Default Settings
Merlin Mann has a post asking people to describe what ‘default settings’ they’d change in software.
First setting I’d change is the default browser in Windows from Internet Explorer to Firefox.
I would switch encryption on in all e-mail and IM clients, and have 4,096-bit GPG encryption setup by default. Unless you told it not to it would send it encrypted to the recipient.
All e-mail clients would be set to do bottom-post quoting only. It would reject the mail if you tried to top post it.
Yahoo! Mash: social networking eats itself
Guy West sent me an invite for Yahoo! Mash. It really is a bit crap. I cannot see the point in it at all. It’s basically MySpace that’s been scrubbed up enough to shove through the W3C HTML and CSS validator. Beyond that the pages validate, there’s not much nice I can say.
Sam Sethi says it’s supposed to be some kind of attention aggregation lifestream thing. Sorry, but Twitter and Jaiku (and Plazes and Google Reader!) do it better.
It’s not going to attract the kids from MySpace or Facebook. They are pretty much there involuntarily for the long haul, just as they are on MSN Messenger for the long-haul - because that’s where their friends are. And Yahoo! already have a social platform - Groups, Answers, Messenger.
If Yahoo! wants to build a social platform, take some of the things they have already on their site and make them social ‘objects’ for use. What? Well, things like TV and News - both strong Yahoo properties. Don’t just give me TV listings, show me what shows my friends are interested in. You’ve already got a ton of this data on Flickr. Flickr is a social network with a purpose - sharing photos. Build stuff around it. Let me go to Flickr, say “share my friends list with other Yahoo! services” and then when I go to Yahoo’s TV site, it would show it to me based on what my Flickr friends find interesting. Add comments to the TV listings. Because, to be frank, the TV listings and Flickr are the only bit of Yahoo! I ever use.
This would be a lot more useful than yet another dull social network competing for the MySpace market. Mash does have some really nice JavaScript effects backed up with Ajax where appropriate. Editing your profile requires very few page refreshes. That’s kinda neat. Unfortunately, JavaScript cannot save a site. Pointless is still pointless regardless of how well implemented it’s XMLHTTPRequest objects are. And Yahoo! Mash is just that: pointless.
Okay, there is one reasonably neat feature about Yahoo! Mash. You can tag yourself. I’ve just added a whole batch of BarCamps and the such which I’ve been to. Have a gander. It doesn’t use rel-tag though…
Creationists and Catholics in America
“One of the main harms inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical sciences; this harm occurs even though it extends far beyond this scope.”
“Realities of the world are not limited to physical realities. And the material is just a shadow of supreme realities, and physical creation is just one of the stories of the creation of the world. Human being is just an example of the creation that is a combination of the material and the spirit.”
No, it’s not a Discovery Institute press release - it’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad giving a science lesson at Columbia University (via Jeffrey Shallit).
There is some good news on the religion front though. Ed Brayton has covered the story of how the courts in Rhode Island have decided that the Catholic Church does not have the right under the free exercise clause to shield it’s population of child rapists in robes from criminal prosecution. Of course, without the guiding power of the Catholic Church, how will we stop people from raping children?!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If a multi-national company, trade union or government department acted in the way that the Catholic Church has done over allegations of child rape, there would be significantly more outrage. Religion has been a deciding factor in letting the Church of the hook for covering up the misdeeds of it’s priests. The fact that the Church’s lawyers are arguing that co-operating with the investigation of child rapists in their midst is an infringement to their freedom of religious expression should be a nail in the coffin of this ridiculous, immoral institution.
The fact that the State of Rhode Island has decided that covering up child rape is not a valid part of religious free expression means that there is at least some sanity remaining on the benches of the judiciary.
As Diderot put it: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Ain’t it the truth?
