Udo's Data Stream

slashdot: Re:Yes, please.

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In fact, the notion of fire being an element is something the ancient Greeks thought up, not something you'll find in the Bible. Ironically, they came to this conclusion after the rejection of religion and insistence upon observation of nature. I was talking about alchemy, and the point was that this was the last time when chemistry was compatible with and encouraged by the Christian leadership. Which is still correct, but I apologize if I failed to bring that point across. Have mercy on a non-native English speaker ;-)We don't read the Bible as if it's a scientific treatise.No, most of "you" replace the Bible with scientific treatise and the rest of "you" thinks the Bible should supersede science whenever it seems necessary. But so as not to generalize too much, I'll just talk about your position as I perceived it, which is more closely related to the latter.When it says that God created Man, we can believe that without knowing all of the details of how he did it.I believe that you do indeed try to live according to that. It's a few lines further down when you state the opposite by professing that religion does not cherish ignorance where I have trouble keeping my sarcasm in check. But let's not dwell on that, let's instead talk about facts, not perceived intentions. Trouble is, God did demonstrably not create Man (or woman for that matter). You see, science cannot just glance over certain areas of nature, just because "we can believe the Bible without knowing the details".We investigate everything, because we have to. Science would not even work if important pieces of the puzzle were off-limits. So we researched. And we found out how the universe came into existence, we found out how matter interacts, and we found out how life works. In great detail, and we're not even close to finished. In some areas, and for some of us, those results may be troubling or directly contradict the teachings of our ancestors. But they exist nonetheless, and wishful thinking cannot rewrite reality. It becomes a question of whether you either accept what you found out and move on, or you willingly ignore what you learned and stay with a world view that is entirely based on fiction.I'll now move on to the depressing Bible passage you posted that, if nothing else, apparently demonstrates to both of us how scripture is designed to be interpreted however one likes it:That men may appreciate wisdom and discipline, may understand words of intelligence;May receive training in wise conduct, in what is right, just and honest;I liked that, but in the back of my head there was the creeping suspicion that those words meant something else for the author than they do for us today. And indeed, here comes the resolution:The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; wisdom and instruction fools despise.So many things wrong with that, on so many levels, where to start... First off, if your God rules through fear, he is first and foremost a complete douche-bag and following tyrants is generally considered an act of cowardice if not treason. However, once again I have to concede that this argument is not exactly on-topic anymore.Let's stay with the part where God is placed on top of every scientific observation. That's just not possible anymore, even if a scientist somehow tried it, their results would be severely compromised. This is exactly what pushed Einstein over the cliff and why Boltzmann killed himself. Now, nearly a century later, it has become even more futile to unify science and religion, especially for people who want to stay true to both.You see, religion isn't content with merely the explanation of natural phenomenon, but seeks to understand all aspects of reality - including the supernatural, the spiritual, and the moral as well.Religion does not really explain anything, it just defines stuff arbitrarily. Yes, it provides definitive answers on everything, but in the context of objective reality those answers turned out to be provably untrue (which is the entire reason this thread exists) and don't even get me started on the intangible stuff like morality where both of us just just be infinitely glad that we don't have to live in a world governed by the literal law of the Bible anymore. After subtracting the concretely objective and the intangibly psychological, we are left with just one aspect of scripture which refers to omnipotence, a self-enforcing concept designed to end any discussion.
from slashdot on 2010-07-28 12:52:12

slashdot: Re:Yes, please.

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Since mathematics is the only pure science, perhaps you can enlighten me how exactly it contradicts scripture.For what definition of "pure" would that be? Mathematics provides basic logical reasoning tools that help us deduce complex causal relationships and create models that show impressively how phenomena work without the need of a deity standing behind the curtain pulling the strings. Mathematics also gave us direct access to information technology that we use to simulate interactions accurately, including but not limited to evolutionary mechanisms. By providing these means mathematics contradicts religion on a daily basis both directly and indirectly.I'm sure there's some scripture somewhere that contradicts one of the laws of chemistry - can you name it?First, it's not as if chemistry is based on a set of commandments where I can now just invoke something like "the 9th law of chemistry", but yes there are a few concepts that come to mind. For example, pretty much all of biochemistry that provides concrete insights into how organisms work and interact with their environment. These models are based very concretely on evolution, so I'm pretty sure everything that happens in a cell is not something that is compatible with scripture. Heck, you can't even begin to grasp proteins without evolution. But it goes deeper than that. Alchemy was the last science based on and compatible with Christian religion. Once we discovered fire wasn't an element, we departed from the bible for good.Surely there's a commandment against information theory, something about not computing on the Sabbath, maybe? There may not be a commandment, but I do recall the demonization of knowledge being a fundamental concept in the bible. Wasn't there even some Tree of Knowledge or something that made God really angry at humans for eating its fruits? I may have that mixed up though, correct me as necessary. I do also seem to remember that Satan, who is apparently the personification of evil, is known as the bringer of light and knowledge. As such he is probably a direct descendant of Prometheus with whom the ancient gods got really upset for bringing the humans fire and thus technology. From a sociological viewpoint that makes sense, because knowledge really is the nemesis of belief and vice versa.Or perhaps the problem is that there are people who observe variations among species in nature and automatically jump to the conclusion that such variations are somehow proof that God doesn't exist.Sort of, yes. There are countless areas of scientific knowledge that lead you to the conclusion that the concept of an invisible deity is not only superfluous but also counterproductive reasoning. So, it's not restricted to evolution, you can arrive at this conclusion from almost any field of science.That the possibility of life adapting to its environment - rather than a sign of God's genius - is proof of his absence. No. There are really two concepts of God we're talking about here. The first is the literal biblical god, whose existence really has been disproved over time through countless breakthroughs in understanding. The second is the general idea of an omnipotent being that guides all of the universe, but has taken every conceivable precaution so his existence can never be demonstrated but also can (on account of omnipotence) never be ruled out. Of course the number of hypothetically existing but unprovable things that can be constructed from sheer imagination is endless and not restricted to gods. Creating unprovable hypotheses is easy and you cannot logically infer truth from the mere fact that they cannot be demonstrated as false.Or to put it differently: I can postulate that the world is in reality powered by invisible unicorn excrement and top that off with a statement about how the unicorns are infinitely clever about hiding it. There is really no way of disproving that and the discussion is over at that point. Which is exactly the reason why I suggested that you should stick to a purely religious argument because it makes you immune to logical attacks.Don't you find it odd that evolution is the only scientific theory to which fundamentalists object?In fact I do, as I already said. If you guys only knew what else is out there in the body of basic scientific knowledge, your heads would explode. You need to think way beyond evolution if you want to stop this. Of course it probably makes sense to attack one scientific model first and then use the social leverage against the next and so on. But hey, you have pretty much already won on the biology class thing, you need to expand. Strategically, physics would be the logical choice to attack next.Maybe, just maybe, there's something about teaching evolution that is more than just science? Let me think about it. Uhm... no, I got nothing. Seriously, what do you have in mind?
from slashdot on 2010-07-26 22:34:50

slashdot: Re:Yes, please.

