Today was a lazy day at work to say the last – I was told to surf for the first few hours until lunch, and after that I had a lot of time on my hands while waiting for various installations to finish.
Luckily, I stumbled upon an article on electronic books and e-reading over at Ars Technica.
While the technology required for reading ‘book-texts’ on small electronic devices has been around for around two decades, there has been no major breakthrough for the concept of e-books. People whip up all kinds of un-researched arguments against e-books and the publishing industry has been even more conservative with regard to new technology than the music and film industries. Yes, we all like to kvetch about those entertainment dinosaurs still not having made much progress in the modern world, but in some ways the world of publishing is way worse.
Vastly popular titles like those in the Harry Potter series are not available at all to be bought legitimately through online e-book stores, prices are based on actual print books, which makes no sense, the list goes on.
So, what if we all stop buying physical books? E-readers aren’t actually that bad anymore (I don’t expect you to be inspired by the Kindle, I know it’s fugly, check out the Sony eReader and other options instead), and if you don’t want an e-reader you can just as well peruse the e-books on an iPod, smart-phone or similar device. It would be a pity to wait for the reluctant generations to die off before this technology can enter everyday life, so start figuring things out.
Quote, on the way some people oppose new tech: “Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn’t. I’m sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a “horseless carriage”—and they never did! And then they died.”
Whether or not humans have made a significant contribution to climate change, the consensus is that we are in the middle of it. Studies show that reverting the changes will at best take hundreds of years, perhaps thousands – so it’s no wonder that acceptance for geoengineering ideas is on the rise. See the links below for some apocalyptic reading.
Patents in general can be troublesome, and software patents even more so. When it comes to inhibiting new competition and development, little can be compared to patents. Take the Apple Iphone Patent, an
all-encompassing patent for nearly all features of the iPhone, that was recently granted. Let’s be honest now, what part was actually invented in the iPhone? The touch interface was something inventive, at least, but touch technologies have been around for quite some time. And just look at the title of the patent – “Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.” This abstract title says something about the lunacy of the world of patents (if you’re interested, you can read the patent documentation here). In potential forthcoming legal battles relating to this patent, how could somebody make a fair judgement? “Is it an iPhone copy? Well, it kind of looks similar, and it does have a touch screen so that’s clearly an infringement anyway.” Enough about that, let’s just hope that some major reconsiderations are done in the field of patents sometime soon.
About something else now – it was recently announced that the music streaming service Spotify is putting restrictions on its track library depending on which country you are accessing the service from. It’s sad to see that the Internet and media that can be communicated through are tied down by old policies and differences in national laws. From the Spotify blog: “These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good.” If digital media rights are managed on a global level from now on, we will at least be heading in the right direction…
A normal day at work means waiting for about an hour, browsing the Internet, then eventually when things start moving in the right direction we start playing the game. Today, about five hours was enough, pizza included as always during weekends.
It certainly can get a bit tedious and repetitive after a while, but hey, I worked at IBM before this. IBM was, and still is I’ve heard, eternal night. The corposphere is so thick that all creative and innovative thinking is soon extinguished, and little value is seen in the human capital. Also, it is company policy that no written reference whatsoever is given to employees when leaving the company – apparently a policy fed by malice. My advice, keep out of this big-corp.
In comparison, playing games is quite relaxing.
I came across a telling video at unreasonablefaith.com, shown below:
One of the fanatics says plainly that she came to the demonstration because god “called her” and none of them can give an account of why abortion is wrong. Most just utter something like “abortion is wrong because it is murder” which is just a subjective use of terms – you can define murder in whichever way, but it is obvious that even these people do not consider abortion comparable to conventional murder in terms of what punishment the perpetrators deserve. Ah, schadenfreude!
Om “Sveriges första advokat i slöja.”
Visst, att bära slöja är inte egentligen värre än att bära keps – om det inte vore för en sak, nämligen det slöjan representerar. Lika lite som vilken annan religion/fundamentalism som helst ska inte islam ges någon dispens för att utan kritik påverka samhället.
Det anses fult att inte respektera religioner i Sverige, alla ska få ha sin egen åsikt och trosuppfattning. Till en liten, liten del kan jag hålla med här – om en vuxen person är troende och inte i någon större utsträckning påverkar andra, vilket visserligen inte är troligt, finns det inte så mycket att säga.
Blind tro ska däremot inte ha någon plats i till exempel rättsväsendet, och bärandet av slöja indikerar att personen i fråga står bakom en hel ideologi som i de flesta fall motsätter sig fritänkande, rationell debatt, moderna värderingar, mänsklig jämlikhet och så vidare. Givetvis inser jag att Cherin Awad knappast helhjärtat står bakom islams ideologier, tvärtom har hon säkert sunda uppfattningar och bra egenskaper för juridik, men faktum kvarstår att hon genom att bära slöja signalerar en acceptans för blind ideologi i vårt samhälle.
Förresten, skulle slöjan godkännas i en rättssal om Cherins skäl att ha den bara var personlig smak eller bekvämlighet? Om inte, vad finns det i en religion som logiskt rättfärdigar till exempel slöjbärande?
