Upotreba Interneta povećava inteligenciju

[Ghoul]

Uprkos brigama o štetnim uticajima digitalnog doba na razvoj mozga, "surfovanje" Internetom pomaže povećanju IQ-a, tvrde naučnici.

Istraživači sa Fakulteta "California" u Los Anđelesu uporedili su mozgove osoba koje retko koriste Internet i iskusnih korisnika dok su pretraživali web. Posle pet dana, područja frontalnog korteksa, koji kontroliše sposobnost odlučivanja i integraciju kompleksnih informacija se značajno aktivirao.

- Reč je o području koje je na početku eksperimenta bilo poprilično neaktivno kod osoba koje se ne služe toliko Internetom, ali posle pet dana se aktiviralo kao i kod redovnih korisnika - objasnio je Geri Smal, profesor koji je vodio navedenu studiju dodavši kako to ukazuje na to da se funkcije mozga mogu menjati čak i poboljšati upotrebom Interneta i to poprilično brzo.

- Ovo pokazuje kako se prosečni IQ povećava sa napretkom digitalne kulture. Unapređuje se i sposobnost procesuiranja informacija, dok se greške tipične za obavljanje više zadataka odjednom smanjuju - dodaje Smal.

Čak i dosadne aktivnosti kao sortiranje e-mailova, može da podstakne sposobnost donošenja odluka.

Selektivno čišćenje e-mailova na dnevnoj bazi može da pomogne u razvijanju sposobnosti da se lakše i brže prolazi kroz velike količine informacija i odluči šta je važno a šta ne - kaže profesor Smal i dodaje da nam to pomaže da se lakše nosimo sa ogromnom količinom informacija koje se pojavljuju i nestaju na našem mentalnom ekranu iz trenutka u trenutak.

Međutim, postoji i loša strana priče. Preduga upotreba računara ima duboko dejstvo na način na koji razmišljamo, osećamo i ponašamo se.

- Iako Internet unapređuje procesuiranje informacija i ubrzava sposobnost donošenja odluka, preterana upotreba može da ošteti neke naše druge veštine. S vremenom, naime, se smanjuje sposobnost povezivanja sa ljudima i dolazi do pada zadržavanja pažnje - upozorava Smal i preporučuje da ukoliko celi dan osoba radi za računarom, posle posla treba što je više moguće da se druži sa ljudima.


(Preuzeto sa sajta Lepota i zdravlje - 08. 01. 2010.)
11.01.2010

[ridiculus]

Znači, opet se "naučnici" busaju u prsa misleći da su prvi otkrili toplu vodu. Ne, pardon, sad su je "dokazali". Ono ranije je bila čista intuicija - nešto na nivou religije...

   

(Ta teorija je već dokazana pre gotovo 30 godina, nevezano za internet, istina, ali potrebna je minimalna moć zaključivanja, odnosno ono što Boban zove piščevom inteligencijom, da bi se povukla analogija - "pojačava percepciju (pronalaženje bitnih elemenata), ali smanjuje disciplinu".)

[lilit]

hhaha, prigodan topik imajući u vidu nekoliko poslednjih dana. gul uvek ide ispred svog vremena!!!

[Josephine]

"surfovanje" Internetom pomaže povećanju IQ-a, tvrde naučnici.

Ne i kod Džona.

[Джон Рейнольдс]

Мислим да је код мене други проблем. Живим не претерано бурним животом средовечног мушкарца из средње класе. Уме то да... успори човека.

Рачунам да чергарење по Београду, без икакве перспективе, и паразитирање као једини начин за пуко преживљавање захтева веће напрезање можданих вијуга. Не да ће то донети богзна какве резултате, говорим чисто о напрезању.

[mac]

Jao, što nisam neka vlast, pa sve bih vas obrisao!

Lilit, šta je to bitno u vezi sa poslednjim danima?

[Josephine]

Ne budi smešan. Niti si ti srednja klasa ( ), niti sam ja parazit. Još plaćam i porez za nezaposlene.

A i kolo sreće se okreće. Gore-dole, gore-dole. Pogotovo kada pojma nemaš o čemu pričaš, a još i mrziš pride. I imaš potrebu da ističeš "srednju klasu".  Sva je verovatnoća da si najobičniji golja.

[Albedo 0]

Posle pet dana, područja frontalnog korteksa, koji kontroliše sposobnost odlučivanja i integraciju kompleksnih informacija se značajno aktivirao.

moguće, ali to je samo jedan aspekat inteligencije, pogotovo što

smanjuje sposobnost povezivanja sa ljudima i dolazi do pada zadržavanja pažnje

ovo i nije baš naročito inteligentno, plus mi nije jasno kako neko integriše kompleksne informacije a nije sposoban da zadrži pažnju, zvuči kao balerina kojoj odsijeku prste pred premijeru.

[Meho Krljic]

Upotreba Interneta možda povećava inteligenciju ali se to ne da primetiti od silne gluposti na istome. Kejs in point: Bitcoin je izmišljen da se zaobiđu države i banke u finansijskim transakcijama, ali to ne znači da je imun na piramidalne šeme:
 
 Suspected multi-million dollar Bitcoin pyramid scheme shuts down, investors revolt 

Remember pirateat40, the e-currency banker we speculated could be the Bernie Madoff of Bitcoin? Well, it looks like he owes a lot of people money. On August 17, pirateat40 announced the closure of Bitcoin Savings & Trust, a virtual hedge fund that promised to pay high rewards to investors who parked their Bitcoins there. Ten days later, investors are still waiting to get paid and pirateat40 is on the defensive. "When I know, you will," says his away message in the fund's official chat room, an effort to quiet the loudening chorus of, "WHERE ARE MY BITCOINS?"
Pirateat40 consistently maintained that he made his money legitimately through secret investment strategies. The announcement that BS&T was shutting down was similarly vague and obtuse:
 

The decision was based on the general size and overall time required to manage the transactions. As the fund grew there were larger and larger coin movements which put strain on my reserve accounts and ultimately caused delays on withdraws and the inability to fund orders within my system. On the 14th I made a final attempt to relieve pressure off the system by reducing the rates I offered for deposits. In a perfect world this would allow me to hold more coins in reserve outside the system, but instead it only exponentially increased the amount of withdrawals overnight causing mass panic from many of my lenders.

He claimed that BS&T was sitting on 500,000 BTC on the day of the shutdown, worth more than $5.6 million USD at today's price of $11.38. "Once my process is released you'll understand more of how coins move around," he told members of the Bitcoin community last week.
Pirateat40 initially promised to refund his investors' Bitcoin deposits plus interest within a week, effectively admitting that he did not have the Bitcoins on hand. The fund normally paid out on Mondays, but last Monday and today have passed so far without refunds. BS&T investors are complaining loudly and so-called "pass-through" funds that invested with BS&T are shutting down. As of this writing, BS&T says there is "no ETA on payments."
BS&T claimed to be sitting on 500,000 Bitcoins when it shut down, worth more than $5.6 million USD today

Some investors are still keeping the faith, imagining various scenarios under which they might see their Bitcoins again. Others have started hunting for pirateat40, who is believed to be based in Texas. Others are sure that the jig is up. "It's game over, just a question of who wants to believe it yet," Bryan Micon, a poker player and early pirateat40 skeptic, said in an email. "He has been paying interest since late 2011, albeit a helluvalot more recently... it looks like he doubled the size of the scam from April until it went boom."
Pirateat40 and BS&T had been promising interest payments of up to seven percent a week, a rate that would nearly double one's total investment in just 10 weeks. The promises of such hefty profits attracted scores of investors, but the claims struck some as too good to be true. It was speculated that the fund, one of several "high yield investment programs" to pop up in recent months, was a pyramid scheme that used new deposits to pay off its previous investors. One detractor made several bets that BS&T would implode, including a 5,000 BTC wager with pirateat40 himself.
If pirateat40 fails to pay his debts, it certainly won't be the first time an elaborate scheme cost Bitcoin users real money. The community that has sprung up around the decentralized currency still lacks an effective way to deal with crime. However, there is a lawsuit pending in California that aims to take some Bitcoin bankers to task for lost deposits.
 

Dafina dvadeset prvog veka!!!

[Meho Krljic]

Međutim! Hipoteza: sad kad ljudi imaju smartfounove da nekakvom intelektualnom stimulacijom popune svaki trenutak u danu, više nemaju momente za refleksiju, introspekciju itd.
 
Have smartphones killed boredom (and is that good)?
 

(CNN) -- Take a look around today at people in line at Starbucks, on the train platform or waiting for their bags at the airport.
 
Odds are, a huge chunk of them are staring down into a glowing mobile device -- passing time by checking on friends, catching up on texts or e-mail or playing a video game that would have required a PC or home console just a few years ago.
 
"That's me," said Jeromie Williams, a 36-year-old social media manager and blogger from Montreal. "If I'm on the bus. If I'm waiting in line somewhere ... .
 
"The other day I was at a restaurant with a friend. He got up two times -- once to smoke a cigarette and once to go to the bathroom. As soon as his ass was off the seat, 'Boom!' iPhone in hand."
 
Opinion: Going a day without my cell phone
 
Thanks to technology, there's been a recent sea change in how people today kill time. Those dog-eared magazines in your doctor's office are going unread. Your fellow customers in line at the deli counter are being ignored. And simply gazing around at one's surroundings? Forget about it.
        Staying connected without a cell phone 
Between smartphones, tablets and e-readers, we're becoming a society that's ready to kill even a few seconds of boredom with a tap on a touchscreen.
 
Smartphone ownership in the United States, and elsewhere, hit a tipping point in 2012. More people now own a smartphone in the United States -- 45% of adults -- than own a traditional cellphone, according to a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life project.
 
And 42% of all mobile phone users say they expressly use their phone for entertainment when they're bored. (Presumably, non-entertainment uses like texting and e-mail would jack that number up even higher).
 
"I do everything with my phone," said Alexandra Reed, 39, a self-employed single mom from Charlotte, North Carolina.
 
