Yeah, like their stupid mail reader, which incidentally doesn't even seem to have a name (try to tell a user the difference between his email and the program used to read email) which doesn't have the usual security enhancements because... that would be too many buttons to clic ?
Sorry, but you're misinformed about this. I've currently got two accounts set up in Mail.app: one using POP3/SMTP, and one using IMAP/SMTP. Both are using SSL, for all server connections. It was pretty painless to set up, too.
In the preferences dialog's Accounts section, select the account you're configuring from the list on the left, and then select the Advanced tab on the right. There's a checkbox for whether or not to use SSL. The port configuration just to its left will auto-update to the default correct value as you check and uncheck it.
For the SMTP server, open the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) dropdown on the Account Information tab; select Edit SMTP Server List; check the Use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) checkbox.
Yup. With most browser default settings, if you have a Facebook account that you've logged into even once since you last completely cleared your cookies and cache, and you see a Facebook icon on any website you visit, Facebook records that you visited that website (regardless of whether you're currently logged into Facebook or not, it's going by cookie-tracking not login).
How does that work, exactly? I mean, how does some random website at foo.com get access to cookies which are set by facebook.com or static.ak.fbcdn.net or whatever?
I ask out of genuine curiosity. I see FB "Like" buttons all over the web lately, and plenty of sites offer to let me log into my Facebook account for a more social-tastic experience, but none of them seem to know who I actually am, even if I'm logged into Facebook in another tab at the time.
I run Adblock Plus and also don't accept 3rd-party cookies, but from what I know of the cookie protocol, that isn't really relevant, since the 3rd-party cookies I'm refusing would have to be set from iframes anyway, which iframes again wouldn't be able to cross-communicate with the page at foo.com...
I'd also argue that going to a religious text just to pickout a basic moral framework is kinda pointless - there are easier and more basic ways to do that. That's like buying a computer because you need a 6" length of copper wire. Sure it's in there, but there are far more efficient ways to get it.
Brilliant quote, thanks. I'd make it my sig if it'd fit.:)
have you ever had to edit your java code because Sun (or a third party) changed their exception specification? You might end up having to modify all the functions in the call chain!
That's exactly one of the issues checked exceptions are meant to deal with - if the exception-throwing behavior of code you call changes, you get notified during compilation so that you can update your own code (either by handling the new exceptions, or passing them on). That's not bad, that's good!
What's the practical alternative? A random new exception shows up in your error logs one day, and you think huh.. guess they changed their exception spec?
To each his own, as you said, but I love Java's checked exceptions. One thing I hate about C# is that it won't even let me optionally specify each function's exceptions.
There're no third party mail apps for the iPhone (since Apple doesn't allow "duplication of functionality")
Actually, there are 3rd-party mail apps for iPhone, e.g. AltaMail, which I use. There are probably others too, though I have no idea whether any of them support S/MIME.
Your basic point stands, of course - I just wanted to point out that whatever official reasons it gives for App-Store rejections, Apple only "plays rough" with apps submissions when it feels like they challenge its core business, not merely because they duplicate Apple-provided functionality.
in my perfect world, you will all agree with me and get together and take up a collection to buy me a fully functional animatronic Natalie Portman.
Dude, it's your perfect world.. why not just go for the gusto and wish for the actual Natalie Portman?
:-)
Re:If you ever lived in a foreign country
on
Censorship By Glut
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· Score: 1
I hadn't ever thought about it that way: if the world pretty much revolves around you, you're not really self-centered.
Yeah.. or maybe it's more accurate to say that you are self-centered, but with just cause.:)
As an aside: I think that a similar effect is partially behind the fact that so few Americans speak a second language. Most places except America, there's at least one "obvious" second language to learn (and English is often that language) - but for Americans, it's not obvious what a good second language to pick up would be. So a Swede, say, has more compelling reasons to pick up English that I do to pick up Swedish.
And, indeed, that's exactly what Bennet Hazelton is writing about: people watch what everyone else is watching, and then even more people do, and what everyone else is watching is the story about Annette's cat.
Yep, you're right on here. And with "entertainment" (e.g. music), I don't really consider it a problem.
