nooneelse

Thanks, without your comment I wouldn't have thought to put this on the top of the possible-guts list for a similar project I've been hoping to get to. I was thinking of a little NAS back-up box going out in the back-yard, buried and protected in some nice groundwater-safe enclosure. For a sort of pseudo-off-site backup.

The law and courts can specify, recognize, and decide things based on judgements of intent.

They also pop up for me when I tap to put a cursor in the search box at the top of the map app.

My Broca's and Wernicke's areas often go on and on about how good a job they would do with sudo privileges. And they say their arguments are well formed.

Not just the price. Have it tell you any one of a number of information types that you personally value. Such as if that item has any ingredients that you have blacklisted (or your doctor has). Have it show you a "Pollan-score" for the item or reviews of it by experts and/or friends. Have it tell you a guess at what ratio of the price will go to corporations that you do and don't like the politics of. Did it get shipped on a boat that has a carbon-emission rating that is higher than you like? Is there another brand sold at this store that more closely matches your preferences, and if so what does their packaging look like?

Customers have had their information stream systematically filtered/impoverished by those who would rather not have the invisible hand of the market move in response to some subgroups' aggregate utility evaluations. Information at the point of choice can alter these dynamics.

Also, if you never learn to read it, you can't begin to learn to write for the reader.

That, and I wonder if he will get bummed out looking at something on a really high shelf, or a cobweb up in an unreachable corner. The old muscle memory quickly telling him how much force to kick off from the floor with to get there. And then his higher brain realizing that he is stuck to the floor. Like a 3-d prisoner forever trapped in Flatland.

Which is really too bad. Make one with a button that calls a single number programmed in via the usb connection and it would be a sweet little communicator. Parents would love to strap one on their kid(s).

Exactly. Internalize the externalities.

I don't see why it is inherently unsustainable. There is nothing in the very nature of disposability that precludes a robust recycling path to close the matter loop. And nothing that precludes including the cost of that recycling in the price of the items that will eventually be recycled and/or the next things made with the material.

Trees dispose of their leaves, those rot and feed a chain of creatures and the material is recycled to the trees. This is something of an existence proof that such a system is possible.

I would agree we currently do a terrible job of approximating any such ideal.

Also, a mouse is quite handy if the screen being displayed to is far enough away that one can't, in some common use cases, touch it comfortably.

I'm going to kill this kitten if you don't give me your car. You wouldn't want to be indirectly responsible for the kitten's death would you?

That is a point good enough to deserve an attempt to encapsulate it in a memorable saying. "Don't let your ecological web depend too much on indicator species" doesn't work. How about: "Don't depend on canary eggs when you live in a coal mine."

This seems to involved something conceptually similar the part of unscheduling (http://www.lifeclever.com/how-to-unschedule-your-work-and-en...) that has one fill in the calendar with all the non-work things one is going to do. Thus one sees how little time is actually available to get something done, and so not wasting it gets easier.

In Player of Games, the Culture doesn't represent we humans on Earth. The Azad do. They aren't alien and different because of that.

In cannon, Earth is an un-contacted planet and the Culture isn't our future. They are out there now.

Though, obviously, as a literary device you are right.

We live in a pretty cynical time. One part of that is in our stories. We often take the quick path to "interesting" ideas by tearing apart good things. Utopia can't be, write about a dystopia instead. It is easier that way. This rut is comfortable.

It gets the author out of the hard task of building something that fits together well, and out of having to dream up something that works and that they would genuinely like to live in. Thinking up terrible things and things that fall apart can be much easier than thinking up what would make us lastingly happy. It also lets the listeners/readers/viewers of the story not think about their world in relation to some better world. That can be depressing; looking into a warm, comfy restaurant can just highlight how cold, poor, and hungry you are. Comparing our lives to those poor schmucks in some "utopia" with an terrible dark side isn't so bad; it doesn't impugn us for not having made something truly good to live in a reality.

