Social Noise Reduction

There is a particularly common criticism of today's society I hear a lot. I am not sure what the term for it is, but I think it is a core part of the larger ideas of Postmodernism and Cyberpunk. The criticism is that nowadays, thanks mostly to the internet and mass media, people are bombarded with so many opinions, alleged facts, works of fiction, ideas, and memes, that people have become either terminally unable to separate the "signal" from the "noise" in the information we process, and/or are incressingly distracted by the trivial.

And yeah, I can see that. But before we go around claiming Ludd was right and throwing out all our communication technology, maybe we should consider that maybe PEOPLE are the problem, not the information. First of all, I think the problem with people being unable to tell the difference between fact and fiction is simply that most people don't have the critical thinking skills needed to parse information in an optimal way. What's more, most people don't have a broad enough perspective to realize that sometimes it doesn't even matter. People are often more interested in picking a side and being right then anything else. Sometimes, especially with controversial or heavily contested subjects, you just have to admit that some things may or may not be true. This doesn't mean you can't draw conclusions, you just need to think about logic in a different way.

As for people being distracted by the trivial, I actually take it as a sign that what a lot of people say is important, isn't really that important to a lot of people. That doesn't mean it isn't important in the grand scheme of things, but people so rarely look or care about the the grand scheme of things. I think, for example, kids getting distracted from school by video games is not a problem with the games. It's a problem with the school or maybe the parents. People shutting themselves in and playing MMORPGs all day is not a problem with the MMORPG. It's a problem with our society. As for the people who get distracted themselves, it's hard for me to make an argument that they are at fault if they honestly don't care. I mean, yeah, they are doing it to themselves but that is a choice. They pay the consequences for that choice. Though I may be bias because that is more or less what I am doing, allowing myself to get distracted fully understanding that there is a price to pay. Some times it's worth it, sometimes it's not.

I feel personally, like I have spent the last ten or so years of my life mostly just gathering information and working it out in my head. Trying to build a sort of cathedral of images and thoughts in a manner similar to how Carl Jung worked out his issues by writing his Red Book. I have been interested in that sort of thing for a while, probably ever since I was a kid and saw parts of The Wall, and perhaps even before that with my childhood games of imagination.

But, Carl Jung stressed the need to write these things down, so that they become contained and objectified, and I have done very little in the way of actual writing and art. I have a powerful urge to do so, which is part of what my hack was intended to do actually. To give my ideas and outlet and to make them more 'real' so to speak. I suppose in the back of my mind, there is a third criticism of today's society that saps me of the motivation to do much work on it. And that criticism is that there is so much of that kind of stuff out there. Stuff that both intentionally and unintentionally explores these themes I want to explore. And while they might not do it in the same way, they cover a lot of the same ground.

Lately I have been reading a lot of random webcomics and watching videos of a lot of random games. And it gets to the point where there are just so many works of fiction with so many themes and ideas, that even if a few of them still make me take notice of something or reevaluate my ideas slightly, I don't really think there is much room for me. Which is a stupid way of looking at it really. I talk all the time about being the butterfly that starts the storm, of how I would be happy if my ideas were remembered even if I were not. After all, I am sitting here writing this in a blog that I am not sure anyone actually takes the time to read. And maybe this blog is like my red book. Maybe blogging in general will help people deal with there problems just knowing, even if it is never read, that it is out there somewhere for people to randomly find.

I can always hope, and I guess hope is enough to live on.

It Just Dosn't Ad Up

I was reading an old article criticizing Google's advertisement service, and while I think a lot of the criticism is somewhat valid, it strikes me as sort of like a business man getting money out of an idiot because the idiot was to spaced out to actually pay attention to what they were doing. I mean yes, it might be sort of exploitive, but I often feel like smacking the idiot almost as hard as I do the business man. But really, it's not surprising to me in the least, because as far as I am concerned, advertisement in general is more or less a scam. Especially on the Internet.

I mean, yeah, I can understand the basic idea (even if I don't like it), street vendors calling out in a crowded marketplace, shops putting up some posters on some walls, events being posted on a bulletin board for people to see, but any more then that gets sort of iffy. The problem sort of started with television and radio advertisements, which interrupts the programing every now and then to have some ad play. Despite it being a bit disruptive, I can understand why it happens. For television and radio, there is no real "product" to sell to customers, so they make money by letting advertisers run ads from time to time. But this sets up a strange triangle of relations between the broadcasters, the advertisers, and the customers which can end up doing more harm then good at times.