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Evolutionary theory teaches that there is a physical process by which living organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, the environment over periods of many, many generations. Though we can't explain it completely yet, we believe we will someday discover how life came about on this planet. No. Abiogenesis is not part of evolution. And that's not an arbitrary distinction either. The chemical processes that lead to the spontaneous assembly of the first complex self-replicating macromolecules are poorly understood because we don't yet know the composition and environmental conditions of the early earth. Abiogenesis is a concrete chemistry problem and active research field in biochemistry. Evolution on the other hand, is an abstract mathematical model that describes a universal process of change and adaptation. Biological organisms are just one of many possible substrates on which evolution can take place, for instance the process has also been observed and implemented in many areas of information technology. We can, indeed, explain it very well, profoundly and completely.That science has been wrong more often than not.Not in the way religion has, and must be, per definition. Science creates models that serve to predict outcomes. When the actual outcome does not fit the prediction made by using the model, it's time to refine (or in some cases rebuild) the model. As such, science invites failure because scientists are eager to learn from them. Failure is one of the mechanisms that make science stronger as time progresses. You can't even say that science has been wrong more often than not. Our models have become very, very good. Most people don't realize how immensely we rely on them every single day to make billions of decisions, most of which are completely correct. (You made that point yourself, but I had to throw my 2 cents in here)That science often believes things on faith - for example, there's faith that someday we'll discover the means by which the first living cells came to be. It may even be a well founded faith - backed up by years of experimentation and data. But it's still faith.This is a potentially misleading argument. Science does not really require faith. Science could be done by automatons that don't have any capacity for faith. The danger of this wording is it creates the impression that science and faith are somehow on the same level and are interrelated if not interchangeable. Science believes things based on models that are supported by measurements and abstract mathematics. Furthermore, no scientific theory stands on its own, it exists in an ecosystem of proven and reliable ideas that supply a mutually supporting and robust outlook on the world. Even hypotheses, often conceptually mistaken to be equivalent to theories, rest on some evidence and usually offer models that are at least plausible. But nobody really goes out and equates a hypothesis with proven theory, since that would indeed mean taking things on faith.Having actually met a person in college who chose not to believe in God because of her HS biology class, I find it troubling that evolution is taught at all. Not because I take issue with the scientific theory, but because for so many, the fight over evolution is a fight over teaching against the existence of God.So you encountered one of the few cases where encountering actual facts made a person think and change their mind about religion and you find that alarming. Rest assured, it doesn't happen that often. Many people instead compartmentalize their minds into ridiculously incompatible world views, each used when it seems opportune. And the vast majority, like you noticed, simply doesn't care how the world works. You could tell them the earth is steam-powered by unicorn excrement and they'd swallow it without question. Which is, incidentally, the essence of religious teaching and brings me back to your original statement: you find it alarming that evolution is taught in classrooms? So basically you propose that children should be told about science as long as that science does not directly contradict scripture? I've got news for you: evolution isn't the only field of science constantly spewing anathema your way. You'd have to outlaw mathematics, physics, large parts of chemistry, information theory, parts of history, geology, ah fuck it: you'd have to outlaw pretty much everything. For some reason, you guys have singled out evolution, but the rest of science is kicking your collective asses just as badly.The science doesn't take a position one way or another, but so many have minds so small that they cannot understand the Genesis account of creation tells us who created us and why we were created, while science postulates about the process by which it came about.I really hope you're trolling, for your own sake. If so, well done sir! Let me just answer this steaming pile of ignorance with the basic observation that you cannot divide everything up between those two opposing concepts and expect to keep your sanity. Even if there was no science, your arbitrarily chosen piece of scripture does not hold up to the simplest philosophical examinations. So you're on pretty shaky ground to begin with. But to make it worse, you practically invite science to explain the world in parallel (as long as it doesn't come to close). In case you haven't noticed the folklore-based creation story you chose to build your world view on has already been disproved by science. You could escape this by adopting the old "we don't take that old stuff literally anymore" but it seems you even blocked that last escape route for yourself. You would fare much better in discussions if you just summarily discarded science. But the way you're doing it now you're just inviting intellectual ass-kicking, leaving you with no valid answers to respond back. At this point, your only hope is basically throwing logical fallacies at everyone and hope they get confused long enough until the discussion is over. Hence my well-meant advice: sack up, drop the pretense science stuff, stick with religion, you'll be way better off.
from slashdot on 2010-07-26 20:37:57

twitter: _udo: @sinahong ich bin auch total reif für das nächste Procrastinators Anonymous Meeting :-/ Bist du auf Facebook? 140 Zeichen sind doof...

_udo: @sinahong ich bin auch total reif für das nächste Procrastinators Anonymous Meeting :-/ Bist du auf Facebook? 140 Zeichen sind doof...
from twitter on 2010-07-21 06:18:00

twitter: _udo: @sinahong ich bin auch total reif für das nächste Procrastinators Anonymous Meeting :-/ Bist du auf Facebook? 140 Zeichen sind doof...

_udo: @sinahong ich bin auch total reif für das nächste Procrastinators Anonymous Meeting :-/ Bist du auf Facebook? 140 Zeichen sind doof...
from twitter on 2010-07-21 06:18:00

slashdot: Could be the most awesome country ever

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If this was a real project (which it isn't) with real funding and serious intentions, this could be a very cool engineering feat. If you base the assembly process on solar-powered automated collectors and separators, a 3D printer-like unit could be used to create any object shape the island needs for construction. However, anyone planning such an undertaking would have to take two big problems into account: toxic chemicals present in the recycled and susceptibility of the island in the face of frequent thunderstorms. Both of which could be tackled by careful engineering, but it won't be easy.But hey, living on an awesome sci-fi plastic flotilla/arcology? Sign me up!
from slashdot on 2010-07-15 11:20:48

twitter: _udo: @sinahong Wow, Tawi?! *g* mein Twitter-Account ist genauso tot wie mein Blawg -> Zeimangel :-S Schön, von dir zu hören! How'sitgoing?

_udo: @sinahong Wow, Tawi?! *g* mein Twitter-Account ist genauso tot wie mein Blawg -> Zeimangel :-S Schön, von dir zu hören! How'sitgoing?
from twitter on 2010-07-03 15:34:59

twitter: _udo: @sinahong Wow, Tawi?! *g* mein Twitter-Account ist genauso tot wie mein Blawg -> Zeimangel :-S Schön, von dir zu hören! How'sitgoing?

_udo: @sinahong Wow, Tawi?! *g* mein Twitter-Account ist genauso tot wie mein Blawg -> Zeimangel :-S Schön, von dir zu hören! How'sitgoing?
from twitter on 2010-07-03 15:34:59

slashdot: Re:Nanites

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To get medical treatment, you would need money.Or, you know, doctors would only be people who aren't in it for the money, because those are the doctors you really want anyway. The same would apply for all other professions. Everybody would be free to do what they like, even if that happens to be nothing at all. I think we'd see some pretty amazing advances in science and art without the ever-looming yoke of scarcity.People seem to be so enamored with the status quo, with our entire society based on the concept of scarcity and monetary value, they tend to freak out if the subject of abolishing it even comes up. I just hope when the time comes we'll make the right decision and let go of this model instead of keeping it alive artificially (as we do now with so many other bad ideas that have become obsolete but are still on life support).
from slashdot on 2010-06-18 04:10:50

twitter: _udo: mpf...

_udo: mpf...
from twitter on 2010-06-03 00:05:23

twitter: _udo: mpf...

_udo: mpf...
from twitter on 2010-06-03 00:05:23

twitter: _udo: mpf...

_udo: mpf...
from twitter on 2010-06-03 00:05:23

slashdot: Re:Was Not Impressed at All

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You seem to neglect that there is a rather vocal portion of the TV viewing demographic that is in love with the idea of television, movies and music reinforcing their world view of ignorance over substance. Listen to popular songs and see how many of them talk about spirituality. If there was a scientific explanation of what was happening on the island there would be riots in the streets with the religious nutters acting like you defiled the story of Christ and they would be right. The narrative was a Christian allegory, a morality play for a modern time and as much as I was disgusted with the way they treated the series as a pulpit for their views I'm more concerned at how they treated science as something not even worth explaining because, " We all die in the end."I absolutely agree.
from slashdot on 2010-05-24 22:52:48

slashdot: Re:Was Not Impressed at All

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You're clearly not a scientistNice assumption. Guess again. Maybe you can make it more insulting by throwing in a "clearly you're not a good one" in there?I find that in science, answers to questions almost always raise many new questions, they never wrap the whole field up nicely.That's a straw man argument, I never said anything to the contrary. Clearly, you're trying to misunderstand my initial statement. It's not about the fact that we already know everything, we certainly don't. But the unknown isn't locked up behind some unsurmountable barrier either. And if you think we don't have a very good framework for your field originating from our vast knowledge of chemistry and physics, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Our knowledge today is amazing and it gets even better every year. There just is no need to invoke the supernatural anymore to explain anything.We live in a world where the "how does this work" questions are generally answerable and regularly do get answered. Even *gasp* in biology ignorance isn't celebrated and there is no magical line beyond which knowledge cannot be obtained. Contrary to modus operandi of Lost, obviously. Which was my point to begin with.
from slashdot on 2010-05-24 22:47:59

