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Good day, bloggers, readers, and social media mavens. The implementation of features that allow Livejournal posts and comments to be cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter launches, which messes up my tabbing muscle memory horribly, having to tab an extra time to post a comment, instead of only having one. Hopefully, that will be fixed soon. More on the accessibility implications of the extra tabs later. For something at least neutral on the issue, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
azurelunatic offers the parts that are likable about the changes. However, the privacy implications of the feature were likely not thought through - the new feature allows people who comment, even on locked posts, to link their comments on other places, potentially exposing the content, if not the exact wording, of your post to a larger audience than intended. And then, in the old-now-new second big feature, pingbacks, it appears that pingbacks do not respect the friends-lock, meaning that if you wanted to rage about your worst enemy, and both of you have pingbacks turned on, they'll know, and they'll be able to see a snippet of the text surrounding their name. Said post also talks about the accessibility-hosing issues of putting the checkboxes where they are in the flow of commenting. For those wishing to be rid of this meddlesome priest, and are equipped with the Greasemonkey add-on or other user scripting plug-in, one can revert the changes back to the traditional form. For those wanting to kill the possibility of others doing such things in their journal, 51stcenturyfox offers some custom CSS code to drop in. Assuming that you can do custom CSS on your account level, that is.
Usually accompanying many of those posts are the traditional "If you'd like not to be reamed nonconsensually by a large corporation that has long since lost whatever ideals the founder had for it, you can join into Dreamwidth, who, just before this came about, released a seven-set of invite codes to all their users." Since I, too, use Dreamwidth, I have several invite codes for the curious, the frustrated, or those who prefer their platforms stay relatively separate, and I can say that their cross-post and importer have worked flawlessly and well for me since I started straddling two services, my own failures of coding notwithstanding.
Personally, after the point of the privacy violations, which will hopefully be fixed swiftly, and the fact that no, I don't actually want all of my networks to talk to each other, the part I find most irritating is that I do not wish to link disparate platforms to each other. The 140-character broadcast medium is good for linking to posts, which is what the Twitter link does (although it does so by simply taking the first 100 or so characters of the post and then adding a link), but that requires a backstop somewhere for longer-form things to reside. If I were on Facebook, I would primarily use it as a networking tool to chat with people and exhange pleasantries and play games, not as a platform for expressing Thinkies and news roundups. My usage of those items in relation to LJ/DW would be primarily as a "Hey, look at me and what I've done!" broadcast tool, and those are usually fairly irritating. Ka-Block, indeed.
Finally, I respect my readers as sane, civilized human beings who will make appropriate decisions about what to do with their newfound power, and I expect you to hold me to the same standard. Not that I intend on using any of these other new features, excepting perhaps the pingbacks one, because I'm curious about what people might say, and I'm hoping they close the giant privacy hole in it soon so that it can be used safely. That said, if at some point, you wish to invoke me without invoking the god of pingbacks, you can just mention the name without the associated code or reference my DWself, which will not trip any sort of invasive strike.
Onward to the news. Not too far away from the border, more unmanned aerial vehicles are taking flight to patrol the entirety of the United States-Mexico border, hoping to keep drug and human smuggling operations down as much as possible.
Following on a story from yesterday, the two gentlemen who were arrested on the possibility they were doing a test run of terror attacks are no longer thought of as suspected terrorists. I'm guessing that if someone wanted to, they could point to this so far and say, "The system works. So much so that it captures false positives. Can you please stop whining about how the Democrats are weak on security?"
Here in the United States, another example of the malice that threatens to...nah, I can's say that, the political system has already unraveled and disintegrated into a popularity contest administered by shock jocks and stun gun fanatics who want to see how much voltage the American people will take before they collapse in a heap, unable to vote from the paroxysms of stupidity backed by malice, allowing the monsters created by the Victors of each political party to do the work for them, animated by the same voltage that knocked out the populace. Galvanic response is a funny thing. Anyway, our latest poll indicates more than half of the Republican Party believes that the President is sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism and secretly wants to impose fundamentalist Islamic law on the United States.
The Times throws what looks like a fastball in the headline and then develops into a curve in the article, claiming the troops don't fully support the President and then going into detail about all the things they think he's done right. This seems to be a trend in reporting - CNN's headline says the number banks on the troubled list is up, but then goes on to say that most on the list never reach the failure point.
Finally, it must be a slower news day when column space is devoted to the Oval Office receiving some redesign and redecoration.
