Most of these 'choices' aren't. You might as well complain that developers can't know if they should write their app for Windows 2000, ME, NT, XP, Vista, 7, 8, Server, etc...
I've been using Linux for about a decade and I haven't heard of anybody actually using OSS...ever. Old applications, sure, but those go straight to an ALSA adapter. My understanding is that OSS has been legacy for a LONG time.
JACK is another one that I've never heard of anybody actually using. It was my understanding that JACK was mostly designed for professional audio work, and was something that nobody who isn't running or writing software for a music studio would care about.
So we're left with ALSA and PulseAudio. Which is the current transition, although really they work together -- I admit I don't know the details, but Pulse seems to run on top of ALSA and just make things easier to manage. Pulse used to be a colossal pain, but that was a good four or five years ago. Lately it makes audio far simpler. I used to always have problems with audio on Linux, but that was nearly a decade ago. Today the worst problem I've seen with audio would be my weird 'BeatsAudio' HP laptop, in which only two of the four speakers would work out of the box. After which I had to go through the colossal pain of...opening my audio mixer, finding the muted output channel, and turning off mute.
By 'it' do you mean Eclipse or VS? Because it looks like Eclipse, but I've used Eclipse quite a lot and I've never touched any kind of.ini file -- the path to the JDK can be set within the options window, but I've never had to do that either unless I've got multiple JDKs installed and need to use a specific one....
Hmm; I'll admit that this law is not as common as I had expected. But still, in most states, you must at a minimum stay in the right lane if you are not keeping up with the current flow of traffic -- even if that traffic is exceeding the posted limit. Which would still make it potentially illegal to sit in the left lane at the speed limit.
Arkansas and South Dakota seems to be the only states that never require you to stay in the right lane (unless you are 'obstructing traffic' or 'slow moving'); and only Alaska, Maryland, North Dakota, and Ohio permit driving in the left lane, irregardless of surrounding traffic, if you are driving at the posted limit. (According to http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html)
Doubtful. There are places where I currently do 30mph above the speed limit. If that speed limit was 85mph...well, my car can't even REACH 115MPH because of the speed governor. But even if it could, I'm not going to be driving that fast. I feel perfectly safe up to 90MPH on a GOOD highway; I feel reasonably comfortable up to 100; It doesn't matter what the speed limit on the road is. There are some 55MPH roads where I (and most other drivers on that same road) are doing 80; there are others where I won't even hold 55 because it doesn't feel safe.
Unless there is slower traffic to your right, driving in the far left lane -- even if you're doing the speed limit -- is not only rude, it's illegal. Read your vehicle code; it's not a 'fast lane', it's a passing lane. If you aren't currently passing someone, you need to move over.
In New England it seems that any road with a 55MPH or above speed limit ends up with an average speed of 80MPH. Having just come up here from PA, where most people actually tend to obey the limits and most large highways have speed traps every few miles...it's pretty nice. Though it should be interesting once it starts to snow....
You were _required_ to? We had those in Pennsylvania as well, and I took one when I learned to drive six years ago...but it certainly wasn't required. You did need to have a certain number of hours of driving experience with a parent/guardian or other driver over 25 (I think), but that was basically just having them sign a paper saying you did it.
Of course, almost everyone who didn't take that course failed their actual driving test...multiple times...
It varies based on where you are. I mean the actual laws differ by state, but it's also pretty hard to get tested on highway driving if you don't live anywhere near a highway!
For me (in PA) it was written test to get a permit, a few dozen hours of driving experience on the permit, then the exam was driving mostly through town -- it would have taken three times as long to get to, drive down, and return from any decent sized highway, and even then the highway would have MAYBE had a traffic level of five cars per mile. The closest large highway with any real amount of traffic on it was an hour's drive away. Of course this was also with a couple inches of unplowed snow on the roads, but I suppose you'd be used to that too up in Canada;)
But a lot people in the US who actually get their license right at 16 take a driving class as well -- pretty much every highschool offers them, and the instructors are certified examiners as well so you can take your test there and save a ton of time at the DMV. And at least the class I took did things like "simulating" the car stalling (by reaching over and turning off the key), "simulating" a tire blow-out, and taking you to the top of a looong hill, getting the car up to 45MPH, and having you stop the car within a certain distance using only the gear shift and parking brake. Which was a lesson I've already put to use -- when I was 17 or so the brake line on my mom's car rusted through while I was driving it...and going downhill towards main street. Good thing it was me in the car though -- she didn't even know where the parking brake WAS, and most likely would have been looking around wondering what would be the least dangerous thing to crash into....