"I have five e-mail accounts for different things. I have two phones, one for business and one personal. I use apps -- Mapquest, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Plus, CNN, ESPN ... ."
 
Is it a boredom killer? Absolutely, she said.
 
"Even when I'm driving, I might have Facebook open," she said. "At a red light the first thing I (do is) just look at my phone. I get a little anxious if I see a notification and don't read it."
 
Researchers say this all makes sense. Fiddling with our phones, they say, addresses a basic human need to cure boredom by any means necessary.
 
Five user complaints about iPhone 5
 
Christopher Lynn, an anthropology professor at the University of Alabama, compares tapping at smartphones to smoking a cigarette. Both can be "pivots," he says -- things that quickly transfer us from the monotony of everyday life into a world of "unscheduled play."
 
"Smartphones are like cigarettes are like junk food are like chewing your nails or doodling ...," Lynn wrote in a May essay for the Evolutionary Studies Consortium. "Does the naked space of your own mind and the world around you send you screaming into oblivion when you walk across campus, across a street even? Pull out your smartphone and check your email again -- that car will swerve around you."
 
With their games, music, videos, social media and texting, smartphones "superstimulate" a desire humans have to play when things get dull, Lynn told CNN in an interview. And he believes that modern society may be making that desire even stronger.
 
"When you're habituated to constant stimulation, when you lack it, you sort of don't know what to do with yourself ...," he said. "When we aren't used to having down time, it results in anxiety. 'Oh my god, I should be doing something.' And we reach for the smartphone. It's our omnipresent relief from that."
 
So, our phones are brutally efficient at addressing an ancient desire. But is that always a good thing?
 
At Oxford, England's Social Issues Research Centre, researchers fear it is not. In their view, by filling almost every second of down time by peering at our phones we are missing out on the creative and potentially rewarding ways we've dealt with boredom in days past.
 
"Informational overload from all quarters means that there can often be very little time for personal thought, reflection, or even just 'zoning out,' " researchers there wrote. "With a mobile (phone) that is constantly switched on and a plethora of entertainments available to distract the naked eye, it is understandable that some people find it difficult to actually get bored in that particular fidgety, introspective kind of way."
 
Williams, the Montreal blogger, admits as much.
 
"One thing that unfortunately I do miss out on is that sort of quiet time where I can think about something I want to write ... where, if I'm bored, I'm flipping open Word and punching something out," he said. "Instead, out comes 'Infinity Blade II' and I'm killing titans.
 
"Before smartphones came out, you had that down time where you sit on the bus and your mind just kind of wanders and you think of these amazing things. You get out that old thing called pen and paper and you jot it down."
 
Watch: Dramatic iPhone 5 arrival
 
But Joel Marx, a 25-year-old research assistant in Baltimore, Maryland, disagrees. Marx juggles two jobs and sees his phone as a way to be productive, and keep up with the news, during gaps in his hectic workdays. He relies on it for fun, but also for research and scheduling.
 
"I feel like it gives me a break from what's at hand," he said. "I even find it helps to keep me going through the day as I can get in touch with things in the outside world. Most of the time, I would have done nothing during those times anyhow."
 
Reed, the Charlotte mom, admits her phone use sometimes distracts her from work or even watching a movie. But compared to other time-killers, she thinks the phone is a good option.
 
"I actually feel more productive reading things online and on social media like Twitter and Facebook than if I was just sitting and watching a TV show," she said. "I follow people who are mostly sports and news anchors, people like that -- interesting people I know I can learn something from."
 

I još malo na tu temu, ovaj antropolog je citiran u članku:

Pivoting around Smartphones & Cigarettes: Evolved to Play in Extra-structural Interludes
 

Smartphones are like cigarettes are like junk food are like chewing your nails or doodling.  Right.  What do they have in common?  Easy.  Things we do when we’re bored.  Bored in my class?  Doodle.  There were some amazing Jurassic landscapes drawn on quizzes in my “Evolution for Everyone” class last semester.  Can’t sit idly waiting for the red light?  Chew your fingernails until the edges bleed.  Commercials got you down?  Good you keep a bag of chips handy & a bowl full of M&Ms.  Is our conversation too much of me talking & not enough about you?  Step outside & have a smoke break in the monotony of our friendship.  Does the naked space of your own mind & the world around you send you screaming into oblivion when you walk across campus, across a street even?  Pull out your smartphone & check your email again–that car will swerve around you.
I am being facetious…& of course I am not.  All these little things we compulsively do when it would be nice if we were paying attention are annoying when you’re on the other end of them, but this isn’t one of those preachy what-has-the-world-come-to those kids with their smartphone-doo-hickies I-remember-when-we-thought-a-rotary-dial-was-newfangled rants. ( I am currently desperately seeking to upgrade to an iPhone myself.)  No, no, I’m far more interested in how smartphones “superstimulate” our evolved compulsion to “play” at all the “extrastructural” interludes of our lives — i.e., when we’re “bored.”  I love the concept of cultural  structures or objects superstimulating our cognitive architecture because it simultaneously stimulates a variety of mechanisms that evolved for other purposes.  Pascal Boyer uses this concept to outline the by-product model of religion (read a 2008 summary article in Nature here).  I think many successful memes are so because they simultaneously please us in so  many ways.  Television superstimulates us, as do computers (with high-speed internet), & now smartphones.   Smartphones do so by both serving as a fantastic “prop” (Walton 1990) or “pivot” (Vygosky 1978(2007:5)It is in response to such unstructured time that unscheduled play enters the picture in “improvisational forms” (2007:6).  Play typically involves some rules, particularly in the case of certain games, & thus extrastructural situations are not wholly without structures, as play imposes structure on the interstitial space “to substitute for that which is missing” (2007:6).
I began riffing on this halfway thru this past semester when (1) either the smartphone texting came to a critical mass in the midst of my lecturing or (2) I started to take more notice & umbrage.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been growing the course, maybe it’s attracting a less interested general audience, maybe it’s me…No, no, it’s the “Anthropology of Sex.”  It’s hard to kill the interest in that class.  I have my days, but not EVERY day…I had brought up Peter Stromberg’s 2007 Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry article with Mark & Mimi Nichter, “Taking Play Seriously: Low-Level Smoking among College Students,” in an Honors seminar I teach called “Primate Religion & Human Consciousness,” made a smartphone connection, & then noticed them popping up like so many Bics being flicked at  a golden oldies reunion concert.  ”Youth live in an age of increasing time compression, greater opportunities for arousal and diminishing tolerance for boredom, and the proliferation of products that promise instant gratification (Starace 2002),” the authors point out (2007:7).  As I say, I have resisted the “these young people today” sentiments, but perhaps there is something to it.  Stromberg, who has written the book Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You & writes a blog for Psychology Today called ”Sex, Drugs, & Boredom,” draws on the evolution of play literature to frame young adult cigarette smoking behavior as “play,” & I find myself quite taken with this idea.
Developmentally, play is how we build & test social contingencies or “scenario-build,” as Richard Alexander laid out in his seminal article “Evolution of the Human Psyche.”  Playing is how we superficially test scenarios & test the boundaries of safety, both in social relationships & reality.  So I pose the question, what do you like to play?  Would anyone say, “I like to play with smoking cigarettes”?  What is the difference between saying, “I like to play knife- & ax-throwing” (which I had just done at a Renaissance Faire-type event) & “I like to play cigarette smoking”?  Both are adult forms of boundary-pushing, safe in moderation & controlled settings but potentially dangerous.  Both can make a person look cool if done right or a ridiculous caricature if not.  And then if I’m a knife-thrower, when I’m not throwing my knives, what do I do with them?  I may try to keep them safely in my…(what? pants pocket?)…er, I may find myself picking my teeth with them, cleaning my nails, even while I talk to you.   Thru obtaining some mastery of them, they now become my props with which I pivot around social space.
What person lights his or her first cigarette saying, “I want to be a smoking addict & be compelled to smoke a pack or more a day despite the unpleasant breath, reduced senses of taste & smell, lingering odor, frequent sore throat, & higher risk for all forms of cancer & emphysema”?  But, in this day & age, who doesn’t know it comes with a risk when they first inhale?  The same is true of alcohol, drugs, sky-diving, driving fast cars — hell, playing football (sorta big in my neck of the woods)!  These are all obvious, intuitive.  Yes, we play football — “play” is in the very way it is expressed.  We don’t say, “I’m going footballing” (well, not in the U.S., at any rate).  You get my meaning.  So what is qualitatively different about smoking?  As Stromberg points out, not much.  We start off smoking even though we know it’s bad for us, because, well, probably there are a lot of reasons.  Smoking is, Stromberg & his colleagues point out, “socially engineered (advertised) to be an antidote for boredom (Mark Nichter 2003)” (2007:7).
I smoked because it looked cool.  I still think some people simply look cool holding & smoking a cigarette, & I thought I was one of them.  I stopped but not because I wanted to.  It just wasn’t worth it anymore.  Same with drugs.  Few people smoke a first joint & say, ”I want to die a drug addict.”  As the authors say, “both drinking and smoking served to structure the unstructured situation of the party through routines of consumption” (Stromberg, Nichter, & Nichter 2007: .  I wanted to know what I was missing, how to be social like those people, how to feel light like they looked, how to feel more comfortable in my own skin, how to be bolder, better, more free, more laid, all that…And it worked.  That’s the magic of it.  And this is all the exact same thing as boredom.  When I’m not bored, I do not think about what I look like to other people or what I might be missing out on because I am busy doing.
Not only does the cigarette or other pivot structure an ambiguous situation, it “promotes social interaction, contributing to an atmosphere of egalitarian comaraderie” (Stromberg, Nichter, & Nichter 2007:9), a factor I also have found to be true.  Smoking provides an embodied feeling of belongingness, “something Csordas (1993) has described using the term ‘somatic mode of attention’” (Stromberg, Nichter, & Nichter 2007:11).  There was a Friends episode once where Rachel took up smoking so she could go out with her coworkers on smoke breaks, as obviously there was significant bonding & structuring of extrastructural time going on, such that decisions being made in favor of other members of the smoking club in her absence.  I distinctly remember this feeling of being part of something, both when I started drinking & smoking.  It takes a lot of work for some of us to socialize without a prop when much of the world is oriented around consumption.  When I played in bands, the long hours spent sitting in bars after load-in until showtime, including waiting for all the other bands to play, was incredibly fucking boring.  In my last band, I used to have to go take walks around the neighborhoods of whatever city we were in while the others sat in the club in some town we’d never been to & drank & smoked.  Extrastructural time.  What do you do with it?  My wife has recently taken up knitting.  I get it.
What is so interesting about smoking & drinking to fill these spaces is that they are not innocuous substances.  They come with great risk.  No one takes the risk without the promise of experiencing something.  Gosh, I remember doing incredibly stupid things & remember them with relish.  I would never want to take them back & not just because I’d be doomed to do something else stupid & might not be so lucky the next time.  Gloriously, ridiculously stupid acts have the potential to be so life-altering.  Life-altering things are important things, right?  Having kids was life-alteringly important.  Getting married was life-alteringly important.  And we play at both of those things before they happen.  ”Play activity is closely patterened after something that already has a meaning in its own terms” (Goffman 1986:40).  We play around them because they have tremendous potential import.
Of my late teens & early 20s, I am most proud of what some might have considered the most stupid things I ever did but that in testing the limits of my own capacities were, personally, incredibly important.  I used to take multiple hits of acid to see how out of my mind I could get.  I remember once being in a predicament wherein I had to drive the half hour home at 4AM thru downtown Indianapolis even though I had lost a reflexive motor sense of how to put the key in, turn on the car, put it in gear, turn the wheel, etc.  I felt like I was in a hovercraft going 20MPH & the actions of the car had nothing to do with the actions of my hands & body.  Another time I remember walking across a rotted out train trestle in the dark my friends knew about.  The next day I saw it was about 100 feet up over a ravine.  I wouldn’t do it again, mind you, but I am pleased for that playful night.  When I moved to NYC, I used to get smashed drunk & pass out on subways, riding back & forth all night long.  One night I kept dozing off & missing my stop, crossing the platform at the next stop to the return train, missing it again.  Finally, the car was getting fuller & fuller with people & I ran into some co-workers on their way to work, & there I was still trying to get home.  Fortunately, I worked in the music industry where play like that was par for the course.  I always say, everything in moderation, even the extremes, which I believe expresses the same principle.
Smoking & drug use are obvious risk behaviors adults play with, but there are many others, more & less obvious.  Anything associated with “at-risk” behavior starts as a form of play — sex, body modification, joining gangs, skipping school (which I also did once or twice to play & have fun but was so nerdy at that point I ended up at the library working on a report so I wouldn’t get behind) — but so does joining a cult.  I experienced the same awkward nervousness upon entering a Pentecostal revival meeting in my first anthropological research endeavor but ultimately enjoyed playing at praying & the charisms, which make for fantastic pivots (if you can’t think of what to do or say, just shout “Jesus!”).  Not that I am calling Pentecostalism cultish, but they both provide compelling props to fill all manner of interstitial spaces & can really string you out & take over your life, for better or worse.  As Stromberg et al. point out, play is what we do in those periods of our day that are not scheduled, wherein we have no plans for our minds or bodies.  These are the chunks that the religions like to get hold of, to give us some more structure/ritual, these are the “idle hands” moments.
Probably most of the time such pivotal exploration is adaptive, or it would not be so ubiquitous.  Sometimes it is maladaptive.  We poke at the fire, we see if it burns.  We smoke a cigarette, we take a drink, we eat a potato chip, we push the envelope to see what will happen.  Sometimes kids doing stupid things while on acid or drunk get killed, sometimes smokers get cancer & die, sometimes people who use potato chips as props grow obese & contract type II diabetes & cardiovascular disease…right?  Sometimes.  So I would say, for instance, that someone who sky-dives or bunjie-jumps or drives race cars is no more crazy than someone who smokes cigarettes or plays with a smartphone.  It’s all on a continuum of playing with risk.Pull out your smartphone in my class againNow, back to smartphones.  What is risky about them?  I don’t know.  This is not a neat & tidy unitary theory where play = risk or anything like that.  A smartphone in the hands of a student while you’re teaching class is certainly a prop that they’re playing with because they’re bored or stressed or something.  I learned a trick from a colleague to bribe the students to keep the phones put away.  The whole class gets an increasing amount of extra credit on the final if no one pulls one out all semester, but if one person violates that, everyone loses.  It’s like Full Metal Jacket, where Pyle eats the donut while the whole platoon does push-ups as punishment for his error.  You remember what they did to Pyle?  Then he went postal.  So if you pull your goddamn smartphone out my class again…
 

