OpenId's big problem

If you really look at the comment box at the bottom of any of my posts, you'll find a whole bunch of ways to say "I'm a human". One of these is OpenID. I like OpenID, and its cousin OAuth, on general principle. People shouldn't have to be hooked up to some suspect overlord like facebook or google to participate, you know?

(On consideration, my "reasons" for not allowing "anonymous" comments may be suspect. Maybe I should allow that. But that's not related to my point.)

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror made a recent post about "install our apps" pop-ups. You know the kind:

One of the points he makes is that with so many apps, apps kinda need to be free. Otherwise, they're overpriced. But that brings us to this old privacy-freak adage:

When apps are free, you are the product.

OpenID and OAuth are intended to help solve this problem. And that, in a fit of paradoxical irony, is their problem. The very thing they're supposed to do, is the very thing the people who'd have to adopt it don't want.

Without huge, hyper-driven use demand, they're doomed.

Faulty Thinking: "some things man was not meant to know"

Breakpoint, who I respect in general, just aired a radio article on transhumanism. And their concerns are good, and need to be considered. That doesn't mean they didn't commit a thinking error.

The main point of the article was that knowledge can be used evily, and some forms of knowledge can be put to greater evils than others. With which I agree. It then claims that such areas shouldn't be researched at all. Here they went wrong.

The trouble is that any piece of knowledge that can be discovered, can be rediscovered. History supports this claim just as much as it does theirs, if not more. What matters is when it's discovered, and by who.

(There's a handy example of this in cryptography, the study of secret communication. A group of people working for the british government invented the form of encription now used for internet banking, -- before powerful computers existed. The british government kept it hush, because they didn't have a way to break it. Later, some american academics came up with the same system, without knowing anything about the british version.)

If you'll forgive my archtypes, I'm going to go with a supervillian analogy. Say a supervillain is doing genetic research. He discovers a way to trigger a latent genetic defect in the majority of humanity--a virus that causes cancer, maybe. He can then release it, or threaten to releas it, on major cities or even the whole planet.

But if a good guy scientist has been researching as well, and discovers the trigger first, she and others can research and find an antidote or a vaccine. Then, by the time the supervillain is ready to unleash his disaster virus, maybe it won't work anymore. Certainly it won't be as bad. Now imagine if the scientists hadn't been working on the antidote.

I won't argue with the should-ness of their claim. But as the line being crossed sooner or later is inevitable, it's far better to look in hope for Prometheus than to wait in fear for Pandora.

Logging

All I really want is to save everything I ever see in my browser to disk somewhere so I can see it again as I first saw it if I want to, no matter what happens to the originating site or original file in the interim. If we conveniently ignore disk-space and copyright/'intellectual property' issues, is that really too much to ask?

Apparently, yes. It seems it really is.

Hey, advertisers, make a note of this:

I used to consider adblock 'only' "really nice". Then I got hit by an auto-playing video ad in another tab. Adblock is now considered mandatory.

(Get adblock plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

"oh, crap", as it were

Are we really up to 4x04 already?! I haven't even finished season three yet!

[spoiler]
Twilight still has wings, I see. Mind you, I'd probably be griping if they hadn't kept them, too. It's not like you can just retcon something as major as apparently changing the species of the closest thing you have to a main character.
[/spoiler]

I only know this much because I wound up on this blogspot after doing this image search.

Well, that's enoug derping around on the internet for one day

Over on RationalWiki I stumbled across their page about "QuantumMAN". Not that I'm not endorsing RationalWiki. I don't know nearly enough about them to do so. A lot of their articles I've read have been completely reasonable "okay, really?" examples ranging from "eyeroll" to "facepalm". But QuantumMAN, assuming it's an accurate representation (a fair assumption to make as far as I'm concerned, given what gets mentioned), is actually painful to think about. Anyone with any knowledge of applied quantum mechanics, biology, or computers could tell you that there's no way in the universe for their claims to make sense. Even /r/VXjunkies is more plausible, likely due to the fact that they don't even try to be plausible.

Using the Mac

I discovered today that I can't use the Mac effectively. I can kinda use it, but only the same way I can 'kinda' drive a stick shift: I can steer and stop, and even hit the gas, but ask me to change gears and we are done.

Thing is, all the problems have to do with the keyboard. First is the command key. Through long training, I have become accustomed to using the 'control' key. This one isn't really Apple's fault... much the same way it's not the carmaker's fault if they put the turn signal controls in the middle of the dash instead of on the stem, or Ford's fault that the Model T doesn't even have turn signals. I don't blame them for it, I just hate it.

Then there's the keyboard itself. I might have more success with macs if I used Mac keyboards. All Macs these days have those chiclet laptop-type keyboards, though. When I'm at a desktop, like our Mac, I really prefer the old-style key-travel 'klacky' keyboards. They feel better. And no, my older Mac keyboard won't cut it. It doesn't have quite the right feel to the keys.

The real insult, though, is emacs. I'm used to the Alt key sending emacs' `meta`, but for the life of me I can't seem to find the `meta` key on the Mac. This forces me to use `Esc`, a real problem because just about everything I love about emacs is on the `meta` key. Those of you who've never used the power of emacs might feel this is a little like complaining about a car not having a steering-wheel cover. Which is true as far as it goes, but it's more like complaining about a car not having a steering wheel.

Google+, revisited

Oh, gee, thanks a lot, Google. I'll just go through a crap-ton of work to delete my entire Google+ account AGAIN.

Seriously. You'd think they'd mention when they're offering to create a Google+ account for you, but noo...