Its not that bad, I took public bus to school as a thirteen year old. It was as crowded as an MTA bus. Except there is no Air Conditioning, otherwise it is not that bad. Trains however tend to be much worse, since the doors never close.
While I wouldn't go as far to call it BS.
I agree with your argument.
I believe we need better laws that will ensure the freedom rather than modifying the system. In all other aspects of human life, we have relied on legal system to achieve economies of scale, while preserving our freedom. We dont grow our own food, or manufacture our own drugs, rather we rely on oversight of FDA etc. Sure the system isn't perfect but still its better than having a farm in your backyard and a chemical plant in your basement.
We need a legal revolution to address issues posed by rapidly evolving technology.
a.) Yes, there are some privacy and ownership/property problems that legislation could possibly solve, but…
b.) more laws makes it harder and less fun to write, distribute, and profit from making software.
However, I do think that a legal recourse for users to be able to export all of their data from a service in some format makes sense, especially when said data are entrusted to software startups that have a proclivity for being bought, sold, and swiftly unsupported or end-of-life'd at the drop of a hat.
Or, simpler, and less encumbering: how about a developer-initiated consortium of companies who "won't screw you over" when it comes time to back-up or find a new home for your data? Something like a Better (Software) Business Bureau who promises not to leave you high and dry… but now I'm just having excessively utopian thoughts.
I don't think the practical risk here justifies any such thing, because all of this is occurring in a market with possibly one of the lowest barriers-to-entry of any market in human history. With the ubiquity of screen scrapers, the power of various programming languages and environments, and the interconnectedness of the web, any attempt to jail your data can usually be met, quickly, by a large number of people.
For example: back when Facebook was really irritating everyone, Diaspora came along. Now, Diaspora should probably be considered a failed project at this point, but along the way there was a not-small number of developers that came forward and said, "hey, I already did this, start with my code...", and if the anger over Facebook hadn't subsided, I have no doubt that at least one of those projects would have become successful.
Or, for another example: when word got leaked that Yahoo was going to "sunset" Delicious, it took me all of a few bucks and a couple of clicks to export every last one of my bookmarks to Pinboard. (Thanks Pinboard!)
Proprietary software, by contrast, carried much greater risk, because it often used secret data formats which were extremely difficult (or impossible) to reverse-engineer, and because it was much more difficult to scrape the data from the screen in a reliable way. I have direct experience with this: small grocery stores tend to use a product called NCR ScanMaster, which at least semi-recently was "powered" by a truly atrocious Btrieve database backend, which was unreadable without the schema files, which nobody would give you without lots of money. It was damned hard to reverse-engineer too; I have a proud history of that kind of thing, and it totally stumped me for all but the simplest of data extractions.
One of my clients needed to be able to make special sale-related changes to large numbers of products on a regular basis without paying someone to sit there and key it in all day (and make mistakes while they were at it). We eventually came up with using AutoHotKey to control the screen and data fields, but even that was rather challenging because of ScanMaster's variable time delays between screens and AutoHotKey's limitations.
Contrast that with anything web-related, where I could use PHP or Javascript & Greasemonkey or one of any of a number of solutions to parse and scrape the content of any site within a matter of hours.
I can't read the article right now -- the site is down -- but the thing about Stallman is that he's a radical, and he will see his epic foe everywhere he looks. Cloud computing and SaaS have become popular, and are replacing many aspects of traditional desktop computing, but if he's making the claim that there is just as much danger, in terms of personal freedom, with cloud computing and SaaS as there was with proprietary desktop software or timesharing systems, well, he's just plain wrong.
He's also, in this context, probably completely irrelevant. I suspect that his opinions of cloud computing or SaaS will have epsilon impact on the industry, no matter how loudly or oft-stated.
I have tried using both Hadoop (55 node cluster at Cornell) and a single AWS High Memory double extra large instance with 32GB memory.
I have found that since the Twitters social graph is small enough to fit in the memory, a single instance with huge amount of RAM is much more efficient, especially when your algorithm iterates over nodes in the network.
You can read about it here:
Hadoop based results:
www.akshaybhat.com/LPMR/
Results using a single High Memory instance AWS instance
www.akshaybhat.com/LPMR/GRAPHLAB
Even the startup hunch has taken a similar approach and use a single machine with large amount of memory rather than a hadoop cluster.
Good call. The dataset was large enough that it didn't feel silly to use something like MapReduce but the same thought has been in the back of my head the whole time.
I believe that the benefits of a social network such as Facebook outweigh the risks. The problem is that, it is very hard to quantify the positive effect which arises from small interactions. Sure there is huge scope for improvement, but one could have made similar arguments against telephony when it was invented.
I believe we are still to see rise of real social network based applications. e.g. something that allows us to estimate trust for a person, given his and your social network.
On the other hand you don't know shit about the risk. If the US government takes a totalitarian turn, and they start taking away your friends and family under the guise of homeland security then Facebook suddenly becomes your worse nightmare. And don't get me started on Color: Wilhelm Zaisser's corpse is busting a nut about that 50 years posthumous.
As someone who has dysgraphia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia), I have faced this problem so many time in school. Luckily in India esp. in my state, if you have Dysgraphia, you could use a scribe and dictate your answers at least for major examinations.
I am happy that even though I am in a grad school, I now rarely have to write anything.
Oh weird, my handwriting looks almost exactly like the "motor dysgraphia" sample and I seem to have a good number of the symptoms of motor dysgraphia (pretty much everything except the spelling mistakes and talking to myself while writing). I never realized it might a "thing" before.
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I was born left-handed and retrained to be right-handed as a kid?
Interestingly I don't see anything wrong with the 2nd half of the motor dysgraphia sample. I have tons of friends who write like that. Here's an example of George Carlin's handwriting:
Yeah, I definitely get the pain part. Actually, I should be pretty thankful because it's my aversion to handwriting that made me spend a lot of time on the computer, leading to my entire career. :)
FYI, writing caused me pain if I did it for more than a line or two, and was always a slow and laborious process. It turned out I'm predisposed to RSI -- a load of vitamin B6 plus learning to write cursive italic, plus switching to fountain pens really improved my writing and eliminated the pain.
The tool as it exists now is a template/layout builder, but long term the goal is to export complete and styled websites. A kind of automated PSD2HTML service that doesn't suck. Marketing it now as a website builder vs a WYSIWYG CSS template builder serves that end.
