The fundamentalist Islamic states give a good picture of where the 'shield people from sexual immorality' approach ends up. To ensure 'male sexual morality' you have to make women invisible. To ensure 'female sexual morality', you have to make women silent, and the property of their owners, either their fathers or their husbands. That is where the religious nutcases of this world wish to push us.
If we don't want to go down that route, then there must be a means to keep our basic human sexual nature fed, exercised and happy, so as not to seek satisfaction 'at all costs'. By trying to 'lock it in a box and starve it into submission', we do not achieve this, but rather strengthen our sexual appetites, and promote the 'something is better than nothing' attitude which leads top guys wanking off to the underwear sections of clothing catalogues, or to weathergirls, or whatever. Having a world where every basic need is met, but where people's sexual drives are basically starved, is a recipe for disaster. But that is exactly what many 'mindless moralist' campaigners think is what we need.
Being saying this for years. If our braun behaviour is a consequence of neurin behaviour, this is inevitable. Think of a horde of Minions, each with a different idea of what a banana looks like, and a single button each to press if they see what they think is banana.
I wrote a letter to my MP, which was forwarded to some minister, who replied with the usual political "don't think it's right criminals and terrorists can communicate in secret" lines, saying that they do not intend to prevent people using strong cryptography (oblivious to the contradictions in what he wrote), and essentially the whole point, that end-to-end encrypted messaging can be achieved by anybody with a LAMP stack online somewhere and a couple of hours to write a few hundred lines of PHP, Javascript and HTML (using croptojs). We have a government of technologically clueless idiots.
I imagine the restrictions will lead to poor uptake. Lots of hassle and 4k, vs little or no hassle and full hd, will lead most to decide that full hd is good enough. Porn sites, on the other hand, are churning our drm free downloadable 4k porn. I can imagine a scenario where a disproportionately high amount of 4k entertainment watched is porn for just this reason (though there again we have the full hd is good enough thing).
Windows is basically a games platform that also runs legacy software like Microsoft Office. The main thing I have it around for is running games (e.g. via steam), music software (e.g. VSTs), or a few Windows only things. I wish Apple would make machines with the build quality of professional laptops and workstations, like e.g. Lenovo Thinkpads and HP Z-series workstations, rather than shiny toy that one needs an oxyacetylene blowtorch to get into, and for which the standard remedy for any fault is to bin the device and buy a new one. It is a good illustration of the problems of committing to a closed proprietary platform: if Apple's hardware lineup doesn't suit you, but you're committed to running software that only runs on macs, you're screwed. There is no market competition, just Hobson's choice.
It is similar to the way fundamentalist sects work.
1. (Confirmation bias) people prefer to be told what they like to hear, to have their beliefs and wishes confirmed. 2. (Intellectual laziness) people don't tend to waste effort scrutinising what they already agree with. 3. (Complexity of debunking) to give a convincing reason why fake news is wrong, you have to go into details, and this turns off many readers, especially the intelligent readers with cerebral jobs whose brains are tired from their day jobs. 4. (Effort of debunking) it is often easier to knock out a fake story sufficiently plausible to those who already agree with it, than to put out a carefully thought through article debunking fake news.
The problem is one of quality vs quantity: once you have the right psychological conditions (charismatic leader or group saying what some want to hear, frustrated audience that want change), fake news in support of something can be churned out, and circulated via media, social or traditional, on an industrial scale, cheaply and largely decentralised. Proper journalism and proper rebuttals simply can't be produced on a comparable scale. So to the naive, it can can appear clear that the balance favours the fake news.
(The comparison with fundamentalism can be seen if you peruse some of the religious apologetics literature, or books pushing creationism or similar.)
Reason and scrutiny are intellectually expensive, and cheap and cheerful bullshit is not.
I had thought of the possibility of this years ago. The basic idea is that, if you downsample an image, and then upsample it again, information is lost in the low resolution version that must be reconstructed somehow. Essentially what you need is a means to make educated guesses as to the missing information. Traditional codecs are based on the maths that results when the codec is intended to reconstruct an arbitrary image. If we constrain the space of possible images, such as photos of the same person, the amount of information necessary to specify the image is less. Where deep learning comes in is finding convenient subsets of 'all possible images' such that, if we assume an image lies within a given subset of 'all possible images', we can make better guesses as to the missing information than if the image was totally arbitrary.