slashdot: Re:5 word summary

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they were holding on to their fantasy about what life would have been like without the island Or, for people who prefer meta explanations: the writers didn't yet know how to integrate the alternate universe. Signs point to the possibility that they wanted to explore two different timelines that separated when the bomb was detonated but in the end they could not figure out how to make them come together without making one of them meaningless. So they came up with the afterlife idea during the brainstorming for the series finale instead. There, done.And yes, most Dungeons and Dragons game masters are better at writing story arcs than those guys. But overall, I still enjoyed watching most of it.
from slashdot on 2010-05-24 21:55:23

slashdot: Re:Meandering story not going anywhere

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Heh, most of us gave up on Flashfoward after the horrible and prolonged torture of physics and repeated painful explanation of the FFs as a quantum event affecting the global "consciousness field". That was the point when it became obvious that the flashforwards were really an unexplainable plot device stuffed with terrible non-science unsuccessfully posing as authentic physics in a vain attempt at making their cognitively underpowered viewers feel smart.
from slashdot on 2010-05-24 21:46:22

slashdot: Re:Religious Viewers= $

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Sorry, I'm an Atheist and the ending for me was like watching the crew of the enterprise meeting Santa Claus at the North PoleBeing an atheist doesn't preclude a person from enjoying fantasy-themed fiction, even if it's "spiritual" fiction. But with Lost it became clear very early on that the writers didn't have a clue about their own storyline, much less where the line that separates scifi from fantasy actually runs. Being annoyed at that has nothing to do with Atheism, it's just a common human reaction to being screwed over after a long con. As an Atheist myself, I didn't even have an issue with the afterlife ending, I actually liked the way those characters were sent off. I did take issue with the inept and clueless way the audience was treated from the second season on, but I decided to keep watching it because there were some decent moments in there. But really, at this point it shouldn't surprise anyone that there just was no answer to most of these "mysteries".On a side note: wishing for an afterlife is not at all incompatible with Atheism. An afterlife would be the coolest thing ever. So would world peace and the option for every human being to live a happy and fulfilling life. I can wish for many things, that doesn't mean I have to postulate they exist simply because I would like them to be true. It does mean, however, that in order for something to change, we need to do it ourselves instead of sitting around and praising the divinity of the status quo.
from slashdot on 2010-05-24 21:28:31

slashdot: Re:Was Not Impressed at All

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As to the lack of a mechanism for the island, I guess it's like real life, where your "how does this work" questions are rarely answered.That only applies if you're religious and kinda celebrating ignorance. The reality is that we live in a time where we're technically able to explain almost any common occurrence or effect. Sure, there's a lot of cutting-edge stuff like String Theory, and some dark corners in Astronomy, but as far as everyday life is concerned we have a pretty decent grip on what's going on.
from slashdot on 2010-05-24 20:27:18

slashdot: Re:Was Not Impressed at All

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Acknowledging the bizarre elements, Lindelof was quick to point out: "This show isn't 'The X-Files.' Everything that happens to these characters is grounded to reality as we know it. Time and space are not bent."which turned out later to be the complete opposite of the truth.A much more sinister (realistic?) explanation would be that the writers really do not have any concept of scientific reality and hence are unable to recognize that they departed from it. For me, this suspicion was finally confirmed when the whole time travel thing started. The writers clearly had no idea that all those strange "coincidences" were unlikely beyond the point of being absurd. In the end, Lost's genre was more fantasy than anything else, it certainly wasn't scifi.
from slashdot on 2010-05-24 19:49:34

slashdot: Re:All for me to browse /.

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It may be a bit crazy, but consider that we don't invest as much energy as we used to in physical labor. I think it's quite a fitting use for this excess energy, since our bodies want to absorb it anyway we may as well put it to good use. There is, however, one small problem: the glucose metabolic pathway is only one of many, and it consist of several systems working in a chain. To actually get the full amount of energy out, we need to look a little deeper into replicating the natural processes our bodies use. But this is definitely a promising start!
from slashdot on 2010-05-20 19:24:21

slashdot: Re:All for me to browse /.

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The efficiencies aren't going to stay that low. Since the basic reaction is enzymatic, we can assume a great deal of eventual efficiency once this is scaled up. (At this point the question remains open when we'll be ready to make devices that actually perform the entire conversion of a glucose molecule into water and CO2.)Taking myself as an example, I eat about 2000 to 3000 kcal worth of stuff every day. I really need about 1000 of it, the rest is just used by my body to predispose me for an especially early death. Let's be conservative and say that most of us could spare 1000 kcal/day that could be converted into electrical energy. This equates to roughly 4000 kJ of energy. Distributed over 24 hours, that would mean a sustained power output of 46 W, easily enough to power quite a few personal electronic devices. It's enough to power a MacBook and a cell phone.Also keep in mind that the power requirements of implanted (or closely worn) devices are generally much lower, especially once direct retinal projection technology takes off which is the point where all those power-hungry displays become obsolete.
from slashdot on 2010-05-20 06:27:21

twitter: _udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through

_udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:22:19

twitter: _udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through

_udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:22:19

twitter: _udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through

_udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:22:19

twitter: _udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through

_udo: @t maybe you'd like to check out http://hubbub.at as opposed to waiting on #diaspora to follow through
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:22:19

twitter: _udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at

_udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:12:01

twitter: _udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at

_udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:12:01

twitter: _udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at

_udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:12:01

twitter: _udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at

_udo: @rjs If you want to see code instead of marketing and money, have a look at http://hubbub.at
from twitter on 2010-05-15 10:12:01

slashdot: Re:What type of control are you planning?

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Exactly. The general idea is that the protocol is open, but I recognize that also brings the danger of "embrace and extend". That's one of the reasons why there is an "official" reference implementation, not only to see what works, but also to provide a common perspective.
from slashdot on 2010-05-07 13:01:58

slashdot: Distributed, Open Source Social Networking

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What if we could have the functionality of proprietary social networking sites, but with an open model that allowed everyone true ownership of their data? A few months ago I started thinking about this idea, and out of these deliberations the Hubbub open source networking software was born. It follows a distributed philosophy that allows people to install the software on their own servers. What do Slashdot readers think, can something like this work? Under what circumstances would you prefer a software like this to your favorite social network?
from slashdot on 2010-05-07 11:34:49

slashdot: Re:Free =/= Fun

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Yes, it does. That word can have a lot of meanings and different definitions are usually applied in different contexts. So yeah, in this case, it does mean what he thinks it means.
from slashdot on 2010-05-07 03:23:59

slashdot: Re:Parental controls

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I remember when I was 11, I had the only computer in the house and was the only person who actually knew what a computer was. In hindsight, I had been toiling along aimlessly for years until I got my first Commodore for my 9th birthday. That thing literally transformed me, and woke me up in countless ways. I hate to think about how miserable my childhood might have been if my parents hadn't allowed me to live my hobby like they did. There were no usage restrictions of any kind, they just trusted me. Granted, there was no internet, but there was lots of pirated software and other stuff going around, including porn which I assume parents today are most afraid of. On that note, we also had several freely accessable TVs in the house, allowing among other things unrestricted access to egregious German porn channels. And you know what? I didn't even watch TV, except maybe for an occasional episode of TNG.The point is, my parents used a trust system and it worked out great, because trust then goes both ways. They believed in talking to their children. They believed that children, while still immature, are capable of insight and reason. Because they always explained the reasoning behind their rules, there needed to be very few rules in the first place. These methods also have the added benefit of children that adhere to the spirit of the rules rather than merely to the letter. However hard parents try, they will never be able to "protect" their children from exposure to gross, unsuitable material - especially online. Filtering and censorships do not work. And what's worse, when filtering does break down, a child will be exposed to bad content wholly unprepared.Of course it sucks that children come across, say, waterballoon fetishists on youtube every day by accident. The problem is probably a lot more severe if a child has an illness such as autism. Being admittedly largely ignorant when it comes to the education of autistic children, I'd still be interested to learn if it isn't possible to convey the nature of fetish porn to an 11-year old child and teach him how to avoid this stuff by himself?
from slashdot on 2010-04-11 19:58:25