And, because reality is a collective hunch, that *is* what's important, as much as we might like to argue the point.
On this point, I disagree with you, though. In the realm of ideas (not entertainment), some ideas have value aside from simple popularity.
What you're saying is like, say, suggesting that candy is the best food because most kids naturally like to eat it more than vegetables. But food has a nutrition value that we can define and measure separately from its flavor, and which is important to our health and thus long-term happiness, not just immediate gratification.
I think that there are "nutritious" ideas, including a general awareness of what's going on in the world politically and economically, and that it's important for us to find a way to spread those ideas to everyone. That's what news used to do, but in an open info-entertainment market, it has to compete with entertainment, and it seems to be doing so by becoming entertainment itself.
I don't know how to fix that problem.:-/ But I think it's pretty important that we try.
IJ is in my opinion the best novel in the english language,
and DFW's suicide at such a young age is a huge loss to literature.
I agree; IJ has meant a lot to me each time I've read it, although it especially blew my mind the first time. It's an amazing masterpiece.
I'm in my 30s, and this is the first "celebrity death" I've ever really been sad and upset about. Even Vonnegut's passing didn't affect me like this..:-/
You already got a ton of good answers, but I'd add this rule: whatever else is true, if there is anyone alive who knew the founder and/or recalls the founding, it's a cult.
By that measure, Scientology is still a cult, and will be for another couple of decades; whereas Mormonism, which was undoubtedly a cult ~150-200 years ago, is now a religion.
Blade Runner was great, but left out every shred of thought (Mercerism, Mood Machines, radiation poisoning, social significance of real pets vs. synthetic ones, etc) in favor of film noir.
Yeah, they left out a lot, but they added some things of real significance too..
Actually, Blade Runner is the only PKD "adaptation" that I like better than the original story. By removing things like Mercerism, they were able to pare the story down to its essence, and make Deckard a replicant. Which if you think about it only makes sense - like they're going to be using actual people to do dirty work like tracking down escaped replicants? Hardly.
It's actually a little surprising to me that PKD overlooked (or just chose to forgo) that angle, especially when you consider A Scanner Darkly's plot, of stories like Second Variety..
So while Blade Runner might be kind of a poor adaptation of Do Androids Dream, it's a pretty brilliant story in its own way.
Am I the only one here that has no problem with the genetic engineering of humans?
Eh, I'm in favor of using it to help eliminate diseases & similar problems. But using it to "improve" people? Well.. that's a little scary.
If genetically-engineered improvements became widespread, how would I continue to compete in the marketplace, for a mate, etc? Especially because since I'm 33 now, those genetically-improved super people would be reaching their prime about the time I'm reaching old age.. I'd be just an elderly, stale, useless "old-style" human. Old age is going to be hard enough as it is.
So I fear that. And honestly, whatever people might say about the issue, I think that at core most people who are opposed to creating "super people" are so at least partly (and maybe mainly) because of some variation on this same basic fear.
Plus if you read about the history of Eugenics, I think it's obvious that creepy, scary people are drawn to the idea of creating a race/sub-race of "super people". However good our initial intentions are, the genetic engineering is likely to be hijacked by unsavory types at some point.
I'm normally not a luddite at all. Heck, if we were talking about cybernetic enhancements, I'd be among the first to volunteer for an implant or augmentation. But genetically engineering people who'd look down on us for our comparative frailty, or stupidity, or whatever - that just doesn't seem very wise, know what I mean?
Apple has been doing the same thing for YEARS, yet it hasn't really been an issue for MacOS users.
They used to, yeah, in OS 9 and below; OS X doesn't though. Instead it lets you configure which already-installed app gets launched when discs of various types (music, video, photo, blank) are inserted.
For data discs, you an icon is shown on the desktop, and as a vendor shipping a disc, you can give that disc's root folder a nice background image, lay out the icons so that the readme and/or installer is highlighted, etc.
The fact that it autoruns is irrelevant. That just saves them a couple clicks of a mouse, or a bit of typing. Either way, if it's infected, they're going to have problems as soon as they try to use the content on the disc.
