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20 February, 2011
You all know Murphy's Law, which states "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong", but there are as well other funny laws that rule the Internet, listed here by Roba Al Assi. What about you? Do you have your own "internet law" which you've invented? Write it down on our comments section!
There’s a brilliantly handy guide on The Telegraph to help increase Internet literacy. Check out the 10 laws on their site, but here are some excerpts:
1. Godwin’s Law.
Formed by Mike Godwin in 1990. As originally stated, it said: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” It has now been expanded to include all web discussions. It is closely related to the logical fallacy “reductio ad Hitlerum”, which says “Hitler (or the Nazis) liked X, so X is bad”, frequently used to denigrate vegetarians and atheists.
2. Poe’s Law.
Not to be confused with the law of poetry enshrined by Edgar Allen Poe, the internet Poe’s Law states: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”
3. Rule 34
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States: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” See also Rule 35: “If no such porn exists, it will be made.” Generally held to refer to fictional characters and cartoons, although some formulations insist there are “no exceptions” even for abstract ideas like non-Euclidean geometry, or puzzlement.
4. Skitt’s Law
It is an online version of the proofreading truism Muphry’s Law, also known as Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: “any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror”.
5. Scopie’s Law
States: “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.” First formulated by Rich Scopie on the badscience.net forum.
6. Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law)
States: “If you have to insist that you’ve won an internet argument, you’ve probably lost badly.” Named after a user on the role-playing gamers’ forum RPG.net.
7. Pommer’s Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person’s mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”
8. DeMyer’s Laws
Named for Ken DeMyer, a moderator on Conservapedia.com. There are four: the Zeroth, First, Second and Third Laws. The Second Law states: “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.” The Zeroth, First and Third Laws cannot be very generally applied and will be glossed over here.
9. Cohen’s Law
Proposed by Brian Cohen in 2007, states that: “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that… …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”
10. The Law of Exclamation
First recorded in an article by Lori Robertson at FactCheck.org in 2008, this states: “The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters.”
This article was first posted on Roba Al-Assi's blog: http://andfaraway.net/blog/2009/10/24/the-laws-of-the-internet/
21 September, 2010
If the Internet has drastically changed one thing, it’s definitely the way we consume information.
Newspapers and magazines provide their content on websites for free, and books can be bought in digital formats from services like Amazon’s Kindle or downloaded from RapidShare as pirated PDFs. Mixed tapes no longer make the rounds (we now can buy singles for 99 cents or pirate a whole album), and we stream movies on YouTube (often divided into ten different 8-minute parts). Expensive software such as Adobe’s Creative Suite are just a few, free minutes away for a torrent seeker.
That’s all not to mention a whole new breed of media creators; Bloggers, YouTube stars, citizen journalists, and MySpace musicians are taking the world by storm, deliberately choosing to share their creations with the Internet population for absolutely no money. It is no surprise that they do either, as research shows that 75% of musicians actually make more profit from piracy on the Internet than they would have without, because sharing allows for sampling, propelling more consumers to purchase music, paraphernalia, and concert tickets.*
It’s a different world, where information (whether in letters, sound, or imagery) is either free or much more affordable than it ever was before.
What is Copyleft?
This “openness” is partially made possible by the use of copyleft (as opposed to copyright) licenses like Creative Commons (CC). Copyleft is a form of licensing used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music, and art. An author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of his or her work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute it as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme.
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Creative Commons in particular defines the spectrum of possibilities between full (all rights reserved) and the public domain (no rights reserved). Thus, the content creator is given the choice on whether or not he or she wants their intellectual property to be remixed, sold, shared, credited, locked up in a drawer, or none of the above.
This system of “copyrighting” is often referred to as permission culture.
Creative Commons in Use
The list of work published under a Creative Commons license is long. In education, MIT’s OpenCourseWare allows Internet users to access all of their educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate level courses online. Depending on the course, this might include reading lists, class notes, interactive web demonstrations, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures. Wikipedia is another popular information source that uses a CC license – which is probably good news for lazy students, and some local magazine editors.
On the other end of the spectrum, Radiohead, arguably one of the most successful contemporary bands, has had several experiments with Creative Commons. Their seventh album, “In Rainbows”, was released online with a “Pay what you think this single is worth” system (seriously!). The profits from the digital download of “In Rainbows” outstripped combined profits from digital downloads of all of their other studio albums. A few years later, they experimented some more when they shot one of their videos using 3D scanning devices in place of cameras, then released the source code for free under a CC license. AlJazeera is similarly experimenting with copyleft, becoming the first network to offer a repository of broadcast-quality video footage, freely available to be downloaded, shared, remixed, subtitled and eventually rebroadcasted by users and TV stations across the world.