In technology, a trifecta of most interesting concepts, all that potentially allow normal people to access networks normally restricted to a certain group, using their location-aware smartphone or similar device, be it an iProduct or an Android device. First, AirBnB, which allows people to rent their houses and rooms to travelers to stay at, setting their own prices and amenities. For people who are looking for vacation outside of the standard hotel, motel, or resort, this opens up quite a pool of possible places to stay. Second, UberCab, an application that lets a person who needs a car summon one, for which a local driver can accept using their own UberCab application, and then transact their business together. Ratings are available, both from passenger to driver and driver to passenger. The rates are slightly higher than a normal taxi fare at the moment, also because the current fleets of cars are higher-end "black car" vehicles compared to the standard yellow cab. Currently, it only works in San Francisco, but demand and supply might allow for new places to appear. And then to pay for these applications, there is Square, a device that plugs into the headphone jack of an iProduct or Driodphone that, when paired with the corresponding application, allows those phones to accept credit card swipes and send/print receipts, capturing information even about cash transactions entered into the phone for receipts. In all three of these cases, persons equipped with intelligent, application-running phones and products can put themselves in businesses that most people do not have the capital or the client base to run individually - a single driver with the UberCab application could freelance into a network or just stay freelanced on their own. AirBnB means that people can rent out their rooms individually to a large audience without having to necessarily do a giant amount of legwork and advertising on their own. Square gives people who wouldn't be able to afford the merchant accounts the ability to take credit, debit, and gift cards in payment for their services. Your Mom and Pop would be able to take your credit card and thus access a really big group of people they wouldn't otherwise have. In all of these cases, the people offering are running the risk that they will be hurt, defrauded, or otherwise harmed by the people they contract with, but the ratio of good to hurtful is hopefully very skewed in favor of the good.
Welcome to opinions, where the elephant in the room for the donkeys is that they haven't done much to get their voter base enthused and ready to keep them in office. Well, in two of three occasions - the House seems more than willing to rumble and do cool stuff, but the intransigent Senate and the conflict-avoidant President kill that momentum before it gets anywhere. If you look on the other side, though, they prefer to accuse the President of playing bait and switch with them, calling for bipartisan suggestions on debt only to declare that Republicans want to do things like privatize Social Security and reject their suggestions. The premise of the bait and switch is that the thing that gets you in the door isn't actually there. And from all indications that I've seen, sometimes against what we would call his better judgment, the President really does want bipartisan ideas. He just wants ones that will actually preserve Social Security as the social contract that it is, instead of throwing that money into a place where an ill-timed market crash could force seniors who were looking forward to retiring to work until they die. Also, the accusations leveled are at least partially true based on some Senate candidates and other suggestions of the Republican Party in recent years. So it's not really a bait-and-switch. Being far more honest about his plan, Mr. Williams says that Social Security has become a Ponzi scheme, and that those who paid in early are getting far more out in benefits than they contributed, while those coming in later will pay far more in taxes than they will get in benefits. So the solution for him is obviously to cut benefits for the elderly who have already cashed out all they paid in, setting up the situation above where, y'know, seniors work until they die. And people claim they want to help fix the unemployment problem. Well, if you're not providing for orderly retirement and the ability to live after work, you're not freeing up jobs that you can use to hire in younger, less expensive workers.
Mr. Beck's rally has produced a few more opinions, now that we're a few days away from the event itself. Mr. Horowitz thinks that Beck and his...half-million followers at the event are showing the new brand of conservative that marches and demonstrates, putting up Mr. Beck as the individual who has done the most to expose the truth of the "collectivists of Obama progressivism", the "progressive wolves in 'liberal' sheep's clothing". Mr. I. Montoya, your honors. Mr. Freeman is a couple hundred thousand less than Mr. Horowitz, and he focuses both on the politeness and good behavior of the attendees and an insistence that the Beck followers are not going to be lock-step Republicans. Mr. Fund, on the other hand, seems to think that Tea Partiers and religious conservatives will fall into the same boat and work together where they would normally stay well away from each other.
And last out, Mr. Mauro wants the United States to leave the UN Human Rights Council and stop feeding them material they'll use for anti-democratic propaganda in their own countries, because our presence legitimizes them, with membership such as Cuba, Iran, and other despotic governments, and our admission that we have faults is only going to make them bolder in criticizing the United States and Israel. Actually, I think his column is really about how much the UNHRC is staffed with anti-Israel haters and the U.S. is giving them legitimacy they don't deserve, so the organization should be disbanded or the U.S. withdraw. An argument that relies heavily on the premise that Israel does Good in all that it does, or the Jews are God's people, and the Christians need to support them against the evil people. If you look at the records, though, Israel does not have a spotless record. Or even much of a clean one, the further down you go.
