It started here, and it ended up here, here and here.
Oh, and there’s a promo video.
Yes, this draws a “WTF” type of smirk from me. I’m a fan of the series (and I even answered this question in the form of an essay), but this is like…….WOW.
This could be bigger than Star Wars.
If there’s one thing that I’ve read online that particularly annoys me in its obvious sentiment towards those to whom it is directed, it is the following:
“ur just jealous bc ur too poor to afford one“, or something along those lines.
I call this “monetary/material ableism“, and only a mild case of it. It is most often displayed as a psychological/mental defense mechanism by the owner or “fan” of a particular product or brand against criticism of that product or brand.
Are we becoming more acclimated or accommodating towards such approaches to critics, feeling that we are more than sufficiently justified in the purchase of a product that we must defend the brand or product against those who, it is assumed, are less monetarily enabled to purchase the product and are thus suffering “non-buyer’s remorse?”
I might need to write something on my views on jealousy in another post.
If it wasn’t for watching this one video on TV at night (only because Wanda was watching it), after a day spent entirely in bed:
It’s not like I’m really itching for this winter quarter to start on Tuesday. In fact, I’ll be taking classes that I should’ve taken back in fall 2005, such as psychology.
But for right now, the daylight isn’t missed. I haven’t gotten any closer to where I want to be, or to what I exactly want to do.
Even asking questions – any question – is harder for me than it used to be.
Last quarter was my final technology-related quarter, and I’m disappointed that, while I passed, I neither did better than I could’ve, nor did I get what I really wanted out of it. I really wanted to create a wiki from scratch as my final project in “Database Connectivity”, but realized a few weeks before the end that I wouldn’t have the resources for accomplishing such a feat (it actually requires study material from certain university-level courses, as I found out from the teacher).
I hope that I don’t let this disappointment and anxiety take me over some unforeseen edge.
Plus, maybe it was a crash course, this whole program that I’ve taken; a highly embarrassing crash course, but one from which I’ve learned quite a bit.
This program, to be a bit retrospective, is something into which I’ve been wanting to delve since I was probably 9 years old, when we first got a computer (a spare from a friend at the church) at home. I used it, primarily to use Collier’s Encyclopedia on CD, and was interested whenever it had to connect to the Internet. So, I nagged my mother to get an ISP, but she was very set against getting AOL (she already detested the CDs in the washing detergent that they sold at the Commissary), so I found a mail-in Compuserve CD instead.
Don’t remember what happened next or if mom ever subscribed to Compuserve, but for some reason the computer either blue-screened, caught a virus, or something like that. Either way, the computer was rendered useless by whatever I did to it (I remember that I put a password into the BIOS configuration settings of the PC, but not much else).
But ever since then, I was strongly fascinated by the Internet/WWW, and wanted desperately to get onto it. I think the Digimon thing only aggravated my festering affinity for the Internet, and I tried every possible free, accessible means in order to make use of what it had to offer at the time.
I remember that, when “Digimon the Movie” had come out in theaters (in 2000, I think), I used a computer of my mother’s hair designer friend who lived much further down Watson Blvd. I looked at the Movie’s website using Netscape Navigator, making sure to head to another page when my mother was nearby for fear that she would find out.
By the time that we got the Internet at home (2004), Digimon was on the wane, I was on top of the Internet as far as I was concerned.
Oh, how the high and mighty have fallen, lol.
Come next year, the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be reapportioned from its current number of 10 provinces to 26 provinces, primarily in a move for greater governmental responsiveness to local issues and affairs. Plus, these new provinces will be given legislatures and the power to elect and impeach their governors (a power that is already given to the current 10 provinces since 2006), an unprecedented political concession in the country’s history.
However, this is not the first time that the DRC (also known as Congo-Kinshasa, to separate it linguistically from the Republic of the Congo, or Congo-Brazzaville, to the west of the eponymous river) has had a federalist approach to regional/local governance; rather, the central government in Kinshasa practiced a similar devolution during the days of the Congo Crisis from 1960-1967.