Eh.. I suppose that use-case is accurate sometimes - like for software install discs I've already decided to trust, like a game disc, or my Visual Studio installation disc. But what if I, say, got a shareware disc in a magazine, and I just want to check out the software, read the readme first, etc?
Plus, the Sony Rootkit fiasco highlighted that autorun, even if it's helpful in some cases, is overused and/or gives too much control to the disc: even though most people would think of a music CD as safe - it's "just music" - Sony was still able to autorun programs from those discs. That's just stupid. And it's not like a user can tell whether a CD-like object is really just a music CD or not by looking at it - you have to put it in your drive in order to tell, at which point it might be too late, if autorun is on.
No, I think the best you can say about autorun is that it was conceived in a simpler era; the people who created it just didn't forsee the consequences in today's world.
Making P2P more efficient by aligning peer selection with ISP structure makes the ISP side less grouchy about it. This is good. The more precisely you can do that, the more you reduce the impact on the ISP's performance and costs
Yeah... maybe. Or maybe heavy BitTorrent users will just download more stuff in the same amount of time, keeping last-mile network utilization constant.
Basically, most of the "recreational" P2P users I've known just download as much as they reasonably can; the faster their network connection, the more they download.
So more efficient P2P algorithms will help keep network utilization down from people like me (I use BitTorrent occasionally to download large files when it's convenient, or is the default method, such as with ISOs). But for recreational BitTorrent users, I don't think it necessarily holds true that the amount downloaded will remain constant, with Ono's improvement resulting in overall network utilization decreasing - instead, I think those users will keep their network use the same, and the amount they download will go up. And those are the users ISPs are currently concerned about, not casual/occasional P2P users like me.
Something like Ono may allow for "official" BitTorrent-based distribution (such as commercially-backed video download services) to have less impact on the network, which might make the ISPs happier... although many ISPs seem mostly to want to kill or co-opt those services too, because they're also cable operators, and perceive them as competitors.
Interesting thought. I like it just because it's such a cool hack, but it might actually be useful too.:)
As another poster pointed out, some work would have to be done making it cross-browser-compatible first (and to deal with missing fonts, etc). But aside from that, it might be a useful step forward in the arms race against CAPTCHA crackers.
It wouldn't be an absolute solution - if I was trying to crack it, I'd probably embed Gecko in to my program, let Gecko render it just as a user would see it, then grab the rendered image as pixels and move on as before - but it would raise the bar somewhat..
Actually, this is a bit different - and much more unique and impressive, IMHO. I can't get to the first link (slashdotted already), but the Bush portrait and this Homer are both made using overlapping bits of various font characters, sized and colored using CSS, to make the curves and lines of the picture.
View source on that Homer "image" to see what I mean - the artist basically used font characters as a palette of vectors, and clipped out just the partial shape of each character that he wanted, using CSS properties.
As a result, instead of bloating to many MB, that Homer picture is only ~16KB. Bush is only ~32KB.
Translating pixels into an HTML table is not that interesting now.. I mean, I was excited when my brother wrote an app to do that about 8 years ago, and I even wrote a little companion app that parsed ANSI escape sequences and turned ANSI art into HTML tables too, but that was back then.:)
This, on the other hand, is really original and unique. I'm pretty impressed by it.
Thanks for posting, I agree with pretty much all of your points (although I still do currently eat meat). Including the one about god, if he existed, being a sick & twisted bastard.:)
One question though; when you said:
Most people have no clue how extreme of an impact eating meat has on the environment. A staggering, mind-boggling big impact. 1/3 of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to growing meat.
your link actually leads to an article about "Metacognition in the Rat", not (as I expected) to something detailing the environmental impact of current meat-production practices. Did you maybe just accidentally link to the wrong URL? If so, do you have a correct one handy? I'd like to follow up on a couple of your statements, especially those regarding land use for growing meat, and greenhouse-gas release.
Yeah, that's an old idea - one SF story I recall addressing it is "The Euphio Question" by Kurt Vonnegut; that was published in Welcome to the Monkey House, in 1968.
But sometimes that kind of thing gets past the authorities, at least for a while. One way that happens is if it has therapeutic uses - then it's generally not completely outlawed, just somewhat controlled, with that control delegated to the medical community. And so then it of course it's available in the black market.