Technically, the posted speed limit is the maximum in ideal circumstances. Pretty sure the law in most states is that you must adjust your speed to the road conditions and such -- though obviously such laws are never actually enforced, as it's all rather subjective.
When you can show me some scientific evidence of creationism, then I'll agree that we can teach it in science classes and let people make up their mind.
As far as I can tell, the evidence for creationism is 'some guy said so in this book' and 'you can't explain that!' (and therefore our idea, which cannot be explained either, must somehow be right)
I dunno, when I was in London there were a LOT more than one every 50m. I noticed large clusters on nearly every street corner, plus the ones on the underground...never saw anything like it in NYC -- sure, there's a fair bit of private ones scattered about, but that's not the same thing. As far as city/police owned cameras, you'll maybe find one or two on high traffic street corners. Never seen even a single cluster like the ones that were so common in London...
I REALLY don't think returning to an age of unlimited and unregulated industrial pollution is the solution here...I'm quite happy to NOT be living next to a toxic chemical dump, thanks.
The problem isn't regulation, it's globalization. China doesn't have much of these regulations yet, which is why we're losing a lot of business to them -- but they're destroying their nation in the process. It's just not sustainable. Eventually they'll realize that and things will start to balance out a bit more, but the problem is that we had a head start, so we now either must wait for them to catch up, or regress to their level.
Ah, my other reply neglected to reply to this bit:
Right. Because what I really want is 1000 commercial sites all responding to queries for Kurt Werle with data about me they have scrapped off the web.
THAT I see as a big issue. I suspect it could be handled by reputable node operators simply blacking nodes that are reported to be doing this. Make it a web-of-trust model. But I admit that this may become impractical if the network and/or the number of spam nodes are large enough...
..But email wasn't always decentralized, so there's no reason why social networking couldn't end up decentralized as well, if people demand it...
Wait. What? When was email not decentralized? Which is to say: when was email centralized?
I mean, I will say I have no personal experience with this having not been alive at the time, but it is my understanding that in the early days of personal computers there were many email providers with proprietary systems that were not capable of sending messages between networks.
From http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2002/cmsc434-0101/MUIseum/applications/emailhistory.html : "In the late-1970's and 1980's the phenomenal growth of personal computers (Apple II 1978 - 1985; IBM PC 1983 and Apple Macintosh 1984) created a whole new genre of email technologies. Some of these systems were proprietary 'dial-up' systems such as MCI Mail, EasyLink, Telecom Gold, One-to-One, CompuServe, AppleLink etc. For two people to exchange messages remotely on these systems they had to both be subscribers. The proprietary systems did not interoperate or transmit messages from one system to another, or for the few systems that did these were notoriously unreliable...."
You could certainly state that by not being interoperable this wasn't technically email, but that's not really the point -- if social networks became decentralized in the same way I bet people in thirty years would be claiming Facebook wasn't technically a social network either.
I think the real, "killer app" win here would be if they could make it easily to fully segregate your data.
Circles work fine for me. Most people seem to care very little.
Well, we're both going on purely anecdotal evidence, but FWIW: Most people I know care a lot. Some care enough to make multiple separate accounts on the same network. Most do as I do and simply refuse to add large numbers of people. For example, I will never add a coworker on Facebook unless we're hanging out outside of work and I get to know them fairly well. I refuse to add ANY family members. My Facebook account is for friends only, because there's no way to ensure that what I post to one group won't end up visible to everything. Shit, just the other day my privacy settings somehow got altered so that all of my posts were set to 'public' rather than 'friends'. I sure as hell didn't change that (at least not intentionally); and I wouldn't have even known if someone else hadn't noticed and pointed it out to me. I think most people would have a larger 'friends' list if they could ensure this separation -- which to me implies that they'd like to be able to do so.
Google+ is better by far, and would probably be sufficient, but my point was more that if you phrased it and built it as 'profile isolation!' or something it would be easier to understand for most users and provide a more compelling use case than saying 'more user friendly privacy controls!' -- even if it's the exact same thing.
