motters

28 ms·

241.
by motters 14y ago
Stallman is right about this in my opinion. I think if the feature isn't either opt-in, or removed, in 13.04 then Ubuntu is going to lose a great deal of credibility, especially amongst its long time supporters. With 12.10 they can claim
242.
by motters 14y ago
"Sender pays" is a good way of stopping those pesky citizens from communicating and turning the interwebs into a TV-like experience.
243.
by motters 14y ago
Not forgetting http://zombo.com/
244.
by motters 14y ago
Bitcoin is looking increasingly less practical. The size of the block chain is becoming massive. Recently I tried downloading the official client, and after 2.8GB of downloading with the progress bar only about half way through I gave up.
245.
by motters 14y ago
While much has been published about the German Enigma system I've not seen much about the British equivalents during WW2. If this message was produced using a one time pad - which is practical for short messages - then it may be very diffic
246.
by motters 14y ago
No, I don't want to download Chrome.
247.
by motters 14y ago
Yes, this might be a problem with proprietary software more generally - that it ultimately ends up trying to strongarm or "hard sell" the user rather than merely trying to meet their requirements.
248.
by motters 14y ago
The first thing to understand is that this isn't a problem with contemporary computing per se, it's a problem with Microsoft Windows and its software ecosystem.
249.
by motters 14y ago
Correct. The far more common story is "how I lost $Xk on the stock market". Probably most people with programming/AI skills have tried their luck with the stock picking problem at one time or another. I have a few times, but only in simu
250.
by motters 14y ago
There is of course http://www.oolite.org/
251.
by motters 14y ago
I don't see how inverting the props is necessarily any more efficient.
252.
by motters 14y ago
As a sociological experiment I wonder what would happen if the cameraman was replaced by a mobile robot with a camera. Would people still react in the same way?
253.
by motters 14y ago
I think the point here is that the notion of privacy is actually quite a complicated one. If you asked people in a cafe or a supermarket if they knew they were being videoed then they'd probably say "yes" and be able to point to one of sev
254.
by motters 14y ago
I think the answer is no, and that the main difference between human language and other languages is its grammatical structure. The languages of other creatures seem to be context free, or just regular expressions of the type "if your hear
255.
by motters 14y ago
To build smart agriculture systems I think more needs to be known about the food chain. If you had a large inventory of the inputs and outputs for each organism then it would be possible to design miniature ecosystems which work cooperativ
256.
by motters 14y ago
I wrote a program to plot temperature data a while ago, although it's from the GHCN rather than the HadCRUT4 data set. https://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/ The square gridding method which they appear to have used in HadCRUT4 introduces p
257.
by motters 14y ago
In the last couple of years I've been reading the books of Stafford Beer, and he had some interesting ideas which were way ahead of his time. It's debatable how well Cybersyn and Cyberfolk would have worked in the early 1970s, using a sing
258.
by motters 14y ago
I'm not a Facebook user, but it seems to me that "promoted" (or bribed) posts could be very damaging to their business, because it confuses what's interesting with what has been paid for. If the idea takes off then users are increasingly o
259.
by motters 14y ago
This is true, but the same applies to any technology. I grew up taking central heating, TV and electric lighting completely for granted, but a few decades prior to that those were wonder inspiring inventions and people would have recounted
260.
by motters 14y ago
A thought occurs that if any of these universities have computer science or software engineering courses, or even infosec courses, then part of that should include the students examining and/or documenting the universities own IT systems an
261.
An Introduction to Demography(youtube.com)
1 points by motters 14y ago|0 comments
262.
Space colony art from the 1970s(publicdomainreview.org)
125 points by motters 14y ago|49 comments
263.
by motters 14y ago
I'm aware of the problems which have gone on at Foxconn and personally I do not wish to purchase products manufactured in that manner. The main problem is that as a consumer it's hard to distinguish between products constructed within reas
264.
by motters 14y ago
The privacy and liability issues here are significant - disclosure of searches of the local OS potentially revealing the names of documents to third parties - so I think that Ubuntu/Canonical needs to take those onboard and do some re-engin
265.
by motters 14y ago
It all depends upon the details of implementation. If they're spamming the user with "and before you open this window our sponsor would like to bring you this message..." then that would be pretty bad, and I'd stop using Ubuntu as a result
266.
by motters 14y ago
Looks nice, but I think I'd only buy something that expensive if I could make a good business case for using it.
267.
by motters 14y ago
I think this could be rephrased as "Apple and Microsoft products are broken", and that's a problem because he's a Microsoft employee so he probably has no option but to dogfood. For less constrained users there are other products around th
268.
by motters 14y ago
It's not only a problem of negativity though. It's also about churnalism, which compromises the integrity of a lot of mainstream news.
269.
by motters 14y ago
It's a recognisable problem, but for me the blatant self-promotion at the end left me feeling that I'd just been duped into viewing an advert.
270.
by motters 14y ago
Like Wolfram, I've been doing some personal analytics for a while, but only with email ( http://sluggish.dyndns.org/wiki/Emailgraph ). Potentially it would be possible to build a Friendica addon which does similar things to the Facebook Re

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