Ever since TPB announced that buyout deal with GGF, the populists who exclaimed "ra ra ra!" for the TPB owners at the infamous trial in Stockholm are now seething with either anger or dismissiveness for the "new" TPB. They're exclaiming "How could you do this to us, your loyal users?! Fuck you, I'm going to Demonoid!" because the prospect of TPB becoming a user-paid site (alot like Metafilter) rubs their offended ex-userbase as "going legit" or "kowtowing to the MAFIAA".

I rarely use TPB: I tend to use BT for downloading anime series and the occasional film, so I know that I'll find far more of what I want on isoHunt and AnimeSuki than on TPB, which seems to be much more used for software (for which, since using Ubuntu and mostly free-software, I've hardly lacked) and film/documentary distribution. So it hardly affects me that TPB will go legit and user-paid to any length, but I know that they have legitimate reasons (both financial and political) for doing such, and I find much of the fury that is being directed in its way from commenters on Digg and TorrentFreak to be self-righteous and misdirected.

But as a user-driven site, TPB, like Digg and YouTube, is finding itself in the crosshairs of many active Internet users who have an active disdain for anything that is corporately-driven or monetarily-supported, including web advertisements or making user accounts dependent upon monetary subscriptions. True, money is always a hurdle for any site to cross, and corporations tend to have an arguably-heightened sense of entitlement to monetary payments for many of the most minute perks and features that they distribute, but the behavior of corporations doesn't excuse the user from playing a role in the sustenance of a site for its services. That's why the Pirate Bay had banner and text ads on every page of the website.

The sites which display the content, or at least links to the content, need money to drive revenue for their survival as autonomous units; otherwise, they will fall to the wayside, no matter how popular they may be to their userbases.

The most disturbing mentality of TPB's proponents-turned-detractors ("I'm deleting you from my bookmarks. Good day, sir!"), however, shows when they comment on how TPB will be replaced by another new head of the BitTorrent hydra, followed by a "good riddance" to another old, expendable head. It's like they expect to be perpetually able to switch out hydra heads (i.e., trackers and search engines) every 6-12 months like shoes or toothbrushes, every time that a hydra head either gets taken to the judicial abattoir to be bled and culled or gets a bit "uppity" and starts to consider more sophisticated, machiavellian methods of financial sustenance.

So I ask myself....how do you reserve any respect for these fickle, thin-skinned "pirates" who can't even be counted on to dig into their own pockets to support their own captains and fix the severe damage to their own sinking ships BEFORE it comes to the captains forcing those pockets inside-out as a last-ditch effort? They're hilarious in their churlish textual expressions of "Fuck the RIAA!" e-rage and claims of support to the "cause", but they're truly impotent and unstable in the bladder and couldn't be counted upon to support any single one of the many public torrent sites.

So I don't think the Pirate Bay is in the wrong for going ahead with paid user subscriptions; actually, its been a long time coming for any major previously-non-corporate tracker of the TPB's size or popularity, and that people didn't see this coming as a feature is laughable. DRM on files may be a stretch, and may be signs of overreaching desperation to recoup legal costs (as DRM is seen as a "big no-no" for the free culture movement), but it's not surprising that TPB went this route after the trial.

And as it has been said in the media, this may be the symbolic end of the "Pirate" era of the free culture movement (and of this decade), but the contributions made by the unaffiliated trifecta of TPB, the Pirate Party and the Swedish Piratbyran will make part of a sociopolitical foundation for the pro-copyreform movement in the European Union, and will also open new questions for the Western copyreform and copyleft movements to answer.

Finally, I think that this decade has shown the advance of what I call the "wikileft", or the current movement towards making the production of media more open, publicly-persistent, collaborative and human-readable (as in the case of wikis for encyclopedic articles, or even in Mozilla's Bespin project for a web-based collaborative IDE). It is copyleftist by necessity (hence naturally allowing for P2P distribution), but it brings a greater focus upon the production of content, a focus which was never fully considered or exploited by the copyreform movement which cast its lot behind TPB and other distribution hubs. The wikileft, IMO, gives a far greater window of user involvement and responsibility than the copyleft or copyreformism ever did; users not only contribute their works to the wiki whiteboard, but take a role in the nurturing and development of the information contained on the whiteboard (including information posted by others) and ultimately "own" the responsibility and recognition for their own contributions.