An orgasm-inducing helmet would certainly be therapeutic in many cases, so it might be more apt to compare it to OxyContin than to heroin..
That's not to say there aren't flaws, however. Allowing synchronization on any reference was a mistake, IMO.
Just out of curiosity, why do you think that was a mistake?
(I'm not arguing the point.. in fact I have no opinion on it one way or another. Just wondering what you've run into that's made you decide that wasn't a good idea.)
Well, that just confirms my belief that this is an issue we need to fight at the social/legal level, and not rely on technical workarounds for. IOW, our status as the technically adept (and maybe socially less-adept), while it may "protect" us against Facebook now, is not a long-term solution for the issue..
On the one hand, you want to be able to post pictures of yourself passed out in your own vomit, stripped down to your panties and french kissing another sorority sister, and simulating fellatio on a blow up doll. On the other hand, you don't want people to be able to copy the pictures and send them around the web.
No, people don't want Facebook itself to share their pictures, posts and movie ratings for them. They generally understand that their friends may do so, and accept that risk (just as they accept or even welcome the idea that people who were at a party in person with them will gossip about that incident with the lampshade..)
And that's not at all unreasonable. People sign up for social networking sites in order to share photos and stories with their friends & acquaintances, not teh internets at large. Just as your ISP could republish the contents of your emails or your browsing history, or MS could republish every thing you ever type into a Word document, it's reasonable to expect them not to. Why do so many slashdotters think it's not reasonable to expect the same of Facebook?
In fact, Facebook is violating the expectations of users, and is therefore facing blowback from them. While users' expectations may be unrealistic in this case, they are not at all unreasonable. And while most slashdotters would be incensed to find that MS was republishing - or even just tracking - the contents of our Word documents, unless we explicitly opted out for each document, many here seem to think it's just dandy if Facebook does the equivalent, and if Facebook's users don't like it, screw 'em.
Yes, sure, people should read Facebook's TOS more carefully. No argument there. But a general contract of trust has been established over time between users and application/service providers, and Facebook is definitely pushing the line on that; it's Facebook who's in the wrong, even if its users are being a little naive.
The only Notepad specific "file type" is a.LOG text file, where the ASCII '.', 'L', 'O', 'G' is the file magic in the first four characters (might require after, I forget). It appends the date and time whenever you open the file.
Wow - weird, I had no idea there was any such feature buried in Notepad. Textpad emulates the behavior too, interestingly enough..
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, like their stupid mail reader, which incidentally doesn't even seem to have a name (try to tell a user the difference between his email and the program used to read email) which doesn't have the usual security enhancements because... that would be too many buttons to clic ?
Sorry, but you're misinformed about this. I've currently got two accounts set up in Mail.app: one using POP3/SMTP, and one using IMAP/SMTP. Both are using SSL, for all server connections. It was pretty painless to set up, too.
In the preferences dialog's Accounts section, select the account you're configuring from the list on the left, and then select the Advanced tab on the right. There's a checkbox for whether or not to use SSL. The port configuration just to its left will auto-update to the default correct value as you check and uncheck it.
For the SMTP server, open the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) dropdown on the Account Information tab; select Edit SMTP Server List; check the Use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) checkbox.
Yup. With most browser default settings, if you have a Facebook account that you've logged into even once since you last completely cleared your cookies and cache, and you see a Facebook icon on any website you visit, Facebook records that you visited that website (regardless of whether you're currently logged into Facebook or not, it's going by cookie-tracking not login).
How does that work, exactly? I mean, how does some random website at foo.com get access to cookies which are set by facebook.com or static.ak.fbcdn.net or whatever?
I ask out of genuine curiosity. I see FB "Like" buttons all over the web lately, and plenty of sites offer to let me log into my Facebook account for a more social-tastic experience, but none of them seem to know who I actually am, even if I'm logged into Facebook in another tab at the time.
I run Adblock Plus and also don't accept 3rd-party cookies, but from what I know of the cookie protocol, that isn't really relevant, since the 3rd-party cookies I'm refusing would have to be set from iframes anyway, which iframes again wouldn't be able to cross-communicate with the page at foo.com...