The basic trick you can use (something which took me at most a couple of hours on a lazy afternoon to knock out off the top of my head -- easy or any CS student) is to have a MySQL table somewhere, with a simple schema of { int insertTime, char[32] key, string value }. The keys are produced by hashing a string of some sort, and the values are produced by encrypting using some password used by a related hashing method. Essentially you take a string 'HexVision' and salt it in two different ways. All table rows with this key are considered part of the conversation. Anybody with correct means to produce encryption key and row key can see the conversation. Encryption and decryption is done in javascript in the browser, as is producing the hashes (aes.js and sha.js). All the server does is store and retrieve rows, and is a few lines of PHP. You then get e.g. the last n messages, (get rows with matching key, sort by time, return last n), or the messages after a given time. The time things are written is not encrypted in this simple approach.
The thing is, you can write this into a single PHP file that you can stick on any LAMP stack anywhere (copy aes.js and sha.js inline). Then for the salting stuff, you use a separate html page (using sha.js and a few lines of js) to generate stuff to stick into the messaging page. Stuff like that.
Then, you stick it in something like a wordpress blog, where accessing a certain page (e.g. myweb.com/blog?page=46&etc=45) at the right time gives you the messaging application, but otherwise not. Then stick this in a country other than the UK.
Too easy. The government has basically declared its right to use a magic wand to summon unicorns.
This 'historical evidence' thing is another scam exported by China to the world. Indeed they have many sweatshop factories where children are worked to death to produce 'historical evidence' to export to the US.
Essentially for each place we have to remember what time solar noon is (that is, when the sun is at its zenith), when sunrise is, and so on. Then midnight may be at 3pm.
Then someone will come up with the bright idea of having a local time which is offset from UTC, so as to make the numbers more intuitive, and voila, we will have reinvented timezones. Having two clocks, one local, one UTC, rather than just one, would make a lot of sense. But only having UTC, like only having metric measurements, is too inconvenient.
One thing that can be said for Unity is that it once someone is past the novice stage, it can be a great incentive to learn how to change you choice of desktop environment.
I have two X201s, and the biggest problem with both is that the wifi needs replacing, and I can't be bothered to do that. (Basically I use the ethernet port, though I have known some USB wifi dongles to cause total lockups.)
That said, my recommendation to anybody who does not need a high-end gaming or 3d laptop, and is on a budget, to go for something like a refurb Lenovo thinkpad. They're just so much better built and designed than consumer laptops, and provided you stick with the Windows 7 Pro they were designed for (if you want to run Windows, and bear in mind they often come with licensed Windows, so basically switch it out for an ssd with Linux, or bung said Linux SSD in the optical drive bay, if you have something like a T410).
OS wise, I tend to use Ubuntu Studio (and certainly either xfce4 or lxde as the desktop, never gnome or kde), which runs happily off a sandisk memory stick (which makes it easy to carry the system from one laptop to another, or carry on if one battery goes flat -- none of that 'hardware change ring this number' malarkey beloved of MS).
They record visitor habits, data mine the shit out of it, sell on the results, and market their it expertise. In addition, Mindgeek, who own the pornhub network, also own a number of major porn studios. So ads and visitor habits are likely their products.
While distributed social media (like Diaspora) has been an idea floating around for a while, something like the 'twittersphere' is where it could be most useful, having multiple interlinked 'twitterverses' where different rules on acceptability apply. The SJW's can have some, and the anti-politically-correct can run their own free-for-all zones, and so on. What is then needed is the distributed indexing and so on. But for a technology which is basically a glorified indexed array of char[140]'s, it has little that isn't easily copied in terms of functionality. Given that most users' number of followers is in the 100s, a simple PHP script spewing out RSS feeds is almost good enough for that task (and already way more complex than it needs to be). An aggregator simply needs to get a few KB of text from a few hundred URIs every few minutes, and then compose it into an aggregated feed. The trouble with modern social media is that they need to overcomplicate it in order to turn it into something they control. Then they need to give it away free, figure out how to make money from it, and so on. We really need an 'opentwitter' system. Twitter has demonstrated the need and power of this sort of communication, but cannot make a profitable business out of it. Just like email isn't owned, we need a twitter that isn't owned. And preferably before Twitter as a company tanks.