I još malo
 
The desire for desires
 

Why reports of the death of boredom have been greatly exaggerated"Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored: therefore they created human beings."
  Soren Kierkegaard
Have things changed so very much since Kierkegaard's time? His portrayal of boredom echoes the tagline of a recent mobile phone advertisement — "The devil finds work for idle thumbs". The boredom of the supermarket checkout queue, the launderette, the long haul bus trip, is anathema to most of us, and the current plethora of portable amusement gadgets — camera phones, i-pods, portable games consoles — stands as a testament to general fear of what the hermits of 4th century Lower Egypt called 'the noonday demon'.
Our frantic attempts to avoid boredom uphold a lucrative corner of the entertainment industry, while the variety of books, websites, tv programmes and videos aimed at children and called "Boredom Busters" suggests that ennui has no age restriction. This is no new development – obsessive texting is hardly on a level with watching lions rip gladiators to shreds for entertainment, and, as the British public seem to be moving on to a stage where fox-hunting is no longer seen as a justifiable, fun diversion, we must be doing something right. However, some pundits have recently pointed out that obsessive avoidance of boredom (apart from being quite dull in itself – have you ever tried to have a decent conversation with an extreme sports enthusiast?) denies access to the certain kind of mental space which boredom brings and in doing so leaves us creatively and spiritually malnourished. In other words, boredom is becoming "a lost art form".
It would be simple to dismiss such statements as (boring?) bourgeois nostalgia, of the "times were better when we had to make our own entertainment" genre. But, as Steven Winn of the San Francisco chronicle puts it in a recent article:
"As more and more people seem to recognise, the universal experience of being bored – unengaged, detached, afloat in some private torpor – may be far more precious, fruitful and even profound than a surface apprehension might suggest. As ordinary as grey skies and equally pervasive, boredom deserves its own sun-splashed attention and celebration."
This is a very particular understanding of what boredom is, and perhaps this very problem of definition is what lies at the root of the supposed debate. On the one hand, boredom can be defined as a state of listlessness, a lack of interest in that which surrounds us and a general sense of ennui. Of this particular definition, Saul Steinberg wrote, "The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes." So in this case, boredom is something we flee from in horror – even Kierkegaard's gods existed in perpetual fear of this kind of boredom, a fear which, if Kierkegaard's thesis is to be followed to the letter, we can apparently thank for our own existence.
Another conception of boredom is of a blank, private mental space, invaluable for relaxing and for the fermentation of creative juices. Steven Winn quotes US poet Billy Collins on this conception of boredom, saying that:
"Boredom is paradise.it is the blessed absence of what the world offers as 'interesting', i.e., the lures of fashion, media and other people, which, you may recall, Sartre considered Hell."
It is this type of boredom which is considered by some to be a lost art form. Informational overload from all quarters means that there can often be very little time for personal thought, reflection, or even just 'zoning out'. With a mobile that is constantly switched on and a plethora of entertainments available to distract the naked eye, it is understandable that some people find it difficult to actually get bored in that particular fidgety, introspective kind of way.
Yet if we look more closely at these two different ideas of boredom, it is fair to say that they are the same phenomenon witnessed from two different perspectives. To the man who lives in a constant whirl of advertising, lights, noise, pollution and general urban overstimulation, the comparative boredom of a white room or a four-hour chanting session may be the epitome of peace and clarity. On the other hand, to the frustrated teenager with limited control over his/her circumstances, living under a 'regime' of parentally enforced sensible peace and quiet, the noise, lights, stink and confusion of a rave or a commercial music festival bring joy unbounded. To say that boredom is a lost art form in this context is therefore a bit like saying "I don't have time to think anymore" or "I don't like computer games, they are distracting and noisy" — entirely subjective opinions that have nothing to do with our definition of ennui. Peach or poison is what this supposed distinction comes down to, and so one can only conclude that boredom as an art form is alive and kicking. Or rather, alive and listlessly dangling its legs.
The essential role of boredom in the creative process is part of a dialectic between activity and inactivity which characterises all human life. Perhaps best expressed in the form of the "Get out of bed today? Don't get out of bed today?" dilemma, movement between rest and thought, flurries of activity and spells of relaxation, characterises the creative process and indeed working life in general, for many people. As Graham Greene's protagonist Bendrix, from the novel "The End of the Affair" puts it:
"So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."
Perhaps the boredom that the creative type rails against through music-making or book-writing is the most effective impetus towards work. (Except for poverty, although I suppose it could be argued that poverty is in itself a kind of boredom).
So-called 'boring' things often act as welcome release from overload of one kind or another. A plain fast after the overindulgence of the festive season, for example, or the freshness of  minimalist art or music after an overload of baroque. Nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than in the pornography trade. After the first five minutes of visual shock, most pornography descends into the utter banality of a broken record, which perhaps explains the almost ludicrous variety of 'harder', specifically fetishistic pornographic material — the basic stuff simply doesn't cut it after a while.
Fashion matriarch Muiccia Prada acknowledges this paradox of sexual availability in a recent interview with "The Observer":
"Sometimes I think that the obsession with fashion is  just about the desperation of being sexy. My young assistants come to work and they wear these amazing things. Very provocative. And they are so obsessed about being beautiful and sexy, and they are always alone. And I tell them that the more they dress for sex, the less sex they will have. It's so basic, but they don't seem to understand me."
Wise words indeed from a woman who has turned dressing like David Bowie in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' into an acceptable activity for wannabe starlets. Anyone who can sell a million brown bowling bags at £300 a pop has to know something about the subversive power of the plain and the boring in an overloaded, overstimulated market.
From a religious perspective, the capacity for handling 'boring' scenarios is seen as a powerful tool for concentrating the mind and as an aid to spiritual development. Rather than frantically attempting to escape from the fidgety numbness of one's own thoughts, the Buddhist monk and the Christian contemplative alike find strength in facing the unquiet mind, facing the lack of understanding and ultimate fear of death which drives the mind so frantic in the quieter moments of life. As Michael Raposa, author of 'Boredom and the Religious Imagination' points out:
"Trying or even excruciating as it may be, boredom offers an elevated awareness of time's conquering, expansive enormity. It's an intimation of death, a glimpse into the nothingness that lurks behind and threatens each person, each project, each moment."
So, the state of boredom has a role not just as a dialectical opposition to the state of creative activity, but also as an entity to be explored in search of a deeper understanding of thought and fear.
Reports of the death of boredom, then, have been greatly exaggerated. But before we all run off to buy Steve Reich records and grey woolly jumpers, it is perhaps best to remember that boredom's value is as part of a dialectic between activity and inactivity. A potential spur for the creative impulse, excessive boredom can also drive us barmy if not acted upon quickly enough. On that note, I shall leave you with words of the US president George Bush:
"What's wrong with being a boring kind of a guy?"
Potentially, George, one hell of a lot.
 

