Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.
Dang if you don't sound exactly like my grandmother complaining about those no-talent Beatles and any jazz artist younger than Artie Shaw.
I doubt that there is any such thing as "intrinsic" beauty and art devoid of cultural context. Art is one of the things that defines a culture. Due to the hegemony of classic Western ideals, most people are familiar with the conventions of representational art as practiced by the ancient Greek and Roman sculptors and the painters of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, so most of us can relate to it and experience it as beautiful.
It doesn't necessarily make sense or look beautiful to someone growing up in a non-Western culture where aesthetics might not be as strongly influenced by a reductionist point of view that can find beauty in compositional rules based on the ratios of small integers. They may not appreciate the skill that it takes to project a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional canvas and the acute observation it takes to emulate the effect of lighting on a variety of surfaces, because such values are not important in their culture.
Abstract art doesn't make sense to a lot of people because it doesn't try to represent anything; it's just itself, the paint and the canvas and the actions of the painter that brought it into being. It was the product of a culture that was reacting to and trying to move beyond the idea of painting as a skillful representation of something else. It can be ugly or meaningless to someone attached to classical art, but to claim the opposite, that the work of the old masters is intrinsically more beautiful, I think is mistaken.
I wrote off all social media long ago, I don't even keep track. No thanks, spy on someone else.
It's really no different than Usenet. Except with Usenet you don't have any control at all over who sees your post. Ever. It's not Facebook's or Google's fault that you can't figure out the filtering.
--
BMO
Google's privacy controls are pretty transparent, but Facebook appears to deliberately obfuscate their privacy settings, and the policies change frequently. I believe Facebook does this deliberately in order to maximize the amount of personal info their customers and 3rd party developers have access to.
Usenet was indeed a form of computer-mediated social networking long before the term was invented, but otherwise there are not many similarities. Nobody had any expectation of privacy on Usenet; all you had to do was grep through the raw feed to find anything you want. Facebook on the other hand promises privacy control but in practice they actively thwart it and only provide the illusion of privacy. They always have complete access to your info even if their customers don't.
Exactly my thought. I'm thinking of it as a replacement for the Linksys NSLU2 slugs I've been using as media servers for the past 6 years or so. And since X11 is available for the platform then we'll have interactive terminals, editors, and graphical clients running on the Raspberry Pi that don't need a local graphics display (which is the case for the Linksys NSLU2).
Collectively we humans are a primitive bunch. We can't even handle differences in skin color without inspiring murder and war.
Imagine increasing numbers of privileged people with the resources for self-augmentation actually wandering around with pieces of metal and electronics permanently protruding from their faces (especially hardware that gets in the way of eye contact). I could see a bit of a problem with societal acceptance, especially if there's no way to know if they are recording your interactions with them.
Until such self-augmentation becomes invisible in casual encounters I'd say it's a really bad idea to make them permanent.
Very true. I was recently trying to buy tickets to a showing of Prometheus at the local Sundance Kabuki theatre in San Francisco. Google Search was totally broken for the task -- it kept giving me the showtimes itself instead of a link to the theater's own site, and all the links it provided were to reviews of the movies that were playing there. I had to finally guess the proper url (it was something like sundancecinemas.com) to actually get to the site where I could purchase the tickets and reserve the seats online.
On another occassion, I was using the iOS Google Maps app to navigate around Point Reyes. I was trying to get directions to a bed and breakfast that we had reservations for, but Google couldn't find it and instead uselessly kept suggesting routes to a totally different "sponsored" bed and breakfast... it was infuriating. I finally gave up, pulled an old frayed paper road map out of the glove compartment, and called the place for directions.
Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it accessible doesn't seem to apply if Google can find a way to insert itself between you and your goal for the purposes of advertising.
Forgive my ignorance, but does the encrypted nature of SPDY along with no option for middle-men mean that ad blockers would no longer be possible? That is, do browser plug-ins effectively function as middle-men?
Probably the best shows Viacom has to offer, and they're both on break right now. I predict that Viacom and DirecTV will resolve their difficulties before they're off break on Monday the 16th and the shit really hits the fan.
