I would prefer creating virtual objects for this kind of prototyping because they do not produce plastic waste. I wonder if the protopiper device can be used with biodegradable tape.
Interesting thought. The plastic tape is just a representative raw material. The plastic tape can totally be replaced with biodegradable material.
The key idea is to start with something with no structural integrity, the tape as a sheet and give it a good strength to weight ratio by folding it into tube.
And the gap will only increase if the proposed intelligence services act (Wiv20xx) is passed by parliament. The act allows the intelligence services to mass surveillance all electronic communication and forces all service providers (not just telecom providers) to pay for surveillance equipment.
Besides being morally wrong to mass surveillance everyone when the current act already allows the intelligence services to monitor the few thousand potential terrorists and spies, it would also hurt the Dutch economy. International companies would move their European cloud infrastucture to e.g. Germany and Dutch startups providing a communication service (i.e. almost any startup) would be less trusted by their users and run the risk of paying for expensive surveillance equipment.
If you are Dutch i recommend reading the reaction of Nederland ICT [1] to the proposed act.
The MP who proposed the law has lost support of his party recently (The Labor party) to keep on pushing the law in current form.
Also the CTIVD ,the organization that supervises the AIVD (The dutch NSA) has told the law isn't possible to implement in current form.
So the chance that it will pass it pretty small. Though they'll probably juggle around some words and try again so we should stay alert. Luckily it has gotten quite some media attention and people seem to be aware that the law is a bad idea.
Having used gopher a bit before the first browser it was inline images that made the web revolutionary imo. I remember being amazed by the pages with layout and images. So at least for me the web has always been a very visual medium.
Other than leaks via Wikileaks etc. i don't have access to a lot of information that the president of the USA had 30 years ago. Most public information on the internet today was also available pre-internet. The main difference is the time needed to access information. Instead of searching for hours or even days it's now minutes. Time effiency increased a lot with the internet.
Because it is now so much faster to get information the question has become: is the info that i want really relevant to me? Otherwise it is still a time waster even though it only takes a minute to look up. Like many people here i tend to be intellectually curious and knowing things gives satisfaction. But increasingly i have come to realize that much is not truely relevant to me. I think that's where the focus should be for future technologies, helping people get small amounts of highly relevant information while respecting their privacy.
I wonder if more than you think is actually relevant to you? The old adage is you get data, give it structure and it becomes information. I am thinking that maybe nowadays we need the next level: get information, give it 'structure' and it becomes... What?
I've been thinking about this a lot recently due to an article here on HN about the fact that we are getting lots of 'data' recently in the form of scandalous articles in the media, which shock and dismay us, but are we tying these all together into a larger picture? I don't think so, therefore we end up with the modern day equivalent of shamans - conspiracy theorists. They see the 'data' (or nowadays in its current higher level form information) and give us 'information' about what it means (sorry, I'm still struggling with what the higher form of information is).
Shamans saw dark clouds on the horizon and said the gods were angry, conspiracy theorists see the NSA spying and say 'illuminati'
Now I've done a fair bit of work on KMSs (knowledge management systems) and that could be one view, structured information becomes knowledge. But I think that that is somehow missing the point. Information+structure+experience+remembrance = knowledge (one way of looking at it IMHO) So I'm searching for an other, different way to think about this issue, because that doesn't quite seem to fit the bill here.
Is the path data>information>knowledge>wisdom ? Or are we missing steps, or even missing completely different paths?
Or is it not even a path, but more of a n-dimensional network that is recursive in time and size?
Maybe this should be the future focus of technologies.
I think you have to shift the graph: what you have under info- rss atom etc, should move up to the data position.
Then what? You could do something simple like keyword grouping - '500 news events including the word "drone"' but I feel that is not enough. Take it further and use semantics to do sentiment analysis maybe? '50 data point talking positively about airbnb today'
But I still think there is something missing. I'm interested in any other thoughts you may have, especially after shifting info-now down to data, what would be 'new' knowledge or wisdom?
information: do a basic keyword-analysis of the news snippets, maybe with some natural language processing, push it all into a graph database, using meaningful nouns as nodes and verbs as edges. Think of something like DBpedia, but with tiny information pieces and high interconnectedness between. This would be good structured "information", right?
knowledge: define some sophisticated query language / data endpoint, ideally again with some natural language processing, to discover the informations in the graph. the result of such a sophisticated query i'd call 'knowledge'.