slashdot: Re:I've got the cure

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http://americanaffairs.suite101.com/article.cfm/high_std_rates_abstinence_ed_linkhttp://www.newsweek.com/id/74005http://gayteens.about.com/b/2009/11/17/rising-std-rates-linked-to-abstinence-only-education.htmhttp://www.avert.org/abstinence.htmJust a few links off the top google search results on the subject. While facts will certainly never really matter to people who feel so strongly in favor of religious indoctrination and against sex, it's certainly easy for the rest of us to see the obvious effects at work here. It's a lovely subject of discussion between fundamentalists and enlightened people, but for the sake of all adolescents who are just starting out on this whole sex thing, I'd rather see that relgious brainwashing stay out of sex education (or any form of education for that matter).
from slashdot on 2010-03-31 13:57:45

slashdot: Re:I've got the cure

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
Religions teach abstinence until the person meets another person, and then makes a permanent commitment to that person.Then religions say Go for it!I sincerely hope you're being sarcastic. Religions perceive sex as a necessary evil, to be used for procreation only. Actually, most religions go even further and condone the concept of love (and by extension sex) only if it subject to some kind of religious regulation mechanism, because anything else gnaws away at the oppressive stranglehold religion has over everyday life. In order to exist, religion needs to have a monopoly on everything fulfilling and meaningful.Sex is an addiction to anyone who has done it. Once you start, you don't stop.Again, you're kidding, right? Sexuality, for most people, is a natural part of their existence, a part of themselves. Sex addiction is not a recognized medical condition, it's a catchphrase invented by tabloid media designed to appeal to stupid people.Religions know this, and that's why they say to wait until you found the right person, to not only have sex with, but to also have a family with.And until you found "the right person", you are required to act as if you're a sexless, joyless, dishonest zombie. You're not even allowed to find out if that person is actually sexually compatible, until ít's too late. Oh, I forget "the right person" has to meet certain requirements of gender and, in many cases, social status. Otherwise, they're obviously not the right person. And once you have declared one person to be "the right person", you can never change your mind, or an invisible sky tyrant will crush your immortal soul for all eternity. Sounds awesome.
from slashdot on 2010-03-31 13:42:29

slashdot: Re:why is the Via C7 not more popular?

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
Oops. Didn't know that, thanks for clearing it up. I think I'd rather make my next home server CPU a C7 instead of an Atom then!
from slashdot on 2010-03-29 11:37:25

slashdot: Re:why is the Via C7 not more popular?

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
Sort of. You have to install the VIA Java Cryptography Service Provider to use the hardware acceleration, and I have the distinct feeling that standard SSH implementations won't be able to use that unless you patch them accordingly.
from slashdot on 2010-03-29 11:13:10

slashdot: Re:Rails 3.1 Comparison

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
Actually I pulled the sample straight from the documentation for the project in the OP.I didn't realize this, sorry. But nevertheless, it seemed like an unfair and artificial comparison to me. Most people would agree that Rails is a nice, mature MVC framework and I doubt the same can be said about SolarPHP (which I personally don't know anything about). My perception was that your examples were chosen to present Ruby in a more concise and more elegant light, by force.Again, which is not to say that there isn't a good point to be made here. Ruby code tends to be a little more concise and, as a PHP-heavy programmer myself, I have to concede that PHP's syntax is anything but elegant. It's one step away from the surreal ASCII art that is Perl ;-)
from slashdot on 2010-03-12 10:53:02

slashdot: Re:Rails 3.1 Comparison

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
You may have a valid point, but I can't get over the trollish way you souped up those code examples to prove your point. You made the PHP example over-commented, bulky and redundant on purpose. A more accurate counterpart would more likely look like this:public function actionIndex(){ $this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array( 'where' => array('blogs.status = ?' => 'public'), 'order' => 'blogs.created DESC' ));}Without knowing the actual library used for the PHP example, there might be saner and less ugly variants.
from slashdot on 2010-03-12 00:58:56

slashdot: Re:Health Insurance in Germany

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
In your case it's 300 €, but keep in mind that the amount you pay for insurance is directly linked to your income, not to how much you've been sick last year. You could argue it's unfair that you have to subsidize a bunch of students and old people for a while, but it sure beats any other system I've seen. I agree it's not fun to pay the insane amount of insurance and taxes here in Europe, and yes, a huge part of it is going to be wasted on government pork and mismanagement. We need to address that. I'd speculate we could cut those insurance premiums in half if we abolished all the profiteering, corruption and misappropriation. But all in all, it's the price we pay for a pretty decent attempt at social equality.
from slashdot on 2010-03-07 11:12:18

slashdot: Headlines are superfluous

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
Don't you hate it when people refuse to accept the premise of a technical question and write long monologues why the submitter is working with false assumptions even though they don't know what exactly they are dealing with? Yeah, me too. Makes them look arrogant, ignorant and smug. I'm going to go ahead though and reject the submitter's premise: there is no chance in hell that you're on the right track with whatever project you're attempting to do. But instead of merely dissing you for incompetence, I'll lay out a few scenarios (might as well, since you didn't supply any of your own).If the actual physical bits matter to you...you're either a hard drive manufacturer or a clueless person who should read up on how drives actually work. And we both know you're not working for a manufacturer. What you need to know is that there are several layers of indirection between the write call from within an OS down to the actual magnetic platter. These layers are there for a reason. At the very least, the onboard controller of the drive abstracts away the physical block allocation, and the drive won't work without the controller at all. Since the intricacies of the drive's physical address space are not accessible from the outside, there will never never never be a reason to try and fiddle with it directly. Because you can't.If you are looking for disk I/O without a filesystem...we're finally in saner territory. There are valid reasons to do this, e.g. speed and overhead considerations. Some database vendors actually have features like these. In this scenario, you're using the entire drive as one big addressable blob. A good starting point would be to have a look at the source code of a simple filesystem, such as ext2. Strip away all the actual file handling stuff and learn what you can from the disk I/O routines. On the other hand, if you didn't arrive at this conclusion yourself, that's not a very encouraging sign.If you simply want a drive without error correction...you're not developing software that will run on any modern system. If you accept this caveat, you can buy an ancient drive off ebay and use that. However, keep the first scenario firmly in mind: there is simply no reason to control the exact placement of every single byte if you don't plan on literally putting the drive under a microscope afterwards. Otherwise, this has no practical implications and, again, you are on the wrong track.If you're a DRM/malware/virus developer...I will sleep very comfortably tonight, because you had to ask about this on Slashdot, signaling once more that you're doing it wrong.
from slashdot on 2010-03-03 12:06:10

slashdot: Re:You believed them when the promised?

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
They didn't want to wait the month for the samples from the scene to get analyzed to determined there were 2 different samples of DNA in the area and find out people had skipped town[...]No, that was not the case. There was a lot of time between the analysis of the crime scene and the collection of random DNA samples. From TFA:"Over the course of a year they advertised for witnesses many times, offered rewards and interviewed all his neighbours many times. I wasn’t interviewed as I’d been living in Bristol at the time. Eventually, they phoned me up and asked I’d mind helping them out. It was clear they were scraping the bottom of the barrel."
from slashdot on 2010-03-02 16:54:25

slashdot: Re:You believed them when the promised?

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
It doesn't really matter whether the majority of police officers are "good and honorable people" (which is probably doubtful anyway since it's a profession that attracts bullies disproportionately). What does matter is that it's their job to get you. That's right, they're out to get you. Any law professor will tell you that they are allowed to lie to you at any time, and do a couple of other things to you, just to catch you for something, preferably for the crime they're investigating. They have no incentive whatsoever to make sure they get the right guy, their only job is to get someone convicted.Take for example this case. A guy was found stabbed in a cupboard. They had no clue who might have done it. Finally, it was decided that he actually stabbed himself and then put himself in a cupboard. You have to wonder, why did the police go around collecting DNA samples in the first place if there was no foreign DNA on the crime scene to begin with. Clearly, either DNA was collected from random people in the hope of getting them convicted for any other crime, or the final conclusion that the guy stabbed himself is another lie to make their crime solving statistics look good after months of fruitless investigation.By the way, while the individual likelihood of being misidentified through your DNA markers as a match for one given piece of evidence is very small, your chance "matching" some completely random piece of evidence among the millions they got lying around is actually getting higher with increasing database size. So if your DNA is on file, and is routinely compared to every new piece of evidence that comes in, an individual's chance of being framed by the birthday paradox is higher than one might think.
from slashdot on 2010-03-02 10:25:44

slashdot: Censorship has multiple uses

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
Of course, ideologues like the limitless possibilities censorship offers when it comes to shaping the thoughts of the population by making inconvenient material unavailable. It also helps them get re-elected. But in this case, censorship has a very clear business aspect: it means that if you as a publisher don't pay up, they have the power to make your product disappear. Not only will your website disappear from view, the censorship filter makes it impossible for people to even talk about your product. So this is about corruption, clear and simple.
from slashdot on 2010-02-24 09:26:32

slashdot: Depression Linked to Heavy Internet Use

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
In other news, "researchers" with a less Luddite agenda might have drawn the reverse conclusion: depressive people are more likely to heavily use the internet.While there are many causes of depression, we can be reasonably sure that the internet is not causing any of it. However, depressive persons suffer from social problems as a result of their disease and those are problems that can be partially compensated by substituting actual face to face activities (that are often difficult for patients suffering from depression) with interaction through the internet.
from slashdot on 2010-02-04 02:26:05

slashdot: Re:Is compiled PHP even possible?