On an unrelated note -- basing your profile address on a domain name? Really? Why not a more decentralized approach?
Right. Because what I really want is 1000 commercial sites all responding to queries for Kurt Werle with data about me they have scrapped off the web.
This is one of the biggest invisible features of the walled gardens of Facebook & gPlus: the walls. Because if you think that email spam is bad, wait until you start to get Diaspora spam from Russia, China, and a million zombie boxes all running bogus diaspora nodes.
I fail to see how this is a problem. That's kind of the point of social networks -- you only see posts from people you have agreed to see posts from. Unless you're talking about the common 'message' feature on most networks -- in which case there's really no difference between that and email, and the same technology that manages to keep my Gmail completely devoid of spam should work just as well in something like diaspora.
People change email addresses. It happens. It's not easy, but arguably that could be a feature. Might not be great if people are switching nodes every week. But it would be nice to be able to switch nodes if I discover a flaw with the node I am currently on. This also makes some forms of abuse more difficult -- if you're doing some seriously shady stuff, it's a lot harder to just keep jumping from one node to the next. The example someone gave was a guy posting nude photos of his ex. If it takes you a couple days to switch nodes, that'll be fine for someone who wants to go somewhere with a better privacy policy, but useless for someone who just wants to do it to harass people.
You can't force deletion of data that you have placed on someone else's server. Doesn't matter if it's email, social networking, a website...once it's in someone else's hands, they can theoretically do whatever they want with it. Why is this a surprise? You could always do what a lot of people did during the Myspace > Facebook migration -- change your profile text to something like 'I'm no longer using this profile, please find me at: [url]'
Of course, there's no reason you couldn't have an apps system on top of a distributed social network. Maybe the nodes would handle the app deployment process, and the apps would just be available to everyone from that node. Or maybe you can have special app servers (which, frankly, the first model would probably evolve into rather quickly anyway) that the network can connect to and allow users to access these apps. After all, there's no reason you couldn't do the same with Facebook -- you can already create "apps" that are just dedicated websites that interact with a user's Facebook profile, just need someone to set up a framework to make the deployment easier.
But the benefit of a decentralized system? There will certainly be 'no apps' servers that pop up. Or app limited servers. One where I can say 'do not send me ANY app requests'. The best Facebook has is 'ban requests from THIS app', which is useless when I'm getting inundated with requests from a different app every week...
- Am I expected to trust other adminstrators? Sure. Now I get to decide which of thousands (millions?) of admins I am willing to trust. And this is an improvement how?
No, you're supposed to trust specific service providers. Just like email. Most people would be somewhat wary of an email coming from an @lrciudhbk.net address, unless you happened to know who owns that domain.
Somehow, I betcha we end up with Disapora hosts that consolidate these servers into hosting sites.
That's exactly the point. It will be more like email. The benefit is that if you don't like Google scanning your email messages for targeted ads, you can switch to another provider without needing to opt out of the entire network. You can even host your own email server if you want -- just like you can host your own Diaspora node -- but it's not really expected that every user will do so.
These hosting aggregators would probably offer free sevice if I let them mine my data, you know. Back to the future. Mission accomplished.
Or for having ads appear on your profile. Just like existing free services. Or you could pay for a premium server. Or you could host your own. The entire point is to give control back to the user. You have more options than 'tolerate whatever Facebook decides to do with your data' vs 'don't participate in social networking'
Now...how many people care about Google scanning their email? Not many. How many would care about what a specific Diaspora node operator did with their data? Not many. But it would provide options for those who do, and if it was easier to move the hosts would be more cautious in their actions. Ever month I see a flood of "I'm about to leave Facebook" posts -- but most of them don't do anything, because they're locked in. If you could leave Facebook while still being connected to all your friends on Facebook as easily as downloading a file and uploading it to a new service, I bet a decent number of people would do so.
I remember an era when people complained that setting the clock on their VCRs was too difficult. Nowadays, most high school students know how to work Excel and many high schools even teach college-level Java programming.
...and most people still can't figure out how to set the clock on their VCR/DVD player (though most no longer seem to have a clock)...shit, most people I know just leave their car's clock an hour off during daylight savings because they don't know how to reset it!