If the wikileft can comprehensively outsource the production of prime, expert-level media to the lay public within the next decade, what would be the need for the statically-produced media that the copyreform movement fights for the right to non-commercially distribute under the protection of fair use? Who would care about the Encarta Encyclopedia client software being distributed on BitTorrent when one can point to any one of the nearly 3 million English Wikipedia articles created and edited by millions of users?

The copyleft, for its own sake, must morph into the wikileft to make user-generated, user-supported content more ubiquitous and prevalent throughout the Internet, thus squeezing out the demand for the proprietarily-licensed, statically-produced media which the TPB, isoHunt, LokiTorrent, OiNK and others past and present  fight for the right to distribute. The latter type must be dumped in the shortest order in order to render irrelevant the companies which claim intellectual monopolies over their distribution, and bring the nightmare of the MAFIAA to a blessed end.

I wonder about how labor unions have increasingly come out in favor of mutualization of larger megacorporations, particularly in their favoring of worker cooperatives as a model for such mutualization.

I wonder about it because I'm a bit lost on whether worker co-ops are in philosophical conflict with consumer co-ops: both are mutualized institutions meant to at least provide a more transparent product and more democratic governance, but worker-owned co-ops are more limited in their demographic and democratic spread than consumer co-ops, and they are more bound by necessity to ensure job security for all worker-owners.

Job security, of course, is good: it not only fits within the labor unions' ultimate goal of protection of jobs and worker welfare (by mutual assurance, if need be), but it also guarantees that any owning member will have a means of generating income for both oneself and for the other members of the co-op, giving worker co-ops a philosophical and financial advantage over consumer co-ops, which are larger in membership but provide seemingly basic, threadbare benefits in comparison.

Of course, even if the worker co-ops assimilate into each other to create a megacooperative conglomerate, it may only make a fraction of consumers into worker-owners. Its not like the labor unions will be able to announce "Hey, everyone aged 18+ in the country is hired, so come clock in on Monday! We'll send everyone - including you - to a day job, get you educated, and get you settled into an apartment at the same time!" It would be nice to dole out job positions like nation-states dole out citizenship, but I doubt that worker cooperative federations or conglomerates will be able to ensure jobs and income for all adults in that way....at least, not with the way that worker cooperative federations are structured.

Once again, the debate over governorship of ICANN, the semi-private body which doles out new top-level domains (like .com, .eu, .org) every so-often, has resurfaced, this time over the European Union's demand for the end of the collaboration agreement between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Neither side - the EU nor the US - wants to budge over ICANN's governorship, but fears expressed in the United States primarily center over whether a globally-restructured de-governmentalization of ICANN would lead to the body taking a more activist, less impartial approach towards its governorship of domain allocation. The more extreme fears are that an internationalization of ICANN may result in it kowtowing to the demands of governments - directly or by corporate proxy - for the deposition or censorship of certain media from the Internet, an affront to the long tradition of U.S. constitutional upholding of free speech; such a fear stems from the practices of governments such as those of the People's Republic of China, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Iran towards their own domestic media.

Ironically, such was the fear inside the United States in the last decade regarding the demands of domestic religious organizations for the creation of the .xxx domain as a place of outer, censored darkness to cast and imprison all "mature/adult" media; this move was ultimately defeated by ICANN for free speech motivations, but it ultimately showed that the danger of affronting free speech and free thought on the Internet was as much domestic as it was international, and as much religious as it was political. 

In my opinion, the fear of foreign censorship of international media and the demand for a non-governmental restructuring of such an important international body should compliment each other rather than rule each other out. Why not incorporate international organizations which act both as effective checks on the power of ICANN and its actions as well as watchdogs for freedom of speech on an international, Internet-wide level?

No, its not just a global democratization of ICANN that is necessary (although proportional representation is a good way to gauge the fuller breadth of international opinion and interest), but also an introduction of constitutionalism, judicial review (and restraint), and other features that those U.S. free speech advocates who would feel more at ease with U.S. governance or influence would wish to be copied and enhanced to an internationalized governance. 

But of course, one person on Digg has highlighted the political nature of the debate over ICANN, which may not be the necessitating factor for such a move; ultimately, money and heightened economic factors have to be involved with the lack of any shift of ICANN governance before there is a stronger change of the status quo.