In this first devolution, the country was apportioned into a maximum of 21 provinces in a period from 1962 to 1966, when the majority of the provinces were remerged into 12, then 8 provinces and placed under unitary authority. Initially, this was meant as an appeasement plan in order to turn back any further regional secessions similar to what happened in Katanga in 1960-1963. However, after less than a year of shaky peace following the crushing of the Katanga rebellion, the “Simba” rebellion of Pierre Mulele was initiated and spread following the dissolution of Parliament by Cyrille Adoula in September 1963; it threatened to destroy the Kinshasa government’s authority over the eastern portions of the country, at which point, the government replaced Adoula with the leader of the former Katangan state, who then requested and received US and Belgian support to rescue nearly 2000 European and US civilian hostages in what is now Kisangani. They were rescued, the rebellion was put down, Mobutu overthrew both the president and prime minister and became the dictator of the country (which, from 1971-1997, was known as the Republic of Zaire), and Mobutu remerged most of the provinces into 8 provinces by 1966 (then reapportioned to the current 10 in 1988). Until 1997, the country would be a unitary republic under Mobutu’s rule.
After Mobutu, weakened by a short civil war that swept the country from the east, was overthrown by Laurent Kabila, a seasoned anti-Mobutu rebel who once counted Che Guevara among his comrades, the country soon descended into a second civil war, one that reached amazing levels of depravity and anti-humanity over a period of five years. This war, which also began in the eastern provinces because of a citizenship dispute involving a local Tutsi minority, and which received the discreet support of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, nearly succeeded in driving out the Kabila regime from Kinshasa; however, this trend was reversed after some 8 African countries sent their military operatives to support Kabila’s army.
During this period, some former provinces in the eastern DRC were restored under rebel control, namely Ituri Province (then known as Kibali-Ituri). This immediately led to the Ituri conflict involving at least two rival ethnic groups in Ituri, even after the province (which, currently and officially, is a district of Equateur Province) was retaken by government forces.
So now that the DRC has had its first national elections since its independence in 1960, this being under its most recent constitution, the country plans to return to the old federal model that was first used during the country’s first few years of independence, and for the exact same reasons and intentions as those which were used back in 1962.
But will this second fling with federalism work out, eventually, to the common intentions of all the country’s citizens – everyone from Joseph Kabila (the son of the rebel-turned-president) and Gizenga (an 81-year-old living legend who once served as head of a rebel government during the Congo Crisis and is the 23rd and current prime minister of the DRC) to the lowliest peasants and former rebels in Ituri? Will it succeed in bringing a greater equal distribution of the country’s immense wealth and potential to all parts of the country and all ethnicities and social minorities?
One could answer “No” emphatically, considering that federalism in other countries on the continent (Sudan and Nigeria) does not hold a good track record of working to the common interests of their populations, or at least were held back by the advancements of other institutions, including the militaries of those countries (and of others, as the military has played a long, and often detrimental, role in the political histories of most African countries).
So maybe the better question to ask would be “Is Congo presently ready to move away from a militaristic, violent, predatory, human-eat-human history to a civil, non-violent, dialogue-dependent, pro-human future?”
Maybe federalism – the type that is being envisioned by Kinshasa and the UN – is simply a feature that could accompany the latter, and not necessarily a stop-gap asset that is meant to prevent the former, as was intended for the first fling with federalism.
Soon, 2009 will be the present. It is up to those who are willing to serve as civil servants at the provincial and national level if they are willing to move toward the above future, rather than continue in the above past.
Well, the media hype has mostly died down surrounding the iPhone, at least in the U.S.
However, what I find lacking about the current iPhone is that it only integrates or interacts with one core product in Apple’s repertoire: the many iterations of the Mac (Mac Mini, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, Macbook, iMac). What about integration with Apple’s other consumer-oriented products, like AirPort Extreme?
Or better yet, did it ever occur to Apple’s engineers that the iPhone (or the iPod touch) would integrate well with the Apple TV? Perhaps, as a touchscreen remote?
Well……it looks like they had caught a fleeting glance of it back in…what? 2005, you say? In the USPO, you say?
No, I don’t fully expect for Apple to make use of this patent in the next iteration of either the Apple TV (which doesn’t have iPhone’s bluetooth) or the iPhone (which doesn’t have AppleTV’s infrared). But, in my honest opinion, it would push for a more diverse purposing for the iPhone:
Think of it as being a more handheld, mobile replacement for the Mac (well, that’s what Macworld said in October), being able to use the iPhone more with the Apple TV than you would use your Mac or PC.
This is what hasn’t been fully explored.