[scallop]

Sad vidim zašto sam tako zaostao. Nemam smartfon.

[M.M]

I ja sam.

[Meho Krljic]

PCPRO ima članak koji analizira recentnu epidemiju crowdfundinga i pokazuje šta tu funkcioniše, a šta ne:
 
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/377242/does-crowdfunding-work
 

 Does crowdfunding work? Posted on 28 Sep 2012 at 14:45
Is it really practical to fund a business from hundreds of small donations harvested over the internet? Simon Brew investigates
There’s a sporting chance that you’ve seen the work of Jane Espenson on your television over the past decade or so. She’s written scripts for shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Torchwood and Battlestar Galactica. Naturally, therefore, she’s worked with and befriended some people with very deep pockets.
Yet, when it came to raising funds for one of her most recent projects – a small web-based sitcom by the name of Husbands - she chose not to turn to her well-heeled contacts. For Espenson is one of a growing number of people who has turned to the idea of crowdfunding: seeking small donations from many supporters over the internet, instead of big contributions from venture capitalists, banks and such like.

Consequently, the budget for Husbands’ second season has come almost directly from its audience. In all, 956 people have donated a total of $60,000, with the smallest contribution being only $1. Impressively, it raised its budget in less than a month.
Crowdfunding is a fascinating idea, and one that’s beginning to find its feet, thanks to the rise of dedicated websites such as Kickstarter. Could it really give the banks – with their continued reluctance to lend to small businesses – some serious competition?
 Who needs crowdfunding?
Let’s be honest from the outset: for the majority of businesses, crowdfunding simply won’t work. Since it requires the interest of a comparatively large number of people to fund a venture, the project itself has to have relatively wide appeal. After all, there’s something idyllic and romantic about being able to fund a film, but an educational hobby robot? That had 31% of its target when we visited its appeal page, with only 18 days left to go. Setting up a crowdfunding appeal is clearly no guarantee of success.
“You need to do your homework,” Jane Espenson told PC Pro. “Look at other projects, both successful and unsuccessful, and figure out what would make you back something. Work on the campaign video and the wording of your appeal. Find great incentives for donors and include incentives across the spectrum, from low to high amounts. And publicise the campaign.”
 
Espenson only turned to the crowdfunding model for the second season of Husbands, “so we had all of season one to use as a demonstration of what people were funding”. And if you don’t have a back catalogue of work at hand? “Find another way to demonstrate what makes your project special,” she advises.
 
Many have. In the past year, there’s been a substantial rise in the number of crowdfunded projects. These range from small video games costing a few hundred dollars, through to a documentary about US footballer Jay DeMerit, which has banked $223,422. Seemingly out of nowhere – although the roots of this variant of crowdfunding go back a decade in the music industry, at least – a viable, previously relatively untapped source of project funding has appeared.
However, Doug Andrews, the CFO of the Homeworking & Small Business Alliance (HSBA) wonders if the novelty factor is what’s attracting investors. “Crowdfunding sounds like something that could work brilliantly for early pioneers, but I suspect that once it becomes mainstream, it will be very difficult to get your idea found among all the other businesses vying for attention. A lot of the excitement and goodwill that’s associated with early trends will have been replaced with people asking ‘what am I going to get out of this?’”. Andrews admits that such questioning is “not necessarily a bad thing in itself”, but adds that “as a business owner, I wouldn’t want 2,000 investors dipping their oar in and trying to run my business”.
 
 Investor influence
Do investors really get much say? The emerging crowdfunding model, through websites such as Kickstarter, Sponsume, Indiegogo and their ilk, encourage project initiators to offer rewards for differing levels of donation, but they tend to be gift-based rather than offering input into the business or a guaranteed return. Some of the rewards are enticing – a part in a film, special versions of the product being funded, the chance to get involved – but they tend to be a substitute for a firm, legally binding share of the profits that a substantive investment would normally attract.
“It’s more like a charity investment,” says Toby Ricketts, CEO of Margetts Fund Management. “People are investing on trust, or in excitement, in the same way you and I would buy a lottery ticket. There’s pleasure at the point of investment”. There are, however, far more effective – and tax-efficient – ways to invest in a business, Ricketts argues, adding that he would “invest £20 in a project, but only if I got £20 of enjoyment out of it”.
    While the burgeoning popularity of crowdfunding websites suggests that people like the idea of small, tangible sponsorship of a project, it’s an uphill battle to convince potential investors to part with their credit card details, especially in less glamourous industries. A scan of the most popular crowdfunding websites confirms a skew towards creative projects. At Kickstarter, 943 film and video projects were trying to attract funding when we visited, compared to 90 in technology. More tellingly, in May 2012, only 23 tech projects had hit their funding target. In the film and video category, it was 345.
That isn’t to say tech projects can’t attract funding. Tammy Erdel, for example, is using Kickstarter to finance AIRbudz in-ear earphones. “I believe that Kickstarter is beginning to promote more products that don’t necessarily fall into the creative works arena,” she told PC Pro. That said, she adds that “it’s important that you have another means to promote your product and direct people to Kickstarter”.
Theresa Burton, CEO and co-founder of British crowdfunding service Buzzbnk, told us that 58% of projects listed on her site receive full backing, although she adds that “we work hard to set expectations about what does and doesn’t work in crowdfunding, and the amount of effort required to actively fundraise”. Buzzbnk also offers the option for investors to make a loan, possibly with an interest return.
It’s worth noting that if you have a less prominent project that fails to meet its target, you haven’t actually lost much. Bernie Thompson, of Plugable, has successfully raised funding via Kickstarter in the past, and is currently seeking investment for a $50 thin client computer for schools. He isn’t sure he’ll get to his funding target this time – although “there’s often a big jump in backers at the end”. But he argues: “We’ll have invested a bunch of time, but we won’t have risked a big investment in hardware inventory, because we do that purchase only if the Kickstarter succeeds. We’ll have learned something very valuable about the size or character of the market for the product, with less risk.” And if he doesn’t hit his target? He’ll scale down his project, and do it anyway.       The crowdfunding sites
A growing number of projects do manage to hit their goals, and the current wave of crowdfunding services seems to have tapped into an appetite among individuals to contribute to projects. That’s interesting news for business.
Furthermore, it’s a myth to suggest that crowdfunding is all about a few pounds here and a few dollars there. The scaling system of incentives (which you determine when setting up your appeal) is intended to attract the wealthier investor. There’s ample evidence already of people being willing to offer large sums, even though the most popular reported donation is around the $25 mark.
With the growing number of people interested and investing in crowdfunding, there’s been an inevitable rise in the number of services catering for it. Among the highest profile is Kickstarter. Its model is simple, and not uncommon. If you want to list a project, there are certain criteria you must meet.
  First, you have to have a tangible end point: to produce a film, make a product or write something, for example. The golden rule is simple – your venture can’t be an open-ended proposition. Second, it has to fit within the fairly broad, predetermined categories, which inevitably limits what projects can be listed. And third, there are expected criteria prohibiting certain products. You’re not allowed what the site describes as “fund my life” projects either, meaning appeals for tuition fees or expensive holidays are off limits.
Next, you’re at a screen where you’re entering details of the project, coming up with a target funding goal, and setting a duration of up to 60 days to keep your appeal open (Kickstarter recommends 30 or fewer). There’s a small, salient point lying in the small print here: Kickstarter will take 5% of funds raised, and Amazon then skims off a further 3-5% for credit card processing. There’s no charge if a project doesn’t raise all of its funding, but it’s all or nothing: if you miss your target by a penny, you don’t get a bean.
Once your project page is complete, it goes off to Kickstarter for approval, and it can be live within a matter of days. Already, that’s a far quicker process than the traditional model of attracting investment. You don’t even need to print a physical prospectus, although investing in a good video makes sense.
 The cons of crowdfunding
For a small business looking to get a project off the ground, there are obvious advantages to the crowdfunding model, but there are risks too. The obvious one is having to surrender a proportion of capital raised, up to 10%, to the crowdfunding site in the first place.
You also have to be realistic. Crowdfunding might be a catalyst for a business, but that’s it. It’s quick funding for a single project, and that’s different to a long-term investment.
For instance, what happens if your project runs over budget? What happens if things don’t go to plan? Partnering with a more traditional investor may leave you open to similar costs, but there’s a relationship. It comes back to the all-or-nothing mentality. If you raise funding but fail to complete your project, you’re honour-bound with crowdfunding – although not legally obliged – to return people’s money.

