I moved the wall from the sidebar to a tab
http://doubleshotexpresso.com/the-wall/
I did this on the recommendation of chuga66, because I felt I could add a lot of useful features to the wall if it were on a page rather than the sidebar. some feature I will add soon:
email notification option
integration with the special project I’m working on (not announced yet!)
CSS make over (i.e. more prettyful)
The developer community around Wave will hopefully become as large as that of Mozilla. Imagine seeing the quality and qauntity of extensions that firefox has, on the Wave api.
With radio, television, newspapers, and all other classic information dissemination mediums, ads pay for things, so pissing the advertisers off with objectionable content is a bad idea. You don’t want to loose funding or be canceled outright for saying something the advertisers don’t like. Even some websites are subject to this if their advertisers or sponsors are corporate in nature.
With the internet, as it exists today, ads rarely effect the content you see on a website, unless the ads are corporate sponsors of some kind. But for sites like this one, Joystiq, Engadget, and Ars Technica, ads are placed through an ad service like Google Adsense, which detects the kind of content on the site, and displays ads that are relevant. The pool of ads that Adsense pulls from is maintained by Google, not the manufacturer of the product being advertised. So you could have an ad about remington guns on a blog that favors Smith and Weston guns, and there would be absolutely no backlash from Smith and Weston, probably no backlash from readers of the blog, and certainly no backlash from Google.
Ads on websites are not a bad thing. They help the owner of the domain pay for things, they help the company whos product is being advertised, and they help the ad service thats displaying the ads. All of this without much complaint from anybody.
You are not under the thumb of an advertiser when you’re on the internet, and that’s one reason the medium is so great. If net neutrality is protected, this remains true.
update: I want to add one point. Though Pay-per-click advertising cannot, by its very nature, affect a websites content, it is a scammable system. Pyrabang.com is trying to reduce that scamming with an earn-per-click system:
“With PyraBang’s earn-per-click system you’ll earn micro-payments on clicks of your news, entertainment, music or advertising. Pay per click systems are wrought with fraud since it’s the advertiser who pays for the click. There are actually groups of webmasters out there who make a killing clicking on each-other’s websites! With earn-per-click, there is no incentive for webmasters to be fraudulent because they are actually paying for each click in return for new members being added to their groups. This is a win-win for both the webmaster and the advertiser!”
“…That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified…If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.”
You know what’s ironic? In his speech, the president blasts the Bush administration for creating an ad hoc legal structure to ligitimize their gross violations of constitutional and international law. Rachel Maddow tears Obama apart on her MSNBC show:
I’ve said it before. It’s my opinion that the foreign policy of Obama is not very different from that of Bush’s or McCain’s. I haven’t really been proven wrong on any significant level yet, but I hope that changes.
It’s interesting though, that democrats are starting to dislike Obama, and republicans already dislike him. It seems like this ‘bipartisan’ discontent is shining a light on libertarian ideas and the people who represent them. Maybe that’s why Fox news is considering putting “Freedom watch” on television, and maybe thats why Ron Paul’s HR 1207 bill has well over 150 cosponsors, many of them democrats.
Dear President Obama, please keep making stupid decisions (seriously, how can you talk about Constitutional credibility and indefinite detention of potential criminals, in the same speech?)
The Free Realms ToS, section D:
Please note that some games available on or through The Station may, when in operation, monitor your computer’s random access memory, MAC address, and system and configuration files, crash data, etc. for the purpose of monitoring and improving quality and service and also for the purpose of identifying unauthorized third party programs running concurrently with your game which, in SOE’s sole determination: (i) enable or facilitate cheating of any type; (ii) allow users to modify or hack the applicable game interface, environment, and/or experience in any way not expressly authorized by SOE; or (iii) intercept, “mine” or otherwise collect information from or through the applicable game (an “Unauthorized Third Party Program“). In the event that a game detects an Unauthorized Third Party Program, (a) the game may communicate information back to SOE, including without limitation your Station Account username, details about the Unauthorized Third Party Program detected and the activities or functions performed thereby, and/or details about your computer, and/or (b) SOE may exercise any or all of its rights and remedies under this Agreement or the applicable game end user license agreement without prior notice to the user linked to such Unauthorized Third Party Program.