More generally, a rethink about internet communications would be welcome: having more fine grained control about who can send what to whom would make a lot of sense (and can essentially be done via things like cryptographic keys) -- then basic data and document types. (For example, a tweet is basically a char[140], most small things could be considered a json object fitting some schema, and for many web documents, the content part least, could make do with a far lighter weight document type than modern HTML: something where a high quality light-weight renderer wouldn't need something as complex as an operating system, as modern web browsers are.)
At present, I could not recommend a new pc over a refurbished ex pro Windows 7 machine from 5 years ago for things other than gaming, unless the person has a _lot_ to spend, so that Windows 10 will be useable. That Microsoft insisted on ramming so much into the Windows interface without the option of a lean, clean, simple OS that only does what I need to, more so than Windows 7, means you need to spend a lot to get an enjoyable user experience if you're someone who enjoys actually getting stuff done, rather than going 'wow! Shiny thing!'. The way manufacturers differentiate themselves with incompatible crapware that most people don't have (so there is no longer a shared experience with friends who have PCs). 1000s of companies are all trying to get a niche monopoly cash cow that they control, and in doing so we have ended up with a Balkanised industry of companies all concerned primarily with defending their territory, and the users needs are an afterthought. The potential of modern computing has gone from optimistic dream to a nightmare of annoyance, and users are tired of this. The fault is with the industry, and they have earned this downturn by taking the market and their customers for granted, preferring to structure things to chase short term profit. Users then must do the same, picking and choosing from a bad bunch of options, knowing how industry behaves. A weird kind of quasi-Nash-equilibrium that serves almost nobody that well.
Seeing a computer as a mini-network is a change that needs to happen. Having mini ARM cores doing things like coordinating I/O and graphics, so that all the main processor sees is somewhere to send instructions in a standard language (kind of like Vulkan is doing with graphics, and kind of like Postscript in some ways), so all that 'board support' stuff can be moved away from the main CPU, and all the complex compatibility and driver code isolated to a separate, low-power core. That could be down with both ARM and x86 machines very easily, and to my mind would enable massive increases in efficiency, shifting a lot of the menial work currently done by an OS running on CPUs which are often way overpowered for these menial tasks, and which have to timeslice between user programs and housework. In the old days, coprocessors were a necessity in many things, and I think going forward, seeing a computer as network of coprocessors, with the main CPUs being essentially there _only_ for high-level user computation tasks (deciding what to write in a window, rather than how to put the window onscreen, or move it about). The funny thing about X-terminals is that with the hindsight of 3 decades, and the kind of graphics languages we have in things like PDF and Postscript (and how Apple used this model in Quartz), doing X-terminal type things, but over the PCIe bus, rather than 10Mb ethernet, would work wonders. (This would in no way get in the way of efficiency, since you could still throw textures and command buffers, or software-rendered windows, across the PCIe bus as we do with current architectures, but simpler things like window-drawing, and rendering PDF-type documents to the screen, as Quartz does, could easily be done with lightweight CPU cores on the GPU, and a better integration between the two: imagine being able to create a texture buffer in GPU memory, and write to it by the CPU sending postscript drawing commands, or creating a dialog window and sending content to it as AJAX does over the net, but with the network being the PCIe bus, and so on. Then do similar with sound and DSP. Economies of scale is where the major step forward would happen.)
Slashdot Mirror
What if we made homeowners responsible for hateful graffiti scrawled on their house? Or pubs and cafes liable for what is discussed there?
The fundamentalist Islamic states give a good picture of where the 'shield people from sexual immorality' approach ends up. To ensure 'male sexual morality' you have to make women invisible. To ensure 'female sexual morality', you have to make women silent, and the property of their owners, either their fathers or their husbands. That is where the religious nutcases of this world wish to push us.
