Yeah, the American people elected Trump in an extremely rare case of the public taking back the election from corporate behemoths.
But let's pretend that Google hasn't had enormous sway over the White House and hasn't been rubbing shoulders with Obama and other Democrats [1][2][3][4]. Let's also ignore the fact that much of Silicon Valley publicly supported Hillary and opposed Trump, with big outspoken critics including Microsoft, Faceboook, and Apple.
It's a shame to see indoctrination stretching to users of this site such that people here legitimately believe that a bunch of Russians locked away in some computer lab single-handedly elected the only man who challenged the prospect of perpetually living under the oligarchical thumb of the Bushes and the Clintons.
This is off-topic, and your idea of how Trump got elected is not the only — or even one of the popular — view.
Closer to the topic: what Facebook enabled was far more effective targeting, by agents not authorized by the targets, on a massive scale. That's a lot different than the "bunch of Russians locked away in some computer lab single-handedly elected" rhetoric.
It's as on topic as the parent comment. I have to yet to see even a single fact to back up your claim. If someone is going to spread disinformation and not present any facts, then I am going to post a sourced rebuttal. Feel free to change my mind with actual facts instead of undermining the voters who disagreed with your political outlook and then blaming the results on some ludicrous notion of a bogeyman.
Yes, your parent comment introduced the topic of Trump's election, though still in the context of online tracking. Pardon my poor choice of words above.
> I have to yet to see even a single fact to back up your claim.
> If someone is going to spread disinformation and not present any facts, then I am going to post a sourced rebuttal.
I don't see any sourced rebuttal.
> instead of undermining the voters
I didn't undermine any voters. I made no claims about any voters. I commented only on the targeting, and that the targets hadn't consented to their data being accessed.
> blaming the results on some ludicrous notion of a bogeyman.
A calmer rhetoric would be more productive to discourse. Targeted advertising is not a "bogeyman". Stolen data and privacy concerns are not bogeymen. That people put up lots of private info that can be used to accurately profile them is a fact. That ads can be effective has been proven from the time ads were invented, and that targeted ads can be even more effective — especially in a political context — has also been studied and concluded lots of times. See [1] and [2].
Frankly, now that you've brought up backing of claims, I'm a bit discouraged to have to defend stuff like this against clearly biased political rhetoric.
There is a strong perception across the world that facebook swung the election, which means that the world concentrates on the power of facebook, which drives that perception.
This is pretty cool. It would be neat to see people collaboratively work on a large mural but griefers tend to ruin things like these, just like in the early days of Minecraft.
Yeah, that's definitely a concern. I made it deliberately difficult to delete to at least stop people from destroying what is there already. But of course if you are there while someone is making something, you could still ruin it
Show me some evidence that pigs are "way smarter" than dogs.
Although figures seem to vary, there is evidence that dog domestication began at least 30,000 years ago. Dogs co-evolved with humans to the point that we can communicate with them to a really impressive extent - humans can understand dog emotions and vice versa. It has also been shown that dogs can understand human pointing, a feat that even chimps are unable to accomplish, and I don't see any evidence of pigs doing the same either.
Dogs have been used for hunting, pest control, guidance (as in guide dogs), and companionship (individuals with PTSD or emotional problems) amongst many other uses. I have never heard of pigs being capable of any of these tasks. Their only other major use appears to be for truffle hunting.
I do not eat pork and I respect that pigs are highly intelligent creatures, but to claim that they are "way smarter" than dogs is absurd. To insinuate that we should eat dogs because they are supposedly less intelligent than pigs is even more ridiculous, and shame on anyone who thinks that. Without dogs, many human populations would not have survived, the Thule and Inuit being prime examples.
For example: "Additionally, pigs can use pointing by humans (under certain circumstances) to lead them to a food reward (Nawrothet al., 2013b)."
But from a cursory glance, it seems that pigs are not "way smarter" than dogs, however they may be "about as smart" as dogs, which is surprising in and of itself.
I never doubted that pigs are pretty much on par with dogs, but the original poster claimed that pigs are "way smarter," and there isn't any conclusive evidence to support this. I went through that paper and as you mentioned, it just points to the fact that all evidence suggests that pigs are fairly comparable to dogs in intelligence.
One key point about the paper is that we still have an incredibly long way to go in the research of animal intelligence, especially with regards to animals apart from chimps and cetaceans. Even though dogs are so tightly ingrained in human lives, there is still so much that we have yet to understand about their intelligence, even more so with pigs and other animals.
In any case, I think it's silly to prioritize one life over another solely based on intelligence. I consider dogs to be family so eating one would essentially be cannibalism in my book, but I also really value animal lives in general and I would never eat a pig either.