The Seven-Point Manifesto is a document that has circulated on a number of English blogs and first appeared in the conservative Pajamas Media blog; it supposedly was distributed among Iranian protestors in the hundreds of copies before being translated from Farsi into English for an international audience.

However, despite being linked from Commentary Magazine and the Guardian, the comments in the original PajamasMedia post raise doubts about the document's extense of internal usage within the reformist movement, let alone the authenticity or verifiability of the document. Plus, its demand for Grand Ayatollah Montazeri (rather than Rafsanjani, as I initially posited) to replace Khamenei as transitional Supreme Leader seems rather far-fetched at the moment, given that Montazeri, a more liberally-oriented cleric and veteran of the Iranian Revolution, has been in internal exile and under house arrest until fairly recently.

So at best, this manifesto can only stand recognized as an expression of a minority of the protest movement's less influential rungs, far from a guiding internal document that is being used by the movement as the sort of basic, direct articulation for which I requested in the last post.

The newest cause celebre from the Iranian crisis, Neda Agha-Soltan's bloody, 40-second expiration on camera, has made the rounds on both television and Internet within the last two or three days. There's outrage, there's sadness, there's the arms-length solidarity from overseas, and all such emotional capital is being translated into......nothing.

I mean, there's not much that Obama can, could or should do, despite the incessant Republican haranguing: the current reasoning is that anything which he says (let alone does) regarding the crisis is a blind foreign policy gamble, one which could end up like previous electoral disputes under the previous administration into which the U.S. chipped with words of encouragement for the ill-fated opposition.

Furthermore, there's no remotely-transparent way to measure the desires or strengths of the opposition. The reformists currently figuring in the opposition's leadership are only being depicted as wanting a limited, timid change of guard, with Mousavi replacing Ahmadinejad (no indication on whether it extends to replacing Khamenei with Rafsanjani, as you're not hearing anything advocating such a drastic change from the protesters); its only among the ostracized rebel militant organizations in the more hinterlands of Iran and in the diaspora, including the Tudeh party and the People's Mujahideen (currently based in Iran), who are calling for a change of regime, for a total overthrow of the clerical-military apparatus, and no ones paying attention or giving coverage to such voices from the latter camp. The reformists have also been stereotyped as urban, educated, middle-class types who have not connected with the poorer, rural majority of Iranians, the latter of which may or may not want a continuance of the current status quo under Khamenei-Ahmadinejad and who are less accessible from the Western press due to media restrictions.

Finally, as I was telling a friend in Atlanta earlier last week, we aren't seeing any vocal endorsements or spearheadings for the reformist opposition from the local governments of the country, including the mayors and governors. Swinging them from one side to another may make for a better clarification, expansion and articulation of demands (especially those of an economic nature which could appeal to the larger masses) from the opposition. Such may have been key in Madagascar earlier this year, when the Mayor of Antananarivo managed to rally a no-name party's support from masses of protesters and elicit enough sympathy from the military to force the then-president from office and into exile.

Right now, no such swing is happening. The military and paramilitaries are arresting and shooting protesters and bystanders, such as Neda and the family members of Rafsanjani (Mousavi's backer and the head of the Assembly of Experts which elects the Supreme Leader who authorized the military, paramilitary and police out onto the street to arrest such individuals as Rafsanjani's family members.....WTF?).

So....comparisons are already being drawn between this series of events and other events which ended in tragedy due to the opposing side not being able to win over key members of the military apparatus: Tiananmen, Saffron Revolution, the whole Zimbabwe debacle, and so on. And all that the West can do is reach, emotionally and frightfully, into the dark.

Source: OneBlog

If any users of the English WikiFur have noticed talk page announcements posted this Thursday regarding Wikia's exclusive switch to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license this Friday, we would like to inform all users that WikiFur is already mentioned as an opt-out candidate, as we have already switched to a dual-licensing scheme involving both the CC-by-SA and the GFDL as of the last week. The English WikiFur is already slated for resettlement onto non-Wikia servers owned by timduru by the end of the year (the last and largest WikiFur project to do such), and, as stated in an earlier post by greenreaper, all WikiFur subprojects will retain the dual-licensing scheme for the foreseeable future on the new servers.