I'd also argue that going to a religious text just to pickout a basic moral framework is kinda pointless - there are easier and more basic ways to do that. That's like buying a computer because you need a 6" length of copper wire. Sure it's in there, but there are far more efficient ways to get it.
Brilliant quote, thanks. I'd make it my sig if it'd fit. :)
have you ever had to edit your java code because Sun (or a third party) changed their exception specification? You might end up having to modify all the functions in the call chain!
That's exactly one of the issues checked exceptions are meant to deal with - if the exception-throwing behavior of code you call changes, you get notified during compilation so that you can update your own code (either by handling the new exceptions, or passing them on). That's not bad, that's good!
What's the practical alternative? A random new exception shows up in your error logs one day, and you think huh.. guess they changed their exception spec?
To each his own, as you said, but I love Java's checked exceptions. One thing I hate about C# is that it won't even let me optionally specify each function's exceptions.
There're no third party mail apps for the iPhone (since Apple doesn't allow "duplication of functionality")
Actually, there are 3rd-party mail apps for iPhone, e.g. AltaMail, which I use. There are probably others too, though I have no idea whether any of them support S/MIME.
Your basic point stands, of course - I just wanted to point out that whatever official reasons it gives for App-Store rejections, Apple only "plays rough" with apps submissions when it feels like they challenge its core business, not merely because they duplicate Apple-provided functionality.
I dress professionally [...] I don't even wear glasses.
Or pants, apparently.. um, which profession did you say you were in, again? :)
in my perfect world, you will all agree with me and get together and take up a collection to buy me a fully functional animatronic Natalie Portman.
Dude, it's your perfect world.. why not just go for the gusto and wish for the actual Natalie Portman?
I hadn't ever thought about it that way: if the world pretty much revolves around you, you're not really self-centered.
Yeah.. or maybe it's more accurate to say that you are self-centered, but with just cause. :)
As an aside: I think that a similar effect is partially behind the fact that so few Americans speak a second language. Most places except America, there's at least one "obvious" second language to learn (and English is often that language) - but for Americans, it's not obvious what a good second language to pick up would be. So a Swede, say, has more compelling reasons to pick up English that I do to pick up Swedish.
And, indeed, that's exactly what Bennet Hazelton is writing about: people watch what everyone else is watching, and then even more people do, and what everyone else is watching is the story about Annette's cat.
Yep, you're right on here. And with "entertainment" (e.g. music), I don't really consider it a problem.
And, because reality is a collective hunch, that *is* what's important, as much as we might like to argue the point.
On this point, I disagree with you, though. In the realm of ideas (not entertainment), some ideas have value aside from simple popularity.
What you're saying is like, say, suggesting that candy is the best food because most kids naturally like to eat it more than vegetables. But food has a nutrition value that we can define and measure separately from its flavor, and which is important to our health and thus long-term happiness, not just immediate gratification.
I think that there are "nutritious" ideas, including a general awareness of what's going on in the world politically and economically, and that it's important for us to find a way to spread those ideas to everyone. That's what news used to do, but in an open info-entertainment market, it has to compete with entertainment, and it seems to be doing so by becoming entertainment itself.
I don't know how to fix that problem. :-/ But I think it's pretty important that we try.
IJ is in my opinion the best novel in the english language,
and DFW's suicide at such a young age is a huge loss to literature.
I agree; IJ has meant a lot to me each time I've read it, although it especially blew my mind the first time. It's an amazing masterpiece.
I'm in my 30s, and this is the first "celebrity death" I've ever really been sad and upset about. Even Vonnegut's passing didn't affect me like this.. :-/
You already got a ton of good answers, but I'd add this rule: whatever else is true, if there is anyone alive who knew the founder and/or recalls the founding, it's a cult.
By that measure, Scientology is still a cult, and will be for another couple of decades; whereas Mormonism, which was undoubtedly a cult ~150-200 years ago, is now a religion.
Of course you will. But at least nobody will be able to say so.
:)
Yeah, they left out a lot, but they added some things of real significance too..