But I'm so glad that Banks didn't go that route. Sci-fi needs to be able to get out of that rut. And it isn't that he doesn't know dark topics or how to write them; he can wrench a reader's guts along with the best of 'em. Yet he did the harder thing of looking for a consistent, shining-happy civilization to dream of living in. Gene Roddenberry got no small fame for a popular but rather more shoddy try at that many decades back. Banks did it with top notch sci-fi and writing skill. And I'd love to live in his utopia too.

But the books themselves, not the Culture, also include plenty of gut wrenching. Not as some easy dark side to the Culture itself. But at the edges of it, where the friction happens from its interaction with less nice places to live.

Are you envisioning a monastic-like group dedicated to turning productive making toward eradicating human suffering and the like?

> ...it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressure.

The extra value a producer is able to capture from price discrimination due to a relative lack of competition can be thought of as one of the ways in which the deal between producers and society called "intellectual property" functions to shift rewards for innovation toward to the producer.

Something thought "insufficient" for one end, might be in proper indeed for some other end.

Perhaps all data access by extensions should be logged. It wouldn't be of much interest to most programming laymen, but it would be more accessible/understandable than pointing them to Extension Gallery and Web Store Inspector so they can look at the code. I wouldn't recognize well obfuscated code that can grab my CC#, but I can recognize the number itself just fine.

At the least, it would let everyone know that their extension's activities are being watched. And laymen knowing that extension authors know that this activity is watched would be reassuring to the laymen.

Could such logging be done by a separate extension?

So, what about using someone's frailties against them. Doing a time-constrained, cleverly marketed and salesman pushed, complex contract product agreed to by someone just this side of the line of legal competence due to low IQ?

If some form of delegative voting is used, then when someone determines that the technocrat they previously trusted has become corrupted, they move their vote away from that delegate to a new delegate. Or they use their vote them-self. This allows for turn-over in the technocrat pool.

Why would a tween want an earpiece of any kind when texting seems to be the main communication method they use on a phone?

I've searched a little but can't find a picture of someone wearing them pushed up onto their head like people often do with sunglasses. But I too don't understand why people seem to be ignore that option in their objections. Or put a lanyard on them and wear them around your neck when you want to show everyone around that you are not splitting your attention.

I think the wearable tinkering community has plenty of ideas for input devices to draw from. Such as this little one-handed keyboard: http://chordite.com/ . A touch panel (doing the same job as the one on the side of Glass, so you could operate Glass without reaching up to the side of your head) could be located pretty much anywhere and blend in quite well, on a belt or watch or some such. Someone else mentioned Myo (https://getmyo.com/ ); that would be nice too.

As long as the interface makes the number of choices available at each "page" of the interface pretty low, then input devices get small and easy to hide.

Seems like it will be quite possible with Glass to ditch the full phone and go with a mobile hotspot. By doing calls over that we can push the carriers into what they should be (according to so many geeks these days), dumb pipes.

Heck, keep the hotspot in a bag or make a wearable, unobtrusive hotspot belt or anklet, then the battery size & life can be increased while still having no gadgets in one's pockets. One could put a widrive on the belt/anklet too, so Glass becomes useful even without constant access to the cloud.

> It wasn't until the smaller, cheaper cell phones of the 90s that everybody had one.

Why think that was about the size and not more about the price? Every kid I knew who watched Saved by the Bell wanted a mobile phone, they just weren't in the "get it for Xmas or birthday" price range.

Absolutely. When I also derived that commonly known idea for myself (seems the only way to have a hope of internalizing it and having it stick), I tried to think of a pithy way to say it, so I would have a better chance of remembering it when in the moment. The version that won by being remembered the most, "They didn't take pictures of Lincoln's messy closets."

The fingerpainting analogy is what I use as a springboard when someone belittles styluses and good digitizers. Babies and kids fingerpaint, adults use brushes and pens.

The look and the sound of the Daleks communicates very well that they don't care one wit about anything like our aesthetics nor do their ideas of practicality line up with our own.

And yeah, they look like cold, mechanical things, but then one learns that, no, there are biological creatures in there, but that doesn't mitigate anything, it makes things worse. They aren't detached and emotionless machines, they are creatures who find it rational to live inside of tanks and feel only hate and rage for others beings.