's what? The kids'll grow w\ changes as we all did on MS or anyone's wares. Change is a fact of life in the field of computing, get used to it.
U fail to note that there are radically differing versions of *NIX desktops too, ala KDE vs. GNOME (& others like xfce & more and changes in them as well over time), plus the changes that occur on its attendant softwares that ride on it too (that aren't used 1/100th as much as Windows & its wares are).
Thus, Your very argument is defeated on its very basis, albeit, turned around on Linux, ala "reverse-psychology" and the numbers prove the rest for me in terms of usership/mindshare (as well as marketshare).
Wait, what?
The argument was basically "Microsoft software will have a different interface by the time these kids leave school, so the important thing is teaching the kids to use computers, not about teaching them about using a particular flavour of computers."
So whose argument has been defeated? I'd say it's yours. We don't need to teach kids Microsoft software, just software. I started learning word processing on BBC Masters and Acorn Archimedeses, and I'm better with Microsoft Word than many of my colleagues who've only ever used Microsoft Word...
When the most important aspect of a singers voice is how loud they can scream, when they sound like you put a bag or gravel in a food possessor, that is a bag thing.
It is indeed. It's not my bag, it's not your bag, but it's clearly somebody's. Maybe it's my father's; he's just bought one from the shop -- it's brand new, you know.
"While your lungs were damaged after you were hit by that car, we do have good news! Using your own stem cells put in storage after your birth, we can grow a new set of lungs for transplant, with zero percent chance of rejection, and we have already started the printing process, with only 2 hours remaining."
How long was your umbilical cord? You'd be hard pressed to get enough stem cells out of a few vials of blood to build new lungs. The chances are that by the time they can get these stem cells to replicate, they'll understand enough about cell manipulation to grow completely viable stem cells from adult tissue....
If money's not a scare resource...as it isn't for many of us in the engineering/IT world...I can't see why I wouldn't pay a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to do something that has a small chance of being a life saver.
But how many things are there that have a small chance of being a lifesaver that you aren't currently doing? Having your car serviced monthly instead of every couple of years has a small chance of saving your life. Being innoculated against diseases that aren't normally fatal (but occassionally are) or that aren't prevalent in your area (but might be introduced in the future) has a small chance of saving your life. Keeping a marine-band VHF radio and flare gun in the boot(EN_US: trunk) of your car has a small chance of saving your life...
Explain that. Some processes work in reverse, but I can't see how this one would. It may just be that I'm thick, but just as a DAC is not just an ADC in reverse, I can't see how a flat fliter can work both ways.
Yes, but that fab process is for flat components. Recreating a light field evolves producing completely unidirectional emitters at a wide range of angles.
All screens project a light field -- it's just the light field of a flat surface.
As to recreating the original light-field, in theory it's not an impossible task, but it's faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar beyond current technology, as it would involve a near infinitive array of light-producing elements firing light in very specific directions. Photography and vision is the summation of light from particular sources following various paths -- you need to recreate a near-infinity of paths to create an accurate recreation of the original light-field. You'd be talking about multiple hundreds of very low power light emitting diodes for every pixel in one of todays images....
Binocular 3D is one thing, but you're still going to lose depth of field if you have to open the aperture for low light or high speed photography. Combine the two technologies and stereoscopic light-field cameras will give you the best of both worlds -- you'll be able to reproduce a full humans-eye-view image.
Although I'm not sure what practical applications that would have, except for the archives of our new genocidal alien overlords, who I for one welcome.
but I said that Lytro needs to make some changes such as enlarging the screen before the value of the device will be completely obvious to consumers.
Or they could use a smaller screen and put an eyepiece on it, making it look more or less like a spotter scope. That even gives them legitimate reason to ditch the touchscreen and replace it with a couple of buttons.
Theoretically the Lytro could do that as well, automatically focusing wherever you look, though of course, it would need to know where you're looking, which isn't something normal computers know. Clicking a mouse on the image to focus there isn't as automatic, of course, but it's similar to what we do naturally with our eyes.
have yet to take off because of the lack of a real "killer app". But tie OpenGazer (or other webcam eyetracker) to this, and you'd have a rather cool tech demo.
Actually, I think they've really missed a trick. Isn't "3D" the big trend this year? Why not launch with a zoomless stereoscopic camera that you point about like a pair of binoculars (hence small LCD requirement), then power the PC end (yes, I know, this device is Mac only for no sensible reason) with eyetracking and 3D TV support.
A gimmick, yes, but one that ticks all the zeitgeist boxes and presses all the hot buttons. Think of all the column inches talking about "taking 2.5D to real 3D" or "unlocking the third dimension" or "tackling the hidden dimension". It would advertise itself....
Slashdot Mirror
Are you suggesting that the modding system isn't free speech? You're allowed to say it, we're allowed to tell you to eff off, you vile, odious racist.