The ongoing protests against the election process (not to mention Ahmadinejad's victory) are rather harrowing, given the past treatment of internal dissent by the militant forces of the Islamic Republic....

well, the treatment does continue to happen, but apparently there's less tolerance in the opposition commons for that sort of thing:


(courtesy of Gary Sick)

Also, in relation to Netanyahu's speech, I think its time that he whips out the long-neglected Lieberman Plan: "land for land, peace for peace". This would turn over Arab majority areas in the North District to Arab independent rule in return for gaining most of Jerusalem and Judea, thus recognizing a long-standing reality on the ground that

• the majority-Muslim Arabs of the North District have stayed in the majority in that district for the longest and are unable to be unseated from that position anytime soon, hence making them a liability for a majority-Jewish state
• The best that the Israelis can accomplish with its own population and growth rate is to win the key religio-demographic battle over Jerusalem and Judea (the southern, smaller lobe of the West Bank); the other possibility being something like giving the Arabs Judea, Jerusalem and most of the Negev so as to unify Gaza with the rest of the Arab population in a majority-Arab state while getting Samaria and the north in return (since the Tel Aviv metro area directly borders Samaria), but resulting in far more of an impetus of driving out the Arab towns in the North District.
• If the Arab state is to get the North District, then the new Arab state would have to deal with Lebanon, Syria, and their own mutual border disputes, a situation that would be exacerbated extensively by the return and absorption of Palestinian refugees.

It's only 1 or 2 out of 730+ seats, but the Pirate Party of Sweden gaining such a minute number of seats from their party list in the European Parliament is no big feat. It may not directly pose an earthquake-strength challenge to the status quo of intellectual property law in most of the 27 member states of the European Union, but the mere thought of explicitly pro-P2P file sharing, pro-copyleft politicians being present in one of the largest legislative bodies in the world is a sign of changes to come in the supranational congregation's dealings with the economically-sensitive topic.

Thus, the news that the Pirate Party crossed the 4% threshold in Sunday's EP election in Sweden, gaining at least 7.1%, is slowly being welcomed by blogs and European news sites as a historic moment in the EP's evolution, even with the news that this election achieved both the lowest turnout since the legislature's founding and a huge upsurge in the electoral fortunes of right wing nationalist-populist(-Eurosceptic-conspiracist-nativist) movements competing for seats in the body.

The same news of the PP's entrance into the EP also comes with questions about its parliamentary group affiliations come the inauguration of MEPs to office: major news sources have hinted at an affiliation with either the Greens-EFA (which has already made clear its pro-file-sharing stance) or the ALDE (a liberal group, given that the lead candidate on the PP's list is formerly of the Liberal People's Party of Sweden), or, otherwise, sitting as "non-inscrits" (the EP's rough equivalent of "independent", or one who doesn't sit with any of the parliamentary groups, even if they identify with such-and-such minor party). I don't even think the left-wing or left-green parliamentary groups have even entered into the question regarding the PP's affiliations (which may be due to the severely deprecated reputation of the traditional Eurosocialist left at all levels - European, national and local - translating into the aforementioned upsurge in fortunes of right-wing parties, including the much-derided British National Party).

This seems like a lot about the EU is slated for change within the next few years, with the "fringe" both gaining in capital and clout within EU politics. Furthermore, such fringes will be allocated taxpayer money to build up their campaigns (both electoral and legislatorial) and, if they are constituted as European parties, their own "Eurofoundations" (or European-level Europarty-affiliated think tanks). Of course, making too much of a spending spree may cost a sitting party, as has happened to the well-monied, loosely-organized Libertas party headed by Irish millionaire and anti-Lisbon Treaty activist Declan Ganley (who is likely to not gain a seat this time around, and whose Europarty may only gain one seat - in France).

Thus, pitfalls - both obvious and unforeseen - await the young Pirate Party in the EP. There are opportunities to build up aspirant Pirate Parties in other member states for the next EP elections in 2014 - and for national elections in between - but it is a long and slow shot to build the party away from being a young, populist, ideologically one-trick pony of a party to a recognisable, multi-concern presence that doesn't fear outright parliamentary extinction but can still take a hint (switch out leadership, switch out ideological components, etc.) when it takes a licking at the polls. People have seen what can happen to minor, often fringe parties in the EP when they forge flimsy alliances and parliamentary groups that only last a good year due to infighting and ideological incoherence among members (i.e., ....uhhhh, for what did we form this group/alliance/party again?)