If we don't want to go down that route, then there must be a means to keep our basic human sexual nature fed, exercised and happy, so as not to seek satisfaction 'at all costs'. By trying to 'lock it in a box and starve it into submission', we do not achieve this, but rather strengthen our sexual appetites, and promote the 'something is better than nothing' attitude which leads top guys wanking off to the underwear sections of clothing catalogues, or to weathergirls, or whatever. Having a world where every basic need is met, but where people's sexual drives are basically starved, is a recipe for disaster. But that is exactly what many 'mindless moralist' campaigners think is what we need.
Being saying this for years. If our braun behaviour is a consequence of neurin behaviour, this is inevitable. Think of a horde of Minions, each with a different idea of what a banana looks like, and a single button each to press if they see what they think is banana.
I wrote a letter to my MP, which was forwarded to some minister, who replied with the usual political "don't think it's right criminals and terrorists can communicate in secret" lines, saying that they do not intend to prevent people using strong cryptography (oblivious to the contradictions in what he wrote), and essentially the whole point, that end-to-end encrypted messaging can be achieved by anybody with a LAMP stack online somewhere and a couple of hours to write a few hundred lines of PHP, Javascript and HTML (using croptojs). We have a government of technologically clueless idiots.
I imagine the restrictions will lead to poor uptake. Lots of hassle and 4k, vs little or no hassle and full hd, will lead most to decide that full hd is good enough. Porn sites, on the other hand, are churning our drm free downloadable 4k porn. I can imagine a scenario where a disproportionately high amount of 4k entertainment watched is porn for just this reason (though there again we have the full hd is good enough thing).
Windows is basically a games platform that also runs legacy software like Microsoft Office. The main thing I have it around for is running games (e.g. via steam), music software (e.g. VSTs), or a few Windows only things. I wish Apple would make machines with the build quality of professional laptops and workstations, like e.g. Lenovo Thinkpads and HP Z-series workstations, rather than shiny toy that one needs an oxyacetylene blowtorch to get into, and for which the standard remedy for any fault is to bin the device and buy a new one. It is a good illustration of the problems of committing to a closed proprietary platform: if Apple's hardware lineup doesn't suit you, but you're committed to running software that only runs on macs, you're screwed. There is no market competition, just Hobson's choice.
It is similar to the way fundamentalist sects work.
1. (Confirmation bias) people prefer to be told what they like to hear, to have their beliefs and wishes confirmed.
2. (Intellectual laziness) people don't tend to waste effort scrutinising what they already agree with.
3. (Complexity of debunking) to give a convincing reason why fake news is wrong, you have to go into details, and this turns off many readers, especially the intelligent readers with cerebral jobs whose brains are tired from their day jobs.
4. (Effort of debunking) it is often easier to knock out a fake story sufficiently plausible to those who already agree with it, than to put out a carefully thought through article debunking fake news.
The problem is one of quality vs quantity: once you have the right psychological conditions (charismatic leader or group saying what some want to hear, frustrated audience that want change), fake news in support of something can be churned out, and circulated via media, social or traditional, on an industrial scale, cheaply and largely decentralised. Proper journalism and proper rebuttals simply can't be produced on a comparable scale. So to the naive, it can can appear clear that the balance favours the fake news.
(The comparison with fundamentalism can be seen if you peruse some of the religious apologetics literature, or books pushing creationism or similar.)
Reason and scrutiny are intellectually expensive, and cheap and cheerful bullshit is not.
I had thought of the possibility of this years ago. The basic idea is that, if you downsample an image, and then upsample it again, information is lost in the low resolution version that must be reconstructed somehow. Essentially what you need is a means to make educated guesses as to the missing information. Traditional codecs are based on the maths that results when the codec is intended to reconstruct an arbitrary image. If we constrain the space of possible images, such as photos of the same person, the amount of information necessary to specify the image is less. Where deep learning comes in is finding convenient subsets of 'all possible images' such that, if we assume an image lies within a given subset of 'all possible images', we can make better guesses as to the missing information than if the image was totally arbitrary.
