Disqus - Latest Comments for evanwolf

Re: Once again, future-safe archives (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:21:12 -0000

Yahoo!'s choosing to shut down Geocities to save money.

Re: My web site is my space (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:37:41 -0000

Google has been adjusting the browsing experience for years. Google Translate rewrites your page in French. Their PageRank widget shows how famous your site is. Users have the power to change typefaces and font sizes to better suit their reading habits, to replace images with alt-text to support the visually impaired, etc. Firefox extensions automatically block ads placed by site owners, show from which countries the pages are served, DNS info about the domain, trust/safety of the site. I don't think that's the problem.

The great offense appears to be showing comments about a page in visual proximity to the page without the page author having any control over those comments.

Sidewiki could evolve to address these concerns.

First, federation. I'd hope there would be many hosts of sidewiki content and that you'd be able to subscribe to one or more of them. Hosts might be shared by people with similar values or interests (the Monster.com sidewiki service, the Slashdot sidewiki service). This reduces the concentration of power held by Google.

Second, moderation services would give you some influence over what appears next to your pages, perhaps even how much. I'd want change alerting, sentiment analysis, sidewikis respecting robots.txt bans, and DISQUS-style moderation of sidewiki content.

I agree with Jake that sidewiki creates the power for abuse without practical means of redress. Evolution along these lines might cut abuse and add back tools for giving site owners at least the illusion of control.

iamronen says courtesy comes from being able to cultivate the flavor of conversation. Without giving some tools to site owners, Google's sidewiki will remain rude.

Re: How Elders Protect Themselves from Young’uns

evanwolf — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:53:37 -0000

I agree on your general point but disagree on the specific case. Visual thinking, being able to use your hands to express ideas of space and time, the interplay of things and people, the use of style to convey abstractions and emotions - these all take the development of muscle memory, eye-hand coordination, and motor skills. These are all amplified by drawing systems but they are, for the most part, better initiated with the simplest of tools: eyes, hands, pencils, inks and brushes, and straight edges.

Architecture is like baseball, piano, and cooking: you want to learn on the real thing so you do the right things in virtual space, even without the nuances of feedback from imperfect systems. Some day those systems will provide the sensory feedback we need, but until then you'd better put a trumpet to your lips before playing a virtual one.

Re: Performance Enhancing

evanwolf — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:44:31 -0000

I'd like for there to be two leagues: one where they take the pledge to be unaugmented chemically or mechanically. The other where they trick out their bodies using every means possible. In the Natural League you see pure human nature. In the Power League you'll see bodies and minds turbocharged like race cars, with pit crews and doctors standing by.

Re: Performance Enhancing

evanwolf — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:34:02 -0000

Re: Nokia to launch it’s own app store/portal at MWC 09

evanwolf — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:55:13 -0000

Does it matter if Samsung and Nokia have app stores (a cobranded Symbian store?) if mobile carriers don't feature them in the client configurations? While Apple had the power to force the issue with AT&T in the US, do Nokia and the other handset manufacturers have the clout to make their app store a home page app and part of new phone orientation?

Re: Izea: Where Is That Line Again?

evanwolf — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:52:57 -0000

sorry. didn't think a conflict-of-interest ethics-as-industry joke needed unpacking.

Re: Izea: Where Is That Line Again?

stoweboyd — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:32:24 -0000

Huh?

Re: Izea: Where Is That Line Again?

evanwolf — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:29:58 -0000

There you go again, Stowe. Another pitch for the Ethics Industrial Complex.

Re: Boycott Iranian Oil

evanwolf — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:54:05 -0000

I'm confused. I thought crude was sold on commodity markets. So barrels of crude from Iran, the US, Russia or Saudi Arabia look the same, are priced the same, and are interchangeable except for distribution costs. How do you boycott anyone when a barrel is just a barrel?

Re: Boycott Iranian Oil

tevslin — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:00:13 -0000

By notifying oil companies in your jurisdiction where they are NOT allowed to buy oil from. That's why it takes a worldwide effort.

It's hard to hide a tanker so fairly obvious where oil is coming from in any meaningful quantity.

Tom Evslin
blog: blog.tomevslin.com
novel: hackoff.com
latest: The Interpreter's Tale

Re: Who will be the Republican VP nominee? (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:46:01 -0000

Huckabee. Brings in the religious right, a governor for executive experience, relative youth, and charm/charisma/likeability

Re: Independence Day (Scripting News)

Mariva — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:46:28 -0000

Yup.

Re: Independence Day (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:29:18 -0000

The time for quibbling ended when Obama got the nomination. Now it's a choice between McCain and Obama. Who do you want to lead the country for the next four years? If you want to lobby for policies and positions, wait until the second Wednesday in November. Now is the time to register voters, persuade them to vote for your candidate, build community within your party, and get out the vote.

And for those of you who say there's no difference between the candidates or parties, you're congenitally stupid or willfully ignorant. History and biography speak loudly. Listen.

Re: NewsJunk.com: The Top 25 most-read articles

evanwolf — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:16:23 -0000

Just for an experiment, let's vote up Salon's "Oh no they didn't". Can we game newsjunk rankings? Should we?