Sources and useful links:
This question has been asked before: should Opera, the Internet client from Norway that you’ve probably used on the Nintendo Wii’s Internet channel, go open source like its closest cross-platform competitor, Mozilla Firefox?
It’s become a common complain with Firefox junkies, that Opera isn’t a viable option for web browsing because of the proprietary ownership of its company (Opera Software ASA).
However, IMO, Opera has an advantage in its proprietary approach to software, in that its developers can construct and deconstruct their own layout and scripting engines from behind closed doors without having to make sure that it works well with a slew of development APIs. To date, Opera has used at least 3 different layout engines, including the current Presto engine.
Meanwhile, Mozilla possesses a long history with third-party developers. Until recently, Firefox was simply the icing on top of the “Mozilla platform”, a stack that included the following sub-browser features:
This allowed for third-party developers to plug into the processes which made applications like Firefox and Thunderbird work and look like they do.
This also resulted in “feature creep” and “code bloat”, two controversial terms which no developer wants to hear or talk about. Besides becoming a poster boy for the emergent FOSS ideology, Firefox – in fact, almost all applications which have been built upon the Mozilla platform – also became quite infamous for the attitude of its developers to the growing anger over the application’s regular consumption of memory.
However, no matter how angry the users have become with Firefox’s outstanding issues, the Mozilla developers have consistently expressed their desire for incremental improvement, rather than total abandonment of such oldened processes like Gecko and XPCOM, due to the reliance of third-party developers upon these technologies.
This leaves the Opera browser with a technical advantage over Mozilla. There is much less of an audience of third-party developers who depend upon the underlying platform of the browser, which is only licensed to software companies such as Adobe for usage in their Dreamweaver product.
What about the future of either browser?
I think that Opera Software is, at present, planning to phase the browser further into the background as their widgets platform, which is mostly based on web-standard technologies like CSS, SVG and eventually Theora, becomes bigger and more prominent.
However, the Mozilla corporation, with its recent moves (such as ditching Thunderbird, leading to accusations that Mozilla Corp. has become the “Firefox Corporation”), may also head in a similar direction as well. Mozilla has expressed an interest in the advancement of web services and web applications which will make use of Firefox-specific, rather than Mozilla-specific technologies; it sounds similar to the widget
Does this mean that Opera and Firefox are on their way to competing as browser-based application platforms?
So when should Opera go open source?
In my opinion, Opera should only go open source once their business and development initiative is no longer focused exclusively upon the browser, but rather on the applications which depend upon the browser and the technologies which stand upon it, rather than its runtime, for function purposes.
When that time comes, they will no longer be focused upon incremental improvement of the already-established underlying runtime technologies which allow for the widgets to function, and would need help from outside.
Furthermore, open-sourcing the browser and its technologies will allow for other browsers and widget platforms to stand upon the shoulder of a formidable giant, one which is designed for designers rather than developers. This will lead to greater adoption of these standards in consumer markets. Open-sourcing Opera, in the long run, will benefit the WWW more than it may benefit Opera.
However, that is a long ways off from right now, when Opera and Safari are far in front of the other, larger browser vendors and their technologies.
Firefox, as long as it rides on the coattails of the Mozilla platform rather than realize its own, will remain in lockstep with the platform’s failures and shortcomings.
When a group of individuals known as the OpenDocument Foundation (not associated with the format except by promotion of it) annouced their intention to drop their support for ODF in favor of the Compound Document Formats, the uproar in response was rather loud. Even those who said that CDF might be a better format (actually, its a container for other XML-based formats rather than being a format itself) also stated that they would still support ODF because of the “need” to uniformly combat the dominance of MS Office in the workplace.
So…this is all about Microsoft again?
Frankly, this is the software world example of how the Democrats opposed Ralph Nader from running for president – twice. Or the South Carolina Democrats opposing Stephen Colbert’s mock campaign for president.
What is this – tactical voting again?
Plus, why is it that we simply *have* to prop up the word processor software genre? Isn’t it old hat already?
We have web browsers now, so we can view documents. We have wikis and blogs, so we can edit documents. Why do we need word processors or word processor formats in 2007 (maybe 1985, but in this day and age?)? Why can’t I view either an ODF document or OOXML/Word document in the web browser?
More or less, this fight between ODF and OOXML (or openOffice.org and MS Office) is a battle for the hearts and minds of big business, big government and big education, all of whom are still hopelessly dependent upon word processor documents for communication within their specific infrastructures.