This is a slashdot comment, any formatting - including quotation marks - has been removed:
No, if it's a string containing the characters "72.6", it will silently convert it to float and return 100. (Which is actually pretty nice)
from slashdot on 2010-02-02 15:59:22

shared: Mapping the brain

Researchers at MIT and other institutions intend to map the connectomes (wiring diagrams of the brain) of animals and eventually perhaps those of humans. Their results could fundamentally alter our understanding of the brain. Piecing together connectomes requires analyzing vast numbers of electron microscopic images of brain slices and tracing the tangled connections between neurons, each of which can send projections to other cells several inches away. So MIT researchers are now using automated machine learning, feed computers electron micrographs as well as human tracings of these images. The computer then searches for an algorithm that allows it to imitate human performance. The eventual goal is to use computers to process the bulk of the images needed to create connectomes. (Source: )
from shared on 2010-01-29 05:05:39

shared: Mapping the brain

Researchers at MIT and other institutions intend to map the connectomes (wiring diagrams of the brain) of animals and eventually perhaps those of humans. Their results could fundamentally alter our understanding of the brain. Piecing together connectomes requires analyzing vast numbers of electron microscopic images of brain slices and tracing the tangled connections between neurons, each of which can send projections to other cells several inches away. So MIT researchers are now using automated machine learning, feed computers electron micrographs as well as human tracings of these images. The computer then searches for an algorithm that allows it to imitate human performance. The eventual goal is to use computers to process the bulk of the images needed to create connectomes. (Source: )
from shared on 2010-01-29 05:05:39

shared: Mapping the brain

Researchers at MIT and other institutions intend to map the connectomes (wiring diagrams of the brain) of animals and eventually perhaps those of humans. Their results could fundamentally alter our understanding of the brain. Piecing together connectomes requires analyzing vast numbers of electron microscopic images of brain slices and tracing the tangled connections between neurons, each of which can send projections to other cells several inches away. So MIT researchers are now using automated machine learning, feed computers electron micrographs as well as human tracings of these images. The computer then searches for an algorithm that allows it to imitate human performance. The eventual goal is to use computers to process the bulk of the images needed to create connectomes. (Source: )
from shared on 2010-01-29 05:05:39

shared: Mapping the brain

Researchers at MIT and other institutions intend to map the connectomes (wiring diagrams of the brain) of animals and eventually perhaps those of humans. Their results could fundamentally alter our understanding of the brain. Piecing together connectomes requires analyzing vast numbers of electron microscopic images of brain slices and tracing the tangled connections between neurons, each of which can send projections to other cells several inches away. So MIT researchers are now using automated machine learning, feed computers electron micrographs as well as human tracings of these images. The computer then searches for an algorithm that allows it to imitate human performance. The eventual goal is to use computers to process the bulk of the images needed to create connectomes. (Source: )
from shared on 2010-01-29 05:05:39

shared: Viruses use 'hive intelligence' to focus their attack

Imperial College London researchers found that Vaccinia viruses hop over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold. Vaccinia is known to spread from cell to cell in a characteristic way. After attaching to the cell membrane of its target, it releases a protein that enters the cell, where it communicates with actin â€" a protein that helps maintain the cell's structure. The actin responds by growing longer, and then attaches itself to the virus, still sitting on the surface of the cell, as a so-called "actin tail." This tail helps the virus take off from the cell and find the next victim. Finding ways to block the cell surface proteins might lead to new antiviral drugs. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html)
from shared on 2010-01-22 05:15:35

shared: Viruses use 'hive intelligence' to focus their attack

Imperial College London researchers found that Vaccinia viruses hop over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold. Vaccinia is known to spread from cell to cell in a characteristic way. After attaching to the cell membrane of its target, it releases a protein that enters the cell, where it communicates with actin â€" a protein that helps maintain the cell's structure. The actin responds by growing longer, and then attaches itself to the virus, still sitting on the surface of the cell, as a so-called "actin tail." This tail helps the virus take off from the cell and find the next victim. Finding ways to block the cell surface proteins might lead to new antiviral drugs. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html)
from shared on 2010-01-22 05:15:35

shared: Viruses use 'hive intelligence' to focus their attack

Imperial College London researchers found that Vaccinia viruses hop over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold. Vaccinia is known to spread from cell to cell in a characteristic way. After attaching to the cell membrane of its target, it releases a protein that enters the cell, where it communicates with actin â€" a protein that helps maintain the cell's structure. The actin responds by growing longer, and then attaches itself to the virus, still sitting on the surface of the cell, as a so-called "actin tail." This tail helps the virus take off from the cell and find the next victim. Finding ways to block the cell surface proteins might lead to new antiviral drugs. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html)
from shared on 2010-01-22 05:15:35

shared: Viruses use 'hive intelligence' to focus their attack

Imperial College London researchers found that Vaccinia viruses hop over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold. Vaccinia is known to spread from cell to cell in a characteristic way. After attaching to the cell membrane of its target, it releases a protein that enters the cell, where it communicates with actin â€" a protein that helps maintain the cell's structure. The actin responds by growing longer, and then attaches itself to the virus, still sitting on the surface of the cell, as a so-called "actin tail." This tail helps the virus take off from the cell and find the next victim. Finding ways to block the cell surface proteins might lead to new antiviral drugs. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html)
from shared on 2010-01-22 05:15:35

shared: Viruses use 'hive intelligence' to focus their attack

Imperial College London researchers found that Vaccinia viruses hop over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold. Vaccinia is known to spread from cell to cell in a characteristic way. After attaching to the cell membrane of its target, it releases a protein that enters the cell, where it communicates with actin â€" a protein that helps maintain the cell's structure. The actin responds by growing longer, and then attaches itself to the virus, still sitting on the surface of the cell, as a so-called "actin tail." This tail helps the virus take off from the cell and find the next victim. Finding ways to block the cell surface proteins might lead to new antiviral drugs. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html)
from shared on 2010-01-22 05:15:35

shared: Viruses use 'hive intelligence' to focus their attack

Imperial College London researchers found that Vaccinia viruses hop over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold. Vaccinia is known to spread from cell to cell in a characteristic way. After attaching to the cell membrane of its target, it releases a protein that enters the cell, where it communicates with actin â€" a protein that helps maintain the cell's structure. The actin responds by growing longer, and then attaches itself to the virus, still sitting on the surface of the cell, as a so-called "actin tail." This tail helps the virus take off from the cell and find the next victim. Finding ways to block the cell surface proteins might lead to new antiviral drugs. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html)
from shared on 2010-01-22 05:15:35

shared: Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator

As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new ?5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED (the "IP Rights Enforcement Directive," a punishing piece of anti-Internet legislation). I've been looking for a reliable VPN to use on public hotspots -- this might just be it.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

In fact, I just signed up. I'll let you know how it works out.

Ipredator

Pirate Bay's Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public (TorrentFreak) (via Memex 1.1)

from shared on 2010-01-21 06:33:02

shared: Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator

As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new ?5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED (the "IP Rights Enforcement Directive," a punishing piece of anti-Internet legislation). I've been looking for a reliable VPN to use on public hotspots -- this might just be it.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

In fact, I just signed up. I'll let you know how it works out.

Ipredator

Pirate Bay's Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public (TorrentFreak) (via Memex 1.1)

from shared on 2010-01-21 06:33:02

shared: Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator

As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new ?5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED (the "IP Rights Enforcement Directive," a punishing piece of anti-Internet legislation). I've been looking for a reliable VPN to use on public hotspots -- this might just be it.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

In fact, I just signed up. I'll let you know how it works out.