And last out for tonight, the beginnings of what science and scientists might look like if they were mapped to subway lines. A lot of the commenters have asked to add more names, and to split off more lines. I think they'd be happiest if it became interactive, with differing levels of zoom possible so that you could cram all the names you wanted onto the list and then drill down to the level of specificity that you wanted.
azurelunatic offers the parts that are likable about the changes. However, the privacy implications of the feature were likely not thought through - the new feature allows people who comment, even on locked posts, to link their comments on other places, potentially exposing the content, if not the exact wording, of your post to a larger audience than intended. And then, in the old-now-new second big feature, pingbacks, it appears that pingbacks do not respect the friends-lock, meaning that if you wanted to rage about your worst enemy, and both of you have pingbacks turned on, they'll know, and they'll be able to see a snippet of the text surrounding their name. Said post also talks about the accessibility-hosing issues of putting the checkboxes where they are in the flow of commenting. For those wishing to be rid of this meddlesome priest, and are equipped with the Greasemonkey add-on or other user scripting plug-in, one can revert the changes back to the traditional form. For those wanting to kill the possibility of others doing such things in their journal, 51stcenturyfox offers some custom CSS code to drop in. Assuming that you can do custom CSS on your account level, that is.Usually accompanying many of those posts are the traditional "If you'd like not to be reamed nonconsensually by a large corporation that has long since lost whatever ideals the founder had for it, you can join into Dreamwidth, who, just before this came about, released a seven-set of invite codes to all their users." Since I, too, use Dreamwidth, I have several invite codes for the curious, the frustrated, or those who prefer their platforms stay relatively separate, and I can say that their cross-post and importer have worked flawlessly and well for me since I started straddling two services, my own failures of coding notwithstanding.
Personally, after the point of the privacy violations, which will hopefully be fixed swiftly, and the fact that no, I don't actually want all of my networks to talk to each other, the part I find most irritating is that I do not wish to link disparate platforms to each other. The 140-character broadcast medium is good for linking to posts, which is what the Twitter link does (although it does so by simply taking the first 100 or so characters of the post and then adding a link), but that requires a backstop somewhere for longer-form things to reside. If I were on Facebook, I would primarily use it as a networking tool to chat with people and exhange pleasantries and play games, not as a platform for expressing Thinkies and news roundups. My usage of those items in relation to LJ/DW would be primarily as a "Hey, look at me and what I've done!" broadcast tool, and those are usually fairly irritating. Ka-Block, indeed.
Finally, I respect my readers as sane, civilized human beings who will make appropriate decisions about what to do with their newfound power, and I expect you to hold me to the same standard. Not that I intend on using any of these other new features, excepting perhaps the pingbacks one, because I'm curious about what people might say, and I'm hoping they close the giant privacy hole in it soon so that it can be used safely. That said, if at some point, you wish to invoke me without invoking the god of pingbacks, you can just mention the name without the associated code or reference my DWself, which will not trip any sort of invasive strike.
Onward to the news. Not too far away from the border, more unmanned aerial vehicles are taking flight to patrol the entirety of the United States-Mexico border, hoping to keep drug and human smuggling operations down as much as possible.
Following on a story from yesterday, the two gentlemen who were arrested on the possibility they were doing a test run of terror attacks are no longer thought of as suspected terrorists. I'm guessing that if someone wanted to, they could point to this so far and say, "The system works. So much so that it captures false positives. Can you please stop whining about how the Democrats are weak on security?"
Here in the United States, another example of the malice that threatens to...nah, I can's say that, the political system has already unraveled and disintegrated into a popularity contest administered by shock jocks and stun gun fanatics who want to see how much voltage the American people will take before they collapse in a heap, unable to vote from the paroxysms of stupidity backed by malice, allowing the monsters created by the Victors of each political party to do the work for them, animated by the same voltage that knocked out the populace. Galvanic response is a funny thing. Anyway, our latest poll indicates more than half of the Republican Party believes that the President is sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism and secretly wants to impose fundamentalist Islamic law on the United States.
The Times throws what looks like a fastball in the headline and then develops into a curve in the article, claiming the troops don't fully support the President and then going into detail about all the things they think he's done right. This seems to be a trend in reporting - CNN's headline says the number banks on the troubled list is up, but then goes on to say that most on the list never reach the failure point.
Finally, it must be a slower news day when column space is devoted to the Oval Office receiving some redesign and redecoration.