In general, the problem often becomes a mutual animosity or lack of respect because each of the players in the game have very different and mutually exclusive aims. Customers want content, and are generally not interested in sitting through advertisements to get it. Advertisers of course, want to convince customers to go out and buy stuff and are not interested in the content or the customer's wants beyond what it takes to get them to buy stuff. Broadcasters generally want to sell advertisement time, and often are only are interested in the content as a way to get customers to watch the ads, and don't care if the advertisers actually sell anything.

What all this leads too, I think, is an environment where the kind of more disruptive and exploitive advertisement practices thrive. If a vendor is being too disruptive or a business is putting posters or notices in the wrong place, customers are free to confront them in person or call the authorities. But in an environment where the very medium is owned by someone who uses it to sell advertisement time, advertisers are free to do almost whatever they want to get people's attention. They can funnel more and more money into something and make bigger, longer and more disruptive advertisements without regard for the customer's wishes.

But also, advertisers themselves are also a victim in a lot of cases. Street vendors can see face to face the kind of reaction they are getting, and a poster or notice can be placed in a position most likely to be looked at by someone who is already interested in finding the business it's advertising (though billboards and such are much more like tv/radio ads in this regard). But an advertisement that is just put out there randomly even if it's in a time slot most likely to be seen by it's target audience, has little guarantee that anyone who sees it will pay any attention or be interested. Often times it can just waste money.

But all of this is nothing compared to the sometimes downright abusive tactics in internet advertisements. Really for all that article above disses on Google, it might be one of the more honest and safe ad providers (I also think Project Wonderful is fairly honest and safe, or at least seems so, but I would rather they do everything via server-side scripts and not javascript). Part of this is because it's just so unregulated and doesn't have any sort of barrier to anyone doing what they want with it, and part of it is that there is too much information being gathered about people who browse it, but I think it's mostly just a lack of responsibility on everyone's side.

But it's more complex then that. With tv and radio, broadcasters and content providers are usually more or less identical. The broadcasters don't necessarily create the content, but they fund it's creation or buy the rights to show it (though I am not a fan of copyright, but that's a discussion for another day). Sure, often there can be a lot of strife between broadcasters and content providers on TV and radio, but for the most part they act as the same group. On the internet, almost anyone can create content, but not everyone can host it (or at least, host it reliably, quickly, or easily enough to be worth it for most people), and the people who can sell content creators space for hosting. So now, you have four groups of people and not three, each also with often mutually exclusive goals. The rift between web hosts and content providers is much deeper. They are no longer generally in the same group and this can come with all sorts of complications.

Not only are there more groups, the role of the groups is much less solid. Content providers often are also advertisers, and sometimes web hosts are as well, the people who browse the web can become content providers easily even if it's just in the forms of comments or forum posts. One particular absurdity I have noticed is that often content providers will advertise to get more hits to make more money with their advertisements to pay for hosting that charges for the extra bandwidth they use for the extra hits, and a number of the ads they use are for other content providers who are doing the same thing. It makes me wonder how such a system could ever work, but most of the sites that do that are just making enough anyway, even if they have to resort to donation as well.

And really, this would be all fine and good to the browsers to just have a banner or something, if it didn't end up attracting an even worse escalation of disruptive advertisements that used flash and javascript to be as disruptive as possible, and if it people with more ethical flexibility didn't decide to use well-meaning technical tricks to gather as much information as possible from the person browsing, or hackers using bugs and security holes on unwitting victims, or people taking advantage of stupid people by offering things through advertisements and directing them to malware or gathering their personal information, or any of the million other problems with internet advertisements.