Ipredator

Pirate Bay's Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public (TorrentFreak) (via Memex 1.1)

from shared on 2010-01-21 06:33:02

shared: Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator

As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new ?5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED (the "IP Rights Enforcement Directive," a punishing piece of anti-Internet legislation). I've been looking for a reliable VPN to use on public hotspots -- this might just be it.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

In fact, I just signed up. I'll let you know how it works out.

Ipredator

Pirate Bay's Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public (TorrentFreak) (via Memex 1.1)

from shared on 2010-01-21 06:33:02

shared: Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator

As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new ?5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED (the "IP Rights Enforcement Directive," a punishing piece of anti-Internet legislation). I've been looking for a reliable VPN to use on public hotspots -- this might just be it.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

In fact, I just signed up. I'll let you know how it works out.

Ipredator

Pirate Bay's Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public (TorrentFreak) (via Memex 1.1)

from shared on 2010-01-21 06:33:02

shared: Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator

As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new ?5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED (the "IP Rights Enforcement Directive," a punishing piece of anti-Internet legislation). I've been looking for a reliable VPN to use on public hotspots -- this might just be it.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

In fact, I just signed up. I'll let you know how it works out.

Ipredator

Pirate Bay's Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public (TorrentFreak) (via Memex 1.1)

from shared on 2010-01-21 06:33:02

shared: Photo



from shared on 2010-01-20 00:51:58

shared: Photo



from shared on 2010-01-20 00:51:58

shared: Photo



from shared on 2010-01-20 00:51:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: Watch carefully as the



funny pictures of cats with captions

Watch carefully as the feline sneak up on their unsuspecting prey? *sigh* Is he doing the Attenborough voice again? Yup?

deyz iz dooin moar gooder dan dis guy

Picture by: me Caption by: Spooky_Toast via Advanced Lol Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions



from shared on 2010-01-17 19:00:58

shared: ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

In this week's ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup - our digest of the best posts from the past week - we discuss why HTML 5 is going to kill Flash, where the best school for majors in entrepreneurship are, and how for the most innovative entrepreneurs, it all starts with "why." Also this week we revealed some secrets to social media, and added to our continuing series chronicling startup communities with profiles of both Boston and Portland.

Sponsor

Death to Flash: 3 Great HTML 5 Demos

google_html5_jan10.jpgThis morning ReadWriteWeb accompanied The Great Wall Club (a group of Chinese mobile executives) to Google for a look at some of the company's development tools. While Developer Relations Manager Patrick Chanezon was unable to comment on yesterday's news of Google's threat to cease operations in China, he did show off some impressive demos utilizing HTML 5.

Top 6 Colleges with Entrepreneurial Programs

graduate_guy_jan10.jpgFor young budding entrepreneurs approaching graduation this spring, or for those looking to go back for a post-graduate degree, finding the right program for your needs is very important. In their seventh annual joint effort last fall, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review teamed up to rank the top 25 undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship programs in the United States. Only six programs managed to make the top 10 in both lists, securing their spots at the top of the best overall entrepreneurship programs.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

social-media_jan10.jpgPresentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

Entrepreneurs: It's Not What You Do It's Why You Do It

Motivational speaker and author of the book Start With Why Simon Sinek believes he has found a way to map out the way inspiring leaders and innovators think. Young entrepreneurs who may think they aren't up to snuff with the big boys of innovation should be encouraged by Sinek's theories which seek to break down inspiration into an easily replicated formula.

He calls his concept "The Golden Circle," a series of three concentric circles that represent the different ways we think about a product or goal. The outermost circle, labeled "What," represents, for instance, a company's product. The next circle, "How," would be the technology behind this product, and the innermost circle represents "Why" the company makes the product.

Never Mind the Valley: Here's Portland

portland_valley_jan10.jpgWhen asked what shapes Portland's startup culture, Silicon Florist blogger Rick Turoczy named 3 defining aspects of the industry - hardware roots, open source projects and iPhone development. Turoczy has been in Oregon for the past 15-years and started Silicon Florist as a way to cover the region's early stage startup scene alongside other Portland tech sites like Mike Rogoway's Silicon Forest blog and Strange Love Live.
Since then he's watched his town grow into a bustling tech hub and enjoyed every minute of it. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Turoczy and a few other Portland influencers to get a feel for the scene.

Never Mind the Valley: Here's Boston

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort.

In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms.
In 1957, the ARDC invested $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation, a company founded by two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers working on transistor-based computing. The ARDC was later able to turn around and sell their investment for $450 million, quite possibly the best return on an investment ever at that point.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-17 18:30:00

shared: ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

In this week's ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup - our digest of the best posts from the past week - we discuss why HTML 5 is going to kill Flash, where the best school for majors in entrepreneurship are, and how for the most innovative entrepreneurs, it all starts with "why." Also this week we revealed some secrets to social media, and added to our continuing series chronicling startup communities with profiles of both Boston and Portland.

Sponsor

Death to Flash: 3 Great HTML 5 Demos

google_html5_jan10.jpgThis morning ReadWriteWeb accompanied The Great Wall Club (a group of Chinese mobile executives) to Google for a look at some of the company's development tools. While Developer Relations Manager Patrick Chanezon was unable to comment on yesterday's news of Google's threat to cease operations in China, he did show off some impressive demos utilizing HTML 5.

Top 6 Colleges with Entrepreneurial Programs

graduate_guy_jan10.jpgFor young budding entrepreneurs approaching graduation this spring, or for those looking to go back for a post-graduate degree, finding the right program for your needs is very important. In their seventh annual joint effort last fall, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review teamed up to rank the top 25 undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship programs in the United States. Only six programs managed to make the top 10 in both lists, securing their spots at the top of the best overall entrepreneurship programs.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

social-media_jan10.jpgPresentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

Entrepreneurs: It's Not What You Do It's Why You Do It

Motivational speaker and author of the book Start With Why Simon Sinek believes he has found a way to map out the way inspiring leaders and innovators think. Young entrepreneurs who may think they aren't up to snuff with the big boys of innovation should be encouraged by Sinek's theories which seek to break down inspiration into an easily replicated formula.

He calls his concept "The Golden Circle," a series of three concentric circles that represent the different ways we think about a product or goal. The outermost circle, labeled "What," represents, for instance, a company's product. The next circle, "How," would be the technology behind this product, and the innermost circle represents "Why" the company makes the product.

Never Mind the Valley: Here's Portland

portland_valley_jan10.jpgWhen asked what shapes Portland's startup culture, Silicon Florist blogger Rick Turoczy named 3 defining aspects of the industry - hardware roots, open source projects and iPhone development. Turoczy has been in Oregon for the past 15-years and started Silicon Florist as a way to cover the region's early stage startup scene alongside other Portland tech sites like Mike Rogoway's Silicon Forest blog and Strange Love Live.
Since then he's watched his town grow into a bustling tech hub and enjoyed every minute of it. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Turoczy and a few other Portland influencers to get a feel for the scene.

Never Mind the Valley: Here's Boston

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort.

In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms.
In 1957, the ARDC invested $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation, a company founded by two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers working on transistor-based computing. The ARDC was later able to turn around and sell their investment for $450 million, quite possibly the best return on an investment ever at that point.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-17 18:30:00

shared: ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

In this week's ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup - our digest of the best posts from the past week - we discuss why HTML 5 is going to kill Flash, where the best school for majors in entrepreneurship are, and how for the most innovative entrepreneurs, it all starts with "why." Also this week we revealed some secrets to social media, and added to our continuing series chronicling startup communities with profiles of both Boston and Portland.

Sponsor

Death to Flash: 3 Great HTML 5 Demos

google_html5_jan10.jpgThis morning ReadWriteWeb accompanied The Great Wall Club (a group of Chinese mobile executives) to Google for a look at some of the company's development tools. While Developer Relations Manager Patrick Chanezon was unable to comment on yesterday's news of Google's threat to cease operations in China, he did show off some impressive demos utilizing HTML 5.