The point Elon Musk makes is about information equality. It seems you were lucky enough to be at a place in time where a good amount of information was readily available. Not me. I had to depend on very old encyclopedias. No libraries available and no one to ask. Now days, thanks to the web, I have the same general access as you. Which is his point about equality.
When he mentions the president, the point seems to be that the person holding that position could simply ask and get the information he desired. That option was not available to the masses until web search came to be. And think about it. You do have access to a lot of sensitive information. Such as updated maps of every country. Direct and instant communication with people from other nationalities. And so on.
i don't have access to a lot of information that the president of the USA had 30 years ago. Most public information on the internet today was also available pre-internet. The main difference is the time needed to access information.
But time restriction is information restriction. Who in the 1980s had the time to sit in a library for hours on end every day researching esoteric issues? I'd argue that the information wasn't meaningfully available to everyone - only people in academic careers that had time to conduct research.
I agree, but I also think the poster to whom you are responding has a valid point as well. The internet gives us access to a lot of useful information. It also gives us access to orders of magnitude more useless information. And the President of the United States? Well, I just hope that 30 years ago his information was better than what I can find by Googling. (Though hind-sight makes most things clear)
I think the President comparison is useful, because we, if nothing else, have the ability to access so much information that would have made the President's jaw drop three decades ago. However, I agree with the minor nitpick that he had access to higher quality, classified information that the rest of us will never see.
After years of reading HN it's still fascinating how submissions reach the front page. I gave this the first upvote while it was still on the first page of 'new'. And i was certain that once it would go to the second page it would not get more upvotes in the weekend. To my surprise it is now on no. 1. A few crucial votes in a short time can make the difference. And i am certain that the person who submits it also plays a role. At least for me it was a reason to open the link because i recognized the name of the submitter.
Is Apple not concerned about losing developer momentum? Paid apps are on the way down. Market share is becoming more important than ever. Only in the US will a large share of the population pay $600+ for a phone. Strong iPad sales will buy Apple some time but i suspect that more and more developers outside the US will go Android first.
Android is a monopoly. The network effect will get worse and worse and worse. Two or three years from now, Apple will be lucky to have 7% of the global smart phone market. The only thing left is for the iPhone to be squeezed into an ever smaller corner, as Windows did to them last time. Tech markets like these are almost always winner take 95%.
Over the next three years, Android will take over 80% of the tablet market as well. The iPad will potentially suffer an even worse fate than the iPhone market share wise, because the subsidies aren't going to be there for much of the tablet market. The iPad will be competing with $125 and $200 tablets that are 90% as good at half the price. The outcome has always been obvious.
I suspect that PG has given up moderating Hacker News and currently sees HN mostly as an effective marketing channel for YC startups. Lately most replies from PG and many founders seem filtered to prevent the inevitable backlash. The raw opinionated discussions likely happen elsewhere and i miss reading those.
Where is the Steam Box? I would pay Valve $800 if it guarantees 1080p@60 games for several years. Both the XBox One and PS4 likely do not have enough power to do that for most games.
In Europe i am hoping that Germany will lead the way. The German people seem to care most about personal freedom. If they can convince the government not to give in to outside pressure to take away more and more liberty it could become not only the economic but also moral leader of Europe.
> The German people seem to care most about personal freedom
That may be the case, but they still don't manage to get rid of their corrupt CDU/CSU politicians who are also most active in implementing US- and US-friendly policies in Germany.
My belief is that with proper education, people would find out on the long run how governments should behave and what policies should not be tolerated. But for some reason, education is no longer a priority for these governments, I wonder why...
How did german people,and specifically people who lived in soviet east germany or those close to them, treated online privacy and google/facebook etc, before the NSA scandal ?