   Anthony Caulfield is trying to raise money for a documentary feature, and he argues that “no-one oversees how you spend the money, and donors have to trust that you’re capable. If you’ve been involved in dodgy campaigns in the past, that reputation will stick, and you’re unlikely to be successful.”
Also, you may have to surrender more information about your business than you’re comfortable with. You need to put enough details of your idea into the public domain to raise interest, but that in turn exposes what’s arguably your primary business asset.
 Is it worth it?
The question, then, is does it all work? The answer: sort of. Crowdfunding certainly has its place, and the indisputable fact is that many creative projects that otherwise wouldn’t attract money are receiving funding from generally undemanding investors.
  Take From Bedrooms to Billions, Anthony and Nicola Caulfield’s planned documentary about the rise of British video games. Anthony told PC Pro that, after pitching the idea for the project to broadcasters, he couldn’t believe the lack of interest. He was told that gaming was a “niche hobby”, and that broadcasters “wouldn’t know where to place” his documentary. BBC Four turned it down, despite having recently commissioned an expensive drama on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry. “We’re not talking about a fad that suddenly appeared then fizzled out,” Caulfield argues. “Gaming was something that was born out of enthusiastic interest and not necessarily commercial enterprise, which went on to become the biggest entertainment industry on the planet!”
Caulfield, an experienced documentary maker, therefore turned to crowdfunding and, at the time of writing, has achieved more than 20% of his target total, and stands a real chance of hitting his target.
The immediate future for this iteration of crowdfunding seems bright, with the sheer novelty set to fuel things for a good while yet. The real test, however, will be when it’s time to deliver on the many projects that have successfully achieved full funding. In the months and years ahead, it’s vital that they’re realised, and that the backers are kept in touch with, simply to allow them to keep faith with the initiative.
Inevitably, then, the continued future and broadening of crowdfunding hinges on the very people who have raised funds through the assorted services. Or, more to the point, on the people who suddenly have a few hundred bosses they didn’t have before. After all, as Jane Espenson acknowledges, a crowd of investors brings with it an unwritten demand of its own. “We’re spending their money,” she told us, “and I feel a huge responsibility to spend it in smart ways.” There’s little doubt Espenson will. It needs many more like her to keep crowdfunding viable, well into the future.
Author: Simon Brew


 Five tips for crowdfunding success Keep your goal attainable
Most crowdfunding websites won’t give you a penny of the cash you raise unless you hit your target, so don’t miss out by a few pounds because you over-stretched. 
Kickstarter alone isn't enough
The funding page itself should be only the final part in a broader attempt to drive awareness and interest.
Stagger rewards
Come up with interesting rewards for differing levels of funding. You might get an extra £10 out of a donor, just for something as simple as autographing whatever you produce.
Keep your investors up to date
That way, when you come to do another project, they’ll already know you’re trustworthy.
And the big one
Deliver on your project, or return the money.
 
        Notable hitsThe Age of Stupid
A 2009 feature documentary, directed by Franny Armstrong and starring Pete Postlethwaite. The bulk of its £450,000 budget was raised via a crowdfunding model, with 223 investors.
Carmageddon: Reincarnation
A sequel to the ultra-violent video game of yesteryear is now in production, courtesy of a Kickstarter campaign; 11,947 backers donated a total of $456,944.
Amanda Palmer
American musician Palmer chose to raise funding for her new album, tour and art book outside of the record label system. She raised $1,059,129 from 21,963 backers.

 

[Meho Krljic]

Ooooh, sjajno, naučnici su uspeli da desetostruko povećaju brzinu wireless komunikacije, bez ikakve tehnološke intervencije, samo koristeći nove algoritme da digitalizovani signal pretvore u algebarske izraze koji se lako dekodiraju (čak i kad fale komadi) bez mnogo opterećivanja procesora na odredištu. Dakle, 1000 posto brži internet samo putem boljeg softvera!!!! Zapjevajmo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Naravno, ovo samo znači da će nas provajderi umesto po deset sada kačiti po sto na jednu vezu i naplaćivati nam malo manje, ali... ipak je lepo ovako nešto videti.

[Loni]

   Upotreba interneta, pored ostalog, smanjuje i nacionalizam. Umesto druženja samo sa pripadnicima svog naroda, praćenja samo medija svoje države i svega ostalog što vodi zaarikadiranju, imamo priliku da svet imamo na dlanu, upoznajemo strance i njihove ideje. Zapravo ništa i nije takav sinonim za globalizam kao net.

[mac]

Loni, da li ti je poznat sajt www.stormfront.org ? Upotreba bilo koje tehnologije ti samo omogućava da još više budeš ono što već jesi.

[Father Jape]

Pa ovo o čemu Loni priča, i ako jeste tačno, može da radi samo na duge staze. Dakle morali bismo uporediti društva posle sto godina neograničenog pristupa Internetu, i ista takva bez njega.
A dotad, naravno da će sve ono što postoji postojati i tamo. Mada, nekako ipak mislim da na papiru i VHSu nije bilo baš *toliko* pornografije. 

[scallop]

Bilo je manje, ali je bolje vozdizala.

[Джон Рейнольдс]

Лони има класичан проблем глобалиста и мондијалиста јер национализам поистовећује с интелектуалном и образовном ограниченошћу. Следећа замка у коју пада је заблуда да ће ако некоме нешто тури под нос, тај неко променити свој став. Па ту лежи парадокс, јер то што му тура под нос заправо нема никакве везе са тим "проблематичним" ставом.

Упознавање страних култура ће смањити национализам? Бизарна помисао! Ниђе везе.

[scallop]

Meni je zanimljiva diskrepancija između globalizma i biodiverziteta.

[Albedo 0]

Loni, klasična tehnooptimistička budaletina, nikako da shvati da svaka priča o revolucionarnom uticaju tehnologije direktno poništava teoriju evolucije.

Dakle, valjda je svakome jasno da se kod Darvina govori o milionima godina, to ne može da se neutralizuje za pišljivih 20 godina interneta.

[Barbarin]

i naplaćivati nam malo manje,

Nema šanse, može samo skuplje, a može da povećaju brzinu, cene ispod ovih u Srbiji neće ići.

[Albedo 0]

kako skuplje kad ne moraju da mijenjaju infrastrukturu bar desetak godina?

sa ovakvim rješenjem je i dial up solidna veza a kamoli obični adsl

naravno, sve zavisi je li ovo neko licencirano rješenje problema

[Barbarin]

Živiš u Srbiji, zar ne, kad je ovde nešto stvarno pojeftinilo. Skoči evro, cene gore, padne evro, cene iste, skoči evro, cene gore, i tako dalje i tako dalje. Skoči cena nafte na svetskom tržištu, skoči i kod nas, iako se ta poskupela nafta nije ni kupila niti će se u Srbiji prodavati.

[Albedo 0]

ne živim u Srbiji, na sreću

ali niko nema uredbe o cijeni nafte, jer se od toga direktno puni budžet, ali ne puni se budžet od internet koncekcije, ima dosta privatnih provajdera + postoji plan za digitalizaciju, dakle država mora da radi na pojeftinjenju internet pristupa

po meni je logično za očekivati da bar 5mbps košta kao 2 ili 1 mbps

[Meho Krljic]

Ne, ne, pa jasno je valjda šta sam mislio: naplaćivaće manje isto kao što rade danas kada ti cena paketa ostane ista a povećaju ti brzinu. Dakle, sad će da ti povećaju brzinu samo time što će promeniti algoritme, pa će njihov profit biti veći.

[Barbarin]

Uvek su oni na dobitku dal bila država ili kompanija, pa se čak i te dve stvari ponekad ujedine da isprazne naše čepove.

Evo ti sjbb 1.566 dinara imaš tri varijante brzina, ako oćeš da plaćaš svaki mesec bez ugovora i obaveza imaš 2mbps, ako uzmeš samo kao postpaid imaš 6mbps a ako potpišeš ugovor na 12 meseci imaš 10mbps, a ako uzmeš još neki mix paket dobiješ za malo manje pare, al ti je televizija malo skuplja.

Svi su se oni lepo uračunali i ugradili.

[Meho Krljic]

