Deathlok was pretty cool, and almost 20 year later, the stories aren’t as terrible as I was expecting. In fact, they’re pretty good if you excuse all the 1991 “cyber” talk. It’s making me investigate other great comics I miss that were brought back to life, including Grimjack. I think I’ll be poor again soon.

Here’s an example from the early days:

Funniest comic evar.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The transcription of the video is still left available on the 60 Minutes website.

“MICHAEL USHER: Critically, three weeks before the explosion, a crewman’s mistake damaged a crucial safety seal on a device known as the blowout preventer, designed to stop an explosion. The problem was discussed at a safety meeting onboard Deepwater Horizon. Mike Williams says the rig’s owner, Transocean, suggested a temporary shutdown. But BP, which owns the oil, demanded drilling continue.

“MIKE WILLIAMS: I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said, “Well, my process is different, “and I think we’re going to do it this way.” So there was sort of a chest bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to really break down as to who was ultimately in charge.”

Click here to read the rest of the transcript

The script is written in gawk and is available here:

sa-spam-stats.tar.gz

I hope it’s of use to someone. If you want changes or have recommendations, please let me know.

Here is some example output:

As sites like Facebook don’t have Dislike buttons, many people worry that they’re restricted in their ability to properly categorise content.

But we need a better way of categorising or approving and disapproving of content. The Like/Dislike options aren’t always appropriate, and they’re not always appropriate because everyone will use them differently. This was recently discussed on Reddit (but I can’t find the link), and just shows that everybody uses their votes in different ways. Some, of course, maliciously, but most simply have different perceptions of up- and downvoting.

For instance, some downvote a comment simply if they disagree with it. Some will upvote if they disagree with it, but the comment leads insight, or contributes to the conversation in a useful or constructive way. Not that any of those are right or wrong — they’re just different. And with enough of a community, most things should balance out anyway. And that’s fine for comments on articles.

However, what about the articles themselves. When I see an article from BBC on Google Reader about how Catholic priests have been getting away with raping young boys for decades, how am I supposed to respond? If I Like the article, am I trying to indicate that I approve of the molestation of children, or am I indicating that I think this article should be read by as many people as possible?

It’s a bit easier when it’s news on a new fancy gadget that’s coming out. That’s a no brainer — I either like it or I don’t. But the matter can be complicated if the article is badly written, has no insight, is full of grammatical errors, or is just a lazy article. How do I cast my vote so that others can save their time on reading it? If I downvote a badly written article about an Apple gadget, then the Fanbois will assume that all the downvotes are because of ire toward their beloved vendor. If I upvote that badly written article, am I giving the author the impression he or she did a good job?

It’s too easy to give the wrong impression with the Like/Dislike rating system. It’s just too weak and doesn’t even scratch the surface of the nuances of human opinion.

Reading mailing lists is an excellent way to really see some of the dregs of electronic humanity. Here are some of my pet peeves:

Top-Posting

Seriously. Do you read upside down? Are you too lazy to reply properly, or have you no concept of “in-line reply”? Back in the old days, back to BBS’s, when you replied to someone’s message, especially one that was going to be read by dozens or hundreds of others — who you knew were also going to be involved in an unknowable number of other related and unrelated threads — you made sure that you left a hint of the previous conversation before your reply. This acted as a gentle refresher on the topic at hand, and let a reader understand the context of your reply.

Quite straight forward and courteous, really.

Now top-posting, I believe came about by a Microsoft email client onto unsuspecting, ignorant masses, and has henceforth become the defacto standard of message response format. In other words, quote every other Darwin-damned thing in the entire history of the conversation, and prepend your reply at the top. It’s unnatural. If one was feeling masochistic enough to follow the thread (note that we’re already fighting against logic here, because we really want to read a thread beginning to end, which implies top to bottom), from the beginning then we must go to the end, scroll up a bit to find the start of the last message, then read down. Then we scroll back up to the start of the second to last message, then read down. And so on until we’ve zig-zagged our path illogically through the entire message until we finally get to the last reponse, all the way at the beginning of the message. Make sense to you? If it does, the next bus leaving Earth should be a long soon. Make sure to have your ticket ready.

Not Trimming

Now some people have come to grips with in-line replies, but only on a most basic fundamental level. But at least they’re on the road to recovery, so it’s a good start. However, they don’t trim. And by trim, I mean removing all the extraneous parts of a message.

At its simplest, you want to remove (or trim) everything in the previous email that you’re not directly replying to, or that doesn’t help give context to what you’re saying.

For example, replying to the first paragraph, but leaving two other paragraphs dangling below that you haven’t replied to is stupid. Especially if it’s long enough that someone has to scroll down to find there’s nothing else to read.

If you’re not replying to it, cut it out.

And don’t leave a quoted signature:

> Regards, Bob

WTF is up with that? Oh yeah, and leave a gap of at least one blank line between your reply and the quote so we can distinguish them. Some mail clients wrap lines badly and the replies can sometimes run right off the quote.