It’s a New World
The Internet has taken the discriminatory copyright system and punched it hard in the face. Let there be the power of information sharing. We should all actively participate in supporting the information revolution by publishing our thoughts, imagery, or work under licenses like Creative Commons. After all, hacking, sharing, and re-making will continue to exist regardless of how hard the authorities will try to curb them. In third world countries with low GDP in particular, the average citizen cannot afford to spend a thousand bucks on software, or even $15 on a book. Without access to resources, knowledge, and heck, even pop culture, our societies will always be held back.
Information should be free. Here’s to creative freedom, digital freedom, and a world where ideas and knowledge are not owned or controlled, but are instead tools to change destiny.
*(Oberholzer & Strumpf, 2005. The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales An Empirical Analysis.)
(Originally published in Venture magazine)
CC-BY-NC-SA Roba Al-Assi
18 July, 2010
It’s no secret that I love Firefox, and what really makes me love it is how customizable it is. I already told you about the plugins I have… and here are my favorite config tweaks.
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(CC-BY-SA Foomandoonian)
How to edit your config preferences, type the following in your address bar:
about:config
Change minimum width of the tabs to 75 rather than 100:
This makes your tab bar shorter, thus displaying more tabs before you have to scroll. Cool shit, yeah?
browser.tabs.tab
MinWidth Modified Value: 75
One close button to rule them all:
My favorite setting! Make the close button only appear at the end of the tab bar, rather than at every tab.
browser.tabs.close
Buttons Modified Value: 3
Disable prefetching of sites:
This will save up on your bandwidth, stopping FF from randomly guessing what you’re going to click and preloading them.
network.prefetch-next
Modified Value: false
Extend Spell check to forms:
Add spell check to forms.
layout.spellcheckDefault
Modified Value: 2
Increase History Undo Close Tab Limit:
Undo Close Tab 15 times rather than just ten (recently closed tabs)
browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo
Modified Value: 15
Always open tabs in far right:
It’s really annoying when a tab opens next to another tab rather than at the end of the tab que where it belongs.
browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
Modified Value: false
5 June, 2010
When I first found out that open source is the topic of the second edition of Amman’s very own Tech Tuesday, I thought, “Oops”.
Open source is such a tricky topic. Think about it. It’s really two options for a discussion:
1. A talk about the basics of open source; the pros and cons, the statistics, the history, and why it kicks Microsoft’s butt (that seemed to be the theme yesterday). This option sucks, because you will be pissing off half the very geeky audience for telling them something they can preach just as well themselves. It’s also terrible for the “Tech Tuesday” brand — which, come on, is not Computer 101 at Jordan University.
2. A very technical talk about open source technologies; this option is slightly better, with a much smaller risk of pissed off people. It still sucks though, because you’re risking alienating half the audience, some of whom are not exactly technical, like myself.
That’s why I was very worried, as I walked into the Friendship Hall of Princess Sumaya University.
Fortunately for the audience, thanks to the great team organizing Amman Tech Tuesdays as well as a fantastic list of speakers, neither option one nor option two were a problem. The second #AmmanTT was a huge success.
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The speakers were:
George Akra - CEO of Ikbis http://www.ikbis.com/
George spoke about intelligent choices of technology for the Web.
Ashraf Amayreh – CEO at O-Minds http://www.o-minds.com/
Ashraf showcased some OS technologies they are building.
Basem Aggad – CEO at Scooter Express
Basem had a very funny presentation about how his company uses OS.
Kefah Issa - Founder & CEO at FreeSoft http://www.freesoft.jo/
Kefah did what I thought was rather brave by having his whole presentation is classical Arabic. I personally would have preferred spoken Arabic, but that’s just me, many people in the audience liked that.
Ammar Ibrahim – CTO of Al Bawaba http://www.albawaba.com/ and co-founder of Indemaj Technology http://indemajtech.com/
Ammar had an awesome presentation with tons of funny analogies that had the audience rolling with laughter about how Jordan can benefit from using OS technologies.
Of course, for a minute-by-minute review of what was happening at #AmmanTT, you can read my live-blogging post here, or you can watch a recording of the live-stream.
This post was first published here: http://andfaraway.net/blog/2010/06/02/ammantt-edition-of-may/ and it is licensed under a CC-BY-SA license.
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