This is incredible. I love Python and I tried to learn JavaScript, but I had a tremendous amount of trouble with it. Moreover, I really can't stand JavaScript. CoffeeScript alleviated a lot of my concerns, but this tool is perfect considering that it lets me use a language with which I am already way more comfortable. I think that this will make an excellent learning tool for a lot of people. Thanks a lot for creating and sharing this.
How does this compare to droppy? I use droppy on one of my servers, which has very poor specs, but droppy is lightweight enough that it still runs very well with a decent amount of resources to spare. I definitely like what I see in your Freehold Screencast video though.
I have an Open C and I recently manually updated the phone from 1.3 to 2.1. You can most definitely compile and install a new version of Firefox OS yourself regardless of what ZTE chooses to do. The only catch is that you need root access, and this is not enabled on the Open C by default, but ZTE provides a tool for rooting your phone with a single button press.
My understanding is that all aspects of the OS under the control of Mozilla are completely open, but manufacturers like ZTE include proprietary components and of course their hardware isn't 100% open, but Mozilla isn't responsible for that. Mozilla certainly needs to find other partners however, because my experiences with ZTE have been pretty poor thus far, and I've read a lot of negative things about Alcatel's Firefox OS devices as well.
As an aside, Mozilla needs to start targeting higher end devices since I believe that hardware experience will largely factor into the success of the OS, and the current official Firefox OS devices are pretty awful. I've also been following bugs concerning core features for YEARS now, and Mozilla has yet to address any of these. 2.1 has some improvements over 1.3 for sure, but it's missing very basic functionality like some group messaging features and a calendar application that's actually useful. A lot of the noticeable changes from 1.3 to 2.1 are purely cosmetic, and it's incredibly frustrating to see essential features get completely overlooked time and time again. The marketplace is also starting to seem completely devoid of useful applications - a lot of them are very low quality, some of them are simply shortcuts to the mobile versions of websites, and games seem to make up the majority of the applications.
This is interesting given that OS X is anything but a hacker's paradise. The platform is very locked down, discourages tinkering and customization, and given how expensive Apple hardware is, this is the least accessible and most exclusive out of the three main players. Even worse is when developers make it the leading platform for their software, like in the case of Atom, where the Windows support is awful given that they started out focusing on OS X.
I'm guessing it takes a lot of work to create and maintain things like homebrew in order to make the OS X experience more palatable, but why not just use your Linux flavor of choice and cut to the chase? I used to use OS X and I loved homebrew, but it feels like it's cut off from the rest of the operation system, which has often caused me a lot of headaches in the past.
I definitely don't expect Windows or OS X to turn into Linux. I think they each have advantages for the people who are using them. The grandparent was talking about hackability, and I was saying I don't think OS X counts as hackable just because the kernel is open source. There is a lot more that's closed source surrounding that kernel that makes it OS X.
> why not just use your Linux flavor of choice and cut to the chase
Because desktop Linux is simply not sufficient for me as a daily driver. It is unpleasant to me, it's highly frictional and there are a thousand shitty cuts everywhere that you have to endure for the legitimately good development environments you can get there. I am a software developer but I'm a person first and as a person Linux-on-the-desktop doesn't work for me. Quality matters to me, and OS X's user experience is qualitatively better for my use case.
If OS X didn't exist, I'd still be using Windows and SSHing everywhere. But OS X is a happy combination of the tools I want to use (including ones that don't exist on Linux--I use TextMate 2, for example, because I'm not a big fan of Sublime Text) and a desktop environment that doesn't make me endure it rather than enjoy it.
(And as for expense: if you've got a job as a software developer in the developed world, you can afford Mac gear. If you can't, that sucks, but frankly I'm gonna still use the best tools for my job.)
These projects are amazing, and I only wish I knew about them a few years earlier. I studied C. elegans quite a bit when I was in school, and I also worked with D. melanogaster for a genetics project. I wonder how OpenWorm will help shape research in the years to come as it matures. It's a really nice surprise to see useful, open software that it so pertinent to the things I spent so much time studying - I hope I can still reach the people who picked up on my old projects and share these tools with them.
I'm really glad Firefox OS is getting attention and this post highlights the features that Mozilla should be advertising in more developed countries instead of just focusing solely on appealing to developing nations. Competition is good and there really needs to be another player in the game apart from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. We especially need a completely transparent and open mobile operating system like Firefox OS, so I really hope this project succeeds.
I would also really like for Mozilla to focus on higher end hardware and to also address some core features that are completely absent from the OS. Some issues regarding these missing features have been sitting open for YEARS on Bugzilla, and it has prompted me to start learning how to develop for the OS, but I have a long while yet before I can make any meaningful contribution.