I dunno, I still email comcast.net addresses on a daily basis and tcs.com addresses and cvs.com addresses and sometimes hushmail.com addresses and a TON of psu.edu addresses and yesterday I emailed an attleboropolice.com address and I could go on...but I won't.
In fact, if you look at the top hundred messages in my inbox, you'd find around 50 different domain names for the senders. If you look at my sent box, it is probably around 90% to two domains -- but those are psu.edu and comcast.net, not gmail, yahoo, or hotmail. Those three combined are maybe 5%.
I know a lot of people who still use their ISPs email. I also know a number of people whose only email is their work address. Or school address. I won't argue that people creating their own addresses are almost always going with gmail, hotmail, or yahoo...but I highly doubt that's even breaking 50% of all email users.
5) Feel empowered to customize their own node to their personal tastes. They would not be limited to what Facebook feels it should look like. Profile Themes?
...which is part of the reason everyone left Myspace for Facebook...
First of all, plenty of people still use their ISP email. Mostly older people though in my experience -- those who just got email when they got internet and don't want to bother to change their address.
But social networking seems to be in pretty much the place email was many, many years ago. The only difference (which, I'll admit, is not at all minor) is that there's less providers with more inertia. But email wasn't always decentralized, so there's no reason why social networking couldn't end up decentralized as well, if people demand it.
I think the real, "killer app" win here would be if they could make it easily to fully segregate your data. The privacy settings and 'circles' of current networks just aren't quite cutting it. There's a reason people tend to have a separate Linked In profile and Facebook profile -- and I even know people with multiple Facebook profiles as well. One for friends, one for family, and then Linked In for employers and coworkers. Rather than just privacy settings, how about a network that allows you to create multiple linked profiles? When someone searches for you, they see one result. They send a friend request to that result, and you can choose to add them to your 'friends' profile, or your 'work' profile, or your 'family' profile...then when you post you can choose both profile(s) and privacy setting(s). Or maybe even have something like what Facebook uses with pages, where you need to click a link to swap from one profile to the other (but still get all notifications together.) I know, it's perfectly possible to have this sort of separation currently with existing privacy settings, but nobody does because it's such a pain to deal with. Google+ does it FAR better than Facebook, but that's still lacking in my opinion. Users need to feel like there is an actual, solid separation between these areas before they'll start using a single unified profile.
On an unrelated note -- basing your profile address on a domain name? Really? Why not a more decentralized approach? You should definitely be able to have some kind of unique hash for each user -- it's been done in P2P networks forever. Or even a centralized lookup service of some sort, kind of like a parallel DNS, though I guess you'd still need to find a way to pay for that...I just think the key benefit is that you can easily transfer, but if it costs you $15/year to be able to do that, most people aren't going to pay and therefore won't see any benefit.
No, you wouldn't. The wheel is made up of individual particles. It bends, it compresses, it shrinks...it seems to be solid and move instantly, but that is only because it is too small to see these effects.
Say you have a giant steel rod from the Earth to Pluto. You push on this rod. You would think that the rod would move forward on Pluto at the instant you push on it, allowing FTL binary communication. But it doesn't. You push on the rod and it creates a pressure wave travelling through the rod around the speed of sound. The molecules of steel can compress and move, and they have a top speed. In the end, it's actually going to be a while before that push is felt at the other end.
I dunno, I had an android MP3 player with a 5" screen (Archos 5 IMTw/A) and I loved that thing. So much better than the iPod touch I had before -- and a large part of that was the larger screen. Although the fact that it was a resistive screen helped a ton too. I've always found Apple touch screen devices to be too small and too imprecise for many applications. I can barely even use the virtual keyboard because the keys are too small. I don't even understand why it pops up when you're holding the thing in portrait mode -- it's absolutely unusable at that size. Even landscape is difficult at best. And my fingers aren't small, but they aren't in any way abnormally large.
Oh, and a 5" screen plus a fairly thick plastic bezel around it was still small enough to fit easily and comfortable in any pocket I tried to stick it in...why _not_ go for a bigger screen?
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Most of these 'choices' aren't. You might as well complain that developers can't know if they should write their app for Windows 2000, ME, NT, XP, Vista, 7, 8, Server, etc...
