bowlofpetunias

15 ms·

91.
by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
If it's a digital democracy it's neither secure nor a democracy. The system can be rigged with the oldest means possible: a knife to the voters' throat. I really wish fellow techies would cut this kind of dangerously ignora
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Any major IT consultancy company. Especially those working for the government. But the modus operandus is standard even for small agencies. You get to bid for a project. If your bid is anywhere near realistic, there's no way you'l
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Google+ is just the most high profile symptom. The problem started when Google started using strategies against the fundamental nature of the internet. We always assumed that Google was "good" because they understood and embraced
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I don't like the way tech is being used as a false argument to paint the opposition as anti-tech. Nobody is opposing technological innovation or suggesting it should be slowed down. It's the business models that leverage that tech
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Would work nicely for Amsterdam, except that it considers houseboats down in the canals buildings that throw as much shadow as the buildings around them, thereby eliminating 50% of the options in my neighborhood (all canals, all filled with
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I don't know which software people you mean, but "software people" built and operate Google, Facebook and countless other smaller companies and apps that wipe their asses with privacy. I don't see other people's p
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry? The tools people use in the movie industry are commodities with relatively slow innovation. People can
98.
by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I found a sentence in his follow up post that pretty much sums up this very common "I quit" rant: "Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic." Just think about this sentence for a second. Especially the
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
And once again the Netherlands shows up on the bottom of that list, so I'll say it once more: we have a high participation of women in the work force, but most of those only work part-time, often in stereotypically "women's j
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
YouTube.
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Yeah, right. The law defines the right, it doesn't force Google to do anything. Google can take every request to court. The qualification "horribly rash, poorly thought" out applies to the services Google creates ("huh,
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
So now we have to amateurish approaches to design. One with the esthetic sensibility of a visually impaired 3 year old, and one that completely ignores the goals and requirements of both the publisher and their audience. Both of them are eq
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Leaving ethics aside for a second, neither of these statements are "completely" true in the real world. In the real world, you have to deal with lots of rules and regulations regarding advertising (which is what paid links are) an
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Hey, here's a surprise: the law also applies to the website itself. Just because the person who brought the suit targeted Google first (which is not strange, given that Google collects and re-publishes that information in a way that ma
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Ah, the US, where blatantly racist categorization of humans is used to prove your not racist. Seriously, how many other countries divide people in "black" and "white"? Or is it even legal to do so?
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Same in the Netherlands. However, if the bankruptcy of the company is found to be the result of blatant mismanagement, the creditors can go after the owners personal possessions. There is no stigma attached to an entrepreneur who's com
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
The day publishers like Hachette start selling their publications directly and unencumbered by DRM is the day Amazon will slowly start losing their leverage. (And get me as a customer.) Sure, it will take a while, but that's only becau
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
No, I'm not creeped out by it. Largely of course because I have it turned off. I am however shocked by the fact that so many people are okay with it being legal for any company to collect such data from people we all know full well do
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
The complete lack of concrete information and the fact that the "incident" applies to only one user suggests something was discovered that triggered the company lawyers to engage cover-your-ass mode. The alternative explanation wo
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
The author is ignoring the elephant in the room: WYSIWYG is for static, single format output. It doesn't define behavior . Even after so many years, MS Word is still only suited for print and static digital facsimiles of print documen
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Much of what the author suggests in terms of regulation already exists in most European countries, and most of it pre-dates the commercial rise of the internet. Sure, much of the wording and enforcement is lagging behind today's realit
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Given that publishers, authors, printers, bookstore and basically the entire publishing chain has done pretty much fuck all in the 20(!) years that Amazon has been active to even remotely innovate their industry, I have a hard time feeling
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Exactly. I have much more Apache servers than Nginx, but you can't see most of those Apache instances from the outside.
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
The counterpoint to that is that it has already become socially acceptable to persecute, arrest and jail people for the abominable crime of... sharing .
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Uhm, that's how I still learn new languages. Copy, paste, modify just to get something done. The modify part leads to more concrete questions, more Googling, more detailed reading of docs, until at some point I'm engaged enough to
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
It's the lazy way of stopping users from cheating a minimum password length requirement. To be fair, any other way would be lead to convoluted rules like "no consecutive spaces", "no leading/trailing spaces" or
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
A somewhat off-topic but honest question: why is it that the NYT gets a free pass when it comes to linking pay-walled sites? Others would get ignored, not upvoted, flagged or at least come with a clear warning label in the title. Linking to
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
This is why I use different browsers for different accounts (Chrome, Safari and Firefox are generally all fine for regular web use) and Choosy ( http://www.choosyosx.com/ ) to prompt me which browser to open the link in. It a
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Google account switching is an insane nightmare. Sometimes I log out from account A, log in to account B, go to some Google service only to magically find myself to be in account A again. Not only that, there is simply no way to go where I
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by bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I agree with most of this, but it's not just technology. It's the balance of power expressed in the way old media publishers publish content. The see the content they produce as the primary value, and the comments as a sideshow. P

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