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Comment Re:Government doesn't bother me (Score 1) 319

They may have changed it in one of their redesigns, but for a long time your subscription list was public. You could disable it from your profile, but even then that info was still available in the channels list of subscribers. Does the owner still get a mail when you subscribe to his channel? Either way, that's basically the point, it's quite unclear what gets shared and with whom.

Comment Re:Government doesn't bother me (Score 1) 319

Well, it affects your freedoms, but those are worthless, so who cares?

It's not the data that affects my freedom, it's the laws and regulations of the government that do that.

The fact that the government can change the rules, misinterpret the data, and use it to harass virtually anyone doesn't matter at all.

Misinterpreting the data is what I would consider a minor annoyance. Sure it will happen, but it's not like not collecting the data would magically stop the SWAT team from knocking on the wrong door. Mistakes happen and if anything, data provides a way to reduce them.

Comment Government doesn't bother me (Score 4, Interesting) 319

The government snooping around doesn't bother me all that much, as while it might be a waste of money, it really doesn't affect me. It's just dead data sitting around on some NSA server. There is more interesting stuff to read then my email. What I am bothered by is the leaking of private data that happens all over the place, things like the people you follow on Twitter or Youtube being publicly visible information. Why exactly does every modern social webpage treat what are essentially bookmarks as public information and publishes it to the world? Why is everybody just accepting that and not complaining about? You can't even switch it off most of the time. I find that incredible annoying and avoid any service that does that when I can. I don't have much of a problem with my information being out there, but at the very least a service should make it very clear what kind of information is public and what is private and modern services don't really do that.

Another thing I have a real issue with is the starting pervasiveness of requiring real life authentication to log into a webpages. Mobile phone numbers started as just a way to get your password back, but now quite a few webpages are requiring them and Google+ and Facebook have their real name requirements. Furthermore there are more and more webpages that only allow you to access them via your Facebook or Twitter login, not via a webpage specific account. So once Facebook or Google switching on the requirement for a mobile phone number or real name and enforce that, that means your real life identity is linked to a ton of a webpages and you can't stop that from happening unless you completely avoid that webpage, as even Tor doesn't give you a free anonymous mobile phone number.

Comment Re:CastAR (Score 1) 55

AR is coming, but it's still years away from being practical, so Valve focuses on VR instead which is right around the corner. Also CastAR isn't really suited for general purpose AR, as it needs a special surface to project on. So it's probably an evolutionary dead end in the long run. Finally CastAR seems overall more focused on the toy/boardgame market then on the gamer market and Valve is mainly interested in gamers.

Comment Re:What's the point? (Score 1) 147

The gimping is a feature, it means parents don't have to worry about the kid gaining access to the Internet, buying stuff on their credit card or all the other things that can go wrong with an Internet enabled console. This thing plays the games grandma buys them for Christmas and nothing else. For everybody else the Wii Mini might not be a good buy, but they are not the target audience, this thing is made as Christmas present for 6 year olds.

Comment Re:Like libraries? (Score 1) 268

An object has state, you have to initialize it, use it's functions in the right order or things will explode. Flow based programming is more like your Unix shell, where you have "cat | sort | uniq | ..." and don't have to worry about the state "sort", you simply throw data into it at once end and data comes out at the other.

Comment Re:Not this shit again (Score 2) 754

So, the guy didn't learn from the Industrial Revolution (and revolutions since) that all the fear of 'no more jobs for anyone' ended up being unfounded?

That is unless you were a horse. I don't see all that many horses employed any more, there are still a tiny few jobs left for horses, but for most part the talents that a horse provided has been completely replaced with machines, leaving the horse job less. With humans it's going to take a little longer till all our talents can be replaced by machines, but I don't see any reason to assume that won't happen and that we will end up just as jobless as the horses.

Comment Re:Kind of on topic (Score 1) 232

The core problem is that you record a video in 1080x1920 which is then scaled down to 608x1080 to fit into a horizontal player, thus you lose information. The trivial fix would be to simply not squish vertical video into a horizontal player, instead play it in a vertical player, thus preserving all the image detail.

Comment Re:Better games came along right after? (Score 1) 374

While the variety isn't bad, one problem is that the mid-level games have largely disappear. There used to be a time when many games where done by 10 or 15 people. Today on the other side you either have indie games done by like three people and the AAA blockbuster done by 300 people. There is very little in between and that in turn means that a lot of the indie games just feel a little unsatisfying, as a three man team can't produce the same quality as a team of 15. So even technology has advanced a lot, a lot of games end up feeling like a downgrade. The AAA games of course have the personal, but they don't have the freedom to experiment like the smaller teams could. The recent Kickstarter hype might be a way out of the problem and help get funding back into smaller teams, but if that is actually sustainable or will collapse on itself once the first few flops come in we have to wait and see.

Comment Re:What are you going to print? (Score 1) 347

What are people going to print with their fancy home 3d printer? It's always easy to complain about the lack of imagination, but I have yet to see a plausible scenario where home 3d printer will be in 20 years and what the heck I would be doing with them. Computers never had that problem and there were always plenty of visionaries pointing where things would be going. With 3d printers on the other side it's:

1) Printers for useless plastic toys
2) ???
3) Star Trek replicators

What exactly will happen at 2?

Comment What are you going to print? (Score 1) 347

I doubt that home 3D printers will ever be a serious danger for regular products. A user might print a case for his iPhone or something like that, but even the most simplistically functional objects tend to be far beyond what a home 3D printer can do. Even when a 3D printer can compete, it's often more expensive then the same product done regularly somewhere in China and shipped over here.

I think the copyright with 3D printings won't be with the big manufacturers, but within the realm of the hacker/maker crowd itself, people taking each others design without following the license and stuff that like. Wouldn't surprise me if some Chinese company would start mass producing a popular object without paying royalties either. But that's basically the same set of problems we already have with Open Source, music, films and even Youtube videos.

In general I consider home 3D printing rather overhyped, there is only so much plastic crap you can print and most people won't have any use for a personal 3D printer. Outside of the home, 3D printers are for more interesting, be it to create rocket parts or organ replacements, but your home printer won't ever be capable of that.

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