This, IMO, is not a battle for the web-based grassroots, who, if it wasn’t involving the likes of Microsoft, would have very little ill-informed opinion or hot air to spout.
I think that, if it is simply a container for already-available web document formats and syntaxes, rather than being an all-in-one format that needs a bunch of extensions and hacky thingamajigs to be compatible with other formats and syntaxes (like ODF and OOXML), then CDF might have a technological heads up over the other two formats.
Plus, I like diversity. I like confusion, choice, duplicity, subversion and treason. Therefore, the third-party, whenever possible, will get my vote.
The above title, of course, is my subversion of a quote from George Orwell.
Everyone is looking for the truth, or thinks that they are in full possession of it already (and market themselves or their venture as if they have more of it than the last “authority”). Personally, I don’t believe in truth, and I question the truth whenever I can.
Why?
Because I think that truth requires belief, and that belief requires faith. And faith leads us to go batsh*t religious/fanboyish, with no regard for any other alternative answer or solution.
And that holds all of us back, IMO.
So my description of Wikipedia is not as a repository of universal truth, but as a growing repository of every lie and truth ever recorded, as long as it has cited sources. To me, that’s a good thing; it keeps us from drinking too much of any particular flavor of Kool-Aid.
ALSO:
At YouTube, Obama’s no longer a candidate for the Anti-Christ position:
I have a question: why is it that ethnic Judaists were violently persecuted in both countries whose governments espoused a conservative, nativist, pro-religious ideology and countries whose governments espoused a liberal, Marxist ideology?
The ethnic Judaists of Germany were massacred by the country’s Nazi, virulently anti-Communist government back during the first half of the 20th century, and were oppressed by the Communist, anti-Nazi government of the Soviet Union.
Following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, oppression was visited upon the ethnic Judaists of South West Asia by both Islamic conservative and Arab socialist governments, which led to a massive exodus from that region to Israel from the 1960’s to the 1980’s.
In both types of government, the ethnic Jews were condemned for espousing or associating themselves with contrary, anti-government ideologies: in Nazi Germany, they were lumped together with gays and communists in the concentration camps, while in the Soviet Union, they were lumped together with gays and conservative religious figures in the gulags.
Within Israel, today you have a clash of Jewish conservatism and Jewish liberalism, which has only progressed since the establishments of the first Labor Zionist kibbutz in Israel in the 1920s. This has been seen in numerous misunderstandings between progressive social activists (who often advocate for peace and a two-state solution) and conservative religious activists (who advocate for greater recognition of Jewish law and tradition and the fight against Palestinian militants), including calls for prosecution, assassination, deportation, or divestment of political office.
A flashpoint in the battle between religious conservatives and social liberals in Israel is the debate over civil rights for the country’s LGBT minority, which has led to violent incursions at venues such as the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade.
The battle between conservatism and liberalism has also been felt in the Palestinian territories, most recently in the violent split between the social democratic nationalist Fatah in the West Bank and the religious conservative nationalist Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
But then back to the question: why is it that the Jews were persecuted by both avowed “leftists” and avowed “rightists” for being in cahoots with the opposing ideology of the time? Why is that the only Jewish country in the world comes under criticism from avowed leftists and rightists? And why is it that Jewish leftists and Jewish rightists have assaulted each other over the same or similar rifts and issues of which their forefathers were often accused in their former home countries?
It’s very ironic, and weird.
The copyright is for the vindictive software business. The copyleft is for the vindictive software hacker collective.
Case in point: the apology from Monsoon for having initially refused to make their source code modifications available, and the response from the Digg peanut gallery.
Of course, they, the copyright and copyleft, are eventually going to learn alot from each other. I think they each have something that the other lacks: the copyleft has distributed development man-hours and manpower behind it, while the copyright has lots of ideas to test out, money to devote and markets which need better software for their computing appliances.
Eventually, the two will push computing technology forward. The copyright will lead the way, but their implementation will be half-baked; the copyleft will take what the copyright created and develop it into a standard.
But where is the copycenter, the permissive software licenses, in all this?
Does it simply pick up the slack that the copyright and copyleft drop in their move to progress? Maybe its not as stuck on supposed slights or enemies of “innovation” (EULAs) or “freedom” (GPL).
It just wants to be used.