One of DirecTV's complaints about Viacom is that they're paying too much for feeds of shows like Colbert Report that Viacom gives away for free. And so Viacom is now able to tell DirecTV that they no longer provide such content for free.
Android doesn't use X11 because it's intended to run on low-power, memory-constrained devices.
MacOS doesn't use X11 because it's a consumer OS. Consumers typically don't set up networks of desktop machines in their homes and don't expect to be able to run native applications on remote machines while displaying and interacting with them on their local desktops.
X11 is incredibly useful for engineers and technical people who use multiple Unix and Linux hosts to get their work done. Any other environment feels like working in a closet. X11 is complicated because the requirements are complicated. That's no reason to throw out 30 years of development and refinement.
I guess the inevitable conclusion is that Ubuntu and Wayland developers don't care about engineers, professionals, and dedicated hackers. Good luck competing with Apple and Microsoft! In the meantime your core base will move on.
I've been reading all the comments, and it wasn't until I read the parent here that it finally hit me: Wayland integrates the window manager.
This is an amazing leap backward. And on top of that, clients must provide their own window decorations? I can't even imagine what this will do to UI consistency, usability, and appearance.
The latest Roku 2 XS streamers are preloaded with Angry Birds, while games like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are available for purchase. It uses a bluetooth motion controller like the Wii for playing, and costs $100. It looks exactly like the casual TV gaming market niche that Ouya is targeting, so I wonder if they really have a chance competing with such an established player.
I don't know where I read it, but from what I understand the Google Glasses are supposed to have a touch-sensitive surface somewhere on the frame next to the temple.
Not the stupid 'get paid wages' argument again! Here is a clue for you: the ONLY reason you get paid a wage is because someone else expects to make more off of your work than they paid you to do the work.
No, often you get paid a wage because someone wants you to provide a good or a service that they actually need or want. For example, I pay a house painter $X/hour because the house looks like crap and I want it to look nice. I'm not going to sell the house, I just want to live in it. I paid a musician to play at my wedding because I wanted the experience of live music at my wedding, not because I wanted to record it and sell it.
And it actually appears to have some innovation behind it, display results and the provoking queries on the same screen in a way that makes it easier to navigate between them:
Everybody here is commenting on the wonders of the completed system: fully networked autonomous cars communicating and coordinating with each other. But to get there, we have to go through a period of time, perhaps decades, when autonomous cars are mixed with human-driven cars. How are the ultra-conservative and safe autonomous cars going to interact with cars driven by emotional humans who are probably going to throw road-rage fits at cars traveling 55mph on major freeways?
I know from personal experience living in the Boston area that anyone obeying the laws and driving conservatively is not going to make any headway against aggressive commuters. Negotiatiing 4-way stop signs even in quiet neighborhoods is often a game of chicken... will these autonomous cars have enough AI to deal with griefers actively trying to mess with them, and to do so safely?
Liability is another interesting issue. From what I understand, the occupants of an autonomous car will still be liable for any accidents. Even if the driverless cars have just 0.1% the accident rate of human-driven cars, that's still tens of fatalities every year in the USA. Much of the attraction of a driverless car will be gone if you still feel like you have to pay attention to the road to avoid a massive liability in case of a rare accident.
Those were simpler times... Google has a lot more data acquisition capabilities, market power, and social influence now than Microsoft ever had. They practically defeated SOPA single-handedly with a single ad on their main web page (yes, Wikipedia helped a bit). Sure, they've pledged to "don't be evil", and for the moment I'm inclined to give their current leadership the benefit of the doubt, but ten years out and who knows who'll be in control of all their data...
Google still makes a ton of money, but clearly that advertising cash cow can't go on forever. If Google ever decided to turn evil in order to raise profits then the public could be in a lot of trouble without the oversight. I welcome it even though I don't necessarily trust the FTC either.
How about turning around and looking behind you before you back up?
