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Comment Re:Amazon Response (Score 5, Informative) 204

Yeah, but it is perfectly fine precedent for WikiLeaks to judge that they aren't putting anyone at risk.

Less than 1% of the cables have been released. Wikileaks is working with around a dozen news services from around the world to sift through the data. Wikileaks gave The Pentagon the option to redact sensitive information, and they refused.

There has not been a full dump of the 250,000 cables, they have been slowly releasing them alongside the news agencies they're working with (New York Times, The Guardian, etc). What we've seen so far is only a small fraction of the cables.

The idea that Wikileaks has been indiscriminate with releasing the cables is simply not true.

Comment Re:Amazon Response (Score 5, Insightful) 204

U.S. federal government documents are not covered under copyright, so when you're talking about "ownership", there's no legal basis for this argument. Those documents, now leaked, are in the public domain. Wikileaks "owns" them just as much as anyone else.

Also, this part:

Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.

Is a really dangerous precedent for Amazon to set for themselves. If you're going to cancel members accounts based on not just the potential danger of known information held within, but on the possibility that information not yet discovered could potentially put someone in danger, that's making a decision based on an extraordinary amount of hypotheticals.

Comment Re:Missed opportunity (Score 1) 98

I want to be able to read my RPGs like a book sometimes.

All I've ever wanted was the option to keep the voice acting in Japanese, with English subtitles. It would go a long way to making modern RPG's more enjoyable, since I don't speak Japanese, and can't accurately gauge whether Japanese voice actors are as terrible as I'm sure they are.

Comment Maybe I'm being naive... (Score 1) 460

But can someone explain to me why IPv6 didn't just extend the IPv4 format logically and stylistically? Why not just tack on more numbers? And all existing numbers could be assumed

For instance,

209.85.225.147

becomes

1.1.209.85.225.147

Instead, we break convention to use colons and hex, ie. 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf

It seems to me adoption could have been a lot quicker and less painless.

Comment If I quote LL Cool J, feel free to tell me to stop (Score 5, Informative) 266

That was in May. Since then I've put out six revisions.

The thing is, although there was seemingly a stop in development (since 2008/2009, actually), I had never given up on the project. I had a notebook with all the ideas, sketches, mockups, etc. where I wanted to take the project. When Diaspora hit, I emailed them, offering to help. I never heard back, so I decided to push forward on Appleseed.

The pace may seem extraordinary considering I'm essentially the sole full time developer, with most help having come from designers and testers, and I handle a full time job on the side, while I do put in a lot of hours, things have moved along so quickly because I had gamed and spec'd out so much in the year prior.

Check out our roadmap, you'll see exactly where we're going.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/

You can also send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org for an invite to the beta test site. Here's a screenshot for people who don't want to bother signing up (apologies for FB hosting. we're working on that :)

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs1207.snc4/155927_469182004405_510304405_5358353_7159703_n.jpg

Michael Chisari
Lead Developer, The Appleseed Project

Comment We can already start building this now... (Score 4, Interesting) 380

This is basically a model of public intellectualism, and popular education. It has three components: 1. Creating a culture of learning which is not dependent on structure, but which is interwoven into life's fabric. 2. Pushing access to information to everyone, with no prejudices about who it will benefit best or who should be prioritized. 3. Encouraging a culture of healthy debate, humility, and a collective struggle for answers, instead of an individual struggle for superiority.

We're already seeing this on some level: Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, Amateur Astronomy, Open Courseware, etc. But I think it's not enough to just keep doing what we're doing, I would advocate that we need to go further. There is no reason that, for instance, a university doing research, no matter how obscure, should not be pressured to put their work online in an accessible fashion. Videos of conferences and presentations, notes, theses, etc. Beyond that, we need to actively break down prejudices about who benefits from this information. We cannot claim to know how people will use information, and determining the importance of their access based on condition, geography, poverty, gender, etc. should not be tolerated. Someone who does studies alternative energies should not dismiss the notion that a teenager living in Nigeria might not want to pour over everything they know, either in order to use that knowledge to create a DIY solar or wind generator, or to create something they hadn't even considered. We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.

And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.

This is something I feel very strongly about, that the delineation between the academic and the non-academic, the intellectual and the non-intellectual, must be broken down and done away with. Here, then, is an RSA animate which talks about the structure of the current education system, and touches on the stratification within it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Comment Because filters have always worked before. (Score 1) 184

Whew! There is *no* way kids will find a way around this. Problem: SOLVED! /s

I've said it before, but you can't always solve social problems with technological solutions, and here's a perfect example of that. Teenagers need to be informed about the permanence of the internet, the value of trust, and what the consequences of actions are. Beyond that, society needs to be more forgiving when kids screw up (which they can't help but do) and not brand them for life because of early mishaps.

Those are social solutions, setting up technological barriers without addressing the social problems and solutions, you're just making kids better at finding workarounds.

Comment Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series (Score 1) 401

As I said earlier, I replay games constantly. I have a PS3 I use almost exclusively for PS1 games, and I put my emulators through 10x as much use as my Wii. Final Fantasy 6 stands the test of time, it is an extraordinary game, and that's why even generations who didn't grow up on it, discover it, and list it on their top ten list. Even Final Fantasy 7 is infinitely more profound the second time through than anything that came after it (even just the basic plot concept of being an eco-terrorist group, with sympathetic goals combined with abhorrent methods), so I'm not just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.

Just recently, I played the demo of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I really wanted to like, I was all ready to go to amazon.com and buy a copy, but the demo was so lackluster, and was missing so much that made Castlevania great, that instead I just paid $10 for Castlevania:Symphony of the Night, which was totally worth it, and is 100% as fun as I remember it.

I've replayed games like "A boy and his blob" or "Dragon Warrior", and recognized how things can be more fun when you're a kid, but some games really are classics for a reason.

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