Luckily, unlike TV where the best you can do usually is hit the mute button (or pay more for premium cable channels), there are programs to block ads, like this firefox plugin. The sad thing is, so many content providers only means of support is advertisements, although a good number of them do collect donations too. But it's kind of hard for me to feel bad for a lot of them to be honest, because again, I often feel like smacking the idiot almost as hard as I do the business man. I know most of these content providers have very little choice, but I can't help but feel that too many content providers don't think about what advertisements or advertising services they have. It's too often lately that sites just use advertisement servers they have no control over and that may do any number of underhanded things, or may allow the people who advertise to do underhanded things. I don't trust internet advertisements anymore. It used to be you could ignore them. Not anymore. Even Project Wonderful, which generally seems safe, uses javascript, and javascript and flash in ads is one of the main reason why they are allowed to abuse a lot of security holes (I also use the noscript plugin btw). So no. Of the sites I frequent, I made an exception for only one, and only because I am so heavily involved in the community.

And I feel bad, I really do, for all the owners of all the pages out there that I look at that rely on advertisements. But the fact is, it's an abusive relationship on all sides. I understand why it's necessary, but every once and a while, someone is going to walk away with a black eye, and it isn't going to be me. If you take that to mean I don't love you enough, I am sorry you feel that way.

Let's Interface

Six or seven months ago, I think some time in march, I came up with a plan. A crazy plan. A silly plan. A plan involving a series of games I always had a interest in despite not being the most refined or enjoyable series of games in the world. That game series is Pokemon. That plan is the one I began with a last desperate bid to get an event pokemon, and it is almost complete. On my birthday in July I received the second item, a brand new 3DS, and today (well yesterday now) I received the final item, that of a brand new copy of Pokemon White. Now it is only a matter of time till my plan is complete.

Quite a while ago

But all that crap is completely besides the point of what I actually wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is a realization I made while playing Pokemon White and also with the 3DS. Well not so much a realization as a conformation, since it's something I have thought about before. And that is that computer interfaces are getting so much more... maybe not better, but more INTERESTING at least. How they look and how they behave, and what they do, from the 3DS's little "augmented reality" games to the pretty way the menus open up and fold out, as if the game menu was a device on the character's wrists, the way the 3DS organizes things and how the 3D works, all sorts of little details most people don't really ever think about.

A while ago, I don't remember when, I learned about what I have heard referred to as The Mother of All Demos, and event in 1968, where a team of scientists first demonstrated ideas about computer interfaces to the world. A lot of the way commuters work today can be traced back to that team. When I watched it I was awestruck. Here seeing some of the first ideas of how these things work take flight.

But more then the practicality it's also the look of the 3DS and of Pokemon's interfaces that gets me, and not only interfaces, and not only the 3DS. It seems the new "future look" is that cool sleek plastic ipad-like thing, and that seems to extend both to interfaces and devices.

I also have to say one of the things I really like about Pokemon in particular is how the newer games fuse the interface into the story and the setting in some way. Black and White's visuals have tons and tons of interesting technological devices, a lot of which serve some gameplay purpose. it did it the last game I played too, and to a lesser extent to the older ones. And as I alluded to before, pretty much the whole menu system and various new abilities and functions are actual devices your characters use. And I think that's super neato. I think Homestuck also deals with some fun devices come to think of it. Like the whole alchemiter thing. It's neat to think about what you could do with these hypothetical technological marvels.

( Side note: As an added bonus to my plan, my brother finally found my long lost copy of Ruby that he misplaced when I lent it to him (the fact he got it for me in the first place is besides the point). Which means, I have a perfect line of secession through Generation III, IV, and V, even if my Generation IV games are remakes of Generation II, so I don't get all the Pokemon from IV, but I do get all of them from II and probably most of Generation I as II also featured the regions and Pokemon of I. Why does this matter? Heck, I am not even sure any of my plan matters.)

Div-ided Over Tables

A debate has been raging for years and years on the web, the great tables vs divs debate. The idea is tables are meant for "tabular data", you know like spread sheets, and shouldn't be used for layouts. That's all well and good, but what it's meant for and what it does are two different things. It makes grids. Grids can be helpful for layouts. Hence using tables for layouts seems fine to me. When they are used right. This layout on my blog here for example, really would probably work better and be less hacky with a table. Just one. But then again with a layout like this it doesn't make that much of a difference.

And I know some people might bring up how screen reader software treats tables and blah blah. Personally I don't see what the difference is. Without the visual layout information it's all just blocks of text anyway. I feel sorry for blind for all the stuff they miss out on, but I really cannot imagine the difference, as long as it's done in a reasonable way.