TXT Typing

A few years ago we used to laugh at people who typed email messages as if they were TXTing on a cellphone; however, in this day and age, cellphone use to read and write emails is common. However, if you’re going to post on a mailing list that will be seen by hundreds, or sometimes thousands of people, do us the courtesy of using a computer with a real keyboard. You look like an ignorant teen wn u wrt lk dis.

And get rid of that damn “Sent from my iPhone” wank sig. I have a mail filter that bins those messages, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

If you don’t have the courtesy to write complete sentences, then we won’t take the courtesy of responding to you, or treating you like a human being.

CCing the Original Author

You’re on a mailing list and you’re replying to a message. You can take it as a given that the person you’re replying to is also on the list, or else they wouldn’t have been able to post in the first place. Why the fuck are you CCing them? Is your brain malfunctioning?

Starting a New Thread by Replying to an Old One

This is the ultimate in lazy and ignorant email use. Most people have no idea that email messages store threading information. There’s a message header called In-Reply-To that tracks the message ID of the message you’re (funnily enough) replying to. Mail clients can use this information to show you threads in correct sequence of their replies. It’s an extraordinarily useful way of reading mailing lists, but it’s often ruined by lazy pricks who start new threads right in the middle of an old one.

The lazy person wants to post a message to a mailing list, so he (we’ll assume he for the rest of this conversation so I don’t have to make everyone trans- or indeterminate gender) will reply to an existing message, change the subject and type in his message. So in a thread we find things going along nicely until BAM there’s a different thread in there nested eight levels deep. WTF? How’d that get in there? Oh yeah, the poster was a lazy douche.

How hard is it to copy the mailing list address from an existing message, then paste it into a new message? It’s only a couple of clicks more and a few bytes of your copypasta buffer wasted.

HTML Emails

This is less of an issue these days because I use Claws-Mail and it allows me to view all messages in plain text until I click on the HTML tab. But you’re still lame.

Conclusion

So the basic gist of this is that you should think before you post on a mailing list. If it’s a one-on-one email conversation, or a small group at your work, do what you want, but when you’re on a public mailing list, you have to think about what you’re doing.

The main goal of formatting your email is to make it readable and coherent to someone reading it. It’s really not that hard.

I don’t fancy playing whak-a-mole with the accounts. But if you want an account, just email me and ask.

The other option is to comment through Buzz, and I’ve just added a Buzz button to the posts to promote that.

In this telling article from The Register, Zuckerberg apparently is more than happy to give his friends private info on Facebook users. The chat transcripts were from 2004, when Facebook was primarily being used by students.

But moreover, the more press their recent privacy changes are getting, the more Zuckerberg and his cronies show their true colours. They think it’s your fault that everyone can see your information, because you’re publishing it. If you want it private, they say you shouldn’t put it online. They also say that most people are happy with the new public “privacy” settings. But I’m going to take a stab in the dark that most people simply have no idea of the consequences. Some say they know, but think it isn’t as bad as everyone’s making it out to be, while others are just blissfully ignorant of the whole debacle.

One of the execs — Elliot Schrage, VP of public policy at Facebook — wrote a Q&A response published by NY Times. It has such notable quotes as:

“It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making.“

They’re not saying the changes they made were wrong, they’re saying they didn’t communicate it well. But I believe that was intentional, because if they did communicate it better, more people would be pissed off. Schrage says that the controls are still too confusing for some people, implying that they’re going to dumb them down even further. Which will mean more will be public by default, because they don’t want to confuse the poor users.

Of course, the result will be that applications and external websites will be able to access even more information about you than ever before. As far as I’m concerned, even having settings that allowed anyone and everyone to access your info is fine. But setting those as default is stupid. Schrage claims that of the info that’s shared, it all remains perfectly anonymous because they don’t share your name, but that’s a complete lie. With the new settings, things you Like (yes, with a capital L) are completely public. You now effectively join a “group” which shows everyone who Likes it.

For example, if you like pancakes, and you mention it in your profile, you will join a mass group made up of everyone else who has said they also like pancakes in their profile. The only way for you to unsubscribe from the group, is to not mention that you Like it.

Previously, Liking something was private. Only you and your friends could see that information (and maybe friends-of-friends if you allowed them). But now, you’re part a big group of pancake lovers, and everyone on the planet can see that association. Your only way to control that is to remove it.

Facebook’s response is that if you don’t want the entire planet at large to know about it, you shouldn’t be saying it.

Hmm.. I don’t think so somehow. Personally I prefer a bit more control over my information and my privacy. I don’t trust Facebook, and I sure as fuck don’t trust Zuckerberg with my info. He’ll gladly sell the info to advertisers, and as has been shown, gladly give it away to his friends to show them how big his dong is. Someone whose morality is that low, won’t have changed over the years.