The basic trick you can use (something which took me at most a couple of hours on a lazy afternoon to knock out off the top of my head -- easy or any CS student) is to have a MySQL table somewhere, with a simple schema of { int insertTime, char[32] key, string value }. The keys are produced by hashing a string of some sort, and the values are produced by encrypting using some password used by a related hashing method. Essentially you take a string 'HexVision' and salt it in two different ways. All table rows with this key are considered part of the conversation. Anybody with correct means to produce encryption key and row key can see the conversation. Encryption and decryption is done in javascript in the browser, as is producing the hashes (aes.js and sha.js). All the server does is store and retrieve rows, and is a few lines of PHP. You then get e.g. the last n messages, (get rows with matching key, sort by time, return last n), or the messages after a given time. The time things are written is not encrypted in this simple approach.
The thing is, you can write this into a single PHP file that you can stick on any LAMP stack anywhere (copy aes.js and sha.js inline). Then for the salting stuff, you use a separate html page (using sha.js and a few lines of js) to generate stuff to stick into the messaging page. Stuff like that.
Then, you stick it in something like a wordpress blog, where accessing a certain page (e.g. myweb.com/blog?page=46&etc=45) at the right time gives you the messaging application, but otherwise not. Then stick this in a country other than the UK.
Too easy. The government has basically declared its right to use a magic wand to summon unicorns.
This 'historical evidence' thing is another scam exported by China to the world. Indeed they have many sweatshop factories where children are worked to death to produce 'historical evidence' to export to the US.
We would hope that more influentual authors ans works are better ones. Whether that hope is well founded is another thing.
Not to mention how easily you can simultaneously disconnect all external peripherals at once.
They give the observed averages, but nothing about how it varies from person to person, or with usage habits. Like a reading with unspecified error.
Essentially for each place we have to remember what time solar noon is (that is, when the sun is at its zenith), when sunrise is, and so on. Then midnight may be at 3pm.
Then someone will come up with the bright idea of having a local time which is offset from UTC, so as to make the numbers more intuitive, and voila, we will have reinvented timezones. Having two clocks, one local, one UTC, rather than just one, would make a lot of sense. But only having UTC, like only having metric measurements, is too inconvenient.
If you keep doing this to athletes for decades, do you still have an improvement?
One thing that can be said for Unity is that it once someone is past the novice stage, it can be a great incentive to learn how to change you choice of desktop environment.
I have two X201s, and the biggest problem with both is that the wifi needs replacing, and I can't be bothered to do that. (Basically I use the ethernet port, though I have known some USB wifi dongles to cause total lockups.)
That said, my recommendation to anybody who does not need a high-end gaming or 3d laptop, and is on a budget, to go for something like a refurb Lenovo thinkpad. They're just so much better built and designed than consumer laptops, and provided you stick with the Windows 7 Pro they were designed for (if you want to run Windows, and bear in mind they often come with licensed Windows, so basically switch it out for an ssd with Linux, or bung said Linux SSD in the optical drive bay, if you have something like a T410).
OS wise, I tend to use Ubuntu Studio (and certainly either xfce4 or lxde as the desktop, never gnome or kde), which runs happily off a sandisk memory stick (which makes it easy to carry the system from one laptop to another, or carry on if one battery goes flat -- none of that 'hardware change ring this number' malarkey beloved of MS).
They record visitor habits, data mine the shit out of it, sell on the results, and market their it expertise. In addition, Mindgeek, who own the pornhub network, also own a number of major porn studios. So ads and visitor habits are likely their products.
Run from the zombies, and be careful not to infringe trademarks and copyrights on zombies while you leg it.
At present, women are a significant minority, and they still will be. 20% is enough, but 5% is not. Managing % figures is not the way to go.