But I think this whole debate is just a symptom of a more pressing problem, that webpages have become to reliant on complicated markup and stupid hacks. Or maybe that was always the problem since someone decided that making HTML as vague as possible about everything. Honestly it took me ages to get used to using divs and CSS. Mostly because I am always intentionally like 5 years behind. I hardly ever use CSS3 because it's just not supported enough. JavaScript I got used to, but lately I have been browsing with it off because more and more security problems are reported with it, and god does it annoy me how over used it is. For lulz I put a message in this blog when it's turned off the other day.

Here is an experiment for you. Using firefox? Go to the "View" menu. Go to "Page Style". Select "No Style". Notice a problem?

Vector Art is Doomed

Every once and a while I mess around with Inkscape and other vector art programs, but I find them lacking in many ways. Much of the reason for this is the way paths work. I actually think they should take a hind from Doom level editors (which are probably in turn based on CAD programs). Looking into the .SVG format it seems that the biggest problem is a lack of point or line objects.

SVG files define all the path info in a big block like this:

d="m 28.575867,107.0797 c -0.123355,5.53028 0.684603,11.10722 2.649974,16.27795 1.96537,5.17074 5.109136,9.92603 9.292245,13.54553 4.514219,3.906 10.122472,6.40535 15.917209,7.83924 5.794738,1.43389 11.795405,1.84498 17.764278,1.932 6.417683,0.0936 12.890473,-0.18795 19.126585,-1.7066 6.236112,-1.51866 12.259952,-4.33887 16.868082,-8.8066 4.61045,-4.46998 7.63175,-10.45068 8.97929,-16.7293 1.34753,-6.27862 1.07261,-12.84368 -0.30719,-19.11529 -2.314,-10.517816 -7.8188,-20.382009 -15.87312,-27.530932 C 94.938912,65.636775 84.32799,61.311069 73.558802,61.250674 61.69759,61.184155 49.967322,66.350885 41.745372,74.900291 33.523423,83.449696 28.840374,95.221251 28.575867,107.0797"

I much prefer the Doom way with vertexes, lines, and sectors. You place points, join two points to make a line, then have each side of a line be tagged for closed areas. The only thing doom lacks is curves, and that's actually easy to do, just make lines connect have up to 4 vertexes, two for the end points and two for the curve control nodes.

It may be possible to do some of this in SVG now with some javascript scripting actually, which would be handy for maps and such where a lot of lines connect at the same place. But some of the neat stuff you could do with a SVG-like format that uses this is interpolate the line width and color for each vertex. Mostly I just wish I could make solid shapes with outlines only on some edges. Oh well. Maybe there is even inkscape plugins that do a lot of this crap already. I donno, I didn't find any.

Maybe I just should learn to draw without relying on such silly tricks. I mean inkscape has a snap to vertex feature anyway.

Net Chaotic Neutrality

I was watching C-span again, and I saw a FCC debate about "Net Neutrality". I really hate the Net Neutrality debate, because it's bullshit. 100% bullshit.

The basic debate is that someone got the idea that ISPs could boost some sites or services over others. That caused everyone to freak out and scream about censorship and the end of the Internet. Okay it's a tad more complex then that, but that's the basic idea.

There are two main reasons why the whole argument is bullshit:
1. If a ISP does something to block or slow down sites in ways that consumers don't like, those consumers are more then free to choose another ISP.
2. People WILL find a way around any sort of block or slowdown. Any attempt to make some programs work faster will be emulated with other programs. Hackers will always find a way to bypass anything thrown at them.
3. People on the internet do not play by the rules. Attempt to control them and they will destroy you. Period. You really thing any company will survive 4chan's rage when they are put on a shit list?

In short, Net Neutrality is bullshit because the net is already neutral. In fact it's chaotic neutral. Laws and rules mean nothing to the internet, nor does money or social status. The internet will not die unless it's users abandon it.

PSProblems

For a while now I have been caught up in a dilemma regarding my PSP. See people have made all sorts of stuff for the PSP, and much of it is actually much better then the official stuff made for it.

But Sony wants to make sure all the software run on the device is sanctioned by them. They claim they want to stop piracy but as they already have various ways of encrypting games and allowing limited "user mode" access, it's obvious the real reason is something else. I have heard that Sony has a rather odd strategy of undercharging for the device and making most money with development kits. As a result of course, hackers can't help but bypass Sony's silly little protection, which just opens the device up to pirates, where as if they just allowed limited user mode homebrew, most hackers wouldn't bother.