You Can’t Say That on the Internet
 

A BASTION of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.
What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable.
Consider just a few recent kerfuffles. In early September, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site’s nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test.
That’s right — a venerable publication that still spells “re-elect” as “reëlect” is less puritan than a Californian start-up that wants to “make the world more open.”
And fighting obscenity can be good for business. Impermium, a Silicon Valley company that helps Web sites deal with unwanted reader comments, has begun marketing technology that identifies “all kinds of harmful content — such as violence, racism, flagrant profanity, and hate speech — and allows site owners to act on it in real-time, before it reaches readers.” Impermium will police the readers — but who will police Impermium?
Apple, too, has strayed from its iconoclastic roots. When Naomi Wolf’s latest book, “Vagina: A New Biography,” went on sale in its iBooks store, Apple turned “Vagina” into “V****a.” After numerous complaints, Apple restored the title, but who knows how many other books are still affected?
True, these books are still on sale. Unlike the good old United States Post Office, which once confiscated “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and other books it deemed too lewd, Silicon Valley does not engage in direct censorship. What it does, though, is present ideas and terms that have gained public acceptance as something to be ashamed of. Silicon Valley doesn’t just reflect social norms — it actively shapes them in ways that are, for the most part, imperceptible.
The proliferation of the Autocomplete function on popular Web sites is a case in point. Nominally, all it does is complete your search query — on YouTube, on Google, on Amazon — before you’ve finished typing, using an algorithm to predict what you’re most likely typing. A nifty feature — but it, too, reinforces primness.
How so? Consider George Carlin’s classic comedy routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” See how many of those words would autocomplete on your favorite Web site. In my case, YouTube would autocomplete none. Amazon almost none (it also hates “penis” and “vagina”). Of Carlin’s seven words, Google would autocomplete only “piss.”
Until recently, even the word “bisexual” wouldn’t autocomplete at Google; it’s only this past August that Google, after many complaints, began to autocomplete some, but not all, queries for that term. In 2010, the hacker magazine 2600 published a long blacklist of similar words. While I didn’t verify all 400 of them on Google, a few that I did try — like “swastika” and “Lolita” — failed to autocomplete. Is Nabokov not trending in Mountain View? Alas, these algorithms are not particularly bright: unable to distinguish between Nabokov’s novel and child pornography, they assume you want the latter.
Why won’t tech companies let us freely use terms that already enjoy wide circulation and legitimacy? Do they fashion themselves as our new guardians? Are they too greedy to correct their algorithms’ mistakes?
Thanks to Silicon Valley, our public life is undergoing a transformation. Accompanying this digital metamorphosis is the emergence of new, algorithmic gatekeepers, who, unlike the gatekeepers of the previous era — journalists, publishers, editors — don’t flaunt their cultural authority. They may even be unaware of it themselves, eager to deploy algorithms for fun and profit.
Many of these gatekeepers remain invisible — until something goes wrong. Thus, in early September, the online livestream from the Hugo Awards, the Oscars of the science fiction world, was interrupted with a cryptic copyright warning, right before the popular author Neil Gaiman was to deliver an acceptance speech.
Apparently, Ustream — the site streaming the ceremony — was using the services of another company to determine whether its streamed videos violated any copyrights. The partner company draws on a very large video archive to see, in real time, if what’s being streamed matches anything in its collection. Somehow, the celebratory video that preceded Mr. Gaiman’s speech tripped a copyright match, and the feed was cut off, even though the organizers had all the requisite permissions (and, under the doctrine of fair use, probably didn’t need them anyway).
The limitations of algorithmic gatekeeping are on full display here. How do you teach the idea of “fair use” to an algorithm? Context matters, and there’s no rule book here; that’s why we have courts. From the perspective of sticky, amorphous human culture, semi-automation — pairing up humans with algorithms — beats full automation. Sometimes, gaps are productive. But will profit-driven Silicon Valley ever acknowledge this insight?
Our reputations are increasingly at the mercy of algorithms, too. No one knows this better than Bettina Wulff, the former German first lady who has sued Google for autocompleting searches for her name with words like “escort” and “prostitute.” Ms. Wulff insists that Google’s algorithms spread false rumors about her; Google says that the suggested terms are just an “algorithmically generated result of objective factors, including the popularity of the entered search terms.”
Google’s defense would sound tenable if its own algorithms weren’t so easy to trick. In 2010, the marketing expert Brent Payne paid an army of assistants to search for “Brent Payne manipulated this.” Soon anyone typing “Brent P” into Google would see that phrase in their autocomplete suggestions. After Mr. Payne publicized his experiment, Google removed that particular suggestion, but how many similar cases have gone undetected? What is “objective” about such algorithmic “truths”?
Quaint prudishness, excessive enforcement of copyright, unneeded damage to our reputations: algorithmic gatekeeping is exacting a high toll on our public life. Instead of treating algorithms as a natural, objective reflection of reality, we must take them apart and closely examine each line of code.
Can we do it without hurting Silicon Valley’s business model? The world of finance, facing a similar problem, offers a clue. After several disasters caused by algorithmic trading earlier this year, authorities in Hong Kong and Australia drafted proposals to establish regular independent audits of the design, development and modifications of computer systems used in such trades. Why couldn’t auditors do the same to Google?
Silicon Valley wouldn’t have to disclose its proprietary algorithms, only share them with the auditors. A drastic measure? Perhaps. But it’s one that is proportional to the growing clout technology companies have in reshaping not only our economy but also our culture.
Obviously, Silicon Valley won’t develop or embrace similar norms overnight. However, instead of accepting this new reality as a fait accompli, we must ensure that, in pursuing greater profits, our new algorithmic gatekeepers are forced to accept the idea that their culture-defining function comes with great responsibility.
  The author of the forthcoming book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.”

[Meho Krljic]

Džon Mekafi je u bekstvu od policije jer je osumnjičen za ubistvo i odlučio je da se opere pišući blog.
 

John McAfee, the security software pioneer who is wanted in connection with a murder in Belize, has launched a blog to defend himself while on the lam.
SLIDESHOW: 11 sorriest tech companies of 2012
Buzzblog: Calling BS on McAfee’s “pre-written” blog posts
   Related Content  "The Hinterland - The official blog of John McAfee" debuted on Nov. 17, with McAfee writing of a couple of reporters who he claims appear to be out to get him through the press by emphasizing his dark side. One, he claims, is seeking revenge over incriminating photos McAfee believes the reporter thinks McAfee sent to the writer's wife.
According to news reports, the 67-year-old McAfee is the prime suspect in the shooting death of Gregory Faull, an American expatriate and a neighbor of McAfee's.
ABC News and The Register report that the blog has been authenticated by Chad Essley, a friend of McAfee's whose upcoming graphic novel about McAfee is plugged prominently. ABC News also reports that a man identifying himself as McAfee confirmed the blog is his.
McAfee writes that he is on run with a 20-year-old female named Sam, photos of whom are in the blog, along with a post from her. McAfee says a handful of friends and associates have been rounded up by police over the past week or so. His posts are filled with dramatic descriptions of his actions (including returning to his home in disguise to find police digging up his dead dogs and cutting off their heads) and lay bare his suspicions about Belize authorities.
BUZZBLOG: Oh, you mean it's THAT John McAfee?
"The first two days Sam and I were on the run we were far from our house. I felt helpless, especially given the fact that so many of our friends and workers were being arrested. I realized that unless I knew, moment by moment, what was happening, my chances of coming out of this intact, both emotionally and physically, were slim. I needed to be close to area where the events occurred and needed to watch, and hear, the actions of the authorities. I also needed to do my own investigation, since the police only seemed to be investigating my whereabouts. My safety is contingent on the truth being discovered. I today announced on NBC Television that I am offering a $25,000 reward for the capture of the person or persons responsible for Mr. Faul's murder."
Another post urges readers to study up on Belize's prime minister and a Gang Suppression Unit that McAfee says has been used to go after the prime minister's critics and enemies, apparently including McAfee himself, as he refers to a raid of his compound by the unit in April. McAfee says the government was wrongfully going after him for illegal drug production and possession of firearms.
McAfee pledges that the blog will stay updated even if he is captured:
"I have pre-written enough material to keep this blog alive for at least a year."
McAfee started McAfee, Inc. in 1987 and resigned in 1994, before McAfee merged with Network General to form Network Associates (the company later reorganized, shed some acquisitions and McAfee returned to its old name). As for John McAfee, he amassed a fortune once estimated at about $100 million before the economy tanked and he moved to Belize a few years ago.
 
 
His exotic relocation and recent actions have lured enterprising reporters to McAfee's south-of-the-border, former paradise. A CNN correspondent tells of visiting McAfee's beachfront property (or the beach in front of his property) via golf cart, and running into one of seven McAfee girlfriends who live together.
Bob Brown tracks network research in his Alpha Doggs blog and Facebook page, as well on Twitter and Google +.
Read more about security in Network World's Security section.
 

[Meho Krljic]

Oh, noes!!!! Bezbednosni propust u novim Samsungovim televizorima koji imaju ugrađenu i kameru i mikrofon (da biste mogli da sajberujete sa prekomorskim partnerima udobno razlogićeni na trosedu a ne zgrbljeni ispred laptopa) potencijalno omogućava hakerima da vas posmatraju i slušaju protiv vaše volje!!!!!!!!!

[Meho Krljic]

Ovo smo sami primetili i bez naučnika, ali lepo je to potvrđuju anegdotalne dokaze:

Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say

Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to. “I give it a few seconds — not even minutes — and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.