Furthermore, the party may not be touched at first by the perception of the public regarding corruption and graft in the EP, which has become a significant talking point for Eurosceptics and right-wingers in the EU within the last decade, but PP doesn't have long to clearly set itself apart from that previous history of the EP; the Republican effect, as we've seen here in the US, may be felt in the EP with the rise of the center-right's share of seats, and the PP, having gained entrance at the same time as the BNP and other right-wing parties (some with more authoritarian tendencies), may have entered into the legislature at the politically-strangest time to be considered a "pirate" in the legislature.

There seems to be much to follow, much to hope, much to discuss about the PP in the EP. One of those hopes is that we're not seeing a political train wreck, although that is taking second or third place to the hope that we will see a redressing of intellectual property law in the European Union's member states. Hopefully, the PP - and, of they're to be believed by their campaigns, the Greens-EFA - heralds such an endeavor in an even-handed, non-top-down manner.

I mean, were the scriptwriters serious?! " We've learned Earth's languages through the World Wide Web"?!

This just tore me up a bit, but its not the first time that screenwriters have displayed such an utter misunderstanding of the Internet; for one, the fact that the World Wide Web is only one Internet-dependent application (and one that is text-centric, not voice-centric) may render the above quote partly inaccurate.

I can only think that, if the two factions and their leaders were able to 

1. Receive radio signals emanating from digital-electronic, networked machines
2. Use a voice browser to vocally read text
3. Manage to pair recorded voice-readings of hyperlinked text to their own native language for comparisons, contrasts and translations of words and contexts

all within mere seconds on an incremental basis, then we might have a more solid hypothesis for the Transformer race's own networking capabilities, alongside all the other technological capabilities which they possess.

But in the meantime, we only have this alternative hypothesis for what would happen if the Transformers had learned Earth's languages by rapidly flipping through a web browser:


EDIT: See also this slightly-related writeup from 1996 on extraterrestrials using the WWW. Vos Post wrote a section about the potential hyperlinearity of alien communication, comparing it to the more familiar hyperlinearity of the World Wide Web.
EDIT 2: Someone else wrote a criticism of this same quote, primarily from an SMS/mobiletexting-centric focus, for the Apache Pow Wow newspaper of Tyler Junior College.

I've finally thought up a possible first application for the combination of augmented reality and brain computer interfaces:

Telepresence.

Basically, one can both use a non-invasive BCI setup and a virtual reality headset in combination, login to Second Life using a plugin (or viewer) that allows for augmented reality access, and use the avatar "mouselook" view to peer through the avatar's eyes into the other region of the real world.

This, of course, would need a number of strategically-placed volumetric cameras placed around the area of augmented view to allow the avatar to "see" the real world and its objects in as many complete dimensions as possible (alot like Street View, in a way).

Technically, this should allow the user to both neurally and freely navigate whole regions of the real world and graphically self-project to another region of the real world using a remotely-controlled virtual avatar.

I  can also visualize a number of applications for this:

• Providing Croquet-like virtual 3D hyperlinks/hyperframes between the real world regions would allow for quick avatar-based hypertravelling between regions. In addition, tabbed navigation could allow for easy switching back-and-forth between real world regions.
• Incorporation of KML markup coordinates could signal the positions of remote-controlled avatars in the real world and could necessitate SL/OpenSim hyperlinks to these coordinates in the real world.
• Extraterrestrial tourism, in which users would never have to leave Earth to visit the Moon and Mars since cameras and coordinate markers could be shipped on lunar robot missions to allow avatars to navigate regions of the two bodies, is a possibility.
• Remote meetings or get-togethers would be simplified, with a mix of both real individuals and virtual avatars.

I'm sure there's more to this, but I'll wait until another post.

I like how Open Cobalt, another virtual world project, allows for the linking of two in-world spaces using 3D window frames, which can swivel from side-to-side, provide live views of whatever's going on in the opposite end of the window and allow for one to walk an avatar through the window into the other in-world space. It reminds me of what I once told someone when I was logged into SL (I think it had more to do with streaming video than with being able to walk between virtual world areas, though). Example of this method begins below at 0:38.