Anyway, the result of this was that every time Sony would limit the device, hackers found a way to unlock it. Then Sony would scramble to fix the bugs hackers exploited, and hackers would come up with new ways to bypass it. Up until a while ago the hackers always ended up on top. But my PSP was wearing down and last year I got a new one to replace it. This time hacking became harder and harder, needing all sorts of special stuff. I never got into homebrew as much after that.

Now, today I got some new games that require an upgrade to play which will make me unable to use exploits without buying some dumb game I have no interest in. I have heard promises of a new thing that may come out soon that will totally open up the psp again. But reliable information is becoming harder and harder to find as the psp hacking community fills up with false hope and crappy news. So you know what? Screw it. Now I have a laptop. If the exploit I hope for comes out, great. If not, oh well I will have to settle for playing the actual games.

Registry Locks

Attention software programmers: If you want to use window's registry system to store data, do me and yourself a huge favor:

DON'T.

It's a badly designed badly implemented system filled with idiotic obscure CLSIDs and stupid shit, and if I have to clean up another botched install by deleting obscure keys no one can find, I will seriously hunt you all down and force you all to program software with the use in mind for once.

You know back in the day we put configuration in a file in the same directory of the application. That people, ya know, knew where it was and how to edit it. I know! Allowing the user to modify stuff! How crazy and primitive! Also we could delete stuff without worrying about tedious uninstall processes. So glad we got out of that and decided to make things 500 times more complicated! That sure improved user efficiency! We even had system configuration in files and people could actually change it with a text editor! Surly that is madness! I mean all the service people would be out of a job if configuration settings were actually easy to fix!

There is only one appropriate thing to do at this point
MICROSOFT RAAAAGGGEEEE!!!

Exploring the Metaverse

Virtual Reality is one of those things people used to think was cool, but now is almost universally acknowledged as a stupid idea. Even putting aside the silly goggles and huge gyroscope equipment made to make you feel in the game, which isn't necessary anyway because, as anyone who plays games seriously will tell you, it's easy to get caught up in the experience on your own (I have felt the heat of Norfair plenty of times without fancy neural interfaces). Despite (or maybe even because of) all the silly Hollywood crap where people become trapped in some virtual reality, the interest in that kind of thing is rapidly draining away. Maybe I will feel different when there is a non-invasive full neural interface that let me feel sex over the internet or something, cause goodness knows I am not getting any in real life. Also I would be a girl of course. Er I mean... anyway moving on...

But although the idea of hooking yourself up to a computer sounds sillier and sillier, using computers to make neat virtual worlds to play around with has not. Games seem to be going more in the wide open sandbox direction, and MMORPGs are becoming as much if not more for the social interaction then the game it's self.

But sometimes it goes farther then that. There are programs like Second Life which, while they have gameplay elements, really have no game to them at all. A long while ago, I played around with Second Life. It was fun to build and script things and occasionally to play with people in various role playing games that people liked doing. The problem was in my mind that it didn't really go anywhere. Everyone I met there I only knew from in the world, and while I fiddled around designing stuff I had no real goal or artistic vision. So I got bored and left, as I tend to do with all online things after a while. I lasted longer then some games though. Maybe cause I liked building stuff.

Second Life had some noticeable problems though. For one thing all the world is user constructed and almost everything can be brought with real money. I guess MMORPGs are doing that too and you can often find players selling in-game things for money, but in this system your not paying for something you have to grind to get, your paying for essentially art and/or tools.

A fairly interesting digital rights management system is in place that remembers the owner and creator of each type of object, and assigns permissions to them. The owner can restrict your ability to change or copy the object as they wish (along with other things). There is one important difference between this system and most digital rights management systems. Most others try and control something you have on your computer, but this only is for connecting to the shared world. Honestly if digital rights management worked in such a way with other things it might not be a problem.

Surprisingly enough, it actually sort of WORKS this way, although some programs can capture copies of the object, but I am not sure if all the information can be retained. Scripts are run on the server, so you may never see them, but almost everything else can be captured on a client I guess. But if you abuse copying other people's stuff, they will just kick you off the world and won't let you back in.