As mentioned, I’ve deleted my Facebook account, and won’t be going back to it. Even if they change the privacy controls back, I simply don’t trust them. Many others will continue to do so because they don’t care or don’t know any better, but I think that this time Facebook have done a lot of damage, and this will hurt them more in the fuckups they make in the future. Unless they eat some humble pie (and publicly add it to their profiles), I don’t envisage them lasting long. Enough people are getting pissed off that some geeks are bound to be working on alternatives in secret.

One, Diaspora*, is doing so very publicly and riding on the Facebook hate wave, but I’m not sure that their offering is going to have mass appeal. It appears as if they’ve just picked out a bunch of security and privacy buzzwords and thrown them on a webpage saying that’s what they’re going to do. How they’re going to achieve end-to-end GPG encryption in a non-intrusive way, I haven’t yet fathomed. Of course, it’ll be needed because it’s going to be a “distributed” service, so you won’t want people prying on your data in plain text. But just as to how and why a social network should or would be distributed, I can’t grok. I would have thought that a central system would be the way to go because if it’s distributed, then it sounds like not all content will be available all the time.

It all sounds a bit odd to me.

And earlier this week (or end of last week), they rolled out a bunch of changes that really fucked things up for everyone’s privacy. The changes they made were designed to help you “connect” to everything and everyone you like. A new API was rolled out that allowed websites to add code that would link users’ Facebook accounts to the site — in fact some sites now allow you to log in to their site with your Facebook credentials. Yeah, that’s not likely to cause any security issues, huh?

A lot of people have been posting about these, but a few links (below) really stand out for me.

Facebook Timeline of privacy settings

A security hole that lets people view their friends’ live chats

Some stuff you need to know about FB with its current settings

Websites have been adding apps without your authorisation. This bug has apparently been fixed, but only for sites you visit from now on. It’ll still pay to check your app list for anything that’s been added for you in the last few days.

I mean, this is some seriously shocking stuff. And these are all rational posts — I’m sure there are plenty comparing this to the End Times(tm) as well. On top of all this is Facebook’s lawsuit against a guy who harvested a bunch of publicly available data from FB accounts just to show how much FB shared. So they sued him. I would almost say it’s hypocritical, but I think from their point of view, he should be paying them money to get to your info. Which is kind of business, but they’re going about it all wrong in my opinion. They’re being cunts about it, and that’s just impolite.

So in light of all the above, and the fact that Facebook are doing their darndest to monetise you and your private info, they can:

Interestingly, the BBC posted a question asking who still used floppy disks, and got their response. Turns out only a few are legitimate uses. Reading through them, one struck me as most fascinating. One old man who still uses floppy disks because they’re easier to catalogue like a paper filing system. Write a label on them and put them in a flip file. Yep, I used to do that and only a couple of months ago threw out boxes and boxes of Amiga floppy disks, many of them in flip box thingies.

Floppy disks, after going through a few incarnations of varying sizes and capacities from 8″ to 5.25″ to 3.5″, eventually gave way to CDs and memory sticks. A modified version of the media was released called a Floptical, which according to Wikipedia started life as a 21MB disk, but I only remember the 120MB LS-120′s. Maybe the 21 meggers never saw their way into the NZ market. Anyway, they were 3.5″ disks that had different media allowing it the higher capacity.

Then there was Iomega’s ZIP and JAZ drives, which had 100MB, and 1GB respectively, and those were quite popular for a while.

Blah blah blah, OK, who gives a fuck? They’ve all been and gone, past their use-by dates, and the world is a happier place. Well, not completely happy, USB flash drives are sooooooo slooooooowwww..

CD-RW’s and DVD-RW’s can be used as portable, removable media, but I don’t think they’re very reliable. It may be different with DVD-RW’s, but I remember using a CD-RW many years ago as backup media for my docs. After a while, files started disappearing. I don’t know where they went. Maybe the file allocation table was limited, so it started dropping files off the front. I dunno. But it did sour me off that media.

And like the old dude, I’d like to be able to have some kind of “permanent,” or more appropriately, shelvable (is that a word?), rewritable media that I can file. A medium that doesn’t require anything mechanical to operate. CD-ROMs and floppy drives are spinning media, and require lots of moving parts. On laptops in this day and age, that’s unforgivable. Don’t start me on netbooks with spinning hard drives and CD-ROMs..

I’d like to see a “drive” that read some kind of flash memory (preferably bypassing a slow bus like USB — attaching them to the SATA bus could be interesting), about 2″ square — making them big enough to write labels on, and allowing us to file them away. Any smaller just makes labeling them impossible, and handling them difficult.

While Micro SD cards are frikkin awesome feats of technology managing to pack in decent capacity into stupidly small form factors, it’s tough to make them the removable media of choice because they’re so damn small that they’re too easy to lose. Imagine something 2″ square that had the same thickness and data density of a Micro SD card.

That’d be a whole lotta win in my book.