I wonder, however, if this method of hyperlinking can be embedded into the virtual world's persistent objects, such as buildings? In fact, just like how originally non-electronic text was eventually imported to the Web and enhanced with context-specific links, the same could be done with 3D copies of real world (and virtual) objects into the virtual world, namely appending links into the objects which link them to the views of other virtual objects; a wiki approach could be used in this process, whereby "redlinks" (or in this case, null spaces) can be linked within these virtual objects in order to allow users to create the new objects in the null spaces.

The problem of appending links to 3D objects is the way that these links should look embedded within the objects without any visually disturbances. If frames are going to be one of the main presentational means of linking one object to another, then it would have to maintain a color or design scheme that is distinguishable from the rest of the object but not too distinguishable. It would also need a means of navigation that makes frames easily responsive to the mouse pointer, no matter how visually skewed the linked portion looks from the rest of the object.

"Hyperframes" could also be a major boost to the usage of "tabbed traveling" or "tabbed teleportation" in virtual worlds, since they would be middle-clickable to allow for a new tab of a new space to be visited non-linearly.

 OK, so SL has three key features that I want to utilize in this proposal: SLURLs, landmarks and teleportation. 

My idea is that an SL user can embed a SLURL in a specific location in-world, perhaps as a script, and the next user can left-click on the script to select one of two pertinent actions: "teleport" or "add as landmark":

• If "add as landmark" is selected, then it will open either as a separate HUD window menu which displays the landmark inventory and various means of landmark management, or, if the option is middle-clicked, as a whole new tab containing the same.
• If "teleport" is middle-clicked (or the script itself can be middleclicked), then the teleportation load can take place in another new tab while the user is still in the previously-open location.
• The kicker: once the new tab is finished loading the view of its own location, the user can then select the new tab and immediately move the avatar's presence to the new tab's location, and then move freely back to the older tab with the avatar's presence following the user to the older tab's location. You move in, the avatar moves in; you move out, the avatar moves out, and so on.
• The avatar's behavior across tabs can be optionally switched off if the user simply wants to view another location's goings-on without the user's avatar getting involved or, worse, stuck in the middle of such events.

I think this navigation method can work for the following reasons:

• Instead of saying "I'll be going now, gotta head to Luskwood", it can instead be "gimme a sec, I'm looking in Luskwood as we speak....oh, nevermind, I'm back here at Badwolf's...nah, its dead there, now I'm up in this space station filled with alien avatars".
• Flying from one place to another can be quicker, farther, multitasked and much more balanced.
• Going from one grid to another and back (or maybe three grids or more in separate tabs) can also be a matter of seconds.
• You wouldn't have to be automatically logged out of Second Life if one grid is closing for repairs.
• Avoiding griefer attacks while watching (peeking?) the disasters unfold in another tab will either be hilarious or sobering from a distance.

So yes, it is a proposal to make virtual world clients more like modern web browsers without necessarily entailing the embedding of the web inside the virtual world (although current web-browsing capabilities of the SL client may benefit from the above-described virtual world tabbed browsing); it captures the non-linearity of the tabbed navigational experience and fits it upon the virtual world that is much too linear (think "IE6") to navigate fully and smoothly within a multitasking framework.

 Wikia Search didn't have to do as poorly in its short life as it did. By the time that Jimmy Wales announced the end of the project on March 31, the search results had improved somewhat, but the user interface was still mixing the cutting-edged with the half-assed and the non-existent, and most user input or activity for the project had ended by the Fall of 2008 (that includes the project's blog and mailing list). 

Wikia Search could've followed other major search engines (Live Search, Google, Yahoo!) into the realm of vertical search, with separate search modes that made use of Wikia Search's backend to search specific types of content (Video Search, Blog Search, even - HELLO! - Wiki Search, one that's better than Wikipedia's own in-site search), and it could've provided custom search for domain name owners.

It could've done so much more in such an amount of time, but it didn't.

What went wrong?

EDIT: Wales' latest gig, Wikianswers, will probably get into a legal tiff with WikiAnswers soon; they both lay claim to having been the first to use the name. Not necessarily saying that Wales may have to save face in light of Wikia Search's end, but this will get ridiculous before it gets better.