Actually, Blade Runner is the only PKD "adaptation" that I like better than the original story. By removing things like Mercerism, they were able to pare the story down to its essence, and make Deckard a replicant. Which if you think about it only makes sense - like they're going to be using actual people to do dirty work like tracking down escaped replicants? Hardly.
It's actually a little surprising to me that PKD overlooked (or just chose to forgo) that angle, especially when you consider A Scanner Darkly's plot, of stories like Second Variety..
So while Blade Runner might be kind of a poor adaptation of Do Androids Dream, it's a pretty brilliant story in its own way.
Eh, I'm in favor of using it to help eliminate diseases & similar problems. But using it to "improve" people? Well.. that's a little scary.
If genetically-engineered improvements became widespread, how would I continue to compete in the marketplace, for a mate, etc? Especially because since I'm 33 now, those genetically-improved super people would be reaching their prime about the time I'm reaching old age.. I'd be just an elderly, stale, useless "old-style" human. Old age is going to be hard enough as it is.
So I fear that. And honestly, whatever people might say about the issue, I think that at core most people who are opposed to creating "super people" are so at least partly (and maybe mainly) because of some variation on this same basic fear.
Plus if you read about the history of Eugenics, I think it's obvious that creepy, scary people are drawn to the idea of creating a race/sub-race of "super people". However good our initial intentions are, the genetic engineering is likely to be hijacked by unsavory types at some point.
I'm normally not a luddite at all. Heck, if we were talking about cybernetic enhancements, I'd be among the first to volunteer for an implant or augmentation. But genetically engineering people who'd look down on us for our comparative frailty, or stupidity, or whatever - that just doesn't seem very wise, know what I mean?
They used to, yeah, in OS 9 and below; OS X doesn't though. Instead it lets you configure which already-installed app gets launched when discs of various types (music, video, photo, blank) are inserted.
For data discs, you an icon is shown on the desktop, and as a vendor shipping a disc, you can give that disc's root folder a nice background image, lay out the icons so that the readme and/or installer is highlighted, etc.
The fact that it autoruns is irrelevant. That just saves them a couple clicks of a mouse, or a bit of typing. Either way, if it's infected, they're going to have problems as soon as they try to use the content on the disc.Eh.. I suppose that use-case is accurate sometimes - like for software install discs I've already decided to trust, like a game disc, or my Visual Studio installation disc. But what if I, say, got a shareware disc in a magazine, and I just want to check out the software, read the readme first, etc?
Plus, the Sony Rootkit fiasco highlighted that autorun, even if it's helpful in some cases, is overused and/or gives too much control to the disc: even though most people would think of a music CD as safe - it's "just music" - Sony was still able to autorun programs from those discs. That's just stupid. And it's not like a user can tell whether a CD-like object is really just a music CD or not by looking at it - you have to put it in your drive in order to tell, at which point it might be too late, if autorun is on.
No, I think the best you can say about autorun is that it was conceived in a simpler era; the people who created it just didn't forsee the consequences in today's world.
Have you conclusively eliminated even the smallest chance that one can exist?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
Yeah... maybe. Or maybe heavy BitTorrent users will just download more stuff in the same amount of time, keeping last-mile network utilization constant.
Basically, most of the "recreational" P2P users I've known just download as much as they reasonably can; the faster their network connection, the more they download.
So more efficient P2P algorithms will help keep network utilization down from people like me (I use BitTorrent occasionally to download large files when it's convenient, or is the default method, such as with ISOs). But for recreational BitTorrent users, I don't think it necessarily holds true that the amount downloaded will remain constant, with Ono's improvement resulting in overall network utilization decreasing - instead, I think those users will keep their network use the same, and the amount they download will go up. And those are the users ISPs are currently concerned about, not casual/occasional P2P users like me.
Something like Ono may allow for "official" BitTorrent-based distribution (such as commercially-backed video download services) to have less impact on the network, which might make the ISPs happier... although many ISPs seem mostly to want to kill or co-opt those services too, because they're also cable operators, and perceive them as competitors.
Interesting thought. I like it just because it's such a cool hack, but it might actually be useful too. :)
As another poster pointed out, some work would have to be done making it cross-browser-compatible first (and to deal with missing fonts, etc). But aside from that, it might be a useful step forward in the arms race against CAPTCHA crackers.