For this reason, whole companies can spring up providing virtual world content, and even some real life companies get into it, especially clothing manufactures and fashion designers. The problem is, almost everything sold is useless. Not only is there a lot of free stuff that does the same thing, it's a frigging imaginary world for goodness sake. Do people really care about making up their digital avatar that much? I guess so but it seems silly to me. Even some of the more "useful" tools really aren't worth any thing. The most useful thing I ever made was a special invisible ball that could let me hear things people said from far away and could also say things so I could make it look like something else was talking if I was clever. I also made commands to make it vanish with a command if I needed. Honestly it was a pretty cool thing, but I am sure others have made something better and I never got all the bugs worked out. Even still about the only think I could use it for is spying and pulling pranks.

And that brings me to another problem. The users. Half of the people in it join stupid little clubs and spend time dressing up and doing stupid stuff. A few play games, but they arn't really very interesting ones and most of the users are either sex freaks who like to do things with fake 3D dongs and fake vaginas, which you can buy in vending machines... beat that Japan! You may have panties but Second Life has whole private parts! Others usually sit around and talk about stupid stuff or just do nothing. Sometimes you can even earn money by sitting and doing nothing. No joke. But it takes forever so unless you want to stay online 24 hours a day for a dollor, don't bother.

And worse, Second Life has such a bad reputation and people have nothing better to do so there are often waves of greifer attacks which fill the map with self replication penises or send people in to orbit. You think the first would be easy to fix by having replication limits and commands to mass delete items for admins, but apparently they never thought that far ahead. Also there is a combat system but no one ever uses it because users are basically unrestricted with what kind of objects they can make and how powerful they can be. Funny thing, objects and users do have an "energy" number that is used when they do something, and in theory you should be able to use this to enforce some sort of limit on things, but they don't.

Still, I have often thought about looking into it again, now that OpenSim exists. It is nice to make things, but if I could do that by setting up a private local OpenSim server to play with is there a point to the whole online thing? And without some game features and such I think I will quickly be bored. Maybe I should look more into Gerry's Mod instead, I hear that has interesting movie features, but I would have to install steam and stuff again.

Eh too lazy for both anyhow. Should get back to hacking.

Adventures in the Third Dimension!

Today I downloaded Blender on a whim, even though my past experience with such 3d software hasn't been very good. The only 3d stuff I ever got the hang of is Half-life level editing, and that was ages ago. As I should have expected, Blender's interface is counterintuitive and filled with hidden keyboard shortcuts and strange little icons. Plus you can't even seem to select things like you would expect but dragging with the mouse, and moving things was a bit screwy until I figured out how handles work, but they were STILL a bit screwy.

How much is just bad interface design and how much is me not being used to it I am not sure. I mean the basics of doing stuff in 3D should be simple, you make a top, front, side, and 3d view, then create primitives and line them up. Why is blender making that simple task so frustrating? I am sure my brother would do better, he has actually schooling on this stuff. It also stands out in my mind that little to know programs of this sort use a right click context menu for objects, or allow you to punch in values for things like Doom and Half-life level editing tools do (or at least not that I see).

Of course even if the interface were intuitive to me, the actual method of modeling is usually not. Most people, at least according to what I have seen and what my brother has told me, use a sculpting-style method of cutting parts off a shape until you get what you want. That method I feel I probably couldn't master as I don't have the foresight, although it should work for detailing better. Another method which is usually included is Constructive solid geometry which is very helpful for simple shapes but probably less so for complex ones. There are also methods for making curves but how you define curves right in 3d is a bit of a mystery to me.

One thing I would like to see more of is modeling with voxels either using basic height-maps or slices. That way it become much easier to draw a basic shape. Of course it still needs a bit of planning and extra set up to do something complex, like say, a human shape. There also exotic modeler programs for things like this, and such. I really have to look into this stuff more.

I have my Open Scorces

I wrote this as a post to SMW Central but it's a little to long and ranty, so it's better off here. I didn't really mean to make a rant, I just want to try and explain Open Source better because I don't think most people really understand what it is, and it's causing people to not want to use it.

There are a lot of programmers that absolutely refuse to make anything open source. Common logic that people seem to justify this with is that they will lose control over the project or that they will get no credit for their work (though I think most of the programmers themselves just say their code is sloppy and they don't think anyone could understand it, to which I say: "So?").

