Posts by VikiAi 510 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2018
That sounds like here, with the occasional spare cake that anyone can have a slice of. On the worksite across the other side of the city where I am stationed on my own (generally worth missing out on the cake, to be fair).
I occasionally buy a cake at the supermarket on the way in, put it in my fridge here, and email-announce that anyone who wants a slice is free to come over and get one.
Then I eat all the cake as, apparently, no-one wants to make the 80-minute round trip to get a slice!
The shouting down bit is part of a specific set of neuro-circuity that is now known to be absent in 75% of the human population (you can find it - or its absence - on a medium-resolution active MRI, and they even know which gene generates the required neuro-structures it in those who have it).
Lacking that particular mental ability in no way effects general intelligence, but it does make for phenomenally ineffective decision-making abilities!
I think we are arguing the same side from different angles. :-) Yes, content cannot practically be suppressed, and people who really really want to see it will, but the potential audience that is prepared (or technically able) to access it outside the comfort of their mainstream web-for-dummies social-media interface is very significantly reduced.
I like the approach of one of the alien groups in Sherri S. Tepper's book "The Fresco":
"One of the programs we left to start without us, back on Earth, is the rewording of your newspapers and TV shows. They will no longer be able to use empty language, like "paid his debt to society," or "claimed responsibility" for an act of terrorism. Instead, they must use true words. "He has been sentenced to prison for ten years which will do nothing to ameliorate his urges to molest and mutilate little girls." Or, "The XX faction has asserted that it committed the cowardly atrocity of killing a busload of schoolchildren." Earthians must learn to say truly what has happened and not cover it with easy-speak."
They were using some pretty heavy-duty Clarke-tech to do it even to already printed material, but we could probably with current "earthling technology" achieve it with electronic media at least. If we wanted to, of course.
Anyone can broadcast anything from any IP address they have access to, but getting it under people's eyeballs is where Facebook et.al. come in. Social Media as the notification and sharing platform is the issue, what/where/how the content is transmitted is a red herring.
I stuck to the RSS feed headers for this one for exactly that reason: People need to know what happened, but no-one outside the case investigation needs that much detail!
Part of my brain was curious, of course: it is presently in the corner reflecting on the shouting-down the rest of my brain gave it!
Very much, Re: community support.
The Pi is actually a bit rubbish for what most people tend to use it for (which isn't what it was intended for, so not holding that against it!), but the community around it goes an order of magnitude beyond making up for it. The BeagleBone and Odroid communities do similar for those platforms. .... Then you have the vast ocean of technically better and often also cheaper boards that, support wise, well... best of luck!
I was recently accosted at a local office-supply store by someone who apparently knew me from a former job and needed quick advice on which cabling they needed for their network and phone at home. Happy to help since it actually was quick - they had already guessed the correct network cable and had it in their hand, so I just had to say, "Yeah, that looks right", but without knowing what sort of phone they had (VoIP, POTS) the second cable was as much a guess for me as for them.
Boomerangs are more traditional around here. Some skill required if you hope to hit anything, but once you have mastered it, I doubt a drone would survive the encounter, considering they can take down a car-totaling roo!
(Sadly, they don't come back if you are actually aiming to strike prey, rather than throwing them specifically to have them come back!)
If these things become ubiquitous buzzing around the sky, I don't imagine buying a similar model, giving it a quick look-alike paint job and weaponising it somehow, and slipping it in among the delivery and surveillance-disguised-as-delivery suburban sky-traffic would be particularly hard.
(Not the icon - I'm not suggesting this as in any way at all good thing!)
To be fair, you can't lump all Chinese into either category. When I was teaching university there, I noticed a distinctly healthier attitude towards money and wealth in the up-coming generation than in the older Chinese (who, to be fair, were all very new to the whole concept). That - 10 years on - those same uni students I observed are now in the middle of the phone-buying demographic may or may not be significant.
Well yes, but you and I are content *creators* (and/or content managers). The Desktop PC (in olden-days terms: "Workstation") will be relevant to us for a good long time yet, likely well after Apple and MS have given them up as economically viable platforms so support, even!
But the large majority of users are content consumers,with an overlapping small majority of content-adjusters, and a Desktop PC is already becoming an anachronism for the former and the latter isn't too far behind.
The best thing, from a Linux perspective, is that it gives us somewhere to point all the people who just want "Windows but open-source" to!
(And there is not necessarily anything wrong with wanting that! Other than that Linux is "UNIX but open source" so has never been a good fit and trying to shoe-horn it into the role just leaves both sides feeling dirty and miserable!)
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