But it’s not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.
“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”
To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.
“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”
If the rise of nonstop cable TV news gave the world a culture of sound bites, the Internet, Wolf said, is bringing about an eye byte culture. Time spent online — on desktop and mobile devices — was expected to top five hours per day in 2013 for U.S. adults, according to eMarketer, which tracks digital behavior. That’s up from three hours in 2010.
Word lovers and scientists have called for a “slow reading” movement, taking a branding cue from the “slow food” movement. They are battling not just cursory sentence galloping but the constant social network and e-mail temptations that lurk on our gadgets — the bings and dings that interrupt “Call me Ishmael.”
Researchers are working to get a clearer sense of the differences between online and print reading — comprehension, for starters, seems better with paper — and are grappling with what these differences could mean not only for enjoying the latest Pat Conroy novel but for understanding difficult material at work and school. There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills.
The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. It just reflects how we live.
“The brain is plastic its whole life span,” Wolf said. “The brain is constantly adapting.”
Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.”
“I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”
 Adapting to read
The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read.
Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions. Reading in print even gave us a remarkable ability to remember where key information was in a book simply by the layout, researchers said. We’d know a protagonist died on the page with the two long paragraphs after the page with all that dialogue.
The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.
“We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scroll­ing and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” said Andrew Dillon, a University of Texas professor who studies reading. “We’re in this new era of information behavior, and we’re beginning to see the consequences of that.”
Brandon Ambrose, a 31-year-old Navy financial analyst who lives in Alexandria, knows of those consequences.
His book club recently read “The Interestings,” a best-seller by Meg Wolitzer. When the club met, he realized he had missed a number of the book’s key plot points. It hit him that he had been scanning for information about one particular aspect of the book, just as he might scan for one particular fact on his computer screen, where he spends much of his day.
“When you try to read a novel,” he said, “it’s almost like we’re not built to read them anymore, as bad as that sounds.”
Ramesh Kurup noticed something even more troubling. Working his way recently through a number of classic authors — George Eliot, Marcel Proust, that crowd — Kurup, 47, discovered that he was having trouble reading long sentences with multiple, winding clauses full of background information. Online sentences tend to be shorter, and the ones containing complicated information tend to link to helpful background material.
“In a book, there are no graphics or links to keep you on track,” Kurup said.
It’s easier to follow links, he thinks, than to keep track of so many clauses in page after page of long paragraphs.
Kurup’s observation might sound far-fetched, but told about it, Wolf did not scoff. She offered more evidence: Several English department chairs from around the country have e-mailed her to say their students are having trouble reading the classics.
“They cannot read ‘Middlemarch.’ They cannot read William James or Henry James,” Wolf said. “I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.”
Wolf points out that she’s no Luddite.  She sends e-mails from her iPhone as often as one of her students. She’s involved with programs to send tablets to developing countries to help children learn to read. But just look, she said, at Twitter and its brisk 140-character declarative sentences.
“How much syntax is lost, and what is syntax but the reflection of our convoluted thoughts?” she said. “My worry is we will lose the ability to express or read this convoluted prose. Will we become Twitter brains?”
 Bi-literate brains?
Wolf’s next book will look at what the digital world is doing to the brain, including looking at brain-scan data as people read both online and in print. She is particularly interested in  comprehension results in screen vs. print reading.
Already, there is some intriguing research that looks at that question. A 2012 Israeli study of engineering students — who grew up in the world of screens — looked at their comprehension while reading the same text on screen and in print when under time pressure to complete the task.
The students believed they did better on screen. They were wrong. Their comprehension and learning was better on paper.
Researchers say that the differences between text and screen reading should be studied more thoroughly and that the differences should be dealt with in education, particularly with school-aged children. There are advantages to both ways of reading. There is potential for a bi-literate brain.
“We can’t turn back,” Wolf said. “We should be simultaneously reading to children from books, giving them print, helping them learn this slower mode, and at the same time steadily increasing their immersion into the technological, digital age. It’s both. We have to ask the question: What do we want to preserve?”
Wolf is training her own brain to be bi-literate. She went back to the Hesse novel  the next night, giving herself distance, both in time and space, from her screens.
“I put everything aside. I said to myself, ‘I have to do this,’ ” she said. “It was really hard the second night. It was really hard the third night. It took me two weeks, but by the end of the second week I had pretty much recovered myself so I could enjoy and finish the book.”
Then she read it again.
“I wanted to enjoy this form of reading again,” Wolf said. “When I found myself, it was like I recovered. I found my ability again to slow down, savor and think.”

[Meho Krljic]

S obzirom da se na ovom forumu poslednjih dana unaokolo bacakaju izrazi koje u kafanskoj komunikaciji ne možete da čujete, mislim da je ovo pravo mesto da se zakači link na poučan tekst koji prenosi Wired a koji se ozbiljno bavi trolovanjem, internet-zlostavljanjem i percepcijom toga šta je u redu a šta ne:



Why the Trolls Will Always Win

[Meho Krljic]

Vrlo dugačak ali zanimljiv tekst:


  'Overnight, everything I loved was gone': the internet shaming of Lindsey Stone

[Meho Krljic]

Upotreba interneta (ponekad) povećava samo saldo na računu:
 
 The Maker Of The Trollface Meme Is Counting His Money

[Meho Krljic]

Skajnet je još korak bliže. Na univerzitetu Kornel razvijaju algoritam koji, vele, već sada ume da prepozna trolove u diskusijama već sa prvih deset postova i, prezjumabli, biće korišćen da se ovakve pojave automacki benuju, da se ne muče administratori:
 
  Scientists develop algorithm that can auto-ban internet trolls
 

Researchers at Cornell University claim to be able to identify internet trolls with more than 80% AUC*, positing the possibility of creating automated methods to identify or even auto-ban forum and comment-thread pests.
 
Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Jure Leskovec submitted the paper Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities [PDF] in early April, which details the findings from an 18-month study of banned commenters over three high-traffic communities: news giant cnn.com, political hub breitbart.com and the vocal gaming communities at ign.com.
 
The study, which was partly-funded by Google and had the cooperation of the Disqus commenting ecosphere, compared anti-social users (‘Future Banned Users’ or FBUs) ‘destined to be permanently banned after joining the community with those joiners who are not permanently banned (Never Banned Users or NBUs) in the study-period.
 
Many of the study’s findings could have been anticipated by anyone who has ever had a comment thread hijacked by an interloper who seems more intent on causing disruption and friction than participating in a reasonable discussion. For example over the 10,000 FBUs studied, nearly all began their commenting life at a lower perceived standard of literacy and/or clarity than the median for their host groups, with even that standard dropping in the final stretch towards a moderator ban. Additionally those last pre-ban troll posts tend to home in on a smaller number of comment threads relative to the number of posts – the classic characteristic of digging in for a sustained flaming match either with the host community or one or more members of it who have decided to engage the troll.
 
The study found that on CNN the studied trolls were more likely to initiate new posts or sub-threads, whilst at Breitbart and IGN they were more likely to weigh into existing threads.
 
The report does not exonerate host communities of all blame for troll behaviour, finding that immediately intolerant communities are more likely to foster trolls:
 
“[communities] may play a part in incubating antisocial behavior. In fact, users who are excessively censored early in their lives are more likely to exhibit antisocial behavior later on. Furthermore, while communities appear initially forgiving (and are relatively slow to ban these antisocial users), they become less tolerant of such users the longer they remain in a community. This results in an increased rate at which their posts are deleted, even after controlling for post quality,”
 
The broad profile of the FBU as presented by the paper is that of a semi-literate, provocative and fairly persistent poster, whose descent into totally anti-social behaviour is summoned at inverse speed to that with which the host community rejects them, and whose final posts before a permanent ban are characterised by persistent and heated battle on a small number of topics.
 
Regarding the possibility of developing automated methods for identifying and even banning trolls, the researchers are circumspect, since 1 in 5 of users were misclassified by their analysis system, which otherwise claims to spot a persistent comment pest within as few as ten posts. “While we present effective mechanisms for identifying and potentially weeding antisocial users out of a community, taking extreme action against small infractions can ex- acerbate antisocial behavior (e.g., unfairness can cause users to write worse), “

[Meho Krljic]

Sami pali, sami se, jelte, ubili:

In Oracle v. Google, a Nerd Subculture Is on Trial

The problem with Oracle v. Google is that everyone actually affected by the case knows what an API is, but the whole affair is being decided by people who don’t, from the normals in the jury box to the normals at the Supreme Court—which declined to hear the case in 2015, on the advice of the normals at the Solicitor General’s office, who perhaps did not grasp exactly how software works.
In a world where Silicon Valley is coming into dominance, Oracle v. Google is an unusual instance in which the nerds are getting totally owned by the normals. Their judgment on the technologies they have birthed is being overridden by old people in black robes; their beloved traditions and mythologies around free and open source software are being scoffed at by corporate stiffs in suits as inconsistent hippie nonsense.
Google’s witnesses are—or at least profess to be—true believers in free and open source software (FOSS), and FOSS isn’t purely about the technology, it’s also a bastion of copyright radicalism. The General Public License (GPL) and other licenses carve out a counterculture amidst a harsh copyright law. In trying to explain the facts, the nerds must also explain their religion, and Oracle attorneys have nothing but scorn and skepticism for them.

Silicon Valley wants to live in a world of its own, where it sets its own rules and writes its own laws. Oracle v. Google does little to change its mind that this is only right and fair.
 

And to be fair to Oracle attorneys, although the copyleft idealism of the free and open source software movement infects Silicon Valley at its very foundation, Silicon Valley is a capitalist enterprise, and has always had an ambivalent relationship with FOSS. It’s all well and good for Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android, to sit in a courtroom and explain that Android makes money despite giving a product away for free, but outside the walls of the courthouse, the elegant, perfectly manicured, proprietary walled gardens of Apple are beating the goddamn pants off Android.
The nerds don’t want to dwell on that. There’s one big thing on their minds: they are really, really worried that the jury does not understand nerd shit. The witnesses that Google calls keep turning to the jury and trying to explain what an API is, only to be halted by Oracle’s objections that Eric Schmidt (once an executive at Sun Microsystems, later chairman and CEO of Google, now executive chairman of Alphabet) and Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun during Android’s development) aren’t expert witnesses.
Schmidt and Schwartz are just there to talk about how things went down over the years that Google created Android: the who, what, where, when. They aren’t there to explain the technology as experts—that job falls to the actual expert witnesses, who are, as Judge Alsup speculated disapprovingly on Wednesday, likely being paid millions of dollars to play their roles in this litigation. But to Schmidt and Schwartz, the definition of an API—which may be an arcane, slippery concept for the jury—is fundamental to the questions they are being asked about who, what, where, when. They know this, and with the classic compulsion inherent to every nerd, they want to explain so very badly.
Eric Schmidt sought to describe APIs and languages using power plugs as an analogy. Jonathan Schwartz tried his hand at explaining with “breakfast menus,” only to have Judge William Alsup respond witheringly, “I don't know what the witness just said. The thing about the breakfast menu makes no sense.”
Schwartz’s second attempt at the breakfast menu analogy went much better, as he explained that although two different restaurants could have hamburgers on the menu, the actual hamburgers themselves were different—the terms on the menu were an API, and the hamburgers were implementations.
No one bothered to challenge Schwartz’s apparent belief that hamburgers are commonly featured on breakfast menus, as he had already moved on to confusing the jury on another front: the operating system GNU, which is a pearl of the free software community. When asked by Judge Alsup to “explain GNU in 30 seconds,” he launched into a reverent speech about how a “very smart man” believed that software should be free.
Before he could actually name Richard M. Stallman, or give out the “free as in freedom” speech that many of us adjacent to the tech community have heard from that one friend of ours many times, Alsup interrupted him. “That’s not 30 seconds,” the judge said, and managed to truncate the stirring legend of the Free Software Movement to a few minutes of terse explanations, including what the acronym GNU stands for: GNU is Not Unix.
“The G part stands for GNU?” Alsup asked in disbelief.
“Yes,” said Schwartz on the stand.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said the 71-year-old Clinton appointee.



