There's Urbit and Twetch. First uses some of ethereum, and calling a twitter replacement is 1% of it's story. Twetch uses a bitcoin fork as a db and users have to pay to post, but get impression revenue directly
That's what I said about Bitcoin at $1 (groan).... I'm heavy into Urbit now, learning their programming language, Hoon (more mindbending than Brainfuck).
I just checked on opensea.io; you can get a planet for 0.04 ETH--around $50.
Urbit is the Next Big Thing--I haven't seen anything like it in 40 years; it's a "computing platform" blank slate! I don't think it'll ever go away because there are enough tech people to keep it going. I can also see academia using it.
Setting up your own planet is a real hassle. Soon, you will be able to "rent" your own planet for a monthly fee (like paying for an ISP), and the provider will take care of all hardware and software. On the other hand, you can put your planet on a server for $10-$20/month.
Urbit using Ethereum as a global consistent PKI store seemed like a perfectly fine idea, until transaction costs for distributing those keys bloomed 11,000% in a year :(
It's being worked on. If the plan to use ZK-STARKs to rollup PKI transactions goes through, it should be only a few cents to set up a planet. In the meantime though, it is a major barrier :(
One observation, that the bbc didn't note, is that the decoder brain in the end had a representation of the encoder's whiskers.
To be a bit hyperbolic, the rat started to think it had two bodies. Or maybe it thought it had an extra set of whisker's some where. I can't quite imagine what the rat's body image would be.
Makes me think of Steven Wright's bit about the light switch in his house he couldn't figure out the purpose for, so he flicks it on or off when he passes. After a month, he gets a letter from a woman in Germany saying, "Cut that out!"
Damn, I think I found myself a christmas present. Pity it's so small though. I'll have to look at some numbers and see if it's good enough to cool a desktop's cpu heat sink.
What drew me to this article was it's discussion of the tactics a unorganized group can do and try all at once. A neat superposition of several topics.
unfortunately any mass movement is dependent on being able to apply political pressure. It might work if there is a growing momentum and you end up with an 'orange' revolution. Most likely it's going to simply die out by itself unless it can actually transform into a political force.
Being in Spain I can tell you the protests accomplished nothing, changed nothing politically and ended up dissolving themselves once it got cold.
Yes, I personally think that if these Occupy movements result in organizing long-term institutions which help people, then they're successful. Lurid riot porn is not a victory condition.
One problem is the attitude mentioned in the article: "This has been a show of bravado that has the tactical benefits of providing media coverage of the brutal methods of police and the benefit of draining the resources of the oppressor by forcing them to incur the expense of arresting and prosecuting people for trivial offenses." (Keep in mind that the US imprisons its populace far more than any other nation, so this is no joke.) I read this rebuttal recently:
"Getting arrested as an unavoidable consequence of standing up for a cause is noble; getting arrested as a voluntary, symbolic act is widely considered bizarre, at best. Moreover, it frustrates huge sectors of the movement who see an opportunity cost to the resources that go into unnecessary jail support, bail, and legal costs. Perhaps worst of all, voluntary arrest is seen by members of especially targeted communities as flaunting arrestees’ race and class privilege."
Yeah, those examples are discussed in the ZCommunications article, as effective in only some situations. ("True as this is, don’t forget that these movements were addressing state and societal brutality against entire groups of people as the primary focus of their strategy; state violence was thus an illustration of their point. In the case of a holistic movement primarily focused on elite rule instead of state repression, police violence is a distraction. It may earn you sympathies, but it does not help to make your point in any clearly illustrative manner, as it did in these examples.")
On this point: while they are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the Occupy movement has a lot of structural similarities to the Tea Part movement.
The sad thing about grassroots politics in the US is that the conservative grassroots movements, like Tea Party, form loose, non-hierarchical yet highly organized coalitions where as the liberals end up going lowest-common-denominator and form protest groups.
The problem is that the political system in America is geared up to accept pressure from political groups like Tea Party but isn't particularly affected by protect groups on the street. As a liberal I find it depressing that folks refuse to take on the political system at it's own game like the Tea Partiers have done.
The Tea Party people think they're opposing particular liberal policies.
The Occupy movement is rebelling against an entire POWER STRUCTURE, the entire hierarchy backed by corporate funding, which funding also pays the GOP apparatchiks that started the Tea Party.