Top 6 Colleges with Entrepreneurial Programs

graduate_guy_jan10.jpgFor young budding entrepreneurs approaching graduation this spring, or for those looking to go back for a post-graduate degree, finding the right program for your needs is very important. In their seventh annual joint effort last fall, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review teamed up to rank the top 25 undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship programs in the United States. Only six programs managed to make the top 10 in both lists, securing their spots at the top of the best overall entrepreneurship programs.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

social-media_jan10.jpgPresentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

Entrepreneurs: It's Not What You Do It's Why You Do It

Motivational speaker and author of the book Start With Why Simon Sinek believes he has found a way to map out the way inspiring leaders and innovators think. Young entrepreneurs who may think they aren't up to snuff with the big boys of innovation should be encouraged by Sinek's theories which seek to break down inspiration into an easily replicated formula.

He calls his concept "The Golden Circle," a series of three concentric circles that represent the different ways we think about a product or goal. The outermost circle, labeled "What," represents, for instance, a company's product. The next circle, "How," would be the technology behind this product, and the innermost circle represents "Why" the company makes the product.

Never Mind the Valley: Here's Portland

portland_valley_jan10.jpgWhen asked what shapes Portland's startup culture, Silicon Florist blogger Rick Turoczy named 3 defining aspects of the industry - hardware roots, open source projects and iPhone development. Turoczy has been in Oregon for the past 15-years and started Silicon Florist as a way to cover the region's early stage startup scene alongside other Portland tech sites like Mike Rogoway's Silicon Forest blog and Strange Love Live.
Since then he's watched his town grow into a bustling tech hub and enjoyed every minute of it. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Turoczy and a few other Portland influencers to get a feel for the scene.

Never Mind the Valley: Here's Boston

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort.

In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms.
In 1957, the ARDC invested $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation, a company founded by two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers working on transistor-based computing. The ARDC was later able to turn around and sell their investment for $450 million, quite possibly the best return on an investment ever at that point.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-17 18:30:00

shared: Wilkinson Residence in Portland?s Forest

ultimate-tree-house-design-robert-harvey-oshatz

This is not the tree house your Dad built for you.

Built by Robert Harvey Oshatz in the forests of Portland, Oregon ? designed in 1997 and completed in 2004, the Wilkinson Residence is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Built on a steep sloping lot, the living space resides amongst the forest canopy, making your morning coffee most enjoyable.

best-treehouse-ever-oshatz-wilkinson

Description from the architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz:

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

coolest-treehouse-ever-wilkinson-residence

Project Details
- Project Name: Wilkinson Residence
- Site Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
- Architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz
- Project Type: Residential
- Client: Roy Wilkinson
- Site Area: 2200 square meters (23,680 sq. ft)
- Built-up Area: 480 square meters (5,162 sq. ft)
- Designed in 1997, construction completed in 2004

forest-living-amongst-the-trees-design

tree-house-mansion-robert-harvey-oshatz-portland-oregon

All information and images courtesy of: http://www.oshatz.com/text/wilkinson.htm

insane-tree-house-design-oshatz-wilkinson

canopy-living-amongst-the-trees-forest-house

curved-copper-roof-design-oshatz-wilkinson

tree-house-deck-patio-design

curved-roof-rooms-design-tree-house

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-residence-floor-plan

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-wilkinson-lot-property-map

Hat tip Twisted Sifter


from shared on 2010-01-17 13:10:51

shared: Wilkinson Residence in Portland?s Forest

ultimate-tree-house-design-robert-harvey-oshatz

This is not the tree house your Dad built for you.

Built by Robert Harvey Oshatz in the forests of Portland, Oregon ? designed in 1997 and completed in 2004, the Wilkinson Residence is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Built on a steep sloping lot, the living space resides amongst the forest canopy, making your morning coffee most enjoyable.

best-treehouse-ever-oshatz-wilkinson

Description from the architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz:

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

coolest-treehouse-ever-wilkinson-residence

Project Details
- Project Name: Wilkinson Residence
- Site Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
- Architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz
- Project Type: Residential
- Client: Roy Wilkinson
- Site Area: 2200 square meters (23,680 sq. ft)
- Built-up Area: 480 square meters (5,162 sq. ft)
- Designed in 1997, construction completed in 2004

forest-living-amongst-the-trees-design

tree-house-mansion-robert-harvey-oshatz-portland-oregon

All information and images courtesy of: http://www.oshatz.com/text/wilkinson.htm

insane-tree-house-design-oshatz-wilkinson

canopy-living-amongst-the-trees-forest-house

curved-copper-roof-design-oshatz-wilkinson

tree-house-deck-patio-design

curved-roof-rooms-design-tree-house

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-residence-floor-plan

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-wilkinson-lot-property-map

Hat tip Twisted Sifter


from shared on 2010-01-17 13:10:51

shared: Wilkinson Residence in Portland?s Forest

ultimate-tree-house-design-robert-harvey-oshatz

This is not the tree house your Dad built for you.

Built by Robert Harvey Oshatz in the forests of Portland, Oregon ? designed in 1997 and completed in 2004, the Wilkinson Residence is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Built on a steep sloping lot, the living space resides amongst the forest canopy, making your morning coffee most enjoyable.

best-treehouse-ever-oshatz-wilkinson

Description from the architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz:

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

coolest-treehouse-ever-wilkinson-residence

Project Details
- Project Name: Wilkinson Residence
- Site Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
- Architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz
- Project Type: Residential
- Client: Roy Wilkinson
- Site Area: 2200 square meters (23,680 sq. ft)
- Built-up Area: 480 square meters (5,162 sq. ft)
- Designed in 1997, construction completed in 2004

forest-living-amongst-the-trees-design

tree-house-mansion-robert-harvey-oshatz-portland-oregon

All information and images courtesy of: http://www.oshatz.com/text/wilkinson.htm

insane-tree-house-design-oshatz-wilkinson

canopy-living-amongst-the-trees-forest-house

curved-copper-roof-design-oshatz-wilkinson

tree-house-deck-patio-design

curved-roof-rooms-design-tree-house

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-residence-floor-plan

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-wilkinson-lot-property-map

Hat tip Twisted Sifter


from shared on 2010-01-17 13:10:51

shared: Wilkinson Residence in Portland?s Forest

ultimate-tree-house-design-robert-harvey-oshatz

This is not the tree house your Dad built for you.

Built by Robert Harvey Oshatz in the forests of Portland, Oregon ? designed in 1997 and completed in 2004, the Wilkinson Residence is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Built on a steep sloping lot, the living space resides amongst the forest canopy, making your morning coffee most enjoyable.

best-treehouse-ever-oshatz-wilkinson

Description from the architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz:

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

coolest-treehouse-ever-wilkinson-residence

Project Details
- Project Name: Wilkinson Residence
- Site Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
- Architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz
- Project Type: Residential
- Client: Roy Wilkinson
- Site Area: 2200 square meters (23,680 sq. ft)
- Built-up Area: 480 square meters (5,162 sq. ft)
- Designed in 1997, construction completed in 2004

forest-living-amongst-the-trees-design

tree-house-mansion-robert-harvey-oshatz-portland-oregon

All information and images courtesy of: http://www.oshatz.com/text/wilkinson.htm

insane-tree-house-design-oshatz-wilkinson

canopy-living-amongst-the-trees-forest-house

curved-copper-roof-design-oshatz-wilkinson

tree-house-deck-patio-design

curved-roof-rooms-design-tree-house

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-residence-floor-plan

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-wilkinson-lot-property-map

Hat tip Twisted Sifter


from shared on 2010-01-17 13:10:51

shared: Wilkinson Residence in Portland?s Forest

ultimate-tree-house-design-robert-harvey-oshatz

This is not the tree house your Dad built for you.