Schwartz and Schmidt aren’t supposed to be expert witnesses, but they can’t help but be ambassadors of a strange universe that the jurors may or may not be familiar with. In any other jurisdiction I would confidently say that none of the jurors had ever heard of Richard Stallman—but this is San Francisco, after all. There’s a chance that all this talk of free and open source software is not nearly as alien to the jury as it could be, but it’s more likely than not that it’s very, very, very alien.
The nerds struggle to be understood. It doesn’t help that towards the end of his cross-examination by Oracle, Schwartz became snippier and snippier, answering the Oracle lead attorney’s questions with passive-aggressive hostility. He seemed to lose his cool starting with the moment that Benjamin Bicks brandished an exhibit, asking, “You kept a Google blog on yourself, did you not?”
“No,” replied Schwartz, bewildered. When Bicks showed him the exhibit, he looked it over, and said, “I think you’re mistaken on what this is.”
It was a Google Alert on Jonathan Schwartz’s name, one of many emails that had landed in his inbox and likely never gotten read. “You don't remember this article about being one of the fifteen worst CEOs in American history?” Bicks asked him.
“There’s a lot of things on Google Alerts I don’t control,” said Schwartz, unable to resist sarcasm. “It’s a big internet.”
Schwartz seemed less upset about being called one of the worst CEOs in America, and more put off by the sheer indignity of being cross-examined by a man who didn’t know what a blog is—enough that he broke a 10-month long Twitter silence to snark about it.
On the stand, Schwartz comes off as an inconsistent character, but his inconsistencies are only the inconsistencies of the tech industry at large. The big players both love and hate FOSS, and FOSS both loves and hates the big players. And in reality, the soulless corporations can’t really be separated from the starry-eyed idealists, who themselves work for the corporations as both engineers and executives—thus generating the hypocrisies that Oracle is eager to point out in this trial.
This is why Schwartz can speak reverently of Stallman, even though Schwartz apparently walked away from a deal with Android over disagreements about control of the Java ecosystem—control that Sun did not wish to relinquish. This is why Schwartz congratulates Google on developing an open source mobile platform to its face, and then calls it “Scroogle” in a private email—derogatory portmanteaus being a classic pastime of FOSS nerds, the most prolific creator being FOSS patron saint Richard Stallman himself, who insists on calling the Amazon Kindle “the Amazon Swindle.”
Google’s nerd witnesses are hamstrung on their ability to explain the motivations behind their actions, because a big part of the sequence of events that led up to Oracle v. Google is that no one thought the Java APIs were copyrightable. Programming languages aren’t copyrightable because they were only valuable insofar as many programmers could freely use them. And it is impossible to implement programming languages without the APIs. Copyrighting a Java API would be absurd. It’s why Sun never threatened to sue Apache Harmony for their implementation of Java, it’s why Sun put out their own open source implementation of Java themselves.

Oracle v. Google is the revenge of the normals, bringing a hammer down on the customs and practices that the nerds decided for themselves.
 

But ever since a bunch of normals at the Federal Circuit decided in 2014 that the structure, sequence, and organization of the Java APIs are copyrightable, copyrightable they are—and now Google witnesses are struggling to explain their actions as part of a long shared history in an insular community of nerds with their own language, their own mythology, their own intuitions about software and intellectual property.
Oracle v. Google is the revenge of the normals, bringing a hammer down on the customs and practices that the nerds decided for themselves. After all, something can’t be copyrightable just because all the nerds agree it is; so why should something be unable to be copyrighted just because the nerds think it is?
But Oracle v. Google does nothing to disabuse the nerd of the conviction that they are right, and that the copyright law forged by the normals is an unrigorous wishy-washy piece of nonsense. Because in this case, the law really is completely out of touch with what the technology actually is, with reality itself. Just look at the Federal Circuit opinion that ruled that APIs are copyrightable, where they say, “Google was free to develop its own API packages and to ‘lobby’ programmers to adopt them.” A federal appeals court actually proposed that in some alternate universe, Android launched and told developers to write apps in a language they’d never encountered before.
Silicon Valley wants to live in a world of its own, where it sets its own rules and writes its own laws. And Oracle v. Google does little to change its mind that this is only right and fair. It’s why the tech community often lashes out with such vitriol at Larry Ellison over this suit: It’s a betrayal of nerd solidarity, Ellison selling them all out just to land a $9 billion punch right in Google’s face.
The normals would have never had a chance to get it wrong if Ellison hadn’t pursued this grudge-match all the way to the top. And now this trial—over whether the Android use of the Java APIs was fair use—proceeds on an absurd foundation, the assumption that APIs are copyrightable in the first place.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Alphabet. He is the chairman.

[Meho Krljic]

The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule

[lilit]

blast from the past!

ontopik
dobar tekst, još kad bismo ponovo umeli da sletimo na mesec, ne bi bilo tužno kako sve to izgleda danas.

[Meho Krljic]

Saće još malo Elon na Mars,

#wecandoit

[Labudan]

Фејсбукери заглупљени, гејминг опамећује

Students who use social media score lower in math, reading and science
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/social-media-use-linked-low-math-reading-science-performance/

[Meho Krljic]

U.S. says transfer of internet governance will go ahead on Oct. 1

The U.S. will go ahead with its plan to hand over oversight of the internet's domain name system functions to a multistakeholder body on Oct. 1, despite fierce opposition from some lawmakers and advocacy groups.



 The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), under contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, operates the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which enables the operation of the internet domain name system (DNS). These include responsibility for the coordination of the DNS root, IP addressing and other internet protocol resources.
 The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Commerce Department, said in March 2014 that it planned to let its contract with ICANN expire on Sept. 30, 2015, passing the oversight of the functions to a global governance model. NTIA made it clear that it would not accept a plan from internet stakeholders that would replace its role by that of a government-led or intergovernmental organization or would in any way compromise the openness of the internet.
 The transfer was delayed to September as the internet community needed more time to finalize the plan for the transition. The new stewardship plan submitted by ICANN was approved by the NTIA in June.   NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling said Tuesday that the agency had informed ICANN that “barring any significant impediment,” NTIA intends to allow the IANA functions contract it has with ICANN to expire as of Oct. 1, said Strickling, who is also assistant secretary for communications and information.
 Last week, ICANN said Public Technical Identifiers, a nonprofit public benefit corporation, had been incorporated in California, to eventually run the IANA functions under contract from ICAAN, after the transition was complete.
 The proposed transfer of control of the IANA functions has been criticized by Republicans in Congress and some conservative groups, who are concerned that the transition will hand over control of the internet to governments, including some that have a reputation for stifling online activity.
 Last week, 25 advocacy groups asked Congress to sue to enforce riders it passed on prohibiting spending of taxpayer money on the IANA transition. On Tuesday, one of the groups, TechFreedom, said the move to go ahead with the transition, which would require the time of NTIA staff and thus appropriated salaries, was a "deliberate affront to Congress."   The courts can still pause the transition in September or unwind it after the contract expires, said Berin Szóka, president of TechFreedom, in a statement. He raised the possibility that private parties could sue if Congress doesn't. The groups, which are opposed to rushing the transition, have said that key issues about the transfer are "not expected to be fully resolved until summer 2017."
 NTIA said in an accompanying FAQ on Tuesday that both NTIA and ICANN have formally affirmed that the U.S. government is the administrator of .mil and .gov and any changes made to the top-level domains can only be made with the express written approval of the U.S. government. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, has introduced legislation that stated that the .gov and .mil top-level domains are U.S. property and asked the government to secure in the transition the exclusive ownership, control and use of the domains in perpetuity.
 Under ICANN's transition proposal, governments will continue to have an advisory role through the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). There is nothing that increases the role of governments over the DNS or ICANN as an organization, and the ICANN bylaws retain the prohibition on government officials serving as voting board members, NTIA said.   

[Labudan]

Луд збуњеног... ко на крају контролише днс протокол?

[mac]

Šta znači kontrolisati protokol? DNS protokol je jedan tekst koji opisuje način komunikacije sa DNS serverima. Ima ko to kontroliše (mislim ICANN), to jest ko je odgovoran za standardizaciju, ali sumnjam da je to ono što tebe interesuje. Možda je pravo pitanje ko kontroliše DNS servere? Sećam se da je ranije bilo da je glavnih servera bilo 13, od čega su Amerikanci držali 12, a Evropljani 1. Sada je to pravednije raspodeljeno. Ameri su prihvatili da Internet nije baš samo njihov, ali većina glavnih DNS servera je i dalje njihova.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

[Labudan]

ко може да искључи нпр кину с мреже?

То би било конкретније питање

[mac]

U Evropi Evropljani, u Americi Amerikanci, u Africi Afrikanci, itd. To je što se tiče DNS-ova, ali moguće je ograditi ceo region i na IP nivou, što je sama Kina uradila. Lepo narediš svim provajderima da spreče saobraćaj na određene IP segmente, i pojedine IP adrese, i zakonski zabraniš pučanstvu da se kači na internet bilo kako osim preko tih provajdera, kao i da koristi spoljne VPN sevise, i gotova priča, manje-više.

[Labudan]

Ја сам некад читао да је днс протокол и измишљен само ради тога, контроле, кажњавања, искључивања, онај што је створио www, Бернерс Ли бјеше се зове, изјавио да је то Ахилова пета слободног интернета

[Labudan]

Питам у смислу колико је сад релевантно што се не питају само Амери, кад и даље то контролише шачица људи.... иако сам начуо да је било неког уласка актера цивилног друштва у icann

[Son of Man]

Ja sam bio imbecil 2000. kad sam počo rabiti internet, a sad sam već nabio IQ na 120+, jel to TO?

[Labudan]

По истраживању које сам поставио, само гејмери су увећали интелигенцију!

[Dybuk]

Hahah @Sin 

moj slucaj je suprotan; licno se osecam nepametnije otkad aktivno koristim net, al jopet nisam gejmer, pa mozda zato.