In addition, you acknowledge that any and all character and account data that is stored and is resident on our servers, and any and all communications that you make within The Station or any game (including, but not limited to, messages solely directed at another player or group of players) traverse through our servers, may or may not be monitored by us or our agents, you have no expectation of privacy in any such communications and expressly consent to such monitoring of communications you send and receive. For example, SOE may monitor chat rooms in certain portions of The Station directed to Children.
dump some UV light, sugar molecules, an isolated base, and some phosphate into a bowl, and stir.
That’s the laymens recipe for what was likely the primordial soup that brought DNA into the mix. And it’s what John Sutherland, from the University of Manchester, UK, cooked up recently, while researching the origins of DNA.
Sutherlands recipe is a slight modification of a previously tested soup that did not yield any interesting results. But this time, Sutherland got it right.
Until now, it’s been a complete mystery as to how molecules capable of storing genetic information could have ever arisen from the primordial cooking pot (which is likely to be a warm pond, like Darwin theorized). But Sutherlands soup produced RNA naturally, and spontaneously; Sutherland:
“We don’t use any way-out scenarios - all the conditions are consistent with what we know about early Earth.”
Think of RNA as a messenger between DNA and our amino acids (essential to life).
Sutherlands experiment has demonstrated that, maybe, possibly, life can spontaneously and naturally be created.
I’ve been trying to figure out precisely how to express to people what this website is about, but however specific my explanation is, I always feel like I failed to properly define the purpose of it.
Seth Godin’s TED talk helped me realize a better way to explain it to people:
“It turns out that it’s tribes, not money, not power, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people, not ’cause you force them to do something against their will, but because they wanted to connect. What we do for a living now, all of us I think, is find something worth changing and then assemble tribes, that assemble tribes, that spread the idea, and spread the idea, and it becomes something far bigger than ourselves, it becomes a movement.”
Here’s the link to the TED talk:
Seth Godin on the tribes we lead
The military’s response to cyber attacks may not be limited to cyberspace.
Kevin P. Chilton, Air Force General and head of U.S. Strategic Command says:
“The United States’ response to a cyber attack would be decided by the president and Defense secretary…our job would be to present them options, just as every other combatant commander would do…I don’t think you take anything off the table when you provide options to the president to decide…you don’t take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we would respond?”
It’s not entirely unsensible, but if the military wants to start treating perpetrators of DDos attacks or botnet writers like terrorists, then we would have a problem.
Another concern:
“…Why would we constrain ourselves on how we would respond?”
I find it rather unsettling that a top U.S. commander would say something like that. But I am not surprised one bit.
Saint Augustine was a man who grew up in changing times. He was born in the transitional period between the ancient age of thought and the middles ages. In fact, Christianity was a relatively new ideal that was spreading across Europe and Russia. With this spread, people from all across Europe began to travel to holy sites and question the old gods that had existed for centuries. Interestingly enough, Augustine was born to a catholic mother and a pagan father, which caused him to be very conflicted in his faith. In his book titled Confessions, Augustine questions his beliefs, his education, his life and understanding, and even questions God. The question of who or what God is has been around since the invention, or discovery, of God. The modern idea of God suggests that there is a supreme being that is all knowing, all powerful, all benevolent and all encompassing. This God is one who is feared and worshiped by the laity and can be prayed to when help is needed. He is watching our every move and knows the path that we will take in life, but there seems to be a problem with this. This idea of God seems to be far too “human” to be God. Meaning that this way of looking at the deity is very shallow and naïve. Instead, Augustine proposes that God is something far more complex and incomprehensible. God is a form based on perfections of different ideals such as morality, justice, love, wisdom, thought, desire, understanding and faith and when correct reason is applied to the pursuit of these forms or perfections, then the nature of God will become much clearer.
To fully grasp the Augustinian God, you must understand the mindset of the time that Augustine lived. Today, the goal of Christianity is to reach the mental and physical experience that could be described as the presence of God. In other words, the individual must achieve an epiphany or mystical occurrence in order to “know” God. Augustine on the other hand, had a very different understanding of being spiritual. The common belief at his time was that if one could understand or interpret the scriptures in a skillful way, then that person was a spiritual individual. Meaning that since Augustine, in his later years, had come to some degree of understanding of the scripture, he was a very spiritual Christian, even if he did not have any mystical understanding of the nature of God. His ability to read through the visible words of scripture allowed him to better understand the nature of God according to the common beliefs at his time. Read the rest of this entry
