In the meantime, the hard thing to do is to be ready. Because that’s the real message of PIPA and SOPA. Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming — not producing, not sharing — and we should say, “No.”
Mark Shuttleworth just announced the HUD, which is sort of like Synapse, but for app menu items. Personally, I’m looking forward to this in Precise (if it lands). Compared to the traditional menu, discoverability does take a hit in the HUD (at least in its current form) and Mark does admit as much. However, the Inkscape example in the video is interesting. Fuzzy matching and prioritising is rather sweet.
I’d also imagine this to work really well in applications where you’re already spending a lot of time on the keyboard: text editors, word processors and terminals come to mind. Great to see Canonical pushing forward here.
“In Book IV, section 4, of St. Augustine’s “The City of God”, Augustine tells the parable of a pirate captain who is captured and brought before Alexander the Great. The emperor says “How dare you terrorize the seas”? The pirate captain replies, “How dare you terrorize the whole world? Because I only have one ship, I’m called a pirate; because you have a great navy, you’re called an emperor.” The difference between a pirate and an emperor is one of scale only. And that’s the position we find ourselves in here: the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and its allies have twisted the discussion so we’re talking about the wrong thing. We shouldn’t be talking about the small-scale piracy of individual movies (which probably helps sales in the long run, as we’ve observed in the publishing business). We should be talking about the real piracy, the wholesale takeover of creativity by the media industry. That’s the piracy we should be outlawing.”
Source radar.oreilly.com
SOPA and PIPA (by khanacademy)
Simple and easy to follow primer on the two draconian and incredibly lopsided bills.
Source youtube.com
![newsweek:
Tweets from kids trying to use Wikipedia for their homework—and failing. SOPA!
[h/t gangster curator Katie Notopoulos]
Heh, silly kids.](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxzcrtxnzC1qzs5cqo1_500.png)
Tweets from kids trying to use Wikipedia for their homework—and failing. SOPA!
Heh, silly kids.
Reblogged from Penn Jillette rambles quite a bit. It’s moderately amusing at best, and he does it often. But there is something to be said for the larger point he tries to make. Which is that it is possible to live an ethical/moral life based on shared experiences with other people, and without believing in a god.
“An excellent example of software that has done this well is in the video game genre, going back as far as 1985 with Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. It was a game that truly anyone could pick up and play, with an invisible interface that taught you everything you needed to know to get started and become good at it. The screen would only scroll right, so you couldn’t walk left. You could jump, but standing on top of special bricks did nothing, so you would try to jump against them from below. Pipes visibly led down, so you’d try your luck with the down arrow on the direction pad. And at the end of the level, the bonus flag was raised high, encouraging competitive players to jump to the very peak for top points. All of the game’s mechanics were explained in one level, without a single instruction, tutorial or guiding word.”
“Why is math the only discipline that has to put up with this bullshit? People gladly learn art, music, literature and geography. You’ll even nod like a happy idiot when you learn what a haiku is, and you never complain or whine about how you’ll never use this in your “life.” When is the last time you wrote a haiku, asshole?”
I haven’t been to the best page in the universe for some time now, but this latest piece by Maddox is rather hilarious. In a way that only Maddox can pull it off.
Source thebestpageintheuniverse.net