1. It suits me
2. Tux is cute
3. Microsoft Windows Sucks
4. Macs cost loads
5. Tux is cute
While distributed social media (like Diaspora) has been an idea floating around for a while, something like the 'twittersphere' is where it could be most useful, having multiple interlinked 'twitterverses' where different rules on acceptability apply. The SJW's can have some, and the anti-politically-correct can run their own free-for-all zones, and so on. What is then needed is the distributed indexing and so on. But for a technology which is basically a glorified indexed array of char[140]'s, it has little that isn't easily copied in terms of functionality. Given that most users' number of followers is in the 100s, a simple PHP script spewing out RSS feeds is almost good enough for that task (and already way more complex than it needs to be). An aggregator simply needs to get a few KB of text from a few hundred URIs every few minutes, and then compose it into an aggregated feed. The trouble with modern social media is that they need to overcomplicate it in order to turn it into something they control. Then they need to give it away free, figure out how to make money from it, and so on. We really need an 'opentwitter' system. Twitter has demonstrated the need and power of this sort of communication, but cannot make a profitable business out of it. Just like email isn't owned, we need a twitter that isn't owned. And preferably before Twitter as a company tanks.
More generally, a rethink about internet communications would be welcome: having more fine grained control about who can send what to whom would make a lot of sense (and can essentially be done via things like cryptographic keys) -- then basic data and document types. (For example, a tweet is basically a char[140], most small things could be considered a json object fitting some schema, and for many web documents, the content part least, could make do with a far lighter weight document type than modern HTML: something where a high quality light-weight renderer wouldn't need something as complex as an operating system, as modern web browsers are.)
Have number of such indexes, default defferently for desktop vs mobile, but let the user have ultimate choice.
At present, I could not recommend a new pc over a refurbished ex pro Windows 7 machine from 5 years ago for things other than gaming, unless the person has a _lot_ to spend, so that Windows 10 will be useable. That Microsoft insisted on ramming so much into the Windows interface without the option of a lean, clean, simple OS that only does what I need to, more so than Windows 7, means you need to spend a lot to get an enjoyable user experience if you're someone who enjoys actually getting stuff done, rather than going 'wow! Shiny thing!'. The way manufacturers differentiate themselves with incompatible crapware that most people don't have (so there is no longer a shared experience with friends who have PCs). 1000s of companies are all trying to get a niche monopoly cash cow that they control, and in doing so we have ended up with a Balkanised industry of companies all concerned primarily with defending their territory, and the users needs are an afterthought. The potential of modern computing has gone from optimistic dream to a nightmare of annoyance, and users are tired of this. The fault is with the industry, and they have earned this downturn by taking the market and their customers for granted, preferring to structure things to chase short term profit. Users then must do the same, picking and choosing from a bad bunch of options, knowing how industry behaves. A weird kind of quasi-Nash-equilibrium that serves almost nobody that well.
Seeing a computer as a mini-network is a change that needs to happen. Having mini ARM cores doing things like coordinating I/O and graphics, so that all the main processor sees is somewhere to send instructions in a standard language (kind of like Vulkan is doing with graphics, and kind of like Postscript in some ways), so all that 'board support' stuff can be moved away from the main CPU, and all the complex compatibility and driver code isolated to a separate, low-power core. That could be down with both ARM and x86 machines very easily, and to my mind would enable massive increases in efficiency, shifting a lot of the menial work currently done by an OS running on CPUs which are often way overpowered for these menial tasks, and which have to timeslice between user programs and housework. In the old days, coprocessors were a necessity in many things, and I think going forward, seeing a computer as network of coprocessors, with the main CPUs being essentially there _only_ for high-level user computation tasks (deciding what to write in a window, rather than how to put the window onscreen, or move it about). The funny thing about X-terminals is that with the hindsight of 3 decades, and the kind of graphics languages we have in things like PDF and Postscript (and how Apple used this model in Quartz), doing X-terminal type things, but over the PCIe bus, rather than 10Mb ethernet, would work wonders. (This would in no way get in the way of efficiency, since you could still throw textures and command buffers, or software-rendered windows, across the PCIe bus as we do with current architectures, but simpler things like window-drawing, and rendering PDF-type documents to the screen, as Quartz does, could easily be done with lightweight CPU cores on the GPU, and a better integration between the two: imagine being able to create a texture buffer in GPU memory, and write to it by the CPU sending postscript drawing commands, or creating a dialog window and sending content to it as AJAX does over the net, but with the network being the PCIe bus, and so on. Then do similar with sound and DSP. Economies of scale is where the major step forward would happen.)