Re: NewsJunk.com: The Top 25 most-read articles

evanwolf — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:10:31 -0000

fyi. Was writing a comment and newsjunk.com/counts.html refreshed while i was writing.

Re: Three Reasons To Use Disqus

qthrul — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:35:23 -0000

My past reflections on this topic of the life cycle of content and the medium have made me question if copier outsourcing struggled with the same concerns.

Gosh Bill, I'd really like to try out this new copier service thing called Kinkos I've heard so much about...

Dangit Bob, we print the old fashioned way! One hand cranked page at a time from the purple monster!

My point is, if I have one, each new outsource possibility has to have portable input and output. Proprietary and/or lack of the both ends for input and output make me skittish.

Re: Three Reasons To Use Disqus

evanwolf — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:37:01 -0000

my concern is trust. i've outsourced comments before, only to have the service shut down, losing all the comments. what does disqus do to assure survival of comments, profiles, and threading post-disqus?

Re: Fear bombs of 2008 (Scripting News)

PaulDing — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:46:44 -0000

When's the last time you voted for a candidate who won by *one* vote?

The only wasted vote is the one that's not counted. Maybe you stayed home. Maybe you didn't RTFM, and your vote was discarded. If you write in a vote for "Donald Duck" and he hasn't been registered as a write-in candidate, your vote doesn't get counted. (And Donald Duck isn't just a cartoon character. He was a guest on Johnny Carson one night. His parents named his that before Walt Disney came up with the character you're thnking of.)

Huckabee hasn't dropped from the contest, even though he has no realistic chance to win, because when people vote for him, it *does* change things. People have a right to express their idea, and calling their candidate a "spoiler" is a feeble-minded insult to both the candidate, and those who favor his ideas.

In the '68 national Democratic convention, one of the delegates voted for Julian Bond in the first round. He wasn't yet 35 at the time; even if the Electoral College chose him, he couldn't have assumed the office. Never the less, it wasn't a wasted vote.

I've been a Nancy Nall fan since the 1980s, and after watching the events unfold yesterday, I'm even more of a fan. I'm thinking about writing in her name on my Pennsylvania GOP primary ballot. It won't be counted; among other things Nancy is a flaming liberal of a Democratic, bless her sharp pen, but then, the GOP ticket is pretty well determined already.

(I don't care *what* you say, Dave, it looks *stupid* to call someone a Democratic. If the Republican party members are Republicans, then the party made up of Democrats should be the Democrat party.)

Re: Fear bombs of 2008 (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:14:18 -0000

There *is* such a thing as a "wasted vote." When you vote for "Donald Duck", you know your vote won't affect the outcome. So you force yourself to choose among viable candidates, even write-in ones.

This is realpolitik, I think. If you're voting for a Republican, you want a candidate that can beat whoever the Dems throw against you. Ability to win is a valid criterion, if not a prerequisite, for how I invest my vote.

And while you're right, that nobody is entitled to my vote, isn't it willful blindness to ignore that your appeal reaches into one of the existing parties? And that, based on experience, you might earn enough votes to swing an election?

As for the "chance to win", the dems and republicans have over 100k electeds in local, state, and national offices. They have local committees and clubs in every city. They will spend over $500 million in ad bucks.

As voters and as candidates, we serve democracy by acting to elect the best candidate within the system we have.

Effectively, a vote for Nader which would have gone to a Democrat is a vote for McCain.
Nader knows it.
And doesn't care.
The same logic elected George Bush.
I wonder if any of the people who voted for Ralph last time will vote for him again.

Re: Fear bombs of 2008 (Scripting News)

dave — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:44:30 -0000

I question all these assumptions. I'm sure he thinks he has a chance to win, truth is that he does have a chance to win. May not be very big, but it's his. And people who vote for him aren't owned by anyone, not even him. Votes don't belong to anyone. You should really formulate these ideas more carefully and try to find what you're really saying but I agree with him, he's not responsible for what happened in 2000, he's a candidate for office, and our form of government anticipates that many people may run for office, and I tend to agree with him that it would be better if parties came and went more frequently. This sense of entitlement by the Dems and Reps is not a good thing for us.

Re: Fear bombs of 2008 (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:37:26 -0000

What do you think of the Nader candidacy? He knows he cannot win. He knows most of his votes will come from Democrats. He accepts no responsibility for the 2000 election results and and declines the "spoiler" label.

Re: Fear bombs of 2008 (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:44:52 -0000

I've already heard the "Hussein" injected in everyday right talk radio.

Re: Campaign conference call MP3s, day 2 (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:23:01 -0000

Sunshine in this area would be very useful. It would make the reporters more accountable and would make it easier to assess their quality as analysts and filters. Being able to point out bandwagon effects, biases, and missed stories could only improve the quality and effectiveness of coverage.

Re: Blogger of the Year (Scripting News)

evanwolf — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:55:07 -0000

I always thought your choice to back off on the awards shut down something valuable. Not that it wasn't right for you at the time but that your values, your experience, are meaningful and worth sharing, especially as the blogfather. The bloggies and other more electrifying events have their places. But the Scripting News Blogger of the Year could build its own reputation as defined by the cadre of voices you choose.