I've been using Linux for about a decade and I haven't heard of anybody actually using OSS...ever. Old applications, sure, but those go straight to an ALSA adapter. My understanding is that OSS has been legacy for a LONG time.
JACK is another one that I've never heard of anybody actually using. It was my understanding that JACK was mostly designed for professional audio work, and was something that nobody who isn't running or writing software for a music studio would care about.
So we're left with ALSA and PulseAudio. Which is the current transition, although really they work together -- I admit I don't know the details, but Pulse seems to run on top of ALSA and just make things easier to manage. Pulse used to be a colossal pain, but that was a good four or five years ago. Lately it makes audio far simpler. I used to always have problems with audio on Linux, but that was nearly a decade ago. Today the worst problem I've seen with audio would be my weird 'BeatsAudio' HP laptop, in which only two of the four speakers would work out of the box. After which I had to go through the colossal pain of...opening my audio mixer, finding the muted output channel, and turning off mute.
By 'it' do you mean Eclipse or VS? Because it looks like Eclipse, but I've used Eclipse quite a lot and I've never touched any kind of .ini file -- the path to the JDK can be set within the options window, but I've never had to do that either unless I've got multiple JDKs installed and need to use a specific one....
Hmm; I'll admit that this law is not as common as I had expected. But still, in most states, you must at a minimum stay in the right lane if you are not keeping up with the current flow of traffic -- even if that traffic is exceeding the posted limit. Which would still make it potentially illegal to sit in the left lane at the speed limit.
Arkansas and South Dakota seems to be the only states that never require you to stay in the right lane (unless you are 'obstructing traffic' or 'slow moving'); and only Alaska, Maryland, North Dakota, and Ohio permit driving in the left lane, irregardless of surrounding traffic, if you are driving at the posted limit.
(According to http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html)
Doubtful. There are places where I currently do 30mph above the speed limit. If that speed limit was 85mph...well, my car can't even REACH 115MPH because of the speed governor. But even if it could, I'm not going to be driving that fast. I feel perfectly safe up to 90MPH on a GOOD highway; I feel reasonably comfortable up to 100; It doesn't matter what the speed limit on the road is. There are some 55MPH roads where I (and most other drivers on that same road) are doing 80; there are others where I won't even hold 55 because it doesn't feel safe.
Unless there is slower traffic to your right, driving in the far left lane -- even if you're doing the speed limit -- is not only rude, it's illegal. Read your vehicle code; it's not a 'fast lane', it's a passing lane. If you aren't currently passing someone, you need to move over.
In New England it seems that any road with a 55MPH or above speed limit ends up with an average speed of 80MPH. Having just come up here from PA, where most people actually tend to obey the limits and most large highways have speed traps every few miles...it's pretty nice. Though it should be interesting once it starts to snow....
You were _required_ to? We had those in Pennsylvania as well, and I took one when I learned to drive six years ago...but it certainly wasn't required. You did need to have a certain number of hours of driving experience with a parent/guardian or other driver over 25 (I think), but that was basically just having them sign a paper saying you did it.
Of course, almost everyone who didn't take that course failed their actual driving test...multiple times...
It varies based on where you are. I mean the actual laws differ by state, but it's also pretty hard to get tested on highway driving if you don't live anywhere near a highway!
For me (in PA) it was written test to get a permit, a few dozen hours of driving experience on the permit, then the exam was driving mostly through town -- it would have taken three times as long to get to, drive down, and return from any decent sized highway, and even then the highway would have MAYBE had a traffic level of five cars per mile. The closest large highway with any real amount of traffic on it was an hour's drive away. Of course this was also with a couple inches of unplowed snow on the roads, but I suppose you'd be used to that too up in Canada ;)
But a lot people in the US who actually get their license right at 16 take a driving class as well -- pretty much every highschool offers them, and the instructors are certified examiners as well so you can take your test there and save a ton of time at the DMV. And at least the class I took did things like "simulating" the car stalling (by reaching over and turning off the key), "simulating" a tire blow-out, and taking you to the top of a looong hill, getting the car up to 45MPH, and having you stop the car within a certain distance using only the gear shift and parking brake. Which was a lesson I've already put to use -- when I was 17 or so the brake line on my mom's car rusted through while I was driving it...and going downhill towards main street. Good thing it was me in the car though -- she didn't even know where the parking brake WAS, and most likely would have been looking around wondering what would be the least dangerous thing to crash into....