The referenced articles all seem to refer to the blind spots that can occur when you depend solely on your mirrors for situational awareness. This is appropriate when you're on the highway, driving at a high rate of speed, and with all the other cars around you going in the same direction.
Presumably, you are not moving forward when you initiate backing up. That means there's plenty of time, and yes, an obligation, to turn around, look over your shoulder, and look directly for obstacles, especially other people, before and during the entire time you're moving backwards.
It's interesting that liability for accidents still lies entirely with the operator. This kind of takes away from the attraction of the concept: if the technology fails for whatever reason when you fall asleep or you're reaching around to deal with kids in the back seat, and the fault is still yours, then how many people are going to be willing to assume that level of risk?
On the other hand, if the liability rests with the manufacturer, then it's hard to imagine this technology deployed on a wide scale. Even if self-driving cars are 100 times safer than manual driving, that's still 300 - 400 fatalities a year that will dropped into the laps of the manufacturers, who will likely be sued for millions of dollars given that they have a lot more money than most people, in addition to suffering the effects of extremely negative publicity.
I also have to wonder how self-driving cars will handle anti-social behavior from non-self-driving cars, say at a 4-way stop sign or left turns across incoming traffic. I know from experience that in the Boston area, if you're polite and cautious, you'll never get anywhere driving that way.
Modded funny, I know. But as a society, do we really want to encourage more people to use cars? This technology is a plus if it makes driving safer and more convenient without using more energy resources, but if it actually encourages more people to live further away from where they physically need to be working, then overall it could be a negative.
How is this story a right-wing lie? As an old leftie I'm horrified by the idea of the USDA mandating what foods should go into a healthy school lunch. The USDA is an organization set up to protect factory agriculture interests, not your child's. These were the people who determined that ketchup counted as a serving of vegetables. They have absolutely no business overriding a parent's food choices for their children. If the right-wing is up in arms about this, then more power to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.
-- Frank Zappa
Dang if you don't sound exactly like my grandmother complaining about those no-talent Beatles and any jazz artist younger than Artie Shaw.
I doubt that there is any such thing as "intrinsic" beauty and art devoid of cultural context. Art is one of the things that defines a culture. Due to the hegemony of classic Western ideals, most people are familiar with the conventions of representational art as practiced by the ancient Greek and Roman sculptors and the painters of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, so most of us can relate to it and experience it as beautiful.
It doesn't necessarily make sense or look beautiful to someone growing up in a non-Western culture where aesthetics might not be as strongly influenced by a reductionist point of view that can find beauty in compositional rules based on the ratios of small integers. They may not appreciate the skill that it takes to project a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional canvas and the acute observation it takes to emulate the effect of lighting on a variety of surfaces, because such values are not important in their culture.
Abstract art doesn't make sense to a lot of people because it doesn't try to represent anything; it's just itself, the paint and the canvas and the actions of the painter that brought it into being. It was the product of a culture that was reacting to and trying to move beyond the idea of painting as a skillful representation of something else. It can be ugly or meaningless to someone attached to classical art, but to claim the opposite, that the work of the old masters is intrinsically more beautiful, I think is mistaken.
I wrote off all social media long ago, I don't even keep track. No thanks, spy on someone else.
It's really no different than Usenet. Except with Usenet you don't have any control at all over who sees your post. Ever. It's not Facebook's or Google's fault that you can't figure out the filtering.
-- BMO
Google's privacy controls are pretty transparent, but Facebook appears to deliberately obfuscate their privacy settings, and the policies change frequently. I believe Facebook does this deliberately in order to maximize the amount of personal info their customers and 3rd party developers have access to.
Usenet was indeed a form of computer-mediated social networking long before the term was invented, but otherwise there are not many similarities. Nobody had any expectation of privacy on Usenet; all you had to do was grep through the raw feed to find anything you want. Facebook on the other hand promises privacy control but in practice they actively thwart it and only provide the illusion of privacy. They always have complete access to your info even if their customers don't.
Exactly my thought. I'm thinking of it as a replacement for the Linksys NSLU2 slugs I've been using as media servers for the past 6 years or so. And since X11 is available for the platform then we'll have interactive terminals, editors, and graphical clients running on the Raspberry Pi that don't need a local graphics display (which is the case for the Linksys NSLU2).