It wouldn't be an absolute solution - if I was trying to crack it, I'd probably embed Gecko in to my program, let Gecko render it just as a user would see it, then grab the rendered image as pixels and move on as before - but it would raise the bar somewhat..
Actually, this is a bit different - and much more unique and impressive, IMHO. I can't get to the first link (slashdotted already), but the Bush portrait and this Homer are both made using overlapping bits of various font characters, sized and colored using CSS, to make the curves and lines of the picture.
View source on that Homer "image" to see what I mean - the artist basically used font characters as a palette of vectors, and clipped out just the partial shape of each character that he wanted, using CSS properties.
As a result, instead of bloating to many MB, that Homer picture is only ~16KB. Bush is only ~32KB.
Translating pixels into an HTML table is not that interesting now.. I mean, I was excited when my brother wrote an app to do that about 8 years ago, and I even wrote a little companion app that parsed ANSI escape sequences and turned ANSI art into HTML tables too, but that was back then. :)
This, on the other hand, is really original and unique. I'm pretty impressed by it.
Thanks for posting, I agree with pretty much all of your points (although I still do currently eat meat). Including the one about god, if he existed, being a sick & twisted bastard. :)
One question though; when you said:
your link actually leads to an article about "Metacognition in the Rat", not (as I expected) to something detailing the environmental impact of current meat-production practices. Did you maybe just accidentally link to the wrong URL? If so, do you have a correct one handy? I'd like to follow up on a couple of your statements, especially those regarding land use for growing meat, and greenhouse-gas release.
Thanks, and have a better one..
Yeah, that's an old idea - one SF story I recall addressing it is "The Euphio Question" by Kurt Vonnegut; that was published in Welcome to the Monkey House, in 1968.
But sometimes that kind of thing gets past the authorities, at least for a while. One way that happens is if it has therapeutic uses - then it's generally not completely outlawed, just somewhat controlled, with that control delegated to the medical community. And so then it of course it's available in the black market.
An orgasm-inducing helmet would certainly be therapeutic in many cases, so it might be more apt to compare it to OxyContin than to heroin..
Just out of curiosity, why do you think that was a mistake?
(I'm not arguing the point.. in fact I have no opinion on it one way or another. Just wondering what you've run into that's made you decide that wasn't a good idea.)
Replying to myself, but from a comment on another recent /. story, I learned that some ISPs may be selling users' browsing habits to advertisers, too:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=482074&cid=22703796
*sigh*
Well, that just confirms my belief that this is an issue we need to fight at the social/legal level, and not rely on technical workarounds for. IOW, our status as the technically adept (and maybe socially less-adept), while it may "protect" us against Facebook now, is not a long-term solution for the issue..
No, people don't want Facebook itself to share their pictures, posts and movie ratings for them. They generally understand that their friends may do so, and accept that risk (just as they accept or even welcome the idea that people who were at a party in person with them will gossip about that incident with the lampshade..)
And that's not at all unreasonable. People sign up for social networking sites in order to share photos and stories with their friends & acquaintances, not teh internets at large. Just as your ISP could republish the contents of your emails or your browsing history, or MS could republish every thing you ever type into a Word document, it's reasonable to expect them not to. Why do so many slashdotters think it's not reasonable to expect the same of Facebook?
In fact, Facebook is violating the expectations of users, and is therefore facing blowback from them. While users' expectations may be unrealistic in this case, they are not at all unreasonable. And while most slashdotters would be incensed to find that MS was republishing - or even just tracking - the contents of our Word documents, unless we explicitly opted out for each document, many here seem to think it's just dandy if Facebook does the equivalent, and if Facebook's users don't like it, screw 'em.
Yes, sure, people should read Facebook's TOS more carefully. No argument there. But a general contract of trust has been established over time between users and application/service providers, and Facebook is definitely pushing the line on that; it's Facebook who's in the wrong, even if its users are being a little naive.
Clotaire Rapaille.
http://www.randomhouse.com/broadway/culturecode/Wow - weird, I had no idea there was any such feature buried in Notepad. Textpad emulates the behavior too, interestingly enough..