Technically, the posted speed limit is the maximum in ideal circumstances. Pretty sure the law in most states is that you must adjust your speed to the road conditions and such -- though obviously such laws are never actually enforced, as it's all rather subjective.
When you can show me some scientific evidence of creationism, then I'll agree that we can teach it in science classes and let people make up their mind.
As far as I can tell, the evidence for creationism is 'some guy said so in this book' and 'you can't explain that!' (and therefore our idea, which cannot be explained either, must somehow be right)
Sounds kinda like Freenet. Or I2P. Or FCON. Or even Tor at this point. Except those are far more secure than BitTorrent.
I dunno, when I was in London there were a LOT more than one every 50m. I noticed large clusters on nearly every street corner, plus the ones on the underground...never saw anything like it in NYC -- sure, there's a fair bit of private ones scattered about, but that's not the same thing. As far as city/police owned cameras, you'll maybe find one or two on high traffic street corners. Never seen even a single cluster like the ones that were so common in London...
I REALLY don't think returning to an age of unlimited and unregulated industrial pollution is the solution here...I'm quite happy to NOT be living next to a toxic chemical dump, thanks.
The problem isn't regulation, it's globalization. China doesn't have much of these regulations yet, which is why we're losing a lot of business to them -- but they're destroying their nation in the process. It's just not sustainable. Eventually they'll realize that and things will start to balance out a bit more, but the problem is that we had a head start, so we now either must wait for them to catch up, or regress to their level.
Ah, my other reply neglected to reply to this bit:
Right. Because what I really want is 1000 commercial sites all responding to queries for Kurt Werle with data about me they have scrapped off the web.
THAT I see as a big issue. I suspect it could be handled by reputable node operators simply blacking nodes that are reported to be doing this. Make it a web-of-trust model. But I admit that this may become impractical if the network and/or the number of spam nodes are large enough...
..But email wasn't always decentralized, so there's no reason why social networking couldn't end up decentralized as well, if people demand it...
Wait. What? When was email not decentralized? Which is to say: when was email centralized?
I mean, I will say I have no personal experience with this having not been alive at the time, but it is my understanding that in the early days of personal computers there were many email providers with proprietary systems that were not capable of sending messages between networks.
From http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2002/cmsc434-0101/MUIseum/applications/emailhistory.html :
"In the late-1970's and 1980's the phenomenal growth of personal computers (Apple II 1978 - 1985; IBM PC 1983 and Apple Macintosh 1984) created a whole new genre of email technologies. Some of these systems were proprietary 'dial-up' systems such as MCI Mail, EasyLink, Telecom Gold, One-to-One, CompuServe, AppleLink etc. For two people to exchange messages remotely on these systems they had to both be subscribers. The proprietary systems did not interoperate or transmit messages from one system to another, or for the few systems that did these were notoriously unreliable...."
You could certainly state that by not being interoperable this wasn't technically email, but that's not really the point -- if social networks became decentralized in the same way I bet people in thirty years would be claiming Facebook wasn't technically a social network either.
I think the real, "killer app" win here would be if they could make it easily to fully segregate your data.
Circles work fine for me. Most people seem to care very little.
Well, we're both going on purely anecdotal evidence, but FWIW: Most people I know care a lot. Some care enough to make multiple separate accounts on the same network. Most do as I do and simply refuse to add large numbers of people. For example, I will never add a coworker on Facebook unless we're hanging out outside of work and I get to know them fairly well. I refuse to add ANY family members. My Facebook account is for friends only, because there's no way to ensure that what I post to one group won't end up visible to everything. Shit, just the other day my privacy settings somehow got altered so that all of my posts were set to 'public' rather than 'friends'. I sure as hell didn't change that (at least not intentionally); and I wouldn't have even known if someone else hadn't noticed and pointed it out to me. I think most people would have a larger 'friends' list if they could ensure this separation -- which to me implies that they'd like to be able to do so.
Google+ is better by far, and would probably be sufficient, but my point was more that if you phrased it and built it as 'profile isolation!' or something it would be easier to understand for most users and provide a more compelling use case than saying 'more user friendly privacy controls!' -- even if it's the exact same thing.