Collectively we humans are a primitive bunch. We can't even handle differences in skin color without inspiring murder and war.
Imagine increasing numbers of privileged people with the resources for self-augmentation actually wandering around with pieces of metal and electronics permanently protruding from their faces (especially hardware that gets in the way of eye contact). I could see a bit of a problem with societal acceptance, especially if there's no way to know if they are recording your interactions with them.
Until such self-augmentation becomes invisible in casual encounters I'd say it's a really bad idea to make them permanent.
Very true. I was recently trying to buy tickets to a showing of Prometheus at the local Sundance Kabuki theatre in San Francisco. Google Search was totally broken for the task -- it kept giving me the showtimes itself instead of a link to the theater's own site, and all the links it provided were to reviews of the movies that were playing there. I had to finally guess the proper url (it was something like sundancecinemas.com) to actually get to the site where I could purchase the tickets and reserve the seats online.
On another occassion, I was using the iOS Google Maps app to navigate around Point Reyes. I was trying to get directions to a bed and breakfast that we had reservations for, but Google couldn't find it and instead uselessly kept suggesting routes to a totally different "sponsored" bed and breakfast... it was infuriating. I finally gave up, pulled an old frayed paper road map out of the glove compartment, and called the place for directions.
Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it accessible doesn't seem to apply if Google can find a way to insert itself between you and your goal for the purposes of advertising.
Forgive my ignorance, but does the encrypted nature of SPDY along with no option for middle-men mean that ad blockers would no longer be possible? That is, do browser plug-ins effectively function as middle-men?
Probably the best shows Viacom has to offer, and they're both on break right now. I predict that Viacom and DirecTV will resolve their difficulties before they're off break on Monday the 16th and the shit really hits the fan.
One of DirecTV's complaints about Viacom is that they're paying too much for feeds of shows like Colbert Report that Viacom gives away for free. And so Viacom is now able to tell DirecTV that they no longer provide such content for free.
Android doesn't use X11 because it's intended to run on low-power, memory-constrained devices.
MacOS doesn't use X11 because it's a consumer OS. Consumers typically don't set up networks of desktop machines in their homes and don't expect to be able to run native applications on remote machines while displaying and interacting with them on their local desktops.
X11 is incredibly useful for engineers and technical people who use multiple Unix and Linux hosts to get their work done. Any other environment feels like working in a closet. X11 is complicated because the requirements are complicated. That's no reason to throw out 30 years of development and refinement.
I guess the inevitable conclusion is that Ubuntu and Wayland developers don't care about engineers, professionals, and dedicated hackers. Good luck competing with Apple and Microsoft! In the meantime your core base will move on.
I've been reading all the comments, and it wasn't until I read the parent here that it finally hit me: Wayland integrates the window manager.
This is an amazing leap backward. And on top of that, clients must provide their own window decorations? I can't even imagine what this will do to UI consistency, usability, and appearance.
The latest Roku 2 XS streamers are preloaded with Angry Birds, while games like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are available for purchase. It uses a bluetooth motion controller like the Wii for playing, and costs $100. It looks exactly like the casual TV gaming market niche that Ouya is targeting, so I wonder if they really have a chance competing with such an established player.
I don't know where I read it, but from what I understand the Google Glasses are supposed to have a touch-sensitive surface somewhere on the frame next to the temple.
Not the stupid 'get paid wages' argument again! Here is a clue for you: the ONLY reason you get paid a wage is because someone else expects to make more off of your work than they paid you to do the work.
No, often you get paid a wage because someone wants you to provide a good or a service that they actually need or want. For example, I pay a house painter $X/hour because the house looks like crap and I want it to look nice. I'm not going to sell the house, I just want to live in it. I paid a musician to play at my wedding because I wanted the experience of live music at my wedding, not because I wanted to record it and sell it.
Are slashdotters really this blind to obvious satire? Geez, what do you guys do when you encounter the Colbert Report?