I just don't understand why Kickstarter would hold the project manager accountable for comments posted by backers, but not give the manager the ability to do anything about those comments.
Kickstarter's original complaint was that she was feeding the trolls, not that the trolls were showing up. As far as I can see, Kickstarter wanted rid of her because she was stirring up trouble, or because they were worried about the complaints coming in about a previous project. The last thing they want to do is put something in writing that is legally actionable, so they just default to the Ts & Cs in a vague way. As a course of action, it's time-tested and legally sound.
It's not that rare. One of the implications of Dunbar's number is the idea that we might not be mentally capable of accepting the sheer number of human beings in the world. If there's only 150 "people" in your mental model of the world, and it's only people that can mod down Slashdot comments, then it's not that big a step to anthropomorphise downvotes into a single "enemy"...
And you're anonymous. Which looks more stalkerish to you...?
To be honest, this has all the hallmarks of an internaut with an inflated ego who winds people up and takes their reactions as proof of a great big conspiracy of hate. I've seen a fair few people who fall into that pattern. In fact, I once had someone stalk me across newsgroups and forums in order to accuse me of stalking him.
Great, but who are you?
1: If he's so good and untraceable that the police can't track him down, how can anyone know he's been sending stuff to hundreds of victims? Each case will be untraceably separate.
2: Stalkers are not indiscriminate. Genuine stalkers get fixated on a particular individual. Hundreds of victims isn't "stalking" it's just being a serial ar$€hole.
Talking back to a genuine, real-life stalker is a very bad idea. Stalkers are generally certifiably mentally ill. They have a delusion that involves the victim. Any contact, any attention, feeds that delusion. That's one of the reasons you show never engage directly with a stalker.
Sorry, this is no plaice for such humour. This thread has jumped the shark.
"Indie" is short for "independent". Not to be confused with "newbie". An indie is an indie because they don't answer to a corporate hierarchy. If Bill Gates decided to start programming iPad games under the name "Gatekeeper Games", even he would be an "indie", despite being insanely rich.
Hmmm... prizes have been in for a bit of criticism as effectively slave labour. Get 100 teams coding a solution to your program/drafting an advertising campaign/designing your new corporate headquarters, and then pay one of them what would have been a living wage for 4 or 5 of them -- even 10, maybe-- and what looks like a major bonus to each and every one of them. In the end, the backer gets a better end product than it would have got if it had hired ten teams to start off with, and 99 teams go hungry.
Hardly a good way to build a stable economy.
The issue here is that windows is blatantly in your face on 99% of laptop and desktop computers... Linux may be running on thousands of other devices, but people don't even know it's there.
That may be the issue that you want to raise, but that is not the issue here, in this discussion. We were talking about the presence/absence of a gift economy, and Lumpy pointed out that the world more or less runs on software that was written pro bono by a bunch of altruistic devs. The lack of visibility of the OS, and the resulting lack of public awareness of the importance of the OS, is totally irrelevant.
Yes, but there is such a thing as an honest misjudgement, and people with genuine intentions underestimate challenges all the time. All financial backers, whether traditional investors or crowdfunders, have to accept that not all projects come through. So again: if a project's founders could afford to take the risk, they would not go to Kickstarter.
So while it would freeze out the fraudsters, it would also freeze out anyone with any R&D left, and would reduce Kickstarter's job to funding initial machining/manufacture and distribution set up for completed and tested prototype items.
Yes. Linux changes. Kjella never said it didn't. Kjella advocated learning skills, not specific packages. Kjella didn't even mention Linux once. The point is that the platform doesn't matter -- the skills do. You do not need a specific platform to learn the general skill.
Also, I'll commit murder if I ever meet the designers of some of the educational software platforms out there. The software aspect is absolutely lacking at the moment when it comes to educational stuff. If the software doesn't exist, then good luck at getting it down to a reasonable price. I'm still stunned that Moodle currently gets promoted as the best solution.
++Agree.
I've been teaching English as a foreign language, and I kept looking for technology to build useful exercises for my classes. The facilities in Moodle etc are abysmal. Rather than freeing the teacher, they box us in to a small selection of very limited exercise types. As a trade-off, you'd want some sort of flexibility, some sort of adaptability... but it's not there, or if it is, it's well hidden. Even the simple stuff is hard to put together, so you end up writing pretty uninspired exercises that are less effective than you originally had on paper. In the end, I sat down in front of Notepad++ and within two days of work I'd knocked up a webpage that did most of what I wanted.
I'll never regret that computer science degree -- computers aren't worth the money if you can't get them to do what you want.
Microsoft'll still be there as it's been 4 decades: Ur point's what? The kids'll grow w\ changes as we all did on MS or anyone's wares. Change is a fact of life in the field of computing, get used to it.