On an unrelated note -- basing your profile address on a domain name? Really? Why not a more decentralized approach?
Right. Because what I really want is 1000 commercial sites all responding to queries for Kurt Werle with data about me they have scrapped off the web.
This is one of the biggest invisible features of the walled gardens of Facebook & gPlus: the walls. Because if you think that email spam is bad, wait until you start to get Diaspora spam from Russia, China, and a million zombie boxes all running bogus diaspora nodes.
I fail to see how this is a problem. That's kind of the point of social networks -- you only see posts from people you have agreed to see posts from. Unless you're talking about the common 'message' feature on most networks -- in which case there's really no difference between that and email, and the same technology that manages to keep my Gmail completely devoid of spam should work just as well in something like diaspora.
In other words, it works exactly like email.
People change email addresses. It happens. It's not easy, but arguably that could be a feature. Might not be great if people are switching nodes every week. But it would be nice to be able to switch nodes if I discover a flaw with the node I am currently on. This also makes some forms of abuse more difficult -- if you're doing some seriously shady stuff, it's a lot harder to just keep jumping from one node to the next. The example someone gave was a guy posting nude photos of his ex. If it takes you a couple days to switch nodes, that'll be fine for someone who wants to go somewhere with a better privacy policy, but useless for someone who just wants to do it to harass people.
You can't force deletion of data that you have placed on someone else's server. Doesn't matter if it's email, social networking, a website...once it's in someone else's hands, they can theoretically do whatever they want with it. Why is this a surprise? You could always do what a lot of people did during the Myspace > Facebook migration -- change your profile text to something like 'I'm no longer using this profile, please find me at: [url]'
This.
Of course, there's no reason you couldn't have an apps system on top of a distributed social network. Maybe the nodes would handle the app deployment process, and the apps would just be available to everyone from that node. Or maybe you can have special app servers (which, frankly, the first model would probably evolve into rather quickly anyway) that the network can connect to and allow users to access these apps. After all, there's no reason you couldn't do the same with Facebook -- you can already create "apps" that are just dedicated websites that interact with a user's Facebook profile, just need someone to set up a framework to make the deployment easier.
But the benefit of a decentralized system? There will certainly be 'no apps' servers that pop up. Or app limited servers. One where I can say 'do not send me ANY app requests'. The best Facebook has is 'ban requests from THIS app', which is useless when I'm getting inundated with requests from a different app every week...
- Am I expected to trust other adminstrators? Sure. Now I get to decide which of thousands (millions?) of admins I am willing to trust. And this is an improvement how?
No, you're supposed to trust specific service providers. Just like email. Most people would be somewhat wary of an email coming from an @lrciudhbk.net address, unless you happened to know who owns that domain.
Somehow, I betcha we end up with Disapora hosts that consolidate these servers into hosting sites.
That's exactly the point. It will be more like email. The benefit is that if you don't like Google scanning your email messages for targeted ads, you can switch to another provider without needing to opt out of the entire network. You can even host your own email server if you want -- just like you can host your own Diaspora node -- but it's not really expected that every user will do so.
These hosting aggregators would probably offer free sevice if I let them mine my data, you know. Back to the future. Mission accomplished.
Or for having ads appear on your profile. Just like existing free services. Or you could pay for a premium server. Or you could host your own. The entire point is to give control back to the user. You have more options than 'tolerate whatever Facebook decides to do with your data' vs 'don't participate in social networking'
Now...how many people care about Google scanning their email? Not many. How many would care about what a specific Diaspora node operator did with their data? Not many. But it would provide options for those who do, and if it was easier to move the hosts would be more cautious in their actions. Ever month I see a flood of "I'm about to leave Facebook" posts -- but most of them don't do anything, because they're locked in. If you could leave Facebook while still being connected to all your friends on Facebook as easily as downloading a file and uploading it to a new service, I bet a decent number of people would do so.
I remember an era when people complained that setting the clock on their VCRs was too difficult. Nowadays, most high school students know how to work Excel and many high schools even teach college-level Java programming.
...and most people still can't figure out how to set the clock on their VCR/DVD player (though most no longer seem to have a clock)...shit, most people I know just leave their car's clock an hour off during daylight savings because they don't know how to reset it!