It's not a joke, it's political satire. And as such it is just as serious as it is entertaining.
You may want to check out the Extended Support Release (Firefox ESR). It's up to 10.0.5 now with the latest security and stability fixes.
And it actually appears to have some innovation behind it, display results and the provoking queries on the same screen in a way that makes it easier to navigate between them:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/23/killer-mobile-browser/#s:2012-05-23-at-15-34-51
http://axis.yahoo.com/
Everybody here is commenting on the wonders of the completed system: fully networked autonomous cars communicating and coordinating with each other. But to get there, we have to go through a period of time, perhaps decades, when autonomous cars are mixed with human-driven cars. How are the ultra-conservative and safe autonomous cars going to interact with cars driven by emotional humans who are probably going to throw road-rage fits at cars traveling 55mph on major freeways?
I know from personal experience living in the Boston area that anyone obeying the laws and driving conservatively is not going to make any headway against aggressive commuters. Negotiatiing 4-way stop signs even in quiet neighborhoods is often a game of chicken... will these autonomous cars have enough AI to deal with griefers actively trying to mess with them, and to do so safely?
Liability is another interesting issue. From what I understand, the occupants of an autonomous car will still be liable for any accidents. Even if the driverless cars have just 0.1% the accident rate of human-driven cars, that's still tens of fatalities every year in the USA. Much of the attraction of a driverless car will be gone if you still feel like you have to pay attention to the road to avoid a massive liability in case of a rare accident.
Those were simpler times... Google has a lot more data acquisition capabilities, market power, and social influence now than Microsoft ever had. They practically defeated SOPA single-handedly with a single ad on their main web page (yes, Wikipedia helped a bit). Sure, they've pledged to "don't be evil", and for the moment I'm inclined to give their current leadership the benefit of the doubt, but ten years out and who knows who'll be in control of all their data...
Google still makes a ton of money, but clearly that advertising cash cow can't go on forever. If Google ever decided to turn evil in order to raise profits then the public could be in a lot of trouble without the oversight. I welcome it even though I don't necessarily trust the FTC either.
How about turning around and looking behind you before you back up?
The referenced articles all seem to refer to the blind spots that can occur when you depend solely on your mirrors for situational awareness. This is appropriate when you're on the highway, driving at a high rate of speed, and with all the other cars around you going in the same direction.
Presumably, you are not moving forward when you initiate backing up. That means there's plenty of time, and yes, an obligation, to turn around, look over your shoulder, and look directly for obstacles, especially other people, before and during the entire time you're moving backwards.
It's interesting that liability for accidents still lies entirely with the operator. This kind of takes away from the attraction of the concept: if the technology fails for whatever reason when you fall asleep or you're reaching around to deal with kids in the back seat, and the fault is still yours, then how many people are going to be willing to assume that level of risk?
On the other hand, if the liability rests with the manufacturer, then it's hard to imagine this technology deployed on a wide scale. Even if self-driving cars are 100 times safer than manual driving, that's still 300 - 400 fatalities a year that will dropped into the laps of the manufacturers, who will likely be sued for millions of dollars given that they have a lot more money than most people, in addition to suffering the effects of extremely negative publicity.
I also have to wonder how self-driving cars will handle anti-social behavior from non-self-driving cars, say at a 4-way stop sign or left turns across incoming traffic. I know from experience that in the Boston area, if you're polite and cautious, you'll never get anywhere driving that way.
Modded funny, I know. But as a society, do we really want to encourage more people to use cars? This technology is a plus if it makes driving safer and more convenient without using more energy resources, but if it actually encourages more people to live further away from where they physically need to be working, then overall it could be a negative.
How is this story a right-wing lie? As an old leftie I'm horrified by the idea of the USDA mandating what foods should go into a healthy school lunch. The USDA is an organization set up to protect factory agriculture interests, not your child's. These were the people who determined that ketchup counted as a serving of vegetables. They have absolutely no business overriding a parent's food choices for their children. If the right-wing is up in arms about this, then more power to them.