In technology, a trifecta of most interesting concepts, all that potentially allow normal people to access networks normally restricted to a certain group, using their location-aware smartphone or similar device, be it an iProduct or an Android device. First, AirBnB, which allows people to rent their houses and rooms to travelers to stay at, setting their own prices and amenities. For people who are looking for vacation outside of the standard hotel, motel, or resort, this opens up quite a pool of possible places to stay. Second, UberCab, an application that lets a person who needs a car summon one, for which a local driver can accept using their own UberCab application, and then transact their business together. Ratings are available, both from passenger to driver and driver to passenger. The rates are slightly higher than a normal taxi fare at the moment, also because the current fleets of cars are higher-end "black car" vehicles compared to the standard yellow cab. Currently, it only works in San Francisco, but demand and supply might allow for new places to appear. And then to pay for these applications, there is Square, a device that plugs into the headphone jack of an iProduct or Driodphone that, when paired with the corresponding application, allows those phones to accept credit card swipes and send/print receipts, capturing information even about cash transactions entered into the phone for receipts. In all three of these cases, persons equipped with intelligent, application-running phones and products can put themselves in businesses that most people do not have the capital or the client base to run individually - a single driver with the UberCab application could freelance into a network or just stay freelanced on their own. AirBnB means that people can rent out their rooms individually to a large audience without having to necessarily do a giant amount of legwork and advertising on their own. Square gives people who wouldn't be able to afford the merchant accounts the ability to take credit, debit, and gift cards in payment for their services. Your Mom and Pop would be able to take your credit card and thus access a really big group of people they wouldn't otherwise have. In all of these cases, the people offering are running the risk that they will be hurt, defrauded, or otherwise harmed by the people they contract with, but the ratio of good to hurtful is hopefully very skewed in favor of the good.
Welcome to opinions, where the elephant in the room for the donkeys is that they haven't done much to get their voter base enthused and ready to keep them in office. Well, in two of three occasions - the House seems more than willing to rumble and do cool stuff, but the intransigent Senate and the conflict-avoidant President kill that momentum before it gets anywhere. If you look on the other side, though, they prefer to accuse the President of playing bait and switch with them, calling for bipartisan suggestions on debt only to declare that Republicans want to do things like privatize Social Security and reject their suggestions. The premise of the bait and switch is that the thing that gets you in the door isn't actually there. And from all indications that I've seen, sometimes against what we would call his better judgment, the President really does want bipartisan ideas. He just wants ones that will actually preserve Social Security as the social contract that it is, instead of throwing that money into a place where an ill-timed market crash could force seniors who were looking forward to retiring to work until they die. Also, the accusations leveled are at least partially true based on some Senate candidates and other suggestions of the Republican Party in recent years. So it's not really a bait-and-switch. Being far more honest about his plan, Mr. Williams says that Social Security has become a Ponzi scheme, and that those who paid in early are getting far more out in benefits than they contributed, while those coming in later will pay far more in taxes than they will get in benefits. So the solution for him is obviously to cut benefits for the elderly who have already cashed out all they paid in, setting up the situation above where, y'know, seniors work until they die. And people claim they want to help fix the unemployment problem. Well, if you're not providing for orderly retirement and the ability to live after work, you're not freeing up jobs that you can use to hire in younger, less expensive workers.
Mr. Beck's rally has produced a few more opinions, now that we're a few days away from the event itself. Mr. Horowitz thinks that Beck and his...half-million followers at the event are showing the new brand of conservative that marches and demonstrates, putting up Mr. Beck as the individual who has done the most to expose the truth of the "collectivists of Obama progressivism", the "progressive wolves in 'liberal' sheep's clothing". Mr. I. Montoya, your honors. Mr. Freeman is a couple hundred thousand less than Mr. Horowitz, and he focuses both on the politeness and good behavior of the attendees and an insistence that the Beck followers are not going to be lock-step Republicans. Mr. Fund, on the other hand, seems to think that Tea Partiers and religious conservatives will fall into the same boat and work together where they would normally stay well away from each other.
And last out, Mr. Mauro wants the United States to leave the UN Human Rights Council and stop feeding them material they'll use for anti-democratic propaganda in their own countries, because our presence legitimizes them, with membership such as Cuba, Iran, and other despotic governments, and our admission that we have faults is only going to make them bolder in criticizing the United States and Israel. Actually, I think his column is really about how much the UNHRC is staffed with anti-Israel haters and the U.S. is giving them legitimacy they don't deserve, so the organization should be disbanded or the U.S. withdraw. An argument that relies heavily on the premise that Israel does Good in all that it does, or the Jews are God's people, and the Christians need to support them against the evil people. If you look at the records, though, Israel does not have a spotless record. Or even much of a clean one, the further down you go.
And last out for tonight, the beginnings of what science and scientists might look like if they were mapped to subway lines. A lot of the commenters have asked to add more names, and to split off more lines. I think they'd be happiest if it became interactive, with differing levels of zoom possible so that you could cram all the names you wanted onto the list and then drill down to the level of specificity that you wanted.