Built by Robert Harvey Oshatz in the forests of Portland, Oregon ? designed in 1997 and completed in 2004, the Wilkinson Residence is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Built on a steep sloping lot, the living space resides amongst the forest canopy, making your morning coffee most enjoyable.

best-treehouse-ever-oshatz-wilkinson

Description from the architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz:

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

coolest-treehouse-ever-wilkinson-residence

Project Details
- Project Name: Wilkinson Residence
- Site Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
- Architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz
- Project Type: Residential
- Client: Roy Wilkinson
- Site Area: 2200 square meters (23,680 sq. ft)
- Built-up Area: 480 square meters (5,162 sq. ft)
- Designed in 1997, construction completed in 2004

forest-living-amongst-the-trees-design

tree-house-mansion-robert-harvey-oshatz-portland-oregon

All information and images courtesy of: http://www.oshatz.com/text/wilkinson.htm

insane-tree-house-design-oshatz-wilkinson

canopy-living-amongst-the-trees-forest-house

curved-copper-roof-design-oshatz-wilkinson

tree-house-deck-patio-design

curved-roof-rooms-design-tree-house

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-residence-floor-plan

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-wilkinson-lot-property-map

Hat tip Twisted Sifter


from shared on 2010-01-17 13:10:51

shared: Wilkinson Residence in Portland?s Forest

ultimate-tree-house-design-robert-harvey-oshatz

This is not the tree house your Dad built for you.

Built by Robert Harvey Oshatz in the forests of Portland, Oregon ? designed in 1997 and completed in 2004, the Wilkinson Residence is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. Built on a steep sloping lot, the living space resides amongst the forest canopy, making your morning coffee most enjoyable.

best-treehouse-ever-oshatz-wilkinson

Description from the architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz:

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

coolest-treehouse-ever-wilkinson-residence

Project Details
- Project Name: Wilkinson Residence
- Site Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
- Architect: Robert Harvey Oshatz
- Project Type: Residential
- Client: Roy Wilkinson
- Site Area: 2200 square meters (23,680 sq. ft)
- Built-up Area: 480 square meters (5,162 sq. ft)
- Designed in 1997, construction completed in 2004

forest-living-amongst-the-trees-design

tree-house-mansion-robert-harvey-oshatz-portland-oregon

All information and images courtesy of: http://www.oshatz.com/text/wilkinson.htm

insane-tree-house-design-oshatz-wilkinson

canopy-living-amongst-the-trees-forest-house

curved-copper-roof-design-oshatz-wilkinson

tree-house-deck-patio-design

curved-roof-rooms-design-tree-house

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-residence-floor-plan

robert-harvey-oshatz-wilkinson-wilkinson-lot-property-map

Hat tip Twisted Sifter


from shared on 2010-01-17 13:10:51

shared: Photo



from shared on 2010-01-16 14:11:48

shared: Photo



from shared on 2010-01-16 14:11:48

shared: Photo



from shared on 2010-01-16 14:11:48

shared: Facebook blocks "Web 2.0 Suicide Machine," now a cease-and-desist reported

suicide.jpg

Boing Boing reader John says,

The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org's IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.

From the nettime announcement by Florian Cramer:

"On behalf of Facebook, the law firm Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.

Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn't have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)"

BB reader John asks, "Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?"

More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook's efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.

from shared on 2010-01-12 05:25:42

shared: Facebook blocks "Web 2.0 Suicide Machine," now a cease-and-desist reported

suicide.jpg

Boing Boing reader John says,

The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org's IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.

From the nettime announcement by Florian Cramer:

"On behalf of Facebook, the law firm Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.

Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn't have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)"

BB reader John asks, "Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?"

More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook's efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.

from shared on 2010-01-12 05:25:42

shared: Facebook blocks "Web 2.0 Suicide Machine," now a cease-and-desist reported

suicide.jpg

Boing Boing reader John says,

The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org's IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.

From the nettime announcement by Florian Cramer:

"On behalf of Facebook, the law firm Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.

Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn't have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)"

BB reader John asks, "Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?"

More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook's efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.

from shared on 2010-01-12 05:25:42

shared: Facebook blocks "Web 2.0 Suicide Machine," now a cease-and-desist reported

suicide.jpg

Boing Boing reader John says,

The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org's IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.

From the nettime announcement by Florian Cramer:

"On behalf of Facebook, the law firm Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.

Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn't have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)"

BB reader John asks, "Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?"

More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook's efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.

from shared on 2010-01-12 05:25:42

shared: Facebook blocks "Web 2.0 Suicide Machine," now a cease-and-desist reported

suicide.jpg

Boing Boing reader John says,

The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org's IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.

From the nettime announcement by Florian Cramer:

"On behalf of Facebook, the law firm Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.

Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn't have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)"

BB reader John asks, "Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?"

More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook's efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.

from shared on 2010-01-12 05:25:42

shared: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Sponsor

Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

That's Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook's Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before - now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all these different services that have people sharing all this information." That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company's justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.

(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users' desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: Facebook's privacy vs. real-world privacy: two different things.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-10 05:25:34

shared: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Sponsor

Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

That's Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook's Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before - now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all these different services that have people sharing all this information." That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company's justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.

(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users' desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: Facebook's privacy vs. real-world privacy: two different things.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-10 05:25:34

shared: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Sponsor

Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

That's Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook's Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before - now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all these different services that have people sharing all this information." That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company's justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.

(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users' desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: Facebook's privacy vs. real-world privacy: two different things.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-10 05:25:34

shared: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Sponsor

Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

That's Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook's Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before - now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all these different services that have people sharing all this information." That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company's justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.

(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users' desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: Facebook's privacy vs. real-world privacy: two different things.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-10 05:25:34

shared: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Sponsor

Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

That's Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook's Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before - now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all these different services that have people sharing all this information." That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company's justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.

(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users' desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: Facebook's privacy vs. real-world privacy: two different things.

Discuss

from shared on 2010-01-10 05:25:34

shared: Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction

For the past two years, Stanford has been rolling out a series of courses (collectively called Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum) that gives you a baseline knowledge for thinking intelligently about modern physics. The sequence, which moves from Isaac Newton, to Albert Einstein?s work on the general and special theories of relativity, to black holes and string theory, comes out of Stanford?s Continuing Studies program (my day job). And the courses are all taught by Leonard Susskind, an important physicist who has engaged in a long running ?Black Hole War? with Stephen Hawking. The final course, Statistical Mechanics, has now been posted on YouTube, and you can also find it on iTunes in video. The rest of the courses can be accessed immediately below. (The courses also appear in the Physics section of our collection of Free Courses.) Six courses. Roughly 120 hours of content. A comprehensive tour of modern physics. All in video. All free. Beat that.

Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum

PS If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should consider checking out Prof. Susskind?s new course.  It takes a yearlong look at new revolutions in Particle Physics, and how important theories will be tested by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. His second course in the series begins next week. Learn more here.

Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

from shared on 2010-01-09 22:37:41

shared: Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction

For the past two years, Stanford has been rolling out a series of courses (collectively called Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum) that gives you a baseline knowledge for thinking intelligently about modern physics. The sequence, which moves from Isaac Newton, to Albert Einstein?s work on the general and special theories of relativity, to black holes and string theory, comes out of Stanford?s Continuing Studies program (my day job). And the courses are all taught by Leonard Susskind, an important physicist who has engaged in a long running ?Black Hole War? with Stephen Hawking. The final course, Statistical Mechanics, has now been posted on YouTube, and you can also find it on iTunes in video. The rest of the courses can be accessed immediately below. (The courses also appear in the Physics section of our collection of Free Courses.) Six courses. Roughly 120 hours of content. A comprehensive tour of modern physics. All in video. All free. Beat that.

Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum

PS If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should consider checking out Prof. Susskind?s new course.  It takes a yearlong look at new revolutions in Particle Physics, and how important theories will be tested by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. His second course in the series begins next week. Learn more here.

Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

from shared on 2010-01-09 22:37:41

shared: Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction

For the past two years, Stanford has been rolling out a series of courses (collectively called Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum) that gives you a baseline knowledge for thinking intelligently about modern physics. The sequence, which moves from Isaac Newton, to Albert Einstein?s work on the general and special theories of relativity, to black holes and string theory, comes out of Stanford?s Continuing Studies program (my day job). And the courses are all taught by Leonard Susskind, an important physicist who has engaged in a long running ?Black Hole War? with Stephen Hawking. The final course, Statistical Mechanics, has now been posted on YouTube, and you can also find it on iTunes in video. The rest of the courses can be accessed immediately below. (The courses also appear in the Physics section of our collection of Free Courses.) Six courses. Roughly 120 hours of content. A comprehensive tour of modern physics. All in video. All free. Beat that.

Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum

PS If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should consider checking out Prof. Susskind?s new course.  It takes a yearlong look at new revolutions in Particle Physics, and how important theories will be tested by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. His second course in the series begins next week. Learn more here.

Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

from shared on 2010-01-09 22:37:41