Greg @ #3: "This may, at most, only give me a list of places to start reading about the topic. This should not be read for learning about the topic itself, at least not without some external checks."
Umm, that's basically true of any tertiary source of information. ie. all encyclopedias.
Lexica @190: "No additional mouseclicks or pageloads necessary."
It is possible (even relatively easy, as web-development tasks go) to make the de-obfuscation easier than that. For example, moving the mouse pointer over the obfuscated text could reveal the original, with no mouse-clicks or page loads required (moving the mouse elsewhere un-de-obfuscates it, of course).
In fact, you could make the method of obfuscation and the level of effort required for de-obfuscation configuration options for the administrator/moderator.
I would buy a book by you on moderation. Heck, I would buy it as an e-book (ala 37signals 'Getting Real').
Note the prior art in this area:
'Community Building on the Web' by Amy Jo Kim
'Online Communities - Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability' by Jenny Preece
'Design for Community' by Derek Powazek
All of these cover moderation to some extent, but none focus on it exclusively.
While I'm making requests for book length works, I would really love to read one on 'Lost Fandoms' ( http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/001424.html ) that also explicitly makes the connection to recurring patterns of human behavior in the current 'blogosphere', as well as older incarnations such as The Well and RASFF.
Insert 'History, Tragedy, Farce' quote here.
Kathryn @94: Two developments you may want to factor in are:
1) Sony's new OLED displays which reportedly have a contrast ratio of 1:1,000,000 (no, that isn't a typo)
2) The radically different LCD display technology that the OLPC has, which provides both a normal resolution transmitive color mode and a high resolution greyscale reflective mode (which still falls somewhat short of the contrast ratio available from e-paper).
Both of these are entering mass markets (not the *same* mass markets, obviously), and will spur further investment in this area.
I think that we will see displays of some sort that rival or exceed paper in every way (with the exception of durability over deca-year timescales) within the next 5-10 years. Even cost, if it is amortized over a relatively small personal library.
Ah, I forgot that that disclaimer was one of a set. I also forgot that they don't want it reproduced anywhere else without permission (I found the material quoted above from somewhere else, through Google).
Here is their FAQ page, with the various disclaimers interspersed throughout:
http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/faq.html
The Alchemy Mindworks disclaimer:
All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of Alchemy Mindworks Inc. No fur-bearing animals were harmed during the creation of this document. Allergy alert: may contain nutmeg, but we doubt it. Return for refund where applicable. Not recommended for persons with sugar-restricted diets. Batteries are included -- best of luck finding them. Proud sponsor of the 1934 penguin olympic games at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. May cause irritability, sleeplessness or warts after prolonged use. Contents under pressure. BHT added to preserve freshness. Caution: this product has caused some laboratory rats to rip through their cages, fly across the room and brutally murder hundreds of innocent people. Shake well before using. No vacuum tubes or other user-serviceable parts inside. Not to be combined with other radioisotopes except under the advice of a physician. Avoid prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light. The truth is out there. Use no hooks. Not intended for use by children or liberals under the age of five. Printed on unrecycled dead trees and we're proud of it.
Serge @10: I like your stereotype/archetype duality. Someone once told me they didn't like E.E. Smith's work because it was clichéd space opera. I remarked that it wasn't clichéd, it was prototypical.
#26: Note that one of the design parameters for the OLPC is that it can be powered by a hand-crank. Another is that the devices talk to each other without any intervening devices (they automatically form an ad-hoc network). Another is that if any of them do have access to the internet, the connection is shared with all the other machines on the ad-hoc network.
One of the problems in many developing countries is that they are so far behind and their demographics are so skewed, that even if you built schools (and added the books and other infrastructure necessary to make it useful), you wouldn't have the necessary teachers.
The OLPC is $100 today. In 2 years, they will likely be cheaper and more reliable. We only need a few iterations of moore's law to get to the $10 laptop, given an established and proven market.
OLPC isn't a cure-all, and it is a radical departure from previous attempts, and may well fail to achieve some of it's objectives, but doing the same-old-thing has been demonstrated to not work, so I'm all for trying something new in the way of building out infrastructure for education.
We have now seen that given a low-cost publishing platform, large-scale volunteer efforts can collaborate to create astonishing reference and educational resources, so I have no doubts that the necessary materials can and *will* be created, translated, internationalized, and distributed through these machines, and that the children they are given to will become active participants in these efforts very quickly.
I'm a little surprised no one has brought up John Taylor Gatto's book 'The Underground History of American Education'.
Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants notwithstanding, is actually a copyright maximalist. He's in favor of non-expiring copyrights, and for retroactive extensions.
Meh.
Thankfully, Serge, this is less of a "programmer who wrote application code in a future-incompatible way to optimize use of memory" problem than y2k was. More precisely, the limitation is in operating systems and system libraries instead, not in the applications running on top of those systems, so I have every expectation that the epoch bug will be eradicated long before the deadline, as part of the normal transition to 64-bit and (eventually) 128-bit systems.
Also, note that this is not as widespread of a *storage* problem, as y2k was, since most date-related data is already stored as strings like '2005-12-12T00:39:57Z', which aren't really subject to this bug directly (although there is still an implicit y10k problem). Rather, this is a date/time recording and manipulation problem, which cases are easier to catch.
Serge, the next date people are starting to worry about is Tuesday, January 19th, 2038. That's when 32 bits will no longer be sufficient to store the number of seconds from noon on January 1st, 1970. Google '2038' for more info.
Serge, you might find Varian and Shapiro's book 'Information Rules' informative and/or interesting. It's a somewhat pop-sci treatment of the economics of information from '99, and has aged rather well.
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| 2005 | 3 |
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