I got a ZTE Open C as my first smart phone, and I was really impressed with how capable it is, but there are some incredibly annoying issues that seem like they are never going to be addressed. For one, the screen brightness returns to 100% every single time I wake my phone up front standby. I really hope Mozilla partners with more manufacturers down the line because I've heard nothing but negative things about the Geeksphone and ZTE phones, and my experiences so far confirm these findings.
Thanks for highlighting the least emphasized but the most important aspect of the operating system, which is being completely free and open. Too often I see people criticizing Firefox OS because it looks slow and the current hardware is inferior to whatever device they have now, but to me, that's completely besides the point. The market needs an open mobile OS that respects the user's liberties, and it's only because of Firefox OS that I finally went for my first smartphone.
The OS definitely has a really long way to go and I've noticed quite a few bugs and plenty of missing essential features, but I'm optimistic about its future, provided the developers acknowledge these issues. I think people also need to be made aware that as development continues, they will be able to install the OS on other more powerful devices if they fall outside of current low end, cheap smartphone market.
On a side note, thanks for sharing the link to your guide because I've been looking all over the place for a good resource to help me start learning how to develop web applications.
There are too many list, but I will name a few. If you want a thorough list, head over to the Firefox OS section on Bugzilla.
-Default applications, such as Settings, will intermittently go completely blank. If you zoom out to list all applications, it will look normal, but when you zoom back in, the screen is completely blank.
-Group messages (MMS) are barely functional. You can receive them and initiate them in an unorthodox manner, but you cannot partake in group conversations, nor are they properly displayed as a single thread.
-You cannot add import .ics files to use in the Calendar application. You cannot create recurring events. It's as basic as a calendar can get.
-The clock application doesn't display world time.
-The OS will claim that a SIM card is not inserted when you power on/reboot the phone, even though you can still make calls and send texts. You need to enable and then disable airplane mode in order for it to acknowledge the SIM card (necessary for the Usage application).
-The browser doesn't support extensions. So far, you have tabbed browsing, and you can clear your cookies and your history. That's it.
-Since I last updated my phone, it returns to 100% brightness every time I wake it up from standby. This means that I essentially use the display/brightness settings as my home screen so that I can lower the brightness every single time I want to use my phone (this might be ZTE's fault, but I didn't have this problem before the recent update).
Even my old feature phones from many years ago support some of these features, like proper group messaging. Some of these bugs and feature requests have existed for nearly 2 years on Bugzilla. Nevertheless, I'm enjoying the phone, and I love it when the Marketplace gets updated with new applications to check out. I'm really looking forward to the 2.0 update, and I hope that ZTE rolls it out to the Open C, unlike how they completely abandoned support for the original Open.
I have used the OS and I can confirm your headaches, and maybe even worse (because I've used 1.1 and it was far more bad than the current release version).
They released it too early. It wasn't ready. It still isn't ready, from what I've seen. I'm aware that Android was in a pretty bad state in its own v1.4, but when they release a mobile OS today, it has to put up to expectations set forth by others. No one is going to say "it has so many bugs and far worse functionality than Android/iOS, but it's okay because it's only v1.4" simply isn't going to fly because users expect what they're accustomed to.
And the choice of technology is a little problematic. How can you ever implement Skype, for instance, in Javascript? (But with acceptable performance, naturally.) I guess they have to improve asm.js support astronomically in order to enable such use-cases.
I've developed for FxOS (you can find an app I made on my Github) and it's been really fun and liberating (I have an Android phone so I tried developing for it but I don't like Java, especially the way Android uses the language, and it's been more or less a horror to work with, sadly) but there is a lack of standardization, and supporting docs and building blocks are still not up to my expectations, which is exactly where Android (and I presume iOS) shines. Then again, Javascript is not a bad language. With first class functions, for example, I consider it rather powerful and easy to work with. (But easy to fall into the inefficiency trap, I suppose.) Myself, being a guy who has been writing C/C++ and PHP for scripting it was a great break from routine.
My point exactly. Skype is a big P2P network using proprietary schemes for just about everything. They don't seem eager to interoperate with open standards in the slightest.
But let's pretend that Google hasn't had enormous sway over the White House and hasn't been rubbing shoulders with Obama and other Democrats [1][2][3][4]. Let's also ignore the fact that much of Silicon Valley publicly supported Hillary and opposed Trump, with big outspoken critics including Microsoft, Faceboook, and Apple.
It's a shame to see indoctrination stretching to users of this site such that people here legitimately believe that a bunch of Russians locked away in some computer lab single-handedly elected the only man who challenged the prospect of perpetually living under the oligarchical thumb of the Bushes and the Clintons.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transf...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/18/google-polit...
[4] http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/09/google-higher-ups-love-don...