I think that tabbed browsing, which has worked wonders for web browsing (and may work similar wonders in file navigation), can be a feasible, necessary addition to the desktop clients of virtual worlds like Second Life. Rather than the single-tasking that forces a user to view only one persistent virtual world location at a time within the client, tabbed navigation of the virtual world can allow the user, through the user's avatar, to glide effortlessly between the tabs which contain open locations; the indication of presence can also follow the user between the tabs, allowing other users to know when the user's avatar is in the tab or not.

This sort of browsing, which can also be applied to virtual earth clients such as Google Earth, can also allow the user to open other locations with a simple middle-click of a teleport link, which will then open in a separate, adjacent tab. This can also be deemed as opening separate instances within the client.

Tabbed browsing of virtual worlds may result in greater capabilities for user multitasking, and can allow for users to WYSIWYGially drag copies of virtual objects from one location in a tab to another location in a separate tab, alot like text links in Firefox.

Why can't SSB environments like Fluid, Chrome or Prism allow for the creation of custom toolbars that are also site-specific, allowing for persistent access to user-initiated tasks?

Stereopsis is an effect that allows for the eyes + brain to perceive depth, and is utilized in an optical illusion that, when equipped with the right method of visual perception, allows for the viewer to perceive a sense of depth in an otherwise flat surface area.

Many methods have been devised since the 19th century to give off an illusion of depth in a media-dedicated flat surface area (a technique known as stereoscopy), ranging from "wiggle stereoscopy" to the manual side-by-side-so-cross-your-eyes stereoscopy to the iconic anaglyph image + polarized "red and blue" glasses.

Most recently, a few folks on YouTube took to demonstrating the combination of anaglyph imagery and polarized 3D glasses with MIT graduate Johnny Chung Lee's WiiMote headtracking method (resulting in hundreds of demo videos on YouTube from inspired users) to demostrate how such a combination of anaglyph imagery with headtracking might work.

Sadly, I'm not convinced by the look of the videos. Plus, after thinking it through, I 've started to think that it seems redundant to combine digital CGI anaglyphs with headtracking polarized glasses.

I mean, if you demonstrate Compiz Fusion with its Wiimote-recognition plugin for headtracking separately from Compiz Fusion with its anaglyph filter plugin for polarized glasses, you get a fairly stereoscopic view from either perception; in fact, the Wiimote plugin for headtracking seems to possess much further potential range depending upon the range of motion that the viewer has around the screen, while the Wiimote anaglyph plugin for polarized glasses gives the classic feel of being able to almost reach inside the imagery on the screen.

The drawbacks, therefore, may dedicate either method of perception to particular media and particular audiences:

• the Wiimote headtracking method may be best for visual environments - preferably 2.5D - which concurrently allow for manipulation of the environment's contents through interactive controls (like games)
• the anaglyph method may be best for visual environments - namely 2D - which don't allow for manipulation of the environment's contents through interactive controls (like movies).

I'll expand upon this a bit later, but here are the two demos posted to YouTube:

 They're not saying anything on CNN International, nor are they posting anything on CNN.com's Africa archive.

Why is it that a possible overthrow of a sitting head of state by a strong - and pissed - opposition in one African country doesn't win as much coverage on CNN as whatever's gong on in Sudan and Zimbabwe? The last story posted about the conflict on CNN.com was from last month. Yet foreign embassies employees have gotten out of dodge and army has gone through a shift in leadership (a mutiny of sorts) that placed it more outside the hands of the current president than within the camp of the opposition; the military police has done likewise.

So I suppose that we'll see something big happen by 1800 GMT, which is the time by which Rajoelina says he'll make his move?

 I've finally gotten the Navbox template done on WikiFur.

Also, I think that a MediaWiki extension that utilizes a LiveJournal code base is possible and replete with potential benefits, although it may be more for integration of LiveJournal's core features into MediaWiki in the form of user and community blogs (with the obvious utilization of wikitext in blog posts and comments).

Finally, what relevance does augmented reality have to brain-computer interfaces? I have glanced over multiple articles where the two are included as examples of virtual reality interaction, but I honestly haven't seen where the two can be relevant to each other. At best, I can assume that any combination of AR and (two-way?) BCI can result in something like what I saw in Denno Coil and its concept of "Imago".