Here is the thing: That's not what "Open Source" is. Open Source means simply that the source is available. It does not mean you lose rights to it. It does not mean anyone can make their own versions of it. Heck it doesn't even imply people can modify it at all. It just means it's there if people want to peak at it to see how it works. I am not saying every program should be open source, I just mean it's not the same thing as "Free Software" where everyone can modify and mess with it and make subversions willy nilly. There are rules with what you can do with it. Hell even free software usually allows people credit.

Now I know handing you valuable source to the internet is scary and there are any number of people that can run off with it and make there own version, but really. Is a idiot who changes a program name or about page so hard to spot?

And yes. You shouldn't have to incorporate other people's code you don't understand that may break something into your project. And guess what? You don't have to. You are still in control. You never gave that up. If you see something useful that someone made with it you want to incorporate, you can do that too.

In short, disliking open source because of lack of creative or version control is bullshit, because you still have that. This isn't free software or public domain.

Or maybe you are just afraid they will make something BETTER then you can. But if they are prevented from uploading or using it anywhere except though you, it just means you get more work done on it. If your afraid people will steal your ideas or algorithms, then grow the hell up. Your ideas are not something you can protect or have any right to protect. Plus other people could probably make a whole new program to do the same thing. Yes the source makes this simpler to figure out how you did something, but you know what? This site is full of ASM hackers. Me included. And while PC ASM and such is different, it's still not THAT different. And thats assuming we can't figure out how to do the same thing in another way. The only thing protecting you right now is laziness. And that would protect a open source project almost as well.

Now I know this all is meaningless unless we can enforce this control. Guess what? We can. That is one of the reasons uploads and such are moderated and have a unloader and a author field. Yes it's not reasonable to expect full legal enforcement, but the rom hacking community we are part of can police it's self almost as well.

But it's not that I feel open source is the best solution to everyone's problem. It may in fact be impractical to package up the source, especially when proprietary libraries are involved (though I personally think some source is better then none). It's just that people seem to see open source as meaning no control, and it's not. Thats more free software, and even then, you still have some over what branches are official or not, and you still get credit.

Edit: I know no one cares but I was told of a good source of information related to this stuff here. Also helps explain how the term "open source" go to be misused.

Information Nenotechnology

I have done a whole lot of thinking about nanotechnology off and on for the past decade or so. Why? Simply because I think it's going to be the next big thing and may possibility end up solving a lot of problems such as most deceases and even possibly old age. Fears of Grey Goo aside, nothing in science right now provides as many practical benefits.

What I have been thinking about the most is, if people use nanotechnology to augment themselves dues ex style, or something like that, how would they work? I would assume the idea would be to create blank-state nano-devices that are signaled or given directives or simple tasks... for example programing them to eliminate a class of virus or to alter a body in some way. The two major questions are, how would they make sure it's safe both in case of malfunction and outside tampering, and how would they signal a nanodevice to preform a task?

It is most likely such devices will be preprogrammed for at least the beginning period of there use. But wouldn't it be nice if you could customize your body in the same way you could your iPhone (if you have one, I don't)? Maybe so, but think about it... wouldn't it be possible for people to "hack" your body and do all sorts of nasty things? And what if you load a body Internet virus? And how to you make sure each tiny thing in your body is updated right? Likely at the very least there should be some failsafe, such as completely shutting down all devices in a strong electric field for example. Also there is always the possibility of decay of information and wild mutation, so there should be a crash condition if program checksums are compromised. Ironically, this might be exactly why we age: Our cells mutate and could turn harmful, so if they are mutated they sometimes just shut down.

On actually preforming tasks, nanodevices would probably be much like normal body cells or viruses and act in similar ways. How do viruses find cells to infect? How do white blood cells find viruses? How do bacteria do things? I really am not an expect on such things but I think a nanodevice should probably be something very close. Now not all bacteria and even possibly viruses are actually harmful. We have a hell of a lot of them inside us at any time, and many of them are good for us. There is no reason to assume any more would hurt that much.

In any case, it's way to early to say if nanotechnology will live up to it's promise, and even if it does, I doubt it will do all of the things it does in fiction. So we will have to see.

Also, stem cell research is good too.