Is difficult. Therefore, we should improve it. How about some kind of crowdsourced, comprehensive system where anyone can rate the content anywhere on the web? You’re thinking Digg etcetera, but we need to get beyond the point where you can just rate whether something is positive or negative – it isn’t really that useful. Instead, there could be a system with a limited number of pre-defined informative descriptions that you can select to quickly describe the content in for example a blog post. These descriptors could be chunked together in a few categories, like language, content type and subject matter. The language category could include descriptors for formal/informal style, slang, accuracy, objectivity and more. Content type would include options for the kind of content and how it is presented, and subject matter would list a limited number of subjects to describe what the content is about.
The whole point here is to create a system that is at least slightly less subjective than rating something good or bad. By using preset properties to describe web content, I think a majority of people will agree on the most suitable descriptions whether they like the content or not. Each descriptor here could be thought of a little as a tag, but the maximum number of possible simultaneous options from each category would have to be limited to just a few.
A system like this would enable users to find more relevant information, in theory. It could probably be easily implemented across WordPress.com, since there already is an omnipresent bar at the top for logged in users. This already has some options relating to the currently shown WordPress.com blog, and a system as described could easily fit in there.
Ars Technica recently wrote about an interesting study on the economic impact of file sharing, made by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The following is an excerpt from Ars Technica’s commentary.
Things get really interesting on page 116 as the report starts to dissect the societal effects of file sharing. The study concludes that the effects are strongly positive because consumers get to enjoy desirable content and also get to keep their cash to buy other things. Because the consumers save much more money than the producers lose, the net economic effects are positive. The report also reinforces the truth that unpaid downloads do not translate into lost sales in anything close to a one-to-one ratio.
The last sentence here is what the entertainment industry completely seems to have failed to grasp – one unpaid download does not equal a loss in revenue amounting to the purchasing price for that item. I believe it is imperative to understand this before sentencing a file sharer to something just short of death. Perhaps we should instead be grateful for their economic contribution? Ending up at that conclusion from the results of the paper would be going a little too far, but hopefully the paper will at least make for some discussion among policy-makers.
Even if everything in the study was truly indicating economic net benefits as a result from file sharing, there would be the problem of the survival of the entertainment industries. However, this will not be a problem for long, because these industries are beginning to open up to new, more efficent solutions for consumers (example: Spotify). Yes, the industries will necessarily bleed for a while, but when enough blood has been shed only the vital structures will have survived. At that point, these big organisations will be much smaller businesses and less lavish and inefficient. Let them be revitalised – but first, bleed!
Redaktionen på DN är i behov av antingen mer tid att korrekturläsa artiklar, rättstavningsprogram eller språkkunskap. Kanske behövs egentligen en blandning av dessa, men hur som helst kommer jag dagen till ära att spela bitter pensionär och klaga lite på språkets förfall i DN.*
Som exempel kan vi först ta följande mening: “Men kommer de 7.000 portabla toaletterna att räcka till miljonpubliken som väntas se Obamas installation.” Felet? Ordföljden i den här meningen skvallrar om att meningen är uppbyggd som en fråga, och då bör man givetvis använde frågetecken, inte punkt, för att avsluta meningen. Elementärt, kan tyckas, men jag befarar att frågetecknets dagar är räknade.
Ett annat exempel tyder bara på rent slarv: “Kreationisterna har haft flera uppmärksammade dus- ter med lokala skolstyrelser.” Avstavningen förekommer mitt i en rad, och har inget syfte. Lite korrekturläsning skulle avhjälpa detta. I samma artikel återfinns ordet “kristet-fundamentalistiska,” och nu är jag ute på aningen svagare is, men det stämmer inte riktigt. Begreppet står i relation till ordet “organisation” och därmed borde inte neutrum-form för adjektivet användas. Om man ända vill ha “kristet” som det är, skriver man “kristet fundamentalistiska” enligt min mening.
Andra småfel inkluderar till exempel stavningen av ordet “museet” som bör skrivas muséet (även om statistiken från en Google-sökning tycks motbevisa detta) och sättet man verkar vilja ge eftertryck åt separata ord – i stället för kursiv text såg jag exempel där man satt in mellanrum mellan varje bokstav i ett ord(!).
Man kan tycka att en av Sveriges ledande seriösa dagstidningar borde försöka hålla språknivån på topp, men tyvärr är nivån på nedgång.**
Jag inser att ett inlägg om språkriktighet kommer att dömas hårt och reserverar mig mot eventuella oriktigtheter (ha!).
* Ursäkta generaliseringen, pensionärer.
** Jag har tyvärr bara tillgång till webbupplagan av DN, men om jag inte missminner mig har även den vanliga upplagan språkproblem.
John Pike wrote an interesting piece in Washington Post, on ground robots taking the place of infantry in the American army. It’s interesting not because Pike is very insightful, on the contrary. The piece is written in the belief that the world with America as a supreme police power would be a wonderful place – and the way to achieve that is by developing stone-cold killer bots.
Of course, more efficient killers does not equal a more peaceful world, especially considering that there is only a very slim chance that the US, if developing those first, would be able to keep the monopoly for long. The killer bots will be copied by other countries, if other more technologically advanced countries fail to make them first.
Then you could question how efficient these bots would be, say in a small-scale guerilla war scenario. Sure, they might help in a conventional war, but the existence of these would surely eliminate the enemy’s will to engage in such warfare.
All in all, this piece of writing reminds me of blind religious faith – there is little or no connection to the world outside Pike’s head. Still, it is interesting to read this and reflect on.
The comments to that post are a good read, find them here.