U fail to note that there are radically differing versions of *NIX desktops too, ala KDE vs. GNOME (& others like xfce & more and changes in them as well over time), plus the changes that occur on its attendant softwares that ride on it too (that aren't used 1/100th as much as Windows & its wares are).
Thus, Your very argument is defeated on its very basis, albeit, turned around on Linux, ala "reverse-psychology" and the numbers prove the rest for me in terms of usership/mindshare (as well as marketshare).
Wait, what?
The argument was basically "Microsoft software will have a different interface by the time these kids leave school, so the important thing is teaching the kids to use computers, not about teaching them about using a particular flavour of computers."
So whose argument has been defeated? I'd say it's yours. We don't need to teach kids Microsoft software, just software. I started learning word processing on BBC Masters and Acorn Archimedeses, and I'm better with Microsoft Word than many of my colleagues who've only ever used Microsoft Word...
If you were on the fence about buying a hybrid instead of normal ICE-only car, buy a hybrid. The more people who do that, the less oil we will need.
That'll only be true when they do something about the atrocious fuel efficiency of the hybrids....
When the most important aspect of a singers voice is how loud they can scream, when they sound like you put a bag or gravel in a food possessor, that is a bag thing.
It is indeed. It's not my bag, it's not your bag, but it's clearly somebody's. Maybe it's my father's; he's just bought one from the shop -- it's brand new, you know.
"While your lungs were damaged after you were hit by that car, we do have good news! Using your own stem cells put in storage after your birth, we can grow a new set of lungs for transplant, with zero percent chance of rejection, and we have already started the printing process, with only 2 hours remaining."
How long was your umbilical cord? You'd be hard pressed to get enough stem cells out of a few vials of blood to build new lungs. The chances are that by the time they can get these stem cells to replicate, they'll understand enough about cell manipulation to grow completely viable stem cells from adult tissue....
If money's not a scare resource...as it isn't for many of us in the engineering/IT world...I can't see why I wouldn't pay a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to do something that has a small chance of being a life saver.
But how many things are there that have a small chance of being a lifesaver that you aren't currently doing? Having your car serviced monthly instead of every couple of years has a small chance of saving your life. Being innoculated against diseases that aren't normally fatal (but occassionally are) or that aren't prevalent in your area (but might be introduced in the future) has a small chance of saving your life. Keeping a marine-band VHF radio and flare gun in the boot(EN_US: trunk) of your car has a small chance of saving your life...
Explain that. Some processes work in reverse, but I can't see how this one would. It may just be that I'm thick, but just as a DAC is not just an ADC in reverse, I can't see how a flat fliter can work both ways.
Yes, but that fab process is for flat components. Recreating a light field evolves producing completely unidirectional emitters at a wide range of angles.
All screens project a light field -- it's just the light field of a flat surface.
As to recreating the original light-field, in theory it's not an impossible task, but it's faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar beyond current technology, as it would involve a near infinitive array of light-producing elements firing light in very specific directions. Photography and vision is the summation of light from particular sources following various paths -- you need to recreate a near-infinity of paths to create an accurate recreation of the original light-field. You'd be talking about multiple hundreds of very low power light emitting diodes for every pixel in one of todays images....
Binocular 3D is one thing, but you're still going to lose depth of field if you have to open the aperture for low light or high speed photography. Combine the two technologies and stereoscopic light-field cameras will give you the best of both worlds -- you'll be able to reproduce a full humans-eye-view image.
Although I'm not sure what practical applications that would have, except for the archives of our new genocidal alien overlords, who I for one welcome.
but I said that Lytro needs to make some changes such as enlarging the screen before the value of the device will be completely obvious to consumers.
Or they could use a smaller screen and put an eyepiece on it, making it look more or less like a spotter scope. That even gives them legitimate reason to ditch the touchscreen and replace it with a couple of buttons.
Theoretically the Lytro could do that as well, automatically focusing wherever you look, though of course, it would need to know where you're looking, which isn't something normal computers know. Clicking a mouse on the image to focus there isn't as automatic, of course, but it's similar to what we do naturally with our eyes.
Projects like OpenGazer
have yet to take off because of the lack of a real "killer app". But tie OpenGazer (or other webcam eyetracker) to this, and you'd have a rather cool tech demo.
Actually, I think they've really missed a trick. Isn't "3D" the big trend this year? Why not launch with a zoomless stereoscopic camera that you point about like a pair of binoculars (hence small LCD requirement), then power the PC end (yes, I know, this device is Mac only for no sensible reason) with eyetracking and 3D TV support.
A gimmick, yes, but one that ticks all the zeitgeist boxes and presses all the hot buttons. Think of all the column inches talking about "taking 2.5D to real 3D" or "unlocking the third dimension" or "tackling the hidden dimension". It would advertise itself....