I dunno, I still email comcast.net addresses on a daily basis
and tcs.com addresses
and cvs.com addresses
and sometimes hushmail.com addresses
and a TON of psu.edu addresses
and yesterday I emailed an attleboropolice.com address
and I could go on...but I won't.
In fact, if you look at the top hundred messages in my inbox, you'd find around 50 different domain names for the senders. If you look at my sent box, it is probably around 90% to two domains -- but those are psu.edu and comcast.net, not gmail, yahoo, or hotmail. Those three combined are maybe 5%.
I know a lot of people who still use their ISPs email. I also know a number of people whose only email is their work address. Or school address. I won't argue that people creating their own addresses are almost always going with gmail, hotmail, or yahoo...but I highly doubt that's even breaking 50% of all email users.
5) Feel empowered to customize their own node to their personal tastes. They would not be limited to what Facebook feels it should look like. Profile Themes?
...which is part of the reason everyone left Myspace for Facebook...
First of all, plenty of people still use their ISP email. Mostly older people though in my experience -- those who just got email when they got internet and don't want to bother to change their address.
But social networking seems to be in pretty much the place email was many, many years ago. The only difference (which, I'll admit, is not at all minor) is that there's less providers with more inertia. But email wasn't always decentralized, so there's no reason why social networking couldn't end up decentralized as well, if people demand it.
I think the real, "killer app" win here would be if they could make it easily to fully segregate your data. The privacy settings and 'circles' of current networks just aren't quite cutting it. There's a reason people tend to have a separate Linked In profile and Facebook profile -- and I even know people with multiple Facebook profiles as well. One for friends, one for family, and then Linked In for employers and coworkers. Rather than just privacy settings, how about a network that allows you to create multiple linked profiles? When someone searches for you, they see one result. They send a friend request to that result, and you can choose to add them to your 'friends' profile, or your 'work' profile, or your 'family' profile...then when you post you can choose both profile(s) and privacy setting(s). Or maybe even have something like what Facebook uses with pages, where you need to click a link to swap from one profile to the other (but still get all notifications together.) I know, it's perfectly possible to have this sort of separation currently with existing privacy settings, but nobody does because it's such a pain to deal with. Google+ does it FAR better than Facebook, but that's still lacking in my opinion. Users need to feel like there is an actual, solid separation between these areas before they'll start using a single unified profile.
On an unrelated note -- basing your profile address on a domain name? Really? Why not a more decentralized approach? You should definitely be able to have some kind of unique hash for each user -- it's been done in P2P networks forever. Or even a centralized lookup service of some sort, kind of like a parallel DNS, though I guess you'd still need to find a way to pay for that...I just think the key benefit is that you can easily transfer, but if it costs you $15/year to be able to do that, most people aren't going to pay and therefore won't see any benefit.
Communication requires that you can control what that information is.
Bad analogy, but -- static on your TV set is certainly information, but it's not really communication.
No, you wouldn't. The wheel is made up of individual particles. It bends, it compresses, it shrinks...it seems to be solid and move instantly, but that is only because it is too small to see these effects.
Say you have a giant steel rod from the Earth to Pluto. You push on this rod. You would think that the rod would move forward on Pluto at the instant you push on it, allowing FTL binary communication. But it doesn't. You push on the rod and it creates a pressure wave travelling through the rod around the speed of sound. The molecules of steel can compress and move, and they have a top speed. In the end, it's actually going to be a while before that push is felt at the other end.
I dunno, I had an android MP3 player with a 5" screen (Archos 5 IMTw/A) and I loved that thing. So much better than the iPod touch I had before -- and a large part of that was the larger screen. Although the fact that it was a resistive screen helped a ton too. I've always found Apple touch screen devices to be too small and too imprecise for many applications. I can barely even use the virtual keyboard because the keys are too small. I don't even understand why it pops up when you're holding the thing in portrait mode -- it's absolutely unusable at that size. Even landscape is difficult at best. And my fingers aren't small, but they aren't in any way abnormally large.
Oh, and a 5" screen plus a fairly thick plastic bezel around it was still small enough to fit easily and comfortable in any pocket I tried to stick it in...why _not_ go for a bigger screen?